Sepharad

olympia

DAYS BEFORE LEAVING, my life had already been turned by the magnet of the journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places where I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life, confined to a single city, to a few streets, which I traveled at fixed times between house and office, or between the office and the café where I went every morning to have breakfast with my friend Juan, in the half hour of freedom granted me by labor laws and administered by the clocks where we had to insert a punch card as if it were an open sesame.

Never was I so obsessed with impossible journeys as then, so distanced from myself and from the tangible and real around me. It wasn’t that an important part of me was hidden from others’ eyes; my whole self was hidden. The shell that others saw didn’t matter at all, it had nothing to do with me. A municipal employee, low-grade, an administrative assistant, although having everything in place, married, with a small child. With literary vanity, I sought refuge in being unknown, hidden, but there was also a conformity in me at least as strong as my rebellion, with the difference that the conformity was practical while the rebellion showed only occasionally as a blurry discontent — with the exception of those daily morning conversations with Juan, who was then living a very similar life, working a few offices away from mine.

Against my principles I had married in the Church, and in precisely nine months my son was born. Sometimes I was struck with remorse for not having dared to live a different life, with a sharp longing for other cities and other women, cities where I had never been, women I remembered or invented, whom I had loved in vain or whom I imagined I had lost for lack of courage. I remembered one woman especially, even though it had been five years since I saw her. She lived in Madrid now and was married, with one or two children; I wasn’t sure of the number because I had only indirect news of her from time to time. I still shivered when someone spoke her name.

There were two worlds, one visible and the other invisible, and I adapted tamely to the norms of the first so I could retreat without too much inconvenience into the second. Many years later, I occasionally dream about those days in the office, and what I experience is not depression but a quiet melancholy. I dream that I go back to work after a long absence, and I do it without distress or any hint of the old bitterness.

Now, at the end of my years, I realize that my docility wasn’t a mask, the false identity of a spy, but rather a substantial and true part of my being: the intimidated and obedient part that has always been one aspect of my nature, the satisfaction that I looked respectable to others as son and student, and later as employee, husband, and father. When I dream of going back to the municipal office I abandoned so long ago, my fellow workers welcome me with affection; they are not surprised to see me and don’t ask about the long absence. For years I liked remembering — embellishing the memory of — my turbulent adolescence, but now I believe the love of conformity dominated my youth, not rebellion, and that love undoubtedly returned to influence me in my adult life, when I accepted marriage and went along with the obligations and little humiliations that made me boil inside: the church wedding, the ritual communion, the family banquet, everything that had been prescribed for an eternity and that I obeyed, unresisting, to the letter of the law. I knew I was deceiving myself, just as I was deceiving the woman I had married without true conviction, as well as the relatives in both families who congratulated one another that finally such a dubious, erratic, and long courtship was over. I never thought about the irresponsibility of my silence, about the bitterness and lies it sowed outside the boundaries of my secret fantasies, seeds that flowered in the real life of the person at my side.

As a boy I obeyed my parents and teachers happily, and the fact that I got excellent grades and was considered an exemplary student filled me with pride. I was the envy of my friends’ mothers, and if a teacher favored me, I felt literally paralyzed with satisfaction. I wasn’t pretending, as I later invented, wasn’t striving to get good grades so I could escape the hidebound life of work in the country that my origins foreordained. I studied because I was supposed to and because fulfilling obligations gave me as much pleasure as living by religious precepts. Until I was fifteen, I went to mass faithfully, and confessed and took communion without once feeling I was performing a ritual alien to me, and for a time I entertained the possibility of becoming a priest.

I have actually had very few outbursts of true rebellion in my life, and most of them were clumsy, senseless, leaving nothing but a memory of humiliation and failure. Once, when I was twenty-two, I gave up everything, my sweetheart and my respectability along with any consideration for my parents or her parents, who had already accepted me as a model son. I had fallen in love with another woman, and when she went off to Madrid I couldn’t get along without her. One night at the end of term, I caught the express train and showed up the next morning at the supermarket that belonged to my lover’s family. From the way they looked at me I realized that what had happened between us was over for her, and had never really been very important, never reached full bloom. I returned that same night, feeling ridiculous and that I had learned a lesson. I made up with my fiancée, and when she put her arms around me, weeping and saying she had always been sure I would come back to her, I thought, with a flash of miserable lucidity, that I was fooling myself, but I did nothing, and for many years I did nothing but drift, and do everything expected or demanded of me.

For a long time, while I worked in that office in the provincial city I had moved to, I remembered a phrase of William Blake that I’d read somewhere, something like “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I was a mass of aspirations unacted on, of fantasies as unreal as those that kept me company in the quiet solitudes of my childhood. I was always wanting to go somewhere, a misfit never pleased with anything, and suddenly I found myself settled down, paralyzed, in a rut at the age of twenty-seven, making payments on an apartment, receiving good bonuses at work, going from house to office, office to house, imagining trips, daydreaming, escaping through books, hazily surrounded by family and fellow workers, and every morning from nine thirty to ten, during that half hour for breakfast, sharing thoughts with my friend Juan.

Wild sexual interludes with the women we passed in the street, with clerks in the shops, models in magazines, and the satiny, totally untouchable stars of black-and-white movies, that is what my friend and I dreamed about, hopelessly, that and travel, places it was unlikely we would ever be and women who would never go to bed with us and in fact never gave us a second look when we passed them in the streets near our office, the alleyways of the centro, the downtown business district, the cafés where we went for breakfast every morning, always at nine thirty, nine thirty-five, newspaper tucked under one arm, bought every morning at the same kiosk, the mineral water and café con leche and toast the waiter brought without our asking. We had become habitual presences in the morning routine of other people, figures circling round and round like the mechanical dolls that march out to mark the hour on clocks in German squares.

Every morning we walked past the large window of a travel agency featuring a huge poster of New York. We liked that agency because of their posters of faraway places and because a very pretty woman worked there, whom we never saw outside her office or even away from her desk. She was blond and slender, with an extraordinary profile; every morning she was talking on the phone or working at her typewriter, almost always wearing a turtleneck sweater, her back straight yet inclined slightly forward like the wooden bust of Nefertite I saw years later, when I did do some traveling, in the Egyptian museum of Berlin. This girl had a narrow face, large mouth, large, slanted eyes, and a nose with that pronounced tip some admirable Italian noses have. As she talked on the phone, head tilted to clamp the earpiece to her shoulder, she would gesture with a slender hand holding a pencil as she turned the pages of a schedule or catalog with the other, and we would watch with furtive passion, pausing only a moment every morning at the window, afraid of attracting her attention. We saw both her and her reflection, because facing her in the agency office was a large wall of mirrors. Each time we liked to observe some new feature of her beauty: her hair might be loose, or she had pulled it back into a ponytail to emphasize the purity of her profile, or maybe into a bun that revealed the splendid line of her throat and the back of her neck. Behind that glass window, facing the mirror that multiplied the plants adorning her desk and the posters of foreign cities and views of beaches or deserts, she belonged both to the everyday life of the city and to the exotic places of her profession, and part of her appeal to us were the names of foreign countries and cities, and the large color photograph of New York in the window added luster to her image. She may have been no less deskbound than we were, but as she spoke on the telephone and read schedules and made hotel reservations, jotting down things in her agenda, she seemed endowed with a dynamism that was the opposite of our dull work as minor officials; without moving from her desk, she took on the golden tones of East Indian beaches and the bold freedom of the most beautiful women on the Via Veneto, or Portobello Road, or Calle Corrientes, or Fifth Avenue. We fantasized about walking into the agency one morning and asking in a normal way for a brochure, some information about hotels or flights. But of course we never did, and we never saw her going in or out of her office, never met her in the streets we walked. She existed only inside the travel agency, behind the glass window and in the mirrored wall, just as Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth lived in the black-and-white world of movies; she was as unchangeable and distant as they, and so we watched her a few seconds every morning and continued our brief half-hour routine, the newspaper kiosk, the café con leche and toast in the Café Suizo or the Regina, maybe a stop at the post office, for Juan to mail a letter, and then back to the office before the time clock we had to punch reached five after ten.

There was a sweetness in that routine, in the predictable familiarity of street corners and plazas, the sunlit clarity of Bibrrambla and the shadows of the narrow little streets leading to it, the repeated faces, the synchronized appearances, the same girl in dark glasses who arrived every morning at the same hour to raise the iron shutters of a shop with mannequins and mirrors, the officials and the clerks, the woman in the Olympia Travel Agency, whom we’d named Olympia after the Greek goddess and Manet’s nude, the lottery-ticket vendors, even the beggars and bums were there every day, following a routine similar to mine, each with his own life, with his secret novel, background figures in the novel I was living or inventing for myself, not the novel of what I did but of things that didn’t happen, the trips I never took and the plans my friend Juan and I postponed for a future neither of us much believed in but that served as an excuse for our present inertia.

Our friendship itself was routine and habit: meeting every morning at the same place, walking to a café, hands in our pockets and newspaper tucked under one arm, talking with no obligation to say anything new or too confidential. We were both crushed by the same docility and indolence, shyness or cowardice or lack of drive. Our friendship was surely based on that dismal reality, and it cost us nothing to share the irony with which we viewed the mediocrity of our lives and the deterioration of our ambitions. Each saw in the other the mirror of his insufficiency. We were united by the person neither of us dared to be. With identical correctness, we carried out our duties as employees, husbands, and fathers, rarely dropping the neutral sarcasm of our conversations for a true complaint. Many mornings during our walk to breakfast, Juan dropped a letter in the box at the post office located in the arcade of Calle Ganivet. Like everyone absorbed in his own melancholy, I was not too observant then. I had some vague idea that those letters were office business, until I noticed one that had a stamp for foreign mail. Juan gave no indication that he was trying to hide them from me, but there was something in his attitude that kept me from asking about them. Once, when we were having breakfast at the Suizo, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving his newspaper behind on the bar. I picked it up, and two letters slipped out. One of them was from New York, addressed to him, but at his home address, not his office. The other letter he had written, and it bore the name of the woman who had written him from New York. In a couple of seconds I put the letters back inside the folded newspaper, and when Juan returned I said nothing but thought, with a certain desolation, that in my friend’s life, which I’d thought was an open book, there was a part he chose not to reveal.

COMING OUT OF THE small lane where the Club Taurino used to be, we sometimes ran into our friend and office mate Gregorio Puga, who also worked as acting associate director of the city band, after having lost a much more prestigious job in the band of another city, and who even at that early hour was always a little drunk, smelling of stale alcohol and nicotine despite the coffee beans he sucked. Gregorio was the first friend I made when I started working, maybe because everyone had given up on him and he had to latch onto new employees when he wanted company at breakfast or for having a few beers or glasses of wine in the little hideaway taverns in the centro. It was said that were it not for his fondness for drink he would have been a major composer and conductor. He had a different version of his failure, which he would deliver with the whining monotony of a drunk: people had pushed him over the edge, they’d made him give up his promising career, begun under the best auspices in Vienna, and all in exchange for what, a pittance, the petty security of a steady job. He would sit with his elbows propped on the bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, held between the yellow tips of his second and third fingers, the languid, soft fingers of an old office worker, although I don’t think that he was more than forty-five at the time.

“They bait you with the promise of security, and you get used to the money coming in every month, and then you don’t have the will to keep studying, even less when your wife burdens you right off with kids and is always going on about how you’re useless and why don’t you stop all this foolishness and dreaming and do something to get ahead in the office or go out and look for a job in the evening. At first you don’t, of course, your evenings are sacred, you have to keep writing, rehearsing with other musicians until you get out of them what not even they know they have inside, and you want to direct an orchestra, not a city band, that was my life’s dream, but you get depressed, and besides it’s true, you need money, so you agree to give private classes, or you get a place in a school, and before you get paid at the end of the month you’ve already spent or budgeted the money, it’s clothes for the kids, and books and uniforms for school, because of course we had to take them to a Catholic school. Midafternoon you leave the office, and because you dread going home you stop for a couple of glasses of wine, you get a bite of something and go to your evening job, and when that’s over, well, it’s the same: Gregorio, let’s go have a drink. At first you say no, then all right, just one rum and that’s all, the old lady will be pissed if she hasn’t seen the whites of my eyes by dinnertime, so you have two rums and one for the road or to help you face the uproar you know is waiting at home, and you forget to look at the clock and when you go outside to the Plaza del Carmen, it’s striking eleven and there’s hell to pay. I’ll buy some cigarettes and pull myself together, but you don’t have coins to put in the machine, and you’re too tired to ask for change for a bill, so you ask for a glass of wine, and maybe if you’re lucky you run into a friend who’s alone at the bar, and he treats you to the next one, or it’s the waiter who invites you, because all his life he’s been seeing you come in and out, he’s served you the coffee, or coffee and cognac, at dawn, the rums for an aperitif, and coffee and drinks after dinner — though in all honesty you haven’t eaten, just nibbled to fill your stomach.”

I remember Gregorio with affection and pain, Maestro Puga, whom I haven’t seen for several years now, and I wonder if he’s still making the rounds of the bars in the centro where the office workers go, whether he’s still alive and clinging to the dream of a symphony premiere, elbows on the bar, wearing his suit that is getting more and more frayed and dirty, a cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of wine held loosely in the other hand, and maybe a coffee bean sucked in a mouth now missing a few teeth. Some mornings Juan and I met him as we turned a corner and didn’t have time to avoid him, so we had to stand and listen to his whining and persistent invitations to come have a drink, just a quick cognac or anisette in the few minutes left of the half hour allotted for breakfast. When I was less cautious, I agreed to have a rum with him after work, and didn’t get away until eleven, ending up so drunk that the next morning I didn’t remember anything we talked about all those hours. I remember only one thing, and I’ve never forgotten it, because since then Gregorio has repeated it many times, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward him, enveloping me in a cloud of stale wine and black tobacco as he pierces me with those reddened eyes and says:

“Don’t get stuck in this rut, don’t let what happened to me happen to you, get out while you can, don’t cave in, don’t let yourself be bought.”

I avoided Gregorio, as everyone did, because he was a bore and a drunk, and even if you were fond of him you couldn’t take his bad breath or the tedium of his increasingly disjointed stories, his detailed account of the intrigues and tricks he was victim of in the office, or about the city band, where another man with fewer qualifications but more connections had been named director. But I also avoided him because I was ashamed to have him see the fulfillment of his prophecy about me: the years went by, and I went to work every morning punctually at eight o’clock, I had obligations now, was married with a child and making payments every month on a car and an apartment, and although my wife earned more than I did, the money didn’t always stretch to the end of the month, so I was considering looking for a second job. In this way I’d gradually given up all the plans that seemed so courageous when I started working: preparing myself for a better career, say, university professor, or researcher in art history, or even geography teacher in some institute. But I didn’t have the time or the will, and my free evenings got away from me without my noticing, and besides there were only a few openings every year for a history professor and thousands of university graduates, many of whom I’d gone to school with and who were desperate after years of being unemployed, and looked with envy at even a job as unappealing as mine. I would occasionally meet Gregorio in the corridor, each of us carrying a briefcase loaded with files, or I would see him at a corner of the alleys dotted with bars where office workers escaped at midmorning for a quick coffee, but my repugnance for his bad breath and shabby air was more powerful than any gratitude I felt for his friendship. I would look away, or slip through a side door to escape his red eyes, not wanting to hear again what I knew he would say: “What are you doing? Why haven’t you got out of here? How many more years are you going to take it?”

ONCE IN A WHILE I did go somewhere, but only for a few days; they would send me to Madrid to get papers signed in a ministry or to place an order for supplies I was charged with inspecting. The trips were brief, the per diem insufficient, and my low rank limited me to moderately priced hotels and meals in modest restaurants, yet the anticipated departure acted as a stimulant, pulling me toward the future like a giant magnet, giving me back the childish happiness of looking forward to an outing.

Several days before the train pulled out of the station, I had already left in my mind. The night express with its blue sleeping cars that reminded me of the Orient Express would be sitting there when I arrived with my suitcase a little before 11 P.M., filled with the heady relief of being alone, of having temporarily freed myself from the oppressive sameness of office and home, from the schedules and scares and bad nights that go with having a very young son. The preparations for this short trip contained all the excitement of a real journey, of any one of the journeys I’d read about in books or seen at the movies or imagined for myself as I studied maps and glossy guidebooks. In the midst of such a low-key, shallow life, the trip was an almost physical pleasure, a sensation of freedom and lightness, as if leaving the station would free me from all the obligations and habits that weighed me down. With the slam of the door of the taxi that would take me to the station, my old identity would be entirely sloughed off.

Since I was going somewhere, I wasn’t myself; I luxuriated in the intoxication of being no one. I dissolved into the moments I was living, into the pleasure of being borne away by the train and looking out the window of my compartment at the lights of highways and cities, cheerful windows where stay-at-homes lived, at that hour watching television or going to bed in miserably hot bedrooms beneath a suffocating conjugal blanket, the “watered-down coffee of married life” referred to by Cernuda, a poet I was reading a lot at the time, his disciple and apprentice in the bitterness of the distance between reality and desire.

Those trips were so rare that the administrative monotony of the tasks I had to perform at my destinations didn’t affect my intense and childish sense of adventure. But I traveled seldom not only because so few opportunities presented themselves. Sometimes I sacrificed a trip in order not to upset my wife, who didn’t like my being away from home, and who was exhausted from her own job and from caring for our child and didn’t always want to understand that my stays in Madrid weren’t some capricious escapade but required by my administrative position and that carrying them out well could be to my advantage when eventually it came time for promotion.

Whenever I agreed to go, I had difficulty telling my wife, I would keep putting it off, until in the end I was forced to break the news with insensitive haste, or, worse, she would get wind of it from someone who called from the office or the travel agency that handled the ticketing. I didn’t have to be unfaithful, my natural state was guilt, and the innocuous secret of the upcoming business trip would be as much of a strain on me as an actual affair. I helped weave the entangling web of reproaches and resentment with my cowardice. And up to the last minute I was never sure I was going, because our son might get a fever, or my wife might suddenly be under the weather with a lumbago attack or a difficult period, complaints it seemed I was entirely responsible for, and that would become much worse in my absence, my desertion.

Finally I would leave and still couldn’t believe it, and as the taxi took me to the station I would get a rush of happiness mixed with panic, the fear that I might not get to the station on time because the road was blocked, or because I’d waited too long disentangling myself from my family and my life, from the stifling conjugal heat of my apartment, from the irritation and accusation radiating from my wife as she stood with her arms around my son, who would cry even harder when he saw I was leaving; the two of them would be there in the doorway as I waited for the elevator, and my wife’s face would be pale, her eyes sad.

ONE WINTER MORNING, on one of those trips to Madrid, I finished my errands at the Ministry of Culture early and found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day. My train didn’t leave until eleven that night. Disappointment was quick to come in Madrid, a vulnerable feeling of being alone in such a big city, where I didn’t know anyone, where there was uncertainty and danger everywhere. When you crossed one of those broad avenues, the light always turned red before you could get to the other side, and when you went to a movie at night, you ended up in a labyrinth of dark streets where you could easily be attacked by someone with a knife, one of those pasty drug addicts who loitered on the corner of the Gran Vía and Calle Hortaleza. I was dazed with loneliness, not because I didn’t know anyone anymore, but because I was a nobody, a lowly provincial official who was pulling back into his shell like a snail only three days after fleeing in search of greener pastures and richer air, wandering in circles around the city, carrying his depression with him as if it were a fever that made him long for the shelter of his home and the familiar narrow streets in which he lived his life.

Walking around in a dense fog with no idea of where I was, I ended up at the Retiro, crossing streets that seemed not to be in Madrid, not even Spain, streets with noble buildings and luxuriant trees, the blacktop wet with drizzle, the sidewalks yellow with the newly fallen, broad leaves of plane trees and horse chestnuts. The Prado Museum, the Botanical Garden, the Cuesta de Moyano. At the peak of a wooded hill was a building that resembles a Greek temple: the Observatory. Things opened before me as I approached them through the fog: motionless statues, threatening or serene, a statue of Pio Baroja or Cajal or Galdos, alone in the groves of the deserted park, lost and melancholy in an ostentatious oblivion of bronzes and marbles.

I remember my amazement at the sight of a glass building on the other side of a pond, with columns and filigree of white-painted iron, a white liquefied in the translucent grayness of the morning mist, in the motionless, dark green of the water. I had read in the newspaper that there was an exhibition dedicated to the exile of Spanish Republicans in Mexico in the Crystal Palace of the Retiro. It all comes back, after so many years, an ordinary day of an uneventful trip to Madrid, a walk that by chance led to the Retiro, where amid fog and trees I came upon the Crystal Palace, like one of those enchanted houses that materialize before lost travelers in storybook forests.

I remember glass display cases with newspaper clippings and ration cards, TV monitors showing old films of soldiers wrapped in rags fleeing along the highways toward France, clustered at the border crossings at Port-Bou and Cerbère after the fall of Catalonia. I remember a blackboard and a desk that had been in the first school for Spanish children in Mexico, and a navy-blue student smock with a white celluloid collar, which shook me with unexpected anguish, as did the pages of penmanship exercises written in pencil by children forty years before, and the boxes of paints identical to ones I’d had in school. The smock, too, was very similar to those we wore, and there were the same creased, colored oilcloth maps of Spain that I saw the first time I walked into a schoolroom, except that on these the flag was tricolor: red, yellow, and purple. There was a large photograph of people crowding onto a steamship in a French port. A woman of about fifty was standing next to me, staring at it, murmuring something in a Mexican accent, although there was no one with her. She was breathing hard; I looked at her and saw that she was crying.

“I was on that boat, señor,” she said, hiccuping. She had large eyeglasses and dyed hair and was the only person besides me that morning in the glass building enveloped in fog, as if padded with silence. “I am one of the persons in this picture. I was eight and trembling, afraid my papa would let go of my hand.”

NOW I AM IN A different past, a different morning, not the one in which I walked through the Retiro and fog to the weightless shape of the Crystal Palace, the beautiful and melancholy purple of Republican flags on the shelves of an exhibition, insignia of a country I had lost before I was born. I leave the Ministry of Culture on Plaza del Rey and start walking aimlessly, disheartened before I begin by the hours ahead, in which I have nothing to do and no one to talk to, hours in which I will slowly become infected with the unreality of being alone in a large, unfamiliar city, of turning into a ghost that from time to time stares back at a stranger reflected in a shopwindow. I look at my watch and calculate that at this hour my friend Juan will be finishing breakfast, reading his newspaper in the Suizo, or maybe he will already have used the pedestrian crosswalk to the post office to mail one of those letters he doesn’t want me to know about. Instead of walking back toward the office beside him, both of us dragging our feet, I am wandering around Madrid, leaving to chance the route and choice of streets, and after half an hour I am totally lost, or maybe I’ve let myself be guided by an old memory independent of my consciousness, rising from the blind and persistent impulse of my feet. On a certain street there is a certain heavy door, says one of Borges’s poems. I walk along streets with narrow sidewalks and recessed doors, with fish markets and fruit stands and old-fashioned stationery shops and stores selling groceries and notions more antiquated than the ones in the city where I live, with a pullulating mass of cars and people and the strong, working-class voices of Madrid. Remembering, drifting, I head toward a place I shouldn’t go, a place I visited only once: Fernando VI, Argensola, Campoamor, Santa Teresa. At some moment, unknowingly, chance has become purpose, and the sequence the street names trace upon the city in which I am a stranger is a coded map, a wound that hasn’t hurt for a long time but can still be felt as a slight scar.

Calle Campoamor, at the corner of Santa Teresa; it was here, five years ago, in that time when the years seemed to last much longer, not slip away as they do now. Half a lifetime fit within those five years. I recognize the white shutters on the second-floor balcony. If she comes out on the balcony, she will recognize me, and if I climb the two flights of wooden steps and press the button, the bell will ring not in a dream but in reality, intruding upon the lives of other people, an unwanted surprise. I’ve heard almost nothing about her all this time, we barely know each other, we were together only briefly, long ago.

My thoughts and actions are not in sync, just as there is no correspondence between this place and my being here. I walk back and forth, looking up at the balconies, thinking at one point that I see a figure behind the windowpanes. I walk into the foyer, which is open and has that strange smell of damp and old wood that doorways have in Madrid. On one of the mailboxes I see her name, handwritten, beside that of her husband. The name that once made me shiver as I spoke it, and in which are codified every degree of tenderness, uncertainty, pain, and desire, is a common name written by hand on a card on a mailbox, among the names of neighbors who meet her every day in the foyer or on the stairs, and for whom her face is part of the same trivial reality as these streets and this city, where I, the traveler, float among mirages of loneliness.

The bravery of cowards, the strength of the weak, the daring of the faint-hearted: I have come to the landing and without hesitation ring the doorbell. An old door, large, painted dark green, with a brass peephole. Every detail falls back into place, and my agitation and the weakness in my legs are the same as then, even though I am a different person. “Maybe she isn’t home,” I think with both hope and disappointment. A few seconds pass, and I don’t hear anything, not footsteps, not voices, only the resonance of the bell in silent rooms.

The door opens, and she is looking at me. At first she doesn’t recognize me; she wears the suspicious and questioning expression of someone expecting a door-to-door salesman. I realize that I am much heavier now, and I don’t have my beard, and my hair is shorter than it was five years ago, thinner too. In her arms she holds a large child with dark skin and curly hair who has a pacifier in his mouth and a dirty bib over his pajama top. A little girl wearing glasses peers cautiously from behind her, peering at me with her mother’s eyes. The boy has stopped crying and is staring at me intently, sniffling and making a slurping, sucking noise with his pacifier.

I recognize the slender face and light gray eyes, the two locks of almost blond hair framing her face, but I can’t associate the girl I knew with this carelessly dressed woman who holds in her arms a child so big that he must exhaust her, and who has a little girl who looks so astonishingly like her.

“What a surprise,” she says to me. “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” and she smiles a smile that lights up her eyes with the gleam of old times. I apologize. “I was just passing by, and I thought I might as well see if you were in.” I hear my own voice, hoarser than it should be, a voice that hasn’t spoken with anyone for hours. “It’s a miracle you caught me at home, I was going to take the boy to the doctor, but since I don’t have anyone to leave my little girl with I was going to take her too. He’s not sick,” she explains, “at least not really sick. As soon as his tonsils get a little inflamed, his temperature shoots up, and I shouldn’t get frightened, but I always do.” I am a little deflated by the natural way she’s talking, with no trace of surprise, as if I were an ordinary acquaintance. She feels the boy’s forehead. “I gave him an aspirin, I think his fever is coming down.” We give aspirin to my son too, and the same thing happens. I’m about to tell her that but don’t, held back by a strange shyness, as if to hide from her that I’m married too and a father, that my son is more or less the same age as hers and also sick, according to what my wife told me last night on the phone.

I make some show of getting ready to leave, having been so flustered that I didn’t kiss her when I first saw her. “But come in, don’t stand there in the doorway; since you’ve come to see me, I’m not letting you go without at least giving you a cup of coffee.” Her apartment has long hallways, high ceilings with elaborate plasterwork, and wood floors. It must have been very luxurious once, but now it’s half empty and looks almost abandoned; maybe it belonged to her parents, or her husband’s, and now they don’t have the money to keep it up. She didn’t give me the impression of money, or at least she wasn’t taking care of herself as she did when I knew her, she wore old jeans and canvas shoes with no laces. Her skin had lost its transparency, and her hair was messy, like that of a woman who doesn’t get out of the house all day and, worn down by her children, doesn’t have the time or the energy to put on makeup.

She clears toys, scribbled papers, and colored pencils from a large, old chair and asks me to have a seat while she makes coffee. I find myself alone in a living room dominated somehow by both emptiness and disorder. On the table is a blender just like the one my wife and I use to blend fruit for our son, a dirty bib, a jar of liquid soap for babies, and a disposable diaper that smells strongly of urine. Street noise comes through the two balconies where sheer curtains filter the wan light of a cloudy day. In an adjoining room I can hear the little boy crying, accompanied by the loud strains of a morning cartoon show. What am I doing sitting here? Absurd and correct as a visitor, rigid in this armchair, not daring to so much as cross my legs, waiting for her to appear in the doorway, as I once waited, eager yet frightened of her presence, covetous of her every feature and gesture, the way she dressed — a little extreme for a provincial city — and her Madrid accent.

She comes back carrying coffee on a tray, and as she sets it down on the table, she sees the dirty diaper and looks away with an expression of annoyance and weariness. “I forgot the sugar, I don’t know where my head is.” She takes away the diaper, the pacifier, and the blender, and I hear her say something to the little boy, who has stopped crying, and she appears again, smiling with a look of “Sorry!” and brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. Then, as if in a painting, I see her as she was five years ago, as precisely as the clear view you get after you clean a cloudy pane of glass, and I think she looks a lot like someone I know, although it takes a while to realize whom: the woman in the travel agency, the Olympia my friend Juan and I are so crazy about. The same foreshortening as she lifts the hair from her face, the same chestnut hair, the large mouth, the line of her chin and jaw, the glint in her light-colored eyes.

Just as when I was so much in love with her, I can’t concentrate on what she’s telling me, I’m too absorbed in the fantasy of love, of the contemplative, paralyzing, adolescent passion that reaches its tortuous culmination in impossibility, that nourishes the desire for powerlessness, for the suffering and cowardice of literature. “I left medical school when I got pregnant, you remember? I tried to go back when my daughter was a little older, but then I got pregnant again, and now I’m thinking about entering nursing school. It doesn’t take as long, I can handle the assignments, and I’m pretty sure it will be easy to find a job. Imagine, with my experience they could make me head of Maternity.”

She gets up because the boy has started crying again, very loud, and when she comes back, he is in her arms. His face is red, and his eyes shine with fever. Suddenly I’m jealous, looking at the boy, recognizing his father’s features, the man I begged her to leave and come away with me. From the next room the girl calls to her, because something has fallen to the floor with a crash. As she leaves the room again, I observe her from the rear. Her face is the same, but her body has filled out, she has lost that sinuous line I loved so much when she was twenty. When she handed me my coffee I noted, furtively, that her breasts are larger and heavier now, the breasts of a woman who has had two children, and nursed them, and not taken very good care of herself afterward. I remember her tight-fitting jeans and her soft shirts buttoned low, blouses with a liquid, silky touch that felt like her skin the few times I dared caress her. I invited her out for dinner one night in early summer, and she came downstairs wearing sandals and a dress of a fine plaid material with her hair caught back in a pony-tail and two curls at her cheeks, so sexy and desirable that it was a torment not to grab her.

“But don’t go, tell me something about yourself, you haven’t said a word, you haven’t changed a bit in that regard.” The boy isn’t crying now, and I can hear the television again in the next room. She sits down across from me and asks me to tell her about my life these days, and I notice, with a glowing coal of satisfaction, that she’s combed her hair and dashed on some lipstick. “I heard that you got married too, to your old sweetheart.” “Like you,” I find the courage to say, and for a moment we are truly ourselves and the void between us is a narrow void, we crossed it only once a long time ago but it never entirely closed. We smile, shaking our heads politely, acknowledging the objective vulgarity of real life. “At least you did something, finished your degree. I remember how much you liked art history, how excited you were about it, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Picasso, Bosch, Velázquez, Giotto. I still have the postcard you sent me from Florence.”

And a lot of good that did. I remember that card, the exact moment I wrote you sitting on the steps of Santa Maria del Fiore; how I loved you. I explain to her that I found a temporary job as an administrative assistant, and that the next year I took the competitive exams, “although I don’t plan to stay in that office forever. As soon as I can I’ll go back and work on my thesis in earnest, or I’ll start taking my exams to teach at an institute.” “That’s what Victor is doing, he’s studying for exams for the post office. We’ll see if he has as much luck as you.” Victor. She says that name so casually. If she’d stayed with me, she’d be saying my name as easily as my wife does; maybe she’d have some loving nickname for me.

The telephone rings at the far end of the room. She speaks in a low voice, not looking at me, telling someone that she will take the child to the doctor, although she thinks his temperature has stopped going up. “Ciao,” she says, “come soon.” What am I doing here? A ghost, a visitor, not even an intruder. Ciao, come soon. People say words without stopping to think what they mean; entire lives fit in the simplest phrase, and a personal insult can hide in a polite formula of courtesy: “What a shame you didn’t run into Victor, he would have enjoyed seeing you.”

This time when I get up, she doesn’t ask me to stay. I notice the smell of domestic life in the hallway, which she doesn’t: the funk of a sick child, kitchen odors, a whiff of sheets and bodies, of a not very well ventilated apartment, these are made up of the everyday events of her life, her real life, which for me is as foreign as this large, disorderly, somber house. There must be a particular smell to the small apartment I bought through a government program, and it must be similar: stale milk and talcum powder. She walks me to the door, holding her son in her arms again. He is red-faced and bawling, his chin wet with slobber. She gives me two kisses, one on each cheek, not touching the skin, barely stirring the air between us. “Will you be in Madrid long? Why don’t you come see us if you’re going to be here awhile?” Perhaps she says that to eliminate any hint of our old relationship. This isn’t the woman who loved me and was ready to live with me; now she speaks in a plural that includes her husband, offering me the kind of matrimonial friendship that is the worst offense to an ex-lover. “I don’t think I’ll have time, I’m going back tonight and I still have things to do.”

THE REST OF THE DAY I walked around Madrid, weary and bored. I chose a restaurant to eat in, after much looking and hesitation. The minute I went in, I realized I’d made a bad choice, but a waiter in a dirty red jacket was already coming toward me and I didn’t have the courage to leave, so I ate a fillet that smelled slightly spoiled. In a large bookstore on the Gran Vía I got dizzy looking at titles and ended up buying a novel I wasn’t interested in and have never read. I went to a movie, and it was dark when I came out, but I still had several hours to kill before the train left. I called home with a touch of guilt, although I’d been gone less than three days. The minute my wife picked up the phone, I knew there was a problem. Our son had woken up that night with a new cough, and choking, and she’d taken him straight to the emergency room, where they said he had laryngitis.

A few minutes before the express pulled out, I saw a young woman running along the platform. It had occurred to me, as I waited, that she might come to say good-bye, that that was why she’d asked me what time the train left. Five years before, that other time, I’d waited till the last moment on this same platform, watching the clock and the faces of the people pushing through the glass doors. I’d looked for her when I arrived at dawn and again that night — on the same train I’d come on — and she hadn’t been there either time. Subconsciously, I’d repeated the wait, not because I thought it was likely she would come, not even that I wanted her to, but out of a sentimental inertia.

Now, shivering, incredulous, almost frightened, I watched her come running toward me, five years too late, and the person who was excited was the person I was then, revived, not as yet humiliated by surrender, by the excessive price of work and family life, but unfortunately not improved with time either, as bewildered and foolish as ever.

Then I saw it wasn’t she, although the woman kept looking toward me as she came nearer and smiled at me and held her arms open for a hug. She was tall, slender, with curly hair. But she went past me and threw her arms around a man standing behind me. I boarded the train and watched them through the window. The man was carrying a large suitcase, but neither of them looked up when the whistle blew. I watched them grow small in the distance as the train pulled away, arms around each other and alone in the darkness of the platform.