Reasons for returning home later came easily and without remorse—a delayed appointment or some last-minute work—and when he hung up the phone he promptly forgot the hint of reluctant disbelief in Adela’s voice. With Judith Biely everything happened to him for the first time, the exaltation of the night beginning at an hour when not long before he’d resigned himself to domestic somnolence, the taste of her mouth or the dense sweetness of entering her or the gratitude and surprise of feeling how her body tensed like a bow when she came with a generous abandon that didn’t resemble anything he’d known in his experience of lovemaking. Guided by her, he discovered worlds and lives he’d never imagined in the city that was his and yet became a promising, unknown place on the nights when he explored it beside her. (The lie hadn’t stained them yet. Between his old life and the one he led with her there were no dark zones or points of friction. He passed from one to the other as easily as he jumped from a streetcar a short time before it stopped, adjusting his jacket or hat, perhaps blinking to adapt his eyes to the sudden abundance of sun.) But he was also the same man he’d always been, the one he’d be again after a few hours or the next morning (breakfast at the dining room table, the children ready to go to school; the agitation of typewriters and ringing telephones in the drafting room at University City, plans on the drawing tables, crews of men on scaffolds and in trenches, going up in cranes to the terraces of buildings almost completed), and yet he was another man, younger, passionate, dazed, not fully responsible for actions he sometimes observed with alarm, as if looking at himself from the outside while he let himself be carried away by an impulse he didn’t want to resist. Holding Judith’s hand, he went down narrow steps to basements filled with music and smoke, occupied by pale faces in a semidarkness that was greenish, bluish, reddish, in a submerged Madrid that left no traces in the light of day, that didn’t know his secret and to which he gained access by crossing hostile doors, passageways so dimly lit he would have been lost if Judith Biely hadn’t led him. He’d been one of those daytime men for whom night falls earlier and earlier in their lives: the return home after work, the key in the lock, the familiar voices and smells coming to receive him from the end of the hall, supper at the table, heads bent over plates in the light of the lamp, the somnolence of conversation punctuated by domestic sounds, the light squeak of a fork’s tines on porcelain, a spoon against the side of a glass. From the window of his conjugal bedroom, Madrid was a far-off country whose bright lights were lost in the distance and from which he occasionally could hear, in the silence and in his insomnia, bursts of laughter from people out late, car engines, hands clapping for the sereno, the watchman, then the sound of his pike against the paving stones. Now the night expanded before him like those spacious landscapes that dominated dreams, or revealed labyrinths extending beneath or to the other side of the city he’d always known as he knew metro tunnels and the galleries of subterranean pipelines. A simple lie was the password that gave him partial access to the guiltless paradise of a Madrid that was his own and more foreign than ever, where the presence of Judith Biely walking with him and holding his arm granted him an unaccustomed right to citizenship. It took very little drink (or none at all, just breathing the damp, cold night air, looking at the constellations of neon signs and their reflections on the hoods of cars) for him to become giddy, just as he didn’t need more than a certain glance or the brush of her hand or her mere proximity to awaken desire. In those places the light was always more subdued, the faces paler, the heads of hair shinier, the voices more foreign. Sexual tension and alcohol blurred everything, and matters flowed with the swift broken rhythm of the music. Judith knocked on an apartment door in a building with a marble staircase on Calle Velázquez, and as soon as they entered they were submerged in a dark space crossed by shadows, where the sound of conversations in English mixed with smoke that had a resinous aroma, and the lit ends of cigarettes illuminated young faces that seemed to nod in time to the pulsations of music that could be heard from the street. Under the low light of a private room in a flamenco tavern, a woman wearing a great deal of makeup stamped her heels—and seen more closely turned out to be a man. Under the bare brick arches of an American bar installed in a basement behind the Gran Vía (a flickering light shaped like a red owl lit the doorway) he saw with alarm that Judith Biely was embracing a stranger with a shaved head wearing a dinner jacket. It was Philip Van Doren, who said something to him but the music was too loud, the drumbeats as dry and fast as the heels pounding the wooden platform in the flamenco tavern. Ignacio Abel felt Judith’s hand squeezing his in a visible, proud affirmation of her love for him. “I hope you’ve made your decision,” Van Doren said close to his ear, and it took Abel a moment to realize he was referring not to Judith but the invitation to travel to Burton College. Van Doren looked sideways at their clenched hands, at Ignacio Abel’s bold gesture when he put his arm around Judith’s waist. He smiled approvingly, with the air of a conspirator or an expert in human weakness, pleased by the success of his prediction. He asked them to join the other guests at his table and summoned a waiter with the same cold, peremptory gesture he used with his valet. “How nice to see you, Professor, you make me envious. You’ve become younger since I last saw you. Can it be expectations of an electoral victory by your Socialist comrades?” Suddenly Ignacio Abel thought that Judith and Van Doren had been lovers and were still seeing each other. The drinking and his jealousy filled him with unseemly suspicion: wasn’t there something mocking in that approving smile, something condescending? Judith and Van Doren spoke in English and there was too much noise for him to hear what they said. He looked at her lips moving, curving to inhale a cigarette that Van Doren lit with a flat gold lighter. In the oppressive atmosphere under the low ceiling the alcohol made him as dizzy as the music, the voices, the too-near faces of strangers who elbowed their way to the bar. Someone was talking to him in a loud voice, yet he couldn’t hear: a redheaded man with glasses in Van Doren’s group, a secretary at the American embassy who had just given Abel his card and insisted on holding a formal conversation. “Do you believe, Professor, that the Popular Front has any chance of winning the elections?” He responded vaguely as he looked past the man: still holding her glass, Judith was dancing with Van Doren on the tiny floor; facing each other, they made identical gestures. Her tousled hair covered half her face, the twirl of her skirt revealed her knees burnished by silk stockings. The undaunted secretary was commenting on the Spanish government’s diplomatic responses to the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Ignacio Abel watched Judith dance, consumed with desire and pride, jealous of Van Doren and the other men who looked at her. The League of Nations had once again demonstrated its lamentable irrelevance, the secretary said self-importantly. The trumpet and saxophone hurt Abel’s ears. Did he think there was a real threat in Spain of a new revolutionary uprising like the one in Asturias, this time more violent and better organized and perhaps with more likelihood of success? Judith whirled around, led by Van Doren, her skirt lifted and revealed her thighs. And if the left won next February’s elections, which seemed possible, wouldn’t that cause a military coup? Drum rolls and the metallic crash of cymbals buffeted the inside of his skull. The American government would view with pleasure the formation in Spain of a stable parliamentary majority regardless of its political identification. A final drum roll and applause ended the dance. Her face glowing with perspiration and her hair disheveled, Judith Biely came toward him and looked at him as if no one else were there.
He remembered her most clearly walking toward him, and memory became even more precious when he realized he wouldn’t see her again. He imagined her, saw her coming from the bathroom in the room in Madame Mathilde’s house, from the vanishing point at the end of the gallery in the Prado, from the revolving door of a café, or in places where they’d never been, Judith Biely in the hallway of his apartment in Madrid, which had been taken over by solitude and disorder in the course of the summer, in the turbulent time when the word
“war” was not yet current. Judith outlined against the window of the auditorium in the Student Residence, where he’d seen her for the first time less than a year ago, the room where the piano was now covered and pushed into a corner of the stage on which she’d walked, heels clicking, because the space was now occupied by hospital beds. She came toward him from a distance and he watched her, eager, concentrated in his desire, avidity in his eyes, sitting on the divan in a café where he’d arrived early, not only because he was impatient to be with her but also because he loved to see her arrive, coming in from the street, slim and foreign, disoriented by the semidarkness, and he saying, as he stood to welcome her, with the out-of-date courtesy of a man older than she, “I never tire of looking at you.”
The Madrid they saw when they were looking for each other or were together was only partially the city each would have lived in if they hadn’t met. Before she arrived, Madrid had been a fantasy for Judith Biely, resplendent with promise and literature, the city of books and a language she loved; for Ignacio Abel, Madrid was the city he’d lived in reluctantly since he was born and for which he felt an uncomfortable mixture of frustration and tenderness. He wanted to leave Madrid—and, if possible, Spain—with the same intensity he wanted to engage in urban design projects that, in spite of gradual skepticism and accommodation to the bourgeois life into which he’d settled, continued to be nourished by his impulse toward social justice and improvement of the world and the lives of ordinary people. The city Judith Biely had imagined by studying maps and photographs, and by reading Galdós at the university with the same passion she had brought to reading Washington Irving when she was in school, became interwoven with the one Ignacio Abel rediscovered because he was showing it to her and looking at it through her wondering eyes. He thought of his own experience when he had arrived in Germany, about the celebratory quality the most trivial acts had for him, buying a newspaper and laboriously reading it in a café, exchanging polite words with the landlady at his pensión; about the permanent joy of learning something new, a word or turn of phrase in German, a secret of the art of drawing or geometry explained by Paul Klee, the rational miracle of an ordinary object suddenly revealed in the hands of Professor Rossman. He understood Judith Biely’s love of Spain by recalling the man he’d been, by wanting to recover the part of himself that contained the best of his spirit and had become lethargic since his return. The intensity of his desire for Judith brought back the enthusiasm that sustained him during his time in Germany: the charm of expectation, the sensation of having before him something tangible and at the same time without limits, of once again looking through a wide window in his life that later closed. He understood Judith without her having to explain: as free in Madrid of the weight of the past as he’d been in Berlin and Weimar, the present took on a dazzling sensory quality for her. She’d just turned the age he’d been when he went to Germany: love and the desire to know made her even younger. Infected by her, Ignacio Abel now perceived differently the texture and density of life in familiar places, prepared to love things as she saw them—free of shadows from the past, the regrets of memory, and associated with her love for him. Madrid was the joyful present in which she, too, lightened almost all the weight of her personal identity. She was what Ignacio Abel saw in her, what she herself told him, and more so because when she spoke Spanish she became in part a new person, temporarily divesting herself not only of her usual language but of her former existence. Still immune to suspicion and guilt, though later she didn’t know whether it had been a state of innocence or insensitivity—she was grateful it lasted as long as it did but also reproached herself for the pain inflicted, her sordid complicity in deception, she who’d been so honest until then, her conscience so clear—she observed her own life in another country and language as if it were a novel, her immersion in the book she was always about to write: similar to when she’d been an adolescent and stopped reading or came out of a movie theater but continued to reside inside the fiction that had so powerfully bewitched her. What happened to her in that other existence was real, but like events in a film, it had no consequence in the outside world and wasn’t governed by its rules. Walking through this city where she knew no one and where nothing had associations in her memory, finding herself in it with a lover she was never sure of seeing again, were acts that belonged to an order of things as distant from her life in America as the episodes of a novel: a novel that continued to unfold without anyone writing it, in which she was the protagonist and only reader; a film shown in a theater where she was the only spectator, a film that absorbed her so much it canceled what it was hard to believe still existed—the wounding light of day, the harsh, hostile weather of the outside world.
But in Madrid novels bore a closer resemblance to truth. Judith Biely attended Professor Salinas’s classes on Fortunata y Jacinta, and the names of places that in her earlier readings had seemed improbable and fantastic she now found on metro maps and corner street signs. She read on the streetcar, and when she got off at the Puerta del Sol and took just a few steps, she was already in the heart of the novel. The streetcar’s route, the walking, the street noise made the book come to life for her. Calle de Postas, Plaza de Santa Cruz, Plaza de Pontejos existed, incredibly, with the same exquisiteness as the Alhambra of Washington Irving and the Manchegan plains John Dos Passos had traveled in search of Don Quijote’s fictional trail. On the Plaza de Pontejos, Assault Guard vans and police wearing high boots and blue uniforms with gold buttons moved back and forth. Election posters pasted one over the other covered the walls and reached as high as the first balconies in a chaotic melodrama of typographies and the signs and symbols of political parties. From the novel she recognized the gloomy shops that sold fabrics and images of saints and religious objects, the street peddlers shouting under the arcades on the Plaza Mayor, and at one of its corners she looked for the pharmacy that served as the entrance to the house where Fortunata lived. On Calle Toledo she followed in the footsteps of the garrulous Estupina. At the foot of the granite buttress of the Arco de Cuchilleros, she read the description of the arrival of Juanito Santa Cruz to the tenement where he was about to see the girl who would change the course of his life. Young women as beautiful as that fictional character hawked in shrill voices the things they sold at street stalls: swarthy, with eyes as dark and faces as sensual as the paintings of saints by Velázquez and Zurbarán at the Prado, hair disheveled, wearing wide black skirts and shawls over their shoulders, some sitting on a step and casually revealing the swollen white breast on which a child with a red round face and blessed sleep on his eyelids was nursing. Madrid became suburban and rustic: an odor of esparto grass and leather came from mysterious stores of agricultural implements and harnesses for animals. Hammer blows and clouds of smoke from metal submerged in water reached her from the dark mouth of a blacksmith’s shop in whose interior glowing coals and white-hot tips of metal gleamed. Peasants’ somber faces behind the windows of a bus, wagons pulled by mules beaten mercilessly by drivers in sheepskin coats shouting obscenities, cars honking, the monotonous chant of blind men who sang ballads in the doorways of taverns, flamenco songs and advertisements played at top volume on radios, barefoot boys with shaved heads who had fistfights over a cigarette butt. A car with two loudspeakers on its roof blared “The Internationale,” and the air filled with leaflets that fluttered in the wind like an invasion of white butterflies. MADRILEñOS! VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATES OF THE POPULAR FRONT! The anthem was interrupted to make way for a voice that declared with deficient metallic amplification over the street noises: FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE WRONGFULLY IMPRISONED HEROES OF OCTOBER, FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF THE ASTURIAS EXECUTIONERS, FOR THE TRIUMPH OF THE WORKING CLASS. Attentive to everything, a foreigner, stared at, her head uncovered and a novel under her arm, Judith Biely discovered Madrid, and the streets of New York rose in her memory: on the other side of the ocean, and at an even greater distance in time, she recognized cadences of shouts, the poverty-stricken density of human lives
, the stink of manure and rotten fruit and frying grease, the juxtaposition of voices, signs, businesses, trades, the anxieties of survival, perhaps less anguished here, just as the crowds of people were less suffocating, perhaps because the climate was more benign.
She was moving through a real city, the plot and subject matter of a novel, and the oldest part of the memory of the man she loved. On that February afternoon Judith walked, carried along by joy and curiosity, on the same streets where her lover had been a boy at the end of another century, in a city of streetcars pulled by mules and street lamps lit by gas. In the book she had to write, there would also be the resonance of that memory: although it didn’t belong to her, it had turned out to be extremely intimate. She would have liked to walk with him here, asking questions: on the far side of the square she saw the entrance to the Plaza Mayor through the Arco de Cuchilleros and recalled his telling her that he had used it as a guide so as not to get lost the first few times he went to school by himself, a boy not very different from the ones she saw now playing in the street, with gray shorts and espadrilles and shaved heads, scarves and berets and faces red with cold, approaching her, attracted by her foreignness, like the men who stood looking at her and muttering in low voices words she didn’t understand, as she moved faster past the doors of taverns. She savored the street names, pronouncing them softly to practice her Spanish and underlining them on the pages of the novel. Ignacio Abel thought it strange that Judith found so much beauty in them, surprised at her discovery, uncomfortable when she insisted on asking him things he had long forgotten: the address of the house where his mother had worked as a porter, the location of the window through which a perpetual gray light entered the basement where he studied feverishly in the light of an oil lamp, listening to people’s footsteps and horses’ hooves on the paving stones, and the wheels of wagons like the one that brought his father home dead. He was awkward or reluctant when remembering; what excited him was what he saw in front of his eyes or what didn’t exist yet. He didn’t ask Judith about her past so that he wouldn’t have to imagine her with other men. Of his own past he recalled with her his first trip through Europe, the year he spent in Germany, and the trunk filled with books and magazines he brought back when he returned and that still nourished him. “Like you now in Madrid, almost as young as you.” He wasn’t the one who told her about the two buildings erected in recent years that filled him with a pride too private to degrade by talking about them or becoming arrogant. It was Philip Van Doren, whom he distrusted so intensely, feeling himself observed, judged by eyes where an intelligence gleamed, at once piercing and cold, which he found unsettling because he couldn’t understand it, the intelligence of someone who knows he has enough money to buy anything and perhaps imagines he can control from a distance the lives of others: his life and Judith’s. It was Philip Van Doren who showed Judith photographs of the public school and the marketplace designed by Ignacio Abel for the neighborhood where he’d been born. That afternoon she looked for the two buildings as intently as she had followed the trail of Galdós’s characters. Each imposed its presence in a different way, suddenly appearing on a square or around a corner, singular and at the same time blending with the tenements, the modest rows of balconies, the horizon of tiled roofs. The school was all right angles and large picture windows: the children in their blue smocks flooded out when she stopped in front of the building, imagining the care Ignacio Abel must have used in selecting the exact color of the bricks, the forms of the letters carved into the white stone over the entrance: SPANISH REPUBLIC. NATIONAL COEDUCATIONAL SCHOOL “PÉREZ GALDÓS.”The concrete roof arched against dark tiles and chimneys like a great animal emerging from the water. She recognized him here, just as she did in the abrupt strokes of his handwriting, the turbulence repressed and concealed beneath his correct manners, beneath his crushing formality, in his impatience when he undressed her the minute they were alone, and kissed and bit her, probed her as feverishly with his eyes as with his fingers and lips. Right angles, wide picture windows, concrete and brick already bruised and ennobled by the weather, massive tensions supported on the buoyancy of a mathematical key, on the pure force of gravity and the solidity of foundations driven into the earth: where others saw a market filled with people and loud voices, filthy with refuse, occupied by mountains of produce and butchered animals oozing blood on white tile counters under the wounding light of electric lamps, she found a personal confession, the hidden lines of a self-portrait.
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