She had to overcome her depression, made worse by physical lethargy, to organize as if for a military campaign the annual tasks involved in moving to the Sierra (“The sooner all of you leave Madrid, dear girl, the better. Your father says something very bad is going to happen, and I ask him to stop reading the paper to me because you know how I get—I hardly have enough time to rush to the bathroom”): picking up the carpets, laundering all the linens, arranging the closets, waxing the parquet floors and the furniture before covering everything with cloths to keep out the desert dust of Madrid summers. But where would she find the strength to give orders to the maids and maintain the necessary authority if she shuffled around the house in a robe and slippers at this hour, her hair uncombed, with no desire to look at herself, no energy to scold the cook for playing the radio so loud, those commercials and flamenco songs resonating in her skull. Like the throb of pain in her temples, the little key insinuated itself into her conversations and actions. There were moments when she made an effort to forget it, others when she lamented the accident of having seen it and at the same time reproached herself for her curiosity and cowardice, her impatience to examine the inside of the drawer, her fear at what she might find there. But there also might be nothing to justify so much anxiety, and the best thing would be to sit calmly at the desk in the study, turn the key, and one minute later be cured of uncertainty and even allow herself a little remorse for having succumbed to curiosity and invaded a private place that didn’t belong to her.
She wasn’t blind and she wasn’t a fool; she couldn’t help but suspect, not because of her distrust but his typically male negligence, his inattentiveness to what he revealed in his actions. If he wasn’t there, Adela entered his study only to oversee the cleaning, moving with combined reverence and discretion in order not to disrupt anything, and at the same time act with invisible diligence to prevent the spread of disorder. She looked at things, examining a sheet on which something was drawn and putting it back in the same place, or perhaps imposing a certain geometric harmony on the objects and papers on the desk. (What envy she felt when Zenobia Camprubí told her she was Juan Ramón’s right hand, secretary, typist, almost his editor, that he read everything to her and considered nothing definitive, wouldn’t agree to have anything typed, until Zenobia had given her approval.) She put pencils and brushes in a jar, gathered together loose notes, visiting cards, pages torn out of a notebook, and placed them under a paperweight, not trying very hard to decipher the tiny handwriting he was well known for and that with the years had become less legible and closer to microscopic, though not more difficult for her to read. (It hurt even more to hear Zenobia talk about her exhausting duties—smiling, with her mixture of complaint and gratification, her light eyes brilliant, just like her light skin and American dentures—because Adela, too, had once enjoyed typing Abel’s articles and class notes, happy to help him, to do something useful that actively connected her to his work.) With caution, she preferred not to start reading, avoiding the possibility of learning something that might be painful; she checked the pockets of his jackets before sending them to the cleaner’s, trying not to look at what he’d written on some forgotten piece of paper, not wondering why there were two movie tickets for a matinee showing on a workday, not finding out whose phone number was written in the margin of a newspaper. What you don’t know can’t hurt you—it may never have existed in the first place. Curiosity was capitulation in advance, a sign of danger, of panic. Adela had been brought up not to question or have doubts about men’s behavior beyond the domestic sphere. You didn’t subject the honor of individuals to overly stringent scrutiny. If you did, you allowed and even encouraged an eruption of the indecent and the unacceptable, and once such a thing came to light, you couldn’t pretend you hadn’t seen it. Now the indecent was always on view in Spain, with an offensive carnality, and no one cared. In the daily life of an intelligent, vigorous man who didn’t intend to abandon other projects and was beginning to receive his first international commissions, a position with so much responsibility in the construction of University City demanded all his time. Since she had an honorable spirit and a passive character, Adela liked things to be what they seemed. Didn’t her husband always say a building has to honorably show what it is, what it’s made of, what it’s good for, and for whom? Some mornings the disorder was greater because he’d stayed up working until dawn; in order not to wake her, he’d slept on the divan, usually stacked with books and files of plans. Over time it became more customary for him to sleep in his study. The divan was large and comfortable; she made certain a blanket and clean pillow were always in the closet. Sometimes she was ill, and it was uncomfortable for the two of them to sleep together. From time to time, above all during this past year, he was so burdened with work that he didn’t get home until two or three in the morning. No matter how quietly he opened the door and moved down the hall, she heard him come in. She was awake, looking at the time on the luminous hands of the clock on the night table, or she’d dozed off and her sleep was so light the distant noise of the elevator woke her, or the friction of the key cautiously entering the lock. The footsteps approached; Adela closed her eyes and remained rigid in bed, attempting to give her breathing the regularity of sleep. He mustn’t know she’d been awake, waiting, mustn’t suspect he was being watched. But the footsteps didn’t stop at the bedroom; they continued on to his study. How clearly she heard everything in the silence of the apartment, how detectable each familiar sound, catalogued in memory: the study door opening and closing, the click of the lamp he turned on, the tired weight of his body on the springs of the divan. So exhausted, so many hours of work without respite, so many days without a break, so submerged in his concerns and obsessions: deadlines approaching, countless details requiring his attention, accidents at the sites, scaffolds collapsing because they were put up hurriedly and negligently, strikes, lost days, threats on the phone, anonymous letters in the mail. What else could I have wanted than to help you if you’d let me, if you had the confidence in me you had at the beginning and thought I was intelligent enough to understand what you told me.
More and more, what kept her up at night was the fear that something had happened to him. In the mornings she’d go to the balcony to watch him leave the building and walk to the garage where he kept the car. Some gunmen had waited for an engineer on the Lozoya Canal at the entrance to his building, not far from theirs, right on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, and shot him at the streetcar stop, and when he fell to the ground they finished him off in front of the people who were waiting and looked away. Zenobia had told her she passed the corner of Lista and Calle Alcántara with Juan Ramón on the night Captain Faraudo was killed and saw the pool of blood no one had cleaned, and people were walking in it, paying no attention, leaving their tracks on the sidewalk. Adela preferred not to think about such things if she could avoid it. What you didn’t think about didn’t exist. But she feared for her husband, almost as much as she feared for her brother, especially since the great fool had been reckless enough to start dressing in uniform and carrying a pistol. The telephone rang in midmorning and her heart seemed to stop. She heard shots or shouts on the street and the maids ran to the balconies with the same curiosity they brought to watching a wedding or a funeral procession. The day the engineer was killed, the cook came back from the market insisting she’d seen the corpse on the sidewalk with her own eyes, which undoubtedly was the reason she’d been out for almost two hours. “His leg was twitching like a rabbit,” she said. “Exactly like a rabbit.” But it was better not to say anything to the maids, because they confronted her, muttering under their breath as they went down the hall toward the kitchen: what does she think, does she think she’ll always be the señora and us the servants? People had no judgment. The maids and the building porter and the grocery clerk gathered on the corner and talked about people killed in an attack as if they were incidents at a soccer game. Ignacio Abel was late coming home at night and she thought about the da
ily radio reports of gunfire and assassinations, always incomplete because of censorship, which made them even more alarming. She was frightened by how casually her father and brother predicted that very soon something serious would happen; the country couldn’t continue sliding down the same slope, and only after a great bloodbath would things begin to be rectified in Spain. Those words, repeated so often, made her shudder. “Bloodbath” wasn’t abstract to her: she imagined the bathtub in her apartment filled with blood that overflowed and stained the white floor tiles. She asked Ignacio, timid about pestering him or saying something that might worsen his nervousness and fatigue, more visible as the months passed and summer approached, “What will happen?” “Nothing will happen, the same as always. Smoke and no fire,” he replied without looking her in the eye. So tired that when he came home he fell asleep as he read the paper, waiting for supper. So overburdened that after supper he went into his study to work on the drawing board or write letters or talk on the phone. It took her a long time to suspect him. She never imagined he could deceive her or take a mistress, like so many men. What she’d liked about him from the very beginning was his not being like other men: he didn’t smell of tobacco; he was always considerate with her, affectionate with the children, never raising his voice to them, never raising his hand (except that time in May when he came out of their bedroom distraught and saw her in the hall and said nothing, and the boy’s face was red and he was paralyzed, about to burst into tears, trembling, his mouth open as if gasping for air, just as when he was an infant and his crying stopped and his chest swelled and he seemed about to suffocate); when her father and brother, like almost everyone else, began to argue about politics, he kept his opinions to himself or expressed them in an ironic tone; he didn’t go to cafés; his life was guided by a single purpose; when he concentrated so much on work that it seemed the people and things closest to him had become blurred, it was a consequence of his vocation, which Adela accepted with melancholy admiration. When he was close there was, increasingly, a degree of absence; that this absence surrounded a nucleus of coldness was a discovery Adela preferred not to make. Her inadequate education as a Spanish señorita had left her with a feeling of intellectual inferiority, made more pronounced because her sharp intelligence allowed her to understand the extent of what she hadn’t learned. How could she assess the formidable energies deployed by a man of will and talent in the exercise of a profession as filled with difficulties and possible rewards as her husband’s, so rich in different disciplines, with room for invention as well as mathematical rigor, for the secret, manual shaping of forms (the drawings on his desk each morning; the small models the children had once played with), and the courage to give orders and control machines and teams of workers. A man paid a price for the privilege of immersing himself in action, of visibly acting on the world. Perhaps her husband hadn’t known at first how to calculate what he ought to be paid. He’d wanted so much to be named to this position. Perhaps only she, because she knew better than anyone the signs of what he struggled to hide, knew how much it mattered to him, though he feigned indifference; how impatiently he’d waited for calls that didn’t come, letters with an official letterhead that took too long to arrive. It mattered to him to be chosen from among so many architects, to have the opportunity to work on a project of an originality and scale uncommon in Europe. But also, she knew, it mattered to him to rank higher than the others: those who’d enjoyed more opportunities than he had, those who had powerful family names and took advantage of influential connections. He also made use of his: at the same time that he asserted his Republican and Socialist credentials to Dr. Negrín, he didn’t reject the help of his father-in-law’s friends, well established and close to the last monarchist government. Perhaps, at that time, not even he had realized the intensity of his ambition. Men, Adela had observed, were not perceptive regarding their own weaknesses, least of all when they touched on a certain shamelessness in the temporary suspension of their principles. Her husband’s principles mattered less to her than to him, so it was easy for her to observe his fondness for two or three decrepit members of the king’s coterie who enjoyed honorary positions on the University City Construction Commission and were old acquaintances of Don Francisco de Asís. The benevolent father-in-law, well placed in the regime whose imminent collapse no one could imagine, wrote letters, arranged meetings, celebrated with verbose abundance the merits of his daughter’s spouse. She observed her husband at close hand, saw what he himself wasn’t aware of, the eager gleam in his eye, his growing capacity for sincere adulation, the longing that had always been in him and was the cause and not the consequence of frustrated desires not always formulated in his own mind, much less communicated to her. What could she have given him, what satisfaction, not to mention relief, had she not been educated to be an intellectually crippled creature, like one of those Chinese women whose feet were bound from the time they were little girls.
If she’d been able to study; if she’d enjoyed the advantages awaiting her own daughter, advantages already there at age fourteen; or if she’d had the courage to go back and forth selling and buying and furnishing and renting apartments, like Zenobia Camprubí, immune to the opinion of others or the censure of her own family. How many times had Zenobia asked for her help in her popular handicrafts shop? She’d earn some money and escape the tedium of housekeeping now that the children no longer needed her constant presence. Of course she would have liked to, but she’d never dare. Her son’s not being brilliant or diligent didn’t worry her. Men eventually found their place in life. But the girl, Lita, it was important for her to study, to be confident in public, never paralyzed by her mother’s shyness, never submissive, not only to expressed orders or looks of censure but to the unformulated desires of others, the sickly need for gratitude through obedience, to know what other people thought of her. How she admired her husband’s ability to listen to other people’s opinions only to the extent it suited him. She’d seen him courting, flattering, at times humbling himself so much that it had been uncomfortable for her to watch. A man with so high an opinion of himself couldn’t acknowledge he’d behaved hypocritically, and so he needed to believe his own lies while saying them and forget them as soon as they’d been said. She didn’t judge him. If she detected these weaknesses, it was because she loved him. She consoled him in periods of uncertainty, she stayed awake beside him when he couldn’t sleep, anxiety-ridden because of the wait for a decision that was taking too long to arrive. No one but she knew how shamelessly Ignacio Abel had longed for his appointment, yet in public he displayed an educated skepticism about it. But the thing most desired was transformed before long into a burden, the trap one willfully constructs and then falls into. A man had before him so great an abundance of possibilities that any goal he chose would be undermined by his awareness of the ones he’d discarded. He always had to be wanting something; his enthusiasm and his disappointment followed parallel courses. To work at University City, he’d suppressed his own artistic vision: the projects he didn’t do or postponed were lost opportunities that fed his longing and didn’t allow him to enjoy what he was actually doing. His good life, what he’d achieved with so much effort over so many years, was more than anything the tangible reverse side of other lives he might have known. Adela had always feared this, the temptation not of other women but of his longing for things he cared about—above all because he didn’t have them or because others, no better than he, did—and his desire to visit places whose greatest attraction was his not having seen them. In magazines he looked at buildings his colleagues had designed and that he might have worked on had he not been mired in the endless construction of University City. He’d been invited to design a library in the United States, and not even that could please him; perhaps it wasn’t an international commission as important as the ones Lacasa or Sánchez Arcas or Sert received, and they were younger than he was; perhaps the confirmation wouldn’t arrive or the government wouldn’t grant him permission to leave;
perhaps he preferred not to take his family and still hadn’t decided to say so, and therefore changed the topic when the children asked about the journey and evaded her eyes. But he always did. He didn’t look her in the eye, and if he did, it was for an uncomfortable instant and he didn’t really see her. She couldn’t give him anything he was looking for. What she’d given him in the past he no longer remembered. Perhaps he was ashamed of having loved her once, or at least of having needed her. He wrote his notes in a tiny hand and kept them locked in a drawer, just as he guarded his thoughts when he was with her and the children and for a moment his gaze was lost, or he nodded at something they told him about school without paying any attention, or suddenly seemed to remember that he had to make an urgent phone call or attend an unexpected meeting.
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