“Or maybe they thought there were more of us and ran away.”
“How scared I was not to see you, Don Ignacio. How could I face my father if anything happened to you?”
A sign carved into a boundary stone finally indicated the road: TO MADRID, 10 LEAGUES. They want Anarchist communism and we haven’t gotten as far as the decimal metric system. The road led to the national highway, and the slow river of refugees moving toward Madrid forced them to slow down. The multitude looked at the red banner with the emblem of the Fifth Regiment, didn’t move out of the way when the horn sounded. They had the air of fatigued, solemn poverty, of a primitive exodus, a universal migration leaving deserted lands behind. The mules, the donkeys, the carts with crude wooden wheels, the old men, fathers with children on their shoulders, women in black skirts and shawls, herds of goats, the cry of a newborn searching for its mother’s dry breast, the dust and silence enveloping everything, the unanimity of the flight, the urgency lessened by the exhaustion of walking since before dawn, leaving everything or almost everything behind, dropping on the road what became too heavy or unnecessary, like a trash heap the length of the highway, traces of shipwrecks in the dirty foam left by the sea when it recedes. They flee from an army of legionnaires, Moors, and Falangists who’ve been advancing toward Madrid since the end of July, fatigued from their killing spree. Now they lift their eyes and see Madrid for the first time, in the distance, as fantastic as the shapes of clouds, the formidable buildings, the terrifyingly wide streets they won’t dare cross for fear of the cars, the great yellow Telephone Company tower that Ignacio Abel and Miguel Gómez were grateful to see, shining in the sun above the rooftops.
Night was falling when they entered the city, and under the trees along the Prado and Recoletos the café tables were full. A heavy rain had fallen; the air was clean and the leaves on the trees glistened. On the wet paving stones streetcar rails gleamed. The setting sun illuminated the width of Calle de Alcalá with a dusty light, gold and violet, striking the glass in the high windows of the buildings. Ignacio Abel took his leave of Miguel Gómez in the courtyard of the Alliance without saying much. He was dying of hunger, weariness, thirst, but he climbed the stairs of the palace two by two in search of Bergamín’s secretary. From the large hall came the sound of an energetic paso doble. He was in the doorway of Bergamín’s office when the poet Alberti appeared, dressed as a lion tamer in a red jacket with gold braid, white trousers, high boots, carrying a folder of printer’s proofs. He looked at Ignacio Abel and made a distracted gesture of greeting or recognition. In the waiting room Mariana Ríos was taking dictation at her typewriter from a tall man who was standing behind her, his hand resting on the back of her chair. The secretary stopped typing, opened a drawer, and handed Ignacio Abel a sealed envelope. She told him he’d find Professor Rossman in the morgue of the National Security Agency, on Calle de Víctor Hugo. He walked out of the Heredia Spinola Palace, leaving behind the lit balconies and dance music, tearing open the envelope to read its contents in the light of a street lamp: a judicial document written in an ornate hand and detailing the discovery of a man killed by bullet wounds caused by an unknown perpetrator or perpetrators, the sole identity document on his person a card issued by the National Library in the name of Don Carlos Luís Rossman. On the table at the morgue, Professor Rossman wasn’t wearing his glasses but he did have on one of his felt slippers, held by a rubber band around the instep of his right foot. He had one eye open and the other almost closed, his face turned to one side, his upper lip drawn back and showing his gums with a few uneven teeth, his expression a frozen smile or one of surprise. Hunger and exhaustion, the growing unreality of it all, sank Ignacio Abel into a daze. In the labyrinth of narrow streets around the National Security Agency he walked to the Gran Vía to find the pensión where Señorita Rossman must have spent another day waiting for his call. The globes of the street lamps, painted blue as a precaution against night bombing raids, lit the corners with the sickly light of a theater set. Some militiamen asked for his papers in the Plaza de Vázquez de Mella, and he saw only the metal of their pistols and the lighted ends of their cigarettes. From a door came a reddish light, the noise of loud laughter, the music of a barrel organ, a brothel smell of disinfectant and perfume. What would he say to Señorita Rossman? What could he do but stand silent in the doorway of her room, so narrow her father would go out to a café to allow his daughter a few hours’ privacy. But Señorita Rossman wasn’t in the pensión, and the landlady told him she hadn’t appeared for several days; they’d come to ask for her from the office where she worked in the Telephone Company, and she, the landlady, had told them she didn’t know anything, she had enough troubles of her own — probably the German had left to avoid paying her monthly rent, and if she didn’t show up in another two or three days, she would have to collect the debt by taking anything of theirs that had value, even if it was only the suitcase on top of the wardrobe.
From time to time Ignacio Abel thinks of Señorita Rossman; the phone rings and he thinks she must be calling, and before the ringing stops he knows he’s been dreaming. Before he left Madrid, he called the press censorship office in the Telephone Company Building several times, and was told that Señorita Rossman was out sick or had left for unknown reasons, and finally that no one by that name worked there. He didn’t call again.
32
STANDING NEAR THE window, Ignacio Abel watches the taillights of the car that brought him to the guesthouse move down the path through the trees. The sound of the engine gradually dissolves in the silence of the woods, where he can hear the dry rapping of a woodpecker. Above the dense treetops a pale blue light remains in the sky, where he can just make out the evening star. The trees are evergreens, pines standing high above the house. He sees no other building, and he doesn’t recall ever being submerged in so profound a silence. Stupefied, relieved, exhausted, hypnotized, he stays in front of the window, his coat still on, holding his hat, in his left hand the pain of having clutched the handle of the suitcase for so long, a gesture as instinctive now as patting his pockets to search for his passport or turning around thinking someone has called his name.
He isn’t accustomed to the idea of having reached his destination. He can’t calculate the exact number of days that have passed since he left Madrid. And he doesn’t remember the day of the week or today’s date, just that it’s near the end of October. Trains, hotels, a ship’s cabin, border crossings, names of stations are confused in his memory, a continuous yet disconnected sequence of places, sensations, faces, days and nights. He isn’t who he was when he started this journey. What for so long had been the sound of a name and a black dot on a map is now what his eyes have seen since he reached the station, what he looks at as he stands at the window: fields where horses or cows graze, wooden houses and fences painted white, barns, narrow roads, autumnal woods where light continues to vibrate in spite of dusk. There will be no ragged refugees fleeing along these roads, no dead horses in the ditches with swollen bellies, no black smoke on the horizon, suitcases tossed beside the highway, their contents plundered or scattered by passing vehicles, the trampling of animals, the flood of refugees. Rhineberg was a promise, an enigma, a place difficult to imagine in Madrid, and now it’s the house in a clearing in the forest with a porch and wooden columns, large rectangular windows without curtains or grilles, built perhaps at the turn of the century by a tycoon whose taste was more neoclassical than Victorian. He’d touched one of the columns when he got out of the car — Professor Stevens had hurried to open the rear doors, first for him, then for Van Doren. The smooth paint and solid wood were soothing to the touch. Like someone who’s just disembarked after a long sea voyage, he feels the firm floorboards vibrating beneath his swollen feet. His body has become accustomed to constant movement: train wheels, iron bridges, turbine pistons continue to buzz in his ears. How distant now the night he left Madrid in the back of a truck, driving along the Valencia highway with its headlights off, surrounded by men who smoked in the darkness or slept leaning on bundles, covering themselves with old blankets and overcoats, clutching the handles of their suitcases. In the passageway of the crowded night train that carried him to Paris, he slept sitting on the floor; a plainclothes policeman woke him with a kick because he was blocking the way, and with ill humor demanded his papers. He got to his feet, fatigued and half asleep, numb with cold. At first he couldn’t find his passport in any of the pockets he patted with increasing alarm. The rough voice repeated, “Papiers, papiers,” and then the policeman thrust his flashlight close to Ignacio Abel’s face to compare it with the passport photograph, his hair smelling of pomade, his breath of tobacco.