It’s no longer possible to avoid the word: he saw it in the French papers, obscene in the red and black ink of the headlines: GUERRE EN ESPAGNE. He’s seen it in the New York papers he sometimes worriedly looked for — and other times tried to avoid — at the stand outside his hoteclass="underline" LATEST NEWS ON THE WAR IN SPAIN. Like a congenital illness he can’t be cured of, and those who printed and delivered the papers were immune to, like our poverty and picturesque backwardness, our baroque Virgins with glass tears and silver hearts pierced by daggers, and that colorful, savage slaughterhouse that is our national pastime. KILLINGS AT THE BULLFIGHT RING IN BADAJOZ. Our names, so sonorous and exotic, standing out among the words of another language, thatched walls in ruins, barren lands, photographs of our poor people’s war, our women with black shawls and bundles on their heads fleeing along roads, crossing the plains, shoved with rifle butts at the frontier by French gendarmes while I looked away and did nothing and felt the cruel privilege of my formal dress and my papers in order. That still didn’t exempt me from the Spanish disease: the customs officials searched my suitcase with calculated rudeness, took their time examining my drawings and sketches, the passport they’d already gone over once, the photograph I was beginning not to resemble, the page with the U.S. visa. Who’d accept without suspicion that title, Spanish Republic, inscribed in gold letters on the cover above the shield with its mural crown, if at any moment that republic might cease to exist, and if a few steps away, on the Spanish side of the border, there were no uniformed guards and clerks but militiamen who’d hauled down the tricolor and hoisted a red-and-black banner on the flagpole. In spite of everything, while he waited, dignified and upright, for the gendarmes to return his passport and permit him to close his suitcase, there was his pride at being a citizen of the Spanish Republic and rage at the indifference of the French and British who watched it turn, awkward and defenseless, to face its attackers, but also the feeling of inferiority for belonging to such a country, and the desire to escape it, and guilt for having run away, for not having known how to be useful, for not having remedied anything.
He remembers being on the Plaza de Oriente one morning, the last one, when his escape was assured and he went to say goodbye to Moreno Villa. Lashed by wind and rain, the plaza looked larger, the National Palace more gray than white against the background of dark storm clouds coming out of the west over the sharp greens of the Campo del Moro, with the Casa de Campo dissolving in the fog. In the French gardens an encampment of refugees protected themselves from the rain under their carts or canvas cloths stretched between the hedges and trees. In the middle of October, winter announced its arrival in Madrid, as if brought there by the gradually approaching war along the southwest highway, the one to Extremadura. How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago, the plaza with the encampment of tarpaulins and shanties among the hedges, around the equestrian statue of Felipe IV supported only by the hind legs, delicate against the gray sky and the rain, wielding a sodden red flag; Ignacio Abel walking by it, a solitary bourgeois silhouette under an umbrella, approaching the guardpost where soldiers in the impeccable uniforms of the presidential battalion — steel helmets, leather straps, shining boots, well-shaven faces — will let him pass with no more formality than checking his name on a typed list. Footsteps and orders echoed in the granite cavities of the foyer. In a porter’s lodge behind a small glass door, one could hear a radio and a typewriter and smell the aroma of food. He climbed broad staircases of granite and then of marble that had no carpeting to muffle his steps. He crossed halls with tapestries and clocks and swirling mythological scenes painted on the ceilings, and bare corridors that led to courtyards with stone arches covered by glass domes on which the rain drummed. Moreno Villa was in an office behind a paneled door with a low lintel, a tiny office overrun by books and file folders in the middle of a magnificence of empty spaces. Ignacio Abel thought that throughout his life Moreno Villa had maintained an invariable model of a workroom, identical in the National Palace and the Student Residence, in any place where chance might lead him in a future that had suddenly become uncertain. The cold was insidious, slowly overpowering you, first your fingertips and the end of your nose, then the soles of your feet. In a corner of the office was a small electric heater. But the current was weak and the glow of the element as sickly as in the lamp on the desk where Moreno worked, absorbed in his files, his investigations into the buffoons and madmen who served the kings in the time of Velázquez. His white beard had grown pointed, like a figure by El Greco. He was thinner than in the summer, and wore reading glasses that made him look older.
“You’re finally leaving, Abel. You must find it hard to believe you have all your papers in order. It’s obvious you’re a man who wants to leave, who knows how to leave, if you’ll allow me to say so.”
“Are you still sleeping in the Residence?”
“And where would I sleep if I didn’t sleep there, Abel? It’s my home. My provisional home, but I’ve lived there so many years I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. The garrison is gone and now they’ve set up a field hospital. How those poor boys scream. The horrible wounds. You think you know war’s dreadful but have no idea of anything until you see it. Imagination is useless, impotent, cowardly. We see soldiers fall in films and believe that’s how it is, that everything’s over quickly, a bloodstain on the chest. But there are things worse than dying. Tell me what kind of insanity that is — what’s the good of such suffering? You look away, because when you look, you’ll retch. And the smell, my God! The smell of gangrene and excrement from burst intestines. The smell of blood when the nurses cover them with newspapers or sawdust. Sometimes I tell myself I’ll have to draw these things, but I don’t know how, it makes me ashamed to attempt it. I think no one has done it, no one has dared, not the Germans in the Great War, and not Goya. Goya got closer, but even he lacked the courage. I think of the caption he put on one of the prints in Disasters of War: ‘One cannot look.’ You won’t have to any longer.”