He didn’t need to go on waiting. He was there saying goodbye to Moreno Villa and it was as if he’d already begun the journey, postponed so many times because of tortuous procedures, papers or stamps or signatures, promised letters, delayed or lost in the mail. Before going to see Moreno Villa he’d picked up the final document and carried it like a fragile treasure in the inside pocket of his jacket, a safe-conduct on the letterhead of the Ministry of Finance, signed by Negrín in his new position as minister, authorizing the trip to Valencia and from there to France and suggesting a vague official mission — in case new difficulties arose and his passport with the American visa and the French transit visa wasn’t enough when he reached the border. “We’re a government that almost doesn’t exist,” Negrín told him in his large office in the Ministry of Finance. He finally had a space that corresponded to his physical size, with an enormous desk, a large window facing Calle de Alcalá, a thick rug into which footsteps sank silently. “We give orders to an army of phantom divisions in which a handful of officers still loyal to the Republic have no troops to command. They’ve made poor Prieto minister of the navy, but the few old warships the Republic has are lost, and we don’t know where they are because the sailors killed the officers and threw them in the ocean and didn’t leave anyone who knows how to read a nautical chart or set a course. We write decrees that no one obeys. We’re unable to control the borders of our own country. Governments that should be our allies want nothing to do with us. We send telegrams to our embassies or set up conference calls, and the ambassadors and secretaries have gone over to the enemy. We’re the legitimate government of a member of the League of Nations, and even our French comrades from the Popular Front treat us as if we had the plague. They don’t want their excellent relations with Mussolini and Hitler ruined on our account, not to mention the British, who for some reason despise us more than they do the insurgents. They don’t want to sell us weapons. We have no planes, no tanks, no artillery, and barely a fraction of the materiel left over from the Great War that those thieving French didn’t want and were selling to us until a few months ago. And now not even that, no helmets from 1914 or muskets from the Franco-Prussian War…”
But strangely, Negrín’s lucidity before the magnitude of the catastrophe didn’t dishearten him. When Abel entered his office, he found him dictating a letter in French at top speed to a secretary, walking back and forth, his hands behind his back. He paused to make a call, grew impatient that it took so long to be connected, slammed down the receiver. “Even so, we won’t surrender,” he said, stopping in front of Abel. “We’ll rebuild the army from the bottom up, an effective and well-equipped army, with discipline and muscle, an army of the people and the Republic. We’ll end this madness — reality is the best antidote to mental derangement. We know why the enemy’s fighting and why the military rebelled, but what we don’t know is why we’re fighting. Or if there is a we that we fit into, all of us who’ll end up shot or exiled if the other side wins. Each madman has his mania. Don Manuel Azaña wants the French Third Republic. You and I and a few others like us would settle for a Social Democratic republic like Weimar. But our coreligionist and now president of the government says he wants a Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, and Don Lluís Companys a Catalán republic, and the Anarchists forget we’re at war and facing a bloodthirsty enemy and in this chaos experiment with the abolition of the state. And to put into practice its own particular delirium, the first thing each party and union does is invent its own police, its own prisons, and its own executioners. But I refuse to believe all is lost. Our currency has fallen internationally, but we have more than enough gold and can pay cash for the best weapons. Our sister democracies, as they say in speeches, don’t want to sell them to us? We’ll buy them from the Soviets, or international traffickers, whoever.” The telephone rang: the connection he’d asked for was possible now. He requested something in a categorical way but with the greatest courtesy, and since the secretary who’d been typing the letter took her time removing the paper from the typewriter, Negrín pulled it out himself with a precise gesture and checked the spelling by pushing up his glasses and bringing the letter close to his eyes. “And that’s not all, Abel my friend. Those photographs our militiamen take of themselves dressed like priests in the ruins of burned churches and that do us so much good in the eyes of the world when the newspapers publish them? Those same papers refuse to publish the photographs we send them of children blown to pieces by German planes because they say they’re propaganda. We have no people who speak foreign languages. We send loyal Republicans and Socialists abroad to fill diplomatic posts and explain our cause, but how are they going to explain it if in the best case they never went beyond first-year French in a priests’ academy. This good-looking girl who works with me here is a treasure, she speaks French. But letters in English or German I have to write myself, and if foreign emissaries or journalists come to interview someone in the government, I act as interpreter.” A functionary came in with a document in a folder, which he presented ceremoniously to Negrín, calling him “Señor Minister.” Negrín looked it over quickly before signing it with a flourish and passed it to Ignacio Abel. “If they don’t let you cross with this, I can think of only one measure,” he said, laughing. “You carry a pistol too, just in case, and shoot your way out.” Ignacio Abel carefully folded the safe-conduct and put it in an inside pocket. He remembers now that when he left Negrín’s office, his relief was stronger than his remorse or his gratitude. In the waiting room stood officials, militiamen, and uniformed carabineers. The carabineers came to attention when they saw the minister, who took Ignacio Abel’s arm and accompanied him to the exit. He’s going to ask me not to leave, Abel thought, suddenly frightened, feeling on his arm the pressure of Negrín’s enormous hand; he’s going to remind me that I can speak foreign languages and should offer my services to the Republic just as he’s doing, sacrificing a career far more brilliant than mine, that if he wanted to, he could obtain an appointment at any university outside Spain. But Negrín didn’t ask anything. He ignored Abel’s extended hand, gave him a hug, and told him, laughing, not to take too long with that building in America, come back soon and finish University City once and for all. So many ruins will have to be razed, he said, you architects will turn into gold. He stood for a moment on the threshold of a door with elaborate gilding, then turned and disappeared.
Lying in bed, he relives the sensation of cold drops on his cheeks, on a morning in October that felt like December. He thought of Negrín turning to go back to his office, thought that perhaps he too had been infected by a form of madness. The rain streamed down the tall gray façades on Calle de Alcalá, soaking the torn posters, shreds of wet paper breaking up the slogans in red letters and the figures of heroic militiamen in boots trampling swastikas, bishops’ miters, bourgeois top hats, shirt fronts with medals, workers breaking chains and advancing toward brilliant horizons of factory smokestacks. The peddlers, shoeshine boys, and habitual idlers in the Puerta del Sol took shelter from the rain under the awnings of shops and in the doorways of buildings. The city had become sullen and wintry, and smelled of wet soot, garbanzo and cabbage stew, and overheated air from the metro tunnels. He took refuge in a nearly empty café, waiting behind a window clouded with steam for the rain to let up. The odor of sawdust reminded him of another café several months earlier, equally gloomy at that same hour of the morning, of Judith Biely, who didn’t lift her head as he approached and didn’t get up when he stood beside her, her face transformed into that of a woman who didn’t know him. He couldn’t risk the safe-conduct recently signed by Negrín getting wet. How a life can depend on a sheet of paper, an official letterhead, an ink signature so easily dissolved by a few drops of water. As if they were hidden treasure, he thought of all the papers he already had in his desk drawer, the same locked drawer where he kept Judith’s letters: the documents he’s brought with him and had to present so often during his trip, obtained one by one after exhausting transactions and weeks of waiting, interrogations, lengthy inspections of each document, each stamp and signature on each letter. To apply for the transit visa through France, he had to present his American visa and ticket for the ship as well as a certificate of financial solvency. The letter of invitation from Burton College, which he needed to apply for the American visa, took months to arrive. Most of the personnel at the embassies had left the country; the few officials left were irritated, overwhelmed by applications, insolent with the growing crowd of those who came early every morning and waited for hours in front of the closed doors, each with a briefcase or folder of documents held close to the chest, longing to escape, or at least find refuge in the embassies, looking out of the corner of their eye each time a car with rifle barrels at the windows or a truckload of militiamen went by. He recognized some of the regulars on the lines and in the offices: in a hallway at the French consulate he passed an architect he knew was a rightist, and neither greeted the other; a Russian woman he’d seen several times showed him her worn czarist passport and a diploma in Cyrillic characters issued, she said, by the Imperial Conservatory of Moscow. A contract for teaching piano was waiting for her at the Juilliard School. Couldn’t he, since he looked like a gentleman, help her with a small amount, since she had all the necessary emigration documents and needed only the cost of a third-class passage?