Too formaclass="underline" the suit cut by a modern tailor in Madrid is, here at Burton College, suddenly old-fashioned, almost antiquated, compared with the students’ casual clothing and the flannels and checked jackets of the professors, who project an air of rural English gentry in harmony with the vague medieval mimesis of the architecture. That’s why it’s so easy to distinguish Ignacio Abel when he leaves the Faculty Club and walks along a path in the central quadrangle of the campus. He’s more formal and moves more slowly than the rest, more leisurely with his hands in his pockets and his excessive Spanish pallor, enjoying the early afternoon sun without his raincoat or a suitcase in hand, passing groups of young men and women carrying books and briefcases and hurrying to their classes or the library, where there is no more room for books, a pseudo-Gothic building that will be abandoned as soon as the new library is built, the one that exists only as an imaginative conjecture sketched in a notebook he carries in his pocket. He observes supple bodies and healthy faces that seem never to have been brushed by the shadow of fear or distorted by cruelty or anger. The girls in light dresses on the warm October morning, in flat shoes and white socks, and the boys in brightly colored sweaters, almost all of them bareheaded, mixing in a seemingly effortless camaraderie. The quality of their teeth allows their laughter: he recalls Negrín’s judgment when he observed people’s faces in Madrid with the eyes of a physician and saw the sad signs of malnutrition and lack of hygiene. Pasteurized milk and cod liver oil, abundant calcium for rotten teeth, would be the remedies for Spain’s backwardness! He has time; they won’t be picking him up for the dinner the president of the college is giving in his honor until six. Hours seemed to sprout within hours: he finished dressing this morning and still had time to eat breakfast, write a letter, and examine the solitude of the guesthouse. In the hallways hung oil portraits of men in colonial dress or nineteenth-century frock coats, landscapes of the banks of the Hudson with blue mountains in the background and hills covered by autumnal forests, and watercolor renderings of projected college buildings. On one crudely executed, vividly detailed picture, a label with the inscription
Burton College, 1823 floated above a view of a large, fortified, Gothic-looking tower rising from a clearing, as meticulous as a medieval illuminated manuscript. Like an intruder or a phantom he walked down the oak steps of the staircase that led to the foyer. In the light of day everything was different from what he’d seen the evening before. He crossed a large library with half-empty shelves, a grand piano in the center, folding chairs propped against one wall. He crossed a sitting room that overlooked a garden and had a hearth where a fire of fragrant wood crackled, and deep leather armchairs beside which hung newspapers on frames. It seemed as if someone diligent and invisible had been waiting for him to wake. He heard the sounds of plates and flatware. At the end of a long dining room table was a breakfast service. A stout black woman said a jovial good morning and asked a series of questions he understood only gradually, deciphering the obvious sounds with some delay. He agreed to everything: he wanted coffee, he wanted sugar and milk, he wanted orange juice, butter and marmalade, rye bread. The woman was at once majestic and accommodating: she said things to him that were indecipherable when he thought he was on the point of understanding them, and she observed with indulgent patience as he attempted to say something and suddenly a trivial word would escape him. She watched him eat, respectful and affable, served him more milk and more coffee and slices of dark, porous bread, and indicated with gestures that he should spread on more butter and try each of the pots of marmalade arranged on the table. She quickly gathered the breakfast things and told him with exaggerated hand movements not to worry about anything, she’d come back later to clean the house. Her expression was sad as she watched him eat and said something about the Great War and the lack of food then, and that her husband (or her son) had fought in Europe and come back sickened by poison gas. There was something wholesome in everything around him, in the construction of the house and the thickness of the slices of bread, the rich density of the milk and the heavy china of the cup, a kind of robust cordiality that was also in the woman’s presence and the size of her hands, with their pink nails and white palms.