How difficult the first step in the conception of what doesn’t exist yet: the line of a sketch that might contain in germ the final work, an angle that will engender the complete drawing, not obeying any external purpose but guided by an impulse toward organic growth. Where there’s nothing, there has to be something. From a blank page the first form of a library must emerge. From a hole dug into the side of a hill and quickly covered by vegetation that replaces what was gutted or cut down, walls will rise, staircases, balustrades, windows. The form sketched in the notebook will be glimpsed through the groves of trees and may be seen from sailboats or barges with blunt prows and rusted hulls that pass along the river. Ignacio Abel has the notebook open on his knees and a pencil in his hand but hasn’t drawn anything yet. He is seated on the partially hollow trunk of a tree that fell perhaps many years ago, its roots in the air, the surface burrowed by insects that in some areas have reduced the wood to soft powder. He hears cracking noises, the sounds of animals he can’t see, the flapping of birds over his head that stir brief eddies of fallen leaves. This area of the woods hasn’t been cleared out in a long time. Fragments of trunks, packed-down dry branches, and sheets of bark mix together on the ground under a carpet of many autumns’ leaves, the oldest the color of the earth and in part blended with it, crumbled by insects juxtaposing their shapes and colors like disordered pieces in a mosaic, with a variety of ribs and symmetries he would have liked to decipher by drawing them in the notebook, or better still, picking them up and pressing them between its pages. From the river comes the muffled noise of a train, the sound of a foghorn he heard in his dreams last night. The fallen trunks, covered with lichen, remind him of the ruins in the Roman Forum: grass and wild mustard, broken columns, the marble on the capitals so eroded and porous it has become pure debris and turned a calcareous white like animal bones. He understands that the sketches he’s made are useless. The building can’t have existed in his imagination with that diamond-like perfection he’s admired so much when he saw Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona — admired with envy of something he knew he wouldn’t be capable of achieving, feeling mediocre, limited, provincial. How would a prism of steel and glass look, surging before the eyes of someone coming up the road between the trees, or seen from other buildings on the campus when night fell, shining in the distance like an illuminated lighthouse. The imminence of work generates in him both excitement and dejection: sloth, almost panic, the vertigo of a void he isn’t sure he’ll know how to confront. A squirrel with a rounded body and lustrous fur approaches with a succession of brief movements and picks up an acorn, examines it, suspended between its front paws. He doesn’t move, so as not to frighten it, and the squirrel turns its back, brushing one of his shoes with a tail as soft and full as a shaving brush, moves away in silent leaps, divested of weight, making a sound in the leaves as faint as the damp breeze that makes them tremble. The sky has clouded over, the air is cooler, and the leaves are falling in more frequent gusts of wind. A round drop dampens the middle of the page in the notebook where he hasn’t drawn anything. He raises his head and Philip Van Doren looks at him, smiling, his arms crossed, leaning against a tree.
“I see you managed to free yourself from Stevens. But you should be careful in these woods, Ignacio. As a city dweller, you don’t know its dangers.”
“Are there wild animals?”
“Something worse, that I don’t believe you have in Spain. Poison ivy.”
“Hiedra venenosa?”
“Right now you’re sitting close to it. You can’t imagine the itching. But it’s fantastic to see you wearing your suit from Madrid in our American wilderness. I wish Judith could see you.”
They look at each other across the clearing, not saying anything now that the name’s been spoken. A light rain has begun to fall. From an athletic field comes a burst of scattered applause and the sharp repeated sound of a whistle. Ignacio Abel has closed the notebook and put it in a jacket pocket, expectant for no reason, alarmed because he’s heard Judith’s name, the evidence of her objective existence.
“You want to ask me whether I know anything about Judith, but you can’t bring yourself to. Like that night in Madrid, don’t you remember? The city was burning and all you could think of was finding her. You’re reserved, something I approve of. Given my Lutheran upbringing, so am I. But I don’t like your distrust of me. I’ve given you proof of my loyalty. It wasn’t easy getting you out of Spain and arranging for you to come to America, to Burton College.”
“I regret not having thanked you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
Now the sky was a darker gray that accentuated the shadows deep in the forest. Ignacio Abel swallowed.
“Were you her lover when you lived in Paris?”
“Splendid Spanish jealousy.” Van Doren looked at him, smiling fondly, almost indulgently. “I imagined you took it for granted I don’t find women attractive.”
“Probably only Judith attracted you.”
“Don’t say it in the past tense. I find Judith very attractive. More than any other woman and more than a lot of men. I was drawn to her from the moment I saw her, on the deck of the ship that had just taken off from America. In that regard you and I are alike. We both saw in her a desire to experience everything, to enjoy everything, without irony, like a model student, which is what she should have been. You need a good deal of nobility to feel real enthusiasm. Judith’s doctorate was Europe. Everything in Europe — architecture, museums, paintings. I don’t think anyone has spent more time or been happier at the Louvre, or the Jeu de Paume, or the Uffizi, or the Prado. She felt the same rapture sitting in a café and writing a card or a letter and putting Paris in the return address. The letters she wrote to her mother, do you remember? Pages and pages, telling her everything, like class exercises where she demonstrated how much she’d learned. The Americans who come to Paris settle into a café on Saint-Germain-des-Prés as soon as they can and put on a weary look that says they’ve already seen it all and don’t have to go on playing the tourist. Being a tourist is a humiliating condition. But Judith didn’t have those reservations. She wanted to climb the Eiffel Tower and attend a Gregorian Mass in Notre-Dame and ride at night in a Bateau Mouche along the Seine. She also wanted to go to Shakespeare and Company and spend hours looking at the books she longed to read and standing watch in case James Joyce or Hemingway put in an appearance. Judith is the great American enthusiast. Even more American because her parents are Russian Jews who speak English with a terrible accent. Her mother, as you know, sacrificed everything so she could make this trip, and Judith had to show her that she was taking advantage of every penny. One invests hard-earned money and expects a profit. To squeeze every penny of it dry. She’d be offended if she heard me say it, but it’s a very Jewish idea of return on your money. Very Jewish and very American. Money doesn’t provoke in us the modesty you have in Europe, especially in Spain. Every cent her mother kept in a tin box, hiding it in the kitchen, was a small act of prowess when you think what the past few years have been like in my country for people of the class Judith belongs to. Penny by penny, the sound of copper in the tin box, the worn dollar bills. But your life wasn’t very different when you were young, if I’m not mistaken. I have a gift for imagining what other people are living or have lived through. That’s my only talent. Just as you have a gift for seeing what doesn’t exist yet.”