“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Lovers, Judith and I? If it were true, you wouldn’t need to ask. Judith would have told you. American honesty. Full disclosure, we say. Just to set the record straight. In Paris what I liked most about her was not so much Judith herself as the enthusiasm she radiated, the light that was in her. She’d go into a café filled with smoke on one of those horrible black rainy afternoons, and it seemed she was followed by the spotlight in a theater. But I fell more in love in Madrid. Not with Judith but with your love for her, what you were seeing when you looked at her and what she saw in you. I wanted to be you when I saw her looking at you. I remember it all so well. I saw how you came into my apartment in Madrid and almost blushed when you discovered Judith among my guests that afternoon. A coup de foudre if I’ve ever seen one. You probably assume it’s inevitable that I like opera, with all its falseness that’s truer the more exaggerated and unbelievable it is. You were Tristan the moment he takes the cup away from his lips and looks at Isolde. Operas should be performed in street clothes and ordinary places, Tristan and Isolde or Pelléas and Mélisande meeting in a café after walking through a revolving door. Drinking an icy martini instead of a medieval cup of poison. But I’ll understand if you’ve grown to hate Wagner. Perhaps Debussy is more tolerable. I was in Bayreuth two years ago and saw Tristan. When everybody was seated, waiting for the curtain to rise, there was a rush of uniforms and evening clothes because Chancellor Hitler had just entered the box of honor, but I didn’t come to see him. It doesn’t matter. I lack the ability to tell something in a straight line. You don’t discipline yourself as a narrator if your entire life is spent surrounded by people who have to listen to you. You and Judith didn’t know it yet, but the moment you saw each other the two of you were lost. I was dying of envy. The magnetic current between you passed through me, crossed the air in my house. I wanted to be each of you. Few things that have happened to me have shaken me as much. Nothing, in fact. The world seems to me a very expensive theatrical production mounted exclusively for me. All alone in a box in an enormous empty theater, like Ludwig of Bavaria attending the premiere of an opera by Wagner. He couldn’t permit himself that, and ended up bankrupt. But I can. And what I like is not to watch a performance but real life. Actors are vain and venal, and if you approach them, you see the unpleasant makeup that melts on their faces under the heat of the lights and their sweat. I do no harm by observing real lives. I don’t stoop to paying for others to pretend to love me. I prefer to see other people’s genuine love, or any passion that ennobles them. Judith in Paris, looking at Manet’s Olympia up close, or in Madrid when she went to one of those tiresome flamenco dance performances, or when she once showed me that empty museum you’d taken her to, the Academy of San Fernando, happy to show me something that was almost a secret and not those rooms in the Prado filled with foreigners. Or you a moment ago, so deep in your notebook you didn’t hear me arrive. I’ve never learned how to do anything. My passion is observing the passions of others. If they consent, or if they don’t know, who gets hurt?”
“You spied on us in the house on the beach. You offered it so you could follow us.”
“Don’t give me so little credit, Ignacio. I wasn’t drooling in the next room, watching through a crack. It was enough for me to imagine you on those days. To see you from a certain distance. A telescope is the most useful of inventions.”
It has started to rain. Tiny drops gleam on Van Doren’s shaved head and he continues to stare at Ignacio Abel, his gestures passing from irony to the appearance of affection or complicity or sadness.
“I hope you’re not offended. Judith didn’t ask me to, but I did everything I could to bring you here. Not that it was difficult. Your name carries weight, even this deep in the woods. I needed to find a solution, if only a provisional one, a breather for you both. I knew your work and that’s why I invited you, but then it was no more than a project, like so many others that go nowhere. As for Judith, she couldn’t go on postponing her return to America. Her mother’s savings weren’t going to last forever. I had to bring both of you here.”
“To continue to spy on us?”
“So you’d have a part of the life you both deserved. So that thanks to your talent, Burton College will have a beautiful, modern library, and something I can do will objectively benefit the order of the world.”
Van Doren turns when he hears a car coming up the muddy road. Stevens puts his head out the window, looking distressed, blows the horn with triumphant vehemence, as if he were sounding trumpets. He’d been looking for them for he doesn’t know how long, he says, getting out of the car with an umbrella; he’s been everywhere, afraid something had happened, that Professor Abel was lost. First he escorts Van Doren, opens the back door for him, comes back to Ignacio Abel, reminds him that in less than an hour they must be at the college president’s house, and under no circumstances can they be late. The rain lashes the windshield when Stevens turns the car to go back to the campus, fat drops drumming on the leather top. Ignacio Abel looks at Van Doren — who’s wiping his head and face with a handkerchief and looking out at the woods — as if he didn’t remember his presence. But he has to decide, in spite of his cowardice, his fear of not knowing and his fear of knowing.