“I look at you and I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I’ll leave soon.”
“Then why did you come?”
“It was on my way. A detour.”
“You’ll stay the night. There are plenty of rooms.”
“And what would your colleagues think if they saw me leave here in the morning? You don’t know what these places are like. Wellesley’s the same way. They know everything and gossip. Like a novel by Galdós, but with professors as protagonists.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come.”
“I’ll go as soon as I’ve eaten something and rested a bit. I can be in New York in two hours.”
“Don’t you have to teach class tomorrow?”
“I’ve left that job.”
“But I thought they just hired you.”
“Philip tells you everything.”
“Is it true you’re working with Salinas?”
“Worked. I know you don’t like him, but he does remind me of you.”
“Will his wife and children be joining him soon?”
“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know whether his contract will be renewed for next year. He’s discouraged when he doesn’t get letters or news from Spain, and even more discouraged when he does. It’s easy in these places to become isolated.”
“I just arrived yesterday and already it seems I’ve been here a long time.”
“Poor Professor Salinas tells me he misses Madrid a great deal. Whenever he can he escapes to New York for the weekend. But he says the hardest thing for him is getting used to eating without wine.”
“Does he have any hope of going back to Spain?”
“What about you? You left not long ago. You’re better informed than he is.”
“I read the papers here and listen to the radio and everybody seems convinced that Franco’s about to enter Madrid.”
“He hasn’t entered yet. With a little luck he never will.”
“And what do you know? How can you be so sure?”
“Because I don’t believe the American newspapers or radio networks are telling the truth. They belong to the big corporations, and their owners have supported Franco from day one, just like the Catholic Church.”
“This doesn’t sound like you. More like the talk at a meeting the other day in New York.”
“Were you there? Last Saturday? In Union Square?”
“I looked at the faces of all the women, hoping to see yours.”
“The last thing I’d have expected would’ve been to run into you.”
“I’ve been hoping to run into you since the day you walked out of the café.”
“It was moving, all those people filling the square. Some climbed the trees and the statue of George Washington. I saw the Republican flag and heard the ‘Himno de Riego’ and ‘The Internationale’ and couldn’t stop crying.”
“Good intentions, but no one’s helping. They look at us as if we had the plague, as if we were lepers. In a hotel in Paris they didn’t want to give me a room when they saw my Spanish passport. They probably thought I’d fill the bed with lice. Civilized opinion seems to be that it’s a good idea to leave us alone so we can keep killing one another until we grow tired of it. They look at us like those tourists who go to bullfights, ready to be excited or horrified, to enjoy being horrified in order to feel more civilized than us. And the fact is, they’re not altogether wrong, given the spectacle we’re offering them.”
“It isn’t right for you to say that. The military and the Falangists rebelled against the Republic. They haven’t been defeated yet only because they have the help of Mussolini and Hitler.”
“You’re talking again as if you were at a meeting.”
“Aren’t I speaking the truth?”
“The truth is so complicated nobody wants to hear it.”
“If you know it, explain it to me.”
“I probably left so I wouldn’t see it. Truth seen up close is an ugly thing.”
“I don’t think you can live with your eyes closed.”
“And why not? Most people do and it’s not hard. I’m not talking about people outside Spain, who after all may not know about the war, or read about it in the paper and care less than they do about a soccer game. Even in Madrid I know many people who’ve managed not to know what’s happening or at least act as if they didn’t. They lead perfectly normal lives, believe it or not. They adopt the new style and the new vocabulary. But I imagine I’d get used to it if I had stayed, at least if I was lucky and they didn’t kill me.”
“Why would they kill you?”
“For any reason. On a whim, or by mistake, or for no reason, by chance. Killing an unarmed, peaceful person is the easiest thing in the world. You don’t know how easy — like putting out a candle. Unless the executioner is clumsy or gets nervous or doesn’t know how to handle a rifle. Then it can seem endless. Like bullfights when the butchers miss with the sword or dagger.”
“The newspapers here publish terrible lies about what’s going on in Madrid.”
“Some of those lies are true. The worst ones.”
“The others commit worse crimes. They started it. They’re to blame.”
“Reason and justice are on your side.”
“I don’t like such abstractions. You didn’t use them before.”
“You did. That afternoon we talked for hours in the bar at the Hotel Florida. I was struck by how seriously you took it. It annoyed you when Philip Van Doren spoke contemptuously about the Republic and praised the Soviet Union and Germany in his snobbish way. You said you were Republican because you believed in reason and justice. I liked your passion.”
“I didn’t remember our talking about those things.”
“Don’t you think the same way anymore?”
“What I think is that killing doesn’t bring about reason and justice.”
“If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself.”
“And do you have the right to kill innocents?”
“I was afraid something might’ve happened to you.”
“Then you didn’t think everything they were saying was a lie.”
“And you came close?”
“You could’ve written and asked.”
“I’m asking now.”
“I was saved by accident, at the last moment. You’ll understand if I don’t really feel like going back.”
They have to learn to speak to each other again, to adjust the tone of their voices, to smooth away the strangeness, to move close to each other gradually, naturally, slowly, the way one learns to walk again after recovering from an accident, when you discover that it took no time for your legs to lose their muscle tone and the habit of taking steps. Evasive eyes no longer know how to hold a stare; with greater difficulty mouths form words in another language that were once habitual. Perhaps it’s not that they have become strangers in so short a time, but that they see each other for the first time in a light not clouded by desire. It’s not the changes that have occurred during their separation but the reality not seen when it was there every day. They felt their way at first, asking neutral questions. I see you’ve had a haircut; this morning, before I left on the trip, do you like it? Of course I do; you don’t like it; I have to get used to it; you always wore it longer and curlier; I didn’t have time to go to a hairdresser. Neither one has said the other’s name yet. Silence follows each question; they almost count the seconds it takes for words to arrive again, as if they didn’t depend on the will of either one. A nuance, a barely suggested tone of intimacy miscarries. An isolated phrase sounds as if it had been memorized for a performance, an overly literal exercise in good manners in a language class. “May I use the bathroom?” she said when she finally came in, when he closed the door and they found themselves alone in the house. While she ate, he observed her in silence as he sat on the other side of the table in the library, in the somewhat incongruous formality of his dark suit and tie, relieved she wasn’t looking at him, a healthy young woman unhurriedly satisfying her hunger after having driven for several hours, drinking from the bottle of beer, more American than he remembered now that he sees her in her own country. She’s put salami between two slices of bread and eats it in vigorous mouthfuls. His desire for her is more of a pain than pure sexual appetite. It’s the pain in his joints, the pit of his stomach. Since he hasn’t set out napkins, Judith wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. What he finds unfamiliar and distant in her must have to do with the presence of another man. Jealousy is a physical snakebite, a toxic substance circulating in his blood. In photographs, in memories, Judith’s beauty had a blurred quality, as if he were looking at her through a faint gauze filter. The word “beautiful” can’t exactly be applied to the woman Ignacio Abel sees before him, with her short hair and simple shirt, her ringless hands that hold the sandwich of rye bread and salami and open the bottle of beer with such ease. There’s something more carnal, raw, excessive in the peremptoriness of her features: her nose, large mouth, pronounced chin, the hard shape of bone beneath the skin. He likes her even more, and more than ever. He especially likes what’s taken him by surprise because he didn’t see it before and sees it now. Lack of hope and the certainty he’d lost her allow him to enjoy a painful objectivity. Her existence is enough: the unexpected gift of having her near.