“And you’re above it all?”
“I’ve gone as far as I’ve been pushed. They could have killed me in Madrid — the other side surely would have killed me if I’d stayed with my children that Sunday in the Sierra. I’m not a brave man. I’m not a passionate man. I’ve almost never had strong emotions, except for you, or sometimes for my work, imagining it. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe history has a direction or that you can build heaven on earth. And even if you could, if the price is an endless bloodbath and tyranny, I don’t think it’s worth paying. But if I’m wrong, and revolution and slaughter are necessary to bring about justice, I prefer to step aside if I have the chance, at least to save my life. It’s the only one I have. I’m not a man of action like my friend Dr. Negrín. I learned it these past few months, spending so much time alone. I hardly spoke to anyone and often couldn’t sleep and thought about what I really like, what I need. I need to do something well that is also useful and lasting and solid. People obsessed by political passions frighten me, or seem ridiculous, like those who turn red shouting at a soccer game, or the racetrack, or a bullfight. Now they also disgust me. I think there are many more despicable people than I ever imagined. The old intoxicate the young to take revenge on their youth and send them to slaughter. Many people who seem normal become savages when they see and smell blood. They see a neighbor shot who until yesterday had greeted them every morning, and if they can, they steal his wallet or his shoes. My poor friend Professor Rossman was a saint. He never hurt anyone. He’d get on a streetcar and take off his hat if there was a woman in front of him. He made his bed every morning at the pensión to save the maid work. He’d been eminent in Germany, and in Spain he earned a poor living selling pens in cafés, but I never heard him complain about the country or lose his patience. You met him. Well, they killed him like an animal because some cretin must have thought he was a spy because he spoke with a German accent or carried a briefcase filled with newspaper clippings and maps of the front. Before they killed him, they beat his face to a pulp. And I didn’t see his daughter again, either. They didn’t know anything about her at the pensión or the office where she worked. As if the earth had swallowed her. I couldn’t help either one of them. I probably didn’t have any luck or was afraid to insist too much and put myself in danger. That’s the truth. My wife’s brother came one night to ask me to hide him because they were looking for him. I didn’t open the door. If I’d let him in, I probably couldn’t have left, or I’d have had to postpone the trip again, or they’d have locked me up for helping him. Maybe they killed him that same night. He was a Falangist and a fool, but nobody deserves to go around hiding in doorways like an animal. And that’s not all. He really loved my children, and they loved him, the boy especially. He loved his uncle so much it made me jealous. And if in spite of everything he managed to escape and get to the other side, he’ll be so full of rancor he’ll become a butcher. It’s possible he goes to see my children, and they admire him all the more seeing him turned into a war hero, and he tells them their father betrayed him. I could have told him to stay and denounced him. I would have done my duty, since my brother-in-law was in one of those Falangist groups that shoot militiamen from roofs or drive in a car at top speed machine-gunning people who line up for bread or charcoal. A traitor. A saboteur. But it’s not that I felt compassion for him. I didn’t want my trip ruined because of him.”
He speaks without moving and without taking his eyes off Judith. Words leave his mouth, though he barely separates his lips. He speaks and doesn’t think about what he’s going to say next, the sound of his own voice spurs him on. The fury is in the words, not in him. He maintains a monotonous neutrality, as if testifying at a trial or making a statement, being careful not to speak too quickly for the typist who’s transcribing it. Speaking alleviates and exalts him. It returns shame and lucidity to him in waves, and restores an abused but not abolished shadow of personal integrity. He can’t be the only one who’s fled, who hides behind a submissive courtesy, who before speaking must be certain not to offend or annoy anyone. His hands still rest on the table, one on top of the other, and the muscles in his face don’t move either, though the unequal light from the fire and oil lamp modifies the shadows. But he’s become more confident as he speaks, raising his voice a little or perhaps pronouncing words with more precision and a different kind of energy, just as he hasn’t once lowered his eyes or stopped speaking when Judith looked as if she were about to say something. He’s been silent for so long that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop talking. It’s now, stimulated by his own words, that he begins to realize how long his silence has lasted, the huge volume of what he’s kept silent, its monstrous proliferation, silence a habit and a refuge and a way of accommodating to the world, then transformed into the very space around him, the cell and bell jar where he’s lived in recent months. The silence in his apartment on sleepless nights, the silence in his office at University City; looking and keeping silent, looking away, not saying anything, traveling in silence on trains, alone in hotel rooms, in a cabin on the ship that crossed the Atlantic, in New York cafeterias where he sat by the window to look at the street and the signs painted in bright colors. He’s been silent for so long, and now words come easily to him, the images of what he’s seen and what he’d like to describe to Judith with absolute accuracy, though he suspects he won’t succeed. No explanation can convey the experience, the terror, the absurd truth that only someone who’s lived it can understand, though he tries in vain to turn it into words and moves his lips as if gasping for air, not looking away from Judith’s eyes; looking at her now with an openness he didn’t have before, slowly taking pleasure in her reclaimed features, her proximity, the marvel of her existence now that he has no hope, and desire is stunted by her physical reticence, by the inertia of a bitter male capitulation, wounded vanity, and sexual humiliation. But it’s this lack of hope that allows him to see Judith more clearly than ever, his attention for the first time free of the urgency of a desire that in its former fulfillment was always undermined by the fear of evanescence and loss. Now he sees Judith exactly as she is. Her voice reaches him as precisely as the brush of a hand on his eyelids.