“If you know so much, tell me the honorable way to act. Tell me whether you think there’s a just way to behave.”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know whether I’m as much of a clown as the rest. Each person justifies his shameful behavior the best he can. Only the murdered are without guilt, and you don’t want to be one of them. Professor Rossman, or Lorca.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. Professor Salinas was distraught. I wanted to think it was a rumor, a false report. Why would they have killed him?”
“For no reason, Judith. He was innocent. Do you think that’s a small crime? Innocents are not wanted anywhere.”
“You finally said my name.”
“You haven’t said mine yet.”
“‘Living in pronouns.’ Do you remember? I didn’t really understand the meaning of that poem. You explained it to me. The lovers can call each other only ‘you’ and ‘I’ so they won’t be found out.”
“Don’t go. Stay with me.”
“I already have the ticket. The ship sails tomorrow from New York. Three hundred of us are going. And many more will go soon. In small groups, to keep a low profile. Some will go to France first, others to England.”
“The borders will be closed.”
“We’ll cross where the smugglers do.”
“This is not a novel, Judith.”
“Don’t talk to me again in that mocking tone.”
“I don’t want you to be killed.”
“I asked you to tell me what can be done, and you haven’t answered.”
“There’s nothing you can or should do. You’re lucky, it’s not your country. Forget about it because you can. Many more people were killed in Abyssinia than in Spain and neither of us lost any sleep over it. And neither did the democracies or the League of Nations. Hitler wants to expel all the Jews from Germany, and he’s put the Social Democrats and Communists in camps, and there hasn’t been a single international protest. Will anyone be shocked to learn that he’s helping Franco? In Russia they die of hunger by the millions and nobody cares, but all the generous lovers of justice are moved by Soviet propaganda. With some exceptions, this whole world is a horrifying place. Don’t they lynch Negroes in the south of your country? How many were killed three or four years ago in Paraguay, in the Chaco War? Hundreds of thousands. You may not have heard of it. Do you really believe that your actions, just or unjust, can make any difference? If you want to ease your conscience, join a committee of solidarity with the Spanish Republic. Ask for money in the street, collect warm clothing. The militiamen need it now in the Sierra. If you send them a sweater or a blanket, you’ll have been more useful than letting yourself be killed. If you collect just one can of condensed milk or a pack of cigarettes for them.”
“I hear you speak and I don’t know you.”
“I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear.”
“I shouldn’t have come. I could have been in New York by now.”
“Go on, then. Maybe by the time you get to Spain the Republic won’t have collapsed yet. They’ll welcome you with placards and bands. They’ll take you on a tour of some peaceful front. In Madrid they’ll give a dinner dance in your honor at the palace of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. The meal they’ll serve will be much better and more abundant than the food they give the soldiers at the front — that is, if there are trucks to bring the food, or gasoline for the trucks, maybe there isn’t any, or it’s being used for parades or for taking people to slaughter. Alberti and his gang of poets in nicely pressed blue coveralls will recite yards of verses for you. They’ll take you to a bullfight and a flamenco performance. They’ll take pictures of you and you’ll be in the papers. They’ll present you as further confirmation that all over the world sympathy is growing for the struggle of the Spanish people against fascism. Then they’ll take you to the border and you’ll all go back to your countries with a clear conscience and the joy of having had a dangerous, exotic adventure. You’ll even go back with a tan.”
“I’m leaving. I don’t have to listen to this. I’m ashamed of you.”
She stood up and now looks at him from above, as if challenging him to try to block her way. His two hands are separated, parallel on the table, but that’s the only movement he’s made. He raises his eyes to her, then looks at the fire, then at the spot where Judith had been only a moment before. She’ll leave, and each step she takes will be a definitive parting. He thinks of Moreno Villa this summer, in his room at the Residence: now we’ve learned that in these times a casual departure may be forever. She’ll cross the darkened library, the foyer. He’ll hear the door shut, then wait for the car engine to start. Angry and nervous, Judith won’t begin to drive right away. The sound of the engine will become steady. Sitting still, his eyes on the fire, he’ll hear the sound fading until it’s gone, the red taillights dimming like embers at the end of the road, the tunnel of entwined tree branches. In the silence the patter of the rain will return, the crackle of the fire, a brief burst of logs burning. After a while no sign that Judith has been here, only the plate with her unfinished supper, the half-consumed bottle of beer. He’ll go up to bed, lighting his way with the oil lamp, and search for Judith’s scent on a towel. He’ll look in the mirror to brush his teeth, half his face erased by darkness, his own eyes eluding him. He makes no move to stop her, now that he still has her within reach. Judith speaks, framed by the door she’s just opened and at any moment will cross. She is calm.
“You think you know everything, but you don’t know anything. The volunteers I know don’t go to Spain to be tourists, I can assure you. Many are already there receiving military training to join the Republican army. Many more will arrive from America and half the world. If there were so few differences between the two sides, and it all amounts to nothing more than savagery and senselessness, there wouldn’t be so many intelligent and brave people prepared to risk their lives in Spain. You know I’m not a fanatic. I don’t feel much sympathy for the Communists. But they’re organizing recruitment, and I’ll go to Spain with them and many others who aren’t Communists. If I hadn’t fallen in love with you, I probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with Spain. But by now it’s my other country, and what’s happening there breaks my heart. Just reading the names of the towns in the paper or hearing them pronounced on the radio. When they say ‘Madrid,’ it’s my city because you showed it to me. I lived two years in London and Paris and never stopped feeling like a foreigner. A foreigner who visited extraordinary museums with a guilty conscience because I got bored too soon and wasn’t European. I went to Madrid, and as soon as I took my first walk around the Plaza de Santa Ana, between the shoeshine boy and the grocery, it was as if I were back in New York. I like the Spanish. Me caen bien, as you say. I like the slow, shabby streetcars and the pots of red geraniums on the balconies. I like the Rastro as much as the Prado. But it isn’t the romanticism of an American, though you may think so. It’s political common sense. I was moved by the poor lining up with so much dignity to vote on the day of the last elections. I liked to go through your neighborhood and see people entering and leaving the new modern market you designed, with the flag on the façade. If Hitler and Mussolini help the military win in Spain, what will happen next in the world? I don’t want those people to enter Madrid.”