shoot him, they had to lift him because his legs didn’t hold him and he pissed down his trousers and the urine soaked one of his shoes, and as he walked he heard the liquid squishing at each step he took; and when he got home he took a shower and no matter how much he soaped himself he still smelled of urine and fear; and while they searched his briefcase filled with plans and technical reports and asked if they weren’t maps of the front meant to guide the enemy in their advance toward Madrid, what he feared was that they’d discover her letters and photos and take them; he didn’t feel terror at dying but passive indifference, an acceptance disturbed only by the sorrow of thinking he wouldn’t see her again, wouldn’t see his children become adults. Judith looked at him, against the fire, her eyes bright, the changing light of the flames molding the delicate bones beneath her skin, and he swallowed and kept talking. Behind him dance music played on the radio as if from a distant, large, empty ballroom, the band playing and the filigrees of the clarinet followed by the singer’s guileless, high-pitched voice, scattered applause, and the announcer’s excessive enthusiasm as he recited song titles and commercials. He told her he’d taken it for granted that the sexual upheaval he experienced for the first time with his Hungarian lover in Weimar when he was in his thirties would never be repeated. The women who’d offered themselves in Madrid, painted and livid beneath the gaslights in certain alleys when he was young, had excited him and at the same time produced panic in him, and a revulsion not so much toward them as toward himself, toward his instinctual desire for them and the shame that made him blush and walk faster if they called to him. He hadn’t believed a woman could really feel pleasure with him. Adela would ask him to turn off the light and she’d remain motionless, perhaps moan faintly in the heavy darkness of their bedroom; his Hungarian lover squeezed her eyelids shut and rhythmically stroked herself while he labored on top of her, as irrelevant as the insect that pollinates a flower, joined to each other and both self-absorbed and busy with their own lust. He told Judith that the first time he touched her he’d noticed a vibration both delicate and powerful that he didn’t know existed. He found her hand and instead of moving it away she pressed his, and it was as if they were embracing (they both remembered: in the car, driving up the Castellana, the radio playing, his left hand on the wheel, the right caressing Judith’s thighs, the headlights illuminating groves of trees and fences and the façades of palaces); as he discovered her, he’d been discovering himself, being touched, kissed, nibbled, explored, guided by her. He’d never had friends, he told her, or real conversations with anyone, least of all sexual conversations, which, he observed, other men were so fond of. Only when he met her did he realize the solitary life he’d always led, from the time he was a child and his parents didn’t let him leave the porter’s quarters except to go to school, for fear he’d get lost in the hustle of the neighborhood, or the violent boys from the outskirts would hit him, or he’d catch a disease. The only child of parents who were too old; his father dead when he was thirteen; keeping vigil over his dead mother when he was twenty-one and returning on foot to the empty apartment on Calle Toledo from the distant East Cemetery, his feet aching in tight boots, enveloped in the derby hat and black cape that had belonged to his father; so young and a figure from the last century, with a burden of excessive responsibilities that would never be alleviated; his course of study, the inhuman privations to finish it, using up his father’s legacy; then examinations, the weight of his engagement, the new burden quickly made heavier by children. Strange, but now was the first time he felt something resembling relief, though it was inseparable from the feeling of dispossession. He wouldn’t hold anything back, he told Judith, sitting across from her, sunk like an invalid into the leather armchair, his palms rubbing the worn part of the upholstery. Only with her had he discovered and now regained what he’d never known could be so pleasurable, the habit of conversing, explaining himself to himself, confirming immediate affinities in what until then he’d thought of as solitary sensations and thoughts. Always his fear of inconveniencing, his slowness in finding the exact words and the courage to say them, always the temptation of silence and conformity, the permanent frustration of feeling like a guest in his own house and in a life that was the only one he had and yet had never belonged to him. Because Judith listened, he’d learned to explain himself to another person. When she disappeared, as oppressive as her absence was the great bell jar of silence falling over him again when he’d already lost the habit of living inside it, of looking at everything from behind the glass of indifference, distance, and bitterness. But now he’d lost even the more or less unconscious scrupulousness about saying things she’d like to hear, that would make her fall in love. With no hope of seducing her again, almost convinced not only of the uselessness but also the moral baseness of attempting to, he said what he thought, what he was, and what he often didn’t acknowledge even to himself. Remorse for having left wasn’t strong enough to provoke in him a real longing for Spain, he told her. The weight of responsibility had for too many years been as oppressive as the burden of his ambition, including his dark, unconfessed vanity, and at that moment, he told her, on that night, he felt relieved of all three — vanity, responsibility, ambition — though he didn’t know for how long or when guilt or nostalgia would overpower him and make him distort both memories and desires. He didn’t want to cause grief. He didn’t want to pretend he’d have preferred to be in Madrid now, impotently witnessing the destruction of his city, the disaster of a delirious revolution that burned churches and left banks intact, the carnival of parades and murders, the cold villainy and the squandered heroism. He didn’t believe that Salinas, in his comfortable position as a visiting professor at Wellesley College, felt as much anguish as he showed when he talked to her, basically flattered by the cordiality of so young and attractive a woman who spoke Spanish with that clear accent between American and Madrilenian, and who flattered him with an admiration that must act like a balm to his professor’s vanity, a shell of his former brilliance. Of course he’d like the Republic to win, he told her, but he wasn’t sure what kind of republic there’d be in Spain when the war was over, or whether he’d be permitted to return, or whether he wanted to. Everything destroyed with so much fury had to be rebuilt; the trees uprooted by bombs or cut down for firewood replanted; systems of pipes that had been blown up and railroad tracks twisted in the air above mountains of paving stones relaid; bridges dynamited by retreating armies reconstructed; telephone posts and lines that had cost so much to install raised again. But who would resuscitate the dead or return arms or legs to the mutilated, paint the lost canvases or print the unique books burned in bonfires, palliate mourning or hatred, reconstruct the libraries and churches and laboratories and apartment buildings so difficult to build and demolished in the course of an afternoon, a single night. And how could Spain be governed by the same fools, criminals, and misguided men who’d dragged her to disaster, each with his degree of irresponsibility and irrationality, all, with few exceptions, immune to remorse and the bitter wisdom of those who’ve learned from experience. There was something his work had taught him: it takes a long time to bring a building to completion, because no matter how much effort you put into it, things grow with organic slowness; but the instantaneousness of destruction is resplendent, the spurt of gasoline and the flame that rises devouring everything, the shot that fells a man as strong as a tree. He told her that what astonished him most was to have been so wrong about everything, especially the things he was surest of; to have trusted the solidity of everything that collapsed overnight, without drama, almost effortlessly; to have been so wrong about himself, believing he was a rationalist, a pragmatist, a sarcastic witness to the ideological ravings of those who predicted with all seriousness the coming of the dictatorship of the proletariat or Libertarian Communism, those convinced that by abolishing money and taking up nudism or Esperanto or free love, paradise would be established on earth, the idolaters of Stalin or Mussolini, those who roared with a clenched fist or an open hand; believing himself to be a skeptic, he’d been more deluded than any of them, imagining he was concerned only with what could be calculated and measured, what produced a modest but indisputable benefit, some progress. But progress was precisely what was being denied in Spain: not the abolition of property and money, apparently advanced successfully in certain towns in Aragón, not the great Soviet theater of giant posters of Lenin and Stalin hanging in the streets and proletarian battalions parading with arrogant, unanimous discipline, but tangible progress, the methodical, gradual development of technical inventions, everything that to him had seemed earthbound and undeniable, far from the verbose nonsense of visionaries, what he’d discussed so often with Negrín — good nutrition, daily milk in schools to strengthen the bones of poor children, spacious, airy housing, and health education so women would not be encumbered by unwanted children. No other dream had turned out to be more foolish; common sense was the most discredited of the utopias. But how was it possible not to have believed in progress, believed the present and future were the luminous country where one belonged, unlike the sad inhabitants of the past, confined to a decrepit realm he knew well because he’d spent the first part of his life there. You don’t know what I remember, he told her: the Madrid of the last century, women in black shawls and men with beards and large mustaches and capes covering their mouths in winter, streetcars pulled by mules, and carts with creaking wooden wheels slowly climbing the slope of Calle Toledo. Progress hadn’t been an illusion of brains overheated by verbal vapors: he’d witnessed the explosion of electric streetcars and automobiles, telephones and movie projectors, all the things that disconcerted or terrified his parents, who, after all, were inhabitants of the somber country of the past, his mother especially, who’d lived a few years longer, who at the end of her life didn’t dare cross the street for fear of speeding vehicles, who was frightened each time the phone that had been installed in the porter’s lodging rang, who didn’t venture beyond the Plaza Mayor for fear of everything, even the glare of illuminated signs that made her dizzy, who never got in a car or took an elevator. Progress had the inevitability of a river’s abundant current. Buildings were taller, and because of electric lights, night didn’t plunge the city into darkness. Progress was more undeniable because he’d seen it with his own eyes when he traveled in Europe. What already existed in Paris or Berlin wouldn’t take long to reach Madrid. He’d disbelieved the political and visionary fervor of some of his teachers in Weimar, but not the luminous reality of the architectures and forms he learned from them. Human intelligence exploded in the austere model of a house, or in one of those ordinary objects whose internal laws Professor Rossman demonstrated to them, or in the drawings as faint as dreams in appearance and yet as precise as the typographies Paul Klee designed in his classes. My children were going to have a life better than mine, just as I’d had a life better than my parents’, he told her. The Republic had come thanks not to any conspiracy but to the natural impulse of things, by virtue of which the monarchy was an antique as decrepit as silent movies or the mule drivers’ carts swept off the Cava Baja by the eruption of trucks and buses. But now, when night fell, Madrid was darker and more dangerous and emptier than a medieval forest, and human beings behaved like jackals, like primitive hordes armed not with sticks or axes or stones but with rifles. He told her about the sensation of emerging onto the Gran Vía from a metro station after a bombing and finding himself lost between two narrow passes of darkness, treading on broken glass, tripping over rubble, among frightened shadows in doorways, and with ordinary people transformed into fugitive beasts or hunters and executioners. He’d been wrong about everything, but especially about himself, his place in time. All his life thinking he belonged to the present and the future, and now beginning to grasp that he felt so out of place because his country was the past.