In a drawer in his study locked with a small key, useless now, which Ignacio Abel continues to carry in his pocket, is the folded sheet announcing the lecture. The smallest things can last a long time, immune to abandonment and even the physical disappearance of the person who held them in his hands. A yellow sheet, somewhat faded, the line of the fold so worn that after a few years it will fall apart if someone attempts to open it, if it hasn’t been burned or tossed in the trash, if it doesn’t disappear beneath the rubble of the house after one of the enemy bombing raids the following winter. He found the handbill in a pocket of the jacket he hadn’t worn since then, but by now it was a secret clue, the material proof of the start of another life that began that evening, without anything announcing it, not even the silhouette crossing in front of the slide projector. The day and the year, the place and the hour, like an unearthed inscription that permits the dating of an archeological find: Tuesday, October 7, 1935, 7:00 in the evening, the Auditorium of the Student Residence, Pinar 21, Madrid. Ignacio Abel folded the sheet carefully, with a certain clandestine feeling, and locked it in the same drawer that held his first letters from Judith Biely.
If not for that paper printed in the Residence’s noble, austere typography, perhaps he wouldn’t have proof of the date he heard her name for the first time. But a few minutes before someone introduced them, he’d already recognized her in a kind of flash when, as he concluded his talk, the lights in the auditorium went on and he bowed with some discomfort when he heard well-mannered applause and woke from a fervor he now privately regretted or was embarrassed by, looking sideways toward the end of the first row where Adela and the girl, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia Camprubí, and María de Maeztu in her twisted hat were all sitting, and next to them, incongruous and young, exotic with her fair hair, pale skin, and energetic applause, the stranger who’d irritated him when she came in late. He remembered the woman at the piano, her back to him, who’d turned around, just as he recalled the ripe autumnal quality of the sunlight shining on her hair.
He embraced his daughter, who ran toward him as soon as he came down from the stage. “Why isn’t your brother here with all of you?” “He had a German lesson with Señorita Rossman. Have you seen her father? Mamá couldn’t get away from him.” Professor Rossman made his way through the crowd, enveloped him in his oppressive Germanic cordiality, his sour smell of unwashed clothing, a squalid pensión, and prostate disease. (“Professor Rossman smells like old cat piss,” his son once protested with the savage sincerity of a child.) “An excellent speech, my dear friend, excellent. You don’t know how grateful I am for your invitation, yet another courtesy I can’t reciprocate.” Behind the thick lenses of his round glasses, Professor Rossman’s colorless eyes were wet with emotion, an excessive gratitude Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive. He did, in fact, smell of uric acid and had on a suit he had worn too much, and his bald oval head shone with sweat. He now scraped a living by selling fountain pens in cafés and with the small amount of money Ignacio Abel paid his daughter to give German lessons to Miguel and Lita. “But I don’t want to keep you, my friend — you have many people to greet.” Ignacio Abel moved away, and Dr. Rossman remained alone, isolated by his obvious state of impoverished foreignness and misfortune.
While he looked after the ladies and accepted congratulations, agreed with comments, thought before responding to questions, Ignacio Abel looked through the crowd for the blond woman, fearing she’d left. It comforted his vanity that so many people had attended. The booming voice and corpulence of Don Juan Negrín stood out from the civilized murmur of the others. “I was the one who proposed to López Otero that he hire our friend Abel when we began construction of University City, and as you see, I wasn’t wrong,” he heard Negrín say, in the center of a vaguely official group, with his mouth full. Waiters in short jackets held trays of small sandwiches and served glasses of wine, grenadine, and lemon soft drinks. Professor Rossman bowed stiffly to people who didn’t know him or didn’t remember that they’d been introduced, and took canapés as the trays passed, eating some and putting others in his jacket pocket. When he returned to the pensión that night, he’d share them with his daughter. Ignacio Abel looked at him out of the corner of his eye, conscious of too many things at the same time, constantly torn by feelings that were too disparate.
“Juan Ramón would have liked so much to hear the lovely things you said this evening,” Zenobia Camprubí commented. “‘The cubist rigor of white Andalusian villages’—how beautiful. And how grateful I am that you quoted him. But you know how delicate his health is, how difficult it is for him to set foot outside.”
“Ignacio always says your husband has an instinctive sense of architecture,” Adela said. “He never tires of admiring the composition of his books, the covers, the typography.”
“Not only that.” Ignacio Abel smiled, looked furtively beyond the circle of ladies who surrounded him, and didn’t notice his wife’s annoyance. “The poems, above all. The precision of each word.”
Moreno Villa spoke with the blond foreigner, gesticulating a great deal, leaning against the piano, and she, taller than he, nodded and occasionally let her glance wander over the crowd.
“I thought it went without saying that we don’t admire Juan Ramón because of the external beauty of his books,” said Adela, suddenly very shy, deeply humiliated, like a much younger woman. Zenobia pressed her gloved hand.
“Of course, Adela darling. We all understood what you meant.”
A photographer circulating through the crowd asked Ignacio Abel to allow him to take a picture. “It’s for Ahora.” Abel moved away from the ladies and observed that his daughter looked at him with pride, and the blond woman turned when she noticed the flash. The following day he was irritated to see himself in the newspaper photo with an overly complacent smile he hadn’t been aware of and perhaps gave other people an idea of him that he disliked. The esteemed architect Señor Abel, associate director of construction at University City, spoke brilliantly last night on the rich history of traditional Spanish popular architecture to a select audience who gathered to hear him in the auditorium of the Student Residence. Cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, the gloved, mobile hands of the women, the delicate veils of their hats, the civilized sound of conversations. Judith Biely’s laugh burst like a glass breaking on the polished wood floor. He would have liked to detach himself heedlessly from the admiring circle of ladies and walk straight across the hall to her.
“I liked the comparison of architecture and music,” said Señora de Salinas in an almost inaudible voice; she always had an air somewhere between fatigue and absence. “Do you really believe there’s no middle ground between the popular tradition and the modern objects of the twentieth century?”
“The nineteenth century is all bourgeois adornment and bad copies,” the engineer Torroja interrupted. “Pastry decorations made of stucco instead of cream.”
“I agree,” said Moreno Villa. “The trouble is, the fine arts in Spain haven’t come into the twentieth century yet. The public is bullheaded and patrons are backward.”
“You only have to look at the villa with fake Mudéjar tiles where his excellency the president of the Republic has his private residence.”