For years he performed the role so literally and with no detectable effort that he almost forgot another life might have been possible. Deception and conformity quickly became stable traits of his spirit, along with a profound indifference toward everything that wasn’t the solitary intellectual exaltation his work afforded him. Tedium without histrionics, sex without desire, and a shared and excessive concern for the children sustained his conjugal life. Unthinkingly, he imagined that his self-involvement and impassivity, gradually transformed into indifference, didn’t trouble Adela, that she even accepted them with relief, for she was a woman who always seemed insecure about and rather ashamed of her body, convinced it was typical of men to leave home early and return late and occupy the intervening time with incomprehensible tasks whose only result worthy of interest was the family’s welfare. The idea of patronizing prostitutes would have offended him even if he’d been able to ignore the undeniable hygienic arguments against it, which to his surprise didn’t faze other men. What he’d experienced in a room in Weimar with a young, determined, naked woman who shivered and embraced him and looked smilingly into his eyes as he moved rhythmically on top of her, adapting his thrusts to the knowing undulation of her hips — that wasn’t going to happen to him again, in the same irrevocable way he wouldn’t relive his youth. He looked attentively at all women but rarely felt deeply attracted by one or turned to continue looking at her after she passed. He supposed age was dampening his physical desire as much as his ambitions and the wildness of his imagination. He’d liked an American stranger a great deal for a few minutes and they exchanged a few words, and he’d been satisfied to think about her in the darkness of a taxi while Adela sat beside him and spoke with a hostile tone in her voice, as if she’d guessed, as if she’d been capable of catching in her husband’s eyes an instantaneous flash that hadn’t animated them in many years, just as Lita had noticed the foreigner’s narrow skirt and haircut and accent when she spoke Spanish, so different from Señorita Rossman’s severe Germanic consonants. He thought about her again as he lay in silence next to his wife that night, forcing himself to fix in his memory the details of her face — the freckles around her nose, the gleam of her eyes behind a lock of curly hair, which he’d been madly tempted to brush aside with his fingers — at the same time noting an indubitable beginning of physical excitement that soon languished, a flame fed by the very weak materials of his adult imagination. The following day, in his office at University City — on his desk was a newspaper with a review of his talk and a dark photo in which his face could hardly be seen — he asked to be connected to Moreno Villa’s telephone while he thought of the pretext for a conversation that would veer easily toward Judith Biely. But he hung up immediately, indecisive, cutting off the operator, unaccustomed to those kinds of tricks, and he didn’t have the opportunity to repeat the call or carry out a vague intention to invent an excuse for returning to the Residence in the childish hope he’d run into her.
The days go by and the possibility of something that was about to occur dissolves like a drawing traced in one’s breath on glass. Ignacio Abel might never have seen Judith Biely a second time and neither would have thought of the other again as they moved into the labyrinths of their own lives. Now he was walking along a corridor on the tenth floor of a new building on the Gran Vía — dark suit, double-breasted jacket, hat in hand, gray hair flat against his temples, the distracted, energetic appearance of someone who at heart doesn’t fear very much or expect too much, except for what’s appropriate. Surrounded by the predictable sounds of footsteps, secretaries’ clicking heels, bursts of announcements on radios, ringing telephones, the clatter of typewriters behind frosted-glass doors, he could distinguish more clearly the music he’d begun to hear when he left the elevator. The song reminded him of Judith Biely even before he knew it was guiding him to her. He remembered her first name but not her second — the sunlight coming in through the large window facing west as she turned her head without interrupting the melody she was playing on the piano, Negrín saying that her last name was or sounded Russian. The silent elevator had opened on a wide expanse of polished floor and a wall of glass bricks that diffused the light from a large interior courtyard. The elevator operator touched his cap and stepped aside to let him pass. It smelled promisingly new, just completed, with odors of recent varnish, fresh paint, and wood. Even footsteps had the resonance of a space not yet completely occupied, its bare walls returning echoes and accentuating sharp sounds.
The music came from the other side of one of the numbered doors along the corridor where Ignacio Abel was looking for the nameplate of the person who’d made an appointment with him, the effusive voice with a strong Mexican accent that called him on the phone two or three days after his lecture. “You don’t know who I am, but I know a great deal about you,” the voice said. “I know and admire your work. We have mutual friends. Dr. Negrín was kind enough to give me your number.” Ignacio Abel accepted out of curiosity, yielding to flattery, and because that Friday afternoon he was going to be alone in Madrid. Adela and the children had left for the house in the Sierra in preparation for one of the great yearly family celebrations, the saint’s day of her father, Don Francisco de Asís. He imagined the appointment would be in an office. There were many in the building, the headquarters of foreign businesses, film producers and distributors, travel agencies, and steamship companies. The typewriters and telephones sounded in gusts, as when a door is opened and closed and the sound of the rain comes in. Young secretaries passed him, wearing makeup and moving fast like the ones he’d seen ten years earlier in Germany: uniformed pages, telegram deliverymen, clerks with briefcases under their arms, workers putting the finishing touches on installations. The activity pleased him, the suggestion of urgent tasks, so different from the lethargic calm of the ministerial offices where he sometimes had to go to take care of matters related to the construction at University City: records of payments that were never resolved, transactions that ground to a halt because a signature was missing, or a certificate, or the purple oval of a stamp, or medieval red sealing wax at the bottom of a document. On the outside this building, like so many recent ones in Madrid, had a noble mass but was complicated and affected, with columns and cornices that held up nothing and stone balconies where no one would ever stand, plaster filigrees whose only purpose would be to immediately collect pigeon droppings and soot from chimneys and cars. The interiors, however, were diaphanous, right angles and clean curves, arithmetical sequences that unfolded before him as he walked along the corridor and approached the door from which the music came; it wasn’t frosted glass and didn’t have a commercial sign but a discreet plaque with a name written in cursive script: P. W. Van Doren.