He recognized the song at the same time he recalled her musical and forgotten last name: Biely. And a moment later, when the door opened, he saw her, with no prior warning, as if her presence had been an emanation of the music and her suddenly remembered name. Instead of an office he found himself in the middle of what seemed to be a party, somewhat incongruous at that early hour, still part of the working day. He had the feeling that when he crossed the threshold he was entering a space not continuous with the corridor that brought him there; it didn’t seem Spanish, didn’t seem completely reaclass="underline" a large living room with white walls and abstract masses, like an interior in a modern film. The people, the guests, looked like extras, arranged in small groups and conversing in several languages and on different planes, as if to occupy the set in a convincing way. Unexpected, recognized, carnal among those figures who didn’t notice the presence of the new arrival — not because they intended to act as if they didn’t see him, but because they moved on another plane of reality — Judith saw him as soon as he came in and from a distance made a gesture of welcome. She held a gleaming record in her hands and stood next to the gramophone, lost as well among strangers though he didn’t realize it at the time, in front of a large window overlooking a provincial Madrid of tile roofs and bell towers and church domes, keeping the rhythm of the song with nods of her head. The clarinet, the piano, Benny Goodman accompanying Teddy Wilson on a disk recorded in New York only a few months earlier, discovered by her with a rush of nostalgia in the listening booth of a music store in Paris at the beginning of the summer, when she didn’t yet know she would travel to Madrid in September, when Spain for her was still the place dreamed about in books, a country as illusory and anchored in her youthful imagination as Treasure Island or Sancho Panza’s Ínsula Barataria. The maid in the black uniform and white cap who opened the door moved away discreetly, carrying Ignacio Abel’s hat and umbrella. His quick, expert glance simultaneously assessed the dimensions of the space and the quality and disposition of the objects, identifying the creators of the paintings and furniture, almost all German or French of the past ten years except for a distinguished Viennese or two from the beginning of the century. Everything had the attractiveness of excessive premeditation, of calculated disorder, with a shine like that of photographic paper or an international design magazine. A young waiter, his hair lacquered with pomade, offered him a glass of transparent liquid that smelled of iced gin, a small tray with canapés of fresh butter and caviar. Judith seemed to take a long time to reach him through groups of people who separated without seeing her to let her pass or whom she skirted, guided only by the melody she’d played tentatively on the piano in the Residence. The closer she came, the more real and exciting she was, dressed in a plain white blouse and wide trousers. Then she shook his hand with masculine assurance. Her warm hand, with slim fingers and fragile bones when he pressed it slightly, caught in his for a moment that was prolonged without either one doing anything about it, not knowing anything about the other and alone again in the sound made by invisible people, just as they’d been a few nights earlier at the Residence. When she looked at him, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his own appearance, too severe and too Spanish in that environment, among people younger than he and, like Judith, dressed in sports clothes — close-fitting sweaters, bright ties, checked trousers, two-toned shoes. Occasionally a laugh or an American exclamation rose above the conversations and the clink of glasses.
“The man who doesn’t like bullfights,” said Judith. “I’m so happy to see you again, among so many strangers.”
“I thought they were all compatriots of yours.”
“But in my country I wouldn’t have known any of them.”
“One isn’t the same away from one’s country.”
“What are you like when you’re away from Spain?” Judith looked at him over the glass she held to her lips.
“I almost don’t remember. I haven’t traveled for a long time.”
“You say that sadly. Your face lit up when you showed photographs of modern German buildings in your talk.”
“I hope you weren’t too bored.” Alcohol, which he wasn’t accustomed to drinking, caused a warm surge in his chest each time he took a sip. The smell of gin mixed with the scent of Judith’s cologne or soap. The physical desire her closeness provoked was as new and as immediate for him as the alcohol in his blood, and it produced a comparable bewilderment. He was waking after more than ten years, astonished at having been asleep for so long.
“Now you’re fishing for compliments.” Judith had moved instinctively to English and began to laugh at her own linguistic confusion: she wiped her lips with a small napkin, sorry now for her laughter and perhaps her remark. “You know very well no one was bored.”
He liked her even more than he remembered. He hadn’t known how to keep in his memory the exact color of her eyes, the brightness of her ironic and alert intelligence, the way her thick, curly hair was cut at a right angle at her cheeks, the luminous timbre of her voice in Spanish. Enthusiasm made her beautiful. She’d been in Madrid for a month and felt all the ardor of an unexpected love affair with the city. She was one of those people able to take pleasure in everything, to be grateful for the new with no shadow of mistrust toward the unknown. Talking to her that afternoon, Ignacio Abel thought she resembled Lita in her balance between a rigorous vocation for learning and a good-natured aptitude for receiving the gifts of the unforeseen, for serenely enjoying life. She’d spent two years traveling in Europe and planned to leave a six-month stay in Spain for the end. But a former classmate from Columbia University, where Judith had abandoned her doctoral studies a few years earlier, called at the beginning of the summer: she was ill and couldn’t take charge of the group of students whom she had to accompany during a semester of exchange studies in Madrid. So many pieces of chance required to weave a decisive moment in life. Since the beginning of September, and contrary to all her recent expectations, Judith Biely was a teacher living in a pensión in Madrid, in an austere, bright room overlooking the Plaza de Santa Ana, while she waited for a room to become available at the Residence for Young Ladies. She was perfecting her Spanish, which she had begun to study on her own as a child after reading a student edition of Tales of the Alhambra; she attended classes in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and in Spanish history at the Center for Historical Studies on Calle Almagro, and went to lectures and concerts and film screenings at the Student Residence; she ate delicious, indigestible stews in the taverns along Cava Baja; she strolled at dusk along Vistillas and the Viaducto and the Plaza de Oriente to watch the sunsets that in this inland city took on the delicate breadth of ocean horizons sieved with mist. The purples and grays of the Sierra seen through her window on the first rainy days of October she recognized a short time later in the backgrounds of Velázquez’s hunting scenes. The joy of leaving her pensión and spending a morning in the museum was not very different from the pleasure afterward of having a sandwich of fried squid and a glass of beer at a stand on the Paseo del Prado, watching the talkative, active people of Madrid walk by, attempting to decipher their turns of phrase, reviewing in a small notebook the new words and expressions she was learning. When she was ten or twelve years old and her family lived in Brooklyn she read Washington Irving, bent for hours over a table in a public library, looking at illustrations in which the Alhambra was an Oriental palace, sitting by a window through which she could see courtyards covered with clotheslines of sheets in a neighborhood of Italian and Jewish immigrants; now she was impatient to take an express train one night and wake up in Granada. A little before enrolling at City College she discovered a book of travels through Spain by John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again, and now she carried it with her and at times reread it in the very places described in its pages. Thanks to Dos Passos she’d learned about Cervantes and El Greco, but in the Prado was moved much more by Velázquez and Goya. Had she seen Goya’s frescoes in the dome of San Antonio de la Florida, his less famous but equally powerful canvases in the Academia de San Fernando, his several series of etchings? Ignacio Abel surprised himself by offering to act as guide. They were very near San Fernando, and they could reach the hermitage of San Antonio in just a few minutes by car: you crossed the river, and the landscape of the Pradera, with the city in the background and the great white smudge of the Palacio de Oriente, was the same one Goya painted. His own boldness disconcerted him: it would in no way be difficult to put out his hand and touch her face, so close, to move away the lock of hair that brushed the corner of her smiling mouth. Judith nodded, very attentive in order to understand each word, her thin lips moistened by her drink, her eyes shining, or was it simply the euphoric effect of alcohol and conversation in a foreign language, the same boldness that was urging him on, irresponsible, a little dizzy, insisting that his car was nearby, and besides, because of his work, he knew the chaplain at the hermitage, who would allow them to climb up to the dome to see the frescoes more closely. He was not in love yet and already he was jealous of others who might touch her, other men joined to her by the complicity of language. A husky man with a shaved head embraced her from behind.