He looks at his watch again, though he looked at it only a minute ago, like the smoker who doesn’t remember that he has a cigarette and anxiously lights another. If they haven’t attacked the city yet, it’s likely that the engines of the planes can already be heard in the frightened silence of a night without lights. Moreno Villa must hear them behind the closed window in his room at the Residence, where on other nights he’s heard the orders and guns of nearby firing squads, the purr of cars that light the scene and wait with their motors running for the job to be over. Perhaps the planes fly in from the north and Miguel and Lita hear them passing over the peaks of the Sierra, knowing they’re going to bomb Madrid, imagining their father is still in the city, or has died, that they won’t see him again, their last image of him a badly made photo that disappears in the developing fluid, the light suit, the black briefcase, the summer hat waving on the other side of the gate as the train whistle sounds again.
With a whistle like a ship’s siren the train moves away from the riverbank and plunges at higher speed into the tunnel of yellow, ocher, orange, blue, and red leaves of a forest so dense the afternoon light can barely penetrate. The wind caused by the power of the train raises eddies of leaves that flutter like clouds of agitated butterflies, collide with the window, and are rapidly left behind. Leaves of oak, maple, elm, trees he’s never seen, still plentiful at the treetops and floating through the air or covering the ground like a great snowstorm of reds, yellows, ochers, among tree trunks as extravagant as primitive columns and impenetrable thickets where it seems primordial nature has been preserved only a few steps from the train, like the river’s oceanic current that breaks in diminished waves against the bank adjacent to the rails. His eyes are lost in the density of the woods, as if suddenly there were no traces of the city only a few minutes behind them, or the bridge that testifies to a proximate human presence, as if the continent had closed in on itself in a flood of rivers and forests, erasing the scars of the invaders’ presence. The ruins of an abolished civilization might be concealed under vegetation this dense. Coming in through the window now isn’t the smell of algae and the ocean but the odor of leaves, damp earth, and fertile soil where vegetable matter rots in the shade of impenetrable undergrowth. Entire forests of pine groves in the Sierra Morena and the Sierra de Cazorla were cut down to build the ships of Philip II’s armada, which a storm sank in just a few hours near the English coast. Dead animals, birds without shelter, rain washing away soil on slopes the tree roots had held in place, finally thankless bare rock, the harsh homeland of goatherds, rachitic peasants, the ecstatic, determined to cut and burn more and leave no refuge even for scorpions.
He took Judith Biely for a walk in the Royal Botanical Garden the second time they met. She recognized American trees, the identical fall colors, though it surprised her that the forest ended abruptly and they immediately came upon the straight paths, fences, and pergolas of a French garden. She walked by his side and both were silent, listening to the rustle of dry leaves under their feet. They’d done no more than caress and kiss with apprehensive awkwardness in the greenish half-light of the bar at the Hotel Florida, and then in the car when Ignacio Abel drove her for the first time to her boarding house, the two of them surprised and silent following their boldness. They hadn’t seen each other naked. Conversation had distracted them from the fact of being together and permitted them to suspend the connection affecting them behind their words. They’d agreed to meet at the entrance to the Botanical Garden, and the impulse for one to go to the other had been halted in the prelude to physical intimacy. Indecisive or diffident, they didn’t kiss or take each other by the hand. A renewed timidity wiped away the closeness of their first meeting; it seemed impossible that they’d embraced and kissed at length. They had to begin again, probe the reestablished limits one more time, the invisible restraints of good manners. How strange that all of it had occurred, that only a year had gone by since then, that the October afternoon light was almost identical, like the smell and colors of the leaves. “And the strangest thing of all is that I feel so at home in Madrid,” Judith had said just before she fell silent, her hands in the pockets of her light coat, her head bare, looking around as calmly as on the first day they were together on the street, on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía when they’d left Van Doren’s apartment, in front of the movie posters covering the façade of the Palacio de la Prensa. In the Garden, on a cool, damp October morning with the subtle scent of smoke and fallen leaves in the air, they read the labels with the names of the trees in Latin and Spanish. Judith pronounced them aloud, uncertain, allowing herself to be corrected, taking pleasure in names that alluded to distant origins: the elm of the Caucasus, the weeping pine of the Himalayas, the giant sequoia of California. She told him she felt more at home in Madrid than in any European city she’d visited in the past year and a half, and it had been true from the moment she got off the train in the North Station and went out to a sunny, damp street in the first light of a September morning and took a taxi to the Plaza de Santa Ana, filled with produce and flower stands covered by awnings, the shouts of vendors and the warbling of birds for sale in their wire cages, the cries and flutes of knife grinders and the sound of conversations coming through the wide-open doors of the cafés. Her New York neighborhood had been like that when she was a girl, she said, but perhaps with a more anguished vitality, a more visible fury in the daily search for sustenance or profit, in the harshness of social relationships, men and women from remote places in the world having to earn a living from the first day and without anyone’s help in a city that for them was strange and overwhelming beyond the familiar streets where immigrants crowded together, dressed as they had dressed in the villages and ghettos of the far eastern reaches of Europe, surrounded by signs, shouts, and cooking odors that reproduced those of the old country. In Madrid the street peddler standing on a corner or the patron leaning on the bar in a tavern gave Judith the impression of always having been there, inhabiting an uneventful indolence, like that of the men in dark suits who looked out at the street through the large windows of cafés or the drowsing guards in the rooms of the Prado. He asked her whether, in the matter of Oriental indolence, she’d tried the clerks in public offices yet, gone at nine to take care of some transaction and waited until after ten, and found herself looking, beyond the arc of a small window, at a face both embittered and impassive, a nicotine-stained index finger moving back and forth, negating something, or pointing accusingly at a missing stamp on a document, a seal, the signature of someone you’d have to look for in another, more obscure office where the window for serving the public wasn’t open yet.