“Don’t mistake backwardness for exoticism,” Ignacio Abel said, uncertain at having used the familiar form of address, as if it were an inappropriate move, not daring merely to touch her but to desire her fully. “We Spaniards have the misfortune of being picturesque.”
“You seem and don’t seem Spanish,” said Judith, and she stopped, looking at him with a smile of recognition, more adventurous than he, impatient, wanting to let him know she did remember that what happened the last time wasn’t forgotten.
“Do I seem American to you?”
“More American than anybody.”
“Phil Van Doren would have his doubts. His family came to America three centuries ago, and mine thirty years ago.”
He didn’t like her saying that name, Van Doren, and even less the casual name Phil. He thought of the fixed, sarcastic eyes under depilated brows, the blunt, hairy hands with rings pressing Judith’s waist, the moment when, just having walked out of his study and leaving them alone, he looked in again, pushing the door abruptly as though he’d forgotten something.
“For him we Spaniards must be something like Abyssinians. He talks about his trips through the interior of the country as if he had to take along native carriers.”
He realized his hostility was a deep personal ill will caused by his jealousy of a link between Van Doren and Judith from which he was excluded and about which he didn’t dare question her — what right did he have? If Van Doren didn’t like women, why did he touch her so much? How could Ignacio Abel feel confident next to her when they were alone, if he didn’t dare touch her or look her in the eyes? He heard train whistles in the nearby station, and car engines and horns on the Paseo del Prado, muffled by the dense trees, like the rustle of the dry leaves beneath their feet that sank slightly into the damp earth, only a year ago, a year and a few days, in another city, another continent, another time. And if she had regrets or simply considered it unimportant, or thought there was something embarrassing or ridiculous in the eagerness of a well-known married man with children, a man in his late forties who couldn’t risk being seen in public with a woman who wasn’t his wife, a foreign younger woman observed by the vigilant faces of Madrid in taverns and cafés. What was he doing, he must have asked himself when they both fell silent and conversation no longer stretched the ruse of a pretext beneath them like a net, leaving the office much earlier than he should have, making a date with Judith with an excuse of almost pathetic puerility, showing her the Botanical Garden, his favorite place in Madrid, he told her, the best of Spain, better than the Prado, better than University City, his motherland full of statues of naturalists and botanists, not bloody generals or cretinous kings, his island of civilization dedicated to the knowledge and patience to classify nature according to the scale of human intelligence. Then Judith stopped, facing him on the other side of one of those basin fountains where red fish swam and a weak jet of water rose, and before she said anything, he knew she’d refer to what hadn’t been mentioned so far, the other night in the bar at the Florida.
“I wasn’t sure you’d call me.”
“How could I not call you?” Ignacio Abel felt himself blushing slightly. He spoke so softly it was difficult for her to understand what he was saying. “What made you think that? I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”
“You were so serious while you were driving, not saying anything, not looking at me. I thought you must have regretted it.”
“I couldn’t believe I dared kiss you.”
“Will you dare now?”
“How do you say me muero de ganas in English?”
“‘I’m dying to.’”
But in the boldness he’d felt on the afternoon of their first meeting, there was not only desire but also alcohol, the clear liquid in the cone-shaped glasses served in Van Doren’s apartment by the waiter following his employer’s instructions, his subtle, imperious gestures. The intoxication of drink, the novelty of words, the same song playing again on the phonograph, his own voice slightly changed, the October sky over the roofs of Madrid, the faces of the guests, most of them American, the works by Klee and Juan Gris, the blank, diaphanous space that took him back to his time in Germany, just as his desire for Judith wakened the part of him that had been sleeping since his affair with his Hungarian lover. He said, looking at his watch when Van Doren had left them alone in his office, “Now I really do have to go,” and was grateful as if for a disproportionate gift when Judith replied that she did, too, and would leave with him, and in the elevator she sighed with relief, arranging her hair in the mirror. Out on the street they’d walked together for the first time, in the light of day and among people, with no need for caution, even when it was time to say goodbye and nothing happened, time for each of them to walk away into the crowd on the Gran Vía at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, store windows and large, hand-painted canvas banners on the façades of movie theaters, honking, the sun shining on the silvery metal of automobiles, a present without a future, the inevitable future unleashed by a word that might not be said. He could say what was true, that it was urgent for him to go back to the office, to documents and blueprints and urgent calls he had to answer. He felt lightheaded: if he drove with the window down, the air would clear his mind. At each moment possible futures unfolded that burn like flares in the darkness and a second later are extinguished. He wanted to go on listening to her voice, the peculiar way her Spanish vowels and consonants sounded, to prolong the state of gentle physical intoxication, her proximity the powerful imminence of something, the exciting, mysterious ambit of the feminine. Judith stood looking with a smile of recognition at the sunlight on the terraces of the tallest buildings, the limpid blue of the sky against which the tower of the Capitol Theater was outlined.
“I look up and it’s as if I were in New York.”
“But the buildings must be much taller there.”
“It’s not the buildings, it’s the light. This is the same light as in New York right now. I mean, that will be there in six hours.”
He could suggest they have a drink and Judith would smile and thank him and say she was late for an appointment with her students or a talk at the Residence or at the Center for Historical Studies. He thought about his dark, empty apartment when he’d go home that night, when he’d open the door and not hear the voices of his children; perhaps they were exploring the garden of the house in the Sierra, or planning an expedition, like the ones in Jules Verne’s novels, for his arrival the following day. In a lighthearted tone that surprised him and hid his fear, he told Judith he was inviting her to have a drink at the Hotel Florida across the street. After a moment of hesitation she agreed, shrugging with a smile, and took his arm to cross the Gran Vía in the middle of traffic.