Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell. He’s dreamed of Judith Biely’s voice (which he hardly remembers after only three months), but its sound was less true than the sensation of being brushed, touched by her hand, pressed against her smooth skin, kissed by her lips, caressed by her curly hair almost as immaterially as by her breath, like a faint breeze that has silently come through an open window. He was walking beside her along an avenue in the Botanical Garden and suddenly they were silent and all that could be heard were the leaves beneath their feet: the leaves of trees brought as seeds or frail shoots from America in the eighteenth century, housed in the dark holds of ships, waiting to germinate in this distant land where Judith Biely, after almost two years of traveling, feels at home, in a homeland she never knew she had until now, recognizing the trunks and the shapes and colors of the leaves, learning their names in Spanish, saying them in English so he could pronounce after her. He seemed awkward now and much younger than the first few times she saw him, younger and softer at each meeting, as if his life were being projected backward: the tall, professorial figure behind a podium at the Residence, with his dark suit and gray hair and judgmental appearance. The man who afterward looked at her across the crowd from the other end of the room, who left without saying goodbye, beside his wife, who was visibly older than he; who appeared in the doorway of Van Doren’s apartment; who leaned stiffly toward her in a private booth in the bar of the Hotel Florida and almost didn’t dare kiss her; who now, only a few days later, disconcerted, erudite, pronounces the names of trees in Latin, not realizing the mud on the ground was dirtying his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers, stopping because she’d stopped and not daring to meet her eyes, perhaps regretful, overwhelmed by the responsibility of having gone so far, of having called her again, unable to continue talking, to go on pretending he was some kind of teacher or mentor of botany or Spanish customs and she a foreign pupil, paralyzed by the recognition of a desire that couldn’t be contained and that he couldn’t manage, a desire he barely remembered existed.
“I’m dying to.”
9
NOT USED TO LYING, the ease of concealing something for the first time in a long while surprised him. The novelty of pretense was as stimulating as his resurgent desire and the signs of falling in love. There was a kind of innocence in such perfect impunity. What no one could know had occurred only a few hours earlier, and was clear and fresh in his memory, and still had left no trace in his external appearance. The mind’s secrecy was a prodigious gift. Lying on the grass in the mild sun of a Saturday afternoon, he talked distractedly with Adela about the children’s new school term, and though she was looking into his eyes she couldn’t know what he was thinking, what he was reliving, delighting in the precision of each detail, each minute. His memory was a camera obscura where only he could see Judith Biely, a gallery of murmurs where only he heard her voice, as close as if she were talking into his ear. Adela was probably grateful for his talkative, friendly mood when he arrived that morning at the house in the Sierra, his rested, almost smiling air, his amiable disposition toward her and her relatives, which came as a surprise since he often seemed uncomfortable around them. She was in the kitchen helping the maids peel quinces — she liked the brown and gold down that remained on her fingertips and had so delicate a scent when she brought her fingers to her nose — when she was startled by the sound of a car’s engine. Pleasantly surprised that her husband had arrived earlier than expected, fearful he would be unsociable, in a bad mood, sleep-deprived. She would have liked not to have so acute a perception of the variations in his state of mind, not to respond so immediately to any indication of a change of mood, of anger or dejection, as if over the years she’d sharpened an instrument of detection so sensitive it approached prophecy, because it warned of certain symptoms before they occurred. Her children’s footsteps resounded as they galloped down the stairs. “Ah, my faithful vassals at the battlements, a knight-errant approaches the castle, if not an inn or station snack bar,” Don Francisco de Asís declaimed with theatrical exaggeration under the squat granite columns of the porch when his grandchildren crossed the garden on their way to the gate. Ignacio Abel stopped the car in front of it, looking at himself for a moment in the rearview mirror, prepared without remorse for the novelty of lying. In the seat next to him was no trace of the woman who only the night before had sat there, half closing her eyes to feel the cool air coming through the lowered window and blowing her hair away from her face while he drove up the Castellana. She’d looked into the same mirror to fix her lipstick and comb her hair with her fingers before getting out. The eyes that a few hours earlier had looked at her with so much attention and desire now revealed nothing, the same eyes that had seen her come near, opening her lips and tilting back her head. How strange that this memory wasn’t visible to others, that it was so easy to keep the secret, like a thief who shakes your hand and steals something valuable with no effort and in view of everyone and then walks away in the full light of day. He got out of the car and his daughter ran toward him and hung around his neck to kiss him. The boy remained standing by the gate, expectant and serious, more timid than his sister, weaker, perhaps suspecting something, alert to any sign that his father’s presence was not completely certain, for he tended to arrive later than he’d announced, and probably this time, too, his stay would be shorter than he’d promised. Embracing his father, he then clung to him as if to make sure he really had arrived, as if deep down he’d feared he wouldn’t appear. In the clear space of the garden in front of the house, Don Francisco de Asís received Ignacio Abel with open arms in a melodramatic gesture of welcome, like a parody of the classic Spanish theater he liked so much. “What a surprise, my illustrious son-in-law! Your presence honors this humble rustic dwelling, ancestral home of my elders!” He gave his son-in-law two loud, wet kisses, too absorbed in himself or too innocent or childish to notice Abel’s physical displeasure, his attitude of rejection. But Adela noticed it, waiting in the doorway, drying her hands, which smelled of quince, on her apron. She heard her father’s hackneyed declamation through her husband’s ears, and what otherwise would have been no more than one of an old man’s tiresome habits that awaken only patience and some tenderness sounded to her like embarrassing nonsense. She noticed her husband’s expression as he pulled back slightly; she knew what he must be thinking and was ashamed of her father’s eccentricities, guilty about the embarrassment and disloyalty to him that muddied the otherwise loving resignation with which she would have accepted those eccentricities if not for Ignacio Abel. Too sensitive to the states of mind of someone who paid little attention to hers, as inclined as her son to depend too much on an undependable affection. The girl didn’t suffer from these kinds of insecurities: she walked with her father along the gravel path, carrying his briefcase like a page in his service, certain of the preference bestowed on her. She became pleasingly childish in his presence, to the same degree that with her mother she defended somewhat defiantly her right not to be treated like a little girl.