How strange that in this part of his life nothing had been altered by what only he and Judith Biely knew, that he didn’t have to pretend in order to conceal — as if he’d crossed the invisible border between two contiguous worlds, the inhabitants of one not suspecting the existence of the other. And though he missed Judith and would have liked to wake beside her, he delighted in the presence of his children and the scent of rockrose and resinous wood smoke in the Sierra air, the first autumn colors in the garden. The Japanese creeper climbed like a flame curling around a column at the entrance and along the balcony railing, the vibrant red of its leaves standing out against the granite and whitewash on the façade of the house that had a certain rustic nobility in its proportions. On Saturday morning, time in this other world seemed suspended. A cowbell’s slow clang, the lowing of cattle from nearby pastures, and occasional shooting by hunters didn’t disturb the autumnal stillness. Ignacio Abel was self-absorbed, doing nothing, the newspaper on his lap, sitting on the porch that faced south, and the sun had a slow density of honey that warmed the air, turned things golden, revived dozing insects. The last figs were opening on the fig tree, revealing the red pulp that sparrows and blackbirds pecked at and wasps sucked. Inside the house the family chattered noisily, Doña Cecilia’s shrill tones rising above the others, supported by Don Francisco de Asís’s booming organ voice, like a basso continuo. There would be elections, he declaimed, in a long-sleeved undershirt and slippers, his suspenders hanging down on each side, the paper in his hands like a banner ruined by the misfortunes of Spanish politics. There would be elections, and if the right won again, the left would rise up in another attempt at a Bolshevik revolution, and if the left won, the Bolshevik revolution would also be inevitable, a collapse of civilization as terrifying as in Russia. Don Francisco de Asís liked the word “terrifying,” the word “civilization.” Doña Cecilia asked him please not to talk about those things: in her husband’s booming voice, apocalyptic prophecies gave her, she said, an upset stomach. Don Francisco de Asís voted sensibly for the Catholic and somewhat cajoling right of Gil Robles, but what truly moved him was the oratory of Don José Calvo Sotelo: what emotion when that man said “ship of state” or “the backbone of the nation,” with what good judgment had he reformed and strengthened public administration throughout his mandate as minister during the dictatorship of Don Miguel Primo de Rivera. The boy played ball in the garden, imagining he was eluding famous soccer players, happy to be at the house in the Sierra, happy his father had come. The girl sat on the swing, balancing slowly as she read a book, the tips of her sandals brushing against the ground. Bluish oak groves in the distance; from the pastures the echoes of isolated shooting; on the ground quinces and burst pomegranates, their skins red and dry; on the grapevine that shaded the entrance to the house the last grapes had the same rich honey color as the October sun (he recalled the fruit bowl of grapes and quinces in Moreno Villa’s room). His briefcase filled with documents and drawings lay on the table outdoors where the family had supper on summer nights, but Ignacio Abel felt too lazy to open it. Time had paused in a sweet somnolence that weighed on his eyelids. In Madrid Judith Biely would be thinking about the same things, wondering where he’d gone. They hadn’t spoken about seeing each other again when they said goodbye. As if satisfied with what had already happened, first in the half-light of the private booth, when they suddenly faced each other in silence after a lively conversation, then in the uncomfortable interior of the car. Looking for a continuation, making plans, would have profaned the unexpected paradise where they suddenly found themselves, not as if they’d traveled there but had awakened and were not completely certain where they were. Concealment was so easy: to think about Judith Biely’s bare thighs above her stockings and at the same time to smile at Adela, who came out of the house bringing him a glass of wine and an appetizer, a foretaste of the meal being prepared, Doña Cecilia’s renowned arroz con pollo. And it hadn’t been difficult, when he arrived, to kiss Adela on the lips while he passed his hand along her waist in an unusual gesture that the boy’s vigilant eyes noted with approval. He was so unaccustomed to lying, he hadn’t even devised a response for when Adela or his father-in-law or the children asked him what he’d done yesterday afternoon. But it wasn’t at all difficult to invent something on the spot, and he was astonished it was all so easy, that something unforgettable could have occurred with no consequences and flowed with as little premeditation as the words they’d said in a dim corner of the bar at the Hotel Florida, which they chose with tacit complicity. That was how they’d talked as they rode down in the elevator of the Palacio de la Prensa, how Judith Biely had held his arm when they crossed the Gran Vía, dodging traffic.
He’d forgotten the sensation of novelty, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was the pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding car passed close to them. It was her singularity as a woman, possessed of a life that seemed richer and more mysterious because he knew nothing about it, with a language and accent in Spanish that didn’t belong to anyone with her same background but only to her, as intrinsic to the attraction she exercised as the shape of her eyelids or her large mouth. With impunity he felt he inhabited two worlds. The emotional intoxication of yesterday afternoon in Madrid was transmitted without guilt to his perceptions this morning in the house in the Sierra, just as it had accompanied him on his drive along the highway to La Coruña, the car’s speed as assuring and joyful as his self-awareness. The freshness of the air on that October morning, the oak groves and houses as clear in the distance as if etched in diamond, a motionless swelling of clouds overflowing the mountains of El Escorial with the magnificence of an ice cliff.
Judith had liked listening to music on the radio as they drove across Madrid. With concealed vanity Ignacio Abel pressed the accelerator and handled the controls of the recently installed radio. The speed and the music seemed to feed on each other. In the headlights the straight rows of trees along the Castellana and the palaces behind the gates and gardens became visible; streetcar tracks gleamed on paving stones. He was lucky to have become an adult in an age of extraordinary machines, more beautiful than the statues of antiquity, more incredible than the marvels in stories. Very soon they’d all conspire to facilitate his love for Judith Biely. Streetcars and automobiles would rapidly carry him to her, prolonging the meager time of their meetings; telephones would secretly bring him her voice when he couldn’t have her with him and he’d call her from his house, covering his mouth with his hand, feigning a conversation about work if anyone came near; movie theaters would welcome them in their simulacrum of hospitable darkness when they wanted to hide from the light of day; telegraph offices would remain open late so he could send her a telegram on the spur of the moment. Mechanized belts transported the letters they soon began to write to each other and canceled the stamps automatically, allowing their messages to traverse distances with more accurate speed. Thanks to a splendid Fiat motor, he’d driven from one world to another in less than two hours. Adela noticed he was talking more than usual that morning. He greeted his mother-in-law, the maiden aunts, distant relatives whose names he never remembered. The family began to prepare early for the celebration — moved back to Saturday to make it more resplendent — of Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. From the kitchen came the bubbling aroma of the stew, along with Doña Cecilia’s melodramatic voice deliberating with Adela, the maids, and Don Francisco de Asís regarding the advantages and disadvantages of starting the rice, for fear that if her son Víctor arrived late, as he so often did, he’d find it overcooked when after all he liked it so much and it was so easy for rice to be overdone and then it lost all its savor. In this family there was nothing that wasn’t a tradition, a commemoration. Every time Doña Cecilia prepared her stew—“legendary” in the opinion of Don Francisco de Asís — the conflict regarding the proper moment to put in the rice was repeated almost word for word, what Don Francisco de Asís called “the burning question”: whether to add the rice to the bubbling liquid now or wait a little longer; whether to send the maid to the gate to see if Señorito Víctor was arriving from Madrid; whether to hold off at least until they heard the next train at the station. Ignacio Abel thought about Judith Biely — but he didn’t have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory — and he greeted and chatted like an actor who doesn’t need to make much of an effort to perform his assigned role. He listened, agreed without understanding anything, refined his capacity for resignation and self-absorption. When Víctor finally arrived — on an almost telepathic hunch Doña Cecilia had put in the rice only a few minutes earlier — it was in no way difficult for him to accept the excessive grip of his handshake and not show displeasure. He didn’t even lie; he told the partial truth, explaining to Adela and the children that he’d spent all of Friday afternoon at the home of an American millionaire who lived in Madrid and had invited him to travel to America to teach some classes and design a building.