“A skyscraper?” said the boy. “Like the Telephone Company?”
“Bigger, dummy. In America skyscrapers are much taller.”
“Don’t talk like that to your brother.”
“A library. In the middle of a forest. On the banks of a very wide river.”
“The Mississippi?”
“You think that’s the only river in America?”
“It’s the one in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
“The Hudson River.”
“That has its mouth right at New York.”
“She thinks she knows all about geography.”
“Will you take us with you?”
“If your mother agrees, this afternoon I’ll take you to the irrigation pond — that’s much closer than America.”
He didn’t pretend. It was easy for him to talk to Adela and his children and not feel the sting of imposture or betrayal. What happened in his secret life didn’t interfere with this one but transferred to it some of its sunlit plenitude. And he didn’t care too much about the ominous prospect of immersion in the celebrations of his in-laws, usually as suffocating for him as the air in the places where they lived, heavy with dust from draperies, rugs, faux heraldic tapestries, smells of fried food and garlic, ecclesiastical colognes, liniments for the pains of rheumatism, sweaty scapulars. A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he’d never stopped being a stranger, an intruder. The maiden aunts swarmed in the sewing room, which had an oriel window facing south. They covered their mouths when they laughed, leaned toward one another to say things in a subdued voice, embroidered sheets and pillowcases with romantic motifs of a century ago, marked patterns with slivers of soap polished to the same shine as their faces of girls grown old. Ignacio Abel kissed them one by one and still wasn’t sure of their number. The uncle who was a priest would arrive when it was time to eat, with a good appetite but a somber face, recounting tales of ungodliness or assaults against the Church, predicting the return to government — if it was true that elections would be called — of the same men who in 1931 secretly encouraged the burning of convents. Abel’s recently arrived brother-in-law, Víctor, dressed for a Sierra weekend in a kind of hunting or riding outfit, extended his hand with the palm on the diagonal, turned partially downward, in a gesture he must have thought athletic or energetic. “Ignacio, how good to see you.” His thin hair, lying close to his scalp, formed a widow’s peak. He was younger than he looked; what aged him was a rather perpetual scowl and the shadow of a beard on his bony, prominent chin, the hardness of his features, a product of his determination to display manliness without weaknesses or cracks. His Hispanic, virile brother-in-law’s cordiality contrasted with a deep distrust of Ignacio Abel that was only in part ideologicaclass="underline" Víctor gave the impression of lying in wait, looking for some threat to the honor or well-being of his sister, toward whom he felt protective although ten years her junior. Adela treated him with the limitless indulgence and docility of a pliant mother, which irritated Ignacio Abel. Víctor carried a pistol and a blackjack. Sometimes he came to eat at his parents’ house in the shirt and leather straps of a Falangist centurion. Adela was both submissive and protective: “He always liked uniforms, and the pistol doesn’t even have bullets.” He raised his chin as he shook Ignacio Abel’s hand and looked into his eyes, searching for signs of danger, not suspecting anything. He showed them the gift he’d brought for his father: a pseudo-antique
Quijote bound in leather, with gilt letters and edges and reproductions of Doré. The family possessed an insatiable appetite for atrocious objects, fake antiquities, Gothic calligraphy on parchment, luxury bindings, and illusory genealogies. On the façade of the house, behind the two granite columns that held up the terrace, were embedded the heraldic coats of arms of the two family names, those of Don Francisco de Asís and of Doña Cecilia: Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo. In the family the distinctive traits of each of the two branches were passionately debated: My son Víctor has the unmistakable Ponce-Cañizares nose; you can tell the girl came into this world with a pure Salcedo character. From the time they were born, the children of Ignacio Abel and Adela were picked up by their grandfather, the maiden aunts, Abel’s brother-in-law Víctor, and the uncle who was a priest, and scrutinized as they discussed to which of the two lines a nose or a type of hair or dimples belonged, from which Ponce or Cañizares or Salcedo the baby had inherited the tendency to cry so loudly — those strong Cañizares lungs! No sooner had the child taken a few hesitant steps than the exact resemblance to some especially graceful ancestor was recognized, or its Ponce or Ponce-Cañizares or Salcedo origin vehemently argued over with the attention to detail of philologists debating an obscure etymology. In the heat of these gratifying diatribes they tended to forget the inevitable genetic contribution of the children’s father, unless they could relate it to the hint of a defect: The boy seems to have inherited his father’s eccentricity, one of them would say. At family meals Adela would look at her husband out of the corner of her eye and become irritated with herself for not knowing how to overcome the stress of imagining what he must be thinking, what he must be seeing. You despise my parents, who love you like a son, who love you even more because your parents aren’t alive. You see them as foolish and ridiculous and don’t realize they’re not young anymore and are developing the manias of old people like the ones you or I will have when we’re their age. You think my brother is a Fascist and a parasite, and when he says something to you your answer is so dismissive even I feel embarrassed. You can’t see any goodness or generosity in them, or how much they love your children and how much your children love them. You can’t imagine how they suffer when they hear about the horrible things your people or the people you think are your people are doing in Madrid, and they’re in distress just like me and your children at not knowing where you are or if those savages have done something to you. I think they make you angry and jealous. You don’t know how happy each of your professional accomplishments makes them. They respect you and don’t care if you’re a Republican and a Socialist and don’t go to Mass on Sunday or want our children to have a religious upbringing, as if my opinion didn’t matter. You despise them just because they’re Catholic and vote for the right and go to Mass and recite the rosary every day, even though they don’t hurt anybody. But you didn’t turn down the money my father gave us when we didn’t have anything, or the commissions you received thanks to him, and when you got it into your head to go to Germany even though the children were so young, you didn’t think twice about asking my father to let us live in his house while you were away because that would allow you to leave with no sense of guilt, besides saving you money as you wouldn’t have been able to live for a whole year in Germany on the grant the Council for Advanced Studies gave you. You aren’t grateful to them for accepting you with open arms even though other people in my family and from our class told them you didn’t have a cent when you courted me and were the son of a Socialist construction foreman and a caretaker on Calle Toledo. They’re reactionaries as all of you call them but they’ve always been much more generous with you than you’ve been with them. Had it not been for them and our children I would have rotted with loneliness all these years. What would I do without them now that you have gone back to Madrid even though you knew as well as we did that something very bad was going on there, you cared more about seeing your mistress than staying with your own children.