“I have to consult with Negrín first. And I have to see what they offer and how long I’ll have to stay. However it turns out, you’ll all come with me.”
But Adela detected a touch of insincerity in his voice, though he himself didn’t know he wasn’t telling the whole truth. Now he was in the two worlds, two simultaneous times, yesterday afternoon with Judith and today with Adela and the children, in the dim light of the bar at the Florida and in the comfortable sun at the edge of the pond, smelling rockrose and thyme and resin, not divided but duplicated, ablaze with love and at the same time settled into the solid routine he’d constructed over the years, which that afternoon reached a kind of visual plenitude, like a completed painting, like the maturation of the last fruits of October, pomegranates and quince, yellow squash, persimmons, bursting golden grapes in the garden. He had so little experience, or so little capacity for real introspection, he didn’t imagine the guilt and anguish lying in wait; he didn’t even ask himself what Judith Biely might be feeling. She didn’t exist for him in an autonomous, complete way but only as a projection of his own desire.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing, work.”
“You seemed to be in another world.”
“Perhaps I ought to go back to Madrid tomorrow afternoon.”
“You promised the children we’d drive back together early on Monday.”
“If I go back, it’s not on a whim.”
“Don’t tell them you’ll take them to America if you’re not going to do it. Don’t make promises you know you won’t keep.”
“And you, would you like to make the trip?”
“What I’d like is never to be separated from you. Where we are doesn’t matter.”
She blushed when she said this and looked younger. She resembled the overly shy woman who no longer counted on finding a man, which she’d been when they met, the one for whom her parents predicted the same familial destiny as the maiden aunts, with whom she sometimes spent Sunday afternoons praying the rosary. With her wide hips settled on the warm grass beside the pond, her ankles tended to swell. Her black hair styled with an out-of-date wave made her seem older. But her eyes suddenly looked as they had fifteen years earlier and had a passionate, vulnerable expression, as if she’d passed from not expecting anything to wanting it all, from conformity to audacity, and from there to anticipated disillusionment, to skepticism regarding what life could offer her. Now she might have wished that her children weren’t so near, that they didn’t shout so much while they looked for smooth stones along the edge and then threw them at the water. For her it was a contretemps when they approached, tired and hungry, their cheeks reddened by exercise and the Sierra breeze, demanding the snack they’d brought in a wicker basket. For Ignacio Abel it was a relief. The sun began to go down behind the pines, the air acquired a touch of dampness that intensified the mountain odors, the smell of thyme and rockrose and dry pine needles. The bells and the lowing of cows, the smaller bells of sheep, emphasized acoustically the sensation of amplitude and distance. If the air had been clearer, the white smudge of Madrid would have been visible on the horizon. It would be cold as soon as the setting sun no longer reached the pond, raising a faint golden mist over it. Secretly disloyal, unpunished in his dissimulation, Ignacio Abel decided he’d invent an excuse to return to Madrid on Sunday afternoon. He wouldn’t wait until then to hear Judith Biely’s voice; he’d go to the village to buy something and try to call her from the only phone, located in the station café. He looked up, coming out of his absorption, his secret trip to that other, invisible, contiguous world. Sitting on a rock, his daughter ate a sandwich and read a novel by Jules Verne. Adela took a few awkward steps along the bank, ridding her legs of numbness, brushing pine needles and grass stems from her skirt. His son was looking at him with wide-open eyes, as if he’d read his mind and was aware of his deceit, as if he already knew that the next afternoon his father would go back to Madrid alone, and if he went to America, he would also go alone.
10
WHERE HAD JUDITH come from, bringing with her a different world, bursting into his life like someone who abruptly enters a room, someone unexpected who opens the door and is followed by cold outside air that in a few seconds has altered the closed atmosphere. Her very presence was an upheaval, the new arrival who rings the bell brusquely and makes all eyes look. Judith Biely always moved quickly among much slower people, like an emissary of herself, detached from her will and character, the luminous advance of something that might be a promise of another life in another, less harsh country whose colors were less gritty or mournful, a tangible woman and at the same time the illusion and synthesis of what Ignacio Abel found was most desirable in women, in the very substance of the feminine: changing, unpredictable, entering unexpectedly, leaving so quickly that trapping an image of her on his retina, one that would remain fixed in memory, was as impossible as stopping time, or suspending it so a secret meeting might last longer. Judith Biely was like that in the only photograph of her Ignacio Abel keeps in his wallet, slightly out of focus because she was turning to one side at the moment the automatic camera shot the picture, a faint mist around her eyes, her smiling mouth, responding with a lighthearted expression to something that attracted her attention and forgetting for an instant that she was posing for a photograph, the precise instant captured in it. She must have been waiting uncomfortably for the flash to go off inside the booth on the street when something or someone made her turn her face slightly and smile, and the light exploded on her chin and cheeks, the curls in her hair, her slightly smudged eyes where a gleam of light stands out, as does one on her lips. It’s the imperfection of the photo that appeals to Ignacio Abeclass="underline" the impersonal quality of chance causes Judith to be more present without the interference of a photographer’s eye and intention, as if she were really there, in that rescued moment. And to make the photo even truer, it’s not of the Judith he remembers but the one who hadn’t yet traveled to Madrid, the one not yet distorted by familiarity or the obsession of desire, intact in her distance and as much herself as when she burst into his life a few months later, in a future about which she still knows nothing when she smiles in the photograph, because she doesn’t know she’s about to receive the offer that will make her change her plans by moving forward the trip to Spain.
Where had she come from? Recounting her life in a new language limited the amount of detail she could provide and forced her to simplify her story. Listening to herself from the perspective of this man granted her an objectivity that was liberating. Her life experiences, when told, took on something of a novel’s rigor and sense of purpose. The uncertainty of so many years acquired the curve of an arc that emerged from the murky past to rise above time and bring its far end to rest in the present moment, on the other side of the world, in Madrid during the days of October 1935, in a shadowy private booth in the Hotel Florida, in the gentle dizziness of driving along a straight, tree-lined avenue that opened like a tunnel in the headlights, her eyes half closed, seeing things through a light mist he’ll recognize afterward and want to treasure in an ordinary photo from an automatic picture booth. Images and words flow, appear, are lost, just like the treetops and façades and lights shining in the windows of the mansions along the Castellana; Judith Biely is in a car moving through Madrid but she could also be on an avenue in Paris, or in any of the European capitals she’s visited in the past two years that are becoming confused in her fatigued memory; the headlights illuminate black paving stones as brilliant as patent leather, the rails and cables of streetcars; she’s silent beside the man at the wheel, who seems much younger now than just a few hours ago, when he appeared alienated, almost frightened in the foyer of Philip Van Doren’s apartment (where Van Doren must be now; how shrewdly he’d suspected and understood, almost prophesied). She’s fallen silent, but turning over in her head is the sense of having talked a great deal; her life, as recounted, extends before her like the avenue along which the car is driving, opens up with a feeling of symmetry and purpose that she knows is false but for now doesn’t mind enjoying, like the speed of the car or the music from the radio. Ignacio Abel finds Judith’s hand and holds it gently, though she doesn’t respond, doesn’t quite acknowledge what’s happening. How strange, the play of hands at this age.