On that morning she came toward him in the same straight line she’d taken across Fifth Avenue from the stairway of the library: her back erect, her pace the bold, determined walk of people in her city, her mouth partially open, wearing the same expectant expression Ignacio Abel saw from the table at the back of the café where he was waiting for her, or when he remained standing, not taking off his jacket and often not even his overcoat, in the room rented for the secret meetings where he saw her naked for the first time, in the semidarkness of heavy curtains and half-closed shutters through which the afternoon light filtered as faintly as the noises of the city and the sounds in the house. Each of the steps she’d taken preceded her silent walk on bare feet across the worn rug toward the man who hadn’t moved or begun to undress. Only weeks earlier, a little more than a month, she’d arrived at a pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana, not knowing anyone in Madrid and exhausted after an entire night on the train that brought her from Hendaye. How different from Paris this city smelled, how different the odor in the air since she’d crossed the border. Early on that September morning, Madrid had the damp smell of an earthenware jug set to cool in a kitchen window. It smelled of paving tiles recently watered by a municipal tank pulled by two old horses; it smelled of horse manure, oil, dry dust, of the stubble on which there was still dew as the train pulled into Madrid; of rockrose and pines in the Sierra; of the damp half-light and wooden steps of the building where the pensión was located, steps scrubbed and scoured with bleach, half-light invaded by the smell of sausage and spices from a grocery store downstairs whose shutters were just being raised when she arrived, suitcase in hand, receiving as a welcome, almost an embrace, the dense aroma of the coffee the shopkeeper was grinding in the doorway. The room she was given faced a narrow street that led to the plaza. A noise rose from it that at first she couldn’t identify, still disoriented by strangeness and fatigue: people chatting in groups looking for shade, peddlers, street vendors announcing repairs of umbrellas and tin pots, radio speakers in stalls selling drinks, the songs of maids cleaning, hanging clothes on the flat roofs, beating carpets or shaking out sheets on nearby balconies. Happiness settled in her: it was the sense of ample, austere space in the room, more welcoming than the increasingly smaller ones she’d been able to afford in Paris. As in the landscapes she saw at daybreak from the train window, in the room things seemed arranged in an order that defined space. In other countries in Europe, the countryside, like the cities, appeared too complete, too full, too cultivated and inhabited. In Spain empty spaces had the amplitude of America. Above the iron bed in the room was a crucifix, and a painted plaster Virgin Mary stood on a bureau in which she put her clothes, its deep drawers lined with sheets of newspaper. The walls were white, painted with lime, and had black paneling that reached as high as the window; the floor was of red clay tiles interspersed with smaller ones of polychrome ceramic. The straight bars of the bed ended in gilded tin balls that jingled when footsteps made the floor vibrate. On the bureau, next to the Virgin with a smooth bosom and blue mantle who crushed the head of a serpent with her small, unshod foot, was a kind of bronze or tin candelabrum holding candles. The electric cable crossed the wall in a straight line to a black bakelite switch above the bed and the bulb with a blue glass shade hanging from the ceiling. The top of the bed sheet was folded over a light quilt, under the pillow, with a solemn suggestion of whiteness and volume that Judith would recognize that same morning, on her first visit to the Prado, in the habits of Carthusian friars painted by Zurbarán. Opposite the bed was a bare pine table, solid, its legs resting on the tiles, with a drawer that emitted a smell of resin when it was opened. In front of the table was a chair with a straight back and a rush seat that invited you to sit down. Before she finished unpacking the suitcase, she placed her typewriter on the table, along with a folder of blank sheets, an ink bottle, her fountain pen, a blotter, a pencil case, her notebook, the small round mirror she always had at hand when she sat down to work. Each object seemed to fit with an effortless precision that anticipated writing and made it inevitable: all the things on the wooden table in the golden, slightly damp light of a Madrid morning related to one another like the random objects in the flat space of a cubist painting. The armoire, tall and gloomy, had a full-length mirror, and Judith looked at herself, benevolently studying the signs of weariness, the contrast between her foreign presence and the background of the room. The washbasin and pitcher of water on the washstand were of white porcelain with a delicate blue edge. She felt a sensation she hadn’t yet experienced on her journey: an immediate affinity with the place where she found herself, a harmony that alleviated the solitude and at the same time confirmed for her the privilege of not needing anyone. On the roof opposite the window a cat lay dozing in the sun. Farther away, at a dormer window, a woman was wrapping her black hair in a towel, her eyes and face turned to the sun. A few days later, Judith had learned to identify the buildings outlined against the roofed horizon: the large tower with columns and the bronze Athena of the Fine Arts Circle, the battlements on the Palace of Communications, and above them a flag waving that had awakened in her an unwarranted affection from the moment she first saw it when she crossed the border at Hendaye — red, yellow, purple, shining in the sun with something of the proletarian boldness of the geraniums on the balconies.