She wanted to do everything at once, that very morning, she later told Ignacio Abel. Go out to the street, lie down on the white, fragrant sheet, write a letter to her mother, write an article about her trip: the sensation of having come to another world simply by crossing a border; of finding people with darker faces and eyes with an intensity that at first disconcerted her; of glimpsing through the train window, in the darkness, the shadows of bare rocks and precipices; of being awakened by the violent shaking of a train much slower and less comfortable than French trains and seeing at first light a level, abstract landscape in earth tones, flat and dry like a juxtaposition of autumn leaves. She wanted to read the book by Dos Passos she’d brought with her but also wanted to sit at the table with a dictionary at hand to read a novel by Pérez Galdós that her professor at Columbia had introduced her to, or go outside holding the novel and find the streets his characters had walked along. Sitting in front of the typewriter and the open window, she felt for the first time, in her consciousness and at the tips of her fingers, barely brushing the keys, the imminence of a book that would include each of the things she was feeling at that moment. It wasn’t a chronicle or a travel story or a confession or a novel; the uncertainty both wounded and stimulated her; she sensed that if she stayed alert but also allowed herself to drift, she’d find a beginning as tenuous as the tip of a thread; she’d have to squeeze it between her fingers not to lose it, but if she squeezed it with a little more strength than necessary, the thread would break and she wouldn’t be able to find it again. Through the window came the voices of street vendors, the cooing of pigeons, the noises of traffic, the ringing of bells. The sounds of the bells changed every few minutes or became confused with one another: the horizon over the roofs was filled with bell towers. Someone knocked at the door, startling her. A maid came in with a tray and Judith tried to explain in her awkward Spanish that there must be some mistake, she hadn’t ordered anything. “It’s from the landlady,” the maid said, “in case the señorita arrived with an empty stomach after traveling so much in foreign countries.” She put the tray on the table, using her elbow to move the typewriter, which didn’t fail to attract her attention because she didn’t associate it with a woman. “I hope you enjoy it”: a large cup of coffee, a small pitcher of milk, a toasted white-flour roll, cut in half, dripping a gold-green oil, the grains of salt on top gleaming in the light. Suddenly she discovered how hungry she was. The bread covered in oil crackled as it dissolved in her mouth, the grains of salt bursting on her palate like seeds of delight. With a checked napkin she wiped the oil from the corners of her mouth, the muzzle of cream the milk left on her lips. Everything conspired for her happiness, including her exhaustion, the sweet somnolence, the din of the church bells that provoked flights of pigeons over the roofs. She took off her shoes and sat on the bed, to massage her feet, swollen and painful after so many hours of traveling. She lay down, holding the novel by Pérez Galdós, searching its pages for place names in Madrid that wouldn’t be too far away, and in less than a minute she was sleeping as soundly as she had when she was a little girl on those winter mornings when she didn’t feel well and her mother brought her breakfast in bed, after the men had gone and a peaceful silence had descended on the apartment.
11
WHEN HIS CHILDREN were small, Ignacio Abel liked to make for them drawings and models, cutouts of houses, automobiles, animals, trees, ships. He’d begin by drawing a tiny dog in his sketchbook, and next to the dog a street lamp would emerge like a tall flower, and near it a window, and from there the entire house would take shape, and above the roof and chimney, beside which a cat was outlined, the moon appeared like a slice of melon. Lita and Miguel would look at those prodigious creations, their elbows on the table, leaning so close to the sketchbook they barely left him room to continue drawing, competing for a proximity they rarely enjoyed. They lived in their shared bedroom that was also their homework room and playroom, and in the back rooms where the maids reigned, not observing the severe norms of silence or things said in quiet voices that the children had to submit to when entering adult territory: in the kitchen, in the laundry room, where Miguel spent all his spare time, the maids talked loudly and the radio played all day long, and through the window overlooking an interior courtyard came the voices of the servants in other residences as they called to one another, slurring their speech in an accent Miguel imitated perfectly. In the rest of the house the children had to close and open doors gently, walk without making noise, especially near their father’s study or the bedroom with closed curtains where their mother often had to withdraw because of endless headaches or ailments that rarely had a precise name or were serious enough to require the doctor’s presence. In the kitchen the maids’ voices and those on the radio fused with the splatters and smoke emanating from the stoves, and colorful characters would appear at the service door, delivery men from the stores, peddlers loaded down with cheeses, pots of honey, sometimes chickens or rabbits, heads down and feet tied. But the door separating the service area from the rest of the apartment had to be kept closed, and the children, above all Miguel, who had a more confused idea of his place in the world, were fascinated by this rigorous frontier that only they moved across freely. Not only faces and sounds changed but accents and odors, the odors of things and of people: on one side it smelled of oil, food, fish, the blood of a recently slaughtered chicken or rabbit, the maids’ sweat; on the other side it smelled of the lavender soap their mother used to wash her hands, their father’s cologne, furniture polish, the cigarettes visitors sometimes smoked.
As she grew older, the girl ventured across the frontier less and less frequently, for the most part in order to remain true to the character of a distinguished intellectual señorita she’d invented for herself, and instead of flamenco verses about jealousy and crimes and great black eyes playing on the kitchen radio, Lita listened with her mother to symphonic broadcasts on Unión Radio. While Miguel, enthralled, read about film stars and advertisements for exorcisms and astrological remedies in the cheap magazines the maids bought (LOVE and LUCK are yours FREE OF CHARGE if you possess the mysterious RADIATING FLOWER prepared in accordance with the millenarian rites of PAMIR and the immutable astrological principles of the MAGI OF THE ORIENT), Lita read novels by Jules Verne, knowing she’d earn her father’s approval, and interpreted for the family the popular ballads she learned to sing at school. But both had felt attracted to their father’s study, whose mysterious spaces their childish imaginations had enlarged. He was fast and sure with the pencil, as absorbed as his children in what he was doing. He would shade the outlines of the drawing and add the form of a foldable base, then cut everything out, house, tree, balloon, animal, automobile with its convertible top and headlights, the radii of the wheels perfectly detailed, even the profile of a chauffeur in a visored cap at the wheel, a Western outlaw on horseback, a motorcycle with the driver leaning forward, wearing a leather jacket and aviator goggles. Once he drew an airplane, and when he finished cutting it from the sketchbook, flew it between his fingers above the heads of the children, each desperate to hold it first. In stationery stores he looked for cutouts of famous buildings, bridges, trains, ocean liners; he taught them to handle scissors, in which their pudgy child’s fingers became entangled, to follow with cautious precision the edges of a drawing, to distinguish between cutting and folding lines, to gently squeeze the bottle of glue so that only the small drop that was needed came out. And when they became impatient or gave up, he’d take the scissors and show them again how to cut out a drawing, recalling Professor Rossman, his teacher in Weimar, who would go into a comic ecstasy when he heard the sound and observed the resistance of the sheet of paper he was cutting.