He brought them old models from the office, drew cutouts of buildings he’d studied in international magazines. When they were older, perhaps they’d remember that as children they played with models of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, which they liked more because it resembled a lighthouse and a castle tower. But it wasn’t that Ignacio Abel condescended to entertain his children or showed them praiseworthy patience. His own love of architecture had a portion of self-absorbed childish play. He liked to cut and fold. The flexible angles of an empty pillbox gave him immediate tactile pleasure, pure forms as perceptible with one’s fingertips as with one’s eyes: angles, stairways, corners. How strange the invention of the staircase, a concept of something so remote from any inspiration in nature, space folding over itself at right angles, a single broken line on blank paper, as limitless in principle as a spiral, or those parallel lines whose definition had overwhelmed him at schooclass="underline" “No matter how far they extend, they will never meet.” So close one to the other, yet condemned never to meet by an unexplained curse. From his able hands, from the shadows of words and childish fears, an emotion receded to the bottom of time: as if advancing along a very long passage toward a faint light, he saw the boy he had been, sitting in a room with a low ceiling, bent over a notebook, wielding a cheap pen, dipping it into an inkwell, objects near him erased beyond the small circle of the oil lamp. The sun didn’t come in the basement window, but the sound of people’s footsteps did, and animals’ hooves, and wagon wheels, the permanent yelling of street vendors, the monotonous chant of blind men singing. One night hooves and wheels stopped at the window. Someone knocked at the door and he remembered that his mother had gone out and he had to go up and open the street door. In the wagon was a shape covered with sacks.
He made a small building and told his children it was a house for fleas; next to it a tree, an automobile, a bridge a little farther away, its raised arch identical to the one in the Viaducto, or the one the engineer Torroja had designed to save the gully of a stream in University City; the marquee of a train station, its clock hanging from the beams, the tiny Roman numerals drawn inside the sphere with a pencil he’d sharpened to an extremely fine point. With the same joy he studied the scale model of University City that had been growing in one of the drafting rooms at his office, a replica of the space visible through the windows, at first not a blank page but a wasteland of bare earth covered with the stumps of thousands of pines. Like Gulliver in Lilliput he supervised a diminutive city where his footsteps would have reverberated like seismic shocks, the city that had begun as cardboard and ink, glue, blocks of wood, the faithful model of a fragment of the world that was three-dimensional but didn’t exist yet or was being created slowly, too slowly. On the other side of the windows, steam shovels opened great trenches in the barren earth, lifting roots like manes of hair, like naked branches of trees that would have grown in the subsoil (to build, one first had to clear away and cut down, clean out and flatten, make the earth as smooth and abstract as a sheet of paper spread on a drawing table). Laborers swarmed along the esplanades, on the embankments; with agility they climbed the scaffolding of buildings under construction, thronged in corridors and future lecture halls, applying cement, installing tiles, completing a row of bricks, beginning another; monarchs of their trades, experts in giving real form to what began as capricious fantasy in a sketchbook, copper-colored men in berets with cigarettes glued to their lips; powerful dump trucks and droves of donkeys that transported loads of plaster or jugs of water in their panniers; armed guards who patrolled the construction sites to chase away the crowds of laid-off workers who demanded jobs or tried to overturn or burn the machines that had replaced them and condemned them to starvation. Primitives and millenarians, like them, deluded now not by the expectation of the End of Days but by Libertarian Communism. With a slight effort of his rational imagination, Ignacio Abel could see the completed buildings when bricklayers were still hard at work on their scaffolding and cranes with electric motors swayed over them: beautiful blocks of red brick shining in the sun, along with the exact visual rhythm of the windows, against the dark green background of the Sierra’s spurs. He saw avenues with large trees that now were little more than weak shoots or not even that, cardboard trees he’d cut out himself and glued to the sidewalk of a model. The School of Philosophy students crossed felled trees to reach their building, inaugurated in a rush (in the lecture halls one could still hear the workers’ shouts and pounding hammers). He imagined the students arriving in high-speed streetcars along the straight, wide avenues, strolling in the shade of the trees, lindens or oaks, dispersed on the grass that would grow someday on that bare ground: young, well-fed men and women with strong bones, children of privilege but also workers’ children, educated in solid public schools where knowledge wouldn’t be corrupted by religion and merit would prevail over family background and money. He preferred the vigor of sap to boiling Spanish blood, botany to politics, irrigation projects to five-year plans. Running water, electric streetcars, trees with broad, dense foliage, ventilated spaces. “Abel, for you the social revolution is a question of public works and gardening,” Negrín once said to him, and he replied, “And it’s not for you, Don Juan?” He could almost see his daughter, in a few years’ time, destined for the School of Philosophy and Letters, good-natured and mature, jumping off the streetcar, books under her arm, her hair under a beret slanted to one side, her raincoat open, still an uncommon sight among groups of male students. The future wasn’t a fog of the unknown or a projection of senseless desires, not the predictions of cards or lines on one’s hand, not preachers’ sinister prophecies of the end of the world or paradise on earth. The future was foreseen in the blue lines on plans and in the models he’d helped to build, seeing something in a single glance, understanding with one’s eyes, guessing at a form with the touch of one’s fingers. Ignacio Abel loved the blocks of wood in his children’s building sets, the typography in the books of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poetry of right angles in Le Corbusier. The flat outskirts of Madrid were a clear drawing table on which the future city could be laid out beyond the plans for the university. Straight perspectives that would dissolve in the horizon of the Sierra, vanishing lines of streetcar tracks and electric cables, the workers’ district and its white houses with large windows surrounded by plazas and gardens. To the same extent that he distrusted the vagueness of words, he loved concrete acts and tangible, well-made constructions. A school with bright, comfortable classrooms, a spacious playground, a well-equipped gymnasium; a bridge built with solidity and beauty; a rationally conceived house with running water and a bathroom — he could not imagine more practical ways of improving the world.
He had accomplished things that could be measured and judged, that had an undeniable lasting presence in reality. How unsettling the thought that time would run out, that he wouldn’t have the intellectual clarity or presence of mind or courage to carry out what he dreamed of: a house where he and Judith Biely would live both in the world and separate and safe from it, a library in a clearing in the woods beside a great river. The tiny human figures he’d placed on the model to give an idea of scale — he saw them as animated and enlarged to the size of adults, young men and women carrying books, his own children. He was impatient for that future to arrive sooner. He’d heard Juan Ramón Jiménez speak of an unhurried hurry, of joyful work. He wanted to see them concluded: the University Hospital, the School of Medicine, the School of Sciences, the School of Architecture (so close to completion); he wanted that open ground with trenches like scars and harsh brambles to be an athletic field; he wanted the sticks of trees to grow and give more shade to the barren land of Madrid (other trees had been cut down earlier, other walls demolished by pickaxes and steam shovels, but in a short time the wounds in the landscape would heal, and what existed before would be forgotten). How painful the slowness of the work, what impatience with administrative procedures, with the dilatoriness of the human effort required for any task, even more so with such primitive methods of construction. Picks, hoes, shovels scratching at the hard earth of Castilla, malnourished laborers in filthy berets, with ruined mouths from which hand-rolled cigarettes hung. Early on Monday the work would start up with a show of energy, and a week later all was left hanging because of a government crisis or because another construction strike had been called.