In the midst of that upheaval only the girl seemed to remain calm, going from room to room, her pacifier in her mouth, observing the maid as she cleaned the baby’s bottom and washed the diapers under the tap in the kitchen, watching the wet nurse when she brought the small red face to her large, swollen white breast, the translucent skin crossed with blue veins, the enormous dark nipples, the broad hands that caressed the baby’s sweaty, flattened hair and delicately put the mouth at her nipple from which surged a rich, white thread of milk. The girl went down the long hallway and stole into the bedroom where her mother lay. She sat next to her on the edge of the bed, caressed her hands or smoothed her hair, damp with sweat, uncombed, dirty after so many days of convalescence. She seemed not to think it strange that her mother didn’t respond to her gestures of affection or give any sign she was aware of her presence. They put a white veil on the girl and had her hold a candle at her brother’s baptism, and she stood on tiptoe to watch as the priest poured water on the baby’s head and then dried it lightly with an embroidered handkerchief on which he also wiped his fingertips. That night, when her brother cried, she went to him and, instead of rocking the cradle, took his hand, and the baby calmed. From then on, the girl slept with the cradle beside her bed. When she heard the beginning of a whimper in the dark, her hand would feel its way between the bars. The boy’s tiny hand would close around his sister’s thumb, and, feeling safe, he went back to sleep. Meanwhile, awake in his bedroom, Ignacio Abel counted the seconds of silence, fearing that before he reached a minute the crying would start again. He could imagine himself dozing on a long train journey at night, autonomous and alone in a European city, as clearly as if that future were part of a memory, the way he saw himself as a boy, elbows propped on a table, in front of his notebook, the pen drawing two parallel lines on the blank page a moment before the knocking sounded on the door, in the light of the oil lamp that seemed to burn forever at the heart of time.
12
HOW STRANGE THAT he remained guilt-free for so long; the unshadowed gift, limitless and full of secret places, became sweeter the more he enjoyed it: dark movie theaters and open-air cafés from which one could see in an expanse as broad as a marine horizon the oak trees of the Casa de Campo and the Monte del Pardo and the hazy distances of the Sierra; the room rented by the hour in a private hotel at the end of Calle O’Donnell (streetcar bells and car horns heard faintly through heavy curtains drawn to achieve a pretense of night during the day’s working hours); and the public space of the Velázquez rooms at the Prado, early on winter mornings when the museum had just opened and before tourists had begun to come in. He awoke when it was still dark with an instinctive feeling of happiness waiting for him, and when he looked at the time on the alarm clock, he remembered he would meet her in only three hours. How strange that fear hadn’t intruded yet: the presentiment that something unexpected would happen and he wouldn’t be able to see her that day, or ever again, that she was separated from him by fate or because another man had taken her from him or because she herself had decided to leave, exercising the same freedom that had brought her from America to Europe and moved her to become his lover. He shaved after his shower, savoring his secret, looking in the mirror at the face of the man at whom Judith Biely would smile in a little more than two hours, and no one else would know. Time and the order of things conspired in his favor: breakfast waiting on the table, his two children healthy and obedient, his wife, who handed him his briefcase and hat in the entrance hall and told him to button up, it was foggy and damp this morning, and was satisfied, or at least seemed satisfied, with a domestic kiss that barely brushed her lips and a wave goodbye in which no smile and hardly a glance intervened. Efficient, involuntary accomplices acted on his behalf: the new elevator with its electric mechanism and gentle hydraulic brakes, the porter’s son who had gone to the garage for his car and had it ready for him at the door, the Fiat motor that in spite of the morning cold started with just a turn of the ignition key, the straight streets, still clear of traffic, that allowed him to arrive quickly at his appointment, not wasting a single minute. Even though it was early, someone was at the museum’s ticket office, ready to sell him an admission, and a sleepy porter in a blue uniform was there to tear it for him. In the light of the deserted central gallery footsteps echoed before he could see at a distance the figure they announced. One of them would arrive, and the other was waiting, feeling observed in the empty galleries by personages in the paintings, saints and kings whose names Judith Biely didn’t know, martyrs of a religion that to her was sumptuous and exotic. One of them walked down the long museum corridor in the gray illumination from the skylights, and the other arrived at the same time, appeared in a doorway and was recognized in the distance with a skipped heartbeat by sharp eyes proficient in searching. Ignacio Abel arrived first so he’d be sure to see her arrive. Judith Biely’s broad shoulders, her determined walk, her head tilted slightly to one side, and her hair covering half her face; her eyes large, and as she came closer, widely separated; her cheeks; her thin lips parted at the corners, with a suggestion of expectation, like a word or smile about to be formed; her face serious and angular and yet illuminated by the beginning of a smile, still only hinted at, like the morning light becoming more intense inside a tenuous fog, the one they’d passed through as they walked to the museum along different streets. Alone and self-confident, determined to give herself with all the deliberation of a will that both flattered and frightened him. It frightened him and aroused him just to see her walk toward him, provocative and carefree. In a corner safe from the eyes of the guards they kissed greedily, noticing the winter cold on skin, the smell of cold on breath and hair, on outer clothing damp from the fog.