Unlike Judith’s voice, Adela’s remains intact in his memory. He’s often heard it calling to him, as she sometimes called to him when she had a bad dream and clung to him in bed, her eyes closed, to be certain he was near. He’s heard it coming from the end of the hall in the apartment in Madrid, as clear in wakefulness as in dreams, on summer nights when the noises of war were gradually becoming routine, waking him at times with the feeling that Adela had come back, crossed the front line, returned to claim him and demand an explanation. How dirty the house was, how disordered the rooms. (There were no longer maids who came in to clean, no cook to prepare food for the señor, soon there wouldn’t even be food.) Too bad he’d let the plants on the balcony die. What a shame he hadn’t made more of an effort to get in touch with his wife and children. The complaints written in the letter he should have torn up or at least left behind in the hotel room in New York, those remembered and the ones imagined, intertwine in the monotonous sound of a voice that belongs to Adela and to his own guilty conscience. How strange not to have felt in her voice that she suspected, that she knew. How could she not have known? How strange not to be able to see oneself from the outside, in the looks of others, those who are closest and suspect though they would have preferred not to find out, who discover without understanding. The boy so serious in the last few months, so withdrawn, observing, standing at the door of his room when his father lowered his voice to speak on the phone in the hall. Ignacio Abel turned to wave a last goodbye after the gate closed at the house in the Sierra, and Miguel, standing next to his mother and sister at the top of the steps, looked and didn’t look at him, as if not wanting to believe that gesture of farewell, as if wanting to let him know he wasn’t deceived, that he, his scorned twelve-year-old son, knew with incongruous lucidity about his father’s impatience, his desire to leave, the relief he felt getting into the car or quickening his pace on the way to the station so as not to miss the train that would take him back to Madrid. His mother, next to him, remained enveloped in a fog of sorrow that rarely lifted, and Miguel could not grasp her motives no matter how much he scrutinized her; Lita became quite emotional, uncharacteristically so, and perhaps somewhat superficially, just as she did when she saw her father arrive and ran out to embrace him and tell him right away the grades she’d received, the books she’d read.
With clarity Ignacio Abel now relives a scene, the paused image in a documentary film: night in the apartment, the white cloth on the dining room table illuminated by the chandelier, the gold-green light reflecting on place settings and white china plates, the crystal of glasses. The time is February, a few days before the elections. He sees it from the outside, from a distance, a domestic scene glimpsed by the solitary stranger on a street in a city where he doesn’t know anyone, where nothing awaits him but a hotel room. He’s at the head of the table and Adela faces him, the children at the sides in their assigned seats, holding a quiet, trivial conversation while the maid walks down the hall after serving the soup, the maid who was now putting on a white cap and apron, ordered to do so by the señora, who was becoming more and more strict about such details, who a short while before had reprimanded the cook for going out in a hat instead of the kerchief or beret appropriate to her position. Miguel moved his left leg nervously under the table and attempted with little success not to make noise eating his soup. He observed out of the corner of his eye, in a permanent state of alert, attentive to the smallest detail or hint of danger with a sensibility much more acute than his capacity to reason, and therefore more restless. He imagined himself transformed into an invisible man like the one in the movie he’d seen a few Saturdays before with Lita and the maids, behind the back of his father, who, like a distracted, arbitrary monarch, forbade excursions to the movies whenever he heard about an epidemic of something or other in Madrid. The Invisible Man! Miguel was easily overwhelmed when he liked a film a great deal. He couldn’t sit still; he leaned forward in his seat as if trying to be closer to the screen, to sink into it, convulsed with laughter or trembling with fear, pinching Lita, punching her, so enthralled by the film that when they left the theater he was lightheaded, agitated, and that night there was no way to keep him quiet when the lights were turned off; he wanted to keep talking to Lita about the scenes and characters, and when she fell asleep he was still too excited to close his eyes, and he relived the film, imagining variations in which he himself played a part. The chilling enigma of a scientific discovery that offers superhuman powers to the person who controls it! How marvelous to spy without anyone seeing you, to watch everything with no danger of being caught. On his way home from school he’d seen on the door of the shabby theater he was allowed to go to with Lita and the maids the ferocious poster for a film with a black silhouette holding a letter and a large magnifying glass. THE SEALED ENVELOPE (The Secret of the Dardanelles). COMING SOON. How fantastic that phrase was — coming soon — what excitement it unleashed in him when he simply thought about it, about the days left until the film opened, about the possibility of being sick or coming home from school with a failing grade and as punishment not being allowed to go to the movies. If his father became aware of his jiggling leg, he’d scold him, but Miguel hoped the tablecloth would hide it, and in any case he was incapable of sitting still or ordering his leg to stop. “You’re sewing on the Singer,” his father would say. “It seems the boy will have a tailor’s vocation after all.” They all acted in their predictable ways, repeated themselves, the same gestures, but Miguel was the one they all noticed — the scapegoat, he thought, feeling sorry for himself, the black sheep. He thought the Dardanelles in the title of the movie must be members of some secret society of spies or international traffickers, and Lita had laughed at him, calling him ignorant, and told him the Dardanelles was the name of a strait. “And why do you care if your son moves his leg, it’s not serious,” his mother would say, giving his father a look at once concerned and resigned, different from the one she gave the boy, with whom she had to be both indulgent and severe. Dinner became a series of increasingly difficult tests, a race of exasperating slowness, and as he weakened, tripping over obstacles, jiggling his leg without a moment’s rest under the table, unable to sit still in his chair, Lita sat across from him, gliding as if on a magic carpet, smiling and self-confident, eating her soup in silence, handling her knife and fork without leaning her elbows on the table, politely attentive to the adults’ conversation and at times asking a question or making an observation that didn’t provoke an ironic or condescending reply, the kind he’d become used to hearing from his father. He would have liked to run out, not leaving his napkin folded beside the plate, not asking permission to leave the table, just becoming invisible, floating along the hall toward the partially prohibited territory filled with promise at the back of the house, the kitchen and laundry room and tiny room the cook and the maid shared, where he could hear the sound of the radio, with Angelillo singing a song that brought tears to his eyes, the story of the gravedigger Juan Simón, who one day finds himself obliged to bury his own daughter, dead in the bloom of life: