I’m a gravedigger coming back
Oh, I’m a gravedigger coming back
From burying my own heart.
Miguel wanted to see that film at all costs. He wanted to see it because he liked the song and because the cook and maid had already seen it and told him about it in detail, both of them moved as they remembered it, pausing to recall some dramatic moment. He wanted to see it even more because his father, mother, and sister seemed to have agreed to dislike it without having seen it. His mother wouldn’t ridicule him or become angry if she caught him beside the radio, his eyes filled with tears. But she wouldn’t have defended him either. She was distressed by his lack of masculinity, by the possibility he would awaken his father’s distaste and contempt. But what hurt Miguel most was that Lita had taken the adults’ side. She, his accomplice in loving movies on the afternoons they laughed and laughed at the theater watching the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin, or shivered with fear as they watched Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, also disliked movies with flamenco songs and regional dancing, precisely the ones the maids and Miguel liked best. She’d refused to go with him to Juan Simón’s Daughter. She’d listened with an approving expression when their father said to their mother a few nights earlier during dinner:
“Look at Buñuel, who was so much a surrealist and so modern, and now he’s not embarrassed to earn a pile of money producing that piece of folkloric idiocy, Juan Simón’s Daughter.”
Folkloric idiocy. Miguel knew he was going to say or do something wrong, and precisely because he knew it, the transgression was inevitable. How hard would it have been for him to remain silent when his father made that scornful comment about Buñuel? But he couldn’t help it, he didn’t even think about it; he knew what he was going to say, and he said it, and as he did he became aware of the inevitable reprimand he’d receive and the fact that his mother and sister weren’t going to defend him:
“Well, Herminia says it’s a picture you cry over and it has pretty songs.”
“Herminia.” His father repeated the maid’s name with burlesque seriousness. “A great cinematic authority.”
Now the song was coming from the end of the hall, and they all acted as if they didn’t hear it. Or perhaps Miguel was the only one who did, nervously shaking his leg under the table, watching his father’s face out of the corner of his eye, noting that his mother, beneath her air of absent placidity, was becoming tense, and Lita, far removed from the possibility of disaster, was recounting a recent excursion with her classmates to the Prado. He admired her as unconditionally as he had when he was little; he admired her even when he resented and despised her because she fawned over their father, when he was tempted to spill ink on her impeccable exercise notebook, or step as if accidentally on one of those school albums in which Lita glued leaves and dried flowers. If she could concentrate on everything she did, and move with so much serenity and in a straight line, it was because she wasn’t distracted or alarmed by the sounds of danger, because she lacked the invisible antennae that detected the turmoil he always provoked. His father was going to be irritated because the music on the radio was too loud, because the maid, when she left the dining room, didn’t close the door behind her, and because the kitchen door was open. That’s why it was so difficult for him to concentrate: because he was mindful of too many things at the same time, because he guessed what the others were thinking or sensed changes in their states of mind, like those barometers in school with fast-moving needles that registered atmospheric disturbances.
Then the telephone rang, just as Miguel was swallowing a mouthful of water, so focused on not making noise that the first ring startled him and made him choke. Sitting across from him, Lita put her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. The telephone didn’t stop ringing, shrill in the silence that had fallen after his coughing had stopped. How was it possible that his father and sister didn’t hear it? His father, rigid with anger, concentrated meticulously on chewing. With an abrupt gesture his mother placed her fork and knife on her plate and left the dining room, and a moment later the ringing stopped and her voice was heard in the hall, uneasy because it was unusual for people to call so late: “Who’s calling? Who? One moment.” She returned to the dining room unhurriedly, seemed more serious and more tired than a moment earlier, looking at his father in a strange way when she gave him the message.
“It’s for you. From your office, a woman who sounds foreign.”
“Well, it’s a fine time for people to be calling,” said Lita, unaware of what Miguel’s eyes saw but his mind couldn’t decipher, innocent of all uncertainty, of any suspicion of danger, sure in the world.
Inside his apartment, Ignacio Abel crossed the invisible border to his other life, walking down the dark hallway to the phone on the wall, to the unexpected voice of Judith Biely, leaving behind the family scene in the dining room, interrupted and blurred on the other side of the glass that filtered light and voices. In a few seconds and in so small a space, his heart pounding in his chest, he took on his other identity; he stopped being a father and husband to become a lover; his movements became more secretive, less confident; his voice was changing to become the one Judith would hear — hoarse, anxious, altered by a mixture of bewilderment, happiness, and the sudden fear that it wasn’t she who called, breaking an unspoken agreement for a reason that must be serious. His hand trembled when he picked up the earpiece, still swaying against the wall; his voice sounded so low and rasping that Judith, equally anxious in the telephone booth in a café whose location she didn’t know, at first didn’t recognize it. She too spoke quietly, quickly, in English and a moment afterward in Spanish, short phrases, murmured so close to the mouthpiece that Ignacio Abel heard her breathing and could almost feel on his ear the brush of her lips. “Please come and rescue me. Casi no sé dónde estoy. Unos hombres venían siguiéndome. I want to see you right away.”