2
THE MIRACLE OF such a sight ends suddenly. That Judith Biely is in the world right now seems as improbable as her appearing in the car of a train about to depart, forcing him to invent the melodrama of her last-minute arrival at the station. He doesn’t remember exactly how long ago she left Madrid, but he has a precise count of the days that have passed since he last saw her. He has walked through the city for four days, traveled on streetcars, subways, and elevated trains, and has never stopped looking for her in each young woman who crossed paths with him or whom he saw from a distance, and the repeated disappointment hasn’t inoculated him against the hallucination of recognizing her. In Union Square he saw a poster announcing an act of solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the glorious struggle of the Spanish people against fascism, and he made his way through the crowd waving placards and banners and singing anthems only in the hope of running into her. From the deck of the ship he saw the towers of the city emerge from the fog like brightly lit cliffs, and aside from fear and vertigo, his only thought was that Judith Biely might be somewhere in that labyrinth. In the innumerable columns of names in the New York telephone directory, he found hers listed three times; he called two of them, annoyed voices he could barely understand telling him he had the wrong number, and the third rang a long time but no one answered. The mind, however, secretes images and fictions just as the glands in the mouth secrete saliva. Judith running past people in the great lobby of Pennsylvania Station, looking for him, thinking she saw him in any middle-aged man in a dark suit, descending the echoing iron steps with gymnastic agility in spite of her high heels and narrow skirt, and arriving on time. And so he looked for her among the passengers on the express trains about to leave Madrid on the night of July 19, a seemingly ordinary night and not a definitive threshold in time, despite the radios blasting at top volume on the lighted, wide-open balconies, and the crowds shouting down the main streets, and the bursts of gunshots one could still mistake for backfires or fireworks. He’d find her a few moments before her train pulled out, her blond hair billowing from a sleeping-car window in a cloud of steam made iridescent by powerful electric lights, and when she saw him, she’d back down from her decision to break up with him and leave Spain, and throw herself into his arms. Puerile fictions, the subliminal effect of novels and films in which destiny allows the reunion of lovers seconds before the end. Musicals he’d seen with her in the movie houses of Madrid, enormous and dark, smelling of new materials and disinfectant, their surfaces golden under the silver light of the big screen.
They used to meet in one of the theaters on Calle Bravo Murillo, and though it was unlikely anyone would recognize them in a working-class district far from downtown, they entered separately for the first afternoon showing, when the audience was smaller. The bustling, dusty street was hot in early summer and the sun was blinding; all you had to do was walk through the doors lined with garnet fabric and into the artificial delight of darkness and cooled air. It took time for them to become accustomed to the dark, and they looked for each other by taking advantage of the best-lit scenes, the sudden brightness of midday on the first-class deck of a fake ocean liner, the sea projected on a transparency screen, an ocean breeze from electric fans agitating the heroine’s blond curls. In the newsreel, two million men carrying olive branches and tools on their shoulders marched along the avenues of Berlin on May Day to the rhythm of military bands. An equally oceanic and disciplined crowd waved weapons, flowering branches, flags, and portraits on Red Square in Moscow. Cyclists with the hard faces of farm laborers pedaled up rocky paths in the Tour of Spain. He searched avidly for her hands in the dark, the bare skin of her thighs; he abandoned himself to the secretive, indecent caress of her hand, her smiling face illuminated by powder flashes from the screen. Insolent Italian legionnaires with black pirate goatees and colonial helmets crowned with feathers marched before the recently conquered palace of the negus in Addis Ababa. Don Manuel Azaña left the Congress of Deputies after his swearing-in as president of the Spanish Republic, dressed in tails with a sash across his distended torso, pale, wearing an absurd top hat and an astonished expression as if attending his own funeral. (Judith had seen the procession pass in the street and recalled the contrast between Azaña’s colorless skin in the open car and the red crests of the cavalry soldiers who escorted him.) Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire glided weightlessly on a lacquered platform, holding each other as they danced in a pose identical to the one on the full-color canvas announcement that covered the façade of the Europa. The evident fakery of the film offered Judith a true emotion to which she gave herself up with no resistance: the mouths that moved without singing, the unlikelihood of a man and woman dressed in street clothes talking as they walked and a moment later singing and dancing and having to protect themselves from a sudden, obviously artificial rain. She knew all the songs by heart, including the ones on Spanish radio commercials, which she studied as meticulously as the traditional ballads or the poems of Rubén Darío she was learning in Don Pedro Salinas’s classes. She’d recite the lyrics of the songs in English and asked Ignacio to explain the ones sung by Imperio Argentina in Morena Clara, which for reasons he didn’t understand she liked as much as Top Hat. On the phonograph in her room, she played songs she’d brought from America as often as those of García Lorca accompanying La Argentinita on the piano. That Judith liked those muddled movies about flamenco dancers and smugglers, and the strident voices that sang in them, irritated Ignacio Abel less than the fact that his son, Miguel, at the age of twelve, adored them too. The first time he saw her, her presence had been announced by the music that radiated from her as naturally as her voice or the shine of her hair or the fragrance, between sportive and rustic, of the cologne she wore. One afternoon at the end of September, Ignacio Abel entered the auditorium of the Student Residence looking for Moreno Villa, and a woman with her back to him was playing the piano and singing quietly to herself in the empty hall, flooded by the reddish-gold light of sunset that would remain intact in his memory like a drop of amber, the precise light of that late afternoon on September 29.
It feels like yesterday, but so much time has gone by. He knows now that personal identity is too fragile a tower to stand on its own without witnesses to certify it or glances to acknowledge it. The memories of what matters to him most are as distant as if they belonged to another man. The face in the passport is almost a stranger’s; the one he is used to seeing now in the mirror, Judith Biely or his children would barely recognize. In Madrid he saw the faces of people he thought he knew well transformed overnight into the faces of executioners or prophets or fugitives or cattle brought to the slaughter; faces entirely occupied by mouths shouting in euphoria or panic; faces of the dead barely recognizable, half converted into red pulp by a rifle bullet; waxen faces deciding on life and death behind a table lit by a lamp while rapid fingers type lists of names. Like the face of someone in the glare of headlights moments before being murdered, or falling gravely wounded, twisting in the throes of death until a pistol placed at the back of his neck ends the misery. Death in Madrid is sometimes a sudden explosion of gunfire and at other times a slow procedure requiring documents written in administrative prose and typed with several carbon copies and legalized with rubber stamps. As he reminisces about the day a little over a year ago when he first saw Judith there’s almost no feeling of loss, because what’s lost has ceased to exist as completely as the man who might have longed for it. There is instead a scrupulous striving for exactitude, the desire to leave a mark through the effort to imagine a world that’s been erased, leaving behind few material traces, so fragile they too are destined for a swift disappearance. But he isn’t satisfied with his attempts to restore that moment to its authenticity, stripping away the additions and superimpositions of memory, like the restorer who cleans a fresco with delicate patience to bring back the splendor of its original colors. He wants to relive the steps that led him to an encounter that might not have happened, to reconstruct step by step that entire afternoon, the prelude, the hours that brought him to this point in his life.