“HOW STRANGE TO BE standing at a streetcar stop across from the mansion and see yourself as you were thirty years before, because it isn’t that I was remembering,” my friend says. “I was literally seeing myself, the way you might see someone in the street and have trouble recognizing him because it’s been so long since the last time. I was so young, so different, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in a German uniform.” I could feel what he was feeling at that moment, the excitement and suspense of the waiting, the fear that his friend the captain might appear and suspect something or simply tell him he had to go back to headquarters. Because before leaving him to dance with a commander of the SS, the redheaded woman had told him to let a half hour go by and then meet her on the other side of the square beneath the shelter for the streetcar stop. He watched her move away through the dancing couples, now in the arms of the man in the black uniform, who was a little taller than she, casually turning to look for him while talking to her partner. He had to give her time to make small talk with some friends of her lover, who had never taken his eyes off her and who now and then sent short, precise signals to her, time to say good-bye. He didn’t need to have someone take her home since she lived only two stops away on the streetcar. “I won’t leave you alone for a moment,” my friend told her, not being foolhardy but with the same assurance and absence of fear he felt sometimes as he leaped over a trench, immune to bullets, exalted and agile, pistol in hand, hoarse from shouting orders to the soldiers advancing behind him, fighting through the clay and tangles of wire and cadavers strewn across the no-man’s-land. “I won’t leave you by yourself,” he told her again, when their dance ended and she tried to step away from him because the SS commander was waiting his turn. “If you want to help me, do as I told you,” she pleaded, with an urgency that widened her eyes, and immediately smiled at the German officer who took her in his arms with a polite nod to my friend.
Thirty years later he saw himself from the other side of the square, a solitary figure standing at the streetcar stop in a cone of light, the cobbles wet from the fog. He looked at the windows of the mansion where the dancing was still in full swing, and heard very faintly the music of the orchestra and the sound his feet made as he stamped them to keep warm, the echoes that spread across the wide, open space. He was at the same time the young lieutenant who counted the minutes, jumping out of his skin with hope and disappointment every time the door of the mansion opened. He felt both the wrenching impatience of someone who doesn’t know what the next minute will bring and the melancholy compassion of knowing what it brought: the young man waited for more than an hour, more desolate by the minute, and then went back to the ballroom to look for the redheaded woman, but did not find her, neither her nor her protector in the garish pinstripe suit, nor the SS commander who had bowed so ceremoniously when he claimed her. The lieutenant looked for her on the dance floor, then in the large room where drinks and canapés were being served, and walked through corridors where there was no one at all and through salons and libraries lit by large crystal chandeliers.
“And I never saw her again,” he says, making a gesture with two upraised hands, as if to indicate a thing that vanishes into thin air. It occurred to him that maybe she had left without his seeing her and was waiting for him at the streetcar stop, and if he didn’t hurry she would tire of waiting and leave, and then it would be too late to get her address, but in the vestibule he ran into the captain he’d come with and who had been looking for him. The captain said it was late and they had to get back to the barracks.
THERE IS NO NOISE NOW in the restaurant. Without realizing it, we have lingered until we are the only ones left. A waiter helps my friend into his navy-blue jacket, which accentuates the stoop of his shoulders. Watching him walk ahead of me toward the exit, I remember that he is a man of eighty. Outside we are surprised to find the pale light of early dusk, and the air is damp. My friend offers to take me home in his car.
“I still like to drive, although now and then I get into trouble when people see how old I am. One jerk yelled at me the other day at a traffic light, said it was time for me to pick out my coffin. I asked him, ‘You want to bury me alive?’ He scowled, rolled up his window, and shot off ahead of me. Generalizations are harmful, I should know, but the real problem is our species. We’re aggressive primates, much more dangerous than gorillas or chimpanzees; we carry cruelty and the will to dominate in our brains, and we get the oldest part of the brain from our reptile ancestors. It’s all in Darwin, to our misfortune. I know the theory that’s going around, that in the evolution of the species the instinct for cooperation has served us better than the law of the survival of the fittest. Except that some primates cooperate to wipe others out. Look how well the Nazis and Communists cooperated, how many millions of dead they left behind. But it’s not just them, think of Bosnia, or Rwanda just a while back, only yesterday, a million people murdered in a few months’ time, and with machetes and clubs, not the technology the Germans had. Who knows what evil is being perpetrated this very moment while you and I are talking? I don’t sleep much anymore, I lie in the darkness waiting for the dawn and remember all the dead I’ve seen rotting between our lines and the Russian positions, the bodies lying in ditches along the highways as we approached the front, or piled into trucks, stiff from the cold. I could easily have been one of them. And I see them all, one after another, and they look at me like that Jew in the pince-nez, and tell me that because I’m alive I have the obligation to speak for them, say what was done, so that the little that remains of them in people’s memories will not be lost for all time.”
We passed the park where the Egyptian temple of Debod is now, and I remember that the La Montana barracks stood in that very place. Here too we walk over tombs without names, over common graves. I remember black-and-white photographs and films of the first days of the Civil War, when my friend was a boy of sixteen studying Greek and Latin and German in the Institute and staying up late at night reading Nietzsche, Rilke, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega, when there was no way he could have known that in a few years he would be a decorated war hero. Not far from where we are now, in those gardens where the ruins of an Egyptian temple are enshrined and mothers walk their children and retirees take the afternoon sun, there was an esplanade filled with dead more than sixty years ago. On the same sidewalk where my friend and I are walking bombs fell during Franco’s siege of Madrid.