THE CONDUCTOR IS announcing the name of the next station in a solemn, powerful voice that rises above the noise of the train. Other passengers are already standing, putting on hats, raincoats, light topcoats, looking out the windows with an air of fatigue, men tired after a full day’s work who return home at nightfall, picking up briefcases, folding newspapers, looking at a landscape so familiar they barely notice it, the immense width of the river, the bank the train runs along, so close to the water that small waves break against the tracks’ incline, the landscape of daily life that never seems to change, or only to the extent that the seasons change, night falls earlier or later, reds and yellows replace the bright greens in the treetops. There’s an end to each journey and to each flight, but where does desertion end, and when? The river’s current has an oily texture stained red in the declining light. You can keep running from misfortune and fear, but there is no hiding from remorse. The hills on the opposite bank acquire a darker and denser rust color, interrupted by white splashes of houses where lights are being turned on, though it’s not dark yet. Perfect places to take refuge, for two lovers to meet, for someone to come back to, tired and at peace, and not lock the door or fear noises in the night. With briefcases or small suitcases in hand and overcoat lapels raised against the damp cold of the woods and the river, the passengers will walk home along gravel paths. He too had walked from the small station in the Sierra, one afternoon in late September or early October, the vivid memory of an autumn that had just begun: early nightfall, the aroma of damp earth and pines, the smoke of an oak log rising from the chimney against the still blue sky, the creak of the gate and the cold iron on his hands, while from the house, at the end of the garden, came his children’s voices. Back then he didn’t have a car. He’d have returned by train, enjoying the trip, going over papers or letting his eyes linger on the stands of oak that had a gleam of dusty gold in the afternoon sun, the silhouette of a deer among the oaks, or the flash of a hare. He would walk on fallen leaves covering the gravel path that led to the house; as he got closer, the children’s faces became visible, pressed against a window, Adela standing behind them. The train whistle always alerted them of his arrival.
He prepares again for another arrival, his suitcase ready, his wallet in place, safe in his inside pocket, his passport in the other. Ignacio Abel touches the roughness of his beard, wondering about his appearance now that he’ll be scrutinized by the eyes of strangers: his suit not cleaned and pressed, his raincoat wrinkled, his shirt stained with coffee, the shoes he should have had shined this morning. Some passengers are moving toward the exit at the back of the car, others remain seated. Sudden weariness in his shoulders and the back of his neck, in fingers that have to grasp the suitcase, in feet that after more than two hours on the train have swollen inside his worn shoes, discouragement on an arrival so long postponed, the end of his journey but perhaps not of his flight and certainly not of his desertion. So much impatience to arrive here, and now he’d like the trip to last longer, a few hours, perhaps all night, to avoid all movement, the need to speak, to reestablish human communication, become again the man he was, avoid the anguish of answering questions—how was your trip, you must be very tired, what was it like to live in Madrid, is this the first time you’ve visited the United States. He’d give anything for this not to be his station, to remain seated a little longer, his neck against the back of the seat, his face near the glass, watching the autumnal woods go by, and the river, nothing more than that, making out from time to time a light on a dock, in the window of a solitary house, a house where lovers can hide or a woman and her children can hear the train whistle and know the father will arrive in a few minutes along the path through the trees.
He can calculate how many days his trip has lasted, his flight. But he knows his desertion didn’t begin three weeks ago in Madrid, when he closed the door of his apartment and didn’t bother to insert the key—the key that jingles in his trouser pocket along with some Spanish, French, and American coins, the same pocket where he keeps the train ticket and the receipt from the cafeteria where he had a cup of coffee and a pastry this morning—but much earlier, more than two months earlier, on Sunday, July 19, to be precise, a few minutes before five in the afternoon, at the exact moment he closed the iron gate at the house in the Sierra and heard the train whistle nearby. Weak, almost a hiss, scaled to the Spanish penury in things, not like the deep vibration of a ship’s siren with which this American train announces its approach, resounding in the river and the woods, the woods that just a step from the tracks have a jungle’s untamable density. He looked at his watch, two minutes to five, for once the train would be on time. He began to walk quickly along the dirt path, past the adobe walls of other summer houses, beneath the vertical sun of the July siesta, even though he had more than enough time since the station was very close, the little station where two or three weeks earlier Adela had arrived at about the same time on the train from Madrid, when the men who played cards in the tavern were surprised to see her on the platform alone, wearing high-heeled shoes and a small-brimmed hat tilted over her face. The same men would stare at him when he arrived on the platform, deserted in the lethargy of noon. A couple of Civil Guards walked along the platform, their uniforms old, their primitive muskets on their shoulders, their dark features contracting in the heat beneath their three-cornered hats. One of them asked Ignacio Abel for his identity card and whether he was going to Madrid. Under the marquee the station clock had stopped, its glass broken. On the list of scheduled arrivals and departures, written in chalk on a blackboard, there were two or three spelling mistakes. The July heat crushed the will and made things unravel, anesthetizing consciousness under the blinding sunlight and the cicadas’ chirping. The train pulled in and the coal locomotive filled the air with black smoke. Inside the carriage he trembled with impatience, with disbelief; he looked at his watch as he settled onto the hard wooden seat. For the first time in many days he’d meet Judith Biely not in a café, not at a park corner, but in the house of Madame Mathilde, in the rented bedroom where the curtains would be closed, where he’d see her naked, coming toward him, Judith recovered, offering herself again, resisting her own decision, tied to him by a need more powerful than remorse or decency. In spite of it all you were dying to get back to Madrid. You couldn’t care less about your children, and me even less. You were lucky to catch the last train to the city. You probably don’t remember how the children liked to watch the trains go by, anticipating your arrival. So strange not to hear the trains come and go anymore. I don’t have to tell you what would have happened to you had you stayed.
He’d walked away from the house along the garden path, brushing against the rockrose, the overnight bag in his hand, resisting the temptation to look at his watch, to quicken his pace while still in sight of everyone, trying to control his impatience and haste, at least until he heard the gate close behind him. It was then that he took one last look at the house; the family had resumed their conversation in the shade of the grapevine, as if they had already forgotten his existence. The scene couldn’t have been more distant or insular had he been looking at a photo of a stranger’s family on their Sierra vacation. People were frozen in a casual manner while keeping their distance from each other: the older man in an undershirt, who at any moment will doze in his rocking chair, a straw hat down over his eyes; the white-haired woman in a dark apron, the matriarch of the house, sitting in a low chair, sewing or embroidering or holding in her hands what might be a rosary; the corpulent priest with his legs wide apart and the collar of his cassock unfastened; the frail unmarried ladies, their hair arranged in an outdated style; the other younger woman still attractive in spite of the gray streaks in her hair and the glasses on her broad, placid face which she wears to read a book, and who appears to be lost in her reading and not looking at the man in the light suit who walks down the path, his back to her, attempting not to quicken his pace in too obvious, too shameless a way; going to a place, a person, in spite of his awkward promises, his contrition that’s false not because he’s lying but because there is nothing to be done, because the irreparable has already taken place. As she watched him leave, she knew he’d turn when he reached the gate. Between shadow and light, the back of a figure holding a tray: for the person who sees the photograph after years have passed, that face will remain hidden; the young maid, a white apron over her dark dress and the cap the señora insists she wear even though they’re in the Sierra, holding on the tray a large pitcher of fresh lemonade and some glasses: when she moves between shadow and light projected by the trellis, the sun shines for a few seconds on the yellow-green liquid, turning it golden. He should have had a glass of lemonade before he left; Adela offered it, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, but he couldn’t take the risk. Now he was thirsty, and when he turned at the gate he felt that the soft collar of his summer shirt was too tight. In the photo, perhaps in a blur, the figure of his daughter, who, after accompanying her father halfway across the garden and giving him two kisses and telling him to come back soon, sat on the swing and began to sway back and forth, more childish in the house in the Sierra than in Madrid because she’s closer to her little-girl memories, the treasured memory of so many identical summer vacations, the same garden and the same swing with its rusty hinges, her father walking away, his briefcase in his hand, the sleepy voices of the family gathering behind her as she begins to swing, the solemn voice of her grandfather, the chirping-bird titters of the maiden aunts. She’ll call her brother to come and give her a push, now that they no longer fight as they did only a few years ago about who’d sit on the swing first, they won’t count aloud the number of times each pushes the other, and it won’t be necessary for their mother or father to come and order a rigorous taking of turns. In the photograph, in memory, the boy is a figure separate from the others, sitting on the highest step at the entrance to the house beside one of the squat granite columns that support the veranda on the upper floor, in front of the area of densest shade from the portico where flies buzz. The boy does nothing, he simply looks at his father, who’s leaving; he is suddenly grown, taciturn, with a shadow of thin facial hair on his upper lip, having entered adolescence, aggrieved because his father’s going to a life he doesn’t know and his mother and sister don’t share; watching him leave with the old rankling mixture of relief, resentment, and nostalgia, the son who hasn’t stopped watching his mother since they brought her home from the hospital, where she spent a week after an accident no one explained and only he knows, imagines, has to do with his father, with his father’s unfamiliar, terrified face on the night he saw him standing in the center of his study, in front of the overturned drawer, among disordered papers and photographs on the floor. There are things he sees so clearly yet others seem not to notice, and this disconcerts him and draws him into himself, something that is not obvious in photos from previous summers but is captured in this image, existing only in Ignacio Abel’s mind, fixed there because of his own guilt. A child changes so rapidly at that age, he must already have pimples, his voice must be deepening, and if his father heard it now, after only three months, perhaps he wouldn’t recognize it. What school would he be attending, if any schools are open on the other side, in the enemy zone, his son, so fond of movies and magazines, who failed half his exams in June, though his father and mother didn’t pay much attention to a setback that in other circumstances would have angered them, his mother in the hospital and then convalescing in the bedroom where the curtains were always closed, his father so distracted by his work at University City, leaving the house at dawn and coming home in the middle of the night, picked up at the entrance to the building by a car in which someone he trusted traveled with him and, Miguel and Lita knew, carried a pistol, a bodyguard like the ones in movies, though he wore a mason’s cap, not a gangster’s hat, and had a cigarette in a corner of his mouth.
What was it like to have experienced that Sunday, that entire week? How many people are left who still remember, who preserve a precious image like a fragile relic, one not added to in retrospect, not induced by knowledge of what was about to occur, what no one foresaw in its monstrous scale, its irrationality, lasting so long no one would remember normal life or have the strength to miss it, life already in hopeless disarray though there’s not a single sign of change in the things Ignacio Abel saw when he left the house, after closing the squeaking gate and using a handkerchief to wipe the rust from his sweaty hand. I want to imagine, with the precision of lived experience, what happened twenty years before I was born and what no one will remember anymore in just a few years: the brightness of those few distant days in July and the darkness of time, that very afternoon, the days that preceded it; to do this I’d need an impossible sixth sense to perceive a past that precedes memory itself: I’d need to be innocent of the future, ignorant of what is imminent in the present, in each of these people’s lives, their astonishing, uniform blindness, like one of those ancient epidemics that erased millions. But if I could reach out my hand across the frontier of time, touch things, not merely imagine them, not merely see them in museum display cases or by staring hard at the details in photographs: touch the cool surface of that pitcher of water a waiter has just left on the table in a café in Madrid; walk along the Gran Vía or the Calle de Alcalá and feel the bright sunlight vanish in the shade provided by striped awnings whose colors can’t be distinguished in black-and-white photos; touch the fleshy geranium leaves seen around a window frame in the photograph of a station in the Sierra very similar to the one close to the house where Ignacio Abel’s family spends the summers. The most trivial thing would be a treasure: getting into a taxi in Madrid on a July day in 1936, the odor of the worn, sweaty leather, of the hair pomade men used in those days, of the back seat, a smell of tobacco that must be very different from what can be breathed in now because everything’s minutely specific and everything’s disappeared, or almost everything, just as almost everything I could see looking out the window, if I were granted the gift of riding in that taxi, has disappeared except the topography of the streets and the architecture of a certain number of buildings—everything demolished by a great cataclysm, more efficient and more tenacious than war, one that occurs each minute and has carried away all the automobiles, all the streetcars with their advertisements faded by the weather, all the awnings and all the store signs, that has submerged paving stones in asphalt and before that torn up the tracks of the streetcars, the mannequins in the shop windows in their summer dresses and bathing costumes and the large smiling heads in the hat stores, all the posters pasted on façades, faded by the rain and sun, torn off in strips, posters for political meetings and bullfights and soccer games and boxing matches, posters for contests to choose the most beautiful señorita at the festival of Carmen, election posters from the February campaign that display categorical statements of victory by candidates who were then defeated. To see, touch, smell: one hazy morning late in May, as I pass by the fence of a country manor half in ruins, I smell the dense, delicate aroma of poplar blossoms from a gigantic tree that has prospered in abandonment and weeds, and the aroma is undoubtedly identical to what someone might have smelled when passing this same spot seventy-three years earlier. I touch the pages of a newspaper—a bound volume of the daily Ahora from July 1936—and it seems I’m touching something that belongs to the substance of that time, but the paper leaves the feel of dust, like dry pollen, on my fingertips, and the pages break at the corners if I don’t turn them with the necessary care. It isn’t hard for me to conjecture that Ignacio Abel would read that Republican, politically moderate paper, with excellent graphics, an abundance of brief articles in tiny print that after three-quarters of a century continue to transmit, like the buzz of a honeycomb, a powerful, distant drone of lost words, voices extinguished long ago. He bought the paper on Sunday, July 12, when he got off the train in the station at nightfall, back from the Sierra, and probably glanced at it and put it in his pocket or left it in the taxi that took him to the center of the city, to the Plaza de Santa Ana, with the carelessness that characterizes how most ordinary things are handled and lost, things that are everywhere every day and yet disappear without a trace after a short time, or are preserved by pure chance because someone used the pages of that day’s paper to line a drawer, or because the paper was left in a trunk no one opened again for seventy years, along with a little notebook that had a few dates written in it, a packet of postcards, a box of matches, a coaster from a cabaret on which a red owl is drawn, seeds of a time that will bear fruit in the imagination of someone not yet born. He was going to the Plaza de Santa Ana in the hope of seeing Judith. Three days earlier she’d agreed by phone to meet him when she returned from her trip to Granada, so frequently postponed, on condition he not look for her, not call her, not write to her. She didn’t say when she’d go to Granada or when she’d return and had no reason to give him that information. She’d be waiting for him in Madame Mathilde’s house on Sunday, the nineteenth, then perhaps she’d leave to take some literature courses at the International University of Santander. Ignacio Abel agreed with the urgency of an addict ready to lose everything in exchange for a single dose of guaranteed pleasure. He hung up the phone and began to count the days until he’d see her. On Saturday morning, the eleventh, he left the car at a repair shop on Calle Jorge Juan and went by train to the Sierra. He chatted with Don Francisco de Asís, the uncle who was a priest, the maiden aunts; he said the construction strike couldn’t last much longer and it wasn’t true that gangs of threatening strikers were breaking into grocery stores; he denied that he himself was in any danger; he’d received a few anonymous letters like everyone else, but the police assured him he had nothing to worry about, so he’d dispensed with the armed guard who came to pick him up each morning, to the disappointment of Miguel, who found it worthy of a novel that no one could tell the serious young man was carrying an automatic pistol under his jacket; his brother-in-law Víctor had told them it would be impossible for him to come to the family dinner that Sunday, and so Doña Cecilia’s rice and chicken could be enjoyed without the uncertainties and surprises of almost every summer Sunday, though Doña Cecilia couldn’t stop wondering where that boy would eat, in some inn or tavern or whatever, especially considering how much he liked her rice, which in the judgment of Don Francisco de Asís had no equal in the best restaurants in Madrid. Adela was present for everything, calm and withdrawn, a little drowsy because of the pills prescribed for her when she’d been discharged from the sanatorium. She accepted with a forced smile her husband’s new deferential treatment; Miguel, observing her, was surprised the smile was so affected, that there was in her an even more meager sense of authenticity than in his father’s conjugal attentions: adjusting the cushion at the back of her wicker chair, filling her glass with water. When he arrived on Saturday, Ignacio Abel had brought her a bouquet of flowers. Adela thanked him, saying they were pretty, but she didn’t look at them once after she’d handed the bouquet to the maid to put in a vase. Beneath a façade of normality the family hid an unspeakable secret. After the rice, and coffee in the shade of the trellis, Ignacio Abel seemed to have dozed off for a while in the rocking chair, but the hands resting on the curved arms couldn’t abandon themselves to rest. Miguel saw the tension in the knuckles beneath the skin, the movement of the eyeballs beneath the lids. Detectives at Scotland Yard solve seemingly unsolvable mysteries by studying the most insignificant details at the crime scene. It was enough for the sound of a train to approach for his father to open his eyes, to dissemble as he consulted his watch. It was amazing how little capacity for pretense adults had, so predictable and yet so pompous, so sure their actions would awaken no suspicions. A few minutes before the six o’clock train for Madrid arrived, Miguel saw his father cross the garden in his light suit and summer hat, his briefcase under his arm, walking to the gate where he’d turn to say goodbye before he disappeared for several days. He holds his briefcase tightly to let us know that what he carries inside is very important and he has to leave. He turns after he’s opened the gate and doesn’t wait to be lost from sight before erasing from his face any indication of still being here.
In the house in the Sierra, being deprived of Judith had been more tolerable because it fell into the order of things. As soon as he left the station and breathed the hot air of Madrid in the July twilight, he could no longer not look for her. He wouldn’t have the patience to read the paper, thicker in its Sunday edition. He got out of the taxi at the corner of Calle del Prado and Plaza de Santa Ana with the premonition that one of the women with short hair and a print summer dress would be Judith, that he’d see her coming out the doorway of her pensión or behind the glass of the ice cream shop where she liked to have horchata and meringue ice cream, her two new Spanish passions. Searching for her was a way to invoke her presence. He could feel her in the sensual touch of warm air at nightfall, in the luminous blue sky over the fantastic tower of the Hotel Victoria, which she loved from the first morning she saw it above Madrid when she opened her window. But perhaps she was still in Granada, and the sense of imminence was an illusion, his search fruitless. Ignacio Abel walks along the Plaza de Santa Ana, filled with open-air cafés where people are having beers and soft drinks, grateful for the first signs of the night’s cool breeze. At the open balconies you can see the lighted interiors of houses, family conversations and the clink of dishes blending with music from the radios: the broadcast of a concert by the Municipal Band of Madrid, conducted by Maestro Sorozábal. A bewildered imagination allies itself with knowledge of those mundane details and for a few seconds, like a hallucination, a night in July, a night seventy-three years ago, falls before one’s eyes. The Municipal Band of Madrid is playing on the Paseo de Rosales, and the person listening will smell the recently watered grass in the Parque del Oeste. By consulting the newspaper program for Unión Radio on the night of Sunday, July 12, you can find out which piece of music is heard through the open balconies while Ignacio Abel sits down, disheartened, on a still warm stone bench on the Plaza de Santa Ana, the paper folded on his lap, the hand that had been holding it sticky with ink. In his house at 89 Calle Velázquez, Deputy José Calvo Sotelo, who’s also spent the day in the Sierra, listens to the concert on the radio with his wife and children in a living room I imagine as pretentious, a room with old religious paintings and Spanish furniture, the kind Don Francisco de Asís likes. Lieutenant José Castillo walks along Calle de Augusto Figueroa, erect in his black Assault Guard uniform, swinging his arms, his right hand brushing the holster where he carries his pistol with instinctive caution, because in recent months, ever since he fired on the Fascists accompanying the coffin of Second Lieutenant Reyes on the Plaza de Manuel Becerra, he’s received anonymous death threats. Calvo Sotelo is a man of solemn haughtiness, with a broad, fleshy face and the bearing of someone who has occupied with complete confidence his position of supremacy in the world; he speaks with a warm voice and a rhetoric somewhere between exalted and apocalyptic, which captivates the ladies and arouses the boundless admiration of Don Francisco de Asís when he reads Calvo Sotelo’s parliamentary speeches aloud to Doña Cecilia. Lieutenant Castillo is slim, short, erect, almost rigid when in uniform, with round glasses and thinning hair plastered to his skull. He’s said goodbye to his wife at the entrance to the house on Augusto Figueroa where they live with her parents—the young, recently married couple can’t afford their own place yet. Only in the middle of the festive Sunday night crowd on the Plaza de Santa Ana does Ignacio Abel capitulate and decide he’ll return to his house on Príncipe de Vergara, taking a long walk across Madrid; he’ll sleep better if he’s tired; he’ll eat something standing up in the kitchen, and on his way to the bedroom he’ll pass through the rooms in the dark where the furniture and lamps have been covered with white cloths since the family moved to the Sierra at the beginning of July. As Ignacio Abel walks down Calle de Alcalá on his way to Cibeles, Lieutenant Castillo crosses Augusto Figueroa toward Fuencarral and looks at his wristwatch to make sure he will report for duty punctually at the Assault Guard barracks behind the Ministry of the Interior. He’ll cross the Puerta del Sol, and on the large ministry clock it’s a few minutes before ten, still enough time. In Calvo Sotelo’s house, someone has turned off the lights in the living room to lessen the heat and make it more pleasant to listen to the concert by the Municipal Band in the Parque del Oeste. In the shadowy living room the radio dial shines brightly, illuminating the heavy-lidded, strong face of Calvo Sotelo. Lieutenant Castillo is crossing the street when suddenly there’s a commotion, and in the midst of the confusion his heart contracts in his chest and his right hand holds on to his pistol without taking it out of the holster. Lieutenant Castillo is stunned by the mass of human shapes and the hollow sound of shots, so close they don’t seem like gunfire, and when he opens his eyes he sees only blurry forms that quickly slip away because he’s lost his glasses and is bleeding, the smell of gasoline makes him dizzy, he’s in a taxi on its way to the emergency room. By the time the audience applauds at the end of the Municipal Band’s concert and the musicians pack up their scores and instruments, Lieutenant José Castillo is dead. José Calvo Sotelo has never crossed paths with him and will never know he’s been killed or that because of the crime he’ll die in just a few hours. Before lying down, Calvo Sotelo kneels in his pajamas before a large crucifix hanging above his bed. It’s no more than a fifteen-minute walk from Calvo Sotelo’s house on Calle Velázquez, corner of Maldonado, to Ignacio Abel’s on Príncipe de Vergara. At two in the morning, Ignacio Abel tosses in his bed, unable to sleep, listening through the open balcony to the sound of cars in the empty city, thinking of Judith Biely and counting the days until he can see her, only a week. “It’s better if we stay silent for a while. We’ve said too much and written too much.” In the middle of the night, in the great sound of the city that stretches beyond the half-closed shutters through which an occasional breath of wind comes in, each life seems lodged in the orbit of a solar system, distant from all the rest. José Calvo Sotelo slept so soundly in his conjugal bed beneath the large crucifix that he didn’t hear the violent pounding of gun butts right away, the voices ordering him to open the door. On Tuesday morning, the fourteenth, Ignacio Abel buys the daily Ahora and the face of José Calvo Sotelo fills the front page, the broad, solemn face that now belongs to a dead man. Day after day that week he buys newspapers, listens to heated conversations in the cafés and unsubstantiated news on the radio, and calculates the time remaining until he can see Judith Biely. In history books names have a crushing finality, and events follow one another like necessary links in a chain of cause and effect. In the infinite present that one would like to imagine in its entirety, in the innermost throbbing of time, every detail entangled, voices upon voices, page after page in newspapers half read, waves of words breaking against the unknown of the day, against what tomorrow will bring and what no one can foresee.
Two atrocious crimes in the space of a few hours. An Assault Guard lieutenant and Señor Calvo Sotelo assassinated in Madrid. Lieutenant Castillo waylaid and shot when he left his house shortly before ten o’clock on Sunday night. The head of Spanish Renewal abducted in the small hours, shot dead, his body dumped in the municipal cemetery. The corpse of Lieutenant Castillo moved to Security Headquarters. Señor Calvo Sotelo’s family says he was tricked into leaving his home; he’d spent Sunday in Galapagar, just outside Madrid. Minutes before he was killed, Lieutenant Castillo said goodbye to his young wife at their front door. Many German tourists visit Ceuta and Tetouan, in Morocco. An automobile collides with a motorcycle, and the cyclist and his companion are seriously injured. In Michigan, the morgues are filling up with the dead, victims of a heat wave afflicting the United States, and doctors claim they have never seen so many die from heat stroke. In Murcia, numerous people with right-wing affiliations are arrested. Fire destroys a shack, and the ragpicker who lived there is hurt. A man dives from a board into a pond and smashes his face against a rock. Rafael Díaz Rivera, thirteen years of age, desperate at having gambled and lost 90 céntimos given to him for an errand, commits suicide in Priego by hanging himself from a tree. Hundreds of athletes representing twenty-two countries will gather in Barcelona next Sunday, July 19, to celebrate the great People’s Olympiad. One eleven-year-old boy stabs another and leaves him gravely wounded. The ghost some residents of Tarragona believed they saw was actually an old, mentally disturbed woman. Four armed men attack a radio station in Valencia and gag the announcer in order to give a Fascist-leaning speech in which they proclaim that the hour is near and the redemptive movement will come soon. Gypsies shoot and seriously wound a farmer, intending to rob him. At the monument to the dead at Verdun, German veterans fraternize with French in a homage that evokes deep emotion. A truck runs over a child, and the boy’s father attacks one of the drivers of the vehicle. The German-Austrian peace pact can lead the way to an alliance among Germany, Austria, and Italy. Mussolini says the accord should be greeted with satisfaction by lovers of peace. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Swim Club of Sevilla, a comedy festival was held in which participants wore grotesque bathing costumes. Last Sunday a dinner was held at the Brazilian embassy in honor of the president of the Republic and Señora de Azaña, attended by members of the government, eminent diplomats, and other prominent figures. The public lines up at the door to Security Headquarters to view the body of Lieutenant Castillo. At the yearling bullfight held in Madrid to benefit the Railroad Workers’ Widows and Orphans Fund, the bullfighter Señorita Julita Alocén made her debut. All the parliamentary minorities in the Popular Front condemn the murders of Señores Castillo and Calvo Sotelo and confirm their loyalty and support for the Republican government. Three people attack a peasant and extract his blood after anesthetizing him. In honor of his birthday Commissar Maxim Litvinov has been awarded the Order of Lenin. Señorita Lidia Margarita Corbette, of Swiss nationality, attempted to end her life by shooting herself with a pistol. The president of the Republic will spend his summer vacation in Santander. It is believed Il Duce has the peaceful goal of unifying Europe. Four cars of a train out of Bilbao careen over an embankment, killing four people and injuring sixty. Barcelona police raid a secret meeting of affiliates of the Spanish Falange. Soviet expedition lost in Kazakhstan desert. The director general of security announces his deep involvement in efforts to discover those responsible for the murders of Lieutenant Castillo and Señor Calvo Sotelo. An intoxicated motorist driving his car at top speed crashes into a wall. The blacksmith of Coria del Río, José Palma León, called Oselito, will run from Sevilla to Barcelona inside a wagon wheel to participate in the People’s Olympiad. To perform the autopsy on the body of Señor Calvo Sotelo, the occipital region was shaved, revealing two entry wounds made by bullets fired at close range. In honor of the feast of the Virgin of Carmen, lively celebrations, including a bullfight, have been held in the picturesque village of Santurce. The body of Don José Calvo Sotelo, dressed in a Franciscan habit and holding a crucifix, lay in state in a mahogany coffin with silver fittings. In London, a thirty-three-year-old mother of five is executed for poisoning her husband. The hippopotamus at the Barcelona Zoo has successfully given birth to a robust offspring. The permanent delegation of the Cortes prolongs the state of emergency. The terrace of the Hotel Nacional was the site of a banquet in honor of Dr. Guillermo Angulo, a pediatrician, for his recent appointment to the competitive position of director of children’s services in the National Institute of Social Welfare. The file on the death of Lieutenant Castillo has been given to a special judge, Señor Fernández Orbeta, who is proceeding with great diligence. A farm worker climbs through the window of a room where a young woman is sleeping and she shoots him to death. Señor Calvo Sotelo’s abductors cut the phone lines to prevent anyone from calling for help. Medieval festivities in Hitler’s Germany a great success. City in Anatolia is fuel to flames. Beginning next week, audiences at the National Palace are suspended until after the summer vacation of his excellency the president. The family of Señor Calvo Sotelo says he was taken from his home on the pretext of an official investigation. The eminent astronomer Señor Comas y Solá warns of the possibility of great electromagnetic disturbances in 1938. The director general of security congratulates the Murcia police on the capture of a dangerous Fascist who escaped prison. Lieutenant Castillo and his young wife married in Madrid last May. The eminent Spanish professor Señor García y Marín delivers the inaugural address at the formal opening session of the International Congress of Administrative Sciences in Warsaw. The military commander of Las Palmas, General Balmes, was examining a jammed automatic pistol when the weapon discharged and the bullet entered his stomach and exited his back. A Catalán engineer discovers a wine-based fuel to profitably replace gasoline. The efforts of the special tribunal successfully identify the leader of the abductors who entered the home of Señor Calvo Sotelo last Sunday. A young woman aboard a Spanish yacht anchored in Gibraltar accidentally shoots herself with the revolver she was handling and is seriously injured. When the British sovereign was on his way to Hyde Park to present new flags to a regiment of guards, a man broke through the police cordon and rushed at the monarch, revolver in hand. Those responsible for the death of Captain Faraudo have not surfaced, and the prosecutor demands seven years of imprisonment for the detained accomplices. The eminent Dr. Marañón and his family have left in the Madrid-to-Lisbon mail plane for the capital of the neighboring republic. The man responsible for the attack on King Edward VIII is a social reformer who has taken part in campaigns against the death penalty. A man who killed his mother and aunt in Barcelona has been sentenced to sixty years in prison. The widow of Señor Calvo Sotelo arrived in Lisbon yesterday and intends to spend the summer vacation with her family in Estoril. An army unit that represents Spain in Morocco has rebelled, turning on its own country and committing shameful acts against the nation. The heat wave in the United States has claimed the lives of 4,600 people. At this time, air, sea, and land forces, with the sad exception previously indicated, remain loyal to their duty and have turned against seditious elements to bring down this senseless, shameful movement. The Republican government is in control of the situation and states that in a matter of hours it will report to the nation.
“I’ll be back Thursday night, Friday morning at the latest,” he said to Adela, who hadn’t looked him in the eye or registered his presence since she came home from the hospital, and when she did talk to him, it was in a neutral, unemotional tone. Only he was aware, and perhaps his sensitive son too, of that indifference, that subtle retaliation, a wound inflicted with a blade that left no trace, discrediting anything he might do or say, the adulterous husband whose betrayal only she knew of, the man overwhelmed by a guilt she alone administered, for it wasn’t dispensed in public or through familial vilification. Adela, contrary to what Ignacio Abel in his cowardice expected, said nothing to anyone, sought no refuge in her parents or her brother, who questioned her solicitously, certain that the reason she’d attempted to take her own life was the infidelity of her husband, whom he’d never trusted. Not even to Víctor did she acknowledge that this had been her intention. She regained consciousness in the hospital bed and at first didn’t remember anything or know where she was. As she gradually recalled in disconnected flashes the letters and photographs, the key in the drawer lock, walking in high heels on the path soft with pine needles, the water entering her nose, she decided she would explain nothing, at first because of fatigue and then so as not to allow anyone to join in a resentment she preferred to discharge whole on the person who had humiliated her; it would belong to her marital intimacy as much as her love of earlier times. She wouldn’t raise her voice. She wouldn’t make any accusation or cause a scene. She wouldn’t lower herself to that level, despite the injury that the man she’d trusted for sixteen years had inflicted on her. She wouldn’t give anyone, least of all him, the opportunity to feel sorry for her, and she wouldn’t offer him the spectacle of a hysteria that would allow him to feel justified in his impulse to run away from a suffocating situation. She wouldn’t grant him the benefit of rejecting and then gradually accepting the false explanations, the promises to change inspired only by male cowardice and a transitory remorse. All she did was agree distractedly if he spoke to her, or look away, or imply with a subtle gesture she no longer believed anything that came out of his mouth, reducing his status from an adulterous husband to a mediocre impostor, a contemptible hypocrite. On Sunday morning, when the table was already set and lunch delayed because she and her parents still hoped Víctor would come from Madrid, she saw Ignacio Abel approach her and the children and understood he was going to tell them he’d go back to Madrid after lunch and not that night, or the next morning, as he had assured them on Saturday morning when he arrived. (The car was in the shop for repairs; the mechanic told him he could pick it up on Monday or Tuesday; one constantly makes plans in life, taking the immediate future for granted.) She saw that he was approaching but didn’t have the courage. Almost with pity (he was so impaired, so anxious in recent days), Adela noted his nervousness, she knew him so well, better than anyone, the way his gestures betrayed him, too awkward to lie, too lacking in courage to know what he wanted. She acted as if she were devoting all her attention to how the always negligent maids had arranged the silverware and napkins on the table under the trellis, on the north side of the garden, where it wasn’t so hot, where a stream that flowed over mossy rocks highlighted the sensation of coolness. When they were alone the fiction they usually performed in front of others was more uncomfortable. Without witnesses, they didn’t know how to speak. He delayed the moment of saying he’d leave after lunch; Adela guessed how disconcerting the continuing postponement of lunch was for him; time stood still and at the same time it was fleeing; the train’s departure was approaching without the meal arriving, without his saying anything. It was a relief for Ignacio Abel when Don Francisco de Asís came out to the garden holding his pocket watch. He too was waiting, wondering why his reckless fool of a son was so late in coming from Madrid. “And he knows how his mother worries,” said Don Francisco de Asís, with no theatrics now, looking older, his shirt without a collar, his suspenders hanging beside his trousers. “It’s nothing. He’s always late. We shouldn’t make others wait. Let’s eat.” Adela spoke to her father, but Ignacio Abel knew it was him she was addressing, letting him know she was aware of his impatience and couldn’t care less whether he went back to Madrid that afternoon.
“How annoying. And to think how much he likes my rice and chicken. Something must have happened to him.”
“I demanded his word of honor as my son and a gentleman that he wouldn’t attend Calvo Sotelo’s funeral.”
“God rest his soul.”
“And the poor Assault Guard lieutenant too.”
“I feel sorry for his widow, so young, she wasn’t to blame for anything.”
“They say she was pregnant.”
“What a feat for whoever committed the crime, making an orphan of a baby who hasn’t been born yet.”
“He promised me he’d come today. Something’s happened to the boy.”
“What happened to him is what happens every Sunday, Mamá. He gets distracted in Madrid and always arrives late.”
“Or with all this upset the trains aren’t running.”
“Of course they’re running. I’ve heard them go by on time all morning.”
“A sign that nothing serious has happened and you don’t have to worry.”
“We should have waited a little longer to put in the rice. There was no hurry.”
“But Mamá, we’re all famished.”
“That boy doesn’t eat right when he’s alone in Madrid. At least if I see him eating well on Sunday, I rest a little easier.”
“Keep a plate covered for him, and when he comes you’ll see how hungry he is when he eats.”
“But Adela, you know that if the rice sits too long it’s no good and the taste is ruined.”
“Your chicken and rice is a classic, Mamá. It gets better with time.”
“What ideas you have, Papá.”
Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia called each other Papá and Mamá. Ignacio Abel listened to the conversation and could predict the exchange almost word for word, just as he predicted the saffron-heavy taste of Doña Cecilia’s rice casserole and the sucking sounds of the diners, including the paterfamilias, as Don Francisco de Asís called himself. So many Sundays, one after the other, exactly the same, so many summers around this same table, the present identical to the past and undoubtedly to the future. Víctor would arrive at the last moment and Doña Cecilia would urge the maid to serve him his plate of rice, lamenting that its time was past, it’s a shame but rice can’t wait. Víctor would devour it, denying with a full mouth his mother’s protestations because the rice was delicious, he liked it better this way. But this Sunday lunch ended and Víctor hadn’t arrived, and Doña Cecilia, as she had so often, ordered the maid to keep the señorito’s plate of rice covered in the pantry, listening for a car coming down the road or a whistle announcing the arrival of a train.
He remembers the torpor into which the heat of a July afternoon and Doña Cecilia’s rice-and-chicken casserole immersed the people in the house after Sunday dinners. “If it’s so hot here,” someone would say, about to succumb to sleep, “I don’t want to think what they’re suffering in Madrid.” “There’s a difference of only three degrees centigrade.” The day before, on Saturday, he’d bought the paper before boarding the train, and a report on the Council of Ministers said nothing about the rumors of a military coup. “Everybody envies the noble Spanish institution of the siesta.” “I can’t get over how upset I am about that boy not tasting the rice today.” He couldn’t imagine that in a few hours he’d be with Judith, hearing her voice. “He still might come and have it for tea.” Impatient, he’d ring the bell at Madame Mathilde’s, which would emit a sound of chimes. “It’s not good anymore.” He’d cross the hot, dark house smelling of perfume and disinfectant, push the door open. “Your rice is incomparable, Mamá.” The sound of their voices was as lethargic as the cicadas at that hour of high heat. Ignacio Abel went into the cool, shadowy bedroom, put on a clean shirt and tie, and washed his hands with lavender soap. He looked at his watch over and over again with a reflexive gesture. Through the open window came the sound of the rusted swing his children were sitting on. Had he heard the train whistle? Impossible—it wasn’t due for another half hour. He’d have time to wait, alone, on a bench on the platform. Nothing mattered to him now. Only the expectation of his encounter with Judith, more and more real as the minutes brought it closer. He’d arrive in Madrid and the suffocating tension of Friday night would have dissipated, erased by the heat and the invincible normality. He’d take a taxi and ride through the empty city on a summer Sunday to the chalet of Madame Mathilde. Someone entered the bedroom and he turned, thinking he’d see Adela’s face. But it was Don Francisco de Asís in his collarless shirt and house slippers, his face that of a helpless old man.
“Ignacio, you shouldn’t go to Madrid this afternoon. My daughter should have told you this, but I’ll say it. Don’t go. Wait a few days.”
“I have to work tomorrow, early. You know I can’t stay.”
“Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow.”
Ignacio Abel closed his overnight bag, which was on the bed. He put his wallet and the keys to his apartment in a trouser pocket. He couldn’t waste a minute. Time on our hands. Don Francisco de Asís blocked the door, not a trace of farce on his slack features, shorter than he was; the image of the man he’d had for so many years had suddenly disappeared, and in his place was an old man dying of fear, his voice turned into the sound of entreaty.
“You’ll know how to take care of yourself, but my son won’t. My son will look for misfortune—if something hasn’t happened to him already and that’s why he didn’t come today. You have good judgment and he doesn’t, you know that. Promise me if something happens to him you’ll help him. You’re my son, just as he is. You’ve been like my own son since the day you walked into my house. What each of us thought or didn’t think doesn’t matter. You’re a good man. You know as well as I do that shooting down people as if they were animals doesn’t solve problems. All I’m asking is that when you’re in Madrid, if you find out my son’s involved in something idiotic, you’ll help him out. When will you be back?”
“Thursday night. Friday at the latest.”
“You’re a good man. Bring him back with you. My son’s almost forty years old and he is worse than a child—no sense. Why deceive ourselves? He’ll never get anything right. But I don’t want him in trouble. I don’t want him killed. Or doing something stupid. Don’t let him.”
“What can I do?”
“Please give me your word, Ignacio. I’m not asking for more. Give me your word and I’ll be reassured and able to reassure his mother.”
“You have my word.”
Ignacio Abel made a move to walk out of the room with his bag in one hand and his hat in the other, but Don Francisco de Asís didn’t move. He grabbed his son-in-law by the neck with both hands, embraced him, and gave him two kisses.