PERHAPS HE WAS ALREADY dead while I was listening to Bergamín, he thinks now, remembering the somewhat high-pitched, monotonous voice in a half-light of leaded glass, remembering the long clammy hand, the hand of a man susceptible to the cold, awkward in his aviator’s leather jacket, who looked into his eyes for a moment and then lowered his gaze to continue talking while his thin fingers played with a letter opener shaped like a Toledan sword which must have been expropriated from the evicted owners of the palace. Perhaps Professor Rossman was already dead or waiting to be killed in a basement or the damp wine cellar of one of those palaces converted into prisons or barracks for the militias, or into places of execution, and I might have arrived in time to save him if I’d been more astute or more aggressive or hadn’t been discouraged from continuing the search or trusted so uselessly in Bergamín’s help or had been more insistent with Negrín, who managed to save so many people, including his own brother, a friar he helped escape to France—“and not without difficulty,” Negrín had told him, “as if the poor man were a conspirator or a fifth columnist, my brother, who hadn’t left his convent in twenty years.” He had to wait, Bergamín said to Ignacio Abel, looking into his eyes for a moment from the cavern of his own, shadowed by heavy eyebrows, but he didn’t accompany him to the door of the pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Mudéjar office; he had to have confidence, not believe the lies of enemy propaganda that had filled foreign newspapers with reports of crimes and excesses committed in our territory, with doctored photographs of churches being desecrated and militiamen pointing their rifles at innocent priests, as if they were the martyrs of a new persecution of Christianity, they who’d been the first to betray the evangelical message and encourage and bless the spilling of innocent blood, said Bergamín. He raised his voice slightly, but not too much because he was hoarse, to give instructions to his secretary: “Mariana, take Comrade Abel’s address and phone number, and connect me right away with the director general of security.” He smiled a feeble smile from the other side of the enormous desk, carved, Abel noticed, with the depraved self-indulgence of rich Spaniards, with the brutal Spanish display of money, then raised his handkerchief again to his nose, as thin as a bird’s beak, sneezing behind the closed door while Ignacio Abel gave his phone number and address to the secretary, an attractive young woman possessed of a severe beauty, light eyes, and short hair combed back with a part. Perhaps he’d met her before and didn’t remember; perhaps her militiawoman’s trousers and shirt and the pistol at her waist made her a stranger to him. “Ask for me when you call. Mariana Ríos. I’ll write down my number for you. Though you know you can’t always get a connection.” He must have taken a wrong turn when he looked for the exit and found himself crossing a large hall with aristocratic coats of arms and standards on the walls, an enormous fireplace with medieval pretensions, probably authentic suits of armor in the corners, some with militiamen’s caps placed at a slant over the helmets. On a long dining table pushed against the wall and transformed into a stage, a small band rehearsed a burlesque waltz with syncopated trills on the saxophone and trumpet and rolls on the drum. Young workers carried in large trunks and left them open on the parquet floor, exchanging jokes and cigarettes with the girls kneeling in front of them, who with preening gestures pulled out evening gowns, old dress uniforms, tailcoats, hats with ostrich feathers. A militiaman marched up and down carrying a halberd on his shoulder and wearing a diplomat’s three-cornered hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a lit cigarette in his mouth. The band began to play a foxtrot, and two of the girls went up onstage, keeping time with a loud stamping of their heels that resonated in the coffered ceiling, one of them wearing a tiara of feathers and fake diamonds above her small round face. A clatter of typewriters came from somewhere, a powerful cadence of Linotypes working. The smell of ink mixed with the odor of camphor and dust from the clothing recently exhumed from the large trunks, which had gilt fittings and labels from international hotels and ocean liners. The hall was cluttered with mountains of books, paintings leaning against the walls, piles of recently printed newspapers and posters. With a hammer and chisel a militiaman forced open the doors of an armoire, and out tumbled an avalanche of footwear, men’s, women’s, patent leather, satin, shoes, boots, mules, everything in perfect condition, spilling onto the floor covered with dust and papers and cigarette butts. In the palace courtyard, in front of the entrance stairway, the poet Alberti pointed his small camera at a group of dignitaries with a foreign air—round glasses, carefully trimmed goatees, looks of irritation or impatience. He asked them to stand closer together, gesturing a great deal, giving instructions in precarious French.
He returned home at dusk after looking in vain for Negrín at the Workers’ Cooperative and the Café Lion (where they told him he hadn’t come back from the Sierra; someone repeated the rumor that there’d be a new government and Negrín would be appointed minister of something). He opened the door, exhausted, and Señorita Rossman was waiting, as if she hadn’t moved since he left her in the morning, sitting on the edge of the chair, the glass of water before her untouched, her hands in her lap, staring into the fading light of the empty dining room, the sounds of the street and the whistles of martins and the crackle of distant gunfire filling the air. He invented hope, vague measures taken in administrative offices that would undoubtedly have a favorable outcome. He offered to accompany Señorita Rossman to the pensión, unless she preferred to spend the night in his apartment, where there were more than enough bedrooms. Señorita Rossman blushed slightly when she said no: thanks to her job, she had a safe-conduct to move freely around Madrid, and there was time to get back before dark.
“Don’t worry,” said Ignacio Abel, hearing the lack of conviction in his own voice. “It doesn’t look like anything serious.”
“But do you know where they’re holding him?”
He looked at her before responding, seeking the right tone so his negative reply wouldn’t sound completely discouraging.
“You know the situation we’re in, things are complicated. But your father is not in irresponsible hands. Influential people have assured me that everything possible’s being done to find him. Remember—your father has an international reputation.”
“So did García Lorca.”
“But the other side killed García Lorca. There’s a difference.”
Señorita Rossman looked at him, offered her strong hand, her rough palm. She left with her head down, took the stairs, passed through the front door, went out to the street, and only then looked up, suspecting she was being followed, hoping to find a streetcar that would take her to the center of the city, a woman alone, a foreigner, conspicuous despite her efforts to keep invisible. And as Ignacio Abel saw her walk away, watching from a balcony (the plants withered, the soil hard in the pots Adela tended so carefully), Professor Rossman perhaps was already dead, on the cement floor of a basement or in a ditch or ravine or beside a wall on the outskirts of Madrid, dead and nameless, with no identification documents in his pockets, only things no one would bother to steal from a corpse: the torn half of a movie ticket, a copper coin caught in an almost inaccessible fold, a book of matches, a small red-and-blue pencil, sharpened at both ends, a stub but still serviceable, the kind used to underline—any of the trivial objects that continued to fascinate Professor Rossman with the humble mystery of their usefulness and form. But he, whose fingers had always been busy, examining by touch what his myopic eyes couldn’t, automatically playing with anything on the table or in his pocket, died with his hands tied behind his back with a coarse piece of twine that sank into his swollen, violet-colored skin. How strange to have come to a country to die like this, he must have thought, with the gentle fatalism of those who let themselves be pushed into the back of a truck, then get out on their own and follow their executioners to a wall peppered with bullet holes and bloodstains or to the edge of a ravine, their eyes squinting to avoid the glare of headlights, the faint silhouettes readying their weapons. What must he have seen in those last few seconds: the shadows of the pines in the Casa de Campo, perhaps, the sky covered in stars, a blue-black night in early September, a cool night.
“If your friend hasn’t done anything wrong, he’ll show up eventually,” Bergamín had said in his high-pitched, composed voice. As he rubbed his hands together when he rose to his feet behind the desk in his office, perhaps Professor Rossman had already been dead for several hours. Or was still alive and was killed on the night his daughter arrived at the pensión and locked herself in the room no one had straightened in her absence, and Ignacio Abel closed the balcony door after watching her walk to the corner of Calle O’Donnell. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day, just a cone of roasted peanuts he’d bought from the vendor on the Paseo de Recoletos after leaving the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. In the kitchen he found a can of sardines in oil and ate them sitting at the table, placing a double sheet of newspaper under the can, dipping pieces of hard bread into the thick oil, scraping the bottom of the can with his fork. There was something primitive in the act of eating alone, in his reluctance to lay a tablecloth and look for a napkin. He wiped his fingers on the stained sheet of newspaper, and on it he left the empty can and the fork with brilliant drops of oil. He paid attention only to his clothes, which the doorman’s wife washed and ironed for him once a week. The porter had suggested that once in a while his wife could clean the house, until the situation had been resolved, though it didn’t seem as if all this could last much longer, two or three weeks and it would be over, and the señora and the children and the two maids would be back from the other side of the Sierra. But he didn’t like the idea of the two of them spying on him, or was simply too embarrassed to let them see the disrepair, the dust, the newspapers strewn everywhere, the dirty sheets on the bed he never made, the bad smell and grime in the kitchen and bathroom. He tried to telephone Negrín, the phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He dialed the number Bergamín’s secretary had given him, and when he was about to hang up he heard a woman’s voice asking, in a loud voice, who was calling, a clamor of voices and music in the background. Mariana Ríos wasn’t there, neither was Comrade Bergamín, best to call again first thing tomorrow morning. He thought about Judith Biely as he sat by his desk, imagining the letters he could write but wouldn’t know where to send. Resentful, he sees himself fading from her memory on the very night that Professor Rossman waits in a dark basement or lies dead, anonymous, his body unclaimed. He turned on the radio and an announcer with a sonorous voice proclaimed yet again the reconquest of Aragón and the unstoppable advance of the people’s militias toward Zaragoza. He turned down the volume to look for one of the enemy’s stations, and on Radio Sevilla a similar though more distant voice, besieged by whistles, announced the heroic resistance of the Alcázar de Toledo against whose Numantian fortress the waves of Marxist hordes shattered in vain. When all this was over, not only rubble and dead bodies will have to be cleared away, but words as well, a rigorous national abstention from adjectives: unstoppable, uncontainable, imperishable, unpardonable, unavoidable, inflammatory, frenzied, heroic. He heard footsteps and turned off the radio, then the light. Standing motionless in the dark, he heard voices, among them the doorman’s. They knocked at a door on the other side of the landing. He tiptoed down the long hallway. The wall clock had stopped, he hadn’t wound it in a long time. He reached the door and pressed his face to the peephole but saw no light on the landing, heard nothing. Beyond the shutters, Calle Príncipe de Vergara and Madrid’s roofed horizon were an impenetrable darkness, full of terrors, like the forests in the stories he read to his children when they were little. Flashes of headlights, sirens. In the silence, someone’s footsteps, a conversation, the click of a cigarette lighter. He threw himself onto the unmade bed without taking off his clothes or shoes, fell asleep, then woke with a filthy aftertaste of sardines in oil, his heart pounding in his chest. The bed, the lamp on the night table, the entire house shook, and for a moment he had no idea where that prolonged crash of thunder came from. Then, the sirens: enemy planes flying low and leisurely bombing targets in a city with no antiaircraft defenses except for rifles and pistols firing from rooftops at the German Junkers. Motionless, on his back, with lethargy stronger than fear, he felt the ground vibrate less and less as the sound of the planes’ engines faded away. They bomb poor neighborhoods, not this one. They know many people here are on their side. And what an air force we have, only some French discards from the Great War, no powerful alarms that can actually shake the air but pitiful sirens, which some Assault Guards have mounted on their motorcycles and turn with one hand while they hold on to the handlebars with the other. The whistle and roar of the bombs, a long silence, broken by ambulance sirens and fire engine bells. When he’s still half asleep, an unexpected and vivid memory of Judith begins to take shape, her body tensing, her eyes closed, her heels rubbing against the sheet, her hands guiding his fingers, making him slow down, she moans softly in his ear. In the darkness of the conjugal bedroom, on wrinkled, dirty sheets where there was no trace of Adela’s scent, he tried to imagine that it was Judith’s hand touching him, that when he masturbated with a brusque, mechanical urge he was invoking her delicate body. But it was useless, a spasm and it was over, leaving him with only a rankling, sterile longing, a feeling of absurdity, almost embarrassment, a fifty-year-old man jerking off in the insomnia of war. It was growing light when he fell asleep, a cold, wet drop on his stomach, filled with remorse for not having gone out in search of Professor Rossman.
He woke thinking it was late, but it was not yet eight o’clock. He took a shower, brushed his teeth, shaved the gray and white stubble of his beard, avoiding his eyes in the mirror. At least there was still running water and he still had clean and pressed clothes in the closet. He’d go back to see Bergamín. He’d ask again at the offices and requisitioned palaces and militia barracks he’d visited the previous day. He’d go to the State Security Office, the Workers’ Cooperative, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Europa movie house, the Beatriz movie house—he’d been told that since the basements were full, they held some prisoners, their hands tied, in theaters. He was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror in the entrance hall when the telephone rang. It was Señorita Rossman, begging his pardon for calling so early, silent for a moment when he told her he still had no information, but she shouldn’t worry, he was about to leave the house to continue the search. He called the number for Bergamín’s secretary, but no one answered. The urgency of war didn’t change office hours. He remembered a poster in the metro: EVERYONE TO THE FRONT! DEATH BEFORE RETREAT! THE RED BULLETS REGIMENT CALLS ON YOU! (Registration from 9 to 1 and from 4 to 7.) Not even for Death Before Retreat were administrative hours expanded. He went for breakfast to a nearby dairy store on Calle Don Ramón de la Cruz. It looked closed. He knocked on the metal blinds and the owner, who knew him, let him in, looking up and down the street, then closing the blinds again. In his old life, the owner would come up the service stairs early each morning carrying the milk and butter his children liked best, and in the summer he sold delicious meringue ice cream. The counter and walls preserved their usual white brilliance, but a calendar with the Virgin of Almudena, and a framed print of the Christ of Medinaceli, had disappeared from the walls. “I open up for you because I know and trust you, Don Ignacio, but tell me what I should do if one of those patrols with muskets shows up and requisitions several days’ worth of stock. They take a hundred-liter can of milk they say is for militiamen at the front or for orphaned children and pay me with a voucher on a scrap of paper, and you tell me what good that is to me, or they raise their fists and boom: UHP! Unite, brothers of the proletariat! They say they’re all proletarian brothers, and what am I, a bourgeois? Haven’t I been getting up at four in the morning every day since before my head reached the counter? He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat, they always say. And if they take what’s mine away from me, what am I to eat while I work myself to death? And what work are they doing if they are not at the front? What committee or what International Red Aid will feed my children if I have to close the store because they steal everything from me, or if it occurs to them one morning to collectivize my business, or pronounce me an insurgent, and I end up filled with bullets at a cemetery wall in Almudena or on the San Isidro meadow or wherever it is they kill people? Excuse me for letting off steam, Don Ignacio, but you’re a decent man, and if I stay here all day without talking to anybody, I think my head will explode. How much longer do you think all this can go on? Because if things don’t get better soon, in a few days I won’t have any milk or coffee left, and the reserves of sugar are running out. Wouldn’t you like another coffee, on the house?” The shop owner was a fat, gentle man with a soft double chin, as if nourished by the same excellent butter and thick cream he was proud to sell to his distinguished clientele, almost all gone now, fled or in hiding, and some turned out of their houses after midnight and executed not far away, on some empty lot. He spoke to Ignacio Abel and at the same time was attentive to the cup of coffee and the expression with which this rare patron, who hadn’t left Madrid and didn’t seem frightened, sipped it, and every few seconds his restless eyes went to the partly open door when he heard footsteps or the sound of a car engine on the street. The jolly merchant who ceremoniously greeted the señoras of the neighborhood and knew the names of all the maids now crouched in the store he had refused to abandon or close, the redoubt with the white counter and tiles into which he’d put the effort of a lifetime, the inhuman small hours of the morning, the céntimo-by-céntimo saving, the servility toward ladies and gentlemen who insisted on being called Don or Doña or Señora de and Señora Marquesa and yet sometimes didn’t pay their dairy bills; and now, without understanding why, he who’d never been political had to live in fear, he said, lowering his voice, in fear that somebody would come and take away his life’s work or shoot him. Then his eyes filled with fear as it dawned on him that his trust in Ignacio Abel was without foundation. Well-known, respectable-looking neighbors were not above accusing others if it meant saving themselves or staying in the good graces of a gang of killers. Besides, how could a man of his rank still live so comfortably in this neighborhood without being in cahoots with those killers? The same affable expression was on his face but now doubt had passed like a shadow across his eyes, and they became evasive as he charged Ignacio Abel for the coffee and thanked him for the tip. One had to look closely to read fear, because everyone knew that showing it openly could be interpreted as a sign as clear as buying batteries of a certain size to tune in enemy stations, or slipping, early on a Sunday morning, into the side door of a church, not yet converted into a garage or warehouse, where Masses were still being said.
But fear also had a subtle hue on the faces of those who felt relatively safe: the doorman, for instance, proud in his blue coverall and leather straps and raising his fist when parades passed by, remembered defending, among a group of deliverymen and maids from the neighborhood, what he called the forces of order and celebrating the Foreign Legion’s victory against the rebellious Asturian miners in 1934. Somebody else might also remember. Ignacio Abel saw a familiar face approaching (perhaps a neighbor, making a clumsy attempt to hide his bourgeois status, unshaven, without a tie, wearing a beret instead of a hat), saw the fear in those eyes as they evaded him. He couldn’t see it in his own face but felt its effect and imagined that same look, unfamiliar and frightened, persisting in an impossible pretense when an armed patrol came toward him, or a car stopped abruptly beside him, or at night when footsteps raced up the marble stairs of his overly opulent building. But who would acknowledge the terror, even in secret, deep down inside, each with his share of the great universal, unnamed fear one learned to hide in the light of day but unraveled when night fell and the streets emptied.
He walked along the street on the second day of his search for Professor Rossman, and in every face he recognized a different gradation of fear, more obvious the more it was hidden, the more it was wrapped in euphoria, lightheartedness, or feigned indifference. He saw fear in the families of fleeing campesinos who walked along Calle Toledo; he saw it in people coming out of the metro, getting off a streetcar at the last stop, at the empty lots where he began to look that morning for Professor Rossman among the corpses; on the faces of the dead fear had dissolved or hardened into a grotesque grimace. But fear was also in those who went there for the pleasure of walking among the bodies and pointing at postures they found comic or ridiculous, and with a foot turning up a face that had fallen into the dirt. There was fear in their laughter as well as in their silence, in the fatigued indifference of municipal workers who loaded corpses into trucks, and in the meticulousness of the court officials who prepared death certificates and consulted their watches to make a note of the time the bodies were found. Unidentified male, bullet wounds in the head and chest, perpetrator or perpetrators unknown. He went to see Bergamín again, but he was not in his office yet, and the secretary, not the one he had met before, knew nothing about measures taken to resolve the disappearance of Professor Rossman, but she made a note just in case, along with Ignacio Abel’s address and telephone number. He climbed on a moving streetcar going up the Castellana and got off at the Museum of Natural Sciences and the road to the Student Residence. Was it Negrín who’d told him that the bodies of the executed appeared there too, every morning? “On our playing fields, my dear Abel, against the museum walls, steps from my laboratory, which has been closed for who knows how long.”
“I hear them every night from here, close by,” said Moreno Villa, aged, thinner, unshaven, looking like a beggar or a martyr in a painting by Ribera.
The Residence was now a barracks for militiamen and Assault Guards. Next to the reception desk was the guardroom, a mass of armed men who came and went with rifles on their shoulders, straw mattresses spread on the floor, smelling like a pigsty, tobacco smoke everywhere, the walls full of posters covered with handwritten slogans, the floor littered with cigarette butts. In the corridor leading to Moreno Villa’s room were hospital beds occupied by wounded militiamen; the air reeked of disinfectant and blood. Yellowish, badly shaven faces turned incuriously as he passed, eyes possessed by a kind of fear unlike any other, the somber, hermetic fear of those who have seen death.
“I hear a car driving up the hill, the doors opening and closing, orders, sometimes laughter, as if it were a party. Then bursts of gunfire. By counting them I know how many they’ve killed. Sometimes they’re sloppy or drunk, then it takes longer.”
Moreno Villa in his large, ascetic room, the cell of the anchorite he’d become after not seeing anyone for so long or not venturing out for days, not even to the garden at the Residence’s entrance, now occupied by Assault Guard trucks and motorcycles. He went out only to go to work at the archives of the National Palace, with the punctuality of a dutiful official who didn’t have to be asked. The president of the Republic, who had his office near Moreno Villa’s, had suggested that he sleep at the palace. But he preferred to return every evening to the Residence, as incongruous among militiamen and the wounded as he would have been anywhere else in Madrid, in his old-fashioned suit, high shoes, and the bow tie he’d been in the habit of wearing since he came back from the United States, the trip he’d written about in a short, heartfelt book, as all of his were, a book by an author who enjoys some prestige but whom no one reads. He was just as Ignacio Abel had seen him a year earlier, surrounded by books, sitting near the window in front of a small, unfinished still life, perhaps the same one he’d started in late September, in the remote past of less than a year ago.
“By this time they’ve already taken away the bodies. A municipal crew comes in a slow garbage truck. I recognize it by the sound of the engine. They arrive a little after dawn. If your friend was here last night, he must be in the morgue by now. Rossman was his name, wasn’t it? Or still is, poor man, who knows. I remember chatting with him once.”
“Last year, in October, he came to my lecture.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? Remembering anything that happened before all this began. Things happen and they seem inevitable, as if anyone could have predicted them. But who could have told us our Residence would be turned into a barracks? A barracks and also a hospital, a few days ago. Now, aside from the shots at night we have to listen to the moans of those poor boys. You have no idea how they scream, Abel. No medicine, no sedatives, no anesthesia, no nothing. Not even good gauze to control hemorrhages. I leave my room and find puddles of blood on the floor. We didn’t know how sticky blood is, how shocking it is, the quantity of blood a human body holds. We thought we were men with experience and judgment, but we were nothing and knew nothing. And the little we knew is ridiculous and serves no purpose. Don José Ortega stayed for a few weeks before he left Spain, like so many others. He was ill. It was painful to see him sitting in a hammock in the sun, an old man, his mouth hanging open, yellow, with that lock of hair he always carefully combed to hide his bald spot. Our great philosopher, the man who had an opinion on everything, silent, looking into the void, dying of fear, just like all of us, or more so, because he was afraid his fame would work against him and he would not be allowed to leave Spain. I don’t know if you know that some people came to ask him to sign the manifesto of intellectuals in favor of the Republic. Bergamín, Alberti, someone else, all of them with boots and leather straps, with pistols. But Don José didn’t sign. As sick as he was, feverish, scared. They left and he was much worse. I approached him to ask after his health, and he didn’t answer.”
“And they didn’t ask you to sign the manifesto?”
“I’m not famous enough. It’s the advantage of being invisible.”
“Poor Lorca didn’t have it.”
“He left Madrid because he was frightened. He took the express after they killed Lieutenant Castillo and Calvo Sotelo, July 13. I spoke with him a few days earlier. He was very frightened.”
“I saw him from a taxi. He was sitting on the terrace of a café on Recoletos, in a light suit, smoking a cigarette, as if waiting for someone. I waved to him but I don’t think he saw me.”
“Now we spend our lives trying to remember the last time we did something or saw a friend. It frightens us to think it was the last time. Before, we would say goodbye as if we were going to live forever. How many times have you and I said goodbye, Abel my friend, or passed each other if we were in a hurry with no more than a tip of the hat. When we say goodbye this time, it’s not unlikely we won’t ever see each other again.”
“It’s dangerous for you to be living here alone, so removed from everything. Come to my apartment. I’m there alone. One of the maids stayed with my family in the Sierra and the other disappeared. You’ll be safer and we can keep each other company.”
“Don’t worry about me, Abel my friend. Who’ll want to do anything to an old man?”
“You’re not that old and you aren’t safe. No one is. I saved myself at the last moment almost by accident.”
What would happen to Moreno Villa, sedentary and stubborn, determined to live as if the world hadn’t collapsed around him, alone in the Residence, wandering the hallways and classrooms where the foreign students who’d left toward the end of July wouldn’t return, where the beautiful exotic voices he loved no longer sounded? He spent sleepless nights in the dark, listening to the gunfire, the car engines, the shouting, the laughter.
“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about a good deal lately, Moreno? An article you published last year about the desire everyone seemed to have to kill his adversary. I thought you were exaggerating.”
“I’ve been thinking about it too. ‘I Was Killing Them All’ was the title. Then I saw it in El Sol and was almost ashamed to have used those words, though it was meant to be ironic. Some words shouldn’t be written or pronounced. You say something without conviction or thinking, and once you’ve said it, it begins to be true.”
They said nothing else, uncomfortable in a silence they couldn’t break. A bugle sounded from the garden in front of the Residence. On the athletic fields groups of militiamen were training to the beat of a drum.
“And you, Abel, do you plan to leave?”
He took a while to answer. How could Moreno Villa believe that if he was leaving, or trying to, it was because he’d planned the trip long before the war started, because in that earlier time, already as distant as a dream, he’d been invited to spend an academic year at an American university, to give classes and perhaps design a library? Others had already left, taking advantage of privileges, inventing international missions, diseases that required treatment abroad. There were rumors that Ortega himself hadn’t really been gravely ill when he left, that at heart he sympathized with the Fascists or was in some way involved with them and feared reprisals. Ignacio Abel’s words told the truth but sounded false, even to his own ears; they sounded like the lie of someone who’s going to desert and repeats an explanation, an honorable alibi, especially when he heard himself saying that worst of all was not hearing anything from his wife and children on the other side of the front, so close and yet in another country, another world, the antithesis of this one but just as delirious. “I expected to take them with me,” he said, knowing it wasn’t quite true, knowing the lie contaminated his sorrow over the absence of his children, imagining that perhaps Moreno Villa suspected other reasons, not just his possible cowardice and intention to flee Spain, but also what he’d probably learned or been told in a Madrid so rarefied and filled with gossip, especially because he lived in the Residence and had met Judith, witnessed with the astute eyes of an easily infatuated bachelor the first meetings between her and Ignacio Abel. Out of vanity or lack of imagination, you convince yourself that others pay attention to every little thing you do. Moreno Villa’s sad, questioning eyes troubled Ignacio Abel, they probed his conscience, but as he spoke he noticed in his own voice a tone of imposture or guilt. Moreno Villa was thinking about something else, as much a prisoner of his ruminations and uncertainties as Abel was, just as perturbed by the eruption of all this madness, this bloody world he didn’t understand and couldn’t escape and couldn’t ignore.
He said goodbye, promising he’d come back, and on the shaded side of the hill where the Residence stood like a tower keeping watch over the outskirts of Madrid, he looked for corpses, looked for Dr. Karl Ludwig Rossman. The scent of rockrose, thyme, and rosemary made him think of his children, the garden of the house in the Sierra, the path to the pond. He felt surrounded by death, days and nights haunted by an emptiness more powerful than the proximity of real people. Adela and his two children, their absence more real than his presence in the shadows of the house. And the thought of Judith Biely, invoked by his footsteps on dry grass, Judith coming toward him at nightfall through the grove of trees lit by paper lanterns while dance music from a radio played nearby, Judith still recently and secretly his, Judith seated with a group of foreign students, talking, looking at him with a complicity only he noticed. Behind the solitary dome of the Museum of Natural Sciences ran the irrigation ditch called the Canalillo. When the good weather came, metal tables and chairs were set up there, garlands of café lights hung among the tree branches. On the wall of the café kiosk, the whitewash was chipped by bullets and stained with blood. There were shoes in the summer’s dry undergrowth, widowed shoes that had lost their mates, some women’s, some men’s, some worn down, and others still with the gleam of a recent shoeshine. He stepped on things that crunched: a shotgun cartridge, eyeglass lenses. He examined the frames but none resembled Professor Rossman’s. In that cool morning at the end of August, the cicadas’ chirping merged with the sound of running water in the irrigation ditch. Beyond the shade of the Lombardy poplars, the great expanse of Madrid, a city calmed by summer. From the hill of the Residence, not a trace of smoke, not a sign of war.