In the Night of Time (11 page)

 

If not for that paper printed in the Residence's noble, austere typography, perhaps he wouldn't have proof of the date he heard her name for the first time. But a few minutes before someone introduced them, he'd already recognized her in a kind of flash when, as he concluded his talk, the lights in the auditorium went on and he bowed with some discomfort when he heard well-mannered applause and woke from a fervor he now privately regretted or was embarrassed by, looking sideways toward the end of the first row where Adela and the girl, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia Camprubí, and María de Maeztu in her twisted hat were all sitting, and next to them, incongruous and young, exotic with her fair hair, pale skin, and energetic applause, the stranger who'd irritated him when she came in late. He remembered the woman at the piano, her back to him, who'd turned around, just as he recalled the ripe autumnal quality of the sunlight shining on her hair.

He embraced his daughter, who ran toward him as soon as he came down from the stage. “Why isn't your brother here with all of you?” “He had a German lesson with Señorita Rossman. Have you seen her father? Mamá couldn't get away from him.” Professor Rossman made his way through the crowd, enveloped him in his oppressive Germanic cordiality, his sour smell of unwashed clothing, a squalid pensión, and prostate disease. (“Professor Rossman smells like old cat piss,” his son once protested with the savage sincerity of a child.) “An excellent speech, my dear friend, excellent. You don't know how grateful I am for your invitation, yet another courtesy I can't reciprocate.” Behind the thick lenses of his round glasses, Professor Rossman's colorless eyes were wet with emotion, an excessive gratitude Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive. He did, in fact, smell of uric acid and had on a suit he had worn too much, and his bald oval head shone with sweat. He now scraped a living by selling fountain pens in cafés and with the small amount of money Ignacio Abel paid his daughter to give German lessons to Miguel and Lita. “But I don't want to keep you, my friend—you have many people to greet.” Ignacio Abel moved away, and Dr. Rossman remained alone, isolated by his obvious state of impoverished foreignness and misfortune.

While he looked after the ladies and accepted congratulations, agreed with comments, thought before responding to questions, Ignacio Abel looked through the crowd for the blond woman, fearing she'd left. It comforted his vanity that so many people had attended. The booming voice and corpulence of Don Juan Negrín stood out from the civilized murmur of the others. “I was the one who proposed to López Otero that he hire our friend Abel when we began construction of University City, and as you see, I wasn't wrong,” he heard Negrín say, in the center of a vaguely official group, with his mouth full. Waiters in short jackets held trays of small sandwiches and served glasses of wine, grenadine, and lemon soft drinks. Professor Rossman bowed stiffly to people who didn't know him or didn't remember that they'd been introduced, and took canapés as the trays passed, eating some and putting others in his jacket pocket. When he returned to the pensión that night, he'd share them with his daughter. Ignacio Abel looked at him out of the corner of his eye, conscious of too many things at the same time, constantly torn by feelings that were too disparate.

“Juan Ramón would have liked so much to hear the lovely things you said this evening,” Zenobia Camprubí commented. “‘The cubist rigor of white Andalusian villages'—how beautiful. And how grateful I am that you quoted him. But you know how delicate his health is, how difficult it is for him to set foot outside.”

“Ignacio always says your husband has an instinctive sense of architecture,” Adela said. “He never tires of admiring the composition of his books, the covers, the typography.”

“Not only that.” Ignacio Abel smiled, looked furtively beyond the circle of ladies who surrounded him, and didn't notice his wife's annoyance. “The poems, above all. The precision of each word.”

Moreno Villa spoke with the blond foreigner, gesticulating a great deal, leaning against the piano, and she, taller than he, nodded and occasionally let her glance wander over the crowd.

“I thought it went without saying that we don't admire Juan Ramón because of the external beauty of his books,” said Adela, suddenly very shy, deeply humiliated, like a much younger woman. Zenobia pressed her gloved hand.

“Of course, Adela darling. We all understood what you meant.”

A photographer circulating through the crowd asked Ignacio Abel to allow him to take a picture. “It's for
Ahora.
” Abel moved away from the ladies and observed that his daughter looked at him with pride, and the blond woman turned when she noticed the flash. The following day he was irritated to see himself in the newspaper photo with an overly complacent smile he hadn't been aware of and perhaps gave other people an idea of him that he disliked. The esteemed architect Señor Abel, associate director of construction at University City, spoke brilliantly last night on the rich history of traditional Spanish popular architecture to a select audience who gathered to hear him in the auditorium of the Student Residence. Cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, the gloved, mobile hands of the women, the delicate veils of their hats, the civilized sound of conversations. Judith Biely's laugh burst like a glass breaking on the polished wood floor. He would have liked to detach himself heedlessly from the admiring circle of ladies and walk straight across the hall to her.

“I liked the comparison of architecture and music,” said Señora de Salinas in an almost inaudible voice; she always had an air somewhere between fatigue and absence. “Do you really believe there's no middle ground between the popular tradition and the modern objects of the twentieth century?”

“The nineteenth century is all bourgeois adornment and bad copies,” the engineer Torroja interrupted. “Pastry decorations made of stucco instead of cream.”

“I agree,” said Moreno Villa. “The trouble is, the fine arts in Spain haven't come into the twentieth century yet. The public is bullheaded and patrons are backward.”

“You only have to look at the villa with fake Mudéjar tiles where his excellency the president of the Republic has his private residence.”

“Architecture for the bandstand.”

“Worse, the bullring.”

Moreno Villa and the blond woman had gradually approached. She wasn't as young as she'd seemed at a distance because of her haircut and self-assurance. Her features looked as if they'd been drawn with a precise, fine pencil. An old acquaintance of the ladies and their eminent husbands, Moreno Villa carried out with old-fashioned ease the protocol of introductions.
I looked at you up close for the first time and it seemed I'd always known you and that no one but you was in that hall.
With secret male disloyalty, Ignacio Abel saw his wife comparing herself to the young foreigner whose strange name he heard for the first time without catching the surname. A Spanish woman, mature, widened by motherhood and the neglect of age, her hair waved in a style that had become out-of-date, so similar to the other women, her friends and acquaintances, fond of midafternoon teas, artistic and literary talks for ladies at the Lyceum Club, the wives of professors, midlevel government dignitaries, inhabitants of an enlightened and rather fictitious Madrid that took on something of reality only in places like the Residence, or in the shop of popular Spanish crafts run by Zenobia Camprubí.

“Will you forgive me for coming late to your lecture? I'm always in a rush and I lost my way in the halls,” Judith said.

“If you'll forgive me for interrupting your rehearsal the other day.”

But she hadn't noticed, or didn't remember.

“My dear Abel, give me a hug. You've won two ears and a tail in a very demanding bullring—excuse the metaphor, since I know you hate the national pastime.” Negrín broke in with his excessive presence, the physical pride of a large man in a country of short men. Moreno Villa made the introductions, and this time Ignacio Abel listened closely to the foreigner's name.

“Biely,” said Negrín. “Isn't that Russian?”

“My parents were Russian. They immigrated to America at the beginning of the century.” Judith spoke a clear, careful Spanish. “Don't you like bullfights?”

When she asked the question she looked at Ignacio Abel in a way that canceled out the presence of Negrín and Moreno Villa. His daughter came toward him, took his hand, told him in a quiet voice that her mother was a little tired. The time he spent with Judith would always be measured, threatened, always subject to someone's questioning, to an anguished usury of hours and minutes, of wristwatches you don't want to look at yet glance at sideways, public clocks that slowly approach the hour of an appointment or mark with indifference the inexorable moment of saying goodbye that can't be put off any longer.

“Our friend Abel feels the same as the eminent husband of Señora Camprubí, who's here now,” said Negrín. Adela and Zenobia had approached the group. Adela looked at the foreigner to whom she hadn't been introduced with the distrustful curiosity she frequently displayed with strangers, men or women. “His secular, anti-military, and anti-bullfight principles are so solid that his worst nightmare would be a battlefield Mass in a bullring.”

Negrín celebrated his own joke with a laugh. He could no more control the volume of his voice than the pressure of his hand, and didn't realize that Judith Biely hadn't completely understood what he said, spoken rapidly and enveloped in the noise of nearby conversations.

“Great Spanish intellectuals have written beautiful things about bullfighting.” Judith had thought out the entire sentence in Spanish before daring to say it.

“It would be better for everyone if they wrote about things that were more serious and less barbaric,” said Ignacio Abel, regretting it immediately because he noticed that she blushed, the foreign pink of her skin more intense on her cheeks and neck, like a rash.

 

Adela reproached him afterward in the taxi, as they were crossing the deserted edges of Madrid at night, with stretches of unlit building lots and streetcar tracks that would be lost in rural darkness beyond the last illuminated corners. “How cold you are sometimes, my dear. You don't moderate your words or realize the overly serious face you put on. First you make me look ridiculous in front of Zenobia and then you say something rude about the bullfights to that poor foreign girl who was only trying to make polite conversation. She must have felt awful. You never gauge your strength. You don't seem to realize how much you can wound. Or maybe you do, and that's why you do it.” But what she was rebuking him for, not with her words but with the tone in which she pronounced them, was that he'd looked to her to alleviate his insecurity but afterward hadn't shared his relief and satisfaction at his success, hadn't bothered to thank her or even to notice the deep conjugal emotion that she, docile and at the same time protective, felt, the too-comforting admiration he no longer seemed to need. Leaning back in the cab, exhausted, lightheaded, Ignacio Abel looked with some private hostility at Adela's profile, so close, so overly familiar, the face of a woman he suddenly realized he didn't love, with whom he hadn't associated the idea of love for many years, if he ever had. He couldn't recall. He could perhaps recover a trace of old tenderness by identifying in the faces of his children the features of a much younger Adela. But he was reluctant to think about the past, the years of their engagement, and perhaps he was ashamed of having loved her more than he was now willing to remember, with an antiquated, verbose love, almost the kind found on a hand-colored romantic postcard, the love of the young, ignorant man it had been difficult for him to stop being, the man Adela recalled with a memory that was both compassionate and ironic. What she saw in him couldn't be detected now by anyone who knew only the accomplished, solid man of today, none of the ladies who'd watched and listened to him this evening at the Residence, tall on the platform, well dressed in his pinstriped suit and handmade shoes, his flexible high-quality collar and English bow tie. She'd tied the bow before he left the apartment. They saw the finished man, not the precarious rough drafts that had preceded him, the architect who projected images of old Andalusian houses and German buildings with right angles, broad windows, and nautical railings on the terraces, who knew how to pronounce names in German and English and appropriately interrupt a serious exposition with an ironic aside that flattered the audience by presupposing their ability to catch it. But she, Adela, sitting next to their daughter and her friends in the first row, pleased by her husband's brilliance, knew things about him the others did not, and could measure the distance between the man of this evening and the unpolished, half-grown boy he was when they first met, calibrate the degree of artifice in his manner and worldliness, for at those moments everything in him was too irreproachable to be completely true.
Although it may not matter to you, there's no one in this world who can love you more than I because there's no one who has known you so intimately your whole life and not just a few months or a few years.
The scorned lover is a legitimist who vainly defends ancestral rights no one believes in. She doesn't see the signs, doesn't suspect what's incubating inside him, in the still unmodified presence of the other, doesn't perceive the slightly greater degree of ill will in his silence, the secret, not fully conscious disloyalty of the man who rides beside her in the taxi, tired and content, relieved to be returning home, mentally listing the people he knew who attended his lecture, the ones
Heraldo,
Ahora,
and
El Sol
will mention tomorrow in articles he'll look for with disguised impatience, for his vanity lies in not showing his vanity, and it disconcerts him not to be immune to the weakness that he finds so unpleasant in others. Now the taxi was driving down Calle Príncipe de Vergara, advancing more slowly along the row of young trees on the central promenade, some displaying the dimmed bulbs and paper pennants of a recent festival. “We're close to home now,” said the girl, who sat next to the driver, erect and attentive, as if responsibility for their ride home had been entrusted to her. Coming toward them on the sidewalk were an older man and a tall, thin woman holding his arm, walking close to the wall on their way to the metro station. “Look, Papá, we're lucky, Professor Rossman got here ahead of us and has already picked up his daughter.”