He inspects the bedroom, slowly becomes conscious of every detail, the high bed with its plain wooden headboard, plump white pillows, a white quilt on which he left his unopened suitcase. Pressing on the soft quilt is like submerging his hand in deep, warm, still water. He regains the pleasure of starched bed linen, fragrant sheets, the warm shelter of domestic comfort. How would it be to have Judith Biely with him in this room — Judith who perhaps right now is somewhere on this continent of dark forests undulating beyond the window. How would his children have explored the house, Miguel and Lita chasing each other on the stairs, going out into the woods to imagine they were living in a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a film about soldiers in long jackets and three-cornered hats and Indians with tomahawks and stiff crests of hair and painted faces. There’s a wide, solid desk of varnished wood in front of the window. When he turns on the brass lamp with a green shade that stands on it, the darkness of the landscape becomes a mirror in which he sees his face, partially in shadow, against the background of the room. Who has seen you and who sees you? Who would recognize you now? His face with the rough shadow of a beard, an edge of grime on his shirt collar, his tie carelessly knotted. The face Van Doren and Stevens have seen, which he has detected behind their courtesy. From a distance comes the sound of a train that takes a long time to pass: lit windows through the trees, reflected in the ocean-like current of the river. In Madrid night fell hours ago and it’s still a long time until daybreak. The tremor of battle goes on in the distance and darkness, just like the sound of the train. REBEL FORCES EXPECTED TO FURTHER TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP ON LOYALIST CAPITAL, a newspaper headline said yesterday or the day before. Standing in front of the window, Ignacio Abel empties his pockets onto the desk: train tickets, hotel bills, French and Spanish coins, American pennies, receipts from Automats in New York, pencil stubs, the telegram from Stevens that reached the hotel after three days, when he thought he’d be thrown out for lack of payment, loose one-franc bills, a wrinkled five-peseta note, the few dollars to which his entire capital has been reduced. Forgotten things, like archeological remains of a lost time: the keys to his apartment in Madrid, two movie tickets from an afternoon in early June, the letter he decided several times to tear up and yet has kept, Dear Ignacio, allow me to call you that, despite everything. I’m your wife and have the right and still love you. Adela’s letter and Judith’s, his wallet swollen and misshapen by use, Judith’s photo next to one of his children, his Socialist Party card, the General Union of Workers card, his identity document, his notebook with the first sketches for the library, lines and pencil smudges, uncertain attempts at forms that have become irrelevant in the context of the power and scale of this landscape: what can he design that won’t be trivial and ridiculous, his Spanish imagination nullified here, just as it is in New York City, by the excessive size conspicuous both in human works and in nature, requiring an energy, a spirit, a lack of restraint for which he isn’t prepared. He’s been alone in the room for a while and still isn’t calmed by its spaciousness or its silence. He sees himself as a foreign body, potentially infectious, propagating disorder, smells that have clung to his clothing during his journey, dirty clothes now turned out of the open suitcase on the bed and things spilling out of his pockets onto the desk, the silence oppressing him, the external darkness increasing the dimensions of distance.
A metallic noise wakes him, blows from a hammer or monkey wrench, steam whistles. In fractions of a second his mind, alert but still disoriented, eliminates a succession of places: his bedroom in Madrid, the tiny cabin on the ship, the hotel room in New York, the one in Paris. With the sudden shock of antiquated pipes, the heat has come on. He remembers dreaming about voices that dissolve before he can identify them. One said his name amid the noise of a crowd, murmured it in his ear; another begged for his help on the other side of a closed door. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door. What he has no memory of is lying down on top of the quilt, not taking off his shoes, covering himself with his raincoat, as if he’d gone to sleep on a bench in a waiting room. He is aware of his body but sees it from the outside. He knows that if he so decides, he can lift the hand resting on his chest or open his eyelids a little more or close them again or bend a leg, but he does nothing, and in this inaction is a kind of indifference or physical distance, as if the neural connections between brain and muscles had temporarily been suspended. It isn’t that he’s lost feeling, as when a limb goes numb in a cramped position. He notes the pressure of his body on the quilt and the heat of his hands, one on the other, notes the thin weight of his lids on his eyeballs. His body is heavy and at the same time it floats on the quilt that’s both dense and light. His body is heavy but not his thoughts, not the flow of consciousness or his perception of things. At some point as he slept and the night thickened, the woodpecker’s beak stopped striking the tree trunk, but the owl’s call or hoot did not; it returned, identical, after longer intervals of silence. Is this how it is to be dead, when the heart has stopped but there remains, so they say, a final glimmer of lucidity in the brain, when the bullet’s just torn open the chest or the severed head’s fallen into the guillotine basket? If only Professor Rossman had known a last moment of pity like this one, lying face-up on the ground, his lifeless body resting on the great breadth of the earth, beyond fear and pain, beneath a summer sky at dawn. Inside his shoes, Ignacio Abel’s feet are swollen now and more painful, as if each foot weighs the millions of steps taken on his journey. The air enters his nostrils and leaves an instant later, warmer, the temperature of breath. In a rhythm just as involuntary, his heart contracts and expands in his chest, the waves of blood in his ears, the pulsation in his temples, a pressure in his skull that isn’t quite a headache.