In the Night of Time (14 page)

“
Judith, my dear, would you please introduce me to my own guest?
”

How did he know her, for how long? Why did he rest his square chin on her shoulder and brush her hair with his lips with no awkwardness and put his arms around her waist, his two large, thick hands with black hairs (but pink, glossy manicured nails) closing just above her trousers? She made a gesture of detaching herself but without much conviction, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable though not enough to move her face away, to separate the hands that pressed her against the male body adhering to her back. How would it feel to be in his place, pressing that slim body, feeling the rhythm of her breathing beneath the fabric of her blouse? He was surprised by this confusion of sudden emotions, as impervious to the control of his will as the beating of his heart or the rapid surges of pressure at his temples.

“Phil Van Doren,” said Judith, looking at Ignacio Abel as if begging his pardon. “Philip Van Doren the Third, to give his complete name.”

“I couldn't attend your lecture the other day, but I read about it in several newspapers, and Judith gave me all the details.”

I would have liked to separate those two hands that touched you so confidently, with their black hairs and rings and polished nails, make him move away from you and not put his mouth so close to yours, and not keep brushing against you with that proprietary air he had toward everything, his house, his guests, even me, who didn't even know why he'd called me and didn't care, it was enough to have found you again.

“As I told you on the phone, I've made some inquiries about you. I've seen some of your work in Madrid.” Van Doren spoke excellent Spanish, with a Mexican accent. “The public school in that southern neighborhood, the Marketplace. Magnificent works, if you'll permit the opinion of an
amateur.
”

He pronounced
amateur
in perfect French. He had light eyes and a penetrating gaze that could easily turn suspicious or sarcastic, and he depilated his eyebrows as carefully as he shaved his skull. No matter how sharp his razor, it would never mitigate the black shadow of his beard. From a turtleneck sweater that emphasized his pectoral muscles emerged the tanned, powerful head of an athlete. Ignacio Abel immediately felt relief tinged with discomfort: in those solidly masculine hands embracing Judith there was probably no desire, but his gaze had the excessive fixity of someone prepared to make quick, irrevocable judgments regarding whoever was in front of him, subjecting that person to tests for which he was the only judge; a brazen, covetous, indiscriminate, incautious curiosity, an instinct for discovering what was most hidden and learning what no one else knew.

“Things never turn out as one would like,” said Abel, flattered, especially because Judith was there, and unaccustomed to praise. “There's always a lack of money, and delays, and you have to fight with everybody. Not to mention the strikes, the ones that are justified and the ones that are not . . .”

But once he was no longer the person speaking, Van Doren became instantly distracted. He looked at the guests, the waiters, attentive to every detail, making abrupt movements with his head as if constantly adjusting the angle and distance of vision. He nodded a great deal, he greeted someone briefly, he looked toward the large windows as if the brightness of the day or the condition of the atmosphere also depended on him. He asked Ignacio Abel to accompany him to his study. When he'd taken him by the arm to lead him there, he seemed to remember Judith, signaled her to join them, and put his arm around her waist, affectionate again, noticing her glass was almost empty, ordering a waiter with an authoritative gesture to give her another, his face animated by a wide smile one moment and very serious the next, frowning in anger. Ignacio Abel allowed himself to be carried along. The hand leading him was as strong as his sexual desire, and the gin he drank unexpectedly weakened his self-control. He was confused by the strangeness of the place, the bubble of space he'd entered when the maid opened the door and he saw Judith in the back of the room, gesturing as if she had been expecting him all along; she knew he'd come; somehow it was part of a purpose that involved him without his knowledge; she was going to change the record on the gramophone and turned when she heard the doorbell over the music and the guests' voices.

 

Van Doren closed his door more energetically than necessary, and when he sat across from them in a tubular easy chair covered in calfskin and placed his hands on his knees, he had the serenity of a dancer who has completed a leap without visible effort. Resting on the sporty fabric of his trousers, his hands stood out with obscene crudeness. The sound of the party was faint, intensifying in Ignacio Abel the sensation of distance, of losing his footing, of advancing in the darkness along a passage, extending his hands and not finding a solid point of reference to define the space. The close-fitting sleeves of Van Doren's sweater revealed a portion of his muscular, hairy forearms. The watch on his left wrist and the bracelet on his right were gold, and both shook when he moved his hands. The pale light of the October afternoon shone on her hair and the taut skin of her cheeks and chin. Van Doren had rung a bell when he observed Judith lighting a cigarette and followed with his eyes the hand that left the burned match on the glass tabletop. The waiter came in, and Van Doren signaled to him to bring an ashtray, always in a hurry and with a touch of rage that his smile couldn't conceal, not because he didn't know how but because he didn't try. Perhaps what he didn't know was how to live without the sensation of frightening whoever was near him. The waiter changed Ignacio Abel's unfinished, by now warm glass for another in which the cold left a cloud of condensation on its delicate, inverted-cone shape. Judith tasted hers in short sips, like her puffs on the cigarette, which she kept far from her face.

“Modern architecture is my passion,” said Van Doren. “Painting, too, as you may have noticed, but in another way. Do you like Paul Klee?”

That vigilant stare had followed his, incredulous, overwhelmed by five small canvases by Paul Klee, watercolors and oils, and not far from them a drawing of a still life, probably by Juan Gris.

“Klee was my drawing professor in Germany.”

“You studied at the Bauhaus?” Now Van Doren granted him the consideration that until then, for one reason or another, out of mistrust or simple arrogance, he'd only feigned.

“One year, during the early period, in Weimar. I learned more in a few months than I had in my entire life.”

But Van Doren had already lost interest. Still smiling, he was elsewhere, like someone who closes his eyes for a second, is asleep, and wakes with a start. He contracted his facial muscles and in an instant picked up the interrupted thread of his monologue.

“But painting is a private pleasure, even when it's enjoyed in a museum. You're alone before the canvas, and the world around you no longer exists. Painting demands a degree of contemplation that at times is a problem for active people. When you're still for a few minutes, don't you regret it, feel you're losing something? Of course a building can be enjoyed as privately as a painting. As you know, the esthetic emotion tends to be reinforced by the privilege of possession. But architecture always has a public part, accessible to anyone, on the street, outdoors. It's an affirmation. Like a fist coming down on a table . . .”

Van Doren made a fist with his right hand and held it up, pushing up the sleeves of his sweater almost to the elbow.

“Look at that magnificent Telephone Company tower. Perhaps Judith has told you we own shares in it. My family, I mean, through American Telephone and Telegraph. The tower is a statement—the power of money, our dear Judith, who has radical sympathies as you know, would say. And she's correct, of course she is, but there's also something else. The marvel of telephone communications, and better still, radio waves that don't require the laying of cables to transmit words through the atmosphere, making them resonate like echoes in the stratosphere, then retrieving them. A miracle for people our parents' age, an act of witchcraft. But that tower is saying something else as well, and you as an architect are aware of what it means: the drive of your country, as powerful now as when the cathedrals were built. You approach Madrid and the Telephone Company Building is its cathedral. A tower of offices and a warehouse filled with machinery and cables, a symbol too, just like a church or a Greek temple or a pyramid.”

He took a final sip of his drink, clicking his tongue, and looked sideways at his watch. Ignacio Abel studied the somewhat absent face of Judith, whose eyes were fixed on her cigarette smoke. Perhaps their mutual excitement had dissipated. Perhaps when the effect of alcohol and physical proximity had passed, neither would feel anything for the other.

“But I see you're impatient. I don't want to waste your time or mine. I haven't forgotten that you're not a contemplative soul either. I suppose you haven't heard of Burton College. It's a small school, very select, about two hours by train north of New York, on the Hudson River. Beautiful country. The campus is in the middle of a natural landscape, the houses and farms of the early colonists surround it—”

“And before that, those of the Indians expelled by the early colonists,” said Judith.

Van Doren looked at her with absolute serenity, examining her slowly, then looking at Ignacio Abel as if to make certain he'd witnessed his magnanimity. It pleased him to give the impression that some kind of familiarity existed between Judith and him.

“It was inevitable when we reached this point that our dear Judith would bring up the Indians. Sadly disappeared. You Spaniards know something about that. But if Judith permits, I'd prefer to go on with my story about Burton College. Right now the woods are turning red and yellow. I'm not sentimental, and I like Madrid a great deal, but I miss the autumn colors in that part of America. Judith knows what I'm referring to. Haven't you ever been to the United States, Professor Abel? Perhaps the right moment is now. My family has been connected to Burton College for several generations. At one point, in fact, it was almost called Van Doren College. The land for the campus was a gift from a great-grandfather of mine. As you know, we settled there before the English arrived. We Dutch, I mean. Their New York was our New Amsterdam first, just as today's Mexico was your New Spain—”

“That's why that part of the state is filled with Dutch names,” Judith interrupted, perhaps with some annoyance at his display of ancestors, she whose only forebears in America were her parents, immigrants who spoke English with a terrible accent and argued in Russian and Yiddish.

“The Roosevelts, to name some prominent neighbors,” and Van Doren laughed. “Or the Vanderbilts. Or the Van Burens. Except in our family we've been more discreet. No politics, no speculative transactions. The last crisis barely affected us.”

“It affected
us,
” said Judith, but Van Doren decided to ignore her.

“Burton College has been the preferred area for our philanthropy. There's a Van Doren Hall where symphonic concerts are given regularly, a Van Doren Wing in the hospital, specializing in pioneering treatments for cancer. And for years, since my father's time, a project has existed that I love dearly because my father wanted to build it and died too soon: a new library, the Van Doren Library, the Philip Van Doren the Second Library, to be exact. Several architects have already done work for us, but I don't like any of the proposals. Of course I'm not the one who decides, but what I say carries a good deal of weight with the board of trustees, and in the end, I'm the one who holds the purse strings.”

“The one who has the frying pan by the handle,” said Judith, happy to correct Van Doren for his literal translation from English with a straightforward Spanish expression she'd learned not long before and liked very much.

“So far everything they've presented to us has been a
pastiche,
as you can imagine.” Van Doren again pronounced a French word with mannered correctness. “Gothic
pastiches,
imitations of imitations, Greek temples, Roman baths, railroad stations, or exposition halls imitating Greek temples and Roman monuments, pastries in the
Beaux-Arts
style. But I don't want that land profaned by a monstrosity that resembles a post office. I'd like you to see it. I'll have photographs and plans sent to you. It's a clearing in a forest of maples and oaks, high ground beyond the western edge of the campus, with a view of the Hudson. The building will be seen from the trains that run along the riverbank, from the ships that sail up and down the river. Even from the New Jersey side. It'll be the most visible building of the college. I picture it above the treetops, more hidden when they're full of leaves, at the end of a walk that will lead away from the central quadrangle, a secluded, elevated path to books, its lights on until midnight. There will be books but also records of any kind of music, from anywhere in the world. Judith, with her excellent ear, will undoubtedly help me find recordings of Spanish music. My family has shares in some gramophone companies. I imagine soundproof booths for listening to the records, projection rooms where anyone can watch films. I'm interested in the project you have now in Spain to record the voices of your most eminent personalities. There'll be reading rooms with large windows offering views of the woods and the river, the other buildings on campus. Not one of those lugubrious libraries like the ones in England that are mindlessly imitated in America, with smells of mildew and crumbling leather, stacks and card catalogues of dark wood, like coffins or funerary monuments, low lamps with green shades that give faces the color of death. I see a bright library, like those buildings and shops your teachers built in Germany, like the school you built in Madrid. A library that's practical, like a good gymnasium, a gymnasium for the mind. A watchtower and a refuge as well.”