Rossmanâs oval head stopped moving, and his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, focused on him with an affectionate attention that made Ignacio Abel feel bewildered as someone much younger, a student not certain he can endure the scrutiny of the professor who knows him well. What had he done in those years that could measure up to what heâd learned in Germany, to the expectations heâd had for himself and his work? The nocturnal lights and strong colors of Berlin, the calm of Weimar, the libraries, the joy of finally penetrating a language heâd handled until then only laboriously and to which his ears suddenly opened up as naturally as if heâd removed plugs of wax, the lecture halls at Weimar, those rainy nightfalls of self-reflection, lamps lit behind curtains, bicycle bells echoing in the silence. The cold, too, and the scarcity of everything, but he didnât care or notice very much. The hooves of policemenâs horses raising sparks on the paving stones, the solemn, angry demonstrations by unemployed workers in berets and leather jackets and red armbands, the placards and red flags lit by torches, the veterans with amputated limbs begging on the sidewalks, displaying stumps under the rags of their uniforms or faces doubly disfigured by war wounds and surgeries. The young women in short skirts, eyes and lips painted, chin-length hair, sitting on the terraces of Berlin cafés with their legs crossed, smoking cigarettes on which they left red lipstick marks, walking with determination along the sidewalks without male companions, jumping onto streetcars after the offices closed, heels clicking as they hurried down the metro steps.
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He didnât think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadnât known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didnât count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didnât recognize him and took frightened refuge in her motherâs arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what heâd done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruinsâor, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because heâd mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where heâd been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madridâs University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europeâheâd read something in an international magazine. âWrite to me,â he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. âLet me know how everything goes. I wish
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He didnât think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadnât known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didnât count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didnât recognize him and took frightened refuge in her motherâs arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what heâd done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruinsâor, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because heâd mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where heâd been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madridâs University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europeâheâd read something in an international magazine. âWrite to me,â he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. âLet me know how everything goes. I wish
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