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of machinery, the ringing of telephones, the shouts of men; the solitude of a place where a crowd rushed through seconds before, people busy with their tasks, fulfilling their duties, doing their part in the great general undertaking. The son of a construction foreman, accustomed since childhood to dealing with masons and working with his hands, Ignacio Abel maintained a practical, sentimental affection for the specific trade skills that were transformed into the character traits of the men who cultivated them. The draftsman who inked a right angle on a plan, the bricklayer who spread a base of fresh mortar and smoothed it with the trowel before placing the brick on top of it, the woodworker who sanded the curve of a banister, the glazier who cut the exact dimensions of the pane of glass for a window, the master craftsman who verified with a plumb line the verticality of a wall, the stonecutter who cut a paving stone or the stone block for a curb or the plinth of a column. Now his hands were too delicate and couldn’t have endured the roughness of the materials, and they never had acquired the wisdom of touch he’d observed as a boy in his father and the men who worked with him. His fingers brushed soft Bristol board and paper, handled rulers, compasses, drawing pencils, watercolor brushes, moved quickly on a typewriter, skillfully dialed phone numbers, closed around the curved black lacquer of his fountain pen as he inked signatures on paperwork. But somewhere he’d kept a tactile memory that longed for the feel of tools and objects in his hands. He had an extraordinary ability to assemble and disassemble his children’s Meccano sets and toys; on his worktable there were always paper houses, boats, birds; he took photos with a small Leica to document each phase in the construction of a building and developed them himself in a tiny darkroom he’d installed at home, to the excitement and admiration of his children, especially Miguel, who, unlike his sister, possessed a whimsical imagination, and when he saw his father’s camera decided that when he grew up he was going to be one of those photographers who traveled to the far corners of the world to capture images that appeared as full-page spreads in magazines.
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    With a pleasant feeling of fatigue and relief, of work accomplished, he crossed the empty space of the office and went outside, feeling on his face a cool breeze from the Sierra with its hint of autumn. The scents of pine and oak, of rockrose, thyme, and damp earth. To prolong the enjoyment, he left the window of his small Fiat open when he started the engine. A short distance from Madrid, University City would have both the geometrical harmony of an urban design and a breadth of horizons outlined by tree-covered slopes. In a few more years the luxuriant growth of trees would provide a counterpoint to the straight lines of the architecture. The mechanical rhythm of construction work, the impatience to impress upon reality the forms of models and plans, corresponded to the unhurried pace of organic growth. What had recently been completed achieved true nobility only with use and a constant resistance to the elements, the wear caused by wind and rain, the passage of humans, the voices that at first resound with too-raw echoes in spaces still permeated by the smell of plaster and paint, wood, fresh varnish. Partial to technical novelties, Ignacio Abel had a radio in the car. But now he preferred not to turn it on, so nothing would distract him from the pleasure of driving slowly along the straight, empty avenues of the future city, looking over construction work and machines, the progress of recent days, allowing himself to be carried along by a mixture of attentive contemplation and daydreaming, because he saw with an expert eye what was in front of him as well as what did not yet exist, what was complete in the plans and in the large model installed in the center of the drafting room. The