She didn't say good-bye or order him to leave, she simply stopped seeing him or forgot she wasn't alone, and her words faded into a very slow silence, just as her features faded in the same semidarkness that was erasing the shapes of the furniture and the corners of the room, coming up from the garden, from the empty hallways and rooms where Minaya had to feel his way back like a traveler surprised by darkness in a thick wood where there were no roads, only closed doors. Solitary doors, suspended in air, hermetic like the book Minaya was looking for and that perhaps never was written. Half-open doors that invite one in and then close, as if in a sudden gust of wind, behind the person who dares to cross them. He stood noiselessly and murmured an excuse or a farewell, but the small woman in mourning continued to look at the garden with her hands folded in her lap and her back ridgidly erect, as if posing for a photograph.
"You're not like them," she said, and seen from above she was smaller and almost vulnerable, with her bones sharp beneath her skin and the white needlework on the velvet of her mourning. "Come back to see me whenever you like."
As he was leaving he saw her in profile, the dark silhouette, her white hair dazzling against the pale light from the window and the purple and opaque blue of nightfall on the roofs. He closed the door slowly and when he turned he found the light, staring eyes of Ines, who seemed to have been waiting for him to leave and was carrying on the silver tray the supper that Dona Elvira wouldn't taste that night either.
8
HE, TOO, DEFEATED AND OBSCURE beneath the blankets where a sick body lies, I imagine, he, too, looking at the ceiling or the semidarkness or the faint light that comes through the curtains that someone partially closed before leaving him alone. There are medicine bottles on the night table and the odor of the alcohol Medina used to disinfect the needle is still in the air. He closed his bag at the foot of the bed, slowly moving his head, the hands that so delicately lifted the back of Mariana's neck from the droppings, as if he didn't want to wake her. He looked at his watch and placed it back in his vest pocket, studying Manuel, who seems to be asleep but who is watching him, high and distant, from a fog not of physical pain but of melancholy, prepared to close his eyes in order not to sleep and surrender to the last light of day fading in the plaza and on the white curtains at the balcony with the same sweet slowness with which he wishes to be extinguished, let it be tonight, he thinks, with no fear or urgency, with his eyes closed, with the picture of Mariana and the one of his Aunt Cristina attending with their solemn presence as silent witnesses. For a moment he sees Medina or dreams him as he was in 1937, slim and with a black mustache, in his captain's uniform, leaning not over him but over the body of Mariana, who wears a sheer nightdress and has a red, round stain on her forehead. Medina, slow and heavy again, presses his hand for an instant and then leaves the room, and his cautious voice can be heard speaking to someone, Teresa or Amalia, in the hallway. Now Manuel curls up on his side and raises the fold of the sheet until it covers his mouth, his back to the balcony, and stares at the moldings on the closet, dissolving in the night. The only vestige is a vague muscular pain in his chest, the quiet hand, the tranquil reptile that isn't even asleep beneath closed eyelids. It only waits for the next, the definitive day, the hour when it will move up his left side brushing against the warm pink tissue of his lungs and then encircling his heart before squeezing it, closing the ring of asphyxia around its frightened beating, like a blind animal that had been incubated in Manuel's chest thirty-two years earlier to pay, day after day, the extremely long installment plan of anguish and longed-for death. He had spent the afternoon in the library, not doing anything, lacking even the will to climb the stairs to the pigeon loft, waiting for Minaya to come back from his visit to Dona Elvira, and perhaps the disquiet of waiting and cigarettes had caused the reawakening of the old wound near his heart, like a road that precisely indicates its white line in the growing light of dawn. What will she say about me, he thought, about all of us, fearing his mother's hatred less than the manner in which she might show it to Minaya, the indiscretion, the very probable slander. Since the proximity of the pain in his chest was more certain with each passing minute—now the reptile or hand was lodged in his stomach and groping its way upward, animated by brandy and tobacco—Manuel put on his coat and hat and took the bamboo stick that had belonged to his father to walk out to the watchtowers on the wall. But there was no respite because fear and pain were already moving up his veins like a single knife thrust, already hastening his breath and opening before his feet a pit that separated him from the world and left him alone with the bite of terror. He walked, slow and anachronistic, down Calle Real, very close to the building walls, ceding the sidewalk to the ladies, whom he greeted when he thought he knew them, touching the brim of his hat with a distracted and completely involuntary gesture, but the air on the street was not enough to ease the incessant pounding that cracked a whip in his heart and temples, and in an instant of vertigo the dark hand oppressing his chest sometimes even stopped the flow of his blood. Leaning against the walls, he was able to reach the Plaza of Santa Maria, and when he felt in his heart the last peck and the shadow's slap that knocked him to the paving stones, he recalled an April morning when that same plaza and its backdrop of palaces and distant bell towers seemed more boundless than ever to him, because Mariana, in a white blouse and summer sandals, came toward him, smiling, from the facade of El Salvador. It was that same image, intact, that he found before him when he woke from his brief death not knowing who he was or in what part of the world the room and the bed he was lying in were to be found. He heard voices, pigeons, the notes of a strange habanera that never ended, he heard, as he was overcome by the dense lethargy of sedatives, little girls' voices in the plaza singing the funeral ballad of Alfonso XII and Dona Mercedes, and in the not-yet-unfathomable waters of sleep the melody of the habanera became entwined with the voices of the children's song, the nocturnal footsteps in the hallway, the murmur like that of a hospital, the wakefulness that reached him from the other side of the door.
"He's fallen asleep," said Teresa, closing the door again with extreme care. Minaya and Medina were smoking beside the darkened glass doors of the gallery, talking in that muffled tone of voice used in churches and in the vicinity of the sick.
"The worst thing afflicting your uncle, my boy, isn't that he drinks and smokes and exerts himself too much given the fragility of his heart, but that he doesn't want to live. Understand what I'm saying: when you reach the age that Manuel and I are, living becomes an act of will."
Inés passed them with Doña Elvira's untouched tray and looked for a second at Minaya with an expression so rapid it seemed unreal. He saw her walk away with the clink of porcelain and silver, like a perfume or a melody that followed and announced her.
"You speak about will, but my uncle has had a cardiac lesion since a bullet grazed his heart."
"My friend..." Medina, smiling, picked up his bag from the floor, ready to leave. "Manuel has told me you're a kind of writer, so perhaps you'll understand what I am going to tell you. In my work, one becomes very skeptical with the years and discovers that in certain cases the heart and its ailments are a metaphor. Manuel had his first serious attack on the day following Mariana's death. That was when his real illness began, and it wasn't caused by the bullet you mentioned but by the one that killed her."
They went downstairs in silence, trying to keep their footsteps from resounding on the marble, less to respect Manuel's sleep than to avoid committing an uncertain profanation. In the courtyard, Medina ceremoniously shook the hands of Teresa and Amalia and accepted the hat and coat that Minaya handed him with the quiet gravity of a priest who dons his liturgical cape at the door of the sacristy. They were alone, in the doorway, and only then did Minaya dare to ask the question that had been troubling him since they came down from the gallery. Who killed her, he said, regretting it instantly, but there was no censure in Medina's glance, only a serene wonder, as if he were surprised to discover
that after so many years there was still someone asking that question.
"There was shooting on the roofs, on the other side of the house, above the lanes that the pigeon loft looks out on. A militia patrol was pursuing a rebel, whom I'm sure they never captured. Mariana, who was in the pigeon loft, went to the window when she heard the shots. One of them hit her in the forehead. We never found out anything else."
He thought about Medina as he groped his way up the last steps to the pigeon loft, not daring yet to turn on the flashlight, about Medina, about his slow eyes that had seen Mariana barely covered by the nightgown under whose silk folds one could make out the faint shadow of her pubis, about the way he cleaned his eyeglasses so un-hurriedly or looked in his vest for the watch he used to measure with equal composure the time of his visits and the passage of his life toward an old age as irreparable and mediocre as the tyranny he once had fought and now tolerated—without accepting submission but also without the vain certainty that he would witness its downfall—as one tolerates an incurable disease. Some nights, after the game of cards in the parlor, when the others had withdrawn, Medina delayed drinking his last glass of anisette and remained seated in silence across from Manuel, who gathered up the deck counting the cards on the table with that distracted air of his, as if he were counting coins. At first, from his bedroom, Minaya listened to the silence, perhaps Medina's cough or a few words in a quiet voice that almost never became a conversation, asking himself why the two men were still there doing nothing, facing each other, smoking in the light of the lamp that enclosed them in a conical bell of silence and smoke. When it was after midnight, Medina would ask Manuel something, who agreed, and then a sound could be heard like whistles and tearing paper, voices that interrupted one another or were inundated by a remote babel of words in foreign languages. "It's no use," said Manuel, "there's too much interference tonight, and I can't find it." And then, when he was about to fall asleep, the music of the Anthem of Riego' woke Minaya, and he knew what he should have guessed long before: Manuel and Medina stayed in the parlor that late to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees. "Don't have any illusions, Manuel," he heard Medina say one night, "you and I will never see the Third Republic. We're condemned to Franco in the same way we're condemned to grow old and die." "Then why do you come every night to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees?" Medina burst into laughter: he had the sonorous laugh of a bishop. "Because I like the 'Anthem of Riego.' It rejuvenates me. That anthem of Franco's is for third-rate funerals."
After kneeling beside Mariana and confirming that she had no pulse, Medina stood up, brushing off the knees of his military trousers. Death had been instantaneous, he said, but no one paid attention to his words. Near the door, Minaya imagined as he slid the circle of the flashlight around the walls, there would be the others: Dona Elvira, in mourning, Manuel, Amalia, perhaps Teresa, if she was already working in the house then. Utrera, Jacinto Solana, biting their lips, wanting blindly to die. When it reached the window without glass or shutters, the illumination from the flashlight dispersed in a well of night, and then the very weak circle shed light on the roof on the other side of the lane. Leaning on the sill, Medina saw two Assault Guards crawling with difficulty along the neighboring roof, rifles over their shoulders, examining the broken tiles. "There's a trail of blood here, Captain," one of them said. "The militiamen say the Fascist hid behind the chimney and fired from here." In the darkness, Minaya, who had turned off the flashlight because its light made the pigeons restless, thought he heard footsteps, imagined that the staircase was creaking, that someone was going to discover his useless investigation, but the footsteps and his fear were simply the way his conscience felt guilt, the invincible and secret shame of being an impostor that had pursued him his entire life and now, in the house, in the places of the time he dared to enter clandestinely, it hounded him more than ever. They're asleep now, he thought, while I climb like a thief up to this place that doesn't belong to me and shine the flashlight on an empty space, they're asleep or probably they never sleep and their eyes are open in the dark as they listen to my footsteps over their heads. For a moment, the murmur of the sleeping pigeons and the sound of the blood beating in his temples seemed like the combined breathing of all those who slept or didn't sleep in the rooms of the house. Above the roofs, in the center of the window, was a half-moon as precise and fragile as the illustration in a children's book. Minaya closed the door of the pigeon loft and felt his way down the steep staircase. Only one of the lamps in the gallery was lit, and its light projected his own very long shadow in front of Minaya. The afternoon's conversation with Dona Elvira, Manuel's relapse, the time spent in darkness in the pigeon loft, had plunged him into a state of singular fatigue and nervous excitement that denied in advance the possibility of sleep. His sudden image was that of a sleepwalker in the tall mirrors along the stairs. But when he reached the courtyard, he knew he wouldn't be alone in the library. A line of light slipped under the door, and in an easy chair next to the fire, her lips painted, her hair loose over her shoulders, holding a cigarette and a book in her hands, was Inés, who looked at him without surprise, smiling, as if she had been waiting for him, knowing he would come.
9
ORLANDO SHOULD HAVE SURVIVED to sketch Inés just as he had sketched Mariana. He, who never desired women but was never indifferent to the beauty of a body, would have known how to sketch in exact equilibrium the cold lines of her profile and figure and the passion they incited: the pencil tracing with distant tenderness Inés' nose and chin, her lips, on the white paper, the modeling of her hands and ankles, the invisible smile that sometimes lit up her eyes and that the most attentive camera would never have captured in a photograph, because it was an inner smile, like the one provoked so slightly by the splash of a fish's tail on the surface of a lake. But that night, when Minaya found her in the library, or the days and dawns that preceded it, the line of the pencil on untouched white would not have been enough to draw Inés, desired by two men who situated her body on the balance of an obscure symmetry. A single red stroke for her smile, a red or pink spot for her lips, the same as the one left by her lipstick on the towels in her maid's room, when she locked her door to put on makeup at a mirror hanging on the wall, as if it were a secret rehearsal or a brief performance meant only for herself, for in the end, when she had succeeded in combing her hair and painting her lips in a way that satisfied her, she would pull back her hair again and wipe off the lipstick with a wet towel and return silently to her earlier, hermetic simulation.
Very soon the game acquired new characteristics: she liked to put on makeup and look at herself naked in closet mirrors and go down to the library when she was sure no one would surprise her to repeat a scene she had relished in certain fashion magazines. Sitting next to the fire, with a glass she never finished and a cigarette pilfered from Manuel's case, she read in the oblique light of a low lamp, absorbed in the adventures presented in the book but conscious at the same time of each one of her gestures, as if she could see herself in a mirror. When she heard the door she closed the book, marking the page where she had stopped with a peculiar sliding of her fingers that Minaya could not help but notice because it had the quality of a caress, and she contemplated with irony and tenderness the surprise of the newcomer. It had to happen there, in the library, and nowhere else, at that time and with that light, which invited and seemed to accentuate Inés' features and the unfamiliar perfume that Minaya distinguished among the usual odors of wood and books. It was easy, that night, to imagine what was going on, to calculate the particulars of the scene and the words Inés would use to recount it afterward, interrupting the kisses to add a minor detail: the way Minaya sat down across from her, not looking at her yet, searching for his cigarettes, his momentary evasion, asking about the book she was reading, overwhelmed by the terror and vertigo of knowing that Inés had painted her lips and combed her chestnut hair in that new, dazzling way to wait only for him at two o'clock in the morning. Sitting on the chair, her leg
s extended so that her heels rested on the precise spot where he had to sit, with that inexplicable cigarette between her lips, for she didn't know how to smoke and every time she exhaled the smoke it gave rise to the cough of a fourteen-year-old with clandestine cigarettes.
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