"Nobody will hear us. Don Manuel's asleep with the pills Medina gave him, and the others sleep very far from here."
It would have been enough to say no a second time, oblige her to move away from the door, go out alone perhaps and accept insomnia and rage, but he did nothing, only looked at her, sick with desire and fear: she sat down on the bed, dropped her shoes, raised her skirt to undo her stockings. Minaya saw her long white thighs, her raised knees, her feet finally bare and willful under his kisses, pink and white and moving like fish in the semidarkness of the mirrors. When he opened her thighs to descend to the damp rose of her belly he thought he heard the sound of a distant door, but he didn't care anymore about fear, or even decency, or his life, or his awareness that he was disintegrating like the shape of the room and the identity and limits of his body. He heard Inés' voice confused with his own, and he bit her lips as he looked into her eyes to discover a gaze that never had belonged to him until that night. Holding on to each other like two shadows, they rolled to the floor, dragging the sheets from the bed with them, and on the rug, on the stained sheets, they sought each other and overthrew and bit each other in a persecution multiplied by the mirrors in the dark, purple air. As if they had survived a shipwreck at sea and the temptation to succumb to a sweet death underwater, they found themselves once again motionless on the bed and couldn't recall how or when they had returned to it. "Now I don't care if I die," said Minaya. "If you offered me a cup of poison right now, I'd drink it down." Sitting on the bed, Inés caressed his hair and mouth and slowly made him turn toward her, between her thighs, until Minaya's lips found the pink cleft that she herself opened with the thumb and index finger of both hands to receive him. But there was no urgency now, no desperation, and the serene cupidity of his palate was prolonged and ascended in the inquiry of his gaze. Urged on by the dark breath that had revived more deeply when he was drinking from her womb, he moved up to her breasts, her chin, her mouth, the damp hair that covered her cheekbones, and then he felt that he was disappearing, quivering motionless, lucid, suspended at the edge of a sweetness from which there was no return. "Don't move," said Inés, "don't do anything," and she began to move back and forth, gyrating under his hips, clutching at him, wounding him, draining the air and expelling it very slowly as she rose and curved and sank her elbows and heels into the sheets, and smiled with her eyes fixed on Minaya, murmuring "slow," saying in a quiet voice words he had never dared say to her. Like a wounded animal he rose up, lifting his head, and that was when time ripped as if a vengeful stone had broken the mirrors reflecting them, because they heard behind them the sound of the door and saw the terrifying slowness with which the knob moved and the long stain of light entered the bedroom and stopped at the foot of the bed when Manuel appeared on the threshold, barefoot, in his pajamas of an incurably sick man and his Italian scarf around his neck, looking at them with a stupefaction from which anger would have been absent if it hadn't been for the unmoving hand that ascended when he took a step toward the bed, as if in a frozen gesture of malediction. He opened his mouth in a shout that never was heard, and even took one more step before his eyes became empty and staring, not at Inés or Minaya but at the hand that had descended until it lay open beside his heart, curving as it clutched at the cloth of his pajamas at the same time that Manuel fell to his knees and raised his blue eyes again to look at them. Inés didn't see that last look: she said she had buried her face in Minaya's chest and dug her nails into him when she heard something rebound heavily on the wooden floor. Trembling with cold she opened her eyes and saw in the dresser mirror that she was alone and very pale on the bed. Minaya, still naked, was leaning over Manuel's body, feeling his chest under the pajamas. He's dead, he said, and locked the bedroom door. Manuel's open mouth was against the floor and his eyes fixed on the light on the night table. Inés, in order not to see them, got off the bed like a sleepwalker and extended a cowardly hand until she touched his eyelids, but Minaya stopped her and obliged her to stand up, shaking her as if she were a child who doesn't want to waken. For the first time in his life he was not paralyzed by fear: now fear was an impulse to intelligence or the dirty courage to simulate and flee.
"Listen. Now we're going to get dressed and straighten up the bed and the room. We'll leave the window open to get rid of the smell in the air. That won't make them suspect anything: Manuel could have opened it before he died. You'll go to your room, and I'll go to mine, and in an hour I'll go and wake Utrera. I'll say I couldn't sleep and heard a shout and something falling near the parlor. Nobody will find out about us, Inés."
Later he told the story with the desperate fervor used to tell certain necessary lies, he told it to the incredulous gaze of Utrera, who was already dressed when he went to call him, he repeated it a few more times, adding details that made him feel despicable, but not less persecuted, and when he heard Amalia telling it to Doña Elvira, it seemed to him that the story, when it took place in a different voice, entered reality completely, and he was temporarily relieved of its weight. But Utrera, when they picked up Manuel's body to lay it on the bed, had examined the open window, the quilt, the half-burned candle still smelling of wax in the candlestick on the night table. I'll leave here tomorrow, Minaya said aloud, when he was alone and in the room, facing the window to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias, suddenly possessed by the premonition of exile. He heard a distant bell and then footsteps and voices on the stairs, the slow footsteps, the unmistakable voice of Medina, but still he didn't leave the room. He could hear them and recognize each of their voices, because they were all in the parlor, on the other side of the door, but also in the blue notebook, on the last pages that he was beginning to read now, asking himself which of them, which of the living or the dead had been a murderer thirty-two years earlier.
PART TWO
After all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity.
—CERVANTES, Don Quixote, I, PROLOGUE
1
I STILL COULD HEAR the concave sound of the galleries, metal gates closing behind someone's footsteps, the pounding of the guards' heels, a thicket of voices that resounded in the high vaults like the ocean in a shell and seemed like voices and footsteps that were infinitely distant, the dark ocean heard in dreams. I had left behind the gate of the final gallery, high and painted black, like the wrought-iron grillwork in a cathedral, and now I was walking down ordinary corridors with floors of tiles and not damp cement, with gray doors and peaceful offices on the other side of the doors, where I waited interminably and acquiesced, signed typewritten forms, docile, cowardly, always fearing I hadn't completely understood what they were saying to me, repeating my name without avoiding the suspicion that when he heard it, the man bent over the typewriter would lift his head and order the guard who accompanied me to handcuff me again. There were countless offices, all the same, and in all of them there was someone who shook his head when he heard my name and didn't look at me, only read something on a list and asked something and, with an engrossed air, opened a large record book and then closed it without having found what he was looking for or asked me to sign somewhere, handing me a pen across the counter that I no longer knew how to hold between my thumb and index finger, too thin and too fragile for my fingers made clumsy by the cold, by ten years of not touching or using a pen. Now the guard was walking in front of me, rhythmically hitting the bunch of keys against the side of his trouser leg, and I no longer expected freedom and the street to be on the other side of any door. Now the doors were made of wood and not metal and were painted green like the shutters at the windows, but they still resounded in the same deep, definitive way when they were shut and there were no prisoners sweeping the corridors. I said my name again and signed a receipt; they gave me an open suitcase, and I put my papers and clothes in it while two guards with unbuttoned tunics watched me and smoked in a room without windows that had numbered metal lockers and a low-hanging lamp that swayed above the table, thickening the cigarette sm
oke in its cone of light. The other guard, the one who had led me there, ponderously left the bunch of keys on the table and ordered me to follow him, but this time the last door we passed through didn't have a lock and opened onto a small courtyard with very high walls of ocher brick and sentry towers rising at the corners of the roof, where two Civil Guards in gleaming oilskin capes were profiled like symmetrical statues against a low, pale gray sky. They didn't look at the courtyard, they didn't do anything when I crossed it trembling with fear and unknown joy and with twitching fingers grasped the handle of the suitcase as I approached the entrance, as closed and undifferentiated as a wall, where someone, another Civil Guard, opened a gate and stepped to one side to let me pass, saying something I didn't stop to hear, because the gate had closed behind me with a long clanking of locks and I was alone before the facade of the prison, under the yellow and red flag that snapped in the wind like the wings of a large bird.
THE PRISON WAS A HIGH ocher island in the barren ground and fog. Facing it, on the other side of the highway, was a building with long whitewashed walls and broken windows that looked like an industrial ship or an abandoned warehouse. I walked toward it, stepping on mud crisscrossed by tracks of horses and cars, but I still didn't see the black car parked at a corner: perhaps I saw it without noticing it, and I remembered only when I heard the engine starting that I had seen it and that the blades of the windshield wipers were moving even though it wasn't raining. To shield myself from the wind, I walked very close to the wall, the brim of my hat down over my eyes and the lapels of my overcoat raised, and I didn't turn around when I heard the engine and then the tires skidding in the mud. I heard it moving slowly behind me, as if it didn't want to get ahead of me, and I walked faster and moved closer to the wall that never ended, on my way to the single tree and the shack made of debris that sometimes, from a high window in the prison, I had seen beside the highway, the only indication that a city existed beyond the wasteland my eyes could glimpse briefly. The men who left the city at dawn on slow bicycles would stop there to drink a glass of aguardiente and then leave rubbing together their hands numb with cold, exhaling the hot breath of the alcohol as they grasped the handlebars again and pedaled down the highway with their heads sunk down between the lapels of their dark jackets, as if they were leaving for a wintry, distant exile. From the tin roof rose a column of smoke that the wind dispersed among the branches of the tree. Without turning around to look at the black car, I pushed the door of poorly assembled planks and entered a narrow, warm place filled with smoke and cases of bottles. The counter was a board that smelled strongly of wood soaked in alcohol, lying across two barrels. Behind it, lit by an oil lamp, a very fat woman nursed a child red-faced with crying. Nailed to the wall were yellowed posters announcing remote bullfights and a 1945 calendar on which a black woman with a red shawl tied around her waist smiled as she displayed a tin of cocoa. The woman behind the counter, motionless on an empty case, slowly and methodically examined my face, my suitcase, the mud on my shoes. I asked for a glass of cognac, and she didn't detach the child from her large white breast or stop looking at me as she stood to find the bottle. She didn't look at my eyes but at the indications of what she had known since she had seen me come in: the awkwardness, the still undiminished distrust, the way my hand held the glass and raised it, with a slight tremor. I drank the cognac in one swallow and nodded in silence when the woman asked if I wanted another one. The glass in the small window that faced the highway was dirty and opaque with vapor, but through it I could see the black silhouette of the car, which had stopped. The alcohol burned in my throat with violent sweetness and intensified the colors of things. With the second glass still intact, I went to sit beside the window, wrapped in my overcoat, in the warm blur of the alcohol, raising the faint mask of abandonment and smoke that was between my eyes and the door that perhaps was going to open. I smoked with half-closed eyes, waiting, not indolent, lost, feeling the alcohol rising in my veins like successive undulations in the water of a lake, I half-closed my eyes as if waiting for sleep so I wouldn't see anything but the blue smoke rising and the dirty semidarkness of the barrels and the row of bottles, the red spot on the calendar whose pages numbered the days of a time when I hadn't existed. I took a drink and closed my eyes completely, and on the other side of the window, the door of the black car slammed shut. When I opened them again she, Beatriz, was looking at me through the smoke that the icy outside air had shaken, taller than I remembered, as if immune to time, as if she had just turned thirty, her age the last time I saw her, tall and solemn with her blonde mane and gray overcoat and the beret she held in her hands as if she weren't sure how she ought to behave. The fat woman had lain the child down, and now she was cleaning a row of bottles on the counter. From the corner of my eye I saw her looking at us as Beatriz embraced me, touching me with her blonde hair from which there rose an unfamiliar perfume and taking my hard face in her hands to recognize and touch what her eyes saw, undimmed by tears. She watched us without interest or modesty, with inert fixity, wiping the dust from the bottles with a dirty rag that she sometimes passed slowly over the counter, and when I approached to ask her for another glass, she studied Beatriz' coat and stockings and high-heeled shoes and then looked at me, with a different expression, as if comparing us, asking herself perhaps why a woman dressed like that had come into her tavern to find me.
We didn't speak at first, or between long silences we said only the necessary, useless words, looking for a respite with cigarettes and drinks, leaning on our elbows in the gray light that came from the other side of the window, from the field where the black car waited, occupied now only by a man who smoked as he rested his elbows on the steering wheel. "We thought you were dead," said Beatriz, caressing her lighter of smooth, gold-colored metal, very close to my hand on the stained wood, moving her fingers close, her unpainted nails trailing across the veins in the table, then stopping when they seemed about to touch me, then brushing against the acknowledged metal boundary, the pack of American cigarettes that now formed part of her perfume and her distance. "Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could tell me if you had died or were in prison or had managed to escape over the French border at the last minute. A woman told me she had heard that you were seen sick or wounded in the camp at Argeles, but they also said you had escaped to the sea and were arrested in the port of Alicante. After a year I began to write and receive letters. I wrote to friends in exile asking about you, but you weren't in France, or Mexico, or Argentina. You weren't dead or alive anywhere, but I waited every day to receive a letter from you. Last month a comrade just out of prison came to the house. He was the one who told us you'd be getting out very soon."
SO THE AMBIGUOUS, the sacred plural was still true in spite of the gold-colored lighter and the silk stockings, and they were still called comrades and not shades or survivors and as a plural they had waited for me and thought I was dead and now they had come to receive me and welcome me not in the warm interior of the car or in a probably clandestine house but in the ancient, failed, intact plural behind which were hidden, in succession, impotence and fear, the fervor of old names, of lost banners, the unconfessed tenderness of Beatriz, who searched for my hand on the table and didn't dare touch it, always brushing against the boundary in the space that divided us like the blade of a knife, the one, desperate question she never would ask me now. From a great distance, behind the smoke, I watched her talk to me and estimated the words beneath each eruption of silence, indifferent, like a doctor who does not need to examine the body lying next to him to know the exact place where the pain is lodged. It was as if time or the chance that governs such transfigurations had used the past ten years to complete a work—the face, the hands, the figure of Beatriz—which earlier, when I knew her, had only been foreshadowed and that reached their plenitude in the prelude to their decadence. There was something dry or cruel in her slender hands, perhaps the shadow of an obstinate, useless determination, a hardness not rooted in any purpose,
faint wrinkles, like the slashes of knives, next to her lips, around her covetous, firm eyes. I looked at her, still not asking, I heard her talk to me about her life during those years, perceiving the same chasm in time already proclaimed by the dates on the bullfight posters nailed to the dirty walls of the tavern and that month of July 1945 that remained inert on the calendar like a rip in my memory. She had waited for me, she said, wanting to involve me in the invocation of her waiting and her remembering, wanting to vindicate as attributes of a shared suffering the letters that never arrived anywhere, the empty letterbox in the hollow of the stairs, the horror and hunger and loneliness of the winter of 1941, and when she remembered, she claimed me for herself and demanded the part of my sorrow I had denied her. "And while you were in prison, condemned to death, and I didn't know anything," she said, as if she were demanding not only sorrow but also blame for not having found me, but then she raised her damp eyes to me and suddenly understood that she was becoming vulnerable because she was alone in her remembering, and to defend herself she was forced to turn to pride and pretended serenity. She sat up straight before her glass, before me, lighting a cigarette with excessive resolve, her fingers firm on the gold-colored lighter, as if in that gesture she were using all the determination she had needed to survive from the May night in 1937 when I had gone to Magina without saying a word to her. "I can see you're surprised at my appearance. At first I was too, when I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't tell you that since '42 I've been working in a dress store on the Gran Via, selling expensive clothes to the richest women in Madrid. Sometimes I even design a model. Do you find it strange? It was like a story or a miracle, I was making things for a dressmaking shop where I didn't earn enough to pay my rent, and one day that man, Ernesto, the owner of the dress store appeared, and asked if I wanted to work exclusively for him, imagine, I was so hungry I almost didn't sleep so I could sew all night. I think he's in love with me, like an old-fashioned gentleman, you know, he invites me to the theater and takes my arm almost without touching me when we go into a restaurant, he always gives me things, the lighter, this coat, this perfume, which is very expensive. That's his car, he brought me here."
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