First came the photograph, recounts Medina, the vague snapshot taken on the Carrera de San Jerónimo by a street photographer who caught Mariana's laughter and the passage of her white high heels, but also, as a witness, the distracted gesture of Jacinto Solana, the way in which Manuel turned his head very slightly to look at her without her noticing, her two hands resting on their arms with the kind of impartiality that cannot always be distinguished from indifference. Manuel opened his leather wallet and showed Medina the photograph as if it were a valuable secret document. "Her name is Mariana. She models at the School of Fine Arts. Jacinto met her three years ago, in Orlando's studio." Medina examined the photograph and then looked attentively at Manuel, as if he wanted to confirm a doubtful resemblance. "But he was a different man," he recalls, with theatrical exaggeration, passing his hand over his own face, "and I wouldn't have been able to say how he had changed, but he had the same expression Saint Paul must have had the day after he fell off his horse. Love, I imagine, that thing that should have dazzled him when he was sixteen and left him immune, but not at the age of thirty-two, because then there was no way to defend against it or to avoid his walking around with that photograph in his pocket like the lock of hair of a medieval damsel." Manuel delicately put the photograph back in his wallet and questioned Medina. "Insufficient, Manuel. I'm referring to the photo. But the proofs of miracles always are, aren't they?" Manuel took Medina's irony as an insult, but that didn't stop him from talking about Mariana: her large almond eyes, her laugh, her wavy chestnut hair, which she combed, he stated precisely, with the part on the left, her way of looking at him and talking to him as if they had always known each other: her name, which he repeated even when there was no need to for the sheer pleasure of pronouncing the three syllables that referred to her. "I can't understand how there can be other women in the world named Mariana," he said once to Medina, for he understood that Mariana wasn't a name given to someone arbitrarily at birth but a word as definitively and exactly connected to her as the moon was to the word moon. They came, then, like secret emissaries, the photograph and the name, and only a year later Mariana herself, like a silent, attentive nurse to Manuel, who was convalescing from the wound that had left him close to death on the Guadalajara front, but long before Mágina and Mágina's pride finally met that woman who from so far away and without even setting foot in the city had insulted them, in their closed houses, in the salons where they so cautiously tuned in at night to the stations of the other faction to hear the voice of Queipo de Llano and the anthems that would not be played publicly for another three years along the conquered streets of Mágina, persistent voices repeating her name and Manuel's and enumerating the details of their insolence, their undoubted madness, with the same rancor they used to tell one another the bad news of another church burned or another execution at the cemetery walls. Very soon they ignored her name to call her only "the militia woman" or "the Red": they said she had danced nude in a cabaret in Madrid, and then, when the war began, a relative of the Señoritas López Cabaña stated with certainty that he had seen her marching with a musket, cartridge belt, blue coverall, and militiaman's beret worn at a slant down the Calle de Alcalá, along with Manuel and Jacinto Solana. But the part of the story they preferred to tell, perhaps because it was the first part they had known, or because they found in it a certain dramatic quality, was the moment when Manuel appeared at the house of Señorita López Cabaña, treacherously carrying a bouquet of violets, and, after asking her mother and sisters to leave him alone with his fiancee—this added bit of drama was, of course, false, but it had a symbolic value no one wished to disparage—he sat down beside her, offered her the violets with the impeccable smile of an impostor, said in a quiet voice, looking perhaps at his own hands holding his hat on his knees: "Maria Teresa, our relationship has to end, and it's going to end right now."
In his early adolescence, Minaya had heard that scene intact and with those exact words, their bland harshness born not of reality but of certain worldly plays by Benavente; now, as he listened to Medina's narrative, he understood perhaps that they weren't a slander, that the lie and added details were the ironic attributes of truth. "But Manuel didn't care about anything," Medina said. "At first it didn't even occur to him to think of the possibility that Mariana might love him. I think her mere existence was enough to make him happy. She was a goddess, you know, and goddesses don't fall in love with you. Perhaps they smile at you from their pedestal, permit you to look at their photograph as if it were a statue, touch your hand distractedly in the café, offer you a cigarette stained with lipstick. The old school, my friend. I don't know why I have the impression that you belong to it too. And so Manuel, when he left the inconsolable Señorita López Carabaña, which made me infinitely happy, didn't do it because he was ready to marry Mariana: you don't ask for Aphrodite's hand in marriage when you see her emerge from the water, preferably nude, as on the pornographic postcards of my youth. It's just that one day early in July, without his even knowing how he dared to do it, Manuel took her hand on a tree-lined walk in the Retiro when no one else was around and told her all at once everything that had not let him live or sleep over the past few months, and she, instead of laughing, stood looking at him as if she didn't completely understand what he was saying, and responded that yes, she too, ever since that day in February when Solana introduced them. And now their only problem wasn't how to tell Doña Elvira but Jacinto Solana, whom they were going to see in an hour, because they both knew, and would rather have died than confess it to each other, that Solana had been in love with her for three years."
Medina saw him arrive, pale and still in uniform, recently discharged from the military hospital where Mariana had been with him for the past few months, during the nights of agony and fever when pain made worse by nightmares so frequently made him feel submerged in death, with no other hold on lucidity and life than the hand that held his and wiped his forehead and caressed his unshaven face in dreams. Marianas face dissolved into sphinxlike animals, into faces of doctors who bent over him from an infinite height, into shadows without bodies to contain them, into a tranquil light similar to the light of dawn that gradually took on again the shape and features of Mariana. Once—he couldn't remember when because in the hospital the measurement of time disintegrated and lengthened like the faces in nightmares—he awoke and Mariana wasn't alone, but it wasn't a doctor who was with her. Rising blindly from the darkness and the mire of sheets soaked in cold sweat in order not to lose an extremely slender possibility of consciousness, he recognized a voice saying something to her, her forgotten name perhaps, a fine-drawn face and the flash of eyeglasses, and before he passed out again he knew who it was and said "Solana," immediately returning to a suffocating dream in which he continued to hear her voice, their voices, as if he were already dead and they were talking beside his coffin. But on the day he finally awoke, free of the slime of dreams, Mariana was alone at the head of his bed, wearing a white blouse and a blue ribbon in her chestnut hair, smiling at him, overcome by happiness. This is how Medina saw her, in Magina, a week later, sitting beside Manuel at the round table in the garden, and he immediately thought she wasn't the kind of woman he had imagined from looking at the photograph, and even less the one Magina had predicted and feared. "You're Medina, aren't you?" she said to him as she stood, shaking his hand with an absolutely masculine gesture, with the immediate fondness certain women feel for the friends of the man they love. "Manuel and Solana have talked a great deal about you." The fine skin, translucent at the temples, the green or gray eyes, the short chin, the nose like an attentive bird's that Orlando had drawn with so much delicacy. It was a very warm morning in April, and Mariana had her white blouse unbuttoned down to the top of her breasts.
"And so that was Mariana," said Medina, shaking his head as if he still felt the astonishment of that distant morning. "If you were to see her, you wouldn't recognize her, because she didn't resemble the Madrid photograph at all, or even the one
they took on their wedding day. Only Orlando's drawing is more or less faithful to reality. But the dead immediately stop resembling their photographs. I estimate that Mariana must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, but she didn't look it at all: her body was a little like that girl's, Inés, but she didn't have Inés' serious walk or that reserve you can see in Inés' eyes when you look at her. Mariana's glance was absolutely transparent, which always made me uneasy for some reason I never could fathom. It was as if her eyes were asking for something, as if they were empty, as if just by looking at her, you saw her naked. When I met her here that day, I thought she resembled Hedy Lamarr a little. Back then I liked women like Jean Harlow."
It was there in the garden, at the beginning of May, when they decided to write to Solana, and Medina knew they had torn up a good number of drafts at the round metal table painted white before they found the exact words, the circumspect and earnest and cowardly words of invitation, written in Manuel's English hand, that Solana read in his house in Madrid, swearing to himself there would be no truce, that he would never agree to smile and accept and be a witness to the culmination of his failure, and then tearing up the letter with meticulous rage not toward Manuel or Mariana but toward himself, promising the empty wall, the pieces of paper he still held in his hands, that on May 20, 1937, he would not be in Magina.
5
I OPEN MY EYES but still cannot see or remember anything. On my stomach, face against the sheet, hands tensely grasping the bars at the head of the bed, I touch the cold metal and recognize its moldings as if I were recognizing and touching the limits of the body that slowly is becoming mine. In the first darkness that my eyes have encountered, areas of dim light are taking shape, the light patch of the curtains, the form of the door, the window, circular like an eye that had been spying on me as I slept, fixed on me and on the plaza that the sound of water falling over the rim of the fountain brings now to my memory, adding it to the world. It seems as if when I awoke, I had suddenly started the clock on the night table: pale green in the semidarkness, luminous face and hands indicating an hour vaguely suspended between four and five in the morning. I brush the wall with my fingers, behind the bars at the head of the bed, searching for the light switch, but it's useless because they cut off the light at eleven. On the night table, next to the alarm clock, I always keep the candlestick, cigarettes, a box of matches, paper, a pen. Sometimes I wake because of an intuition that seemed memorable in my dreams but crumbles into nothing when I try to write it down. I dream I'm writing a definitive and perfect page, that there isn't enough paper or I can't find enough to receive all the words that continue flowing and spilling out and getting lost and disappearing in the air while I look for a single blank page, a piece of paper, a smooth surface where I can write them down and save them from my dream. I write, and the ink disappears into large blue stains on suddenly liquid paper, I trace signs with a knife on the damp stone of a wall that is the one in any of the cells where I've awakened for the past eight years and the steel point breaks without penetrating that hard material. I want to write, but I've forgotten how, and I'm alone in front of the desk where I sat in school. I dream insomnia, fear, the blank page. I fumble and light the candle: a point of light that ascends, when it seemed extinguished, a pointed yellow tongue that illuminates the clock, the night table, my own hands rolling a cigarette because I know I won't get back to sleep. I carry the candlestick to the table, arrange around me the inkwell, the pen, cigarette papers, blank pages in a pile, the ashtray. I draw a long line on the unmarked paper and look at it as if it were the writing of a language I don't know.
"Why don't you write a real book," my father would say, "a novel like Rosa Maria, so I can read it." One book that would have the mysterious appearance that all the books of my childhood had: a dense, necessary object, a volume made weighty by the geometry of the words and the materiality of the paper, its hard angles and covers worn by longstanding dealings with the imagination and with hands. Perhaps now I'm not writing for myself or to save a forbidden memory; obscurely I'm being led by the desire to plan and create a book in the way a potter models a clay jar, so that his dead man's hands can touch it and his eyes blinded by the final fear and stupefaction of a fate that wasn't his can read it and revive it. They tell me, Manuel says, that nobody knows why they killed him, but that is a pious or cowardly way of not saying that they killed him because he was my father. They were probably afraid that I had managed to escape; they may have calculated that a single death was not enough to exhaust my punishment or my guilt. I know, they've told me, that on the second or third day of April 1939, they saw him come to the Plaza of San Lorenzo just as he had left it three years earlier. He tied the mare's bridle to the grillwork at the window, opened the door with the large metal key, unloaded the mattress and the disassembled bed and asked a neighbor who had won the war, shaking his head pensively when he was told. For several days he didn't leave the house. He listened to the radio until very late at night, watched the plaza through the shutters at a balcony, and when someone knocked at the door, he hurried to answer it, breaking an old habit.
On the fourth day a van painted black drove to the plaza and stopped under the poplars, directly in front of the house. With a clamor of violently slammed doors and military boots five men in blue shirts and red berets got out. Inside the van, next to the driver, sat a man in civilian clothes who made affirmative gestures to the others indicating the door that was still closed. When he opened to see who was knocking they pushed the barrel of a pistol into his chest, forcing him back inside, shouting at him to keep his hands at the back of his neck. "Are you Justo Solana?" said one, the man who had first pointed the gun at him. Hitting him with the butts of their pistols, they pushed him out to the street, until he was close to the window through which the man in civilian clothes was looking. He stood there for a time, motionless, surrounded by pistols, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, and finally the man in civilian clothes, who had lowered the window to look at him more carefully, said, "That's him. I recognized him right away," and the others, as if obeying an order, hit him with the butts of their pistols and forced him into the van and then jumped in after him still pointing their guns at the closed windows of the plaza, which opened again very quietly only when the sound of the engine had disappeared down the narrow lanes.
I've seen the place where they took him. A convent, abandoned now, that during the war was a storage depot and barracks for the Anarchist militias, on one of those treeless little plazas that one sometimes finds unexpectedly at the end of a street in Magina. In 1939 they whitewashed the facade of the convent to cover the large red letters painted on it, but the years and the rain have delicately dissolved the whitewash and now the initials, the condemned words can be made out again. F.A.I., he must have read on the facade when they made him get out of the van. PRAISE DURRUTI, but undoubtedly he didn't know who Durruti was or the meaning of the Anarchist initials furiously scrawled in red brushstrokes. They were only a part of the war that had trapped him in the end, as indecipherable as the war itself and the faces of the men who pushed him and the reason they gave for arresting him. The cellars, the chapel, the cells of the friars were filled with prisoners, and they had stretched barbed wire between the columns in the courtyard to hold the ones who couldn't fit into the cells. From the street one could see a cloud of dark faces adhering to the gratings at the windows, eyes and hands clutching at the bars or emerging from the semidarkness like strange animals or tree branches stretching in vain to reach the light. There was also, I suppose, in the upper corridors, where one could hardly hear the noise of pounding heels and orders and the engines of trucks filled with prisoners that stopped on the plaza, the busy sound of papers and typewriters, fans, perhaps, lists of names endlessly repeated on carbon paper and confirmed by someone who ran a pencil down the margin and stopped from time to time to correct a name or make a brief mark beside it.
I know that every day at dusk, a string of don
keys loaded down with cauliflower leaves came to the convent. They emptied the panniers at the entrance, and a gang of prisoners watched over by Moroccan guards gathered the fodder in big armloads and threw it over the barbed wire to the others in the courtyard. The large leaves of a green between blue and gray spilled into the outstretched hands of the prisoners, who fought to get them and tore them apart and then bit greedily into the ribs, sucking at the sticky, bitter juice. He didn't eat. He didn't want to humiliate himself among the groups of men who fought over a leaf of cow fodder and crawled on all fours around the feet of the others searching for a trampled leftover that had gone unnoticed. After eating those leaves that crinkled like wrapping paper and left a dirty, wet, green stain around their mouths, some prisoners, perhaps the ones who had fought most savagely to get them, writhed on the tiles and vomited and clutched at their bellies and the next day were dead and swollen in the middle of the courtyard or in a corner of a cell. Silent and alone, he looked at the unknown faces and strange things happening around him and thought that this, after all, was war, the same cruelty and disorder he had known in his youth when they sent him to Cuba. Sometimes, at midnight, he heard a truck shaking to a stop at the door to the convent. Then silence was suddenly imposed on the murmur of bodies crowded together in the dark, and all eyes remained fixed on the air, never on the faces of others, because looking at another man meant seeing a préfiguration of being called, of death. The sound of the truck was followed by the noise of locks and the pounding of boots along the corridors. Between two columns in the courtyard, at the doorway to a cell, a group of uniformed figures came to a halt and one of them, shining a flashlight on the typed list he held in his other hand, read the names slowly, stumbling sometimes over the pronunciation of a difficult last name.
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