One night they called his. His bones were swollen with dampness, and he had a disagreeable taste of ashes in his mouth. Two guards picked him up from the floor and tied his hands behind him with a wire. He thought about me, about whom no one had heard anything for two years, about his closed house, about his land lying solitary in the night. They made him climb into the body of the truck and tied him to the back of a chair beside a man whose head hung low and who shuddered in his bonds with silent, continual weeping. They had nailed a double row of rush chairs to the boards of the truck, and the men tied to the backs remained lined up and rigid, as if they were attending their own wake, solemnly moving back and forth on the curves of the streets and bouncing up and down, shaken, when the truck left the last lit corners behind and drove onto a dirt road in the barren lands to the north of the city. He smelled the limitless odor of the air and the empty fields in the night that the headlights cut through looking for the road to the cemetery The truck finally drove between dark cypresses, and when it reached the iron gate, it turned left and continued down a narrow path that ran the length of the low, whitewashed walls. Someone shouted to the driver to stop, and the truck drove in reverse until it stopped in front of a section of wall where the whitewash was pockmarked with bullet holes. Two soldiers were untying the ropes that secured them to the chairs and then pushing them until they jumped out of the truck. They lined them up in front of the wall, lit by the yellow headlights that lengthened their shadows on the turned over, stained ground. Long before the sound of the bolts on the rifles and the single detonation that he didn't hear, he had stopped being afraid because he knew he was on the other side of death: death was that yellow light blinding him, it was the shadow that began behind it and took on the shape of the nearby olive trees and the men hiding in them or confused with them who raised their rifles and remained motionless for an endless time, as if they were never going to move or shoot. Not the pain of the void or the vertigo of falling with tied hands to the ground or onto another body but a sudden sensation of lucidity and abandonment and the raw taste of blood in his mouth that was closed against the dark.
I light a cigarette in the candle that I put out slowly when I exhale the smoke. The smoke is blue and gray and hangs in the air like the gray light out of which emerge the room painted white, the unmade bed, the blue plaza beneath the roofs, the acacias. Smoking, motionless next to the glass, beyond the circular windows, as if in a cabin on a ship, I see the Magina dawn, as if day were dawning in a city where I am dead too.
6
"AND NOW HE'S LYING DOWN in the room," Manuel thought, "with the shutters closed, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the buckle of that absurd coat that smells of the train and that he hasn't taken off because he's trembling with cold even though Teresa lit the fire that faces his bed, his hands folded, his fingers interlaced over the coat, his thumbs rhythmically tapping each other, as if he were marking shapeless, limitless time with no precise destination, just as one marks the beats of one's heart or the drip of water falling at night from a half-closed tap. He heard me when I went in and he pretended he was sleeping, or perhaps he really was sleeping and his sleep resembles an exhausted insomnia as he lies on the bed, dressed, his unopened suitcase in the middle of the room, his shoes with the laces untied dirtying the edge of the bedspread with mud, and that smell of rough blankets and cold dawn that I had forgotten." Even before his mother came into the dining room, examining everything in a single glance as she searched for some sign that would proclaim the arrival of her guest and enemy, Manuel knew that Solana's presence in the house would weigh on the predictable silence in which supper would take place, even if his name weren't spoken, for Dona Elvira had always known how to use silence as an accusation and an insult, and Solana was one of the names she never pronounced, obeying a fierce standard of pride inculcated in her in her youth. When she finally appeared in the doorway of the dining room, flanked by Amalia as if she were an ancient lady-in-waiting, Manuel and Utrera stood at the same time, but it was Utrera who hurried to pull out the chair reserved for her at the head of the table, holding the back while Doña Elvira sat down, bowing too deeply, like a hotel waiter. In those years, Medina said then, Utrera seemed determined to maintain a certain air of a cinematic hotel receptionist, always solicitous, somewhat South American, slightly oily, with his pinstriped suits, hair stiffly waved with pomade, and the very thin black mustache that exaggerated his smile, the soft line of his mouth.
"Señora," he said, as Doña Elvira opened her napkin and placed it on her lap, looking without expression at the other side of the table but also, very much out of the corner of her eye, at Manuel, who was sitting to her left, "I have no words to thank you for accepting my invitation tonight. With your permission, I shall tell Amalia to begin serving supper." The municipal council of a nearby town had commissioned a very large allegory of Victory, and since, like the painters of the Renaissance, he was paid according to the number of figures, he had invited Manuel and his mother to a supper that he himself classified as special. After requesting permission from Manuel, who shrugged, Amalia had agreed to serve supper on the silver table service, and to place on the table the two bronze candelabra that normally were on the sideboard and were a partial testimony to the time when Manuel's father was still alive and gala suppers were held in the house, like the one attended by Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. In the light of the candelabra, the dining room and the three figures gathered around the table that was too large had the melancholy appearance of an unfortunate simulacrum. As he had done at the formal suppers of his adolescence, Manuel looked obsessively at his shirtcuffs and the hands that held his fork and knife, sometimes lifting his head to agree with what Utrera was saying, with his solicitude and his smile, distant, like the gestures of an actor who has been left alone on stage and attempts to move the audience in a half-empty hall. He noticed, suddenly, that Teresa had left the dining room and had not returned, and a sideways glance at his mother let him know that she too had noticed the girl's absence. "Teresa," said Doña Elvira, interrupting something Utrera was telling her. Amalia took a step and approached her but looked at Manuel as if asking for a sign. "Yes, Señora?" Doña Elvira slowly placed the knife and fork on the tablecloth and spoke, barely separating her lips. "I didn't call you. Isn't Teresa here?" Amalia was still looking at Manuel, nervously smoothing the edge of her white apron with her fingers. "She'll be right back, Señora." It was then that Manuel spoke, understanding, accepting the trap that had been laid, daring to look in his mother's eyes just as he had looked in them on the day he told her he was going to marry Mariana, imitating without realizing it their blue fixity, stripped of any desire to explain or defy. "Teresa has gone up to take Solana his supper."
She had heard the bell from her bedroom, sensing in its long ring a danger she couldn't specify, because she didn't recognize the voice of the person who had just arrived, but as soon as she heard the street door closing she rang the bell imperiously for Amalia to come up, and she asked and found out, while the maid helped her dress, that the old threat had never died but had only been incubating for ten years, ready to return at any time from a future she had always feared and that was being realized now as inevitably as the coming of autumn or old age. "So they didn't kill him in the war or after the war," she said, "they condemned him to death and pardoned him, and now he's left prison to come to my house." "I heard him say he'd be leaving soon," said Amalia, behind her, placing the embroidered peignoir over her shoulders. "It doesn't matter if he stays or leaves today. He came, and my son has seen him. The harm has already been done." But she asked every morning if he had left, not saying his name, alluding with a movement of her head to the part of the house where the outsider was staying, and every day during the first week she received the same reply, which didn't explain anything, because no one, not even Manuel, knew Solanas intention. They told her he probably was sick, because he coughed and his hands trembled and he almost never left the room or got out
of bed, and when Teresa brought him a meal and left it on the night table he acted as if he hadn't seen her, but then, as soon as the girl left the room, he sat up and ate without taking off his coat or using the cutlery or the napkin, stopping abruptly if he heard a noise outside his door, as if he were ashamed to let anyone discover how hungry he was. "He still hasn't opened his suitcase," said Amalia on the morning of the fourth day, "and he hasn't even untied the rope he had around it, or moved it from the spot where he left it when he came." The untouched suitcase, the overcoat, the empty closet, even the attitude of Manuel, whom they rarely saw talking to Solana, were gradually being established as signs of an immediate departure, a respite, at least, because as the days passed the presence of the outsider seemed to dissolve without anything taking place. Doña Elvira never crossed paths with him in the dining room, as she had feared, and she didn't see him in the courtyard or the hallway in the gallery. But it was enough for her to know he was near her, in the house, in the same room he had occupied in 1937, to imagine him alone, waiting for something, poisoned by a purpose that she would discover only when it was too late to put an end to his evil spell. "Just like it was before," she said to Utrera, "when my simpleminded son would bring him here for a snack and do everything to keep me from knowing. But the smell of the rubber in his espadrilles was left in the library."
They ate alone, Doña Elvira and Utrera, because Manuel had stopped coming to the dining room and spent his time in the pigeon loft, in the upper rooms, occupied, as they learned from Teresa, in supervising the work of the masons he had hired to restore the roof. He chose the huge room with the circular windows, which for thirty years had been a storeroom for old furniture and religious paintings stowed against the walls, and chests like tombs where solemn ballroom dresses were kept and carnival costumes that hadn't been worn since the turn of the century. The masons moved everything to an attic, sealed the rat holes, and painted the ceiling and walls of the room white, as well as the shutters at the two windows. With the help of Teresa, to whom he had suggested that she say nothing, not even to her Aunt Amalia, Manuel had the wooden floor cleaned until its former chestnut color was restored and he arranged the new furniture in the room so thoughtfully that Teresa suspected he intended to move into it himself. A bed with a thick mattress and clean sheets and blankets that had never been used, facing the two circular windows that were oriented to the southeast so they would receive the first light of day, an oak desk between the two windows, its Isabelline moldings newly varnished, a shining Underwood, an English fountain pen and an inkwell and a packet of blank sheets carefully arranged in the top drawer, and on the wall, above the desk, a darkened, Arcadian eighteenth-century landscape depicting the ocher outskirts of a city and a long gondola crossing the waters of the lagoon of Venice. But if Manuel was going to banish himself to that room where the other voices in the house didn't reach, it would not be only to sleep, Teresa thought: it was as if he had decided to prepare everything and definitively cut himself off from the world, because he hung a curtain across one end and behind it he placed a small kerosene stove and a locker with dishes and cutlery for one person, sausages, canned goods, bottles of wine that the two of them brought up more or less secretly from the wine cellar, and even a pack of candles to illuminate the room when the electricity was cut off every night at eleven. By the light of one of the candles, on the night of the fifth day after Solanas arrival, Manuel and Teresa checked all the things one by one as if they were inspecting the staterooms and pantries of a ship that was about to sail, and Manuel, exhausted, because he hadn't stopped working since dawn, lit a cigarette and sat in front of the typewriter, brushing the keyboard with the tip of his index finger, not daring to strike the grouped, identical letters, only feeling their brief metal touch like a possibility of interminable words. Then he remembered something Jacinto Solana had told him in a very old letter: words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.
The next morning, when Teresa came into Solanas bedroom with the breakfast tray, she found him standing in front of the mirror, fastening the belt of the coat that he may not have taken off the night either before when he slept. "He said he's leaving today," she hurried to tell Manuel when she went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later Amalia was already repeating the news to Doña Elvira, who showed no sign of relief when she heard it. "I saw him in the hallway in the gallery," Amalia said, "with his hat on and his suitcase in his hand. I didn't hear him cough, and he's not as pale as he was when he came." He went down the hallway in the way he had walked since leaving prison, slowly and very close to the wall, as if he wanted to take shelter in it, fatigued, tenacious, one hand in the pocket of his overcoat and the other clutching the suitcase with contracted knuckles that jutted out of his dirty sleeve, and it wasn't the odor of prison and of trains or the weariness of his shoulders that pointed to his future of bad weather and stations with no destination, but that pallid gesture of his hand that held the suitcase as if it were an accepted and necessary attribute of his condition, like the brief tie, the dark shirt collar, the overcoat that belonged to another time and another man who perhaps was still in prison. He walked with his head bowed, looking through the glass in the gallery at the amber light descending to the courtyard, but he never went down the stairs because Manuel was waiting for him and didn't seem to hear him when he said he was leaving. "Come. I want to show you something." "I'm in a hurry, Manuel. They told me a train to Madrid comes through at eleven." Manuel took his suitcase from him and had him go up with him to a part of the house that Solana had never visited: dark staircases, empty salons with mirrors on the walls and pale painted wreaths in the corners of the ceilings, vaulted glass niches where the staring eyes gleamed of saints modeled in wax with ringlets of human hair. Finally they came to the first door in a hallway whose other end was lost in darkness, and when Manuel opened the door, it was as if the daylight were spilling violently over them. The desk between the two windows, the high typewriter that sparkled gold and black and metallic in the icy sun of the January morning, the white walls that still smelled faintly of paint, the air full of a fragrance of clean sheets and varnish that repeated in Solana's memory the distant invitation he took as an offense the first time Manuel had him go into the library, standing in the doorway, just as he did now, so that he would enter only in the glare of delight. He took a few steps, as he had then, not daring to go all the way in, he stood still before the typewriter, before the light from the circular windows, picking up the pen and then putting it down carefully, as if he were afraid to damage it with his hard, clumsy hands, and it may have been when he saw the pack of black tobacco and the cigarette papers that he definitively realized that the room and the typewriter and the bed with its white sheets had been prepared for him, because Manuel smoked only light tobacco. "You know I can't accept, Manuel. You know I'd never be able to repay you," he said, looking at all the untouched offerings, and he made a brusque movement as if to leave and renounce them while it was still possible not to surrender to temptation, but Manuel remained in front of the door, blocking his way. "Write your book here. In the top drawer of the desk you have all the paper you'll need. I'll make certain nobody bothers you." He put the key on the desk and went out, closing the door very slowly. He heard Solana's footsteps, silence, then the bedsprings, and again silence and footsteps on the parquet, the typewriter, sounding as if an index finger were hitting over and over again the same letter chosen at random and repeated with tireless fury on the paper, on the black, empty roller.
7
WHEN SHE HEARD the still distant whistle, Mariana stepped to the edge of the platform to look at the deserted track that vanished among the green fields and the first olive groves, and the south wind, the one that announces rain, blew her hair and skirt and the white cloth of her blouse as if she were standing on a pier by the o
cean. "It's coming," she called to me, pointing at the almost motionless column of smoke bending over the tops of the olive trees, and then she turned toward me smoothing her hair and the skirt that had revealed her knees for a delicious moment, but the smile on her lips now was no longer mine, and her impatience for the arrival of the train carrying Orlando was an affront very similar to the uneasiness of jealousy. I hated the train and I hated Orlando, because they were coming to decapitate my being alone with her, they were emissaries of the time that would snatch her away from me and the future hours when her absence would destroy me. Stripped of will, of resignation, of pride, I consisted of nothing but two yearning eyes that looked at Mariana, and consciousness of the last respite that had venomously been granted to my imagination. She was already leaving, although she seemed immobile, I felt her becoming lost as slowly as the hands of a clock or a train that begins its departure in silence slipping away toward the red lights in the darkness, and when the second whistle sounded and I saw the column of smoke coming closer, the empty station, the indolent quiet of the May morning, were suddenly the landscape of a desert island where I had been abandoned and left alone, looking at the clock that pointed to noon, calculating the place and destination of my next flight, not going more than three days into the future because beyond that time limit nothing would remain. The respite that for me was disintegrating like a face of smoke lasted interminably for Mariana, and this mutual discord in our perception of time wounded me like a disloyalty more certain than her marriage to Manuel. "I count the days, Jacinto, I can't live in that house, with that woman who doesn't look at me and hates me without saying anything to me, with that man, the sculptor, who always looks at my neckline and has clammy hands. Even Manuel is like a stranger to me."
A Manuscript of Ashes Page 17