A few hours after running into Jacinto Solana on the riverbank, the madman Cardena called Frasco by whistling to him from the almond trees, but this time he wasn't carrying a recently beheaded kid in his bag, and he didn't threaten him with death if he didn't hand over five liters of wine. "I know that man you're hiding," he said, smiling with his empty eyes, his mouth open and as wet as the snout of his dog, panting next to him, hiding between his legs. "The only one hiding here is you, Cardena. So you can go back the way you came, or I'm calling you know who." Trembling, the madman Cardena and the dog raised their heads at the same time, as if they had detected the scent or the footsteps of an enemy approaching in silence. "You're hiding him so they don't kill him like they killed his father." Then Frasco turned around: the madman, happy at having trapped him as he was walking toward the house, didn't say anything yet, he remained squatting, looking at him while he caressed the dog, who licked his hand, and acting as if he were following the flight of a bird through the branches of the almond trees. "There was no way to knock down that door," he said, not to Frasco, perhaps to the dog or to himself, to the part of his memory not ravaged by madness, rocking back and forth on bent knees as if he were hearing music, "we were knocking and they didn't open, why would they open if they already knew what we were looking for, and then the old man passed by, riding his mule, and that bastard who denounced us afterward saw the ax sticking out of the saddlebag and says, Comrade, lend us the ax and we'll give it right back, and the old man was scared, he didn't want to, and the other one took out his pistol, if you don't give it to us in a nice way we'll take it in a not nice way, I'm denouncing you, we'll see what you're doing at this hour with an ax, the old man trembling, not getting down from the mule, I remember it as if I could see him now, I went up to Magina just to get the ax, and now I'm going back to my farm, and the other one put his pistol to his chest and says, well, now you're going to knock down that door, inside there are some fine gentlemen who don't want to let us in, now that's rude, and the old man, who couldn't stand because he was so scared of the pistol, got off the mule and took out the ax and at first he sort of looked sideways and hit the door very slow, like he didn't know how to use the ax, until the other one pointed the pistol at him again and said, we'll see if he's on the side of the Falangistas inside, and the old man hit the lock three times and knocked down the door, and put the ax back in the saddlebag right away and without getting back on the mule he took the reins and went down the street, but then, when the troops came in, that Judas lost no time going to the Falange and telling them he knew the names of the men who killed the family of Domingo González, and that I was in charge of the patrol, and like everybody knows they asked him for more names, and so to get in good with them, he denounced the old man as an accomplice and was the ruination of us both, since he'll never be at peace as long as I live, because one of these days I'll pick up the rifle and go to Mágina and kill him, and then let them come for me, they won't catch me alive at night or during the day, I'll hang myself before I give myself up to them."
He had spoken as if reciting an interminable litany, in a monotone, indifferent, somnambulistic, his chin rigid against his chest and his hands clasping his knees as if to roll himself into a ball or maintain the monotonal impulse of his rocking, and abruptly, without any variation in his voice announcing that he was about to fall silent, he bit his lips and picked up the rifle again, sitting up slowly against the damp hollow of the cave, fixed now on Solana with an attention sharpened by fear, as if he had recognized in him the other man, the dead man, whom he hadn't seen since that dawn in 1937, returned from the dead to pursue him to the last tunnel of his refuge, to the end of his memory or his madness. They didn't leave yet; they remained still, bending down, facing the man who no longer saw them, waiting for words they could hear, which meant nothing. "Cardeña," said Frasco, putting his hand on his shoulder, as if to wake him, "Cardeña." "Let's go," said Solana behind him, in a very quiet voice. When they left him alone, the madman Cardeña murmured slow tatters of words with his arms around his dog's neck and clawed at his pointed stiff beard with meticulous rage, as if carrying out a methodical flagellation in secret.
13
ALL I HAVE LEFT is the weary privilege of enumerating and writing, of calculating the precise instant when I didn't do what I should have or could have done or the way in which a gesture or word of mine could have modified the passage of time as the erasures or details added to my manuscript modify the story I imagine and recall as stripped of any intention of surviving because of it in anyone's memory as an Egyptian scribe putting the finishing touches on the figures and signs of a funeral papyrus in order to place them in a hermetically sealed chest in the darkness of a tomb. Now I know that if in the small hours of May 22, 1937, when I saw Mariana walking barefoot and as if asleep toward the door that led to the pigeon loft, I had remained a few seconds longer behind the column in the gallery that kept her from seeing me, I would have seen just a few steps away the face of her killer. Now I know that while I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and wrote in the light of dawn the final verses of my life, someone was grasping a pistol and silently climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, and my father, who had gone up to Magina in the dead of night to find an ax and come back to the farm before daybreak, realized too late that he should have obeyed the presentiment of fear he had when he saw the patrol of militiamen and was about to pull on the mule's bridle perhaps and head for another street. He shouldn't have slept that night either while I walked around the bedroom I was going to leave the next morning and sat on the bed without finding the will to take off my glasses or untie my shoelaces and got up again as if I had heard someone calling me, only to sit down not against the pillow but facing the desk where a burning lamp opened a crack of light in the mirror in which my face was a portrait of future dark and an inert prophecy of how I would remember everything and of the past time that concentrated and accumulated there to watch over my insomnia and testify to the last boundary of successive simulations in a biography so tenaciously sustained in them that it suddenly fell apart, like the ash of a paper that did not lose its shape when transformed by fire, when it was no longer possible to use the mask of a new imposture. Not writing yet, not daring to go out to the hallway because I knew that as soon as I stepped on the chess maze of white and black tiles I would walk to the parlor and the door of the marriage bedroom and listen to Mariana's laughter and Manuel's dark breathing and the sound of bodies tirelessly entwined and clinging, I smoked quietly at the desk and looked at myself in the mirror, like an actor so possessed by the character to whom he surrenders his life, that one night, in the empty theater, after the last performance, when he takes off the false eyebrows and the wig and is cleaning off his makeup with routine skill, he discovers that the cotton soaked in alcohol is erasing the features of his true and only face behind which there is simply an oval, livid surface, as smooth and vacant as the glass in two facing mirrors. Like the photographs of Mariana or of our false shared youth that Manuel kept and classified long before the war ended with the melancholy perseverance of a caretaker in a provincial museum, hanging them on walls or placing them randomly on sideboards and on the shelves in the library according to an order as carefully established in the catalogs of his memory as they were invisible to anyone else, my face, that night, was a lucid, brutal prophecy of my past, and everything I never knew or never wanted to know gathered densely around me, at my back, in the shadows and corners of the room, in the hallways of the house, like distant relatives who return in their mourning to hold a vigil for someone who never thought of them when he was alive and about whom they had heard nothing for many years. It was four or five o'clock when I left the bedroom, afraid of running into someone in the hallway. No doubt at that hour he had already got up and harnessed the mule and was going back and forth between the stable and the single room that served as his bedroom and storeroom with the restlessness of excessively early risers: as a boy, before he called me
, I would wake, alerted by fear, when I heard his footsteps on the stairs or the violent cough brought on by his first cigarette, and I would hide desperately under the top sheet, as if by remaining still and keeping my eyes closed I could stop or slow down time or dig in the warm hollow of the sheets a burrow where the bitter odor of tobacco couldn't reach or my father's footsteps climbing the stairs again to knock on my bedroom door and throw me with no excuses into the wretchedness of cold and dawn. Recently combed, inflexible, his face red from washing with icy water he had splashed on in the corral, as immune to sleep as he was to fatigue or tenderness, despising me because I walked around groggy and couldn't find the saddle for the white mare. Next to him my clumsy slowness, my physical cowardice in handling animals and tools grew worse, so that his blind resolve when he worked frightened me more than the possibility of punishment. The shape of a hoe was as brutal and intractable as the muzzle of a mule. He noted the ineptitude, the cowardice of my gestures, the absent air with which I carried out his orders, and he shook his head as if accepting an insult he never deserved.
BUT I DIDN'T THINK about him even once that night. Treacherously, while I crushed my cigarette into the marble on the night table and opened the bedroom door, resolved to swallow the indignity or shame, to approach like a wolf the region of the house where it was possible to hear Mariana's laughter and inviting racy words, peremptory commands, brief muffled shouts of exaltation and agony, chance pushed my father like a slow magnet toward his house in Magina and modulated his step to lead him to the precise place and moment in which a closed door and a pistol and an ax would cause the conspiracy of death against us all to germinate. I want to stop him now, as I write, I want him to choose another street to return to the farm or to take so long to find the ax that when he passes the house where Domingo Gonzalez was hiding the door is already knocked down and he moves to one side to keep the mule from walking on the splinters. Any small alteration in the architecture of time can or could save him and save Mariana and stop the killer who was already holding the pistol and watching her, quieting his breath against the badly joined boards of the door to the pigeon loft. He saw her from the back, leaning on the windowsill, looking at the line of the roofs and the fig trees in the courtyards above which the distant smoke of chimneys and the icy blue of dawn ascended, as if she were contemplating the sea from the deck of a ship, serene and solitary, like someone who has undertaken a journey announced in a dream, naked beneath the transparent cloth of the nightgown that outlined the shape of her hips and thighs in the faint backlight of air sifted by silence and the sound of sleeping pigeons that woke suddenly and flew into the corners and against the roof of the pigeon loft when the brief shock of gunshots resounded all through the house. I was writing at the time. Before the witness watching me in the mirror with impassive solemnity, incurably sick with literature, I had read aloud the verses I conceived of as a whispered, very long sentence as I prowled the hallway of the gallery and the marriage bedroom like a sleepwalker, and in my voice poisoned with gloom those words that several months later I would find, unfamiliar, printed, indifferent, definitively strange, like the beauty of a woman we once loved who can no longer move us, on the pages of a dirty, tattered copy of Hora de Espana that a soldier left on the train taking us to the front. "Mágina," I wrote, "May 22, 1937," and when I was about to cross out a word to break the excessive rhythm of one of the lines, it was as if all the glass in the gallery and the dome had shattered under the deafening roar of a multitude of pursued men or animals. I had a premonition of sirens and airplane engines rising above the blackness cut by searchlights and the flash of a machine gun, because the instinct of fear returned me to the hideous nights of the bombing of Madrid, but behind the first explosion, in whose immediate recollection I now discerned nearby voices that moved away and a tumult of steps on the roofs and rifle shots, there was only a silence very similar to the one that is prelude to the whistle of a bomb that doesn't explode. I ran to the window and moved aside the curtains, and on the other side of the street I could see, at the edge of the eaves, a very tall shadow that bent forward as it ran and slipped on the roof tiles and finally disappeared as if it had abruptly deserted the body it was pursuing. Then nothing, silence, an empty minute like the foliage in a woods where a hunter's gun has gone off, then footsteps and voices and the weeping of a woman who was Amalia, who came into my room without knocking to tell me that Mariana was dead in the pigeon loft, and the sudden memory of Mariana walking barefoot on the cold tiles a step away from me, my shame hidden behind a corner of the gallery—the curtains were closed across the courtyard windows, and a symmetrical figure invisible to my fascination or my insomnia was stationed behind them, its hand tense on the pistol butt and its ear attentive to the sound like silk swishing of Mariana's footsteps—my stupefaction and desire grown to the now indivisible boundary of my longing to die ever since I learned what the taste of her mouth was like and felt on my fingers the wet warmth that caught at them at the top of her thighs. Some nights, in the house, during this winter, I've left the room with the circular windows, believing I was fleeing the typewriter, and only when I came to the door of the parlor and saw, when I turned on the light, the wedding portrait in which Mariana looks at me with the loyalty of the dead from the distance of that indelible afternoon when she put on her brides dress and obliged Manuel to put on his now useless lieutenant's uniform to pose for the photographer, I understood and accepted that I was repeating the same steps I took ten years earlier in order to listen to her voice behind the closed door of the bedroom where she was turning over entwined with Manuel and breathing with the same fever that had demolished me beneath her body when she said my name and felt my face like a blind person in the perfumed, avid darkness of the garden. Like that night, with the fervor of someone arriving for an impossible appointment, I entered the parlor and looked beneath the door of the bedroom that no one has occupied since then for a line of light, a sign of the one that shone on the gleam of their bodies and was still lit when dawn came through the window, when Manuel was asleep with fatigue and happiness and Mariana, very carefully moving the arm abandoned to sleep that still held her waist, put on her nightgown and closed the shutters before going out so that the light of day would not wake Manuel. I stood still at the glass door to the parlor and the now-forgotten scent of Mariana's body was not in the air, only the discord between the immobility of places and the headlong flight of time, the persistence of the green-topped table and the bronze clock held up by Diana the Huntress and the sofa with yellow flowers, which had been there long before Mariana came to the house and perhaps will remain in the same indifferent quietude when Manuel and I have died. I stepped forward, after turning on the light, poured less than a glass of anisette from the bottle that Manuel and Medina had left on the table after turning off the radio on which they had listened to the remote music of the "Hymn to Riego" and "The International," lifted a light-tobacco cigarette from Manuel's cigarette case, and when I raised my eyes to the oval photograph, from any angle in the room Mariana was looking at me, fixed on me, as if her eyes were pursuing me in the parlor, just as they had looked for me, without a single gesture or movement of her head betraying her, while the photographer prepared his camera and arranged the lights and Orlando and I talked quietly in the semidarkness that covered the other half of the studio. Like the delicate trace of the touch of a leaf that belonged to a tree that became extinct in another era of the world and survives forever transmuted into a fossil, or a shell's whorls imprinted on a rock very far from the sea with a precision more unalterable than that of the effigies on ancient coins, that was how the moment, when my eyes met Mariana's after an entire day of avoiding each other like two accomplices who do not want to be connected to a crime, endured thanks to chance and the magnesium flash firmer than memory and as undeniable as the bronze profile or light tunic of the Diana the Huntress that was always on the sideboard in the parlor. From there I heard the tenacious, failed panting of Manuel and t
he laugh and entreaty broken by a long groan in which I didn't recognize the voice of Mariana, and still I didn't move, as attentive as a spy, supported by the darkness, when the silence fell and the respiration of two exhausted bodies reached me like the sound of the sea that one hears and still doesn't see behind a line of tall dunes. I was writing in my imagination, I counted syllables and words as if I were segregating an inevitable material completely foreign to my will, a long thread of drivel and dirty literature as interminable as the flow of thought that followed me everywhere and traced the shape of my destiny and each one of my steps. Followed, pushed by literature, calculating under the remorse and jealousy and fear that someone would surprise me in the parlor, the spurious possibility of recounting that critical moment in the future book I was always on the verge of beginning, I went out to the hallway groping at the walls and furniture, and I was returning to my room when at my back the sound of a loose tile that someone was walking on made me hide behind a corner of the gallery. I saw her pass so close I could have touched her just by stretching out a hand impelled by the instinct to repeat just one caress, but her proximity was as remote and forbidden as that of the blind, like them she was surrounded by an irremediable space of solitude. Disheveled, barefoot, a recently lit cigarette between very pale lips, her face illuminated by the dawn had the mysterious intensity of a gaze that divined everything, a serene light tempered by the devastation of love and the melancholy of fatigue and knowledge, as if at the end of that night her beauty and life had been purged of every banal attribute in order to be summarized in the perfection of a few indelible features, just as a few lines drawn as if at random on the blank space of the paper had been enough for Orlando to sketch a profile of Mariana that could never be captured by photographs.
A Manuscript of Ashes Page 24