Afterward, when I saw her stretched out and dead in front of all of us, I realized that perhaps it hadn't been the light of dawn that sharpened her features but a secret divination of the death that was already calling her to the pigeon loft with a voice only she could hear. "Didn't you hear the shooting, Don Jacinto? They killed Señorita Mariana." Amalia was crying and covering her face with both hands, and I didn't understand yet or didn't accept it; I got up from the desk and shook her by the shoulders, I moved her hands away from her face and obliged her to look at me because I didn't comprehend the words blurred by weeping, and she wiped her tears and pointed upward repeating that a stray bullet, that a shot in the forehead, that Mariana was dead in front of the unshuttered window in the pigeon loft, her knees dirty with droppings and her nightgown raised to the middle of her long white thighs, her hands extended and open and her face turned to one side and partially covered by her hair. When I went up to the pigeon loft, Manuel had already closed her eyes. He was kneeling next to her and he wasn't crying; he only extended an almost firm hand in which you could barely notice the violent trembling that shook his shoulders to touch her cheeks very delicately or move away from her mouth a lock of hair that had caught on half-parted lips. He seemed to be shivering with cold next to a fire that had gone out and would never raise his head and stand and come toward us, obscurely gathered in front of the door to the pigeon loft as if an unspoken command or the line of a circle in whose exact center Mariana's head lay prohibited our taking a single step toward her. Standing together, motionless, enclosed in a silence in which Amalia's weeping throbbed against our unified consciousness like the tearing of a wound, we separated momentarily only when Medina and the judge and a captain of the Assault Guard made their way past us to examine Mariana's body, and then immediately, as if the space they passed through had made us vulnerable, we grouped together again to close it, silently driven by the cowardly urgency that brings together a crowd surrounded by fear: Orlando, beside me, squeezing my hand without looking at me, without looking at Santiago, whose eyes were still drowsy with sleep and perhaps last night's alcohol; Utrera, who was blinking and whose respiration was very deep, broken at times as if by a stabbing pain; Dona Elvira, in perpetual mourning, staring not at Manuel or Mariana but at a place in the air that contained nothing, perhaps at the gold and blue strip of May sky that outlined the empty rectangle of the window or the roof where some guards advanced on all fours, looking for something among the broken tiles; Amalia, who cried in screams and wrung large red hands that sometimes tore at her hair or wiped her eyes and mouth in an emphatic gesture. I remember her long weeping like the wailing of a dog and the way Manuel's shoulders and knees trembled when Medina helped him to stand and brought him toward us, moving him as if he were a sleepwalker or a blind man who suddenly had been left alone on the streets of a strange city. I went up to him, said his name in a low voice, "Manuel, it's me, Solana," with desperate tenderness, useless shame, taking him by the arm with a clumsy, blind pity meant for him and myself and the never-denied connection of that mutually sworn loyalty that had begun twenty-five years earlier in the courtyard of a school where we wore blue aprons and had lasted until it was condensed finally in the name of Mariana, but he, lost and alone, didn't recognize me or didn't see me, and he continued trembling as if he were shaken by a fever that blinded him and dilated his pupils, moving his lips as if he were murmuring something, acknowledging the voice of someone calling him whom he didn't see.
AS IN DREAMS, in the pigeon loft I am a figure partly removed from myself and more opaque than the others. The pain I remember, the sudden, bitter sensation like the taste of blood in a mouth that has fallen against a damp cement floor, belong to that shadow, and I can't relive them because there are certain kinds of pain that act as anesthesia on memory. At the bottom of a great darkness, the pigeon loft illuminated by the indecent sun of the morning of May 22 that paused at Mariana's waist like the embroidered edge of the nightgown in the middle of her thighs is a cubical space suspended in the air, as far from the house and from Magina as I am from those days, as Magina is from me, high above the twilight mist and the gray-bronze of the olive trees, as are the words I write about things I've already given up recovering and naming. I'm alone, the pigeon loft has gradually and silently been emptied, like a church a few minutes after Mass is over, and on the staircase landing, behind me, Medina is talking to the captain of the Assault Guard, who leaned out the window before he left and ordered his men to wait for him in the street. "She died instantly," says Medina, and I hear the click of the metal spring that closes his case with the same unappealable certainty that he and the captain display in establishing how Mariana died. "She heard the shots and went to the window. Or she probably was already looking out and the shot hit her in the forehead before she saw anything. Don't you agree?" The captain doesn't say anything, probably he shakes his head with the sorrow of someone accepting a misfortune that has befallen others. "But let's see, Medina, you're a friend of the family, can you tell me what that woman was doing half-naked in the pigeon loft at that hour? They were married yesterday, weren't they?" I'm alone, and for the first time since I came in, I move toward the empty place where Mariana's body lay, on the thin disturbed layer of droppings and feathers like thistle flowers or tufts of cotton. Leaning on the sill of rotting wood where Mariana may have placed her hands before she died, I look at the impassive scene, the roofs that extend like dunes toward a distance of faded blue where the sierra is outlined, almost wiped away by the glare of a sun that trembles as invisibly as hot air above the chimneys. She had gone up to the highest spot in the house to say good-bye to the city where she always knew she was an outsider and to look for the last time at the things Manuel and I had looked at since we were born, because she would have liked, she told me once, to be part of the oldest paradises in our memories, to remove from hers all the recollections of an earlier life she didn't care about, so that its large, voluntarily emptied area would be ready to receive a new memory never to be divided from ours, a territory as intimately designed for happiness as the memory of certain rooms from childhood. She never spoke to us about hers, and not even Orlando, her oldest friend and the delicate, hermetic confidant of those terrifying chasms in her heart not visible from a distance when she momentarily transformed before me into an unknown woman, knew how she lived or what she did in the years before the spring of 1933, before the precise day he found her sitting in a cafe at a table on which there was only a glass of water, with her straight hair cut like Louise Brooks' and a resolute determination to model for a painter or photographer who wouldn't rush to touch her breasts as soon as she was naked. "She died in the same way she appeared to us," I thought, looking at the same roofs and blue brightness Mariana saw before she died, as if I could find in them the key her eyes always denied me, "she died and left exactly as she came, as if she had never been here." She didn't feel anything, Medina had said, she didn't even hear the shot or know she was going to die: a sharp blow on the forehead and then darkness and forgetting as she fell on her back and her already inert body rebounded on the dirty planks. But I remembered that her knees were soiled with droppings and that on her forehead, sticking to her hair and the thin border of darker blood surrounding the wound, was a pigeon feather, so small the killer didn't notice it when he wiped her face. He also forgot to pick up the cartridge of his single bullet or perhaps he couldn't find it, driven by the need to get away. It was next to the doorsill, in the crack between two floor planks, hard and vile and hidden, like those insects that fold themselves over when they sense danger until they take on the shape of a little gray ball.
14
BEFORE THEY REACHED THE RIVER, they turned off the engine and headlights and let the car slide along the thin white dust where the moonlight revealed bird tracks like the characters in a strange piece of writing. The car very slowly entered the wet gray fog as it descended to the end of the road, and the low, flexible branches of the olive trees whipped
against the windows and then cracked like slow whips when they were left behind, perhaps provoking the flight and shriek of a bat that had watched with no surprise the passage of the curved black body on which the dust gleamed with a tonality slightly less livid than on the road. When they reached the railroad tracks, next to the station's freight shed built at the entrance to the bridge that extended the road to the country house, they saw above the fog the grove of almond trees and the esplanade and the irregular building of the Island of Cuba, its baroque pediments covered with whitewash where the moon shone faintly and its roofs laid out at such unequal heights that they gave the house the air of a rugged, broken ruin, like those castles whose debris barely stands out on the slope where they were built and yet they display, especially from below and at a distance, the traces of an architecture conceived both as a labyrinth and a watchtower, an arch in the air, a high earthen wall, a concave roof under which swifts make their nests. On level ground, very close to the tracks, they used up the car's last impulse forward to turn it between two olive trees, and they stopped it there, hidden beneath the hard branches at whose ends the olives were already blossoming in fragrant yellow clusters. The leaves on the olive trees scratched at the windows, moved by a breeze they couldn't feel when they got out of the car, and had, at so short a distance, from the darkness of the interior, a metal gleam similar to that of the rails or the river water. On the white, cold earth that shone like sulfur the shadows of the trees had the precision of silhouettes cut out of cardboard, and behind the low volume of fog, beyond the river whose sound was still confused with the wind in the branches, the rise of the Island of Cuba was prelude to a limitless, empty space, mauve, gray and blue, violet at its farthest limits, vast and high like a dome held up only by the light of the moon over the uniform olive trees that sank into precipices of dry torrents marked by yellow broom and then ascended along the side of the hill with the methodical obstinacy of the ocean and stopped their advance at the spurs of the sierra, their roots still adhering to the bare rock, like mollusks clinging to the fissure in a cliff, on slopes of sour thickets where not even the lunatic who planted them there would climb to pick their fruit. Alarmed, exhausted, uselessly on guard, they watched as a night train passed before them, like a long, tremulous ribbon of yellow lights, and its whistle told Solana that it must be between one and two in the morning, because Frasco had taught him to calculate the hour according to the height of the sun or the passage of the trains, and to determine, even if he didn't see them, if they were freight trains or mail trains or express trains, if they were traveling to Madrid or returning to one of those cities on the other side of the sierra that Frasco had never seen and invariably imagined as very large and very close to the sea. Lying on the bed, not yet turning off the light that Beatriz saw before the car stopped knowing it was lit only for him, recognizing him in it just as in another time she would have recognized him in a jacket left on the back of a chair or in the enduring odor of his body between the sheets in the bedroom, Jacinto Solana took pleasure in the certainty of finding himself alone at the Island of Cuba, and the size of the empty house and the olive groves and the landscape surrounding it increased his delight in solitude, no longer driven by literature, because that afternoon, he recorded without emotion in the blue notebook, he had finished the last page of his book, Beatus Ille, and now he had before him, on the table that would never again be disordered with rough drafts and the smoke from cigarette butts, a pile of pages as impeccably ordered as those seen on the shelves in stationery stores, but completely covered by a writing that greedily swallowed up the margins and had deserved the absolution of a period. He was mildly calmed and exalted by the mere physical presence of the stacked pages, the solid, certain touch of their corners, the odor of the paper, as if the book were not the score of possible music that other minds and future eyes would bring back to life but an object already definitive and beautiful, closely tied to its weight and the persistence of its volume in space, enclosed in it and its shape like a bronze figure: grown, with the imperious slowness of a tree or a branch of coral, by the addition of the edge of each of the pages that now testified to the duration of its progress, like concentric rings in the recently cut trunk of a tree. He thought about his past life and couldn't understand how he could have survived so many years of empty desperation when the book did not yet exist, and he recalled with distant gratitude the stories he wrote as a boy in his notebooks to show to Manuel later, passing them in secret beneath the desk they always shared, whose somber wood stained with ink blotches was like that of the desk over which he had bent, writing, since he arrived at the country house. He would illustrate those narratives copied from the vicissitudes of silent film with drawings that he colored painstakingly, and at the foot of each he wrote a brief caption between ellipses, as they did in the illustrations for serialized stories, and on the last page he would write End in tall block letters, carefully following with a dampened pencil point the line of the squares so that the firm strokes would not swerve. Like successive rehearsals that never could satisfy him completely, he wrote the word End many times in the blue notebook, fascinated perhaps by its sound, its shape like the point of a knife, and he probably had written it that same night in the center of the last page of his book, two or three hours before the car with its headlights turned off stopped among the olive trees, on the other side of the river, tracing its letters on the paper with the delicacy and relief of a Chinese calligrapher who concludes, on a silk cloth, the manuscript that has consumed his life.
WHEN HE HEARD THE TRAIN whistle that returned him to time and brought him back from his exhausted lethargy, he got up from the bed and took the candle that was his light to go down to the kitchen, because he had finished a bottle of wine and was not resigned to not prolonging the solitary celebration of the end of his book, as sweet as the last day of school and the lit stove in a corner of the classroom, when he looked at the snow-covered courtyard through the windows of winter and knew that the next morning his father would not shout at him to get up before dawn because all the roads would be blocked by snow. "It's him," said Beatriz, staring at the light that moved away now from the window and swayed back and forth and disappeared and then returned, more opaque and distant, to a front balcony, to the entrance door that poured it over the paving stones when it was half open. "I'm sure it's him," she repeated, as if the others hadn't heard her or didn't believe what she was telling them. "But there must be more people in a house that big. There must be dogs, I suppose," said the man in the light suit sitting next to her, not raising his eyes, not sitting up on the leather seat against which he was resting his unshaven face, as if he had renounced all desire or impulse not to survive but to prolong the flight that had been brought to a temporary halt before the railroad tracks, as if before a definitive, ordinary obstacle. Behind them, in the back seat, the youngest passenger bit his lips and panted quietly as he gripped his wounded thigh with both hands, devastated by fever, by the absurd certainty that the moonlit night and the house where the others spoke vaguely of finding refuge were the final trap that death had set for them. They smoked, not getting out of the car, hiding the lit end of their cigarettes in the hollow of their hands, as if that minor precaution could free them of the Civil Guards who were tracking down the car along nearby highways, or was unavoidable even in the density of the olive trees and the fog. They kept the car windows up, and the smoke, as it thickened, wrenched a gloomy cough from the throat of the wounded man, who leaned against the back of his seat with his mouth open and the right side of his trousers soaked with blood, his eyes brilliant beneath almost closed lids, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip like a thread of saliva. "Let's go," said Beatriz, groping in the dark to pull out the key, "he'll help us. He probably knows some way to cross the sierra without going back to the main highway." She was the one driving the car, Solana noted afterward, the one who had torn one of her silk blouses to make bandages to stop the bleeding from the thigh wound, the one who took
the wheel when the other one, the man in the light suit whose profile Solana had seen through the window of that same car six months earlier, began to cry without dignity or tears in the ditch of a forsaken highway and doubled over and vomited when he saw and smelled the blood and remembered the dry, terrifying sound of the shots that tore like horn thrusts into the hip and thigh of the passenger whose name he never knew. "A comrade, she says, perfectly serious," Solana wrote, "a fugitive from the Valley of the Fallen with false documents and a fake mustache and the hair at his temples tinted gray as if for a bad play, a dead man as premature and undeniable as she herself or that guy with white hands and pink brilliant nails who gave them his car and came with them not because he believes in the Republic or in the Party or even in the possibility that they can come out of their trip alive, but for the simple, obscene reason that he's in love with Beatriz and wants to marry her though he knows that's impossible while I'm alive and was even during the years when it seemed I was dead." "I asked him to lend me the car for a few days," says Beatriz, laying out before me like an unformulated reproach the self-sacrifice, the gentlemanliness of the other man, probably her lover, "I told him it was a very long and possibly dangerous trip, and that I didn't want to involve him in something like this, but he insisted on coming with us, he even said he'd denounce me if I didn't let him go. Now he's dying of fear, the smell of blood nauseates him." In love, submissive in advance, prepared to hide bundles of clandestine newspapers in the storeroom of his dress shop or to take her in his own car to a distant city and the door of the prison through which would come the gloomy phantom who once was married to Beatriz and whose face he has seen up close only tonight, in love and avid to carry out all her desires, to guess and anticipate any desire of hers that Beatriz hasn't confessed to him yet, whether it's a handkerchief like the ones she's using now to wipe away blood and perspiration from the wound or a foreign perfume or a reckless, deadly trip to that city on the coast whose name she didn't want to tell me where a smugglers' ship is waiting to take the fugitive to Gibraltar or North Africa, if he lives long enough to get there or they're not killed first in a police ambush. Very pale, his fitted linen jacket stained with blood like a butcher's smock, he looks at me with rancor, with the part of his fear that belongs not to his flight or the memory of the shots and the blood but to the evidence that it is because of me that Beatriz has been denied him and that a single gesture or word from me would be enough for her to leave him with the same serene resolve as on that January morning, in front of the prison, when she got out of the car and walked on high heels across the mud of the highway to go into the tavern where I was drinking beside the fogged window and looking at him, who smoked and counted every minute as he leaned on the steering wheel and couldn't overcome the fear that she was gone forever.
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