"Let's go," said Beatriz, and she opened the car door, but the wounded man and the other man didn't seem to hear her, as if they didn't believe in the mirage she announced when she showed them the house. She got out with her head bowed to keep the branches of the olive tree from tangling in her hair, and when she looked again for the light she had seen slipping from window to window, like ghosts in the movies, she couldn't find it, but there was a motionless figure in the middle of the esplanade, at the edge of the river embankment, and although from that distance it was impossible for her to see his face, she recognized in a melancholy way, like someone who listens to a piece of music and recovers an intimate feeling that had been forgotten, the shape of his shoulders, the way Jacinto Solana sometimes looked at things with his head tilted to one side and his hands lazily thrust into his pockets. "I'll go alone," she said then, "you two wait here." She crossed the tracks, the bridge, she disappeared in the fog, emerged on the other side of the river, and from there she turned to verify with relief that the car had dissolved in the shadow of the two olive trees hiding it. As indifferent and silent as a tree mineralized by the moon, Solana didn't notice her approach, and saw Beatriz only when she was almost at the end of the road and said his name, first in a quiet voice, as if she were afraid the light that dilated forms and endowed them with the hardness of figures of salt could also enlarge and disfigure the sound of voices, then shouting or perhaps hearing her own voice like the pale shouts in dreams, because the sound of the water erased it, and it vanished in the brilliance of the moon and in the warped space of the olive groves and the liquid blue sierra, as weightless and extended as the fog. "Jacinto," she said again, in a louder voice, but her voice didn't sound to him like a shout, "it's me, Beatriz."
"The three of them are dead," he wrote a few hours later in the blue notebook, after leaving them hidden in the wine cellar and lowering the heavy trap door with the feeling he was adjusting the slab of stone over a tomb, "they're dead and they know it, and maybe I am too, because death is a contagious disease. When they put the car in the shed and I took them to the kitchen, they walked back and forth as if they were in a death cell and ate with the same bitter greed I saw so often in those men who knew they were going to be shot at daybreak. The wounded one shakes and sweats with fever and Beatriz passes him a wet handkerchief for his forehead, and then she returns to scraping the bottom of a can of sardines with her oil-stained fingers, with her long painted nails. They tell me they've gone twenty-four hours without eating, that last night, after the encounter with the Civil Guard, they fled along highways they didn't know and didn't stop until dawn, in an abandoned house, in the middle of a red plain where there was nothing and nobody, not a tree or an animal or a human or a sierra or a city in the distance. At nightfall they left again for the south, and suddenly, Beatriz says, when she had lost consciousness of how many hours she had been driving, she saw in the headlights the sign for a city, Magina, and then a lit, deserted gas station that might have a public telephone. As on other occasions, in years gone by, when letters hadn't been enough and she would call Manuel to ask if he knew anything about me, she asked the operator for his number and waited a long time until she heard the alarmed voice stupid with sleep that said the Island of Cuba and explained how to get here. The Island of Cuba, she says to me with exhausted irony, only you could end up living in a place with a name like that.'"
They were dead, though nobody came to find them in the wine cellar for the whole day they spent there and where they would still be if on the following night, when the wounded one had already lost consciousness and was raving and groaning as he writhed on the pillows and blankets they put down for him in the backseat of the car, they managed to cross the sierra on the road Solana showed them from the Island of Cuba, the old muledrivers' route, abandoned when they paved the main highway, because they carried death with them like fugitives from a city invaded by the plague. They were dead from the precise moment that the passenger, who had not said a single word since they left Madrid, as if silence were a part of his clandestine identity, asked them to stop the car in the middle of a plain through which the highway ran limitlessly in a straight line toward a darkness whose final boundary it didn't seem they would ever reach, got out, tilting his hat over his eyes, then stopping at the ditch, his back to them, as if he were looking for something on the dark horizon, his hand in his jacket pocket where he probably had a pistol. In the rearview mirror Beatriz saw yellow headlights that grew larger until they blinded her and lit the side of the man who was still motionless and taller against the line of darkness. She heard doors open and then a distant voice, a shout, an order, and the passenger turned toward the light and began to run slipping on the gravel in the ditch, and when he was already getting into the car he was paralyzed for a moment against the window, staggering once, and then again, clutching at the edge of the door when the second shot sounded, falling back inside like a soldier wounded as he left the trenches.
Dead, Solana thought as he watched them eat, his elbow on the mantle over the fireplace, witnessing from a solitude untouched by their appearance the devastation caused by flight and fear, the persistence of failure, the clothes abused and covered with dust, the unshaven faces, the border of sweat around the collars of white shirts. Beatriz' high heels twisted when she walked, and her tall hairdo collapsed over her forehead when she bent toward the wounded man. It wasn't the failure and general rout at the end of the war, he recalled, because then the razed fields and the entire universe seemed to share in the defeat of the men who filled the highways like flocks of despair and silence, but a solitary flight, unpremeditated, absurd, the abandonment of a place conquered by fire whose survivors escaped still wearing the clothes of the fiesta they were celebrating, the light jackets and trousers for the June night, the delicate torn stockings, the perfumed handkerchiefs soaked in blood. When she finished eating, Beatriz wiped her oily mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of red on it. She smoked with her eyes closed, exhaling large mouthfuls of smoke, and the other one, her lover, the coward who loved her who hadn't even had the courage to look at Solana when he shook his hand, went up to her and stood behind her, as if he were guarding her sleep, and when he bent down to say something in her ear, he put a hand on her shoulder and extended his fingers very gently until he touched her neck. "I watched them, I knew he wasn't going to say anything to her, that anything he might say would be nothing but a pretext to get closer to her and demonstrate to me, or to his own fear of losing her, that he could talk to her in a tone of voice that only lovers use and put his hand on her shoulder and caress her neck. Then Beatriz opened her eyes and slowly moved his hand away while she looked at me, as if the immobility of her eyes on mine could wipe out the house and the persecution and the night and leave us alone at the beginning of time. Brusquely I pretended I was tending to the wounded man: I looked for water, a glass, I moistened his lips and when I looked at Beatriz again, her eyes no longer searched for mine and the other one's hands lay white and useless on the back of the chair where she was leaning."
He wrote again that night, when he lowered the trapdoor to the wine cellar and recovered as if it were a gift the feeling or appearance of his solitude in the house, he closed all the shutters on the ground floor and checked the chamber and the safety on his pistol and put it on the table while he wrote in the blue notebook as if even after finishing his book he couldn't elude the instinct of literature, Minaya thought, as if things didn't happen completely until he had transmuted them into words that didn't crave the future or the light, only the unmitigated intensity of their own poison, hard words written for oblivion and the fire. He wrote past dawn, and the next night, when the others left, even before the car drove away along the road to the sierra, he closed the outside door of the house and returned to the pen and the blue notebook to recount their departure, but this time he didn't even have time to finish a page, and the last words he managed to write were the prelude to his own death. He heard dogs
barking and when he went to the window, he saw the military capes moving, cautiously climbing the embankment, the cold gleam of the moon on the patent leather of the three-cornered hats. That's exactly how Minaya imagined him: unexpectedly liberated from fear and literature, he thought about the others, about Beatriz' gaze, about her pride without supplication and her loyalty firmer than disenchantment and betrayal. Beyond the last line in the blue notebook, in a space free of reality and words, not recalled by any memory, Minaya wanted to contrive the ambiguous figure of a hero: Solana still hears the engine moving away and estimates that Beatriz will press harder on the accelerator when she hears the first shots behind her. While he stays at the window shooting at the pursuers, the car will enter the sierra and gain ten minutes or an hour or an entire day of urgent freedom. Calmly he records the proximity of the shadows that come along the river and fan out on the red clay of the embankment to surround the house, and then, just as he has closed the notebook and replaced the cap on the pen, he puts out the candle, takes the safety off the pistol, leans partially out the window, still protected by the darkness, waiting until the Guards have come so close he can reach them with his bullets.
PART THREE
I am a distant fire and a far-off sword.
—CERVANTES, Don Quixote, I, XIV
1
ONE BY ONE THE CAPSULES, in the palm of the right hand, between the fingers, rolling between thumb and index finger, small pink bullets that will not wound the temple, that after each sip of water disintegrate in the dark acids of the stomach and the suicidal blood that beats so weakly in eyelids and wrists where hard veins trace a ridge like a scar on yellow flesh, gradual coins for counting and crossing off each minute and hour of the last night, for acquiring not death, which even now is inconceivable and abstract, but an avid pacifying somnolence of thought and of fatigue, a sweetness similar to that of the traveler who arrives very late at the hotel in a distant city where no one is expecting him and, overcome by sleep, slips between cold strange sheets that become hospitable in response to the heat of his body and keep him warm when he falls asleep and loses his hold on time, reason, memory, like the darkness in a childhood bedroom. The capsules on the night table, the glass of water, the cigarettes, the exact curve of the pillow where the back of the neck rests without sinking down completely, which avoids the horizontality of a dead body or a sick person and allows the effortless contemplation of the open window, on the right side of the room, of the door closed so cautiously that nobody will open it now, of one's own body whose shape is erased toward the foot of the bed like a dune eroded by the wind. They are made of a glossy material that fingernails cannot pierce, neutral to the palate, smooth and neutral in the throat, slowly perforated and worn away, like a coin in a cup of acid, when it reaches the stomach and dissolves there, in that lugubrious unknown cavity that forms part of me as surely as my hands or face, their dose of poison and longed-for lethargy, their sweetness of a hand outstretched in the darkness that brushes the eyelids and grants them sleep as if returning sight to the eyes of a blind man. Only the person who chooses the manner and hour of his own death acquires in exchange the magnificent right to stop time. He uproots wrinkles and numbers, leaves the double-inverted receptacle of the hourglass empty, spills on the ground the water of the clepsydra as if he were knocking over a glass of wine. What remains then is the pure, strange shape of the glass, the blank sphere, a wafer or circle of paper, the interminable immobile duration of a stopped watch on the wrist of a dead man or a stopped clock in the living room of a vacant house. There is nothing but sterile time between two heartbeats, between a capsule and a sip of water, between two instants as stripped of their own substance as the extension of a desert, but he, Minaya, doesn't know this, and perhaps never will know it, because he still imagines that time is made to the measure of his desire, or the negation of his desire and he scrutinizes clocks like an astrologer trying to determine the urgent shape of his future in them. In the Mágina station he looks at the large clock hanging from the metal beams of the entrance canopy, walks toward the end of the platform, toward the red lights and the night where the rails disappear, he asks what time the mail train from Madrid will arrive, he confirms on his wristwatch the truth of the voracious advance toward midnight indicated by the hands on the great yellow sphere hanging like a moon above his head. Twelve o'clock, very soon, bells in the Plaza of General Orduña, in the parlor, in the library where the scent of lilies and funeral flowers still lingers, the train that now hugs the bank of the Guadalquivir and blows its whistle when it begins to climb the slope to Mágina, its windows lit and fleeting among the olive trees and its long lead-colored cars, slow and nocturnal like the trains that took men toward a horizon dazzled by the brilliance of a battle that rumbled in the air and over the earth like a distant storm. Passively he waits for the arrival of the train that will carry him away from Magina and the impossible appearance of Inés, just as he waited for her on other occasions, pretending that he was organizing books in the library or smoking in the dark in his bedroom, without his will ever doing anything to fulfill or hasten his desire, merely paralyzing him in the wait, in the painful consciousness of each minute that passed without her, of each footstep or creak in the silence of the house that announced the arrival of Inés only to unscrupulously prove it false the more certain he was that she was near. And to ease the pain he has imposed on himself a pretense of courage, like a betrayed lover who cultivates humiliation and rancor, wanting to exact from them a spirited will his failed pride denies him, and he looks at the clock and grips his suitcase, telling himself almost aloud that he hopes the train comes soon, because when he gets on and settles into his seat and closes his eyes and the station begins to slip away on the other side of the window through which he swears not to look, the definitive impossibility of searching again for Inés or continuing to wait for her will extinguish in a single blow, he supposes, the slow torture of uncertainty. But the train will probably arrive late, as it does every night, and the fierce, instantaneous, already vanquished intention of leaving disintegrates like a gesture of smoke in the prolonged wait, and Minaya crosses the empty lobby very much to the rear of his desire that precedes him and goes out of the station like a messenger moving too quickly, and he stops at the door, near the line of taxis also waiting for the train's arrival, and leaning against the jamb he puts down his suitcase and smokes melancholically, looking at the double row of linden trees where a shadow approaches to which he assigns the features and walk of Inés until proximity and the harsh white light of the street lamps shatter his illusion. But this is how he always has waited, long before coming to Magina and meeting Inés, because waiting is perhaps the only way in which he conceives of the substance of time, not as a quality added on to his desires but as an attribute of his soul, like his intelligence or his propensity for solitude and tenderness, and he doesn't know he will go on waiting when he gets onto the train and when he leaves Atocha Station at seven in the morning, numb with cold, somnambulistic, and walks again through the vast city that dawn and absence have made unfamiliar. That was how he waited this afternoon, in the bedroom, as he packed his clothes and books and Jacinto Solana's manuscripts and put on in front of the mirror the black tie someone, Utrera or Medina, had lent him for Manuel's funeral, in this way postponing the moment of going down to the library to confront the faces that undoubtedly were going to accuse him, and the dead transfigured face that by now resembled an inexact mask not of Manuel but of any of the dead men Minaya had seen since his childhood, the double mask of his parents, beneath the glass of their coffins, wrapped in velvet and hospital bandages and absorbent cotton, the dripping, destroyed face on a marble table, the imagined funeral mask of Jacinto Solana. Like inglorious trophies, he kept at the bottom of his suitcase the manuscripts and the blue notebook, the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a long pink ribbon with which Ines sometimes tied back her hair and that he untied last night as he kissed her, but before closing the suitcase
he moved aside the books and the shirts she had ironed and folded and picked up the cartridge, then kept it, after a moment of indecision, with the relieved gesture of someone who discovers as he's walking out that he's almost forgotten his house key. He thought, he told me, when he had locked the suitcase and examined with cowardly discretion the knot in his tie and the meticulously drawn part in his damp hair, that he had no real right to withdraw into nostalgia, that never, not even in the days when his conversations with Manuel and his usual dealings with books and writing on the file cards gave him the placid sensation of living a life permanently sustained by customs more faithful than exaltation or happiness, so that he could no longer imagine himself living in any city other than Magina or dedicated to any work other than cataloguing the library, never had he personally ceased being a guest for whom the same standard of hospitality that had welcomed him into the house would end one day by demanding that he leave. The balcony shutters were opened wide, and the sound of the water that fell and rose over the basin of the fountain and the scent of the acacias that recently had bloomed came in like a damp breeze to add to the present and to the proximity of the journey the delicate, dead weight of a sorrow older than his consciousness and more deadly than his memories. The darkly closed suitcase on the bed gave the entire bedroom the gloomy, stripped appearance of a hotel room. As in them, as at that critical moment when the traveler, ready to leave, returns to check he hasn't forgotten anything and once more opens empty drawers and doors to the closet where a solitary hanger moves back and forth, Minaya understood that the city and the house had never accepted him as one of their own, because even before he left, the furniture, the cool odor of the wood and the sheets, the mirror where he once saw Inés coming toward him naked and embracing him from the back, were denying him like suddenly disloyal accomplices and hurrying to erase every proof or trace of the time he had spent among them and to pretend they had recovered the same impassive hostility with which they had received him the first time he entered the bedroom, turning their backs on him as they did that afternoon when he asked them for one final sign not of hospitality but of recognition and farewell. Because downstairs, in the library, the others, the true inhabitants of the house, surrounded Manuel's coffin and murmured prayers or memories or sad judgments on the brevity of life or deadly diseases of the heart, taking refuge in the voluntary semidarkness, waiting for him to arrive in order to receive him with their planned silence of reproval, asking themselves what he was doing, why he hadn't come down yet, why last night, when Medina arrived, he had locked himself in his bedroom and not come out again until very late in the morning, recently showered and silent, as if mourning had nothing to do with him or he didn't know how to respect the details of its ceremony. Utrera knows, he feared, Utrera saw the pink ribbon on the night table and smelled the traces and sweat of bodies, and now he accuses us in a quiet voice with his offended lucidity, with his rancor of an old roué who reproves and condemns what he cannot achieve. Minaya went out to the parlor, because he never left his bedroom through the door that opened to the hallway, and at that moment when the urgency of deciding on an action had removed the image of Inés from his thoughts, he saw her in profile, wearing her mourning blouse, standing in the gallery as if she were lost at a crossroads, and when he tried to reach her, he was alone in the hallway and Inés' face was like those flashes in the dark that one glimpses with closed eyes. He ran toward the corner where she had disappeared and continued to hear her footsteps in the empty rooms and on the staircases where he had walked only once, on the February afternoon when he had gone up to Dona Elvira's rooms. Sweet, impossible Inés, a spy, thorn of persecution, alibi for all desire and all baseness. When he thought he was lost in the successive rooms as alike as a set of mirrors, he found the way he was looking for when he recognized on a chest the Baby Jesus that raised a pale plaster hand beneath a glass bell, pointing an index finger at the hidden turning and staircase that led to the bedroom where Dona Elvira had withdrawn twenty-two years earlier in order not to go on witnessing the decadence of the world and the obstinate failure of her son. But now the disorder from whose menace she had fled in June 1947 like a deposed king who chooses exile without abdicating his crown and his pride, seemed, like an invader, to have broken through the walls and locked doors she had raised against it, which had protected her for twenty-two years, because when Minaya entered the bedroom illuminated by the large windows of the conservatory, he saw before him a place as unfamiliar as those streets that at dawn seemed flattened by a night bombing and one couldn't recognize a single derail of what had been until a few minutes before the long sound of the sirens and the incessant, frightening, earsplitting noise of enemy planes had begun. Just like then, just like those women wrapped in black kerchiefs who searched through the rubble and perhaps recovered an absurdly undamaged family portrait or a crib with twisted bars, Inés, kneeling in the midst of the disaster, deliberately put in order old dresses ripped or trampled in a rage by Dona Elvira after she had overturned chests that may have occupied the same place since the early years of the century, she gathered up letters and postcards, scores of melancholy sonatas and habaneras that Dona Elvira must have danced to in the time of her inconceivable youth, carnival masks, embroidered table linen, long silk gloves that lay on rumpled bedclothes like amputated hands, periodicals about atrocious crimes, old society magazines with lithographs on glossy paper shredded by eager scissors, solemn accounts books on which Dona Elvira had smashed a cosmetics jar and then ground it with her foot. "She began this morning," said Inés, as if stating the effects of a natural catastrophe whose violence cannot be attributed to anyone, "she came here when the undertakers took Don Manuel's body down to the library, and she didn't want any of us to help her. She locked herself in with a key and began to knock everything over and break it and empty all the drawers." Without tears, without a single gesture of despair or evident madness, as methodically determined to create disorder around her as the general of an army who administers and calculates the permanent devastation of a conquered city and sows salt in the pits where its foundations had been. "She called us a little while ago. She kept ringing the bell until Amalia and I got here. She had already combed her hair and dressed for the funeral, and it looked as if she had been crying, but I didn't see any tears, and her whole face was covered with powder." Inés was dressed in mourning too, and the black blouse and tight skirt prematurely added to her body a part of the slim, grave plenitude it would achieve in a few years and that now only some of her gestures were a prelude to, an unknown future body that these hands guessed at in caresses like prophecies and will no longer touch, and that Minaya is ignorant of, because he hasn't learned yet to look at bodies in time, which is the only light that reveals their true nature, the ones an eye and an instant cannot discover. Awkward and cowardly, as he was in the early days, humiliated by the feeling of having lost Inés as inexplicably as she granted him her tenderness, he could only manage to say to her, with a coldness he supposed infected by the coldness he detected in her, a few words that made her feel, him as well, strange and inert, forsaker of the memory of so many nights and days coldly thrown into the acceptance of forgetting, an accomplice not of guilt but of repentance, of simulation, of vile glances fixed on the ground. As it had been the first time he saw her, Inés wore her hair gathered at the back of her neck, smooth and tight at her temples, so that when she completely revealed the shape of her cheeks and forehead, she purified the gracefulness of her profile, but a single chestnut ringlet, translucent, almost blonde, loosened at random when she bent over to pick something up, fell on her face and almost brushed her lips, curled and light like a ribbon of smoke that Minaya would have wanted to touch and undo with his fingers as secretly as at another time he had moved aside the sheets covering Inés' bare breasts and belly and thighs to watch her sleep. Indistinctly he asked her to let him help, and when she moved away as if to avoid a caress she perhaps desired and that Minaya never would have dared to initiate, sh
e dropped the handful of old postcards she had been picking up. White beach resorts with ladies in tall hats seated around tables, casinos beside a sea of pink waves and heraldic views of San Sebastián in hand-tinted twilights, with teams of oxen that removed from the beach the tilting cabanas of the bathers, an illustrated card commemorating the first communion of the boy Manuel Santos Crivelli, celebrated in the parish church of Santa Maria, in Mágina, May 16, 1912, a letter, suddenly, with a republican stamp, addressed to Don Eugenio Utrera Beltrán on May 12, 1937. "Did you notice this letter?" asked Minaya, standing up, and he removed from the envelope, with extreme care, as if he were raising the wings of a mounted butterfly and attempting to keep it from disintegrating in his fingers, a typewritten sheet, almost torn at the folds. "It's strange that Dona Elvira has it here. It was addressed to Utrera." "That woman has always been crazy," said Inés, barely looking at the letter, "she must have kept it the way she kept everything." The date of the heading, written beneath a letterhead in elaborate calligraphy ("Santisteban and Sons, Antiquarians, Firm Established 1881") was the same as the canceled stamp, and included the letter, even before Minaya began to read it, in the narrow band of time when the wedding and then the death of Mariana occurred, transforming it into a part of that surviving material he could not touch without shuddering, like the cartridge and the piece of newspaper in which he found it wrapped and the white cloth flower that Mariana wore in the wedding photograph and Inés put in her hair one night. "Madrid," he read, "May 12, 1937," thinking that on the same day so impassively indicated by the typewriter, Mariana was still alive, that the time she inhabited was not an exclusive attribute of her person or the history already closing in around her to lead her to her death, but a vast general reality to which that letter and the man who wrote it also belonged. "Sr. D. Eugenio Utrera Beltran. Dear friend: I am happy to inform you of the arrival on the 17th of the present month of our colleague D. Victor Vega, whose invaluable skill in the antiquary's difficult art I have no need to describe to you, for you already know the number of years Sr. Vega has been employed in this Firm and the high esteem he enjoys here. As previously agreed, Sr. Vega will inform you with respect to the matters that interest you so deeply concerning our business, in which I hope you decide to take part with the good taste and reliability you have always proudly displayed with regard to the Fine Arts. I inform you as well that on his arrival in Magina, Sr. Vega will stay at the Hotel Comercio on the Plaza and await your visit there on the 17th. Very truly yours, M. Santisteban." He looked at the letters of the name, Victor Vega, he pronounced it aloud, on the edge of a revelation, asking himself where he had heard or read it, then giving thanks to chance for the opportunity of discovering what his intelligence never would have elucidated otherwise. And when he finally went down to the library, when he had before him the semidarkness and in it the hostile, accusatory faces, he carried the letter in his pocket like a certainty that made him invulnerable and wiser, sole master of clarity, like the detectives in books who gather in the drawing room the inhabitants of a closed house where a crime was committed in order to reveal to them the name of the murderer, who waits and is quiet and knows himself condemned, alone, blemished among the others, who are still ignorant of his guilt. It was, this afternoon, like pushing Minaya toward the conclusion of a mystery, like directing his steps and his thoughts from the darkness, from literature, fearing he would not dare to reach the end and yet not wanting him to persist in his search beyond the indicated boundary, it was seeing what his eyes saw and detecting with him the scent of the candles burning at the corners of the coffin and the funeral flowers that surrounded it like the edges of an abyss at whose bottom lay Manuel, like the vegetation of a swamp into which he was sinking very slowly, unrecognizable by now, his hands tied by a rosary that wound around his yellow, rigid fingers and his eyelids squeezed or sewn shut in the obstinacy of dying, without any dignity at all, without that stillness that statues attribute to the dead, humiliated by scapulars that Dona Elvira had ordered hung around his neck and dressed in a suit that seemed to belong to another man, because death, which had exaggerated the bones in his face and the curve of his nose and erased the line of his mouth, also made his body smaller and more fragile, so that when Minaya went up to the coffin, it was as if he were looking at the corpse of a man he had never seen. Except for Medina, who conspicuously did not pray, who remained erect and silent as if affirming against everyone the secular dignity of his grief, a trace of Manuel's transfiguration infected the others, enveloping them in the same gloomy play of light and shifting semidarkness that the candles established and that probably, like the disposition of the catafalque and the black hangings that covered it, had been calculated by Utrera to achieve in the library an effect of liturgical staging. In that light the entire library acquired an oppressive suggestion of chapel and vault, and the old, ordinary smells of varnished wood and leather and the paper in the books had been replaced by a dense breath of church and funeral indistinguishable from the first hints of decomposition already diluting in the air. They were seated in a semicircle around the coffin, shapes without emphasis or the possibility of movement beneath the mourning clothes that tied them to the shadows, barely opening their lips as they prayed, as if the uniform voice marking the rhythm of the litanies did not emerge from their throats but from the darkness or from the scent of the candles, an emanation like a filthy secretion from the rigid weight of sorrow, and when Minaya came in they raised their eyes not to look at him but at a point in space slightly removed from his presence, as if a current of air and not a body had pushed open the door, closing it afterward with a muffled thud. He shook the hand of Frasco, who stood ceremoniously to offer his condolences in too loud a tone of voice, provoking an angry glance from Utrera, an imperious order to be silent. Or perhaps it wasn't the tone of voice, Minaya thought, but the simple fact that Frasco, when he offered his condolences, was recognizing in him a family connection to Manuel that Utrera considered illegitimate. Not daring to say anything to Dona Elvira, whose face was half covered by a translucent veil and who led the rosary as she slipped the beads between fingers as thin and pointed as a bird's claws, Minaya went to sit next to Medina and learned from him the details of the travesty. "They were the ones," the doctor said in his ear, "the old woman and that parasite, that damn hypocrite. Look what they've done to Manuel, that rosary in his hands, those scapulars, the crucifix. He made it very clear in his will that he didn't want a religious funeral, and now see what they've done, they waited until he died to get what they couldn't have when he was alive. And if it weren't for my screaming and yelling, they would have buried him in a Nazarene habit. Where did you get to? I spent all morning looking for you. I have something very important to tell you." Once again Utrera demanded silence, theatrically raising his index finger to his lips, and Medina, with ironic gravity, crossed his hands over his stomach as if parodying the gesture of a canon. "That one already knows. Which is why he's looking at you that way. He's dying of envy." "I don't understand, Medina." Fat and magnanimous, Medina smiled to himself and gave Minaya a kind of pitying look, a look of incredulous astonishment at his youth and ignorance. "Everybody knows by now, even Frasco, who was as happy as I am. A week ago Manuel changed his will. Now you're the sole heir. Of course that won't do you much good for a few years, because Dona Elvira will have all the property at her disposal in usufruct until she dies. And that woman's capable of living to a hundred if she decides to, just as she's lived until now, out of sheer spite." So that now, at the end, when he was concluding the prelude to expulsion, Medina's words abruptly granted him the right not to possession of the house or of the Island of Cuba, because that was a disconnected, abstract condition he could not conceive of, but to ownership of a history in which he had until then been a witness, an impostor, a spy, and that now, in a future he couldn't imagine either, would linger on in him, Minaya, but leaving him, as he would find out very soon afterward when he arrived at the station to buy a single ticket for Mad
rid, with the same sensation of inconsolable emptiness as the man who wakes and understands that no gift of reality can mitigate the loss of the happiness he just experienced in his last dream. Bewildered, as if he were slowly waking, he abandoned the lethargy into which the waiting, the semidarkness, and the sound of prayers had plunged him and went out to the courtyard searching for the relief of air and the pink and yellow light that turned white only on the marble paving stones, white and cold in the mirror on the first landing, resonant with voices because in that courtyard each sound, a laugh, a voice that says a name, footsteps, the fluttering wings of a pigeon against the glass in the dome, acquires the sharp, dazzling solidity of pebbles in a channel of frozen water, and things that happen there, even the trivial act of lighting a cigarette, magnified by its sonority, seem to be happening forever. Perhaps that was why, when Utrera came out after him and began to accuse him, Minaya was sure of each of the words he was going to say and certain this was the only place where he should say them. Now Utrera wasn't wearing a white carnation in his lapel but a mourning button, and a wide band of black cloth sewn around one sleeve, which gave him the air of a disabled reprobate. He asked for a light, coming very close, like a queer or a policeman, small, exhaling the smoke in rapid mouthfuls, intent on injury, on not holding back a single offense. "I don't know what you're waiting for, I don't know why you haven't left yet, how you dare to remain here, to go into the library, to mock our grief." "Manuel was my uncle. I have the same right to mourn him as any of you." He was astonished by his own audacity, by the firmness of his voice, more certain and clear in the sonority of the courtyard, very close, suddenly, to an appetite for cruelty, involuntarily pleased at acceding to a siege that would turn into an ambush of his accuser precisely when he, Minaya, wanted it to, simply by displaying the letter or the cartridge he had in his jacket or saying one or two necessary words. "Don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand me. Don't be so sure you've deceived us the way you deceived poor Manuel. You killed him, last night, you and that hypocritical tart you were wallowing with in the most sacred place in this house. I saw you and her when you came out of the bedroom. And before that, I saw you go in, biting each other like animals, and I heard you, but I didn't do what I should have done, I didn't tell Manuel and I didn't go in to throw the two of you out myself, I left so I wouldn't be a witness to that profanation and when I came back it was already too late. That smell in the bedroom, on the sheets, the same one you couldn't get rid of and that I noticed when you came to call on me. Weren't you surprised that I was still dressed at that hour? The ribbon on the night table. Do you think I'm blind, that I can't smell or see? But probably you didn't even try to hide. You're young, you love blasphemy, I suppose, just as you don't know the meaning of gratitude. Do you know what Ines was before she came to this house? She was in the poorhouse without a father or any family name except the one her mother gave her before she abandoned her, a wild creature who would have been expelled from that nuns' orphanage if Manuel hadn't taken her in. But you're different. You come from a good family and you have breeding and an education and carry in your veins the same blood as Manuel. You were a fugitive and a political agitator when you came here, don't think I couldn't find out, even though your uncle, for the sake of courtesy, and hospitality, never told me. He's come to write a book about Solana, poor Manuel told me, as if he didn't realize that the only thing you were doing in this house was eating and sleeping free of charge and hiding from the police and going to bed every night with that maid in order to discredit the hospitality all of us showed you since your arrival. It would be too merciful to call you ungrateful. You are a defiler and a murderer. Last night you killed Manuel." Vain, theatrical, invested with justice and mourning just as he once invested himself with glory and then, as the years passed, with the melancholy and rancor of the overlooked artist, Utrera held his breath as if chewing it with his false teeth and showed Minaya the street door. "Leave right now. Don't continue to profane our sorrow or Manuel's death. And take that slut with you. Neither you nor she have the right to remain in this house." This house is mine, Minaya could have or should have responded, but the crude consciousness of ownership, even one as future and imaginary and founded only on a quiet confidence of Medina's, did not provoke his pride or add anything to his firmness, because the vast white facade with marble balconies and circular windows and a courtyard with columns and the glass in the dome had belonged to his imagination since he was a child with the definitive legitimacy of sensations and desires born and nourished only in oneself and requiring no attachment to reality to sustain themselves, because since less than an hour before, since he found the letter in Dona Elvira's bedroom and confirmed in a passage in Solana's manuscripts who Victor Vega was, he had taken over possession not of a house but of a history that had been beating in it for thirty years and that he would bring to a close by stripping away its mystery, granting to the scattering and forgetting of its details the dazzling, atrocious shape of truth, its passionate geometry, impassive like the architecture of the courtyard and the beauty of the statues in Magina, like the style and plot of the book that Jacinto Solana wrote for himself. "You know my uncle began to die a long time ago, on the day they killed Mariana," said Minaya, like a challenge, without any emotion at all, only with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he still weren't sure about daring to say what he had to say, what was demanded of him or dictated to him by loyalty to Manuel, to Jacinto Solana, to the outlined, broken history in the manuscripts, "and I think you also know who killed her." Utrera's dead smile, his old petulance of a hero of brothels and official commemorations twisting the expression of his mouth and remaining there, in his cold look of contempt, in his regained fear, still hidden. "I don't know what you're talking about. Don't you want to leave any of our dead in peace? You know as well as I how Mariana died. There was a judicial investigation and they did an autopsy. Ask Medina, in case you haven't found that out yet. He came here with the judge and examined the body. A stray bullet killed her, a bullet fired from the roofs." He won't deny it at first, Minaya had calculated, he won't tell me I'm lying or that he's innocent, because that would be like accepting my right to accuse him. He'll say he doesn't understand, that I'm crazy, he'll turn his back and then I'll take out the cartridge and the letter and oblige him to turn around so he can see them in my hands just as he may have seen the pistol Dona Elvira handed him that night or afternoon or morning in May when she thought up the way Mariana was going to die. "Let me alone and leave," said Utrera, and when he turned his back as if with that gesture he could erase the presence and the accusation not yet spoken by Minaya, he saw Inés on the first landing, next to the mirror, and for a moment he stayed that way, his head turned, as if repeating the arrogance of any of his statues, and then, Inés said, he was unexpectedly defeated and moved toward the dining room, knowing that Minaya was walking behind him, and even if he could elude or deny his questions, he would not escape the interrogation he had seen in the girl's eyes, transparent and precise like the sonority of the courtyard, earlier than all reasoning or suspicion, all doubt, born of an instinctual knowledge whose sole, frightening method was divination. He lit a cigarette, poured a glass of cognac, put the bottle back on the sideboard, and when he went to sit down, Minaya was in front of him, on the other side of the same long, empty table where they'd had supper together the first night, obstinate, unreal, gathering proofs and words and courage to go on saying them while Inés, in the doorway, without even hiding, witnessed and heard so there would be nothing later on, right now, surrendered to the imperfection of forgetting. "You killed Mariana," said Minaya, he recalled, as if the crime had occurred not thirty-two years ago but last night, this very morning, as if it were Mariana's body and not Manuel's they were mourning in the library, you, it was necessary to say this in another voice that had never been his, picked up the pistol in the small hours of May 21, 1937, and prowled around the gallery, hidden behind the curtains that then, like now, covered the
large windows over the courtyard, and Solana almost saw you, but he didn't see you, only a shadow or a trembling of the sheer curtains, and when Mariana began to climb the steps to the pigeon loft on the labyrinthine staircase I've climbed myself at other times, when Jacinto Solana gave up following her and shut himself in his room to write in front of the mirror the verses that twenty years after his death called me to this city and to this house, you walked after her, the pistol in your right hand, which probably was trembling, the pistol hidden in your jacket pocket, driven by a hatred that belonged not to you but to that woman who made you her executioner and her emissary and armed your hand to make certain Mariana would never be able to take Manuel away from this house. "You're crazy," said Utrera, and he got to his feet, draining the glass of cognac, "there was shooting, they were chasing a fugitive, go back up to the pigeon loft and look out the window and you'll see that you can almost touch the next roof. There's no need for you to tell me that Doña Elvira didn't love Mariana. We all knew that. But what had she or Manuel done to me? Why would I kill her?" That's what Solana didn't know, what kept him from finding out the name of her murderer, Minaya thought when he unpacked his suitcase and untied the red ribbons around the manuscripts and searched them for the account of the lynching in the Plaza of General Orduña and the not yet exactly remembered name of Victor Vega, the antiquarian, the spy. "But Solana found the proof that the pistol had been fired from the door to the pigeon loft." It was the chosen instant, the necessary critical moment of the revelation, just one gesture and he would disarm Utrera with the trivial omnipotence of a man who lifts a foot to step on an insect and then keeps walking without even noticing the dry, light crunch of the animal's shell flattened under the sole of his shoe: it was enough to look at the old man from above, from the certainty of the truth, to examine as proofs of guilt his mouth hanging open because of stupefaction and age and the way the knot of Utreras black tie pressed like a noose into the flabby skin of his neck, Minaya's slipping his hand inside his jacket like a man looking for a cigarette and taking out a small package and a typed sheet that tore in the middle when he opened it again. Santisteban and Sons, antiquarians, firm founded in 1881, an appointment in Mágina for an accessory in a network of spies and fifth columnists destroyed in Madrid just a few hours before its messenger established contact with you, Utrera, said Minaya, smoothing and joining together the two pieces of paper on the wood of the table and displaying the cartridge that rolled for a moment and then stopped between them, as irrevocable as the deciding card in a game. "Solana found this cartridge. He also noticed that Mariana had traces of droppings on her knees and forehead, which would have been impossible if, as they said then, she had fallen on her back at the window when the shot hit her. She fell face down, because when she died she was looking toward the door of the pigeon loft, and her killer turned her over and wiped the droppings from her nightgown and face so it would seem as if the shot had come from the street, but he forgot to pick up the cartridge, or he looked for it and didn't have time to find it. It was Solana who saw it. Solana wrote down everything. I've read his manuscripts and I've gone where he couldn't go, because he didn't see this letter. Doña Elvira kept it in her bedroom. I think it has the answer." Utrera looked at the cartridge and the two pieces of the letter without yet accepting, without understanding anything that wasn't their double threat, as if he were listening to a judge accuse him in a foreign language whose unknown syllables would condemn him more irrevocably than the meaning of what they said, without yet recognizing in the yellowed, torn paper, the letterhead with the Gothic calligraphy, and the writing in the lost letter he had been looking for throughout the entire house for thirty-two years and that now appeared before him as the face of a forgotten and distant dead man returns in dreams. "Don't make me laugh. Solanas manuscripts, his famous work of genius. After his death a squad of Falangistas came here and burned them all, just as they had done at the country house. They threw his typewriter into the garden from the conservatory window, they burned all his papers and all the books that had his signature, right there, behind you, at the foot of the palm tree. And even if something were left, didn't anyone tell you that Solana was a liar his whole life?" Again he turned to cognac, contempt, useless irony, refusing to look right at Minaya because he wasn't the one he was seeing but the other one, the dead man, the true accuser who had usurped another life to embody in it the obstinacy of his shade, never completely driven away, and it wasn't Minaya's lucidity that made him surrender, or even the way he stood up behind him to hold the letter in front of his eyes like someone bringing a light up to a blind man's face, but the impossible evidence that speaking to him behind that voice was the voice of Jacinto Solana, dead and returned, lodged at the back of Minaya's eyes as if he were behind a mirror that allowed him to see everything and remain hidden. And that voice was also his, the voice of the secret and the guilt, so that when Minaya continued speaking, it was as if Utrera were listening to himself, free at last of the torment of simulating and lying, absolved by the proximity of punishment. "You were going to become a Franco spy," said the voice, Minaya, "you received that letter, and when you were waiting for Victor Vega to come to Magina, you learned he had been arrested and then lynched by the mob in the Plaza of General Orduna, and you looked for the letter to destroy it but couldn't find it, and probably Dona Elvira, who stole it from you, who knew as well as you that the letter could lead to your torture and a firing squad, threatened to give it to the police if you didn't kill Mariana." But as Minaya spoke, he began to hear what he himself was saying as if it were a monologue in a book that loses its energy and truth when it is recited by a mediocre actor: he didn't recognize his own brutality and couldn't stop the dirty pleasure he found in it and that incited him to prolong it, just what he had felt, he said afterward, tonight, when he was a cowardly little boy and avenged the fear and humiliations he suffered by hitting those who were weaker and more cowardly than he, and his shame and disgust impelled him to continue hitting until his childhood was over. Utrera looked at the letter and the empty bottom of his glass and moved his bald, humbled head, not affirming or denying, only allowing himself to be struck by each word as if he had lost his will or his consciousness, and it moved back and forth, held up only by his rigid neck and the knot of his black tie, waiting for the blows still to come. It was, suddenly, like hitting a dead man, like closing his fist, expecting muscled resistance and sinking it into decayed or rotted material and pulling back and hitting again with greater fury without anything happening. "Who are you to demand an accounting from me?" said Utrera in a voice Minaya had never heard from him before, because it was the one he used to talk to himself when he was alone, when he returned from the café, at night, and sat down in his studio at the table covered with the dead leaves of newspapers stained with varnish, his useless hands hanging between his knees, "how can it matter to me now that you found that letter? Don't you see? I've spent thirty-two years paying for what I did that day, and I'll go on paying until I die, and afterward too, I suppose. Doña Elvira always says there's no pardon for anyone. Certainly it would have been better if I'd let her turn me in that day, but I was on the Plaza of General Orduña too when they took Victor Vega out of the police station and I saw what they did to him. I didn't know who he was then. I found out that night, when Medina came back from the hospital and told us his name." Driven by fear, he went up to his room immediately to burn the letter, but there was nothing in the drawer where he was sure he had put it, in the pages of a book he couldn't find either, as if the thief, when taking it, had wanted to emphasize the evidence of the robbery. He looked through his clothes, in the closet, at the bottom of each one of the drawers, under the bed, in the pages of all his books, in the notebooks of sketches he had brought from Italy, he continued searching even though he knew he wasn't going to find anything while he listened in the distance to the sonorous laughter of Mariana or Orlando and the music Manuel was playing on the piano in the dining room, and that night an
d the following night, when everyone was asleep, he searched with desperate, absurd tenacity on the shelves in the library, in the disorder of Manuel's desk, and when he told Minaya about his search he remembered as if it were an illumination that as he was trying to open the only locked drawer in the desk, Jacinto Solana came into the library and stood looking at him from the doorway as if he had found him out. But Solana left without saying anything to him, or perhaps, he couldn't remember, he was the one who went out with his head bowed, murmuring an excuse, and then he went up to the parlor to continue searching, though he could not possibly have lost the letter there, and then, he said, when after so many hours of constant searching he had lost track of the time, Amalia came looking for him, long after midnight, and with the same indifferent naturalness with which she would have transmitted an invitation to have tea, she said that Doña Elvira wanted to see him, that she was waiting for him in her rooms. "She always looked at the mail, alone, before anyone else saw it. I think she still does. She looked at all the letters that came, one by one, and then she put them back on the same tray on which Amalia had brought them to her and allowed her to distribute them. She never opened any letter, but she studied the return address and the cancellation stamp with that magnifying glass she uses now to go over the administrator's accounts. She herself told me that when she heard the name of the antiquities shop on the radio, she recalled having read it earlier and immediately knew where. That woman is incapable of forgetting anything, not even now." He tapped cautiously on the half-closed door behind which he saw no light, and as he listened in the silence, waiting for a word from Doña Elvira or a sign that she really was there, he heard again from the bottom of the house and the darkness the sound of a tune that grew louder until it seemed very close to him and then began to fade away as if its impulse had been exhausted and abruptly it was extinguished, leaving behind a tense, prolonged emptiness in which the voice of Doña Elvira in front of him, asking him to come in, sounded like an omen. She was standing in the dark, next to the window, lit only by the inconstant illumination of the night, and she raised her index finger to her lips when he tried to ask her why she had called for him, and she ordered him in a quiet voice to come to the window without making noise, pointed out to him something that moved in the shadows of the garden, beneath the fronds of the palm tree, a white blot that seemed trapped in the dark, embracing, lying down, two bodies and then a face still without features, pale, inflamed, locked together like branches in a thicket they were seeking and with which they became confused far away in the garden, behind the glass, in the silence of an aquarium. "Look at whom my son is going to marry. She's been like that for an hour, wallowing like a bitch with the other one, his best friend, he says. And they don't even hide. Why would they?" The strangest thing wasn't that he had been summoned to that place like an ambassador granted a secret audience or that he was there, at one in the morning, beside Doña Elvira, looking at the garden as if from the rear of a box in the theater; it was the silence in which the bodies moved, like avid reptiles, like fish in circular, incessant flight. Since his fear, his certainty that when he entered the dark room he was walking into the prelude to a perdition foretold by the death of Victor Vega, the two bodies rolling on the grass in the garden as if giving themselves over to being dissolved into a single shadow, and the immutable profile and waved gray hair of the woman leaning her forehead against the glass to continue spying on them, seemed to him as keenly desired and distant as the music that hadn't sounded again. "Turn on the light," Doña Elvira ordered, and she remained motionless in front of the window even after he had obeyed her, and when she finally turned around, with a gesture of tedium, she was holding a paper in her right hand, an extended envelope, exact and brief like a weapon. "As you can understand," she said to him, "I didn't have you come here only to see my shame. That woman has dishonored my son and will take him away the day after tomorrow if I can't stop her. I want you to help me. You aren't like this rabble that has invaded my house. But if you don't do as I say, one telephone call and the Assault Guard will come for you. You should have done a better job of hiding this letter from your friends in Madrid. It took Amalia less than fifteen minutes to find it." Now she had a pistol in her hand, flat, silvery, with an ivory handle, small and cold and gleaming in the light like a razor. She handed it to him as she tucked the letter under the wristband of her black velvet dress, and when he took it and held it as if he didn't know yet how to handle it, she turned her back and looked down again at the darkness in the garden, though no one was there. Later there was only insomnia and the icy touch and memory of the pistol, its shape calculated for secrets and death, its invitation to suicide, the destroyed mouth and coagulated blood on Victor Vega's lips, his ruined body in the sun beside the arcades on the Plaza of General Orduna, the blindfold over his eyes and his hands tied and the bite of the fire that would throw him against a wall riddled by gunshots or a ditch that was like a pit. "But I knew I was incapable of killing her," he said, "and I was determined to kill myself, but I went out to the hallway thinking that before noon she and Manuel would have left and then I saw her pass by, as close as you are now, and I swear that if I followed her, it wasn't because I intended to kill her, it was as if another man were climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, because I didn't care anymore about being killed, how could I care if I was already dead?" Without will, without any purpose at all, he kept climbing up to the pigeon loft, conscious of each stair he stepped on, very slowly, without hearing the sound of his own footsteps, as if the design he was obeying had stripped him of physical solidity and was pushing him up the stairs like an ocean swell that picks up a man who before going under when it knocks him down looks at the shore growing more and more distant and knows he is going to drown. Like a magnet the pistol clutched in his hand led him on, the butt wet with perspiration, the short barrel and the trigger that his fingers groped when he reached the top landing afraid Mariana could hear through the closed door the noise of his breathing, but that wasn't what he was hearing, that monotonous sound shaken by the beating of his heart came not from his throat but from the interior of the pigeon loft, it was the murmur of the sleeping pigeons. Perhaps Mariana believed that Manuel had wakened and had come up to find her, because when she moved away from the window, she had an unsurprised smile on her lips, as if she had been pretending not to hear the footsteps in order to allow Manuel the delicate opportunity of coming up to her silently and covering her eyes as he embraced her. "Utrera," she said, "its you," in that tone of fatigued indifference she always used to resign herself to the arrival of someone she didn't want to see, and she hadn't seen the pistol yet or understood why he was looking at her that way, so fixedly, as if reproving her presence in the pigeon loft or examining with obscene dissimulation the folds of her nightgown, trying to guess at the lines of her naked body beneath the cloth, the dark shadow of her belly. "Some men with rifles are running along the roofs. It seems they're chasing somebody." Before recognizing what was shining in the hand that rose and rigidly pointed at her and aimed at her eyes wide with fright, Mariana heard shouts and the clatter of feet running on tiles on the other side of the lane, and perhaps a first shot that was still not the one of her death and to which Utrera's pistol responded like an echo, a sudden raging blade above his index finger, then finally still in his hand, pointing now at the smoke and the empty window while his single shot was dispersed in the doubled pandemonium of pigeons and incessant bullets like a hailstorm on the roofs. He turned Mariana over, he said, and wiped her mouth, moving her hair away from her face, her open eyes, in which there remained as if changed into glass the final astonishment of the pistol and her death. Then, when he stood up, wiping the droppings from his knees, he saw the man hiding behind the chimney opposite the window. Barefoot, his feet bleeding, wearing an undershirt, unshaven, as if he had jumped out of bed when they came for him, panting, his mouth wide open, so close Utrera could see the trembling of his chest beneath the dirty undershirt and the hunte
d, animal sound of his respiration. For a moment, one he would remember forever, they looked at each other, recognizing the other man in the solitude of their fear and their plea for a respite or an impossible refuge, as if they had passed each other in a corridor reserved for those condemned to death. "His name is Domingo González," said Utrera, standing up, finishing in one swallow the glass he hadn't touched while he spoke. "After the war I found out that he saved himself by hiding in a barn, under a pile of straw. From time to time we've passed on the street, but he doesn't remember me, or at least he behaves as if he doesn't know me." He crushed the cigarette he had just lit in the ashtray and left the empty glass on the table, very close to the torn letter and useless cartridge, wiping his lips damp with cognac as carefully as someone cleaning the blood from a small wound. He wouldn't recognize himself either if he could see himself as he was then, Minaya thought, looking without pity or hatred at the mourning button in his lapel and the black band that hung half unstitched from his right sleeve, and I can't even imagine what he's told me or remember what I know in order to call him murderer, because that word, like the crime and the man who committed it, perhaps no longer refer to him, because no one can continue to sustain sorrow or guilt or merely memory after thirty-two years. Minaya suddenly perceived in the dining room this afternoon the immense weight of reality and the ignominy of the guesses that until a few minutes before had exalted him, and he immediately renounced his lucidity like a lover who, when he learns the day will come when his love dies, censures that future treachery with more fury than his present misfortune. He, Minaya, had rescued a book and explained a crime, he maintained intact the power to accuse, to continue asking, to grant not pardon but silence, or to tell what he knew and throw the murderer and his accomplice into a shame more sordid than the old age in which they survived as in an exile with no possible pardon. "Don't look at me like that," said Utrera from the door he had already begun to open, closing it again, "you can't harm me. I have nothing to lose, because I don't have anything. When Doña Elvira dies and you inherit this house, you can throw me out, but by then I'll probably be dead too. I swear that's the only thing I want in this world." Minaya was left alone, Inés said, sitting in the dining room at the long empty table like the client in a hotel who arrives too late for supper and waits in vain for someone to come and serve him, staring with inert fixity, a cigarette between his fingers, at the cartridge and the letter or at the polished wood where the oblique sun of the April afternoon was shining, cross-sectioned by the glass in the white French doors to the garden as if by a lattice window. Inés came to tell him that the undertakers men had just arrived, with their blue dusters, with their black cars recently parked beneath the acacias on the plaza, with their disrespectful haste that reminded Minaya, when he went out to the courtyard and saw them open the library and house doors wide to carry out the coffin that was closed now, of the afternoon when other men like them emptied his parents' bedroom with pulleys and ropes and loaded their furniture into a truck from which he never saw it emerge again. They put out the candles, passed the candelabras from one to the other and carried them by the armful to the back of a car, took down the wreaths of flowers and the black velvet cloth that had covered the platform where the coffin had been, and then, when they were gone, a great empty space remained in the center of the library, deserted now and still in shadow, like a stage after the last show, and it was in that spot without anything—right there, in another time, barely a week before, where the desk had been, the filing cabinet, the habit of taking notes on the books and waiting for Inés—where Minaya became aware of his own future absence, as irreparable and certain as Manuel's. "Let's go," said Medina beside him, "they're waiting for us." The hearse and the two taxis that would take them to the cemetery were already leaving when he and Medina went outside. He still had to come back after the funeral and burial to pick up his bag, but it seemed to him as he leaned back in the taxi, while the scent of the acacias and the entire plaza was being left behind, that he was saying good-bye forever not only to the house that was closed now and deserted but also to Inés and everyone who had lived there, to a part of his life that very soon would no longer belong to him, inaccessible to returning and to memory, because remembering and going back, he doesn't know yet, are exercises as useless as demanding explanations from a mirror of the face that an hour or a day or thirty years ago had looked into it. He'll come back, no doubt, just as he came back tonight, when it was almost eleven o'clock, hurrying to reach the station on time, crossing the courtyard, I imagine, climbing the illuminated staircase without seeing anyone, like the last passenger on a great ship that is beginning to sink but whose recently abandoned salons have not yet been invaded by the water already flooding the holds, fearing that Dona Elvira or Utrera will appear before him around a corner or in the parlor to subject him to the hateful discipline of saying good-bye, wondering why there is no one anywhere and why all the lights in the house are on. As a last privilege I want to imagine it like this as he leaves it, bright and empty, white in the dark of the plaza as if in the middle of the ocean, because now that Manuel is dead and the book is finished, there is no one left who deserves to live in it. Here, not in the cemetery and even less in the station, is where the end should be, in the illuminated balconies, the circular windows on the top floor, the muffled flash of that light on the rim of the fountain, on the man who from the end of the lane turns to look at it and then grasps the handle of his suitcase and walks toward the Plaza of General Orduna as if assaulting the shadows, with his head bowed, with the posthumous courage of fugitives. I invented the game, I set the rules, I arranged the end, calculating the steps, the successive squares, the equilibrium between intelligence and the blows of chance, and when I did that I shaped for Minaya a face and a probable destiny. Now he is fulfilling it, in the station, now he obeys me and, tall and alone, waits for me as he obeyed and waited in the cemetery while gravediggers moved aside the stone where Manuel's name had not yet been inscribed and Dona Elvira, supported by Utrera and Teresa, bent down to pick up a handful of earth that she would then toss on the coffin with a slow, rigid gesture. He was taller than any of them, and his stature and his youth seemed the visible attributes of his status as stranger, the proof that in spite of the dark suit, the black tie, the summary expression of grief, he did not belong to the group of people in mourning who had gathered around the grave and murmured prayers that in the distance of the afternoon and the empty cemetery sounded like the buzz of insects. Old distant faces, unrecognizable, enervated by heat and oppressive mourning clothes, surrounded by crosses, by the yellow brilliance of the hedge mustard flowers that erased the graves and the paths that separated them and wound around their feet like a swamp of roots. Of all of them, only Medina kept himself partially free of decrepitude, fat and impassive, his arms folded, his hair still black, looking at the men sliding the coffin between rough ropes into the hole of the grave with the composed attention he would bring to looking at a patient who had just died. But Inés didn't look at the grave, Minaya noticed, although she kept her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap and she moved her lips, pretending to repeat the prayers of the others. Only he, who spied on her and her gestures looking for a sign that would allow him to recognize in her the same woman who had embraced him last night, not to get her back but in order not to lose the right to tell himself at least that certain things now impossible had happened to him, realized that Inés had secretively moved her eyes toward a corner of the cemetery, toward a mausoleum shaded by cypresses beside which a man seemed to pray as he leaned on a cripple's crutches. The brim of his hat covered his face, and his head sank between his shoulders, exaggeratedly raised by the crutches. Inés noticed Minaya's questioning and she stared fixedly again at the ground and pretended to pray, but her eyes beneath long lashes slid slowly beyond the still-open grave, over the hedge flowers, as if all of her and not only her gaze were fleeing, just as she did when Minaya was talking to her and she stopped hearing hi
m and smiled at him so he couldn't follow her in her flight or decipher a thought in which she was alone. Taut with the weight of the coffin, the ropes were lowered, rubbing against the sharp marble edges, and one of the men holding them stopped to wipe his brow, interrupting for a single second the voices that were praying. In that fraction of silence, Inés raised her head and looked openly at the man on crutches. He was looking at them too, motionless, leaning on the crutches as if they were a windowsill he had reached using the last of his strength, and although Minaya couldn't see his face, he imagined an indecent curiosity in those eyes covered by shadow and veiled by distance, shining in a sudden reflection of glass when the man began to walk and came out from the cypresses, awkward and very slow, ruined and tenacious between the crutches that preceded him, testing the ground as if looking for hidden graves beneath the hedge flowers. The grave diggers retrieved the ropes, and Doña Elvira took a few steps forward and began to drop earth on the now-invisible coffin without completely opening her hands, as if waiting for someone to capture her gesture in a photograph. The man walked more and more slowly toward the metal grillwork of the cemetery gate, hugging an adobe wall, disappearing at times behind a mausoleum and then reappearing more worn and more awkward, more impossibly determined to reach the exit. He was very close to it when he seemed to give up walking and leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and now Inés, who could no longer look at him without turning her head, said something to Amalia that Minaya couldn't hear, crossed herself at the grave, and with the same haste moved away from it to go toward the man, who was no longer leaning against the wall. Before he followed her without waiting for the grave diggers to adjust the stone, Minaya remembered that when he came to the cemetery there was a taxi parked next to the gate. He heard the engine starting up and he ran faster, jumping over the graves and the hedge flowers, his heart pounding in his chest as violently as when he had run that winter from the guards along the avenues of Madrid, no longer asking himself what the others would think or who the man on crutches was, but when he reached the cemetery gate, when he stopped on the dusty esplanade where the road to the city began between two rows of cypresses, he saw the taxi driving away leaving behind a translucent cloud of dust and exhaust and the fleeting image as dazzling as a powder flash of two faces that looked at him through the rear window and were immediately erased in the dust, in the distance of rows of cypresses and the first houses in the city. He kept running and waved his hand and probably called to Inés asking her to stop the taxi, but his voice was inaudible and his figure became smaller as the successive shadows of cypresses multiplied in the window, and finally he stood motionless in the distance of the road, still moving his right hand, as if he were saying good-bye, powerless and vanquished, overwhelmed by fatigue, by the incredible certainty that he was partially opening the prelude to the true story when he believed he had left its conclusion behind him. And now it was only a question of waiting for him to come, to cross the fields and the last streets of Magina, walking very quickly, not seeing or hearing anything of what was happening around him, because the city, the cars, the people he bumped into on the sidewalks were moving out of his way like a sea that parts to show him the only road he should follow, running until he was out of breath and his legs had given out, advancing with no progress, no respite, beyond fatigue, as if only the devastating will to reach the plaza where he had waited so often for Inés kept him on his feet, the plaza where he was tediously condemned to look at Utreras heroic monument and the hermetic balconies of the house she had never allowed him to enter. "My uncle is sick. He doesn't want to see anybody," she would say. "I'd like to meet him." "He can't, at least not now. I'll let you know when he's better." All that was left was to wait for him with the avid, feigned, wary calm of a hunter who has laid his trap and crouches in the darkness, in the propitious thicket where the muffled movement of a body will sound and then the cold crack of the trap when it closes. "He's here," said Inés from the window when we heard the bell at the entrance. He pulled on the cord several times, but nobody answered, and then he went into the house, into the devastated courtyard above which damp clothes hang on lines, closing off the sky and the railing of rotting wood where the women who live in the rooms along the corridor go to shout at one another or to empty buckets and basins of dirty water, where they lean in the sun, with embroidered housecoats over their shoulders, to dry their hair on Sunday mornings. It always smells of damp, of deep, dark places, of wet lime and stone and cesspool water. From the railing a dry, disheveled woman moved aside the sheets on the lines and pointed to the end of the courtyard when Minaya asked for Inés. "That Inés and her uncle live in the second yard, up top, at the back of the stairs. I saw them come in a little while ago. Now they're riding in a car, like rich people." The sheet fell back like a sopping wet curtain on the woman and her laugh, which was prolonged in other voices along the corridor, in glances of suspicion and mockery that followed Minaya from above until he disappeared into a gloomy passage that took him to another courtyard without a railing or wooden columns, a courtyard like a well, with high unwhitewashed walls, with a single window and a tree whose topmost branches stretched toward it, brushing against open shutters. "Now he's coming up," said Inés, and she moved away from the window, picking up again the needle she had just threaded and the frame where she was embroidering something, a sketch of blue flowers and birds that she looked at meditatively as she sat down in the chair she always used to sew, so absorbed in the needle and the movement of her fingers that touched the taut cloth, searching for the exact spot where she should make the next stitch, that she seemed to have forgotten that Minaya was climbing the stairs, coming closer and closer to me, to us, to the instant when his eyes would meet the eyes of a dead man and when he would hear the impossible and somehow revived voice of a manuscript he hadn't found yet, of so many words deceitfully calculated and written to trap him in a book that had existed only in his imagination, that has ended now, as if he, Minaya, had closed it just as he closed the door when he left here. But perhaps, as he climbed the stairs knowing he was approaching me, he was tempted to turn around, to close his eyes and his intelligence and his sleepless desire to know and leave for the station and Madrid as if he hadn't seen the man on crutches in the cemetery, as if not a single doubt was left that could stain or undo the history he had looked for and now possessed. He climbed up as if going down to a dark basement, he stopped in front of the only door in the corridor, abruptly I was no longer hearing his footsteps, and I guessed he was standing still behind it. "Come in, Minaya, don't stay out there," I said, "we've been expecting you for an hour."
A Manuscript of Ashes Page 26