A Manuscript of Ashes (11 page)

That was the question and the hidden challenge and the conclusion that all her words had led to, not a confession but a raw challenge in which she, after displaying her weapons, put simulation and words to one side like a gambler who clears the table to leave a single card and then turns it over with marked slowness. That was the only question and the only reason she had received him, and Minaya had been waiting for it since he entered the room, long before that, since Inés announced the señoras order and the moment designated for his audience. This afternoon, at five, Doña Elvira had said, and he spent the entire morning calculating the tone and precise words and manner in which he should present himself, docile, Manuel warned him, because she would look at him searching for confirmation of an ancient threat that was once, but not always, called Mariana or Jacinto Solana, well dressed and combed as she imagined a young man of evident dignity, though limited funds, ought to dress and comb his hair, but not so impeccable or servile that Doña Elvira might suspect the premeditated use of a mask.

"Before you can see her," said Manuel as they ate lunch, "she will have looked you over from head to toe, especially your collar, cuffs, and hands, because she has always said that in the collar and cuffs of his shirt one can discover if a man is or is not a gentleman. Since you arrived she's been asking about you, questioning Inés and Amalia, and even Medina when he goes up to examine her, but especially Teresa, who's afraid of her and feels hypnotized when my mother speaks to her. She already knows everything about you, and of course why you have come, but she wants to hear it from your own lips to decide if you're a danger."

And now he was sitting in front of her, in front of her only question, pouring himself a little more cold tea in order to break or prolong a truce and looking before responding, for ten extremely long seconds, at the garden conquered by darkness and the roofs and the sky where it was still day. I want to write a book, he said at last, about Jacinto Solana, anticipating a grimace or wounded rejection but not the laughter that sounded again like the rattle of bones and immediately died out.

 

"S
OLANA
. T
HAT
S
OLANA
. No one has said his name before me for the past twenty years. I thought that thank God he had been erased forever from the world, and now you come to tell me you're going to write a book about him, as if one could write about nothing, about a fraud. But he was such a liar that after he died he continues telling lies just as he told lies from the time he was a boy until the day they killed him. And so he's deceived you too, just as he deceived my son and his own wife, who waited for him for ten years without his sending her a single letter or telling her he was leaving when he abandoned her. But many years earlier he had deceived my husband. Perhaps you don't know that it was he, my husband, who was responsible for Solana getting out of the dung heap and receiving an education that those of his class have never needed. There was a kind of charitable committee or something like that, and every year it tested the children in the schools for the poor and selected the most outstanding and paid for them to study with the Piarists. My husband, who was deputy for Magina at the time, presided over the committee, and it was his vote that decided Solana's fate and my son's misfortune. A great writer, they said, but I never saw a book signed by him, not even the one he seemed to be writing when he came back from prison to live at our expense, first in this house and then at the Island of Cuba. What happened in the war was being forgotten, and Manuel, who escaped dying in prison because of the name he bears, seemed to have recovered his senses, or at least one could no longer detect the madness that drove him to become a Communist or a republican or whatever it was—because I believe he didn't know himself—and to enter into that absurd marriage. We all thought Solana was dead or had escaped to another country. But he came back. He came back saying what he had always said, that he was going to write a book, though he didn't deceive me. 'Don't call attention to yourself, Manuel,' I told my son, 'that man is an ex-convict, and he'll be your ruin again.' I knew something bad was going to happen, and I waited for the disaster until some Civil Guards came to tell me, very courteously, I must say, because the lieutenant colonel was related to me, that they had to search the house and question Manuel, because that friend of his, Solana, had killed two of their men at the Island of Cuba. That was the book he was writing, and of course no one could find it afterward. He used the farm to meet with his accomplices, a gang of those Red bandits who were wandering the sierra then. And again they dragged Manuel out of his bed in the middle of the night to take him to their barracks in handcuffs. Once again I had to cover my face with a veil and humiliate myself by knocking at the doors of those who had been my friends to save him from death or a sentence that would have killed him a little more slowly. And do you know the first thing he did when he was free? Look for his friend in the morgue and pay for his funeral and a marble gravestone. It's still there, I suppose, in the cemetery, in case you want to visit it. Manuel never comes up to see me, but every year he takes flowers to the graves of his soul mate and of the woman who turned his life upside down. And took his honor, if truth be told."

She didn't say good-bye or order him to leave, she simply stopped seeing him or forgot she wasn't alone, and her words faded into a very slow silence, just as her features faded in the same semidarkness that was erasing the shapes of the furniture and the corners of the room, coming up from the garden, from the empty hallways and rooms where Minaya had to feel his way back like a traveler surprised by darkness in a thick wood where there were no roads, only closed doors. Solitary doors, suspended in air, hermetic like the book Minaya was looking for and that perhaps never was written. Half-open doors that invite one in and then close, as if in a sudden gust of wind, behind the person who dares to cross them. He stood noiselessly and murmured an excuse or a farewell, but the small woman in mourning continued to look at the garden with her hands folded in her lap and her back ridgidly erect, as if posing for a photograph.

"You're not like them," she said, and seen from above she was smaller and almost vulnerable, with her bones sharp beneath her skin and the white needlework on the velvet of her mourning. "Come back to see me whenever you like."

As he was leaving he saw her in profile, the dark silhouette, her white hair dazzling against the pale light from the window and the purple and opaque blue of nightfall on the roofs. He closed the door slowly and when he turned he found the light, staring eyes of Ines, who seemed to have been waiting for him to leave and was carrying on the silver tray the supper that Dona Elvira wouldn't taste that night either.

H
E, TOO, DEFEATED AND OBSCURE
beneath the blankets where a sick body lies, I imagine, he, too, looking at the ceiling or the semidarkness or the faint light that comes through the curtains that someone partially closed before leaving him alone. There are medicine bottles on the night table and the odor of the alcohol Medina used to disinfect the needle is still in the air. He closed his bag at the foot of the bed, slowly moving his head, the hands that so delicately lifted the back of Mariana's neck from the droppings, as if he didn't want to wake her. He looked at his watch and placed it back in his vest pocket, studying Manuel, who seems to be asleep but who is watching him, high and distant, from a fog not of physical pain but of melancholy, prepared to close his eyes in order not to sleep and surrender to the last light of day fading in the plaza and on the white curtains at the balcony with the same sweet slowness with which he wishes to be extinguished, let it be tonight, he thinks, with no fear or urgency, with his eyes closed, with the picture of Mariana and the one of his Aunt Cristina attending with their solemn presence as silent witnesses. For a moment he sees Medina or dreams him as he was in 1937, slim and with a black mustache, in his captain's uniform, leaning not over him but over the body of Mariana, who wears a sheer nightdress and has a red, round stain on her forehead. Medina, slow and heavy again, presses his hand for an instant and then leaves
the room, and his cautious voice can be heard speaking to someone, Teresa or Amalia, in the hallway. Now Manuel curls up on his side and raises the fold of the sheet until it covers his mouth, his back to the balcony, and stares at the moldings on the closet, dissolving in the night. The only vestige is a vague muscular pain in his chest, the quiet hand, the tranquil reptile that isn't even asleep beneath closed eyelids. It only waits for the next, the definitive day, the hour when it will move up his left side brushing against the warm pink tissue of his lungs and then encircling his heart before squeezing it, closing the ring of asphyxia around its frightened beating, like a blind animal that had been incubated in Manuel's chest thirty-two years earlier to pay, day after day, the extremely long installment plan of anguish and longed-for death. He had spent the afternoon in the library, not doing anything, lacking even the will to climb the stairs to the pigeon loft, waiting for Minaya to come back from his visit to Dona Elvira, and perhaps the disquiet of waiting and cigarettes had caused the reawakening of the old wound near his heart, like a road that precisely indicates its white line in the growing light of dawn. What will she say about me, he thought, about all of us, fearing his mother's hatred less than the manner in which she might show it to Minaya, the indiscretion, the very probable slander. Since the proximity of the pain in his chest was more certain with each passing minute—now the reptile or hand was lodged in his stomach and groping its way upward, animated by brandy and tobacco—Manuel put on his coat and hat and took the bamboo stick that had belonged to his father to walk out to the watchtowers on the wall. But there was no respite because fear and pain were already moving up his veins like a single knife thrust, already hastening his breath and opening before his feet a pit that separated him from the world and left him alone with the bite of terror. He walked, slow and anachronistic, down Calle Real, very close to the building walls, ceding the sidewalk to the ladies, whom he greeted when he thought he knew them, touching the brim of his hat with a distracted and completely involuntary gesture, but the air on the street was not enough to ease the incessant pounding that cracked a whip in his heart and temples, and in an instant of vertigo the dark hand oppressing his chest sometimes even stopped the flow of his blood. Leaning against the walls, he was able to reach the Plaza of Santa Maria, and when he felt in his heart the last peck and the shadow's slap that knocked him to the paving stones, he recalled an April morning when that same plaza and its backdrop of palaces and distant bell towers seemed more boundless than ever to him, because Mariana, in a white blouse and summer sandals, came toward him, smiling, from the facade of El Salvador. It was that same image, intact, that he found before him when he woke from his brief death not knowing who he was or in what part of the world the room and the bed he was lying in were to be found. He heard voices, pigeons, the notes of a strange habanera that never ended, he heard, as he was overcome by the dense lethargy of sedatives, little girls' voices in the plaza singing the funeral ballad of Alfonso XII and Dona Mercedes, and in the not-yet-unfathomable waters of sleep the melody of the habanera became entwined with the voices of the children's song, the nocturnal footsteps in the hallway, the murmur like that of a hospital, the wakefulness that reached him from the other side of the door.

"He's fallen asleep," said Teresa, closing the door again with extreme care. Minaya and Medina were smoking beside the darkened glass doors of the gallery, talking in that muffled tone of voice used in churches and in the vicinity of the sick.

"The worst thing afflicting your uncle, my boy, isn't that he drinks and smokes and exerts himself too much given the fragility of his heart, but that he doesn't want to live. Understand what I'm saying: when you reach the age that Manuel and I are, living becomes an act of will."

Inés passed them with Doña Elvira's untouched tray and looked for a second at Minaya with an expression so rapid it seemed unreal. He saw her walk away with the clink of porcelain and silver, like a perfume or a melody that followed and announced her.

"You speak about will, but my uncle has had a cardiac lesion since a bullet grazed his heart."

"My friend..." Medina, smiling, picked up his bag from the floor, ready to leave. "Manuel has told me you're a kind of writer, so perhaps you'll understand what I am going to tell you. In my work, one becomes very skeptical with the years and discovers that in certain cases the heart and its ailments are a metaphor. Manuel had his first serious attack on the day following Mariana's death. That was when his real illness began, and it wasn't caused by the bullet you mentioned but by the one that killed her."

They went downstairs in silence, trying to keep their footsteps from resounding on the marble, less to respect Manuel's sleep than to avoid committing an uncertain profanation. In the courtyard, Medina ceremoniously shook the hands of Teresa and Amalia and accepted the hat and coat that Minaya handed him with the quiet gravity of a priest who dons his liturgical cape at the door of the sacristy. They were alone, in the doorway, and only then did Minaya dare to ask the question that had been troubling him since they came down from the gallery. Who killed her, he said, regretting it instantly, but there was no censure in Medina's glance, only a serene wonder, as if he were surprised to discover that after so many years there was still someone asking that question.

"There was shooting on the roofs, on the other side of the house, above the lanes that the pigeon loft looks out on. A militia patrol was pursuing a rebel, whom I'm sure they never captured. Mariana, who was in the pigeon loft, went to the window when she heard the shots. One of them hit her in the forehead. We never found out anything else."