A Manuscript of Ashes (13 page)

 

S
UDDENLY
M
INAYA WAS ALONE
, and it was as if nothing could attest to the fact that he had been kissing Ines on a sofa in the illuminated,
unmoving
library. The sensation of the caresses and the darkness remained in his consciousness, with no reason to connect it to the present, even less so to the blurred scene that had preceded it, just as an apparition leaves no trace when it fades away. In front of the fire was the glass table where she placed the book she was reading while she waited for him and that held the bottle and glasses and ashtray with cigarette ends stained crimson, but Inés, before she left, had put the book back on the shelf where it belonged and removed the glasses and the bottle as urgently as she had straightened her skirt and buttoned her blouse, then disappeared as if she were never going to return. "Now she's in her room, probably naked under the sheets, because she may still be waiting for me, and this flight has been a trick to get me to follow her." But he didn't do anything except insist on the alcohol, on his cowardice and good fortune, except to look at Orlando's drawing and the photograph in which Jacinto Solana was smiling at him, Minaya, guessing, understanding everything, with the air of someone who confirms with disdain that what he always imagined has happened and that the gift of prophecy is a melancholy privilege. Then he went up without even daring to pass Inés' bedroom, going along the hallways in the house as if they were the last streets of a city not entirely recognized or inhospitable, obedient to sleep and the mature night where, as if in a kind of future memory, there were to be found Inés' embraces and the placidity of the sheets waiting to remind him of the commandment of abandonment and forgetting, because out in the world it was February 1969, tyranny and fear, but inside those walls what endured was a delicate anachronism, a plot he was also a part of though he didn't know it: Inés, who didn't belong to this time or any other because her presence was enough to cancel it, Mariana in the drawing and in photographs, Manuel in his lieutenant's uniform, and Jacinto Solana not motionless in his figure and in the date of his death, but always writing, even now, narrating, Minaya imagined, like the impostor and guest
who enters the parlor at three in the morning and discovers that there is a key in the lock of the forbidden room, that it will be infinitely easy to push the door and contemplate what no one but Manuel has seen in the last thirty-two years. A large, unexpectedly vulgar room, with dark furniture and white curtains across the shutters to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias. He moved forward uncertainly, closing the door behind him, he lit a match and saw himself in the double mirror on the closet, his pale face emerging from the darkness as if in a chiaroscurist portrait. But it wasn't entirely a funereal place, because the top sheet was clean and looked recently ironed and the air didn't smell of enclosure but of a cold February night, as if someone had just closed the balcony door. He locks himself in here, he thought, to caress the embroidery or the edge of the sheets as if he were caressing the body of the woman who lay on them for a single night, to look at the plaza from the balcony that only he can open, or to look at the mirror searching for a memory of Mariana, disheveled and naked, and perhaps he no longer feels anything, because no one is capable of incessant memory. He opened the closet, as empty as one in a hotel room, he searched through the dresser drawers and saw Mariana's lingerie and stockings and a mirrored compact that contained a pink substance as delicate as pollen, and in the bottom drawer, under her wedding dress, which became entwined in his hands like silken foam, he found the packet of old handwritten pages tied with a red ribbon. There was no need to hold it up to the candle to read the name written on the first sheet: he could recognize Jacinto Solana not only in his insomniac handwriting but above all in the talent for secrecy that seemed to have endured in him even after his death. They killed him, they thought they could demolish his memory by stomping on the typewriter that he was heard pounding constantly for three months in the highest room in the house, they ripped the papers he had written and burned them in a fire they set in the garden, but like a virus that lodges in the body and returns when the patient thinks it has been exterminated, the furtive words, the incessant writing of Jacinto Solana appeared again twenty-two years later, and in a place, Minaya supposed, that would have pleased him: the most untouched room in the house, the drawer where the wedding dress was kept and the intimate silk things of the woman he loved, so that the odor of the paper blended with the scent of her clothes, a distant heir of other scents that were in Mariana's skin.

Only later, when Minaya had read the manuscript, could he understand why Manuel had lied and told him that not even a page remained of the book Solana had been writing when they killed him. It read "Beatus Ille" at the top of the first sheet, though it wasn't or didn't seem to be a novel but a kind of diary written between February and April of 1947 and crisscrossed with long evocations of things that had happened ten years earlier. At times Solana wrote in the first person and at other times he used the third, as if he wanted to hide the voice that was telling and guessing everything and in this way give the narration the tone of an impassive history. Kneeling next to the open drawer, next to the wedding dress that spread around him, Minaya untied the knots in the red ribbons with clumsy, eager slowness, and when he touched the manuscript pages one by one with the incredulous fervor of a man who has witnessed a miracle, he heard the door of the bedroom closing quietly, and before he turned around, he recalled in a moment of lucidity and terror that he hadn't taken the key out of the lock. But it wasn't Manuel, it was Inés at his side, Inés who turned the key so that no one could take them by surprise and who, tall and ironic, looked at him as if he were a thief who, when he was discovered, forgot the fruit of his greed between his hands. Still on his knees, he let the manuscript fall, unable to say anything or think of a possible excuse. "I saw Utrera walking around the gallery," Inés said, "he almost caught you," and her voice wasn't the voice of an accuser but of an accomplice when she kneeled beside him to put away the dress. "Look what I've found. Manuscripts by Jacinto Solana." But Ines didn't seem to hear him; she had seen, among the bride's clothes, a rose of yellow cloth that Mariana must have removed from her hair before the wedding photograph was taken, and she put it on one side of her forehead, with transitory elegance, and looked in the mirror for an instant, smiling at herself, at Minaya's stupefaction and passion. With a caress he removed the rose from her hair as he kissed her with his eyes closed.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE GARDEN
, next to the palm tree that's so tall its top can be seen from the plaza, Manuel, convalescing, sat in the sun and talked to Minaya, sitting on a wicker chair, wearing no tie and a light-colored suit that seemed to have been chosen to match his white hair and the tone of the paint on the small round table with a glass of water sparkling in the light and an opaque bottle of medicine. Dominating his figure, beyond the fatigue of his convalescence visible only in the flat pallor of his skin and a certain tremor in his left: hand, was a serene inaugural air, as if he had dressed so carefully to attend a fiesta or receive a group of guests in the garden. Disobeying Medina's orders without excessive pleasure, though with absolute premeditation, Manuel smoked his first cigarette since the afternoon when his heart knocked him down in the Plaza of Santa Maria. Still intact was the delight of taking it out of the cigarette case and fitting the filter in the holder with a light pressure of thumb and index finger, but the tobacco had a taste somewhere between unfamiliar and neutral, and Manuel, after the disappointment of the first few inhalations, continued smoking only because of loyalty to himself, just as he had allowed himself the useless elegance of going out to the garden, wearing his linen suit and an Italian scarf instead of a tie.

"Utrera told me you were going to visit his studio. He's a little nervous, and I think a little ashamed. You know, he considers the works they commission now humiliating. So you shouldn't praise his Medieval Virgins too much. He has a high opinion of you. He says you've inherited the artistic temperament of your grandfather Minaya and your grandmother Cristina."

Minava couldn't imagine his grandmother as an old woman. In fact, he had never thought about her until he saw her oil portrait in Manuel's bedroom: a blonde girl with singularly delicate features looking into empty space and holding on her lap a half-open book on whose cover one can read with some difficulty the title written in Gothic letters:
Arpeggios
, by J. E. Minaya.

"My father rarely spoke of her, and then only to reproach her until after she had died for what he called her bad marriage. 'Dear God, what have I done that You gave me a poet for a father, a disinherited mother, and a son who's a Communist.' He said that once when he found a clandestine journal among my papers."

 

T
HERE WAS NOTHING STRANGER FOR
M
INAYA
than remembering his father in the garden of the house that his bad luck had denied him. Death, he thought, isn't that boundary, that unmoving trench one imagines when it has just happened, but a slow distancing that ends in forgetting and disloyalty. In Madrid, in the sad streets and doorways of the district where they had taken him when they left Magina, in a cell at Security Headquarters, the shadow of his father had moved very slowly away from Minaya, but it survived, transfigured and abstract, in the sensation of failure and fear, in the disagreeable need to take the metro every day and work and know he was alone. Now he was smoking in the garden and listening to the extremely hospitable voice of Manuel, who was telling him something about the visits he and Jacinto Solana made in their adolescence to the blonde girl in the painting, and the figures of his parents faded irremediably, like his own life and his future, abolished in time, in the pink fragrance of the wisteria that sifted the early light and brought him the memory of Inés, as if the day he would leave the house would never come, as if there were no days beyond the one indicated by the calendars that morning, no cities on the other side of the blue sierra. Even the next few minutes seemed remote to him: "If the smoke stopped in the air, if the light at the end of the cigarette stopped burning, if the splotches of shadow did not advance along the gravel in the garden." He walked toward the rear, toward the door of the carriage house where Utrera was waiting for him. "Triumphant," he had read in a passage of the manuscript, "solicitous, offering smiles and black-market cigarettes, appealing, as he says, to forgetting past rancors, to friendship, which is stronger than political differences. Wearing one of those dustcoats that mechanics used thirty years ago, he rules over the three workers who help him in the studio and over the statues like dismantled mannequins to which he barely applies a touch of paint or varnish when they are presented to him, for he claims that his art, like Leonardo's,
e cosa mentale.
Beneath the dustcoat he always wears a suit with spectacular shoulder pads for his slight figure, and a white carnation in his lapel. In the late afternoon, a worker acting as his
valet de chambre
—the mockery is Manuel's—helps him remove the dustcoat, and then Utrera emerges ready to prolong his reign in conversation at the cafe and at the tables with heaters under them in the brothels. He returns in the middle of the night with a drunkard's wariness and usually enters his studio through the back gate in the lane. He uses too much cologne and too much pomade, but I suppose that's another sign of success. He never looks me in the eye."

The same dustcoat, Minaya thinks, the same smile roughened by the gleam of his false teeth, almost the same cafes, darker now or more deserted, as excessive and empty as the workshop where Eugenio Utrera, leaning over a low table that looks something like a cobbler's bench, scratches with his sharpened gouge at a piece of wood to obtain something that resembles a saint or a Romanesque Virgin. His hands, the long yellow index fingers and blue veins, a cigarette that has gone out in a mouth wet with saliva, a man who isn't exactly Utrera murmuring at the back of the carriage house, diminished, erased by the empty space and high ceiling that has a large glass skylight toward the center. He finishes a carving, leaves it on the table covered with old newspapers and shavings that allow him to smell at least the sweet, almost faded aroma of fresh wood, shakes off the lapels of his dustcoat and looks at his work and hates it with a devotion he only uses secretly to curse himself. Tacked to the wall, next to the shelf where the varnished figures are lined up, are newspaper clippings no longer legible, because years ago the dampness faded the photographs and headlines announcing the inauguration of a new monument sculpted by Utrera. "Orthopedic Virgins," wrote Solana, "wire nudes and amputated hands: the head, the wax lips that smile as if at the top of a pike, the hands extended at the end of a body of wires and wicker rods. Then, over nothing, over so light an armature, tunics and embroidered mantles are added so that no one can see the obscenity of these Virgins. Utrera isn't copying Martínez Montañés, as he supposes, but Marcel Duchamp."

In a corner of the workshop was the last car Manuel's father bought before he died, gloomy behind its windows closed like certain glass urns. "Look," said Utrera, pointing at it with pride, "look at how it still shines. Doesn't it look like a viceregal carriage? Nowadays they don't make automobiles like this one." He cleans off a chair, tossing the stained newspapers that covered it to the floor, offers it to Minaya, puts into a chest the piece of wood where there was the beginning of a suggestion of crude oval eyes.

"Romanesque Virgins," he murmurs, as if apologizing, "now everybody wants to have a Romanesque Virgin in the dining room or a bearded saint as a bookend. Of course there are more serious clients: for them I make special counterfeits, though you shouldn't think the store pays me much more for them. Shall I tell you a secret? Last week I finished a fourteenth-century crucifix."