A Manuscript of Ashes (14 page)

His incessant talk, Minaya notices, is muffled in the workshop, as if here he weren't permitted the petulance he exhibits in the dining room, the library, the card games in the parlor, the Mágina cafés where he has occasionally seen Utrera lethargic in front of a glass of water and a snifter of cognac, pale in the damp semidarkness that smells of wood soaked in alcohol and urinal drains. He has seen him, without Utrera noticing him, at the back of
cafés
where the light of day never reaches, he has followed him at night along the lanes of his cowardly return, when he comes down to the house from the Plaza of General Orduña staggering and murmuring those things solitary drunks say to thin air, the alcoholic sidelong glances still not exempt from shame. Since Minaya's arrival in Mágina, his own consciousness had been pared down and reduced to a gaze that ascertains and desires, like a spy in a foreign country who has forgotten his true, distant identity in order not to be more than an eye and a hidden camera. He has visited the Gothic cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria and in its chapels, lit by candles, he has seen Eugenio Utreras statues elevated on thrones that women in mourning adorn with large bouquets of flowers. The eyes blank, lacking the half-moon of glass eyes, the hard features of the Virgins gleaming in the semidarkness with a waxen smoothness. But in all those faces there is a unique, ambiguous air that isn't due simply to negligence and the monotony of a studio overwhelmed by commissions. Looking at Utreras Virgins and Veronicas and penitent Magdalenes in the chapels of Santa Maria sounded an alarm for Minaya, a warning that he was about to discover something so hidden and fragile that only an abrupt revelation could give it definitive form. He recalled the photographs, Orlando's drawing, he recalled a Sunday afternoon when he waited for Inés next to the Monument to the Fallen and a night when he surprised Utrera looking for something in the gardens surrounding the statue, on his knees, drunk, holding a flashlight that barely illuminated his face. The Fallen Hero has the hair and features of a woman and a small circular mark on the forehead. Now he dares to say it, in Utreras studio, as the old man catalogues humiliations and scorn, the persistence of ingratitude and forgetting. His hands are the same bloodless color of the old newspapers that cover the table and lie on the floor and the chairs and the shelf with the rows of wooden saints and cans of varnish. When he hears the name, Mariana, spoken by Minaya, Utrera moves his eyes away from his own hands and slowly raises his line of sight until he is looking at the other man and he smiles at him with the same questioning, suspicious air he used the first time they met in the dining room.

"It was because of the eyes, wasn't it? The eyes and cheekbones. Her mouth was admirable and her nose, as you must have noticed, was just a little longer and sharper than the accepted norms of sculpture. But her beauty lay above all in her almond-shaped eyes and those extremely high cheekbones. They weren't perfect, but when one looked at them, one's hands almost felt the sensation of modeling them."

It wasn't in the church but afterward, when he left there to look at the face in the Plaza of the Fallen, that could only be seen between the angel's legs and from an angle as unusual as it was difficult, when Minaya realized that all of Utrera's female faces were partial portraits of Mariana. A minor variation in the mouth or in the rendering of the face was enough to transform her into an unknown woman, but the long, pensive eyes were always the same in the dark air of the chapels, the same cheekbones that Orlando had summarized forever with a single stroke of his pencil. Now Utrera has forgotten all suspicion as he gives himself over to pride: standing and facing Minaya, with his dirty dustcoat and the tense or involuntary smile of his false teeth, he smokes and agrees to remember, to grant him the status of accomplice.

"You're right. The face of the Fallen Hero is a portrait of Mariana, a funerary portrait, to be more exact. I had made her death mask, but I lost it before the war was over. I found it again many years later, in '53, I think, when I was already working on the Monument to the Fallen. It was in the drawer of an old armoire, in the basement, so forgotten that finding it seemed like a miracle. At first I thought the angel ought to have Mariana's face, but exposing it to light after all the years it had been hidden in the basement would have been a profanation. Have you seen photographs of those Egyptian statues that appear in the tombs of the pharaohs? They were made for the darkness, so that no one but the deceased could contemplate their beauty. In fifteen years no one, absolutely no one, discovered my secret. Now I have to share that portrait of Mariana with you. Promise me you won't say anything to anybody."

I promise, Minaya says, lying, imagining in advance how he'll tell these things to Inés and the words Solana would have used in the manuscripts to describe the conversation and the scene. All things, he thought then, have already been written and matter only to the extent I can recount them to Inés to provoke in her eyes a flash of longed-for mystery. Like her on certain clandestine nights, when she is naked and embraces his body, which never stops desiring her, to tell him about a book or a film or the brief dream she had while he was smoking in the dark and didn't know she was asleep, Minaya wants to tell her what he knows now, Utrera's pride and hidden rage, the pride and rage of looking at the empty car and his useless hands but always knowing he has added to the world a single memorable face, the unique shape of the eyes and cheekbones concealed, as if by a veil, with features that didn't belong to them, the precise lines of the face of a sleeping girl who smiles inside a dream disintegrated in death. He returns to the house from which he vindicated his glory with no witnesses other than a glass of cognac or a clouded mirror, and sometimes, when he is ready to open the door to the lane, he stands proudly erect on the aberration of alcohol and decides to prolong his steps to the shadowy plaza where the portrait of Mariana and the certainty of his pride await him with a constant loyalty possessed only by statues and paintings. At night, so that no one will follow him, like a miser who goes down to the basement where he counts and contemplates his coins every night and lets them slide through avid fingers, he stumbles, flips on his lighter, cannot manage to hold up the flame and shelter it from the wind, gropes at the granite he so delicately polished, recognizes every undulation, and stops his index finger at the small sunken circle in the middle of the forehead. He hears footsteps very close by, but it's too late when he gets to his feet because someone, a tall, familiar figure, has seen him kneeling next to the statue. When he stands so abruptly the blood pounds in his temples and a cognac nausea comes up from his stomach, but he cares more about his certain embarrassment, his obligation to pretend. It's that young man, Minaya, Manuel's nephew; it's midnight and very cold and what is he doing here except spying on me.

"Now you're thinking I fell in love with Mariana too. I hope you'll believe me when I tell you that didn't happen. She was the kind of woman every artist wants as a model, but nothing else, at least for me, especially if you keep in mind that she was going to marry the man to whose hospitality I owed my life. I don't betray my friends."

"And Solana?"

Utrera remains silent: premeditatedly grave, almost wounded, when he speaks again he avoids Minaya's eyes, as if forced against his will to take a step beyond discretion. "One shouldn't speak ill of the dead." When he leaves the studio, the noon light dazzles Minaya in the garden. With his back turned to him, Manuel in his wicker armchair remains in a repose belied only by the blue cigarette smoke that rises until it disappears in the clusters of wisteria.

T
HE NARROW GAUGE TRAIN
slowly descends the Magina slope to the Guadalquivir. In the distance, among blue olive trees and dunes of wheat or drab fields lying fallow, the river glitters like a thin plate of metal, of silver, of the same livid, glassy blue in the air at the edge of the sierra. As it goes down to the Guadalquivir, the train advances more rapidly between the olive groves, whose long rows open like fans into successive vanishing points. In profile next to the window, Inés looks at the olive groves and the white houses that appear for an instant like islands in the geometry of their thick growth, holding on her knees a wicker basket covered with a blue-checkered cloth. The olive trees and the dense line of poplars that announces the river, the distant sierra with clusters of white houses hanging from the slopes, are for Minaya like those landscapes of blue mountains and curving rivers visible in the background of certain quattrocento portraits in which a girl smiles in profile. With a casual air he caresses the hand resting on the basket, Inés' hands and knees, her ankles close together, the glance that recognizes and waits for a sign among the oleanders and the olive trees. "When we reach the river, the house where I was born is after the next curve." The rolling plain vibrates with the hedge mustard's greens and silvers and yellows, and before the river can be seen through the windows, an odor of mud and shaded water announces its vast, almost motionless, proximity. "Look," Inés sits up, lowers the glass, and points at a house on the other side of a little grove of pomegranate trees and cypresses, "that was my grandfather's mill, that's where I was born." But the house is immediately left behind, barely glimpsed, like the new gleam in Inés' eyes when they looked at it. He would have liked to stop there, get off with her, go along the path that leads to the house among the pomegranate branches, acknowledge the grapevine in whose shade her uncle told her tales of travels, and the bedroom where she waited for sleep every night, hearing the passage of the water through the vault of the mill and the distant wind that shook the trees and carried to Mágina the deep whistles of trains or improbable ships. "At night, so I'd forget my fear of the dark, my uncle would come into my bedroom and sit beside me, leaving his crutches on the bed. He made me listen to the water and the whistles of the trains, and when you could hear one coming from very far away, he'd tell me it wasn't a train but a ship passing through the Straits of Gibraltar."

He would have liked to know, one by one, all the places and moments in the life of Inés, the childhood days at the mill, the seven years at the boarding school for orphan girls, the house where she lived now that she never allowed him to visit, transforming all of it into a part of his consciousness with the same urgent thirst of eyes and lips with which he sometimes undressed her and caressed her and opened her. But just as Inés' body always emerged somehow untouched and alone from their mutual sieges, her thoughts and memories were not revealed to Minaya except in flashes of chaotic images that tended to have, because they almost always alluded to the girl's early childhood, the ecstatic air and unsettled disorder of illustrations in color. Motionless for a moment to his gaze, despite the landscape passing the train window, the first illustration has been fixed now in Minaya's eyes: around 1956, a little girl cradles a cardboard doll at the feet of the crippled man who looks at her and smokes as he sits under a grapevine, scratching at the ground with his crutches. "We're almost there," says Inés. On the other side of the tracks is an abandoned shed that once must have been a station, and beyond the river, the shore of red mud and the banks covered with oleanders and reedbeds. "Give my respects to Don Manuel," says the conductor from the step as the train starts up again. They cross the stone bridge over the slow waters, and when they reach the other side Inés, turning around, shows Minaya the hilltop where Màgina is spread out, gray and remote, high with pointed towers, Màgina alone on the hill of spillways and ramparts, open to the blue, as in Orlando's last watercolors.

It had been Manuel who suggested to Minaya that he visit the Island of Cuba, offering Inés as a guide on his way down, but now, when he looked at the city and the valley again from the esplanade of the country estate, when he shook the large hand of Frasco, the caretaker, witness to Solana's final days and death, he felt he hadn't been brought there by Manuel's suggestion or by his own desire for knowledge, but by the clandestine order of the manuscript he had discovered in the marriage bedroom, its last page dated March 30, 1947, one day before Jacinto Solana went down to the Island of Cuba in his penultimate flight, knowing perhaps that he never would return to Magina. As if he were moving on a blank page where the total absence of words concealed invisible writing, Minaya followed Inés up the path through the olive trees until they reached the esplanade where Jacinto Solana's dead body had been lain, at the entrance to the house. "Ask Frasco," Manuel had said, "he was the last of us to see Solana alive."

 

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of April 1947, at dawn, Jacinto Solana was tempted to go up to the cemetery to look for the pauper's grave where his father was buried. Without mentioning his intention to anyone, he left very early so they wouldn't see him when he crossed the Plaza of General Orduna, but he was not aware of his error and didn't realize that the commemoration was in progress until a shout made him raise his head as he passed the Church of La Trinidad. In front
of the facade, at the top of the Baroque stairs, were three poles and three flags and a kind of burning censer next to which five men stood guard, looking down at him with folded arms in their blue uniforms and dazzling boots. One of them called to Solana, taking pleasure in repeating his first and last names and insulting him with predictable coldness, indicating the flags with a not entirely enraged gesture as he took his pistol out of the holster. "Raise your arm, and sing nice and loud so we can hear you." His eyes fixed on the ground, his hand raised and cowardly and shaken by a trembling that wasn't fear but an unfathomable future shame, Jacinto Solana heard from the depths of his consciousness his own voice singing the anthem of those aiming weapons at him with the same piercing clarity with which he heard the laughter and the usual insults. "That morning I went up to his room and saw that he kept his things in the same suitcase he had brought from prison," said Manuel. "He wanted to leave Magina without telling me where he was going, and without his knowing either, because there was no place he could go. Then I told him to go to the Island of Cuba for a while, at least until he finished his book. Sometimes, when we were boys, we'd ride the white mare there from his father's farm to swim in the river. He left that same afternoon, I took him to the train station myself. I never saw him again." Beatus ille, thinks Minaya, with a melancholy not entirely his, sudden and general, as indifferent as the landscape of olive trees that extends to the spurs and the faded blue of the sierra. Ines has gone into the house, calling Frasco's name, and when her voice can no longer be heard, Minaya is temporarily lost in the solitude, which he always imagines as definitive, of unfamiliar, empty places. Across from the house is a small hill planted with almond trees, and from it comes a breeze with the scent of damp earth, risen perhaps from the river. Then Frasco appeared among the almond trees, a clay-encrusted hoe on his shoulder and a wide straw hat covering his face. You could hear his trouser legs brushing harshly against the hedge mustard, and from the energy of his step and the muscular tension that could be guessed at in the way he held the hoe, Minaya would have said it wasn't an old man but a forty-year-old who was approaching him. They walked together to the house, chatting at random about the recent rain, Manuel's illness, the distant time when the estate, which had been the best in the entire district of Magina, had ten thousand olive trees. But that was long before the war, explained Frasco, who still remembered the visit of Alfonso XIII in his sportsman's outfit and high hunter's gaiters and the dust raised on the road by the cars of his entourage. Sitting in the entryway, at the bare wooden table, they watched Ines in silence as she served them their meal. In the entryway, on the entire ground floor of the house, a damp semidarkness like the breath of a well prevailed and made the paving stones, as worn as pebbles, glisten.