A Manuscript of Ashes (19 page)

The next morning, without talking to anyone, my father loaded the mare with a mattress, a disassembled metal bed, and the second book of
Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love,
a serialized novel in three volumes of infinite pages and lugubrious lithographs he had inherited from his father and that very probably he never finished reading. As a boy I had entered those volumes with the exaltation and horror of someone crossing an uninhabited forest at night, and many years later, when I returned to Magina to attend my mother's funeral, I discovered that in the middle of the second book of
Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love
my father kept, carefully cut and folded, some of the articles I had begun to publish then in Madrid newspapers. I never told him I had seen them; he never acquiesced and revealed to me, even indirectly, that he read and kept them with a pride stronger than his desire to renounce me, for I had fled Magina and the future that he himself assigned to me even before I was born, when he dug a well in the living rock and leveled a hillside of barren earth and built the house I didn't want to share or inherit and where he finally spent the last three years of his life inflexibly alone, far from a city and a war he didn't care about, just as he never cared about Alfonso XIII or Primo de Rivera or that vague Republic that had changed the flags on the public buildings and the names of some streets in Magina. Because I talked about it and defended it, he must have thought the Republic belonged, like Madrid and literature, to the same kind of illusions that had poisoned my imagination ever since I went to school and was irremediably turned into a stranger in his eyes and he could do nothing to get me back.

***

O
LD AND SLIGHT
in the black smock, but still endowed with a physical strength that had remained intact because it was an attribute of his moral courage, he loaded the basket of onions on his shoulder and carried it up to the house without letting me help him. Piled in the shed were baskets and sacks of damp vegetables that he showed to me with pride. "Look how much I care about that war. When I saw how they killed that man almost at our door, I said to myself, 'Justo, they've finally gone crazy, and this is none of your business.' And so I loaded a few things on the mule, double-locked the house, and came to the farm. I haven't set foot in Magina since that day. People come here and buy my vegetables, or I trade them for what I need, which is almost nothing because I even make my bread. And you, how do you make a living?" "I have a job at the Ministry of Propaganda." He looked at me in silence, shaking his head with an air of disillusionment I already knew: he, who never asked anyone for anything or obeyed anyone, who never wanted to work except for himself or have anything he hadn't earned with his own hands. "Eating off the government ... It ought to make you ashamed, Jacinto." But I couldn't explain anything or even defend myself, and not because I knew he wouldn't understand me, but because in that place and at that moment, I myself could not conceive of a reason that would justify me. The usual words, the still sacred words, the pure sensation of joy and rage that still moved us in the spring of 1937 were things as improbable and distant that afternoon as the war in the consciousness of my father: an unknown man killed in the white-hot light of a July siesta, a sound of sirens at midnight confused at times with the whistle of the trains that crossed the valley, a squadron of planes that flew higher than any bird and glittered in the sun before being lost on the other side of the sierra. I had felt it since I passed through the gate in the wall and recognized just beside it the post where when I was a boy I would take the white mare and then start to gallop along the farm road. I had come from Manuel's house and had Mariana's eyes fixed in my memory, but as soon as I left the wall behind and walked on the fine dust of the paths, it was as if I had shed my present form to become, as I walked down to the meeting with my father, the shade of what I had been when those roads and the valley and the blue sierra were the only landscape in my life. I thought that time wasn't successive but immobile, that the regions and boundaries of its geography can be drawn with the precision that the world has in school maps. Like Orlando's watercolors, my father's farm was a region immune to time, and I couldn't go back to it, just as one can't cross a mirror or join the figures in a painting: I could only, if my will didn't intervene, accept the forgetting, the transfiguration, the fear, the impossible tenderness I had felt for so many years before my father, the share of guilt that was mine because of his disillusionment or his old age.

 

T
HEN, AS NOW
, when I write so uselessly to bring him back to life, gratitude was impossible. In the mild May afternoon, the shadow of the ramparts and Magina's south wall extended over us, and the air had the damp odor of pomegranate leaves, the cold transparency of water in the irrigation ditches. Before me the terraces of the farm descended to the valley like the stanzas of a successive garden. He was sweeping the packed-down earth of the shed, and he stopped when he reached my side, looking where I was looking, as if he had guessed the temptation that possessed me so suddenly, not like a desire or a purpose, but with the imperious certainty of a pain that wounds us again when we had already forgotten it: "The world ends here; there's nothing on the other side of the sierra, only that sea of shipwrecks and dark cliffs I imagined then, because I had seen it in a print in
Rosa Maria.
" But perhaps I'm trying to correct the past. Now, ten years later, it is shut in this room with circular windows like a fugitive, when I feel the blind, the useless temptation of tearing out my consciousness like Oedipus tore out his eyes so that nothing's left in me but the memory of that orchard and my father: tall, buttoned up, choked by the hard collar and the half boots that creaked
in a strange way when he walked down the corridor of the school, because he put them on only to attend funerals, tall and suddenly a coward when he knocked at the door and asked permission without daring to go in before the headmaster stood to receive him. I had just turned eleven, and one night, after giving the animals their last feed and barring the street door, he sat in front of me and moved aside the book I was reading to look into my eyes. "Tomorrow I'm taking you out of school. What you know now is enough." Behind me, next to the fire, my mother was sewing something or simply looking at him, not impassive but defeated beforehand, and even though I would have liked to say something to her or ask her for help, it would have been impossible because weeping choked my voice and everything was very far away behind the mist of tears. "Don't cry, you're not a little boy anymore. Men don't cry." He picked up the oil lamp from the mantle over the fireplace and signaled to my mother. They left me alone, illuminated by the red embers of the fire, my eyes staring at the book and the words that dissolved as if they were written on water. The next day, before dawn, I saddled the white mare and took her to drink at the post at the wall. Dawn was breaking as I rode slowly along the road to the farm. I intended not to stop: I'd continue to the end of the white road, beyond the farms, the olive groves, the river, the distant blue hills that undulated before the first spurs of the sierra. But when I reached the dead poplar, I got down from the mare and left her tied by the bridle, and I sat down in the manger to wait for the full light of day, because I had brought my book bag with my notebooks for school and I wanted to finish an arithmetic exercise, as if that mattered, as if I had before me a placid future of schoolyards and desks and examinations in which, not for love of studying but out of a kind of vengeful obstinacy, I always received the highest grade. That morning, sitting at the desk I shared with Manuel, I let him copy the exercises from my notebook without saying a single word to him, and I didn't play with him or anyone else when we went out to recess. With
their blue aprons and white collars, the others ran shouting after a ball or climbed the bars in the schoolyard, but I wasn't like them. I looked at the large clock on the facade of the school, forever stopped at a quarter past ten, and that stopped hour was more fearsome because it hid the true passage of time, the other invisible hands that brought the moment close when my father, after selling the last produce and closing his stall at the market, would put on his hard collar and suit and boots for funerals to inform the headmaster that I, his son, Jacinto Solana, would not return to school because now I was a man and he needed me to work on his land until the end of my life. But when at last he arrived and we went into the headmaster's office together, I saw him infinitely docile, lost, vulnerable, murmuring "With your permission?" in a voice I had never heard from him. He nodded, murmured things, and held his hat in his two large hands that I suddenly imagined as useless, keeping himself erect with difficulty on the edge of the chair where he had dared to sit only when the headmaster indicated it to him, and then I felt the need to defend him or to squeeze his hand and walk with him the way I had when I was little and I went with him to sell milk to the houses in Magina. "But you don't know the foolish mistake you're about to make, my friend": defend him from the headmaster and his bland smile and his words that acquired the same hostile quality from the oak desk where he rested his hands and from the portrait of Alfonso XIII he had hung above his head. "I must tell you that your son is the best student we have in the school. I predict a magnificent future for him, whether he leans toward the sciences or the arts, both of them paths for which nature has endowed him with exceptional qualities. No, it isn't necessary for you to tell me so: agriculture is a very worthy profession, and a great source of wealth for the nation, but young heads like that of your son are called to a destiny, if not worthier then of a higher and greater responsibility." He paused to catch his breath and rose decisively to his feet, resting his soft, small hands on my shoulders with a gesture in which, after so many years, I suspect a vague allegorical intention. "Your son, my friend, should continue under the care of his teachers. Who can say that we do not have before us a future engineer, an eminent physician, or, if I am pressed, a statesman of impassioned oratory? Very great men have come from humble homes. For example, Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal." After an hour, when we left the headmaster's office, we walked in silence down a very long corridor to the door of my classroom. Above the vague sound coming from the rooms that lined the hall I listened to my father's footsteps and the uncomfortable creak of his boots, and I recalled his voice finally saying the words I hadn't even dared to wish for—"Well, if you say so, I'll leave him here, even though I need him, and we'll see if he gets to be a useful man some day"—but I found in them not the temporary salvation they seemed to promise but a dark guilt more certain than gratitude: the consciousness of a debt that perhaps I didn't deserve, that I never would repay. Before he left, my father bent down to give me a kiss, smiling at me in a way that wounded me because it was the smile of a man I no longer knew. "Go on, go back to your class, and don't play around when you get out, you have to bring my lunch to the farm." He turned to wave good-bye in the last light in the hall, and when I went into the classroom and Manuel moved to one side to give me room at the desk, I covered my face with my hands so he wouldn't know I had been crying.

As if brought in by the immense shadow of the wall, at the top of which they were turning on the distant lights of the watchtower, night had fallen over the farm and the valley—very slow, perfumed and blue and deep, like the gleam of motionless water in the irrigation ditches. He took the oil lamp from the house and hung it on one of the beams in the shed. On nights like this he cooked supper on a fire outdoors. Outside the circle of that light, which shone before the house like the flames of stubble burned on summer nights, there was the darkness of a waveless ocean, of black hills and trees like ghosts or statues. But he didn't fear the darkness or the uninhabitable silence. He cleaned the fireplace of ashes, trimmed the light, stood with an agility that disconcerted me to show me where the pan and oil were. In a tower in the city the bells had struck ten. "I have to go now, Father." He stood still, next to the fire, shook his head with an air of melancholy or exhausted disillusionment. "All the time it's been that you don't come to see me and you don't even stay for supper. Where are you staying in Mágina?" "In my friend Manuel's house. He's getting married the day after tomorrow. He asked me to invite you." "Well you tell him thank you and say your father's sick. I'm not going up to Mágina until all of you end that war." When we said good-bye he kissed me without looking at me and turned immediately to stir the fire that was going out. From the road to Mágina I saw him absorbed, sitting back, alone in the light of the fire as if he were on an island, angrily alone against the darkness and surrender. I imagined him putting out the fire when he finished supper, going into the house with the lamp in his hand, acknowledging the semidarkness and the order he had chosen. He would hang the lamp at the head of the bed, and lying on it he would open the second volume of
Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love,
which was a book longer than his patience and his own life, finding perhaps the old clippings that were now as yellow as the pages of the novel. But he never told anyone he knew how to read and write: it was important to him not to leave traces of his presence in the world, and in writing, as in photographs, he suspected a trap he always tried to avoid, the invisible snare laid by fingerprints.

The road to Mágina gleamed like moondust in the dark. I reached the gate in the wall and walked alone down the paved lanes toward Manuel's house, but the impulse that led me wasn't my will: it was desire pushing me, the warm, recovered despair of knowing that Mariana's eyes would receive me.

T
ENSE AND SERENE
, in the center of the photographs and in Orlando's drawing and in the essence of a plural memory that became one when interwoven in her, like men's glances at a girl walking alone between the tables in a cafe: firm in her unknown desire, in the certainty of the fascination she exercised, and in the slight tilt of her hat with a veil that concealed her eyes and reached just to the middle of her nose and cheeks. Solana on one side, and on the other Manuel, both welcomed by her, who had taken the arm of each in order not to lose them in the crowd that filled the Puerta del Sol and held herself up between their twofold and denied tenderness with a grace as indifferent as the profile of a tightrope walker who does not look at the slender cord or the pit or the dizzying emptiness over which his feet move forward. "But when that photo was taken Manuel wasn't in love with her yet," Medina explained. "Or he didn't know it and had only a few hours to find out." With the years she had stopped being a single face and a single woman to become what had perhaps always been her destiny, not interrupted but consummated by her death: a catalogue of glances and recollections fixed at times by a photograph or a drawing, profiles on coins incessantly lost and recovered and spent by the covetousness of hatred or remembrance, coins of ash. Voices: hers, unimaginable to Minaya, a little dark, according to Solana's words, the other voices that continued naming her when she was already dead, in solitude, before mirrors, saying her name into the pillows of insomnia, repeating for her sake the three syllables into which defamation continued to be condensed with no less fervor than remorse or desire.