A Manuscript of Ashes (20 page)

"Born of the water," said a jovial Medina, laughing, as he usually did, with his mouth closed, "she appeared walking in her white high heels on the pavements of Madrid, next to Solana, risen from the water or from that crowd, the largest and most inspiring Manuel had seen in all the days of his life, celebrating the triumph of the Popular Front and shouting, demanding amnesty and a new government in the same plaza where they had heard the Republic proclaimed. You've read books, I suppose, you've seen photographs, but you can't know what happened then. On Sunday, election day, I had been with Manuel, here, in Mágina, and when we realized we were going to win, he said to me in a fit of daring, 'I'm going to Madrid tonight.' That was February 16, and a month later Manuel was going to marry his lifelong sweetheart, Señorita de López Cabaña, whom I called de López Carabaña, because she was as exciting as a bottle of Carabaña mineral water. The trousseau was already on display in the house of the bride-to-be, which was the custom back then, and almost every night Manuel had a visit from the tailor who was making his cutaway coat. That's why I mentioned daring to you: instead of going to the house of Señorita López Carabaña, who that afternoon, I imagine, after virtuously voting for Gil Robles, would be saying a rosary for the victory of the right wing with her mother and her infinite Carabaña sisters, Manuel held me by the arm so I wouldn't leave him alone and took me into the presence of Doña Elvira, to whom he communicated with all the solemnity the wine allowed, because we had been drinking in the worst taverns in Mágina, that it was urgent he go to Madrid to settle some piece of family business. His mother didn't say anything but kept looking at me as if I were the one responsible for this reckless escapade of Manuel's. I suppose she feared something, but neither she, nor I, nor anyone, could imagine what would happen five days later, when Manuel returned from Madrid with a certain photograph in his pocket and went to Señorita López Carabaña's house to tell the poor martyr and her mother and sisters, more Carabañas than ever, that he considered his engagement canceled, provoking a bereavement of Carabaña tears that lasted until 1941, when the young lady in question again became engaged to a former captain in the Regular Army who now manages the family oil factory."

First came the photograph, recounts Medina, the vague snapshot taken on the Carrera de San Jerónimo by a street photographer who caught Mariana's laughter and the passage of her white high heels, but also, as a witness, the distracted gesture of Jacinto Solana, the way in which Manuel turned his head very slightly to look at her without her noticing, her two hands resting on their arms with the kind of impartiality that cannot always be distinguished from indifference. Manuel opened his leather wallet and showed Medina the photograph as if it were a valuable secret document. "Her name is Mariana. She models at the School of Fine Arts. Jacinto met her three years ago, in Orlando's studio." Medina examined the photograph and then looked attentively at Manuel, as if he wanted to confirm a doubtful resemblance. "But he was a different man," he recalls, with theatrical exaggeration, passing his hand over his own face, "and I wouldn't have been able to say how he had changed, but he had the same expression Saint Paul must have had the day after he fell off his horse. Love, I imagine, that thing that should have dazzled him when he was sixteen and left him immune, but not at the age of thirty-two, because then there was no way to defend against it or to avoid his walking around with that photograph in his pocket like the lock of hair of a medieval damsel." Manuel delicately put the photograph back in his wallet and questioned Medina. "Insufficient, Manuel. I'm referring to the photo. But the proofs of miracles always are, aren't they?" Manuel took Medina's irony as an insult, but that didn't stop him from talking about Mariana: her large almond eyes, her laugh, her wavy chestnut hair, which she combed, he stated precisely, with the part on the left, her way of looking at him and talking to him as if they had always known each other: her name, which he repeated even when there was no need to for the sheer pleasure of pronouncing the three syllables that referred to her. "I can't understand how there can be other women in the world named Mariana," he said once to Medina, for he understood that Mariana wasn't a name given to someone arbitrarily at birth but a word as definitively and exactly connected to her as the moon was to the word
moon.
They came, then, like secret emissaries, the photograph and the name, and only a year later Mariana herself, like a silent, attentive nurse to Manuel, who was convalescing from the wound that had left him close to death on the Guadalajara front, but long before Mágina and Mágina's pride finally met that woman who from so far away and without even setting foot in the city had insulted them, in their closed houses, in the salons where they so cautiously tuned in at night to the stations of the other faction to hear the voice of Queipo de Llano and the anthems that would not be played publicly for another three years along the conquered streets of Mágina, persistent voices repeating her name and Manuel's and enumerating the details of their insolence, their undoubted madness, with the same rancor they used to tell one another the bad news of another church burned or another execution at the cemetery walls. Very soon they ignored her name to call her only "the militia woman" or "the Red": they said she had danced nude in a cabaret in Madrid, and then, when the war began, a relative of the Señoritas López Cabaña stated with certainty that he had seen her marching with a musket, cartridge belt, blue coverall, and militiaman's beret worn at a slant down the Calle de Alcalá, along with Manuel and Jacinto Solana. But the part of the story they preferred to tell, perhaps because it was the first part they had known, or because they found in it a certain dramatic quality, was the moment when Manuel appeared at the house of Señorita López Cabaña, treacherously carrying a bouquet of violets, and, after asking her mother and sisters to leave him alone with his fiancee—this added bit of drama was, of course, false, but it had a symbolic value no one wished to disparage—he sat down beside her, offered her the violets with the impeccable smile of an impostor, said in a quiet voice, looking perhaps at his own hands holding his hat on his knees: "Maria Teresa, our relationship has to end, and it's going to end right now."

In his early adolescence, Minaya had heard that scene intact and with those exact words, their bland harshness born not of reality but of certain worldly plays by Benavente; now, as he listened to Medina's narrative, he understood perhaps that they weren't a slander, that the lie and added details were the ironic attributes of truth. "But Manuel didn't care about anything," Medina said. "At first it didn't even occur to him to think of the possibility that Mariana might love him. I think her mere existence was enough to make him happy. She was a goddess, you know, and goddesses don't fall in love with you. Perhaps they smile at you from their pedestal, permit you to look at their photograph as if it were a statue, touch your hand distractedly in the café, offer you a cigarette stained with lipstick. The old school, my friend. I don't know why I have the impression that you belong to it too. And so Manuel, when he left the inconsolable Señorita López Carabaña, which made me infinitely happy, didn't do it because he was ready to marry Mariana: you don't ask for Aphrodite's hand in marriage when you see her emerge from the water, preferably nude, as on the pornographic postcards of my youth. It's just that one day early in July, without his even knowing how he dared to do it, Manuel took her hand on a tree-lined walk in the Retiro when no one else was around and told her all at once everything that had not let him live or sleep over the past few months, and she, instead of laughing, stood looking at him as if she didn't completely understand what he was saying, and responded that yes, she too, ever since that day in February when Solana introduced them. And now their only problem wasn't how to tell Doña Elvira but Jacinto Solana, whom they were going to see in an hour, because they both knew, and would rather have died than confess it to each other, that Solana had been in love with her for three years."

Medina saw him arrive, pale and still in uniform, recently discharged from the military hospital where Mariana had been with him for the past few months, during the nights of agony and fever when pain made worse by nightmares so frequently made him feel submerged in death, with no other hold on lucidity and life than the hand that held his and wiped his forehead and caressed his unshaven face in dreams. Marianas face dissolved into sphinxlike animals, into faces of doctors who bent over him from an infinite height, into shadows without bodies to contain them, into a tranquil light similar to the light of dawn that gradually took on again the shape and features of Mariana. Once—he couldn't remember when because in the hospital the measurement of time disintegrated and lengthened like the faces in nightmares—he awoke and Mariana wasn't alone, but it wasn't a doctor who was with her. Rising blindly from the darkness and the mire of sheets soaked in cold sweat in order not to lose an extremely slender possibility of consciousness, he recognized a voice saying something to her, her forgotten name perhaps, a fine-drawn face and the flash of eyeglasses, and before he passed out again he knew who it was and said "Solana," immediately returning to a suffocating dream in which he continued to hear her voice, their voices, as if he were already dead and they were talking beside his coffin. But on the day he finally awoke, free of the slime of dreams, Mariana was alone at the head of his bed, wearing a white blouse and a blue ribbon in her chestnut hair, smiling at him, overcome by happiness. This is how Medina saw her, in Magina, a week later, sitting beside Manuel at the round table in the garden, and he immediately thought she wasn't the kind of woman he had imagined from looking at the photograph, and even less the one Magina had predicted and feared. "You're Medina, aren't you?" she said to him as she stood, shaking his hand with an absolutely masculine gesture, with the immediate fondness certain women feel for the friends of the man they love. "Manuel and Solana have talked a great deal about you." The fine skin, translucent at the temples, the green or gray eyes, the short chin, the nose like an attentive bird's that Orlando had drawn with so much delicacy. It was a very warm morning in April, and Mariana had her white blouse unbuttoned down to the top of her breasts.

"And so that was Mariana," said Medina, shaking his head as if he still felt the astonishment of that distant morning. "If you were to see her, you wouldn't recognize her, because she didn't resemble the Madrid photograph at all, or even the one they took on their wedding day. Only Orlando's drawing is more or less faithful to reality. But the dead immediately stop resembling their photographs. I estimate that Mariana must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, but she didn't look it at all: her body was a little like that girl's, Inés, but she didn't have Inés' serious walk or that reserve you can see in Inés' eyes when you look at her. Mariana's glance was absolutely transparent, which always made me uneasy for some reason I never could fathom. It was as if her eyes were asking for something, as if they were empty, as if just by looking at her, you saw her naked. When I met her here that day, I thought she resembled Hedy Lamarr a little. Back then I liked women like Jean Harlow."

It was there in the garden, at the beginning of May, when they decided to write to Solana, and Medina knew they had torn up a good number of drafts at the round metal table painted white before they found the exact words, the circumspect and earnest and cowardly words of invitation, written in Manuel's English hand, that Solana read in his house in Madrid, swearing to himself there would be no truce, that he would never agree to smile and accept and be a witness to the culmination of his failure, and then tearing up the letter with meticulous rage not toward Manuel or Mariana but toward himself, promising the empty wall, the pieces of paper he still held in his hands, that on May 20, 1937, he would not be in Magina.

I
OPEN MY EYES
but still cannot see or remember anything. On my stomach, face against the sheet, hands tensely grasping the bars at the head of the bed, I touch the cold metal and recognize its moldings as if I were recognizing and touching the limits of the body that slowly is becoming mine. In the first darkness that my eyes have encountered, areas of dim light are taking shape, the light patch of the curtains, the form of the door, the window, circular like an eye that had been spying on me as I slept, fixed on me and on the plaza that the sound of water falling over the rim of the fountain brings now to my memory, adding it to the world. It seems as if when I awoke, I had suddenly started the clock on the night table: pale green in the semidarkness, luminous face and hands indicating an hour vaguely suspended between four and five in the morning. I brush the wall with my fingers, behind the bars at the head of the bed, searching for the light switch, but it's useless because they cut off the light at eleven. On the night table, next to the alarm clock, I always keep the candlestick, cigarettes, a box of matches, paper, a pen. Sometimes I wake because of an intuition that seemed memorable in my dreams but crumbles into nothing when I try to write it down. I dream I'm writing a definitive and perfect page, that there isn't enough paper or I can't find enough to receive all the words that continue flowing and spilling out and getting lost and disappearing in the air while I look for a single blank page, a piece of paper, a smooth surface where I can write them down and save them from my dream. I write, and the ink disappears into large blue stains on suddenly liquid paper, I trace signs with a knife on the damp stone of a wall that is the one in any of the cells where I've awakened for the past eight years and the steel point breaks without penetrating that hard material. I want to write, but I've forgotten how, and I'm alone in front of the desk where I sat in school. I dream insomnia, fear, the blank page. I fumble and light the candle: a point of light that ascends, when it seemed extinguished, a pointed yellow tongue that illuminates the clock, the night table, my own hands rolling a cigarette because I know I won't get back to sleep. I carry the candlestick to the table, arrange around me the inkwell, the pen, cigarette papers, blank pages in a pile, the ashtray. I draw a long line on the unmarked paper and look at it as if it were the writing of a language I don't know.