A Manuscript of Ashes (22 page)

They ate alone, Doña Elvira and Utrera, because Manuel had stopped coming to the dining room and spent his time in the pigeon loft, in the upper rooms, occupied, as they learned from Teresa, in supervising the work of the masons he had hired to restore the roof. He chose the huge room with the circular windows, which for thirty years had been a storeroom for old furniture and religious paintings stowed against the walls, and chests like tombs where solemn ballroom dresses were kept and carnival costumes that hadn't been worn since
the turn of the century. The masons moved everything to an attic, sealed the rat holes, and painted the ceiling and walls of the room white, as well as the shutters at the two windows. With the help of Teresa, to whom he had suggested that she say nothing, not even to her Aunt Amalia, Manuel had the wooden floor cleaned until its former chestnut color was restored and he arranged the new furniture in the room so thoughtfully that Teresa suspected he intended to move into it himself. A bed with a thick mattress and clean sheets and blankets that had never been used, facing the two circular windows that were oriented to the southeast so they would receive the first light of day, an oak desk between the two windows, its Isabelline moldings newly varnished, a shining Underwood, an English fountain pen and an inkwell and a packet of blank sheets carefully arranged in the top drawer, and on the wall, above the desk, a darkened, Arcadian eighteenth-century landscape depicting the ocher outskirts of a city and a long gondola crossing the waters of the lagoon of Venice. But if Manuel was going to banish himself to that room where the other voices in the house didn't reach, it would not be only to sleep, Teresa thought: it was as if he had decided to prepare everything and definitively cut himself off from the world, because he hung a curtain across one end and behind it he placed a small kerosene stove and a locker with dishes and cutlery for one person, sausages, canned goods, bottles of wine that the two of them brought up more or less secretly from the wine cellar, and even a pack of candles to illuminate the room when the electricity was cut off every night at eleven. By the light of one of the candles, on the night of the fifth day after Solanas arrival, Manuel and Teresa checked all the things one by one as if they were inspecting the staterooms and pantries of a ship that was about to sail, and Manuel, exhausted, because he hadn't stopped working since dawn, lit a cigarette and sat in front of the typewriter, brushing the keyboard with the tip of his index finger, not daring to strike the grouped, identical letters, only feeling their brief metal touch like a possibility of interminable words. Then he remembered something Jacinto Solana had told him in a very old letter: words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.

The next morning, when Teresa came into Solanas bedroom with the breakfast tray, she found him standing in front of the mirror, fastening the belt of the coat that he may not have taken
off
the night either before when he slept. "He said he's leaving today," she hurried to tell Manuel when she went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later Amalia was already repeating the news to Doña Elvira, who showed no sign of relief when she heard it. "I saw him in the hallway in the gallery," Amalia said, "with his hat on and his suitcase in his hand. I didn't hear him cough, and he's not as pale as he was when he came." He went down the hallway in the way he had walked since leaving prison, slowly and very close to the wall, as if he wanted to take shelter in it, fatigued, tenacious, one hand in the pocket of his overcoat and the other clutching the suitcase with contracted knuckles that jutted out of his dirty sleeve, and it wasn't the odor of prison and of trains or the weariness of his shoulders that pointed to his future of bad weather and stations with no destination, but that pallid gesture of his hand that held the suitcase as if it were an accepted and necessary attribute of his condition, like the brief tie, the dark shirt collar, the overcoat that belonged to another time and another man who perhaps was still in prison. He walked with his head bowed, looking through the glass in the gallery at the amber light descending to the courtyard, but he never went down the stairs because Manuel was waiting for him and didn't seem to hear him when he said he was leaving. "Come. I want to show you something." "I'm in a hurry, Manuel. They told me a train to Madrid comes through at eleven." Manuel took his suitcase from him and had him go up with him to a part of the house that Solana had never visited: dark staircases, empty salons with mirrors on the walls and pale painted wreaths in the corners of the ceilings, vaulted glass niches where the staring eyes gleamed of saints modeled in wax with ringlets of human hair. Finally they came to the first door in a hallway whose other end was lost in darkness, and when Manuel opened the door, it was as if the daylight were spilling violently over them. The desk between the two windows, the high typewriter that sparkled gold and black and metallic in the icy sun of the January morning, the white walls that still smelled faintly of paint, the air full of a fragrance of clean sheets and varnish that repeated in Solana's memory the distant invitation he took as an offense the first time Manuel had him go into the library, standing in the doorway, just as he did now, so that he would enter only in the glare of delight. He took a few steps, as he had then, not daring to go all the way in, he stood still before the typewriter, before the light from the circular windows, picking up the pen and then putting it down carefully, as if he were afraid to damage it with his hard, clumsy hands, and it may have been when he saw the pack of black tobacco and the cigarette papers that he definitively realized that the room and the typewriter and the bed with its white sheets had been prepared for him, because Manuel smoked only light tobacco. "You know I can't accept, Manuel. You know I'd never be able to repay you," he said, looking at all the untouched offerings, and he made a brusque movement as if to leave and renounce them while it was still possible not to surrender to temptation, but Manuel remained in front of the door, blocking his way. "Write your book here. In the top drawer of the desk you have all the paper you'll need. I'll make certain nobody bothers you." He put the key on the desk and went out, closing the door very slowly. He heard Solana's footsteps, silence, then the bedsprings, and again silence and footsteps on the parquet, the typewriter, sounding as if an index finger were hitting over and over again the same letter chosen at random and repeated with tireless fury on the paper, on the black, empty roller.

W
HEN SHE HEARD
the still distant whistle, Mariana stepped to the edge of the platform to look at the deserted track that vanished among the green fields and the first olive groves, and the south wind, the one that announces rain, blew her hair and skirt and the white cloth of her blouse as if she were standing on a pier by the ocean. "It's coming," she called to me, pointing at the almost motionless column of smoke bending over the tops of the olive trees, and then she turned toward me smoothing her hair and the skirt that had revealed her knees for a delicious moment, but the smile on her lips now was no longer mine, and her impatience for the arrival of the train carrying Orlando was an affront very similar to the uneasiness of jealousy. I hated the train and I hated Orlando, because they were coming to decapitate my being alone with her, they were emissaries of the time that would snatch her away from me and the future hours when her absence would destroy me. Stripped of will, of resignation, of pride, I consisted of nothing but two yearning eyes that looked at Mariana, and consciousness of the last respite that had venomously been granted to my imagination. She was already leaving, although she seemed immobile, I felt her becoming lost as slowly as the hands of a clock or a train that begins its departure in silence slipping away toward the red lights in the darkness, and when the second whistle sounded and I saw the column of smoke coming closer, the empty station, the indolent quiet of the May morning, were suddenly the landscape of a desert island where I had been abandoned and left alone, looking at the clock that pointed to noon, calculating the place and destination of my next flight, not going more than three days into the future because beyond that time limit nothing would remain. The respite that for me was disintegrating like a face of smoke lasted interminably for Mariana, and this mutual discord in our perception of time wounded me like a disloyalty more certain than her marriage to Manuel. "I count the days, Jacinto, I can't live in that house, with that woman who doesn't look at me and hates me without saying anything to me, with that man, the sculptor, who always looks at my neckline and has clammy hands. Even Manuel is like a stranger to me."

It was at the beginning, that morning, when we arrived at the station in the Ford that had belonged to Manuel's father, crossing the lit empty streets of the city, the avenue of linden trees that ended in the high esplanade with its flags where a boy in uniform saluted us with a raised fist. There were silent women in mourning and wounded soldiers on the benches along the platform and on every wall violent war posters that had an anachronistic, distant air, as if the war they exalted had nothing to do with the peaceful station and the morning in Magina. We were alone, Mariana and I, we had been alone in the house when I came down to have breakfast and found her waiting for me in the dining room, recently bathed and light-hearted, with her damp hair and her white blouse unbuttoned almost to the tops of her loose, pale breasts that I glimpsed in their slight semidarkness every time she leaned toward me to tell me something, bringing me back with sudden clarity and sorrow to the afternoon in 1933 when I saw her, unknown and naked, in Orlando's studio. It had always been like this, I thought, always touching her with my eyes and hands and never crossing the chasm that divides bodies when they are so close that a single gesture or a single word would
be enough to tear apart the cowardly spiderweb that joins desire to despair, exactly four years that resolved into ashes and nothingness with the cold visible serenity of what has already happened, like the sugar that I poured into the cup and that dissolved in the coffee as I sat across from Mariana and stirred it with a spoon, impassive, attentive, darkly absorbed in my breakfast and in her half-opened blouse. But we were alone and the silence in the house was like a final gift I never would have dared to ask for, and just as the war didn't seem to exist in Magina because sirens didn't sound at night and there was no burned rubble in the middle of the streets, the absence of the others allowed me the clandestine privilege of imagining that nobody would come to argue with me over Mariana, cleanly offered to my eyes in the empty dining room. Manuel had left very early for the country estate, using the train and not the car so that Mariana and I could drive to the station to pick up Orlando. When I sat next to her on the leather seat and slammed the door shut at the same time that Mariana turned on the ignition, it was as if I too was stirred by its thrust, very violent at first, barely controlled by her when we turned into the first narrow lane on the way to the Plaza of General Orduna, then passing like a sound or a long gust of wind against the windows when we drove down the broad empty streets to the north, and Mariana, who had been tense and hunched over the wheel, leaned back and asked me to light a cigarette for her. She belonged to me boundlessly now, not to me, who was going to lose her, but to the tenderness of my eyes that in the warm interior of the car added new, unknown images to the figure of Mariana. Mariana in profile against the glass of the window, her hands sliding or firm on the wheel, her chestnut hair lifted and then falling again over her forehead and the rapid movement of her hand that brushed it aside and then immediately rested again on the brake lever, her forehead and her nose and her mouth and beyond them the fleeting, familiar streets of Magina, the distant cemetery among the empty fields, the shadows of the linden trees that successively hid her face and returned it to the light, her laughter when she stopped the car in front of the station, as if we had completed an adventure.

They told us that Orlando's train would be two or three hours late. The delay irritated Mariana, as if the wait would lengthen hers to escape Magina, but I secretly was grateful for the unexpected hours granted to me. It had been so long since I had been alone with her that I was incapable of calculating the exact duration of what I now had: each future minute was a coin from those excessive treasures we find in some dreams, a thin thread of dizzyingly spilled sand that I clutched at in order to retrieve it. I saw her approaching, returning from the precise moment when I knew I had known her only to lose her, the Mariana of 1933 who had just appeared, the possible Mariana, not yet desired, the girl with no name and the lock of hair hanging straight over her brows and her eyes made up like those of Louise Brooks, whom I had seen before I met her in some photographs that Orlando showed me. I saw her return as we walked on one side of the tracks, beyond the platform, past the long banks of young hedge mustard that extended it, our heads bowed, slightly apart, looking at the slow advance of our own steps or the distant gray of the olive groves. "I spend all my time with Manuel, imagine, today is the first day we've been apart since he got out of the hospital, but in that house it's as if I were always alone. Everything frightens me, even counting the days left until we leave. It frightens me to think about the trip to Paris, and I'm so adventurous that the first time I left Madrid was to come to Magina. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you've come. After we mailed you the letter I was waiting for your answer and always afraid you'd stay in Madrid. Somebody would knock at the door and I'd run out to see if it was the mailman, and if the phone rang, I closed my eyes, hoping it was you. With you in the house, that woman, those people, no longer frighten me. Medina was sure you wouldn't come. I started to hate him for the way he said it, so much the doctor, as if he could know everything."