A Manuscript of Ashes (23 page)

By now we were very far from the platform, and when we reached the first olive trees we slowly began our return. Mariana took my arm and rested her weight on me with a gesture that was usual in another time, in Madrid, before Manuel, in the uncertain streets of the small hours and the never satisfied temptation to embrace her. "Tomorrow," I said, rigid and cowardly when I felt her hand and the proximity of her hips, tomorrow and then never, the other house, the dark bedroom, the insomnia, the silence and the waiting and the darkness where Beatriz wasn't sleeping. "I almost can't remember what I did before I knew you," Mariana said. A step away from the platform, the lazy soldiers looked at her, the clock was about to strike eleven. But she still leaned on my arm, and when she raised her head to look into my eyes, I saw in the transparency of hers something that had nothing to do with her words, that wasn't mine, or Manuel's, or anybody's, that belongs now only to the memory of the man they fixed on for the last time, the certainty of an appointment and a shot in the pigeon loft, the will to die, I know it now, to never be vulnerable again to abandonment or fear. "A model," she repeated, laughing: "Who remembers that? You shouldn't remind me of it now. I was nobody, less than nobody, I was nothing when I met you. I went from one place to another, never stopping, because if I had paused at someone or something I would have disintegrated immediately, like a face in the water. When you appeared and looked at me, it was as if I finally had been embodied in myself. I can see you now, so quiet, so firm, looking at the painting and not at me because it embarrassed you to look at me naked. That day it was as if I were seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. You didn't need to speak or even move for people to know you were in the world. I never had read anything with as much attention as the poems of yours that Orlando gave me. 'Look, this is what Solana has written. Except for the two of us, it's a secret.' I didn't sleep at night, reading the books you gave me. I brought the first one with me,
The Voice Owed to You,
with the dedication you asked Salinas to write for me.
To Mariana Rios, with affection, September 1933.
When I read those poems I always had the feeling it was you who wrote them."

"There's another creature I'm looking for in the world," I quoted, but Mariana was no longer beside me, she was looking at things beyond my desire to immobilize them in her, torn by the hands of the clock that joined to indicate twelve o'clock and by the still distant whistle and the column of smoke that thickened into a soot-stained cloud when the train, stained by war and with ripped banners hanging from the sides of the locomotive, obscene like an old animal with wet skin, stopped in front of us. Through the smoke that dissipated to reveal dark anxious faces at the windows looking at the platform, I saw Orlando, who signaled to Mariana by waving his drawing portfolio over the heads grouped at the windows, taller than the others, and before he saw me, because I was still sitting on the bench on the platform, I heard over the din of the cars and the shouts of the soldiers his huge voice and laugh as he embraced Mariana, picking her up and swinging her around. "Solana, you old satyr, prince of your own darkness, you're even paler than you were last Sunday. Or was it Saturday when we got drunk the last time?" Big, tired, his clothes in the disarray of nighttime drunkenness, with thin damp hair at his temples, smelling of alcohol and medicine because he suffered attacks of asthma, laughing with an obstinacy in his intoxicated eyes that sometimes seemed close to madness, Orlando got down from the train bringing with him like an emissary all the excitement of the war and the blind urgency of Madrid. He brought portfolios of drawings that fell to the ground when he embraced Mariana and that I collected from between people's feet, and a suitcase that had been mislaid somewhere in the corridor or in his compartment. When we climbed into the train to look for it, urged on by Orlando's despair, who said he had packed the sketches for a masterpiece in it, a slim boy with long, very black hair whose face I vaguely recognized appeared with it. "God, here at last," Orlando said in a way that didn't reveal if he was referring to the suitcase or the boy. "I was afraid I had lost them both, and I swear to you that I would have preferred to lose the suitcase than him. Santiago, this is Mariana, who has been kind enough to invite us to her wedding with a local landowner. I think you already know Solana. He's the one who writes those fine articles in
Octubre
on art and the proletarian revolution. He aspires to a position in the political bureau."

He talked so much and so rapidly and with such a perverse edge that I estimated he had been drinking right up to the moment the train arrived in Magina. The flask of liquor bulged in his jacket pocket, but when he introduced us to the boy he had brought with him, I understood that pride and not alcohol was the real reason for his elation. "Solana, you ought to get right back to Madrid. The front is going to collapse if you don't go in and recite some of your Communist ballads for our soldiers. Even the intellectuals are clamoring for you. The other day I ran into Bergamin, with that face that always looks as if he's just taken communion, and he said that as soon as you get back he was going to name you as his secretary for that congress you're all preparing in Valencia. Don't miss it, Mari-anita, the Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals or something like that. Everything with capital letters." He put his hand on my shoulder not to be amiable so much as to keep his balance, and leaning on Mariana and me, he left the station. There he stopped beside the open car where Santiago and I had put the luggage, looking as if dazed at the vast blue sky and the double avenue of linden trees that cut across the plain toward Magina, whose highest towers looked like pointed needles above the empty fields. Orlando took off the red and black handkerchief he always wore around his neck and wiped the sweat off his face, staring at the light, the handkerchief paused by his mouth, like a mask he hadn't decided to remove. "Solana," he said, his back to us, "Solana you infidel, you should have told me, you should have warned me about the light. Didn't you realize that this is the light I've been waiting for? Even Velazquez is darkness compared with this." He staggered with his head turned toward the blue, and when Santiago got out of the automobile that was already running to take him by the arm as if he were a blind man, he suddenly became disheartened and closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep against the back of the rear seat, his mouth and nostrils wide open, as if he were dreaming about the beginning of an asthma attack.

We were already crossing the first streets of low villas and dusty gardens where Magina ends in the north when I saw in the rearview mirror his open, reddened eyes staring into mine in an absent lucidity that his waking, or the silence that had overtaken the four of us since Mariana had started the car, stripped of any sign of mockery or pride. He let his head fall slowly onto Santiago's shoulder, and the boy remained solemn and firm beside him, looking at the long lines of houses, and when he lit a cigarette without moving his eyes away from the rearview mirror I thought I could detect in his expression an old countersign of desolation or renunciation, as if the illusions of alcohol had abruptly abandoned him. He moved his head a little and then I knew he was alluding to Mariana and was asking me about her without words. "You look beautiful when you're driving, Mariana," he said, his eyes half-closed to complete his indolence, "you remind me of that heroine in
Orlando Furioso
who rode on a winged horse wearing brilliant armor." He rested his hand on the back of Mariana's seat and caressed her hair with fleeting tenderness, like a dozing faun, as if he were touching the air or liquid silk that dissolved between his large, stained fingers. She looked away from the road for a moment to smile at him in the mirror with the tranquil gratitude of an accomplice, which was always present in the way she looked at Orlando. I was jealous when I caught their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror, because I desired the candid, offered part of Mariana that she revealed only in her behavior with Orlando as much as the other darker, more carnal part that belonged to Manuel, and I would have liked to join the two in a single indubitable woman not closed to my intelligence and desire, like the third Mariana, the only one I knew, shadow or reverse of the others or of herself, who always seemed to be to one side of things, who sometimes, that very morning, would take me by the arm and stop to tell me the exact words that burned inside me and that I would never say to her. "I'll always be with you. Whatever I do and no matter who I'm with, even if I don't see you again. I want you to know that and never forget it, not even when you don't care about me anymore."

 

S
UDDENLY
I
NOTICED
that we were proceeding more and more slowly now, because as we approached the Plaza of General Orduna, the sidewalks and streets were filling with a slow-moving crush of people. They came out of the narrow lanes, at first in silence, unarmed men in white shirts and corduroy trousers, tense women clustered at the corners who talked quietly and turned inquisitively to look at the car that by now was almost at a standstill and surrounded by a single-minded crowd who walked toward the plaza and seemed to inundate us and then drag us along to the rhythm of their movement forward. The voices still had the same vast, muffled sound as the footsteps, but very soon, when we finally entered the plaza—the small tree tops surrounding the amputated pedestal of General Orduna stood out above their heads—the great sound broke apart into a clamor of shouts and raised fists rhythmically beating the air as they leaned toward the closed balconies of the police station, toward the cubic tower where a red and yellow and purple flag hung over the broken sphere of the clock. Mariana sounded the horn several times, but by now it was useless, because we couldn't open a passage and there were hostile faces looking at us through the windows as if we were fish in an aquarium and furious fists pounding on the car body to the rhythm of their shouts, the single shout in which all the voices had already converged when Mariana stopped the car at one side of the plaza and we managed to get out by pushing the doors against the bodies that seemed to adhere with the tenacity of mollusks. "Give him to us," they shouted, "give us the traitor," convulsing in violent eddies toward the closed balconies of the police station, and no
sooner did I ger out of the car than I found myself lost and far from the others in a dense pulsation in which bodies and voices were confused, driven by instinct or a determined rage as indecipherable in its purpose as the energy of the ocean. Like swimming in sand, I moved forward until I reached the hand that Mariana held out to me, but I could no longer see Santiago or Orlando. We drifted together toward the center of the plaza, where the bodies had erased the benches and the line of the gardens and covered in their flood tide the pedestal of General Orduna. Now we saw the closed doors of the police station and the only space not yet engulfed by the crowd: nine Assault Guards formed a semicircle in front of the building, standing firm, their legs apart, with hard somber faces under shining visors and rifles held against their chests, as if they didn't see the surging crowd that besieged them or the closed fists that stopped so close to their rifles. Then a side balcony opened and I saw a man in uniform who looked at the plaza without stepping outside entirely, smoking, partially protected behind opaque glass, but that image, endowed with the serenity of an illusion, vanished when I felt people shoving me and separating me from Mariana, because a police van was making its way unhesitatingly through the crowd and approaching the semicircle defended by the Assault Guards. I saw Mariana moving away and calling to me with her hand, as if she were being dragged out by the sea, my blind fear was that I had lost her and I shouted her name over the agitated heads that again occupied the fissure opened on the plaza by the passage of the van, and when I could no longer see her a brusque undulation of bodies threw her into my arms and knocked both of us against a tree trunk. As if waking from a bad dream, we found ourselves greedily embracing, her bare legs wrapped around mine and my open hands trembling at her waist and feeling for the first time since I met her the perfumed and delicate attraction, the curved, slender, definite body of Mariana. I brushed her forehead, her chestnut hair with my lips, I raised my eyes to the balcony of the police station and the man in uniform was srill there, calm, holding his cigarette at a middle height, looking at the plaza as if there were no one on it, or only us, Mariana and I, embracing under the faded foliage of a tree.

"Let's go, comrades," I heard someone saying to me, one voice very close in the silence in which for ten seconds all the shouts in the plaza had exploded, the butt of a musket and a body that detached me from Mariana as he made his way between the two of us, while we avoided looking at each other and again were lost and inert and trying to pretend that our embarrassment wasn't real, that the embrace like a lightning flash of desire hadn't happened. "Let's go, comrades, let me pass, I want to see the face of that spy when they bring him out," said the voice at my side, a boy summarily dressed as a militiaman who elbowed his way forward raising his musket, probably unloaded and useless, like a banner. "What's going on?" Mariana asked him, "who's been arrested?" and he told us, as if excited by fever, that two days earlier they had arrested a Fascist spy in a Magina hotel and now they were preparing to take him to the provincial prison in the Assault Guards' van. "But this is where justice should be done. That Fascist is ours. They say he wanted to put a bomb in the House of the People, the murderer." He moved away from us, hitting the bodies in his path with the butt of the musket, and I saw him disappear or sink among the heads, shouting as if he were alone, and then resurface, hanging onto the grating at a window very close to the police station, his musket waving at the end of the overly long strap that held it around his neck. "Now they'll bring him out," he shouted, pointing at the six guards who had climbed out of the van to form a second, tighter line next to the door of the police station, which someone was beginning to open very cautiously. "He's coming out now," announced the boy, and a single great roar extended over the plaza as the crowd pushed with dark violence against the cordon of guards, "they have him at the door, they're going to bring him out right now." The man on the balcony reluctantly threw away his cigarette and disappeared behind the glass, and as if that were a signal,
the guards stood more erect until they seemed taller in their blue uniforms, and at the same time they released the bolts on their rifles. When the door to the police station was finally opened, all the voices suddenly became muffled and faded into a sound very similar to silence. Unmoving eyes, raised heads, banners, high and red at midday, quiet among the trees. Without realizing it Mariana painfully squeezed my hand. "There's a guard in the doorway," I said. "He's pointing at someone with a pistol." The guard walked backward, saying something I couldn't hear as he waved the pistol, half-turned toward the encircling crowd. Behind him a man came out with bowed head and cuffed hands, whom the other guards shoved toward the van. Surrounded by them, the man didn't seem to walk but simply to yield as if in a lethargy to the momentum of the rifles hitting him, wounded by the cruelty of the sudden light blinding his eyes after two days of darkness, avoiding it, very pale, already sleepwalking to his death. Before climbing into the back of the van, he stood motionless, as if he didn't understand what they were ordering him to do, and he raised his head for the first time to look at the wall of faces, silent on the other side of the rifles. He had straightened up like someone who hears his name and cannot determine where the call is coming from. Then the boy hanging on the grate shouted "murderer," and abruptly thrust out his hand that no longer held his military cap but something I didn't see, and he whistled and knocked the handcuffed man down among the legs of the guards at the same time that the revived crowd and the long shout and the rage dragged us helplessly toward the door of the police station, knocking down the barrier of rifles and uniforms and lifting into the air the bloodstained body of the prisoner who rebounded against the wall and fell to the paving stones and was again hoisted up and thrown by unanimous open hands that came up to hit him or claw at his face or his torn shirt. I saw his eyes, I saw the gleam of blood streaming from the corners of his mouth and the last shred of a black tie around his neck, I saw him get to his knees, panting, and run like a goaded, wounded animal toward the stone columns of the portico. He threw his arms around one of them, his mouth convulsed against the rough yellow stone, turned toward his persecutors who had stopped, waiting for something or merely witnessing his death agony, forming a circle of silence around the column. Without closing his eyes, without moving his mouth away from the stone edge where he seemed to be searching for air, he began to slip to the ground as slowly as the thread of his blood flowed down the column, his hands together, as if hidden in his groin, his tongue torn in a very dark, not red coagulated mass that didn't completely spill out between his lips when he stopped moving.