A Manuscript of Ashes (24 page)

Then I remember the plaza gradually emptying and the contracted body beside the column, but that image is lost in the image of other bodies I didn't see, my father's, illuminated by the headlights of a truck at the foot of the cemetery wall, the solitary dead body my father saw on July 19, 1936, at a corner of the Plaza of San Lorenzo. Bodies without faces as if biting the bitter earth or the pavement of a street, abandoned to the sun, in an empty siesta hour, dead and alone, rotting and alone, without name or dignity or glory, exactly like dead animals in the mud of a river. Silently we entered the water before dawn, raising the rifles with both hands above our heads, and we stepped on something soft that sank, something slimy and corrupt, mud and corpses of drowned mules under the weight of a machine gun and human bodies that seemed stripped of bones. I remember the Plaza of General Orduna as if I were seeing it from high above, at an hour made even emptier because the tower clock could not announce it: the empty pedestal, Manuel's car, the body that an Assault Guard poked at with the end of his rifle. Mariana and I walked very slowly, keeping our distance from each other, to the car, sat down in it, not saying anything, not asking each other where Orlando and Santiago were now. Mariana placed her tense hands on the steering wheel and looked at the empty plaza or only at the dirty glass that separated us from it. Her disheveled chestnut hair covered her profile like a veil conceived of only to keep me from seeing her. I said her name in a quiet voice, and she looked at me in the rearview mirror without turning toward me. I placed a hand on her knee without daring to acknowledge or feel the shape of her thigh under the thin skirt, as if desiring her at that moment would have been disloyalty. When we returned to Manuel's house, he hadn't come back yet from the country house, and Orlando and Santiago were waiting for us in the library, a little drunk, very close together on the sofa, laughing at something they were whispering in each other's ear, their glasses raised, as if they couldn't remember the reason for having a toast.

T
HE LIGHT, EVERY NIGHT
, round and yellow and high like a minor moon that belonged only to the plaza, the one light burning at midnight in the darkness of Magina, the one consciousness, Manuel thought, not made sluggish by the still intact stupefaction of the war and the extremely long winter that after eight years seemed to prolong it. He returned to the house at dusk, after seeing Medina in his office on his slow walk that normally took him to the watchtower in the wall, and before pushing open the door, he stopped for a while under the acacias to look at the lighted window in the room where Jacinto Solana was writing at that very moment. He imagined he could hear the sound of the typewriter through the rain, and he continued to hear it, confused with the rain or with the murmur of Jacinto Solana's voice, when he woke in the middle of the night fleeing the vast hand that opened his chest to tear out his heart the way you tear a root out of clod-filled wet ground. The multiplied, metallic blows sounded above his head like rain on the balcony glass and the insomniac footsteps of the man who never seemed to sleep or abandon for a single second his perpetual vigil in front of the typewriter or around it, always uncovered, Teresa told him, beginning at dawn, like a mechanical animal on the desk that Solana circled when he couldn't write, pacing blindly through the smoke of his cigarettes and the importunate labyrinth of his memory, walking in circles of obsessive geometry like an insect flying around a lamp. At eleven the electricity was cut off and all the streets and windows in Magina were erased by the sudden flood of darkness, but then, after a few minutes during which the circle of the window vanished in the high blackness of the house, a yellower, fainter light appeared and in it was outlined the shadow of the solitary man who had lit the first candle of the night to illuminate his insomnia of written or rejected words, and at times Manuel, hidden under the branches of the acacias, would see Jacinto Solana smoking, motionless, in the circle of light, looking at the swamp of shadows where he tossed the butt like someone who throws a stone down a well and waits to hear it hit the water. Then he would close the window, and Manuel would hear again the distant metallic blows of his writing, as usual among the sounds in the house as the beating of blood in his temples, and like a coward he would approach them, going up in silence to the very door of the room, but when he extended his hand to knock, he would stop and listen to the footsteps on the parquet or the sound of the typewriter, and he never knocked because he was afraid Solana would not want to receive him.

"At first I went up to talk to him almost every afternoon, and I'd bring him tobacco, a thermos of coffee, an occasional bottle of cognac. He'd leave the house at dawn to avoid running into my mother or Utrera, and that was when Teresa cleaned the room and made his bed, but gradually he stopped going out or even opening the door for Teresa, and she would leave a breakfast tray outside the closed door, and when she came back for it, she'd find it untouched. There was one afternoon when he wouldn't open for me either. I wanted to believe, and even told Medina afterward, that he probably had fallen asleep after several nights of insomnia and didn't hear me knock. But a moment earlier I had heard the typewriter, and as I waited at the door I was absolutely certain he was sitting in front of the machine, holding his breath, the index fingers of both hands immobile above the keyboard, waiting for me to go away. I heard the click of the lighter and very strange breathing, like that of an invalid, and then, as I was thinking that Solana couldn't write and was trapped in the agony of a blank page, I heard the harsh scrape of the pen on paper, and I knew that not even silence signaled a truce."

Like the blood in one's temples, like wood borers on the most inaccessible shelves in the library, like a spider invisibly weaving the threads of its trap under a cellar hatchway: he was there, in the house, in the room with circular windows, and sometimes he went out or wandered aimlessly at three in the morning along the gallery hallway, but very soon, when the first days of excitement caused by his arrival had passed, it seemed as if he really had left in an irrevocable way, because they never spoke of him or ran into his taciturn figure, and only Teresa's periodic visits to the top floor with the broom and dustcloth or the tray of food indicated that someone was living in that region of rooms unoccupied for so many years: someone, in any case, who was losing the name and face that all their memories assigned to him and little by little was reduced to an obscure presence, the faded and at times fearsome certainty that the top floor was not empty, and if they thought about him because they heard his footsteps on the parquet or the noise of the typewriter, they barely could connect those signs to the memory of the man they knew before the war or to his inexact shadow that stood in the courtyard ten years later. He was in the house like the wood borer is there, even though one cannot hear its gnawing, and after a month his presence had hidden so definitively behind the brief indications that disclosed it that Manuel, when he finally decided to go into his room even if he didn't want to receive him because he feared he might be sick, waited at the door he had knocked on several times without an answer, feeling the awful uncertainty that the man who unbolted the door for him wasn't Jacinto Solana.

 

"B
ECAUSE WHAT
I
DIDN'T
understand then, what I understand only now, as I'm telling it to you, a man who didn't know him and has no idea how much he had changed and imagine him, I suppose, as a literary character, is that when I lost him, I wasn't losing only the one man I could call my friend but also the right to remember or know how my life had been before I renounced it forever. Things exist only if there is someone, an interlocutor or a witness, who allows us to recall that at one time they were true. Which is why he would say that the worst misfortune for a lover is not losing his love but being left alone with his memory, left blind, he would specify, remembering some verses by Don Pedro Salinas that he always recited and that perhaps you've seen underlined in that book of his in the library.
For there's another being through whom I look at the world, because she loves me with her eyes.
Now I know that in the beginning, when without saying anything to him I cleaned the room with the circular windows and put the typewriter in it, I didn't do it to offer him a refuge or the possibility of writing his book, but to have him here, in this city and in this house, to have someone to whom I could say what I hadn't said in ten years and share the memory of the time when Mariana was alive. It was the same before the war, when she and I fell in love. We were always looking for him, because his presence made us aware of our happiness more intensely than when we were alone. But he never talked to me about Mariana during the months he was here. He said her name only once, on the first day, when he told me he was going to write a book about all of us. I imagine that book was like a vampire that robbed him of the use of language and of memories as he wrote it. He gave it his life just as someone gives blood at a hospital or dedicates himself to opium. That's why I didn't recognize him when he opened the door of his room that night. He hadn't shaved for at least a week or eaten the hot food that Teresa left for him in the hall, and the air in the room and his clothes smelled as if he hadn't opened the window or changed or washed since he arrived here. He opened the door and stood looking at me with his coat over his shoulders, and his shadow hit me at the same time that I detected the rarefied odor of the air, because the lamp
in the room swayed behind him as if he had bumped into it when he stood to answer the door. He was swaying too, his arms crossed and both hands holding the wide lapels of his coat, and he smiled without my being able to see his eyes behind his glasses. It took me a little while to realize he was drunk and was moving back and forth in alcohol like a fish behind the glass of an illuminated aquarium, beyond the insolent shame of someone who drinks alone until he falls down and immediately gets up because he hears someone calling him and he has to pretend he's sober. Do you have a light, he said, showing me a cigarette that had gone out, which he placed on the edge of the ashtray and soon forgot about, and he asked me to sit down, repeating my name as if he had just remembered it and wasn't familiar with it yet, and abruptly he forgot about me and turned his back to look at the plaza through one of the circular windows. 'You have to let Medina see you,' I said, but he didn't hear me or didn't pay attention to me, and he began to laugh that cold laugh I hadn't known in him until then and that seemed like the laugh of a dead man. To keep from falling he leaned against the window recess, and he walked toward me following an arduous straight line, holding a new cigarette and a glass of cognac that moved slightly with the trembling of his hand. 'Teresa has told me that you hardly taste your food. Medina's downstairs, in the parlor. If you like, he'll come up to see you right now.' He collapsed into a chair, facing the typewriter, and moved his hands and lips to say something, he said Mariana or Solana and showed me with a weary gesture the written sheets on the floor and desk and the blank sheet in the typewriter. 'Excuse me, Manuel,' he apologized in every gesture or word, excuse me for not having cleaned this up to receive you. I never was very orderly, you know. Now I think I'm becoming dirty. But I'm not sick. You remember Orlando: when he looked at you with those cold saurian eyes, it was because he was going to die from drinking so much. This afternoon I began to write and couldn't get past the second line. Alcohol works sometimes, but it isn't a substitute. Orlando knew that too.' I drank with him, I asked about the unfinished and frightening book whose pages thrown down next to the table he was treading on or kicking aside with a careless air in which I saw something of voluntary punishment and perversity, but the man I was talking to was no longer Jacinto Solana."

He didn't go up again, he recounts, as if he were telling about a very long, definitive farewell, he spoke to him again only on the afternoon of April i, when he went into Solana's room and saw him placing his papers and clothes into the cardboard suitcase. He had just shaved and put on a tie, and his breath didn't smell of cognac. Like a traveler about to leave a hotel, he was arranging his things in the suitcase, and he had made the bed and cleaned the ashtrays and was moving, unfamiliar and resolute, around the room. "I'm going to Madrid, Manuel. Nobody knows me there. I'll be safer." Then, like his own guilt, Manuel recalled inviting Solana to go to the Island of Cuba: the slow brown river moving among the oleanders, the solitary house on the hill, surrounded by almond trees, Jacinto Solana's precise and never-again postponed appointment with his desire to die. Manuel called a taxi, and they waited together at the entrance, accepting forever the unfamiliar courtesy of strangers between them, they got into the car and in silence crossed the lanes of Magina and the Plaza of General Orduna and then the wide straight streets that extend the city to the north, and when they reached the station, neither one had to begin the gesture of good-bye because the yellow train of the Guadalquivir was already moving slowly on the track. Manuel saw him standing on the running board and moving away, the suitcase in his hand and his hat over his eyes, and he waved a good-bye that Solana never saw because he had already gone inside the car and found a seat next to the window to see how the streets of Magina disappeared forever in a high city hanging over the ruins of a wall, suspended like a line of blue mist over the undulating remoteness of the olive groves.

"For twenty-two years I've been alone," Manuel said, looking at Minaya as if he were deciphering on his face that period of time, "from the moment Solana went away until you arrived." In the same taxi that had taken them to the station he returned to the house when night had already fallen, and he was surprised not to see the light burning in the circular windows. He was in Solana's room, which still smelled of tobacco smoke and the presence and usury of a body; he covered the typewriter and then went down to the parlor to look at himself in 1937, to look at his own pride and manhood exalted by the buttons and straps of his uniform. In the oval photograph, Mariana looked at him as if she were foreseeing the future dead man before her now. "But Mariana was looking at him, you ought to know that," Manuel said in the library, in front of the fire. "We were in the photographer's studio, and I had put on my uniform and the two stars I never wore because they promoted me to lieutenant when I was dying in a hospital in Guadalajara. She took my arm and looked at the lens when the photographer told us to smile, but Solana was behind him, with Orlando, and I barely could see them because the lights were blinding me. At the same time that she pressed my arm, Mariana moved her head very slightly and found Solana's eyes. That was exactly when the photographer took the picture. No matter from which angle of the parlor you look, she seems to be smiling and looking at you, but the one she's looking at is Jacinto Solana."