A Manuscript of Ashes (25 page)

A
BRUPTLY AND WITHOUT ANY
foreshadowing of it, the need to escape had disappeared, the incessant fear of time's flight. Now I perceived everything through the sweet desired fog of wine that ripened its effect precisely at the point where the things and faces flowing on the other side didn't matter or seemed to have happened many years earlier. I drank slowly, beginning at dusk, when Manuel had not yet returned from the country estate and Mariana wandered aimless and alone through the rooms, the courtyard, the hallway in the gallery, avidly attentive to the clock in the library and the door where he would appear. I drank the white wine brought up by Amalia from the wine cellar in dusty bottles whose labels Orlando read with an alcoholic's sacred wonder, relics kept in the darkness of cellars not to celebrate the eve of the wedding but simply to allow me the privilege of the serenity and pale golden light that occupied the place of the air and gave everything an appearance of premature distance very similar to the certain possibility of oblivion. Very slowly, not surrendering, as Orlando did, to the immediate fever of the alcohol spilled on my lips and ablaze in my veins, spinning out my gestures as if I were looking at myself in a mirror pretending I was drinking, like someone who prepares and administers to himself in solitude a medicine or the exact dose of poison to commit suicide. The glass between my fingers, the bottle on the nearby table, the curved edge of glass against my lips, the passage of the wine from palate to consciousness. Now, as I write to recover that night and the day and night that ended in two bodies embracing in the light from a window, suddenly burning above the garden, very close to the palm tree and the metal swing whose creaking, because the wind was moving it slightly, I did not stop listening to as I closed my eyes to kiss Mariana's bare breasts, I find I can barely establish a precise chronology of the things I did and saw while the white wine enveloped everything in its mist as light and clear as the transparency Orlando loved so much in the paintings of Velazquez.

I hear his voice that night, Orlando's savage laugh, I see his eyes saturated with lucidity and cruelty and Santiago's profile like that of a page painted on a quattrocento fresco as he sat next to him, absent and docile, the indifferent tenderness with which he let Orlando caress a knee or a hand auspiciously resting on the edge of the sofa. I hear voices, I see faces, but behind them there is nothing that allows me to establish them in a room or in a landscape, only a dark curtain, perhaps an object that they touch or raise as a signal so that the person who looks at them many years later can recognize them. A night and a day and next to the last night Mariana was alive, broken images and flashes and words that remained in the air after being spoken, like the cigarette smoke, like the indolence that left me lying on the bed in my room or slowly moving back and forth on the swing in the garden, shamelessly intending for Mariana to come and ask me why I was alone, why I seemed so sad and had slipped away from the others, from her. Leaning back in an armchair, next to the fireplace, I became drunk with a serene and filthy delicacy as I listened to Medina, who was explaining something to us about the spy they had lynched a few hours earlier in the Plaza of General Orduna, when Manuel came into the library and Medina fell silent—his last words were a name, Victor or perhaps Hector Vera, or Vega—because Mariana had stood up to embrace Manuel and now she was kissing him on the mouth, in front of all of us, as if she were defying us, in front of Utrera, Medina, and Amalia, who had just come in with a tray of appetizers and bottles of wine and remained standing in the middle of the library. In front of me and Santiago and Orlando, who took a drink, raising his glass like a countersign or a malevolent toast conceived exclusively so that I would notice.

Orlando, a mask of laughter, a hard voice of accusation and augury. The next morning, when we all drove down to the country estate in the black car to celebrate the wedding feast, Orlando, possessed by the fervor of the light that had excited him since his arrival in Magina, took his portfolio and pencils and was constantly drawing things he allowed only Santiago and Mariana to see, but he didn't seem to care about the landscape spread out before him, surrounding the hill where the house stood. He was sitting among the almond trees, his portfolio open on his knees and his red and black handkerchief, wet with perspiration, around his neck, and if he raised his eyes from the paper and looked at the olive groves or the river or the distant, gray line of the roofs in Magina, it was as if he were seeing not what we saw but the definitive and future form of the picture that at that instant he had decided to paint. At times he put down his pencil to look at us. He smiled, holding the glass of wine that Santiago had brought to his retreat, barely drinking from it, as if all he needed for his happiness was the presence of the boy, the lukewarm odor of the river among the almond trees, the sudden sensation of looking at a scene that secretly obeyed the intention of his imagination as the pencil obeyed his hand. And for that reason I don't know now if when I write I'm recounting what happened then or simply imagining the picture Orlando never painted, the watercolors I saw in January 1939 in a funereal, icy apartment in Madrid. I see the esplanade and the house from the spot where Orlando was sitting among the almond trees. Manuel's black Ford covered with dust to one side of the gate with its baroque metal fittings, in the shade of the grapevine, the obsessive, absurd phonograph playing tangos and extremely long blues erased by the wind, the table with its white tablecloths, Magina in the distance, the pale green or gray of the olive groves and the river and the hills and lunar ravines that extended the world toward the south, toward the blue sierra where I've never gone.

He knew, he was to one side among the almond trees, his pencil, its point as harsh and precise as his eye, suspended over the paper and his glass recently filled with wine by the solicitous hand of the only creature in the world who mattered to him. Now I know that all of us, Mariana, Manuel, myself, existed that day only so that Orlando could draw his discerning labyrinth of figures entwined in despair and desire. Frasco and his wife had cleared the table at the end of the meal, and they, not Orlando or I, were talking about the bombing of Guernica because a squadron of very high-flying planes was crossing the Magina sky, and about someone, a spy—"A fifth columnist," Medina specified, as if he were saying the exact name of an illness—arrested three days earlier in Magina. "There are laws," said Utrera. "There's a penal code. If a man commits a crime, he deserves a trial, and if necessary to be condemned to death, but they have no right to lynch him. It's barbaric, like when they burned the churches." "Those things do more harm to the Republic than a rebel offensive. You should have seen the condition of that man's corpse when it reached the hospital. I'm saying this because I was on duty, and I had to perform the autopsy." Medina, composed, drinking his coffee, citing clinical details and speeches of Don Manuel Azana, whose hand he once shook before he was president of the Republic and came to give a talk at the Athenaeum of Magina. Then Orlando's voice resounded like a severe invocation: "The Spanish people have the right to burn churches and lynch Fascists, because what they do will be much worse if we're unlucky enough to lose this war. Think of Guernica, or the bullfight ring in Badajoz. The people are hoping not for the revolution but the Apocalypse."

Straddling a chair, leaning on the back as if it were a windowsill, I looked at the white gleam of the sun on the wings of the silent planes that were disappearing beyond the hills, my back to the others, who were still sitting around the table with a pensive or rigid ceremonial air refuted by the light and the wind that disturbed the tablecloths, raising them at times like the sails of ships. I thought that perhaps my father had looked up from the ground at that same instant to watch the passage of the planes, forgetting them immediately, as if they were birds taking shelter after the first October cold and not emissaries of the war. The wind came up from the ravine of the Guadalquivir, heavy with the odor of mud and wet earth, and it carried away the voices and the music on the phonograph, a fox-trot, a tango, then a trumpet, intermittent and gradually moving away like the rhythm of a train, with the slowness of all the things that one will lose forever. On the ground, within reach of my hand, so that I only had to lean over a little to pick it up, was my glass of white wine, delicate and slow like the music and the faint smell of rotting algae that came from the still waters of the river, illuminating things with a tepidness similar to that of the threads of light that crossed the trellis next to the door of the country house and floated above the dust or pollen, around the crude black stain of the car, above the music recovered and dispersed and the sound of voices behind me becoming confused with the chink of spoons against the porcelain of the cups of coffee and the thin crystal of the glasses that a gust of wind overturned on the tablecloths. Mariana came over, before I saw her I knew she was coming because I recognized her step and the way her presence made the air tremble, to bring me coffee and a lit cigarette, and she remained crouching at my side, facing the city and the wind from the river that lifted the hair on her forehead, as if she had come to an appointment that only for the two of us was not invisible. When she gave me the cup, she placed a hand on my shoulder, and her hair covered one side of her face. Exactly like Orlando's sketch: not a face, but the pure shape of a desire, and that night, back at the house, when he gave me the drawing, he was offering me the sign of a temptation too undeniable for my cowardice.

"Mariana's alone, in the library," he said. "She's sitting and smoking, like you, watching the smoke while she listens to music, waiting for you. Even Manuel knows that if she hasn't gone to bed yet, it's because she wants to see you. Everybody seems to know that here except you. I've been watching the two of you since I got off the train yesterday morning. You wander all over the house, looking for each other, and you pass each other like two sleepwalkers, as if you still had time. For three years you've been looking for each other and hiding from each other like this, don't you remember? You came to my studio and didn't dare to look at her because she was naked. You don't even dare to look at me now. And don't pretend you're drunk or that you're an adolescent scorned by the woman you love. Open your eyes, Solana. It's me, your enemy, it's Orlando."

I close my eyes as I did that night, when I listened to Orlando lying on the yellow-flowered sofa in the parlor, and I hear his voice again, murmuring and serious, as if it were whistling in my ear as he untied the red strings of his portfolio and opened it to show me the portrait of Mariana. It was midnight, and it seemed as if the house and the world were uninhabited. Only Orlando and I, separated by the table in the parlor where the drawing lay under the light of the lamp, only Mariana's profile traced on the paper and perhaps on the dark background of the shelves in the library, Orlando's voice beating like the blood in my temples with the heavy indolence of alcohol. I got up, leaning on the edge of the table, clumsy and cowardly in front of Orlando's not-exactly-human eyes. "Leave me in peace," I said to him, "go away and leave me alone," but he didn't move or take his eyes off mine. He brushed, he tapped very softly the surface of the portfolio with his short, paint-stained fingers, and sweat shone on his neck and beneath the thin hair on his forehead like makeup running beneath the too-close light of the lamp. "It isn't necessary to raise your voice like that, Solana, I'm not your conscience. I don't care what you don't do tonight, or what she doesn't do. When she finishes her cigarette or her drink, she'll go to sleep or try on her wedding dress again, and you'll have the opportunity to give yourself another night of insomnia. I won't be the one to argue with anybody, least of all you, about the right to bring about your own failure. But I suppose you'll understand if I tell you that love has simplified my life. The only thing I care about is painting and having Santiago with me. I know he'll go just like he came, and it's very likely that he'll leave me when we return to Madrid and that I'll die when he goes, but not even that frightens me, Solana, fear is a trap, like shame, and now I'm alive and invulnerable."

Orlando signed the drawing, wrote the date in the margin, and handed it to me with a smile of surrender and tenderness directed at himself, as if when he heard his own words, he had understood all at once the entire feverishness of his love and imminence of the time when he would once again be exiled in solitude. He opened the door of the parlor, and before he went out to the hallway, he turned to look at me. "The music's still playing in the library. She's calling you." When I was alone, the drawing completely took on its imperious quality of invitation and the exact, empty pattern for absence. The wavy, short hair over her cheeks, the grave, pensive smile, not on her lips but in her gaze fixed on a distance of blank paper, of words unspoken, unwritten, of frozen gestures. The wine no longer existed or its excuse or its fog, only the clear line of the drawing against the light of the lamp, and behind it the eyes, the presence of Orlando, who was no longer a witness but the figure and voice in which the only lucid part of my thinking was embodied. And so when Manuel appeared at the door of the library, recently returned from the country estate, and Mariana went to him and kissed him with the greed of someone who has survived too long a wait, I knew that if I lifted my head, I would meet the complicit or accusatory eyes of Orlando, the spy of my rancor, of the plot hidden behind the stillness of things with as much impunity as the geometry that orders the disposition of figures in a painting to make it seem the result of chance.

Motionless figures in the library, as on a stage too brightly lit or in the studio of a photographer where prolonged exposure to the heat of the lights made their faces shine with the brilliance of wax. Medina, still in uniform, because he had come from the military hospital, as he did every night to examine Manuel. Utrera somber and alone among the others, like a guest in a hostile house, censuring in silence all the signs of disorder that the night before the wedding had brought into the house: Mariana's lack of modesty, Santiago's tight-fitting trousers, Orlando's obscene laughter. Amalia, standing next to me with a tray of appetizers and bottles, just down from the upstairs rooms where Dona Elvira murmured things and cursed and looked in the mirrors in her mourning clothes wringing her hands in her lap. Orlando, on the sofa with his knees devotedly joined to Santiago's, allowing himself small indecencies, the light caresses of a sodomite in a furtive park, of a tremulous, besotted, obscene old man who cannot decide to touch a little girl's thighs. Figures turned toward Magina on the esplanade of the country house, their backs to the proximity of dispersion and death, to the hand and eye for which they posed without knowing it. The painting was going to be called
Une partie de plaisir,
but when I asked about it two years later, Orlando could no longer recall its title or even the intention he once had to paint it.