A Manuscript of Ashes (27 page)

In Orlando's gestures was the fiction of a fortune-teller who recites poems in old provincial theaters. With what arrogance he moved among us, free, not trapped by our silence, immune to everything, even the sudden old age he already knew would come when love, firm and cruel like a hero recently returned from hell, deserted him. "You've never descended, Solana," he would say to me, "you still haven't written what you ought to write because you haven't gone down to hell, and you don't know what it means to come back and preserve the degree of rationality necessary for remembering." Now Manuel and Mariana and I dissolved at the touch of his words as a dream dissolves when it is shattered by the reality, victorious and obscene, of waking, the cold of dawns beyond the sheets. As if he were posing for a photographer of slightly pornographic postcards, Santiago drank and leaned his elbow on the piano, wearing the red undershirt of a lover for hire, and he shaped his lips into a kiss of dubious tenderness each time Orlando stopped talking to catch his breath and searched Santiago's eyes for a confirmation that he didn't always grant. When I saw him get off the train carrying Orlando's portfolio and mislaid luggage, I thought Santiago was an adolescent, but now, that night, victim of the successive snares of disillusionment and chastisement that knowledge usually set for me, I found him older than Orlando and Orlando's tenderness, older and viler than any of us, antecedent to everything, like a stone statue with painted lips or one of the women with pale thighs who looked at me from doorways on certain streets the first time I came to Madrid. He wore a red undershirt that bared his weak chest darkened by hair that perhaps had grown in recent months not as a declaration of any sort of manliness but to crudely belie the illusion of adolescence that one could find on his face, and white trousers very tight around his hips that moved like mollusks or a woman's hips. Orlando, lost in a drunkenness that he must have imagined as sacred, kissed him on the lips, and with a leap of his ungainly body, he sat on top of the piano, provoking the echo of a single low and very long note. From there, swinging his legs, he looked at us as if from the seat of honor of a pride untouched by shame.

"There's no more need to pretend or renounce," he said, pointing at me, "because what's coming now is the Apocalypse. All of you remember what the papers are saying about Guernica. Phosphorus bombs and scorched earth, fire and brimstone, as in the Cities of the Plain. Your desire makes you afraid because none of you has accepted that it's not possible to choose it without choosing indignity and betrayal at the same time. What all of you have discovered now I found out when I was twelve or thirteen and realized I liked men, not women. That's why you can fall in love and continue to feel the need for decency. You both desire a woman, Mariana, for example, and you feel a little disloyal and a little adulterous, but you don't know anything about fearing a temptation that, if discovered, would make you accept the filthiest word as a sign of shame. I'm going to paint a picture: all of you, this morning, at the country house, in that light Van Gogh couldn't even imagine, united by guilt, and I to one side, like Velazquez in
Las meninas,
looking at you as if you existed only in my imagination and I could erase you just by closing my eyes, like a god."

Then things happened in a way I've given up trying to put into order or explain. I've remembered and I've written, I've torn up sheets of paper where I'd written nothing but Mariana's name, I've stubbornly resorted to the superstitions of literature and memory to pretend that a necessary order existed in that night's acts. During sleepless nights in a cell for those condemned to death, I've caught myself trying to recover, one by one, the most trivial events, gnawed at by the peremptory need not to surrender to oblivion a single one of the casual gestures that later, in memory, shone like signs. I've looked at Mariana's eyes again which, ten years later, when I returned to the house, were still fixed on me as they were in the photographer's studio, when I still didn't know that what was revealed to me in them was an infinite, motionless farewell. I go outside, to the esplanade of the country house, and the moon that turns the earth white through the branches of the olive trees is the same moon that paused in the May air that night when I turned my back on the others and went out to the garden, still hearing Orlando's voice and the notes of a jazz tune that Manuel had begun on the piano. Mariana was writing something on a paper and covering it with her left hand as if she were afraid that someone might be spying on her, and when she raised her eyes, she looked toward the doors to the garden, but she couldn't see me because for her they were a mirror. Sitting on the swing, I saw them in the squared yellow light of the windows, as if I were watching a film from the unpunished darkness, and like the movie theaters of my adolescence, the piano music infected the figures with its slow, convulsed melody. Mariana stopped writing, looked at the paper, tore it in half and then into very small pieces that she let fall from her closed hand when she stood and crossed the dining room and stopped at the threshold to the garden before moving toward me, walking on the oblique path of the light.

 

T
HE MUSIC
M
ANUEL
was playing and Mariana's footsteps acquired an undeniable direction. With his head sullenly sunk between his shoulders, Manuel looked at his own hands and at the keyboard as if he were leaning over the edge of a well, weaving with violent delicacy the rhythm of the song, "If We Never Meet Again," which I heard constantly during that time on the phonograph in the library. Behind the white square of the windows, I can remember the red spatter of Santiago's undershirt as he listened in silence, I see or very probably imagine Orlando standing next to him, not listening to the music, looking at Mariana's back when she stopped at the door to the garden and guessing step-by-step what would happen when she began walking again. Sitting on the swing, not moving, I saw her coming toward me, and I looked away from her when she was beside me.
Her eyes had the dark brilliance of a lake in the moonlight, a depth untouched and smooth like her temples or her cheeks or the warm skin of her thighs when I moved my hands under her skirt to caress them. "Orlando's right," she said, sitting down beside me, moving the swing a little with the tips of her shoes, "he says you're unsociable. We're all in the dining room listening to Manuel, and suddenly you turn as if you were going away forever and come here, to watch us from a distance." We were together in the space of air marked off by her perfume, and when she pushed the swing she leaned against me a little and brushed my face with her hair, but the proximity of our bodies made the never vulnerable line, the exact distance at which a caress is halted and denied, more intense and physical. "I've had a lot to drink," I said, still not looking at her, "and it's too warm inside." Mariana took my face between her hands and obliged me to look at her, taking from my lips the cigarette I was smoking and tossing it to the ground, as if she were disarming me. Now the brilliance of her eyes dilated in the darkness seemed very close to tears or to a kind of tenderness I had never known how to find in them until that night. "You always talk to me like that, ever since you came to Magina. You tell me it's hot or that you've had too much to drink or that you're in a hurry to leave for Madrid because you're preparing for that writers' congress, but if I don't look at you, I can't recognize your voice, it's as if someone else were talking to me, and if I look into your eyes to be sure you're still you, it's as if you didn't know me. It's not that you don't look at me or talk to me. It's even worse, because you look through me and talk to me as if I were a statue. I've spent two months in this house thinking about the day you'd arrive, imagining that with you I'd get to see the places where you played as a boy, the plaza with the poplars you told me about so often, and now that you're here, you're farther away than if you had stayed in Madrid. Before you came to Magina, at least I had the hope of receiving a letter from you. But you didn't write to me in all this time." The music came from a greater and greater distance and was completely
erased at times behind Mariana's murmuring voice that was so close, and looking into the dining room while she spoke to me was like spending the night beside the window of a house where the open shutters reveal a remote family supper caught off guard. I meant to tell her that since the day I met her I hadn't stopped writing to her: that all the things I had written and published since then were nothing but the chapters of an infinite letter meant only for her, that even when I went in those unruly trucks of militiamen to recite ballads on the Madrid front and I climbed up on the wooden platform and heard the applause generated by my poetry, I was thinking about her and looking for her face and her impossible smile of complicity or approval among the rows of soldiers standing in their rough military greatcoats. I was going to say something to her, perhaps an ignoble excuse, and I may have been about to suggest that we return to the dining room with the others, choosing the appropriate, neutral tone of voice, but Mariana found my hand in the darkness and pressed it slowly, very gently at first, then grasping it with a serene, sustained violence that did not show on her face when she turned to look at me. Further down, on her skirt, between our two bodies, our hands clutched and intertwined, emissaries of immodesty and unspoken desire. "I'll write to you when I go to Crete," I said, "I'll send you a postcard just for the pleasure of writing your first and last names in a place so far away. I don't think I'll add anything else: just that palace with the stairways and the red columns on one side, and on the other your name, Mariana, Mariana Ríos." "I like to hear you say my name. It's the first time you have since you came here." "Names are sacred. Each thing and each one of us has a true name, and it's very difficult to learn what it is and say it." "Tell me what my name is. Tell me what the name of Crete is." A single word, I thought, I knew lucidly, a single word and the boundary and the fear will be torn apart as if they never had existed, as if that interminable music were not sounding in the dining room and the windows in front of us weren't lit or the doors to the garden not wide open. "Crete is Mariana," I said: in the silence I heard voices conversing and didn't know whose they were. Very slowly, as if in completing that gesture one would hold back all the instants and days that had passed in vain since we met, Mariana brought her lips close to my mouth from the distance of the other corner of the swing, from the afternoon when I had seen her naked in Orlando's studio, from each one of the hours when I had her and lost her without knowing that all the acts of my life, and fear and guilt and postponement, had been meticulously conspiring to clear the way for that island in time when I kissed her and licked her tears and let myself be demolished, trapped in her body, repeating her name just as she was saying mine as if everything we had to say could be summarized in our names. We rolled onto the ground and onto the cold grass like animals greedy for darkness, and I opened or tore open her blouse to look at her white breasts in the light of the moon shining on them while her hands searched and caressed, awkwardly, delicately going down between trousers and shirt, very awkwardly and very delicately going down between skin and the rough fabric of my trousers.

Then I opened my eyes and a violent light that didn't come from the dining room obliged me to close them. We were lying on the ground, and the light from a very high window fell on us covering us with the shadow of a single figure outlined there. Without getting up or entirely breaking the embrace that protected both of us from fatigue and our recovered sense of shame, we fled toward the darkness, and for a moment the light kept shining like a yellow, empty rectangle on the place where it had taken us by surprise, but the shadow spy was no longer at the window. We didn't dare look at each other again until the light went out. Before guilt could rise up around us like a filthy nocturnal tide and drown us, Mariana, kneeling in front of me, touched my lips, my eyelids, the back of my neck, buried her fingers in my hair and drew me once again to her mouth, repeating my name with a dark intonation that made it unfamiliar, as if it no longer alluded to me but to another man whose face she could not see completely in the darkness of the garden, because it was destined to be erased and leave no ashes or attributes of pride in her memory at the precise moment we stood to return to the dining room.

"They've all left," said Mariana, still smiling at me as she fastened the buttons on her blouse. She smoothed my hair with her fingers, and with a handkerchief that smelled exactly like her skin, she wiped my mouth smeared with lipstick, and each gesture was a small sign of complicity and tenderness. As if we were walking through a strange city, she took my arm as we crossed the garden, leaning on my shoulder, and at the door to the dining room she stopped and embraced me for the last time, lifting her hips to press her belly against mine. The piano was open and there were glasses and empty bottles on the table, the floor, next to the broken glass and the stain of spilled alcohol. Mariana lit a cigarette and brushed my face as she placed it between my lips, and then she left, her head bowed, and was about to come back to me when she reached the door, but she didn't, she only stood quietly for a moment and closed the door very carefully when she went out to the courtyard, as if she were trying not to wake someone.

A
T DUSK THE MIST ROSE
over the reddish gullies and the canebrakes and the tall white oleanders on the banks, becoming sluggish in the bends of the river. The mist was dense and blue on moonlit nights and became opaque, solid, white or faintly yellow when the sunlight began to shine on it at dawn, spreading over the course of the river, very close to the ground, like the smoke from the bonfires that on icy December days crept among the packs of olive groves and did not rise above the gray tops of the olive trees. In the mist the whistle of the night trains, emissaries from the sea, the only clocks for measuring how long insomnia lasted, became more intense and more distant, and from the other bank of the river, from the other side of the train tracks, the Island of Cuba emerged at dawn like an island in the mist that still lay in long tatters among the almond trees and detached very slowly from the low roofs of the house, like the last waters of a cautious receding flood whose crest no one had noticed. Before dawn, from the window of his room high above the mist and the slopes of the river like the moat of a castle, Jacinto Solana, just awakened by the passing of an interminable freight train closed like the trains in the war, looked at a darkness turning silver and blue and ashen with the disciplined slowness that time has as it moves on clocks. It was, perhaps, because the entry in his diary was undated, a morning
in mid-April, when Solana still saw no proximate end to his book and was desperate with fear of the possibility that he never would finish it, a disorder of truncated pages and sleepless nights and ashtrays filled with stubbed-out cigarettes while the sterile silence was shaken by barking dogs and the noise like a distant storm of a train crossing the metal bridge over the Guadalquivir. It was undoubtedly the time when he still always carried the pistol that Frasco saw on the first day at the bottom of his cardboard suitcase, between the bundles of typed pages that he tied carefully with red ribbon and the dark suit and the shirt that had belonged to Manuel. On the first day, the first afternoon, when Frasco showed him the old barn with the window overlooking the river where twenty-two years later Minaya would find the blue notebook and the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, Solana untied the ropes around his suitcase and took out the paltry possessions of a fugitive with a kind of methodical absorption that excluded conversation and disorder, like someone who always lives in hotels and knows the desolation of arriving at one on a Sunday afternoon. And as naturally as he arranged his clothing on the bed and his typed and blank pages at the corners of the desk, Frasco saw him take out the pistol, which was very large and looked recently oiled, and place it on the pages like a paperweight, beside the inkwell and the pen, as if it weren't a weapon but a neutral object and somehow necessary for writing, and when he went down to the kitchen to eat that night the pistol bulged in his right jacket pocket. At first he only wrote and waited, Frasco said, and the pistol and the pen always remained within reach of his hand, even when he left the area of his seclusion to take a very short walk among the almond trees or drink a few glasses of wine with him next to the fire where the stew for supper was bubbling. As if he never stopped waiting for someone, he watched the bridge over the river and the path that ended at the house, and sitting next to the fire he remained fixed in the light of the flames, not paying attention to Frasco, searching perhaps behind the crackling of the wood for an indication that at last the footsteps of his pursuers had arrived, calculating the time left in the truce, the blank pages he still needed to fill.