A Manuscript of Ashes (28 page)

 

"L
IGHTS OF
M
ÁGINA
in the dark, above the mist, reflected in it as if in the water of a very distant bay. Uncertain liquid brilliance, candles lit in the last chapels of the churches. Everything seems to sleep, but nothing is sleeping, nobody is sleeping. Lights of Magina above a great plain of insomnia." Later, when the dogs began to bark and the mules could be heard stirring in the hot breath of the stables, the city was being born at the top of its hill at the same time that the lights went out, emerged from nothing, from the darkness or the mist, materializing as if by chance around a pointed tower higher than the roofs or above the precise line of the wall. Then from the window of his room Jacinto Solana would look in the distance for his father's farm, the small white stain of the house next to the irrigation tank and the poplar tree, but he couldn't make it out in the uniform density that expands and descends between the supports of the wall and the first lines of olive trees like an oasis that surrounds the city, and gradually that failure of vision acquired for him a tonality of relief that also alluded to his memory, as if the distance his eyes could not decipher had also been established between his present consciousness and the fatigued and guilty habit of his memories. Magina, from the Island of Cuba, was a detail in a landscape or a watercolor by Orlando, not a city but its remote illustration, a docile pretext for contemplation, an empty corner ready to be occupied by literature, and those who had lived in it or still lived in it were losing very slowly and almost sweetly their quality of real creatures in order to conclude completely their transfiguration into characters in a book that at the end of May, as Minaya learned in the blue notebook, was very close to its final pages and no longer loomed as an impossible goal or an intimate form of siege, for it had eventually become for Jacinto Solana an almost peaceful habit of his seclusion in the country house, like the wine and conversation with Frasco and the walks with no destination among the olive trees, which took him very far from the house, toward the sierra, to the slopes of bare slate and harsh valleys of red or sulfur-colored earth as bare
of any
trace
of
human presence or eyes as the seas of the moon. After two months of living in the Island of Cuba, the old pain and the old tenderness poisoned by rage and remorse were fading like the shape of a face it is no longer possible to recall, and for that reason the pages in that notebook Minaya found in the lining of a gloomy jacket contained, intermingled with the atrocious story of the last night Mariana lived and the appearance of her corpse in the pigeon loft, short annotations written in the margins or on the back of the squared pages, in which the voice of the narrator until then dedicated to and imprisoned in the plot split in two as if folding over into the attitude of a witness. "28, May, 47. At noon it's very hot and I go down to the river to swim. Icy water. Two pages after lunch, without a single erasure." "May 30, 9 pm, a plane over the vertical of Magina, at dusk: long trail of smoke tinged with pink paler than in clouds. Maybe include it in chapter on country house, at the end, when they return to city and nobody in the car speaks." In the small hours of May 30, Solana was probably writing a passage that Minaya couldn't find, and to which some annotations in the blue notebook alluded: Manuel enters the marriage bedroom carrying Marianas dead body in his arms and lays it on the unmade bed. Minaya, who imagined that scene as if it were his own memory, abruptly found it transformed into a question of style: "Correct the fall of nightdress so thighs not exposed. Only her knees, very slim, dirty with droppings. The word 'bloodless' prohibited."

Frasco says that toward the end, Solana hardly was writing, or at least not in the obsessive way he had during the first weeks, and the pistol even disappeared from his desk and his pocket, as if he had forgotten his fear or it no longer mattered to him. Almost at the end, in the blue notebook, in Frasco's words, the man whom Minaya had pursued and constructed until he had given him a destiny as firm as the dates of birth and death that marked the limits of his biography, suddenly got away and left behind nothing more than a few trivial notes and the memory of a peaceful indolence, like a book in whose best chapter the printer inadvertently left a few pages blank: he returned later, but with another voice and a face that in Minaya's imagination was as unfamiliar as the coldness of the final pages of his diary, to recount Beatriz' arrival at the Island of Cuba and her departure for the serene certainty of the death that was waiting for them, her and the two men with her, when they walked out the door of the country house and went into the stand of almond trees, and there was nothing after that, only the squared pages where Solana wrote no more than the exact date of the last day of his life, underlined with a firm stroke of the pen, like a long final flourish: June 6, 1947, dawn, barely twenty-four hours after writing the end of the last chapter in his book. But like those pages where he had summarized and saved himself, though nothing was left of them for the future reestablished by Minaya in the spring of 1969 except some fragments and first drafts as difficult to put in order or explain as the ruins of a buried temple, the final hours of his life were hidden in darkness only partially lifted by the statements of Frasco, who didn't see him die, who only heard the shots and the shouts of the men pursuing him over the roofs of the country house and along the muddy slope of the Guadalquivir and could see, surrounded by the rifles of the guards, how they tossed his corpse onto a truck like a sack of clay.

"I had gone up to Magina to see my mother and on the way to settle with the administrator the accounts for some day laborers," Frasco said, "and that night when I was back on the estate I saw a light in Don Jacinto's window but didn't want to bother him because I imagined he was writing, and so I put the mule in the stable and went to sleep, and about four or five in the morning I woke up sweating with fear, because I dreamed I was back in the war and was being killed. Then I heard shots very close by and footsteps on the stairs, and three Civil Guards knocked down the door and came into my room and pushed the barrels of their rifles into my chest while one of them held a flashlight so close to my eyes I couldn't see anything. From their shouts and the way they looked at me and hit me, I knew that this time they didn't want to scare Don Jacinto or take him off to jail but kill him on the spot like vermin. But he defended himself, he killed one of them, and even when they had fatally wounded him, he must have hidden in the canebrakes and kept running downriver, because it took them several hours to find his body and the sun was already high when they dragged him back along the bank and threw him in the truck."

 

F
OR,
F
RASCO THIS UNEXPLAINED
and sudden eruption of death that came like a gust of winter wind to take his fruit and then left with the sputtering of the truck engine, without leaving any trace of its passing on things, without its infamy lasting in the June morning except for a puddle of mud and algae at the door of the country house, seemed like the confirmation of a destiny of mourning initiated eight years earlier, when a patrol of Falangistas came to the Plaza of San Lorenzo to take Justo Solana away with his hands in cuffs and a bloodstain at the corner of his mouth. They were the same, he always knew, even though they hadn't spoken for so many years, even though his father hadn't known how to read or write and never had left not only Magina but the Plaza of San Lorenzo and his farm at the foot of the wall and the road that led to it, because those three places constituted the only landscape in the world he cared about. Frasco, who had played with Jacinto Solana as a child and had heard in his youth, in conversations in the barbershop or the tavern, the story of the son who rose up against his father and deserted the land and fled one night to take a train to Madrid, discovered at the Island of Cuba that Jacinto Solana had spent his life inhabited by the shade of his father, and that the never completed flight or desertion he began twenty-two years earlier when he finally boarded one of those trains whose whistles, like those of invisible ships, had stirred him for as
long as he could remember was transformed into and ended in his return. His gray hair, his tense unshaven jaws, his hard expression of solitude and disdain took on with every passing day a more interior and darker resemblance to his father's features, and even the way he gave himself over to his insomniac devotion to the written word repeated with mysterious loyalty the obsessive connection that since the beginning of the century Justo Solana had maintained with the land that he himself had broken and cleared and on which he built a house and dug a well of deep, icy water with no help except his own hands and no motive other than his desire not to obey anyone and his pride as the founder and sole owner of his land and life. At night, when Frasco returned to the house and lit the fire and prepared supper in the huge kitchen where on winter dawns the crews of men would gather before going out with their long heather staffs to the olive groves, Solana would come down from his room with a lost or fatigued air and sit next to the fireplace slowly to drink a glass of wine while he looked at or stirred the fire and still didn't say anything, as if he hadn't returned from the place and time where the practice of literature confined him, or reestablished his dealings with reality: he would look at the fire then with the same slow stupor with which he had looked at a blank page, searching its empty presence for the clue to a future word, and only after he'd had several glasses of wine, which Frasco refilled like a silent cupbearer, did he seem to recover the power of speech and the certainty of where he was, the semblance or model of another region and another house situated as firmly on the pages of his manuscript as the Island of Cuba on the bank of the Guadalquivir. He would speak about his father in an indirect way at first, as if hovering over his memory without daring to invoke him, with a sense of shame very similar to fear or the sensation of distance that injured him forever that morning in his childhood when he said good-bye to him in the semidarkness of a corridor in the school, a préfiguration or warning of the definitive leave-taking so many years later, on the dark May night in 1937, when
he turned on the path to say good-bye and saw him old and vulnerable and alone in the now-remote light of the fire he had lit to cook the supper he didn't want to share. He spoke at first as if to himself and tended to choose the oldest images he had of his father, but he didn't take long to confirm that Frasco was not only a witness but also an accomplice to his memory, because he told him things about the older Solana that he had forgotten or never had known and that abruptly disproved the fatigued, abstract figure in which forgetting had deposited his memories, so that when he heard Frasco talking to him about his father, it was as if he suddenly had discovered the true face of a stranger, like coming across a fixed, strange gaze that was somehow familiar and finally discovering, after an instant of unrepeatable hallucination or lucidity, that one was seeing oneself in the mirror without realizing it. He learned, for example, that during the last days of his life in Magina, before the war, Justo Solana had taken to frequenting, always alone and as if secretively, the taverns of melancholy drunks whose lights burned at night in the last houses of the slum district around the wall, he learned that his solitude, his house that was empty and too large, his fierce determination not to accept the excuse of old age when work overwhelmed him, had been wearing him down with slow, pressing constancy, as the passage of time wears down and disfigures a face and levels the places where no one lives. Sometimes Frasco saw him walking toward the Plaza of San Lorenzo feeling his way along the walls, as if he were moving in the dark, and he said that in his jacket pocket he usually carried a well-folded, visible Madrid newspaper with an article signed by Jacinto Solana. He remembered him one afternoon, in a corner of the barbershop, impatient and gruff, passing his hand over his unshaven chin while he waited his turn and paid no attention to the conversation of the others. "Listen, Frasco," he said to him, and took out the paper, unfolding it very carefully, as if he were afraid his large hands would tear that fragile, unknown material, not the paper but the faint weft of the printed words, "you know how to read, find the thing they say my son has in here. But don't read it very loud—I don't want them to hear." Then he put the newspaper back and patted his pocket like someone making certain he hasn't lost a valuable wallet, and he took it out again in the last taverns of the night, already worn out, like his expression, anachronistic, useless, dirty around the edges where he had folded it and at the corners of the pages where he had left the print of his thumb dampened with saliva, and he spread it out and smoothed it on the bar to ask one of the opaque drinkers if he knew how to read and to ask him to look for a first name and a family name on the damaged pages that he was so secretly familiar with.

"They were the same," Frasco said, "and they were killed the same, the way they killed people then, not asking or explaining anything, they would come to somebody's house one day and take him away in a car, and then he'd show up in a ditch or beside the wall of the cemetery with a bullet in the back of his neck and his hands tied with rope or a piece of wire. They said that a lot of people were killed because they'd been marked during the war, but the only thing they could accuse Don Jacinto's father of was that he'd never gone inside a church in his life, and they shot him just the same, as if he had done something, and Don Jacinto thought it had been his fault, 'to take their revenge against me, Frasco, that was the only reason,' he would say to me, and I think that if when he first came here he had that uneasiness that didn't let him rest or sleep at night, it wasn't because of the book he was writing but the guilty conscience he had when he thought about his father's awful death. And in the meantime, the madman Cardena up there, in the sierra, a step away from the estate, knowing everything he knew and remembering it very well although he seemed to have lost his mind, because he had been in the militia, not one of the men who risked their lives at the front but one of those who always went around with their coveralls clean and their berets at a slant and who were very brave when they marched through the plaza in Magina or stopped somebody at night to ask for papers. The madman Cardena was the only one who knew why they killed Don Jacinto's father and who denounced him. One day when he was drunk or really crazy, he told me he was in the patrol that went to look for that Falangista, Domingo Gonzalez, who spent almost a year hiding in the attic of the house of some relatives, and who finally escaped even though they chased him along the roofs and shot at him. They got to the house before dawn, to surprise them when they were sleeping, but the door was very strong and all the bolts were closed, so they needed an ax to knock it down."