A Manuscript of Ashes (29 page)

Eyes of a blue as pale as that in the veins visible beneath the skin of his temples, a blue melting and liquid like that in the eyes of the blind, the beard scant on his cheeks, long and hook-shaped on his chin, rigid, as if it were false, crossed by a brilliant thread of saliva that he would lick as he looked at something with his eyes of a hunted animal, standing among the olive trees with his lame, misanthropic dog panting, adhering to his trouser legs, as motionless as a distant tree on the slope he climbed each night followed by the dog and the half-wild she-goats of his flock to return to the shelter of the slabs of slate where he and the goats and the toothless, cowardly dog lived in the obscene confusion of a trash pile or a stable. Before Frasco led him to the hut and raised the filthy curtain to penetrate the darkness where eyes were gleaming neither animal nor human, only circular and staring, stripped of all reference to a body, all connection to the light shining outside in the yellow fennel and the dark splinters of the escarpments, eyes of phosphorus lit by irrationality or horror, Solana had seen the madman Cardena up close only once, on the riverbank, and it was like meeting straight on an animal that quietly challenges and then flees like a bolt of lightning without any other sign of its appearance remaining except the sudden stabbing of his eyes. As indecipherable as an animal, as the dog whose harsh panting had urged him to turn around impelled by the certainty that he was not alone, the madman Cardena contemplated Solana with an expression of impassive attention, and before fleeing he was shaken by a convulsion as violent and rapid as a shudder, and he said something or simply opened his mouth and couldn't remember what the language of other men was like, because Frasco said that since the spring of '39, when he came to the sierra fleeing the troops that had occupied Magina, the madman Cardena had maintained no other relations in his solitude than with the she-goats and the lame dog who always walked behind him like an extension of his shadow, so that his feigned madness had in the end become true and he no longer knew how to speak except in abrupt monosyllables and brief syncopated phrases like pants or barks that he almost never concluded. The hut where the madman Cardena lived, attached to a vertical wall of slate, went very deep into a cave in whose final recess he had taken shelter with his dog when Frasco and Solana went in to look for him. He was trembling, holding on knees that were tightly pressed together an old Mauser that he had kept for seven years after running out of ammunition, and caressing the ill-treated back of the dog while he shook his head, not daring to raise his eyes, and cursed and denied as if he were being accused in a dream. "I don't remember anything. It wasn't my fault. It was the other one, he stopped the old man, he says to him, give me the ax. Then he told them it was me." He let go of the rifle, which fell to the ground with the trembling of his knees, and he clawed at his beard or clawed at the air with nails that were long, curved, and hard, like uniform beaks, retreating until he rested the back of his neck against the wall. "Cardena," said Frasco, taking a step toward him, bent in the semidarkness because the roof of the cave was so low they couldn't stand up straight, and they waited there in an attitude of useless ambush, exhausted by the stink in the air, by the extremely slow waiting, "Cardena, don't play the idiot with me, you know you can't fool me. Tell us what you told me yesterday, when I gave you the decanter of wine. "

He prowled the perimeter of the Island of Cuba and spied on Frasco from a great distance, almost never daring to cross the invisible frontier drawn by the white boundary stones on the ground, but sometimes he and his dog went onto the estate with the wariness of wolves and spied on the house from the grove of almond trees or followed Frasco, hiding behind the olive trees, jumping from one to the other with an unsettling capacity for silence. "Cardena, come out, I've seen you," Frasco would shout, standing motionless, pretending he still didn't know the place where the madman was stationed, just as when he went hunting and found a very recent trail, and after a while the madman Cardena and his dog would emerge in the middle of the grove, looking at him with alienated, suspicious eyes and shaken by the panting of hunted animals. The madman prowled around the house and followed Frasco to ask him for a decanter of wine or a packet of tobacco, and when at last he was facing him, he would leave on the ground, not saying a word, a sheepskin or a decapitated kid, like a merchant who doesn't know the language of the distant region to which his journey has brought him, and he would hide again and lie in wait until Frasco returned with the tobacco and the wine. Then he would leave his refuge as if he were catching his prey, and when he fled to the river's embankments, he would shout ancient threats and cowardly curses that in the distance became confused with his dog's barking. He would call Frasco a traitor and a Jew and a lackey of capitalism, and he predicted a rat's death for him if he dared denounce him to the Civil Guard, whose three-cornered hats and dark capes appeared to him each night in the shadows of the trees like an unmoving army against which he waged ghostly battles entrenched inside the fences around the corral where he kept his she-goats, aiming at the valley with his unloaded rifle and shouting blasphemies and challenges that dispersed echoes among the precipices of the sierra.

A few hours after running into Jacinto Solana on the riverbank, the madman Cardena called Frasco by whistling to him from the almond trees, but this time he wasn't carrying a recently beheaded kid in his bag, and he didn't threaten him with death if he didn't hand over five liters of wine. "I know that man you're hiding," he said, smiling
with his empty eyes, his mouth open and as wet as the snout of his dog, panting next to him, hiding between his legs. "The only one hiding here is you, Cardena. So you can go back the way you came, or I'm calling you know who." Trembling, the madman Cardena and the dog raised their heads at the same time, as if they had detected the scent or the footsteps of an enemy approaching in silence. "You're hiding him so they don't kill him like they killed his father." Then Frasco turned around: the madman, happy at having trapped him as he was walking toward the house, didn't say anything yet, he remained squatting, looking at him while he caressed the dog, who licked his hand, and acting as if he were following the flight of a bird through the branches of the almond trees. "There was no way to knock down that door," he said, not to Frasco, perhaps to the dog or to himself, to the part of his memory not ravaged by madness, rocking back and forth on bent knees as if he were hearing music, "we were knocking and they didn't open, why would they open if they already knew what we were looking for, and then the old man passed by, riding his mule, and that bastard who denounced us afterward saw the ax sticking out of the saddlebag and says, Comrade, lend us the ax and we'll give it right back, and the old man was scared, he didn't want to, and the other one took out his pistol, if you don't give it to us in a nice way we'll take it in a not nice way, I'm denouncing you, we'll see what you're doing at this hour with an ax, the old man trembling, not getting down from the mule, I remember it as if I could see him now, I went up to Magina just to get the ax, and now I'm going back to my farm, and the other one put his pistol to his chest and says, well, now you're going to knock down that door, inside there are some fine gentlemen who don't want to let us in, now that's rude, and the old man, who couldn't stand because he was so scared of the pistol, got off the mule and took out the ax and at first he sort of looked sideways and hit the door very slow, like he didn't know how to use the ax, until the other one pointed the pistol at him again and said, we'll see if he's on the side of the Falangistas inside, and the old man hit the lock three times and knocked down the door, and put the ax back in the saddlebag right away and without getting back on the mule he took the reins and went down the street, but then, when the troops came in, that Judas lost no time going to the Falange and telling them he knew the names of the men who killed the family of Domingo González, and that I was in charge of the patrol, and like everybody knows they asked him for more names, and so to get in good with them, he denounced the old man as an accomplice and was the ruination of us both, since he'll never be at peace as long as I live, because one of these days I'll pick up the rifle and go to Mágina and kill him, and then let them come for me, they won't catch me alive at night or during the day, I'll hang myself before I give myself up to them."

He had spoken as if reciting an interminable litany, in a monotone, indifferent, somnambulistic, his chin rigid against his chest and his hands clasping his knees as if to roll himself into a ball or maintain the monotonal impulse of his rocking, and abruptly, without any variation in his voice announcing that he was about to fall silent, he bit his lips and picked up the rifle again, sitting up slowly against the damp hollow of the cave, fixed now on Solana with an attention sharpened by fear, as if he had recognized in him the other man, the dead man, whom he hadn't seen since that dawn in 1937, returned from the dead to pursue him to the last tunnel of his refuge, to the end of his memory or his madness. They didn't leave yet; they remained still, bending down, facing the man who no longer saw them, waiting for words they could hear, which meant nothing. "Cardeña," said Frasco, putting his hand on his shoulder, as if to wake him, "Cardeña." "Let's go," said Solana behind him, in a very quiet voice. When they left him alone, the madman Cardeña murmured slow tatters of words with his arms around his dog's neck and clawed at his pointed stiff beard with meticulous rage, as if carrying out a methodical flagellation in secret.

A
LL
I
HAVE LEFT
is the weary privilege of enumerating and writing, of calculating the precise instant when I didn't do what I should have or could have done or the way in which a gesture or word of mine could have modified the passage of time as the erasures or details added to my manuscript modify the story I imagine and recall as stripped of any intention of surviving because of it in anyone's memory as an Egyptian scribe putting the finishing touches on the figures and signs of a funeral papyrus in order to place them in a hermetically sealed chest in the darkness of a tomb. Now I know that if in the small hours of May 22, 1937, when I saw Mariana walking barefoot and as if asleep toward the door that led to the pigeon loft, I had remained a few seconds longer behind the column in the gallery that kept her from seeing me, I would have seen just a few steps away the face of her killer. Now I know that while I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and wrote in the light of dawn the final verses of my life, someone was grasping a pistol and silently climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, and my father, who had gone up to Magina in the dead of night to find an ax and come back to the farm before daybreak, realized too late that he should have obeyed the presentiment of fear he had when he saw the patrol of militiamen and was about to pull on the mule's bridle perhaps and head for another street. He shouldn't
have slept that night either while I walked around the bedroom I was going to leave the next morning and sat on the bed without finding the will to take off my glasses or untie my shoelaces and got up again as if I had heard someone calling me, only to sit down not against the pillow but facing the desk where a burning lamp opened a crack of light in the mirror in which my face was a portrait of future dark and an inert prophecy of how I would remember everything and of the past time that concentrated and accumulated there to watch over my insomnia and testify to the last boundary of successive simulations in a biography so tenaciously sustained in them that it suddenly fell apart, like the ash of a paper that did not lose its shape when transformed by fire, when it was no longer possible to use the mask of a new imposture. Not writing yet, not daring to go out to the hallway because I knew that as soon as I stepped on the chess maze of white and black tiles I would walk to the parlor and the door of the marriage bedroom and listen to Mariana's laughter and Manuel's dark breathing and the sound of bodies tirelessly entwined and clinging, I smoked quietly at the desk and looked at myself in the mirror, like an actor so possessed by the character to whom he surrenders his life, that one night, in the empty theater, after the last performance, when he takes off the false eyebrows and the wig and is cleaning off his makeup with routine skill, he discovers that the cotton soaked in alcohol is erasing the features of his true and only face behind which there is simply an oval, livid surface, as smooth and vacant as the glass in two facing mirrors. Like the photographs of Mariana or of our false shared youth that Manuel kept and classified long before the war ended with the melancholy perseverance of a caretaker in a provincial museum, hanging them on walls or placing them randomly on sideboards and on the shelves in the library according to an order as carefully established in the catalogs of his memory as they were invisible to anyone else, my face, that night, was a lucid, brutal prophecy of my past, and everything I never knew or never wanted to know gathered densely around me, at my back, in the shadows and corners of the room, in the hallways of the house, like distant relatives who return in their mourning to hold a vigil for someone who never thought of them when he was alive and about whom they had heard nothing for many years. It was four or five o'clock when I left the bedroom, afraid of running into someone in the hallway. No doubt at that hour he had already got up and harnessed the mule and was going back and forth between the stable and the single room that served as his bedroom and storeroom with the restlessness of excessively early risers: as a boy, before he called me, I would wake, alerted by fear, when I heard his footsteps on the stairs or the violent cough brought on by his first cigarette, and I would hide desperately under the top sheet, as if by remaining still and keeping my eyes closed I could stop or slow down time or dig in the warm hollow of the sheets a burrow where the bitter odor of tobacco couldn't reach or my father's footsteps climbing the stairs again to knock on my bedroom door and throw me with no excuses into the wretchedness of cold and dawn. Recently combed, inflexible, his face red from washing with icy water he had splashed on in the corral, as immune to sleep as he was to fatigue or tenderness, despising me because I walked around groggy and couldn't find the saddle for the white mare. Next to him my clumsy slowness, my physical cowardice in handling animals and tools grew worse, so that his blind resolve when he worked frightened me more than the possibility of punishment. The shape of a hoe was as brutal and intractable as the muzzle of a mule. He noted the ineptitude, the cowardice of my gestures, the absent air with which I carried out his orders, and he shook his head as if accepting an insult he never deserved.