A Manuscript of Ashes (30 page)

 

B
UT
I
DIDN'T THINK
about him even once that night. Treacherously, while I crushed my cigarette into the marble on the night table and opened the bedroom door, resolved to swallow the indignity or shame, to approach like a wolf the region of the house where it was possible to hear Mariana's laughter and inviting racy words, peremptory commands, brief muffled shouts of exaltation and agony, chance pushed my father like a slow magnet toward his house in Magina and modulated his step to lead him to the precise place and moment in which a closed door and a pistol and an ax would cause the conspiracy of death against us all to germinate. I want to stop him now, as I write, I want him to choose another street to return to the farm or to take so long to find the ax that when he passes the house where Domingo Gonzalez was hiding the door is already knocked down and he moves to one side to keep the mule from walking on the splinters. Any small alteration in the architecture of time can or could save him and save Mariana and stop the killer who was already holding the pistol and watching her, quieting his breath against the badly joined boards of the door to the pigeon loft. He saw her from the back, leaning on the windowsill, looking at the line of the roofs and the fig trees in the courtyards above which the distant smoke of chimneys and the icy blue of dawn ascended, as if she were contemplating the sea from the deck of a ship, serene and solitary, like someone who has undertaken a journey announced in a dream, naked beneath the transparent cloth of the nightgown that outlined the shape of her hips and thighs in the faint backlight of air sifted by silence and the sound of sleeping pigeons that woke suddenly and flew into the corners and against the roof of the pigeon loft when the brief shock of gunshots resounded all through the house. I was writing at the time. Before the witness watching me in the mirror with impassive solemnity, incurably sick with literature, I had read aloud the verses I conceived of as a whispered, very long sentence as I prowled the hallway of the gallery and the marriage bedroom like a sleepwalker, and in my voice poisoned with gloom those words that several months later I would find, unfamiliar, printed, indifferent, definitively strange, like the beauty of a woman we once loved who can no longer move us, on the pages of a dirty, tattered copy of
Hora de Espana
that a soldier left on the train taking us
to the front. "Mágina," I wrote, "May 22, 1937," and when I was about to cross out a word to break the excessive rhythm of one of the lines, it was as if all the glass in the gallery and the dome had shattered under the deafening roar of a multitude of pursued men or animals. I had a premonition of sirens and airplane engines rising above the blackness cut by searchlights and the flash of a machine gun, because the instinct of fear returned me to the hideous nights of the bombing of Madrid, but behind the first explosion, in whose immediate recollection I now discerned nearby voices that moved away and a tumult of steps on the roofs and rifle shots, there was only a silence very similar to the one that is prelude to the whistle of a bomb that doesn't explode. I ran to the window and moved aside the curtains, and on the other side of the street I could see, at the edge of the eaves, a very tall shadow that bent forward as it ran and slipped on the roof tiles and finally disappeared as if it had abruptly deserted the body it was pursuing. Then nothing, silence, an empty minute like the foliage in a woods where a hunter's gun has gone off, then footsteps and voices and the weeping of a woman who was Amalia, who came into my room without knocking to tell me that Mariana was dead in the pigeon loft, and the sudden memory of Mariana walking barefoot on the cold tiles a step away from me, my shame hidden behind a corner of the gallery—the curtains were closed across the courtyard windows, and a symmetrical figure invisible to my fascination or my insomnia was stationed behind them, its hand tense on the pistol butt and its ear attentive to the sound like silk swishing of Mariana's footsteps—my stupefaction and desire grown to the now indivisible boundary of my longing to die ever since I learned what the taste of her mouth was like and felt on my fingers the wet warmth that caught at them at the top of her thighs. Some nights, in the house, during this winter, I've left the room with the circular windows, believing I was fleeing the typewriter, and only when I came to the door of the parlor and saw, when I turned on the light, the wedding portrait in which Mariana looks at me with the loyalty
of the dead from the distance of that indelible afternoon when she put on her brides dress and obliged Manuel to put on his now useless lieutenant's uniform to pose for the photographer, I understood and accepted that I was repeating the same steps I took ten years earlier in order to listen to her voice behind the closed door of the bedroom where she was turning over entwined with Manuel and breathing with the same fever that had demolished me beneath her body when she said my name and felt my face like a blind person in the perfumed, avid darkness of the garden. Like that night, with the fervor of someone arriving for an impossible appointment, I entered the parlor and looked beneath the door of the bedroom that no one has occupied since then for a line of light, a sign of the one that shone on the gleam of their bodies and was still lit when dawn came through the window, when Manuel was asleep with fatigue and happiness and Mariana, very carefully moving the arm abandoned to sleep that still held her waist, put on her nightgown and closed the shutters before going out so that the light of day would not wake Manuel. I stood still at the glass door to the parlor and the now-forgotten scent of Mariana's body was not in the air, only the discord between the immobility of places and the headlong flight of time, the persistence of the green-topped table and the bronze clock held up by Diana the Huntress and the sofa with yellow flowers, which had been there long before Mariana came to the house and perhaps will remain in the same indifferent quietude when Manuel and I have died. I stepped forward, after turning on the light, poured less than a glass of anisette from the bottle that Manuel and Medina had left on the table after turning off the radio on which they had listened to the remote music of the "Hymn to Riego" and "The International," lifted a light-tobacco cigarette from Manuel's cigarette case, and when I raised my eyes to the oval photograph, from any angle in the room Mariana was looking at me, fixed on me, as if her eyes were pursuing me in the parlor, just as they had looked for me, without a single gesture or movement of her head betraying her, while
the photographer prepared his camera and arranged the lights and Orlando and I talked quietly in the semidarkness that covered the other half of the studio. Like the delicate trace of the touch of a leaf that belonged to a tree that became extinct in another era of the world and survives forever transmuted into a fossil, or a shell's whorls imprinted on a rock very far from the sea with a precision more unalterable than that of the effigies on ancient coins, that was how the moment, when my eyes met Mariana's after an entire day of avoiding each other like two accomplices who do not want to be connected to a crime, endured thanks to chance and the magnesium flash firmer than memory and as undeniable as the bronze profile or light tunic of the Diana the Huntress that was always on the sideboard in the parlor. From there I heard the tenacious, failed panting of Manuel and the laugh and entreaty broken by a long groan in which I didn't recognize the voice of Mariana, and still I didn't move, as attentive as a spy, supported by the darkness, when the silence fell and the respiration of two exhausted bodies reached me like the sound of the sea that one hears and still doesn't see behind a line of tall dunes. I was writing in my imagination, I counted syllables and words as if I were segregating an inevitable material completely foreign to my will, a long thread of drivel and dirty literature as interminable as the flow of thought that followed me everywhere and traced the shape of my destiny and each one of my steps. Followed, pushed by literature, calculating under the remorse and jealousy and fear that someone would surprise me in the parlor, the spurious possibility of recounting that critical moment in the future book I was always on the verge of beginning, I went out to the hallway groping at the walls and furniture, and I was returning to my room when at my back the sound of a loose tile that someone was walking on made me hide behind a corner of the gallery. I saw her pass so close I could have touched her just by stretching out a hand impelled by the instinct to repeat just one caress, but her proximity was as remote and forbidden as that of the blind, like them she was surrounded by an irremediable space of solitude. Disheveled, barefoot, a recently lit cigarette between very pale lips, her face illuminated by the dawn had the mysterious intensity of a gaze that divined everything, a serene light tempered by the devastation of love and the melancholy of fatigue and knowledge, as if at the end of that night her beauty and life had been purged of every banal attribute in order to be summarized in the perfection of a few indelible features, just as a few lines drawn as if at random on the blank space of the paper had been enough for Orlando to sketch a profile of Mariana that could never be captured by photographs.

Afterward, when I saw her stretched out and dead in front of all of us, I realized that perhaps it hadn't been the light of dawn that sharpened her features but a secret divination of the death that was already calling her to the pigeon loft with a voice only she could hear. "Didn't you hear the shooting, Don Jacinto? They killed Señorita Mariana." Amalia was crying and covering her face with both hands, and I didn't understand yet or didn't accept it; I got up from the desk and shook her by the shoulders, I moved her hands away from her face and obliged her to look at me because I didn't comprehend the words blurred by weeping, and she wiped her tears and pointed upward repeating that a stray bullet, that a shot in the forehead, that Mariana was dead in front of the unshuttered window in the pigeon loft, her knees dirty with droppings and her nightgown raised to the middle of her long white thighs, her hands extended and open and her face turned to one side and partially covered by her hair. When I went up to the pigeon loft, Manuel had already closed her eyes. He was kneeling next to her and he wasn't crying; he only extended an almost firm hand in which you could barely notice the violent trembling that shook his shoulders to touch her cheeks very delicately or move away from her mouth a lock of hair that had caught on half-parted lips. He seemed to be shivering with cold next to a fire that had gone out and would never raise his head and stand and come toward us, obscurely gathered in front of the door to the pigeon loft as if
an unspoken command or the line of a circle in whose exact center Mariana's head lay prohibited our taking a single step toward her. Standing together, motionless, enclosed in a silence in which Amalia's weeping throbbed against our unified consciousness like the tearing of a wound, we separated momentarily only when Medina and the judge and a captain of the Assault Guard made their way past us to examine Mariana's body, and then immediately, as if the space they passed through had made us vulnerable, we grouped together again to close it, silently driven by the cowardly urgency that brings together a crowd surrounded by fear: Orlando, beside me, squeezing my hand without looking at me, without looking at Santiago, whose eyes were still drowsy with sleep and perhaps last night's alcohol; Utrera, who was blinking and whose respiration was very deep, broken at times as if by a stabbing pain; Dona Elvira, in perpetual mourning, staring not at Manuel or Mariana but at a place in the air that contained nothing, perhaps at the gold and blue strip of May sky that outlined the empty rectangle of the window or the roof where some guards advanced on all fours, looking for something among the broken tiles; Amalia, who cried in screams and wrung large red hands that sometimes tore at her hair or wiped her eyes and mouth in an emphatic gesture. I remember her long weeping like the wailing of a dog and the way Manuel's shoulders and knees trembled when Medina helped him to stand and brought him toward us, moving him as if he were a sleepwalker or a blind man who suddenly had been left alone on the streets of a strange city. I went up to him, said his name in a low voice, "Manuel, it's me, Solana," with desperate tenderness, useless shame, taking him by the arm with a clumsy, blind pity meant for him and myself and the never-denied connection of that mutually sworn loyalty that had begun twenty-five years earlier in the courtyard of a school where we wore blue aprons and had lasted until it was condensed finally in the name of Mariana, but he, lost and alone, didn't recognize me or didn't see me, and he continued trembling as if he were shaken by a fever that blinded him and dilated his pupils, moving his lips as if he were murmuring something, acknowledging the voice of someone calling him whom he didn't see.

 

A
S IN DREAMS,
in the pigeon loft I am a figure partly removed from myself and more opaque than the others. The pain I remember, the sudden, bitter sensation like the taste of blood in a mouth that has fallen against a damp cement floor, belong to that shadow, and I can't relive them because there are certain kinds of pain that act as anesthesia on memory. At the bottom of a great darkness, the pigeon loft illuminated by the indecent sun of the morning of May 22 that paused at Mariana's waist like the embroidered edge of the nightgown in the middle of her thighs is a cubical space suspended in the air, as far from the house and from Magina as I am from those days, as Magina is from me, high above the twilight mist and the gray-bronze of the olive trees, as are the words I write about things I've already given up recovering and naming. I'm alone, the pigeon loft has gradually and silently been emptied, like a church a few minutes after Mass is over, and on the staircase landing, behind me, Medina is talking to the captain of the Assault Guard, who leaned out the window before he left and ordered his men to wait for him in the street. "She died instantly," says Medina, and I hear the click of the metal spring that closes his case with the same unappealable certainty that he and the captain display in establishing how Mariana died. "She heard the shots and went to the window. Or she probably was already looking out and the shot hit her in the forehead before she saw anything. Don't you agree?" The captain doesn't say anything, probably he shakes his head with the sorrow of someone accepting a misfortune that has befallen others. "But let's see, Medina, you're a friend of the family, can you tell me what that woman was doing half-naked in the pigeon loft at that hour? They were married yesterday, weren't they?" I'm alone, and for the first time since I came in, I move toward the empty place where Mariana's body lay, on the thin
disturbed layer of droppings and feathers like thistle flowers or tufts of cotton. Leaning on the sill of rotting wood where Mariana may have placed her hands before she died, I look at the impassive scene, the roofs that extend like dunes toward a distance of faded blue where the sierra is outlined, almost wiped away by the glare of a sun that trembles as invisibly as hot air above the chimneys. She had gone up to the highest spot in the house to say good-bye to the city where she always knew she was an outsider and to look for the last time at the things Manuel and I had looked at since we were born, because she would have liked, she told me once, to be part of the oldest paradises in our memories, to remove from hers all the recollections of an earlier life she didn't care about, so that its large, voluntarily emptied area would be ready to receive a new memory never to be divided from ours, a territory as intimately designed for happiness as the memory of certain rooms from childhood. She never spoke to us about hers, and not even Orlando, her oldest friend and the delicate, hermetic confidant of those terrifying chasms in her heart not visible from a distance when she momentarily transformed before me into an unknown woman, knew how she lived or what she did in the years before the spring of 1933, before the precise day he found her sitting in a cafe at a table on which there was only a glass of water, with her straight hair cut like Louise Brooks' and a resolute determination to model for a painter or photographer who wouldn't rush to touch her breasts as soon as she was naked. "She died in the same way she appeared to us," I thought, looking at the same roofs and blue brightness Mariana saw before she died, as if I could find in them the key her eyes always denied me, "she died and left exactly as she came, as if she had never been here." She didn't feel anything, Medina had said, she didn't even hear the shot or know she was going to die: a sharp blow on the forehead and then darkness and forgetting as she fell on her back and her already inert body rebounded on the dirty planks. But I remembered that her knees were soiled with droppings and that on her forehead, sticking to her hair and the thin border of darker blood surrounding the wound, was a pigeon feather, so small the killer didn't notice it when he wiped her face. He also forgot to pick up the cartridge of his single bullet or perhaps he couldn't find it, driven by the need to get away. It was next to the doorsill, in the crack between two floor planks, hard and vile and hidden, like those insects that fold themselves over when they sense danger until they take on the shape of a little gray ball.