A Manuscript of Ashes (32 page)

They were dead, though nobody came to find them in the wine cellar for the whole day they spent there and where they would still be if on the following night, when the wounded one had already lost consciousness and was raving and groaning as he writhed on the pillows and blankets they put down for him in the backseat of the car, they managed to cross the sierra on the road Solana showed them from the Island of Cuba, the old muledrivers' route, abandoned when they paved the main highway, because they carried death with them like fugitives from a city invaded by the plague. They were dead from the precise moment that the passenger, who had not said a single word since they left Madrid, as if silence were a part of his clandestine identity, asked them to stop the car in the middle of a plain through which the highway ran limitlessly in a straight line toward a darkness whose final boundary it didn't seem they would ever reach, got out, tilting his hat over his eyes, then stopping at the ditch, his back to them, as if he were looking for something on the dark horizon, his hand in his jacket pocket where he probably had a pistol. In the rearview mirror Beatriz saw yellow headlights that grew larger until they blinded her and lit the side of the man who was still motionless and taller against the line of darkness. She heard doors open and then a distant voice, a shout, an order, and the passenger turned toward the light and began to run slipping on the gravel in the ditch, and when he was already getting into the car he was paralyzed for a moment against the window, staggering once, and then again, clutching at the edge of the door when the second shot sounded, falling back inside like a soldier wounded as he left the trenches.

Dead, Solana thought as he watched them eat, his elbow on the mantle over the fireplace, witnessing from a solitude untouched by their appearance the devastation caused by flight and fear, the persistence of failure, the clothes abused and covered with dust, the unshaven faces, the border of sweat around the collars of white shirts. Beatriz' high heels twisted when she walked, and her tall hairdo collapsed over her forehead when she bent toward the wounded man. It wasn't the failure and general rout at the end of the war, he recalled, because then the razed fields and the entire universe seemed to share in the defeat of the men who filled the highways like flocks of despair and silence, but a solitary flight, unpremeditated, absurd, the abandonment of a place conquered by fire whose survivors escaped still wearing the clothes of the fiesta they were celebrating, the light jackets and trousers for the June night, the delicate torn stockings, the perfumed handkerchiefs soaked in blood. When she finished eating, Beatriz wiped her oily mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of red on it. She smoked with her eyes closed, exhaling large mouthfuls of smoke, and the other one, her lover, the coward who loved her who hadn't even had the courage to look at Solana when he shook his hand, went up to her and stood behind her, as if he were guarding her sleep, and when he bent down to say something in her ear, he put a hand on her shoulder and extended his fingers very gently until he touched her neck. "I watched them, I knew he wasn't going to say anything to her, that anything he might say would be nothing but a pretext to get closer to her and demonstrate to me, or to his own fear of losing her, that he could talk to her in a tone of voice that only lovers use and put his hand on her shoulder and caress her neck. Then Beatriz opened her eyes and slowly moved his hand away while she looked at me, as if the immobility of her eyes on mine could wipe out the house and the persecution and the night and leave us alone at the beginning of time. Brusquely I pretended I was tending to the wounded man: I looked for water, a glass, I moistened his lips and when I looked at Beatriz again, her eyes no longer searched for mine and the other one's hands lay white and useless on the back of the chair where she was leaning."

He wrote again that night, when he lowered the trapdoor to the wine cellar and recovered as if it were a gift the feeling or appearance of his solitude in the house, he closed all the shutters on the ground floor and checked the chamber and the safety on his pistol and put it on the table while he wrote in the blue notebook as if even after finishing his book he couldn't elude the instinct of literature, Minaya thought, as if things didn't happen completely until he had transmuted them into words that didn't crave the future or the light, only the unmitigated intensity of their own poison, hard words written for oblivion and the fire. He wrote past dawn, and the next night, when the others left, even before the car drove away along the road to the sierra, he closed the outside door of the house and returned to the pen and the blue notebook to recount their departure, but this time he didn't even have time to finish a page, and the last words he managed to write were the prelude to his own death. He heard dogs barking and when he went to the window, he saw the military capes moving, cautiously climbing the embankment, the cold gleam of the moon on the patent leather of the three-cornered hats. That's exactly how Minaya imagined him: unexpectedly liberated from fear and literature, he thought about the others, about Beatriz' gaze, about her pride without supplication and her loyalty firmer than disenchantment and betrayal. Beyond the last line in the blue notebook, in a space free of reality and words, not recalled by any memory, Minaya wanted to contrive the ambiguous figure of a hero: Solana still hears the engine moving away and estimates that Beatriz will press harder on the accelerator when she hears the first shots behind her. While he stays at the window shooting at the pursuers, the car will enter the sierra and gain ten minutes or an hour or an entire day of urgent freedom. Calmly he records the proximity of the shadows that come along the river and fan out on the red clay of the embankment to surround the house, and then, just as he has closed the notebook and replaced the cap on the pen, he puts out the candle, takes the safety off the pistol, leans partially out the window, still protected by the darkness, waiting until the Guards have come so close he can reach them with his bullets.

I am a distant fire and a far-off sword.

—C
ERVANTES,
Don Quixote,
I, XIV

O
NE BY ONE THE CAPSULES
, in the palm of the right hand, between the fingers, rolling between thumb and index finger, small pink bullets that will not wound the temple, that after each sip of water disintegrate in the dark acids of the stomach and the suicidal blood that beats so weakly in eyelids and wrists where hard veins trace a ridge like a scar on yellow flesh, gradual coins for counting and crossing off each minute and hour of the last night, for acquiring not death, which even now is inconceivable and abstract, but an avid pacifying somnolence of thought and of fatigue, a sweetness similar to that of the traveler who arrives very late at the hotel in a distant city where no one is expecting him and, overcome by sleep, slips between cold strange sheets that become hospitable in response to the heat of his body and keep him warm when he falls asleep and loses his hold on time, reason, memory, like the darkness in a childhood bedroom. The capsules on the night table, the glass of water, the cigarettes, the exact curve of the pillow where the back of the neck rests without sinking down completely, which avoids the horizontality of a dead body or a sick person and allows the effortless contemplation of the open window, on the right side of the room, of the door closed so cautiously that nobody will open it now, of one's own body whose shape is erased toward the foot of the bed like a dune eroded by the wind. They are made of a glossy material that fingernails cannot pierce,
neutral to the palate, smooth and neutral in the throat, slowly perforated and worn away, like a coin in a cup of acid, when it reaches the stomach and dissolves there, in that lugubrious unknown cavity that forms part of me as surely as my hands or face, their dose of poison and longed-for lethargy, their sweetness of a hand outstretched in the darkness that brushes the eyelids and grants them sleep as if returning sight to the eyes of a blind man. Only the person who chooses the manner and hour of his own death acquires in exchange the magnificent right to stop time. He uproots wrinkles and numbers, leaves the double-inverted receptacle of the hourglass empty, spills on the ground the water of the clepsydra as if he were knocking over a glass of wine. What remains then is the pure, strange shape of the glass, the blank sphere, a wafer or circle of paper, the interminable immobile duration of a stopped watch on the wrist of a dead man or a stopped clock in the living room of a vacant house. There is nothing but sterile time between two heartbeats, between a capsule and a sip of water, between two instants as stripped of their own substance as the extension of a desert, but he, Minaya, doesn't know this, and perhaps never will know it, because he still imagines that time is made to the measure of his desire, or the negation of his desire and he scrutinizes clocks like an astrologer trying to determine the urgent shape of his future in them. In the Mágina station he looks at the large clock hanging from the metal beams of the entrance canopy, walks toward the end of the platform, toward the red lights and the night where the rails disappear, he asks what time the mail train from Madrid will arrive, he confirms on his wristwatch the truth of the voracious advance toward midnight indicated by the hands on the great yellow sphere hanging like a moon above his head. Twelve o'clock, very soon, bells in the Plaza of General Orduña, in the parlor, in the library where the scent of lilies and funeral flowers still lingers, the train that now hugs the bank of the Guadalquivir and blows its whistle when it begins to climb the slope to Mágina, its windows lit and fleeting among the olive trees and its long
lead-colored cars, slow and nocturnal like the trains that took men toward a horizon dazzled by the brilliance of a battle that rumbled in the air and over the earth like a distant storm. Passively he waits for the arrival of the train that will carry him away from Magina and the impossible appearance of Inés, just as he waited for her on other occasions, pretending that he was organizing books in the library or smoking in the dark in his bedroom, without his will ever doing anything to fulfill or hasten his desire, merely paralyzing him in the wait, in the painful consciousness of each minute that passed without her, of each footstep or creak in the silence of the house that announced the arrival of Inés only to unscrupulously prove it false the more certain he was that she was near. And to ease the pain he has imposed on himself a pretense of courage, like a betrayed lover who cultivates humiliation and rancor, wanting to exact from them a spirited will his failed pride denies him, and he looks at the clock and grips his suitcase, telling himself almost aloud that he hopes the train comes soon, because when he gets on and settles into his seat and closes his eyes and the station begins to slip away on the other side of the window through which he swears not to look, the definitive impossibility of searching again for Inés or continuing to wait for her will extinguish in a single blow, he supposes, the slow torture of uncertainty. But the train will probably arrive late, as it does every night, and the fierce, instantaneous, already vanquished intention of leaving disintegrates like a gesture of smoke in the prolonged wait, and Minaya crosses the empty lobby very much to the rear of his desire that precedes him and goes out of the station like a messenger moving too quickly, and he stops at the door, near the line of taxis also waiting for the train's arrival, and leaning against the jamb he puts down his suitcase and smokes melancholically, looking at the double row of linden trees where a shadow approaches to which he assigns the features and walk of Inés until proximity and the harsh white light of the street lamps shatter his illusion. But this is how he always has waited, long before coming to Magina and meeting Inés, because waiting
is perhaps the only way in which he conceives of the substance of time, not as a quality added on to his desires but as an attribute of his soul, like his intelligence or his propensity for solitude and tenderness, and he doesn't know he will go on waiting when he gets onto the train and when he leaves Atocha Station at seven in the morning, numb with cold, somnambulistic, and walks again through the vast city that dawn and absence have made unfamiliar. That was how he waited this afternoon, in the bedroom, as he packed his clothes and books and Jacinto Solana's manuscripts and put on in front of the mirror the black tie someone, Utrera or Medina, had lent him for Manuel's funeral, in this way postponing the moment of going down to the library to confront the faces that undoubtedly were going to accuse him, and the dead transfigured face that by now resembled an inexact mask not of Manuel but of any of the dead men Minaya had seen since his childhood, the double mask of his parents, beneath the glass of their coffins, wrapped in velvet and hospital bandages and absorbent cotton, the dripping, destroyed face on a marble table, the imagined funeral mask of Jacinto Solana. Like inglorious trophies, he kept at the bottom of his suitcase the manuscripts and the blue notebook, the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a long pink ribbon with which Ines sometimes tied back her hair and that he untied last night as he kissed her, but before closing the suitcase he moved aside the books and the shirts she had ironed and folded and picked up the cartridge, then kept it, after a moment of indecision, with the relieved gesture of someone who discovers as he's walking out that he's almost forgotten his house key. He thought, he told me, when he had locked the suitcase and examined with cowardly discretion the knot in his tie and the meticulously drawn part in his damp hair, that he had no real right to withdraw into nostalgia, that never, not even in the days when his conversations with Manuel and his usual dealings with books and writing on the file cards gave him the placid sensation of living a life permanently sustained by customs more faithful than exaltation or happiness,
so that he could no longer imagine himself living in any city other than Magina or dedicated to any work other than cataloguing the library, never had he personally ceased being a guest for whom the same standard of hospitality that had welcomed him into the house would end one day by demanding that he leave. The balcony shutters were opened wide, and the sound of the water that fell and rose over the basin of the fountain and the scent of the acacias that recently had bloomed came in like a damp breeze to add to the present and to the proximity of the journey the delicate, dead weight of a sorrow older than his consciousness and more deadly than his memories. The darkly closed suitcase on the bed gave the entire bedroom the gloomy, stripped appearance of a hotel room. As in them, as at that critical moment when the traveler, ready to leave, returns to check he hasn't forgotten anything and once more opens empty drawers and doors to the closet where a solitary hanger moves back and forth, Minaya understood that the city and the house had never accepted him as one of their own, because even before he left, the furniture, the cool odor of the wood and the sheets, the mirror where he once saw Inés coming toward him naked and embracing him from the back, were denying him like suddenly disloyal accomplices and hurrying to erase every proof or trace of the time he had spent among them and to pretend they had recovered the same impassive hostility with which they had received him the first time he entered the bedroom, turning their backs on him as they did that afternoon when he asked them for one final sign not of hospitality but of recognition and farewell. Because downstairs, in the library, the others, the true inhabitants of the house, surrounded Manuel's coffin and murmured prayers or memories or sad judgments on the brevity of life or deadly diseases of the heart, taking refuge in the voluntary semidarkness, waiting for him to arrive in order to receive him with their planned silence of reproval, asking themselves what he was doing, why he hadn't come down yet, why last night, when Medina arrived, he had locked himself in his bedroom and not come out again
until very late in the morning, recently showered and silent, as if mourning had nothing to do with him or he didn't know how to respect the details of its ceremony. Utrera knows, he feared, Utrera saw the pink ribbon on the night table and smelled the traces and sweat of bodies, and now he accuses us in a quiet voice with his offended lucidity, with his rancor of an old roué who reproves and condemns what he cannot achieve. Minaya went out to the parlor, because he never left his bedroom through the door that opened to the hallway, and at that moment when the urgency of deciding on an action had removed the image of Inés from his thoughts, he saw her in profile, wearing her mourning blouse, standing in the gallery as if she were lost at a crossroads, and when he tried to reach her, he was alone in the hallway and Inés' face was like those flashes in the dark that one glimpses with closed eyes. He ran toward the corner where she had disappeared and continued to hear her footsteps in the empty rooms and on the staircases where he had walked only once, on the February afternoon when he had gone up to Dona Elvira's rooms. Sweet, impossible Inés, a spy, thorn of persecution, alibi for all desire and all baseness. When he thought he was lost in the successive rooms as alike as a set of mirrors, he found the way he was looking for when he recognized on a chest the Baby Jesus that raised a pale plaster hand beneath a glass bell, pointing an index finger at the hidden turning and staircase that led to the bedroom where Dona Elvira had withdrawn twenty-two years earlier in order not to go on witnessing the decadence of the world and the obstinate failure of her son. But now the disorder from whose menace she had fled in June 1947 like a deposed king who chooses exile without abdicating his crown and his pride, seemed, like an invader, to have broken through the walls and locked doors she had raised against it, which had protected her for twenty-two years, because when Minaya entered the bedroom illuminated by the large windows of the conservatory, he saw before him a place as unfamiliar as those streets that at dawn seemed flattened by a night bombing and one couldn't recognize
a single derail of what had been until a few minutes before the long sound of the sirens and the incessant, frightening, earsplitting noise of enemy planes had begun. Just like then, just like those women wrapped in black kerchiefs who searched through the rubble and perhaps recovered an absurdly undamaged family portrait or a crib with twisted bars, Inés, kneeling in the midst of the disaster, deliberately put in order old dresses ripped or trampled in a rage by Dona Elvira after she had overturned chests that may have occupied the same place since the early years of the century, she gathered up letters and postcards, scores of melancholy sonatas and habaneras that Dona Elvira must have danced to in the time of her inconceivable youth, carnival masks, embroidered table linen, long silk gloves that lay on rumpled bedclothes like amputated hands, periodicals about atrocious crimes, old society magazines with lithographs on glossy paper shredded by eager scissors, solemn accounts books on which Dona Elvira had smashed a cosmetics jar and then ground it with her foot. "She began this morning," said Inés, as if stating the effects of a natural catastrophe whose violence cannot be attributed to anyone, "she came here when the undertakers took Don Manuel's body down to the library, and she didn't want any of us to help her. She locked herself in with a key and began to knock everything over and break it and empty all the drawers." Without tears, without a single gesture of despair or evident madness, as methodically determined to create disorder around her as the general of an army who administers and calculates the permanent devastation of a conquered city and sows salt in the pits where its foundations had been. "She called us a little while ago. She kept ringing the bell until Amalia and I got here. She had already combed her hair and dressed for the funeral, and it looked as if she had been crying, but I didn't see any tears, and her whole face was covered with powder." Inés was dressed in mourning too, and the black blouse and tight skirt prematurely added to her body a part of the slim, grave plenitude it would achieve in a few years and that now only some of her gestures were a prelude
to, an unknown future body that these hands guessed at in caresses like prophecies and will no longer touch, and that Minaya is ignorant of, because he hasn't learned yet to look at bodies in time, which is the only light that reveals their true nature, the ones an eye and an instant cannot discover. Awkward and cowardly, as he was in the early days, humiliated by the feeling of having lost Inés as inexplicably as she granted him her tenderness, he could only manage to say to her, with a coldness he supposed infected by the coldness he detected in her, a few words that made her feel, him as well, strange and inert, forsaker of the memory of so many nights and days coldly thrown into the acceptance of forgetting, an accomplice not of guilt but of repentance, of simulation, of vile glances fixed on the ground. As it had been the first time he saw her, Inés wore her hair gathered at the back of her neck, smooth and tight at her temples, so that when she completely revealed the shape of her cheeks and forehead, she purified the gracefulness of her profile, but a single chestnut ringlet, translucent, almost blonde, loosened at random when she bent over to pick something up, fell on her face and almost brushed her lips, curled and light like a ribbon of smoke that Minaya would have wanted to touch and undo with his fingers as secretly as at another time he had moved aside the sheets covering Inés' bare breasts and belly and thighs to watch her sleep. Indistinctly he asked her to let him help, and when she moved away as if to avoid a caress she perhaps desired and that Minaya never would have dared to initiate, she dropped the handful of old postcards she had been picking up. White beach resorts with ladies in tall hats seated around tables, casinos beside a sea of pink waves and heraldic views of San Sebastián in hand-tinted twilights, with teams of oxen that removed from the beach the tilting cabanas of the bathers, an illustrated card commemorating the first communion of the boy Manuel Santos Crivelli, celebrated in the parish church of Santa Maria, in Mágina, May 16, 1912, a letter, suddenly, with a republican stamp, addressed to Don Eugenio Utrera Beltrán on May 12, 1937. "Did you notice this letter?"