A Manuscript of Ashes (34 page)

Dona Elvira handed him that night or afternoon or morning in May when she thought up the way Mariana was going to die. "Let me alone and leave," said Utrera, and when he turned his back as if with that gesture he could erase the presence and the accusation not yet spoken by Minaya, he saw Inés on the first landing, next to the mirror, and for a moment he stayed that way, his head turned, as if repeating the arrogance of any of his statues, and then, Inés said, he was unexpectedly defeated and moved toward the dining room, knowing that Minaya was walking behind him, and even if he could elude or deny his questions, he would not escape the interrogation he had seen in the girl's eyes, transparent and precise like the sonority of the courtyard, earlier than all reasoning or suspicion, all doubt, born of an instinctual knowledge whose sole, frightening method was divination. He lit a cigarette, poured a glass of cognac, put the bottle back on the sideboard, and when he went to sit down, Minaya was in front of him, on the other side of the same long, empty table where they'd had supper together the first night, obstinate, unreal, gathering proofs and words and courage to go on saying them while Inés, in the doorway, without even hiding, witnessed and heard so there would be nothing later on, right now, surrendered to the imperfection of forgetting. "You killed Mariana," said Minaya, he recalled, as if the crime had occurred not thirty-two years ago but last night, this very morning, as if it were Mariana's body and not Manuel's they were mourning in the library, you, it was necessary to say this in another voice that had never been his, picked up the pistol in the small hours of May 21, 1937, and prowled around the gallery, hidden behind the curtains that then, like now, covered the large windows over the courtyard, and Solana almost saw you, but he didn't see you, only a shadow or a trembling of the sheer curtains, and when Mariana began to climb the steps to the pigeon loft on the labyrinthine staircase I've climbed myself at other times, when Jacinto Solana gave up following her and shut himself in his room to write in front of the mirror the verses that twenty years after his death
called me to this city and to this house, you walked after her, the pistol in your right hand, which probably was trembling, the pistol hidden in your jacket pocket, driven by a hatred that belonged not to you but to that woman who made you her executioner and her emissary and armed your hand to make certain Mariana would never be able to take Manuel away from this house. "You're crazy," said Utrera, and he got to his feet, draining the glass of cognac, "there was shooting, they were chasing a fugitive, go back up to the pigeon loft and look out the window and you'll see that you can almost touch the next roof. There's no need for you to tell me that Doña Elvira didn't love Mariana. We all knew that. But what had she or Manuel done to me? Why would I kill her?" That's what Solana didn't know, what kept him from finding out the name of her murderer, Minaya thought when he unpacked his suitcase and untied the red ribbons around the manuscripts and searched them for the account of the lynching in the Plaza of General Orduña and the not yet exactly remembered name of Victor Vega, the antiquarian, the spy. "But Solana found the proof that the pistol had been fired from the door to the pigeon loft." It was the chosen instant, the necessary critical moment of the revelation, just one gesture and he would disarm Utrera with the trivial omnipotence of a man who lifts a foot to step on an insect and then keeps walking without even noticing the dry, light crunch of the animal's shell flattened under the sole of his shoe: it was enough to look at the old man from above, from the certainty of the truth, to examine as proofs of guilt his mouth hanging open because of stupefaction and age and the way the knot of Utreras black tie pressed like a noose into the flabby skin of his neck, Minaya's slipping his hand inside his jacket like a man looking for a cigarette and taking out a small package and a typed sheet that tore in the middle when he opened it again. Santisteban and Sons, antiquarians, firm founded in 1881, an appointment in Mágina for an accessory in a network of spies and fifth columnists destroyed in Madrid just a few hours before its messenger established contact with
you, Utrera, said Minaya, smoothing and joining together the two pieces of paper on the wood of the table and displaying the cartridge that rolled for a moment and then stopped between them, as irrevocable as the deciding card in a game. "Solana found this cartridge. He also noticed that Mariana had traces of droppings on her knees and forehead, which would have been impossible if, as they said then, she had fallen on her back at the window when the shot hit her. She fell face down, because when she died she was looking toward the door of the pigeon loft, and her killer turned her over and wiped the droppings from her nightgown and face so it would seem as if the shot had come from the street, but he forgot to pick up the cartridge, or he looked for it and didn't have time to find it. It was Solana who saw it. Solana wrote down everything. I've read his manuscripts and I've gone where he couldn't go, because he didn't see this letter. Doña Elvira kept it in her bedroom. I think it has the answer." Utrera looked at the cartridge and the two pieces of the letter without yet accepting, without understanding anything that wasn't their double threat, as if he were listening to a judge accuse him in a foreign language whose unknown syllables would condemn him more irrevocably than the meaning of what they said, without yet recognizing in the yellowed, torn paper, the letterhead with the Gothic calligraphy, and the writing in the lost letter he had been looking for throughout the entire house for thirty-two years and that now appeared before him as the face of a forgotten and distant dead man returns in dreams. "Don't make me laugh. Solanas manuscripts, his famous work of genius. After his death a squad of Falangistas came here and burned them all, just as they had done at the country house. They threw his typewriter into the garden from the conservatory window, they burned all his papers and all the books that had his signature, right there, behind you, at the foot of the palm tree. And even if something were left, didn't anyone tell you that Solana was a liar his whole life?" Again he turned to cognac, contempt, useless irony, refusing to look right at Minaya because he wasn't the one he
was seeing but the other one, the dead man, the true accuser who had usurped another life to embody in it the obstinacy of his shade, never completely driven away, and it wasn't Minaya's lucidity that made him surrender, or even the way he stood up behind him to hold the letter in front of his eyes like someone bringing a light up to a blind man's face, but the impossible evidence that speaking to him behind that voice was the voice of Jacinto Solana, dead and returned, lodged at the back of Minaya's eyes as if he were behind a mirror that allowed him to see everything and remain hidden. And that voice was also his, the voice of the secret and the guilt, so that when Minaya continued speaking, it was as if Utrera were listening to himself, free at last of the torment of simulating and lying, absolved by the proximity of punishment. "You were going to become a Franco spy," said the voice, Minaya, "you received that letter, and when you were waiting for Victor Vega to come to Magina, you learned he had been arrested and then lynched by the mob in the Plaza of General Orduna, and you looked for the letter to destroy it but couldn't find it, and probably Dona Elvira, who stole it from you, who knew as well as you that the letter could lead to your torture and a firing squad, threatened to give it to the police if you didn't kill Mariana." But as Minaya spoke, he began to hear what he himself was saying as if it were a monologue in a book that loses its energy and truth when it is recited by a mediocre actor: he didn't recognize his own brutality and couldn't stop the dirty pleasure he found in it and that incited him to prolong it, just what he had felt, he said afterward, tonight, when he was a cowardly little boy and avenged the fear and humiliations he suffered by hitting those who were weaker and more cowardly than he, and his shame and disgust impelled him to continue hitting until his childhood was over. Utrera looked at the letter and the empty bottom of his glass and moved his bald, humbled head, not affirming or denying, only allowing himself to be struck by each word as if he had lost his will or his consciousness, and it moved back and forth, held up only by his rigid neck
and the knot of his black tie, waiting for the blows still to come. It was, suddenly, like hitting a dead man, like closing his fist, expecting muscled resistance and sinking it into decayed or rotted material and pulling back and hitting again with greater fury without anything happening. "Who are you to demand an accounting from me?" said Utrera in a voice Minaya had never heard from him before, because it was the one he used to talk to himself when he was alone, when he returned from the café, at night, and sat down in his studio at the table covered with the dead leaves of newspapers stained with varnish, his useless hands hanging between his knees, "how can it matter to me now that you found that letter? Don't you see? I've spent thirty-two years paying for what I did that day, and I'll go on paying until I die, and afterward too, I suppose. Doña Elvira always says there's no pardon for anyone. Certainly it would have been better if I'd let her turn me in that day, but I was on the Plaza of General Orduña too when they took Victor Vega out of the police station and I saw what they did to him. I didn't know who he was then. I found out that night, when Medina came back from the hospital and told us his name." Driven by fear, he went up to his room immediately to burn the letter, but there was nothing in the drawer where he was sure he had put it, in the pages of a book he couldn't find either, as if the thief, when taking it, had wanted to emphasize the evidence of the robbery. He looked through his clothes, in the closet, at the bottom of each one of the drawers, under the bed, in the pages of all his books, in the notebooks of sketches he had brought from Italy, he continued searching even though he knew he wasn't going to find anything while he listened in the distance to the sonorous laughter of Mariana or Orlando and the music Manuel was playing on the piano in the dining room, and that night and the following night, when everyone was asleep, he searched with desperate, absurd tenacity on the shelves in the library, in the disorder of Manuel's desk, and when he told Minaya about his search he remembered as if it were an illumination that as he was trying to open the
only locked drawer in the desk, Jacinto Solana came into the library and stood looking at him from the doorway as if he had found him out. But Solana left without saying anything to him, or perhaps, he couldn't remember, he was the one who went out with his head bowed, murmuring an excuse, and then he went up to the parlor to continue searching, though he could not possibly have lost the letter there, and then, he said, when after so many hours of constant searching he had lost track of the time, Amalia came looking for him, long after midnight, and with the same indifferent naturalness with which she would have transmitted an invitation to have tea, she said that Doña Elvira wanted to see him, that she was waiting for him in her rooms. "She always looked at the mail, alone, before anyone else saw it. I think she still does. She looked at all the letters that came, one by one, and then she put them back on the same tray on which Amalia had brought them to her and allowed her to distribute them. She never opened any letter, but she studied the return address and the cancellation stamp with that magnifying glass she uses now to go over the administrator's accounts. She herself told me that when she heard the name of the antiquities shop on the radio, she recalled having read it earlier and immediately knew where. That woman is incapable of forgetting anything, not even now." He tapped cautiously on the half-closed door behind which he saw no light, and as he listened in the silence, waiting for a word from Doña Elvira or a sign that she really was there, he heard again from the bottom of the house and the darkness the sound of a tune that grew louder until it seemed very close to him and then began to fade away as if its impulse had been exhausted and abruptly it was extinguished, leaving behind a tense, prolonged emptiness in which the voice of Doña Elvira in front of him, asking him to come in, sounded like an omen. She was standing in the dark, next to the window, lit only by the inconstant illumination of the night, and she raised her index finger to her lips when he tried to ask her why she had called for him, and she ordered him in a quiet voice to come to the
window without making noise, pointed out to him something that moved in the shadows of the garden, beneath the fronds of the palm tree, a white blot that seemed trapped in the dark, embracing, lying down, two bodies and then a face still without features, pale, inflamed, locked together like branches in a thicket they were seeking and with which they became confused far away in the garden, behind the glass, in the silence of an aquarium. "Look at whom my son is going to marry. She's been like that for an hour, wallowing like a bitch with the other one, his best friend, he says. And they don't even hide. Why would they?" The strangest thing wasn't that he had been summoned to that place like an ambassador granted a secret audience or that he was there, at one in the morning, beside Doña Elvira, looking at the garden as if from the rear of a box in the theater; it was the silence in which the bodies moved, like avid reptiles, like fish in circular, incessant flight. Since his fear, his certainty that when he entered the dark room he was walking into the prelude to a perdition foretold by the death of Victor Vega, the two bodies rolling on the grass in the garden as if giving themselves over to being dissolved into a single shadow, and the immutable profile and waved gray hair of the woman leaning her forehead against the glass to continue spying on them, seemed to him as keenly desired and distant as the music that hadn't sounded again. "Turn on the light," Doña Elvira ordered, and she remained motionless in front of the window even after he had obeyed her, and when she finally turned around, with a gesture of tedium, she was holding a paper in her right hand, an extended envelope, exact and brief like a weapon. "As you can understand," she said to him, "I didn't have you come here only to see my shame. That woman has dishonored my son and will take him away the day after tomorrow if I can't stop her. I want you to help me. You aren't like this rabble that has invaded my house. But if you don't do as I say, one telephone call and the Assault Guard will come for you. You should have done a better job of hiding this letter from your friends in Madrid. It took Amalia less than fifteen minutes to find