A Manuscript of Ashes (35 page)

it." Now she had a pistol in her hand, flat, silvery, with an ivory handle, small and cold and gleaming in the light like a razor. She handed it to him as she tucked the letter under the wristband of her black velvet dress, and when he took it and held it as if he didn't know yet how to handle it, she turned her back and looked down again at the darkness in the garden, though no one was there. Later there was only insomnia and the icy touch and memory of the pistol, its shape calculated for secrets and death, its invitation to suicide, the destroyed mouth and coagulated blood on Victor Vega's lips, his ruined body in the sun beside the arcades on the Plaza of General Orduna, the blindfold over his eyes and his hands tied and the bite of the fire that would throw him against a wall riddled by gunshots or a ditch that was like a pit. "But I knew I was incapable of killing her," he said, "and I was determined to kill myself, but I went out to the hallway thinking that before noon she and Manuel would have left and then I saw her pass by, as close as you are now, and I swear that if I followed her, it wasn't because I intended to kill her, it was as if another man were climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, because I didn't care anymore about being killed, how could I care if I was already dead?" Without will, without any purpose at all, he kept climbing up to the pigeon loft, conscious of each stair he stepped on, very slowly, without hearing the sound of his own footsteps, as if the design he was obeying had stripped him of physical solidity and was pushing him up the stairs like an ocean swell that picks up a man who before going under when it knocks him down looks at the shore growing more and more distant and knows he is going to drown. Like a magnet the pistol clutched in his hand led him on, the butt wet with perspiration, the short barrel and the trigger that his fingers groped when he reached the top landing afraid Mariana could hear through the closed door the noise of his breathing, but that wasn't what he was hearing, that monotonous sound shaken by the beating of his heart came not from his throat but from the interior of the pigeon loft, it was the murmur of the sleeping pigeons. Perhaps Mariana
believed that Manuel had wakened and had come up to find her, because when she moved away from the window, she had an unsurprised smile on her lips, as if she had been pretending not to hear the footsteps in order to allow Manuel the delicate opportunity of coming up to her silently and covering her eyes as he embraced her. "Utrera," she said, "its you," in that tone of fatigued indifference she always used to resign herself to the arrival of someone she didn't want to see, and she hadn't seen the pistol yet or understood why he was looking at her that way, so fixedly, as if reproving her presence in the pigeon loft or examining with obscene dissimulation the folds of her nightgown, trying to guess at the lines of her naked body beneath the cloth, the dark shadow of her belly. "Some men with rifles are running along the roofs. It seems they're chasing somebody." Before recognizing what was shining in the hand that rose and rigidly pointed at her and aimed at her eyes wide with fright, Mariana heard shouts and the clatter of feet running on tiles on the other side of the lane, and perhaps a first shot that was still not the one of her death and to which Utrera's pistol responded like an echo, a sudden raging blade above his index finger, then finally still in his hand, pointing now at the smoke and the empty window while his single shot was dispersed in the doubled pandemonium of pigeons and incessant bullets like a hailstorm on the roofs. He turned Mariana over, he said, and wiped her mouth, moving her hair away from her face, her open eyes, in which there remained as if changed into glass the final astonishment of the pistol and her death. Then, when he stood up, wiping the droppings from his knees, he saw the man hiding behind the chimney opposite the window. Barefoot, his feet bleeding, wearing an undershirt, unshaven, as if he had jumped out of bed when they came for him, panting, his mouth wide open, so close Utrera could see the trembling of his chest beneath the dirty undershirt and the hunted, animal sound of his respiration. For a moment, one he would remember forever, they looked at each other, recognizing the other man in the solitude of their fear and their plea for
a respite or an impossible refuge, as if they had passed each other in a corridor reserved for those condemned to death. "His name is Domingo González," said Utrera, standing up, finishing in one swallow the glass he hadn't touched while he spoke. "After the war I found out that he saved himself by hiding in a barn, under a pile of straw. From time to time we've passed on the street, but he doesn't remember me, or at least he behaves as if he doesn't know me." He crushed the cigarette he had just lit in the ashtray and left the empty glass on the table, very close to the torn letter and useless cartridge, wiping his lips damp with cognac as carefully as someone cleaning the blood from a small wound. He wouldn't recognize himself either if he could see himself as he was then, Minaya thought, looking without pity or hatred at the mourning button in his lapel and the black band that hung half unstitched from his right sleeve, and I can't even imagine what he's told me or remember what I know in order to call him murderer, because that word, like the crime and the man who committed it, perhaps no longer refer to him, because no one can continue to sustain sorrow or guilt or merely memory after thirty-two years. Minaya suddenly perceived in the dining room this afternoon the immense weight of reality and the ignominy of the guesses that until a few minutes before had exalted him, and he immediately renounced his lucidity like a lover who, when he learns the day will come when his love dies, censures that future treachery with more fury than his present misfortune. He, Minaya, had rescued a book and explained a crime, he maintained intact the power to accuse, to continue asking, to grant not pardon but silence, or to tell what he knew and throw the murderer and his accomplice into a shame more sordid than the old age in which they survived as in an exile with no possible pardon. "Don't look at me like that," said Utrera from the door he had already begun to open, closing it again, "you can't harm me. I have nothing to lose, because I don't have anything. When Doña Elvira dies and you inherit this house, you can throw me out, but by then I'll probably be dead too. I swear that's the
only thing I want in this world." Minaya was left alone, Inés said, sitting in the dining room at the long empty table like the client in a hotel who arrives too late for supper and waits in vain for someone to come and serve him, staring with inert fixity, a cigarette between his fingers, at the cartridge and the letter or at the polished wood where the oblique sun of the April afternoon was shining, cross-sectioned by the glass in the white French doors to the garden as if by a lattice window. Inés came to tell him that the undertakers men had just arrived, with their blue dusters, with their black cars recently parked beneath the acacias on the plaza, with their disrespectful haste that reminded Minaya, when he went out to the courtyard and saw them open the library and house doors wide to carry out the coffin that was closed now, of the afternoon when other men like them emptied his parents' bedroom with pulleys and ropes and loaded their furniture into a truck from which he never saw it emerge again. They put out the candles, passed the candelabras from one to the other and carried them by the armful to the back of a car, took down the wreaths of flowers and the black velvet cloth that had covered the platform where the coffin had been, and then, when they were gone, a great empty space remained in the center of the library, deserted now and still in shadow, like a stage after the last show, and it was in that spot without anything—right there, in another time, barely a week before, where the desk had been, the filing cabinet, the habit of taking notes on the books and waiting for Inés—where Minaya became aware of his own future absence, as irreparable and certain as Manuel's. "Let's go," said Medina beside him, "they're waiting for us." The hearse and the two taxis that would take them to the cemetery were already leaving when he and Medina went outside. He still had to come back after the funeral and burial to pick up his bag, but it seemed to him as he leaned back in the taxi, while the scent of the acacias and the entire plaza was being left behind, that he was saying good-bye forever not only to the house that was closed now and deserted but also to Inés and everyone who had lived there, to a part of his
life that very soon would no longer belong to him, inaccessible to returning and to memory, because remembering and going back, he doesn't know yet, are exercises as useless as demanding explanations from a mirror of the face that an hour or a day or thirty years ago had looked into it. He'll come back, no doubt, just as he came back tonight, when it was almost eleven o'clock, hurrying to reach the station on time, crossing the courtyard, I imagine, climbing the illuminated staircase without seeing anyone, like the last passenger on a great ship that is beginning to sink but whose recently abandoned salons have not yet been invaded by the water already flooding the holds, fearing that Dona Elvira or Utrera will appear before him around a corner or in the parlor to subject him to the hateful discipline of saying good-bye, wondering why there is no one anywhere and why all the lights in the house are on. As a last privilege I want to imagine it like this as he leaves it, bright and empty, white in the dark of the plaza as if in the middle of the ocean, because now that Manuel is dead and the book is finished, there is no one left who deserves to live in it. Here, not in the cemetery and even less in the station, is where the end should be, in the illuminated balconies, the circular windows on the top floor, the muffled flash of that light on the rim of the fountain, on the man who from the end of the lane turns to look at it and then grasps the handle of his suitcase and walks toward the Plaza of General Orduna as if assaulting the shadows, with his head bowed, with the posthumous courage of fugitives. I invented the game, I set the rules, I arranged the end, calculating the steps, the successive squares, the equilibrium between intelligence and the blows of chance, and when I did that I shaped for Minaya a face and a probable destiny. Now he is fulfilling it, in the station, now he obeys me and, tall and alone, waits for me as he obeyed and waited in the cemetery while gravediggers moved aside the stone where Manuel's name had not yet been inscribed and Dona Elvira, supported by Utrera and Teresa, bent down to pick up a handful of earth that she would then toss on the coffin with a slow, rigid
gesture. He was taller than any of them, and his stature and his youth seemed the visible attributes of his status as stranger, the proof that in spite of the dark suit, the black tie, the summary expression of grief, he did not belong to the group of people in mourning who had gathered around the grave and murmured prayers that in the distance of the afternoon and the empty cemetery sounded like the buzz of insects. Old distant faces, unrecognizable, enervated by heat and oppressive mourning clothes, surrounded by crosses, by the yellow brilliance of the hedge mustard flowers that erased the graves and the paths that separated them and wound around their feet like a swamp of roots. Of all of them, only Medina kept himself partially free of decrepitude, fat and impassive, his arms folded, his hair still black, looking at the men sliding the coffin between rough ropes into the hole of the grave with the composed attention he would bring to looking at a patient who had just died. But Inés didn't look at the grave, Minaya noticed, although she kept her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap and she moved her lips, pretending to repeat the prayers of the others. Only he, who spied on her and her gestures looking for a sign that would allow him to recognize in her the same woman who had embraced him last night, not to get her back but in order not to lose the right to tell himself at least that certain things now impossible had happened to him, realized that Inés had secretively moved her eyes toward a corner of the cemetery, toward a mausoleum shaded by cypresses beside which a man seemed to pray as he leaned on a cripple's crutches. The brim of his hat covered his face, and his head sank between his shoulders, exaggeratedly raised by the crutches. Inés noticed Minaya's questioning and she stared fixedly again at the ground and pretended to pray, but her eyes beneath long lashes slid slowly beyond the still-open grave, over the hedge flowers, as if all of her and not only her gaze were fleeing, just as she did when Minaya was talking to her and she stopped hearing him and smiled at him so he couldn't follow her in her flight or decipher a thought in which she was alone. Taut with the weight of the coffin,
the ropes were lowered, rubbing against the sharp marble edges, and one of the men holding them stopped to wipe his brow, interrupting for a single second the voices that were praying. In that fraction of silence, Inés raised her head and looked openly at the man on crutches. He was looking at them too, motionless, leaning on the crutches as if they were a windowsill he had reached using the last of his strength, and although Minaya couldn't see his face, he imagined an indecent curiosity in those eyes covered by shadow and veiled by distance, shining in a sudden reflection of glass when the man began to walk and came out from the cypresses, awkward and very slow, ruined and tenacious between the crutches that preceded him, testing the ground as if looking for hidden graves beneath the hedge flowers. The grave diggers retrieved the ropes, and Doña Elvira took a few steps forward and began to drop earth on the now-invisible coffin without completely opening her hands, as if waiting for someone to capture her gesture in a photograph. The man walked more and more slowly toward the metal grillwork of the cemetery gate, hugging an adobe wall, disappearing at times behind a mausoleum and then reappearing more worn and more awkward, more impossibly determined to reach the exit. He was very close to it when he seemed to give up walking and leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and now Inés, who could no longer look at him without turning her head, said something to Amalia that Minaya couldn't hear, crossed herself at the grave, and with the same haste moved away from it to go toward the man, who was no longer leaning against the wall. Before he followed her without waiting for the grave diggers to adjust the stone, Minaya remembered that when he came to the cemetery there was a taxi parked next to the gate. He heard the engine starting up and he ran faster, jumping over the graves and the hedge flowers, his heart pounding in his chest as violently as when he had run that winter from the guards along the avenues of Madrid, no longer asking himself what the others would think or who the man on crutches was, but when he reached the cemetery