A Manuscript of Ashes (36 page)

gate, when he stopped on the dusty esplanade where the road to the city began between two rows of cypresses, he saw the taxi driving away leaving behind a translucent cloud of dust and exhaust and the fleeting image as dazzling as a powder flash of two faces that looked at him through the rear window and were immediately erased in the dust, in the distance of rows of cypresses and the first houses in the city. He kept running and waved his hand and probably called to Inés asking her to stop the taxi, but his voice was inaudible and his figure became smaller as the successive shadows of cypresses multiplied in the window, and finally he stood motionless in the distance of the road, still moving his right hand, as if he were saying good-bye, powerless and vanquished, overwhelmed by fatigue, by the incredible certainty that he was partially opening the prelude to the true story when he believed he had left its conclusion behind him. And now it was only a question of waiting for him to come, to cross the fields and the last streets of Magina, walking very quickly, not seeing or hearing anything of what was happening around him, because the city, the cars, the people he bumped into on the sidewalks were moving out of his way like a sea that parts to show him the only road he should follow, running until he was out of breath and his legs had given out, advancing with no progress, no respite, beyond fatigue, as if only the devastating will to reach the plaza where he had waited so often for Inés kept him on his feet, the plaza where he was tediously condemned to look at Utreras heroic monument and the hermetic balconies of the house she had never allowed him to enter. "My uncle is sick. He doesn't want to see anybody," she would say. "I'd like to meet him." "He can't, at least not now. I'll let you know when he's better." All that was left was to wait for him with the avid, feigned, wary calm of a hunter who has laid his trap and crouches in the darkness, in the propitious thicket where the muffled movement of a body will sound and then the cold crack of the trap when it closes. "He's here," said Inés from the window when we heard the bell at the entrance. He pulled on the cord several times, but nobody answered,
and then he went into the house, into the devastated courtyard above which damp clothes hang on lines, closing off the sky and the railing of rotting wood where the women who live in the rooms along the corridor go to shout at one another or to empty buckets and basins of dirty water, where they lean in the sun, with embroidered housecoats over their shoulders, to dry their hair on Sunday mornings. It always smells of damp, of deep, dark places, of wet lime and stone and cesspool water. From the railing a dry, disheveled woman moved aside the sheets on the lines and pointed to the end of the courtyard when Minaya asked for Inés. "That Inés and her uncle live in the second yard, up top, at the back of the stairs. I saw them come in a little while ago. Now they're riding in a car, like rich people." The sheet fell back like a sopping wet curtain on the woman and her laugh, which was prolonged in other voices along the corridor, in glances of suspicion and mockery that followed Minaya from above until he disappeared into a gloomy passage that took him to another courtyard without a railing or wooden columns, a courtyard like a well, with high unwhitewashed walls, with a single window and a tree whose topmost branches stretched toward it, brushing against open shutters. "Now he's coming up," said Inés, and she moved away from the window, picking up again the needle she had just threaded and the frame where she was embroidering something, a sketch of blue flowers and birds that she looked at meditatively as she sat down in the chair she always used to sew, so absorbed in the needle and the movement of her fingers that touched the taut cloth, searching for the exact spot where she should make the next stitch, that she seemed to have forgotten that Minaya was climbing the stairs, coming closer and closer to me, to us, to the instant when his eyes would meet the eyes of a dead man and when he would hear the impossible and somehow revived voice of a manuscript he hadn't found yet, of so many words deceitfully calculated and written to trap him in a book that had existed only in his imagination, that has ended now, as if he, Minaya, had closed it just as he closed the door when he left here. But perhaps, as he climbed the stairs knowing he was approaching me, he was tempted to turn around, to close his eyes and his intelligence and his sleepless desire to know and leave for the station and Madrid as if he hadn't seen the man on crutches in the cemetery, as if not a single doubt was left that could stain or undo the history he had looked for and now possessed. He climbed up as if going down to a dark basement, he stopped in front of the only door in the corridor, abruptly I was no longer hearing his footsteps, and I guessed he was standing still behind it. "Come in, Minaya, don't stay out there," I said, "we've been expecting you for an hour."

V
ERY TALL IN THE DOORWAY
, taller and younger than I had imagined, with an air of attentive stupefaction and accepted misfortune that he probably had kept intact since his adolescence and that I suspect he'll never lose, like that way he has of looking at things with his head bowed, of assenting as if he didn't believe completely or never could accept in his innermost thoughts a destiny that he never will stop deferring to, because he was born for a kind of rebellion effected only in silence, in imaginary flight, in tenderness or despair revealed solely when the fulfillment of one's desire has become impossible. Tall and strange, obvious, cowardly, standing in the doorway, at the boundary of deception and astonishment, looking at me as if to confirm that it was I, the vague face wearing glasses in the photographs, the crippled man who walked among the graves with a black hat over his eyes, I, the dead man, the pale worn mask that sat up in bed to receive him, to extend a hand that he hesitated for a moment to shake, as if afraid I might infect him with death, that I would never let him go. He avoided my eyes, without glasses now because I had taken them off to see him better when he came close, he looked at the bed, the night table, the low ceiling in the room, he looked at Ines, sitting next to the window, leaning over the frame and the cloth she was pretending to embroider that spread out in hard white angles over her knees. Fixed on the pattern of the threads, Ines raised her right
hand, and it seemed as if she held nothing between her fingers, but then in a slender beam the light caught the tip of the needle or the taut thread that extended it, just as at times, in empty space, very close to one's eyes, the curved, long outline of a spiderweb appears and is immediately invisible again. Before he arrived, while the footsteps that were undoubtedly his were coming down the hall, Inés looked up from her needlework and kept her hand raised and motionless, holding the needle as if the tension of the thread were the only indication of how attentively she waited, and that was exactly how Minaya saw her when he came in, lost in the indifferent tranquility of a figure in a painting in which the artist hadn't wanted to depict her face so much as the artless repose of her hands resting on the frame, sharply delineated on the white cloth and in the oblique light from the window that fell on her bare, bowed neck and was quiet all around her, on the floor tiles, without illuminating the rest of the room, as if in a Stillwater where it would endure when its coppery brilliance had been extinguished on the highest bell towers in the city. "Excuse me for not getting up to receive you," I said, "but I came home from the cemetery very tired. Sit down, here, on this chair, I want to see you better. I want to know what you're like, Minaya." He didn't say anything, or he only repeated my name, which when it sounded in his voice had a hard, strange, remote quality, because I didn't name myself, the man I really am, but someone else, perhaps a hero, a shadow hidden in the manuscripts and photographs, the body Manuel saw on a marble table, the man who died at the Island of Cuba, beside the Guadalquivir, in its muddy waters, twenty-two years ago. "Solana," he repeated, incredulous, crushed by questions that devastated him, by evidence that frightened him. I recognized in him, in his large chestnut eyes that looked at me as if they hadn't yet surmounted the temporal distance from the day when I was supposed to have died to that moment when we had met, the signs of a race of reckless seekers, an excessive, never-submissive intelligence insistent on lucidity even at the cost of failure, a fervor and a will predestined to disappear impetuously into the void. I knew he was fated since birth to know much more than was good for him, to deserve exactly what never would be granted him, to not be satisfied if he ever, by chance, achieved it. I saw what Inés hadn't seen—every night when she came home I demanded that she tell me everything—what she wouldn't have been able to tell me: that by virtue of the same aberration of the blood that had made Manuel not resemble his father or his mother or inherit the slightest trace of his paternal grandfather's rough incessant energy but receive instead the delicate features, blonde hair, and blue eyes of his Aunt Cristina, in Minaya an elegance survived that had belonged to Manuel. And that resemblance was even more substantive and undeniable because in no way was it evident at first glance, and it couldn't be isolated in a single individual trait but in a certain internal attitude that could be glimpsed in his eyes, in the way he moved his hands, lit a cigarette, filled a glass, in some unlearned, almost always fleeting gesture that made its way to the intelligence of the person who knew how to see it, like those clues in old novels that allow one to discover the beautiful, high-born lady voluntarily hidden beneath rough peasant clothes. Perhaps that's why I permitted him to know I was alive, out of loyalty or gratitude to that gaze that demanded wonder and knowledge, to Manuel, who had looked at me the same way so often, to Doña Cristina, the white-haired lady with the high, anachronistic hairdo, who gave us tea on the unreal afternoons of 1920 and always asked me to read the poems her nephew had told her about so fervently, with an enthusiasm for them I was very far from feeling, comparing me to Bécquer, to Rubén Darío, to poor José Emilio Minaya, Doña Cristina's deceased husband, whose only book of verses,
Arpeggios,
dedicated to her, Manuel and I knew by heart, because those poems, which would soon feel the fury of our scorn when a magazine in Madrid allied us to Ultraism, had been the first ones we ever read. "You're still not sure," I said to him, "you still can't believe that I'm the person speaking to you, that I'm alive. Neither can I, young
man. For twenty-two years I've been dead, I've enjoyed the incredible privilege of not existing for anybody who knew me before those Civil Guards came for me, of calmly losing my memory and my life, as if I had turned into a statue or a tree. Without knowing it, they did me the biggest favor anyone could ever have done for me when they said they had killed me and smashed in the face of another man's corpse and put my glasses on him and dressed him in trousers and a shirt that weren't even mine but Manuel's, and gave him my name, maybe because the lieutenant in charge had strict orders to return to Magina with my body and didn't have the courage to confess they couldn't find it in the river or because they wanted people in Magina to take my death as a warning or a public threat. And so when I opened my eyes in the house where I was taken care of and hidden, and it took me so many hours to remember my identity and my name that I wasn't anybody anymore, I was that oblivion and that empty consciousness of the first hour after I woke, and not even the inert body and the hands touching it under the sheets belonged to me, because they were as unfamiliar and external to me as the metal of the bed and the beams in the ceiling and the constant tumult of water sounding beneath the paving stones, at times very close and at other times as remote as a memory allied to the sensation of water, of wetness, of slime, of someone drowning in dreams who opened his eyes and mouth underwater and struggled in an opaque light that gradually darkened, colored in blood, in the taste of blood and algae drenched in mud, someone who closed his eyes and remained motionless, indifferently vanquished, pushed along by the water, by the sweetness of stillness and asphyxiation. But I could not attribute that memory or dream to my life because I no longer had one, I was only that gaze or images of semidarkness and half-closed window and light that succeeded one another without coming together into a permanent shape, I was only the hand testing the body and the sheets as if they were a singular material, I was the room, immobility, the sound of water, the lethargy that had returned,
no one, and after several hours the woman came in with a cup of milk and medicines and told me my name, I still couldn't connect it to me but only to that dream of water, to the drowned man without a face, to a bottomless time of mud and reptiles that no memory could ever reach. But it wasn't simply a matter of a hallucination. It was also a premonition. Because a few days later, the man who found me in the backwater of the mill, Inés' grandfather, who had been my father's comrade-in-arms in the war with Cuba, showed me the newspaper with my photograph and name and the article about my death. 'Red bandits brought down in heroic action by the Civil Guard,' I remember it said, and beside my photograph, the one from the file they made when I went to prison, was one of Beatriz dead and one of the man who accepted death because he was in love with her and who may not even have succeeded in becoming her lover. But the photograph of the other man, the younger one, wasn't there, and the paper didn't mention him, so it was undoubtedly his body they gave my name to, bequeathing me the infinite freedom I had conceived of when I awoke and didn't know who I was, saving me from my entire life and from my failure, from the unshaved face, the frightened eyes of the unknown man in the photograph, the shame of looking at Beatriz' dead, swollen face and remembering all the years when I renounced her loyalty and tenderness with the same silent pretense I showed when I renounced my own life, always, long before I met Mariana and up until the last day, until the last night, when I saw her telling me good-bye and I feigned a little sorrow because she was leaving with the others and I didn't dare acknowledge to myself that the only thing I wanted was to be left alone as soon as possible, to close the door to the country house and go back to my bedroom, not to write or to feel safe but only to know that I was alone, with no one blackmailing me with friendship or love or obedience to those slogans in which Beatriz and Manuel and even the cynic Medina continued to believe as if they were the catechism eight years after we had lost a war we never could have won. I was a deserter
and an apostate, and it's possible I always had been one, as Beatriz said that night, but in the newspaper that certified my death, they spoke of me as if I had died in combat, I was that photograph of a man who had confronted the Civil Guard with a pistol and preferred death to surrender. You wanted a writer and a hero. There he is. You must have seen that newspaper among Manuel's papers and given it a precise place in the biography of Jacinto Solana that you expect or expected to write. But let me tell you something I left out of the blue notebook. Jacinto Solana leaves his visitors in the wine cellar of the Island of Cuba and goes back, lighting his way with a candle, to the room that faces the river. He puts out the light, smokes in bed, closes his eyes knowing he won't be able to sleep that night either, thinks about the others hiding in the wine cellar, in a damp darkness not mitigated by the moon, in close air where they smell the sweat of fatigue and fear and the odor of blood, hear the labored breathing of the wounded man. He thinks about them and the way they have of accepting persecution and death, and he knows he is thinking about Beatriz and hoping and fearing she will lift the trapdoor to the wine cellar and come up to find him, because if she came here, it wasn't to elude the encircling Civil Guard or to find a road into the sierra that will take them south but for the same reason that led her six months earlier to ask the other man to lend her his car to travel to a distant city where there was a prison and a man about to be released from it. He doesn't write, as I wanted you to suppose, he doesn't go through the pages of a recently finished book with indolent happiness to correct a comma, a word, to cross out an adjective or add one that is more precise, or crueler, he doesn't recall her obstinacy or her pride because those are two virtues he almost always has ignored. He only waits and smokes in the growing clarity of insomnia, he only remembers the way she said, before going down to the cellar, 'So it's true you're writing a book,' and her weary smile, and her twisted heels, and her fingernails scratching at the bottom of an empty can of sardines as if she weren't invulnerable to indignity either.
He's waiting for her, but he shivers when he hears the door open because Beatriz came up barefooted to his bedroom, leaving the other man in the cellar, dying of jealousy and fear beside the wounded man who pants and doesn't sleep, powerless and alone, passed over, waiting, as he did when he watched her get out of the car in the field at the prison and didn't dare go after her and was afraid she would never come back. The coward Solana puts out his cigarette and turns to the wall to pretend he's sleeping, but that doesn't erase the presence of Beatriz from his old, intact cowardice. 'You haven't changed,' she says to him, still standing, 'you do the same thing you did when we lived together. You close your eyes and breathe as if you were sleeping so I won't talk to you. Back then I'd be quiet and try to sleep, but I'm not twenty-five anymore. You don't have to keep your eyes closed. I'm not going to ask you for any explanations.' She searches out my face in the darkness, touches my hair, my lips, with those hands of categorical sweetness that recognize my skin as if more than ten years hadn't passed since they touched me the last time, as if it were April 1937 and I had just opened the letter in which Manuel and Mariana invited me or invited us to their wedding in Magina in twenty days' time. I hear the springs in the bed and feel next to me the weight of her body, her hips, now broad and solemn, the unfamiliar perfume and the slide of the silk blouse against her skin and of the stockings she folds down over her thighs, her knees, as if tearing at the silk, the long white body I haven't looked at yet that trembles when it joins mine, when it rises up over me, the blonde hair spread out over bare shoulders, the bitter, tenacious belly and the open thighs that grasp my waist as I turn over and raise my eyes to look at her and hers close in a gesture of obstinate sorrow. She comes down now, and her hair falls over her forehead and covers her lips, she moves away my hands that enclosed without emotion the restlessness of her breasts and she withdraws and comes down until she bites me on the neck, until she sinks into my groin as she pulls away the rough cloth of my trousers and
takes between her fingers and shakes and demands what she was looking for, what grows and affirms itself between her lips as far from me as the coldness of the moon and abruptly spills out in a mediocre death rattle after which there isn't anything, not even the avid desperation with which she licks and swallows and lifts up her hair, wiping her mouth, not looking at me, looking at the open window or the whitewash of the wall behind the bars of the bed. What was I going to say to her, what lie, what caress was I going to attempt when she fell back beside me and lay there quivering, when she drew up a sheet to cover her thighs and buried her face in the pillow as if it were the foul matter of solitude and silence, as if searching there as she bit into it for a weapon against tears. It was the same darkness and the same heavy silence between us, poisoned by guilt and involuntary, thorough cruelty and words unspoken, abdication into wakefulness, the torment of two bodies entwined between the same sheets and two minds as secretly divided as if they belonged to another woman and another man who never had met, who were attempting, impossibly, to sleep at the same time in two hotels at opposite ends of the earth. I watched her dress from my corner of cold shame and semidarkness just as I had witnessed her caresses, and when she adjusted her stockings and lowered her skirt, she turned her face illuminated by the end of her cigarette toward me, and she no longer seemed the same woman who a few minutes earlier had trembled humiliated and naked against my body, as if when she dressed she had recovered her pride and the serene possibility of contempt. It was then and not the next night that she said good-bye to me. Do you know what she said to me? Do you know what she had been waiting ten years to say to me? 'The only thing I've never accepted is your leaving me for a woman who was worth less than either one of us.' That was exactly what she said to me, and worst of all is that she probably was right, because Beatriz was never wrong. She was lucidity in the same way that Mariana had been the simulacrum of mystery, but in those years when I met her and fell in love with her—I'm speaking of Mari ana—I was like you: I preferred mystery even at the cost of deception, and I thought literature wasn't for illuminating the dark part of things but for supplanting them. Perhaps that was why I never could write a single one of the pages I imagined and needed as urgently as one requires air. Haven't you read my real writing from those years in Manuel's library? I was always the exact and somewhat delayed symbol of any manifesto published in Madrid, I even wrote one, in '29 or '30, with Orlando and Buñuel, but it never was published. It was called the