A Manuscript of Ashes (37 page)

Abyssist Manifesto,
because we wanted to destroy the deception of surrealism, and we proclaimed something and gave it the name of the Abyss. 'The limit,' said Orlando, drunk, as he wrote on a napkin in a café, Vertigo, blindness, suicide from the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper in New York,' but when Buñuel, who was going to place our manifesto in
La Gaceta Literaria,
found out that Orlando preferred men to women, he wrote me a letter warning me about what he called the perfidy of faggots and didn't want anything more to do with the Abyss. I was the most radical of all the surrealists, but hardly anybody knew it; I published a story entitled 'The Outrageous Aviator' in the
Revista de Occidente,
and before that issue appeared, I was sure I'd be famous at last, but when it came out it was as if everybody had stopped reading the
Revista de Occidente
at the same time. I carried it under my arm to all the cafés, and nobody said anything to me, as if my story and I had become invisible. But I wasn't worse than any of the others: I was exactly like them, decipherable in what they wrote or said, more discreet perhaps, or more cowardly, or poorer, or more unfortunate, because I continued to write and was publishing articles in
El Sol
and they asked me for poems for provincial magazines, and when Alberti and Maria Teresa León founded
Octubre,
they asked me to write about film, but invisibility was like an attribute of my devotion to literature, like a warning to my pride that I was writing in air and wouldn't be anything until I locked myself behind stone walls to start a book, and all I knew about it was that it would be dazzling and unique and as necessary as
those books from the past without which one cannot imagine the world. But it was always necessary to write an article in order to go on living or simply to see my name in the pages of a magazine; I always had to attend a meeting or an assembly about something and inevitably postpone until tomorrow or ten days from now the beginning of real literature and real life, and suddenly we were in the war and there was no time or moral justification left for anything that wasn't the methodical manufacture of ballads against Fascism and theater pieces that I sometimes saw produced at the front with a feeling of shame and fraud as intense and unspeakable then as what I felt when I saw myself dressed in a blue coverall among the militias, among those men who would remain there when we had left again for Madrid with our vans and loudspeakers and uniforms for pretending that we too were fighting in the war, that truth and immediate victory were as certain as the spirit of our verses or the anthems we sang at the end when we raised our fists on the wooden platform. But perhaps imposture and error were not in others but in me, in that part of myself that could not completely believe or accept anything too evident, anything that demanded faith and generosity and closed eyes. That night, before she left, Beatriz said I never had believed in the Republic or in Communism, that I hadn't betrayed anything because there never was anything I was loyal to, that if in the summer of'37 I enlisted as a soldier in the army, leaving my position at the Ministry of Propaganda, it wasn't to fight the Fascists with weapons but to find the death I didn't have the courage to give myself. She did believe, like Manuel, who died expecting the proclamation of the Third Republic. She had inflexible discernment and had drawn a line as firm as her moral integrity through everything. On one side, her love for me and her loyalty to the Communist Party. On the other, the rest of the world. Don't think I'm mocking them: I've spent my life admiring their faith and knowing it was their goodness that made me guilty. Even Orlando was capable of certainties that didn't move me, though at times I supported him in them, in
the same way I got drunk with him and admired his pronouncements about painting and then returned at dawn to my house thinking, as soon as I was alone, when the cold air gave me back some distance from his words and my own actions, that tonight, as on all other nights, I had wasted an absurd amount of time. Orlando believed as if it were an article of faith that genius was inseparable from the systematic cultivation of any excess. To console himself for not having been Rimbaud at the age of sixteen, when he went to Mass every day and wasn't named Orlando yet, he wanted to be Verlaine, Van Gogh, Gauguin, the savage, the accursed, the he-goat, the seer. But if he painted when he was drunk, he produced nothing but mediocre canvases, and the great love of his life, the fruit of the audacity that according to him I never would have if I didn't go down to hell, was a crude teenager who left him dying of despair when he went off with another man who probably paid him more. I saw him almost at the end of the war, when I went back to Madrid. He was very fat and had decayed teeth and laughed when he told me about the tricks he had used to be declared unfit when his age group was mobilized, mocking me and the uniform I wore, as if the war and the cold that winter and our inevitable defeat were deceptions in which only he had not been caught. 'My dear Solana, you still have that serious gaze, that air of rectitude. The world is collapsing like the walls of Jericho, but you're still thinking about writing a book. Look at me: I'm tired, I'm sick, I'm happy, I've saved myself from mediocrity, I've renounced painting. Death itself is the only work worthy of an artist. Remember what we were saying ten or twelve years ago: to go on writing or painting in the age of the movies is like insisting on perfecting the stagecoach when propeller planes already exist. Propeller, do you remember? We liked that word so much. It was like the name of an Ultraist goddess.' But I could write that book, you're thinking, and it doesn't matter to you if it was scattered and burned and I was the only one who had seen it complete. A book exists even if no one reads it, the perfection of a statue or a painting
endures when the lights have been turned off and no one is left in the museum, and a headless marble torso restores to the world the untouched beauty of an Aphrodite buried for two thousand years. But that book you were looking for and thought you had found never was written, or you've written it yourself since you came to Mágina, from the night Inés heard you ask about Jacinto Solana until this afternoon. Right now your disillusionment and your astonishment keep writing what I didn't write, separating unwritten pages. Do you know the impossibility of writing? Not the clumsiness, or the slowness, or the hours wasted searching for a single word that may be hidden under the others, under that white fissure in the paper, under another word that supplants it or denies it and must be erased in order to write in its place the real, the necessary, the only word. Not the effort of searching for the correct adjective, or a rhythm that is at once more fluid and more secret. I'm speaking about an interminable paralysis like that of the wounded man who after a long period of immobility wants to use his hands again or his legs and cannot manage to direct his steps or bring his fingers together with the precision needed to pick up a pencil or lift a spoon up to his mouth. Haven't you dreamed that you want to run and you sink into the ground and open your mouth to speak and can't find the air or curve your lips to form a single word? It never was easy for me to write, or maybe only until I was seventeen or eighteen years old, before I went to Madrid, when I wrote, moved by despair and innocence, in something like a state of automatic grace that came over me as soon as I touched pen and paper, without the intercession of anything or anybody. Friendship, rage against my fate, the tedium and humiliation of work never mattered to me, because I didn't allow them to interfere with my life. It was later that I degraded myself, but that part of the story doesn't matter. It's enough for you to know that until June 6, 1947, at dawn, I was a ruined rough draft of everything I had wanted to be when I was fourteen, of all the personages I invented to elude the only one to which I was condemned, of
all the books Manuel lent me and that I read at night without my father knowing. The war and prison helped me learn I couldn't be a hero or even a victim resigned to his misfortune. But in the six months I spent shut up in Manuel's house and the Island of Cuba, I discovered I wasn't a writer either. I would look at the recently oiled typewriter, the shiny Underwood that Manuel bought so I could write, the stacked blank sheets, the pen, the inkwell, the solid, clean desk in front of the circular windows, and all those things he had gathered there as if he had guessed in detail that the oldest desire of my hands was for the instruments of an unknown science. I touched the typewriter, rolled in a sheet of paper, and sat looking at it hypnotized by its empty space. I filled the pen and wrote my name or the title of my book and no more words flowed from it. The act of writing was as necessary and impossible as breathing for a drowning man. I only smoked, looking at the rectangle of paper or the plaza and the roofs of Màgina, I only smoked and drank and remained interminably immobile, with the story I couldn't write oppressing me entire and intact in my imagination like a treasure next to which I was dying of powerlessness and hunger. Sometimes, impelled by alcohol, I wrote all night, thinking that at last the spell had been broken, knowing, as I wrote, that the fervor was false, that when I woke the next morning I would despise what I had written like the memory of a turbid drunkenness. A man isn't always responsible for the first episodes of his failure, but he is for the architecture of the last circle of hell. Instead of giving up and escaping from the book and that house and Màgina, I persisted in the torment until I transformed it into the habit of a degradation that didn't even have the generosity or excuse of madness. Yesterday, when you and Inés went down to the Island ol Cuba, Frasco told you that the Civil Guard had burned all my papers. But most of those burned sheets had no writing on them, and it was I who set them on fire a few minutes before they came. As I burned all the rough drafts and all the blank sheets to deny myself the possibility of continuing to pretend to myself that
I was writing a book, it was as if Beatriz were still looking at me the way she looked at me when she got up from the bed, as if the car hadn't started yet on the esplanade of the country house and she was still making a brief gesture of farewell behind the window and on the other side of the death they were carrying with them, in the back seat, in the darkness where the wounded man shook with fever, his eyes closed. There was never a mask that could defend me from that look: she was in front of me, unmoving, not vengeful, serene, in front of the vain gesture of renouncing and burning to which I devoted myself as if to a minor suicide, which instead of saving me from indignity tied me to it at the end of my life. I heard the first shots, and before I turned out the light and looked for my pistol under the pillow, I rushed to set fire to the papers that hadn't burned yet, and I ground my foot into the ashes with the same fury I would have used to grind my foot into the pieces of a broken mirror that kept reflecting me. There was, of course, no blue notebook, no manuscripts I had forgotten in Manuel's house before I went to the Island of Cuba. There was nothing but the ashes of blank pages and a besieged and cowardly man who didn't have the time or the courage to get off a single shot. Literature did not absolve me, as you supposed, as I helped you just a little to think. The loss of my life and my name absolved me, because waking in the house where they hid me was like coming back from the dead, and when you come back you acquire the privilege of being another man or of being no one forever, which is what I chose. Don't ask me what the years were like that I spent hidden in that room in the mill, because I don't know how to remember the way one remembers and measures the time you belong to, the time of the living. There's a single static image, of immobility and semidarkness, the man who came in to see me at night and talked to me about my father, and the woman who always brought me cups of very hot broth and came in without making noise so as not to wake me. She left soon after her daughter, Ines, was born, I suppose because she was ashamed to have had the baby with a
man we never knew, and at first she wrote and sent money for the girl, but then the letters stopped coming and the grandfather sold the mill and we came to Magina, to this house, and we took Inés to that nuns' orphanage. But those details shouldn't matter to you, you came here to look for a book and a mystery and the biography of a hero. Don't look at me like that, don't think that for all this time I've been mocking your innocence and your desire to know. I invented the game, but you have been my accessory. It was you who demanded a crime that would resemble the ones in literature and an unknown or unjustly forgotten writer with the prestige of political persecution and the memorable, accursed work, damned, dispersed, exhumed by you after twenty years. I hated you only at first, when Inés came every night and told me you were asking questions about me and writing a book and looking in the library for the magazines in which I published before the war. You came to remind me that I'd had a name and a life that weren't extirpated from the world, to tell me hatefully to arise and walk with the sole, base intention of writing a doctoral dissertation about me. But on one of those sleepless night when I cursed you and asked myself why you had to come here, I conceived of the game, as if the plot of a book had suddenly occurred to me. Let's build him the labyrinth he wants, I thought, let's give him not the truth but what he supposes happened and the steps that will allow him to find the novel and discover the crime. It was enough to send Inés to a printshop to buy a tablet and a pack of paper that were old enough, and write on them in ink diluted with water, and have you find them later in appropriate places, in the marriage bedroom, in the lining of the jacket that Frasco keeps in a trunk at the country house. It was enough to add to the written words a few objects to make them more real, the cartridge, my pen, the letter that you're surely still carrying in your jacket pocket. It's true: I couldn't have invented it all, and other voices that weren't always mine have guided you. I didn't invent Mariana's death in the pigeon loft or Utrera's guilt, and the letter you found this afternoon through the mediation of Ines wasn't falsified by me either, but it's possible that I wasn't the one who found the cartridge in the pigeon loft or that it didn't come from Utrera's pistol, or that the way I discovered the murderer wasn't as exciting and literary as the one I suggested to you. Reality, like the police, tends to clarify crimes with the basest procedures that cannot matter to you or me tonight, because they're almost never useful for literature. And perhaps the history you've found is only one among several possibilities. Perhaps there were other manuscripts in the house or at the Island of Cuba, and chance kept you from finding them. It doesn't matter if a story is true or false, it only matters if you know how to tell it. If you prefer, think that this moment doesn't exist, that you didn't see me this afternoon in the cemetery or that I was nothing more than an old cripple you saw looking at a grave and then forgot like a face that passes you on the street. Now you're the owner of the book and I'm your character, Minaya. I've obeyed you too."