A Manuscript of Ashes (10 page)

"Which means you should pay no attention to Utrera," said Manuel, with the sad irony he always used when he talked to Minaya about his family, "when he recounts the merits of our ancestors. All those paintings in the courtyard and the gallery were bought by my grandfather, your great-grandfather, from the same penniless aristocrats who sold him their country estates."

As if ashamed of having been born where he was born and bearing the name he bore, but not daring to reveal his shame completely or to cultivate his disdain openly, for he was not unaware that only the house and the name connected to it had saved him from being shot and from the obligation for courage, demanding from him instead a passive loyalty that, as he grew older, stopped being the never-demolished boundary line and the exact measure of his resignation and failure to become one of his habits. Who then was the man with the haughty, almost heroic bearing in the wedding photo graph, the one who was promoted to lieutenant for bravery in action after he jumped undefended into an enemy trench with no help other than a pistol torn from a corpse and a group of frightened militiamen and who shot to death those who were firing an Italian machine gun at them, where did he look for and find the valor needed to marry Mariana, abandoning without the slightest misgiving the girl in whose languid company he had spent a six-year engagement with the always alert indulgence of Dona Elvira, who took this sudden fit of her son's as a personal insult and never forgave him for it?

"And not only that," Medina recalled, "he was also capable of finding a position in the Spanish embassy in Paris, I suppose through the mediation of Solana, and he had everything prepared for going there the day after his wedding, imagine, the same man who had come home from Madrid without finishing his studies in order not to oppose his mother. Which means that if Mariana had not died the way she died, your uncle would now be a member of the republican government-in-exile, or something like it."

Many times in the course of the two years granted him to survive the slow surrender of his will, Manuel looked at his wedding photograph and felt he wasn't the man who appeared in it, not because he didn't believe he had once possessed the spirit or the madness needed to confront his mother and overcome the fear that made him vomit before an attack at the front but because he had never thought he deserved Mariana's blind tenderness and proferred body, and he looked at her photographs and Orlando's drawing with the same unlimited, incredulous devotion and the same astonishment with which he looked at her and he saw himself in the bedroom mirrors when he finally had her white and naked in his arms. It was Solana, declared Magina or that part of Magina where unconquered pride survived, he was the one who made him a Red and encouraged him to become involved with that slut, said aggrieved voices in the salon where the embroidered table linen and silver table service were still displayed, what was going to be the dowry of the bride so abruptly abandoned, relics now of her melancholy destiny. And without saying anything to her, even though she was preparing the wedding dress and my cousin knew it, Minaya's father recounted many years later, because Mariana was dead and the war that had brought her to Màgina was over, but her pride and imperious capacity for contempt were still intact, perhaps even ennobled, like the statue of General Orduna, by indications of heroism and ignominy.

"And don't think that girl was a scarecrow because she belonged to one of the best families in Magina, almost as respectable as ours. Ask your mother, who knew her very well. Of course in the end she was lucky and recovered from my cousin's betrayal. She married, and it was a very good match, a captain in the Regular Army."

Inexhaustible, intact, and useless, like Magina's light and its statues with Greek profiles, rancor is the only thing they save or that saves them from oblivion and strengthens the persistence of pride over the void. Each morning, attended by Teresa and Amalia, who climbs the stairs very slowly and holds the railing and the walls and breathlessly reaches the top floor of the house, Dona Elvira dresses ceremoniously before a mirror and combs her white hair waved according to the by-now blurred style of 1930, at times permitting herself a drop of perfume at her wrists and on her neck and a light shadow of pink powder on her cheeks. How is my son, she asks without looking at anyone or expecting anyone to answer, directing her gaze over the heads of the two women moving around her, because she was taught that this was how a lady ought to address her servants, remind Inés that today is Thursday and she has to bring me the magazines. Has the administrator called? Have someone let him know. I want to settle the olive accounts with him before I forget about it and he cheats me. Dressed and perfumed as if she were going out, though she does that only early in the morning on Good Friday, Dona Elvira contemplates her own firm body in the mirror and smooths with her index finger the deleted line of her eyebrows.

"Teresa, when you've made the bed, water the geraniums. Don't you see they're withering?"

Still in front of the mirror, without turning around or raising her voice, Doña Elvira sees Teresa pulling the sheets and quilt from the large double bed where she still sleeps forty years after becoming a widow, and she suddenly notices, with secret satisfaction, how much the maid who was only a girl when she entered her service has aged. The cold yellow sun of February enters obliquely through the large window to the terrace, leaving on the tiles a damp stain of light, sifted down like pollen, which surrounds things without ever touching them and slides over to the doorway where Amalia, who almost doesn't see it, is standing and waiting.

"Does the señora want anything else?"

"Nothing, Amalia. Tell Inés she can bring me the paper and my breakfast now."

Before he was allowed to meet her, Doña Elvira imposed herself on Minaya's consciousness like a great absent shadow, depicted, with severe precision, in the fear with which Jacinto Solana imagined her many years earlier, in certain customs and words that ambiguously alluded to her, almost never naming her, not explaining her seclusion or her life, only suggesting that she was there, in the topmost rooms, appearing at the balcony of the greenhouse or looking at the garden from the window where her figure sometimes was outlined. A tray with the silver teapot and a single cup set out at midafternoon on the kitchen sideboard, the
ABC
folded and unopened, the illustrated magazines that Inés bought every Thursday at the kiosk on the Plaza of General Orduña, the account books next to the coat and hat of the administrator, who talks to Amalia in the courtyard, waiting until Doña Elvira wishes to receive him, the sound of the television set and the piano canceling each other out and confused in the distance with the fluttering wings of pigeons against the glass in the dome. He had learned to catalogue and discover the signs of Doña Elvira's presence and always to fear her when he walked alone down the hallways, and one day, without anything foretelling it, Inés told him that the señora had invited him to tea that afternoon in her rooms. The way up began with a door at the back of the gallery and crossed a dark region of rooms, perhaps never occupied, that had religious paintings on the walls and porcelain saints enclosed in crystal urns. Solitary figures on credenzas looking into empty space with lost, glassy eyes, looking at Minaya like motionless guardians of no-man's-land as he crossed the deserted semidarkness behind Inés' footsteps and the muffled clink of teaspoons and cups on the silver tray that she held solemnly, as if they were objects of worship.

"Come in," he heard the hard voice on the other side of the door first, and then, when he went in, Inés' faint scent was lost in an unfamiliar, dense perfume that occupied everything, as if it too formed part of the invisible presence, the enclosed solitude and the clothing and furniture of another time that surrounded Doña Elvira. It isn't the aroma of a woman, he thought, but of a century: this was how things, the air, smelled fifty years ago. Without looking up, Inés made a vague curtsy and left the tray on a table near the window. "Leave now," said Doña Elvira and didn't look at her, because she had been observing Minaya since he came in, and even when he helped her to sit next to the tea table, she continued watching him in the closet mirror, clumsy, solicitous, bending over her, conscious of the silence he didn't know how to break and of the cold, wise eyes that had already judged him.

 

"Y
OU LOOK LIKE YOUR MOTHER
," she said, contemplating him at her leisure behind the steam and the cup of tea. "The same eyes and mouth, but the way you smile comes from your father. The way my husband and all the men in his family smiled, and even your grandmother Cristina, who was as good-looking as you. Haven't you seen her portrait that my son has in his bedroom? All of you smile to excuse your lies, not even to hide them, because all of you have always lacked
the moral sense needed to distinguish between what is just and what isn't, or why that should matter to you. That is why my poor husband excused himself before committing an error or telling a lie, never afterward. For him there was nothing he did that could not be pardoned. His smile was never more candid or more charming than when he informed me he had sold a farm with a thousand olive trees to buy one of those Italian cars, Bugattis, they were called. He took it and a slut to Monte Carlo and returned in a month without the car or the slut, and, of course, without a cent, but he did come back with a very elegant dinner jacket and a bouquet of gladiolus and smiled as if he had traveled to the Cote d'Azur only to buy me flowers. My son, on the other hand, has never even known how to smile like his father, or like yours, who also was an extremely dangerous liar. He's been wrong as often as either of them, but with all the solemnity in the world, as if he were taking Communion. He went voluntarily into that army of the hungry who had taken half our land to divide it among themselves, and he almost lost his life fighting against those who were really his people, and as if that were not enough he married that woman who was already used goods, you understand me, and even wanted to go to France with her. But I'm sure you're not entirely like them, like my husband and my son and that madman your father, or like your great-grandfather, Don Apolonio, who infected them all with his deceptions and madness but not with his ability to make money. All of them liars, all of them reckless or useless, or both things at the same time, like my husband—may God have mercy on his soul—but if he had taken a few more years to die, he would have left us in poverty, with that mania he developed for collecting first thoroughbred horses and then women and cars. That's why, when he was a deputy, he became such good friends with Alfonso XIII. They had the same enthusiasms, and neither one bothered to hide them. Your father probably told you that when the king came to Magina in '24, he took tea with us one afternoon, in this house. The people with titles were green with envy when they saw the friendliness the king displayed toward my husband, who after all was the son of a man who made his money in the Indies and whose only coat of arms was invented for him by your grandfather José Emilio Minaya, the poet, who I think was the only man who could deceive him, he seemed so guileless, because he got five hundred pesetas from him to publish that book of poetry and made off with his daughter, though not with her inheritance. On the last night of his visit to Mágina, Alfonso XIII disappeared, something he apparently did habitually, and no one, not the queen, or Don Miguel Primo de Rivera, who had come here with him, or his military escort knew where to find him. At two in the morning, the telephone woke me. It was Primo, so nervous he didn't seem drunk. 'Elvira, is His Majesty in your house?' 'But Don Miguel,' I said, 'does Your Excellency think that if the king were here, I would have gone to bed?' And do you know where he was? At the Island of Cuba, which by then was the only estate we had left, drinking champagne with two deluxe sluts my husband had found for him, because I believe playing go-between for his friends gave him more pleasure than being a fighting cock. He returned at dawn, undressed as casually as if he had come from the opera, and told me before he fell asleep, 'Really, darling, His Majesty is a sportsman.'"

Doña Elvira's laugh, he later told Inés, was a short, cold outburst that shattered like glass and gleamed for an instant in eyes unfamiliar with indulgence and tenderness, eyes open and inflexible and rigorously sharpened by the lucidity of her contempt and the proximity of her death: the taut translucent skin at her temples, the white needlework at cuffs and neckline to hide from herself and the mirror the worst ravages of old age. All that could be seen of her hands were the short, slender fingers that drummed on the table or grasped the cup to hide their tremor.

"No, you're not like them. You're better-looking and more intelligent, and you owe both things to your mother, because your father, that stupid man, never could console himself for having been born disinherited, and he did nothing to give her the life she deserved. What was he doing when he killed himself?"

"Something in real estate. He said he was going to earn a good deal of money. He bought a car."

"Was it an honest business?"

"It seemed to be. But after his death they impounded even the furniture. I had to find a job and move to a pension."

"From time to time, before the three of you went to Madrid, he would come to me and lament his bad luck and ask for money for his business without your mother knowing. I never gave him a cent, of course, among other reasons because even if I had trusted him—and I never made that mistake—I had nothing to give him. My husband left everything to Manuel; that was another of his jokes, the final one. There's still a copy of his will around here somewhere. 'I declare my son Manuel sole inheritor of all my goods,' it said, in order not to break some tradition or other, which naturally was false, and he left me a painting, nothing but a painting. 'To my dearly beloved and faithful wife, Maria Elvira, I leave the portrait of Reverend Father Antonio Maria Claret, to whom I know she is very devoted.' He didn't do it for revenge but to go on laughing at me after death. But I'm the one who saved this house, and if we still have a little land and some capital in the bank, it hasn't been thanks to my son, who never took care of anything and was as much a bungler as he is now, but to me, who spent forty-four years struggling to preserve what my husband didn't have the time or desire to sell at a loss in order to pay for his whims. Look at those books. I spend entire nights over them, revising the accounts of the administrator, who is a scoundrel and cheats me if I'm careless. Since he knows my eyes are failing, he makes the numbers smaller and smaller, but I've bought a magnifying glass, and with it I can see even what isn't written down. There never was a man who could deceive me, and I won't permit it now, in my old age. Neither can you, but you know that. Tell me why you've come."