A Manuscript of Ashes (16 page)

If he knew I wasn't a witness but a spy, that I've gone into his marriage bedroom and discovered the manuscripts he didn't want to show
me, perhaps because they recount what could be seen only by a shadow posted above the garden that night in May when Solana and Mariana wandered around in the dark kissing each other with the desperation of two lovers on the eve of the end of the world." Manuel had spoken in a voice that grew increasingly faint, and finally, in silence, he pressed Minaya's hand for a long time, not looking at him, as if he wanted to be certain he was still there. Then the hand, yellow and motionless, the palm turned up and the fingers curved like the claw of a dead bird, the hand that moved sluggishly through the air not to curse or expel Inés and Minaya but to make them disappear like smoke in a closed room, their two naked bodies shadows or premature apparitions that announced to Manuel the dream of death when he, pursued by her, got up from his bed and left the bedroom and crossed the dark hallway to look for the last time at Mariana's face in the photograph in the parlor and open the door of the room where he had embraced and possessed her. He awoke, caught off guard by the sudden awareness that he was going to die, but not even when he was standing and dared to walk barefoot on the cold chessboard of the tiles could he elude the sensation of inhabiting a dream in which, for the first time, the stabbing pain in his heart and the suffocating lightness of the air, like the vertigo in his temples and the cold on the soles of his feet, were things alien to his own body. Which is why it shouldn't have surprised him that there was a line of light under the door of the marriage bedroom or that above the noise of his respiration he could hear the obscene panting of entwined bodies, the bitter breath of a man murmuring and biting as he closed his eyes to empty the impossible instant of desperation or joy and the long shout or the tears or laughter of a woman whose fierce pleasure exploded like the brash noise of breaking glass in the silence of the house. He understood then, on the verge of passing out, the unreality of so many years, his status as a shadow, his interminable and never mitigated memory of a single night and a single body, and perhaps when he opened the door and stood on the threshold, sensing in the air the same candescent odor of that night, he didn't recognize the bodies captured on the bed, gleaming in the semidarkness, and died, obliterated by the certainty and the miracle of having returned to the night of May 21, 1937, to witness behind the glass of death how his own body and hands and lips laid siege to a naked Mariana.

"No," Inés had said, leaning against the closed bedroom door when Minaya, who had returned the manuscripts to the drawer where he had found them, prepared to go out. "It has to be here. I like that bed and the mirror on the closet." She said it in a voice that wasn't so much inviting as determined in advance to fulfill that specific desire even if Minaya didn't agree to stay, as if he weren't an accomplice but a witness to the pleasure she imagined and in which she would somehow be alone. She said "It has to be here," smiling with serene audacity, and he knew immediately that he would stay even if he couldn't share her courage or forget his fear of being discovered, which hadn't stopped since Inés had come to his room and said, with the same smile, that she had found the key to the marriage bedroom in one of Manuel's jackets. It was Minaya who had asked her to look for it: some day, some night when he couldn't sleep, it was possible that Manuel would look in the bedroom for the manuscripts he himself must have hidden after Solana's death. For a time Minaya was confident that at some point the accident that allowed him to find them would be repeated, but Manuel didn't forget again to lock the bedroom, which, Minaya suspected, might have been proof that his uncle already distrusted him. He heard footsteps approaching, and he still hadn't dared to hope they were Inés' footsteps when he heard the three quiet knocks of their signal and she slipped into the room dressed and made up for the usual secret game of their nocturnal rendezvous, pushing aside, in her yellow skirt and her Sunday afternoon blouse and stockings and the shadow of cosmetics on her cheeks, the semidarkness of midnight, the solemn presence on the desk of the blue notebook and the manuscripts, the pages where Minaya was outlining the biography of Jacinto Solana. But now, when he had Inés in front of him, all that mattered was her beauty and the devastating certainty that he would be in love with her for the rest of his life. He didn't turn around immediately to embrace her: he first saw her reflected in the windows to the balcony, standing behind him, while he was still writing, and that image acquired for Minaya the immobile quality of a symbol or a future memory, because in it was summarized the only inhabitable future he conceived of for himself.

Hiding and alone, at three or three-thirty in the morning—he didn't have a watch and hadn't heard the clock in the parlor and was incapable of estimating the time that had passed since he had spoken to Medina—he sat down again at the desk and saw in the glass the same light that had illuminated it three hours earlier, but now he saw only himself, knowing that never again would the serene figure of Inés, uselessly searched for now in the empty glass, in the disloyalty of mirrors, be reflected next to his. The present had shattered and condemned him irremediably to the usury of memory, which was already urging him to commemorate with obsessive details the first embrace at midnight and the smile in Inés' eyes when she showed him the key like an ambiguous invitation that was revealed completely only in the marriage bedroom, after Minaya had placed the manuscripts under the wedding dress.

"Nobody will hear us. Don Manuel's asleep with the pills Medina gave him, and the others sleep very far from here."

It would have been enough to say no a second time, oblige her to move away from the door, go out alone perhaps and accept insomnia and rage, but he did nothing, only looked at her, sick with desire and fear: she sat down on the bed, dropped her shoes, raised her skirt to undo her stockings. Minaya saw her long white thighs, her raised knees, her feet finally bare and willful under his kisses, pink and white and moving like fish in the semidarkness of the mirrors. When he opened her thighs to descend to the damp rose of her belly
he thought he heard the sound of a distant door, but he didn't care anymore about fear, or even decency, or his life, or his awareness that he was disintegrating like the shape of the room and the identity and limits of his body. He heard Inés' voice confused with his own, and he bit her lips as he looked into her eyes to discover a gaze that never had belonged to him until that night. Holding on to each other like two shadows, they rolled to the floor, dragging the sheets from the bed with them, and on the rug, on the stained sheets, they sought each other and overthrew and bit each other in a persecution multiplied by the mirrors in the dark, purple air. As if they had survived a shipwreck at sea and the temptation to succumb to a sweet death underwater, they found themselves once again motionless on the bed and couldn't recall how or when they had returned to it. "Now I don't care if I die," said Minaya. "If you offered me a cup of poison right now, I'd drink it down." Sitting on the bed, Inés caressed his hair and mouth and slowly made him turn toward her, between her thighs, until Minaya's lips found the pink cleft that she herself opened with the thumb and index finger of both hands to receive him. But there was no urgency now, no desperation, and the serene cupidity of his palate was prolonged and ascended in the inquiry of his gaze. Urged on by the dark breath that had revived more deeply when he was drinking from her womb, he moved up to her breasts, her chin, her mouth, the damp hair that covered her cheekbones, and then he felt that he was disappearing, quivering motionless, lucid, suspended at the edge of a sweetness from which there was no return. "Don't move," said Inés, "don't do anything," and she began to move back and forth, gyrating under his hips, clutching at him, wounding him, draining the air and expelling it very slowly as she rose and curved and sank her elbows and heels into the sheets, and smiled with her eyes fixed on Minaya, murmuring "slow," saying in a quiet voice words he had never dared say to her. Like a wounded animal he rose up, lifting his head, and that was when time ripped as if a vengeful stone had broken the mirrors reflecting them, because they heard behind them the sound of the door and saw the terrifying slowness with which the knob moved and the long stain of light entered the bedroom and stopped at the foot of the bed when Manuel appeared on the threshold, barefoot, in his pajamas of an incurably sick man and his Italian scarf around his neck, looking at them with a stupefaction from which anger would have been absent if it hadn't been for the unmoving hand that ascended when he took a step toward the bed, as if in a frozen gesture of malediction. He opened his mouth in a shout that never was heard, and even took one more step before his eyes became empty and staring, not at Inés or Minaya but at the hand that had descended until it lay open beside his heart, curving as it clutched at the cloth of his pajamas at the same time that Manuel fell to his knees and raised his blue eyes again to look at them. Inés didn't see that last look: she said she had buried her face in Minaya's chest and dug her nails into him when she heard something rebound heavily on the wooden floor. Trembling with cold she opened her eyes and saw in the dresser mirror that she was alone and very pale on the bed. Minaya, still naked, was leaning over Manuel's body, feeling his chest under the pajamas. He's dead, he said, and locked the bedroom door. Manuel's open mouth was against the floor and his eyes fixed on the light on the night table. Inés, in order not to see them, got off the bed like a sleepwalker and extended a cowardly hand until she touched his eyelids, but Minaya stopped her and obliged her to stand up, shaking her as if she were a child who doesn't want to waken. For the first time in his life he was not paralyzed by fear: now fear was an impulse to intelligence or the dirty courage to simulate and flee.

"Listen. Now we're going to get dressed and straighten up the bed and the room. We'll leave the window open to get rid of the smell in the air. That won't make them suspect anything: Manuel could have opened it before he died. You'll go to your room, and I'll go to mine, and in an hour I'll go and wake Utrera. I'll say I couldn't sleep and heard a shout and something falling near the parlor. Nobody will find out about us, Inés."

Later he told the story with the desperate fervor used to tell certain necessary lies, he told it to the incredulous gaze of Utrera, who was already dressed when he went to call him, he repeated it a few more times, adding details that made him feel despicable, but not less persecuted, and when he heard Amalia telling it to Doña Elvira, it seemed to him that the story, when it took place in a different voice, entered reality completely, and he was temporarily relieved of its weight. But Utrera, when they picked up Manuel's body to lay it on the bed, had examined the open window, the quilt, the half-burned candle still smelling of wax in the candlestick on the night table. I'll leave here tomorrow, Minaya said aloud, when he was alone and in the room, facing the window to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias, suddenly possessed by the premonition of exile. He heard a distant bell and then footsteps and voices on the stairs, the slow footsteps, the unmistakable voice of Medina, but still he didn't leave the room. He could hear them and recognize each of their voices, because they were all in the parlor, on the other side of the door, but also in the blue notebook, on the last pages that he was beginning to read now, asking himself which of them, which of the living or the dead had been a murderer thirty-two years earlier.

After all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity.

—C
ERVANTES,
Don Quixote,
I, P
ROLOGUE

I
STILL COULD HEAR
the concave sound of the galleries, metal gates closing behind someone's footsteps, the pounding of the guards' heels, a thicket of voices that resounded in the high vaults like the ocean in a shell and seemed like voices and footsteps that were infinitely distant, the dark ocean heard in dreams. I had left behind the gate of the final gallery, high and painted black, like the wrought-iron grillwork in a cathedral, and now I was walking down ordinary corridors with floors of tiles and not damp cement, with gray doors and peaceful offices on the other side of the doors, where I waited interminably and acquiesced, signed typewritten forms, docile, cowardly, always fearing I hadn't completely understood what they were saying to me, repeating my name without avoiding the suspicion that when he heard it, the man bent over the typewriter would lift his head and order the guard who accompanied me to handcuff me again. There were countless offices, all the same, and in all of them there was someone who shook his head when he heard my name and didn't look at me, only read something on a list and asked something and, with an engrossed air, opened a large record book and then closed it without having found what he was looking for or asked me to sign somewhere, handing me a pen across the counter that I no longer knew how to hold between my thumb and index finger, too thin and too fragile for my fingers made clumsy by the cold, by ten years of not touching or using a pen. Now the guard was walking in front of me, rhythmically hitting the bunch of keys against the side of his trouser leg, and I no longer expected freedom and the street to be on the other side of any door. Now the doors were made of wood and not metal and were painted green like the shutters at the windows, but they still resounded in the same deep, definitive way when they were shut and there were no prisoners sweeping the corridors. I said my name again and signed a receipt; they gave me an open suitcase, and I put my papers and clothes in it while two guards with unbuttoned tunics watched me and smoked in a room without windows that had numbered metal lockers and a low-hanging lamp that swayed above the table, thickening the cigarette smoke in its cone of light. The other guard, the one who had led me there, ponderously left the bunch of keys on the table and ordered me to follow him, but this time the last door we passed through didn't have a lock and opened onto a small courtyard with very high walls of ocher brick and sentry towers rising at the corners of the roof, where two Civil Guards in gleaming oilskin capes were profiled like symmetrical statues against a low, pale gray sky. They didn't look at the courtyard, they didn't do anything when I crossed it trembling with fear and unknown joy and with twitching fingers grasped the handle of the suitcase as I approached the entrance, as closed and undifferentiated as a wall, where someone, another Civil Guard, opened a gate and stepped to one side to let me pass, saying something I didn't stop to hear, because the gate had closed behind me with a long clanking of locks and I was alone before the facade of the prison, under the yellow and red flag that snapped in the wind like the wings of a large bird.