A Manuscript of Ashes (21 page)

"Why don't you write a real book," my father would say, "a novel like
Rosa Maria
, so I can read it." One book that would have the mysterious appearance that all the books of my childhood had: a dense, necessary object, a volume made weighty by the geometry of the words and the materiality of the paper, its hard angles and covers worn by longstanding dealings with the imagination and with hands. Perhaps now I'm not writing for myself or to save a forbidden memory; obscurely I'm being led by the desire to plan and create a book in the way a potter models a clay jar, so that his dead man's hands can touch it and his eyes blinded by the final fear and stupefaction of a fate that wasn't his can read it and revive it. They tell me, Manuel says, that nobody knows why they killed him, but that is a pious or cowardly way of not saying that they killed him because he was my father. They were probably afraid that I had managed to escape; they may have calculated that a single death was not enough to exhaust my punishment or my guilt. I know, they've told me, that on the second or third day of April 1939, they saw him come to the Plaza of San Lorenzo just as he had left it three years earlier. He tied the mare's bridle to the grillwork at the window, opened the door with the large metal key, unloaded the mattress and the disassembled bed and asked a neighbor who had won the war, shaking his head pensively when he was told. For several days he didn't leave the house. He listened to the radio until very late at night, watched the plaza through the shutters at a balcony, and when someone knocked at the door, he hurried to answer it, breaking an old habit.

On the fourth day a van painted black drove to the plaza and stopped under the poplars, directly in front of the house. With a clamor of violently slammed doors and military boots five men in blue shirts and red berets got out. Inside the van, next to the driver, sat a man in civilian clothes who made affirmative gestures to the others indicating the door that was still closed. When he opened to see who was knocking they pushed the barrel of a pistol into his chest, forcing him back inside, shouting at him to keep his hands at the back of his neck. "Are you Justo Solana?" said one, the man who had first pointed the gun at him. Hitting him with the butts of their pistols, they pushed him out to the street, until he was close to the window through which the man in civilian clothes was looking. He stood there for a time, motionless, surrounded by pistols, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, and finally the man in civilian clothes, who had lowered the window to look at him more carefully, said, "That's him. I recognized him right away," and the others, as if obeying an order, hit him with the butts of their pistols and forced him into the van and then jumped in after him still pointing their guns at the closed windows of the plaza, which opened again very quietly only when the sound of the engine had disappeared down the narrow lanes.

I've seen the place where they took him. A convent, abandoned now, that during the war was a storage depot and barracks for the Anarchist militias, on one of those treeless little plazas that one sometimes finds unexpectedly at the end of a street in Magina. In 1939 they whitewashed the facade of the convent to cover the large red letters painted on it, but the years and the rain have delicately dissolved the whitewash and now the initials, the condemned words can be made out again. F.A.I., he must have read on the facade when they made him get out of the van. PRAISE DURRUTI, but undoubtedly he didn't know who Durruti was or the meaning of the Anarchist initials furiously scrawled in red brushstrokes. They were only a part of the war that had trapped him in the end, as indecipherable as the war itself and the faces of the men who pushed him and the reason they gave for arresting him. The cellars, the chapel, the cells of the friars were filled with prisoners, and they had stretched barbed wire between the columns in the courtyard to hold the ones who couldn't fit into the cells. From the street one could see a cloud of dark faces adhering to the gratings at the windows, eyes and hands clutching at the bars or emerging from the semidarkness like strange animals or tree branches stretching in vain to reach the light. There was also, I suppose, in the upper corridors, where one could hardly hear the noise of pounding heels and orders and the engines of trucks filled with prisoners that stopped on the plaza, the busy sound of papers and typewriters, fans, perhaps, lists of names endlessly repeated on carbon paper and confirmed by someone who ran a pencil down the margin and stopped from time to time to correct a name or make a brief mark beside it.

I know that every day at dusk, a string of donkeys loaded down with cauliflower leaves came to the convent. They emptied the panniers at the entrance, and a gang of prisoners watched over by Moroccan guards gathered the fodder in big armloads and threw it over the barbed wire to the others in the courtyard. The large leaves of a green between blue and gray spilled into the outstretched hands of the prisoners, who fought to get them and tore them apart and then bit greedily into the ribs, sucking at the sticky, bitter juice. He didn't eat. He didn't want to humiliate himself among the groups of men who fought over a leaf of cow fodder and crawled on all fours around the feet of the others searching for a trampled leftover that had gone unnoticed. After eating those leaves that crinkled like wrapping paper and left a dirty, wet, green stain around their mouths, some prisoners, perhaps the ones who had fought most savagely to get them, writhed on the tiles and vomited and clutched at their bellies and the next day were dead and swollen in the middle of the courtyard or in a corner of a cell. Silent and alone, he looked at the unknown faces and strange things happening around him and thought that this, after all, was war, the same cruelty and disorder he had known in his youth when they sent him to Cuba. Sometimes, at midnight, he heard a truck shaking to a stop at the door to the convent. Then silence was suddenly imposed on the murmur of bodies crowded together in the dark, and all eyes remained fixed on the air, never on the faces of others, because looking at another man meant seeing a préfiguration of being called, of death. The sound of the truck was followed by the noise of locks and the pounding of boots along the corridors. Between two columns in the courtyard, at the doorway to a cell, a group of uniformed figures came to a halt and one of them, shining a flashlight on the typed list he held in his other hand, read the names slowly, stumbling sometimes over the pronunciation of a difficult last name.

One night they called his. His bones were swollen with dampness, and he had a disagreeable taste of ashes in his mouth. Two guards picked him up from the floor and tied his hands behind him with a wire. He thought about me, about whom no one had heard anything for two years, about his closed house, about his land lying solitary in the night. They made him climb into the body of the truck and tied him to the back of a chair beside a man whose head hung low and who shuddered in his bonds with silent, continual weeping. They had nailed a double row of rush chairs to the boards of the truck, and the men tied to the backs remained lined up and rigid, as if they were attending their own wake, solemnly moving back and forth on the curves of the streets and bouncing up and down, shaken, when the truck left the last lit corners behind and drove onto a dirt road in the barren lands to the north of the city. He smelled the limitless odor of the air and the empty fields in the night that the headlights cut through looking for the road to the cemetery The truck finally drove between dark cypresses, and when it reached the iron gate, it turned left and continued down a narrow path that ran the length of the low, whitewashed walls. Someone shouted to the driver to stop, and the truck drove in reverse until it stopped in front of a section of wall where the whitewash was pockmarked with bullet holes. Two soldiers were untying the ropes that secured them to the chairs and then pushing them until they jumped out of the truck. They lined them up in front of the wall, lit by the yellow headlights that lengthened their shadows on the turned over, stained ground. Long before the sound of the bolts on the rifles and the single detonation that he didn't hear, he had stopped being afraid because he knew he was on the other side of death: death was that yellow light blinding him, it was the shadow that began behind it and took on the shape of the nearby olive trees and the men hiding in them or confused with them who raised their rifles and remained motionless for an endless time, as if they were never going to move or shoot. Not the pain of the void or the vertigo of falling with tied hands to the ground or onto another body but a sudden sensation of lucidity and abandonment and the raw taste of blood in his mouth that was closed against the dark.

I light a cigarette in the candle that I put out slowly when I exhale the smoke. The smoke is blue and gray and hangs in the air like the gray light out of which emerge the room painted white, the unmade bed, the blue plaza beneath the roofs, the acacias. Smoking, motionless next to the glass, beyond the circular windows, as if in a cabin on a ship, I see the Magina dawn, as if day were dawning in a city where I am dead too.

"A
ND NOW HE'S LYING DOWN
in the room," Manuel thought, "with the shutters closed, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the buckle of that absurd coat that smells of the train and that he hasn't taken off because he's trembling with cold even though Teresa lit the fire that faces his bed, his hands folded, his fingers interlaced over the coat, his thumbs rhythmically tapping each other, as if he were marking shapeless, limitless time with no precise destination, just as one marks the beats of one's heart or the drip of water falling at night from a half-closed tap. He heard me when I went in and he pretended he was sleeping, or perhaps he really was sleeping and his sleep resembles an exhausted insomnia as he lies on the bed, dressed, his unopened suitcase in the middle of the room, his shoes with the laces untied dirtying the edge of the bedspread with mud, and that smell of rough blankets and cold dawn that I had forgotten." Even before his mother came into the dining room, examining everything in a single glance as she searched for some sign that would proclaim the arrival of her guest and enemy, Manuel knew that Solana's presence in the house would weigh on the predictable silence in which supper would take place, even if his name weren't spoken, for Dona Elvira had always known how to use silence as an accusation and an insult, and Solana was one of the names she never pronounced, obeying a fierce standard of pride inculcated in her in her youth. When she finally appeared in the doorway of the dining room, flanked by Amalia as if she were an ancient lady-in-waiting, Manuel and Utrera stood at the same time, but it was Utrera who hurried to pull out the chair reserved for her at the head of the table, holding the back while Doña Elvira sat down, bowing too deeply, like a hotel waiter. In those years, Medina said then, Utrera seemed determined to maintain a certain air of a cinematic hotel receptionist, always solicitous, somewhat South American, slightly oily, with his pinstriped suits, hair stiffly waved with pomade, and the very thin black mustache that exaggerated his smile, the soft line of his mouth.

"Señora," he said, as Doña Elvira opened her napkin and placed it on her lap, looking without expression at the other side of the table but also, very much out of the corner of her eye, at Manuel, who was sitting to her left, "I have no words to thank you for accepting my invitation tonight. With your permission, I shall tell Amalia to begin serving supper." The municipal council of a nearby town had commissioned a very large allegory of Victory, and since, like the painters of the Renaissance, he was paid according to the number of figures, he had invited Manuel and his mother to a supper that he himself classified as special. After requesting permission from Manuel, who shrugged, Amalia had agreed to serve supper on the silver table service, and to place on the table the two bronze candelabra that normally were on the sideboard and were a partial testimony to the time when Manuel's father was still alive and gala suppers were held in the house, like the one attended by Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. In the light of the candelabra, the dining room and the three figures gathered around the table that was too large had the melancholy appearance of an unfortunate simulacrum. As he had done at the formal suppers of his adolescence, Manuel looked obsessively at his shirtcuffs and the hands that held his fork and knife, sometimes lifting his head to agree with what Utrera was saying, with his solicitude and his smile, distant, like the gestures of an actor who has been left alone on stage and attempts to move the audience in a half-empty hall. He noticed, suddenly, that Teresa had left the dining room and had not returned, and a sideways glance at his mother let him know that she too had noticed the girl's absence. "Teresa," said Doña Elvira, interrupting something Utrera was telling her. Amalia took a step and approached her but looked at Manuel as if asking for a sign. "Yes, Señora?" Doña Elvira slowly placed the knife and fork on the tablecloth and spoke, barely separating her lips. "I didn't call you. Isn't Teresa here?" Amalia was still looking at Manuel, nervously smoothing the edge of her white apron with her fingers. "She'll be right back, Señora." It was then that Manuel spoke, understanding, accepting the trap that had been laid, daring to look in his mother's eyes just as he had looked in them on the day he told her he was going to marry Mariana, imitating without realizing it their blue fixity, stripped of any desire to explain or defy. "Teresa has gone up to take Solana his supper."

She had heard the bell from her bedroom, sensing in its long ring a danger she couldn't specify, because she didn't recognize the voice of the person who had just arrived, but as soon as she heard the street door closing she rang the bell imperiously for Amalia to come up, and she asked and found out, while the maid helped her dress, that the old threat had never died but had only been incubating for ten years, ready to return at any time from a future she had always feared and that was being realized now as inevitably as the coming of autumn or old age. "So they didn't kill him in the war or after the war," she said, "they condemned him to death and pardoned him, and now he's left prison to come to my house." "I heard him say he'd be leaving soon," said Amalia, behind her, placing the embroidered peignoir over her shoulders. "It doesn't matter if he stays or leaves today. He came, and my son has seen him. The harm has already been done." But she asked every morning if he had left, not saying his name, alluding with a movement of her head to the part of the house where the outsider was staying, and every day during the first week she received the same reply, which didn't explain anything, because no one, not even Manuel, knew Solanas intention. They told her he probably was sick, because he coughed and his hands trembled and he almost never left the room or got out of bed, and when Teresa brought him a meal and left it on the night table he acted as if he hadn't seen her, but then, as soon as the girl left the room, he sat up and ate without taking off his coat or using the cutlery or the napkin, stopping abruptly if he heard a noise outside his door, as if he were ashamed to let anyone discover how hungry he was. "He still hasn't opened his suitcase," said Amalia on the morning of the fourth day, "and he hasn't even untied the rope he had around it, or moved it from the spot where he left it when he came." The untouched suitcase, the overcoat, the empty closet, even the attitude of Manuel, whom they rarely saw talking to Solana, were gradually being established as signs of an immediate departure, a respite, at least, because as the days passed the presence of the outsider seemed to dissolve without anything taking place. Doña Elvira never crossed paths with him in the dining room, as she had feared, and she didn't see him in the courtyard or the hallway in the gallery. But it was enough for her to know he was near her, in the house, in the same room he had occupied in 1937, to imagine him alone, waiting for something, poisoned by a purpose that she would discover only when it was too late to put an end to his evil spell. "Just like it was before," she said to Utrera, "when my simpleminded son would bring him here for a snack and do everything to keep me from knowing. But the smell of the rubber in his espadrilles was left in the library."