A Manuscript of Ashes (3 page)

"Valuable, Minaya, it's true, I don't deny any of the value you attribute to it, but you haven't seen the best things yet. Read these ballads. You can see they're photocopies from
El Mono Azul.
They were published between September '36 and May '37."

With gestures of clandestinity, of mystery, he pawed through his briefcase among smeared, duplicated pages and notebooks of notes, looking all around the cafeteria before showing Minaya a pile of photocopies that appeared in his hand like a magician's pigeon, just arrived from Mexico, he said, fragile, as sacred as relics, like the manuscripts of a persecuted, hidden faith, heavy with heroic memory and conspiracy.
El Mono Azul,
Weekly Pamphlet of the Alliance of Anti fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture, Madrid, Thursday, October i, 1936, the black rectangle of an undecipherable photograph:
Rafael Alberti, José Bergamin, and Jacinto Solana in the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment.
Then the other man spread out before Minaya the ballads "The Iron Militia," "The Ballad of Lina Odena," "The Twentieth of July," "International Brigades." The name at the bottom of each one, Jacinto Solana, almost erased among the large letters of the titles, like his face in the photograph, lost in forgetting, in a time that never seemed to have existed, but the voice wasn't the same one Minaya had heard when he read the first poem. Now it was confused with the others, exalted by the same fervor, by the monotony of rage, as if the man who had written the ballads was not the one who looked at himself, enclosed and alone, in the mirror of a shadowy room. He read the name of the city and the date again, "Magina, May 1937," like a countersign that the other man, José Manuel Luque, could not see, like an invitation deeper than the one offered by the poems, without calculating yet the possible alibi, only astonished that for the second time in a matter of days the inert territory of his consciousness where the city lay, his own wasted, distant life, had opened again like a wound. "I know he didn't die," he was going to say, recalling his father's sad monologues in which the name of Jacinto Solana sometimes appeared, "I know he didn't disappear from the world when the war ended, that he got out of prison and went back to Magina to go on fighting as if the fury that had moved him when he wrote the ballads still lived in him and perhaps came to an end only when they killed him." But he didn't say anything; he nodded in silence at the other man's enthusiasm, then listening to the usual predictions about the irremediable decay and fall of the tyranny, about the united general strike that would bring it down if everyone, including him, Minaya, devoted themselves to the struggle, shoulder to shoulder. For it seems that after thirty years they are still using the same words that had not been exhausted by the evidence of defeat, the same blind inherited certainty that they could not have learned back then because they hadn't been born yet, the secret, single word said in a quiet voice in rooms full of smoke and conspiracy, the initials written in red brushstrokes on the walls of midnight, in the vacant fields of fear. Blind, bold, fearless, between the legs of the Cyclops that takes a step and squashes them without even noticing, who lifts them up in his hand to throw them down into a courtyard sealed off by gray walls, in handcuffs, already dead, still undamaged in their condition of the heroic dead.

"And nobody knows about it, Minaya, absolutely nobody, and it will remain unpublished until I bring it to light, I mean, if you keep my secret. I've even thought of the title for my doctoral dissertation: 'Literature and Political Engagement in the Spanish Civil War. The Case of Jacinto Solana.' You can't deny it sounds good."

Minaya cleaned a section of clouded glass and saw the motionless horsemen at the corners again. Gray overcoats in the January dusk, hard faces restrained under helmets, black rubber truncheons hanging from the saddlebows, raised like swords when they galloped in pursuit among the cars. He drained his glass, vaguely noted the date and password for a clandestine appointment he wouldn't keep, promised silence and gratitude, left the cafeteria and the university, crossing in front of the horsemen and the barred windows of the jeeps, hoping fear wouldn't be noticed in his calm step, his lowered head. Abruptly, that night, he imagined the lie and wrote the letter, and later he told Inés that it took ten interminable days to receive Manuel's reply, and on the night train that brought him to Mágina he didn't hear anybody speak, and there were indolent guards in civilian clothes smoking as they leaned against the dark windows in the corridors, looking at him at times as if they recognized him.

I
NÉS SAID SHE SAW HIM
standing among the acacias, not yet decided, examining the house, the balconies, the white plaster moldings, as if giving time to his memory to recognize them, still and solitary behind the fountain's rim, not protecting himself from the fine spray that dampened his hair and overcoat, indifferent to it. She was changing the sheets on the bed in the room that Manuel had told her that same morning to prepare for the guest, and she said that from the first time she looked out from the balcony and saw him there in the plaza, staring so intently at the house, she knew who he was, and that very soon, when he tossed away the cigarette and picked up the suitcase in a gesture of brusque resolve, the bell would ring in the silence of the courtyard and then Teresa's footsteps would sound on the marble flagstones. She went out to the gallery and hid behind the curtains to see him from the front when the door opened, framed in the light of the threshold, tall, his hair tousled and damp, with a gray-checked overcoat and sloping shoulders that emphasized his air of fatigue and a small suitcase he didn't want to give to Teresa when she asked him into the parlor room where the fire was already lit.

"Inés," Teresa called, going to the stairwell, "tell Don Manuel that his nephew's here, the one from Madrid."

 

I
NÉS REMAINED QUIET
on the other side of the curtains, her face very close to the glass, because she liked to stand that way for hours, behind
the windows, looking at the street or the courtyard with white columns or the animal pen with a poplar tree and a dry well that she has to cross for the last time tonight on her way to the Magina station. She liked to look at everything from a distance, immobile things, the passage of light across the glass in the dome, and without anyone noticing her presence—she was so stealthy and slim that only a very attentive ear, one alerted ahead of time, could detect her—she pressed her nose and forehead to the glass and traced lines or words left by her breath, returned to an extremely slow time, the time of her childhood, lost in it, immune to the voices calling her. Before going back to the kitchen with her swaying walk, Teresa looked up from the middle of the courtyard, searching for Inés' shadow behind the gallery curtains, because she suspected she hadn't obeyed her and was still there, watching her, perhaps choosing a favorable angle that would allow her to still see the new arrival, and ordered her again to hurry and let Don Manuel know. The clocks struck six, first the clock in the parlor, very close to Inés, and a few seconds later, when the girl was already climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, the bells of the clock in the library, sounding deep and distant to her, startled Minaya, who hadn't dared to sit down and remained standing, very firm and attentive, at the closed door, his coat over his arm and the suitcase close by, as if he still weren't sure he would be accepted in the house. Reality, I calculate, imposed unpleasant corrections on his memory. The ceiling wasn't as high as he remembered, and the books no longer prodigiously covered every wall, but the parquet floor shone exactly as before and creaked slightly under his feet, and a fire was burning in the marble fireplace to receive him. There were two large windows divided into rectangles by white woodwork, almost like grillwork, and through the panes the plaza he had left a few minutes earlier seemed imaginary or distant, as if the city and the winter did not maintain a precise connection to the interior of the house, or only in the sense that an intimate landscape was added on to look at from the balconies and a sensation of hostile twilight that made its enclosed space more inviting. Then, as he waited and was afraid, he saw the first two images of Mariana, which later, day after day, would be repeated and extended in others when her face, not always recognized, would appear to him in the rooms of the house, the writings of Jacinto Solana, a plaza, and some churches in the city. First he saw Orlando's framed drawing between two shelves in the library, the face foreshortened, almost in profile, of a young woman with short hair hanging over her cheeks, a fine-drawn nose, a short chin, and wide-open eyes fixed on something that wasn't outside her but absorbed into her consciousness, her slight smile. "Orlando," he read, "May 1937." On the mantel over the fireplace, in a photograph that despite the glass protecting it was taking on a sepia tone, the same young woman walked between two men along a street that undoubtedly was in Madrid. She wore a coat with a fur collar opened over a white dress and high-heeled shoes, but all that could be seen clearly of her face was the large smile that mocked the photographer, because she had the brim of her hat pulled low on her forehead and a veil hid her eyes. The man who walked to her left held a cigarette and looked at the spectator with an air of irony or misgiving, as if he did not completely approve of Minaya's presence or had discovered a spy in him. Minaya thought he recognized his uncle in the one on the right, the tallest of the three and clearly the best dressed. Manuel was surprised by the photographer's shot while he was turning toward Mariana, who unexpectedly had taken his arm and pressed it against her without noticing the gift she was granting him, attentive only to the eye of the camera, like a mirror in which she liked to look at herself as she walked.

"That man, the one on the left, is Jacinto Solana," said Manuel, at his back.

Minaya recalled a tall figure with gray hair, a large, pale hand on his shoulders, but the face that bent down toward him that afternoon to kiss him lightly on the cheeks had been erased forever from his
memory by the almost terrifying exactitude of the large clock whose golden pendulum slowly moved back and forth behind the glass of a box that resembled a coffin. Now, when the clock and the bookshelves and the entire house took on dimensions without mystery, the earlier figure with gray hair disappeared before Minaya, supplanted by the features of a stranger. He was not nearly as tall as in memory and not as heavy as in the photograph, and he had white hair and a posture ruined not by old age but by long neglect and the habit of illness, the cardiac ailment left over from his war wounds, made worse by the passage of the years and nourished by his own negligence because he continued to smoke and never took the pills Medina prescribed for him. Any shock provoked violent palpitations and a dark, tenacious pain that did not allow him to sleep and was like a shadowy hand that penetrated his chest and squeezed his heart to the point of asphyxia at the precise moment sleep conquered him. He would sit up, shaken by the certainty that he had been about to die, turn on the light, and remain motionless in the bed, his hand at his heart, attentive to its beat, and he could not get back to sleep until dawn, for as soon as he closed his eyes the vertigo of fear would break free and the invading hand would slip again inside his body, groping between his lungs and his ribs, coming up from his belly like a reptile silently coiling around his heart. Fear of the definitive attack and the obsessive attention with which he listened to his own heart probably made his ailment worse, but eventually they also allowed him to acquire a serene familiarity with death, for he knew how it would come, and when he could recognize it from a distance, he gradually had stopped fearing it. It would be, as it had been so often, that pain in his left arm, the stabbing pain in his chest piercing without warning, like a bullet or a knife thrust, perhaps when he was eating breakfast alone in front of the large windows to the garden, or in the afternoon in the library, or striking him dead on the plank floor of the pigeon loft. It would be that same stabbing pain turned into a sudden shot or blade and the tide of terror rising from his stomach and
taking on in his chest the form of that familiar, lethal hand that would not stop this time but penetrate until it tore out his breath and his heart so that he would never return again from that anguish and could remain sweetly dead and abandoned on the bed, or even better, in the pigeon loft, on the same planks where Mariana had died, her forehead punctured by a single bullet. The habit of solitude and the longing for death were for him residual or secret ways of remembering his wife and Jacinto Solana, and having survived them for so many years seemed to him a disloyalty unmitigated even by the devotion of his memory. In the bedroom he shared with Mariana for only one night, he kept her wedding dress and the white shoes and the bouquet of artificial flowers she carried on their wedding day. He had catalogued not only all his memories but the photographs of Mariana and of Jacinto Solana as well, and distributed them around the house according to a private and very strict order, which allowed him to transform his passage through the rooms into a reiterated commemoration. He was not satisfied with the few images a man can or has the right to remember: he demanded of himself dates, precise locations, exact tones of light and nuances of tenderness, enumerations of meetings, of words, and with so much thinking about Mariana and the man who had been his best friend, his recollections became worn, so that he was no longer sure they had really existed outside the photographs and his memory. This is why he was so surprised that in his nephew's letter the name of Jacinto Solana appeared: someone not himself and not connected to his house had heard that name far from Magina and even had knowledge of his life and some poems which for Manuel had not existed until then except as attributes of his most secret autobiography. Reading that name, Jacinto Solana, written by another hand, in Madrid, at the end of January 1969, was proof that the man it designated had in fact lived and left in the world traces of his presence that could not be erased by time or the voracious executioners in blue uniforms who one day made the flagstones in the courtyard and the parquet in the rooms tremble with the tramping of their boots and who burned in the garden all of Jacinto Solanas books and kicked his typewriter to pieces.