A Manuscript of Ashes (31 page)

B
EFORE THEY REACHED THE RIVER
, they turned off the engine and headlights and let the car slide along the thin white dust where the moonlight revealed bird tracks like the characters in a strange piece of writing. The car very slowly entered the wet gray fog as it descended to the end of the road, and the low, flexible branches of the olive trees whipped against the windows and then cracked like slow whips when they were left behind, perhaps provoking the flight and shriek of a bat that had watched with no surprise the passage of the curved black body on which the dust gleamed with a tonality slightly less livid than on the road. When they reached the railroad tracks, next to the station's freight shed built at the entrance to the bridge that extended the road to the country house, they saw above the fog the grove of almond trees and the esplanade and the irregular building of the Island of Cuba, its baroque pediments covered with whitewash where the moon shone faintly and its roofs laid out at such unequal heights that they gave the house the air of a rugged, broken ruin, like those castles whose debris barely stands out on the slope where they were built and yet they display, especially from below and at a distance, the traces of an architecture conceived both as a labyrinth and a watchtower, an arch in the air, a high earthen wall, a concave roof under which swifts make their nests. On level ground, very close to the tracks, they used up the car's last impulse forward to
turn it between two olive trees, and they stopped it there, hidden beneath the hard branches at whose ends the olives were already blossoming in fragrant yellow clusters. The leaves on the olive trees scratched at the windows, moved by a breeze they couldn't feel when they got out of the car, and had, at so short a distance, from the darkness of the interior, a metal gleam similar to that of the rails or the river water. On the white, cold earth that shone like sulfur the shadows of the trees had the precision of silhouettes cut out of cardboard, and behind the low volume of fog, beyond the river whose sound was still confused with the wind in the branches, the rise of the Island of Cuba was prelude to a limitless, empty space, mauve, gray and blue, violet at its farthest limits, vast and high like a dome held up only by the light of the moon over the uniform olive trees that sank into precipices of dry torrents marked by yellow broom and then ascended along the side of the hill with the methodical obstinacy of the ocean and stopped their advance at the spurs of the sierra, their roots still adhering to the bare rock, like mollusks clinging to the fissure in a cliff, on slopes of sour thickets where not even the lunatic who planted them there would climb to pick their fruit. Alarmed, exhausted, uselessly on guard, they watched as a night train passed before them, like a long, tremulous ribbon of yellow lights, and its whistle told Solana that it must be between one and two in the morning, because Frasco had taught him to calculate the hour according to the height of the sun or the passage of the trains, and to determine, even if he didn't see them, if they were freight trains or mail trains or express trains, if they were traveling to Madrid or returning to one of those cities on the other side of the sierra that Frasco had never seen and invariably imagined as very large and very close to the sea. Lying on the bed, not yet turning off the light that Beatriz saw before the car stopped knowing it was lit only for him, recognizing him in it just as in another time she would have recognized him in a jacket left on the back of a chair or in the enduring odor of his body between the sheets in the bedroom, Jacinto Solana took pleasure in the certainty of finding himself alone at the Island of Cuba, and the size of the empty house and the olive groves and the landscape surrounding it increased his delight in solitude, no longer driven by literature, because that afternoon, he recorded without emotion in the blue notebook, he had finished the last page of his book,
Beatus Ille,
and now he had before him, on the table that would never again be disordered with rough drafts and the smoke from cigarette butts, a pile of pages as impeccably ordered as those seen on the shelves in stationery stores, but completely covered by a writing that greedily swallowed up the margins and had deserved the absolution of a period. He was mildly calmed and exalted by the mere physical presence of the stacked pages, the solid, certain touch of their corners, the odor of the paper, as if the book were not the score of possible music that other minds and future eyes would bring back to life but an object already definitive and beautiful, closely tied to its weight and the persistence of its volume in space, enclosed in it and its shape like a bronze figure: grown, with the imperious slowness of a tree or a branch of coral, by the addition of the edge of each of the pages that now testified to the duration of its progress, like concentric rings in the recently cut trunk of a tree. He thought about his past life and couldn't understand how he could have survived so many years of empty desperation when the book did not yet exist, and he recalled with distant gratitude the stories he wrote as a boy in his notebooks to show to Manuel later, passing them in secret beneath the desk they always shared, whose somber wood stained with ink blotches was like that of the desk over which he had bent, writing, since he arrived at the country house. He would illustrate those narratives copied from the vicissitudes of silent film with drawings that he colored painstakingly, and at the foot of each he wrote a brief caption between ellipses, as they did in the illustrations for serialized stories, and on the last page he would write
End
in tall block letters, carefully following with a dampened pencil point the line of the squares so that the firm strokes would not swerve. Like successive rehearsals that never could satisfy him completely, he wrote the word
End
many times in the blue notebook, fascinated perhaps by its sound, its shape like the point of a knife, and he probably had written it that same night in the center of the last page of his book, two or three hours before the car with its headlights turned off stopped among the olive trees, on the other side of the river, tracing its letters on the paper with the delicacy and relief of a Chinese calligrapher who concludes, on a silk cloth, the manuscript that has consumed his life.

 

W
HEN HE HEARD THE TRAIN
whistle that returned him to time and brought him back from his exhausted lethargy, he got up from the bed and took the candle that was his light to go down to the kitchen, because he had finished a bottle of wine and was not resigned to not prolonging the solitary celebration of the end of his book, as sweet as the last day of school and the lit stove in a corner of the classroom, when he looked at the snow-covered courtyard through the windows of winter and knew that the next morning his father would not shout at him to get up before dawn because all the roads would be blocked by snow. "It's him," said Beatriz, staring at the light that moved away now from the window and swayed back and forth and disappeared and then returned, more opaque and distant, to a front balcony, to the entrance door that poured it over the paving stones when it was half open. "I'm sure it's him," she repeated, as if the others hadn't heard her or didn't believe what she was telling them. "But there must be more people in a house that big. There must be dogs, I suppose," said the man in the light suit sitting next to her, not raising his eyes, not sitting up on the leather seat against which he was resting his unshaven face, as if he had renounced all desire or impulse not to survive but to prolong the flight that had been brought to a temporary halt before the railroad tracks, as if before a definitive, ordinary obstacle. Behind them, in the back seat, the youngest passenger bit his lips and panted quietly as he gripped his wounded thigh with
both hands, devastated by fever, by the absurd certainty that the moonlit night and the house where the others spoke vaguely of finding refuge were the final trap that death had set for them. They smoked, not getting out of the car, hiding the lit end of their cigarettes in the hollow of their hands, as if that minor precaution could free them of the Civil Guards who were tracking down the car along nearby highways, or was unavoidable even in the density of the olive trees and the fog. They kept the car windows up, and the smoke, as it thickened, wrenched a gloomy cough from the throat of the wounded man, who leaned against the back of his seat with his mouth open and the right side of his trousers soaked with blood, his eyes brilliant beneath almost closed lids, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip like a thread of saliva. "Let's go," said Beatriz, groping in the dark to pull out the key, "he'll help us. He probably knows some way to cross the sierra without going back to the main highway." She was the one driving the car, Solana noted afterward, the one who had torn one of her silk blouses to make bandages to stop the bleeding from the thigh wound, the one who took the wheel when the other one, the man in the light suit whose profile Solana had seen through the window of that same car six months earlier, began to cry without dignity or tears in the ditch of a forsaken highway and doubled over and vomited when he saw and smelled the blood and remembered the dry, terrifying sound of the shots that tore like horn thrusts into the hip and thigh of the passenger whose name he never knew. "A comrade, she says, perfectly serious," Solana wrote, "a fugitive from the Valley of the Fallen with false documents and a fake mustache and the hair at his temples tinted gray as if for a bad play, a dead man as premature and undeniable as she herself or that guy with white hands and pink brilliant nails who gave them his car and came with them not because he believes in the Republic or in the Party or even in the possibility that they can come out of their trip alive, but for the simple, obscene reason that he's in love with Beatriz and wants to marry her though he knows that's impossible while I'm alive and was even during the years when it seemed I was dead." "I asked him to lend me the car for a few days," says Beatriz, laying out before me like an unformulated reproach the self-sacrifice, the gentlemanliness of the other man, probably her lover, "I told him it was a very long and possibly dangerous trip, and that I didn't want to involve him in something like this, but he insisted on coming with us, he even said he'd denounce me if I didn't let him go. Now he's dying of fear, the smell of blood nauseates him." In love, submissive in advance, prepared to hide bundles of clandestine newspapers in the storeroom of his dress shop or to take her in his own car to a distant city and the door of the prison through which would come the gloomy phantom who once was married to Beatriz and whose face he has seen up close only tonight, in love and avid to carry out all her desires, to guess and anticipate any desire of hers that Beatriz hasn't confessed to him yet, whether it's a handkerchief like the ones she's using now to wipe away blood and perspiration from the wound or a foreign perfume or a reckless, deadly trip to that city on the coast whose name she didn't want to tell me where a smugglers' ship is waiting to take the fugitive to Gibraltar or North Africa, if he lives long enough to get there or they're not killed first in a police ambush. Very pale, his fitted linen jacket stained with blood like a butcher's smock, he looks at me with rancor, with the part of his fear that belongs not to his flight or the memory of the shots and the blood but to the evidence that it is because of me that Beatriz has been denied him and that a single gesture or word from me would be enough for her to leave him with the same serene resolve as on that January morning, in front of the prison, when she got out of the car and walked on high heels across the mud of the highway to go into the tavern where I was drinking beside the fogged window and looking at him, who smoked and counted every minute as he leaned on the steering wheel and couldn't overcome the fear that she was gone forever.

"Let's go," said Beatriz, and she opened the car door, but the wounded man and the other man didn't seem to hear her, as if they didn't believe in the mirage she announced when she showed them the house. She got out with her head bowed to keep the branches of the olive tree from tangling in her hair, and when she looked again for the light she had seen slipping from window to window, like ghosts in the movies, she couldn't find it, but there was a motionless figure in the middle of the esplanade, at the edge of the river embankment, and although from that distance it was impossible for her to see his face, she recognized in a melancholy way, like someone who listens to a piece of music and recovers an intimate feeling that had been forgotten, the shape of his shoulders, the way Jacinto Solana sometimes looked at things with his head tilted to one side and his hands lazily thrust into his pockets. "I'll go alone," she said then, "you two wait here." She crossed the tracks, the bridge, she disappeared in the fog, emerged on the other side of the river, and from there she turned to verify with relief that the car had dissolved in the shadow of the two olive trees hiding it. As indifferent and silent as a tree mineralized by the moon, Solana didn't notice her approach, and saw Beatriz only when she was almost at the end of the road and said his name, first in a quiet voice, as if she were afraid the light that dilated forms and endowed them with the hardness of figures of salt could also enlarge and disfigure the sound of voices, then shouting or perhaps hearing her own voice like the pale shouts in dreams, because the sound of the water erased it, and it vanished in the brilliance of the moon and in the warped space of the olive groves and the liquid blue sierra, as weightless and extended as the fog. "Jacinto," she said again, in a louder voice, but her voice didn't sound to him like a shout, "it's me, Beatriz."

"The three of them are dead," he wrote a few hours later in the blue notebook, after leaving them hidden in the wine cellar and lowering the heavy trap door with the feeling he was adjusting the slab of stone over a tomb, "they're dead and they know it, and maybe I am too, because death is a contagious disease. When they put the car in the shed and I took them to the kitchen, they walked back and forth as if they were in a death cell and ate with the same bitter greed I saw so often in those men who knew they were going to be shot at daybreak. The wounded one shakes and sweats with fever and Beatriz passes him a wet handkerchief for his forehead, and then she returns to scraping the bottom of a can of sardines with her oil-stained fingers, with her long painted nails. They tell me they've gone twenty-four hours without eating, that last night, after the encounter with the Civil Guard, they fled along highways they didn't know and didn't stop until dawn, in an abandoned house, in the middle of a red plain where there was nothing and nobody, not a tree or an animal or a human or a sierra or a city in the distance. At nightfall they left again for the south, and suddenly, Beatriz says, when she had lost consciousness of how many hours she had been driving, she saw in the headlights the sign for a city, Magina, and then a lit, deserted gas station that might have a public telephone. As on other occasions, in years gone by, when letters hadn't been enough and she would call Manuel to ask if he knew anything about me, she asked the operator for his number and waited a long time until she heard the alarmed voice stupid with sleep that said the Island of Cuba and explained how to get here. The Island of Cuba, she says to me with exhausted irony, only you could end up living in a place with a name like that.'"