A Manuscript of Ashes (38 page)

I
COUNT THE CAPSULES
like last coins, resonant in the glass bottle, secretive with silence and death against the palate and in the stomach, and now the fragrance of the night and Minayas words and his solitary figure on the platform dissolve in the heavy presentiment of sleep, like Inés' eyes unclouded by tears when she leaned over me to kiss me so infinitely on the mouth and pull the blanket up to my chin, then plumping the pillow under my neck as if tonight were the same as every other night and tomorrow there would be a waking assisted by her tenderness, by the warmth and softness of her bare thighs beneath the sheets and the cup of coffee on the night table, next to the ashtray and the bottles of medicine. How strange now, when I'm alone, to remember my voice, the irony, Minayas bewilderment, his presence in this very room, on that empty chair, the passion with which he continued asking questions and wanting to know beyond knowledge and disillusionment, in spite of them, and jealousy, and that glance he directed at Inés when she came to pour me a glass of wine and left her index finger on my lips for a moment, as if asking me for silence or invoking in front of him a secret complicity that connects her only to me. He asked until the end, obsessive, immune to irony and play, filling my glass when it was empty as if to bring on a confession and forgetting about his on the night table,
then getting up, when I asked him to leave and to take Ines with him, with the abrupt gesture of someone emerging from water, facing her, waiting for a movement or a sign from her eyes, more fixed than ever on the cloth she was embroidering, silent and very tall, devastated by love, by fear of losing her, urged on by the thought of the train he is supposed to take tonight and by the bell striking the hour in the Plaza of General Orduna, counting the strokes in silence as I now count the last capsules I've poured into the palm of my hand while my sleepiness grows and reaches my limbs like a flood of sand. "You've written the book," I told him, "for a few days you returned me to life and literature, but you may not be able to measure my gratitude and affection, which are greater than my irony. Because you are the main character and the deepest mystery in the novel that did not have to be written in order to exist. You, who didn't know that time, who had the right to be lacking in memory, who first opened your eyes when the war was over and all of us had been condemned for some years to shame and death, exiled, buried, imprisoned in jails or in the habit of fear. You love literature as we are not even permitted to love it in adolescence, you search for me, for Mariana, for the Manuel of those years as if we weren't shadows but creatures truer and more alive than you. But it's in your imagination where we were born again, much better than we actually were, more loyal, better looking, free of cowardice and truth. Leave now, and take Ines with you. She's over eighteen and it's unfair for her intelligence and body to remain buried here, next to a dead man who never finishes dying, in that house where they'll conspire to humiliate her now that Manuel's gone, if they haven't already decided to throw her out. I've taught her everything I remembered or knew. I've tried to educate her as I educated myself, in Manuel's library. She speaks excellent French and has read more books than you can imagine. With your help she can study in Madrid and find a good job. Take her with you. Tonight, right now." He said nothing, standing against the door, vertical and oblique because of a ceiling as low as the
shadow of a light resting on the floor, a stranger, very tall, with his melancholy formal suit and mourning tie, just as he is now, I suppose, while he waits on the platform and doesn't know that Inés is going up to the station along the streets of Màgina, past the corners of closed windows with single lightbulbs under the eaves, at the boundary of dark empty fields where the long walls of the cemetery and the station rise up, in another world. He saw her get up and come toward the bed, brushing him with her perfume and her will to defiance, not looking at him, refusing to acknowledge that he was here, that he existed like us and it was possible to choose him. "I don't want to go," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, smoothing my hair, taking from my hand the glass of wine that was trembling, curled up against my chest as in the distant days when she was afraid of water and darkness and would lie down with me asking me to tell her again the story of the phantom ship as motionless as stone in the middle of the valley of the Guadalquivir whose whistle we could hear from the bedroom in the mill. He, Minaya, continued in front of us, like a guest who has not yet accepted the obligation to leave, but Inés had already excluded him from her tenderness and from the world and embraced me as if we were alone, telling me she would never leave, and kissed me as she curved her lips to say no and she kept saying no with her eyes and her hands and her entire body that affirmed her will to remain here despite my surrender or indolence, fiercely embracing my neck, as if she were defending me, as if when she turned her back on Minaya and the future, she had expelled them from us. She wasn't a shade, she was the only thing that never had contained even the slightest hunger for lies or guilt, the only body undoubtedly and as precisely modeled for happiness as a god's desire and when I embraced it and knew I was tasting its final caresses I wasn't moved by repentance or the sorrow of saying good-bye but by a sweetness very similar to gratitude for the only gift no one had been able to strip from me and that will not be squandered by oblivion. She said no to Minaya, who was no longer in the room, who
had gone out in silence and returned to look at us from the hall as if he were about to leave for an exile longer than his own life, she said she would always stay with me and, standing with the reckless determination to choose loyalty of those adolescents who refuse to grow older and be despicable, she closed the door and leaned against it as if to stop anyone or anything from coming in to separate us, and she said no again and kneeled beside me, wanting to stop my words when she saw the bottles of capsules for insomnia, and knew why she had to leave tonight. Now I see her walking toward the station with a clarity firmer than any memory and I see her eyes that have recognized Minaya and rest on him from a distance as serenely as they looked at me when she understood that she could not undo my purpose and that when she left she would fulfill the final, delicate, necessary tribute to our mutual loyalty. When I was young I cursed myself for not being able to remember the faces of the women I loved. Now the darkness to which I am descending as if abandoning myself again to the warm water of that river from which I perhaps never returned, or to sleep beneath the sheets of a wintry bed, is the space of clear-sightedness in my memory that I don't want to and can't distinguish from divination. I see Inés walking alone on the avenue of linden trees, and I know there is not an instant in my life when the exact shape of her mouth or the precise tonality of her eyes will stop being as present in me as the scent of her body that is still in the blouse she left on the bed and that I touch and smooth as if I were caressing the profile of her absence. I see Minaya, I immobilize him, I imagine him, I impose on him minute gestures of waiting and solitude, I want him to think that now too, when he is escaping, he obeys me, I want him not to look up yet at the entrance to the station, and to curse me in a low voice and swear that as soon as he arrives in Madrid and breaks the fabric of my curse, he'll burn the manuscripts and the blue notebook and renounce Magina and Inés, I want him to know that I am imagining him and to hear my voice like the beat of his own blood and consciousness, and when he sees Ines standing under the large yellow clock, it will take him an instant to realize she is not another illusion constructed by his desire and despair, beatus ille.

 

Granada and Ubeda,
May 1983-May 1985