A Manuscript of Ashes (5 page)

I can imagine him now, in his leather armchair, in the precise spot in the library where Ines said he had sat across from Minaya, his hands joined, his cigarette forgotten in the ashtray, all the lost years written on his face and on his hair that had been blond and that gave him, along with his blue eyes and his manners from another country and another time, a foreign air exaggerated by his shyness and his loyalty. Like a prolongation in his memory of the words he had said after an infinite respite of silence, Manuel looked at the pencil drawing of Mariana and repeated to himself the date and name written in the margin, but when he stood it was not to take down the drawing and show his nephew the words Solana had written on the back, but to pick up from the mantel over the fireplace the photograph taken on the same day they learned about the victory of the Popular Front in the February elections and hand it to Minaya. Look at us, he could have said, smiling at the proximity of war and death, contemplating with open eyes the dirty future reserved for us, the shame, the useless enthusiasm, the miracle of a hand that for the first time rested on my arm.

"What your father told you was true. It was Solana who introduced me to my wife. Ten or fifteen minutes before this picture of us was taken, on February 17, 1936."

H
E HAD A NOTEBOOK
where he wrote down dates, Inés said, places, names, a notebook that he kept in the top drawer of his desk and in which at first he didn't write anything, as if it were only a part of his meticulous simulation, except, on the cover, the date he arrived in the city, January 30, Wednesday, and on the first page, in the middle of the empty space, just the name Jacinto Solana, 1904–1947, like a funeral inscription, like the title of a book that was still blank, destined perhaps never to be written, to be nothing but a volume of ordered pages without a single word or any other marks except those of its blue squares. Then he began to write down dates and names, at night, when he went to bed, as if he were outlining the rough draft of a future biography that his indolence would always postpone, the names of all the inhabitants of the house and the titles of the magazines he had consulted that afternoon in the library, when he was alone and turned red if Inés came in to ask him something, to offer him something, because Manuel had told her to, a cup of tea or a drink. He always listened, very silent, solicitous, and stayed very late conversing with Utrera, with Manuel, with Medina, the doctor, and with brief questions, with silences that contained the questions he didn't always dare to ask, he tried to have the conversation gravitate to Jacinto Solana, to his profiled shadow, elusive and laconic like his gaze in the photographs, like the dedications to Mariana or Manuel in some of the books in the library, on some postcards sent from Paris in 1930, from Moscow in 1935, in December.

He writes in his bedroom, Inés said as she undressed, first pulling off her blue tights, dazzling the semidarkness of the room with her white thighs, her white feet, the pink heels numb with cold, and after taking off her skirt she got into bed and sat on it, covering herself to the waist, her icy feet in the deepest part of the sheets, and then, when she removed the red wool sweater, her head disappeared for an instant and emerged again, beautiful and disheveled, to submerge completely, up to her chin, lying still and shivering, unveiling one hand to toss her bra and shirt to the floor, naked now, clinging, pushing her knees forward, her thighs, with her eyes closed, as if feeling her way, her skin cool and then warm, her small breasts, the brush of nipples hardened by the cold and then soft again and pink and docile to the caress or slow bite that she confirmed, still without the assistance of sight, so that when her eyes opened she, Inés, would be recovered and close, intact, breaking free of the embrace, bending her long body that lay in the dark corner of the sheets that had to be moved away to see her whole, the brief, smooth pubis between closed thighs, the angular, raised hips, and when the hand moved down until the fingertips felt the straight, wet cleft, that touch, like a countersign, advised of the transition to the celebration of odors, deep salty vagina and delicate breath and mouth that sometimes closed pink and wet and a smile of thin lips pressed tight that was the candid, wise smile of happiness and rest.

"But he stops talking when I come in, and he looks at me a lot, almost never in the eye, he looks at me when I turn my back, but I see him watching me in mirrors," she said, laughing only with her lips, certain of her body, grateful to it in a way that excluded adolescence and chance. For Minaya she had prepared the room located to the left of the parlor, symmetrical with the empty bedroom of Manuel and Mariana, and on the first night, when he went down to the library after bathing, Inés examined his suitcase and his books and the papers he had put in the desk, and when she opened the closet she confirmed her suspicion that the recent arrival had no suit other than the one he was wearing. Then she went to the courtyard, hovering near the half-opened library door, pretending to clean the paintings or the tiles, but then Utrera appeared, back from the café, and he began to ask her things about Minaya in his slow, drunkard's voice, what he was like, what time he had arrived, where he was now, brushing against her body in a siege either casual or cowardly, so close she could smell his breath rotten with tobacco and cognac. Utrera, who didn't go into the library because he couldn't walk a straight line and his hands were trembling, looked at her for the last time, not at her face but at her hips and belly, and then he disappeared into the depths of the house, no doubt to shut himself inside the carriage house where he had his studio, or what he called his studio, because in all the years Inés had been in Manuel's service, the old man hadn't done anything but carve a Saint Anthony for a village church and repeat to the point of satiety a series of Romanesque-looking figures that he sold regularly to a furniture store.

"You can stay here as long as you like, even when you've finished your book," she heard Manuel say, and she moved away from the library door because the voice had sounded very close by. She saw him walk out, head bowed and more distracted than usual, and she was surprised he didn't ask for his hat and coat, as he did every night, to take the long walk past the watchtowers on the wall that Medina had prescribed for him. "Inés," he said, turning to her from the stairs, "see if our guest needs anything," but she couldn't do as he asked because Teresa came out of the kitchen then and asked her to help prepare supper for Doña Elvira—Amalia, the other maid, lethargic and almost lost in blindness, gave them vague orders as she sat next to the stove. Broth, a plate of boiled vegetables, and a glass of water that she, Inés, usually took up to the señoras rooms, attending to the most unpleasant part of her work, because Doña Elvira frightened her, like some of the nuns at the orphanage where she had spent her childhood, and she looked at her in the same way. Doña Elvira spent her days examining accounting books or fashion magazines from the time of her youth with a magnifying glass, and she always had the television set on, even when she played the piano, and never looked at it. I estimate that she must have been almost ninety, but Inés says there is not a single sign of decrepitude in her eyes. She wears a black dress with lace collar and cuffs, and her hair is short and waved in the style of 1930. This afternoon, for the first time in twenty-two years, she has left her rooms and her house to go up to the cemetery and witness without tears, with a rigid expression of grief very similar to that of certain funerary statues, the burial of her son.

"Your supper, Señora," Inés said.

"Is my nephew's son, Minaya, here yet?"

"He arrived at six, Señora. He's in the library now."

"What's he like?"

"Tall, Señora, and he seems pretty quiet."

"Is he good-looking?"

"I didn't notice."

"That's a lie. He's good-looking. I can tell by looking at you. And of course you noticed. Will he stay very long?"

"It seems about two weeks."

"We'll see. He'll deceive my son, like that Utrera, who still says he's a sculptor, and he'll stay until he gets tired of living at our expense. He's bound to be a sponger, like his father."

When she came down again with the untouched tray, she saw that the light in the parlor was on, and following her custom of spying on everything—it wasn't curiosity but an instinct of her large, always open eyes and her body trained in stealth, like the eyes and body of a nocturnal animal—she could see Manuel without his detecting her, trapped in Mariana's dead gaze and then locking himself in the marriage bedroom with a key that he alone possessed, and she knew
then that this return to an abandoned custom was the first consequence of the stranger's arrival and the conversation in the library. She distrusted Minaya as an affable invader, and with the same attention she had used to search his suitcase and books and smell the traces of his body in the bathroom and on the damp towels, she studied him later, in the library, enjoying his uneasiness when she looked directly into his eyes, when she brushed against him as she leaned over to fill his glass during supper in the dining room, or caught in the mirror his look of interrogation, of proclaimed desire. Silent and hostile, alert to the danger, she entered the library to see Minaya up close now that he was alone. They would remember afterward that it was the first time they spoke to each other, and that Minaya stood when he saw her and didn't know what to say when Inés asked if he wanted anything as she waited in the doorway, undecipherable and submissive, her chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail and her beautiful girl's hands abused by the murky water in washtubs. She had just turned eighteen, and with her mere presence she knew how to establish an invisible distance between herself and the things that brushed against her without ever touching her, between her body and the looks that desired it, and the obscure, exhausting work she did in the house. She scrubbed the floors and made the beds and spent hours on end kneeling beside a bucket of dirty water to clean the flagstones in the courtyard, and five times a day she carried food or tea to Dona Elvira, holding the silver tray with the same absorbed elegance as those figures of saints in old paintings who hold before them the emblems of their martyrdom, but she and her body kept themselves safe, and every night at about eleven, from the balcony of his bedroom, Minaya saw her go out to the plaza in her coat that was too short and her flat shoes, haughty and suddenly free and moving away to another place and another life that neither he nor anyone else knew about, just as no one, not even he, could determine her thoughts or find out about her past before the day she came to the house recommended by the nuns of the or phanage where she had lived until she was twelve or thirteen years old. She walked to another life every night, to a rented room off the plaza where Utrera's Monument to the Fallen stood. But at first, that afternoon in the library, before desire and the will to know, Minaya was moved only by gratitude and fear of her beauty and his customary predilection for very slim girls.

"Still a little skinny, but wait until you see her in a couple of years," said Utrera, examining her shamelessly from across the table with his little damp eyes, as lively as points of light in the midst of the wrinkles on his eyelids. When the clock struck nine, Minaya had entered the empty dining room that was too large, thinking that the setting placed across from his was his uncle's, but after a few minutes of solitude and waiting it was not Manuel who came in but a tiny, talkative old man who smelled vaguely of alcohol and wore a white carnation in his lapel. Everything about him, except his hands, was small and carefully arranged, and his impeccable baldness seemed like an attribute of his orderliness, like the gleam of his dentures and the bow tie that topped his shirt.

"Since it's very possible that Manuel won't have supper with us," he said, tense and extravagant, "I'm afraid I'll have to introduce myself on my own. Eugenio Utrera, sculptor and unworthy guest in this house, though I must inform you that very much against my will I find myself a step away from retirement. You're young Minaya, am I right? We had a real desire to meet you. Your father was a good friend of mine. Didn't he ever tell you? On one occasion the two of us were about to organize an antiques business. But sit down, please, and together let us do honor to these delectables brought to us by the beautiful Ines. I understand that you are planning to write a book about Jacinto Solana. A difficult undertaking, I would imagine, but an interesting one."

He spoke very quickly, leaning his body forward to be closer to Minaya, with a smile greedy for responses that he didn't wait for, and as he sipped his soup the air whistled through his false teeth, which at times, when he adjusted them, emitted a sound like bones knocking together. He had large, blunt hands that seemed to belong to another man, and on his left ring finger he wore a green stone, as extravagant as his smile, a testimony, just like his smile, of the time when he reached and lost his brief glory. He smiled and spoke as if sustained by the same spring, about to break, that kept his figure of an anachronistic gallant standing, and only his eyes and his hands did not participate in the will-o'-the-wisp of his gesticulations, for he could not hide the fever in his eyes sharpened every morning and every night in the mirror of old age and failure or the ruin of his useless hand that in another time had sculpted the marble and granite of official statues and modeled clay and now lay still and slowly became dull in an immobility driven by arthritis. Behind his words and the smoke of his cigarettes, his eyes, not veiled by vanity or lies, scrutinized Minaya or pursued Inés with the devotion of a dirty old man, and when she leaned over to serve him something or remove the tablecloth, Utrera remained silent and looked at her neckline out of the corner of his eye, sitting a little more erect, very serious, the fork in his hand, his napkin carefully placed in the collar of his shirt.

"She lives with an uncle who is ill, I think he's an invalid, there's something wrong with his legs or his spine. From time to time he must suffer some kind of relapse, because Inés stops coming or leaves in the middle of the afternoon, with no explanation, you must have noticed by now that she doesn't talk very much."