A Manuscript of Ashes (8 page)

"Don't worry. I'll tell Don Manuel the drawing fell when I was cleaning it."

When he picked it up, Minaya saw that something was written on the back. "Invitation," he read, and again it was the tiny, familiar, furious hand he had found a few weeks earlier in the novel by Jules Verne and that very soon he would secretly pursue through the most obscure drawers in the house, a slender thread of ink, a flowing stream not heard by anyone that led only to him, not to the key to the labyrinth he had already begun to imagine, but to the trap he himself was setting with his search. He saw the desk, the mirror, the hands on the paper, the pen that was tracing without hesitation or rest the final verses Jacinto Solana wrote not realizing until the end that the sheet he had used was the one where Orlando had drawn his portrait of Mariana. That night, when Minaya entered the library after supper, the drawing was back in its place with new glass. Sitting across from him, meditative and calm, Medina examined it with the attentive air of someone who suspects a falsification.

"I'll tell you something if you promise to keep it a secret. I never thought that poor Mariana was as attractive as they said. As Manuel and Solana said, of course, though Solana was very careful about saying it aloud. And do you know what they both suffered from? An excess of seminal fluids and literature—forgive my vulgarity. I suppose they've already told you that Solana was in love with her too. Desperately in love, and long before Manuel, but with the disadvantage that he was already married when he met her. Piously married in a civil ceremony, like the good Communist he was, feeling Christianly remorseful for the temptation of deceiving his wife and his best friend at the same time. Your father really never talked to you about it?"

T
IME IN
M
ÁGINA
revolves around a clock and a statue. The clock on the tower of the wall built by the Arabs and the bronze statue of General Orduna, whose shoulders are yellow with rust and traces of pigeons and whose head and chest have nine bullet holes. When Minaya can't fall asleep and tosses and turns in the arduous duration of his insomnia, he is rescued by the great clock on the tower striking three in the empty Plaza of General Orduna, where the cab drivers stretch out and fall asleep on the backseats of their cars and an officer sitting in boredom at the entrance to the police station guards the door with his elbows on his knees and his flat-peaked cap down over his face, and perhaps he gives a start and sits up when above his head he hears the striking of the hour, which then, like a more distant, metallic resonance, is repeated in the tower of
EL
Salvador, its bulbous, lead-colored dome visible over the roofs on the Plaza of the Fallen, where Inés lives. Then there is almost a half minute of silence and suspended time that ends when it strikes three inside the house, but still very remote, on the clock in the library, and immediately, as if the hour were approaching Minaya, climbing the deserted stairs with inaudible steps and slipping along the checkered corridor of the gallery, the three bells strike very close to his bedroom, on the clock in the parlor, and so the whole city and the entire house and the consciousness of whoever cannot sleep eventually merge in a unique submerged and bidimensional correlation, time and space or past and future linked by a present that is empty and yet measurable: it precisely occupies the seconds that pass between the first bell in the tower of General Orduna and the last one that sounds in the parlor.

Wide towers crowned with brambles, made huge by solitude and darkness, like the Cyclops whose single eye is the clock that never sleeps, a lookout that informs all those condemned to ceaseless lucidity and unites them in a dark fraternity. The sick undermined by pain, those in love who do not sleep in order not to abandon a shared memory, killers who dream about or remember a crime, lovers who have left the bed where another body sleeps and smoke naked beside the curtains trembling in the night breeze. But this may be the final insomnia of all, the one that flows into death, and enduring it is like walking at night along the last street in a city without lights and suddenly discovering that you've reached the flat wasteland beyond the houses.

The bottles are lined up on the night table, within reach, as are the glass of water, the cigarettes, the capsules that are pink and white, blue and white, blue and yellow: delicate pastel tones for administering the minimal methodical death each of them contains. Diluted blues, yellows, pinks, like the ones in Orlando's last sketches, his watercolors of Magina seen from the south, from the esplanade of the Island of Cuba, in which the sensation of distance—a long profile of roofs and towers and white houses spread out across the top of the hill toward which the gray lines of olive trees and the pale green of wheat fields ascend—was also an indication of its distance in time, for they weren't painted on the eve of the wedding but during the last winter of the war in a house in Madrid, half destroyed by bombs, in whose hallways and rooms with their boarded-up windows no light like the one Orlando had seen in Magina in the spring of 1937 ever penetrated.

At that time the Plaza of General Orduna had lost not only the bronze statue but also the name written on the stone tablets at the corners.
For three years, and until the day the general returned from the garbage dump swaying like an intrepid drunken charioteer on the back of a truck and watched over by a double row of Civil Guard and Moorish soldiers on horseback, it was called the Plaza of the Republic, but no one ever used that name to refer to it, and even less the name of General Orduña. It was, for the inhabitants of Mágina, the old plaza or simply the Plaza, and the statue of the general belonged to it because it had entered the natural order of things, like the clock tower and the gray pigeons and the arcades where men gathered on rainy winter mornings or at dusk on Sundays with their hands in the pockets of their wide dark suits, their curly hair damp with pomade, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The large taxis as black as funeral carriages are lined up beneath the trees on one side of the central gazebo, facing the clock tower and the police station. The cab drivers talk or smoke, leaning against the rounded hoods, as if taking refuge in tedium under the protection of the statue of the general who ignores them, standing quiet and alert in the center of the plaza. "One of the most distinguished sons of Mágina, from our family, I think," Minaya remembers his father saying, leading him by the hand on any forgotten Sunday, after eleven o'clock Mass at El Salvador and a visit to the confectioners, where with a magnanimous gesture he gave him a coin so he could take a candy out of the great glass ball that gleamed in the semidarkness, spotted with light from the street. A flock of pigeons takes flight abruptly at Minaya's feet and settles on the head and shoulders of the general, and one of them pecks at the hole that a vengeful, precise bullet opened in his left eye. "To the most excellent Señor Don Juan Manuel Orduña y León de Salazar, hero of the Ixdain Beach, Mágina, in gratitude, MCMXXV," his father would read aloud, and Minaya recalls that it frightened him to contemplate the height of the statue and the holes made by bullets that had penetrated his head and chest and gave him the appearance of the living dead in horror movies. Rigid, like them, invulnerable to gun shots, and looking out with a single eye no more obstinate and fearsome than the other empty socket, the general seemed to sway back and forth on his marble base and his entire golem's bulk weighed on Minaya. In his right hand he holds a pair of bronze binoculars, and in his left, adhering to the high leg of the boots with spurs, a whip or saber that he is about to raise. Indifferent to pigeons and oblivion, the general has his one eye fixed on the south, on the straight street that descends from the plaza, hugging the ruins of the wall, to the embankments of the spillways and the farms and the distant blue of Sierra Mágina, as if there, on the elevated horizon that on rainy days displays the purple mist of Velázquez' Guadarrama, he caught a glimpse of a military objective that was unreachable now, a column of white smoke that he will decipher with the binoculars before raising the whip or saber and shouting a bold, heroic order.

"Those are bullet holes, Son," said his father, solemn and pedagogical. "Since they couldn't shoot General Orduña, because he was already dead, those imbeciles shot the statue."

They arrived in a ragged formation of blue coveralls and espadrilles, unbuttoned tunics over white shirts, military trousers held up by a rope around the waist and militia caps and helmets tilted or fallen over the back of their necks. They carried old muskets from the Cuban war and Mausers stolen during an attack on the barracks of the Civil Guard, and some, especially the women, brandished no weapons other than their raised fists and their voices repeating an Anarchist anthem. Someone shouted for silence and the best-armed men lined up in front of the statue, aiming their muskets at his face. A silence like that of an execution had fallen over the entire plaza and over the crowd waiting in the arcade. The first shot hit General Orduña in the forehead, and the explosion frightened away the pigeons, which flew in terror up to the eaves and went astray in the air each time a volley was discharged that was greeted by the crowd with a vast, single shout. When the guns were silent, a man carrying a long hemp rope made his way through the mass of people and threw an accurate noose over the statue's head that had been punctured nine times, calling for the help of the others who placed their guns across their backs and joined in his effort to bring down the general's likeness. With the rope tense and the harsh knot closed around the hollow torso that resonated like a great wounded bell when it was penetrated by the bullets, General Orduna rocked very slowly, still vertical and not entirely humiliated, and then it moved back and forth and finally fell with a bronze clamor, pulling down in its slow fall the marble pedestal that splintered on the flagstones of the plaza. They adjusted the slipknot around the neck of the statue and dragged it bouncing on the paving stones of the city until they threw it into the chasm of the garbage dump. Three years later, a municipal crew spent an entire week looking for it in the trash and debris, and before they raised General Orduna onto a new base, men in white coats who had come from Madrid—in Magina they were immediately called statue doctors—repaired the dents and cleaned the bronze, but no one thought of covering the holes scattered like scars over the forehead, eyes, firm mouth, haughty neck, and the chest armor-plated in a general's medals. On the same day his statue was erected again on the base that had been empty for three years, the bells of the clock on the tower sounded again, because the men who pulled down the general had also shot at the white sphere, whose motionless hands marked the exact moment the statue fell and Magina entered the exalted and voracious time of the war.

 

"T
HAT WAS THE FIRST THING
he must have noticed when he returned to the city after ten years," Minaya thinks in the plaza and writes later that night in the notebook that Inés punctually opens and examines every morning when she comes in to clean his bedroom, "and what gave him the measure of their defeat and of his sentence, which had not ended when he left prison: not only the red and yellow flag that hung now from the balcony of the police station but also the restored statue and the clock that began to tell time again only
when the city had been conquered by the fascists." Like Solana, imagining what he did or feared, he avoids the more traveled streets and goes down toward the southern wall along cobblestoned lanes and white walls that lead to intimate plazas with abandoned sixteenth-century palaces and tall poplars quivering with birds, to the hidden Plaza of San Lorenzo, where the house is located in which Jacinto Solana was born and lived and before whose door he stopped one dawn in January 1947. From the half-closed doors, from the open windows through which the music of a radio soap opera reaches the plaza, attentive women watch Minaya and question one another, pointing at the stranger, who stands beneath the poplars and looks at all the entrances one by one, as if he were searching for someone or had lost his way in the city. That's how they looked at Solana when he arrived there, and perhaps they didn't recognize him because he was ill and had aged and ten years had passed since the last time they had seen him in Magina. And so, with a slow step and bowed head, he came to his father's house and saw the balconies and closed door that nobody opened when he struck the door with the knocker. Number three, said Manuel, the corner house, the one that has a coat of arms over the doorway with the cross of Santiago and a half moon. The house with deep animal pens and barns where he would hide behind sacks of wheat to read the books Manuel gave him and that had, like the library, the profound fragrance of serene time and money that isolated him from his own life and from the shouts of his father calling him from the door to come down and clean the stable or give the animals their feed. In his house the golden miracle of electric light did not exist, and when his parents went up to bed, they took with them the kerosene lamp whose yellow, greasy light swung between their sleepy voices and lengthened their shadows in the hollow of the staircase, and he remained alone in the kitchen, his light the embers of the fire and the candle he lit in order to continue reading the adventures of Captain Grant or Henry Morton Stanley or the journeys of Burton and Speke to the source of the Nile until his eyes began to close. He groped his way up to his room, and from his bed he listened to the coughs and snores of his father, who fell asleep with the same brutal resolve he brought to his work, and as soon as he had fallen asleep, sinking into the mattress of corn husks as if it were a bed of sand, his father was knocking at the door and calling him because it was almost dawn and he had to get up and saddle the white mare and take her to the farm along the road that began at the Gothic door in the wall. He tied his book bag to his back, and it was already morning when he returned to the city, running along the paths on the ramparts to get to school on time, and there Manuel, blond and clean and just recently awake, was waiting for him to copy the composition and arithmetic homework from his notebook.