A Manuscript of Ashes (9 page)

What a strange logic of memory and pain conspires silently to transform the prison of another time into paradise: he trembled with gratitude and tenderness when he turned the corner of the plaza and saw the poplars and the familiar doorways, loyal to his recollection, and the illuminated air that became blue over the high, ivy-covered belfry of San Lorenzo. For a moment, as he walked toward the house recognizing even the irregularities in the ground, he thought his whole life had been one long mistake, that he never should have left the place with serene light that received him now as if he were a stranger. It was the time of the olive harvest, and a man he didn't recognize immediately was loading empty sacks and long poles of heather wood for shaking down the olives onto a mule tied to the grillwork over the window.

"How could I not remember him if we grew up together," the man says to Minaya, and he chokes and coughs without taking the cigarette wet with saliva from his mouth, sitting in the sun on a wicker chair that creaks beneath his large, defeated body. "But he went to Madrid during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and found a job on a newspaper and got involved in politics, because he had a lot of ideas and never liked the countryside, so he left his father alone with all the work they had on the farm, and they didn't speak for years."

"Be quiet, Manuel," murmurs a woman beside the old man who has her white hair pulled back and a black shawl over her shoulders, who had been sweeping the sidewalk and saw Minaya stop in front of the house next door, as if he didn't know that no one had lived in it for many years. The man—"Manuel Biralbo, pleased to meet you"—had stopped braiding the rope he was holding in his large hands when Minaya arrived and offered him another chair facing his, in the corner of the plaza where there's a smell of damp earth, in the light that sifts through the thick foliage of the poplar. "Be quiet, Manuel," the woman repeats in a low voice, looking out of the corner of her eye at the stranger who asks questions about forgotten things, but her husband, as if he were not aware of the risk she observes and fears, goes on talking and not only invites Minaya to sit down but also offers him his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers and becomes entangled in senseless explanations that no one has asked him for.

"Justo Solana, the father, they shot him when the war was over, and nobody knows why. He must have done something, people say, like so many others who had fingers pointed at them back then, but I don't know what he could have done since he wasn't a man who got mixed up in politics, and for the whole war he stayed at the farm. But he came back a little while before the troops marched in, and in three or four days they came for him in a car and took him to jail, in handcuffs like a criminal. Then I found out they killed him. But his son, Jacinto, didn't know until he came here from prison. I can see him as clearly as I see you, with his black coat and hat and the suitcase tied up with a rope in his hand. At first I didn't know him. I was in my doorway when he knocked at the door of his house, and I saw his face when they told him his father didn't live there anymore. Jacinto, I said, don't you remember me? And when I shook his hand, I saw that he was crying. He said, 'Manuel, what did they do to my father?' and I didn't know what to tell him because I had a thing here, in my throat, and I couldn't even talk. 'They killed him,' I said, and he looked at me and lowered his head and left the plaza without saying another word. And I never saw him again. That summer I heard they had killed him too."

His footsteps returning, the inert sound of his footsteps on the paving stones of the street that takes him away from the Plaza of San Lorenzo, where Manuel Biralbo sat watching him leave, never to return, sitting on his wicker chair, braiding a rope to occupy his hands, explaining to his wife that there's no danger, that this boy who's so polite is writing a book about Jacinto Solana, you remember, Justo's son, the one who went to Madrid and then they killed him. Like the ticking of a clock, like the beating of the suicide's heart and the ringing of bells in Magina, his footsteps drummed on the empty street, not subject to his will and his consciousness, indicating the only possible road left to him in his banishment. He thought he would never reach the white palace on the Plaza of San Pedro as he walked along the Calle de la Luna y el Sol, remembering other dawns when the mare's hooves sounded in the silence to invite him to gallop and imagine an adventure, but the now unfamiliar city continued to be a firm habit of his footsteps. Clinging to the walls, Minaya thinks, his face hidden beneath the brim of his hat, between the lapels of his overcoat, the face without eyes or nose or mouth, only a straw hamper of shadow to waylay the besieged presence of the Invisible Man. But he still doesn't know the street plan in Magina—long medieval streets, curved like a bow, that never let you see their ending, you simply have to guess gradually at the shape of nearby houses and discover a plaza only when you've reached it—and wanting to repeat Solana's exact footsteps on that cloudy early morning in January, he soon found himself lost in narrow lanes that have the names of ancient guilds and saints, and when he finally thought he had found his way to Manuel's house, it isn't the Plaza of San Pedro he comes to but another larger square he had never seen before and in whose center there is a scraggly garden with cypresses standing like guards around the monument erected by Magina in 1954 to honor its fallen. The house, Minaya recalls in a sudden rush of tenderness, the house on the corner where Inés lives with her sick or paralyzed uncle at the back of a courtyard in an apartment house, where the motionless man waits every night at the highest window for her to return.

Because he doesn't know how to renounce the custom of waiting for her, Minaya lingers in the Plaza of the Fallen, looking from time to time, like a zealous spy, at the closed door and balconies where it's possible she may appear. Utrera's monument shines in the midafternoon like a great block of marble against the dark backdrop of the cypresses. "An entire year of work, my boy, my hands, these hands, bloody every night from struggling with the granite. It was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, but tell me if art, great art, doesn't always consist of that." As if exhausted under his mineral wings, the angel bends over the fallen and tries to lift him up from the stone altar where his sword lies, but the naked white body overflows his arms, and his face is turned toward the wall, toward the high stone slab where the cross is sculpted with the names of the fallen of Magina, so that it is very difficult to see his features. "Because Utrera wanted no one or almost no one to see them," Minaya wrote in his notebook, "because he wanted only a very small number of viewers, or perhaps none at all, to discover his most perfect work, and in this way publicly keep it secret, the treasure of a strange avarice."

One night when he had taken up his post in the Plaza of the Fallen to look for Inés, because she hadn't come to the house for a week, Minaya heard at his back the sound of a body moving through the hedges, and he saw the glow of a small flashlight wielded by someone who seemed to be hiding on the other side of the statues. He's following me, he thought, suddenly recovering the fear of his final days in Madrid, but Utrera was too drunk to recognize him in the dark and hadn't even seen him. He was looking for something between the pedestal and the cypresses, cursing in a quiet voice, and when he heard Minaya and turned the light on him, he didn't know what to say and stood there in front of him, the flashlight in his hand and his mouth open and an alcoholic somnolence clouding his eyes.

"I dropped my watch. I tripped over a tree, and I dropped my watch in that garden. A family memento. Thank God I found it. Would you be so kind as to walk home with me?"

Minaya felt the intolerable certainty that he wouldn't see Ines that night, and perhaps not tomorrow either, and to go on waiting for her was not a way to prod destiny into making her appear.

"My friend, my young friend and guide," said Utrera, who accepted his own drunken clumsiness and Minaya's firm arm like an aristocrat who had resigned himself to ruin without, for that reason, losing pride in his lineage. "There is no way to deceive you. Have you looked carefully at my monument? The signature is there, wait until I shine the flashlight on it: E. Utrera, 1954. Have you already seen all my works in the churches of Magina? Well please don't go to see them. Maybe there'll be another war and they'll burn them all and then they'll begin to give me commissions again. Do you believe those students who are organizing demonstrations in Madrid will burn any churches?"

But Minaya might never have found out what Utrera was looking for that night with the flashlight if Ines hadn't told him. It was Sunday afternoon and he was waiting for her in the plaza, paying attention to the clock and the slow-moving minutes left before she would arrive with her perfumed hair hanging loose and her blue shoes and the white or yellow dress she put on only on Sundays to go out with him, which for Minaya was, like the afternoon light and the scent of the acacias, an attribute of happiness. Like an adolescent on his first date, he looked in the windows of the parked cars to make sure the part in his hair was still straight, and he smoked without stopping as he watched the door of the house where she would appear like an undeserved gift, walking toward him through the cypresses with a slight smile in her eyes and on her lips. But that after noon he didn't see Inés arrive, and when he heard her voice she was already at his side, brushing his hand with a gesture as casual and precise as a countersign, the same one she used some nights in the dining room to tell him secretly that when everyone was in bed she would be waiting for him, naked and distinct in the darkness of her bedroom and attentive to the sound of his cautious footsteps in the silence. "Do you like it?" Inés asked, pointing at Utreras monument. Minaya shrugged and tried to kiss her, but she eluded his lips, and taking him by the hand made him turn toward the pedestal of the statue.

"I want to show you something," she said, smiling, as if she were inviting him to play a mysterious game, and she asked him to look carefully at the face of the fallen, hidden between the legs of the angel. "I realized it once when I hid here playing hide-and-seek."

The fallen hero has a body of barely chiseled hard angles, but his face, which cannot be seen head on and is revealed only from one, very difficult vantage point situated behind the pedestal, shows the incontrovertible features of a woman and seems sculpted by another hand. The straight nose, the delicate cheeks with the smoothness of marble, the half-opened lips, the almond-shaped eyes about to close, and the sleepy charm of hair falling across one side of the face.

"It's as if she had just fallen asleep," said Minaya, following with his index finger the line of the lips that suggested a smile not completely unknown to his memory, "as if she had turned in her sleep to face the wall."

That was when Inés showed him the darker, slightly sunken circle in the middle of the young woman's forehead.

"She isn't asleep. She's been shot in the head, and she's dead."

F
ASCINATION OF HALF-CLOSED
or closed doors, like the eyes of the statue that has a man's body and the secret face of a woman, like Ines' body, always, before first kisses, when she becomes someone else and is unreachable by words or the caresses that touch her as if they were touching the inert smoothness of a statue, immune to silent pleading and to silent despair. In the house there are hospitable half-closed doors that invite one to go into the successive rooms of memory, but there are also, and Minaya knows it, in a cowardly or greedy way he guesses it, closed doors that he is not permitted to violate and whose existence is hidden from him or denied, like a man crossing the empty salons of a Baroque palace who discovers that the door he wanted to pass through is painted on the wall or reflected in a mirror. The house is so large that its inhabitants, including Minaya, are lost or erased in it, and if each one is secluded in a precise space that they almost never leave, it is not because they desire or have chosen solitude but because they have surrendered to its powerful, empty presence that is taking over, one by one, all the rooms, the length of all the hallways. Every night Minaya makes notes, enumerates on his pad: Utrera carving improbable Romanesque saints in his workshop at the back of the house, behind the garden; Amalia and Teresa in the kitchen or the laundry, in the dark rooms of what in another time was called the service area; Manuel shut in the pigeon loft all morning,
smoking silently beside the fire in the library, when Minaya isn't there; Doña Elvira with her magnifying glass bending over the glossy pages of a magazine devoted to celebrities as if it were a case of insects, or playing the piano in front of the television set she never looks at. Shipwrecked people, Minaya writes, in a city that is now, and has been for three centuries, a motionless shipwreck, like a galleon with high Baroque rigging thrown onto the top of its hill by some ancient maritime catastrophe. Medina, an unbelieving local scholar, says that Mágina was first the name of a peaceful city of merchants and shady Roman villas extending along the plain of the Guadalquivir, and occasionally a plow or an archaeologist's pick unearths a millstone or the headless statue of a Carthaginian or Iberian divinity on the banks of that muddy stream, but the other Mágina, walled and high, was built not for happiness or life fertilized by the waters of the river and the goddess with no chapel or face but to defend a military frontier, first against Christian armies and then against the Arabs, who came up from the south to reconquer it and were defeated along the wall they themselves had raised, and on one of whose highest towers is the clock that now measures out the days of Mágina and the duration of its decadence and its pride. For it was pride, not prosperity, that constructed the churches with bas-reliefs of pagan gods and battles with centaurs and palaces with courtyards of white columns brought from Italy, like their architects, in the by-now mythological times when a man from Mágina was secretary to the Emperor Carlos V. Orlando's judgment in the Plaza of Santa Maria, before the palace of the Vázquez de Molina who administered the finances of Felipe II: "What I like most about this city is that her beauty is absolutely inexplicable and useless, like the beauty of a body you encounter when you turn a corner." Now those palaces are abandoned or converted into apartment houses, and all that is left of some is, like a painted curtain, the high facade and empty windows that reveal a site strewn with rubble and columns fallen among the hedge mustard flowers, but the white house on the Plaza of San Pedro doesn't resemble any of those, because it was built more that two hundred years after the ancient pride of Magina had been extinguished forever. The marble balustrade that crowns its facade and the garden walls and the garlands sculpted in white stucco over the arches of the balconies give it an air between French and colonial, like a serene extravagance. In 1884, Manuel's grandfather, Don Apolonio Santos who, they say, had been a gilder of altarpieces in his youth and left the city without saying good-bye to anyone after winning two hundred silver duros in the casino, came back from Cuba weighed down with a fortune as barbarous as the means he used for twenty years to obtain it, and he had the house built and a neo-Gothic mausoleum erected in the Magina cemetery. Ten years after his return, Don Apolonio owned the best palace in the city and had bought eight or ten thousand olive trees within its boundaries, but he barely had enough life to enjoy his fortune, because some poorly treated fevers—and, they said, his displeasure at seeing his youngest daughter married to a clerk with no future—brought him to his neo-Gothic tomb during the first winter of the century.