A Manuscript of Ashes Read online

  "If you could have seen," Manuel said, "the expression in his eyes when he entered the library for the first time. My mother had gone to spend a few days at the Island of Cuba, and my father was in Madrid, at the Congress of Deputies, and for a week the entire house was ours. We were eleven or twelve years old, and Solana, when he walked into the courtyard, stood very still and silent, as if he were afraid to move forward. 'This is like a church,' he said, but in reality it wasn't the house that interested him but the place where the books came from that I would lend him behind my mother's back, and which he read with a speed that always bewildered me because he did it at night by the light of a candle when his parents had gone to bed. In his house there was only one book. I remember it was called Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, a serialized story in three volumes that Solana had read when he was ten and toward which he always felt a kind of gratitude. 'What else could I ever want than to write something like those two thousand pages of misfortunes?' he would say. He entered the library as if he were going into a cave filled with treasure, and he didn't dare touch the books, he only looked at them, or gently ran his hand over them as if he were stroking an animal."

  Solana's tightened lips, his dark rage, his lucid, precocious hatred of the life that denied him that house and that library, his desire to rebel against everything and flee Magina and his father and the two hectares of land and the future in which his father wanted to confine him. It wasn't his love of books that made him clench his fists and wait in silence in the middle of the reception room that smelled of leather and polished wood, but his consciousness of the miserable poverty into which he had been born and the brute fatigue of the work to which he knew he was condemned. The books, like the opaque gleam of the furniture and the golden lamps and the white cap and starched apron of the woman who served them chocolate at teatime in large porcelain cups decorated with blue landscapes, were merely the measure or sign of his desire to flee in order to calculate at a distance his future revenge, longed for and planned out when he read in books about the return of the Count of Monte Cristo. Manuel, alarmed by his silence, suggested they go to the rooms upstairs, but at that moment Jacinto Solana had become a stranger. He ran up the stairs to induce him to follow, but from the gallery balustrade he saw that Jacinto Solana was looking at himself in the mirror on the first landing, distant from him and his voice and everything he so eagerly wanted to offer him in order not to lose the friendship he felt was in danger for the first time since they had met. Solana looked in the mirror at his shaved head and his hemp espadrilles and the gray jacket that had belonged to his father, signs of the degradation against which he could defend himself by imagining with obstinate fervor a future in which he would be a rich, mysterious traveler, implacable with his enemies, or a correspondent and a hero in a war from which he would return and humiliate at his feet all those who now conspired against his talent and his pride. Manuel did not see his tears before the mirror or hear his silence, but a half century later he still recalled the hostile resolve with which Jacinto Solana had said that some day the books he was going to write would be in the library too.

  Beatus ille, thought Minaya: what an elevated life and work he desired until his death and never had. His books weren't there, but his words and eyes were, like scratches in the shadow, obsessively contemplating from the mantel over the fireplace the area of serene semidarkness and volumes in a row that he never reached. Crossed-out words or scratches of his poor handwriting suddenly appearing in the margins of a novel that Minaya leafed through for the sheer pleasure of touching the pages and looking at the romantic prints that interrupted them from time to time. He was cataloguing the beautiful volumes of the first French edition of Les voyages extraordi-naires—Manuel's father, a devotee of Verne's, must have bought them in Paris early in the century—when he noticed that L'île mystérieux was missing. He searched all the shelves in vain for the book and asked Manuel about it, who didn't remember having seen it. One morning, when he went into the library, Inès was there dusting the bookcases and the furniture and replacing the bottles in the liquor cabinet. L'île mystérieux was on Minaya's desk.

  "I brought it back," Inès said. "I finished reading it last night."

  "But it's in French," said Minaya, and immediately regretted saying it because she set aside the duster and stood looking at him with an expression of impassive mockery in her chestnut-colored eyes.

  "I know that."

  To escape his embarrassment, Minaya feigned a sudden interest in his work and didn't stop writing on the file cards until Inés left the library. This was how she would always leave him, so often lost in stupefaction, halted at the brink of a revelation he never could attain and besieged by the desire not only for her body but above all for everything her body and her gaze concealed, because in her, caresses and hungry kisses and fatigued, final stillness were the mask and the lure that hid her from Minaya, so that each boundary of desire he crossed with her was not its assuaging consummation but an impulse to go even deeper and tear away the veils of silence or words that inexhaustibly imposed themselves on Inés' consciousness. But the sensation of advancing was completely illusory, for it wasn't a question of successive veils that would eventually end in the true, unknown face of Inés, but of a single, reiterated, immobile one: the eyes and mouth and thin lips she tensed to apologize or to smile, the voice and face that Minaya never could fix for any length of time in his memory. Slowly he turned the large yellow pages of L'île mystérieux and stopped at the last print: when those who had been shipwrecked have abandoned the Nautilus, fleeing the eruption that will destroy the island, Captain Nemo dies alone in the splendor of his submerged library. There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the print, and it was difficult for Minaya to decipher it because the blue ink had almost faded. "3-11-47. If only I had the courage of Captain Nemo. My name is nobody, says Ulysses, and that saves him from the Cyclops. JS."

  But between himself and the words written by Jacinto Solana, which always had the quality of a voice, there now was Inés, mocking his clumsiness, and the book she had brought back was proof of her irony and her absence, for Minaya still found himself in that trance in which desire, not yet revealed in its deceitful plenitude, advances like a nocturnal enemy and makes accomplices of all the things that are transformed into emissaries or signs of the creature who has touched them or to whom they belong. The large house on the Plaza of the Fallen, one of Inés' shirts on the clothesline in the garden, her coat, her pink kerchief on the coatrack, the bed and the glass of water on the night table in the room where she slept when she stayed at the house, the leather sofa where he kissed her for the first time at the beginning of March, Orlando's drawing that fell to the floor, interrupting the shared excitement of their embrace with a crash of broken glass when she pushed him with her hips against the wall and kissed him on the mouth with her eyes closed. As if the sound of the glass had awakened him from a dream, Minaya opened his eyes and saw before him the half-closed lids and eager wings of Ines' nose, who had not stopped kissing him. For a moment he was afraid that someone had come into the library, and he moved away from the girl, who still moaned in tender protest and then opened her eyes, smiling at him with lips wet and inflamed by his kiss.

  "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?"

  6

  TIME IN MÁGINA 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 ea
ch 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.