A Manuscript of Ashes (12 page)

He thought about Medina as he groped his way up the last steps to the pigeon loft, not daring yet to turn on the flashlight, about Medina,
about his slow eyes that had seen Mariana barely covered by the nightgown under whose silk folds one could make out the faint shadow of her pubis, about the way he cleaned his eyeglasses so un-hurriedly or looked in his vest for the watch he used to measure with equal composure the time of his visits and the passage of his life toward an old age as irreparable and mediocre as the tyranny he once had fought and now tolerated—without accepting submission but also without the vain certainty that he would witness its downfall—as one tolerates an incurable disease. Some nights, after the game of cards in the parlor, when the others had withdrawn, Medina delayed drinking his last glass of anisette and remained seated in silence across from Manuel, who gathered up the deck counting the cards on the table with that distracted air of his, as if he were counting coins. At first, from his bedroom, Minaya listened to the silence, perhaps Medina's cough or a few words in a quiet voice that almost never became a conversation, asking himself why the two men were still there doing nothing, facing each other, smoking in the light of the lamp that enclosed them in a conical bell of silence and smoke. When it was after midnight, Medina would ask Manuel something, who agreed, and then a sound could be heard like whistles and tearing paper, voices that interrupted one another or were inundated by a remote babel of words in foreign languages. "It's no use," said Manuel, "there's too much interference tonight, and I can't find it." And then, when he was about to fall asleep, the music of the Anthem of Riego' woke Minaya, and he knew what he should have guessed long before: Manuel and Medina stayed in the parlor that late to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees. "Don't have any illusions, Manuel," he heard Medina say one night, "you and I will never see the Third Republic. We're condemned to Franco in the same way we're condemned to grow old and die." "Then why do you come every night to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees?" Medina burst into laughter: he had the sonorous laugh of a bishop. "Because I like the 'Anthem of Riego.' It rejuvenates me. That anthem of Franco's is for third-rate funerals."

After kneeling beside Mariana and confirming that she had no pulse, Medina stood up, brushing off the knees of his military trousers. Death had been instantaneous, he said, but no one paid attention to his words. Near the door, Minaya imagined as he slid the circle of the flashlight around the walls, there would be the others: Dona Elvira, in mourning, Manuel, Amalia, perhaps Teresa, if she was already working in the house then. Utrera, Jacinto Solana, biting their lips, wanting blindly to die. When it reached the window without glass or shutters, the illumination from the flashlight dispersed in a well of night, and then the very weak circle shed light on the roof on the other side of the lane. Leaning on the sill, Medina saw two Assault Guards crawling with difficulty along the neighboring roof, rifles over their shoulders, examining the broken tiles. "There's a trail of blood here, Captain," one of them said. "The militiamen say the Fascist hid behind the chimney and fired from here." In the darkness, Minaya, who had turned off the flashlight because its light made the pigeons restless, thought he heard footsteps, imagined that the staircase was creaking, that someone was going to discover his useless investigation, but the footsteps and his fear were simply the way his conscience felt guilt, the invincible and secret shame of being an impostor that had pursued him his entire life and now, in the house, in the places of the time he dared to enter clandestinely, it hounded him more than ever. They're asleep now, he thought, while I climb like a thief up to this place that doesn't belong to me and shine the flashlight on an empty space, they're asleep or probably they never sleep and their eyes are open in the dark as they listen to my footsteps over their heads. For a moment, the murmur of the sleeping pigeons and the sound of the blood beating in his temples seemed like the combined breathing of all those who slept or didn't sleep in the rooms of the house. Above the roofs, in the center of the window, was a half-moon as precise and fragile as the illustration in a children's book. Minaya closed the door of the pigeon loft and felt his way down the steep staircase. Only one of the lamps in the gallery was lit, and its light projected his own very long shadow in front of Minaya. The afternoon's conversation with Dona Elvira, Manuel's relapse, the time spent in darkness in the pigeon loft, had plunged him into a state of singular fatigue and nervous excitement that denied in advance the possibility of sleep. His sudden image was that of a sleepwalker in the tall mirrors along the stairs. But when he reached the courtyard, he knew he wouldn't be alone in the library. A line of light slipped under the door, and in an easy chair next to the fire, her lips painted, her hair loose over her shoulders, holding a cigarette and a book in her hands, was Inés, who looked at him without surprise, smiling, as if she had been waiting for him, knowing he would come.

O
RLANDO SHOULD HAVE SURVIVED
to sketch Inés just as he had sketched Mariana. He, who never desired women but was never indifferent to the beauty of a body, would have known how to sketch in exact equilibrium the cold lines of her profile and figure and the passion they incited: the pencil tracing with distant tenderness Inés' nose and chin, her lips, on the white paper, the modeling of her hands and ankles, the invisible smile that sometimes lit up her eyes and that the most attentive camera would never have captured in a photograph, because it was an inner smile, like the one provoked so slightly by the splash of a fish's tail on the surface of a lake. But that night, when Minaya found her in the library, or the days and dawns that preceded it, the line of the pencil on untouched white would not have been enough to draw Inés, desired by two men who situated her body on the balance of an obscure symmetry. A single red stroke for her smile, a red or pink spot for her lips, the same as the one left by her lipstick on the towels in her maid's room, when she locked her door to put on makeup at a mirror hanging on the wall, as if it were a secret rehearsal or a brief performance meant only for herself, for in the end, when she had succeeded in combing her hair and painting her lips in a way that satisfied her, she would pull back her hair again and wipe off the lipstick with a wet towel and return silently to her earlier, hermetic simulation.

Very soon the game acquired new characteristics: she liked to put on makeup and look at herself naked in closet mirrors and go down to the library when she was sure no one would surprise her to repeat a scene she had relished in certain fashion magazines. Sitting next to the fire, with a glass she never finished and a cigarette pilfered from Manuel's case, she read in the oblique light of a low lamp, absorbed in the adventures presented in the book but conscious at the same time of each one of her gestures, as if she could see herself in a mirror. When she heard the door she closed the book, marking the page where she had stopped with a peculiar sliding of her fingers that Minaya could not help but notice because it had the quality of a caress, and she contemplated with irony and tenderness the surprise of the newcomer. It had to happen there, in the library, and nowhere else, at that time and with that light, which invited and seemed to accentuate Inés' features and the unfamiliar perfume that Minaya distinguished among the usual odors of wood and books. It was easy, that night, to imagine what was going on, to calculate the particulars of the scene and the words Inés would use to recount it afterward, interrupting the kisses to add a minor detail: the way Minaya sat down across from her, not looking at her yet, searching for his cigarettes, his momentary evasion, asking about the book she was reading, overwhelmed by the terror and vertigo of knowing that Inés had painted her lips and combed her chestnut hair in that new, dazzling way to wait only for him at two o'clock in the morning. Sitting on the chair, her legs extended so that her heels rested on the precise spot where he had to sit, with that inexplicable cigarette between her lips, for she didn't know how to smoke and every time she exhaled the smoke it gave rise to the cough of a fourteen-year-old with clandestine cigarettes.

"You've been in the pigeon loft."

"You saw me?"

"I saw the feathers sticking to your sweater."

"Do you see everything?"

Never until then had he seen that smile in Inés' eyes and on her lips, or perhaps he had, he would remember later: that same morning, when they were talking about
The Charterhouse of Parma
and she, in their shared enthusiasm for the adventures and courage of Fabrizio del Dongo, smiled at him for an instant, as if he were her accomplice in a secret passion. She talked about Fabrizio the way she talked about Errol Flynn, because her literary imagination had been educated visually by Technicolor movies on Sunday afternoons, and when she read a book she moved her profile forward as attentively and greedily as if she were contemplating the illuminated screen. Ever since he saw her come into the library at ten in the morning, as she did every day, with the feather duster and the white apron around her waist, her gestures had acquired for Minaya the quality of signs about to be revealed. Useless to seek refuge in the severe protection of the books, the pasteboard filing cards that he wrote and put in order with a purpose whose conclusion was so distant it was becoming impossible. Inés sat across from him, forgetting the duster on the table, her face lazily resting on her hands, which held and framed her angular pink cheekbones, while he gave himself over to his enduring task of calligraphy and pasteboard.

"Last night I was up until three o'clock reading
The Charterhouse.
I've never read a book I liked as much as that one. What about you?"

"Only
The Mysterious Island.
Where did you learn French?"

"At the orphanage. There was a French nun."

It was the same smile, the same way of looking at him as if she finally were seeing him, and of using literature, the sonorous name of Fabrizio del Dongo and the illusory recollection of the landscapes of northern Italy, to speak about herself, about Minaya, whose face she instinctively attributed to Fabrizio, for since then their conversations about books on tepid mornings in the library were the veil for other words neither of them dared to say. On the mantel over the fireplace, in the semidarkness across the room, Jacinto Solana smiled at them from an afternoon in 1936 with his obscene loyalty to every unconfessed desire. Inés, Minaya said then, interrupting a phantom conversation in which books and Mariana's picture intervened, calm now and a little drunk, firm in his twenty-six years as a man alone and in the certainty that he desired her that night with the clarity of an axiom. "You never say my name. Did you realize that? As if it embarrassed you." But he didn't explain that it was modesty that kept him from pronouncing her name in front of her, because naming her would be saying everything, his sleeplessness, his solitary love under the sheets, memory retrieving her body to desire her more, closing his eyes until all of him melted in a hot, despicable spasm, mornings without her in the library, the inconsolable emotion when he saw her coat hanging on the rack in the courtyard or passed by her room and saw her stockings and white apron on the bed. Saying Inés aloud was like doing what he perhaps would never do, like taking her hand and slowly removing the glass or caressing her breasts. Inés, the two beloved syllables, the hand that offered him a cigarette stopping at the boundary beyond which a caress would begin, the music she had put on Manuel's phonograph as if at random and that was incredibly, premeditatedly the trumpet and voice of Louis Armstrong on a record from 1930, at last her lips, the girl barefoot and kissing him in the darkness like no one, not even she, would kiss him again, gratitude broken into delicate bites of silence, into caresses of the blind who search each other for characteristics driven not by desire but by an urgent wish for acknowledgment. Inés' cheekbones, chin, wet lips, the tears that moistened Minaya's fingertips in the darkness, the perfume, the music sounding in a closed room in 1930 just as it sounded seven years later, that same song, on Manuel's piano, and he translated the title for Mariana before he began to play "If We Never Meet Again."

The end of the music and of their caresses came at the same time, and then, when Minaya and Inés drew back listening to their double and single breathing, they could see each other as strangers in an uncertain light that came from the plaza, because they had turned off the lamp when they began to kiss, and they heard, as if they had just returned to the world, that the record was silently turning with the needle still on it and the pendulum of the clock had not stopped moving back and forth in a corner of the library. Now their voices were different, slower and warmer, as if made denser by the darkness, and they extended their hands to stroke the other's hands or simply to touch the clothes or skin or perfumed air that surrounded them, run aground not in peaceful fatigue but in the stupefaction of having survived happiness. Ines said afterward that when she wanted to get up to turn on the light, Minaya kept her at his side. He wanted to stop time, not take a step beyond the instant in which the darkness still enfolded them like a silken wing, not return to the usual light that leveled everything and would return them to their modesty, strangers once again, their hands hurrying to straighten their clothes and erase from the library the signs that could expose them the next morning. A glass of wine overturned in the grass, an empty bottle, a rectangle of light advancing without mercy on the shadows of the garden like a river whose flooding the lovers would move away from without undoing their embrace. Mariana, sitting up, leaned her beautiful disheveled head against the trunk of the date palm, immune to the fear that had made them move back when the light went on and they saw in its squared patch the shadow of someone who perhaps had been spying on them. "Solana," she said, the cigarette between her lips, taking in her hands the dark face in front of her, then caressing his neck and drawing him to her, as if guiding him, until she sheltered him between her white breasts under the moon, "Jacinto Solana," like a challenge and an invitation that would never be accepted because they were already consuming the ashes of the time they had been granted.