A Manuscript of Ashes (15 page)

"I was told you saw them kill Solana."

"I didn't see it. Only they saw it, the ones who killed him. I heard the burst of the three-and-a-half-inch caliber weapon the Civil Guard carried and shots from Don Jacinto's pistol; he jumped into the river gorge from the shed. I spent a whole year on the Cordoba front, and I could identify every kind of weapon. They had me handcuffed right here, two of them, pointing their rifles at me, as if I could escape, and I heard the gunfire and the shouts, and from time to time Don Jacinto's pistol, he always carried it, even when he was writing. He kept it on the table, next to his papers, and when he went down to the river to swim, he left it with his clothes, because he knew they were going to come for him. I remember it took them several hours to find the body, because he was dead when he fell into the river and the current dragged him, so it was already daylight when they brought him here and threw him in the middle of the esplanade, full of mud, his whole face covered with blood. They didn't let me near him, but I could see from a distance the broken lenses of his glasses glinting on his face."

Inés listened to Frasco's story with the same fascinated attention she had felt when she was a little girl in the dark listening to tales of islands and tall empty ships that sail up the valley of the Guadalquivir on moonless nights. She was standing behind Minaya, and from time to time she touched his shoulder or brushed his neck with a very light touch, because nothing pleased her as much as enveloping any sign of tenderness in secrecy. With a shiver of gratitude he squeezed the hand she held out to him in the shadows as they followed Frasco up the stairs to the room Solana had occupied during the last three months of his life, a large hay loft with a sloping roof and long beams with halters tied to them, and in the back a single window covered with a piece of burlap that tinted the light the yellow of pollen. Under the bed was the trunk no one had opened for the past twenty-two years, because Frasco hadn't wanted to touch anything after the Civil Guard left carrying the dripping wet body of Jacinto Solana.

"I swept up the ashes. The floor was full of burned papers everywhere, even under the bed, I don't know how the roof didn't catch fire—you can see it's made of wood and reeds—and burn the whole house down. They didn't burn all the papers at the same time, in a bonfire; it seems they burned them one by one."

"Did they burn the books too?" asked Minaya as he examined the blue ink stains on the table. Stains of a finger sometimes, like fingerprints, long stains like the shadow of Jacinto Solana's hands.

"There weren't any books. Don Jacinto didn't bring any when he came here. Nothing but the suitcase tied with rope and the pistol in his jacket pocket. He wrote with a pen Don Manuel had given him. The Guards must have taken it with them because I didn't see it again."

Moving aside the piece of burlap that covered the window, Inés leaned her elbows on the sill to look at the river and the walled blue line of the city, as if she weren't listening to Frasco's words. The water formed dark clotted eddies around the pillars of the bridge and the reedbeds on the shore. Beneath the window was the sloping roof of the small shed from which Jacinto Solana had jumped to the embankment,
rolling blind through the slippery leaves of oleander, between the darkness and the mud, then getting up and pushing his elbows into the red earth to fire at the Guards pursuing him. Inés, said Minaya, and from the tone of his voice she knew they were alone now in the loft and all she had to do was remain motionless and he would embrace her from the rear and caress her breasts, saying her name again in a darker voice as if it were hidden in her hair, which he explored with his lips. But this time Minaya didn't embrace her: Frasco had gone, he said, and would be right back, and while they were alone he wanted to open the trunk under the bed. When he raised the lid Minaya had the sensation that he was opening a coffin. "There's nothing," said Inés, kneeling beside him, "just old clothes." They searched down to the bottom of the trunk, where there was a pair of cracked shoes, a fountain pen, a cigarette lighter, a red ribbon like the ones tied around the manuscripts in the marriage bedroom. Like the metal bed with the bare mattress, and the ink stains on the table, each of the things they exhumed added obscurely to the others to lay out before them the empty mass of Jacinto Solana's presence. "Memory doesn't last," Minaya thought as he opened the pen that perhaps Solana touched a few minutes before he died, as he attempted to work the lighter that for so many nights had occupied a precise place between the habits of writing and insomnia, "the only things that last have always belonged to forgetting, the pen, the lighter, a pair of shoes, an ink stain like a fingerprint on the wood." It was Inés who found the notebook and the small cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper. She was folding a gray jacket to put it back in the trunk when she noticed a hard, smooth surface in the lining, and then, as she continued searching, a bundle so small that at first her fingers didn't distinguish it from the fold where it was resting. There was a tear in the inside pocket, and the cartridge and notebook had undoubtedly slipped through it. "Look, it's the same handwriting as on the manuscript." It was a notebook whose pages were graph paper, it had a blue cover and a schoolboy air, and it was irregularly filled by writing that seemed disciplined by desperation. That afternoon as they returned to the city on the train, Minaya examined the pages where the lines of ink were now as faint as the grid marks, and when he deciphered the words, which at times he read aloud to Inés, the images of the river, the esplanade in front of the house, the room with the table and the single window through which you could see the silhouette of Magina, specified the details of a nocturnal setting surrounding the figure who in the light of a candle writes incessantly even after he hears the uproar of rifle butts banging on the door of the country house, when the Guards' boots thundered like galloping horses on the stairs, but he knows he's going to die and doesn't want his final words to end up in the fire. "He hid the notebook in the jacket lining himself," Minaya told Inés excitedly, as if he were talking to himself, to his yearning to find out and know, "because this diary was his will, and he knew that when he began to write it." He kept the notebook when they reached Magina station, not having read yet the long account that filled the last pages and consequently not understanding the reason why there was also a cartridge in the lining wrapped in a piece of the Republican
ABC
of May 22, 1937. Only that night, last night, when Manuel was already dead on the rug in the marriage bedroom, did Minaya lock the door of his room and discover that Solana had recounted the death of Mariana in the last pages of the notebook, and that the bullet that killed her hadn't come from the roofs where militia men were pursuing a fugitive, but from a pistol that someone held and fired from the doorway of the pigeon loft.

H
E HAD TELEPHONED
Medina himself and gone downstairs to unbolt the outside door so the doctor would find it open when he arrived, bringing to these actions a useless urgency, a somnambulistic haste similar to that shown by Teresa and Inés in preparing coffee, bottles of hot water, clean sheets for making the bed where Minaya and Utrera had lain Manuel, as if death were not something definitive, as if it could be stopped or mitigated by pretending they were ministering not to a corpse but a sick person, and their hurry to arrange everything in the marriage bedroom in silence, not speaking to each other or to anyone else, avoiding looking at each other just as they tried not to look at the man lying on the bed, was motivated by the sense of propriety that the imminent arrival of the doctor provokes in houses where someone is ill. Wandering in a waking state as dark as the film over her eyes, Amalia drifted between the gallery hallway and the parlor and marriage bedroom, setting herself vague tasks she didn't complete, bringing a glass of water to Doña Elvira or clumsily smoothing the quilt around Manuel's feet, and she murmured things that to Minaya's ear were confused with Doña Elvira's murmurs or prayers and the profusion of footsteps that exaggerated the silence. Like fish in an aquarium they all passed one another in the area of the bedroom and the parlor, their bodies sometimes making contact but not their eyes, and if Minaya, overcoming for a moment the stupefaction of a guilt that resembled our guilt for the crimes we commit in dreams, searched out Inés' eyes when he found himself alone with her in the hallway, he encountered an attitude of flight or a fixed stare that did not seem to notice him. He wasn't afraid then that they would be discovered: with a fear that wiped out all culpability or sense of danger, he was afraid only that Inés had stopped loving him.

Now death was Manuel, with his silk scarf around his neck and his touseled white hair that Doña Elvira smoothed as if in a dream with a dry caress, it was open eyes at the threshold to the room and the hand he had raised as if to curse them or expel them, then curving as if wanting to clutch at his heart and the hoarse sound of air escaping his lungs and of his body slowly collapsing then falling all at once onto the disorder of Minaya's and Inés' clothes and the bridal veil she had worn to initiate the game of pretending to be or being Mariana on her wedding night. But everything was very distant and as if it hadn't happened, because death demolished the possibility of remembering and fleeing, and the moment when Manuel died was now as imaginary or remote as Medina's voice, torpid with sleep, when he promised Minaya he'd be at the house in twenty minutes. Minaya went out to the hallway, with the useless intention of confirming that the courtyard light was on for Medina's arrival, he refused a cup of coffee that Teresa offered him, looked for Inés and when he saw her coming didn't dare look at her, brusquely opened the door to his room and locked himself in and saw on the desk Jacinto Solanas manuscripts, the blue notebook, the cartridge that in a few minutes, when he had read the final pages in the notebook, would be established as the conclusion of the story he had pursued for three months. But now there was only a culpable lucidity in his mind. He understood that in looking for a book, he had discovered a crime, and that after Manuel's death there was no possibility left to him for innocence.

They had returned from the station that afternoon, pursuing each other down the lanes and embracing with an obstinacy of desire that for the first time excluded all modesty or tenderness, delaying the moment they would arrive at the house and daring rough caresses at the empty streetcorners and sweet, dirty words they had never said before. But the game and the fever didn't end when they knocked at the door of the house. As they listened to Teresa crossing the courtyard and repeating "Coming," they arranged their clothes, their hair, they solemnly stood erect at either side of the door, feigning indifference or fatigue, and now simulation excited them more than the chase.

"Don Manuel is worse," said Teresa. "He had to lie down after lunch."

"Did the doctor come?"

"Of course, and he scolded him for smoking and not taking his medicine. How can he get better if he pays no attention to what they tell him to do?"

When she heard Minaya, Amalia felt her way down the stairs, clutching at the banister. She was coming from Manuel's bedroom and brought with her the weary smell of the sickroom. "Your uncle wants to see you." There was a dirty gleam of tears beneath her painted lids. When Minaya knocked gently at the bedroom door Manuel's voice inviting him in sounded unfamiliar, as if it had been infected prematurely by the strangeness of death. But he thought about those things afterward, when he was alone in his room waiting for Medina, because one always remembers the eve of a misfortune imagining vague presentiments that could not be verified while there was still time and that perhaps did not exist. The same voice coming out of the semidarkness asked him to open the curtains. "Open them more, all the way. I don't know why they have to leave you in the dark when you're sick." Because light is an affront, Minaya thought when he turned to his uncle, looking at his sunken cheeks against the white pillow, the slender, motionless hands on the quilt, the wrists with long blue veins emerging from the sleeves of his pajamas. In the plaza, above the tops of the acacias, the sand-colored church tower, crowned by gargoyles under the eaves, shone brilliantly in the afternoon against a violent blue crisscrossed by swallows.

"Bring over that chair. Sit here, closer. I can't speak very loudly. Medina prohibited my talking. He's spent thirty years prohibiting my doing things and ordering absurdities."

Manuel closed his eyes and very slowly brought his hand to his left side, holding in the air and then expelling it with a very long whistling sound. Once again it was the stabbing pain, the knife, the dark hand splitting open his chest until it squeezed his heart and then released it as slowly as it had seized it, as if offering a respite, as if advancing only as far as the precise boundary where asphyxia would begin.

"This morning, when you went to the estate, I entered the library and saw you had forgotten to put away some written pages. I was going to do it myself because I thought they were notes for the book that I don't know if you still want to write, and I was afraid Teresa would disturb them when she cleaned, but when I put them together I saw without meaning to that you had written and underlined my name and Mariana's several times. Don't look at me that way: I'm the one who ought to apologize, not you. Because I was tempted to open the drawer again and read what you had written about us. Since you came here I've answered all your questions, but this morning it frightened me to imagine what you must think of us, of Mariana and me, and of Solana, who did what you're doing, who looked at everything the same way you do, as if he were verifying the history of each thing and what one was thinking and hiding behind the words. With that novel of his that he never finished, the same thing would have happened to me as with your papers. I wouldn't have had the courage to read it.