A Manuscript of Ashes (18 page)

M
ANUEL REMEMBERS HE WAS
sitting at the kitchen table, looking through the panes in the white doors at the dark morning beginning in the garden and raising a late mist, sourly bristling with rain. Amalia had served him a large cup of lukewarm café con leche that was the dirty color of mud and a slice of unusually white bread that he crumbled slowly over the cup and stirred into the coffee with a spoon. "Eat it all up, Don Manuel, that's real bread," Amalia said, "I bought it on the black market for twelve pesetas. " The delight of the white bread, the porcelain cup with blue designs, the silver spoon and the linen napkin on his knees. In those years, he recalls aloud to his nephew Minaya, one gave oneself over to minor tactile pleasures as if they were the unique, hidden happiness that no one could detect or snatch away. He touched the loyal things to which he had always belonged, searching them for the possibility of a narrow escape accessible only to his fingertips, and the presence of the linen, the curved porcelain, the silver flatware, secretly saved him from the unpleasant taste of the coffee at dawn and the smoke from the stove, filled with damp wood, that turned the air in the kitchen gray like an extension of the bad weather and cold fog from which the garden and the city, his own lethargic life, were emerging so slowly. The doorbell rang in the courtyard, and it was still so early that Amalia and Teresa and even Manuel remained motionless, not deciding to open the door and not even acknowledging they had heard it, because at that hour, as it did at night, the sound of the bell always seemed to announce a threat. Amalia stopped moving dishes in the sink, and Manuel, with involuntary caution, went out to the courtyard, making a silent gesture to Teresa so that she wouldn't open the door yet. On the translucent glass of the entrance door, a tall masculine figure was outlined. "Open it," said Manuel, and he went back to the kitchen. A man alone didn't frighten him. He carefully fit the first cigarette of the morning into the holder and prepared to wait and listen, his back to the courtyard and to the voice it took him a little while to recognize. "Don Manuel," said Teresa, "Don Jacinto Solana has come."

 

H
E SAW HIM STANDING
in the courtyard as if in the middle of time, returned not exactly from prison but from memory and death and the ten years that had passed since the night in 1937 when he took a train to Madrid. The time of his absence and the mystery of his fate during those years surrounded him in the emptiness like the paving stones and columns of the courtyard and gave his return the sudden quality of an apparition, because he seemed to have come from nowhere, wearier and older but untouched in his pride, his solitude, his ironic way of saying "Manuel," smiling before he embraced him, as if the irony and the smile could maintain the old virtue of eluding the hideous edges of things and he hadn't come from a prison where they had amputated eight years of his life. His hair was gray, cut very close, white at the temples and the badly shaved tips of his whiskers. His voice was more serious, but perhaps it was always that way and Manuel didn't remember it. "But he's the same," he thought, seeing how he took off his hat and placed the cardboard suitcase tied with a rope on the ground to look with his sharp gray eyes at the columns in the courtyard, the gallery, the stained glass of the dome. "The library door to the left," he said, as if reciting a lesson, "to the right the marble staircase with the mirror on the first landing.
I liked imagining it all. I set myself the discipline of remembering each thing with absolute exactitude. To the rear the kitchen, and the piano room, and the window shutters painted white that open to the garden." It wasn't his more serious voice, it was the tone, the slowness with which he said the words, as if he didn't care about them or didn't see to whom he was saying them: it was his eyes, Manuel realized later, remote from the smile and the voice and endowed with an expression as dark as his consciousness, as the true nature of his despair. In the kitchen Teresa and Amalia approached reverentially to greet him. "But your hands are frozen, Don Jacinto, come over to the stove, I'll give you breakfast right now." The dirty nails, the sides of his eyeglasses secured with black string, the eyes avidly fixed on the coffee and the piece of bread that Teresa set before him. He wore a heavy overcoat that was big on him, with a belt and buckle and very wide coattails, like the ones worn a few years before the war. He had put his hat on the table but didn't take off his coat or lower the lapels to eat breakfast: he rubbed his large, unfamiliar hands together as he hunched inside his vast overcoat next to the stove, so close to it that the smoke choked him, he drank the coffee holding the cup with both hands and didn't use the napkin to wipe his mouth when he had finished. With the spoon he scooped up the crumbs of bread remaining at the bottom of the cup and only then raised his eyes to Manuel, who smoked and looked at him from the other side of the table, melancholically confirming the indecency of hunger and the ravages of time that had brought them down and reunited them now as brutally as it had divided them: to offer them not the relief of recognition but the certainty of its impossibility. "White bread," Solana said, "I had even forgotten its taste. Do you know the last time I ate it? In March of '39, the day before the Fascists entered Madrid. They threw us white bread from their planes, Manuel." Never, says Manuel, never since he returned to Magina had he heard him take pleasure in sorrow or recall hatred or lost battles. In his voice, the war, when it did come up, was as distant as everything else, and he never stopped to tell him why at the beginning of June 1937 he left his job at the Ministry of Propaganda to enlist voluntarily in the army or what the circumstances of his arrest had been when the war was over. He knew only that when he was wounded at the Ebro, he was an artillery sergeant, that between January and March 1939 he was in Madrid and saw Orlando, that in 1940 he shared a cell for prisoners condemned to death with Miguel Hernández. When he finished breakfast, he stood and plunged his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and for an instant Manuel recognized him: it was his old gesture of determination, the secret, sudden way he always had of leaving even though he didn't move. The sun had come out in the garden, and an icy wind beat at the glass and shook the swing under the palm tree. They looked at it at the same time when they heard the creak of the chains that held it down, and perhaps they both saw the same phantom suspended over the white swing, but they didn't talk about Mariana yet. "I've begun to write a book," said Solana, pointing vaguely at his suitcase, where he might be keeping the first drafts. "In prison, like Cervantes," he half-opened his lips to smile and Manuel noticed he was missing several teeth. "It will be called
Beatus Ille.
Do you like the title? It's about Mágina, and all of us, Mariana and you, Orlando, this house. That's why I needed to see it again. In January of '39, when I returned to Madrid, I happened to find out where Orlando lived, and I went to see him. It was a very dark, very large apartment, in Argüelles, an old building with all the windows boarded up, still standing by some miracle, because it was very close to the Ciudad Universitaria front, it was like an island surrounded by rubble. It was hit by a bomb a week later, and I suppose Orlando died buried in the ruins. He wasn't living anymore with that boy who came with him to your wedding and scandalized Utrera and your mother. He had gotten married, and don't ask me why because I don't know. He looked very sick, constantly spitting into a handkerchief stained with blood, shivering with cold on a mattress that looked as if it had been rescued from a garbage dump, because in that apartment there was no bed, no furniture, only bare tiles and frozen radiators. His wife was a nurse, an unsociable type who didn't say a single word while I was there. She stood and watched us from the door to the room, and from time to time she took his temperature and brought him cups of broth that he drank down immediately, as if he were afraid. At first he didn't seem to recognize me. He laughed a great deal, with a laugh as strange as his cough, he made fun of my sergeant's stripes and called me a Communist hero and didn't know or remember anything about the war, as if he didn't care that we were about to lose it. 'I fooled them, Solana,' he said with that miserable laugh of a dying man, 'they wanted to send me to the front and had to declare me unfit. Look there, in those papers on the floor, look for one where it says I'm unfit for military service.' I asked about that picture he had decided to paint when he was in Magina, you remember, the one he imagined in the country house the day before your wedding. He had decided to call it
Une partie de plaisir
and told all of us it was going to be his masterpiece. He didn't remember it, of course. 'I've retired from painting, Solana. Art and happiness are incompatible.' But on the floor I saw the last things he had painted. They were all watercolors, and the same landscape was repeated in all of them. Magina's hill above the olive groves, the outline of the city just as we saw it that day from the country house. The watercolors had a beauty that wasn't of this world, it wasn't perfection but something beyond that, something that didn't even belong to art, and even less to the man who had painted them. Then I thought that just one of those landscapes was enough to justify Orlando, and all of us, because we were participants in his brilliance. I remembered with shame all the things I had written, the articles in
El Sol
and in
Octubre,
the ballads in
Mono Azul
and in the war murals, and I realized I had to break with it all and forget it all to write something that would resemble Orlando's watercolors." Abruptly Solana fell silent, still walking up and down past the glass doors to the garden, his head bowed and his hands fiercely thrust into the pockets of his overcoat. He's left again, Manuel thought. As he spoke he slowly had been recovering his gestures, the way he looked and moved his hands, the cold fervor of another time, but now silence returned him to his present form, unfamiliar and a little frightening: the hard, unshaven jaws, the scraped, long nape like a sign of obstinacy or failure, the myopic eyes reddened by sleep that rested on him like two spies when Jacinto Solana took off his glasses to clean the fogged lenses and said what Manuel had foreseen and feared since he saw him in the courtyard: "Tell me how they killed my father."

I
CALLED TO HIM
from the top of the path, but the din of the water overflowing into the irrigation ditch from the cistern kept him from hearing me, and then, instead of going over to him or calling him again, I stayed next to the dead poplar where we had tied the mare when I was a teenager and watched him for a long time before he noticed my arrival, watched him alone and absorbed in his work, as he always had wanted to live. He was squatting, leaning over the edge of the cistern, in the shade of the pomegranate tree, with his straw hat that hid his face from me and the black smock he had always worn buttoned to the neck. I saw his large reddened hands vigorously shaking a bunch of onions in the water to clean the mud from the roots, and when he stood to place the onions in a wicker basket, I finally saw his face with the cigarette end glued to one side of his mouth. From the top of the path the farm descended a slope of meticulously cultivated terraces, with angles as precise as those on a sheet of paper, bounded by irrigation ditches and the fig and pomegranate trees on whose trunks I so often had carved my name with a knife. I walked along the path and stopped halfway down to call him again. He stood slowly, wiped his damp, red hands on the tails of the smock, and carefully put out the cigarette before kissing me twice, as he had always done, but now he was not nearly as tall as me and he had to stand straight to reach my face. "You didn't even write me a damned letter, you bastard." With him I always was paralyzed by an old shyness that wasn't completely separate from the fear I had of him once, when he was a frightening man as big as a tree who told me I'd turn into an idiot from reading so many books. "It's the war, father," I apologized, without his paying attention, "it doesn't leave me time to write to you." "The war?" he said looking around, as if when he didn't see its traces on the peaceful cultivated earth and in the irrigation ditches he might think I was lying to him. "What do you have to do with the war?" I wanted to stand firm, even indict him, say something with the necessary fervor, but when I spoke to him in my own voice, I recognized the same vacuous tone of exaggeration or lies that official communiques had then. "Here you don't know, or don't want to know, but we're teaching the Fascists a lesson," I concluded. I remember that he sat down, shrugging his shoulders, on the stone bench under the pomegranate tree, and then he looked through the smock, searching for the cigarette he had put out, looking at me as if confirming that after twenty years his suspicion had come true that reading books would turn me into an idiot. "That's what they told us when they sent us to Cuba. That we were going to teach the insurgents a lesson. And now you see, a little more and you wouldn't have been born."

He lived alone on the farm he had plowed himself, in the house he had built with his own hands before I was born: a shed with mangers, a small stall for the pigs, a single room with the fire, the bed, the sacks of seeds, the tools, the earthenware dishes in which he prepared his food with exactly the same pleasure he found in all the chores of solitude, because now, when he's dead, I know he was a man dominated by a fierce will to be alone, and if he left Magina on July 19, 1936, it wasn't because he was afraid of the war but because the war offered him the excuse he always had wanted to leave the city and escape his tedious dealings with other men. On the afternoon of that July 19, he went out and saw a man running across the Plaza of San Lorenzo, and he stationed himself at one of the corners. The man, a stranger, wore a shirt stained with perspiration and looked at my father with his mouth open, saying something he couldn't understand because immediately afterward a shot was fired in the empty plaza, and the stranger, pushed to the wall as if by a gust of wind, rebounded against it, holding his stomach, and fell to the paving stones dead.