A Manuscript of Ashes (26 page)

T
HE BELL AT THE ENTRANCE
didn't ring when they arrived, but one of the door knockers sounded on the exterior door, which Manuel or Amalia always locked around midnight, when Medina would leave after having a last drink in the parlor and there was no one left on the ground floor of the house. Manuel hadn't gone to bed yet, he was in the garden, in the dark, waiting for sleep to come on the gentle night in early June, and a wind scented with wisteria had carried from the Plaza of General Orduna the sound of the tower clock striking, but he heard the violent knocking on the door only when Amalia, lighting her way with an oil lamp, opened wide the glass-paned doors that led from the dining room to the garden. She was barefoot and in her nightgown, and the lamp light heightened on her face, still puffy with sleep, the horror of someone who has awakened from a nightmare. "Don Manuel," she called, looking for him in the darkness, "they're knocking at the door. I asked who it is, but they don't answer." For a moment he thought or wanted to think it was Solana who had come back, driven by one of those fits of rapture that long ago had been the ordinary traits of his character and were always preceded by a singularly indolent state. "He's finished the book," he thought before he left the garden, where the clamor of the bronze door knockers sounded muffled and distant, "he's finished the book and has come back to Magina to show it to me or simply has decided he's sick of the country house and wants to leave tonight for Madrid or someplace where they'll give him a forged passport so he can leave Spain," but when he went out to the courtyard and heard up close the banging that shook the glass in the gallery and the dome, he knew that at no time had he expected it to be Solana knocking and he didn't have to open the door to know the faces and uniforms he would find on the other side. "Don't open it, Don Manuel, they'll take you away like they did when the war was over." Amalia, holding the lamp at the height of Manuel's face, with her back to the door, held his hand to stop him from sliding the bolts, and between their two bodies the light trembled behind the shade of smoked glass as if it too were shaken by the increasingly peremptory sound of the knocking. "Move away, Amalia, go up to your room right now," said Manuel, and he took the lamp from her, noticing that his own hands stopped trembling only when they grasped the cold metal of the bolts, when he took a step into the interior of fear and saw before him the men who had come for him. Later, in the basement of the barracks where they ordered him to look at the body lying on the marble table, he remembered that before leaving the house he had heard behind him some steps on the stairs and a voice or a scream that belonged to his mother. "It's nothing, Senora, nothing to worry about," one of the men had said, the one dressed in civilian clothes, turning from the entrance toward the figure, motionless with stupefaction and rage, that Manuel did not wish to look at, "a minor verification. We'll return your son in a couple of hours." Before closing the door, he saluted Dona Elvira, touching the brim of his hat with his fingers, then looked at the fountain without water and the tops of the acacias, still smiling, as if he personally had approved the quiet of the night, took Manuel's arm firmly and gave an order in a low voice to the Civil Guards, who lowered their weapons and walked behind them like an entourage of silence along the deserted lanes where their boots and the brush of rifles against their belts resonated.

In his treatment of Manuel, the man in civilian clothes, whom the guards called "Captain," adopted from the very beginning an affable air not completely contradicted by his evident desire to look like Glenn Ford. He was bald and wore excessively long sideburns and an unbuttoned and absurd raincoat that he didn't take off when he sat down behind the desk in his office, beneath an equestrian portrait of General Franco. Before speaking he twisted his mouth and tightened his lips as he looked down at the floor or at a typed paper that was on the desk and whose only purpose, Manuel supposed, was to increase the cowardice and waiting time of the person who would be interrogated. "Manuel Alberto Santos Crivelli," the captain read, then raised his eyes from the paper to look at him thoughtfully, as if searching his face for confirmation that the name attributed to him was correct, "owner of the country property called the Island of Cuba, situated at the edge of Magina, beside the Guadalquivir River. Am I mistaken?" Barely moving his head, Manuel sustained the captain's glance. He was standing, his hands together and his legs slightly separated, and the dark hand of his wound, revivified by fear, climbed steadily toward his heart, cutting like a knife through the wet tissue of his lungs, and each prolonged silence extending between the captain's words was a pit that augmented his vertigo and the throbbing that made a path for the avid edge of the knife drawing closer and closer to his heart. "Is it true that on your invitation, the individual called Jacinto Solana Guzman moved to the above mentioned property on the first day of April of the current year?" The captain read with difficulty, or perhaps he was pretending to read and didn't remember all the words he needed to say or the exact manner in which he had to repeat them. "He was ill," Manuel said in a voice so low he didn't think the captain had heard him, "the doctor advised him to spend some time in the country." As in some dreams, he didn't have enough breath to raise his voice, and a feeling of asphyxia or of something oozing in his throat erased the words, leaving only the brief, empty movement of his lips. The captain brusquely rose to his feet, folded the paper, and put it in the pocket of his raincoat. "He is ill," he repeated, his face looking down toward the floor, his tightened lips inaccurately feigning the sad smile he had seen in movies. "Come with me, if you don't mind."

The basement smelled of hospital, and damp stone, and something penetrating and rotting that Manuel recognized before the captain turned on the light and remained next to the door while he walked in. The smell of old, wet clothes, saturated with algae or mud or still water. Under a light like the one in a wartime operating room the body was lying on a marble table whose edges were stained with blood, like the counter in a butcher shop. The black socks, still wet, had slipped down toward his ankles, revealing dead flesh, soiled like the light and the grayish white surface of the marble. The metal frames of his eyeglasses, Manuel recalls, twisted and broken, driven into the clot where the blood was a little darker than the mud, the deep hole like a cut windpipe that he looked away from when he discovered it wasn't his mouth, the black thread that had attached the arms of his eyeglasses. Like details of a bad dream, he recognized the trousers he had given Solana when he left for the country house and the checked jacket with a cigarette burn on the lapel. "It wasn't enough for them to kill him. Maybe he was already dead when they pulled him from the river, but they couldn't accept the hunt ending like that. He was dead and they trampled him and somebody continued shooting at very close range until the magazine was empty." He stepped back, not turning yet toward the captain, not looking at the ruined face or the hand that hung half open, casting a shadow resembling a tree branch on the floor, only at the swollen shoes, the too-short socks over the sharp, definitively frozen ankles in the mourning of an operating room. Now the captain was smoking as he leaned against the wall, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. "Do you recognize this man?" From a distance he already knew was more lasting than sorrow, because he had inhabited it, a stranger to everything, from the day he saw Mariana lying dead on the floorboards of the pigeon lofit, Manuel said Jacinto Solana's name like a vindication and an homage, and when he pronounced it for an instant he felt that the man to whom he alluded was safe from the degradation of death, immune to the solitude of his own body lying on a marble table.

"So he was your friend. Your friend Jacinto Solana, you say. He used your country house to hide bandits hunted by the Civil Guard. Didn't you know that? We knew it. Last night, when we went to interrogate him, he fired at us. There's one guard dead and another seriously wounded. You ought to find other kinds of friends, Senor Santos Crivelli. Your name may not always be enough, and we may forget who you are." The captain turned out the light and locked the metal door with a key when they left the basement. Manuel walked beside him to the offices and interrogation rooms, overwhelmed by an intense feeling of disloyalty and guilt, as if when the light was turned off over the table where Jacinto Solana was lying, he had left him alone in the cold and in death. He thought about the broken glasses, about the broken, open hands, about the body abandoned in the dark, and he didn't care about or didn't hear the captain's questions or the noise of the typewriter or even the things he said in response, and when he left the barracks and saw the blue light of dawn it was as if the basement, the interrogation rooms, the smoke, the voice of the captain had disappeared along with the immediate, distant night in which they had occurred: as if his identity and his life had also been canceled at the end of the night, so that now, as he walked toward the Plaza of San Pedro, when he saw the white facade and circular windows beyond the acacias, he perceived with a clear-sightedness uninflected by compassion or tenderness the empty space that surrounded him forever, its boundary as thin and precise as the line on a compass, as irrevocable as the metal door behind which the body of Jacinto Solana had been left.

I
WAS TREMBLING
when I opened the door to the library, but the footsteps I had heard in there from the courtyard didn't belong to Mariana. Kneeling beside the desk where Manuel usually sat to catalogue the books or pretend he was reviewing the administrator's accounts, Utrera was looking for something in the lower drawers, a confusion of papers scattered around him, which he rushed to pick up when he saw me come in. Hurriedly he closed the drawers and got to his feet, smoothing his hair, his jacket, smiling as if he wanted to excuse himself or explain something. "I couldn't sleep," he said, "I came down to look for a book." For a moment I stood silent at the door of the library, and I didn't say anything when Utrera walked past me, explaining again about his insomnia and moving his head as he took his leave with the servile deference of someone who has been caught committing a reprehensible act and who smiles knowing that pretense is useless. He walked in front of me, and his face vanished from my consciousness as if I had seen him from the window of a train. That was how I looked at everything then: it all fled, devoured by the magnet of time while I, motionless, advanced toward the empty future where Mariana didn't exist, where I didn't exist. "Mariana's alone in the library; she's waiting for you," Orlando had said, but there was no one in the library or in the courtyard with its marble flagstones and columns or any place where I could go. The light was on in the dining room, and through the high glass doors painted white the night breeze came in carrying a scent of mock orange and the rhythmic sound of the chain on the swing. There was a box of English cigarettes on the piano, and a bottle of whiskey whose presence I accepted as an invitation.

I drank as I sat facing the door to the garden, facing the yellow path sketched by the light on the gravel, which stopped just at the foot of the swing and the palm tree. Mariana liked to swing there very slowly, brushing the ground with the tips of her white sandals, so deep in thought and rhythmical in her movement that her gestures seemed like a way of measuring time or of yielding life up to its vacant duration. When she and Manuel came into the dining room, I had finished my cigarette and my drink and was getting ready to go up to my room, estimating beforehand the fear with which I'd cross the courtyard again and climb the stairs where perhaps she would appear, the fear of seeing her and not saying anything to her or of not seeing her and confirming the disillusionment of each one of my steps along the empty hallways. I imagined that my return to the bedroom and insomnia would never end because I couldn't accept the possibility of not seeing her again that night. It had been the same on other occasions, in years past, when I would walk with her to the door of her house counting the steps and the minutes left until we reached it and knowing that I would leave her as she looked for her key and then walk back along the same streets hoping with an infinite feeling of desire and failure that the steps I heard behind me were hers, that her voice had come to ask me to go back with her, inventing some excuse, offering me a last drink. Just like then, when I would turn around believing that someone was calling me and that it was her voice saying my name, I heard her now, close, impossible, I heard a burst of her laughter in the dining room, and when I turned toward the door, fearing that the illusion of her voice would be nothing but one of desire's usual deceptions, I discovered them, Mariana and Manuel, with their arms around each other, and they separated when they saw me because they never embraced when they were with me.

 

W
E AVOIDED ONE ANOTHER'S EYES
, and nothing was more frightening than silence, or a glance checked in silence. While Manuel filled the glasses and we lit cigarettes, we were still safe; it wasn't absolutely necessary to speak and not leave a single pause or chink between the words, but afterward, when the three of us sat down, the conversation acquired the apprehensiveness of a flight from a horseman who pursued us and was always at our heels, and we listened to our own words, feeling the pressing nearness of their conclusion, behind which was silence and the only words we cared about and weren't going to say. A second of silence was as unbearable as an empty glass or a hand not holding a cigarette, and that game of calm words interlocked by despair became more difficult, because there were very few things we could talk about that didn't contain the possibility of an affront or allude to the trip that would separate us in two days. Just as they had moved away from each other when they saw me in the dining room, they spoke now of their trip to Paris, avoiding any sign of excessive enthusiasm, indicating the probable discomfort of the plane they would take in Valencia, the official red tape awaiting them when they arrived in France, their fear of not knowing how to establish themselves in a foreign country and in another language. "I," Manuel said, "who have almost never left Magina," and he bowed his head as if suddenly overwhelmed by a melancholy that wasn't part of the game of mitigating their happiness so as not to exclude me from it. "Manuel's afraid," said Mariana, looking at me for the first time with such fixed intensity that I saw a well of loneliness in her gray or blue eyes. Now the words began to name the things obscurely kept in silence, and for a moment I sensed that it wasn't only guilt or shame that we were running from. "He's afraid we'll lose the war and we won't be able to return to Spain." She and Manuel and I knew it wasn't that or not exactly that, but she was defying
him and looked at me to know she was on firmer ground, with that portion of coldness in her, that way of hers—and of Beatriz', I thought suddenly, amazed it had taken me so long to discover her similarity to Mariana—of not accepting the cowardice and procrastination of men, capable, like Manuel, like me, of wasting their lives in a perpetual simulation of rebellion or decency that doesn't help them to renounce completely the desires they once deserved and to establish themselves in reality with resignation or serenity or to tear at the limits of shame and a tainted negligence that doesn't permit them to attain those desires. When I understood this I shuddered as if while she looked at me, Mariana was using my presence to inflict the wound of her defiance on Manuel. Now I, who had taken so much pleasure in spying on their mutual tenderness in order to offer it to myself as a counterpoint to my abandonment, my desperation, my rancor, was part of the same scheme that throbbed beneath their embraces, as well as the words unspoken in the silence we no longer knew how to escape. "Manuel's afraid to leave Mágina," said Mariana, wiping her lips after draining her glass too quickly, looking, I knew, for courage in the alcohol, not audacity, only the tempting sensation that words don't obey one's will but a kind of fatality or lethargy that they themselves impel: "He's afraid to leave his house and his library and his pigeon loft. He'd like it if it weren't necessary to pay in order to obtain what one desires. He wants to have it all at the same time, his house, his wife, his city. His friend Jacinto Solana. Tell him now, Manuel, tell him you'd like for everything to go on the way it was on the day he introduced us." When Manuel raised his head, I realized how long it had been that we hadn't looked each other in the eye. He took a breath and partially opened his lips but didn't say anything, he only filled Mariana's glass and mine and put the bottle back on the floor, looking toward the garden, as if he thought he had discovered a furtive presence in the darkness. I took a drink and spoke so that the silence wouldn't completely humiliate us, or to avoid Mariana's calm, cold face and eyes with the same cow ardice
as on that afternoon in 1933, in Orlando's studio, when I began to look at the recently started canvas and the sketches hanging on the wall in order not to see Mariana naked. "How I wish I could go away. Not to Paris, like you two, but much farther, and never return, or only when I had become a foreigner and could look at everything as a foreigner." "Where?" asked Mariana, leaning toward me. With both hands she held her chestnut hair away from her face and leaned her elbows on her spread knees, as if the alcohol or a devastating sense of banishment would not allow her to hold up her head. She asked where, and the question was a contained, fierce part of her defiance, but I didn't answer, because Manuel began speaking at the same time, and his words didn't erase Mariana's question, they simply left it hanging in the air between us, like the gray or blue eyes that remained firmly fixed on mine: "We always wanted to leave. We'd look at that map in school, you remember, full of cracks, made of oilskin, so old that in the center of Africa there was still a large blank space. You pointed it out to me and said we'd escape Magina and discover the source of the Nile." "Jacinto escaped," said Mariana, smiling, and for an instant her smile absolved all three of us. "Not enough. If I had, I wouldn't be here now." I stopped speaking with premeditation and Mariana's question, which had remained in the air like the note of a violin extending into another, higher-pitched one when its sound was already fading, returned to her voice at the same time that she stood up for no reason and took a few steps toward the doors to the garden, then turning around to look at us as if we had fallen far behind and she was inviting us to follow her. "Where would you be?" I remembered a map and a book and a hand-colored postcard where you could see ruined stairways and red columns. It had never been an objective, only a name that shone like beaten copper and an impossible place, a junction of longitude and latitude pointed to by an index finger on the inviolate blue of planispheres. "On Crete, for example. Or on the island where Ulysses lived for seven years with the nymph Calypso. I never understood why he left her to return to Ithaca. I liked to imagine that the
Odyssey
is an incomplete poem, and that in the final canto, which must have been lost or perhaps condemned to the flames, Ulysses abandons Ithaca after a few weeks of sleeping with Penelope and goes to sea again to return to Calypso's island. It must be intolerable to live in the place you thought about constantly for twenty years." "Why?" asked Mariana, not looking at me but at Manuel, who still seemed lost in the lethargy of a meditation interrupted by alcohol. "Because there's no one and nothing that deserves so much loyalty." Mariana turned toward us, letting her empty glass drip onto her hip, weaving a little, as if she were high or attempting a dance step she couldn't quite remember. With her the silence came again to take up its place among us, the useless desire to stretch out my hand and open Mariana's blouse a little more and touch her breasts, which I imagined to be as warm and translucent as the skin on her temples, and also the awareness of each of the minutes of the secret truce I had been granting to myself since I saw them come into the dining room and knew I had to leave and that I couldn't leave. Each word, each cigarette and mouthful of smoke, each raw swallow of alcohol burning my lips a truce, a truce and a boundary and a stopped clock when it was no longer possible to attempt any word against the silence. That was why the three of us eagerly felt saved when Orlando's voice and laughter came into the dining room like a gust of wind rattling the panes. He and Santiago had wet hair and shining eyes, and they smelled of clean clothes and a feminine cologne that was like a shameless announcement of their happiness. "Traitors," said Orlando, leaning on Santiago's bare shoulder, pointing at us with his index finger like a drunken marksman who cannot keep his gunsight on the target, "it seemed this whole house was a mausoleum, but you stayed here to drink up the last bottle behind our backs." They looked for glasses in the sideboard, and when they opened the glass door they knocked over a tray, causing a crash of sharp broken glass on the floor that nobody tried to clean up. He and Santiago kicked away the broken pieces and then filled their glasses until the whiskey spilled over the top and onto their hands, which they wiped slowly on the sides of their trousers, laughing and leaning on each other as if fatigue didn't allow them to be completely drunk but only to feign inebriation, an obstinate and vacuous and desperate happiness. "I've been listening to you, Solana," Orlando said, "Santiago and I were behind the door, and we heard you telling those stories of yours about trips you're never going to make. Solana, my brother, you wandering Jew, are you sure your father isn't a new Christian? Because if he isn't, I can't understand this exile of yours, this not belonging anywhere or to anybody, not even to your modesty and your shame, which is Jewish and Catholic. Look at him: you look at him, Mariana. He's still ashamed. All of you are. And I think the Republic is the name you give to your shame, though you know this Republic isn't yours and this war that we're all going to lose would never have been your victory. Whoever wins—and we're not going to win or any of you or whoever that Republic is with its banners and its
Official Gazette
—you'll have lost, Solana, not because your side is weaker or because those son-of-a-bitch French and English have invented that filthy Catholic commandment of nonintervention, but because your Jew-without-a-country blood keeps you from the possibility of belonging to a winning side. Don't look at me like that. I belong to the Iberian Anarchist Federation because I lack the modesty or the shame that obliges my friend Jacinto Solana to be a member of the Communist Party. If at the beginning of this month I had been in Barcelona and not in Madrid, I'd be shot now or locked up in one of those republican jails that defend shame, but God or Prince Piotr Kropotkin wanted me to live in Madrid and for you two to invite me to tomorrow's wedding when you'll marry decency, Mariana and Manuel, just as my friend Solana married modesty when he joined the Communist Party. They say, first the war and then the revolution, exactly like a decent girl puts off her boyfriend at the door, because first come caresses and then happy surrender in marriage. But that hope is a fraud: this war is the end of the world, and there won't be any future after it."