A Manuscript of Ashes (6 page)

He ate slowly, as if he were officiating, cutting the meat into very small pieces and sipping the wine like a bird, hospitable, always careful that Minaya's glass was never empty, recalling or inventing an old friendship with his father, in those days, he said, so reviled now and so prosperous for him, when he was somebody in the city, in Spain, a well-known sculptor, as his father had perhaps told Minaya, as he undoubtedly would confirm if he visited his studio one morning and looked at the albums of press clippings where his photo and his name were reproduced and it was stated that he, Eugenio Utrera, was destined to be, as they said in
Blanco y Negro,
a second Mariano Ben-lliure, a present-day Martínez Montañés, and not only in Mágina, where he had recarved for the Holy Week brotherhoods all the procession statues burned by the Reds during the war, but in the entire province, in Andalucía, in the distant plazas of cities he had never visited, where the Monuments to the Fallen bore his signature written in learned Latin capitals, EVGENIO VTRERA, sculptor. Now he drank without pretense the rest of the bottle that Inés, responding to a discreet signal from him, had not taken away when she cleared the table, and he looked at his hands remembering with threadbare melancholy the unrepeatable years when his workshop was visited by presidents of brotherhoods and local heads of the Movement to commission Baroque Virgins and statues of fallen heroes, somber busts of Franco, granite angels with swords. The empty spaces of plundered altarpieces had to be filled and Holy Week thrones had to be remade that perished in the bonfires lit in every plaza in Mágina during that summer of madness, their flames leaving behind high trails of soot that can still be seen, he said, on the facades of certain churches abandoned since then, closed to worship, like the one opposite, the church of San Pedro, some of them converted into warehouses or garages. During the years following the war, Utreras workshop teemed, like an animated forest, with Virgins pierced by daggers, Christs carrying the cross, crucified, expiring, whipped by executioners on whom Utrera without the slightest scruple depicted his enemies, Christs resurrected and ascending, motionless, on clouds of metallic blue paint. In 1954, he recalled, on the first of April, the minister of the interior came to Mágina to inaugurate the Monument to the Fallen. In the midst of the hedges, among the recently planted cypresses, a monolith, a stone cross and altar, a great block of imprecise edges covered by a huge national flag. He wasn't a politician, he was an artist, he explained, but he could not remember without pride the moment when the minister pulled on the cord, making the red and yellow cloth fall to one side and revealing to applause and hymns an angel with lifted wings and a hard, windblown mane of hair who sheltered the body of the Fallen and grasped his sword, raising it with muscled arms like Caravaggio's dead Christ, which perhaps Minaya knew.

"Now I go into my workshop, and it seems a lie that any of it happened. They gave me a medal and a certificate, and the
ABC
published my picture in the photogravure section. I should have left Magina then, when there was still time, just like your father did. We're isolated from everything here. We turn into statues."

He, who had been in Paris, who had seen the marbles of Michelangelo and Bernini in Rome, who had been somebody and succumbed to the conspiracy of envy, of dubious enemies established in Madrid, he said, a victim now, a melancholy artist conquered by the world's ingratitude. The Monument to the Fallen in Magina was his last official commission, and since 1959 he had not carved another Holy Week image. "And it isn't that tastes have changed," he would say to whomever wanted to listen, sitting on the divan in a shadowy cafe where he spent the afternoons with a snifter of brandy and a glass of water, "they've simply become depraved, those plastic-looking Christs, those elongated Virgins with girls' faces that look like something Protestant, or Cubist." At first light he would go down to the immense workshop, which had first been a stable, when the house was built, and then a carriage-house where Manuel's father kept the trophies of his mad passion for cars, and there he would spend the morning, not doing anything, perhaps sketching models of statues that were impossible now, carving Romanesque saints, cheap falsifica-tions that had no future, looking at the vast empty space.

"I came to Magina on July 5, 1936. I had spent a month in France and Italy, and before returning to Granada, it occurred to me to visit Manuel. We had met when he was studying law, and we continued corresponding after he returned to Magina, when his father died. I was here a little more than a week, and when I was leaving, when I was saying good-bye to Manuel and his mother, Amalia came out of the kitchen and told us she had heard on the radio that the garrison in Granada had sided with the rebels. How can you go now, Manuel said, wait a while and see if the situation clarifies. And so I came to spend a few days and stayed for thirty-three years."

He was also ready to leave in 1939, but he no longer had anywhere to go, because his mother had died during the war, or at least that's what he told Manuel to justify remaining in the city and in his house. He packed his suitcase then, too, and consulted the schedules of the trains that stopped in Mágina, but this time he, who for three years had wanted the victory of those who won, knew he was probably contaminated not by the defeat of the Republic or by Manuel, who would very soon be dragged from his invalids bed to prolong his dying for six months in the Mágina prison, but by a future, his, the one he had imagined in Rome and in Paris and in the Granada discussions of his youth, definitively upended or broken in the bitter spring of 1939, wiped out, like his right to dignity and to the skill of his hands, by three years of waiting and silence, both less brutal than guilt. With his hands in his trouser pockets and his hat tilted over his face in an expression of petulance that he would improve on years later and that back then only he was capable of admiring, he would wander through the cafés looking for someone who could treat him to a drink or a cigarette, or he would spend the slow afternoons strolling through the Plaza of General Orduña, as if waiting for something, among the gray men in groups who were waiting just like him, with their hands in their pockets and their eyes fixed on the clock in the tower or on the profile of the general whose statue had been rescued from the garbage dump where it had been thrown in the summer of '36 and raised again in the middle of the plaza on a pedestal of martial allegories. He visited offices, unsuccessfully laying claim to old loyalties from long before the war, using up the hours of tedium and despair until nightfall, when the light in the clock on the tower was lit, and then, when it was too late to return to the house and pick up his suitcase and go to the station before the train arrived that would take him back to a city where no one was waiting for him, he walked slowly down the narrow lanes and swore to himself that tonight he'd have the courage to ask Manuel for the exact amount he needed to buy the ticket. He never managed to do it. Six months after the victorious troops entered Mágina, a general competition was announced to replace the image of Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, an apocryphal work by Gregorio Fernández, which had been publicly profaned and burned in July '36.

"Never, never, even if I lived a hundred years, could I repay the debt I owe your Uncle Manuel, my boy. Although he knew I admired the Movement, he allowed me to live in this house throughout the war and then, when I won that competition and received a commission for my first piece of scuplture, he offered me the carriage house to set up my workshop, because I didn't have enough to even rent a room. It's true I interceded for him when things became difficult, but that doesn't repay him. I owe everything I am to his generosity back then."

Because his greatest pride wasn't official glory or the medal or the yellowed clippings he kept as relics in a box in his workroom, but his undeniable loyalty to a friend, to the custom of gratitude, to this house. He spoke to Minaya about Manuel's family as if it were his own, and he knew by heart the names and ranks of the gentlemen depicted in the indistinct portraits in the gallery and in the photo albums that only he bothered to exhume from the library shelves, showing Minaya solemn ancestors he had never heard of, because the oldest face he could recognize belonged to his grandmother Cristina.

"You should have known Doña Elvira when I met her. She was a lady, my friend, as tall as Manuel, and so elegant, a true aristocrat. The death of her husband was a terrible blow, but she would have overcome that if it hadn't been for the things that happened later. I can still see her on the day Manuel came home from the hospital, re-covering from that serious wound and ready to marry Mariana. Because, as she said, it was one thing for her son to be for the Republic, and even a little bit of a Socialist, and quite another to see him married to that woman after dropping his lifelong sweetheart. I remember Doña Elvira standing at the door of the library, dressed in mourning, and when Mariana offered her hand she turned and withdrew to her rooms without saying a single word."

Her eyes wide open, Minaya thought, her lips resolute and her eyes flashing and fixed on the offense as they would remain afterward, unmoving, in the time without hours of the wedding photograph, in the blind persistence of the things she looked at and held in her hands and brushed with her body and the air where her perfume resided. It was the wine, he suspected when he stood and shook Utreras hand again, which remained flaccid and dead in his as the old man reiterated his pleasure at having met him and begged his pardon and invited him to visit his studio any time, it was the wine and his fatigue from the train and his lethargy after the bath and everything muffled or blurred by the strangeness of the house, but as he climbed the stairs and turned the shadowy corners of the gallery, he suddenly felt the physical certainty that Jacinto Solana, the name written at the bottom of the poems he had in his room, had actually existed and breathed the same air and walked on the same tiles he was walking on now knowing as if in a dream that after a few steps he would come to the parlor where Marianas eyes had been waiting since long before he was born to look at him exactly as they had looked at Solana and the world in 1937. He smoked as he lay on the bed, looking up at a ceiling with painted wreaths that no longer resembled any memory, and then, in the empty exaltation of alcohol and insomnia, he opened the shutters to the balcony and continued smoking with his elbows resting on the marble balustrade, facing the tops of the acacias and the tile roofs and the towers of Mágina submerged in the damp darkness, in the inviting, frightening night that always receives travelers in strange cities. He heard the street door closing with a heavy resonance, and after a moment, when it struck eleven in the Plaza of General Orduna, in the library, in the parlor, he saw Inés passing under the acacias and disappearing into the shadows of a lane, her hair loose and her walk more energetic than the one she used in the house, her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of a coat too short for the raw January night.

P
ERHAPS NOW, IN THE STATION
, when he remembers and denies and wants to rein in his will and desire so that they offer him only the necessary future of desertion, departure and the train and eves vengefully closed, he will want to comprehend the length of time he has spent in Màgina and the order in which things happened, and he will discover he doesn't know or can't know that the precise time of calendars doesn't concur with that of his memory, that two months and thirty years and several lifetimes have gone by without his being able to assign them connections of succession or cause. Now he remembers and is astonished by the speed with which the house took hold of his actions of a new arrival and turned them into habits, and he doesn't know precisely the day he desired Inés for the first time or when he was irremediably trapped by the biography of Jacinto Solana, even before finding his hidden manuscripts and visiting the Island of Cuba and the landscape where they killed him and the plaza where he was born and lived until he was twenty. He doesn't remember dates, only sensations as extensively modulated as musical passages, habits of tranquility sustained in the restlessness of waiting for Inés or stealing after midnight into rooms where he searched for clues and manuscripts fearing he would be caught.

Apart from the house and the present into which he had settled like someone who locks a room from the inside to sit quietly by the fire
and doesn't feel the cold or hear the rain or the clock striking the hours, and absorbed in reading a book, the city almost didn't exist, and Madrid even less, or the mediocre past. When he arrived he had crossed the city without recognizing it through the taxi windows, first the empty lots around the station, and the avenue of linden trees with bare branches raised against a vast gray sky that clung like mist to the edge of the plain where church towers were outlined. But that wasn't the city he remembered, and it wasn't the winter light that belonged to it but the exalted light on whitewashed walls and thresh-holds of sand-colored stone, the one that flowed out of the tunnel of darkness at entrances and gathered in pools like shaded lagoons at the rear, in the vine-arbored courtyards of Magina, when in the first morning hour, a woman, his mother, opened the door and all the windows and swept the pavement then sprinkled it with water until it gave off the odor of damp cobblestones and wet earth after a storm. Which was why he couldn't recognize the city when he arrived and took so long to walk its streets like a stranger, because Magina, on winter afternoons, becomes a Castilian city of closed shutters and gloomy shops with polished wood counters and faded mannequins in the display windows, a city of cheerless doorways and plazas that are too large and empty where the statues endure winter alone and the churches seem like tall ships run aground. His light was of a different sort, golden, cold, blue, stretching from the ramparts of the city wall in an undulating descent of orchards and curved irrigation ditches and small white houses among the pomegranate trees, extending in the south to the endless olive groves and blue or violet fertile lowlands of the Guadalquivir, and that landscape was the one he would recognize later in the manuscripts of Jacinto Solana, flat as the world in ancient maps and limited by the outline of the sierra beyond which it was impossible that anything else existed. And he, Solana, had also looked as a child at that place of unlimited light and returned there to die, the open streets of Magina that looked as if they would end at the sea and ramparts like steep balconies or high crows nests from which he looked out on all the clarity of a world unviolated except by the avidity of his eyes and the fables in his imagination.