A Manuscript of Ashes (7 page)

"His father had a farm," Manuel said. "It's abandoned now, but from the watchtower of the town wall you can see the house and cistern. Every afternoon when we left school, I went down with him and helped him load the produce onto their white mare, to carry it to market. Then we would ride across the city on the mare, but I got down a few streets before we reached here, because if my mother found out I had been with Solana, she would punish me and not let me go out on Sunday. My son, she would say, unloading fruit in the market, like a farmhand. But my father had a certain fondness for him, always somewhat distant, similar to how he would have viewed the child of one of his foremen who showed an aptitude for studying, and when Solana went to Madrid, he carried a letter of recommendation, written by my father, for the editor of
El Debate,
who had known him back when he was a member of parliament. 'I like that boy,' he would say when my mother wasn't around, 'he has ambition, and you can see in his eyes that he knows what he wants and is prepared to do anything to get it.' I've always suspected those words weren't so much praise for Solana as a reproach for me."

He doesn't know when that custom began either, because now it seems to him it lasted for many months or all his life, and that it's impossible Manuel is dead and won't converse with him again every afternoon in the library, when Ines would come in with the tray of coffee and they would smoke English cigarettes with their backs to the window where the light was dying until their only illumination came from the fireplace, interrupted at times by the arrival of Medina, who came to examine Manuel with his medical bag and useless prescriptions and to censure coffee and tobacco and the absurd habit of always talking about the dead, about Jacinto Solana, regarding whom he once told Minaya that he had been nothing but a timid adulterer, and then laughed with his chuckle of a libertine physician addicted to hygiene and what he called the physiology of love.

"I don't know if you realize it, young man, but your presence in this house is having an effect on your uncle as beneficial as a swim in the sea. In my capacity as physician allow me to entreat you not to leave yet. I look at Manuel and don't recognize him. On any afternoon he spends with you he talks more than he has talked to me in the past twenty years, which isn't all that meritorious, because you're young and educated and know how to listen, and I can almost never keep quiet. How's that book of yours on Solana coming along?"

Inés said it was as if Manuel had returned to his own house, as if when he saw it again he observed with astonishment and guilt the signs of the decay into which his neglect had plunged it. He reim-posed a fixed schedule for meals, took care of discussing the day's purchases with Amalia and Teresa, and even renewed the supplies of wine in the cellar, finding in these occupations that he had forgotten for so many years a pleasure that surprised even him. Punctually each morning, before withdrawing to the pigeon loft, he went down to have breakfast with his nephew, and from time to time their afternoon conversations were prolonged in slow walks along the watchtowers of the wall, where Manuel would point with his walking stick to the white road that led to Solana's fathers farm, the house with its collapsed roof, the cistern blocked by weeds. One day, as if he had guessed that his hospitality was turning into a debt for Minaya, he asked him not to leave yet, to help him organize the books in the library, left for thirty years to an abundant disorder, offering him a justification for remaining in the house that was in no way humiliating. He wouldn't need to abandon his dissertation on Solana, he said, he could work on it a few hours a day and then devote himself, perhaps in the afternoon, to creating a catalogue for the books and perhaps also for the furniture and valuable paintings that were now scattered in no order throughout the rooms and attics. "You'll be my librarian," he said, smiling, as if requesting a favor he wasn't sure would be granted, not daring yet to offer a salary, always afraid to offend. This work, whose proportions very soon revealed themselves as disheartening, had the virtue of calming Minaya in singular fashion because it offered him a new time limit so far off it no longer made him afraid to imagine his departure. At about ten in the morning he would go to the library and begin working with a silent, constant passion, nourished in equal measure by the solitude and stillness of the books and by the tight golden light that came in from the plaza, where there was always the sound of water ascending higher than the acacias and then spilling over the rim of the fountain. When his eyes grew tired of so much writing on file cards in a very small and voluntarily meticulous hand that had allowed him to discover the serene pleasures of calligraphy, Minaya put down the pen and lit a cigarette and sat looking at the white shutters on the windows, the squared, reduced landscape of the acacias and hedges where a feminine figure passed by who sometimes was Inés, back from her other life, ready to enter the library and roil with her perfume the peaceful smell of the books that Minaya tended to as a refuge so he could pretend he wasn't watching her.

From higher up, from the circular windows on the top floor, Jacinto Solana had contemplated the plaza in the winter of 1947, the night still as a well, the only light the insomniac lamp in the shelter Manuel had prepared for him and that wasn't enough for him to finish his book or escape the persecution of his executioners. Minaya saw the metal bed with the bare mattress, the desk by the window where the typewriter had been, the empty drawers that once held his pen and the sheets of paper, blank or written on in the same parsimonious, almost indecipherable hand that traced on the back of Mariana's picture the veiled, precise words, like an augury of his "Invitation." Beyond the circular windows and the shuttered balconies was the same city his eyes had seen and that had remained in his memory like a vengeful paradise during the last two years of the war and the eight years he spent in prison waiting first for death and then for a freedom so remote he could no longer imagine it. Magina, suspended high on the prow of a hill too far from the Guadalquivir, as beautiful as any of its marble statues, as the sand-colored caryatids with bare bosoms that on the facades of palaces hold up the coats-of-arms of those who left them to the city as a useless inheritance, undeserved and pagan. Dissolved in the city, contained within it like a narrow stream that flowed invisibly and almost never touched his consciousness completely, was Minaya's early life, but there was a fog-bound area beyond the final reaches of his memory that without a break was becoming confused with Jacinto Solana's. He sensed him in the house, just as he came to sense the proximity of Inés before his ears or eyes announced her, he surmised his attentive presence on the other side of things, witnessing everything with the same renegade or ironic indolence that was in his gaze on the morning the photograph in the library was taken. Because he lingered in the city and in the house and in the landscapes of roofs or blue hills that surrounded them, but above all in the library, in the dedications in the books he sent to Manuel from Madrid and that at times rose up before Minaya like a warning that he, Solana, was still there, not only in the memory or imagination of the living but also in the space and matter that had survived him, as enduring and faint as the fossilized trace of an animal or the leaf of a tree that no longer exist in the world.

"If you could have seen," Manuel said, "the expression in his eyes when he entered the library for the first time. My mother had gone to spend a few days at the Island of Cuba, and my father was in Madrid, at the Congress of Deputies, and for a week the entire house was ours. We were eleven or twelve years old, and Solana, when he walked into the courtyard, stood very still and silent, as if he were afraid to move forward. 'This is like a church,' he said, but in reality it wasn't the house that interested him but the place where the books came from that I would lend him behind my mother's back, and which he read with a speed that always bewildered me because he did it at night by the light of a candle when his parents had gone to bed. In his house there was only one book. I remember it was called
Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love,
a serialized story in three volumes that Solana had read when he was ten and toward which he always felt a kind of gratitude. 'What else could I ever want than to write something like those two thousand pages of misfortunes?' he would say. He entered the library as if he were going into a cave filled with treasure, and he didn't dare touch the books, he only looked at them, or gently ran his hand over them as if he were stroking an animal."

Solana's tightened lips, his dark rage, his lucid, precocious hatred of the life that denied him that house and that library, his desire to rebel against everything and flee Magina and his father and the two hectares of land and the future in which his father wanted to confine him. It wasn't his love of books that made him clench his fists and wait in silence in the middle of the reception room that smelled of leather and polished wood, but his consciousness of the miserable poverty into which he had been born and the brute fatigue of the work to which he knew he was condemned. The books, like the opaque gleam of the furniture and the golden lamps and the white cap and starched apron of the woman who served them chocolate at teatime in large porcelain cups decorated with blue landscapes, were merely the measure or sign of his desire to flee in order to calculate at a distance his future revenge, longed for and planned out when he read in books about the return of the Count of Monte Cristo. Manuel, alarmed by his silence, suggested they go to the rooms upstairs, but at that moment Jacinto Solana had become a stranger. He ran up the stairs to induce him to follow, but from the gallery balustrade he saw that Jacinto Solana was looking at himself in the mirror on the first landing, distant from him and his voice and everything he so eagerly wanted to offer him in order not to lose the friendship he felt was in danger for the first time since they had met. Solana looked in the mirror at his shaved head and his hemp espadrilles and the gray jacket that had belonged to his father, signs of the degradation against which he could defend himself by imagining with obstinate fervor a future in which he would be a rich, mysterious traveler, implacable with his enemies, or a correspondent and a hero in a war from which he would return and humiliate at his feet all those who now conspired against his talent and his pride. Manuel did not see his tears before the mirror or hear his silence, but a half century later he still recalled the hostile resolve with which Jacinto Solana had said that some day the books he was going to write would be in the library too.

Beatus ille, thought Minaya: what an elevated life and work he desired until his death and never had. His books weren't there, but his words and eyes were, like scratches in the shadow, obsessively contemplating from the mantel over the fireplace the area of serene semidarkness and volumes in a row that he never reached. Crossed-out words or scratches of his poor handwriting suddenly appearing in the margins of a novel that Minaya leafed through for the sheer pleasure of touching the pages and looking at the romantic prints that interrupted them from time to time. He was cataloguing the beautiful volumes of the first French edition of
Les voyages extraordi-naires
—Manuel's father, a devotee of Verne's, must have bought them in Paris early in the century—when he noticed that
L'île mystérieux
was missing. He searched all the shelves in vain for the book and asked Manuel about it, who didn't remember having seen it. One morning, when he went into the library, Inès was there dusting the bookcases and the furniture and replacing the bottles in the liquor cabinet.
L'île mystérieux
was on Minaya's desk.

"I brought it back," Inès said. "I finished reading it last night."

"But it's in French," said Minaya, and immediately regretted saying it because she set aside the duster and stood looking at him with an expression of impassive mockery in her chestnut-colored eyes.

"I know that."

To escape his embarrassment, Minaya feigned a sudden interest in his work and didn't stop writing on the file cards until Inés left the library. This was how she would always leave him, so often lost in stupefaction, halted at the brink of a revelation he never could attain and besieged by the desire not only for her body but above all for everything her body and her gaze concealed, because in her, caresses and hungry kisses and fatigued, final stillness were the mask and the lure that hid her from Minaya, so that each boundary of desire he crossed with her was not its assuaging consummation but an impulse to go even deeper and tear away the veils of silence or words that inexhaustibly imposed themselves on Inés' consciousness. But the sensation of advancing was completely illusory, for it wasn't a question of successive veils that would eventually end in the true, unknown face of Inés, but of a single, reiterated, immobile one: the eyes and mouth and thin lips she tensed to apologize or to smile, the voice and face that Minaya never could fix for any length of time in his memory. Slowly he turned the large yellow pages of
L'île mystérieux
and stopped at the last print: when those who had been shipwrecked have abandoned the
Nautilus,
fleeing the eruption that will destroy the island, Captain Nemo dies alone in the splendor of his submerged library. There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the print, and it was difficult for Minaya to decipher it because the blue ink had almost faded. "3-11-47. If only I had the courage of Captain Nemo. My name is nobody, says Ulysses, and that saves him from the Cyclops. JS."

But between himself and the words written by Jacinto Solana, which always had the quality of a voice, there now was Inés, mocking his clumsiness, and the book she had brought back was proof of her irony and her absence, for Minaya still found himself in that trance in which desire, not yet revealed in its deceitful plenitude, advances like a nocturnal enemy and makes accomplices of all the things that are transformed into emissaries or signs of the creature who has touched them or to whom they belong. The large house on the Plaza of the Fallen, one of Inés' shirts on the clothesline in the garden, her coat, her pink kerchief on the coatrack, the bed and the glass of water on the night table in the room where she slept when she stayed at the house, the leather sofa where he kissed her for the first time at the beginning of March, Orlando's drawing that fell to the floor, interrupting the shared excitement of their embrace with a crash of broken glass when she pushed him with her hips against the wall and kissed him on the mouth with her eyes closed. As if the sound of the glass had awakened him from a dream, Minaya opened his eyes and saw before him the half-closed lids and eager wings of Ines' nose, who had not stopped kissing him. For a moment he was afraid that someone had come into the library, and he moved away from the girl, who still moaned in tender protest and then opened her eyes, smiling at him with lips wet and inflamed by his kiss.