A Manuscript of Ashes (2 page)

"We're going to Madrid, Manuel," his father said. "And there we'll have a clean slate. In Magina there's no stimulus for an enterprising man, there's no dynamism, no market."

Then his mother, very rigid and sitting next to him, covered her face with her hands, and it took Minaya a little while to realize that the strange, dry noise she was making was weeping, because until that afternoon he had never seen her cry. For the first time it was the weeping without tears that he learned to recognize and spy on for many years, and as he learned when his parents were already dead and safe from all misfortune or ruin, it revealed in his mother the obstinate, useless rancor toward life and the man who was always on the verge of becoming rich, of finding the partner or the opportunity that he too deserved, of breaking the siege of bad luck, of going to prison once because of a run-of-the-mill swindle.

"Your grandmother Cristina, Son, she was the one who began our misfortune, because if she hadn't been stupid enough to fall in love with my father and renounce her family in order to marry him, we'd be the ones living now in my cousin's palace and I'd have the capital to be a success in business. But your grandmother liked poetry and romanticism, and when my poor devil of a father, may he rest in peace and may God forgive me, dedicated some poems to her and told her a few vulgar cliches about love and twilight, she didn't care if he was a clerk at the registry office or that Don Apolonio, her father, your great-grandfather, threatened to disinherit her. And he certainly did disinherit her, as if it were a serialized novel, and he didn't see her again or ask about her for the rest of his life, which turned out to be short because of that unpleasantness, and he ruined her and me, and also you and your children if you have any, because how can I raise my head and give you a future if bad luck has pursued me since before I was born?"

"But it's absurd for you to complain. If my grandmother Cristina hadn't married your father, you wouldn't have been born."

"And you think that's a small privilege?"

A few days after the funeral of his parents, who when they died left him some family portraits and a rare instinct for sensing the proximity of failure, Minaya received a condolence letter from his Uncle Manuel, written in the same very slanted and pointed hand he would recognize four years later in the brief invitation to spend a few weeks in February in Magina, offering him his house and his library and all the help he could offer in his research on the life and work of Jacinto Solana, the almost unpublished poet of the generation of the Republic about whom Minaya was writing his doctoral dissertation.

"My cousin would like to be English," said his father. "He takes tea in the middle of the afternoon, smokes his pipe in a leather armchair, and to top it off, he's a leftist, as if he were a bricklayer."

Not daring yet to use the knocker, Minaya searches in his overcoat for his uncle's letter as if it were a safe-conduct that would be demanded of him when the door was opened, when he crosses once more the entrance where there was a tile frieze and tries to reach the courtyard where he wandered that afternoon as if he were lost, expecting his parents to come out of the library, because the maid who had used
usted
with him led him away when his mother's weeping began, and he was possessed by the enduring fascination of the solemn faces that looked down at him from the paintings on the walls and by the light and the design of large flowers or birds formed by the panes of glass in the dome. At first he limited himself to walking in a straight line from one column to the next, because he liked the sound of his own methodical footsteps, and it was like inventing one of those games that only he knew, but then he dared to climb very silently the first steps toward the gallery, and his own image in the mirror on the landing obliged him to stop, a guardian or symmetrical enemy that forbade him to advance toward the upper rooms or enter the imaginary hallway that extended to the other side of the glass and where perhaps oblivion keeps several faces of Mariana that are not exactly the same, the print of Manuel when he went up after her in his lieutenant's uniform, the expression that Jacinto Solana's eyes had only one time in the small hours of May 21, 1937, unaware it was the eve of the crime, after being carried away by her caresses and tears on the grass in the garden and telling each other that guilt and the war didn't matter on that night when giving in to sleep would have been a betrayal of happiness.

In that mirror where Inés will not see herself again, Minaya knows he will look for impossible traces of a boy dressed in a sailor suit who stopped in front of it twenty years earlier when a voice, his father's, ordered him to come down. In the courtyard his father was taller than his cousin, and seeing his impeccable jacket and spotless boots and the opulent gesture with which he consulted the watch whose gold chain crossed his vest, one would have said he was the owner of the house. "If I'd had just half the opportunities my cousin has had from the time he was born," he would say, trapped between rancor and envy and an unconfessed family pride, because when all was said and done, he too was the grandson of the man who built the house. He spoke of Manuel's errant ways and the lethargy into which his life seemed to have fallen since the day a stray bullet killed the woman he had just married, but his irony was never more poisonous than when he recalled his cousin's political ideas and the influence this Jacinto Solana had on them, a man who earned his living working for leftist papers in Madrid and who once spoke at a meeting of the Popular Front in the Màgina bull ring, who was sentenced to death after the war and then pardoned and who left prison to die in the way he deserved in a skirmish with the Civil Guard. And in this manner, ever since he had the use of his reason and the memory to recall sitting at the table after meals when his father made conjectures regarding senseless business deals and did long arithmetical operations in the margins of the newspaper, cursing the ingratitude of fortune and the insulting indolence and prosperity of his cousin, Minaya had formed a very blurred and at the same time very precise image of Manuel that was always inseparable from that one afternoon in his childhood and a certain idea of ancient heroism and peaceful seclusion. Now, when Manuel is dead and in Minaya's imagination his real story has supplanted the mystery of the gray-haired man who occupied it for twenty years, I want to invoke not his flight this evening but his return, the moment when he holds the letter he received in Madrid and prepares to knock at the door and is afraid it will be opened, but he doesn't know that returning and fleeing are the same, because tonight too, when he was leaving, he looked at the white facade and the circular windows on the top floor where a light that illuminates no one is shining, as if the submarine he wanted to inhabit in his childhood had been abandoned and was sailing without a pilot through an ocean of darkness. I'll never come back, he thinks, enraged in his grief, in his flight, in the memory of Ines, because he loves literature and the good-byes forever that occur only in books, and he walks along the lanes with his head lowered, as if charging the air, and he comes out on the Plaza of General Orduna, where there's a taxi that will take him to the station, perhaps the same one he took three months earlier when he came to Magina to find in Manuel's house a refuge from his fear.
It will be my pleasure to help you any way I can in your research on Jacinto Solana who, as you know, lived for a time in this house, in 1947,
when he left prison, he had written,
but I'm afraid you won't find a single trace of his work here, because everything he wrote before his death was destroyed in circumstances you no doubt can imagine.

A
PRETEXT, AT FIRST
, a secondary lie learned perhaps from those contrived by his father so he could go on wearing a suit and tie and polished shoes, a casual alibi so that the act of fleeing and not continuing to resist the harsh inclemency of misfortune would resemble a positive act of will. Minaya was alone and in a kind of daze in a corner of the cafeteria at the university, far from everything, brushing the rim of an empty cup with the tip of his cigarette and silently putting off the moment of going out to the wintry avenue where hard, gray horsemen stood guard, and he hadn't yet thought of Jacinto Solana or the possibility of using his name to save himself from persecution; he thought, having recently emerged from a detention cell on the Puerta del Sol, only about interrogations and the sirens of police wagons and the body that had lain as if at the bottom of a well on the concrete or paving stones of a courtyard at State Security headquarters. Around him he saw unfamiliar faces that clustered at the counter and at the nearby tables with briefcases of notes and overcoats that seemed to protect them with identical efficiency from winter and the suspicion of fear, secure in the warm air and cigarette smoke and voices, firm in their names, their chosen futures, as irrevocably unaware of the silent presence among them of the emissaries of tyranny as they, children of forgetting, were unaware that the pine groves and redbrick buildings they walked past had been a battlefield thirty years earlier. He was alone forever and definitively dead, he later told Inés, ever since the day the guards trapped him and with punches and kicks from their black boots forced him into a van with metal gratings, ever since he left prison with his belt in a pocket and his shoelaces in his hand, because they had been confiscated when they took him to the cell, perhaps to keep him from dismally hanging himself, and were returned only a few
minutes
before he was released, but they said the other one had committed suicide, that he took advantage of a moment's carelessness on the part of the guards who were interrogating him to throw himself down into the courtyard and die in handcuffs. He, Minaya, had survived the blows and the ghastly wait to be called for another interrogation, but even after he was out, the slightest sound grew until it became the deafening noise of bolts and heavy metal doors in his dreams, and every night the sheets on his bed were as rough as the blankets they gave him when he entered the cell, and his body retained the stink it had acquired in the basements, behind the last grating, when they took away his watch, his belt, his matches, his shoelaces, and handed him those two gray blankets that smelied of horse sweat.

But deeper than his fear of footsteps in the corridor and the methodical fury of hard slaps in the face, those five days left Minaya with an unpleasant sensation of impotence and helpless solitude that refuted all certainty and forever denied the right to salvation, rebelliousness, or pride. How to redeem himself from the cold at daybreak that penetrated beneath the blankets where he hid his head in order not to see the perpetual yellow light hung between the corridor and the cell's peephole or to invent in the name of what or whom a justification for the smell of confined bodies and cigarette butts, where to find a handhold to keep him steady when he didn't know if it was day or night and he leaned the back of his neck against the wall waiting for a guard to come in and say his name. It was on the second night that he thought of returning to Màgina. The cold woke him, and he remembered that he had dreamed about his father putting on his boots in the red bedroom and looking at him with the pale smile of a dead man. He told Inés that in his dream there was a pink, icy light and a feeling of distance or ungraspable tenderness that was also the light of May coming in and waking him from a balcony of his childhood where swallows built their nests or lingering in midafternoon over a plaza with acacias. In vain he closed his eyes and tried to resume the dream or recover it whole without forfeiting its pleasure or the exact tone of its color, but even after he lost the dream, the name of Màgina remained as if it were an illumination of his memory, as if saying it were enough to tear down walls of forgetting and to have before him the intact city, available and remote on its blue hill, more and more precise in its invitation and its inviolable distance, while for Minaya all the streets and faces and rooms in Madrid were transformed into snares of a persecution that did not end when they released him, that continued to crouch behind him, all around him, when he drank a cup of coffee in the cafeteria at the university; and on the other side of the windows, among the dark green, rainwashed pines, he saw the gray horsemen, dismounted now, serene, the visors of their helmets raised, like weary knights who without disarming allow their steeds to graze on the grass wet with dew, near the waiting jeeps.

Then someone came and talked to him about Jacinto Solana: dead, unpublished, renowned, heroic, disappeared, probably shot at the end of the war. Minaya had finished his coffee and was getting ready to leave when the other man, armed with a briefcase and a glass of cognac, spread before him his combative enthusiasm, his friendship, which Minaya never asked for, the evidence of a discovery that in the future would probably provide him with a summa cum laude. "His name was, his name is, José Manuel Luque," he told Inés, "and I can't imagine him without running the risk of anachronisms, impassioned, I suppose, addicted to clandestine conversations, ignoring discouragement and doubt, carrying forbidden papers in his briefcase, determined to have destiny fulfill what they affirm, and with a beard and rough workman's boots."

"Jacinto Solana. Make a note of the name, Minaya," the other man said, "because I'll be sure you hear it in the future and read these poems. They were published in
Hora de España,
in the July 1937 issue. Though I warn you this is only an appetizer for what you'll see later."

"Invitation," read Minaya, fifteen lines without rhyme, without any apparent rhythm, as if the person who wrote them had with absolute premeditation renounced indicating any emphasis, so that the words would sound as if spoken in a quiet voice, with sustained coldness, with the serene purpose of achieving perfection and silence, as if perfection, and not even the act of writing, mattered. A man alone was writing in front of a mirror and closing his lips before saying the only name that dwelled in him in order to look at himself in a tranquil invitation to suicide. At the end, "Mágina, May 1937." Each line, each word sustained on the negation of itself, was an ancient call that seemed to have been written only so Minaya might know it, not in a vast future but on that precise afternoon, in just that place, thirty-one years and eight months later, as if in the mirror where that man was looking at himself as he wrote he had seen Minaya's eyes, his predestined loyalty.