A Manuscript of Ashes (33 page)

asked Minaya, standing up, and he removed from the envelope, with extreme care, as if he were raising the wings of a mounted butterfly and attempting to keep it from disintegrating in his fingers, a typewritten sheet, almost torn at the folds. "It's strange that Dona Elvira has it here. It was addressed to Utrera." "That woman has always been crazy," said Inés, barely looking at the letter, "she must have kept it the way she kept everything." The date of the heading, written beneath a letterhead in elaborate calligraphy ("Santisteban and Sons, Antiquarians, Firm Established 1881") was the same as the canceled stamp, and included the letter, even before Minaya began to read it, in the narrow band of time when the wedding and then the death of Mariana occurred, transforming it into a part of that surviving material he could not touch without shuddering, like the cartridge and the piece of newspaper in which he found it wrapped and the white cloth flower that Mariana wore in the wedding photograph and Inés put in her hair one night. "Madrid," he read, "May 12, 1937," thinking that on the same day so impassively indicated by the typewriter, Mariana was still alive, that the time she inhabited was not an exclusive attribute of her person or the history already closing in around her to lead her to her death, but a vast general reality to which that letter and the man who wrote it also belonged. "Sr. D. Eugenio Utrera Beltran. Dear friend: I am happy to inform you of the arrival on the 17th of the present month of our colleague D. Victor Vega, whose invaluable skill in the antiquary's difficult art I have no need to describe to you, for you already know the number of years Sr. Vega has been employed in this Firm and the high esteem he enjoys here. As previously agreed, Sr. Vega will inform you with respect to the matters that interest you so deeply concerning our business, in which I hope you decide to take part with the good taste and reliability you have always proudly displayed with regard to the Fine Arts. I inform you as well that on his arrival in Magina, Sr. Vega will stay at the Hotel Comercio on the Plaza and await your visit there on the 17th. Very truly yours, M. Santisteban." He
looked at the letters of the name, Victor Vega, he pronounced it aloud, on the edge of a revelation, asking himself where he had heard or read it, then giving thanks to chance for the opportunity of discovering what his intelligence never would have elucidated otherwise. And when he finally went down to the library, when he had before him the semidarkness and in it the hostile, accusatory faces, he carried the letter in his pocket like a certainty that made him invulnerable and wiser, sole master of clarity, like the detectives in books who gather in the drawing room the inhabitants of a closed house where a crime was committed in order to reveal to them the name of the murderer, who waits and is quiet and knows himself condemned, alone, blemished among the others, who are still ignorant of his guilt. It was, this afternoon, like pushing Minaya toward the conclusion of a mystery, like directing his steps and his thoughts from the darkness, from literature, fearing he would not dare to reach the end and yet not wanting him to persist in his search beyond the indicated boundary, it was seeing what his eyes saw and detecting with him the scent of the candles burning at the corners of the coffin and the funeral flowers that surrounded it like the edges of an abyss at whose bottom lay Manuel, like the vegetation of a swamp into which he was sinking very slowly, unrecognizable by now, his hands tied by a rosary that wound around his yellow, rigid fingers and his eyelids squeezed or sewn shut in the obstinacy of dying, without any dignity at all, without that stillness that statues attribute to the dead, humiliated by scapulars that Dona Elvira had ordered hung around his neck and dressed in a suit that seemed to belong to another man, because death, which had exaggerated the bones in his face and the curve of his nose and erased the line of his mouth, also made his body smaller and more fragile, so that when Minaya went up to the coffin, it was as if he were looking at the corpse of a man he had never seen. Except for Medina, who conspicuously did not pray, who remained erect and silent as if affirming against everyone the secular dignity of his grief, a trace of Manuel's transfiguration
infected the others, enveloping them in the same gloomy play of light and shifting semidarkness that the candles established and that probably, like the disposition of the catafalque and the black hangings that covered it, had been calculated by Utrera to achieve in the library an effect of liturgical staging. In that light the entire library acquired an oppressive suggestion of chapel and vault, and the old, ordinary smells of varnished wood and leather and the paper in the books had been replaced by a dense breath of church and funeral indistinguishable from the first hints of decomposition already diluting in the air. They were seated in a semicircle around the coffin, shapes without emphasis or the possibility of movement beneath the mourning clothes that tied them to the shadows, barely opening their lips as they prayed, as if the uniform voice marking the rhythm of the litanies did not emerge from their throats but from the darkness or from the scent of the candles, an emanation like a filthy secretion from the rigid weight of sorrow, and when Minaya came in they raised their eyes not to look at him but at a point in space slightly removed from his presence, as if a current of air and not a body had pushed open the door, closing it afterward with a muffled thud. He shook the hand of Frasco, who stood ceremoniously to offer his condolences in too loud a tone of voice, provoking an angry glance from Utrera, an imperious order to be silent. Or perhaps it wasn't the tone of voice, Minaya thought, but the simple fact that Frasco, when he offered his condolences, was recognizing in him a family connection to Manuel that Utrera considered illegitimate. Not daring to say anything to Dona Elvira, whose face was half covered by a translucent veil and who led the rosary as she slipped the beads between fingers as thin and pointed as a bird's claws, Minaya went to sit next to Medina and learned from him the details of the travesty. "They were the ones," the doctor said in his ear, "the old woman and that parasite, that damn hypocrite. Look what they've done to Manuel, that rosary in his hands, those scapulars, the crucifix. He made it very clear in his will that he didn't want a religious funeral,
and now see what they've done, they waited until he died to get what they couldn't have when he was alive. And if it weren't for my screaming and yelling, they would have buried him in a Nazarene habit. Where did you get to? I spent all morning looking for you. I have something very important to tell you." Once again Utrera demanded silence, theatrically raising his index finger to his lips, and Medina, with ironic gravity, crossed his hands over his stomach as if parodying the gesture of a canon. "That one already knows. Which is why he's looking at you that way. He's dying of envy." "I don't understand, Medina." Fat and magnanimous, Medina smiled to himself and gave Minaya a kind of pitying look, a look of incredulous astonishment at his youth and ignorance. "Everybody knows by now, even Frasco, who was as happy as I am. A week ago Manuel changed his will. Now you're the sole heir. Of course that won't do you much good for a few years, because Dona Elvira will have all the property at her disposal in usufruct until she dies. And that woman's capable of living to a hundred if she decides to, just as she's lived until now, out of sheer spite." So that now, at the end, when he was concluding the prelude to expulsion, Medina's words abruptly granted him the right not to possession of the house or of the Island of Cuba, because that was a disconnected, abstract condition he could not conceive of, but to ownership of a history in which he had until then been a witness, an impostor, a spy, and that now, in a future he couldn't imagine either, would linger on in him, Minaya, but leaving him, as he would find out very soon afterward when he arrived at the station to buy a single ticket for Madrid, with the same sensation of inconsolable emptiness as the man who wakes and understands that no gift of reality can mitigate the loss of the happiness he just experienced in his last dream. Bewildered, as if he were slowly waking, he abandoned the lethargy into which the waiting, the semidarkness, and the sound of prayers had plunged him and went out to the courtyard searching for the relief of air and the pink and yellow light that turned white only on the marble paving stones,
white and cold in the mirror on the first landing, resonant with voices because in that courtyard each sound, a laugh, a voice that says a name, footsteps, the fluttering wings of a pigeon against the glass in the dome, acquires the sharp, dazzling solidity of pebbles in a channel of frozen water, and things that happen there, even the trivial act of lighting a cigarette, magnified by its sonority, seem to be happening forever. Perhaps that was why, when Utrera came out after him and began to accuse him, Minaya was sure of each of the words he was going to say and certain this was the only place where he should say them. Now Utrera wasn't wearing a white carnation in his lapel but a mourning button, and a wide band of black cloth sewn around one sleeve, which gave him the air of a disabled reprobate. He asked for a light, coming very close, like a queer or a policeman, small, exhaling the smoke in rapid mouthfuls, intent on injury, on not holding back a single offense. "I don't know what you're waiting for, I don't know why you haven't left yet, how you dare to remain here, to go into the library, to mock our grief." "Manuel was my uncle. I have the same right to mourn him as any of you." He was astonished by his own audacity, by the firmness of his voice, more certain and clear in the sonority of the courtyard, very close, suddenly, to an appetite for cruelty, involuntarily pleased at acceding to a siege that would turn into an ambush of his accuser precisely when he, Minaya, wanted it to, simply by displaying the letter or the cartridge he had in his jacket or saying one or two necessary words. "Don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand me. Don't be so sure you've deceived us the way you deceived poor Manuel. You killed him, last night, you and that hypocritical tart you were wallowing with in the most sacred place in this house. I saw you and her when you came out of the bedroom. And before that, I saw you go in, biting each other like animals, and I heard you, but I didn't do what I should have done, I didn't tell Manuel and I didn't go in to throw the two of you out myself, I left so I wouldn't be a witness to that profanation and when I came back it was already too late. That smell
in the bedroom, on the sheets, the same one you couldn't get rid of and that I noticed when you came to call on me. Weren't you surprised that I was still dressed at that hour? The ribbon on the night table. Do you think I'm blind, that I can't smell or see? But probably you didn't even try to hide. You're young, you love blasphemy, I suppose, just as you don't know the meaning of gratitude. Do you know what Ines was before she came to this house? She was in the poorhouse without a father or any family name except the one her mother gave her before she abandoned her, a wild creature who would have been expelled from that nuns' orphanage if Manuel hadn't taken her in. But you're different. You come from a good family and you have breeding and an education and carry in your veins the same blood as Manuel. You were a fugitive and a political agitator when you came here, don't think I couldn't find out, even though your uncle, for the sake of courtesy, and hospitality, never told me. He's come to write a book about Solana, poor Manuel told me, as if he didn't realize that the only thing you were doing in this house was eating and sleeping free of charge and hiding from the police and going to bed every night with that maid in order to discredit the hospitality all of us showed you since your arrival. It would be too merciful to call you ungrateful. You are a defiler and a murderer. Last night you killed Manuel." Vain, theatrical, invested with justice and mourning just as he once invested himself with glory and then, as the years passed, with the melancholy and rancor of the overlooked artist, Utrera held his breath as if chewing it with his false teeth and showed Minaya the street door. "Leave right now. Don't continue to profane our sorrow or Manuel's death. And take that slut with you. Neither you nor she have the right to remain in this house." This house is mine, Minaya could have or should have responded, but the crude consciousness of ownership, even one as future and imaginary and founded only on a quiet confidence of Medina's, did not provoke his pride or add anything to his firmness, because the vast white facade with marble balconies and circular windows and a courtyard with
columns and the glass in the dome had belonged to his imagination since he was a child with the definitive legitimacy of sensations and desires born and nourished only in oneself and requiring no attachment to reality to sustain themselves, because since less than an hour before, since he found the letter in Dona Elvira's bedroom and confirmed in a passage in Solana's manuscripts who Victor Vega was, he had taken over possession not of a house but of a history that had been beating in it for thirty years and that he would bring to a close by stripping away its mystery, granting to the scattering and forgetting of its details the dazzling, atrocious shape of truth, its passionate geometry, impassive like the architecture of the courtyard and the beauty of the statues in Magina, like the style and plot of the book that Jacinto Solana wrote for himself. "You know my uncle began to die a long time ago, on the day they killed Mariana," said Minaya, like a challenge, without any emotion at all, only with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he still weren't sure about daring to say what he had to say, what was demanded of him or dictated to him by loyalty to Manuel, to Jacinto Solana, to the outlined, broken history in the manuscripts, "and I think you also know who killed her." Utrera's dead smile, his old petulance of a hero of brothels and official commemorations twisting the expression of his mouth and remaining there, in his cold look of contempt, in his regained fear, still hidden. "I don't know what you're talking about. Don't you want to leave any of our dead in peace? You know as well as I how Mariana died. There was a judicial investigation and they did an autopsy. Ask Medina, in case you haven't found that out yet. He came here with the judge and examined the body. A stray bullet killed her, a bullet fired from the roofs." He won't deny it at first, Minaya had calculated, he won't tell me I'm lying or that he's innocent, because that would be like accepting my right to accuse him. He'll say he doesn't understand, that I'm crazy, he'll turn his back and then I'll take out the cartridge and the letter and oblige him to turn around so he can see them in my hands just as he may have seen the pistol