Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

What a strange logic of memory and pain conspires silently to transform the prison of another time into paradise: he trembled with gratitude and tenderness when he turned the corner of the plaza and saw the poplars and the familiar doorways, loyal to his recollection, and the illuminated air that became blue over the high, ivy-covered belfry of San Lorenzo. For a moment, as he walked toward the house recognizing even the irregularities in the ground, he thought his whole life had been one long mistake, that he never should have left the place with serene light that received him now as if he were a stranger. It was the time of the olive harvest, and a man he didn't recognize immediately was loading empty sacks and long poles of heather wood for shaking down the olives onto a mule tied to the grillwork over the window.

"How could I not remember him if we grew up together," the man says to Minaya, and he chokes and coughs without taking the cigarette wet with saliva from his mouth, sitting in the sun on a wicker chair that creaks beneath his large, defeated body. "But he went to Madrid during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and found a job on a newspaper and got involved in politics, because he had a lot of ideas and never liked the countryside, so he left his father alone with all the work they had on the farm, and they didn't speak for years."

"Be quiet, Manuel," murmurs a woman beside the old man who has her white hair pulled back and a black shawl over her shoulders, who had been sweeping the sidewalk and saw Minaya stop in front of the house next door, as if he didn't know that no one had lived in it for many years. The man—"Manuel Biralbo, pleased to meet you" — had stopped braiding the rope he was holding in his large hands when Minaya arrived and offered him another chair facing his, in the corner of the plaza where there's a smell of damp earth, in the light that sifts through the thick foliage of the poplar. "Be quiet, Manuel," the woman repeats in a low voice, looking out of the corner of her eye at the stranger who asks questions about forgotten things, but her husband, as if he were not aware of the risk she observes and fears, goes on talking and not only invites Minaya to sit down but also offers him his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers and becomes entangled in senseless explanations that no one has asked him for.

"Justo Solana, the father, they shot him when the war was over, and nobody knows why. He must have done something, people say, like so many others who had fingers pointed at them back then, but I don't know what he could have done since he wasn't a man who got mixed up in politics, and for the whole war he stayed at the farm. But he came back a little while before the troops marched in, and in three or four days they came for him in a car and took him to jail, in handcuffs like a criminal. Then I found out they killed him. But his son, Jacinto, didn't know until he came here from prison. I can see him as clearly as I see you, with his black coat and hat and the suitcase tied up with a rope in his hand. At first I didn't know him. I was in my doorway when he knocked at the door of his house, and I saw his face when they told him his father didn't live there anymore. Jacinto, I said, don't you remember me? And when I shook his hand, I saw that he was crying. He said, 'Manuel, what did they do to my father?' and I didn't know what to tell him because I had a thing here, in my throat, and I couldn't even talk. 'They killed him,' I said, and he looked at me and lowered his head and left the plaza without saying another word. And I never saw him again. That summer I heard they had killed him too."

His footsteps returning, the inert sound of his footsteps on the paving stones of the street that takes him away from the Plaza of San Lorenzo, where Manuel Biralbo sat watching him leave, never to return, sitting on his wicker chair, braiding a rope to occupy his hands, explaining to his wife that there's no danger, that this boy who's so polite is writing a book about Jacinto Solana, you remember, Justo's son, the one who went to Madrid and then they killed him. Like the ticking of a clock, like the beating of the suicide's heart and the ringing of bells in Magina, his footsteps drummed on the empty street, not subject to his will and his consciousness, indicating the only possible road left to him in his banishment. He thought he would never reach the white palace on the Plaza of San Pedro as he walked along the Calle de la Luna y el Sol, remembering other dawns when the mare's hooves sounded in the silence to invite him to gallop and imagine an adventure, but the now unfamiliar city continued to be a firm habit of his footsteps. Clinging to the walls, Minaya thinks, his face hidden beneath the brim of his hat, between the lapels of his overcoat, the face without eyes or nose or mouth, only a straw hamper of shadow to waylay the besieged presence of the Invisible Man. But he still doesn't know the street plan in Magina — long medieval streets, curved like a bow, that never let you see their ending, you simply have to guess gradually at the shape of nearby houses and discover a plaza only when you've reached it — and wanting to repeat Solana's exact footsteps on that cloudy early morning in January, he soon found himself lost in narrow lanes that have the names of ancient guilds and saints, and when he finally thought he had found his way to Manuel's house, it isn't the Plaza of San Pedro he comes to but another larger square he had never seen before and in whose center there is a scraggly garden with cypresses standing like guards around the monument erected by Magina in 1954 to honor its fallen. The house, Minaya recalls in a sudden rush of tenderness, the house on the corner where Inés lives with her sick or paralyzed uncle at the back of a courtyard in an apartment house, where the motionless man waits every night at the highest window for her to return.

Because he doesn't know how to renounce the custom of waiting for her, Minaya lingers in the Plaza of the Fallen, looking from time to time, like a zealous spy, at the closed door and balconies where it's possible she may appear. Utrera's monument shines in the midafternoon like a great block of marble against the dark backdrop of the cypresses. "An entire year of work, my boy, my hands, these hands, bloody every night from struggling with the granite. It was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, but tell me if art, great art, doesn't always consist of that." As if exhausted under his mineral wings, the angel bends over the fallen and tries to lift him up from the stone altar where his sword lies, but the naked white body overflows his arms, and his face is turned toward the wall, toward the high stone slab where the cross is sculpted with the names of the fallen of Magina, so that it is very difficult to see his features. "Because Utrera wanted no one or almost no one to see them," Minaya wrote in his notebook, "because he wanted only a very small number of viewers, or perhaps none at all, to discover his most perfect work, and in this way publicly keep it secret, the treasure of a strange avarice."

One night when he had taken up his post in the Plaza of the Fallen to look for Inés, because she hadn't come to the house for a week, Minaya heard at his back the sound of a body moving through the hedges, and he saw the glow of a small flashlight wielded by someone who seemed to be hiding on the other side of the statues. He's following me, he thought, suddenly recovering the fear of his final days in Madrid, but Utrera was too drunk to recognize him in the dark and hadn't even seen him. He was looking for something between the pedestal and the cypresses, cursing in a quiet voice, and when he heard Minaya and turned the light on him, he didn't know what to say and stood there in front of him, the flashlight in his hand and his mouth open and an alcoholic somnolence clouding his eyes.