Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"Which means you should pay no attention to Utrera," said Manuel, with the sad irony he always used when he talked to Minaya about his family, "when he recounts the merits of our ancestors. All those paintings in the courtyard and the gallery were bought by my grandfather, your great-grandfather, from the same penniless aristocrats who sold him their country estates."

As if ashamed of having been born where he was born and bearing the name he bore, but not daring to reveal his shame completely or to cultivate his disdain openly, for he was not unaware that only the house and the name connected to it had saved him from being shot and from the obligation for courage, demanding from him instead a passive loyalty that, as he grew older, stopped being the never-demolished boundary line and the exact measure of his resignation and failure to become one of his habits. Who then was the man with the haughty, almost heroic bearing in the wedding photo graph, the one who was promoted to lieutenant for bravery in action after he jumped undefended into an enemy trench with no help other than a pistol torn from a corpse and a group of frightened militiamen and who shot to death those who were firing an Italian machine gun at them, where did he look for and find the valor needed to marry Mariana, abandoning without the slightest misgiving the girl in whose languid company he had spent a six-year engagement with the always alert indulgence of Dona Elvira, who took this sudden fit of her son's as a personal insult and never forgave him for it?

"And not only that," Medina recalled, "he was also capable of finding a position in the Spanish embassy in Paris, I suppose through the mediation of Solana, and he had everything prepared for going there the day after his wedding, imagine, the same man who had come home from Madrid without finishing his studies in order not to oppose his mother. Which means that if Mariana had not died the way she died, your uncle would now be a member of the republican government-in-exile, or something like it."

Many times in the course of the two years granted him to survive the slow surrender of his will, Manuel looked at his wedding photograph and felt he wasn't the man who appeared in it, not because he didn't believe he had once possessed the spirit or the madness needed to confront his mother and overcome the fear that made him vomit before an attack at the front but because he had never thought he deserved Mariana's blind tenderness and proferred body, and he looked at her photographs and Orlando's drawing with the same unlimited, incredulous devotion and the same astonishment with which he looked at her and he saw himself in the bedroom mirrors when he finally had her white and naked in his arms. It was Solana, declared Magina or that part of Magina where unconquered pride survived, he was the one who made him a Red and encouraged him to become involved with that slut, said aggrieved voices in the salon where the embroidered table linen and silver table service were still displayed, what was going to be the dowry of the bride so abruptly abandoned, relics now of her melancholy destiny. And without saying anything to her, even though she was preparing the wedding dress and my cousin knew it, Minaya's father recounted many years later, because Mariana was dead and the war that had brought her to Màgina was over, but her pride and imperious capacity for contempt were still intact, perhaps even ennobled, like the statue of General Orduna, by indications of heroism and ignominy.

"And don't think that girl was a scarecrow because she belonged to one of the best families in Magina, almost as respectable as ours. Ask your mother, who knew her very well. Of course in the end she was lucky and recovered from my cousin's betrayal. She married, and it was a very good match, a captain in the Regular Army."

Inexhaustible, intact, and useless, like Magina's light and its statues with Greek profiles, rancor is the only thing they save or that saves them from oblivion and strengthens the persistence of pride over the void. Each morning, attended by Teresa and Amalia, who climbs the stairs very slowly and holds the railing and the walls and breathlessly reaches the top floor of the house, Dona Elvira dresses ceremoniously before a mirror and combs her white hair waved according to the by-now blurred style of 1930, at times permitting herself a drop of perfume at her wrists and on her neck and a light shadow of pink powder on her cheeks. How is my son, she asks without looking at anyone or expecting anyone to answer, directing her gaze over the heads of the two women moving around her, because she was taught that this was how a lady ought to address her servants, remind Inés that today is Thursday and she has to bring me the magazines. Has the administrator called? Have someone let him know. I want to settle the olive accounts with him before I forget about it and he cheats me. Dressed and perfumed as if she were going out, though she does that only early in the morning on Good Friday, Dona Elvira contemplates her own firm body in the mirror and smooths with her index finger the deleted line of her eyebrows.

"Teresa, when you've made the bed, water the geraniums. Don't you see they're withering?"

Still in front of the mirror, without turning around or raising her voice, Doña Elvira sees Teresa pulling the sheets and quilt from the large double bed where she still sleeps forty years after becoming a widow, and she suddenly notices, with secret satisfaction, how much the maid who was only a girl when she entered her service has aged. The cold yellow sun of February enters obliquely through the large window to the terrace, leaving on the tiles a damp stain of light, sifted down like pollen, which surrounds things without ever touching them and slides over to the doorway where Amalia, who almost doesn't see it, is standing and waiting.

"Does the señora want anything else?"

"Nothing, Amalia. Tell Inés she can bring me the paper and my breakfast now."

Before he was allowed to meet her, Doña Elvira imposed herself on Minaya's consciousness like a great absent shadow, depicted, with severe precision, in the fear with which Jacinto Solana imagined her many years earlier, in certain customs and words that ambiguously alluded to her, almost never naming her, not explaining her seclusion or her life, only suggesting that she was there, in the topmost rooms, appearing at the balcony of the greenhouse or looking at the garden from the window where her figure sometimes was outlined. A tray with the silver teapot and a single cup set out at midafternoon on the kitchen sideboard, the ABC folded and unopened, the illustrated magazines that Inés bought every Thursday at the kiosk on the Plaza of General Orduña, the account books next to the coat and hat of the administrator, who talks to Amalia in the courtyard, waiting until Doña Elvira wishes to receive him, the sound of the television set and the piano canceling each other out and confused in the distance with the fluttering wings of pigeons against the glass in the dome. He had learned to catalogue and discover the signs of Doña Elvira's presence and always to fear her when he walked alone down the hallways, and one day, without anything foretelling it, Inés told him that the señora had invited him to tea that afternoon in her rooms. The way up began with a door at the back of the gallery and crossed a dark region of rooms, perhaps never occupied, that had religious paintings on the walls and porcelain saints enclosed in crystal urns. Solitary figures on credenzas looking into empty space with lost, glassy eyes, looking at Minaya like motionless guardians of no-man's-land as he crossed the deserted semidarkness behind Inés' footsteps and the muffled clink of teaspoons and cups on the silver tray that she held solemnly, as if they were objects of worship.