Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

SUDDENLY MINAYA WAS ALONE, and it was as if nothing could attest to the fact that he had been kissing Ines on a sofa in the illuminated, unmoving library. The sensation of the caresses and the darkness remained in his consciousness, with no reason to connect it to the present, even less so to the blurred scene that had preceded it, just as an apparition leaves no trace when it fades away. In front of the fire was the glass table where she placed the book she was reading while she waited for him and that held the bottle and glasses and ashtray with cigarette ends stained crimson, but Inés, before she left, had put the book back on the shelf where it belonged and removed the glasses and the bottle as urgently as she had straightened her skirt and buttoned her blouse, then disappeared as if she were never going to return. "Now she's in her room, probably naked under the sheets, because she may still be waiting for me, and this flight has been a trick to get me to follow her." But he didn't do anything except insist on the alcohol, on his cowardice and good fortune, except to look at Orlando's drawing and the photograph in which Jacinto Solana was smiling at him, Minaya, guessing, understanding everything, with the air of someone who confirms with disdain that what he always imagined has happened and that the gift of prophecy is a melancholy privilege. Then he went up without even daring to pass Inés' bedroom, going along the hallways in the house as if they were the last streets of a city not entirely recognized or inhospitable, obedient to sleep and the mature night where, as if in a kind of future memory, there were to be found Inés' embraces and the placidity of the sheets waiting to remind him of the commandment of abandonment and forgetting, because out in the world it was February 1969, tyranny and fear, but inside those walls what endured was a delicate anachronism, a plot he was also a part of though he didn't know it: Inés, who didn't belong to this time or any other because her presence was enough to cancel it, Mariana in the drawing and in photographs, Manuel in his lieutenant's uniform, and Jacinto Solana not motionless in his figure and in the date of his death, but always writing, even now, narrating, Minaya imagined, like the impostor and guest who enters the parlor at three in the morning and discovers that there is a key in the lock of the forbidden room, that it will be infinitely easy to push the door and contemplate what no one but Manuel has seen in the last thirty-two years. A large, unexpectedly vulgar room, with dark furniture and white curtains across the shutters to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias. He moved forward uncertainly, closing the door behind him, he lit a match and saw himself in the double mirror on the closet, his pale face emerging from the darkness as if in a chiaroscurist portrait. But it wasn't entirely a funereal place, because the top sheet was clean and looked recently ironed and the air didn't smell of enclosure but of a cold February night, as if someone had just closed the balcony door. He locks himself in here, he thought, to caress the embroidery or the edge of the sheets as if he were caressing the body of the woman who lay on them for a single night, to look at the plaza from the balcony that only he can open, or to look at the mirror searching for a memory of Mariana, disheveled and naked, and perhaps he no longer feels anything, because no one is capable of incessant memory. He opened the closet, as empty as one in a hotel room, he searched through the dresser drawers and saw Mariana's lingerie and stockings and a mirrored compact that contained a pink substance as delicate as pollen, and in the bottom drawer, under her wedding dress, which became entwined in his hands like silken foam, he found the packet of old handwritten pages tied with a red ribbon. There was no need to hold it up to the candle to read the name written on the first sheet: he could recognize Jacinto Solana not only in his insomniac handwriting but above all in the talent for secrecy that seemed to have endured in him even after his death. They killed him, they thought they could demolish his memory by stomping on the typewriter that he was heard pounding constantly for three months in the highest room in the house, they ripped the papers he had written and burned them in a fire they set in the garden, but like a virus that lodges in the body and returns when the patient thinks it has been exterminated, the furtive words, the incessant writing of Jacinto Solana appeared again twenty-two years later, and in a place, Minaya supposed, that would have pleased him: the most untouched room in the house, the drawer where the wedding dress was kept and the intimate silk things of the woman he loved, so that the odor of the paper blended with the scent of her clothes, a distant heir of other scents that were in Mariana's skin.

Only later, when Minaya had read the manuscript, could he understand why Manuel had lied and told him that not even a page remained of the book Solana had been writing when they killed him. It read "Beatus Ille" at the top of the first sheet, though it wasn't or didn't seem to be a novel but a kind of diary written between February and April of 1947 and crisscrossed with long evocations of things that had happened ten years earlier. At times Solana wrote in the first person and at other times he used the third, as if he wanted to hide the voice that was telling and guessing everything and in this way give the narration the tone of an impassive history. Kneeling next to the open drawer, next to the wedding dress that spread around him, Minaya untied the knots in the red ribbons with clumsy, eager slowness, and when he touched the manuscript pages one by one with the incredulous fervor of a man who has witnessed a miracle, he heard the door of the bedroom closing quietly, and before he turned around, he recalled in a moment of lucidity and terror that he hadn't taken the key out of the lock. But it wasn't Manuel, it was Inés at his side, Inés who turned the key so that no one could take them by surprise and who, tall and ironic, looked at him as if he were a thief who, when he was discovered, forgot the fruit of his greed between his hands. Still on his knees, he let the manuscript fall, unable to say anything or think of a possible excuse. "I saw Utrera walking around the gallery," Inés said, "he almost caught you," and her voice wasn't the voice of an accuser but of an accomplice when she kneeled beside him to put away the dress. "Look what I've found. Manuscripts by Jacinto Solana." But Ines didn't seem to hear him; she had seen, among the bride's clothes, a rose of yellow cloth that Mariana must have removed from her hair before the wedding photograph was taken, and she put it on one side of her forehead, with transitory elegance, and looked in the mirror for an instant, smiling at herself, at Minaya's stupefaction and passion. With a caress he removed the rose from her hair as he kissed her with his eyes closed.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GARDEN, next to the palm tree that's so tall its top can be seen from the plaza, Manuel, convalescing, sat in the sun and talked to Minaya, sitting on a wicker chair, wearing no tie and a light-colored suit that seemed to have been chosen to match his white hair and the tone of the paint on the small round table with a glass of water sparkling in the light and an opaque bottle of medicine. Dominating his figure, beyond the fatigue of his convalescence visible only in the flat pallor of his skin and a certain tremor in his left: hand, was a serene inaugural air, as if he had dressed so carefully to attend a fiesta or receive a group of guests in the garden. Disobeying Medina's orders without excessive pleasure, though with absolute premeditation, Manuel smoked his first cigarette since the afternoon when his heart knocked him down in the Plaza of Santa Maria. Still intact was the delight of taking it out of the cigarette case and fitting the filter in the holder with a light pressure of thumb and index finger, but the tobacco had a taste somewhere between unfamiliar and neutral, and Manuel, after the disappointment of the first few inhalations, continued smoking only because of loyalty to himself, just as he had allowed himself the useless elegance of going out to the garden, wearing his linen suit and an Italian scarf instead of a tie.