Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"It was because of the eyes, wasn't it? The eyes and cheekbones. Her mouth was admirable and her nose, as you must have noticed, was just a little longer and sharper than the accepted norms of sculpture. But her beauty lay above all in her almond-shaped eyes and those extremely high cheekbones. They weren't perfect, but when one looked at them, one's hands almost felt the sensation of modeling them."

It wasn't in the church but afterward, when he left there to look at the face in the Plaza of the Fallen, that could only be seen between the angel's legs and from an angle as unusual as it was difficult, when Minaya realized that all of Utrera's female faces were partial portraits of Mariana. A minor variation in the mouth or in the rendering of the face was enough to transform her into an unknown woman, but the long, pensive eyes were always the same in the dark air of the chapels, the same cheekbones that Orlando had summarized forever with a single stroke of his pencil. Now Utrera has forgotten all suspicion as he gives himself over to pride: standing and facing Minaya, with his dirty dustcoat and the tense or involuntary smile of his false teeth, he smokes and agrees to remember, to grant him the status of accomplice.

"You're right. The face of the Fallen Hero is a portrait of Mariana, a funerary portrait, to be more exact. I had made her death mask, but I lost it before the war was over. I found it again many years later, in '53, I think, when I was already working on the Monument to the Fallen. It was in the drawer of an old armoire, in the basement, so forgotten that finding it seemed like a miracle. At first I thought the angel ought to have Mariana's face, but exposing it to light after all the years it had been hidden in the basement would have been a profanation. Have you seen photographs of those Egyptian statues that appear in the tombs of the pharaohs? They were made for the darkness, so that no one but the deceased could contemplate their beauty. In fifteen years no one, absolutely no one, discovered my secret. Now I have to share that portrait of Mariana with you. Promise me you won't say anything to anybody."

I promise, Minaya says, lying, imagining in advance how he'll tell these things to Inés and the words Solana would have used in the manuscripts to describe the conversation and the scene. All things, he thought then, have already been written and matter only to the extent I can recount them to Inés to provoke in her eyes a flash of longed-for mystery. Like her on certain clandestine nights, when she is naked and embraces his body, which never stops desiring her, to tell him about a book or a film or the brief dream she had while he was smoking in the dark and didn't know she was asleep, Minaya wants to tell her what he knows now, Utrera's pride and hidden rage, the pride and rage of looking at the empty car and his useless hands but always knowing he has added to the world a single memorable face, the unique shape of the eyes and cheekbones concealed, as if by a veil, with features that didn't belong to them, the precise lines of the face of a sleeping girl who smiles inside a dream disintegrated in death. He returns to the house from which he vindicated his glory with no witnesses other than a glass of cognac or a clouded mirror, and sometimes, when he is ready to open the door to the lane, he stands proudly erect on the aberration of alcohol and decides to prolong his steps to the shadowy plaza where the portrait of Mariana and the certainty of his pride await him with a constant loyalty possessed only by statues and paintings. At night, so that no one will follow him, like a miser who goes down to the basement where he counts and contemplates his coins every night and lets them slide through avid fingers, he stumbles, flips on his lighter, cannot manage to hold up the flame and shelter it from the wind, gropes at the granite he so delicately polished, recognizes every undulation, and stops his index finger at the small sunken circle in the middle of the forehead. He hears footsteps very close by, but it's too late when he gets to his feet because someone, a tall, familiar figure, has seen him kneeling next to the statue. When he stands so abruptly the blood pounds in his temples and a cognac nausea comes up from his stomach, but he cares more about his certain embarrassment, his obligation to pretend. It's that young man, Minaya, Manuel's nephew; it's midnight and very cold and what is he doing here except spying on me.

"Now you're thinking I fell in love with Mariana too. I hope you'll believe me when I tell you that didn't happen. She was the kind of woman every artist wants as a model, but nothing else, at least for me, especially if you keep in mind that she was going to marry the man to whose hospitality I owed my life. I don't betray my friends."

"And Solana?"

Utrera remains silent: premeditatedly grave, almost wounded, when he speaks again he avoids Minaya's eyes, as if forced against his will to take a step beyond discretion. "One shouldn't speak ill of the dead." When he leaves the studio, the noon light dazzles Minaya in the garden. With his back turned to him, Manuel in his wicker armchair remains in a repose belied only by the blue cigarette smoke that rises until it disappears in the clusters of wisteria.

THE NARROW GAUGE TRAIN slowly descends the Magina slope to the Guadalquivir. In the distance, among blue olive trees and dunes of wheat or drab fields lying fallow, the river glitters like a thin plate of metal, of silver, of the same livid, glassy blue in the air at the edge of the sierra. As it goes down to the Guadalquivir, the train advances more rapidly between the olive groves, whose long rows open like fans into successive vanishing points. In profile next to the window, Inés looks at the olive groves and the white houses that appear for an instant like islands in the geometry of their thick growth, holding on her knees a wicker basket covered with a blue-checkered cloth. The olive trees and the dense line of poplars that announces the river, the distant sierra with clusters of white houses hanging from the slopes, are for Minaya like those landscapes of blue mountains and curving rivers visible in the background of certain quattrocento portraits in which a girl smiles in profile. With a casual air he caresses the hand resting on the basket, Inés' hands and knees, her ankles close together, the glance that recognizes and waits for a sign among the oleanders and the olive trees. "When we reach the river, the house where I was born is after the next curve." The rolling plain vibrates with the hedge mustard's greens and silvers and yellows, and before the river can be seen through the windows, an odor of mud and shaded water announces its vast, almost motionless, proximity. "Look," Inés sits up, lowers the glass, and points at a house on the other side of a little grove of pomegranate trees and cypresses, "that was my grandfather's mill, that's where I was born." But the house is immediately left behind, barely glimpsed, like the new gleam in Inés' eyes when they looked at it. He would have liked to stop there, get off with her, go along the path that leads to the house among the pomegranate branches, acknowledge the grapevine in whose shade her uncle told her tales of travels, and the bedroom where she waited for sleep every night, hearing the passage of the water through the vault of the mill and the distant wind that shook the trees and carried to Mágina the deep whistles of trains or improbable ships. "At night, so I'd forget my fear of the dark, my uncle would come into my bedroom and sit beside me, leaving his crutches on the bed. He made me listen to the water and the whistles of the trains, and when you could hear one coming from very far away, he'd tell me it wasn't a train but a ship passing through the Straits of Gibraltar."