Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

He would have liked to know, one by one, all the places and moments in the life of Inés, the childhood days at the mill, the seven years at the boarding school for orphan girls, the house where she lived now that she never allowed him to visit, transforming all of it into a part of his consciousness with the same urgent thirst of eyes and lips with which he sometimes undressed her and caressed her and opened her. But just as Inés' body always emerged somehow untouched and alone from their mutual sieges, her thoughts and memories were not revealed to Minaya except in flashes of chaotic images that tended to have, because they almost always alluded to the girl's early childhood, the ecstatic air and unsettled disorder of illustrations in color. Motionless for a moment to his gaze, despite the landscape passing the train window, the first illustration has been fixed now in Minaya's eyes: around 1956, a little girl cradles a cardboard doll at the feet of the crippled man who looks at her and smokes as he sits under a grapevine, scratching at the ground with his crutches. "We're almost there," says Inés. On the other side of the tracks is an abandoned shed that once must have been a station, and beyond the river, the shore of red mud and the banks covered with oleanders and reedbeds. "Give my respects to Don Manuel," says the conductor from the step as the train starts up again. They cross the stone bridge over the slow waters, and when they reach the other side Inés, turning around, shows Minaya the hilltop where Màgina is spread out, gray and remote, high with pointed towers, Màgina alone on the hill of spillways and ramparts, open to the blue, as in Orlando's last watercolors.

It had been Manuel who suggested to Minaya that he visit the Island of Cuba, offering Inés as a guide on his way down, but now, when he looked at the city and the valley again from the esplanade of the country estate, when he shook the large hand of Frasco, the caretaker, witness to Solana's final days and death, he felt he hadn't been brought there by Manuel's suggestion or by his own desire for knowledge, but by the clandestine order of the manuscript he had discovered in the marriage bedroom, its last page dated March 30, 1947, one day before Jacinto Solana went down to the Island of Cuba in his penultimate flight, knowing perhaps that he never would return to Magina. As if he were moving on a blank page where the total absence of words concealed invisible writing, Minaya followed Inés up the path through the olive trees until they reached the esplanade where Jacinto Solana's dead body had been lain, at the entrance to the house. "Ask Frasco," Manuel had said, "he was the last of us to see Solana alive."

ON THE FIRST DAY of April 1947, at dawn, Jacinto Solana was tempted to go up to the cemetery to look for the pauper's grave where his father was buried. Without mentioning his intention to anyone, he left very early so they wouldn't see him when he crossed the Plaza of General Orduna, but he was not aware of his error and didn't realize that the commemoration was in progress until a shout made him raise his head as he passed the Church of La Trinidad. In front of the facade, at the top of the Baroque stairs, were three poles and three flags and a kind of burning censer next to which five men stood guard, looking down at him with folded arms in their blue uniforms and dazzling boots. One of them called to Solana, taking pleasure in repeating his first and last names and insulting him with predictable coldness, indicating the flags with a not entirely enraged gesture as he took his pistol out of the holster. "Raise your arm, and sing nice and loud so we can hear you." His eyes fixed on the ground, his hand raised and cowardly and shaken by a trembling that wasn't fear but an unfathomable future shame, Jacinto Solana heard from the depths of his consciousness his own voice singing the anthem of those aiming weapons at him with the same piercing clarity with which he heard the laughter and the usual insults. "That morning I went up to his room and saw that he kept his things in the same suitcase he had brought from prison," said Manuel. "He wanted to leave Magina without telling me where he was going, and without his knowing either, because there was no place he could go. Then I told him to go to the Island of Cuba for a while, at least until he finished his book. Sometimes, when we were boys, we'd ride the white mare there from his father's farm to swim in the river. He left that same afternoon, I took him to the train station myself. I never saw him again." Beatus ille, thinks Minaya, with a melancholy not entirely his, sudden and general, as indifferent as the landscape of olive trees that extends to the spurs and the faded blue of the sierra. Ines has gone into the house, calling Frasco's name, and when her voice can no longer be heard, Minaya is temporarily lost in the solitude, which he always imagines as definitive, of unfamiliar, empty places. Across from the house is a small hill planted with almond trees, and from it comes a breeze with the scent of damp earth, risen perhaps from the river. Then Frasco appeared among the almond trees, a clay-encrusted hoe on his shoulder and a wide straw hat covering his face. You could hear his trouser legs brushing harshly against the hedge mustard, and from the energy of his step and the muscular tension that could be guessed at in the way he held the hoe, Minaya would have said it wasn't an old man but a forty-year-old who was approaching him. They walked together to the house, chatting at random about the recent rain, Manuel's illness, the distant time when the estate, which had been the best in the entire district of Magina, had ten thousand olive trees. But that was long before the war, explained Frasco, who still remembered the visit of Alfonso XIII in his sportsman's outfit and high hunter's gaiters and the dust raised on the road by the cars of his entourage. Sitting in the entryway, at the bare wooden table, they watched Ines in silence as she served them their meal. In the entryway, on the entire ground floor of the house, a damp semidarkness like the breath of a well prevailed and made the paving stones, as worn as pebbles, glisten.

"I was told you saw them kill Solana."

"I didn't see it. Only they saw it, the ones who killed him. I heard the burst of the three-and-a-half-inch caliber weapon the Civil Guard carried and shots from Don Jacinto's pistol; he jumped into the river gorge from the shed. I spent a whole year on the Cordoba front, and I could identify every kind of weapon. They had me handcuffed right here, two of them, pointing their rifles at me, as if I could escape, and I heard the gunfire and the shouts, and from time to time Don Jacinto's pistol, he always carried it, even when he was writing. He kept it on the table, next to his papers, and when he went down to the river to swim, he left it with his clothes, because he knew they were going to come for him. I remember it took them several hours to find the body, because he was dead when he fell into the river and the current dragged him, so it was already daylight when they brought him here and threw him in the middle of the esplanade, full of mud, his whole face covered with blood. They didn't let me near him, but I could see from a distance the broken lenses of his glasses glinting on his face."

Inés listened to Frasco's story with the same fascinated attention she had felt when she was a little girl in the dark listening to tales of islands and tall empty ships that sail up the valley of the Guadalquivir on moonless nights. She was standing behind Minaya, and from time to time she touched his shoulder or brushed his neck with a very light touch, because nothing pleased her as much as enveloping any sign of tenderness in secrecy. With a shiver of gratitude he squeezed the hand she held out to him in the shadows as they followed Frasco up the stairs to the room Solana had occupied during the last three months of his life, a large hay loft with a sloping roof and long beams with halters tied to them, and in the back a single window covered with a piece of burlap that tinted the light the yellow of pollen. Under the bed was the trunk no one had opened for the past twenty-two years, because Frasco hadn't wanted to touch anything after the Civil Guard left carrying the dripping wet body of Jacinto Solana.