Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

They had returned from the station that afternoon, pursuing each other down the lanes and embracing with an obstinacy of desire that for the first time excluded all modesty or tenderness, delaying the moment they would arrive at the house and daring rough caresses at the empty streetcorners and sweet, dirty words they had never said before. But the game and the fever didn't end when they knocked at the door of the house. As they listened to Teresa crossing the courtyard and repeating "Coming," they arranged their clothes, their hair, they solemnly stood erect at either side of the door, feigning indifference or fatigue, and now simulation excited them more than the chase.

"Don Manuel is worse," said Teresa. "He had to lie down after lunch."

"Did the doctor come?"

"Of course, and he scolded him for smoking and not taking his medicine. How can he get better if he pays no attention to what they tell him to do?"

When she heard Minaya, Amalia felt her way down the stairs, clutching at the banister. She was coming from Manuel's bedroom and brought with her the weary smell of the sickroom. "Your uncle wants to see you." There was a dirty gleam of tears beneath her painted lids. When Minaya knocked gently at the bedroom door Manuel's voice inviting him in sounded unfamiliar, as if it had been infected prematurely by the strangeness of death. But he thought about those things afterward, when he was alone in his room waiting for Medina, because one always remembers the eve of a misfortune imagining vague presentiments that could not be verified while there was still time and that perhaps did not exist. The same voice coming out of the semidarkness asked him to open the curtains. "Open them more, all the way. I don't know why they have to leave you in the dark when you're sick." Because light is an affront, Minaya thought when he turned to his uncle, looking at his sunken cheeks against the white pillow, the slender, motionless hands on the quilt, the wrists with long blue veins emerging from the sleeves of his pajamas. In the plaza, above the tops of the acacias, the sand-colored church tower, crowned by gargoyles under the eaves, shone brilliantly in the afternoon against a violent blue crisscrossed by swallows.

"Bring over that chair. Sit here, closer. I can't speak very loudly. Medina prohibited my talking. He's spent thirty years prohibiting my doing things and ordering absurdities."

Manuel closed his eyes and very slowly brought his hand to his left side, holding in the air and then expelling it with a very long whistling sound. Once again it was the stabbing pain, the knife, the dark hand splitting open his chest until it squeezed his heart and then released it as slowly as it had seized it, as if offering a respite, as if advancing only as far as the precise boundary where asphyxia would begin.

"This morning, when you went to the estate, I entered the library and saw you had forgotten to put away some written pages. I was going to do it myself because I thought they were notes for the book that I don't know if you still want to write, and I was afraid Teresa would disturb them when she cleaned, but when I put them together I saw without meaning to that you had written and underlined my name and Mariana's several times. Don't look at me that way: I'm the one who ought to apologize, not you. Because I was tempted to open the drawer again and read what you had written about us. Since you came here I've answered all your questions, but this morning it frightened me to imagine what you must think of us, of Mariana and me, and of Solana, who did what you're doing, who looked at everything the same way you do, as if he were verifying the history of each thing and what one was thinking and hiding behind the words. With that novel of his that he never finished, the same thing would have happened to me as with your papers. I wouldn't have had the courage to read it.

If he knew I wasn't a witness but a spy, that I've gone into his marriage bedroom and discovered the manuscripts he didn't want to show me, perhaps because they recount what could be seen only by a shadow posted above the garden that night in May when Solana and Mariana wandered around in the dark kissing each other with the desperation of two lovers on the eve of the end of the world." Manuel had spoken in a voice that grew increasingly faint, and finally, in silence, he pressed Minaya's hand for a long time, not looking at him, as if he wanted to be certain he was still there. Then the hand, yellow and motionless, the palm turned up and the fingers curved like the claw of a dead bird, the hand that moved sluggishly through the air not to curse or expel Inés and Minaya but to make them disappear like smoke in a closed room, their two naked bodies shadows or premature apparitions that announced to Manuel the dream of death when he, pursued by her, got up from his bed and left the bedroom and crossed the dark hallway to look for the last time at Mariana's face in the photograph in the parlor and open the door of the room where he had embraced and possessed her. He awoke, caught off guard by the sudden awareness that he was going to die, but not even when he was standing and dared to walk barefoot on the cold chessboard of the tiles could he elude the sensation of inhabiting a dream in which, for the first time, the stabbing pain in his heart and the suffocating lightness of the air, like the vertigo in his temples and the cold on the soles of his feet, were things alien to his own body. Which is why it shouldn't have surprised him that there was a line of light under the door of the marriage bedroom or that above the noise of his respiration he could hear the obscene panting of entwined bodies, the bitter breath of a man murmuring and biting as he closed his eyes to empty the impossible instant of desperation or joy and the long shout or the tears or laughter of a woman whose fierce pleasure exploded like the brash noise of breaking glass in the silence of the house. He understood then, on the verge of passing out, the unreality of so many years, his status as a shadow, his interminable and never mitigated memory of a single night and a single body, and perhaps when he opened the door and stood on the threshold, sensing in the air the same candescent odor of that night, he didn't recognize the bodies captured on the bed, gleaming in the semidarkness, and died, obliterated by the certainty and the miracle of having returned to the night of May 21, 1937, to witness behind the glass of death how his own body and hands and lips laid siege to a naked Mariana.

"No," Inés had said, leaning against the closed bedroom door when Minaya, who had returned the manuscripts to the drawer where he had found them, prepared to go out. "It has to be here. I like that bed and the mirror on the closet." She said it in a voice that wasn't so much inviting as determined in advance to fulfill that specific desire even if Minaya didn't agree to stay, as if he weren't an accomplice but a witness to the pleasure she imagined and in which she would somehow be alone. She said "It has to be here," smiling with serene audacity, and he knew immediately that he would stay even if he couldn't share her courage or forget his fear of being discovered, which hadn't stopped since Inés had come to his room and said, with the same smile, that she had found the key to the marriage bedroom in one of Manuel's jackets. It was Minaya who had asked her to look for it: some day, some night when he couldn't sleep, it was possible that Manuel would look in the bedroom for the manuscripts he himself must have hidden after Solana's death. For a time Minaya was confident that at some point the accident that allowed him to find them would be repeated, but Manuel didn't forget again to lock the bedroom, which, Minaya suspected, might have been proof that his uncle already distrusted him. He heard footsteps approaching, and he still hadn't dared to hope they were Inés' footsteps when he heard the three quiet knocks of their signal and she slipped into the room dressed and made up for the usual secret game of their nocturnal rendezvous, pushing aside, in her yellow skirt and her Sunday afternoon blouse and stockings and the shadow of cosmetics on her cheeks, the semidarkness of midnight, the solemn presence on the desk of the blue notebook and the manuscripts, the pages where Minaya was outlining the biography of Jacinto Solana. But now, when he had Inés in front of him, all that mattered was her beauty and the devastating certainty that he would be in love with her for the rest of his life. He didn't turn around immediately to embrace her: he first saw her reflected in the windows to the balcony, standing behind him, while he was still writing, and that image acquired for Minaya the immobile quality of a symbol or a future memory, because in it was summarized the only inhabitable future he conceived of for himself.