Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

THE PRISON WAS A HIGH ocher island in the barren ground and fog. Facing it, on the other side of the highway, was a building with long whitewashed walls and broken windows that looked like an industrial ship or an abandoned warehouse. I walked toward it, stepping on mud crisscrossed by tracks of horses and cars, but I still didn't see the black car parked at a corner: perhaps I saw it without noticing it, and I remembered only when I heard the engine starting that I had seen it and that the blades of the windshield wipers were moving even though it wasn't raining. To shield myself from the wind, I walked very close to the wall, the brim of my hat down over my eyes and the lapels of my overcoat raised, and I didn't turn around when I heard the engine and then the tires skidding in the mud. I heard it moving slowly behind me, as if it didn't want to get ahead of me, and I walked faster and moved closer to the wall that never ended, on my way to the single tree and the shack made of debris that sometimes, from a high window in the prison, I had seen beside the highway, the only indication that a city existed beyond the wasteland my eyes could glimpse briefly. The men who left the city at dawn on slow bicycles would stop there to drink a glass of aguardiente and then leave rubbing together their hands numb with cold, exhaling the hot breath of the alcohol as they grasped the handlebars again and pedaled down the highway with their heads sunk down between the lapels of their dark jackets, as if they were leaving for a wintry, distant exile. From the tin roof rose a column of smoke that the wind dispersed among the branches of the tree. Without turning around to look at the black car, I pushed the door of poorly assembled planks and entered a narrow, warm place filled with smoke and cases of bottles. The counter was a board that smelled strongly of wood soaked in alcohol, lying across two barrels. Behind it, lit by an oil lamp, a very fat woman nursed a child red-faced with crying. Nailed to the wall were yellowed posters announcing remote bullfights and a 1945 calendar on which a black woman with a red shawl tied around her waist smiled as she displayed a tin of cocoa. The woman behind the counter, motionless on an empty case, slowly and methodically examined my face, my suitcase, the mud on my shoes. I asked for a glass of cognac, and she didn't detach the child from her large white breast or stop looking at me as she stood to find the bottle. She didn't look at my eyes but at the indications of what she had known since she had seen me come in: the awkwardness, the still undiminished distrust, the way my hand held the glass and raised it, with a slight tremor. I drank the cognac in one swallow and nodded in silence when the woman asked if I wanted another one. The glass in the small window that faced the highway was dirty and opaque with vapor, but through it I could see the black silhouette of the car, which had stopped. The alcohol burned in my throat with violent sweetness and intensified the colors of things. With the second glass still intact, I went to sit beside the window, wrapped in my overcoat, in the warm blur of the alcohol, raising the faint mask of abandonment and smoke that was between my eyes and the door that perhaps was going to open. I smoked with half-closed eyes, waiting, not indolent, lost, feeling the alcohol rising in my veins like successive undulations in the water of a lake, I half-closed my eyes as if waiting for sleep so I wouldn't see anything but the blue smoke rising and the dirty semidarkness of the barrels and the row of bottles, the red spot on the calendar whose pages numbered the days of a time when I hadn't existed. I took a drink and closed my eyes completely, and on the other side of the window, the door of the black car slammed shut. When I opened them again she, Beatriz, was looking at me through the smoke that the icy outside air had shaken, taller than I remembered, as if immune to time, as if she had just turned thirty, her age the last time I saw her, tall and solemn with her blonde mane and gray overcoat and the beret she held in her hands as if she weren't sure how she ought to behave. The fat woman had lain the child down, and now she was cleaning a row of bottles on the counter. From the corner of my eye I saw her looking at us as Beatriz embraced me, touching me with her blonde hair from which there rose an unfamiliar perfume and taking my hard face in her hands to recognize and touch what her eyes saw, undimmed by tears. She watched us without interest or modesty, with inert fixity, wiping the dust from the bottles with a dirty rag that she sometimes passed slowly over the counter, and when I approached to ask her for another glass, she studied Beatriz' coat and stockings and high-heeled shoes and then looked at me, with a different expression, as if comparing us, asking herself perhaps why a woman dressed like that had come into her tavern to find me.

We didn't speak at first, or between long silences we said only the necessary, useless words, looking for a respite with cigarettes and drinks, leaning on our elbows in the gray light that came from the other side of the window, from the field where the black car waited, occupied now only by a man who smoked as he rested his elbows on the steering wheel. "We thought you were dead," said Beatriz, caressing her lighter of smooth, gold-colored metal, very close to my hand on the stained wood, moving her fingers close, her unpainted nails trailing across the veins in the table, then stopping when they seemed about to touch me, then brushing against the acknowledged metal boundary, the pack of American cigarettes that now formed part of her perfume and her distance. "Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could tell me if you had died or were in prison or had managed to escape over the French border at the last minute. A woman told me she had heard that you were seen sick or wounded in the camp at Argeles, but they also said you had escaped to the sea and were arrested in the port of Alicante. After a year I began to write and receive letters. I wrote to friends in exile asking about you, but you weren't in France, or Mexico, or Argentina. You weren't dead or alive anywhere, but I waited every day to receive a letter from you. Last month a comrade just out of prison came to the house. He was the one who told us you'd be getting out very soon."

SO THE AMBIGUOUS, the sacred plural was still true in spite of the gold-colored lighter and the silk stockings, and they were still called comrades and not shades or survivors and as a plural they had waited for me and thought I was dead and now they had come to receive me and welcome me not in the warm interior of the car or in a probably clandestine house but in the ancient, failed, intact plural behind which were hidden, in succession, impotence and fear, the fervor of old names, of lost banners, the unconfessed tenderness of Beatriz, who searched for my hand on the table and didn't dare touch it, always brushing against the boundary in the space that divided us like the blade of a knife, the one, desperate question she never would ask me now. From a great distance, behind the smoke, I watched her talk to me and estimated the words beneath each eruption of silence, indifferent, like a doctor who does not need to examine the body lying next to him to know the exact place where the pain is lodged. It was as if time or the chance that governs such transfigurations had used the past ten years to complete a work — the face, the hands, the figure of Beatriz — which earlier, when I knew her, had only been foreshadowed and that reached their plenitude in the prelude to their decadence. There was something dry or cruel in her slender hands, perhaps the shadow of an obstinate, useless determination, a hardness not rooted in any purpose, faint wrinkles, like the slashes of knives, next to her lips, around her covetous, firm eyes. I looked at her, still not asking, I heard her talk to me about her life during those years, perceiving the same chasm in time already proclaimed by the dates on the bullfight posters nailed to the dirty walls of the tavern and that month of July 1945 that remained inert on the calendar like a rip in my memory. She had waited for me, she said, wanting to involve me in the invocation of her waiting and her remembering, wanting to vindicate as attributes of a shared suffering the letters that never arrived anywhere, the empty letterbox in the hollow of the stairs, the horror and hunger and loneliness of the winter of 1941, and when she remembered, she claimed me for herself and demanded the part of my sorrow I had denied her. "And while you were in prison, condemned to death, and I didn't know anything," she said, as if she were demanding not only sorrow but also blame for not having found me, but then she raised her damp eyes to me and suddenly understood that she was becoming vulnerable because she was alone in her remembering, and to defend herself she was forced to turn to pride and pretended serenity. She sat up straight before her glass, before me, lighting a cigarette with excessive resolve, her fingers firm on the gold-colored lighter, as if in that gesture she were using all the determination she had needed to survive from the May night in 1937 when I had gone to Magina without saying a word to her. "I can see you're surprised at my appearance. At first I was too, when I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't tell you that since '42 I've been working in a dress store on the Gran Via, selling expensive clothes to the richest women in Madrid. Sometimes I even design a model. Do you find it strange? It was like a story or a miracle, I was making things for a dressmaking shop where I didn't earn enough to pay my rent, and one day that man, Ernesto, the owner of the dress store appeared, and asked if I wanted to work exclusively for him, imagine, I was so hungry I almost didn't sleep so I could sew all night. I think he's in love with me, like an old-fashioned gentleman, you know, he invites me to the theater and takes my arm almost without touching me when we go into a restaurant, he always gives me things, the lighter, this coat, this perfume, which is very expensive. That's his car, he brought me here."