Antonio Molina: A Manuscript of Ashes

In that mirror where Inés will not see herself again, Minaya knows he will look for impossible traces of a boy dressed in a sailor suit who stopped in front of it twenty years earlier when a voice, his father's, ordered him to come down. In the courtyard his father was taller than his cousin, and seeing his impeccable jacket and spotless boots and the opulent gesture with which he consulted the watch whose gold chain crossed his vest, one would have said he was the owner of the house. "If I'd had just half the opportunities my cousin has had from the time he was born," he would say, trapped between rancor and envy and an unconfessed family pride, because when all was said and done, he too was the grandson of the man who built the house. He spoke of Manuel's errant ways and the lethargy into which his life seemed to have fallen since the day a stray bullet killed the woman he had just married, but his irony was never more poisonous than when he recalled his cousin's political ideas and the influence this Jacinto Solana had on them, a man who earned his living working for leftist papers in Madrid and who once spoke at a meeting of the Popular Front in the Màgina bull ring, who was sentenced to death after the war and then pardoned and who left prison to die in the way he deserved in a skirmish with the Civil Guard. And in this manner, ever since he had the use of his reason and the memory to recall sitting at the table after meals when his father made conjectures regarding senseless business deals and did long arithmetical operations in the margins of the newspaper, cursing the ingratitude of fortune and the insulting indolence and prosperity of his cousin, Minaya had formed a very blurred and at the same time very precise image of Manuel that was always inseparable from that one afternoon in his childhood and a certain idea of ancient heroism and peaceful seclusion. Now, when Manuel is dead and in Minaya's imagination his real story has supplanted the mystery of the gray-haired man who occupied it for twenty years, I want to invoke not his flight this evening but his return, the moment when he holds the letter he received in Madrid and prepares to knock at the door and is afraid it will be opened, but he doesn't know that returning and fleeing are the same, because tonight too, when he was leaving, he looked at the white facade and the circular windows on the top floor where a light that illuminates no one is shining, as if the submarine he wanted to inhabit in his childhood had been abandoned and was sailing without a pilot through an ocean of darkness. I'll never come back, he thinks, enraged in his grief, in his flight, in the memory of Ines, because he loves literature and the good-byes forever that occur only in books, and he walks along the lanes with his head lowered, as if charging the air, and he comes out on the Plaza of General Orduna, where there's a taxi that will take him to the station, perhaps the same one he took three months earlier when he came to Magina to find in Manuel's house a refuge from his fear. It will be my pleasure to help you any way I can in your research on Jacinto Solana who, as you know, lived for a time in this house, in 1947, when he left prison, he had written, but I'm afraid you won't find a single trace of his work here, because everything he wrote before his death was destroyed in circumstances you no doubt can imagine.

A PRETEXT, AT FIRST, a secondary lie learned perhaps from those contrived by his father so he could go on wearing a suit and tie and polished shoes, a casual alibi so that the act of fleeing and not continuing to resist the harsh inclemency of misfortune would resemble a positive act of will. Minaya was alone and in a kind of daze in a corner of the cafeteria at the university, far from everything, brushing the rim of an empty cup with the tip of his cigarette and silently putting off the moment of going out to the wintry avenue where hard, gray horsemen stood guard, and he hadn't yet thought of Jacinto Solana or the possibility of using his name to save himself from persecution; he thought, having recently emerged from a detention cell on the Puerta del Sol, only about interrogations and the sirens of police wagons and the body that had lain as if at the bottom of a well on the concrete or paving stones of a courtyard at State Security headquarters. Around him he saw unfamiliar faces that clustered at the counter and at the nearby tables with briefcases of notes and overcoats that seemed to protect them with identical efficiency from winter and the suspicion of fear, secure in the warm air and cigarette smoke and voices, firm in their names, their chosen futures, as irrevocably unaware of the silent presence among them of the emissaries of tyranny as they, children of forgetting, were unaware that the pine groves and redbrick buildings they walked past had been a battlefield thirty years earlier. He was alone forever and definitively dead, he later told Inés, ever since the day the guards trapped him and with punches and kicks from their black boots forced him into a van with metal gratings, ever since he left prison with his belt in a pocket and his shoelaces in his hand, because they had been confiscated when they took him to the cell, perhaps to keep him from dismally hanging himself, and were returned only a few minutes before he was released, but they said the other one had committed suicide, that he took advantage of a moment's carelessness on the part of the guards who were interrogating him to throw himself down into the courtyard and die in handcuffs. He, Minaya, had survived the blows and the ghastly wait to be called for another interrogation, but even after he was out, the slightest sound grew until it became the deafening noise of bolts and heavy metal doors in his dreams, and every night the sheets on his bed were as rough as the blankets they gave him when he entered the cell, and his body retained the stink it had acquired in the basements, behind the last grating, when they took away his watch, his belt, his matches, his shoelaces, and handed him those two gray blankets that smelied of horse sweat.

But deeper than his fear of footsteps in the corridor and the methodical fury of hard slaps in the face, those five days left Minaya with an unpleasant sensation of impotence and helpless solitude that refuted all certainty and forever denied the right to salvation, rebelliousness, or pride. How to redeem himself from the cold at daybreak that penetrated beneath the blankets where he hid his head in order not to see the perpetual yellow light hung between the corridor and the cell's peephole or to invent in the name of what or whom a justification for the smell of confined bodies and cigarette butts, where to find a handhold to keep him steady when he didn't know if it was day or night and he leaned the back of his neck against the wall waiting for a guard to come in and say his name. It was on the second night that he thought of returning to Màgina. The cold woke him, and he remembered that he had dreamed about his father putting on his boots in the red bedroom and looking at him with the pale smile of a dead man. He told Inés that in his dream there was a pink, icy light and a feeling of distance or ungraspable tenderness that was also the light of May coming in and waking him from a balcony of his childhood where swallows built their nests or lingering in midafternoon over a plaza with acacias. In vain he closed his eyes and tried to resume the dream or recover it whole without forfeiting its pleasure or the exact tone of its color, but even after he lost the dream, the name of Màgina remained as if it were an illumination of his memory, as if saying it were enough to tear down walls of forgetting and to have before him the intact city, available and remote on its blue hill, more and more precise in its invitation and its inviolable distance, while for Minaya all the streets and faces and rooms in Madrid were transformed into snares of a persecution that did not end when they released him, that continued to crouch behind him, all around him, when he drank a cup of coffee in the cafeteria at the university; and on the other side of the windows, among the dark green, rainwashed pines, he saw the gray horsemen, dismounted now, serene, the visors of their helmets raised, like weary knights who without disarming allow their steeds to graze on the grass wet with dew, near the waiting jeeps.