Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

I CALLED TO HIM from the top of the path, but the din of the water overflowing into the irrigation ditch from the cistern kept him from hearing me, and then, instead of going over to him or calling him again, I stayed next to the dead poplar where we had tied the mare when I was a teenager and watched him for a long time before he noticed my arrival, watched him alone and absorbed in his work, as he always had wanted to live. He was squatting, leaning over the edge of the cistern, in the shade of the pomegranate tree, with his straw hat that hid his face from me and the black smock he had always worn buttoned to the neck. I saw his large reddened hands vigorously shaking a bunch of onions in the water to clean the mud from the roots, and when he stood to place the onions in a wicker basket, I finally saw his face with the cigarette end glued to one side of his mouth. From the top of the path the farm descended a slope of meticulously cultivated terraces, with angles as precise as those on a sheet of paper, bounded by irrigation ditches and the fig and pomegranate trees on whose trunks I so often had carved my name with a knife. I walked along the path and stopped halfway down to call him again. He stood slowly, wiped his damp, red hands on the tails of the smock, and carefully put out the cigarette before kissing me twice, as he had always done, but now he was not nearly as tall as me and he had to stand straight to reach my face. "You didn't even write me a damned letter, you bastard." With him I always was paralyzed by an old shyness that wasn't completely separate from the fear I had of him once, when he was a frightening man as big as a tree who told me I'd turn into an idiot from reading so many books. "It's the war, father," I apologized, without his paying attention, "it doesn't leave me time to write to you." "The war?" he said looking around, as if when he didn't see its traces on the peaceful cultivated earth and in the irrigation ditches he might think I was lying to him. "What do you have to do with the war?" I wanted to stand firm, even indict him, say something with the necessary fervor, but when I spoke to him in my own voice, I recognized the same vacuous tone of exaggeration or lies that official communiques had then. "Here you don't know, or don't want to know, but we're teaching the Fascists a lesson," I concluded. I remember that he sat down, shrugging his shoulders, on the stone bench under the pomegranate tree, and then he looked through the smock, searching for the cigarette he had put out, looking at me as if confirming that after twenty years his suspicion had come true that reading books would turn me into an idiot. "That's what they told us when they sent us to Cuba. That we were going to teach the insurgents a lesson. And now you see, a little more and you wouldn't have been born."

He lived alone on the farm he had plowed himself, in the house he had built with his own hands before I was born: a shed with mangers, a small stall for the pigs, a single room with the fire, the bed, the sacks of seeds, the tools, the earthenware dishes in which he prepared his food with exactly the same pleasure he found in all the chores of solitude, because now, when he's dead, I know he was a man dominated by a fierce will to be alone, and if he left Magina on July 19, 1936, it wasn't because he was afraid of the war but because the war offered him the excuse he always had wanted to leave the city and escape his tedious dealings with other men. On the afternoon of that July 19, he went out and saw a man running across the Plaza of San Lorenzo, and he stationed himself at one of the corners. The man, a stranger, wore a shirt stained with perspiration and looked at my father with his mouth open, saying something he couldn't understand because immediately afterward a shot was fired in the empty plaza, and the stranger, pushed to the wall as if by a gust of wind, rebounded against it, holding his stomach, and fell to the paving stones dead.

The next morning, without talking to anyone, my father loaded the mare with a mattress, a disassembled metal bed, and the second book of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, a serialized novel in three volumes of infinite pages and lugubrious lithographs he had inherited from his father and that very probably he never finished reading. As a boy I had entered those volumes with the exaltation and horror of someone crossing an uninhabited forest at night, and many years later, when I returned to Magina to attend my mother's funeral, I discovered that in the middle of the second book of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love my father kept, carefully cut and folded, some of the articles I had begun to publish then in Madrid newspapers. I never told him I had seen them; he never acquiesced and revealed to me, even indirectly, that he read and kept them with a pride stronger than his desire to renounce me, for I had fled Magina and the future that he himself assigned to me even before I was born, when he dug a well in the living rock and leveled a hillside of barren earth and built the house I didn't want to share or inherit and where he finally spent the last three years of his life inflexibly alone, far from a city and a war he didn't care about, just as he never cared about Alfonso XIII or Primo de Rivera or that vague Republic that had changed the flags on the public buildings and the names of some streets in Magina. Because I talked about it and defended it, he must have thought the Republic belonged, like Madrid and literature, to the same kind of illusions that had poisoned my imagination ever since I went to school and was irremediably turned into a stranger in his eyes and he could do nothing to get me back.

***

OLD AND SLIGHT in the black smock, but still endowed with a physical strength that had remained intact because it was an attribute of his moral courage, he loaded the basket of onions on his shoulder and carried it up to the house without letting me help him. Piled in the shed were baskets and sacks of damp vegetables that he showed to me with pride. "Look how much I care about that war. When I saw how they killed that man almost at our door, I said to myself, 'Justo, they've finally gone crazy, and this is none of your business.' And so I loaded a few things on the mule, double-locked the house, and came to the farm. I haven't set foot in Magina since that day. People come here and buy my vegetables, or I trade them for what I need, which is almost nothing because I even make my bread. And you, how do you make a living?" "I have a job at the Ministry of Propaganda." He looked at me in silence, shaking his head with an air of disillusionment I already knew: he, who never asked anyone for anything or obeyed anyone, who never wanted to work except for himself or have anything he hadn't earned with his own hands. "Eating off the government… It ought to make you ashamed, Jacinto." But I couldn't explain anything or even defend myself, and not because I knew he wouldn't understand me, but because in that place and at that moment, I myself could not conceive of a reason that would justify me. The usual words, the still sacred words, the pure sensation of joy and rage that still moved us in the spring of 1937 were things as improbable and distant that afternoon as the war in the consciousness of my father: an unknown man killed in the white-hot light of a July siesta, a sound of sirens at midnight confused at times with the whistle of the trains that crossed the valley, a squadron of planes that flew higher than any bird and glittered in the sun before being lost on the other side of the sierra. I had felt it since I passed through the gate in the wall and recognized just beside it the post where when I was a boy I would take the white mare and then start to gallop along the farm road. I had come from Manuel's house and had Mariana's eyes fixed in my memory, but as soon as I left the wall behind and walked on the fine dust of the paths, it was as if I had shed my present form to become, as I walked down to the meeting with my father, the shade of what I had been when those roads and the valley and the blue sierra were the only landscape in my life. I thought that time wasn't successive but immobile, that the regions and boundaries of its geography can be drawn with the precision that the world has in school maps. Like Orlando's watercolors, my father's farm was a region immune to time, and I couldn't go back to it, just as one can't cross a mirror or join the figures in a painting: I could only, if my will didn't intervene, accept the forgetting, the transfiguration, the fear, the impossible tenderness I had felt for so many years before my father, the share of guilt that was mine because of his disillusionment or his old age.