Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

THEN, AS NOW, when I write so uselessly to bring him back to life, gratitude was impossible. In the mild May afternoon, the shadow of the ramparts and Magina's south wall extended over us, and the air had the damp odor of pomegranate leaves, the cold transparency of water in the irrigation ditches. Before me the terraces of the farm descended to the valley like the stanzas of a successive garden. He was sweeping the packed-down earth of the shed, and he stopped when he reached my side, looking where I was looking, as if he had guessed the temptation that possessed me so suddenly, not like a desire or a purpose, but with the imperious certainty of a pain that wounds us again when we had already forgotten it: "The world ends here; there's nothing on the other side of the sierra, only that sea of shipwrecks and dark cliffs I imagined then, because I had seen it in a print in Rosa Maria. " But perhaps I'm trying to correct the past. Now, ten years later, it is shut in this room with circular windows like a fugitive, when I feel the blind, the useless temptation of tearing out my consciousness like Oedipus tore out his eyes so that nothing's left in me but the memory of that orchard and my father: tall, buttoned up, choked by the hard collar and the half boots that creaked in a strange way when he walked down the corridor of the school, because he put them on only to attend funerals, tall and suddenly a coward when he knocked at the door and asked permission without daring to go in before the headmaster stood to receive him. I had just turned eleven, and one night, after giving the animals their last feed and barring the street door, he sat in front of me and moved aside the book I was reading to look into my eyes. "Tomorrow I'm taking you out of school. What you know now is enough." Behind me, next to the fire, my mother was sewing something or simply looking at him, not impassive but defeated beforehand, and even though I would have liked to say something to her or ask her for help, it would have been impossible because weeping choked my voice and everything was very far away behind the mist of tears. "Don't cry, you're not a little boy anymore. Men don't cry." He picked up the oil lamp from the mantle over the fireplace and signaled to my mother. They left me alone, illuminated by the red embers of the fire, my eyes staring at the book and the words that dissolved as if they were written on water. The next day, before dawn, I saddled the white mare and took her to drink at the post at the wall. Dawn was breaking as I rode slowly along the road to the farm. I intended not to stop: I'd continue to the end of the white road, beyond the farms, the olive groves, the river, the distant blue hills that undulated before the first spurs of the sierra. But when I reached the dead poplar, I got down from the mare and left her tied by the bridle, and I sat down in the manger to wait for the full light of day, because I had brought my book bag with my notebooks for school and I wanted to finish an arithmetic exercise, as if that mattered, as if I had before me a placid future of schoolyards and desks and examinations in which, not for love of studying but out of a kind of vengeful obstinacy, I always received the highest grade. That morning, sitting at the desk I shared with Manuel, I let him copy the exercises from my notebook without saying a single word to him, and I didn't play with him or anyone else when we went out to recess. With their blue aprons and white collars, the others ran shouting after a ball or climbed the bars in the schoolyard, but I wasn't like them. I looked at the large clock on the facade of the school, forever stopped at a quarter past ten, and that stopped hour was more fearsome because it hid the true passage of time, the other invisible hands that brought the moment close when my father, after selling the last produce and closing his stall at the market, would put on his hard collar and suit and boots for funerals to inform the headmaster that I, his son, Jacinto Solana, would not return to school because now I was a man and he needed me to work on his land until the end of my life. But when at last he arrived and we went into the headmaster's office together, I saw him infinitely docile, lost, vulnerable, murmuring "With your permission?" in a voice I had never heard from him. He nodded, murmured things, and held his hat in his two large hands that I suddenly imagined as useless, keeping himself erect with difficulty on the edge of the chair where he had dared to sit only when the headmaster indicated it to him, and then I felt the need to defend him or to squeeze his hand and walk with him the way I had when I was little and I went with him to sell milk to the houses in Magina. "But you don't know the foolish mistake you're about to make, my friend": defend him from the headmaster and his bland smile and his words that acquired the same hostile quality from the oak desk where he rested his hands and from the portrait of Alfonso XIII he had hung above his head. "I must tell you that your son is the best student we have in the school. I predict a magnificent future for him, whether he leans toward the sciences or the arts, both of them paths for which nature has endowed him with exceptional qualities. No, it isn't necessary for you to tell me so: agriculture is a very worthy profession, and a great source of wealth for the nation, but young heads like that of your son are called to a destiny, if not worthier then of a higher and greater responsibility." He paused to catch his breath and rose decisively to his feet, resting his soft, small hands on my shoulders with a gesture in which, after so many years, I suspect a vague allegorical intention. "Your son, my friend, should continue under the care of his teachers. Who can say that we do not have before us a future engineer, an eminent physician, or, if I am pressed, a statesman of impassioned oratory? Very great men have come from humble homes. For example, Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal." After an hour, when we left the headmaster's office, we walked in silence down a very long corridor to the door of my classroom. Above the vague sound coming from the rooms that lined the hall I listened to my father's footsteps and the uncomfortable creak of his boots, and I recalled his voice finally saying the words I hadn't even dared to wish for—"Well, if you say so, I'll leave him here, even though I need him, and we'll see if he gets to be a useful man some day" — but I found in them not the temporary salvation they seemed to promise but a dark guilt more certain than gratitude: the consciousness of a debt that perhaps I didn't deserve, that I never would repay. Before he left, my father bent down to give me a kiss, smiling at me in a way that wounded me because it was the smile of a man I no longer knew. "Go on, go back to your class, and don't play around when you get out, you have to bring my lunch to the farm." He turned to wave good-bye in the last light in the hall, and when I went into the classroom and Manuel moved to one side to give me room at the desk, I covered my face with my hands so he wouldn't know I had been crying.

As if brought in by the immense shadow of the wall, at the top of which they were turning on the distant lights of the watchtower, night had fallen over the farm and the valley — very slow, perfumed and blue and deep, like the gleam of motionless water in the irrigation ditches. He took the oil lamp from the house and hung it on one of the beams in the shed. On nights like this he cooked supper on a fire outdoors. Outside the circle of that light, which shone before the house like the flames of stubble burned on summer nights, there was the darkness of a waveless ocean, of black hills and trees like ghosts or statues. But he didn't fear the darkness or the uninhabitable silence. He cleaned the fireplace of ashes, trimmed the light, stood with an agility that disconcerted me to show me where the pan and oil were. In a tower in the city the bells had struck ten. "I have to go now, Father." He stood still, next to the fire, shook his head with an air of melancholy or exhausted disillusionment. "All the time it's been that you don't come to see me and you don't even stay for supper. Where are you staying in Mágina?" "In my friend Manuel's house. He's getting married the day after tomorrow. He asked me to invite you." "Well you tell him thank you and say your father's sick. I'm not going up to Mágina until all of you end that war." When we said good-bye he kissed me without looking at me and turned immediately to stir the fire that was going out. From the road to Mágina I saw him absorbed, sitting back, alone in the light of the fire as if he were on an island, angrily alone against the darkness and surrender. I imagined him putting out the fire when he finished supper, going into the house with the lamp in his hand, acknowledging the semidarkness and the order he had chosen. He would hang the lamp at the head of the bed, and lying on it he would open the second volume of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, which was a book longer than his patience and his own life, finding perhaps the old clippings that were now as yellow as the pages of the novel. But he never told anyone he knew how to read and write: it was important to him not to leave traces of his presence in the world, and in writing, as in photographs, he suspected a trap he always tried to avoid, the invisible snare laid by fingerprints.