Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

The road to Mágina gleamed like moondust in the dark. I reached the gate in the wall and walked alone down the paved lanes toward Manuel's house, but the impulse that led me wasn't my will: it was desire pushing me, the warm, recovered despair of knowing that Mariana's eyes would receive me.

TENSE AND SERENE, in the center of the photographs and in Orlando's drawing and in the essence of a plural memory that became one when interwoven in her, like men's glances at a girl walking alone between the tables in a cafe: firm in her unknown desire, in the certainty of the fascination she exercised, and in the slight tilt of her hat with a veil that concealed her eyes and reached just to the middle of her nose and cheeks. Solana on one side, and on the other Manuel, both welcomed by her, who had taken the arm of each in order not to lose them in the crowd that filled the Puerta del Sol and held herself up between their twofold and denied tenderness with a grace as indifferent as the profile of a tightrope walker who does not look at the slender cord or the pit or the dizzying emptiness over which his feet move forward. "But when that photo was taken Manuel wasn't in love with her yet," Medina explained. "Or he didn't know it and had only a few hours to find out." With the years she had stopped being a single face and a single woman to become what had perhaps always been her destiny, not interrupted but consummated by her death: a catalogue of glances and recollections fixed at times by a photograph or a drawing, profiles on coins incessantly lost and recovered and spent by the covetousness of hatred or remembrance, coins of ash. Voices: hers, unimaginable to Minaya, a little dark, according to Solana's words, the other voices that continued naming her when she was already dead, in solitude, before mirrors, saying her name into the pillows of insomnia, repeating for her sake the three syllables into which defamation continued to be condensed with no less fervor than remorse or desire.

"Born of the water," said a jovial Medina, laughing, as he usually did, with his mouth closed, "she appeared walking in her white high heels on the pavements of Madrid, next to Solana, risen from the water or from that crowd, the largest and most inspiring Manuel had seen in all the days of his life, celebrating the triumph of the Popular Front and shouting, demanding amnesty and a new government in the same plaza where they had heard the Republic proclaimed. You've read books, I suppose, you've seen photographs, but you can't know what happened then. On Sunday, election day, I had been with Manuel, here, in Mágina, and when we realized we were going to win, he said to me in a fit of daring, 'I'm going to Madrid tonight.' That was February 16, and a month later Manuel was going to marry his lifelong sweetheart, Señorita de López Cabaña, whom I called de López Carabaña, because she was as exciting as a bottle of Carabaña mineral water. The trousseau was already on display in the house of the bride-to-be, which was the custom back then, and almost every night Manuel had a visit from the tailor who was making his cutaway coat. That's why I mentioned daring to you: instead of going to the house of Señorita López Carabaña, who that afternoon, I imagine, after virtuously voting for Gil Robles, would be saying a rosary for the victory of the right wing with her mother and her infinite Carabaña sisters, Manuel held me by the arm so I wouldn't leave him alone and took me into the presence of Doña Elvira, to whom he communicated with all the solemnity the wine allowed, because we had been drinking in the worst taverns in Mágina, that it was urgent he go to Madrid to settle some piece of family business. His mother didn't say anything but kept looking at me as if I were the one responsible for this reckless escapade of Manuel's. I suppose she feared something, but neither she, nor I, nor anyone, could imagine what would happen five days later, when Manuel returned from Madrid with a certain photograph in his pocket and went to Señorita López Carabaña's house to tell the poor martyr and her mother and sisters, more Carabañas than ever, that he considered his engagement canceled, provoking a bereavement of Carabaña tears that lasted until 1941, when the young lady in question again became engaged to a former captain in the Regular Army who now manages the family oil factory."

First came the photograph, recounts Medina, the vague snapshot taken on the Carrera de San Jerónimo by a street photographer who caught Mariana's laughter and the passage of her white high heels, but also, as a witness, the distracted gesture of Jacinto Solana, the way in which Manuel turned his head very slightly to look at her without her noticing, her two hands resting on their arms with the kind of impartiality that cannot always be distinguished from indifference. Manuel opened his leather wallet and showed Medina the photograph as if it were a valuable secret document. "Her name is Mariana. She models at the School of Fine Arts. Jacinto met her three years ago, in Orlando's studio." Medina examined the photograph and then looked attentively at Manuel, as if he wanted to confirm a doubtful resemblance. "But he was a different man," he recalls, with theatrical exaggeration, passing his hand over his own face, "and I wouldn't have been able to say how he had changed, but he had the same expression Saint Paul must have had the day after he fell off his horse. Love, I imagine, that thing that should have dazzled him when he was sixteen and left him immune, but not at the age of thirty-two, because then there was no way to defend against it or to avoid his walking around with that photograph in his pocket like the lock of hair of a medieval damsel." Manuel delicately put the photograph back in his wallet and questioned Medina. "Insufficient, Manuel. I'm referring to the photo. But the proofs of miracles always are, aren't they?" Manuel took Medina's irony as an insult, but that didn't stop him from talking about Mariana: her large almond eyes, her laugh, her wavy chestnut hair, which she combed, he stated precisely, with the part on the left, her way of looking at him and talking to him as if they had always known each other: her name, which he repeated even when there was no need to for the sheer pleasure of pronouncing the three syllables that referred to her. "I can't understand how there can be other women in the world named Mariana," he said once to Medina, for he understood that Mariana wasn't a name given to someone arbitrarily at birth but a word as definitively and exactly connected to her as the moon was to the word moon. They came, then, like secret emissaries, the photograph and the name, and only a year later Mariana herself, like a silent, attentive nurse to Manuel, who was convalescing from the wound that had left him close to death on the Guadalajara front, but long before Mágina and Mágina's pride finally met that woman who from so far away and without even setting foot in the city had insulted them, in their closed houses, in the salons where they so cautiously tuned in at night to the stations of the other faction to hear the voice of Queipo de Llano and the anthems that would not be played publicly for another three years along the conquered streets of Mágina, persistent voices repeating her name and Manuel's and enumerating the details of their insolence, their undoubted madness, with the same rancor they used to tell one another the bad news of another church burned or another execution at the cemetery walls. Very soon they ignored her name to call her only "the militia woman" or "the Red": they said she had danced nude in a cabaret in Madrid, and then, when the war began, a relative of the Señoritas López Cabaña stated with certainty that he had seen her marching with a musket, cartridge belt, blue coverall, and militiaman's beret worn at a slant down the Calle de Alcalá, along with Manuel and Jacinto Solana. But the part of the story they preferred to tell, perhaps because it was the first part they had known, or because they found in it a certain dramatic quality, was the moment when Manuel appeared at the house of Señorita López Cabaña, treacherously carrying a bouquet of violets, and, after asking her mother and sisters to leave him alone with his fiancee — this added bit of drama was, of course, false, but it had a symbolic value no one wished to disparage — he sat down beside her, offered her the violets with the impeccable smile of an impostor, said in a quiet voice, looking perhaps at his own hands holding his hat on his knees: "Maria Teresa, our relationship has to end, and it's going to end right now."