Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"Why don't you write a real book," my father would say, "a novel like Rosa Maria , so I can read it." One book that would have the mysterious appearance that all the books of my childhood had: a dense, necessary object, a volume made weighty by the geometry of the words and the materiality of the paper, its hard angles and covers worn by longstanding dealings with the imagination and with hands. Perhaps now I'm not writing for myself or to save a forbidden memory; obscurely I'm being led by the desire to plan and create a book in the way a potter models a clay jar, so that his dead man's hands can touch it and his eyes blinded by the final fear and stupefaction of a fate that wasn't his can read it and revive it. They tell me, Manuel says, that nobody knows why they killed him, but that is a pious or cowardly way of not saying that they killed him because he was my father. They were probably afraid that I had managed to escape; they may have calculated that a single death was not enough to exhaust my punishment or my guilt. I know, they've told me, that on the second or third day of April 1939, they saw him come to the Plaza of San Lorenzo just as he had left it three years earlier. He tied the mare's bridle to the grillwork at the window, opened the door with the large metal key, unloaded the mattress and the disassembled bed and asked a neighbor who had won the war, shaking his head pensively when he was told. For several days he didn't leave the house. He listened to the radio until very late at night, watched the plaza through the shutters at a balcony, and when someone knocked at the door, he hurried to answer it, breaking an old habit.

On the fourth day a van painted black drove to the plaza and stopped under the poplars, directly in front of the house. With a clamor of violently slammed doors and military boots five men in blue shirts and red berets got out. Inside the van, next to the driver, sat a man in civilian clothes who made affirmative gestures to the others indicating the door that was still closed. When he opened to see who was knocking they pushed the barrel of a pistol into his chest, forcing him back inside, shouting at him to keep his hands at the back of his neck. "Are you Justo Solana?" said one, the man who had first pointed the gun at him. Hitting him with the butts of their pistols, they pushed him out to the street, until he was close to the window through which the man in civilian clothes was looking. He stood there for a time, motionless, surrounded by pistols, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, and finally the man in civilian clothes, who had lowered the window to look at him more carefully, said, "That's him. I recognized him right away," and the others, as if obeying an order, hit him with the butts of their pistols and forced him into the van and then jumped in after him still pointing their guns at the closed windows of the plaza, which opened again very quietly only when the sound of the engine had disappeared down the narrow lanes.

I've seen the place where they took him. A convent, abandoned now, that during the war was a storage depot and barracks for the Anarchist militias, on one of those treeless little plazas that one sometimes finds unexpectedly at the end of a street in Magina. In 1939 they whitewashed the facade of the convent to cover the large red letters painted on it, but the years and the rain have delicately dissolved the whitewash and now the initials, the condemned words can be made out again. F.A.I., he must have read on the facade when they made him get out of the van. PRAISE DURRUTI, but undoubtedly he didn't know who Durruti was or the meaning of the Anarchist initials furiously scrawled in red brushstrokes. They were only a part of the war that had trapped him in the end, as indecipherable as the war itself and the faces of the men who pushed him and the reason they gave for arresting him. The cellars, the chapel, the cells of the friars were filled with prisoners, and they had stretched barbed wire between the columns in the courtyard to hold the ones who couldn't fit into the cells. From the street one could see a cloud of dark faces adhering to the gratings at the windows, eyes and hands clutching at the bars or emerging from the semidarkness like strange animals or tree branches stretching in vain to reach the light. There was also, I suppose, in the upper corridors, where one could hardly hear the noise of pounding heels and orders and the engines of trucks filled with prisoners that stopped on the plaza, the busy sound of papers and typewriters, fans, perhaps, lists of names endlessly repeated on carbon paper and confirmed by someone who ran a pencil down the margin and stopped from time to time to correct a name or make a brief mark beside it.

I know that every day at dusk, a string of donkeys loaded down with cauliflower leaves came to the convent. They emptied the panniers at the entrance, and a gang of prisoners watched over by Moroccan guards gathered the fodder in big armloads and threw it over the barbed wire to the others in the courtyard. The large leaves of a green between blue and gray spilled into the outstretched hands of the prisoners, who fought to get them and tore them apart and then bit greedily into the ribs, sucking at the sticky, bitter juice. He didn't eat. He didn't want to humiliate himself among the groups of men who fought over a leaf of cow fodder and crawled on all fours around the feet of the others searching for a trampled leftover that had gone unnoticed. After eating those leaves that crinkled like wrapping paper and left a dirty, wet, green stain around their mouths, some prisoners, perhaps the ones who had fought most savagely to get them, writhed on the tiles and vomited and clutched at their bellies and the next day were dead and swollen in the middle of the courtyard or in a corner of a cell. Silent and alone, he looked at the unknown faces and strange things happening around him and thought that this, after all, was war, the same cruelty and disorder he had known in his youth when they sent him to Cuba. Sometimes, at midnight, he heard a truck shaking to a stop at the door to the convent. Then silence was suddenly imposed on the murmur of bodies crowded together in the dark, and all eyes remained fixed on the air, never on the faces of others, because looking at another man meant seeing a préfiguration of being called, of death. The sound of the truck was followed by the noise of locks and the pounding of boots along the corridors. Between two columns in the courtyard, at the doorway to a cell, a group of uniformed figures came to a halt and one of them, shining a flashlight on the typed list he held in his other hand, read the names slowly, stumbling sometimes over the pronunciation of a difficult last name.

One night they called his. His bones were swollen with dampness, and he had a disagreeable taste of ashes in his mouth. Two guards picked him up from the floor and tied his hands behind him with a wire. He thought about me, about whom no one had heard anything for two years, about his closed house, about his land lying solitary in the night. They made him climb into the body of the truck and tied him to the back of a chair beside a man whose head hung low and who shuddered in his bonds with silent, continual weeping. They had nailed a double row of rush chairs to the boards of the truck, and the men tied to the backs remained lined up and rigid, as if they were attending their own wake, solemnly moving back and forth on the curves of the streets and bouncing up and down, shaken, when the truck left the last lit corners behind and drove onto a dirt road in the barren lands to the north of the city. He smelled the limitless odor of the air and the empty fields in the night that the headlights cut through looking for the road to the cemetery The truck finally drove between dark cypresses, and when it reached the iron gate, it turned left and continued down a narrow path that ran the length of the low, whitewashed walls. Someone shouted to the driver to stop, and the truck drove in reverse until it stopped in front of a section of wall where the whitewash was pockmarked with bullet holes. Two soldiers were untying the ropes that secured them to the chairs and then pushing them until they jumped out of the truck. They lined them up in front of the wall, lit by the yellow headlights that lengthened their shadows on the turned over, stained ground. Long before the sound of the bolts on the rifles and the single detonation that he didn't hear, he had stopped being afraid because he knew he was on the other side of death: death was that yellow light blinding him, it was the shadow that began behind it and took on the shape of the nearby olive trees and the men hiding in them or confused with them who raised their rifles and remained motionless for an endless time, as if they were never going to move or shoot. Not the pain of the void or the vertigo of falling with tied hands to the ground or onto another body but a sudden sensation of lucidity and abandonment and the raw taste of blood in his mouth that was closed against the dark.