Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

I light a cigarette in the candle that I put out slowly when I exhale the smoke. The smoke is blue and gray and hangs in the air like the gray light out of which emerge the room painted white, the unmade bed, the blue plaza beneath the roofs, the acacias. Smoking, motionless next to the glass, beyond the circular windows, as if in a cabin on a ship, I see the Magina dawn, as if day were dawning in a city where I am dead too.

"AND NOW HE'S LYING DOWN in the room," Manuel thought, "with the shutters closed, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the buckle of that absurd coat that smells of the train and that he hasn't taken off because he's trembling with cold even though Teresa lit the fire that faces his bed, his hands folded, his fingers interlaced over the coat, his thumbs rhythmically tapping each other, as if he were marking shapeless, limitless time with no precise destination, just as one marks the beats of one's heart or the drip of water falling at night from a half-closed tap. He heard me when I went in and he pretended he was sleeping, or perhaps he really was sleeping and his sleep resembles an exhausted insomnia as he lies on the bed, dressed, his unopened suitcase in the middle of the room, his shoes with the laces untied dirtying the edge of the bedspread with mud, and that smell of rough blankets and cold dawn that I had forgotten." Even before his mother came into the dining room, examining everything in a single glance as she searched for some sign that would proclaim the arrival of her guest and enemy, Manuel knew that Solana's presence in the house would weigh on the predictable silence in which supper would take place, even if his name weren't spoken, for Dona Elvira had always known how to use silence as an accusation and an insult, and Solana was one of the names she never pronounced, obeying a fierce standard of pride inculcated in her in her youth. When she finally appeared in the doorway of the dining room, flanked by Amalia as if she were an ancient lady-in-waiting, Manuel and Utrera stood at the same time, but it was Utrera who hurried to pull out the chair reserved for her at the head of the table, holding the back while Doña Elvira sat down, bowing too deeply, like a hotel waiter. In those years, Medina said then, Utrera seemed determined to maintain a certain air of a cinematic hotel receptionist, always solicitous, somewhat South American, slightly oily, with his pinstriped suits, hair stiffly waved with pomade, and the very thin black mustache that exaggerated his smile, the soft line of his mouth.

"Señora," he said, as Doña Elvira opened her napkin and placed it on her lap, looking without expression at the other side of the table but also, very much out of the corner of her eye, at Manuel, who was sitting to her left, "I have no words to thank you for accepting my invitation tonight. With your permission, I shall tell Amalia to begin serving supper." The municipal council of a nearby town had commissioned a very large allegory of Victory, and since, like the painters of the Renaissance, he was paid according to the number of figures, he had invited Manuel and his mother to a supper that he himself classified as special. After requesting permission from Manuel, who shrugged, Amalia had agreed to serve supper on the silver table service, and to place on the table the two bronze candelabra that normally were on the sideboard and were a partial testimony to the time when Manuel's father was still alive and gala suppers were held in the house, like the one attended by Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. In the light of the candelabra, the dining room and the three figures gathered around the table that was too large had the melancholy appearance of an unfortunate simulacrum. As he had done at the formal suppers of his adolescence, Manuel looked obsessively at his shirtcuffs and the hands that held his fork and knife, sometimes lifting his head to agree with what Utrera was saying, with his solicitude and his smile, distant, like the gestures of an actor who has been left alone on stage and attempts to move the audience in a half-empty hall. He noticed, suddenly, that Teresa had left the dining room and had not returned, and a sideways glance at his mother let him know that she too had noticed the girl's absence. "Teresa," said Doña Elvira, interrupting something Utrera was telling her. Amalia took a step and approached her but looked at Manuel as if asking for a sign. "Yes, Señora?" Doña Elvira slowly placed the knife and fork on the tablecloth and spoke, barely separating her lips. "I didn't call you. Isn't Teresa here?" Amalia was still looking at Manuel, nervously smoothing the edge of her white apron with her fingers. "She'll be right back, Señora." It was then that Manuel spoke, understanding, accepting the trap that had been laid, daring to look in his mother's eyes just as he had looked in them on the day he told her he was going to marry Mariana, imitating without realizing it their blue fixity, stripped of any desire to explain or defy. "Teresa has gone up to take Solana his supper."

She had heard the bell from her bedroom, sensing in its long ring a danger she couldn't specify, because she didn't recognize the voice of the person who had just arrived, but as soon as she heard the street door closing she rang the bell imperiously for Amalia to come up, and she asked and found out, while the maid helped her dress, that the old threat had never died but had only been incubating for ten years, ready to return at any time from a future she had always feared and that was being realized now as inevitably as the coming of autumn or old age. "So they didn't kill him in the war or after the war," she said, "they condemned him to death and pardoned him, and now he's left prison to come to my house." "I heard him say he'd be leaving soon," said Amalia, behind her, placing the embroidered peignoir over her shoulders. "It doesn't matter if he stays or leaves today. He came, and my son has seen him. The harm has already been done." But she asked every morning if he had left, not saying his name, alluding with a movement of her head to the part of the house where the outsider was staying, and every day during the first week she received the same reply, which didn't explain anything, because no one, not even Manuel, knew Solanas intention. They told her he probably was sick, because he coughed and his hands trembled and he almost never left the room or got out of bed, and when Teresa brought him a meal and left it on the night table he acted as if he hadn't seen her, but then, as soon as the girl left the room, he sat up and ate without taking off his coat or using the cutlery or the napkin, stopping abruptly if he heard a noise outside his door, as if he were ashamed to let anyone discover how hungry he was. "He still hasn't opened his suitcase," said Amalia on the morning of the fourth day, "and he hasn't even untied the rope he had around it, or moved it from the spot where he left it when he came." The untouched suitcase, the overcoat, the empty closet, even the attitude of Manuel, whom they rarely saw talking to Solana, were gradually being established as signs of an immediate departure, a respite, at least, because as the days passed the presence of the outsider seemed to dissolve without anything taking place. Doña Elvira never crossed paths with him in the dining room, as she had feared, and she didn't see him in the courtyard or the hallway in the gallery. But it was enough for her to know he was near her, in the house, in the same room he had occupied in 1937, to imagine him alone, waiting for something, poisoned by a purpose that she would discover only when it was too late to put an end to his evil spell. "Just like it was before," she said to Utrera, "when my simpleminded son would bring him here for a snack and do everything to keep me from knowing. But the smell of the rubber in his espadrilles was left in the library."