Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

It was at the beginning, that morning, when we arrived at the station in the Ford that had belonged to Manuel's father, crossing the lit empty streets of the city, the avenue of linden trees that ended in the high esplanade with its flags where a boy in uniform saluted us with a raised fist. There were silent women in mourning and wounded soldiers on the benches along the platform and on every wall violent war posters that had an anachronistic, distant air, as if the war they exalted had nothing to do with the peaceful station and the morning in Magina. We were alone, Mariana and I, we had been alone in the house when I came down to have breakfast and found her waiting for me in the dining room, recently bathed and light-hearted, with her damp hair and her white blouse unbuttoned almost to the tops of her loose, pale breasts that I glimpsed in their slight semidarkness every time she leaned toward me to tell me something, bringing me back with sudden clarity and sorrow to the afternoon in 1933 when I saw her, unknown and naked, in Orlando's studio. It had always been like this, I thought, always touching her with my eyes and hands and never crossing the chasm that divides bodies when they are so close that a single gesture or a single word would be enough to tear apart the cowardly spiderweb that joins desire to despair, exactly four years that resolved into ashes and nothingness with the cold visible serenity of what has already happened, like the sugar that I poured into the cup and that dissolved in the coffee as I sat across from Mariana and stirred it with a spoon, impassive, attentive, darkly absorbed in my breakfast and in her half-opened blouse. But we were alone and the silence in the house was like a final gift I never would have dared to ask for, and just as the war didn't seem to exist in Magina because sirens didn't sound at night and there was no burned rubble in the middle of the streets, the absence of the others allowed me the clandestine privilege of imagining that nobody would come to argue with me over Mariana, cleanly offered to my eyes in the empty dining room. Manuel had left very early for the country estate, using the train and not the car so that Mariana and I could drive to the station to pick up Orlando. When I sat next to her on the leather seat and slammed the door shut at the same time that Mariana turned on the ignition, it was as if I too was stirred by its thrust, very violent at first, barely controlled by her when we turned into the first narrow lane on the way to the Plaza of General Orduna, then passing like a sound or a long gust of wind against the windows when we drove down the broad empty streets to the north, and Mariana, who had been tense and hunched over the wheel, leaned back and asked me to light a cigarette for her. She belonged to me boundlessly now, not to me, who was going to lose her, but to the tenderness of my eyes that in the warm interior of the car added new, unknown images to the figure of Mariana. Mariana in profile against the glass of the window, her hands sliding or firm on the wheel, her chestnut hair lifted and then falling again over her forehead and the rapid movement of her hand that brushed it aside and then immediately rested again on the brake lever, her forehead and her nose and her mouth and beyond them the fleeting, familiar streets of Magina, the distant cemetery among the empty fields, the shadows of the linden trees that successively hid her face and returned it to the light, her laughter when she stopped the car in front of the station, as if we had completed an adventure.

They told us that Orlando's train would be two or three hours late. The delay irritated Mariana, as if the wait would lengthen hers to escape Magina, but I secretly was grateful for the unexpected hours granted to me. It had been so long since I had been alone with her that I was incapable of calculating the exact duration of what I now had: each future minute was a coin from those excessive treasures we find in some dreams, a thin thread of dizzyingly spilled sand that I clutched at in order to retrieve it. I saw her approaching, returning from the precise moment when I knew I had known her only to lose her, the Mariana of 1933 who had just appeared, the possible Mariana, not yet desired, the girl with no name and the lock of hair hanging straight over her brows and her eyes made up like those of Louise Brooks, whom I had seen before I met her in some photographs that Orlando showed me. I saw her return as we walked on one side of the tracks, beyond the platform, past the long banks of young hedge mustard that extended it, our heads bowed, slightly apart, looking at the slow advance of our own steps or the distant gray of the olive groves. "I spend all my time with Manuel, imagine, today is the first day we've been apart since he got out of the hospital, but in that house it's as if I were always alone. Everything frightens me, even counting the days left until we leave. It frightens me to think about the trip to Paris, and I'm so adventurous that the first time I left Madrid was to come to Magina. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you've come. After we mailed you the letter I was waiting for your answer and always afraid you'd stay in Madrid. Somebody would knock at the door and I'd run out to see if it was the mailman, and if the phone rang, I closed my eyes, hoping it was you. With you in the house, that woman, those people, no longer frighten me. Medina was sure you wouldn't come. I started to hate him for the way he said it, so much the doctor, as if he could know everything."

By now we were very far from the platform, and when we reached the first olive trees we slowly began our return. Mariana took my arm and rested her weight on me with a gesture that was usual in another time, in Madrid, before Manuel, in the uncertain streets of the small hours and the never satisfied temptation to embrace her. "Tomorrow," I said, rigid and cowardly when I felt her hand and the proximity of her hips, tomorrow and then never, the other house, the dark bedroom, the insomnia, the silence and the waiting and the darkness where Beatriz wasn't sleeping. "I almost can't remember what I did before I knew you," Mariana said. A step away from the platform, the lazy soldiers looked at her, the clock was about to strike eleven. But she still leaned on my arm, and when she raised her head to look into my eyes, I saw in the transparency of hers something that had nothing to do with her words, that wasn't mine, or Manuel's, or anybody's, that belongs now only to the memory of the man they fixed on for the last time, the certainty of an appointment and a shot in the pigeon loft, the will to die, I know it now, to never be vulnerable again to abandonment or fear. "A model," she repeated, laughing: "Who remembers that? You shouldn't remind me of it now. I was nobody, less than nobody, I was nothing when I met you. I went from one place to another, never stopping, because if I had paused at someone or something I would have disintegrated immediately, like a face in the water. When you appeared and looked at me, it was as if I finally had been embodied in myself. I can see you now, so quiet, so firm, looking at the painting and not at me because it embarrassed you to look at me naked. That day it was as if I were seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. You didn't need to speak or even move for people to know you were in the world. I never had read anything with as much attention as the poems of yours that Orlando gave me. 'Look, this is what Solana has written. Except for the two of us, it's a secret.' I didn't sleep at night, reading the books you gave me. I brought the first one with me, The Voice Owed to You, with the dedication you asked Salinas to write for me. To Mariana Rios, with affection, September 1933. When I read those poems I always had the feeling it was you who wrote them."