Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

Then someone came and talked to him about Jacinto Solana: dead, unpublished, renowned, heroic, disappeared, probably shot at the end of the war. Minaya had finished his coffee and was getting ready to leave when the other man, armed with a briefcase and a glass of cognac, spread before him his combative enthusiasm, his friendship, which Minaya never asked for, the evidence of a discovery that in the future would probably provide him with a summa cum laude. "His name was, his name is, José Manuel Luque," he told Inés, "and I can't imagine him without running the risk of anachronisms, impassioned, I suppose, addicted to clandestine conversations, ignoring discouragement and doubt, carrying forbidden papers in his briefcase, determined to have destiny fulfill what they affirm, and with a beard and rough workman's boots."

"Jacinto Solana. Make a note of the name, Minaya," the other man said, "because I'll be sure you hear it in the future and read these poems. They were published in Hora de España, in the July 1937 issue. Though I warn you this is only an appetizer for what you'll see later."

"Invitation," read Minaya, fifteen lines without rhyme, without any apparent rhythm, as if the person who wrote them had with absolute premeditation renounced indicating any emphasis, so that the words would sound as if spoken in a quiet voice, with sustained coldness, with the serene purpose of achieving perfection and silence, as if perfection, and not even the act of writing, mattered. A man alone was writing in front of a mirror and closing his lips before saying the only name that dwelled in him in order to look at himself in a tranquil invitation to suicide. At the end, "Mágina, May 1937." Each line, each word sustained on the negation of itself, was an ancient call that seemed to have been written only so Minaya might know it, not in a vast future but on that precise afternoon, in just that place, thirty-one years and eight months later, as if in the mirror where that man was looking at himself as he wrote he had seen Minaya's eyes, his predestined loyalty.

"Valuable, Minaya, it's true, I don't deny any of the value you attribute to it, but you haven't seen the best things yet. Read these ballads. You can see they're photocopies from El Mono Azul. They were published between September '36 and May '37."

With gestures of clandestinity, of mystery, he pawed through his briefcase among smeared, duplicated pages and notebooks of notes, looking all around the cafeteria before showing Minaya a pile of photocopies that appeared in his hand like a magician's pigeon, just arrived from Mexico, he said, fragile, as sacred as relics, like the manuscripts of a persecuted, hidden faith, heavy with heroic memory and conspiracy. El Mono Azul, Weekly Pamphlet of the Alliance of Anti fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture, Madrid, Thursday, October i, 1936, the black rectangle of an undecipherable photograph: Rafael Alberti, José Bergamin, and Jacinto Solana in the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment. Then the other man spread out before Minaya the ballads "The Iron Militia," "The Ballad of Lina Odena," "The Twentieth of July," "International Brigades." The name at the bottom of each one, Jacinto Solana, almost erased among the large letters of the titles, like his face in the photograph, lost in forgetting, in a time that never seemed to have existed, but the voice wasn't the same one Minaya had heard when he read the first poem. Now it was confused with the others, exalted by the same fervor, by the monotony of rage, as if the man who had written the ballads was not the one who looked at himself, enclosed and alone, in the mirror of a shadowy room. He read the name of the city and the date again, "Magina, May 1937," like a countersign that the other man, José Manuel Luque, could not see, like an invitation deeper than the one offered by the poems, without calculating yet the possible alibi, only astonished that for the second time in a matter of days the inert territory of his consciousness where the city lay, his own wasted, distant life, had opened again like a wound. "I know he didn't die," he was going to say, recalling his father's sad monologues in which the name of Jacinto Solana sometimes appeared, "I know he didn't disappear from the world when the war ended, that he got out of prison and went back to Magina to go on fighting as if the fury that had moved him when he wrote the ballads still lived in him and perhaps came to an end only when they killed him." But he didn't say anything; he nodded in silence at the other man's enthusiasm, then listening to the usual predictions about the irremediable decay and fall of the tyranny, about the united general strike that would bring it down if everyone, including him, Minaya, devoted themselves to the struggle, shoulder to shoulder. For it seems that after thirty years they are still using the same words that had not been exhausted by the evidence of defeat, the same blind inherited certainty that they could not have learned back then because they hadn't been born yet, the secret, single word said in a quiet voice in rooms full of smoke and conspiracy, the initials written in red brushstrokes on the walls of midnight, in the vacant fields of fear. Blind, bold, fearless, between the legs of the Cyclops that takes a step and squashes them without even noticing, who lifts them up in his hand to throw them down into a courtyard sealed off by gray walls, in handcuffs, already dead, still undamaged in their condition of the heroic dead.

"And nobody knows about it, Minaya, absolutely nobody, and it will remain unpublished until I bring it to light, I mean, if you keep my secret. I've even thought of the title for my doctoral dissertation: 'Literature and Political Engagement in the Spanish Civil War. The Case of Jacinto Solana.' You can't deny it sounds good."

Minaya cleaned a section of clouded glass and saw the motionless horsemen at the corners again. Gray overcoats in the January dusk, hard faces restrained under helmets, black rubber truncheons hanging from the saddlebows, raised like swords when they galloped in pursuit among the cars. He drained his glass, vaguely noted the date and password for a clandestine appointment he wouldn't keep, promised silence and gratitude, left the cafeteria and the university, crossing in front of the horsemen and the barred windows of the jeeps, hoping fear wouldn't be noticed in his calm step, his lowered head. Abruptly, that night, he imagined the lie and wrote the letter, and later he told Inés that it took ten interminable days to receive Manuel's reply, and on the night train that brought him to Mágina he didn't hear anybody speak, and there were indolent guards in civilian clothes smoking as they leaned against the dark windows in the corridors, looking at him at times as if they recognized him.

INÉS SAID SHE SAW HIM standing among the acacias, not yet decided, examining the house, the balconies, the white plaster moldings, as if giving time to his memory to recognize them, still and solitary behind the fountain's rim, not protecting himself from the fine spray that dampened his hair and overcoat, indifferent to it. She was changing the sheets on the bed in the room that Manuel had told her that same morning to prepare for the guest, and she said that from the first time she looked out from the balcony and saw him there in the plaza, staring so intently at the house, she knew who he was, and that very soon, when he tossed away the cigarette and picked up the suitcase in a gesture of brusque resolve, the bell would ring in the silence of the courtyard and then Teresa's footsteps would sound on the marble flagstones. She went out to the gallery and hid behind the curtains to see him from the front when the door opened, framed in the light of the threshold, tall, his hair tousled and damp, with a gray-checked overcoat and sloping shoulders that emphasized his air of fatigue and a small suitcase he didn't want to give to Teresa when she asked him into the parlor room where the fire was already lit.