Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"For twenty-two years I've been alone," Manuel said, looking at Minaya as if he were deciphering on his face that period of time, "from the moment Solana went away until you arrived." In the same taxi that had taken them to the station he returned to the house when night had already fallen, and he was surprised not to see the light burning in the circular windows. He was in Solana's room, which still smelled of tobacco smoke and the presence and usury of a body; he covered the typewriter and then went down to the parlor to look at himself in 1937, to look at his own pride and manhood exalted by the buttons and straps of his uniform. In the oval photograph, Mariana looked at him as if she were foreseeing the future dead man before her now. "But Mariana was looking at him, you ought to know that," Manuel said in the library, in front of the fire. "We were in the photographer's studio, and I had put on my uniform and the two stars I never wore because they promoted me to lieutenant when I was dying in a hospital in Guadalajara. She took my arm and looked at the lens when the photographer told us to smile, but Solana was behind him, with Orlando, and I barely could see them because the lights were blinding me. At the same time that she pressed my arm, Mariana moved her head very slightly and found Solana's eyes. That was exactly when the photographer took the picture. No matter from which angle of the parlor you look, she seems to be smiling and looking at you, but the one she's looking at is Jacinto Solana."

ABRUPTLY AND WITHOUT ANY foreshadowing of it, the need to escape had disappeared, the incessant fear of time's flight. Now I perceived everything through the sweet desired fog of wine that ripened its effect precisely at the point where the things and faces flowing on the other side didn't matter or seemed to have happened many years earlier. I drank slowly, beginning at dusk, when Manuel had not yet returned from the country estate and Mariana wandered aimless and alone through the rooms, the courtyard, the hallway in the gallery, avidly attentive to the clock in the library and the door where he would appear. I drank the white wine brought up by Amalia from the wine cellar in dusty bottles whose labels Orlando read with an alcoholic's sacred wonder, relics kept in the darkness of cellars not to celebrate the eve of the wedding but simply to allow me the privilege of the serenity and pale golden light that occupied the place of the air and gave everything an appearance of premature distance very similar to the certain possibility of oblivion. Very slowly, not surrendering, as Orlando did, to the immediate fever of the alcohol spilled on my lips and ablaze in my veins, spinning out my gestures as if I were looking at myself in a mirror pretending I was drinking, like someone who prepares and administers to himself in solitude a medicine or the exact dose of poison to commit suicide. The glass between my fingers, the bottle on the nearby table, the curved edge of glass against my lips, the passage of the wine from palate to consciousness. Now, as I write to recover that night and the day and night that ended in two bodies embracing in the light from a window, suddenly burning above the garden, very close to the palm tree and the metal swing whose creaking, because the wind was moving it slightly, I did not stop listening to as I closed my eyes to kiss Mariana's bare breasts, I find I can barely establish a precise chronology of the things I did and saw while the white wine enveloped everything in its mist as light and clear as the transparency Orlando loved so much in the paintings of Velazquez.

I hear his voice that night, Orlando's savage laugh, I see his eyes saturated with lucidity and cruelty and Santiago's profile like that of a page painted on a quattrocento fresco as he sat next to him, absent and docile, the indifferent tenderness with which he let Orlando caress a knee or a hand auspiciously resting on the edge of the sofa. I hear voices, I see faces, but behind them there is nothing that allows me to establish them in a room or in a landscape, only a dark curtain, perhaps an object that they touch or raise as a signal so that the person who looks at them many years later can recognize them. A night and a day and next to the last night Mariana was alive, broken images and flashes and words that remained in the air after being spoken, like the cigarette smoke, like the indolence that left me lying on the bed in my room or slowly moving back and forth on the swing in the garden, shamelessly intending for Mariana to come and ask me why I was alone, why I seemed so sad and had slipped away from the others, from her. Leaning back in an armchair, next to the fireplace, I became drunk with a serene and filthy delicacy as I listened to Medina, who was explaining something to us about the spy they had lynched a few hours earlier in the Plaza of General Orduna, when Manuel came into the library and Medina fell silent — his last words were a name, Victor or perhaps Hector Vera, or Vega — because Mariana had stood up to embrace Manuel and now she was kissing him on the mouth, in front of all of us, as if she were defying us, in front of Utrera, Medina, and Amalia, who had just come in with a tray of appetizers and bottles of wine and remained standing in the middle of the library. In front of me and Santiago and Orlando, who took a drink, raising his glass like a countersign or a malevolent toast conceived exclusively so that I would notice.

Orlando, a mask of laughter, a hard voice of accusation and augury. The next morning, when we all drove down to the country estate in the black car to celebrate the wedding feast, Orlando, possessed by the fervor of the light that had excited him since his arrival in Magina, took his portfolio and pencils and was constantly drawing things he allowed only Santiago and Mariana to see, but he didn't seem to care about the landscape spread out before him, surrounding the hill where the house stood. He was sitting among the almond trees, his portfolio open on his knees and his red and black handkerchief, wet with perspiration, around his neck, and if he raised his eyes from the paper and looked at the olive groves or the river or the distant, gray line of the roofs in Magina, it was as if he were seeing not what we saw but the definitive and future form of the picture that at that instant he had decided to paint. At times he put down his pencil to look at us. He smiled, holding the glass of wine that Santiago had brought to his retreat, barely drinking from it, as if all he needed for his happiness was the presence of the boy, the lukewarm odor of the river among the almond trees, the sudden sensation of looking at a scene that secretly obeyed the intention of his imagination as the pencil obeyed his hand. And for that reason I don't know now if when I write I'm recounting what happened then or simply imagining the picture Orlando never painted, the watercolors I saw in January 1939 in a funereal, icy apartment in Madrid. I see the esplanade and the house from the spot where Orlando was sitting among the almond trees. Manuel's black Ford covered with dust to one side of the gate with its baroque metal fittings, in the shade of the grapevine, the obsessive, absurd phonograph playing tangos and extremely long blues erased by the wind, the table with its white tablecloths, Magina in the distance, the pale green or gray of the olive groves and the river and the hills and lunar ravines that extended the world toward the south, toward the blue sierra where I've never gone.

He knew, he was to one side among the almond trees, his pencil, its point as harsh and precise as his eye, suspended over the paper and his glass recently filled with wine by the solicitous hand of the only creature in the world who mattered to him. Now I know that all of us, Mariana, Manuel, myself, existed that day only so that Orlando could draw his discerning labyrinth of figures entwined in despair and desire. Frasco and his wife had cleared the table at the end of the meal, and they, not Orlando or I, were talking about the bombing of Guernica because a squadron of very high-flying planes was crossing the Magina sky, and about someone, a spy—"A fifth columnist," Medina specified, as if he were saying the exact name of an illness — arrested three days earlier in Magina. "There are laws," said Utrera. "There's a penal code. If a man commits a crime, he deserves a trial, and if necessary to be condemned to death, but they have no right to lynch him. It's barbaric, like when they burned the churches." "Those things do more harm to the Republic than a rebel offensive. You should have seen the condition of that man's corpse when it reached the hospital. I'm saying this because I was on duty, and I had to perform the autopsy." Medina, composed, drinking his coffee, citing clinical details and speeches of Don Manuel Azana, whose hand he once shook before he was president of the Republic and came to give a talk at the Athenaeum of Magina. Then Orlando's voice resounded like a severe invocation: "The Spanish people have the right to burn churches and lynch Fascists, because what they do will be much worse if we're unlucky enough to lose this war. Think of Guernica, or the bullfight ring in Badajoz. The people are hoping not for the revolution but the Apocalypse."