Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

Straddling a chair, leaning on the back as if it were a windowsill, I looked at the white gleam of the sun on the wings of the silent planes that were disappearing beyond the hills, my back to the others, who were still sitting around the table with a pensive or rigid ceremonial air refuted by the light and the wind that disturbed the tablecloths, raising them at times like the sails of ships. I thought that perhaps my father had looked up from the ground at that same instant to watch the passage of the planes, forgetting them immediately, as if they were birds taking shelter after the first October cold and not emissaries of the war. The wind came up from the ravine of the Guadalquivir, heavy with the odor of mud and wet earth, and it carried away the voices and the music on the phonograph, a fox-trot, a tango, then a trumpet, intermittent and gradually moving away like the rhythm of a train, with the slowness of all the things that one will lose forever. On the ground, within reach of my hand, so that I only had to lean over a little to pick it up, was my glass of white wine, delicate and slow like the music and the faint smell of rotting algae that came from the still waters of the river, illuminating things with a tepidness similar to that of the threads of light that crossed the trellis next to the door of the country house and floated above the dust or pollen, around the crude black stain of the car, above the music recovered and dispersed and the sound of voices behind me becoming confused with the chink of spoons against the porcelain of the cups of coffee and the thin crystal of the glasses that a gust of wind overturned on the tablecloths. Mariana came over, before I saw her I knew she was coming because I recognized her step and the way her presence made the air tremble, to bring me coffee and a lit cigarette, and she remained crouching at my side, facing the city and the wind from the river that lifted the hair on her forehead, as if she had come to an appointment that only for the two of us was not invisible. When she gave me the cup, she placed a hand on my shoulder, and her hair covered one side of her face. Exactly like Orlando's sketch: not a face, but the pure shape of a desire, and that night, back at the house, when he gave me the drawing, he was offering me the sign of a temptation too undeniable for my cowardice.

"Mariana's alone, in the library," he said. "She's sitting and smoking, like you, watching the smoke while she listens to music, waiting for you. Even Manuel knows that if she hasn't gone to bed yet, it's because she wants to see you. Everybody seems to know that here except you. I've been watching the two of you since I got off the train yesterday morning. You wander all over the house, looking for each other, and you pass each other like two sleepwalkers, as if you still had time. For three years you've been looking for each other and hiding from each other like this, don't you remember? You came to my studio and didn't dare to look at her because she was naked. You don't even dare to look at me now. And don't pretend you're drunk or that you're an adolescent scorned by the woman you love. Open your eyes, Solana. It's me, your enemy, it's Orlando."

I close my eyes as I did that night, when I listened to Orlando lying on the yellow-flowered sofa in the parlor, and I hear his voice again, murmuring and serious, as if it were whistling in my ear as he untied the red strings of his portfolio and opened it to show me the portrait of Mariana. It was midnight, and it seemed as if the house and the world were uninhabited. Only Orlando and I, separated by the table in the parlor where the drawing lay under the light of the lamp, only Mariana's profile traced on the paper and perhaps on the dark background of the shelves in the library, Orlando's voice beating like the blood in my temples with the heavy indolence of alcohol. I got up, leaning on the edge of the table, clumsy and cowardly in front of Orlando's not-exactly-human eyes. "Leave me in peace," I said to him, "go away and leave me alone," but he didn't move or take his eyes off mine. He brushed, he tapped very softly the surface of the portfolio with his short, paint-stained fingers, and sweat shone on his neck and beneath the thin hair on his forehead like makeup running beneath the too-close light of the lamp. "It isn't necessary to raise your voice like that, Solana, I'm not your conscience. I don't care what you don't do tonight, or what she doesn't do. When she finishes her cigarette or her drink, she'll go to sleep or try on her wedding dress again, and you'll have the opportunity to give yourself another night of insomnia. I won't be the one to argue with anybody, least of all you, about the right to bring about your own failure. But I suppose you'll understand if I tell you that love has simplified my life. The only thing I care about is painting and having Santiago with me. I know he'll go just like he came, and it's very likely that he'll leave me when we return to Madrid and that I'll die when he goes, but not even that frightens me, Solana, fear is a trap, like shame, and now I'm alive and invulnerable."

Orlando signed the drawing, wrote the date in the margin, and handed it to me with a smile of surrender and tenderness directed at himself, as if when he heard his own words, he had understood all at once the entire feverishness of his love and imminence of the time when he would once again be exiled in solitude. He opened the door of the parlor, and before he went out to the hallway, he turned to look at me. "The music's still playing in the library. She's calling you." When I was alone, the drawing completely took on its imperious quality of invitation and the exact, empty pattern for absence. The wavy, short hair over her cheeks, the grave, pensive smile, not on her lips but in her gaze fixed on a distance of blank paper, of words unspoken, unwritten, of frozen gestures. The wine no longer existed or its excuse or its fog, only the clear line of the drawing against the light of the lamp, and behind it the eyes, the presence of Orlando, who was no longer a witness but the figure and voice in which the only lucid part of my thinking was embodied. And so when Manuel appeared at the door of the library, recently returned from the country estate, and Mariana went to him and kissed him with the greed of someone who has survived too long a wait, I knew that if I lifted my head, I would meet the complicit or accusatory eyes of Orlando, the spy of my rancor, of the plot hidden behind the stillness of things with as much impunity as the geometry that orders the disposition of figures in a painting to make it seem the result of chance.

Motionless figures in the library, as on a stage too brightly lit or in the studio of a photographer where prolonged exposure to the heat of the lights made their faces shine with the brilliance of wax. Medina, still in uniform, because he had come from the military hospital, as he did every night to examine Manuel. Utrera somber and alone among the others, like a guest in a hostile house, censuring in silence all the signs of disorder that the night before the wedding had brought into the house: Mariana's lack of modesty, Santiago's tight-fitting trousers, Orlando's obscene laughter. Amalia, standing next to me with a tray of appetizers and bottles, just down from the upstairs rooms where Dona Elvira murmured things and cursed and looked in the mirrors in her mourning clothes wringing her hands in her lap. Orlando, on the sofa with his knees devotedly joined to Santiago's, allowing himself small indecencies, the light caresses of a sodomite in a furtive park, of a tremulous, besotted, obscene old man who cannot decide to touch a little girl's thighs. Figures turned toward Magina on the esplanade of the country house, their backs to the proximity of dispersion and death, to the hand and eye for which they posed without knowing it. The painting was going to be called Une partie de plaisir, but when I asked about it two years later, Orlando could no longer recall its title or even the intention he once had to paint it.