Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

THE BELL AT THE ENTRANCE didn't ring when they arrived, but one of the door knockers sounded on the exterior door, which Manuel or Amalia always locked around midnight, when Medina would leave after having a last drink in the parlor and there was no one left on the ground floor of the house. Manuel hadn't gone to bed yet, he was in the garden, in the dark, waiting for sleep to come on the gentle night in early June, and a wind scented with wisteria had carried from the Plaza of General Orduna the sound of the tower clock striking, but he heard the violent knocking on the door only when Amalia, lighting her way with an oil lamp, opened wide the glass-paned doors that led from the dining room to the garden. She was barefoot and in her nightgown, and the lamp light heightened on her face, still puffy with sleep, the horror of someone who has awakened from a nightmare. "Don Manuel," she called, looking for him in the darkness, "they're knocking at the door. I asked who it is, but they don't answer." For a moment he thought or wanted to think it was Solana who had come back, driven by one of those fits of rapture that long ago had been the ordinary traits of his character and were always preceded by a singularly indolent state. "He's finished the book," he thought before he left the garden, where the clamor of the bronze door knockers sounded muffled and distant, "he's finished the book and has come back to Magina to show it to me or simply has decided he's sick of the country house and wants to leave tonight for Madrid or someplace where they'll give him a forged passport so he can leave Spain," but when he went out to the courtyard and heard up close the banging that shook the glass in the gallery and the dome, he knew that at no time had he expected it to be Solana knocking and he didn't have to open the door to know the faces and uniforms he would find on the other side. "Don't open it, Don Manuel, they'll take you away like they did when the war was over." Amalia, holding the lamp at the height of Manuel's face, with her back to the door, held his hand to stop him from sliding the bolts, and between their two bodies the light trembled behind the shade of smoked glass as if it too were shaken by the increasingly peremptory sound of the knocking. "Move away, Amalia, go up to your room right now," said Manuel, and he took the lamp from her, noticing that his own hands stopped trembling only when they grasped the cold metal of the bolts, when he took a step into the interior of fear and saw before him the men who had come for him. Later, in the basement of the barracks where they ordered him to look at the body lying on the marble table, he remembered that before leaving the house he had heard behind him some steps on the stairs and a voice or a scream that belonged to his mother. "It's nothing, Senora, nothing to worry about," one of the men had said, the one dressed in civilian clothes, turning from the entrance toward the figure, motionless with stupefaction and rage, that Manuel did not wish to look at, "a minor verification. We'll return your son in a couple of hours." Before closing the door, he saluted Dona Elvira, touching the brim of his hat with his fingers, then looked at the fountain without water and the tops of the acacias, still smiling, as if he personally had approved the quiet of the night, took Manuel's arm firmly and gave an order in a low voice to the Civil Guards, who lowered their weapons and walked behind them like an entourage of silence along the deserted lanes where their boots and the brush of rifles against their belts resonated.

In his treatment of Manuel, the man in civilian clothes, whom the guards called "Captain," adopted from the very beginning an affable air not completely contradicted by his evident desire to look like Glenn Ford. He was bald and wore excessively long sideburns and an unbuttoned and absurd raincoat that he didn't take off when he sat down behind the desk in his office, beneath an equestrian portrait of General Franco. Before speaking he twisted his mouth and tightened his lips as he looked down at the floor or at a typed paper that was on the desk and whose only purpose, Manuel supposed, was to increase the cowardice and waiting time of the person who would be interrogated. "Manuel Alberto Santos Crivelli," the captain read, then raised his eyes from the paper to look at him thoughtfully, as if searching his face for confirmation that the name attributed to him was correct, "owner of the country property called the Island of Cuba, situated at the edge of Magina, beside the Guadalquivir River. Am I mistaken?" Barely moving his head, Manuel sustained the captain's glance. He was standing, his hands together and his legs slightly separated, and the dark hand of his wound, revivified by fear, climbed steadily toward his heart, cutting like a knife through the wet tissue of his lungs, and each prolonged silence extending between the captain's words was a pit that augmented his vertigo and the throbbing that made a path for the avid edge of the knife drawing closer and closer to his heart. "Is it true that on your invitation, the individual called Jacinto Solana Guzman moved to the above mentioned property on the first day of April of the current year?" The captain read with difficulty, or perhaps he was pretending to read and didn't remember all the words he needed to say or the exact manner in which he had to repeat them. "He was ill," Manuel said in a voice so low he didn't think the captain had heard him, "the doctor advised him to spend some time in the country." As in some dreams, he didn't have enough breath to raise his voice, and a feeling of asphyxia or of something oozing in his throat erased the words, leaving only the brief, empty movement of his lips. The captain brusquely rose to his feet, folded the paper, and put it in the pocket of his raincoat. "He is ill," he repeated, his face looking down toward the floor, his tightened lips inaccurately feigning the sad smile he had seen in movies. "Come with me, if you don't mind."

The basement smelled of hospital, and damp stone, and something penetrating and rotting that Manuel recognized before the captain turned on the light and remained next to the door while he walked in. The smell of old, wet clothes, saturated with algae or mud or still water. Under a light like the one in a wartime operating room the body was lying on a marble table whose edges were stained with blood, like the counter in a butcher shop. The black socks, still wet, had slipped down toward his ankles, revealing dead flesh, soiled like the light and the grayish white surface of the marble. The metal frames of his eyeglasses, Manuel recalls, twisted and broken, driven into the clot where the blood was a little darker than the mud, the deep hole like a cut windpipe that he looked away from when he discovered it wasn't his mouth, the black thread that had attached the arms of his eyeglasses. Like details of a bad dream, he recognized the trousers he had given Solana when he left for the country house and the checked jacket with a cigarette burn on the lapel. "It wasn't enough for them to kill him. Maybe he was already dead when they pulled him from the river, but they couldn't accept the hunt ending like that. He was dead and they trampled him and somebody continued shooting at very close range until the magazine was empty." He stepped back, not turning yet toward the captain, not looking at the ruined face or the hand that hung half open, casting a shadow resembling a tree branch on the floor, only at the swollen shoes, the too-short socks over the sharp, definitively frozen ankles in the mourning of an operating room. Now the captain was smoking as he leaned against the wall, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. "Do you recognize this man?" From a distance he already knew was more lasting than sorrow, because he had inhabited it, a stranger to everything, from the day he saw Mariana lying dead on the floorboards of the pigeon lofit, Manuel said Jacinto Solana's name like a vindication and an homage, and when he pronounced it for an instant he felt that the man to whom he alluded was safe from the degradation of death, immune to the solitude of his own body lying on a marble table.