Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

In Orlando's gestures was the fiction of a fortune-teller who recites poems in old provincial theaters. With what arrogance he moved among us, free, not trapped by our silence, immune to everything, even the sudden old age he already knew would come when love, firm and cruel like a hero recently returned from hell, deserted him. "You've never descended, Solana," he would say to me, "you still haven't written what you ought to write because you haven't gone down to hell, and you don't know what it means to come back and preserve the degree of rationality necessary for remembering." Now Manuel and Mariana and I dissolved at the touch of his words as a dream dissolves when it is shattered by the reality, victorious and obscene, of waking, the cold of dawns beyond the sheets. As if he were posing for a photographer of slightly pornographic postcards, Santiago drank and leaned his elbow on the piano, wearing the red undershirt of a lover for hire, and he shaped his lips into a kiss of dubious tenderness each time Orlando stopped talking to catch his breath and searched Santiago's eyes for a confirmation that he didn't always grant. When I saw him get off the train carrying Orlando's portfolio and mislaid luggage, I thought Santiago was an adolescent, but now, that night, victim of the successive snares of disillusionment and chastisement that knowledge usually set for me, I found him older than Orlando and Orlando's tenderness, older and viler than any of us, antecedent to everything, like a stone statue with painted lips or one of the women with pale thighs who looked at me from doorways on certain streets the first time I came to Madrid. He wore a red undershirt that bared his weak chest darkened by hair that perhaps had grown in recent months not as a declaration of any sort of manliness but to crudely belie the illusion of adolescence that one could find on his face, and white trousers very tight around his hips that moved like mollusks or a woman's hips. Orlando, lost in a drunkenness that he must have imagined as sacred, kissed him on the lips, and with a leap of his ungainly body, he sat on top of the piano, provoking the echo of a single low and very long note. From there, swinging his legs, he looked at us as if from the seat of honor of a pride untouched by shame.

"There's no more need to pretend or renounce," he said, pointing at me, "because what's coming now is the Apocalypse. All of you remember what the papers are saying about Guernica. Phosphorus bombs and scorched earth, fire and brimstone, as in the Cities of the Plain. Your desire makes you afraid because none of you has accepted that it's not possible to choose it without choosing indignity and betrayal at the same time. What all of you have discovered now I found out when I was twelve or thirteen and realized I liked men, not women. That's why you can fall in love and continue to feel the need for decency. You both desire a woman, Mariana, for example, and you feel a little disloyal and a little adulterous, but you don't know anything about fearing a temptation that, if discovered, would make you accept the filthiest word as a sign of shame. I'm going to paint a picture: all of you, this morning, at the country house, in that light Van Gogh couldn't even imagine, united by guilt, and I to one side, like Velazquez in Las meninas, looking at you as if you existed only in my imagination and I could erase you just by closing my eyes, like a god."

Then things happened in a way I've given up trying to put into order or explain. I've remembered and I've written, I've torn up sheets of paper where I'd written nothing but Mariana's name, I've stubbornly resorted to the superstitions of literature and memory to pretend that a necessary order existed in that night's acts. During sleepless nights in a cell for those condemned to death, I've caught myself trying to recover, one by one, the most trivial events, gnawed at by the peremptory need not to surrender to oblivion a single one of the casual gestures that later, in memory, shone like signs. I've looked at Mariana's eyes again which, ten years later, when I returned to the house, were still fixed on me as they were in the photographer's studio, when I still didn't know that what was revealed to me in them was an infinite, motionless farewell. I go outside, to the esplanade of the country house, and the moon that turns the earth white through the branches of the olive trees is the same moon that paused in the May air that night when I turned my back on the others and went out to the garden, still hearing Orlando's voice and the notes of a jazz tune that Manuel had begun on the piano. Mariana was writing something on a paper and covering it with her left hand as if she were afraid that someone might be spying on her, and when she raised her eyes, she looked toward the doors to the garden, but she couldn't see me because for her they were a mirror. Sitting on the swing, I saw them in the squared yellow light of the windows, as if I were watching a film from the unpunished darkness, and like the movie theaters of my adolescence, the piano music infected the figures with its slow, convulsed melody. Mariana stopped writing, looked at the paper, tore it in half and then into very small pieces that she let fall from her closed hand when she stood and crossed the dining room and stopped at the threshold to the garden before moving toward me, walking on the oblique path of the light.

THE MUSIC MANUEL was playing and Mariana's footsteps acquired an undeniable direction. With his head sullenly sunk between his shoulders, Manuel looked at his own hands and at the keyboard as if he were leaning over the edge of a well, weaving with violent delicacy the rhythm of the song, "If We Never Meet Again," which I heard constantly during that time on the phonograph in the library. Behind the white square of the windows, I can remember the red spatter of Santiago's undershirt as he listened in silence, I see or very probably imagine Orlando standing next to him, not listening to the music, looking at Mariana's back when she stopped at the door to the garden and guessing step-by-step what would happen when she began walking again. Sitting on the swing, not moving, I saw her coming toward me, and I looked away from her when she was beside me. Her eyes had the dark brilliance of a lake in the moonlight, a depth untouched and smooth like her temples or her cheeks or the warm skin of her thighs when I moved my hands under her skirt to caress them. "Orlando's right," she said, sitting down beside me, moving the swing a little with the tips of her shoes, "he says you're unsociable. We're all in the dining room listening to Manuel, and suddenly you turn as if you were going away forever and come here, to watch us from a distance." We were together in the space of air marked off by her perfume, and when she pushed the swing she leaned against me a little and brushed my face with her hair, but the proximity of our bodies made the never vulnerable line, the exact distance at which a caress is halted and denied, more intense and physical. "I've had a lot to drink," I said, still not looking at her, "and it's too warm inside." Mariana took my face between her hands and obliged me to look at her, taking from my lips the cigarette I was smoking and tossing it to the ground, as if she were disarming me. Now the brilliance of her eyes dilated in the darkness seemed very close to tears or to a kind of tenderness I had never known how to find in them until that night. "You always talk to me like that, ever since you came to Magina. You tell me it's hot or that you've had too much to drink or that you're in a hurry to leave for Madrid because you're preparing for that writers' congress, but if I don't look at you, I can't recognize your voice, it's as if someone else were talking to me, and if I look into your eyes to be sure you're still you, it's as if you didn't know me. It's not that you don't look at me or talk to me. It's even worse, because you look through me and talk to me as if I were a statue. I've spent two months in this house thinking about the day you'd arrive, imagining that with you I'd get to see the places where you played as a boy, the plaza with the poplars you told me about so often, and now that you're here, you're farther away than if you had stayed in Madrid. Before you came to Magina, at least I had the hope of receiving a letter from you. But you didn't write to me in all this time." The music came from a greater and greater distance and was completely erased at times behind Mariana's murmuring voice that was so close, and looking into the dining room while she spoke to me was like spending the night beside the window of a house where the open shutters reveal a remote family supper caught off guard. I meant to tell her that since the day I met her I hadn't stopped writing to her: that all the things I had written and published since then were nothing but the chapters of an infinite letter meant only for her, that even when I went in those unruly trucks of militiamen to recite ballads on the Madrid front and I climbed up on the wooden platform and heard the applause generated by my poetry, I was thinking about her and looking for her face and her impossible smile of complicity or approval among the rows of soldiers standing in their rough military greatcoats. I was going to say something to her, perhaps an ignoble excuse, and I may have been about to suggest that we return to the dining room with the others, choosing the appropriate, neutral tone of voice, but Mariana found my hand in the darkness and pressed it slowly, very gently at first, then grasping it with a serene, sustained violence that did not show on her face when she turned to look at me. Further down, on her skirt, between our two bodies, our hands clutched and intertwined, emissaries of immodesty and unspoken desire. "I'll write to you when I go to Crete," I said, "I'll send you a postcard just for the pleasure of writing your first and last names in a place so far away. I don't think I'll add anything else: just that palace with the stairways and the red columns on one side, and on the other your name, Mariana, Mariana Ríos." "I like to hear you say my name. It's the first time you have since you came here." "Names are sacred. Each thing and each one of us has a true name, and it's very difficult to learn what it is and say it." "Tell me what my name is. Tell me what the name of Crete is." A single word, I thought, I knew lucidly, a single word and the boundary and the fear will be torn apart as if they never had existed, as if that interminable music were not sounding in the dining room and the windows in front of us weren't lit or the doors to the garden not wide open. "Crete is Mariana," I said: in the silence I heard voices conversing and didn't know whose they were. Very slowly, as if in completing that gesture one would hold back all the instants and days that had passed in vain since we met, Mariana brought her lips close to my mouth from the distance of the other corner of the swing, from the afternoon when I had seen her naked in Orlando's studio, from each one of the hours when I had her and lost her without knowing that all the acts of my life, and fear and guilt and postponement, had been meticulously conspiring to clear the way for that island in time when I kissed her and licked her tears and let myself be demolished, trapped in her body, repeating her name just as she was saying mine as if everything we had to say could be summarized in our names. We rolled onto the ground and onto the cold grass like animals greedy for darkness, and I opened or tore open her blouse to look at her white breasts in the light of the moon shining on them while her hands searched and caressed, awkwardly, delicately going down between trousers and shirt, very awkwardly and very delicately going down between skin and the rough fabric of my trousers.