Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

Then I opened my eyes and a violent light that didn't come from the dining room obliged me to close them. We were lying on the ground, and the light from a very high window fell on us covering us with the shadow of a single figure outlined there. Without getting up or entirely breaking the embrace that protected both of us from fatigue and our recovered sense of shame, we fled toward the darkness, and for a moment the light kept shining like a yellow, empty rectangle on the place where it had taken us by surprise, but the shadow spy was no longer at the window. We didn't dare look at each other again until the light went out. Before guilt could rise up around us like a filthy nocturnal tide and drown us, Mariana, kneeling in front of me, touched my lips, my eyelids, the back of my neck, buried her fingers in my hair and drew me once again to her mouth, repeating my name with a dark intonation that made it unfamiliar, as if it no longer alluded to me but to another man whose face she could not see completely in the darkness of the garden, because it was destined to be erased and leave no ashes or attributes of pride in her memory at the precise moment we stood to return to the dining room.

"They've all left," said Mariana, still smiling at me as she fastened the buttons on her blouse. She smoothed my hair with her fingers, and with a handkerchief that smelled exactly like her skin, she wiped my mouth smeared with lipstick, and each gesture was a small sign of complicity and tenderness. As if we were walking through a strange city, she took my arm as we crossed the garden, leaning on my shoulder, and at the door to the dining room she stopped and embraced me for the last time, lifting her hips to press her belly against mine. The piano was open and there were glasses and empty bottles on the table, the floor, next to the broken glass and the stain of spilled alcohol. Mariana lit a cigarette and brushed my face as she placed it between my lips, and then she left, her head bowed, and was about to come back to me when she reached the door, but she didn't, she only stood quietly for a moment and closed the door very carefully when she went out to the courtyard, as if she were trying not to wake someone.

AT DUSK THE MIST ROSE over the reddish gullies and the canebrakes and the tall white oleanders on the banks, becoming sluggish in the bends of the river. The mist was dense and blue on moonlit nights and became opaque, solid, white or faintly yellow when the sunlight began to shine on it at dawn, spreading over the course of the river, very close to the ground, like the smoke from the bonfires that on icy December days crept among the packs of olive groves and did not rise above the gray tops of the olive trees. In the mist the whistle of the night trains, emissaries from the sea, the only clocks for measuring how long insomnia lasted, became more intense and more distant, and from the other bank of the river, from the other side of the train tracks, the Island of Cuba emerged at dawn like an island in the mist that still lay in long tatters among the almond trees and detached very slowly from the low roofs of the house, like the last waters of a cautious receding flood whose crest no one had noticed. Before dawn, from the window of his room high above the mist and the slopes of the river like the moat of a castle, Jacinto Solana, just awakened by the passing of an interminable freight train closed like the trains in the war, looked at a darkness turning silver and blue and ashen with the disciplined slowness that time has as it moves on clocks. It was, perhaps, because the entry in his diary was undated, a morning in mid-April, when Solana still saw no proximate end to his book and was desperate with fear of the possibility that he never would finish it, a disorder of truncated pages and sleepless nights and ashtrays filled with stubbed-out cigarettes while the sterile silence was shaken by barking dogs and the noise like a distant storm of a train crossing the metal bridge over the Guadalquivir. It was undoubtedly the time when he still always carried the pistol that Frasco saw on the first day at the bottom of his cardboard suitcase, between the bundles of typed pages that he tied carefully with red ribbon and the dark suit and the shirt that had belonged to Manuel. On the first day, the first afternoon, when Frasco showed him the old barn with the window overlooking the river where twenty-two years later Minaya would find the blue notebook and the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, Solana untied the ropes around his suitcase and took out the paltry possessions of a fugitive with a kind of methodical absorption that excluded conversation and disorder, like someone who always lives in hotels and knows the desolation of arriving at one on a Sunday afternoon. And as naturally as he arranged his clothing on the bed and his typed and blank pages at the corners of the desk, Frasco saw him take out the pistol, which was very large and looked recently oiled, and place it on the pages like a paperweight, beside the inkwell and the pen, as if it weren't a weapon but a neutral object and somehow necessary for writing, and when he went down to the kitchen to eat that night the pistol bulged in his right jacket pocket. At first he only wrote and waited, Frasco said, and the pistol and the pen always remained within reach of his hand, even when he left the area of his seclusion to take a very short walk among the almond trees or drink a few glasses of wine with him next to the fire where the stew for supper was bubbling. As if he never stopped waiting for someone, he watched the bridge over the river and the path that ended at the house, and sitting next to the fire he remained fixed in the light of the flames, not paying attention to Frasco, searching perhaps behind the crackling of the wood for an indication that at last the footsteps of his pursuers had arrived, calculating the time left in the truce, the blank pages he still needed to fill.

"LIGHTS OF MÁGINA in the dark, above the mist, reflected in it as if in the water of a very distant bay. Uncertain liquid brilliance, candles lit in the last chapels of the churches. Everything seems to sleep, but nothing is sleeping, nobody is sleeping. Lights of Magina above a great plain of insomnia." Later, when the dogs began to bark and the mules could be heard stirring in the hot breath of the stables, the city was being born at the top of its hill at the same time that the lights went out, emerged from nothing, from the darkness or the mist, materializing as if by chance around a pointed tower higher than the roofs or above the precise line of the wall. Then from the window of his room Jacinto Solana would look in the distance for his father's farm, the small white stain of the house next to the irrigation tank and the poplar tree, but he couldn't make it out in the uniform density that expands and descends between the supports of the wall and the first lines of olive trees like an oasis that surrounds the city, and gradually that failure of vision acquired for him a tonality of relief that also alluded to his memory, as if the distance his eyes could not decipher had also been established between his present consciousness and the fatigued and guilty habit of his memories. Magina, from the Island of Cuba, was a detail in a landscape or a watercolor by Orlando, not a city but its remote illustration, a docile pretext for contemplation, an empty corner ready to be occupied by literature, and those who had lived in it or still lived in it were losing very slowly and almost sweetly their quality of real creatures in order to conclude completely their transfiguration into characters in a book that at the end of May, as Minaya learned in the blue notebook, was very close to its final pages and no longer loomed as an impossible goal or an intimate form of siege, for it had eventually become for Jacinto Solana an almost peaceful habit of his seclusion in the country house, like the wine and conversation with Frasco and the walks with no destination among the olive trees, which took him very far from the house, toward the sierra, to the slopes of bare slate and harsh valleys of red or sulfur-colored earth as bare of any trace of human presence or eyes as the seas of the moon. After two months of living in the Island of Cuba, the old pain and the old tenderness poisoned by rage and remorse were fading like the shape of a face it is no longer possible to recall, and for that reason the pages in that notebook Minaya found in the lining of a gloomy jacket contained, intermingled with the atrocious story of the last night Mariana lived and the appearance of her corpse in the pigeon loft, short annotations written in the margins or on the back of the squared pages, in which the voice of the narrator until then dedicated to and imprisoned in the plot split in two as if folding over into the attitude of a witness. "28, May, 47. At noon it's very hot and I go down to the river to swim. Icy water. Two pages after lunch, without a single erasure." "May 30, 9 pm, a plane over the vertical of Magina, at dusk: long trail of smoke tinged with pink paler than in clouds. Maybe include it in chapter on country house, at the end, when they return to city and nobody in the car speaks." In the small hours of May 30, Solana was probably writing a passage that Minaya couldn't find, and to which some annotations in the blue notebook alluded: Manuel enters the marriage bedroom carrying Marianas dead body in his arms and lays it on the unmade bed. Minaya, who imagined that scene as if it were his own memory, abruptly found it transformed into a question of style: "Correct the fall of nightdress so thighs not exposed. Only her knees, very slim, dirty with droppings. The word 'bloodless' prohibited."