Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"Let's go," said Beatriz, and she opened the car door, but the wounded man and the other man didn't seem to hear her, as if they didn't believe in the mirage she announced when she showed them the house. She got out with her head bowed to keep the branches of the olive tree from tangling in her hair, and when she looked again for the light she had seen slipping from window to window, like ghosts in the movies, she couldn't find it, but there was a motionless figure in the middle of the esplanade, at the edge of the river embankment, and although from that distance it was impossible for her to see his face, she recognized in a melancholy way, like someone who listens to a piece of music and recovers an intimate feeling that had been forgotten, the shape of his shoulders, the way Jacinto Solana sometimes looked at things with his head tilted to one side and his hands lazily thrust into his pockets. "I'll go alone," she said then, "you two wait here." She crossed the tracks, the bridge, she disappeared in the fog, emerged on the other side of the river, and from there she turned to verify with relief that the car had dissolved in the shadow of the two olive trees hiding it. As indifferent and silent as a tree mineralized by the moon, Solana didn't notice her approach, and saw Beatriz only when she was almost at the end of the road and said his name, first in a quiet voice, as if she were afraid the light that dilated forms and endowed them with the hardness of figures of salt could also enlarge and disfigure the sound of voices, then shouting or perhaps hearing her own voice like the pale shouts in dreams, because the sound of the water erased it, and it vanished in the brilliance of the moon and in the warped space of the olive groves and the liquid blue sierra, as weightless and extended as the fog. "Jacinto," she said again, in a louder voice, but her voice didn't sound to him like a shout, "it's me, Beatriz."

"The three of them are dead," he wrote a few hours later in the blue notebook, after leaving them hidden in the wine cellar and lowering the heavy trap door with the feeling he was adjusting the slab of stone over a tomb, "they're dead and they know it, and maybe I am too, because death is a contagious disease. When they put the car in the shed and I took them to the kitchen, they walked back and forth as if they were in a death cell and ate with the same bitter greed I saw so often in those men who knew they were going to be shot at daybreak. The wounded one shakes and sweats with fever and Beatriz passes him a wet handkerchief for his forehead, and then she returns to scraping the bottom of a can of sardines with her oil-stained fingers, with her long painted nails. They tell me they've gone twenty-four hours without eating, that last night, after the encounter with the Civil Guard, they fled along highways they didn't know and didn't stop until dawn, in an abandoned house, in the middle of a red plain where there was nothing and nobody, not a tree or an animal or a human or a sierra or a city in the distance. At nightfall they left again for the south, and suddenly, Beatriz says, when she had lost consciousness of how many hours she had been driving, she saw in the headlights the sign for a city, Magina, and then a lit, deserted gas station that might have a public telephone. As on other occasions, in years gone by, when letters hadn't been enough and she would call Manuel to ask if he knew anything about me, she asked the operator for his number and waited a long time until she heard the alarmed voice stupid with sleep that said the Island of Cuba and explained how to get here. The Island of Cuba, she says to me with exhausted irony, only you could end up living in a place with a name like that.'"

They were dead, though nobody came to find them in the wine cellar for the whole day they spent there and where they would still be if on the following night, when the wounded one had already lost consciousness and was raving and groaning as he writhed on the pillows and blankets they put down for him in the backseat of the car, they managed to cross the sierra on the road Solana showed them from the Island of Cuba, the old muledrivers' route, abandoned when they paved the main highway, because they carried death with them like fugitives from a city invaded by the plague. They were dead from the precise moment that the passenger, who had not said a single word since they left Madrid, as if silence were a part of his clandestine identity, asked them to stop the car in the middle of a plain through which the highway ran limitlessly in a straight line toward a darkness whose final boundary it didn't seem they would ever reach, got out, tilting his hat over his eyes, then stopping at the ditch, his back to them, as if he were looking for something on the dark horizon, his hand in his jacket pocket where he probably had a pistol. In the rearview mirror Beatriz saw yellow headlights that grew larger until they blinded her and lit the side of the man who was still motionless and taller against the line of darkness. She heard doors open and then a distant voice, a shout, an order, and the passenger turned toward the light and began to run slipping on the gravel in the ditch, and when he was already getting into the car he was paralyzed for a moment against the window, staggering once, and then again, clutching at the edge of the door when the second shot sounded, falling back inside like a soldier wounded as he left the trenches.

Dead, Solana thought as he watched them eat, his elbow on the mantle over the fireplace, witnessing from a solitude untouched by their appearance the devastation caused by flight and fear, the persistence of failure, the clothes abused and covered with dust, the unshaven faces, the border of sweat around the collars of white shirts. Beatriz' high heels twisted when she walked, and her tall hairdo collapsed over her forehead when she bent toward the wounded man. It wasn't the failure and general rout at the end of the war, he recalled, because then the razed fields and the entire universe seemed to share in the defeat of the men who filled the highways like flocks of despair and silence, but a solitary flight, unpremeditated, absurd, the abandonment of a place conquered by fire whose survivors escaped still wearing the clothes of the fiesta they were celebrating, the light jackets and trousers for the June night, the delicate torn stockings, the perfumed handkerchiefs soaked in blood. When she finished eating, Beatriz wiped her oily mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of red on it. She smoked with her eyes closed, exhaling large mouthfuls of smoke, and the other one, her lover, the coward who loved her who hadn't even had the courage to look at Solana when he shook his hand, went up to her and stood behind her, as if he were guarding her sleep, and when he bent down to say something in her ear, he put a hand on her shoulder and extended his fingers very gently until he touched her neck. "I watched them, I knew he wasn't going to say anything to her, that anything he might say would be nothing but a pretext to get closer to her and demonstrate to me, or to his own fear of losing her, that he could talk to her in a tone of voice that only lovers use and put his hand on her shoulder and caress her neck. Then Beatriz opened her eyes and slowly moved his hand away while she looked at me, as if the immobility of her eyes on mine could wipe out the house and the persecution and the night and leave us alone at the beginning of time. Brusquely I pretended I was tending to the wounded man: I looked for water, a glass, I moistened his lips and when I looked at Beatriz again, her eyes no longer searched for mine and the other one's hands lay white and useless on the back of the chair where she was leaning."

He wrote again that night, when he lowered the trapdoor to the wine cellar and recovered as if it were a gift the feeling or appearance of his solitude in the house, he closed all the shutters on the ground floor and checked the chamber and the safety on his pistol and put it on the table while he wrote in the blue notebook as if even after finishing his book he couldn't elude the instinct of literature, Minaya thought, as if things didn't happen completely until he had transmuted them into words that didn't crave the future or the light, only the unmitigated intensity of their own poison, hard words written for oblivion and the fire. He wrote past dawn, and the next night, when the others left, even before the car drove away along the road to the sierra, he closed the outside door of the house and returned to the pen and the blue notebook to recount their departure, but this time he didn't even have time to finish a page, and the last words he managed to write were the prelude to his own death. He heard dogs barking and when he went to the window, he saw the military capes moving, cautiously climbing the embankment, the cold gleam of the moon on the patent leather of the three-cornered hats. That's exactly how Minaya imagined him: unexpectedly liberated from fear and literature, he thought about the others, about Beatriz' gaze, about her pride without supplication and her loyalty firmer than disenchantment and betrayal. Beyond the last line in the blue notebook, in a space free of reality and words, not recalled by any memory, Minaya wanted to contrive the ambiguous figure of a hero: Solana still hears the engine moving away and estimates that Beatriz will press harder on the accelerator when she hears the first shots behind her. While he stays at the window shooting at the pursuers, the car will enter the sierra and gain ten minutes or an hour or an entire day of urgent freedom. Calmly he records the proximity of the shadows that come along the river and fan out on the red clay of the embankment to surround the house, and then, just as he has closed the notebook and replaced the cap on the pen, he puts out the candle, takes the safety off the pistol, leans partially out the window, still protected by the darkness, waiting until the Guards have come so close he can reach them with his bullets.