Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

In the midst of the pigeons' muffled cooing he heard the footsteps of Inés, who was coming up to tell him something — perhaps he thought then, but that too was part of an old habit, that this was how Mariana's footsteps must have sounded on a certain dawn in 1937—and before the girl came into the dovecote he already knew that Minaya was waiting for him in the library, a witness to the photographs and Orlando's drawing, but also, remotely, to the existence of Jacinto Solana and the time that in response to the incantation of his name was returning after a silence of twenty-two years. "In some newspapers from the war I found not long ago a few admirable poems by Jacinto Solana, who, I know through my father, was a good friend of yours, and to whom I would like to dedicate my doctoral dissertation," Minaya had written, trying with difficulty to reconcile dignity and lies. How it would have amused him to know that someone, after so many years, was attempting to write a solemn doctoral dissertation about his work.

" Oeuvre , Manuel, everybody is looking for and has an Oeuvre, with a capital O, just like Juan Ramón. They go down the street with the O of their Oeuvre around their necks, as if it were the frame of the portrait in which they are already posing for posterity. And I've been writing since long before I had the use of my reason, and at the age of thirty-two I don't have a bad book I can call my Oeuvre, and I'm not even sure I'm a writer."

That was all he talked about in the spring of 1936, about the need to leave the bad life of newspapers and banquets with their toasts and literary magazines and return to Mágina and lock himself inside his father's house and not leave or talk to anybody until he had finished a book that wasn't called Beatus Ille yet and was going to be not only the justification for his life but also the weapon of an uncertain vengeance because, he said, with the smile that expressed no pleasantness or bitterness but rather a very calculated complicity with himself, sometimes the success of the best was personal revenge. He thought about him and his wise, cold smile as he slowly descended the steps of the pigeon loft on his way to the courtyard where night had definitively fallen and the library where Minaya was waiting for him. In the mirror on the last landing he looked at himself to find out how his nephew would see him: he seemed old and disheveled, and there were tiny white or gray feathers on his stained trousers and his tweed jacket with the torn pockets. He smoothed back his white hair, and not without a certain uneasiness, because he was still very timid, he opened the door to the library. Minaya, his back to the door, was looking at the photograph on the fireplace, which in Manuel's catalogue had an invisible number one written on it, because it was the first one taken with Mariana and also the oldest image he had of her. After the initial silence and the stupefaction of not recognizing each other — for a moment what seemed to divide them was not immobility or the great empty space of the library but a chasm in time — Manuel came toward Minaya and embraced him, and then, resting both hands on his shoulders, stepped back to look at him with blue eyes circled in weariness beneath his lids. At close range he was a stranger, and Minaya could barely find in him any characteristic that reminded him of the tall figure glimpsed in his childhood: perhaps the hands, his hair, the set of his shoulders.

"The last time I saw you, you came just to my waist," said Manuel, and he invited him to sit down on one of the armchairs arranged in front of the fire, as if that too had been anticipated because of the delicate talent he always had for hospitality. "Did you remember the house?"

"I remembered the courtyard and the tiles, and the clock that frightened me back then. But I thought it was all much larger."

Slowly the fire, the attentive voice, Manuel's gestures, stripped away the feeling of flight, the dejection of the trains, and for the first time Madrid and the memory of prison were as distant as the winter night thickening in the plaza against the windowpanes and the white shutters, closed to protect him. Leaning back in the chair, Minaya gave in to fatigue and the warm influence of the cognac and the English cigarettes that Manuel had offered him, hearing himself talk, as if he were someone else, about his life in Madrid and the death of his parents, which occurred when a doubtful stroke of good luck in business allowed them to buy a car and treat themselves to a vacation in San Sebastián, because his father, who had hereditary nostalgia, always wanted to spend the summer like the aristocrats in the illustrated magazines he had read in his youth. He lied without will, without excessive guilt, as if each of the lies he devised had the virtue of not hiding his life but correcting it. He didn't say that in recent years he had lived in a pensión, or that the incidental pieces he occasionally published in literary magazines slipped inevitably from indifference to oblivion, he didn't speak of his fear of prison or the gray horsemen, but of the poem "Invitation," which someone had shown him in the cafeteria at the university. He had copied it, he said, and read it so many times that by now he knew it by heart, and he recited it slowly, not looking at Manuel, grasping at the only fragment of indubitable truth that sustained his imposture. Manuel nodded gravely, as if he too remembered the lines, and when Minaya finished saying them neither of them spoke, so that in the end the urgent will to die in those words remained suspended and present in the library like the final striking of a clock, like the smile and gaze of the man who had written them. Later, when they went upstairs so that Minaya could see his bedroom, Manuel opened the door to a room that contained only an iron bed and a desk placed in front of a mirror.

"Here it is," he said, "the window and the mirror in that poem. This is where he wrote it."

As they went up, the piano music that had been playing since Minaya entered the house sounded more clearly and closer. It invaded the silence and suddenly broke off in the middle of a phrase, though nothing had announced the proximity of its ending, and then all that could be heard was the beating of pigeons' wings against the glass dome. "That's my mother," said Manuel, smiling, as if excusing her for her eccentric way of playing a habanera that never advanced, that stopped abruptly and returned to the first phrase, like the exercises of a student who does not achieve the certainty of perfection. Minaya climbed the stairs, sliding his hand along the varnished, curved wood of the railing as if guided by a silk ribbon that dissolved in the music and traced lingering art nouveau curves in the angles of the labyrinth. Always, ever since he was a boy, he had liked to climb shadowy staircases in houses and movie theaters this way, and he half-closed his eyes so he had only the polished touch of the wood to guide him.

"This house is too big," said Manuel in the gallery, gesturing toward the large windows of the courtyard and the line of doors to the rooms. "It's all Ines and Teresa can do to keep it clean, and in winter it's very cold, but it has the advantage of allowing you to lose yourself in any room as if it were a desert island."

Lost forever, Minaya swore, safe, enclosed behind the white shutters to the balconies, in the heat of the fire burning in the marble fireplaces, and the clean sheets, and the water in which he dissolved with closed eyes, abandoned and alone, undamaged, naked, not fearing anything or anyone, as if fear and the obscene possibility of failure had not been able to pursue him to Magina. Manuel had left him alone in the bedroom, and before unpacking and taking a long bath that made him lose his awareness of the time and place where he found himself, he examined with gratitude and discretion the large, high bed that yielded so sweetly under the weight of his body, the deep closet, the paintings, the modern lamp on the night table, the desk facing the balcony that made him imagine tranquil afternoons of literature and indolence when he would look out at the tops of the acacias and the dark roofitiles of the houses in Magina. I'll be thrown out of here, he thought as he dried himself before a mirror, as he shaved and dressed and used the comb and razor as the tools of an actor who isn't sure he has learned his part and doesn't have time to rehearse before he's called on stage: "I'll be thrown out or I'll have to leave when I can't pretend anymore that I'm writing a book about Jacinto Solana and I don't even have enough money to take a taxi to the station." Lost forever, for two weeks, he calculated, using each hour as if it were his last coin, a respite for an impostor or a condemned man. When he left the room, bathed and relatively decent in his only suit and tie, he found himself in the parlor that opened onto the nuptial bedroom. Before they married, Manuel had assigned the front rooms on the second floor to his conjugal life with Mariana so they could have their own area separate from the rest of the house, but of that original plan all that remained was the bedroom no one had used since May 21, 1937, and the wedding photograph hanging on the wall of the parlor over the sofa with yellow flowers. Tall and erect in his lieutenant's uniform, with a small blond mustache and his hair fixed with pomade, in the photograph Manuel had the unwilling appearance of a hero frozen by the shock of the flash, his eyes staring and lost. Mariana, on the other hand, and this was not a coincidence, I suppose, but an indication of their different characters, looked at the spectator from whichever angle you contemplated the photograph. You entered the parlor and there were her large, almond eyes looking at you without expression or doubt, her white veil and ambiguous smile, her long, extended fingers resting on Manuel's arm, very close to his two lieutenant's stars. The straps, the pistol at his waist, his military bearing, were no longer anything but a simulation or testimony to what had ended, for when the photograph was taken it had been two months since Manuel had definitively been discharged from the army because of the bullet that had grazed his heart on the Guadalajara front and kept him on the verge of death for several weeks. But the clarity of his blue eyes was the same that Minaya had encountered when he met with him in the library, as well as that air of useless solidity and excessive generosity, limited only by modesty. Dressed now in a dark suit that he wore very few times during the year and prepared, because he was a gentleman and knew the norms of hospitality, to receive his nephew properly, he again resembled the tall, solemn man in the wedding photograph.