Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"But he stops talking when I come in, and he looks at me a lot, almost never in the eye, he looks at me when I turn my back, but I see him watching me in mirrors," she said, laughing only with her lips, certain of her body, grateful to it in a way that excluded adolescence and chance. For Minaya she had prepared the room located to the left of the parlor, symmetrical with the empty bedroom of Manuel and Mariana, and on the first night, when he went down to the library after bathing, Inés examined his suitcase and his books and the papers he had put in the desk, and when she opened the closet she confirmed her suspicion that the recent arrival had no suit other than the one he was wearing. Then she went to the courtyard, hovering near the half-opened library door, pretending to clean the paintings or the tiles, but then Utrera appeared, back from the café, and he began to ask her things about Minaya in his slow, drunkard's voice, what he was like, what time he had arrived, where he was now, brushing against her body in a siege either casual or cowardly, so close she could smell his breath rotten with tobacco and cognac. Utrera, who didn't go into the library because he couldn't walk a straight line and his hands were trembling, looked at her for the last time, not at her face but at her hips and belly, and then he disappeared into the depths of the house, no doubt to shut himself inside the carriage house where he had his studio, or what he called his studio, because in all the years Inés had been in Manuel's service, the old man hadn't done anything but carve a Saint Anthony for a village church and repeat to the point of satiety a series of Romanesque-looking figures that he sold regularly to a furniture store.

"You can stay here as long as you like, even when you've finished your book," she heard Manuel say, and she moved away from the library door because the voice had sounded very close by. She saw him walk out, head bowed and more distracted than usual, and she was surprised he didn't ask for his hat and coat, as he did every night, to take the long walk past the watchtowers on the wall that Medina had prescribed for him. "Inés," he said, turning to her from the stairs, "see if our guest needs anything," but she couldn't do as he asked because Teresa came out of the kitchen then and asked her to help prepare supper for Doña Elvira — Amalia, the other maid, lethargic and almost lost in blindness, gave them vague orders as she sat next to the stove. Broth, a plate of boiled vegetables, and a glass of water that she, Inés, usually took up to the señoras rooms, attending to the most unpleasant part of her work, because Doña Elvira frightened her, like some of the nuns at the orphanage where she had spent her childhood, and she looked at her in the same way. Doña Elvira spent her days examining accounting books or fashion magazines from the time of her youth with a magnifying glass, and she always had the television set on, even when she played the piano, and never looked at it. I estimate that she must have been almost ninety, but Inés says there is not a single sign of decrepitude in her eyes. She wears a black dress with lace collar and cuffs, and her hair is short and waved in the style of 1930. This afternoon, for the first time in twenty-two years, she has left her rooms and her house to go up to the cemetery and witness without tears, with a rigid expression of grief very similar to that of certain funerary statues, the burial of her son.

"Your supper, Señora," Inés said.

"Is my nephew's son, Minaya, here yet?"

"He arrived at six, Señora. He's in the library now."

"What's he like?"

"Tall, Señora, and he seems pretty quiet."

"Is he good-looking?"

"I didn't notice."

"That's a lie. He's good-looking. I can tell by looking at you. And of course you noticed. Will he stay very long?"

"It seems about two weeks."

"We'll see. He'll deceive my son, like that Utrera, who still says he's a sculptor, and he'll stay until he gets tired of living at our expense. He's bound to be a sponger, like his father."

When she came down again with the untouched tray, she saw that the light in the parlor was on, and following her custom of spying on everything — it wasn't curiosity but an instinct of her large, always open eyes and her body trained in stealth, like the eyes and body of a nocturnal animal — she could see Manuel without his detecting her, trapped in Mariana's dead gaze and then locking himself in the marriage bedroom with a key that he alone possessed, and she knew then that this return to an abandoned custom was the first consequence of the stranger's arrival and the conversation in the library. She distrusted Minaya as an affable invader, and with the same attention she had used to search his suitcase and books and smell the traces of his body in the bathroom and on the damp towels, she studied him later, in the library, enjoying his uneasiness when she looked directly into his eyes, when she brushed against him as she leaned over to fill his glass during supper in the dining room, or caught in the mirror his look of interrogation, of proclaimed desire. Silent and hostile, alert to the danger, she entered the library to see Minaya up close now that he was alone. They would remember afterward that it was the first time they spoke to each other, and that Minaya stood when he saw her and didn't know what to say when Inés asked if he wanted anything as she waited in the doorway, undecipherable and submissive, her chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail and her beautiful girl's hands abused by the murky water in washtubs. She had just turned eighteen, and with her mere presence she knew how to establish an invisible distance between herself and the things that brushed against her without ever touching her, between her body and the looks that desired it, and the obscure, exhausting work she did in the house. She scrubbed the floors and made the beds and spent hours on end kneeling beside a bucket of dirty water to clean the flagstones in the courtyard, and five times a day she carried food or tea to Dona Elvira, holding the silver tray with the same absorbed elegance as those figures of saints in old paintings who hold before them the emblems of their martyrdom, but she and her body kept themselves safe, and every night at about eleven, from the balcony of his bedroom, Minaya saw her go out to the plaza in her coat that was too short and her flat shoes, haughty and suddenly free and moving away to another place and another life that neither he nor anyone else knew about, just as no one, not even he, could determine her thoughts or find out about her past before the day she came to the house recommended by the nuns of the or phanage where she had lived until she was twelve or thirteen years old. She walked to another life every night, to a rented room off the plaza where Utrera's Monument to the Fallen stood. But at first, that afternoon in the library, before desire and the will to know, Minaya was moved only by gratitude and fear of her beauty and his customary predilection for very slim girls.

"Still a little skinny, but wait until you see her in a couple of years," said Utrera, examining her shamelessly from across the table with his little damp eyes, as lively as points of light in the midst of the wrinkles on his eyelids. When the clock struck nine, Minaya had entered the empty dining room that was too large, thinking that the setting placed across from his was his uncle's, but after a few minutes of solitude and waiting it was not Manuel who came in but a tiny, talkative old man who smelled vaguely of alcohol and wore a white carnation in his lapel. Everything about him, except his hands, was small and carefully arranged, and his impeccable baldness seemed like an attribute of his orderliness, like the gleam of his dentures and the bow tie that topped his shirt.