Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"Since it's very possible that Manuel won't have supper with us," he said, tense and extravagant, "I'm afraid I'll have to introduce myself on my own. Eugenio Utrera, sculptor and unworthy guest in this house, though I must inform you that very much against my will I find myself a step away from retirement. You're young Minaya, am I right? We had a real desire to meet you. Your father was a good friend of mine. Didn't he ever tell you? On one occasion the two of us were about to organize an antiques business. But sit down, please, and together let us do honor to these delectables brought to us by the beautiful Ines. I understand that you are planning to write a book about Jacinto Solana. A difficult undertaking, I would imagine, but an interesting one."

He spoke very quickly, leaning his body forward to be closer to Minaya, with a smile greedy for responses that he didn't wait for, and as he sipped his soup the air whistled through his false teeth, which at times, when he adjusted them, emitted a sound like bones knocking together. He had large, blunt hands that seemed to belong to another man, and on his left ring finger he wore a green stone, as extravagant as his smile, a testimony, just like his smile, of the time when he reached and lost his brief glory. He smiled and spoke as if sustained by the same spring, about to break, that kept his figure of an anachronistic gallant standing, and only his eyes and his hands did not participate in the will-o'-the-wisp of his gesticulations, for he could not hide the fever in his eyes sharpened every morning and every night in the mirror of old age and failure or the ruin of his useless hand that in another time had sculpted the marble and granite of official statues and modeled clay and now lay still and slowly became dull in an immobility driven by arthritis. Behind his words and the smoke of his cigarettes, his eyes, not veiled by vanity or lies, scrutinized Minaya or pursued Inés with the devotion of a dirty old man, and when she leaned over to serve him something or remove the tablecloth, Utrera remained silent and looked at her neckline out of the corner of his eye, sitting a little more erect, very serious, the fork in his hand, his napkin carefully placed in the collar of his shirt.

"She lives with an uncle who is ill, I think he's an invalid, there's something wrong with his legs or his spine. From time to time he must suffer some kind of relapse, because Inés stops coming or leaves in the middle of the afternoon, with no explanation, you must have noticed by now that she doesn't talk very much."

He ate slowly, as if he were officiating, cutting the meat into very small pieces and sipping the wine like a bird, hospitable, always careful that Minaya's glass was never empty, recalling or inventing an old friendship with his father, in those days, he said, so reviled now and so prosperous for him, when he was somebody in the city, in Spain, a well-known sculptor, as his father had perhaps told Minaya, as he undoubtedly would confirm if he visited his studio one morning and looked at the albums of press clippings where his photo and his name were reproduced and it was stated that he, Eugenio Utrera, was destined to be, as they said in Blanco y Negro, a second Mariano Ben-lliure, a present-day Martínez Montañés, and not only in Mágina, where he had recarved for the Holy Week brotherhoods all the procession statues burned by the Reds during the war, but in the entire province, in Andalucía, in the distant plazas of cities he had never visited, where the Monuments to the Fallen bore his signature written in learned Latin capitals, EVGENIO VTRERA, sculptor. Now he drank without pretense the rest of the bottle that Inés, responding to a discreet signal from him, had not taken away when she cleared the table, and he looked at his hands remembering with threadbare melancholy the unrepeatable years when his workshop was visited by presidents of brotherhoods and local heads of the Movement to commission Baroque Virgins and statues of fallen heroes, somber busts of Franco, granite angels with swords. The empty spaces of plundered altarpieces had to be filled and Holy Week thrones had to be remade that perished in the bonfires lit in every plaza in Mágina during that summer of madness, their flames leaving behind high trails of soot that can still be seen, he said, on the facades of certain churches abandoned since then, closed to worship, like the one opposite, the church of San Pedro, some of them converted into warehouses or garages. During the years following the war, Utreras workshop teemed, like an animated forest, with Virgins pierced by daggers, Christs carrying the cross, crucified, expiring, whipped by executioners on whom Utrera without the slightest scruple depicted his enemies, Christs resurrected and ascending, motionless, on clouds of metallic blue paint. In 1954, he recalled, on the first of April, the minister of the interior came to Mágina to inaugurate the Monument to the Fallen. In the midst of the hedges, among the recently planted cypresses, a monolith, a stone cross and altar, a great block of imprecise edges covered by a huge national flag. He wasn't a politician, he was an artist, he explained, but he could not remember without pride the moment when the minister pulled on the cord, making the red and yellow cloth fall to one side and revealing to applause and hymns an angel with lifted wings and a hard, windblown mane of hair who sheltered the body of the Fallen and grasped his sword, raising it with muscled arms like Caravaggio's dead Christ, which perhaps Minaya knew.

"Now I go into my workshop, and it seems a lie that any of it happened. They gave me a medal and a certificate, and the ABC published my picture in the photogravure section. I should have left Magina then, when there was still time, just like your father did. We're isolated from everything here. We turn into statues."

He, who had been in Paris, who had seen the marbles of Michelangelo and Bernini in Rome, who had been somebody and succumbed to the conspiracy of envy, of dubious enemies established in Madrid, he said, a victim now, a melancholy artist conquered by the world's ingratitude. The Monument to the Fallen in Magina was his last official commission, and since 1959 he had not carved another Holy Week image. "And it isn't that tastes have changed," he would say to whomever wanted to listen, sitting on the divan in a shadowy cafe where he spent the afternoons with a snifter of brandy and a glass of water, "they've simply become depraved, those plastic-looking Christs, those elongated Virgins with girls' faces that look like something Protestant, or Cubist." At first light he would go down to the immense workshop, which had first been a stable, when the house was built, and then a carriage-house where Manuel's father kept the trophies of his mad passion for cars, and there he would spend the morning, not doing anything, perhaps sketching models of statues that were impossible now, carving Romanesque saints, cheap falsifica-tions that had no future, looking at the vast empty space.

"I came to Magina on July 5, 1936. I had spent a month in France and Italy, and before returning to Granada, it occurred to me to visit Manuel. We had met when he was studying law, and we continued corresponding after he returned to Magina, when his father died. I was here a little more than a week, and when I was leaving, when I was saying good-bye to Manuel and his mother, Amalia came out of the kitchen and told us she had heard on the radio that the garrison in Granada had sided with the rebels. How can you go now, Manuel said, wait a while and see if the situation clarifies. And so I came to spend a few days and stayed for thirty-three years."

He was also ready to leave in 1939, but he no longer had anywhere to go, because his mother had died during the war, or at least that's what he told Manuel to justify remaining in the city and in his house. He packed his suitcase then, too, and consulted the schedules of the trains that stopped in Mágina, but this time he, who for three years had wanted the victory of those who won, knew he was probably contaminated not by the defeat of the Republic or by Manuel, who would very soon be dragged from his invalids bed to prolong his dying for six months in the Mágina prison, but by a future, his, the one he had imagined in Rome and in Paris and in the Granada discussions of his youth, definitively upended or broken in the bitter spring of 1939, wiped out, like his right to dignity and to the skill of his hands, by three years of waiting and silence, both less brutal than guilt. With his hands in his trouser pockets and his hat tilted over his face in an expression of petulance that he would improve on years later and that back then only he was capable of admiring, he would wander through the cafés looking for someone who could treat him to a drink or a cigarette, or he would spend the slow afternoons strolling through the Plaza of General Orduña, as if waiting for something, among the gray men in groups who were waiting just like him, with their hands in their pockets and their eyes fixed on the clock in the tower or on the profile of the general whose statue had been rescued from the garbage dump where it had been thrown in the summer of '36 and raised again in the middle of the plaza on a pedestal of martial allegories. He visited offices, unsuccessfully laying claim to old loyalties from long before the war, using up the hours of tedium and despair until nightfall, when the light in the clock on the tower was lit, and then, when it was too late to return to the house and pick up his suitcase and go to the station before the train arrived that would take him back to a city where no one was waiting for him, he walked slowly down the narrow lanes and swore to himself that tonight he'd have the courage to ask Manuel for the exact amount he needed to buy the ticket. He never managed to do it. Six months after the victorious troops entered Mágina, a general competition was announced to replace the image of Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, an apocryphal work by Gregorio Fernández, which had been publicly profaned and burned in July '36.