A Manuscript of Ashes

1

SHE CLOSED THE DOOR very slowly and went out with the stealth of someone leaving a sick person who has just fallen asleep at midnight. I listened to her slow steps along the hallway, fearing or wishing she would return at the last minute to leave her suitcase at the foot of the bed and sit down on the edge with a gesture of surrender or fatigue, as if she had already returned from the journey she had never been able to take until tonight. When the door closed the room was left in darkness, and now my only illumination is the thread of light that enters from the hall and slides in a tapering line to the legs of the bed, but at the window there is dark blue night and through the open shutters comes the breeze of a night that is almost summer, crossed in the far distance by the whistles of express trains that travel under the moon along the livid valley of the Guadalquivir and climb the slopes of Magina on their way to the station where he, Minaya, is waiting for her now without even daring to hope that Inés, slim and alone, with her short pink skirt and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, will appear at a corner of the platform. He is alone, sitting on a bench, smoking perhaps as he looks at the red lights and the tracks and the cars stopped at the end of the station and of the night. Now, when she closed the door, I can, if I want, imagine him for myself alone, that is, for no one, I can bury my face beneath the turned-down bedclothes that Inés smoothed with so much secret tenderness before she left, and then, waiting in the darkness and in the heat of my body under the sheets, I can imagine or recount what happened and even direct their steps, those of Inés and his, on the way to their encounter and mutual acknowledgment on the empty platform, as if at this moment I had invented and depicted their presence, their desire, and their guilt.

She closed the door and didn't turn around to look at me because I had forbidden it, I saw for the last time only her slender white neck and the beginning of her hair, and then I heard her steps fading as they moved away to the end of the hallway, where they stopped. Perhaps she put the suitcase on the floor and turned back to the door she had just closed, and then I was afraid and probably wished she wouldn't continue, but in an instant the footsteps could be heard again, farther away, very hollow now, on the stairs, and I know that when she reached the courtyard she stopped again and raised her eyes to the window, but I didn't look out because it was no longer necessary. My consciousness is enough, and the solitude, and the words I say quietly to guide her to the street and the station where he doesn't know how not to go on waiting for her. It is no longer necessary to write in order to guess things or invent them. He, Minaya, doesn't know that, and I suppose that some day he will succumb, inevitably, to the superstition of writing because he doesn't recognize the value of silence or blank pages. Now as he waits for the train that, when this night ends and he arrives in Madrid, will have taken him away forever from Màgina, he looks at the deserted tracks and the shadows of the olive trees beyond the adobe walls, but between his eyes and the world, Inés and the house where he met her persist, along with the wedding portrait of Mariana, the mirror where Jacinto Solana looked at himself as he wrote a poem laconically entitled "Invitation." Like the first day, when he came to the house with the ill-fated melancholy of a guest who has recently gotten off the worst trains of the night, Minaya, in the station, still contemplates the white facade from the other side of the fountain, the tall house half hidden by the mist of water that rises and falls back into the overflowing stone basin and sometimes goes higher than the rounded tops of the acacias. He looks at the house and senses behind him other glances that will converge there to expand its image by adding the distance of all the years that have passed since it was built, and he no longer knows if he remembers it himself or if rising in front of his eyes is the sedimented memory of all the men who have looked at it and lived in it since long before he was born. Undeniable perception, he thinks, amnesia, are gifts possessed completely only by mirrors, but if there were a mirror capable of remembering, it would be set up before the facade of the house, and only it would have perceived the succession of what was immobile, the fable concealed beneath the stillness of closed balconies, its persistence in time.

At nightfall yellow lights are lit at the corners, which don't illuminate the plaza but only sculpt in the dark the entrance to a lane, brighten a patch of whitewash or the shape of a grating, suggest the doorway of a church in whose highest vaulted niche there is a vague Saint Peter decapitated by the rage of another time. The church, closed since 1936, and the headless apostle who still lifts an amputated hand in blessing, give the plaza its name, but the width of the plaza, never opened and very rarely disturbed by cars, is defined by the palace. The palace is older than the acacias and the hedges, but the fountain was already there when it was built, brought from Italy four centuries earlier by a duke who was devoted to Michelangelo, as was the church and its gargoyles, black with lichens, who when it rains expel water onto the street as if it were vomit. From the plaza, behind the trees, like a casual traveler, Minaya looks at the architecture of the house, still hesitating at the bronze door knockers, two gilded hands that strike the dark wood and produce a somber, delayed resonance in the courtyard, under the glass dome. Marble flagstones, white columns supporting the glass-enclosed gallery, rooms with wooden floors where footsteps sounded as they would in a ship's cabin, that day, the only one, when he was six years old and they brought him to the house and he walked on the mysterious parquet floor as if he were finally stepping on the material and dimensions of a space worthy of his imagination. Before that afternoon, when they walked through the plaza on their way to the Church of Santa Maria, his mother would squeeze his hand and walk faster to keep him from stopping on the sidewalk, trapped by the desire to stay there forever looking at the house, imagining what was behind the door that was so high and the balconies and the round windows at the top floor that lit up at night like the portholes of a submarine. At that time Minaya perceived things with a clarity very similar to astonishment and was always inventing mysterious connections among them that didn't explain the world to him but made it inhabited by fables or threats. Because he observed his mother's hostility toward the house, he never asked her who lived there, but once, when the boy went with him to visit someone, his father stopped next to the fountain and with the sad irony that was, as Minaya learned many years later, his only weapon against the tenacity of his failure, he said:

"Do you see that big house? Well, my cousin Manuel, your uncle, lives there."

From then on, the house and its mythological resident acquired for him the heroic stature of a movie adventure. Knowing a man lived in it who was inaccessible and yet his uncle produced in Minaya a pride similar to what he felt at times when he imagined that his real father was not the sad man who fell asleep every night at the table after making endless calculations in the margins of the newspaper, but the Coyote or Captain Thunder or the Masked Avenger, a comic book character dressed in dark clothing and almost always wearing a mask, who one day, very soon Minaya hoped, would come for him after a very long journey and return him to his true life and the dignity of his name. His father, the other one, who almost always was a shadow or a melancholy impostor, sat on one of the red easy chairs in his bedroom. The light had red tonalities when he closed the curtains, and on a pink background, as if in a camera obscura, small inverted silhouettes were outlined on the ceiling in the warm semidarkness: a boy with a blue apron, a man on horseback, a slow cyclist, as detailed as a drawing in a book, who glided, head down, toward an angle of the wall and disappeared there behind the blue boy and the tenuous rider who preceded him.

Minaya knew something was going to happen that very afternoon. A truck had stopped at the door, and a gang of unknown, frightening men who smelled of sweat had walked calmly through the rooms, picking up the furniture in their bare arms, dragging the trunk that held his mother's dresses out to the street, throwing everything into confusion, shouting to one another words that he didn't know and that made him afraid. They hung a grapple and pulley from the eaves, ran a rope along it, stood on the balcony, attached the furniture he loved best, and Minaya, hidden behind a curtain, watched how an armoire that seemed to have been damaged by those men, a table with curved legs where a plaster dog had always stood, and his disassembled bed swung over the street as if they were about to fall and break into pieces to the guffaws of the invaders. So that no torture would be denied him that afternoon, his mother had dressed him in the sailor suit she took out of the closet only when they were going to visit some gloomy relative. That's why he was hiding, aside from the fear the men caused in him, because if the boys on the street saw him dressed like that, with a blue bow on his chest and the absurd tippet that reminded him of an altar boy's habit, they would laugh at him with the uniform cruelty of their group, because they were like the men devastating his house: dirty, big, inexplicable, and wicked.

My God, his mother said afterward in the now empty dining room, looking at the bare walls, the lighter spots where the pictures had been, biting her painted lips, and her voice didn't sound the same in the stripped house. They had closed the door and were holding him by the hand as they walked in silence, and they didn't answer when he asked where they were going, but he, his intelligence sharpened by the sudden irruption of disorder, knew before they turned the corner of the Plaza of San Pedro and stopped at the door with the bronze door knockers that were a woman's hands. His father adjusted the knot of his tie and stood straighter in his Sunday suit as if to recover all his stature, prodigious at the time. "Go on, you knock," he said to his mother, but she refused, sourly, to listen. "Woman, you wouldn't want us to leave Magina without saying good-bye to my cousin."

White columns; a high dome of red, yellow, blue glass; a gray-haired man who didn't resemble any movie heroes and who took him by the hand and led him to a large room with a parquet floor, where the last light of the afternoon shone like a cold moon while a large shadow that may not belong to reality but to the modifications of memory inundated the walls supernaturally covered with all the books in the world. First he was motionless, sitting on the edge of a chair so high his feet didn't touch the floor, awed by the size of everything: the bookshelves, the large windows that faced the plaza, the vast space over his head. A slow-moving woman dressed in mourning came to serve them small steaming cups of coffee, and she offered him something, a candy or a biscuit, using formal address, something that disconcerted him as much as finding out that the case that was so tall and dark and covered with glass was a clock. They, Minaya's parents and the man whom they had taken to calling his uncle, spoke in quiet voices, in a distant, neutral tone that made him drowsy, acting like a sedative for his excitement and allowing him to retreat into the secret delight of looking at everything as if he were alone in the library.

"We're going to Madrid, Manuel," his father said. "And there we'll have a clean slate. In Magina there's no stimulus for an enterprising man, there's no dynamism, no market."

Then his mother, very rigid and sitting next to him, covered her face with her hands, and it took Minaya a little while to realize that the strange, dry noise she was making was weeping, because until that afternoon he had never seen her cry. For the first time it was the weeping without tears that he learned to recognize and spy on for many years, and as he learned when his parents were already dead and safe from all misfortune or ruin, it revealed in his mother the obstinate, useless rancor toward life and the man who was always on the verge of becoming rich, of finding the partner or the opportunity that he too deserved, of breaking the siege of bad luck, of going to prison once because of a run-of-the-mill swindle.

"Your grandmother Cristina, Son, she was the one who began our misfortune, because if she hadn't been stupid enough to fall in love with my father and renounce her family in order to marry him, we'd be the ones living now in my cousin's palace and I'd have the capital to be a success in business. But your grandmother liked poetry and romanticism, and when my poor devil of a father, may he rest in peace and may God forgive me, dedicated some poems to her and told her a few vulgar cliches about love and twilight, she didn't care if he was a clerk at the registry office or that Don Apolonio, her father, your great-grandfather, threatened to disinherit her. And he certainly did disinherit her, as if it were a serialized novel, and he didn't see her again or ask about her for the rest of his life, which turned out to be short because of that unpleasantness, and he ruined her and me, and also you and your children if you have any, because how can I raise my head and give you a future if bad luck has pursued me since before I was born?"

"But it's absurd for you to complain. If my grandmother Cristina hadn't married your father, you wouldn't have been born."

"And you think that's a small privilege?"

A few days after the funeral of his parents, who when they died left him some family portraits and a rare instinct for sensing the proximity of failure, Minaya received a condolence letter from his Uncle Manuel, written in the same very slanted and pointed hand he would recognize four years later in the brief invitation to spend a few weeks in February in Magina, offering him his house and his library and all the help he could offer in his research on the life and work of Jacinto Solana, the almost unpublished poet of the generation of the Republic about whom Minaya was writing his doctoral dissertation.

"My cousin would like to be English," said his father. "He takes tea in the middle of the afternoon, smokes his pipe in a leather armchair, and to top it off, he's a leftist, as if he were a bricklayer."

Not daring yet to use the knocker, Minaya searches in his overcoat for his uncle's letter as if it were a safe-conduct that would be demanded of him when the door was opened, when he crosses once more the entrance where there was a tile frieze and tries to reach the courtyard where he wandered that afternoon as if he were lost, expecting his parents to come out of the library, because the maid who had used usted with him led him away when his mother's weeping began, and he was possessed by the enduring fascination of the solemn faces that looked down at him from the paintings on the walls and by the light and the design of large flowers or birds formed by the panes of glass in the dome. At first he limited himself to walking in a straight line from one column to the next, because he liked the sound of his own methodical footsteps, and it was like inventing one of those games that only he knew, but then he dared to climb very silently the first steps toward the gallery, and his own image in the mirror on the landing obliged him to stop, a guardian or symmetrical enemy that forbade him to advance toward the upper rooms or enter the imaginary hallway that extended to the other side of the glass and where perhaps oblivion keeps several faces of Mariana that are not exactly the same, the print of Manuel when he went up after her in his lieutenant's uniform, the expression that Jacinto Solana's eyes had only one time in the small hours of May 21, 1937, unaware it was the eve of the crime, after being carried away by her caresses and tears on the grass in the garden and telling each other that guilt and the war didn't matter on that night when giving in to sleep would have been a betrayal of happiness.

In that mirror where Inés will not see herself again, Minaya knows he will look for impossible traces of a boy dressed in a sailor suit who stopped in front of it twenty years earlier when a voice, his father's, ordered him to come down. In the courtyard his father was taller than his cousin, and seeing his impeccable jacket and spotless boots and the opulent gesture with which he consulted the watch whose gold chain crossed his vest, one would have said he was the owner of the house. "If I'd had just half the opportunities my cousin has had from the time he was born," he would say, trapped between rancor and envy and an unconfessed family pride, because when all was said and done, he too was the grandson of the man who built the house. He spoke of Manuel's errant ways and the lethargy into which his life seemed to have fallen since the day a stray bullet killed the woman he had just married, but his irony was never more poisonous than when he recalled his cousin's political ideas and the influence this Jacinto Solana had on them, a man who earned his living working for leftist papers in Madrid and who once spoke at a meeting of the Popular Front in the Màgina bull ring, who was sentenced to death after the war and then pardoned and who left prison to die in the way he deserved in a skirmish with the Civil Guard. And in this manner, ever since he had the use of his reason and the memory to recall sitting at the table after meals when his father made conjectures regarding senseless business deals and did long arithmetical operations in the margins of the newspaper, cursing the ingratitude of fortune and the insulting indolence and prosperity of his cousin, Minaya had formed a very blurred and at the same time very precise image of Manuel that was always inseparable from that one afternoon in his childhood and a certain idea of ancient heroism and peaceful seclusion. Now, when Manuel is dead and in Minaya's imagination his real story has supplanted the mystery of the gray-haired man who occupied it for twenty years, I want to invoke not his flight this evening but his return, the moment when he holds the letter he received in Madrid and prepares to knock at the door and is afraid it will be opened, but he doesn't know that returning and fleeing are the same, because tonight too, when he was leaving, he looked at the white facade and the circular windows on the top floor where a light that illuminates no one is shining, as if the submarine he wanted to inhabit in his childhood had been abandoned and was sailing without a pilot through an ocean of darkness. I'll never come back, he thinks, enraged in his grief, in his flight, in the memory of Ines, because he loves literature and the good-byes forever that occur only in books, and he walks along the lanes with his head lowered, as if charging the air, and he comes out on the Plaza of General Orduna, where there's a taxi that will take him to the station, perhaps the same one he took three months earlier when he came to Magina to find in Manuel's house a refuge from his fear. It will be my pleasure to help you any way I can in your research on Jacinto Solana who, as you know, lived for a time in this house, in 1947, when he left prison, he had written, but I'm afraid you won't find a single trace of his work here, because everything he wrote before his death was destroyed in circumstances you no doubt can imagine.

2

A PRETEXT, AT FIRST, a secondary lie learned perhaps from those contrived by his father so he could go on wearing a suit and tie and polished shoes, a casual alibi so that the act of fleeing and not continuing to resist the harsh inclemency of misfortune would resemble a positive act of will. Minaya was alone and in a kind of daze in a corner of the cafeteria at the university, far from everything, brushing the rim of an empty cup with the tip of his cigarette and silently putting off the moment of going out to the wintry avenue where hard, gray horsemen stood guard, and he hadn't yet thought of Jacinto Solana or the possibility of using his name to save himself from persecution; he thought, having recently emerged from a detention cell on the Puerta del Sol, only about interrogations and the sirens of police wagons and the body that had lain as if at the bottom of a well on the concrete or paving stones of a courtyard at State Security headquarters. Around him he saw unfamiliar faces that clustered at the counter and at the nearby tables with briefcases of notes and overcoats that seemed to protect them with identical efficiency from winter and the suspicion of fear, secure in the warm air and cigarette smoke and voices, firm in their names, their chosen futures, as irrevocably unaware of the silent presence among them of the emissaries of tyranny as they, children of forgetting, were unaware that the pine groves and redbrick buildings they walked past had been a battlefield thirty years earlier. He was alone forever and definitively dead, he later told Inés, ever since the day the guards trapped him and with punches and kicks from their black boots forced him into a van with metal gratings, ever since he left prison with his belt in a pocket and his shoelaces in his hand, because they had been confiscated when they took him to the cell, perhaps to keep him from dismally hanging himself, and were returned only a few minutes before he was released, but they said the other one had committed suicide, that he took advantage of a moment's carelessness on the part of the guards who were interrogating him to throw himself down into the courtyard and die in handcuffs. He, Minaya, had survived the blows and the ghastly wait to be called for another interrogation, but even after he was out, the slightest sound grew until it became the deafening noise of bolts and heavy metal doors in his dreams, and every night the sheets on his bed were as rough as the blankets they gave him when he entered the cell, and his body retained the stink it had acquired in the basements, behind the last grating, when they took away his watch, his belt, his matches, his shoelaces, and handed him those two gray blankets that smelied of horse sweat.

But deeper than his fear of footsteps in the corridor and the methodical fury of hard slaps in the face, those five days left Minaya with an unpleasant sensation of impotence and helpless solitude that refuted all certainty and forever denied the right to salvation, rebelliousness, or pride. How to redeem himself from the cold at daybreak that penetrated beneath the blankets where he hid his head in order not to see the perpetual yellow light hung between the corridor and the cell's peephole or to invent in the name of what or whom a justification for the smell of confined bodies and cigarette butts, where to find a handhold to keep him steady when he didn't know if it was day or night and he leaned the back of his neck against the wall waiting for a guard to come in and say his name. It was on the second night that he thought of returning to Màgina. The cold woke him, and he remembered that he had dreamed about his father putting on his boots in the red bedroom and looking at him with the pale smile of a dead man. He told Inés that in his dream there was a pink, icy light and a feeling of distance or ungraspable tenderness that was also the light of May coming in and waking him from a balcony of his childhood where swallows built their nests or lingering in midafternoon over a plaza with acacias. In vain he closed his eyes and tried to resume the dream or recover it whole without forfeiting its pleasure or the exact tone of its color, but even after he lost the dream, the name of Màgina remained as if it were an illumination of his memory, as if saying it were enough to tear down walls of forgetting and to have before him the intact city, available and remote on its blue hill, more and more precise in its invitation and its inviolable distance, while for Minaya all the streets and faces and rooms in Madrid were transformed into snares of a persecution that did not end when they released him, that continued to crouch behind him, all around him, when he drank a cup of coffee in the cafeteria at the university; and on the other side of the windows, among the dark green, rainwashed pines, he saw the gray horsemen, dismounted now, serene, the visors of their helmets raised, like weary knights who without disarming allow their steeds to graze on the grass wet with dew, near the waiting jeeps.

Then someone came and talked to him about Jacinto Solana: dead, unpublished, renowned, heroic, disappeared, probably shot at the end of the war. Minaya had finished his coffee and was getting ready to leave when the other man, armed with a briefcase and a glass of cognac, spread before him his combative enthusiasm, his friendship, which Minaya never asked for, the evidence of a discovery that in the future would probably provide him with a summa cum laude. "His name was, his name is, José Manuel Luque," he told Inés, "and I can't imagine him without running the risk of anachronisms, impassioned, I suppose, addicted to clandestine conversations, ignoring discouragement and doubt, carrying forbidden papers in his briefcase, determined to have destiny fulfill what they affirm, and with a beard and rough workman's boots."

"Jacinto Solana. Make a note of the name, Minaya," the other man said, "because I'll be sure you hear it in the future and read these poems. They were published in Hora de España, in the July 1937 issue. Though I warn you this is only an appetizer for what you'll see later."

"Invitation," read Minaya, fifteen lines without rhyme, without any apparent rhythm, as if the person who wrote them had with absolute premeditation renounced indicating any emphasis, so that the words would sound as if spoken in a quiet voice, with sustained coldness, with the serene purpose of achieving perfection and silence, as if perfection, and not even the act of writing, mattered. A man alone was writing in front of a mirror and closing his lips before saying the only name that dwelled in him in order to look at himself in a tranquil invitation to suicide. At the end, "Mágina, May 1937." Each line, each word sustained on the negation of itself, was an ancient call that seemed to have been written only so Minaya might know it, not in a vast future but on that precise afternoon, in just that place, thirty-one years and eight months later, as if in the mirror where that man was looking at himself as he wrote he had seen Minaya's eyes, his predestined loyalty.

"Valuable, Minaya, it's true, I don't deny any of the value you attribute to it, but you haven't seen the best things yet. Read these ballads. You can see they're photocopies from El Mono Azul. They were published between September '36 and May '37."

With gestures of clandestinity, of mystery, he pawed through his briefcase among smeared, duplicated pages and notebooks of notes, looking all around the cafeteria before showing Minaya a pile of photocopies that appeared in his hand like a magician's pigeon, just arrived from Mexico, he said, fragile, as sacred as relics, like the manuscripts of a persecuted, hidden faith, heavy with heroic memory and conspiracy. El Mono Azul, Weekly Pamphlet of the Alliance of Anti fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture, Madrid, Thursday, October i, 1936, the black rectangle of an undecipherable photograph: Rafael Alberti, José Bergamin, and Jacinto Solana in the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment. Then the other man spread out before Minaya the ballads "The Iron Militia," "The Ballad of Lina Odena," "The Twentieth of July," "International Brigades." The name at the bottom of each one, Jacinto Solana, almost erased among the large letters of the titles, like his face in the photograph, lost in forgetting, in a time that never seemed to have existed, but the voice wasn't the same one Minaya had heard when he read the first poem. Now it was confused with the others, exalted by the same fervor, by the monotony of rage, as if the man who had written the ballads was not the one who looked at himself, enclosed and alone, in the mirror of a shadowy room. He read the name of the city and the date again, "Magina, May 1937," like a countersign that the other man, José Manuel Luque, could not see, like an invitation deeper than the one offered by the poems, without calculating yet the possible alibi, only astonished that for the second time in a matter of days the inert territory of his consciousness where the city lay, his own wasted, distant life, had opened again like a wound. "I know he didn't die," he was going to say, recalling his father's sad monologues in which the name of Jacinto Solana sometimes appeared, "I know he didn't disappear from the world when the war ended, that he got out of prison and went back to Magina to go on fighting as if the fury that had moved him when he wrote the ballads still lived in him and perhaps came to an end only when they killed him." But he didn't say anything; he nodded in silence at the other man's enthusiasm, then listening to the usual predictions about the irremediable decay and fall of the tyranny, about the united general strike that would bring it down if everyone, including him, Minaya, devoted themselves to the struggle, shoulder to shoulder. For it seems that after thirty years they are still using the same words that had not been exhausted by the evidence of defeat, the same blind inherited certainty that they could not have learned back then because they hadn't been born yet, the secret, single word said in a quiet voice in rooms full of smoke and conspiracy, the initials written in red brushstrokes on the walls of midnight, in the vacant fields of fear. Blind, bold, fearless, between the legs of the Cyclops that takes a step and squashes them without even noticing, who lifts them up in his hand to throw them down into a courtyard sealed off by gray walls, in handcuffs, already dead, still undamaged in their condition of the heroic dead.

"And nobody knows about it, Minaya, absolutely nobody, and it will remain unpublished until I bring it to light, I mean, if you keep my secret. I've even thought of the title for my doctoral dissertation: 'Literature and Political Engagement in the Spanish Civil War. The Case of Jacinto Solana.' You can't deny it sounds good."

Minaya cleaned a section of clouded glass and saw the motionless horsemen at the corners again. Gray overcoats in the January dusk, hard faces restrained under helmets, black rubber truncheons hanging from the saddlebows, raised like swords when they galloped in pursuit among the cars. He drained his glass, vaguely noted the date and password for a clandestine appointment he wouldn't keep, promised silence and gratitude, left the cafeteria and the university, crossing in front of the horsemen and the barred windows of the jeeps, hoping fear wouldn't be noticed in his calm step, his lowered head. Abruptly, that night, he imagined the lie and wrote the letter, and later he told Inés that it took ten interminable days to receive Manuel's reply, and on the night train that brought him to Mágina he didn't hear anybody speak, and there were indolent guards in civilian clothes smoking as they leaned against the dark windows in the corridors, looking at him at times as if they recognized him.

3

INÉS SAID SHE SAW HIM standing among the acacias, not yet decided, examining the house, the balconies, the white plaster moldings, as if giving time to his memory to recognize them, still and solitary behind the fountain's rim, not protecting himself from the fine spray that dampened his hair and overcoat, indifferent to it. She was changing the sheets on the bed in the room that Manuel had told her that same morning to prepare for the guest, and she said that from the first time she looked out from the balcony and saw him there in the plaza, staring so intently at the house, she knew who he was, and that very soon, when he tossed away the cigarette and picked up the suitcase in a gesture of brusque resolve, the bell would ring in the silence of the courtyard and then Teresa's footsteps would sound on the marble flagstones. She went out to the gallery and hid behind the curtains to see him from the front when the door opened, framed in the light of the threshold, tall, his hair tousled and damp, with a gray-checked overcoat and sloping shoulders that emphasized his air of fatigue and a small suitcase he didn't want to give to Teresa when she asked him into the parlor room where the fire was already lit.

"Inés," Teresa called, going to the stairwell, "tell Don Manuel that his nephew's here, the one from Madrid."

INÉS REMAINED QUIET on the other side of the curtains, her face very close to the glass, because she liked to stand that way for hours, behind the windows, looking at the street or the courtyard with white columns or the animal pen with a poplar tree and a dry well that she has to cross for the last time tonight on her way to the Magina station. She liked to look at everything from a distance, immobile things, the passage of light across the glass in the dome, and without anyone noticing her presence — she was so stealthy and slim that only a very attentive ear, one alerted ahead of time, could detect her — she pressed her nose and forehead to the glass and traced lines or words left by her breath, returned to an extremely slow time, the time of her childhood, lost in it, immune to the voices calling her. Before going back to the kitchen with her swaying walk, Teresa looked up from the middle of the courtyard, searching for Inés' shadow behind the gallery curtains, because she suspected she hadn't obeyed her and was still there, watching her, perhaps choosing a favorable angle that would allow her to still see the new arrival, and ordered her again to hurry and let Don Manuel know. The clocks struck six, first the clock in the parlor, very close to Inés, and a few seconds later, when the girl was already climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, the bells of the clock in the library, sounding deep and distant to her, startled Minaya, who hadn't dared to sit down and remained standing, very firm and attentive, at the closed door, his coat over his arm and the suitcase close by, as if he still weren't sure he would be accepted in the house. Reality, I calculate, imposed unpleasant corrections on his memory. The ceiling wasn't as high as he remembered, and the books no longer prodigiously covered every wall, but the parquet floor shone exactly as before and creaked slightly under his feet, and a fire was burning in the marble fireplace to receive him. There were two large windows divided into rectangles by white woodwork, almost like grillwork, and through the panes the plaza he had left a few minutes earlier seemed imaginary or distant, as if the city and the winter did not maintain a precise connection to the interior of the house, or only in the sense that an intimate landscape was added on to look at from the balconies and a sensation of hostile twilight that made its enclosed space more inviting. Then, as he waited and was afraid, he saw the first two images of Mariana, which later, day after day, would be repeated and extended in others when her face, not always recognized, would appear to him in the rooms of the house, the writings of Jacinto Solana, a plaza, and some churches in the city. First he saw Orlando's framed drawing between two shelves in the library, the face foreshortened, almost in profile, of a young woman with short hair hanging over her cheeks, a fine-drawn nose, a short chin, and wide-open eyes fixed on something that wasn't outside her but absorbed into her consciousness, her slight smile. "Orlando," he read, "May 1937." On the mantel over the fireplace, in a photograph that despite the glass protecting it was taking on a sepia tone, the same young woman walked between two men along a street that undoubtedly was in Madrid. She wore a coat with a fur collar opened over a white dress and high-heeled shoes, but all that could be seen clearly of her face was the large smile that mocked the photographer, because she had the brim of her hat pulled low on her forehead and a veil hid her eyes. The man who walked to her left held a cigarette and looked at the spectator with an air of irony or misgiving, as if he did not completely approve of Minaya's presence or had discovered a spy in him. Minaya thought he recognized his uncle in the one on the right, the tallest of the three and clearly the best dressed. Manuel was surprised by the photographer's shot while he was turning toward Mariana, who unexpectedly had taken his arm and pressed it against her without noticing the gift she was granting him, attentive only to the eye of the camera, like a mirror in which she liked to look at herself as she walked.

"That man, the one on the left, is Jacinto Solana," said Manuel, at his back.

Minaya recalled a tall figure with gray hair, a large, pale hand on his shoulders, but the face that bent down toward him that afternoon to kiss him lightly on the cheeks had been erased forever from his memory by the almost terrifying exactitude of the large clock whose golden pendulum slowly moved back and forth behind the glass of a box that resembled a coffin. Now, when the clock and the bookshelves and the entire house took on dimensions without mystery, the earlier figure with gray hair disappeared before Minaya, supplanted by the features of a stranger. He was not nearly as tall as in memory and not as heavy as in the photograph, and he had white hair and a posture ruined not by old age but by long neglect and the habit of illness, the cardiac ailment left over from his war wounds, made worse by the passage of the years and nourished by his own negligence because he continued to smoke and never took the pills Medina prescribed for him. Any shock provoked violent palpitations and a dark, tenacious pain that did not allow him to sleep and was like a shadowy hand that penetrated his chest and squeezed his heart to the point of asphyxia at the precise moment sleep conquered him. He would sit up, shaken by the certainty that he had been about to die, turn on the light, and remain motionless in the bed, his hand at his heart, attentive to its beat, and he could not get back to sleep until dawn, for as soon as he closed his eyes the vertigo of fear would break free and the invading hand would slip again inside his body, groping between his lungs and his ribs, coming up from his belly like a reptile silently coiling around his heart. Fear of the definitive attack and the obsessive attention with which he listened to his own heart probably made his ailment worse, but eventually they also allowed him to acquire a serene familiarity with death, for he knew how it would come, and when he could recognize it from a distance, he gradually had stopped fearing it. It would be, as it had been so often, that pain in his left arm, the stabbing pain in his chest piercing without warning, like a bullet or a knife thrust, perhaps when he was eating breakfast alone in front of the large windows to the garden, or in the afternoon in the library, or striking him dead on the plank floor of the pigeon loft. It would be that same stabbing pain turned into a sudden shot or blade and the tide of terror rising from his stomach and taking on in his chest the form of that familiar, lethal hand that would not stop this time but penetrate until it tore out his breath and his heart so that he would never return again from that anguish and could remain sweetly dead and abandoned on the bed, or even better, in the pigeon loft, on the same planks where Mariana had died, her forehead punctured by a single bullet. The habit of solitude and the longing for death were for him residual or secret ways of remembering his wife and Jacinto Solana, and having survived them for so many years seemed to him a disloyalty unmitigated even by the devotion of his memory. In the bedroom he shared with Mariana for only one night, he kept her wedding dress and the white shoes and the bouquet of artificial flowers she carried on their wedding day. He had catalogued not only all his memories but the photographs of Mariana and of Jacinto Solana as well, and distributed them around the house according to a private and very strict order, which allowed him to transform his passage through the rooms into a reiterated commemoration. He was not satisfied with the few images a man can or has the right to remember: he demanded of himself dates, precise locations, exact tones of light and nuances of tenderness, enumerations of meetings, of words, and with so much thinking about Mariana and the man who had been his best friend, his recollections became worn, so that he was no longer sure they had really existed outside the photographs and his memory. This is why he was so surprised that in his nephew's letter the name of Jacinto Solana appeared: someone not himself and not connected to his house had heard that name far from Magina and even had knowledge of his life and some poems which for Manuel had not existed until then except as attributes of his most secret autobiography. Reading that name, Jacinto Solana, written by another hand, in Madrid, at the end of January 1969, was proof that the man it designated had in fact lived and left in the world traces of his presence that could not be erased by time or the voracious executioners in blue uniforms who one day made the flagstones in the courtyard and the parquet in the rooms tremble with the tramping of their boots and who burned in the garden all of Jacinto Solanas books and kicked his typewriter to pieces.

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.

That was when Inés heard them talking about Jacinto Solana. She had gone in to serve them sherry, and when she heard that name she paid more attention to what they were saying, and she remained still, very attentive, without their noticing her, in a dark corner, choosing to be invisible, the same attitude of absent submissiveness she had adopted as a child at the orphanage; but when she had poured the glasses and placed a tray of appetizers on the table — the other one, the stranger, watched her moving around them and spoke in a peculiar tone about a book he was going to write — Manuel told her she could leave, since Amalia and Teresa undoubtedly had prepared supper for Dona Elvira, and he began to recall his friendship with Solana only when he supposed that Inés was no longer listening.

"It would be inexact to say he was my best friend, as your father told you. He wasn't the best friend but the only friend I've had in my life, and also my teacher and my older brother, the one who guided me through Madrid and found the books for me that I had to read and took me to see the best films, because he was very fond of movies and had been in Paris with Bunuel for the opening of L 'Age d'Or. Before the war, one of his jobs was writing screenplays for that film studio of Bunuel's, Filmófono it was called, he did screenplays and publicity too, but he kept writing for the newspapers, short things, film reviews in El Sol, poetry in Octubre, a story or two that Don José Ortega published in the Revista de Occidente. You can read it all if you like, because I have those things in the library, though he always told me he didn't care anything about them and they deserved to be forgotten. When we were boys, at secondary school, we imagined we'd become war correspondents and rich, famous writers, like Blasco Ibanez, and our success would make the girls like us, the ones we fell in love with so futilely. We planned to go to Madrid together, not to study for a career but to live a bohemian life and achieve glory. But my father died when I was in my second year of law, and I had to come back to Mágina to help my mother, and I didn't finish my studies and I lacked the will to leave here, as Solana had done. He came from time to time and talked about Madrid and the world, the cafés where it was possible to sit beside the writers who were like gods to me, and he brought or sent me newspaper clippings with his byline, always saying it was nothing compared with what he was about to write. At the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he published a good number of articles and some poems, especially in the Gaceta Literaria, because he had become a surrealist, but I believe his only friends in Madrid were Buñuel and Orlando, the painter who illustrated his stories, and then, just before the war, Miguel Hernández, who was younger than us and saw in him something like a mirror of his own life. Solana really disliked the way Hernández boasted about his origins. "I've tended goats too," he would say, "but I don't think that's something to be proud of." He didn't stop writing when the war broke out, but I suspect he wouldn't have liked knowing that those ballads from the Mono Azul that you've read have survived him for so many years. In May '37, when he came to Mágina for my wedding, he was one of the editors of that paper and belonged to the Alliance of Antifascists, and they had just named him cultural commissar in an assault brigade, but suddenly nobody heard anything about him, and he didn't attend the writers' congress they were holding that summer in Valencia. Not even his wife knew where he was. He had enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the popular army under another name, and he didn't publish a single word. He was wounded on the Ebro, and at the end of the war he was arrested in the port of Alicante. But all of this I found out ten years after he disappeared, when he left prison and came to Mágina and to this house. He still wanted to write a book, one memorable book, he said, and then die afterward, because that was the only thing that had mattered to him in his Life, to write something that would go on living when he was dead. That's exactly what he told me."

I can imagine him now, in his leather armchair, in the precise spot in the library where Ines said he had sat across from Minaya, his hands joined, his cigarette forgotten in the ashtray, all the lost years written on his face and on his hair that had been blond and that gave him, along with his blue eyes and his manners from another country and another time, a foreign air exaggerated by his shyness and his loyalty. Like a prolongation in his memory of the words he had said after an infinite respite of silence, Manuel looked at the pencil drawing of Mariana and repeated to himself the date and name written in the margin, but when he stood it was not to take down the drawing and show his nephew the words Solana had written on the back, but to pick up from the mantel over the fireplace the photograph taken on the same day they learned about the victory of the Popular Front in the February elections and hand it to Minaya. Look at us, he could have said, smiling at the proximity of war and death, contemplating with open eyes the dirty future reserved for us, the shame, the useless enthusiasm, the miracle of a hand that for the first time rested on my arm.

"What your father told you was true. It was Solana who introduced me to my wife. Ten or fifteen minutes before this picture of us was taken, on February 17, 1936."

4

HE HAD A NOTEBOOK where he wrote down dates, Inés said, places, names, a notebook that he kept in the top drawer of his desk and in which at first he didn't write anything, as if it were only a part of his meticulous simulation, except, on the cover, the date he arrived in the city, January 30, Wednesday, and on the first page, in the middle of the empty space, just the name Jacinto Solana, 1904–1947, like a funeral inscription, like the title of a book that was still blank, destined perhaps never to be written, to be nothing but a volume of ordered pages without a single word or any other marks except those of its blue squares. Then he began to write down dates and names, at night, when he went to bed, as if he were outlining the rough draft of a future biography that his indolence would always postpone, the names of all the inhabitants of the house and the titles of the magazines he had consulted that afternoon in the library, when he was alone and turned red if Inés came in to ask him something, to offer him something, because Manuel had told her to, a cup of tea or a drink. He always listened, very silent, solicitous, and stayed very late conversing with Utrera, with Manuel, with Medina, the doctor, and with brief questions, with silences that contained the questions he didn't always dare to ask, he tried to have the conversation gravitate to Jacinto Solana, to his profiled shadow, elusive and laconic like his gaze in the photographs, like the dedications to Mariana or Manuel in some of the books in the library, on some postcards sent from Paris in 1930, from Moscow in 1935, in December.

He writes in his bedroom, Inés said as she undressed, first pulling off her blue tights, dazzling the semidarkness of the room with her white thighs, her white feet, the pink heels numb with cold, and after taking off her skirt she got into bed and sat on it, covering herself to the waist, her icy feet in the deepest part of the sheets, and then, when she removed the red wool sweater, her head disappeared for an instant and emerged again, beautiful and disheveled, to submerge completely, up to her chin, lying still and shivering, unveiling one hand to toss her bra and shirt to the floor, naked now, clinging, pushing her knees forward, her thighs, with her eyes closed, as if feeling her way, her skin cool and then warm, her small breasts, the brush of nipples hardened by the cold and then soft again and pink and docile to the caress or slow bite that she confirmed, still without the assistance of sight, so that when her eyes opened she, Inés, would be recovered and close, intact, breaking free of the embrace, bending her long body that lay in the dark corner of the sheets that had to be moved away to see her whole, the brief, smooth pubis between closed thighs, the angular, raised hips, and when the hand moved down until the fingertips felt the straight, wet cleft, that touch, like a countersign, advised of the transition to the celebration of odors, deep salty vagina and delicate breath and mouth that sometimes closed pink and wet and a smile of thin lips pressed tight that was the candid, wise smile of happiness and rest.

"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.

"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.

"Never, never, even if I lived a hundred years, could I repay the debt I owe your Uncle Manuel, my boy. Although he knew I admired the Movement, he allowed me to live in this house throughout the war and then, when I won that competition and received a commission for my first piece of scuplture, he offered me the carriage house to set up my workshop, because I didn't have enough to even rent a room. It's true I interceded for him when things became difficult, but that doesn't repay him. I owe everything I am to his generosity back then."

Because his greatest pride wasn't official glory or the medal or the yellowed clippings he kept as relics in a box in his workroom, but his undeniable loyalty to a friend, to the custom of gratitude, to this house. He spoke to Minaya about Manuel's family as if it were his own, and he knew by heart the names and ranks of the gentlemen depicted in the indistinct portraits in the gallery and in the photo albums that only he bothered to exhume from the library shelves, showing Minaya solemn ancestors he had never heard of, because the oldest face he could recognize belonged to his grandmother Cristina.

"You should have known Doña Elvira when I met her. She was a lady, my friend, as tall as Manuel, and so elegant, a true aristocrat. The death of her husband was a terrible blow, but she would have overcome that if it hadn't been for the things that happened later. I can still see her on the day Manuel came home from the hospital, re-covering from that serious wound and ready to marry Mariana. Because, as she said, it was one thing for her son to be for the Republic, and even a little bit of a Socialist, and quite another to see him married to that woman after dropping his lifelong sweetheart. I remember Doña Elvira standing at the door of the library, dressed in mourning, and when Mariana offered her hand she turned and withdrew to her rooms without saying a single word."

Her eyes wide open, Minaya thought, her lips resolute and her eyes flashing and fixed on the offense as they would remain afterward, unmoving, in the time without hours of the wedding photograph, in the blind persistence of the things she looked at and held in her hands and brushed with her body and the air where her perfume resided. It was the wine, he suspected when he stood and shook Utreras hand again, which remained flaccid and dead in his as the old man reiterated his pleasure at having met him and begged his pardon and invited him to visit his studio any time, it was the wine and his fatigue from the train and his lethargy after the bath and everything muffled or blurred by the strangeness of the house, but as he climbed the stairs and turned the shadowy corners of the gallery, he suddenly felt the physical certainty that Jacinto Solana, the name written at the bottom of the poems he had in his room, had actually existed and breathed the same air and walked on the same tiles he was walking on now knowing as if in a dream that after a few steps he would come to the parlor where Marianas eyes had been waiting since long before he was born to look at him exactly as they had looked at Solana and the world in 1937. He smoked as he lay on the bed, looking up at a ceiling with painted wreaths that no longer resembled any memory, and then, in the empty exaltation of alcohol and insomnia, he opened the shutters to the balcony and continued smoking with his elbows resting on the marble balustrade, facing the tops of the acacias and the tile roofs and the towers of Mágina submerged in the damp darkness, in the inviting, frightening night that always receives travelers in strange cities. He heard the street door closing with a heavy resonance, and after a moment, when it struck eleven in the Plaza of General Orduna, in the library, in the parlor, he saw Inés passing under the acacias and disappearing into the shadows of a lane, her hair loose and her walk more energetic than the one she used in the house, her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of a coat too short for the raw January night.

5

PERHAPS NOW, IN THE STATION, when he remembers and denies and wants to rein in his will and desire so that they offer him only the necessary future of desertion, departure and the train and eves vengefully closed, he will want to comprehend the length of time he has spent in Màgina and the order in which things happened, and he will discover he doesn't know or can't know that the precise time of calendars doesn't concur with that of his memory, that two months and thirty years and several lifetimes have gone by without his being able to assign them connections of succession or cause. Now he remembers and is astonished by the speed with which the house took hold of his actions of a new arrival and turned them into habits, and he doesn't know precisely the day he desired Inés for the first time or when he was irremediably trapped by the biography of Jacinto Solana, even before finding his hidden manuscripts and visiting the Island of Cuba and the landscape where they killed him and the plaza where he was born and lived until he was twenty. He doesn't remember dates, only sensations as extensively modulated as musical passages, habits of tranquility sustained in the restlessness of waiting for Inés or stealing after midnight into rooms where he searched for clues and manuscripts fearing he would be caught.

Apart from the house and the present into which he had settled like someone who locks a room from the inside to sit quietly by the fire and doesn't feel the cold or hear the rain or the clock striking the hours, and absorbed in reading a book, the city almost didn't exist, and Madrid even less, or the mediocre past. When he arrived he had crossed the city without recognizing it through the taxi windows, first the empty lots around the station, and the avenue of linden trees with bare branches raised against a vast gray sky that clung like mist to the edge of the plain where church towers were outlined. But that wasn't the city he remembered, and it wasn't the winter light that belonged to it but the exalted light on whitewashed walls and thresh-holds of sand-colored stone, the one that flowed out of the tunnel of darkness at entrances and gathered in pools like shaded lagoons at the rear, in the vine-arbored courtyards of Magina, when in the first morning hour, a woman, his mother, opened the door and all the windows and swept the pavement then sprinkled it with water until it gave off the odor of damp cobblestones and wet earth after a storm. Which was why he couldn't recognize the city when he arrived and took so long to walk its streets like a stranger, because Magina, on winter afternoons, becomes a Castilian city of closed shutters and gloomy shops with polished wood counters and faded mannequins in the display windows, a city of cheerless doorways and plazas that are too large and empty where the statues endure winter alone and the churches seem like tall ships run aground. His light was of a different sort, golden, cold, blue, stretching from the ramparts of the city wall in an undulating descent of orchards and curved irrigation ditches and small white houses among the pomegranate trees, extending in the south to the endless olive groves and blue or violet fertile lowlands of the Guadalquivir, and that landscape was the one he would recognize later in the manuscripts of Jacinto Solana, flat as the world in ancient maps and limited by the outline of the sierra beyond which it was impossible that anything else existed. And he, Solana, had also looked as a child at that place of unlimited light and returned there to die, the open streets of Magina that looked as if they would end at the sea and ramparts like steep balconies or high crows nests from which he looked out on all the clarity of a world unviolated except by the avidity of his eyes and the fables in his imagination.

"His father had a farm," Manuel said. "It's abandoned now, but from the watchtower of the town wall you can see the house and cistern. Every afternoon when we left school, I went down with him and helped him load the produce onto their white mare, to carry it to market. Then we would ride across the city on the mare, but I got down a few streets before we reached here, because if my mother found out I had been with Solana, she would punish me and not let me go out on Sunday. My son, she would say, unloading fruit in the market, like a farmhand. But my father had a certain fondness for him, always somewhat distant, similar to how he would have viewed the child of one of his foremen who showed an aptitude for studying, and when Solana went to Madrid, he carried a letter of recommendation, written by my father, for the editor of El Debate, who had known him back when he was a member of parliament. 'I like that boy,' he would say when my mother wasn't around, 'he has ambition, and you can see in his eyes that he knows what he wants and is prepared to do anything to get it.' I've always suspected those words weren't so much praise for Solana as a reproach for me."

He doesn't know when that custom began either, because now it seems to him it lasted for many months or all his life, and that it's impossible Manuel is dead and won't converse with him again every afternoon in the library, when Ines would come in with the tray of coffee and they would smoke English cigarettes with their backs to the window where the light was dying until their only illumination came from the fireplace, interrupted at times by the arrival of Medina, who came to examine Manuel with his medical bag and useless prescriptions and to censure coffee and tobacco and the absurd habit of always talking about the dead, about Jacinto Solana, regarding whom he once told Minaya that he had been nothing but a timid adulterer, and then laughed with his chuckle of a libertine physician addicted to hygiene and what he called the physiology of love.

"I don't know if you realize it, young man, but your presence in this house is having an effect on your uncle as beneficial as a swim in the sea. In my capacity as physician allow me to entreat you not to leave yet. I look at Manuel and don't recognize him. On any afternoon he spends with you he talks more than he has talked to me in the past twenty years, which isn't all that meritorious, because you're young and educated and know how to listen, and I can almost never keep quiet. How's that book of yours on Solana coming along?"

Inés said it was as if Manuel had returned to his own house, as if when he saw it again he observed with astonishment and guilt the signs of the decay into which his neglect had plunged it. He reim-posed a fixed schedule for meals, took care of discussing the day's purchases with Amalia and Teresa, and even renewed the supplies of wine in the cellar, finding in these occupations that he had forgotten for so many years a pleasure that surprised even him. Punctually each morning, before withdrawing to the pigeon loft, he went down to have breakfast with his nephew, and from time to time their afternoon conversations were prolonged in slow walks along the watchtowers of the wall, where Manuel would point with his walking stick to the white road that led to Solana's fathers farm, the house with its collapsed roof, the cistern blocked by weeds. One day, as if he had guessed that his hospitality was turning into a debt for Minaya, he asked him not to leave yet, to help him organize the books in the library, left for thirty years to an abundant disorder, offering him a justification for remaining in the house that was in no way humiliating. He wouldn't need to abandon his dissertation on Solana, he said, he could work on it a few hours a day and then devote himself, perhaps in the afternoon, to creating a catalogue for the books and perhaps also for the furniture and valuable paintings that were now scattered in no order throughout the rooms and attics. "You'll be my librarian," he said, smiling, as if requesting a favor he wasn't sure would be granted, not daring yet to offer a salary, always afraid to offend. This work, whose proportions very soon revealed themselves as disheartening, had the virtue of calming Minaya in singular fashion because it offered him a new time limit so far off it no longer made him afraid to imagine his departure. At about ten in the morning he would go to the library and begin working with a silent, constant passion, nourished in equal measure by the solitude and stillness of the books and by the tight golden light that came in from the plaza, where there was always the sound of water ascending higher than the acacias and then spilling over the rim of the fountain. When his eyes grew tired of so much writing on file cards in a very small and voluntarily meticulous hand that had allowed him to discover the serene pleasures of calligraphy, Minaya put down the pen and lit a cigarette and sat looking at the white shutters on the windows, the squared, reduced landscape of the acacias and hedges where a feminine figure passed by who sometimes was Inés, back from her other life, ready to enter the library and roil with her perfume the peaceful smell of the books that Minaya tended to as a refuge so he could pretend he wasn't watching her.

From higher up, from the circular windows on the top floor, Jacinto Solana had contemplated the plaza in the winter of 1947, the night still as a well, the only light the insomniac lamp in the shelter Manuel had prepared for him and that wasn't enough for him to finish his book or escape the persecution of his executioners. Minaya saw the metal bed with the bare mattress, the desk by the window where the typewriter had been, the empty drawers that once held his pen and the sheets of paper, blank or written on in the same parsimonious, almost indecipherable hand that traced on the back of Mariana's picture the veiled, precise words, like an augury of his "Invitation." Beyond the circular windows and the shuttered balconies was the same city his eyes had seen and that had remained in his memory like a vengeful paradise during the last two years of the war and the eight years he spent in prison waiting first for death and then for a freedom so remote he could no longer imagine it. Magina, suspended high on the prow of a hill too far from the Guadalquivir, as beautiful as any of its marble statues, as the sand-colored caryatids with bare bosoms that on the facades of palaces hold up the coats-of-arms of those who left them to the city as a useless inheritance, undeserved and pagan. Dissolved in the city, contained within it like a narrow stream that flowed invisibly and almost never touched his consciousness completely, was Minaya's early life, but there was a fog-bound area beyond the final reaches of his memory that without a break was becoming confused with Jacinto Solana's. He sensed him in the house, just as he came to sense the proximity of Inés before his ears or eyes announced her, he surmised his attentive presence on the other side of things, witnessing everything with the same renegade or ironic indolence that was in his gaze on the morning the photograph in the library was taken. Because he lingered in the city and in the house and in the landscapes of roofs or blue hills that surrounded them, but above all in the library, in the dedications in the books he sent to Manuel from Madrid and that at times rose up before Minaya like a warning that he, Solana, was still there, not only in the memory or imagination of the living but also in the space and matter that had survived him, as enduring and faint as the fossilized trace of an animal or the leaf of a tree that no longer exist in the world.

"If you could have seen," Manuel said, "the expression in his eyes when he entered the library for the first time. My mother had gone to spend a few days at the Island of Cuba, and my father was in Madrid, at the Congress of Deputies, and for a week the entire house was ours. We were eleven or twelve years old, and Solana, when he walked into the courtyard, stood very still and silent, as if he were afraid to move forward. 'This is like a church,' he said, but in reality it wasn't the house that interested him but the place where the books came from that I would lend him behind my mother's back, and which he read with a speed that always bewildered me because he did it at night by the light of a candle when his parents had gone to bed. In his house there was only one book. I remember it was called Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, a serialized story in three volumes that Solana had read when he was ten and toward which he always felt a kind of gratitude. 'What else could I ever want than to write something like those two thousand pages of misfortunes?' he would say. He entered the library as if he were going into a cave filled with treasure, and he didn't dare touch the books, he only looked at them, or gently ran his hand over them as if he were stroking an animal."

Solana's tightened lips, his dark rage, his lucid, precocious hatred of the life that denied him that house and that library, his desire to rebel against everything and flee Magina and his father and the two hectares of land and the future in which his father wanted to confine him. It wasn't his love of books that made him clench his fists and wait in silence in the middle of the reception room that smelled of leather and polished wood, but his consciousness of the miserable poverty into which he had been born and the brute fatigue of the work to which he knew he was condemned. The books, like the opaque gleam of the furniture and the golden lamps and the white cap and starched apron of the woman who served them chocolate at teatime in large porcelain cups decorated with blue landscapes, were merely the measure or sign of his desire to flee in order to calculate at a distance his future revenge, longed for and planned out when he read in books about the return of the Count of Monte Cristo. Manuel, alarmed by his silence, suggested they go to the rooms upstairs, but at that moment Jacinto Solana had become a stranger. He ran up the stairs to induce him to follow, but from the gallery balustrade he saw that Jacinto Solana was looking at himself in the mirror on the first landing, distant from him and his voice and everything he so eagerly wanted to offer him in order not to lose the friendship he felt was in danger for the first time since they had met. Solana looked in the mirror at his shaved head and his hemp espadrilles and the gray jacket that had belonged to his father, signs of the degradation against which he could defend himself by imagining with obstinate fervor a future in which he would be a rich, mysterious traveler, implacable with his enemies, or a correspondent and a hero in a war from which he would return and humiliate at his feet all those who now conspired against his talent and his pride. Manuel did not see his tears before the mirror or hear his silence, but a half century later he still recalled the hostile resolve with which Jacinto Solana had said that some day the books he was going to write would be in the library too.

Beatus ille, thought Minaya: what an elevated life and work he desired until his death and never had. His books weren't there, but his words and eyes were, like scratches in the shadow, obsessively contemplating from the mantel over the fireplace the area of serene semidarkness and volumes in a row that he never reached. Crossed-out words or scratches of his poor handwriting suddenly appearing in the margins of a novel that Minaya leafed through for the sheer pleasure of touching the pages and looking at the romantic prints that interrupted them from time to time. He was cataloguing the beautiful volumes of the first French edition of Les voyages extraordi-naires—Manuel's father, a devotee of Verne's, must have bought them in Paris early in the century — when he noticed that L'île mystérieux was missing. He searched all the shelves in vain for the book and asked Manuel about it, who didn't remember having seen it. One morning, when he went into the library, Inès was there dusting the bookcases and the furniture and replacing the bottles in the liquor cabinet. L'île mystérieux was on Minaya's desk.

"I brought it back," Inès said. "I finished reading it last night."

"But it's in French," said Minaya, and immediately regretted saying it because she set aside the duster and stood looking at him with an expression of impassive mockery in her chestnut-colored eyes.

"I know that."

To escape his embarrassment, Minaya feigned a sudden interest in his work and didn't stop writing on the file cards until Inés left the library. This was how she would always leave him, so often lost in stupefaction, halted at the brink of a revelation he never could attain and besieged by the desire not only for her body but above all for everything her body and her gaze concealed, because in her, caresses and hungry kisses and fatigued, final stillness were the mask and the lure that hid her from Minaya, so that each boundary of desire he crossed with her was not its assuaging consummation but an impulse to go even deeper and tear away the veils of silence or words that inexhaustibly imposed themselves on Inés' consciousness. But the sensation of advancing was completely illusory, for it wasn't a question of successive veils that would eventually end in the true, unknown face of Inés, but of a single, reiterated, immobile one: the eyes and mouth and thin lips she tensed to apologize or to smile, the voice and face that Minaya never could fix for any length of time in his memory. Slowly he turned the large yellow pages of L'île mystérieux and stopped at the last print: when those who had been shipwrecked have abandoned the Nautilus, fleeing the eruption that will destroy the island, Captain Nemo dies alone in the splendor of his submerged library. There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the print, and it was difficult for Minaya to decipher it because the blue ink had almost faded. "3-11-47. If only I had the courage of Captain Nemo. My name is nobody, says Ulysses, and that saves him from the Cyclops. JS."

But between himself and the words written by Jacinto Solana, which always had the quality of a voice, there now was Inés, mocking his clumsiness, and the book she had brought back was proof of her irony and her absence, for Minaya still found himself in that trance in which desire, not yet revealed in its deceitful plenitude, advances like a nocturnal enemy and makes accomplices of all the things that are transformed into emissaries or signs of the creature who has touched them or to whom they belong. The large house on the Plaza of the Fallen, one of Inés' shirts on the clothesline in the garden, her coat, her pink kerchief on the coatrack, the bed and the glass of water on the night table in the room where she slept when she stayed at the house, the leather sofa where he kissed her for the first time at the beginning of March, Orlando's drawing that fell to the floor, interrupting the shared excitement of their embrace with a crash of broken glass when she pushed him with her hips against the wall and kissed him on the mouth with her eyes closed. As if the sound of the glass had awakened him from a dream, Minaya opened his eyes and saw before him the half-closed lids and eager wings of Ines' nose, who had not stopped kissing him. For a moment he was afraid that someone had come into the library, and he moved away from the girl, who still moaned in tender protest and then opened her eyes, smiling at him with lips wet and inflamed by his kiss.

"Don't worry. I'll tell Don Manuel the drawing fell when I was cleaning it."

When he picked it up, Minaya saw that something was written on the back. "Invitation," he read, and again it was the tiny, familiar, furious hand he had found a few weeks earlier in the novel by Jules Verne and that very soon he would secretly pursue through the most obscure drawers in the house, a slender thread of ink, a flowing stream not heard by anyone that led only to him, not to the key to the labyrinth he had already begun to imagine, but to the trap he himself was setting with his search. He saw the desk, the mirror, the hands on the paper, the pen that was tracing without hesitation or rest the final verses Jacinto Solana wrote not realizing until the end that the sheet he had used was the one where Orlando had drawn his portrait of Mariana. That night, when Minaya entered the library after supper, the drawing was back in its place with new glass. Sitting across from him, meditative and calm, Medina examined it with the attentive air of someone who suspects a falsification.

"I'll tell you something if you promise to keep it a secret. I never thought that poor Mariana was as attractive as they said. As Manuel and Solana said, of course, though Solana was very careful about saying it aloud. And do you know what they both suffered from? An excess of seminal fluids and literature — forgive my vulgarity. I suppose they've already told you that Solana was in love with her too. Desperately in love, and long before Manuel, but with the disadvantage that he was already married when he met her. Piously married in a civil ceremony, like the good Communist he was, feeling Christianly remorseful for the temptation of deceiving his wife and his best friend at the same time. Your father really never talked to you about it?"

6

TIME IN MÁGINA revolves around a clock and a statue. The clock on the tower of the wall built by the Arabs and the bronze statue of General Orduna, whose shoulders are yellow with rust and traces of pigeons and whose head and chest have nine bullet holes. When Minaya can't fall asleep and tosses and turns in the arduous duration of his insomnia, he is rescued by the great clock on the tower striking three in the empty Plaza of General Orduna, where the cab drivers stretch out and fall asleep on the backseats of their cars and an officer sitting in boredom at the entrance to the police station guards the door with his elbows on his knees and his flat-peaked cap down over his face, and perhaps he gives a start and sits up when above his head he hears the striking of the hour, which then, like a more distant, metallic resonance, is repeated in the tower of EL Salvador, its bulbous, lead-colored dome visible over the roofs on the Plaza of the Fallen, where Inés lives. Then there is almost a half minute of silence and suspended time that ends when it strikes three inside the house, but still very remote, on the clock in the library, and immediately, as if the hour were approaching Minaya, climbing the deserted stairs with inaudible steps and slipping along the checkered corridor of the gallery, the three bells strike very close to his bedroom, on the clock in the parlor, and so the whole city and the entire house and the consciousness of whoever cannot sleep eventually merge in a unique submerged and bidimensional correlation, time and space or past and future linked by a present that is empty and yet measurable: it precisely occupies the seconds that pass between the first bell in the tower of General Orduna and the last one that sounds in the parlor.

Wide towers crowned with brambles, made huge by solitude and darkness, like the Cyclops whose single eye is the clock that never sleeps, a lookout that informs all those condemned to ceaseless lucidity and unites them in a dark fraternity. The sick undermined by pain, those in love who do not sleep in order not to abandon a shared memory, killers who dream about or remember a crime, lovers who have left the bed where another body sleeps and smoke naked beside the curtains trembling in the night breeze. But this may be the final insomnia of all, the one that flows into death, and enduring it is like walking at night along the last street in a city without lights and suddenly discovering that you've reached the flat wasteland beyond the houses.

The bottles are lined up on the night table, within reach, as are the glass of water, the cigarettes, the capsules that are pink and white, blue and white, blue and yellow: delicate pastel tones for administering the minimal methodical death each of them contains. Diluted blues, yellows, pinks, like the ones in Orlando's last sketches, his watercolors of Magina seen from the south, from the esplanade of the Island of Cuba, in which the sensation of distance — a long profile of roofs and towers and white houses spread out across the top of the hill toward which the gray lines of olive trees and the pale green of wheat fields ascend — was also an indication of its distance in time, for they weren't painted on the eve of the wedding but during the last winter of the war in a house in Madrid, half destroyed by bombs, in whose hallways and rooms with their boarded-up windows no light like the one Orlando had seen in Magina in the spring of 1937 ever penetrated.

At that time the Plaza of General Orduna had lost not only the bronze statue but also the name written on the stone tablets at the corners. For three years, and until the day the general returned from the garbage dump swaying like an intrepid drunken charioteer on the back of a truck and watched over by a double row of Civil Guard and Moorish soldiers on horseback, it was called the Plaza of the Republic, but no one ever used that name to refer to it, and even less the name of General Orduña. It was, for the inhabitants of Mágina, the old plaza or simply the Plaza, and the statue of the general belonged to it because it had entered the natural order of things, like the clock tower and the gray pigeons and the arcades where men gathered on rainy winter mornings or at dusk on Sundays with their hands in the pockets of their wide dark suits, their curly hair damp with pomade, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The large taxis as black as funeral carriages are lined up beneath the trees on one side of the central gazebo, facing the clock tower and the police station. The cab drivers talk or smoke, leaning against the rounded hoods, as if taking refuge in tedium under the protection of the statue of the general who ignores them, standing quiet and alert in the center of the plaza. "One of the most distinguished sons of Mágina, from our family, I think," Minaya remembers his father saying, leading him by the hand on any forgotten Sunday, after eleven o'clock Mass at El Salvador and a visit to the confectioners, where with a magnanimous gesture he gave him a coin so he could take a candy out of the great glass ball that gleamed in the semidarkness, spotted with light from the street. A flock of pigeons takes flight abruptly at Minaya's feet and settles on the head and shoulders of the general, and one of them pecks at the hole that a vengeful, precise bullet opened in his left eye. "To the most excellent Señor Don Juan Manuel Orduña y León de Salazar, hero of the Ixdain Beach, Mágina, in gratitude, MCMXXV," his father would read aloud, and Minaya recalls that it frightened him to contemplate the height of the statue and the holes made by bullets that had penetrated his head and chest and gave him the appearance of the living dead in horror movies. Rigid, like them, invulnerable to gun shots, and looking out with a single eye no more obstinate and fearsome than the other empty socket, the general seemed to sway back and forth on his marble base and his entire golem's bulk weighed on Minaya. In his right hand he holds a pair of bronze binoculars, and in his left, adhering to the high leg of the boots with spurs, a whip or saber that he is about to raise. Indifferent to pigeons and oblivion, the general has his one eye fixed on the south, on the straight street that descends from the plaza, hugging the ruins of the wall, to the embankments of the spillways and the farms and the distant blue of Sierra Mágina, as if there, on the elevated horizon that on rainy days displays the purple mist of Velázquez' Guadarrama, he caught a glimpse of a military objective that was unreachable now, a column of white smoke that he will decipher with the binoculars before raising the whip or saber and shouting a bold, heroic order.

"Those are bullet holes, Son," said his father, solemn and pedagogical. "Since they couldn't shoot General Orduña, because he was already dead, those imbeciles shot the statue."

They arrived in a ragged formation of blue coveralls and espadrilles, unbuttoned tunics over white shirts, military trousers held up by a rope around the waist and militia caps and helmets tilted or fallen over the back of their necks. They carried old muskets from the Cuban war and Mausers stolen during an attack on the barracks of the Civil Guard, and some, especially the women, brandished no weapons other than their raised fists and their voices repeating an Anarchist anthem. Someone shouted for silence and the best-armed men lined up in front of the statue, aiming their muskets at his face. A silence like that of an execution had fallen over the entire plaza and over the crowd waiting in the arcade. The first shot hit General Orduña in the forehead, and the explosion frightened away the pigeons, which flew in terror up to the eaves and went astray in the air each time a volley was discharged that was greeted by the crowd with a vast, single shout. When the guns were silent, a man carrying a long hemp rope made his way through the mass of people and threw an accurate noose over the statue's head that had been punctured nine times, calling for the help of the others who placed their guns across their backs and joined in his effort to bring down the general's likeness. With the rope tense and the harsh knot closed around the hollow torso that resonated like a great wounded bell when it was penetrated by the bullets, General Orduna rocked very slowly, still vertical and not entirely humiliated, and then it moved back and forth and finally fell with a bronze clamor, pulling down in its slow fall the marble pedestal that splintered on the flagstones of the plaza. They adjusted the slipknot around the neck of the statue and dragged it bouncing on the paving stones of the city until they threw it into the chasm of the garbage dump. Three years later, a municipal crew spent an entire week looking for it in the trash and debris, and before they raised General Orduna onto a new base, men in white coats who had come from Madrid — in Magina they were immediately called statue doctors — repaired the dents and cleaned the bronze, but no one thought of covering the holes scattered like scars over the forehead, eyes, firm mouth, haughty neck, and the chest armor-plated in a general's medals. On the same day his statue was erected again on the base that had been empty for three years, the bells of the clock on the tower sounded again, because the men who pulled down the general had also shot at the white sphere, whose motionless hands marked the exact moment the statue fell and Magina entered the exalted and voracious time of the war.

"THAT WAS THE FIRST THING he must have noticed when he returned to the city after ten years," Minaya thinks in the plaza and writes later that night in the notebook that Inés punctually opens and examines every morning when she comes in to clean his bedroom, "and what gave him the measure of their defeat and of his sentence, which had not ended when he left prison: not only the red and yellow flag that hung now from the balcony of the police station but also the restored statue and the clock that began to tell time again only when the city had been conquered by the fascists." Like Solana, imagining what he did or feared, he avoids the more traveled streets and goes down toward the southern wall along cobblestoned lanes and white walls that lead to intimate plazas with abandoned sixteenth-century palaces and tall poplars quivering with birds, to the hidden Plaza of San Lorenzo, where the house is located in which Jacinto Solana was born and lived and before whose door he stopped one dawn in January 1947. From the half-closed doors, from the open windows through which the music of a radio soap opera reaches the plaza, attentive women watch Minaya and question one another, pointing at the stranger, who stands beneath the poplars and looks at all the entrances one by one, as if he were searching for someone or had lost his way in the city. That's how they looked at Solana when he arrived there, and perhaps they didn't recognize him because he was ill and had aged and ten years had passed since the last time they had seen him in Magina. And so, with a slow step and bowed head, he came to his father's house and saw the balconies and closed door that nobody opened when he struck the door with the knocker. Number three, said Manuel, the corner house, the one that has a coat of arms over the doorway with the cross of Santiago and a half moon. The house with deep animal pens and barns where he would hide behind sacks of wheat to read the books Manuel gave him and that had, like the library, the profound fragrance of serene time and money that isolated him from his own life and from the shouts of his father calling him from the door to come down and clean the stable or give the animals their feed. In his house the golden miracle of electric light did not exist, and when his parents went up to bed, they took with them the kerosene lamp whose yellow, greasy light swung between their sleepy voices and lengthened their shadows in the hollow of the staircase, and he remained alone in the kitchen, his light the embers of the fire and the candle he lit in order to continue reading the adventures of Captain Grant or Henry Morton Stanley or the journeys of Burton and Speke to the source of the Nile until his eyes began to close. He groped his way up to his room, and from his bed he listened to the coughs and snores of his father, who fell asleep with the same brutal resolve he brought to his work, and as soon as he had fallen asleep, sinking into the mattress of corn husks as if it were a bed of sand, his father was knocking at the door and calling him because it was almost dawn and he had to get up and saddle the white mare and take her to the farm along the road that began at the Gothic door in the wall. He tied his book bag to his back, and it was already morning when he returned to the city, running along the paths on the ramparts to get to school on time, and there Manuel, blond and clean and just recently awake, was waiting for him to copy the composition and arithmetic homework from his notebook.

What a strange logic of memory and pain conspires silently to transform the prison of another time into paradise: he trembled with gratitude and tenderness when he turned the corner of the plaza and saw the poplars and the familiar doorways, loyal to his recollection, and the illuminated air that became blue over the high, ivy-covered belfry of San Lorenzo. For a moment, as he walked toward the house recognizing even the irregularities in the ground, he thought his whole life had been one long mistake, that he never should have left the place with serene light that received him now as if he were a stranger. It was the time of the olive harvest, and a man he didn't recognize immediately was loading empty sacks and long poles of heather wood for shaking down the olives onto a mule tied to the grillwork over the window.

"How could I not remember him if we grew up together," the man says to Minaya, and he chokes and coughs without taking the cigarette wet with saliva from his mouth, sitting in the sun on a wicker chair that creaks beneath his large, defeated body. "But he went to Madrid during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and found a job on a newspaper and got involved in politics, because he had a lot of ideas and never liked the countryside, so he left his father alone with all the work they had on the farm, and they didn't speak for years."

"Be quiet, Manuel," murmurs a woman beside the old man who has her white hair pulled back and a black shawl over her shoulders, who had been sweeping the sidewalk and saw Minaya stop in front of the house next door, as if he didn't know that no one had lived in it for many years. The man—"Manuel Biralbo, pleased to meet you" — had stopped braiding the rope he was holding in his large hands when Minaya arrived and offered him another chair facing his, in the corner of the plaza where there's a smell of damp earth, in the light that sifts through the thick foliage of the poplar. "Be quiet, Manuel," the woman repeats in a low voice, looking out of the corner of her eye at the stranger who asks questions about forgotten things, but her husband, as if he were not aware of the risk she observes and fears, goes on talking and not only invites Minaya to sit down but also offers him his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers and becomes entangled in senseless explanations that no one has asked him for.

"Justo Solana, the father, they shot him when the war was over, and nobody knows why. He must have done something, people say, like so many others who had fingers pointed at them back then, but I don't know what he could have done since he wasn't a man who got mixed up in politics, and for the whole war he stayed at the farm. But he came back a little while before the troops marched in, and in three or four days they came for him in a car and took him to jail, in handcuffs like a criminal. Then I found out they killed him. But his son, Jacinto, didn't know until he came here from prison. I can see him as clearly as I see you, with his black coat and hat and the suitcase tied up with a rope in his hand. At first I didn't know him. I was in my doorway when he knocked at the door of his house, and I saw his face when they told him his father didn't live there anymore. Jacinto, I said, don't you remember me? And when I shook his hand, I saw that he was crying. He said, 'Manuel, what did they do to my father?' and I didn't know what to tell him because I had a thing here, in my throat, and I couldn't even talk. 'They killed him,' I said, and he looked at me and lowered his head and left the plaza without saying another word. And I never saw him again. That summer I heard they had killed him too."

His footsteps returning, the inert sound of his footsteps on the paving stones of the street that takes him away from the Plaza of San Lorenzo, where Manuel Biralbo sat watching him leave, never to return, sitting on his wicker chair, braiding a rope to occupy his hands, explaining to his wife that there's no danger, that this boy who's so polite is writing a book about Jacinto Solana, you remember, Justo's son, the one who went to Madrid and then they killed him. Like the ticking of a clock, like the beating of the suicide's heart and the ringing of bells in Magina, his footsteps drummed on the empty street, not subject to his will and his consciousness, indicating the only possible road left to him in his banishment. He thought he would never reach the white palace on the Plaza of San Pedro as he walked along the Calle de la Luna y el Sol, remembering other dawns when the mare's hooves sounded in the silence to invite him to gallop and imagine an adventure, but the now unfamiliar city continued to be a firm habit of his footsteps. Clinging to the walls, Minaya thinks, his face hidden beneath the brim of his hat, between the lapels of his overcoat, the face without eyes or nose or mouth, only a straw hamper of shadow to waylay the besieged presence of the Invisible Man. But he still doesn't know the street plan in Magina — long medieval streets, curved like a bow, that never let you see their ending, you simply have to guess gradually at the shape of nearby houses and discover a plaza only when you've reached it — and wanting to repeat Solana's exact footsteps on that cloudy early morning in January, he soon found himself lost in narrow lanes that have the names of ancient guilds and saints, and when he finally thought he had found his way to Manuel's house, it isn't the Plaza of San Pedro he comes to but another larger square he had never seen before and in whose center there is a scraggly garden with cypresses standing like guards around the monument erected by Magina in 1954 to honor its fallen. The house, Minaya recalls in a sudden rush of tenderness, the house on the corner where Inés lives with her sick or paralyzed uncle at the back of a courtyard in an apartment house, where the motionless man waits every night at the highest window for her to return.

Because he doesn't know how to renounce the custom of waiting for her, Minaya lingers in the Plaza of the Fallen, looking from time to time, like a zealous spy, at the closed door and balconies where it's possible she may appear. Utrera's monument shines in the midafternoon like a great block of marble against the dark backdrop of the cypresses. "An entire year of work, my boy, my hands, these hands, bloody every night from struggling with the granite. It was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, but tell me if art, great art, doesn't always consist of that." As if exhausted under his mineral wings, the angel bends over the fallen and tries to lift him up from the stone altar where his sword lies, but the naked white body overflows his arms, and his face is turned toward the wall, toward the high stone slab where the cross is sculpted with the names of the fallen of Magina, so that it is very difficult to see his features. "Because Utrera wanted no one or almost no one to see them," Minaya wrote in his notebook, "because he wanted only a very small number of viewers, or perhaps none at all, to discover his most perfect work, and in this way publicly keep it secret, the treasure of a strange avarice."

One night when he had taken up his post in the Plaza of the Fallen to look for Inés, because she hadn't come to the house for a week, Minaya heard at his back the sound of a body moving through the hedges, and he saw the glow of a small flashlight wielded by someone who seemed to be hiding on the other side of the statues. He's following me, he thought, suddenly recovering the fear of his final days in Madrid, but Utrera was too drunk to recognize him in the dark and hadn't even seen him. He was looking for something between the pedestal and the cypresses, cursing in a quiet voice, and when he heard Minaya and turned the light on him, he didn't know what to say and stood there in front of him, the flashlight in his hand and his mouth open and an alcoholic somnolence clouding his eyes.

"I dropped my watch. I tripped over a tree, and I dropped my watch in that garden. A family memento. Thank God I found it. Would you be so kind as to walk home with me?"

Minaya felt the intolerable certainty that he wouldn't see Ines that night, and perhaps not tomorrow either, and to go on waiting for her was not a way to prod destiny into making her appear.

"My friend, my young friend and guide," said Utrera, who accepted his own drunken clumsiness and Minaya's firm arm like an aristocrat who had resigned himself to ruin without, for that reason, losing pride in his lineage. "There is no way to deceive you. Have you looked carefully at my monument? The signature is there, wait until I shine the flashlight on it: E. Utrera, 1954. Have you already seen all my works in the churches of Magina? Well please don't go to see them. Maybe there'll be another war and they'll burn them all and then they'll begin to give me commissions again. Do you believe those students who are organizing demonstrations in Madrid will burn any churches?"

But Minaya might never have found out what Utrera was looking for that night with the flashlight if Ines hadn't told him. It was Sunday afternoon and he was waiting for her in the plaza, paying attention to the clock and the slow-moving minutes left before she would arrive with her perfumed hair hanging loose and her blue shoes and the white or yellow dress she put on only on Sundays to go out with him, which for Minaya was, like the afternoon light and the scent of the acacias, an attribute of happiness. Like an adolescent on his first date, he looked in the windows of the parked cars to make sure the part in his hair was still straight, and he smoked without stopping as he watched the door of the house where she would appear like an undeserved gift, walking toward him through the cypresses with a slight smile in her eyes and on her lips. But that after noon he didn't see Inés arrive, and when he heard her voice she was already at his side, brushing his hand with a gesture as casual and precise as a countersign, the same one she used some nights in the dining room to tell him secretly that when everyone was in bed she would be waiting for him, naked and distinct in the darkness of her bedroom and attentive to the sound of his cautious footsteps in the silence. "Do you like it?" Inés asked, pointing at Utreras monument. Minaya shrugged and tried to kiss her, but she eluded his lips, and taking him by the hand made him turn toward the pedestal of the statue.

"I want to show you something," she said, smiling, as if she were inviting him to play a mysterious game, and she asked him to look carefully at the face of the fallen, hidden between the legs of the angel. "I realized it once when I hid here playing hide-and-seek."

The fallen hero has a body of barely chiseled hard angles, but his face, which cannot be seen head on and is revealed only from one, very difficult vantage point situated behind the pedestal, shows the incontrovertible features of a woman and seems sculpted by another hand. The straight nose, the delicate cheeks with the smoothness of marble, the half-opened lips, the almond-shaped eyes about to close, and the sleepy charm of hair falling across one side of the face.

"It's as if she had just fallen asleep," said Minaya, following with his index finger the line of the lips that suggested a smile not completely unknown to his memory, "as if she had turned in her sleep to face the wall."

That was when Inés showed him the darker, slightly sunken circle in the middle of the young woman's forehead.

"She isn't asleep. She's been shot in the head, and she's dead."

7

FASCINATION OF HALF-CLOSED or closed doors, like the eyes of the statue that has a man's body and the secret face of a woman, like Ines' body, always, before first kisses, when she becomes someone else and is unreachable by words or the caresses that touch her as if they were touching the inert smoothness of a statue, immune to silent pleading and to silent despair. In the house there are hospitable half-closed doors that invite one to go into the successive rooms of memory, but there are also, and Minaya knows it, in a cowardly or greedy way he guesses it, closed doors that he is not permitted to violate and whose existence is hidden from him or denied, like a man crossing the empty salons of a Baroque palace who discovers that the door he wanted to pass through is painted on the wall or reflected in a mirror. The house is so large that its inhabitants, including Minaya, are lost or erased in it, and if each one is secluded in a precise space that they almost never leave, it is not because they desire or have chosen solitude but because they have surrendered to its powerful, empty presence that is taking over, one by one, all the rooms, the length of all the hallways. Every night Minaya makes notes, enumerates on his pad: Utrera carving improbable Romanesque saints in his workshop at the back of the house, behind the garden; Amalia and Teresa in the kitchen or the laundry, in the dark rooms of what in another time was called the service area; Manuel shut in the pigeon loft all morning, smoking silently beside the fire in the library, when Minaya isn't there; Doña Elvira with her magnifying glass bending over the glossy pages of a magazine devoted to celebrities as if it were a case of insects, or playing the piano in front of the television set she never looks at. Shipwrecked people, Minaya writes, in a city that is now, and has been for three centuries, a motionless shipwreck, like a galleon with high Baroque rigging thrown onto the top of its hill by some ancient maritime catastrophe. Medina, an unbelieving local scholar, says that Mágina was first the name of a peaceful city of merchants and shady Roman villas extending along the plain of the Guadalquivir, and occasionally a plow or an archaeologist's pick unearths a millstone or the headless statue of a Carthaginian or Iberian divinity on the banks of that muddy stream, but the other Mágina, walled and high, was built not for happiness or life fertilized by the waters of the river and the goddess with no chapel or face but to defend a military frontier, first against Christian armies and then against the Arabs, who came up from the south to reconquer it and were defeated along the wall they themselves had raised, and on one of whose highest towers is the clock that now measures out the days of Mágina and the duration of its decadence and its pride. For it was pride, not prosperity, that constructed the churches with bas-reliefs of pagan gods and battles with centaurs and palaces with courtyards of white columns brought from Italy, like their architects, in the by-now mythological times when a man from Mágina was secretary to the Emperor Carlos V. Orlando's judgment in the Plaza of Santa Maria, before the palace of the Vázquez de Molina who administered the finances of Felipe II: "What I like most about this city is that her beauty is absolutely inexplicable and useless, like the beauty of a body you encounter when you turn a corner." Now those palaces are abandoned or converted into apartment houses, and all that is left of some is, like a painted curtain, the high facade and empty windows that reveal a site strewn with rubble and columns fallen among the hedge mustard flowers, but the white house on the Plaza of San Pedro doesn't resemble any of those, because it was built more that two hundred years after the ancient pride of Magina had been extinguished forever. The marble balustrade that crowns its facade and the garden walls and the garlands sculpted in white stucco over the arches of the balconies give it an air between French and colonial, like a serene extravagance. In 1884, Manuel's grandfather, Don Apolonio Santos who, they say, had been a gilder of altarpieces in his youth and left the city without saying good-bye to anyone after winning two hundred silver duros in the casino, came back from Cuba weighed down with a fortune as barbarous as the means he used for twenty years to obtain it, and he had the house built and a neo-Gothic mausoleum erected in the Magina cemetery. Ten years after his return, Don Apolonio owned the best palace in the city and had bought eight or ten thousand olive trees within its boundaries, but he barely had enough life to enjoy his fortune, because some poorly treated fevers — and, they said, his displeasure at seeing his youngest daughter married to a clerk with no future — brought him to his neo-Gothic tomb during the first winter of the century.

"Which means you should pay no attention to Utrera," said Manuel, with the sad irony he always used when he talked to Minaya about his family, "when he recounts the merits of our ancestors. All those paintings in the courtyard and the gallery were bought by my grandfather, your great-grandfather, from the same penniless aristocrats who sold him their country estates."

As if ashamed of having been born where he was born and bearing the name he bore, but not daring to reveal his shame completely or to cultivate his disdain openly, for he was not unaware that only the house and the name connected to it had saved him from being shot and from the obligation for courage, demanding from him instead a passive loyalty that, as he grew older, stopped being the never-demolished boundary line and the exact measure of his resignation and failure to become one of his habits. Who then was the man with the haughty, almost heroic bearing in the wedding photo graph, the one who was promoted to lieutenant for bravery in action after he jumped undefended into an enemy trench with no help other than a pistol torn from a corpse and a group of frightened militiamen and who shot to death those who were firing an Italian machine gun at them, where did he look for and find the valor needed to marry Mariana, abandoning without the slightest misgiving the girl in whose languid company he had spent a six-year engagement with the always alert indulgence of Dona Elvira, who took this sudden fit of her son's as a personal insult and never forgave him for it?

"And not only that," Medina recalled, "he was also capable of finding a position in the Spanish embassy in Paris, I suppose through the mediation of Solana, and he had everything prepared for going there the day after his wedding, imagine, the same man who had come home from Madrid without finishing his studies in order not to oppose his mother. Which means that if Mariana had not died the way she died, your uncle would now be a member of the republican government-in-exile, or something like it."

Many times in the course of the two years granted him to survive the slow surrender of his will, Manuel looked at his wedding photograph and felt he wasn't the man who appeared in it, not because he didn't believe he had once possessed the spirit or the madness needed to confront his mother and overcome the fear that made him vomit before an attack at the front but because he had never thought he deserved Mariana's blind tenderness and proferred body, and he looked at her photographs and Orlando's drawing with the same unlimited, incredulous devotion and the same astonishment with which he looked at her and he saw himself in the bedroom mirrors when he finally had her white and naked in his arms. It was Solana, declared Magina or that part of Magina where unconquered pride survived, he was the one who made him a Red and encouraged him to become involved with that slut, said aggrieved voices in the salon where the embroidered table linen and silver table service were still displayed, what was going to be the dowry of the bride so abruptly abandoned, relics now of her melancholy destiny. And without saying anything to her, even though she was preparing the wedding dress and my cousin knew it, Minaya's father recounted many years later, because Mariana was dead and the war that had brought her to Màgina was over, but her pride and imperious capacity for contempt were still intact, perhaps even ennobled, like the statue of General Orduna, by indications of heroism and ignominy.

"And don't think that girl was a scarecrow because she belonged to one of the best families in Magina, almost as respectable as ours. Ask your mother, who knew her very well. Of course in the end she was lucky and recovered from my cousin's betrayal. She married, and it was a very good match, a captain in the Regular Army."

Inexhaustible, intact, and useless, like Magina's light and its statues with Greek profiles, rancor is the only thing they save or that saves them from oblivion and strengthens the persistence of pride over the void. Each morning, attended by Teresa and Amalia, who climbs the stairs very slowly and holds the railing and the walls and breathlessly reaches the top floor of the house, Dona Elvira dresses ceremoniously before a mirror and combs her white hair waved according to the by-now blurred style of 1930, at times permitting herself a drop of perfume at her wrists and on her neck and a light shadow of pink powder on her cheeks. How is my son, she asks without looking at anyone or expecting anyone to answer, directing her gaze over the heads of the two women moving around her, because she was taught that this was how a lady ought to address her servants, remind Inés that today is Thursday and she has to bring me the magazines. Has the administrator called? Have someone let him know. I want to settle the olive accounts with him before I forget about it and he cheats me. Dressed and perfumed as if she were going out, though she does that only early in the morning on Good Friday, Dona Elvira contemplates her own firm body in the mirror and smooths with her index finger the deleted line of her eyebrows.

"Teresa, when you've made the bed, water the geraniums. Don't you see they're withering?"

Still in front of the mirror, without turning around or raising her voice, Doña Elvira sees Teresa pulling the sheets and quilt from the large double bed where she still sleeps forty years after becoming a widow, and she suddenly notices, with secret satisfaction, how much the maid who was only a girl when she entered her service has aged. The cold yellow sun of February enters obliquely through the large window to the terrace, leaving on the tiles a damp stain of light, sifted down like pollen, which surrounds things without ever touching them and slides over to the doorway where Amalia, who almost doesn't see it, is standing and waiting.

"Does the señora want anything else?"

"Nothing, Amalia. Tell Inés she can bring me the paper and my breakfast now."

Before he was allowed to meet her, Doña Elvira imposed herself on Minaya's consciousness like a great absent shadow, depicted, with severe precision, in the fear with which Jacinto Solana imagined her many years earlier, in certain customs and words that ambiguously alluded to her, almost never naming her, not explaining her seclusion or her life, only suggesting that she was there, in the topmost rooms, appearing at the balcony of the greenhouse or looking at the garden from the window where her figure sometimes was outlined. A tray with the silver teapot and a single cup set out at midafternoon on the kitchen sideboard, the ABC folded and unopened, the illustrated magazines that Inés bought every Thursday at the kiosk on the Plaza of General Orduña, the account books next to the coat and hat of the administrator, who talks to Amalia in the courtyard, waiting until Doña Elvira wishes to receive him, the sound of the television set and the piano canceling each other out and confused in the distance with the fluttering wings of pigeons against the glass in the dome. He had learned to catalogue and discover the signs of Doña Elvira's presence and always to fear her when he walked alone down the hallways, and one day, without anything foretelling it, Inés told him that the señora had invited him to tea that afternoon in her rooms. The way up began with a door at the back of the gallery and crossed a dark region of rooms, perhaps never occupied, that had religious paintings on the walls and porcelain saints enclosed in crystal urns. Solitary figures on credenzas looking into empty space with lost, glassy eyes, looking at Minaya like motionless guardians of no-man's-land as he crossed the deserted semidarkness behind Inés' footsteps and the muffled clink of teaspoons and cups on the silver tray that she held solemnly, as if they were objects of worship.

"Come in," he heard the hard voice on the other side of the door first, and then, when he went in, Inés' faint scent was lost in an unfamiliar, dense perfume that occupied everything, as if it too formed part of the invisible presence, the enclosed solitude and the clothing and furniture of another time that surrounded Doña Elvira. It isn't the aroma of a woman, he thought, but of a century: this was how things, the air, smelled fifty years ago. Without looking up, Inés made a vague curtsy and left the tray on a table near the window. "Leave now," said Doña Elvira and didn't look at her, because she had been observing Minaya since he came in, and even when he helped her to sit next to the tea table, she continued watching him in the closet mirror, clumsy, solicitous, bending over her, conscious of the silence he didn't know how to break and of the cold, wise eyes that had already judged him.

"YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR MOTHER," she said, contemplating him at her leisure behind the steam and the cup of tea. "The same eyes and mouth, but the way you smile comes from your father. The way my husband and all the men in his family smiled, and even your grandmother Cristina, who was as good-looking as you. Haven't you seen her portrait that my son has in his bedroom? All of you smile to excuse your lies, not even to hide them, because all of you have always lacked the moral sense needed to distinguish between what is just and what isn't, or why that should matter to you. That is why my poor husband excused himself before committing an error or telling a lie, never afterward. For him there was nothing he did that could not be pardoned. His smile was never more candid or more charming than when he informed me he had sold a farm with a thousand olive trees to buy one of those Italian cars, Bugattis, they were called. He took it and a slut to Monte Carlo and returned in a month without the car or the slut, and, of course, without a cent, but he did come back with a very elegant dinner jacket and a bouquet of gladiolus and smiled as if he had traveled to the Cote d'Azur only to buy me flowers. My son, on the other hand, has never even known how to smile like his father, or like yours, who also was an extremely dangerous liar. He's been wrong as often as either of them, but with all the solemnity in the world, as if he were taking Communion. He went voluntarily into that army of the hungry who had taken half our land to divide it among themselves, and he almost lost his life fighting against those who were really his people, and as if that were not enough he married that woman who was already used goods, you understand me, and even wanted to go to France with her. But I'm sure you're not entirely like them, like my husband and my son and that madman your father, or like your great-grandfather, Don Apolonio, who infected them all with his deceptions and madness but not with his ability to make money. All of them liars, all of them reckless or useless, or both things at the same time, like my husband — may God have mercy on his soul — but if he had taken a few more years to die, he would have left us in poverty, with that mania he developed for collecting first thoroughbred horses and then women and cars. That's why, when he was a deputy, he became such good friends with Alfonso XIII. They had the same enthusiasms, and neither one bothered to hide them. Your father probably told you that when the king came to Magina in '24, he took tea with us one afternoon, in this house. The people with titles were green with envy when they saw the friendliness the king displayed toward my husband, who after all was the son of a man who made his money in the Indies and whose only coat of arms was invented for him by your grandfather José Emilio Minaya, the poet, who I think was the only man who could deceive him, he seemed so guileless, because he got five hundred pesetas from him to publish that book of poetry and made off with his daughter, though not with her inheritance. On the last night of his visit to Mágina, Alfonso XIII disappeared, something he apparently did habitually, and no one, not the queen, or Don Miguel Primo de Rivera, who had come here with him, or his military escort knew where to find him. At two in the morning, the telephone woke me. It was Primo, so nervous he didn't seem drunk. 'Elvira, is His Majesty in your house?' 'But Don Miguel,' I said, 'does Your Excellency think that if the king were here, I would have gone to bed?' And do you know where he was? At the Island of Cuba, which by then was the only estate we had left, drinking champagne with two deluxe sluts my husband had found for him, because I believe playing go-between for his friends gave him more pleasure than being a fighting cock. He returned at dawn, undressed as casually as if he had come from the opera, and told me before he fell asleep, 'Really, darling, His Majesty is a sportsman.'"

Doña Elvira's laugh, he later told Inés, was a short, cold outburst that shattered like glass and gleamed for an instant in eyes unfamiliar with indulgence and tenderness, eyes open and inflexible and rigorously sharpened by the lucidity of her contempt and the proximity of her death: the taut translucent skin at her temples, the white needlework at cuffs and neckline to hide from herself and the mirror the worst ravages of old age. All that could be seen of her hands were the short, slender fingers that drummed on the table or grasped the cup to hide their tremor.

"No, you're not like them. You're better-looking and more intelligent, and you owe both things to your mother, because your father, that stupid man, never could console himself for having been born disinherited, and he did nothing to give her the life she deserved. What was he doing when he killed himself?"

"Something in real estate. He said he was going to earn a good deal of money. He bought a car."

"Was it an honest business?"

"It seemed to be. But after his death they impounded even the furniture. I had to find a job and move to a pension."

"From time to time, before the three of you went to Madrid, he would come to me and lament his bad luck and ask for money for his business without your mother knowing. I never gave him a cent, of course, among other reasons because even if I had trusted him — and I never made that mistake — I had nothing to give him. My husband left everything to Manuel; that was another of his jokes, the final one. There's still a copy of his will around here somewhere. 'I declare my son Manuel sole inheritor of all my goods,' it said, in order not to break some tradition or other, which naturally was false, and he left me a painting, nothing but a painting. 'To my dearly beloved and faithful wife, Maria Elvira, I leave the portrait of Reverend Father Antonio Maria Claret, to whom I know she is very devoted.' He didn't do it for revenge but to go on laughing at me after death. But I'm the one who saved this house, and if we still have a little land and some capital in the bank, it hasn't been thanks to my son, who never took care of anything and was as much a bungler as he is now, but to me, who spent forty-four years struggling to preserve what my husband didn't have the time or desire to sell at a loss in order to pay for his whims. Look at those books. I spend entire nights over them, revising the accounts of the administrator, who is a scoundrel and cheats me if I'm careless. Since he knows my eyes are failing, he makes the numbers smaller and smaller, but I've bought a magnifying glass, and with it I can see even what isn't written down. There never was a man who could deceive me, and I won't permit it now, in my old age. Neither can you, but you know that. Tell me why you've come."

That was the question and the hidden challenge and the conclusion that all her words had led to, not a confession but a raw challenge in which she, after displaying her weapons, put simulation and words to one side like a gambler who clears the table to leave a single card and then turns it over with marked slowness. That was the only question and the only reason she had received him, and Minaya had been waiting for it since he entered the room, long before that, since Inés announced the señoras order and the moment designated for his audience. This afternoon, at five, Doña Elvira had said, and he spent the entire morning calculating the tone and precise words and manner in which he should present himself, docile, Manuel warned him, because she would look at him searching for confirmation of an ancient threat that was once, but not always, called Mariana or Jacinto Solana, well dressed and combed as she imagined a young man of evident dignity, though limited funds, ought to dress and comb his hair, but not so impeccable or servile that Doña Elvira might suspect the premeditated use of a mask.

"Before you can see her," said Manuel as they ate lunch, "she will have looked you over from head to toe, especially your collar, cuffs, and hands, because she has always said that in the collar and cuffs of his shirt one can discover if a man is or is not a gentleman. Since you arrived she's been asking about you, questioning Inés and Amalia, and even Medina when he goes up to examine her, but especially Teresa, who's afraid of her and feels hypnotized when my mother speaks to her. She already knows everything about you, and of course why you have come, but she wants to hear it from your own lips to decide if you're a danger."

And now he was sitting in front of her, in front of her only question, pouring himself a little more cold tea in order to break or prolong a truce and looking before responding, for ten extremely long seconds, at the garden conquered by darkness and the roofs and the sky where it was still day. I want to write a book, he said at last, about Jacinto Solana, anticipating a grimace or wounded rejection but not the laughter that sounded again like the rattle of bones and immediately died out.

"SOLANA. THAT SOLANA. No one has said his name before me for the past twenty years. I thought that thank God he had been erased forever from the world, and now you come to tell me you're going to write a book about him, as if one could write about nothing, about a fraud. But he was such a liar that after he died he continues telling lies just as he told lies from the time he was a boy until the day they killed him. And so he's deceived you too, just as he deceived my son and his own wife, who waited for him for ten years without his sending her a single letter or telling her he was leaving when he abandoned her. But many years earlier he had deceived my husband. Perhaps you don't know that it was he, my husband, who was responsible for Solana getting out of the dung heap and receiving an education that those of his class have never needed. There was a kind of charitable committee or something like that, and every year it tested the children in the schools for the poor and selected the most outstanding and paid for them to study with the Piarists. My husband, who was deputy for Magina at the time, presided over the committee, and it was his vote that decided Solana's fate and my son's misfortune. A great writer, they said, but I never saw a book signed by him, not even the one he seemed to be writing when he came back from prison to live at our expense, first in this house and then at the Island of Cuba. What happened in the war was being forgotten, and Manuel, who escaped dying in prison because of the name he bears, seemed to have recovered his senses, or at least one could no longer detect the madness that drove him to become a Communist or a republican or whatever it was — because I believe he didn't know himself — and to enter into that absurd marriage. We all thought Solana was dead or had escaped to another country. But he came back. He came back saying what he had always said, that he was going to write a book, though he didn't deceive me. 'Don't call attention to yourself, Manuel,' I told my son, 'that man is an ex-convict, and he'll be your ruin again.' I knew something bad was going to happen, and I waited for the disaster until some Civil Guards came to tell me, very courteously, I must say, because the lieutenant colonel was related to me, that they had to search the house and question Manuel, because that friend of his, Solana, had killed two of their men at the Island of Cuba. That was the book he was writing, and of course no one could find it afterward. He used the farm to meet with his accomplices, a gang of those Red bandits who were wandering the sierra then. And again they dragged Manuel out of his bed in the middle of the night to take him to their barracks in handcuffs. Once again I had to cover my face with a veil and humiliate myself by knocking at the doors of those who had been my friends to save him from death or a sentence that would have killed him a little more slowly. And do you know the first thing he did when he was free? Look for his friend in the morgue and pay for his funeral and a marble gravestone. It's still there, I suppose, in the cemetery, in case you want to visit it. Manuel never comes up to see me, but every year he takes flowers to the graves of his soul mate and of the woman who turned his life upside down. And took his honor, if truth be told."

She didn't say good-bye or order him to leave, she simply stopped seeing him or forgot she wasn't alone, and her words faded into a very slow silence, just as her features faded in the same semidarkness that was erasing the shapes of the furniture and the corners of the room, coming up from the garden, from the empty hallways and rooms where Minaya had to feel his way back like a traveler surprised by darkness in a thick wood where there were no roads, only closed doors. Solitary doors, suspended in air, hermetic like the book Minaya was looking for and that perhaps never was written. Half-open doors that invite one in and then close, as if in a sudden gust of wind, behind the person who dares to cross them. He stood noiselessly and murmured an excuse or a farewell, but the small woman in mourning continued to look at the garden with her hands folded in her lap and her back ridgidly erect, as if posing for a photograph.

"You're not like them," she said, and seen from above she was smaller and almost vulnerable, with her bones sharp beneath her skin and the white needlework on the velvet of her mourning. "Come back to see me whenever you like."

As he was leaving he saw her in profile, the dark silhouette, her white hair dazzling against the pale light from the window and the purple and opaque blue of nightfall on the roofs. He closed the door slowly and when he turned he found the light, staring eyes of Ines, who seemed to have been waiting for him to leave and was carrying on the silver tray the supper that Dona Elvira wouldn't taste that night either.

8

HE, TOO, DEFEATED AND OBSCURE beneath the blankets where a sick body lies, I imagine, he, too, looking at the ceiling or the semidarkness or the faint light that comes through the curtains that someone partially closed before leaving him alone. There are medicine bottles on the night table and the odor of the alcohol Medina used to disinfect the needle is still in the air. He closed his bag at the foot of the bed, slowly moving his head, the hands that so delicately lifted the back of Mariana's neck from the droppings, as if he didn't want to wake her. He looked at his watch and placed it back in his vest pocket, studying Manuel, who seems to be asleep but who is watching him, high and distant, from a fog not of physical pain but of melancholy, prepared to close his eyes in order not to sleep and surrender to the last light of day fading in the plaza and on the white curtains at the balcony with the same sweet slowness with which he wishes to be extinguished, let it be tonight, he thinks, with no fear or urgency, with his eyes closed, with the picture of Mariana and the one of his Aunt Cristina attending with their solemn presence as silent witnesses. For a moment he sees Medina or dreams him as he was in 1937, slim and with a black mustache, in his captain's uniform, leaning not over him but over the body of Mariana, who wears a sheer nightdress and has a red, round stain on her forehead. Medina, slow and heavy again, presses his hand for an instant and then leaves the room, and his cautious voice can be heard speaking to someone, Teresa or Amalia, in the hallway. Now Manuel curls up on his side and raises the fold of the sheet until it covers his mouth, his back to the balcony, and stares at the moldings on the closet, dissolving in the night. The only vestige is a vague muscular pain in his chest, the quiet hand, the tranquil reptile that isn't even asleep beneath closed eyelids. It only waits for the next, the definitive day, the hour when it will move up his left side brushing against the warm pink tissue of his lungs and then encircling his heart before squeezing it, closing the ring of asphyxia around its frightened beating, like a blind animal that had been incubated in Manuel's chest thirty-two years earlier to pay, day after day, the extremely long installment plan of anguish and longed-for death. He had spent the afternoon in the library, not doing anything, lacking even the will to climb the stairs to the pigeon loft, waiting for Minaya to come back from his visit to Dona Elvira, and perhaps the disquiet of waiting and cigarettes had caused the reawakening of the old wound near his heart, like a road that precisely indicates its white line in the growing light of dawn. What will she say about me, he thought, about all of us, fearing his mother's hatred less than the manner in which she might show it to Minaya, the indiscretion, the very probable slander. Since the proximity of the pain in his chest was more certain with each passing minute — now the reptile or hand was lodged in his stomach and groping its way upward, animated by brandy and tobacco — Manuel put on his coat and hat and took the bamboo stick that had belonged to his father to walk out to the watchtowers on the wall. But there was no respite because fear and pain were already moving up his veins like a single knife thrust, already hastening his breath and opening before his feet a pit that separated him from the world and left him alone with the bite of terror. He walked, slow and anachronistic, down Calle Real, very close to the building walls, ceding the sidewalk to the ladies, whom he greeted when he thought he knew them, touching the brim of his hat with a distracted and completely involuntary gesture, but the air on the street was not enough to ease the incessant pounding that cracked a whip in his heart and temples, and in an instant of vertigo the dark hand oppressing his chest sometimes even stopped the flow of his blood. Leaning against the walls, he was able to reach the Plaza of Santa Maria, and when he felt in his heart the last peck and the shadow's slap that knocked him to the paving stones, he recalled an April morning when that same plaza and its backdrop of palaces and distant bell towers seemed more boundless than ever to him, because Mariana, in a white blouse and summer sandals, came toward him, smiling, from the facade of El Salvador. It was that same image, intact, that he found before him when he woke from his brief death not knowing who he was or in what part of the world the room and the bed he was lying in were to be found. He heard voices, pigeons, the notes of a strange habanera that never ended, he heard, as he was overcome by the dense lethargy of sedatives, little girls' voices in the plaza singing the funeral ballad of Alfonso XII and Dona Mercedes, and in the not-yet-unfathomable waters of sleep the melody of the habanera became entwined with the voices of the children's song, the nocturnal footsteps in the hallway, the murmur like that of a hospital, the wakefulness that reached him from the other side of the door.

"He's fallen asleep," said Teresa, closing the door again with extreme care. Minaya and Medina were smoking beside the darkened glass doors of the gallery, talking in that muffled tone of voice used in churches and in the vicinity of the sick.

"The worst thing afflicting your uncle, my boy, isn't that he drinks and smokes and exerts himself too much given the fragility of his heart, but that he doesn't want to live. Understand what I'm saying: when you reach the age that Manuel and I are, living becomes an act of will."

Inés passed them with Doña Elvira's untouched tray and looked for a second at Minaya with an expression so rapid it seemed unreal. He saw her walk away with the clink of porcelain and silver, like a perfume or a melody that followed and announced her.

"You speak about will, but my uncle has had a cardiac lesion since a bullet grazed his heart."

"My friend…" Medina, smiling, picked up his bag from the floor, ready to leave. "Manuel has told me you're a kind of writer, so perhaps you'll understand what I am going to tell you. In my work, one becomes very skeptical with the years and discovers that in certain cases the heart and its ailments are a metaphor. Manuel had his first serious attack on the day following Mariana's death. That was when his real illness began, and it wasn't caused by the bullet you mentioned but by the one that killed her."

They went downstairs in silence, trying to keep their footsteps from resounding on the marble, less to respect Manuel's sleep than to avoid committing an uncertain profanation. In the courtyard, Medina ceremoniously shook the hands of Teresa and Amalia and accepted the hat and coat that Minaya handed him with the quiet gravity of a priest who dons his liturgical cape at the door of the sacristy. They were alone, in the doorway, and only then did Minaya dare to ask the question that had been troubling him since they came down from the gallery. Who killed her, he said, regretting it instantly, but there was no censure in Medina's glance, only a serene wonder, as if he were surprised to discover that after so many years there was still someone asking that question.

"There was shooting on the roofs, on the other side of the house, above the lanes that the pigeon loft looks out on. A militia patrol was pursuing a rebel, whom I'm sure they never captured. Mariana, who was in the pigeon loft, went to the window when she heard the shots. One of them hit her in the forehead. We never found out anything else."

He thought about Medina as he groped his way up the last steps to the pigeon loft, not daring yet to turn on the flashlight, about Medina, about his slow eyes that had seen Mariana barely covered by the nightgown under whose silk folds one could make out the faint shadow of her pubis, about the way he cleaned his eyeglasses so un-hurriedly or looked in his vest for the watch he used to measure with equal composure the time of his visits and the passage of his life toward an old age as irreparable and mediocre as the tyranny he once had fought and now tolerated — without accepting submission but also without the vain certainty that he would witness its downfall — as one tolerates an incurable disease. Some nights, after the game of cards in the parlor, when the others had withdrawn, Medina delayed drinking his last glass of anisette and remained seated in silence across from Manuel, who gathered up the deck counting the cards on the table with that distracted air of his, as if he were counting coins. At first, from his bedroom, Minaya listened to the silence, perhaps Medina's cough or a few words in a quiet voice that almost never became a conversation, asking himself why the two men were still there doing nothing, facing each other, smoking in the light of the lamp that enclosed them in a conical bell of silence and smoke. When it was after midnight, Medina would ask Manuel something, who agreed, and then a sound could be heard like whistles and tearing paper, voices that interrupted one another or were inundated by a remote babel of words in foreign languages. "It's no use," said Manuel, "there's too much interference tonight, and I can't find it." And then, when he was about to fall asleep, the music of the Anthem of Riego' woke Minaya, and he knew what he should have guessed long before: Manuel and Medina stayed in the parlor that late to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees. "Don't have any illusions, Manuel," he heard Medina say one night, "you and I will never see the Third Republic. We're condemned to Franco in the same way we're condemned to grow old and die." "Then why do you come every night to listen to Radio of the Pyrenees?" Medina burst into laughter: he had the sonorous laugh of a bishop. "Because I like the 'Anthem of Riego.' It rejuvenates me. That anthem of Franco's is for third-rate funerals."

After kneeling beside Mariana and confirming that she had no pulse, Medina stood up, brushing off the knees of his military trousers. Death had been instantaneous, he said, but no one paid attention to his words. Near the door, Minaya imagined as he slid the circle of the flashlight around the walls, there would be the others: Dona Elvira, in mourning, Manuel, Amalia, perhaps Teresa, if she was already working in the house then. Utrera, Jacinto Solana, biting their lips, wanting blindly to die. When it reached the window without glass or shutters, the illumination from the flashlight dispersed in a well of night, and then the very weak circle shed light on the roof on the other side of the lane. Leaning on the sill, Medina saw two Assault Guards crawling with difficulty along the neighboring roof, rifles over their shoulders, examining the broken tiles. "There's a trail of blood here, Captain," one of them said. "The militiamen say the Fascist hid behind the chimney and fired from here." In the darkness, Minaya, who had turned off the flashlight because its light made the pigeons restless, thought he heard footsteps, imagined that the staircase was creaking, that someone was going to discover his useless investigation, but the footsteps and his fear were simply the way his conscience felt guilt, the invincible and secret shame of being an impostor that had pursued him his entire life and now, in the house, in the places of the time he dared to enter clandestinely, it hounded him more than ever. They're asleep now, he thought, while I climb like a thief up to this place that doesn't belong to me and shine the flashlight on an empty space, they're asleep or probably they never sleep and their eyes are open in the dark as they listen to my footsteps over their heads. For a moment, the murmur of the sleeping pigeons and the sound of the blood beating in his temples seemed like the combined breathing of all those who slept or didn't sleep in the rooms of the house. Above the roofs, in the center of the window, was a half-moon as precise and fragile as the illustration in a children's book. Minaya closed the door of the pigeon loft and felt his way down the steep staircase. Only one of the lamps in the gallery was lit, and its light projected his own very long shadow in front of Minaya. The afternoon's conversation with Dona Elvira, Manuel's relapse, the time spent in darkness in the pigeon loft, had plunged him into a state of singular fatigue and nervous excitement that denied in advance the possibility of sleep. His sudden image was that of a sleepwalker in the tall mirrors along the stairs. But when he reached the courtyard, he knew he wouldn't be alone in the library. A line of light slipped under the door, and in an easy chair next to the fire, her lips painted, her hair loose over her shoulders, holding a cigarette and a book in her hands, was Inés, who looked at him without surprise, smiling, as if she had been waiting for him, knowing he would come.

9

ORLANDO SHOULD HAVE SURVIVED to sketch Inés just as he had sketched Mariana. He, who never desired women but was never indifferent to the beauty of a body, would have known how to sketch in exact equilibrium the cold lines of her profile and figure and the passion they incited: the pencil tracing with distant tenderness Inés' nose and chin, her lips, on the white paper, the modeling of her hands and ankles, the invisible smile that sometimes lit up her eyes and that the most attentive camera would never have captured in a photograph, because it was an inner smile, like the one provoked so slightly by the splash of a fish's tail on the surface of a lake. But that night, when Minaya found her in the library, or the days and dawns that preceded it, the line of the pencil on untouched white would not have been enough to draw Inés, desired by two men who situated her body on the balance of an obscure symmetry. A single red stroke for her smile, a red or pink spot for her lips, the same as the one left by her lipstick on the towels in her maid's room, when she locked her door to put on makeup at a mirror hanging on the wall, as if it were a secret rehearsal or a brief performance meant only for herself, for in the end, when she had succeeded in combing her hair and painting her lips in a way that satisfied her, she would pull back her hair again and wipe off the lipstick with a wet towel and return silently to her earlier, hermetic simulation.

Very soon the game acquired new characteristics: she liked to put on makeup and look at herself naked in closet mirrors and go down to the library when she was sure no one would surprise her to repeat a scene she had relished in certain fashion magazines. Sitting next to the fire, with a glass she never finished and a cigarette pilfered from Manuel's case, she read in the oblique light of a low lamp, absorbed in the adventures presented in the book but conscious at the same time of each one of her gestures, as if she could see herself in a mirror. When she heard the door she closed the book, marking the page where she had stopped with a peculiar sliding of her fingers that Minaya could not help but notice because it had the quality of a caress, and she contemplated with irony and tenderness the surprise of the newcomer. It had to happen there, in the library, and nowhere else, at that time and with that light, which invited and seemed to accentuate Inés' features and the unfamiliar perfume that Minaya distinguished among the usual odors of wood and books. It was easy, that night, to imagine what was going on, to calculate the particulars of the scene and the words Inés would use to recount it afterward, interrupting the kisses to add a minor detail: the way Minaya sat down across from her, not looking at her yet, searching for his cigarettes, his momentary evasion, asking about the book she was reading, overwhelmed by the terror and vertigo of knowing that Inés had painted her lips and combed her chestnut hair in that new, dazzling way to wait only for him at two o'clock in the morning. Sitting on the chair, her legs extended so that her heels rested on the precise spot where he had to sit, with that inexplicable cigarette between her lips, for she didn't know how to smoke and every time she exhaled the smoke it gave rise to the cough of a fourteen-year-old with clandestine cigarettes.

"You've been in the pigeon loft."

"You saw me?"

"I saw the feathers sticking to your sweater."

"Do you see everything?"

Never until then had he seen that smile in Inés' eyes and on her lips, or perhaps he had, he would remember later: that same morning, when they were talking about The Charterhouse of Parma and she, in their shared enthusiasm for the adventures and courage of Fabrizio del Dongo, smiled at him for an instant, as if he were her accomplice in a secret passion. She talked about Fabrizio the way she talked about Errol Flynn, because her literary imagination had been educated visually by Technicolor movies on Sunday afternoons, and when she read a book she moved her profile forward as attentively and greedily as if she were contemplating the illuminated screen. Ever since he saw her come into the library at ten in the morning, as she did every day, with the feather duster and the white apron around her waist, her gestures had acquired for Minaya the quality of signs about to be revealed. Useless to seek refuge in the severe protection of the books, the pasteboard filing cards that he wrote and put in order with a purpose whose conclusion was so distant it was becoming impossible. Inés sat across from him, forgetting the duster on the table, her face lazily resting on her hands, which held and framed her angular pink cheekbones, while he gave himself over to his enduring task of calligraphy and pasteboard.

"Last night I was up until three o'clock reading The Charterhouse. I've never read a book I liked as much as that one. What about you?"

"Only The Mysterious Island. Where did you learn French?"

"At the orphanage. There was a French nun."

It was the same smile, the same way of looking at him as if she finally were seeing him, and of using literature, the sonorous name of Fabrizio del Dongo and the illusory recollection of the landscapes of northern Italy, to speak about herself, about Minaya, whose face she instinctively attributed to Fabrizio, for since then their conversations about books on tepid mornings in the library were the veil for other words neither of them dared to say. On the mantel over the fireplace, in the semidarkness across the room, Jacinto Solana smiled at them from an afternoon in 1936 with his obscene loyalty to every unconfessed desire. Inés, Minaya said then, interrupting a phantom conversation in which books and Mariana's picture intervened, calm now and a little drunk, firm in his twenty-six years as a man alone and in the certainty that he desired her that night with the clarity of an axiom. "You never say my name. Did you realize that? As if it embarrassed you." But he didn't explain that it was modesty that kept him from pronouncing her name in front of her, because naming her would be saying everything, his sleeplessness, his solitary love under the sheets, memory retrieving her body to desire her more, closing his eyes until all of him melted in a hot, despicable spasm, mornings without her in the library, the inconsolable emotion when he saw her coat hanging on the rack in the courtyard or passed by her room and saw her stockings and white apron on the bed. Saying Inés aloud was like doing what he perhaps would never do, like taking her hand and slowly removing the glass or caressing her breasts. Inés, the two beloved syllables, the hand that offered him a cigarette stopping at the boundary beyond which a caress would begin, the music she had put on Manuel's phonograph as if at random and that was incredibly, premeditatedly the trumpet and voice of Louis Armstrong on a record from 1930, at last her lips, the girl barefoot and kissing him in the darkness like no one, not even she, would kiss him again, gratitude broken into delicate bites of silence, into caresses of the blind who search each other for characteristics driven not by desire but by an urgent wish for acknowledgment. Inés' cheekbones, chin, wet lips, the tears that moistened Minaya's fingertips in the darkness, the perfume, the music sounding in a closed room in 1930 just as it sounded seven years later, that same song, on Manuel's piano, and he translated the title for Mariana before he began to play "If We Never Meet Again."

The end of the music and of their caresses came at the same time, and then, when Minaya and Inés drew back listening to their double and single breathing, they could see each other as strangers in an uncertain light that came from the plaza, because they had turned off the lamp when they began to kiss, and they heard, as if they had just returned to the world, that the record was silently turning with the needle still on it and the pendulum of the clock had not stopped moving back and forth in a corner of the library. Now their voices were different, slower and warmer, as if made denser by the darkness, and they extended their hands to stroke the other's hands or simply to touch the clothes or skin or perfumed air that surrounded them, run aground not in peaceful fatigue but in the stupefaction of having survived happiness. Ines said afterward that when she wanted to get up to turn on the light, Minaya kept her at his side. He wanted to stop time, not take a step beyond the instant in which the darkness still enfolded them like a silken wing, not return to the usual light that leveled everything and would return them to their modesty, strangers once again, their hands hurrying to straighten their clothes and erase from the library the signs that could expose them the next morning. A glass of wine overturned in the grass, an empty bottle, a rectangle of light advancing without mercy on the shadows of the garden like a river whose flooding the lovers would move away from without undoing their embrace. Mariana, sitting up, leaned her beautiful disheveled head against the trunk of the date palm, immune to the fear that had made them move back when the light went on and they saw in its squared patch the shadow of someone who perhaps had been spying on them. "Solana," she said, the cigarette between her lips, taking in her hands the dark face in front of her, then caressing his neck and drawing him to her, as if guiding him, until she sheltered him between her white breasts under the moon, "Jacinto Solana," like a challenge and an invitation that would never be accepted because they were already consuming the ashes of the time they had been granted.

SUDDENLY MINAYA WAS ALONE, and it was as if nothing could attest to the fact that he had been kissing Ines on a sofa in the illuminated, unmoving library. The sensation of the caresses and the darkness remained in his consciousness, with no reason to connect it to the present, even less so to the blurred scene that had preceded it, just as an apparition leaves no trace when it fades away. In front of the fire was the glass table where she placed the book she was reading while she waited for him and that held the bottle and glasses and ashtray with cigarette ends stained crimson, but Inés, before she left, had put the book back on the shelf where it belonged and removed the glasses and the bottle as urgently as she had straightened her skirt and buttoned her blouse, then disappeared as if she were never going to return. "Now she's in her room, probably naked under the sheets, because she may still be waiting for me, and this flight has been a trick to get me to follow her." But he didn't do anything except insist on the alcohol, on his cowardice and good fortune, except to look at Orlando's drawing and the photograph in which Jacinto Solana was smiling at him, Minaya, guessing, understanding everything, with the air of someone who confirms with disdain that what he always imagined has happened and that the gift of prophecy is a melancholy privilege. Then he went up without even daring to pass Inés' bedroom, going along the hallways in the house as if they were the last streets of a city not entirely recognized or inhospitable, obedient to sleep and the mature night where, as if in a kind of future memory, there were to be found Inés' embraces and the placidity of the sheets waiting to remind him of the commandment of abandonment and forgetting, because out in the world it was February 1969, tyranny and fear, but inside those walls what endured was a delicate anachronism, a plot he was also a part of though he didn't know it: Inés, who didn't belong to this time or any other because her presence was enough to cancel it, Mariana in the drawing and in photographs, Manuel in his lieutenant's uniform, and Jacinto Solana not motionless in his figure and in the date of his death, but always writing, even now, narrating, Minaya imagined, like the impostor and guest who enters the parlor at three in the morning and discovers that there is a key in the lock of the forbidden room, that it will be infinitely easy to push the door and contemplate what no one but Manuel has seen in the last thirty-two years. A large, unexpectedly vulgar room, with dark furniture and white curtains across the shutters to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias. He moved forward uncertainly, closing the door behind him, he lit a match and saw himself in the double mirror on the closet, his pale face emerging from the darkness as if in a chiaroscurist portrait. But it wasn't entirely a funereal place, because the top sheet was clean and looked recently ironed and the air didn't smell of enclosure but of a cold February night, as if someone had just closed the balcony door. He locks himself in here, he thought, to caress the embroidery or the edge of the sheets as if he were caressing the body of the woman who lay on them for a single night, to look at the plaza from the balcony that only he can open, or to look at the mirror searching for a memory of Mariana, disheveled and naked, and perhaps he no longer feels anything, because no one is capable of incessant memory. He opened the closet, as empty as one in a hotel room, he searched through the dresser drawers and saw Mariana's lingerie and stockings and a mirrored compact that contained a pink substance as delicate as pollen, and in the bottom drawer, under her wedding dress, which became entwined in his hands like silken foam, he found the packet of old handwritten pages tied with a red ribbon. There was no need to hold it up to the candle to read the name written on the first sheet: he could recognize Jacinto Solana not only in his insomniac handwriting but above all in the talent for secrecy that seemed to have endured in him even after his death. They killed him, they thought they could demolish his memory by stomping on the typewriter that he was heard pounding constantly for three months in the highest room in the house, they ripped the papers he had written and burned them in a fire they set in the garden, but like a virus that lodges in the body and returns when the patient thinks it has been exterminated, the furtive words, the incessant writing of Jacinto Solana appeared again twenty-two years later, and in a place, Minaya supposed, that would have pleased him: the most untouched room in the house, the drawer where the wedding dress was kept and the intimate silk things of the woman he loved, so that the odor of the paper blended with the scent of her clothes, a distant heir of other scents that were in Mariana's skin.

Only later, when Minaya had read the manuscript, could he understand why Manuel had lied and told him that not even a page remained of the book Solana had been writing when they killed him. It read "Beatus Ille" at the top of the first sheet, though it wasn't or didn't seem to be a novel but a kind of diary written between February and April of 1947 and crisscrossed with long evocations of things that had happened ten years earlier. At times Solana wrote in the first person and at other times he used the third, as if he wanted to hide the voice that was telling and guessing everything and in this way give the narration the tone of an impassive history. Kneeling next to the open drawer, next to the wedding dress that spread around him, Minaya untied the knots in the red ribbons with clumsy, eager slowness, and when he touched the manuscript pages one by one with the incredulous fervor of a man who has witnessed a miracle, he heard the door of the bedroom closing quietly, and before he turned around, he recalled in a moment of lucidity and terror that he hadn't taken the key out of the lock. But it wasn't Manuel, it was Inés at his side, Inés who turned the key so that no one could take them by surprise and who, tall and ironic, looked at him as if he were a thief who, when he was discovered, forgot the fruit of his greed between his hands. Still on his knees, he let the manuscript fall, unable to say anything or think of a possible excuse. "I saw Utrera walking around the gallery," Inés said, "he almost caught you," and her voice wasn't the voice of an accuser but of an accomplice when she kneeled beside him to put away the dress. "Look what I've found. Manuscripts by Jacinto Solana." But Ines didn't seem to hear him; she had seen, among the bride's clothes, a rose of yellow cloth that Mariana must have removed from her hair before the wedding photograph was taken, and she put it on one side of her forehead, with transitory elegance, and looked in the mirror for an instant, smiling at herself, at Minaya's stupefaction and passion. With a caress he removed the rose from her hair as he kissed her with his eyes closed.

10

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GARDEN, next to the palm tree that's so tall its top can be seen from the plaza, Manuel, convalescing, sat in the sun and talked to Minaya, sitting on a wicker chair, wearing no tie and a light-colored suit that seemed to have been chosen to match his white hair and the tone of the paint on the small round table with a glass of water sparkling in the light and an opaque bottle of medicine. Dominating his figure, beyond the fatigue of his convalescence visible only in the flat pallor of his skin and a certain tremor in his left: hand, was a serene inaugural air, as if he had dressed so carefully to attend a fiesta or receive a group of guests in the garden. Disobeying Medina's orders without excessive pleasure, though with absolute premeditation, Manuel smoked his first cigarette since the afternoon when his heart knocked him down in the Plaza of Santa Maria. Still intact was the delight of taking it out of the cigarette case and fitting the filter in the holder with a light pressure of thumb and index finger, but the tobacco had a taste somewhere between unfamiliar and neutral, and Manuel, after the disappointment of the first few inhalations, continued smoking only because of loyalty to himself, just as he had allowed himself the useless elegance of going out to the garden, wearing his linen suit and an Italian scarf instead of a tie.

"Utrera told me you were going to visit his studio. He's a little nervous, and I think a little ashamed. You know, he considers the works they commission now humiliating. So you shouldn't praise his Medieval Virgins too much. He has a high opinion of you. He says you've inherited the artistic temperament of your grandfather Minaya and your grandmother Cristina."

Minava couldn't imagine his grandmother as an old woman. In fact, he had never thought about her until he saw her oil portrait in Manuel's bedroom: a blonde girl with singularly delicate features looking into empty space and holding on her lap a half-open book on whose cover one can read with some difficulty the title written in Gothic letters: Arpeggios, by J. E. Minaya.

"My father rarely spoke of her, and then only to reproach her until after she had died for what he called her bad marriage. 'Dear God, what have I done that You gave me a poet for a father, a disinherited mother, and a son who's a Communist.' He said that once when he found a clandestine journal among my papers."

THERE WAS NOTHING STRANGER FOR MINAYA than remembering his father in the garden of the house that his bad luck had denied him. Death, he thought, isn't that boundary, that unmoving trench one imagines when it has just happened, but a slow distancing that ends in forgetting and disloyalty. In Madrid, in the sad streets and doorways of the district where they had taken him when they left Magina, in a cell at Security Headquarters, the shadow of his father had moved very slowly away from Minaya, but it survived, transfigured and abstract, in the sensation of failure and fear, in the disagreeable need to take the metro every day and work and know he was alone. Now he was smoking in the garden and listening to the extremely hospitable voice of Manuel, who was telling him something about the visits he and Jacinto Solana made in their adolescence to the blonde girl in the painting, and the figures of his parents faded irremediably, like his own life and his future, abolished in time, in the pink fragrance of the wisteria that sifted the early light and brought him the memory of Inés, as if the day he would leave the house would never come, as if there were no days beyond the one indicated by the calendars that morning, no cities on the other side of the blue sierra. Even the next few minutes seemed remote to him: "If the smoke stopped in the air, if the light at the end of the cigarette stopped burning, if the splotches of shadow did not advance along the gravel in the garden." He walked toward the rear, toward the door of the carriage house where Utrera was waiting for him. "Triumphant," he had read in a passage of the manuscript, "solicitous, offering smiles and black-market cigarettes, appealing, as he says, to forgetting past rancors, to friendship, which is stronger than political differences. Wearing one of those dustcoats that mechanics used thirty years ago, he rules over the three workers who help him in the studio and over the statues like dismantled mannequins to which he barely applies a touch of paint or varnish when they are presented to him, for he claims that his art, like Leonardo's, e cosa mentale. Beneath the dustcoat he always wears a suit with spectacular shoulder pads for his slight figure, and a white carnation in his lapel. In the late afternoon, a worker acting as his valet de chambre—the mockery is Manuel's — helps him remove the dustcoat, and then Utrera emerges ready to prolong his reign in conversation at the cafe and at the tables with heaters under them in the brothels. He returns in the middle of the night with a drunkard's wariness and usually enters his studio through the back gate in the lane. He uses too much cologne and too much pomade, but I suppose that's another sign of success. He never looks me in the eye."

The same dustcoat, Minaya thinks, the same smile roughened by the gleam of his false teeth, almost the same cafes, darker now or more deserted, as excessive and empty as the workshop where Eugenio Utrera, leaning over a low table that looks something like a cobbler's bench, scratches with his sharpened gouge at a piece of wood to obtain something that resembles a saint or a Romanesque Virgin. His hands, the long yellow index fingers and blue veins, a cigarette that has gone out in a mouth wet with saliva, a man who isn't exactly Utrera murmuring at the back of the carriage house, diminished, erased by the empty space and high ceiling that has a large glass skylight toward the center. He finishes a carving, leaves it on the table covered with old newspapers and shavings that allow him to smell at least the sweet, almost faded aroma of fresh wood, shakes off the lapels of his dustcoat and looks at his work and hates it with a devotion he only uses secretly to curse himself. Tacked to the wall, next to the shelf where the varnished figures are lined up, are newspaper clippings no longer legible, because years ago the dampness faded the photographs and headlines announcing the inauguration of a new monument sculpted by Utrera. "Orthopedic Virgins," wrote Solana, "wire nudes and amputated hands: the head, the wax lips that smile as if at the top of a pike, the hands extended at the end of a body of wires and wicker rods. Then, over nothing, over so light an armature, tunics and embroidered mantles are added so that no one can see the obscenity of these Virgins. Utrera isn't copying Martínez Montañés, as he supposes, but Marcel Duchamp."

In a corner of the workshop was the last car Manuel's father bought before he died, gloomy behind its windows closed like certain glass urns. "Look," said Utrera, pointing at it with pride, "look at how it still shines. Doesn't it look like a viceregal carriage? Nowadays they don't make automobiles like this one." He cleans off a chair, tossing the stained newspapers that covered it to the floor, offers it to Minaya, puts into a chest the piece of wood where there was the beginning of a suggestion of crude oval eyes.

"Romanesque Virgins," he murmurs, as if apologizing, "now everybody wants to have a Romanesque Virgin in the dining room or a bearded saint as a bookend. Of course there are more serious clients: for them I make special counterfeits, though you shouldn't think the store pays me much more for them. Shall I tell you a secret? Last week I finished a fourteenth-century crucifix."

His incessant talk, Minaya notices, is muffled in the workshop, as if here he weren't permitted the petulance he exhibits in the dining room, the library, the card games in the parlor, the Mágina cafés where he has occasionally seen Utrera lethargic in front of a glass of water and a snifter of cognac, pale in the damp semidarkness that smells of wood soaked in alcohol and urinal drains. He has seen him, without Utrera noticing him, at the back of cafés where the light of day never reaches, he has followed him at night along the lanes of his cowardly return, when he comes down to the house from the Plaza of General Orduña staggering and murmuring those things solitary drunks say to thin air, the alcoholic sidelong glances still not exempt from shame. Since Minaya's arrival in Mágina, his own consciousness had been pared down and reduced to a gaze that ascertains and desires, like a spy in a foreign country who has forgotten his true, distant identity in order not to be more than an eye and a hidden camera. He has visited the Gothic cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria and in its chapels, lit by candles, he has seen Eugenio Utreras statues elevated on thrones that women in mourning adorn with large bouquets of flowers. The eyes blank, lacking the half-moon of glass eyes, the hard features of the Virgins gleaming in the semidarkness with a waxen smoothness. But in all those faces there is a unique, ambiguous air that isn't due simply to negligence and the monotony of a studio overwhelmed by commissions. Looking at Utreras Virgins and Veronicas and penitent Magdalenes in the chapels of Santa Maria sounded an alarm for Minaya, a warning that he was about to discover something so hidden and fragile that only an abrupt revelation could give it definitive form. He recalled the photographs, Orlando's drawing, he recalled a Sunday afternoon when he waited for Inés next to the Monument to the Fallen and a night when he surprised Utrera looking for something in the gardens surrounding the statue, on his knees, drunk, holding a flashlight that barely illuminated his face. The Fallen Hero has the hair and features of a woman and a small circular mark on the forehead. Now he dares to say it, in Utreras studio, as the old man catalogues humiliations and scorn, the persistence of ingratitude and forgetting. His hands are the same bloodless color of the old newspapers that cover the table and lie on the floor and the chairs and the shelf with the rows of wooden saints and cans of varnish. When he hears the name, Mariana, spoken by Minaya, Utrera moves his eyes away from his own hands and slowly raises his line of sight until he is looking at the other man and he smiles at him with the same questioning, suspicious air he used the first time they met in the dining room.

"It was because of the eyes, wasn't it? The eyes and cheekbones. Her mouth was admirable and her nose, as you must have noticed, was just a little longer and sharper than the accepted norms of sculpture. But her beauty lay above all in her almond-shaped eyes and those extremely high cheekbones. They weren't perfect, but when one looked at them, one's hands almost felt the sensation of modeling them."

It wasn't in the church but afterward, when he left there to look at the face in the Plaza of the Fallen, that could only be seen between the angel's legs and from an angle as unusual as it was difficult, when Minaya realized that all of Utrera's female faces were partial portraits of Mariana. A minor variation in the mouth or in the rendering of the face was enough to transform her into an unknown woman, but the long, pensive eyes were always the same in the dark air of the chapels, the same cheekbones that Orlando had summarized forever with a single stroke of his pencil. Now Utrera has forgotten all suspicion as he gives himself over to pride: standing and facing Minaya, with his dirty dustcoat and the tense or involuntary smile of his false teeth, he smokes and agrees to remember, to grant him the status of accomplice.

"You're right. The face of the Fallen Hero is a portrait of Mariana, a funerary portrait, to be more exact. I had made her death mask, but I lost it before the war was over. I found it again many years later, in '53, I think, when I was already working on the Monument to the Fallen. It was in the drawer of an old armoire, in the basement, so forgotten that finding it seemed like a miracle. At first I thought the angel ought to have Mariana's face, but exposing it to light after all the years it had been hidden in the basement would have been a profanation. Have you seen photographs of those Egyptian statues that appear in the tombs of the pharaohs? They were made for the darkness, so that no one but the deceased could contemplate their beauty. In fifteen years no one, absolutely no one, discovered my secret. Now I have to share that portrait of Mariana with you. Promise me you won't say anything to anybody."

I promise, Minaya says, lying, imagining in advance how he'll tell these things to Inés and the words Solana would have used in the manuscripts to describe the conversation and the scene. All things, he thought then, have already been written and matter only to the extent I can recount them to Inés to provoke in her eyes a flash of longed-for mystery. Like her on certain clandestine nights, when she is naked and embraces his body, which never stops desiring her, to tell him about a book or a film or the brief dream she had while he was smoking in the dark and didn't know she was asleep, Minaya wants to tell her what he knows now, Utrera's pride and hidden rage, the pride and rage of looking at the empty car and his useless hands but always knowing he has added to the world a single memorable face, the unique shape of the eyes and cheekbones concealed, as if by a veil, with features that didn't belong to them, the precise lines of the face of a sleeping girl who smiles inside a dream disintegrated in death. He returns to the house from which he vindicated his glory with no witnesses other than a glass of cognac or a clouded mirror, and sometimes, when he is ready to open the door to the lane, he stands proudly erect on the aberration of alcohol and decides to prolong his steps to the shadowy plaza where the portrait of Mariana and the certainty of his pride await him with a constant loyalty possessed only by statues and paintings. At night, so that no one will follow him, like a miser who goes down to the basement where he counts and contemplates his coins every night and lets them slide through avid fingers, he stumbles, flips on his lighter, cannot manage to hold up the flame and shelter it from the wind, gropes at the granite he so delicately polished, recognizes every undulation, and stops his index finger at the small sunken circle in the middle of the forehead. He hears footsteps very close by, but it's too late when he gets to his feet because someone, a tall, familiar figure, has seen him kneeling next to the statue. When he stands so abruptly the blood pounds in his temples and a cognac nausea comes up from his stomach, but he cares more about his certain embarrassment, his obligation to pretend. It's that young man, Minaya, Manuel's nephew; it's midnight and very cold and what is he doing here except spying on me.

"Now you're thinking I fell in love with Mariana too. I hope you'll believe me when I tell you that didn't happen. She was the kind of woman every artist wants as a model, but nothing else, at least for me, especially if you keep in mind that she was going to marry the man to whose hospitality I owed my life. I don't betray my friends."

"And Solana?"

Utrera remains silent: premeditatedly grave, almost wounded, when he speaks again he avoids Minaya's eyes, as if forced against his will to take a step beyond discretion. "One shouldn't speak ill of the dead." When he leaves the studio, the noon light dazzles Minaya in the garden. With his back turned to him, Manuel in his wicker armchair remains in a repose belied only by the blue cigarette smoke that rises until it disappears in the clusters of wisteria.

11

THE NARROW GAUGE TRAIN slowly descends the Magina slope to the Guadalquivir. In the distance, among blue olive trees and dunes of wheat or drab fields lying fallow, the river glitters like a thin plate of metal, of silver, of the same livid, glassy blue in the air at the edge of the sierra. As it goes down to the Guadalquivir, the train advances more rapidly between the olive groves, whose long rows open like fans into successive vanishing points. In profile next to the window, Inés looks at the olive groves and the white houses that appear for an instant like islands in the geometry of their thick growth, holding on her knees a wicker basket covered with a blue-checkered cloth. The olive trees and the dense line of poplars that announces the river, the distant sierra with clusters of white houses hanging from the slopes, are for Minaya like those landscapes of blue mountains and curving rivers visible in the background of certain quattrocento portraits in which a girl smiles in profile. With a casual air he caresses the hand resting on the basket, Inés' hands and knees, her ankles close together, the glance that recognizes and waits for a sign among the oleanders and the olive trees. "When we reach the river, the house where I was born is after the next curve." The rolling plain vibrates with the hedge mustard's greens and silvers and yellows, and before the river can be seen through the windows, an odor of mud and shaded water announces its vast, almost motionless, proximity. "Look," Inés sits up, lowers the glass, and points at a house on the other side of a little grove of pomegranate trees and cypresses, "that was my grandfather's mill, that's where I was born." But the house is immediately left behind, barely glimpsed, like the new gleam in Inés' eyes when they looked at it. He would have liked to stop there, get off with her, go along the path that leads to the house among the pomegranate branches, acknowledge the grapevine in whose shade her uncle told her tales of travels, and the bedroom where she waited for sleep every night, hearing the passage of the water through the vault of the mill and the distant wind that shook the trees and carried to Mágina the deep whistles of trains or improbable ships. "At night, so I'd forget my fear of the dark, my uncle would come into my bedroom and sit beside me, leaving his crutches on the bed. He made me listen to the water and the whistles of the trains, and when you could hear one coming from very far away, he'd tell me it wasn't a train but a ship passing through the Straits of Gibraltar."

He would have liked to know, one by one, all the places and moments in the life of Inés, the childhood days at the mill, the seven years at the boarding school for orphan girls, the house where she lived now that she never allowed him to visit, transforming all of it into a part of his consciousness with the same urgent thirst of eyes and lips with which he sometimes undressed her and caressed her and opened her. But just as Inés' body always emerged somehow untouched and alone from their mutual sieges, her thoughts and memories were not revealed to Minaya except in flashes of chaotic images that tended to have, because they almost always alluded to the girl's early childhood, the ecstatic air and unsettled disorder of illustrations in color. Motionless for a moment to his gaze, despite the landscape passing the train window, the first illustration has been fixed now in Minaya's eyes: around 1956, a little girl cradles a cardboard doll at the feet of the crippled man who looks at her and smokes as he sits under a grapevine, scratching at the ground with his crutches. "We're almost there," says Inés. On the other side of the tracks is an abandoned shed that once must have been a station, and beyond the river, the shore of red mud and the banks covered with oleanders and reedbeds. "Give my respects to Don Manuel," says the conductor from the step as the train starts up again. They cross the stone bridge over the slow waters, and when they reach the other side Inés, turning around, shows Minaya the hilltop where Màgina is spread out, gray and remote, high with pointed towers, Màgina alone on the hill of spillways and ramparts, open to the blue, as in Orlando's last watercolors.

It had been Manuel who suggested to Minaya that he visit the Island of Cuba, offering Inés as a guide on his way down, but now, when he looked at the city and the valley again from the esplanade of the country estate, when he shook the large hand of Frasco, the caretaker, witness to Solana's final days and death, he felt he hadn't been brought there by Manuel's suggestion or by his own desire for knowledge, but by the clandestine order of the manuscript he had discovered in the marriage bedroom, its last page dated March 30, 1947, one day before Jacinto Solana went down to the Island of Cuba in his penultimate flight, knowing perhaps that he never would return to Magina. As if he were moving on a blank page where the total absence of words concealed invisible writing, Minaya followed Inés up the path through the olive trees until they reached the esplanade where Jacinto Solana's dead body had been lain, at the entrance to the house. "Ask Frasco," Manuel had said, "he was the last of us to see Solana alive."

ON THE FIRST DAY of April 1947, at dawn, Jacinto Solana was tempted to go up to the cemetery to look for the pauper's grave where his father was buried. Without mentioning his intention to anyone, he left very early so they wouldn't see him when he crossed the Plaza of General Orduna, but he was not aware of his error and didn't realize that the commemoration was in progress until a shout made him raise his head as he passed the Church of La Trinidad. In front of the facade, at the top of the Baroque stairs, were three poles and three flags and a kind of burning censer next to which five men stood guard, looking down at him with folded arms in their blue uniforms and dazzling boots. One of them called to Solana, taking pleasure in repeating his first and last names and insulting him with predictable coldness, indicating the flags with a not entirely enraged gesture as he took his pistol out of the holster. "Raise your arm, and sing nice and loud so we can hear you." His eyes fixed on the ground, his hand raised and cowardly and shaken by a trembling that wasn't fear but an unfathomable future shame, Jacinto Solana heard from the depths of his consciousness his own voice singing the anthem of those aiming weapons at him with the same piercing clarity with which he heard the laughter and the usual insults. "That morning I went up to his room and saw that he kept his things in the same suitcase he had brought from prison," said Manuel. "He wanted to leave Magina without telling me where he was going, and without his knowing either, because there was no place he could go. Then I told him to go to the Island of Cuba for a while, at least until he finished his book. Sometimes, when we were boys, we'd ride the white mare there from his father's farm to swim in the river. He left that same afternoon, I took him to the train station myself. I never saw him again." Beatus ille, thinks Minaya, with a melancholy not entirely his, sudden and general, as indifferent as the landscape of olive trees that extends to the spurs and the faded blue of the sierra. Ines has gone into the house, calling Frasco's name, and when her voice can no longer be heard, Minaya is temporarily lost in the solitude, which he always imagines as definitive, of unfamiliar, empty places. Across from the house is a small hill planted with almond trees, and from it comes a breeze with the scent of damp earth, risen perhaps from the river. Then Frasco appeared among the almond trees, a clay-encrusted hoe on his shoulder and a wide straw hat covering his face. You could hear his trouser legs brushing harshly against the hedge mustard, and from the energy of his step and the muscular tension that could be guessed at in the way he held the hoe, Minaya would have said it wasn't an old man but a forty-year-old who was approaching him. They walked together to the house, chatting at random about the recent rain, Manuel's illness, the distant time when the estate, which had been the best in the entire district of Magina, had ten thousand olive trees. But that was long before the war, explained Frasco, who still remembered the visit of Alfonso XIII in his sportsman's outfit and high hunter's gaiters and the dust raised on the road by the cars of his entourage. Sitting in the entryway, at the bare wooden table, they watched Ines in silence as she served them their meal. In the entryway, on the entire ground floor of the house, a damp semidarkness like the breath of a well prevailed and made the paving stones, as worn as pebbles, glisten.

"I was told you saw them kill Solana."

"I didn't see it. Only they saw it, the ones who killed him. I heard the burst of the three-and-a-half-inch caliber weapon the Civil Guard carried and shots from Don Jacinto's pistol; he jumped into the river gorge from the shed. I spent a whole year on the Cordoba front, and I could identify every kind of weapon. They had me handcuffed right here, two of them, pointing their rifles at me, as if I could escape, and I heard the gunfire and the shouts, and from time to time Don Jacinto's pistol, he always carried it, even when he was writing. He kept it on the table, next to his papers, and when he went down to the river to swim, he left it with his clothes, because he knew they were going to come for him. I remember it took them several hours to find the body, because he was dead when he fell into the river and the current dragged him, so it was already daylight when they brought him here and threw him in the middle of the esplanade, full of mud, his whole face covered with blood. They didn't let me near him, but I could see from a distance the broken lenses of his glasses glinting on his face."

Inés listened to Frasco's story with the same fascinated attention she had felt when she was a little girl in the dark listening to tales of islands and tall empty ships that sail up the valley of the Guadalquivir on moonless nights. She was standing behind Minaya, and from time to time she touched his shoulder or brushed his neck with a very light touch, because nothing pleased her as much as enveloping any sign of tenderness in secrecy. With a shiver of gratitude he squeezed the hand she held out to him in the shadows as they followed Frasco up the stairs to the room Solana had occupied during the last three months of his life, a large hay loft with a sloping roof and long beams with halters tied to them, and in the back a single window covered with a piece of burlap that tinted the light the yellow of pollen. Under the bed was the trunk no one had opened for the past twenty-two years, because Frasco hadn't wanted to touch anything after the Civil Guard left carrying the dripping wet body of Jacinto Solana.

"I swept up the ashes. The floor was full of burned papers everywhere, even under the bed, I don't know how the roof didn't catch fire — you can see it's made of wood and reeds — and burn the whole house down. They didn't burn all the papers at the same time, in a bonfire; it seems they burned them one by one."

"Did they burn the books too?" asked Minaya as he examined the blue ink stains on the table. Stains of a finger sometimes, like fingerprints, long stains like the shadow of Jacinto Solana's hands.

"There weren't any books. Don Jacinto didn't bring any when he came here. Nothing but the suitcase tied with rope and the pistol in his jacket pocket. He wrote with a pen Don Manuel had given him. The Guards must have taken it with them because I didn't see it again."

Moving aside the piece of burlap that covered the window, Inés leaned her elbows on the sill to look at the river and the walled blue line of the city, as if she weren't listening to Frasco's words. The water formed dark clotted eddies around the pillars of the bridge and the reedbeds on the shore. Beneath the window was the sloping roof of the small shed from which Jacinto Solana had jumped to the embankment, rolling blind through the slippery leaves of oleander, between the darkness and the mud, then getting up and pushing his elbows into the red earth to fire at the Guards pursuing him. Inés, said Minaya, and from the tone of his voice she knew they were alone now in the loft and all she had to do was remain motionless and he would embrace her from the rear and caress her breasts, saying her name again in a darker voice as if it were hidden in her hair, which he explored with his lips. But this time Minaya didn't embrace her: Frasco had gone, he said, and would be right back, and while they were alone he wanted to open the trunk under the bed. When he raised the lid Minaya had the sensation that he was opening a coffin. "There's nothing," said Inés, kneeling beside him, "just old clothes." They searched down to the bottom of the trunk, where there was a pair of cracked shoes, a fountain pen, a cigarette lighter, a red ribbon like the ones tied around the manuscripts in the marriage bedroom. Like the metal bed with the bare mattress, and the ink stains on the table, each of the things they exhumed added obscurely to the others to lay out before them the empty mass of Jacinto Solana's presence. "Memory doesn't last," Minaya thought as he opened the pen that perhaps Solana touched a few minutes before he died, as he attempted to work the lighter that for so many nights had occupied a precise place between the habits of writing and insomnia, "the only things that last have always belonged to forgetting, the pen, the lighter, a pair of shoes, an ink stain like a fingerprint on the wood." It was Inés who found the notebook and the small cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper. She was folding a gray jacket to put it back in the trunk when she noticed a hard, smooth surface in the lining, and then, as she continued searching, a bundle so small that at first her fingers didn't distinguish it from the fold where it was resting. There was a tear in the inside pocket, and the cartridge and notebook had undoubtedly slipped through it. "Look, it's the same handwriting as on the manuscript." It was a notebook whose pages were graph paper, it had a blue cover and a schoolboy air, and it was irregularly filled by writing that seemed disciplined by desperation. That afternoon as they returned to the city on the train, Minaya examined the pages where the lines of ink were now as faint as the grid marks, and when he deciphered the words, which at times he read aloud to Inés, the images of the river, the esplanade in front of the house, the room with the table and the single window through which you could see the silhouette of Magina, specified the details of a nocturnal setting surrounding the figure who in the light of a candle writes incessantly even after he hears the uproar of rifle butts banging on the door of the country house, when the Guards' boots thundered like galloping horses on the stairs, but he knows he's going to die and doesn't want his final words to end up in the fire. "He hid the notebook in the jacket lining himself," Minaya told Inés excitedly, as if he were talking to himself, to his yearning to find out and know, "because this diary was his will, and he knew that when he began to write it." He kept the notebook when they reached Magina station, not having read yet the long account that filled the last pages and consequently not understanding the reason why there was also a cartridge in the lining wrapped in a piece of the Republican ABC of May 22, 1937. Only that night, last night, when Manuel was already dead on the rug in the marriage bedroom, did Minaya lock the door of his room and discover that Solana had recounted the death of Mariana in the last pages of the notebook, and that the bullet that killed her hadn't come from the roofs where militia men were pursuing a fugitive, but from a pistol that someone held and fired from the doorway of the pigeon loft.

12

HE HAD TELEPHONED Medina himself and gone downstairs to unbolt the outside door so the doctor would find it open when he arrived, bringing to these actions a useless urgency, a somnambulistic haste similar to that shown by Teresa and Inés in preparing coffee, bottles of hot water, clean sheets for making the bed where Minaya and Utrera had lain Manuel, as if death were not something definitive, as if it could be stopped or mitigated by pretending they were ministering not to a corpse but a sick person, and their hurry to arrange everything in the marriage bedroom in silence, not speaking to each other or to anyone else, avoiding looking at each other just as they tried not to look at the man lying on the bed, was motivated by the sense of propriety that the imminent arrival of the doctor provokes in houses where someone is ill. Wandering in a waking state as dark as the film over her eyes, Amalia drifted between the gallery hallway and the parlor and marriage bedroom, setting herself vague tasks she didn't complete, bringing a glass of water to Doña Elvira or clumsily smoothing the quilt around Manuel's feet, and she murmured things that to Minaya's ear were confused with Doña Elvira's murmurs or prayers and the profusion of footsteps that exaggerated the silence. Like fish in an aquarium they all passed one another in the area of the bedroom and the parlor, their bodies sometimes making contact but not their eyes, and if Minaya, overcoming for a moment the stupefaction of a guilt that resembled our guilt for the crimes we commit in dreams, searched out Inés' eyes when he found himself alone with her in the hallway, he encountered an attitude of flight or a fixed stare that did not seem to notice him. He wasn't afraid then that they would be discovered: with a fear that wiped out all culpability or sense of danger, he was afraid only that Inés had stopped loving him.

Now death was Manuel, with his silk scarf around his neck and his touseled white hair that Doña Elvira smoothed as if in a dream with a dry caress, it was open eyes at the threshold to the room and the hand he had raised as if to curse them or expel them, then curving as if wanting to clutch at his heart and the hoarse sound of air escaping his lungs and of his body slowly collapsing then falling all at once onto the disorder of Minaya's and Inés' clothes and the bridal veil she had worn to initiate the game of pretending to be or being Mariana on her wedding night. But everything was very distant and as if it hadn't happened, because death demolished the possibility of remembering and fleeing, and the moment when Manuel died was now as imaginary or remote as Medina's voice, torpid with sleep, when he promised Minaya he'd be at the house in twenty minutes. Minaya went out to the hallway, with the useless intention of confirming that the courtyard light was on for Medina's arrival, he refused a cup of coffee that Teresa offered him, looked for Inés and when he saw her coming didn't dare look at her, brusquely opened the door to his room and locked himself in and saw on the desk Jacinto Solanas manuscripts, the blue notebook, the cartridge that in a few minutes, when he had read the final pages in the notebook, would be established as the conclusion of the story he had pursued for three months. But now there was only a culpable lucidity in his mind. He understood that in looking for a book, he had discovered a crime, and that after Manuel's death there was no possibility left to him for innocence.

They had returned from the station that afternoon, pursuing each other down the lanes and embracing with an obstinacy of desire that for the first time excluded all modesty or tenderness, delaying the moment they would arrive at the house and daring rough caresses at the empty streetcorners and sweet, dirty words they had never said before. But the game and the fever didn't end when they knocked at the door of the house. As they listened to Teresa crossing the courtyard and repeating "Coming," they arranged their clothes, their hair, they solemnly stood erect at either side of the door, feigning indifference or fatigue, and now simulation excited them more than the chase.

"Don Manuel is worse," said Teresa. "He had to lie down after lunch."

"Did the doctor come?"

"Of course, and he scolded him for smoking and not taking his medicine. How can he get better if he pays no attention to what they tell him to do?"

When she heard Minaya, Amalia felt her way down the stairs, clutching at the banister. She was coming from Manuel's bedroom and brought with her the weary smell of the sickroom. "Your uncle wants to see you." There was a dirty gleam of tears beneath her painted lids. When Minaya knocked gently at the bedroom door Manuel's voice inviting him in sounded unfamiliar, as if it had been infected prematurely by the strangeness of death. But he thought about those things afterward, when he was alone in his room waiting for Medina, because one always remembers the eve of a misfortune imagining vague presentiments that could not be verified while there was still time and that perhaps did not exist. The same voice coming out of the semidarkness asked him to open the curtains. "Open them more, all the way. I don't know why they have to leave you in the dark when you're sick." Because light is an affront, Minaya thought when he turned to his uncle, looking at his sunken cheeks against the white pillow, the slender, motionless hands on the quilt, the wrists with long blue veins emerging from the sleeves of his pajamas. In the plaza, above the tops of the acacias, the sand-colored church tower, crowned by gargoyles under the eaves, shone brilliantly in the afternoon against a violent blue crisscrossed by swallows.

"Bring over that chair. Sit here, closer. I can't speak very loudly. Medina prohibited my talking. He's spent thirty years prohibiting my doing things and ordering absurdities."

Manuel closed his eyes and very slowly brought his hand to his left side, holding in the air and then expelling it with a very long whistling sound. Once again it was the stabbing pain, the knife, the dark hand splitting open his chest until it squeezed his heart and then released it as slowly as it had seized it, as if offering a respite, as if advancing only as far as the precise boundary where asphyxia would begin.

"This morning, when you went to the estate, I entered the library and saw you had forgotten to put away some written pages. I was going to do it myself because I thought they were notes for the book that I don't know if you still want to write, and I was afraid Teresa would disturb them when she cleaned, but when I put them together I saw without meaning to that you had written and underlined my name and Mariana's several times. Don't look at me that way: I'm the one who ought to apologize, not you. Because I was tempted to open the drawer again and read what you had written about us. Since you came here I've answered all your questions, but this morning it frightened me to imagine what you must think of us, of Mariana and me, and of Solana, who did what you're doing, who looked at everything the same way you do, as if he were verifying the history of each thing and what one was thinking and hiding behind the words. With that novel of his that he never finished, the same thing would have happened to me as with your papers. I wouldn't have had the courage to read it.

If he knew I wasn't a witness but a spy, that I've gone into his marriage bedroom and discovered the manuscripts he didn't want to show me, perhaps because they recount what could be seen only by a shadow posted above the garden that night in May when Solana and Mariana wandered around in the dark kissing each other with the desperation of two lovers on the eve of the end of the world." Manuel had spoken in a voice that grew increasingly faint, and finally, in silence, he pressed Minaya's hand for a long time, not looking at him, as if he wanted to be certain he was still there. Then the hand, yellow and motionless, the palm turned up and the fingers curved like the claw of a dead bird, the hand that moved sluggishly through the air not to curse or expel Inés and Minaya but to make them disappear like smoke in a closed room, their two naked bodies shadows or premature apparitions that announced to Manuel the dream of death when he, pursued by her, got up from his bed and left the bedroom and crossed the dark hallway to look for the last time at Mariana's face in the photograph in the parlor and open the door of the room where he had embraced and possessed her. He awoke, caught off guard by the sudden awareness that he was going to die, but not even when he was standing and dared to walk barefoot on the cold chessboard of the tiles could he elude the sensation of inhabiting a dream in which, for the first time, the stabbing pain in his heart and the suffocating lightness of the air, like the vertigo in his temples and the cold on the soles of his feet, were things alien to his own body. Which is why it shouldn't have surprised him that there was a line of light under the door of the marriage bedroom or that above the noise of his respiration he could hear the obscene panting of entwined bodies, the bitter breath of a man murmuring and biting as he closed his eyes to empty the impossible instant of desperation or joy and the long shout or the tears or laughter of a woman whose fierce pleasure exploded like the brash noise of breaking glass in the silence of the house. He understood then, on the verge of passing out, the unreality of so many years, his status as a shadow, his interminable and never mitigated memory of a single night and a single body, and perhaps when he opened the door and stood on the threshold, sensing in the air the same candescent odor of that night, he didn't recognize the bodies captured on the bed, gleaming in the semidarkness, and died, obliterated by the certainty and the miracle of having returned to the night of May 21, 1937, to witness behind the glass of death how his own body and hands and lips laid siege to a naked Mariana.

"No," Inés had said, leaning against the closed bedroom door when Minaya, who had returned the manuscripts to the drawer where he had found them, prepared to go out. "It has to be here. I like that bed and the mirror on the closet." She said it in a voice that wasn't so much inviting as determined in advance to fulfill that specific desire even if Minaya didn't agree to stay, as if he weren't an accomplice but a witness to the pleasure she imagined and in which she would somehow be alone. She said "It has to be here," smiling with serene audacity, and he knew immediately that he would stay even if he couldn't share her courage or forget his fear of being discovered, which hadn't stopped since Inés had come to his room and said, with the same smile, that she had found the key to the marriage bedroom in one of Manuel's jackets. It was Minaya who had asked her to look for it: some day, some night when he couldn't sleep, it was possible that Manuel would look in the bedroom for the manuscripts he himself must have hidden after Solana's death. For a time Minaya was confident that at some point the accident that allowed him to find them would be repeated, but Manuel didn't forget again to lock the bedroom, which, Minaya suspected, might have been proof that his uncle already distrusted him. He heard footsteps approaching, and he still hadn't dared to hope they were Inés' footsteps when he heard the three quiet knocks of their signal and she slipped into the room dressed and made up for the usual secret game of their nocturnal rendezvous, pushing aside, in her yellow skirt and her Sunday afternoon blouse and stockings and the shadow of cosmetics on her cheeks, the semidarkness of midnight, the solemn presence on the desk of the blue notebook and the manuscripts, the pages where Minaya was outlining the biography of Jacinto Solana. But now, when he had Inés in front of him, all that mattered was her beauty and the devastating certainty that he would be in love with her for the rest of his life. He didn't turn around immediately to embrace her: he first saw her reflected in the windows to the balcony, standing behind him, while he was still writing, and that image acquired for Minaya the immobile quality of a symbol or a future memory, because in it was summarized the only inhabitable future he conceived of for himself.

Hiding and alone, at three or three-thirty in the morning — he didn't have a watch and hadn't heard the clock in the parlor and was incapable of estimating the time that had passed since he had spoken to Medina — he sat down again at the desk and saw in the glass the same light that had illuminated it three hours earlier, but now he saw only himself, knowing that never again would the serene figure of Inés, uselessly searched for now in the empty glass, in the disloyalty of mirrors, be reflected next to his. The present had shattered and condemned him irremediably to the usury of memory, which was already urging him to commemorate with obsessive details the first embrace at midnight and the smile in Inés' eyes when she showed him the key like an ambiguous invitation that was revealed completely only in the marriage bedroom, after Minaya had placed the manuscripts under the wedding dress.

"Nobody will hear us. Don Manuel's asleep with the pills Medina gave him, and the others sleep very far from here."

It would have been enough to say no a second time, oblige her to move away from the door, go out alone perhaps and accept insomnia and rage, but he did nothing, only looked at her, sick with desire and fear: she sat down on the bed, dropped her shoes, raised her skirt to undo her stockings. Minaya saw her long white thighs, her raised knees, her feet finally bare and willful under his kisses, pink and white and moving like fish in the semidarkness of the mirrors. When he opened her thighs to descend to the damp rose of her belly he thought he heard the sound of a distant door, but he didn't care anymore about fear, or even decency, or his life, or his awareness that he was disintegrating like the shape of the room and the identity and limits of his body. He heard Inés' voice confused with his own, and he bit her lips as he looked into her eyes to discover a gaze that never had belonged to him until that night. Holding on to each other like two shadows, they rolled to the floor, dragging the sheets from the bed with them, and on the rug, on the stained sheets, they sought each other and overthrew and bit each other in a persecution multiplied by the mirrors in the dark, purple air. As if they had survived a shipwreck at sea and the temptation to succumb to a sweet death underwater, they found themselves once again motionless on the bed and couldn't recall how or when they had returned to it. "Now I don't care if I die," said Minaya. "If you offered me a cup of poison right now, I'd drink it down." Sitting on the bed, Inés caressed his hair and mouth and slowly made him turn toward her, between her thighs, until Minaya's lips found the pink cleft that she herself opened with the thumb and index finger of both hands to receive him. But there was no urgency now, no desperation, and the serene cupidity of his palate was prolonged and ascended in the inquiry of his gaze. Urged on by the dark breath that had revived more deeply when he was drinking from her womb, he moved up to her breasts, her chin, her mouth, the damp hair that covered her cheekbones, and then he felt that he was disappearing, quivering motionless, lucid, suspended at the edge of a sweetness from which there was no return. "Don't move," said Inés, "don't do anything," and she began to move back and forth, gyrating under his hips, clutching at him, wounding him, draining the air and expelling it very slowly as she rose and curved and sank her elbows and heels into the sheets, and smiled with her eyes fixed on Minaya, murmuring "slow," saying in a quiet voice words he had never dared say to her. Like a wounded animal he rose up, lifting his head, and that was when time ripped as if a vengeful stone had broken the mirrors reflecting them, because they heard behind them the sound of the door and saw the terrifying slowness with which the knob moved and the long stain of light entered the bedroom and stopped at the foot of the bed when Manuel appeared on the threshold, barefoot, in his pajamas of an incurably sick man and his Italian scarf around his neck, looking at them with a stupefaction from which anger would have been absent if it hadn't been for the unmoving hand that ascended when he took a step toward the bed, as if in a frozen gesture of malediction. He opened his mouth in a shout that never was heard, and even took one more step before his eyes became empty and staring, not at Inés or Minaya but at the hand that had descended until it lay open beside his heart, curving as it clutched at the cloth of his pajamas at the same time that Manuel fell to his knees and raised his blue eyes again to look at them. Inés didn't see that last look: she said she had buried her face in Minaya's chest and dug her nails into him when she heard something rebound heavily on the wooden floor. Trembling with cold she opened her eyes and saw in the dresser mirror that she was alone and very pale on the bed. Minaya, still naked, was leaning over Manuel's body, feeling his chest under the pajamas. He's dead, he said, and locked the bedroom door. Manuel's open mouth was against the floor and his eyes fixed on the light on the night table. Inés, in order not to see them, got off the bed like a sleepwalker and extended a cowardly hand until she touched his eyelids, but Minaya stopped her and obliged her to stand up, shaking her as if she were a child who doesn't want to waken. For the first time in his life he was not paralyzed by fear: now fear was an impulse to intelligence or the dirty courage to simulate and flee.

"Listen. Now we're going to get dressed and straighten up the bed and the room. We'll leave the window open to get rid of the smell in the air. That won't make them suspect anything: Manuel could have opened it before he died. You'll go to your room, and I'll go to mine, and in an hour I'll go and wake Utrera. I'll say I couldn't sleep and heard a shout and something falling near the parlor. Nobody will find out about us, Inés."

Later he told the story with the desperate fervor used to tell certain necessary lies, he told it to the incredulous gaze of Utrera, who was already dressed when he went to call him, he repeated it a few more times, adding details that made him feel despicable, but not less persecuted, and when he heard Amalia telling it to Doña Elvira, it seemed to him that the story, when it took place in a different voice, entered reality completely, and he was temporarily relieved of its weight. But Utrera, when they picked up Manuel's body to lay it on the bed, had examined the open window, the quilt, the half-burned candle still smelling of wax in the candlestick on the night table. I'll leave here tomorrow, Minaya said aloud, when he was alone and in the room, facing the window to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias, suddenly possessed by the premonition of exile. He heard a distant bell and then footsteps and voices on the stairs, the slow footsteps, the unmistakable voice of Medina, but still he didn't leave the room. He could hear them and recognize each of their voices, because they were all in the parlor, on the other side of the door, but also in the blue notebook, on the last pages that he was beginning to read now, asking himself which of them, which of the living or the dead had been a murderer thirty-two years earlier.