A Manuscript of Ashes

1

I STILL COULD HEAR the concave sound of the galleries, metal gates closing behind someone's footsteps, the pounding of the guards' heels, a thicket of voices that resounded in the high vaults like the ocean in a shell and seemed like voices and footsteps that were infinitely distant, the dark ocean heard in dreams. I had left behind the gate of the final gallery, high and painted black, like the wrought-iron grillwork in a cathedral, and now I was walking down ordinary corridors with floors of tiles and not damp cement, with gray doors and peaceful offices on the other side of the doors, where I waited interminably and acquiesced, signed typewritten forms, docile, cowardly, always fearing I hadn't completely understood what they were saying to me, repeating my name without avoiding the suspicion that when he heard it, the man bent over the typewriter would lift his head and order the guard who accompanied me to handcuff me again. There were countless offices, all the same, and in all of them there was someone who shook his head when he heard my name and didn't look at me, only read something on a list and asked something and, with an engrossed air, opened a large record book and then closed it without having found what he was looking for or asked me to sign somewhere, handing me a pen across the counter that I no longer knew how to hold between my thumb and index finger, too thin and too fragile for my fingers made clumsy by the cold, by ten years of not touching or using a pen. Now the guard was walking in front of me, rhythmically hitting the bunch of keys against the side of his trouser leg, and I no longer expected freedom and the street to be on the other side of any door. Now the doors were made of wood and not metal and were painted green like the shutters at the windows, but they still resounded in the same deep, definitive way when they were shut and there were no prisoners sweeping the corridors. I said my name again and signed a receipt; they gave me an open suitcase, and I put my papers and clothes in it while two guards with unbuttoned tunics watched me and smoked in a room without windows that had numbered metal lockers and a low-hanging lamp that swayed above the table, thickening the cigarette smoke in its cone of light. The other guard, the one who had led me there, ponderously left the bunch of keys on the table and ordered me to follow him, but this time the last door we passed through didn't have a lock and opened onto a small courtyard with very high walls of ocher brick and sentry towers rising at the corners of the roof, where two Civil Guards in gleaming oilskin capes were profiled like symmetrical statues against a low, pale gray sky. They didn't look at the courtyard, they didn't do anything when I crossed it trembling with fear and unknown joy and with twitching fingers grasped the handle of the suitcase as I approached the entrance, as closed and undifferentiated as a wall, where someone, another Civil Guard, opened a gate and stepped to one side to let me pass, saying something I didn't stop to hear, because the gate had closed behind me with a long clanking of locks and I was alone before the facade of the prison, under the yellow and red flag that snapped in the wind like the wings of a large bird.

THE PRISON WAS A HIGH ocher island in the barren ground and fog. Facing it, on the other side of the highway, was a building with long whitewashed walls and broken windows that looked like an industrial ship or an abandoned warehouse. I walked toward it, stepping on mud crisscrossed by tracks of horses and cars, but I still didn't see the black car parked at a corner: perhaps I saw it without noticing it, and I remembered only when I heard the engine starting that I had seen it and that the blades of the windshield wipers were moving even though it wasn't raining. To shield myself from the wind, I walked very close to the wall, the brim of my hat down over my eyes and the lapels of my overcoat raised, and I didn't turn around when I heard the engine and then the tires skidding in the mud. I heard it moving slowly behind me, as if it didn't want to get ahead of me, and I walked faster and moved closer to the wall that never ended, on my way to the single tree and the shack made of debris that sometimes, from a high window in the prison, I had seen beside the highway, the only indication that a city existed beyond the wasteland my eyes could glimpse briefly. The men who left the city at dawn on slow bicycles would stop there to drink a glass of aguardiente and then leave rubbing together their hands numb with cold, exhaling the hot breath of the alcohol as they grasped the handlebars again and pedaled down the highway with their heads sunk down between the lapels of their dark jackets, as if they were leaving for a wintry, distant exile. From the tin roof rose a column of smoke that the wind dispersed among the branches of the tree. Without turning around to look at the black car, I pushed the door of poorly assembled planks and entered a narrow, warm place filled with smoke and cases of bottles. The counter was a board that smelled strongly of wood soaked in alcohol, lying across two barrels. Behind it, lit by an oil lamp, a very fat woman nursed a child red-faced with crying. Nailed to the wall were yellowed posters announcing remote bullfights and a 1945 calendar on which a black woman with a red shawl tied around her waist smiled as she displayed a tin of cocoa. The woman behind the counter, motionless on an empty case, slowly and methodically examined my face, my suitcase, the mud on my shoes. I asked for a glass of cognac, and she didn't detach the child from her large white breast or stop looking at me as she stood to find the bottle. She didn't look at my eyes but at the indications of what she had known since she had seen me come in: the awkwardness, the still undiminished distrust, the way my hand held the glass and raised it, with a slight tremor. I drank the cognac in one swallow and nodded in silence when the woman asked if I wanted another one. The glass in the small window that faced the highway was dirty and opaque with vapor, but through it I could see the black silhouette of the car, which had stopped. The alcohol burned in my throat with violent sweetness and intensified the colors of things. With the second glass still intact, I went to sit beside the window, wrapped in my overcoat, in the warm blur of the alcohol, raising the faint mask of abandonment and smoke that was between my eyes and the door that perhaps was going to open. I smoked with half-closed eyes, waiting, not indolent, lost, feeling the alcohol rising in my veins like successive undulations in the water of a lake, I half-closed my eyes as if waiting for sleep so I wouldn't see anything but the blue smoke rising and the dirty semidarkness of the barrels and the row of bottles, the red spot on the calendar whose pages numbered the days of a time when I hadn't existed. I took a drink and closed my eyes completely, and on the other side of the window, the door of the black car slammed shut. When I opened them again she, Beatriz, was looking at me through the smoke that the icy outside air had shaken, taller than I remembered, as if immune to time, as if she had just turned thirty, her age the last time I saw her, tall and solemn with her blonde mane and gray overcoat and the beret she held in her hands as if she weren't sure how she ought to behave. The fat woman had lain the child down, and now she was cleaning a row of bottles on the counter. From the corner of my eye I saw her looking at us as Beatriz embraced me, touching me with her blonde hair from which there rose an unfamiliar perfume and taking my hard face in her hands to recognize and touch what her eyes saw, undimmed by tears. She watched us without interest or modesty, with inert fixity, wiping the dust from the bottles with a dirty rag that she sometimes passed slowly over the counter, and when I approached to ask her for another glass, she studied Beatriz' coat and stockings and high-heeled shoes and then looked at me, with a different expression, as if comparing us, asking herself perhaps why a woman dressed like that had come into her tavern to find me.

We didn't speak at first, or between long silences we said only the necessary, useless words, looking for a respite with cigarettes and drinks, leaning on our elbows in the gray light that came from the other side of the window, from the field where the black car waited, occupied now only by a man who smoked as he rested his elbows on the steering wheel. "We thought you were dead," said Beatriz, caressing her lighter of smooth, gold-colored metal, very close to my hand on the stained wood, moving her fingers close, her unpainted nails trailing across the veins in the table, then stopping when they seemed about to touch me, then brushing against the acknowledged metal boundary, the pack of American cigarettes that now formed part of her perfume and her distance. "Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could tell me if you had died or were in prison or had managed to escape over the French border at the last minute. A woman told me she had heard that you were seen sick or wounded in the camp at Argeles, but they also said you had escaped to the sea and were arrested in the port of Alicante. After a year I began to write and receive letters. I wrote to friends in exile asking about you, but you weren't in France, or Mexico, or Argentina. You weren't dead or alive anywhere, but I waited every day to receive a letter from you. Last month a comrade just out of prison came to the house. He was the one who told us you'd be getting out very soon."

SO THE AMBIGUOUS, the sacred plural was still true in spite of the gold-colored lighter and the silk stockings, and they were still called comrades and not shades or survivors and as a plural they had waited for me and thought I was dead and now they had come to receive me and welcome me not in the warm interior of the car or in a probably clandestine house but in the ancient, failed, intact plural behind which were hidden, in succession, impotence and fear, the fervor of old names, of lost banners, the unconfessed tenderness of Beatriz, who searched for my hand on the table and didn't dare touch it, always brushing against the boundary in the space that divided us like the blade of a knife, the one, desperate question she never would ask me now. From a great distance, behind the smoke, I watched her talk to me and estimated the words beneath each eruption of silence, indifferent, like a doctor who does not need to examine the body lying next to him to know the exact place where the pain is lodged. It was as if time or the chance that governs such transfigurations had used the past ten years to complete a work — the face, the hands, the figure of Beatriz — which earlier, when I knew her, had only been foreshadowed and that reached their plenitude in the prelude to their decadence. There was something dry or cruel in her slender hands, perhaps the shadow of an obstinate, useless determination, a hardness not rooted in any purpose, faint wrinkles, like the slashes of knives, next to her lips, around her covetous, firm eyes. I looked at her, still not asking, I heard her talk to me about her life during those years, perceiving the same chasm in time already proclaimed by the dates on the bullfight posters nailed to the dirty walls of the tavern and that month of July 1945 that remained inert on the calendar like a rip in my memory. She had waited for me, she said, wanting to involve me in the invocation of her waiting and her remembering, wanting to vindicate as attributes of a shared suffering the letters that never arrived anywhere, the empty letterbox in the hollow of the stairs, the horror and hunger and loneliness of the winter of 1941, and when she remembered, she claimed me for herself and demanded the part of my sorrow I had denied her. "And while you were in prison, condemned to death, and I didn't know anything," she said, as if she were demanding not only sorrow but also blame for not having found me, but then she raised her damp eyes to me and suddenly understood that she was becoming vulnerable because she was alone in her remembering, and to defend herself she was forced to turn to pride and pretended serenity. She sat up straight before her glass, before me, lighting a cigarette with excessive resolve, her fingers firm on the gold-colored lighter, as if in that gesture she were using all the determination she had needed to survive from the May night in 1937 when I had gone to Magina without saying a word to her. "I can see you're surprised at my appearance. At first I was too, when I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't tell you that since '42 I've been working in a dress store on the Gran Via, selling expensive clothes to the richest women in Madrid. Sometimes I even design a model. Do you find it strange? It was like a story or a miracle, I was making things for a dressmaking shop where I didn't earn enough to pay my rent, and one day that man, Ernesto, the owner of the dress store appeared, and asked if I wanted to work exclusively for him, imagine, I was so hungry I almost didn't sleep so I could sew all night. I think he's in love with me, like an old-fashioned gentleman, you know, he invites me to the theater and takes my arm almost without touching me when we go into a restaurant, he always gives me things, the lighter, this coat, this perfume, which is very expensive. That's his car, he brought me here."

The man alone, behind the car window, perfumed and cowardly, I imagined, drumming his nervous fingers on the steering wheel, turning from time to time toward the prison building to make certain there were no Civil Guards at the door who suspected and were watching him, dying of jealousy, no doubt, of dignity and rage, the cuckolded gentleman. "Of course I've told him who you are and why you were in prison. He also knows I belong to the Party, and he doesn't care. He says he's glad I work with him because that means I'm in less danger. Imagine, who can suspect me, if I try dresses on the wife of the General Director of Security." But there were very few, she said, returning unexpectedly to the plural of persecution and secrecy in which without counting on me she included me, we were, myself also included, very few and inactive and dispersed, slowly we were recognizing one another and grouping again following the disaster in which the illusion had been undone of the underground, basements, secret cells that met to count the dead and discuss repeated, exhausted slogans, they or we had to resist without letting silence resemble surrender, and somewhere in Madrid the same house I had left ten years earlier was waiting for me. "No one has gone in, not even Ernesto, since you left." I drank without saying anything, turning toward the gleaming, quiet automobile in the bare field, in a cowardly way I supposed that Beatriz was going to accuse me now. The woman behind the counter had plugged in the radio and a bolero played from a filthy distance. But the obscene voice of the radio and Beatriz' words passed through me as if I didn't exist, as if I had died in some other empty field in the world, lost my way and died, for example, on any of the rectangular identical days in the month of July 1945. "I remember as if it were yesterday, the day you went away. It'll be ten years on May 15. Do you remember?" Now Beatriz was speaking to another man who wasn't me, and she knew it but no longer cared, in the same way she had stopped caring that someone else was waiting for her in the black automobile. Imperiously she spoke to a shade, to someone who may have been me thirteen or fourteen years earlier, when Mariana did not exist yet or the shame of desiring what had been denied to me, the kind of injustice or error that no one corrects and no one accepts. But neither Beatriz nor I were to blame for Mariana appearing before me in Orlando's studio, sitting naked and facing a recently begun canvas, with her legs crossed and the smile of a patient model, as if she were in a cafe, innocent and shameless, dazzling forever the deepest, blindest essence of my desire. "You don't remember anything, Jacinto. I came home and you weren't there, and at first I felt an awful terror because I was afraid you'd been caught in that afternoon's bombing. It was midnight and you still hadn't come back, and I went out to look for you. I ran into Orlando in a bar on the Puerta del Sol, but he didn't hear what I was asking him because he was so drunk he had to walk leaning on one of those adolescents who were always with him. Finally he looked at me as if he didn't know who I was and didn't understand what I was saying, and he started to laugh that disagreeable laugh he had when he was drunk and said you had taken the train to Magina. He was still laughing when I left."

I'd had too much cognac and the frontiers of time and the limits and profiles of faces had begun to disintegrate. Mariana or Beatriz, 1937 or 1945 or 1933, years and bodies and blame not recovered from its own ashes, a fervor for nothing, the loyalty of the dead, hard eyes looking without tenderness to demand and accuse, immune to the present, to the exact January morning on which the impossible acknowledgment had not taken place. All I wanted was to be alone, hidden in my overcoat, drinking until my consciousness was very slowly obliterated, my legs together under the table, coat collar raised, everything as far from me as the city whose first house I had seen from the highway. "And where are you going to go, then?" said Beatriz, and I didn't say anything at first, I put the glass on the table and looked at the empty field, the air free of fog, like an engraving of ice. "To Magina. I'm going to my father's house." Unhurriedly she got to her feet, putting the lighter and the pack of cigarettes in her leather handbag, and when she leaned over her hair suddenly fell to one side of her face. Through the window I saw her walking with long strides over the mud. I got up to order another drink, and when I returned to the table the black car was no longer in the empty field.

2

MANUEL REMEMBERS HE WAS sitting at the kitchen table, looking through the panes in the white doors at the dark morning beginning in the garden and raising a late mist, sourly bristling with rain. Amalia had served him a large cup of lukewarm café con leche that was the dirty color of mud and a slice of unusually white bread that he crumbled slowly over the cup and stirred into the coffee with a spoon. "Eat it all up, Don Manuel, that's real bread," Amalia said, "I bought it on the black market for twelve pesetas. " The delight of the white bread, the porcelain cup with blue designs, the silver spoon and the linen napkin on his knees. In those years, he recalls aloud to his nephew Minaya, one gave oneself over to minor tactile pleasures as if they were the unique, hidden happiness that no one could detect or snatch away. He touched the loyal things to which he had always belonged, searching them for the possibility of a narrow escape accessible only to his fingertips, and the presence of the linen, the curved porcelain, the silver flatware, secretly saved him from the unpleasant taste of the coffee at dawn and the smoke from the stove, filled with damp wood, that turned the air in the kitchen gray like an extension of the bad weather and cold fog from which the garden and the city, his own lethargic life, were emerging so slowly. The doorbell rang in the courtyard, and it was still so early that Amalia and Teresa and even Manuel remained motionless, not deciding to open the door and not even acknowledging they had heard it, because at that hour, as it did at night, the sound of the bell always seemed to announce a threat. Amalia stopped moving dishes in the sink, and Manuel, with involuntary caution, went out to the courtyard, making a silent gesture to Teresa so that she wouldn't open the door yet. On the translucent glass of the entrance door, a tall masculine figure was outlined. "Open it," said Manuel, and he went back to the kitchen. A man alone didn't frighten him. He carefully fit the first cigarette of the morning into the holder and prepared to wait and listen, his back to the courtyard and to the voice it took him a little while to recognize. "Don Manuel," said Teresa, "Don Jacinto Solana has come."

HE SAW HIM STANDING in the courtyard as if in the middle of time, returned not exactly from prison but from memory and death and the ten years that had passed since the night in 1937 when he took a train to Madrid. The time of his absence and the mystery of his fate during those years surrounded him in the emptiness like the paving stones and columns of the courtyard and gave his return the sudden quality of an apparition, because he seemed to have come from nowhere, wearier and older but untouched in his pride, his solitude, his ironic way of saying "Manuel," smiling before he embraced him, as if the irony and the smile could maintain the old virtue of eluding the hideous edges of things and he hadn't come from a prison where they had amputated eight years of his life. His hair was gray, cut very close, white at the temples and the badly shaved tips of his whiskers. His voice was more serious, but perhaps it was always that way and Manuel didn't remember it. "But he's the same," he thought, seeing how he took off his hat and placed the cardboard suitcase tied with a rope on the ground to look with his sharp gray eyes at the columns in the courtyard, the gallery, the stained glass of the dome. "The library door to the left," he said, as if reciting a lesson, "to the right the marble staircase with the mirror on the first landing. I liked imagining it all. I set myself the discipline of remembering each thing with absolute exactitude. To the rear the kitchen, and the piano room, and the window shutters painted white that open to the garden." It wasn't his more serious voice, it was the tone, the slowness with which he said the words, as if he didn't care about them or didn't see to whom he was saying them: it was his eyes, Manuel realized later, remote from the smile and the voice and endowed with an expression as dark as his consciousness, as the true nature of his despair. In the kitchen Teresa and Amalia approached reverentially to greet him. "But your hands are frozen, Don Jacinto, come over to the stove, I'll give you breakfast right now." The dirty nails, the sides of his eyeglasses secured with black string, the eyes avidly fixed on the coffee and the piece of bread that Teresa set before him. He wore a heavy overcoat that was big on him, with a belt and buckle and very wide coattails, like the ones worn a few years before the war. He had put his hat on the table but didn't take off his coat or lower the lapels to eat breakfast: he rubbed his large, unfamiliar hands together as he hunched inside his vast overcoat next to the stove, so close to it that the smoke choked him, he drank the coffee holding the cup with both hands and didn't use the napkin to wipe his mouth when he had finished. With the spoon he scooped up the crumbs of bread remaining at the bottom of the cup and only then raised his eyes to Manuel, who smoked and looked at him from the other side of the table, melancholically confirming the indecency of hunger and the ravages of time that had brought them down and reunited them now as brutally as it had divided them: to offer them not the relief of recognition but the certainty of its impossibility. "White bread," Solana said, "I had even forgotten its taste. Do you know the last time I ate it? In March of '39, the day before the Fascists entered Madrid. They threw us white bread from their planes, Manuel." Never, says Manuel, never since he returned to Magina had he heard him take pleasure in sorrow or recall hatred or lost battles. In his voice, the war, when it did come up, was as distant as everything else, and he never stopped to tell him why at the beginning of June 1937 he left his job at the Ministry of Propaganda to enlist voluntarily in the army or what the circumstances of his arrest had been when the war was over. He knew only that when he was wounded at the Ebro, he was an artillery sergeant, that between January and March 1939 he was in Madrid and saw Orlando, that in 1940 he shared a cell for prisoners condemned to death with Miguel Hernández. When he finished breakfast, he stood and plunged his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and for an instant Manuel recognized him: it was his old gesture of determination, the secret, sudden way he always had of leaving even though he didn't move. The sun had come out in the garden, and an icy wind beat at the glass and shook the swing under the palm tree. They looked at it at the same time when they heard the creak of the chains that held it down, and perhaps they both saw the same phantom suspended over the white swing, but they didn't talk about Mariana yet. "I've begun to write a book," said Solana, pointing vaguely at his suitcase, where he might be keeping the first drafts. "In prison, like Cervantes," he half-opened his lips to smile and Manuel noticed he was missing several teeth. "It will be called Beatus Ille. Do you like the title? It's about Mágina, and all of us, Mariana and you, Orlando, this house. That's why I needed to see it again. In January of '39, when I returned to Madrid, I happened to find out where Orlando lived, and I went to see him. It was a very dark, very large apartment, in Argüelles, an old building with all the windows boarded up, still standing by some miracle, because it was very close to the Ciudad Universitaria front, it was like an island surrounded by rubble. It was hit by a bomb a week later, and I suppose Orlando died buried in the ruins. He wasn't living anymore with that boy who came with him to your wedding and scandalized Utrera and your mother. He had gotten married, and don't ask me why because I don't know. He looked very sick, constantly spitting into a handkerchief stained with blood, shivering with cold on a mattress that looked as if it had been rescued from a garbage dump, because in that apartment there was no bed, no furniture, only bare tiles and frozen radiators. His wife was a nurse, an unsociable type who didn't say a single word while I was there. She stood and watched us from the door to the room, and from time to time she took his temperature and brought him cups of broth that he drank down immediately, as if he were afraid. At first he didn't seem to recognize me. He laughed a great deal, with a laugh as strange as his cough, he made fun of my sergeant's stripes and called me a Communist hero and didn't know or remember anything about the war, as if he didn't care that we were about to lose it. 'I fooled them, Solana,' he said with that miserable laugh of a dying man, 'they wanted to send me to the front and had to declare me unfit. Look there, in those papers on the floor, look for one where it says I'm unfit for military service.' I asked about that picture he had decided to paint when he was in Magina, you remember, the one he imagined in the country house the day before your wedding. He had decided to call it Une partie de plaisir and told all of us it was going to be his masterpiece. He didn't remember it, of course. 'I've retired from painting, Solana. Art and happiness are incompatible.' But on the floor I saw the last things he had painted. They were all watercolors, and the same landscape was repeated in all of them. Magina's hill above the olive groves, the outline of the city just as we saw it that day from the country house. The watercolors had a beauty that wasn't of this world, it wasn't perfection but something beyond that, something that didn't even belong to art, and even less to the man who had painted them. Then I thought that just one of those landscapes was enough to justify Orlando, and all of us, because we were participants in his brilliance. I remembered with shame all the things I had written, the articles in El Sol and in Octubre, the ballads in Mono Azul and in the war murals, and I realized I had to break with it all and forget it all to write something that would resemble Orlando's watercolors." Abruptly Solana fell silent, still walking up and down past the glass doors to the garden, his head bowed and his hands fiercely thrust into the pockets of his overcoat. He's left again, Manuel thought. As he spoke he slowly had been recovering his gestures, the way he looked and moved his hands, the cold fervor of another time, but now silence returned him to his present form, unfamiliar and a little frightening: the hard, unshaven jaws, the scraped, long nape like a sign of obstinacy or failure, the myopic eyes reddened by sleep that rested on him like two spies when Jacinto Solana took off his glasses to clean the fogged lenses and said what Manuel had foreseen and feared since he saw him in the courtyard: "Tell me how they killed my father."

3

I CALLED TO HIM from the top of the path, but the din of the water overflowing into the irrigation ditch from the cistern kept him from hearing me, and then, instead of going over to him or calling him again, I stayed next to the dead poplar where we had tied the mare when I was a teenager and watched him for a long time before he noticed my arrival, watched him alone and absorbed in his work, as he always had wanted to live. He was squatting, leaning over the edge of the cistern, in the shade of the pomegranate tree, with his straw hat that hid his face from me and the black smock he had always worn buttoned to the neck. I saw his large reddened hands vigorously shaking a bunch of onions in the water to clean the mud from the roots, and when he stood to place the onions in a wicker basket, I finally saw his face with the cigarette end glued to one side of his mouth. From the top of the path the farm descended a slope of meticulously cultivated terraces, with angles as precise as those on a sheet of paper, bounded by irrigation ditches and the fig and pomegranate trees on whose trunks I so often had carved my name with a knife. I walked along the path and stopped halfway down to call him again. He stood slowly, wiped his damp, red hands on the tails of the smock, and carefully put out the cigarette before kissing me twice, as he had always done, but now he was not nearly as tall as me and he had to stand straight to reach my face. "You didn't even write me a damned letter, you bastard." With him I always was paralyzed by an old shyness that wasn't completely separate from the fear I had of him once, when he was a frightening man as big as a tree who told me I'd turn into an idiot from reading so many books. "It's the war, father," I apologized, without his paying attention, "it doesn't leave me time to write to you." "The war?" he said looking around, as if when he didn't see its traces on the peaceful cultivated earth and in the irrigation ditches he might think I was lying to him. "What do you have to do with the war?" I wanted to stand firm, even indict him, say something with the necessary fervor, but when I spoke to him in my own voice, I recognized the same vacuous tone of exaggeration or lies that official communiques had then. "Here you don't know, or don't want to know, but we're teaching the Fascists a lesson," I concluded. I remember that he sat down, shrugging his shoulders, on the stone bench under the pomegranate tree, and then he looked through the smock, searching for the cigarette he had put out, looking at me as if confirming that after twenty years his suspicion had come true that reading books would turn me into an idiot. "That's what they told us when they sent us to Cuba. That we were going to teach the insurgents a lesson. And now you see, a little more and you wouldn't have been born."

He lived alone on the farm he had plowed himself, in the house he had built with his own hands before I was born: a shed with mangers, a small stall for the pigs, a single room with the fire, the bed, the sacks of seeds, the tools, the earthenware dishes in which he prepared his food with exactly the same pleasure he found in all the chores of solitude, because now, when he's dead, I know he was a man dominated by a fierce will to be alone, and if he left Magina on July 19, 1936, it wasn't because he was afraid of the war but because the war offered him the excuse he always had wanted to leave the city and escape his tedious dealings with other men. On the afternoon of that July 19, he went out and saw a man running across the Plaza of San Lorenzo, and he stationed himself at one of the corners. The man, a stranger, wore a shirt stained with perspiration and looked at my father with his mouth open, saying something he couldn't understand because immediately afterward a shot was fired in the empty plaza, and the stranger, pushed to the wall as if by a gust of wind, rebounded against it, holding his stomach, and fell to the paving stones dead.

The next morning, without talking to anyone, my father loaded the mare with a mattress, a disassembled metal bed, and the second book of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, a serialized novel in three volumes of infinite pages and lugubrious lithographs he had inherited from his father and that very probably he never finished reading. As a boy I had entered those volumes with the exaltation and horror of someone crossing an uninhabited forest at night, and many years later, when I returned to Magina to attend my mother's funeral, I discovered that in the middle of the second book of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love my father kept, carefully cut and folded, some of the articles I had begun to publish then in Madrid newspapers. I never told him I had seen them; he never acquiesced and revealed to me, even indirectly, that he read and kept them with a pride stronger than his desire to renounce me, for I had fled Magina and the future that he himself assigned to me even before I was born, when he dug a well in the living rock and leveled a hillside of barren earth and built the house I didn't want to share or inherit and where he finally spent the last three years of his life inflexibly alone, far from a city and a war he didn't care about, just as he never cared about Alfonso XIII or Primo de Rivera or that vague Republic that had changed the flags on the public buildings and the names of some streets in Magina. Because I talked about it and defended it, he must have thought the Republic belonged, like Madrid and literature, to the same kind of illusions that had poisoned my imagination ever since I went to school and was irremediably turned into a stranger in his eyes and he could do nothing to get me back.

***

OLD AND SLIGHT in the black smock, but still endowed with a physical strength that had remained intact because it was an attribute of his moral courage, he loaded the basket of onions on his shoulder and carried it up to the house without letting me help him. Piled in the shed were baskets and sacks of damp vegetables that he showed to me with pride. "Look how much I care about that war. When I saw how they killed that man almost at our door, I said to myself, 'Justo, they've finally gone crazy, and this is none of your business.' And so I loaded a few things on the mule, double-locked the house, and came to the farm. I haven't set foot in Magina since that day. People come here and buy my vegetables, or I trade them for what I need, which is almost nothing because I even make my bread. And you, how do you make a living?" "I have a job at the Ministry of Propaganda." He looked at me in silence, shaking his head with an air of disillusionment I already knew: he, who never asked anyone for anything or obeyed anyone, who never wanted to work except for himself or have anything he hadn't earned with his own hands. "Eating off the government… It ought to make you ashamed, Jacinto." But I couldn't explain anything or even defend myself, and not because I knew he wouldn't understand me, but because in that place and at that moment, I myself could not conceive of a reason that would justify me. The usual words, the still sacred words, the pure sensation of joy and rage that still moved us in the spring of 1937 were things as improbable and distant that afternoon as the war in the consciousness of my father: an unknown man killed in the white-hot light of a July siesta, a sound of sirens at midnight confused at times with the whistle of the trains that crossed the valley, a squadron of planes that flew higher than any bird and glittered in the sun before being lost on the other side of the sierra. I had felt it since I passed through the gate in the wall and recognized just beside it the post where when I was a boy I would take the white mare and then start to gallop along the farm road. I had come from Manuel's house and had Mariana's eyes fixed in my memory, but as soon as I left the wall behind and walked on the fine dust of the paths, it was as if I had shed my present form to become, as I walked down to the meeting with my father, the shade of what I had been when those roads and the valley and the blue sierra were the only landscape in my life. I thought that time wasn't successive but immobile, that the regions and boundaries of its geography can be drawn with the precision that the world has in school maps. Like Orlando's watercolors, my father's farm was a region immune to time, and I couldn't go back to it, just as one can't cross a mirror or join the figures in a painting: I could only, if my will didn't intervene, accept the forgetting, the transfiguration, the fear, the impossible tenderness I had felt for so many years before my father, the share of guilt that was mine because of his disillusionment or his old age.

THEN, AS NOW, when I write so uselessly to bring him back to life, gratitude was impossible. In the mild May afternoon, the shadow of the ramparts and Magina's south wall extended over us, and the air had the damp odor of pomegranate leaves, the cold transparency of water in the irrigation ditches. Before me the terraces of the farm descended to the valley like the stanzas of a successive garden. He was sweeping the packed-down earth of the shed, and he stopped when he reached my side, looking where I was looking, as if he had guessed the temptation that possessed me so suddenly, not like a desire or a purpose, but with the imperious certainty of a pain that wounds us again when we had already forgotten it: "The world ends here; there's nothing on the other side of the sierra, only that sea of shipwrecks and dark cliffs I imagined then, because I had seen it in a print in Rosa Maria." But perhaps I'm trying to correct the past. Now, ten years later, it is shut in this room with circular windows like a fugitive, when I feel the blind, the useless temptation of tearing out my consciousness like Oedipus tore out his eyes so that nothing's left in me but the memory of that orchard and my father: tall, buttoned up, choked by the hard collar and the half boots that creaked in a strange way when he walked down the corridor of the school, because he put them on only to attend funerals, tall and suddenly a coward when he knocked at the door and asked permission without daring to go in before the headmaster stood to receive him. I had just turned eleven, and one night, after giving the animals their last feed and barring the street door, he sat in front of me and moved aside the book I was reading to look into my eyes. "Tomorrow I'm taking you out of school. What you know now is enough." Behind me, next to the fire, my mother was sewing something or simply looking at him, not impassive but defeated beforehand, and even though I would have liked to say something to her or ask her for help, it would have been impossible because weeping choked my voice and everything was very far away behind the mist of tears. "Don't cry, you're not a little boy anymore. Men don't cry." He picked up the oil lamp from the mantle over the fireplace and signaled to my mother. They left me alone, illuminated by the red embers of the fire, my eyes staring at the book and the words that dissolved as if they were written on water. The next day, before dawn, I saddled the white mare and took her to drink at the post at the wall. Dawn was breaking as I rode slowly along the road to the farm. I intended not to stop: I'd continue to the end of the white road, beyond the farms, the olive groves, the river, the distant blue hills that undulated before the first spurs of the sierra. But when I reached the dead poplar, I got down from the mare and left her tied by the bridle, and I sat down in the manger to wait for the full light of day, because I had brought my book bag with my notebooks for school and I wanted to finish an arithmetic exercise, as if that mattered, as if I had before me a placid future of schoolyards and desks and examinations in which, not for love of studying but out of a kind of vengeful obstinacy, I always received the highest grade. That morning, sitting at the desk I shared with Manuel, I let him copy the exercises from my notebook without saying a single word to him, and I didn't play with him or anyone else when we went out to recess. With their blue aprons and white collars, the others ran shouting after a ball or climbed the bars in the schoolyard, but I wasn't like them. I looked at the large clock on the facade of the school, forever stopped at a quarter past ten, and that stopped hour was more fearsome because it hid the true passage of time, the other invisible hands that brought the moment close when my father, after selling the last produce and closing his stall at the market, would put on his hard collar and suit and boots for funerals to inform the headmaster that I, his son, Jacinto Solana, would not return to school because now I was a man and he needed me to work on his land until the end of my life. But when at last he arrived and we went into the headmaster's office together, I saw him infinitely docile, lost, vulnerable, murmuring "With your permission?" in a voice I had never heard from him. He nodded, murmured things, and held his hat in his two large hands that I suddenly imagined as useless, keeping himself erect with difficulty on the edge of the chair where he had dared to sit only when the headmaster indicated it to him, and then I felt the need to defend him or to squeeze his hand and walk with him the way I had when I was little and I went with him to sell milk to the houses in Magina. "But you don't know the foolish mistake you're about to make, my friend": defend him from the headmaster and his bland smile and his words that acquired the same hostile quality from the oak desk where he rested his hands and from the portrait of Alfonso XIII he had hung above his head. "I must tell you that your son is the best student we have in the school. I predict a magnificent future for him, whether he leans toward the sciences or the arts, both of them paths for which nature has endowed him with exceptional qualities. No, it isn't necessary for you to tell me so: agriculture is a very worthy profession, and a great source of wealth for the nation, but young heads like that of your son are called to a destiny, if not worthier then of a higher and greater responsibility." He paused to catch his breath and rose decisively to his feet, resting his soft, small hands on my shoulders with a gesture in which, after so many years, I suspect a vague allegorical intention. "Your son, my friend, should continue under the care of his teachers. Who can say that we do not have before us a future engineer, an eminent physician, or, if I am pressed, a statesman of impassioned oratory? Very great men have come from humble homes. For example, Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal." After an hour, when we left the headmaster's office, we walked in silence down a very long corridor to the door of my classroom. Above the vague sound coming from the rooms that lined the hall I listened to my father's footsteps and the uncomfortable creak of his boots, and I recalled his voice finally saying the words I hadn't even dared to wish for—"Well, if you say so, I'll leave him here, even though I need him, and we'll see if he gets to be a useful man some day" — but I found in them not the temporary salvation they seemed to promise but a dark guilt more certain than gratitude: the consciousness of a debt that perhaps I didn't deserve, that I never would repay. Before he left, my father bent down to give me a kiss, smiling at me in a way that wounded me because it was the smile of a man I no longer knew. "Go on, go back to your class, and don't play around when you get out, you have to bring my lunch to the farm." He turned to wave good-bye in the last light in the hall, and when I went into the classroom and Manuel moved to one side to give me room at the desk, I covered my face with my hands so he wouldn't know I had been crying.

As if brought in by the immense shadow of the wall, at the top of which they were turning on the distant lights of the watchtower, night had fallen over the farm and the valley — very slow, perfumed and blue and deep, like the gleam of motionless water in the irrigation ditches. He took the oil lamp from the house and hung it on one of the beams in the shed. On nights like this he cooked supper on a fire outdoors. Outside the circle of that light, which shone before the house like the flames of stubble burned on summer nights, there was the darkness of a waveless ocean, of black hills and trees like ghosts or statues. But he didn't fear the darkness or the uninhabitable silence. He cleaned the fireplace of ashes, trimmed the light, stood with an agility that disconcerted me to show me where the pan and oil were. In a tower in the city the bells had struck ten. "I have to go now, Father." He stood still, next to the fire, shook his head with an air of melancholy or exhausted disillusionment. "All the time it's been that you don't come to see me and you don't even stay for supper. Where are you staying in Mágina?" "In my friend Manuel's house. He's getting married the day after tomorrow. He asked me to invite you." "Well you tell him thank you and say your father's sick. I'm not going up to Mágina until all of you end that war." When we said good-bye he kissed me without looking at me and turned immediately to stir the fire that was going out. From the road to Mágina I saw him absorbed, sitting back, alone in the light of the fire as if he were on an island, angrily alone against the darkness and surrender. I imagined him putting out the fire when he finished supper, going into the house with the lamp in his hand, acknowledging the semidarkness and the order he had chosen. He would hang the lamp at the head of the bed, and lying on it he would open the second volume of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, which was a book longer than his patience and his own life, finding perhaps the old clippings that were now as yellow as the pages of the novel. But he never told anyone he knew how to read and write: it was important to him not to leave traces of his presence in the world, and in writing, as in photographs, he suspected a trap he always tried to avoid, the invisible snare laid by fingerprints.

The road to Mágina gleamed like moondust in the dark. I reached the gate in the wall and walked alone down the paved lanes toward Manuel's house, but the impulse that led me wasn't my will: it was desire pushing me, the warm, recovered despair of knowing that Mariana's eyes would receive me.

4

TENSE AND SERENE, in the center of the photographs and in Orlando's drawing and in the essence of a plural memory that became one when interwoven in her, like men's glances at a girl walking alone between the tables in a cafe: firm in her unknown desire, in the certainty of the fascination she exercised, and in the slight tilt of her hat with a veil that concealed her eyes and reached just to the middle of her nose and cheeks. Solana on one side, and on the other Manuel, both welcomed by her, who had taken the arm of each in order not to lose them in the crowd that filled the Puerta del Sol and held herself up between their twofold and denied tenderness with a grace as indifferent as the profile of a tightrope walker who does not look at the slender cord or the pit or the dizzying emptiness over which his feet move forward. "But when that photo was taken Manuel wasn't in love with her yet," Medina explained. "Or he didn't know it and had only a few hours to find out." With the years she had stopped being a single face and a single woman to become what had perhaps always been her destiny, not interrupted but consummated by her death: a catalogue of glances and recollections fixed at times by a photograph or a drawing, profiles on coins incessantly lost and recovered and spent by the covetousness of hatred or remembrance, coins of ash. Voices: hers, unimaginable to Minaya, a little dark, according to Solana's words, the other voices that continued naming her when she was already dead, in solitude, before mirrors, saying her name into the pillows of insomnia, repeating for her sake the three syllables into which defamation continued to be condensed with no less fervor than remorse or desire.

"Born of the water," said a jovial Medina, laughing, as he usually did, with his mouth closed, "she appeared walking in her white high heels on the pavements of Madrid, next to Solana, risen from the water or from that crowd, the largest and most inspiring Manuel had seen in all the days of his life, celebrating the triumph of the Popular Front and shouting, demanding amnesty and a new government in the same plaza where they had heard the Republic proclaimed. You've read books, I suppose, you've seen photographs, but you can't know what happened then. On Sunday, election day, I had been with Manuel, here, in Mágina, and when we realized we were going to win, he said to me in a fit of daring, 'I'm going to Madrid tonight.' That was February 16, and a month later Manuel was going to marry his lifelong sweetheart, Señorita de López Cabaña, whom I called de López Carabaña, because she was as exciting as a bottle of Carabaña mineral water. The trousseau was already on display in the house of the bride-to-be, which was the custom back then, and almost every night Manuel had a visit from the tailor who was making his cutaway coat. That's why I mentioned daring to you: instead of going to the house of Señorita López Carabaña, who that afternoon, I imagine, after virtuously voting for Gil Robles, would be saying a rosary for the victory of the right wing with her mother and her infinite Carabaña sisters, Manuel held me by the arm so I wouldn't leave him alone and took me into the presence of Doña Elvira, to whom he communicated with all the solemnity the wine allowed, because we had been drinking in the worst taverns in Mágina, that it was urgent he go to Madrid to settle some piece of family business. His mother didn't say anything but kept looking at me as if I were the one responsible for this reckless escapade of Manuel's. I suppose she feared something, but neither she, nor I, nor anyone, could imagine what would happen five days later, when Manuel returned from Madrid with a certain photograph in his pocket and went to Señorita López Carabaña's house to tell the poor martyr and her mother and sisters, more Carabañas than ever, that he considered his engagement canceled, provoking a bereavement of Carabaña tears that lasted until 1941, when the young lady in question again became engaged to a former captain in the Regular Army who now manages the family oil factory."

First came the photograph, recounts Medina, the vague snapshot taken on the Carrera de San Jerónimo by a street photographer who caught Mariana's laughter and the passage of her white high heels, but also, as a witness, the distracted gesture of Jacinto Solana, the way in which Manuel turned his head very slightly to look at her without her noticing, her two hands resting on their arms with the kind of impartiality that cannot always be distinguished from indifference. Manuel opened his leather wallet and showed Medina the photograph as if it were a valuable secret document. "Her name is Mariana. She models at the School of Fine Arts. Jacinto met her three years ago, in Orlando's studio." Medina examined the photograph and then looked attentively at Manuel, as if he wanted to confirm a doubtful resemblance. "But he was a different man," he recalls, with theatrical exaggeration, passing his hand over his own face, "and I wouldn't have been able to say how he had changed, but he had the same expression Saint Paul must have had the day after he fell off his horse. Love, I imagine, that thing that should have dazzled him when he was sixteen and left him immune, but not at the age of thirty-two, because then there was no way to defend against it or to avoid his walking around with that photograph in his pocket like the lock of hair of a medieval damsel." Manuel delicately put the photograph back in his wallet and questioned Medina. "Insufficient, Manuel. I'm referring to the photo. But the proofs of miracles always are, aren't they?" Manuel took Medina's irony as an insult, but that didn't stop him from talking about Mariana: her large almond eyes, her laugh, her wavy chestnut hair, which she combed, he stated precisely, with the part on the left, her way of looking at him and talking to him as if they had always known each other: her name, which he repeated even when there was no need to for the sheer pleasure of pronouncing the three syllables that referred to her. "I can't understand how there can be other women in the world named Mariana," he said once to Medina, for he understood that Mariana wasn't a name given to someone arbitrarily at birth but a word as definitively and exactly connected to her as the moon was to the word moon. They came, then, like secret emissaries, the photograph and the name, and only a year later Mariana herself, like a silent, attentive nurse to Manuel, who was convalescing from the wound that had left him close to death on the Guadalajara front, but long before Mágina and Mágina's pride finally met that woman who from so far away and without even setting foot in the city had insulted them, in their closed houses, in the salons where they so cautiously tuned in at night to the stations of the other faction to hear the voice of Queipo de Llano and the anthems that would not be played publicly for another three years along the conquered streets of Mágina, persistent voices repeating her name and Manuel's and enumerating the details of their insolence, their undoubted madness, with the same rancor they used to tell one another the bad news of another church burned or another execution at the cemetery walls. Very soon they ignored her name to call her only "the militia woman" or "the Red": they said she had danced nude in a cabaret in Madrid, and then, when the war began, a relative of the Señoritas López Cabaña stated with certainty that he had seen her marching with a musket, cartridge belt, blue coverall, and militiaman's beret worn at a slant down the Calle de Alcalá, along with Manuel and Jacinto Solana. But the part of the story they preferred to tell, perhaps because it was the first part they had known, or because they found in it a certain dramatic quality, was the moment when Manuel appeared at the house of Señorita López Cabaña, treacherously carrying a bouquet of violets, and, after asking her mother and sisters to leave him alone with his fiancee — this added bit of drama was, of course, false, but it had a symbolic value no one wished to disparage — he sat down beside her, offered her the violets with the impeccable smile of an impostor, said in a quiet voice, looking perhaps at his own hands holding his hat on his knees: "Maria Teresa, our relationship has to end, and it's going to end right now."

In his early adolescence, Minaya had heard that scene intact and with those exact words, their bland harshness born not of reality but of certain worldly plays by Benavente; now, as he listened to Medina's narrative, he understood perhaps that they weren't a slander, that the lie and added details were the ironic attributes of truth. "But Manuel didn't care about anything," Medina said. "At first it didn't even occur to him to think of the possibility that Mariana might love him. I think her mere existence was enough to make him happy. She was a goddess, you know, and goddesses don't fall in love with you. Perhaps they smile at you from their pedestal, permit you to look at their photograph as if it were a statue, touch your hand distractedly in the café, offer you a cigarette stained with lipstick. The old school, my friend. I don't know why I have the impression that you belong to it too. And so Manuel, when he left the inconsolable Señorita López Carabaña, which made me infinitely happy, didn't do it because he was ready to marry Mariana: you don't ask for Aphrodite's hand in marriage when you see her emerge from the water, preferably nude, as on the pornographic postcards of my youth. It's just that one day early in July, without his even knowing how he dared to do it, Manuel took her hand on a tree-lined walk in the Retiro when no one else was around and told her all at once everything that had not let him live or sleep over the past few months, and she, instead of laughing, stood looking at him as if she didn't completely understand what he was saying, and responded that yes, she too, ever since that day in February when Solana introduced them. And now their only problem wasn't how to tell Doña Elvira but Jacinto Solana, whom they were going to see in an hour, because they both knew, and would rather have died than confess it to each other, that Solana had been in love with her for three years."

Medina saw him arrive, pale and still in uniform, recently discharged from the military hospital where Mariana had been with him for the past few months, during the nights of agony and fever when pain made worse by nightmares so frequently made him feel submerged in death, with no other hold on lucidity and life than the hand that held his and wiped his forehead and caressed his unshaven face in dreams. Marianas face dissolved into sphinxlike animals, into faces of doctors who bent over him from an infinite height, into shadows without bodies to contain them, into a tranquil light similar to the light of dawn that gradually took on again the shape and features of Mariana. Once — he couldn't remember when because in the hospital the measurement of time disintegrated and lengthened like the faces in nightmares — he awoke and Mariana wasn't alone, but it wasn't a doctor who was with her. Rising blindly from the darkness and the mire of sheets soaked in cold sweat in order not to lose an extremely slender possibility of consciousness, he recognized a voice saying something to her, her forgotten name perhaps, a fine-drawn face and the flash of eyeglasses, and before he passed out again he knew who it was and said "Solana," immediately returning to a suffocating dream in which he continued to hear her voice, their voices, as if he were already dead and they were talking beside his coffin. But on the day he finally awoke, free of the slime of dreams, Mariana was alone at the head of his bed, wearing a white blouse and a blue ribbon in her chestnut hair, smiling at him, overcome by happiness. This is how Medina saw her, in Magina, a week later, sitting beside Manuel at the round table in the garden, and he immediately thought she wasn't the kind of woman he had imagined from looking at the photograph, and even less the one Magina had predicted and feared. "You're Medina, aren't you?" she said to him as she stood, shaking his hand with an absolutely masculine gesture, with the immediate fondness certain women feel for the friends of the man they love. "Manuel and Solana have talked a great deal about you." The fine skin, translucent at the temples, the green or gray eyes, the short chin, the nose like an attentive bird's that Orlando had drawn with so much delicacy. It was a very warm morning in April, and Mariana had her white blouse unbuttoned down to the top of her breasts.

"And so that was Mariana," said Medina, shaking his head as if he still felt the astonishment of that distant morning. "If you were to see her, you wouldn't recognize her, because she didn't resemble the Madrid photograph at all, or even the one they took on their wedding day. Only Orlando's drawing is more or less faithful to reality. But the dead immediately stop resembling their photographs. I estimate that Mariana must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, but she didn't look it at all: her body was a little like that girl's, Inés, but she didn't have Inés' serious walk or that reserve you can see in Inés' eyes when you look at her. Mariana's glance was absolutely transparent, which always made me uneasy for some reason I never could fathom. It was as if her eyes were asking for something, as if they were empty, as if just by looking at her, you saw her naked. When I met her here that day, I thought she resembled Hedy Lamarr a little. Back then I liked women like Jean Harlow."

It was there in the garden, at the beginning of May, when they decided to write to Solana, and Medina knew they had torn up a good number of drafts at the round metal table painted white before they found the exact words, the circumspect and earnest and cowardly words of invitation, written in Manuel's English hand, that Solana read in his house in Madrid, swearing to himself there would be no truce, that he would never agree to smile and accept and be a witness to the culmination of his failure, and then tearing up the letter with meticulous rage not toward Manuel or Mariana but toward himself, promising the empty wall, the pieces of paper he still held in his hands, that on May 20, 1937, he would not be in Magina.

5

I OPEN MY EYES but still cannot see or remember anything. On my stomach, face against the sheet, hands tensely grasping the bars at the head of the bed, I touch the cold metal and recognize its moldings as if I were recognizing and touching the limits of the body that slowly is becoming mine. In the first darkness that my eyes have encountered, areas of dim light are taking shape, the light patch of the curtains, the form of the door, the window, circular like an eye that had been spying on me as I slept, fixed on me and on the plaza that the sound of water falling over the rim of the fountain brings now to my memory, adding it to the world. It seems as if when I awoke, I had suddenly started the clock on the night table: pale green in the semidarkness, luminous face and hands indicating an hour vaguely suspended between four and five in the morning. I brush the wall with my fingers, behind the bars at the head of the bed, searching for the light switch, but it's useless because they cut off the light at eleven. On the night table, next to the alarm clock, I always keep the candlestick, cigarettes, a box of matches, paper, a pen. Sometimes I wake because of an intuition that seemed memorable in my dreams but crumbles into nothing when I try to write it down. I dream I'm writing a definitive and perfect page, that there isn't enough paper or I can't find enough to receive all the words that continue flowing and spilling out and getting lost and disappearing in the air while I look for a single blank page, a piece of paper, a smooth surface where I can write them down and save them from my dream. I write, and the ink disappears into large blue stains on suddenly liquid paper, I trace signs with a knife on the damp stone of a wall that is the one in any of the cells where I've awakened for the past eight years and the steel point breaks without penetrating that hard material. I want to write, but I've forgotten how, and I'm alone in front of the desk where I sat in school. I dream insomnia, fear, the blank page. I fumble and light the candle: a point of light that ascends, when it seemed extinguished, a pointed yellow tongue that illuminates the clock, the night table, my own hands rolling a cigarette because I know I won't get back to sleep. I carry the candlestick to the table, arrange around me the inkwell, the pen, cigarette papers, blank pages in a pile, the ashtray. I draw a long line on the unmarked paper and look at it as if it were the writing of a language I don't know.

"Why don't you write a real book," my father would say, "a novel like Rosa Maria, so I can read it." One book that would have the mysterious appearance that all the books of my childhood had: a dense, necessary object, a volume made weighty by the geometry of the words and the materiality of the paper, its hard angles and covers worn by longstanding dealings with the imagination and with hands. Perhaps now I'm not writing for myself or to save a forbidden memory; obscurely I'm being led by the desire to plan and create a book in the way a potter models a clay jar, so that his dead man's hands can touch it and his eyes blinded by the final fear and stupefaction of a fate that wasn't his can read it and revive it. They tell me, Manuel says, that nobody knows why they killed him, but that is a pious or cowardly way of not saying that they killed him because he was my father. They were probably afraid that I had managed to escape; they may have calculated that a single death was not enough to exhaust my punishment or my guilt. I know, they've told me, that on the second or third day of April 1939, they saw him come to the Plaza of San Lorenzo just as he had left it three years earlier. He tied the mare's bridle to the grillwork at the window, opened the door with the large metal key, unloaded the mattress and the disassembled bed and asked a neighbor who had won the war, shaking his head pensively when he was told. For several days he didn't leave the house. He listened to the radio until very late at night, watched the plaza through the shutters at a balcony, and when someone knocked at the door, he hurried to answer it, breaking an old habit.

On the fourth day a van painted black drove to the plaza and stopped under the poplars, directly in front of the house. With a clamor of violently slammed doors and military boots five men in blue shirts and red berets got out. Inside the van, next to the driver, sat a man in civilian clothes who made affirmative gestures to the others indicating the door that was still closed. When he opened to see who was knocking they pushed the barrel of a pistol into his chest, forcing him back inside, shouting at him to keep his hands at the back of his neck. "Are you Justo Solana?" said one, the man who had first pointed the gun at him. Hitting him with the butts of their pistols, they pushed him out to the street, until he was close to the window through which the man in civilian clothes was looking. He stood there for a time, motionless, surrounded by pistols, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, and finally the man in civilian clothes, who had lowered the window to look at him more carefully, said, "That's him. I recognized him right away," and the others, as if obeying an order, hit him with the butts of their pistols and forced him into the van and then jumped in after him still pointing their guns at the closed windows of the plaza, which opened again very quietly only when the sound of the engine had disappeared down the narrow lanes.

I've seen the place where they took him. A convent, abandoned now, that during the war was a storage depot and barracks for the Anarchist militias, on one of those treeless little plazas that one sometimes finds unexpectedly at the end of a street in Magina. In 1939 they whitewashed the facade of the convent to cover the large red letters painted on it, but the years and the rain have delicately dissolved the whitewash and now the initials, the condemned words can be made out again. F.A.I., he must have read on the facade when they made him get out of the van. PRAISE DURRUTI, but undoubtedly he didn't know who Durruti was or the meaning of the Anarchist initials furiously scrawled in red brushstrokes. They were only a part of the war that had trapped him in the end, as indecipherable as the war itself and the faces of the men who pushed him and the reason they gave for arresting him. The cellars, the chapel, the cells of the friars were filled with prisoners, and they had stretched barbed wire between the columns in the courtyard to hold the ones who couldn't fit into the cells. From the street one could see a cloud of dark faces adhering to the gratings at the windows, eyes and hands clutching at the bars or emerging from the semidarkness like strange animals or tree branches stretching in vain to reach the light. There was also, I suppose, in the upper corridors, where one could hardly hear the noise of pounding heels and orders and the engines of trucks filled with prisoners that stopped on the plaza, the busy sound of papers and typewriters, fans, perhaps, lists of names endlessly repeated on carbon paper and confirmed by someone who ran a pencil down the margin and stopped from time to time to correct a name or make a brief mark beside it.

I know that every day at dusk, a string of donkeys loaded down with cauliflower leaves came to the convent. They emptied the panniers at the entrance, and a gang of prisoners watched over by Moroccan guards gathered the fodder in big armloads and threw it over the barbed wire to the others in the courtyard. The large leaves of a green between blue and gray spilled into the outstretched hands of the prisoners, who fought to get them and tore them apart and then bit greedily into the ribs, sucking at the sticky, bitter juice. He didn't eat. He didn't want to humiliate himself among the groups of men who fought over a leaf of cow fodder and crawled on all fours around the feet of the others searching for a trampled leftover that had gone unnoticed. After eating those leaves that crinkled like wrapping paper and left a dirty, wet, green stain around their mouths, some prisoners, perhaps the ones who had fought most savagely to get them, writhed on the tiles and vomited and clutched at their bellies and the next day were dead and swollen in the middle of the courtyard or in a corner of a cell. Silent and alone, he looked at the unknown faces and strange things happening around him and thought that this, after all, was war, the same cruelty and disorder he had known in his youth when they sent him to Cuba. Sometimes, at midnight, he heard a truck shaking to a stop at the door to the convent. Then silence was suddenly imposed on the murmur of bodies crowded together in the dark, and all eyes remained fixed on the air, never on the faces of others, because looking at another man meant seeing a préfiguration of being called, of death. The sound of the truck was followed by the noise of locks and the pounding of boots along the corridors. Between two columns in the courtyard, at the doorway to a cell, a group of uniformed figures came to a halt and one of them, shining a flashlight on the typed list he held in his other hand, read the names slowly, stumbling sometimes over the pronunciation of a difficult last name.

One night they called his. His bones were swollen with dampness, and he had a disagreeable taste of ashes in his mouth. Two guards picked him up from the floor and tied his hands behind him with a wire. He thought about me, about whom no one had heard anything for two years, about his closed house, about his land lying solitary in the night. They made him climb into the body of the truck and tied him to the back of a chair beside a man whose head hung low and who shuddered in his bonds with silent, continual weeping. They had nailed a double row of rush chairs to the boards of the truck, and the men tied to the backs remained lined up and rigid, as if they were attending their own wake, solemnly moving back and forth on the curves of the streets and bouncing up and down, shaken, when the truck left the last lit corners behind and drove onto a dirt road in the barren lands to the north of the city. He smelled the limitless odor of the air and the empty fields in the night that the headlights cut through looking for the road to the cemetery The truck finally drove between dark cypresses, and when it reached the iron gate, it turned left and continued down a narrow path that ran the length of the low, whitewashed walls. Someone shouted to the driver to stop, and the truck drove in reverse until it stopped in front of a section of wall where the whitewash was pockmarked with bullet holes. Two soldiers were untying the ropes that secured them to the chairs and then pushing them until they jumped out of the truck. They lined them up in front of the wall, lit by the yellow headlights that lengthened their shadows on the turned over, stained ground. Long before the sound of the bolts on the rifles and the single detonation that he didn't hear, he had stopped being afraid because he knew he was on the other side of death: death was that yellow light blinding him, it was the shadow that began behind it and took on the shape of the nearby olive trees and the men hiding in them or confused with them who raised their rifles and remained motionless for an endless time, as if they were never going to move or shoot. Not the pain of the void or the vertigo of falling with tied hands to the ground or onto another body but a sudden sensation of lucidity and abandonment and the raw taste of blood in his mouth that was closed against the dark.

I light a cigarette in the candle that I put out slowly when I exhale the smoke. The smoke is blue and gray and hangs in the air like the gray light out of which emerge the room painted white, the unmade bed, the blue plaza beneath the roofs, the acacias. Smoking, motionless next to the glass, beyond the circular windows, as if in a cabin on a ship, I see the Magina dawn, as if day were dawning in a city where I am dead too.

6

"AND NOW HE'S LYING DOWN in the room," Manuel thought, "with the shutters closed, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the buckle of that absurd coat that smells of the train and that he hasn't taken off because he's trembling with cold even though Teresa lit the fire that faces his bed, his hands folded, his fingers interlaced over the coat, his thumbs rhythmically tapping each other, as if he were marking shapeless, limitless time with no precise destination, just as one marks the beats of one's heart or the drip of water falling at night from a half-closed tap. He heard me when I went in and he pretended he was sleeping, or perhaps he really was sleeping and his sleep resembles an exhausted insomnia as he lies on the bed, dressed, his unopened suitcase in the middle of the room, his shoes with the laces untied dirtying the edge of the bedspread with mud, and that smell of rough blankets and cold dawn that I had forgotten." Even before his mother came into the dining room, examining everything in a single glance as she searched for some sign that would proclaim the arrival of her guest and enemy, Manuel knew that Solana's presence in the house would weigh on the predictable silence in which supper would take place, even if his name weren't spoken, for Dona Elvira had always known how to use silence as an accusation and an insult, and Solana was one of the names she never pronounced, obeying a fierce standard of pride inculcated in her in her youth. When she finally appeared in the doorway of the dining room, flanked by Amalia as if she were an ancient lady-in-waiting, Manuel and Utrera stood at the same time, but it was Utrera who hurried to pull out the chair reserved for her at the head of the table, holding the back while Doña Elvira sat down, bowing too deeply, like a hotel waiter. In those years, Medina said then, Utrera seemed determined to maintain a certain air of a cinematic hotel receptionist, always solicitous, somewhat South American, slightly oily, with his pinstriped suits, hair stiffly waved with pomade, and the very thin black mustache that exaggerated his smile, the soft line of his mouth.

"Señora," he said, as Doña Elvira opened her napkin and placed it on her lap, looking without expression at the other side of the table but also, very much out of the corner of her eye, at Manuel, who was sitting to her left, "I have no words to thank you for accepting my invitation tonight. With your permission, I shall tell Amalia to begin serving supper." The municipal council of a nearby town had commissioned a very large allegory of Victory, and since, like the painters of the Renaissance, he was paid according to the number of figures, he had invited Manuel and his mother to a supper that he himself classified as special. After requesting permission from Manuel, who shrugged, Amalia had agreed to serve supper on the silver table service, and to place on the table the two bronze candelabra that normally were on the sideboard and were a partial testimony to the time when Manuel's father was still alive and gala suppers were held in the house, like the one attended by Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. In the light of the candelabra, the dining room and the three figures gathered around the table that was too large had the melancholy appearance of an unfortunate simulacrum. As he had done at the formal suppers of his adolescence, Manuel looked obsessively at his shirtcuffs and the hands that held his fork and knife, sometimes lifting his head to agree with what Utrera was saying, with his solicitude and his smile, distant, like the gestures of an actor who has been left alone on stage and attempts to move the audience in a half-empty hall. He noticed, suddenly, that Teresa had left the dining room and had not returned, and a sideways glance at his mother let him know that she too had noticed the girl's absence. "Teresa," said Doña Elvira, interrupting something Utrera was telling her. Amalia took a step and approached her but looked at Manuel as if asking for a sign. "Yes, Señora?" Doña Elvira slowly placed the knife and fork on the tablecloth and spoke, barely separating her lips. "I didn't call you. Isn't Teresa here?" Amalia was still looking at Manuel, nervously smoothing the edge of her white apron with her fingers. "She'll be right back, Señora." It was then that Manuel spoke, understanding, accepting the trap that had been laid, daring to look in his mother's eyes just as he had looked in them on the day he told her he was going to marry Mariana, imitating without realizing it their blue fixity, stripped of any desire to explain or defy. "Teresa has gone up to take Solana his supper."

She had heard the bell from her bedroom, sensing in its long ring a danger she couldn't specify, because she didn't recognize the voice of the person who had just arrived, but as soon as she heard the street door closing she rang the bell imperiously for Amalia to come up, and she asked and found out, while the maid helped her dress, that the old threat had never died but had only been incubating for ten years, ready to return at any time from a future she had always feared and that was being realized now as inevitably as the coming of autumn or old age. "So they didn't kill him in the war or after the war," she said, "they condemned him to death and pardoned him, and now he's left prison to come to my house." "I heard him say he'd be leaving soon," said Amalia, behind her, placing the embroidered peignoir over her shoulders. "It doesn't matter if he stays or leaves today. He came, and my son has seen him. The harm has already been done." But she asked every morning if he had left, not saying his name, alluding with a movement of her head to the part of the house where the outsider was staying, and every day during the first week she received the same reply, which didn't explain anything, because no one, not even Manuel, knew Solanas intention. They told her he probably was sick, because he coughed and his hands trembled and he almost never left the room or got out of bed, and when Teresa brought him a meal and left it on the night table he acted as if he hadn't seen her, but then, as soon as the girl left the room, he sat up and ate without taking off his coat or using the cutlery or the napkin, stopping abruptly if he heard a noise outside his door, as if he were ashamed to let anyone discover how hungry he was. "He still hasn't opened his suitcase," said Amalia on the morning of the fourth day, "and he hasn't even untied the rope he had around it, or moved it from the spot where he left it when he came." The untouched suitcase, the overcoat, the empty closet, even the attitude of Manuel, whom they rarely saw talking to Solana, were gradually being established as signs of an immediate departure, a respite, at least, because as the days passed the presence of the outsider seemed to dissolve without anything taking place. Doña Elvira never crossed paths with him in the dining room, as she had feared, and she didn't see him in the courtyard or the hallway in the gallery. But it was enough for her to know he was near her, in the house, in the same room he had occupied in 1937, to imagine him alone, waiting for something, poisoned by a purpose that she would discover only when it was too late to put an end to his evil spell. "Just like it was before," she said to Utrera, "when my simpleminded son would bring him here for a snack and do everything to keep me from knowing. But the smell of the rubber in his espadrilles was left in the library."

They ate alone, Doña Elvira and Utrera, because Manuel had stopped coming to the dining room and spent his time in the pigeon loft, in the upper rooms, occupied, as they learned from Teresa, in supervising the work of the masons he had hired to restore the roof. He chose the huge room with the circular windows, which for thirty years had been a storeroom for old furniture and religious paintings stowed against the walls, and chests like tombs where solemn ballroom dresses were kept and carnival costumes that hadn't been worn since the turn of the century. The masons moved everything to an attic, sealed the rat holes, and painted the ceiling and walls of the room white, as well as the shutters at the two windows. With the help of Teresa, to whom he had suggested that she say nothing, not even to her Aunt Amalia, Manuel had the wooden floor cleaned until its former chestnut color was restored and he arranged the new furniture in the room so thoughtfully that Teresa suspected he intended to move into it himself. A bed with a thick mattress and clean sheets and blankets that had never been used, facing the two circular windows that were oriented to the southeast so they would receive the first light of day, an oak desk between the two windows, its Isabelline moldings newly varnished, a shining Underwood, an English fountain pen and an inkwell and a packet of blank sheets carefully arranged in the top drawer, and on the wall, above the desk, a darkened, Arcadian eighteenth-century landscape depicting the ocher outskirts of a city and a long gondola crossing the waters of the lagoon of Venice. But if Manuel was going to banish himself to that room where the other voices in the house didn't reach, it would not be only to sleep, Teresa thought: it was as if he had decided to prepare everything and definitively cut himself off from the world, because he hung a curtain across one end and behind it he placed a small kerosene stove and a locker with dishes and cutlery for one person, sausages, canned goods, bottles of wine that the two of them brought up more or less secretly from the wine cellar, and even a pack of candles to illuminate the room when the electricity was cut off every night at eleven. By the light of one of the candles, on the night of the fifth day after Solanas arrival, Manuel and Teresa checked all the things one by one as if they were inspecting the staterooms and pantries of a ship that was about to sail, and Manuel, exhausted, because he hadn't stopped working since dawn, lit a cigarette and sat in front of the typewriter, brushing the keyboard with the tip of his index finger, not daring to strike the grouped, identical letters, only feeling their brief metal touch like a possibility of interminable words. Then he remembered something Jacinto Solana had told him in a very old letter: words, literature, are not in the consciousness of the person who writes but in his fingers and the paper and the typewriter, just like the statues of Michelangelo were in the block of marble where they were revealed.

The next morning, when Teresa came into Solanas bedroom with the breakfast tray, she found him standing in front of the mirror, fastening the belt of the coat that he may not have taken off the night either before when he slept. "He said he's leaving today," she hurried to tell Manuel when she went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later Amalia was already repeating the news to Doña Elvira, who showed no sign of relief when she heard it. "I saw him in the hallway in the gallery," Amalia said, "with his hat on and his suitcase in his hand. I didn't hear him cough, and he's not as pale as he was when he came." He went down the hallway in the way he had walked since leaving prison, slowly and very close to the wall, as if he wanted to take shelter in it, fatigued, tenacious, one hand in the pocket of his overcoat and the other clutching the suitcase with contracted knuckles that jutted out of his dirty sleeve, and it wasn't the odor of prison and of trains or the weariness of his shoulders that pointed to his future of bad weather and stations with no destination, but that pallid gesture of his hand that held the suitcase as if it were an accepted and necessary attribute of his condition, like the brief tie, the dark shirt collar, the overcoat that belonged to another time and another man who perhaps was still in prison. He walked with his head bowed, looking through the glass in the gallery at the amber light descending to the courtyard, but he never went down the stairs because Manuel was waiting for him and didn't seem to hear him when he said he was leaving. "Come. I want to show you something." "I'm in a hurry, Manuel. They told me a train to Madrid comes through at eleven." Manuel took his suitcase from him and had him go up with him to a part of the house that Solana had never visited: dark staircases, empty salons with mirrors on the walls and pale painted wreaths in the corners of the ceilings, vaulted glass niches where the staring eyes gleamed of saints modeled in wax with ringlets of human hair. Finally they came to the first door in a hallway whose other end was lost in darkness, and when Manuel opened the door, it was as if the daylight were spilling violently over them. The desk between the two windows, the high typewriter that sparkled gold and black and metallic in the icy sun of the January morning, the white walls that still smelled faintly of paint, the air full of a fragrance of clean sheets and varnish that repeated in Solana's memory the distant invitation he took as an offense the first time Manuel had him go into the library, standing in the doorway, just as he did now, so that he would enter only in the glare of delight. He took a few steps, as he had then, not daring to go all the way in, he stood still before the typewriter, before the light from the circular windows, picking up the pen and then putting it down carefully, as if he were afraid to damage it with his hard, clumsy hands, and it may have been when he saw the pack of black tobacco and the cigarette papers that he definitively realized that the room and the typewriter and the bed with its white sheets had been prepared for him, because Manuel smoked only light tobacco. "You know I can't accept, Manuel. You know I'd never be able to repay you," he said, looking at all the untouched offerings, and he made a brusque movement as if to leave and renounce them while it was still possible not to surrender to temptation, but Manuel remained in front of the door, blocking his way. "Write your book here. In the top drawer of the desk you have all the paper you'll need. I'll make certain nobody bothers you." He put the key on the desk and went out, closing the door very slowly. He heard Solana's footsteps, silence, then the bedsprings, and again silence and footsteps on the parquet, the typewriter, sounding as if an index finger were hitting over and over again the same letter chosen at random and repeated with tireless fury on the paper, on the black, empty roller.

7

WHEN SHE HEARD the still distant whistle, Mariana stepped to the edge of the platform to look at the deserted track that vanished among the green fields and the first olive groves, and the south wind, the one that announces rain, blew her hair and skirt and the white cloth of her blouse as if she were standing on a pier by the ocean. "It's coming," she called to me, pointing at the almost motionless column of smoke bending over the tops of the olive trees, and then she turned toward me smoothing her hair and the skirt that had revealed her knees for a delicious moment, but the smile on her lips now was no longer mine, and her impatience for the arrival of the train carrying Orlando was an affront very similar to the uneasiness of jealousy. I hated the train and I hated Orlando, because they were coming to decapitate my being alone with her, they were emissaries of the time that would snatch her away from me and the future hours when her absence would destroy me. Stripped of will, of resignation, of pride, I consisted of nothing but two yearning eyes that looked at Mariana, and consciousness of the last respite that had venomously been granted to my imagination. She was already leaving, although she seemed immobile, I felt her becoming lost as slowly as the hands of a clock or a train that begins its departure in silence slipping away toward the red lights in the darkness, and when the second whistle sounded and I saw the column of smoke coming closer, the empty station, the indolent quiet of the May morning, were suddenly the landscape of a desert island where I had been abandoned and left alone, looking at the clock that pointed to noon, calculating the place and destination of my next flight, not going more than three days into the future because beyond that time limit nothing would remain. The respite that for me was disintegrating like a face of smoke lasted interminably for Mariana, and this mutual discord in our perception of time wounded me like a disloyalty more certain than her marriage to Manuel. "I count the days, Jacinto, I can't live in that house, with that woman who doesn't look at me and hates me without saying anything to me, with that man, the sculptor, who always looks at my neckline and has clammy hands. Even Manuel is like a stranger to me."

It was at the beginning, that morning, when we arrived at the station in the Ford that had belonged to Manuel's father, crossing the lit empty streets of the city, the avenue of linden trees that ended in the high esplanade with its flags where a boy in uniform saluted us with a raised fist. There were silent women in mourning and wounded soldiers on the benches along the platform and on every wall violent war posters that had an anachronistic, distant air, as if the war they exalted had nothing to do with the peaceful station and the morning in Magina. We were alone, Mariana and I, we had been alone in the house when I came down to have breakfast and found her waiting for me in the dining room, recently bathed and light-hearted, with her damp hair and her white blouse unbuttoned almost to the tops of her loose, pale breasts that I glimpsed in their slight semidarkness every time she leaned toward me to tell me something, bringing me back with sudden clarity and sorrow to the afternoon in 1933 when I saw her, unknown and naked, in Orlando's studio. It had always been like this, I thought, always touching her with my eyes and hands and never crossing the chasm that divides bodies when they are so close that a single gesture or a single word would be enough to tear apart the cowardly spiderweb that joins desire to despair, exactly four years that resolved into ashes and nothingness with the cold visible serenity of what has already happened, like the sugar that I poured into the cup and that dissolved in the coffee as I sat across from Mariana and stirred it with a spoon, impassive, attentive, darkly absorbed in my breakfast and in her half-opened blouse. But we were alone and the silence in the house was like a final gift I never would have dared to ask for, and just as the war didn't seem to exist in Magina because sirens didn't sound at night and there was no burned rubble in the middle of the streets, the absence of the others allowed me the clandestine privilege of imagining that nobody would come to argue with me over Mariana, cleanly offered to my eyes in the empty dining room. Manuel had left very early for the country estate, using the train and not the car so that Mariana and I could drive to the station to pick up Orlando. When I sat next to her on the leather seat and slammed the door shut at the same time that Mariana turned on the ignition, it was as if I too was stirred by its thrust, very violent at first, barely controlled by her when we turned into the first narrow lane on the way to the Plaza of General Orduna, then passing like a sound or a long gust of wind against the windows when we drove down the broad empty streets to the north, and Mariana, who had been tense and hunched over the wheel, leaned back and asked me to light a cigarette for her. She belonged to me boundlessly now, not to me, who was going to lose her, but to the tenderness of my eyes that in the warm interior of the car added new, unknown images to the figure of Mariana. Mariana in profile against the glass of the window, her hands sliding or firm on the wheel, her chestnut hair lifted and then falling again over her forehead and the rapid movement of her hand that brushed it aside and then immediately rested again on the brake lever, her forehead and her nose and her mouth and beyond them the fleeting, familiar streets of Magina, the distant cemetery among the empty fields, the shadows of the linden trees that successively hid her face and returned it to the light, her laughter when she stopped the car in front of the station, as if we had completed an adventure.

They told us that Orlando's train would be two or three hours late. The delay irritated Mariana, as if the wait would lengthen hers to escape Magina, but I secretly was grateful for the unexpected hours granted to me. It had been so long since I had been alone with her that I was incapable of calculating the exact duration of what I now had: each future minute was a coin from those excessive treasures we find in some dreams, a thin thread of dizzyingly spilled sand that I clutched at in order to retrieve it. I saw her approaching, returning from the precise moment when I knew I had known her only to lose her, the Mariana of 1933 who had just appeared, the possible Mariana, not yet desired, the girl with no name and the lock of hair hanging straight over her brows and her eyes made up like those of Louise Brooks, whom I had seen before I met her in some photographs that Orlando showed me. I saw her return as we walked on one side of the tracks, beyond the platform, past the long banks of young hedge mustard that extended it, our heads bowed, slightly apart, looking at the slow advance of our own steps or the distant gray of the olive groves. "I spend all my time with Manuel, imagine, today is the first day we've been apart since he got out of the hospital, but in that house it's as if I were always alone. Everything frightens me, even counting the days left until we leave. It frightens me to think about the trip to Paris, and I'm so adventurous that the first time I left Madrid was to come to Magina. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you've come. After we mailed you the letter I was waiting for your answer and always afraid you'd stay in Madrid. Somebody would knock at the door and I'd run out to see if it was the mailman, and if the phone rang, I closed my eyes, hoping it was you. With you in the house, that woman, those people, no longer frighten me. Medina was sure you wouldn't come. I started to hate him for the way he said it, so much the doctor, as if he could know everything."

By now we were very far from the platform, and when we reached the first olive trees we slowly began our return. Mariana took my arm and rested her weight on me with a gesture that was usual in another time, in Madrid, before Manuel, in the uncertain streets of the small hours and the never satisfied temptation to embrace her. "Tomorrow," I said, rigid and cowardly when I felt her hand and the proximity of her hips, tomorrow and then never, the other house, the dark bedroom, the insomnia, the silence and the waiting and the darkness where Beatriz wasn't sleeping. "I almost can't remember what I did before I knew you," Mariana said. A step away from the platform, the lazy soldiers looked at her, the clock was about to strike eleven. But she still leaned on my arm, and when she raised her head to look into my eyes, I saw in the transparency of hers something that had nothing to do with her words, that wasn't mine, or Manuel's, or anybody's, that belongs now only to the memory of the man they fixed on for the last time, the certainty of an appointment and a shot in the pigeon loft, the will to die, I know it now, to never be vulnerable again to abandonment or fear. "A model," she repeated, laughing: "Who remembers that? You shouldn't remind me of it now. I was nobody, less than nobody, I was nothing when I met you. I went from one place to another, never stopping, because if I had paused at someone or something I would have disintegrated immediately, like a face in the water. When you appeared and looked at me, it was as if I finally had been embodied in myself. I can see you now, so quiet, so firm, looking at the painting and not at me because it embarrassed you to look at me naked. That day it was as if I were seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. You didn't need to speak or even move for people to know you were in the world. I never had read anything with as much attention as the poems of yours that Orlando gave me. 'Look, this is what Solana has written. Except for the two of us, it's a secret.' I didn't sleep at night, reading the books you gave me. I brought the first one with me, The Voice Owed to You, with the dedication you asked Salinas to write for me.To Mariana Rios, with affection, September 1933. When I read those poems I always had the feeling it was you who wrote them."

"There's another creature I'm looking for in the world," I quoted, but Mariana was no longer beside me, she was looking at things beyond my desire to immobilize them in her, torn by the hands of the clock that joined to indicate twelve o'clock and by the still distant whistle and the column of smoke that thickened into a soot-stained cloud when the train, stained by war and with ripped banners hanging from the sides of the locomotive, obscene like an old animal with wet skin, stopped in front of us. Through the smoke that dissipated to reveal dark anxious faces at the windows looking at the platform, I saw Orlando, who signaled to Mariana by waving his drawing portfolio over the heads grouped at the windows, taller than the others, and before he saw me, because I was still sitting on the bench on the platform, I heard over the din of the cars and the shouts of the soldiers his huge voice and laugh as he embraced Mariana, picking her up and swinging her around. "Solana, you old satyr, prince of your own darkness, you're even paler than you were last Sunday. Or was it Saturday when we got drunk the last time?" Big, tired, his clothes in the disarray of nighttime drunkenness, with thin damp hair at his temples, smelling of alcohol and medicine because he suffered attacks of asthma, laughing with an obstinacy in his intoxicated eyes that sometimes seemed close to madness, Orlando got down from the train bringing with him like an emissary all the excitement of the war and the blind urgency of Madrid. He brought portfolios of drawings that fell to the ground when he embraced Mariana and that I collected from between people's feet, and a suitcase that had been mislaid somewhere in the corridor or in his compartment. When we climbed into the train to look for it, urged on by Orlando's despair, who said he had packed the sketches for a masterpiece in it, a slim boy with long, very black hair whose face I vaguely recognized appeared with it. "God, here at last," Orlando said in a way that didn't reveal if he was referring to the suitcase or the boy. "I was afraid I had lost them both, and I swear to you that I would have preferred to lose the suitcase than him. Santiago, this is Mariana, who has been kind enough to invite us to her wedding with a local landowner. I think you already know Solana. He's the one who writes those fine articles in Octubre on art and the proletarian revolution. He aspires to a position in the political bureau."

He talked so much and so rapidly and with such a perverse edge that I estimated he had been drinking right up to the moment the train arrived in Magina. The flask of liquor bulged in his jacket pocket, but when he introduced us to the boy he had brought with him, I understood that pride and not alcohol was the real reason for his elation. "Solana, you ought to get right back to Madrid. The front is going to collapse if you don't go in and recite some of your Communist ballads for our soldiers. Even the intellectuals are clamoring for you. The other day I ran into Bergamin, with that face that always looks as if he's just taken communion, and he said that as soon as you get back he was going to name you as his secretary for that congress you're all preparing in Valencia. Don't miss it, Mari-anita, the Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals or something like that. Everything with capital letters." He put his hand on my shoulder not to be amiable so much as to keep his balance, and leaning on Mariana and me, he left the station. There he stopped beside the open car where Santiago and I had put the luggage, looking as if dazed at the vast blue sky and the double avenue of linden trees that cut across the plain toward Magina, whose highest towers looked like pointed needles above the empty fields. Orlando took off the red and black handkerchief he always wore around his neck and wiped the sweat off his face, staring at the light, the handkerchief paused by his mouth, like a mask he hadn't decided to remove. "Solana," he said, his back to us, "Solana you infidel, you should have told me, you should have warned me about the light. Didn't you realize that this is the light I've been waiting for? Even Velazquez is darkness compared with this." He staggered with his head turned toward the blue, and when Santiago got out of the automobile that was already running to take him by the arm as if he were a blind man, he suddenly became disheartened and closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep against the back of the rear seat, his mouth and nostrils wide open, as if he were dreaming about the beginning of an asthma attack.

We were already crossing the first streets of low villas and dusty gardens where Magina ends in the north when I saw in the rearview mirror his open, reddened eyes staring into mine in an absent lucidity that his waking, or the silence that had overtaken the four of us since Mariana had started the car, stripped of any sign of mockery or pride. He let his head fall slowly onto Santiago's shoulder, and the boy remained solemn and firm beside him, looking at the long lines of houses, and when he lit a cigarette without moving his eyes away from the rearview mirror I thought I could detect in his expression an old countersign of desolation or renunciation, as if the illusions of alcohol had abruptly abandoned him. He moved his head a little and then I knew he was alluding to Mariana and was asking me about her without words. "You look beautiful when you're driving, Mariana," he said, his eyes half-closed to complete his indolence, "you remind me of that heroine in Orlando Furioso who rode on a winged horse wearing brilliant armor." He rested his hand on the back of Mariana's seat and caressed her hair with fleeting tenderness, like a dozing faun, as if he were touching the air or liquid silk that dissolved between his large, stained fingers. She looked away from the road for a moment to smile at him in the mirror with the tranquil gratitude of an accomplice, which was always present in the way she looked at Orlando. I was jealous when I caught their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror, because I desired the candid, offered part of Mariana that she revealed only in her behavior with Orlando as much as the other darker, more carnal part that belonged to Manuel, and I would have liked to join the two in a single indubitable woman not closed to my intelligence and desire, like the third Mariana, the only one I knew, shadow or reverse of the others or of herself, who always seemed to be to one side of things, who sometimes, that very morning, would take me by the arm and stop to tell me the exact words that burned inside me and that I would never say to her. "I'll always be with you. Whatever I do and no matter who I'm with, even if I don't see you again. I want you to know that and never forget it, not even when you don't care about me anymore."

SUDDENLY I NOTICED that we were proceeding more and more slowly now, because as we approached the Plaza of General Orduna, the sidewalks and streets were filling with a slow-moving crush of people. They came out of the narrow lanes, at first in silence, unarmed men in white shirts and corduroy trousers, tense women clustered at the corners who talked quietly and turned inquisitively to look at the car that by now was almost at a standstill and surrounded by a single-minded crowd who walked toward the plaza and seemed to inundate us and then drag us along to the rhythm of their movement forward. The voices still had the same vast, muffled sound as the footsteps, but very soon, when we finally entered the plaza — the small tree tops surrounding the amputated pedestal of General Orduna stood out above their heads — the great sound broke apart into a clamor of shouts and raised fists rhythmically beating the air as they leaned toward the closed balconies of the police station, toward the cubic tower where a red and yellow and purple flag hung over the broken sphere of the clock. Mariana sounded the horn several times, but by now it was useless, because we couldn't open a passage and there were hostile faces looking at us through the windows as if we were fish in an aquarium and furious fists pounding on the car body to the rhythm of their shouts, the single shout in which all the voices had already converged when Mariana stopped the car at one side of the plaza and we managed to get out by pushing the doors against the bodies that seemed to adhere with the tenacity of mollusks. "Give him to us," they shouted, "give us the traitor," convulsing in violent eddies toward the closed balconies of the police station, and no sooner did I ger out of the car than I found myself lost and far from the others in a dense pulsation in which bodies and voices were confused, driven by instinct or a determined rage as indecipherable in its purpose as the energy of the ocean. Like swimming in sand, I moved forward until I reached the hand that Mariana held out to me, but I could no longer see Santiago or Orlando. We drifted together toward the center of the plaza, where the bodies had erased the benches and the line of the gardens and covered in their flood tide the pedestal of General Orduna. Now we saw the closed doors of the police station and the only space not yet engulfed by the crowd: nine Assault Guards formed a semicircle in front of the building, standing firm, their legs apart, with hard somber faces under shining visors and rifles held against their chests, as if they didn't see the surging crowd that besieged them or the closed fists that stopped so close to their rifles. Then a side balcony opened and I saw a man in uniform who looked at the plaza without stepping outside entirely, smoking, partially protected behind opaque glass, but that image, endowed with the serenity of an illusion, vanished when I felt people shoving me and separating me from Mariana, because a police van was making its way unhesitatingly through the crowd and approaching the semicircle defended by the Assault Guards. I saw Mariana moving away and calling to me with her hand, as if she were being dragged out by the sea, my blind fear was that I had lost her and I shouted her name over the agitated heads that again occupied the fissure opened on the plaza by the passage of the van, and when I could no longer see her a brusque undulation of bodies threw her into my arms and knocked both of us against a tree trunk. As if waking from a bad dream, we found ourselves greedily embracing, her bare legs wrapped around mine and my open hands trembling at her waist and feeling for the first time since I met her the perfumed and delicate attraction, the curved, slender, definite body of Mariana. I brushed her forehead, her chestnut hair with my lips, I raised my eyes to the balcony of the police station and the man in uniform was srill there, calm, holding his cigarette at a middle height, looking at the plaza as if there were no one on it, or only us, Mariana and I, embracing under the faded foliage of a tree.

"Let's go, comrades," I heard someone saying to me, one voice very close in the silence in which for ten seconds all the shouts in the plaza had exploded, the butt of a musket and a body that detached me from Mariana as he made his way between the two of us, while we avoided looking at each other and again were lost and inert and trying to pretend that our embarrassment wasn't real, that the embrace like a lightning flash of desire hadn't happened. "Let's go, comrades, let me pass, I want to see the face of that spy when they bring him out," said the voice at my side, a boy summarily dressed as a militiaman who elbowed his way forward raising his musket, probably unloaded and useless, like a banner. "What's going on?" Mariana asked him, "who's been arrested?" and he told us, as if excited by fever, that two days earlier they had arrested a Fascist spy in a Magina hotel and now they were preparing to take him to the provincial prison in the Assault Guards' van. "But this is where justice should be done. That Fascist is ours. They say he wanted to put a bomb in the House of the People, the murderer." He moved away from us, hitting the bodies in his path with the butt of the musket, and I saw him disappear or sink among the heads, shouting as if he were alone, and then resurface, hanging onto the grating at a window very close to the police station, his musket waving at the end of the overly long strap that held it around his neck. "Now they'll bring him out," he shouted, pointing at the six guards who had climbed out of the van to form a second, tighter line next to the door of the police station, which someone was beginning to open very cautiously. "He's coming out now," announced the boy, and a single great roar extended over the plaza as the crowd pushed with dark violence against the cordon of guards, "they have him at the door, they're going to bring him out right now." The man on the balcony reluctantly threw away his cigarette and disappeared behind the glass, and as if that were a signal, the guards stood more erect until they seemed taller in their blue uniforms, and at the same time they released the bolts on their rifles. When the door to the police station was finally opened, all the voices suddenly became muffled and faded into a sound very similar to silence. Unmoving eyes, raised heads, banners, high and red at midday, quiet among the trees. Without realizing it Mariana painfully squeezed my hand. "There's a guard in the doorway," I said. "He's pointing at someone with a pistol." The guard walked backward, saying something I couldn't hear as he waved the pistol, half-turned toward the encircling crowd. Behind him a man came out with bowed head and cuffed hands, whom the other guards shoved toward the van. Surrounded by them, the man didn't seem to walk but simply to yield as if in a lethargy to the momentum of the rifles hitting him, wounded by the cruelty of the sudden light blinding his eyes after two days of darkness, avoiding it, very pale, already sleepwalking to his death. Before climbing into the back of the van, he stood motionless, as if he didn't understand what they were ordering him to do, and he raised his head for the first time to look at the wall of faces, silent on the other side of the rifles. He had straightened up like someone who hears his name and cannot determine where the call is coming from. Then the boy hanging on the grate shouted "murderer," and abruptly thrust out his hand that no longer held his military cap but something I didn't see, and he whistled and knocked the handcuffed man down among the legs of the guards at the same time that the revived crowd and the long shout and the rage dragged us helplessly toward the door of the police station, knocking down the barrier of rifles and uniforms and lifting into the air the bloodstained body of the prisoner who rebounded against the wall and fell to the paving stones and was again hoisted up and thrown by unanimous open hands that came up to hit him or claw at his face or his torn shirt. I saw his eyes, I saw the gleam of blood streaming from the corners of his mouth and the last shred of a black tie around his neck, I saw him get to his knees, panting, and run like a goaded, wounded animal toward the stone columns of the portico. He threw his arms around one of them, his mouth convulsed against the rough yellow stone, turned toward his persecutors who had stopped, waiting for something or merely witnessing his death agony, forming a circle of silence around the column. Without closing his eyes, without moving his mouth away from the stone edge where he seemed to be searching for air, he began to slip to the ground as slowly as the thread of his blood flowed down the column, his hands together, as if hidden in his groin, his tongue torn in a very dark, not red coagulated mass that didn't completely spill out between his lips when he stopped moving.

Then I remember the plaza gradually emptying and the contracted body beside the column, but that image is lost in the image of other bodies I didn't see, my father's, illuminated by the headlights of a truck at the foot of the cemetery wall, the solitary dead body my father saw on July 19, 1936, at a corner of the Plaza of San Lorenzo. Bodies without faces as if biting the bitter earth or the pavement of a street, abandoned to the sun, in an empty siesta hour, dead and alone, rotting and alone, without name or dignity or glory, exactly like dead animals in the mud of a river. Silently we entered the water before dawn, raising the rifles with both hands above our heads, and we stepped on something soft that sank, something slimy and corrupt, mud and corpses of drowned mules under the weight of a machine gun and human bodies that seemed stripped of bones. I remember the Plaza of General Orduna as if I were seeing it from high above, at an hour made even emptier because the tower clock could not announce it: the empty pedestal, Manuel's car, the body that an Assault Guard poked at with the end of his rifle. Mariana and I walked very slowly, keeping our distance from each other, to the car, sat down in it, not saying anything, not asking each other where Orlando and Santiago were now. Mariana placed her tense hands on the steering wheel and looked at the empty plaza or only at the dirty glass that separated us from it. Her disheveled chestnut hair covered her profile like a veil conceived of only to keep me from seeing her. I said her name in a quiet voice, and she looked at me in the rearview mirror without turning toward me. I placed a hand on her knee without daring to acknowledge or feel the shape of her thigh under the thin skirt, as if desiring her at that moment would have been disloyalty. When we returned to Manuel's house, he hadn't come back yet from the country house, and Orlando and Santiago were waiting for us in the library, a little drunk, very close together on the sofa, laughing at something they were whispering in each other's ear, their glasses raised, as if they couldn't remember the reason for having a toast.

8

THE LIGHT, EVERY NIGHT, round and yellow and high like a minor moon that belonged only to the plaza, the one light burning at midnight in the darkness of Magina, the one consciousness, Manuel thought, not made sluggish by the still intact stupefaction of the war and the extremely long winter that after eight years seemed to prolong it. He returned to the house at dusk, after seeing Medina in his office on his slow walk that normally took him to the watchtower in the wall, and before pushing open the door, he stopped for a while under the acacias to look at the lighted window in the room where Jacinto Solana was writing at that very moment. He imagined he could hear the sound of the typewriter through the rain, and he continued to hear it, confused with the rain or with the murmur of Jacinto Solana's voice, when he woke in the middle of the night fleeing the vast hand that opened his chest to tear out his heart the way you tear a root out of clod-filled wet ground. The multiplied, metallic blows sounded above his head like rain on the balcony glass and the insomniac footsteps of the man who never seemed to sleep or abandon for a single second his perpetual vigil in front of the typewriter or around it, always uncovered, Teresa told him, beginning at dawn, like a mechanical animal on the desk that Solana circled when he couldn't write, pacing blindly through the smoke of his cigarettes and the importunate labyrinth of his memory, walking in circles of obsessive geometry like an insect flying around a lamp. At eleven the electricity was cut off and all the streets and windows in Magina were erased by the sudden flood of darkness, but then, after a few minutes during which the circle of the window vanished in the high blackness of the house, a yellower, fainter light appeared and in it was outlined the shadow of the solitary man who had lit the first candle of the night to illuminate his insomnia of written or rejected words, and at times Manuel, hidden under the branches of the acacias, would see Jacinto Solana smoking, motionless, in the circle of light, looking at the swamp of shadows where he tossed the butt like someone who throws a stone down a well and waits to hear it hit the water. Then he would close the window, and Manuel would hear again the distant metallic blows of his writing, as usual among the sounds in the house as the beating of blood in his temples, and like a coward he would approach them, going up in silence to the very door of the room, but when he extended his hand to knock, he would stop and listen to the footsteps on the parquet or the sound of the typewriter, and he never knocked because he was afraid Solana would not want to receive him.

"At first I went up to talk to him almost every afternoon, and I'd bring him tobacco, a thermos of coffee, an occasional bottle of cognac. He'd leave the house at dawn to avoid running into my mother or Utrera, and that was when Teresa cleaned the room and made his bed, but gradually he stopped going out or even opening the door for Teresa, and she would leave a breakfast tray outside the closed door, and when she came back for it, she'd find it untouched. There was one afternoon when he wouldn't open for me either. I wanted to believe, and even told Medina afterward, that he probably had fallen asleep after several nights of insomnia and didn't hear me knock. But a moment earlier I had heard the typewriter, and as I waited at the door I was absolutely certain he was sitting in front of the machine, holding his breath, the index fingers of both hands immobile above the keyboard, waiting for me to go away. I heard the click of the lighter and very strange breathing, like that of an invalid, and then, as I was thinking that Solana couldn't write and was trapped in the agony of a blank page, I heard the harsh scrape of the pen on paper, and I knew that not even silence signaled a truce."

Like the blood in one's temples, like wood borers on the most inaccessible shelves in the library, like a spider invisibly weaving the threads of its trap under a cellar hatchway: he was there, in the house, in the room with circular windows, and sometimes he went out or wandered aimlessly at three in the morning along the gallery hallway, but very soon, when the first days of excitement caused by his arrival had passed, it seemed as if he really had left in an irrevocable way, because they never spoke of him or ran into his taciturn figure, and only Teresa's periodic visits to the top floor with the broom and dustcloth or the tray of food indicated that someone was living in that region of rooms unoccupied for so many years: someone, in any case, who was losing the name and face that all their memories assigned to him and little by little was reduced to an obscure presence, the faded and at times fearsome certainty that the top floor was not empty, and if they thought about him because they heard his footsteps on the parquet or the noise of the typewriter, they barely could connect those signs to the memory of the man they knew before the war or to his inexact shadow that stood in the courtyard ten years later. He was in the house like the wood borer is there, even though one cannot hear its gnawing, and after a month his presence had hidden so definitively behind the brief indications that disclosed it that Manuel, when he finally decided to go into his room even if he didn't want to receive him because he feared he might be sick, waited at the door he had knocked on several times without an answer, feeling the awful uncertainty that the man who unbolted the door for him wasn't Jacinto Solana.

"BECAUSE WHAT I DIDN'T understand then, what I understand only now, as I'm telling it to you, a man who didn't know him and has no idea how much he had changed and imagine him, I suppose, as a literary character, is that when I lost him, I wasn't losing only the one man I could call my friend but also the right to remember or know how my life had been before I renounced it forever. Things exist only if there is someone, an interlocutor or a witness, who allows us to recall that at one time they were true. Which is why he would say that the worst misfortune for a lover is not losing his love but being left alone with his memory, left blind, he would specify, remembering some verses by Don Pedro Salinas that he always recited and that perhaps you've seen underlined in that book of his in the library. For there's another being through whom I look at the world, because she loves me with her eyes. Now I know that in the beginning, when without saying anything to him I cleaned the room with the circular windows and put the typewriter in it, I didn't do it to offer him a refuge or the possibility of writing his book, but to have him here, in this city and in this house, to have someone to whom I could say what I hadn't said in ten years and share the memory of the time when Mariana was alive. It was the same before the war, when she and I fell in love. We were always looking for him, because his presence made us aware of our happiness more intensely than when we were alone. But he never talked to me about Mariana during the months he was here. He said her name only once, on the first day, when he told me he was going to write a book about all of us. I imagine that book was like a vampire that robbed him of the use of language and of memories as he wrote it. He gave it his life just as someone gives blood at a hospital or dedicates himself to opium. That's why I didn't recognize him when he opened the door of his room that night. He hadn't shaved for at least a week or eaten the hot food that Teresa left for him in the hall, and the air in the room and his clothes smelled as if he hadn't opened the window or changed or washed since he arrived here. He opened the door and stood looking at me with his coat over his shoulders, and his shadow hit me at the same time that I detected the rarefied odor of the air, because the lamp in the room swayed behind him as if he had bumped into it when he stood to answer the door. He was swaying too, his arms crossed and both hands holding the wide lapels of his coat, and he smiled without my being able to see his eyes behind his glasses. It took me a little while to realize he was drunk and was moving back and forth in alcohol like a fish behind the glass of an illuminated aquarium, beyond the insolent shame of someone who drinks alone until he falls down and immediately gets up because he hears someone calling him and he has to pretend he's sober. Do you have a light, he said, showing me a cigarette that had gone out, which he placed on the edge of the ashtray and soon forgot about, and he asked me to sit down, repeating my name as if he had just remembered it and wasn't familiar with it yet, and abruptly he forgot about me and turned his back to look at the plaza through one of the circular windows. 'You have to let Medina see you,' I said, but he didn't hear me or didn't pay attention to me, and he began to laugh that cold laugh I hadn't known in him until then and that seemed like the laugh of a dead man. To keep from falling he leaned against the window recess, and he walked toward me following an arduous straight line, holding a new cigarette and a glass of cognac that moved slightly with the trembling of his hand. 'Teresa has told me that you hardly taste your food. Medina's downstairs, in the parlor. If you like, he'll come up to see you right now.' He collapsed into a chair, facing the typewriter, and moved his hands and lips to say something, he said Mariana or Solana and showed me with a weary gesture the written sheets on the floor and desk and the blank sheet in the typewriter. 'Excuse me, Manuel,' he apologized in every gesture or word, excuse me for not having cleaned this up to receive you. I never was very orderly, you know. Now I think I'm becoming dirty. But I'm not sick. You remember Orlando: when he looked at you with those cold saurian eyes, it was because he was going to die from drinking so much. This afternoon I began to write and couldn't get past the second line. Alcohol works sometimes, but it isn't a substitute. Orlando knew that too.' I drank with him, I asked about the unfinished and frightening book whose pages thrown down next to the table he was treading on or kicking aside with a careless air in which I saw something of voluntary punishment and perversity, but the man I was talking to was no longer Jacinto Solana."

He didn't go up again, he recounts, as if he were telling about a very long, definitive farewell, he spoke to him again only on the afternoon of April i, when he went into Solana's room and saw him placing his papers and clothes into the cardboard suitcase. He had just shaved and put on a tie, and his breath didn't smell of cognac. Like a traveler about to leave a hotel, he was arranging his things in the suitcase, and he had made the bed and cleaned the ashtrays and was moving, unfamiliar and resolute, around the room. "I'm going to Madrid, Manuel. Nobody knows me there. I'll be safer." Then, like his own guilt, Manuel recalled inviting Solana to go to the Island of Cuba: the slow brown river moving among the oleanders, the solitary house on the hill, surrounded by almond trees, Jacinto Solana's precise and never-again postponed appointment with his desire to die. Manuel called a taxi, and they waited together at the entrance, accepting forever the unfamiliar courtesy of strangers between them, they got into the car and in silence crossed the lanes of Magina and the Plaza of General Orduna and then the wide straight streets that extend the city to the north, and when they reached the station, neither one had to begin the gesture of good-bye because the yellow train of the Guadalquivir was already moving slowly on the track. Manuel saw him standing on the running board and moving away, the suitcase in his hand and his hat over his eyes, and he waved a good-bye that Solana never saw because he had already gone inside the car and found a seat next to the window to see how the streets of Magina disappeared forever in a high city hanging over the ruins of a wall, suspended like a line of blue mist over the undulating remoteness of the olive groves.

"For twenty-two years I've been alone," Manuel said, looking at Minaya as if he were deciphering on his face that period of time, "from the moment Solana went away until you arrived." In the same taxi that had taken them to the station he returned to the house when night had already fallen, and he was surprised not to see the light burning in the circular windows. He was in Solana's room, which still smelled of tobacco smoke and the presence and usury of a body; he covered the typewriter and then went down to the parlor to look at himself in 1937, to look at his own pride and manhood exalted by the buttons and straps of his uniform. In the oval photograph, Mariana looked at him as if she were foreseeing the future dead man before her now. "But Mariana was looking at him, you ought to know that," Manuel said in the library, in front of the fire. "We were in the photographer's studio, and I had put on my uniform and the two stars I never wore because they promoted me to lieutenant when I was dying in a hospital in Guadalajara. She took my arm and looked at the lens when the photographer told us to smile, but Solana was behind him, with Orlando, and I barely could see them because the lights were blinding me. At the same time that she pressed my arm, Mariana moved her head very slightly and found Solana's eyes. That was exactly when the photographer took the picture. No matter from which angle of the parlor you look, she seems to be smiling and looking at you, but the one she's looking at is Jacinto Solana."

9

ABRUPTLY AND WITHOUT ANY foreshadowing of it, the need to escape had disappeared, the incessant fear of time's flight. Now I perceived everything through the sweet desired fog of wine that ripened its effect precisely at the point where the things and faces flowing on the other side didn't matter or seemed to have happened many years earlier. I drank slowly, beginning at dusk, when Manuel had not yet returned from the country estate and Mariana wandered aimless and alone through the rooms, the courtyard, the hallway in the gallery, avidly attentive to the clock in the library and the door where he would appear. I drank the white wine brought up by Amalia from the wine cellar in dusty bottles whose labels Orlando read with an alcoholic's sacred wonder, relics kept in the darkness of cellars not to celebrate the eve of the wedding but simply to allow me the privilege of the serenity and pale golden light that occupied the place of the air and gave everything an appearance of premature distance very similar to the certain possibility of oblivion. Very slowly, not surrendering, as Orlando did, to the immediate fever of the alcohol spilled on my lips and ablaze in my veins, spinning out my gestures as if I were looking at myself in a mirror pretending I was drinking, like someone who prepares and administers to himself in solitude a medicine or the exact dose of poison to commit suicide. The glass between my fingers, the bottle on the nearby table, the curved edge of glass against my lips, the passage of the wine from palate to consciousness. Now, as I write to recover that night and the day and night that ended in two bodies embracing in the light from a window, suddenly burning above the garden, very close to the palm tree and the metal swing whose creaking, because the wind was moving it slightly, I did not stop listening to as I closed my eyes to kiss Mariana's bare breasts, I find I can barely establish a precise chronology of the things I did and saw while the white wine enveloped everything in its mist as light and clear as the transparency Orlando loved so much in the paintings of Velazquez.

I hear his voice that night, Orlando's savage laugh, I see his eyes saturated with lucidity and cruelty and Santiago's profile like that of a page painted on a quattrocento fresco as he sat next to him, absent and docile, the indifferent tenderness with which he let Orlando caress a knee or a hand auspiciously resting on the edge of the sofa. I hear voices, I see faces, but behind them there is nothing that allows me to establish them in a room or in a landscape, only a dark curtain, perhaps an object that they touch or raise as a signal so that the person who looks at them many years later can recognize them. A night and a day and next to the last night Mariana was alive, broken images and flashes and words that remained in the air after being spoken, like the cigarette smoke, like the indolence that left me lying on the bed in my room or slowly moving back and forth on the swing in the garden, shamelessly intending for Mariana to come and ask me why I was alone, why I seemed so sad and had slipped away from the others, from her. Leaning back in an armchair, next to the fireplace, I became drunk with a serene and filthy delicacy as I listened to Medina, who was explaining something to us about the spy they had lynched a few hours earlier in the Plaza of General Orduna, when Manuel came into the library and Medina fell silent — his last words were a name, Victor or perhaps Hector Vera, or Vega — because Mariana had stood up to embrace Manuel and now she was kissing him on the mouth, in front of all of us, as if she were defying us, in front of Utrera, Medina, and Amalia, who had just come in with a tray of appetizers and bottles of wine and remained standing in the middle of the library. In front of me and Santiago and Orlando, who took a drink, raising his glass like a countersign or a malevolent toast conceived exclusively so that I would notice.

Orlando, a mask of laughter, a hard voice of accusation and augury. The next morning, when we all drove down to the country estate in the black car to celebrate the wedding feast, Orlando, possessed by the fervor of the light that had excited him since his arrival in Magina, took his portfolio and pencils and was constantly drawing things he allowed only Santiago and Mariana to see, but he didn't seem to care about the landscape spread out before him, surrounding the hill where the house stood. He was sitting among the almond trees, his portfolio open on his knees and his red and black handkerchief, wet with perspiration, around his neck, and if he raised his eyes from the paper and looked at the olive groves or the river or the distant, gray line of the roofs in Magina, it was as if he were seeing not what we saw but the definitive and future form of the picture that at that instant he had decided to paint. At times he put down his pencil to look at us. He smiled, holding the glass of wine that Santiago had brought to his retreat, barely drinking from it, as if all he needed for his happiness was the presence of the boy, the lukewarm odor of the river among the almond trees, the sudden sensation of looking at a scene that secretly obeyed the intention of his imagination as the pencil obeyed his hand. And for that reason I don't know now if when I write I'm recounting what happened then or simply imagining the picture Orlando never painted, the watercolors I saw in January 1939 in a funereal, icy apartment in Madrid. I see the esplanade and the house from the spot where Orlando was sitting among the almond trees. Manuel's black Ford covered with dust to one side of the gate with its baroque metal fittings, in the shade of the grapevine, the obsessive, absurd phonograph playing tangos and extremely long blues erased by the wind, the table with its white tablecloths, Magina in the distance, the pale green or gray of the olive groves and the river and the hills and lunar ravines that extended the world toward the south, toward the blue sierra where I've never gone.

He knew, he was to one side among the almond trees, his pencil, its point as harsh and precise as his eye, suspended over the paper and his glass recently filled with wine by the solicitous hand of the only creature in the world who mattered to him. Now I know that all of us, Mariana, Manuel, myself, existed that day only so that Orlando could draw his discerning labyrinth of figures entwined in despair and desire. Frasco and his wife had cleared the table at the end of the meal, and they, not Orlando or I, were talking about the bombing of Guernica because a squadron of very high-flying planes was crossing the Magina sky, and about someone, a spy—"A fifth columnist," Medina specified, as if he were saying the exact name of an illness — arrested three days earlier in Magina. "There are laws," said Utrera. "There's a penal code. If a man commits a crime, he deserves a trial, and if necessary to be condemned to death, but they have no right to lynch him. It's barbaric, like when they burned the churches." "Those things do more harm to the Republic than a rebel offensive. You should have seen the condition of that man's corpse when it reached the hospital. I'm saying this because I was on duty, and I had to perform the autopsy." Medina, composed, drinking his coffee, citing clinical details and speeches of Don Manuel Azana, whose hand he once shook before he was president of the Republic and came to give a talk at the Athenaeum of Magina. Then Orlando's voice resounded like a severe invocation: "The Spanish people have the right to burn churches and lynch Fascists, because what they do will be much worse if we're unlucky enough to lose this war. Think of Guernica, or the bullfight ring in Badajoz. The people are hoping not for the revolution but the Apocalypse."

Straddling a chair, leaning on the back as if it were a windowsill, I looked at the white gleam of the sun on the wings of the silent planes that were disappearing beyond the hills, my back to the others, who were still sitting around the table with a pensive or rigid ceremonial air refuted by the light and the wind that disturbed the tablecloths, raising them at times like the sails of ships. I thought that perhaps my father had looked up from the ground at that same instant to watch the passage of the planes, forgetting them immediately, as if they were birds taking shelter after the first October cold and not emissaries of the war. The wind came up from the ravine of the Guadalquivir, heavy with the odor of mud and wet earth, and it carried away the voices and the music on the phonograph, a fox-trot, a tango, then a trumpet, intermittent and gradually moving away like the rhythm of a train, with the slowness of all the things that one will lose forever. On the ground, within reach of my hand, so that I only had to lean over a little to pick it up, was my glass of white wine, delicate and slow like the music and the faint smell of rotting algae that came from the still waters of the river, illuminating things with a tepidness similar to that of the threads of light that crossed the trellis next to the door of the country house and floated above the dust or pollen, around the crude black stain of the car, above the music recovered and dispersed and the sound of voices behind me becoming confused with the chink of spoons against the porcelain of the cups of coffee and the thin crystal of the glasses that a gust of wind overturned on the tablecloths. Mariana came over, before I saw her I knew she was coming because I recognized her step and the way her presence made the air tremble, to bring me coffee and a lit cigarette, and she remained crouching at my side, facing the city and the wind from the river that lifted the hair on her forehead, as if she had come to an appointment that only for the two of us was not invisible. When she gave me the cup, she placed a hand on my shoulder, and her hair covered one side of her face. Exactly like Orlando's sketch: not a face, but the pure shape of a desire, and that night, back at the house, when he gave me the drawing, he was offering me the sign of a temptation too undeniable for my cowardice.

"Mariana's alone, in the library," he said. "She's sitting and smoking, like you, watching the smoke while she listens to music, waiting for you. Even Manuel knows that if she hasn't gone to bed yet, it's because she wants to see you. Everybody seems to know that here except you. I've been watching the two of you since I got off the train yesterday morning. You wander all over the house, looking for each other, and you pass each other like two sleepwalkers, as if you still had time. For three years you've been looking for each other and hiding from each other like this, don't you remember? You came to my studio and didn't dare to look at her because she was naked. You don't even dare to look at me now. And don't pretend you're drunk or that you're an adolescent scorned by the woman you love. Open your eyes, Solana. It's me, your enemy, it's Orlando."

I close my eyes as I did that night, when I listened to Orlando lying on the yellow-flowered sofa in the parlor, and I hear his voice again, murmuring and serious, as if it were whistling in my ear as he untied the red strings of his portfolio and opened it to show me the portrait of Mariana. It was midnight, and it seemed as if the house and the world were uninhabited. Only Orlando and I, separated by the table in the parlor where the drawing lay under the light of the lamp, only Mariana's profile traced on the paper and perhaps on the dark background of the shelves in the library, Orlando's voice beating like the blood in my temples with the heavy indolence of alcohol. I got up, leaning on the edge of the table, clumsy and cowardly in front of Orlando's not-exactly-human eyes. "Leave me in peace," I said to him, "go away and leave me alone," but he didn't move or take his eyes off mine. He brushed, he tapped very softly the surface of the portfolio with his short, paint-stained fingers, and sweat shone on his neck and beneath the thin hair on his forehead like makeup running beneath the too-close light of the lamp. "It isn't necessary to raise your voice like that, Solana, I'm not your conscience. I don't care what you don't do tonight, or what she doesn't do. When she finishes her cigarette or her drink, she'll go to sleep or try on her wedding dress again, and you'll have the opportunity to give yourself another night of insomnia. I won't be the one to argue with anybody, least of all you, about the right to bring about your own failure. But I suppose you'll understand if I tell you that love has simplified my life. The only thing I care about is painting and having Santiago with me. I know he'll go just like he came, and it's very likely that he'll leave me when we return to Madrid and that I'll die when he goes, but not even that frightens me, Solana, fear is a trap, like shame, and now I'm alive and invulnerable."

Orlando signed the drawing, wrote the date in the margin, and handed it to me with a smile of surrender and tenderness directed at himself, as if when he heard his own words, he had understood all at once the entire feverishness of his love and imminence of the time when he would once again be exiled in solitude. He opened the door of the parlor, and before he went out to the hallway, he turned to look at me. "The music's still playing in the library. She's calling you." When I was alone, the drawing completely took on its imperious quality of invitation and the exact, empty pattern for absence. The wavy, short hair over her cheeks, the grave, pensive smile, not on her lips but in her gaze fixed on a distance of blank paper, of words unspoken, unwritten, of frozen gestures. The wine no longer existed or its excuse or its fog, only the clear line of the drawing against the light of the lamp, and behind it the eyes, the presence of Orlando, who was no longer a witness but the figure and voice in which the only lucid part of my thinking was embodied. And so when Manuel appeared at the door of the library, recently returned from the country estate, and Mariana went to him and kissed him with the greed of someone who has survived too long a wait, I knew that if I lifted my head, I would meet the complicit or accusatory eyes of Orlando, the spy of my rancor, of the plot hidden behind the stillness of things with as much impunity as the geometry that orders the disposition of figures in a painting to make it seem the result of chance.

Motionless figures in the library, as on a stage too brightly lit or in the studio of a photographer where prolonged exposure to the heat of the lights made their faces shine with the brilliance of wax. Medina, still in uniform, because he had come from the military hospital, as he did every night to examine Manuel. Utrera somber and alone among the others, like a guest in a hostile house, censuring in silence all the signs of disorder that the night before the wedding had brought into the house: Mariana's lack of modesty, Santiago's tight-fitting trousers, Orlando's obscene laughter. Amalia, standing next to me with a tray of appetizers and bottles, just down from the upstairs rooms where Dona Elvira murmured things and cursed and looked in the mirrors in her mourning clothes wringing her hands in her lap. Orlando, on the sofa with his knees devotedly joined to Santiago's, allowing himself small indecencies, the light caresses of a sodomite in a furtive park, of a tremulous, besotted, obscene old man who cannot decide to touch a little girl's thighs. Figures turned toward Magina on the esplanade of the country house, their backs to the proximity of dispersion and death, to the hand and eye for which they posed without knowing it. The painting was going to be called Une partie de plaisir, but when I asked about it two years later, Orlando could no longer recall its title or even the intention he once had to paint it.

10

THE BELL AT THE ENTRANCE didn't ring when they arrived, but one of the door knockers sounded on the exterior door, which Manuel or Amalia always locked around midnight, when Medina would leave after having a last drink in the parlor and there was no one left on the ground floor of the house. Manuel hadn't gone to bed yet, he was in the garden, in the dark, waiting for sleep to come on the gentle night in early June, and a wind scented with wisteria had carried from the Plaza of General Orduna the sound of the tower clock striking, but he heard the violent knocking on the door only when Amalia, lighting her way with an oil lamp, opened wide the glass-paned doors that led from the dining room to the garden. She was barefoot and in her nightgown, and the lamp light heightened on her face, still puffy with sleep, the horror of someone who has awakened from a nightmare. "Don Manuel," she called, looking for him in the darkness, "they're knocking at the door. I asked who it is, but they don't answer." For a moment he thought or wanted to think it was Solana who had come back, driven by one of those fits of rapture that long ago had been the ordinary traits of his character and were always preceded by a singularly indolent state. "He's finished the book," he thought before he left the garden, where the clamor of the bronze door knockers sounded muffled and distant, "he's finished the book and has come back to Magina to show it to me or simply has decided he's sick of the country house and wants to leave tonight for Madrid or someplace where they'll give him a forged passport so he can leave Spain," but when he went out to the courtyard and heard up close the banging that shook the glass in the gallery and the dome, he knew that at no time had he expected it to be Solana knocking and he didn't have to open the door to know the faces and uniforms he would find on the other side. "Don't open it, Don Manuel, they'll take you away like they did when the war was over." Amalia, holding the lamp at the height of Manuel's face, with her back to the door, held his hand to stop him from sliding the bolts, and between their two bodies the light trembled behind the shade of smoked glass as if it too were shaken by the increasingly peremptory sound of the knocking. "Move away, Amalia, go up to your room right now," said Manuel, and he took the lamp from her, noticing that his own hands stopped trembling only when they grasped the cold metal of the bolts, when he took a step into the interior of fear and saw before him the men who had come for him. Later, in the basement of the barracks where they ordered him to look at the body lying on the marble table, he remembered that before leaving the house he had heard behind him some steps on the stairs and a voice or a scream that belonged to his mother. "It's nothing, Senora, nothing to worry about," one of the men had said, the one dressed in civilian clothes, turning from the entrance toward the figure, motionless with stupefaction and rage, that Manuel did not wish to look at, "a minor verification. We'll return your son in a couple of hours." Before closing the door, he saluted Dona Elvira, touching the brim of his hat with his fingers, then looked at the fountain without water and the tops of the acacias, still smiling, as if he personally had approved the quiet of the night, took Manuel's arm firmly and gave an order in a low voice to the Civil Guards, who lowered their weapons and walked behind them like an entourage of silence along the deserted lanes where their boots and the brush of rifles against their belts resonated.

In his treatment of Manuel, the man in civilian clothes, whom the guards called "Captain," adopted from the very beginning an affable air not completely contradicted by his evident desire to look like Glenn Ford. He was bald and wore excessively long sideburns and an unbuttoned and absurd raincoat that he didn't take off when he sat down behind the desk in his office, beneath an equestrian portrait of General Franco. Before speaking he twisted his mouth and tightened his lips as he looked down at the floor or at a typed paper that was on the desk and whose only purpose, Manuel supposed, was to increase the cowardice and waiting time of the person who would be interrogated. "Manuel Alberto Santos Crivelli," the captain read, then raised his eyes from the paper to look at him thoughtfully, as if searching his face for confirmation that the name attributed to him was correct, "owner of the country property called the Island of Cuba, situated at the edge of Magina, beside the Guadalquivir River. Am I mistaken?" Barely moving his head, Manuel sustained the captain's glance. He was standing, his hands together and his legs slightly separated, and the dark hand of his wound, revivified by fear, climbed steadily toward his heart, cutting like a knife through the wet tissue of his lungs, and each prolonged silence extending between the captain's words was a pit that augmented his vertigo and the throbbing that made a path for the avid edge of the knife drawing closer and closer to his heart. "Is it true that on your invitation, the individual called Jacinto Solana Guzman moved to the above mentioned property on the first day of April of the current year?" The captain read with difficulty, or perhaps he was pretending to read and didn't remember all the words he needed to say or the exact manner in which he had to repeat them. "He was ill," Manuel said in a voice so low he didn't think the captain had heard him, "the doctor advised him to spend some time in the country." As in some dreams, he didn't have enough breath to raise his voice, and a feeling of asphyxia or of something oozing in his throat erased the words, leaving only the brief, empty movement of his lips. The captain brusquely rose to his feet, folded the paper, and put it in the pocket of his raincoat. "He is ill," he repeated, his face looking down toward the floor, his tightened lips inaccurately feigning the sad smile he had seen in movies. "Come with me, if you don't mind."

The basement smelled of hospital, and damp stone, and something penetrating and rotting that Manuel recognized before the captain turned on the light and remained next to the door while he walked in. The smell of old, wet clothes, saturated with algae or mud or still water. Under a light like the one in a wartime operating room the body was lying on a marble table whose edges were stained with blood, like the counter in a butcher shop. The black socks, still wet, had slipped down toward his ankles, revealing dead flesh, soiled like the light and the grayish white surface of the marble. The metal frames of his eyeglasses, Manuel recalls, twisted and broken, driven into the clot where the blood was a little darker than the mud, the deep hole like a cut windpipe that he looked away from when he discovered it wasn't his mouth, the black thread that had attached the arms of his eyeglasses. Like details of a bad dream, he recognized the trousers he had given Solana when he left for the country house and the checked jacket with a cigarette burn on the lapel. "It wasn't enough for them to kill him. Maybe he was already dead when they pulled him from the river, but they couldn't accept the hunt ending like that. He was dead and they trampled him and somebody continued shooting at very close range until the magazine was empty." He stepped back, not turning yet toward the captain, not looking at the ruined face or the hand that hung half open, casting a shadow resembling a tree branch on the floor, only at the swollen shoes, the too-short socks over the sharp, definitively frozen ankles in the mourning of an operating room. Now the captain was smoking as he leaned against the wall, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. "Do you recognize this man?" From a distance he already knew was more lasting than sorrow, because he had inhabited it, a stranger to everything, from the day he saw Mariana lying dead on the floorboards of the pigeon lofit, Manuel said Jacinto Solana's name like a vindication and an homage, and when he pronounced it for an instant he felt that the man to whom he alluded was safe from the degradation of death, immune to the solitude of his own body lying on a marble table.

"So he was your friend. Your friend Jacinto Solana, you say. He used your country house to hide bandits hunted by the Civil Guard. Didn't you know that? We knew it. Last night, when we went to interrogate him, he fired at us. There's one guard dead and another seriously wounded. You ought to find other kinds of friends, Senor Santos Crivelli. Your name may not always be enough, and we may forget who you are." The captain turned out the light and locked the metal door with a key when they left the basement. Manuel walked beside him to the offices and interrogation rooms, overwhelmed by an intense feeling of disloyalty and guilt, as if when the light was turned off over the table where Jacinto Solana was lying, he had left him alone in the cold and in death. He thought about the broken glasses, about the broken, open hands, about the body abandoned in the dark, and he didn't care about or didn't hear the captain's questions or the noise of the typewriter or even the things he said in response, and when he left the barracks and saw the blue light of dawn it was as if the basement, the interrogation rooms, the smoke, the voice of the captain had disappeared along with the immediate, distant night in which they had occurred: as if his identity and his life had also been canceled at the end of the night, so that now, as he walked toward the Plaza of San Pedro, when he saw the white facade and circular windows beyond the acacias, he perceived with a clear-sightedness uninflected by compassion or tenderness the empty space that surrounded him forever, its boundary as thin and precise as the line on a compass, as irrevocable as the metal door behind which the body of Jacinto Solana had been left.

11

I WAS TREMBLING when I opened the door to the library, but the footsteps I had heard in there from the courtyard didn't belong to Mariana. Kneeling beside the desk where Manuel usually sat to catalogue the books or pretend he was reviewing the administrator's accounts, Utrera was looking for something in the lower drawers, a confusion of papers scattered around him, which he rushed to pick up when he saw me come in. Hurriedly he closed the drawers and got to his feet, smoothing his hair, his jacket, smiling as if he wanted to excuse himself or explain something. "I couldn't sleep," he said, "I came down to look for a book." For a moment I stood silent at the door of the library, and I didn't say anything when Utrera walked past me, explaining again about his insomnia and moving his head as he took his leave with the servile deference of someone who has been caught committing a reprehensible act and who smiles knowing that pretense is useless. He walked in front of me, and his face vanished from my consciousness as if I had seen him from the window of a train. That was how I looked at everything then: it all fled, devoured by the magnet of time while I, motionless, advanced toward the empty future where Mariana didn't exist, where I didn't exist. "Mariana's alone in the library; she's waiting for you," Orlando had said, but there was no one in the library or in the courtyard with its marble flagstones and columns or any place where I could go. The light was on in the dining room, and through the high glass doors painted white the night breeze came in carrying a scent of mock orange and the rhythmic sound of the chain on the swing. There was a box of English cigarettes on the piano, and a bottle of whiskey whose presence I accepted as an invitation.

I drank as I sat facing the door to the garden, facing the yellow path sketched by the light on the gravel, which stopped just at the foot of the swing and the palm tree. Mariana liked to swing there very slowly, brushing the ground with the tips of her white sandals, so deep in thought and rhythmical in her movement that her gestures seemed like a way of measuring time or of yielding life up to its vacant duration. When she and Manuel came into the dining room, I had finished my cigarette and my drink and was getting ready to go up to my room, estimating beforehand the fear with which I'd cross the courtyard again and climb the stairs where perhaps she would appear, the fear of seeing her and not saying anything to her or of not seeing her and confirming the disillusionment of each one of my steps along the empty hallways. I imagined that my return to the bedroom and insomnia would never end because I couldn't accept the possibility of not seeing her again that night. It had been the same on other occasions, in years past, when I would walk with her to the door of her house counting the steps and the minutes left until we reached it and knowing that I would leave her as she looked for her key and then walk back along the same streets hoping with an infinite feeling of desire and failure that the steps I heard behind me were hers, that her voice had come to ask me to go back with her, inventing some excuse, offering me a last drink. Just like then, when I would turn around believing that someone was calling me and that it was her voice saying my name, I heard her now, close, impossible, I heard a burst of her laughter in the dining room, and when I turned toward the door, fearing that the illusion of her voice would be nothing but one of desire's usual deceptions, I discovered them, Mariana and Manuel, with their arms around each other, and they separated when they saw me because they never embraced when they were with me.

WE AVOIDED ONE ANOTHER'S EYES, and nothing was more frightening than silence, or a glance checked in silence. While Manuel filled the glasses and we lit cigarettes, we were still safe; it wasn't absolutely necessary to speak and not leave a single pause or chink between the words, but afterward, when the three of us sat down, the conversation acquired the apprehensiveness of a flight from a horseman who pursued us and was always at our heels, and we listened to our own words, feeling the pressing nearness of their conclusion, behind which was silence and the only words we cared about and weren't going to say. A second of silence was as unbearable as an empty glass or a hand not holding a cigarette, and that game of calm words interlocked by despair became more difficult, because there were very few things we could talk about that didn't contain the possibility of an affront or allude to the trip that would separate us in two days. Just as they had moved away from each other when they saw me in the dining room, they spoke now of their trip to Paris, avoiding any sign of excessive enthusiasm, indicating the probable discomfort of the plane they would take in Valencia, the official red tape awaiting them when they arrived in France, their fear of not knowing how to establish themselves in a foreign country and in another language. "I," Manuel said, "who have almost never left Magina," and he bowed his head as if suddenly overwhelmed by a melancholy that wasn't part of the game of mitigating their happiness so as not to exclude me from it. "Manuel's afraid," said Mariana, looking at me for the first time with such fixed intensity that I saw a well of loneliness in her gray or blue eyes. Now the words began to name the things obscurely kept in silence, and for a moment I sensed that it wasn't only guilt or shame that we were running from. "He's afraid we'll lose the war and we won't be able to return to Spain." She and Manuel and I knew it wasn't that or not exactly that, but she was defying him and looked at me to know she was on firmer ground, with that portion of coldness in her, that way of hers — and of Beatriz', I thought suddenly, amazed it had taken me so long to discover her similarity to Mariana — of not accepting the cowardice and procrastination of men, capable, like Manuel, like me, of wasting their lives in a perpetual simulation of rebellion or decency that doesn't help them to renounce completely the desires they once deserved and to establish themselves in reality with resignation or serenity or to tear at the limits of shame and a tainted negligence that doesn't permit them to attain those desires. When I understood this I shuddered as if while she looked at me, Mariana was using my presence to inflict the wound of her defiance on Manuel. Now I, who had taken so much pleasure in spying on their mutual tenderness in order to offer it to myself as a counterpoint to my abandonment, my desperation, my rancor, was part of the same scheme that throbbed beneath their embraces, as well as the words unspoken in the silence we no longer knew how to escape. "Manuel's afraid to leave Mágina," said Mariana, wiping her lips after draining her glass too quickly, looking, I knew, for courage in the alcohol, not audacity, only the tempting sensation that words don't obey one's will but a kind of fatality or lethargy that they themselves impel: "He's afraid to leave his house and his library and his pigeon loft. He'd like it if it weren't necessary to pay in order to obtain what one desires. He wants to have it all at the same time, his house, his wife, his city. His friend Jacinto Solana. Tell him now, Manuel, tell him you'd like for everything to go on the way it was on the day he introduced us." When Manuel raised his head, I realized how long it had been that we hadn't looked each other in the eye. He took a breath and partially opened his lips but didn't say anything, he only filled Mariana's glass and mine and put the bottle back on the floor, looking toward the garden, as if he thought he had discovered a furtive presence in the darkness. I took a drink and spoke so that the silence wouldn't completely humiliate us, or to avoid Mariana's calm, cold face and eyes with the same cow ardice as on that afternoon in 1933, in Orlando's studio, when I began to look at the recently started canvas and the sketches hanging on the wall in order not to see Mariana naked. "How I wish I could go away. Not to Paris, like you two, but much farther, and never return, or only when I had become a foreigner and could look at everything as a foreigner." "Where?" asked Mariana, leaning toward me. With both hands she held her chestnut hair away from her face and leaned her elbows on her spread knees, as if the alcohol or a devastating sense of banishment would not allow her to hold up her head. She asked where, and the question was a contained, fierce part of her defiance, but I didn't answer, because Manuel began speaking at the same time, and his words didn't erase Mariana's question, they simply left it hanging in the air between us, like the gray or blue eyes that remained firmly fixed on mine: "We always wanted to leave. We'd look at that map in school, you remember, full of cracks, made of oilskin, so old that in the center of Africa there was still a large blank space. You pointed it out to me and said we'd escape Magina and discover the source of the Nile." "Jacinto escaped," said Mariana, smiling, and for an instant her smile absolved all three of us. "Not enough. If I had, I wouldn't be here now." I stopped speaking with premeditation and Mariana's question, which had remained in the air like the note of a violin extending into another, higher-pitched one when its sound was already fading, returned to her voice at the same time that she stood up for no reason and took a few steps toward the doors to the garden, then turning around to look at us as if we had fallen far behind and she was inviting us to follow her. "Where would you be?" I remembered a map and a book and a hand-colored postcard where you could see ruined stairways and red columns. It had never been an objective, only a name that shone like beaten copper and an impossible place, a junction of longitude and latitude pointed to by an index finger on the inviolate blue of planispheres. "On Crete, for example. Or on the island where Ulysses lived for seven years with the nymph Calypso. I never understood why he left her to return to Ithaca. I liked to imagine that the Odyssey is an incomplete poem, and that in the final canto, which must have been lost or perhaps condemned to the flames, Ulysses abandons Ithaca after a few weeks of sleeping with Penelope and goes to sea again to return to Calypso's island. It must be intolerable to live in the place you thought about constantly for twenty years." "Why?" asked Mariana, not looking at me but at Manuel, who still seemed lost in the lethargy of a meditation interrupted by alcohol. "Because there's no one and nothing that deserves so much loyalty." Mariana turned toward us, letting her empty glass drip onto her hip, weaving a little, as if she were high or attempting a dance step she couldn't quite remember. With her the silence came again to take up its place among us, the useless desire to stretch out my hand and open Mariana's blouse a little more and touch her breasts, which I imagined to be as warm and translucent as the skin on her temples, and also the awareness of each of the minutes of the secret truce I had been granting to myself since I saw them come into the dining room and knew I had to leave and that I couldn't leave. Each word, each cigarette and mouthful of smoke, each raw swallow of alcohol burning my lips a truce, a truce and a boundary and a stopped clock when it was no longer possible to attempt any word against the silence. That was why the three of us eagerly felt saved when Orlando's voice and laughter came into the dining room like a gust of wind rattling the panes. He and Santiago had wet hair and shining eyes, and they smelled of clean clothes and a feminine cologne that was like a shameless announcement of their happiness. "Traitors," said Orlando, leaning on Santiago's bare shoulder, pointing at us with his index finger like a drunken marksman who cannot keep his gunsight on the target, "it seemed this whole house was a mausoleum, but you stayed here to drink up the last bottle behind our backs." They looked for glasses in the sideboard, and when they opened the glass door they knocked over a tray, causing a crash of sharp broken glass on the floor that nobody tried to clean up. He and Santiago kicked away the broken pieces and then filled their glasses until the whiskey spilled over the top and onto their hands, which they wiped slowly on the sides of their trousers, laughing and leaning on each other as if fatigue didn't allow them to be completely drunk but only to feign inebriation, an obstinate and vacuous and desperate happiness. "I've been listening to you, Solana," Orlando said, "Santiago and I were behind the door, and we heard you telling those stories of yours about trips you're never going to make. Solana, my brother, you wandering Jew, are you sure your father isn't a new Christian? Because if he isn't, I can't understand this exile of yours, this not belonging anywhere or to anybody, not even to your modesty and your shame, which is Jewish and Catholic. Look at him: you look at him, Mariana. He's still ashamed. All of you are. And I think the Republic is the name you give to your shame, though you know this Republic isn't yours and this war that we're all going to lose would never have been your victory. Whoever wins — and we're not going to win or any of you or whoever that Republic is with its banners and its Official Gazette—you'll have lost, Solana, not because your side is weaker or because those son-of-a-bitch French and English have invented that filthy Catholic commandment of nonintervention, but because your Jew-without-a-country blood keeps you from the possibility of belonging to a winning side. Don't look at me like that. I belong to the Iberian Anarchist Federation because I lack the modesty or the shame that obliges my friend Jacinto Solana to be a member of the Communist Party. If at the beginning of this month I had been in Barcelona and not in Madrid, I'd be shot now or locked up in one of those republican jails that defend shame, but God or Prince Piotr Kropotkin wanted me to live in Madrid and for you two to invite me to tomorrow's wedding when you'll marry decency, Mariana and Manuel, just as my friend Solana married modesty when he joined the Communist Party. They say, first the war and then the revolution, exactly like a decent girl puts off her boyfriend at the door, because first come caresses and then happy surrender in marriage. But that hope is a fraud: this war is the end of the world, and there won't be any future after it."

In Orlando's gestures was the fiction of a fortune-teller who recites poems in old provincial theaters. With what arrogance he moved among us, free, not trapped by our silence, immune to everything, even the sudden old age he already knew would come when love, firm and cruel like a hero recently returned from hell, deserted him. "You've never descended, Solana," he would say to me, "you still haven't written what you ought to write because you haven't gone down to hell, and you don't know what it means to come back and preserve the degree of rationality necessary for remembering." Now Manuel and Mariana and I dissolved at the touch of his words as a dream dissolves when it is shattered by the reality, victorious and obscene, of waking, the cold of dawns beyond the sheets. As if he were posing for a photographer of slightly pornographic postcards, Santiago drank and leaned his elbow on the piano, wearing the red undershirt of a lover for hire, and he shaped his lips into a kiss of dubious tenderness each time Orlando stopped talking to catch his breath and searched Santiago's eyes for a confirmation that he didn't always grant. When I saw him get off the train carrying Orlando's portfolio and mislaid luggage, I thought Santiago was an adolescent, but now, that night, victim of the successive snares of disillusionment and chastisement that knowledge usually set for me, I found him older than Orlando and Orlando's tenderness, older and viler than any of us, antecedent to everything, like a stone statue with painted lips or one of the women with pale thighs who looked at me from doorways on certain streets the first time I came to Madrid. He wore a red undershirt that bared his weak chest darkened by hair that perhaps had grown in recent months not as a declaration of any sort of manliness but to crudely belie the illusion of adolescence that one could find on his face, and white trousers very tight around his hips that moved like mollusks or a woman's hips. Orlando, lost in a drunkenness that he must have imagined as sacred, kissed him on the lips, and with a leap of his ungainly body, he sat on top of the piano, provoking the echo of a single low and very long note. From there, swinging his legs, he looked at us as if from the seat of honor of a pride untouched by shame.

"There's no more need to pretend or renounce," he said, pointing at me, "because what's coming now is the Apocalypse. All of you remember what the papers are saying about Guernica. Phosphorus bombs and scorched earth, fire and brimstone, as in the Cities of the Plain. Your desire makes you afraid because none of you has accepted that it's not possible to choose it without choosing indignity and betrayal at the same time. What all of you have discovered now I found out when I was twelve or thirteen and realized I liked men, not women. That's why you can fall in love and continue to feel the need for decency. You both desire a woman, Mariana, for example, and you feel a little disloyal and a little adulterous, but you don't know anything about fearing a temptation that, if discovered, would make you accept the filthiest word as a sign of shame. I'm going to paint a picture: all of you, this morning, at the country house, in that light Van Gogh couldn't even imagine, united by guilt, and I to one side, like Velazquez in Las meninas, looking at you as if you existed only in my imagination and I could erase you just by closing my eyes, like a god."

Then things happened in a way I've given up trying to put into order or explain. I've remembered and I've written, I've torn up sheets of paper where I'd written nothing but Mariana's name, I've stubbornly resorted to the superstitions of literature and memory to pretend that a necessary order existed in that night's acts. During sleepless nights in a cell for those condemned to death, I've caught myself trying to recover, one by one, the most trivial events, gnawed at by the peremptory need not to surrender to oblivion a single one of the casual gestures that later, in memory, shone like signs. I've looked at Mariana's eyes again which, ten years later, when I returned to the house, were still fixed on me as they were in the photographer's studio, when I still didn't know that what was revealed to me in them was an infinite, motionless farewell. I go outside, to the esplanade of the country house, and the moon that turns the earth white through the branches of the olive trees is the same moon that paused in the May air that night when I turned my back on the others and went out to the garden, still hearing Orlando's voice and the notes of a jazz tune that Manuel had begun on the piano. Mariana was writing something on a paper and covering it with her left hand as if she were afraid that someone might be spying on her, and when she raised her eyes, she looked toward the doors to the garden, but she couldn't see me because for her they were a mirror. Sitting on the swing, I saw them in the squared yellow light of the windows, as if I were watching a film from the unpunished darkness, and like the movie theaters of my adolescence, the piano music infected the figures with its slow, convulsed melody. Mariana stopped writing, looked at the paper, tore it in half and then into very small pieces that she let fall from her closed hand when she stood and crossed the dining room and stopped at the threshold to the garden before moving toward me, walking on the oblique path of the light.

THE MUSIC MANUEL was playing and Mariana's footsteps acquired an undeniable direction. With his head sullenly sunk between his shoulders, Manuel looked at his own hands and at the keyboard as if he were leaning over the edge of a well, weaving with violent delicacy the rhythm of the song, "If We Never Meet Again," which I heard constantly during that time on the phonograph in the library. Behind the white square of the windows, I can remember the red spatter of Santiago's undershirt as he listened in silence, I see or very probably imagine Orlando standing next to him, not listening to the music, looking at Mariana's back when she stopped at the door to the garden and guessing step-by-step what would happen when she began walking again. Sitting on the swing, not moving, I saw her coming toward me, and I looked away from her when she was beside me. Her eyes had the dark brilliance of a lake in the moonlight, a depth untouched and smooth like her temples or her cheeks or the warm skin of her thighs when I moved my hands under her skirt to caress them. "Orlando's right," she said, sitting down beside me, moving the swing a little with the tips of her shoes, "he says you're unsociable. We're all in the dining room listening to Manuel, and suddenly you turn as if you were going away forever and come here, to watch us from a distance." We were together in the space of air marked off by her perfume, and when she pushed the swing she leaned against me a little and brushed my face with her hair, but the proximity of our bodies made the never vulnerable line, the exact distance at which a caress is halted and denied, more intense and physical. "I've had a lot to drink," I said, still not looking at her, "and it's too warm inside." Mariana took my face between her hands and obliged me to look at her, taking from my lips the cigarette I was smoking and tossing it to the ground, as if she were disarming me. Now the brilliance of her eyes dilated in the darkness seemed very close to tears or to a kind of tenderness I had never known how to find in them until that night. "You always talk to me like that, ever since you came to Magina. You tell me it's hot or that you've had too much to drink or that you're in a hurry to leave for Madrid because you're preparing for that writers' congress, but if I don't look at you, I can't recognize your voice, it's as if someone else were talking to me, and if I look into your eyes to be sure you're still you, it's as if you didn't know me. It's not that you don't look at me or talk to me. It's even worse, because you look through me and talk to me as if I were a statue. I've spent two months in this house thinking about the day you'd arrive, imagining that with you I'd get to see the places where you played as a boy, the plaza with the poplars you told me about so often, and now that you're here, you're farther away than if you had stayed in Madrid. Before you came to Magina, at least I had the hope of receiving a letter from you. But you didn't write to me in all this time." The music came from a greater and greater distance and was completely erased at times behind Mariana's murmuring voice that was so close, and looking into the dining room while she spoke to me was like spending the night beside the window of a house where the open shutters reveal a remote family supper caught off guard. I meant to tell her that since the day I met her I hadn't stopped writing to her: that all the things I had written and published since then were nothing but the chapters of an infinite letter meant only for her, that even when I went in those unruly trucks of militiamen to recite ballads on the Madrid front and I climbed up on the wooden platform and heard the applause generated by my poetry, I was thinking about her and looking for her face and her impossible smile of complicity or approval among the rows of soldiers standing in their rough military greatcoats. I was going to say something to her, perhaps an ignoble excuse, and I may have been about to suggest that we return to the dining room with the others, choosing the appropriate, neutral tone of voice, but Mariana found my hand in the darkness and pressed it slowly, very gently at first, then grasping it with a serene, sustained violence that did not show on her face when she turned to look at me. Further down, on her skirt, between our two bodies, our hands clutched and intertwined, emissaries of immodesty and unspoken desire. "I'll write to you when I go to Crete," I said, "I'll send you a postcard just for the pleasure of writing your first and last names in a place so far away. I don't think I'll add anything else: just that palace with the stairways and the red columns on one side, and on the other your name, Mariana, Mariana Ríos." "I like to hear you say my name. It's the first time you have since you came here." "Names are sacred. Each thing and each one of us has a true name, and it's very difficult to learn what it is and say it." "Tell me what my name is. Tell me what the name of Crete is." A single word, I thought, I knew lucidly, a single word and the boundary and the fear will be torn apart as if they never had existed, as if that interminable music were not sounding in the dining room and the windows in front of us weren't lit or the doors to the garden not wide open. "Crete is Mariana," I said: in the silence I heard voices conversing and didn't know whose they were. Very slowly, as if in completing that gesture one would hold back all the instants and days that had passed in vain since we met, Mariana brought her lips close to my mouth from the distance of the other corner of the swing, from the afternoon when I had seen her naked in Orlando's studio, from each one of the hours when I had her and lost her without knowing that all the acts of my life, and fear and guilt and postponement, had been meticulously conspiring to clear the way for that island in time when I kissed her and licked her tears and let myself be demolished, trapped in her body, repeating her name just as she was saying mine as if everything we had to say could be summarized in our names. We rolled onto the ground and onto the cold grass like animals greedy for darkness, and I opened or tore open her blouse to look at her white breasts in the light of the moon shining on them while her hands searched and caressed, awkwardly, delicately going down between trousers and shirt, very awkwardly and very delicately going down between skin and the rough fabric of my trousers.

Then I opened my eyes and a violent light that didn't come from the dining room obliged me to close them. We were lying on the ground, and the light from a very high window fell on us covering us with the shadow of a single figure outlined there. Without getting up or entirely breaking the embrace that protected both of us from fatigue and our recovered sense of shame, we fled toward the darkness, and for a moment the light kept shining like a yellow, empty rectangle on the place where it had taken us by surprise, but the shadow spy was no longer at the window. We didn't dare look at each other again until the light went out. Before guilt could rise up around us like a filthy nocturnal tide and drown us, Mariana, kneeling in front of me, touched my lips, my eyelids, the back of my neck, buried her fingers in my hair and drew me once again to her mouth, repeating my name with a dark intonation that made it unfamiliar, as if it no longer alluded to me but to another man whose face she could not see completely in the darkness of the garden, because it was destined to be erased and leave no ashes or attributes of pride in her memory at the precise moment we stood to return to the dining room.

"They've all left," said Mariana, still smiling at me as she fastened the buttons on her blouse. She smoothed my hair with her fingers, and with a handkerchief that smelled exactly like her skin, she wiped my mouth smeared with lipstick, and each gesture was a small sign of complicity and tenderness. As if we were walking through a strange city, she took my arm as we crossed the garden, leaning on my shoulder, and at the door to the dining room she stopped and embraced me for the last time, lifting her hips to press her belly against mine. The piano was open and there were glasses and empty bottles on the table, the floor, next to the broken glass and the stain of spilled alcohol. Mariana lit a cigarette and brushed my face as she placed it between my lips, and then she left, her head bowed, and was about to come back to me when she reached the door, but she didn't, she only stood quietly for a moment and closed the door very carefully when she went out to the courtyard, as if she were trying not to wake someone.

12

AT DUSK THE MIST ROSE over the reddish gullies and the canebrakes and the tall white oleanders on the banks, becoming sluggish in the bends of the river. The mist was dense and blue on moonlit nights and became opaque, solid, white or faintly yellow when the sunlight began to shine on it at dawn, spreading over the course of the river, very close to the ground, like the smoke from the bonfires that on icy December days crept among the packs of olive groves and did not rise above the gray tops of the olive trees. In the mist the whistle of the night trains, emissaries from the sea, the only clocks for measuring how long insomnia lasted, became more intense and more distant, and from the other bank of the river, from the other side of the train tracks, the Island of Cuba emerged at dawn like an island in the mist that still lay in long tatters among the almond trees and detached very slowly from the low roofs of the house, like the last waters of a cautious receding flood whose crest no one had noticed. Before dawn, from the window of his room high above the mist and the slopes of the river like the moat of a castle, Jacinto Solana, just awakened by the passing of an interminable freight train closed like the trains in the war, looked at a darkness turning silver and blue and ashen with the disciplined slowness that time has as it moves on clocks. It was, perhaps, because the entry in his diary was undated, a morning in mid-April, when Solana still saw no proximate end to his book and was desperate with fear of the possibility that he never would finish it, a disorder of truncated pages and sleepless nights and ashtrays filled with stubbed-out cigarettes while the sterile silence was shaken by barking dogs and the noise like a distant storm of a train crossing the metal bridge over the Guadalquivir. It was undoubtedly the time when he still always carried the pistol that Frasco saw on the first day at the bottom of his cardboard suitcase, between the bundles of typed pages that he tied carefully with red ribbon and the dark suit and the shirt that had belonged to Manuel. On the first day, the first afternoon, when Frasco showed him the old barn with the window overlooking the river where twenty-two years later Minaya would find the blue notebook and the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, Solana untied the ropes around his suitcase and took out the paltry possessions of a fugitive with a kind of methodical absorption that excluded conversation and disorder, like someone who always lives in hotels and knows the desolation of arriving at one on a Sunday afternoon. And as naturally as he arranged his clothing on the bed and his typed and blank pages at the corners of the desk, Frasco saw him take out the pistol, which was very large and looked recently oiled, and place it on the pages like a paperweight, beside the inkwell and the pen, as if it weren't a weapon but a neutral object and somehow necessary for writing, and when he went down to the kitchen to eat that night the pistol bulged in his right jacket pocket. At first he only wrote and waited, Frasco said, and the pistol and the pen always remained within reach of his hand, even when he left the area of his seclusion to take a very short walk among the almond trees or drink a few glasses of wine with him next to the fire where the stew for supper was bubbling. As if he never stopped waiting for someone, he watched the bridge over the river and the path that ended at the house, and sitting next to the fire he remained fixed in the light of the flames, not paying attention to Frasco, searching perhaps behind the crackling of the wood for an indication that at last the footsteps of his pursuers had arrived, calculating the time left in the truce, the blank pages he still needed to fill.

"LIGHTS OF MÁGINA in the dark, above the mist, reflected in it as if in the water of a very distant bay. Uncertain liquid brilliance, candles lit in the last chapels of the churches. Everything seems to sleep, but nothing is sleeping, nobody is sleeping. Lights of Magina above a great plain of insomnia." Later, when the dogs began to bark and the mules could be heard stirring in the hot breath of the stables, the city was being born at the top of its hill at the same time that the lights went out, emerged from nothing, from the darkness or the mist, materializing as if by chance around a pointed tower higher than the roofs or above the precise line of the wall. Then from the window of his room Jacinto Solana would look in the distance for his father's farm, the small white stain of the house next to the irrigation tank and the poplar tree, but he couldn't make it out in the uniform density that expands and descends between the supports of the wall and the first lines of olive trees like an oasis that surrounds the city, and gradually that failure of vision acquired for him a tonality of relief that also alluded to his memory, as if the distance his eyes could not decipher had also been established between his present consciousness and the fatigued and guilty habit of his memories. Magina, from the Island of Cuba, was a detail in a landscape or a watercolor by Orlando, not a city but its remote illustration, a docile pretext for contemplation, an empty corner ready to be occupied by literature, and those who had lived in it or still lived in it were losing very slowly and almost sweetly their quality of real creatures in order to conclude completely their transfiguration into characters in a book that at the end of May, as Minaya learned in the blue notebook, was very close to its final pages and no longer loomed as an impossible goal or an intimate form of siege, for it had eventually become for Jacinto Solana an almost peaceful habit of his seclusion in the country house, like the wine and conversation with Frasco and the walks with no destination among the olive trees, which took him very far from the house, toward the sierra, to the slopes of bare slate and harsh valleys of red or sulfur-colored earth as bare of any trace of human presence or eyes as the seas of the moon. After two months of living in the Island of Cuba, the old pain and the old tenderness poisoned by rage and remorse were fading like the shape of a face it is no longer possible to recall, and for that reason the pages in that notebook Minaya found in the lining of a gloomy jacket contained, intermingled with the atrocious story of the last night Mariana lived and the appearance of her corpse in the pigeon loft, short annotations written in the margins or on the back of the squared pages, in which the voice of the narrator until then dedicated to and imprisoned in the plot split in two as if folding over into the attitude of a witness. "28, May, 47. At noon it's very hot and I go down to the river to swim. Icy water. Two pages after lunch, without a single erasure." "May 30, 9 pm, a plane over the vertical of Magina, at dusk: long trail of smoke tinged with pink paler than in clouds. Maybe include it in chapter on country house, at the end, when they return to city and nobody in the car speaks." In the small hours of May 30, Solana was probably writing a passage that Minaya couldn't find, and to which some annotations in the blue notebook alluded: Manuel enters the marriage bedroom carrying Marianas dead body in his arms and lays it on the unmade bed. Minaya, who imagined that scene as if it were his own memory, abruptly found it transformed into a question of style: "Correct the fall of nightdress so thighs not exposed. Only her knees, very slim, dirty with droppings. The word 'bloodless' prohibited."

Frasco says that toward the end, Solana hardly was writing, or at least not in the obsessive way he had during the first weeks, and the pistol even disappeared from his desk and his pocket, as if he had forgotten his fear or it no longer mattered to him. Almost at the end, in the blue notebook, in Frasco's words, the man whom Minaya had pursued and constructed until he had given him a destiny as firm as the dates of birth and death that marked the limits of his biography, suddenly got away and left behind nothing more than a few trivial notes and the memory of a peaceful indolence, like a book in whose best chapter the printer inadvertently left a few pages blank: he returned later, but with another voice and a face that in Minaya's imagination was as unfamiliar as the coldness of the final pages of his diary, to recount Beatriz' arrival at the Island of Cuba and her departure for the serene certainty of the death that was waiting for them, her and the two men with her, when they walked out the door of the country house and went into the stand of almond trees, and there was nothing after that, only the squared pages where Solana wrote no more than the exact date of the last day of his life, underlined with a firm stroke of the pen, like a long final flourish: June 6, 1947, dawn, barely twenty-four hours after writing the end of the last chapter in his book. But like those pages where he had summarized and saved himself, though nothing was left of them for the future reestablished by Minaya in the spring of 1969 except some fragments and first drafts as difficult to put in order or explain as the ruins of a buried temple, the final hours of his life were hidden in darkness only partially lifted by the statements of Frasco, who didn't see him die, who only heard the shots and the shouts of the men pursuing him over the roofs of the country house and along the muddy slope of the Guadalquivir and could see, surrounded by the rifles of the guards, how they tossed his corpse onto a truck like a sack of clay.

"I had gone up to Magina to see my mother and on the way to settle with the administrator the accounts for some day laborers," Frasco said, "and that night when I was back on the estate I saw a light in Don Jacinto's window but didn't want to bother him because I imagined he was writing, and so I put the mule in the stable and went to sleep, and about four or five in the morning I woke up sweating with fear, because I dreamed I was back in the war and was being killed. Then I heard shots very close by and footsteps on the stairs, and three Civil Guards knocked down the door and came into my room and pushed the barrels of their rifles into my chest while one of them held a flashlight so close to my eyes I couldn't see anything. From their shouts and the way they looked at me and hit me, I knew that this time they didn't want to scare Don Jacinto or take him off to jail but kill him on the spot like vermin. But he defended himself, he killed one of them, and even when they had fatally wounded him, he must have hidden in the canebrakes and kept running downriver, because it took them several hours to find his body and the sun was already high when they dragged him back along the bank and threw him in the truck."

FOR, FRASCO THIS UNEXPLAINED and sudden eruption of death that came like a gust of winter wind to take his fruit and then left with the sputtering of the truck engine, without leaving any trace of its passing on things, without its infamy lasting in the June morning except for a puddle of mud and algae at the door of the country house, seemed like the confirmation of a destiny of mourning initiated eight years earlier, when a patrol of Falangistas came to the Plaza of San Lorenzo to take Justo Solana away with his hands in cuffs and a bloodstain at the corner of his mouth. They were the same, he always knew, even though they hadn't spoken for so many years, even though his father hadn't known how to read or write and never had left not only Magina but the Plaza of San Lorenzo and his farm at the foot of the wall and the road that led to it, because those three places constituted the only landscape in the world he cared about. Frasco, who had played with Jacinto Solana as a child and had heard in his youth, in conversations in the barbershop or the tavern, the story of the son who rose up against his father and deserted the land and fled one night to take a train to Madrid, discovered at the Island of Cuba that Jacinto Solana had spent his life inhabited by the shade of his father, and that the never completed flight or desertion he began twenty-two years earlier when he finally boarded one of those trains whose whistles, like those of invisible ships, had stirred him for as long as he could remember was transformed into and ended in his return. His gray hair, his tense unshaven jaws, his hard expression of solitude and disdain took on with every passing day a more interior and darker resemblance to his father's features, and even the way he gave himself over to his insomniac devotion to the written word repeated with mysterious loyalty the obsessive connection that since the beginning of the century Justo Solana had maintained with the land that he himself had broken and cleared and on which he built a house and dug a well of deep, icy water with no help except his own hands and no motive other than his desire not to obey anyone and his pride as the founder and sole owner of his land and life. At night, when Frasco returned to the house and lit the fire and prepared supper in the huge kitchen where on winter dawns the crews of men would gather before going out with their long heather staffs to the olive groves, Solana would come down from his room with a lost or fatigued air and sit next to the fireplace slowly to drink a glass of wine while he looked at or stirred the fire and still didn't say anything, as if he hadn't returned from the place and time where the practice of literature confined him, or reestablished his dealings with reality: he would look at the fire then with the same slow stupor with which he had looked at a blank page, searching its empty presence for the clue to a future word, and only after he'd had several glasses of wine, which Frasco refilled like a silent cupbearer, did he seem to recover the power of speech and the certainty of where he was, the semblance or model of another region and another house situated as firmly on the pages of his manuscript as the Island of Cuba on the bank of the Guadalquivir. He would speak about his father in an indirect way at first, as if hovering over his memory without daring to invoke him, with a sense of shame very similar to fear or the sensation of distance that injured him forever that morning in his childhood when he said good-bye to him in the semidarkness of a corridor in the school, a préfiguration or warning of the definitive leave-taking so many years later, on the dark May night in 1937, when he turned on the path to say good-bye and saw him old and vulnerable and alone in the now-remote light of the fire he had lit to cook the supper he didn't want to share. He spoke at first as if to himself and tended to choose the oldest images he had of his father, but he didn't take long to confirm that Frasco was not only a witness but also an accomplice to his memory, because he told him things about the older Solana that he had forgotten or never had known and that abruptly disproved the fatigued, abstract figure in which forgetting had deposited his memories, so that when he heard Frasco talking to him about his father, it was as if he suddenly had discovered the true face of a stranger, like coming across a fixed, strange gaze that was somehow familiar and finally discovering, after an instant of unrepeatable hallucination or lucidity, that one was seeing oneself in the mirror without realizing it. He learned, for example, that during the last days of his life in Magina, before the war, Justo Solana had taken to frequenting, always alone and as if secretively, the taverns of melancholy drunks whose lights burned at night in the last houses of the slum district around the wall, he learned that his solitude, his house that was empty and too large, his fierce determination not to accept the excuse of old age when work overwhelmed him, had been wearing him down with slow, pressing constancy, as the passage of time wears down and disfigures a face and levels the places where no one lives. Sometimes Frasco saw him walking toward the Plaza of San Lorenzo feeling his way along the walls, as if he were moving in the dark, and he said that in his jacket pocket he usually carried a well-folded, visible Madrid newspaper with an article signed by Jacinto Solana. He remembered him one afternoon, in a corner of the barbershop, impatient and gruff, passing his hand over his unshaven chin while he waited his turn and paid no attention to the conversation of the others. "Listen, Frasco," he said to him, and took out the paper, unfolding it very carefully, as if he were afraid his large hands would tear that fragile, unknown material, not the paper but the faint weft of the printed words, "you know how to read, find the thing they say my son has in here. But don't read it very loud — I don't want them to hear." Then he put the newspaper back and patted his pocket like someone making certain he hasn't lost a valuable wallet, and he took it out again in the last taverns of the night, already worn out, like his expression, anachronistic, useless, dirty around the edges where he had folded it and at the corners of the pages where he had left the print of his thumb dampened with saliva, and he spread it out and smoothed it on the bar to ask one of the opaque drinkers if he knew how to read and to ask him to look for a first name and a family name on the damaged pages that he was so secretly familiar with.

"They were the same," Frasco said, "and they were killed the same, the way they killed people then, not asking or explaining anything, they would come to somebody's house one day and take him away in a car, and then he'd show up in a ditch or beside the wall of the cemetery with a bullet in the back of his neck and his hands tied with rope or a piece of wire. They said that a lot of people were killed because they'd been marked during the war, but the only thing they could accuse Don Jacinto's father of was that he'd never gone inside a church in his life, and they shot him just the same, as if he had done something, and Don Jacinto thought it had been his fault, 'to take their revenge against me, Frasco, that was the only reason,' he would say to me, and I think that if when he first came here he had that uneasiness that didn't let him rest or sleep at night, it wasn't because of the book he was writing but the guilty conscience he had when he thought about his father's awful death. And in the meantime, the madman Cardena up there, in the sierra, a step away from the estate, knowing everything he knew and remembering it very well although he seemed to have lost his mind, because he had been in the militia, not one of the men who risked their lives at the front but one of those who always went around with their coveralls clean and their berets at a slant and who were very brave when they marched through the plaza in Magina or stopped somebody at night to ask for papers. The madman Cardena was the only one who knew why they killed Don Jacinto's father and who denounced him. One day when he was drunk or really crazy, he told me he was in the patrol that went to look for that Falangista, Domingo Gonzalez, who spent almost a year hiding in the attic of the house of some relatives, and who finally escaped even though they chased him along the roofs and shot at him. They got to the house before dawn, to surprise them when they were sleeping, but the door was very strong and all the bolts were closed, so they needed an ax to knock it down."

Eyes of a blue as pale as that in the veins visible beneath the skin of his temples, a blue melting and liquid like that in the eyes of the blind, the beard scant on his cheeks, long and hook-shaped on his chin, rigid, as if it were false, crossed by a brilliant thread of saliva that he would lick as he looked at something with his eyes of a hunted animal, standing among the olive trees with his lame, misanthropic dog panting, adhering to his trouser legs, as motionless as a distant tree on the slope he climbed each night followed by the dog and the half-wild she-goats of his flock to return to the shelter of the slabs of slate where he and the goats and the toothless, cowardly dog lived in the obscene confusion of a trash pile or a stable. Before Frasco led him to the hut and raised the filthy curtain to penetrate the darkness where eyes were gleaming neither animal nor human, only circular and staring, stripped of all reference to a body, all connection to the light shining outside in the yellow fennel and the dark splinters of the escarpments, eyes of phosphorus lit by irrationality or horror, Solana had seen the madman Cardena up close only once, on the riverbank, and it was like meeting straight on an animal that quietly challenges and then flees like a bolt of lightning without any other sign of its appearance remaining except the sudden stabbing of his eyes. As indecipherable as an animal, as the dog whose harsh panting had urged him to turn around impelled by the certainty that he was not alone, the madman Cardena contemplated Solana with an expression of impassive attention, and before fleeing he was shaken by a convulsion as violent and rapid as a shudder, and he said something or simply opened his mouth and couldn't remember what the language of other men was like, because Frasco said that since the spring of '39, when he came to the sierra fleeing the troops that had occupied Magina, the madman Cardena had maintained no other relations in his solitude than with the she-goats and the lame dog who always walked behind him like an extension of his shadow, so that his feigned madness had in the end become true and he no longer knew how to speak except in abrupt monosyllables and brief syncopated phrases like pants or barks that he almost never concluded. The hut where the madman Cardena lived, attached to a vertical wall of slate, went very deep into a cave in whose final recess he had taken shelter with his dog when Frasco and Solana went in to look for him. He was trembling, holding on knees that were tightly pressed together an old Mauser that he had kept for seven years after running out of ammunition, and caressing the ill-treated back of the dog while he shook his head, not daring to raise his eyes, and cursed and denied as if he were being accused in a dream. "I don't remember anything. It wasn't my fault. It was the other one, he stopped the old man, he says to him, give me the ax. Then he told them it was me." He let go of the rifle, which fell to the ground with the trembling of his knees, and he clawed at his beard or clawed at the air with nails that were long, curved, and hard, like uniform beaks, retreating until he rested the back of his neck against the wall. "Cardena," said Frasco, taking a step toward him, bent in the semidarkness because the roof of the cave was so low they couldn't stand up straight, and they waited there in an attitude of useless ambush, exhausted by the stink in the air, by the extremely slow waiting, "Cardena, don't play the idiot with me, you know you can't fool me. Tell us what you told me yesterday, when I gave you the decanter of wine. "

He prowled the perimeter of the Island of Cuba and spied on Frasco from a great distance, almost never daring to cross the invisible frontier drawn by the white boundary stones on the ground, but sometimes he and his dog went onto the estate with the wariness of wolves and spied on the house from the grove of almond trees or followed Frasco, hiding behind the olive trees, jumping from one to the other with an unsettling capacity for silence. "Cardena, come out, I've seen you," Frasco would shout, standing motionless, pretending he still didn't know the place where the madman was stationed, just as when he went hunting and found a very recent trail, and after a while the madman Cardena and his dog would emerge in the middle of the grove, looking at him with alienated, suspicious eyes and shaken by the panting of hunted animals. The madman prowled around the house and followed Frasco to ask him for a decanter of wine or a packet of tobacco, and when at last he was facing him, he would leave on the ground, not saying a word, a sheepskin or a decapitated kid, like a merchant who doesn't know the language of the distant region to which his journey has brought him, and he would hide again and lie in wait until Frasco returned with the tobacco and the wine. Then he would leave his refuge as if he were catching his prey, and when he fled to the river's embankments, he would shout ancient threats and cowardly curses that in the distance became confused with his dog's barking. He would call Frasco a traitor and a Jew and a lackey of capitalism, and he predicted a rat's death for him if he dared denounce him to the Civil Guard, whose three-cornered hats and dark capes appeared to him each night in the shadows of the trees like an unmoving army against which he waged ghostly battles entrenched inside the fences around the corral where he kept his she-goats, aiming at the valley with his unloaded rifle and shouting blasphemies and challenges that dispersed echoes among the precipices of the sierra.

A few hours after running into Jacinto Solana on the riverbank, the madman Cardena called Frasco by whistling to him from the almond trees, but this time he wasn't carrying a recently beheaded kid in his bag, and he didn't threaten him with death if he didn't hand over five liters of wine. "I know that man you're hiding," he said, smiling with his empty eyes, his mouth open and as wet as the snout of his dog, panting next to him, hiding between his legs. "The only one hiding here is you, Cardena. So you can go back the way you came, or I'm calling you know who." Trembling, the madman Cardena and the dog raised their heads at the same time, as if they had detected the scent or the footsteps of an enemy approaching in silence. "You're hiding him so they don't kill him like they killed his father." Then Frasco turned around: the madman, happy at having trapped him as he was walking toward the house, didn't say anything yet, he remained squatting, looking at him while he caressed the dog, who licked his hand, and acting as if he were following the flight of a bird through the branches of the almond trees. "There was no way to knock down that door," he said, not to Frasco, perhaps to the dog or to himself, to the part of his memory not ravaged by madness, rocking back and forth on bent knees as if he were hearing music, "we were knocking and they didn't open, why would they open if they already knew what we were looking for, and then the old man passed by, riding his mule, and that bastard who denounced us afterward saw the ax sticking out of the saddlebag and says, Comrade, lend us the ax and we'll give it right back, and the old man was scared, he didn't want to, and the other one took out his pistol, if you don't give it to us in a nice way we'll take it in a not nice way, I'm denouncing you, we'll see what you're doing at this hour with an ax, the old man trembling, not getting down from the mule, I remember it as if I could see him now, I went up to Magina just to get the ax, and now I'm going back to my farm, and the other one put his pistol to his chest and says, well, now you're going to knock down that door, inside there are some fine gentlemen who don't want to let us in, now that's rude, and the old man, who couldn't stand because he was so scared of the pistol, got off the mule and took out the ax and at first he sort of looked sideways and hit the door very slow, like he didn't know how to use the ax, until the other one pointed the pistol at him again and said, we'll see if he's on the side of the Falangistas inside, and the old man hit the lock three times and knocked down the door, and put the ax back in the saddlebag right away and without getting back on the mule he took the reins and went down the street, but then, when the troops came in, that Judas lost no time going to the Falange and telling them he knew the names of the men who killed the family of Domingo González, and that I was in charge of the patrol, and like everybody knows they asked him for more names, and so to get in good with them, he denounced the old man as an accomplice and was the ruination of us both, since he'll never be at peace as long as I live, because one of these days I'll pick up the rifle and go to Mágina and kill him, and then let them come for me, they won't catch me alive at night or during the day, I'll hang myself before I give myself up to them."

He had spoken as if reciting an interminable litany, in a monotone, indifferent, somnambulistic, his chin rigid against his chest and his hands clasping his knees as if to roll himself into a ball or maintain the monotonal impulse of his rocking, and abruptly, without any variation in his voice announcing that he was about to fall silent, he bit his lips and picked up the rifle again, sitting up slowly against the damp hollow of the cave, fixed now on Solana with an attention sharpened by fear, as if he had recognized in him the other man, the dead man, whom he hadn't seen since that dawn in 1937, returned from the dead to pursue him to the last tunnel of his refuge, to the end of his memory or his madness. They didn't leave yet; they remained still, bending down, facing the man who no longer saw them, waiting for words they could hear, which meant nothing. "Cardeña," said Frasco, putting his hand on his shoulder, as if to wake him, "Cardeña." "Let's go," said Solana behind him, in a very quiet voice. When they left him alone, the madman Cardeña murmured slow tatters of words with his arms around his dog's neck and clawed at his pointed stiff beard with meticulous rage, as if carrying out a methodical flagellation in secret.

13

ALL I HAVE LEFT is the weary privilege of enumerating and writing, of calculating the precise instant when I didn't do what I should have or could have done or the way in which a gesture or word of mine could have modified the passage of time as the erasures or details added to my manuscript modify the story I imagine and recall as stripped of any intention of surviving because of it in anyone's memory as an Egyptian scribe putting the finishing touches on the figures and signs of a funeral papyrus in order to place them in a hermetically sealed chest in the darkness of a tomb. Now I know that if in the small hours of May 22, 1937, when I saw Mariana walking barefoot and as if asleep toward the door that led to the pigeon loft, I had remained a few seconds longer behind the column in the gallery that kept her from seeing me, I would have seen just a few steps away the face of her killer. Now I know that while I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and wrote in the light of dawn the final verses of my life, someone was grasping a pistol and silently climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, and my father, who had gone up to Magina in the dead of night to find an ax and come back to the farm before daybreak, realized too late that he should have obeyed the presentiment of fear he had when he saw the patrol of militiamen and was about to pull on the mule's bridle perhaps and head for another street. He shouldn't have slept that night either while I walked around the bedroom I was going to leave the next morning and sat on the bed without finding the will to take off my glasses or untie my shoelaces and got up again as if I had heard someone calling me, only to sit down not against the pillow but facing the desk where a burning lamp opened a crack of light in the mirror in which my face was a portrait of future dark and an inert prophecy of how I would remember everything and of the past time that concentrated and accumulated there to watch over my insomnia and testify to the last boundary of successive simulations in a biography so tenaciously sustained in them that it suddenly fell apart, like the ash of a paper that did not lose its shape when transformed by fire, when it was no longer possible to use the mask of a new imposture. Not writing yet, not daring to go out to the hallway because I knew that as soon as I stepped on the chess maze of white and black tiles I would walk to the parlor and the door of the marriage bedroom and listen to Mariana's laughter and Manuel's dark breathing and the sound of bodies tirelessly entwined and clinging, I smoked quietly at the desk and looked at myself in the mirror, like an actor so possessed by the character to whom he surrenders his life, that one night, in the empty theater, after the last performance, when he takes off the false eyebrows and the wig and is cleaning off his makeup with routine skill, he discovers that the cotton soaked in alcohol is erasing the features of his true and only face behind which there is simply an oval, livid surface, as smooth and vacant as the glass in two facing mirrors. Like the photographs of Mariana or of our false shared youth that Manuel kept and classified long before the war ended with the melancholy perseverance of a caretaker in a provincial museum, hanging them on walls or placing them randomly on sideboards and on the shelves in the library according to an order as carefully established in the catalogs of his memory as they were invisible to anyone else, my face, that night, was a lucid, brutal prophecy of my past, and everything I never knew or never wanted to know gathered densely around me, at my back, in the shadows and corners of the room, in the hallways of the house, like distant relatives who return in their mourning to hold a vigil for someone who never thought of them when he was alive and about whom they had heard nothing for many years. It was four or five o'clock when I left the bedroom, afraid of running into someone in the hallway. No doubt at that hour he had already got up and harnessed the mule and was going back and forth between the stable and the single room that served as his bedroom and storeroom with the restlessness of excessively early risers: as a boy, before he called me, I would wake, alerted by fear, when I heard his footsteps on the stairs or the violent cough brought on by his first cigarette, and I would hide desperately under the top sheet, as if by remaining still and keeping my eyes closed I could stop or slow down time or dig in the warm hollow of the sheets a burrow where the bitter odor of tobacco couldn't reach or my father's footsteps climbing the stairs again to knock on my bedroom door and throw me with no excuses into the wretchedness of cold and dawn. Recently combed, inflexible, his face red from washing with icy water he had splashed on in the corral, as immune to sleep as he was to fatigue or tenderness, despising me because I walked around groggy and couldn't find the saddle for the white mare. Next to him my clumsy slowness, my physical cowardice in handling animals and tools grew worse, so that his blind resolve when he worked frightened me more than the possibility of punishment. The shape of a hoe was as brutal and intractable as the muzzle of a mule. He noted the ineptitude, the cowardice of my gestures, the absent air with which I carried out his orders, and he shook his head as if accepting an insult he never deserved.

BUT I DIDN'T THINK about him even once that night. Treacherously, while I crushed my cigarette into the marble on the night table and opened the bedroom door, resolved to swallow the indignity or shame, to approach like a wolf the region of the house where it was possible to hear Mariana's laughter and inviting racy words, peremptory commands, brief muffled shouts of exaltation and agony, chance pushed my father like a slow magnet toward his house in Magina and modulated his step to lead him to the precise place and moment in which a closed door and a pistol and an ax would cause the conspiracy of death against us all to germinate. I want to stop him now, as I write, I want him to choose another street to return to the farm or to take so long to find the ax that when he passes the house where Domingo Gonzalez was hiding the door is already knocked down and he moves to one side to keep the mule from walking on the splinters. Any small alteration in the architecture of time can or could save him and save Mariana and stop the killer who was already holding the pistol and watching her, quieting his breath against the badly joined boards of the door to the pigeon loft. He saw her from the back, leaning on the windowsill, looking at the line of the roofs and the fig trees in the courtyards above which the distant smoke of chimneys and the icy blue of dawn ascended, as if she were contemplating the sea from the deck of a ship, serene and solitary, like someone who has undertaken a journey announced in a dream, naked beneath the transparent cloth of the nightgown that outlined the shape of her hips and thighs in the faint backlight of air sifted by silence and the sound of sleeping pigeons that woke suddenly and flew into the corners and against the roof of the pigeon loft when the brief shock of gunshots resounded all through the house. I was writing at the time. Before the witness watching me in the mirror with impassive solemnity, incurably sick with literature, I had read aloud the verses I conceived of as a whispered, very long sentence as I prowled the hallway of the gallery and the marriage bedroom like a sleepwalker, and in my voice poisoned with gloom those words that several months later I would find, unfamiliar, printed, indifferent, definitively strange, like the beauty of a woman we once loved who can no longer move us, on the pages of a dirty, tattered copy of Hora de Espana that a soldier left on the train taking us to the front. "Mágina," I wrote, "May 22, 1937," and when I was about to cross out a word to break the excessive rhythm of one of the lines, it was as if all the glass in the gallery and the dome had shattered under the deafening roar of a multitude of pursued men or animals. I had a premonition of sirens and airplane engines rising above the blackness cut by searchlights and the flash of a machine gun, because the instinct of fear returned me to the hideous nights of the bombing of Madrid, but behind the first explosion, in whose immediate recollection I now discerned nearby voices that moved away and a tumult of steps on the roofs and rifle shots, there was only a silence very similar to the one that is prelude to the whistle of a bomb that doesn't explode. I ran to the window and moved aside the curtains, and on the other side of the street I could see, at the edge of the eaves, a very tall shadow that bent forward as it ran and slipped on the roof tiles and finally disappeared as if it had abruptly deserted the body it was pursuing. Then nothing, silence, an empty minute like the foliage in a woods where a hunter's gun has gone off, then footsteps and voices and the weeping of a woman who was Amalia, who came into my room without knocking to tell me that Mariana was dead in the pigeon loft, and the sudden memory of Mariana walking barefoot on the cold tiles a step away from me, my shame hidden behind a corner of the gallery — the curtains were closed across the courtyard windows, and a symmetrical figure invisible to my fascination or my insomnia was stationed behind them, its hand tense on the pistol butt and its ear attentive to the sound like silk swishing of Mariana's footsteps — my stupefaction and desire grown to the now indivisible boundary of my longing to die ever since I learned what the taste of her mouth was like and felt on my fingers the wet warmth that caught at them at the top of her thighs. Some nights, in the house, during this winter, I've left the room with the circular windows, believing I was fleeing the typewriter, and only when I came to the door of the parlor and saw, when I turned on the light, the wedding portrait in which Mariana looks at me with the loyalty of the dead from the distance of that indelible afternoon when she put on her brides dress and obliged Manuel to put on his now useless lieutenant's uniform to pose for the photographer, I understood and accepted that I was repeating the same steps I took ten years earlier in order to listen to her voice behind the closed door of the bedroom where she was turning over entwined with Manuel and breathing with the same fever that had demolished me beneath her body when she said my name and felt my face like a blind person in the perfumed, avid darkness of the garden. Like that night, with the fervor of someone arriving for an impossible appointment, I entered the parlor and looked beneath the door of the bedroom that no one has occupied since then for a line of light, a sign of the one that shone on the gleam of their bodies and was still lit when dawn came through the window, when Manuel was asleep with fatigue and happiness and Mariana, very carefully moving the arm abandoned to sleep that still held her waist, put on her nightgown and closed the shutters before going out so that the light of day would not wake Manuel. I stood still at the glass door to the parlor and the now-forgotten scent of Mariana's body was not in the air, only the discord between the immobility of places and the headlong flight of time, the persistence of the green-topped table and the bronze clock held up by Diana the Huntress and the sofa with yellow flowers, which had been there long before Mariana came to the house and perhaps will remain in the same indifferent quietude when Manuel and I have died. I stepped forward, after turning on the light, poured less than a glass of anisette from the bottle that Manuel and Medina had left on the table after turning off the radio on which they had listened to the remote music of the "Hymn to Riego" and "The International," lifted a light-tobacco cigarette from Manuel's cigarette case, and when I raised my eyes to the oval photograph, from any angle in the room Mariana was looking at me, fixed on me, as if her eyes were pursuing me in the parlor, just as they had looked for me, without a single gesture or movement of her head betraying her, while the photographer prepared his camera and arranged the lights and Orlando and I talked quietly in the semidarkness that covered the other half of the studio. Like the delicate trace of the touch of a leaf that belonged to a tree that became extinct in another era of the world and survives forever transmuted into a fossil, or a shell's whorls imprinted on a rock very far from the sea with a precision more unalterable than that of the effigies on ancient coins, that was how the moment, when my eyes met Mariana's after an entire day of avoiding each other like two accomplices who do not want to be connected to a crime, endured thanks to chance and the magnesium flash firmer than memory and as undeniable as the bronze profile or light tunic of the Diana the Huntress that was always on the sideboard in the parlor. From there I heard the tenacious, failed panting of Manuel and the laugh and entreaty broken by a long groan in which I didn't recognize the voice of Mariana, and still I didn't move, as attentive as a spy, supported by the darkness, when the silence fell and the respiration of two exhausted bodies reached me like the sound of the sea that one hears and still doesn't see behind a line of tall dunes. I was writing in my imagination, I counted syllables and words as if I were segregating an inevitable material completely foreign to my will, a long thread of drivel and dirty literature as interminable as the flow of thought that followed me everywhere and traced the shape of my destiny and each one of my steps. Followed, pushed by literature, calculating under the remorse and jealousy and fear that someone would surprise me in the parlor, the spurious possibility of recounting that critical moment in the future book I was always on the verge of beginning, I went out to the hallway groping at the walls and furniture, and I was returning to my room when at my back the sound of a loose tile that someone was walking on made me hide behind a corner of the gallery. I saw her pass so close I could have touched her just by stretching out a hand impelled by the instinct to repeat just one caress, but her proximity was as remote and forbidden as that of the blind, like them she was surrounded by an irremediable space of solitude. Disheveled, barefoot, a recently lit cigarette between very pale lips, her face illuminated by the dawn had the mysterious intensity of a gaze that divined everything, a serene light tempered by the devastation of love and the melancholy of fatigue and knowledge, as if at the end of that night her beauty and life had been purged of every banal attribute in order to be summarized in the perfection of a few indelible features, just as a few lines drawn as if at random on the blank space of the paper had been enough for Orlando to sketch a profile of Mariana that could never be captured by photographs.

Afterward, when I saw her stretched out and dead in front of all of us, I realized that perhaps it hadn't been the light of dawn that sharpened her features but a secret divination of the death that was already calling her to the pigeon loft with a voice only she could hear. "Didn't you hear the shooting, Don Jacinto? They killed Señorita Mariana." Amalia was crying and covering her face with both hands, and I didn't understand yet or didn't accept it; I got up from the desk and shook her by the shoulders, I moved her hands away from her face and obliged her to look at me because I didn't comprehend the words blurred by weeping, and she wiped her tears and pointed upward repeating that a stray bullet, that a shot in the forehead, that Mariana was dead in front of the unshuttered window in the pigeon loft, her knees dirty with droppings and her nightgown raised to the middle of her long white thighs, her hands extended and open and her face turned to one side and partially covered by her hair. When I went up to the pigeon loft, Manuel had already closed her eyes. He was kneeling next to her and he wasn't crying; he only extended an almost firm hand in which you could barely notice the violent trembling that shook his shoulders to touch her cheeks very delicately or move away from her mouth a lock of hair that had caught on half-parted lips. He seemed to be shivering with cold next to a fire that had gone out and would never raise his head and stand and come toward us, obscurely gathered in front of the door to the pigeon loft as if an unspoken command or the line of a circle in whose exact center Mariana's head lay prohibited our taking a single step toward her. Standing together, motionless, enclosed in a silence in which Amalia's weeping throbbed against our unified consciousness like the tearing of a wound, we separated momentarily only when Medina and the judge and a captain of the Assault Guard made their way past us to examine Mariana's body, and then immediately, as if the space they passed through had made us vulnerable, we grouped together again to close it, silently driven by the cowardly urgency that brings together a crowd surrounded by fear: Orlando, beside me, squeezing my hand without looking at me, without looking at Santiago, whose eyes were still drowsy with sleep and perhaps last night's alcohol; Utrera, who was blinking and whose respiration was very deep, broken at times as if by a stabbing pain; Dona Elvira, in perpetual mourning, staring not at Manuel or Mariana but at a place in the air that contained nothing, perhaps at the gold and blue strip of May sky that outlined the empty rectangle of the window or the roof where some guards advanced on all fours, looking for something among the broken tiles; Amalia, who cried in screams and wrung large red hands that sometimes tore at her hair or wiped her eyes and mouth in an emphatic gesture. I remember her long weeping like the wailing of a dog and the way Manuel's shoulders and knees trembled when Medina helped him to stand and brought him toward us, moving him as if he were a sleepwalker or a blind man who suddenly had been left alone on the streets of a strange city. I went up to him, said his name in a low voice, "Manuel, it's me, Solana," with desperate tenderness, useless shame, taking him by the arm with a clumsy, blind pity meant for him and myself and the never-denied connection of that mutually sworn loyalty that had begun twenty-five years earlier in the courtyard of a school where we wore blue aprons and had lasted until it was condensed finally in the name of Mariana, but he, lost and alone, didn't recognize me or didn't see me, and he continued trembling as if he were shaken by a fever that blinded him and dilated his pupils, moving his lips as if he were murmuring something, acknowledging the voice of someone calling him whom he didn't see.

AS IN DREAMS, in the pigeon loft I am a figure partly removed from myself and more opaque than the others. The pain I remember, the sudden, bitter sensation like the taste of blood in a mouth that has fallen against a damp cement floor, belong to that shadow, and I can't relive them because there are certain kinds of pain that act as anesthesia on memory. At the bottom of a great darkness, the pigeon loft illuminated by the indecent sun of the morning of May 22 that paused at Mariana's waist like the embroidered edge of the nightgown in the middle of her thighs is a cubical space suspended in the air, as far from the house and from Magina as I am from those days, as Magina is from me, high above the twilight mist and the gray-bronze of the olive trees, as are the words I write about things I've already given up recovering and naming. I'm alone, the pigeon loft has gradually and silently been emptied, like a church a few minutes after Mass is over, and on the staircase landing, behind me, Medina is talking to the captain of the Assault Guard, who leaned out the window before he left and ordered his men to wait for him in the street. "She died instantly," says Medina, and I hear the click of the metal spring that closes his case with the same unappealable certainty that he and the captain display in establishing how Mariana died. "She heard the shots and went to the window. Or she probably was already looking out and the shot hit her in the forehead before she saw anything. Don't you agree?" The captain doesn't say anything, probably he shakes his head with the sorrow of someone accepting a misfortune that has befallen others. "But let's see, Medina, you're a friend of the family, can you tell me what that woman was doing half-naked in the pigeon loft at that hour? They were married yesterday, weren't they?" I'm alone, and for the first time since I came in, I move toward the empty place where Mariana's body lay, on the thin disturbed layer of droppings and feathers like thistle flowers or tufts of cotton. Leaning on the sill of rotting wood where Mariana may have placed her hands before she died, I look at the impassive scene, the roofs that extend like dunes toward a distance of faded blue where the sierra is outlined, almost wiped away by the glare of a sun that trembles as invisibly as hot air above the chimneys. She had gone up to the highest spot in the house to say good-bye to the city where she always knew she was an outsider and to look for the last time at the things Manuel and I had looked at since we were born, because she would have liked, she told me once, to be part of the oldest paradises in our memories, to remove from hers all the recollections of an earlier life she didn't care about, so that its large, voluntarily emptied area would be ready to receive a new memory never to be divided from ours, a territory as intimately designed for happiness as the memory of certain rooms from childhood. She never spoke to us about hers, and not even Orlando, her oldest friend and the delicate, hermetic confidant of those terrifying chasms in her heart not visible from a distance when she momentarily transformed before me into an unknown woman, knew how she lived or what she did in the years before the spring of 1933, before the precise day he found her sitting in a cafe at a table on which there was only a glass of water, with her straight hair cut like Louise Brooks' and a resolute determination to model for a painter or photographer who wouldn't rush to touch her breasts as soon as she was naked. "She died in the same way she appeared to us," I thought, looking at the same roofs and blue brightness Mariana saw before she died, as if I could find in them the key her eyes always denied me, "she died and left exactly as she came, as if she had never been here." She didn't feel anything, Medina had said, she didn't even hear the shot or know she was going to die: a sharp blow on the forehead and then darkness and forgetting as she fell on her back and her already inert body rebounded on the dirty planks. But I remembered that her knees were soiled with droppings and that on her forehead, sticking to her hair and the thin border of darker blood surrounding the wound, was a pigeon feather, so small the killer didn't notice it when he wiped her face. He also forgot to pick up the cartridge of his single bullet or perhaps he couldn't find it, driven by the need to get away. It was next to the doorsill, in the crack between two floor planks, hard and vile and hidden, like those insects that fold themselves over when they sense danger until they take on the shape of a little gray ball.

14

BEFORE THEY REACHED THE RIVER, they turned off the engine and headlights and let the car slide along the thin white dust where the moonlight revealed bird tracks like the characters in a strange piece of writing. The car very slowly entered the wet gray fog as it descended to the end of the road, and the low, flexible branches of the olive trees whipped against the windows and then cracked like slow whips when they were left behind, perhaps provoking the flight and shriek of a bat that had watched with no surprise the passage of the curved black body on which the dust gleamed with a tonality slightly less livid than on the road. When they reached the railroad tracks, next to the station's freight shed built at the entrance to the bridge that extended the road to the country house, they saw above the fog the grove of almond trees and the esplanade and the irregular building of the Island of Cuba, its baroque pediments covered with whitewash where the moon shone faintly and its roofs laid out at such unequal heights that they gave the house the air of a rugged, broken ruin, like those castles whose debris barely stands out on the slope where they were built and yet they display, especially from below and at a distance, the traces of an architecture conceived both as a labyrinth and a watchtower, an arch in the air, a high earthen wall, a concave roof under which swifts make their nests. On level ground, very close to the tracks, they used up the car's last impulse forward to turn it between two olive trees, and they stopped it there, hidden beneath the hard branches at whose ends the olives were already blossoming in fragrant yellow clusters. The leaves on the olive trees scratched at the windows, moved by a breeze they couldn't feel when they got out of the car, and had, at so short a distance, from the darkness of the interior, a metal gleam similar to that of the rails or the river water. On the white, cold earth that shone like sulfur the shadows of the trees had the precision of silhouettes cut out of cardboard, and behind the low volume of fog, beyond the river whose sound was still confused with the wind in the branches, the rise of the Island of Cuba was prelude to a limitless, empty space, mauve, gray and blue, violet at its farthest limits, vast and high like a dome held up only by the light of the moon over the uniform olive trees that sank into precipices of dry torrents marked by yellow broom and then ascended along the side of the hill with the methodical obstinacy of the ocean and stopped their advance at the spurs of the sierra, their roots still adhering to the bare rock, like mollusks clinging to the fissure in a cliff, on slopes of sour thickets where not even the lunatic who planted them there would climb to pick their fruit. Alarmed, exhausted, uselessly on guard, they watched as a night train passed before them, like a long, tremulous ribbon of yellow lights, and its whistle told Solana that it must be between one and two in the morning, because Frasco had taught him to calculate the hour according to the height of the sun or the passage of the trains, and to determine, even if he didn't see them, if they were freight trains or mail trains or express trains, if they were traveling to Madrid or returning to one of those cities on the other side of the sierra that Frasco had never seen and invariably imagined as very large and very close to the sea. Lying on the bed, not yet turning off the light that Beatriz saw before the car stopped knowing it was lit only for him, recognizing him in it just as in another time she would have recognized him in a jacket left on the back of a chair or in the enduring odor of his body between the sheets in the bedroom, Jacinto Solana took pleasure in the certainty of finding himself alone at the Island of Cuba, and the size of the empty house and the olive groves and the landscape surrounding it increased his delight in solitude, no longer driven by literature, because that afternoon, he recorded without emotion in the blue notebook, he had finished the last page of his book, Beatus Ille, and now he had before him, on the table that would never again be disordered with rough drafts and the smoke from cigarette butts, a pile of pages as impeccably ordered as those seen on the shelves in stationery stores, but completely covered by a writing that greedily swallowed up the margins and had deserved the absolution of a period. He was mildly calmed and exalted by the mere physical presence of the stacked pages, the solid, certain touch of their corners, the odor of the paper, as if the book were not the score of possible music that other minds and future eyes would bring back to life but an object already definitive and beautiful, closely tied to its weight and the persistence of its volume in space, enclosed in it and its shape like a bronze figure: grown, with the imperious slowness of a tree or a branch of coral, by the addition of the edge of each of the pages that now testified to the duration of its progress, like concentric rings in the recently cut trunk of a tree. He thought about his past life and couldn't understand how he could have survived so many years of empty desperation when the book did not yet exist, and he recalled with distant gratitude the stories he wrote as a boy in his notebooks to show to Manuel later, passing them in secret beneath the desk they always shared, whose somber wood stained with ink blotches was like that of the desk over which he had bent, writing, since he arrived at the country house. He would illustrate those narratives copied from the vicissitudes of silent film with drawings that he colored painstakingly, and at the foot of each he wrote a brief caption between ellipses, as they did in the illustrations for serialized stories, and on the last page he would write End in tall block letters, carefully following with a dampened pencil point the line of the squares so that the firm strokes would not swerve. Like successive rehearsals that never could satisfy him completely, he wrote the word End many times in the blue notebook, fascinated perhaps by its sound, its shape like the point of a knife, and he probably had written it that same night in the center of the last page of his book, two or three hours before the car with its headlights turned off stopped among the olive trees, on the other side of the river, tracing its letters on the paper with the delicacy and relief of a Chinese calligrapher who concludes, on a silk cloth, the manuscript that has consumed his life.

WHEN HE HEARD THE TRAIN whistle that returned him to time and brought him back from his exhausted lethargy, he got up from the bed and took the candle that was his light to go down to the kitchen, because he had finished a bottle of wine and was not resigned to not prolonging the solitary celebration of the end of his book, as sweet as the last day of school and the lit stove in a corner of the classroom, when he looked at the snow-covered courtyard through the windows of winter and knew that the next morning his father would not shout at him to get up before dawn because all the roads would be blocked by snow. "It's him," said Beatriz, staring at the light that moved away now from the window and swayed back and forth and disappeared and then returned, more opaque and distant, to a front balcony, to the entrance door that poured it over the paving stones when it was half open. "I'm sure it's him," she repeated, as if the others hadn't heard her or didn't believe what she was telling them. "But there must be more people in a house that big. There must be dogs, I suppose," said the man in the light suit sitting next to her, not raising his eyes, not sitting up on the leather seat against which he was resting his unshaven face, as if he had renounced all desire or impulse not to survive but to prolong the flight that had been brought to a temporary halt before the railroad tracks, as if before a definitive, ordinary obstacle. Behind them, in the back seat, the youngest passenger bit his lips and panted quietly as he gripped his wounded thigh with both hands, devastated by fever, by the absurd certainty that the moonlit night and the house where the others spoke vaguely of finding refuge were the final trap that death had set for them. They smoked, not getting out of the car, hiding the lit end of their cigarettes in the hollow of their hands, as if that minor precaution could free them of the Civil Guards who were tracking down the car along nearby highways, or was unavoidable even in the density of the olive trees and the fog. They kept the car windows up, and the smoke, as it thickened, wrenched a gloomy cough from the throat of the wounded man, who leaned against the back of his seat with his mouth open and the right side of his trousers soaked with blood, his eyes brilliant beneath almost closed lids, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip like a thread of saliva. "Let's go," said Beatriz, groping in the dark to pull out the key, "he'll help us. He probably knows some way to cross the sierra without going back to the main highway." She was the one driving the car, Solana noted afterward, the one who had torn one of her silk blouses to make bandages to stop the bleeding from the thigh wound, the one who took the wheel when the other one, the man in the light suit whose profile Solana had seen through the window of that same car six months earlier, began to cry without dignity or tears in the ditch of a forsaken highway and doubled over and vomited when he saw and smelled the blood and remembered the dry, terrifying sound of the shots that tore like horn thrusts into the hip and thigh of the passenger whose name he never knew. "A comrade, she says, perfectly serious," Solana wrote, "a fugitive from the Valley of the Fallen with false documents and a fake mustache and the hair at his temples tinted gray as if for a bad play, a dead man as premature and undeniable as she herself or that guy with white hands and pink brilliant nails who gave them his car and came with them not because he believes in the Republic or in the Party or even in the possibility that they can come out of their trip alive, but for the simple, obscene reason that he's in love with Beatriz and wants to marry her though he knows that's impossible while I'm alive and was even during the years when it seemed I was dead." "I asked him to lend me the car for a few days," says Beatriz, laying out before me like an unformulated reproach the self-sacrifice, the gentlemanliness of the other man, probably her lover, "I told him it was a very long and possibly dangerous trip, and that I didn't want to involve him in something like this, but he insisted on coming with us, he even said he'd denounce me if I didn't let him go. Now he's dying of fear, the smell of blood nauseates him." In love, submissive in advance, prepared to hide bundles of clandestine newspapers in the storeroom of his dress shop or to take her in his own car to a distant city and the door of the prison through which would come the gloomy phantom who once was married to Beatriz and whose face he has seen up close only tonight, in love and avid to carry out all her desires, to guess and anticipate any desire of hers that Beatriz hasn't confessed to him yet, whether it's a handkerchief like the ones she's using now to wipe away blood and perspiration from the wound or a foreign perfume or a reckless, deadly trip to that city on the coast whose name she didn't want to tell me where a smugglers' ship is waiting to take the fugitive to Gibraltar or North Africa, if he lives long enough to get there or they're not killed first in a police ambush. Very pale, his fitted linen jacket stained with blood like a butcher's smock, he looks at me with rancor, with the part of his fear that belongs not to his flight or the memory of the shots and the blood but to the evidence that it is because of me that Beatriz has been denied him and that a single gesture or word from me would be enough for her to leave him with the same serene resolve as on that January morning, in front of the prison, when she got out of the car and walked on high heels across the mud of the highway to go into the tavern where I was drinking beside the fogged window and looking at him, who smoked and counted every minute as he leaned on the steering wheel and couldn't overcome the fear that she was gone forever.

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

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

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

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

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