A Manuscript of Ashes

1

ONE BY ONE THE CAPSULES, in the palm of the right hand, between the fingers, rolling between thumb and index finger, small pink bullets that will not wound the temple, that after each sip of water disintegrate in the dark acids of the stomach and the suicidal blood that beats so weakly in eyelids and wrists where hard veins trace a ridge like a scar on yellow flesh, gradual coins for counting and crossing off each minute and hour of the last night, for acquiring not death, which even now is inconceivable and abstract, but an avid pacifying somnolence of thought and of fatigue, a sweetness similar to that of the traveler who arrives very late at the hotel in a distant city where no one is expecting him and, overcome by sleep, slips between cold strange sheets that become hospitable in response to the heat of his body and keep him warm when he falls asleep and loses his hold on time, reason, memory, like the darkness in a childhood bedroom. The capsules on the night table, the glass of water, the cigarettes, the exact curve of the pillow where the back of the neck rests without sinking down completely, which avoids the horizontality of a dead body or a sick person and allows the effortless contemplation of the open window, on the right side of the room, of the door closed so cautiously that nobody will open it now, of one's own body whose shape is erased toward the foot of the bed like a dune eroded by the wind. They are made of a glossy material that fingernails cannot pierce, neutral to the palate, smooth and neutral in the throat, slowly perforated and worn away, like a coin in a cup of acid, when it reaches the stomach and dissolves there, in that lugubrious unknown cavity that forms part of me as surely as my hands or face, their dose of poison and longed-for lethargy, their sweetness of a hand outstretched in the darkness that brushes the eyelids and grants them sleep as if returning sight to the eyes of a blind man. Only the person who chooses the manner and hour of his own death acquires in exchange the magnificent right to stop time. He uproots wrinkles and numbers, leaves the double-inverted receptacle of the hourglass empty, spills on the ground the water of the clepsydra as if he were knocking over a glass of wine. What remains then is the pure, strange shape of the glass, the blank sphere, a wafer or circle of paper, the interminable immobile duration of a stopped watch on the wrist of a dead man or a stopped clock in the living room of a vacant house. There is nothing but sterile time between two heartbeats, between a capsule and a sip of water, between two instants as stripped of their own substance as the extension of a desert, but he, Minaya, doesn't know this, and perhaps never will know it, because he still imagines that time is made to the measure of his desire, or the negation of his desire and he scrutinizes clocks like an astrologer trying to determine the urgent shape of his future in them. In the Mágina station he looks at the large clock hanging from the metal beams of the entrance canopy, walks toward the end of the platform, toward the red lights and the night where the rails disappear, he asks what time the mail train from Madrid will arrive, he confirms on his wristwatch the truth of the voracious advance toward midnight indicated by the hands on the great yellow sphere hanging like a moon above his head. Twelve o'clock, very soon, bells in the Plaza of General Orduña, in the parlor, in the library where the scent of lilies and funeral flowers still lingers, the train that now hugs the bank of the Guadalquivir and blows its whistle when it begins to climb the slope to Mágina, its windows lit and fleeting among the olive trees and its long lead-colored cars, slow and nocturnal like the trains that took men toward a horizon dazzled by the brilliance of a battle that rumbled in the air and over the earth like a distant storm. Passively he waits for the arrival of the train that will carry him away from Magina and the impossible appearance of Inés, just as he waited for her on other occasions, pretending that he was organizing books in the library or smoking in the dark in his bedroom, without his will ever doing anything to fulfill or hasten his desire, merely paralyzing him in the wait, in the painful consciousness of each minute that passed without her, of each footstep or creak in the silence of the house that announced the arrival of Inés only to unscrupulously prove it false the more certain he was that she was near. And to ease the pain he has imposed on himself a pretense of courage, like a betrayed lover who cultivates humiliation and rancor, wanting to exact from them a spirited will his failed pride denies him, and he looks at the clock and grips his suitcase, telling himself almost aloud that he hopes the train comes soon, because when he gets on and settles into his seat and closes his eyes and the station begins to slip away on the other side of the window through which he swears not to look, the definitive impossibility of searching again for Inés or continuing to wait for her will extinguish in a single blow, he supposes, the slow torture of uncertainty. But the train will probably arrive late, as it does every night, and the fierce, instantaneous, already vanquished intention of leaving disintegrates like a gesture of smoke in the prolonged wait, and Minaya crosses the empty lobby very much to the rear of his desire that precedes him and goes out of the station like a messenger moving too quickly, and he stops at the door, near the line of taxis also waiting for the train's arrival, and leaning against the jamb he puts down his suitcase and smokes melancholically, looking at the double row of linden trees where a shadow approaches to which he assigns the features and walk of Inés until proximity and the harsh white light of the street lamps shatter his illusion. But this is how he always has waited, long before coming to Magina and meeting Inés, because waiting is perhaps the only way in which he conceives of the substance of time, not as a quality added on to his desires but as an attribute of his soul, like his intelligence or his propensity for solitude and tenderness, and he doesn't know he will go on waiting when he gets onto the train and when he leaves Atocha Station at seven in the morning, numb with cold, somnambulistic, and walks again through the vast city that dawn and absence have made unfamiliar. That was how he waited this afternoon, in the bedroom, as he packed his clothes and books and Jacinto Solana's manuscripts and put on in front of the mirror the black tie someone, Utrera or Medina, had lent him for Manuel's funeral, in this way postponing the moment of going down to the library to confront the faces that undoubtedly were going to accuse him, and the dead transfigured face that by now resembled an inexact mask not of Manuel but of any of the dead men Minaya had seen since his childhood, the double mask of his parents, beneath the glass of their coffins, wrapped in velvet and hospital bandages and absorbent cotton, the dripping, destroyed face on a marble table, the imagined funeral mask of Jacinto Solana. Like inglorious trophies, he kept at the bottom of his suitcase the manuscripts and the blue notebook, the cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a long pink ribbon with which Ines sometimes tied back her hair and that he untied last night as he kissed her, but before closing the suitcase he moved aside the books and the shirts she had ironed and folded and picked up the cartridge, then kept it, after a moment of indecision, with the relieved gesture of someone who discovers as he's walking out that he's almost forgotten his house key. He thought, he told me, when he had locked the suitcase and examined with cowardly discretion the knot in his tie and the meticulously drawn part in his damp hair, that he had no real right to withdraw into nostalgia, that never, not even in the days when his conversations with Manuel and his usual dealings with books and writing on the file cards gave him the placid sensation of living a life permanently sustained by customs more faithful than exaltation or happiness, so that he could no longer imagine himself living in any city other than Magina or dedicated to any work other than cataloguing the library, never had he personally ceased being a guest for whom the same standard of hospitality that had welcomed him into the house would end one day by demanding that he leave. The balcony shutters were opened wide, and the sound of the water that fell and rose over the basin of the fountain and the scent of the acacias that recently had bloomed came in like a damp breeze to add to the present and to the proximity of the journey the delicate, dead weight of a sorrow older than his consciousness and more deadly than his memories. The darkly closed suitcase on the bed gave the entire bedroom the gloomy, stripped appearance of a hotel room. As in them, as at that critical moment when the traveler, ready to leave, returns to check he hasn't forgotten anything and once more opens empty drawers and doors to the closet where a solitary hanger moves back and forth, Minaya understood that the city and the house had never accepted him as one of their own, because even before he left, the furniture, the cool odor of the wood and the sheets, the mirror where he once saw Inés coming toward him naked and embracing him from the back, were denying him like suddenly disloyal accomplices and hurrying to erase every proof or trace of the time he had spent among them and to pretend they had recovered the same impassive hostility with which they had received him the first time he entered the bedroom, turning their backs on him as they did that afternoon when he asked them for one final sign not of hospitality but of recognition and farewell. Because downstairs, in the library, the others, the true inhabitants of the house, surrounded Manuel's coffin and murmured prayers or memories or sad judgments on the brevity of life or deadly diseases of the heart, taking refuge in the voluntary semidarkness, waiting for him to arrive in order to receive him with their planned silence of reproval, asking themselves what he was doing, why he hadn't come down yet, why last night, when Medina arrived, he had locked himself in his bedroom and not come out again until very late in the morning, recently showered and silent, as if mourning had nothing to do with him or he didn't know how to respect the details of its ceremony. Utrera knows, he feared, Utrera saw the pink ribbon on the night table and smelled the traces and sweat of bodies, and now he accuses us in a quiet voice with his offended lucidity, with his rancor of an old roué who reproves and condemns what he cannot achieve. Minaya went out to the parlor, because he never left his bedroom through the door that opened to the hallway, and at that moment when the urgency of deciding on an action had removed the image of Inés from his thoughts, he saw her in profile, wearing her mourning blouse, standing in the gallery as if she were lost at a crossroads, and when he tried to reach her, he was alone in the hallway and Inés' face was like those flashes in the dark that one glimpses with closed eyes. He ran toward the corner where she had disappeared and continued to hear her footsteps in the empty rooms and on the staircases where he had walked only once, on the February afternoon when he had gone up to Dona Elvira's rooms. Sweet, impossible Inés, a spy, thorn of persecution, alibi for all desire and all baseness. When he thought he was lost in the successive rooms as alike as a set of mirrors, he found the way he was looking for when he recognized on a chest the Baby Jesus that raised a pale plaster hand beneath a glass bell, pointing an index finger at the hidden turning and staircase that led to the bedroom where Dona Elvira had withdrawn twenty-two years earlier in order not to go on witnessing the decadence of the world and the obstinate failure of her son. But now the disorder from whose menace she had fled in June 1947 like a deposed king who chooses exile without abdicating his crown and his pride, seemed, like an invader, to have broken through the walls and locked doors she had raised against it, which had protected her for twenty-two years, because when Minaya entered the bedroom illuminated by the large windows of the conservatory, he saw before him a place as unfamiliar as those streets that at dawn seemed flattened by a night bombing and one couldn't recognize a single derail of what had been until a few minutes before the long sound of the sirens and the incessant, frightening, earsplitting noise of enemy planes had begun. Just like then, just like those women wrapped in black kerchiefs who searched through the rubble and perhaps recovered an absurdly undamaged family portrait or a crib with twisted bars, Inés, kneeling in the midst of the disaster, deliberately put in order old dresses ripped or trampled in a rage by Dona Elvira after she had overturned chests that may have occupied the same place since the early years of the century, she gathered up letters and postcards, scores of melancholy sonatas and habaneras that Dona Elvira must have danced to in the time of her inconceivable youth, carnival masks, embroidered table linen, long silk gloves that lay on rumpled bedclothes like amputated hands, periodicals about atrocious crimes, old society magazines with lithographs on glossy paper shredded by eager scissors, solemn accounts books on which Dona Elvira had smashed a cosmetics jar and then ground it with her foot. "She began this morning," said Inés, as if stating the effects of a natural catastrophe whose violence cannot be attributed to anyone, "she came here when the undertakers took Don Manuel's body down to the library, and she didn't want any of us to help her. She locked herself in with a key and began to knock everything over and break it and empty all the drawers." Without tears, without a single gesture of despair or evident madness, as methodically determined to create disorder around her as the general of an army who administers and calculates the permanent devastation of a conquered city and sows salt in the pits where its foundations had been. "She called us a little while ago. She kept ringing the bell until Amalia and I got here. She had already combed her hair and dressed for the funeral, and it looked as if she had been crying, but I didn't see any tears, and her whole face was covered with powder." Inés was dressed in mourning too, and the black blouse and tight skirt prematurely added to her body a part of the slim, grave plenitude it would achieve in a few years and that now only some of her gestures were a prelude to, an unknown future body that these hands guessed at in caresses like prophecies and will no longer touch, and that Minaya is ignorant of, because he hasn't learned yet to look at bodies in time, which is the only light that reveals their true nature, the ones an eye and an instant cannot discover. Awkward and cowardly, as he was in the early days, humiliated by the feeling of having lost Inés as inexplicably as she granted him her tenderness, he could only manage to say to her, with a coldness he supposed infected by the coldness he detected in her, a few words that made her feel, him as well, strange and inert, forsaker of the memory of so many nights and days coldly thrown into the acceptance of forgetting, an accomplice not of guilt but of repentance, of simulation, of vile glances fixed on the ground. As it had been the first time he saw her, Inés wore her hair gathered at the back of her neck, smooth and tight at her temples, so that when she completely revealed the shape of her cheeks and forehead, she purified the gracefulness of her profile, but a single chestnut ringlet, translucent, almost blonde, loosened at random when she bent over to pick something up, fell on her face and almost brushed her lips, curled and light like a ribbon of smoke that Minaya would have wanted to touch and undo with his fingers as secretly as at another time he had moved aside the sheets covering Inés' bare breasts and belly and thighs to watch her sleep. Indistinctly he asked her to let him help, and when she moved away as if to avoid a caress she perhaps desired and that Minaya never would have dared to initiate, she dropped the handful of old postcards she had been picking up. White beach resorts with ladies in tall hats seated around tables, casinos beside a sea of pink waves and heraldic views of San Sebastián in hand-tinted twilights, with teams of oxen that removed from the beach the tilting cabanas of the bathers, an illustrated card commemorating the first communion of the boy Manuel Santos Crivelli, celebrated in the parish church of Santa Maria, in Mágina, May 16, 1912, a letter, suddenly, with a republican stamp, addressed to Don Eugenio Utrera Beltrán on May 12, 1937. "Did you notice this letter?" asked Minaya, standing up, and he removed from the envelope, with extreme care, as if he were raising the wings of a mounted butterfly and attempting to keep it from disintegrating in his fingers, a typewritten sheet, almost torn at the folds. "It's strange that Dona Elvira has it here. It was addressed to Utrera." "That woman has always been crazy," said Inés, barely looking at the letter, "she must have kept it the way she kept everything." The date of the heading, written beneath a letterhead in elaborate calligraphy ("Santisteban and Sons, Antiquarians, Firm Established 1881") was the same as the canceled stamp, and included the letter, even before Minaya began to read it, in the narrow band of time when the wedding and then the death of Mariana occurred, transforming it into a part of that surviving material he could not touch without shuddering, like the cartridge and the piece of newspaper in which he found it wrapped and the white cloth flower that Mariana wore in the wedding photograph and Inés put in her hair one night. "Madrid," he read, "May 12, 1937," thinking that on the same day so impassively indicated by the typewriter, Mariana was still alive, that the time she inhabited was not an exclusive attribute of her person or the history already closing in around her to lead her to her death, but a vast general reality to which that letter and the man who wrote it also belonged. "Sr. D. Eugenio Utrera Beltran. Dear friend: I am happy to inform you of the arrival on the 17th of the present month of our colleague D. Victor Vega, whose invaluable skill in the antiquary's difficult art I have no need to describe to you, for you already know the number of years Sr. Vega has been employed in this Firm and the high esteem he enjoys here. As previously agreed, Sr. Vega will inform you with respect to the matters that interest you so deeply concerning our business, in which I hope you decide to take part with the good taste and reliability you have always proudly displayed with regard to the Fine Arts. I inform you as well that on his arrival in Magina, Sr. Vega will stay at the Hotel Comercio on the Plaza and await your visit there on the 17th. Very truly yours, M. Santisteban." He looked at the letters of the name, Victor Vega, he pronounced it aloud, on the edge of a revelation, asking himself where he had heard or read it, then giving thanks to chance for the opportunity of discovering what his intelligence never would have elucidated otherwise. And when he finally went down to the library, when he had before him the semidarkness and in it the hostile, accusatory faces, he carried the letter in his pocket like a certainty that made him invulnerable and wiser, sole master of clarity, like the detectives in books who gather in the drawing room the inhabitants of a closed house where a crime was committed in order to reveal to them the name of the murderer, who waits and is quiet and knows himself condemned, alone, blemished among the others, who are still ignorant of his guilt. It was, this afternoon, like pushing Minaya toward the conclusion of a mystery, like directing his steps and his thoughts from the darkness, from literature, fearing he would not dare to reach the end and yet not wanting him to persist in his search beyond the indicated boundary, it was seeing what his eyes saw and detecting with him the scent of the candles burning at the corners of the coffin and the funeral flowers that surrounded it like the edges of an abyss at whose bottom lay Manuel, like the vegetation of a swamp into which he was sinking very slowly, unrecognizable by now, his hands tied by a rosary that wound around his yellow, rigid fingers and his eyelids squeezed or sewn shut in the obstinacy of dying, without any dignity at all, without that stillness that statues attribute to the dead, humiliated by scapulars that Dona Elvira had ordered hung around his neck and dressed in a suit that seemed to belong to another man, because death, which had exaggerated the bones in his face and the curve of his nose and erased the line of his mouth, also made his body smaller and more fragile, so that when Minaya went up to the coffin, it was as if he were looking at the corpse of a man he had never seen. Except for Medina, who conspicuously did not pray, who remained erect and silent as if affirming against everyone the secular dignity of his grief, a trace of Manuel's transfiguration infected the others, enveloping them in the same gloomy play of light and shifting semidarkness that the candles established and that probably, like the disposition of the catafalque and the black hangings that covered it, had been calculated by Utrera to achieve in the library an effect of liturgical staging. In that light the entire library acquired an oppressive suggestion of chapel and vault, and the old, ordinary smells of varnished wood and leather and the paper in the books had been replaced by a dense breath of church and funeral indistinguishable from the first hints of decomposition already diluting in the air. They were seated in a semicircle around the coffin, shapes without emphasis or the possibility of movement beneath the mourning clothes that tied them to the shadows, barely opening their lips as they prayed, as if the uniform voice marking the rhythm of the litanies did not emerge from their throats but from the darkness or from the scent of the candles, an emanation like a filthy secretion from the rigid weight of sorrow, and when Minaya came in they raised their eyes not to look at him but at a point in space slightly removed from his presence, as if a current of air and not a body had pushed open the door, closing it afterward with a muffled thud. He shook the hand of Frasco, who stood ceremoniously to offer his condolences in too loud a tone of voice, provoking an angry glance from Utrera, an imperious order to be silent. Or perhaps it wasn't the tone of voice, Minaya thought, but the simple fact that Frasco, when he offered his condolences, was recognizing in him a family connection to Manuel that Utrera considered illegitimate. Not daring to say anything to Dona Elvira, whose face was half covered by a translucent veil and who led the rosary as she slipped the beads between fingers as thin and pointed as a bird's claws, Minaya went to sit next to Medina and learned from him the details of the travesty. "They were the ones," the doctor said in his ear, "the old woman and that parasite, that damn hypocrite. Look what they've done to Manuel, that rosary in his hands, those scapulars, the crucifix. He made it very clear in his will that he didn't want a religious funeral, and now see what they've done, they waited until he died to get what they couldn't have when he was alive. And if it weren't for my screaming and yelling, they would have buried him in a Nazarene habit. Where did you get to? I spent all morning looking for you. I have something very important to tell you." Once again Utrera demanded silence, theatrically raising his index finger to his lips, and Medina, with ironic gravity, crossed his hands over his stomach as if parodying the gesture of a canon. "That one already knows. Which is why he's looking at you that way. He's dying of envy." "I don't understand, Medina." Fat and magnanimous, Medina smiled to himself and gave Minaya a kind of pitying look, a look of incredulous astonishment at his youth and ignorance. "Everybody knows by now, even Frasco, who was as happy as I am. A week ago Manuel changed his will. Now you're the sole heir. Of course that won't do you much good for a few years, because Dona Elvira will have all the property at her disposal in usufruct until she dies. And that woman's capable of living to a hundred if she decides to, just as she's lived until now, out of sheer spite." So that now, at the end, when he was concluding the prelude to expulsion, Medina's words abruptly granted him the right not to possession of the house or of the Island of Cuba, because that was a disconnected, abstract condition he could not conceive of, but to ownership of a history in which he had until then been a witness, an impostor, a spy, and that now, in a future he couldn't imagine either, would linger on in him, Minaya, but leaving him, as he would find out very soon afterward when he arrived at the station to buy a single ticket for Madrid, with the same sensation of inconsolable emptiness as the man who wakes and understands that no gift of reality can mitigate the loss of the happiness he just experienced in his last dream. Bewildered, as if he were slowly waking, he abandoned the lethargy into which the waiting, the semidarkness, and the sound of prayers had plunged him and went out to the courtyard searching for the relief of air and the pink and yellow light that turned white only on the marble paving stones, white and cold in the mirror on the first landing, resonant with voices because in that courtyard each sound, a laugh, a voice that says a name, footsteps, the fluttering wings of a pigeon against the glass in the dome, acquires the sharp, dazzling solidity of pebbles in a channel of frozen water, and things that happen there, even the trivial act of lighting a cigarette, magnified by its sonority, seem to be happening forever. Perhaps that was why, when Utrera came out after him and began to accuse him, Minaya was sure of each of the words he was going to say and certain this was the only place where he should say them. Now Utrera wasn't wearing a white carnation in his lapel but a mourning button, and a wide band of black cloth sewn around one sleeve, which gave him the air of a disabled reprobate. He asked for a light, coming very close, like a queer or a policeman, small, exhaling the smoke in rapid mouthfuls, intent on injury, on not holding back a single offense. "I don't know what you're waiting for, I don't know why you haven't left yet, how you dare to remain here, to go into the library, to mock our grief." "Manuel was my uncle. I have the same right to mourn him as any of you." He was astonished by his own audacity, by the firmness of his voice, more certain and clear in the sonority of the courtyard, very close, suddenly, to an appetite for cruelty, involuntarily pleased at acceding to a siege that would turn into an ambush of his accuser precisely when he, Minaya, wanted it to, simply by displaying the letter or the cartridge he had in his jacket or saying one or two necessary words. "Don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand me. Don't be so sure you've deceived us the way you deceived poor Manuel. You killed him, last night, you and that hypocritical tart you were wallowing with in the most sacred place in this house. I saw you and her when you came out of the bedroom. And before that, I saw you go in, biting each other like animals, and I heard you, but I didn't do what I should have done, I didn't tell Manuel and I didn't go in to throw the two of you out myself, I left so I wouldn't be a witness to that profanation and when I came back it was already too late. That smell in the bedroom, on the sheets, the same one you couldn't get rid of and that I noticed when you came to call on me. Weren't you surprised that I was still dressed at that hour? The ribbon on the night table. Do you think I'm blind, that I can't smell or see? But probably you didn't even try to hide. You're young, you love blasphemy, I suppose, just as you don't know the meaning of gratitude. Do you know what Ines was before she came to this house? She was in the poorhouse without a father or any family name except the one her mother gave her before she abandoned her, a wild creature who would have been expelled from that nuns' orphanage if Manuel hadn't taken her in. But you're different. You come from a good family and you have breeding and an education and carry in your veins the same blood as Manuel. You were a fugitive and a political agitator when you came here, don't think I couldn't find out, even though your uncle, for the sake of courtesy, and hospitality, never told me. He's come to write a book about Solana, poor Manuel told me, as if he didn't realize that the only thing you were doing in this house was eating and sleeping free of charge and hiding from the police and going to bed every night with that maid in order to discredit the hospitality all of us showed you since your arrival. It would be too merciful to call you ungrateful. You are a defiler and a murderer. Last night you killed Manuel." Vain, theatrical, invested with justice and mourning just as he once invested himself with glory and then, as the years passed, with the melancholy and rancor of the overlooked artist, Utrera held his breath as if chewing it with his false teeth and showed Minaya the street door. "Leave right now. Don't continue to profane our sorrow or Manuel's death. And take that slut with you. Neither you nor she have the right to remain in this house." This house is mine, Minaya could have or should have responded, but the crude consciousness of ownership, even one as future and imaginary and founded only on a quiet confidence of Medina's, did not provoke his pride or add anything to his firmness, because the vast white facade with marble balconies and circular windows and a courtyard with columns and the glass in the dome had belonged to his imagination since he was a child with the definitive legitimacy of sensations and desires born and nourished only in oneself and requiring no attachment to reality to sustain themselves, because since less than an hour before, since he found the letter in Dona Elvira's bedroom and confirmed in a passage in Solana's manuscripts who Victor Vega was, he had taken over possession not of a house but of a history that had been beating in it for thirty years and that he would bring to a close by stripping away its mystery, granting to the scattering and forgetting of its details the dazzling, atrocious shape of truth, its passionate geometry, impassive like the architecture of the courtyard and the beauty of the statues in Magina, like the style and plot of the book that Jacinto Solana wrote for himself. "You know my uncle began to die a long time ago, on the day they killed Mariana," said Minaya, like a challenge, without any emotion at all, only with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he still weren't sure about daring to say what he had to say, what was demanded of him or dictated to him by loyalty to Manuel, to Jacinto Solana, to the outlined, broken history in the manuscripts, "and I think you also know who killed her." Utrera's dead smile, his old petulance of a hero of brothels and official commemorations twisting the expression of his mouth and remaining there, in his cold look of contempt, in his regained fear, still hidden. "I don't know what you're talking about. Don't you want to leave any of our dead in peace? You know as well as I how Mariana died. There was a judicial investigation and they did an autopsy. Ask Medina, in case you haven't found that out yet. He came here with the judge and examined the body. A stray bullet killed her, a bullet fired from the roofs." He won't deny it at first, Minaya had calculated, he won't tell me I'm lying or that he's innocent, because that would be like accepting my right to accuse him. He'll say he doesn't understand, that I'm crazy, he'll turn his back and then I'll take out the cartridge and the letter and oblige him to turn around so he can see them in my hands just as he may have seen the pistol Dona Elvira handed him that night or afternoon or morning in May when she thought up the way Mariana was going to die. "Let me alone and leave," said Utrera, and when he turned his back as if with that gesture he could erase the presence and the accusation not yet spoken by Minaya, he saw Inés on the first landing, next to the mirror, and for a moment he stayed that way, his head turned, as if repeating the arrogance of any of his statues, and then, Inés said, he was unexpectedly defeated and moved toward the dining room, knowing that Minaya was walking behind him, and even if he could elude or deny his questions, he would not escape the interrogation he had seen in the girl's eyes, transparent and precise like the sonority of the courtyard, earlier than all reasoning or suspicion, all doubt, born of an instinctual knowledge whose sole, frightening method was divination. He lit a cigarette, poured a glass of cognac, put the bottle back on the sideboard, and when he went to sit down, Minaya was in front of him, on the other side of the same long, empty table where they'd had supper together the first night, obstinate, unreal, gathering proofs and words and courage to go on saying them while Inés, in the doorway, without even hiding, witnessed and heard so there would be nothing later on, right now, surrendered to the imperfection of forgetting. "You killed Mariana," said Minaya, he recalled, as if the crime had occurred not thirty-two years ago but last night, this very morning, as if it were Mariana's body and not Manuel's they were mourning in the library, you, it was necessary to say this in another voice that had never been his, picked up the pistol in the small hours of May 21, 1937, and prowled around the gallery, hidden behind the curtains that then, like now, covered the large windows over the courtyard, and Solana almost saw you, but he didn't see you, only a shadow or a trembling of the sheer curtains, and when Mariana began to climb the steps to the pigeon loft on the labyrinthine staircase I've climbed myself at other times, when Jacinto Solana gave up following her and shut himself in his room to write in front of the mirror the verses that twenty years after his death called me to this city and to this house, you walked after her, the pistol in your right hand, which probably was trembling, the pistol hidden in your jacket pocket, driven by a hatred that belonged not to you but to that woman who made you her executioner and her emissary and armed your hand to make certain Mariana would never be able to take Manuel away from this house. "You're crazy," said Utrera, and he got to his feet, draining the glass of cognac, "there was shooting, they were chasing a fugitive, go back up to the pigeon loft and look out the window and you'll see that you can almost touch the next roof. There's no need for you to tell me that Doña Elvira didn't love Mariana. We all knew that. But what had she or Manuel done to me? Why would I kill her?" That's what Solana didn't know, what kept him from finding out the name of her murderer, Minaya thought when he unpacked his suitcase and untied the red ribbons around the manuscripts and searched them for the account of the lynching in the Plaza of General Orduña and the not yet exactly remembered name of Victor Vega, the antiquarian, the spy. "But Solana found the proof that the pistol had been fired from the door to the pigeon loft." It was the chosen instant, the necessary critical moment of the revelation, just one gesture and he would disarm Utrera with the trivial omnipotence of a man who lifts a foot to step on an insect and then keeps walking without even noticing the dry, light crunch of the animal's shell flattened under the sole of his shoe: it was enough to look at the old man from above, from the certainty of the truth, to examine as proofs of guilt his mouth hanging open because of stupefaction and age and the way the knot of Utreras black tie pressed like a noose into the flabby skin of his neck, Minaya's slipping his hand inside his jacket like a man looking for a cigarette and taking out a small package and a typed sheet that tore in the middle when he opened it again. Santisteban and Sons, antiquarians, firm founded in 1881, an appointment in Mágina for an accessory in a network of spies and fifth columnists destroyed in Madrid just a few hours before its messenger established contact with you, Utrera, said Minaya, smoothing and joining together the two pieces of paper on the wood of the table and displaying the cartridge that rolled for a moment and then stopped between them, as irrevocable as the deciding card in a game. "Solana found this cartridge. He also noticed that Mariana had traces of droppings on her knees and forehead, which would have been impossible if, as they said then, she had fallen on her back at the window when the shot hit her. She fell face down, because when she died she was looking toward the door of the pigeon loft, and her killer turned her over and wiped the droppings from her nightgown and face so it would seem as if the shot had come from the street, but he forgot to pick up the cartridge, or he looked for it and didn't have time to find it. It was Solana who saw it. Solana wrote down everything. I've read his manuscripts and I've gone where he couldn't go, because he didn't see this letter. Doña Elvira kept it in her bedroom. I think it has the answer." Utrera looked at the cartridge and the two pieces of the letter without yet accepting, without understanding anything that wasn't their double threat, as if he were listening to a judge accuse him in a foreign language whose unknown syllables would condemn him more irrevocably than the meaning of what they said, without yet recognizing in the yellowed, torn paper, the letterhead with the Gothic calligraphy, and the writing in the lost letter he had been looking for throughout the entire house for thirty-two years and that now appeared before him as the face of a forgotten and distant dead man returns in dreams. "Don't make me laugh. Solanas manuscripts, his famous work of genius. After his death a squad of Falangistas came here and burned them all, just as they had done at the country house. They threw his typewriter into the garden from the conservatory window, they burned all his papers and all the books that had his signature, right there, behind you, at the foot of the palm tree. And even if something were left, didn't anyone tell you that Solana was a liar his whole life?" Again he turned to cognac, contempt, useless irony, refusing to look right at Minaya because he wasn't the one he was seeing but the other one, the dead man, the true accuser who had usurped another life to embody in it the obstinacy of his shade, never completely driven away, and it wasn't Minaya's lucidity that made him surrender, or even the way he stood up behind him to hold the letter in front of his eyes like someone bringing a light up to a blind man's face, but the impossible evidence that speaking to him behind that voice was the voice of Jacinto Solana, dead and returned, lodged at the back of Minaya's eyes as if he were behind a mirror that allowed him to see everything and remain hidden. And that voice was also his, the voice of the secret and the guilt, so that when Minaya continued speaking, it was as if Utrera were listening to himself, free at last of the torment of simulating and lying, absolved by the proximity of punishment. "You were going to become a Franco spy," said the voice, Minaya, "you received that letter, and when you were waiting for Victor Vega to come to Magina, you learned he had been arrested and then lynched by the mob in the Plaza of General Orduna, and you looked for the letter to destroy it but couldn't find it, and probably Dona Elvira, who stole it from you, who knew as well as you that the letter could lead to your torture and a firing squad, threatened to give it to the police if you didn't kill Mariana." But as Minaya spoke, he began to hear what he himself was saying as if it were a monologue in a book that loses its energy and truth when it is recited by a mediocre actor: he didn't recognize his own brutality and couldn't stop the dirty pleasure he found in it and that incited him to prolong it, just what he had felt, he said afterward, tonight, when he was a cowardly little boy and avenged the fear and humiliations he suffered by hitting those who were weaker and more cowardly than he, and his shame and disgust impelled him to continue hitting until his childhood was over. Utrera looked at the letter and the empty bottom of his glass and moved his bald, humbled head, not affirming or denying, only allowing himself to be struck by each word as if he had lost his will or his consciousness, and it moved back and forth, held up only by his rigid neck and the knot of his black tie, waiting for the blows still to come. It was, suddenly, like hitting a dead man, like closing his fist, expecting muscled resistance and sinking it into decayed or rotted material and pulling back and hitting again with greater fury without anything happening. "Who are you to demand an accounting from me?" said Utrera in a voice Minaya had never heard from him before, because it was the one he used to talk to himself when he was alone, when he returned from the café, at night, and sat down in his studio at the table covered with the dead leaves of newspapers stained with varnish, his useless hands hanging between his knees, "how can it matter to me now that you found that letter? Don't you see? I've spent thirty-two years paying for what I did that day, and I'll go on paying until I die, and afterward too, I suppose. Doña Elvira always says there's no pardon for anyone. Certainly it would have been better if I'd let her turn me in that day, but I was on the Plaza of General Orduña too when they took Victor Vega out of the police station and I saw what they did to him. I didn't know who he was then. I found out that night, when Medina came back from the hospital and told us his name." Driven by fear, he went up to his room immediately to burn the letter, but there was nothing in the drawer where he was sure he had put it, in the pages of a book he couldn't find either, as if the thief, when taking it, had wanted to emphasize the evidence of the robbery. He looked through his clothes, in the closet, at the bottom of each one of the drawers, under the bed, in the pages of all his books, in the notebooks of sketches he had brought from Italy, he continued searching even though he knew he wasn't going to find anything while he listened in the distance to the sonorous laughter of Mariana or Orlando and the music Manuel was playing on the piano in the dining room, and that night and the following night, when everyone was asleep, he searched with desperate, absurd tenacity on the shelves in the library, in the disorder of Manuel's desk, and when he told Minaya about his search he remembered as if it were an illumination that as he was trying to open the only locked drawer in the desk, Jacinto Solana came into the library and stood looking at him from the doorway as if he had found him out. But Solana left without saying anything to him, or perhaps, he couldn't remember, he was the one who went out with his head bowed, murmuring an excuse, and then he went up to the parlor to continue searching, though he could not possibly have lost the letter there, and then, he said, when after so many hours of constant searching he had lost track of the time, Amalia came looking for him, long after midnight, and with the same indifferent naturalness with which she would have transmitted an invitation to have tea, she said that Doña Elvira wanted to see him, that she was waiting for him in her rooms. "She always looked at the mail, alone, before anyone else saw it. I think she still does. She looked at all the letters that came, one by one, and then she put them back on the same tray on which Amalia had brought them to her and allowed her to distribute them. She never opened any letter, but she studied the return address and the cancellation stamp with that magnifying glass she uses now to go over the administrator's accounts. She herself told me that when she heard the name of the antiquities shop on the radio, she recalled having read it earlier and immediately knew where. That woman is incapable of forgetting anything, not even now." He tapped cautiously on the half-closed door behind which he saw no light, and as he listened in the silence, waiting for a word from Doña Elvira or a sign that she really was there, he heard again from the bottom of the house and the darkness the sound of a tune that grew louder until it seemed very close to him and then began to fade away as if its impulse had been exhausted and abruptly it was extinguished, leaving behind a tense, prolonged emptiness in which the voice of Doña Elvira in front of him, asking him to come in, sounded like an omen. She was standing in the dark, next to the window, lit only by the inconstant illumination of the night, and she raised her index finger to her lips when he tried to ask her why she had called for him, and she ordered him in a quiet voice to come to the window without making noise, pointed out to him something that moved in the shadows of the garden, beneath the fronds of the palm tree, a white blot that seemed trapped in the dark, embracing, lying down, two bodies and then a face still without features, pale, inflamed, locked together like branches in a thicket they were seeking and with which they became confused far away in the garden, behind the glass, in the silence of an aquarium. "Look at whom my son is going to marry. She's been like that for an hour, wallowing like a bitch with the other one, his best friend, he says. And they don't even hide. Why would they?" The strangest thing wasn't that he had been summoned to that place like an ambassador granted a secret audience or that he was there, at one in the morning, beside Doña Elvira, looking at the garden as if from the rear of a box in the theater; it was the silence in which the bodies moved, like avid reptiles, like fish in circular, incessant flight. Since his fear, his certainty that when he entered the dark room he was walking into the prelude to a perdition foretold by the death of Victor Vega, the two bodies rolling on the grass in the garden as if giving themselves over to being dissolved into a single shadow, and the immutable profile and waved gray hair of the woman leaning her forehead against the glass to continue spying on them, seemed to him as keenly desired and distant as the music that hadn't sounded again. "Turn on the light," Doña Elvira ordered, and she remained motionless in front of the window even after he had obeyed her, and when she finally turned around, with a gesture of tedium, she was holding a paper in her right hand, an extended envelope, exact and brief like a weapon. "As you can understand," she said to him, "I didn't have you come here only to see my shame. That woman has dishonored my son and will take him away the day after tomorrow if I can't stop her. I want you to help me. You aren't like this rabble that has invaded my house. But if you don't do as I say, one telephone call and the Assault Guard will come for you. You should have done a better job of hiding this letter from your friends in Madrid. It took Amalia less than fifteen minutes to find it." Now she had a pistol in her hand, flat, silvery, with an ivory handle, small and cold and gleaming in the light like a razor. She handed it to him as she tucked the letter under the wristband of her black velvet dress, and when he took it and held it as if he didn't know yet how to handle it, she turned her back and looked down again at the darkness in the garden, though no one was there. Later there was only insomnia and the icy touch and memory of the pistol, its shape calculated for secrets and death, its invitation to suicide, the destroyed mouth and coagulated blood on Victor Vega's lips, his ruined body in the sun beside the arcades on the Plaza of General Orduna, the blindfold over his eyes and his hands tied and the bite of the fire that would throw him against a wall riddled by gunshots or a ditch that was like a pit. "But I knew I was incapable of killing her," he said, "and I was determined to kill myself, but I went out to the hallway thinking that before noon she and Manuel would have left and then I saw her pass by, as close as you are now, and I swear that if I followed her, it wasn't because I intended to kill her, it was as if another man were climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, because I didn't care anymore about being killed, how could I care if I was already dead?" Without will, without any purpose at all, he kept climbing up to the pigeon loft, conscious of each stair he stepped on, very slowly, without hearing the sound of his own footsteps, as if the design he was obeying had stripped him of physical solidity and was pushing him up the stairs like an ocean swell that picks up a man who before going under when it knocks him down looks at the shore growing more and more distant and knows he is going to drown. Like a magnet the pistol clutched in his hand led him on, the butt wet with perspiration, the short barrel and the trigger that his fingers groped when he reached the top landing afraid Mariana could hear through the closed door the noise of his breathing, but that wasn't what he was hearing, that monotonous sound shaken by the beating of his heart came not from his throat but from the interior of the pigeon loft, it was the murmur of the sleeping pigeons. Perhaps Mariana believed that Manuel had wakened and had come up to find her, because when she moved away from the window, she had an unsurprised smile on her lips, as if she had been pretending not to hear the footsteps in order to allow Manuel the delicate opportunity of coming up to her silently and covering her eyes as he embraced her. "Utrera," she said, "its you," in that tone of fatigued indifference she always used to resign herself to the arrival of someone she didn't want to see, and she hadn't seen the pistol yet or understood why he was looking at her that way, so fixedly, as if reproving her presence in the pigeon loft or examining with obscene dissimulation the folds of her nightgown, trying to guess at the lines of her naked body beneath the cloth, the dark shadow of her belly. "Some men with rifles are running along the roofs. It seems they're chasing somebody." Before recognizing what was shining in the hand that rose and rigidly pointed at her and aimed at her eyes wide with fright, Mariana heard shouts and the clatter of feet running on tiles on the other side of the lane, and perhaps a first shot that was still not the one of her death and to which Utrera's pistol responded like an echo, a sudden raging blade above his index finger, then finally still in his hand, pointing now at the smoke and the empty window while his single shot was dispersed in the doubled pandemonium of pigeons and incessant bullets like a hailstorm on the roofs. He turned Mariana over, he said, and wiped her mouth, moving her hair away from her face, her open eyes, in which there remained as if changed into glass the final astonishment of the pistol and her death. Then, when he stood up, wiping the droppings from his knees, he saw the man hiding behind the chimney opposite the window. Barefoot, his feet bleeding, wearing an undershirt, unshaven, as if he had jumped out of bed when they came for him, panting, his mouth wide open, so close Utrera could see the trembling of his chest beneath the dirty undershirt and the hunted, animal sound of his respiration. For a moment, one he would remember forever, they looked at each other, recognizing the other man in the solitude of their fear and their plea for a respite or an impossible refuge, as if they had passed each other in a corridor reserved for those condemned to death. "His name is Domingo González," said Utrera, standing up, finishing in one swallow the glass he hadn't touched while he spoke. "After the war I found out that he saved himself by hiding in a barn, under a pile of straw. From time to time we've passed on the street, but he doesn't remember me, or at least he behaves as if he doesn't know me." He crushed the cigarette he had just lit in the ashtray and left the empty glass on the table, very close to the torn letter and useless cartridge, wiping his lips damp with cognac as carefully as someone cleaning the blood from a small wound. He wouldn't recognize himself either if he could see himself as he was then, Minaya thought, looking without pity or hatred at the mourning button in his lapel and the black band that hung half unstitched from his right sleeve, and I can't even imagine what he's told me or remember what I know in order to call him murderer, because that word, like the crime and the man who committed it, perhaps no longer refer to him, because no one can continue to sustain sorrow or guilt or merely memory after thirty-two years. Minaya suddenly perceived in the dining room this afternoon the immense weight of reality and the ignominy of the guesses that until a few minutes before had exalted him, and he immediately renounced his lucidity like a lover who, when he learns the day will come when his love dies, censures that future treachery with more fury than his present misfortune. He, Minaya, had rescued a book and explained a crime, he maintained intact the power to accuse, to continue asking, to grant not pardon but silence, or to tell what he knew and throw the murderer and his accomplice into a shame more sordid than the old age in which they survived as in an exile with no possible pardon. "Don't look at me like that," said Utrera from the door he had already begun to open, closing it again, "you can't harm me. I have nothing to lose, because I don't have anything. When Doña Elvira dies and you inherit this house, you can throw me out, but by then I'll probably be dead too. I swear that's the only thing I want in this world." Minaya was left alone, Inés said, sitting in the dining room at the long empty table like the client in a hotel who arrives too late for supper and waits in vain for someone to come and serve him, staring with inert fixity, a cigarette between his fingers, at the cartridge and the letter or at the polished wood where the oblique sun of the April afternoon was shining, cross-sectioned by the glass in the white French doors to the garden as if by a lattice window. Inés came to tell him that the undertakers men had just arrived, with their blue dusters, with their black cars recently parked beneath the acacias on the plaza, with their disrespectful haste that reminded Minaya, when he went out to the courtyard and saw them open the library and house doors wide to carry out the coffin that was closed now, of the afternoon when other men like them emptied his parents' bedroom with pulleys and ropes and loaded their furniture into a truck from which he never saw it emerge again. They put out the candles, passed the candelabras from one to the other and carried them by the armful to the back of a car, took down the wreaths of flowers and the black velvet cloth that had covered the platform where the coffin had been, and then, when they were gone, a great empty space remained in the center of the library, deserted now and still in shadow, like a stage after the last show, and it was in that spot without anything — right there, in another time, barely a week before, where the desk had been, the filing cabinet, the habit of taking notes on the books and waiting for Inés — where Minaya became aware of his own future absence, as irreparable and certain as Manuel's. "Let's go," said Medina beside him, "they're waiting for us." The hearse and the two taxis that would take them to the cemetery were already leaving when he and Medina went outside. He still had to come back after the funeral and burial to pick up his bag, but it seemed to him as he leaned back in the taxi, while the scent of the acacias and the entire plaza was being left behind, that he was saying good-bye forever not only to the house that was closed now and deserted but also to Inés and everyone who had lived there, to a part of his life that very soon would no longer belong to him, inaccessible to returning and to memory, because remembering and going back, he doesn't know yet, are exercises as useless as demanding explanations from a mirror of the face that an hour or a day or thirty years ago had looked into it. He'll come back, no doubt, just as he came back tonight, when it was almost eleven o'clock, hurrying to reach the station on time, crossing the courtyard, I imagine, climbing the illuminated staircase without seeing anyone, like the last passenger on a great ship that is beginning to sink but whose recently abandoned salons have not yet been invaded by the water already flooding the holds, fearing that Dona Elvira or Utrera will appear before him around a corner or in the parlor to subject him to the hateful discipline of saying good-bye, wondering why there is no one anywhere and why all the lights in the house are on. As a last privilege I want to imagine it like this as he leaves it, bright and empty, white in the dark of the plaza as if in the middle of the ocean, because now that Manuel is dead and the book is finished, there is no one left who deserves to live in it. Here, not in the cemetery and even less in the station, is where the end should be, in the illuminated balconies, the circular windows on the top floor, the muffled flash of that light on the rim of the fountain, on the man who from the end of the lane turns to look at it and then grasps the handle of his suitcase and walks toward the Plaza of General Orduna as if assaulting the shadows, with his head bowed, with the posthumous courage of fugitives. I invented the game, I set the rules, I arranged the end, calculating the steps, the successive squares, the equilibrium between intelligence and the blows of chance, and when I did that I shaped for Minaya a face and a probable destiny. Now he is fulfilling it, in the station, now he obeys me and, tall and alone, waits for me as he obeyed and waited in the cemetery while gravediggers moved aside the stone where Manuel's name had not yet been inscribed and Dona Elvira, supported by Utrera and Teresa, bent down to pick up a handful of earth that she would then toss on the coffin with a slow, rigid gesture. He was taller than any of them, and his stature and his youth seemed the visible attributes of his status as stranger, the proof that in spite of the dark suit, the black tie, the summary expression of grief, he did not belong to the group of people in mourning who had gathered around the grave and murmured prayers that in the distance of the afternoon and the empty cemetery sounded like the buzz of insects. Old distant faces, unrecognizable, enervated by heat and oppressive mourning clothes, surrounded by crosses, by the yellow brilliance of the hedge mustard flowers that erased the graves and the paths that separated them and wound around their feet like a swamp of roots. Of all of them, only Medina kept himself partially free of decrepitude, fat and impassive, his arms folded, his hair still black, looking at the men sliding the coffin between rough ropes into the hole of the grave with the composed attention he would bring to looking at a patient who had just died. But Inés didn't look at the grave, Minaya noticed, although she kept her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap and she moved her lips, pretending to repeat the prayers of the others. Only he, who spied on her and her gestures looking for a sign that would allow him to recognize in her the same woman who had embraced him last night, not to get her back but in order not to lose the right to tell himself at least that certain things now impossible had happened to him, realized that Inés had secretively moved her eyes toward a corner of the cemetery, toward a mausoleum shaded by cypresses beside which a man seemed to pray as he leaned on a cripple's crutches. The brim of his hat covered his face, and his head sank between his shoulders, exaggeratedly raised by the crutches. Inés noticed Minaya's questioning and she stared fixedly again at the ground and pretended to pray, but her eyes beneath long lashes slid slowly beyond the still-open grave, over the hedge flowers, as if all of her and not only her gaze were fleeing, just as she did when Minaya was talking to her and she stopped hearing him and smiled at him so he couldn't follow her in her flight or decipher a thought in which she was alone. Taut with the weight of the coffin, the ropes were lowered, rubbing against the sharp marble edges, and one of the men holding them stopped to wipe his brow, interrupting for a single second the voices that were praying. In that fraction of silence, Inés raised her head and looked openly at the man on crutches. He was looking at them too, motionless, leaning on the crutches as if they were a windowsill he had reached using the last of his strength, and although Minaya couldn't see his face, he imagined an indecent curiosity in those eyes covered by shadow and veiled by distance, shining in a sudden reflection of glass when the man began to walk and came out from the cypresses, awkward and very slow, ruined and tenacious between the crutches that preceded him, testing the ground as if looking for hidden graves beneath the hedge flowers. The grave diggers retrieved the ropes, and Doña Elvira took a few steps forward and began to drop earth on the now-invisible coffin without completely opening her hands, as if waiting for someone to capture her gesture in a photograph. The man walked more and more slowly toward the metal grillwork of the cemetery gate, hugging an adobe wall, disappearing at times behind a mausoleum and then reappearing more worn and more awkward, more impossibly determined to reach the exit. He was very close to it when he seemed to give up walking and leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and now Inés, who could no longer look at him without turning her head, said something to Amalia that Minaya couldn't hear, crossed herself at the grave, and with the same haste moved away from it to go toward the man, who was no longer leaning against the wall. Before he followed her without waiting for the grave diggers to adjust the stone, Minaya remembered that when he came to the cemetery there was a taxi parked next to the gate. He heard the engine starting up and he ran faster, jumping over the graves and the hedge flowers, his heart pounding in his chest as violently as when he had run that winter from the guards along the avenues of Madrid, no longer asking himself what the others would think or who the man on crutches was, but when he reached the cemetery gate, when he stopped on the dusty esplanade where the road to the city began between two rows of cypresses, he saw the taxi driving away leaving behind a translucent cloud of dust and exhaust and the fleeting image as dazzling as a powder flash of two faces that looked at him through the rear window and were immediately erased in the dust, in the distance of rows of cypresses and the first houses in the city. He kept running and waved his hand and probably called to Inés asking her to stop the taxi, but his voice was inaudible and his figure became smaller as the successive shadows of cypresses multiplied in the window, and finally he stood motionless in the distance of the road, still moving his right hand, as if he were saying good-bye, powerless and vanquished, overwhelmed by fatigue, by the incredible certainty that he was partially opening the prelude to the true story when he believed he had left its conclusion behind him. And now it was only a question of waiting for him to come, to cross the fields and the last streets of Magina, walking very quickly, not seeing or hearing anything of what was happening around him, because the city, the cars, the people he bumped into on the sidewalks were moving out of his way like a sea that parts to show him the only road he should follow, running until he was out of breath and his legs had given out, advancing with no progress, no respite, beyond fatigue, as if only the devastating will to reach the plaza where he had waited so often for Inés kept him on his feet, the plaza where he was tediously condemned to look at Utreras heroic monument and the hermetic balconies of the house she had never allowed him to enter. "My uncle is sick. He doesn't want to see anybody," she would say. "I'd like to meet him." "He can't, at least not now. I'll let you know when he's better." All that was left was to wait for him with the avid, feigned, wary calm of a hunter who has laid his trap and crouches in the darkness, in the propitious thicket where the muffled movement of a body will sound and then the cold crack of the trap when it closes. "He's here," said Inés from the window when we heard the bell at the entrance. He pulled on the cord several times, but nobody answered, and then he went into the house, into the devastated courtyard above which damp clothes hang on lines, closing off the sky and the railing of rotting wood where the women who live in the rooms along the corridor go to shout at one another or to empty buckets and basins of dirty water, where they lean in the sun, with embroidered housecoats over their shoulders, to dry their hair on Sunday mornings. It always smells of damp, of deep, dark places, of wet lime and stone and cesspool water. From the railing a dry, disheveled woman moved aside the sheets on the lines and pointed to the end of the courtyard when Minaya asked for Inés. "That Inés and her uncle live in the second yard, up top, at the back of the stairs. I saw them come in a little while ago. Now they're riding in a car, like rich people." The sheet fell back like a sopping wet curtain on the woman and her laugh, which was prolonged in other voices along the corridor, in glances of suspicion and mockery that followed Minaya from above until he disappeared into a gloomy passage that took him to another courtyard without a railing or wooden columns, a courtyard like a well, with high unwhitewashed walls, with a single window and a tree whose topmost branches stretched toward it, brushing against open shutters. "Now he's coming up," said Inés, and she moved away from the window, picking up again the needle she had just threaded and the frame where she was embroidering something, a sketch of blue flowers and birds that she looked at meditatively as she sat down in the chair she always used to sew, so absorbed in the needle and the movement of her fingers that touched the taut cloth, searching for the exact spot where she should make the next stitch, that she seemed to have forgotten that Minaya was climbing the stairs, coming closer and closer to me, to us, to the instant when his eyes would meet the eyes of a dead man and when he would hear the impossible and somehow revived voice of a manuscript he hadn't found yet, of so many words deceitfully calculated and written to trap him in a book that had existed only in his imagination, that has ended now, as if he, Minaya, had closed it just as he closed the door when he left here. But perhaps, as he climbed the stairs knowing he was approaching me, he was tempted to turn around, to close his eyes and his intelligence and his sleepless desire to know and leave for the station and Madrid as if he hadn't seen the man on crutches in the cemetery, as if not a single doubt was left that could stain or undo the history he had looked for and now possessed. He climbed up as if going down to a dark basement, he stopped in front of the only door in the corridor, abruptly I was no longer hearing his footsteps, and I guessed he was standing still behind it. "Come in, Minaya, don't stay out there," I said, "we've been expecting you for an hour."

2

VERY TALL IN THE DOORWAY, taller and younger than I had imagined, with an air of attentive stupefaction and accepted misfortune that he probably had kept intact since his adolescence and that I suspect he'll never lose, like that way he has of looking at things with his head bowed, of assenting as if he didn't believe completely or never could accept in his innermost thoughts a destiny that he never will stop deferring to, because he was born for a kind of rebellion effected only in silence, in imaginary flight, in tenderness or despair revealed solely when the fulfillment of one's desire has become impossible. Tall and strange, obvious, cowardly, standing in the doorway, at the boundary of deception and astonishment, looking at me as if to confirm that it was I, the vague face wearing glasses in the photographs, the crippled man who walked among the graves with a black hat over his eyes, I, the dead man, the pale worn mask that sat up in bed to receive him, to extend a hand that he hesitated for a moment to shake, as if afraid I might infect him with death, that I would never let him go. He avoided my eyes, without glasses now because I had taken them off to see him better when he came close, he looked at the bed, the night table, the low ceiling in the room, he looked at Ines, sitting next to the window, leaning over the frame and the cloth she was pretending to embroider that spread out in hard white angles over her knees. Fixed on the pattern of the threads, Ines raised her right hand, and it seemed as if she held nothing between her fingers, but then in a slender beam the light caught the tip of the needle or the taut thread that extended it, just as at times, in empty space, very close to one's eyes, the curved, long outline of a spiderweb appears and is immediately invisible again. Before he arrived, while the footsteps that were undoubtedly his were coming down the hall, Inés looked up from her needlework and kept her hand raised and motionless, holding the needle as if the tension of the thread were the only indication of how attentively she waited, and that was exactly how Minaya saw her when he came in, lost in the indifferent tranquility of a figure in a painting in which the artist hadn't wanted to depict her face so much as the artless repose of her hands resting on the frame, sharply delineated on the white cloth and in the oblique light from the window that fell on her bare, bowed neck and was quiet all around her, on the floor tiles, without illuminating the rest of the room, as if in a Stillwater where it would endure when its coppery brilliance had been extinguished on the highest bell towers in the city. "Excuse me for not getting up to receive you," I said, "but I came home from the cemetery very tired. Sit down, here, on this chair, I want to see you better. I want to know what you're like, Minaya." He didn't say anything, or he only repeated my name, which when it sounded in his voice had a hard, strange, remote quality, because I didn't name myself, the man I really am, but someone else, perhaps a hero, a shadow hidden in the manuscripts and photographs, the body Manuel saw on a marble table, the man who died at the Island of Cuba, beside the Guadalquivir, in its muddy waters, twenty-two years ago. "Solana," he repeated, incredulous, crushed by questions that devastated him, by evidence that frightened him. I recognized in him, in his large chestnut eyes that looked at me as if they hadn't yet surmounted the temporal distance from the day when I was supposed to have died to that moment when we had met, the signs of a race of reckless seekers, an excessive, never-submissive intelligence insistent on lucidity even at the cost of failure, a fervor and a will predestined to disappear impetuously into the void. I knew he was fated since birth to know much more than was good for him, to deserve exactly what never would be granted him, to not be satisfied if he ever, by chance, achieved it. I saw what Inés hadn't seen — every night when she came home I demanded that she tell me everything — what she wouldn't have been able to tell me: that by virtue of the same aberration of the blood that had made Manuel not resemble his father or his mother or inherit the slightest trace of his paternal grandfather's rough incessant energy but receive instead the delicate features, blonde hair, and blue eyes of his Aunt Cristina, in Minaya an elegance survived that had belonged to Manuel. And that resemblance was even more substantive and undeniable because in no way was it evident at first glance, and it couldn't be isolated in a single individual trait but in a certain internal attitude that could be glimpsed in his eyes, in the way he moved his hands, lit a cigarette, filled a glass, in some unlearned, almost always fleeting gesture that made its way to the intelligence of the person who knew how to see it, like those clues in old novels that allow one to discover the beautiful, high-born lady voluntarily hidden beneath rough peasant clothes. Perhaps that's why I permitted him to know I was alive, out of loyalty or gratitude to that gaze that demanded wonder and knowledge, to Manuel, who had looked at me the same way so often, to Doña Cristina, the white-haired lady with the high, anachronistic hairdo, who gave us tea on the unreal afternoons of 1920 and always asked me to read the poems her nephew had told her about so fervently, with an enthusiasm for them I was very far from feeling, comparing me to Bécquer, to Rubén Darío, to poor José Emilio Minaya, Doña Cristina's deceased husband, whose only book of verses, Arpeggios, dedicated to her, Manuel and I knew by heart, because those poems, which would soon feel the fury of our scorn when a magazine in Madrid allied us to Ultraism, had been the first ones we ever read. "You're still not sure," I said to him, "you still can't believe that I'm the person speaking to you, that I'm alive. Neither can I, young man. For twenty-two years I've been dead, I've enjoyed the incredible privilege of not existing for anybody who knew me before those Civil Guards came for me, of calmly losing my memory and my life, as if I had turned into a statue or a tree. Without knowing it, they did me the biggest favor anyone could ever have done for me when they said they had killed me and smashed in the face of another man's corpse and put my glasses on him and dressed him in trousers and a shirt that weren't even mine but Manuel's, and gave him my name, maybe because the lieutenant in charge had strict orders to return to Magina with my body and didn't have the courage to confess they couldn't find it in the river or because they wanted people in Magina to take my death as a warning or a public threat. And so when I opened my eyes in the house where I was taken care of and hidden, and it took me so many hours to remember my identity and my name that I wasn't anybody anymore, I was that oblivion and that empty consciousness of the first hour after I woke, and not even the inert body and the hands touching it under the sheets belonged to me, because they were as unfamiliar and external to me as the metal of the bed and the beams in the ceiling and the constant tumult of water sounding beneath the paving stones, at times very close and at other times as remote as a memory allied to the sensation of water, of wetness, of slime, of someone drowning in dreams who opened his eyes and mouth underwater and struggled in an opaque light that gradually darkened, colored in blood, in the taste of blood and algae drenched in mud, someone who closed his eyes and remained motionless, indifferently vanquished, pushed along by the water, by the sweetness of stillness and asphyxiation. But I could not attribute that memory or dream to my life because I no longer had one, I was only that gaze or images of semidarkness and half-closed window and light that succeeded one another without coming together into a permanent shape, I was only the hand testing the body and the sheets as if they were a singular material, I was the room, immobility, the sound of water, the lethargy that had returned, no one, and after several hours the woman came in with a cup of milk and medicines and told me my name, I still couldn't connect it to me but only to that dream of water, to the drowned man without a face, to a bottomless time of mud and reptiles that no memory could ever reach. But it wasn't simply a matter of a hallucination. It was also a premonition. Because a few days later, the man who found me in the backwater of the mill, Inés' grandfather, who had been my father's comrade-in-arms in the war with Cuba, showed me the newspaper with my photograph and name and the article about my death. 'Red bandits brought down in heroic action by the Civil Guard,' I remember it said, and beside my photograph, the one from the file they made when I went to prison, was one of Beatriz dead and one of the man who accepted death because he was in love with her and who may not even have succeeded in becoming her lover. But the photograph of the other man, the younger one, wasn't there, and the paper didn't mention him, so it was undoubtedly his body they gave my name to, bequeathing me the infinite freedom I had conceived of when I awoke and didn't know who I was, saving me from my entire life and from my failure, from the unshaved face, the frightened eyes of the unknown man in the photograph, the shame of looking at Beatriz' dead, swollen face and remembering all the years when I renounced her loyalty and tenderness with the same silent pretense I showed when I renounced my own life, always, long before I met Mariana and up until the last day, until the last night, when I saw her telling me good-bye and I feigned a little sorrow because she was leaving with the others and I didn't dare acknowledge to myself that the only thing I wanted was to be left alone as soon as possible, to close the door to the country house and go back to my bedroom, not to write or to feel safe but only to know that I was alone, with no one blackmailing me with friendship or love or obedience to those slogans in which Beatriz and Manuel and even the cynic Medina continued to believe as if they were the catechism eight years after we had lost a war we never could have won. I was a deserter and an apostate, and it's possible I always had been one, as Beatriz said that night, but in the newspaper that certified my death, they spoke of me as if I had died in combat, I was that photograph of a man who had confronted the Civil Guard with a pistol and preferred death to surrender. You wanted a writer and a hero. There he is. You must have seen that newspaper among Manuel's papers and given it a precise place in the biography of Jacinto Solana that you expect or expected to write. But let me tell you something I left out of the blue notebook. Jacinto Solana leaves his visitors in the wine cellar of the Island of Cuba and goes back, lighting his way with a candle, to the room that faces the river. He puts out the light, smokes in bed, closes his eyes knowing he won't be able to sleep that night either, thinks about the others hiding in the wine cellar, in a damp darkness not mitigated by the moon, in close air where they smell the sweat of fatigue and fear and the odor of blood, hear the labored breathing of the wounded man. He thinks about them and the way they have of accepting persecution and death, and he knows he is thinking about Beatriz and hoping and fearing she will lift the trapdoor to the wine cellar and come up to find him, because if she came here, it wasn't to elude the encircling Civil Guard or to find a road into the sierra that will take them south but for the same reason that led her six months earlier to ask the other man to lend her his car to travel to a distant city where there was a prison and a man about to be released from it. He doesn't write, as I wanted you to suppose, he doesn't go through the pages of a recently finished book with indolent happiness to correct a comma, a word, to cross out an adjective or add one that is more precise, or crueler, he doesn't recall her obstinacy or her pride because those are two virtues he almost always has ignored. He only waits and smokes in the growing clarity of insomnia, he only remembers the way she said, before going down to the cellar, 'So it's true you're writing a book,' and her weary smile, and her twisted heels, and her fingernails scratching at the bottom of an empty can of sardines as if she weren't invulnerable to indignity either. He's waiting for her, but he shivers when he hears the door open because Beatriz came up barefooted to his bedroom, leaving the other man in the cellar, dying of jealousy and fear beside the wounded man who pants and doesn't sleep, powerless and alone, passed over, waiting, as he did when he watched her get out of the car in the field at the prison and didn't dare go after her and was afraid she would never come back. The coward Solana puts out his cigarette and turns to the wall to pretend he's sleeping, but that doesn't erase the presence of Beatriz from his old, intact cowardice. 'You haven't changed,' she says to him, still standing, 'you do the same thing you did when we lived together. You close your eyes and breathe as if you were sleeping so I won't talk to you. Back then I'd be quiet and try to sleep, but I'm not twenty-five anymore. You don't have to keep your eyes closed. I'm not going to ask you for any explanations.' She searches out my face in the darkness, touches my hair, my lips, with those hands of categorical sweetness that recognize my skin as if more than ten years hadn't passed since they touched me the last time, as if it were April 1937 and I had just opened the letter in which Manuel and Mariana invited me or invited us to their wedding in Magina in twenty days' time. I hear the springs in the bed and feel next to me the weight of her body, her hips, now broad and solemn, the unfamiliar perfume and the slide of the silk blouse against her skin and of the stockings she folds down over her thighs, her knees, as if tearing at the silk, the long white body I haven't looked at yet that trembles when it joins mine, when it rises up over me, the blonde hair spread out over bare shoulders, the bitter, tenacious belly and the open thighs that grasp my waist as I turn over and raise my eyes to look at her and hers close in a gesture of obstinate sorrow. She comes down now, and her hair falls over her forehead and covers her lips, she moves away my hands that enclosed without emotion the restlessness of her breasts and she withdraws and comes down until she bites me on the neck, until she sinks into my groin as she pulls away the rough cloth of my trousers and takes between her fingers and shakes and demands what she was looking for, what grows and affirms itself between her lips as far from me as the coldness of the moon and abruptly spills out in a mediocre death rattle after which there isn't anything, not even the avid desperation with which she licks and swallows and lifts up her hair, wiping her mouth, not looking at me, looking at the open window or the whitewash of the wall behind the bars of the bed. What was I going to say to her, what lie, what caress was I going to attempt when she fell back beside me and lay there quivering, when she drew up a sheet to cover her thighs and buried her face in the pillow as if it were the foul matter of solitude and silence, as if searching there as she bit into it for a weapon against tears. It was the same darkness and the same heavy silence between us, poisoned by guilt and involuntary, thorough cruelty and words unspoken, abdication into wakefulness, the torment of two bodies entwined between the same sheets and two minds as secretly divided as if they belonged to another woman and another man who never had met, who were attempting, impossibly, to sleep at the same time in two hotels at opposite ends of the earth. I watched her dress from my corner of cold shame and semidarkness just as I had witnessed her caresses, and when she adjusted her stockings and lowered her skirt, she turned her face illuminated by the end of her cigarette toward me, and she no longer seemed the same woman who a few minutes earlier had trembled humiliated and naked against my body, as if when she dressed she had recovered her pride and the serene possibility of contempt. It was then and not the next night that she said good-bye to me. Do you know what she said to me? Do you know what she had been waiting ten years to say to me? 'The only thing I've never accepted is your leaving me for a woman who was worth less than either one of us.' That was exactly what she said to me, and worst of all is that she probably was right, because Beatriz was never wrong. She was lucidity in the same way that Mariana had been the simulacrum of mystery, but in those years when I met her and fell in love with her — I'm speaking of Mari ana — I was like you: I preferred mystery even at the cost of deception, and I thought literature wasn't for illuminating the dark part of things but for supplanting them. Perhaps that was why I never could write a single one of the pages I imagined and needed as urgently as one requires air. Haven't you read my real writing from those years in Manuel's library? I was always the exact and somewhat delayed symbol of any manifesto published in Madrid, I even wrote one, in '29 or '30, with Orlando and Buñuel, but it never was published. It was called the Abyssist Manifesto, because we wanted to destroy the deception of surrealism, and we proclaimed something and gave it the name of the Abyss. 'The limit,' said Orlando, drunk, as he wrote on a napkin in a café, Vertigo, blindness, suicide from the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper in New York,' but when Buñuel, who was going to place our manifesto in La Gaceta Literaria, found out that Orlando preferred men to women, he wrote me a letter warning me about what he called the perfidy of faggots and didn't want anything more to do with the Abyss. I was the most radical of all the surrealists, but hardly anybody knew it; I published a story entitled 'The Outrageous Aviator' in the Revista de Occidente, and before that issue appeared, I was sure I'd be famous at last, but when it came out it was as if everybody had stopped reading the Revista de Occidente at the same time. I carried it under my arm to all the cafés, and nobody said anything to me, as if my story and I had become invisible. But I wasn't worse than any of the others: I was exactly like them, decipherable in what they wrote or said, more discreet perhaps, or more cowardly, or poorer, or more unfortunate, because I continued to write and was publishing articles in El Sol and they asked me for poems for provincial magazines, and when Alberti and Maria Teresa León founded Octubre, they asked me to write about film, but invisibility was like an attribute of my devotion to literature, like a warning to my pride that I was writing in air and wouldn't be anything until I locked myself behind stone walls to start a book, and all I knew about it was that it would be dazzling and unique and as necessary as those books from the past without which one cannot imagine the world. But it was always necessary to write an article in order to go on living or simply to see my name in the pages of a magazine; I always had to attend a meeting or an assembly about something and inevitably postpone until tomorrow or ten days from now the beginning of real literature and real life, and suddenly we were in the war and there was no time or moral justification left for anything that wasn't the methodical manufacture of ballads against Fascism and theater pieces that I sometimes saw produced at the front with a feeling of shame and fraud as intense and unspeakable then as what I felt when I saw myself dressed in a blue coverall among the militias, among those men who would remain there when we had left again for Madrid with our vans and loudspeakers and uniforms for pretending that we too were fighting in the war, that truth and immediate victory were as certain as the spirit of our verses or the anthems we sang at the end when we raised our fists on the wooden platform. But perhaps imposture and error were not in others but in me, in that part of myself that could not completely believe or accept anything too evident, anything that demanded faith and generosity and closed eyes. That night, before she left, Beatriz said I never had believed in the Republic or in Communism, that I hadn't betrayed anything because there never was anything I was loyal to, that if in the summer of'37 I enlisted as a soldier in the army, leaving my position at the Ministry of Propaganda, it wasn't to fight the Fascists with weapons but to find the death I didn't have the courage to give myself. She did believe, like Manuel, who died expecting the proclamation of the Third Republic. She had inflexible discernment and had drawn a line as firm as her moral integrity through everything. On one side, her love for me and her loyalty to the Communist Party. On the other, the rest of the world. Don't think I'm mocking them: I've spent my life admiring their faith and knowing it was their goodness that made me guilty. Even Orlando was capable of certainties that didn't move me, though at times I supported him in them, in the same way I got drunk with him and admired his pronouncements about painting and then returned at dawn to my house thinking, as soon as I was alone, when the cold air gave me back some distance from his words and my own actions, that tonight, as on all other nights, I had wasted an absurd amount of time. Orlando believed as if it were an article of faith that genius was inseparable from the systematic cultivation of any excess. To console himself for not having been Rimbaud at the age of sixteen, when he went to Mass every day and wasn't named Orlando yet, he wanted to be Verlaine, Van Gogh, Gauguin, the savage, the accursed, the he-goat, the seer. But if he painted when he was drunk, he produced nothing but mediocre canvases, and the great love of his life, the fruit of the audacity that according to him I never would have if I didn't go down to hell, was a crude teenager who left him dying of despair when he went off with another man who probably paid him more. I saw him almost at the end of the war, when I went back to Madrid. He was very fat and had decayed teeth and laughed when he told me about the tricks he had used to be declared unfit when his age group was mobilized, mocking me and the uniform I wore, as if the war and the cold that winter and our inevitable defeat were deceptions in which only he had not been caught. 'My dear Solana, you still have that serious gaze, that air of rectitude. The world is collapsing like the walls of Jericho, but you're still thinking about writing a book. Look at me: I'm tired, I'm sick, I'm happy, I've saved myself from mediocrity, I've renounced painting. Death itself is the only work worthy of an artist. Remember what we were saying ten or twelve years ago: to go on writing or painting in the age of the movies is like insisting on perfecting the stagecoach when propeller planes already exist. Propeller, do you remember? We liked that word so much. It was like the name of an Ultraist goddess.' But I could write that book, you're thinking, and it doesn't matter to you if it was scattered and burned and I was the only one who had seen it complete. A book exists even if no one reads it, the perfection of a statue or a painting endures when the lights have been turned off and no one is left in the museum, and a headless marble torso restores to the world the untouched beauty of an Aphrodite buried for two thousand years. But that book you were looking for and thought you had found never was written, or you've written it yourself since you came to Mágina, from the night Inés heard you ask about Jacinto Solana until this afternoon. Right now your disillusionment and your astonishment keep writing what I didn't write, separating unwritten pages. Do you know the impossibility of writing? Not the clumsiness, or the slowness, or the hours wasted searching for a single word that may be hidden under the others, under that white fissure in the paper, under another word that supplants it or denies it and must be erased in order to write in its place the real, the necessary, the only word. Not the effort of searching for the correct adjective, or a rhythm that is at once more fluid and more secret. I'm speaking about an interminable paralysis like that of the wounded man who after a long period of immobility wants to use his hands again or his legs and cannot manage to direct his steps or bring his fingers together with the precision needed to pick up a pencil or lift a spoon up to his mouth. Haven't you dreamed that you want to run and you sink into the ground and open your mouth to speak and can't find the air or curve your lips to form a single word? It never was easy for me to write, or maybe only until I was seventeen or eighteen years old, before I went to Madrid, when I wrote, moved by despair and innocence, in something like a state of automatic grace that came over me as soon as I touched pen and paper, without the intercession of anything or anybody. Friendship, rage against my fate, the tedium and humiliation of work never mattered to me, because I didn't allow them to interfere with my life. It was later that I degraded myself, but that part of the story doesn't matter. It's enough for you to know that until June 6, 1947, at dawn, I was a ruined rough draft of everything I had wanted to be when I was fourteen, of all the personages I invented to elude the only one to which I was condemned, of all the books Manuel lent me and that I read at night without my father knowing. The war and prison helped me learn I couldn't be a hero or even a victim resigned to his misfortune. But in the six months I spent shut up in Manuel's house and the Island of Cuba, I discovered I wasn't a writer either. I would look at the recently oiled typewriter, the shiny Underwood that Manuel bought so I could write, the stacked blank sheets, the pen, the inkwell, the solid, clean desk in front of the circular windows, and all those things he had gathered there as if he had guessed in detail that the oldest desire of my hands was for the instruments of an unknown science. I touched the typewriter, rolled in a sheet of paper, and sat looking at it hypnotized by its empty space. I filled the pen and wrote my name or the title of my book and no more words flowed from it. The act of writing was as necessary and impossible as breathing for a drowning man. I only smoked, looking at the rectangle of paper or the plaza and the roofs of Màgina, I only smoked and drank and remained interminably immobile, with the story I couldn't write oppressing me entire and intact in my imagination like a treasure next to which I was dying of powerlessness and hunger. Sometimes, impelled by alcohol, I wrote all night, thinking that at last the spell had been broken, knowing, as I wrote, that the fervor was false, that when I woke the next morning I would despise what I had written like the memory of a turbid drunkenness. A man isn't always responsible for the first episodes of his failure, but he is for the architecture of the last circle of hell. Instead of giving up and escaping from the book and that house and Màgina, I persisted in the torment until I transformed it into the habit of a degradation that didn't even have the generosity or excuse of madness. Yesterday, when you and Inés went down to the Island ol Cuba, Frasco told you that the Civil Guard had burned all my papers. But most of those burned sheets had no writing on them, and it was I who set them on fire a few minutes before they came. As I burned all the rough drafts and all the blank sheets to deny myself the possibility of continuing to pretend to myself that I was writing a book, it was as if Beatriz were still looking at me the way she looked at me when she got up from the bed, as if the car hadn't started yet on the esplanade of the country house and she was still making a brief gesture of farewell behind the window and on the other side of the death they were carrying with them, in the back seat, in the darkness where the wounded man shook with fever, his eyes closed. There was never a mask that could defend me from that look: she was in front of me, unmoving, not vengeful, serene, in front of the vain gesture of renouncing and burning to which I devoted myself as if to a minor suicide, which instead of saving me from indignity tied me to it at the end of my life. I heard the first shots, and before I turned out the light and looked for my pistol under the pillow, I rushed to set fire to the papers that hadn't burned yet, and I ground my foot into the ashes with the same fury I would have used to grind my foot into the pieces of a broken mirror that kept reflecting me. There was, of course, no blue notebook, no manuscripts I had forgotten in Manuel's house before I went to the Island of Cuba. There was nothing but the ashes of blank pages and a besieged and cowardly man who didn't have the time or the courage to get off a single shot. Literature did not absolve me, as you supposed, as I helped you just a little to think. The loss of my life and my name absolved me, because waking in the house where they hid me was like coming back from the dead, and when you come back you acquire the privilege of being another man or of being no one forever, which is what I chose. Don't ask me what the years were like that I spent hidden in that room in the mill, because I don't know how to remember the way one remembers and measures the time you belong to, the time of the living. There's a single static image, of immobility and semidarkness, the man who came in to see me at night and talked to me about my father, and the woman who always brought me cups of very hot broth and came in without making noise so as not to wake me. She left soon after her daughter, Ines, was born, I suppose because she was ashamed to have had the baby with a man we never knew, and at first she wrote and sent money for the girl, but then the letters stopped coming and the grandfather sold the mill and we came to Magina, to this house, and we took Inés to that nuns' orphanage. But those details shouldn't matter to you, you came here to look for a book and a mystery and the biography of a hero. Don't look at me like that, don't think that for all this time I've been mocking your innocence and your desire to know. I invented the game, but you have been my accessory. It was you who demanded a crime that would resemble the ones in literature and an unknown or unjustly forgotten writer with the prestige of political persecution and the memorable, accursed work, damned, dispersed, exhumed by you after twenty years. I hated you only at first, when Inés came every night and told me you were asking questions about me and writing a book and looking in the library for the magazines in which I published before the war. You came to remind me that I'd had a name and a life that weren't extirpated from the world, to tell me hatefully to arise and walk with the sole, base intention of writing a doctoral dissertation about me. But on one of those sleepless night when I cursed you and asked myself why you had to come here, I conceived of the game, as if the plot of a book had suddenly occurred to me. Let's build him the labyrinth he wants, I thought, let's give him not the truth but what he supposes happened and the steps that will allow him to find the novel and discover the crime. It was enough to send Inés to a printshop to buy a tablet and a pack of paper that were old enough, and write on them in ink diluted with water, and have you find them later in appropriate places, in the marriage bedroom, in the lining of the jacket that Frasco keeps in a trunk at the country house. It was enough to add to the written words a few objects to make them more real, the cartridge, my pen, the letter that you're surely still carrying in your jacket pocket. It's true: I couldn't have invented it all, and other voices that weren't always mine have guided you. I didn't invent Mariana's death in the pigeon loft or Utrera's guilt, and the letter you found this afternoon through the mediation of Ines wasn't falsified by me either, but it's possible that I wasn't the one who found the cartridge in the pigeon loft or that it didn't come from Utrera's pistol, or that the way I discovered the murderer wasn't as exciting and literary as the one I suggested to you. Reality, like the police, tends to clarify crimes with the basest procedures that cannot matter to you or me tonight, because they're almost never useful for literature. And perhaps the history you've found is only one among several possibilities. Perhaps there were other manuscripts in the house or at the Island of Cuba, and chance kept you from finding them. It doesn't matter if a story is true or false, it only matters if you know how to tell it. If you prefer, think that this moment doesn't exist, that you didn't see me this afternoon in the cemetery or that I was nothing more than an old cripple you saw looking at a grave and then forgot like a face that passes you on the street. Now you're the owner of the book and I'm your character, Minaya. I've obeyed you too."

3

I COUNT THE CAPSULES like last coins, resonant in the glass bottle, secretive with silence and death against the palate and in the stomach, and now the fragrance of the night and Minayas words and his solitary figure on the platform dissolve in the heavy presentiment of sleep, like Inés' eyes unclouded by tears when she leaned over me to kiss me so infinitely on the mouth and pull the blanket up to my chin, then plumping the pillow under my neck as if tonight were the same as every other night and tomorrow there would be a waking assisted by her tenderness, by the warmth and softness of her bare thighs beneath the sheets and the cup of coffee on the night table, next to the ashtray and the bottles of medicine. How strange now, when I'm alone, to remember my voice, the irony, Minayas bewilderment, his presence in this very room, on that empty chair, the passion with which he continued asking questions and wanting to know beyond knowledge and disillusionment, in spite of them, and jealousy, and that glance he directed at Inés when she came to pour me a glass of wine and left her index finger on my lips for a moment, as if asking me for silence or invoking in front of him a secret complicity that connects her only to me. He asked until the end, obsessive, immune to irony and play, filling my glass when it was empty as if to bring on a confession and forgetting about his on the night table, then getting up, when I asked him to leave and to take Ines with him, with the abrupt gesture of someone emerging from water, facing her, waiting for a movement or a sign from her eyes, more fixed than ever on the cloth she was embroidering, silent and very tall, devastated by love, by fear of losing her, urged on by the thought of the train he is supposed to take tonight and by the bell striking the hour in the Plaza of General Orduna, counting the strokes in silence as I now count the last capsules I've poured into the palm of my hand while my sleepiness grows and reaches my limbs like a flood of sand. "You've written the book," I told him, "for a few days you returned me to life and literature, but you may not be able to measure my gratitude and affection, which are greater than my irony. Because you are the main character and the deepest mystery in the novel that did not have to be written in order to exist. You, who didn't know that time, who had the right to be lacking in memory, who first opened your eyes when the war was over and all of us had been condemned for some years to shame and death, exiled, buried, imprisoned in jails or in the habit of fear. You love literature as we are not even permitted to love it in adolescence, you search for me, for Mariana, for the Manuel of those years as if we weren't shadows but creatures truer and more alive than you. But it's in your imagination where we were born again, much better than we actually were, more loyal, better looking, free of cowardice and truth. Leave now, and take Ines with you. She's over eighteen and it's unfair for her intelligence and body to remain buried here, next to a dead man who never finishes dying, in that house where they'll conspire to humiliate her now that Manuel's gone, if they haven't already decided to throw her out. I've taught her everything I remembered or knew. I've tried to educate her as I educated myself, in Manuel's library. She speaks excellent French and has read more books than you can imagine. With your help she can study in Madrid and find a good job. Take her with you. Tonight, right now." He said nothing, standing against the door, vertical and oblique because of a ceiling as low as the shadow of a light resting on the floor, a stranger, very tall, with his melancholy formal suit and mourning tie, just as he is now, I suppose, while he waits on the platform and doesn't know that Inés is going up to the station along the streets of Màgina, past the corners of closed windows with single lightbulbs under the eaves, at the boundary of dark empty fields where the long walls of the cemetery and the station rise up, in another world. He saw her get up and come toward the bed, brushing him with her perfume and her will to defiance, not looking at him, refusing to acknowledge that he was here, that he existed like us and it was possible to choose him. "I don't want to go," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, smoothing my hair, taking from my hand the glass of wine that was trembling, curled up against my chest as in the distant days when she was afraid of water and darkness and would lie down with me asking me to tell her again the story of the phantom ship as motionless as stone in the middle of the valley of the Guadalquivir whose whistle we could hear from the bedroom in the mill. He, Minaya, continued in front of us, like a guest who has not yet accepted the obligation to leave, but Inés had already excluded him from her tenderness and from the world and embraced me as if we were alone, telling me she would never leave, and kissed me as she curved her lips to say no and she kept saying no with her eyes and her hands and her entire body that affirmed her will to remain here despite my surrender or indolence, fiercely embracing my neck, as if she were defending me, as if when she turned her back on Minaya and the future, she had expelled them from us. She wasn't a shade, she was the only thing that never had contained even the slightest hunger for lies or guilt, the only body undoubtedly and as precisely modeled for happiness as a god's desire and when I embraced it and knew I was tasting its final caresses I wasn't moved by repentance or the sorrow of saying good-bye but by a sweetness very similar to gratitude for the only gift no one had been able to strip from me and that will not be squandered by oblivion. She said no to Minaya, who was no longer in the room, who had gone out in silence and returned to look at us from the hall as if he were about to leave for an exile longer than his own life, she said she would always stay with me and, standing with the reckless determination to choose loyalty of those adolescents who refuse to grow older and be despicable, she closed the door and leaned against it as if to stop anyone or anything from coming in to separate us, and she said no again and kneeled beside me, wanting to stop my words when she saw the bottles of capsules for insomnia, and knew why she had to leave tonight. Now I see her walking toward the station with a clarity firmer than any memory and I see her eyes that have recognized Minaya and rest on him from a distance as serenely as they looked at me when she understood that she could not undo my purpose and that when she left she would fulfill the final, delicate, necessary tribute to our mutual loyalty. When I was young I cursed myself for not being able to remember the faces of the women I loved. Now the darkness to which I am descending as if abandoning myself again to the warm water of that river from which I perhaps never returned, or to sleep beneath the sheets of a wintry bed, is the space of clear-sightedness in my memory that I don't want to and can't distinguish from divination. I see Inés walking alone on the avenue of linden trees, and I know there is not an instant in my life when the exact shape of her mouth or the precise tonality of her eyes will stop being as present in me as the scent of her body that is still in the blouse she left on the bed and that I touch and smooth as if I were caressing the profile of her absence. I see Minaya, I immobilize him, I imagine him, I impose on him minute gestures of waiting and solitude, I want him to think that now too, when he is escaping, he obeys me, I want him not to look up yet at the entrance to the station, and to curse me in a low voice and swear that as soon as he arrives in Madrid and breaks the fabric of my curse, he'll burn the manuscripts and the blue notebook and renounce Magina and Inés, I want him to know that I am imagining him and to hear my voice like the beat of his own blood and consciousness, and when he sees Ines standing under the large yellow clock, it will take him an instant to realize she is not another illusion constructed by his desire and despair, beatus ille.

Granada and Ubeda,

May 1983-May 1985