"Now I go into my workshop, and it seems a lie that any of it happened. They gave me a medal and a certificate, and the ABC published my picture in the photogravure section. I should have left Magina then, when there was still time, just like your father did. We're isolated from everything here. We turn into statues."
He, who had been in Paris, who had seen the marbles of Michelangelo and Bernini in Rome, who had been somebody and succumbed to the conspiracy of envy, of dubious enemies established in Madrid, he said, a victim now, a melancholy artist conquered by the world's ingratitude. The Monument to the Fallen in Magina was his last official commission, and since 1959 he had not carved another Holy Week image. "And it isn't that tastes have changed," he would say to whomever wanted to listen, sitting on the divan in a shadowy cafe where he spent the afternoons with a snifter of brandy and a glass of water, "they've simply become depraved, those plastic-looking Christs, those elongated Virgins with girls' faces that look like something Protestant, or Cubist." At first light he would go down to the immense workshop, which had first been a stable, when the house was built, and then a carriage-house where Manuel's father kept the trophies of his mad passion for cars, and there he would spend the morning, not doing anything, perhaps sketching models of statues that were impossible now, carving Romanesque saints, cheap falsifica-tions that had no future, looking at the vast empty space.
"I came to Magina on July 5, 1936. I had spent a month in France and Italy, and before returning to Granada, it occurred to me to visit Manuel. We had met when he was studying law, and we continued corresponding after he returned to Magina, when his father died. I was here a little more than a week, and when I was leaving, when I was saying good-bye to Manuel and his mother, Amalia came out of the kitchen and told us she had heard on the radio that the garrison in Granada had sided with the rebels. How can you go now, Manuel said, wait a while and see if the situation clarifies. And so I came to spend a few days and stayed for thirty-three years."
He was also ready to leave in 1939, but he no longer had anywhere to go, because his mother had died during the war, or at least that's what he told Manuel to justify remaining in the city and in his house. He packed his suitcase then, too, and consulted the schedules of the trains that stopped in Mágina, but this time he, who for three years had wanted the victory of those who won, knew he was probably contaminated not by the defeat of the Republic or by Manuel, who would very soon be dragged from his invalids bed to prolong his dying for six months in the Mágina prison, but by a future, his, the one he had imagined in Rome and in Paris and in the Granada discussions of his youth, definitively upended or broken in the bitter spring of 1939, wiped out, like his right to dignity and to the skill of his hands, by three years of waiting and silence, both less brutal than guilt. With his hands in his trouser pockets and his hat tilted over his face in an expression of petulance that he would improve on years later and that back then only he was capable of admiring, he would wander through the cafés looking for someone who could treat him to a drink or a cigarette, or he would spend the slow afternoons strolling through the Plaza of General Orduña, as if waiting for something, among the gray men in groups who were waiting just like him, with their hands in their pockets and their eyes fixed on the clock in the tower or on the profile of the general whose statue had been rescued from the garbage dump where it had been thrown in the summer of '36 and raised again in the middle of the plaza on a pedestal of martial allegories. He visited offices, unsuccessfully laying claim to old loyalties from long before the war, using up the hours of tedium and despair until nightfall, when the light in the clock on the tower was lit, and then, when it was too late to return to the house and pick up his suitcase and go to the station before the train arrived that would take him back to a city where no one was waiting for him, he walked slowly down the narrow lanes and swore to himself that tonight he'd have the courage to ask Manuel for the exact amount he needed to buy the ticket. He never managed to do it. Six months after the victorious troops entered Mágina, a general competition was announced to replace the image of Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, an apocryphal work by Gregorio Fernández, which had been publicly profaned and burned in July '36.
"Never, never, even if I lived a hundred years, could I repay the debt I owe your Uncle Manuel, my boy. Although he knew I admired the Movement, he allowed me to live in this house throughout the war and then, when I won that competition and received a commission for my first piece of scuplture, he offered me the carriage house to set up my workshop, because I didn't have enough to even rent a room. It's true I interceded for him when things became difficult, but that doesn't repay him. I owe everything I am to his generosity back then."
Because his greatest pride wasn't official glory or the medal or the yellowed clippings he kept as relics in a box in his workroom, but his undeniable loyalty to a friend, to the custom of gratitude, to this house. He spoke to Minaya about Manuel's family as if it were his own, and he knew by heart the names and ranks of the gentlemen depicted in the indistinct portraits in the gallery and in the photo albums that only he bothered to exhume from the library shelves, showing Minaya solemn ancestors he had never heard of, because the oldest face he could recognize belonged to his grandmother Cristina.
"You should have known Doña Elvira when I met her. She was a lady, my friend, as tall as Manuel, and so elegant, a true aristocrat. The death of her husband was a terrible blow, but she would have overcome that if it hadn't been for the things that happened later. I can still see her on the day Manuel came home from the hospital, re-covering from that serious wound and ready to marry Mariana. Because, as she said, it was one thing for her son to be for the Republic, and even a little bit of a Socialist, and quite another to see him married to that woman after dropping his lifelong sweetheart. I remember Doña Elvira standing at the door of the library, dressed in mourning, and when Mariana offered her hand she turned and withdrew to her rooms without saying a single word."