Her eyes wide open, Minaya thought, her lips resolute and her eyes flashing and fixed on the offense as they would remain afterward, unmoving, in the time without hours of the wedding photograph, in the blind persistence of the things she looked at and held in her hands and brushed with her body and the air where her perfume resided. It was the wine, he suspected when he stood and shook Utreras hand again, which remained flaccid and dead in his as the old man reiterated his pleasure at having met him and begged his pardon and invited him to visit his studio any time, it was the wine and his fatigue from the train and his lethargy after the bath and everything muffled or blurred by the strangeness of the house, but as he climbed the stairs and turned the shadowy corners of the gallery, he suddenly felt the physical certainty that Jacinto Solana, the name written at the bottom of the poems he had in his room, had actually existed and breathed the same air and walked on the same tiles he was walking on now knowing as if in a dream that after a few steps he would come to the parlor where Marianas eyes had been waiting since long before he was born to look at him exactly as they had looked at Solana and the world in 1937. He smoked as he lay on the bed, looking up at a ceiling with painted wreaths that no longer resembled any memory, and then, in the empty exaltation of alcohol and insomnia, he opened the shutters to the balcony and continued smoking with his elbows resting on the marble balustrade, facing the tops of the acacias and the tile roofs and the towers of Mágina submerged in the damp darkness, in the inviting, frightening night that always receives travelers in strange cities. He heard the street door closing with a heavy resonance, and after a moment, when it struck eleven in the Plaza of General Orduna, in the library, in the parlor, he saw Inés passing under the acacias and disappearing into the shadows of a lane, her hair loose and her walk more energetic than the one she used in the house, her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of a coat too short for the raw January night.
5
PERHAPS NOW, IN THE STATION, when he remembers and denies and wants to rein in his will and desire so that they offer him only the necessary future of desertion, departure and the train and eves vengefully closed, he will want to comprehend the length of time he has spent in Màgina and the order in which things happened, and he will discover he doesn't know or can't know that the precise time of calendars doesn't concur with that of his memory, that two months and thirty years and several lifetimes have gone by without his being able to assign them connections of succession or cause. Now he remembers and is astonished by the speed with which the house took hold of his actions of a new arrival and turned them into habits, and he doesn't know precisely the day he desired Inés for the first time or when he was irremediably trapped by the biography of Jacinto Solana, even before finding his hidden manuscripts and visiting the Island of Cuba and the landscape where they killed him and the plaza where he was born and lived until he was twenty. He doesn't remember dates, only sensations as extensively modulated as musical passages, habits of tranquility sustained in the restlessness of waiting for Inés or stealing after midnight into rooms where he searched for clues and manuscripts fearing he would be caught.
Apart from the house and the present into which he had settled like someone who locks a room from the inside to sit quietly by the fire and doesn't feel the cold or hear the rain or the clock striking the hours, and absorbed in reading a book, the city almost didn't exist, and Madrid even less, or the mediocre past. When he arrived he had crossed the city without recognizing it through the taxi windows, first the empty lots around the station, and the avenue of linden trees with bare branches raised against a vast gray sky that clung like mist to the edge of the plain where church towers were outlined. But that wasn't the city he remembered, and it wasn't the winter light that belonged to it but the exalted light on whitewashed walls and thresh-holds of sand-colored stone, the one that flowed out of the tunnel of darkness at entrances and gathered in pools like shaded lagoons at the rear, in the vine-arbored courtyards of Magina, when in the first morning hour, a woman, his mother, opened the door and all the windows and swept the pavement then sprinkled it with water until it gave off the odor of damp cobblestones and wet earth after a storm. Which was why he couldn't recognize the city when he arrived and took so long to walk its streets like a stranger, because Magina, on winter afternoons, becomes a Castilian city of closed shutters and gloomy shops with polished wood counters and faded mannequins in the display windows, a city of cheerless doorways and plazas that are too large and empty where the statues endure winter alone and the churches seem like tall ships run aground. His light was of a different sort, golden, cold, blue, stretching from the ramparts of the city wall in an undulating descent of orchards and curved irrigation ditches and small white houses among the pomegranate trees, extending in the south to the endless olive groves and blue or violet fertile lowlands of the Guadalquivir, and that landscape was the one he would recognize later in the manuscripts of Jacinto Solana, flat as the world in ancient maps and limited by the outline of the sierra beyond which it was impossible that anything else existed. And he, Solana, had also looked as a child at that place of unlimited light and returned there to die, the open streets of Magina that looked as if they would end at the sea and ramparts like steep balconies or high crows nests from which he looked out on all the clarity of a world unviolated except by the avidity of his eyes and the fables in his imagination.
"His father had a farm," Manuel said. "It's abandoned now, but from the watchtower of the town wall you can see the house and cistern. Every afternoon when we left school, I went down with him and helped him load the produce onto their white mare, to carry it to market. Then we would ride across the city on the mare, but I got down a few streets before we reached here, because if my mother found out I had been with Solana, she would punish me and not let me go out on Sunday. My son, she would say, unloading fruit in the market, like a farmhand. But my father had a certain fondness for him, always somewhat distant, similar to how he would have viewed the child of one of his foremen who showed an aptitude for studying, and when Solana went to Madrid, he carried a letter of recommendation, written by my father, for the editor of El Debate, who had known him back when he was a member of parliament. 'I like that boy,' he would say when my mother wasn't around, 'he has ambition, and you can see in his eyes that he knows what he wants and is prepared to do anything to get it.' I've always suspected those words weren't so much praise for Solana as a reproach for me."
He doesn't know when that custom began either, because now it seems to him it lasted for many months or all his life, and that it's impossible Manuel is dead and won't converse with him again every afternoon in the library, when Ines would come in with the tray of coffee and they would smoke English cigarettes with their backs to the window where the light was dying until their only illumination came from the fireplace, interrupted at times by the arrival of Medina, who came to examine Manuel with his medical bag and useless prescriptions and to censure coffee and tobacco and the absurd habit of always talking about the dead, about Jacinto Solana, regarding whom he once told Minaya that he had been nothing but a timid adulterer, and then laughed with his chuckle of a libertine physician addicted to hygiene and what he called the physiology of love.
"I don't know if you realize it, young man, but your presence in this house is having an effect on your uncle as beneficial as a swim in the sea. In my capacity as physician allow me to entreat you not to leave yet. I look at Manuel and don't recognize him. On any afternoon he spends with you he talks more than he has talked to me in the past twenty years, which isn't all that meritorious, because you're young and educated and know how to listen, and I can almost never keep quiet. How's that book of yours on Solana coming along?"