Inés said it was as if Manuel had returned to his own house, as if when he saw it again he observed with astonishment and guilt the signs of the decay into which his neglect had plunged it. He reim-posed a fixed schedule for meals, took care of discussing the day's purchases with Amalia and Teresa, and even renewed the supplies of wine in the cellar, finding in these occupations that he had forgotten for so many years a pleasure that surprised even him. Punctually each morning, before withdrawing to the pigeon loft, he went down to have breakfast with his nephew, and from time to time their afternoon conversations were prolonged in slow walks along the watchtowers of the wall, where Manuel would point with his walking stick to the white road that led to Solana's fathers farm, the house with its collapsed roof, the cistern blocked by weeds. One day, as if he had guessed that his hospitality was turning into a debt for Minaya, he asked him not to leave yet, to help him organize the books in the library, left for thirty years to an abundant disorder, offering him a justification for remaining in the house that was in no way humiliating. He wouldn't need to abandon his dissertation on Solana, he said, he could work on it a few hours a day and then devote himself, perhaps in the afternoon, to creating a catalogue for the books and perhaps also for the furniture and valuable paintings that were now scattered in no order throughout the rooms and attics. "You'll be my librarian," he said, smiling, as if requesting a favor he wasn't sure would be granted, not daring yet to offer a salary, always afraid to offend. This work, whose proportions very soon revealed themselves as disheartening, had the virtue of calming Minaya in singular fashion because it offered him a new time limit so far off it no longer made him afraid to imagine his departure. At about ten in the morning he would go to the library and begin working with a silent, constant passion, nourished in equal measure by the solitude and stillness of the books and by the tight golden light that came in from the plaza, where there was always the sound of water ascending higher than the acacias and then spilling over the rim of the fountain. When his eyes grew tired of so much writing on file cards in a very small and voluntarily meticulous hand that had allowed him to discover the serene pleasures of calligraphy, Minaya put down the pen and lit a cigarette and sat looking at the white shutters on the windows, the squared, reduced landscape of the acacias and hedges where a feminine figure passed by who sometimes was Inés, back from her other life, ready to enter the library and roil with her perfume the peaceful smell of the books that Minaya tended to as a refuge so he could pretend he wasn't watching her.
From higher up, from the circular windows on the top floor, Jacinto Solana had contemplated the plaza in the winter of 1947, the night still as a well, the only light the insomniac lamp in the shelter Manuel had prepared for him and that wasn't enough for him to finish his book or escape the persecution of his executioners. Minaya saw the metal bed with the bare mattress, the desk by the window where the typewriter had been, the empty drawers that once held his pen and the sheets of paper, blank or written on in the same parsimonious, almost indecipherable hand that traced on the back of Mariana's picture the veiled, precise words, like an augury of his "Invitation." Beyond the circular windows and the shuttered balconies was the same city his eyes had seen and that had remained in his memory like a vengeful paradise during the last two years of the war and the eight years he spent in prison waiting first for death and then for a freedom so remote he could no longer imagine it. Magina, suspended high on the prow of a hill too far from the Guadalquivir, as beautiful as any of its marble statues, as the sand-colored caryatids with bare bosoms that on the facades of palaces hold up the coats-of-arms of those who left them to the city as a useless inheritance, undeserved and pagan. Dissolved in the city, contained within it like a narrow stream that flowed invisibly and almost never touched his consciousness completely, was Minaya's early life, but there was a fog-bound area beyond the final reaches of his memory that without a break was becoming confused with Jacinto Solana's. He sensed him in the house, just as he came to sense the proximity of Inés before his ears or eyes announced her, he surmised his attentive presence on the other side of things, witnessing everything with the same renegade or ironic indolence that was in his gaze on the morning the photograph in the library was taken. Because he lingered in the city and in the house and in the landscapes of roofs or blue hills that surrounded them, but above all in the library, in the dedications in the books he sent to Manuel from Madrid and that at times rose up before Minaya like a warning that he, Solana, was still there, not only in the memory or imagination of the living but also in the space and matter that had survived him, as enduring and faint as the fossilized trace of an animal or the leaf of a tree that no longer exist in the world.
"If you could have seen," Manuel said, "the expression in his eyes when he entered the library for the first time. My mother had gone to spend a few days at the Island of Cuba, and my father was in Madrid, at the Congress of Deputies, and for a week the entire house was ours. We were eleven or twelve years old, and Solana, when he walked into the courtyard, stood very still and silent, as if he were afraid to move forward. 'This is like a church,' he said, but in reality it wasn't the house that interested him but the place where the books came from that I would lend him behind my mother's back, and which he read with a speed that always bewildered me because he did it at night by the light of a candle when his parents had gone to bed. In his house there was only one book. I remember it was called Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, a serialized story in three volumes that Solana had read when he was ten and toward which he always felt a kind of gratitude. 'What else could I ever want than to write something like those two thousand pages of misfortunes?' he would say. He entered the library as if he were going into a cave filled with treasure, and he didn't dare touch the books, he only looked at them, or gently ran his hand over them as if he were stroking an animal."
Solana's tightened lips, his dark rage, his lucid, precocious hatred of the life that denied him that house and that library, his desire to rebel against everything and flee Magina and his father and the two hectares of land and the future in which his father wanted to confine him. It wasn't his love of books that made him clench his fists and wait in silence in the middle of the reception room that smelled of leather and polished wood, but his consciousness of the miserable poverty into which he had been born and the brute fatigue of the work to which he knew he was condemned. The books, like the opaque gleam of the furniture and the golden lamps and the white cap and starched apron of the woman who served them chocolate at teatime in large porcelain cups decorated with blue landscapes, were merely the measure or sign of his desire to flee in order to calculate at a distance his future revenge, longed for and planned out when he read in books about the return of the Count of Monte Cristo. Manuel, alarmed by his silence, suggested they go to the rooms upstairs, but at that moment Jacinto Solana had become a stranger. He ran up the stairs to induce him to follow, but from the gallery balustrade he saw that Jacinto Solana was looking at himself in the mirror on the first landing, distant from him and his voice and everything he so eagerly wanted to offer him in order not to lose the friendship he felt was in danger for the first time since they had met. Solana looked in the mirror at his shaved head and his hemp espadrilles and the gray jacket that had belonged to his father, signs of the degradation against which he could defend himself by imagining with obstinate fervor a future in which he would be a rich, mysterious traveler, implacable with his enemies, or a correspondent and a hero in a war from which he would return and humiliate at his feet all those who now conspired against his talent and his pride. Manuel did not see his tears before the mirror or hear his silence, but a half century later he still recalled the hostile resolve with which Jacinto Solana had said that some day the books he was going to write would be in the library too.