Wide towers crowned with brambles, made huge by solitude and darkness, like the Cyclops whose single eye is the clock that never sleeps, a lookout that informs all those condemned to ceaseless lucidity and unites them in a dark fraternity. The sick undermined by pain, those in love who do not sleep in order not to abandon a shared memory, killers who dream about or remember a crime, lovers who have left the bed where another body sleeps and smoke naked beside the curtains trembling in the night breeze. But this may be the final insomnia of all, the one that flows into death, and enduring it is like walking at night along the last street in a city without lights and suddenly discovering that you've reached the flat wasteland beyond the houses.
The bottles are lined up on the night table, within reach, as are the glass of water, the cigarettes, the capsules that are pink and white, blue and white, blue and yellow: delicate pastel tones for administering the minimal methodical death each of them contains. Diluted blues, yellows, pinks, like the ones in Orlando's last sketches, his watercolors of Magina seen from the south, from the esplanade of the Island of Cuba, in which the sensation of distance — a long profile of roofs and towers and white houses spread out across the top of the hill toward which the gray lines of olive trees and the pale green of wheat fields ascend — was also an indication of its distance in time, for they weren't painted on the eve of the wedding but during the last winter of the war in a house in Madrid, half destroyed by bombs, in whose hallways and rooms with their boarded-up windows no light like the one Orlando had seen in Magina in the spring of 1937 ever penetrated.
At that time the Plaza of General Orduna had lost not only the bronze statue but also the name written on the stone tablets at the corners. For three years, and until the day the general returned from the garbage dump swaying like an intrepid drunken charioteer on the back of a truck and watched over by a double row of Civil Guard and Moorish soldiers on horseback, it was called the Plaza of the Republic, but no one ever used that name to refer to it, and even less the name of General Orduña. It was, for the inhabitants of Mágina, the old plaza or simply the Plaza, and the statue of the general belonged to it because it had entered the natural order of things, like the clock tower and the gray pigeons and the arcades where men gathered on rainy winter mornings or at dusk on Sundays with their hands in the pockets of their wide dark suits, their curly hair damp with pomade, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The large taxis as black as funeral carriages are lined up beneath the trees on one side of the central gazebo, facing the clock tower and the police station. The cab drivers talk or smoke, leaning against the rounded hoods, as if taking refuge in tedium under the protection of the statue of the general who ignores them, standing quiet and alert in the center of the plaza. "One of the most distinguished sons of Mágina, from our family, I think," Minaya remembers his father saying, leading him by the hand on any forgotten Sunday, after eleven o'clock Mass at El Salvador and a visit to the confectioners, where with a magnanimous gesture he gave him a coin so he could take a candy out of the great glass ball that gleamed in the semidarkness, spotted with light from the street. A flock of pigeons takes flight abruptly at Minaya's feet and settles on the head and shoulders of the general, and one of them pecks at the hole that a vengeful, precise bullet opened in his left eye. "To the most excellent Señor Don Juan Manuel Orduña y León de Salazar, hero of the Ixdain Beach, Mágina, in gratitude, MCMXXV," his father would read aloud, and Minaya recalls that it frightened him to contemplate the height of the statue and the holes made by bullets that had penetrated his head and chest and gave him the appearance of the living dead in horror movies. Rigid, like them, invulnerable to gun shots, and looking out with a single eye no more obstinate and fearsome than the other empty socket, the general seemed to sway back and forth on his marble base and his entire golem's bulk weighed on Minaya. In his right hand he holds a pair of bronze binoculars, and in his left, adhering to the high leg of the boots with spurs, a whip or saber that he is about to raise. Indifferent to pigeons and oblivion, the general has his one eye fixed on the south, on the straight street that descends from the plaza, hugging the ruins of the wall, to the embankments of the spillways and the farms and the distant blue of Sierra Mágina, as if there, on the elevated horizon that on rainy days displays the purple mist of Velázquez' Guadarrama, he caught a glimpse of a military objective that was unreachable now, a column of white smoke that he will decipher with the binoculars before raising the whip or saber and shouting a bold, heroic order.
"Those are bullet holes, Son," said his father, solemn and pedagogical. "Since they couldn't shoot General Orduña, because he was already dead, those imbeciles shot the statue."
They arrived in a ragged formation of blue coveralls and espadrilles, unbuttoned tunics over white shirts, military trousers held up by a rope around the waist and militia caps and helmets tilted or fallen over the back of their necks. They carried old muskets from the Cuban war and Mausers stolen during an attack on the barracks of the Civil Guard, and some, especially the women, brandished no weapons other than their raised fists and their voices repeating an Anarchist anthem. Someone shouted for silence and the best-armed men lined up in front of the statue, aiming their muskets at his face. A silence like that of an execution had fallen over the entire plaza and over the crowd waiting in the arcade. The first shot hit General Orduña in the forehead, and the explosion frightened away the pigeons, which flew in terror up to the eaves and went astray in the air each time a volley was discharged that was greeted by the crowd with a vast, single shout. When the guns were silent, a man carrying a long hemp rope made his way through the mass of people and threw an accurate noose over the statue's head that had been punctured nine times, calling for the help of the others who placed their guns across their backs and joined in his effort to bring down the general's likeness. With the rope tense and the harsh knot closed around the hollow torso that resonated like a great wounded bell when it was penetrated by the bullets, General Orduna rocked very slowly, still vertical and not entirely humiliated, and then it moved back and forth and finally fell with a bronze clamor, pulling down in its slow fall the marble pedestal that splintered on the flagstones of the plaza. They adjusted the slipknot around the neck of the statue and dragged it bouncing on the paving stones of the city until they threw it into the chasm of the garbage dump. Three years later, a municipal crew spent an entire week looking for it in the trash and debris, and before they raised General Orduna onto a new base, men in white coats who had come from Madrid — in Magina they were immediately called statue doctors — repaired the dents and cleaned the bronze, but no one thought of covering the holes scattered like scars over the forehead, eyes, firm mouth, haughty neck, and the chest armor-plated in a general's medals. On the same day his statue was erected again on the base that had been empty for three years, the bells of the clock on the tower sounded again, because the men who pulled down the general had also shot at the white sphere, whose motionless hands marked the exact moment the statue fell and Magina entered the exalted and voracious time of the war.