"THAT WAS THE FIRST THING he must have noticed when he returned to the city after ten years," Minaya thinks in the plaza and writes later that night in the notebook that Inés punctually opens and examines every morning when she comes in to clean his bedroom, "and what gave him the measure of their defeat and of his sentence, which had not ended when he left prison: not only the red and yellow flag that hung now from the balcony of the police station but also the restored statue and the clock that began to tell time again only when the city had been conquered by the fascists." Like Solana, imagining what he did or feared, he avoids the more traveled streets and goes down toward the southern wall along cobblestoned lanes and white walls that lead to intimate plazas with abandoned sixteenth-century palaces and tall poplars quivering with birds, to the hidden Plaza of San Lorenzo, where the house is located in which Jacinto Solana was born and lived and before whose door he stopped one dawn in January 1947. From the half-closed doors, from the open windows through which the music of a radio soap opera reaches the plaza, attentive women watch Minaya and question one another, pointing at the stranger, who stands beneath the poplars and looks at all the entrances one by one, as if he were searching for someone or had lost his way in the city. That's how they looked at Solana when he arrived there, and perhaps they didn't recognize him because he was ill and had aged and ten years had passed since the last time they had seen him in Magina. And so, with a slow step and bowed head, he came to his father's house and saw the balconies and closed door that nobody opened when he struck the door with the knocker. Number three, said Manuel, the corner house, the one that has a coat of arms over the doorway with the cross of Santiago and a half moon. The house with deep animal pens and barns where he would hide behind sacks of wheat to read the books Manuel gave him and that had, like the library, the profound fragrance of serene time and money that isolated him from his own life and from the shouts of his father calling him from the door to come down and clean the stable or give the animals their feed. In his house the golden miracle of electric light did not exist, and when his parents went up to bed, they took with them the kerosene lamp whose yellow, greasy light swung between their sleepy voices and lengthened their shadows in the hollow of the staircase, and he remained alone in the kitchen, his light the embers of the fire and the candle he lit in order to continue reading the adventures of Captain Grant or Henry Morton Stanley or the journeys of Burton and Speke to the source of the Nile until his eyes began to close. He groped his way up to his room, and from his bed he listened to the coughs and snores of his father, who fell asleep with the same brutal resolve he brought to his work, and as soon as he had fallen asleep, sinking into the mattress of corn husks as if it were a bed of sand, his father was knocking at the door and calling him because it was almost dawn and he had to get up and saddle the white mare and take her to the farm along the road that began at the Gothic door in the wall. He tied his book bag to his back, and it was already morning when he returned to the city, running along the paths on the ramparts to get to school on time, and there Manuel, blond and clean and just recently awake, was waiting for him to copy the composition and arithmetic homework from his notebook.
What a strange logic of memory and pain conspires silently to transform the prison of another time into paradise: he trembled with gratitude and tenderness when he turned the corner of the plaza and saw the poplars and the familiar doorways, loyal to his recollection, and the illuminated air that became blue over the high, ivy-covered belfry of San Lorenzo. For a moment, as he walked toward the house recognizing even the irregularities in the ground, he thought his whole life had been one long mistake, that he never should have left the place with serene light that received him now as if he were a stranger. It was the time of the olive harvest, and a man he didn't recognize immediately was loading empty sacks and long poles of heather wood for shaking down the olives onto a mule tied to the grillwork over the window.
"How could I not remember him if we grew up together," the man says to Minaya, and he chokes and coughs without taking the cigarette wet with saliva from his mouth, sitting in the sun on a wicker chair that creaks beneath his large, defeated body. "But he went to Madrid during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and found a job on a newspaper and got involved in politics, because he had a lot of ideas and never liked the countryside, so he left his father alone with all the work they had on the farm, and they didn't speak for years."
"Be quiet, Manuel," murmurs a woman beside the old man who has her white hair pulled back and a black shawl over her shoulders, who had been sweeping the sidewalk and saw Minaya stop in front of the house next door, as if he didn't know that no one had lived in it for many years. The man—"Manuel Biralbo, pleased to meet you" — had stopped braiding the rope he was holding in his large hands when Minaya arrived and offered him another chair facing his, in the corner of the plaza where there's a smell of damp earth, in the light that sifts through the thick foliage of the poplar. "Be quiet, Manuel," the woman repeats in a low voice, looking out of the corner of her eye at the stranger who asks questions about forgotten things, but her husband, as if he were not aware of the risk she observes and fears, goes on talking and not only invites Minaya to sit down but also offers him his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers and becomes entangled in senseless explanations that no one has asked him for.
"Justo Solana, the father, they shot him when the war was over, and nobody knows why. He must have done something, people say, like so many others who had fingers pointed at them back then, but I don't know what he could have done since he wasn't a man who got mixed up in politics, and for the whole war he stayed at the farm. But he came back a little while before the troops marched in, and in three or four days they came for him in a car and took him to jail, in handcuffs like a criminal. Then I found out they killed him. But his son, Jacinto, didn't know until he came here from prison. I can see him as clearly as I see you, with his black coat and hat and the suitcase tied up with a rope in his hand. At first I didn't know him. I was in my doorway when he knocked at the door of his house, and I saw his face when they told him his father didn't live there anymore. Jacinto, I said, don't you remember me? And when I shook his hand, I saw that he was crying. He said, 'Manuel, what did they do to my father?' and I didn't know what to tell him because I had a thing here, in my throat, and I couldn't even talk. 'They killed him,' I said, and he looked at me and lowered his head and left the plaza without saying another word. And I never saw him again. That summer I heard they had killed him too."
His footsteps returning, the inert sound of his footsteps on the paving stones of the street that takes him away from the Plaza of San Lorenzo, where Manuel Biralbo sat watching him leave, never to return, sitting on his wicker chair, braiding a rope to occupy his hands, explaining to his wife that there's no danger, that this boy who's so polite is writing a book about Jacinto Solana, you remember, Justo's son, the one who went to Madrid and then they killed him. Like the ticking of a clock, like the beating of the suicide's heart and the ringing of bells in Magina, his footsteps drummed on the empty street, not subject to his will and his consciousness, indicating the only possible road left to him in his banishment. He thought he would never reach the white palace on the Plaza of San Pedro as he walked along the Calle de la Luna y el Sol, remembering other dawns when the mare's hooves sounded in the silence to invite him to gallop and imagine an adventure, but the now unfamiliar city continued to be a firm habit of his footsteps. Clinging to the walls, Minaya thinks, his face hidden beneath the brim of his hat, between the lapels of his overcoat, the face without eyes or nose or mouth, only a straw hamper of shadow to waylay the besieged presence of the Invisible Man. But he still doesn't know the street plan in Magina — long medieval streets, curved like a bow, that never let you see their ending, you simply have to guess gradually at the shape of nearby houses and discover a plaza only when you've reached it — and wanting to repeat Solana's exact footsteps on that cloudy early morning in January, he soon found himself lost in narrow lanes that have the names of ancient guilds and saints, and when he finally thought he had found his way to Manuel's house, it isn't the Plaza of San Pedro he comes to but another larger square he had never seen before and in whose center there is a scraggly garden with cypresses standing like guards around the monument erected by Magina in 1954 to honor its fallen. The house, Minaya recalls in a sudden rush of tenderness, the house on the corner where Inés lives with her sick or paralyzed uncle at the back of a courtyard in an apartment house, where the motionless man waits every night at the highest window for her to return.