Doña Elvira's laugh, he later told Inés, was a short, cold outburst that shattered like glass and gleamed for an instant in eyes unfamiliar with indulgence and tenderness, eyes open and inflexible and rigorously sharpened by the lucidity of her contempt and the proximity of her death: the taut translucent skin at her temples, the white needlework at cuffs and neckline to hide from herself and the mirror the worst ravages of old age. All that could be seen of her hands were the short, slender fingers that drummed on the table or grasped the cup to hide their tremor.
"No, you're not like them. You're better-looking and more intelligent, and you owe both things to your mother, because your father, that stupid man, never could console himself for having been born disinherited, and he did nothing to give her the life she deserved. What was he doing when he killed himself?"
"Something in real estate. He said he was going to earn a good deal of money. He bought a car."
"Was it an honest business?"
"It seemed to be. But after his death they impounded even the furniture. I had to find a job and move to a pension."
"From time to time, before the three of you went to Madrid, he would come to me and lament his bad luck and ask for money for his business without your mother knowing. I never gave him a cent, of course, among other reasons because even if I had trusted him — and I never made that mistake — I had nothing to give him. My husband left everything to Manuel; that was another of his jokes, the final one. There's still a copy of his will around here somewhere. 'I declare my son Manuel sole inheritor of all my goods,' it said, in order not to break some tradition or other, which naturally was false, and he left me a painting, nothing but a painting. 'To my dearly beloved and faithful wife, Maria Elvira, I leave the portrait of Reverend Father Antonio Maria Claret, to whom I know she is very devoted.' He didn't do it for revenge but to go on laughing at me after death. But I'm the one who saved this house, and if we still have a little land and some capital in the bank, it hasn't been thanks to my son, who never took care of anything and was as much a bungler as he is now, but to me, who spent forty-four years struggling to preserve what my husband didn't have the time or desire to sell at a loss in order to pay for his whims. Look at those books. I spend entire nights over them, revising the accounts of the administrator, who is a scoundrel and cheats me if I'm careless. Since he knows my eyes are failing, he makes the numbers smaller and smaller, but I've bought a magnifying glass, and with it I can see even what isn't written down. There never was a man who could deceive me, and I won't permit it now, in my old age. Neither can you, but you know that. Tell me why you've come."
That was the question and the hidden challenge and the conclusion that all her words had led to, not a confession but a raw challenge in which she, after displaying her weapons, put simulation and words to one side like a gambler who clears the table to leave a single card and then turns it over with marked slowness. That was the only question and the only reason she had received him, and Minaya had been waiting for it since he entered the room, long before that, since Inés announced the señoras order and the moment designated for his audience. This afternoon, at five, Doña Elvira had said, and he spent the entire morning calculating the tone and precise words and manner in which he should present himself, docile, Manuel warned him, because she would look at him searching for confirmation of an ancient threat that was once, but not always, called Mariana or Jacinto Solana, well dressed and combed as she imagined a young man of evident dignity, though limited funds, ought to dress and comb his hair, but not so impeccable or servile that Doña Elvira might suspect the premeditated use of a mask.
"Before you can see her," said Manuel as they ate lunch, "she will have looked you over from head to toe, especially your collar, cuffs, and hands, because she has always said that in the collar and cuffs of his shirt one can discover if a man is or is not a gentleman. Since you arrived she's been asking about you, questioning Inés and Amalia, and even Medina when he goes up to examine her, but especially Teresa, who's afraid of her and feels hypnotized when my mother speaks to her. She already knows everything about you, and of course why you have come, but she wants to hear it from your own lips to decide if you're a danger."
And now he was sitting in front of her, in front of her only question, pouring himself a little more cold tea in order to break or prolong a truce and looking before responding, for ten extremely long seconds, at the garden conquered by darkness and the roofs and the sky where it was still day. I want to write a book, he said at last, about Jacinto Solana, anticipating a grimace or wounded rejection but not the laughter that sounded again like the rattle of bones and immediately died out.
"SOLANA. THAT SOLANA. No one has said his name before me for the past twenty years. I thought that thank God he had been erased forever from the world, and now you come to tell me you're going to write a book about him, as if one could write about nothing, about a fraud. But he was such a liar that after he died he continues telling lies just as he told lies from the time he was a boy until the day they killed him. And so he's deceived you too, just as he deceived my son and his own wife, who waited for him for ten years without his sending her a single letter or telling her he was leaving when he abandoned her. But many years earlier he had deceived my husband. Perhaps you don't know that it was he, my husband, who was responsible for Solana getting out of the dung heap and receiving an education that those of his class have never needed. There was a kind of charitable committee or something like that, and every year it tested the children in the schools for the poor and selected the most outstanding and paid for them to study with the Piarists. My husband, who was deputy for Magina at the time, presided over the committee, and it was his vote that decided Solana's fate and my son's misfortune. A great writer, they said, but I never saw a book signed by him, not even the one he seemed to be writing when he came back from prison to live at our expense, first in this house and then at the Island of Cuba. What happened in the war was being forgotten, and Manuel, who escaped dying in prison because of the name he bears, seemed to have recovered his senses, or at least one could no longer detect the madness that drove him to become a Communist or a republican or whatever it was — because I believe he didn't know himself — and to enter into that absurd marriage. We all thought Solana was dead or had escaped to another country. But he came back. He came back saying what he had always said, that he was going to write a book, though he didn't deceive me. 'Don't call attention to yourself, Manuel,' I told my son, 'that man is an ex-convict, and he'll be your ruin again.' I knew something bad was going to happen, and I waited for the disaster until some Civil Guards came to tell me, very courteously, I must say, because the lieutenant colonel was related to me, that they had to search the house and question Manuel, because that friend of his, Solana, had killed two of their men at the Island of Cuba. That was the book he was writing, and of course no one could find it afterward. He used the farm to meet with his accomplices, a gang of those Red bandits who were wandering the sierra then. And again they dragged Manuel out of his bed in the middle of the night to take him to their barracks in handcuffs. Once again I had to cover my face with a veil and humiliate myself by knocking at the doors of those who had been my friends to save him from death or a sentence that would have killed him a little more slowly. And do you know the first thing he did when he was free? Look for his friend in the morgue and pay for his funeral and a marble gravestone. It's still there, I suppose, in the cemetery, in case you want to visit it. Manuel never comes up to see me, but every year he takes flowers to the graves of his soul mate and of the woman who turned his life upside down. And took his honor, if truth be told."