Minaya knew something was going to happen that very afternoon. A truck had stopped at the door, and a gang of unknown, frightening men who smelled of sweat had walked calmly through the rooms, picking up the furniture in their bare arms, dragging the trunk that held his mother's dresses out to the street, throwing everything into confusion, shouting to one another words that he didn't know and that made him afraid. They hung a grapple and pulley from the eaves, ran a rope along it, stood on the balcony, attached the furniture he loved best, and Minaya, hidden behind a curtain, watched how an armoire that seemed to have been damaged by those men, a table with curved legs where a plaster dog had always stood, and his disassembled bed swung over the street as if they were about to fall and break into pieces to the guffaws of the invaders. So that no torture would be denied him that afternoon, his mother had dressed him in the sailor suit she took out of the closet only when they were going to visit some gloomy relative. That's why he was hiding, aside from the fear the men caused in him, because if the boys on the street saw him dressed like that, with a blue bow on his chest and the absurd tippet that reminded him of an altar boy's habit, they would laugh at him with the uniform cruelty of their group, because they were like the men devastating his house: dirty, big, inexplicable, and wicked.
My God, his mother said afterward in the now empty dining room, looking at the bare walls, the lighter spots where the pictures had been, biting her painted lips, and her voice didn't sound the same in the stripped house. They had closed the door and were holding him by the hand as they walked in silence, and they didn't answer when he asked where they were going, but he, his intelligence sharpened by the sudden irruption of disorder, knew before they turned the corner of the Plaza of San Pedro and stopped at the door with the bronze door knockers that were a woman's hands. His father adjusted the knot of his tie and stood straighter in his Sunday suit as if to recover all his stature, prodigious at the time. "Go on, you knock," he said to his mother, but she refused, sourly, to listen. "Woman, you wouldn't want us to leave Magina without saying good-bye to my cousin."
White columns; a high dome of red, yellow, blue glass; a gray-haired man who didn't resemble any movie heroes and who took him by the hand and led him to a large room with a parquet floor, where the last light of the afternoon shone like a cold moon while a large shadow that may not belong to reality but to the modifications of memory inundated the walls supernaturally covered with all the books in the world. First he was motionless, sitting on the edge of a chair so high his feet didn't touch the floor, awed by the size of everything: the bookshelves, the large windows that faced the plaza, the vast space over his head. A slow-moving woman dressed in mourning came to serve them small steaming cups of coffee, and she offered him something, a candy or a biscuit, using formal address, something that disconcerted him as much as finding out that the case that was so tall and dark and covered with glass was a clock. They, Minaya's parents and the man whom they had taken to calling his uncle, spoke in quiet voices, in a distant, neutral tone that made him drowsy, acting like a sedative for his excitement and allowing him to retreat into the secret delight of looking at everything as if he were alone in the library.
"We're going to Madrid, Manuel," his father said. "And there we'll have a clean slate. In Magina there's no stimulus for an enterprising man, there's no dynamism, no market."
Then his mother, very rigid and sitting next to him, covered her face with her hands, and it took Minaya a little while to realize that the strange, dry noise she was making was weeping, because until that afternoon he had never seen her cry. For the first time it was the weeping without tears that he learned to recognize and spy on for many years, and as he learned when his parents were already dead and safe from all misfortune or ruin, it revealed in his mother the obstinate, useless rancor toward life and the man who was always on the verge of becoming rich, of finding the partner or the opportunity that he too deserved, of breaking the siege of bad luck, of going to prison once because of a run-of-the-mill swindle.
"Your grandmother Cristina, Son, she was the one who began our misfortune, because if she hadn't been stupid enough to fall in love with my father and renounce her family in order to marry him, we'd be the ones living now in my cousin's palace and I'd have the capital to be a success in business. But your grandmother liked poetry and romanticism, and when my poor devil of a father, may he rest in peace and may God forgive me, dedicated some poems to her and told her a few vulgar cliches about love and twilight, she didn't care if he was a clerk at the registry office or that Don Apolonio, her father, your great-grandfather, threatened to disinherit her. And he certainly did disinherit her, as if it were a serialized novel, and he didn't see her again or ask about her for the rest of his life, which turned out to be short because of that unpleasantness, and he ruined her and me, and also you and your children if you have any, because how can I raise my head and give you a future if bad luck has pursued me since before I was born?"
"But it's absurd for you to complain. If my grandmother Cristina hadn't married your father, you wouldn't have been born."
"And you think that's a small privilege?"
A few days after the funeral of his parents, who when they died left him some family portraits and a rare instinct for sensing the proximity of failure, Minaya received a condolence letter from his Uncle Manuel, written in the same very slanted and pointed hand he would recognize four years later in the brief invitation to spend a few weeks in February in Magina, offering him his house and his library and all the help he could offer in his research on the life and work of Jacinto Solana, the almost unpublished poet of the generation of the Republic about whom Minaya was writing his doctoral dissertation.
"My cousin would like to be English," said his father. "He takes tea in the middle of the afternoon, smokes his pipe in a leather armchair, and to top it off, he's a leftist, as if he were a bricklayer."
Not daring yet to use the knocker, Minaya searches in his overcoat for his uncle's letter as if it were a safe-conduct that would be demanded of him when the door was opened, when he crosses once more the entrance where there was a tile frieze and tries to reach the courtyard where he wandered that afternoon as if he were lost, expecting his parents to come out of the library, because the maid who had used usted with him led him away when his mother's weeping began, and he was possessed by the enduring fascination of the solemn faces that looked down at him from the paintings on the walls and by the light and the design of large flowers or birds formed by the panes of glass in the dome. At first he limited himself to walking in a straight line from one column to the next, because he liked the sound of his own methodical footsteps, and it was like inventing one of those games that only he knew, but then he dared to climb very silently the first steps toward the gallery, and his own image in the mirror on the landing obliged him to stop, a guardian or symmetrical enemy that forbade him to advance toward the upper rooms or enter the imaginary hallway that extended to the other side of the glass and where perhaps oblivion keeps several faces of Mariana that are not exactly the same, the print of Manuel when he went up after her in his lieutenant's uniform, the expression that Jacinto Solana's eyes had only one time in the small hours of May 21, 1937, unaware it was the eve of the crime, after being carried away by her caresses and tears on the grass in the garden and telling each other that guilt and the war didn't matter on that night when giving in to sleep would have been a betrayal of happiness.