She didn't say good-bye or order him to leave, she simply stopped seeing him or forgot she wasn't alone, and her words faded into a very slow silence, just as her features faded in the same semidarkness that was erasing the shapes of the furniture and the corners of the room, coming up from the garden, from the empty hallways and rooms where Minaya had to feel his way back like a traveler surprised by darkness in a thick wood where there were no roads, only closed doors. Solitary doors, suspended in air, hermetic like the book Minaya was looking for and that perhaps never was written. Half-open doors that invite one in and then close, as if in a sudden gust of wind, behind the person who dares to cross them. He stood noiselessly and murmured an excuse or a farewell, but the small woman in mourning continued to look at the garden with her hands folded in her lap and her back ridgidly erect, as if posing for a photograph.
"You're not like them," she said, and seen from above she was smaller and almost vulnerable, with her bones sharp beneath her skin and the white needlework on the velvet of her mourning. "Come back to see me whenever you like."
As he was leaving he saw her in profile, the dark silhouette, her white hair dazzling against the pale light from the window and the purple and opaque blue of nightfall on the roofs. He closed the door slowly and when he turned he found the light, staring eyes of Ines, who seemed to have been waiting for him to leave and was carrying on the silver tray the supper that Dona Elvira wouldn't taste that night either.
8
HE, TOO, DEFEATED AND OBSCURE beneath the blankets where a sick body lies, I imagine, he, too, looking at the ceiling or the semidarkness or the faint light that comes through the curtains that someone partially closed before leaving him alone. There are medicine bottles on the night table and the odor of the alcohol Medina used to disinfect the needle is still in the air. He closed his bag at the foot of the bed, slowly moving his head, the hands that so delicately lifted the back of Mariana's neck from the droppings, as if he didn't want to wake her. He looked at his watch and placed it back in his vest pocket, studying Manuel, who seems to be asleep but who is watching him, high and distant, from a fog not of physical pain but of melancholy, prepared to close his eyes in order not to sleep and surrender to the last light of day fading in the plaza and on the white curtains at the balcony with the same sweet slowness with which he wishes to be extinguished, let it be tonight, he thinks, with no fear or urgency, with his eyes closed, with the picture of Mariana and the one of his Aunt Cristina attending with their solemn presence as silent witnesses. For a moment he sees Medina or dreams him as he was in 1937, slim and with a black mustache, in his captain's uniform, leaning not over him but over the body of Mariana, who wears a sheer nightdress and has a red, round stain on her forehead. Medina, slow and heavy again, presses his hand for an instant and then leaves the room, and his cautious voice can be heard speaking to someone, Teresa or Amalia, in the hallway. Now Manuel curls up on his side and raises the fold of the sheet until it covers his mouth, his back to the balcony, and stares at the moldings on the closet, dissolving in the night. The only vestige is a vague muscular pain in his chest, the quiet hand, the tranquil reptile that isn't even asleep beneath closed eyelids. It only waits for the next, the definitive day, the hour when it will move up his left side brushing against the warm pink tissue of his lungs and then encircling his heart before squeezing it, closing the ring of asphyxia around its frightened beating, like a blind animal that had been incubated in Manuel's chest thirty-two years earlier to pay, day after day, the extremely long installment plan of anguish and longed-for death. He had spent the afternoon in the library, not doing anything, lacking even the will to climb the stairs to the pigeon loft, waiting for Minaya to come back from his visit to Dona Elvira, and perhaps the disquiet of waiting and cigarettes had caused the reawakening of the old wound near his heart, like a road that precisely indicates its white line in the growing light of dawn. What will she say about me, he thought, about all of us, fearing his mother's hatred less than the manner in which she might show it to Minaya, the indiscretion, the very probable slander. Since the proximity of the pain in his chest was more certain with each passing minute — now the reptile or hand was lodged in his stomach and groping its way upward, animated by brandy and tobacco — Manuel put on his coat and hat and took the bamboo stick that had belonged to his father to walk out to the watchtowers on the wall. But there was no respite because fear and pain were already moving up his veins like a single knife thrust, already hastening his breath and opening before his feet a pit that separated him from the world and left him alone with the bite of terror. He walked, slow and anachronistic, down Calle Real, very close to the building walls, ceding the sidewalk to the ladies, whom he greeted when he thought he knew them, touching the brim of his hat with a distracted and completely involuntary gesture, but the air on the street was not enough to ease the incessant pounding that cracked a whip in his heart and temples, and in an instant of vertigo the dark hand oppressing his chest sometimes even stopped the flow of his blood. Leaning against the walls, he was able to reach the Plaza of Santa Maria, and when he felt in his heart the last peck and the shadow's slap that knocked him to the paving stones, he recalled an April morning when that same plaza and its backdrop of palaces and distant bell towers seemed more boundless than ever to him, because Mariana, in a white blouse and summer sandals, came toward him, smiling, from the facade of El Salvador. It was that same image, intact, that he found before him when he woke from his brief death not knowing who he was or in what part of the world the room and the bed he was lying in were to be found. He heard voices, pigeons, the notes of a strange habanera that never ended, he heard, as he was overcome by the dense lethargy of sedatives, little girls' voices in the plaza singing the funeral ballad of Alfonso XII and Dona Mercedes, and in the not-yet-unfathomable waters of sleep the melody of the habanera became entwined with the voices of the children's song, the nocturnal footsteps in the hallway, the murmur like that of a hospital, the wakefulness that reached him from the other side of the door.
"He's fallen asleep," said Teresa, closing the door again with extreme care. Minaya and Medina were smoking beside the darkened glass doors of the gallery, talking in that muffled tone of voice used in churches and in the vicinity of the sick.
"The worst thing afflicting your uncle, my boy, isn't that he drinks and smokes and exerts himself too much given the fragility of his heart, but that he doesn't want to live. Understand what I'm saying: when you reach the age that Manuel and I are, living becomes an act of will."
Inés passed them with Doña Elvira's untouched tray and looked for a second at Minaya with an expression so rapid it seemed unreal. He saw her walk away with the clink of porcelain and silver, like a perfume or a melody that followed and announced her.
"You speak about will, but my uncle has had a cardiac lesion since a bullet grazed his heart."
"My friend…" Medina, smiling, picked up his bag from the floor, ready to leave. "Manuel has told me you're a kind of writer, so perhaps you'll understand what I am going to tell you. In my work, one becomes very skeptical with the years and discovers that in certain cases the heart and its ailments are a metaphor. Manuel had his first serious attack on the day following Mariana's death. That was when his real illness began, and it wasn't caused by the bullet you mentioned but by the one that killed her."