"Utrera told me you were going to visit his studio. He's a little nervous, and I think a little ashamed. You know, he considers the works they commission now humiliating. So you shouldn't praise his Medieval Virgins too much. He has a high opinion of you. He says you've inherited the artistic temperament of your grandfather Minaya and your grandmother Cristina."
Minava couldn't imagine his grandmother as an old woman. In fact, he had never thought about her until he saw her oil portrait in Manuel's bedroom: a blonde girl with singularly delicate features looking into empty space and holding on her lap a half-open book on whose cover one can read with some difficulty the title written in Gothic letters: Arpeggios, by J. E. Minaya.
"My father rarely spoke of her, and then only to reproach her until after she had died for what he called her bad marriage. 'Dear God, what have I done that You gave me a poet for a father, a disinherited mother, and a son who's a Communist.' He said that once when he found a clandestine journal among my papers."
THERE WAS NOTHING STRANGER FOR MINAYA than remembering his father in the garden of the house that his bad luck had denied him. Death, he thought, isn't that boundary, that unmoving trench one imagines when it has just happened, but a slow distancing that ends in forgetting and disloyalty. In Madrid, in the sad streets and doorways of the district where they had taken him when they left Magina, in a cell at Security Headquarters, the shadow of his father had moved very slowly away from Minaya, but it survived, transfigured and abstract, in the sensation of failure and fear, in the disagreeable need to take the metro every day and work and know he was alone. Now he was smoking in the garden and listening to the extremely hospitable voice of Manuel, who was telling him something about the visits he and Jacinto Solana made in their adolescence to the blonde girl in the painting, and the figures of his parents faded irremediably, like his own life and his future, abolished in time, in the pink fragrance of the wisteria that sifted the early light and brought him the memory of Inés, as if the day he would leave the house would never come, as if there were no days beyond the one indicated by the calendars that morning, no cities on the other side of the blue sierra. Even the next few minutes seemed remote to him: "If the smoke stopped in the air, if the light at the end of the cigarette stopped burning, if the splotches of shadow did not advance along the gravel in the garden." He walked toward the rear, toward the door of the carriage house where Utrera was waiting for him. "Triumphant," he had read in a passage of the manuscript, "solicitous, offering smiles and black-market cigarettes, appealing, as he says, to forgetting past rancors, to friendship, which is stronger than political differences. Wearing one of those dustcoats that mechanics used thirty years ago, he rules over the three workers who help him in the studio and over the statues like dismantled mannequins to which he barely applies a touch of paint or varnish when they are presented to him, for he claims that his art, like Leonardo's, e cosa mentale. Beneath the dustcoat he always wears a suit with spectacular shoulder pads for his slight figure, and a white carnation in his lapel. In the late afternoon, a worker acting as his valet de chambre—the mockery is Manuel's — helps him remove the dustcoat, and then Utrera emerges ready to prolong his reign in conversation at the cafe and at the tables with heaters under them in the brothels. He returns in the middle of the night with a drunkard's wariness and usually enters his studio through the back gate in the lane. He uses too much cologne and too much pomade, but I suppose that's another sign of success. He never looks me in the eye."
The same dustcoat, Minaya thinks, the same smile roughened by the gleam of his false teeth, almost the same cafes, darker now or more deserted, as excessive and empty as the workshop where Eugenio Utrera, leaning over a low table that looks something like a cobbler's bench, scratches with his sharpened gouge at a piece of wood to obtain something that resembles a saint or a Romanesque Virgin. His hands, the long yellow index fingers and blue veins, a cigarette that has gone out in a mouth wet with saliva, a man who isn't exactly Utrera murmuring at the back of the carriage house, diminished, erased by the empty space and high ceiling that has a large glass skylight toward the center. He finishes a carving, leaves it on the table covered with old newspapers and shavings that allow him to smell at least the sweet, almost faded aroma of fresh wood, shakes off the lapels of his dustcoat and looks at his work and hates it with a devotion he only uses secretly to curse himself. Tacked to the wall, next to the shelf where the varnished figures are lined up, are newspaper clippings no longer legible, because years ago the dampness faded the photographs and headlines announcing the inauguration of a new monument sculpted by Utrera. "Orthopedic Virgins," wrote Solana, "wire nudes and amputated hands: the head, the wax lips that smile as if at the top of a pike, the hands extended at the end of a body of wires and wicker rods. Then, over nothing, over so light an armature, tunics and embroidered mantles are added so that no one can see the obscenity of these Virgins. Utrera isn't copying Martínez Montañés, as he supposes, but Marcel Duchamp."
In a corner of the workshop was the last car Manuel's father bought before he died, gloomy behind its windows closed like certain glass urns. "Look," said Utrera, pointing at it with pride, "look at how it still shines. Doesn't it look like a viceregal carriage? Nowadays they don't make automobiles like this one." He cleans off a chair, tossing the stained newspapers that covered it to the floor, offers it to Minaya, puts into a chest the piece of wood where there was the beginning of a suggestion of crude oval eyes.
"Romanesque Virgins," he murmurs, as if apologizing, "now everybody wants to have a Romanesque Virgin in the dining room or a bearded saint as a bookend. Of course there are more serious clients: for them I make special counterfeits, though you shouldn't think the store pays me much more for them. Shall I tell you a secret? Last week I finished a fourteenth-century crucifix."
His incessant talk, Minaya notices, is muffled in the workshop, as if here he weren't permitted the petulance he exhibits in the dining room, the library, the card games in the parlor, the Mágina cafés where he has occasionally seen Utrera lethargic in front of a glass of water and a snifter of cognac, pale in the damp semidarkness that smells of wood soaked in alcohol and urinal drains. He has seen him, without Utrera noticing him, at the back of cafés where the light of day never reaches, he has followed him at night along the lanes of his cowardly return, when he comes down to the house from the Plaza of General Orduña staggering and murmuring those things solitary drunks say to thin air, the alcoholic sidelong glances still not exempt from shame. Since Minaya's arrival in Mágina, his own consciousness had been pared down and reduced to a gaze that ascertains and desires, like a spy in a foreign country who has forgotten his true, distant identity in order not to be more than an eye and a hidden camera. He has visited the Gothic cloisters of the Church of Santa Maria and in its chapels, lit by candles, he has seen Eugenio Utreras statues elevated on thrones that women in mourning adorn with large bouquets of flowers. The eyes blank, lacking the half-moon of glass eyes, the hard features of the Virgins gleaming in the semidarkness with a waxen smoothness. But in all those faces there is a unique, ambiguous air that isn't due simply to negligence and the monotony of a studio overwhelmed by commissions. Looking at Utreras Virgins and Veronicas and penitent Magdalenes in the chapels of Santa Maria sounded an alarm for Minaya, a warning that he was about to discover something so hidden and fragile that only an abrupt revelation could give it definitive form. He recalled the photographs, Orlando's drawing, he recalled a Sunday afternoon when he waited for Inés next to the Monument to the Fallen and a night when he surprised Utrera looking for something in the gardens surrounding the statue, on his knees, drunk, holding a flashlight that barely illuminated his face. The Fallen Hero has the hair and features of a woman and a small circular mark on the forehead. Now he dares to say it, in Utreras studio, as the old man catalogues humiliations and scorn, the persistence of ingratitude and forgetting. His hands are the same bloodless color of the old newspapers that cover the table and lie on the floor and the chairs and the shelf with the rows of wooden saints and cans of varnish. When he hears the name, Mariana, spoken by Minaya, Utrera moves his eyes away from his own hands and slowly raises his line of sight until he is looking at the other man and he smiles at him with the same questioning, suspicious air he used the first time they met in the dining room.