"Inés," Teresa called, going to the stairwell, "tell Don Manuel that his nephew's here, the one from Madrid."
INÉS REMAINED QUIET on the other side of the curtains, her face very close to the glass, because she liked to stand that way for hours, behind the windows, looking at the street or the courtyard with white columns or the animal pen with a poplar tree and a dry well that she has to cross for the last time tonight on her way to the Magina station. She liked to look at everything from a distance, immobile things, the passage of light across the glass in the dome, and without anyone noticing her presence — she was so stealthy and slim that only a very attentive ear, one alerted ahead of time, could detect her — she pressed her nose and forehead to the glass and traced lines or words left by her breath, returned to an extremely slow time, the time of her childhood, lost in it, immune to the voices calling her. Before going back to the kitchen with her swaying walk, Teresa looked up from the middle of the courtyard, searching for Inés' shadow behind the gallery curtains, because she suspected she hadn't obeyed her and was still there, watching her, perhaps choosing a favorable angle that would allow her to still see the new arrival, and ordered her again to hurry and let Don Manuel know. The clocks struck six, first the clock in the parlor, very close to Inés, and a few seconds later, when the girl was already climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, the bells of the clock in the library, sounding deep and distant to her, startled Minaya, who hadn't dared to sit down and remained standing, very firm and attentive, at the closed door, his coat over his arm and the suitcase close by, as if he still weren't sure he would be accepted in the house. Reality, I calculate, imposed unpleasant corrections on his memory. The ceiling wasn't as high as he remembered, and the books no longer prodigiously covered every wall, but the parquet floor shone exactly as before and creaked slightly under his feet, and a fire was burning in the marble fireplace to receive him. There were two large windows divided into rectangles by white woodwork, almost like grillwork, and through the panes the plaza he had left a few minutes earlier seemed imaginary or distant, as if the city and the winter did not maintain a precise connection to the interior of the house, or only in the sense that an intimate landscape was added on to look at from the balconies and a sensation of hostile twilight that made its enclosed space more inviting. Then, as he waited and was afraid, he saw the first two images of Mariana, which later, day after day, would be repeated and extended in others when her face, not always recognized, would appear to him in the rooms of the house, the writings of Jacinto Solana, a plaza, and some churches in the city. First he saw Orlando's framed drawing between two shelves in the library, the face foreshortened, almost in profile, of a young woman with short hair hanging over her cheeks, a fine-drawn nose, a short chin, and wide-open eyes fixed on something that wasn't outside her but absorbed into her consciousness, her slight smile. "Orlando," he read, "May 1937." On the mantel over the fireplace, in a photograph that despite the glass protecting it was taking on a sepia tone, the same young woman walked between two men along a street that undoubtedly was in Madrid. She wore a coat with a fur collar opened over a white dress and high-heeled shoes, but all that could be seen clearly of her face was the large smile that mocked the photographer, because she had the brim of her hat pulled low on her forehead and a veil hid her eyes. The man who walked to her left held a cigarette and looked at the spectator with an air of irony or misgiving, as if he did not completely approve of Minaya's presence or had discovered a spy in him. Minaya thought he recognized his uncle in the one on the right, the tallest of the three and clearly the best dressed. Manuel was surprised by the photographer's shot while he was turning toward Mariana, who unexpectedly had taken his arm and pressed it against her without noticing the gift she was granting him, attentive only to the eye of the camera, like a mirror in which she liked to look at herself as she walked.
"That man, the one on the left, is Jacinto Solana," said Manuel, at his back.
Minaya recalled a tall figure with gray hair, a large, pale hand on his shoulders, but the face that bent down toward him that afternoon to kiss him lightly on the cheeks had been erased forever from his memory by the almost terrifying exactitude of the large clock whose golden pendulum slowly moved back and forth behind the glass of a box that resembled a coffin. Now, when the clock and the bookshelves and the entire house took on dimensions without mystery, the earlier figure with gray hair disappeared before Minaya, supplanted by the features of a stranger. He was not nearly as tall as in memory and not as heavy as in the photograph, and he had white hair and a posture ruined not by old age but by long neglect and the habit of illness, the cardiac ailment left over from his war wounds, made worse by the passage of the years and nourished by his own negligence because he continued to smoke and never took the pills Medina prescribed for him. Any shock provoked violent palpitations and a dark, tenacious pain that did not allow him to sleep and was like a shadowy hand that penetrated his chest and squeezed his heart to the point of asphyxia at the precise moment sleep conquered him. He would sit up, shaken by the certainty that he had been about to die, turn on the light, and remain motionless in the bed, his hand at his heart, attentive to its beat, and he could not get back to sleep until dawn, for as soon as he closed his eyes the vertigo of fear would break free and the invading hand would slip again inside his body, groping between his lungs and his ribs, coming up from his belly like a reptile silently coiling around his heart. Fear of the definitive attack and the obsessive attention with which he listened to his own heart probably made his ailment worse, but eventually they also allowed him to acquire a serene familiarity with death, for he knew how it would come, and when he could recognize it from a distance, he gradually had stopped fearing it. It would be, as it had been so often, that pain in his left arm, the stabbing pain in his chest piercing without warning, like a bullet or a knife thrust, perhaps when he was eating breakfast alone in front of the large windows to the garden, or in the afternoon in the library, or striking him dead on the plank floor of the pigeon loft. It would be that same stabbing pain turned into a sudden shot or blade and the tide of terror rising from his stomach and taking on in his chest the form of that familiar, lethal hand that would not stop this time but penetrate until it tore out his breath and his heart so that he would never return again from that anguish and could remain sweetly dead and abandoned on the bed, or even better, in the pigeon loft, on the same planks where Mariana had died, her forehead punctured by a single bullet. The habit of solitude and the longing for death were for him residual or secret ways of remembering his wife and Jacinto Solana, and having survived them for so many years seemed to him a disloyalty unmitigated even by the devotion of his memory. In the bedroom he shared with Mariana for only one night, he kept her wedding dress and the white shoes and the bouquet of artificial flowers she carried on their wedding day. He had catalogued not only all his memories but the photographs of Mariana and of Jacinto Solana as well, and distributed them around the house according to a private and very strict order, which allowed him to transform his passage through the rooms into a reiterated commemoration. He was not satisfied with the few images a man can or has the right to remember: he demanded of himself dates, precise locations, exact tones of light and nuances of tenderness, enumerations of meetings, of words, and with so much thinking about Mariana and the man who had been his best friend, his recollections became worn, so that he was no longer sure they had really existed outside the photographs and his memory. This is why he was so surprised that in his nephew's letter the name of Jacinto Solana appeared: someone not himself and not connected to his house had heard that name far from Magina and even had knowledge of his life and some poems which for Manuel had not existed until then except as attributes of his most secret autobiography. Reading that name, Jacinto Solana, written by another hand, in Madrid, at the end of January 1969, was proof that the man it designated had in fact lived and left in the world traces of his presence that could not be erased by time or the voracious executioners in blue uniforms who one day made the flagstones in the courtyard and the parquet in the rooms tremble with the tramping of their boots and who burned in the garden all of Jacinto Solanas books and kicked his typewriter to pieces.