He had spoken as if reciting an interminable litany, in a monotone, indifferent, somnambulistic, his chin rigid against his chest and his hands clasping his knees as if to roll himself into a ball or maintain the monotonal impulse of his rocking, and abruptly, without any variation in his voice announcing that he was about to fall silent, he bit his lips and picked up the rifle again, sitting up slowly against the damp hollow of the cave, fixed now on Solana with an attention sharpened by fear, as if he had recognized in him the other man, the dead man, whom he hadn't seen since that dawn in 1937, returned from the dead to pursue him to the last tunnel of his refuge, to the end of his memory or his madness. They didn't leave yet; they remained still, bending down, facing the man who no longer saw them, waiting for words they could hear, which meant nothing. "Cardeña," said Frasco, putting his hand on his shoulder, as if to wake him, "Cardeña." "Let's go," said Solana behind him, in a very quiet voice. When they left him alone, the madman Cardeña murmured slow tatters of words with his arms around his dog's neck and clawed at his pointed stiff beard with meticulous rage, as if carrying out a methodical flagellation in secret.
13
ALL I HAVE LEFT is the weary privilege of enumerating and writing, of calculating the precise instant when I didn't do what I should have or could have done or the way in which a gesture or word of mine could have modified the passage of time as the erasures or details added to my manuscript modify the story I imagine and recall as stripped of any intention of surviving because of it in anyone's memory as an Egyptian scribe putting the finishing touches on the figures and signs of a funeral papyrus in order to place them in a hermetically sealed chest in the darkness of a tomb. Now I know that if in the small hours of May 22, 1937, when I saw Mariana walking barefoot and as if asleep toward the door that led to the pigeon loft, I had remained a few seconds longer behind the column in the gallery that kept her from seeing me, I would have seen just a few steps away the face of her killer. Now I know that while I looked at myself in my bedroom mirror and wrote in the light of dawn the final verses of my life, someone was grasping a pistol and silently climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, and my father, who had gone up to Magina in the dead of night to find an ax and come back to the farm before daybreak, realized too late that he should have obeyed the presentiment of fear he had when he saw the patrol of militiamen and was about to pull on the mule's bridle perhaps and head for another street. He shouldn't have slept that night either while I walked around the bedroom I was going to leave the next morning and sat on the bed without finding the will to take off my glasses or untie my shoelaces and got up again as if I had heard someone calling me, only to sit down not against the pillow but facing the desk where a burning lamp opened a crack of light in the mirror in which my face was a portrait of future dark and an inert prophecy of how I would remember everything and of the past time that concentrated and accumulated there to watch over my insomnia and testify to the last boundary of successive simulations in a biography so tenaciously sustained in them that it suddenly fell apart, like the ash of a paper that did not lose its shape when transformed by fire, when it was no longer possible to use the mask of a new imposture. Not writing yet, not daring to go out to the hallway because I knew that as soon as I stepped on the chess maze of white and black tiles I would walk to the parlor and the door of the marriage bedroom and listen to Mariana's laughter and Manuel's dark breathing and the sound of bodies tirelessly entwined and clinging, I smoked quietly at the desk and looked at myself in the mirror, like an actor so possessed by the character to whom he surrenders his life, that one night, in the empty theater, after the last performance, when he takes off the false eyebrows and the wig and is cleaning off his makeup with routine skill, he discovers that the cotton soaked in alcohol is erasing the features of his true and only face behind which there is simply an oval, livid surface, as smooth and vacant as the glass in two facing mirrors. Like the photographs of Mariana or of our false shared youth that Manuel kept and classified long before the war ended with the melancholy perseverance of a caretaker in a provincial museum, hanging them on walls or placing them randomly on sideboards and on the shelves in the library according to an order as carefully established in the catalogs of his memory as they were invisible to anyone else, my face, that night, was a lucid, brutal prophecy of my past, and everything I never knew or never wanted to know gathered densely around me, at my back, in the shadows and corners of the room, in the hallways of the house, like distant relatives who return in their mourning to hold a vigil for someone who never thought of them when he was alive and about whom they had heard nothing for many years. It was four or five o'clock when I left the bedroom, afraid of running into someone in the hallway. No doubt at that hour he had already got up and harnessed the mule and was going back and forth between the stable and the single room that served as his bedroom and storeroom with the restlessness of excessively early risers: as a boy, before he called me, I would wake, alerted by fear, when I heard his footsteps on the stairs or the violent cough brought on by his first cigarette, and I would hide desperately under the top sheet, as if by remaining still and keeping my eyes closed I could stop or slow down time or dig in the warm hollow of the sheets a burrow where the bitter odor of tobacco couldn't reach or my father's footsteps climbing the stairs again to knock on my bedroom door and throw me with no excuses into the wretchedness of cold and dawn. Recently combed, inflexible, his face red from washing with icy water he had splashed on in the corral, as immune to sleep as he was to fatigue or tenderness, despising me because I walked around groggy and couldn't find the saddle for the white mare. Next to him my clumsy slowness, my physical cowardice in handling animals and tools grew worse, so that his blind resolve when he worked frightened me more than the possibility of punishment. The shape of a hoe was as brutal and intractable as the muzzle of a mule. He noted the ineptitude, the cowardice of my gestures, the absent air with which I carried out his orders, and he shook his head as if accepting an insult he never deserved.
BUT I DIDN'T THINK about him even once that night. Treacherously, while I crushed my cigarette into the marble on the night table and opened the bedroom door, resolved to swallow the indignity or shame, to approach like a wolf the region of the house where it was possible to hear Mariana's laughter and inviting racy words, peremptory commands, brief muffled shouts of exaltation and agony, chance pushed my father like a slow magnet toward his house in Magina and modulated his step to lead him to the precise place and moment in which a closed door and a pistol and an ax would cause the conspiracy of death against us all to germinate. I want to stop him now, as I write, I want him to choose another street to return to the farm or to take so long to find the ax that when he passes the house where Domingo Gonzalez was hiding the door is already knocked down and he moves to one side to keep the mule from walking on the splinters. Any small alteration in the architecture of time can or could save him and save Mariana and stop the killer who was already holding the pistol and watching her, quieting his breath against the badly joined boards of the door to the pigeon loft. He saw her from the back, leaning on the windowsill, looking at the line of the roofs and the fig trees in the courtyards above which the distant smoke of chimneys and the icy blue of dawn ascended, as if she were contemplating the sea from the deck of a ship, serene and solitary, like someone who has undertaken a journey announced in a dream, naked beneath the transparent cloth of the nightgown that outlined the shape of her hips and thighs in the faint backlight of air sifted by silence and the sound of sleeping pigeons that woke suddenly and flew into the corners and against the roof of the pigeon loft when the brief shock of gunshots resounded all through the house. I was writing at the time. Before the witness watching me in the mirror with impassive solemnity, incurably sick with literature, I had read aloud the verses I conceived of as a whispered, very long sentence as I prowled the hallway of the gallery and the marriage bedroom like a sleepwalker, and in my voice poisoned with gloom those words that several months later I would find, unfamiliar, printed, indifferent, definitively strange, like the beauty of a woman we once loved who can no longer move us, on the pages of a dirty, tattered copy of