Afterward, when I saw her stretched out and dead in front of all of us, I realized that perhaps it hadn't been the light of dawn that sharpened her features but a secret divination of the death that was already calling her to the pigeon loft with a voice only she could hear. "Didn't you hear the shooting, Don Jacinto? They killed Señorita Mariana." Amalia was crying and covering her face with both hands, and I didn't understand yet or didn't accept it; I got up from the desk and shook her by the shoulders, I moved her hands away from her face and obliged her to look at me because I didn't comprehend the words blurred by weeping, and she wiped her tears and pointed upward repeating that a stray bullet, that a shot in the forehead, that Mariana was dead in front of the unshuttered window in the pigeon loft, her knees dirty with droppings and her nightgown raised to the middle of her long white thighs, her hands extended and open and her face turned to one side and partially covered by her hair. When I went up to the pigeon loft, Manuel had already closed her eyes. He was kneeling next to her and he wasn't crying; he only extended an almost firm hand in which you could barely notice the violent trembling that shook his shoulders to touch her cheeks very delicately or move away from her mouth a lock of hair that had caught on half-parted lips. He seemed to be shivering with cold next to a fire that had gone out and would never raise his head and stand and come toward us, obscurely gathered in front of the door to the pigeon loft as if an unspoken command or the line of a circle in whose exact center Mariana's head lay prohibited our taking a single step toward her. Standing together, motionless, enclosed in a silence in which Amalia's weeping throbbed against our unified consciousness like the tearing of a wound, we separated momentarily only when Medina and the judge and a captain of the Assault Guard made their way past us to examine Mariana's body, and then immediately, as if the space they passed through had made us vulnerable, we grouped together again to close it, silently driven by the cowardly urgency that brings together a crowd surrounded by fear: Orlando, beside me, squeezing my hand without looking at me, without looking at Santiago, whose eyes were still drowsy with sleep and perhaps last night's alcohol; Utrera, who was blinking and whose respiration was very deep, broken at times as if by a stabbing pain; Dona Elvira, in perpetual mourning, staring not at Manuel or Mariana but at a place in the air that contained nothing, perhaps at the gold and blue strip of May sky that outlined the empty rectangle of the window or the roof where some guards advanced on all fours, looking for something among the broken tiles; Amalia, who cried in screams and wrung large red hands that sometimes tore at her hair or wiped her eyes and mouth in an emphatic gesture. I remember her long weeping like the wailing of a dog and the way Manuel's shoulders and knees trembled when Medina helped him to stand and brought him toward us, moving him as if he were a sleepwalker or a blind man who suddenly had been left alone on the streets of a strange city. I went up to him, said his name in a low voice, "Manuel, it's me, Solana," with desperate tenderness, useless shame, taking him by the arm with a clumsy, blind pity meant for him and myself and the never-denied connection of that mutually sworn loyalty that had begun twenty-five years earlier in the courtyard of a school where we wore blue aprons and had lasted until it was condensed finally in the name of Mariana, but he, lost and alone, didn't recognize me or didn't see me, and he continued trembling as if he were shaken by a fever that blinded him and dilated his pupils, moving his lips as if he were murmuring something, acknowledging the voice of someone calling him whom he didn't see.
AS IN DREAMS, in the pigeon loft I am a figure partly removed from myself and more opaque than the others. The pain I remember, the sudden, bitter sensation like the taste of blood in a mouth that has fallen against a damp cement floor, belong to that shadow, and I can't relive them because there are certain kinds of pain that act as anesthesia on memory. At the bottom of a great darkness, the pigeon loft illuminated by the indecent sun of the morning of May 22 that paused at Mariana's waist like the embroidered edge of the nightgown in the middle of her thighs is a cubical space suspended in the air, as far from the house and from Magina as I am from those days, as Magina is from me, high above the twilight mist and the gray-bronze of the olive trees, as are the words I write about things I've already given up recovering and naming. I'm alone, the pigeon loft has gradually and silently been emptied, like a church a few minutes after Mass is over, and on the staircase landing, behind me, Medina is talking to the captain of the Assault Guard, who leaned out the window before he left and ordered his men to wait for him in the street. "She died instantly," says Medina, and I hear the click of the metal spring that closes his case with the same unappealable certainty that he and the captain display in establishing how Mariana died. "She heard the shots and went to the window. Or she probably was already looking out and the shot hit her in the forehead before she saw anything. Don't you agree?" The captain doesn't say anything, probably he shakes his head with the sorrow of someone accepting a misfortune that has befallen others. "But let's see, Medina, you're a friend of the family, can you tell me what that woman was doing half-naked in the pigeon loft at that hour? They were married yesterday, weren't they?" I'm alone, and for the first time since I came in, I move toward the empty place where Mariana's body lay, on the thin disturbed layer of droppings and feathers like thistle flowers or tufts of cotton. Leaning on the sill of rotting wood where Mariana may have placed her hands before she died, I look at the impassive scene, the roofs that extend like dunes toward a distance of faded blue where the sierra is outlined, almost wiped away by the glare of a sun that trembles as invisibly as hot air above the chimneys. She had gone up to the highest spot in the house to say good-bye to the city where she always knew she was an outsider and to look for the last time at the things Manuel and I had looked at since we were born, because she would have liked, she told me once, to be part of the oldest paradises in our memories, to remove from hers all the recollections of an earlier life she didn't care about, so that its large, voluntarily emptied area would be ready to receive a new memory never to be divided from ours, a territory as intimately designed for happiness as the memory of certain rooms from childhood. She never spoke to us about hers, and not even Orlando, her oldest friend and the delicate, hermetic confidant of those terrifying chasms in her heart not visible from a distance when she momentarily transformed before me into an unknown woman, knew how she lived or what she did in the years before the spring of 1933, before the precise day he found her sitting in a cafe at a table on which there was only a glass of water, with her straight hair cut like Louise Brooks' and a resolute determination to model for a painter or photographer who wouldn't rush to touch her breasts as soon as she was naked. "She died in the same way she appeared to us," I thought, looking at the same roofs and blue brightness Mariana saw before she died, as if I could find in them the key her eyes always denied me, "she died and left exactly as she came, as if she had never been here." She didn't feel anything, Medina had said, she didn't even hear the shot or know she was going to die: a sharp blow on the forehead and then darkness and forgetting as she fell on her back and her already inert body rebounded on the dirty planks. But I remembered that her knees were soiled with droppings and that on her forehead, sticking to her hair and the thin border of darker blood surrounding the wound, was a pigeon feather, so small the killer didn't notice it when he wiped her face. He also forgot to pick up the cartridge of his single bullet or perhaps he couldn't find it, driven by the need to get away. It was next to the doorsill, in the crack between two floor planks, hard and vile and hidden, like those insects that fold themselves over when they sense danger until they take on the shape of a little gray ball.