d searching for the relief of air and the pink and yellow light that turned white only on the marble paving stones, white and cold in the mirror on the first landing, resonant with voices because in that courtyard each sound, a laugh, a voice that says a name, footsteps, the fluttering wings of a pigeon against the glass in the dome, acquires the sharp, dazzling solidity of pebbles in a channel of frozen water, and things that happen there, even the trivial act of lighting a cigarette, magnified by its sonority, seem to be happening forever. Perhaps that was why, when Utrera came out after him and began to accuse him, Minaya was sure of each of the words he was going to say and certain this was the only place where he should say them. Now Utrera wasn't wearing a white carnation in his lapel but a mourning button, and a wide band of black cloth sewn around one sleeve, which gave him the air of a disabled reprobate. He asked for a light, coming very close, like a queer or a policeman, small, exhaling the smoke in rapid mouthfuls, intent on injury, on not holding back a single offense. "I don't know what you're waiting for, I don't know why you haven't left yet, how you dare to remain here, to go into the library, to mock our grief." "Manuel was my uncle. I have the same right to mourn him as any of you." He was astonished by his own audacity, by the firmness of his voice, more certain and clear in the sonority of the courtyard, very close, suddenly, to an appetite for cruelty, involuntarily pleased at acceding to a siege that would turn into an ambush of his accuser precisely when he, Minaya, wanted it to, simply by displaying the letter or the cartridge he had in his jacket or saying one or two necessary words. "Don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand me. Don't be so sure you've deceived us the way you deceived poor Manuel. You killed him, last night, you and that hypocritical tart you were wallowing with in the most sacred place in this house. I saw you and her when you came out of the bedroom. And before that, I saw you go in, biting each other like animals, and I heard you, but I didn't do what I should have done, I didn't tell Manuel and I didn't go in to throw the two of you out myself, I left so I wouldn't be a witness to that profanation and when I came back it was already too late. That smell in the bedroom, on the sheets, the same one you couldn't get rid of and that I noticed when you came to call on me. Weren't you surprised that I was still dressed at that hour? The ribbon on the night table. Do you think I'm blind, that I can't smell or see? But probably you didn't even try to hide. You're young, you love blasphemy, I suppose, just as you don't know the meaning of gratitude. Do you know what Ines was before she came to this house? She was in the poorhouse without a father or any family name except the one her mother gave her before she abandoned her, a wild creature who would have been expelled from that nuns' orphanage if Manuel hadn't taken her in. But you're different. You come from a good family and you have breeding and an education and carry in your veins the same blood as Manuel. You were a fugitive and a political agitator when you came here, don't think I couldn't find out, even though your uncle, for the sake of courtesy, and hospitality, never told me. He's come to write a book about Solana, poor Manuel told me, as if he didn't realize that the only thing you were doing in this house was eating and sleeping free of charge and hiding from the police and going to bed every night with that maid in order to discredit the hospitality all of us showed you since your arrival. It would be too merciful to call you ungrateful. You are a defiler and a murderer. Last night you killed Manuel." Vain, theatrical, invested with justice and mourning just as he once invested himself with glory and then, as the years passed, with the melancholy and rancor of the overlooked artist, Utrera held his breath as if chewing it with his false teeth and showed Minaya the street door. "Leave right now. Don't continue to profane our sorrow or Manuel's death. And take that slut with you. Neither you nor she have the right to remain in this house." This house is mine, Minaya could have or should have responded, but the crude consciousness of ownership, even one as future and imaginary and founded only on a quiet confidence of Medina's, did not provoke his pride or add anything to his firmness, because the vast white facade with marble balconies and circular windows and a courtyard with columns and the glass in the dome had belonged to his imagination since he was a child with the definitive legitimacy of sensations and desires born and nourished only in oneself and requiring no attachment to reality to sustain themselves, because since less than an hour before, since he found the letter in Dona Elvira's bedroom and confirmed in a passage in Solana's manuscripts who Victor Vega was, he had taken over possession not of a house but of a history that had been beating in it for thirty years and that he would bring to a close by stripping away its mystery, granting to the scattering and forgetting of its details the dazzling, atrocious shape of truth, its passionate geometry, impassive like the architecture of the courtyard and the beauty of the statues in Magina, like the style and plot of the book that Jacinto Solana wrote for himself. "You know my uncle began to die a long time ago, on the day they killed Mariana," said Minaya, like a challenge, without any emotion at all, only with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he still weren't sure about daring to say what he had to say, what was demanded of him or dictated to him by loyalty to Manuel, to Jacinto Solana, to the outlined, broken history in the manuscripts, "and I think you also know who killed her." Utrera's dead smile, his old petulance of a hero of brothels and official commemorations twisting the expression of his mouth and remaining there, in his cold look of contempt, in his regained fear, still hidden. "I don't know what you're talking about. Don't you want to leave any of our dead in peace? You know as well as I how Mariana died. There was a judicial investigation and they did an autopsy. Ask Medina, in case you haven't found that out yet. He came here with the judge and examined the body. A stray bullet killed her, a bullet fired from the roofs." He won't deny it at first, Minaya had calculated, he won't tell me I'm lying or that he's innocent, because that would be like accepting my right to accuse him. He'll say he doesn't understand, that I'm crazy, he'll turn his back and then I'll take out the cartridge and the letter and oblige him to turn around so he can see them in my hands just as he may have seen the pistol Dona Elvira handed him that night or afternoon or morning in May when she thought up the way Mariana was going to die. "Let me alone and leave," said Utrera, and when he turned his back as if with that gesture he could erase the presence and the accusation not yet spoken by Minaya, he saw Inés on the first landing, next to the mirror, and for a moment he stayed that way, his head turned, as if repeating the arrogance of any of his statues, and then, Inés said, he was unexpectedly defeated and moved toward the dining room, knowing that Minaya was walking behind him, and even if he could elude or deny his questions, he would not escape the interrogation he had seen in the girl's eyes, transparent and precise like the sonority of the courtyard, earlier than all reasoning or suspicion, all doubt, born of an instinctual knowledge whose sole, frightening method was divination. He lit a cigarette, poured a glass of cognac, put the bottle back on the sideboard, and when he went to sit down, Minaya was in front of him, on the other side of the same long, empty table where they'd had supper together the first night, obstinate, unreal, gathering proofs and words and courage to go on saying them while Inés, in the doorway, without even hiding, witnessed and heard so there would be nothing later on, right now, surrendered to the imperfection of forgetting. "You killed Mariana," said Minaya, he recalled, as if the crime had occurred not thirty-two years ago but last night, this very morning, as if it were Mariana's body and not Manuel's they were mourning in the library, you, it was necessary to say this in another voice that had never been his, picked up the pistol in the small hours of May 21, 1937, and prowled around the gallery, hidden behind the curtains that then, like now, covered the large windows over the courtyard, and Solana almost saw you, but he didn't see you, only a shadow or a trembling of the sheer curtains, and when Mariana began to climb the steps to the pigeon loft on the labyrinthine staircase I've climbed myself at other times, when Jacinto Solana gave up following her and shut himself in his room to write in front of the mirror the verses that twenty years after his death called me to this city and to this house, you walked after her, the pistol in your right hand, which probably was trembling, the pistol hidden in your jacket pocket, driven by a hatred that belonged not to you but to that woman who made you her executioner and her emissary and armed your hand to make certain Mariana would never be able to take Manuel away from this house. "You're crazy," said Utrera, and he got to his feet, draining the glass of cognac, "there was shooting, they were chasing a fugitive, go back up to the pigeon loft and look out the window and you'll see that you can almost touch the next roof. There's no need for you to tell me that Doña Elvira didn't love Mariana. We all knew that. But what had she or Manuel done to me? Why would I kill her?" That's what Solana didn't know, what kept him from finding out the name of her murderer, Minaya thought when he unpacked his suitcase and untied the red ribbons around the manuscripts and searched them for the account of the lynching in the Plaza of General Orduña and the not yet exactly remembered name of Victor Vega, the antiquarian, the spy. "But Solana found the proof that the pistol had been fired from the door to the pigeon loft." It was the chosen instant, the necessary critical moment of the revelation, just one gesture and he would disarm Utrera with the trivial omnipotence of a man who lifts a foot to step on an insect and then keeps walking without even noticing the dry, light crunch of the animal's shell flattened under the sole of his shoe: it was enough to look at the old man from above, from the certainty of the truth, to examine as proofs of guilt his mouth hanging open because of stupefaction and age and the way the knot of Utreras black tie pressed like a noose into the flabby skin of his neck, Minaya's slipping his hand inside his jacket like a man looking for a cigarette and taking out a small package and a typed sheet that tore in the middle when he opened it again. Santisteban and Sons, antiquarians, firm founded in 1881, an appointment in Mágina for an accessory in a network of spies and fifth columnists destroyed in Madrid just a few hours before its messenger established contact with you, Utrera, said Minaya, smoothing and joining together the two pieces of paper on the wood of the table and displaying the cartridge that rolled for a moment and then stopped between them, as irrevocable as the deciding card in a game. "Solana found this cartridge. He also noticed that Mariana had traces of droppings on her knees and forehead, which would have been impossible if, as they said then, she had fallen on her back at the window when the shot hit her. She fell face down, because when she died she was looking toward the door of the pigeon loft, and her killer turned her over and wiped the droppings from her nightgown and face so it would seem as if the shot had come from the street, but he forgot to pick up the cartridge, or he looked for it and didn't have time to find it. It was Solana who saw it. Solana wrote down everything. I've read his manuscripts and I've gone where he couldn't go, because he didn't see this letter. Doña Elvira kept it in her bedroom. I think it has the answer." Utrera looked at the cartridge and the two pieces of the letter without yet accepting, without understanding anything that wasn't their double threat, as if he were listening to a judge accuse him in a foreign language whose unknown syllables would condemn him more irrevocably than the meaning of what they said, without yet recognizing in the yellowed, torn paper, the letterhead with the Gothic calligraphy, and the writing in the lost letter he had been looking for throughout the entire house for thirty-two years and that now appeared before him as the face of a forgotten and distant dead man returns in dreams. "Don't make me laugh. Solanas manuscripts, his famous work of genius. After his death a squad of Falangistas came here and burned them all, just as they had done at the country house. They threw his typewriter into the garden from the conservatory window, they burned all his papers and all the books that had his signature, right there, behind you, at the foot of the palm tree. And even if something were left, didn't anyone tell you that Solana was a liar his whole life?" Again he turned to cognac, contempt, useless irony, refusing to look right at Minaya because he wasn't the one he was seeing but the other one, the dead man, the true accuser who had usurped another life to embody in it the obstinacy of his shade, never completely driven away, and it wasn't Minaya's lucidity that made him surrender, or even the way he stood up behind him to hold the letter in front of his eyes like someone bringing a light up to a blind man's face, but the impossible evidence that speaking to him behind that voice was the voice of Jacinto Solana, dead and returned, lodged at the back of Minaya's eyes as if he were behind a mirror that allowed him to see everything and remain hidden. And that voice was also his, the voice of the secret and the guilt, so that when Minaya continued speaking, it was as if Utrera were listening to himself, free at last of the torment of simulating and lying, absolved by the proximity of punishment. "You were going to become a Franco spy," said the voice, Minaya, "you received that letter, and when you were waiting for Victor Vega to come to Magina, you learned he had been arrested and then lynched by the mob in the Plaza of General Orduna, and you looked for the letter to destroy it but couldn't find it, and probably Dona Elvira, who stole it from you, who knew as well as you that the letter could lead to your torture and a firing squad, threatened to give it to the police if you didn't kill Mariana." But as Minaya spoke, he began to hear what he himself was saying as if it were a monologue in a book that loses its energy and truth when it is recited by a mediocre actor: he didn't recognize his own brutality and couldn't stop the dirty pleasure he found in it and that incited him to prolong it, just what he had felt, he said afterward, tonight, when he was a cowardly little boy and avenged the fear and humiliations he suffered by hitting those who were weaker and more cowardly than he, and his shame and disgust impelled him to continue hitting until his childhood was over. Utrera looked at the letter and the empty bottom of his glass and moved his bald, humbled head, not affirming or denying, only allowing himself to be struck by each word as if he had lost his will or his consciousness, and it moved back and forth, held up only by his rigid neck and the knot of his black tie, waiting for the blows still to come. It was, suddenly, like hitting a dead man, like closing his fist, expecting muscled resistance and sinking it into decayed or rotted material and pulling back and hitting again with greater fury without anything happening. "Who are you to demand an accounting from me?" said Utrera in a voice Minaya had never heard from him before, because it was the one he used to talk to himself when he was alone, when he returned from the café, at night, and sat down in his studio at the table covered with the dead leaves of newspapers stained with varnish, his useless hands hanging between his knees, "how can it matter to me now that you found that letter? Don't you see? I've spent thirty-two years paying for what I did that day, and I'll go on paying until I die, and afterward too, I suppose. Doña Elvira always says there's no pardon for anyone. Certainly it would have been better if I'd let her turn me in that day, but I was on the Plaza of General Orduña too when they took Victor Vega out of the police station and I saw what they did to