"This house is too big," said Manuel in the gallery, gesturing toward the large windows of the courtyard and the line of doors to the rooms. "It's all Ines and Teresa can do to keep it clean, and in winter it's very cold, but it has the advantage of allowing you to lose yourself in any room as if it were a desert island."
Lost forever, Minaya swore, safe, enclosed behind the white shutters to the balconies, in the heat of the fire burning in the marble fireplaces, and the clean sheets, and the water in which he dissolved with closed eyes, abandoned and alone, undamaged, naked, not fearing anything or anyone, as if fear and the obscene possibility of failure had not been able to pursue him to Magina. Manuel had left him alone in the bedroom, and before unpacking and taking a long bath that made him lose his awareness of the time and place where he found himself, he examined with gratitude and discretion the large, high bed that yielded so sweetly under the weight of his body, the deep closet, the paintings, the modern lamp on the night table, the desk facing the balcony that made him imagine tranquil afternoons of literature and indolence when he would look out at the tops of the acacias and the dark roofitiles of the houses in Magina. I'll be thrown out of here, he thought as he dried himself before a mirror, as he shaved and dressed and used the comb and razor as the tools of an actor who isn't sure he has learned his part and doesn't have time to rehearse before he's called on stage: "I'll be thrown out or I'll have to leave when I can't pretend anymore that I'm writing a book about Jacinto Solana and I don't even have enough money to take a taxi to the station." Lost forever, for two weeks, he calculated, using each hour as if it were his last coin, a respite for an impostor or a condemned man. When he left the room, bathed and relatively decent in his only suit and tie, he found himself in the parlor that opened onto the nuptial bedroom. Before they married, Manuel had assigned the front rooms on the second floor to his conjugal life with Mariana so they could have their own area separate from the rest of the house, but of that original plan all that remained was the bedroom no one had used since May 21, 1937, and the wedding photograph hanging on the wall of the parlor over the sofa with yellow flowers. Tall and erect in his lieutenant's uniform, with a small blond mustache and his hair fixed with pomade, in the photograph Manuel had the unwilling appearance of a hero frozen by the shock of the flash, his eyes staring and lost. Mariana, on the other hand, and this was not a coincidence, I suppose, but an indication of their different characters, looked at the spectator from whichever angle you contemplated the photograph. You entered the parlor and there were her large, almond eyes looking at you without expression or doubt, her white veil and ambiguous smile, her long, extended fingers resting on Manuel's arm, very close to his two lieutenant's stars. The straps, the pistol at his waist, his military bearing, were no longer anything but a simulation or testimony to what had ended, for when the photograph was taken it had been two months since Manuel had definitively been discharged from the army because of the bullet that had grazed his heart on the Guadalajara front and kept him on the verge of death for several weeks. But the clarity of his blue eyes was the same that Minaya had encountered when he met with him in the library, as well as that air of useless solidity and excessive generosity, limited only by modesty. Dressed now in a dark suit that he wore very few times during the year and prepared, because he was a gentleman and knew the norms of hospitality, to receive his nephew properly, he again resembled the tall, solemn man in the wedding photograph.
That was when Inés heard them talking about Jacinto Solana. She had gone in to serve them sherry, and when she heard that name she paid more attention to what they were saying, and she remained still, very attentive, without their noticing her, in a dark corner, choosing to be invisible, the same attitude of absent submissiveness she had adopted as a child at the orphanage; but when she had poured the glasses and placed a tray of appetizers on the table — the other one, the stranger, watched her moving around them and spoke in a peculiar tone about a book he was going to write — Manuel told her she could leave, since Amalia and Teresa undoubtedly had prepared supper for Dona Elvira, and he began to recall his friendship with Solana only when he supposed that Inés was no longer listening.
"It would be inexact to say he was my best friend, as your father told you. He wasn't the best friend but the only friend I've had in my life, and also my teacher and my older brother, the one who guided me through Madrid and found the books for me that I had to read and took me to see the best films, because he was very fond of movies and had been in Paris with Bunuel for the opening of L 'Age d'Or. Before the war, one of his jobs was writing screenplays for that film studio of Bunuel's, Filmófono it was called, he did screenplays and publicity too, but he kept writing for the newspapers, short things, film reviews in El Sol, poetry in Octubre, a story or two that Don José Ortega published in the Revista de Occidente. You can read it all if you like, because I have those things in the library, though he always told me he didn't care anything about them and they deserved to be forgotten. When we were boys, at secondary school, we imagined we'd become war correspondents and rich, famous writers, like Blasco Ibanez, and our success would make the girls like us, the ones we fell in love with so futilely. We planned to go to Madrid together, not to study for a career but to live a bohemian life and achieve glory. But my father died when I was in my second year of law, and I had to come back to Mágina to help my mother, and I didn't finish my studies and I lacked the will to leave here, as Solana had done. He came from time to time and talked about Madrid and the world, the cafés where it was possible to sit beside the writers who were like gods to me, and he brought or sent me newspaper clippings with his byline, always saying it was nothing compared with what he was about to write. At the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he published a good number of articles and some poems, especially in the Gaceta Literaria, because he had become a surrealist, but I believe his only friends in Madrid were Buñuel and Orlando, the painter who illustrated his stories, and then, just before the war, Miguel Hernández, who was younger than us and saw in him something like a mirror of his own life. Solana really disliked the way Hernández boasted about his origins. "I've tended goats too," he would say, "but I don't think that's something to be proud of." He didn't stop writing when the war broke out, but I suspect he wouldn't have liked knowing that those ballads from the Mono Azul that you've read have survived him for so many years. In May '37, when he came to Mágina for my wedding, he was one of the editors of that paper and belonged to the Alliance of Antifascists, and they had just named him cultural commissar in an assault brigade, but suddenly nobody heard anything about him, and he didn't attend the writers' congress they were holding that summer in Valencia. Not even his wife knew where he was. He had enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the popular army under another name, and he didn't publish a single word. He was wounded on the Ebro, and at the end of the war he was arrested in the port of Alicante. But all of this I found out ten years after he disappeared, when he left prison and came to Mágina and to this house. He still wanted to write a book, one memorable book, he said, and then die afterward, because that was the only thing that had mattered to him in his Life, to write something that would go on living when he was dead. That's exactly what he told me."