in the ceiling and the constant tumult of water sounding beneath the paving stones, at times very close and at other times as remote as a memory allied to the sensation of water, of wetness, of slime, of someone drowning in dreams who opened his eyes and mouth underwater and struggled in an opaque light that gradually darkened, colored in blood, in the taste of blood and algae drenched in mud, someone who closed his eyes and remained motionless, indifferently vanquished, pushed along by the water, by the sweetness of stillness and asphyxiation. But I could not attribute that memory or dream to my life because I no longer had one, I was only that gaze or images of semidarkness and half-closed window and light that succeeded one another without coming together into a permanent shape, I was only the hand testing the body and the sheets as if they were a singular material, I was the room, immobility, the sound of water, the lethargy that had returned, no one, and after several hours the woman came in with a cup of milk and medicines and told me my name, I still couldn't connect it to me but only to that dream of water, to the drowned man without a face, to a bottomless time of mud and reptiles that no memory could ever reach. But it wasn't simply a matter of a hallucination. It was also a premonition. Because a few days later, the man who found me in the backwater of the mill, Inés' grandfather, who had been my father's comrade-in-arms in the war with Cuba, showed me the newspaper with my photograph and name and the article about my death. 'Red bandits brought down in heroic action by the Civil Guard,' I remember it said, and beside my photograph, the one from the file they made when I went to prison, was one of Beatriz dead and one of the man who accepted death because he was in love with her and who may not even have succeeded in becoming her lover. But the photograph of the other man, the younger one, wasn't there, and the paper didn't mention him, so it was undoubtedly his body they gave my name to, bequeathing me the infinite freedom I had conceived of when I awoke and didn't know who I was, saving me from my entire life and from my failure, from the unshaved face, the frightened eyes of the unknown man in the photograph, the shame of looking at Beatriz' dead, swollen face and remembering all the years when I renounced her loyalty and tenderness with the same silent pretense I showed when I renounced my own life, always, long before I met Mariana and up until the last day, until the last night, when I saw her telling me good-bye and I feigned a little sorrow because she was leaving with the others and I didn't dare acknowledge to myself that the only thing I wanted was to be left alone as soon as possible, to close the door to the country house and go back to my bedroom, not to write or to feel safe but only to know that I was alone, with no one blackmailing me with friendship or love or obedience to those slogans in which Beatriz and Manuel and even the cynic Medina continued to believe as if they were the catechism eight years after we had lost a war we never could have won. I was a deserter and an apostate, and it's possible I always had been one, as Beatriz said that night, but in the newspaper that certified my death, they spoke of me as if I had died in combat, I was that photograph of a man who had confronted the Civil Guard with a pistol and preferred death to surrender. You wanted a writer and a hero. There he is. You must have seen that newspaper among Manuel's papers and given it a precise place in the biography of Jacinto Solana that you expect or expected to write. But let me tell you something I left out of the blue notebook. Jacinto Solana leaves his visitors in the wine cellar of the Island of Cuba and goes back, lighting his way with a candle, to the room that faces the river. He puts out the light, smokes in bed, closes his eyes knowing he won't be able to sleep that night either, thinks about the others hiding in the wine cellar, in a damp darkness not mitigated by the moon, in close air where they smell the sweat of fatigue and fear and the odor of blood, hear the labored breathing of the wounded man. He thinks about them and the way they have of accepting persecution and death, and he knows he is thinking about Beatriz and hoping and fearing she will lift the trapdoor to the wine cellar and come up to find him, because if she came here, it wasn't to elude the encircling Civil Guard or to find a road into the sierra that will take them south but for the same reason that led her six months earlier to ask the other man to lend her his car to travel to a distant city where there was a prison and a man about to be released from it. He doesn't write, as I wanted you to suppose, he doesn't go through the pages of a recently finished book with indolent happiness to correct a comma, a word, to cross out an adjective or add one that is more precise, or crueler, he doesn't recall her obstinacy or her pride because those are two virtues he almost always has ignored. He only waits and smokes in the growing clarity of insomnia, he only remembers the way she said, before going down to the cellar, 'So it's true you're writing a book,' and her weary smile, and her twisted heels, and her fingernails scratching at the bottom of an empty can of sardines as if she weren't invulnerable to indignity either. He's waiting for her, but he shivers when he hears the door open because Beatriz came up barefooted to his bedroom, leaving the other man in the cellar, dying of jealousy and fear beside the wounded man who pants and doesn't sleep, powerless and alone, passed over, waiting, as he did when he watched her get out of the car in the field at the prison and didn't dare go after her and was afraid she would never come back. The coward Solana puts out his cigarette and turns to the wall to pretend he's sleeping, but that doesn't erase the presence of Beatriz from his old, intact cowardice. 'You haven't changed,' she says to him, still standing, 'you do the same thing you did when we lived together. You close your eyes and breathe as if you were sleeping so I won't talk to you. Back then I'd be quiet and try to sleep, but I'm not twenty-five anymore. You don't have to keep your eyes closed. I'm not going to ask you for any explanations.' She searches out my face in the darkness, touches my hair, my lips, with those hands of categorical sweetness that recognize my skin as if more than ten years hadn't passed since they touched me the last time, as if it were April 1937 and I had just opened the letter in which Manuel and Mariana invited me or invited us to their wedding in Magina in twenty days' time. I hear the springs in the bed and feel next to me the weight of her body, her hips, now broad and solemn, the unfamiliar perfume and the slide of the silk blouse against her skin and of the stockings she folds down over her thighs, her knees, as if tearing at the silk, the long white body I haven't looked at yet that trembles when it joins mine, when it rises up over me, the blonde hair spread out over bare shoulders, the bitter, tenacious belly and the open thighs that grasp my waist as I turn over and raise my eyes to look at her and hers close in a gesture of obstinate sorrow. She comes down now, and her hair falls over her forehead and covers her lips, she moves away my hands that enclosed without emotion the restlessness of her breasts and she withdraws and comes down until she bites me on the neck, until she sinks into my groin as she pulls away the rough cloth of my trousers and takes between her fingers and shakes and demands what she was looking for, what grows and affirms itself between her lips as far from me as the coldness of the moon and abruptly spills out in a mediocre death rattle after which there isn't anything, not even the avid desperation with which she licks and swallows and lifts up her hair, wiping her mouth, not looking at me, looking at the open window or the whitewash of the wall behind the bars of the bed. What was I going to say to her, what lie, what caress was I going to attempt when she fell back beside me and lay there quivering, when she drew up a sheet to cover her thighs and buried her face in the pillow as if it were the foul matter of solitude and silence, as if searching there as she bit into it for a weapon against tears. It was the same darkness and the same heavy silence between us, poisoned by guilt and involuntary, thorough cruelty and words unspoken, abdication into wakefulness, the torment of two bodies entwined between the same sheets and two minds as secretly divided as if they belonged to another woman and another man who never had met, who were attempting, impossibly, to sleep at the same time in two hotels at opposite ends of the earth. I watched her dress from my corner of cold shame and semidarkness just as I had witnessed her caresses, and when she adjusted her stockings and lowered her skirt, she turned her face illuminated by the end of her cigarette toward me, and she no longer seemed the same woman who a few minutes earlier had trembled humiliated and naked against my body, as if when she dressed she had recovered her pride and the serene possibility of contempt. It was then and not the next night that she said good-bye to me. Do you know what she said to me? Do you know what she had been waiting ten years to say to me? 'The only thing I've never accepted is your leaving me for a woman who was worth less than either one of us.' That was exactly what she said to me, and worst of all is that she probably was right, because Beatriz was never wrong. She was lucidity in the same way that Mariana had been the simulacrum of mystery, but in those years when I met her and fell in love with her — I'm speaking of Mari ana — I was like you: I preferred mystery even at the cost of deception, and I thought literature wasn't for illuminating the dark part of things but for supplanting them. Perhaps that was why I never could write a single one of the pages I imagined and needed as urgently as one requires air. Haven't you read my real writing from those years in Manuel's library? I was always the exact and somewhat delayed symbol of any manifesto published in Madrid, I even wrote one, in '29 or '30, with Orlando and Buñuel, but it never was published. It was called the