Later he told the story with the desperate fervor used to tell certain necessary lies, he told it to the incredulous gaze of Utrera, who was already dressed when he went to call him, he repeated it a few more times, adding details that made him feel despicable, but not less persecuted, and when he heard Amalia telling it to Doña Elvira, it seemed to him that the story, when it took place in a different voice, entered reality completely, and he was temporarily relieved of its weight. But Utrera, when they picked up Manuel's body to lay it on the bed, had examined the open window, the quilt, the half-burned candle still smelling of wax in the candlestick on the night table. I'll leave here tomorrow, Minaya said aloud, when he was alone and in the room, facing the window to the balcony that overlooks the Plaza of the Acacias, suddenly possessed by the premonition of exile. He heard a distant bell and then footsteps and voices on the stairs, the slow footsteps, the unmistakable voice of Medina, but still he didn't leave the room. He could hear them and recognize each of their voices, because they were all in the parlor, on the other side of the door, but also in the blue notebook, on the last pages that he was beginning to read now, asking himself which of them, which of the living or the dead had been a murderer thirty-two years earlier.
PART TWO
After all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity.
1
I STILL COULD HEAR the concave sound of the galleries, metal gates closing behind someone's footsteps, the pounding of the guards' heels, a thicket of voices that resounded in the high vaults like the ocean in a shell and seemed like voices and footsteps that were infinitely distant, the dark ocean heard in dreams. I had left behind the gate of the final gallery, high and painted black, like the wrought-iron grillwork in a cathedral, and now I was walking down ordinary corridors with floors of tiles and not damp cement, with gray doors and peaceful offices on the other side of the doors, where I waited interminably and acquiesced, signed typewritten forms, docile, cowardly, always fearing I hadn't completely understood what they were saying to me, repeating my name without avoiding the suspicion that when he heard it, the man bent over the typewriter would lift his head and order the guard who accompanied me to handcuff me again. There were countless offices, all the same, and in all of them there was someone who shook his head when he heard my name and didn't look at me, only read something on a list and asked something and, with an engrossed air, opened a large record book and then closed it without having found what he was looking for or asked me to sign somewhere, handing me a pen across the counter that I no longer knew how to hold between my thumb and index finger, too thin and too fragile for my fingers made clumsy by the cold, by ten years of not touching or using a pen. Now the guard was walking in front of me, rhythmically hitting the bunch of keys against the side of his trouser leg, and I no longer expected freedom and the street to be on the other side of any door. Now the doors were made of wood and not metal and were painted green like the shutters at the windows, but they still resounded in the same deep, definitive way when they were shut and there were no prisoners sweeping the corridors. I said my name again and signed a receipt; they gave me an open suitcase, and I put my papers and clothes in it while two guards with unbuttoned tunics watched me and smoked in a room without windows that had numbered metal lockers and a low-hanging lamp that swayed above the table, thickening the cigarette smoke in its cone of light. The other guard, the one who had led me there, ponderously left the bunch of keys on the table and ordered me to follow him, but this time the last door we passed through didn't have a lock and opened onto a small courtyard with very high walls of ocher brick and sentry towers rising at the corners of the roof, where two Civil Guards in gleaming oilskin capes were profiled like symmetrical statues against a low, pale gray sky. They didn't look at the courtyard, they didn't do anything when I crossed it trembling with fear and unknown joy and with twitching fingers grasped the handle of the suitcase as I approached the entrance, as closed and undifferentiated as a wall, where someone, another Civil Guard, opened a gate and stepped to one side to let me pass, saying something I didn't stop to hear, because the gate had closed behind me with a long clanking of locks and I was alone before the facade of the prison, under the yellow and red flag that snapped in the wind like the wings of a large bird.
THE PRISON WAS A HIGH ocher island in the barren ground and fog. Facing it, on the other side of the highway, was a building with long whitewashed walls and broken windows that looked like an industrial ship or an abandoned warehouse. I walked toward it, stepping on mud crisscrossed by tracks of horses and cars, but I still didn't see the black car parked at a corner: perhaps I saw it without noticing it, and I remembered only when I heard the engine starting that I had seen it and that the blades of the windshield wipers were moving even though it wasn't raining. To shield myself from the wind, I walked very close to the wall, the brim of my hat down over my eyes and the lapels of my overcoat raised, and I didn't turn around when I heard the engine and then the tires skidding in the mud. I heard it moving slowly behind me, as if it didn't want to get ahead of me, and I walked faster and moved closer to the wall that never ended, on my way to the single tree and the shack made of debris that sometimes, from a high window in the prison, I had seen beside the highway, the only indication that a city existed beyond the wasteland my eyes could glimpse briefly. The men who left the city at dawn on slow bicycles would stop there to drink a glass of aguardiente and then leave rubbing together their hands numb with cold, exhaling the hot breath of the alcohol as they grasped the handlebars again and pedaled down the highway with their heads sunk down between the lapels of their dark jackets, as if they were leaving for a wintry, distant exile. From the tin roof rose a column of smoke that the wind dispersed among the branches of the tree. Without turning around to look at the black car, I pushed the door of poorly assembled planks and entered a narrow, warm place filled with smoke and cases of bottles. The counter was a board that smelled strongly of wood soaked in alcohol, lying across two barrels. Behind it, lit by an oil lamp, a very fat woman nursed a child red-faced with crying. Nailed to the wall were yellowed posters announcing remote bullfights and a 1945 calendar on which a black woman with a red shawl tied around her waist smiled as she displayed a tin of cocoa. The woman behind the counter, motionless on an empty case, slowly and methodically examined my face, my suitcase, the mud on my shoes. I asked for a glass of cognac, and she didn't detach the child from her large white breast or stop looking at me as she stood to find the bottle. She didn't look at my eyes but at the indications of what she had known since she had seen me come in: the awkwardness, the still undiminished distrust, the way my hand held the glass and raised it, with a slight tremor. I drank the cognac in one swallow and nodded in silence when the woman asked if I wanted another one. The glass in the small window that faced the highway was dirty and opaque with vapor, but through it I could see the black silhouette of the car, which had stopped. The alcohol burned in my throat with violent sweetness and intensified the colors of things. With the second glass still intact, I went to sit beside the window, wrapped in my overcoat, in the warm blur of the alcohol, raising the faint mask of abandonment and smoke that was between my eyes and the door that perhaps was going to open. I smoked with half-closed eyes, waiting, not indolent, lost, feeling the alcohol rising in my veins like successive undulations in the water of a lake, I half-closed my eyes as if waiting for sleep so I wouldn't see anything but the blue smoke rising and the dirty semidarkness of the barrels and the row of bottles, the red spot on the calendar whose pages numbered the days of a time when I hadn't existed. I took a drink and closed my eyes completely, and on the other side of the window, the door of the black car slammed shut. When I opened them again she, Beatriz, was looking at me through the smoke that the icy outside air had shaken, taller than I remembered, as if immune to time, as if she had just turned thirty, her age the last time I saw her, tall and solemn with her blonde mane and gray overcoat and the beret she held in her hands as if she weren't sure how she ought to behave. The fat woman had lain the child down, and now she was cleaning a row of bottles on the counter. From the corner of my eye I saw her looking at us as Beatriz embraced me, touching me with her blonde hair from which there rose an unfamiliar perfume and taking my hard face in her hands to recognize and touch what her eyes saw, undimmed by tears. She watched us without interest or modesty, with inert fixity, wiping the dust from the bottles with a dirty rag that she sometimes passed slowly over the counter, and when I approached to ask her for another glass, she studied Beatriz' coat and stockings and high-heeled shoes and then looked at me, with a different expression, as if comparing us, asking herself perhaps why a woman dressed like that had come into her tavern to find me.