As if brought in by the immense shadow of the wall, at the top of which they were turning on the distant lights of the watchtower, night had fallen over the farm and the valley — very slow, perfumed and blue and deep, like the gleam of motionless water in the irrigation ditches. He took the oil lamp from the house and hung it on one of the beams in the shed. On nights like this he cooked supper on a fire outdoors. Outside the circle of that light, which shone before the house like the flames of stubble burned on summer nights, there was the darkness of a waveless ocean, of black hills and trees like ghosts or statues. But he didn't fear the darkness or the uninhabitable silence. He cleaned the fireplace of ashes, trimmed the light, stood with an agility that disconcerted me to show me where the pan and oil were. In a tower in the city the bells had struck ten. "I have to go now, Father." He stood still, next to the fire, shook his head with an air of melancholy or exhausted disillusionment. "All the time it's been that you don't come to see me and you don't even stay for supper. Where are you staying in Mágina?" "In my friend Manuel's house. He's getting married the day after tomorrow. He asked me to invite you." "Well you tell him thank you and say your father's sick. I'm not going up to Mágina until all of you end that war." When we said good-bye he kissed me without looking at me and turned immediately to stir the fire that was going out. From the road to Mágina I saw him absorbed, sitting back, alone in the light of the fire as if he were on an island, angrily alone against the darkness and surrender. I imagined him putting out the fire when he finished supper, going into the house with the lamp in his hand, acknowledging the semidarkness and the order he had chosen. He would hang the lamp at the head of the bed, and lying on it he would open the second volume of Rosa Maria or the Flower of Love, which was a book longer than his patience and his own life, finding perhaps the old clippings that were now as yellow as the pages of the novel. But he never told anyone he knew how to read and write: it was important to him not to leave traces of his presence in the world, and in writing, as in photographs, he suspected a trap he always tried to avoid, the invisible snare laid by fingerprints.
The road to Mágina gleamed like moondust in the dark. I reached the gate in the wall and walked alone down the paved lanes toward Manuel's house, but the impulse that led me wasn't my wilclass="underline" it was desire pushing me, the warm, recovered despair of knowing that Mariana's eyes would receive me.
4
TENSE AND SERENE, in the center of the photographs and in Orlando's drawing and in the essence of a plural memory that became one when interwoven in her, like men's glances at a girl walking alone between the tables in a cafe: firm in her unknown desire, in the certainty of the fascination she exercised, and in the slight tilt of her hat with a veil that concealed her eyes and reached just to the middle of her nose and cheeks. Solana on one side, and on the other Manuel, both welcomed by her, who had taken the arm of each in order not to lose them in the crowd that filled the Puerta del Sol and held herself up between their twofold and denied tenderness with a grace as indifferent as the profile of a tightrope walker who does not look at the slender cord or the pit or the dizzying emptiness over which his feet move forward. "But when that photo was taken Manuel wasn't in love with her yet," Medina explained. "Or he didn't know it and had only a few hours to find out." With the years she had stopped being a single face and a single woman to become what had perhaps always been her destiny, not interrupted but consummated by her death: a catalogue of glances and recollections fixed at times by a photograph or a drawing, profiles on coins incessantly lost and recovered and spent by the covetousness of hatred or remembrance, coins of ash. Voices: hers, unimaginable to Minaya, a little dark, according to Solana's words, the other voices that continued naming her when she was already dead, in solitude, before mirrors, saying her name into the pillows of insomnia, repeating for her sake the three syllables into which defamation continued to be condensed with no less fervor than remorse or desire.