"There's another creature I'm looking for in the world," I quoted, but Mariana was no longer beside me, she was looking at things beyond my desire to immobilize them in her, torn by the hands of the clock that joined to indicate twelve o'clock and by the still distant whistle and the column of smoke that thickened into a soot-stained cloud when the train, stained by war and with ripped banners hanging from the sides of the locomotive, obscene like an old animal with wet skin, stopped in front of us. Through the smoke that dissipated to reveal dark anxious faces at the windows looking at the platform, I saw Orlando, who signaled to Mariana by waving his drawing portfolio over the heads grouped at the windows, taller than the others, and before he saw me, because I was still sitting on the bench on the platform, I heard over the din of the cars and the shouts of the soldiers his huge voice and laugh as he embraced Mariana, picking her up and swinging her around. "Solana, you old satyr, prince of your own darkness, you're even paler than you were last Sunday. Or was it Saturday when we got drunk the last time?" Big, tired, his clothes in the disarray of nighttime drunkenness, with thin damp hair at his temples, smelling of alcohol and medicine because he suffered attacks of asthma, laughing with an obstinacy in his intoxicated eyes that sometimes seemed close to madness, Orlando got down from the train bringing with him like an emissary all the excitement of the war and the blind urgency of Madrid. He brought portfolios of drawings that fell to the ground when he embraced Mariana and that I collected from between people's feet, and a suitcase that had been mislaid somewhere in the corridor or in his compartment. When we climbed into the train to look for it, urged on by Orlando's despair, who said he had packed the sketches for a masterpiece in it, a slim boy with long, very black hair whose face I vaguely recognized appeared with it. "God, here at last," Orlando said in a way that didn't reveal if he was referring to the suitcase or the boy. "I was afraid I had lost them both, and I swear to you that I would have preferred to lose the suitcase than him. Santiago, this is Mariana, who has been kind enough to invite us to her wedding with a local landowner. I think you already know Solana. He's the one who writes those fine articles in Octubre on art and the proletarian revolution. He aspires to a position in the political bureau."
He talked so much and so rapidly and with such a perverse edge that I estimated he had been drinking right up to the moment the train arrived in Magina. The flask of liquor bulged in his jacket pocket, but when he introduced us to the boy he had brought with him, I understood that pride and not alcohol was the real reason for his elation. "Solana, you ought to get right back to Madrid. The front is going to collapse if you don't go in and recite some of your Communist ballads for our soldiers. Even the intellectuals are clamoring for you. The other day I ran into Bergamin, with that face that always looks as if he's just taken communion, and he said that as soon as you get back he was going to name you as his secretary for that congress you're all preparing in Valencia. Don't miss it, Mari-anita, the Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals or something like that. Everything with capital letters." He put his hand on my shoulder not to be amiable so much as to keep his balance, and leaning on Mariana and me, he left the station. There he stopped beside the open car where Santiago and I had put the luggage, looking as if dazed at the vast blue sky and the double avenue of linden trees that cut across the plain toward Magina, whose highest towers looked like pointed needles above the empty fields. Orlando took off the red and black handkerchief he always wore around his neck and wiped the sweat off his face, staring at the light, the handkerchief paused by his mouth, like a mask he hadn't decided to remove. "Solana," he said, his back to us, "Solana you infidel, you should have told me, you should have warned me about the light. Didn't you realize that this is the light I've been waiting for? Even Velazquez is darkness compared with this." He staggered with his head turned toward the blue, and when Santiago got out of the automobile that was already running to take him by the arm as if he were a blind man, he suddenly became disheartened and closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep against the back of the rear seat, his mouth and nostrils wide open, as if he were dreaming about the beginning of an asthma attack.
We were already crossing the first streets of low villas and dusty gardens where Magina ends in the north when I saw in the rearview mirror his open, reddened eyes staring into mine in an absent lucidity that his waking, or the silence that had overtaken the four of us since Mariana had started the car, stripped of any sign of mockery or pride. He let his head fall slowly onto Santiago's shoulder, and the boy remained solemn and firm beside him, looking at the long lines of houses, and when he lit a cigarette without moving his eyes away from the rearview mirror I thought I could detect in his expression an old countersign of desolation or renunciation, as if the illusions of alcohol had abruptly abandoned him. He moved his head a little and then I knew he was alluding to Mariana and was asking me about her without words. "You look beautiful when you're driving, Mariana," he said, his eyes half-closed to complete his indolence, "you remind me of that heroine in Orlando Furioso who rode on a winged horse wearing brilliant armor." He rested his hand on the back of Mariana's seat and caressed her hair with fleeting tenderness, like a dozing faun, as if he were touching the air or liquid silk that dissolved between his large, stained fingers. She looked away from the road for a moment to smile at him in the mirror with the tranquil gratitude of an accomplice, which was always present in the way she looked at Orlando. I was jealous when I caught their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror, because I desired the candid, offered part of Mariana that she revealed only in her behavior with Orlando as much as the other darker, more carnal part that belonged to Manuel, and I would have liked to join the two in a single indubitable woman not closed to my intelligence and desire, like the third Mariana, the only one I knew, shadow or reverse of the others or of herself, who always seemed to be to one side of things, who sometimes, that very morning, would take me by the arm and stop to tell me the exact words that burned inside me and that I would never say to her. "I'll always be with you. Whatever I do and no matter who I'm with, even if I don't see you again. I want you to know that and never forget it, not even when you don't care about me anymore."