Then I remember the plaza gradually emptying and the contracted body beside the column, but that image is lost in the image of other bodies I didn't see, my father's, illuminated by the headlights of a truck at the foot of the cemetery wall, the solitary dead body my father saw on July 19, 1936, at a corner of the Plaza of San Lorenzo. Bodies without faces as if biting the bitter earth or the pavement of a street, abandoned to the sun, in an empty siesta hour, dead and alone, rotting and alone, without name or dignity or glory, exactly like dead animals in the mud of a river. Silently we entered the water before dawn, raising the rifles with both hands above our heads, and we stepped on something soft that sank, something slimy and corrupt, mud and corpses of drowned mules under the weight of a machine gun and human bodies that seemed stripped of bones. I remember the Plaza of General Orduna as if I were seeing it from high above, at an hour made even emptier because the tower clock could not announce it: the empty pedestal, Manuel's car, the body that an Assault Guard poked at with the end of his rifle. Mariana and I walked very slowly, keeping our distance from each other, to the car, sat down in it, not saying anything, not asking each other where Orlando and Santiago were now. Mariana placed her tense hands on the steering wheel and looked at the empty plaza or only at the dirty glass that separated us from it. Her disheveled chestnut hair covered her profile like a veil conceived of only to keep me from seeing her. I said her name in a quiet voice, and she looked at me in the rearview mirror without turning toward me. I placed a hand on her knee without daring to acknowledge or feel the shape of her thigh under the thin skirt, as if desiring her at that moment would have been disloyalty. When we returned to Manuel's house, he hadn't come back yet from the country house, and Orlando and Santiago were waiting for us in the library, a little drunk, very close together on the sofa, laughing at something they were whispering in each other's ear, their glasses raised, as if they couldn't remember the reason for having a toast.
8
THE LIGHT, EVERY NIGHT, round and yellow and high like a minor moon that belonged only to the plaza, the one light burning at midnight in the darkness of Magina, the one consciousness, Manuel thought, not made sluggish by the still intact stupefaction of the war and the extremely long winter that after eight years seemed to prolong it. He returned to the house at dusk, after seeing Medina in his office on his slow walk that normally took him to the watchtower in the wall, and before pushing open the door, he stopped for a while under the acacias to look at the lighted window in the room where Jacinto Solana was writing at that very moment. He imagined he could hear the sound of the typewriter through the rain, and he continued to hear it, confused with the rain or with the murmur of Jacinto Solana's voice, when he woke in the middle of the night fleeing the vast hand that opened his chest to tear out his heart the way you tear a root out of clod-filled wet ground. The multiplied, metallic blows sounded above his head like rain on the balcony glass and the insomniac footsteps of the man who never seemed to sleep or abandon for a single second his perpetual vigil in front of the typewriter or around it, always uncovered, Teresa told him, beginning at dawn, like a mechanical animal on the desk that Solana circled when he couldn't write, pacing blindly through the smoke of his cigarettes and the importunate labyrinth of his memory, walking in circles of obsessive geometry like an insect flying around a lamp. At eleven the electricity was cut off and all the streets and windows in Magina were erased by the sudden flood of darkness, but then, after a few minutes during which the circle of the window vanished in the high blackness of the house, a yellower, fainter light appeared and in it was outlined the shadow of the solitary man who had lit the first candle of the night to illuminate his insomnia of written or rejected words, and at times Manuel, hidden under the branches of the acacias, would see Jacinto Solana smoking, motionless, in the circle of light, looking at the swamp of shadows where he tossed the butt like someone who throws a stone down a well and waits to hear it hit the water. Then he would close the window, and Manuel would hear again the distant metallic blows of his writing, as usual among the sounds in the house as the beating of blood in his temples, and like a coward he would approach them, going up in silence to the very door of the room, but when he extended his hand to knock, he would stop and listen to the footsteps on the parquet or the sound of the typewriter, and he never knocked because he was afraid Solana would not want to receive him.
"At first I went up to talk to him almost every afternoon, and I'd bring him tobacco, a thermos of coffee, an occasional bottle of cognac. He'd leave the house at dawn to avoid running into my mother or Utrera, and that was when Teresa cleaned the room and made his bed, but gradually he stopped going out or even opening the door for Teresa, and she would leave a breakfast tray outside the closed door, and when she came back for it, she'd find it untouched. There was one afternoon when he wouldn't open for me either. I wanted to believe, and even told Medina afterward, that he probably had fallen asleep after several nights of insomnia and didn't hear me knock. But a moment earlier I had heard the typewriter, and as I waited at the door I was absolutely certain he was sitting in front of the machine, holding his breath, the index fingers of both hands immobile above the keyboard, waiting for me to go away. I heard the click of the lighter and very strange breathing, like that of an invalid, and then, as I was thinking that Solana couldn't write and was trapped in the agony of a blank page, I heard the harsh scrape of the pen on paper, and I knew that not even silence signaled a truce."
Like the blood in one's temples, like wood borers on the most inaccessible shelves in the library, like a spider invisibly weaving the threads of its trap under a cellar hatchway: he was there, in the house, in the room with circular windows, and sometimes he went out or wandered aimlessly at three in the morning along the gallery hallway, but very soon, when the first days of excitement caused by his arrival had passed, it seemed as if he really had left in an irrevocable way, because they never spoke of him or ran into his taciturn figure, and only Teresa's periodic visits to the top floor with the broom and dustcloth or the tray of food indicated that someone was living in that region of rooms unoccupied for so many years: someone, in any case, who was losing the name and face that all their memories assigned to him and little by little was reduced to an obscure presence, the faded and at times fearsome certainty that the top floor was not empty, and if they thought about him because they heard his footsteps on the parquet or the noise of the typewriter, they barely could connect those signs to the memory of the man they knew before the war or to his inexact shadow that stood in the courtyard ten years later. He was in the house like the wood borer is there, even though one cannot hear its gnawing, and after a month his presence had hidden so definitively behind the brief indications that disclosed it that Manuel, when he finally decided to go into his room even if he didn't want to receive him because he feared he might be sick, waited at the door he had knocked on several times without an answer, feeling the awful uncertainty that the man who unbolted the door for him wasn't Jacinto Solana.