"BECAUSE WHAT I DIDN'T understand then, what I understand only now, as I'm telling it to you, a man who didn't know him and has no idea how much he had changed and imagine him, I suppose, as a literary character, is that when I lost him, I wasn't losing only the one man I could call my friend but also the right to remember or know how my life had been before I renounced it forever. Things exist only if there is someone, an interlocutor or a witness, who allows us to recall that at one time they were true. Which is why he would say that the worst misfortune for a lover is not losing his love but being left alone with his memory, left blind, he would specify, remembering some verses by Don Pedro Salinas that he always recited and that perhaps you've seen underlined in that book of his in the library. For there's another being through whom I look at the world, because she loves me with her eyes. Now I know that in the beginning, when without saying anything to him I cleaned the room with the circular windows and put the typewriter in it, I didn't do it to offer him a refuge or the possibility of writing his book, but to have him here, in this city and in this house, to have someone to whom I could say what I hadn't said in ten years and share the memory of the time when Mariana was alive. It was the same before the war, when she and I fell in love. We were always looking for him, because his presence made us aware of our happiness more intensely than when we were alone. But he never talked to me about Mariana during the months he was here. He said her name only once, on the first day, when he told me he was going to write a book about all of us. I imagine that book was like a vampire that robbed him of the use of language and of memories as he wrote it. He gave it his life just as someone gives blood at a hospital or dedicates himself to opium. That's why I didn't recognize him when he opened the door of his room that night. He hadn't shaved for at least a week or eaten the hot food that Teresa left for him in the hall, and the air in the room and his clothes smelled as if he hadn't opened the window or changed or washed since he arrived here. He opened the door and stood looking at me with his coat over his shoulders, and his shadow hit me at the same time that I detected the rarefied odor of the air, because the lamp in the room swayed behind him as if he had bumped into it when he stood to answer the door. He was swaying too, his arms crossed and both hands holding the wide lapels of his coat, and he smiled without my being able to see his eyes behind his glasses. It took me a little while to realize he was drunk and was moving back and forth in alcohol like a fish behind the glass of an illuminated aquarium, beyond the insolent shame of someone who drinks alone until he falls down and immediately gets up because he hears someone calling him and he has to pretend he's sober. Do you have a light, he said, showing me a cigarette that had gone out, which he placed on the edge of the ashtray and soon forgot about, and he asked me to sit down, repeating my name as if he had just remembered it and wasn't familiar with it yet, and abruptly he forgot about me and turned his back to look at the plaza through one of the circular windows. 'You have to let Medina see you,' I said, but he didn't hear me or didn't pay attention to me, and he began to laugh that cold laugh I hadn't known in him until then and that seemed like the laugh of a dead man. To keep from falling he leaned against the window recess, and he walked toward me following an arduous straight line, holding a new cigarette and a glass of cognac that moved slightly with the trembling of his hand. 'Teresa has told me that you hardly taste your food. Medina's downstairs, in the parlor. If you like, he'll come up to see you right now.' He collapsed into a chair, facing the typewriter, and moved his hands and lips to say something, he said Mariana or Solana and showed me with a weary gesture the written sheets on the floor and desk and the blank sheet in the typewriter. 'Excuse me, Manuel,' he apologized in every gesture or word, excuse me for not having cleaned this up to receive you. I never was very orderly, you know. Now I think I'm becoming dirty. But I'm not sick. You remember Orlando: when he looked at you with those cold saurian eyes, it was because he was going to die from drinking so much. This afternoon I began to write and couldn't get past the second line. Alcohol works sometimes, but it isn't a substitute. Orlando knew that too.' I drank with him, I asked about the unfinished and frightening book whose pages thrown down next to the table he was treading on or kicking aside with a careless air in which I saw something of voluntary punishment and perversity, but the man I was talking to was no longer Jacinto Solana."
He didn't go up again, he recounts, as if he were telling about a very long, definitive farewell, he spoke to him again only on the afternoon of April i, when he went into Solana's room and saw him placing his papers and clothes into the cardboard suitcase. He had just shaved and put on a tie, and his breath didn't smell of cognac. Like a traveler about to leave a hotel, he was arranging his things in the suitcase, and he had made the bed and cleaned the ashtrays and was moving, unfamiliar and resolute, around the room. "I'm going to Madrid, Manuel. Nobody knows me there. I'll be safer." Then, like his own guilt, Manuel recalled inviting Solana to go to the Island of Cuba: the slow brown river moving among the oleanders, the solitary house on the hill, surrounded by almond trees, Jacinto Solana's precise and never-again postponed appointment with his desire to die. Manuel called a taxi, and they waited together at the entrance, accepting forever the unfamiliar courtesy of strangers between them, they got into the car and in silence crossed the lanes of Magina and the Plaza of General Orduna and then the wide straight streets that extend the city to the north, and when they reached the station, neither one had to begin the gesture of good-bye because the yellow train of the Guadalquivir was already moving slowly on the track. Manuel saw him standing on the running board and moving away, the suitcase in his hand and his hat over his eyes, and he waved a good-bye that Solana never saw because he had already gone inside the car and found a seat next to the window to see how the streets of Magina disappeared forever in a high city hanging over the ruins of a wall, suspended like a line of blue mist over the undulating remoteness of the olive groves.
"For twenty-two years I've been alone," Manuel said, looking at Minaya as if he were deciphering on his face that period of time, "from the moment Solana went away until you arrived." In the same taxi that had taken them to the station he returned to the house when night had already fallen, and he was surprised not to see the light burning in the circular windows. He was in Solana's room, which still smelled of tobacco smoke and the presence and usury of a body; he covered the typewriter and then went down to the parlor to look at himself in 1937, to look at his own pride and manhood exalted by the buttons and straps of his uniform. In the oval photograph, Mariana looked at him as if she were foreseeing the future dead man before her now. "But Mariana was looking at him, you ought to know that," Manuel said in the library, in front of the fire. "We were in the photographer's studio, and I had put on my uniform and the two stars I never wore because they promoted me to lieutenant when I was dying in a hospital in Guadalajara. She took my arm and looked at the lens when the photographer told us to smile, but Solana was behind him, with Orlando, and I barely could see them because the lights were blinding me. At the same time that she pressed my arm, Mariana moved her head very slightly and found Solana's eyes. That was exactly when the photographer took the picture. No matter from which angle of the parlor you look, she seems to be smiling and looking at you, but the one she's looking at is Jacinto Solana."