leave, returns to check he hasn't forgotten anything and once more opens empty drawers and doors to the closet where a solitary hanger moves back and forth, Minaya understood that the city and the house had never accepted him as one of their own, because even before he left, the furniture, the cool odor of the wood and the sheets, the mirror where he once saw Inés coming toward him naked and embracing him from the back, were denying him like suddenly disloyal accomplices and hurrying to erase every proof or trace of the time he had spent among them and to pretend they had recovered the same impassive hostility with which they had received him the first time he entered the bedroom, turning their backs on him as they did that afternoon when he asked them for one final sign not of hospitality but of recognition and farewell. Because downstairs, in the library, the others, the true inhabitants of the house, surrounded Manuel's coffin and murmured prayers or memories or sad judgments on the brevity of life or deadly diseases of the heart, taking refuge in the voluntary semidarkness, waiting for him to arrive in order to receive him with their planned silence of reproval, asking themselves what he was doing, why he hadn't come down yet, why last night, when Medina arrived, he had locked himself in his bedroom and not come out again until very late in the morning, recently showered and silent, as if mourning had nothing to do with him or he didn't know how to respect the details of its ceremony. Utrera knows, he feared, Utrera saw the pink ribbon on the night table and smelled the traces and sweat of bodies, and now he accuses us in a quiet voice with his offended lucidity, with his rancor of an old roué who reproves and condemns what he cannot achieve. Minaya went out to the parlor, because he never left his bedroom through the door that opened to the hallway, and at that moment when the urgency of deciding on an action had removed the image of Inés from his thoughts, he saw her in profile, wearing her mourning blouse, standing in the gallery as if she were lost at a crossroads, and when he tried to reach her, he was alone in the hallway and Inés' face was like those flashes in the dark that one glimpses with closed eyes. He ran toward the corner where she had disappeared and continued to hear her footsteps in the empty rooms and on the staircases where he had walked only once, on the February afternoon when he had gone up to Dona Elvira's rooms. Sweet, impossible Inés, a spy, thorn of persecution, alibi for all desire and all baseness. When he thought he was lost in the successive rooms as alike as a set of mirrors, he found the way he was looking for when he recognized on a chest the Baby Jesus that raised a pale plaster hand beneath a glass bell, pointing an index finger at the hidden turning and staircase that led to the bedroom where Dona Elvira had withdrawn twenty-two years earlier in order not to go on witnessing the decadence of the world and the obstinate failure of her son. But now the disorder from whose menace she had fled in June 1947 like a deposed king who chooses exile without abdicating his crown and his pride, seemed, like an invader, to have broken through the walls and locked doors she had raised against it, which had protected her for twenty-two years, because when Minaya entered the bedroom illuminated by the large windows of the conservatory, he saw before him a place as unfamiliar as those streets that at dawn seemed flattened by a night bombing and one couldn't recognize a single derail of what had been until a few minutes before the long sound of the sirens and the incessant, frightening, earsplitting noise of enemy planes had begun. Just like then, just like those women wrapped in black kerchiefs who searched through the rubble and perhaps recovered an absurdly undamaged family portrait or a crib with twisted bars, Inés, kneeling in the midst of the disaster, deliberately put in order old dresses ripped or trampled in a rage by Dona Elvira after she had overturned chests that may have occupied the same place since the early years of the century, she gathered up letters and postcards, scores of melancholy sonatas and habaneras that Dona Elvira must have danced to in the time of her inconceivable youth, carnival masks, embroidered table linen, long silk gloves that lay on rumpled bedclothes like amputated hands, periodicals about atrocious crimes, old society magazines with lithographs on glossy paper shredded by eager scissors, solemn accounts books on which Dona Elvira had smashed a cosmetics jar and then ground it with her foot. "She began this morning," said Inés, as if stating the effects of a natural catastrophe whose violence cannot be attributed to anyone, "she came here when the undertakers took Don Manuel's body down to the library, and she didn't want any of us to help her. She locked herself in with a key and began to knock everything over and break it and empty all the drawers." Without tears, without a single gesture of despair or evident madness, as methodically determined to create disorder around her as the general of an army who administers and calculates the permanent devastation of a conquered city and sows salt in the pits where its foundations had been. "She called us a little while ago. She kept ringing the bell until Amalia and I got here. She had already combed her hair and dressed for the funeral, and it looked as if she had been crying, but I didn't see any tears, and her whole face was covered with powder." Inés was dressed in mourning too, and the black blouse and tight skirt prematurely added to her body a part of the slim, grave plenitude it would achieve in a few years and that now only some of her gestures were a prelude to, an unknown future body that these hands guessed at in caresses like prophecies and will no longer touch, and that Minaya is ignorant of, because he hasn't learned yet to look at bodies in time, which is the only light that reveals their true nature, the ones an eye and an instant cannot discover. Awkward and cowardly, as he was in the early days, humiliated by the feeling of having lost Inés as inexplicably as she granted him her tenderness, he could only manage to say to her, with a coldness he supposed infected by the coldness he detected in her, a few words that made her feel, him as well, strange and inert, forsaker of the memory of so many nights and days coldly thrown into the acceptance of forgetting, an accomplice not of guilt but of repentance, of simulation, of vile glances fixed on the ground. As it had been the first time he saw her, Inés wore her hair gathered at the back of her neck, smooth and tight at her temples, so that when she completely revealed the shape of her cheeks and forehead, she purified the gracefulness of her profile, but a single chestnut ringlet, translucent, almost blonde, loosened at random when she bent over to pick something up, fell on her face and almost brushed her lips, curled and light like a ribbon of smoke that Minaya would have wanted to touch and undo with his fingers as secretly as at another time he had moved aside the sheets covering Inés' bare breasts and belly and thighs to watch her sleep. Indistinctly he asked her to let him help, and when she moved away as if to avoid a caress she perhaps desired and that Minaya never would have dared to initiate, she dropped the handful of old postcards she had been picking up. White beach resorts with ladies in tall hats seated around tables, casinos beside a sea of pink waves and heraldic views of San Sebastián in hand-tinted twilights, with teams of oxen that removed from the beach the tilting cabanas of the bathers, an illustrated card commemorating the first communion of the boy Manuel Santos Crivelli, celebrated in the parish church of Santa Maria, in Mágina, May 16, 1912, a letter, suddenly, with a republican stamp, addressed to Don Eugenio Utrera Beltrán on May 12, 1937. "Did you notice this letter?" asked Minaya, standing up, and he removed from the envelope, with extreme care, as if he were raising the wings of a mounted butterfly and attempting to keep it from disintegrating in his fingers, a typewritten sheet, almost torn at the folds. "It's strange that Dona Elvira has it here. It was addressed to Utrera." "That woman has always been crazy," said Inés, barely looking at the letter, "she must have kept it the way she kept everything." The date of the heading, written beneath a letterhead in elaborate calligraphy ("Santisteban and Sons, Antiquarians, Firm Established 1881") was the same as the canceled stamp, and included the letter, even before Minaya began to read it, in the narrow band of time when the wedding and then the death of Mariana occurred, transforming it into a part of that surviving material he could not touch without shuddering, like the cartridge and the piece of newspaper in which he found it wrapped and the white cloth flower that Mariana wore in the wedding photograph and Inés put in her hair one night. "Madrid," he read, "May 12, 1937," thinking that on the same day so impassively indicated by the typewriter, Mariana was still alive, that the time she inhabited was not an exclusive attribute of her person or the history already closing in around her to lead her to her death, but a vast general reality to which that letter and the man who wrote it also belonged. "Sr. D. Eugenio Utrera Beltran. Dear friend: I am happy to inform you of the arrival on the 17th of the present month of our colleague D. Victor Vega, whose invaluable skill in the antiquary's difficult art I have no need to describe to you, for you already know the number of years Sr. Vega has been employed in this Firm and the high esteem he enjoys here. As previously agreed, Sr. Vega will inform you with respect to the matters that interest you so deeply concerning our business, in which I hope you decide to take part with the good taste and reliability you have always proudly displayed with regard to the Fine Arts. I inform you as well that on his arrival in Magina, Sr. Vega will stay at the Hotel Comercio on the Plaza and await your visit there on the 17th. Very truly yours, M. Santisteban." He looked at the letters of the name, Victor Vega, he pronounced it aloud, on the edge of a revelation, asking himself where he had heard or read it, then giving thanks to chance for the opportunity of discovering what his intelligence never would have elucidated otherwise. And when he finally went down to the library, when he had before him the semidarkness and in it the hostile, accusatory faces, he carried the letter in his pocket like a certainty that made him invulnerable and wiser, sole master of clarity, like the detectives in books who gather in the drawing room the inhabitants of a closed house where a crime was committed in order to reveal to them the name of the murderer, who waits and is quiet and knows himself condemned, alone, blemished among the others, who are still ignorant of his guilt. It was, this afternoon, like pushing Minaya toward the conclusion of a mystery, like directing his steps and his thoughts from the darkness, from literature, fearing he would not dare to reach the end and yet not wanting him to persist in his search beyond the indicated boundary, it was seeing what his eyes saw and detecting with him the scent of the candles burning at the corners of the coffin and the funeral flowers that surrounded it like the edges of an abyss at whose bottom lay Manuel, like the vegetation of a swamp into which he was sinking very slowly, unrecognizable by now, his hands tied by a rosary that wound around his yellow, rigid fingers and his eyelids squeezed or sewn shut in the obstinacy of dying, without any dignity at all, without that stillness that statues attribute to the dead, humiliated by scapulars that Dona Elvira had ordered hung around his neck and dressed in a suit that seemed to belong to another man, because death, which had exaggerated the bones in his face and the curve of his nose and erased the line of his mouth, also made his body smaller and more fragile, so that when Minaya went up to the coffin, it was as if he were looking at the corpse of a man he had never seen. Except for Medina, who conspicuously did not pray, who remained erect and silent as if affirming against everyone the secular dignity of his grief, a trace of Manuel's transfiguration infected the others, enveloping them in the same gloomy play of light and shifting semidarkness that the candles established and that probably, like the disposition of the catafalque and the black hangings that covered it, had been calculated by Utrera to achieve in the library an effect of liturgical staging. In that light the entire library acquired an oppressive suggestion of chapel and vault, and the old, ordinary smells of varnished wood and leather and the paper in the books had been replaced by a dense breath of church and funeral indistinguishable from the first hints of decomposition already diluting in the air. They were seated in a semicircle around the coffin, shapes without emphasis or the possibility of movement beneath the mourning clothes that tied them to the shadows, barely opening their lips as they prayed, as if the uniform voice marking the rhythm of the litanies did not emerge from their throats but from the darkness or from the scent of the candles, an emanation like a filthy secretion from the rigid weight of sorrow, and when Minaya came in they raised their eyes not to look at him but at a point in space slightly removed from his presence, as if a current of air and not a body had pushed open the door, closing it afterward with a muffled thud. He shook the hand of Frasco, who stood ceremoniously to offer his condolences in too loud a tone of voice, provoking an angry glance from Utrera, an imperious order to be silent. Or perhaps it wasn't the tone of voice, Minaya thought, but the simple fact that Frasco, when he offered his condolences, was recognizing in him a family connection to Manuel that Utrera considered illegitimate. Not daring to say anything to Dona Elvira, whose face was half covered by a translucent veil and who led the rosary as she slipped the beads between fingers as thin and pointed as a bird's claws, Minaya went to sit next to Medina and learned from him the details of the travesty. "They were the ones," the doctor said in his ear, "the old woman and that parasite, that damn hypocrite. Look what they've done to Manuel, that rosary in his hands, those scapulars, the crucifix. He made it very clear in his will that he didn't want a religious funeral, and now see what they've done, they waited until he died to get what they couldn't have when he was alive. And if it weren't for my screaming and yelling, they would have buried him in a Nazarene habit. Where did you get to? I spent all morning looking for you. I have something very important to tell you." Once again Utrera demanded silence, theatrically raising his index finger to his lips, and Medina, with ironic gravity, crossed his hands over his stomach as if parodying the gesture of a canon. "That one already knows. Which is why he's looking at you that way. He's dying of envy." "I don't understand, Medina." Fat and magnanimous, Medina smiled to himself and gave Minaya a kind of pitying look, a look of incredulous astonishment at his youth and ignorance. "Everybody knows by now, even Frasco, who was as happy as I am. A week ago Manuel changed his will. Now you're the sole heir. Of course that won't do you much good for a few years, because Dona Elvira will have all the property at her disposal in usufruct until she dies. And that woman's capable of living to a hundred if she decides to, just as she's lived until now, out of sheer spite." So that now, at the end, when he was concluding the prelude to expulsion, Medina's words abruptly granted him the right not to possession of the house or of the Island of Cuba, because that was a disconnected, abstract condition he could not conceive of, but to ownership of a history in which he had until then been a witness, an impostor, a spy, and that now, in a future he couldn't imagine either, would linger on in him, Minaya, but leaving him, as he would find out very soon afterward when he arrived at the station to buy a single ticket for Madrid, with the same sensation of inconsolable emptiness as the man who wakes and understands that no gift of reality can mitigate the loss of the happiness he just experienced in his last dream. Bewildered, as if he were slowly waking, he abandoned the lethargy into which the waiting, the semidarkness, and the sound of prayers had plunged him and went out to the courtyar