A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page A

Minaya thinks in the plaza and writes later that night in the notebook that Inés punctually opens and examines every morning when she comes in to clean his bedroom, "and what gave him the measure of their defeat and of his sentence, which had not ended when he left prison: not only the red and yellow flag that hung now from the balcony of the police station but also the restored statue and the clock that began to tell time again onlywhen the city had been conquered by the fascists." Like Solana, imagining what he did or feared, he avoids the more traveled streets and goes down toward the southern wall along cobblestoned lanes and white walls that lead to intimate plazas with abandoned sixteenth-century palaces and tall poplars quivering with birds, to the hidden Plaza of San Lorenzo, where the house is located in which Jacinto Solana was born and lived and before whose door he stopped one dawn in January 1947. From the half-closed doors, from the open windows through which the music of a radio soap opera reaches the plaza, attentive women watch Minaya and question one another, pointing at the stranger, who stands beneath the poplars and looks at all the entrances one by one, as if he were searching for someone or had lost his way in the city. That's how they looked at Solana when he arrived there, and perhaps they didn't recognize him because he was ill and had aged and ten years had passed since the last time they had seen him in Magina. And so, with a slow step and bowed head, he came to his father's house and saw the balconies and closed door that nobody opened when he struck the door with the knocker. Number three, said Manuel, the corner house, the one that has a coat of arms over the doorway with the cross of Santiago and a half moon. The house with deep animal pens and barns where he would hide behind sacks of wheat to read the books Manuel gave him and that had, like the library, the profound fragrance of serene time and money that isolated him from his own life and from the shouts of his father calling him from the door to come down and clean the stable or give the animals their feed. In his house the golden miracle of electric light did not exist, and when his parents went up to bed, they took with them the kerosene lamp whose yellow, greasy light swung between their sleepy voices and lengthened their shadows in the hollow of the staircase, and he remained alone in the kitchen, his light the embers of the fire and the candle he lit in order to continue reading the adventures of Captain Grant or Henry Morton Stanley or the journeys of Burton and Speke to the source of the Nile until his eyes began to close. He groped his way up to his room, and from his bed he listened to the coughs and snores of his father, who fell asleep with the same brutal resolve he brought to his work, and as soon as he had fallen asleep, sinking into the mattress of corn husks as if it were a bed of sand, his father was knocking at the door and calling him because it was almost dawn and he had to get up and saddle the white mare and take her to the farm along the road that began at the Gothic door in the wall. He tied his book bag to his back, and it was already morning when he returned to the city, running along the paths on the ramparts to get to school on time, and there Manuel, blond and clean and just recently awake, was waiting for him to copy the composition and arithmetic homework from his notebook.
    What a strange logic of memory and pain conspires silently to transform the prison of another time into paradise: he trembled with gratitude and tenderness when he turned the corner of the plaza and saw the poplars and the familiar doorways, loyal to his recollection, and the illuminated air that became blue over the high, ivy-covered belfry of San Lorenzo. For a moment, as he walked toward the house recognizing even the irregularities in the ground, he thought his whole life had been one long mistake, that he never should have left the