A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page B

place with serene light that received him now as if he were a stranger. It was the time of the olive harvest, and a man he didn't recognize immediately was loading empty sacks and long poles of heather wood for shaking down the olives onto a mule tied to the grillwork over the window.
    "How could I not remember him if we grew up together," the man says to Minaya, and he chokes and coughs without taking the cigarette wet with saliva from his mouth, sitting in the sun on a wicker chair that creaks beneath his large, defeated body. "But he went to Madrid during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and found a job on a newspaper and got involved in politics, because he had a lot of ideas and never liked the countryside, so he left his father alone with all the work they had on the farm, and they didn't speak for years."
    "Be quiet, Manuel," murmurs a woman beside the old man who has her white hair pulled back and a black shawl over her shoulders, who had been sweeping the sidewalk and saw Minaya stop in front of the house next door, as if he didn't know that no one had lived in it for many years. The man—"Manuel Biralbo, pleased to meet you"—had stopped braiding the rope he was holding in his large hands when Minaya arrived and offered him another chair facing his, in the corner of the plaza where there's a smell of damp earth, in the light that sifts through the thick foliage of the poplar. "Be quiet, Manuel," the woman repeats in a low voice, looking out of the corner of her eye at the stranger who asks questions about forgotten things, but her husband, as if he were not aware of the risk she observes and fears, goes on talking and not only invites Minaya to sit down but also offers him his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers and becomes entangled in senseless explanations that no one has asked him for.
    "Justo Solana, the father, they shot him when the war was over, and nobody knows why. He must have done something, people say, like so many others who had fingers pointed at them back then, but I don't know what he could have done since he wasn't a man who got mixed up in politics, and for the whole war he stayed at the farm. But he came back a little while before the troops marched in, and in three or four days they came for him in a car and took him to jail, in handcuffs like a criminal. Then I found out they killed him. But his son, Jacinto, didn't know until he came here from prison. I can see him as clearly as I see you, with his black coat and hat and the suitcase tied up with a rope in his hand. At first I didn't know him. I was in my doorway when he knocked at the door of his house, and I saw his face when they told him his father didn't live there anymore. Jacinto, I said, don't you remember me? And when I shook his hand, I saw that he was crying. He said, 'Manuel, what did they do to my father?' and I didn't know what to tell him because I had a thing here, in my throat, and I couldn't even talk. 'They killed him,' I said, and he looked at me and lowered his head and left the plaza without saying another word. And I never saw him again. That summer I heard they had killed him too."
    His footsteps returning, the inert sound of his footsteps on the paving stones of the street that takes him away from the Plaza of San Lorenzo, where Manuel Biralbo sat watching him leave, never to return, sitting on his wicker chair, braiding a rope to occupy his hands, explaining to his wife that there's no danger, that this boy who's so polite is writing a book about Jacinto Solana, you remember, Justo's son, the one who went to Madrid and then they killed him. Like the ticking of a clock, like the beating of the suicide's heart and the ringing of bells in Magina, his footsteps drummed on the empty street, not subject to his will and his consciousness, indicating the only possible road left to him in his banishment. He thought he would never reach the white palace on the Plaza of San Pedro as he walked along the Calle de la Luna y el