A Manuscript of Ashes Read Online Free PDF

writer."
    That was all he talked about in the spring of 1936, about the need to leave the bad life of newspapers and banquets with their toasts and literary magazines and return to Mágina and lock himself inside his father's house and not leave or talk to anybody until he had finished a book that wasn't called
Beatus Ille
yet and was going to be not only the justification for his life but also the weapon of an uncertain vengeance because, he said, with the smile that expressed no pleasantness or bitterness but rather a very calculated complicity with himself, sometimes the success of the best was personal revenge. He thought about him and his wise, cold smile as he slowly descended the steps of the pigeon loft on his way to the courtyard where night had definitively fallen and the library where Minaya was waiting for him. In the mirror on the last landing he looked at himself to find out how his nephew would see him: he seemed old and disheveled, and there were tiny white or gray feathers on his stained trousers and his tweed jacket with the torn pockets. He smoothed back his white hair, and not without a certain uneasiness, because he was still very timid, he opened the door to the library. Minaya, his back to the door, was looking at the photograph on the fireplace, which in Manuel's catalogue had an invisible number one written on it, because it was the first one taken with Mariana and also the oldest image he had of her. After the initial silence and the stupefaction of not recognizing each other—for a moment what seemed to divide them was not immobility or the great empty space of the library but a chasm in time—Manuel came toward Minaya and embraced him, and then, resting both hands on his shoulders, stepped back to look at him with blue eyes circled in weariness beneath his lids. At close range he was a stranger, and Minaya could barely find in him any characteristic that reminded him of the tall figure glimpsed in his childhood: perhaps the hands, his hair, the set of his shoulders.
    "The last time I saw you, you came just to my waist," said Manuel, and he invited him to sit down on one of the armchairs arranged in front of the fire, as if that too had been anticipated because of the delicate talent he always had for hospitality. "Did you remember the house?"
    "I remembered the courtyard and the tiles, and the clock that frightened me back then. But I thought it was all much larger."
    Slowly the fire, the attentive voice, Manuel's gestures, stripped away the feeling of flight, the dejection of the trains, and for the first time Madrid and the memory of prison were as distant as the winter night thickening in the plaza against the windowpanes and the white shutters, closed to protect him. Leaning back in the chair, Minaya gave in to fatigue and the warm influence of the cognac and the English cigarettes that Manuel had offered him, hearing himself talk, as if he were someone else, about his life in Madrid and the death of his parents, which occurred when a doubtful stroke of good luck in business allowed them to buy a car and treat themselves to a vacation in San Sebastián, because his father, who had hereditary nostalgia, always wanted to spend the summer like the aristocrats in the illustrated magazines he had read in his youth. He lied without will, without excessive guilt, as if each of the lies he devised had the virtue of not hiding his life but correcting it. He didn't say that in recent years he had lived in a pensión, or that the incidental pieces he occasionally published in literary magazines slipped inevitably from indifference to oblivion, he didn't speak of his fear of prison or the gray horsemen, but of the poem "Invitation," which someone had shown him in the cafeteria at the university. He had copied it, he said, and read it so many times that by now he knew it by heart, and he recited it slowly, not looking at Manuel, grasping at the only fragment of indubitable truth that sustained