A Manuscript of Ashes

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Authors: Antonio Muñoz Molina
of the glass had awakened him from a dream, Minaya opened his eyes and saw before him the half-closed lids and eager wings of Ines' nose, who had not stopped kissing him. For a moment he was afraid that someone had come into the library, and he moved away from the girl, who still moaned in tender protest and then opened her eyes, smiling at him with lips wet and inflamed by his kiss.
    "Don't worry. I'll tell Don Manuel the drawing fell when I was cleaning it."
    When he picked it up, Minaya saw that something was written on the back. "Invitation," he read, and again it was the tiny, familiar, furious hand he had found a few weeks earlier in the novel by Jules Verne and that very soon he would secretly pursue through the most obscure drawers in the house, a slender thread of ink, a flowing stream not heard by anyone that led only to him, not to the key to the labyrinth he had already begun to imagine, but to the trap he himself was setting with his search. He saw the desk, the mirror, the hands on the paper, the pen that was tracing without hesitation or rest the final verses Jacinto Solana wrote not realizing until the end that the sheet he had used was the one where Orlando had drawn his portrait of Mariana. That night, when Minaya entered the library after supper, the drawing was back in its place with new glass. Sitting across from him, meditative and calm, Medina examined it with the attentive air of someone who suspects a falsification.
    "I'll tell you something if you promise to keep it a secret. I never thought that poor Mariana was as attractive as they said. As Manuel and Solana said, of course, though Solana was very careful about saying it aloud. And do you know what they both suffered from? An excess of seminal fluids and literature—forgive my vulgarity. I suppose they've already told you that Solana was in love with her too. Desperately in love, and long before Manuel, but with the disadvantage that he was already married when he met her. Piously married in a civil ceremony, like the good Communist he was, feeling Christianly remorseful for the temptation of deceiving his wife and his best friend at the same time. Your father really never talked to you about it?"

6
    T IME IN M ÁGINA revolves around a clock and a statue. The clock on the tower of the wall built by the Arabs and the bronze statue of General Orduna, whose shoulders are yellow with rust and traces of pigeons and whose head and chest have nine bullet holes. When Minaya can't fall asleep and tosses and turns in the arduous duration of his insomnia, he is rescued by the great clock on the tower striking three in the empty Plaza of General Orduna, where the cab drivers stretch out and fall asleep on the backseats of their cars and an officer sitting in boredom at the entrance to the police station guards the door with his elbows on his knees and his flat-peaked cap down over his face, and perhaps he gives a start and sits up when above his head he hears the striking of the hour, which then, like a more distant, metallic resonance, is repeated in the tower of EL Salvador, its bulbous, lead-colored dome visible over the roofs on the Plaza of the Fallen, where Inés lives. Then there is almost a half minute of silence and suspended time that ends when it strikes three inside the house, but still very remote, on the clock in the library, and immediately, as if the hour were approaching Minaya, climbing the deserted stairs with inaudible steps and slipping along the checkered corridor of the gallery, the three bells strike very close to his bedroom, on the clock in the parlor, and so the whole city and the entire house and the consciousness of whoever cannot sleep eventually merge in a unique submerged and bidimensional correlation, time and space or past and future linked by a present that is empty and yet measurable: it precisely occupies the seconds that pass between the first bell in the tower of General Orduna and the last one that sounds in the

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