A Manuscript of Ashes Read Online Free Page A

leaned against the dark windows in the corridors, looking at him at times as if they recognized him.

3
    I NÉS SAID SHE SAW HIM standing among the acacias, not yet decided, examining the house, the balconies, the white plaster moldings, as if giving time to his memory to recognize them, still and solitary behind the fountain's rim, not protecting himself from the fine spray that dampened his hair and overcoat, indifferent to it. She was changing the sheets on the bed in the room that Manuel had told her that same morning to prepare for the guest, and she said that from the first time she looked out from the balcony and saw him there in the plaza, staring so intently at the house, she knew who he was, and that very soon, when he tossed away the cigarette and picked up the suitcase in a gesture of brusque resolve, the bell would ring in the silence of the courtyard and then Teresa's footsteps would sound on the marble flagstones. She went out to the gallery and hid behind the curtains to see him from the front when the door opened, framed in the light of the threshold, tall, his hair tousled and damp, with a gray-checked overcoat and sloping shoulders that emphasized his air of fatigue and a small suitcase he didn't want to give to Teresa when she asked him into the parlor room where the fire was already lit.
    "Inés," Teresa called, going to the stairwell, "tell Don Manuel that his nephew's here, the one from Madrid."
    Â 
    I NÉS REMAINED QUIET on the other side of the curtains, her face very close to the glass, because she liked to stand that way for hours, behindthe windows, looking at the street or the courtyard with white columns or the animal pen with a poplar tree and a dry well that she has to cross for the last time tonight on her way to the Magina station. She liked to look at everything from a distance, immobile things, the passage of light across the glass in the dome, and without anyone noticing her presence—she was so stealthy and slim that only a very attentive ear, one alerted ahead of time, could detect her—she pressed her nose and forehead to the glass and traced lines or words left by her breath, returned to an extremely slow time, the time of her childhood, lost in it, immune to the voices calling her. Before going back to the kitchen with her swaying walk, Teresa looked up from the middle of the courtyard, searching for Inés' shadow behind the gallery curtains, because she suspected she hadn't obeyed her and was still there, watching her, perhaps choosing a favorable angle that would allow her to still see the new arrival, and ordered her again to hurry and let Don Manuel know. The clocks struck six, first the clock in the parlor, very close to Inés, and a few seconds later, when the girl was already climbing the stairs to the pigeon loft, the bells of the clock in the library, sounding deep and distant to her, startled Minaya, who hadn't dared to sit down and remained standing, very firm and attentive, at the closed door, his coat over his arm and the suitcase close by, as if he still weren't sure he would be accepted in the house. Reality, I calculate, imposed unpleasant corrections on his memory. The ceiling wasn't as high as he remembered, and the books no longer prodigiously covered every wall, but the parquet floor shone exactly as before and creaked slightly under his feet, and a fire was burning in the marble fireplace to receive him. There were two large windows divided into rectangles by white woodwork, almost like grillwork, and through the panes the plaza he had left a few minutes earlier seemed imaginary or distant, as if the city and the winter did not maintain a precise connection to the interior of the house, or only in the sense that an intimate landscape was added on to look at from the balconies and a sensation of hostile twilight that made its enclosed space more inviting. Then, as he waited and was afraid, he saw the first two images of Mariana, which later, day