A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online

store.
    "You can stay here as long as you like, even when you've finished your book," she heard Manuel say, and she moved away from the library door because the voice had sounded very close by. She saw him walk out, head bowed and more distracted than usual, and she was surprised he didn't ask for his hat and coat, as he did every night, to take the long walk past the watchtowers on the wall that Medina had prescribed for him. "Inés," he said, turning to her from the stairs, "see if our guest needs anything," but she couldn't do as he asked because Teresa came out of the kitchen then and asked her to help prepare supper for Doña Elvira—Amalia, the other maid, lethargic and almost lost in blindness, gave them vague orders as she sat next to the stove. Broth, a plate of boiled vegetables, and a glass of water that she, Inés, usually took up to the señoras rooms, attending to the most unpleasant part of her work, because Doña Elvira frightened her, like some of the nuns at the orphanage where she had spent her childhood, and she looked at her in the same way. Doña Elvira spent her days examining accounting books or fashion magazines from the time of her youth with a magnifying glass, and she always had the television set on, even when she played the piano, and never looked at it. I estimate that she must have been almost ninety, but Inés says there is not a single sign of decrepitude in her eyes. She wears a black dress with lace collar and cuffs, and her hair is short and waved in the style of 1930. This afternoon, for the first time in twenty-two years, she has left her rooms and her house to go up to the cemetery and witness without tears, with a rigid expression of grief very similar to that of certain funerary statues, the burial of her son.
    "Your supper, Señora," Inés said.
    "Is my nephew's son, Minaya, here yet?"
    "He arrived at six, Señora. He's in the library now."
    "What's he like?"
    "Tall, Señora, and he seems pretty quiet."
    "Is he good-looking?"
    "I didn't notice."
    "That's a lie. He's good-looking. I can tell by looking at you. And of course you noticed. Will he stay very long?"
    "It seems about two weeks."
    "We'll see. He'll deceive my son, like that Utrera, who still says he's a sculptor, and he'll stay until he gets tired of living at our expense. He's bound to be a sponger, like his father."
    When she came down again with the untouched tray, she saw that the light in the parlor was on, and following her custom of spying on everything—it wasn't curiosity but an instinct of her large, always open eyes and her body trained in stealth, like the eyes and body of a nocturnal animal—she could see Manuel without his detecting her, trapped in Mariana's dead gaze and then locking himself in the marriage bedroom with a key that he alone possessed, and she knewthen that this return to an abandoned custom was the first consequence of the stranger's arrival and the conversation in the library. She distrusted Minaya as an affable invader, and with the same attention she had used to search his suitcase and books and smell the traces of his body in the bathroom and on the damp towels, she studied him later, in the library, enjoying his uneasiness when she looked directly into his eyes, when she brushed against him as she leaned over to fill his glass during supper in the dining room, or caught in the mirror his look of interrogation, of proclaimed desire. Silent and hostile, alert to the danger, she entered the library to see Minaya up close now that he was alone. They would remember afterward that it was the first time they spoke to each other, and that Minaya stood when he saw her and didn't know what to say when Inés asked if he wanted anything as she waited in the doorway, undecipherable and submissive, her chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail and her beautiful girl's hands abused by the murky water in washtubs. She had just turned eighteen, and with her mere presence