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

she knew how to establish an invisible distance between herself and the things that brushed against her without ever touching her, between her body and the looks that desired it, and the obscure, exhausting work she did in the house. She scrubbed the floors and made the beds and spent hours on end kneeling beside a bucket of dirty water to clean the flagstones in the courtyard, and five times a day she carried food or tea to Dona Elvira, holding the silver tray with the same absorbed elegance as those figures of saints in old paintings who hold before them the emblems of their martyrdom, but she and her body kept themselves safe, and every night at about eleven, from the balcony of his bedroom, Minaya saw her go out to the plaza in her coat that was too short and her flat shoes, haughty and suddenly free and moving away to another place and another life that neither he nor anyone else knew about, just as no one, not even he, could determine her thoughts or find out about her past before the day she came to the house recommended by the nuns of the or phanage where she had lived until she was twelve or thirteen years old. She walked to another life every night, to a rented room off the plaza where Utrera's Monument to the Fallen stood. But at first, that afternoon in the library, before desire and the will to know, Minaya was moved only by gratitude and fear of her beauty and his customary predilection for very slim girls.
    "Still a little skinny, but wait until you see her in a couple of years," said Utrera, examining her shamelessly from across the table with his little damp eyes, as lively as points of light in the midst of the wrinkles on his eyelids. When the clock struck nine, Minaya had entered the empty dining room that was too large, thinking that the setting placed across from his was his uncle's, but after a few minutes of solitude and waiting it was not Manuel who came in but a tiny, talkative old man who smelled vaguely of alcohol and wore a white carnation in his lapel. Everything about him, except his hands, was small and carefully arranged, and his impeccable baldness seemed like an attribute of his orderliness, like the gleam of his dentures and the bow tie that topped his shirt.
    "Since it's very possible that Manuel won't have supper with us," he said, tense and extravagant, "I'm afraid I'll have to introduce myself on my own. Eugenio Utrera, sculptor and unworthy guest in this house, though I must inform you that very much against my will I find myself a step away from retirement. You're young Minaya, am I right? We had a real desire to meet you. Your father was a good friend of mine. Didn't he ever tell you? On one occasion the two of us were about to organize an antiques business. But sit down, please, and together let us do honor to these delectables brought to us by the beautiful Ines. I understand that you are planning to write a book about Jacinto Solana. A difficult undertaking, I would imagine, but an interesting one."
    He spoke very quickly, leaning his body forward to be closer to Minaya, with a smile greedy for responses that he didn't wait for, and as he sipped his soup the air whistled through his false teeth, which at times, when he adjusted them, emitted a sound like bones knocking together. He had large, blunt hands that seemed to belong to another man, and on his left ring finger he wore a green stone, as extravagant as his smile, a testimony, just like his smile, of the time when he reached and lost his brief glory. He smiled and spoke as if sustained by the same spring, about to break, that kept his figure of an anachronistic gallant standing, and only his eyes and his hands did not participate in the will-o'-the-wisp of his gesticulations, for he could not hide the fever in his eyes sharpened every morning and every night in the mirror of old age and failure or the ruin of his useless hand that in another time had sculpted the marble and granite of official statues and modeled clay and now