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

lay still and slowly became dull in an immobility driven by arthritis. Behind his words and the smoke of his cigarettes, his eyes, not veiled by vanity or lies, scrutinized Minaya or pursued Inés with the devotion of a dirty old man, and when she leaned over to serve him something or remove the tablecloth, Utrera remained silent and looked at her neckline out of the corner of his eye, sitting a little more erect, very serious, the fork in his hand, his napkin carefully placed in the collar of his shirt.
    "She lives with an uncle who is ill, I think he's an invalid, there's something wrong with his legs or his spine. From time to time he must suffer some kind of relapse, because Inés stops coming or leaves in the middle of the afternoon, with no explanation, you must have noticed by now that she doesn't talk very much."
    He ate slowly, as if he were officiating, cutting the meat into very small pieces and sipping the wine like a bird, hospitable, always careful that Minaya's glass was never empty, recalling or inventing an old friendship with his father, in those days, he said, so reviled now and so prosperous for him, when he was somebody in the city, in Spain, a well-known sculptor, as his father had perhaps told Minaya, as he undoubtedly would confirm if he visited his studio one morning and looked at the albums of press clippings where his photo and his name were reproduced and it was stated that he, Eugenio Utrera, was destined to be, as they said in
Blanco y Negro,
a second Mariano Ben-lliure, a present-day Martínez Montañés, and not only in Mágina, where he had recarved for the Holy Week brotherhoods all the procession statues burned by the Reds during the war, but in the entire province, in Andalucía, in the distant plazas of cities he had never visited, where the Monuments to the Fallen bore his signature written in learned Latin capitals, EVGENIO VTRERA, sculptor. Now he drank without pretense the rest of the bottle that Inés, responding to a discreet signal from him, had not taken away when she cleared the table, and he looked at his hands remembering with threadbare melancholy the unrepeatable years when his workshop was visited by presidents of brotherhoods and local heads of the Movement to commission Baroque Virgins and statues of fallen heroes, somber busts of Franco, granite angels with swords. The empty spaces of plundered altarpieces had to be filled and Holy Week thrones had to be remade that perished in the bonfires lit in every plaza in Mágina during that summer of madness, their flames leaving behind high trails of soot that can still be seen, he said, on the facades of certain churches abandoned since then, closed to worship, like the one opposite, the church of San Pedro, some of them converted into warehouses or garages. During the years following the war, Utreras workshop teemed, like an animated forest, with Virgins pierced by daggers, Christs carrying the cross, crucified, expiring, whipped by executioners on whom Utrera without the slightest scruple depicted his enemies, Christs resurrected and ascending, motionless, on clouds of metallic blue paint. In 1954, he recalled, on the first of April, the minister of the interior came to Mágina to inaugurate the Monument to the Fallen. In the midst of the hedges, among the recently planted cypresses, a monolith, a stone cross and altar, a great block of imprecise edges covered by a huge national flag. He wasn't a politician, he was an artist, he explained, but he could not remember without pride the moment when the minister pulled on the cord, making the red and yellow cloth fall to one side and revealing to applause and hymns an angel with lifted wings and a hard, windblown mane of hair who sheltered the body of the Fallen and grasped his sword, raising it with muscled arms like Caravaggio's dead Christ, which perhaps Minaya knew.
    "Now I go into my workshop, and it seems a lie that any of it happened. They gave me a medal