A Manuscript of Ashes
“Manuel hadn't gone to bed yet, he was in the garden, in the dark, waiting for sleep to come on the gentle night in early June, and a wind scented with wisteria had carried from the Plaza of General Orduna the sound of the tower clock striking, but he heard the violent knocking on the door only when Amalia, lighting her way with an oil lamp, opened wide the glass-paned doors that led from the dining room to the garden. She was barefoot and in her nightgown, and the lamp light heightened on her f...ace, still puffy with sleep, the horror of someone who has awakened from a nightmare. "Don Manuel," she called, looking for him in the darkness, "they're knocking at the door. I asked who it is, but they don't answer." For a moment he thought or wanted to think it was Solana who had come back, driven by one of those fits of rapture that long ago had been the ordinary traits of his character and were always preceded by a singularly indolent state. "He's finished the book," he thought before he left the garden, where the clamor of the bronze door knockers sounded muffled and distant, "he's finished the book and has come back to Magina to show it to me or simply has decided he's sick of the country house and wants to leave tonight for Madrid or someplace where they'll give him a forged passport so he can leave Spain," but when he went out to the courtyard and heard up close the banging that shook the glass in the gallery and the dome, he knew that at no time had he expected it to be Solana knocking and he didn't have to open the door to know the faces and uniforms he would find on the other side.MoreLess
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