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lieutenant's uniform, with a small blond mustache and his hair fixed with pomade, in the photograph Manuel had the unwilling appearance of a hero frozen by the shock of the flash, his eyes staring and lost. Mariana, on the other hand, and this was not a coincidence, I suppose, but an indication of their different characters, looked at the spectator from whichever angle you contemplated the photograph. You entered the parlor and there were her large, almond eyes looking at you without expression or doubt, her white veil and ambiguous smile, her long, extended fingers resting on Manuel's arm, very close to his two lieutenant's stars. The straps, the pistol at his waist, his military bearing, were no longer anything but a simulation or testimony to what had ended, for when the photograph was taken it had been two months since Manuel had definitively been discharged from the army because of the bullet that had grazed his heart on the Guadalajara front and kept him on the verge of death for several weeks. But the clarity of his blue eyes was the same that Minaya had encountered when he met with him in the library, as well as that air of useless solidity and excessive generosity, limited only by modesty. Dressed now in a dark suit that he wore very few times during the year and prepared, because he was a gentleman and knew the norms of hospitality, to receive his nephew properly, he again resembled the tall, solemn man in the wedding photograph.
    That was when Inés heard them talking about Jacinto Solana. She had gone in to serve them sherry, and when she heard that name she paid more attention to what they were saying, and she remained still, very attentive, without their noticing her, in a dark corner, choosing to be invisible, the same attitude of absent submissiveness she had adopted as a child at the orphanage; but when she had poured the glasses and placed a tray of appetizers on the table—the other one, the stranger, watched her moving around them and spoke in a peculiar tone about a book he was going to write—Manuel told her she could leave, since Amalia and Teresa undoubtedly had prepared supper for Dona Elvira, and he began to recall his friendship with Solana only when he supposed that Inés was no longer listening.
    "It would be inexact to say he was my best friend, as your father told you. He wasn't the best friend but the only friend I've had in my life, and also my teacher and my older brother, the one who guided me through Madrid and found the books for me that I had to read and took me to see the best films, because he was very fond of movies and had been in Paris with Bunuel for the opening of
L 'Age d'Or.
Before the war, one of his jobs was writing screenplays for that film studio of Bunuel's, Filmófono it was called, he did screenplays and publicity too, but he kept writing for the newspapers, short things, film reviews in
El Sol,
poetry in
Octubre,
a story or two that Don José Ortega published in the
Revista de Occidente.
You can read it all if you like, because I have those things in the library, though he always told me he didn't care anything about them and they deserved to be forgotten. When we were boys, at secondary school, we imagined we'd become war correspondents and rich, famous writers, like Blasco Ibanez, and our success would make the girls like us, the ones we fell in love with so futilely. We planned to go to Madrid together, not to study for a career but to live a bohemian life and achieve glory. But my father died when I was in my second year of law, and I had to come back to Mágina to help my mother, and I didn't finish my studies and I lacked the will to leave here, as Solana had done. He came from time to time and talked about Madrid and the world, the cafés where it was possible to sit beside the writers who were like gods to me, and he brought or sent me newspaper clippings with his byline, always saying it was nothing compared with what he was about to write. At