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the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he published a good number of articles and some poems, especially in the
Gaceta Literaria,
because he had become a surrealist, but I believe his only friends in Madrid were Buñuel and Orlando, the painter who illustrated his stories, and then, just before the war, Miguel Hernández, who was younger than us and saw in him something like a mirror of his own life. Solana really disliked the way Hernández boasted about his origins. "I've tended goats too," he would say, "but I don't think that's something to be proud of." He didn't stop writing when the war broke out, but I suspect he wouldn't have liked knowing that those ballads from the
Mono Azul
that you've read have survived him for so many years. In May '37, when he came to Mágina for my wedding, he was one of the editors of that paper and belonged to the Alliance of Antifascists, and they had just named him cultural commissar in an assault brigade, but suddenly nobody heard anything about him, and he didn't attend the writers' congress they were holding that summer in Valencia. Not even his wife knew where he was. He had enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the popular army under another name, and he didn't publish a single word. He was wounded on the Ebro, and at the end of the war he was arrested in the port of Alicante. But all of this I found out ten years after he disappeared, when he left prison and came to Mágina and to this house. He still wanted to write a book, one memorable book, he said, and then die afterward, because that was the only thing that had mattered to him in his Life, to write something that would go on living when he was dead. That's exactly what he told me."
    I can imagine him now, in his leather armchair, in the precise spot in the library where Ines said he had sat across from Minaya, his hands joined, his cigarette forgotten in the ashtray, all the lost years written on his face and on his hair that had been blond and that gave him, along with his blue eyes and his manners from another country and another time, a foreign air exaggerated by his shyness and his loyalty. Like a prolongation in his memory of the words he had said after an infinite respite of silence, Manuel looked at the pencil drawing of Mariana and repeated to himself the date and name written in the margin, but when he stood it was not to take down the drawing and show his nephew the words Solana had written on the back, but to pick up from the mantel over the fireplace the photograph taken on the same day they learned about the victory of the Popular Front in the February elections and hand it to Minaya. Look at us, he could have said, smiling at the proximity of war and death, contemplating with open eyes the dirty future reserved for us, the shame, the useless enthusiasm, the miracle of a hand that for the first time rested on my arm.
    "What your father told you was true. It was Solana who introduced me to my wife. Ten or fifteen minutes before this picture of us was taken, on February 17, 1936."

4
    H E HAD A NOTEBOOK where he wrote down dates, Inés said, places, names, a notebook that he kept in the top drawer of his desk and in which at first he didn't write anything, as if it were only a part of his meticulous simulation, except, on the cover, the date he arrived in the city, January 30, Wednesday, and on the first page, in the middle of the empty space, just the name Jacinto Solana, 1904–1947, like a funeral inscription, like the title of a book that was still blank, destined perhaps never to be written, to be nothing but a volume of ordered pages without a single word or any other marks except those of its blue squares. Then he began to write down dates and names, at night, when he went to bed, as if he were outlining the rough draft of a future biography that his indolence would always postpone, the names of all the inhabitants of the house and the titles of the magazines he had consulted that afternoon in