Lying in bed now, alone, she stroked the wrinkled sheets where they’d made love. He’d stared into her eyes the whole time, a dim light glimmering somewhere in the depths of his expression. It was as though he was trying to see right through her, asking her to help him become the man he’d been once more, the man whose flame had not gone out.
Tania curled up and hugged her pillow. It smelled of him, and she thought of the scars and bruises on his body that she’d slowly kissed, one by one. And then, anguished, she remembered Atxaga, beating him in that garage, and the sense of loss she’d felt, the rage in her gut and the urge she’d felt to protect him.
Was it possible? Could she be falling in love with Gonzalo Gil? Or was she just trying to get close to the ghost of his father?
19
BARCELONA, MARCH 1938
Elías Gil hoisted himself up onto a heap of smoking wreckage, to survey the devastation wrought by that bomb that hit the intersection of Balmes and Las Cortes at midday.
It was a nightmarish scene: The projectile dropped by an Italian Savoia had left a blackened crater several yards long, taking out a water main that now shot like a geyser up into the air. Several yards on, a military truck loaded with explosives had caught fire and blown up, leaving only a twisted mass of steel. Grenades were going off and weapons were still being fired, making it impossible to get to the bodies strewn all around. The blast had been colossal, taking out the windows of buildings for several blocks, leaving a sea of broken shards, streetlights had melted as though made of plastic, and trees were either entirely uprooted or stood burning like oversized candles. A bus crowded with passengers had been blown up and caught fire. It was impossible to count the dead, and the wounded moaned and screamed, their cries blending in with the useless blaring of the air raid sirens. Everywhere lay human remains so disfigured they would never be identified.
Air raids of this magnitude had been going on for three days and were no longer confined to the port and industrial areas. Mussolini had given the order for the Savoia SM.79 bomber squads based in Mallorca to concentrate on the civilian population, and Franco had put up no opposition. They were attacking both the center—streets like Entenza, Córcega, and Marina—and heavily populated neighborhoods such as Sagrera, San Gervasio, and San Andrés. Thirteen indiscriminate attacks had now been recorded, at regular intervals. The sight of massacred children at the church of San Felipe Neri, of overturned streetcars full of dead workers, of ships sinking at the docks all had the objective of ramming home the reality of war, to make it palpable to housewives, students, merchants, kids playing outside, people in line at the cinema or walking hand in hand through the gardens of Horta: Defeat was imminent. No one was safe, absolutely no one. And there was nothing that Prime Minister Negrín and his government, currently taking refuge in the city, could do; nothing the International Brigades on the verge of pulling out and abandoning Spain to its fate could do; nothing the columns of the Republican Army, now retreating on all fronts, could do.
The war was lost. All that remained was to see how long the suffering would go on.
There was no longer any point to the official propaganda, to the press releases with their inanely lofty language condemning the attacks and begging for international aid, which in the best of cases went little beyond feeble condemnations on the part of embassies already prepared to negotiate with the rebel government in Burgos.
“The defense service reports that they’ve taken down two Italian bombers. One fell in Campo de la Bota and the other exploded over the sea.”
“Have they recovered the pilots’ bodies?”
Elías’s assistant was a fiery young man, a member of the workers’ CNT who, after the bombing of Guernica in 1937, hadn’t hesitated to join the Socialist PSUC and betray his ex-comrades. A baker by profession, he’d found his true calling in the Military Intelligence Service. He specialized in dealing with detainees at the secret prison known as Preventorio D, on Muntaner Street, where the MIS had their command. They called him the Chain, because he had a fondness for using shock collars during interrogations. And he was quite proud of the nickname.
“No. But we took one of the collaborators alive. Found him in a room at Hotel Colón with a portable transmitter and maps of the city, the targets already marked. He’s been transferred to La Tamarita.”
The man’s rabid-dog smile made Elías’s skin crawl.
La Tamarita was one of the MIS enclaves in Barcelona. It was located at the intersection of Doctor Andreu Avenue and Císter Street, far from prying eyes. Almost all of the staff there were Soviets, trusted men whom Orlov and Gerö had put in charge before returning to Moscow. The building resembled one of the bourgeois mansions that had sprung up around the city in the early nineteenth century, thanks to the Cuban slave trade and profits brought in from coffee and sugar. The grounds were well kept, with roses, carnations, and jasmine giving an impression of bonhomie that was contradicted on approaching the entrance, where sandbags were piled up around the doors and windows. Despite the fact that he was officially a lieutenant, Elías had never worn a military uniform; his job didn’t require it. Nor did he have to show his ID at the checkpoint. Everyone in the MIS had heard about the silent Asturian, tough and efficient, and he was easily enough identified by the black patch over his right eye and the empty look in the left.
The captured fifth columnist had already been put through what they referred to as the Bell. It was a cement box no bigger than a coffin where detainees were often left for hours, obligatorily hunched over in an excruciating position. They were forced to listen to blaring, strident music, shouting, and a constant clanging of bells, which eventually drove them mad. Plenty of other horrors could be found at La Tamarita as well, including an electric chair (the Chain’s personal favorite), which emitted shocks to a prisoner’s feet, eyelids, anus, and testicles; and the icebox, where prisoners endured repeated freezing showers. Anyone who was taken down into the basement—originally living quarters for the servants—had little chance of making it back out alive, and if they did, there was no doubt they’d left their mental health behind.
The detainee was a young man. He had a wound on one arm and was bleeding from a gash that no one had bothered to treat. They brought him to Elías naked, trembling from cold and fear. Mostly fear. He’d been savagely beaten with a rubber tube and had several of his teeth kicked out. The man could hardly stand, and when the guards holding him up by the armpits let go, he collapsed heavily to the floor.
Elías felt sick at the sight of him, but he focused on the aftermath of the bombing—the mutilated bodies, the cries of the innocents—and his blood boiled. He also fueled the flames of his rage by thinking back to his own detention in Moscow, calling to mind the face of that officer who had gotten him to sign his own confession for a miserable glass of water.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
The man refused to look him in the face, or perhaps simply didn’t have the strength to lift his head. Elías grabbed his greasy hair and jerked the man’s head back. Suddenly, from within the mass of pulverized flesh and blood, he caught a glimpse of the man’s sheer terror, a light slowly dimming that would soon be extinguished. And in that faint light came recognition.
Elías ordered the man transferred to a cell not used for torture and gave clear instructions that he was not to be harmed.
“Have a doctor look at him and give him some food. When he’s recovered, I want to interrogate him myself.”
For several minutes after the prisoner was hauled off, Elías Gil stood lost in thought, gazing absently at the trail of blood the man’s body had left on the floor.
An SIM car dropped him off at home with orders that he be ready at six the following morning. It was already eleven o’clock at night, and he still had several hours’ work to do in his tiny office where People’s Tribunal Against Acts of Treason files were piling up. Most of them had no judicial gu
arantee, and Elías knew it. Still, he sent them off promptly, so that the ministry could approve the sentence of prison or, often, death. It was simply a formality that had to be followed—by the time the ministry’s blessing arrived, the executions had frequently already been carried out. How long would this bloodletting go on? It had been only a year since Gerö and Orlov forced him to denounce Consul Antonov, but it seemed another century. That act began an open war on the anarchists, the POUM, and anyone else in Barcelona whom Gerö deemed to be against the “war effort to counter fascism.” This provided the excuse they needed to begin eliminating all those opposed to Negrín’s Stalinist line.
They’d won. The Communist Party now held every key position in the army and government, but they were ruling over a battlefield of death and charred remains. Given how close Franco’s troops were, and in light of the evidence that Barcelona was about to fall, Falangists and their collaborators in the rear guard were springing up everywhere and becoming more audacious. Elías’s job was to root them out and exterminate them, but it was impossible to keep up. How much longer would the killing and suffering have to go on before they gave in to the evidence? Where would it end? With the last drop of blood. That was the order from Moscow. With the last drop of blood, which of course came not from the Soviets but from those who day after day were forced to watch the sky turn to flames over their heads.
Esperanza was in bed, lying on her side, head to the wall. She was still recovering from a miscarriage. Elías’s eyes rested for a moment on her young body, the blanket silhouetting her hips and thighs.
“Are you asleep?”
Esperanza turned her head and gazed at him with a sort of placid indifference that had set in when she began to hemorrhage. The baby didn’t take hold, was how the attending physician had put it. And the expression hit them both like a thunderbolt splitting a tree in two. The baby didn’t take hold, hadn’t wanted to attach to a womb offering the promise of life and preferred instead to let go before growing into anything more than an unfulfilled promise. Elías had seen the five-month-old fetus, which was almost formed, almost a baby. There was a heart, there were lungs, and a tiny purple mouth. Better that way, he thought now. Why be born into a world like this? To end up like the children massacred at San Felipe Neri? All of that effort simply to have a shrieking bomb shatter their illusions and those of their parents?
He’d never said that to Esperanza, nor had he told her that he felt relieved when the midwife wrapped the fetus in a cloth and took it off to who knows where. She’d have scratched out his one good eye with her fingernails, would never have forgiven him. Justifiably. The doctor consoled her, telling her that she was strong and it was the child who had not shown the determination to thrive, that she could have as many children as she wanted or could handle. It was simply a matter of time. But time was ticking away and his little Russian was not recovering. She chose to remain bedridden, holding her belly, which seemed to promise nothing but a barren future.
Elías decided to send her to Moscow. Things in Barcelona were getting worse, and it wouldn’t be long before there was a mass exodus and then everything would become more complicated. But there was another reason why he sometimes wanted to send her away. He wasn’t convinced that he loved her, nor was he sure he’d done the right thing by marrying her and bringing her to Spain. Elías had believed that her love would be enough for both of them and that in time—always a vague notion that never arrived—Esperanza could make him forget about Nazino, about Irina and Anna, about what he’d done to stay alive. When she laughed and made him laugh, he really thought it could work. Sometimes when they made love, she was so desperate to be his everything, to fill him with the present and leave no room for the past, that it seemed possible. It had worked for the first few months, when the past seemed so far away despite being just around the corner.
When they found out she was pregnant, Elías was afraid. And it had been a new kind of fear, nothing like what he’d felt in Siberia, a fear that pulsed beneath his hand whenever he rested it on Esperanza’s growing belly. He became afraid of the future, of the possibility of happiness; he felt like a fraud, someone who had no right to be happy. Esperanza’s miscarriage put an end to that fear and confirmed what he already suspected, that he would never be rewarded with peace and tranquility.
So he threw himself into his work, going at it hammer and tongs. His diligence was nothing like the untamed instincts of his bloodthirsty assistants, nor did it at all resemble the robotic incivility of the officials in his service. His fervor was detached, systematic, exhaustive, and implacable. And that was what was so frightening. The interrogations led by Lieutenant Elías Gil—the Cyclops, as people were starting to call him—were infamous in all the clandestine prisons in Madrid and Barcelona. He would pace back and forth, rhythmically flicking open and snapping shut the locket he kept in his pocket. No one knew exactly who the woman and little girl in the photo were, but after staring at them vacantly, he would turn his one vitriolic eye to the detainee. Some said they were his mother and sister, and that they’d been killed in the 1934 Asturias uprising. Others speculated that the woman was a lover, the girl an illegitimate child, but no one knew the truth. Elías never spoke about his past or his life. In fact, he spoke of nothing but the task at hand.
It was at about this time that he began having terrible migraines. The pain bored into his skull like a drill and made his body feel like it was melting. Army specialists confirmed that the optic nerve of the eye he’d lost had never healed properly, despite Irina’s poultices and ministrations, and that the agony—intermittent but devastating—would be with him for the rest of his life. When he had one of his attacks, the pain shot up like a ball of fire into his empty socket, as though the missing eye were trying to grow back, desperate to see again. At those moments his hatred for Igor Stern—and in his absence, for whoever was around, including Esperanza—would explode.
She was the preferred target of his rage during those episodes; he’d shout and forbid her from making the slightest noise, force her to remain silent for hours on end, in the dark. He insulted her in Russian, and sometimes violently forced himself on her, as though the wolf in Siberia that had tried to run off with Anna were back. He would rant and rave, smashing everything in his path—furniture, bottles, books…and men and women. And aside from opiates, alcohol—in ever-increasing quantities—was the only thing that could temporarily calm him. It then left him in a state of deep depression, which in wartime was something he could not afford.
After each episode, he would take stock of how much damage he’d done and feel devastated. He’d beg Esperanza to forgive him, and she, downcast yet firmly clinging to her love for him, would promise that she would never leave him or fear him, no matter what.
“It’s not you; it’s them. They’re destroying you,” she would say, pointing resentfully to the photo of Irina and Anna.
Sometimes Elías would go weeks without coming home, especially after one of his episodes. He felt ashamed, hid in his office at the MIS command center on Muntaner Street, worked himself to death in an attempt to stop thinking. And the dirtier and emptier he felt, the more he avoided Esperanza and the deeper he sank into a pit of self-loathing, which was the one place he felt he deserved to be.
Like many of the men under his command, hardened by the violence and brutality of the job, he sought solace at one of the dives in the Barceloneta quarter, where a blind eye was still turned to prostitution. Elías frequented a place called the Gat Negre, the Black Cat, a clandestine hole-in-the-wall on Sal Street run by a woman Rubens would have adored. She was a Catalan from Lérida getting on in both years and girth but more resembled a Cordoban: long hair, dark skin, and a sharp tongue. A tough lady, she was stern and high-handed when it came to the half dozen girls working for her. Because of the nearby bombings earlier that year, a good part of the neighborhood had been evacuated, but the listless concubines of the Gat Negre refused to budge
. They prowled the streets after dark, propositioning potential johns behind sandbags, mounds of rubble, and bombed-out buildings. Like queens of destruction in dusty dresses that had been torn and mended, they flashed dull-skinned thighs and cleavage, refusing to accept the end of days.
Elías didn’t go for the sex, or for the booze. The madam of the Gat Negre had something much more valuable for him: information. She was a committed but shrewd old Communist, a woman he himself had recruited for the clandestine information service.
“Men are more likely to confess to a woman in bed than a priest in church,” he’d said, doing his best to fake a low-class, streetwise accent. And it was true. After sex, even the toughest men cried like babies in the comfort of sweaty thighs; they’d sell the Republic for a promise of pleasure. Men could not be trusted when between the legs of a woman who knew how to love them, regardless of affiliation, guns, or flags. A man has no allegiance before a naked woman.
This was precisely the reason many of them ended up being hauled straight from the cots at the Gat Negre to prison ships like the Villa de Madrid and the Uruguay, sometimes literally without enough time to cover their asses.
“Everyone comes here for a drink,” the matron said, pointing lewdly between her legs. “Italian Fascists, Nazis, Falangists, monarchists, priests, and even anarchists, Communists, and Socialists. They all need to quench their thirst and someone to talk to.”
Elías was prepared to tolerate certain things in exchange for the services the madam provided him. Trafficking in morphine and passports, black market ration tickets. He knew she was building up a nest egg that she’d use to head to France if things got worse, which seemed more than likely. He wouldn’t stop her, wouldn’t accuse her of being a deserter. Everyone did what they had to in order to survive.
A Million Drops Page 38