A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “Word on the street is that Uribarri ran off to France with all the cash, and plenty of compromising documentation.”

  Elías didn’t deny it. Until the previous month, Manuel Uribarri had been in charge of the MIS. An old Socialist militia leader, he’d been on the job only three months before making off with a fortune in jewels and cash. The new boss was just a kid, a twenty-two-year-old greenhorn who’d had something to do with Calvo Sotelo’s assassination in ’36. The politician’s death had triggered the Franco uprising. It was an excuse, of course, but the Socialists in La Motorizada, the militia unit, really stuck it to the nationalists.

  “What about you? Are you and that precious Russki wife of yours going to jump ship? I bet they’ve got a stack of medals waiting for you in Moscow.”

  “Did anyone tell you that defeatism is punishable by firing squad?”

  The grand dame was clearly in a touchy-feely mood, perhaps because she’d overdone it on the morphine that night. Her glassy eyes shone wickedly and she’d reached for Elías’s crotch a couple of times, which was unlike her; generally the madam did not sleep around.

  “What I wouldn’t give to lick that black hole,” she added, laughing obscenely, one hand reaching for the lieutenant’s leather eye patch. Elías gently pulled away her fingers; they must once have pleasured countless men but now all they inspired was a hint of disgust.

  “Do you still have those safe-conducts for the rebel zone?”

  She flashed him a suspicious look, dubious. On the one hand, she feared a trap. Had she gone too far with the lieutenant? Maybe it was true what they said, that he had no heart because a wolf had ripped it out in Siberia. On the other, she sensed a risky—very risky—opportunity.

  “Complete with official seals and stamps. Passports, too: Portuguese, French, British, and American. As you know, the keys I hold can open any door. Why do you ask?”

  People like her sprang up all over the world in times of trouble, like poisonous mushrooms after an autumn rain. Scavengers, hyenas, vultures, survivors. People who under normal circumstances would never have excelled (what on earth had she done before the war?) but when chaos hit managed to rig things in their favor. On Nazino, Elías had been one of them, as had Michael and Martin in a way, and Stern.

  “They’re not for me.”

  “I never said they were.”

  “You may not have, but your expression did.”

  “So are you going to rip my eyes out?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  He wasn’t kidding, that much was clear. So she moved back a little and, although her movements had the telltale languor of drugs, her face paled.

  “Tell me what you need.”

  “Safe-conducts and papers for two adults and a one-year-old child. I’ll give you the names and photos to put on the documents.”

  “When do you need them?”

  “Now.”

  The house on Muntaner Street was better than La Tamarita, but that wasn’t saying much. The ground floor, cellar, and garage had all been converted into cells. They were narrow cubicles painted in garish colors, their floors built on a twenty to thirty percent incline—as was the cement bench that doubled as a bed—making it literally impossible to remain standing. In addition, the floors had shards of brick sticking out, and prisoners were forced to remain barefoot. The only place they could stand was right beside the door hatch, where every five minutes a guard’s penetrating eye appeared. The cells reeked of filth and excrement; you risked infection simply by breathing there.

  For some reason, the fifth columnist arrested at the Hotel Colón was in his cell only thirty minutes before being dragged out and having his hands cuffed behind his back. The guards treated him roughly, but—following orders from the MIS commanding officer—no one laid a hand on him. He’d been given clothes, nothing new but they were reasonably clean. The clothes of a dead man, no doubt, he thought as he buckled a belt far too big for him. A doctor disinfected his wound and stitched him up, efficiently if not courteously. As he did so, the doctor kept musing that this was a pathetic waste of time. After all, he thought blithely, what was the point if the man would simply be thrown into a ditch along the road to Arrabassada that night, a bullet to the head?

  Claiming to be prepared to die for the cause was a lie he’d been willing to believe. He knew perfectly well what he risked by joining the rear guard of the Falange cell, sending information to Italian bombers via transmitters they’d obtained in the most roundabout way. Certainly, death was always there, it was a presence. But until now it hadn’t seemed like a reality. Death was what happened when a pedestrian was run over by a carriage, a motorcar, or the wheels of a tram. It was always, miraculously, something that happened to someone else. Colleagues of his had been captured by the MIS, but he put that down to the inexperience or stupidity of men who—unlike him—didn’t know how to protect themselves.

  He was exceedingly cautious, had military training, and his brief experience in the Guardia Civil—which he’d joined in ’35, after the Asturias uprising—put him at a distinct advantage. So he’d convinced himself that the inevitable would not occur. Not to him. Until the door of his room at Hotel Colón was kicked down and a furious concierge stood pointing accusatorily. He hadn’t even had time to get rid of the transmitter or send a coded message to alert the others. And there were plenty of others, like him, all over—in schools, in neighborhoods, even in the police force. Not much longer, the rebel officers in Burgos told them. Just hold on a little longer.

  And now, as he was being led up the stairs, sweating, he couldn’t stop thinking about what they might do to him. How long would he be able to withstand the pain and torture before informing on the others? He just hoped it was long enough for them to find safety. But he was going to talk, there was no doubt about it. He simply prayed that the MIS hadn’t discovered the farmhouse near Sant Celoni where his wife and son were hiding. He’d taken them there, more than forty kilometers from Barcelona, to keep them from the chaos as well as to keep himself from having to hear his wife’s constant accusations. She didn’t understand how he could put their lives at risk for an ideal, just as she had never understood why he accepted a post as officer in the Guardia Civil—he, who’d gone to university, who’d studied engineering and could devote his life to building roads and bridges.

  Approaching the top step, a spotlight blinding him, and the prisoner wondered if it had really been worth it, but he couldn’t find it in himself to insist that it was, not even to himself. He wished he’d never met José Antonio Primo de Rivera at that 1931 rally at Madrid’s Royal Palace, wished he hadn’t let his friends at university—bourgeois Catholics who had nothing in common with his mining background—seduce him with their smiles, their fancy suits, their ideas about fascism, which they claimed only aspired to make men happy. Men like him. Country and order were hollow-sounding words now, as hollow as the sound of his own hesitant footsteps, which were taking him to be tortured. He felt his guts clench and prayed to God that he would have the fortitude not to shit his pants and be ridiculed by the guards in addition to everything else they were going to do to him.

  Head bent over the file as he stared in horror at the man’s real name—Ramón Alcázar Suñer—Elías Gil sat smoking a cigarette, one thumb pressed to his temple, as bluish smoke wafted up to the chipped ceiling. When it seemed the right moment, he looked up and gazed at the man without a word. Finally, he crushed out his cigarette in a green glass ashtray and ordered the guards to leave them alone.

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  The comment, delivered almost cordially, surprised Ramón.

  “It says here you have a son.”

  He made no reply, determined to sit straight although his chin was at his chest and his eyes were glued to the floor.

  “Ramón, look at me. Don’t you know who I am? It’s me, Elías.”

  Ra
món Alcázar, jaw hanging open, searched the man’s face, trying to make a connection that struck him as impossible. He turned his head like an owl, unable to believe the evidence before him, which fear and panic had not allowed him see. Ramón’s initial shock was followed by a glimmer of hope, the preposterous idea that maybe their childhood friendship could somehow be his lifeline. But immediately he picked up on Elías’s cold manner, the way he looked at him with a total lack of curiosity, placid and indifferent, no glimmer of warmth.

  “Sit down.”

  Ramón obeyed, his back slightly hunched, unable to stop staring at his childhood friend. Could this encounter save his life? Ramón doubted it. Maybe Elías would take pity, allow him to avoid torture in exchange for a quick confession that would undoubtedly lead to the scaffold.

  “You’ve changed,” he dared to say.

  “Haven’t we all?”

  Slowly Ramón nodded. He could never have imagined this situation in a million years, and yet here he was in the middle of it, unable to close his eyes and wish it away.

  “Please don’t draw this out longer than necessary, Elías, I’m begging you. I’m not going to talk, just have me shot right away, for old times’ sake.”

  “I heard you joined the Guardia Civil and that your father was with General Fanjul in Madrid.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Elías frowned. “You should have stayed on your side, Ramón.”

  “This is where I was needed.”

  Elías held out a stack of photographs and spread them on the table. The faces of the Balmes bombing victims. All numbered. Men, women, and children who looked in no way human.

  “For this?”

  Ramón turned his head away, sickened. “It was not my intention to cause those deaths. My battle is with the military.”

  “What did you think was going to happen when you started dropping five-hundred-kilogram bombs in the middle of a city?”

  “That wasn’t what I was told. My job was to identify where the anti-aircraft artillery was located, and that’s what I did.”

  “So you bear no responsibility for any of these deaths? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “What about you? What do you have to say about all the people being executed in your clandestine prisons? Or the nuns murdered in Vallvidrera, the dead bodies piling up every night in the outskirts of Barcelona?”

  “I’m not here to compare my conscience with yours. Not every death carries the same weight; some are more justified than others.”

  “To those who are dead, none of them are justified.”

  “You have your blame and I have mine. But right now you’re the one in that chair and I’m the one behind the desk. Which makes you guilty and me innocent. Tomorrow, or a year from now, it might be the other way around. But that doesn’t change what we’ve done, Ramón.”

  “I don’t remember you being this cynical.”

  “I’m trying to make sense of how it came to this. We were supposed to live out our lives, build roads and bridges, have families, and grow old surrounded by grandchildren.”

  “Ideals outrank personal interests; these are the times we live in. We’ve made our beds. It doesn’t really matter whether the choices we made were conscious or we were simply swept away by circumstances.”

  “Ideals? Tell me this: If you could save your life right now, if I told you I could protect you and your family in exchange for your ideals, would you give them up? Alter them? Think about it before you answer, Ramón. Your death will not be quick, remember; you’ve seen all the toys we have in the basement, imagine the suffering. And if that’s not enough, count the years you’ll have lost, the future that won’t exist, the things you’ll never do with your wife and son. Can your ideals give you that? And whose ideals are they anyway? Those of a few parasitic army officers, dismissive egotistical men lashing out against some perceived affront; those of a few incompetent politicians, demagogues toying with our lives like giants kicking a few tiny insignificant balls, which is all we are to them. Ideals can make you a martyr. But there are already too many of those. No one will remember you. No one.”

  “Without ideals we’re nothing but mercenaries, bodies without a soul, garbage blowing in the wind.”

  “You haven’t answered my question, Ramón.”

  Ramón Alcázar Suñer thought of his wife and child, huddling terrified in a farmhouse, hidden from sight, not even speaking to the local peasants for fear of being denounced. They would be waiting for him, out of their wits, their nerves shattered. His wife would shout at him, call him reckless, crazy, foolish, would accuse him of being selfish for putting their lives in danger. Ramón would be furious, refuse to acknowledge that his son’s whimpering drove him to distraction, that he felt as though the walls were closing in on him; his blood would boil, as he listened to radio dispatches from the front while he sat there doing nothing but hiding. Ideals were simply an excuse; that’s all they’d ever been.

  He knew enough about the world to realize that if men changed, it was for the worse, that the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and that heroic times were made for cowards looking for a way out of their pathetic lives. God, country, family, and order—they were big ideas, impassioned ideas that weren’t worth a bullet to the head. It was all a charade, smoke and mirrors, an obscenity that had swept people into a state of insanity. He knew all of this, and as his wife—nothing stoic about her—said, the only ones he ought to show loyalty to were himself and his family. And yet…ideals were all he had.

  “It’s too late for us, don’t you think? We’ve come too far, given up too much to admit that we’re both wrong. If I have to die, let it be quick. But I will not cooperate.”

  Elías observed his old friend serenely. Despite his bluster, Ramón was as fragile and defenseless as a little bird. He’d made a bold claim in an attempt to summon the courage he wished for but didn’t possess. Elías knew Ramón wouldn’t withstand even a single day of torture: The mere mention of where his wife and son were hiding—which Elías had obviously verified—would be enough to make him collapse. Martyrs didn’t actually choose to be burned at the stake. They prayed for a miracle, an epiphany, some form of divine intervention that might save them at the last moment. But they all went up in flames, shrieking in pain and shitting themselves. It was only later that their weakness was buried and they were reinvented as shining examples. Very few men faced death with any honor, and even those who did died with a flicker of doubt in their dilated pupils. He thought of Martin and Michael, of Claude, and of the officer on Nazino who’d blown his brains out. Each one of them had made his decision. And the world was not a better place for it. The world didn’t even notice.

  The ground shook for a moment, causing a few books to fall from their shelves and onto the floor. The windowpanes rattled threateningly but did not shatter. Elías walked over to the window and parted the curtain. A huge column of smoke was rising up from the middle of Entenza Street. Small bursts of flame dotted the sky with little pink clouds, spaced out like defective fireworks. It was anti-aircraft artillery fire, which had no chance of hitting the bomb squads dropping shrapnel nonstop from over fifteen thousand feet. Like a macabre orchestra came the crescendo of helicopter wings, fire truck sirens, and explosions.

  From the distance, from that altitude, murder was a simple question of aim. It was like playing a game: Hit a courtyard, blow up a tower flying the Republican flag, target the cages at the zoo. Once, many years ago, Elías had dreamed of being a bomber pilot. Now, seeing the glare of explosions turning Barcelona into a plaything that pilots toyed with, he was glad that he was not. He preferred to see death up close, where he could touch it and smell it, and never forget it.

  From the east came two Republican Mosca fighter planes: Polikarpov I-16s. They’d taken off from El Prat Airport. Perhaps the pilots had been trained at the Moscow flight academy; m
aybe one of them was the man who’d given Caterina his jacket and named her Esperanza. If so, Elías hoped it wasn’t the man in the plane that had gone into a tailspin, crashing into the breakwater with a trail of black smoke. He thought, then, that from the roof of their apartment building they had a privileged view over the seafront. Esperanza might have watched the plane fall, seen it spinning out of control. He pictured her hugging her bomber jacket and weeping in silence.

  “You’re right,” he said, turning back to Ramón. “We have to fight for something, and to believe that what we fight for is just, even if so-called justice serves only to cover up our acts. Even if our action is pointless, we still have to do it.”

  Elías gave Ramón a look that made him shudder, then strode to the door and ordered the guards in.

  “Take him down and lock him in solitary. Erase his name from the arrest log.”

  Ramón knew what this meant. He wasn’t going to be tried. They would simply execute him.

  Darkness fell, and with it came the horrors of the night. People were rarely killed in the light of day, as though even murderers and executioners were racked by guilt and wanted to hide. Night was the land of the dead, of those who “fell” from rooftops, of agonizing cries in the cellar, shots fired in the alley, and stabbings in a doorway. It was the time for drives along the road to Rovira or Las Aguas, headlights illuminating the embankment where foreheads were pressed to the rock, hands cuffed behind the back.

  Night littered the ground with corpses that got picked up the following morning by a truck that took them to the morgue to be tagged and numbered and put on display, a gruesome exhibit viewed by mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who came to find out if they’d won this sickening raffle, clenching their teeth in hopes they had not. And the world filled with disillusionment and revolutionary songs on one side and quiet prayers on the other. But most men simply waited in silence, like Ramón, their brains atrophied as they clung to a ludicrous platitude, believing that it couldn’t happen to them. Eyes hooded, sunken, ringed in blue, they were excruciatingly alert to the sound of a floor tile, footsteps, a shadow on the other side of the door, barking an order.