by Ben Pastor
Bora watched the colonel’s austere face suck in the strong tobacco of the cigar. His attention was drawn to the crickets in the house. Their feeble voices rose from crannies and narrow crevices where the whitewashed plain walls met the floor.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Standing up from a crouching position, Brissot cursed. His English was better than his Spanish, so he addressed Walton in English while rinsing his hands in front of the body. “What do you expect me to do? There’s nothing I can do! Calm yourself, Felipe. At least we found him. Anger isn’t going to make him any less dead. You want to know what they did to him. What they did to him was shoot him once in the head, six or seven hours ago.” He nodded for Walton to pour more water into a dented metal basin. “The rigidity hasn’t spread to his lower body yet. He’s starting to show some hypostatic stains on his left side, which means he’s been lying on that side since he died.”
Water splashed about as Walton waved the pitcher in his hand. “They fooled with the body, though!”
Brissot shrugged. He began to dry his hands by turning his wrists vigorously. “It depends on what you mean by ‘fooling’. They stole his shoes and searched him. From the medical standpoint, there’s no evidence of anything else. And emotion is a bourgeois response from you as far as I’m concerned.” He squirted alcohol from a bottle on to his palms and rubbed them together.
Maetzu stood behind Walton in the sweltering kitchen, as did the others. Rafael embarrassed himself by quickly giving the sign of the cross.
Walton spat on the floor. The gathering of saliva felt slick in his mouth, bitter with the sourness of alcohol in his system. His eyes and head ached. He could not bear to look at the body, so he faced Brissot instead. “I don’t see how you can fucking say we’re not supposed to be emotional about this. He was unarmed and alone and the Fascists killed and dumped him like a dog by the wayside. He was my friend, and I fucking feel like caring that he was dumped by the wayside!”
“Well, isn’t that just like the Fascists? Ask Maetzu. Ask Bernat. They know first-hand.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Brissot clammed up. Walton fell into the doctor’s silence and angrily forced himself out of it. “Cover him up!” Walton ordered Bernat. “Flies are getting into his fucking mouth!”
As Walton walked outside, Maetzu followed close behind. The morning brightness blinded them. Maetzu shielded his eyes. “Was he supposed to have anything on him?” he asked. Beaded with sweat, reddish stubble glistened on his big-boned, triangular face. It was a murderous face; Walton never looked at it without feeling an inward revulsion, despite his admiration for the man. “Do you figure they took anything from him, Felipe?”
Walton spat out the acid taste in his mouth, his tongue feeling like a dead slug. “How should I know? He might not have been carrying identification papers, though he’d have been a fool not to do so. I doubt he had nothing in his pockets. Shit. He might have carried letters, other things.”
“Money?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Walton led Maetzu to the higher ground, between spiny bushes that caught their arms and sleeves and were gradually being broken off to nothing. He snapped a branch and threw it away. A green lizard that had been squatting in the sun slithered under a rock like a fast-moving comma.
“We’ve got to bury him, you know.”
“What?”
“Bury him, Felipe. We’ve got to bury him somewhere. There are a couple of places up the sierra, unless you want to use the cemetery at Castellar.”
“No.” What did Maetzu know? Walton felt like he had more than six months earlier, on the day he’d first met Maetzu and the others near Madrid: he was trying to hold on to his anger and losing it. That day he’d seen himself mentally and physically for what he was, a man with political grudges that embittered him, but not enough to keep him angry. Long, lank, shaggy and black-haired enough to pass for a Spaniard except for his blue eyes, speaking good Spanish for an American. And everyone thought him angry. He kept stripping the spiny bushes as he climbed.
“Where are we going, Felipe?”
“Up.”
They left the path that wormed up by twists and turns to the village of Castellar, sitting in a rocky bowl inside the sierra. As much a roaming ground to them as to the Fascists, had they gone straight through the village, past the mass of El Baluarte parting the mountain ledge, they’d have come dangerously close to the enemy post. The chapel of San Martín, perched as it seemed at the edge of the world, was already below them to the south-east. Ahead sat only the gun emplacement, a Lewis .303 machine gun and a mortar, manned day and night by two volunteers from Castellar.
Maetzu stopped. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve got in mind, or not?”
Walton scrambled the short distance to the gun emplacement. He said a few words to the men who squatted there, puffing on hand-rolled cigarettes. Soon one of them stood up to slip a shell into the metal cylinder.
“This,” Walton told Maetzu.
The shell left the mortar with a dull, hollow pop. It rose straight upwards in the white sky and arched westwards, over El Baluarte.
RISCAL AMARGO
It fell so suddenly at the rim of the ledge in front of the caserón that Fuentes barely had the time to dive behind a low wall before the shell exploded. The blast lifted a column of debris just under the rim, shattered shrubs flying up with it; rocks, dirt and dust shot skyward, the wind catching them and blowing them back against the ledge. Bora had been standing on the threshold talking to Colonel Serrano and the blast’s concussion slammed the door shut against him, knocking him to the floor. The window of his room, closed against the heat of the day, burst and rained down glass. Men scurried up the mountainside, seeking the shelter of terracing walls.
The second shell struck the middle of the ledge, and the impact against solid rock magnified the explosion. A storm of shattering metal and bright granite splinters jetted in all directions, smashing the upper-floor windows, embedding shrapnel in the ashlar and battering and studding the door. Rocks and steel pelted the roof with the hard sound of hail; tiles broke and came falling down. The gutter, unhooked, loosened itself from the eaves and slid down, bouncing off the ground. Echoes rolled back from the sierra; when Serrano cried out something, Bora couldn’t understand what he said. He assumed it was an order. Back on his feet, Bora ran outside to check the damage.
Dust was settling here and there, still whirling where an airstream from the valley buoyed it in sparkling yellow spirals. A gouged star-shaped gash marked the place where the second shell had hit; jagged pieces of granite rent from the mountain littered the ground around it. Thick metal slivers lay everywhere. On the ledge’s rim, the first shell had demolished the stone step where the path leading down began. It seemed as though a gigantic mouth had taken a bite out of it. The lonely tree had lost one of its main branches, and there was no sign of the colonel’s well-harnessed gelding.
“Fuentes! Aixala!” Bora called out as the men emerged from their temporary shelter. The others, who’d crawled behind terracing walls, came down shaking dust and dirt off their clothes. Only now did the words Serrano had yelled at him in the house register with him. “You can see the Reds are already acting as though we were responsible for the killing.”
The gelding had trotted off to safety a short distance up the mountain. Tomé led it back, caressing its neck, and then went to check on Bora’s grey in the stable. Serrano insisted on examining the damage, with Bora in tow. “Poor aim,” he said disparagingly. “Far too long.”
Bora scanned El Baluarte through his field glasses. “All they need is a man up there to tell them how to adjust their aim. I expect it was meant as a warning.”
Serrano turned sharply. “That’s obvious. Any more brilliant observations?”
After years of family life and school training, Bora had learned to conceal his frustration well, and simply said no.
With a flip of his glove, Serrano called for Tomé. “I a
m off. Lieutenant, ride with me only as far as the crossroads.” He placed his foot in the cradle of Tomé’s hands to get in the saddle.
Already mounted, Bora waited until the colonel started up the trail before telling Fuentes, “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes, sargento.”
“Y si el americano nos bombardea además?”
“If he does, there’s not much we can do about shells, is there?”
Once Bora and Serrano reached higher land, dwarf trees crowded the trail as it entered a narrow passage in the mountains. Ahead, the trail curved away from Castellar, the Red camp and the chapel of San Martín. Shaggy cedar-like trees let out an aromatic scent as the officers rode between them.
“We don’t need an incident here now,” Serrano said between his teeth, sitting up straight in the saddle as if impaled. “You will strike only if and when you’re ordered to do so.” Once they entered the pass, the blue sky in the cleft of the rock felt refreshing after the chalky whiteness of the ledge below. “Did you tell me everything about the body in your report, Lieutenant?”
Bora wondered how the colonel had seen through him, but didn’t consider not telling him the truth. “Well, his trousers were undone.”
Serrano’s reins made a slapping noise on the saddle. “He’d probably stopped to relieve himself. What’s so unusual about that?”
“Maybe.”
“Of course! They might have told him to get out of the car – if they came in a car – or just told him he could have a minute to do what he needed. It’s a merciful way of killing someone.”
Bora led the horse without pulling on its reins, instead tightening his knees every now and again. “What if they took him from his home without giving him time to get dressed? He was in his stockinged feet, too.”
“Good shoes are at a premium, even if taken from a dead body.”
“Yes, but … This man, Colonel, do we know where he lived?”
In his dark green uniform Serrano cut an old-fashioned, self-possessed figure. He paused before responding. “It appears he’d been in hiding for the past several months. I hadn’t kept up with his career or movements ever since he made his political choice.”
“Or the choice was made for him.”
Serrano looked over his shoulder with a frown. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“Your judgement is flawed.”
“Because I advance hypotheses?”
“Because you advance flawed hypotheses.”
“I can’t be sure they are flawed until I prove or disprove them, Colonel.”
“University-educated officers make bad subalterns, and worse superiors. Your family should have never allowed you to seek higher schooling. A soldier ought to receive no more academic attention than is required to be civilized in society. You’ll need very different skills from those you received at university. I hope the Legion broke you in at Dar Riffian and Tétouan, beyond teaching you how to ride in the desert and shout Viva la muerte.”
Bora knew better than to argue. His right shoulder was sore from the fall, and he balanced his weight on the saddle so that Serrano would not notice. He waited to speak until they left the pass and the trail started to plunge towards the crossroads below, three miles west of the mule track. “Was the dead man from Aragon, Colonel?”
“No, he was Andalusian, from a long line of small landowners and conversos …Jews converted to Christianity.”
“It’s curious that a man in hiding should land in Aragon, the most divided of provinces.”
“No more curious than you finding yourself here when you’re not even Spanish.”
Bora saw from the colonel’s expression that he meant to embarrass him; still, he held his tongue.
“His cousins live in Teruel, Lieutenant. Retrieving the body will be risky, but I don’t want you to take more than two men along.”
“I’ll start by having informants ask around the countryside. And while a search would be best done at night, we’ll need daylight to make sure we have the right body.”
“Act quickly; the season is hot. Although the saying goes ‘The dead and departed have no friends,’ one such as he will be missed. So, you see, I want his body. Besides, no body – no crime.”
“Sir, you speak as if we’re responsible for this death after all!”
Serrano’s voice came in impeccable Castilian. “Just find me the body, Lieutenant.”
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Maria Paz – Marypaz, he called her – came back to camp just before noon, when Walton had begun to hope she’d stay in Castellar for the day, moping.
But there she was, stirring dust from the bushes along the mountain trail, behind the drover and the donkey heavily laden with supplies. She was talking to the young man in a loud forced tone and paid no attention when Walton waved, which was a confirmation that she knew.
How she always knew, he couldn’t figure out. Sitting by the fountain, Walton had been patching up his map of Aragon with the last of the paper tape he’d bought in Barcelona. Now he watched her help unload the donkey and send the drover on his way, ignoring him. Carefully he folded the map and put it back in his pocket. He reached for the tin cup hanging from a nail by the water pipe, filled it and began drinking. Three gulps is all she’ll let me take before she comes charging, he thought. He waited.
Standing two yards away, trying to control the trembling in her voice, Marypaz said, “You went to see her yesterday. You’re lying if you tell me that you didn’t.”
Walton rounded his lips to take another sip of water. Now that she was facing him, he didn’t feel like arguing at all. “Why don’t you wear a skirt? I don’t like you in dungarees.”
Marypaz tossed back her head, arching her plump throat. “Why, does she wear a skirt? I thought she didn’t even bother with clothes if there were men around.”
Despite her attempts at control, the tears came, and a sudden stupid need to laugh rose in Walton. He reached out his arm and grabbed her round the waist, making her lose her balance and fall into his lap. “Why, you’re jealous!”
“I’m not jealous, I’m angry at you.” She struggled in his grip, making him spill water from the tin. His left hand felt the soft bulges of her breasts under the blouse. “Her tits aren’t anywhere near as big as these, Marypaz. What are you jealous of?”
“See? You’re still sleeping with her! I knew it!” He let go and she scrambled to her feet. “Eres un putero, Felipe!” she wept, furiously pinning her sleek coil of dark hair into a bun.
A whore-chaser? Walton didn’t move. I guess that’s what Remedios is, he thought. A whore, and sure as hell I’ll chase her. He watched Marypaz march off, admiring her short roundness. Hey, he ought to say to her, there’s a dead man inside. If you go inside, you’ll find a body on the floor. But there was a measure of spite in letting her walk in unawares. “Look on the bright side,” he called to her. “At least you walked away from the fish stalls before you turned twenty, unlike your sisters.”
She looked back. “It was Mosko who got me out of Cartagena. If it was up to you, I’d still be slaving in the marketplace. Remember? You had a girl from the big city in those days.”
“So? You had Mosko.” Walton filled the tin again. “Come now, we’ve been together six months, haven’t we? I’d never spend six months with someone I don’t like.”
“Ha! Is that the way they do it in America?”
Walton’s hand tightened around the tin. “Don’t annoy me, Marypaz.”
“I’m going to kill you, Felipe.”
“Why don’t you try to kill her?”
She stomped back over to him. “No, you. I’m going to kill you, because it’s you who’s going to her.”
“Pobrecita!” The foolish need to laugh came back to him, and he laughed. “You’re not skinny and mean enough to be that angry.” She picked up a rock and threw it at him. It hit Walton on the shin and suddenly he was no longer amused. He tossed the tin at her feet. “Goddamn, Marypaz
, you’re getting on my nerves. I got divorced once already because my skinny bitch of a wife kept giving me grief. What in God’s name do you want from me? You’ve had your fun. Mosko wasn’t the only one you were having fun with when I met you. But that’s OK, because that’s the way it is in the People’s Army. We all have a right to have fun, even me.”
“I hate you. I hope a bomb falls on your head.”
Walton turned away from her. Maetzu and Chernik were back from a scouting trip to climb El Baluarte and check on the effects of the mortar attack. “Get lost, Marypaz,” he said flatly, before turning to the men.
“So, how did it go?”
Chernik answered, in his makeshift Spanish, “We hit the ledge, but you told us to do no more than scare them off. Iñaki here wanted to keep at it.” Wiping sweat off his neck with a frayed handkerchief, he glanced over at Maetzu. “Didn’t you?”
“I don’t believe in warning Fascists.”
Next to the Basque, Chernik seemed diminutive. Sparrow-necked and hairy all over except his head, Walton didn’t know much about him. Nor did anyone else. He was always amiable, but his drawling speech and amiability were an armour over his true self. “Folks in Castellar report there’s a German leading the Fascists at Riscal Amargo,” he added.
Walton found himself grinning again, and began to worry that it might be his nervous reaction from the days of the Great War, masking very different feelings. Nothing to do with pleasure. “A whole German,” he said. “You don’t say. Should I worry?”
“He’s new, and an officer.” Maetzu lowered his voice, and spoke through his teeth. “It’d take me fifteen minutes to slip over and kill him.”
Walton wished he could stop smiling, but he had no control over the grimace which had frozen on his face. He cut through the air with a broad wave of his hand. “You killed the last sonofabitch army lieutenant at Riscal and now we’ve got a German in his place. Too many Fascists in Teruel to risk them coming after our asses right now. Let it go, Iñaki. We have our own dead to bury. Mosko says there’s a good place at Muralla del Rojo. Go as soon as it gets dark. By that time the grave will have been dug.”