by Ben Pastor
Funny, though, that the band of haze reminded him of the yellow wall in his dreams. Maybe the wall meant that he ought to forget Guadalajara, block it off. Walls were what he needed inside, not doors. He shouldn’t let any of the doors open again on the past, or else – here he remembered the anxiety of the morning, leaving Remedios’ house – he ought to ignore them.
He rolled a cigarette and lit it. The first drag released a pungent curl of smoke in his mouth, and Walton swallowed it even though a conscientious young doctor at the Maurin Sanatorium had advised him against it just yet. Why? One of the most practical lessons learned in Spain was how to roll cigarettes firm and tight, Andalusian style. Even tobacco with the texture of wood shavings is acceptable if the cigarette is rolled tight. Walton sucked on it. Yes, I’m cutting myself off. With a sort of pleasure in the pit of his stomach, he recalled his relief at leaving the Brigade volunteers, mostly war veterans, at Albacete. None had served with him in France, but he didn’t want them to get too close. Going to Madrid on his own as a militiaman had been his plan since stepping on board the Normandie. As for Guadalajara, the confusion of battle had been such that not even Brissot, who’d fought in it, had heard anything other than Walton’s account of how things had gone. And man, the cigarette was good.
“Mosko is back.” Valentin’s voice reached him from behind. “And the faggot’s with him.”
“I’m coming,” Walton said, but didn’t move. Eyes wandering back to the dimming haze, he tried to prolong the acquisitive pleasure of owning his thoughts. The term was “avarice”, a word he’d always liked the sound of. Keeping things to yourself, hoarding them where others couldn’t get to them. He saw clearly, almost like a picture, his poverty-stricken boyhood in Eden, the long summer evenings after school when his father had already died and his mother had grown tired of calling him for supper. He’d rolled his first cigarette then, a moist lump that had fallen apart in his mouth like sawdust. He remembered the grit of dirt and ice-ground pebbles under his feet. And nobody around except the woods, drawn like curtains behind him. How he’d enjoyed hiding things from others even then. Worn, unreadable coins, pieces of chipped Indian flint so thin its edges were transparent, hand-forged nails bent double. There had to be some of those possessions still buried somewhere along Eden Lake, where frost and mud and rank grass would keep layering over them and deepen their safety.
Marypaz’s laughter, so much like the clucking of a young chicken, reached him from further back on the ledge. The courier with the flashy knife had been talking since his arrival about the changes in Barcelona, how shops had opened again after the riots and you could find butter and women’s fancy underwear for sale. Walton couldn’t hear what he was saying now, but imagined the empty chatter.
When he turned towards the camp, Brissot was drinking from the fountain. Soler, unused to riding, was still saddled, and only when Valentin gave him a hand did he dismount. In a rare show of domesticity, Marypaz announced she was going to prepare supper, which prompted the couriers to follow her inside the house.
Walton nodded to Soler, whose pale face was a blur in the evening light, and, taking Brissot aside, said, “I’m escorting him back as soon as it grows dark. What happened at San Martín?”
“Nothing. Soler didn’t expect to find anything.”
Walton watched Soler gather water in his hand and drink greedily. In his mind, there was effeminacy in the way he scooped the water to his lips. “What did he tell you?”
“He’s either too smart or too scared to talk beyond generalities. According to him, Lorca had been nervous before his disappearance but unwilling to give explicit reasons for it. It seems he felt guilty about staying with his relatives, and at least once in the past month had spoken of moving into a place of his own. Soler offered to share his apartment with him, but he refused.”
Soler stepped back from the fountain as Valentin brought the horses to water them. His weariness and grief were obvious, but not enough for Walton to feel sympathy. “Mosko, did he explain how he got to Libros?”
“He was driven by a wholesale grocer who’s friends with his father and delivers goods in and around Teruel. He admits he had no plans for his trip back. Says he discouraged Lorca from travelling outside Teruel, and that Lorca had all but quit discussing his movements with him. I don’t know if we ought to believe this detail. Claiming ignorance is a safe alternative for people like Soler.”
“OK. What about politics? Where does he stand politically?”
Brissot tilted his hand in a flutter that expressed ambivalence. “He concedes that his father owns a chocolate factory in Montalbán, and that the old man’s very much the conservative king-loving Carlist. Wants us to believe he hasn’t become politically involved so far, even though, of course, his heart ‘is with the forces of democracy’. Little does he know how the term is being tossed around these days and how many of us feel about it. He says his old man cut him off years ago due to his decision to be an artist.”
“And a queer.”
“Maybe. If his old man even knows about it. Anyway, it’s a bad idea for you to take him back by yourself, even if you have a mind to leave him on this side of Teruel. He may very well be who he says he is, but riding with him into Fascist territory is another matter.”
“I’m not letting him go alone, and there’s no point in having more than one of us accompany him,” Walton retorted. “Relax, he is Lorca’s close friend. I told you, I saw a snapshot of the two of them in his billfold when Lorca showed me a Workers’ Union card.”
“What?” For the first time in their conversation, Brissot raised his voice. “Lorca carried a CNT card in Teruel?”
“Take it easy, it wasn’t even his. He picked it up from a gutter in Barcelona after the riots, when PSUC guardsmen started confiscating weapons and tearing up syndicalist cards. It still amazes me how he was afraid and yet would take risks for nothing, for a lark. I convinced him to tear it up when we met at Castralvo. I burned it myself.” Ignoring Brissot’s scowl, Walton started for the house. “Tell comrade Soler he can take a nap, and in good time he and I will go for a night ride.” He grinned at the ambiguity of his words. “I mean that literally, of course.”
RISCAL AMARGO
Grabrelief eines jungen Mannes mit Militärinsignien. Bora could not imagine why the sentence, scribbled in his diary when he was first listing the antiquities and oddities of Spain, had accompanied him for the last stretch of his journey back to the sierra. It described the weathered Roman headstone he’d seen embedded in the foundation of an orchard wall: a vacuous young face, snub-nosed and chinless with the rain of centuries and the injuries of reuse, and a mutilated funeral inscription. Nothing but a schoolboy interest in the past, but this evening, as Pardo wearily entered the mountain pass, Bora felt kinship for the dead. The ancient and the new, the long buried and the exposed, those over whom people wept, and the dead whose name or gravesite no one knew. All of them claimed brotherhood with him tonight. It might be the balmy scent of the evergreens brushing against his boots, or the day closing like an eye, or knowing that Lorca was dead, as was Colonel Serrano’s son. The man from Mockau, too, was as dead “as all the dead of the earth”, in Lorca’s own words. It might be any of those things, but his narrow escape only made him kin to the bones of Spain. Bora guided Pardo into the descent to Riscal with his knees and voice, breathing the green odour of the bushes. Ahead of him, the sky opened up its fleshy paleness, and the valley was a boundless cup. A tendril of smoke rose straight up from the yet invisible chimney of the army post.
Life. Tomorrow it’d make him hungry and thirsty and aroused: in need of cleansing his body, sleeping, fighting, making love, explaining himself to himself and others. Tonight, having nearly died on Spanish soil, a gut-rending love of Spain was beginning to take shape. Bora savoured the evening air as if his whole body were an organ of taste and vision.
Life? The intricacy of delicate stems, blurring poppies, the stacked stones of the wall and nameless f
ields and waysides claimed him, owned him now. The ambush had been life. And for all his intention to keep to his role as a foreigner, Bora knew that he could never fight for his own country so selflessly. Spain’s greatness and cruelty and divided passions all owned him … his side and the enemy side, because it is the crusader’s lot to mirror his foe. It surprised him that he had begun to love Spain, and that of all the losses today, Lorca’s death was his one deep grief.
When Pardo floundered on the steepest point of the way down, Bora only remained saddled due to skill and luck. At the edge of the camp, he couldn’t remember the password he’d given out this morning. Luckily there was enough light left, and Niceto let him through without asking for it.
Bora dismounted and handed Pardo’s reins to Tomé, who’d come with his solicitous catlike sidling walk. Standing after the long ride made him unsteady and nauseous again. For a moment the few steps to the door seemed an insurmountable distance which Bora faced with a curious sense of astonishment and forgetfulness. This was … what? Home? Fuentes advanced, hitching his trousers from the grove, dark head bobbing like a cork in a pond. Behind him, El Baluarte stood like Böcklin’s Island of the Dead.
Home? Spain. Bora walked inside, and upstairs, and to the narrow shelter of his cot.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
It was turning out to be the kind of summer night Walton liked. Moonless, temperate. In the pen behind the house, the odour of trampled grass and horse urine was strong, nearly aromatic. Walton walked outside, leaving the back door ajar so that the glare of the oil lamp cast a wedge of light: in the middle of it Valentin was saddling the horses, and didn’t turn or say a word. A lazy shuffle of hoofs came from the other mounts, a gelding and two mules grouped in the dark ahead. He only realized Maetzu was behind him when his grudging voice came from close to his ear.
“Mosko told me you’re going. It’s a bad idea. Which way are you travelling?”
“The long way. Castellar, then down. I won’t follow the mule track.”
The wedge of light darkened when Soler appeared at the back door. Whatever Maetzu was about to add, he kept it to himself. Standing so that a ripple of light ran down his face and right shoulder, Soler spoke. “I haven’t done much riding until now,” he apologized. “I’m sure you noticed. I hope the horse will find his way in the dark without my help.”
“He will.” Walton vaulted into the saddle. “Valentin, help him mount.”
Outside the pen the wind increased, carrying spicy whiffs of wild rosemary from the sierra.
“From now on we don’t speak until I give permission,” Walton said, and rode ahead. His horse instinctively sought the trail on the obscure face of the mountain, and Soler’s horse followed.
Only the clicking of stones under hoofs was heard during the climb towards the dark houses of Castellar, which the riders skirted and left behind. Dim shapes and uncertain depths cushioned their field of vision, and a vast silence surrounded them. The haze of sundown had turned the sky into a dome of cottony gloom, like a blind urban sky. On the night his train had reached Pittsburgh nine years before, Walton had looked up from the platform at the lurid glare of the sky and sensed the city trap. Shivering in her thin coat, his wife had hung on his arm. He’d pulled away from her, but the trap had snapped shut already, and it would be seven years before he could tear himself loose again.
When they began the descent to the valley, Walton let Soler ride ahead, and as the incline levelled gradually, he unlatched his pistol holster.
There was no wind in the valley. A shrill, grating sound of insects came from the denser darkness of the cane groves alongside the mule track. Like sinking stars, shepherds’ fires dotted the dark towards Riodeva and Camarena de la Sierra. “Now we can talk,” Walton said, and riding alongside Soler led both horses away from the track. Soon they were heading north across dry pastures and untended fields. Invisible on their right, the brook also wound north past the mule track. Along its curving banks, the clamour of frogs, like rusted wheels, rose and sank.
When Soler’s voice came, it was no longer apologetic. “Look, I’m not good at lying. I might as well tell you that Federico speaks of you often.”
Walton straightened in his saddle. The words captured his attention and flattered him, though he wasn’t about to admit that. He felt vindicated and not even curious to hear why Soler hadn’t admitted it earlier.
But Soler was confessing, his voice made uneven by the jolts of riding on hard terrain. “I’ve been wanting to meet this Felipe ‘whose heart is like an Aragon drum’. The reason why I didn’t speak up at your camp is that … well, I saw both the anarchist black and the red flag flying outside the door, and I didn’t know if I should mention it in mixed company. I’m not politically astute.”
It made sense. Walton ignored the self-serving clumsiness of the last sentence and asked, careful to use the present tense, “I never told you I knew him. What does Lorca say about me?”
“He told me how you met in America. How you were poor, self-educated, risen from the ranks in wartime: el hombre de Edem. He spoke of you as of a picturesque character from a book. He understood you were crushed by the menial nature of your job and pay after proving yourself by fighting overseas.” Through the dark, the sound of an isolated, faraway gunshot reached them, and Soler paused until Walton said it was nothing and urged him to go on. “He thought he’d never meet you again, but he did. He was thrilled like a boy and melancholy about it, too. He told me that you have a wife, which made me feel better.”
Again Walton pretended the last sentence didn’t apply, whatever Soler meant by it. He got his bearings by glancing at the dim outlines of the landscape. “This way,” he said. “Try to keep up.” He slowed down to a pace because Soler was falling behind. “I met Lorca again in the spring,” he added, no longer seeing the wisdom of keeping Lorca’s death from Soler but vexed that the other man expected the truth and was only speaking to get it out of him. “That’s when he came to read poetry to the wounded from Jarama and Guadalajara at the sanatorium in Barcelona. Like everybody else, I assumed he’d been killed months before. Next thing I know, he shows up at my bedside.” Walton couldn’t help embellishing the next detail. “I told him – I had a bullet through my lungs, and speaking was a major effort – how rumours of his assassination had led me to volunteer.” It was true that it’d been part of his motivation, but he hadn’t told Lorca that. In fact, he’d been too ill to say much. “He gave us an account of how CNT agents were behind his fortunate escape in Granada. He even joked and asked me if I was disappointed to find him alive. Disappointed? His showing up was the best news I’d had in weeks. If anything, it helped me get better.”
Soler took his time to agree. “He enjoyed his visits to the Maurin Sanatorium, but it became dangerous because there were so many foreigners there and he didn’t want to be recognized. Soon after the Guardia Civil seized the telephone exchange, he left Barcelona altogether.”
“I was too caught up in the riots to pay attention, but by 9 May I was out of Barcelona too.” Walton felt the old acquisitive pleasure of choosing what to say, and what to leave unsaid. Bent nails, buried flint. What had really happened at Guadalajara. He added, “Hearing that Lorca had made it to this province, I tried my best to contact him.”
When the echo of another, even more remote gunshot rolled in from the night across the brook, Soler simply opened his mouth again. “He said he met you in Castralvo, though he didn’t mention why. It was difficult to understand Federico’s real motivations at times, but in Barcelona he’d become more politicized, and now he had to watch himself closely.”
Hearing Soler’s voice lose energy under the weight of grief, Walton could imagine him crumpling in the saddle. He began to say, “We shouldn’t assume —” but the Spaniard would no longer play the game.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” He sounded firm, unwilling to let Walton get away with untruths. In the windless dark, his voice was controlled and hoarse. “I love him, an
d am asking you because you were his friend. I’ll answer any question you ask. Anything. Just answer this: is Federico dead?”
Walton overcame the impulse to spur ahead. The terrain dipped as they crossed a dry gravel bed, and he knew by it that they were on the right path, heading for the low land around Villel. He hung on to silence by a thread, and Soler snapped it.
“Is he dead?”
“He is.”
“O Jesús!”
Walton spoke angrily now. “That’s all I know, there’s no more to say. He’s dead, and you’re forbidden to tell his family or anyone. It’s not the right time to talk about it yet, and if I hear that the news is being spread in Teruel I swear to God I’ll kill you.” He couldn’t tell why he was threatening Soler, other than that he was acting out of a belated, testy desire for control over what he’d already said.
Up high and down low, in barren fields, insects sang and peeped and chirped all around. Like in Eden, nature couldn’t care less if anyone was hurting. Alongside him in the night, Walton saw the outline of his companion hunch over as he buried his face in his hands.
RISCAL AMARGO
16 July. Night, at the post.
Now that I know the body was Lorca, I can’t get over feeling diminished by his death, and am grateful that the first reading of his poetry unsettled me. I needed unsettling. The poem of the Unfaithful Bride, which I like most of all and have nearly memorized, challenges my sense of what honourable conduct is. How I’d love to lie with her in the dry riverbed! It’s this desire to break rules (fraught with sexuality as far as I’m concerned, by my teachers’ and my dear mother’s leave) that keeps men alive in battle, I think, more than any skill learned during army training. After today I can vouch for Aristotle’s statement – “Those acting out of anger only appear to be brave” – and make no claims about my courage. But I’m beginning to understand that war is not a possibility for some of us: rather, it’s a way of clarifying things to ourselves by seeking someone to oppose, a shamelessly primitive dualism I’m too inexperienced or dense to go beyond just now.