by Ben Pastor
The old man wheezed, buttoning the top of his cassock with his tobacco-stained fingers. “I never suggested that you should come. It’s not a good idea, coming here. The church is no place for politics.”
Bora understood the old man was afraid for himself. “There’s no one out there,” he said.
“No one? In the last five minutes, three different people have come to tell me they saw you entering the church. I was about to take a nap. I need a nap, I’m an old man. I don’t need these aggravations.” More flustered than the situation deserved, the priest turned in search of a place to sit, as if there weren’t empty pews on both sides of the aisle.
“I talked to my men,” Bora explained. “For whatever it’s worth, I hope it helps.”
The priest finally sat down, crumpling like a bat. “Is that all you came to say?”
“I also wanted to see the village.”
“You could have seen it without entering the church.”
Bora strode away from the altar, not caring if he sounded contemptuous. “I take it the American’s men come to town more often than we do.”
“Do they? I wouldn’t know.” Grudgingly the priest kept his eyes on him. “I never go out except to say Mass, and I say Mass only once a day, even on Sunday. I live next door. So you see it was a great sacrifice for me to travel to your camp.” He bunched the worn cloth of the cassock between his knees, like a fussy housewife. “It was too hot, and I got diarrhoea from it. I’m an old man. You don’t understand because you’re a young man, and young men are foolish and full of sensuousness. It’s their flesh that drives them, not courage.”
Bora wouldn’t argue the point: it was quite true as far as he was concerned. Still, he felt the need to comment. “Flesh and courage lead you to different things. The first drives you to what you want, and the second to what you fear.”
“What you fear is always what you secretly want.” Sluggishly the priest started for the low side door, shaking his head. “Don’t follow me out. Stay another ten minutes before you go.”
For half an hour or so Bora sat rereading the gilded letters on the wall. The priest might be right. It was a matter of flesh: everything was. Being here, exerting oneself, the war itself. Competing with other men, proving oneself. Seeking worn-out philosophical justifications for what his excess of energy demanded, which was a regular lancing. The gilded letters swayed if he stared at them too intensely, turning into a blur. VIVA LA PURÍSIMA VIRGEN MARIA, NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LOS REMEDIOS.
Next, he was standing in the front pew and looking for the door to the bell tower. He found it where the wall angled into a recessed area behind the altar, next to the door to the vestry. It was open.
A steep ramp of wooden steps rose from the limited floor space into the tall, light-gorged shaft of the tower. Heedless of the groaning planks Bora began the climb, only to find that the three top flights of wooden steps were missing. The frayed bell ropes hung useless at mid-shaft, and the bells themselves were invisible in the converging splendour of the sunlight shining through the top windows. Bora noticed that ladders had been precariously set at acute angles on what remained of the landings ahead. And the narrow platform under his feet was already some twenty feet from the ground.
The cooing of pigeons increased as he tried the strength of the first ladder and started up the shrunken rungs. He felt the wooden frame tremble under his weight, creak and give as his hobnailed boots gained footing, but didn’t look down. The odour of powdery plaster, dust and guano filled his nostrils as he straddled the second landing. Here he nearly overturned the precariously balanced ladder set against the wall. In a storm of weightless down from the fleeing pigeons, he steadied it and climbed it quickly. The third landing was narrower than the rest, a square of time-weary mortar and stone. The last ladder rested on it as if by a miracle, two middle rungs broken. Bora hesitated. In the glare of afternoon light flooding into the belfry, it was impossible to judge whether it’d stand his weight. Below him, the rickety ladders and steps criss-crossing the plunging drop would not stop a fall. Above, the pigeons returned in a squall of wings and paced the sills amid ashen mounds of guano. Bora watched the delicate fluff waft down and stick to the dangling bell ropes, too far out of reach to grasp if he needed them. Bora passed the strap of his field glasses under his arm, so they wouldn’t dangle in front of him, took firm hold of the ladder, and went up.
As soon as he set foot on the top landing, the pigeons whirred off for good. The tarnished bells were so close he could tap his fingers on them, but already he was focusing his field glasses on the sweeping view of the ridge past clustered roofs. Details of striped rocks appeared, squat bushes, the occasional blinding glare of the sky as he moved the lenses. He recognized the trail from Riscal Amargo, where goats were still ravaging the shrub. Framed by the northern window, the spur of Lorca’s burial, flattened by perspective, seemed less forbidding from this height. Between the two points, El Baluarte dominated the sky with its formidable prow of barren rock.
Its top was Mas del Aire. Flashes and rainbows of refracted sunlight played across the lenses as Bora scanned the strange high place where Remedios lived. All he could see was the profile of an empty crest. He desperately searched for her house, knowing it to be there because both Fuentes and the American had said so.
Heedless of the chalky bird waste, Bora straddled the sill of the western window to take a better look, and when a scent of hardy grasses reached the tower from the sierra his blood pulsed through him. The priest, he admitted, was not only right about young men; he was also very wise.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
In the evening the airplane banked high over Walton’s camp. The sun, already below the horizon, still lit it up fully, making it look like a slowly circling star against the dim sky.
Walton crouched behind the anti-aircraft gun with the two men manning it, conscripts who had left their Madrid artillery barracks to come home to Castellar. It had taken him some time to convince them to join. Now they perched above their comrades on this wind-beaten rock, ate and slept and grew bored here, and their makeshift shelter of sticks and tarpaulin looked and smelled like an animal’s lair. Only once a week did two men from the camp come to take their place. Refuse piled up in the crags, waiting to be washed away or else mark the spot long after the war and the men were gone.
Walton said, “If it ever comes lower … as soon as it comes lower, open fire. We can’t afford to wait and see. Knock it out of the sky and then we’ll ask questions.”
The two nodded. Walton saw they still had cigarettes, probably the same dried-up Italian ones he’d given them days before. They quietly puffed on the thin Macedonias, as if solitude had carved the need to communicate out of them. It was only pride that kept Walton from bumming one, because even cheap tobacco sounded good after hours of abstinence.
“Well,” he added, “the pilot isn’t going to try anything for tonight.”
With the coming of darkness, the airplane went out like a shooting star in the north-west sky. Walton smelled the stale tobacco smoke, ashamed to admit to himself that, like Chernik, he might end up having to roll toasted onion pieces in cigarette paper.
When he walked down to camp under a mess of stars, past the spot where Bernat stood watch, the others sat munching their dinner between a small open fire and the fountain. Bernat anticipated Walton’s question with a quick furtive scratch of his neck: “Beans. What else?”
Chernik, Brissot and Rafael were crouched smoking onion tobacco by the embers. Brissot nodded to Walton when he came to squat opposite to him.
“Let me take a drag, Mosko.”
Brissot handed him his pipe. “You have to talk to Rafael. Things are getting out of hand.” As an impatient Walton rose to leave, he clamped his hand on his shoulder. “Rafael doesn’t want to hear reason, and has got everyone thinking that Valentin is a thief. A week from now will be too late. You have to talk to him tonight or we’ll have trouble.”
Walton spat twice to g
et rid of the onion taste. Valentin, sitting away from the others, was looking back at them, and though the conversation had been whispered in English, he must have understood what it was about. In the glimmer of the dying fire his lids twitched as if he were squinting at a source of unbearable light. Rafael stuffed himself with beans without looking up.
“OK, I will,” Walton said.
“When?”
“Later tonight. Just tell Rafael I want to talk to him.” As soon as Brissot left to carry out the order, Walton turned his back to the fire and to the men around it. The incident was annoying him more than he cared to show. He was, after all, the one who had quit his job as a foreman at the Union Switch and Signal Company when he couldn’t exonerate a worker wrongly accused of theft. A move that seemed stupid now, because it had accomplished nothing. He’d even forgotten the details. So much about Pittsburgh, despite the years spent there, had gone from his memory. But it had happened at the end of April 1935, on his wife’s birthday.
He remembered riding the bus home, the cold, smudge-filled city air spattered with hazy stars and thickening clouds. She’d become hysterical when he entered the room with a silver wristwatch wrapped in pink paper and news of his resignation. He recalled nothing of the argument other than that he’d left the house again to avoid hearing her weep and recriminate to her mother on the neighbours’ phone. Until dawn, he’d walked the streets under a drizzle that could never rinse away the crowd of steel mills and belching smokestacks. Tonight he would give a year of his life for a cigarette and complete oblivion. It wasn’t enough that his wife was merely an insect against the backdrop of factories and bridges lacing the confluence of Pittsburgh’s rivers; insect and backdrop both had to be flicked away.
Later, when he was the only one left near the grey embers, Brissot returned.
“I told you I’ll talk to Rafael,” Walton said. “You don’t need to remind me.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Brissot spoke in bursts, in the conspiratorial voice he used sometimes. “I was thinking of the bloodstains on Lorca’s shirt. Did you notice how blood had flowed down between his shoulders? He was shot sitting up.”
Walton tossed a pebble into the coals, raising a spark. “Or standing, or kneeling.”
“Anyhow, he maintained that position long enough for most of the blood to flow vertically. But how could that have been the case? I believe he was killed instantly.”
“So there was a car, and they shot him inside it. We’ve been through that.”
“Then ask yourself: whose car was it? The Fascists next door don’t have one. And if Lorca was travelling under escort, where did they vanish to? Wouldn’t there have been more shots fired? Wouldn’t the mulero haven see them? I say there wasn’t an escort at all.”
“Or maybe there was, and they left without opening fire, and the mulero was lying.”
Brissot shook his burly head. “Suppose he was telling the truth. If Lorca was shot inside a car at close range, why were there two shots fired? How could they have missed the first time? And why wouldn’t they have taken off at once? The mulero didn’t say the car left in haste.”
In spite of himself, Walton began to pay attention. He poked the ashes with a stick, freeing more sparks.
When Valentin flitted past to his watch like a shadow, Brissot followed him with his eyes. “And supposing that the cenetistas did escort Lorca out of Teruel and lost him to a Fascist ambush, wouldn’t they have come searching for him later?”
Walton said nothing. Rafael hurried past in Valentin’s footsteps, misplacing rocks as he went, and Brissot nudged the American. “We’d better make sure we stop them from doing something stupid —”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence when scuffling sounds came from the darkness. Brissot was already up and running. Walton didn’t move. He heard thuds and stifled sounds, groans, Brissot’s voice reproving Rafael and Valentin, but all he said was, “Callaos.” A short pause followed, as if the contenders were being restrained, then the voices grew loud and abusive again. From the dark, a piercing, high cry of physical pain caused him to bristle. Walton started out too, scattering embers under his feet.
RISCAL AMARGO
Fuentes, who was about to stand watch, carried the sleeping bag to the well, where the lieutenant wanted it. Bora dipped the ladle into the barrel, pouring water over his head and shoulders. “Everything in order, Fuentes?”
“Everything in order. Buenas noches, mi teniente.”
Three hours later, walking back from his watch, Fuentes noticed that the sleeping bag hadn’t even been unrolled, and Bora was nowhere near it.
Bora didn’t show up again until dawn. A damp clarity etched the looming prow of the sierra when he climbed, wringing wet, from the valley.
He found himself face to face with Fuentes, who’d been waiting a long time judging by the cramped way he stood to salute and his hard-eyed frown of concern. To avoid embarrassing both of them, Bora chose to ignore the other man’s concern. “The password for today is Coraje hasta la Victoria,” he said, adding, “Is the colonel up?” because Fuentes was still staring at him.
“Not yet, sir.”
Blood was running from numerous cuts on Bora’s legs, from the hem of the drenched khaki shorts above his knees to the rolled hems of his heavy army socks. He tried to look indifferent to Fuentes’ attention. What would be the use? There was no hiding the wounds. They had stopped bleeding overnight but swimming had reopened them, and now the broken skin stung, itched, and blood was again starting to crawl across his skin in red trails. Fuentes was no doubt wondering how he could have blundered into barbed wire when there was no barbed wire on the sierra.
Bora waited for the sergeant to enter the post before recovering a straight, long thorn from his pocket. I can’t imagine where I went wrong. I went around from the Castellar side, just as I planned in the bell tower. The goat path leads up to Mas del Aire: there are no possible wrong turns. I took no wrong turns. I could even see the light of her window from below. Yet at the foot of the last climb, by far the steepest, he had ended up entangling himself in a thick growth of bushes that seemed to have no leaves, only woody, sharp thorns, thin and straight as sailcloth needles. In the dark, he hadn’t realized how far he’d gone into the spiny patch until he was in the middle of it. His good sense of direction hadn’t kept him from gashing his arms and legs, and he never did regain the path. He had struggled just to free himself, tearing his skin as if struggling through razor wire. Each rip in the flesh had made him angrier, but the shrubs wouldn’t give way. He’d fought the thorns until the tangle somehow spewed him out further down the mountainside. The golden light of her small window had no longer been visible above him. The worn, bare crags all around were unknown to him, and he had to watch his steps to avoid stumbling into the Red camp. Losing sight of her tempting window when it was nearly at hand had made him lonely and more fiercely eager to meet Remedios, who was perhaps, after all, a bruja.
For the first time since coming to the sierra, he’d really got lost afterwards. He’d wandered around gaunt granite faces and down steep narrow trails, where unexpected breaths of wind from below warned him that he’d come dangerously close to the abyss. Sudden wells of starry sky opened above him, shadowy figures glided overhead to hunt in the clefts of the earth. Bora had strayed as far as San Martín de la Sierra, the dark sentinel guarding the pit. As he had gone on, his blood had trickled to coat his broken skin. An intimate, heady odour had risen from it, and bringing his battered hands to his lips he’d tasted the blood on the tip of his tongue.
“Besame con tu lengua, aquí.”
The sky had begun to pale by the time he had scrambled down the last slope to the brook. Sore and thick with blood and dust, Bora hadn’t bothered to take his clothes off before getting into the water. Now he hoped to get changed before the men saw him.
The last thing he wanted to see was Serrano’s immaculate shirt-clad torso at the windowsill of his room. Bora slipped the thorn into his ches
t pocket to execute a smart army salute. The colonel was putting on his tunic with the slow, measured gestures of a priest dressing for Mass. “Come up, Bora,” he said. “I wish to speak to you.”
The young Requetés were still asleep in Fuentes’ narrow room. Bora glanced at them as he walked by the open door. They were about his age but he thought they looked much younger, almost like boys. He considered the possibility that he might look so hopelessly young himself.
Serrano had his back to the window. His left hand was closed in a fist, and the book of Lorca’s poetry was in his right hand. “Close the door,” he said. “How did you come to have this publication, Lieutenant?”
Bora answered that he had borrowed it, which wasn’t apparently what Serrano wanted to know.
“I meant ideologically speaking: what made you wish to read these works?”
He’s noticed the cuts, and that I haven’t shaved. Bora tried to keep from worrying. If he asks about the cuts, I’ll have to make something up. I can’t tell him the truth.
“I heard about Lorca’s poetry, Colonel, and was curious. There was no political curiosity on my part, only a literary interest.”
Serrano’s deep-set eyes slowly rose from the bloody marks on Bora’s legs. “You said you didn’t know who the man was when you found his body.”
“It’s true; I didn’t.”
“I happen to be familiar with this particular edition of Lorca’s works. The frontispiece features a full-page photographic portrait of him.”
Bora made an effort to slow down his breathing. “I don’t recall seeing a photograph, Colonel Serrano.”
“Of course not.” Serrano opened the book wide, showing it to Bora. “It was ripped out of this copy.”
Bora forgot about his breathing. “The photograph was already missing from the book when I borrowed it.”
Serrano showed no interest in the book’s provenance. “Is it your habit to spend nights away from this post?” he asked sharply.
“No, sir.” So this was how Aixala and Paradís must have felt while he was questioning them. It was uncomfortable, and since Bora had no intention to lie as they had done, making comparisons didn’t help. “I only spent one night away from the post.”