by Ben Pastor
“Last night, judging by your state. Doing what?”
“I went for a walk around the sierra, and I’m sorry to admit that I got lost.”
Serrano placed the book on the table, face down. “Have the sergeant saddle our horses; my nephews and I are riding out for the morning.”
Gloomily Bora walked to the water barrel to shave. It wasn’t until he stared into the pinkish lather that he realized blood had run down his forearms to the palms of his hands.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
“How’s he doing?” Walton was waiting for Brissot at the foot of the stairs with Marypaz, whose cotton dress showed the plumpness of her thighs against the morning-lit door.
Brissot winked at Marypaz. “Oh, he’s all right. The blade only glanced off his arm. It’s a good thing that it was dark. Even so, gypsies seldom miss their mark, so we can assume that Valentin didn’t want to hurt Rafael badly, only teach him a lesson. I can’t say Rafael didn’t deserve it, and you’re partly responsible, because you didn’t speak to him as I told you to. What about Valentin?”
“Looks like Maetzu broke his nose restraining him, but he won’t let anybody get close. He won’t let you take a look, even, unless you can get Rafael to apologize to him first.”
RISCAL AMARGO
Sunday 18 July. Midday, at the post.
“Pleasure gives accuracy to the Workings,” says Book 10 of the Ethics. It’s true enough that the things I like doing come easiest. Twice as much effort has to go into doing the things I’m less interested in as well, but the result is the same. Their accuracy is the same. In any case, the life choice of a volunteer is damn revealing, especially in a war like this.
Herr C. is not telling me everything he knows about Lorca. Whether he wants me to find out on my own or doesn’t think it worth his trouble to inform me, it matters little. What I do know is that Lorca didn’t keep the appointment with his escort. This can only mean that: 1. he was kidnapped after leaving Herr C., driven off and killed; or, 2. he drove himself out of Teruel and was ambushed by the Reds. In either case, since there was no car near the body, somebody must have driven away with it.
I can only wonder why he didn’t wait for his escort: did he mistrust them? I don’t see why. According to Herr C. they saved him in Granada. But let’s say Lorca left Teruel on his own and drove himself unarmed to the sierra. The Reds could have easily overtaken him on the mule track. Would they have taken the car afterwards, and where to? Surely not to this mountain.
I think he was more likely kidnapped in Teruel: but when? His family didn’t see him after eight or so. He left Herr C.’s place an hour later. Three hours after that, he was dead at the foot of the sierra. Those are the facts. There’s also the photograph: why would he carry a signed picture of himself if not to give it to that friend of his, Francisco, whom they called Paquito? It rankles with me that I know so little and can’t figure out the rest.
The rest? He couldn’t even find his way to Remedios’. Bora capped his pen. Sitting in the shady swelter of the lean-to, he left the diary open for the ink to dry on the page. He’d been careful to keep his right palm from bleeding onto the paper, and now studiously examined the cut.
The crisp, torn edges of gaping skin were translucent on both sides of the dark curdle of blood and plasma. If he pressed the edges together, the clot started oozing again; if he pressed harder, a gummy trickle beaded up, carrying red cells and minute bits of skin. If he pulled apart the sides of the cut, the tear bled and hurt more. Bora blotted his hand on his shirt before clasping the diary shut.
“You wanted to see me, teniente.”
Niceto stood in the dazzle just outside the lean-to. The laxness of his attire and head of curls made him the perfect provincial Hamlet, but he was a good fighter from what Fuentes said, and Bora didn’t dislike him. “I want you to escort me down to the brook at 05.00 sharp tomorrow,” he said.
“A sus ordines.”
Bora stood up. He took Lorca’s paperback out of his pocket. “Here. Me ha gustado mucho.” Niceto stretched out his hand to receive the book, but Bora held on to it. “I’m just curious about this missing page,” he said.
“What missing page?” Niceto studied the margin of the frontispiece, where bits of torn paper betrayed the removal of the photograph. “I hadn’t noticed there was a page missing.” He snapped his fingers self-consciously. “The book was used when I bought it. Whoever owned it before me must have taken it out. Is it important?”
“It’s a nice little edition. Where did you buy it?”
Niceto saw that Bora was handing him the book this time, and took it. “Good God, let me think … it was in Madrid, more than two years ago. I also bought a collection of Rubén Darío and an illustrated Cervantes that day. It all cost very little.” He made an artificial, proffering gesture with his right hand. “Feel welcome to keep it, teniente. You’re not about to find Lorca’s poems in the stores this summer.”
Grateful that Niceto gave no sign of noticing the cuts, Bora would not accept the book as a gift, but said he’d keep it a few more days. “Does anyone know how Lorca died?” he added nonchalantly.
“Not really. He was killed in Granada last year, as I told you. Shot by firing squad, according to reports. He should have left Spain, or else remained holed up in Madrid where he could weather the storm.”
Bora sneered. “We’ll take Madrid soon enough.”
“Not soon enough for me, teniente. My sister is a nun there, and I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“We’ll take Madrid soon, be sure of that.” It sounded like a foreigner’s glib confidence, but Bora could not come up with anything deeper right now. “I can’t imagine who’d want to kill a poet.”
Even in the shade, the heat made the men’s lungs feel like leather pouches in their chests, and Niceto looked suddenly burdened by the sultriness. “Who, teniente? How many, you mean. Artists have their bitter conflicts. They say Buñuel couldn’t stand him, and the painter Dali had his own grudges against him. I was so furious after he turned me down for that oaf from León, I could have strangled Lorca myself. It’s just that strangling playwrights won’t solve an actor’s problems.” Proudly Niceto tossed his head of dark hair. “It’d do no good whatever, in fact. Who knows who physically killed García Lorca, teniente. It might not even matter. What really killed him is something else.”
Bora glanced past Niceto to the mutilated tree on the ledge, where Tomé was watering Pardo from a bucket. “What do you mean, something else? What else?”
“Duende.”
“Duende. You said that before. I don’t know what the word means. What is duende?”
Niceto grinned politely. “What is it? It’s not an answerable question.”
“If it exists, it has to have a definition!”
“Yes, of course. But it’s one of those things that are best described by what they lack. I can always judge who has no duende. But if one has it, then … it’s hard to put it into words. ‘Spirit’ is a word for it. ‘Soul’ is another. But neither term does justice to what duende allows a man to do. Let me put it another way, teniente. I’ve seen you draw sketches. You read; I expect you like art. Do you by any chance play an instrument?”
Bora nodded, unsure of where the conversation was going. “Yes, the piano.”
“And do you play well?”
“Sometimes I play quite well.”
Niceto brought his hands together with a faint clapping sound. “Ah, but so well that it is as though God were in your fingers, and you were one with the piano, and music, and
God himself?”
Bora hesitated.
“What I mean, teniente, is as if you and music —”
“At times, yes. There are such times.”
“Beyond technique?”
“Beyond and outside of it, even.”
“But is it a fire, a burning fire in the marrow and the gut?”
Bora understood. “Like love?” he surprised himself by sayi
ng, although the admission embarrassed him and seemed out of place. “Yes. But also like death. When I play as you say, no matter what or where, it is … like death, mostly.”
“Yes!” Niceto lit up. “That – what you just said – that is duende. Whatever your field, music, poetry, war. When you do it so well that no one can compare with you, when the edge is too close to tell what is life and what isn’t, there is duende. That’s what Lorca had. Too much of it. Having too much is as bad as having none at all.”
Bora worried at the cut on his hand, nodding. On the ledge, Tomé had finished watering Pardo, and as he walked back he stared at the lean-to and the two men in the shade. Bora resented the attention, and felt petty anger towards him.
“I get your point,” he quickly told Niceto. “Perhaps it explains Lorca’s artistry and fascination for death, but how could it have killed him?”
Niceto might have noticed Tomé’s look, or he might not. In any case, he left the shade of the lean-to. “Los enduendados se mueren jovenes, teniente.” He stepped back into the sun. “Dying young is the price. Which is why I don’t regret being just a slightly above average actor: it may guarantee me a longer life.”
“I see.” Bora had scraped the cut on his palm until it bled. “Was Lieutenant Jover enduendado?”
“Lieutenant Jover?” Niceto stepped away, grimacing in the sun. “No. No, he wasn’t, teniente. But you … I don’t know you well enough, but you might turn out to be.”
Bora stayed behind, with his diary and Lorca’s poems under his arm and his hand bleeding. He was startled when Fuentes approached with his heavy tread and saluted.
“Teniente, the colonel and his nephews are back from the sierra.”
Even Serrano’s fastidious figure was wilting in the oppressive swelter. The Requetés’ youthful glowing faces were nearly as red as the Royalist berets they wore. The lathered horses were at once attended to and sheltered by Tomé.
“This is nothing compared to Morocco’s bled es siba,” the colonel was telling his nephews by way of consolation. “That borderland is where men prove themselves.” While the boys went to greedily drink the barrel water they’d been shunning until this morning, Serrano slid his gloves into his belt and searched his breast pocket for a cigar. “Bora, I heard in Castellar that there’s a vantage point higher than both camps. What do you know about it?”
Mas del Aire. Bora felt his heart thump suddenly. “The place is marked on the maps as little more than a ruin. I know” – he checked himself – “I more or less know how to get there.”
Serrano struck a match. “And with all your wanderings through the sierra you haven’t yet inspected the place?”
The glare of the sun on the ledge was unbearable; for a moment Bora saw nothing but a veil of blood lighting his entire body. When he managed clumsily to mumble, “I’m at the Colonel’s orders,” he was worried the huskiness in his voice might give him away.
“Well, there’s no time like the present. Go.”
He should be wondering why the order was coming now, but Bora wasn’t about to question it. Soon he was stuffing map, sketchbook and camera in the canvas bag, where the bloody passbook of the man from Mockau was stashed away. So were the partially erased music sheets he’d found by the side of the brook after Lorca’s death. Not even the key signature was recognizable on them; a few bars with semiquavers, a repeat sign and the runny dots of other notes smeared the first sheet. It was impossible to read them, and Bora understood why he had given up on the task. Standing in the full sun, however, he now made out a pencilled line that he managed to decipher by tilting the sheet so that the light hit it at an angle: the words CANCIÓN DE JÍNETE.
It was the title of two poems by Lorca, he recalled. One of them read, “In the black moonlight / of the highwaymen …” Could it be a musical version of either poem? The blurred indication of a march tempo made it unlikely. Because Serrano was keeping an eye on him, he hastened to put the papers away and take the path up the sierra.
In less than twenty minutes, he reached Castellar. The climb to Mas del Aire looked moderately demanding from here, but the heat promised to make it brutal at this time of day. Bora started up at a steady pace.
Observing the small things around him in order to disregard his physical exertion worked for a time. Yellow and white crucifers bloomed in their clusters of bluish clover-like leaves. New thistles raised their barbed purple tufts, while old ones disintegrated to the touch into feathery bursts. Under the beating-down sunlight, rocks and shrubs had no shade; if he stopped to rest or look around for direction, Bora himself cast only the trace of a shadow, like a purple hem tucked beneath his feet. There was a moment when he mistook a swift cruciform silhouette on the ground for the airplane, but it was only a hawk swooping and soaring overhead.
Castellar appeared to shrink behind him. Ahead, the rise was steeper on this side of the sierra than it must be from the camp where the American known as Felipe climbed to see Remedios. Whatever his real name was – Philip, maybe? Philip what? – he was not someone Bora cared to think about now. He clambered up, using his hands at times when the grade became difficult, hampered by the canvas bag on his back, keeping on the lookout for the Reds.
It had been much easier in the cool of night. In front of him, small brown snakes slithered and shiny-eyed lizards darted into their holes or under the rocks. An invisible multitude of insects spoke a babel of clicking, ticking, grating voices. The crucifers became sparse and eventually disappeared from sight. Then there were only rocks, both safe and unsafe. Pebbles which escaped his grip clattered hollowly downhill. Dusty dirt came down with the sound of sifted wheat. Blanched, mirror-bright, the sky was too much to look at. Bora kept his face to the rock.
At one point he lost his footing. He thought he wasn’t afraid of heights until he began to fall backwards and only a narrow shelf broke the fall as it met the sole of his boot and held his weight. Blood drummed in the veins of his neck. How had he done this in the dark? Bora clung to the rock wall to catch his breath. He smelled the stone’s ancient dusty odour, dead and maternal. I’m sorry, he felt he ought to say, as though his slipping and then clinging on were clumsy and crude.
That’s how he’d done it in the dark. At night, he hadn’t fought the rock. He’d trusted it. This awareness made the climb less of a struggle, although the grade soon reached the limit of his ability to climb without equipment. No more insect noises, no more crumbling of pebbles into the void.
Suddenly, a brown ruffle of feathers alerted him that he’d caught up with the hawk. It balanced on a crag to his right, crouching over a young hare it was shredding with its beak and talons. Angry or disturbed, the bird flung a furry red scrap skyward before taking off with its broken prey. Stringy drops of blood fell, one of them landing on Bora’s upturned, staring face.
Castellar had plunged into a cauldron of trembling haze by the time he wormed up El Baluarte, where it rose in wider, eroded shelves before the last strenuous climb to Mas del Aire. Bora reached a place wide enough to stand and catch his breath.
Here he had got lost the night before. Looking at it now, it seemed impossible. Only a few brambles clawed the inhospitable dryness. Bora recognized the thorns, but it was hardly the maze that had drawn blood from him hours earlier. Yet he’d been here; there was no other route he could have taken, even in the dark. It was right here, under Remedios’ bright window, that the thorns had forced him back. Glancing up, only the blind corner of a rubble wall was visible from where he stood.
How strange. Even had he wanted to, he could not have followed a different path. Even the man called Felipe would eventually have to pass this way. But the wall had no windows.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Chernik walked to where Walton and Maetzu stood, at the edge of the camp. “Why is Marypaz crying?”
Walton said nothing. Maetzu, glued to the field glasses as if the valley had something to reveal today that yesterday or the day before had not been there, answered, “I
didn’t know she was crying. Ask Felipe.”
Walton turned on his heel. “Not me. I’m going to the sierra.”
“She’s crying her heart out, Felipe.”
“She’ll get over it, Chernik. Let her cry.”
Maetzu spat over his shoulder. “Going to see Remedios, eh? And Chernik wonders why Marypaz is crying.”
“Mind your business, Iñaki.”
“See if I don’t.”
Chernik followed Walton as he started out. “Well, Felipe, that’s not good enough for me. She’s miserable, and this time you can’t just walk off.”
MAS DEL AIRE
Standing at the edge of Mas del Aire, a bracing dry wind, like God’s breath, gusted at him from the huge eastern sky. He felt a sense of exhilaration.
Remedios’ house. This was Remedios’ house. His heart sank pleasurably at the sight. Fifty paces away, the battered wing of an abandoned friary rose out of a circle of stone rubble. Its long side faced south-west towards the inner sierra, jutting out at the north end where a ramp of steps led up to a small three-arched porch. On the roof a scrolled iron cross, filed away by rust, leaned askew on the bleached bed of tiles. Shuttered windows marked the upper floor; martins flew back and forth from the eaves in front of them. Among tall weeds, a doorway opened on the long side, directly under the shuttling flight of birds.
All that separated him from an overwhelming silence was a dampened throb of blood in his ears if he turned his head to the valley. Bora kept still lest the rustle of his clothes break the hush.
But her door, Remedios’ door, attracted him. With no plans about what he’d do or say if she came to open it, he knocked. No one answered. He knocked again, and a third time, and when he tried to push the wooden leaf inward, he met the obstacle of the lock. The door did not yield. Turning away from the door, Bora felt his way along the walls of the building through a growth of wild mint and nettles, searching for another opening. Leaving a trail of broken weeds, he found a small shuttered window on the south wall, and, coming around the back, he recognized the blank wall he’d seen from below. It belonged to the dilapidated enclosure of a chapel. Arched and more substantial, its double door did not budge, though Bora went as far as kicking it before leaving it be.