The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  Bora dipped a ladle in the barrel of stale water. He sipped from it and poured the rest over his head and shoulders. “You wouldn’t think there’s enough grass left in the valley to catch a spark, but I ran into two patches of wildfire on the way back. Scared the wits out of Pardo, because the flames were sweeping across the road. Is the colonel in?”

  “He’s in.”

  “Get me a clean shirt first, Fuentes, and see that Pardo gets watered.”

  Serrano, smoking in Bora’s room, paid as little attention to Bora’s clean shirt as he did his weariness. He used a dainty pocketknife to open his wife’s letter, and read it at once. “My wife finds you pleasant,” he observed without looking up from the paper. “Personally, I do not believe that pleasantness is a virtue as much as an expedient. She is more generous in her judgements than I.”

  Despite the heat, he looked impeccable, so much so that Bora began to apologize for presenting himself to Señora Serrano in a filthy uniform. The colonel cut him short. “I know you go off to execute orders from German intelligence, Bora, so the state of your clothes is hardly my wife’s primary concern. My nephews and I will be leaving within the hour for Teruel. Send in Sergeant Fuentes to do my packing, and have our mounts readied.”

  By half past two Serrano and the Requetés were gone. To make sure they’d left for good, Bora waited until three to reclaim his room.

  The colonel’s cigar smoke had left behind a noxious spoor. Bora’s few things – books, a backpack, drawing pads – were stacked in a corner and none seemed displaced. But because he’d been wondering about Lorca’s “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar” ever since hearing Señora Serrano mention it, Bora reached for the poetry book and searched through the index.

  The four poems had been censored in black ink by Serrano’s German-made Pelikan pen.

  You were alive, my God, in the monstrance

  Speared by your Father with a spike of fire

  Pulsating like the poor heart of a …

  Bora wasn’t sure, but the next word might be “frog”.

  Sulkily he put the book away. Now he’d have to take Niceto’s offer and keep the book, or else make a fool of himself.

  He’d been standing at the window looking at the distant fires when Fuentes knocked and walked in. “Sir, Tomé is downstairs saying he’s to report to you.”

  Bora stayed turned to the window. “Send him up.”

  Fuentes hesitated, obviously in disagreement with Bora’s command. “He’s supposed to report to you, then.”

  “Yes, yes.” Bora turned on his heels. “What’s with you, Fuentes? Send the man up.”

  Moments later Tomé came into the room with an expectant look on his face. Bora gave no indication that he’d noticed it. He lifted the field glasses to resume his survey of the fires, and although Tomé stood there like a cat hoping to be fed, Bora made him wait.

  Even through the lenses, the sole evidence of the fires was white smoke, billowing where the grass grew thickest. “I want you to be ready to escort me in fifteen minutes. I’m going to the brook for a swim,” Bora said, glancing over for a moment without lowering the field glasses.

  “A sus ordines.”

  “That’s all.” From the absence of any noise, it was obvious that Tomé had made no move to leave. Bora overheard Fuentes clearing his throat next door, where he was supposedly reclaiming his own space. “All right, Tomé, you’re dismissed,” he said.

  “Muchas gracias, mi teniente.”

  No sooner had he gone than Fuentes stood in his place, impatient to say something. Bora kept looking through his field glasses. On the ledge a solitary cicada made an inordinate amount of noise, the early afternoon sun blazed, and still Fuentes stood there. “All right, Fuentes. What’s it going to be?”

  “Sir, I don’t know why you had to go asking Tomé.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Couldn’t I come down with you to the brook?”

  “I don’t want you. I want Tomé.”

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  By evening the fires had travelled across the valley, leaving behind wrinkled black trails like pencil marks. Now that the sun had gone down the charred stubble had become less visible; in the darkness, if they didn’t burn themselves out first, the fires would start to glow.

  Walton smelled ashes in the air and said, “It’s going to rain.” Around him, men sat on their haunches on the terraced space where Chernik was cooking soup in a kettle. “When I get this pain in my neck and shoulder, it never fails to rain.”

  Brissot tasted the soup and made a face. “Too much salt.”

  “Not for me. I like it salty,” Chernik said. “What is it, Felipe, you’ve got war wounds that predict the weather, like an old-timer?”

  “They’re not war wounds.”

  Chernik turned to Walton with a conniving look on his sallow, hairy face. He asked, in English, “Where was it, Detroit?”

  “Washington. The Bonus Army March.”

  “Were you with the veterans or the communists?”

  “Both.” Massaging his neck, Walton wondered why he’d brought up the issue. He didn’t want to remember Anacostia. “Compliments of the US army.”

  With a twig Bernat scratched his right ear. “I thought you were in the US army.”

  “Not five years ago.”

  Beyond the open fire, Brissot surveyed the small group with his arms crossed. “The army charged protesters and burned down the shanties of some 20,000 veterans, Bernat. Isn’t that so, Felipe?”

  Walton tilted his neck slowly to ease the pain. The smell of smoke had reminded him of Anacostia, that’s what it was. He neither answered nor looked at Brissot.

  “I reported on the march and the Anacostia shanties,” Chernik intervened in Spanish. “The paper didn’t pay my way to Washington, but I got there on my own before 15 June. Damn, it was a great article on the passing and killing of the bill! When I went back to Chicago they gave me a promotion and fired me.” He stretched to stir the kettle, grinning at Walton. “Four years in the newspaper’s shit pile, and I still managed to cover the Chester strike last year and make headlines: ONE DEAD AND FORTY WOUNDED IN PENNSYLVANIA: POLICE CRACKED SKULLS, KEPT ORDER. Well, soup’s ready. Bernat, where are the others?”

  “Marypaz is inside. Maetzu, I don’t know where he is: he said he was going to keep watch on El Baluarte. Valentin is on guard duty, and Rafael is with him.”

  Chernik started passing around bowls of bean soup. “For two people who tried to kill each other, they’re getting along fine. Last night Valentin got Rafael laid with the Widow Yarza.”

  “How would you know?”

  Chernik laughed. “He told me. Rafael came too fast and got his pants wet and had to hang around her house until they dried up.”

  “Don’t put any oil in mine,” Walton told Chernik. “It’s your turn next, Bernat, so eat quick and go relieve Valentin.”

  Bernat filled his mouth with soup. “I don’t have to. Valentin wants to keep watch an extra hour.”

  “What for?”

  “Search me. I guess he wants to keep company with his new-found friend.”

  “Tell Marypaz to come eat, then.”

  RISCAL AMARGO

  Tuesday, 20 July. Evening, at the post.

  I don’t know what possessed me to go down to the brook with Tomé. I had good reasons for doing so – if Tomé was ever to open up, he’d only do so away from the others – but there’s no explaining any of it to Fuentes, who appoints himself the guardian of every young officer and probably drove Jover to get himself shot!

  Thanks to his horror stories about snipers, Tomé was jumpy and overly watchful all the way down to the brook. What’s worse, he only started to relax when I took off my shirt and got into the water (I kept my army shorts on). The water is low and tastes like mud, and there’s no swimming to be had, really: you just sink into it and get out again.

  Casually I told Tomé that I’d heard him play the guit
ar, and agreed with Niceto that he plays very well indeed. “I’m not bad,” he said, and when I added I’d heard he’d won prizes, he said he’d won one, “when La Barraca came to Tarragona three years ago”. I knew a little about La Barraca from Niceto. It was Lorca’s travelling theatre group before the war, an attempt to reach the masses by celebrating Spanish folklore and history. Still, I let Tomé explain it to me. It embarrassed me beyond belief that he’d furtively picked up my bar of soap and was smelling it, facing away from the water. When he saw me watching, he acted as if he was just removing bits of dirt from the soap. He said that people came all the way from Almería and Jaén to hear the performers, and the poet García Lorca was one of the judges. This, too, I’d heard from Niceto. “Lorca gave me first prize for playing ‘Los Cuatro Muleros’,” Tomé said. “You know the song: they rewrote it as ‘Los Cuatro Generales’ when the war started.” I mentioned I know the tune (meanwhile, I was struggling to unbutton my shorts to wash them; God knows what impression I was giving).

  The idiot didn’t take his eyes off me all the while. “The original words are different,” he said. He sang under his breath, “Of the four mule drivers / who ride into the fields / he of the dapple mule / is dark-haired and tall.” And then he actually said, “Como usted, mi teniente.” I was well beyond embarrassment at this point, and itched to strike him. But I attempted to laugh it off, saying, “Like myself? Like half of all Spanish men!”

  Joking helped, I think, because he changed the subject immediately. The other judge, he said, was a Teruel man, who now serves in the city government. “A real patriot, that one. He argued and disagreed over every prize.” I asked if he was another poet. “No, he runs a pharmacy on Calle Nueva.” Don Millares, I thought. That’s interesting. The same man who knew where Soler was hiding, and who speaks so contemptuously of him! I tried to get more out of Tomé, but this piece of news seemed to be the only information he had to give. When I walked out of the water, he stood up with the strangest expression on his face and said, “Already? You haven’t even been for a swim!” to which I answered that there was too much silt, etc. and put my shirt back on. He actually mumbled, “I’m sorry if I did something wrong.”

  All this without my saying a word about his staring or about the soap. He was so craven that it made me sick; I don’t know what kept me from smacking him. I said I didn’t know what he meant, that the water is getting too low for swimming, and that was all.

  As we were climbing back to the post, he said that L. had told him, “You have a good voice, you know the tunes. But you won’t succeed beyond Aragon, because you have no duende.” The judgement seemed to grieve him: “Porqué no tienes duende. That’s what he said, teniente.”

  In other news, I’m trying to make sense of what I have learned in the last two days from Soler (he didn’t tell me everything), Señora Serrano and the priest at the seminary. Who searched Soler’s flat, and why did they remove the text and sketches of The Miraculous Horseman? Is it (as Soler himself admitted) because it features characters identified as mariquitas and others called seminaristas de niña, which I take to mean “girlish seminarians”? Why didn’t Luisa Cadena tell me that Lorca had had his bags packed until I pressed her further?

  I’m restless, crave action and can’t keep still. Tomorrow I plan to approach the Red camp by way of El Baluarte, until I find a good perch to take some photographs. The trick is going to be keeping Fuentes from tagging along. It’s getting too dark to write without a light. Not looking forward to the night. I feel muddled and cannot get Remedios out of my head.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  Fuentes insisted on coming along, making no secret of the fact that he thought it a bad idea. They had to clamber up the Riscal side of El Baluarte from the sparse cedar grove that reeked of human excrement and swarmed with flies. Bora merrily led the way uphill, ignoring the litany of Spanish profanities that came each time Fuentes risked losing his grip because of the rifle he carried. “We’re almost there,” he said when they were only a third of the way up. The odour of burning grass still filled the air, and when he turned the valley was a cauldron of brilliant haze. The fires created a single line across the arid land, beyond which all was veiled and unseen.

  Fuentes laboured at Bora’s heels. “Almost there, mi madre. Don’t we have to find a way down to the other side first?”

  The sun was rising by the time they crawled over the hump and found enough space to rest. The granite incline, no more than fifty feet wide at the top, divided the ledge, rising up almost vertically to become Mas del Aire, an impossible climb from here. Where it bulged and then tapered to rejoin the lower face of the sierra, the ravine separated it from the valley, the brook and the mule track.

  On all fours, Bora preceded Fuentes to the eastern rim of the crest. The breeze carried impalpable cinders, like dead moths; below, El Baluarte dropped away with enough shelving and craggy projections to allow a descent. It bulged at an irregular sixty-degree angle, with a manageable foothill; the climb from the Red camp to the sierra seemed almost comfortable. Horses and supply mules must be able to negotiate it far more easily than from Riscal. On its portion of the ledge, a tumbledown, whitewashed house sat against the sierra wall, flags limp by the door, iron patches glaring on the roof.

  “Well,” Bora said, “there it is.”

  Fuentes kept his thoughts to himself. He started down with the clumsy agility of grizzlies Bora had seen as a child at Leipzig Zoo. They had lowered themselves from cleft to notch, hanging on to jutting, glass-sharp rocks to reach cramped footholds that just allowed them to crouch side by side and look out with the stone affording them some protection.

  Bora focused his field glasses on the rangy man sipping from a tin cup by an open fire. Even from a distance, the American they called Felipe seemed mature, self-assured. His gestures were spare, which to Bora was always a sign of inner control. Just now, Bora would give anything to be thirty or even forty.

  Fuentes said, “See down there, teniente? There’s a woman at the window.”

  A woman. Bora’s lenses searched the facade. The girl leaning with her elbows on the windowsill was young, plump, common-looking. Tanned, not fair. Hair black, not red. He breathed out in relief.

  “The one by the fountain with a moustache and glasses is another foreigner,” Fuentes added. “In Castellar they say he’s some kind of physician.”

  On the threshold of the house a man squatted scratching his head, a rifle leaning against his left thigh. Bora took a couple of photographs before saying, “I don’t see any outbuildings. Do you suppose they store their ammunition inside?”

  “Maybe, unless they stack it somewhere in the walled-up space at the back of the house.” Fuentes was crouching with his knees nearly touching his chin, pointing. “See the almond trees? In between there’s a horse pen or something.”

  Bora watched Walton head into the house. “They’re flying two flags. A mixed group of anarchists and communists. I wonder which one the American belongs to?”

  “They’re all Reds to me, teniente. Did you see the gun emplacement way up there?”

  “I saw it.” Another photograph followed. “There’s no radio antenna on the roof.”

  “No damn weathervane, either.”

  “They have plenty of water, though.” Bora handed the field glasses to Fuentes. “Look at it flowing.” Below, after stopping to talk with the man on the threshold, the American had joined the bespectacled fellow Fuentes had called a physician. “Can you tell how many are keeping watch?” Bora asked.

  “No. I only see the one by the door.”

  Bora took another photo before putting away the camera. He rose slowly until he stood with his back to the rock. “We’re still too high, and the angle is not good.” He showed Fuentes an exposed, rugged perch several feet below, and started moving to the right to climb down to it. “I’m going over there to get a better shot of the enclosure behind the house.”

  At the camp, watching Brissot deftly manoeu
vre the razor over his own chin, Walton asked him, “Is Maetzu still on El Baluarte? I thought I told him to get down from there.”

  Brissot wiped the blade on his trousers. “He’s been there all night and won’t come down until he’s good and ready.”

  “I’m taking Marypaz to Castellar. If we run late, make sure Maetzu is accounted for by noon.” Glancing away from the rugged side of the granite hump, Walton shook his head. “I’d like to know what he’s looking for.”

  “Get down!”

  The rifle shot struck so close to Bora’s head that sparks and stone debris flew into his face. The sky and mountain surged and sank before him. He thought he’d lost his hold and was falling, but it was Fuentes shoving him down. Bora felt the other man’s bulk, his protective hands and elbows. “Stay down!” Bullets flew overhead, gashed the rock. Fuentes’ knees, in the small of his back, clamped him down. He felt a stab in his groin from a rock beneath him. Bora fought to free himself enough to reach for his gun, and struggled out from under the sergeant.

  “He’s to the left, look out!” Fuentes was positioning himself to take aim at a point along the same side of the massif, where the flank widened towards the valley. “To the left, there!”

  Bora looked, incredulous. The shots came from no more than an extrusion of the rock, a narrow bulge which was allowing the attacker to shoot with the sun behind him. Squatting beside Bora, Fuentes kept firing with the steadiness of a hunter, one crack after the other. Bullets came ringing in return, ricocheting at random, smashing against granite, scoring the rock with a clang like metal bars being struck. Bora caught the split-second glimpse of a rifle barrel and fired. Everything left his mind for that single point in space, compressed, circumscribed, lethal, where the sniper fire originated and became a target. It awed him how quickly his fourteen bullets were spent.

  And all the while out of Fuentes’ mouth flowed a stream of obscenities, in which he could make out words like mierda and “He can see us clearly!” One, two shots burst into sparks when they hit the granite just below the place he was aiming for. “We’ve got to pull back, teniente!”