The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  Bora did not so much as alter the rhythm of his walk. “Nobody in Castellar seems to know anything about a burial.”

  “I haven’t asked you to come here to play games.” Walton stopped in mid-stride. He’d last used the expression with Remedios, and righteous anger choked him.

  “And I haven’t come to be interrogated. I have questions.” The way Bora said it, the controlled urgency of his tone, struck Walton as unrehearsed, naively betraying other interests, in fact.

  “The grave is empty,” Walton charged. “I know you’re involved. Somehow you found the grave and removed the body that was inside. I want to know why.”

  This time Bora lost his cool enough to step into a sorry-looking bush that bordered the grave ahead of him. “I don’t have to tell you anything, Major. If that’s why we’re here, we can end it right now.” For all his bluster, he sounded imprudent or uncomfortable at disguising his feelings. “I thought perhaps it was about the matter of the flag,” he added.

  “The flag? I couldn’t give a damn about the flag. And it’s nothing to do with my gun, either.”

  They stared at one another across an untended grave. Walton was at this moment so obsessed with Remedios, he feared the German would mention her.

  Bora said, coolly, “So, you must be wondering instead if my men killed García Lorca.”

  Walton was entirely taken aback. He felt as if the two of them had been dropped from a height, to a place where words were naked and newly important.

  “If I knew who had killed him, Major, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to meet you.”

  Well, the sonofabitch. “What makes you think I know anything about it?”

  “García Lorca wasn’t coming to see us.”

  Preceding the American, Bora reached the porch and sat on its shady cement step. Where the walls met, the corner of the porch swarmed with green flies. Their hum sounded ominous in a cemetery, although they probably fed on decaying flowers and plants placed on the graves.

  “Suppose you start by telling me what you did with the body,” Walton said.

  Behind Bora, the tombs were stacked six high, their ends sealed with marble plaques. On some of these, the lettering identified the dead as having fallen “for God and Country”. The eternal lie governments indulge in, Walton knew. “Por Dios y por España” was the local version, and surely there was a German variation on the theme. Bora sat, seemingly ignoring the question. “I intend to discover who killed him.”

  The brash statement outraged Walton. “Is that a fact?”

  Bora raised his eyes to meet Walton’s. “I’m not sure I can figure it out on my own.”

  The American stood in front of him. Days of resentment were coming to a head. He stared at the wholesome tautness of Bora’s face and neck, the vigorous, untouched looks of one who had grown from a privileged childhood to boyhood and was now a man. A young man, which made a difference to the way Remedios looked at him.

  Before Spain Walton hadn’t thought much about ageing, or about comparing himself to others. Today forced him to confront those issues. Bare-kneed and clean-shaven, Bora faced him with the satisfaction – there was no doubt about it – of having taken Remedios from him, the older man.

  Instantly Walton was beyond prudence and back to his unformed murderous reason for coming here. He imagined levelling a kick at Bora’s chest or face, in partial retribution for this encounter.

  As if sensing the threat, Bora rose to challenge him, inch by inch. “On second thoughts, Major, I believe I can. You’re welcome to tell me what you know, but I don’t really have to reciprocate, because I’ll figure it out anyway.”

  Walton began to laugh. “I’m telling you nothing.” Seeing Bora unfazed by his laughter was another mortifying reminder of the age difference. “And about the grave …” He straddled the ground among the sun-wilted shrubs. “I could thrash the answer out of you.”

  “Really? Forgive me, Major, but I’m quite a bit younger than you are.” Bora smiled his half-amused, half-insolent smile. “And I don’t think a cemetery is the appropriate place to fight it out.” All the same, he started to tense around his neck and jaw, readying for a fight.

  He had no time to do anything more. Walton landed his right fist on Bora’s face, surprised at his own speed. The shock of his knuckles striking bone travelled up his arm. He could not ward off a blow to his shoulder, and when he aimed a second hook, he only glanced the German’s cheekbone, and the excess energy propelled him forward. No blow came in return; instead, he felt a brutal shove as Bora forced him towards the centre of the graveyard, the two men now chest to chest. He hated the German’s unafraid arrogance, his unwillingness to brawl. Walton stumbled, found his footing, and began to fight in earnest, using the crude techniques he’d learned in street riots: a hot-headed sequence of quick, bitter, short blows without thinking, without covering himself enough to avoid a heavy uppercut to his chin. It hurt, and he threw a wild punch; Bora lost his balance and stumbled backwards, but wasn’t hurt enough to fall, or even to groan.

  Walton grunted, kicking out this time, but the German grabbed his foot. Suddenly the bright sky was flying at him and Walton found himself lying flat on his back. He twisted to get up, felt the weight of the other man on top of him and the risk of being pinned down. There was blood on his hands, although he couldn’t tell whose it was. No pain registered, although he was receiving and landing blows. Then he was up and pushing Bora back, back, over the cement step. Against the corner of the wall where the green flies buzzed, he struck hard with his fists and knee and Bora groaned after all, doubling over but not crumpling, in pain now; but so was Walton, and when another blow came it was like an explosion in the pit of his stomach. The breath jetted out of him and he groped for the wall to keep standing. He saw out of the corner of his eye Bora staggering away from him to the sun of the cemetery and stumbling towards a gravestone to sit on: blood was pouring from his nose, and for a moment or two he did nothing about it, letting it run down his chin. Then he untucked his shirt and wiped his face with it.

  For the better part of a minute they remained where they were, Walton getting his breath back and Bora tending his nosebleed as best he could, head tilted back against a marble cross.

  “I believe he was killed in or near the car that brought him here,” the German said. The bleeding had not stopped, but he sounded singularly amenable given the circumstances.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Learning what happened is more important to me than your opinion of my sincerity. I want to know who did it, and you probably do as well.”

  Walton discreetly unbuckled his pistol holder, a motion that made his ribs and back ache. I’m still angry, he told himself. I’m still good and angry. “Were you the first to find the body?”

  “I think so.” Bora spoke with his face in the bloody hem of his shirt. “I found a spent shell nearby, so he must have been shot there.”

  Walton pulled out his gun three-quarters of the way before sliding it back in and turning around. “One shell? There never were two shots, then.”

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  Chernik, who was keeping watch at the edge of the camp, stared as Walton strode past him.

  On the stifling ground floor of the house the odour of burnt onions was overpowering. Brissot was playing solitaire with both decks of greasy cards while the others dozed on ragged army blankets by the back door, where a waft of stale air came from the horse pen.

  “Well, did you kill him?” He was the only one who Walton had told about the meeting, and had advised against it.

  “I beat him to within an inch of his life.”

  Brissot looked at him doubtfully. “Obviously within that inch he managed to give you a black eye. No. You never wanted to kill him.”

  Walton glanced at the tidy arrangement of cards. He hadn’t felt anything wrong with his eye until Brissot mentioned it. Now he noticed a stinging throb in the upper lid, as if grit had lodged underneath
it. He grabbed a water pitcher from the table. “In the end he told me nothing and I told him nothing.”

  “You were up there a long time for two people who said nothing to each other.”

  “I didn’t spend all the time there,” Walton lied. He poured water into the palm of his hand and cupped it against his right eye. “I went to Remedios afterwards.”

  “Hmm.” Brissot stood up from his chair. He removed Walton’s hand to look at his swelling eye, a physician’s response. “Any impressions of the man we’re facing?”

  Walton stepped away from the scrutiny, tight-lipped with pain. “Army school prig,” he speculated. “I bet he hasn’t got any combat experience worth a damn. There’s nothing to report. It was a waste of time.”

  “Maetzu left camp in one of his moods. He may be ‘looking for blood’ in Castellar.”

  Walton did not mention that he’d heard a shot while in the graveyard. He avoided a confrontation by going upstairs, despite the oppressive heat under the metal roof. In his room the bed was still where he had dragged it away from the leak in the ceiling. He sat on it to take off his boots.

  Nothing to report? He and the German had squatted against the wall in the fly-ridden shade of the porch to talk warily for a long time. After Bora had washed away the blood with water from his canteen, they’d done nothing but talk. Walton could count on the fingers of one hand the times anyone had listened to him so attentively. He’d been tempted to feel flattered but had resisted it.

  When he had probed him by asking, “What’s in it for you?” Bora had looked genuinely surprised.

  “In it?” he had repeated. He had a deep voice and pronounced words with terse clarity, like a soldier. “I hadn’t thought about it. Peace of mind, I expect.”

  “You said you’d never even met Lorca.”

  “I never met the Generalissimo, either. But I’m here.”

  And then it’d been Walton’s turn to say something memorable: “I was García Lorca’s friend.”

  Take that. There are different ways of landing a punch. Walton grimaced when he tried to open his eye fully. The bed still smelled of liquor. Since Marypaz left, he’d lain in it every night with his boots on, leaving muddy tracks on the bare mattress. He searched for the tobacco pouch in his breast pocket. The last pack of cheap Italian cigarettes he was keeping to one side for night-time smoking, when he couldn’t roll a cigarette in the darkness outside.

  Forget Marypaz. It was all about Remedios. Remedios had taken more than she’d given him, sucking him dry. She let him make love to her like it was a concession. She’d never said the word “love” once, not even the way women do when they want a man to come. Now Marypaz was gone, and Remedios too was gone, as if her bed had floated away to an unmeasurable distance, visible but not reachable. She’d lie in it, white and small, with the handful of red between her thighs, that tight void that sucked the life right out of him.

  Somewhere into the equation fit Bora, who had spoken about Lorca as if he had a right to know what Walton knew. He’d only agreed to meet again because, because … He liked to think it was because neither man wanted to give up, and because he might yet extort from Bora the new location of the grave.

  But beneath this there was more. It was dark and filthy at the bottom, a degraded curiosity he hadn’t satisfied, so he needed to go to Bora again. As for himself, he’d conceded that he felt bitter about Lorca’s death. The German would realize that much, if he hadn’t done so already.

  Walton flicked the cigarette butt out of the window. Unless he saw and smelled more, his anger towards Bora risked changing in its intensity. Not diminishing exactly, but taking the colour of contempt, old wartime hatred, becoming more diffuse and less personal. Already Walton caught himself disliking not just Bora but all young men, Marroquí and Rafael and Valentin included, as if he’d never been one of them and their masculine stupidity and eagerness were unfamiliar to him. It needed to be broken in all of them, that assurance of youth.

  He’d never felt secure. No one had ever given him anything, not even Remedios.

  How could the German called Bora possibly have the arrogance to say, “Help me discover who killed him”?

  RISCAL AMARGO

  Tuesday 27 July. Afternoon, at the post.

  Met the American! His name is Philip Walton, and he may have given me the greatest breakthrough in my investigation so far. Here’s the summary: he knew Lorca well; he heard from an informant about a car with three passengers and two shots fired; he suspects I was first on the scene (I confirmed this). According to Lorca, he added, his cousin Antonio Cadena had been edgy and afraid recently.

  Much tension between us from the start. Acted upon it. Told Fuentes nosebleed due to sun. Ended up talking about Lorca more freely than we’d intended, as if we both needed it. On edge at the thought he’d bring up Remedios … I think I’d have killed him then (he did pull a gun on me at one point and thought I hadn’t noticed). Balance of the encounter: Walton self-assured, concise, impressive hardbitten sort. Likely agnostic. Seems unflinching in the face of danger. Bora self-contained, circumspect, smacking of European and army biases. Better uppercut (if that’s what it was). Planned another meeting for tomorrow morning, with the understanding that military business between us will continue unaltered.

  In unrelated matters, Fuentes reported that due to the victory at Brunete Colonel Serrano has countermanded my orders confining Aixala and Paradís to the post. Aixala has been to Castellar and back already. Paradís is still out.

  Bora resorted to his sketchbook to transcribe his conversation with Walton, quoting verbatim whenever possible. When Fuentes showed up on the threshold he distractedly replied, “Yes, yes,” and “I’m busy,” to whatever the sergeant said.

  Fuentes wouldn’t budge. “Busy or not, teniente, you’d better hear this.”

  It took them under half an hour to reach Castellar, a record time even for two fit men. Bora had never seen more than three locals together in one place, while this afternoon a cluster of onlookers watched and waited.

  Paradís’ body had been moved to the side of the road. A coarse piece of fabric lay draped over his head, and Bora thought it was dark red until he realized it was soaked through with blood. He warded off a grisly urge to look under the cloth.

  “They got him in the left temple as he walked out,” Fuentes said. With a slow gesture, he pointed at the blood on the step, starting at the small house in the fig orchard. “The widow inside says she didn’t see who fired the shot. That’s possible, because it looks like it came from a marksman’s rifle. Could have come from a long way off.”

  “Get her out here.”

  Soleá Yarza emerged in her blue robe, a tacky pastiness on her face. Her ropy black hair bristled with cheap celluloid combs at the sides of her head, like fish gills. Bora, who had never met her before but like everyone else had heard of her, laid a quick, astonished look on her shabby person. She stared at him, trying to keep the blood and body out of her peripheral vision by contorting her head and neck in a strange position. A stance of avoidance and fear of what had already taken place.

  Any suspicion Bora might entertain about her fell before the woman’s terrified response, because any of them – including Fuentes, who was a married man; including him – could have been cut down walking out of any woman’s door. It was raw and real, a reminder of men’s fragility, shatterable at any time: Fuentes keeping on scanning faces and the land, rifle in hand; the old men gawking; and he, Bora, acutely aware of the danger they were in. And Soleá’s turning away, the averting gesture of her open hand, reminded him of the verse in The Odyssey where the faithless handmaidens are brought in after the slaughter of the queen’s suitors and ordered to sponge their lovers’ blood before being hanged by the palace wall. And there they hung like doves, Bora quoted to himself. The pity he had felt for Lorca’s body on the mule track returned, a creature’s sadness for his own mirrored mortality. The sadness and mortality of things.

  “I w
as in the house; I didn’t see anyone.” The widow began to weep.

  “You may go back inside,” Bora said.

  Paradís had no one to claim him. Fuentes suggested that they bury him at once and be done with it, though Bora insisted on getting the priest. When the priest sent word that he was not well, Bora stormed to the church himself and came back with the old man glumly tagging along. A mulero and a cart were secured, and they headed for the cemetery. Its wall was visible not far from the widow’s house, among fantastically twisted fig trees, and having just met Walton there, Bora had a peculiar feeling of déjà vu. There, Walton had hinted that a mulero had witnessed the murder. In return, Bora had confessed his admiration for Lorca’s poetry. Edgily they’d begun to talk, revealing just enough, holding back just enough, posturing to avoid giving in. Bora remembered saying, “I am freer to move than you are. You may have more information, but it won’t get you anywhere. You must help.”

  “Bury him here,” the priest said, craning his wrinkled neck and indicating an unkempt patch among some old graves, close to the spot where Walton and Bora had wordlessly fought over Remedios as men always fight over women. Bora felt wayward and exhilarated at the notion that his blood would still mark the slab where he’d sat.

  “Me? I haven’t been to Castellar in a week,” Paradís had said. Now he’d be here for much longer than that.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  In the afternoon, Walton woke up covered in sweat after a bad dream. He must have slept long enough for his eye to swell. He could open it now, but it felt cottony and sore. Swinging his legs off the bed to stand, he stepped on a loose floor tile, a reminder that he ought to push the bed back into place now that the rain was over. In the dream, the German had told him he’d burned Lorca’s body. No doubt the grass fires and the smell of overcooked onions had played a part in it, mingling in his memory.

  “What if I told you that we had buried him in Teruel?” Bora had in fact asked him.