by Ben Pastor
“Well? To quote your own words, if you get killed, you get killed.”
Bora tried not to lose hope. “I cannot go back to my post unarmed!”
The mention of the post seemed to distract Cziffra from his displeasure. “You’re not going back to the sierra.”
Bora felt his stomach tighten as if to ward off a physical blow. He understood well there was no negotiation here either. He watched Cziffra take out of his desk a typed sheet of paper. “It’s the copy of a reassignment order from Colonel Jacinto Costa y Serrano.”
Wretchedly Bora handed over his pistol belt. “Where am I being sent?”
“North of here. Belchite.”
“Oh, for the love of God. What am I going to do there? It’s more dead than the sierra!”
Cziffra looked as though he found some humour in the matter, because he made an indulgent gesture indicating to Bora that he could keep the Browning. “You should have turned the other cheek to Serrano. At all events, the assignment at Belchite might be livelier than you think, sooner than you think. That’s where the Reds are due to strike next.”
CAÑADA DE LOS ZAGALES
The sky was as pale as dust. Haze made it look like a canvas tent stretched above. Along the mule track, the canes rustled like crumpled paper. The water in the brook was low and made no noise at all.
Walton came early to the meeting place to scope it beforehand; the German, however, was now running late. Ten minutes by his watch, enough to irritate him. Slipping on the gravel bed, he walked to a spot where he could squat and wash his face. The swelling in his eye had subsided; still, he wiped it gently. When he held it out, his hand trembled a little; he concentrated, and controlled the tremor by stiffening the arm. At last he’d been able to void his bladder, and had even managed to sleep for an hour or two on the mattress salvaged from the ruins. Brissot, who stored his political propaganda upstairs, was too busy digging through the rubble to pay attention to Walton’s or anyone else’s state of mind.
A swishing sound in the cane grove caused Walton to rise quickly and turn, gun in hand, expecting Bora to appear. But across the mule track, the feathery heads of the canes barely nodded in the breeze. Walton put away his gun. The next thought in his mind was that Maetzu was crouching by the bank, waiting for the German to show up.
“Iñaki?” he called under his breath, and the lack of an answer didn’t mean that Maetzu wasn’t there, ready for the ambush. After Brissot had warned him about it, for a moment Walton had considered sending word to Bora to cancel the meeting. His own laziness had stopped him taking action on Brissot’s warning, and if Bora chose to come, it was at his own risk. Death was in this place: Lorca’s, the mulero’s. It might be the German’s turn, and there was no stopping it.
As for himself, death was somewhere too, but he had put aside any fear of it for the time being. He was as incapable of predicting when that fear would be needed as he was of controlling it once it took hold. Bora had said, “I envy you”! Standing on the mule track, Walton kicked pebbles around. The younger man’s incomprehensible admission flattered him, although what there was to envy, he didn’t know. Age? Can you be so dumb as to envy age? Experience? He’d had a bellyful of that, and there was nothing to pine for in that department either. What can you say about a man who couldn’t make it in Eden, and couldn’t make it out of Eden either?
Walton paced slowly. He was closing the chink in this door too, not out of indifference, but out of awareness that giving the key to Bora had been his contribution to solving Lorca’s murder. It’s just as well.
When they had parted ways at San Martín, Bora had come up with an unexpected request. “If your men should kill me, would you afford me the courtesy of a decent burial?” Because Walton had answered neither yes nor no, he’d indirectly, politely pressed the matter. “Would you like me to promise the same for you?”
To this, Walton recalled grinning in contempt. He had said, “Sure,” knowing that promises are as good as scribbles on a cold windowpane. No, worse than that. Boys are liberal with promises, love, curiosity; they swear and poke into doors, fuck, go on to the next thing. Whether they’re from Eden or any other place on earth that isn’t Eden – like Germany – they think themselves smart and hard-assed and immortal enough to mention death seriously, but only in passing.
Speaking of promises, Bora was not about to come, the sonofabitch. Walton kicked the gravel. Waiting, clenching his trembling hands into fists, he only wished the German would show up so that he could say that he wasn’t disappointed, that the fact Bora hadn’t kept his promise meant nothing to him, that nothing really meant anything to him any more.
There. And you’d do well to envy me, boy, because I took idealism and optimism and whatever other phoney piece of lead tying me down and tossed them away. As for dying, I died a thousand times, and there was no one to bury me. You, you are weighed down more than you know; it’ll take you years to dig the lead out of your soul if you live that long.
“You like Lorca?” he’d said to Bora. “Go back and read Lorca where he writes that ‘a door is not a door until a dead man is carried out of it.’ The sum of what you envy is all there: age, experience, life. All of it. The rest is commentary.”
Rain was starting to fall out of the pale sky. Walton waited ten minutes more, letting water come down on him like a sad blessing, and then climbed back to camp.
POSTSCRIPT
SKAŁA, NORTH OF CRACOW, SOUTH-WEST POLAND
Thursday, 7 September 1939.
This is the first chance I’ve had to sit down to write since we crossed the Polish border on the 1st. Plenty has gone unrecorded in the past several months, so some catching up follows.
16 August 1939.
Drove to Halle, where Dikta was staying with friends. Decided to marry on the spur of the moment. Father displeased at my “marrying without thinking”, as he puts it. Nina disappointed at not being able to organize a big wedding. Brother ecstatic at the thought that I got away with it and am now a married man. Spent two nights with Dikta before boarding the train to join my company (promoted to captain 12 August). Unfortunately a hotel, little privacy, still … I’m head over heels. Bless Remedios tenfold for teaching a silly Alemán what it is to love a woman.
1–5 September 1939.
With my 1st Cavalry Brigade, 3rd Army (under General Feldt). Mounted reconnaissance duties, well in advance of the troops. My spoken and written Russian is coming along, and will come in useful soon. Life is starting to look like the dream two years ago, on 20 July: after we cut the Polish Lancers to pieces at Frankowo and Krasnobród, I saw many a fallen enemy alongside his dead mount. What senseless resistance they put up against our tanks! I remembered Lorca’s words about the black horse carrying its dead horseman, and thought that the horseman’s song ends here, come what will.
Later in the month.
Awful reports about our treatment of Polish Jews. I’d be disinclined to believe them if I didn’t know better. On my own authority, I contacted the Army War Crimes Bureau, since the tu quoque rule of reprisals hardly applies here. We’ll see what good comes of it.
And since I haven’t written about the matter before, I might as well record how things went in Spain after I left the sierra for Belchite on 3 August 1937.
Herr – or rather Colonel Cziffra – was right about my assignment. The Red siege of Belchite was a nightmare that lasted until 6 September: no water, no food, a desperate situation. I made it out of there by the skin of my teeth before surrender, and rejoined the forces in Teruel. There I just traded one siege situation for another, and God keep me from having to go through the likes of it again. We lasted in -30 weather until 8 February 1938 (the last of us holed up among the dead and dying in the seminary, the one that had looked like a fortress to me back in July). In the fierce fighting for Concud, so many died that the piled corpses were doused with fuel in an unsuccessful attempt to dispose of them. We heard that half-starved dogs came in packs to feed on human flesh.
By then, Nationalist battalions around Teruel, which needed twenty or so officers, were down to four or five, so I was granted more responsibility than I ever had dreamed of. We kept our spirits up and went at it like furies between the 18th and the 19th, when we retook Santa Barbara Hill and the cemetery. On the 22nd Teruel was ours again, and for good!
While the “Te Deum” was sung in the cathedral, I went looking for the unrecovered bodies of my men, many of whom had fallen taking the square. During the siege (this, to quote Colonel Serrano, is how incestuous civil wars are) I’d heard that we’d been facing Red units previously deployed on the Sierra de San Martín, and that Major Walton – under his battle name Felipe – was among them. Preliminary interrogations of prisoners revealed that he was missing in action, presumed dead. So, faithful to our mutual promise of a decent burial (even though later on he must have believed I had chosen to keep the result of the investigation from him), I secured the assistance of his second in command, a French physician by the name of Brissot.
At first Dr Brissot refused to accompany me, although I suspect he knew I’d met Walton on the sierra. He looked miserable and exhausted, and I no better, because in Teruel we all got lice and canker sores and so much else they glossed over in army school. Only after I repeatedly expressed in French my sympathy about Walton’s death did he agree to my request.
In the rubble of Teruel, Walton’s body lay in the Calle de Villanueva, behind a ruined yellow wall. A bullet had gone clear through his neck. Killed him instantly, I think. Recalling the impression I’d had of him as a man steeled to danger, I was glad in a way that he had been aware of his approaching death. Brissot said Walton had fought alone behind that yellow wall, having been cut off from the rest. He held the street single-handed for the best part of a day, against all hope. An impressive show of manliness, deserving of something better than death!
I wonder what Walton’s thoughts were as he crouched by a wall the colour of fear, knowing that he’d die soon. I wonder if he thought of Remedios when the bullet struck. In any case, I’m sure he was unafraid to the end. That men, enemies included, should display such courage, is an example I have carried ever since Spain.
On that day, I told Brissot that I couldn’t promise a decent military burial for all his men (not even for mine), but would secure it for Walton. He saw I was moved, and I think had less respect for me because of it. This chapter of my life began and ended with burying a man, I realize now, one of the rituals that set us apart from animals. Poor Walton. Poor Lorca, poor Jover. How final are your deaths.
Often I think of what Remedios predicted, and how Walton died seven months after she spoke to me. She was right; I counted the days: first the seven days that followed her words, then the seven months that led to February, when I came very close to fulfilling the prophecy. But here we are in 1939, and the next possible deadline (seven years) is 1944. The war will be over long before then, so perhaps Remedios was mistaken after all.
There are times when I wonder what Mendez Roig is doing. How, since he was never punished and must have gone on to better things, he can live with himself. I wonder what happened to Fuentes and the other men, whether Colonel Serrano will ever tell anyone where García Lorca is buried.
I have seen the grave in my dreams, suspended between the sierra and the sky, remote, and I feel the grief you can only feel for someone whose death you mourn not having known him, more intimate because it is not altered by the reality of a friendship. All is possible in this sympathy; no misspoken word gets in its way, no falling out, no disappointment. Sometimes I think we can only love, only hate, only mourn this way. Love, hate and grief are fragile and have a way of not standing up to reality.
10 October.
Tomorrow I am to be detached in Cracow, uralte deutsche Stadt, as we like to think.
Billeted overnight at a farmhouse near Miechów. A weathervane on the roof moaned all night, and I lay in the dark thinking that daytime would come and I would be at Riscal Amargo, with the beams criss-crossing the ceiling, the broken window, and Mas del Aire touching God. In the morning it was rainy, and definitely Poland. Tomorrow after my official entrance to this “ancestrally German city”, our horses will be stabled more and more often, as we gradually convert to mechanized reconnaissance.
All I seem to remember tonight of Lorca’s verses, as I write in this requisitioned room, are three verses, which sum up more than ever what his writing meant to my younger self:
Tender and distant voice poured into me
Tender and distant voice tasted by me
Tender and distant voice that fades away.
Yes, the horseman’s song ends here, and something else – something else, unclear, that I want to call glory but is already so visibly made of blood – has already begun.
AUTHOR’S FINAL NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The history books tell us that Federico García Lorca was arrested and executed by Franco’s troops in the summer of 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body, however, was never recovered, and his place of burial is at best uncertain. The characters in my novel (with the obvious exception of Lorca) are fictional. What is true are geographical setting, battles, political organizations – and, generally, the entire background of the plot.
While working on The Horseman’s Song I became indebted to many university colleagues, researchers, journalists, musicians, actors, flamenco dancers, literary critics and military advisers, in the United States as well as in Europe. There are too many to list by name, but I warmly thank all of them. Without their help, The Horseman’s Song would never have seen the light.