by David Hewson
She listened, but there was no reply.
There had been premonitions before. When a cousin had written her a letter, she had foreseen its arrival even before the postman arrived in the courtyard. When her father had left for the bank without his umbrella, she had been able to tell why he had returned prematurely, even before he spoke. He had recognized this too, in his way. He called her ‘our little gypsy’ and looked at her through those troubled, brown eyes as if apologizing. As if he were trying to say: this is the best I can offer in the circumstances. It is not enough. And for that I am sorry.
That night she did not know whether she was asleep or awake, whether the terror that gripped her was the product of a dream or a real, deadly premonition of the darkness that was about to engulf them. As the light began to fail, she lay on her bed, straight and rigid, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling, listening to the voices downstairs subside. She thought she heard the sound of her mother sobbing, and wondered if that could be true. Her mother did not cry like this. It was not what was expected of a Lucena, even one who had married into the line. But then it became unmistakable, a rhythmic, breathy sobbing that sounded sadder than anything Cristina had ever heard.
Outside, in the hot, thick, semi-tropical dark, there was the brief sound of a gunshot and, on her big, iron-framed bed, comfy on the feather mattress, the young girl shivered. The beads of sweat turned icy on her skin and, for a moment, she felt she was quite alone in the world. Nothing stood between her and the stars. God was now absent from the universe and in his place was a great, all-enveloping blackness, cold, inhuman, capable of flicking away her tiny existence as if it were a mote of dust floating idly in a half-lit room.
Cristina shivered again, closed her eyes and tried to sleep. The night gave way to vague shifting shapes of scarlet, shapes that lumbered and twisted through her consciousness, unformed, unspeaking, unremitting, like huge faceless phantoms of living tissue, dancing through the darkness. They had no eyes, no faces, yet somehow they were human. And they did human things too, things she only half-understood. Limbs grew from the red, bleeding tissue, bodies formed, then opened and closed on each other. Huge torsos rose and fell, pushing, twitching, writhing, bright hot liquid spurting from dark cavities that appeared and then vanished. This was the world, an endless procession of blood and tissue and muscle, intertwined, intertwining, ever restless, ever in agony. And behind it there was a sound, a deep low moaning that mixed pain and ecstasy with animal grunts that hovered around the edges of words, real words, words Cristina could only barely comprehend. Words she feared, for the effect they might have on her.
She watched two phantasms writhe to the centre stage of her nightmare, grip each other, sometimes half-human in form, at other times a mass of sinew and flesh. Then they separated and, briefly, took on a dimly recognizable shape. Arms formed from the trunk, large and fleshy, each ending in a reddened point streaked with veins and arteries. There was a head, a body and then legs, fat as tree trunks. From somewhere came a sound like high-pitched laughter, but wrong. It was too forced, too rapid, too mechanical. There was something liquid about it too, she realized, and for a moment she thought her sanity would leave her. Then the creatures embraced, shockingly. One fell onto its back, the huge tree legs opened to reveal a vast, blood-red cavity in the crotch, and its mate changed shape, transformed into something massive and threatening. It bent down, towards the cavernous hole, entered it, pushed, joined with the flesh, rammed itself into the second, both shouting in joyous, ecstatic screams. The world shook. It comprised nothing but this image, of two things each consuming the other. She watched as the one below divided, was split in two by its partner’s animal force, then they joined in a single, twisting mass of meat, rolling in the waves of gore that gushed around them, a vast red ocean possessed of a heat she could feel on her skin, with a smell that mixed blood with something more fundamental, some base human essence.
Cristina’s eyes were closed, but the obscenity was still there, still real in front of her. She looked up, to the sky, to God. It was a clear, cloudless night. The stars were bright against a deep-blue darkness, unfamiliar shapes, constellations she did not recognize. She was beyond the world, beyond the universe.
There was a light in the centre of the sky and it came closer. As it did, she recognized the form. It was a dove, a radiant, iridescent white so bright it made her want to shield her eyes from its pitiless purity. As it approached she heard a single, monotonous sound: an unchanging, high-pitched musical tone from some unknown instrument that seemed to play from every direction simultaneously.
The dove drew nearer. It was flapping its wings with a lazy, slow regularity. She could see every feather moving gently in the velvet sky, backwards and forwards, the wing tips translucent, the stars shining through them.
It came closer, closer, until it was hovering, still with an impossible slowness, only inches from her face, staring at her with a single eye. She could feel the air gently displaced by its tiny, beating wings. She could examine every inch of its unblemished body. It shone with a blazing, chaste light that had a preternatural intensity, shone just in front of her face, dazzling her with its radiance.
Cristina looked at its head. The half-open beak was yellow, the colour of newly ripened corn under the sun. It held its head still as its wings beat slowly in the air. There was a nobility, a majesty, about the creature that filled her with awe.
She looked into its eye and this alone seemed wrong. It was dark, with a faint white circle of iris near the rim. She stared at it then, with a shock she could not explain, realized that the bird was blind. If this was God, it was a God that could not see, and this seemed more terrible than anything else in the nightmare. She gazed into its deep black eye, searching for recognition, but there was none. Something changed. The black centre seemed to alter shape, its colour turned darker. It was a swirling, tiny mass of liquid that shifted tone as she stared at it.
Cristina watched, unable to look away, as a pinpoint of bright blood appeared in the centre of the retina. It grew like a tiny scarlet whirlpool, larger and larger. A drop fell from the bird’s beak and stained the perfect feathers of its chest. She began to scream, but no sound came out of her mouth. The bird was now no messenger from God. Its eyes were red pits. A steady stream of thick clotted blood dripped out of the corn-yellow beak, luminescent red pearls against the soft, dark sky.
Cristina tried to cover her eyes with her hands, but the vision remained. It was there, always there, always demanding to be seen. She looked at her fingers. They were covered in blood. Its blood. The bird opened its beak. Wide. Wider than was possible. Its throat was a pool of vivid, eddying crimson.
There was the sound of wings, larger wings. Black shadows hovered over her and the smell returned: fetid, miasmic, yet somehow terribly human.
This time the dove screamed and it sounded like a child in agony, in terror. She watched as its head exploded in a cloud of gore that erupted everywhere. It spattered her face, it flew into her mouth. She could feel its brains on her tongue. The world went black, then white, then red. She felt herself turned upside down, flung down a long, narrow tunnel into hell.
White light. Incandescent. She was awake. In her room. It was morning. The sun streamed through the open window. Outside came the street noise, loud, unfamiliar, threatening. She looked down at herself. This was the heaviest she had known. A huge pool of dried blood soaked her nightdress from knee to waist. The coverlet beneath was ruined. She felt herself. The blood was warm and sticky, but it had ceased to run. This was not sickness. This was normal. She looked at it on her fingers, dried in brown clots. She sniffed it and felt a sense of awe.
The room was no different. The world was only a little different. She had survived. There had been screams, there had been shouts, of that she was sure. And no one had come. No one.
Cristina looked at her fourteen-year-old fingers again and thought: I have met God and he failed me. I have loved my family and they have
failed me. I bleed and I alone notice. But I am a Lucena and I shall not be defeated.
She poured herself a bath, stayed in the water for a good half-hour, came out clean, smelling of strong soap and talcum powder, wore a freshly pressed white dress, went down to breakfast, then walked through every room. Listening to their conversations, so full of fear and trepidation. Watching them look at her through a haze of condescension. They did not know, they could not see.
At ten in the morning she had returned to her room, tired of the tense wave of near-hysteria that seemed to have gripped the house, ashamed of their fear. She had changed into her favourite pink-and-white cotton dress, sketched a little: the courtyard from the window, light dappling the trees, the golden stone of the wall. She had ignored the noise from the street. It was irrelevant now. There was a new book in her hands. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. Through it she had entered a different world, one contained between its burnished green leather covers, with the title blocked in gold lettering. She had dozed, she had dreamed.
Somewhere close to midday a noise had woken Cristina Lucena. She had walked downstairs, looked into the courtyard, stood back in mute shock as another, louder noise ripped through the fabric of her world.
When she saw the dove fall in a flutter from the sky, headless, blood pumping from its neck, she realized, with a start that made her feel physically sick, that this time the nightmare would be real.
TWENTY-THREE
There were at least a dozen men. They wore coarse country clothes: rough jackets, heavy cotton trousers. They carried rifles over their shoulders or held them, threateningly, over an arm. Violence hung around them like flies around a dead animal. When Cristina tried to look into their eyes she found nothing there except the hint, distant and ominous, of dull, mute hatred.
With a start, she realized what they reminded her of: a hunting party.
They motioned the family into the back of a delivery van. Inside, in the airless darkness, Papa could not bear to look at anyone. He stared at the metal wall, his face lit haphazardly by a grilled window on each side. He seemed to be somewhere else. One of the boys, Fernando, who had invented the tale of the tortured soul trapped inside the banyan tree, said something and a man screamed at him, waving the gun. After that they were silent as the van bounced and lurched through the streets, silent except for the faint sobbing of her mother who sat with her hands over her eyes.
Cristina thought: If they were going to kill us, why didn’t they kill us at the house? Why take us somewhere else?
It didn’t make sense. But then, killing people didn’t make sense. She found herself filled with a quiet, internal feeling of outrage. Not for what was happening, or might happen, in itself, but for the outright, naked stupidity of it all. ‘Men’s games.’ She had heard her mother use the phrase during the night, when she had been berating Papa for ‘taking sides’. These were ‘men’s games’ and they were indescribably, ineffably idiotic.
The van threw them around for hours. She could sense the change in the air as they left the city and found the countryside. The smells of horse and car fumes disappeared, to be replaced by fields, manure, the dry, dusty tang of crops waiting to be harvested. The sounds changed too. The birds were different; the space between their songs more pronounced. Gradually, their song disappeared completely and then, with a bone-jarring lurch to the right, the van turned off the road, jounced over some rough ground and came to a stop.
Please, thought Cristina. Do not open the doors. Make this a joke. Leave us here, rotting in our fear. All night if you wish. Let us stew in our own terror. Have your fun. Your men’s fun.
Then light spilled into the van, harsh and cruel and golden, and they looked out onto a landscape of utter desolation. Cristina heard her mother release a cry so desperate it made her shiver and she felt a collective dread enfold them like a soft, consuming cloak.
La Soledad.
The wilderness.
The grieving.
The camp had been built in a flat, shallow depression on dun, infertile ground just outside the city boundary. The landscape was bare and forbidding: dry rock and dust and sand. There was not a blade of grass or a sign of water anywhere. They were outside the twin main gates, which were now opening to receive them. A little way off to the right was a single-storey white farmhouse next to a bull enclosure, and then, a little further along, one of the training rings where the farmers tested their animals, sorting the fast from the slow, the brave from the cautious. A meagre herd of bulls stood motionless in the pen, mouths open, panting in the still summer air. They did not look like the creatures of the ring. They were thin and listless, bones jutting out from their haunches.
No sport there, Cristina.
The thought came from nowhere and she found herself shivering. She was damp again and didn’t dare to see if it showed. Before they were shoved through into the camp, she turned and looked again at the farm. In the little practice ring, hung on the rickety fencing, stood the trappings of the corrida. Pikes, horse guards, darts with fading ribbons casually stuck into the woodwork. There was a stain in the sand too that looked recent. She shook her head, tried to look again, but an arm pushed her towards the gate and she obeyed.
La Soledad seemed as if it had been made out of flotsam and jetsam collected from the beach. The enclosure was roughly the shape of a horse-track: an oblong, rounded at each corner. The perimeter appeared impenetrable: a picket of wooden stakes, at least twelve feet tall, with ramshackle lean-to guard posts at each corner reached by ladders. From each cabin poked the long, silver-grey nose of a machine gun with a khaki figure behind it, shielded from the unyielding sun by a makeshift palm roof. Beneath the post nearest the main gate was a small hut with the flag of the Falange fluttering idly from a window. Around the enclosure, in haphazard arrangements, were scattered simple low buildings, perhaps twenty, dilapidated hovels of scrap metal and wood, straw and occasional brick. A few had palm fronds extended at the front on bamboo sticks. In the shade, men and women lay silently, still, without life. There were no chairs. There was no sound. From behind a flimsy fence came the stench of an open drain.
The family had entered together, but soon they were split apart. The men with guns ordered her mother and father to a low, brown hut close to the latrines. The rest of the children were sent to the opposite end of the camp, to a hut that looked like a converted sty. Cristina discreetly felt herself, felt the dampness between her legs and wondered, inwardly: How would she cope? There were no servants, there was no sign of water.
They were halfway across the dry dusty ground that formed the centre of the enclosure when she saw him. He was sitting on a chair in front of the guard post with the flag. He looked as if he had some kind of authority, just from the way he sat on the chair, idly, casually, rocking back and forth, a cigar in his mouth.
She saw him gaze at her, felt the unpleasant attention of his eyes, then turned away. He was behind her now. She could pretend he did not exist, follow her brothers and sisters to the hut, keep quiet, do as she was told.
One of the guards leading them motioned the group to stop. She looked up. Overhead, black shapes were circling in the sun. She felt terribly thirsty. She blinked and when she opened her eyes he was standing in front of her. Looking. Smiling. The silence boomed all around her.
The man asked the guard for their names. He smiled when he heard.
‘How old are you?’ he asked Cristina.
She swallowed. It was hard. The heat, she thought.
‘Fourteen, sir,’ she said.
He towered over her, blocking out the sun. She wanted to look at him, but found she could not.
‘You don’t look well, Cristina.’
She tried to swallow again.
‘I would like a drink of water, sir. If that’s possible.’
He laughed. ‘It is possible. Come.’
The guard was glaring at him. ‘Antonio . . . ?’
The man turned on him and Cristina could see his face
for the first time now. It was caught by the full blast of the sun and quite astonished her. Antonio Alvarez looked like a film star: fine, high cheekbones; clear, lightly tanned skin; dark, intelligent eyes; a slender, black moustache that almost seemed as if it had been drawn on his face, the line was so neat and straight and proper. He looked like the men she had seen in the cinema, men who had seemed more than human. Brave, dashing, honourable men. She could not take her eyes off him.
‘Remember your place, amigo,’ Alvarez said coldly and the guard was quiet. Then to her, ‘My name is Antonio Alvarez. Come.’
They walked across the encampment, he in front, she following behind, a bewildered young girl in a pink-and-white cotton dress. He barked at the guards at the entrance. The timber gates swung slowly open. She followed him to the little white cottage, keeping the same distance behind all the way. When they reached the porch he took out a key, opened the old wooden door painted a fading shade of deep blue and waited for her to walk inside. It was cool and dark. He opened a ragged curtain. Light flooded one side of the room. She saw a desk with papers, a few chairs, an old sofa, a water basin with a jug on a low table beside it. Leading off to the left was a door that was ajar. Beyond was what looked like a double bed, unmade.
He walked to the little table, lifted the jug and poured her a glass.
‘We have wine too here. And brandy.’
She shook her head, gulped at the water and said nothing. The room seemed to be boundless, with deep shadows at every corner. There was a smell, stale and organic, which she could not place.