“You have forgotten the package,” the waiter said. He handed me the meat which was wrapped in two envelopes which had brought copies of the Spur to the piles of magazines which accumulated in one of the office rooms of the Embassy.
“I understand,” I said to the waiter. “Truly.”
“He was an old client and a good client. Also I have never denounced anyone before. I did not denounce for pleasure.”
“Also I should not speak cynically or brutally. Tell him that I denounced him. He hates me anyway by now for differences in politics. He’d feel badly if he knew it was you.”
“No. Each man must take his responsibility. But you understand?”
‘‘Yes,’’ I said. Then lied. “I understand and I approve.” You have to lie very often in a war and when you have to lie you should do it quickly and as well as you can.
We shook hands and I went out the door with John. I looked back at the table where Luis Delgado sat as I went out. He had another gin and tonic in front of him and everyone at the table was laughing at something he had said. He had a very gay, brown face, and shooter’s eyes, and I wondered what he was passing himself off as.
He was a fool to go to Chicote’s. But that was exactly the sort of thing that he would do in order to be able to boast of it when he was back with his own people.
As we went out of the door and turned to walk up the street, a big Seguridad car drew up in front of Chicote’s and eight men got out of it. Six with submachine guns took up positions outside the door. Two in plain clothes went inside. A man asked us for our papers and when I said, “Foreigners,” he said to go along; that it was all right.
In the dark going up the Gran Via there was much new broken glass on the sidewalk and much rubble under foot from the shelling. The air was still smoky and all up the street it smelled of high explosive and blasted granite.
‘Where you go eat?” asked John.
“I have some meat for all of us, and we can cook it in the room.”
“I cook it,” said John. “I cook good. I remember one time when I cook on ship—”
“It will be pretty tough,” I said. “It’s just been freshly butchered.”
“Oh no,” said John. “Is a no such thing as a tough meat in a war.”
People were hurrying by in the dark on their way home from the cinemas where they had stayed until the shelling was over.
“What’s a matter that fascist he come to that café where they know him?”
“He was crazy to do it.”
“Is a trouble with a war,” John said. “Is a too many people crazy.”
“John,” I said, “I think you’ve got something there.”
Back at the hotel we went in the door past the sandbags piled to protect the porter’s desk and I asked for the key, but the porter said there were two comrades upstairs in the room taking a bath. He had given them the keys.
“Go on up, John,” I said. “I want to telephone.”
I went over to the booth and called the same number I had given the waiter.
“Hello? Pepé?”
A thin-lipped voice came over the phone. “¿Qué tal Enrique?”
“Listen Pepé, did you pick up a certain Luis Delgado at Chicote’s?”
“Si, hombre, si. Sin novedad. Without trouble.”
“He doesn’t know anything about the waiter?”
“No, hombre, no.”
“Then don’t tell him. Tell him I denounced him then, will you? Nothing about the waiter.”
“Why when it will make no difference? He is a spy. He will be shot. There is no choice in the matter.”
“I know,” I said. “But it makes a difference.”
“As you want, hombre. As you want. When shall I see thee?”
“Lunch tomorrow. We have some meat.”
“And whiskey before. Good, hombre, good.”
“Salud, Pepé, and thank you.”
“Salud, Enrique. It is nothing. Salud.’
It was a strange and very deadly voice and I never got used to hearing it, but as I walked up the stairs now, I felt much better.
All we old clients of Chicote’s had a sort of feeling about the place. I knew that was why Luis Delgado had been such a fool as to go back there. He could have done his business someplace else. But if he was in Madrid he had to go there. He had been a good client as the waiter had said and we had been friends. Certainly any small acts of kindness you can do in life are worth doing. So I was glad I had called my friend Pepé at Seguridad headquarters because Luis Delgado was an old client of Chicote’s and I did not wish him to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters there before he died.
The Butterfly and the Tank
On this evening I was walking home from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather. I should have gone on home. It was only five blocks more, but when I saw Chicote’s doorway I thought I would get a quick one and then do those six blocks up the Gran Via through the mud and rubble of the streets broken by the bombardment.
The place was crowded. You couldn’t get near the bar and all the tables were full. It was full of smoke, singing, men in uniform, and the smell of wet leather coats, and they were handing drinks over a crowd that was three deep at the bar.
A waiter I knew found a chair from another table and I sat down with a thin, white-faced, Adam’s-appled German I knew who was working at the censorship and two other people I did not know. The table was in the middle of the room a little on your right as you go in.
You couldn’t hear yourself talk for the singing and I ordered a gin and angostura and put it down against the rain. The place was really packed and everybody was very jolly; maybe getting just a little bit too jolly from the newly made Catalan liquor most of them were drinking. A couple of people I did not know slapped me on the back and when the girl at our table said something to me, I couldn’t hear it and said, “Sure.”
She was pretty terrible looking now I had stopped looking around and was looking at our table; really pretty terrible. But it turned out, when the waiter came, that what she had asked me was to have a drink. The fellow with her was not very forceful looking but she was forceful enough for both of them. She had one of those strong, semi-classical faces and was built like a lion tamer; and the boy with her looked as though he ought to be wearing an old school tie. He wasn’t though. He was wearing a leather coat just like all the rest of us. Only it wasn’t wet because they had been there since before the rain started. She had on a leather coat too and it was becoming to the sort of face she had.
By this time I was wishing I had not stopped into Chicote’s but had gone straight on home where you could change your clothes and be dry and have a drink in comfort on the bed with your feet up, and I was tired of looking at both of these young people. Life is very short and ugly women are very long and sitting there at the table I decided that even though I was a writer and supposed to have an insatiable curiosity about all sorts of people, I did not really care to know whether these two were married, or what they saw in each other, or what their politics were, or whether he had a little money, or she had a little money, or anything about them. I decided they must be in the radio. Any time you saw really strange looking civilians in Madrid they were always in the radio. So to say something I raised my voice above the noise and asked, “You in the radio?”
“We are,” the girl said. So that was that. They were in the radio.
“How are you comrade?” I said to the German.
�
��Fine. And you?”
“Wet,” I said, and he laughed with his head on one side.
“You haven’t got a cigarette?” he asked. I handed him my next to the last pack of cigarettes and he took two. The forceful girl took two and the young man with the old school tie face took one.
“Take another,” I shouted.
“No thanks,” he answered and the German took it instead.
“Do you mind?” he smiled.
“Of course not,” I said. I really minded and he knew it. But he wanted the cigarettes so badly that it did not matter. The singing had died down momentarily, or there was a break in it as there is sometimes in a storm, and we could all hear what we said.
“You been here long?” the forceful girl asked me. She pronounced it bean as in bean soup.
“Off and on,” I said.
“We must have a serious talk,” the German said. “I want to have a talk with you. When can we have it?”
“I’ll call you up,” I said. This German was a very strange German indeed and none of the good Germans liked him. He lived under the delusion that he could play the piano, but if you kept him away from pianos he was all right unless he was exposed to liquor, or the opportunity to gossip, and nobody had even been able to keep him away from those two things yet.
Gossip was the best thing he did and he always knew something new and highly discreditable about anyone you could mention in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and other political centers.
Just then the singing really started in again, and you cannot gossip very well shouting, so it looked like a dull afternoon at Chicote’s and I decided to leave as soon as I should have bought a round myself.
Just then it started. A civilian in a brown suit, a white shirt, black tie, his hair brushed straight back from a rather high forehead, who had been clowning around from table to table, squirted one of the waiters with a Hit gun. Everybody laughed except the waiter who was carrying a tray full of drinks at the time. He was indignant.
“No hay derecho,” the waiter said. This means, “You have no right to do that,” and is the simplest and the strongest protest in Spain.
The flit gun man, delighted with his success, and not seeming to give any importance to the fact that it was well into the second year of the war, that he was in a city under siege where everyone was under a strain, and that he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place, now squirted another waiter.
I looked around for a place to duck to. This waiter, also, was indignant and the Hit gun man squirted him twice more, light-heartedly. Some people still thought it was funny, including the forceful girl. But the waiter stood, shaking his head. His lips were trembling. He was an old man and he had worked in Chicote’s for ten years that I knew of.
“No hay derecho,” he said with dignity.
People had laughed, however, and the flit gun man, not noticing how the singing had fallen off, squirted his flit gun at the back of a waiter’s neck. The waiter turned, holding his tray.
“No hay derecho,” he said. This time it was no protest. It was an indictment and I saw three men in uniform start from a table for the flit gun man and the next thing all four of them were going out the revolving door in a rush and you heard a smack when someone hit the flit gun man on the mouth. Somebody else picked up the flit gun and threw it out the door after him.
The three men came back in looking serious, tough and very righteous. Then the door revolved and in came the flit gun man. His hair was down in his eyes, there was blood on his face, his necktie was pulled to one side and his shirt was tom open. He had the flit gun again and as he pushed, wild-eyed and white-faced, into the room he made one general, unaimed, challenging squirt with it, holding it toward the whole company.
I saw one of the three men start for him and I saw this man’s face. There were more men with him now and they forced the flit gun man back between two tables on the left of the room as you go in, the flit gun man struggling wildly now, and when the shot went off I grabbed the forceful girl by the arm and dove for the kitchen door.
The kitchen door was shut and when I put my shoulder against it it did not give.
“Get down here behind the angle of the bar,” I said. She knelt there.
“Flat,” I said and pushed her down. She was furious.
Every man in the room except the German, who lay behind a table, and the public-school-Iooking boy who stood in a comer drawn up against the wall, had a gun out. On a bench along the wall three over-blonde girls, their hair dark at the roots, were standing on tiptoe to see and screaming steadily.
“I’m not afraid,” the forceful one said. “This is ridiculous.”
“You don’t want to get shot in a café brawl,” I said. “If that flit king has any friends here this can be very bad.”
But he had no friends, evidently, because people began putting their pistols away and somebody lifted down the blonde screamers and everyone who had started over there when the shot came, drew back away from the flit man who lay, quietly, on his back on the floor.
“No one is to leave until the police come,” someone shouted from the door.
Two policemen with rifles, who had come in off the street patrol, were standing by the door and at this announcement I saw six men form up just like the line-up of a football team coming out of a huddle and head out through the door. Three of them were the men who had first thrown the flit king out. One of them was the man who shot him. They went right through the policemen with the rifles like good interference taking out an end and a tackle. And as they went out one of the policemen got his rifle across the door and shouted, “No one can leave. Absolutely no one.”
“Why did those men go? Why hold us if anyone’s gone?”
“They were mechanics who had to return to their air field,” someone said.
“But if anyone’s gone it’s silly to hold the others.”
“Everyone must wait for the Seguridad. Things must be done legally and in order.”
“But don’t you see that if any person has gone it is silly to hold the others?”
“No one can leave. Everyone must wait.”
“It’s comic,” I said to the forceful girl.
“No it’s not. It’s simply horrible.”
We were standing up now and she was staring indignantly at where the flit king was lying. His arms were spread wide and he had one leg drawn up.
“I’m going over to help that poor wounded man. Why has no one helped him or done anything for him?”
“I’d leave him alone,” I said. “You want to keep out of this.”
“But it’s simply inhuman. I’ve nurse’s training and I’m going to give him first aid.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Don’t go near him.”
“Why not?” She was very upset and almost hysterical.
“Because he’s dead,” I said.
When the police came they held everybody there for three hours. They commenced by smelling of all the pistols. In this manner they would detect one which had been fired recently. After about forty pistols they seemed to get bored with this and anyway all you could smell was wet leather coats. Then they sat at a table placed directly behind the late flit king, who lay on the floor looking like a grey wax caricature of himself, with grey wax hands and a grey wax face, and examined people’s papers.
With his shirt ripped open you could see the flit king had no undershirt and the soles of his shoes were worn through. He looked very small and pitiful lying there on the floor. You had to step over him to get to the table where two plain clothes policemen sat and examined everyone’s identification papers. The husband lost and found his papers several times with nervousness. He had a safe conduct pass somewhere but he had mislaid it in a pocket but he kept on searching and perspiring until he found it. Then he would put it in a d
ifferent pocket and have to go searching again. He perspired heavily while doing this and it made his hair very curly and his face red. He now looked as though he should have not only an old school tie but one of those little caps boys in the lower forms wear. You have heard how events age people. Well this shooting had made him look about ten years younger.
While we were waiting around I told the forceful girl I thought the whole thing was a pretty good story and that I would write it sometime. The way the six had lined up in single file and rushed that door was very impressive. She was shocked and said that I could not write it because it would be prejudicial to the cause of the Spanish Republic. I said that I had been in Spain for a long time and that they used to have a phenomenal number of shootings in the old days around Valencia under the monarchy, and that for hundreds of years before the Republic people had been cutting each other with large knives called Navajas in Andalucia, and that if I saw a comic shooting in Chicote’s during the war I could write about it just as though it had been in New York, Chicago, Key West or Marseilles. It did not have anything to do with politics. She said I shouldn’t. Probably a lot of other people will say I shouldn’t too. The German seemed to think it was a pretty good story however, and I gave him the last of the Camels. Well, anyway, finally, after about three hours the police said we could go.
Short Stories Page 51