by Mary Gordon
Particularly not her love for the smiling stone angels on the cathedral facade. She doesn’t love the cathedral’s interior, and she hasn’t the slightest shred of anything but rage-filled aversion for the Church as an institution. But the angels, the calm saints, their impassive, half-smiling faces: is it wrong for her, in her daily exhaustion, in her despair at the suffering she has been able to do so little to assuage, is it wrong to look just for a moment at those cool, sweet expressions and to believe that someday, it will all be over, someday, life will go on in a way that these stone faces might recognize?
Above all, there’s no one she can talk to about what she feels when she goes into one of the churches that have become a hostel, sheltering people who have lost their homes in the bombings or the fires after the bombings, in the chaos of everything blown up. The churches have been opened up to these people, and of course it is a good thing, of course it’s right that the endless side altars should become miniature apartments where families can sleep and eat together, of course it is right that the altars should be covered with all available food—never enough—set out there so people can take what they need back to their small alcoves or to the pews they have turned into beds. Of course it’s good, of course she’s glad. And yet, she’s troubled by the incessant noise. Once she came into a church looking for quiet and found it had been turned into a stable. She saw a horse eating from a bucket on the main altar; she stepped over dung on the cool, stone floor. Of course it was good, of course it was right, and she knows she’s wrong to feel this sense of loss, that a whole category that, without her knowing it, had been important to her—the sacred—is quite useless now, entirely gone.
•
Russell is becoming more and more difficult, more and more irritable. He’s lost his dark humor. She tells him about the signs the new earnest Welsh head nurse has put up in the wards, which caused her and Lydia Wentworth a fit of almost punishable giggles. “Promiscuous use of adhesive tape can lose us the war.” And he looks away, as if she were speaking a dialect he no longer cares to use. Even a few hours stolen by the water seem to bring him no pleasure. A day of swimming along the gentle coastline is ruined for him by a story told to them by their Valencian driver. As they pass through a woods, the driver says, “My uncle, who owned a factory, was shot here by the anarchists. My other uncle, a socialist school teacher, was shot in the same place by the Nationalists.”
When Marian praises the calm waves: “It’s so different from the fierce Atlantic waves,” Russell says. “Perhaps the people have sucked the ferocity out of the air and taken it into their own lungs.”
—
The endless political arguments get to him in a way they don’t get to Marian because she never takes part in them herself. When she says, “Honey, we have so little free time, don’t waste it on fights that no one can ever win,” he walks out of the room because they don’t like to disagree, their lives are too difficult for private quarrels. “Let’s get an horchata, let’s walk to the beach,” she says. And he says, “You can’t escape from things, Marian, you can’t run away from the truth.”
But she doesn’t agree with him that it is wrong to want a little respite from the fatigue punctuated by terror, if only to refresh yourself so you can be better able afterward to be of use. She is most frightened when she seems far away from her own body, watching herself from a precipice, seeing herself straddling a cleft of rock that is widening, and she won’t keep her footing, she will fall through, she knows it—any moment, she will fall into the abyss, and, from the precipice, she sees herself falling through. She can’t always locate a central core that she can name with certainty as herself; there’s too often a distance that she can’t traverse between her body’s actions and what she can only call her understanding, who is doing that, what are they doing, who is this Marian, I can say a name that I have been told is mine, but it’s not real, Marian could be anyone, she could be anywhere, where is she, here, what do you mean by here, what does that mean, something that is different from there, but they are words, and words have no meaning. When she tries to ask what does meaning mean, she is farther away from the core than ever. Only once, the question helped because she answered it in a way that satisfied her: meaning is connection. But perhaps there is no connection, perhaps she is alone in the universe and she will spin and spin in a large, buzzing fog that will never allow her to come to rest, to know herself as herself.
It terrifies her to be that far from herself, so far that it becomes too difficult to return to the world of meaning. The sense of unconnectedness frightens her most. That is why she needs quiet, respite. It’s why she’s sorry that the churches now are of use for feeding and for shelter rather than what she would once have called recollection. To re-collect. To collect the flying, buzzing pieces dangerously far from the central core. To recollect, she needed silence, solitude. But it is impossible to come by, and, after all, why not, it is a time of war. It’s why she’s here, to help those who are struck down by doing the actual fighting: of course there is no silence, there is no time, and never enough equipment, enough electricity, water, never enough of anything, so how could there be time to say “I” or “Marian” or to search for the solid core or to fear its disappearance? None of that means anything when you are breathing in the nightmare of suffering animals, but they are humans, these animals, and they suffer as humans because they know they are dying, but they bleed and stink and cry out as animals, and they always need something, there is always something she needs to be doing, it is a relief from the buzzing, the spinning away from the central core, and so, in some ways, a relief. And yet, she needs respite.
But Russell will not allow himself respite, and so she walks by herself and seeks it on her own. It makes her lonely. But she would rather be lonely than bereft of respite.
—
Russell is tortured by a combination of remembrance and forgetting. He wants to talk endlessly. Why isn’t he as exhausted as she is? He works as many hours, but when she comes home, all she wants to do is sleep, or what she wants really is a bath, or to wash her hair, but that isn’t possible, there is no spare water for baths or hair washing, and he wants her to listen to his talking. Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, honey, this is important, it’s important to me. I’m so damn disillusioned, he says over and over, I’m so damn disappointed in everyone involved in the whole damn mess, and she wants to say: Russell, this is a time of war, disillusionment and disappointment are minor sorrows, remember, we wanted to forget minor sorrows, our own sorrows, our personal sorrows. She is thinking of Johnny, but she doesn’t believe he thinks about Johnny anymore; he wants to finger the wound of his disillusionment, his disappointment.
And then he falls in love.
—
She knows what he does in the nights he goes out without her, cruising the harbor for young men. They don’t speak about it because, although they are officially married, he knows very well that she is still a virgin, has experienced nothing more than a few chaste kisses from boys for whom she felt nothing. And both of them are uneasy because of the ghost of Johnny; she hopes he doesn’t know that it bothers her that he should be with anyone else, that what she believes most deeply is that his proper posture should be a lifetime of endless mourning, endless consecration to the great beloved, the great beloved dead, that this is a privilege she envies him, but a privilege she cannot, must not, ask him to take on.
And then one night, he comes in late, a little drunk, with an unmistakable air of satiation, and he lies on the bed next to her. She can smell a different kind of sweat, not the sweat of labor she knows so well. “Honey, I can’t help it. I’m in love.”
She leans on her elbow and looks at him, not knowing what she wants to say, not knowing what she feels, but knowing what is expected.
“That’s wonderful, Russell,” she says.
“Can you believe it, sweetheart, he’s an anarchist, and you know how I feel about anarchists, what crap it is to be talking ab
out transforming the social system when you’re trying to win a war against people who out-arm you ten to one. One of God’s little jokes, right, but after all, isn’t this a country of God’s little jokes, or big ones, but here I am, in love with an anarchist. And, of course, I know, I’m not a fool, he may just want my money, but he says he loves me, and why shouldn’t I believe him for now? He’s terribly young.”
“How young?”
“Nineteen.”
“I’m nineteen.”
He rolls over on his back and laughs. “Well, you see, it’s perfect. My wife and my lover are the same age.”
She pretends to laugh, but she’s frightened because she doesn’t know what it means, for her, for Russell.
“I want to meet him, Russ. If you love him, I want to meet him.”
“What a girl you are. Johnny always said it, ‘She’s one in a million, my sister, the best of the best, the pearl of great price.’ ”
She remembers a song Johnny made up for her when they were little: “Marian’s a pearl, she’s a pearl of a girl, she can spin, she can twirl, like a duchess or an earl.” And she said, “An earl’s a man, Johnny,” and he said, “Whoops, well, you see, you’re better than anyone.”
It’s happened; Johnny’s entered the room. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s good, I don’t have to pretend not to be thinking of him.
“You have some time off tomorrow. We both do. Okay if we meet for a drink in the square? You and me and Eugenio?”
“Of course,” she says. “I’d like it very much.”
But she knows that “like” or “dislike” are words that are much too simple for what she is feeling. What will happen if she loses Russell, if he moves out of the room, where they can be alone, where they can be safe together, say anything to each other, where there is a place for Johnny, where he, too, is safe?
—
They walk hand in hand to the square. Piles of rubble are everywhere, and yet some café owners have set up tables in the midst of the rubble because it’s summer and the sky is still blue until ten o’clock. Russell is uneasy; he’s afraid Eugenio won’t come, that it will be too much for him that Russell has a wife, that he will disapprove on anarchist grounds, or sexual ones.
And then, Russell raises his arm, and Marian sees the boy raise his arm in response. How can Russell, who is so muscular, so large, embrace this slight young man without fear of crushing him? This boy whom he must outweigh by fifty pounds. Does he think of Johnny’s body, which was smaller than his but recognizably similar in mass, as belonging to a different category from this young boy—Eugenio is his name?—who is running up to them, full of smiles, skimming over the rubble in his patched khaki pants and shirt, apologizing already, twenty feet away from them, for his lateness.
“Da nada,” Russell says. His Spanish is rudimentary, but improving, and he apologizes for his limited language to his lover but says that Marian is fluent, and now they will really know what the other is saying.
“Maybe that will not be so good,” Eugenio says, smiling expansively. Two of his front teeth are missing but that takes nothing away from the power of his smile, his thorough loveliness, the fineness of his bones. Yes, Russell, I understand, she wants to say. I understand loveliness.
They drink quickly. The beer is weak, and Russell keeps ordering more; Eugenio talks about his hometown in Saragossa and how the republic will win, the workers will triumph, the seas of Spain are the most beautiful in the world, the mountains the most grand, his pride in being a part of POUM—the Workers Party of Marxist Unification—and, with every other word, “The fascist pigs, the fascist pigs,” and Marian says they should all spit together on the pavement at the mention of the fascist pigs.
She’s more than a little drunk, exhausted, ill-fed: it doesn’t take much. She raises her hand to cover her eyes from the sun’s late but strong rays, soaking into the stones of the cathedral.
“You see, Eugenio,” she says, “I like you very much, and we don’t know many anarchists, Russell and I, my husband Russell,” she says, giggling, and Eugenio punches Russell in the arm, and Russell covers his face in burlesque shame. “So, I’m going to ask you what I’ve always wanted to ask. Why do you burn the churches? Why did you burn down the cathedral here?”
And he says, with real seriousness, “We didn’t burn the main altar. It was just the vestibule.”
Marian laughs, and Eugenio laughs, and Russell orders more beer.
“They were so bad to the poor people, the ordinary people; they were always on the side of the rich; they told us it was a sin to join a union, everything was a sin except if you were rich, and then nothing was a sin. The anarchists were the only ones who really stood up to them, all those fat priests. I didn’t feel I was really a man until I got my own priest. We’d captured the fascists in the town, the mayor, the banker, the biggest landowner, and the priest. We weren’t drunk, but we felt drunk with our own triumph, and we said to them, the four of them, ‘Okay, run, we’ll give you a head start,’ and they ran like the cowards they were, and we ran after them with our guns and shot them as they ran. I got the priest. We all went into the café and had beers, and they drank to me and said, ‘You got the prize, you bagged the real game.’
“We’d just left their bodies in the woods, we didn’t want to do them the honor of burying them, we wanted them to rot as they had let the poor around them rot, and my friend, Luis, he was the wildest of us all, he said, ‘I know what we’ll do with the carcass of the pig priest,’ and we went into the woods and took the priest’s body and stripped it and hung it on the hook in the window of the butcher shop where the butcher had hung the pigs and the sides of beef.”
He is laughing, and he expects them to laugh, but, quickly, he sees in their faces that they’re horrified, they aren’t laughing. What is that look on his face? Surprise, shock, a sudden comprehension? Then he smiles that smile that dazzles despite his toothlessness, and he says he has to go to the toilet and runs off clutching his stomach.
Russell and Marian say nothing to each other. They order more beer, and the sky begins to lose its brilliance and turn inky. After a while, she says, “Honey, I’m kind of tight. I have to go to bed. You wait for him here.”
“Sure,” he says. “See you in bed,” and they laugh, as if this were a joke they could never get tired of, because they need something to hold on to, something familiar, something that makes sense.
She tries not to think about what she’s just heard, she tries not to see a human carcass hanging from a hook in the butcher’s shop. She runs home as fast as she can so she can be asleep, because, as always, she is exhausted, and she wants to hear nothing, to see nothing, to think of nothing.
Russell comes home stinking of cheap beer. She’s never known him to be as drunk as this, but he wants to talk, once again, he wants to talk. He wakes her when all she wants, all she yearns for, is more sleep.
“How can this be, how can this be, that a person whom I know to be basically decent can do something like this and laugh about it?”
“I don’t know, Russell,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t understand anything anymore. It’s a war…”
He grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. “What are we fighting for, though, tell me, what are we fighting for? Even if we win—which, of course, we won’t—but even if we win, who will be left to be in charge that hasn’t lost their minds to this insanity? Why are we doing this, who are we doing it for?”
“For the Spanish people, for all the wonderful people we work beside every day. What you’re talking about…it’s just a few, just a few young men driven crazy by crazy circumstances, by centuries of injustice.”
She only half believes what she’s saying, but she is determined that he will believe.
“No, my love, it’s not a few, so many of them, so many of them, Eugenio…my comrades justifying God knows what…the fascists painting words on the wall: ‘One Hundred Years off Purgatory if You Shoot a Red.’ ”
; “I didn’t even think you knew what purgatory was,” she says, desperate to lighten the tone.
“How could I have been with Johnny and not known about purgatory? Every time we made love, he’d say, ‘Do you know how many hundreds of years in purgatory I’m going to have to spend for this hour of heaven?’ ”
Johnny is in the room again, and she is free to invoke his name. “Johnny wouldn’t want you to give up.”
“Johnny’s dead,” he says, turning away from her. “We don’t know what he would want, and how can you say, without feeling the mockery, how can you say that a suicide wouldn’t want you to give up?”
She will not allow him to speak of Johnny in this way. Now having been insulted, the ghost must be allowed, or ordered, to withdraw.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It was my fault. It was bad of me to ask about the burning of the cathedral; I’d drunk too much, and you know…how I can get.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve never seen you drunk.”
“Well, usually, I just shut up because you and our friends are always arguing about Trotsky or the NKVD or collectivization or something I have no idea about. I’d like to talk, but usually I’m not given the chance.”
“Well, mazel tov,” he says. “You certainly made the most of the opportunity.”
“Yes, of course what Eugenio said was terrible, but it’s not the whole story of what’s been done with the churches. Even the cathedral here. Remember, Russell, they’ve taken the paintings from the Prado and hidden them in the basement of the cathedral, they let people in to see them, workers who would never have gotten to see a great painting in their lives, there are concerts in the churches, free for everybody…Mariposa, you know the girl that’s so good at taking blood, she told me she’d never heard an orchestra before. It isn’t all one thing, Russell, it isn’t all madness and horror. Think of Julio’s family making us that paella with the last food they had, think of Antonio, the surgeon from Galicia. Think of all the people fighting and dying against tyranny. That’s not nothing, Russell,” she says, “it’s not nothing.”