There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  When they reach the shore, she would like to lie down and rest; the exertion has undone her. But she has forgotten that this is not one of the sandy beaches of her childhood; stones, not sand, lead to the water. Ignacio cries that the stones hurt his feet; he wants to go home, he is cold, he is hungry. They are at the shore only fifteen minutes before she gives in to him, agrees to take him home.

  But it didn’t occur to her how difficult it would be to climb up the hundreds of stairs leading from the sea to their home, which is at the highest point of the town. Holding her heavy child. She tries to make him walk up the stairs with her, tries to think of some way it would seem like play to him, but he loosens himself from her grasp and lies down on a step in the middle of the staircase. She cajoles, she wheedles, but he will not move. She crouches, lifts him, promises to carry him all the way home. But after a few steps she is out of breath, and her limbs have lost all strength. She tells Ignacio they must take a rest. He screams that he needs to go home.

  From nowhere, from everywhere, women appear at the top of the staircase. “Are you all right? Is the child all right?” they cluck, squat officious hens; but their concern, she sees, is not uncensoring.

  “Yes,” she says. “I just need to rest a bit before carrying him.”

  “You are a big boy,” says one woman, the age of his grandmother. “You can walk on your own, can’t you?”

  Ignacio opens his mouth in what Marian thinks will be a scream, but instead he bends over and on the stairs deposits a half-dollar-sized puddle of brown vomit.

  “The little one is sick,” the grandmother says, no longer dreaming of urging the little one to walk.

  “I will get my son,” she says. She disappears into one of the white houses and then comes down the steps to them, holding the hand of a huge boy—a man—who is clearly puzzled, and, Marian sees, perhaps not completely right in the head. At his mother’s order, he lifts Ignacio, and the grandmother says, “Walk ahead of him, don’t worry, he’s a good boy; he’s slow, but he’s a good boy, show him where to go and he can help you.”

  Marian thanks the circle of clucking mothers, grandmothers, and leads the tall boy man up the hundreds of steps. Ignacio is silent all the way but looks over his carrier’s shoulder with what Marian thinks is a victorious, a sated look. When they get home he says that he is hungry, and she feeds him bread and orange marmalade, preserved last year. She prays that he will agree to a nap after lunch, which means that she can sleep, and sleep is all she longs for.

  At supper Pilar says, “Well, you made a spectacle of yourself today. Why did you take him out? I told you not to take him out. And if he catches cold now, whose fault will that be? You know how easily he catches cold.”

  It does not need to be said, it is so clearly understood by Marian, Ramón, even the child: You have failed; you are not to be trusted.

  And finally, only weeks later, Pilar, the hanging judge, gets all the proof she needs.

  —

  Marian doesn’t know how it happened. She was sitting on the hard, unaccommodating sofa—horsehair, she knows, is what it’s stuffed with and always, sitting on it, she feels she is sitting on a bony and resistant nag. Ignacio was on the floor in front of her, rolling the spools back and forth, the sound of them repetitive, soporific. She was trying, she knows she was trying, not to let her eyes close. But it happened, of course, it must have happened, she fell asleep.

  And then she wakes, terrified. Ignacio is not on the floor in front of her and Pilar is in the house, shaking Marian by the shoulders, leaning over her, her face feverish with outrage.

  “Useless good-for-nothing! You allow your child to wander on the streets. Two and a half years old. Thank God he had the sense to make his way to my brother’s home, where they know how to care for children.”

  How had it happened, that he had made his way out of the house? The heavy wooden door had not been closed; the weather was warm, and only a beaded curtain separated them from the street. But there was no excuse. She was to blame. She supposed she should be grateful that he had made his way to the house of his uncle.

  •

  Pilar’s brother. José Ramirez. Merchant. Black marketeer.

  In Marian’s dreams of Spain before she’d ever seen it, there had been no place for the Ramirez family, who were neither stoic and warmhearted peasants nor haughty hidalgos. They were the bourgeoisie. Their importance in the town was outsized now in this time when scarcity was the chief currency. Only Pilar in the pharmacy could provide relief from pain, only José could make the difference between bare survival and the normalcy of prewar domestic life. All holidays were in his hands; without him there could be no celebration.

  If Pilar was a woman of stone, José was the gnome villain of a fairy tale, his lightless eyes, his oversized potato-shaped nose and chin as sharp as a knife blade, his hunched shoulders, as if he were always counting coins in a secret cellar, bending over his treasure in the dark. When she thought of him, Marian wished that she could call up the old categories of sin, because she believed he was a great sinner, watching his neighbors starve while he guarded his treasures of oil, ham, olives, eggs, locked in a back room with a key he kept always on a chain around his waist, selling them at ten times what they were worth.

  Hunger. Starvation. They were not descriptive words, they were conditions that could lead to death. One day when Ignacio was sleeping and she went down to the kitchen for a glass of water, Marian saw the servant Lucia slipping some pieces of cheese wrapped in a cloth down the front of her dress. She turned and looked at Marian with a look of pure hatred. “This is for my family. You must understand. I am not a thief. My niece almost died because all she had to eat was grass boiled in salt water; when they were lucky, they made a dinner of carob pods. And the señora has more than she needs, you all have more than you need.”

  “I would never say anything, never,” Marian said. “You can trust me.”

  “Trust,” Lucia said, snorting. “We have learned some things about trust that cannot be unlearned.”

  If Marian imagined that she would make a friend of Lucia, or at least an ally, she was wrong. The woman seemed to grovel even more to Pilar, and to cut Marian with a more marked coldness, as if she could not forgive Marian for placing her in the position where she might have to be grateful, or relax her suspicions, or risk the safe berth she had as the servant of the sister of the black marketeer.

  —

  They huddle together, the Ramirez family; José’s house is fifty yards from Pilar’s, his shop another fifty yards from his house. The house, even more overstuffed than Pilar’s, is presided over by the strapping blond wife, the contrast between her and her husband so clearly comical that it seems like one of those jokes that lost its flavor by being repeated too often. How proud he was of his wife’s largeness, her blondness, as if it were a particularly clever investment he had had the sense to make at a time when good buys were to be had by the perspicacious. “Beef on the hoof” were the words that came to Marian’s mind whenever she saw Inez: the thick muscular calves, the high heels she always wore drawing attention to their strength, their heft. At family dinners, Inez sat always at the head of the table, across from the gilt-framed mirror; she could scarcely take her eyes away from her own reflection to pass a dish, to lift a fork to her lipsticked mouth.

  And yet, like Pilar, both of them icons of flourishing female health, each had only produced one child. She often wondered what Ramón, her husband, had thought of his cousin José. Blond, and heavy like his mother, his largeness had loomed, whereas his mother’s kept its place in the closed circle of her coiffed and corseted self-invention. He lived for the days when he could put on his blue Falangist uniform and parade, holding a flag, following the priest who raised the cross, following in his turn the Falangist officer who carried the banner with Franco’s picture.

  José and his wife worked in his father’s shop. Ana was a country girl, a distant cousin whose face always expressed a kind of willed puzz
lement, a desire to give way. They lived next door to José’s parents and were the producers of the treasured girl child Fernanda, six months older than Ignacio. Fernanda of the golden ringlets, whose feet were never, it seemed to Marian, allowed to touch the ground. To serve her seemed an honor all the family vied for, and Pilar made her own contribution to this worship, placing Ignacio beside her: the princess and the crowned prince, her consort.

  A sister of Ana’s—Rosa was her name—had been brought in from the country to care for Fernanda while Ana worked in the store. Rosa shared her sister’s look of bewilderment, but whereas working behind the counter had dyed Ana’s self-effacement with a shade of commercially based pride, Rosa scurried around like an animal unused to its new habitat, and abased herself in front of Fernanda as if she were the infanta, who could send anyone afraid to the gallows for any infringement, real or imagined.

  It is to the house of the princess of the golden curls, the house of unlimited food and warmth, the house where he is prince, his great-uncle’s house, that Ignacio makes his way, opening the door and walking out while his mother sleeps, her feet still on the floor, her head supported by the hard back of the brocade couch.

  And so they appear before her, judge, jury, hangman. Pilar, her brother, his wife and son. The princess being carried by her father, Ignacio in the arms of his grandmother. Sucking a caramel, his eyes heavy with sleep and sugar. It has been decided, no one questions this, that he will spend his days with little Fernanda, prince and princess, waited on by the country girl who feels honored to be allowed to perform the task.

  “Now you can stay in your bed and sleep the whole day long,” Pilar says.

  For a moment, Marian would like to thank her. Sleep all day long. Never wake. What could be better, what could be more wonderful?

  •

  In the depth of her shame a light enters, as dim as the vigil light in front of the trick picture that changes if you move your head.

  A few weeks after it has been decided that Marian cannot care for her child—weeks in which she has done almost nothing but sleep and sit in her dark room, thinking of nothing—her father-in-law knocks on her door. “I was wondering if, since you will be more free in the daytime now, perhaps you could work with me in the store,” he says. “It would be of great help to me if you could speak to the customers, help me with the money.”

  She is touched, and she knows this is an act, not just of kindness but of courage. What is more precious than the offer of a life preserver from a drowning man?

  “I would like that very much, Ramón. But what would Pilar think?”

  Both of them understand that Pilar, the stone woman, the iron woman (he is an ironworker, but he has no strength to bend and shape the iron of his wife), has for both of them nothing but contempt. The only question: does she desire to punish Marian by a thoroughgoing imprisonment inside the house, or will she say, by her refusal to put her weight on one scale or another, You are nothing, you are nothing, nothing you do is of the slightest consequence to me.

  “She said it makes no difference to her what you do.”

  •

  Marian had thought that perhaps having a destination that she had some obligation to reach might give her energy. But the air of the streets is of the same poisonous quality as the air of the house. As if a two-headed monster dwelt on the top of the near mountain, breathing over every inch of the town. The two heads, inseparable from the massive trunk. One head, the Church; the other the Caudillo. Caudillo, Franco’s chosen title, leader, head, selected so that he might match the Führer or El Duce. Only they had disappeared, and he was everywhere.

  It is never possible to feel free from surveillance. It is in the air: the lungs take it in like silicate; no one breathes naturally for years. Children are warned to trust no one; parents, out of love for their children, conceal the simplest details of their past. Children are beaten for asking questions they can’t imagine are worth a beating. Because families are divided, no one feels safe, even at family gatherings. People speak, habitually, in whispers; people cover their mouths with their hands to make the slightest transactions. When Marian is working at her father-in-law’s shop, she has to ask people to repeat their orders several times, their voices are so low, or they are speaking behind their hands, whispering: Can you fix my gate; my window latch fails to close properly. These are the only words spoken to her by the people of the town; she has been warned by Pilar against speaking to anyone, and her father-in-law has explained to her that it is an accepted belief that “no good ever comes from speaking to a stranger.”

  —

  So she gets used to being unaddressed at church, and even at the movies shown in the parish hall. The movies, the one occasion for shared release. The people of the town flock to them with an avidity that surprises Marian, coming from America, where movies were one of the many entertainments available even to ordinary people. But in this town, they are the only entertainment; in the colder months, they are the only source of steady heat. Even here, no one is free from the all-seeing eye of the Caudillo. Each film starts with a newsreel praising Franco and his achievements. When his face appears, everyone must stand and salute him.

  The censoring arm of the Falange controls what films can be shown in Franco’s Spain. The majority of the Spanish films are either a version of operetta, where the girl and boy overcome obstacles to marry with a final duet mingling with the songs of birds, or rural, particularly Andalusian, romances, in which cheerful peasant boys and girls fight poverty to achieve perfect happiness while the townspeople happily dance. Popular too are historical epics chronicling the glories of Spain. A particular favorite are the ones recounting the expulsion of the Moors. Then there are the religious dramas: noble missionaries risking brutal torture and death at the hands of savages. The Miracle of Fatima, the most popular film of 1943, dramatizes the appearance of the Virgin in Portugal in 1917, with three brave peasant children enduring the disbelief of the bishop to spread the Virgin’s words: Communism is the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Sometimes the two genres—the heroic past of Spain, the saint’s life—are blended. San Ignacio de Loyola, the dandy, the soldier, who finds Jesus while recovering from a wound earned in battle. Santa Teresa—nothing to do with the Bernini Marian remembers from her trip to Rome: no ecstatic swoon, only a rigid insistence on the denial of all pleasure, her insistence that the nuns go barefoot. Marian notices what she thinks is a fetishistic emphasis on the saint’s lovely feet.

  The two American movies permitted in the town are The Song of Bernadette, celebrating the Miracle of Lourdes, and, incomprehensibly to Marian, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, dubbed so that even the pleasure of sophisticated filming is denied her. She does not listen to the dialogue; she concentrates on Laurence Olivier, who she believes is saying something wonderful in English, something else she is denied. She goes to the movies because it is a way of getting out of the house, and in the darkness she can close her eyes and sleep.

  —

  There is one required destination: she has to be seen in church, at the very least each Sunday for Mass. There is no way for her to keep herself from it. Over and over, Pilar warns her, hissing into her ear, as if it were a precious secret, “You must be seen in church. They suspect you of being a Rojo, and they will have no trouble taking you and the child away forever.” The Guardia, visible everywhere and nowhere, make it impossible for her to doubt her mother-in-law. The Guardia Civil, always imported from another region, always strangers, unplaceable. Everything about them becomes the furniture of nightmares: their patent leather tricorner hats, their stiff photogenic uniforms. Once, two of them tried to join a group of boys playing soccer on the beach—perhaps an innocent request. But the boys, seeing them, lost their zeal for playing; they ran halfheartedly, they let the ball go always to the Guardia, then trailed off, one by one, leaving the two Guardia to kick the ball back and forth to each other.

  Three times a day, prayers are broadcast everywhere in the town
from a loudspeaker—a gift of the mayor—that is attached to the walls of the church. The morning Rosary. The evening Vespers. At noon everyone must stop what they are doing and pray the Angelus.

  Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.

  Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.

  The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.

  And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.

  The Angelus: the words of Mary and the Angel, when she is informed that she will give birth to the Son of God. The source of thousands of paintings: the lovely girl, the swooping angel with chaste or flamboyant wings. But here, the words ricochet like bullets against the stark white walls of the houses, they crash against the black cobblestones of the steep streets; the flowers trailing up the walls do not absorb them; nothing softens them; the blatant light of noon magnifies them, they root themselves, as straight as spears thrown down into the dry-packed earth.

  Now the Angelus and the response to it are a way of keeping track, grounds for possible punishment. The Guardia patrol the streets at noon, they write something in their books—no one knows what—if they see someone not stopping work or a conversation to pray. The possible uses of this information are imagined, feared, never to be verified. What is known: people have disappeared, people have been imprisoned, and no one is told why.

  Even the seasons of the year seem to be in their charge.

  Summer is time for special surveillance; the Guardia in their uniforms, the priests in their cassocks, patrol the beach making sure that no women are wearing immodest bathing suits. Eventually, the beach is cordoned off into two sections: one for women, one for men. Two holidays mark the hot months: July 18, the anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War; August 15, the Assumption of the Virgin—both days in which the Falangists in their blue, their trumpets and their drums, insisting that everyone attend and think of nothing else. Any lack of enthusiasm, even a moderate response, can be a danger.