by Mary Gordon
“And, in the middle of it all, I had my love story.”
Whatever Amelia expected next, she would not have predicted love.
“I suppose I wouldn’t have had it if Russell hadn’t gotten disgusted with all the infighting and packed up and left. I don’t know why I decided to stay. Maybe it was because I couldn’t imagine any kind of life for myself in America. Maybe it was because of the girls whose hands smelled of oranges, who had learned so much, so quickly, who had never been off their family’s land and now somehow were tremendously skilled at quite complicated procedures. Or because of the people I was working with at the hospital, so much devotion, so much patience, the hospital that was so beautiful in spite of everything. I can see it clearly now, how odd, a place of terrible suffering, and yet a place I loved.”
“Why did Russell leave?” Amelia asks, not wanting to let her grandmother’s dreaminess take over, eager to hear about the love story…but first wanting to bring her back to something harder, something that needs to be finished off.
Her grandmother shakes herself like a dog that has just gotten out of the water.
“Why did Russell leave? Oh, well, so many things, but one thing in particular. What a strange time that was.”
Amelia wonders what exactly her grandmother means by “that,” because everything she has said seems strange. But was there some firm ground that seemed ordinary, normal even, and then earthquakes, smaller or larger? Perhaps one of these is what her grandmother is calling “strange.”
“You see, I was very different from him. He really was political—politically sophisticated, I mean. He had read so much and gone to so many meetings, he could quote Marx and talk about all sorts of things in terms of class conflict, but for me it was: Well, these are the good people, this is the best way to be for most people, this is a good way to live, the others are evil. His faith had a creed, and mine was just, I guess, a bunch of impressions. So when he saw the people who he believed were his people betraying what he believed was a great cause, a holy cause—although, of course, he would never have used that word, but I knew what it meant to consider something holy, and I knew that was what communism was for him. And, you see, I always knew that alongside ideas, or, I guess I would say, hiding themselves under the cloak of ideas, were personal experiences that made one person see the world one way rather than another, and he left because of the betrayal of a great idea, but really he left because of love and friendship. Because a friend of his, a man he admired, had been taken by the communists, his reputation ruined by a lie, and then he fell in love with a young anarchist, and when he understood that the boy, who was really quite simple, was in love with violent bloodshed, that it was that love that fueled everything he did, not a desire to redistribute wealth or reorganize society, that was why he gave up.
“After Russell left, it was a strange time—not strange in the sense that the whole time had been strange because times of war are strange, but strange in a rather ordinary way, almost a domestic way. I’d been tolerated at the hospital Russell worked at because they needed Russell, but then Russell was gone, and it was known that he’d questioned the behavior of some of the people in charge, and it was uncomfortable for them that I was staying on. They didn’t know what to do with me, so they sent me to another hospital, which was much less fraught. That was the hospital I said I loved. It was by the sea, and it was very beautiful. I loved that place, I loved the people I was working with, and, for the first time in my life, I fell in love.”
Despite herself, Amelia feels a kind of cheap thrill, as if she were watching a love scene in a movie. Her grandmother is in love. Her grandmother, nineteen, or maybe twenty, is in love for the first time.
“Ramón was his name. Ramón Ortiz. I had absolutely no experience. I was surprised at how attracted I was to him, because any words you’d use to describe his body don’t seem very appealing. He was stocky, you might say. Stout.”
“ ‘Stout,’ ” Amelia says. “That’s a funny word. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use it.”
“ ‘My rock,’ I used to call him. He always knew what he thought. Before he spoke, he would have looked at all sides of a question and said the thing no one had thought of. Imagine, Amelia, he was twenty-five, not much older than you, he’d just finished his medical studies and he was in charge of a whole hospital, grotesquely understaffed, grotesquely undersupplied, and he was always steady. He never seemed to get rattled. I could tell him everything, tell him the truth, everything I thought, and he would see the truth of what I was saying and cut away what wasn’t true. That was when he was pointed and sharp, he could cut away the untruth, he could untangle the knots of words and ideas. It seemed to me he could make sense of everything.
“Of course, we didn’t have much time together, and I often wonder what would have become of us: if I would have kept my admiration over years. Admiration is one of the hardest things to hold on to.”
Where has that come from? Amelia wonders. Whom has her grandmother stopped admiring, and why?
“I admire you, Meme. I have always admired you. I will admire you all my life.”
“Well, that’s somewhat foolish, but I’m grateful nonetheless.” Marian reaches, absently, for Amelia’s hand, as if she weren’t sure quite where she is.
“Ramón had this wonderful solidity, but I’d come to know later that what was comfortingly solid in Ramón was murderously rigid in his mother. But, of course, I thought nothing of that at the time, I really didn’t know much about his past, where he came from, I knew it was somewhere in the province of Valencia. He was solid, he was serious, he was entirely truthful and wonderfully incisive, but he had a playful side, even a silly side. All the time we were together, we clung to each other, like people thrown overboard in a violent ocean because these were the months of the terrible defeats. Teruel. Belchite. The Battle of the Ebro, which seemed to go on forever. And we would hold each other, and in our happiness in each other’s arms…life seemed possible.”
It makes Amelia very happy to hear her grandmother talking about a happy love. That she had a good time in the arms of a man she admired, that they laughed together. It gives her hope for herself, because she has not yet experienced what she believes being in love is. Her times with men never included anything like admiration, not much laughter, and not nearly enough play. When she was with a man, she often felt that she was looking down at herself from the ceiling of whatever bedroom she was in, watching herself acting the part called “the lover,” watching from some other place, remote and safe.
But Amelia’s happiness doesn’t last long because her grandmother’s next words are, “Then I got pregnant. And then he died.”
The sentences hit the ground with a dull force, a rock falling from a low place, low but invisible. Her grandmother goes silent then. She looks through the hill of unpeeled grapes for what can be salvaged.
Amelia doesn’t know whether she should ask a question now. And what would the question be? Certainly not “What about the pregnancy?” And “How did he die” sounds brutal, raw.
“Was it a bomb?” she asks, thinking it more seemly to ask a question that can be answered with a yes or a no.
“Sepsis,” her grandmother says. “He was infected while operating on a young soldier.
“It all happened at once. I realized I was pregnant. My periods were very irregular, we were eating very little, and I was exhausted—to say I was tired and under stress, that would be a ridiculous understatement. I didn’t find out I was pregnant till I was five months gone. I said I’d have an abortion, but Ramón said it was too late.
“Not for one second was either of us happy about the coming of this child. It’s a terrible thing; I think my son knew, even in my womb, that his coming into the world involved no joy. I think that’s why he turned out as he did, or why I turned out to be the kind of mother I was for him. Ramón and I hadn’t really begun to think about what we would do, and then Ramón fell sick. He died a horrible death�
��terrible fever and chills and an awful thirst that nothing could quench. All preventable if we’d had the proper equipment.
“I was seven and a half months pregnant. There wasn’t enough time for me to travel back to America, even if I could have gotten on a ship. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t know where Russell was. Letters were impossible. Later, I found out he was in Paris in the American hospital. I had no one else to go to in America, even if I could have gotten there.
—
“After Ramón died, I became catatonic. I knew he had told his parents that we’d got married; he said his father was kind, his mother displeased. But he said, ‘It is my mother’s nature to be displeased.’ I would learn about that, I would certainly learn about that. And he had scrawled a note to them just before he died—that they should take me in, care for me and the baby. Somehow, someone, I don’t know who, arranged it, put me on a truck, and I arrived at his parents’ door.”
“And the baby?” Amelia asks, frightened of what she’ll hear.
“I had the baby. He survived. You could say he grew and thrived. I left him behind when I left Spain. You see, I never loved him. He was never really mine.”
SPAIN, 1946
“WE’LL SPEAK ENGLISH,” the doctor says.
Strange, Marian thinks, strange to be spoken to in English. There is a dull pain in her leg, and she remembers now: her fall on the wet street, being carried somewhere on a stretcher, and she remembers thinking it odd that she is being carried on a stretcher, having carried so many herself. She’d been carried to the doctor’s office. This is the doctor, a woman, speaking English. With an accent she can’t quite place. Irish, maybe, but not like any Irish accent she has ever heard. Two odd things: a woman doctor speaking English, and here in this small town in Spain where she has been marooned, incapable of movement or decision, her brain a dirty frozen pool, or a bowl of filthy water left out somewhere and frozen through. Almost visible at the bottom: sediment, grit, the skeleton of dead leaves. For quite a while now, she has been someone she cannot recognize. There is no one whom she loves.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“The street was wet; I lost my footing. I believe I fell.”
“You fell and broke your leg. But the miracle is that nothing like this has happened before. How long have you been taking this drug?”
It’s happened to her before; it happens quite frequently. She puts it down to missing something in a language not her own. But the woman is speaking English, and her words still make no sense.
“I don’t take any drugs. My mother-in-law, who’s a pharmacist, as you know, gives me a tonic because she thinks I’m anemic. But that’s the only thing I take.”
“Your mother-in-law,” the doctor says, lighting a cigarette, the match striking the box with a contemptuous fury. “ ‘Head of bone, heart of stone.’ That’s what I called her when we were in school. I would say it in English behind her back. She didn’t know what I was saying. It drove her crazy. I suppose it was a little sadistic.”
“You know my mother-in-law?”
“Everyone in this town knows everyone. But especially, yes, I know your mother-in-law. She was not unintelligent, not uncourageous. Unusual for a middle-class girl to train as a pharmacist, although her father was a pharmacist. But then, my father was a doctor. But even as a girl, she was fanatical. Of course, in this country, to be fanatical is not unusual.”
The doctor laughs, and Marian notices her teeth: uneven, greyish, and yet not taking away from her attractiveness. This is a face you want to look at; you can’t help it. It has an aliveness that the faces she has known in Spain no longer have.
“What a relief it is, to be able to speak things aloud. I hardly know you. But I feel free to speak. Perhaps because, of course, I know something of your history. Perhaps because it has been so long since I could speak free of anxiety that what I said was being taken down, could be used against me somehow, by anyone, by someone I might least suspect. How long has she been giving you this ‘tonic’?”
“Since my child was born. Seven years.”
“Well, my dear, the news is you’ve been drugged for seven years. Phenobarbital. Didn’t you notice that your reactions were dulled, that you felt fatigued all the time, confused, in a stupor?”
“I thought it was because of what I’d been through in the war. And so many people around me seem vague and confused and in a stupor. I guess I thought it was the way we would all be now. Something in the air we breathed.”
“You’re right, of course, but not in your case. In your case, you were being drugged. I can only imagine why. The question is: what do we do about it? I can’t send you home, back there, because taking you off the drug, of course, will have an effect, what effect I can’t pinpoint exactly. Most likely, you may find it difficult to sleep. Your dreams may be troubling. You may find yourself irritable, surprised that the slightest thing will set you off. But don’t be surprised; remember, this is the effect of the drug. Or the cessation of the drug.”
Once again, the words confuse her. A way of speaking she hasn’t heard for years. A belief that something might be changed. Changed for the better, that there are problems that might possibly be solved.
—
Somehow, it has been agreed (but she doesn’t know how; she hasn’t been consulted) that she will be staying in the part of the doctor’s house that is set aside for convalescents. This is a house that she can breathe in. It stands a hundred yards up from the Calpe Road, and every window opens to the sea. The furniture is vibrant and comfortable: the sofa covered with a rough fabric, a saturated yellow gold; the rush-seated chairs; the long plain table, pine, its slender base and legs painted an apple green. A glass bowl, cobalt blue, filled with fragrant oranges. No brocade, no dark benumbed benumbing wood. Pots of flowers—terra cotta, blue enamel, blue and white porcelain; she wakes to shades of purple, orange, shocking reds. It is so unlike the house of her in-laws, where she has lived for seven years, that it seems wrong to call them both by the same word: house.
The house where she lived. But how was it that she lived? She understands now, the fog that seemed omnipresent, only to be expected, the slowness of limb, the longing for the bed, sleep the only thing to be desired. It was not, as she had thought, the natural outgrowth of events. She had been drugged. She cannot begin to imagine what will follow now, what she will call her life.
The servant, who explains nothing, brings her food and a bedpan and helps her bathe. For five days, she speaks to no one but the doctor. In the evening, the servant brings two plates of food on a tray, glasses of wine and water. It is understood that she and the doctor will eat together.
“I was fond of your husband, Ramón,” the doctor says, “very fond. He was a rose among thorns. His father is a kind man, but with no curiosity; I don’t know where Ramón’s curiosity came from. God knows not from his mother. Before the war, before the madness started, when neighbors could speak to each other freely, without fear, he would come here to the surgery, and we would talk about medicine and science. And when my brother was around, he would take Ramón into the country with him on his expedition to collect specimens.”
“Your brother is a scientist?”
“Yes, a botanist. But also a priest. You may meet him if you like.”
Marian is confused. A priest. A scientist. But not living in the rectory. She has never seen him saying Mass, the Mass she is told she must attend if she doesn’t want to risk imprisonment. He must be the one whom no one sees, who hears confessions but does not say Mass. “The wounded priest,” he is called; she has never known why. A priest who lives with his sister. But she is beholden to the doctor; she won’t say anything to offend her—this is Spain, country of easily taken offense—by asking a question that might be considered prying.
“I would like to meet him if it’s convenient.”
“ ‘Convenient.’ What an American word.”
Marian feels ashamed of her Americanness, the old shame
of an undeserved privilege. Her face colors—the curse of the Taylor skin. The word made flesh, the skin turned pink from anger, shame, or love.
But the doctor doesn’t seem to notice.
“Tell me about how you came to Spain.”
Not a request; a command. Earned, of course. The doctor has tended her, the doctor may, perhaps, have given her back if not her life, then her clarity of mind.
She doesn’t speak about Johnny or Russell. She suggests that everyone of goodwill in America was on the side of the Republicans, and that she felt she had a duty to be of service. She describes her work in Valencia—only her work. It would be unseemly, she thinks, to speak more personally.
“Well, that’s very interesting. Are you a comrade?”
Marian feels pressure in the word: the demand for absolute loyalty. Which she cannot, has never been able to, give.
“I am certainly sympathetic. But it’s not in my nature to align myself so exclusively.”
She feels, for the first time since Ramón’s death, a spark of her old identity. She is able to say who she is, what she might or might not do. “Those kinds of fealty remind me too much of the Church.”
The doctor laughs. “That’s what my brother says. Perhaps it’s time for you to meet my brother.”
Once again, a decision made for her without consultation. The doctor stands up, walks as if she’s just been given a command no one else has heard, but that must be instantly obeyed. Marian lies back, her head spinning, but not now in the old fog, and tries to understand what has just happened.
The doctor comes into the room, accompanied by a man, lumbering in his walk, so different from the quick tap tap of the doctor’s heels on the stone floor. Marian thought the doctor said he was a priest, but he’s not in clerical clothing. She thinks it’s almost comical that they are brother and sister. He is tall, large boned. There is something birdlike about the doctor: darting, ready to take to the air. Her hair is wild, carelessly cut; Marian imagines she cuts it herself without looking in the mirror. His hair is thick and wavy, his eyes are such a deep blue that she imagines in some lights they appear black, or grape colored. The doctor’s are light brown, with flecks of orange. Her brother’s upper lip is long; his lower lip is very full; his lips are unusually reddish for a man. He has not been cursed with the doctor’s uneven teeth. But before she has made sense of the face, begun to categorize it, she thinks, “This is the saddest man I have ever seen.”