While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

  Even though it was winter, the sun shone brazenly. It would never have dared shine that way in London, which went a long way toward explaining my own skin, ludicrously pallid in this land of dark vigor. Smoke hung heavy in the streets; everywhere there was the odor of potatoes, frying oil, horse manure.

  I saw an old woman knitting a pink sweater as she walked down the street.

  The first two days, I ate lunch in empty restaurants, wondering if their emptiness signaled that they were second-rate, until I caught on that no one here had lunch before three. This was then followed by siesta, two hours during which the city became a ghost town, every shop shuttered. Around dusk, things came alive again and didn’t stop. The Ramblas were up all night; you could buy a parrot that said “I love you” in four languages at three in the morning; everywhere there were soldiers, brigadiers, the color red. The Spanish call the mysterious hours between midnight and dawn la madrugada; if you stay awake through it, you are said to madrugar, and most people I met madrugared every night. But working hours were no different than anywhere else. When did they sleep? Did they hibernate in the winter, like bears?

  Every couple of hours, news from the front shot through the city. Women thrust wirelesses out their windows and turned them up full blast; old men dragged blackboards to the streets, on which they scrawled hastily received dispatches. Usually these had to do with battles in Aragon. The actual facts—who had won, how many had died—got through only after several days’ worth of unsubstantiated and contradictory rumors. Then came funeral processions, huddled clusters of mourners bearing sepia-toned photographs of young soldiers wreathed in flowers. And the mothers wailed their grief, grief on a Mediterranean scale, showing none of the restraint for which the English are famous. They tore open their blouses until the buttons popped, they scratched at their chests; if they could have, they would have torn out their own hearts.

  Word spread that there had been heavy brigade losses at Guadalajara. But when I visited the local Communist Party headquarters and asked for information about casualties, the depressed-looking lackey at the desk merely shook his head and said he was sorry but he had no news.

  The grand dining room of the Ritz Hotel, meanwhile, had been converted by the hotel trade unions into a canteen; the Anarchist leader Federica Montseny, who wanted to outlaw marriage, was appointed minister of health; and on posters all over the city a bare-chested fellow appeared with whom I might easily have fallen in love. “The Spanish workers struggle for the liberty and the cultures of all countries!” he pleaded. “Solidarity with them!” Barcelona, it seemed, was revolution central, while down the coast in Málaga the Fascists ruled; vendors sold postcards on which Hitler, Franco and Mussolini shared equal billing, like a demented Three Stooges. (Hitler did look like Moe.) “Viva España!” the captions read. “Viva Italia! Heil Hitler!” And how long would it be, I wondered, before the Führer’s Mediterranean confrères emulated him further, dispensing with nationalism, demanding allegiance not to the mother country but to its holy generalissimo, its prodigal son?

  Two days passed, and still I had received no word from Northrop.

  Finally I decided to go myself to Altaguera.

  I was in the middle of packing when the old woman who ran my pension rapped on the door. Northrop had sent a message to say he would be in Barcelona that evening. Could I meet him at ten o’clock at Bar Bristol on Plaza Madrid?

  I got there half an hour early. Bar Bristol turned out to be a simple bodega, barnlike, with big communal tables and, instead of chairs, warped benches designed to hold ten people but squeezed, that night, with as many as twenty. (Once, one of the benches collapsed under the pressure, spilling its occupants onto the stone floor.) The owners, a young couple of weather-beaten beauty, appeared to speak the same four languages that the parrots on the Ramblas spoke, with only slightly more fluency.

  I stood near the entrance. The bar was so crowded, people were literally bursting out the doors onto the streets. Music might have been playing, but you couldn’t hear it; it was completely drowned out by a huge human noise like a hive of bees, men and women shouting about politics, or demanding tables. While the husband balanced trays filled with wine and cerveza, tapas and empanadas and bocadillos, his wife simultaneously sliced ham, pulled a bottle from an ice chest and wrote up a bill. They had no employees; the two of them managed the unruly crowd by themselves. They seemed to be the sort of people who could do a dozen things at once, perfectly, without ever losing their otherworldly composure.

  In a dozen different languages, the patrons at the bar were arguing—Communists with Anarchists, Catalans with Castilians—which went a long way toward explaining the divided condition of the left. Spaniards enjoy argument and practice it as a sport, something I witnessed frequently during my days there, restaurateurs duking it out with customers over the honor of an insulted salad. Even those who stood on the same side of the fence could work themselves into such a frenzy over fine points, they might come to blows.

  Across the room some soldiers started singing a drinking song. With each verse they raised their glasses higher into the air, until, on the twelfth verse, one of them lifted his glass so high the beer splashed a bare light bulb on the ceiling, which fizzled out. “Coño,” the wife said, then went into the kitchen, emerging with a ladder and a new bulb, which she held between her teeth like a rose. She climbed the ladder and began removing the old bulb. The soldiers, still singing, surrounded her and lifted the ladder in the air, and taking the bulb out of her mouth, she told them to put her down, but they would not put her down; instead they started twirling the ladder as if it were a chair that carries the bride at a wedding. Then she smiled, she threw back her head so that her hair flew out in a fan, as the ladder swayed, and the crowd applauded, and she let herself be lost in the pleasure of motion.

  I heard a voice, loud and distinctly English: “Excuse me, excuse me, passing through.” It was Northrop, looking quite hale in his brigade uniform. “Botsford,” he said, “how good to see you!”

  He thrust out one of his huge hands to shake mine; the other, I noticed, was swathed in bandages. “Sorry about the delay,” he said. “We took a bit of a drubbing at Guadalajara. No one emerged unscathed, not even yours truly, though in the end I’m happy to say our side managed to prevail.”

  “Were losses heavy?”

  “Depends on your definition of ‘heavy’. Let’s get a table, shall we? Manu!”

  The husband put down his tray and came over to greet Northrop. For some moments they conducted a gushing conversation in Spanish, the result of which was our being ferried immediately to two open places at a table, much to the chagrin of the people who had been waiting. Northrop, it appeared, had become a figure of importance.

  Two cervezas arrived—pale and urine-colored, nothing like English beer. “Drink, drink,” Northrop said. “I know it looks pissy, but it’s the best you’ll find over here.” I drank. “Cheers, I forgot to say. Anyway, I was delighted to get your telegram, though I can’t say it surprised me. I knew you’d come around sooner or later.”

  “Northrop, I must ask you about Edward,” I interrupted.

  “Edward?”

  “Edward Phelan. The fellow who shared my flat.”

  “Ah, Phelan, yes.” He shook his head.

  “Well—is he all right?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “But I presumed—” My heart was racing. “Northrop, has something happened to Edward?”

  “Easy, old boy! It’s just that he’s deserted.”

  “Deserted!”

  “Yes. It’s been almost a week now.”

  So Edward wasn’t dead. I closed my eyes in a silent prayer of thanks.

  “But we’ll find him,” Northrop went on. “Mark my words, we’ll find him. A thing like that can’t go unpunished. If men desert and get away with it—well, what then of the republic? What then of the cause?”

  “But how? Why did he leave?”

  Northrop shrug
ged. “I suppose he just didn’t like the fighting. Not that anyone does. Anyway, he came to me and asked to be relieved. I said no. The next morning”—he snapped his fingers—“gone.”

  I stared into my beer.

  “And no one has any idea where?”

  “Oh, we’ve got leads. Nothing I can talk about, of course. In any case he hasn’t got his passport, so he won’t be able to leave the country. It may take a few days but we’ll track him down.”

  “Well, really, what’s the point? Why not just let him go?”

  Northrop’s eyes widened. “This is an army, my friend! Not some rugby club! Things like this can’t just be overlooked. Phelan is a soldier, and as such subject to military law.”

  “So you’ll just hunt him down like an animal, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Don’t confuse what’s happening here with one of your novels. We will not hunt him down like an animal. The police will simply search for him and when they find him turn him over.”

  “And then?”

  “There’ll be a hearing. A fair one. He’ll be judged by his comrades.”

  “And what might they decide?”

  “Well, he could be sent home, though that’s unlikely. Or they could assign him a few months’ duty in a prison camp, after which he’d probably be put back into the battalion. The firing squad is a possibility as well, though I tend to doubt—”

  “The firing squad! The boy’s a volunteer! What kind of barbarians are you, to shoot a boy who’d volunteered?”

  “If you’ll let me finish, I was saying the firing squad is a possibility. An extremely unlikely possibility.” He brushed his fingers through his hair.

  “I hope for his sake he makes it to France.”

  Northrop eyed me narrowly. “Look, what is it with you and this boy? Phelan knew what he was getting into when he signed up; I made it all very plain to him. He welcomed the opportunity. And a soldier can’t just leave a war because he’s changed his mind. If we allowed that, where would we be? Just where Franco wants us. Just where Hitler wants us.”

  “But he’s twenty years old!”

  “They’re all twenty years old.”

  “Well, that’s my point! There’s no draft here, Northrop. These boys came by choice, out of a sense of idealism. Surely you can be easier on them than the Royal Marines.”

  He slammed down his beer and leaned closer. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here, Botsford. This is class struggle. Class warfare. Individual lives don’t matter. I would give up my life gladly for the cause. We’d all give up our lives, just as so many millions of our comrades gave up their lives so the rich could—”

  “You are the rich!”

  “Botsford—”

  “Don’t give me this party line shit. I know you! Christ, you grew up in fucking Eaton Square! You went to Oxford! Your father’s an earl, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Are you done?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “Good. And now that you’ve had this little opportunity to vent your frustrations, may I speak frankly as well?”

  “Of course.”

  Then he looked me in the eye and said, “You’re a buggerer. And for the last several months you’ve been buggering that boy, until finally he decided he’d had enough and he had to get away from you.”

  “That’s ridiculous—”

  “Maybe you thought I didn’t know what was happening. Maybe you think I’m stupid generally. Well, I’m not. Oh, I know we’ve never discussed what went on in school, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember. It was normal—back then. Now’s a different story. A lot of people wouldn’t stand for it, but my feeling is, what a fellow does in his bedroom is his business, so I kept my mouth shut. Now it’s wartime. I’m in charge of a battalion, and where the morale of my men is concerned I’ve got to put my foot down.”

  I looked away. “You don’t understand, Edward and I—”

  “Oh, I think I understand perfectly. You used him. You exploited him sexually the same way the bourgeoisie has been sexually exploiting the working class for generations. And Phelan went along with it, because he didn’t know any better. That’s the sad part. They’ve been trained to think it’s good for them too. Probably Phelan figured he’d make a quid or two that he could spend standing his mates a few pints at the pub, or getting Mum a new dress. Only soon he was in over his head. I guessed from the minute he rang what it was he wanted, and to be honest, my first reaction was, well, it’s the best thing for him. The chance to get out of England and prove he’s a man on the battlefield, with other, normal blokes. Now, if you want my advice, you’ll stay out of it. Don’t worry anymore about Phelan; you’ll only bring him trouble, and believe me, he’s got enough as it is.”

  He smiled at me: a jaunty, old-school smile. I wanted to smash his teeth in. You idiot, I wanted to say. You fucking self-satisfied idiot. It wasn’t like that!

  “If I were you,” Northrop went on, “I’d stop worrying about Phelan and start thinking about yourself. You’re right: you do know me. Your world is my world. For years people have been telling us it’s us that matters, us above all else, the privileged sons of the English privileged classes. Everything revolves around us. Servants have no existence beyond serving us. The world was created so that we could exploit it. And of course we came to believe them. How couldn’t we when it was all so convenient? You may say you’re a Communist now, Botsford, but it’s obvious you’re still in the thrall of the Capitalist reward system. Not that I blame you. It took me years to overcome my upbringing, but I did it. You can too. I’ll help you.”

  His voice had grown honeyed, almost seductive.

  “First off, you’ve got to recognize that your homosexuality is merely a corrupt bourgeois aberration—”

  “Oh, piss off!” And I stood, upsetting a glass of beer. The stream of yellow liquid raced toward the table edge. Northrop leapt out of its path just in time.

  He looked at me as if I were mad but I stared him down.

  “I have only one thing to say to you, Northrop, and it’s this: if anything should happen to Edward—anything at all—I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

  “I’m going to forget this conversation,” Northrop shouted. “I’m going to forget this conversation ever happened—”

  But I was already turning, pushing my way through the crowd, hurrying out the door into the lamplight, the moonlight, the moist, deserted streets.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I spent the next several days waiting—hungering—for news that never came. When I wasn’t listening for gossip in Bar Bristol, I was wandering the city, hallucinating Edward’s face into the most outlandish and improbable circumstances. Not that I had any good reason to suspect he might be in Barcelona; it was as likely—and unlikely—as his being in France, or Upney, or dead. Still, I had to believe something. So I drew upon my creaky draftsman’s skills and worked up a likeness of Edward in black ink, which I showed to the patrons at Bar Bristol, to soldiers, to strangers in the street. An old woman on Calle del Carmen thought she’d seen him selling fruit at the boquería, the huge open-air market near the port—a purported sighting that sent me running frantically through that maze of stalls and peddlers where openmouthed fish gaped up from beds of ice, and the guillotined heads of boars and rabbits leered behind glass partitions, and pretty girls in dresses patterned with bluebells wiped their bloody knives with their aprons. The Spanish do not fear looking death in the face. There were chickens, half plucked like poodles, still wearing their crowns. But alas, no Edward, not even beheaded behind a counter, mouth and eyes open, bewildered, appalled. One young man looked like him from behind, but when he turned around he had cheeks scarred with acne, a missing front tooth.

  Various other sightings were reported. A soldier at Bar Bristol said he thought he’d seen Edward the day before walking a dog on Plaza d’España. A woman was sure he’d been at a meeting she’d attended in December. Another woman said he had a shave
twice a week at a barbershop on Calle Aribau.

  In my madness I followed each of these leads to its inevitable fruitless conclusion. Don’t think, however, that I required the prompting of strangers to start a wild-goose chase. I could do it just as well on my own. Thus one afternoon I hailed a taxi and had it follow a fruit truck thirty blocks through the rain, because I was convinced I’d seen Edward’s face steal a glance out the back of it. During a parade I tried—without success—to break into an apartment on the balcony of which I was sure I’d seen Edward watering some plants. I even wandered “by accident” into the kitchen of a restaurant in the old quarter where I was having lunch one day. But the boy chopping potatoes in the back corner—the boy whom I had glimpsed stumbling sleepily toward the toilet—wasn’t Edward. He didn’t even look like Edward.

  A telegram arrived from Chambers. As my first assignment, I was to travel to the town of —— and interview the mayor. He, in turn, would explain to me how the town had flourished under a Communist government. As I had no compelling reason to stay on in Barcelona, I decided that I would travel to —— as quickly as possible, then hurry back to see if there was any word as to Edward’s whereabouts. Besides, —— was just as likely a place for Edward to be hiding as Barcelona.

  It was a long journey to ——, almost nineteen hours. Outside the window, scenes of unrelieved harshness unfolded. The land was knotty and windblown: all edge. Periodically the train slowed to a crawl as it passed through villages where old women leaned out windows and children stood immobile on cobbled streets, watching as the train crept along, segmented like a worm, huffing and huge, almost kingly. Then the town would be gone, the old women gone; we’d pick up speed through olive groves, thorny fields of rosemary, rice paddies in watery troughs. The Spanish landscape, so much more varied than films would have you believe; and yet the light was always the same—severe, unforgiving, as if the sun were a bare bulb screwed into a ceiling socket.