Copyright © Manuel de Lope 2000
Originally published in Spanish as La sangre ajena
Translation copyright © 2010 John Cullen
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Lope, Manuel de.
[Sangre ajena. English]
The wrong blood / by Manuel de Lope; translated by John Cullen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-401-6 1. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Fiction. 2. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Women—Fiction. 3. Women and war—Spain—History—20th century—Fiction. 4. Women—Spain—Fiction. 5. País Vasco (Spain)—Fiction. I. Cullen, John, 1942-II. Title.
PQ6662.O57S2613 2010
863′.64—dc22
2010011433
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
Will He … Fill the void veins of Life again with youth?
—WILFRED OWEN
War Poems
Verano era aquél, verano hazía.…
—Fray Luis de León
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
One
THE WEDDING
Two
THE HONEYMOON
Three
THE STILLBORN FRUIT
Four
THE WRONG WOMB
About the Author
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF
The Wrong Blood
Certain events in the Spanish Civil War serve as a framework for my novel La sangre ajena (here translated as The Wrong Blood), and a few details concerning those events may be useful to the American reader. In its day, the conflict caused international reverberations, but its significance has been weakened by the continuous development of history and the therapy of time.
The Civil War began in the summer of 1936 with a military coup d’état against the young and still unsettled Spanish Republic. The coup failed, but it launched the country onto the battlefields. The rebels scored a first, resounding victory when the institutions of the Republic collapsed. Spain split into two camps. On one side was the rebel army, which immediately initiated combat operations. Socially, this force was supported by conservative groups and by political parties of the Fascist type. On the other side were those Army units that had remained loyal to the government, supported by popular militias that used the pretext of saving the Republic to start a revolution. The Spanish Civil War was a high-intensity, extremely violent conflict in which neither side refrained from committing atrocities behind the front lines. In towns and cities, acts of personal or political revenge, along with other crimes, produced horror that surpassed what was happening in the combat zones.
It has always been said that the Spanish Civil War was the prelude to the global war that so closely followed it. Spain became the proving ground for the great powers of the time. Hitler and Mussolini sent troops and weapons to the Fascist side. Stalin crammed the Republican side with agents and commissars. The liberal democracies showed their weakness by taking cover behind a nonintervention agreement. The war ended on April 1, 1939, only a few months before Germany invaded Poland and triggered the Second World War. The winners of the Spanish Civil War were the so-called National forces. The defeated were the Republican forces. The conflict produced a dictatorship that treated the losing side with great savagery.
Soldiers die young, and therefore, it’s said, mothers hate war. Wives or mothers, girlfriends or sisters, women experience war in a way much different from what men go through. One could cite examples of female behavior in war that would surprise many men. Women can cut through enemy prisoners’ lips with scissors, as the women of the French Revolution did. They can dress themselves immaculately, pick up a parasol, and go on a promenade to watch the firing squads, as happened in some Spanish cities during the Civil War. But the women’s war is not the men’s war. The men’s war takes place in another landscape. The American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman said that war is hell. Few of General Sherman’s female contemporaries would have disagreed with him, but Sherman’s war was a male hell, very different from the female hell that women lived through inside the men’s war.
Choosing one tender-hearted, simple, and ravaged figure from within the collective tragedy of the war, I wish to mention a particular crime that took place in the same geographical area where The Wrong Blood is set. The incident involved a young schoolmistress in a little town in the Salazar Valley, in the mountains of the Navarrese Pyrenees. In the first days of the uprising, this young woman was taken from her residence next to the school by a group of armed men, brought to a place of detention, raped repeatedly, and at the end of a few days, executed on a roadside with two shots to the head. She was twenty-four years old. I know no mountains more idyllic than those of her village.
The protagonists of The Wrong Blood are two women. One of them is solid and primitive. The other finds herself on the verge of psychic dissolution. The two women share a secret that will allow them to survive the war, each in her way and according to her condition. Their circumstances include the death of a loved one, a rape, and a birth with disastrous results. In this rather claustrophobic emotional context, the landscape plays an important role, and some geographical details may assist the American reader. In cinematic terms, the location of the novel is in northern Spain, near the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Biscay, between the beautiful coastal city of San Sebastián and the beautiful coastal city of Biarritz in southern France. The two cities are separated by the Bidasoa River, whose lower tract forms the westernmost portion of the border between France and Spain. (For a while, I considered calling the novel Bidasoa.) When the situation requires it to do so, the camera moves to the mountains, to the valley of the Baztán and the upper course of the river. Throughout this region, the war was swift, because strategic control of the frontier was an urgent necessity for both sides. The battles, very violent and localized, took place in the summer months of 1936. We’re in the Basque Country. The indigenous language of the region is Euskara, a pre-Roman tongue, the most venerable in Europe. In the course of the narration, a few words in Euskara give an idea of the linguistic substratum upon which part of the story unfolds.
—MANUEL DE LOPE
[Translated by John Cullen
February 7, 2010]
One
THE WEDDING
IT WAS THE MONTH OF MAY, or the month of June, in any case summer was near, and within only a few weeks the war would break out, although nobody knew this at the time, and those who had premonitions couldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what the intuition accepts, and they wouldn’t have been able to convince anybody anyway. And so it was the month of May, or the month of June, in wedding season. The midday sunlight exaggerated the radiance of the meadows on the banks of the Bidasoa River. The mountains retained their thick semidarkness, and the waters of th
e river were subsiding to their lowest level. On one of the sharpest curves in the road from Irún to Elizondo, a curve of most unhappy memory, the huge roses climbing up the façade of Etxarri’s Bar proudly displayed themselves to the sun. People who know about roses maintain that rosebushes with large flowers were fashionable for many years, and that roses as plump as a wet nurse’s breasts bloomed in the gardens; and such a plant had sprouted up on the façade of the big, rambling inn, which stood with its back to a riverside meadow. The building had been a roadside inn for mule drivers and carters until 1924, and then a cheap stopping place for truckers and automobilists when the road was partly cobbled and partly blacktopped around 1933. By then, rosebushes bearing large roses had gone out of style, and visitors to the Etxarri inn were always surprised by the size of the roses on its front wall, because diminutive tea roses were the current fashion in every garden.
Three men dressed as if they were on their way to a wedding arrived in a black Citroën 11, which had been washed that same day or at the latest the day before, for its chrome parts shone like mirrors, its waxed metal surfaces gleamed, and its windshield and windows dazzled. Its whitewall tires, quite rare on this model, looked as though they had been scrubbed with a toothbrush. The dust of the road had deposited only a thin, velvety veil that extended no higher than the vehicle’s fenders. Its occupants, who had been riding with the windows down so that air would circulate, alighted at the door of the bar. One of the passengers was a rich man from the town of Vera de Bidasoa. Of his two companions, there was little to say, but the proprietor of Etxarri’s Bar knew the rich man from Vera. He owned a hardware store as well as a half interest in a paper factory.
As the three men, sheathed in their wedding finery, entered the café, they wiped their faces with their handkerchiefs. The rich man from Vera, a tall, fat person, continued without stopping across the half-lit room, heading for the dark door of the latrine, where he intended to urinate. “Let me have a glass of water,” he said as he walked. The other two men stepped up to the bar and shooed away flies. The bartender, the owner of Etxarri’s, always kept a loaded double-barreled shotgun within reach under the bar. As he fetched three glasses from the cupboard, he thought that those men could be going to a wedding in Lesaka, and he also thought that they could be going to a wedding in Irún, and in any case, he thought, no one would have washed and polished his car like that if he didn’t intend to go to a wedding. For the same reason, no one on his way to a wedding seems like a dangerous man, and experience taught that dangerous men can come from a wedding, after the dancing and the drinking and the horseplay, but that men are not dangerous before going to a wedding, and so the owner of Etxarri’s Bar gave no thought to his loaded shotgun. He let the water run for a few seconds until it flowed cool from the tank. When this modern cistern was built, the inn’s water had begun to take on a ferruginous taste, because of the pipes or because of the tank itself, which had been manufactured out of anodized sheet metal, but many people liked the rusty taste, and some thought the rust might be beneficial to bones and teeth. Without waiting for the rich man from Vera to return, one of the other two took a drink from his glass and smacked his lips in delight.
Two or three minutes passed, and the rich man from Vera who had gone to the latrine did not reappear. The owner of Etxarri’s Bar figured that it must have been two or three minutes, enough time for the flies to start landing again here and there. The barroom was submerged in semidarkness, like a sacristy. The only window had a southern exposure and let in a great rectangle of sunlight half filtered by the rosebush that spread over the façade. Those who knew Etxarri’s in those days say that the stuffed head of an African buffalo hung on the wall right next to the window. Even some years later, the African buffalo’s head was still there, surmounted by its great helmet of horns, with long, almost feminine eyelashes above big brown glass eyes, parted lips revealing four yellow teeth, and a thrusting snout, black and shiny, as if the animal had plunged it into honey or marmalade. New visitors to the bar would raise their nostrils and admire the gigantic head, which almost touched the ceiling, and ask how the head of an African buffalo could have wound up in the valley of the Bidasoa. Regular customers, on the other hand, would contemplate the African buffalo’s head with consummate naturalness, as if it were the head of a fighting bull, and make rude jokes about its horns. What’s certain is that the innkeeper either didn’t know where the head had come from or never cared to give an explanation of its provenance. He would talk about an uncle of his who had been a sailor, and on other occasions he would talk about another, much less probable uncle who had been a hunter. The bar top was made of colored artificial stone. Near the window, there were two wooden tables, placed end to end and furnished with benches, where the truckers used to eat and where the mule drivers had eaten before them, and where the Romans may have eaten long before the mule drivers; but after the war, the wooden tables and benches were replaced by normal tables with four places and tablecloths. In the rear part of the house, next to the cow barn, facing the meadow, and under a kind of porch that had once been a hayloft, one of those long tables could still be seen, transformed into the back wall of a henhouse or rabbit hutch, with boards forming the side walls and roof and a metal screen covering the front. An arch behind the bar framed a mirror and the glass shelves where the liquor was kept. The rarest bottles, containing spirits no longer to be found, stood on the top shelves, out of reach. On the right-hand side of the bar, nickel-plated and gleaming like a Rolls Royce, was the coffee machine.
The second visitor did not appear to like the ferruginous water from the sheet-metal tank, the same water that others praised as the most unusual of mineral waters, and it was evident from this that he was an outsider. “This water tastes terrible,” he muttered in a low voice. Many people, including some of the locals, thought the same thing the stranger did, and the owner of Etxarri’s Bar didn’t bat an eye.
“We’re on our way to a wedding,” said the first visitor, crossing the room and admiring the rosebush from inside the window. “May I pick a couple of roses when we leave?”
“Of course,” the innkeeper said.
The third glass of water remained untouched. The rich man from Vera who had gone to the restroom seemed to be in no hurry to come out. In those days, the man who ran the Etxarri inn was in his early forties, and there were some who knew he was not an Etxarri, that is, he wasn’t a member of the Etxarri family, although he was known by that name because he presided over the inn, and the name of the inn could not be changed. Whether or not this man’s uncle had sailed the seas or hunted buffalo was a question of little importance. The master of Etxarri’s Bar was distrustful by nature, as keepers of inns often are, and when the old-style roadside inns and taverns went out of existence, the innkeepers’ distrust passed, by the same right and the law of communicating vessels, to the proprietors of the small, cheap hotels known as hostales. He was an ugly man, with an apron perpetually tied around his waist so that he could dry his hands, and he cared little about the roses on the façade, because they were his wife’s department. His wife was not in the bar on that day. She herself was indeed an Etxarri, a member of the family that had established the inn in the days of the mule drivers, or in the days of the Romans, and the man she called her husband, even though he wasn’t, had formed the habit of acting as though the inn belonged to him. But that wasn’t what was important, nor would he cite it some years later, when it was a matter of taking legal possession of the property without any more right to it than what might have accrued to him from sharing a bed, that is, without any right supported by documents or implied in his name; but the war had caused so many difficulties that few people raised questions about any property rights to the ruins of the inn. No one knew for sure whether there might be titles or documents somewhere, or whether the inn and its meadow and the half-dozen oaks that constituted its share of the forest could belong to anyone who didn’t bear that name, nor could any civil-law notary testify to
any of this, and the upshot was that the innkeeper was called Etxarri, too, although he wasn’t a member of the family. He had a stepdaughter, that is, the daughter of the woman who shared his bed and a previous man, but that day the stepdaughter wasn’t in the inn, either. The girl had recently reached her sixteenth birthday, and from time to time her stepfather opined that she needed some discipline, which took the form of blows, administered either with his hands or with his belt. Of course, no one imagined that the war would break out in a few weeks or that the girl, María Antonia, would suffer what she suffered, which will be related in due course. On that day, the owner of Etxarri’s Bar was alone. He drew back slightly from the counter. At this point, he felt more curiosity than distrust in regard to the three men, who he was convinced were on their way to a wedding, even though he had only two of them in his sight, because the rich man from Vera de Bidasoa, whose name, the innkeeper knew, was either Leonardo or Leopoldo, was still in the restroom. Five minutes passed, and the innkeeper shooed away the flies again with a corner of his apron. One of the men, the one who looked the youngest and who had asked about the roses, turned toward his friend. “What’s your uncle doing?”
But the innkeeper knew that mature men have bladder problems or worse. He didn’t know whether the men were going to pay for their three glasses of water, even though one of them was untouched and the other two only half empty, nor did he consider asking them to pay if they didn’t; it was free, his medicinal water. Behind the house and the meadow, the mountainside rose in a steep slope to the spring whose water was carried from there to the cistern, and laying the requisite pipes and building the tank by means of which running water passed from the spring to a faucet in the inn had entailed an investment, which it was only just that the innkeeper would attempt to recuperate, at least in part, by charging for a glass of water. He would see about that later, or he wouldn’t see about it at all. The shooed flies had taken over the rectangle of sunlight that came in through the window. The man who looked like a boy stepped through the curtain of light and flies and stood by the window again. For a moment, he contemplated the automobile. Then he looked around the barroom. He raised his eyes to the buffalo’s head and examined it with indifference, as if he were a frequent visitor to the inn, or as if his young life had been replete with buffaloes. After that, he returned to the right side of the bar. And then he lost patience. “Don’t you think something’s happened to him?”
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