There were no great effusions and no enthusiastic well-wishing on the part of the wedding guests when the newlyweds decided to take their leave. The couple dodged away surreptitiously before the party ended, bidding only their closest friends farewell. After shaking his regimental comrade’s hand, Arderius said again, this time into his ear, “Gold digger.” The newlyweds went upstairs to change their clothes and then got into an automobile that someone had already loaded with two new suitcases, which were part of the bride’s trousseau. The bride carried a handbag. Captain Herráiz sat in the driver’s seat. The pale twilight of early summer had descended. Lead-colored clouds edged with gold hung in the distant sky, the kind of sky one sees in prints and commemorative cards, and anyone who saw the bride and groom leaving would have thought they were going to hide someplace where the night was calmer, and where they could finally stop being engaged, after having been so for two years, and especially after such an exhausting day. They crossed the Bidasoa, happy as two truant schoolchildren, and waved in passing to the French customs officials, who wore the Maurice Chevalier-style mustaches that were usual with the Customs Service. Captain Herráiz drove with one hand and slipped his other arm around his fiancée’s shoulders—as yet, he didn’t dare call her his wife. “Gold digger,” Arderius had said, and that remark sounded to the captain like an insult, or like a strange form of adultery, in which married love is betrayed by the love of money, a stronger, more concrete love, and the strange promiscuity that results is masked by sentimental lies. Then he thought of the hotel in Biarritz and its wedding-cake architecture, exactly the right place for a honeymoon. In Captain Herráiz’s memory, the sea was covered with white curls like sheep’s wool, and there was something in that panorama that soothed his soul. He could still feel his wife’s presence, very close to him. And if he could have done so, or if he had been granted the fulfillment of one last wish, he would have wished to stand on the balcony of that hotel again and put his arms around her waist. Behind him, the contents of the two suitcases were scattered over the rose-pink counterpane that covered the big double bed. The hotel manager, knowing that they were honeymooners, had presented them with a large bouquet of red roses, accompanied by a gilt-edged card that read, “Avec les compliments de la Direction.” The flowers stood in a vase and opened slowly, like a choir of little women with curious little heads. Captain Herráiz had ordered a bottle of champagne sent to the room. The bottle was chilling in an ice bucket while they gazed at the sea from the hotel balcony. Night had fallen. The wind whistled in the rigging of the flags that lined the seaside promenade, and lightning crisscrossed the sky over the horizon with short, silent strokes, as if the storm were still too far off and only wished to announce its arrival by way of enhancing the wedding night. The air was like pure oxygen, and breathing it lightened the heart. Nothing presaged that, within a few weeks, Captain Herráiz’s life would come to an end before a firing squad, or that memories of his honeymoon would occupy the end of his life with the fantastic yet intimate vision of that hotel room.
The intervening weeks had been a long nightmare. When the newlyweds returned from Biarritz, Isabel had chosen to stay at Las Cruces, while Captain Herráiz had gone back to his garrison in San Sebastián. Since then, he’d heard nothing from her, and this lack of news gave their relationship an aura of inexistence and fantasy that the captain was unable to distinguish from reality. It was as though she hadn’t said “I do” at the wedding ceremony, or as if she had disappeared into the arms of another lover, or as if she had simply never given herself to him. Things had happened very fast, and he had told her in a letter all that could be told. He saw dead horses. The road from San Sebastián to Tolosa was paved with granite stones. Captain Herráiz heard the sharp clatter of the ammunition wagons’ iron wheels and the curses of men whose wagons had overturned, and he saw the fire in a village wedged between a fir forest and a millstream, and in the black building that housed the bakery where he and his fiancée, during their excursions in days of peace, would stop to buy some good bread. The soldiers also passed a wine warehouse that had been sacked, though there was no telling whether the plunderers had been local people or outsiders; perhaps they were the troops who had preceded the unit under Captain Herráiz’s command. At the door of the warehouse, a wine cask displayed its broken ribs to the sun. Its hoops had rolled away or lay flaccid at the feet of the splintered staves. There was a fresh reek of fermentation, not completely disagreeable, not completely obscene, smelling as wine usually smells when an excessive amount of it has been spilled. In a certain way, this odor was exciting and pleasant in the nostrils of those weary troops, who had tried marching in step for only a few kilometers after they left San Sebastián. The men made a prolonged halt at the warehouse, unharnessing the mules and loosening their own belts. Some of the troops took off their shoes and socks in order to soothe their blisters with water from their canteens. Captain Herráiz was accompanied by two other officers, one of them a lieutenant in the Carabineros, the frontier guards. This handful of officers formed a group apart, as though they were having a long meeting. Men from all over the region had joined the Azpeitia column, some without weapons or any footwear save espadrilles, others with weapons and military equipment from the barracks that were subjugated after the rising. In front of that wine warehouse, in the shade of the trees that lined the road, the ground was strewn with the strange straw wraps used in those days to cover champagne bottles with a kind of cape or hood that protected the glass. Captain Herráiz and his men had no way of knowing whether toasts had been drunk here to them or to the enemy, or if the troops that had preceded them had carried off the bottles, despoiled of their straw wrapping, in order to slake their thirst on the road. The old, broken barrels showed their insides, dark with cardinal-red vegetation. No other remains of a celebration could be seen. Someone went inside the half-open door, which had been torn from its hinges, and soon came back outside, cursing. There was nothing left in the warehouse. The gigantic shadow of a quarry raised its unpleasant back above the landscape. And on that slow, suffocating afternoon, entirely shaped by curses and plans for victory, entirely directed toward the teaching of a thumping good lesson, to be learned by themselves or by the deserving enemy, wherever he might be, perhaps on the heights of Echegárate, perhaps in the menacing cavities of that enormous quarry—on that afternoon, then, during a few minutes of repose, the reek of wine clouded the senses and refreshed the spirits of those scowling, angry troops, still inflamed by recent speeches and street shoot-outs but languid and weary after a week of action, and still idealistic, a mixture of recruits from towns and peasants from farmhouses, soothing their feet in front of a recently sacked wine warehouse as if they had found, in the shade of the chestnut trees that lined the road, a redeemed fatherland.
They had been preceded by troops of Galician militia, who had fled El Ferrol in fishing boats and landed in Pasajes after a five-day journey. Then, in more than twenty trucks, they had traveled the scenic roads to San Sebastián, passing places where, only a few days previously, summer vacationers had exposed their cleanly persons to the sun; but the Galicians had been blackened by sea and fire, and having seen their comrades shot, they were hungry for vengeance and life. A portion of them had split off and gone to defend Irún, following the secondary route that ran along the coastal cliffs and avoiding the pocket that Beorlegui had succeeded in consolidating at Oyarzun. The other, smaller portion, together with peasant volunteers, had set out for the front, which was beginning to take shape in the interior of the country. Herráiz had traced on a map the movements of the past few days, ever since the fall of the Loyola barracks, but nothing, no map, no plan, no intuition based on topography could give an idea of the scope of the decisions being discussed in the region, some of them as confused as the organization of the column itself, others disparate and heroic, related to the old spirit from which the defense juntas that fought against Napoleon had sprung up of their own accord.
They were carr
ying two pieces of light artillery, three Vickers machine guns, and a considerable but not unlimited supply of ammunition belts. Herráiz assumed that his troop had been preceded by two armored trucks transporting the first Galician units. He had sent scouts out along the heights, and although he would have liked to explore the countryside, perhaps even to lose himself a little on the hills, which were thickly forested with fir trees, unmoving and outspread like vegetal armies in the August sun, although he would have liked to wander in the mist that the heat was raising in the deepest valleys, only to drink it afterward, and although he would have liked to catch a glimpse of the sea between the green lines of the overlapping hills, he had preferred to lead his troops along the secondary branch of the paved road, halting out of prudence or laziness, setting up positions at every curve on the way before continuing the advance through the placid but unending hill country.
The captain moved away from the group and contemplated the splendor of the valleys. The loyalty that was going to be fatal to him, the loyalty that would determine his death sentence, included a bucolic dimension, like a serene, subdued print, where only the accompaniment of military equipment and the smoke rising from a hill could foreshadow a future that would be unhappy, when cowbells would no longer be heard in the valleys, nor villagers’ voices, nor woodcutters’ axes, and not intense barrages of gunfire, either, and not the explosions that had punctured the past nights and filled them with uncertainty. Captain Herráiz wiped his face with a handkerchief and put it away, stained with sweat and dust. He adjusted the belt with the holster containing his regulation pistol and turned toward the boy who had served as his orderly since the beginning of the march. He was a youth from Beasain, no more than twenty years old, and he had worked as a waiter. He wore blue pants, a villager’s beret, and a military jacket without stripes, a couple of sizes too big for him and probably removed from some corpse after the fall of the barracks. The captain beckoned him with a sign. “Pen and paper!” the captain cried.
The boy saluted him as though they were schoolboys playing a game and then executed an about-face. Miraculously, bringing up the rear of the column behind a field kitchen like a motorized stove, there was a van filled with all the gear an authentic headquarters might require, including leather folders, untrimmed paper, inkwells, and pens with metal nibs, with which sergeants used to practice calligraphy in peacetime, poking out their tongues as they wrote up their reports. In a few minutes, the orderly came back with what Herráiz had ordered. The captain dismissed the boy and moved over to a rock at the foot of a tree. Men were lounging on the ground with their rifles between their knees. Some were making preparations to eat. Flies buzzed, and from behind the sacked wine warehouse came the sound of a swift-flowing stream. The captain sat on the rock, placed the leather folder on his knees, and began to write a second letter to his wife. He had deposited the first one in a mailbox in Donosti, quite simply, as if he could still believe in a postal service. He had arrived with a detachment to protect the post office building and had dropped his letter into a mailbox. He’d begun that first letter thus: My Dear Isabel. But this second letter required other terms, perhaps because Isabel would never receive the first, perhaps because his present situation, poetic in the light that flooded the valleys, rusty and dusty on the roadside where he and his men were resting, called for a more complete commitment of emotion. Any onlooker would have admired Chicken Thigh’s composure as he sat under the tree with his pen suspended in midair and the leather folder balanced on his knees. Using one thumb to immobilize the untrimmed paper, Herráiz began to write in his fine hand:
My Dear Love.
The captain’s eyes grew moist as he slowly and deliberately set down what was supposed to be a description of his stopping place and news of the previous days’ events but was in reality the expression of his emotional deracination and of an unbearable nostalgia for the days they had spent in Biarritz. In the military schools, it was said that the most dangerous problems in a war concerned how to get into it in the beginning and how to get out of it at the end. This dictum could also be applied to the captain and his honeymoon. And so his Dear Love was still Isabel’s happy, embarrassed laughter as she lay between bloodstained sheets in the pitch-black night, with the balcony open to the sea and the bedside lamp turned on, while the last bits of ice chilling the cloth-wrapped bottle of champagne melted in the ice bucket and their two glasses glinted like diamonds and the roses they had received with the compliments of the hotel management bowed their rosy-red heads. They had seemed to be not just a few miles from the border but on another planet, and even more so now, considering what it had been like to return from a honeymoon trip as the entire country was falling into convulsions. Dawn had surprised the captain alone in the bed. Isabel had disappeared into the bathroom, but after a few minutes under the torrential shower she came out again, wearing a brand-new dressing gown from her trousseau. In a few days, they had stopped being fiancés and become lovers, not husband and wife, or at least not exclusively. Although the captain could renounce practices learned in brothels, he wasn’t able totally to abandon his experience, while Isabel had dedicated herself, partly with modesty and partly with avidity, to the accumulation of sexual knowledge. It was said that certain women in those years were happy, cautious, and dissolute, and those terms included everything that a judicious and seductive mixture of good breeding and carnality entailed. And had that not been the case, had those certain women lacked any of the three paradigmatic qualities that men both expected and feared, their respective men, if they truly loved them, would have felt cheated, as if their dearest hope were that their betrothed would turn out to be neither so chaste nor so prudent as the bourgeois circumstances of their betrothal obliged her to appear.
My Dear Love, Captain Herráiz continued, gambling on the certainty that his love would indeed read his letter. A rosary of ants marched in procession past his boot. And what had become of his two marriage witnesses? Captain Pistols had gone to Bilbao to join the rebellion, although he would be able to camouflage himself should it fail. Arderius wasn’t stationed in the Loyola barracks, and Captain Herráiz could expect to meet him leading an enemy unit once they were through the hills. Was it conceivable that of the three regimental comrades, only one had been excluded from the conspiracy? But that was what had happened, and neither of the other two would hesitate to execute him. While the captain’s pen moved across the leaf of untrimmed paper, intermittently seeking the mouth of the inkwell beside him, some of his men raised their eyes. The boy from Beasain, arms folded, leaned against a tree and contemplated him. No one could imagine that the captain had asked for a pen and an inkwell and some untrimmed paper in order to write a poem or a love letter, nor did they think he’d gone mad. Before light fell that day, it was expected that they would reach the crest line, after having cleaned out the shadowy terrain around the quarry, and enter into contact with the force that had preceded them and that was no doubt already deployed, and then they would wait for who knew what events to transpire on the other side. They had stopped near a wine warehouse, a few houses, and a sawmill, all of them deserted, but up ahead, farther downhill, other troops of his unit were reclining in the ditches along the road, and his force amounted to something like 150 men altogether. Some of those farthest off in the twisting line of march took advantage of the rest halt, not to desert—or at least, not as they considered the matter—but to go back to their farmhouses. And all those men, or all those sufficiently close to the captain to see and follow his movements, thought that their commanding officer was writing a note to be transmitted through a liaison to the rear guard or to be delivered by a designated messenger to the advanced positions, but nobody would have thought that their captain was writing a love letter.
The captain prepared to conclude his missive. Believe me when I tell you that all my love is with you, and nothing will erase the memory of your lips against my lips. The captain asked for some water. My heart will beat for you in the difficult da
ys that lie ahead. I shall return as soon as circumstances permit, and in the meanwhile, day and night, my love is with you. The captain stopped writing. In those minutes, during the brief period of time that had passed since he began his letter, all his pining for his love had been condensed into those lines, saturated and crystallized like some precious chemical solution his heart could hardly identify in words, the same words that kept running through his thoughts, but his men didn’t observe this, nor could they, rapt as they were in the trivialities of a rest halt on the march and only occasionally granting their captain’s sudden epistolary caprices a distracted glance. The captain raised his head. Then he lowered his eyes and gazed at the rosary of ants that continued to hustle and bustle past his boot. It was the daily hustle and bustle, the barely symbolic image of that long file of men who were following him up the branch road that mounted to the high, wooded, and still distant crest. Then he looked back at his writing. He had little to add to the urgent expression of his feelings. With great care, he again dipped his pen into the inkwell at his side. He concluded with a simple and tender Many kisses and then signed the letter: Julen.
The Wrong Blood Page 8