The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  After blowing on the leaf of untrimmed paper to dry the ink, Captain Herráiz folded his letter in half, then in half again, and put it, along with another document, into the pocket of his army jacket. He called the orderly to take away the writing materials, and when the men saw the captain rise to his feet, they desultorily bestirred themselves. There was general motion up and down the long line. Rifles were collected, half-eaten snacks were wrapped in gray paper, and the wicks of pocket lighters were tied off. The men moved into place, joking or discussing questions of precedence in the file or of their respective assignments in the formation’s tactical scheme. The sound of firing came from some distant valley and the men raised their heads, as if the threat came from the air at the same time as the staccato crackling of gunshots. Their halt had lasted a little more than half an hour when the captain mounted his mule and gave the order to continue the march. The gun carriages bearing the two artillery pieces creaked as they rolled over the stones of the badly paved road. By the end of the day, they had reached the crest line of the range, but not before a detachment had scoured the inhospitable area around the quarry. The unit had made contact with the troops ahead of them, already deployed, and Captain Herráiz chose his position in accordance with the ample terrain and his own intuition. The first column was on his left, covering both flanks of the main road. On his right, the foothills rolled away toward the horizon of Nanclares, where promontories and chalk hollows formed what looked like the backbone of some great fossil, the gray and golden rock still imbued with the mysteriously tenacious twilight.

  The captain ordered the two 75-millimeter artillery pieces set up in the hollow of an outcrop of rock, where they formed half a battery, capable of pounding the first curves of the road on the slope some kilometers below their position. Fifty meters to the rear, sheltered by high ground, the field kitchen and the supply van were stationed. The captain fanned out his three Vickers machine guns so that their lines of fire converged and crossed the most likely approaches to the position. Night had fallen, and the light, limpid air, still permeated by the heat of the day, breathed peace and premonitions. It was said that the troops who had requisitioned the contents of the warehouse were going to distribute the wine later that night, and every unit had to send its quartermaster to fetch it. The lighting of fires was forbidden so as not to give the position away. Thus did matters stand on that fateful night, full of portents, covered with stars, fantastic in its beauty, and indifferent to the destinies of men, its face turned toward the profound panorama of the universe; and at the same time, it was an intimate night that recalled to the heart of every man the memory of other summer nights, when he lingered outside the door of a tavern or stood at the entrance to a smithy or took his leave in darkness after a picnic and an extended excursion in the woods, scenes like illustrations from the same calendar, because all those men retained similar memories of their land and their condition. In the darkness, the vans seemed to be loaded with coffins. Down toward the plains, it was possible to make out lights, which were said to be the lights of Alsasua or of some other town presumed to be in enemy hands. The sleeping men, the silent, cautious movements of the sentinels, and the mules’ bored snorting were elements of the similar ritual performed when agricultural operations had to be carried out with all deliberate speed but within a reasonable period of time, before the arrival of storms or hail. And then the crickets began to sing. The lengthy night was alive with synchronized messages, obsessively and melancholically announcing the approach of September. Nothing in this sector would change for several days, or even for several weeks, apart from the sporadic warning of artillery fire, feeling out positions known to be under solid control, or the laconic crackle of rifle fire between patrols gone astray, because in those days the military rising undertook no large-scale actions, nor had the front yet been marked on any map, nor were any decisions made that could be considered definitive, as if the mutual enemies had made camp and settled in to wait for results proceeding from other districts, other valleys, other regions.

  The positions on the heights that the militias and the troops of the Defense Juntas had wished to hold were wiped out in the course of a few days. Some say that the Republicans had sufficient forces to defend the access to all the valleys, and that with a different operational strategy, they could have salvaged control of the frontier and whatever else was still salvageable. At that time, a column of 150 men was a considerable force. But if dates are necessary, it’s also true that at the distance of so many years, dates are irrelevant, and the doctor undoubtedly thought about his own situation in those days, newly burdened with a definitively useless leg, and the anguish of knowing himself crippled for life played some part in his forgetful disdain for dates; although if the case required it, the doctor knew how to proceed with dates, in the same way that one knows how to examine a stamp in a philatelic collection or an insect’s complex markings. Irún was burned on September 5. Donosti fell on the thirteenth. On the twentieth, Iruretagoyena’s troops got through the mountain passes, occupied Monte Andatxa, and thrust as far as Zumárraga. Many years later, a number of commentators would say that the war was lost in the north, and the success of this first onslaught supports their arguments. The Navarrese brigades hurled themselves on Guipúzcoa. The war front stabilized along the banks of the Deva River. It’s true that all this took place over a series of long, exhausting, grievous days, but viewed from a distance, they seemed to have flown past as the days do when you run your eye over a calendar. They left behind a feeling of misfortune and uncertainty, like pebbles rolling over the mesh of a sieve, producing an aching, cruel sound, a grinding of teeth, a sign of what hell could be like if eternal damnation were set in those leafy valleys, and poets sang of their grief in the language of the country:

  Your glory, Mother, has died in the mountains.

  How did the heroes fall?

  Disclose it not in Tolosa.

  Proclaim it not in the streets of Donosti.

  Let not the renegades’ daughters exult

  Or the traitors’ daughters leap for joy.

  Others raised similar laments:

  Your glory, Euzkadi, has perished in the mountains.

  How did the heroes fall?

  But there were no hymns, no psalms, no words to sing the bitterness of those two months, which, if you added up the events they contained, were two centuries, and which would remain for many people the only subject of the stories they told for the rest of their lives. Many escaped in boats, and among them were some who, instead of crossing to the other side of the river, pointed their prows toward the west, crossed the mouth of the Deva, and headed for the new front that was forming around Bilbao. But over in the valleys, processions of prisoners were coming back, long-haired, unshaven, their stunned faces hollowed by fatigue. Others didn’t come back. Finally, there were others who disappeared a few days after the defeat turned them into suffering matter, rolling around in a sieve. If dates counted for anything, those were, without a doubt, dates on which many destinies were shuffled, even more than could be inferred from eyes aglow with victory or from the bitter taste left in the mouths of the defeated.

  A few hours before he was led out to face the firing squad, Captain Herráiz wondered whether his wife would have received his first letter, that is, the letter he had dropped into a mailbox in the San Sebastián post office before he and his troops had moved out, the letter that began with the words My Dear Isabel. The second letter, the one that began with the words My Dear Love, was still in the pocket of his army jacket. His papers and other documents had been confiscated from him, but he had been granted the privilege—requested by himself—of keeping that letter, and when he raised his hand to his heart and felt the paper crackle against his chest, he remembered his honeymoon again. He was in Alsasua, in the boiler room of the Piarist Fathers’ school, which the blast of a howitzer shell had partially destroyed. When he was transferred there, he’d caught a glimpse of the inscription on the façade of the
building, right next to the flagpole: COLEGIO DE PP ESCOLAPIOS, and that name had made his fate seem heavier by giving it the character of a schoolboy’s punishment. In the semidarkness of the suffocating boiler room, with its dense network of pipes and valves, Captain Herráiz’s face gleamed as if it had been smeared with grease. There was an absent glow in his white eyes. He could hear muffled sounds, like furniture being dragged about or supplies or military equipment unloaded. The court-martial had taken place in one of the classrooms on the second floor, presided over by a school crucifix. A colonel and a major from the Estella garrison, two of those who had joined the rising from the very beginning, constituted the court. A captain from the Automotive Fleet introduced the accused. On the teacher’s platform, the extremely summary tribunal conducted a brief deliberation. Those were the days when verdicts were handed down within a few minutes and consisted of two types: thirty years or death. There were men who left the classroom smiling, sentenced to thirty years and therefore safe, if only from execution. For Captain Herráiz, the matter had been resolved differently, and now all he had to hope for as he waited to be executed was the water he’d requested. Over the course of several hours, he examined the place where he found himself. He stared at the thermometers and pressure gauges with a childlike curiosity, and then he furrowed his brow, as though they were oracular. Eventually, he sat on a cement bench, under a window set at ground level, and savored the painful solace of his remembered honeymoon. Isabel’s merry voice came to his ears: “Julen, hand me my bathrobe!”

  And a few moments later, she tiptoed out of the shower and headed for the dressing table, leaving the ephemeral prints of her wet feet on the hotel carpet. The captain, already dressed, had draped his jacket over the back of an armchair. Hands in his pockets, he went out onto the balcony while she finished getting ready. In those days, Biarritz wasn’t what it would become in thirty years, or fifty years, nor did it contain many things that Doctor Castro could reveal to his young neighbor if he would accept the doctor’s invitation to dine there someday soon, precisely in Biarritz, while the golden autumn came closer. Large commercial areas had invaded what used to be cornfields and meadows, and new hotels had risen in place of the villas formerly owned by rich Jews and Central European princesses, and other disasters or nondisasters of time and city planning had definitively altered the physiognomy of the place that Captain Herráiz had enjoyed on his honeymoon. But since Captain Herráiz departed this life in front of a firing squad, the question of what he would have thought of Biarritz so many years later was both futile and thankless. Back in his day, the beach still looked as it had looked at the turn of the century, and while he stood on the balcony and adjusted his shirt cuffs, the captain took in the broad and elegant curve of the sandy shore as it received the tide’s heavy homage, the tall waves like joyful horses fanning out, the tamarind trees with their fine green plumage, the awnings, the bathing huts with their heraldic stripes in the primary beach colors, namely red, green, and blue. Of all those things, only the tides provided an astronomical clock capable of reducing to its just proportion the insignificance of time past, the tiresome feeling that human memory exaggerates the hold it believes itself to have on time. Captain Herráiz did not imagine that he had attained Saturn’s dominion over time, or that, by the power of his memory, he was capable of reversing the universal course of the days, but in those last hours, he consoled himself with the apparent eternity of his visions, nurtured by a lingering doubt that his life was really going to end in a few hours in front of a firing squad. The evocation of the sea was especially welcome in those moments, and that alone soothed his grief. As day was dawning, he heard volleys of gunfire. They repeated similar volleys from the previous day. The beaten-earth courtyard of the school, the captain knew, must be drinking blood, so he fled the thought of the fate awaiting him and returned to the memory of the hotel room.

  Throughout the fifteen days of their stay, the hotel management sent up a daily bouquet of fresh roses to replace the ones in the vase. Standing on the balcony, facing the sea, the captain smiled. One might have taken him for a lucky roulette player, particularly cheerful the morning after an exciting night at the gambling tables. Pale and serene, moved as always by the marine landscape, inhaling the sea breeze with delight, surrounded by the triumphantly waving curtains behind him, the captain played with the golden wedding band on his ring finger. He was not yet accustomed to the ring, still an unusual item in his life, like the guarantee of an agreement he hadn’t yet begun to evaluate, but which had already taken on the appearance of a good agreement, or a good contract, independently of what fate might have in store. Meanwhile, Isabel was almost ready. The captain stepped back into the room and there she was, tying a green ribbon around her hair, smiling, with raised arms and a sweet coquetry that made her body childlike. She’d put on a green dress, gray-green like almonds, close fitting to just above the knees and then flaring into a little skirt in that summer’s French fashion, which was called evasé. Her wedding trousseau included as many as half a dozen fashionable French dresses, almond-colored, pearl-colored, honey-colored, as if chosen to represent the four seasons or the colors of the overcast sky, the clear sky, the frosty sky. A golden wedding band shone on her ring finger, too, and the captain’s eye caught a fleeting sparkle, like the confirmation of a consummated agreement. That woman was his dear Isabel, who in the unbearable distress of the last few days had gradually turned into his dear love. That woman was the incarnate form of his feelings and his desires, all mingled together in the euphoria and bashful passion of the wedding trip. The captain stood still, backlit by the light from the balcony and enveloped like an apparition in the billowing curtains. The sea air had disheveled his hair, and she burst out laughing. There was something formidable in that laugh. And there was something exceptionally painful in recalling it, like an excess of pleasure whose absence torments the mind. Still laughing, she drew near to comb his hair with her own hands, and he took her into his arms and turned her laughter into another kiss and held her close, and then he lifted her in the air as though picking up a doll and laid her on the bedspread, almost in sport, almost without desire, only to see her lying there like that.

  “Julen, you’re going to ruin my dress.”

  “I’m going to dress you in kisses.”

  “You’re crazy, Julen.”

  Captain Herráiz smiled. She wriggled free and rolled away to escape his embrace. He could still see her, free of his arms and laughing.

  “You’re crazy, Julen. You promised we’d go out for lunch.”

  He still smiled at the memory. His eyes shone like hard porcelain in his blackened face, shone in the suffocating semidarkness of that boiler room, in the sinister and makeshift dungeon where his last hours ticked away. He remembered hours of pleasure, and hours of delight, and silent hours they’d spent hand in hand, gazing at the dark blue sea while storm clouds threatened the horizon. They had also talked about the name they planned to give to the fruit of those hours, for they hoped their endeavors would bear fruit, and if the fruit of their endeavors was a boy, she wanted him to be called Julen, and if the fruit was a girl, the captain wanted her to be called Isabel. They went out to eat at a farmhouse in the middle of a pine forest, at a certain spa located some distance inland, and at the restaurants on the beach, some of which still had the same names and emblems now as they’d had when Captain Herráiz and his bride were there on their honeymoon, as if disaster had spared some reference points in order to illustrate the story better, regardless of whether its protagonists, or those who found a certain kind of virtue in remembering history and celebrating its protagonists, would ever set foot there again. But if Biarritz had changed—and Doctor Castro could testify that it had changed very much—cities and landscapes never change so utterly that one can’t recognize them anymore. A hotel doorman’s features may have changed somewhat since he began as a bellboy, and yet the architecture of people’s faces remains unaltered. And the profile of a promontor
y, which is on geological time, changes very little. The incessant waves never stop performing the cosmic ritual of the tides and submitting to the laws of the moon, and man’s only consolation may consist in adhering to those other, insurmountable dimensions of time and by that very means surmounting them, by integrating himself into the movement of the stars and the respiration of the sea and the minutely slow erosion of the cliffs, and seeking in those things the survival of his most ephemeral memories, thus saved from their own condition. In the terrible circumstances of his last hours, Captain Herráiz remembered Isabel’s laugh. With the extraordinary lucidity that those final moments granted him, he realized that the greatest beauty was contained in that laugh, in the naked and simple act of laughing, in the delight of the woman who is beloved and knows herself beloved, even without leaving their luminous room with the windows open to the sea, even confessing, in mutual embarrassment, that they had spent three quarters of their honeymoon without leaving their hotel. The captain thought that perhaps the seed he’d deposited in her womb would prosper, and that someday their child would inherit its mother’s charming laugh. Only that laugh could redeem his squalid death. There was nothing to protect him, nothing to sustain him, except the memory of the brief, intense pleasure of his love. And moving his porcelain eyes over the gloomy corners of the boiler room where he was imprisoned, the captain felt that his happiness, however ephemeral, had not been in vain if it provided him some solace in those final moments. The pipes were covered with a thin down, the mold of cellars and neglect. He could sense the inert presence of water in the conduits, waiting for someone to fire up the boilers and for the plutonian toil of the coming winter to begin, of that winter and all the other winters he would not see. Night had fallen. The captain’s thoughts flew over different landscapes. A bluish light came through the skylight in the boiler room. Outside that place, he knew, the land lay under the vault of night. In the days when he was engaged to be married, he had dreamed under those same constellations. He heard voices—the changing of the guard—and the sound of engines. But by virtue of his memory, the anteroom to death that he was in could be transformed, and the captain dedicated the better part of his thoughts to that end, as he’d read in history books, as his fortitude and his contained emotion required, for it was almost painful, a painful pleasure, for him to hear Isabel’s remembered laugh again.