The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  Other things happened. On some nights, poor wretches were executed down on the beach, and the shots could be heard in the village. Then all that stopped. It’s said that a few tuna-fishing vessels still transported fugitives to the other side of the estuary, but that may not be true, because there were no ships or even boats, for almost all of them had fled. Guns were mounted on two barges that had remained in port. Fresh troops arrived. Some people remember the coming and going of trucks in the night, driving with their lights off through the crossroads at Irún and along the old San Sebastián road, and lines of roped mules loaded with cases of ammunition—the whole train of that war, which started without knowing that it was really a war. A signal station was established on the heights of Mount Jaizkibel. In those days, the road was barely practicable, and beasts of burden carried the material for the station up the mountain. Through the Velate Pass, the Navarrese columns received a good part of their supplies of weapons and men, who were sent to garrison the frontier or to reinforce San Sebastián or to cover the seaward flanks of the troops in the passes as they made their way down to the line of the Deva. Behind the shelter of a concrete slab, under the lighthouse platform, a coastal battery was set up. The guns were of such heavy caliber that no mule could carry more than two of their shells. No one could say whether or not the battery had ever opened fire. There are some people who remember all that, and also some who remember a village strangely deserted in the midst of the hectic movements of troops and supplies, as if, paradoxically, the same circumstances obtained in overcrowding as in solitude. There had been little destruction. And the people, that is to say, all those who were fleeing the war, the women and children, or the men who hadn’t fought, or those who had thrown away, before it was too late, a rifle too rashly taken up, along with a belt and some bands of ammunition, or those who had nothing to fear from the victors—all those people were prowling around like beggars or panhandlers, waiting for the army field kitchens to finish distributing food to the troops and to deliver the leftover bacon, potatoes, and bread to the civilian population.

  An officer came to the doctor’s house. Some weeks previously, the bulk of the unit that had occupied Hondarribia after the assault on Irún had moved on to other positions, leaving a small garrison in the village. A squad with reserve supplies had remained on the Alameda, and a powder magazine for the rear guard was established in what had been an automobile repair shop. The officer who appeared at the doctor’s house belonged to a communications section. The doctor opened the door but didn’t step over the threshold. The officer saluted. He was a young man, wrapped in a raincoat with his lieutenant’s stars on the inside of the upturned collar, and bareheaded, as he was carrying his military cap, protected by his raincoat, under his arm. The lieutenant was about the same age as the doctor, perhaps a little younger, and it should not be forgotten that the doctor, at the time, was a young man. He examined the lieutenant’s bearing before stepping aside to let him come in. Yes, they could have been about the same age, neither young nor mature, although in terms of the calendar, they were both still young, because a few events had served to prolong time and age indefinitely. A light rain was falling. The lieutenant ran his hand through his wet hair. An orderly on a motorcycle with a sidecar was waiting for him beside the garden gate. Before entering the house, the officer shook off the rain, removed his raincoat, and slung it over his shoulder. He was wearing calf-length leather boots, which tracked in a little sandy mud from the garden and crunched on the floor tiles in the entryway. When he reached the living room, the boards of the parquet floor creaked. The lieutenant dried his hands on a handkerchief. He drew a sheet of paper from the pocket of his uniform jacket and addressed the doctor: “Doctor Félix Castro?”

  The doctor replied in the affirmative. The lieutenant folded the paper with the doctor’s name and returned it to his jacket pocket. The pocket had no button. There were problems to be resolved that didn’t concern the doctor directly. Because of his dead leg, nobody was interested in enlisting him for military service, not even for a rearguard hospital. The officer cast a glance around the interior of the house and asked another question. A corporal and two privates operated the signal station on Mount Jaizkibel. A second lieutenant and six soldiers under his command had been assigned to the coastal battery. For all those men, the lieutenant had to find lodging that would allow them to remain close to their posts. The path that climbed to the station on Jaizkibel passed behind the villa of Los Sauces and traversed a portion of the meadows in the rear of the Las Cruces property. The road leading to the battery and the lighthouse passed lower down, in front of the two villas’ garden walls. Four of the soldiers assigned to the battery were bivouacked in a shelter set up near the guns. Two more had moved into the living quarters attached to the lighthouse. The second lieutenant had found accommodations in the village. One man was permanently on duty at the signal station, and lodgings were needed for the other two.

  “Who lives in the neighboring villa?” the lieutenant asked.

  “A woman—a widow. I’ll put your men up in my house,” the doctor hastened to add.

  The officer reflected for a moment, stroking his chin. He had left his cap on a little table when he entered the living room. A few droplets of water oozed from his hair and ran down his cheeks. His eyes were yellow, as if he suffered from a liver disease or had gone several nights without sleeping. He seemed not to have heard the doctor’s offer.

  “Is she young?”

  “She’s the widow of an officer,” the doctor said.

  The lieutenant assumed that the doctor meant an enemy officer. “I understand,” he said.

  Then he looked around, as if he were thinking of taking up quarters there himself. In those days, the house had the same arrangement as it did now, and in that the doctor gave proof of his constancy, his attachment to things, his laziness in introducing innovations or in getting rid of certain pieces of furniture. He didn’t know whether those factors, which shaped his character, sprang from slovenliness or existed because having certain constant reference points enabled him to value his life more, even if the reference points were nothing but furniture. The little table where the lieutenant had left his cap was still in the living room, because the years pass with greater ease over furniture than they do over men. The lieutenant stepped over to a window. For a few moments, he gazed out at the villa of Las Cruces, on the other side of the garden. A silhouette glided past the window facing him. It’s possible that she had heard the motorcycle arrive. The doctor moved a chair out of the way and limped closer to the window where the lieutenant was standing. The silhouette passed again behind the gauzy lace curtains. The officer drew his head back, as if the doctor’s proximity bothered him.

  “Does she live alone?”

  “She lives alone,” the doctor said. “The gardener does some odd jobs for her.”

  “Many people live alone,” the lieutenant grumbled.

  The doctor refrained from making any comment. Then, carefully keeping his tone free of the least hint of reproach, he said, “Her husband fell in Alsasua.”

  The officer turned around abruptly. “Is that my fault?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” the doctor said, making a cowardly apology.

  “Is it my fault that there’s a widow woman on the other side of that garden?” the officer retorted, pointing a finger at the doctor’s French doors.

  The doctor made no reply. He moved away from the window and looked for a chair. The lieutenant walked to the foot of the stairs and raised his eyes to the upper floor. There was a great weariness in his movements. He assumed that the bedrooms were up there and no doubt thought wistfully about a bed with a double mattress, dry sheets, and woolen blankets. Then he turned to the doctor, who had managed to reach an armchair and was sitting with his leg outstretched next to one of his crutches. The visit was surely nearing its end. The lieutenant had not come to chat but to transmit a notification. Nevertheless, he stayed awhile longer at the foot
of the stairs. Anyone who had been on campaign and lived through the events of the last months would have felt the attraction of a home, a comfortable living room on a rainy afternoon, the silence in the other rooms, books on the bookshelves, some maps, and a fireplace where winter fires would soon be burning, and perhaps he wouldn’t have imagined that the person living in the house was an invalid who would have preferred to be an officer on campaign, so that he could experience those events differently; for without admitting it, the doctor had always carried some regret in his heart for not having lived the war the way those men lived it, both victors and defeated, perhaps with more enthusiasm for the losing side, because of the poetry attached to defeat, but also with some feeling for the side represented by the yellow-eyed lieutenant, wrapped in his wet raincoat, who could just as easily have been, say, a civil expert as a military communications officer, but whose good health and intact bones gave him the opportunity to participate in the war. Was that what the doctor would have wanted? Was that really what he would have wanted? Over the course of his life, he’d indulged in some fantasies about what might have been. Probably, he would have been mobilized and posted to some medical services unit, or if he’d thrown in his lot with the other side, he might have followed the refugees to Vizcaya, or to the other side of the Bidasoa, or who knows, his life might perhaps have come to an end on the beach, or against a wall. In civil wars, there’s nothing more dangerous than their beginnings. If you can survive that, it’s easy to stay alive afterward. No one could say that doctors who had been so unlucky as to treat enemy casualties would be spared. Yes, Doctor Castro thought, the really dangerous enterprise is to survive the early stages of a civil war, and thanks to his ruined leg, he was doing just that. The lieutenant returned from the foot of the stairs and cast a glance into the kitchen and at the door that led to the cellar. Then he turned to the doctor.

  “Has there been anyone else in this house?”

  The doctor shook his head. Why was he being asked that question? Again he felt cowardly and cautious, as if unimaginably fateful decisions lay in his visitor’s power and depended on the doctor’s reply. He said, “There hasn’t been anyone here who has anything to do with politics.”

  “I’m not asking you that,” the lieutenant said with a smile. “It’s a question of finding accommodations for two men. That’s the only question.”

  The doctor gave a sigh of relief. “I’ll put up those two soldiers, Lieutenant,” he replied.

  “All right,” the officer said brusquely.

  He patted the pockets of his jacket, looking for the paper with the quartering assignments, but he was obliged to recognize that he’d forgotten it. He hesitated for a few moments, calculating that nothing was keeping him there any longer except the appeal of that comfortable home, and perhaps a game of cards and a good nap, which would help him forget too many days without any rest at all. He picked up the cap he’d left on the little table and thrust the headgear under his arm. He directed his eyes to the window again in a long gaze that passed over the garden wall and the neighboring garden and sought to determine whether the silhouette of the young widow the doctor had talked about would cross the window once more. Then he turned around, wrapped himself in his raincoat again, and left the house without saying good-bye. A trail of sand from his boots remained on the floor tiles in the entryway. The smell of his wet coat remained in the living room. When he got in the sidecar, the orderly who had been waiting for him beside the garden gate started the motorcycle and drove up the road a little way before turning around and heading back down. With the aid of his cane and one crutch, the doctor propelled himself out his front door in time to see the motorcycle go by.

  When the men from the battery walked down to the village, they passed in front of the villas, singing as they went, and returned a couple of hours later, often rather drunk and unsteady on their feet, and if it rained, they returned in a cluster, huddled together under a canvas sheet. Those assigned to the signal station on Jaizkibel went down the back path. The two men who were to be quartered in the doctor’s house presented themselves two days later. They were Carlist requetés, volunteers from Cizur, on the outskirts of Pamplona. One of them was an electrician whose surname was Fuentes. The other was a farmer or a farmer’s son, and the doctor didn’t hear his name, but it seemed that his comrade called him Severo. They showed the doctor the quartering orders their officer had given them. They each carried a bedroll, a blanket, a canteen, and some personal items, among them a strange folding stool, which Severo had picked up somewhere and which was of great importance to him. Their helmets were attached to their belts, as were their blankets. No doubt their red requetés’ berets were among their personal items. When they entered the house, they felt uncomfortable, like teenagers caught with an embarrassing object, and didn’t know where they should put their rifles. Some days later, by which time they had gained more confidence, the electrician explained that he’d been assigned to the communications section because he was an electrician, and that his friend, the farmer’s son, had come with him. The doctor had already confined himself to the lower floor, as he didn’t yet dare to climb the stairs with his crutches or his cane. The two soldiers each chose a room on the upper floor. Soon the electrician stopped coming to the house because, it seemed, he had found other accommodations in the village, unbeknownst to his superiors. The other soldier remained, the boy named Severo, who gave the doctor to understand that his comrade liked bars, some of which were now open in the village, and that he was involved with a woman. Then the young man began to spend his evenings on the lower floor with the doctor, who gradually came to feel some affection for him and accepted his company like that of a big, docile dog. He was a lad of twenty-two or twenty-three, with thick peasant’s hands that gripped his rifle as if they were holding on to a hoe, a rake, or a wagon shaft. He held his spoon the same way when he sat down to eat with the doctor, balancing his plate on his knees, refusing the table, and it was the doctor who prepared their dinner, believing that his obligations as host went beyond offering the fire and salt required by the ordinances of war. The youth had not participated in the bloody assaults on the fortified convent of San Marcial, or in the firing from both ends of the Endarlatza bridge, or in Beorlegui’s daft maneuver through the mountains, or to put it another way, the only actions he had taken part in were the occupation of the ruins of Irún and the establishment of the communications post in Hondarribia, well behind the front lines. In short, for whatever reasons, Doctor Castro was growing increasingly fond of him and even appreciated his name, Severo, which the doctor would not have hesitated to give to a dog. At nightfall, the soldier would come down from the signal station, lurching about on the path because of its many twists and turns. Soon it was necessary to light the fire in the hearth, and in the course of those evenings spent before blazing logs, the big kid from Cizur came to seem like an oversized companion animal, hypnotized by the fire, with his elbows resting on his knees, his head inclined, and his large hands clasping his rifle, which he held between his legs as he sat on the collapsible stool he’d confiscated in some small-scale pillage and for which he showed great esteem, with the unmistakable admiration that denizens of the rural world feel for folding things. The doctor, installed in his armchair, stretched out both his legs to the blaze, feeling the heat moving up his good leg and sensing a slight tickling in the rigid one. The electricity had been cut, or it functioned only intermittently, because the turbines in some of the power stations along the waterfalls of the Bidasoa had been damaged and some cracked dams had lost volume. One must envision the living room, illuminated by a candelabra or by burning candles stuck in bottle necks. The glow from the hearth put fire in the cheeks of the boy from Cizur, whose expression was as severe as the name Severo implied, and the same glow lit up the doctor’s nose and sparkled in the glass of cognac he had at hand, the last glass from the last bottle of his cognac reserve, one of those brandies from before the war that were later so greatly prized. T
hat was the sum of those wartime evenings. One must remember—and the doctor remembered—the long nights and the short days. The boy had been witness to half a dozen horrors, not all committed upon humans; some of the victims had been animals, one of them a pig, hacked to death by the bayonets of the group from Cizur in order to carry off the quarters and the slabs of meat for their provision. Nobody had felt sufficient compassion to kill the pig with a knife before they began to cut it to pieces. And the human horrors and the memory of the dismembered pig’s screams darkened the boy’s face and opened up long pauses of silence between him—by nature a man of few words—and the doctor’s unembellished questions. One must consider those evenings, with the crippled doctor and the somber Severo, who broke into an imitation of the doomed pig’s shrieks every time he told the story. He didn’t say cerdo, the usual word for pig, he said gorrín, in the Navarrese way. And with lugubrious irony, the doctor thought that the dozen and more names given to the pig in Spain illustrated the country’s diversity as well as all its misunderstandings. The boy declared that, in his opinion, the unnecessary cruelty to that gorrín had been a sin. He kept quiet about the human horrors. But in the end, he described one of the atrocities he’d witnessed, without saying that it was typical, or rather hiding the fact that it was. They had handcuffed a man, tied his feet, and thrown him into the middle of the road, so that their unit’s entire convoy, consisting of two trucks and three wagons loaded with the munitions of half a field battery, passed over him. The unfortunate wretch’s bones cracked like chicken bones. That was how things had been. But if he assumed that Severo wasn’t the most sensitive of the forty volunteers from Cizur, then the doctor had to think that a couple of them must have put an end to their remorse by getting themselves killed, or they must have succumbed to the long melancholy of guard duty, nearly apathetic, nearly numb to the emotions of the senses, or in some other state of clinical balance imposed and established by the war. The big northwest wind forced its way down the chimney and blew smoke back into the living room. A little later, the wind seemed to suck up the air, provoking a whirl of burning embers. The gusts raised the roof tiles and made the joists shudder. From the signal station, one could watch the endless procession of sea squalls, week after week, and that unremitting sameness clouded the boy’s head. Soon the season of Christmas nougat and chestnuts would arrive. In the middle of December, the soldiers received their Christmas rations.