The scarred rebel slowly lowered the lantern to the ground where Juanito was kneeling and snapped his rifle into position. He tilted his head left and right, cracking the vertebras in his neck, and then edged forward by half steps toward Diego’s hiding place. Diego pressed his back hard against the door.
Juanito saw that his friend was trapped. “Hey, scar face! Did your mother give you that when you raped her?”
The soldier spun around and trained his rifle on Juanito’s head. His finger was on the trigger ready to shoot, and then, thinking twice, he relaxed and lowered his weapon. “You must really want to die, you filthy communist pig.”
The soldier spit into Juanito’s face and then, intent on flushing out his prey, turned again, moving slowly toward Diego.
“I may be a communist,” Juanito jeered, “but your mother loved it when I humped her like a dog.”
The eyes and mouth of the scarred soldier narrowed, and in one movement he recircled and belted Juanito under the jaw with the stock of his rifle. Juanito’s jaw was broken, but he was not unconscious. The soldier pointed his gun at the heart of his prisoner.
Diego was overtaken by the horror of the scene, his mouth open in a silent scream. At the same time, his brain was spinning. Should he rush out of his hiding place and plow into the soldiers? Could he seize one of the rifles and turn it on the Black Squad? Or should he stay where he was and live another day for Lupe and his unborn son? In the end, he remained motionless and undecided.
“You are going to die, you piece of cow dung,” the soldier said, again popping his neck vertebras. “Would you like to say something else before I send you to hell?”
Juanito spat out a mouthful of blood. He tore open his white shirt, exposing his chest, and raised his hands over his head. The lantern light cast a yellow, shadowy glow across his body. There, kneeling before his own blood, Juanito recreated Goya’s painting of the 1808 Madrid execution. Diego saw this, and tears pooled in his eyes and streaked down his cheeks.
When Juanito spoke, each word was agony. “Silence, love, charity, peace. Silence, love, charity, peace. Silence, love—”
“Shut up! Enough of your communist propaganda!” The scarred rebel aimed and shot a round into Juanito’s heart. He reloaded the bolt-action rifle and shot a second time and, then, a third time. He reloaded a fourth time, but the other soldiers stopped him from firing.
“That is enough, Cecilio,” one of them said to the scar-faced man. “Leave him for the crows to peck out his eyes.”
In his rage, Cecilio forgot about the muffled sound in the shadows. He shouldered his rifle and hooked his arms around the necks of his drunken comrades. The three retraced their steps, moving away from Diego’s lair, the voice of the scarred soldier echoing in the ghostly corridor: “He had it coming, the son-of-a-bitch.”
Diego was frozen with fear and shame. His tears were streaming as he stared at Juanito’s crumpled body in the lantern’s light. “Silence, love, charity, peace,” he whispered to himself.
When the Black Squad was out of sight, Diego ran to his friend, dropped to his knees, and cradled him in his arms. He cried in torment: “My God, my God, what have I done? I am sorry, my brother. Please forgive me.”
Diego slowly unknotted the red bandanna from Juanito’s neck, opened it, and pressed the scarf against his friend’s bloodied chest. Then, saturated with the patriot’s blood, he tied the bandanna around his own neck. “Now I will fight the fight against tyranny.”
Diego heard the clacking of approaching footsteps, and he knew he must leave his friend. He gently laid him down in the lantern light. Then, more by raw luck than stealth, he made his way back to the safety of his apartment and Lupe’s arms—all the time repeating to himself, “It is my fault. It is my fault.”
Diego was racked with grief. How was it possible that in the same moment one man could be so courageous and giving and another so unspeakably cruel? It was a question that would haunt Diego’s dreams for years to come. One thing was certain: From that day forward, he wanted no part of soldiers or tyrants or politicians or, for that matter, any other icons of authority.
Two weeks after the execution, a few citizens began to drift back into the Albaicín. Although curfew was still enforced, life began to regain a guarded sense of normalcy.
Again, Diego felt compelled to return to Juanito’s apartment. He chose Sunday afternoon, well within the hours of curfew, and reached his friend’s studio without incident.
Juanito’s body was, of course, gone, but his blood still stained the cobblestoned street. Diego knelt at the mark of his friend’s execution, placed his hand over the dark blot, and then over his heart. He did not stay long in that position; it was too dangerous.
He climbed the stairs to Juanito’s studio and knocked on the door, thinking that the Nationalists might have confiscated the apartment. There was no answer, which was a mercy, for Diego had no plan for appeasing marauding soldiers. He turned the doorknob; incredibly, it was unlocked.
Inside, the apartment had been ransacked. Juanito’s books—all the wisdom of the ages—did not interest the soldiers; they would have been content with a few pesetas and a bottle of wine.
Diego reasoned that the drunken soldiers had forgotten about the room and never returned. That was fortunate. Normally, such intellectual wealth was considered dangerous to a fascist state and was immediately burned; after all, grand ideas can foment discontent and disloyalty to the regime.
The Black Squad had missed more than classical literature. The condemning evidence that Juanito had tried to hide at the last minute was still scattered on the kitchen table: Republican pamphlets that exalted human rights and denounced the Franco junta as a blasphemy against the people of Spain.
Diego walked into the bedroom. Goya’s masterwork was still hanging. Now, more than ever, the painting had special meaning for Diego. He unhooked the reproduction from the wall and wrapped it in a bed sheet. Then he searched the room for one special book, Pascal’s Pensées, and when he found it, he tucked it under his jacket.
Diego went to the front door and listened. There was nothing. He looked at the room one last time and said, “Thank you, my brother.” Then he was out the door, down the stairs, and on his way back to his apartment.
NOW IT WAS DIEGO’S TIME for a nap. “I am tired,” he said, his eyes slowly closing.
Miguel was silent for ten seconds, looking first at Lupita, then Diego, then back at Lupita. “Is he asleep? Do not tell me he just fell asleep.”
Lupita smiled. “Oh, yes.”
“That is not possible. He still has not told us about the stranger.”
“That will come. He likes to do things in his own time.”
“But when?”
“Do not be so anxious, Miguel. He will wake up in ten or fifteen minutes. What is fair is fair. You had your little siesta; now it is Tito’s turn.”
Miguel sighed heavily. “I could use a refill, if it is not asking too much,” he said, tapping the side of the mug with his ring.
The two walked into the kitchen, Miguel sitting down at the table. Lupita served a round of coffee and leaned back against the sink, cupping her elbow in her hand. When Miguel pulled out a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, Lupita glared at him. Miquel wagged his head, breathed a long-suffering sigh, and returned the pack with a single tap into his pocket.
“You are more like your father every day,” Miguel said.
“In what way?”
“He was hard too.”
“No, he was like his namesake: happy, passionate, fiercely loyal.”
“It is true. Your father was a good man.”
“And my mother a good woman.”
Lupita stared at the coffee cup and pictured her parents sixteen years earlier, leaving the house to pick up supplies in Córdoba. “Bring me back a surprise,” Lupita had called out to them as they drove away.
She never saw her parents alive again.
The tragic scenario that she pie
ced together from the police report was not far from reality:
It was near midnight. Lupita’s parents were on the return leg of their trip. They were lighthearted, chattering about their purchases and the chances for a good harvest. Then, straight ahead, they saw the oncoming lights of a semi-trailer truck fishtailing across two lanes.
“Slow down,” Lupita’s mother said. “He is out of control.”
“I see him.”
Lupita’s father reduced his speed, but just as they were about to pass, the semi jackknifed and plowed directly into their small passenger car. They were both killed instantly. Ironically, the truck driver, who was drunk and had fallen asleep at the wheel, survived unscathed.
Lupita’s father was only thirty-eight years old and her mother thirty-six.
In the wreckage was a package with a small charm of an olive tree on a long silver chain. The words “For Lupita” were scrawled on the little box in her mother’s script. At first Lupita could not wear the necklace, feeling that her offhanded plea for a surprise was somehow linked to her parents’ death. A year later, on the anniversary of the accident, she released her guilt and placed the chain over her head. From that day on, she wore the necklace in memory of her parents.
While Lupita and Miguel conversed quietly in the kitchen, the stranger was deep asleep and reliving a teenage experience that would become a metaphor for his personal world view.
It was one o’clock in the morning, the second day of a two-day climb to the 14,410-foot summit of Mount Rainier. Tony was only sixteen years old, and he was climbing with his third foster father, Michael, who was a vigorous forty-eight.
On the first day, they had climbed nine miles to Camp Muir and set up their tent for the night. Tony did not think the day’s climb was too tough. It was true, his thirty-pound pack had cut into his shoulders, but he could manage; the day had been little more than a slow slog up the snowfield. The second day, however, would be altogether different.
At the 10,000-foot-elevation base camp, Tony was already feeling a little queasy. He hadn’t slept well that night, and he didn’t feel much like eating.
Michael, on the other hand, was in top form. He was tall and lean and perfectly straight. He could still outclimb most men half his age, and he was proud of it. It delighted him every time he passed a younger climber on the trail.
The two stepped into their crampons and roped up, Michael taking the lead. After an hour, they were on Ingram Flats, which was considered the beginning of the real climb. At that point they had a choice: To climb the standard route, which skirted an extended rock buttress, or to take the more direct and more dangerous glacier route, which was a mass of ice blocks and crevasses.
“What do you say, Tony? Feel like a man?”
“Fuck you,” Tony whispered under his breath.
If Michael heard the slur, he ignored it. He did what Tony knew he would do: He took the more difficult glacier route.
The two trudged up the mountainside, sometimes taking long switchbacks, sometimes challenging exposed ledges. Then, at 13,000 feet, with the wind beginning to kick up, the two prepared to cross a three-foot-wide snow bridge. Michael went first and set an anchor and belayed. Tony followed, easing his way forward. When he was halfway across the bridge, he looked down the side of the ice-blue crevasse; he could not see bottom, and it made him dizzy.
“Keep moving!” Michael boomed.
The boy took another step too far to one side and a chunk of the bridge fell away under his foot. He fell to his stomach and punched his ice axe into the snow and ice.
“I’ve got you,” Michael shouted. “Get up and get the hell across.”
Tony pulled himself to his knees, and then his feet, and lunged forward to the other side, but he was done in. He was utterly sick now.
“I’m going to throw up,” he said.
“Then do it.”
The boy’s stomach convulsed, but offered only dry heaves. “I don’t think I can make it,” he said, his eyes tearing up, not out of suffering, but out of rancor.
“Oh, no, you’re not going to cry on me! You’ve got a little altitude sickness. That’s all. It’s no big thing; a lot of people get it.”
“My head really hurts, Mike.”
“So what? You want to give up now? We’re just 1,000 feet from the summit.” Then he added, with a face of stone, “You pathetic pussy.”
The boy shot his foster father a look of contempt, which went unheeded. Tony was motionless.
“For God’s sake!” Michael bellowed, slapping Tony’s helmet with such brute impact that the boy thought his head would explode. “Get up before we both freeze to death. We are climbing this mountain, if I have to drag your lazy ass all the way to the top.”
The boy struggled to his feet, and the two climbers faced the mountain and plodded up the glacier. With each step the boy cursed his foster father: “He will not beat me, the son-of-a-bitch. He will not beat me.”
When Tony reached the summit, it was not a victory over the mountain, but a victory over Michael. He unhooked the rope from his climbing harness, fell to his knees, and then to his back. Overhead, he watched the clouds drift across the August sky, and he wished he could be there—sailing, far away from the grasp of his guardian’s loveless demands. Then he thought about the descent. He imagined Michael breaking through a snow bridge and dangling helplessly above the deepest crevasse. Tony would fall to his face and bury his axe into the ice. Michael would call out to him. “Help me, Son!” And he, Tony Rossi, who was not his son, who was no one’s son, would fumble for his Swiss army knife, open the razor-sharp blade . . . and slice the rope in two.
When the conversation came to a lull, Lupita begged Miguel’s pardon and walked to her bedroom to check in on her patient. The stranger was sweating. Lupita looked into the man’s face, as if trying to solve the mystery of his life. She watched his closed eyelids quiver and wondered what torment he was reliving.
Lupita took a washcloth from the bedside table, dipped it in a basin of water, rung out the cloth, and dabbed it across the stranger’s face. She was shaking her head, when Miguel followed her into the room.
“What is it?” Miguel asked.
“I do not know,” she said. “That is the problem; I just do not know. What secrets does he hold? What sadness does he harbor?” Then, looking at Miguel, she added. “I do not know, Miguel, but I do know this. I will not abandon him now.”
Miguel started to speak and then, realizing there was no arguing with Lupita, censored himself and held his peace.
LUPITA AND MIGUEL RETURNED TO the terrace and found that Diego had already awakened from his nap.
“Well, do you want to hear this story or not?” Diego asked with feigned irritation.
“That depends,” Miguel said. “Are we going to hear about the stranger?”
Diego widened his eyes. “Yes, Señor Chief of Police, but all in good time.”
The date was September 10, 1936. In the opening weeks of the civil war, hundreds of Granada’s Republican sympathizers—union workers and intellectuals, mostly—had been executed or imprisoned. Cemetery records showed 572 executions for the month of August alone. It did not require much to be found guilty of treason against the Franco regime: failure to attend mass could do it, as could affiliation with a workers’ syndicate or communist association. Diego was guilty on all counts, and it frightened him.
He returned to work, but it was not the same without Juanito. His heart was out of it, and he began thinking that once his son was born (he was still sure he would have a son), he would take his family back to Espejo.
One night after work, Diego returned to the apartment and found Lupe lying in a cold sweat on the bed. He rushed to her side and turned pale; her white cotton dress and bed sheet were stained with blood.
“Something is wrong,” Lupe cried, her face distorted with fear and pain.
Diego tried to control the terror that was turning inside his gut. He leaned over his wife, brushing the ta
ngled hair from her face. “What should I do?”
“The baby is coming. We have to get to the hospital.”
“Can you move?”
“I have to.”
Leaning heavily on Diego, Lupe managed to right herself on the edge of the bed. She lifted herself to her feet and, with both hands cupped under her stomach, shuffled slowly across the room to the door. She was shoeless, and Diego remembered the first day he saw her working barefoot in the olive orchard. Those carefree days seemed so far away now.
At the door, Diego slipped Lupe’s feet into her sandals.
It was too painful to see his wife descend the stairs, so he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the street. “Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
The streets were deserted, as they had been every night since the beginning of the war; it was just too dangerous to be outside after dusk. But the couple had no choice. Slowly, they made their way to the hospital, which was almost two kilometers away.
At the hospital’s main entrance, Diego swept his wife into his arms and carried her up the steps and through the door to the front desk.
“Help us! Please, help us!”
Behind the desk was a nurse who flushed when she saw the man and wife. She started to stand, but was forcefully shoved back into her seat with the weight of a man’s hand on her shoulder.
That hand belonged to Francisco. “These people are communists,” the priest snapped. “There is no room for their kind here.”
“But, Father …”
“You heard me, nurse. Get them out of here.”
“Francisco, I am your brother!” Diego cried, straining under the load of his wife, who was now in and out of consciousness.
“You once said that I was dead to you. Now I say to you: ‘If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him.’ Get them out!”
The Awakening Page 7