I am Venus

by Barbara Mujica

  I close my eyes and I can see them. Even though this all happened decades ago, images of those battered soldiers still haunt my dreams. Their wailing still rings in my ears.

  I did talk to them sometimes, even though I knew it wasn’t the proper thing to do. A woman—I should say a lady accompanied by her maid—had no business talking to maimed old men. (They looked like old men, even though some of them couldn’t have been more than thirty.) But I am Venus. I break rules.

  His name was Carlos. Or perhaps it wasn’t. You shouldn’t ever trust what people say—you can’t even trust your own eyes. That’s one thing I learned from Velázquez. People can dress like counts and claim to have titles, when all they are is pícaros, street scum. Anyhow, I called him Carlos. He was one of so many men strewn on the steps like bundles of garbage. Compared to many, he was lucky—he had both his hands and both his legs, both his eyes and both his ears. I didn’t know if he had both his balls, but I imagined so. I almost stepped on his fingers one day on my way to the mentidero. He was leaning on one hand, holding a bota with cheap wine in the other.

  “Písame, no más,” he snarled. “Go ahead and walk all over me.”

  I apologized. He burped.

  We got to talking. It was unseemly, to be sure, but those men had memories, and I was eager to know Carlos’s story. It wasn’t the first time the men on the steps of San Felipe had seen me in conversation with one of their comrades. Some of them recognized me—some even nodded and smiled, or perhaps, grimaced would be a better word. But Carlos never smiled. He was angry—even enraged. Enraged and melancholic. He lashed out at people, then sank into sullenness. I wanted to know what was behind all that fury. I knew he had fought in Flanders. He had seen action. He had killed men and was proud of it. “Heretics!” he snarled. “Heretics who set fire to Catholic churches where innocent women and children were praying!” People who did such evil things deserved to die, he said. They captured Catholics, and then impaled and disemboweled them. He had seen the bloodless heads of his countrymen atop poles in town squares. He whimpered as he cursed them. “Bastards! Protestant vermin!”

  Even when the money from the Crown stopped flowing, the men kept on fighting. What else could they do? There was no food, no firewood, no new ammunition. But they fought on. They marched, marched in the driving snow, their teeth chattering, their soaked uniforms sticking to their bodies, lumbering northward toward the Dutch territories.

  “It was so cold that the piss froze on the horses’ dicks,” he said. “So cold some of us dropped to our knees and prayed death would take us right there, right then. All we wanted was to drift into sleep, slowly and gently. First, your fingers and toes go numb, then your hands and feet. Your breathing slows down and you lose consciousness and then you freeze. I’ve seen it happen, and it couldn’t be worse than having your head shattered by a bullet. Or starving.”

  I knelt beside him. Decent people stared. A lady kneeling on the steps! It was an outrage!

  “Were you really starving?”

  He looked at me as though I were an idiot.

  “Why did you join up in the first place?” I asked him.

  “How else can a poor man get ahead? I didn’t want to be a farmer like my father. To break your back working another man’s land? My father left Soria when he was a young man. Made his way south to Andalusia to get work in the orange groves. But he died of disease. I didn’t want to relive his life. A good fighter can get a promotion, move up, make something of himself. Only it’s impossible to be a good fighter when you haven’t eaten for days and have no bullets for your gun.

  “I joined when I was twelve. At first, it was fine. Noblemen were still leading the charge. It was a matter of honor for the great families to have a son or two in command of a regiment. And where there are nobles, there’s food and shelter for their troops. So I joined to get ahead and, ha!, to keep from starving. Funny, isn’t it! I joined to keep from starving and wound up starving. Life is so stupid.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “In the beginning there was always food. The nobleman saw to it that his commanders and their men were well fed. And then, occasionally you’d ravage a town and take whatever you wanted. Food, money, girls to fuck, animals to slaughter … But then the great families no longer had money to support a regiment. The nobles lost interest. One by one they abandoned the fight. And then there were just poor slobs in command. Poor slobs who had risen in the ranks but who didn’t have powerful families behind them. Slobs no better than me. And the king—what can you expect from the king? He has no money. What he has, he spends on the campaign in Italy.”

  “But what about your pension?”

  “Yes, yes, we’re all supposed to have one. But it’s not for deserters.”

  “You …?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He sat with his head between his hands. I could see his eyes were bloodshot. He kept swallowing saliva over and over again, as though his throat were so dry he needed to lubricate it. I thought he had forgotten I was there. I was about to get up when he began to speak again.

  “We were marching north. I was so hungry that my head was pounding. I could hear the drums … brmmm brmmm … and it was as though they were battering my brain. We were so hungry that when we slept—which was almost never because it’s almost impossible to sleep when your guts are screaming with hunger—but when we did manage to sleep, our jaws moved up and down, up and down. We chewed our saliva, dreaming of food. Sometimes I’d watch my comrades gnawing at their tongues in their sleep and I’d want to bludgeon them to put them out of their misery. You don’t want to hear this story, señora. What’s a lady like you want to hear this story for? Go on and gossip with other damas in fluffy skirts.”

  “Go on. You were marching. The drums were beating.”

  “In the distance I saw a farmhouse. I said to the guy next to me, my pal Vivaldo, ‘Let’s go. We can be there and back in a half hour. Then we can catch up with the others.’ ‘They’ll shoot us,’ he said. ‘Not if they don’t catch us,’ I answered.”

  “So you took off and never came back.”

  “You already know the story, lady? Then you tell it and I’ll just lie here and chug my drink.”

  “No, I’m sorry. Please go on.”

  “It was hard going in the snow. Curtains of white opened and closed depending on the wind. Sometimes we could see the house in the distance, and sometimes we couldn’t. As we drew nearer, it became more steadily visible. We trudged on and on for what seemed like hours. Finally we reached it. Vivaldo checked to see if there was a back door, but there wasn’t. The front door was locked, but not bolted. We kicked it open, the way we always did. We had plenty of experience. When we took a village, we spread out in front of the houses. Then we just kicked in doors and hauled out the people. Sometimes we shot them, but usually we let them run away. Then we just took what we wanted.”

  “Was there anybody inside?”

  “There was no one. Maybe they saw us coming and hid. I don’t know. Maybe they were out attending to the animals. Even in a storm, animals have to eat, you know. In Flanders the animals eat better than Spanish soldiers. Anyhow, I didn’t see anyone. If there’d been a woman, I swear I would’ve raped her. But I didn’t see a soul. There were four loaves of bread on the table.”

  “And you took them.”

  “Yes, we took them. Vivaldo took two and hid them under his rags, and I took the other two. Then we set out toward the road.”

  “Did you reach your platoon?”

  “We were plodding along. The drifts were so high, they were like barricades. We made it back to the road, though, the warm loaves pressing against our bodies. They felt so good, like a heating stone. And the aroma, how can I describe it? Like the scent of vanilla candles at Christmastime. Like heaven itself. The snow started to let up a bit, and we turned in the direction our men had taken. There was no one around. No sound. No shadow.

  “Suddenly a child appea
red. He was standing right in our path—a blond boy, ragged and tired-looking. He had a face like a cherub, but he had snot coming out of his nose and he was hacking like he had consumption. His lips were bloody from the cough. But no, he was a pretty child in spite of all that. Something about him reminded me of the sea. Big green eyes, so deep you could swim in them. Skin as pale as sand. A merman, that’s what he was. As beautiful and seductive as a mermaid, except he was a boy. There was something eerie about him. Something almost—I don’t know, translucent. He was shivering horribly.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Maybe eight or ten. He was so blond. I’ve never seen hair so fair on a child. It was like white gold, the way it glistened.”

  “So you gave him your bread!”

  “You know what, lady, if you already know the story, get the hell out of here and let me drink myself dumb!”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Please go on.”

  He closed his eyes, trying to remember. He didn’t speak again until I started to get up because I was sure he’d fallen asleep.

  “He was staring at us,” Carlos said finally. “At Vivaldo and me. At the loaves of bread that were peeping out through our shirts.”

  I sat back down.

  “His eyes were glued to our torsos. Those enormous, emerald, watery eyes. He was working his mouth, salivating and swallowing spit, the way soldiers do in their sleep. He kept staring, staring. I was sure he was going to lunge. He took a step towards me, as if to grab my loaves.”

  I held my breath. Carlos began to tremble. He thrust out his arm like a wild man. His hand slapped the air, as if he had no control of it.

  “We’d trudged all the way to hell and back for those loaves. I wasn’t going to give up mine, not even to a kid with a face like a sea sprite. I reached out to shove him away, but he was quicker. He sprang at me. He had something in his hand—I saw it flickering in the white morning glare. It was a knife!”

  Tears were trickling down Carlos’s jowl. His whole body was quivering.

  “He was almost on top of me, at no more than a finger’s distance. He drew back his elbow for the plunge. I thought I was a dead man. And then suddenly, inexplicably, he fell back into the snow.”

  Carlos paused, took a breath, shuddered, and then went on. “I stared at him. He was nothing but a crumpled mass of brains and blood. ”

  I inhaled sharply. “What?” I whispered.

  “Vivaldo saw the blade before I did. He raised his sword and split the kid’s skull open like a pomegranate. His face was no longer a face. Blood oozed everywhere. It seeped into the snow. It formed little puddles, then, like juice seeping into a flavored ice, disappeared under the surface. Crimson, vermillion, pink, lighter and lighter until it almost blended into the white of the snow. I stared at the crumpled form. I couldn’t force myself to move. I just stood there, frozen.”

  I didn’t say anything about it at that moment, but Carlos’s description of the fading color of blood seemed bizarrely precise.

  “Vivaldo wiped his sword in the snow. Then he gave me a push. ‘Get going,’ he hissed. ‘We have to get out of here.’ ‘But the kid!’ I said. ‘We can’t just leave him on the road!’ ‘Why not? It’s just one more dead heretic! We’ve killed plenty of these bastards before. What difference does one more make?’ I let him drag me along the road. I could feel urine trickling out of my body and freezing on my leg. It burned and made me want to scream. ‘I can’t,’ I cried. ‘I can’t go on!’ ‘You have to go on, asshole!’ I sucked back sobs. I felt as though I had a lump of coal smoldering in my throat. ‘But what about his mother? What if she finds him like that?’ ‘For Christ’s sake!’ snarled Vivaldo. ‘He’s just Protestant scum. He was going to rot in hell anyhow. He was dying of consumption, or didn’t you notice? I did him a favor, spared him a lot of suffering.’

  “I tripped along until we could see our men in the distance. They were heading toward a wood, probably to rest in a more concealed area. It had stopped snowing, and the ground was a smooth sheet of ice that glistened in the frail winter sunlight. I felt as though I were walking on a mirror. My reflection moved before me, a formless blotch of indistinct color. I am dead, I thought. I am a ghost, like all the other ghosts that float over this blood-soaked, godforsaken land.

  “‘Eat that bread,’ snapped Vivaldo.

  “I didn’t want to eat it. I was ravenous, but the image of that child discharging his brains into the snow made me nauseous.

  “Vivaldo insisted: ‘Eat it now. If the others see it, they’ll grab it away from you. Not only that, they’ll know we broke rank.’ The plan was to slip back into the formation without being noticed, but the bread would be a giveaway that we’d been gone.

  “He was already tearing into his, pulling out fat chunks and stuffing them into his mouth. I felt as though I were seeing it through a haze. I wanted to vomit. ‘Eat!’ he snarled. ‘Or I’ll eat mine and yours, too.’

  “I choked it down. It felt like raw dough in my stomach. My gut tightened as we hurried our step. I wanted to take a crap, but there was no time. Finally, we caught up with our men. No one said anything about our being gone.

  “Images of the child’s mother flashed through my mind. I imagined her blond and emerald-eyed, like her son. Her horror when she found him, her screams, her wails. What if he were an only child? He was sick, it’s true, but maybe he would have recovered. Maybe he would have brought her solace in her old age. Maybe he wanted to steal my bread for her. Poor kid. Sure, he was a Protestant, but he was just a child … What did he know about the sanctity of the pope and the intercession of saints and all that stuff? Suddenly the sermons of the priests, about how Protestants were going to hell because they didn’t believe in transubstantiation seemed—I don’t know. I know it’s a sin to say it, but it all seemed senseless.” Carlos was weeping again, softly, pitifully.

  “Rest a while,” I whispered. I wanted to put my hand on his, but didn’t dare, not because of the scandal it would provoke, but because he would have felt diminished to be comforted by a woman. After all, he was a man, a soldier, a Spaniard.

  “No,” he sighed miserably. “I’ve told it this far. Better just to get it all out.” He took a swig and then went on.

  “When we got to the woods, we took a break. Then we formed ranks and resumed our march northward. Some men were so famished that they fainted. We stepped over them and left them to their fate. I was so numb from the cold I couldn’t see straight. The backs of the soldiers in front of me seemed to blend together and quiver, as though seen through glass. I wished I would collapse, so that I could just die on the road. Vivaldo, on the other hand, seemed refreshed.

  “We marched and marched. I lost track of the days. When we finally came to a village, we kicked in doors, raped the farm girls, and replenished our provisions.” Carlos shook his head. “My heart wasn’t in it, though. I wanted to go home.”

  I stifled the urge to ask him if that was when he deserted. “Where was home?” I asked instead.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “After my father died, my mother went to live in Seville. Maybe she’s still there.” He was calm now. His breath was even, controlled.

  I wanted to ask his mother’s name, but it seemed silly. Seville is a huge city, and there was no way I would know the mother of this poor soldier.

  “We must have been fairly close to the border when suddenly we heard the pounding of hooves and the shriek of men in agony. Our men. Blood was spurting all around me, and curses sliced the air. Fighters in the front lines fell back. Horses lay on the snow, their legs churning, their insides oozing from gaping wounds in their sides. The Dutch were skilled at ambush, and our men were too weak to fight. I saw Vivaldo parry and lunge, then stumble and crumple almost comically, a sword stuck hideously in his heart. A Dutch soldier pulled it out and then whacked off his head.

  “I was trembling. Every part of my body wanted to move in a different direction. I felt like a broken puppet. I took a step
backward, then another, then another. I was watching the Dutch soldier to see if he would come after me. At first I thought he didn’t see me, that his mind was set on lopping off the heads of fallen Spaniards. But then I caught his eye, yellow, like a tiger’s—or the way I imagine a tiger’s eye must be, anyway. He was staring at me, and he looked ready to pounce. I felt trapped in his gaze like startled prey. I tried to take another step backward, but my legs were frozen. His tiger’s eyes were focused on my coward’s eyes, my deserter’s eyes. I was sure he was going to spring.

  “But he must have decided I wasn’t worth the effort because he only sneered, threw back his head, and turned away. In a moment he was back in the fray.

  “Paralyzed, I forced myself to focus on the gore before me. I knew it was only seconds before some other Dutchman caught sight of me and ran me through. I turned and ran. I ran as fast as I could with my wooden legs on the frozen ground. Behind me I heard the thumping of boots. ‘I can’t slip,’ I kept telling myself. ‘I can’t fall. They’re right behind me.’

  “My knees throbbed. My blistered feet screamed with pain. Still, I ran. I ran and ran and ran until the hurt began to dissipate. Finally, I felt nothing. My whole body was numb. I stopped in my tracks. ‘Let them kill me,’ I whispered. ‘I’d rather be dead.’ I turned to face my enemy. There was no one there.