by Kerry Postle
The droning stopped. The fly, black and plump, landed on the small round wooden table next to Maria. A smile travelled across her face. One of the few she’d given since she’d last met up with Paloma. She lifted her arm up. Smack. Her hand came swiftly down. She must have hit the fly, though she thought it strange that she felt no ooze of guts spread across her palm. She lifted her hand slowly to see. No death was upon it.
Her eyes scanned the dimly lit room. She would not grant the fly a second chance.
Then it came. The buzzing. She turned her head in its direction. There it was, tracing circles on the windowpane. Though heavy in the heat, Maria jumped to her feet. This time she was armed. The instinct to kill was rapid. She peeled her notebook away from the glass. She thanked God. The blood smear upon it was deeply satisfying, certainly far more so than any mark she’d yet managed to make inside.
But her gratitude to the Almighty was to be short lived.
If the moment Maria took a deep breath in she was to feel elation at a foe defeated, the very instant she exhaled, all joy would melt away. On the turn of air in her body so sound trampled her entire being: the beating of drums pounded within her head, the one-two, one-two stamping of soldiers’ boots pummelled her lungs, disturbing cheers of jubilation tore at her heart. She wrapped her arms around her ears. In self-defence. Denial.
Either way it was useless. It was too late.
She’d hoped to see Paloma. Now she knew she would not. The returning soldiers’ cheers sent lightning through every fibre of her body, tracing its way to pierce her very soul. Needing but the merest of sparks to ignite, once lit the truth was unstoppable.
She looked at the squashed fly on the window in front of her.
Moving to the side, she took care to keep in the shadows, from where she watched, transfixed by the sight below. There they were, soldiers of the civil guard, defiling the streets of her beloved Fuentes.
Needles stabbed at her heart as she brought to mind the first time she’d seen them. These men. These fine Spanish men. Many young, attractive, neat haircuts, clean uniforms, polished boots. She cursed them, cursed herself.
Fuentes had surrendered to them peacefully 19th July. Was it really such a short time ago? So much had happened since then, though Maria recalled the day with excruciating clarity. And shame.
Alvaro was running through Richard Johnson’s departure details for the second time. That he’d already gone through them in less pressing circumstances several weeks before irked him. The older man was about to ask why in God’s name the fool had willingly returned into the devil’s mouth when he heard it. A noise. Like thunder ripping the very sky asunder. The sound of boots crushing souls beneath them. Marching. Relentlessly. In time. An unstoppable war machine whipping up a storm of destruction. Getting closer. And closer.
Maria.
He rushed in to see her, leaning out of the window. She’d wanted to see Paloma for so long and now the soldiers were returning, the soldiers who had taken her. Paloma was coming home at last.
The marching grew louder and louder. It was Richard Johnson who pulled Maria away from the window, out of sight. Each one of them, Maria, Richard Johnson, Doctor Alvaro, waited in silence, their heads battling with images of women conjured up by stories they’d heard. Women with faces stained with tears; with shaven heads, torn clothes; made to drink castor oil, humiliated. Maria covered her eyes at the thought of what Paloma must surely have become. To look unscathed after such an ordeal, that would be impossible.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t stay looking out of the window?’ her father said to her, wanting to protect his daughter from the distress of seeing, as well as Paloma from the anguish of being seen. Paloma would be back with her family soon enough, what difference did it make that Maria would be able to say that she had witnessed her homecoming?
Doctor Alvaro went to close the shutters, but fear electrified his daughter’s body, melting it into the slats and rendering it immobile. She had to stand and stare, even though she screamed inside with dread at the thought of what she might see. ‘I owe it to Paloma,’ she told her father as she freed herself from Richard’s grasp and made herself ready.
Though no amount of preparation could have anticipated the grotesque carnival that would soon play out before her eyes in the streets below.
Boots clapped deafeningly. They were so close Maria could feel the dust stamped up in the air, feel it on her lips. And she could see rifles, parading rifles, their pointed tips erect, decorated with tattered flags. Shaken up and down, the flags fluttered, like damaged butterflies, their wings matted and torn. Maria looked on.
A tattered butterfly flag flew free from the tip of a soldier’s rifle. It landed on the powder dry earth, its frayed edges now still. She looked at it, concerned. It took only the time needed for Maria to blink for her to understand what she was looking at. At first glance she saw only a tattered flag waving from a rifle, the next, lying still on the ground, she saw … She wouldn’t, couldn’t let herself believe it. Oh, the shame. The reaction was immediate. Vitriol stung the back of her throat. She fought to swallow it back but it bubbled up again as if to choke her. It pumped out of her mouth. Tears burst the banks of her eyes. While her nostrils secreted a mixture of both. She wiped a sleeve across her face, smearing tears, mucus and vomit across her cheek, matting her hair, clinging to her clothes. She blinked away the veil of tears and forced herself to see with knowing eyes. Her father tried to pull Maria to him. But she would not move away.
The true glory of war. There it was. She forced herself to contemplate it as it erupted outside. Regimented, organised, proud. The army marched below her window in time, torn, bloodstained undergarments attached to their rifles, the undergarments, Maria knew, of the very women they’d taken away only a few days ago. Were these the spoils of war?
The second she saw the bloodied rags she knew she was never going to see Paloma again. Instead she scoured the warrior faces of the returning troops for signs of guilt. She found none. Satisfaction. Hilarity. Pride. Scorn. They were all there. But guilt? Not a sign of it. The closest she could pick out was indifference, there, on the face of the young boy on the other side, possibly shock.
Revulsion turned to anger, uncontrollable, strong. It seized her every sinew, wracked her body so that it shook. Her father reached out to calm her, but his hands were tired and no match for the strength of the violent convulsions that had taken over his daughter’s body. ‘Come away Maria! Please. Come away!’ Richard pleaded with her, his own mind on fire with the anguish Paloma’s family would soon be thrown into.
But Maria was deaf to all entreaties. She was in the grip of an overwhelming urge to propel herself forward, to fling herself over the balcony, to throw herself in the midst of the murderous monsters marching outside. She had to denounce them. She would surely be killed. And she didn’t care.
As she went to lunge, Richard Johnson’s hand grabbed her firmly by the arm and held her back, while her father’s hand, stronger now, clamped itself effectively across her vomit coated mouth, stopping the scream. Maria would not be shining brightly with the flame of truth just yet.
Together they led her to the sofa on the other side of the room. She collapsed. Her father held her in his arms as she wept. This audacious Daniel would not be walking into the lion’s den today.
‘There are times when it’s right to denounce evil,’ her father said to her as he stroked his daughter’s hair. ‘There are other occasions when it is better to watch and wait,’ he said calmly. ‘The fires will always be waiting, burning, for these perpetrators of evil in their own special circle of hell,’ he said, his hands now stroking his daughter’s cheek with love.
‘They should be punished!’ Maria sobbed, pulling away from him. She reached out for her blood smeared notebook and flung it across the room. Writing! What use would that be now?
‘And they will be,’ her father said, ‘but now is not the time and you are not in any position to do it,’ Doctor Alvaro sigh
ed. His daughter’s life had been hard won. Her fragile mother had given everything, everything, to give birth to her. He wasn’t going to let her throw it away so lightly. He resolved to dig deep. He looked at Richard Johnson. He heard the stamp of boots. He didn’t have much time.
Chapter 31
‘Poor Lola.’ It was Richard Johnson who was the first person in the room to think of anyone in Paloma’s family. ‘Poor Cecilia,’ Doctor Alvaro sighed, a close second, his voice heavy with sadness. ‘First Manu, now this. I must go to them,’ he said. Richard went to get up too. ‘No,’ the older man told him. ‘I would be happier if you stayed here. For now.’ And with that he was gone.
The parade of soldiers had long since passed but Maria’s anguish had not. She still lay on the sofa, a molten mess bubbling away into the cushions, but her violent sobs had subsided into soft whimpers. Soon, Richard hoped, she would be falling, exhausted, into sleep. The light was fading, the incoming shade ushering a drop in temperature. Maria slipped slowly away. Richard Johnson watched her as she slept. Maria shook. The English boy went to fetch a cover.
His mind was in a mess. He wanted to be with Lola when Doctor Alvaro broke the news to her and her mother. She would need him. To think how devastated she would be made his heart ache. Yet to think of his Lola, the one with the cheeky smile and the way she said ‘Richard Johnson’, her voice so unapologetically Spanish as to not even try to pronounce her r’s and j’s in the English way, made that very same heart do somersaults of delight. He shuffled awkwardly. Pure feelings tainted by images of barbarism. To feel desire with the memory of such brutality still fresh in his head made him disgusted with himself. Maria made a snuffling sound that distracted him from his thoughts. Poor Maria. He felt she sensed his feelings for Lola, but he had not yet spoken to her about them. He’d wanted to tell her, say the words, about Lola. But he wouldn’t be able to tell her now.
The door opened then closed. Maria’s father had returned. The man looked ill, shrunken. Compassion had drained him, truth had left weals on his soul and his body. He nodded at Richard.
‘You’re leaving tonight,’ he said to Richard.
‘But I …’ He was about to say that he couldn’t. He was thinking he had to see Lola, when Doctor Alvaro repeated, in a tone not to be argued with, ‘Tonight.’ The older man went into his study. There were things he needed to do.
Chapter 32
Cecilia wore black.
And, with the return of the soldiers, so grief scraped its indelible mark into the heart of the town. It scratched away at Fuentes leaving an open wound which its gnarled fingers and broken finger nails would not allow to scab over. The town screamed deep and low from the pit of its soul and the dust in the streets throbbed in the heat, the dry-flaky skin of a dying animal.
No one came and explained. Said sorry. Broke the news to the families of the missing wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. But they knew. Bloodied undergarments waved in barbaric victory were there for all to see. Even neighbours were afraid to be seen to console them. Only the brave, like Doctor Alvaro and Father Anselmo came to make sure they were surviving as to see if they were fine would be to ask the impossible: they would never be fine again.
The Captain put a curfew in place. Oh, there had been curfews before, but this one was to be strictly adhered to. If any disgruntled peasant was going to vent their spleen at being down a woman, better they do it during the hours of daylight when they could be seen and shot. They would be shot at night as well of course, but the cloak of darkness might allow them to wreak some havoc of their own first. They were so loyal to one another, some of these villagers. The Captain, after ‘consulting’ with Seňora Gonzalez, agreed that soon it might be time to call on the help of some of the more observant citizens to keep an eye out for possible problems.
However, the imposition of any curfew was an unnecessary step, at least for the women. They had, understandably, issued a self-imposed curfew that extended to the daytime too. They stayed at home, only venturing out for matters of life and death.
‘This village looks more like a prison with each passing day,’ the Captain said, without the slightest trace of irony, as he followed Seňora Gonzalez into her house the first day after the soldiers had returned. She was out and about for all to see. She felt no solidarity with the other women in the village.
Garcia gave a low growl, appreciating from behind the soft folds of the woman’s pinned up hair and the delightful way she went so audaciously in at the waist and so fulsomely out at the hips which she accentuated with the swinging rhythm of her walk. He’d been looking forward to his meeting with Seňora Gonzalez all week and it hadn’t taken much to get her husband out of the way. Give him a horse and a band of Falangists to ride round the country with looking for communist scum for a day or two and Senor Gonzalez was more than happy. Senora Gonzalez affected a laugh by way of an homage to the Captain’s wit which encouraged him to dig around in the limited word bank that was his mind for something to say that she might find wittier still.
‘Where have all the women gone? Did my troops take that many of them away?’ he guffawed as he followed her inside her house and sat himself down on a chair, slapping his thigh with self-congratulation as he did so. Seňora Gonzalez blanched. Why did he have to do that? she asked herself. Not even she, in all consciousness, could carry on supporting the Captain if he openly boasted about what had happened. Well, at least he was inside, where only she could hear him. She swallowed hard, told herself repeatedly he was only joking, that none of it was true. She put it down to bad taste then clicked back into seductress mode. She feigned a tinkly laugh and placed her hand on Captain Garcia’s shoulder. He placed his hand on top of hers. The weekly meeting had begun.
Chapter 33
Life was to carry on as normal. Shops would conduct their business as before, labourers would work on the farms, take in the crops, feed the animals, the school would stay open, villagers would go to church, people would get married, children would get confirmed, and the priest would preach that God’s foot soldiers had arrived. There were several drawbacks to the Captain’s plan – one in relation to the school was that the teacher had disappeared, and another was that most of the villagers didn’t trust their self-appointed, self-anointed saviours. People moved quickly from home to work, work to home, never hanging round for fear of being apprehended by trigger-happy soldiers who had developed a taste for shooting people down at random whenever they’d wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.
It had been Seňora Gonzalez’s idea to have soldiers shadow Doctor Alvaro. He’d not made it on to her original list but of late there was something about him that caused Seňora Gonzalez’s eyes to narrow. Whispering into the Captain’s ear at one of their first meetings, it hadn’t taken much for him to agree that the Alvaro man was worth keeping an eye on, doctor or no doctor. He was a man with a conscience and in the battle for Spain a conscience was an indulgence they could ill afford.
Luis was the soldier assigned to the task. Garcia’s attempts to ‘make a man’ of Don Felipe’s son had failed miserably. The boy had even dared to challenge his captain. That was why Luis was handpicked to stand and watch the doctor’s house, then follow him whenever he went out. When the time came, and Garcia believed that it would be sooner rather than later, then it would fall to the landowners’ boy to go and give the doctor his final call.
Garcia could tell the boy didn’t like what he’d been asked to do, and this satisfied him no end. A reliable source had informed the Captain while in bed with him the other afternoon that the doctor had been instrumental in helping the Espinoza brothers escape. The spoilt Luis could have nothing in his arsenal to argue against that.
Alvaro had spotted the boy the moment his surveillance had started. He recognised him instantly as the soldier who’d dragged the three brothers out of harm’s way; as the landowners’ son; as the soldier who’d let Manu escape; and as the boy who had his daughter’s heart. He hardened his own again
st him. This boy, no matter what he thought of him personally, was his enemy. And that he’d been posted outside to spy on him confirmed the fact. Alvaro could not afford to let his guard down in these exceptional, dangerous times.
Chapter 34
Cecilia would not take to her bed even though what was left of her family wished she would. Instead she would walk outside, the only one, apart from Seňora Gonzalez, who still did. Soldiers looked at her as she passed them, a dishevelled, plump woman, her eyes distracted, as if looking for something or someone that was just out of reach. She never looked back at them. For her they did not exist. Her mind was so cluttered she had got lost in it and rarely surfaced to make contact with the world around. The only place that gave her peace was the church and so that was where she would take herself every day. She would open the door and stand there in the entrance, a small, round, black silhouette against the blinding sunlight. Then she would walk into the cool darkness and stagger to a seat where she would sit, sometimes for hours, crying and talking to Mary about losing a child. Possibly two. ‘Oh Manu … oh, my Paloma. Are you there?’ she would ask, looking into the shadows. Then she would ramble on unintelligibly, sometimes making cradling movements as though carrying a baby in her arms, sometimes crying, often both. ‘Oh, an infant. I don’t know anymore … Lola … my Lola …’
Father Anselmo would sit with her when he could and listen to the outpourings of a shattered mind and when she was ready to leave he would lead her home tenderly, a shepherd with a lost sheep, back to the fold where what was left of her broken family waited.