by Kerry Postle
The sound of cats screaming and screeching outside pierced the night air.
He froze. Pulled away. He took her face in his hands and saw the reflection of the stars in her eyes as she looked up at the sky through the roofless hut. She was love, life and hope to him. He sat back. His passion, on the verge of getting out of hand, had been brought back under control. He wanted her but not like this, furtive, guilty. Like animals tearing at each other down some back alley.
He loved Maria. He had felt it for some time but not as clearly as he did now. He had wanted to meet with her this evening. He had something to tell her. He put his hand in his pocket to make sure the letter he’d written to her was still there.
‘Don’t you want me?’ she asked him, her body going limp with rejection. ‘Yes. No,’ he answered. ‘Not like this.’ He wanted to tell her he loved her but instead looked at her without saying another word. Her eyes were full of tears. He kissed them away. ‘Please take me home,’ she said.
By the time the couple had returned to the outskirts of the village Maria was silent with shame at what she saw as Luis’ rejection of her and Luis was weighed down by the heavy burden of the news that he still had to tell her. He pulled her down a quiet alley. He was running out of time.
‘We … I am being posted on tomorrow.’ He broke it to her bluntly. It was the only way.
Her hand stiffened within his. She pulled her head back as his lips kissed her hair. She became deaf to his words as he whispered, ‘I love you’. All she could think about was how he’d rejected her. She convinced herself that her actions had been motivated by love, not self-destruction, that he had turned her away. And now he was abandoning her.
‘When this is over – and I pray that it’s over soon – I will wait for you,’ he said, a sad smile on his lips. ‘One day, very soon, we will all be Spanish, no matter who wins.’
Maria did not reply. ‘I will wait for you forever,’ he said. And he meant it.
Maria shuddered with confusion, shook with unworthiness.
There was a call from another soldier somewhere in a nearby street. ‘Quick, take this,’ Luis whispered, thrusting a letter into her hand. ‘I beg you to read it the second you get home. Remember, you’re stronger than you know and one day you will prove it. Go now Maria! I’ll be waiting for you. Remember that. I’ll wait for you forever.’ He kissed her tenderly on the lips. It tasted of forever. But then he was gone.
Maria stood there, a solitary figure in the moonlight. Was that it? Was it all over? Maria shuddered with confusion, shook with unworthiness. She loved Luis, hated herself. Hated Luis, loathed herself. When she had offered herself to him he had spurned her. Her fingers brushed over her lips. Had his lied? She started to cry and walked unsteadily home, no longer caring whose prying eyes saw her. She’d killed Paloma. Lost Luis. And she’d failed to be the soldiers’ whore everyone thought she was. Maria despised herself at the very moment an arm draped itself firmly around her trembling shoulders. ‘Hey, Maria!’ She looked up to see the familiar face of the soldier Luis was regularly on patrol with. ‘Luis sent me to make sure you got home safely. Come here love, let’s get you back.’
She sank her head into his chest and he laughed. ‘Here, come and sit down for a minute or two. You can’t go in like that now, can you?’
The guardian sat down by her. He fondled her arm. Nuzzled the top of her head. She didn’t stop him. He brushed the front of her dress. Within seconds he was kissing her neck, his body drawing ever closer, his lips working their way to her mouth. ‘I’m off tomorrow,’ he said, as if that explained the way things were going.
‘Stop!’ she said. He felt her go stiff. Her hand shot up. ‘Not on the mouth.’
He hesitated, said, ‘So let’s get you home then.’
‘Don’t stop. No, don’t stop,’ she whispered. ‘Just don’t kiss me on the mouth.’ The taste of Luis’ lips were still upon hers.
‘Are you sure?’ he said. His concern very nearly brought her to her senses.
‘I want to have you give it to me like a real man,’ she said, reciting, as in a dream, words she’d heard on the radio. He winced for a moment but he did not need a second invitation. He slipped his hand up under her skirt. The soft warmth of her thighs made him shudder. The rough touch of his hands made her cringe. She closed her eyes until it was all over; when it was, she felt herself to be ridiculous.
She’d come out this evening with the intention of ruining herself. Well, she’d succeeded.
‘My, you’re a dark horse!’ he whispered. ‘Now you look after yourself, you hear me. Quick. Get yourself in,’ he said, going to give her a kiss but, seeing the look she shot him, thinking better of it. Instead he gave her a gentle tap on the backside to show his appreciation. She despised him for being human. She despised herself more for being a fool.
‘Oh, nearly forgot. Luis asked me to give you a message,’ the soldier said as he turned and walked away. ‘Read the letter.’
She slunk up the stairs. She pulled at her clothes, threw them on her bed. She washed herself. Over and over. To get rid of the smell. She brought her dress to her nose and sniffed it. She flung it down, ashamed, and as she did so she saw a folded piece of paper slip out of a pocket and onto the floor. The letter.
My darling Maria, it began.
She didn’t read any more. ‘It’s too late,’ she thought. ‘Words. What power is left to them when actions make them weak? Worthless?’ What was she to do?
She scrunched the letter up, threw it down on the floor; picked it back up, unscrunched it. By morning it was covered in ragged edged teardrops, the ink had run, the paper was crumpled, but still she couldn’t bear to read it. Instead, she folded it as neatly as she could and placed it between the covers of Don Quixote. She’d never been able to finish reading that either. But it was as big and as heavy as a doorstop.
Chapter 36
‘I need to go to Madrid,’ Maria announced the next morning. ‘You help everyone else to escape. I know. Why not me? And Madrid is where I can do something good. Meaningful. I have to …’ Before she had finished speaking the certainty in her voice trailed off at the sight of her father, his head slumped upon the kitchen table, hands folded over his ears. He raised his head, eyes heavy, scorching tears tracing the rough, deep wrinkles of his face, finally soaking into tufts of hair. Dark grey clumps stuck out from behind his ears. His shoulders shook. Her father looked like Maria felt. He’d been working things out all night.
He too had made a decision, and as he looked up at his daughter, standing there, looking as wretched as he felt, her copy of Don Quixote held to her chest, he knew it was the right one.
All night he’d been grieving. He’d come to love life in the village. He’d lived here with his Maria for nearly seventeen years. He’d come here with her mother. They’d wanted to escape the noise and bustle of the capital, to start again in a village where nobody knew them. In Madrid he had just finished his medical training. He had met Ines, Maria’s mother, and married her. But her family had never been happy with the match. He’d thought then that it was because they’d not believed him good enough for their daughter, but now that he had a daughter of his own he understood.
Life made things complicated.
Whenever he used to take Ines out her mother would urge caution. ‘Be careful … not too late … don’t tire her out …’ while her father would say, ‘Ines’, as if in that one word and tone of voice he didn’t need to say anything else. It was if they hadn’t trusted him to do the right thing, even when he and Ines had got married.
Alvaro had thought that would all change when they knew about the baby. That they would be happy for Ines, for him, overjoyed to be expecting a grandchild.
They weren’t.
But what had seemed bewildering then made some sort of sense now. Maturity, such a wonderful thing, a pity it had stripped the colour from his hair and gave him reason to loosen the belt around his belly.
Here, as he tried to work out
what to do for the best for his own daughter, he felt closer to his wife’s parents than ever before. Just as he, here in Fuentes, had been up all night going over how best to protect his daughter, so his wife’s parents must have wrestled with conflicting thoughts and emotions when trying to work out how best to protect their Ines.
That she’d not been well hadn’t been apparent to Alvaro when he’d first met his wife. That he’d not noticed how frail she was, how pale and slight, the vague discolouration around her eyes whenever she got the slightest bit tired, seemed strange to him now, particularly given that he was a doctor, but, at the time, all he saw was Ines, a vision of loveliness and youth. She’d suffered from polio as a child and, at times, as she grew into womanhood, her muscles would feel weak causing her great fatigue. She’d never told him.
The family doctor had advised against ever having a family. ‘To have a child might put her life at risk,’ he’d warned. But Ines hadn’t listened. She hadn’t told her husband either, even though, or perhaps because, he was a doctor.
She’d struggled with the pregnancy. She would never let him help. She didn’t want him to know she had problems, though they were plain for everyone, apart from the young Doctor Alvaro, to see. His love was most certainly blind.
And Ines would never speak to him about the birth, though he’d heard the screams through the thick stone walls.
She was never the same after that.
When his wife stopped speaking to her parents he’d sided with her. When she wanted to move away, he’d agreed. Yet he realised now that everything they’d said, everything they’d done, was out of love for her and concern for her safety.
They had attempted to make contact repeatedly over the years. They’d even made a trip from Madrid to the village just so they could watch Maria as she walked along the road. Doctor Alvaro had told them to go. But now it was time to forgive. And be forgiven. They’d done nothing wrong. They’d loved their daughter. They would love their granddaughter too.
Maria looked at her father as he stood up and walked towards her.
‘We will both be going to Madrid,’ he said. ‘Tonight. There’s a battalion of Nationalist soldiers leaving today. There won’t be many guards on patrol. The time is right for us.’
Maria’s stomach jumped. She grimaced as she remembered the night before. ‘I’ll go and pack,’ she said. Her father pulled on her arm. She looked back at him.
‘No,’ he said to her, sympathy in his eyes. ‘We won’t be taking anything with us. Say goodbye to it all now. Take one last look round.’
‘No clothes?’ Maria asked. He shook his head. ‘Just the ones you’re wearing. Nothing else.’ You, only you, he thought. You are my one jewel, my one precious thing.
Maria hugged her father, felt the bones beneath the skin, and squeezed tight, dropped her head upon his shoulder to hear the life force within, loud and vigorous despite the gnarled facade.
Richard had gone, again. Luis would be leaving soon. Now it was their turn. ‘I will go and see Paloma’s family,’ Maria said. Her father shook his head. ‘See Cecilia?’ she asked. ‘To say goodbye, see if she has any news of Manu.’
But ‘No’ her father said again. ‘You will see no one. No one at all.’ Because to be seen to be visited by any one of them, he knew, would be not a touching farewell bid to the people they loved but a bullet in the back of the heads of those left behind. ‘But they’ll think me heartless and uncaring!’ Maria complained. Her father said nothing. He moved to take his daughter’s outstretched hand. ‘Better to be thought heartless and uncaring,’ he said, ‘than to drape the ones left behind in suspicion.’ He gave his daughter’s fingers a squeeze. She squeezed his back. ‘They’ll be looked after, you know. Trust me.’
‘So delighted you’ve decided we’re going to Madrid,’ he said to Maria, with a tired grin on his face. ‘You’ll be able to put your energy to good use there.’ Doctor Alvaro smiled to himself as images played before his mind of Maria working in a workshop happily sewing uniforms; Maria smiled to herself as she imagined herself on top of a mountain waving a rifle in the air in victory shouting, ‘For Paloma!’
In reality she would do neither.
Doctor Alvaro looked at his daughter, so robust with her round smooth cheeks and her strong dark hair that fell in waves around her face, her fingers so solid and strong. Her grandparents would adore her. He thought of his poor dead wife, so small and fine. A flower whose delicate petals dropped too soon. He felt sorrow that he wouldn’t be bringing her back to Madrid with them.
Chapter 37
While Captain Garcia looked at Seňora Gonzalez’s latest addition to her list, Doctor Alvaro and his daughter were escaping under cover of night. The Captain had sent Seňor Gonzalez out for yet another glorified horse-ride with a local group of Falangists, supposedly patrolling the area for enemies of the Spanish people. The Captain had also sent most of his men on and was now tying up loose ends before he could join them the following day. The dangliest of these ends concerned the clean-up operation to rid the village of the remaining left-leaning scum. The initiative would continue. Captain Garcia was here writing up the running order. A bottle of wine and a mountain of cigarettes were on hand to advise him.
‘Well, my Seňora Gonzalez! Who have you put down on here?’ He sat back and smiled. Narrow-lipped. Cruel. He wondered, as he stroked himself, if he might come back and claim this magnificent woman one day. So the troublesome girl he’d met at the dinner at Cortijo del Bosque had crossed his hard-hearted woman one time too many, annoyed her enough to make her add her name to the top (‘the top!’ he laughed to himself) of her original list.
It would have to be the father that they went for first though, he said. Not that he had any qualms about picking up the daughter, it was simply that now wasn’t the time to poke at the open wound. It might stir up fresh blood and, with the troop numbers down in the village, he didn’t need that. But the girl’s time would come. Sooner or later.
He considered if he should get together a band of men and go and pick up the doctor now. He puffed on the cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth. He watched the smoke as it coiled its way to the ceiling, his face a crooked smile. It would be fun, he told himself. But there was no rush. The man was going nowhere. He had a daughter and patients to shackle him to the village, not to mention a conscience, the Captain thought derisively. Besides, the Captain had ordered Don Felipe’s boy to keep father and daughter under surveillance and he’d reported nothing untoward from his hours of observation.
He confidently added Alvaro’s name to his non-urgent list.
As Captain Garcia drained another bottle of wine (liquid gratitude from Don Felipe for everything you’ve done for Luis), so Alvaro and his daughter were waiting for a truck to pick them up and transport them to Madrid. That his daughter still clasped her copy of Don Quixote to her heart with one hand continued to puzzle the doctor. It also made his soul laugh. Of all the things to bring. That she used her other hand to stop her mother’s rings jangling against the enamel sunflower pendant whose chain they now shared he understood completely. Little tokens of loved ones lost.
Doctor Alvaro had arranged for them to be picked up on the track that led towards a run-down hut used by goatherds before the war. Maria knew it well. They were to wait near the old olive tree, the one that had been uprooted years ago and now looked as if it had always been there. The two of them sat, their backs against the length of its wide, rough trunk and waited in silence as they listened to gunfire crackling in the distance and watched flashes like shooting stars lighting up the night sky. Far away. Maria shivered, though the night was warm and heavy. Alvaro put his arms around her. Her teeth chattered with something like shock.
Then came the sound of a motor.
Doctor Alvaro peered over the top of the fallen tree trunk and watched as a truck appeared out of the darkness, its headlamps turned off though the glass still caught in the moonlight. He waited until he could make out the face of t
he driver. He recognised him. He tugged on his daughter’s shawl. ‘It’s ours,’ he said.
They climbed up into the back to find four goats and seven people already there, squashed together in a small space, sitting on the few belongings they’d managed to bring with them. They were no doubt from one of the surrounding villages but neither Doctor Alvaro nor his daughter thought to ask. They were all refugees together now, all headed for the capital. They wouldn’t be returning to where they came from any time soon. Maria managed a weak smile, then sat, wedged in between her father and an old woman with a broken tooth, holding on to her book as if it were about to be prised away.
As the truck picked its way along secondary roads and stuttered down cart tracks, its human cargo within remained silent. Maria thought of Luis. She’d never met anyone with a soul as pure and beautiful as his. She drew her book into herself, closed her eyes and allowed her mind to revisit their moments together. Away from the complications of the outside world it didn’t matter that they were on different sides because inside they were the same. The memories touched her soul and transported her to a place where everything was blissful. Last night he’d told her he’d loved her. She knew that she loved him too.
The truck hit a large stone. Maria shifted sideways. A pain brought back to her how she’d betrayed him. She wasn’t the same as him after all. The rest of the journey she went over all the terrible things she had done. She struggled to make sense of them all. She’d thought herself so clever, so good, so much better than everyone else. But even the love she felt to be so pure was itself forbidden. Well, she was punished for it now. She looked around the truck hoping to find distraction. But no one looked back at her. No one made a sound. Even as the sun came up and birds broke into song only the goats replied.