by Kerry Postle
‘Oh please, you must come,’ Maria insisted. ‘I think you’ll love it. It’s called A Night at the Opera featuring the Marx Brothers. I’ve heard it’s funny.’
‘Well …’
When it had been ascertained that the curfew didn’t start until eleven and that bombs weren’t going to stop Madrileňos from going about their normal business and that yes, Maria did know where the nearest air raid shelters were, her grandmother eventually said yes.
*
It was early evening and Maria was waiting for her grandmother in the hall. Thoughts of Luis’ letter had made her head ache and now she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d done to betray him. With the changes she could no longer deny were happening to her body, soon her shame would be visible for all to see. She started to pace.
Isabel was still in her bedroom, rummaging around the bottom of her jewellery box. She anticipated a special night out with her granddaughter and it would turn out to be all the more so if only she could find the blasted ring.
There.
Isabel rushed down the stairs as quickly as her frail legs would allow. She dropped a small velvet box into her bag, the one decorated with fabric sunflowers. She threaded a fragile arm through her granddaughter’s. Her heart sang with joy. She had resigned herself to never knowing Maria and now here she was, arm in arm with this beautiful, precious life. Tonight, she would prove herself to be the grandmother Maria needed.
The evening sky was bright and clear and there was not a hint of a breeze or a chill in the air. The streets were pleasantly busy and both Isabel and Maria floated along them, buoyed by their own thoughts. Isabel patted her granddaughter’s hand. She knew Maria’s secret. It would be all right. Everything would be all right. Isabel had come up with a plan. Maria could wear her ring (her hand moved instinctively over her bag to make sure it was still there). She could tell people that her husband was fighting at the front. Or had been killed. As she preferred. Isabel was going to find it difficult to bring the matter up but she was determined to do so, for her granddaughter’s sake.
Maria’s hand brushed over the front of her skirt instinctively. A voice in her grandmother’s head shouted, ‘Now!’.
She pulled Maria to a standstill. Her fingers fumbled around the infinite folds in her floral bag. Preoccupied, she didn’t notice the searing noise crackling through the sky above.
Maria did. She looked around. No one was rushing, everyone was simply making their way slowly to the entrance of the underground station in the corner of the square. This was the well-heeled Salamanca district of Madrid. Franco had sworn never to bomb it. The planes were passing over on their way to causing havoc elsewhere. ‘Es nada!’ somebody cried. Nothing. Nothing at all.
The noise above grew louder. Drew closer. Maria looked up: German Heinkel 52 fighters. So low she could make out the swastikas on the wings. Then its metal jaws yawned open dropping its deadly contents on the people below. Panic, like wildfire, swept through the people. Mechanical screams pierced the air. Painful. Deafening.
‘One of them’s been hit. Come on!’ a couple said, running past, beckoning the two women to join them. But Maria was transfixed. She watched as flames trailed from the injured plane that roared and screamed around in the sky like a wounded animal. It made a disturbing and dazzling spectacle as it fought to stay up. It started to spin out of control. Even as her grandmother pulled at her Maria couldn’t tear herself away.
She remembered seeing Isabel fall against a wall as she herself was thrown to the ground by the strength of the blast. She put her hand out to break the fall but rubble fell away beneath sending her splayed out across the floor. ‘I’m fine. Really. Quite fine,’ she said, looking over at her grandmother but as she got to her feet she felt a pain in her lower back, then a dragging sensation in her abdomen. ‘Abuela?’ she cried. As she stumbled towards her, Maria saw agony on the elderly woman’s thin, dust-covered face. Maria held her hand, smoothed her hair. Creaking walls and beams, distant ambulance sirens, and her grandmother’s shallow breathing, mingled to make one discordant din. ‘Help is on its way. You’ll be fine. I know you will.’ Black smoke loomed like storm clouds in the air above. Ash settled down on them like snow.
‘The baby?’ her grandmother whispered, before breaking into a cough. ‘The baby?’ Her grandmother knew. For how along, Maria wanted to ask, but to see the fragile woman lying uncomfortably on a bed of rubble, such questions were unimportant. The dull ache in her back invaded her senses once more. She placed her hands over the pain as if to hide it. But Isabel read it in the girl’s face. ‘The baby’s fine, abuela. The baby is going to be fine,’ Maria said, the ache in her back seeping deeper into her abdomen, stretching its cruel fingers around her womb and drawing them in like a vice.
Isabel closed her eyes. Her head rolled gently on her pillow of stone. ‘Stay with me! Look! Look into my eyes, abuela!’ Maria screamed.
Her grandmother was drifting away.
The young woman let out a groan, primal, animal, as violent contractions wracked her body. The guttural sound roused Isabel. Ignited her terror. An electric current surged through her small, weak body. It twitched and crackled, fighting for life.
‘The baby?’ Isabel held out her birdlike hand to her only grandchild. Maria took it, enfolding it within her own. The sight of her ageing grandmother slumped on the ground, combined with her own pain, terrified her. Maria’s fingers squeezed rhythmically in and out in time with her breath, as if pumping air into a blow-up doll, hoping to cheat the puncture. Her grandmother, likewise, willed the life force within to pass from her, to her granddaughter, to the baby she was carrying. Isabel swam in and out of consciousness, a watery world inhabited by her swirling hopes and prayers.
Isabel had known about the baby before Maria herself. The signs were obvious from the start. The nausea, the physical changes … She did not know the circumstances. But a life had started. All other considerations were as nothing. Her own child, Ines, had waited so long to have a child. So many miscarriages. And when she did carry a baby she did not bloom. The glow she had was a ghastly ghostly glimmer, a strange translucent green under the skin. Fertility did not plump up her flesh, no ripe peach was she. More a brittle, flimsy twig on which a growth had managed to stick and whose vigour and strength had caused her to bow and bend. The birth nearly broke her, threatened to snap her in two. Isabel had been distraught. Had wished it away. Until she saw it. Her. Maria. A vital, angry infant, hungry for life. All risks had been worth it.
Isabel lay on the stony ground looking up at her granddaughter. ‘There’s so much good in you,’ she said, a sparkly eyed expression on her face. ‘Always believe that.’ Maria glimpsed the sparkle as it escaped down the side of her grandmother’s dusty cheek, glinting as it caught in the light.
‘Ines?’ she whispered, her words weaker, speech slower.
‘No. I’m her daughter, abuela. Your granddaughter, Maria.’ The sound of the ambulance was getting louder. ‘Hold on, abuela. Please.’
‘Wear … the … ring …’ Isabel fell back into the depths. Her body went limp. Her hand released the little velvet box.
Tears rolled down Maria’s face. ‘Don’t go.’
‘Quick. Two casualties. On the floor. Over here.’ Stretcher bearers appeared. They ran to Isabel. Her eyes fluttered with the delicate life within. One took her pulse. The light went out in his eyes and Maria knew. Her grandmother was barely there. ‘What’s her name?’ he asked, turning to face Maria. And then he saw it – blood, soaking into dust and debris, dark and red brown, in thick painful clots stretching out around the young woman like a moat.
Maria hadn’t wanted to be separated from her grandmother but she’d had no choice. ‘The young one’s bleeding! Quick!’ One hour later and she was no longer with child. ‘An early miscarriage brought on by the impact of the bombing.’ That was how it was explained to her as she lay in a makeshift hospital bed. There was nothing the doctors could have done about it. ‘See it as
a blessing,’ one of the nurses on duty blurted out, her eyes quickly looking up from Maria’s ringless fingers.
Maria was far away within herself. She’d heard the nurse’s words. She’d recognised her look of judgement masked by sympathy. But she didn’t care. She searched her memory to bring what she had lost to life. Her hand crossed protectively over her womb. She remembered the butterfly movements of yesterday and smiled. Thoughts of Paloma sitting next to her under the olive tree flooded her mind with joy but Maria could not keep them alive for long. She couldn’t keep many things alive. She flayed herself with scalding derision.
Another nurse came into the room. ‘Your grandmother’s—’
‘No!’ Maria cried. ‘Don’t say it.’ But the sense of loss was immediate, debilitating, with or without the word. Dizzy, nauseous, thoughts of lost loved ones swam away from Maria. She looked at the nurse and blinked, seeing her properly for the first time. And the more this small woman in a uniform came into focus, with the beauty spot at the corner of her lips, her two front teeth that crossed over one another, and a look of fear in her eyes, the more distant Maria’s loved ones became. She clutched on to them with every feeling nerve in her body. Until they snapped. Her womb went into spasm. She moved her arm across herself protectively but the pity in both nurses’ eyes told her there was nothing to protect. She longed for Paloma, but now Maria’s head hurt to remember her dear friend’s face. She cried for her grandmother, but all that was left was a feeling of loss. This collision of being and nothingness was beyond all understanding and it took her breath away.
She looked at the nurse burdened with news about Isabel. ‘Please don’t say it,’ Maria whispered. ‘Not just yet.’ And with that Maria buried her head in the nurse’s shoulder. And sobbed silently and copiously. Hot tears rolled and rolled in waves, splashing over the rounds of her cheeks. By the time they’d formed rivers along the creases and folds of her neck they were cold.
In the minutes, hours, days and weeks that followed Maria was to shed an ocean of tears. She had lost so many loved ones. But in the loss of her grandmother she had also lost a form of herself.
‘There’s so much good in you, my darling.’ She had no idea why, but these words, more than any others her grandmother had spoken, tormented her. They scorched the inside of her head. Maria found them incendiary because they were untrue. What had happened to Paloma had happened because of her, she had betrayed Richard with Luis, had found love with Luis only to betray him too, she had lured her grandmother to her death. And she had destroyed her own unborn child. Her guilt was incontestable.
Well, she would be willingly punished.
Her mind searched for ways to find the self she’d lost with the passing away of her grandmother. She dwelt on her crimes – this path led to self-loathing. She ruminated over those who’d made the crimes possible – this path led to revenge. Revenge. It seemed sweet, and she mistook it for salvation. She would pursue her accomplices – those who’d dealt the coups de grâce: the Nationalist soldiers who had abducted, raped and left her friend for dead, the pilots whose bombs had killed her grandmother, and the enemies within who somehow were responsible for all that was eating away at Madrid from within. Maria’s rage was burning fast, turning into an uncontrollable fire. It was looking to engulf the enemy.
She was decided. If there was any good left within her, Maria felt sure that the only way she would find it was in destroying the bad without.
Chapter 45
She helped out any way she could, threw herself into anything and everything. Helping at the foodbanks, teaching soldiers to read in the nearby trenches in Casa de Campo on the outskirts of the city, putting up warning signs on unstable buildings bombed the night before within. She worked tirelessly for months. Yet whatever she did left her restless, dissatisfied. Her father looked on, helpless.
One morning she was out with Antonio Rosario Jimenez. The two of them had hit it off that evening in the library. Though she struggled to see the good in herself, she saw that it radiated from Antonio Rosario Jimenez’s every pore. The pair of them had just finished putting up a keep out sign on a dangerous structure of what only the day before had been a solid town dwelling. Like a doll’s house with the front removed, you could still make out the rooms. There a bedroom with a still intact bed, there a drawing room with the remains of a dresser. A tempting sight for the growing number of people in Madrid who had nothing. A goat jumped over the debris within. Loose plaster and masonry rained down upon it causing it to run out skittishly and escape with fright down the street.
Two comrades walking by stopped. One went straight past the warning sign and stepped over some rubble. ‘No!’ Maria shouted. He went in anyway.
‘Can’t you read?’ Antonio Rosario Jimenez asked.
‘What’s that you said, comrade?’
‘He said, ‘Can’t you read?’ Maria answered.
‘Hey, Amaro. Over here. Quick. Come and have a listen to this, comrade.’
The man who’d stayed outside the derelict building bounded over.
Maria recognised him as Manu. Most of his face was now hidden behind a thick moustache and beard that covered the scar running up the side of his face but she would have known those eyes anywhere. Like his mother’s. But he had not recognised her.
‘Can’t I read? Many of our comrades can’t read. Good, honest peasants who fight for our freedom, protect our city, and you dare to ask, can’t you read? Do you disrespect them, comrade?’ It was not Manu who said this. He was studying Maria’s face, trying to place her.
‘Amaro! Amaro! What are you waiting for?’
With a sense of urgency, Manu put his hand on his comrade’s arm to restrain him. To stop him offering to take the educated bourgeois that was Antonio for a little ride in the car. Now was not the time for that.
‘Manu,’ Maria said. ‘Is it really you?’ Here before her was the boy she’d seen speed past in the car all those months back. He was also Federica’s boyfriend, the mysterious Amaro – there could only be one. Manu’s confrontational friend glowered at Antonio Rosario Jimenez. ‘Be sure to show more respect next time, comrade,’ he snarled as Manu dragged him away.
‘We need to meet,’ Maria called after him.
Chapter 46
Manuel was in Madrid. After evading Nationalist capture in Fuentes de Andalucía, with the help of Maria’s father and his mother, he had sought refuge with a guerrilla group, Los Ninos de la Noche (Boys of the Nights), in the high mountains behind the village of Frigiliana. There he carried out attacks on their Nationalist enemies before moving on to a guerrilla camp just outside Granada, and it was here that he’d first heard of Aleksandr Orlov. The Russian Orlov was a colonel in The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, and the man responsible for the training of all guerrilla units. He was based in Madrid, as was the guerrilla training school. Manuel had come to get trained up, to progress within the guerrilla ranks. But, it seemed, despite his experience, Orlov was not yet convinced of the boy’s loyalty to the cause; Manuel would have to find other ways to prove his worth if he was going to win the great man over. That was what he was doing when he crossed paths with Maria: patrolling streets, righting wrongs, dishing out punishments.
‘Be careful,’ Antonio had warned her. He’d sensed Manuel’s violent desperation: he’d nearly become one of its victims. But careful was the last thing Maria wanted to be. She was tired of feeling numb. She wanted to punish anyone who’d ever committed a crime and she’d seen and heard enough of ‘Amaro’ to know that he could help her deliver the justice that she, on her own, could not.
But she could never call him Amaro.
And now she knew who he was she had no problem in tracking him down, nor in getting him to agree to her involvement.
*
The first time Maria went out with Manu and his gang she was kept well from the action. She’d climbed into the back of the car next to a boy called Roco from Extremadura. In the passenger seat was Jordi from Asturia
s. The gruff one who couldn’t read.
She’d hardly ever been in a car before. Manu drove fast sweeping her dark thoughts to the ends of her windblown hair. Exhilarated, she felt her past suppressed as Manu screeched towards an unknown, breathtaking future. Maria felt light and dizzy. Like a film star.
But as the gang ran out of the car to root out an enemy within, a large hand without pushed her head back inside the car. ‘No, comrade. This is not for you.’
Maria waited. Anger and frustration gnawed away at her. And hatred, for the unknown fifth columnist her comrades had gone to deal with. She looked out of the back of the car willing them to reappear. Then they did, running as fast as they could. They piled into the car. Manu put his foot down on the accelerator. ‘It’s done, comrade,’ they told her. ‘It’s over.’ A thrill surged through her body. She told herself that it was because good had overcome evil. She saw the handle of a pistol sticking out of Jordi’s trousers at the side of his waistband. Punishment had been meted out too. Her heart raced some more.
‘There’s a big one coming up,’ Manu said to her as she got out of the car. ‘The rat we’re going to put on trial tomorrow locked many great men away in prison before the war. All wrongfully. And we’re privileged to have one of the greatest come with us to confront him. Are you in?’
‘Yes, I’m in’ came her steely reply, knowing that the second time she went with them she wouldn’t be made to wait in the car. ‘Meet you at five in the morning.’ As the car got swallowed by the street so Maria looked up at the windows all around. Spies were everywhere, conspirators plotting away in darkened rooms. She felt a fluttering in her stomach to think that by this time tomorrow there would be at least one less of them. And she couldn’t wait.
She went upstairs to her bedroom. Her fury was limitless. The guilty had to pay, they would always have to pay. And she was ready to do whatever it took to make them do so.