by Ben Pastor
Maetzu said nothing, but Chernik nodded. He greeted Brissot, who had joined them, and then, as his eyes wandered to the place where Marypaz had stalked off to, added, “Well, if that don’t beat it all. What’s wrong with her, Felipe?”
“I don’t know, she keeps giving me grief.”
“Seems to me she’s tearing your clothes apart.”
Walton wheeled around in the dust. He’d washed his shorts this morning and put them out to dry on a saddle-shaped granite outcrop by the fountain. Marypaz was furiously ripping them to white shreds. Chernik laughed, and Maetzu walked away from the scene with a face of gloomy disgust. Walton felt Brissot’s grip on his arm, stopping him from flying at Marypaz. “What?” he shouted.
“The trouble with you Americans is that you have no sense of history.” Brissot scowled. “Every event, every crime has historical implications. Forget about Marypaz, and think about what’s important. We’re not dealing with a simple murder, Felipe. If you just bury the body or knock the Fascists over with mortar fire, you’re not looking at his death in terms of propaganda. Lorca is dead. He was killed by the Fascists. A hundred years from now, all this shitty fighting on mountainsides won’t mean a tinker’s damn to anyone, but this one death will. If we use it well, his murder will show his enemies have no sense or understanding of history.” Pulling on his tobacco-stained moustache, Brissot still scowled, but there was earnest concern in his voice. “I say we try to find out as much as possible about how he died.”
Walton wearily passed both hands over his cheeks, feeling the calluses on his fingertips and palms. It was like Guadalajara. The thought sickened him. Entrapment. Maybe that’s what the dream of the yellow wall meant. He felt trapped. Yet his anger was ebbing quickly, leaving him numb and forgetting about Marypaz, as Brissot had advised, but without any conscious effort on his part. Even the news of this recent death did nothing but weary him.
Facing Walton, Brissot spoke like a Soviet commissar, which was probably the closest thing to his political stance. “You forget that rumours of his death have been circulated before, Mosko. Besides, that’s not my job.”
“Well, you were the angry one. What else do you have to do? We can’t move, same as the Fascists and their whole goddamned rebel army can’t move. We sit on two sides of a rock close enough to spit and take potshots at each other, waiting for the moment when the civil war blows Aragon to bits. I say we try to find out. It’s only then that the burial place will have any meaning.”
“I have to think about it.”
“Well, think about it.”
Out of habit, Walton glanced at his left wrist, where his watch had been until the day before. “You haven’t seen my watch, have you?” he asked, walking away from Brissot.
RISCAL AMARGO
The afternoon brought stunning heat with it. Bora walked to the well, dug between the stable and the steep face of the mountain. Leaning over the ring of cemented stones, he looked down the shaft, where the sun high overhead showed a circle of silty dirt at the bottom. After the well had dried up two days earlier, Fuentes had held a rope for Bora to go down the musty hole. His footprints still formed a pattern in the silt, and the shaft already didn’t smell damp any more. Behind the army post there was still a trickle of water oozing from the heights, enough to drink and shave, but the dry well felt like a rejection. Bora watched dusty loam crumble from the ring of the well as he leaned on it. Dust became a sparkling nothing as it floated down the shaft.
Despite his back-breaking months spent with the Tercio de la Legion near Tétouan, the heat here bothered him more than it had in North Africa. The welts under his arms ached. Cloth chafed the skin of his groin raw. His only relief was going down to the brook to swim in a waterhole that was growing muddy as it evaporated. At least it wouldn’t dry up altogether, according to Tomé.
Tomé was an unknown quantity, slippery, shifting, unfathomable; and although the man meant nothing to him, it irked Bora that he couldn’t get the measure of him. He’d been coming along to the brook for security, squatting with a rifle across his thighs in the shade of a fat evergreen bush. A slight, supple man with pointed ears and attentive eyes, he had a soft way of moving, like a deceitful cat … but many Spaniards were like that, in Bora’s opinion. Tomé never said much. He normally chewed on a blade of grass, eyes on the shimmer of the water. Now, he unhesitatingly followed Bora down the hill for the second time that day.
At one point on the steep descent, they passed a flat rock marked by a ragged wide stain. There, Lieutenant Jover had been shot in the head a month earlier. The men said that insects had come for days to suck bits of brain from the drying blood. Bora stopped, staring at the dark outline on the rock. “Tomé,” he said, “go back. Tell Sergeant Fuentes we’re going down to the bottom.”
“As the lieutenant wishes.” Tomé turned around and started up the ravine again.
Fifteen minutes later, they reached the foot of the sierra together. Where the stones gave way to reddish earth, the heat rising from the parched sod took their breath. Shadows were negligible under the scant bushes. The brook, in its wide shingle bed, trembled like a mirage, canes and rushes forming a cañada that fanned fine wattled roots into the sluggish water. Where the watercourse twisted and grew deeper, Tomé sat on the bank to keep an eye on the sierra, but soon he was watching Bora slip into the hole and pour water over his head. Bora took it to be a sentinel’s precaution, and did not resent the other man’s attention. When he dipped his hands into the brook, tremulous shields and crescents of glitter broke the copper sheen of the water surface. He said, “Did you hear any noise last night, Tomé?”
“What kind of noise?”
“A motor car, or a shot.”
“No. I never wake up at night.”
“Well, you’re lucky you can sleep, in this heat.”
“I like the heat.” Slouched against a sturdy bush, Tomé twirled a grass stalk between his lips. His dark, monkey-like hands gripped the rifle, and Bora saw how deceptive his quiescence really was. The inertia of things, he thought. Matter is potentiality.
“Why don’t you ask Josep Aixala?” Tomé continued. “He’s been out half the night. He has a girl in Castellar.”
Bora was careful not to show any overt interest. He dived into the deep centre of the hole and then emerged head first. “He does, does he?”
“Fuentes does too.”
“I thought Fuentes was married.”
Tomé sneered. “Even Alfonso has got himself somebody. A widow.”
“And you?”
“I don’t. Women are a nuisance.”
Bora laughed. The pain in his shoulder was worsening, but the water felt good. He plunged in again, tasting the cool siltiness. So, Aixala had been out part of the night. He knew already that Paradís, the wall-eyed sailor, might have been gone between twelve and three. The actor from Cartagena, Niceto, would have had time to be away from his post for at least three hours, from three to six. Bora touched the bottom of the waterhole with his fingers before straightening up suddenly, emerging into the incandescent light of day. Everything seemed red and veiled in the glare. The cane grove hid the nearby bridge and the curving mule track from sight, but he glanced that way automatically. In his mind, it was from now on a place of death, altered and redefined by the presence of the dead man whose name he still did not know.
Cicadas chirred from every shrub and withering head of grass as Bora climbed onto the bank. He sat down where the pebbles touched the water’s edge, because those farther away burned like coals. “Is Aixala serious about this girl?” He spoke idly, his feet still in the water.
Tomé watched him, stalk limp in his mouth. “Possibly.”
“He must be, if he sneaks out to see her at night.” Bora began gathering the pieces of his uniform one by one. He was in no hurry to leave. This line of inquiry was important, and gave him a reason to take his time. When he started dressing, the drenched linen stuck to him like a second skin, and he derived a raw, basic p
leasure from forcing the stiff dry cloth of the uniform over that moisture.
Tomé swallowed hard. “Aixala didn’t go to see his girl last night.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me.”
Turned away from Tomé, Bora buttoned his army shorts. Reaching for his pistol belt awoke a sequence of small throbs of pain from his shoulder muscle, like electrical impulses. The pain, too, was oddly pleasurable. He secured the belt around his hips. “There’s something we must do before we go back.”
Tomé leaned forward eagerly, without rising from his crouch. “I’ll do anything you want, mi teniente,” he said, not meeting Bora’s eyes.
“It’s not what I want, it’s what needs to be done.”
“Anything you want.”
Bora found the alacrity annoying. “Well, that’s good, because we’re climbing the sierra by way of San Martín, to see if the Reds have dug a grave yet.”
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
“It’s more practical to bury him this way. Coffins require time.” Brissot handed the mattress cover to Rafael, who was skulking in a corner of the kitchen. Rafael hadn’t yet turned nineteen, and everyone knew he hadn’t yet seen a dead man close-up. Chernik volunteered him for the job of sewing the body inside the cover, and now he was hesitating, needle and thread in his hands, stiff-jawed. He didn’t move when Brissot held the cloth out to him.
“This is from my own pallet,” Brissot grumbled, “so I’m being generous about this, considering I can’t abide ceremonies. Take it. Come on, take it. Get started. After you’ve been handling a dead body for a while you get used to it.”
Walton had so far been listening without any desire to intervene. Now he wiped his mouth after drinking from his bottle, took the needle and thread from Rafael’s hands and told him, “Here, have a swig and get started. I want to see it when you’re done.”
“Aren’t you going to stay?”
Walton turned to Brissot, who had asked the question and was now filling his pipe with tobacco, as he always did when he was running low on cigarettes.
Bernat looked in through the open window. “Are we done yet?” A freckled anarchist with a skin condition that made his ears and neck flake and shed continuously, he tried not to scratch himself, but it was second nature to him. As everyone ignored the question, he leaned over the sill to make conversation. “Strapping son of a bitch, wasn’t he.”
Brissot shrugged. “He’d have grown stout, had he lived.”
“I think he looks like Tyrone Power,” Chernik said. “When are we taking him up, Mosko?”
“Ask Felipe.”
“When I say so,” Walton said, walking out of the kitchen and scattering across the floor the almonds that had been set to dry along the wall. “I’m going to see Marypaz.”
This was a lie. He longed to be alone. To get out, walk out, listen to no one. Marypaz spent her time away from the camp in the village of Castellar, but Walton had no idea whether she’d gone there after their row, and he didn’t particularly care. Ever since that morning, the thought of death had been troubling him as he’d hoped it never would again. His thoughts were packed with guilt and sickness and the need to get away from death, yet he felt compelled to go sniffing for it, and find it. It might have something to do with Guadalajara. Damn and fuck Guadalajara: it was a stupid name for a stupid place and still he couldn’t get it out of his system. No matter what he did, he ended up thinking of it. Even in his dreams, though he didn’t remember a yellow wall in Guadalajara.
Walton went to the higher ground behind the house, whose north wall was peeling like Bernat’s skin and where the pen smelled of horses. There, the grove of gnarled almond trees huddled, sheltered from the wind by a ruined fence of stacked stones. Entering the copse, Walton awoke a storm of green flies as he stepped over human dung. Shit and refuse were everywhere, as they had been during the Great War. There had been garlands of shit all around the embattled positions near Soissons, but here the soil was as hard as clay, grass growing on it only to wilt again in the July sun. He rested his shoulders against the fissured bark of an almond tree. Grasshoppers jumped around, then settled down again.
Maybe he shouldn’t have gone to see her, as Marypaz had said. Things had grown confused after he’d seen Remedios, up there. She muddled him; the little construction of reasons for being here that underpinned his existence grew weak each time, but he’d gone twice in the last week. He’d go again, whatever Marypaz said. There were doors behind him, which he had to keep carefully shut. One was called Soissons. Another, Pittsburgh. Another, Guadalajara.
Walton thought of Lorca’s body on the floor, with Rafael afraid to touch him. All the beauty, the wit, the kindness and love of words that had belonged to the poet lay dead, blood settled in his flesh to form Brissot’s hypostatic stains. The recollection made him nauseous. How could he ever have thought he’d been done with death nineteen years ago? The old soul-sickness came back. Those closed doors, opened again. A wide circle, passing twice through the same point in the curve. How had he got here? Through choice, the need for money, the desire to leave things and people behind to find other, stranger things and people. Doors opening onto doors. Lorca, who had been his friend, had died. He was killing again, in this country with dry walls and gnarled trees and strange people. Death followed him, or he was following Death.
SAN MARTÍN DE LA SIERRA
With its back to the valley, San Martín de la Sierra was no more than a box of rubble cemented together. It sat on a spur of rock reachable from both camps, but was so remote and irrelevant that neither side claimed it as its own.
Bora knew the chapel. Through its rickety grate, you could see a low altar under the faded fresco of a doll-like Roman soldier on horseback. The soldier saint held a stubby sword, and the square in his left hand must represent the cape he cut in two for the divine beggar. Dry flowers had been tossed in through the gate by occasional pilgrims, and small pebbles too.
When Bora and Tomé reached the rocky spur, there was no one in sight around the chapel. Tomé covered him while Bora ran across the open space to the terraced land ahead. As he vaulted over the first terrace, delicate spirals of loam flew up around him; a thin earth-coloured snake uncoiled and disappeared into a hole no wider than a thumb. Bora scrambled up the three terraces above, looking around.
“Did you find the grave?” Tomé asked Bora when he dropped back down at his side.
“No. Either they haven’t dug it out yet, or they chose another spot. Anyway, they can’t go too deep, the dirt is as hard as rock.”
“If you want I’ll go and check the cemetery at Castellar, mi teniente.”
They crouched close to each other, and it seemed to Bora that Tomé’s lips were trembling. “Not now.” He moved away from him. “Later. When you go, get one of the usual informants to come see me after dark.”
“If the Reds dug a grave in the cemetery, they’ll have someone guarding it.”
“We’ll take care of it when the time comes.”
They didn’t speak on their way back to Riscal Amargo, taking a perilous shortcut through grey outcrops studded with measly shrubs. In front of the army post, Alfonso’s dog was the only thing moving about in the swelter of the hour. Crouching as he scanned the horizon through field glasses, Josep Aixala heard Bora approaching and got to his feet.
After being questioned by Bora, his glance grew morose. A few steps away from the officer, Aixala looked tall, although Bora stood nearly a head above everyone at Riscal. Aixala’s broad torso, attached to overlong thin legs, fit loosely into the washed-out stirrup breeches of his green Legion uniform. The rows of buttons studding the breeches gave his calves the strange outline of an overgrown insect. According to Fuentes, he’d travelled on foot from San Feliu months earlier; he hadn’t yet found his place in the unit nor made up his mind about Bora, who had only been here two weeks. “People like Aixala don’t make up their minds quickly,” Fuentes had said. “It troubles them to have to think
things over, but once they do, ideas stick. Whatever he decides about you, it’s how it’s going to be.”
Bora knew Aixala was taking his time deciding even now. “Well?” he prodded him.
Aixala stared at his feet. “I didn’t know I had to report to an officer about where I spend the night. I wasn’t on guard duty until three o’clock.”
“And you didn’t hear a gunshot, a cry, or the noise of an engine?”
“No.” Aixala grimaced in the full sun, still avoiding Bora’s eyes. “But I don’t pay attention to gunshots much nowadays.”
“Good enough. Depending on the informant’s account, I might want you and Fuentes to be ready for action from midnight onwards.”
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Brissot’s beret-clad head appeared over the wall of the almond grove, followed by his folded arms. “What’s your decision?”
Walton had nearly succeeded in letting go and falling asleep. Brissot’s arrival had worked him up to a terrific anger, short-lived and useless like so many of his emotions these days. “I haven’t taken one.” He didn’t warn Brissot about the dung in the orchard, preferring to hear him curse as he stepped into it.
“If you don’t, I will.” Clad as always in dark coveralls, Brissot wiped the sole of his boot against the exposed root of the tree under which Walton sat. “Castellar is a good place to inquire about last night. There are mule drovers, there are shepherds. They might have seen and heard things. What’s with you, anyway?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You drink too much, you pick fights with Marypaz, and there’s no talking straight to you any more. You’ve changed since the days outside Madrid.”
“Maybe I’m getting too old.”
“At forty-five?”
“At forty-five, why not? White lung disease got my father at thirty-seven. Forty-five feels fucking old to me. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing here. How’s that?” Walton stood up to leave the orchard. “Chew on that one from an ideological standpoint.”
