The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  “Well, the body is ready for burial,” Brissot called after him. “You have to say something to the men about the importance of Lorca’s death.”

  Lorca’s death. You know nothing about him, Walton wanted to protest, but didn’t. You never even spoke to him. You have no idea of what his friendship meant to me, what his writings did for me when no one else cared to feed Philip Walton’s soul, whatever his soul is, whatever the word soul means to one born and raised in Eden, Vermont, and who like Adam was chased from it to earn his bread. “Let’s go,” he said.

  On the ledge, the long afternoon was ending in a glow that made everything look weary; the valley sank, pale with haze. The body lay on the ground at the men’s feet, where its cloth-bound shape made Walton think of a monstrous white grub.

  “Stop scratching,” an irritable Mosko scolded Bernat. “With chronic prurigo, scratching isn’t going to help. Get a hold of yourself or take a bath.”

  “Right!” Bernat snapped back. “You want me to go down to the brook and get my head blown off by the Fascists. Isn’t that just what a Third International apparatchik would say: get a hold of yourself or else?”

  Brissot laughed a spiteful laugh, wiping his glasses with a grimy handkerchief. “No. It’s what a physician would say to keep a Trotskyist from sclerodermic degeneration of the skin.”

  “Bernat, Mosko,” Walton said, “I want you to cover Chernik and Maetzu as they carry the body for burial.”

  Brissot put his glasses back on. “Does one of us have to stay by the grave overnight?”

  “No. If anyone’s spying, I don’t want them to think there’s anybody important in the grave. Whether the Fascist who killed him knew who he was or not, let’s just keep it simple.” Walton hunched forward, feeling awkward. “And since we’re here, I thought we ought to say a word or two over him before we put him away.” He glanced at Valentin, who stood among the others looking sly. “It’s not a prayer,” he premised. Out of his pocket, Walton took a small book with a worn paper cover and opened it. “These are Lorca’s own words …”

  RISCAL AMARGO

  13 July. Evening.

  It’s been a long day. Not much in terms of information, but I wasn’t expecting answers so soon. I’m curious about this entire thing, though I can never tell if my curiosity is justified. I often overanalyse things, which God knows serves none of my aims here. As for the colonel, I trust he’ll come to appreciate my training with the Spanish Foreign Legion if we ever get a chance to engage in battle. Not that I hope it’ll happen any time soon: this place is dead. With all the talk about how Lieutenant Jover ‘got himself shot’, the only action I’ve seen in two weeks amounts to the miserable mortar attack today.

  Fuentes and I were talking – again – about the American in the Red camp. He speaks about him as if I should care, or else he wants to point out it’s no business of any foreigner to be here. But unlike me, whoever he is, the American is a mercenary. Call him Red, Loyalist, Republican, member of the International Brigades: it all comes down to a thousand dollars’ premium if he shoots down an enemy plane. The Legion is a regular army in all respects, and Fuentes ought to know better. But at least, out of everyone here, Fuentes appreciates my drilling the men every day, insisting on a password, sending out details for firewood, and so on. I know the men don’t.

  Second trip to the brook, with that odd Tomé fellow in tow. Halfway down I sent him back with an excuse because I wanted to stop where Jover was killed and the bloodstain still marks the place.

  I’d promised myself that I’d do it. It wasn’t nearly as strange as I’d expected. I scraped a bit of the dry crust with my nail, just a thin dark brown flake – blood? brains? – and licked it off my fingertip. It had no flavour. Only a mild saltiness from the rock and the sweat on my hand. I’d just been reading in Aristotle that pleasure perfects the work. Was I expecting pleasure out of tasting Jover’s blood? No. But I thought there was goodness in the act, somehow. There was value to my sitting there tasting a companion’s blood, an archaic holiness to the act itself, like a communion. More than yesterday, I’m a part of something now.

  Bora closed the cloth-bound diary. Writing in minute Gothic cursive spared paper and gave him a measure of privacy, even though he didn’t expect Colonel Serrano to go through his papers. He placed the diary under a pile of maps in his room and went downstairs. On the ledge, Paradís and Alfonso were re-stacking the terracing wall collapsed by the mortar blast. High above, lost in the muted whiteness of the sky, a small airplane made a long, slow banking curve. Bora looked at it until it veered off to the south.

  “How long has the plane been flying around?” he asked the men.

  Alfonso shrugged. “I didn’t even hear it.” Paradís looked up, his moon-face flushed with the labour of moving stones. “What plane?”

  Bora made a mental note to tell Serrano about it as he walked to the ledge’s rim, where the evening breeze brought relief to the sierra. From there, he saw how the front of the post had been pockmarked by the mortar attack. On the upper floor, like blind eyes, five of the six windows had broken panes.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” From a polite distance, Niceto addressed him in his stage-trained voice.

  Bora couldn’t think of a reason to say no. For the next ten minutes or so he paid little attention to Niceto’s chatter about playwrights and the stage. The words floated to him, but he was distracted, thinking in German about other things. Only when he perceived a change in pitch, a resentful edge in Niceto’s voice, did Bora begin to listen.

  “He died in Granada last year; still, he was a good example of what I was telling you, mi teniente. I met him in ’35 at an audition in Granada.”

  Bora glanced at the veiled colours of the valley below. He had no idea what Niceto had been telling him. A touchy young stage actor who’d been trying until the start of the civil war to break into cinema, he would talk to whatever audience was at hand.

  “Naturally there was no way a conservative like myself could make it; the industry is in the hands of Jews and communists,” he was complaining. “Were you aware that in 1929 Spain and Portugal produced the fifth largest number of motion pictures in the world, over three hundred?”

  “I believe Germany produced three thousand,” Bora observed.

  “Unfortunately I’m not a German actor.”

  “What happened at the audition?”

  “The one with García Lorca? Oh, there was no chance of my working with Lorca, I knew that from the start.” Niceto’s nervous, strong hands moved with elegance, following his words. “He was an invert, you know.”

  Bora made no effort to look disinterested. The name Lorca meant little to him. “No,” he said, “I didn’t know.”

  “I could see that only a certain type of people were going to be accepted for his play El Jínete Milagroso, though I’d memorized the monologue from the first scene of the second act. I had the presencia, you know – the physique and voice of the Miraculous Horseman. I could feel the texture of the part, the tension and depth of it. I was El Jínete.”

  “So, how did you do?”

  “He found somebody else for the part, a totally unsuitable oaf from León. But the oaf was willing to give what I wasn’t.” Niceto lowered his voice to a hiss. “And to think I’d been told Lorca didn’t like maricas! He liked gypsies and maricas, and that’s a fact.”

  Bora drove his hands deep into his pockets, nodding. They stood by the dishevelled lonely tree, close to the spot where the second mortar shell had landed. The valley ahead was a dull, violet bowl. Alfonso’s dog sat at Bora’s feet, balancing on its one front leg.

  “I’m not saying Lorca wasn’t a great poet, mi teniente. He was the best. He was genial. He had duende, really.”

  Bora didn’t know what the word duende meant, but there were plenty of Spanish words he could only guess at. He bent to caress the dog’s back. “Well, there isn’t much theatrical activity for anyone right now.”

  Niceto’s eyes fol
lowed the slow flight of hawks wheeling back to their nests in the mountains. “It’s all precious time lost for me.” He stepped away from the ledge. “Would you like to read something by Lorca? I have a selection of his poems in my bag.”

  “Sure.” Bora showed the actor a small book he carried in his pocket. “I’m down to my last reading.”

  Niceto looked. “What is it?”

  “The Nicomachean Ethics.”

  “Is it a Greek tragedy?”

  “No. Greek philosophy.”

  At dusk, the men gathered inside the post to eat what a dark little woman brought from Castellar. Bora heard their voices drifting now and then through the open windows and door. Like a long-held breath, the breeze exhausted itself in one gust and died down. The silence of the valley brimmed with shadows from here to the dim distance where Teruel lay. And there was hardly any light left by which to read Lorca’s words:

  … I do not want to see it!My memory burns.

  Let the jasmines know,

  With their minute whiteness.

  I do not want to see it!

  The heifer of the old world

  Dragged her sad tongue

  Across a fearful snout of blood

  Spilled in the ring,

  And the Bulls of Guisando,

  Nearly death and nearly stone,

  Bellowed like two centuries

  Weary of pawing the earth …

  The subject was blood. Earnestly Bora stole each line from the growing dark. He understood the motif well enough, but emotionally he didn’t know what to make of it. It was like no poetry he’d ever read. It moved him, despite him taking pride these days in dispassion. His mind went to Lieutenant Jover, killed by the Reds just below this ledge. To the murdered man with the deep red stain on his shirt. To his own blood – how it, too, might soon be spilled, and someone might come and taste it, or curse it, or let the rain wash it from the earth.

  But now he sleeps forever.

  Now grasses and moss

  Pry with knowing fingers

  The flower of his skull.

  And his blood comes forth, singing …

  Fuentes came out to look for him. “Señor teniente, algo que comer?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Fuentes left.

  When it turned too dark to read, Bora put the book away. He could smell the dry dusty air of the valley. Small lights trembled in the swimming shadow below, from lonely farms and shepherds’ fires. Lorca’s words spoke of flesh and young death as if flesh longed for death and were in sad love with it. Bora sensed the hidden truth: the seductive dread, the danger of closing his eyes and saying “yes” to it. He kept his eyes on the shadow below, where solitude itself could be given a shape by connecting those trembling dots. And all the time he envied older men, who were not cocky one moment and vulnerable the next, and well beyond this hard communion with themselves.

  “Hola! Quien vive?” Alfonso’s call announced Tomé’s return from the higher sierra. Bora shoved the poetry book into his pocket and left the ledge.

  Tomé brought along a jittery old man who spoke fast and low. Bora saw him in the wedge of kerosene light shining from the open window. There were no fresh graves in the cemetery at Castellar, Tomé reported. Bora was disappointed. Still he said, “Bueno,” and dismissed him. Then he sat down with the old man and Fuentes, whose help he needed to understand the dialect.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  “We did it.”

  Walton stretched out his legs on the dirt floor, relaxing his shoulders against the kitchen’s end wall. The aroma of his American cigarettes gave him away in the dark, but he wouldn’t answer Brissot’s words.

  “We couldn’t reach much deeper than three feet, it’s like digging through limestone,” the Frenchman added, taking a groping step forward. Walton let him fumble towards the flickering light of his cigarette and sit on the floor somewhere. “We had to pile rocks on top of it. Hopefully it’ll keep the animals away.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I met Marypaz on the way down, Felipe. She’s like a cat in heat, rubbing herself against anything that goes by. If I didn’t respect you as a a comrade, I’d have bedded her tonight.”

  Walton shut his eyes, as if it’d keep him from hearing. “She’ll get over it.”

  “I told her to look out for the Fascists, and she gave me the finger.”

  Walton swallowed a mouthful of smoke. In the dark, he could pretend he wasn’t even here, though for the life of him he couldn’t think of another place he might want to be. He flicked the cigarette butt across the room.

  “Do you want her? Take her.”

  “No, thank you.” Brissot was taking off his coveralls. A rustle of heavy cloth and a whiff of sweat accompanied the motions, the odour of fresh sweat on old sweat. “No, thank you. I have no intention of arguing with you about it tomorrow. I just thought you’d like to know.”

  RISCAL AMARGO

  After the informant left, Fuentes and Bora sat outside the post in the dusty darkness.

  Bora said, “The way we’re going, we might not find out where the grave is for some time yet. And with this heat to boot.”

  “At least we’re pretty sure it didn’t leave the mountains. And since they didn’t bury it at San Martín, it can only be in one or two other places.” Fuentes looked up to the star-crowded sky. “If the old man does his asking in the right way, you could have the news by morning.”

  “I hope so. Who has the first watch of the night?”

  “I do.”

  “Excellent. Make sure no one leaves the post.”

  Fuentes stood up, his bulky figure squaring itself against a haze of small stars. “If you’re going to stay out here, teniente, I’ll fetch your sleeping bag.”

  While Bora waited for Fuentes, Tomé came out of the post with a blanket bunched under his arm. Dimly Bora saw him step with care, mincing around the stones and bits of shrapnel still lying around. “Good night,” he said into the shadow where Bora was, and went around the corner to the stable. He kept his guitar there, and soon a few loose notes, like liquid, came from that direction. Through an open window Paradís’ amused voice said, “He’s serenading the horse,” and someone else said something else and laughed, and then everyone stopped laughing because Fuentes was coming down the stairs.

  Bora had stretched himself out by the well, where the mortar blast had caused no damage. Fuentes handed him the tightly rolled bundle of the sleeping bag.

  “Fuentes, what’s your definition of maricas?”

  A thick, short silence preceded the answer. “Why, sir, they’re men who act queer. Girl-like faggots, you’d say.”

  “I thought so. You throw the word around a great deal in this country.”

  Fuentes cleared his throat. “Anything else, mi teniente?”

  “No. If I’m not awake, call me at the end of your watch.”

  Within an hour, the kerosene lamp was turned off inside the post. The ledge seemed to sink and vanish, then the clean margin between dull and starry dark, earth and sky, drew itself again. Eastward, on the ridgeline of the roof, a waning moon climbed over the scaly edge of the tiles. A black thread, like a seam, appeared to be running through its bright graceful curve, and Bora had to focus on the image before realizing that the moon was rising behind the weathervane.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, the blood had still been alive in the veins of the nameless body by the roadside, and now he – Martin Bora from Edinburgh, Leipzig and Dar Riffian, just granted the rank of teniente in an army that wasn’t his own – would have to find his grave. I wonder if the nameless dead man wants to be found, if he wanted to be buried by us in the first place. I wonder if his blood will come forth singing, and reveal itself. And the poet García Lorca, who died last year in Granada … well, he liked maricas. He must have very much feared and longed for death, judging by the way he wrote. Bora lay back. Rifle at hand, Fuentes stood still in the starlight like the last picket of a vanished fence. Accor
ding to him, there’d been fighting across the sierra until the end of May; whole units had passed through, then the lines had withdrawn. “Like the sides of a gash,” Fuentes had said. Only small outposts had been left behind, harmless but for the meaning of their presence. Matter was equal to potentiality. From here to the valley, it was friendly territory; from Palo de la Virgen on, the whole mountain range was Red. A dull time of keeping watch lay ahead, poised for the next offensive. When Bora had first climbed El Baluarte to observe the enemy camp, he’d been surprised by how similar it was to the army post, a staged symmetry on two shelves of the same mountain ledge. How, in the end, the camps led parallel lives. It had a quality of suspended reality, this closeness, watching, killing one man at a time.

  Sleep would not come. The hard ground had less to do with it, he knew, than his recurrent fantasies about Benedikta Coennewitz back home. It was another world already. His interest in her had begun in April, at an army reception he didn’t even want to attend. When the breathtaking blonde smiled at him across the dance floor, Bora – who’d fleetingly met her the day he and her brother hadn’t qualified for the German equestrian Olympic team – couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t flirted with her back then. Whatever military courtesy and his orders to mingle required, he danced and talked with her alone. Holding Bora’s hand, his arm around her waist, the not-so-casual brushing of hips: Dikta flirted well. Humming the slow American swing tunes, she invited more closeness than even the crowded dance floor justified. “How come you’re so tanned?”

  “From the joint manoeuvres in Italy.” It wasn’t true, of course, though he’d told his mother the same.

  She laughed. “That’s not an Italian tan. Not in April.”

  “South of Rome, it is.” He responded aggressively to her nearness, and when a second lieutenant insisted on asking Dikta for a dance, Bora pulled rank.

  “How far south of Rome?” Sliding up from his shoulder, her thumb began grazing his neck in little spirals. Dikta was a girl of his class, his sport, his size. A well-spoken girl growing up to be like his mother and aunts, who had scented hair and bought clothes in Berlin and Paris and went to Red Cross benefits and expected their men to change for dinner and smoke in the other room. Slowly her thumb inched up to his mouth, and he wetted it with his tongue.