by Ben Pastor
“Not very far.”
Like other couples, during a pause in the music they’d taken their turn in the garden, kissing hard and groping each other in the complicit dark. He remembered the slack curve of a curl seeking the hollow of her neck, and feeling thrown off, hopeful, the blue and red Moroccan months without women suddenly like an immense injustice he had to remedy in the few hours left before going back. They went riding together the following day, and on the way back ended up in the bedroom of her parents’ country house, where things went much too far to stop. Only after they had showered and dressed again did she tell him she had a fiancé in Hamburg.
“Will you keep him now?” he’d asked. She smiled the same smile he’d first seen on the dance floor. “That depends.” And tonight Bora wondered where he stood in that regard, although he ached for her often and was more than a little lovesick. The girls in Bilbao came in between, but these days Bora was alone, not quite willing to find himself a widow in Castellar, like Alfonso had. He turned away from the moon, and closed his eyes.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Walton recognized Marypaz’s warm fragrance even before she lay beside him in the narrow bed. Her round knees and shoulders, the moist sponginess of her breasts sought the length of his body, and for a time he was tempted to turn around and climb on top of her. But it was a mental, not a physical struggle with himself, which he won easily. Her nearness in the heat reminded him of everything he found oppressive in life and had tried to escape from. He chose not to move, breathing deeply and slowly with his face to the wall.
2
“Neighbours,” I asked,
“Where is my grave?”
“In my tail,” said the sun.
“In my throat,” said the moon.
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,
“IX: CASÍDA OF THE DARK DOVES”
RISCAL AMARGO
Before dawn, the sky had turned narrow with haze when Fuentes came to awaken Bora at the end of his watch. Bora was already standing by the well. “Has the informant returned?”
“No, sir.”
The mugginess was resilient, palpable. Bora felt it on his face like a moist web. He walked away from the well. Past the rickety shadow of the lean-to, the mountain formed a ghostly wall. He had to grope for the stingy trickle of water still oozing from the cleft in the rock, hardly gathering enough on his fingers to wet his face. The men kept a barrel by the spring that was always full. Bora lifted the tarpaulin hooding it and reached inside to splash water on his head and shoulders.
It was nearly an hour before the informant picked his way down the rock-strewn incline from the sierra. “Quien vive?” came a call from Paradís, whose watch it was. The three-legged dog twitched in its sleep, but did not growl. “Quien vive?”
Bora came to meet the informant at the foot of the trail, followed by Fuentes, who balanced a brimming tin of coffee he’d made for him.
“Well, viejo,” Bora asked, “did you find out where the body was buried?”
“Not yet.” The old man stood just close enough to avoid having to raise his voice. “They didn’t come anywhere close to the village to do it. The Widow Yarza has one of the Reds for a lover, and she didn’t hear anything about it either. But I don’t know if you can trust her; I think she’s growing fond of the man.”
“So, how long is it going to take you to find out?”
“Another day, maybe two. You can’t rush these things, señor teniente, as Fuentes knows. There’s a couple of boys I can send out to look for a fresh hole in the dirt. No one pays attention to boys.”
“Go back, then. Come in person or send your wife if you hear anything.”
Bora was just turning away when the informant held him back.
“There’s something else you ought to know. A complaint has been made about one of yours molesting a young girl in Castellar. You’ll hear from the priest tomorrow.”
He jerked his arm free. “The priest? Why the priest? Fuentes, what is he talking about?”
Fuentes made a throaty sound which meant he was taking advantage of the half-dark to spit. “Mierda, I bet it’s Paradís again. Damn him, he can’t keep his hands to himself. He’ll get us in trouble yet.”
Bora felt a trickle of sweat running from under his sore right arm and down his side, and for an odd moment its tacky meandering on his skin kept him in suspense. Paradís was the quiet ex-sailor who didn’t relate much to anyone; not even to Aixala, who came from the same province. The men teased him and called him coño, which seemed to be what one ended up being called here whenever one didn’t qualify as a marica. Once Bora had caught sight of him masturbating behind the house, but he’d seen plenty of that at Tétouan and Dar Riffian and had just turned away in embarrassment. Suddenly, he was anxious to dismiss the informant. As soon as the old man was out of earshot, he turned to Fuentes. “Why wasn’t I told about this before?”
Fuentes’ silence lasted long enough for the feeble unison of crickets to rise from the gloom around them. Increasingly distant clinking noises of stones rolling down the trail betrayed the informant’s laborious climb back to Castellar.
“I’m talking to you, Sergeant. What’s the story, and why haven’t I been told?”
“Men will be men, teniente. They’ll go after women, young or not. You can’t expect discipline from this mishmash.”
Angrily Bora turned down the offer of coffee. “We’ll see about that at sunrise.”
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
At sunrise, the heat was still oppressive in Walton’s room. He’d been tossing and turning all night, and now even getting out of bed seemed like an undeserved chore. Tangled in the sweaty sheet, he saw that Marypaz was leaning out of the window, making faces.
“Mosko. Hola, Mosko!” She blew down a kiss, and then stuck her tongue out.
Walton joined her. A wave of musk rose from her body as she brushed past him. She’d just put on the lacy slip he’d bought her in Barcelona, and her perspiration was already letting out a scent as thick as liquor and forming two yellow crescents where her armpits met the cloth. She went to sit cross-legged on the bed to comb her hair.
Under the window, Chernik had just joined Brissot after the last watch of the night. “Sure hope it rains before long,” Chernik groaned.
Shielding his eyes with cupped hands, Brissot turned his black-clad self to the valley. “When it does, it’ll pour. I’ve seen it happen before. I thought the shitty mountain was going to dissolve on us, but at least the air became breathable for a while.”
“Throw me my pants, Marypaz,” Walton called, and started dressing.
Thunder came from the hazy brightness to the southeast a few minutes later, when he reached Brissot on the ledge. He’d freshened up at the fountain and carried his shirt draped over his shoulder. Skinny bundles of muscle, broken in two places by coin-sized whitish bullet scars, roped themselves up and down his torso. Walton liked showing his muscles and scars. The most recent wound had nearly killed him at Guadalajara. “I swear I don’t know why I get so angry at Marypaz; she’s an excellent piece when she wants to be.”
Brissot smirked. “I’m aware. You took her from me, remember?”
“She came willingly. Well, what’s the forecast? Are we going to get any rain?”
“Seems like it.” Brissot pulled at the grizzled brush of his moustache, where sweat hung in minute drops. “And while you’re here, there’s something we must discuss.”
Walton hardened, the wiry muscles on his spare frame distending. “I know what it is, and I’m trying my damn best to put it out of my mind. Drop the propaganda.”
“It’s not as easy as that. I still believe we should try to find out more about his death. I was thinking —”
Walton flung the bundled shirt into Brissot’s face, a reaction so uncalled for that he felt he should justify it by showing anger. “What do you expect to find? I warned him it was a bad idea to hide in Teruel, that Fascist bunghole of a small town! He assured me he had a safe es
cort, and now it’s clear that he didn’t, or else he tried to come alone. Shit, I should have gone out looking for him last night! Now he’s dead, and I don’t want to think about it any more.”
Calmly Brissot used the shirt’s threadbare fabric to wipe his sweaty face. “What else did he tell you?”
“When we met in Valdecebro last week he said someone had been following him, and he’d barely managed to give him the slip.”
“Civilian? Soldier? Guardia Civil?”
“Dunno.” Without showing it, Walton regretted his fit of temper. “One of those. Christ, most people believed he’d died in Granada a year ago. I told him that he was crazy to room with a socialist, even if he was a family member.”
“When you met in Valdecebro, do you know for a fact that he got back safely that day?”
“Yes, yes.” Restlessly Walton glanced to his right, where a remote swelling of clouds was now discernible in the eastern sky. “I waited by the public phone until he called to assure me he’d made it back to Teruel. Give me back the shirt.”
Brissot handed it over. “And Valdecebro is where he told you he was working on an anthem for the Loyalist volunteers.”
“No. He’d been working on it since before Barcelona. He first told me when I was at the hospital. In Valdecebro he said it was complete and he’d bring it over.”
“‘Bring it over’? It’s not like any of us can move freely around the country. Travelling some twenty-three miles overnight! I don’t believe for a minute he did it for a music score. Not for you, not for any of us. And not on foot, that’s for sure. There must have been a car. So, where did the car go? It makes no sense.”
Walton was in the mood for an argument. Brissot’s self-control was now making him feel at fault, and he loathed the feeling. “You don’t know shit. About him, about the way things went in Granada. You don’t know shit.”
“Suppose you told me.”
“You don’t even like people like him, so I can’t begin to explain what kind of man he was.” Walton suddenly noticed, as Brissot no doubt had, that the tension had gone out of his shoulders. “His idealism was … I don’t know, a kind of hot coal inside, like a black fire. He burned too deep to show the flame, but the flame was there.” He found himself searching for words, aware that Brissot had somehow opened a sluice and information would roll out of him whether he wanted or not.
“When he visited America back in ’29, he came to Vermont, of all places. Of all places in Vermont, eight years ago next month he landed in Eden.” Walton spoke with his eyes low. “What a laugh that we have a place called Eden, and I was born in it. Eden. Eden Mills. Eden Lake. If that’s Eden, there’s no way to know what hell is. Seed potatoes, that’s what it’s known for. A fork in the road, a house here and a house there, and the lake ahead. The rich own cabins on the lake, though. He was a guest of the Cummingses, but I got to show him around the woods.” Walton glanced up at Brissot. “It’s mind-boggling what you learn about a man when he sees things for the first time. Scrawny red bushes they don’t have here in Spain, or a dinky flower I’d never noticed, even though I’d been running around the woods searching for the talc mine since I was five. The way the lake reaches out like a wing and changes colour when the clouds pass over it … Who knew? He pointed those things out and I saw them. Maybe Eden wasn’t as desperate and hopeless as I thought, for all that my wife hated it as much as I did and we spent our days arguing about getting out of there. Afterwards he told me he wrote about that visit, the woods and the old mill and the lake, and all that.” Walton began to massage his neck with slow twists of his right hand. “And who the hell was I in 1929? A foreman at the Woodbury Granite Company, which floundered after the stock market crash that year. No money, no security, and then Washington quits ordering stone for its monuments altogether. I was nobody, with no idea of who this Spaniard was. He spoke only this much English.” Walton removed his hand from his neck and pinched his fingers together. “And I spoke what Spanish I’d learned from the Peña boys in the granite shed. I showed him around, that’s all. Before leaving, he invited me to attend his lecture. Me? A lecture, in New York? I was on my way to Pittsburgh to find real work, not to attend a lecture in New York. All I had was unemployment and a wife I couldn’t get rid of.” With his hand back on his neck, Walton pulled himself up straight. “It was eight years before I met him again in Barcelona and told him what it’d meant to me to walk behind him and watch him appreciate life. And yesterday it took some bastard a second to put a bullet into the kind of brain that’s made once every hundred years. The valley is Fascist land. Ask, and they won’t tell you anything and you might end up the same way he did.”
Brissot paused, watching the billowy clouds come from the east, a melancholy cast on his earnest face. “Will you at least come along and look around the spot with Maetzu and myself?”
“If it makes you shut up. Not now, though. Tell Maetzu we’ll go in an hour or two.”
As they spoke, Marypaz came out of the house. She’d put on a dress and plaited her hair in a long braid that swung at every step, like the glossy tail of a healthy cat.
RISCAL AMARGO
The trickle of mountain water behind the lean-to had dried up sometime before dawn. At eight o’clock, when Fuentes came upstairs with the news, Bora couldn’t find a curse word in Spanish. He swore in German, shoving his sketchbook into a field-grey canvas bag.
“Are you sure you want to go now, teniente?”
“Yes.” Bora grabbed a handful of pencils from his table and thrust those into the bag as well. He preceded Fuentes down the airless stairs, and when he stepped out of the door, a stunning blast of heat met him. Hemmed in by towering clouds, the sun burned on the ledge as though through the focus of a lens. The men kept to the shade. Alfonso’s dog lay looking dead, its spotted tongue limp, its mangy sides showing its ribcage.
“This is a mean sun,” Fuentes said. “One who isn’t used to it is liable to get sunstroke.”
Bora slung the bag across his shoulder and headed for the stone edge struck by the mortar shell. He hadn’t gone ten steps when Fuentes called him back.
“Hay el cura, teniente.”
Annoyed, Bora stopped. Halfway up the zigzag trail descending from the sierra, the priest was riding a big-headed donkey. A boy led the animal by a short rope, holding a white handkerchief in his left hand. Once on flat ground the priest took off his wide-brimmed hat and removed a cloth he’d been wearing on his head, tied at the corners. Bora’s men, idling in every sliver of shade available, watched. Paradís had the grin of an idiot. Aixala, who’d been drinking from the water barrel, put down the ladle and went indoors.
Bora saluted the priest. With a gesture, he ordered Fuentes to help him down from his mount. “Tell Aixala to get out,” he said, adding, “I want no one inside while I’m talking to the reverendo padre.”
Having preceded the priest to his office, Bora heard him stumble up the stairs. “Siéntese. How may I help?” he asked, encouraging his visitor to speak. For several minutes, all that was heard in the room was the monotonous speech coming from the priest’s mouth.
“These are good women, you must understand. Churchgoing, respectable. Sadly, it isn’t as though there aren’t shameless ones in Castellar who would accommodate your men. When fathers and husbands leave the house, women are left to fend for themselves. Strange men come by, strangers: they assume that because women live alone … You understand.” Across the table from him, Bora was well aware he looked foreign, unsympathetic. He meant to. He meant for the priest to realize that he wasn’t a Spanish officer, and not even a Spaniard. He meant to appear – what? – irreligious or, worse for a Catholic priest, a Protestant.
“You must understand,” the old man blabbed on, “that when everything else fails, the Church must defend the weak. It’s my Christian duty to ensure that those whom the Scriptures refer to as ‘widows and virgins’ aren’t put to the test by those under your command.”
Bora listened with h
is shoulders back, frowning, wanting to hear none of this. “Is there a description of the man in question?” he asked.
“The little girl, only fourteen, was walking home after sunset from the public fountain when a man in a light-green shirt and black braces accosted her.” The priest interrupted himself, given that Bora wore a similar uniform. “Well, the soldier made an indecent proposal to her, and when she demurred, he tried to grab hold of her. She was so frightened that she dropped her pail, fled to the house, and doesn’t want to go out now even during the daytime. She can’t give a more accurate description than the one I just gave you. If that weren’t enough, someone even tried to enter her house at night.”
Bora turned to the drumming of thunder across the valley. “I will speak to the men.” Like an invisible dragon, the choking heat breathed through the window.
The priest blotted his forehead. Sweat sullied the white collar emerging from his cassock, and he looked out of sorts. “I’m thirsty,” he whined. Lost in the greasy collar, the turtlelike skin of his neck hung in folds under his chin. “May I have a glass of water?”
Bora stepped to the window and called out to Fuentes below to bring up a drink.
“It’s bad enough,” the priest added, “that there are harlots like that godless Remedios woman who lives up the sierra: why molest honest women? It makes caring for my people impossible and forces me to pay visits like this one, which I assure you I didn’t need at my age and with my poor health.”
Fuentes brought a tin full of water, handed it to the priest and left. Surely the water was warm, sour from sitting in the barrel. The priest twisted his mouth as he drank.
“Usted es inglés?” he asked.
“No.”
