by Ben Pastor
When he closed his eyes, the way the American had turned upon hearing him speak English came to his mind, along with the memory of the sunny gravel bed around them. There was someone who’d faced death today. Maybe he should have fired; who knows? There hadn’t been enough time to judge him, but at first sight the American fit the role of an older male, with all the detail that implied for Bora. Insecurity, swagger, a need to prove himself.
Sitting up, he wrote,
Fuentes had told me the American is a feissimo hideputa, when he’s actually a common, rugged-looking fellow, such as we see in American motion pictures. Weathered, in his forties. I wager he’s a veteran, which means he’s fought Germans before. A hard, horsey face. His teeth are discoloured – he smokes, probably. Hair unkempt, shabbily dressed, no uniform. But of course smartness of uniform is difficult here. My stepfather the general wouldn’t be impressed with my own perfunctory attention to detail: khaki shorts and an open-necked army shirt is often the best I can do here. Since Morocco the nattiness of peacetime soldiering has fallen by the wayside, too. There’s a dull brutality in living under these primitive conditions, and yet a provisional quality to life, because at any moment open war could erupt and then this boredom and wearing down of one’s idealism will explode; into what, it remains to be seen. I’m anxious and desirous and feel alive because there’s a risk ahead of me. How can I explain to my stepfather (or to the colonel, for that matter) that the reason why I chose to attend university before army school was that I wasn’t sure that Germany would commit to an army after all, and that the army would commit to something? Nation-building is well and good for some; but for those like myself, who have heard nothing else but retribution and bitterness for Versailles, there has to be something more than nation-building. A holy goal, a course sanctified by necessity and God’s own injunction that we must protect civilization. As a German, I need to feel civilized, and civilizing wars provide a shortcut to that comfortable feeling of superiority. God keep me from being wrong about any of this, or else show me the way before it’s too late.
Bora put away the diary. He was tired. Eventually, the sound of falling water obliterated all other sounds, echoing the priest’s tedious talk of widows and virgins and of the harlot Remedios, who lived up the mountainside. Remedios. Shouldn’t every man know a woman by that name? At one point he thought he heard a woman’s voice whispering to him, “Besame con tu lengua, aquí,” but he was already asleep.
Fuentes came to wake him up. Judging by the lacklustre light coming through the window, the afternoon had worn off. “It’s past seven, teniente, and there’s news about the burial.”
MURALLA DEL ROJO, SIERRA DE SAN MARTÍN
The place where the Reds had dug the grave lay beyond Castellar, almost an hour’s climb away from either camp. During the storm, a torrent of rainwater had overrun the place and carved rambling furrows all around the grave, displacing rocks and uprooting bushes weakened by drought. Facing the valley, Bora could see the rain-washed roof of San Martín de la Sierra on its rocky spur, lost far below. The air smelled of dirt and broken twigs, and it was starting to rain again.
Fuentes put down a folded stretcher. “What a mess.”
Bora turned. “It’s a good thing,” he said. “They won’t be able to tell we tampered with the grave. Let’s get on with it; we have half an hour of light left.”
If his men had any doubts about moving a nameless body from one place to another, they didn’t ask about it. Alfonso was a myopic mathematics student from Salamanca with an unimaginative mind; Fuentes simply didn’t ask questions. One by one Alfonso removed the stones from the grave. In a short while the pile had been cleared and placed to one side with care. Below, the soil felt wet, but hadn’t turned to mud like the surrounding ground. Fuentes dug systematically and placed each shovelful on a square piece of tarpaulin. Alfonso promptly covered the growing pile with the canvas sheet’s hem to keep the loose soil from running off under the rain.
Kneeling over the grave, Bora gathered dirt with his cupped hands and placed it under the tarpaulin. His bare knees sank into the mud and met with bits of grit beneath. Before long, a winding sheet emerged from the grimy, sloshy soup. Fuentes joined Bora in digging and scooping by hand. Little by little, the full length of the bundled corpse appeared in the shallow pit. Fuentes pulled back, muddy hands spread across his knees. Alfonso stared.
Bora sensed the men were suddenly hesitant, and he wasn’t sure himself that it didn’t somehow amount to sacrilege. Still, Fuentes made a quick sign of the cross and clasped the corpse’s feet. Bora reached under the dead man’s torso; dirt forced its way under his nails as he found the hollow under his arms and lifted him. Together they raised the heavy load from its dirt bed and laid it on the stretcher.
Bora held his breath, using a penknife to cut the stitches in the cloth and expose the dead man’s head. Alfonso looked away, and Fuentes simply waited for the officer to cover the man’s face again.
“Now we have to fill the hole,” Bora said.
They’d taken along bundles of wood to stack in the grave, and gathered pebbles to fill the hollow, packing them closely. Alfonso and Fuentes poured back the dirt from under the tarpaulin, stamped it down and re-stacked the stones above the barrow.
Alfonso was too short to help Fuentes with the stretcher, so Bora took his place. Slipping, cursing and rearranging the corpse’s weight, they negotiated the steep climb and then the twisting track that led to Castellar. Darkness was coming fast. Tongues of fog licked the rock walls and sat in the hollows; the width of the valley brimmed with it already. A drop in the temperature made the men’s labour less grievous. On their way back, the only struggle was with their drenched clothes, and the gloom of the hour.
MAS DEL AIRE, SIERRA DE SAN MARTÍN
Walton buttoned his corduroy trousers, turning his back to the bed. Sharp pains travelled up and down his thighs and buttocks, and he couldn’t understand why that should be. He said, “I don’t understand. I hump Marypaz all night and it doesn’t hurt. With you it always hurts.”
Remedios crouched at the foot of the bed watching him, arms folded around her knees, dead-white and smooth. “I’m not Marypaz. I’m not like anyone you know.”
He looked over at the knot of her small body. As always after they’d made love, melancholy was welling up from a deep place within, a darkness of mood that made him dislike himself for coming here. “You suck up my life.” The words came out of him half-meant, half-believed.
Remedios smiled at him, not with him. Her amusement was silent and inward, and he’d never seen her laugh. She lay back so that her head hung down from the bed, and like a decapitated corpse she stretched, her sex showing red, the tips of her breasts like blood against the pallor of her skin. The fleshiness in the handful of fleece between her thighs caught his eye and he felt it like a stab in his belly, a need he couldn’t satisfy now because his body was too tired. But he leaned over to take her ankles and part them, eager to see more.
“Some men need their lives sucked out of them.” When she spoke, the fragility of her neck arching over the edge of the bed was apparent. He found resistance in her ankles, and removed his hands. She lifted herself onto her elbows, pulling up her knees and opening them for him to see. “You only have to be careful if life hangs loose in you like a spiderweb.”
Walton pulled back and stared at her. He stood up uneasily, suddenly anxious to leave and forget about Remedios until the next time.
When he walked out into the open, the air was cool and moist. High above the thorny bushes that grew in the rubble around her house, daylight would come soon. Stars sank into a milky washed-out sky, trembling in the endless space as if the storm had swept away most of them and these were the frightened survivors. The clouds had rolled back. There was a scent of mint, of plants torn and broken by rain.
The green odour reminded him of the forbidding winter’s end back home, when the woods between Eden and Hardwick still harboured frosty puddles
of melting snow. With his back to Remedios’ doorway, he faced the wind-beaten plateau of weeds and pale rock, thrust like a wedge over the void below. He took a deep breath, feeling lonely. Sucking up his life. What did Remedios know? There were worse things than soreness after lovemaking. Regrets. Last night, after turning his back to her, he’d cowered in a cold sweat as if the dark were water, as if he were still climbing in the rain to her impossible mountain lair. Under the pinprick stars sinking and fading, Walton suspected what the truth was. The yellow wall of his dream – a forgotten memory? A sign of things to come? – was new and ominous, but the cold sweat was like in Guadalajara before he’d been wounded during the spring. Like in Soissons a generation ago, when he’d lain rigid in his foxhole at the bloody foot of Hill 205 for days and days, until he turned thin and yellow with fear. There was no denying it any more. Fear is fear is fear. That door was open again, and he’d walked straight into it at the brook yesterday noon.
Behind him, Remedios came naked to the doorstep, and locked him out.
SIERRA DE SAN MARTÍN, OVERLOOKING CASTELLAR
Not far from the canting trail Walton would soon follow to regain lower ground, Fuentes was holding a handkerchief to his nose.
“It begins at the sides of the belly,” he mumbled, looking away from the body. “When it’s as hot as it’s been, flesh rots all the more quickly. We must bury him while the dirt is still moist.”
Bora replaced his drawing pad and pencils in his canvas bag. “I’m done.”
Daybreak found them halfway to Riscal, trudging along the barren ridge above Castellar. Set in its stony bowl, the handful of houses occupied a terraced, arid knoll. The high south rim of the bowl was what they’d have to climb back over in order to reach camp. To their right, spotted with broom and thorny shrubs, the soaring wedge of Mas del Aire crowned El Baluarte. The men were working in a gully, where a few bushes smelling of cedar protected them from view. In the gully, sheltered from the wind, loam had heaped over the years to form a long bed.
Alfonso had been digging a trench in the soil. “See if it’s deep enough, will you?” he called to Fuentes. Bora came over to look as well. “One more foot,” he said. “Get to the rock bottom if you can.”
It didn’t take long for Alfonso to strike stone. Fuentes joined him in the gully and widened the trench by hand.
Next to the bundled corpse, Bora waited, his face to the capricious wind that rose from Castellar. There had been bodies when they entered Bilbao and during the battle for Santander, but he’d never remained near them long enough to smell decay. He didn’t like the experience of putrefaction now, and found the thought of it entirely different from any past intellectual musing over it. Sobering, that was the word. He glanced at the cuts and bruises on his hands, aware that the warlike rhetoric of family and army school talks, aseptic and firmly set in the pale frame of history, had no odour to compare to this.
Coming to take his end of the stretcher, Fuentes announced, “We’re ready.” He backed up into the gully, straining, while Bora carried his end. Together, they tilted the stretcher to let the body drop inside the trench, and began to push dirt over it from the sides. “Pack it down, Fuentes.”
Afterwards, they strewed rocks and gravel up and down the gully, along with rain-torn branches and leaves.
“Looks like nothing ever happened here except yesterday’s storm,” Fuentes said approvingly.
Bora said nothing. Carrying the load up the mountain had reawakened the soreness in his shoulder. As for emotions, he couldn’t identify clearly what he was feeling; perhaps it was just tiredness. While the men weren’t looking, he’d torn a corner from his drawing pad, fashioned it into a small paper cross and slipped it inside the sheet. He felt foolish about it, but would have felt worse if he had done nothing.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Seated on the granite outcrop near the fountain, Brissot continued to trim his toenails even though Walton was calling out to him.
Walton knew that nonchalance was Brissot’s way of disguising that he’d been worried. He made straight for the Frenchman, relieved to hear no mention of his leaving the camp drunk the night before. He squatted in the dirt and sipped cold coffee from the mug Brissot had next to him.
“Watch out, there might be pieces of toenail in it.”
Greedily Walton kept drinking. The walk down from Mas del Aire had done him good. “I’m sure you noticed the airplane,” he said.
“Yes. The same one that came buzzing around the other day. No markings. Circles the sierra and then leaves.” Brissot lifted his eyes to the mountainside where the gun was emplaced. “We’re ready for it if it tries anything.”
“Where’s everybody?”
“Off to gather kindling.”
After yesterday’s rain, the thin topsoil of the ledge had dried up and hardened again. Next, weeds would begin to grow in the pen, and the horses would have to fight ticks and fat flies. Walton returned his attention to Brissot. “Is Maetzu around?”
Brissot shrugged. “You know what buscar sangre means. Maetzu is out looking for blood.” Reaching for his sandals, he knocked them against the granite to shake the dirt off them. “Right now he could be breaking into a Guardia Civil post to slit everyone’s throat in it.”
“Well, I was against letting ex-convicts into our group. I’ll have a talk with him when he comes back.”
Brissot put on his sandals without buckling them. “I expect the mule has brought his master’s body to Campillo by now.”
“Right.” Walton tilted his head from side to side to relax, half-closing his eyes. “Mosko, what do you make of the story of the two shots?”
“I’d say the first was fired inside the car. That’s why it sounded muffled to the mulero. The second was likely the killing shot.”
“But Lorca was shot only once. We can’t be sure the mulero was telling the truth. Maybe there weren’t two shots fired, or even a car with people in it.”
Brissot took a couple of shuffling steps around. “We found no evidence of shells near the body, although they shot him point-blank. That his shoes should be stolen … that makes sense, as does the theft of any money or identification. But what about the music score – if, as you say, he had it on him? Who’d steal that?”
“Whoever took his things and fooled with the body, that’s who.”
“His things? So he was coming to stay. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“There was no telling what his plans might be once he got here.”
Stumbling in his unbuckled sandals, Brissot paced around, flustered. “Look, Felipe, the least you can do now is to exploit his death for propaganda purposes. The rumour that he died a year ago bought Lorca a few more months, but it’s for real now: send word to Barcelona at once. From Barcelona the news will reach the foreign press, and we’ll win a moral victory if nothing else.”
“No.”
“Why not? The Fascists would exploit his death if they were in your place!”
“No. We won’t know what the party line is until we hear from our contacts in Teruel. I’m not going to circulate the news yet.”
“You’re dead wrong. Silence on our part would be a tactical error. I question your ability to decide —”
Walton didn’t let him finish. He grabbed Brissot by the collar, shoving him backwards. “I’ll talk about Lorca’s death when I’m good and ready, Mosko. This isn’t Russia, and I don’t take orders from commissars. So don’t you fucking bring up the murder again until I give you permission to do it!”
They angrily avoided each other until mid-morning, Walton busy making up with Marypaz and Brissot preparing his political lesson for the week.
Just before eleven, Maetzu’s return brought them back together. The Basque was alone, brooding. “I just went off to be alone,” he grumbled. “To work things out by myself without breaking Felipe’s neck.” When Walton grinned and stretched his hand out to him, Maetzu took it without returning the smile. “I also visited the grave,” he added
. “The storm had knocked some stones off overnight, so I put them back.”
RISCAL AMARGO
There were two fine army horses tied outside the stable when Bora returned from the burial. Without waiting for instructions, Fuentes put the stretcher out of sight in the shed behind the house, and Alfonso tossed the shovel after it. Tomé, who was clearing up the last fragments from the mortar blast, was quick to respond to Bora’s summons: “A sus ordines, teniente.”
“Whose mounts are those?”
“Two artillery captains’. They rode in ten minutes ago.” Tomé ran his eyes over Bora’s uniform. “I can run in and bring the teniente some clean clothes.”
Bora turned his back to him. “It’s not necessary.”
On the ground floor, Aixala, Niceto and Paradís were peeling potatoes by the fireplace. In a rare show of discipline, they stood when Bora entered. Upstairs, the two captains were busy rummaging through maps and papers. They turned as Bora entered the room, slowly putting down the objects they’d been handling. Fussily taking in the sad state of his uniform, the shortest of the pair, a thirtyish, rotund man with the complexion of a Moor, pointed out Niceto’s poetry book. “I hope you can explain why you’ve been indulging in the writings of a leftist author, teniente.”
Bora swallowed a spiteful comment. “To improve my Spanish, which I’m sure is a better explanation than the one you gentlemen will give me for digging through my papers.” In fact, he was only pretending not to feel vulnerable. Thank God he’d taken along the canvas bag with his diary in it, and the evidence he’d found by the brook.
The chubby captain tossed the poetry book into a corner of the room. “What do you know about Red anti-aircraft guns on this mountain?”
“I reported on it. It consists of a mortar and a Lewis machine gun of the type used against planes in the Great War. Colonel Serrano has not ordered me to destroy it, and accordingly I have not.” Bora walked around the desk to reclaim his space. “I’m First Lieutenant Douglas, Second Company, Third Legionary Regiment: may I ask who you captains are?”
