by Ben Pastor
Soler straightened up. He nodded – Walton couldn’t tell to which of the two proposals. His only overt sign of emotion was the way his right hand contracted around the cigarette case. Replacing it in his shirt pocket, he mumbled, “I would like to go to San Martín.”
EL CABEZO BLANCO, OFF THE TERUEL–VILLASPESA ROAD
Bora had left the highway over a mile behind. He had a good sense of direction; an affinity for landmarks, shapes and distances freed him from having to check his map. The road he travelled rose moderately through the countryside, edged on the right by a continuous wall of stacked stones. On top of the wall, flat stones sat vertically, leaning on one another at an angle. Beyond, saffron fields and fallow land lay higher than the road, exposing a blaze of poppies here and there. The rain had brought about a burst of plant life. Pardo could smell the green odour from the fields, and though Bora had fed him in Teruel, he showed a stubborn tendency to graze. It was now half past two in the afternoon, and frenzied cicadas lent a hoarse voice to the land. Bora clicked his tongue, tightening his knees to keep the horse going. “Come on, Pardo, it’s too hot to stop.”
Ever since leaving Teruel he’d been thinking of Lorca, who had died, and of Serrano, who wouldn’t admit that he’d died and who was ignoring his own son’s death. There was some morbid justice in it, but no gratification. Bora kept his eyes on the land. No houses, no people in sight anywhere. Ahead of him, a ghostly pond shivered in every dip and rise of the dirt road, unreachable. Farther out, where the horizon flattened after a climb, the road was a white ribbon cut short. “Pardo, move.” Borderless splashes of brilliant red widened beyond the wall and merged into uninterrupted ruddiness. Soon the wall resembled a spotted dam set against a bloody surge. The fields hadn’t seemed so red early in the morning, or so lonely. Just before dismissing him, Cziffra had told him, “Owing to your stepfather’s high military rank, it’s been impossible to keep the true nature of your assignment from him. He wired you a message.”
“May I see it?”
“You don’t need to see it. All it says is, ‘Do well.’”
Do well. Of course he’d do well. He had been raised to do well. The stone walls broke and started up again. A haemorrhage of poppies. Bora reached inside his saddlebag, where he’d placed the supplies bought from the barber’s wife, and pulled out a tin of mints. They tasted chalky but relieved the thirst somewhat.
Just beyond the top of the rise, he expected to see a solitary oak tree at the juncture of two walls. He remembered from his morning ride how past the climb the road straightened for a long stretch, followed by a curve rising smoothly to the left and soon branching like a tuning fork. A small post of the Guardia Civil sat in the eye of the bend a few miles off, seemingly lost in the wilderness although maps showed it to be halfway between the hamlets of Cunia and Cascante del Rio. “Come on, Pardo. What’s with you? Move.”
Again Bora clicked his tongue, and when the horse did not respond, he gave a light touch of the spurs. Pardo bucked and shied, holding back wide-eyed. One ear bent nervously, and then alarm turned to fright, both ears pulling back against the long animal skull.
“Qué pasa, Pardo?”
Like whiplash in front of his face, rifle shots came in quick succession, one-two-three, from two different angles. The horse reared up and would have thrown him had Bora not left the saddle. His boots struck the ground hard, as if the earth were flying at him. Pardo sprinted off and was gone.
Dust rose, and at once the wall was a race of stones askew. Dust, wall. He ran. Shots barely missed him. Stones askew. Grass. Bora vaulted over the wall, throwing his weight forward. Bullets struck stone and rang back or lodged in the cracks. He smelled the rank mash of poppies under his elbow while he unlatched the holster.
Across the road there were other walls, intersecting at odd angles, parting the countryside from here to Cascante del Rio; they protected those who had shot at him. Bora got his heartbeat under control enough to reason that he was facing at least two attackers, stationed right and left at ten or fifteen paces apart. They could safely steal away and cross over unseen, and then it’d be impossible for him to defend himself. Edging the field some thirty paces behind him, a third wall ran perpendicular to the one behind which he crouched now. From there, anyone aiming in his direction could fire on his back from a forty-five-degree angle.
Pardo was gone. Bora thought of crawling in the direction he’d been riding, but the stonework just ahead was dilapidated and he’d have to run several feet in the open before reaching cover again. Still, he began to creep that way, knees and elbows dragging in the dry grass. A turmoil of brown crickets accompanied his motions. And so did every stain and grainy patch of lichen on the wall, each threadlike delicate stalk and trembling insect antenna, the scent of leaves and stems trod upon: all followed him and mapped his crawl to the breach in the stonework. He’d nearly reached the place where he’d have to make a run for it when a shot came from a distant vantage point across the way, on the curve ahead. Bora felt it miss his jaw by a hair, and sank back.
Without lifting his head, cautiously he removed a stone from the top of the wall to look. A bullet smashed at once through the narrow gap. Bora grew so outraged, he rose to his knees and fired twice. Arm stretched forward, gripping the hefty American pistol, he fired twice at the wall across the street, doing nothing more than chipping the stone. A crossfire ensued, several angry shots that forced him to crouch and turn back. Someone reached the perpendicular third wall behind him and began aiming from there. A bullet fell short of him and embedded itself three feet away, with a thud that lifted a spurt of dust. Promptly Bora dropped face down into the grass. He could taste crackling loam under his teeth, and what remained of the chalky mint. For Christ’s sake, he thought. What’s the name of this place? Shouldn’t I know the name of this place? He felt futile anger and shame at being trapped in a place he didn’t know the name of. And with it, hard and clear as glass, the most absolute perception that he was about to die. It would happen here and now, and there were countless things he should and shouldn’t have done and said in his life, like not taking communion or bedding the girls in Bilbao or refusing to turn around to look at his mother at the train station, or not telling Dikta that he hoped she loved him. O good God, I’m heartily sorry …
From where he lay on his stomach, thirty paces across the turfy, uneven field, the third wall ran in a straight line. Bora scanned its toothed ridge against the blazing sky. Behind it, the marksman waited for the right moment to shoot again, and could not possibly miss this time. Now the man of valour will resist fear with all he has. And though he may be afraid even of things not above human strength, he’ll face them as he should … What did Aristotle have to do with any of this? Bora kept his torso, head and legs dead still, all the while trying to move his right arm slowly up his side to bring his own gun in line with the new target. From his forced ground-level perspective, a scarlet cluster of poppies framed the centre of the third wall. If he focused his eyes on the stonework, the flowers blurred into red stains. He’ll face them as he should and as it is right he should. Because it is proper, and for the sake of honour …
For the longest time Bora felt like his eyes focusing and unfocusing were the only parts of him that were moving. But all along, so slowly as to be hardly a motion at all, his right arm was bending closer to his side, trailing in the grass so as not to create a visible angle. His wrist trembled with the effort of holding the Browning sideways, low but not in contact with the dirt. A cricket jumped on his hand, then off it. Slow, slow. Because it is proper, and for the sake of honour …
The men across the road were holding their fire. The marksman, Bora knew, was debating whether to stand up and aim a last shot at his motionless body. His hands, face, every part of him was bathed in mucky sweat. Bora was afraid of losing his grip on the pistol when he began rotating his wrist to aim. He passed his thumb over the rear sight to assure himself it was free of dirt. Ants crawled over him, labouring on his swe
aty skin.
Across the road men’s voices called to each other. Brief, harsh words, distorted by his tension; Bora couldn’t make them out. They were like sounds in a dream.
Then it came to him in a flash that the voices were drawing closer, that the men were crossing the street and would reach the wall right at the point where he lay, look over it where he was helplessly lying and empty their rifles into the back of his head. Revulsion rose into his throat like vomit. He’d die, there was no preventing it. He’d be shot and die. He was about to die. His wrist trembled hard with the weight of steel. And for the sake of honour …
The marksman behind the third wall stood up. Past the red stains of the field, in a split second he was fully visible from the thighs up, aiming. Bora’s hands met with a jolt around the Browning and fired. The standing figure swayed, arms open wide – the rifle was like a third upper limb flung off – and fell forward. Stones slid, tumbled with him. Frantic for time, in a storm of insects Bora jumped to his feet, wheeled his torso around and kept firing.
… And for the sake of honour. For such is the end of virtue.
One man was already so close, Bora’s shots felled him in a spray of blood. His companion dived back into cover across the road. Farther off, a third attacker fired and missed. But there were more coming. Out of his peripheral vision, Bora saw three men riding on horseback around the curve, aiming and shooting as they did so. He had never thought stoicism would feel numb. All he knew was that he didn’t want to sink back and wait to be gunned down like a rabbit, with ants crawling over him. He pushed another magazine in and remained on his feet, ready to answer the horsemen’s fire.
But the horsemen did not shoot at him. Riding with the ease of gypsies on their shiny bays, they were speeding at a gallop in the direction of the wall across the road. Their strange black leather hats and green uniforms made them look like puppet soldiers, and Bora remembered Lorca had called them such in his poems against the Guardia Civil.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
Sitting between the couriers, Marypaz was squealing with laughter when Walton left the house, followed by Brissot. “What do you make of him, Mosko?” Walton asked.
“I don’t know. We could keep him here if you’re concerned about him.”
Walton listened to Marypaz hoot in childish bursts. “I’m not concerned about Soler.” He made an effort not to look towards the fountain. “Lorca showed me pictures of the two of them together. I’m sure he is who he says he is.”
“Why ask my opinion, then?” Brissot’s teeth clicked around the stem of his pipe as he turned it upside down to empty it of tobacco residue. “And would you listen to it anyway?”
“I might.”
“Well, I think he’s a high-strung bourgeois intellectual who would break under interrogation as soon as the Fascist authorities questioned him. And if the authorities did kill Lorca, can his lover be far behind?”
Still talking, they reached the midway point between the house and the fountain. Marypaz sat astride the cement wall of the trough, one leg in the water, the other dangling outside. Almagro sat behind her, and the other man, a big-eared, grinning chump, faced her, close enough to touch her bare knee. In the sun, a partly sheathed army knife hanging from his belt showed a mirror-bright inch of blade near its handle. Walton stopped walking. “I’m not arguing that point,” he said irritably. “But how could anything Soler reports affect us? It’s not like they don’t know we’re here. For Chrissake, we and the Fascists are sitting in each other’s crotches.”
“Well then, let’s escort Soler to San Martín and be done with it.” Brissot dug into the pipe’s bowl with his forefinger, scraping all around. “Only, since he seems convinced of Lorca’s death I’d be damn careful not to let out anything about a grave. That is something I don’t think you’d want the Fascists to find out from him.”
“I’m not stupid.” Walton took one more step towards the fountain. “Marypaz!” he called. “Come here, I want to talk to you!”
She pulled her leg out of the water. “In a minute. I’m talking.”
Walton turned back to Brissot, who’d pocketed his clean pipe. “Mosko, I want you to pump Soler for information when you take him to San Martín. Find out who drove him to Libros, and if it’s true that Lorca never told him about us. I can’t believe he wouldn’t mention the fact that he knew me.”
“Why? Do you think Soler was lying about it, or that Lorca didn’t think enough of your friendship to mention you to Soler?”
Walton didn’t answer.
Marypaz trotted over from the fountain, barefooted. “What did you want, Felipe?”
Passively he let her lean against him to rub grit from between her wet toes. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? What did you call me for, then?”
EL CABEZO BLANCO, OFF THE TERUEL–VILLASPESA ROAD
The men of the Guardia Civil were curious about Bora’s accent. They asked him to repeat his words, as if they didn’t understand him, but were friendly enough. Grabbing at their crotches, they remarked admiringly on the size of his cojones, which he found curious because he’d been quite scared. The highest-ranking among them, a sergeant, helped him look for the cap he’d lost somewhere in the grass. “First we heard the shots,” he said. “We heard rifle shots and pistol shots, but what convinced us was seeing a riderless army horse pass by our post. There was no telling what we’d find; we thought you’d have a pound of lead in you already.”
Bora continued to search the grass. He didn’t particularly care about finding his cap, but he needed somehow to relieve the tension he was feeling, and the exercise of looking where minutes earlier he’d nearly died helped. “Who were they?”
The sergeant made a face. He was a big grey-haired man packed into his cheap uniform, with wrists as thick as a child’s leg. He nodded towards the road, where deep pools of blood were forming meandering traceries in the dirt and three bodies were lined up side by side. An ooze looking like burnt sugar trickled from their mouths and ears, and flies were already clustered on it. “Call them what you please. Rojos. Reds, is what they are. They were shooting at a Legion officer, and that’s reason enough to kill them.” The sergeant parted the grass with his beefy hands. “I patrol as far as Campillo, and the other morning I was rolling myself a cigarette when I saw a mule come down the street with its dead mulero on its back, tied down so he wouldn’t fall off. Now, who in his right mind would kill someone like Vasquez? He was poor as Job, didn’t know his right hand from his left, and all he ever did was carry his load from Albarracín to Cosa by way of Castellar.”
Bora straightened up, suddenly intrigued. “How had he been killed?”
“A shot in the head, right back here.” The sergeant pointed at the base of his own skull. “So close the shot had burned his hair around the hole. Poor bastard. On top of that, I had to tell his wife and kids. Hola, here is your cap.” Holding it by the visor, the sergeant stretched the cap over to Bora, who had already straddled the wall to regain the road. One of the guardsmen was leading a wide-eyed, skittish Pardo back. Bora made sure the canvas bag and its contents were untouched before patting and scratching the horse. Next, he dug out the camera Cziffra had given him and took some pictures of the bodies, his back to the sun.
“Wait,” the sergeant said. “There’s also the one you shot back there. Go and pick him up, Galindo.”
It took Galindo some time to drag the marksman from the wall across the field. Although he could clearly have used some help, his companions remained squatting by the side of the road, glancing at the bodies and cracking jokes. Finally Bora passed the camera strap around his neck and helped Galindo haul the body over.
“Watch the blood, teniente,” Galindo said. “He’s got blood and shit coming out of him.”
The sergeant immediately showed an interest again. “Any papers on him?”
A bloodstained document passed from hand to hand until it reached Bora. Bound in cardboard, the top left corner of the first page ha
d a photograph of the dead man glued to it. All the information – his name, date of birth, city of origin, profession – was printed in French, but someone had used a pen to write over it in Spanish.
“No telling where these Red volunteers come from any more,” the sergeant said. “Seems this shooter of yours was a German. You’d think the Germans would be on our side.”
Bora felt slightly sick. The dead man gave as his residence the Leipzig suburb of Mockau, across town from his parents’ city house. Mockau was where he’d gone riding with Dikta and they’d found a place to kiss behind the airplane factory.
He leaned over the man’s body, mildly curious to see his face. It was a blonde, wide-eyed, anonymous dead face, and there was a stench of faeces and blood on him. In Mockau, Dikta had unbuttoned her blouse to let him reach inside her riding jacket, and, not knowing she had a lover, Bora had thought it a humbling privilege. “I want this document,” he said. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t take it?”
The sergeant shook his head. “He was shooting at you, teniente. Keep it. Aren’t you going to take a picture of him?”
Bora had to photograph the body twice, with and without the guards posing alongside it with grins and cigarettes. He parted ways from them at the post on the sharp curve of the road, and made sure he was out of sight before dismounting to throw up in the ditch.
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
There had been summer evenings in Eden when dust in the air had made the horizon look like yellow gauze, but not often. Walton looked at the dry band of haze across the valley and felt a renewed sense of safety in being away from home and those who knew him well. All his life he’d resented closeness, and the explanations that it required. Things happen. Things happen and there is nothing written anywhere that says you should haul around the responsibility forever for people to stare at, like a wart on your face.
Brissot and Soler had been gone for over three hours; they would return from San Martín any time. I’m cutting myself off from this, too. If I don’t look back, there is no camp. No Soler, no dead Lorca. There’s no Spain. What happened at Guadalajara is not important and no one knows about it, which means that it didn’t happen unless I talk about it. The same as Soissons. They’re like thoughts: there’s no substance to them if I don’t speak them out. And if I don’t look back, there’s no wife, no Pittsburgh, no Eden. There’s no Walton, either.
