by Ben Pastor
The porch, then. Around the corner, there was still the porch. Racing up the eroded steps, Bora found a door that had been left ajar. He unlatched his holster and went in. Inside, a stifling corridor divided two rows of empty low cells, where scented bundles of herbs hung from the rafters. No staircase led downwards, although Bora could look down into the chapel through an inner window.
It was a simple unfurnished space lit by windows set high under the eaves. No hangings, no altar cloth. No altar. Only heaps of drying grass on the floor, smelling like half-forgotten harvests and summers, and a faded fresco of the Holy Ghost as a clumsy dove blotching the sky-blue plaster wall. Bora walked out, feeling something between disappointment and anger. Remedios wasn’t here, so what was the point of going inside? He moodily looked ahead, where the bright north rim of Mas del Aire seemed to mark the edge of the world. From there, martins sought their nests under the porch’s eaves, slicing through the glare like slender skiffs.
The edge of the world. Bora started towards the rim, drawn by the silence and the hard, breathing heat. He found himself thinking, If I reach the edge and look below, I might see all the kingdoms of this earth and their follies, swarms of warring peoples, towers and monuments and graves, rivers writhing into pocket-size oceans. I might see the end of all things and never be allowed to come back. Crazy images scorched him like the fiery breeze. It’s the heat, he reasoned. It’s the sun. What am I thinking of? I won’t see all the kingdoms of this earth. God forbid I should see all the kingdoms of the earth. Fuentes was right; one shouldn’t go bareheaded under this sun.
The void at his feet lent him a dizzy view of the massif dividing the ledge far below, down to the remote valley floor where the brook wandered like strips of foil. Bora could imagine Teruel in the distance behind the haze. Not the kingdoms of the world: only Teruel, and a hawk sweeping in solemn circles on motionless wings, following the updraughts.
He had to crawl to look safely below. On his half of the ledge, the field glasses showed him the army post and the enemy camp. Here, where El Baluarte rose up less steeply than from Riscal, making it more manageable for scouts and sentinels, he saw a roof patched with sheet iron, an enclosure for horses and a terraced orchard. In front of the house, there was a trough full of water. Two men stood talking nearby, one of whom Bora recognized as the American. At least he isn’t with her, he thought. The other was a small hairy man, balding on top, turned so that Bora couldn’t make out his face.
Turning to the massif, he caught the glint of metal betraying at least two armed sentinels.
Searching the valley, Bora found the glimmering brook again, and the place where Lorca had been killed. The cane grove looked feathery from this height; the bridge past the curve a diminutive half-buried ring. Beyond it all, rock walls, sheepfolds, treacherous byways and hidden villages grew hazy until the land blurred into the northern sky.
Looking not at all the kingdoms of the earth but at Spain, lying under the haze with her war and blood and foreign hate, humbled him. He realized how irresponsibly, how shamelessly he had used his idealism to gain experience and learn. Closer in, Lorca’s place of death – where, according to Serrano, the heart of Spain had been cut out – troubled him. I carried the weight of his dead body and buried him with my hands. I laid the heart back in place. And, although I’m the foreigner from Leipzig, the flighty volunteer, the man who dared to cut him out of his country’s breast.
Precariously leaning over the edge, Bora took photographs of the valley and the camps below. The wind had fallen by the time he withdrew to safe ground and turned away from the rim. Remedios’ house, huddled in its charmed circle of stone, brought him to his senses.
How had he been able to keep her out of his mind for so long? Whatever Serrano or Cziffra thought, she was the reason he’d scaled the mountain. Somehow seeking Remedios simplified everything. Although he had never seen her, he couldn’t now bear to leave without meeting her. Young or old, dark or fair, handsome or not … desire overtook his sense of discipline. To hell with duty, politeness, religion. It hadn’t been so brutally simple even with the girls in Bilbao, when wine had made a difference.
Like an eager young dog, Bora crouched in the sun on her doorstep for an hour, waiting, but she did not return. When he finally, reluctantly decided to leave, he took the thorn from his pocket and stuck it in the wood of her door.
He’d gone some distance on the thistle-strewn path down from her house before he turned around on an impulse. Against the white sky, a girl stood there with a willow switch in her hand.
At first he mistook her for a child. Small, bare-legged, barefooted. In the sunlight, a crisp halo of red hair made her look like a slender torch. She’d seen him, of course, but did nothing other than flick the willow switch back and forth along her side. Bora’s blood ran high. He had no doubt that this was Remedios, and he was overtaken by a clumsy, shameless desire for her to want him.
Remedios looked at him as if it were usual for a man in a Legion uniform to find himself there. They were not so close that they could plainly see each other’s features, but he recognized that she was smiling.
“I came to see your house.” Bora climbed back a few steps.
She whipped the willow through the air. “Well, have you seen it?”
“The door was locked.” Bora spoke the next words in the hope that she would take them as he meant them, as a brazen hint. “I want to see inside.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to.”
She smiled. Her toes drew a small raking pattern in the silt when she turned to precede him uphill. “Let’s go, then.”
Bora watched her saunter up the path and nimbly climb the rise that took a fit man some effort. He followed, torn between looking at the strokes of the green switch and at the delicacy of her ankles. He preferred to stumble and stare rather than carefully choose his steps.
Past nettles and thistle blooms she led him, flicking her willow wand. Once in front of the door, she removed the thorn Bora had stuck in the wood, and instead of tossing it away, she put it between her lips. Under the pressure of her hands, the door gave way and opened.
“You didn’t push hard enough,” she said.
“I absolutely pushed hard enough.”
“Como te gusta. It’s open now.” She smiled as he unholstered his gun before entering, the fullness of her lower lip arching, round and moist. “See what you want to see. I’ll wait outside.”
Coming from the rage of the afternoon, her house was as cool as a cave. Bora’s eyes saw nothing but darkness at first. Then the dark turned into shapes, like night opening around him.
He stood in a vaulted space of plastered walls, festooned with aromatic bundles of dry flowers and thorny branches. Beyond a squat open arch was a second room, with an iron bed set against the wall. There, the brightness from the open door became muted like sunlight underwater. Bora drew near the wide, unmade bed. Plain linen sheets rippled across the mattress in eddies and loose spirals of cloth. Pillows were heaped at its head. Looking up from the bed, he recognized the pinched sweet face of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in an unframed print nailed to the wall. A real butterfly wing was pinned onto the Child’s dress.
Past a curtained doorway, the kitchen. Bora glanced in but wasn’t interested. In the twilight of the bedroom, the scent of wild herbs – mint, dill, unnamed but familiar mountain flowers – was heady. The filigree of twigs and leaves drew a seductive spiderweb against the bare walls.
Outside, the heat felt like a blow to his chest, as painful and red as when he had emerged from the murky waterhole on the shingled bank of the brook. Remedios sat on a rock, drawing circles in the silt with the pointed end of the switch. Her amused expression hadn’t changed, although she had now pinned the thorn to the breast of her cotton dress. “Have you found what you were looking for?”
“No.” Bora put away his gun, feeling more than a little foolish.
“You didn’t look hard enough.”
&
nbsp; “You’re wrong. I do everything more than hard enough.” Bora walked over to her and she laughed, but he didn’t know why until he looked down at his feet and saw that he’d stepped into one of the circles. He erased the furrow with the hobnailed sole of his boot. “Do sounds from the valley carry up here?”
“At night, if the wind’s right. When I’m alone.”
Alone? Bora wondered how that could ever be, with sex-starved men up and down the sierra. Remedios was very beautiful, even under the severest scrutiny. She was what he’d always thought beautiful, and her fairness in a land of dark women, her whiteness attracted him, created an intimate kinship of colour and race. When she bent forward to draw another loop in the silt, the motion offered him a glimpse of her small breasts. It was an unrehearsed, fleeting movement, while her knees and ankles stayed tightly joined throughout.
Bora tasted salty dust on his tongue. “And in the daytime?”
“In the daytime I’m alone.”
“Did you hear shooting a few nights ago?”
“No.” Her small face shone like silver in the red halo of her hair. “I must not have been alone.”
Bora looked at her grimly. His life seemed to have compressed itself into the area where his taut stomach muscles met his groin. Although a part of him was counting on the light summer uniform to hide nothing, the awareness of it distressed him. Half despairing, half hopeful, he stood there, silent and resentful and sure that she knew what he was thinking.
Without looking up, Remedios said, “At dawn, before the haze settles in the valley, I can see a long way down.” She drew smaller circles now, one inside the other. “You go to the brook before sunrise.”
Bora watched the circles reduce in size, as in a target that would soon find its centre mark. “How do you know who it is? It’s too far away to tell.”
“I have good eyes, and you look different from all your companions.” She giggled at the cuts on his legs. “Especially now.”
Bora felt the blood rush to his head. He felt such a crude ache that he couldn’t condense it into anything simpler, so essential that it made him shiver and forget every other reason for being here – what his commanders had ordered and expected, why the country was at war, anything. He felt stupid and raw. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No?”
Reaching out quickly, Bora took the sapling from her hand and threw it away.
Remedios let him do it. “Hace mucho calor,” she said, smoothing her dress with the palms of her hands. She stood from the rock and started towards the house. “I have a well inside. I’ll give you to drink.”
Just past the threshold, through the chink between the door and the frame, a fine blade of white light filtered in. There Remedios stopped. Bora held his breath as she leaned her shoulders against the corner where the sunbeam sliced through the darkness, blocking the light out for the length of her small body, trapping herself in the narrow space. Light and dark fusing. Heat and coolness. Outside became inside. She stood poised between opposites like a slender shuttle in the weave. He stood facing her, and couldn’t begin to think of the right words to say.
Remedios pulled the thorn out of the cloth on her breast and touched her lower lip with it. “Besame con tu lengua, aquí.”
Bora did. He kissed her, cradling the nape of her neck without drawing too close, afraid that an embrace would make him lose control.
This is what men remember when they die. Holding a woman’s face, seeking the first opening on offer because to enter her mouth is to be inside her for the first time, to slowly sink into a breathlessness of the body and soul. This is what I’ll remember. All the kingdoms of the earth were in the curl of her tongue. Light, shadow, light knifing the dark and setting her hair afire. Poor Jover, who never again can feel this exquisite pain.
By the act of sliding buttons through cloth, Remedios turned all gleaming and white, darts of brilliant light etching a line along her shoulder and one small breast, lighting her pearlescent skin like an ember. Bora felt her nipple gather crisply under his fingertips as she slid out of her dress to the waist, like an almond clean from its hull. He could no longer bear to look at her face. The dazzle was unsustainable, his entire self singed by her brightness and touch. Still the dress clung husk-like to the moisture of her hips.
Oh, Remedios, you have the navel of a virgin. The cut on Bora’s palm opened and bled. She sank down until he was crouching in front of her, and her knees parted under the cloth like knots of ivory. Everything that had ever opened before him, or been answered, revealed, given, had been preparation for this. The light was as sharp and white as steel, like God looking in at them. Bora folded the dress back.
Remedios, let me do it for the sake of God looking in, looking in – Remedios, let me do it for the sake of God looking in.
Remedios had a well inside. She would give him to drink.
5
What grief,
What grief,
What pain!
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, “HOSPICE”
EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN
As it had the day before, the airplane returned towards evening, when Walton had finally succeeded in convincing Valentin to have his broken nose treated. Now Valentin was stamping his feet as Brissot disinfected the wound: Walton heard his groans while he stood at the door watching the sky. Like a thumbtack on light-blue cardboard, out of reach of the Lewis gun, the airplane sought the interior of the sierra. Minutes later, it was back. High above Remedios’ house it banked slowly, glimmering as the sun struck the cockpit.
Remedios. Walton kneaded the back of his neck. He’d never been able to figure her out, although in recent days he’d been thinking about her more than ever before. Perhaps this change was in response to Marypaz’s jealousy; or perhaps Remedios no longer occupied an important place in his life and was ready to pass into the realm of things he no longer cared about.
For all her flirting with Almagro’s men, there was no denying Marypaz’s love for him. Likewise, Lorca’s death was certain and definitive. Walton didn’t need confirmation of what was secure; vigilance was necessary only where there was doubt, when things could be taken away from him.
By her own admission, Remedios was like no one else. He liked her because she never spoke ill of other women, never asked about Marypaz, never talked politics. There was the lovemaking, too, but that alone didn’t explain the way he felt about her. High overhead the metal tack flew past again, engine straining.
Walton didn’t understand the way Remedios spoke, though, or else she didn’t make sense. “Today the sky is laughing,” she’d say. “What does that mean?” he’d ask, and Remedios would point at the sky: “Look. Can’t you see?” she’d add, as though it were self-evident. And another one: “Some men need to have their lives sucked out of them.” Some men. What kind of men? Men like him, obviously. And what do the other kind of men need?
“Are you done yet?” he heard Valentin complain from inside the house, followed by Brissot’s irritable answer: “No, pig-head.”
On the terraced ground, Rafael and Chernik had returned from gathering sticks to keep the fire going. Oblivious to the airplane, they now squatted by the embers, while Maetzu stood guard halfway up El Baluarte.
Remedios. Walton remembered how he’d once gone to her drunk and somehow they’d ended up arguing. In June, it had been. “You’re just a whore,” he’d said, and had believed it too, as he more or less did now. Anyway, it was close enough to the truth that there had been nothing wrong with saying so. But Remedios had withdrawn to one corner of the bed, squatting like a cat, white-faced, so shrunken into herself that she appeared diminutive.
“Then I’ll give you a whore-gift tonight.” It was all she had said. After returning to camp at daybreak, he’d learned that one of the men had accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun. He told himself he didn’t believe in coincidences, yet from that day on he chose his words carefully with her.
After a last round, the airplane v
eered to the north-west and disappeared for the night. For Walton it was a signal to go back inside, where Brissot was still scolding Valentin. He walked past them and up the stairs.
All afternoon Marypaz had been asleep in his bed, exhausted from crying. She still lay on her side on top of the sheets, beaded with perspiration, sucking her thumb. Walton contemplated her. She hadn’t sucked her thumb since Barcelona but had gone back to it, teeth holding on to her knuckle and the rest of her hand half-closed against her chin. Arguing with Marypaz had forced him to open old doors, doors he’d closed on past aches and disappointments, on his reasons for trying to escape. Like the fact that in eight years and six months of marriage, his wife had proved barren. After five years they’d started the rounds of specialists as far away as Cleveland and Baltimore. They had thought about adopting, at one point, but there had never been enough money, or perhaps not even enough interest on his part. It had played a definite role in their divorce, and although he had told everyone that he’d left his wife, the truth was that she had been as sick of him as he’d been of her. Man, he thought, the door’s wide open now.
Walton straightened himself up silently to avoid waking Marypaz, and went back over to the door. Just before coming to Spain he’d heard his ex-wife had married a drugstore manager with two grown sons and was living past the railroad tracks off Smallman Street. Smallman. How fitting. Life all seemed like that, small and useless like a pinch of dirt you have to put under a microscope to see if it’s real. Slam that door, Walton, and keep it shut. The dimples and folds in Marypaz’s flesh were pale green and sweaty. Walton took another step back, and another.
