The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  Bora had been taught to grasp nettles firmly to avoid their sting. Stretching out his hand, he thought of the thorns that had trapped him when he’d first sought Remedios.

  “Gently,” she said.

  The leaves touched his palm, and he was tempted to clutch them but listened to her and simply cradled them between his fingers. Remedios watched his hand, how he fought the temptation to close it into a fist and kept the hold even and slack.

  She pulled back her hair, baring the fragile shimmer of her temples and neck. Turning a little, she faced him fully. “I’m glad you came, Alemán.”

  The nettle juice on his palm and wrist felt like green fire. Bora did not move a muscle. “I’ve missed you these three days, Remedios.”

  “Verdad? You don’t mind that I’ve given you nettles to hold?”

  “No. Because I know why you’re doing it.” Though the blistering pain in his hand caused his wrist to tremble slightly, Bora kept control of himself.

  Kneeling in front of him, Remedios reached for his face with her small unblemished hands; as if moulding him, she ran her thumbs over his forehead and down from his temples, where the cheekbones were prominent under his youthful skin. She said, “I can see your skull. Que hermosa calavera tienes.”

  Bora drew back at the words, cautiously. Her stroking aroused him, and the indirect mention of death aroused him even more. “It doesn’t scare me, Remedios.” But when he tried to kiss her she teasingly slipped away to push the sun-scorched leaf of the chapel door inwards.

  Bora stood, aware of the burn on his blistered hand and the shrill cry of birds overhead.

  God love you, Remedios! She waited on the worn threshold in her cotton dress, draped by the wind so that it showed the outline of her legs and the place where the flatness of her belly curved into a delicate mound.

  When she disappeared inside, Bora felt a curious instant of agony and longing, which was both a fear of letting go too soon if she touched him, and superstition that the chapel’s threshold separated two worlds. More than it had the first time, crossing it would mean losing himself to his anxious blood; and to the door that must give way, skill and desire represented small keys in an immense lock. In church, Martin? They were childish, distant voices. He pushed the chapel door wide open to follow her across the ancient sill. In church?

  The opening of the door sent a glorious burst of light into the whitewashed space. The walls lit up and danced with it as Bora stepped inside. Across the floor, high beds of dry grass were heaped everywhere, pale and scented, letting out a fine sprinkle of seeds or green pollen into the sunbeams.

  Chaff spiralled, weightless, as Remedios unfastened his gun belt. Bora had never let anyone even touch it before. He drew back against the wall, and flinched when she reached for the well-sewn edge of faded cloth below.

  “Remedios, no me toques.”

  The Holy Ghost soared on the wall in his faded blue halo. A single small moth flew into the light and seemed to catch fire. “Remedios, no me toques,” he repeated, but Remedios’ hair was like a flame that would consume the tinder-dry grass all around.

  Without kissing him first, she nestled the cup of her fingers between layers of cloth without touching the flesh. Bora, who had steadied himself to avoid buckling, dug his head into the white wall. Not looking, not looking, in awe.

  Dikta’s hand had fondled him through his uniform breeches at the army ball: not held him, not moulded itself to him, not comforted that most sensitive, despairing part of his body, in which courage and terror always seemed stored.

  But Remedios, Remedios … He heard himself groan the way wounded men groan, and while he’d pulled back from Dikta for fear of defiling himself, he heard himself say, “Remedios, don’t take your hand away.” You heal all that ever hurt me, or ever will.

  All resistance gone, he felt as light as the fine linen Alejandro Serrano had never worn, as weightless as the cinders meandering outside. They had to come to it. Soon the grass was bed and meadow and a nest without edges. She sank in it as in water. Swirls and eddies, gentle swells: in the middle of them, her shell-white flesh lay dazzling in the light from outside.

  He trembled at the crudity of his need for her, bending low until his mouth met the surface of her belly. He was in church, he thought. He was in church, and all the while he passed his tongue round and round the small dip of her navel, and below it, where the sun lit a copper fire of thin tangled hair. His fairness, his colour, a sister to his brotherhood. He’d taken communion with the same scooping reach of his tongue.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  The horse pen steamed behind the house, and the sun, having broken out of the haze, was now again covered, penny-red and small. It was already pouring down north of Teruel. Ragged curtains partitioned the furthest reaches of the valley.

  Walton’s neck hurt. Now that the wind had fallen, everything was still and like a picture: grass smoke waiting to be doused by the coming showers, skirts of rain hanging behind it. His own pain was fixed like a nail at the nape of his neck.

  Inside, Maetzu’s recriminations at the loss of the flag had the monotonous rambling of madness, to which Brissot’s voice only said “yes” and “no” and “we must wait.” From the doorstep, Walton spat in the dust, creating a curd of saliva and dirt.

  In Eden Mills, this was the time for the rich to rent cottages and invite poets to visit the lake. Had he gone back there after the divorce, he’d have avoided Guadalajara, two wounds and Marypaz. You can starve anywhere, he thought, even without being shot at. In Spain the bonus for bringing down an enemy plane would buy two cars back home, though being killed by one would bring nothing. So a plane is worth two cars and an endless number of men. There’s wisdom somewhere in there.

  Maybe lying down would help the pain.

  When he entered his room, Marypaz was standing by the bed with her back to the door. She was wearing one of his shirts and seemed to be adjusting the front of it.

  “Hello, Marypaz.”

  His greeting startled her into turning around. She’d wedged a pillow into the elastic of her briefs, secured by a string on her belly, and was trying to button his shirt over it. Its bulk reached under her breasts and swelled the cloth to straining point.

  Walton stared at her. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see how I’d look pregnant.”

  “What?”

  Marypaz turned sideways, holding the small of her back, pushing the bulge forward, leering at her reflection in the windowpane. “Maybe I’d like myself this way.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Why, what’s it to you?”

  It was absurd that she was smiling. Walton felt the pain in his neck stab him when he walked over to her. “Take that thing off, Marypaz. You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Am I? I’m going downstairs with it.”

  “You’re crazy.” He tried to grab the pillow from under the shirt. “Take it off. Take it off!”

  Marypaz fought back. She freed herself and started for the door, but Walton was quick and caught her. He felt the pillow under his fingers and was close to yanking it out when she dodged him again. He heard the pounding of her bare feet on the wooden steps and went after her.

  At the foot of the stairs, Bernat stared, round-eyed. Rafael, who’d been round-eyed ever since making love to the widow, dropped the cards he had in his hand.

  Walton jumped over their heads to reach Marypaz, clumsy, bare-legged and heading for the door. “I’ve fucking had it with you, Marypaz!”

  “No, I’ve had it with you!” Encumbered by her bulk, Marypaz put her head back in to yell at him. “Puerco, putero! It’s me who’s had it with you!”

  Chernik was returning from his watch. She ran right into him, scuffled with him, kicked him and dropped the pillow at his feet in the process. He led her back inside by the wrist, telling her, “You just can’t go out like that, Marypaz.” An astonished look was on his face, and until he heard Walton shout, he seemed uncertain
whether he should laugh or worry.

  MAS DEL AIRE

  The Holy Ghost was a white blotch on blue, trying to detach itself from the wall. Were it able to do so, it would have a short flight in the twilight, like a paper dove on a sagging wire. Bora could close his eyes and see it, a swinging blur of God seeking the chapel door. It was starting to rain, and the evening sky through the doorway was empty and wide, like a fading cut-out of the infinite: the Holy Ghost would fly into it, and wet its wings. Poor Lord. Don’t go, Herr Gott: you are made of paint, and would dissolve long before getting to heaven. The angels wouldn’t be able to gather your milky drips in the rain.

  “Remedios, why did you teach me?”

  “Porqué eres digno.” Arms circling her knees, Remedios sat up in the scattered grass like a dove watching him. Her nakedness and his own made him drunk; he wanted to stare at her and away from her.

  “How? Why am I worthy?”

  Remedios didn’t say. Bora started to gather his clothes, but was trembling too much. These were no longer his clothes; they belonged to someone else who’d come here and shed them like a flimsy cast-off skin, leaving him transparent like the weather when rain is imminent. A stunned suspense, all potentiality, like the breaking point of birth. The khaki clothes belonged to the time before Remedios’ door, to the other side. He felt them under his fingers without putting them on, kneeling with the coarse cloth gathered to the shadow of his groin, unwilling to forsake transparency, unwilling to go back. Back? There was no going back. No, unwilling to go out. All outside of here is opaque. The Holy Ghost itself is scared to leave.

  In the scented shade, Remedios sat. Hers was the body out of which he’d come transparent, naked, weeping tears. New.

  She birthed me, he thought. This young woman has just delivered me. It took hours of opening. We were one, and it took hours. Callow and covered in moisture I came out at last between her smooth thighs, fearing I would die in the passage. Not wanting. Crying. Now bits of dry grass cling to me with the varnish from her womb, and we are not one. How will I live apart from her?

  His teeth chattered as he stumbled, seeking his gun belt. “I have to go.”

  In the dusk, less and less visible to him, Remedios’ girlish body remained in the scattered bed of grass, and Bora couldn’t bear looking at her because he couldn’t bear to leave.

  “Why am I worthy, Remedios?” His gun was heavy like the opaque world outside.

  “Because you will suffer much.” She stood up at last, reached the door of the chapel and remained there, her small figure framed by darkness against the damp coming of night. The Holy Ghost flew over her and set itself free.

  Bora had no doubt she was telling the truth.

  “Alemán,” she said without turning. “Spend the night.”

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  Rain curdled the dust at first, like spittle. It tapped on the metal roof next, then drummed on it. It pelted the window, lashing at the panes. The fires in the valley must have gone out. Weighed down by water, a quilt of ashes and smoke on the blackened grass must be turning to mud.

  Lying on his bed, for the last hour or so Walton had been telling himself he’d have to find something to fix the ramshackle window before it flew open. At last he stood to rummage through a heap of equipment in the corner, but only because he was tired of thinking about it. He didn’t give a damn about the rain, the bed could always be moved away from the window, and in the end, he didn’t really care if the world drowned.

  All he could find was a folding shovel, the same one used to bury García Lorca ten days earlier. Ten days. It seemed like much, much longer. To one who’s already dead, it’s forever. Walton jammed the shovel’s handle across the window sashes and went back to bed. Folding the pillow in half under his aching neck, he felt his anger brim over at the memory of Marypaz wearing it over her belly this afternoon. The crazy bitch. Now the men actually thought she was pregnant.

  As for her, she’d gone off before the rain started, and hadn’t returned since. To spite him, she’d emptied the last of Walton’s American liquor over the bed. The mattress reeked of alcohol even though he’d turned it over, because the horsehair mattress was soaked through. She had also shredded the paperback Lorca had given him in Barcelona. Walton had only managed to salvage the frontispiece, where Lorca had written a dedication to him. The tall, thin capitals of his signature were all that remained, penned high above the lower-case letters.

  You don’t know how dead you are, Federico, he thought. And, Marypaz, you don’t know how done we are with each other.

  Pain burrowed into the nape of his neck, eating at him. There’s a joke in it somewhere, not just a lesson. If you pinch your neck here and here, it hurts more, which makes it hurt less. That’s the joke. The pain made him wince and turn away from the rain-stained windowpanes. And here’s another joke. You’re closer to Adam than you think, Philip Walton: you’re longing for Eden for the first time in your life.

  RISCAL AMARGO

  Friday, 23 July, at the post.

  Martin-Heinz Douglas Bora, late of Leipzig, died and went to heaven.

  7

  No forgetting, no dream:

  Crude flesh. Kisses bind lips

  In a tangle of new veins

  And pain will hurt without end

  And who is afraid of death shall

  Carry it on his shoulders.

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, “SLEEPLESS CITY”

  RISCAL AMARGO

  23 July, at the post, continued. Afternoon, pouring.

  I am convinced, after yesterday, that what the Church says is ontologically true (that God instituted matrimony), and I will add that it is an ideal condition of existence. Having spent an entire night in a kind of matrimonial state, I am determined more than ever to marry. Which is, I suspect, my own inhibited way of saying, “Screw continence!”

  I can’t get over my good fortune in coming to Spain. This great country in great peril is my destiny. I don’t care a whit if I “will suffer much”, as Remedios said. Yesterday was worth far in excess of all that’s headed my way. Remedios knows, I’m sure, but I had to tell her I’m not afraid. And, quoting Lorca,

  I will not say, man-like,

  The things she told me.

  The light of discretion

  Makes me politely quiet.

  Later, same place.

  Fuentes is a good man overall. Reasons: I didn’t return to the post until late this morning (and then only because I had to), and he was in a state. He thought I’d been killed. He was braving the rain below Castellar, having apparently checked with certain women in town to see if I was or had been there (poor Fuentes). While it was coming down in buckets, we met as much by chance as is possible these days, me slipping and sliding along the mountainside that had turned to a waterfall, having nearly broken my handsome skull (Remedios’ words) three or four times returning from her house. He realized I’d been to her – to the bruja, no less, and in such spirits that he couldn’t doubt what had happened – and yet he was so embarrassed at being caught looking for me, he couldn’t think of an excuse. Whether he was looking out for me because he fears the loss of another officer (as if we lieutenants were important to anyone other than our mothers) or not, it’s funny (and touching, too), that he is so concerned about my welfare. I think he blames himself unnecessarily for Jover’s death.

  He still can’t swallow the matter of the anarchist flag (but that’s the policeman in him), knowing that I crawled back before sunrise on Wednesday to take it away from the Reds. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, though I could kick myself for not having taken along a scrap of paper to write a message to leave in the flag’s place. American Indians indulged in this sort of daring, and called it coup.

  What the men think of my overnight absence on the sierra, I don’t know. I’m sure Fuentes is taking care of my good name, which for him means that I am sexually active with a girl. As for calming me down, I slept for six solid hours after coming back.
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  Sitting in the corner away from the broken window, Bora reread the entry by flickering candlelight. Over the roof, right above the small room, the weathervane moaned in the rain. Bora’s eyes followed the lines on the diary page as if trying to learn from them where he stood with women after Remedios.

  There had been a time during lovemaking when he’d wanted to die. Die, not live. To sink from an extremity of pleasure to no more need for pleasure, to no risk of having pleasure denied to him; slipping out of his carnal self into her and abiding there forever. He knew now that he’d craved the unspoken thing man craves after he’s born, and by then it’s too late; tonight, this thought made him lonely and insecure. He wrote, underlining each word, “the sheltered dusk of not being”. Remedios had borne him out of the very memory of that formless safety, and he couldn’t help his longing.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  On Saturday, the ceiling in Walton’s room began to leak in earnest. It had been a blemish at the joint of two planks at first, like the wood was sweating, then drops yellow with resin had gathered in the fissure, growing pear-shaped at the tip of a splinter and dripping. Eventually the seepage turned into a string of water. Walton had moved the bed twice before reaching to wedge a rag in the crack. Marypaz was still gone.

  “Shouldn’t you go and check on her?”

  Walton was using a knife to stuff the rag between the planks, and didn’t look at Brissot. “Why?” He was as aware of her absence as anyone else, but this awareness had not turned into any desire to go and look for her. He kept working. Drops of water from the thrusting blade trickled down his wrist. It surprised him a little that he didn’t care about what happened to her. Without her, he bought himself a small piece of freedom.

  Brissot chewed on his pipe. “Well, if you’re not going to look for her, I will.”

  Walton faced him with a first nip of annoyance. “She’s a big girl, she knows what she’s doing. If I go looking for her, she’ll come back.”