The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  It wasn’t clear what the Frenchman thought of this statement. “She’s one of us,” he said. “Go and look for her and let her know you want her out of here.”

  The piece of advice energized Walton. It was still raining, but felt as if the clouds had lost their taste for it. As if they, too, were rags stuffed in the sky, letting the drips through. By the time he reached Castellar, the dirt had turned to mud around Soleá Yarza’s house.

  This morning she was wearing neither jewellery nor curls on her cheeks.

  “So, have you brought my ring back?”

  Surprised, it was beyond Walton’s ability to come up with a story. “I will. Have you seen Marypaz?”

  “Why, are you looking for her?” The satin robe Soleá Yarza had on did nothing for her, and wasn’t particularly clean either. She took two steps towards a chair, but didn’t sit down.

  “No. No, I just want to know where she is.”

  “Well, that’s good, because she’s gone.” The words came like the sound of scissors through cardboard, a soft cutting sound.

  Walton felt sudden hope, but not enough to keep him from asking, “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  “Marroquí came for her.” Wrapped in her flimsy satin, Soleá studied his reactions with a little smile. “I don’t know if they’d planned it or he just happened to come back from wherever he said he was going. Fact is, he knew she was at my house, and came for her with a packhorse. They left together yesterday morning.”

  Walton let out a sigh that emptied his chest. With it, his wet shoulders and neck relaxed, as if tightly knotted ropes had frayed into strands of loose fibres, never likely to tighten again.

  The widow tapped her knees, watching him. “The way they were going at it Friday night, I think she left for good.” Under the robe, Walton reckoned, her hips were twice as wide as his, muscular hunks of flesh wrapped in satin. “By the way, a Fascist sergeant came looking for the German on Friday. He thought he’d be with me, I guess. ‘Have you lost him?’ I said. The man blasphemed so strangely, and the way he said Cristo Rey just made me laugh. Before he left I told him what you said, about keeping to their side of the mountain.” Walton must have looked unenthusiastic at hearing the news, because the widow started to fiddle with the front of her robe, loosening it. “Now that she’s gone, aren’t you going to feel lonely, Felipe?”

  Lonely? Now that Marypaz was out of the picture, he was thinking of Maria Luz de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, who lived at Mas del Aire and was better known as Remedios.

  CAÑADA DE LOS ZAGALES

  The clouds withdrew on the day of St James, 25 July. By four in the morning, the drainage from the sierra had lessened to dribbles, and the brook ran engorged with a silty discharge, dragging along torn branches and shredded foliage. All memory of the grass fires had vanished: smoke, glimmer, the sweet odour of seared leaves.

  Bora went down alone, and after bathing he climbed the bank to the place where he’d found Lorca’s body. The sky was pale, as it had been that day, with a single star banking westwards. A planet, most likely Mercury or Venus, arching downwards. Past the sodden cane grove, he reached the bridge over the brook. It was narrow, with no parapets to protect it from the churning water; from here the reeds and canes would hide the bend from a night traveller.

  In the dark, a car would not speed on gravel. It would brake on the bridge, and for the curve beyond. They could have ambushed Lorca’s car here, unless Lorca had been forced to ride with them from the start. If the Ansaldo had been used for the trip, who had rented it, and who had driven it back to Teruel? Had there been one car, or more than one?

  Even after his talk with Soler, Lorca’s last moments in Teruel remained unknown. What other reasons might there be for having torn pages from the ledger, if not to conceal traces of a night trip? Bora walked back from the bridge. If only he’d paid more attention when he first found the body … Were there other signs, elusive signs that time would quickly erase? It was possible the Reds had watched him turn the body over, check its pockets. Coming down from their camp wouldn’t take them any longer than it did him from the post, although hauling a dead body uphill must have involved a considerable effort.

  Bora shivered in his wet clothes. Colonel Serrano blamed the murder on the Reds. Leftist sources had kept mum about it so far. What made him think he would be able to uncover the truth?

  Lorca’s death was like the ugly red vase in the Abwehr office, its hidden blue side tucked into the niche and wholly invisible. Bora crouched down, touching his hand to the gravel that had been bloody that day. Closing his eyes, he tried to rebuild the scene in his mind. A car travelling here from Teruel. The brook and canes rustling like silk in the dark, a riot of stars rimming the sierra. Jover’s blood calling to Lorca’s yet unspilled blood. The thought of someone sitting in a back seat, smelling of medicine, came to him and slipped away, and so did his recollection of Soler surrendering the key to his apartment on the palm of his hand.

  MAS DEL AIRE

  “Remedios, you don’t make love the same way.”

  “I never make love the same way.”

  Walton pulled up on his elbows, freeing himself from the tangled sheet of her bed. “Don’t play games with me.”

  “I never play games either.”

  Without his watch it was hard to tell the time, but it was still dark outside her window. He’d come before midnight, so it was two, maybe half past.

  He stared at a spot where he’d pressed his face into the pillow during lovemaking and his spittle had drawn a round coin. The wet was drying up already. “Has anyone else come to see you?”

  Remedios smiled, her lips curling without baring her teeth. She sank her head into the pillow and smiled.

  “You’re not soldiers’ flesh, either.”

  Walton watched the way she teased a strand of her hair round and round with two fingers, into a red curl over the bedsheets.

  Remedios looked around the room, oblivious to him; the whites of her eyes, nearly blue, were like half-moons sinking. Walton smelled the bundles of herbs on the wall as if they’d just been hung there and were letting out their scent for the first time tonight. He sensed her detachment and resented it, but didn’t want to argue yet. Angry and wanting to know more, it took an effort to put it the way he did. He said the words in a slow superstitious way, as if spelling them out would disprove them: “It’s the German, isn’t it?”

  Droplets of sweat bloomed on Remedios’ flesh, the moist whiteness of a bruised flower.

  “Isn’t it?”

  She didn’t say a word. Walton’s own weight, half on her, half on the mattress, seemed suddenly leaden to him. Some inner structure, sturdy until now, wanted to buckle and he wouldn’t let it. Details of the pillow – its weave, creases, the immaterial play of shadows in the folds – resembled a landscape unknown and impossible to explore. A broken geometry. “Is he any good?”

  “Good?” Her voice was as new as the landscape, the voice of a person living in a place he’d thought he knew but was somewhere else entirely. “All men are good with the right woman.”

  “You know I’m good.”

  “Well, he’s good too.”

  “Not better.”

  Remedios laughed. He’d never seen or heard her laugh. The arch of her teeth, the pinkish inside of her mouth, all new, all new. The sound rising from her, rippling and low, all new. The only known thing about Remedios at this moment was how against the white of her skin the red nipples on her little breasts seemed raw.

  Walton leaned over her. “He’s not better.”

  “He’s younger. I taught him things.”

  “It’s hard to be better than I am, Remedios.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Is he better than I am?”

  She would say no more. Walton recognized her way of cutting him off by avoiding looking at him, as if they were not in the same bed or even acquainted with each other. It made him insecure, and he loathed the feeling. He was angry enou
gh to feel the veins in his neck beginning to swell, and he lay on his back to regain some control over himself.

  Whore, whore. The room seemed to go red, like a great heart or bowel. He felt himself sinking as though he were being pumped through or digested, estranged from his own still-aroused body. He’d often worried about Brissot, who never ventured this far up in the sierra. Now he had found out it was the German. The German. Fuck and damn the German. Walton had to close his mouth to avoid panting. “Remedios, eres una coja.”

  “Gracias.”

  “If I see him come up to your house I’ll kill him.”

  “And I’ll let him know ahead of time. I’ll dress like a weathervane and go and tell him.”

  “‘Dress like a weathervane’? What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m saying what I’m saying because I don’t like jealous men.”

  Walton lay back, still. Far from collecting himself, he was fighting a raving morbid curiosity to sniff around the room for evidence of the rival, to catch a whiff of the bed and her body.

  Remedios brought a curl of red hair to her lips. “He says I make his blood laugh.”

  “His blood laugh? He’s as crazy as you are.” Suddenly sure of himself, Walton took her wrists. “Let me show you how I make your blood laugh.”

  She didn’t react when Walton straddled and then entered her. He was still erect, and already moving fast. “What do you do with him? You’ve got to tell me at least what it is that you do with him. You’ve got to tell me.” And he dug deep into her, shaking the frame of the bed.

  “We do this.”

  “This hard?” Walton felt the ache start in his loins, his muscles burning with the rude plunging motion into her. “Harder.”

  Walton grabbed her by the shoulders, frantic to have an orgasm but unwilling to sell himself short now. He paused to catch his wheezing breath, sweat gathering in a pool between them. “Not harder. I don’t believe it.”

  “Much harder.”

  Her words enraged him, but he was a good lover and kept at it, pulling her towards himself by the small of her back, kneading his hands into her flesh to get her firmly underneath him.

  “Harder than this? Harder … than … this?”

  Remedios had closed her eyes. Her teeth showed between her lips, but it wasn’t a smile. Walton was afraid for a second, but she felt stiff, not limp, so she hadn’t passed out. Her body was rigid and tight around him, closer and tighter until he felt the pain and tried to pull out, but he couldn’t. He pushed down to get deeper, but this too was precluded, as if a door inside her had shut and her inner walls were closing in to trap him. “Remedios,” he groaned. “What the hell …”

  She didn’t open her eyes. Her arms stayed stretched down at her sides, her thighs like marble, hard and cold, impossible to straddle. Only in her throat there was the beating of a vein, rapid, like a bird’s heartbeat. Walton felt the pain affect his erection; he suppressed a groan and let go, feeling himself grow small, narrow and limp enough to slip out. He was too angry and sore to speak, lying face down on top of her, nose in her pillow, ashamed and angry.

  Remedios stroked his head. Despite his anger, his need for comfort was so great that he sought the side of her face and kissed her.

  “What did you teach him, Remedios?”

  Remedios spoke in his ear, touching his lobe with her lips, then she lay back. “He cried after I taught him.”

  “Teach me.”

  “No.”

  They made love again, silently, and then he stood up and got dressed without washing. Walton left without saying goodbye to her, and Remedios went to the well to pour water between her legs.

  RISCAL AMARGO

  25 July. Afternoon, at the post. The great feast of Santiago and St Christopher.

  I am put in mind of the epistle from 1 Corinthians 4:9 “Brethren, I think God hath set forth us apostles, the last, as it were men appointed to death …”

  What I learned four days ago at the seminary in Teruel is no great help at this time. I went because of what I overheard Millares say at the bar, hinting at some sexual misbehaviour on Soler’s part. Not a subject I could directly bring up in a religious institution, but the priest – a Father Iginio, S. J. – chose not to show me the door when, solely based on the authority my uniform gives me, I asked if Francisco Soler was a graduate of the seminary (a safe way of broaching the subject). Thanks to the impassive face I’m learning from Fuentes, the priest admitted that Soler had been a student there instead of asking me why I was seeking the information. The distinction made me understand I was on to something. “But did he actually graduate?” I insisted. To make a long story short, it seems that Soler attended the seminary, being expelled during his second year for “disciplinary reasons”. I thought it interesting that Father Iginio would remember the name of a student who had been drummed out of the seminary years earlier: how serious had the incident been if it had resulted in that kind of punitive measure? I kept the pressure on. All I managed to get out of him was that there was another boy involved, and that he, too, was expelled. No details, no comments.

  When it was the priest’s turn to ask about me, I told him I am a foreign legionnaire fighting for the preservation of religion in Spain, a Roman Catholic whose errand has nothing to do with politics. He seemed satisfied with that explanation, although I suspect that if I try and spring any more questions on him in future, he won’t be anywhere near as forthcoming.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  It was a clear daybreak on Monday when Walton returned from Mas del Aire. He went straight to bed, and slept late into the morning.

  Over and over, he dreamed of riding home from work in a bus that took every wrong turn and never reached his destination. The city was part Pittsburgh, part Washington, part a faceless derelict suburb. Dark unnamed streets bent around corners and crossed railroad tracks, passed through abandoned industrial yards or ran straight along streets lined with dimly lit drugstores and shops. Past the tracks where shanties had mushroomed on Sylvan Avenue years earlier, the sandy slope crowded with privies had become a yellow wall, shadowy and without end. The bus went on forever, and never reached home.

  When someone stormed into his room, Walton’s immediate reaction was to grab his pistol from under the pillow and level it at the doorway. “Stop the fucking bus,” he mumbled. Then he recognized Rafael, and lowered the barrel.

  The youngster was out of breath. Tramping upstairs after him, Valentin showed his face next. Both looked exhausted and anxious.

  “Felipe, the grave —”

  Walton jumped out of bed. Fully awake now, he groped around the floor for his clothes. “The grave what?” He dressed himself furiously, yelling at the boys. “What are you idiots telling me? When did you go to the grave?”

  “We … went to the grave as soon as it was light enough to see.”

  “To do what? Damn you, what’s wrong with the grave?”

  “It’s empty.”

  Walton slumped back onto the bed. “What?”

  “It’s empty.”

  Brissot came into the room just in time to hear Valentin say, “It really is, Felipe. I was so sick of hearing about Rafael’s rosary, I talked him into coming with me to look inside the grave. He sewed the body into the sheet, didn’t he? Who’s to say he didn’t lose the rosary then?”

  “I didn’t want to do it,” Rafael moped. “He made me do it.”

  Brissot interrupted him, staring at Valentin like an owl mesmerizing a crow. “Let me understand. You two went to the grave and actually dug into it?”

  “All the way. There’s sticks and rocks and branches inside it, but the body and winding sheet are gone.” Valentin showed Brissot his bloody fingers. “We got so desperate, Rafael and me, we started rooting around in the ground like hogs. It’s gone, Mosko.”

  Walton now sat lacing his boots, regaining control. “Valentin, Mosko, you’re coming with me to the site. Rafael, you stay.”

  They took rifles and ext
ra ammunition and left within minutes. From the camp, Muralla del Rojo could be reached by a shortcut across the steep face of the sierra looking west towards San Martín. Burdened with equipment, they spent nearly an hour climbing. Walton was the first there, and he only gave himself a moment to get his breath back before running to the gravesite. After last night’s bitter lovemaking, or perhaps the strenuous hike, his hands and legs trembled as he stared into the hole, enlarged by his men’s panicky search. All around lay pebbles and gnarled branches that had been used to create volume by those who had removed the body.

  Brissot stumbled up and Valentin came last, blinking spasmodically. Brissot took him by the arm. “Was there evidence that someone had been here?”

  “No, not a thing. It had been raining, but it was nothing like the storm of a few days ago. I’m telling you, Mosko, we didn’t realize anything was wrong until we started digging out branches.”

  Walton took a stiff step back when Brissot joined him. Squatting by the hole, the Frenchman ran his hand through the loose dirt, back and forth, like a housewife checking the temperature in a bathtub. “You boys had it in your heads to search a decomposing corpse?”

  Valentin tossed back his greasy hair. “The way I was looking at it, we wouldn’t have to. Rafael gets scared so easily, he’d realize the rosary didn’t mean that much to him, and stop complaining.”

  Walton heard every word as through cotton walls, bits of sounds his mind had to stitch together to understand. The tremor of his hands was the only outward sign of a reaction, even to him. When Brissot approached him, he struggled to look at the doctor.

  “The soil deep inside is drier than I thought, Felipe. How did the grave look when you came a few days ago?”

  Walton’s tongue felt like a piece of leather he had to unglue from his palate in order to speak. “Undisturbed.”

  “So it probably happened before the last rain.”

  At the foot of the grave, Valentin counted on his bruised fingers. “That means some time between Tuesday and the end of Thursday.”