The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  “I wouldn’t believe it.”

  Walton pushed the metal bed across the floor, dislodging the loose tile in the process.

  “Felipe,” Brissot’s voice called from the top of the stairs. “Maetzu is back.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

  “He killed one of the Fascists in Castellar. The man was leaving Soleá Yarza’s house, and Maetzu knocked him down from five hundred yards away.”

  For an appalled, gleeful moment, Walton cherished the animal hope that it had been Bora. Defiance, triumph and a spot of regret were added to the mix. But Brissot added as he walked in, “That’s the shot you heard from the cemetery.”

  “Ah.” Walton knelt to joggle the loose tile, which came out. “What the hell …?” A small square space now gaped between the floor and the ceiling of the room below. “Fuck,” Walton said.

  Tucked inside the hole was a bright piece of cloth, which he recognized as a kerchief he had bought for Marypaz in Barcelona during the spring and hadn’t seen her wear in weeks. It was red, with black and yellow swirls and flowers. He reached for it and felt before he pulled it out that something was wrong. He was sure of its contents even before undoing the bundle. His watch, Brissot’s lighter, Rafael’s silver rosary, Chernik’s pen. Marypaz’s gilded bracelet. The last piece … the last piece had to be Soleá Yarza’s ring, a hefty gold band with a filigree pattern of leaves.

  Walton’s left eye watered if he closed it, so he stared at Brissot in spite of the pain. “What was she trying to do, Mosko? Under my nose, under your nose … She almost got Rafael killed over her joke!”

  “It wasn’t a joke, Felipe.”

  “No? What, then? Letting me go crazy looking for stuff hidden under my own bed!”

  Brissot lifted his lighter from the small pile and put it into one of his many pockets. “If you cannot get it into your head that she was craving attention, there’s no explaining it to you,” he said sternly. “The positive thing is that without the story of Rafael’s rosary you’d have never discovered the empty grave.”

  “For all the good that’s done me! The German sonofabitch wants me to believe they hauled the body to Teruel.”

  Brissot quickly suppressed a sneer. “I thought you hadn’t spoken to one another.”

  “So what? It was a lie, wasn’t it? I don’t need you telling me how to act with a sonofabitch half my age.”

  Brissot shuffled away in his sandals to avoid an argument, adding, “Are you going to tell the men where you found these things, or just leave them casually lying around? They were in your room. And when push comes to shove, everyone liked Marypaz.”

  Walton heard the peevishness in his own voice. “That’s because you miss her.”

  SAN MARTÍN DE LA SIERRA

  Sunrise was still some time away. After the rain, the residual moisture in the lower sierra and the valley had condensed in an immense billow of fog, frothing up to the edge of the rocky spur where the chapel perched alone.

  Bora waited in the muffled silence, and although he strained to hear human sounds, Walton approached so stealthily that he was only revealed at the last moment. Caught off guard but unwilling to admit it, he immediately went on the offensive: “Your men killed one of my men.”

  “We also killed the lieutenant before you,” Walton rejoined.

  Only then did they reluctantly exchange a sullen army salute.

  “It wasn’t an act of war, Major.”

  “Everything between us is an act of war. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Bora rested his back against the chapel wall. The spur where they sat unbeknown to others sank in the swell of haze two feet below them. Walton’s black eye was a more visible reminder of their last encounter than his own bruised jaw. What formality was possible between them, given what they had shared sexually? In his longing for Remedios it all seemed sinful, intrusive and unavoidable.

  We’re not here about Remedios. I ought to be talking about García Lorca, or anything else that will lead to the subject. Across the small space that separated them, Walton’s long Anglo-Saxon face had a day’s growth of dark beard. Minute wrinkles embittered the sides of his mouth, and formed an untanned web at the corners of his eyes, one healthy and one battered. He smelled of cigarette smoke. Even in the open air, Bora recognized it, and wondered with inopportune self-consciousness if Remedios liked that smell. In the end, he said, “You served in the Great War, I expect?”

  Walton nodded. “Western Front.”

  “There were … splendid episodes in that theatre of operations.”

  “Oh yes? It was nothing but shit.”

  “Well, strategically at least —”

  “Spare me.”

  A pebble rolled out from under Bora’s foot, and he caught it before it sank in the fog. “I thought it admirable, how you defined yourself yesterday.”

  Walton turned to him with an annoyed smirk on his weathered face. “What a classist statement! Why, should I be ashamed of calling myself a peasant?”

  “That’s not how I meant it. People generally try to aggrandize themselves.”

  “Because they care for this life.”

  “Because they hold it in regard, yes.”

  “And you don’t.”

  Bora tossed the pebble into the sea of fog. “On the contrary.”

  “You’re in the wrong business, then.”

  “Or in the right one.”

  No mention of Lorca yet, but this was the ceremonial stage of their discussions, necessary if a deal was to follow. Walton sat with his knees drawn up, doubling up his shaggy figure, his blue eyes firmly on Bora. Bora resented his grudging, tactless attention and said, much as one nudges a sleeping dog, “I take it you don’t care much for life.”

  For nearly a minute Walton simply sat, the nape of his neck against the chapel wall as if he could push the brickwork back. Halfway through that interval the sun rose. Bora tossed pebbles with increasing energy, awakening small echoes under the brightening fog.

  Walton did speak eventually, although his first words were mumbled and lost to Bora’s ear. “It’s a hallway with doors, right and left. Think about it. You open, look inside, stay a while, shut them behind you. Right, left, right, left. Some of them you slam. You lock some others. Nothing’s prearranged. You get sick of choosing and shutting doors after so long.”

  Bora mulled over the meaning of those plain yet troubling words. Not for the first time, he asked himself whether he had uselessly complicated his life. The unadorned idea of doors as Kantian “free elective will” had the advantage of simplicity. “Surely you get pushed through some of the doors,” he said, tentatively.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “One could argue that free will isn’t absolute.”

  “Nothing is. Once you get that into your head, philosophy becomes pretty useless.”

  “Then you shouldn’t subscribe to any ideology.”

  “Who says that I do?”

  With the edge of his hand, Bora swept away a crowd of small rocks, sending them into the void below. “You must be in Spain for some reason other than greed.”

  Walton laughed. “Greed is an ideology. Didn’t you know that? It’s called capitalism.”

  He sounded strong, physically and of character, secure in himself. Like a man who’d suffered. “I envy you,” Bora admitted without lying. Then, to make himself clear, “I envy that you were Lorca’s friend. And I envy your age, your experience.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. I feel extremely awkward with men more experienced than myself.”

  “What a fool.”

  Walton’s dismissive tone irked him this time, or else Bora was tired of preliminaries. “Francisco Soler is dead. Were you aware of it?” he asked.

  With sunrise, the great swell of fog took on a gauzy sheen, a veiled incandescence that would soon make the world glow around them.

  “When?”

  “Last week. He was shot in
the head shortly after I questioned him near Castralvo. Someone went through his apartment in Teruel looking for something, I have no idea what.”

  Walton let him wait, rolling himself a cigarette. He lit it and gulped down the smoke before saying, “All right, Lieutenant. Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know.” He took on a pragmatic lack of expression, an embittered face that smoothed itself into dispassion. Before Bora had time to reply, he slipped in, shrewdly, “If you think she likes you, you’re mistaken.”

  Bora found it inadvisable to smile. “Maybe. I like her, a great deal.”

  MAS DEL AIRE

  Black cotton stockings were all she wore; dipped in darkness from mid-thigh downwards, her body emerged like the dawn.

  “… So we’re not doing it because of him, or because of her?”

  “No sé, Remedios.”

  “You do know.” She knelt in the middle of the bed holding up her hair with one hand, like a mermaid in a milky sea. “She has another. No?”

  “Not any more.”

  “She has another, Alemán.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  Gracefully Remedios lay down on her side. “She’ll keep him until you come back.”

  Was it really about Dikta, or Dikta’s lover? They’d been kissing on top of the sheets, Bora still completely dressed, Remedios wearing only her black cotton stockings. Kissing her with his clothes on pushed him to the edge of pleasure and punished him, and having said that he would not make love the pleasure was rimmed with pain, like a burn. Lorca’s words haunted him:

  Limpid pain, always alone.

  Oh, pain of the hidden stream

  And a faraway dawn!

  He lay on his stomach beside her, watching Remedios as one watches a delicate colour respond to the light, absorbing and reflecting it. She folded her hands on the pillow and rested her face on them; her crisp ruddy hair fell over her cheek, veiling her left eye. The other shone like a star.

  “You said I would suffer, Remedios.”

  Her beautiful eye opened slowly, a crescent limning the blue-green of her iris. Bora prodded her gently, a slipping over of his hand to touch her shoulder. “Remedios, am I going to die?”

  “Who isn’t, Alemán?” Her waist, her hip … a curve like a snowdrift he could huddle against and be safe.

  “You know what I mean. Am I going to die in the war?”

  “You shouldn’t be asking.”

  “But do you know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then you have to tell me.”

  Moist from kissing, Remedios’ lower lip had a delectable, fruity redness. In a gesture he was learning so well, she pulled back the hair from her face, baring the fragility of her neck and the meander of her small ear. “What good will it do?”

  “Plenty of good.” Bora grazed her lip with the tip of his finger, remembering the taste of it in his mouth. “Seriously, Remedios: it’ll do me plenty of good.”

  “Will it, Alemán?”

  “It’ll do me plenty of good.”

  “No.”

  He turned sideways to face her. Remedios was holding her small breasts pensively. He longed to reach down to that cradled roundness, but he felt the question’s urgency. “Yes, Remedios. Yes, yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’ll know how to act.”

  “If I tell you either way, you’ll do stupid things. Then you’ll regret that you know and wish that you didn’t.”

  He’d gone too far to back down now, though he was starting to feel afraid. As if they were handsome bodies belonging to others, he saw the tanned skin of his knees meet the black-sheathed whiteness of her legs. “I won’t. I promise I won’t regret it.”

  Remedios sighed again. She lifted her hands to him, slowly. “This is all I’m telling you, Alemán.”

  He looked at her outstretched fingers. “Seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seven what? Months, days? Years?”

  “That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “And Felipe?”

  “Felipe, too.”

  Bora turned on his back, silently swallowing. The sweetness of the kiss in his mouth was all he felt he could depend on. “Let’s make love.” He began to take his clothes off without sitting up, stripping anxiously, his eyes closed.

  “You’re regretting it already.” Remedios’ voice came to his ear, sadder than he’d ever heard. “Don’t say no. You are, I can tell. You’re counting and regretting it.”

  “No. No. I don’t regret anything.”

  TERUEL

  In front of the Hospital de la Asunción, at the Bank of Spain’s end of the square, troops were lined up when Bora arrived in Teruel. Tassels dangling brightly from their side caps, in their brown uniforms they resembled clay soldiers with wicks stuck into them. Complete with military band, they faced the church of San Juan, ready to celebrate something or other, more likely than not the victory at Brunete.

  A group of officers in dress uniform – ties, white gloves and leather gaiters – smoked cigarettes on the church steps, waiting for the ceremony to start. They looked over when Bora passed on horseback. He saluted them, and they returned the greeting slowly, resting their gloved hands briefly against their temples. Captain Mendez Roig was among them, and acknowledged Bora’s greeting with an additional curt nod of his head.

  The streets were more animated than usual, but Cziffra’s storefront remained secluded and in the shade at this early hour. A fanfare was blaring from San Juan’s square as Bora tied up Pardo at the end of the street. Cziffra himself stood behind his secretary’s desk with one hand in the pocket of his linen suit, and for all the coolness of his expression Bora had no doubt he had a pistol in it. “Not going to the parade?” he asked, as if testing a boy on a school subject.

  Bora took the garage ledger from his canvas bag, and handed it over without comment.

  They stood there for some time, during which bugle calls and shouted orders distorted by loudspeakers created a far-off confusion of sounds. In the niche, a plaster bust of Wagner in his limp pancake hat had replaced the ugly red vase. Cziffra’s summer suit was blurrily mirrored in the window; the shot pane had been repaired.

  “Well, we did hear about Soler’s sorry end,” Cziffra conceded with jovial indifference. “The thought did cross my mind that you might have pushed your questioning too far. But if you say that wasn’t the case, all the better. Being an assassin requires more training than you have. Naturally, Serrano will have to follow through with some sort of sanction against you, but it won’t be for dispatching Soler. To top it all, you contravened all orders by meeting Felipe, the American. It seems curious to me that you came to blows with him. Blows seem a brutish method of settling political differences between officers. As for what came out of the second meeting, you may or may not be on the right track.”

  “But do I have your permission to go to Alfambra?”

  “Yes. Ask the Guardia Civil for transportation. In case you’re planning to visit Luisa Cadena, let me dissuade you. She received the news of her relative’s passing. I doubt she wants to see you, or any other uniform.”

  “I have more questions for her!”

  “You’ll have to do without them.”

  “What about the file on Lorca?”

  “Later.” Picking up the anarchist flag Bora had brought along with him, Cziffra freed it from its string bundle with a dainty pair of scissors. He unfolded it. “So, this is the trophy. How interesting. You had better leave it here while you travel north.” He slipped the flag into one of the mysterious drawers of his desk. In its stead, Cziffra pulled out an envelope. “This came for you.” He proffered an opened but uncensored letter. “In English, from your mother. She still doesn’t seem to know where you are.”

  Bora hastened to read it.

  … things are much the same here, my darling. Our J. H. Voss translation of the Iliad-Odyssey with its Genelli plates received flattering reviews in the Literarisch
es Zentralblatt, and we are confident the Bora Verlag will outshine Brockhaus and Baedeker this August.

  On 8 June, your father and I went to Frankfurt for the premiere of our friend Orff’s Carmina Burana, a “musicalized drama”, as he calls it, and a piece like no other: you would love it, and we must catch it together when you return.

  You’ll be interested to know that a young lady telephoned to ask about you. Her name is Benedikta von Coennewitz. I know her mother slightly from my tennis class. She apparently met you at an army reception during the spring. She wanted to know if you were ‘back from Italy’, so I assume you told her that you are abroad on manoeuvres. She sounds charming. Your father – you know how he is – made some gruff remarks about the young lady’s grandmother and great-aunt. She seems perfectly lovely, and after we chatted for a while I invited her to tea next Thursday. I thought it inappropriate for me to ask her, but are you quite close to her? She mentioned you have only met twice, yet she speaks about you rather en famille. But here I am, at forty-three years of age, fussing like my Victorian grandmother! I’m sure that she is perfectly lovely and just very much enchanted with my wonderful son.

  Cziffra made a wry face. “Speaking of wonders, I wonder what your mother means by ‘gruff remarks’. If her father is the same von Coennewitz recently appointed German consul in Milan, the young lady’s parents are in the process of divorcing and quite Protestant.” Outside, the military band struck up a paso doble with vim. “Frau von Coennewitz, if I’m not mistaken, is openly living with a Schutzstaffeln colonel these days … something I wouldn’t tell your mother. And I take it that you’re closer to this perfectly lovely casual acquaintance than your mother suspects, though your stepfather seems to have a clearer idea of the matter.”

  “I plan to marry her, if I go back.”

  Bora was surprised at having said the words. Marrying Dikta? Was this what he’d been thinking of? It was one more step towards making it necessary to ask her. Dikta, who has dimples when she smiles, and a vacuous look when we make love. Other than that she rode well, wore beautiful lingerie and had attended Swiss schools, Bora couldn’t say much more about her. Yet he had been thinking about her differently ever since meeting Remedios, as if Dikta could become Remedios somehow. He was enthralled at the idea of marrying without having worked out the details: his parents’ opinion, his career, the fact that he hardly knew her. As if knowing someone too well decreased the chance of intimacy; the less he knew Dikta, the more he could ascribe to her qualities that she might or might not have. In the end, he loved those qualities anyway, or rather his idea of them: the sort of girlfriend and wife and bedmate who would bear his children. He felt warm and affectionate towards Fräulein Coennewitz and unready for her to say no. She will simply have to say yes when I ask her.