Quince

by David Rees

  There had been some discussion, in the first days of the committee, about what should happen to the bishop and the clergy. Extremists demanded their execution and the burning of at least one church to show the bourgeois that in religious affairs the revolution meant business. This was rejected, and the priests (most of whom had been locked up) were given the same choice as the regular soldiers: death by shooting, or work on building sites. They all chose the latter, of course. Tomás, however was treated quite differently. José and Pedro spoke up for him; the bishop, they said, was a historian, and the movement needed someone to record what had been achieved. This line of argument persuaded the committee, so Tomás was appointed as its official secretary. He had to attend all its meetings, write the minutes and read them out. The card index was declared a valuable addition to Zahara’s treasures. It now had official patronage and would, when it was finished, be placed in the mosque as part of the city’s cultural inheritance.

  Tomás, the reed that bows to every storm and survives, made no more phone calls to Seville, and when Cardinal Hernandez rang to find out what was going on (news of Araquistain’s death had just been announced on the radio and it was thought that Zahara’s cathedral might be burning) he put on a false voice, and said the fate of Bishop Guzmán was unknown; he was, in all likelihood, dead. He could always resurrect himself, he decided, if need be. He now wore workmen’s clothes and enjoyed the freedom of movement they permitted ― ecclesiastical garments, he came to think, were exotic and somewhat stifling. His chief anxiety was that his cathedral would be ill-used, but he was soon reassured. Nobody harmed it, storehouse and granary though it was. He was upset that he could not celebrate Mass in public of course, but he did so in private in his study. The women of the families who lived in his palace were grateful for this ― the prohibition of religion was not popular with the majority of women in Zahara, particularly the older women, even those who were working-class.

  But he had his enemies. Some anarchists thought ― wrongly ― that at no time during the army’s take-over of the city did he speak out against fascism, or try to stop the brutality and the executions. For the moment they could do nothing; Tomás was protected by Pedro and José ― but they allowed the grudge to smoulder quietly.

  Pablo’s death changed life at the Casa Badajoz out of all recognition. José and Cristina were numbed: crushed. Overnight, it seemed, they had grown old. Pedro was the de facto head of the house; it was he who gave orders and made decisions. José accepted this without demur. Cristina had lost her spiritedness, her independence ― laws emancipating women did not now mean much to her in effect, though intellectually she welcomed them; she became a more traditionally Spanish woman, wearing black and spending most of her time cooking and cleaning. Pedro and Stephen were tactful and loving with both of them (Social Deviant/Homosexual, for instance, remained a secret) but it made little difference to the shock of the death. Realising that Pedro and Stephen were lovers did not affect them much, either. In pre-Revolution days they would have thought, as liberal humanists, that a man whose choice was other men had as much right to exercise that choice in his bed as a man who desired a woman. Such an attitude might have received a sharp jolt if they’d known it applied to one of their own children; they would not have accepted it as easily as they would the inclination of somebody else’s offspring ― no grandchildren from that son, and what would friends and neighbours think? Now, if asked, they would have said they didn’t at all like the fact that it was going on in their own house, but … it was just one more extraordinary change you had to put up with. Everything was irrevocably different, was novel and bewildering; the younger generation were in the saddle, and there was nothing you could do; you were impotent…

  Isabella and Carlos were both eager to return to Spain; avenging their brother’s murder and fighting fascism were more important than university studies in Germany and France. They didn’t like Hitler’s Germany, anyway. ‘Go back to Paris, then,’ José said when they telephoned from Munich. ‘Don’t come here. Not till the war is over.’ and he listed several reasons why Zahara was not a safe place ― the anarchists, the nearness to the front, and so on ― but the real reasons were that he didn’t want another child to risk death, and he was unsure of what they might think of his apparently condoning the relationship between Stephen and Pedro. Cristina agreed with him, albeit reluctantly. She would have liked her daughter in particular to be with her now. José sent them money ― it was no use to him in Zahara.

  Pedro, despite all his activities, still found time to spend alone with Stephen. His energy was unflagging ― on the committee, at the court-house as Councillor for Justice, at home: in bed. He lived on tortillas, cigarettes, coffee, and wine; and he required only five hours’ sleep a night. He was a man fulfilling a vision. Everything he did, everything he was, had magnetism. Stephen, forgetting the ruthless assassin, adored him. To be penetrated by this god, to have this god come inside him, was ecstasy.

  ‘Justice,’ Pedro told the committee, ‘has not been practised in Spain since the Moors. But it will be practised now, in Zahara. The common criminal, is he an enemy of society? Not always. In most cases he is a victim of society! Most robbers steal in order to give food to their starving wives and children! Justice will be free! Justice will be just!’ Lawyers, he said, were from now on banned in Zahara; and there would be no court fees and no trial by jury. The people themselves would be the judges. Anybody over sixteen who had the time to spare could come to the court-house to assess guilt or innocence, and decide on the appropriate punishment. The only official would be a president to direct the proceedings: himself.

  The court operated on Sundays, the day when few people worked; this ensured a large gathering of ‘judges.’ There wasn’t a lot of crime to pronounce sentence on― less, in fact, than before the Revolution. There were no quarrels about the ownership of a goat, for example, or accusations that such-and-such a person had stolen a cow: there was no private property. The instigator of a brawl here and there had to be dealt with, however; or a husband’s cruelty, a man suspected of arson, a prostitute who had continued her trade after the decree that closed the brothels. And there would be one major trial, Pedro decided ― of his brother’s murderer, if he was living and could be found.

  Miguel Goicoechea, still in bed, wavered between fear of discovery and its opposite, the desire to admit his guilt. José and Cristina, hearing that he was sick, called at the house, but no one answered the door. Iñez, when she learned what had happened to Carmen, almost went mad. The world, she thought, must be coming to an end ― her husband’s mysterious illness, the outrage to her daughter. She, too, stayed at home all the time now, but she did go out to watch the execution of Sebastián and his friends, which gave her some sort of grim satisfaction. To Miguel, the rape was another astounding blow struck by an inexplicably cruel universe. Why me? he said to himself over and over again. All he wanted from life was to do his job properly and to be left in peace, with his house, a good dinner, Iñez, Carmen… It wasn’t too much to ask. What had gone wrong? Why this chaos, this disintegration, this meaninglessness?

  Pedro’s inquiries among the ex-soldiers working on the foundations of the new hospital produced several witnesses and the name of the man who had fired the fatal shot. Miguel was arrested. Iñez, in consequence, finally lost her reason and was carted off to the lunatic asylum. Their house was given to a family who had been living in a shack on the Grazalema road.

  The trial, much looked forward to, and attended by as many people as could be crammed into the court, was unexpectedly brief. Miguel pleaded guilty, and admitted that every word the witnesses said was true. ‘But, my friends … comrades, I should say … put yourselves in my position!’ he cried. ‘What would you have done? Shoot a man to save yourself from being killed … or be shot? I have a wife and a daughter. I thought of them … and pulled the trigger. If I hadn’t, he would have been killed anyway. “Shoot me and save yourself!” Those were Pablo’s last word
s. “I forgive you,” he said. Why have two deaths when only one was needed? I’ve served this town aft my life; no one can say that as your police chief I wasn’t fair…’ These words were lost in the great hubbub that now broke out― what would you do, men and women asked one another; is it murder, is it manslaughter, is it justifiable self-defence?

  Pedro did not try to stop the noise, but let it continue until it petered out of its own accord. ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘Is he guilty of murder?’

  ‘No!’ the majority answered,

  ‘Manslaughter?’

  ‘We need to vote on that!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Very well. Raise your hands if you think it was.’

  Self-defence might have been the expected result, but people remembered that Pablo was seventeen, guilty of no crime whatsoever, and they allowed this to sway them. If he had been ten years older, self-defence might have been the verdict. But manslaughter it was, by five votes.

  ‘What should his punishment be?’ Pedro asked.

  Uproar. It seemed to go on for ever, for Pedro once again did not try to stop it. Eventually people shouted, ‘We don’t know! You decide! Let him go free or lock him up or shoot him; we can’t make up our minds! You decide, comrade! You! It wasyour brother he killed!’

  He banged for silence. ‘You really want me to think of the punishment?’

  ‘Yes!’ the crowd bawled.

  Pablo, he knew, was not murdered by accident, a trick of fate, but for two reasons: he was a hostage for his father, and he was homosexual. Miguel had told General Araquistain that the Badajoz brothers were queer, and such persons had no place in the general’s vision of Spain; they were social deviants. He wanted to say this to the assembled crowd, but he knew he could not. The committee, in a liberal mood, had legalised homosexual relationships, largely because he, Pedro, had advocated it, but they had thought this simply a part of his zeal for fairness: they did not suspect that he was queer himself. To make a public declaration of this now, as a footnote to saying why Pablo had been shot ― he couldn’t do it. Anyway … was it the business of the court to know what the Badajoz brothers did in bed? What would José and Cristina feel when they heard that two of their sons were homosexual, and that the whole city was aware of this fact? He couldn’t say it. And therefore couldn’t use it in assessing the punishment ― or, rather, couldn’t disclose why and how he was using it.

  Justice must be just, he had said to the committee. Which meant the whole truth had to be unmasked. And here he was, being secretive and devious. So … was there such a thing as absolute justice?

  ‘Comrade!’ the crowd shouted. ‘Why are you taking so long? Shoot him, if you feel like it!’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  Homosexuals have no balls, Miguel had said. Very well: he could lose his.

  A profound, shocked silence greeted the sentence, broken only by a shriek of ‘No! No, no, no, no!!’ from Miguel. The crowd was amazed not because castration was unheard of ― it was a usual thing, a battle-rite, for the Moorish troops in the Army of Africa to cut the balls off the men they killed, and they were now doing this where they could on the Spanish mainland. Their colonels were having some difficulty in stopping them. But as a legal sentence … it was, to put it mildly, radical.

  The crowd, however, accepted it. It was an order from Don Pedro the Lynx: their hero, their darling; the man who had freed them from fascism, the man who could do no wrong. And it was, after all, Pedro’s brother who had been shot … only seventeen… They began to shuffle out of the court-house. The drama was over.

  Pedro wielded the knife ― efficiently. ‘You’re a free man now,’ he said. ‘Put your clothes on.’ The doctor saved from the execution lorry, now the Councillor for Health, was there to administer first aid.

  The free man crawled into the world. He had no place to go, no place he wanted to go. His house was occupied by others. He considered himself a pariah: he who had once been every man’s friend, the popular, even-handed, good-natured chief of police. He was born and raised in the city, had grown old there. He stumbled along the road to Granada ― like the blinded Gloucester pushed out onto the heath, but lacking a Tom o’ Bedlam to look after him. He would cross into Nationalist territory and tell his story; it would make, he thought, even Queipo de Llano’s hair stand on end. He would go to Seville and ask Queipo to obliterate Zahara, wipe it off the face of the earth.

  ‘We’ve decided to live at Rojo de la Frontera. José announced. The old man had died in his sleep, peacefully; the house at Rojo was now theirs, and empty. His father’s death, José felt, was not tragic. Indeed he was glad the old man had gone before any more horrors occurred. He’d led a good, useful life, a contented one for the most part, despite the unremitting toil on the land for little more than starvation wages. He was eighty-six.

  ‘You’re needed here,’ Pedro said.

  José, who was already packing a suitcase, said, ‘I resign. Appoint yourself as mayor.’

  ‘And what will you do in Rojo?’

  ‘Plough my father’s field.’ (Rojo had not gone wholly collective. Money and private property were still legal.) ‘I want to think about what has happened, and try to make some sense of it.’

  ‘You’re disturbed by Miguel’s fate.’

  ‘You could have jailed him.’ They did not know, however, that Pedro himself had used the knife. Very few people did.

  ‘Would that be fairer?’

  ‘You could have freed him,’ Cristina said. ‘What must be on his conscience … it’s surely punishment enough.’

  ‘Why this desire for pain and torture?’ José asked. ‘All this primitive bloodlust … cruelty … barbarism. We’re returning to the Dark Ages! It’s raining blood! Are we to become Visigoths? Decency, humanity, fellow-feeling … they no longer exist!’

  It’s not true.’ Pedro said.

  ‘I think what your father means,’ Cristina said, ‘is that it’s a bit uncomfortable living under the same roof as an avenging angel.’

  That’s absurd! You’re… you’re disappointed with me.’

  ‘No,’ José said. ‘Not disappointed. Much of what you do is admirable … mature … courageous. You have extraordinary qualities! It’s just that I simply don’t agree with you on several very important issues.’

  Pedro did not reply. José looked in the mirror to check his moustache, then went on with his packing.

  ‘It would be good to see Carlos and Isabella again,’ Cristina said. ‘Maybe, José, we should go to France for a while.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll think about it.’

  ‘You’re both impossible!’ Pedro said. He left the room.

  A few hours later he and Stephen had the Casa Badajoz to themselves. In addition to his teaching work, Stephen was now cook and cleaner: housewife.

  On the twenty-fourth of September the whole of Spain, Republican and Nationalist, rocked with laughter. It was perhaps the only collective laugh the country experienced in the entire war, and the cause of it was Queipo de Llano. ‘I once expressed my admiration,’ he yelled in his broadcast that night, ‘for the anarchists of Zahara de los Membrillos. Their daring capture of that city was an object lesson to us all! But now they only deserve our contempt and our hatred! They are indulging in vile, disgusting, loathsome practices that not even savage beasts inflict upon one another!’ His voice became even more strident, and most of Spain’s radio sets began to quiver. ‘They have cut the balls off their Chief of Police!’ No one had ever used such a word on the air. Franco, planning his final attack on Toledo, grunted with surprise. Spain held its breath, wondering what on earth Queipo would say now. ‘Let me give them this warning! When I and my invincible army retake Zahara, we shall chop the balls off every man in the city! They can have balls!! The streets will be filled with them! Aaaaargh!!’

  Franco, the most humourless of men, shuddered. But everyone else in Spain laughed. They needed to.

  Mola was on the telephone at once. ‘Sack him,’ he said.


  ‘As soon as it is politic.’ Franco answered.

  Republican radio stations had a field-day. ‘Drunk again.’ Barcelona screamed with delight.

  ‘He’s now gone completely mad.’ was Valencia’s verdict. ‘We fear for the safety of everyone in Seville ― even the fascists.’

  Bilbao was smug. ‘Nothing like this goes on in the Basque country,’ it announced.

  Madrid was contemptuous, ‘It is perfectly obvious,’ it declared, ‘that with such fools as Queipo in charge the uprising is doomed to failure. An obsession with… mmm…virility now competes with an obsession for destroying Spain. Such degeneracy is astounding! Comrades, to the front! Defend the Republic! Attack while fortune is on our side! Let them see who really has … mmm…The rest of the sentence was lost in stirring military music.

  The rebel radio stations, acutely embarrassed, hastily put on a religious programme, Night Thoughts, with prayers led by the abbess of a convent in Valladolid.

  Stephen was profoundly unsettled by the departure of Cristina and José, and by what had been done to Miguel. He’d liked Don Miguel, and considered him ― as Pablo’s executioner ― a helpless victim of events: he agreed with Cristina that with that on one’s conscience, just living was hell enough. In bed, he found it extraordinary that the hands, stroking his own balls so gently, had severed those of another human being. It was frightening … weird … evil? The more he knew Pedro the less he understood him. The paradoxes: tenderness and lack of pity, love and cruelty. Did Pedro know what he was doing? Was his desire for truth ever tempered by concern for others? Were all his actions blind impulses? Did he think?