by David Hewson
But Cristina registered this only dimly. She was screaming already, a scream that sent two guards racing towards the house, guns drawn. She had seen the face, pale under the moon, the features of the man dying in agony in the ring. It was the face of her father.
As they hammered on the front door, screaming at Antonio for the key, she retreated slowly, as far away as possible, into the kitchen. There they found her, face bloated and swollen with tears, cowering on the floor, hands around her knees, speechless with fright.
They dragged her out of the house screaming, a young girl in fear of her life. None of them remembered she was Cristina Lucena, or believed she might have the presence of mind, before they arrived, to reach into the drawer of the kitchen table, take out the sharp little knife she had once used to prepare his meals and hide it deep in the pocket of her plain, coarse peasant shift.
Antonio still sat on the top tier of the seats, his back to the moon, which was huge, placid in the night sky. It cast him in shadow. She desperately wanted to see his face, to read it. She could read it. She knew that now.
‘Let go of her,’ he said in a low voice free of emotion. ‘She has nowhere to run.’
Then he got down from the stand and turned to look at her. She saw him clearly, saw his cold, expressionless features in the moonlight. It came to her in an instant: there were two of them, two Antonios sharing the same skin. Twins: one light, one dark. Inside, in the house, where there was love and warmth and passion, lived the light one. Out here, next to the ring, the place of torture, the dark one ruled. And looked at her now, without pity, with nothing in his expression except a faint air of disappointment.
The men gathered around her. One spoke, in a rough, peasant voice: ‘She saw it, Antonio. You got to kill her too. We could all die if she goes blabbing this around. You had your fun. Now’s the time.’
He kicked at the ground, ignoring them. He had a power over them. It was obvious, tangible. ‘I am the leader. I say when it’s the time.’
‘She saw. She could get us into big trouble. If Madrid hear about this, we’re dead men.’
He laughed. ‘You think we aren’t already? Leave us. Take the body. I will talk to her.’
They walked away, grumbling, walked to the centre of the ring and the husk of a human being slumped in the moonlight.
Antonio bent down, stroked her cheek. She shivered.
‘Child, child, child. I told you. I told you. Why did you not listen?’
She was crying. The tears filled her eyes and slowly dampened her face. She’d not thought of her family for so long. She felt ashamed. ‘That is my father.’
She wanted to hear him deny it, but knew he would not.
‘Your family are all dead. Except you, and you are very lucky. The last Lucena. This is a death camp, Cristina. Do you know what that means? Do you not understand? We remove our enemies to ensure we do not have to fight them again. They do it. We do it. As I said in the beginning, this is war.’
She could feel the fury building inside her. ‘Enemies? My brothers? My sister?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps not today. But this is a war that will dictate the future. Tomorrow . . . who knows?’
‘Am I your enemy?’
She saw that he could not face her, could not look into her eyes. Antonio half-turned away and stared at the low rocky hills, gaunt in the moonlight.
‘You are . . . I do not know what you are. You are . . . a source of comfort.’
‘Your whore?’
Then he faced her and she saw anger in his face. ‘Such words, from a lady of your age.’
He grabbed her roughly by the dress and tugged her along with him.
‘Come. I will show you.’
They walked behind the ring. A group of men were loading her father’s body onto a cart. She turned away and he let go of her. After that she followed, in silence. It was another minute away, announced by the stench. She had never smelled anything like it. Her stomach turned. She thought she was going to throw up.
‘No further.’ He stopped her with an outstretched arm and, in a moment, he seemed changed. This was the inside Antonio again, she thought. His voice was softer. His manner seemed almost gentle.
‘Look.’
He pointed down. It was dark. A black channel cut into the earth stretched in front of them, deep and foreboding. The stench came from there.
‘Here.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and passed her something. It was the lamp from a bicycle, a tin battery torch. She fumbled for the Bakelite switch, found it, turned it on, cast the beam in the direction he was indicating, gasped, then turned it off.
‘Did you see?’
She clutched a hand to her mouth.
‘Did you see?’
‘Yes,’ she said and that momentary flash came back to her. Body piled upon body, limbs askew, twisted into crazy, impossible angles, dull, blank eyes glistening in the dark, and dead, open mouths. It was a burial pit, the place they hid their carnage. ‘I want to go,’ she said, quietly, in a calm, unhurried voice.
He turned around and she followed. They walked almost back to the ring. The stench diminished, but it never disappeared. Afterwards, she thought she could smell it for weeks. Perhaps even years.
‘There are sixty, perhaps seventy people in there. I don’t know how many they put in before I came here.’
She coughed, then vomited, quietly weeping into a clump of dry brush. When she had finished, he gave her a handkerchief to wipe her mouth. It tasted of gun oil.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because . . .’ He searched for a reason. ‘Because it can be done. These men are fighting the world. They would bury the entire universe there if they could. I try to stop them, as much as is possible. But I cannot change them. If I tried, they would kill me as surely as they would like to kill you. My power here is very tenuous. But I do what I can. They have not killed everybody. They have not killed you.’
‘Yet.’
‘They will not kill you.’
But this was the inside Antonio talking, she thought. What would the outside Antonio say?
She wiped her mouth again, then stuffed the handkerchief into her pocket.
‘When you first . . . when you first took me, you said you were a doctor. Was that true?’
‘I said I worked in the hospital.’
‘You . . . you made me think you were a doctor.’
‘I was a porter. I carried sick people around. From room to room. Dead people too sometimes. Someone has to do it. Someone has to do this.’
She sensed his pain, sensed his realization that he was not untouched by La Soledad.
‘You belong to me,’ he said, in a dull, metallic tone. ‘You are mine. Understand that. Then we will both survive.’
‘In the city,’ she said, ‘you have a wife?’
‘She is in Madrid. With her parents.’
‘Is she pretty?’
She watched his face, trying to read what he was thinking. ‘She looks a little like you. Like you are now. Not before. Yes. She is pretty.’
‘You have children?’
‘No. No children.’
‘And us? Afterwards? When it is over?’
He laughed. ‘Afterwards? How can any of us think of “afterwards”? There is here. There is now. Stay alive, Cristina. Without that there is no “afterwards”. Come.’
She followed him back to the camp and the group of men now gathered around the picket gate.
‘Remember what I said. You belong to me. Remember that and we both survive. These men are angry. They want you dead.’
She could hear the new harshness in his voice. It was as if every step he took towards them, every stride he took away from their own, self-contained intimacy, was another pace towards the other Antonio, the outside one.
They stopped by the men and he smiled at them. ‘You,’ he said.
A youth squatting on the ground cleaning an old rifle looked up. Cristina thought he could be no more than seven
teen. He was filthy. His hair was ragged and uncut. His clothes looked like rags.
‘Stand up,’ Antonio ordered. She could feel the other men looking at her, wondering.
The youth got to his feet. He was astonishingly thin, with a sunken chest and hunched shoulders. He flicked a greasy hank of hair from his face and said, ‘Sir.’ The voice was bucolic and simple. Cristina could smell him: sweat, old clothes, urine.
‘Juan,’ said Antonio. ‘Have you ever seen something like this before?’
He lifted her dress. Her legs were pale, carved images lit by the moon. Juan looked shocked.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ said Antonio.
He lifted the dress higher, above her knees, higher still until they could all see the small dark triangle at the top of her legs. Cristina was trembling with fright and shame, her eyes closed, tears brimming in them.
‘Have you been with a woman, Juan?’
The youth shook his head. He looked imbecilic.
Antonio let go of her dress. She felt the hem fall back around her ankles.
‘Take her. Over there. In the stable. She knows what to do. A child still, and she can show you some things.’
They laughed, a grim, animal sound.
‘Go. When you’re finished with her, put the little bitch back in the house where she belongs. Lock the door. Perhaps next time she will do as she is told. If not . . . then someone else may have the pleasure. Go!’
The youth came to stand in front of her, then grinned. His teeth were yellow, uneven and rotting. The fetid odour that came out of his mouth in taut, excited gasps made her want to stop breathing.
She reached out for Antonio, but already he was walking away, barking orders to the others who hung back, grinning at the youth, making obscene gestures. Juan laughed back at them, clutched at his groin with his hand, then pushed her in the back. She walked towards the stable by the house. The moon was bright over the distant hills, but clouds were beginning to scud across its face.
He patted her backside as if she were a piece of livestock, opened the stable gate, then pushed her in. There were no horses. Just straw and hay, strewn around, a manger, a water trough. He pushed her again, towards a corner protected by a ramshackle awning.
‘You go over there. I don’t want none of those dirty bastards watching.’ His voice sounded coarse and guttural. Small pearls of spittle flew from his mouth as he spoke.
Carefully she patted her pocket, walked over to the hay on the ground, kneeled down, turned round, then lay on her back. He motioned to her. She pulled up her skirt until he nodded, parted her legs a little.
Juan laughed, a banal little noise, fumbled with his pants and dropped them to his ankles. His penis stood pale and half-erect in front of him. Then, laughing, he went down on his knees and shuffled in front of her. She opened her legs wider and he came forward. She could smell his breath. His body reeked. He stared at her, half in despair, holding his penis. He looked lost.
‘You put it in for me,’ he said. ‘You know what to do.’
She nodded and gently pulled her hand out of her pocket. Juan felt some rush of pleasure at the thought of her and grinned. He was still grinning when the blade flashed, a sudden silver light across his line of vision, and then Juan wondered what had happened to his throat. There was a sudden warm feeling there, as if he had been pricked. He put his hand to the flesh, pulled it away. Something hot and viscous ran through his fingers. He could feel his stomach rising. When he realized what was happening he started to shout, but Cristina recognized the moment, recognized she was not finished. She rolled out from underneath him, brought herself upright with her elbows, then thrust the little kitchen blade deep into his throat. He bent over, clutching his neck, the life flowing out of him slowly like a thick, red river. He choked for a few seconds, so she put her knee on his bloody throat and kept it there until he lay silent at her feet.
Cristina wiped the blade on her dress and listened. The only sounds were those of the countryside: a distant owl, dogs barking, the chirruping of crickets. She unfastened the boy’s boots, pulled them off his stinking feet, and put them on her own. They were too big for her, but she could not run barefoot, not through the rough thorny scrub, full of scorpions and snakes, that surrounded this place.
Once outside she vaulted the wall, pausing only for a moment to look around. The distant group of men were working near the ring, the far-off red winking of cigarettes marking their presence.
Without a thought in her head save survival, she turned in the direction of the hills and ran and ran and ran.
TWENTY-SIX
They did not follow her, not as far as she knew. The next day she woke by the side of the road, half-hidden in a ditch filled with rough scrub. Her feet, her legs, her entire body ached, in unison. She was thirsty and starving. She did not know where she was, the day of the week. The month even. Cristina pulled herself out of the ditch and started to walk to the distant low mountains. They looked familiar, like the ones on the road to Ronda. And they led away from the city.
La Soledad proved a good school for what happened during the next two weeks. She soon realized that she could not survive on her own. Occasionally there was a trickle of water in a mountain arroyo. Sometimes she would eat herbs, strip a fattening prickly pear, trying hard to keep the tiny, niggling spines out of her skin. But she could not survive without the help of others, and that help had to be found one way or another.
These were peasants mostly, men who were not directly involved in the war. That made them solitary, silent, suspicious. As she walked the hillsides, from one small white pueblo to the next, she learned how to touch them. Sometimes there were small kindnesses that came unbidden: water, fruit, some hard, fatty sausage. Sometimes she could earn a meal, even a night in an outbuilding, by doing whatever work they needed, or would pretend they required, sweeping out the stables, hosing down the sty, threshing dry, dusty corn in the midday sun. She became practised at asking in the right way, not for charity, but for payment. She wanted them to know that she was no mere beggar and, when they looked into her eyes, saw the grey, steely stare that lived there, usually they appreciated that.
Sometimes she got what she needed in other ways.
The distances were not small, and the weather was hard: hot and dry with a scorching sun. Soon she had the geography of the mountains fixed in her head. She knew where she was, she knew where she wanted to go: west, until the sierra fell down to the plain and Jerez was only a few miles away. It would take weeks to walk all that way. So one morning, after she had earned a bed and some food washing an old woman’s laundry, she walked beyond the last house, sat down by the roadside and waited. Half an hour later a rusty old truck came past, the driver looked at her, grinned and waved to her to get in.
She knew there was usually a price. With Antonio she had learned things she could show them, with her lithe, deft fingers, things that brought it all to a swift, messy little conclusion and then they could get back onto the road, the man bemused, marginally happy, puzzled by this girl beside him, who seemed so young and so old at the same time.
Sometimes they tried to go further, further than she wanted. Only one man had known her that way. Only one man ever would. And if they tried too hard she still had the knife, worn and tiny, but sharp as a dagger. They backed off when they saw her pointing it at them and the look of deadly intent in her eyes.
The girl of fourteen, in her pink-and-white cotton dress, living in her own private dream in a tiled mansion of marbled pillars and cool patios shaded by palms, was buried forever. In her place was someone infinitely older, marked by the darkness of the world.
The last lift was the strangest. She was no more than an hour or two from her destination. A small car rolled down the road and stopped. The driver was young, serious-looking, well dressed. That would have frightened her usually. Yet he seemed decent, concerned even, asking questions, staring at her constantly.
She climbed in, wondering what the price would
be this time.
Then she glanced at the back seat. On it lay a scarlet cape and a black montera, the matador’s hat, a glittering suit of lights, the shoes they wore, neat and small like a ballet dancer’s, the muleta staff to hold the cape and the bright shining sword, sleek and sharp, that the crimson fabric would conceal.
The picture of that night at La Soledad came to life in her head, burning brightly and brutally, like some cancerous tumour awakening.
Before she knew it she was out of the car shrieking, arms flailing, stumbling into the thorns and brush at the side of the road, falling to the hard earth, scuffing her knees, clawing for the knife in her dress.
The man got out and stared at her, puzzled, waiting, seeing something, she believed. When she was calm enough he said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m trying to find some work with the bulls. I fight them.’ He shrugged. ‘These are the tools of my strange little trade.’
He extended a lean, tanned hand and said, ‘My name is Manolo Figuera. I mean you no harm. We live not far from here. My wife can give you some fresh clothes if you like.’
She crouched by the side of the road, hissing at him like an animal, the little kitchen knife stabbing upwards, ready to be used.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, yet there was something different to his interest. It was not like the others.
‘When someone tells you their name . . .’ he said.
‘You don’t want to know who I am.’
He hesitated, then nodded. She realized that, in her stupidity, she had merely confirmed something he already suspected.
‘I already do. I was in Seville a few days ago,’ said Figuera. ‘It’s a sad place. A city of ghosts. Full of dreadful stories.’
The man crouched down and looked into her eyes. There was what she took to be concern in his face, and no sign of weakness, either.
‘When I was starting out with the bulls I worked in that beautiful ring there,’ he said. ‘As an apprentice, dealing with the beasts in the pens. The dark place they wait before going out into the sun to die.’
