There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  She wakes the head nurse, who thanks her and sends her home to sleep.

  Marian knocks on Carmen’s door. Sitting on the floor, they peel the eggs, eating them with great slowness, acknowledging their preciousness.

  “Ah, we’ve sinned,” says Carmen, a look of satisfaction, almost rapturous, on her wide face.

  “But we don’t believe in hell anymore, or even purgatory, and there’s nobody to confess to.”

  “Except each other,” Carmen says.

  “I absolve you, my child,” Marian says.

  “Ego te absolvo,” Carmen replies, making the sign of the cross in the air.

  “What bad girls we are,” she says.

  They kiss each other on the lips. Marian tastes again the rich yolk, the ascetic white, the faint intrusion of the harsh red wine.

  •

  Marian discovers that, despite his serious look, Dr. Ramón Ortiz likes to make jokes. He orders a film to be brought to the hospital for the staff to watch: the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. He introduces the film with words that might be considered punishable in the hospital La Pasionaria. “In this movie, there are four Marx brothers: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Not appearing is the fifth Marx brother: Karl.”

  Everything between them begins because she and Ramón Ortiz are the only two who don’t smoke. This makes them figures of fun, especially when Dr. Ortiz seriously tries to defend himself. “I have enough poisoned air around me when I deal with suppuration.” One day they meet walking along the shore; all the others are sitting on the stone benches of the hospital grounds, smoking. They walk together in silence, not knowing how to speak to each other, and the walk seems not like a walk but like a regimen ordered for their health. At first he is official, taking the tone of a supervisor evaluating her work.

  “You have several qualities that I appreciate very greatly,” he says. “You are willing to do anything, however disagreeable or humble. You have a great facility in inserting IVs, which is invaluable. Most important to me is your fluency in Spanish. It is a great relief not to have to search for a word in German or English, of which I have very little.”

  She has never been good at accepting compliments; she’s always thought it was because so few were provided by her family.

  “What I’m really good at is driving and fixing cars. But the men don’t want me to drive an ambulance because I’m a woman—somehow it seems unladylike to them. So much for the transformation of society,” she says.

  The doctor relaxes; his shoulders lower, his pace picks up. “Where did you learn such good Spanish?”

  “Oh, here and there,” she says, uneasily, unwilling to say, “I learned it from my servants.”

  “Tell me the truth,” he says, “you worked in a Mexican bordello.”

  Another daring joke, so she dares to be daring in return and says, “How did you guess?”

  “Easy,” he says, and pats her arm, causing a small shiver of pleasure, unfamiliar, therefore vaguely shaming.

  —

  Somehow—it can’t be an accident—when she is taking a break, which she uses to walk along the shore while the others smoke, he arrives to join her. They always begin walking in the same direction, turning left, with their back to the harbor, because this way for a little while they can forget there is a war. When they turn around they have to remember: the harbor, repeatedly bombed, presents its ruination in a way they cannot avoid.

  Carmen teases her. “I think you should start wearing lipstick when you go for your walks now, because it is such a coincidence that Dr. Ortiz always just happens to be there when you are.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Marian says. “He doesn’t know I’m alive.”

  “I know when romance is in the air,” Carmen says.

  “And I know that you love seeing things that are nowhere.”

  —

  Ramón Ortiz is the only one she has ever heard speak about the political situation in a measured way. “No one in Spain has ever wanted to listen to a reasonable solution, compromise is betrayal for them, is death, everyone, right and left, young and old, they think they’re El Cid riding on horseback with a raised sword, leaving their enemies in the dust, in their own blood. We were so happy when the Republic was elected, but we made mistakes, we made mistakes because we were so desperate to weaken the power of the Church. We had to weaken it, but we were too rash. We made it illegal to be married or buried in church, and people want to be married and buried as their ancestors were. Why, why is my country so in love with destruction? Every time I hear it…on the right and the left, all the words of blood, of fire, I want to say: Please, you are burning yourselves up, you are letting your own blood, please can’t you move slowly, can’t you see that things will take time. But no, they have to be the Great Crusaders. In the end that will be our downfall, because whoever wins will be drenched in blood. And because in the end reason won’t matter—the fascists are armed by the worst people in the world, and we are armed with sticks and rocks and shovels.”

  —

  He teases her about being the only foreign volunteer he’s met who’s Catholic. “What are you doing here, don’t you understand the Generalissimo is preserving the Holy Church?”

  “It’s my only vanity,” she says, “the one thing besides my Spanish—which I learned in the Mexican bordello. It’s that, because I was brought up Catholic, I understand more of what’s going on than the others, particularly the Americans. I understand the rhetoric: the shedding of blood, the promise of eternal reward. And I understand their taking the side of the rich, because my house was always full of priests with their fine white hands and the fine white linen towels my mother always provided for them, and the fine china in their fine rectories, and their small, consistent cruelties in confession when some poor soul confessed to something they could never dream of…It was always something sexual they were cruel about, some unfortunate girl getting pregnant, some mother of seven using contraceptives. They didn’t care what you did, you could kill someone while you were driving drunk, you could beat your wife to a pulp, and they’d be oh so ready with forgiveness. But some poor wretch of a kid gets pregnant—they’d shame her until she wanted to die.”

  She expected some kind of sympathetic leaning toward her as a result of what she’d said, but, instead, she sees something happening to his whole physical being. His low compactness suddenly thins and sharpens; what was a dependable rock has become the flint head of an arrow. And his voice, always so low, always with some tone of regret or apprehension, suddenly goes high and cold.

  “You think you understand, but you can’t possibly understand. You’re American, and you can’t possibly understand the absolute power they had, not just over your spiritual life, but over the bread in your mouth and the earth under your feet. You think that because some priest was hard on somebody in confession, because some priest liked fancy china and silver, that you understand. But you can’t, the way they would stand by while people starved, the way they would persecute people for something as simple as joining the union, threaten people with hellfire for joining the union, rail against teachers from the pulpit, and, from the same pulpit, defend the landowners who were literally starving the people. In America, it would not be possible to do what they are doing right now in the Nationalist zone, passing out forms that people have to sign, swearing they’ve gone to confession and communion, boxes in the church to collect them, and if your form isn’t in the box, it’s perfectly all right for someone to shoot you on the street.

  “No, you have never seen what we have seen in this country. A priest with a rifle in his hand saying, ‘Shoot, shoot the animals, all reds are animals,’ calling from the altar for a massacre, for the holy sacrifice of shedding blood for the great cause, God’s cause, God’s cause against the devil’s. You talk about cruelty in confession, but, in America, there is no one urging some young man, probably ignorant as dirt, to shoot a red in the name of the Virgin Mary. And you have never seen, as I have, a priest encouraging a
young man to shoot a pregnant woman because, that way, there will be two fewer reds. You’ve never seen priests standing next to armed soldiers who are herding prisoners, herding them down to the shore to shoot them, one at a time. Quite a leisurely thing, they took their time about it so the priests could offer absolution to anyone who wanted it before being shot, and some poor souls asked for it, just in case it might save them from being shot, and, who knows, maybe some of them really still believed. But whether or not they believed, they were all shot, and the priests, thinking they’re acting like some picture of Jesus on the rectory wall, blessing everyone, the butchers and the butchered, blessing everyone as the soldiers pour gasoline over the ones they’ve just shot, setting them on fire, just in case, just in case they’re still living, and then the priests walking home calmly to their dinner and their evening devotions.”

  She knows there’s nothing she can say. She’s humbled, and yet angry, because, in his rage for the public horrors, there is no place for what the Church is responsible for in the private life of her and her brother. But isn’t that why she’s here? To say that the public horrors must take precedence over the private.

  As suddenly as his body thinned and hardened, it relaxes now, not softening, but no longer pointed, no longer a weapon. He is not exactly relaxed, but the engine of his rage is idling now. He leans toward her and moves back, then forward again, taking her hands.

  “Forgive me, I don’t always speak like this, but, you see, in some ways, it is, to me, the worst thing that they act as they do in the name of what should be the most sacred things in the world, what is precious to ordinary people, they have made it impossible to do simply what should be the simplest things in the world: to marry, to bury your dead, without fear or rage.”

  She wants to forgive his outburst; once again, she’s been reminded of her position of privilege, a position she has always hated and worked to be rid of. But it cannot be shed like a mink given happily to a beggar. His country has suffered; hers has not, and has, in fact, refused to put its weight on the scales of relieving the suffering they are witnessing every day. Her country stands back and watches, complacent, compassionate, or complicit…Does it matter if you simply watch? But she will not allow him to say that she hasn’t seen what she has seen—it was the demand made always by her family—even if it is a small part of a larger something, and not the whole of it. It is nonetheless true, and she won’t let him, in the name of a larger suffering, say that what she has seen isn’t there.

  “I understand what you’re saying, but I want you to understand something, too. I understand that they have it in them to be killers because they killed my brother. They made it possible because he loved men instead of women—does that shock you, does it disgust you, as it shocked and disgusted them?”

  “Of course not, of course not,” he says. “Do you think I have never lived in the world?”

  She nods, hoping she can believe him, but feels pressed to go on. “They made it possible, even necessary, for my family to believe they could commit every outrage on him until he preferred to die rather than live with what they had in store for him. Then they refused to bury him in consecrated ground because he was a suicide. A suicide whose blood was on their hands.”

  He kisses her hands, which he has all the time been holding.

  “You must forgive me.”

  And, not knowing where it comes from, she says, “You should know that I’m not really married. Well, I am, but the marriage isn’t real. My husband was my brother’s lover, and so I am, as the law would have it, intact. Not really married, not even in the eyes of American law. Not even in the eyes of the Church.”

  He drops her hand, as if holding it after her confession is a defilement of her purity.

  They sit on the pebbly beach; she feels the cold stones underneath the inadequate material of her dress, and he says, “Well, since you are a virgin, I suppose I must ask your permission to kiss you.”

  —

  And so it begins—what, despite the horror of the times, she can only call her romance.

  She has been in Spain less than a year, and, in that time, so much has happened that she can no longer say with certainty whether she is the same person who boarded the SS Normandie in New York, who was given a fur coat that disintegrated, who threw a hat into the ocean with a husband named Russell, a husband who never touched her. And, having been brought up in a family who rarely touched, she is newly born into a world where skin is more than a covering for the vulnerable organs. Kisses, caresses, the longing for another body, this alongside the bloody, excruciating deaths she’s seen, the bombed streets, the starvation—how can this be the same body that boarded the ship in New York? The body she has, until now, believed she was born with.

  Lovemaking. Making love. She does think they are making something, something that has never existed in the world before. And, in the midst of it, the despair because the news of the war is dreadful, no one can believe their side will win. The disastrous battles of Teruel, the Ebro, ill-conceived, impossible to win because it is not possible—why does anyone on their side think it is?—to prevail against the weapons, the planes, the tanks, the well-functioning guns, the protective helmets, provided by Hitler and Mussolini. From Madrid come reports it is impossible to make sense of: confusing accusations, then counteraccusations. Defeatism is the worst thing one on the Republican side can now be accused of. The president travels to France, then resigns. Indalecio Prieto, the secretary of war, said to be the only decent man in the government, suggests that everything is lost.

  —

  Yet in the midst of the exhaustion and despair, the simple joy of two bodies, young and still, against all odds, lively and healthy, astonished at each other, saying how has this miracle happened in a time when no miracle seems possible, how has this miracle happened: that you are mine.

  She adores his body, although she would have said that he was not her type. But what was her type, free as she was of all experience of real male bodies? She would have said she liked the Gary Cooper “type,” tall with a loping, slow-moving walk, deliberate gestures, nearly mute. There is nothing slow and deliberate about Ramón. His hands make chopping motions when he talks; he is incapable of moving slowly. Her lover is—she has to say it again—stout. He is shorter than she is by two inches. His hair is thinning although he is only twenty-five. When he is upset about something, he pulls his hair out, as if to act out his words, “I could tear out my hair.” He is helpless without his eyeglasses. Without glasses, he has the unironic eyes of an adoring dog. With glasses, the adoration turns to pure attentiveness.

  She loves the dark hair that covers his body. “Let me nuzzle your pelt,” she says. And he says, “ ‘Pelt’ is a word for beasts, so if I am the beast, you must be the beauty. My long-legged American beauty.”

  Their lovemaking is time stolen from the sick, whose needs are endless, in his room that smells of the sea but is infested with black beetles. No one questions that they leave his room together in the mornings. It is a time of war, everyone is way beyond that, although she’s sure they wonder to themselves what happened to her husband.

  Mi amor

  My love

  My darling

  Mi tesoro

  •

  She has lost more than twenty-five pounds in the months she’s been in Spain, and her periods are so irregular that she never even expects them anymore. One morning, when they’re making love, she tells him he needs to be gentler with her breasts. He is hurt. “When am I ever anything but gentle?”

  He teases her that she’s getting a sweet, round belly; no longer my American string bean.

  And then, alarmed, he says, “When was your last period?”

  Not catching on to the alarm, she says, “God knows.”

  He says, “I can’t do a gynecological exam on you, that would be grotesque. But I want you to see Marguerite. I think it might be possible that you’re pregnant.”

  “No,” she says, “no, no, it
can’t be.” The private horror drowning the larger public ones.

  Marguerite, an obstetrician in France, whistles and says, “Five months, I think.”

  Ramón pulls at his hair, and she says, “Don’t tear out your hair; you don’t have that much of it.”

  He says, “It’s too late for an abortion. I won’t have you risk your life…not in these conditions.”

  They wonder if the condoms they were using are, like everything else provided by the Russians, or the leftovers of the West, not of the first quality.

  They know this to be a disaster. They face it with a dull resolution. There is not one second in either of their minds or hearts of the slightest joy.

  And she is someone else’s wife.

  —

  “This is the least of our problems,” he says. “Republican officials aren’t fussy about that sort of thing.”

  They marry in the mayor’s office. Carmen is their witness.

  “I seem to be fated not to have a church wedding.”

  “And you are no longer entitled to wear white.”

  “From virgin to bigamist. A great title for a trashy novel, don’t you think?”

  “Great,” he says. “Brilliant.”

  —

  He writes to his parents to tell them he has a wife who is expecting a child. His father writes in the script of one unused to writing: “I wish you and your new family good luck.” And from his mother, in perfect copperplate, words that come close to a curse: “As you have not been married in the Church, I cannot recognize this as a marriage. At least promise that you will have the child baptized.”

  He hasn’t said much about his parents and passes her the letters without comment. They do not speak of them again.