by Mary Gordon
But with the gift of aliveness there is a price. Isabel had warned her. You may have trouble sleeping. You may become more irritable.
Not a gift, not a gift at all, the theft of a refuge or sleep, this new quotient of wakefulness. Sleep had been her refuge; something to long for, the bed however hard, the blankets however resisting. Now what will her refuge be? The world, she has long known, does not provide her refuge.
Now she notices the streets, not as white monochromes but as peeling blocks interrupted by complex and often rusting black gates. Now she must make the effort to turn her eyes away from the malnourished children, their heads too big for their dwarfed bodies, the dogs that she dare not pet, their thin triangular heads, their backs embossed with weeping sores.
•
After six weeks, she returns to the place she must, despite herself, call home. But it is impossible to think of it as home, this place where she has no place.
Home. Not home. A place, but no place. Not surprisingly, this is where irritability—the symptom of which Isabel had warned her—takes hold. The abject passivity of her father-in-law, which once she pitied, now creates in Marian the desire to slap his face. That face: pockmarked, ruined, unlovely. Wake up, fight back, can’t you move faster? His kindness to her, which in her fog had been a slender branch she clung to, now is cause only for resentment. Did you know what your wife was doing? she wants to shout at him. But even if he had known, he would have done nothing to stop her. He has never been able to say the slightest word of anything but acquiescence to his wife.
But the center of Marian’s irritability is her son. She hears, on the streets through the open windows, mothers shouting at their children, and for the first time she understands. She would like to take her son by the shoulders, to shake him. “Wipe that look off your face or I’ll wipe it off for you.” Where has she heard those words? Certainly not from her genteel, absent parents, from the well-paid servants. So where do they come from? She had hoped that her new clarity would allow an opening for ordinary mother love. But the opposite has happened.
She tries to do things with her son, but it’s too late. She wants to take him into the countryside, even on short walks to the seashore, but her mother-in-law says he is weak, he suffers from allergies, he is prone to asthma, the woods would be a danger to his lungs, the sea breeze would cause him to catch cold. She tries to teach him card games, but his eyes travel always to his grandmother, who stands behind him, ready to snatch him if his mother’s nearness should do him any harm.
She gives him books about animals and ships and children who live in treehouses or the forest, but the only books he likes are about the lives of the saints. He particularly likes child martyrs. His body is flaccid, with none of the liveliness that makes the bodies of all boys beautiful. When Marian suggests that her son might be eating too many sweets, the cheap sweets his grandmother feeds him till his flesh is pale and fat, Pilar tells her she knows nothing about raising a child, a Spanish child; the home is the source of sweetness, a refuge from the bitterness of the world.
There are reasons, of course there are reasons, why the flaccid body of her son causes her to pull away, why his simpering slothful manner makes her want to strike him into some swift boyish life. But the reasons are not good enough. She is an unnatural mother. A casualty of war. Too late for her, as it is too late for the amputees, the beggar woman crying in the street for her assassinated lover.
—
With the new clarity, there is the great gift of work. Tasks that are absorbing, pleasant, unlike the work of the war, they have a kind of leisure folded into them, a place left for understanding. She enjoys being in charge of tending Tomas’s equipment. Making sure everything is properly packed in the rucksack before they start out on their day’s collection. The delicate silver scissors, the plain-faced knife, the lethal-looking shears. Cellophane envelopes. Small cloth bags. Tomas carries the rucksack with the care of a mother carrying a child. At home, he takes over: placing the specimens in the plant press, brought home from his student days in Ireland. Then placing the specimens between sheets of newspaper, to be glued the next day onto special acid-resistant paper, with just the right amount of glue—he insists on doing this himself, as he does the labeling and the transfer of notes from the field notebook to the specimen book.
He praises her care. It has been a very long time since anyone praised her, a very long time since she has done anything she believed worthy of even the slightest praise.
They leave early in the mornings, just at sunrise. On their walks, they are silent. Then, alert as a fox, he will stop, stoop, gesture for the scissors. She provides them, as she provided scalpels to the doctors (two of them her husbands) in the dreadful but heroic operating rooms. She opens a cellophane envelope, hands it to him along with the tweezers, then the sky-blue leather field book, in which he writes a brief note on what he’s found.
Each season delights him, but most especially he loves the early spring, particularly the pink almond blossoms with their unpretentious but insinuating smell. The hundreds of wildflowers that he snips with tenderness, determined that each should be classified, given its proper name. Her favorites are the wild narcissus and wild lilies. He is particularly fond of the carob tree, with its graceful shape; he reminds her that in the worst days of the war, people stayed alive by eating its pods. In the fall, they pick the delectable mushrooms; the cook will make an omelet with the precious morels.
He has a great interest in medicinal plants, and together they prepare tinctures and ointments. He makes a tincture of St. John’s wort, which he tells her with pride is native to this part of the world: it is meant to cure melancholia, although he says it has not been of help to him. Marinated in olive oil, it is a disinfectant. He considered distributing a small pamphlet on medicines that could be made from local plants, but then he reckoned that the old women of the town probably knew far more than he would ever know, but they wouldn’t share their knowledge, even with a priest. And Isabel was contemptuous of herbal remedies. So he decided against it, as he often decides against completing certain projects. A large part of Marian’s job is to convince him that he should keep going, that what he is doing is worthwhile.
They walk the dry roads, and she is so often struck that here, unlike in America, there is no wilderness, nothing that has not been inhabited for centuries. Even the caves in the rocks have, from time to time, served as dwellings. They pass the ruins of houses centuries old, fields that have been terraced since the time of the Moors; terracing, he tells her, is a skill learned from the Moors, like so much that is beautiful in Spain. “They had a genius for anything to do with water. They knew that in a dry land, it is as precious as gold.” They pass men who cut blocks of ice from a pit where water freezes in the brief winters; the men haul the ice to the town on the backs of their donkeys; half of it melts on the way. Sometimes dry winds from Africa blow dust that fills the sky and stains the white houses reddish brown.
On the way home, he speaks easily. Sometimes he sings Irish songs, Spanish songs, Gypsy songs, songs in Catalan and Basque. A sweet, low voice. This is when she sees the boy in him.
He rushes through lunch. Isabel pretends to chide him from eating too fast, but his enthusiasm pleases her. He can’t wait to get to his desk. Marian lays out the papers sent from Ireland for mounting.
They always try to get home before noon, before the broadcast of the Angelus.
Tomas’s distress at the blaring Angelus is nearly unbearable to watch. He stands still, prays, or pretends to pray. Marian pretends only. Then he rushes into the house, sits with his head in his hands, and rocks. “They poison everything beautiful. They beat the ploughshares into swords.”
And Isabel says every time, “Never mind, Tomas. We’re all right here. Come and have lunch.”
But he will not; he disappears into his room. Isabel has charged Marian with being sure they are inside the house well before noon. Almost always, Marian succeeds, and she’s proud of t
his. Fortunately, they work in his study in the afternoons; there’s no chance for them to be in the street when the later prayers are blasted.
•
It is nearly a year before Isabel speaks freely to Marian, although Marian is pretty much living with them. She takes most of her meals with them, nearly all her days are taken up with Tomas’s work: she goes back to the house of Pilar only to sleep. Isabel had said that speaking freely was what she most wanted. But even in English, she whispers, although the Guardia, if they heard, would understand nothing. Still, she whispers. The Guardia have the habit of walking into Isabel’s surgery if it is empty, or if they know that Tomas isn’t there and she and Marian are alone in the house. They open the door without knocking. They ask for a glass of water. And then they just sit in the front room, their feet planted far apart, their legs open, saying nothing, but saying with their bodies: We will do this whenever we want; we can do this whenever we want. You think you are safe, but you are never free of us. Isabel refuses to change anything about her behavior; she goes about her business as if she didn’t see them. But after they leave, she pours a brandy for herself and Marian; then she allows her body the luxury of trembling.
—
Isabel begins the first time with a simple sentence. “My husband and I met at university.” She considers herself hardheaded, a realist, but in fact Marian thinks Isabel is the most romantic person she has ever known. Her romance is not the simple romance of a lost youth: the memories of all-night discussions, cheap wine, endless cigarettes, no need for sleep. Perhaps, Marian thinks, she treasures it because it is a past like many others, a past that many young people all around the world have shared. You didn’t have to be in Spain at a particular moment; it was possible to have had experiences unshaped by disaster. She knew she would marry her husband, she says, the first time he walked into a café where she drank with her friends. She was one of the two women at the table; he chose to sit beside her.
“Before I met him, I was a political naïf, an economic idiot,” she says.
He was a lawyer. They planned to serve the needs of the poor; he would work to bring them justice, she to bring them health.
Her romance of the years 1931 to 1935 has the deepest tincture. She and her husband moved to Cádiz, where his family was from.
“We had a small, perfect house by the sea. The Republic had been elected. Real democracy for the first time in Spain! It was easy to believe that the dead hand of the past would be amputated without bloodshed. Oh, we were foolish, but we were intoxicated, because, in no time at all, the Church had lost control of education, the fat priests had to give up their fat salaries, people went to meetings instead of to Mass, they joined unions instead of sodalities. Women were allowed to vote; divorce became legal. We had the luxury of despising the socialists; we threw around threats and slogans like balloons; we couldn’t believe the country wouldn’t be thrilled to follow our lead.
“And then began the first of the series of shocks: the losses of elections, the crisis of the Asturian miners, when the government, the government we believed in, turned against the striking workers, and we saw our own side shedding our own side’s blood. That was the first we saw of the fat midget, Franco…no one would believe he could be of importance.
“Then the greatest shock: the coup, led by the fat midget, who enlists the help of the German and Italian armies. And the Moors, trained by his soldiers to a particular brutality. We had prided ourselves as Marxists as being free of race prejudice, but we couldn’t stop our terror of the Moors…and maybe it was worse for us because, partly, we believed we deserved brutality at their hands since our hands were covered in the blood of their people.”
—
When she speaks about what was done to her husband, she becomes another woman. She spits her words; she grinds her cigarettes into the ashtray as if she were grinding them against the faces of her enemies.
“I was working in the hospital in Seville when he was killed. He and a group of others known to be Republicans were taken to Falange headquarters, in a former casino, a very luxurious casino, where they were subjected to particularly sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a liter of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and bread crumbs. They were in acute abdominal pain, they continually soiled themselves, and then they were savagely beaten.
“It was a terrible death, an agonizing death, but also a humiliating death, a disgusting death, a death you wouldn’t want anyone to see you dying. His brother called me, his brother whom they had called to claim his body, his brother, not me, because he was a member of the Falange. I think he was frightened of me, he was right to be frightened of me. Of course, they had cleaned my husband up. He looked beautiful, my beautiful Antonio, but I knew he didn’t look beautiful as he was dying. And what his brother said to me was perhaps the worst thing of all. ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘If they’d known who he was, if they’d known he was my brother, they would not have done this thing.’ He wanted to turn the horror into a private tragedy, a singular accident…and that seemed to me the worst betrayal of Antonio, of what he had lived and died for.
“When he said that, I heard myself making a sound that was not a human sound, it was an animal sound; it frightened everyone, even myself. My brother-in-law, who I suppose is not a wicked person, only someone in love with order above all, was frightened of me, that I was a wild animal that might turn on him. What made me make that terrible sound was the word ‘mistake’ and the idea that it was a mistake only because he was connected to someone whose power they honored, and that, without that connection, it would not have been a mistake, it would have been an act of justice.
“Sadists, torturers, taking their hats off to me, afraid of me, afraid of Antonio’s brother, assuring me that those responsible had been punished…did they think that mattered to me? I did go mad, I suppose. I stayed only long enough to try to prevent them from burying him in the Church, but then I went home, I gave up, because his parents wanted that, and whatever else he was to them—a disappointment, a shame, although they really weren’t political, but they were religious, and it was nearly impossible to be close to the Church and be anything but a fascist—whatever else, he was their son; he had been their son longer than he had been my husband. So I gave in; I couldn’t refuse them that consolation. I was beyond consolation, and so I felt it mattered less that I should get my way.”
—
It is another year before she feels secure enough that Marian understands her brother and treasures him as she treasures him, that she tells Marian the history of Tomas’s mutilation.
“In that mad time, the time of the country’s madness, and my madness, I did a terrible thing. I did the thing that I regret more than anything. It was a wicked thing, but I must believe I did it out of madness rather than wickedness. I wrote to Tomas; he was studying in Ireland; our uncle, the bishop, supported his desire to train as a botanist, he wanted Tomas to come back and teach here, and he didn’t believe he could get the training he needed in Spain.
“Tomas was away from the madness, safe, protected, studying. I think he was happy. Until I began writing. I told him everything I saw, every terrible thing. I shouldn’t have done that. I knew him, I should have known what it would do to him, but he was the only one I had, and he was far away—I must admit that there was part of me that was angry that he was safe in the bosom of the Church—and so I wrote compulsively, letter after letter, fifty, a hundred, I don’t know, and so what he did, what happened to him, was my fault, because I should have known.
“I hope he really burned them, those letters, as he says he did, because they should never have been written, they should not be allowed to exist. All my despair, my rage, my absolute loneliness, shot like a bullet to my brother so far away, telling him everything but insisting that he not come back, that he stay where he was in safety. Safe except for me.
“I wrote about all the terrible things I saw, but I concentrated on what the Church had
done in the name of God. The priests who blessed rebel flags, adopted fascist salutes, cartridge belts slung over their cassocks. So many priests joined the rebels that many of the faithful had no one to perform the sacraments. I sent him the speech of the archbishop who praised the bombing of Guernica. I told him about the bishop who bragged that he had watched without emotion as the Moorish soldiers carried on their bayonets the ears and noses of Republican prisoners, describing the scene as merely ‘the natural excess of all wars.’ I wrote pages and pages about the brother of one of the nurses I worked with, the mayor of a small town, a union organizer, who was shot in the stomach next to an open grave in the cemetery. The soldiers got drunk while they watched him die. And they thought it would be funny to put their empty brandy bottle in his mouth so it would look like he’d drunk himself to death. The priest that was with them just stood by and let them do it; he himself laughed. And the wife of a soldier I treated, a young woman of nineteen with twins, the Civil Guard was willing to spare her, but a priest who was with them encouraged them to shoot her because ‘with the animal shot, there is no more rabies.’ ”
She beats her fists against her forehead and says, “I should have known, I know him better than anyone, I have always known him better than anyone, how could I have done it?”
She has become, Marian thinks, a cutout figure of a woman, an outline only, emptied by the words she says.
“And then I got a letter. This letter. I can’t even say the words; you must read it for yourself.”
She hands Marian sheets of paper that have obviously once been rolled into a ball, then straightened out, but nothing could disguise the violent treatment the pages once received.
Marian wishes she had glasses so she could pause for a moment, postpone reading words that she knows will be terrible. She thinks of the letter Johnny wrote to her, “My dearest girl…Life is not good enough for me to live it.”
