The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  When the snow came we used the storms to cover our tracks. We drew the Guards up the mountains in blizzards and led them into ambushes. We always chose the time and the place. And while some of us led them into traps in mountain storms, others of us were down the mountains attacking their depleted barracks. We killed and butchered their horses and ate them in bad times. And Luis was our brains and often he was our courage. But as the Nationalists spread toward Barcelona, bank clerks and mine managers got braver, too. Yesterday they were Republicans. Now they were Nationalists.

  So if they delayed us or refused us, we killed them. Harmless clerks. Bald managers trying to be brave. There is no amnesty for killing them. And whomever we spared, we told them. “Tell them it was Arrabal.” We spread the name like terror. We believed in spreading terror. It was a lust. That’s how Luis became a legend. We spread fear of Arrabal. It was like a weapon. The Civil Guard patrols were afraid, no matter how large they became. Fear, not death, is a fighting man’s first enemy. Fear beckons death.

  But we never tried to fight the Nationalist army. That wasn’t fear, it was prudence. The Civil Guard was our meat; fewer, not so well-armed, isolated, vulnerable. Banks were our meat, blocking roads, blowing up bridges to obstruct the army as it moved deeper into Huesca and toward Lerida and Zaragoza. And the farther we got from the French Basques the fewer friends we had.

  The spring it was now, and we had been eating French mutton for weeks. We talked about cheese till we were going mad to taste some. Luis sent three of us down the mountain to a farmer who had sold us eggs and cheese several times before. We sat half a day above his farm, watching. We saw nobody but the farmer and his wife. So we went down.

  We were in the kitchen with the man and his wife, eating her bread and cheese, and drinking wine, when something fell or was dropped in a room off the kitchen. There was no way out of the room except through the kitchen and when we beat on the door with our gun butts, a young man came out, very frightened. He was the farmer’s son, they said, home on leave. He had been with the Aragonese at the taking of Irun, he told us when we questioned him. But at the time, there was no leave. We paid the farmer and said we were taking the son with us. There was pleading and wailing and the woman said suddenly, “Tell them the truth.”

  “I’m not on leave. I’m not going back,” the son said.

  They’ll come for you or send the Civil Guard to find you, we said. Your family will feel their weight.

  There was a lot of talk about that and the mother said, “Go over the mountains with them.”

  We took him to Luis.

  He was with us for three weeks and we came and went in the night without his knowing. Sometimes the men he met in the morning were not the men he met the day before. Sometimes some of the men he met were wounded and Luis and I attended to them. Once in those three weeks, a man died. Paco, it was, a little man from Burgos who hardly ever spoke.

  It was after Paco died that this young man told us about the money. He was part of a transport detail that carried the army payroll as the Nationalists pushed toward Barcelona and out to the south. It was from this detail, when it made a stop, that he had gone into a bar by the front door and out by the back door and walked away from the army. Six weeks ago. The transport was due again, by the same route, in two weeks.

  We told him nothing and asked him everything. He drove the money truck. There were six men in it, four behind with the money, one up with him in the cabin. The escort was small through country they looked on as friendly and their own—one transport in front with ten men, one behind with ten men.

  Luis sent out messengers to bring in all the groups across the mountains. They were to come closer, to assigned points, and wait. They were not to be seen near our camp.

  The talk went on. The route was talked about, casually, like travel talk. Slowly it came out, kilometer by kilometer. It was obvious what we wanted to know, but he gave no sign that it was obvious to him. Men went out from the other camps to look at chosen points on the route.

  Luis said one night, “If we took that load, we would never need to kill another bank clerk.”

  The points on the route were judged, when the scouts came back to their camps. The place was chosen. “I’ll see it myself,” Luis said.

  He took me and the young man with him. We had no arms, only knives. The young man had nothing.

  The place we went to see was a tight bend in the road, with a sheer drop of eight hundred feet on one side, and a steep slope, well-treed, on the other. The bend was like a cage, with men before it and behind it on the slope.

  When we came back to the camp, men began to drift away at night. They took dynamite, wire, plungers, and arms and ammunition and came back without them. “It is the place I would have chosen,” the young man said to Luis.

  “You can help,” Luis said. With the farmer’s son, we had fifty-one men but he didn’t know that. There were twenty-six men with the convoy. That was the figure he gave us.

  “Go down and get more cheese—all you can pack,” Luis told me. “Take seven men.” The young man prepared to go. “Not you,” Luis said.

  “I’d like to see my parents,” the young man said. “And I can pack a good load.”

  “Not you,” Luis said and put him under guard.

  “Tell that farmer and his wife their son left us and went into France,” Luis told me, “and tell me how they take it.”

  They took it calmly. “He’ll be safe,” the farmer said. His wife said nothing.

  We were in place at the ambush two nights before the money convoy was due. Four men had picks and shovels. They hid them on the well-treed slopes. We all had Civil Guard cloaks, many with bullet holes in them. We slept in the cloaks, under the trees. It was very cold. Luis was restless. He kept scouts out all night and all the next day, searching the slopes above us and on either side of us. We were alone in the world, above a narrow road and a gorge in spring flood. We ate mutton and cheese and had water in our canteens for two days. Our arms were recovered and passed out. We had rifles, revolvers, bandolera heavy with ammunition, ten men had pouches full of hand grenades. There were two machine guns, still stripped and hidden. We had enough dynamite to close the road before and behind the convoy.

  The night before the ambush the pick-and-shovel men buried the dynamite in the road and covered the wires. Luis kept the scouts out. We were alone. All the next morning he kept them out. Nobody passed on the road. The slopes were empty of everything but birds and trees. The machine guns were set up. We were alone, waiting. The scouts were in, lying with us among the trees. The farmer’s son asked for arms.

  “No arms for you,” Luis said.

  The young man shrugged. He had no cloak. He was very cold. He stamped his feet and flapped his arms. “Stop that,” Luis said.

  We heard the heavy engines laboring up the hill on the bad road. They came slowly. Luis went forward above the entrance of the tight bend to watch them come. “They’re too far apart. They won’t all be in the bend together,” he said and came back to wait. There was nothing else he could do. He couldn’t tell them to close up on one another. The machine guns faced into the bend from each end. “Tell the far gun to cover the last truck all the way up the hill,” he said and I went to tell the gunners. They lifted the heavy out-of-date gun on its stand and faced it about. I watched the trucks making their grinding progress up the long hill to the bend. There was a machine gun mounted on the roof of each cabin. The farmer’s son hadn’t told us that. The sides of the trucks were shoulder high. The soldiers were out of sight; they must have been sitting. The engines sounded as if they were dragging the trucks up the hill; the trucks seemed to be almost too heavy for them.

  They’re armor-plated, I told Luis.

  “They’re also open. The grenades will deal with their crews.”

  I said to the farmer’s son, You didn’t mention the machine guns.

  “They must be something new,” he said.

  “Why?” Luis asked him. />
  “I don’t know.”

  “For your sake that had better be true.”

  The young man looked away. His fingers were locked and white.

  Luis said to the gunners covering the exit from the bend, “Move your gun away back—about a hundred meters. Let them out of the bend so that we can close the gate behind the third truck. Wait for my signal.” They picked up their gun and scrambled back along the slope.

  The first truck came into the bend. It was creeping. We lay above the road and watched it. We could see clearly into the cabin. “Look at them,” Luis said.

  The two men in the cabin were not Nationalist soldiers; they were Republican soldiers. Republican prisoners of the Nationalists. We looked down into the high walled truck. It was empty. There were no Nationalist escorts.

  “I listed you dead in Ramosierra,” Luis said. “This is the place. We’re in a trap.” He said to the farmer’s son, “You’re not their son, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Stand up.”

  The young man stood up. His lips were bloodless.

  “Your face to the tree.”

  “My face to you, if you please.”

  “As you please.”

  “Dion,” Luis said, “tell the machine gunners to let the first truck pass.”

  I ran to do what he said. When I came back the young man was lying, curled on his side. The haft of a knife stuck out from his chest. He seemed to be staring at it.

  Luis said, “They are up the mountain behind us, waiting to hear our guns. And on our right and left. They trapped us. If they hear our guns or the engines of the trucks stop, they’ll close on us. I don’t think they can see us and they can’t hear us, so we’ll pass through them in their own transports. Get the men aboard and down—no heads up. Don’t let the trucks stop.”

  He was smiling. Danger was his drink. But he kissed me. “My son,” he said and held me and I knew what he expected, or feared, or thought.

  We were running like foxes. We were always silent at our work. We knew what to do. I jumped after Luis into the cabin of the second truck. Men ran up the road after the first. The most agile were up over the sides of the trucks, hauling the heavier men. The machine guns were hauled aboard. The trucks went on, not stopping. The men lay on the floor boards.

  Luis said to our driver, “Where are they?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “How many?”

  “About five hundred. They’ve been teaching us to drive these things for a week. They left the staging camp a week ago.”

  “They could have gone anywhere.”

  “I asked one of them. He said, ‘We’re going to finish Arrabal.’ ”

  Luis said, “Who’s Arrabal? Speed up.”

  They pulled the second truck up behind the first. Luis jumped out and ran forward, talking to the driver. The pace increased. Luis came back, waving the third truck up close. “Keep up with him,” he said to our driver.

  He kept repeating, as he peered ahead, “Where are they? Where the hell are they?”

  We were dropping off the high ridge. The gorge rose to meet us, the sheer drop widened. In half a mile the road ran along the edge of a little valley with the river boiling along its length.

  “This is the place to run for it,” Luis said. “Out! Across the valley and into the trees.” He said to the driver, “Keep going.”

  Then the front truck blew up. We saw the bits rearing in the air, wheels, bodies, slabs of steel plate, half-tires. “Out!” Luis screamed. “Stop!” he screamed at the driver.

  We were tumbling off the road into the little green valley with the river running through it, and above us from the trees and across the river, rifles, machine guns and grenades were pouring death over us. They cut Luis down by the legs. I tripped over him and lay beside him. “Go, go, go,” he yelled and I couldn’t go. He was all the father I had. His thighs were gaping open. His blood poured. I dragged him among rocks and lay down beside him. “Lie on your face,” he said and smeared his blood over bullet holes in my cloak. “Lie on your face,” he said and lay on his. His blood poured into the ground.

  They came, counting our bodies. “Which is Arrabal?” a voice kept screeching, but nobody knew.

  “We can’t get an accurate count,” another voice said. “We can’t count the bits from the first truck. There are forty more or less whole bodies.”

  That was good enough. They left us where we lay. It was a battlefield.

  There couldn’t have been much blood left in Luis’ body. I heard them haul the blown-up truck off the road. There was the sound of transports, men yelling, men singing. They went away.

  I couldn’t carry Luis far. After a while I cut up my cloak and made a rope that kept breaking, and dragged him up the mountain. That would have killed him anyway. He was dead when I got him to the farm. I had only my revolver. Dig a grave for him, I told the farmer and his wife, and they cleared the soft snow off a place in the middle of a summer pasture and buried him.

  The young man was not your son, I said to them. They swore that he was. I shot them in their kitchen while they fed me. That was what it was like in that day. I took all the food I could carry. Then I forked straw in from the byre, turned out the oxen and set the byre on fire and set the house on fire, and climbed.

  Jesus Gaya, one of the men from our camp, was already in the camp. He said he knew of four other men who scattered. He had a hole in his shoulder. I tended him for four weeks and we divided the money in the cache. We took equal parts. He walked toward the Mediterranean, to reach Barcelona and fight again. I walked down the mountain into France. Luis was dead. The money wasn’t worth much in France, but it got me to my mother’s brother in Paris. When the time came later for my uncle to provide the proof that I lived with him, he produced the necessary documents from a corrupt petty official for a payment. And in his own sworn statement, he lied. Survival is a long series of lies.

  All spring and summer I worked at my French. In the autumn, I started medicine. It was a strange world. But your mother was waiting in Ramosierra, if she was alive. And I could not bear the thought of exile. I worked and waited to come home to your mother and to Spain. And she was there in Ramosierra, and we made our contract with life and we have kept it. That is all.

  Ugalde came back slowly from the mountains and from Paris to the harbor of Bermeo. His son clung to his hand and said nothing.

  “I think we should have something to eat,” Ugalde said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I think you can understand.”

  Mauro did not speak. He held his father’s hand. They walked together up the harbor and Mauro stopped outside the Artxanda, a café overlooking the basin. His face was flushed, his eyes unnaturally bright, and he formed his words with difficulty. “Father …”

  “Yes?”

  “I am proud.”

  “Of what? My blood crimes? That was in a civil war, Mauro. And that was when sides were more or less equal. You could put up an argument for what is done in war. But these young people in the Fifth Assembly—to do what they do when there’s absolutely no chance of winning! The state has all the power, all the ground is theirs, and what the Fifth Assembly can put against it is like a fly against a tank. Hopeless. The hopeless is useless.”

  “The fishermen, the shipyard workers and the steel workers are all on strike—against the law. Climates change. The strikers are part of the climate. They’ll force change.”

  “But they ally themselves with violence. Flesh against guns is not the way to win. It is only when strikes get violent that the State uses violence against them.”

  “What is the way?”

  “Let them create the climate that changes power. To keep power you have to change the terms on which you hold it. If the strikers were passive they would have more power. They would win the people. Their violence frightens the people.”

  “Our condition gets worse.”

  “It gets better.”

&n
bsp; “We’ll not agree, but my only interest is medicine.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  At the table, Ugalde said gloomily, “Mauro, when I say this thing, let the whole matter be at an end. I am not proud of my past. I am Spanish. That means I belong to a race whose national sport is to make a ritual of bloodletting, the blood of horses, and of bulls, and of men. When the Anarchists of Europe discovered the dynamite bomb, they used it for a little while. The Spanish Anarchists went on using it, with animal ferocity, into this century, and this stupid Fifth Assembly uses it today. Mauro, you’re a Spaniard and Spain is a desperado among the nations. Look at it. Its mountains are naked rock, like snarling teeth on an angry dog. Look at our cathedrals, drenched in bloody images and tears and sorrow. In the summer our rivers are beds of rock without water. Didn’t one of our kings build his own mausoleum—and live in it? We’re a people who need a restraining hand or blood will run in the streets again. Never forget where and what you are. I think somebody wrote something like that about us.”

  “One little right? That is very desperate? The right to withhold your labor?”

  “In Spain, there are no little rights. There is ¡Viva Yo! Hooray for me! Other peoples say You and Me. We know only Me—fiercely, proudly, arrogantly.” He waited a moment, “Destructively.”

  “Don’t things sometimes have to be destroyed?”

  “Not by violence. Political violence is this age’s most popular justification for mere crime. And if you get anything by violence, you have to keep it by violence—doesn’t the past forty years in Spain tell you that? From the Right or the Left, it has been true in every case. The gun for liberty—then the gun to keep you from exercising liberty.”

  “That’s just a theory, a sort of scare theory.”

  “I haven’t said what I want to say to you. Maybe if you’re hearing about your father and not about society in general, or the Fifth Assembly or an abstraction like the State, you’ll see my point. Mauro, the first time I killed, I was hysterical. The second time I killed I was afraid. The third and fourth and fifth and on and on through that one year, I was angry and full of hate and I wanted revenge, and I lusted for their blood because they had taken mine. But when I got to Paris, and the climate was not the climate in which our band lived in the mountains, and I had to think more and more of the things of the mind, I discovered something.” He paused for a long time.