The Guardian of Secrets

by Jana Petken

  As he neared the outskirts of his adopted town, he gave himself all the reasons why the Phalanx issue that had separated them no longer existed. The execution of the Phalanx leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the subsequent upheaval in the movement had been a sad day for all of them, but it had also liberated him from all the things he’d grown to hate about the Phalanx. He was now under the command of the regular army and wore a different uniform. He now fought the enemy in a fair contest, and he killed lest he be killed. He loved Mónica. She was what kept him alive in the trenches. It was her sweet voice, soft and soothing, that had kept him warm even on the coldest and darkest of nights. She would have mellowed by now. She had probably missed him just as much. She loved him. She always had.

  On his arrival in Valladolid, he went first to the bar nearest his house. He ordered a glass of wine and drank it down in one. He used the toilet, cleaned himself up, and took a long look at himself in the mirror. He didn’t want to appear at her door looking and talking like a fumbling overexcited schoolboy. Mónica didn’t like weakness of any kind in a man. He practiced what he would say when he saw her and then took a deep breath. This would be a new beginning for both of them, and when the war was over, they would go to Valencia and she’d become part of his family.

  When he finally reached his house, he let out a long deep sigh of relief. He’d made it home. It was late, and all the lights inside the house were off. He used his key and closed the door softly behind him. He tiptoed up the stairs, feeling his heart pound in sweet anticipation and picturing Mónica’s naked body and soft skin. He carried a small bunch of fresh flowers that he had picked in a field just outside the town’s boundary.

  Entering the bedroom, he saw her in the moonlit room asleep with her dark curls tumbling over the pillows. He sat on the edge of the bed, smelling her sweet perfume, and then he saw the man lying beside her roll over to place his arm protectively around her waist.

  Miguel jumped to his feet, stepped backwards, and pressed his back against the wall. Mónica stirred and sighed contentedly. He’d never seen her smile like that before, not at him, he thought. He stood looking at them: the woman he loved, his wife, in bed with another man. She lay in the man’s arms as though she had done it a thousand times, and he felt a pang of guilt for even watching the intimacy before him. But him, guilty? No, he thought, he was not the guilty one. She was! His expression abruptly changed. The momentary shock was over and instantaneously replaced with anger and a desire to kill. He took the pistol from his inside jacket pocket and pointed it at the sleeping occupants in the bed. His hand shook, and he wiped the sweat from his face. His first thought, that it would be so easy to kill them both as they slept, was somehow overtaken by the need to see them squirm with fear and hear them beg for mercy. He continued to stare at his wife. They should suffer before they died. He kept asking himself why he didn’t shoot. Do it, Miguel. Do it! he screamed now in his head.

  The man stirred and opened his eyes. Some sixth sense had likely told him that he and Mónica were not alone in the room. “What the …!”

  “Shut up,” Miguel said quietly, sounding perfectly calm. “Shut your mouth.”

  Mónica woke with a start, sat bolt upright, and stared open-mouthed at Miguel’s shadowy outline in the corner of the room.

  Miguel’s grip on the pistol tightened, and he pointed it unwaveringly in their direction. His tears shone brightly in the moonlight. His face wore an angry scowl of disgust, hurt, and fear – the latter because he worried that he wouldn’t be able to control his fingers that were lightly brushing the trigger of his gun. Fear that he was going to kill the only woman he had ever loved. His whole world crashed before his eyes. His mind raced with uncontrolled thoughts: memories of Mónica in his arms; memories of his family, neglected and shunned by his own unwillingness to contact them; memories of his rifle firing into the chests and heads of unarmed men at dawn; memories of beautiful dreams of the woman he loved suddenly turning into ugliness and shame.

  “Miguel, please, no. Don’t do it!” he heard Mónica shout. “Please let me explain,” she begged him through tears, which at one time would have melted his heart.

  “What is there to explain?” he asked her with a chilling calmness that surprised even him. “What could you possibly say to explain his being naked in our bed with you? Tell me! Explain!”

  The gun was still pointed in her direction, but Mónica stared down its barrel with composed, cold eyes.

  “Juan, leave,” she told the man beside her. “Leave now!”

  Juan, who up until now, had been nothing more than a spectator in a frozen body, took the opportunity to get out of the bed, grab his clothes, and run from the room. Miguel slumped to the floor and watched him leave. A year ago, he would have shot him several times without thinking twice about it, but he had let him live because, strangely enough, he didn’t feel any anger towards him. He had only taken what had been offered to him. He probably didn’t even know Mónica was a married woman … The man shouldn’t have to die because of his sluttish wife’s behaviour. Miguel continued to stare unwaveringly at Mónica. He had seen enough blood. He would not kill her either. She disgusted him now, and she could fuck Valladolid’s entire male population for all he cared! She was already dead to him.

  Mónica covered herself with the sheet and sat on the edge of the bed, continuing to stare at the pistol that now lay limp in Miguel’s hand.

  “Well, are you going to shoot me?” she asked in a steady voice.

  “Why, why did you do it?” Miguel asked her.

  “Because you were not here and Juan was. Because he understands me better than you ever could. Because he is a good Phalanx, and you’re not. Because Juan knows what he wants, and I need a man who’s like that, a man who’s strong.” She stopped talking and watched him put the gun back into his jacket pocket.

  Miguel stared into her eyes again; they were icy cold, glaring without remorse or guilt. She thought him ridiculous, he thought to himself. She wouldn’t say the words out loud, of course, but they were written all over her face. She was thinking that he was pathetic, a coward, and he was.

  “Miguel, I’m sorry,” she said unconvincingly. “But you must have known something like this would happen. You and I, well, we’re just not meant to be together anymore. I don’t think we ever were. Oh, you were fun to be with in the beginning. You had ambitions, a vision, but you lost your edge, and I lost interest. You just don’t fulfil my needs now, and I don’t love you anymore. It’s as simple as that.”

  He felt hatred now but at the same time felt his heart break, felt its pieces shatter in his chest like battlefield shrapnel. He wiped his wet eyes and stood up.

  “Not committed enough? Lost my edge?” he said angrily. “I’ve just spent almost three months lying on my belly in a trench! I’ve just driven through the night dodging snipers along the road to get back to you. I crawled out of a grave and survived because I saw your face as I was dying, and your beautiful image made me want to live … for you!”

  “Yes, when you crawled out of that grave, you were an important figure in the Phalanx, and I loved you, but look at you now, Miguel. You’re just a stupid soldier like hundreds of thousands of other stupid soldiers, and when we win this war, you’ll be nothing, not part of the government, not a hero, and no one will remember your name. You were so different in the beginning. I liked you because you were everything I would have been had I been born a man. You could have gone right to the top, and I would have been there with you!”

  She stopped talking and crossed the room to the door, unashamed of her nakedness. She opened it and then faced Miguel with a haughtiness that made him want to strike her. They stared at each other. She pointed to the door and said, “I’m really sorry, Miguel. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but in a way, I’m glad this happened. It means that you can now get on with your life, and I can get on with mine.”

  “You’re doing that anyway, Mónica, without any help from me,” Miguel told h
er, finding the statement as ridiculous as he felt.

  “What I mean to say is that now you know we’re finished. You know that I don’t love you. So everything is clear, right?”

  “Crystal clear.”

  She nodded. “Then I think it would be better if you didn’t come back here. I want you to leave now.”

  Miguel stood on legs that felt like giving way at any moment; he knew it was over too. The naked woman standing in front of him in the doorway was not the person he had fallen in love with. She was only a dream, an illusion, a fantasy that had gone hand in hand with his desire for power and respect in an organisation that had turned ugly for him, ugly just like her scowling face and well-used body.

  “I gave up my family because of you,” he told her. “I gave up my self-respect, my conscience, my pride, and my dignity – and for what, a whore?”

  She blinked at the word ‘whore’. “I’m a passionate woman, Miguel, not a whore; there’s a difference. I need to feel that passion all the time, but you have never understood that. Now leave, please. Leave me alone and don’t come back.”

  “Oh, I won’t, but before I leave Valladolid, I’m going to make sure that the whole town knows what you’ve done. How will you feel, Mónica, when I tell the Phalanx council that you’re not a good Catholic, not a good wife, and that you’re no better than a republican whore? What will that do for your ambitions?”

  Miguel walked down the stairs and left the house without a backward glance. He should have killed her, he thought as he stepped outside onto the pavement. He would probably live to regret his decision to spare her, for she didn’t deserve to live. Mónica was right. He was a coward, but she would pay for this, maybe not in blood but in a way that would hurt her to the core, and when he had finished destroying her life, she would wish that he had killed her this night.

  After a few drinks in a nearby bar, Miguel decided to wait until he was sober before thinking about what he would eventually do to ruin Mónica’s life. He was sure that even in his intoxicated state, he wouldn’t make good on his threat to report her to the Phalanx and the Church she claimed to worship. He was better than that. At a later stage, he would think of doing something even worse. He’d make it his mission in life to destroy her, but not tonight; tonight he was going to get extremely drunk!

  Chapter 68

  María received Carlos’s note asking her to meet with him. He had given her short notice, but she had somehow managed to swap shifts with another nurse and now found herself standing awkwardly on the corner of the street behind the hospital. While she was waiting, she recalled that it had been almost six weeks since Carlos’s last appearance. Then he had arrived out of the blue and had stayed just long enough for a watery cup of coffee and a kiss behind the hospital building.

  She was freezing, with dull pain in gloveless hands and eyes that stung with the cold. She had never known such cold, a cold that bit into her bones and left her feeling continually tired so that even thoughts of Carlos could not warm her.

  She looked at the faces of the people she passed, exhausted but resolute. The previous two months had been hard, with hundreds of wounded civilians coming to the hospital due to the bombing of the city by German aircraft. Makeshift bomb shelters had been dug quickly, and people slept in the underground tunnels and sewers in an attempt to escape the bombs. Disease and the vermin that carried it were now the people’s greatest enemy, and very few of the infected survived. The intermittent bombing became commonplace, and hundreds died. In her opinion, the bombproof shelters that met her eyes now were not very bombproof at all! Earlier in the week, she had gone for a walk and had been caught up in the panic just before an aerial attack. She’d thought it strange, standing on the steps of one of the shelters, that hundreds of panic-stricken people were trying desperately to get out of rather than into the shelter. The fear of suffocation was undoubtedly their motivation for leaving the Metro station, and as the roar of the aeroplane engines above became louder, signalling that their presence was drawing ever closer, she too decided to leave the madness and take her chances inside a shop across the street.

  She had stood in the doorway watching the crowds, some fighting to get into the shelter and others pushing and shoving to get out. People suddenly stopped in their tracks, looking upward, mesmerised, at the incendiary bombs hurtling towards them. Both the inside and outside of the shelter were bombed, and two hundred people died that day. She knew then that she would never set foot inside a shelter, not even if her life depended on it.

  She looked again at the hungry faces that surrounded her and saw him sauntering towards her with his sure-footed step and cheesy grin. Carlos always had the power to make her smile. A rush of energy poured into her as she ran across the street towards him.

  Carlos grabbed her and hungrily pulled her to him like a starving man. “María! My God, it’s good to see you. How are you, darling?” he asked her, holding her now at arm’s length.

  “I’m all right … a little tired,” she said honestly.

  They kissed again.

  “I’ve missed you; you look pale.” Carlos said. “Are you eating properly?”

  “Yes, I’m fine, really.”

  “How long have you got off?”

  María thought about the question, teasing him by not replying.

  “María, how long can you stay?”

  “I think the answer to that question is in my next question. How long do you have?”

  “Until tomorrow,” he told her.

  “That long!” María threw herself into his arms.

  She was ecstatic. She was used to seeing him for only an hour or two at a time, and even then, she thought, they had never been able to enjoy a meal together without him running out of time. She had heard about the mass mobilisation, and she had a good idea that he had something to tell her, something important. There was going to be a long goodbye at the end of this, she was sure of it.

  They sat at their table in the small restaurant opposite the central bomb shelter. María asked for a glass of red wine, gulping it down as soon as it arrived. He was going to tell her that he was leaving Madrid.

  He looked into her eyes, and she felt her stomach lurch with desire. She tried her best to smile and fought back the tears she always denied.

  “Tell me, Carlos, please, just tell me,” she begged with a weak smile.

  “Tell you what?”

  “You’re leaving Madrid, aren’t you?”

  Carlos sighed and then held her hand. “Yes, I am. María, you know as well as I do what’s going on here. We’re both at the convenience of our government, so why do you ask me these questions over and over again. We’re at war; I go where I’m told, when I’m told. We have no control over our own lives.”

  “I know that. I just want to know, to get it over with and put my mind at rest,” she defended herself.

  Carlos brushed her face with his finger. The sadness in his eyes overwhelmed her, and she gulped down a wretched sob before taking a deep breath.

  “María, please don’t cry. I know you came to Madrid in the hopes of seeing me, and I was selfishly happy at the thought of your being close by, but as I said, we cannot control anything that happens in this war, except for today. Today we can love and take memories with us when we part. We can shut out this war for one whole day, and together we can lose ourselves in a place where it can’t touch us. I’m not letting you out of my sight until tomorrow, but when tomorrow comes and I leave you at the hospital gates, you mustn’t ask me about where I’m going or what I’m going to do.”

  María was not appeased. “But you always know where I am and what I’m doing, so why can’t I know the same about you? You could be on another planet, for all I know!” She batted his hand away. “You’re so damned secretive all the time! It wouldn’t be so bad if I could, just for once, know what kind of danger you may or may not be in or know that I can write to you. Do you know how it feels every time you go away, to God knows where, with no idea if or
when you’ll be back? You wear no uniform, yet you have a rank. You are not attached to any unit I know of in Madrid, and believe me, I’ve seen most of them at some point or another. Yet you talk about orders; orders from whom? Don’t you love me enough to tell me what you do?”

  There, she’d said it; she’d wanted to say these things for a long time now. She wanted him to know how much she hurt – no, agonised – over his secretive operations. She supposed that she was being unfair to him in a way, but he was so damned elusive that even their prearranged meetings were tinged with an amount of scepticism on her part. There had been times when she had looked forward to seeing him for days, only to go to the spot where they were supposed to meet and find it empty. Those were the worst times, when she’d walk back to the hospital wishing that she hadn’t bothered to wash her hair and put on one of her few nice dresses. It was also on those occasions that she wished she didn’t love him so damned much.

  “María, I’m sorry you feel this way. I know it must be hell for you wondering where I am all the time, but I can’t tell you,” Carlos said after a long pause. “It goes against the oath that I have taken to serve my country. It breaks my heart every time I have to leave you, when all I want to do is hold you in my arms all night, every night. But I’m doing my job the best way I know how in order to free us from the fascist rats that are standing at the gates of our capital city. If Madrid falls, María, Valencia will fall too, and we can’t let that happen. I have to leave tomorrow, so please let’s just make the most of the time we have and talk no more about the bloody war!”

  She stared long and hard at her empty glass and watched a tear drip inside it. He loved her, she knew that, but he was not being honest with her, and that was what hurt the most. She’d been a fool to question his feelings and loyalty. She knew that too, for if he was being secretive, it was because he had to be, not because he was deliberately hiding something from her. God, she was pathetic. She looked at his face and decided to do as he said. He was right; here and now was all that mattered, and tomorrow hadn’t happened yet. Today was all they had.