Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  Because there was no airstrip at Guernica—or if there was, it was destroyed—Irene flew to Bilbao, which was about ten miles to the west. Four hundred miles separated Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain from the air base at El Carmoli on the southwestern coast, a flight of less than three hours for such a powerful airplane as the Sirius, but Irene would be crossing the frontiers of this war twice, from Republican to Nationalist territory and back again. Later, Irene remembered thinking how remote you were, flying two and a half miles above the earth. You would never have known this country was at war: it just looked like any old landscape. First she flew over the deserts of Valencia, then the hills and valleys of Aragon that grew into the deserts and mountains of Navarre. As she hurried north, the arid blue sky took on clouds. The ground became green and fertile. She passed from Republican territory into Nationalist territory, and there was no change at all. She would not have known the difference. She crossed into the ancient country of the Basques, where the Republicans still held control of a strip of land bordering the sea. Somewhere ahead lay the Bay of Biscay, that graveyard of ships, that cauldron of notorious weather. Five miles from the coast, along a river estuary, grew the town called Guernica, of which Irene had never heard until now: a town of only seven thousand souls, but vast significance to the Basque people. As Irene began descending into Bilbao, she looked east, in the direction of Guernica. She saw only fields, some woods, wisps of smoke, roads crawling with tiny vehicles. There was something there, but you couldn’t tell what it was.

  Before Irene left El Carmoli, the commandant had promised to send a radio message to Bilbao and alert them that an American airplane was on its way to provide humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Basques. Whether or not this transmission was successful, she met no resistance at all during her flight or landing, from either the Condor Legion—that was the German air force operating for the rebel side—or the loyalist aircraft doing their best to defend the region. When she put on her headset and radioed the Bilbao tower on the frequency the commandant had given her, she was given clearance to land, but there was no one to greet her, no sign at all that she was expected. She jumped down from the airplane. A few men ran past, toward the control tower. She didn’t recognize the scattered airplanes on the ground, but she saw at a glance that they were ancient and dilapidated, no match at all for the airplanes of the Luftwaffe, which she had inspected on an overseas lecture tour two years ago. Some kind of hasty grass netting covered each of them, to disguise them from above. Irene felt the sun on her neck and took off her leather jacket, but not her flight suit. She followed the men toward the tower, and just as she reached it, the faint thud of a propeller engine began to grow in the distance, from the southwest.

  Irene turned and looked up at the sky. Two airplanes approached like a pair of birds, too fast and too high to land. She put up her hand to shade her eyes. What the hell are they doing? she thought, not comprehending at all for some reason. Irene had never in her life encountered an airplane that was not a friend to her. Of course she knew that this was war, that airplanes were now divided into ally and enemy, but it didn’t seem real. War was not real. Not until she heard the quick thuds of bullets, not until she saw the dirt spray up in neat, evenly spaced spouts, like a stone skipping over the water, did she realize what was happening.

  Somebody shouted in Spanish. An arm fell over her shoulder and dragged her backward, into the shelter of the tower. The bullets thwacked past, the noise of the German engines ground the air. Irene was pinned up against the concrete wall of the control tower, half covered by the body of some thick-chested stranger who stank of sweat and cigarettes. He was shouting Spanish in her ear, curses or warnings, and the sound of his voice grew louder and louder until she realized that was because the engines were drawing away, that the bullets had stopped. Then the grip loosened, and Irene stepped away and turned to thank this fellow who had saved her from her own ignorance. He was a couple of inches shorter, stocky, unshaven. He looked as amazed as she was.

  “Hostia puta,” he gasped, “it’s a woman!”

  “Yes. I’m looking for Señor Mallory. He flew in last night from El Carmoli.”

  “Señor Mallory? Then you are—you must be—”

  “His friend.”

  He embraced her and kissed her on each cheek. “My name is Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros,” he said, “and I will take you to Mallory this minute.”

  Sam was not at the airfield. Raoul Velázquez said he’d gone out in the last convoy, to collect wounded and other evacuees. He had made several flights already to take people to the hospitals in Madrid and on the coast—Velázquez couldn’t say exactly how many, because he had been making these flights himself and saw Mallory only in passing—but his airplane had been damaged or shot or broken down in the last run and he had gone to help on the ground while the mechanics attempted to repair it.

  By the time Raoul had talked them both into the back of an ambulance, bouncing its way down the cratered road into Guernica, the sun had fallen deep in the western sky. The light was at its most beautiful, which made the devastation around them all the more astounding. Irene peered through the small window at the back of the truck and saw the burned-out remains of a convoy that had been bombed; a house made of rubble; a field populated by a herd of dead cattle; all of them coated in a fine, translucent gold as they might appear in heaven.

  The closer they got to town, the more ruins they passed, some still smoking faintly. The doctor beside her said the Germans were still bombing, that they were actually bombing the evacuation convoys, the fucking bastards. He was an American, a Jew from Brooklyn, a Communist. He told Irene all about communism as the ambulance jolted and ground its way to Guernica, how this struggle represented the monumental battle of rich against poor, capitalist against proletariat, Church against man, and that when the door of the ambulance opened and Irene saw what fascism had wrought, she would see all this as clearly as he did. Irene loved him for this ferocious idealism, and because he didn’t seem to recognize her, even when she said her name was Irene.

  Raoul was quiet. As they lurched down the road, closer and closer to the center of the devastation, he did not look out the window. He sat with his back to the cab, his knees drawn up against his meaty chest, his fingers linked together like a bridge across them. He stared into space without saying a word, and looked as if he might be praying. Irene remembered about the fiancée and asked him if he had found her yet.

  “No. I have searched for her among the wounded. I have asked everyone. Nobody has any news.” He paused. “She is carrying my child. We were supposed to marry next month, before the baby is born.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It is my fault. She wanted to wait until we were married. She is a virtuous girl, very pious. But I thought our families would never agree to let us marry, so I seduced her into bed and made her pregnant, and if she dies now, before I can marry her . . . in a state of mortal sin . . . and my child still a bastard . . .”

  “God would not be so cruel as that,” Irene said.

  “No, it is God’s will. This is my punishment. My father used to tell me I was too arrogant and too lustful, and God would turn my sins against me.”

  “This is not an act of God. This is an act of man.”

  The ambulance lurched to a stop, and the doctor rose and shook Irene’s hand and thanked her sincerely. He said she could help carry the stretchers, since she was so tall and strong. She opened her mouth to say that she wasn’t here to carry stretchers, she was here to find Sam Mallory, but she realized they were probably the same thing.

  Irene did not turn Communist when she stepped out of the ambulance and saw what the bombs had wrought in Guernica. She already considered herself a pacifist; she hated the idea of people killing each other, and thought the official American policy of non-intervention was probably right. But something had to alter inside her head at the sight of so much rubble, spattered with blood. At the sight of human limbs torn off huma
n bodies, and the carcass of some unfortunate donkey, ribs splintered apart to reveal its stinking viscera. It seemed that not a stone was left in place, not a house neglected. The smell was that of a slaughterhouse. The noise was of souls in purgatory.

  She thought, An airplane did this. You could fill your airplane with bombs and kill a thousand people, without ever knowing whom you had killed, with no more pang of conscience than if you had brought down your boot in the middle of an anthill.

  When she found Sam, two hours later, it was by accident. She and Raoul carried a stretcher together and had taken a wrong turn, and were trying to climb over the ruins of a house while the woman in the stretcher, whose right arm was a stump bound in blood-soaked bandages, and whose gut had been laid open in an eight-inch gash, screamed in mortal anguish. Irene had actually forgotten all about Sam, or at least forgotten that she was supposed to be looking for him. She did not want to find him; she thought that if she did find him, he would probably be dead. So they turned some corner and met another pair of stretcher-bearers, and she happened to catch the eye of one of them and it was a blue eye, it was Sam’s eye.

  It took him longer to recognize her. He hadn’t had the slightest idea she was in Spain, here in Guernica looking for him. He thought she was enjoying her triumph right now, feted in Paris with George Morrow by her side. He caught her eye twice, went right past, heard her shout his name and slipped on a rock, dropping the stretcher. Luckily he had been carrying the lower half. Irene kept hold of her own stretcher but she streamed with tears. Sam was dirty and unshaven and exhausted, his clothes torn and bloodstained, his hands blistered raw. She screamed some curse at him, for being here at all. Then she thanked God that he was alive.

  They said nothing in the ambulance, on the way back to the airfield. Sam fell asleep on Irene’s lap. Raoul sat next to them, staring at the wall of the truck. They had not seen his fiancée among the dead or wounded; nobody could remember seeing a woman of her description, seven months gone with child.

  By the time they reached Bilbao it was dark, and all the airplanes had been caught in the strafing except Irene’s. She said they could load the patients into the Sirius and fly to Madrid or to the coast, and Sam said all right, but they would have to wait until dawn, because you couldn’t navigate from the air when all the towns were blacked out. They ate some stale bread rolls and hard cheese in what had once been a commissary, and went to sleep on pallets in the hangar, one blanket each, while the wounded begged for morphine on the other side of a line of curtains.

  By the grace of God, the Germans didn’t bomb them during the night. Irene woke first and checked her watch, which had a luminous dial. It was half past four. Sam was heavily asleep next to her. She didn’t want to wake him, so she lay perfectly still. The injured had either fallen asleep, or given up, or died, because the hangar was quiet. She stared at the shadow that was Sam’s face until she felt him wake, felt him feel her beside him. Felt him start with surprise and then relax.

  “Goddamn,” he whispered. “So it wasn’t a dream.”

  The next day, Irene made three flights out of Bilbao, taking wounded to the hospitals in Valencia, stopping only long enough to load and unload patients and refuel the airplane. For the next several days, she and Sam and Raoul flew during the daylight, back and forth, while the mechanics worked to repair their planes at night. When they sat together at night, eating their dinner, Raoul didn’t speak, and Irene knew there was no news; he was just flying and flying, to keep himself from thinking about his fiancée.

  When she returned from her last flight on the fifth day, the sun had nearly set, and she had trouble judging the runway in the glare. She came down hard, and the jolt knocked the breath out of her lungs. The orderly in the back thought they were going to crash and screamed. Irene felt her last nerve fray down to nothing. She kept her composure until the ship rolled to a stop. Then she put her head on the edge of the instrument panel and cried.

  “You need a rest,” said Sam.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’re not. You’re exhausted. You need to eat and sleep.”

  “So do you.”

  “I’ll see if I can find you a private room somewhere,” he said. “With a real bed. Or a cot at least.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Irene insisted, but she was falling on her feet, staggering on Sam’s arm as he led her to the commissary and made her sit. He brought her some food and some red Spanish wine and went to speak to the commandant. When he returned, he told her that the commandant had relinquished his own quarters for her.

  “Damn you,” she said. “You told him my name, didn’t you?”

  “Had to. Anyway, what difference does it make?”

  The commandant’s quarters were small and bare, just a washstand and a narrow camp cot, a tiny lavatory attached. Sam said he would sleep on the floor and went to get their kit bags from the hangar. Irene sat on the camp bed and closed her eyes. Her ears felt as if they’d been stuffed with rags, but she was used to that sensation. Silence, that was the only luxury she cared about now. Silence and darkness. There was a blackout curtain hanging in the window; she got up and pulled it shut, then lit the paraffin lamp, just enough to see by. She took off her flight suit for the first time in two days and washed herself as best she could in the basin. When Sam opened the door she turned. He didn’t see her right away. He set down the kit bags and the pair of blankets and said something about filling their canteens from the sink. His voice trailed away in the middle of a sentence. In the hollow glow of the lamp, his expression changed from shock to wonder to despair. His mouth gaped open, trying to make words again.

  “Does George know?” Sam said at last.

  “He does now. I left him a letter.”

  The room was small, and they were only a few yards apart. Irene stood with her hands straight down her sides, wearing only her underwear, her plain silk undershirt and silk drawers, silk not for luxury but because Irene found it the most comfortable fabric for long flights.

  Sam asked if he could touch her. She said of course.

  He stepped forward and stretched out his blistered fingers to measure the shape of her abdomen. How long? he asked, and she said Six months, and he said No, I mean when will it be born, and she said About the beginning of August, and he started to sob. She gathered him in her arms while he wept into her hair. Between them, the baby jerked and stirred like a grasshopper.

  Sam did not sleep on the floor that night, after all. Somehow they found a way to wedge together in the cot. When dawn broke, and Irene started from some dream, she smelled cigarettes and knew he had been awake for some time, turning everything over in his head.

  “Well?” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that if it’s a boy, you should name him for your father.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I don’t remember my father. He left my mother soon after I was born.”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  The room was hot and stuffy, and they were both naked, stuck to each other like a pair of coals that had burned out together. Irene loved the way her belly fit into the curve of Sam’s side. She didn’t want to rise. Every part of her felt heavy and grafted onto Sam. She didn’t think she could move. She asked, “So what if it’s a girl?”

  “No girls. After Pixie? No, I can’t take another girl, Irene. I can’t take that kind of hurt again. It’s got to be a boy. That’s all I ask, a son.”

  “You’ll find her again, Sam. She’ll come back to you. She will.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “How could your own husband not know you were pregnant?”

  “Because he hasn’t seen me naked in months.”

  “Still.”

  “Well, the flight suit’s baggy. And I’m tall, so it doesn’t show that much, anyway. If you’re not looking for it, if you don’t want to see it, you don’t see it.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette and kissed the top of her head. “Fair enou
gh. But all the same, we’ve got to get you out of here. The sooner the better.”

  When they got down to the hangar fifteen minutes later, they were amazed to find that it was full of children. The Republicans wanted to evacuate them from this strip of war zone bordered by the Bay of Biscay on one side and the Nationalist-held territory to the south. At the ports they were loading children on steamers, bound for England and Mexico and the Soviet Union. But these ships were filling fast, so someone had decided that the children with relatives in the eastern regions—those still under government control—should be transported there by air.

  “It’s too dangerous,” said Sam. “What if some German patrol bumps into us? They won’t give a damn that we’re a civilian aircraft.”

  But the Republican officers insisted. Whatever the danger, it was worse here in Biscay, which Franco was determined to bomb into submission and then take by force. Irene just shrugged. “I can fly them to Valencia in less than two hours. We can take three planeloads in one day, maybe four if we leave right away.”

  Sam said darkly, “Can I speak to you for a moment, Señorita Foster?”

  But Irene got her way. It was her airplane, after all; she could do what she wanted with it. And what she wanted was this: she wanted to fly her airplane for some decent cause, some noble cause like evacuating the Basque children; she needed to work herself almost to death in order to purge this unspoken guilt that she was somehow complicit in the bombing of Guernica because she flew airplanes, because she had, in her naïve enthusiasm, so relentlessly pushed the frontiers of aviation, and it had all led to this, the dropping of bombs, the machine gunning of civilians from the air. Sam threw his fist against the wall of the hangar but Irene crossed her arms and held firm.