скачать книгу бесплатно
‘As if he would collaborate with anyone. No one would believe you. They would think you were trying to take his place in my bed.’
‘The olive oil,’ the leader said more loudly, ‘is 30 centimos a litre. Who can say fairer than that?’
‘I asked what it was.’
‘So you know where the priest is?’ he shouted as though she had confessed and the militiamen paused in their pillaging and looked at her curiously.
She stared into the nave of the church where, with her parents and her brothers, she had prayed for a decent world and a reprieve for a stray alley cat and for her grandfather whose lungs played music when he breathed. She remembered the boredom of devotion and the giggles that sometimes squeezed past her lips and the decency of it all. She stepped back so that she could see the blue dome. A militiaman attacking a confessional with an axe shouted. ‘Do you know where the priest is, Ana Gomez?’
And it was then that Ana Gomez was visited by a vision of herself: one fist clenched, head held high, the fierceness that had been in gestation delivered. She told Federico to drag a pew from the pile in the street and when, grumbling, he obeyed, she stood on it.
She said, ‘Yes, I do know where the priest is,’ and before they could protest she held up one hand. ‘Hear me, then do what you will.’
As they fell silent she pointed at one young man with the tanned skin and hard muscles of a building labourer: ‘You, Nacho, were married in this church, were you not?’ And, when he nodded, ‘Then your children are the children of God and this is their house. Can you stand back and see it burned?’ He unclenched one big fist and stared at the palm in case it contained an answer.
‘And you,’ to a white-fleshed man whose belly sagged over his belt, ‘should be ashamed. Wasn’t your mother buried in the graveyard behind the church barely two weeks ago? Do you want her soul to go up in flames?’
‘And you,’ to a youth who had filled his pockets with candles, ‘put those back. Don’t you know they are prayers?’ She paused, waited while he took back the candles which cost ten centimos each.
When he returned she raised both hands. ‘Our fight is not against God: it is against those who have prostituted his love. If you take up arms against God you are destroying yourselves because you came into this world with his blessing.’
‘So the priest who grew fat while we starved should not be punished?’ Federico demanded.
They looked at her, these vandals, and there was a collective pleading in their gaze.
Again she waited. Raised one arm, clenched her fist.
‘Of course he must be punished. So must all the other black crows who betrayed the Church. Beat him, spit on him’ – they wouldn’t settle for less – ‘but don’t degrade yourselves. Why stain your hands with the blood of one fat hypocrite?’
They cheered and she watched the muscles move on their lean ribs, and she saw the light in their eyes.
‘Where is he?’ demanded Nacho.
Another pause. Then, ‘Beneath your feet.’ They stared at the baked mud. ‘In the vaults. With the gold and silver.’
‘Who has the key?’
‘The fat priest. Who else?’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’
She went into the church. Long before the priest had started to squirrel the altar plate in the vaults he had given her father a key; she had it in her hand now as she made her way through the vestry to the door. The key turned easily; in the thin light filtering through a barred window she saw a kneeling figure.
The priest said, ‘So it has come to this,’ and she thought, ‘Please God don’t let him plead.’ ‘Here, take this.’ He handed her a gold chalice. ‘And help me.’
She distanced herself from him and said, ‘This is what you must do. When you emerge in the sunlight they’ll beat you and scream at you and spit on you. Run as if the wrath of God is behind you’ – which it must be, she thought – ‘and make your way to the old house where I used to live.’
‘They’ll kill me,’ the priest said. As her eyesight became accustomed to the gloom she saw that his plump cheeks had sagged into pouches. ‘And make me dig my own grave.’
She wanted to say, ‘My father could do it for you if you hadn’t sacked him,’ but instead she said, ‘Give them the gold and silver, that will speed you on your way.’
‘It’s a trap,’ the priest said. He bowed his head and gabbled prayers. ‘How can they hate me like this? I have been a good priest to them.’
‘That is for God to decide.’
‘You are a good woman,’ the priest said, standing up.
She handed him back the chalice. ‘Take this and the other ornaments and follow me.’
He said, ‘I wish I were brave,’ and she wished he hadn’t said that because it made her think of her husband.
‘If you believe,’ she said, ‘if you truly believe then you need not fear.’
‘Do you believe, Ana Gomez?’
‘In a fable? A black book full of stories? Angels with wings and a devil who lives in a dark and deep place? Yes, I believe,’ she said and led the way out of the vaults.
In the vestry she ripped up a surplice, wrapped it round the leg of a shattered chair, dipped it in gasoline and lit it with a match. She picked up a green and gold vestment, soaked that in gasoline and, torch carried high in one hand, vestment in the other, emerged into the sunlight.
The mob stared at her, confused. She threw the vestment on the pyre; the gold thread glittered in the sunlight. She applied the torch to it. Flames leaped across the cloth, swarmed over the gasoline-soaked fixtures of the church. Thick smoke rose and sparks danced in it.
She turned and signalled to the priest lurking in the church. He had removed his clerical collar and he was wearing a grey jacket and trousers and big black boots, and was more clown than cleric. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, his dewlap quivered.
He threw the altar plate at the foot of the flames and began to run. She spat at him, threw the torch on the pyre and ran towards the gold and silver.
The crowd hesitated; then those at the front made a dash for the booty. Federico, the leader, held aloft a gold salver. ‘And we had to count our centimos,’ he shouted.
Then they were after the priest as, weaving and stumbling, he reached the edge of the poor square. Some made a gauntlet in front of him; rifle butts and axe handles smote him on the shoulders. He tried to protect his face with his plump hands but he uttered no sound. Ana reached him and spat again and hissed to him to run down an alley to his left.
She blocked the alley. ‘To think we obeyed such a donkey,’ she cried and indeed he looked too absurd to pursue.
She listened to the receding clatter of his boots on the cobblestones. The pursuers hesitated and, frowning, looked to each other for guidance.
Federico pushed his way through them. ‘Out of the way, woman,’ he said. ‘We must have the priest.’
‘You will have to move me first.’ She folded her arms across her breast and stared at him.
He advanced upon her but as he reached her a burning pew slipped from the pyre belching flames like cannon fire, and smoke heavy with ash billowed across the square.
Ana raised her arms above her head. ‘It is God’s word.’
As they dispersed she returned to the church, locked the door and made her way down rutted lanes to the house where the priest was waiting for her.
She had listened to La Pasionaria broadcasting on Radio Madrid. ‘The whole country throbs with rage in defiance … It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’
And on 20 July she had stood ready to die in the Plaza de España, where Don Quixote’s lance pointed towards the Montana Barracks in which Fascist troops were beleaguered – Fascists later pointed out that Quixote’s outstretched arm closely resembled a Fascist salute – and she had moved inexorably forward with the mob as they stormed the garrison.
She had watched the troops being butchered, although many, it was learned later, had been loyal to the Republicans, and she had watched a marksman drop officers from a gallery high in the red and grey barracks on to the ground.
She had heard about the Republican execution squads, the bodies piled up in execution pits at the university and behind the Prado – more than 10,000 in one month, it was rumoured – and she had wondered if her brother, Antonio, had been among them because although the bourgeoisie and the priests were fair game there was no more highly prized victim than a Falangist.
And she had heard about the inexorable progress of the Fascists in the south, under the command of General Francisco Franco with his Army of Africa – crack Spanish troops in the Foreign Legion whose battle cry was ‘Long live death’ and Moors who raped when they weren’t killing – and General Emilio Mola’s four columns in the north.
To Mola fell some of the responsibility for the killings in Madrid. Hadn’t he boasted, ‘In Madrid I have a Fifth Column: men now in hiding who will rise and support us the moment we march,’ thus inciting the gunmen, many of them criminals released from jail in an earlier amnesty, to further blood-letting? He had also boasted to a newspaper correspondent that he would drink coffee with him in the Puerta del Sol, so every day coffee was poured for him at the Molinero café.
She had doled out bread to refugees roaming the capital, in the sweating alleys of its old town, on the broad avenues of its heartland, and when the first aircraft, three Ju-52s, had bombed the city on 27 August she had organized air-raid precautions for the barrio – shatter-proofing windows with brown paper, painting street lamps blue, making cellars habitable.
So what am I doing drinking coffee in my old home with the enemy, a priest?
Her brother, a street cleaner whose eye had been knocked out long ago by the police, railed. ‘What is this fat crow doing here? He should have been crucified like all the other sons of whores.’
Salvador harboured a bitterness that was difficult for anyone with two eyes to understand, Ana thought. The patch over the socket stared at her blackly. Salvador hosed down streets at dawn but often his aim was bad.
She said quietly, ‘He baptized you and he married me and he listened to our sins.’
‘Did he ever listen to his own? Did he ever do penance?’
The priest, cheeks trembling as he spoke, said, ‘I did my best for all of you. For all of my flock.’
‘For my eye?’
‘That was none of my doing.’
‘Did you pray for the miners in Asturias?’
‘I pray for Mankind,’ the priest said.
‘Ah, the Kingdom of God. We have to pay high rents to occupy it, father.’
‘Jesus was the son of a carpenter. A poor man.’
‘But, unlike us, he could work miracles. Why did you only educate the rich, father?’
‘We have made mistakes,’ the priest admitted.
This took Salvador by surprise. He adjusted his black patch, good eye staring at Ana accusingly. The three of them, and her father who was dying on the other side of the thin wall, were the only people in the house. The house was a hovel but that had never occurred to her when they had been a family. The patterned tiles on the floor were worn; the whitewashed walls had been moulded with the palms of plasterers’ hands and, since her mother’s death, dust had collected in the hollows.
Salvador lit a cigarette and puffed fiercely. ‘I shall have to report his presence to the authorities,’ he said.
‘Which authorities?’
This bothered him too, as Ana had known it would. Before July he had supported the Socialist Trade Union. But now he suspected that Communists were infiltrating it – Russians who had forged tyranny instead of liberty from their Revolution. And they in their turn were at odds with the anti-Stalin Communists.
So Salvador was beginning to move towards the Anarchists, who believed in freedom through force, and didn’t give a damn about political power.
Already families were divided between the Fascists and the Republicans. Please God, Ana prayed while the priest shakily sipped his coffee, do not let the Cause divide us too.
‘The police,’ Salvador said lamely.
‘Which police? There are many of those, too.’
‘Stop trying to confuse me,’ Salvador said. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said pointing at the priest.
‘Kill him?’
‘Just get rid of him. I don’t want to see his face round here.’
‘Since when was it your home?’
‘You think our father would want a priest, that priest, here?’
‘I don’t know what our father would want,’ Ana said.
‘You realize,’ he said, touching his black patch, ‘that we are now the revolutionaries?’
‘Weren’t we always, in spirit?’
‘Now we are doing something about it and we have the Fascist insurgents to thank for it. We are taking over the country.’
‘Do you think the Fascists know about that?’ Ana asked, and the priest said, ‘We are all God’s people,’ and Salvador said, ‘So why are we fighting each other?’
Ana and Salvador looked deeply at each other but they did not speak about Antonio, their brother who had betrayed them. Had he managed to reach Fascist armies in the north or south? It was possible: certainly Republicans trapped behind Fascist lines were reaching Madrid. Salvador pushed back the top of his blue monos exposing his right shoulder. ‘Do you know what that is?’ pointing at bruised flesh.
‘Of course,’ said Ana who knew that he wanted a distraction from their brother. ‘The recoil of a rifle butt.’
‘The badge of death,’ Salvador said. ‘That’s what the Fascists look for when they capture a town. Anyone with these bruises has been fighting against them and they kill them. In Badajoz they herded hundreds with these bruises into the bullring and mowed them down with machine-guns.’
‘You have been firing a rifle?’ Ana looked at him with disbelief. ‘With one eye?’
‘Think about it,’ Salvador said. ‘When you fire a rifle do you not close one eye?’
‘Where have you been firing a rifle?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Not, who have I been shooting?’ He smiled, one eye mocking. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a murderer. Not yet. There’s a range on the Casa de Campo and I have been practising.’
From the other side of the wall they heard a moan.
Ana, followed by Salvador, went to their father who was dying from tuberculosis. He looked like an autumn leaf lying there, Ana thought. His grey hair grew in tufts, his deep-set eyes gazed placidly at death. On the table beside him stood a bottle of mineral water and a bowl in which to spit. His prized possession, a stick with an ivory handle shaped like a dog’s head, lay on the stiff clean sheet beside him. He was 67 years old and he looked 80; his mother-in-law, who walked in that moment, would outlive him.
He acknowledged his children with a slight nod of his head and stared beyond them.
‘Is there anything you want?’ Ana asked.
A slight shake of his head.
Salvador took one of his hands, a cluster of bones covered with loose skin, and pressed it gently. ‘We are winning the war,’ he said but the old man didn’t care about wars. He closed his eyes, kept them shut for a few moments, then opened them. Some of his lost expression returned and there was an angle to his mouth that might have been a smile. Ana turned. The priest stood behind them. Salvador rounded on him but Ana put her finger to her lips. He stretched out one hand and the priest who had taken away his living for stealing a few expiring blossoms held it.
‘May God be with you,’ the priest said.
Back in the living-room the priest said, ‘I think it would be a good thing if I stayed. I can administer the last rites.’
