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Salvador wet one finger, drew it across his own throat, and said, ‘But who will administer them to you?’
Ana’s sister-in-law, Antonio’s wife, came to her home one late September day. She had discarded the elegant clothes that Ana associated with girls in Estampa and her permanent waves had spent themselves; she was pregnant, her ankles were swollen. Ana regarded her with hostility.
‘Slumming, Martine Ruiz?’ she demanded at the door. Not that the shanty was a slum; it might not have electric light or running water but Jesús left no dust on the photographs of stern ancestors on the walls of the living-room, and the nursery, if that’s what you could call one half of a partitioned bedroom, still smelled of babies, and the marble slab of the sink was scoured clean. But it was very different from Antonio’s house to the south of the Retiro which was built on three floors with two balconies.
‘Please let me in,’ Martine said. Ana hesitated but there was a hunted look about the French woman and, noting the swell of her belly, she opened the door wider.
Jesús was stirring a bubbling stew with a wooden ladle. Food was becoming scarcer as the Fascists advanced on Madrid but he always managed to provide. He greeted Martine without animosity and continued to stir.
Martine sat on a chair, upholstered in red brocade, that Jesús had found on a rubbish dump, the expensive leather of her shoes biting the flesh above her ankles.
Ana said, ‘Take them off, if you wish.’ Martine eased the shoes off, sighing. ‘So what can we poor revolutionaries do for you?’ Ana asked.
Martine spoke in fluent Spanish. Jesús should leave, she said. Ana shrugged. Everyone suspected everyone these days. She said to Jesús, ‘I hear there are some potatoes in the market; see if you can get some.’
‘Very well, querida. Take care of the stew.’ He wiped his hands on a cloth and, smiling gently, walked into the lambent sunshine.
‘He is a kind man,’ Martine said. ‘A gentle man.’
Born in the wrong time, Ana thought. ‘You never thought much of him in the past.’
‘I don’t understand politics. They are not a woman’s business.’
‘Tell that to La Pasionaria. She is our leader, our inspiration.’
‘Really? I thought Manuel Azaña was the leader.’
‘He is president,’ Ana said. ‘That is different. He is a figurehead: Dolores is our lifeblood.’ Martine leaned back in the chair. Ana noticed muddy stains beneath her eyes. ‘So what is it you want?’ she asked her.
Martine arranged her hands across her belly. She stared at Ana. Whatever was coming needed courage. When she finally spoke the words were a blizzard.
‘The police came yesterday,’ she said. ‘SIM, the Secret Police. They asked many questions about Antonio. When had I last seen him? When was I going to see him? Trick questions … Did he give your daughter a present when you saw him? Why did my father help him to escape? Then they went to see my father. As you know, he has a weak heart.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Ana said. She poured Martine a glass of mineral water and handed it to her.
‘He was very distressed. Another interrogation could kill him.’ She sipped her mineral water and stared at the bubbles spiralling to the surface. ‘The police came to my house again this morning. They asked questions about Marisa.’ She blinked away tears. ‘Not threats exactly but hints … What a pretty little girl my daughter was, intelligent … They hoped that no harm would befall her.’
Ana said firmly, ‘The police would not harm Marisa.’
‘If they took me away it would harm her. And what of her brother or sister?’ pointing at her belly. ‘What if I were thrown into prison? I wouldn’t be the first. Then they wait, the SIM, until the husband hears that his wife is in gaol, that his child is starving. Then he gives himself up. Then he is questioned, tortured and shot in one of the execution pits.’
‘Has Antonio contacted you?’
Martine looked away furtively. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said, voice strumming with the lie.
‘That wasn’t what I asked you.’
‘I had a message,’ she said. ‘Through a friend.’
‘Is he well?’
‘He is full of spirit.’
‘He is a fool,’ Ana said. Martine said nothing. ‘So how can I help you?’
‘You can move about Madrid. Meet people, talk to them.’
‘And you can’t?’
‘None of us can.’
‘Us?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Ana said. ‘Fascists.’
‘Anyone with any property or position. Old scores are being settled.’
‘But not with pregnant women. When is the baby due?’
‘I am followed wherever I go,’ Martine said. ‘They want Antonio badly. He knew many things. The baby is due in February,’ she said.
‘You were followed here?’
‘Does it matter? We are sisters-in-law. But there are certain places I cannot visit …’ She hesitated. ‘Can I trust you to keep a secret?’
‘It depends. The names and addresses of Mola’s Fifth Column? No, you cannot trust me.’
Martine fanned herself with a black and silver fan; her hair, once so precise, was damp with sweat. She said, ‘Does the man in the check jacket mean anything to you?’
Ana frowned; it meant nothing.
‘He is an Englishman. And he wears a check jacket.’
‘Stop playing games,’ Ana said.
‘I want you to swear …’
‘I’ll swear nothing. Now, please, I am hungry and Jesús will be back from the market soon.’
Martine said abruptly, ‘I must escape from Spain. For Marisa’s sake. For the sake of your nephew,’ she said slyly, stroking her belly with one hand.
‘The man in the check jacket can help you?’
‘His name is Lance. He’s sometimes known as Dagger. He’s an attaché at the British Embassy in Calle Fernando el Santo. It’s full of refugees …’
‘From Mola’s army? From Franco’s army?’
‘Don’t joke,’ Martine said. ‘You know what I mean. Refugees from the militia, from the Assault Guards. Lance has been getting prisoners out of gaol. He may be able to get them out of Spain.’
‘And you want me to …’
‘I can’t,’ Martine said.
Ana was silent. She thought about Antonio and then she thought about Martine’s daughter, Marisa, and then she thought about the unborn child and then she thought about the priest.
She said, ‘Would you mind travelling with a man of God, a black crow?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said.
Ana considered telling her sister-in-law about the priest. But no, you didn’t confide in women such as her brother’s wife: they used secrets as others use bullets. But maybe this man Lance could take the priest off her hands. And Martine.
She thought, Mi madre! What am I, a daughter of revolution, doing plotting the escape of a hypocritical priest and the daughter of a Falangist?
‘Where does this Englishman live?’ she asked.
‘Calle de Espalter. Number 11. You could go there pretending to offer your services as a cleaning woman.’
Ana laughed. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost admire you.’
At that moment Jesús returned carrying a basket half filled with sprouting potatoes.
Ana went to Calle de Espalter, a short, tree-lined street adjoining the Retiro, a few days later. It was the beginning of October and the air had cooled and the trees in the park were weary of summer. Militiamen, rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolled the street because it was in a wealthy and elegant part of Madrid; a banner fluttered in the breeze: LONG LIVE THE SOVIET. Broken glass crunched under Ana’s feet.
Two assault guards outside the thin block regarded her suspiciously. They wore blue uniforms and they were the Republic’s answer to the Guardia Civil who, with their shiny black tricorns and green-grey uniforms, were always suspected of Fascist sympathies.
‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked her. He was smoking a thin cigarette and smoke dribbled from his flattened nose.
‘Do I have to give reasons for walking in my own city?’ She folded her arms and stared at the guards whose reputation for killing was unequalled in Spain. Had they not assassinated José Calvo Sotelo and helped to spark off the war?
‘You have to give us reasons,’ the guard said but he regarded her warily because some of the women of Madrid were becoming more ferocious than their menfolk: La Pasionaria had led them from the kitchen and the bedroom on to the dangerous streets.
‘Then I will give you one: because I am alive.’
The guard rubbed his dented nose and looked at his colleague for help. His companion said: ‘Papers?’
‘Of course.’ She made no move to show them.
‘If you will forgive me,’ the first guard said, pointing at her cheap red skirt and white blouse, ‘you do not look as though you live here. Do you, perhaps, work for a capitalist?’
Ana spat. The assault guard took a step back.
‘I hope to find work. I have to feed my children and my husband who is the leader of a militia group. But not with a capitalist: with a foreigner. Now if you will excuse me.’ She stepped between them, continued up the street, turned into number 11 and mounted the stairs.
The man who let her into the small apartment was thin with a strong nose and a small moustache; he laughed a lot and he wore a check jacket.
She asked if it was safe to talk. This made him laugh and she began to wonder if this was truly the man who had supposedly whisked prisoners from gaols past the guns of waiting murder squads.
She said, ‘I have heard that you help people on the death lists.’
He stared at her and for a moment she glimpsed the wisdom which he was at pains to conceal.
‘But you, señora,’ he said in his accented Spanish, ‘are not on those lists. You, surely, are a woman of the revolution.’
She told him about Martine and the children, one unborn, and she told him about the priest. She added, ‘If anyone knows I came to you for help I will be killed.’
‘No one will know,’ he said and this time he didn’t laugh. ‘But what am I to do with your sister-in-law and her daughter and your priest?’
‘Hide them in your embassy?’
‘Most of them are in a private hospital and it’s stuffed full already.’
‘Please, Señor Lance.’
‘I will make inquiries.’
‘La palabra inglesa,’ she said. ‘The word of an Englishman. That is all I need to know.’
‘But …’
‘You have made me very happy,’ she said when, hands spread in submission, he laughed; she laughed too.
He made a note of the addresses where Martine and the priest were staying and led her to the door.
‘One last thing, Señor Lance. If anyone asks, I came for a job cleaning your apartment.’
She walked into the sunlit street where, behind shuttered windows, families lived in twilight.
Madrid was doomed.
How could it be otherwise? The Government had packed its bags and on 6 November fled to Valencia, leaving behind a sense of betrayal – and an ageing general, José Miaja, who looked more like a bespectacled monk than a soldier, in charge of its defence. Radio Lisbon had broadcast a vivid description of General Francisco Franco entering the city on a white horse. And the foreign correspondents viewing the Fascist build-up to the final assault from the ninth floor of the Telefónica on the Gran Via were predicting its capitulation.
By the first weekend in the month the Fascists – Moors and crack Foreign Legionnaires mostly – stormed down the woodland parkland of the Casa de Campo crossing the bridges of the Manzanares – what was left of it after the long hot summer – and scaling the heights beside the palace. Could an ill-equipped, ill-assorted ragbag of militia, sleepless and hungry, skulls echoing with explosions, some armed with canned fruit tins stuffed with dynamite, defend itself against 105 mm artillery and the German bombers of the Condor Legion?
Some thought it could.
Among them La Pasionaria who, dressed in black and fierce of face, preached courage to dazed fighters in blue overalls.
Among them a young sailor named Coll who tossed dynamite beneath Italian tanks rumbling towards the centre of the city, disabled them, proving that tanks weren’t invincible, and got himself killed.
Among them children digging trenches and old women boiling olive oil to pour on Fascist heads and younger women defending a bridge vulnerable to enemy attack and tram-drivers taking passengers to the battle front for five centimos.
And their belief given wings by the spectacle of Russian fighters, rats, shooting the bombers out of the cold skies and the soldiers, many wearing corduroys and blue berets, steel helmets on their belts, who materialized on the Sunday 8 November, singing the Internationale in a foreign tongue.
Russians, of course. Word spread through the bruised avenues and alleys: relief was at hand. Except that they weren’t Russians at all; they were 1,900 recruits of the 11th International Brigade, Germans, British, French, Belgians and Poles; Communists, crooks, intellectuals, poets and peasants.
But they armed the ragbag of defenders with hope.
