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The Ju-52 bomber looked innocent. It had split from its formation and, with the November-grey sky temporarily free of Russian fighters, it was looking for a target with grotesque nonchalance.
Ana noticed that it was heading in the general direction of her old home but only vaguely because at the time she was preoccupied with an argument with her husband.
Jesús was writing about the war for the Communist newspaper Mundo Obrero and providing captions for the fine, fierce posters the Republicans were producing.
She kicked off her rope-soled shoes and said, ‘So how was the housekeeping today?’ Rosana, who was eating sunflower seeds in the corner of the room, spitting the husks into a basket, turned her head; she was ten years old and sensitive to atmosphere.
‘I got some rice,’ he said. ‘A few weevils in it but we don’t get enough meat as it is.’
‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that you have to write for a Communist newspaper.’
‘I write for the Cause. In any case, isn’t La Pasionaria a Communist?’
‘She is for the Cause,’ said Ana who knew she was a Communist too.
‘She is a great woman,’ Jesús agreed.
‘Fire in her belly,’ said Ana who had just taken food and brandy to the high positions overlooking the Casa de Campo where, on 1 May, her brother Antonio had announced his betrayal. She had also crossed the Manzanares to the suburb of Carabanchel, and taken rifles and ammunition from dead men in the trenches to give to the living and she had taken a dispatch through the centre of Madrid, through the Gran Via, Bomb Alley, where she had seen a small boy lying dead in a pool of his own blood, and the corpse of an old man with a pipe still stuck stiffly in his mouth.
‘But a Communist nonetheless,’ Jesús remarked.
‘So?’
‘It was you who were complaining that I write for a Communist newspaper. It would be a terrible thing, would it not, if we fell out within ourselves. Communists and Anarchists and Socialists …’
Ana said, ‘It is better to fight than to preach.’
Rosana spat the striped, black-and-white husk of a sunflower seed into the basket.
‘I am no fighter,’ Jesús said.
‘Are you proud of it?’
‘I am not proud of anything.’ He went to the charcoal stove to examine the black saucepan of rice from which steam was gently rising. The ancestors on the walls looked on.
‘Not even me?’
‘Of you I am proud. And Rosana.’ He smiled at their daughter.
Rosana said, ‘When is the war going to finish, papa?’ and Jesús told her, ‘Soon, when the bad men have been driven away from our town.’
‘By whom?’ Ana asked, feeling herself driven by a terrible perversity.
‘By our soldiers,’ Jesús said.
Rosana said, ‘Why don’t you fight, papa?’
‘Some people are born to be soldiers. Others …’
‘Housekeepers,’ Ana said.
‘Or poets,’ he said. ‘Or painters or mechanics. Mechanics have to repair the tanks and the guns; they cannot fight.’ He smiled but there was a sad curve to his lips.
Rosana cracked a husk between her front teeth and said, ‘The father of Marta Sanchez was wounded in the stomach. He can’t eat any more because there’s a big hole there.’
Her hair was curly like her father’s and her teeth were neat but already she is obstinate, like me, Ana thought. She wants many things and she uses guile to get them; she will be a handful, this one.
‘Why are Fascists different from us?’ Rosana asked and Jesús said, ‘I sometimes wonder if they are.’
The ground shook as bombs exploded. Yesterday Pablo had come back with a jagged sliver of shrapnel so hot that it had burned his hand.
Ana said, ‘Because they are greedy.’
‘And cruel?’ Rosana asked.
‘But they are Spaniards,’ Jesús said. ‘Born in different circumstances.’
‘You called them bad men just now,’ Rosana said.
‘Ah, you are truly your mother’s daughter.’ He stirred the rice adding fish broth.
And Ana thought: I should be doing that and he should be peering down the sights of a machine-gun, but since the war had begun the role of many women had changed, as though it had never been intended any other way, as though there had always been a resilience in those women that had never been recognized. And respect for women had been discovered to such an extent that, so it was said, men and women slept together at the front without sex.
She heard the sound of a plane strumming the sky; the Ju-52, perhaps, returning from its nonchalant mission. She hoped the Russian-built rats fell upon it before it landed. She wondered about the pilot and bomb-aimer, Germans presumably. She wondered about the pilots of the Capronis, Italians. Did any of them understand the war and had they even heard of the small towns they bombed? She thought the most ironic aspect of the war was the presence of the Moors: it had taken the Christians 700 years to get rid of them and here they were fighting for the Church.
Ana took the bota from beside the sink and poured resinous wine down her throat; it made a channel through her worries. Rosana picked up her skipping-rope and went into the yard.
Jesús settled his thin body in an upright chair beside Ana, took the bota, wetted his throat and said, ‘Why are brothers killing brothers, Ana. Can you tell me that?’
‘Because it has to be,’ she said. ‘Because they were bleeding us.’
‘Could we not have used words instead of bullets?’
‘Spaniards have always fought.’ Her voice lost some of its roughness and her words became smooth pebbles in her mouth. ‘But perhaps our time has come. Perhaps this war was born a long time ago and has to be settled. Perhaps we will not fight again,’ she said.
‘But we will always talk,’ he said, smiling at her as he had once smiled in the Plaza Mayor as she drank iced coffee through a straw and thought what a wise young man he was. ‘I like you when you’re thoughtful,’ he said.
‘Is that so rare?’ She drank more wine, one of those sour wines that get sweeter by the mouthful. She passed the bota to Jesus. ‘When will the rice be ready?’ she asked.
‘Afterwards,’ he said.
‘After what?’
He bolted the door and took the combs from her hair so that it fell dark and shining across her shoulders.
The bomb had been a small one. It had removed her old home from the row of hunched houses as neatly as a dentist extracts a tooth but had scarcely damaged its neighbours, although some balconies hung precariously from their walls. Light rain was falling and the meagre possessions of her father and her grandmother were scattered across the wet mud on the street: commode, sewing basket, cotton tangled in festive patterns, rocking chair moving in the breeze as though it were occupied, Bible opened in prayer, brass bedstead on which her father had waited for death.
The bodies were laid on stretchers. She lifted the sheets from each and gazed upon the faces. Her father and grandmother, ages merging in death, Salvador now blind in both eyes, all anger spent. She did not look at their wounds, only their faces. Neighbours watched her calmly: these days death was a companion, not an intruder.
Only one occupant of the house had been saved, the priest. Blast from bombs is as fickle as it is ferocious and it had bundled him on to the street, plumply alive beneath his shredded clothes. The priest who was due to report to Lance at the British Embassy that evening said to Ana, ‘It was a merciful release for your father.’ She walked over to the brass bedstead. ‘I prayed for their souls,’ he said. She covered the bed with a sheet because it was indecent to leave it exposed.
She said: ‘Why don’t you go out and fight like a man?’
Jesús, glancing up from an exercise book in which he was writing a poem, looked bewildered.
So did the children, Rosana crayoning planes laying bombs like eggs, Pablo who, at the age of eight, already looked like his father, arranging his shrapnel and his brass cartridge cases and his strip of camouflage said to have been ripped from a Ju-52 by the guns of a rat.
‘A little while ago …’
‘I don’t care about a little while ago. A little while ago was a long time ago. The priest was saved,’ she said. ‘Why the priest?’
‘I don’t understand.’
She told him.
‘Ana, the children.’
‘They have to know.’
Pablo stared hard at the piece of shrapnel lying in the palm of his hand.
‘Why the priest?’ she asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, pointing at the children and shaking his head.
‘I don’t expect you to. What would you know about living and dying? It’s written in blood, not ink.’
Jesús said to the children, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’
They began to gather up their possessions.
In the distance Ana could hear gunfire, the firework splutter of rifles, the chatter of machine-guns and the bark of heavy artillery.
‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I saw a peasant, a refugee, lie like Coll in front of a tank. The treads rolled over him, crushing him, but the tank blew up.’
‘You want me to get killed. Is that it?’
‘I want your children to be proud of you.’
The children remained absorbed with clearing up but Pablo’s bottom lip trembled.
Jesús stood up, knocking the bottle of ink over the scrubbed table. He fetched a newspaper and soaked it up. His fingers were stained blue. The children were silent, following him with their eyes. He walked to the door.
‘I hope the bottle of anis is full in the bar,’ Ana said.
He stood silhouetted against the fading, rain-swept afternoon light. He looked very thin – he didn’t eat as much as the children and, although he was only 32, he stooped a little, but still she let him go.
When she went to bed he had not returned.
In the morning she left the children with a neighbour and marched to the front with a platoon of women militia. They were dressed in blue, and they carried rifles on their shoulders and food for the men. They went first to University City, the model campus and suburb to the north-west of Madrid, near Tetuan, where Fascists who had crossed the Manzanares were fighting hand-to-hand with the militia and the International Brigades. They fought for faculties, libraries, laboratories, rooms. The walls of half-finished buildings swayed; the air smelled of cordite, brick-dust and distemper, and rang with foreign tongues. The Moors bayoneted the wounded; the Germans placed bombs in elevators and sent them up to explode among the Moors.
Ana shot a Moor wearing a kerchief as he raised his bayonet above a German from the Thaelmann Battalion of the 11th International Brigade who was bleeding from a chest wound. It was the first time she had killed. She took provisions to the British defending the Hall of Philosophy and Letters against the Fascists who had already taken the Institute of Hygiene and Cancer and the Santa Cristina and Clinical hospitals. Someone told her there was an English poet named Cornford among the machine-gunners. A poet!
She went about her duties coldly. She no longer thought about young men who knew nothing about each other killing each other. She thought instead about her grandmother and her father and her one-eyed brother who were dead, and she thought about the priest who was alive.
With the other women she descended the heights to a bridge across the Manzanares which the Fascists hadn’t crossed. The Moors were grouped at the other side, Foreign Legionnaires with red tassels on their grey-green gorillo caps behind them. Assault guards and militiamen held the east neck of the bridge, another inlet to the city. The guards were armed with grenades and rifles and one of them was firing a Lewis machine-gun. When Ana and her platoon arrived the dark-skinned Moors in ragged uniforms were advancing across the bridge while the militiamen fitted another magazine on to the Lewis gun. Ana knelt behind them, aimed her rifle, a Swiss antique made in 1886, and squeezed the trigger; the rifle bucked, a Moor fell but she couldn’t tell whether it was her bullet that had hit him because the other militiamen were firing, although without precision and she was dubious about the resolution of these exhausted defenders who had never wanted to be soldiers. There was no doubt about the resolution of the Moors trained by the Spaniards to fight bandits in Morocco: they ignored the bullets and stepped over the dead and wounded.
For some reason the magazine wouldn’t fit on the Lewis gun; it was probably a magazine for another gun; such things were not unknown. The assault guards and militiamen shuffled backwards. The Moors moved forward firing their rifles. A militiaman in front of Ana threw up his arms and fell backwards.
Ana shouted to the women, ‘Keep firing!’ But the militiamen were turning, running towards the women, blocking their view of the Moors. Ana stood up, aimed the ancient Swiss rifle at the militiamen and fired it above their heads. ‘Sons of whores!’ she shouted at these men who had been bakers and housepainters and garbage collectors. ‘Turn back!’
They hesitated.
‘Mierda!’ shouted Ana who never swore. ‘Have you no cojones?’
She reloaded quickly and fired between them. A Moroccan fell. And the militiamen turned away from these women who were more frightening than the Moors and the machine-gunners, fitted the magazine to the Lewis gun, and, planting it firmly on the road surface, aimed it at the Moors who were almost upon them.
Chop-chop went the gun, piling up bodies that were soon too high and disorderly for the back-up Moors to navigate. Instead they retreated. The militiamen sent them on their way with a hail of bullets. Then they looked shamefacedly at Ana.
She looked across the modest river and thought: they knocked out one of Salvador’s eyes with a club then they removed the sight of the other with a bomb dropped as casually as boys drop stones over bridges. Couldn’t they have left my father to die in his own time?
She said, ‘Fix the next magazine.’ They nodded. Then she led her women back to their barrio in Tetuan. Jesús was standing in the yard.
He had acquired a gorillo cap and a bandolier which he wore over a blue shirt she had never seen before. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle. The children, hands tight fisted, observed him wonderingly.
She smiled at him. She felt as happy to see him there as she had in the days when her whole day had been taken up with waiting to meet him.
‘What game is this?’ she asked.
He looked a little ridiculous. He hadn’t found a jaunty angle for his cap; his ears were bigger than she remembered beneath it; the ink was still blue on his fingertips.
‘The game you told me to play,’ he said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that if we were all cowards there would be no wars?’
He straightened the stoop in his back and, so thin that she wanted to stretch out a hand and feel the muscles moving over his ribs, walked past her towards the killing.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_69e584a2-c2a3-508b-8fa8-1f6964543eb3)
February 1937.
Chimo, philosopher, legionnaire and murderer, said, ‘What are you thinking about, Amado?’
Adam Fleming, sheltering in a slit trench from rain and bullets, said, ‘England.’
‘More than that, Amado – you sighed.’ Chimo was an authority on untruths and half-truths because they came readily to his own lips.
‘Why do you call me Amado? My name is Adam. Why not Adamo?’
‘You are Amado. That is you. Were you perhaps thinking about a woman?’ Chimo was an authority on women, too.
