16

One morning early in June, el capitán returned to Murcia angry and not a little frustrated. He had decided to use Spaniards to find Spaniards—young Spanish peasants from the huerta who, sick to death of the spirit of mañana, had been attracted to the party by its harsh discipline and its spirit of doing yesterday what could easily be done tomorrow. He sent them into their villages. ‘It’ll take a month, two, but they’ll find Nuñez,’ he told Vlanoc. ‘He’s not in the cities, he’s too smart. He knows city people talk too much—only peasants know how to keep their mouths shut.’ A few days before he had received word that Nuñez was holed up in a farm near Yecla, and he had chased after him there, but in vain.

Now he washed from the basin in his room on Calle de Traperia, literally Street of Ragshops. Red Struik entered asking, ‘Any luck?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Come, he’s played a joke on us.’

‘Good. I like jokes.’ Jake dressed hurriedly and followed the Belgian pistolero out.

They walked quickly through the streets mobbed with the ambulatory wounded and marketing women. Soon they entered into the market square with its bawling burros and hawkers’ cries. There el capitán read the huge letters printed in dripping crimson: ‘Long Live Truth! Death to the Lie!’ under which was drawn crudely a life-sized dog with a man’s face, labelled ‘el capitán’.

There was a hush in the market and Starr knew the peasants and marketers were observing him, so he laughed aloud. Now they grinned, shrugged, went about their business, selling and buying figs, oranges and sweet onions.

‘Crude, but a good likeness,’ he said to Struik. ‘Well, let Nuñez have his fun. One of these days we’ll find him and you can go to work on him.’ Struik smiled coldly, and Jake began to scratch his chest—noticed it, forced himself to stop. ‘Get Tomás with his paints and brushes, I want him to change Jacobito to Franco. Return with him, and bring a few others. While he’s working, laugh—loud, all of you.’

‘In front of them?’ Struik asked icily.

‘Why not? Treat it like a joke and they will too. They know how to laugh,’ he said drily. ‘In fact, they’re people, try to remember. Salud.’

Struik departed, heavy muscles sweating, brain thinking, what’s he so patronizing about, his bullets kill, too. El capitán, his fresh khaki shirt already purple with sweat, strolled to the corner of La Pasionaria to lean against the old stones and smoke a papaross. As he stared into the riot of carts and burros and peasants crowding and clamoring in the square, at one point a gap opened and he could see the off-duty doctors and nurses drinking coffee or naranjada in the Reina Victoria’s sidewalk café under the torn blue canopy. Recognized the undulating figure of the Brazilian nurse at one of the tables. One, two, three, boom. Hey! A very talented tail. The gap closed, and he noticed a young Interbrigader he had never seen before skipping by on two crutches, his plaster-encased legs swinging jauntily between them. The boy sweetly sang,

Here on his back doth lie Sir Andrew Keeling

And at his feet his doleful lady kneeling;

But when alive he had his feeling,

She was on her back and he was kneeling …

then stopped when he recognized el capitán whose picture he had often seen in the frontline edition of Mundo Obrero, the party newspaper. ‘Salud, la voz. The comrades at Tajuña send their best.’

‘Thanks. I miss them.’

‘Not me. Here there are women.’

‘How do you manage with those legs?’

‘Easy. Here on his back,’ he sang, ‘doth lie Sir Andrew Keeling and at feet his doleful lady—’

Jake laughed, and waved him on.

‘Cheers, compañero,’ the Englishman said, and swung cavalierly away on his crutches.

Starr finished his cigarette, tossed the butt aside, looked again into the bedlam. Saw Hunt Carrington who’d come from the Tajuña valley to repair his piles which had been rendered asunder by terrible food, the Spanish gallops, and trench warfare. He had been operated on, recovered, been appointed American pol for the wounded, a decent pol, too, human, treated his comrades with respect and was thus in return admired and respected. Carrington was with Horton and two Interbrigade nurses, a Lithuanian and Hungarian, all on their way to the Alhambralike casino on Traperia. They disappeared into the crowd, and Jake again saw the Brazilian nurse. She was soft and warm and wild. A burro brayed in his face. He was lonesome and tired. Ought to run up to San Juan for a few days to swim in the Mediterranean. Well, he’d meander over—perhaps she would forgive him his boorish behavior the last time he had spoken to her. He eased his way through the crowded market, emerged into the clear and saw she had gone. A mirage.

All these comrades yet he had been alone for weeks, and now he was seeing things. If there were but one person he could speak to, a human being he could feel at ease with, someone warm and fresh and alive. Joe—why the hell didn’t he write? Or Sarah. She was in Valencia, keeping house for her husband and giving dinner parties to which were invited notables of international journalism and belles lettres, entertaining sincere, brave, intelligent leaders of the vanguard of the working class like Verdad and Ernesto and Gallo and Gomez and Pedro, and not a Spaniard in the lot. Why didn’t she come to Murcia? There was a need for nurses, especially since the increase in typhoid and cholera cases. And there she was living and entertaining like a marquesa in a fancy palacio moro in Valencia on the sea. Suppose she’s forgotten me completely. What the hell, one screw. Middleclass, that’s all she was.

He sat down at a café table and ordered American coffee and toast and guava jelly. Nodded to Horton who had returned with his Hungarian nurse, a beautiful Magyar girl whose husband was a frontline commissar. Comic star—a new coin minted by Mack Berg. Mack Berg was earning himself the hatred of the entire leadership of his brigade—the voice of the rank and file. They were permitting him to get away with it because he had become the smokestack through which the men spouted their pent-up steam. Berg seemed to understand and took advantage of it. One of these days if he wasn’t careful some pol would bomb that smokestack out of existence. Horton had enough sense to keep quiet, except to his nurse Boeshka Haas, who though having an affair with him had informed Vlanoc the kid was sympathetic to the POUM. Horton had huge purplish red scars on his neck since his operation which had been unsuccessful—his bullet still lodged in his spine. He would have to be called up one of these days and given hell, which would shut him up completely.

Jake heard laughter in the square and looked up from the point on the blue tin table at which he had been staring. Tomás was changing Jacobito to Franco, and Struik and the boys were laughing hysterically—joined by the peasants who had gathered about to observe the painter at work. The market seemed to empty as they all swarmed around Tomás, craning their swart scrawny necks to see, and the painter, warming to his job, began to improvise, floppy ears here, longer tail there, the pinga del perro lengthened so it reached into its own mouth. Spanish comics.

Jake looked away, frowning. He could enjoy nothing. There was something nagging at him, something he could not understand. He realized he had lost the habit of thinking about himself—and that was exactly what he wanted. Being taken with himself was after all an adolescent gambit he could do without. A man could begin to think about himself so completely he forgot the world he lived in. He smiled to himself. He didn’t want to forget the world, that’s all he wanted to think about. And wasn’t that a device, too, fabricated to conceal himself? The easiest place to get lost is in a crowd. He gazed about the square, the market place, saw the lean, tawny faces, the wares they sold and bought. With a start his attention was suddenly held by a woman standing at a peasant’s cart heaped with large sweet onions and strings of garlic. Even lost, he thought, a man required a warm hand to hold, a soft breast to kiss, the sweet moist secret of a loved woman’s body. His heart beat quickly. For the woman was the most beautiful he had ever seen, with the most shapely legs, the most splendid breasts, the brownest plaited hair, and she was staring at him with astonished dark blue eyes. His heart spun and his head fell into vertigo. He felt himself rising to his feet and beginning to walk towards her. She merely stood staring at him, her eyes opened wide, biting her lower lip. Finally he was as close to her as he could get without touching, and all he saw was her eyes—the pupils, he could see, were like murciano suns in a vivid burning blue sky. He heard himself from a great distance whisper harshly in Spanish, ‘Vámonos,’ and he turned towards the Paseo del Malecon. Without words, without touching, she followed slowly behind him the length of the stone promenade to the outskirts of the city, between fig and orange trees, then over a metal stairs and into a casa moro which this morning shone extraordinarily white. An old woman, a Goya caprice worn gray with time, closed the door behind them on the persistent white glare and heat.

He led her immediately to a large room on the second floor, still not speaking, not daring to speak, not touching. He turned from her to close the long floor-to-ceiling shutters. When he faced her again, she was sitting upright on the bed, her eyes lit by a soft warm glow, and he could hear his own heart pumping wildly and he was filled with a joy such as he had never before known.

There was an agony to the joy, and he somehow wished to hold on to this agonized joy for an eternity, but he also wanted to touch her. Slowly he moved towards her and dropped to his knees before her, and placed his head on her lap, and then he felt her fingers on his neck.

‘I almost died when I read you had died,’ she said.

‘You kept me alive,’ he said simply.

They were silent again, and there was nothing in the world but them.

When at last he began gently to undress her, she threw her arms wildly about his neck and began to kiss him and to laugh, and soon he joined her.

They made love laughing and crying at one and the very same time.