To her harm, the ant grew wings.
SPANISH PROVERB
They came at six, ringing, hammering, rousing the whole household and the neighbors on the floor. The landlady stayed in bed, sitting up. The two students from the Universidad Comercial, who shared a room and a bed, sat up. Mauro sat up. The fuddled landlord went to the door.
They did not offer to identify themselves. “Ugalde,” one of them said. They followed the landlord to Mauro’s bedroom door and took root outside it.
“Police,” the landlord whispered. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.” His racing heart trembled in his voice.
“Then why are they here, getting my house a bad name?”
“I don’t know.”
Fear turned the landlord’s usually indifferent nature to malice. “In case you’re not coming back, leave enough money for a week’s rent and the cost of sending your stuff home. I don’t want you here.”
They took him to the Camino de La Salve, to the Vizcaya provincial headquarters of the Civil Guard.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked them, building buttresses for his courage.
They neither looked at him nor answered him.
The distinction between Dion Ugalde, Luis Arrabal’s chief lieutenant, and the country doctor of Burguete, who was his father, dissolved in his blood. He was afraid for himself and stricken at what he had done to his father and mother. He closed his eyes to hide what they revealed and saw his father in his little surgery, with its old bookcase of old medical books, the glass cabinet in which he kept his instruments, the narrow cot on which his mother changed the linen every day, the peculiar heavy old desk with the fence around three sides—and his father sitting at it. Faithful, loving, patient and now betrayed by the son he loved so dearly and sacrificed for so willingly. He felt his father’s heartbreak, his mother’s anguish.
If there had been any way out of this, it was past. His father was right. It was lunacy. It couldn’t succeed. The end product could be only useless suffering. He felt his parents’ suffering.
They took him to a small room with only a chair, a table and a bench in it. A door in the opposite wall led somewhere. It was a desolating thought. Where is somewhere? It was seven o’clock.
“Empty your pockets,” they said.
That’s what they do when you’re not going home, he thought. God have pity on my poor parents. He emptied his pockets: papers, the Gastronomic Club key, some money, a student card, a note from Pureza that said, “Come early on Sunday.” His fingers were treacherous, fumbling. His hands sweated and pulled the linings out of his pockets. The police stood, waiting, as patiently unfeeling as concrete. They sealed his possessions in a large brown envelope and took it away.
“Stay,” they said as if to a retriever. It was a quarter past seven.
“Oh,” he said childishly, “they forgot my watch,” and stood up, to be pathetically cooperative. There was nobody to tell. What would they do if he opened a door? Think he was trying to run away, and bash him? He sat down again.
Nobody came. He heard footfalls, voices, laughter, but nobody came. He watched his watch obsessively. It was eight o’clock. Two hours since they hammered on the door. By nine he was limp. His imagination scurried over the landscape of possibilities. Would Basa have him in Burguete? Would he be in wrist irons? Would they send him down to Burgos and the rats? His limbs melted. Nine o’clock. He lay back against the wall. His father was in the room. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. His mother stood away. What have you done what have you done to us all? Forgive me forgive me forgive me. His watch told off the time second by second, endlessly. When the grip had left his fingers and his father and mother refused to be conjured, the door that led somewhere opened. It was eleven.
The young man who came in was a lieutenant in uniform. He was smiling. His eyes were very large and brown. He had a big nose and rich lips and very large teeth. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?” he said pleasantly and held out his hand.
Mauro tried to say, No, but his mouth and throat were too dry. He made a sound and took the man’s hand. His own lay in it like warm, wet liver. The man dropped it, but he kept his smile in place. Mauro tried to stand up but his legs refused. Sitting upright was difficult.
“How long have you been here?”
“They picked me up at six this morning.”
“Six? You mean six?” He appeared to be shocked.
“Yes.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No.”
“Come in here.” He wheeled and led the way through the door that led somewhere. It led into another small room with a couple of chairs, a desk, a filing cabinet and a desk chair. The place had a soldierly austerity. “Sit down.” The man pushed a button, ordered a guard to bring sandwiches and coffee and said, “I am sorry. I am truly sorry. This is unforgivable. You were not ‘picked up.’ I said I wanted you brought here because I wanted to talk with you. I am Mieza—José Mieza, Lieutenant Mieza.”
Mauro’s thinned blood thickened a little. His head felt a little light from the relief that ran through it. Had they anything? “I am Ugalde,” he said and restrained an involuntary giggle. “Mauro Ugalde. Medical student.”
The lieutenant was leafing through a file on his desk when Mauro made this announcement. He raised his head a little, and his eyebrows, and said, “Yes, I know.”
He returned his attention to the file. Then he said, “Since six? Do you need to pee?”
“Yes.”
A Guard took him to a washroom and brought him back. “Better?” the lieutenant asked caringly.
“Much.” Mauro’s bladder was better, his legs were better, his head was stronger. The lieutenant wasn’t hostile. He was humane. That didn’t prove anything, but the Civil Guards weren’t known for their gentle manners or methods. What was next? He waited for several minutes and the lieutenant read and leafed.
“Pamplona,” the lieutenant said. “The Iruña Zarra. That’s been dealt with.”
“I’m sorry? I didn’t follow.”
“The Iruña Zarra.” The lieutenant spoke very distinctly, slowly. “The dining room that was bombed in Pamplona.”
“Oh. I see.”
“They got the people who did that.” Casually. Sharing information.
“I see.”
“Two engineering students have been arrested.”
“I see.”
“One thing I did want to ask you about this. You were questioned about it, I see here.”
“Yes, by Colonel Basa.”
“That’s my point. Why by Colonel Basa? Why not by a sergeant, or a junior officer like me?”
“Well, Colonel Basa is my father’s friend. He was in Burguete that day. I suppose he just did it because he was there. I suppose it was handy.”
“You have some nicely placed friends,” the lieutenant said, looking at the papers.
“Oh, he is not my friend. He and my father …”
“Yes, of course, I understand. But that being so, he would look on you in a kindly spirit.”
“He is very kind.” The sandwiches and coffee came. More reassurance came with them.
“Tuck in,” the lieutenant said as if the idea pleased him. “I’ll clear this up while you eat. There was a young man with you in Pamplona that night.” It was a statement.
“Yes, José Duarte. His home is in Pamplona, we shared lodgings here in Bilbao.”
“Yes, you moved. Tell me about that.”
“My father insisted. He drove over here and ordered me back to my old lodgings.”
“Your father insisted? Why?”
“Well, the people we lodged with are called Mendez. The son of the family was involved in the shipyard strike. He was arrested. My father thought I should not be there.”
“Good for him. You told him this Mendez was an agitator?”
“No.”
“Then how did he know, away up there in Burguete?”
“Colonel Basa told him.”
“Ah! Colonel Basa told him? He’s a very good friend. I met him several times. He’s a very fine man. I met him at something in Burgos last time. I’ll be in touch with him, of course, but when you see him again, give him my greetings, will you? A personal greeting means more than a mere word in a covering letter.” So, that’s the game, Mauro thought. He wants friends at court. “So your father came here and moved you?”
“Yes. We’re very close.”
“You didn’t think of moving yourself?”
“I did. But I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The old Mendez—the grandparents—needed the rent money. They’re really very nice old people.”
“You have a kind heart. But, you know, policemen don’t always see the nicest side of people. They more often see the side that counts. For example, do you know the story of the Mendez grandfather? If you don’t, it might interest you.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, Grandfather Mendez was once a schoolmaster. That was when the Civil War started. He fought for the other side, and was condemned to death after the war for blood crimes. He had a very beautiful sister who was pursued by a then-prominent young Falangist in Bilbao …” The lieutenant told the story old Mendez had told Ugalde of his pardon and his sister’s marriage to get the pardon. “The old man had a sense of humor,” Mieza said. “When he married and had a son, he named the boy Vladimir—after Lenin.” He said, smiling, “An unrepentant and humorous Communist. You kept poor company.”
“I’m afraid so. Duarte asked me to join him and by the time I found out who they were, I had a lot of sympathy for the old people. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking about politics.”
“Well, all’s well that ends well. You’re comfortably settled now?”
“I thought I was, but my landlord didn’t like the police coming for me this morning. I got my marching orders. He said the police coming gave his house a bad name.”
“Never mind that. I’ll talk to him. You can’t keep changing lodgings.” He stood up. “Well, I was obliged to see you to clarify the Mendez business in my own mind and before the arrests were made, I was supposed to see you about the Iruña Zarra affair. We’ve got that lot cleared up. Did you leave anything in the waiting room?”
“They took everything but my watch when I arrived.”
“They did what? Why, in God’s name?” He rang and the large brown envelope was brought. “Just check it while I’m here. I’m so sorry about all this. Sometimes we make such stupid mistakes.” He was quite distressed.
Mauro broke the seal and poured everything onto the lieutenant’s desk. “Everything’s there, thank you.”
“That’s an odd key. What on earth is it?” Mieza picked up the club key and examined it.
“That’s the key to our Gastronomic Club.”
“So you’re a cook?”
“A few of us get together.” He took the offered key and put it in his pocket.
“I come from Granada,” the lieutenant explained. “I’ve heard a lot about these Basque gastronomic clubs, of course, but I’ve never been to one.”
And I’m not asking you, Mauro thought. “Ours is a very poor one,” he said. “I mean, our furniture, our equipment, everything is poor. We made the furniture from packing cases. We can’t afford much, but we love to cook.”
“The cooking is the thing, I understand.”
“Yes.” The subject stalled.
Lieutenant Mieza walked with Mauro to the front entrance. He was relaxed, casual, one young man talking idly with a much younger man with whom there were links of acquaintance, distant but real—Colonel Basa of the Civil Guard. That was a good connection. That’s what Mieza had on his mind: connections! Mauro stilled his rising sense of triumph and listened, nodding, smiling, yessing, noing, being pleasing.
He refused a ride back to his lodgings. “About my landlord,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll have a man over there before you get back. And, yes—I’ll have a good word to say about you in my report to Basa.”
Mauro flagged down a little blue bus and half-way home got off it. His excitement wouldn’t allow him to sit. He drew great breaths; the cool air tasted strong and sweet. He swung his arms, striding; life roared in him. The fear and shame and regret of the long hours before eleven were driven far back in his mind and every vigorous step drove them further. There was nothing to fear. They knew nothing. That Mieza wanted to please Basa. “A good word to say about you to Basa.” They have eyes and ears everywhere. You can’t move but they know it; everybody believes that. Well, there you are: I was right in their jaws, fresh from a bank robbery and they hadn’t a clue. Whoever messed up Mieza’s orders was getting his arse kicked right now. That young police politician probably said, “Send a car for him,” and they picked him up at six in the morning, emptied his pockets, kept him sitting there without a pee for almost five hours. That business about his watch, too. They didn’t forget to take it. That was a technique—let him sit and watch the hours passing. For a moment, anger swept up in him and he walked faster.
But the thought of ambitious, conniving, stupid Mieza restored his good humor. And Luis Arrabal and Dion Ugalde repossessed their heroic world, and the doctor of Burguete was his father in his silent world, and the talent ran in his bloodstream. He looked in the faces of the people passing and smiled at them, and they looked blankly back, puzzled. Who’s that? their eyes said. Do I know him? Who am I? he asked them in his head. You don’t know what I am. I blew up the Iruña Zarra in Pamplona and then toured Colonel Basa’s Summerhouse, and then I talked to him about the bombing and he hadn’t a clue. And I robbed the bank at Valmaseda, and talked to Lieutenant Mieza afterwards at Civil Guard headquarters and he’s going to commend me to the colonel. It’s in the bloodstream. The people around him were like an alcazar in which he walked, shielded and succored. Their very ignorance was a defence behind which he could move with ease and immunity. The vocabulary of Abril’s ideology came nowhere near his mind. The words that floated in it, like little orgasms, were: “cover, operation, execution, tactics, escape …” These were exciting words. He wanted to yell “ARRABAL!” and see what effect it had on the people. Instead, he spoke into the face of a pretty woman as she passed. “¡Viva Yo!” Hurrah for me! he said and she pointed a forefinger at her temple and circled it slowly and did not smile. He laughed, and saluted her and said to himself, “Pretty bitch,” and turned into his lodgings, high on his triumphs.
Out of the fermenting air, into the staleness of his room; here was another world to subdue, and Mauro erected enclosures around his worlds with a certain panache. So he worked hard and singlemindedly on his texts till nine o’clock when his alarm went off. The alarm was a Christmas gift from his mother, and a joke they shared. She bought it one weekend when they went for a brief respite across the frontier to Bidaét. The alarm was Russian, “Made in Rostov,” the face said and it went Bong, bong, bong twelve times before it began to rattle like a crippled tank. Big Boris, they called it. He took a child’s delight in the bongs and always heard them to the end before he shut the thing off. He heard them out now, thinking how nice it would be to see his mother at Christmas—would he tell her this time about Pureza?—shut off the last bong in the middle, kissed the clock, smiling, went for his motorbike and rode through the fermenting air back into Dion Ugalde’s world.
Street-touring on a Tuesday night.
Weaving, dodging, backtracking, curb-crawling. It was unnecessary, of course. Skull and Begoña harassed them often at the club; it was registered officially; now Mieza knew about it. He had even handled the key. Yet it wasn’t unnecessary. Vigilance was always necessary. Are they watching us? Following me? It is necessary to know. He was not followed.
He had laughs for them tonight. He had been into the fiery furnace and look, no singeing, ARRABAL!
He turned his key in the lock.
Their mood was celebration.
They opened bottles of Rioja and drank while they prepared to cook, and drank and sang and broke away briefly to dance while they cooked and the new people in the apartment below hammered the ceiling with a broom handle. And Abril did a few of his Basque high kicks and high leaps in the little space he had and provoked more ceiling-banging and dropped out morsels of information.
“New people below. The girl was kicked out this morning.”
“Why?”
“Using the premises for immoral purposes, the order said.”
“Did you go in there?”
“We were friends if that’s all you mean.”
“Is that why Skull asked you if you ever brought women in here?”
“I don’t know why Skull asks us anything. Yes, I do. Because he’s a thug who works for a thug state.”
Reis asked, grinning his horseman’s grin, “Did you sleep with her, Abril?”
“Do I ask you who you sleep with, Reis?”
“Skull must have known you went in there. He’s watching you.”
“Not unless he stood outside her door and watched me go in and out.”
They considered the geography of the house and agreed.
“Who are the ceiling bangers?”
‘I don’t know their names. A couple. She’s built like a wrestler. She was up here borrowing sugar at five.”
Mauro said sharply, “Why didn’t she borrow it from her next-door neighbor?”
“She said this was the only door that answered.”
“Everybody in the building was out?”
“How would I know?”
“If your little whore …” Haro said.
“She is not a whore.”
“I apologize,” Haro said. “If she was kicked out this morning, how did these people get in so quickly?”
Abril made a face of exasperation. There had been enough questions. This one was the limit. “You don’t know a damn thing about the poor, do you, Haro? This is a poor-people street. The poor breathe down one another’s necks, waiting for a place to live. That couple was probably next on a long waiting list. Maybe they accused her. Poverty and riches have the same effects. They make people cruel. They probably have friends in the building. Their friends probably saw me going in there. Sometimes I did her shopping for her. She’s a waitress. Long hours, you know? They probably told the landlord. He probably got an order on moral grounds.” He looked at Haro. “He probably called her a whore,” he said.
They danced no more, but they sang and cooked and drank and sang and ate and Abril dropped another fragment of information.
“The priest at Valmaseda transferred the bag you left for him, Mauro. I transferred ours. The leadership is pleased with us. They say we’re a crack unit, ready for a big operation.” He said it proudly, like a Boy Scout who had been commended by his Scoutmaster. Haro saw it in his face and was amused. All Abril’s attitudes were so working class, he thought. And what else? He’s incurably working class. As if it were a terminal disease. That’s why he’s the link with the next link in the Fifth Assembly; it’s never one of us. Mauro can be the leader of the unit, but never the link. Mauro and I can go into the bank and lift the money. But Abril delivers it to his link. Everything goes from us through Abril. Everything comes to us through Abril.
“Did they tell you how much we got?” Haro asked.
With his mouth full of chicken and grinning, Abril said, “One and a half million pesetas in dirty notes.” He often talked with his mouth full.
“That’s twenty-five thousand dollars,” Reis said. The wine company did business with New York and exchange figures came unbidden to his mind.
“We were to get five percent for our expenses. How much did we get?”
“Thirty thousand pesetas,” Abril said and crammed his mouth.
“That’s not five percent,” Reis said. “It’s a miserable five hundred dollars.”
“What do we need it for? The Assembly needs every peseta. They’re buying guns. They have to get about. The leaders have to live. The men who’ve been driven over the mountains have to live. Their families have to eat. What do we lack? What do we need more money for?”
“Rioja,” Haro said, feeling the tension. “Thirty thousand pesetas is enough.”
“It’s not enough,” Reis said. “They promised us five percent. When they make a contract, they should honor it. I hope you protested, Abril?”
“I didn’t. I agreed with them. We don’t need any more.”
“What we need is beside the point. They offered us five percent. That’s a contract.”
Abril rinsed his mouth with red wine and said impatiently, “What are we? Bank robbers or revolutionaries?” Christ. It was the richest member of the unit—probably the richest man in the whole Fifth Assembly—who talked about money, contracts, percentages, as if they were a fucking business. That was par for the course the rich always steered. Give us our cut.
Mauro asked, “Where is it, Abril?”
“At the Siglo tobacco shop. We can draw it in small amounts.”
“It’s already a small amount.” Reis was sullen and a little drunk. “It’s not the money I care about, it’s their word.”
“Right.” Mauro pushed the nervous subject out of reach and told them of his visit to Lieutenant Mieza and the celebration was on again. They laughed at the stupidity of the Civil Guard, at the political cupidity of Lieutenant Mieza; they laughed about their now obvious superiority, they laughed about the excitement of it all, and they were all a little tight. They drank more wine and ate and sang and drank and laughed, but Abril was withdrawn now, listening and thinking more than he laughed, and more than he drank.
His thoughts smarted. He liked them, but they were what they were: bourgeois. Once, when he called them that, Reis hoisted his long nose in the air and said, “What does that word mean, Abril? The fact is it no longer has any meaning. It’s just a resentful sound …” Well, “whore" wasn’t just a sound and Haro let it out very easily about little Eulalia who was a waitress and wasn’t even awake when they knocked on her door this morning and gave her the eviction order from her miserable room and kitchen downstairs. What Mauro and Reis and Haro didn’t know was that she came upstairs with her squashed suitcase and sat here crying for a while and he took her to a friend’s home where she’d be allowed to stay till she found another room near her work. If she hadn’t already been fired for being late for her work.
What would Haro know about how she felt? He was a commerce student who’d go into his father’s business and get rich. What he wanted was to be one of the current national heroes—a driver of racing cars. He’d have been content with that adulation. But he didn’t have quite enough of what it took behind a wheel and he couldn’t live without excitement and danger in a society where the excitement of participation belongs to guttersnipes who become bullfighters, or working boys who become soccer stars or rich men’s sons who become racing drivers. And he couldn’t talk freely and safely or lash about him with his tongue at politicians unless he did it in a field or on the top of a mountain. Haro was here because he wanted his own freedom to say and do as he pleased, as a substitute for a chequered flag. He needed excitement. He got it in secrecy, conspiracy and robbing banks. Maybe he didn’t know this himself—but Abril was sure of it. Spain sat heavily on Haro. But it was sitting on Haro, not on Spaniards. Not on Basques. Only on Haro.
Reis was not really different. He couldn’t breathe. He had been on many business trips with his father to London and New York and the theaters and newspapers, and magazines and books and talk intoxicated him. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond question. Everyone, it seemed, was up on his hind legs, challenging everything. It wasn’t that Reis was committed to anything he read or heard. He was committed only to his own right to challenge restraints on himself. At the club he told them of dinner parties with his father’s London and New York customers—mere businessmen like his father, who said outrageous things about society, about religion, about their political leaders, about law, and policies as if it was mere small talk, as if it was as natural as breathing and of no great threat to authority or order. And the club was useful to Reis: He could talk here as freely as Englishmen and Americans talked without his father’s alarmed rebukes, cautions, restraints. Englishmen and Americans are not Spaniards, his father said. We have no talent for the way they live. Word and action are one with us. We are not Europeans, he said, we are Spaniards. As if a Spaniard was something less than an Englishman; more dangerous to himself and others. And that itself a notion to be defied.
Reis needed to defy. Abril suspected that Reis thought the free-flying mouths of Englishmen and Americans made very little difference to the shape of their societies. Socialist-talking businessmen—in England, particularly—who lived like kings, couldn’t expect their privileges and advantages to suffer any diminution or they wouldn’t talk as they did. Abril was certain Reis wanted the Anglo-Saxon liberty to say and do what he pleased—in a Spanish society that would be different from its present structure only with respect to the mind and the mouth. He was quite persuaded that Reis believed the free word was a personal pleasure only. He needed to defy. He cheered the strikers because they defied. He came to the Fifth Assembly because it defied. It was a convenient sort of defiance, dangerous in a way, and that was satisfying, but clandestine; and that was a form of insurance against the consequences of, say, standing up in church and denouncing the chief of state. For that, you were arrested on the spot.
Mauro was a different specimen altogether. The Fifth Assembly chose him. The word came from Burguete, from the link with a unit in the mountain farms. “He’s Arrabal’s grandson and he’s ready.” So Pureza was cast like a lure and Mauro was in. But Abril knew now that there wasn’t much to choose between the three of them: Reis and Haro were bourgeois iconoclasts. They hadn’t a real political idea in their heads; they were frustrated egoists who wanted to hit at something and the biggest target was “the State,” or “society” or “the regime,” or “oppression”—there was no consistency even in their vocabulary and they declined to learn Abril’s. They were stubbornly bourgeois; not because they rejected Abril’s vocabulary on some other ideological ground, but because it was “foreign” and their own, they were sure, was better. There was something silly, they thought and told Abril, about a Spanish working man using all those strange words, “like a parrot,” as Reis put it, “who’d taken a course at the London School of Economics.” And Mauro? He was a bourgeois romantic. He wanted to be another Luis Arrabal out of his time and context.
The important thing about them was not, however, that they were or were not ideologists but that they were useful. Trained, indoctrinated cunningly according to their weaknesses—by which the Fifth Assembly strategists meant the things in them that made them willing to act under orders—they could be used. And Abril was their link, a proletarian with an ideology and a vocabulary that belonged to it. “Don’t force the language if they can’t swallow it. Don’t use it at all,” Abril’s link told him at last. “Use them” There were more important things than vocabulary to bother about.
Abril watched them and listened to them as if they were children. He was twenty-five. But they were useful children, tools in the larger cause. They had much to lose and valued what they had and understood nothing of its relation to the purposes of the men whose cause they joined and all but a very few of whom they had ever seen. Reis was the eldest among them. “Twenty-eight,” Abril liked to tell himself with a proletarian sense of superiority that arose out of a known and defined purpose, “and emotionally retarded.”
“You’re very quiet, Abril.”
“I’m listening.”
So it came to review time. At some point, usually within two weeks of an operation, when all of them had had time to reflect on it, they reviewed the operation and considered its flaws.
“Review time,” Mauro said, and called them to order.
They were, Abril sometimes thought, like the Catholic social workers who took parties of working-class boys to the mountains or the sea for charity holidays. There were times for teeth-cleaning, foot and hand inspecting, praying, sleeping, eating—and reviewing. Still, Abril was not the unit leader, he was the unit link and the unit manipulator. Mauro was the leader, so he led. That was one thing the Assembly knew about its handful of bourgeois units: The bourgeois “knew how to lead.” “Leave them their illusions,” was the word from the link. The problems of a bourgeois unit led by a proletarian had been experienced and examined and judged to be not worth the problems the bourgeois created. So Mauro was the leader.
“The Pamplona operation,” he said, “was an almost unqualified success. The problems were of two different sorts. One was our fault, the other was inherent in the tactical approach. First, the inherent problems.
“I had to meet my contact in the plaza and pass him the key to my saddlebags where he was to put the explosives. I also had to get rid of José Duarte, who was my extra cover, since he lived in Pamplona and I lived in Burguete and it was natural that both of us should be there on a weekend trip home. But at the Iruña café-bar we ran into his friends and they delayed us. I could see my contact through the big windows. He circled the plaza three times before we got away. Then I had to slip him the key as I passed him in the street. He was carrying the bomb in a paper parcel and wanted rid of it.
“Then Duarte decided he had to eat. So we went to the La Vasca restaurant where my bike was parked. Duarte held us up badly and I had to ride him home, repark the bike and plant the bomb.
“When I got down to the Iruña Zarra dining room it was packed. Fifty engineering students and fifty student nurses were having some sort of celebration, eating, drinking, singing, walking about, making a lot of noise. I placed the bomb and left.
“My contact waited for me on the road home and said the explosion would be at five. It went off at four. He mistimed the thing. We could have had a disaster on our hands instead of a punishment. We could have killed and mutilated a hundred people. This sort of thing we could have avoided with more care.”
“Was the contact a regular explosives man?” Haro asked.
“No. His business is with goats.”
They discussed the matter till they had picked it clean and Abril listened to their solemn proposals concerning the making of bombs and agreed to pass them to his link and did not tell them the response would be, “Piss. Why don’t they stick to what they know?” And they spent time on the two misplaced handguns at Valmaseda. It was important, they always agreed, to eliminate every unnecessary risk by guarding against stupid error.
“Reports,” Mauro said, and Reis tried to return to the Valmaseda money. “They cheated us of three percent,” he complained.
“It’s done,” Mauro ruled. “Forget it. Abril?”
Abril had a name he was under orders to raise with them.
“Señora Aña Anson,” he said.
It was a familiar name. It spoke to them of Pamplona painters and sculptors and musicians and writers whose work had flourished or failed to flourish under Señora Anson’s patronage and promotion. And it spoke to them of great wealth and great beauty and an industrial magnate whose plants manufactured cable buses and sewing machines and dishwashers and the common hardware of the kitchen. They had in their own kitchen in the club, some of the products of one of his plants. All these and low wages were what came to mind when they thought of Señora Aña Anson and her husband who was nearing seventy in her fortieth year.
“She must have married him for the money,” Haro said.
“There’s plenty of it,” Abril said. “She’s had a ten-million-peseta price tag put on her by the council. The way the Assembly proposed to get it is the matter I’m ordered to report on. We have been given our next operation.”
It was pleasant to discuss Señora Añson and her beauty and her cultural enterprises and her pictures in the papers; it was nervous work talking of Señor Anson and his money. The assignment came so casually, almost indifferently, as if there could never be doubt; that small or large, operations would never be questioned.
“We are to take Señora Anson. They will demand ten million pesetas for the señora—and Hierro out of jail,” Abril said coldly.
Mauro shivered on his stool. The thought of a kidnap had never touched his mind.
“What’s our percentage?” Reis asked after the shaken silence. And Abril read the bad joke and thought, They’re frightened.
“It’s too big for us,” Mauro said, not thinking of the money.
“We don’t have to collect the money,” Abril said. “Only the señora.”
“It’s too big for us,” Mauro repeated doggedly.
“The Assembly says we’re the right unit for the job,” Abril reported faithfully, free from all useless questionings.
“It’s not our kind of operation.” Mauro was inhibited by an immediate and stubborn reluctance. He had given the issue no thought. There had been no time for thought. He reacted. All his instincts told him it was a mistake. These things were too complicated. They were not like the Valmaseda operation, scouted, planned, executed and out with two bags full. Then forgotten and next day, labs and lectures. A kidnap was a job for the professionals—for those men who lived beyond the frontier and crossed it for one operation. Or for men whose lives were planning and promoting revolution; organizing, always on the move, always under cover. Young men who have to show up in class or account for their absence, young men who have to explain to their fathers why they haven’t been seen in his offices for two, three, how many days? This was not their work. The nature of their lives made them vulnerable, probably made them incompetent, certainly made them unsuitable. He spoke his mind.
“We can handle it, Mauro,” Reis said cheerfully. Mindlessly, Mauro thought.
He said, “There’s a far more serious question. You might get the money, but you’d lose the sympathy of every man, woman and child in Spain. You don’t kidnap women.” It was the first time he had allowed the word kidnap out of his mouth. It chilled him.
“We don’t decide,” Abril said. “The Fifth Assembly decides. We obey orders.”
“Are we ordered?”
“They’ll come here next Tuesday night. They’ll go into it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who they’ll be. They want three keys. I’ll get them made from mine.”
“You don’t kidnap women,” Mauro insisted.
“That’s not for us to say. Anything we can argue, they’ve already argued. They know the arguments and the answers. It’s all been worked out.”
“Abril,” Haro said quietly, “you have a fine proletarian sense of your station in life. Obedience comes naturally.”
“I know why I’m here, Haro. I know why I’m in this. Do you know why you’re in it?” Abril picked up a stack of dirty dishes and carried them to the kitchen. When he came back, he said into their nervous silence, as if he had done nothing to interrupt himself, “Next Tuesday we’d all better know. I don’t know who they’ll be, but the men who come to set this one up—they’ll be pros. And by God, they know why they’re in it.”
It had a harsh and threatening sound.
For the second time in his life, Mauro’s separate worlds failed to stay separate. The doctor of Burguete would not be separated in his mind from Dion Ugalde, Luis Arrabal’s chief lieutenant. The tried and trusted mechanisms of self-deception ceased; comforting, flattering or exciting fantasies that had colored the dreary days were suddenly aggravations threatening his security, and dreary reality was unexpectedly welcome. But dreary reality was depressing: it was the dimension of the new assignment; it was his mother, Maria-Angeles Ugalde, who took on a peculiar likeness to Señora Aña Anson; it was an assignment so large and complex and unpredictable that the prospect of failure threatened his father and mother with disastrous consequences he had not allowed himself to consider before.
He wrote two tests in the days that followed and was alarmed by his performance. His test papers, like his texts, threw up the word “kidnap.” He wrote his weekly letter to his parents and found himself forgetting in the middle of sentences how they were meant to go on. He found “kidnap” falling from the point of his pen when his mind—he thought—had thrust it out. He made four attempts to write his letter, struggling cheerlessly to be cheerful and, desperate for something to say, asked permission in his fifth and final attempt, to bring Pureza to Burguete for some part of the Christmas holiday.
And he went with Haro to the library of the faculty of commerce to search the files of newspapers they kept there for references to Señora Aña Anson. There were plenty. The señora, it was clear, was a fine horsewoman. There were pictures of her riding fine horses, opening exhibitions, reading orchestral scores with visiting conductors (“Do you think she really can read music?” Haro wondered. “When a woman looks like her, she doesn’t even need to read Spanish,” Mauro said), and smiling incessantly with and at groups of dignitaries who had agreed to do for culture what she wanted them to do. Yes, she was beautiful. She was very beautiful. She was gracious. She was generous. She was wealthy. She was half her husband’s age, and childless. Was that her aged husband’s fault? A childless woman is a pitiful thing. If she is beautiful and rich and wears clothes that define what they cover with provocative exactitude so that men and women with blood in their veins can see in her what women desire to be and men desire to possess, then she is doubly pitiful for she has an old man in her bed who can neither value nor possess her to that end which is the purpose of her life: childbearing. In picture after picture, with painters and writers and sculptors and musicians, her smile was frank and friendly with an unassuming openness, but in others there was about her eyes a withdrawn and private light.
“What she needs is a young and potent lover,” Haro said. “She’s sad.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Mauro said impatiently, and knew it was what more than half the women in Spain would say; what his mother would say, what Pureza would say. Once he overheard his mother say of one of his father’s patients in the village (a young waitress in the bar halfway down the street by the town hall, whose breasts were full, legs exquisite, hips eloquent, cradle empty and husband sickly), “She doesn’t need you, Dion. She needs a night on the mountain with a man like Ramiro Urbina, the vet. He’d give her twins.”
And his father laughed and said, “It’s genetics, not big genitals that make twins.”
If Señora Aña Anson in her fortieth year were to flower and bring forth, men would wonder, and women would believe she had taken a potent lover to give her a child; and the women would frown for their men and smile little smiles of triumph with other women and rejoice with and pray for the brave and determined señora who refused to allow her womb to be denied.
It was a mistake, a stupid and destructive mistake to take a woman for ransom and in exchange for Hierro; it was a monumental blunder to take this woman. “And that is what I’ll argue,” he told Haro.
On Saturday, he took Pureza on the back of the bike to the fishing village of Elancove. It roosted against the cliff above its little harbor built of massive cut stone. The one cobble-stoned, narrow street wound along the face of the cliff like a goat path. The houses were accessible only by narrow precipitous steps, and Pureza stood on the steps and touched the houses on either side with her outstretched hands. She was gay, affectionate, amusing.
“Come down,” he said. “Let’s go along beyond the harbor and have lunch. I want to talk to you.” Talk was his reason for bringing her here today. He was nervously impatient to unburden his spirit. He would have been prepared to speak his deepest fears to his mother but that was impossible. He couldn’t trust them to Haro or Reis. What he felt and feared didn’t need a hand to shake but a breast to suckle; or a womb to hide in.
Down in the harbor a fisherman cleaned a large fish on the sea wall and threw the guts into the water. The crying gulls planed down. The man’s wife came out of her house with a bucket of water and a brush and scrubbed the sea wall.
“That’s not the kind of domestic service you can expect from me,” Pureza said. She took his hand and skipped around him, spinning him. “I have different domestic joys planned for you,” she promised him. In a different state of mind and spirit he would have asked for them now. He hid his impatience of her sportive and untimely mood and hurried her along.
The striking fishermen with small glasses in their thick, broad hands stood in a clump on the concrete pad outside the bar door and with knowing, smiling eyes watched them scramble out of sight along the rocky base of the cliff beyond the harbor. Mauro could not hear their comments but he knew them. Pureza could not hear their comments.
“Dirty-minded bastards,” she said.
They ate their sandwiches and drank their wine lodged out of the wind’s way among great rocks. “Stay where you are,” Pureza said. “In a little while a couple of those bullocks will sneak along the cliff and look down to see if you’ve got my slacks off yet.”
Mauro stayed six feet from her. Their backs were braced against confronting rocks. The wind’s whistle and moan were shut away. Now that they were apart and safe in a place where talk could be free, he wasn’t sure how to reach his dangerous subject.
“Pureza,” he said. “I can’t think of anything these days but you and me and a practice in a country town.” He began where all his disturbed emotions took him and always took him when he was afraid; to a place to hide, a dream of repose, a breast to suckle.
“That’s nice,” she said and lobbed pebbles for him to catch, like a pet.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“That you can’t think of anything these days but me and you and a practice in a country town.”
“That’s what I do think.”
“There’s nothing more important?”
“What could be more important?”
“You got me into the Fifth Assembly.”
“You think that’s more important?”
“No.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
“It would sound ridiculous if I said I couldn’t tell you.”
“It would be ridiculous. It would mean you don’t trust me. It would also be about the Fifth Assembly.”
“It is.”
She caught her own pebbles for a moment tossing them high. “What is it, Mauro?” She watched the pebbles. “Do you want out?”
“No. We’ve never swapped information unless they put you on one of the club’s operations.” It was impossible … it was also unwise … to say, I want to be sure I can trust you, I want to be sure the Fifth Assembly isn’t more important.
“Is it a bank?”
“No.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Very. And complicated.”
“Bank jobs aren’t?”
“Do you think they are?”
“I’m always so afraid that I want to run away. If you weren’t there, I think I would, I’m quite sure I would.”
That was an opening. He probed it. “Then why do you do it?”
“Haven’t you seen that yet? When I fell in love with you I wanted to stop. I stayed in because you stayed in. I wanted more than anything to impress you. To tell you the truth, I thought you wouldn’t want me if I wasn’t brave and bold and a great joker. Mauro, do you want out?”
“No.”
“I trust you, Mauro. I love you. Shall I tell you what I really think?”
“Yes.” They were on the right track, going the way he wanted to go. She would take them, it seemed, to where he wanted to be.
“You’ve told me a lot about your family, how close you are. I think you’re too close and you got into the Fifth Assembly as a kind of assertion of your freedom—from boyhood to manhood. Something like that. I think we both did the same thing for the same reason. My parents bullied me and I joined something I couldn’t tell them about to spite them. You did it to … just to be a bit free of them. Is that silly?”
“No. But there’s more to it than that. I think I want to be more like my grandfather than my father. I love him very much, don’t misunderstand me. But Luis Arrabal—well—”
“So you don’t want out?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what’s bothering you, Mauro. I think you’re frightened.”
“I am. If I’m caught, the world will fall in on me.”
“Then, by God, I want to know. I’m going to know, Mauro. If not, take me home and forget me.”
“They want Hierro out of jail.”
“A jail break? It can’t be done. They’d shoot Hierro as soon as it started.”
“Not a jail break. They want Hierro and ten million pesetas for Señora Aña Anson of Pamplona.”
Pureza jumped up. She leaned over him, unbelieving. “A kidnap?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“No!”
“They’re sending men to the club on Tuesday night.”
“You? No! A woman? No! No, Mauro, no!”
“I’ll need all the arguments you can give me.”
“No arguments, Mauro. You just refuse. You won’t do it.”
“They’ve already decided that.”
She sat down beside him, holding tightly to his arm. They were quiet. They did not see the fishermen watching them from the top of the cliff. Then she cried.
“No, no, no,” she said. “The club can’t do it. There are always delays and where are you and Reis and Haro if you’re held up somewhere? How do you account for yourselves? It’s stupid, Mauro. And it’s wrong. Not a woman. But not you anyway. It’s impossible. It’s too complicated. Oh, God. It’s wrong.”
And too dangerous, he thought. I’m frightened. Country town banks are easy, but this. The complications made his head swim.
“I asked my mother if you could come to Burguete for Christmas. Will you come?”
I asked my mother. The words advanced his deflation. He was out of his depths. He felt too young, too dependent, too far from solid ground, too vulnerable. The thought of a country practice and Pureza in bed and in the kitchen was a kind of womb.
“What did she say?”
“She hasn’t had time to say.”
“I’ll come.”
“On Tuesday night, I’ll refuse.”
“Yes,” she said listlessly. “Please let’s go home.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to leave me. The girls are away for the day.”
“Dry your eyes. The men at the bar will think I tried to assault you.”
“You’ll refuse, Mauro? And stick to it?”
“I’ll stick to it.” Will they allow me to stick to it?
“I love you so much, Mauro. I need you so much.”
It was astonishing that anybody should love him. He did not feel like a leader. He felt like Dr. Ugalde’s boy, Mauro. He wished he could talk to his father and touch him and tell him how he loved him, how he needed him.
“You’ll love my father and mother,” he said.
“I know that.”
He was at Somera early on Tuesday night, standing in a doorway, watching number twenty.
Reis came first, almost dancing with a swinging step, whistling; he looked about him to spot observers and, seeing none, waltzed a little, made a joyful Basque leap, high-kicking in the air and went inside. That was Reis. Mauro smiled at Reis. Abril would call him a “bourgeois dilettante” and Abril would be right. Reis would get rich and in time he would see every side of every question and he would be a rich and cynical old man, and tolerant of the oddities of others. He’s probably the best of us, when the story is all told, Mauro thought.
Haro came soon after, walking with purpose, bent a little forward from the waist, as if another inch would help him at the finish line. Haro would die rich and rigid. Radical now, reactionary later. He saw them with a clarity he had never allowed himself before. With his head on the block, his eyes were open.
There were silence and emptiness in the street.
Then a short man as broad as a house, a beret on his head, walked up the street from Ribera. He walked with a powerful waddle and did not hesitate as he turned into number twenty. It had all been scouted. They had passed this way before. It was ten minutes before the next one came, from the other end of the street. He was a man of middle height, bareheaded, without a top coat, walking slowly with his head up as if he listened to the street. He stopped to light a cigar, turned his back to the light wind from the river, checked behind him and stepped briskly into number twenty. The third one was not far behind and from the same direction; a youth. He stayed by the door of the house, lit a cigarette, and began his vigil. Skull would not take them by surprise. They knew everything, foresaw everything, prepared for everything. They were the professionals. Their lives were concealment, evasion, deceit, mobility. Mauro wondered how men could live that way, without being able to relax, be careless, be indifferent. He did not want to live that way. He did not speak to the youth at the door but, bracing his spirit against the apprehension that harassed it, crossed the street and went upstairs and turned his key.
Reis, Haro and Abril were in the kitchen preparing food. Let all things be equal and the same as they were. Food as usual in spite of the señora. Nothing must ever be as it was not. That would be noticed. The two men sat on the bench by the narrow table against the wall. They faced the room and looked to Mauro like farmers waiting in patient discomfort at a bus station. They stood up, watchful as boars in a thicket and did not smile and did not speak. Abril came from the kitchen and waved his hand inclusively. “They’re here,” he said by way of introduction. Nameless. Namelessness is a strange condition, Mauro thought. How many people can they trust? But trust was a powerful word. It made him think of his father and mother and their trust, which embraced him. The thought fortified his resolution. He went into the kitchen to help the cooks.
“It’s good,” the thick one said in a throaty grunt and lacking a name for him, Mauro christened him Boar. The other one he would name when he spoke. Boar shovelled Reis’ potaje de titos into his mouth. He looked at the other one who nodded vigorous agreement and said nothing. He was spooning the dark mess of Haro’s squid. Mauro ate Abril’s pollo a la chilindrón. They ate in throttled silence and drank sparingly.
“That was good,” the Boar said when every pot had been emptied. He took a long draught of red wine. “Good,” he said with deep-bellied satisfaction. “I like good food. Now.” He pushed his dish away.
“When we clear away,” Mauro said, asserting a leadership he had come to assert.
They sat in a half-moon at the low table. The two men sat on the bench, their elbows behind them on the narrow table. “Now,” Boar said and Mauro marveled at his enormous chest.
“You are assigned,” Boar said, “to a vital part of the Anson operation.”
I should speak now, Mauro thought, but there is nothing to speak to yet. He waited, and waiting, felt something drain away, as if by silence he had already given ground.
Boar had peculiar speckled eyes, of what color Mauro could not determine. It was their heat that awed him, and they surveyed the young men around the table as if to dissect them.
“Maps will come later,” Boar said. “The purpose of the action is to exchange the Señora Aña Anson for ten million pesetas and Vincente Hierro.”
“It is a mistake,” Mauro said and the tremor in his throat was audible in his head.
“Discussion will come later,” Boar said. “What discussion is necessary.” He looked steadily at Mauro and remained silent for a long moment. “The situation is simple. This coming Saturday, the señora will open an exhibition of paintings at San Sebastian. They are the work of a young painter of Pamplona. He is Martin Celaya. She believes in him.” He smiled a faint little smile and waited for his irony to be grasped. “In the evening she will preside at a dinner given by her at the Hotel de Londres y de Inglaterra in Celaya’s honor to the cultural notables of San Sebastian. She will leave there with her protege and go to the Anson bloodstock farm at Hernani where they plan to remain till Monday morning. The Señora Anson is, as you know, a famous horsewoman. They plan to ride horses on Sunday. The horses are better housed than the poor of Bilbao.”
“How do you know she’ll be there?” Mauro asked aggressively.
“We read it in her engagement book. We have eyes in her house in Pamplona.”
“A servant?”
“There are three women servants at the Anson farmhouse in Hernani,” Boar said, ignoring Mauro, “and a manservant. You will arrive before the señora and the painter return on Saturday and put these servants under restraint. You will then wait for the señora and the painter, put the painter under restraint and remove the Anson woman to a safe place where you will hold her until the money is paid and Hierro is released across the frontier. The maps will show you in exact detail where you will be and where you will go. We shall study them now …” He reached into his high boot and pulled out the maps.
“No,” Mauro said.
Boar laid the maps on the table with slow, deliberate care. He opened and spread them. Then he turned to Mauro. “You have something to say?”
“The whole thing is a mistake. You can’t kidnap a woman. You’ll alienate all Spain.”
“That has been considered. The decision has been made. You have been assigned your part.”
“I won’t do it.”
Boar took a piece of paper from his inside pocket. He spread it on the table and read from it, “From the bottom,” he said, “the Valmaseda bank, the Iruña Zarra bombing, the bank at Ondárroa, the Civil Guard barrack explosions at Pedernales. Do I go on? You appear to have an excellent service record. Did you take part in these operations?”
“Yes.”
“And seven others?”
“Yes.”
“You took orders and accepted responsibility?”
“Yes.”
“You made no attempt to pick and choose the operations you engaged in?”
“No.”
“And now you do?”
“Yes.”
“You are not free to do so.”
“It’s a stupid operation. You’ll alienate …”
“Is that your only argument?”
“Are you trying to make enemies?” The Boar’s cold condescension, and the power that flowed from him, made Mauro shout. The man was like a rolling boulder on a slope.
“I shall try to put your mind at ease about that,” Boar said. “It has been considered. There are times when the objective makes a temporary alienation of public sympathy well worth risking. The public mind is fickle. There will soon be some government action which sweeps what support we have back to us. The temporary loss of sympathy is the price we have to pay for ten million pesetas and for Hierro, whom we need now. His release will be a major psychological victory. The effect on future arrests will be phenomenal. They will hesitate to make them knowing what we are capable of doing. They cannot guard all the wealthy women of Spain. It has all been discussed. It is decided.”
“And if they won’t pay? If they won’t release Hierro? You lose everything by having to release Señora Anson without your price. You are made to look incompetent.”
“That is why we chose a woman. That is why we chose this woman. Her husband has the price. The government will not keep Hierro. This public opinion that concerns you so much will not let her husband or the government sacrifice a woman.”
“Sacrifice a woman?”
“Sacrifice.”
“What are you telling us?”
“If the industrialist Anson does not pay, and if the government does not release Hierro, the señora will not go home. They might, you could argue, hang Hierro. But the wealthy women of Spain outnumber the leaders of the Fifth Assembly. It has all been decided.”
“You’d kill her?”
“We won’t need to kill her.”
“Answer the question! If they don’t pay, will you kill her?”
“Who holds her will kill her.”
“And we are assigned to hold her?”
“That is the decision.”
“I’ll not do it. They won’t do it.” Mauro swept his arm across the table at his friends. “Reis?” he demanded.
“No,” Reis said. “I will not.” His hands were locked and white.
“Haro?”
“I’ll not do it.” He glowered doggedly at Boar. “I’ll not do it.”
“Abril?”
“I’ll do what must be done.” Abril looked directly into Mauro’s face. “They shot Mendizábal to death. They trapped him in Guecho when he was the leader of the Fifth Assembly before Hierro. They shot six shipyard strikers the other day. They are not squeamish about spilling our blood. Their blood spills as easily as ours and it is red like ours. It looks the same on the street.”
Boar smiled. “That is very dramatic,” he said, “but there will be no need for blood. They will pay. They paid for Huarte. They did not hang the prisoners in the Burgos trials when we took the West German consul to stop the hangings. They will not sacrifice the Anson woman. Public opinion will not let them.”
“But they caught all the men who took Huarte and they killed Mendizábal who led them,” Mauro said.
“Mendizábal was too bold. He did not hide his face. I am not a bold man.”
“I’ll not take any part in it.”
“Young man,” Boar said, and the patience had left his voice. “You have been assigned. You know. Do you think you can be privy to such knowledge and walk away?”
The silence was audible.
Boar said, “They trapped Mendizábal in Guecho and shot him to death. How did they know where to find him? Three days after they shot him to death, a young priest was found, dead by the knife. Do you think we should leave ourselves vulnerable? Do you believe we have no recourse? Priest or pope—there is no immunity, just as there was no sound at that priest’s end. He was the one. Such necessities we find distasteful.”
Reis dropped a pencil he was twisting in his fingers. The small noise sounded like a cannon. “I’m sorry,” he said pointlessly.
“We shall now get down to details,” Boar said.
There was no more discussion. The three young men sat numbly on their stools, confused and afraid in this first encounter with the other side of their radical penny. Boar frightened them. They felt his power. But even more frightening was what they could not see—the tentacles that could reach them, soundlessly.
Abril sat, smiling. And Boar filled the room with his size and his sound.
“We shall all become familiar with our responsibilities,” he said, and put a light to his list of Mauro’s operations, smiling at him. “Nerves,” he said. “You’ll get over them. You have done excellent work.”
He leaned over the maps. “Hernani,” he said. “You will make yourselves familiar with the ground—every yard of it. You will do that separately, not in a group. You will take the woman from this house, to this house, only fourteen kilometers away.” His voice droned on, laden with infinite detail and authority. Over and over again. There were no more questions. He nodded to Mauro. “You will be in charge of the woman. Your gallant feelings qualify you.” He nodded to Abril. “You will be in charge of this part of the general operation. Your sentiments equip you.”
Reis said, very softly, as if not to disturb a sleeping dog, “What is your part?”
“My unit will handle the dangerous part. We shall collect the money. Hierro will carry it from his cell where they will deliver it to him and bring it under escort to the frontier. There is irony in that, is there not? That will make a good story around the world.”