José María Merino*

The Deserter

Love is something very special. That’s why when she saw the shadow by the door – in the faint moonlight, it looked more like a flat, ominous stain – she wasn’t at all frightened. She knew he had come home. The sweet air of that St John’s Eve, the diaphanous sky, the fresh smell of the grass, the murmuring stream, the singing of the nightingales, were suddenly combining all that was most benign in nature with that newly restored presence.

They had only been married for about five months when war broke out. He was called up, and, in the brief letters he wrote to her from the front, she could read between the lines, despite all the words crossed out by the censors, about the hardships of life in the trenches. Those letters, though, which, at first, made somewhat confused reference to events and places, became more and more a simple record of longing and a desire for home. When they started to arrive uncensored, they were so steeped in a stark yearning to be home that they always made her cry when she read them.

She had been less alone at first. His mother was still living in the house at the time, and, even though she was ill, her mere presence had kept her company, filling the days with minor chores, daily conversations and shared comments on his letters and on the other grim news from the war. A year later, the old lady was dead. She died right there in the kitchen, sitting on the bench with a bunch of grapes in her lap and still holding a grape in her right hand. In another letter from him, she learned that, when news of his mother’s death had finally reached him, his officers didn’t consider it necessary to give him leave because the funeral had already been and gone.

Then she was left alone in the house and spent most of the day in silence, except when she dropped round to her sister’s for a brief chat, and the village – from which the young lads and the young husbands were all absent – was equally silent, as if stunned.

She immersed herself in household tasks, willing herself to forget. And, setting herself a rigid timetable, she performed the daily chores of cleaning and cooking, doing the laundry and mucking out the barn, and keeping to the strict calendar required by work in the fields: harvesting and transporting the hay, hoeing the vegetable patch and around the fruit trees, grinding the barley. Absorbed in the task of the moment – the sheer physical effort establishing its own rhythm – she even came to think of his absence as a vague daydream from which she would soon wake up.

Time, however, continued to pass, and still the war did not end. She didn’t really understand the reasons for the war. From the pulpit, the priest described the enemy as some terrifying, diabolical evil, as contagious as the plague. The war and the enemy ended up seeming something quite unreal, as if the war effort were a fight to the death with monstrous beings come from a distant, deadly land. So much so that when, one day, a convoy arrived bringing prisoners, and the intensely curious villagers went out in the street to watch the spectacle, one particularly stout woman exclaimed: ‘But they don’t have tails’, expressing her surprise and disappointment at finding that these enemies in no way resembled what they’d been led to expect from the priest’s diatribes and from other sources.

No, they had no tails, no hooves, no horns. They were men. Sad, dark creatures, wearing filthy capes and threadbare jackets, with balaclavas or field service caps covering their shaven heads. Almost all had thick beards and gaunt faces, although some were lads too young to have even started shaving.

The sight of those battered soldiers made her imagine her own husband who, perhaps at that very moment, was also being driven along in some muddy truck, shivering beneath a khaki cape. Caught up in a state of anguished confusion, she even thought she could recognize her own beloved’s face in those other men’s faces.

Time passed. Another year. The village continued to lose men until the only remaining inhabitants were the children, the women and the elderly. The evenings were no longer happy occasions for telling stories and remembering the past; the only reason to get together now was to pray. Rosaries and litanies, novenas and masses occupied any hours spent together.

When that particular St John’s Evefn1 arrived, they found it hard to believe in a time when the young lads, and the one appointed king for the night, would light the traditional bonfire on top of the hill. It was the children who revived the memory of that ancient fiesta, building a big fire in the square. The fire attracted the grown-ups, who gathered around it. It was a warm, clear night, with not a breath of wind.

The children ran in circles round the fire, shouting and enjoying the warm glow. The grown-ups recalled other St John’s Eves, when their sons would fill the night with noise and laughter. They now missed the very thing they had accepted at the time with the obligatory mixture of indulgence and annoyance called for by such an inevitable ritual; it was as if a part of their life had been amputated. That year, there was no need to keep an eye on eggs or sausages or kettles, as had been the case in the past. No one would creep in at night to steal them. Nor would anyone trample paths or scatter the embers in the hearth.

The village had no young men, and, in the sweet night air, that fact, made still more painful by the circumstances, felt particularly melancholy.

When the fire burned out, the improvised gathering broke up. She went to her sister’s house, briefly greeted her other family members, then went home. That was when she saw the shadow by the door. She recognized him at once and ran to fold him in her arms.

He had changed. He was thinner, paler, and his face had taken on a kind of pensive quality. She realized at once that he had deserted. He had been admitted to hospital after being wounded by shrapnel from a grenade, and had decided, once he recovered, to escape and go home. It had been a gruelling journey, lasting weeks. But there he was, silent and smiling.

Secrecy was of the essence. She concealed her happiness and went about her life as usual. During the hours of daylight, he remained hidden somewhere in the house. At night, under cover of darkness, they went out into the garden and sat next to each other, conscious of the pulsating stars, the murmuring stream and the birds calling to each other in the invisible canopy of the trees.

She rediscovered both the savour of the early days of marriage and the anguish of their final kisses and embraces. And, because love is something very special, all the problems – the war, having to cope on her own, the constant bartering to get enough food to survive – became very secondary considerations.

Her one fear was that he would be discovered. One afternoon, when she returned home after scavenging for firewood, she found two Civil Guards waiting for her. They brought news of his desertion – for he had apparently announced his intention to desert while delirious in hospital – and searched the house. They failed to find him, but that unexpected visit filled her with anxiety, fearing that one day they might find him and take him away again and perhaps punish his desertion with death.

And so the summer oscillated between fear and the joy of having him home. She would sometimes spontaneously burst into song, which, in that glum, silent village, seemed positively shocking.

And yet a strange feeling would sometimes wake her in the middle of the night, and, even though she could still feel his body next to hers, a whole flock of sombre fears would come crowding into her mind, as if the future were already decided and all kinds of terrible omens were about to come true.

When she woke on the first day of September, he was no longer beside her in bed. It was a damp, grey day. She looked for him everywhere, in the house and in the yard, but he was nowhere to be found. His absence, reviving memories of her long solitude, aroused in her a sense of foreboding.

At the hour of the angelus, she saw the two Civil Guards again approaching the house. It had started raining hard, and their oilskin capes were dripping water.

They had found his body on the top of the hill, lying among the rocks, as if he had been straining every sinew to get a glimpse of the village. His wound had presumably opened again on the long journey home, and his body was as withered as a shed snakeskin. The guards said he must have been dead since at least St John’s Eve.