Читать книгу The Gate of the Sun - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 11

Ana Gomez was young and strong and black-haired and, in her way, beautiful but there was a sorrow in her life and that sorrow was her husband.

The trouble with Jesús Gomez was that he did not want to go to war, and when she marched to the barricades carrying a banner and singing defiant songs she often wondered how she had come to marry a man with the spine of a jellyfish.

Yet when she returned home to their shanty in the Tetuan district of Madrid, and found that he had foraged for bread and olive oil and beans and made thick soup she felt tenderness melt within her. This irritated her, too.

But it was his gentleness that had attracted her in the first place. He had come to Madrid from Segovia because it had called him, as it calls so many, and he worked as a cleaner in a museum filled with ceramics and when he wasn’t sweeping or delicately dusting or courting her with smouldering but discreet application he wrote poetry which, shyly, he sometimes showed her. So different was he from the strutting young men in her barrio that she became at first curious and then intrigued, and then captivated.

She worked at that time as a chambermaid in a tall and melancholy hotel near the Puerta del Sol, the plaza shaped like a half moon that is the centre of Madrid and, arguably, Spain. The hotel was full of echoes and memories, potted ferns and brass fittings worn thin by lingering hands; the floor tiles were black and white and footsteps rang on them briefly before losing themselves in the pervading somnolence.

Ana, who was paid 10 pesetas a day, and frequently underpaid because times were hard, was arguing with the manager about a lightweight wage packet when Jesús Gomez arrived with a message from the curator of the museum who wanted accommodation for a party of ceramic experts in the hotel. Jesús listened to the altercation, and was waiting outside the hotel when Ana left half an hour later.

He gallantly walked beside her and sat with her at a table outside one of the covered arcades encompassing the cobblestones of the Plaza Mayor and bought two coffees served in crushed ice.

‘I admired the way you stood up to that old buzzard,’ he said. He smiled a sad smile and she noticed how thin he was and how the sunlight found gold flecks in his brown eyes. Despite the heat of the August day he wore a dark suit, a little baggy at the knees, and a thin, striped tie and a cream shirt with frayed cuffs.

‘I lost just the same,’ she said, beginning to warm to him. She admired his gentle persistence; there was hidden strength there which the boy to whom she was tacitly betrothed, the son of a friend of her father’s, did not possess. How could you admire someone who pretended to be drunk when he was still sober?

‘You should ask for more money, not complain that you have been paid less.’

‘Then I would be sacked.’

‘Then you should complain to the authorities and there would be a strike in all the hotels and a general strike in Madrid. We shall be a republic soon,’ said Jesús, giving the impression that he knew of a conspiracy or two.

Much later she remembered those words uttered in the Plaza Mayor that summer day when General Miguel Primo de Rivera still ruled and Alfonso XIII reigned; how much they had impressed her, too young even at the age of 22 to recognize them for what they were.

‘My father says we will not be any better off as a republic than we are now.’ She sucked iced coffee through a straw. How many centimos had it cost him in this grand place? she wondered.

‘Then your father is a pessimist. The monarchy and the dictatorship will fall and the people will rule.’

On 14 April 1931, a republic was proclaimed. But then the Republicans, who wanted to give land to the peasants and Catalonia to the Catalans and a living wage to the workers and education to everyone, fell out among themselves and, in November 1933, the Old Guard, rallied by a Catholic rabble-rouser, José Maria Gil Robles, returned to power. Two black years of repression followed and a revolt by miners in Asturias in the north was savagely crushed by a young general named Francisco Franco.

But at first, in the late 20s, before Primo de Rivera quit and the King fled, Ana and Jesús Gomez were so absorbed in each other that, despite the heady predictions of Jesús, they paid little heed to the fuses burning below the surface of Spain; in fact it wasn’t until 1936 that Ana discovered her hatred for Fascists, employers, priests, anyone who stood in her way.

When Jesús proposed marriage Ana accepted, ignoring the questions that occasionally nudged her when she lay awake beside her two sisters in the pinched house at the end of a rutted lane near the Rastro, the flea-market. Why after nearly a year was he still earning a pittance in the perpetual twilight of the museum whereas she, at his behest, had demanded a two-peseta-a-day pay rise and been granted one by an astounded hotel manager? Why did he not try to publish the poems he wrote in exercise books? Why did he not join a trade union, because surely there was a place for a museum cleaner somewhere in the ranks of the CNT or UGT?

They were married during the fiesta of San Isidro, Madrid’s own saint. The ceremony, attended by a multitude of Ana’s family, and a handful of her fiancé’s from Segovia, was performed in a frugal church and cost 20 pesetas; the reception was held in a café between a tobacco factory and a foundling hospital owned by the father of Ana’s former boyfriend, Emilio, who fooled everyone by getting genuinely drunk on rough wine from La Mancha.

Emilio, whose black hair was as thick as fur, and who had been much chided by his companions for allowing the vivacious and wilful Ana to escape, accosted the bridegroom as he made his way with his bride to the old Ford T-saloon provided by Ana’s boss. He stuck out his hand.

‘I want to congratulate you,’ he said to Jesús. ‘And you know what that means to me.’ He wore a celluloid collar which chafed his thick neck and he eased one finger inside it to relieve the soreness.

Jesús accepted the handshake. ‘I do know what it means to you,’ he said. ‘And I’m grateful.’

‘How would you know what it means to me?’ Emilio tightened his grip on the hand of Jesús, becoming red in the face, though whether this was from exertion or wine circulating in his veins was difficult to ascertain.

‘Obviously it must mean a lot,’ Jesús said, trying to withdraw his hand.

Ana, who had changed from her wedding gown into a lemon-yellow dress, waited, a dry excitement in her throat. The three of them were standing between the café where the guests were bunched and the Ford where the porter from the hotel stood holding the door open. No-man’s-land.

‘It means a lot to me,’ Emilio said thickly, ‘because Ana promised herself to me.’

‘Liar,’ Ana said.

‘Have you told him what we did together?’

‘We did nothing except hang around while you pretended to get drunk.’ What she had seen in Emilio she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps nothing: their union had been decided without any reference to her.

Emilio continued to grip the hand of Jesús, the colour in his cheeks spreading to his neck. Jesús had stopped trying to extricate his hand and their arms formed an incongruous union, but he showed no pain as Emilio squeezed harder.

The group outside the café stood frozen as though posing for a photographer who had lost himself inside his black drape.

‘We did a lot of things,’ Emilio grunted.

The porter from the hotel, who wore polished gaiters borrowed from a chauffeur and a grey cap with a shiny peak, moved the door of the Ford slowly back and forth. Fireworks crackled in the distance.

Jesús, thought Ana, will have to hit him with his left fist – a terrible thing to happen on this day of all days but what alternative did he have?

Jesús smiled. Smiled! This further aggrieved Emilio.

‘You would be surprised at the things we did,’ he said squeezing the hand of Jesús Gomez until the knuckles on his own fist shone white.

Finally Jesús, his smile broadening with the pleasure of one who recognizes a true friend, said, ‘Emilio, I accept your congratulations, you are a good man,’ and began to shake his imprisoned hand up and down.

‘Cabrón,’ Emilio said.

‘God go with you.’

‘Piss in your mother’s milk.’

‘Your day will come,’ Jesús said, a remark so enigmatic that it caused much debate among the other guests when they returned to their wine.

The two men stared at each other, hands rhythmically rising and falling, until finally Emilio released his grip and, massaging his knuckles, stared reproachfully at Jesús Gomez.

Jesús saluted, one finger to his forehead, turned, waved to the silent guests, proffered his arm to his bride and led her to the waiting Ford.

From the bathroom of the small hostal near the Caso de Campo, she said, ‘You handled that Emilio very well. He is a pig.’

She took the combs from her shining black hair and shed her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. In the street outside a bonfire blazed and couples danced in its light. Would he ask her about those things that Emilio claimed they had done together?

‘Emilio’s not such a bad fellow,’ Jesús said from the sighing double bed. ‘He was drunk, that was his trouble.’

Didn’t he care?

‘He is a great womanizer,’ Ana said.

‘I can believe that.’

‘And a brawler.’

‘That too.’

She ran her hands over her breasts and felt the nipples stiffen. What would it be like? She knew it wouldn’t be like the smut that some of the married women in the barrio talked while their husbands drank and played dominoes, not like the Hollywood movies in which couples never shared a bed but nevertheless managed to produce freckled children who inevitably appeared at the breakfast table. She wished he had hit Emilio and she knew it was wrong to wish this.

In novels, the bride always puts on a nightdress before joining her husband in the nuptial bed. To Señora Ana Gomez that seemed to be a waste of time. She walked naked into the white-washed bedroom and when he saw her he pulled back the clean-smelling sheet; she saw that he, too, was naked and, for the first time, noticed the whippy muscles on his thin body, and in wonderment, and then in abandonment, she joined him and it was like nothing she had heard about or read about or anticipated.

It is true that Ana Gomez only encountered her hatred during the Civil War, but it must have been growing sturdily in the dark recesses of her soul to show its hand so vigorously.

When, slyly, was it conceived? In the black years, when one of her three brothers was beaten up by police, losing the sight of one eye, for rallying the dynamite-throwing miners of Asturias? When, at the age of 62, her father, a gravedigger, bowed by years of accommodating the dead, was sacked by the same priest who had married her to Jesús for taking home the dying flowers from a few graves? Or because the same fat-cheeked incumbent had declined to baptize her first-born, Rosana, because she had not attended mass regularly, although for a donation of 20 pesetas he would reconsider his decision … Ah, those black crows who stuffed the rich with education and starved the poor. Ana believed in God but considered him to be a bad employer.

As the hatred, unrecognized, fed upon itself. Ana noticed changes in her appearance. Her hair, pinned back with tortoiseshell combs, still shone with brushing, the olive skin of her face was still unlined and her body was still young, but there was a fierce quality in her expression that was beyond her years. She attributed this to the inadequacies of her husband.

Not that he was indolent or drunken or wayward. He cooked and scavenged and cleaned and Rosana and Pablo, who was one year old, loved him. But he cared only to exist, not to advance. Why did he not write his sonnets in blood and tears instead of pale ink? wondered Ana who, since the heady days of courtship and consummation, had begun to ask many questions. It was she who had found the shanty in Tetuan, it was she who had found him a job paying five pesetas a week more than the National Archaeological Museum. But his bean soup was still the finest in Madrid.

When the left wing, the Popular Front, once again dispatched the Old Guard five months before the Civil War, Ana understood perfectly why strikes and blood-letting swept the country. The prisoners released from jail wanted revenge; the peasants wanted land; the people wanted schools; the great congregation of Spain wanted God but not his priests. What she did not understand were the divisions within the Cause and, although she reacted indignantly as blue-shirted youths of the Falange, the Fascists, terrorized the streets of the capital, she still didn’t acknowledge the hatred that was reaching maturity within herself.

On May Day, when a general strike had been called, she left the children with her grandmother and, with Jesús, who accompanied her dutifully but unenthusiastically, and her younger brother, Antonio, marched down the broad paseo that bisects Madrid, in a procession rippling with a confusion of banners. One caught her eye: ANTI-FASCIST MILITIA: WORKING WOMEN AND PEASANT WOMEN – red on white – and the procession was heady with the chant of the Popular Front: ‘Proletarian Brothers Unite’. In the side streets armed police waited with horses and armoured cars.

Musicians strummed the Internationale on mandolins. Street vendors sold prints of Marx and Lenin, red stars and copies of a new anti-Fascist magazine dedicated to women. And indeed women marched tall as the widows of the miners from Asturias advanced down the promenade. The colours of the banners and costumes were confusing – blue and red seemed to adapt to any policy – and occasionally, among the clenched fists, a brave arm rose in the Fascist salute.

After the parade the hordes swarmed across Madrid, through the West Park and over the capital’s modest river, the Manzanares, to the Casa de Campo, a rolling pasture of rough grass before the countryside proper begins. There they planted themselves on the ground, boundaries defined by ropes or withering glances, released the whooping children and foraging babies, tore the newspapers from baskets of bread and ham and chorizo, passed the wine and bared their souls to the freedom that was soon to be theirs.

Ana pitched camp between a pine and a clump of yellow broom where you could see the ramparts of the city, the palace and the river below, and, to the north, the crumpled, snow-capped peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

Her happiness as she relaxed among her people, her Madrileños, who were soon to have so much, was dispatched by her brother after his third draught of wine from the bota. As the jet, pink in the sunshine, died, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘I have something to tell you both. A secret,’ although she knew from the pitch of his voice that its unveiling would not be an occasion for rejoicing.

Antonio, one year her junior, had always been her favourite brother. And he had remained so, even when he married above himself, got a job, thanks to his French father-in-law in the Credit Lyonnais where, with the help of the bank’s telephones, he also traded in perfume, and mixed with a bourgeois crowd. He was tall, with tight-curled, black hair, a sensuous mouth and a nimble brain; his cheeks often smelled of the cologne in which he traded.

‘I have joined the Falange,’ he said.

It was a bad joke; Ana didn’t even bother to smile. Jesus took the bota and directed a jet of wine down his throat.

‘I mean it,’ Antonio said.

‘I knew this wine was too strong; it has lent wings to your brains,’ Ana said.

‘I mean it, I tell you.’ His voice was rough with pride and shame.

There was silence beneath the pine tree. A diamond-shaped kite flew high in the blue sky and a bird of prey from the Sierra glided, wings flattened, above it.

Ana said, ‘These are your wife’s words. And her father’s.’

‘It is I who am talking,’ said Antonio.

‘You, a Fascist?’ Ana laughed.

‘You think that is funny? In six months time you will be weeping.’

‘When you are taken out and shot. Yes, then I will weep.’ She turned to Jesús but he had settled comfortably with his head on a clump of grass and was staring at the kite which dived and soared in the warm currents of air.

Antonio leaned forward, hands clenched round his knees; he had taken off his stylish jacket and she could see a pulse throbbing in his neck. She remembered him playing marbles in the baked mud outside their home and throwing a tantrum when he lost.

He said, ‘Please listen to me. It is for your sake that I am telling you this.’

‘Tell it to your wife.’

‘Listen, woman! This is a farce, can’t you see that? The Popular Front came to power because enemies joined forces. But they are already at blows. How can an Anarchist who believes that “every man should be his own government” collaborate with a Communist who wants a bureaucratic government? As soon as the war comes the Russians, the Communists, will start to take over. Do you want that?’

‘Who said anything about a war?’

‘There is no doubt about it,’ Antonio said lighting a cigarette. ‘Within months we will be at war with each other.’

‘Who will I fight against? A few empty-headed Fascists in blue shirts?’

‘Listen, my sister. We cannot sit back and watch Spain bleed to death. The strikes, the burnings, the murders, the rule of the mob.’ He stared at the black tobacco smouldering in his cigarette. ‘We have the army, we have the Church, we have the money, we have the friends …’

‘Friends?’

‘I hear things,’ said Antonio who had always been a conspirator. ‘And I tell you this: the days of the Republic are numbered.’

Jesús, eyes half closed, said, ‘I am sure everything will sort itself out.’ He had taken a notebook from his pocket and was writing in it with an indelible pencil.

‘You were a Socialist once,’ Ana said to Antonio.

‘And I was poor. If I had stayed a Socialist or a Communist or an Anarchist I would have stayed poor. How many uprisings have there been in the past 50 years? What we need is stability through strength!’

‘And who will give that to us?’ She took the bota from her husband, poured inspiration down her throat. Her brother a Fascist? What about their brother, the sight knocked out of one eye by a police truncheon? What about their father, sacked by a priest with a trough of gold beneath his church? What about the miners, with their homemade bombs, gunned down by the military? What about the peasant paid with the chaff of the landowners’ corn?

‘There are many good men waiting to take command.’

‘Of what?’

‘I have said enough,’ Antonio said.

Jesús, licking the pencil point, said, ‘Good sense will prevail. Spain has seen too much violence.’

‘Spain was fashioned by violence,’ Antonio said. ‘But now a time for peace is upon us. After the battle ahead,’ he said. ‘Join us. The fighting will be brief but while it rages you can take the children into the country.’

She stared at him in astonishment. ‘Have you truly lost your senses?’

‘Life will be hard for those who oppose us.’

‘Threats already? A time for peace is upon us?’

Jesús said, ‘The milk of mother Spain is blood.’ He wrote rapidly in his notebook.

Antonio poured more wine down his throat and stood up, hands on hips. ‘I have tried,’ he said. ‘For the sake of you and your husband and your children. If you change your mind let me know.’

‘Why ask me? Why not ask my husband?’

Antonio didn’t reply. He began to walk down the slope towards the Manzanares dividing the parkland from the heights of the city.

When he was 50 metres away from her she called to him. The diamond-shaped kite dived and struck the ground; the bird of prey turned and flapped its leisurely way towards the mountains.

‘What is it?’

He stood there, suspended between distant childhood, and adulthood.

She raised her arm, bunched her fist and shouted, ‘No pasarán!’

The militiamen came for the priest at dawn, a dangerous time in the lawless streets of Madrid in the summer of 1936. Failing to find him, they turned on his church.

The studded doors gave before the fourth assault with a sawn-off telegraph pole. Christ on his altar went next, battered from the cross with the butt of an ancient rifle. They tore a saint and a madonna from two side chapels and trampled on them; they dragged curtains and pews into the street outside and made a pyre of them; they smashed the stained-glass window which had shed liquid colours on the altar as Ana and Jesus stood before the plump priest at their wedding. They were at war, these militiamen in blue overalls, some stripped to the waist, and a terrible exaltation was upon them.

Ana, who knew where the priest was, watched from the gaping doors and could not find it in herself to blame the wild men who were discharging the accumulated hatred of decades. Since the Fascist rising on July 17 the ‘Irresponsibles’ in the Republican ranks had butchered thousands and invariably it was the clergy who were dispatched first. Ana had heard terrible tales; of a priest who had been scourged and crowned with thorns, given vinegar to drink and then shot; of the exhumed bodies of nuns exhibited in Barcelona; of the severed ear of a cleric tossed to a crowd after he had been gored to death in a bullring.

But although she understood – the flowers that her father had taken from the graves of the privileged had been almost dead – such happenings sickened her and she could not allow them to happen to the priest hiding in the vault of the church with the gold and silver plate.

The leader of the gang, the Red Tigers, shouted, ‘If we cannot find the priest then we shall burn the house of his boss.’ He had the starved features of a fanatic; his eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of altar wine.

Ana, to whom blasphemy did not come easily, said, ‘What good will that do, burro, burning God’s house?’

‘He has many houses,’ the leader said. ‘Like all Fascists.’ He thrust a can of gasoline into the hand of a bare-chested militiaman who began to splash it on the walls. ‘What has God ever done for us?’

‘He did you no harm, Federico. You have not done so badly with your olive oil. How much was it per litre before the uprising?’

He advanced upon her angrily but spoke quietly so that no one else could hear him. ‘Shut your mouth, woman. Do you want that scribbling husband of yours shot for collaborating with the Fascists?’

‘As if he would collaborate with anyone. No one would believe you. They would think you were trying to take his place in my bed.’

‘The olive oil,’ the leader said more loudly, ‘is 30 centimos a litre. Who can say fairer than that?’

‘I asked what it was.’

‘So you know where the priest is?’ he shouted as though she had confessed and the militiamen paused in their pillaging and looked at her curiously.

She stared into the nave of the church where, with her parents and her brothers, she had prayed for a decent world and a reprieve for a stray alley cat and for her grandfather whose lungs played music when he breathed. She remembered the boredom of devotion and the giggles that sometimes squeezed past her lips and the decency of it all. She stepped back so that she could see the blue dome. A militiaman attacking a confessional with an axe shouted. ‘Do you know where the priest is, Ana Gomez?’

And it was then that Ana Gomez was visited by a vision of herself: one fist clenched, head held high, the fierceness that had been in gestation delivered. She told Federico to drag a pew from the pile in the street and when, grumbling, he obeyed, she stood on it.

She said, ‘Yes, I do know where the priest is,’ and before they could protest she held up one hand. ‘Hear me, then do what you will.’

As they fell silent she pointed at one young man with the tanned skin and hard muscles of a building labourer: ‘You, Nacho, were married in this church, were you not?’ And, when he nodded, ‘Then your children are the children of God and this is their house. Can you stand back and see it burned?’ He unclenched one big fist and stared at the palm in case it contained an answer.

‘And you,’ to a white-fleshed man whose belly sagged over his belt, ‘should be ashamed. Wasn’t your mother buried in the graveyard behind the church barely two weeks ago? Do you want her soul to go up in flames?’

‘And you,’ to a youth who had filled his pockets with candles, ‘put those back. Don’t you know they are prayers?’ She paused, waited while he took back the candles which cost ten centimos each.

When he returned she raised both hands. ‘Our fight is not against God: it is against those who have prostituted his love. If you take up arms against God you are destroying yourselves because you came into this world with his blessing.’

‘So the priest who grew fat while we starved should not be punished?’ Federico demanded.

They looked at her, these vandals, and there was a collective pleading in their gaze.

Again she waited. Raised one arm, clenched her fist.

‘Of course he must be punished. So must all the other black crows who betrayed the Church. Beat him, spit on him’ – they wouldn’t settle for less – ‘but don’t degrade yourselves. Why stain your hands with the blood of one fat hypocrite?’

They cheered and she watched the muscles move on their lean ribs, and she saw the light in their eyes.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Nacho.

Another pause. Then, ‘Beneath your feet.’ They stared at the baked mud. ‘In the vaults. With the gold and silver.’

‘Who has the key?’

‘The fat priest. Who else?’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’

She went into the church. Long before the priest had started to squirrel the altar plate in the vaults he had given her father a key; she had it in her hand now as she made her way through the vestry to the door. The key turned easily; in the thin light filtering through a barred window she saw a kneeling figure.

The priest said, ‘So it has come to this,’ and she thought, ‘Please God don’t let him plead.’ ‘Here, take this.’ He handed her a gold chalice. ‘And help me.’

She distanced herself from him and said, ‘This is what you must do. When you emerge in the sunlight they’ll beat you and scream at you and spit on you. Run as if the wrath of God is behind you’ – which it must be, she thought – ‘and make your way to the old house where I used to live.’

‘They’ll kill me,’ the priest said. As her eyesight became accustomed to the gloom she saw that his plump cheeks had sagged into pouches. ‘And make me dig my own grave.’

She wanted to say, ‘My father could do it for you if you hadn’t sacked him,’ but instead she said, ‘Give them the gold and silver, that will speed you on your way.’

‘It’s a trap,’ the priest said. He bowed his head and gabbled prayers. ‘How can they hate me like this? I have been a good priest to them.’

‘That is for God to decide.’

‘You are a good woman,’ the priest said, standing up.

She handed him back the chalice. ‘Take this and the other ornaments and follow me.’

He said, ‘I wish I were brave,’ and she wished he hadn’t said that because it made her think of her husband.

‘If you believe,’ she said, ‘if you truly believe then you need not fear.’

‘Do you believe, Ana Gomez?’

‘In a fable? A black book full of stories? Angels with wings and a devil who lives in a dark and deep place? Yes, I believe,’ she said and led the way out of the vaults.

In the vestry she ripped up a surplice, wrapped it round the leg of a shattered chair, dipped it in gasoline and lit it with a match. She picked up a green and gold vestment, soaked that in gasoline and, torch carried high in one hand, vestment in the other, emerged into the sunlight.

The mob stared at her, confused. She threw the vestment on the pyre; the gold thread glittered in the sunlight. She applied the torch to it. Flames leaped across the cloth, swarmed over the gasoline-soaked fixtures of the church. Thick smoke rose and sparks danced in it.

She turned and signalled to the priest lurking in the church. He had removed his clerical collar and he was wearing a grey jacket and trousers and big black boots, and was more clown than cleric. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, his dewlap quivered.

He threw the altar plate at the foot of the flames and began to run. She spat at him, threw the torch on the pyre and ran towards the gold and silver.

The crowd hesitated; then those at the front made a dash for the booty. Federico, the leader, held aloft a gold salver. ‘And we had to count our centimos,’ he shouted.

Then they were after the priest as, weaving and stumbling, he reached the edge of the poor square. Some made a gauntlet in front of him; rifle butts and axe handles smote him on the shoulders. He tried to protect his face with his plump hands but he uttered no sound. Ana reached him and spat again and hissed to him to run down an alley to his left.

She blocked the alley. ‘To think we obeyed such a donkey,’ she cried and indeed he looked too absurd to pursue.

She listened to the receding clatter of his boots on the cobblestones. The pursuers hesitated and, frowning, looked to each other for guidance.

Federico pushed his way through them. ‘Out of the way, woman,’ he said. ‘We must have the priest.’

‘You will have to move me first.’ She folded her arms across her breast and stared at him.

He advanced upon her but as he reached her a burning pew slipped from the pyre belching flames like cannon fire, and smoke heavy with ash billowed across the square.

Ana raised her arms above her head. ‘It is God’s word.’

As they dispersed she returned to the church, locked the door and made her way down rutted lanes to the house where the priest was waiting for her.

She had listened to La Pasionaria broadcasting on Radio Madrid. ‘The whole country throbs with rage in defiance … It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’

And on 20 July she had stood ready to die in the Plaza de España, where Don Quixote’s lance pointed towards the Montana Barracks in which Fascist troops were beleaguered – Fascists later pointed out that Quixote’s outstretched arm closely resembled a Fascist salute – and she had moved inexorably forward with the mob as they stormed the garrison.

She had watched the troops being butchered, although many, it was learned later, had been loyal to the Republicans, and she had watched a marksman drop officers from a gallery high in the red and grey barracks on to the ground.

She had heard about the Republican execution squads, the bodies piled up in execution pits at the university and behind the Prado – more than 10,000 in one month, it was rumoured – and she had wondered if her brother, Antonio, had been among them because although the bourgeoisie and the priests were fair game there was no more highly prized victim than a Falangist.

And she had heard about the inexorable progress of the Fascists in the south, under the command of General Francisco Franco with his Army of Africa – crack Spanish troops in the Foreign Legion whose battle cry was ‘Long live death’ and Moors who raped when they weren’t killing – and General Emilio Mola’s four columns in the north.

To Mola fell some of the responsibility for the killings in Madrid. Hadn’t he boasted, ‘In Madrid I have a Fifth Column: men now in hiding who will rise and support us the moment we march,’ thus inciting the gunmen, many of them criminals released from jail in an earlier amnesty, to further blood-letting? He had also boasted to a newspaper correspondent that he would drink coffee with him in the Puerta del Sol, so every day coffee was poured for him at the Molinero café.

She had doled out bread to refugees roaming the capital, in the sweating alleys of its old town, on the broad avenues of its heartland, and when the first aircraft, three Ju-52s, had bombed the city on 27 August she had organized air-raid precautions for the barrio – shatter-proofing windows with brown paper, painting street lamps blue, making cellars habitable.

So what am I doing drinking coffee in my old home with the enemy, a priest?

Her brother, a street cleaner whose eye had been knocked out long ago by the police, railed. ‘What is this fat crow doing here? He should have been crucified like all the other sons of whores.’

Salvador harboured a bitterness that was difficult for anyone with two eyes to understand, Ana thought. The patch over the socket stared at her blackly. Salvador hosed down streets at dawn but often his aim was bad.

She said quietly, ‘He baptized you and he married me and he listened to our sins.’

‘Did he ever listen to his own? Did he ever do penance?’

The priest, cheeks trembling as he spoke, said, ‘I did my best for all of you. For all of my flock.’

‘For my eye?’

‘That was none of my doing.’

‘Did you pray for the miners in Asturias?’

‘I pray for Mankind,’ the priest said.

‘Ah, the Kingdom of God. We have to pay high rents to occupy it, father.’

‘Jesus was the son of a carpenter. A poor man.’

‘But, unlike us, he could work miracles. Why did you only educate the rich, father?’

‘We have made mistakes,’ the priest admitted.

This took Salvador by surprise. He adjusted his black patch, good eye staring at Ana accusingly. The three of them, and her father who was dying on the other side of the thin wall, were the only people in the house. The house was a hovel but that had never occurred to her when they had been a family. The patterned tiles on the floor were worn; the whitewashed walls had been moulded with the palms of plasterers’ hands and, since her mother’s death, dust had collected in the hollows.

Salvador lit a cigarette and puffed fiercely. ‘I shall have to report his presence to the authorities,’ he said.

‘Which authorities?’

This bothered him too, as Ana had known it would. Before July he had supported the Socialist Trade Union. But now he suspected that Communists were infiltrating it – Russians who had forged tyranny instead of liberty from their Revolution. And they in their turn were at odds with the anti-Stalin Communists.

So Salvador was beginning to move towards the Anarchists, who believed in freedom through force, and didn’t give a damn about political power.

Already families were divided between the Fascists and the Republicans. Please God, Ana prayed while the priest shakily sipped his coffee, do not let the Cause divide us too.

‘The police,’ Salvador said lamely.

‘Which police? There are many of those, too.’

‘Stop trying to confuse me,’ Salvador said. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said pointing at the priest.

‘Kill him?’

‘Just get rid of him. I don’t want to see his face round here.’

‘Since when was it your home?’

‘You think our father would want a priest, that priest, here?’

‘I don’t know what our father would want,’ Ana said.

‘You realize,’ he said, touching his black patch, ‘that we are now the revolutionaries?’

‘Weren’t we always, in spirit?’

‘Now we are doing something about it and we have the Fascist insurgents to thank for it. We are taking over the country.’

‘Do you think the Fascists know about that?’ Ana asked, and the priest said, ‘We are all God’s people,’ and Salvador said, ‘So why are we fighting each other?’

Ana and Salvador looked deeply at each other but they did not speak about Antonio, their brother who had betrayed them. Had he managed to reach Fascist armies in the north or south? It was possible: certainly Republicans trapped behind Fascist lines were reaching Madrid. Salvador pushed back the top of his blue monos exposing his right shoulder. ‘Do you know what that is?’ pointing at bruised flesh.

‘Of course,’ said Ana who knew that he wanted a distraction from their brother. ‘The recoil of a rifle butt.’

‘The badge of death,’ Salvador said. ‘That’s what the Fascists look for when they capture a town. Anyone with these bruises has been fighting against them and they kill them. In Badajoz they herded hundreds with these bruises into the bullring and mowed them down with machine-guns.’

‘You have been firing a rifle?’ Ana looked at him with disbelief. ‘With one eye?’

‘Think about it,’ Salvador said. ‘When you fire a rifle do you not close one eye?’

‘Where have you been firing a rifle?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Not, who have I been shooting?’ He smiled, one eye mocking. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a murderer. Not yet. There’s a range on the Casa de Campo and I have been practising.’

From the other side of the wall they heard a moan.

Ana, followed by Salvador, went to their father who was dying from tuberculosis. He looked like an autumn leaf lying there, Ana thought. His grey hair grew in tufts, his deep-set eyes gazed placidly at death. On the table beside him stood a bottle of mineral water and a bowl in which to spit. His prized possession, a stick with an ivory handle shaped like a dog’s head, lay on the stiff clean sheet beside him. He was 67 years old and he looked 80; his mother-in-law, who walked in that moment, would outlive him.

He acknowledged his children with a slight nod of his head and stared beyond them.

‘Is there anything you want?’ Ana asked.

A slight shake of his head.

Salvador took one of his hands, a cluster of bones covered with loose skin, and pressed it gently. ‘We are winning the war,’ he said but the old man didn’t care about wars. He closed his eyes, kept them shut for a few moments, then opened them. Some of his lost expression returned and there was an angle to his mouth that might have been a smile. Ana turned. The priest stood behind them. Salvador rounded on him but Ana put her finger to her lips. He stretched out one hand and the priest who had taken away his living for stealing a few expiring blossoms held it.

‘May God be with you,’ the priest said.

Back in the living-room the priest said, ‘I think it would be a good thing if I stayed. I can administer the last rites.’

Salvador wet one finger, drew it across his own throat, and said, ‘But who will administer them to you?’

Ana’s sister-in-law, Antonio’s wife, came to her home one late September day. She had discarded the elegant clothes that Ana associated with girls in Estampa and her permanent waves had spent themselves; she was pregnant, her ankles were swollen. Ana regarded her with hostility.

‘Slumming, Martine Ruiz?’ she demanded at the door. Not that the shanty was a slum; it might not have electric light or running water but Jesús left no dust on the photographs of stern ancestors on the walls of the living-room, and the nursery, if that’s what you could call one half of a partitioned bedroom, still smelled of babies, and the marble slab of the sink was scoured clean. But it was very different from Antonio’s house to the south of the Retiro which was built on three floors with two balconies.

‘Please let me in,’ Martine said. Ana hesitated but there was a hunted look about the French woman and, noting the swell of her belly, she opened the door wider.

Jesús was stirring a bubbling stew with a wooden ladle. Food was becoming scarcer as the Fascists advanced on Madrid but he always managed to provide. He greeted Martine without animosity and continued to stir.

Martine sat on a chair, upholstered in red brocade, that Jesús had found on a rubbish dump, the expensive leather of her shoes biting the flesh above her ankles.

Ana said, ‘Take them off, if you wish.’ Martine eased the shoes off, sighing. ‘So what can we poor revolutionaries do for you?’ Ana asked.

Martine spoke in fluent Spanish. Jesús should leave, she said. Ana shrugged. Everyone suspected everyone these days. She said to Jesús, ‘I hear there are some potatoes in the market; see if you can get some.’

‘Very well, querida. Take care of the stew.’ He wiped his hands on a cloth and, smiling gently, walked into the lambent sunshine.

‘He is a kind man,’ Martine said. ‘A gentle man.’

Born in the wrong time, Ana thought. ‘You never thought much of him in the past.’

‘I don’t understand politics. They are not a woman’s business.’

‘Tell that to La Pasionaria. She is our leader, our inspiration.’

‘Really? I thought Manuel Azaña was the leader.’

‘He is president,’ Ana said. ‘That is different. He is a figurehead: Dolores is our lifeblood.’ Martine leaned back in the chair. Ana noticed muddy stains beneath her eyes. ‘So what is it you want?’ she asked her.

Martine arranged her hands across her belly. She stared at Ana. Whatever was coming needed courage. When she finally spoke the words were a blizzard.

‘The police came yesterday,’ she said. ‘SIM, the Secret Police. They asked many questions about Antonio. When had I last seen him? When was I going to see him? Trick questions … Did he give your daughter a present when you saw him? Why did my father help him to escape? Then they went to see my father. As you know, he has a weak heart.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Ana said. She poured Martine a glass of mineral water and handed it to her.

‘He was very distressed. Another interrogation could kill him.’ She sipped her mineral water and stared at the bubbles spiralling to the surface. ‘The police came to my house again this morning. They asked questions about Marisa.’ She blinked away tears. ‘Not threats exactly but hints … What a pretty little girl my daughter was, intelligent … They hoped that no harm would befall her.’

Ana said firmly, ‘The police would not harm Marisa.’

‘If they took me away it would harm her. And what of her brother or sister?’ pointing at her belly. ‘What if I were thrown into prison? I wouldn’t be the first. Then they wait, the SIM, until the husband hears that his wife is in gaol, that his child is starving. Then he gives himself up. Then he is questioned, tortured and shot in one of the execution pits.’

‘Has Antonio contacted you?’

Martine looked away furtively. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said, voice strumming with the lie.

‘That wasn’t what I asked you.’

‘I had a message,’ she said. ‘Through a friend.’

‘Is he well?’

‘He is full of spirit.’

‘He is a fool,’ Ana said. Martine said nothing. ‘So how can I help you?’

‘You can move about Madrid. Meet people, talk to them.’

‘And you can’t?’

‘None of us can.’

‘Us?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Ana said. ‘Fascists.’

‘Anyone with any property or position. Old scores are being settled.’

‘But not with pregnant women. When is the baby due?’

‘I am followed wherever I go,’ Martine said. ‘They want Antonio badly. He knew many things. The baby is due in February,’ she said.

‘You were followed here?’

‘Does it matter? We are sisters-in-law. But there are certain places I cannot visit …’ She hesitated. ‘Can I trust you to keep a secret?’

‘It depends. The names and addresses of Mola’s Fifth Column? No, you cannot trust me.’

Martine fanned herself with a black and silver fan; her hair, once so precise, was damp with sweat. She said, ‘Does the man in the check jacket mean anything to you?’

Ana frowned; it meant nothing.

‘He is an Englishman. And he wears a check jacket.’

‘Stop playing games,’ Ana said.

‘I want you to swear …’

‘I’ll swear nothing. Now, please, I am hungry and Jesús will be back from the market soon.’

Martine said abruptly, ‘I must escape from Spain. For Marisa’s sake. For the sake of your nephew,’ she said slyly, stroking her belly with one hand.

‘The man in the check jacket can help you?’

‘His name is Lance. He’s sometimes known as Dagger. He’s an attaché at the British Embassy in Calle Fernando el Santo. It’s full of refugees …’

‘From Mola’s army? From Franco’s army?’

‘Don’t joke,’ Martine said. ‘You know what I mean. Refugees from the militia, from the Assault Guards. Lance has been getting prisoners out of gaol. He may be able to get them out of Spain.’

‘And you want me to …’

‘I can’t,’ Martine said.

Ana was silent. She thought about Antonio and then she thought about Martine’s daughter, Marisa, and then she thought about the unborn child and then she thought about the priest.

She said, ‘Would you mind travelling with a man of God, a black crow?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said.

Ana considered telling her sister-in-law about the priest. But no, you didn’t confide in women such as her brother’s wife: they used secrets as others use bullets. But maybe this man Lance could take the priest off her hands. And Martine.

She thought, Mi madre! What am I, a daughter of revolution, doing plotting the escape of a hypocritical priest and the daughter of a Falangist?

‘Where does this Englishman live?’ she asked.

‘Calle de Espalter. Number 11. You could go there pretending to offer your services as a cleaning woman.’

Ana laughed. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost admire you.’

At that moment Jesús returned carrying a basket half filled with sprouting potatoes.

Ana went to Calle de Espalter, a short, tree-lined street adjoining the Retiro, a few days later. It was the beginning of October and the air had cooled and the trees in the park were weary of summer. Militiamen, rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolled the street because it was in a wealthy and elegant part of Madrid; a banner fluttered in the breeze: LONG LIVE THE SOVIET. Broken glass crunched under Ana’s feet.

Two assault guards outside the thin block regarded her suspiciously. They wore blue uniforms and they were the Republic’s answer to the Guardia Civil who, with their shiny black tricorns and green-grey uniforms, were always suspected of Fascist sympathies.

‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked her. He was smoking a thin cigarette and smoke dribbled from his flattened nose.

‘Do I have to give reasons for walking in my own city?’ She folded her arms and stared at the guards whose reputation for killing was unequalled in Spain. Had they not assassinated José Calvo Sotelo and helped to spark off the war?

‘You have to give us reasons,’ the guard said but he regarded her warily because some of the women of Madrid were becoming more ferocious than their menfolk: La Pasionaria had led them from the kitchen and the bedroom on to the dangerous streets.

‘Then I will give you one: because I am alive.’

The guard rubbed his dented nose and looked at his colleague for help. His companion said: ‘Papers?’

‘Of course.’ She made no move to show them.

‘If you will forgive me,’ the first guard said, pointing at her cheap red skirt and white blouse, ‘you do not look as though you live here. Do you, perhaps, work for a capitalist?’

Ana spat. The assault guard took a step back.

‘I hope to find work. I have to feed my children and my husband who is the leader of a militia group. But not with a capitalist: with a foreigner. Now if you will excuse me.’ She stepped between them, continued up the street, turned into number 11 and mounted the stairs.

The man who let her into the small apartment was thin with a strong nose and a small moustache; he laughed a lot and he wore a check jacket.

She asked if it was safe to talk. This made him laugh and she began to wonder if this was truly the man who had supposedly whisked prisoners from gaols past the guns of waiting murder squads.

She said, ‘I have heard that you help people on the death lists.’

He stared at her and for a moment she glimpsed the wisdom which he was at pains to conceal.

‘But you, señora,’ he said in his accented Spanish, ‘are not on those lists. You, surely, are a woman of the revolution.’

She told him about Martine and the children, one unborn, and she told him about the priest. She added, ‘If anyone knows I came to you for help I will be killed.’

‘No one will know,’ he said and this time he didn’t laugh. ‘But what am I to do with your sister-in-law and her daughter and your priest?’

‘Hide them in your embassy?’

‘Most of them are in a private hospital and it’s stuffed full already.’

‘Please, Señor Lance.’

‘I will make inquiries.’

‘La palabra inglesa,’ she said. ‘The word of an Englishman. That is all I need to know.’

‘But …’

‘You have made me very happy,’ she said when, hands spread in submission, he laughed; she laughed too.

He made a note of the addresses where Martine and the priest were staying and led her to the door.

‘One last thing, Señor Lance. If anyone asks, I came for a job cleaning your apartment.’

She walked into the sunlit street where, behind shuttered windows, families lived in twilight.

Madrid was doomed.

How could it be otherwise? The Government had packed its bags and on 6 November fled to Valencia, leaving behind a sense of betrayal – and an ageing general, José Miaja, who looked more like a bespectacled monk than a soldier, in charge of its defence. Radio Lisbon had broadcast a vivid description of General Francisco Franco entering the city on a white horse. And the foreign correspondents viewing the Fascist build-up to the final assault from the ninth floor of the Telefónica on the Gran Via were predicting its capitulation.

By the first weekend in the month the Fascists – Moors and crack Foreign Legionnaires mostly – stormed down the woodland parkland of the Casa de Campo crossing the bridges of the Manzanares – what was left of it after the long hot summer – and scaling the heights beside the palace. Could an ill-equipped, ill-assorted ragbag of militia, sleepless and hungry, skulls echoing with explosions, some armed with canned fruit tins stuffed with dynamite, defend itself against 105 mm artillery and the German bombers of the Condor Legion?

Some thought it could.

Among them La Pasionaria who, dressed in black and fierce of face, preached courage to dazed fighters in blue overalls.

Among them a young sailor named Coll who tossed dynamite beneath Italian tanks rumbling towards the centre of the city, disabled them, proving that tanks weren’t invincible, and got himself killed.

Among them children digging trenches and old women boiling olive oil to pour on Fascist heads and younger women defending a bridge vulnerable to enemy attack and tram-drivers taking passengers to the battle front for five centimos.

And their belief given wings by the spectacle of Russian fighters, rats, shooting the bombers out of the cold skies and the soldiers, many wearing corduroys and blue berets, steel helmets on their belts, who materialized on the Sunday 8 November, singing the Internationale in a foreign tongue.

Russians, of course. Word spread through the bruised avenues and alleys: relief was at hand. Except that they weren’t Russians at all; they were 1,900 recruits of the 11th International Brigade, Germans, British, French, Belgians and Poles; Communists, crooks, intellectuals, poets and peasants.

But they armed the ragbag of defenders with hope.

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.