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.
