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
