The Gate of the Sun

‘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.