“Hello,” I said quietly.
“Hello,” he said, and moved into the light.
Once inside my room, we didn’t speak at all. I could smell the smoke and whiskey of Chicote’s on his clothes. The heat of his body was a kind of pressure in the air, and his tongue against mine set off a series of small shock waves. His hands dropped to my waist, tugging my blouse free, and then sliding along my ribs and then higher. It was rash, what we were doing. We would both probably regret it, but I didn’t want to think of that, or anything else for now. Not guilt, and not Pauline. Not how much time we had left in Spain, or what we would say or feel in the future. Maybe the future didn’t even exist. That was more than possible. War made its own rules, after all, and we could only guess at them.
He pulled me tightly to him and I heard my heartbeat roaring back at me from the wall of his body. And as I let myself tumble to the floor with him, what I felt more than anything was terribly lost. What I wanted more than anything—anything—was to be found.
* * *
—
Much later, we lay side by side in the dark. It was strange to be near his body this way when we’d spent so much time together never touching at all.
“What have we done?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
In the dim room, without his glasses on, his face looked young and exposed. Even where there were deep lines around his eyes, I could see the boy he’d been. I liked him, that boy, and I also wanted to hurt him, suddenly. To bring up his wife, for instance, the real one who stoked the home fires in Key West, who had his name and also the grace of a warrior queen. She wasn’t going to go away because he blinked once or twice at me in the dark.
“Maybe you should go.”
I felt him stiffen against me. “I’d like to stay.”
I was quiet for several moments and then finally said, “I’m tired,” because it was easier than saying any of the things I actually felt.
“Sleep, then. It was a hell of a thing you saw today. I think you’re very brave.”
“I don’t feel brave. I don’t know what to feel.”
“I’ll be right here. Just try to put it all out of your mind if you can.”
“All right.” I rolled away from him, closing my eyes. Of course he was deeply part of “it all.” But there was no sorting that out now. All I wanted was to be alone on a sea of unconsciousness, slipping away as the bed became a raft and my mind let go of itself.
“Good night, Marty,” I heard him say as I drifted, bobbing, in the dark.
19
A few days later the boys came to collect me and we set out across the valley for the Guadalajara hills, brown as bread in the distance. Not everyone could find transport out of Madrid, but Ernest could always get a car or even two, and drivers to take him where he needed to go, and as much petrol as he liked.
After the night we’d spent together, I had been doing my best to avoid him, but when he offered to bring me on this trip, I’d said yes immediately. His reputation meant that commanding officers and troops in the field were always happy to see him coming. I would get to witness some extraordinary things, I guessed, and hear the kind of stories I came for. Women were so rare at the front they might as well have been nonexistent. I wasn’t going to miss this chance, not for the world.
As we went, tiny villages were strung along the road at intervals. They probably had been pearls once, these little towns. Now they sagged with defeat. Dirty, hungry-looking children perched on pyres of rubble to watch us pass. Their eyes were huge and slightly accusatory—not because we’d done anything wrong, but because we had the freedom to come and go this way, leaving only a spiraling arm of dust behind the car to show we’d been there at all.
At the top of a high pass, we let the car idle and got out. The whole of the valley lay furled below, long stretches of olive groves and vineyards and the broken earth that meant a battlefield. In the distance, a blur of white stucco smoked. It was a farmhouse, burning. High above, in a sky flat as ironed cotton, a vulture spun one long slow circle that sent a tingling up the back of my neck.
We drove down into the valley and maneuvered the car to one side of the dusty road. From several miles off, we could hear the sounds of artillery coming, the layered stutter of machine-gun fire, the sharp graduated hammering of tommy guns. Walking across sharply broken ground, we came to a lip of earth, and this was the trench. In moments, we had dropped down into it.
It was wide enough for two to stand or kneel side by side, with a dry crackled earth bottom and earthen walls that climbed crudely and sharply. Here and there, the earthworks widened into a small square “room,” if you could call it that. When we came to one, there was a simple table laid over with a map and a military phone. Several folded cots were stacked in one corner, making me think the men slept here, when they slept. There was also a small fire and coffee boiling. It smelled burned, and yet I wanted some badly, if only so I had something to do with my hands.
All the men we met—or they were boys, really, most of them—seemed to look at me with astonishment, as if a wedding cake had turned up, or a gazelle. Some of them were Spanish, some American, some Canadian, some Mexican, it seemed. They had been on the line for forty-five days, one said, and expected an attack every day. Firing came at them all the time, of course, but a real attack would be something else.
We went down farther along the trench, where the ground became so hard and uneven it felt like trying to walk along an arid, stony riverbed. Many of the soldiers held rifles at the ready. Others stood beside theirs, or sometimes lay with their guns like sleeping dogs at their sides. Something I noticed was how many books there were, in back pockets, on carved-out earthen shelves, in straw, in the hands of the men. I saw a copy of Candide and also Leaves of Grass. When we came upon a young man who was reading Walden, I had to stop. He was tall and slender with a shock of blond hair that reminded me of just-shorn fields. The skin on his hands was pale and pink-white, the hands of a poet-philosopher.
“I love Thoreau,” I said. “What’s your favorite part?”
“All of it, I guess. He knows the names of so many flowers and trees. That’s something. I’d rather think about that any day than what we have here.” His eyes were light blue with small black irises, like pinpoints, and they struck me as very beautiful and also unnerving.
“What’s your favorite part?” he asked.
“Oh, all of it, too, I guess. He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I’ve always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.”
He squinted one eye and looked at me sideways, seeming to gaze right through me. “He does say that, doesn’t he?” Then, “I think you’re going to be all right, you know. Don’t worry too much.”
It was presumptuous, the way he was talking to me, and strangely intimate. And yet as exposed as I felt, there was also the consoling flicker of being seen—even for a moment, even by a perfect stranger. “Good luck to you,” I told him.
“You too,” he said, and returned to his book.
When I caught up to Matthews a few moments later, I had the queerest feeling that I’d just seen a ghost.
“What was that about?” he asked.
“I don’t even know. Just a boy, I guess. It’s something being here, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. It’s important, though. We can’t know what these kids are up against, really, but we can feel our way across the same bit of land and look in their eyes.”
“And see the books they’re reading.”
“Sure. That’s the main thing they say about journalism, you know,” he went on. “Don’t trust reportage. Don’t let other people tell you what happened, not if you can help it. You have to take it all in with your own senses. To write what you see, and what you feel.”
That sto
od me still for a moment. “What about being objective?”
“Don’t try. There’s no such thing.”
“I guess I’m glad to hear you say it. I’ve been thinking about the boy I saw die at Santo Domingo. I want to write something, but I don’t think I can without being emotional.”
“Just make a start. Begin anywhere.”
“It might be terrible.”
“It might be. That’s not the worst thing.”
“No,” I agreed. And it wasn’t. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.
* * *
—
For four days, we drove between battalions and slept in encampments next to the soldiers’ tents, eating as they did and sharing their fire. I knew that many of them were inexperienced—like Fisher, the Canadian infantryman I’d met in the hospital in Madrid, who’d never held a gun until he needed to use it with purpose. Some were smooth skinned as babies, their eyes long lashed and frightened, but devout. After talking with many of them and seeing how they lived, I realized they didn’t have an endless supply of bravery, because no one ever did. When courage failed them, they would find a way to stand their ground anyway and fight on spirit alone. They had grit rather than bravery. That was why the Rebels were going to win this war, I thought. Why they had to.
After dark, the tents were thick with stories and red wine we passed in enamel cups. One night, when I grew restless, I slipped away to stand under the stars, smoking. The camp was notched into a hillside surrounded by tall spare pines. I stood in the quiet, taking in the fresh smell of pine resin and liking the feeling of being alone. Then the tent flap opened and Ernest was there beside me.
“Aren’t you afraid out here?” he asked.
“It’s beautiful.” I drew on my cigarette, the paper hissing as it flared.
There was no moon, and the hillside and the pines were shrouded in heavy blackness, as if curtains had been pulled down from some great height. From inside the tent, we heard laughter, but it seemed to have nothing to do with us.
“I meant what I said the other night. It’s too late for me, with you. You might not want to hear any of this. Maybe I’m being a selfish bastard, but I feel more alive now than I have in years. Marty. Marty, look at me.”
“No.”
“Don’t be a child, dammit. I’m in love with you.”
In seconds, he’d crossed the space between us and loomed beside me, blotting out the sky. His hands reached inside my field jacket and he kissed me in a crushing way. I couldn’t breathe, and didn’t care. The ground beneath me tipped sideways. The trees bent in and the whole night did, too, and whatever part of me could usually hold to reason was washed away. His fingertips felt hot along my back and shoulders and neck, and under my hair. Everywhere. I pushed at his clothes, wanting to get closer, to feel his skin, to have him.
“My God,” he said against my neck. “We’ve lost so much time.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I kissed him again, not wanting to stop and also wishing futilely that this moment and everything between us could be finished already. The affair begun and ended, the damage done and the repairs under way, my battered heart on the mend. Because he would break my heart. I already knew that if nothing else.
And yet here we were, anyway, hurtling through the dark toward each other under a hundred million stars, and set to collide disastrously. Logic wouldn’t save us and neither would the dwindling pile of days. We had all the time in the world to make a terrible mistake.
20
The Florida at night was a hive of shadows. I learned to read them all as I made my way to Ernest’s room, my trench coat belted over my pajamas, determined that no one have any inkling that we’d become lovers. It was one thing to hurt ourselves, and another thing entirely to drag other people down with us. His wife couldn’t ever know. My mother couldn’t either, because I wouldn’t survive the look on her face. Again, Marty?
No. It was hard enough to face myself.
Once inside his room, I didn’t say anything, just dropped my coat where I stood at the door and found him in the dark. Our teeth jarred as we came together. He pulled me beneath him, his arms braced over me, a small drop of his blood or mine on my tongue. I felt dizzy and reckless and wondered if I might be falling in love with him, too. Or maybe this was just what it meant to be wholly awake. My nerves seemed to hover exposed around me like a raw kind of halo. I was being turned inside out, and whether it was the war or Spain or Ernest that was doing it, how did that matter? Maybe there wasn’t any difference at all between them anyway.
* * *
—
Almost as soon as we returned from the field, I began to write, finally. I wasn’t sure what would really come. Combing through my notebooks, I worked to flesh out moments and impressions—the sound of the shelling from my own bed at the Florida, the incongruity of the trams that ran up and down the Gran Vía, all the way to the front. The poisonous veils of smoke after an attack, and the lines for bread next to the lines for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The perfume shops where the smell of cordite mingled with bottled gardenias, and the opera theater, which still sold tickets, and the beautiful young tenor who was a volunteer and often turned up for the matinee fresh from the trenches, with traces of blood on his shoes.
I wrote and wrote until I knew that the story I most needed to tell, and the one I was most afraid of, was about the boy and his kite tail of blood, my first long look at death. That day war had stopped being an idea and became personal. I could still see his hand clutching his mother’s shawl. What had happened to her? How had she gone on with her life?
Thinking of either of them made me feel helpless, every cell in my body vibrating with an outrage bordering on despair. But despair didn’t write well. Maybe there was no such thing as objectivity, as Matthews had said, but I didn’t think I could tell the story at all unless I tightened my grip on my emotions somehow, and stripped my language down to the bone.
* * *
—
In 1934, when I was a young journalist newly in the field for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, coolheadedness had been my only lifeline. Like many of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the FERA was young and untested. I was hired by Harry Hopkins, one of the president’s senior advisers, with a handful of other writers to investigate the impact the Depression was having on real people. I would travel state to state, gathering firsthand observations of families on relief, and then send in my reports. Hopkins wanted stories and impressions, not statistics, and I was desperate to be useful.
I was only just back in the States after my disastrous affair with Bertrand, and feeling slightly hopeless. I’d managed to purge some of my despair about the relationship in my first novel, What Mad Pursuit, but after the initial rush of hope and undiluted maternal pride, when I held the first bound copy in my hands, thinking of how it would be shelved in libraries, my hopes had been dashed almost immediately. My father’s bad opinion had stung more painfully than any of the reviews, even the ones calling my characters “hectic” and the whole effort “palpable juvenilia.”
I was completely unprepared for how awful it felt to be kicked this way. I wanted to skulk off under a rock somewhere and hide my head in shame. Instead, I took the FERA job, which felt like a great gift from the sky. I could forget my heartbreak, my wounded pride, and my crushed ambitions of being a celebrated novelist. I could forget myself entirely, in fact, and do something good for the country.
I was sent to North Carolina and then New England with thirty-five dollars a week and a bus voucher. More often I hitched rides with social workers to the saddest towns I’d ever seen. I would have told you I was prepared to be objective in my reports. But day after day, I saw families so wretched and beaten down by poverty they made me want to howl. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, I visited a woolen mill where skeletal girls hung over shuddering spin
ning frames for eight or ten hours without rest, their skin bleached looking and raw. They ate standing up. In the latrine I nearly walked into three young women trying to sleep on the icy concrete floor next to the toilet. One had a blue headscarf the color of faded cornflowers and such defeat in her eyes I had to grip the wall behind me.
I tried to visit five families a day on the road, the women and children often ashamed to leave their houses because their clothes were in rags and they had no shoes. One family of four slept in a single bed and they all had syphilis, even the infant daughter, who was so advanced in the disease she’d become paralyzed. They weren’t seeking treatment because the mother insisted it was “bad blood” and everyone knew that had no cure.
In another village, I sat in a sagging kitchen with oilcloth tacked to the walls to keep the wind out, because they’d run out of coal. A ten-year-old girl named Alice knelt on a pile of rags clutching a white duck to her chest. Her father had won it in a prize drawing where each chance was a penny.
“I thought we’d eat it,” he said, “but you can see. It’s all she has to play with.”
When he walked me outside later, I asked how he thought they’d manage to go on.
His shoulders made a flinching sort of shrug. “If you’d told me even a year ago we could get by on what we have now, I would have called you a liar.”
“You’re doing all you can. More, really.”
“I can’t do anything.” He looked past me, past the rain-soaked street into the pitted sky. “Sometimes I pray an angel will take us in our sleep. So far no one’s listening.”
Back on the train that night, rattling toward Boston, I had to drink several shots of whiskey before I could begin my report. I’d been sent to look at darker things than I even knew existed, and still, they were mere drops in an ocean of human suffering. How could I write about Alice and her duck without sounding hysterical? About the girl with her headscarf, about syphilitic babies with no chance at all? Hysteria would help no one. If anything was ever going to change, Harry Hopkins and the FERA needed to see exactly what I saw, no more and no less. I had to be a camera, just as frank and unflinching as that, only one sentence at a time.