The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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and they didn’t make love now; instead she held him until he slept and stroked his forehead when he whimpered in dreams of battle.
He was in the Popular Army, formed to bring order to the militias and Irresponsibles, but as he walked away from the chabola, stooping under the weight of the carnage he had witnessed, he didn’t look the least bit like a soldier. I am the warrior, Ana thought, regarding the rabbit speculatively, and he should be the provider.
Food! She turned away from the rabbit, allowing it one more reprieve, and went into the bedroom to fetch her shawl and her shabby coat and her shoes laced with string darkened with blacking. She hated the hunger that was always with her, because it was a weakness that distracted her from the Cause.
She left Pablo fashioning a whistle out of a cartridge case and Rosana painting a water colour of a harlequin in black, red and yellow, arm raised in a clench-fist salute.
As she crossed the yard the rabbit thumped its legs.
She went first to an old woman who lived on her own in a hovel that stood alone, like an ancient’s tooth, in a street of rubble. Here she made wreaths with paper flowers tied with black and red ribbon; the flowers were always red and she was always busy. Sometimes she possessed extra food with which the bereaved had paid for their wreaths, but there was none on view today.
‘Just a little bread,’ Ana pleaded, hating herself. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s stale; I can toast it.’ At least they had fires in the chabola, kindled with slats from the ceilings of collapsed houses and fuelled with furniture – a walnut writing-desk had burned for two days.
‘What have you got to offer?’ the crone asked. In her youth she had married a member of the CNT; when he had died she had become the mistress of a doyen of the UGT; now she believed that age was an amnesty for the past. Her face was blotched and hooked; in her youth it must have been sharp enough to cut down trees, Ana thought.
‘A poem?’
‘Ah, a poem. What a beautiful thought, Ana Gomez.’ Beneath her arthritic fingers scarlet crêpe blossomed. ‘Except that I cannot read.’
‘If I read it you will remember it.’
‘I would prefer jewellery,’ the crone said.
‘I have no jewellery, only my wedding ring.’
‘I have a little bread,’ the crone said. ‘A little rice. Admittedly with weevils but beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Ana Gomez?’
Ana twisted the gold band on her finger; she remembered Jesus placing it there.
‘I have money,’ she said.
‘Who wants money? There is nothing to buy with it.’
‘I will come back,’ Ana said. With a gun! ‘Tell me, do you make wreaths for Fascists?’
The crone gazed at her suspiciously. ‘I make wreaths for the dead,’ she said.
Perhaps one day she will make a wreath for Antonio, Ana thought as she stepped over a fallen acacia on a street scattered with broken glass. He had returned to the capital once, as furtive as a pervert, wearing a beret and filthy corduroy trousers and a pistol in his belt. He had crossed the front line, relatively quiet on the western limits of the city since the fury of November, leaving his blue Falange shirt behind him.
He had come to the chabola after dark while she was boiling water on the walnut desk blazing in the hearth. He brought with him cigarettes – the new currency of Republican Spain. He gave her six packs, then, sitting in Jesús’s rocking chair, said, ‘I went to the house; the neighbours told me that Martine and my daughter left several weeks ago …’ Even now he smelled faintly of Cologne.
‘She’s with the British,’ Ana said. ‘Waiting to be evacuated.’ She told him about Christopher Lance and his ambulance service to British warships waiting on the Mediterranean coast. ‘She’s well,’ Ana said. ‘The baby’s due at the beginning of March.’
Antonio lit a cigarette, an Imperial. His curls were tight with dirt and the skin across his cheekbones was taut; he was growing old with the war.
‘When will she go?’
‘Soon. There were many waiting before her.’
‘Is it still dangerous in Madrid for anyone who made the mistake of being successful?’
‘For the Fascists who exploited the workers? Not as bad as it was; the real pigs are all dead. As for the rest …’ Ana tested the water with her wrist as she had done when the children were babies. ‘They can’t even buy your perfume any more. Isn’t that sad?’
‘What happened to the perfume?’
‘The Irresponsibles drank it.’
She lifted the pan of water from the fire and took it to the bathroom and told the children to wash themselves, Rosana first, then Pablo.
‘I hope it poisoned them,’ Antonio said. ‘And how have you been keeping, elder sister?’
‘Surviving,’ Ana said.
‘Jesús?’
‘Fighting.’
‘Mother of God! He’ll shoot his own foot.’ Antonio inhaled deeply and blew smoke towards the fire and watched it wander into the chimney.
‘And Salvador?’
Ana straightened her back in front of the fire. ‘He’s dead.’
Antonio stared at the cigarette cupped in his hand. ‘Papa?’
‘Dead.’
‘How?’
‘Killed by one of your bombs.’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘But the priest lived.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
And then he had gone and she had imagined him flitting through the blacked-out campus, and sidling through the front lines where friend and foe called to each other, and making his way south to the Jarama valley to resume the fight against his own people.
In the Puerta del Sol she spoke to a lottery ticket vendor. The lottery headquarters had moved with the faint-hearted Government to Valencia but tickets which could make purchasers rich beyond the dreams of working men were still on sale in Madrid. But as the crone had said, ‘Who wants money?’ If the first prize had been a kilo of sausages Ana might have joined a syndicate and bought a fraction of a decimo, a tenth part of a ticket.
The vendor was young and broad-shouldered with a strong waist and muscular arms but his legs were shrivelled, tucked under him like a cushion on his wheelchair.
She asked him if he knew any food resources. She had known him for three years, this robust cripple, and they admired each other.
‘I know where there are candles.’
‘You can’t eat candles, idiot.’
‘You can barter with them, guapa.’
‘And what do I barter for the candles?’
‘That rabbit of yours. He is very lucky. I wish I was that rabbit.’
‘If I can’t get any food today I shall eat that rabbit tonight,’ Ana said.
‘I wish even more that I was that rabbit.’
She frowned but she was not displeased; she liked his glow and enjoyed his vulgarity. It was rumoured that, during the frenzied days of July, he had produced a pistol from beneath the blanket covering his thighs and shot a Fascist between the eyes.
‘How is business?’ she asked.
‘Today everyone gambles with death, not figures.’
‘You get enough to eat?’