Famous Last Words (23 page)

again, for a while, when your children have died. He was very good to me: Harry Wyndham. Very good for me. I regained my confidence. I regained my will to live. 1 was not

unlike a little girl whose dolls have all been smashed. For a while, she weeps—and then she walks across the hall and puts on her mother’s make-up, her mother’s tall shoes and her mother’s dress, and she puts up her hair and moves from the nursery into the centre of the salon—and all the adults say: you have now become a woman. Yes? 1 became Harry

Wyndham’s mistress then—but I never lost sight of the fact that I was something more.”

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“Which was?”

“The spoils of war.’

Andromache.

In San Sebastian we stayed overnight in a hotel called the Bilbao. In Bilbao, our hotel was called the San Sebastian.

“And if we stayed in Heaven,” I said, “it would be the

Hotel Hell.” This made—at last—Isabella laugh.

But no matter where we stayed it might as well have been the Hotel Hell. There was never any glass in the windows; never any water in the taps; the beds were always full of lice and the telephones and electricity were always dead.

The worst of all was at Santander, where the war was still in progress and the hotel’s name could not be ascertained because its signs had all been blown away by a bomb on the previous afternoon and half the building didn’t exist; the hallways giving way to space and the stairways marching out into the sky.

We did, however, procure a suite where I slept on a Regency settee in the salon. Isabella gave me her furs to keep

me warm and all night long a convoy of men and mules and trucks moved through the rubble in the street below. The Loyalists were in retreat, their progress steady and unending.

I wondered if the chauffeur would have to defend our Daimler with his life and if he had a gun. And then I wondered

if the chauffeur was himself a Loyalist. So many of his class were Bolsheviks. What if we should be stranded—undefended—before the Insurgents arrived: would our chauffeur

denounce us? Isabella, after all, was Italian; all Italians were universally hated by the Loyalists. Where could we reach for safety?

I was thinking all of this when I heard a noise in the

bedroom. Isabella had gone to bed so early—almost as soon as we arrived—and had said to me, “I hate the world at night. It frightens me. The sooner I’m asleep, the better.”

And now there was this noise. A fierce, whispered muttering.

Alarmed, I arose and, clutching the furs at my neck, 1

approached her door.

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“Isabella?”

Suddenly—silence. All the whispering died away.

“Isabella?”

Nothing.

Out in the streets the great retreat continued—and now

for the first time since we had arrived in Spain I heard the faraway booming of gigantic guns that might have been

somewhere offshore. These noises heightened my alarm.

There was so much movement, so much violent, distant light in contrast to the present dark. Every shadow was a menace.

I went into Isabella’s bedroom and struck several matches—

each one extinguished by the draught from broken windows.

Giving up all hope of seeing her. I called her name.

“Be quiet,” she said.

Her voice was like a knife and I backed instinctively away from it. “What is it,” I said. “Were you dreaming? What?”

The offshore guns were booming. Shells were beginning

to land about ten blocks away along the waterfront. Fires had begun to catch at this or that building, mounting very high so that light of a kind had begun to flicker on the furthest walls of the room. I could see Isabella sitting on the bed with her hands in fists pressed in against her cheeks.

She rocked back and forth, but still she was silent. I could see there were tears in her eyes and spilling down across her knuckles. Slowly, I sat on the bed beside her.

“Please, please tell me,” I said. “How can I help if you will not tell?”

But all she did was shake her head and go on rocking back and forth in what appeared to be a sort of lullaby—as if she could put the fear to sleep by soothing it and shushing it and rocking it like a mother.

I took her hand. Or attempted to.

“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”

So we sat. And I waited. While she stared into the dark and the city moaned with the noises of one army leaving and the gates going up to receive the next. We sat for hours like that, until I slept. And when I woke, she had not moved, but was sitting still the same in her trance of fear.

The menace that had plagued her from the moment of her

husband’s death did not, it appeared, have any intention of

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letting go. And I wondered—of her mind and of her past—

what else I did not know. And of her activities: her mission there in Spain.

Later that morning we made our escape.

“Where are we going?” I asked the chauffeur.

“San Vincente de la Barquera.”

But we never got there. At nine the road was attacked by aeroplanes and we were thrown into a kind of war I had

never experienced before. This was the war where civilians were exclusively the victims and where you never saw the enemy. All you could see was his machines.

The three of us were scattered—Isabella, myself and the chauffeur—running with a hundred others through a field.

Other fields and olive groves had hundreds of their own.

Behind us and before us there was the smack-smack-smock of machinegun bullets striking the earth. The road on which the Daimler sat amongst a horde of broken old carts and panic-stricken horses had been hit with so many bombs it looked like a river filled with islands of smoke. This river sat up over us with all the people spilling down into the fields.

The thing I remember most vividly about that bombing

raid was the sense of having fallen from the earth. Nothing had any real or human context. Everything was upside down or inside out and it seemed we were all in the air and the earth was above us.

Finally, we all fell down together; falling onto stones and stubble with our mouths full of dirt and our fingers clinging to the earth as if the earth could save us like a raft at sea.

We lay there maybe ten or fifteen minutes—mute while

the storm of bullets blew around us—folding our hands

across the backs of our necks; shutting our eyes as children do in the crazy hope the blind cannot be seen. And at last the squalls of machinegun fire began to fade away until there was nothing left but the drifting down of dust to cover us. Dust and sand and even stones. The aeroplanes were

gone.

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For a moment, I remember, there was not a trace of sound or movement. Then all at once the fields stood up. Or so it seemed. And the dead were left where they were, face down and immovable as rocks, while those of us who had survived turned back towards the road and simply walked away. This is all I recall. We just kept moving forward—and our feet, which seemed like miracles, were all that we could see.

Certainly, no one looked at the sky. The sky was now a

traitor; part of the conspiracy against us. It could deliver death without a warning, and it shamed us not to know how to save ourselves or where to hide. I had never felt this humiliation before—which is to say, the indignity of being terrorized by something you had trusted all your life.

The following day we stayed in a nameless village where the chauffeur had engaged a blacksmith to help him manufacture whatever parts were needed to repair the Daimler.

All that afternoon I sat with Isabella in the blacksmith’s yard on a bench beneath the vine. The walls of the yard and the buildings around us were white and the vine’s new

leaves were rainy green. The air was filled with the smell of olive wood and smoke and sun-hot stones. A woman came and brought us wine and bread and pears. The pears were dry and small, but very sweet.

Isabella sat with her legs straight out and crossed at the ankles, showing bruises on her shins I had not been aware existed. These were doubtless from the bombing raid on the road, but combined with the haunted expression in her eyes, the effect was of a torture victim sitting incongruous in the sun.

Isabella said, “They took him from his office into a courtyard such as this—with vines and trees…”

This was a complete non sequitur.

“What?” I said.

But Isabella hardly seemed to know I was there. She was sitting somewhere else, 1 suppose; in the past.

“My husband was only thirty-eight years old,” she said, “and all he had done was express his opinion. All he had

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done was put some words on paper. But they killed him—

shot him—propping him against the courtyard wall—and

they placed the gun in his hands, and they laid my children, all of them dead, around him. As if he had killed them.”

She was peering through the heat, as if to see the scene she described.

I waited.

In a moment she spoke again. “When our friend Matteotti died, he was beaten first. With stones. Were you aware of that?”

“No.” I had only known he was shot, and told her so. I

was watching her carefully. She was perspiring; running a fever; ill—and the words were coming out of dreams.

“…and when I dressed my husband’s corpse, I found his back was bruised. But the fingers in which they had set the gun were as fine and clean and manicured as they had always been in life. Not a mark. Not a mark. Not a visible mark.”

She opened her eyes. “These men—Matteotti and my husband—were writers. Only writers, my friend. Only men of

words.…” And she looked at me, informing me of something that I did not know, perhaps about the dangers of

writing.

And I did not. Know.

“My husband was a poet. Just a poet…” She looked at the wall. “But Mussolini’s people took hirTMnto a courtyard.

Under the trees…” She spoke as if the trees had been disgraced.

“And they killed him. You see? Our friends, my

friend. Our friends. They killed him.” Reaching down, she drew her skirt across the bruises on her shins. “And now, in Spain I am constantly thinking of my husband and his death,” she said. “How they killed him. With their boots.

And I am thinking all the time of Matteotti, too: and how they killed him. With a stone. And 1 am thinking of my

children.…1 am thinking of the wall and of the trees. I am thinking of human beings. 1 am thinking of how it can be that mere human beings can be so afraid of the written word they will kill to be rid of it. In a courtyard such as this. On a day such as this—with the vines and the trees and the stones as their witness. How can that be?” she asked me.

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“Tell me. Tell me. How can that be?”

I did not know.

“And now,” she said, “we are here in Spain. Twelve years have passed—and we are here in Spain and the stones and boots that killed Matteotti and my husband, the bullets that killed my children, have become the bombs on that road

and the shells from the ships offshore. And nothing is for the better. Nothing is changed for the better. Everything of which we dreamed is gone and all that we feared would

happen has come to be. Are you afraid, my friend? Are you never afraid of what we do? Of the meaning of what we do and who we are?”

We were in Spain that summer six more weeks, and then

again in the autumn two more weeks and a half. Isabella’s commission this time took us along the Mediterranean coast and I remember that during our visit to Valencia late in October, the Loyalist government made its retreat to Barcelona.

I

remained completely in the dark as to why—precisely—

we were there. Nothing was hinted at and the cabal was

never mentioned. My discovery of what it was that Isabella had been doing came about completely by accident.

It was at Valencia shortly after General Franco’s troops had entered the city. Isabella and I had remained behind to recuperate from the violent shelling the city had undergone. Isabella’s health’ had been failing. For three whole days she remained in her room at the Hotel Alcador, begging me not to be concerned and urging me not to keep appearing every time I achieved the triumph of an egg or the miracle of figs or the coup of a quarter pound of coffee. “It is enough that I can rest.” she said. “It is all I want—to be alone.”

But she was not alone.

One early evening, I had been wandering through the ruins of a seminary, talking with the first of the brothers who had dared to return in order to salvage his Order’s relics and bury its murdered dead. His story had given me the overpowering urge to write again and I remember that fact as

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being salient. The breakthrough had finally come and 1 was in a state of tremendous excitement, actually shaking as 1

entered the Alcador’s lobbies.

Each hotel that had survived the bombs—and this was

true of any Spanish city during that war—automatically became the meeting place for the local intelligentsia, the local police and the local contingent of foreign correspondents.

The Alcador of Valencia was no different. Consequently 1

was used to finding its lobbies crowded and used to the presence of men in uniform.

But on this particular evening the lobbies of the Alcador were virtually overrun and the patrons, the police and the foreign correspondents had spilled out into the street.

“What is it? What is it?” I said as I tried to make my way inside. “Please tell me what it is!” There was something in the way they stood and something in the way they behaved that prompted a dreadful and overpowering sense of apprehension.

“There has been a suicide,” they said. “Someone has

killed themself in the lobby. Standing up in front of everyone—they shot themself.”

“Was it a woman?” I asked. “Was it a woman?”

Visions of Isabella’s illness, her exhaustion and her history certified my fear that it must have been her.

But no one could say.

“There is a body.” That is all they said.