Summer Snow (24 page)

“Not exactly,” Elena hesitated. “Can I come in?”

“Yes, please sit down.” Alejandra gestured to her mother’s bed in the corner, the only other available seat. “How is Toño?”

Elena smiled. “Well. He’s taken to you. And your mother.”

“He’s a very nice little boy.” Alejandra spoke with warmth as well as politeness. “It was a pleasure to take care of him.”

Elena thought that she saw an opening. “Do you like taking care of children?”

Alejandra nodded. “I used to babysit for Señorita Concha, when she was little. And Isaura’s little nephews come to visit her sometimes.”

“Have you ever thought of doing it for a living when you grow up?” Elena asked.

“Being a nanny, you mean?” Aleja smiled. “I’d love to. But Mama says I’m too young. Maybe if the lieutenant spoke to her—”

“I think you are young to be a nanny,” Elena interrupted hastily. “But I was thinking a few years into the future. How would you feel about becoming a teacher?”

Alejandra’s face went still. “No, Señora. I don’t think I’d like that. I wouldn’t want to be a nun.”

“Not all teachers are nuns,” Elena pointed out.

Alejandra shook her head, and the lines running downward from her mouth were as deep as carved marble. “No. Too much school.”

“You used to like school,” Elena dared to remind her.

“I was a kid then. A stupid kid. Besides”—Aleja’s voice had been harsh, but now it quavered—“school was different then.”

Elena dropped her eyes and studied the pattern of the bedspread and the textbooks lying on top of it. They were well worn, probably bought secondhand, and had the scuffed edges that books owned by children mysteriously acquire. But she knew that they could not be more than a few years old. The Movement had reformed the education system, and no textbook with a whisper of anything contrary to the Regime’s policies had survived the purges. No textbook and no teacher. She remembered the giddy excitement of her first year’s teaching. Her classmates and colleagues had been intoxicated by the dream that all Spanish children would graduate from high school. They had been sure that they were teaching the first generation of children who would grow up free of calcified superstition, class restrictions, and fear. Elena remembered her own amazed, half-terrified delight at the reading primers that told stories of boys who sold newspapers in the morning before going to school, the histories that celebrated Averroes and Maimonides, and the science textbooks with pictures of Elizabeth Blackwell and Marie Curie.
History of Spain: Imperial
Glories
read the title of the textbook lying by Alejandra’s feet. The cover showed a conquistador in armor, brandishing an outsized cross, with a missionary and a palm tree in the background. Elena remembered joking with other teachers that it would be impossible for her students to imagine what Spain had been like before the Republic, no matter how good the history textbooks were. “They’ll just have to listen to us old folks,” someone had said, and the group, five new graduates, none of them more than thirty, had all laughed. With a chill, Elena remembered that two of the people who had laughed with her then were dead and another was in prison.

“It was different,” she agreed softly. “But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad now, does it?”

Aleja shrugged and nudged aside
M
ORAL
A
ND
C
ATHOLIC
D
OCTRINE
F
OR
G
IRLS
. “It’s all right for rich girls, I guess. Something to do before they get married. But I’m not a señorita.”

“That’s foolish,” Elena said, annoyed. “You don’t need to be a señorita to get an education. And a good education
certainly
isn’t only designed to get you a husband!”

“The sisters say it is,” Aleja pointed out.

“They’re wrong.”

“Well, I don’t like school, and that’s that.”

“Do you like work so much?” Elena retorted.

Again the shrug. “It’s all right. At least it’s something real. And I’d be helping out Mama.”

“You’re not worried about your mother paying your fees, are you?” Elena asked, with sudden hope.

“No, I know she doesn’t.” Aleja was impatient. “And it’s very good of you and the lieutenant, Señora. But I’m just not a bookish person. I don’t want you to waste more money.”

Elena had hoped to convince Alejandra that continuing her schooling was an opportunity worth attending a few masses, even if she was not a believer, but it was obvious that Alejandra was ready to deny that school represented any kind of opportunity. Elena repressed a strong desire to cry.

“You know your mother doesn’t feel this way?”

“I know.”

Aleja’s voice was careless, almost insolent. The set of her jaw dared Elena to argue and provoke her into open impertinence. Any reference to her refusal to attend mass, Elena realized, would only give Aleja an opportunity to show contempt and defiance. Elena sighed and rose, admitting defeat for the time being. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, aware of her own dignity and embarrassed at being put on the defensive by a child. “Your mother asked me to speak to you about your schooling. She thinks you’re making a mistake, and so do I.”

“It was good of you to ask,” Alejandra said in a parody of grown-up manners that made Elena want to shake her.

“Perhaps we’ll talk about it again,” Elena said. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

She retreated to her room, shaking with fury and grief. Aleja had been such a sweet, bright little girl, curious about everything, never stupidly antagonistic. She was cutting off her nose to spite her face, and yet . . . and yet Elena knew that she herself would not have been able to bear reading the pap that constituted the lessons in Alejandra’s current textbooks.
Maybe she
needs a father’s influence,
Elena thought.
Maybe she’d respond better
if Carlos talked to her. And maybe she’d spit in his face
.

Elena spent a long afternoon with her mother-in-law, chafing at the forced inactivity. To her annoyance, her husband returned late from the post, and there was no chance to talk to him before dinner either.
It’s all very well for him
, she thought.
He
can disappear all day, without so much as a word, and then complain
that everything’s a mess when he comes home!
Andrés Tejada had telephoned to say that he was dining at the casino with friends. His absence did not notably improve the atmosphere as far as Elena was concerned.

After Elena had put their son to bed, her husband asked, “Do you want to go for a walk? I need to get some fresh air.”

Elena was tired, but the idea of talking freely outside the confines of his parents’ house was extremely attractive. “I’d love to.”

The streets were cold and silent at night, undisturbed by cars or pedestrians. The occasional streetcar screeched down the Gran Vía, incongruously bright and noisy in the calm. The temperature was near freezing and a brisk wind was blowing. Elena shivered and was not surprised to see her breath turn into golden mist as they passed under a streetlight. Tejada put an arm around her. “Cold?”

“A little.”

“Sorry.”

Their footsteps echoed in the silence. Elena could feel the lieutenant’s tension. “Are you all right?”

Tejada sighed. “I suppose. We made some progress today. Found some Communist propaganda hidden in Doña Rosalia’s house, and have a good idea which member of her household it came from.”

“Do the guerrillas operate here, too?” Elena asked.

“
Bandits
operate all over Spain.” Tejada automatically corrected his wife’s terminology.

“But nothing about who might have killed Doña Rosalia?” Elena asked. She was unwilling to debate with him.

“Well, we’ve arrested the man we think is responsible for the pamphlet. If we’re lucky, Rivas will get a confession out of him.” Elena shivered again. “And I practically accused my father of murder,” Tejada added, keeping his voice conversational.

Elena stopped dead, not fooled by his flippant tone. “What?”

“How was your day?” Tejada evaded her question. “You said you had something to tell me at lunch.”

“Carlos, what did you just say about your father?”

“You first.”

“I’ve had a long day, Carlos,” Elena cautioned him.

“Dear God, so have I!” he retorted.

“What happened?” Elena asked.

Slowly, Tejada summarized his morning for his wife. Under her gentle prompting, he rehearsed the majority of his interview with his father, knowing that she would tell him that talking about it would make him feel better. Frequently Elena was right, but in this instance repeating the scene made him feel worse. But at least it was nice to have someone to hold hands with as he relived the low points of his day. “What about you?” he asked, seriously this time, when he had finished an account of his day. “You said you’d met with a problem?”

“Yes. Actually another one has arisen since we talked.” Elena was apologetic. “But neither of them have to do with Doña Rosalia.”

“Thank God for that!” Tejada managed to smile. “What is it? Is Mother being horrible to you?”

“Not even that,” Elena smiled too. “My problems are a missing person and an obnoxious child. Which do you want to hear about first?”

“The missing person. Children are your job, not mine.”

Squelching her annoyance at this casual assumption (which under normal circumstances she would have admitted as perfectly accurate), Elena told him about her meeting with the Encinas family and about Baldo Encinas’s request for information about his aunt. Tejada was silent while she talked, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he disapproved. Or possibly he was simply abstracted, still worrying about his own day.

In fact, because he wanted to think about something besides Doña Rosalia’s murder and his confrontation with his father, Tejada gave the problem his full attention. “I can check the files if you like,” he said mildly, when Elena had finished her story. “And I’ll write a formal request on the Guardia’s letterhead, too. But you won’t get a reply to that within the next ten days. You’ll have to mail any information you get to this kid.”

Elena, who had been tense with defiance expecting a refusal to become involved, gave a little gasp and remembered why she had married Carlos Tejada. “Do you think she might have actually gotten away?” she asked, his startling cooperation making her hope for other, greater miracles.

Her husband sighed and squeezed her arm. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. “You do understand that I’ll only be able to find out if your friend ever saw the inside of a jail cell?”

Elena nodded without looking at him. She was aware of the possibilities. If Cristina had been taken straight to a place of execution there would be no record. “Will you ask about this friend of hers, Beltrán, too?” she pleaded.

“Of course.”

There was a little silence. Tejada wished, not for the first time, that his wife had less unconventional acquaintances. But he had known the shock of discovering the deaths of friends and contemporaries, too, and it was as much sympathy for his wife as a desire to forget about her Red friends that made him say abruptly, “What about the other problem? The obnoxious child?”

“That was this afternoon.” Elena explained her meeting with Alejandra. Here his reaction was exactly what she had foreseen.

“She has to attend mass,” Tejada said. “The sisters are only insisting on it for her own good.”

“I think she’s avoiding it because she wants to be expelled from school,” Elena explained.

“She’s much too young to make any decision like that,” said Tejada, remembering his glimpse of Escolapios earlier in the day and thinking that more than one boy there might decide to start boycotting religious observances if that were a way to avoid school. “If Carmen wants her in school, then she stays in school.”

“She can flunk out if she tries hard enough,” Elena reminded him dryly. “Or be expelled for her behavior.”

“And break her mother’s heart? I don’t think so,” Tejada retorted. “I won’t let her get away with that. And I’ll tell her to her face, if you like.”

“Yes, but she says she hates school,” Elena protested sadly.

“So what?”

“You can’t tell her how to feel!”

“Maybe not,” the lieutenant said grimly. “But I can damn well tell her how to act.” Elena had her doubts, but she did not argue, recognizing that her husband’s mood was still fragile. They walked in silence for a while in a wide loop, Tejada automatically guiding them toward the house. The breeze was at their backs now, whipping Elena’s skirt in front of her, and plastering the lieutenant’s cloak to his legs. Elena leaned back against the wind. Tejada noticed that her weight on his arm was less. “It’s funny,” he said in a meditative tone.

“What?”

“I was thinking about the first night I walked you home. In Madrid.”

Elena closed her eyes. On the night he referred to she had been cold and hungry and terrified. He had been confused and angry and grieving for a friend. Neither of them had enjoyed the walk. “It’s the wind,” Tejada continued apologetically. “And being in a city street that’s so quiet like this.”