The Communist's Daughter (3 page)

Not five minutes later, as I was preparing to resume my day, a knock sounded at the door. Here stood another man, dressed in a black leather coat—very impressive and fit, quite handsome, and bearing a briefcase. With him were five guards, each armed with a carbine. This man, too, demanded to see my documents. Apparently his colleague had scampered down the road to get some help. One of the guards, instructed to descend for the passport, returned a moment later. The man in the leather coat sat down on the bed, briefcase on his lap, and began flipping through its pages. Two guards stood barring the door. I heard others in the hallway, their voices striking a chord of boredom, and the man on my bed looked up and shook his head, as if annoyed by their banal conversation. While a suspect, and perhaps a spy, I still might understand the superior regrets of an important man obliged to spend a whole war in the company of bumpkins. But this handsome, haughty police officer wasn't having such a good day, either, and seemed just as let down as his predecessor had been. My status was unimpeachable. He stood up, organized his minions with a short bark, and finally I was left in peace. For a few minutes I watched from the window, hoping to see them leave, but saw nothing but a busy street teeming with mules and military vehicles and pedestrians.

Then another knock at the door. This time a friendly face greeted me. Henning Sorensen was a Canadian associate of mine with whom I would soon travel (I did not know this yet) up to Paris and London in search of a car and various instruments, gadgets and chemicals we would need to get our clinic up and running. He had been in Spain for a number of weeks, preparing the groundwork, and spoke a bit of Spanish. Shortly before departing for Europe I'd been entrusted with a letter from his sweetheart back in Montreal, and after explaining my ,encounter with the secret police, I retrieved it from my luggage and handed it to him. Just then the man with the briefcase swooped through the door, accompanied by his bored, grunting men. Greatly enjoying his line of work, he snatched the letter out of Sorensen's hand while his guards aimed their rifles directly at us. Greedily, he ripped the letter open, clearly believing he'd smashed a ring of Fascist plotters until he read, “My dearest darling . . .” With that there was nothing left for him but a quiet retreat.

It was a ridiculous episode, but again, a reminder. Sorensen and I watched them leave the building, walk up Gran Vía and disappear into the crowd of vehicles and mules. We descended to the street not long after, looking to soothe our nerves with a drink at the Museo Chicote, though not before I changed my clothes and shaved off my moustache.

*

I remember the tunnel growing narrower and deeper. The things we remember! Your mother's hand brushed against mine. I remember that so well. I felt like a schoolboy! What did I do? I pretended not to notice, of course. I did not move my hand but stretched my fingers out in case her touch might come again. A moment later we entered a small infirmary that was not as crowded as the other rooms had been, situated at the confused and narrow end of the tunnel. It was the end of our journey, and the bullfighter's. The mosaic of this last room represented an operating theatre. Well, I said, at last something I understand. Perhaps the fallen bullfighter had already been gored and was now being carried down to the infirmary, for three doctors and a nurse stood at the ready, all looking very concerned, as well as a solemn-looking priest with long, thin El Greco hands and an old, grey face. The portraits were beautifully rendered and close to life-sized. The artist had required nine tiles to depict the surgeon's rib-spreaders, laid out on the table beside a stethoscope and various cutting instruments. Their smocks were still shiny white.

This last room was the dimmest of the four, with only one electric light hanging from the stuccoed ceiling. The air was stale and damp. Two unoccupied stools sat in front of the mural. The three people in the room were sitting against the opposite wall, looking at the medical scene, and now us, while sipping from the glasses they had brought with them from the bar. They were Spanish. I gestured to the stools, and one man nodded and shrugged. We sat down and listened to the not-so-distant bombs pounding through the walls. After a few minutes Kajsa stood and said, “Take my hand.”

I did, and rose to my feet, saying, “I think we're at the end of the line here.”

She led me out of the room and into a smaller side tunnel. We moved down it perhaps ten feet, crouching, and stopped in front of a chair on which sat a wooden crate full of empty bottles. This alcove had, I supposed, been used for storage.

She moved the crate and chair, then pulled open the small door hidden behind. “What about this? Where do you think this goes?”

“A trap door leading down from the bar?”

“Well . . .” she said, but without finishing her thought she slipped inside.

I lit a match, stepped in after her and looked down a steep set of narrow stairs.

It's difficult to understand the impulse that told me to follow your mother like that, but I did. I suppose I already felt drawn to her, though I was trying to resist it. As I've said, it was a very unusual night. We walked, slightly hunched, down the stairs and along a cramped passageway for twenty or thirty paces before another explosive thud shook us. We journeyed deeper under the city. I struck match after match and walked slowly so as not to extinguish the flame. Occasionally, out of the dark appeared a crate or box or shovel or a bundle of clothing. It was difficult to guess from such objects who came down here, when they last had or why. There was no one in sight. We shouted out but heard no one answer.

We found no rooms off the tunnel, as there had been in the basement of the bar. It was just a narrow passageway, bricked in a low arch like a wine cellar. The path must have curved gently, for we'd entered it, I was almost certain, in a westward direction and now, if I had any sense of orientation left, were heading east toward the Retiro Park and the Prado Museum. It was difficult to tell since we couldn't see farther than a few feet in front of us. As we walked, the walls of brick around us grew silent. The bombs had stopped falling.

“I think it's this way,” she said.

“Why? This might go on for miles.”

“We just follow the wall,” she said. “It'll lead us out somewhere.”

We walked for some time, and then I struck the last match. We were walking side by side and I looked at her face in the dim light. The dying flame disappeared into my fingertips, and a perfect dark surrounded us. We heard only our quiet breathing and footfalls. When she lit a cigarette lighter, we saw a large door, pushed it open, went down another series of stairs hewn from the rock and entered a large, frescoed room with dozens of niches carved into the walls at different heights. Each one, not much more than a small ledge, held a funeral urn.

Kajsa let the light die. “Listen,” she said.

The silence and darkness were total. We waited a minute or two, listening for vibrations coming down from the streets above. The flame flicked on again and we passed under a low overhang and through another short tunnel into a second frescoed room, also devoted to the ashes of the dead. But each of these urns, instead of resting in a niche, had been afforded its own small vestibule with a bench in front. People construct the strangest shrines to honour their dead. I remember thinking that. A cross on a hill. A pyramid. The hushed reverence for the dead spirals out of control to establish these odd fabrications of rock and clay. There is something beautiful in that. But also something very, very lonely.

*

I am beginning to understand that Ho is a very odd boy. I never required thanks after I took him on, only discipline. That he seems as aloof as a cat is fine with me. He is a beautiful child, his dark-gold skin not yet hardened into the tawny hide of these mountain dwellers. The future awaits. He does not limp or scowl or weep at night, at least that I know. May his dreams carry him off through the dark.

There are worse places for dreams, I suppose. I imagine myself at his age, caught in this vile nightmare. How would I have stood up to the test? It is not a thought I like to contemplate. These children are amazingly tough and have earned my silent reverence. What did my father use to say? Children are the heritage of the Lord.

*

While I am thinking about it I will tell you about another encounter you might rightly call absurd. It was on a warm, overcast day in April of that same year, 1937, just over a year ago, though in memory it belongs to a different century. I was walking toward the Gran Vía in good spirits. The unit by then was collecting and distributing between one-half and three-quarters of a gallon of blood per day, and, on average, performing three transfusions in either Madrid or the hills north of the city. I had left the clinic before the usual hour, giving myself an extra few minutes to pick out a gift for your mother. What I had planned for that afternoon, beyond the purchase, was a brief shortwave radio address. The demands on my time were enormous then, but the address would be transmitted to North America and therefore be well worth the effort. It was, of course, an exercise relating to the war. I had been approached by the Spanish government, through the Ministry of War, and had agreed to their request.

We'd returned only the day before from the front lines near Guadalajara, forty miles northeast, where we had photographed bridges, roads and various other points of interest as regards communications. This trip alone would give me ample fodder for my radio address. But so would Madrid, I remember thinking. I could talk about the indiscriminate bombing of its neighbourhoods and the wanton killing of innocent women and children. It was known that the Fascist bombs falling over Madrid carried, as well as high. explosives, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, much like the French 75 mm shells of the Great War, in order to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible. Too many times I had seen the angelic, blood-spattered faces of children. Too many times had their small, crushed bodies been placed before me on my operating tables.

I would say this was no longer war as we had once known it to be. The Fascist war was directed at the women and children of this great society. If you were once neutral, believing this an isolated struggle between two abstractions, the carnage
demanded
that you think again. Ours was a struggle against a murderous machine that would not stop killing until the machine itself was destroyed. I remember how your mother's thinking had begun to influence my own. This was a fight against nihilism, I would say, a fight for the very existence of hope. The machine was run by the mad dictators Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Never before in history had the nations of the world had so much at stake. Never before had these nations been so united against such bloodthirsty fanaticism.

Apart from a single patrol plane flying over the city that afternoon, the atmosphere was calm and relaxed. Buses ran, the cafés were busy, the streets alive with workers on their way home for the afternoon siesta. The street I walked along, Valverde Street, was relatively quiet. The clock at the top of the Telefónica building, which had just come into view, read one-thirty. Up there, beside the clock, two men stood with a 20 mm AA Oerlikon gun, waiting for the next group of Heinkels or the big Italian Capronis to power in from the south. For a moment the war might have been a thousand miles off. The smell of cooking meat and olive oil and wood and coal-burning fires filled the air. Seeing and smelling this I realized I hadn't eaten that day, and, wondering if I might steal ten minutes out of my schedule, I saw the green door of a restaurant, with
El Escondido
stencilled over the big plate-glass window, open directly across from me. A man staggered out, bleeding from a cut above his eye and supported by two others dressed in black leather jackets. Another man followed. These three looked to be of the same ilk as those who had harassed me on my first day here—overeager, bored, stupid brutes.

Of course, it was quite possible that the man they'd apprehended was of legitimate political interest; yet it was just as likely, elaborating from my own experience, that he had failed to sneer deeply enough, or spit in disgust, when speaking of Fascism, or that an acquaintance with some axe to grind had denounced him as a member of the Fifth Column. When they put him in the car idling at the curb, they were careful to push his head down gently, almost gingerly, under the rim of the open door. It was an oddly caring gesture. I looked into the man's eyes as his head went under. Then all the doors closed and the car started off down the street, stopped briefly for traffic, turned left and was gone.

A half block up along the Gran Vía I found the perfume shop that had been recommended to me. I made my purchase quickly enough, scented with lavender and mint, and was again on my way. Another ten minutes of walking brought me to the address I was looking for, an old building adjacent to a small dirt square and a crater hole covered over in planking. There was a hardware store and a small café at street level. I followed the stairs up to the third floor and knocked at number 3D. The door was opened by a thin, pale young man who looked terribly deprived of sleep, with large dark circles under his eyes. He introduced himself as Paco, then led me down a long hallway to a large room, where I met the producer of the radio program. Jorge looked to be in his mid-thirties, and he asked me how I was, if I'd had any trouble finding the place, then offered me a glass of wine. It was their lunchtime, he said, and would I join them? He produced a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese from under a desk. His English was precise but very accented. His reading skills, he explained, were superior to his conversational ones. “We have time to eat something,” he said, and gestured at the control panel behind him. “I will explain this later. Please sit.”

He cut pieces of cheese from the wheel and laid them out on a plate. He did this very delicately and rapidly. His thin fingers shook only slightly and he moved them quickly so I wouldn't notice that he no longer had fingernails. They'd been bitten down to nothing. I had seen this many times in Madrid. His voice was smooth and clear, and after dividing the cheese he pulled a large red sausage from a bag under his desk, then slid the sausage and knife over the desk. His colleague joined us, and we tore the stick of bread into three pieces. I was very hungry, I told them, and would have eaten something on Valverde Street but for the commotion I'd witnessed at the restaurant, the man being taken away.