Watcher in the Pine (21 page)

“Why?” Elena demanded, annoyed. “I thought one of the things the Republic stood for was equality between the sexes. Do you find it so difficult to believe a woman has a mind of her own?”

His faintly mocking smile disappeared, and he thought a moment before replying. When he spoke, his voice was serious. “I beg your pardon, Señora. I only thought that the lieutenant might not appreciate an independent mind in his wife.”

“And what business is that of yours?” Elena snapped.

“None whatsoever.” He smiled with disarming charm. “I seem to have underestimated your husband a second time.” He gestured to his wounded leg and added sardonically, “Although perhaps with less grievous results. In any case, Señora, I do thank you for the visit, and be sure to send Dolores my love.”

“I will.” Elena knew that the visit had been a success. She could return to Dolores with a clear conscience now, having done the girl a kindness. But she hesitated. “Is there anything I can bring you? Food? Tobacco?”

“No, thank you. Guardia Torres has been cultivating my acquaintance, and has spent a fair amount of cigarettes and treats doing so.” Pedro smiled. “He even offered me a shave, but I distrust guardias with razors in their hands.”

“You’re being well treated then?” Elena spoke with some relief.

“By Guardia Torres. Guardia Carvallo is responsible for this little souvenir.” He indicated the bruise along his cheek. “And a few others.” Seeing Elena’s frown, he added, “I have no doubt that your husband has mandated both forms of treatment, Señora, so if you were planning to inform him, save both your breath and your illusions.”

Elena would have liked to defend the lieutenant, but she had the uncomfortable suspicion that the guerrilla was right, so she only said, “Would you like newspapers then? Or books? Dolores has been saying that she’s bored.”

“That would be very kind of you.” Pedro spoke with grave courtesy. “Guardia Torres is generally on duty starting at ten o’clock.”

“Newspapers then?” Elena asked as she knocked on the door of the cell.

The prisoner smiled. “Novels, if you have them. I prefer fiction without the pretense of truth.”

Guardia Torres promptly opened the door for Elena and escorted her to the foot of the stairs. “Did you find anything out?” he asked in a low voice when they were out of earshot.

Elena reflected that Pedro’s paranoia was absolutely justified. “No,” she said.

“What about his accent?” Torres asked, interested. “He’s not from around here. Or from the south, either. I’d know an Andaluz, for all that he tries to use those fancy words. Castilian, you think?”

Elena unwillingly considered the guardia’s question. “Probably,” she said slowly, although, thinking about it, Pedro’s crystalline consonants had the hypercorrect quality of a radio broadcaster or a movie star.
He disguised his voice
, she thought.
But he’s not Salmantino
.
Nor Madrileño
. “Maybe New Castile, or Extremadura.”

“Far from home either way,” Torres said. “I’ve got to go. Nice to see you, Señora.”

Elena was thoughtful on her way home. She had no desire to betray Dolores’s Pedro to the Guardia, and she was rather relieved that he had been so careful not to give her any information. But their conversation had made her curious, and Torres’s question about his origin had done nothing to quiet her curiosity. Why, she wondered, had such an obviously cultured man taken to the mountains? He had probably fought for the Republic. Had he simply gone underground to flee prison? Was he working his way north, hoping to cross the border? But no, if Dolores had known him for a long time, he was settled in Cantabria.
Your
Spain, he had said, as if there were two, and of course there were, whatever Carlos might say. Still pensive, Elena dragged out a box of stationery and sat down at the kitchen table to write a letter, wishing mildly for a proper writing desk. She wrote for a long time, unable to keep a lid on her thoughts any longer. Then, after spilling words out onto three pages, she neatly blacked out the lines that she knew would be censored anyway.

She was making dinner when the lieutenant arrived home. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “The table needs to be cleared still. I was writing a letter and I lost track of time.”

“I’ll go and mail it for you, if you like,” Tejada offered. “If it will help to be out of your way.”

“Thanks. Everything should be ready when you get back.”

Tejada picked up the letter and headed outside again in the twilight. The envelope was stamped with the flag and the likeness of General Franco, partially obscured by stamps. He frowned slightly. Elena had plastered the letter with far more postage than was necessary to send a letter to Salamanca, even for such a fat composition. He glanced down at the address:

Tejada was suddenly aware of the chill in the evening air.
He’s her brother
, the lieutenant thought.
It’s only natural that she should write to him. She’s loyal to her family. Her brother. And my brother-in-law
. Absently, he went through his pockets and came up with a pencil. Then he changed
México
to
Méjico
. He carried the letter by one corner, as if it would soil his hands, although he had forgotten his gloves, and his fingers began to suffer from the cold.
We’ll have to send him photographs of the baby
, Tejada mused.
Or maybe someday he’ll be able to come back and see it. The war’s over, after all
. He dropped the letter in the mailbox, and blew on his cold hands.
I hate the mountains
, he thought.
You’d think it would stay warm in the evenings by now. Spring never seems to come up here
.

Chapter 16

T
he next day, Simón Álvarez presented himself at the Tejadas’ apartment as they were finishing lunch and announced that he had come to return the book. Elena, who doubted that he could have read all the
Cartas de relación
in two days, received him kindly but with some disappointment. It was magically dispelled when, after politely thanking her for the loan, Simón said, “I didn’t know there were pyramids outside of Egypt. Do you have any other books about America? Any novels? Histories are fine, but I like novels.”

Elena directed him to the bookshelves, where he browsed for half an hour. “Those are girls’ books,” he proclaimed disapprovingly, surveying the top shelf.

“Yes, they were mine when I was a child,” Elena said.

Simón sighed and shook his head. Then he turned a little timidly to the lieutenant. “I don’t suppose you have any books from when
you
were a child?”

“I’m afraid most of mine went to my nephew,” Tejada said, amused.

“Oh, well.” Simón returned his attention to the shelves, discouraged.

Tejada took pity on him. “I kept a few of my favorites,” he admitted. “You can borrow them if you promise to take good care of them.”

Simón promised enthusiastically, and went home with Zane Grey’s
El espiritú de la pradera
and
Al último hombre
under his arm. At Elena’s gentle suggestion he also took one of her despised girls’ novels for his sisters. Tejada, who had liked the boy, approved of his wife’s plan to provide reading matter for the carpenter’s son, and thereafter assumed that the gaps in their bookshelves were the result of Simón’s research. This was largely true, but he only learned many years afterward that Elena had loaned several volumes of Unamuno not to Simón but to Pedro.

Elena had not intended to visit Pedro again, but when she dropped off the books, he thanked her gravely and then said, “I expect I’ll be done with these by tomorrow. Friday at the latest. Be sure to reclaim them before I’m taken to Santander.” Trapped by the casual assumption that she would return, Elena visited him again the next day. He greeted her cheerfully, spoke of his reading, and asked her opinion. He listened to her answer with interest, and then began an argument. Had she read Ortega y Gasset? Américo Castro? Did she think of Unamuno more as a novelist or more as a philosopher?

Elena watched him gesture animatedly, her back propped against the wall of the cell, and felt that she had come home. His arguments were solidly conventional, and though his opinions were well expressed, she sometimes found them trite. But he spoke a language that she understood, and spoke it fluently with flawless grammar. She answered eagerly, with the relief of a well-assimilated traveler who finds a compatriot in a foreign land. The conversation ranged wider, and he became more unguarded, perhaps for the same reason. He was fond of opera, but also of the theater, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of specific performances. Had she seen Margarita Xirgu’s Mariana Pineda? What had she thought of Dalí’s sets? And what about that George Bernard Shaw play—the name would come to him in a second—about a patriot being hanged for treason? Elena reflected that a careful review of old newspapers’ culture pages would give the Guardia fairly accurate dates of his stays in Madrid and Barcelona. He was an enthusiastic admirer of “la Xirgu,” and his pronunciation of the name made Elena wonder a little if he was actually a Catalan. Although perhaps he merely took the trouble to say the actress’s name correctly, just as he enunciated the English playwright’s name precisely.

“See you tomorrow, Señora Fernández,” he said easily, when Elena finally excused herself.

“Until tomorrow, Señor—um—Pedro,” Elena answered automatically, and then flushed as his namelessness slid the invisible barrier between them back into place.

He smiled at her. “You really are welcome to use my name, Señora. But as I would never dare to use yours, you can call me, oh, say . . . Vargas. Pedro Vargas.”

“It isn’t your real name?” Elena said, still anxious.

He laughed. “It is now. Tell your husband you wormed it out of me with feminine wiles. Or better still, tell Guardia Torres. Your husband would be jealous.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elena snapped, aware that she had not told Carlos of her visits to the wounded guerrilla, and annoyed with herself for not telling him earlier.

“It’s not ridiculous. I would be, in his place.”

Elena left annoyed, resolved to tell Carlos what she had learned and wash her hands of the guerrilla. But that evening the lieutenant told her in a somewhat put-upon voice that he had received orders from Santander to hold the prisoners until their trial date, which would almost certainly be after Easter. “At least they’re sending us reinforcements finally,” Tejada said. “Although they’ll probably want them all on patrol all the time.”

“Surely no one will be overseeing how you deploy them that closely?” Elena said.

Tejada snorted. “Don’t bet on it. Thanks to your happy idea about English arms, Súarez told me he was getting phone calls from some civilian in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Madrid’s jumpy. A lot of people are going to be looking very closely at what these guardias do.”

“How many are there?” Elena asked.

“Twenty. Arriving next week. And since the barracks won’t hold them we’ll have to quarter them in town, which will be another headache.”

Elena smiled. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

“Don’t strain your sympathies.” Tejada laughed. “But you should know that I’ll be busy over the next week or so.”

“Unlike most of the time?”

“More busy,” Tejada amended. “I don’t want to neglect you, but . . .”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

Tejada was as occupied as he had predicted. Elena, left to her own devices, ended up visiting the prison on a daily basis. Dolores was always eager to see her, and after the first few days of Dolores’s requests to give messages to various friends and family, Elena started simply bringing the girl other visitors. The news spread quickly through Potes that the lieutenant’s wife had been kind to the Severino girl, and that it was easy to visit the prison with her. Elena ended up escorting a friend or relative of Dolores’s to the prison nearly every morning. She spent a few minutes each day gossiping with Dolores and the girl’s other guests. In the process, she began to form a picture of the varying strata of society in the Liébana. The subjects of Dolores’s conversations with her well-wishers taught Elena a good deal about Potes. She learned, for example, that the pharmacist’s daughter Celia was engaged to a boy who had emigrated to Argentina and had promised to bring her over as soon as he had the money, but the way Celia made eyes at all the boys in Potes was scandalous; that the reason Lame Francisco, who worked in the stationery store, was so gloomy all the time was because his mother hated his wife and made their lives a living hell; and that there was lively betting at the bar on whether the reason Miguel Sandino kept hanging around Lucita Vega without ever coming to the point was that he had been wounded in the war or that the engineer Señor Oquendo had been taking Lucita out too and Miguel stood a little in awe of him. In spite of their chatter, the people of Potes said nothing about Dolores’s brother or about the other people who had taken to the hills or those helping them. Elena enjoyed speaking with them, but it was something of a relief to say good-bye to Dolores every day and turn to the cell at the other end of the hall, where the conversation was less relentlessly focused on the youth of Potes.

Vargas was not local, and in spite of Señora Fernández’s sympathy, no one was willing to commit themselves by calling on him, so Elena remained his only visitor. She continued to bring him books, but their discussions did become less confined to art and literature. Both of them meticulously avoided politics. They shared anecdotes of urban childhoods, Elena freely naming the streets of Salamanca, and Pedro speaking only of “plazas” and “avenues” without giving hints of a specific city. Elena, judging from a few comments he let slip about the size of his home, guessed that he had to be from Madrid or Barcelona. Judging from his hypercorrect pronunciation of Castilian, she eliminated the former. Guardia Torres, who continued to show an interest in her conversations with the prisoner, was impressed by her logic, but pointed out gloomily that finding a needle in a haystack was probably easier than running a check on a Red from Barcelona with only one surname, and that probably an alias. Elena agreed and pretended to commiserate, although she had in fact only given away the information because she was sure that it would not hurt Pedro. Torres comfortingly told her not to worry, and encouraged her to keep visiting the prisoners.

“How on earth did you come to marry the lieutenant?” Vargas asked the following Thursday, his voice teasing but genuinely curious.

“How did you come to be a maquis?” Elena retorted.

“Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to pry. Is why you’re in Potes a secret?”

“My husband was promoted to his own command,” Elena said, suppressing extraneous details.

“A dangerous sort of promotion, from Salamanca!”

“More so for you!” Elena retorted loyally.

“For me, personally,” Vargas agreed. “But your Carvallo isn’t just giving me a nightly working over out of spite. And I’m not keeping my mouth shut to protect corpses. Guardias die up here in the mountains.”

“Like Calero, you mean?” Elena asked, smiling slightly.

“What do you know about Calero?” He sounded amused, and almost contemptuous.

“Something very like one of Dolores’s histories,” Elena admitted, and summarized the tale she had heard from the carpenter’s wife. “I thought perhaps Anselmo Montalbán had killed him in revenge,” she finished.

“That sounds about right,” Vargas agreed. “You have good sources of information.”

“Then I won’t worry about my husband,” Elena said. “He has-n’t made any personal enemies like that.”

“That’s a very feminine position,” the maquis said. “The idea that personal grudges are more important than political issues.”

“It seems to be true as far as Montalbán and Calero were concerned,” Elena replied.

“Only because Montalbán was an idiot.” Vargas spoke without heat.

“So now feminine and idiotic are synonyms? Thank you.”

The maquis smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I only meant that Montalbán had a good relationship with the Guardia. He’d never been in trouble, in spite of that business with his son. He was . . . oh, not a spy, but a man who was very well placed to find out what was happening in Potes and tell his friends. A man like that is rare for us. Necessary. To suddenly go haywire and shoot the lieutenant for the sake of some personal vengeance is pure idiocy. Not what we expect of a man who has responsibilities.”

“We?” Elena asked.

Vargas laughed. “Sorry, Señora. No comment. I’ve never believed that feminine and idiotic are synonyms. But I do believe that loyalty to loved ones is a feminine trait, and that you possess it.”

Elena fought down her irritation at being dismissed as “feminine” and said coolly, “Leave aside specific examples then. You believe that humanity has no place in politics?”

“I might have said it did before the war. Time in the mountains gets rid of illusions like that.”

“And you think it’s worse to kill someone who has hurt you than to shoot someone out of pure political expedience?”

Vargas shifted to find a more comfortable position to think over the question. “Put that way it sounds brutal, but yes, I do. That’s the difference between the government’s executing a murderer and the victim’s family starting a blood feud. The state acts without personal malice. It’s what separates the twentieth century from the seventeenth.”

Elena laughed. “That’s a funny argument to hear from a prisoner of the state.”

“Not the legally constituted state,” Vargas said firmly. “I represent the Republic, the
legal
government of Spain.”

“So you have the right to kill on the Republic’s behalf?”

“Yes.” The maquis nodded. “And if I killed for personal reasons I’d be no better than a bandit or highwayman. Which is why that is precisely what your husband and his kind call me.”

Elena considered for a moment. “So the fact that Calero was a despicable human being would have made no difference if he had been useful to the Republic?”

“None, if the risk involved in killing him outweighed Anselmo’s benefit to the cause,” the guerrilla agreed.