Savage Coast (10 page)

The great music continued.

The driver bent quietly over his wheel, reached down, and the truck started to roll, spreading the crowd back on itself.

Dragging, the old woman stumbled a few steps with it, as the boy watched her holding his leg, still astonished, still motionless, unable to be heard.

The truck picked up speed as it shifted gear; she was forced to let go; it moved toward Barcelona, out of the grasp of the crowd.

Only the symphony occupied the air.

Screaming above it, hooting, Helen heard—perhaps! the train whistle! She looked at the mother, to see if it might instead indeed be she; but the cheeks had gone loose, the mouth was shut.

Helen ran back to the train, her arms heavy with the peaches,
the strong music overriding everything but her fear that it had gone. There was no train whistle.

The train had not moved.

She climbed into the car.

THE FAMILY WAS
still sitting there, eating the sausage. Helen spilled her armful of peaches into the grandmother's lap. “A truck has just gone off;” she was out of breath, and, feeling the childishness of language now, the complete childishness, in an undefined situation, waited for them to speak.

The grandmother was master. “We will finish our meal, and then go into the town,” she stated. She wiped a peach off carefully, the bloom rubbing off, leaving the fruit smooth golden against her black skirt, and gave it to her grandson. He took it, nodding to Helen. His skin was only a shade of pink different, more even. Helen was very moved by the graceful turn of his shoulder, his head, refined and delicate, held precisely on the slim clear-oil neck.

“Your son is very fine-looking,” she admired.

The man was cutting meat for her. “Is his mother blonde?” she asked. The two heads were dark, of another race. The man nodded.

“Yes, very blonde.”

“How old is the boy? Twelve?”

Toni was standing at the compartment, a tin cup in his hand, looking at the boy with his purpled, bitter stare. “Give him seven more years, then, and he'll be old enough to be an Anarchist, and go off and fight.”

The father looked up at him. “He could be worse,” he answered, the distinction and loyalty coming out in his words.

A boy carrying a large wicker basket of bread came down the train, calling his sales.

“Go after him, go,” said the father pushing his son with a little gruff gesture, poking him between the delicate shoulder-blades,
sending him after bread. The son turned down the aisle without a word.

“Are they going to war?” asked the old grandmother. She did not look at Toni, but offered almonds from a square of paper outstretched. “I cannot hear any guns,” she said. “Is there fighting near here?”

“Oh, I don't know; nobody says anything definite. Come out, Helen, the team sent the printer into town to find out how things were, and he's going to report to all of us.”

Bread came, the boy holding the long slender loaf; and they sat eating, passing the wine-cup between the women, passing the bottle of strong bitter wine. It rinsed away the heat and irritation of the train and stop and uncertainty.

They finished. Looked at each other for confirmation.

“Now shall we go?” Helen turned to Toni. “We must find out something.”

The father put his hand on hers. “Come back with news,” he said. “Maybe the train will continue, after all.”

Helen went down the steep steps. The Hungarian team was on the platforms, still waiting for the printer. He could be seen in the distance, running down the street along the platform. As they watched him come, the manager crossed to Helen. “You should find the other Americans,” he advised. “There's a lawyer, with glasses, who's looking for you. I told him you were on the train.”

The printer was close now. He threw his arm up before him like an exhausted marathon hero. He brought news. Helen thought, what a child I am now! And then, as his hand went up, this is it, this the clue!

The printer could not wait to reach them. He called out, in a hoarse, important voice:

“General Strike!”
⁷⁰

                 
At the frontier getting down, at railhead drinking hot tea waiting for pack-mules, at the box with three levers watching the swallows . . . The fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun.

—W.H. Auden
⁷¹

G
ENERAL STRIKE
.

The words at the end of a poem, the slogan shouted, the headline for gray industrial scenes, waterfront blue-gray, the black even in the air over mines, the dark sidewalks before factories, covered with lines of gray parading people. Words printed, painted out, broadcast in handbills. Not like this.

She looked about the platform.

There, the young pregnant blonde turned, and began her slow walk toward the head of the train, weighted, undisturbed; the Hungarians began to talk at top speed in their own language, a very beautiful one with heavy eyebrows, the grasping printer, the manager, Toni staring, and the anonymous rest; the boys called out from the yellow trees; the pavement was fairground, distinguished and made serious only by the guards near each door of the train. The near guard came closer to the team, and nodded yes in answer to their question.

“
Huelga General
,” he substantiated.

And the scene was intensely foreign, it was a new world indeed, with these words true.

The train, the frontier.

Now the train was held, as surely as if the tracks before and behind had been blown up, as one rumor said; as surely as if the engineer had refused ever to move again, as Peapack must be thinking; or as if the searching party had found, not photographs, but spy incriminations; more surely.

The anonymous passengers!

“What will you do?” Helen asked Toni.

“The team must decide,” he told her. The printer was talking to the manager, repeating the whole story of what the mayor had told him, had told the American who had been outraged, it seemed, at the mention of the words.

What American?

“Not the lawyer,” the manager said. “Better find him. He speaks seven languages, too.”

“I'll tell the family,” Helen suggested to Toni, thinking of the grandmother.

GENERAL STRIKE
.

They were already wrapping the rest of the sausage in the newspaper, pulling down the great wicker hamper again, preparing to move. The news had come through.

“Where will you go?” she asked them.

“We'll find places in the town,” the father said. “Come with us, it won't be good to sleep on the train.” He looked around the compartment, at the stiff wooden benches, the walls, the metal heat of sun on still wood.

She thanked them. “But I'd better find the others,” she insisted, “the American woman is alone, too, and they tell me there are other Americans here.”

“Yes,” said the grandmother. “You'll have to find them. We'll ask at the café about a place to sleep, and, if you want us, the café will know where we went. Here—” she plucked at her son's elbow. He reached for the heavy black suitcase, and set it on the bench.

“Better go up to first,” he advised, the slow unshaven smile channeling his cheeks. “There are cushions there, anyway.”

They were ready to leave.

The fair-haired boy took the package of food and slung it over his shoulder. He was still eating almonds, and his pointed teeth glittered. As he took his grandmother's hand, he turned suddenly to Helen, with a volunteer look in the startling iodine eyes. “Goodbye,” he said rapidly, trying the word in English.

SHE KICKED THE
suitcase before her through the connection between the cars, kicking it against the feet of a stranger whose thick glasses seemed over-smooth and blazing on his heavily pitted face.

He dodged to the side, escaping apologies.

“Are you American?”

“No,” he answered, still in French. “I am Swiss. There is a Swiss team on the train,
⁷²
but I'm not with it. Are you looking for the Americans who are going to the Olympics in Barcelona?”

She was speaking eagerly, the words falling on each other. If only I were fluent, now, she thought, I need words now!

“They've been looking for you, too,” the Swiss told her. “They heard there were two more Americans on the train.
⁷³
You must be the other woman . . .”

“Do you know about the General Strike?”

“Really?” the Swiss exclaimed, his look of surprise sunk deep in the pockmarked forehead. “Is that what it is?”

He picked her suitcase up easily, and turned.

“Come on through,” he said, “I'll show you where they are. They'll want to hear.”

He led the way through the empty corridor of the first-class car. Voices came from one of the doors, half rolled back on its little groove. He swung it back all the way.

“May I introduce the American lady?” he said, with mock-formality. “And the news: it's General Strike!”

“WE JUST HEARD,”
the man answered, pronouncing in careful French, his mouth shaded by the brown mustache on the long, sensitive lip. He sat against one window, his head thrown back against the antimacassar, his hand stretched out over the clasped hands of the woman who was next to him. “Hello!” he said, in English, to Helen. “Nice day.” And grinned. “We've been looking for you.”

“Yes,” the dark woman beside him agreed. “They've given us at least five different descriptions of you, and none of them fit. Her cheeks caught shadow, her curly hair turned over her forehead, the broad planes of her face missed being Negroid because of the sharp mouth.

“I was in third,” Helen said, looking at the two other women who sat across from the couple.

One was tall, and the red blouse she wore pulled, with its color, at the pointed collarbones, the greenish throat and face; the other shrank, rather sickly, beside her, with her head on one side, listening.

“Wait a minute, I can't hear,” interrupted the tall one nearest the window, “the radio's started again.”

A tremendous voice, like a voice in an airplane, started to expound. It seemed sourceless, deity; it said a few peremptory phrases, came to a violent close, and the music started again, a soft Spanish dance played from a recording.

They waited until the music started. “There, that's news of the battle,” said the man. “The government's sound!”

“God, it has to be,” exploded Helen, forgetting tact, forgetting their strangeness. “What is this all anyway, a putsch of some kind?”

“Why, hello!” said the man, realizing her. “Is that how you feel? Well, for Christ sake, come and sit down.” The Swiss, not understanding, made a sign; he had to leave. The man went on. “It looks like a Fascist putsch; but the radio says it's failing in Barcelona. It's the government radio, of course; but it's good news, just the same, good news for all of us.”

“Are you going to the Games?” Helen asked him.

“Certainly,” the woman beside him said, in her low, reedy voice; “and if you want the Party line on the radio, and the frontier, and the armed guards, Peter's the man to give it to you, aren't you?” she mocked. But the seriousness, the intimacy was very evident. When she spoke to him, the women across were shut out, there was actual closeness.

“Communist?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “and gladder of it right now than about any time. Where are you from?” he asked her, and (through the Spanish music) they knew, New York, a matter of blocks between them, a matter, perhaps, of missing each other by moments in theater lobbies, at lectures, on streets.

“Organization?” asked Peter.

“None,” she answered, “but I've been in the American Student Union, and I've done some work for the I.L.D.” She looked past them to the platform. She could see the gray-haired man with the mourning band, surrounded by the Hungarian team: he must be the mayor—the armed workers, the town, alert, faces leaning from the row houses. “I wish now, for the first time, that I were really active,” she said, slowly.

The two women beside her brightened. “We're in the Teacher's Union,” said the sickly one. “We've been reading up.”

Peter pointed to a yellow pamphlet in the tall one's hand. “How's that?” He burst into laughter, and the woman beside him laughed, as at an old joke. “She's been reading a French pamphlet on the problems of the Spanish Revolution ever since the train was stopped!” Helen laughed, a full, happy laugh from the lungs. “You should have seen the faces of the girls who searched for photographs!”

Helen was trying to remember. “I didn't see you at Port Bou,” she said.

“We saw you, though,” said the dark woman.

“Yes, Olive saw you get on,” Peter told her.

“We were in the next car—got on first of all, I guess. We'd been
swimming in Port Bou—came down from Carcassonne yesterday, so that we could have the night at the border. How's that for perfect timing?”

“Carcassonne!”

“That's how Peter felt,” Olive said to Helen. “That poem about never getting to Carcassonne made him go, I swear.”

“Such a bad poem, too,” Peter was apologizing. “But an amazing city. Preserved, so that the old houses and walls, which should be dead, are full of the living. It was a good prelude to this.” He waved at the window.

Helen looked down at her suitcase. The benches were upholstered here in the first-class gray. “Next car! Were you in third, too?”

Peter followed her look. “Don't be class conscious when it's irrelevant. We took possession of this compartment. It was quite empty—most of first was empty—and we have to be able to take over, you know.”