Savage Coast (34 page)

At the next corner, five men stood waiting for them, guns up, signaling with a white flag. They leveled their guns at the car while the pass was taken, and the man with the flag spoke a rapid sentence to the guide before he allowed the car through. Helen looked at Olive. They waited for the guide to speak, but he sat there, his neck tense, controlling his head, his eyes and mouth. The driver moved quickly, turning the headlight on full, looking from side to side. Finally he said a word to the guide, and jerked his head back toward the women. The guide turned around in his seat, stretching his arm along the back of the upholstery.

“I must tell you,” he said, softly and paternally, emphasizing nothing, “the comrade at the crossing warned us about a Fascist car somewhere on the streets that has just killed four policemen.” He hesitated a moment. “The warning went out a little while ago. They may have shot it down by now.”

Stronger than sleep, than love, than even fear, the horror returned to Olive's face. “Peter,” she muttered to herself, and took Helen's hand, her eyes swimming with a violent nausea. It was true: she was at her most beautiful when she was most deeply moved, in acute fear, in horror, in despair. She muttered “Peter,” but in a moment her life came back, and she was angry. “Those bitches!” she exclaimed, “he would have been here now if these bitches hadn't expected service. And we gave them service,” she added loudly, mystifying the guide, “I'd like to get my hands on them for this.”

“Murder?” asked Helen, smiling roundly. Hans! she thought.

“Why, yes,” Olive answered. The car was going very fast now, blowing the horn One-Two-Three as the barricades on the side streets flickered by like hedges, careening around the Plaza de Cataluña, chasing up the
paseo
toward their street.

“You're safe, you and Hans,” Olive said suddenly. “You decided quickly, and you really were clear all the way through.” It was the first time she had shown any recognition. Helen did not speak, but let her go on, holding her hand, looking at the parting crowds of people, splitting before them in the window, behind them in the mirror above the driver. Memory and imagination, she thought, and returned to Olive's words. “Clear,” she was saying, “I feel near it now, we will all end at different places after this. I know you want to stay here. But how can—”

The car swerved, skidding around a corner on two wheels, seeming for a moment to be headed directly into the lines on the curb waiting to cross the street.

“The woman!” Olive screamed. Just before the wheels the woman stood with the baby blanketed in her arms and asleep. The evening threw violet on her, whitening her blouse and casting her face in shadow. But they were close enough to see her eyes for one second as the car swung round, touching her skirt. They realized as they found her look that the doors were lettered for the government, that their fists were out and the guide was ready with a gun;
for in her look and in her posture of trust as she stood regarding the car was no feeling of harm, but presages of safety. Reckless! thought Helen for a moment, not knowing what she meant, or whom she accused. But the look of trust was stamped on them as they passed the woman with baby. The car crossed the avenue, swung into the Calle Boqueria, and pulled up before the black door of the Madrid.

“Anything we can do?” asked the guide, hurrying the suitcase and knapsacks into the darkness of the hallway.

“Only go back quickly,” Olive's voice was begging. She leaned against the door a moment, her head next to the black knocker, the larger duplicate of the row in Moncada, the delicate large hand, the iron fruit; she watched the car vanish into the night, down the compressed street.

“HE'LL COME, HE'LL
be here any minute now,” Helen said, standing over the wide brass bed. Olive looked up, and moved her hand toward the window.

“Oh, God; he should have been here fifteen minutes ago.” She threw her arms over her eyes. “Those bitches,” she said, all rancor gone out of her voice, nothing but the tone of mourning left, “reading Karl Marx and risking other people's lives without a word.” She sprang up suddenly and ran to the balcony. “Wasn't that a horn?” she asked eagerly, as children ask after a parade. But the triple beat retreated; she came in, and shut the windows. “I'm not going to look again,” she promised, throwing herself on the bed, “I'm going to let him come up the stairs, and open the door, and then I'm going to see if I can be angry at him.”

Helen laughed at her, “You're behaving like a mother with a lost child,” she said, although of course it was real, she thought, the warning, the four policemen, the darkness in the streets, “and when the child comes in with his ice-cream cone, he'll get his thrashing.”

Olive rolled over on her back, her head falling at the side of the
bed, the tight curls off her face. “It would be nice to have some ice-cream,” she said, smiling. “Lovely.”

“Or even ice-water,” Helen answered, sitting down. “Ice-water to drink, and swim in, and keep at the bedside.”

“We're probably all like that,” Olive said. “Let the English yell for tea . . .”

“Never mind,” Helen went on (Peter, she thought, hurry), “we probably could get some cold wine.”

“I'd be tight if it were wine,” said Olive.

“I'd be tight if I looked at it.”

“I've always hated to drink,” Olive said suddenly, “I dread getting tight so much: it makes me feel as if I lost my center, myself. It's that; it gets me so angry.”

“Do you have to?” Helen was surprised.

“Why yes, if you're drunk.” They were explaining very naively now, like two little girls—“yes,” she said, “you're all exposed, betrayed.”

“How can you?” asked Helen, “you can't open yourself up that way, not as much as we have, living on the train.”

Olive looked up at her. “Or that woman,” she remembered, “the one with the infant, who was almost run over. I would have resented anybody who exposed me to a thing like that: I would have screamed in the street the way I did in the car. But she didn't, did she? She trusted them completely. I'd give anything to be like that woman,” she said, “and I never felt like this before. And the baby, did you see? It slept through that entire shock, we took it like an earthquake.” She threw her arm over her eyes again. “God, I wish Peter would come.”

She sat up. “I'm going to get the bitches to take their baggage,” she said positively, “and if he isn't here by the time they come for it . . .”

“I'll help you,” said Helen. “That's a promise.” She had an errand; the letter for Peapack; the postcard for the lady from South
America. They were in her pocket, and the postcard was crumpled and a little blurred already. “I've got to mail them somewhere,” she said. “Peter will be here when we get back.”

THE POTTED PALMS
in the lobby concealed nothing: the wicker chairs ranged around, the chessboard, the big hotel register, were all obvious in the tall room. Dinner was being served, and nobody came until she had rung several times. The little manager could tell Helen nothing about the mails; all he knew was that it was impossible to walk to the lady's address.

“There's a mailbox at the next corner to the right,” he directed. “Nobody knows when the mails will be collected again—when
anything
will be running smoothly—” he threw his hands up, and clapped them in mid-air—“but drop it in, drop it in, and see what happens.”

The smell in the street was dinner, and the high windows were lit. But the stores were dark, the street was all shadowed, and the far blasts of horns sounded ominous and unreal. Helen turned into the lane that cut her street. Narrower still, it could not permit the passage of even one automobile; hardly four people could walk abreast here. It ended immediately, however, and the new street opened at a view of a small burned church, whose flames seemed to have been lit for an hour, and then killed; the facade was burned to its substructure, and only one sign was left, beneath the broken statue of some saint:

FRIEND OF ANIMALS

At the corner, the mailbox carried no mark of delayed or arrested services; the hours of delivery had been charted, and the bulletin remained; but, dropping her card and letter into the slot, Helen heard the soft taffeta sound. The box was almost full; there had been no postal system for days. She wondered what had become of the lady, Peapack, the rest of the train. There was nothing to think about them. What if they did reach Barcelona? What then?

Hans. Hans had reached Barcelona, she thought. It means always learning to accept a position deeper in a group, deeper in a society of one sort or another, she speculated, looking again at the ruined church-front: think—the compartment, the Catalan family, the Olympic people, the Americans, the train, the truck, Hotel Olympic.

Peter. He must be there!

She turned, hurrying up the narrowest lane. Light in the street caught her eye. Stopping to lean over the gutter, she saw what it was. Crushed, battered, still metallic, but distorted as if it had been violently jerked and kicked, a crumpled splendid helmet lay, crammed deep into a sewer, only the silver crest showing, the lines of chased metal, the suggestion of a plume, forced almost down the drain.

Gun-fire, across the city. More horns. Streets, haunted by horns.

He must be there by now.

She went into the room. Olive was standing by the window. “He hasn't come,” she said dully.

“Did you take the book back to the bitches?” Helen asked, avoiding her look.

“Yes. I didn't have the heart to give them hell.”

A car passed in the empty street, not stopping.

Steps on the stair. At the door. It flung open.

Olive turned to Peter, a fierce look of triumph on her. “What did you do, walk?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess I'm late.”

“Didn't you know about the four policemen?” she went on, delicately, sadly.

“Yes. I was talking to some people. It's a nice walk in the evening. Did you hear?” he demanded, “they're all filled with rumors about the front—is it true that they've threatened to bomb Saragossa?”

                 
¿Será bombardeada Zaragoza?

—El Diluvio
headline, July 22

W
hat is '
ot baby
?” asked the boy at the end of the table.

The American social worker who had come in that afternoon looked up as Helen came in.

“There!” they told him. “She'll explain:
enfant chaud, heisses Kind, niña caliente
.”

“Ah,” she said, sitting down beside him in her place, “that's not fair, just because I'm late to dinner—what have they been saying to you?”

Peter looked over the table at her. “But, then, he's been telling us fine things, too,” he said, smiling, and introducing them. “He's Belgian, and he recommends Antwerp—a beach, a workers' camp, thirty francs to the dollar, books for fifteen and twenty francs— sound investment, that country, for Americans.”

Helen's throat contracted. They were talking about leaving! She stared at Peter and Olive, wondering if her fear showed in her eyes and mouth. The Belgian waited for her to answer. His face was brilliant white, narrow, keen as some highly civilized rodent's might appear. Blue softness marked the hollows of his cheeks, but the eager health in his eyes contradicted the color and the pallor.

She said gaily to them. “I think Antwerp has crowded Palma out.”

“Tell me,” he insisted, “what is '
ot baby
'? Nobody will help me with my English.”

“Won't the English help you?”

“They won't help me,” the Belgian answered, passing the olives, “and they won't be allowed to help you.”

She did not know what he meant.

“They're meeting tomorrow with their consul, and they've said they'd like the Americans to sail with them. Wait and see the consul refuse.”

Again: leaving! She passed it off. “They probably won't sail, from what they say,” she answered. “Did you see the French off?”

He spoke with great passion, the brilliance whitened in his face. “I wouldn't go, I couldn't bear it. They let us down, they stopped the Games from taking place! Not that it was their fault”—he cut meat viciously—“they were misled, openly misled, betrayed over their own majority vote!”

“But the United Front—”

“Their Popular Front, that allows them to leave: when they had the most athletes—one thousand of them!—the most to contribute; when their government calls itself
Front Populaire
.”

Helen tried to tell him about the afternoon, the songs, the leave-taking's giant birdflight.

He laughed. “They should have gone off to France shouting ‘
A Zaragoza
!'
That
would have been consistent.”

“Why that?”

“Didn't you know—that's to be the slogan from now on. We had the whole thing explained to us this afternoon—one of the Spanish comrades from the radio bureau lectured to a few of the teams.”

He went on eating, explaining rapidly.

“Madrid and Barcelona are both all right,” he said. “The government was successful the first day, and Catalonia's strongly with the government—always has been, and for its own, the minute this takes hold; it's actually independent now, under Companys nominally,
really under the Workers' War Committee. The two cities are the industrial centers, but that doesn't mean too much: the largest plants are foreign-owned, and most of the workers in Barcelona are women in the textile factories. It's feudal, feudal, all the way through, except for these centers; and the Fascists have other key positions: Saragossa, Valladolid, Seville. Their strength is in their money, their help in wealth and guns from Italy and probably Germany, and their mercenaries from Africa. But these are their weaknesses: the people anywhere, as they see them uncovered, are bound to turn more strongly to the
Frente Popular
. The thing to do now is to keep a complete line of communication from being set up by the Fascists. Did you see the mobilization station?”