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18

The Mountains

Theo and Antonio set off for the mountains at the beginning of the following week.

They left in the early morning, riding two gray mules. Theo stroked his burro’s high ears and soft coat, looked into his big trusting eyes, and laughed as the mule wrinkled up his wet papery nostrils, exposing a set of enormous teeth that looked like a pair of miniature picket fences stacked one on top of the other. He had red tassels hanging from his bridle and a garland of leaves around his neck to keep off the flies.

“What’s his name?” asked Theo, sitting uneasily in the saddle.

“Hers, you mean. Yours is Isabella. And mine’s Ferdinand. The king and queen of mules! What’s wrong? You look nervous.”

“I haven’t ridden before.”

Antonio looked dumbfounded and then burst out laughing, but stopped when Theo didn’t join in.

“I come from New York. Remember?” said Theo. “They ride buses and trains over there.”

“A land without mules. I can’t imagine that,” said Antonio, shaking his head. “I’m sorry I laughed. Riding’s easy, though—just use your feet a little and pull the reins to stop. The mules know the paths, and yours will follow mine. There’s no need to push them.”

It was as Antonio said and Theo slowly relaxed as they rode up out of the village. Behind them, cocks were crowing in their wooden cages on the flat roofs of the housetops, their sharp, thin cries challenging and answering each other across the cold morning air.

Then, just as it seemed that they had left all the houses behind, they rounded a bend and saw in front of them a tumbledown cottage hemmed in by weeds and thornbushes. It was a desolate place, but a thin plume of smoke rising from its crooked chimney showed that it was still inhabited. As they approached, Antonio moved over to the other side of the track and urged his mule forward with Theo’s following behind. And once they’d passed the cabin, he crossed himself several times.

“Why are you doing that?” asked Theo curiously as he drew level.

“Because a witch lives in there,” said Antonio nervously. “She won’t harm us if we leave her alone, but it does not pay to get too close and attract her attention.”

It was Theo’s turn to look incredulous. “Witches don’t exist,” he said. “They’re just in fairy stories.”

“Of course they exist,” said Antonio. “I’ve seen them flying on All Hallows’ Night. They steal babies from their mothers so they can inject their veins with the infants’ blood and become young again, and rich old men pay them for it, too, so they can continue their villainies.”

“Nonsense,” said Theo, shaking his head. “These are all just crazy superstitions. And people can’t fly. It’s physically impossible. Everyone knows that.”

“Who are you to say?” demanded Antonio angrily. “You don’t live here. You know nothing.”

Theo was silenced. It was as if a chasm had unexpectedly opened up between him and his new friend, and he realized in that moment that a great deal more divided them than horse-riding skills. When they had talked in the square, Antonio had seemed almost sophisticated and even cynical in his description of the conflicts in his family and in the village, but here he was talking of flying witches as if they were an established fact of life.

But Theo also understood that he had seriously offended Antonio, who had generously offered to act as his guide and had clearly gone to a great deal of trouble to organize the present expedition. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about this country. Please forgive me.”

Antonio, who had been looking thunderous, smiled and clapped Theo on the back. His forgiveness was immediate and complete, and they rode on into the foothills, leaving the witch’s cottage behind.

The ground on either side of the track was elaborately terraced and planted with olive trees and wheat, which blue-shirted peasants were already out reaping. Their curved sickles flashed silver in the early sunlight, matching the glow on the leaves of the trees. Between the terraces, irrigation channels running down from streams higher up the slopes were bordered by blue periwinkle and purple-and-white iris, and skylarks hovered above their heads, singing. It was a beautiful day and not yet hot enough to make the riders sweat.

Soon they reached the chapel that Don Vincente had spoken of. Theo remembered that the priest had made possible his introduction to Antonio and so was inclined to think well of him, notwithstanding his general unctuousness and Antonio’s allegation that he had kept a concubine in days gone by. He wondered, too, whether he should take Antonio’s stories with a pinch of salt henceforward in the light of his supernatural beliefs.

No expense had been spared on the rebuilding of the chapel, and the stone had not yet weathered and so was almost white. Theo tried the door, but it was locked. He walked around to the side window and looked in, meeting the glass eyes of a statue. It was so lifelike that he thought it was a real woman for a moment. She had a pale rosebud face with crystal teardrops sculpted onto her waxy cheeks and black human hair cascading down over her gown of rich brocade. Her lip appeared to tremble as if she was about to speak. Theo wondered whether this was Santa Leticia or just another Madonna, and he began to understand how witches and ghosts could seem real in a land where statues became saints and answered people’s prayers.

Behind the chapel was the cliff from which the saint had been thrown. Theo looked for a moment over the edge and glimpsed a deep ravine filled with rubbish, and then he stepped back quickly as he felt a surging vertigo pulling him forward toward self-destruction. He knew for a fact that there would be no saint or Virgin to save him if he fell, but, looking over at Antonio, he thought that his friend would certainly not be ruling out the possibility of a divine intervention.

A little way farther on was the village cemetery, surrounded by a low wall. It was an arresting sight: the busy lines of gravestones, many with photographs of the dead preserved behind glass, overlooked by effigies of angels. Flowers wilted in vases of brackish water, unable to last even a day in the harsh summer heat.

Through a small gate at the back, Theo could see a farther enclosure with just a few crudely fashioned wooden crosses sticking up out of the rough, uneven ground. Weeds grew in abundance, whereas there were none inside the main graveyard.

“ La olla —the stewpot!” said Antonio, seeing where Theo was looking. “Where the poor go. Don Vincente says a prayer or two if they’re lucky, closes the gate, and then they’re forgotten. Thrown away like garbage!” He laughed hollowly as he turned away.

Looking at la olla , Theo remembered the anonymous cemetery in Brooklyn where his father lay, also without a headstone, forgotten by everyone except him and Frank. La tierra de la verdad —the land of truth: that was what Sir Andrew had told him the people here called their cemeteries, and looking out at the pathetic makeshift crosses against the background of the vast landscape spread out below and the hard-rearing mountains behind, Theo understood the perfect aptness of the term. He felt as if his illusions were being stripped away so that he could see death unobscured by life and fully understand its universality and finality. It was here in this place: utterly real, waiting and brooding, not to be cheated.

He turned away with a shudder and got on his mule, following Antonio up the path as they climbed steadily into the higher country.

The sun rose in the sky and it felt to Theo as if it was seeking him out, burning every inch of his flesh that he had left exposed—neck, face, hands, even his wrists. The heat hung before them in a shimmering haze, and the poppies growing in profusion across the rocky outcrops appeared to Theo like streams of crimson blood oozing across the parched land.

Relief came with the pine trees that began to appear here and there and then quickly developed into small woods. They passed through shaded corridors between the tall, thin trunks with the sunlight dappling down through the needled branches. The cicadas, invisible in the trees, maintained a ceaseless clicking song that reminded Theo of the whirring noise of the film projector in the square, while on the ground emerald-green lizards slithered away into the undergrowth as the mules approached.

It was a land untouched by man, and they met no one until a peasant in a broad-brimmed hat appeared as if out of nowhere, riding a mule with his wife sitting behind him with her stout arms circled about his waist. Her legs were splayed out wide to accommodate bulging saddlebags, creating a comic effect of which she seemed completely unaware.

The peasant stopped, regarding Antonio and Theo with frank curiosity. “Good day,” he said. “I am going to Parauta because my brother is sick. Perhaps he will die. I do not know. I have all my family there. Where do you come from?”

Antonio named his village and said that Theo was from America.

“America. Popeye the Sailor,” said the peasant, putting a hand over his right eye and bursting into uproarious laughter. Theo laughed too. It seemed the polite thing to do.

“In America you have much to eat?” he asked.

Theo nodded, surprised by the unexpected question.

“Good,” he said. “Much is good. In my village we have little, but in Parauta they eat well.” He gestured with his fingers to his mouth. “But it is as God sends. He giveth and he taketh away. Blessed be his name.” The peasant made the sign of the cross and his wife did the same, making her first movement since they had stopped.

And then abruptly he decided it was time to move on.

“ Vaya con Dios, ” he said and rode on with his wife swaying gently from side to side behind him.

“Is everything about food?” Theo asked Antonio, smiling at the unreal quality of the conversation they had just had.

“Yes. For most people,” said Antonio, speaking seriously. “If they don’t work, they don’t eat. And if they don’t eat, they die. La olla is stuffed full of their bones.”

Theo nodded, remembering the emaciated man who had confronted him in the barrio. He felt ashamed of his flippancy and hoped that his stepfather had found some way to help the workers whom Senor Madera had laid off in the spring.

But his shame didn’t diminish his appetite when they stopped for lunch soon afterward, sitting with their backs to the tree trunks as they ate ham sandwiches and sardines. And afterward they slept, stretched out on the thick pine needle carpet with saddlebags for pillows.

In his dream, Theo was running in the magic shoes that Coach Eames had given him. His stride was easy and fluid, and it was as if he was floating effortlessly above the track. And as he ran, he passed the people he’d known in his life, each of their faces distinct as if they were in a picture gallery. All of them—his grandfather and his grandmother and the whores on Rivington Street and Father Laurence and Jacob from the bookshop with his walrus mustache and Cattermole and Alwyn Thomas. And they were all cheering him on, their faces radiant with warmth and love. On and on he ran, through and past his life.

Until everything abruptly stopped. He stumbled and fell and the faces dissolved, crumbling in upon themselves as if all the time, they’d been puppets made of papier-maché, and he was looking up at Antonio, who was shaking him awake. He didn’t understand. He wanted to push Antonio away and go back, but he couldn’t. The sense of loss was for a moment almost unbearable and then like gossamer it was gone, leaving only a dull ache for something he could no longer remember.

“Come on,” said Antonio. “We’ve slept too long. We’ve a way to go yet. And we need to get there before sunset or we’ll end up out in the open, and you don’t want that.”

“Get where?” asked Theo.

“Where we’re going,” said Antonio, smiling enigmatically. “It’s beautiful. You’ll see. But it’s better if it’s a surprise.”

They came out of the pines, and the ascending path led them through a wilderness of gray rocks and low brush. Bees buzzed greedily around the blue blossoms on the rosemary bushes that filled the air with an aromatic woody scent, even though they had left the trees behind.

A tinkling of tiny bells announced a line of thin sheep with ribs like radiators, followed by a shepherd in a ragged cloak walking behind them, holding a crook. He raised a stiff, grave hand as he walked by and bid them “go with God,” and that was the last human being that they met that day. The world was empty except for the hawks and eagles circling overhead in search of prey. Theo wondered what they fed on, given the barrenness of the landscape that provided scant cover for field mice and voles amid the scree and shaley slopes.

Above their heads, the cliffs rose to great heights, fretted with holes.

“Some of them are caves,” said Antonio. “Gangs of brigands used to live in them. They would ride down into the village at siesta time and seize a rich man and hold him for ransom, turning the screws on his family by sending an ear or a finger or both until they got their money.”

“And if they didn’t?”

“They’d throw him off the cliffs like Santa Leticia,” said Antonio, drawing a finger across his throat.

“Are they still doing it?” asked Theo, feeling a shot of anxiety that they were being observed themselves and assessed for what price they might bring.

“No, the Guardia have cleared them all out. But I can remember when they brought the last capo in. I was six or seven, and they rode with him through the main square with ropes around his waist and neck. They stopped for water and he opened his mouth to drink and all his teeth were gold, so you couldn’t see any white at all.”

“What happened to him?” asked Theo.

“He was garroted in Málaga. They say the spike missed his spinal column and he died a terrible slow death, pierced and strangled by the iron collar.”

Theo shivered, remembering his stepfather talking of the Spaniards’ fascination with killing. In this lonely, empty place, he could picture the condemned man’s terror and agony as if on a screen, and he struggled to erase the image from his mind.

“Come, we must walk now and lead the mules,” said Antonio, dismounting. “The way up from here is steep and narrow.”

He untied his saddlebag, producing a pair of well-sewn jute-soled sandals. “Give me your boots,” he said. “With these alpargatas you are less likely to slip. But you must still be careful. If you fall, you die, and the birds will peck out your eyes.” He laughed but Theo couldn’t tell if he was really joking, and it didn’t help that he fancied he could hear a raven croaking ominously somewhere nearby.

The path twisted and turned through a wilderness of immense boulders lying at haphazard angles to each other, as if they had been tossed about as playthings by a vanished species of giants. Theo kept his eyes fixed on the ground, measuring every step, but felt encouraged by the sure-footedness of Isabella, who picked her way forward unerringly beside him.

And then suddenly they were at the summit—a misty plateau covered with a fine turf in which the green grasses were intermixed with azure-blue gentians and white star-of-Bethlehem flowers. At the back a series of cave mouths ran along the base of the rearing cliffs that receded as the ground widened to accommodate a small lake of still, silvery water. Below, a panoramic view opened up of the foothills and the plain leading away to the distant sea.

“You’re right. It’s magnificent,” said Theo, gazing around with admiration.

“Worth the walk,” said Antonio. “See, I’m a guide who delivers on his promises. Perhaps there’s a future for me here after all.”

“Doing this?”

“No, of course not. I was joking,” said Antonio, laughing. “Los Olivos is the end of the world. You don’t need me to tell you that. No one comes to visit, and so no one needs guiding.”

“Except me.”

“Yes, except you. Look, there’s our village,” he said, pointing down to the right, where distant red-tiled roofs and whitewashed houses clustered around a hilltop with the familiar tower and spire of the church rising up above.

Below, Theo could just about make out his stepfather’s orange groves and the gray line of the road. Small farmsteads were dotted here and there outside the village, surrounded by a patchwork of fields and fruit trees.

“We look at this landscape and we say it’s beautiful,” said Antonio thoughtfully. “And we’re right, of course. But my father sees it and thinks something else entirely. He sees opportunities. He calls it a checkerboard because it’s divided up into tiny squares which he wants to own. Some of them he does already, and if he has his way, he’ll end up claiming them all.”

“I don’t understand,” said Theo. “His business is the café, isn’t it?”

“That’s just a part of it. The café gives him the money to play his game.”

“What game?”

“Checkers. He lends money to the peasants when they can’t pay their taxes. He’s all smiles then, couldn’t be friendlier, except there’s the small detail that he needs a mortgage as security. ‘Just a precaution,’ he says and he walks them over to the ayuntamiento, where they sign or put their thumbmark on the dotted line and the clerk seals the deed with red wax and files it away in the registry up on the third floor. And then afterward, my father waits patiently like a spider, for years if he has to, until they can’t pay the interest because there’s a bad harvest or some other piece of bad luck, and then, quick as lightning, he forecloses.” Antonio darted his head forward like a lizard, opening and shutting his mouth with a snap. “But then comes the masterstroke: he doesn’t take their land. Oh no, he’s much too generous for that. He leaves them to farm it as sharecroppers.”

“What does that mean?”

“They work the land—fields that their grandfathers tamed and tilled—and then they have to bring him a half share of everything. You’ve seen that office he has at the back of the café. That’s where he counts and weighs the produce, and he has a big warehouse next door for storage. He watches the poor bastards like one of those hawks up there,” said Antonio, pointing up at the great birds still circling the sky above their heads. “And in the afternoons when the café’s closed for siesta, he goes on tours of inspection and checks that they aren’t cheating him. ‘There are ten grapefruit missing!’ he’ll shout because he’s counted every one of the grapefruit on his previous visit, and the peasants tremble, knowing he can evict them whenever he feels like it. But later, in the café, he acts like he’s their friend, doing them all a favor, allowing them to stay on the land. He’s the life and soul of the party then!”

Antonio shook his head bitterly. “Money talks,” he said and spat on the ground. “I shall be glad when I’m out of here, marching with the soldiers.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Theo.

“No? Maybe I don’t,” said Antonio with a smile. “To hell with my father! I won’t let him spoil our day.”

The sun was sinking now toward the sea, dropping fast like a golden stone, and they watched, riveted, as it was swallowed up, leaving on the horizon line a green glow that was gone in a moment, as if it had never been. In the violet twilight, the shape of everything seemed distinct before it began to fade.

“Come on,” said Antonio, getting up. “We need to find some brushwood for a fire while we can still see. I know the best cave for the night.”

Antonio squashed the rosemary and lavender and broom into cushions that he called piornos , and the air was pungent with their smell as they caught alight, flaring into flame. The fine white ash blew up and settled on the boys’ hair and eyelashes and they laughed, looking at their shadows dancing on the walls of the cave in the firelight.

Out in the gathering darkness, the stars were glittering low in the sky, seeming to Theo to be so close that he could reach out his hand to touch them, even though they were light-years away.

Antonio produced a frying pan and eggs and more ham and oil from his saddlebag like a conjurer and cooked omelets that they ate with a loaf of bread. There was also a goatskin bolsa of red wine that Antonio tried but failed to teach Theo how to drink from in the Spanish way. He demonstrated, moving the spout of the pouch to his lips and then up and away as far as his arm could reach, from where he released a purplish-red stream that arced gracefully into his open mouth. But Theo made a complete mess of his attempt at imitation and had to drink directly from the bolsa with half the wine spilling down over his shirt, at which they laughed even more, and their happy voices echoed off the cave walls, until they lay back exhausted and fell suddenly fast asleep, watched over by their faithful mules.

Antonio woke Theo just before dawn, shaking him out of another deep sleep. “I want to show you something,” he said.

Over at the top of the path, they stood looking down. The sky was the palest of blues, and the stars, so vivid in the night, were still faintly visible. There was a cool breeze in the air.

“See?” said Antonio, pointing, and Theo, following his finger, caught sight of groups of people on the hillside, where there had been none when they had passed that way the previous afternoon.

“They’re threshing the grain,” said Antonio. “Each spot they’re at is a floor. See how the mules pull the carts over the sheaves going round and round in tight circles and look, over there, they’re winnowing the crop now. They’ve been waiting for the wind and the light. It’s perfect weather.”

Theo stared, transfixed by the unexpected beauty of the scene, as the threshers used wooden forks to toss up the ears, letting the chaff stream away in a white cloud while the grain fell in drifts of gold to the floor.

Afterward, they walked to the tarn to wash and renew their supply of water. The breeze was eddying the surface, sending lines of silver ripples running in all directions.

“You must not swim,” said Antonio, who had hung back, leaving Theo to fill the water bottles. “There’s an enchantress in the deep who lures men out from the shore with her song and then leaves them to drown.”

“Of course there is,” Theo was about to say, but then bit back the words, remembering the enchanted lake in King Arthur , the beautiful book Sir Andrew had given him in New York that he had held on to through thick and thin ever since, taking it with him across the Atlantic and to Saint Gregory’s. He prized it so highly because it was magical and allowed him to dream of worlds beyond the hard, narrow one in which he’d lived. And he was beginning to understand that Spain was a land where the dividing line between the imagined and the real blurred and disappeared so that the two became one. Looking at the lake, it was as if he could see the arm clothed in samite rising from the water holding aloft the sword, Excalibur, gleaming in the golden light of the rising sun.

In the weeks that followed, Sir Andrew was away on business, first in Jerez and then in Barcelona, and Elena was every day at the church, where Don Vincente had gratefully accepted her offers of assistance with flower arranging both there and in the chapel up on the hill. Blossoms didn’t last long in the incense-laden half darkness where the deep reds and blues of the stained-glass windows filtered out the sunlight, and the flowers needed constant replacing.

She was warmly welcomed into this new world by a group of similarly devout well-to-do ladies in black lace mantillas who spent as much time on their knees as on their feet. In only a short time, the church became a second home to her, just as it had once been in Gramercy Park and Little Italy, except that here it provided a greater fulfillment because the faith was the beating heart of Spain, or so she believed, in the same way it had been when she was a girl in Mexico before the revolution. It was as if she had paradoxically crossed the ocean to come home out of her exile, and had at last found happiness at the end of the journey.

Left to his own devices, Theo accompanied Antonio on further expeditions into the wild country that lay in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada above and on either side of the village.

Soon he grew to love this new world, where each experience seemed crystallized, as if it were a picture: a pony turning a waterwheel under poplar trees with the dappled sunlight playing on its brindled coat or a herd of little black goats drinking at a white-pebbled stream watched over by their shepherd. Every such moment and encounter felt separated in its own present from the before and after.

But Theo also came to understand that this impression of permanence and immutability was superficial and deceptive. In the village and in the surrounding countryside, many of the people were stirred up and angry, eager for a change that would come not slowly over time but all at once in a day, ushering in an earthly Utopia in which they believed as fervently as they had once believed in the God that had gone from their lives.

Theo had seen signs when he first arrived in the village: the scrawled red graffiti on the wall, his encounter with the starving man, the priest’s passing reference to the desecration of the chapel by the Anarchists. But he had turned away, following his stepfather’s instruction not to return to the barrio, and instead had followed Antonio up into the mountains, leaving the village behind.

However, the Anarchists were there, too, and a chance encounter in a wayside inn at which they stopped one August night lifted the scales from Theo’s eyes.

He and Antonio had been wandering in the foothills all day, descending in the evening to a wide track that led them to a single-story, barnlike building with big double doors standing open. Outside, in the cobblestoned courtyard, a man was washing a child in a tin horse trough, lathering and scrubbing and singing lustily as the child screamed. He was stripped to the waist, and his feet were stained blue from a lifetime of treading grapes.

Antonio dismounted to ask about food and accommodation, and the man broke off from his song, holding the dripping child suspended in midair as he bid the newcomers welcome and directed them to enter with an expansive wave of his other hand.

They led the burros inside and stood blinking for a moment, adjusting their eyes to the sudden change of light. They were in a long, whitewashed hall without partitions. Outside the pool of sunlit illumination in which they were standing, the farther reaches of the interior were dark and shadowy, lit only by a fire that was burning beneath a hooded chimney at one end.

There was a simple rough-hewn table and chairs, but otherwise no furniture, and blackened pots and pans, harnesses, and farming tools were hanging from nails on the walls. At the other end of the hall from the fire, a donkey was eating at a manger. Swallows swooped and darted between the roof rafters and a pig was fast asleep on a bed of straw, snorting and snuffling in its dreams.

Three women in musty black dresses overlaid with lace shawls were seated on low stools in front of the hearth, and as they turned their heads toward the new arrivals, their gaunt, skin-stretched faces reminded Theo of Rackham’s picture of the witches in Macbeth , one of his favorites in the book of Shakespeare’s tales his stepfather had given him earlier in the summer. He assumed that one of the women had to be the innkeeper’s wife and another his mother, but he could not tell the generations apart. The bloom of youth and beauty was fleeting in the sierras, burned quickly away by the ravages of sun and wind and hardship.

One of the women brought straw and barley for the mules, which Antonio and Theo tethered beside the donkey, and the other two busied themselves around the fire, beginning to cook the evening meal. An iron pan sputtered, and the hall was filled with the smell of sizzling oil and garlic.

Theo and Antonio washed, taking it in turns to use a tin dipper to pour icy cold water from a ewer over their heads and hands, and then sat at the table, drinking coarse red wine that scraped their tongues while they waited to eat.

Soon the innkeeper came in carrying the child, whom he deposited on the straw beside the pig, where it promptly went to sleep. He went around lighting smoky oil lamps, ignored by and ignoring the women at the fire.

Outside there was the sound of hooves, and through the open door Theo saw two riders dismounting in the twilight. Without reason, he felt a sense of foreboding, wondering who these late-arriving strangers might be as they came into the hall, leading their mules.

They couldn’t have been more dissimilar in appearance. One was short and rotund with an easy smile, whereas the other was tall and thin with a pale ascetic face in which his eyes burned like two live coals. Theo couldn’t help staring: the second man was an El Greco portrait brought to life, complete with the daggerlike features beloved of the artist—the long, straight nose and the narrow chin ending in a pointed black beard.

The landlord pushed the doors closed, sliding a bolt across, and the men joined Antonio and Theo at the table. The shorter of the two introduced himself as Pablo and helped himself liberally to the wine, but his companion drank only water. Pablo was as talkative as the other was taciturn.

“I can tell this is a good inn,” he said, rubbing his hands. “A bright fire, strong wine, an openhanded welcome. Where we stayed last night, they demanded money in advance and stood over us while we ate, and then they snatched our plates away before we had finished eating, gobbling down what was left.” He imitated the gobbling with his mouth and banged the table and laughed, but his friend didn’t even smile.

And so they continued, verbose and closemouthed, throughout the dinner of rice and salt cod served on a wide pan from which the guests each ate a quarter section, except for Pablo’s companion, who barely touched his food, leaving it to Pablo to finish it for him, as if by prearranged custom.

Only when the pan had been removed did the tall man break his silence, addressing himself to Theo.

“You don’t speak like us,” he said. “Where are you from?”

“America,” said Theo. “I grew up in New York.”

“The land of the free, where the people are slaves to their money,” said the man, and Theo could hear the scorn in his voice, grating like his harsh Andalusian accent.

“Oh, come on, Carlos,” said Pablo. “There’s no need to pick a quarrel. We’re all friends here.”

There was an uneasy lull in the conversation, but the tall man’s intervention had made Theo curious. Carlos was rude and intimidating, but there was a power about him that made Theo want to find out who he was.

“You don’t like money?” he asked.

“It is the root of all evil,” said Carlos. The phrase was a cliché, but spoken by Carlos, it seemed newly minted, full of pith and force.

“So you agree with Saint Paul about that?” asked Theo, remembering his Bible lessons at Saint Gregory’s.

“About money, yes, but about his faith in God, no. That is a lie, used by the Church to deceive the poor and keep them in submission and ignorance. But no longer. In America, perhaps, but not here. Our work is almost done. Men far better than me have been walking these tracks for sixty years, bringing the truth to the people, and their eyes have been opened. Many can read now, and those that can’t, listen to those that can. They understand that they have the right to be free and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. No one is entitled to control them or starve them or exploit them, as the landlords and priests have done for centuries. They are idle parasites living off the sweat of the poor, grown fat on it because they say the land is theirs to do with as they like. But it is not. There is no property. The land belongs to the people. It always has and it always will. There is more than enough for everyone if it is farmed together.”

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Is that what you mean?” asked Theo.

“Marx!” said Carlos, spitting out the name as if it was a profanity. “Another liar like Paul, who knew how to use the truth for his own ends. The Communists say the state can make people equal. But there can be no freedom or justice when one man has power over another. In Russia, the Bolsheviks are the new parasites. They have betrayed the revolution, so it might as well never have happened.”

“It’s the truth,” said Pablo, refilling his glass with wine and lighting a fat cigarette that he had rolled while his companion was speaking. “Carlos here is like old Fanelli. He can explain the Idea so everyone can understand. One in a thousand he is.”

Theo nodded. Pablo’s easy jocularity was a world removed from Carlos’s harsh rhetoric, but he was right about his friend. At first Carlos’s certainty and fierce intelligence had reminded Theo of Esmond, but the resemblance was misleading. Carlos had none of Esmond’s humor or detachment or intellectual prowess. Instead, he possessed the unique gift of translating the fire burning inside him into simple words. He was what he said.

“But how then do people achieve liberty? Can you tell me that?” asked Theo, leaning forward eagerly. It was the question he had often asked himself without ever finding a satisfactory answer, the one that had kept him ideologically separated from Esmond, even when they had papered over the cracks to fight Mosley’s Fascism together.

Carlos didn’t respond at first, keeping his dark eyes fixed on Theo’s. And then, as if making the final move in a game of chess, he said simply: “They take it. And they do not rest until the last marquis has been strangled with the guts of the last priest.”

For the first and last time, he smiled, and then, getting up from the table, he walked over to where sacks of straw were laid in a corner, took off his boots, pulled a rug from a pile over his body, and lay still.

Theo sat on for a while, lost in thought, while Antonio and Pablo talked and smoked. Carlos’s certainties had made him think once more of Esmond, and his heart ached as he wondered where Esmond was and whether they would meet again. There were so many friends he had left behind. He tried to picture Coach Eames and Frank so unimaginably far away across the great ocean. New York had been everything to him, but now it hardly seemed real, with his mind unable to form a connection between the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue and this ancient rural world, where men farmed the land with oxen and wooden plows.

Shadows flickered across the whitewashed walls in the guttering lamplight and in the corner the child still slept on its bed of straw, reminding Theo of the boy in his grandfather’s apartment asleep on the pile of cloth. Another path that had led nowhere except to loss. Would Spain be like that too? Where would his wandering end?

And beneath the night sounds—the stamping and neighing of the mules and the snoring of the innkeeper and his family—Theo sensed the far-off approach of a coming storm. Thunder in the mountains, the crackle of gunfire, and the beating of drums; blood of beasts and men staining the earth.