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19

Strife

After the long day and the red wine, Theo slept deeply on his sack of straw, and when he awoke, Carlos and Pablo were gone, vanished into the cold pink of the early morning outside the opened doors, as if they had never been.

He and Antonio ate a breakfast of maize polenta and sardines fried over the fire, paid the innkeeper handsomely, harnessed their mules, and set off down the treeless track.

Around the corner, they came upon one of the women from the night before, bringing water from the well in an earthenware jug balanced upon her head. She was singing a malaguena—a quavering lament of drawn-out notes and trills—and as they stopped to listen, Theo felt a return of the trepidation he’d experienced in the night. A nameless sorrow for events that had not yet occurred. And in the weeks that followed, he could never quite banish the song from his mind; it lingered on the edge of his consciousness, adding to his sense of unease.

Perhaps the song was an augury of trouble, and if so, it was correct. The expedition to the inn was the last Theo made with Antonio, as a series of events in the following few days brought a premature end to their time together.

The first came soon after their return. Theo was sitting in the morning sunshine on the terrado at the top of the house with a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald forgotten in his lap when voices below cut into his daydreams. Going to the parapet, he was surprised to see the cacique, Don Fadrique, walking up the path to the front door with that same waddling gait that Theo remembered from the night of the film show. Just as before, he was followed by the same lean youth with the rifle over his shoulder, who kept an exact six feet behind his employer, while turning his head in all directions as if scouting for potential assassins or measuring shots he would take with his gun if he got the chance. Looking up, he caught sight of Theo, who instinctively ducked back and went over to the stairs, descending past his bedroom and stopping on the half landing above the hallway leading to the salon, where he leaned back against the wall, waiting.

It felt wrong to be listening like an eavesdropper, but he sensed that Don Fadrique would not be visiting the house unless it was for something important, and he wanted to know what that something was. From where he was standing, he would be able to hear what was being said in the salon as long as the door remained open, and he thought it unlikely that he would be seen. His mother was at church, and Sir Andrew was in his study down below.

Theo listened as Senora Constanza opened the door and then came back up the stairs to report to Sir Andrew, whose steps Theo could soon hear crossing the hall just below where he was standing.

“Not your man, if you don’t mind, Don Fadrique,” said Sir Andrew. “I don’t like guns in the house.”

Theo didn’t hear Don Fadrique respond, just his puffing and wheezing as he mounted the stairs and followed Sir Andrew into the salon.

At first, there was nothing. Perhaps Sir Andrew was serving his guest sherry. But then Theo heard him asking the cacique to what he owed the honor of his visit.

“The municipal councillors asked me to come,” said Don Fadrique. His voice was unexpectedly soft, so that Theo had to strain to hear. “They are concerned that your decision to pay your braceros for not working is causing others to make similar demands, which we as employers simply cannot afford to meet. They say that work should be paid for, not idleness, which makes sense, does it not?”

“The braceros are not idle,” said Sir Andrew, brushing aside the question. “They are starving. That’s something as Christians we should be striving to prevent.”

“And so we do, Don Andrés. So we do,” said Don Fadrique in a soothing tone. “We make generous donations to Don Vincente, who provides charity to the deserving.”

“Tiny amounts, and only if the deserving confess their sins and attend Mass on Sundays. The rest he spends on beautifying the church and taking trips to see the marquis in Madrid, which I’m sure you know about, given you are in charge of His Excellency’s affairs here.”

“I do have that honor,” said Don Fadrique. “And I think that you do Don Vincente an injustice, if you don’t mind me saying so. The marquis was kind enough to invite him to his son’s wedding. It would have caused offense not to go.”

“The marquis’s kindness does not extend to the poor, though, does it?” said Sir Andrew, returning to the attack. “He—or should I say you—keeps half his land fallow so he can raise fighting bulls and shoot pheasants. Good land that could be rented out and worked. And why? So that you can keep unemployment high and wages low. But that isn’t enough, is it? At harvesttime, you bring in migrant labor to drive the pay down even further. Three or four pesetas a day—no man can support his family on that. And once the harvest is over, nothing. There were laws to stop all this, of course, but since the election they’ve all been repealed. It’s a disgrace.”

“It’s democracy,” said Don Fadrique mildly. “Something which I would have assumed a liberal like yourself would support, Don Andrés.” His voice was just as soft and unperturbed as before, and Theo couldn’t help being impressed by the cacique’s equanimity, knowing from his own experience how intimidating his stepfather could be.

“It’s nothing of the kind.” Sir Andrew was almost shouting now. “The elections are fixed and you know it. Cognac and cigars on Election Day for the compliant and threats and coercion for the rest. If you vote Socialist, then you won’t work or worse. There are some villages, from what I’ve heard, where councils have sent in the results even before the people have voted.”

“Are you saying that is what has happened here?”

“I’m saying I won’t be a part of starving these poor people. I shall do my best for them, whatever you and the others say, and I’ve given my steward instructions accordingly. I’m sorry this has been a wasted visit, Don Fadrique.”

“Nothing is wasted, Don Andrés, I assure you. Indeed, our conversation has been most instructive. Please don’t trouble yourself. I will show myself out.”

Theo listened to more wheezing as Don Fadrique went down the stairs and closed the door, and then a moment later he jumped at the sound of his stepfather’s glass smashing against the back of the fireplace and narrowly avoided falling down the stairs.

Theo would have liked to talk to Sir Andrew about the cacique’s visit, but couldn’t without admitting that he had been eavesdropping.

He felt grateful to his stepfather for having acted on what he had told him about his encounter with the poor man in the barrio, and he was impressed by his willingness to stand up for what he thought was right. Following on from their conversation about bullfighting, Theo was surprised to realize that he had started to feel an affection for Sir Andrew that he wouldn’t have believed possible a few months earlier, when he had him firmly cast as the enemy interloper who had stolen away his mother.

However, Theo remembered all that Antonio had told him about the cacique’s power in the village and he felt certain that Don Fadrique would take steps to try to bring Sir Andrew to heel, now that his attempt at persuasion had been rebuffed. What Theo didn’t anticipate was that the first move would be made against him personally.

Early the next day Theo received a call of his own at the house. Antonio stood awkwardly outside the door, twisting his hat in his hands as he explained that his father needed him in the café, so there could therefore be no more guiding. He refused Theo’s invitation to come in, but didn’t go, either, and it seemed to Theo that his friend had something else to say but couldn’t think of a way to say it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“This isn’t what I want,” said Antonio.

“Nor I,” said Theo warmly. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than these last few weeks. I’ve loved what you’ve shown me. All of it. I—” He broke off, inhibited by his natural reserve from expressing the depth of his feeling.

“Have you?” said Antonio, looking amazed. “But you’ve seen so much of the world. London, New York. This is nothing compared to them.”

“No, you’re wrong. It’s everything,” said Theo passionately. “The country here is so raw. It’s real. Not like anywhere else I’ve ever been. The people too. But now ...” He bit his lip, unable to hide his disappointment.

“Now you can’t see it anymore. Because of me,” said Antonio miserably, finishing Theo’s sentence.

“No, not because of you,” said Theo. “That’s not what I meant at all. You have to do what your father says. I know that.”

“It’s something to do with your stepfather. My father wouldn’t say what, just that I’m not to see you anymore. I can’t stand up to him. I wish I could, but I can’t. I’m not like my sister. I haven’t got it in me.” Antonio had his eyes fixed on the ground, ashamed of his weakness, and then abruptly turned on his heel and walked away.

Passing between the lions at the entrance gate, he looked back for a moment and half raised his hand, and was gone.

Sir Andrew’s mood worsened as the days passed. It wasn’t just the rebuff by Bernardo Alvarez that Theo had felt obliged to report to his stepfather. A more general ostracism was occurring, and he had a stand-up row with Senor Madera when the steward urged him to reconsider his policy of out-of-season payments. Theo didn’t need to eavesdrop to hear his stepfather shouting at the steward, accusing him of being an agent of the cacique, and Senor Madera’s usual dour expression had become funereally grim when Theo passed him in the corridor later that morning.

The taut, oppressive atmosphere in the house affected all its occupants except Elena, whose single-minded focus on the church and its elaborate furnishings and rituals made her unaware of everything else that was going on. It was as if she and her son had both fallen in love, but with two different sides of the same country. One light and one dark, one poor and one rich. Not that she saw it that way.

Theo couldn’t understand his mother. He was repelled by the lifelike statues in the church with their brushed hair and dainty shoes and eyes of glass, clothed in damask and velvet, with rings on their fingers and diadems in their hair. They had nothing in common with the Joseph and Mary who had slept with the animals in the Bethlehem stable and laid their baby in a manger.

It made it worse that that simple world of the Nativity that his mother professed to love did exist here in Spain, in a way that had vanished elsewhere in the world. He had seen it in the inn when he breathed the night air with the pig and the mules. There had been nothing in that long room that wasn’t essential for life. It was just as it had been in the time of Christ. But the Spanish Church had no interest in such simplicity. Their houses of worship were furnished with gold and silver and precious stones, glittering in the incense-filled gloom. A storehouse of worldly things.

To Theo, they were places of death, not life, and the waxlike statues suggested a netherworld of decay and corruption. He hadn’t forgotten Antonio’s image of fat Don Vincente sucking the blood of the village while his parishioners starved. But for Elena, the opposite was true. As she passed the rosary beads through her fingers, she felt the church’s womb-like, candlelit darkness holding and protecting her as if she were gently rocking in the arms of her Savior.

But her bliss was brittle. Like ecstasy, it ran skin deep. Because she knew that outside, the forces of darkness were gathering, ready to attack. She had seen it happen before. In Mexico, the Reds had killed and burned her parents, and she had fled across the fields, lucky to escape with her life. They were still murdering the faithful there and in Russia, too, and they wanted to do the same here in Spain. Don Vincente had told her what the Anarchists had done in the chapel. The statue of the Virgin had been stripped and decapitated and her breast daubed with their red graffiti. PUTA they had written. Whore!

At night, Elena dreamed of fire. At first, just a gleam on the horizon and a whiff of smoke in the air, but then leaping into orange flames in the crackling trees with the smell of sulfur pressing down on her lungs until she could hardly breathe. She woke screaming when she felt the heat on her flesh and Andrew held her, trembling like a wounded bird in his hands.

So, she was a receptive audience when Don Vincente and his black-laced ladies began to whisper in her ear that her husband was putting money in the Anarchists’ pockets with his out-of-season payments to his braceros. Money they would use to finance another outrage or to recruit more members into their Red ranks.

At Mass on Sunday, Don Vincente preached that Spain was the spiritual home of the true Church, not Rome. Spain had brought Christ to the heathen. She had driven out the Jews and the Moors and had fought the Protestant heretics all over Europe. But now she was facing a new and more deadly foe, an enemy within that was determined to destroy religion and property and marriage and everything that was holy. This was the time of trial that had been prophesied when Catholics must stand together and fight to the last for Christ and Spain.

Elena took Don Vincente’s instruction literally. She had been quiet on the way home and through lunch, steeling herself for the ordeal ahead, although she glanced over at her husband several times and inwardly trembled, seeing his creased brow as he pondered his troubles. But when Senora Constanza had finished serving the coffee, she launched herself into battle:

“Andrew, I want you to stop making these payments.”

“What payments?” he asked.

“To the men when they are not working. I want you to stop them.”

“Why? It was your idea in the first place,” said Sir Andrew, looking incredulous. “What on earth has made you change your mind?”

“Don Vincente says that the money’s going to the Anarchists.”

“Don Vincente knows which side his bread is buttered,” said Sir Andrew, his voice laced with sarcasm. “The cacique’s put him up to this. That’s what’s happened. And I won’t tolerate it, I tell you. They have no right trying to get at me through you.”

“I have a right to my opinion,” said Elena, getting to her feet.

“Even when it’s the opposite of your opinion a few weeks ago? Your Christian opinion that led me to start paying the money?”

“Yes.”

Theo was appalled by his mother’s about-face. Couldn’t she see the injustice of what she was asking? The men were starving: Did that mean nothing to her? But just as he was about to weigh in on the side of his stepfather, he stopped, anger turning to fear as he noticed how deathly pale his mother had become and how she was gripping the chairback with both hands for support.

“Andrew, please ...” he began, but his stepfather ignored him. He had been on the verge of losing his temper for days and now it spilled over.

“How dare you interfere!” he shouted at Elena. “I decide what to pay my workers. Not you and not that good-for-nothing priest or his fat paymaster. Me. No one else. Do you hear me?”

“No,” she yelled back, refusing to back down. “I won’t allow you to make us outcasts. Not here. Michael did it in New York when he—” She stopped, swallowing hard and then went on, pushing out her words between labored breaths. “Don Vincente is right. We Catholics have to stand together, because if we don’t, they’ll ...”

She swayed and would have fallen if Theo hadn’t jumped forward to hold her. Her eyes were closed, and Theo thought she had fainted. But then she opened them again and smiled wanly, looking up at her son. Her fury had disappeared, replaced by a quiet calm that frightened him even more.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t get it out of my head. What happened to them. I can’t get past it. I try, but I don’t know how.”

Theo knew who they were. She’d said the same about her murdered parents that day in New York when they’d been honest with each other, but she’d had hope then of overcoming her past, whereas now she sounded defeated. His heart lurched as if something inside him was giving way. It was as if their roles had been reversed. She was supposed to be the parent, showing him the way, but instead she had become like a lost child, begging for guidance, which he couldn’t give her because he was too young.

“Help me,” he said, turning to his stepfather, and together they moved Elena to the sofa in the salon, where she lay down and closed her eyes, while Andrew, overcome with remorse, sat beside her, holding her hand.

Sir Andrew summoned the village doctor, who prescribed sedatives and told him what he already knew: that his wife needed expert care. And the next day, once Elena had awoken and eaten a little breakfast, Sir Andrew told Theo to pack, because they would be leaving at noon.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bowing his head. “I shouldn’t have shouted. I feel I’ve let you down as well as your mother. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s all right,” said Theo. “I was angry with her too. She gets into a state and she can’t see anymore. Right from wrong, I mean.”

Sir Andrew nodded. “It’s this place, I think. She wants to believe she’s gone home to Mexico. But wanting something doesn’t make it true. The Church is different here. It has power and wealth and it’s fighting to keep them, and if people get hurt in the process, then that’s a price Don Vincente and his friends are willing to pay. But as you say, she’s blind to all that. Leaving will help, I hope. Part of me wishes we’d never come.”

“I don’t,” said Theo, and Sir Andrew looked at him curiously, picking up on the vehemence in his stepson’s voice.

“Will you still pay the men?” Theo asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you should. They’ll starve if you don’t.”

Sir Andrew thought for a moment and then nodded, making up his mind. “I’ll tell Madera,” he said.

It didn’t take Theo long to get his things together, and then, going up onto the terrado , he gazed out one last time at the landscape he’d come to love. He remembered how he had felt shut in and isolated here until Antonio had opened up this new world to him in all its infinite variety. Sights and sounds and scents came crowding into his mind: the dark-eyed glances from the girls in the square, the smell and feel of pine needles in the dappled morning light, the cold water of the tarn icy on his skin, the snorting breath of the mules. And Antonio always beside him, pointing, explaining, laughing, and finally leaving with his head cast down, past the gate down below through which Theo would soon be departing himself, perhaps never to return.

He felt a surge of gratitude toward his friend. He owed him so much, but he had never thanked him properly, and he realized suddenly that he couldn’t bear to leave without saying goodbye.

There was just time if he went now. He ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time and almost knocking over Senora Constanza, who was coming up the other way, and then hurtled through the door and down the road past the church, only pausing for breath when he got to the square.

He’d forgotten about Antonio’s father, who was standing outside his café with his hands on his hips, holding forth to a group of customers drinking at the nearby tables. He caught sight of Theo, and his expression changed as he moved to station himself in the doorway. If Antonio was inside, Theo knew he was wasting his time. But he wasn’t. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his friend coming up through the stone arcade on the other side of the square, where the peasant women sold their wares on market day. He had a girl with him, but Theo took off running anyway, dodging past the women at the fountain. He had no time to lose if he was to get back to the house by twelve.

“My mother’s sick and I’ve got to leave,” he burst out as soon as he got to Antonio. “And I didn’t thank you properly when you came over because I wasn’t expecting—”

“This is my sister, Maria,” said Antonio, interrupting. He was smiling and looked transformed from the picture of misery he’d been a week earlier.

Theo turned to the girl and stopped, stricken to silence by her loveliness. Her hair, the color of golden-brown amber, fell in waves around her shoulders, framing the perfect oval of her face in which her blue eyes shone, sapphire-tinted like the sea at evening. She had a queen’s head, Theo thought—full of decision and command, taking for granted its own beauty.

She was dressed simply, in a black dress with a red scarf around her neck tied in a loose knot—Anarchist colors—and her body was lithe, as if she could, if she chose, run faster than the wind.

But for now she was still, looking Theo up and down with an unashamed curiosity. He sensed at once her confidence, her devil-may-care attitude to everyone and everything, and he knew that he couldn’t stand there gawping a moment longer without losing her good opinion before he had even begun.

“Hullo,” he said weakly. “I’m Theo.”

“I know who you are. Antonio has told me all about you,” she said, and her voice was not what he had expected. There was the Andalusian harshness of pronunciation, but also a faint lilt that was all her own and a power, too, that felt almost masculine.

“Good things, I hope?” asked Theo and then immediately regretted his question. It made him sound like a supplicant—an approach he felt sure would earn her contempt.

But she didn’t respond that way. “Yes, good,” she said. “What’s happened to your mother?”

“She got upset with my stepfather and had some kind of nervous attack. She’s fragile, and it feels like she could break. I don’t know what will happen.” There was something about Maria that made him want to tell the truth, even though he didn’t know her at all. He’d never experienced anything like it before.

“I’m sorry,” said Antonio, putting his hand on Theo’s arm. “That’s terrible. And I’m sorry, too, about what I did. I shouldn’t have given in to my father. Maria’s made me see that. Will you forgive me?”

“Of course,” said Theo, feeling stupid. He’d come to thank Antonio, not accept his apology.

“He’s a bastard,” said Maria simply, looking across the square toward the café, where her father was still standing guard over the entrance, his arms folded across his barrel chest. “A stupid, ignorant peasant greedy for land, just like his mother. He’s our enemy. That’s what he is. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Theo, while Antonio simply nodded. It felt like he was signing up to something without knowing exactly what it was. But he hadn’t hesitated. At that moment he thought he would have followed her off a cliff.

“Good. I’m glad we agree,” she said and smiled, and he took it as a gift that she was bestowing directly on him. A spark of connection between them.

“Will you come back?” asked Antonio, and the question restored Theo to himself. Behind him, the church bell was tolling the hour.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll find a way. And thank you. You showed me so much. I won’t forget.”

He stepped forward and Antonio put out his arms and hugged him hard and Theo realized he was crying. And Maria was watching him. And he wanted to reach out to her too. But he couldn’t. He mustn’t. He had to go.