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“I guess not,” said Theo distractedly. He was thinking about Maria.

“But I think maybe you do,” said Antonio, taking hold of Theo’s arm so that he had to stop. “At least listen to a little advice. See my sister if you like, but don’t fall in love with her. It’ll bring you nothing but grief. She doesn’t want love; she wants freedom. Freedom and power, although she won’t admit that last part.”

“I think it’s a bit late for advice,” said Theo, smiling sadly.

Antonio looked hard at his friend and then shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “But if it’s true, don’t tell her. She likes you now, but she’ll get tired of you very quickly if you play the lovelorn boy and ask to be her novio . You’ll be like Primitivo, but without even his crazy violence to commend you. I’m saying this for your own good. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said Theo. “I understand. But I’m not a fool. I know it already.”

“Well, at least that’s something,” said Antonio, looking relieved. “And now maybe we can forget about my sister and think of something more rewarding. Like lunch, for instance? I’m famished.”

“All right.” Theo nodded. But they’d walked on only a few yards when he returned to the subject of Maria. “How do you know she likes me?” he asked.

“Because she told me so. A breath of fresh air is what she called you, I seem to remember.”

Antonio blew air out of his mouth and smiled, but Theo ignored his attempt at comedy. “Anything else?” he pressed.

“She said she’s never met anyone like you before. But whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. Traveling the world isn’t part of the Anarchist training book, the last time I looked. And now, enough! I’ve told you what will happen if you carry on with this obsession, and I’ve had my fill of talking about my sister for one day.”

“Okay,” said Theo, raising his hands in mock surrender and this time staying true to his word.

But that didn’t stop him thinking about all that had happened, puzzling over everything Maria had said, and Antonio too. He knew his friend was right when he’d said that his sister liked power. He could see how she’d used him to inflame Primitivo, but there was more to the way she looked at him than that. He could feel her interest in him, her attention. It was real. He knew it was. Perhaps riling up Primitivo was her way of not having to face what she felt.

He longed to reach out to her and reveal himself, but he sensed that Antonio was right that this could lead her to withdraw. She was quicksilver, acting on the instinct of the moment. It was enough that a seed had been planted; if he didn’t force it, then maybe it would grow.

Primitivo was away sometimes in the weeks that followed, laboring with his father in the fields when work was available, and with only her brother present as a chaperone, Maria became freer, flirting with Theo and confiding in him and sometimes touching his hand to emphasize a point, apparently unaware of the charge she was sending through his body.

He could never get used to the flash of her eyes or the sweep of her hair, the sense that she was in perpetual movement, searching for new experience, just as he had dreamed of adventure as a boy in New York. He recognized that they were alike in this, and he felt a kinship with her that was as real as the longing that gave him no rest, pulsing in his brain day and night. The miasma of feelings that he called love.

“Everything in this village is so narrow,” she told him, tapping her foot on the ground to vent her frustration. “Nothing happens; nothing changes. People become their parents. They’re born, they get married, they die. On and on, round and round, like mice on a wheel. It’s unbearable.”

They were sitting on the low wall inside the stone arcade where Theo had met Maria the previous summer: a moment that had remained as vivid in his mind as if it had occurred just the day before. Antonio had left them alone for a moment while he went to speak to an acquaintance out in the square.

“But you changed,” said Theo. “You weren’t born an Anarchist, were you? It’s the opposite of what your father would’ve wanted you to be. Something must have happened to cause that, surely?”

Maria was silent and Theo was worried for a moment that he had offended her, but then she smiled. “You’re right,” she said. “Something did happen here, and I spoke as if it didn’t. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t the answer Theo had been expecting. Maria was always so quick and confident. She wasn’t one to criticize herself.

“What was it?” As he asked the question, he realized how badly he wanted to know the answer. He had told Maria so much about himself, and yet he still knew next to nothing about her. It was as if she’d wanted it that way, or maybe it was just that she wouldn’t talk about herself when others were present.

“I’ll show you if you like,” she said, surprising him again as she got up and set off along the arcade with Theo following in her wake.

At the end she turned sharp left, crossing quickly to the open door of the ayuntamiento, and they went inside. It was siesta time and the place was empty.

“Shouldn’t we get Antonio?” Theo asked. He was an outsider in the village, but he knew enough of its ways by now to know that it would cause a scandal if he and Maria were found together.

“Do you want to?” she asked, turning the question around.

Theo hesitated and then shook his head and Maria smiled, beckoning him forward into a large room to the right of the entrance hall. A line of chairs was stacked against the far wall, but there was otherwise no furniture, and sheer lace curtains that had seen better days hung down over the tall windows, diffusing the incoming sunlight. Theo guessed that the room was used for meetings and that these were infrequent, judging from the fine layer of dust covering the tiled floor. He breathed easier, thinking there was a good chance that no one would come in, but at the same time he could feel his heart beating hard. It was the first time he and Maria had been alone together, and she was the one who had brought that about.

“This is where I met Nicolás. Two years ago next month,” she said, breaking the pressing silence that had enveloped them after she’d closed the door. “I was standing over there, looking at a painting”—she pointed to the blank stretch of wall behind the stacked-up chairs—“and he came up to me and we talked about it. I think it was the most important conversation of my life.”

“Who’s Nicolás?” asked Theo, feeling confused. It wasn’t a name he’d ever heard Maria refer to before.

“He was a missionary. Don’t worry—not a religious one,” said Maria, laughing when she saw Theo’s look of bewilderment. “Educational missions were an idea of the new liberal government after they got rid of the king—they sent teachers out into the countryside to show the peasants that there was more to life than working in the fields. There were four of them that came here—three young men and a woman. They drove up the hill in a clapped-out truck with a gramophone and books and six big paintings packed in the back, belching out so much exhaust smoke that we didn’t think it would make it to the top. But it did, and that afternoon they hung the pictures up in here with a sign outside saying Museum of the People . There were flowers on tables and a colored carpet on the floor and violins playing on the gramophone. You wouldn’t have recognized the place. It was beautiful ...” Maria broke off with a distant look in her eye, as if she were seeing the room not as it was now but as it had been two years before.

“What kind of paintings were they?” Theo asked, impressed by the vivid strangeness of the scene Maria was describing.

“Copies of Spanish masterpieces in the Prado. The idea was that we had a right to see them because they belonged to all of Spain, not just the rich people in Madrid. There were religious pictures, of course, and portraits, and then there was the Goya. The painting was called The Third of May 1808 . I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Why? What’s it a picture of?” asked Theo, angry with himself that he had never heard of the painting and knew nothing of the artist.

“An execution. One that’s about to happen, and the kneeling man with his hands up in the middle of the picture knows that there’s no escape. You can tell from the look in his eyes. He’s terrified, outraged that his life is going to end, but the point is it doesn’t matter. All around him are peasants that have already been shot and behind him are those that are going to be next, and the soldiers in the firing squad don’t care. They’re pitiless. Nothing will stop them. The man’s not a martyr or a hero, he’s just a target—a sunburnt laborer in a white smock who they’re going to kill. There’s no hope, no justice, no God—that’s what the picture is saying.”

“But you don’t believe that,” said Theo, taken aback. “About the hope, I mean. I know you don’t.”

“No, you’re right, but you have to start with what Goya says. That’s what Nicolás told me. He said no one had painted like that before. Before him, it was always how things should be, not how they are. But Goya told the truth. That the rich are pitiless and cruel and will always starve and kill the poor to keep what they have, because that’s their nature. So we have to end all the things that subjugate—money, capitalism, the state, the Church. It’s the only way to—”

“Nicolás was an Anarchist?” Theo interrupted. He knew what Maria believed; what he wanted to know was why.

“Yes,” she said. “I met him again the next day and he gave me books, and we walked through the village, and he made me see it in a way I never had before. He showed me the houses of the rich and the hovels of the poor. He ran his hands over the crumbling walls and he told me that the poor starved because they were ignorant, and he pointed up to the church and said that it kept them that way with its lies, but that a change was coming and that we had to help make it happen, that we could—” Maria stopped suddenly, the rising tide of her recollection cut off as she turned away, putting her hand up to her face, as if to ward off an attack.

“Could what?” Theo asked.

She shook her head, and he could see that there were tears glistening in her eyes and that her small hands were balled into fists.

“What happened, Maria?” he pressed, putting his hand on her arm for a moment. “Please tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? Something must have.” The deflation with which she pronounced the single word, nada , was like a death, a sudden plunge into void that he instinctively rebelled against.

“Someone saw us together and told my father. In this village, there are eyes in every window, whispers behind every door.”

“What did he do?”

“Shut me up and locked the door, and kept it locked until the mission left. They never came back.”

“Why?”

“The Right won the election.” Maria shrugged. It was as if the energy had drained from her as her vision of the past slipped away. The dreary, empty room in which they were standing had replaced the art gallery it had once been.

“What about Nicolás?” Theo asked. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I wrote a letter to the ministry in Madrid but I never got a reply. And if he wrote to me, my father would have intercepted it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Theo, catching the sadness in her voice. “I know what it’s like to lose a teacher.”

Maria nodded. “You remind me of him,” she said, looking closely at Theo now as if she was measuring him, trying to get a sense of who he really was. “You know things, you’ve seen the world, and you’ve tried to change it too. I admire that. New York, London—when you talk, it’s as if I can see the buildings and the crowds and the traffic and the noise. Life: I can feel its pull. Here!” She clasped her hand to her chest. “It’s everything that this place is not. And I think it has to mean something that you found me here, because it’s so unlikely. No one comes to a village like this, but Nicolás did, and now you too. But then I lie awake at night and think that you are devils sent to taunt me.” She laughed bitterly. “You will leave just like he did, because you are free, while I am in chains and can’t escape. You can’t see them, but they’re as real as the curtains on those windows over there. My father holds me in his fat fist and wants to sell me to the highest bidder like I’m one of his prize pigs fattened for the slaughter, and he laughs when I protest. Laughs! Do you know that?”

“I won’t let it happen,” said Theo, even though he had no idea what he could do to stop it.

“Nor will I,” she said with renewed passion. “Because I believe that the day is coming when we will all be free. Not just me, everyone. And for that we will have to draw blood. Are you prepared for that, Theo? To join me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. It would have been easier to lie, except that he had promised himself to always tell her the truth.

“Why? Why can’t you believe?”

It was the same question he’d so often asked himself. From the day he broke his mother’s Christ statue in the apartment in New York through his dogged refusal to embrace Esmond’s Marxism at Saint Gregory’s. He remembered Carlos’s answer at the inn when he’d asked how the Anarchists would achieve liberation: when “ the last marquis has been strangled with the guts of the last priest. ” He couldn’t fight for that.

“It’s who I am, always on the outside looking in,” he said sadly. “But I promise I’ll fight for you. Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, and it was as if the words had been dragged from her against her will. “I haven’t met anyone like you before.”

“Nor me you,” he replied. He was filled with a sudden elation, knowing with certainty for the first time that Maria cared for him. She’d said as much to Antonio, but it was different to hear it from her directly. He wanted to take her soft hands in his and draw her to him and tell her what he felt. Put an end to the waiting and the longing, regardless of the consequences and Antonio’s warnings.

But perhaps she sensed this, because she moved away just as he was about to speak. “I’ve got to go,” she said without explaining why. “Wait a minute before you come out. I don’t want my father to see us.”

But then no sooner had she left than she put her head back around the door. “I’m glad I told you about Nicolás,” she said. “I didn’t know I was going to, but then I did. It’ll be our secret.”

And before he could think of a reply, she was gone.

Theo couldn’t sleep that night or the next. He paced his room or the moonlit terrado , waiting for the dawn to bring another day when he could see Maria again. His love was an addiction, eating him up from the inside.

He longed to kneel down beside her and make his confession and put an end to the uncertainty between them. The way she touched him and watched him seemed to invite that, as if that was what she wanted too. But each time he was tempted, he drew back, remembering Antonio’s advice.

He couldn’t deceive himself. He was sure he would lose her if he told her, and the way she spoke of love was like a warning.

“These girls are such fools,” she said as they sat with Antonio in the main square one evening a few days later, watching the paseo. It was twilight and Theo had been filled with that same electric sense of possibility that he had felt in the same place a year before, until Maria’s icy contempt brought him crashing down to earth. “Look at them! They’re like animals in a zoo,” she jeered, spitting out her words. “All they care about is finding a novio and then hanging on to him for dear life until they’ve got him to the altar.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” asked Antonio, smiling.

“Because there should be more to life than that,” she said passionately. “Women should be free. They’re as good as men, and they should have the same rights to study and get good jobs, but instead they’re just cleaners and child rearers. That’s all they have to look forward to—stuck in their miserable houses with screaming babies, while their husbands drink away the family’s money at bars like this. Old before their time.”

“But that’s what they want, isn’t it? To get married and have houses and children?” asked Antonio, who seemed to be enjoying playing devil’s advocate.

“Only because they don’t know any better,” said Maria. “And because they’re frightened of idiots like you laughing at them because they’re spinsters. Solterona —that’s the dirtiest word in our language, but it should be the proudest.”

“ Maria la Solterona! ” said Antonio, laughing. “It certainly has a ring to it.”

“You can laugh at me all you like, but it won’t change the fact that you’re a weak-willed coward who jumps when Dad snaps his fingers. You don’t want to join the army, but you’re going because he tells you to. It’s pathetic, and I won’t let that happen to me. Not now, not ever. I’d rather die than marry that pig Pedrito!”

“Maybe you’ll have to, when the time comes,” said Antonio, who seemed to have lost his sense of humor in the face of Maria’s attack.

They were silent, with Antonio turned away in his chair, watching the girls in the square, and Maria breathing hard, trying to control her anger. Theo could see how it was only her brother who met her on equal terms and told her what he thought, and how sometimes she hated him for it, even if she loved him too.

“Antonio doesn’t understand because he’s Spanish and so he thinks that women are men’s property,” she said, laying her hand on Theo’s wrist. “But you’re not like that, are you? In America it’s different.”

Theo wanted to agree with both statements, so he didn’t know whether to nod or shake his head, and ended up doing a bit of both. Anything to keep her hand where it was.

“It’s all going to change,” she went on after a moment with a faraway look in her eye, and it seemed to Theo as if they were back in the ayuntamiento and she was testing him again. “There’s no going back now, not after the rebellion in the North. Soon it won’t just be Asturias, it will be the whole country up in flames. Freedom is coming. It’s so close I can feel it. Can’t you?”

“Yes,” said Theo. And he wasn’t lying. Something was coming. He was sure of that much. What it was he didn’t know, but he could smell it in the air, thick and heavy.