Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

The Lucifer of Blue SHERRY COLDSMITH

THE LONDON TIMES, THE New York Times, bad times: in Barcelona in 1937, I had expected to see the stigmata of all three. I’d certainly noticed the reporters; randy and cocktail-loaded, they roamed the Hotel Continental freely. But they had been the only blemish on my visit. The perfect round of fresh linens, good meals, and hot baths had made me wonder if there really was a civil war on. My only acquaintance with the war was through the Spanish newspapers I translated for Dickie. The fact that I knew Spanish was a sign of Dickie’s good old English pragmatism. If he’d wanted a woman whose skills were limited to the boudoir, he would have brought his wife along. Yes, Dickie did everything quick and on the cheap. Even dying. He’d had his heart attack in the time it takes to lose at cards. And now I was packing. The bad times were here.

I was tying the ribbon on my hatbox when I heard the porter’s knock. I reminded myself of Loyalist etiquette—don’t tip, call him camarada and not señor, and if you think he’s a Fascist and you want to expose him, insult the Virgin.

“It’s unlocked.”

The door swung open, revealing the youthful face of one of the New York reporters. “Dangerous, Miss Dade. You never know who might be in the corridor.”

The sight of Gary Bartow put me off my stride a little. He’d been rather cold to me lately. “Would you be a dear and go fetch the porter?”

He smiled, a narrow opening at best. “Where are you really headed, Miss Dade? Poor old Sam Boywold thinks you’re off to Toulouse, but I know for a fact you can’t afford the fare—unless you’ve snagged a little work since the funeral?”

Bartow wasn’t looking me in the eye. I could just imagine how the truth about me was revealed: Dickie’s pudgy fingers are choking a glass stem. Bartow is drawling about the horrors of prostitution. Then Dickie says, “It just so happens that I have some personal experience of the trade…”

I turned to the mirror and blotted my lipstick. I said to Bartow’s reflection: “Do you wish to procure my services?”

“As a translator or a whore?”

Bartow folded his arms, evidently pleased with himself now that he’d insulted me, thereby saluting Motherhood and all that is decent. Some men are so easy to read. You’d think a girl as perceptive as me would be busy in bed, cajoling some journalist into filling Dickie’s shoes. But I had pretended to be an ordinary career girl; now, I wanted nothing more than to sneak away quietly, before more people found out I was a liar.

I pulled on my coat, picked up my portmanteau and my hat-box, all without help. I said as sincerely as I could, “I hope your stay in Barcelona turns out better than mine.”

I was halfway down the hall when I heard him come running after me.

Bartow actually insisted on riding in the taxi with me, though he kept very quiet. The taxi pushed its way past cyclists and donkey carts in the Plaza de Cataluña, keeping a pace that a crawling baby could rival. The buildings were tall and narrow, with iron balconies and triplets of arched windows. A moldy winter distemper had crept up the sallow walls. I wondered at the dearth of motorcars, then remembered reading that the Loyalists had commandeered nearly everything that burned petrol.

The taxi swerved, skirting a water-filled crater in the road. “Did mortar fire do that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Dickie didn’t show you the town? There’re craters all over. And plenty of bullet holes if you look. When the Fascists seized the army, the unions and the Anarchists twisted the government’s arm into giving everyone a gun or two. Though they didn’t have to twist very hard. The government had to make up for the army it had lost to Franco. In Barcelona it was mainly the Anarchists who drove the Fascists out last summer. And while they were at it, they seized the city government.”

“Sheer opportunism.”

“Maybe. But if Uncle Sam ever calls me up to fight for the sake of the future, he’d better ask me what kind of future I want.”

“And he’d better not call collect,” I said, quoting Mr. Durante. I studied our surroundings more closely. The red-and-black flag of the Anarchists and the tricolor of the Spanish government hung from many shop windows. Signs boasting the establishment of a collectiva were everywhere, even on the bootblacks’ boxes. Political posters smothered the walls. What bare masonry you could see was scarred and pitted. Had gunfire really done that?

The taxi pulled up outside a terraced house, a sliver of Gothic architecture that soared skyward. As I got out, Bartow said, “Why don’t you work at the hotel? I’m sure—”

“Wives,” I answered simply. “Some men travel with theirs.”

He looked down at his big, scarred hands. He hadn’t always been a reporter. “Then come and work for me, for heaven’s sake. I don’t trust my translator—”

I tried to smile graciously. “You wouldn’t tell a barber to hang up his towel just because his razor’s been stolen.”

He gave me an embarrassed smile. Before he could say more, I went to join my luggage inside the deep alcove of the house’s entrance. Wrought iron like a skein of black lace protected the door’s window and made it impossible to see inside. I pressed the bell stud. I considered that I’d come to the wrong place, that this was not Saint Mary’s Infirmary. But then I noticed the sign. In handwritten letters, it read, “Patrons are reminded that the women inside are comrades.” I laughed out loud. What did the girls here think a rigid pecker was? Some form of revolutionary salute?

I was still laughing when the bolt clicked back. A young woman appeared and burbled something in Catalan. She wore a tight skirt and an old-fashioned tulle fichu that sculpted her bosom into buoyancy. “Are you in trouble, camarada? We know someone who can help you.”

I was sure that she did, but it wasn’t an abortionist I needed right now. “I telephoned yesterday. I’m Miss Dade.”

Her smile gave way to a gaze of bold appraisal. Everyone in Loyalist Spain stared at you like that, even the bellboys and lift attendants. I knew what she was thinking. Though I had my coat on, it was easy to tell I was too thin for Spanish tastes.

“May I speak to the proprietor please?”

The woman looked as though she might spit at me. “If you can ask that, you are no comrade.”

At first, I had trouble understanding her meaning. Then the word collectiva hit me with full force. It seemed even the whores had lost their senses. A knocking shop without a madame would be like a war without a general. Who mollified a patron when he couldn’t have the girl he wanted? Who threw the girl out for shamming an illness? And what was to keep the girls from stealing from me?

I pulled myself up straight. If I didn’t find work soon, I wouldn’t have any money to steal. “Make me a comrade, then. Swear me in. I’ll take an oath in blood if I have to.”

She gave a little satisfied grunt. “Come back later. We’re busy right now.”

I didn’t buy it. “I have two grams of Salvaran and the means to dispense it, comrade.” She looked at me quizzically. “Medicine, darling. It’s good for the clap.”

Now I did have her attention. Without a complaint, she helped me get my luggage inside the foyer. It was a dark, stark place, with a mahogany table and a single brass lamp with a fringed, box shade. A long flight of stairs led upward, then curled back on itself, vanishing into the murk. I followed her down a corridor past the staircase. I glanced into the salon. Though the shutters were closed, I could make out satin pillows and brocatelle sofas. Everything was excruciatingly clean. Carlisle Street had been just the same, as if to reassure the gents that syphilis was like ptomaine and could therefore be warred against with brush and bucket.

We went through another door. The light was blinding after the hall. Seven or maybe eight women sat in a room that was half dayroom and half glassed-in loggia, like a greenhouse. Ferns, geraniums and bloodred hyacinths sprouted from every shelf and alcove. There was a child in the middle of the group, seated on a hassock in a cloud of white lace flounces, her face buried in her handkerchief. The sobs were mixed with little gasps of Catalan. Her voice was decidedly unchildlike.

She lifted her face from the hankie. I saw from her bulging forehead that she was a dwarf, with deep-set eyes imprisoned in a whorl of blue paint. She was an improbable schoolgirl in her lace and pigtails. The other women, all in shifts and nightdresses, were clustered around her, trying to get her to drink from a porrón, a beaker that shoots a stream of wine directly into the mouth, bypassing germ-ridden lips. The porrón is ideal for passing around.

One woman, round and rosy in the flesh, looked up and said, “The English girl?” The gaiety in her voice cheered me. She got up, leaving the other women to comfort the dwarf.

“Salud!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. Though still in her nightdress, she was painted up like an actress who works on a stage a thousand miles from the audience. “I have been praying for a girl to make the Americans happy. They like them skinny.”

“We shouldn’t let her join,” the one who’d brought me in said. “She doesn’t know what comradeship is.”

“Alma, give her a chance,” said the woman in front of me. “This is Alma Almirall, Miss Dade. I am Jacinta.” She gestured that she would introduce me to the others later. The two of them led me upstairs.

Alma and Jacinta were lounging on the cot next to mine in the house’s stuffy attic dormitory. They eyed my things while I put them away, making me wish I had a lockable case for my silks.

“What’s wrong with the girl downstairs?” I asked.

Alma snorted. “We’d all like to know that. We took her in because we felt sorry for her and now she cries all the time.”

“Don’t listen to Alma,” Jacinta said. “Gabriella has plenty reason to be upset. You might have heard about—”

Alma interrupted with a groan. “The wilder the story, the more Jacinta repeats it. But tell her the Fascists are a kilometer from Madrid and she forgets it before dinner. You know the priest who carved his own throat?”

“Father Abelardo?” I asked. He had bled all over the steps of the Sagrada Familia church—a locked church—I had read. Loyalist Spain had little love for clerics.

Jacinta nodded excitedly. “He bade his followers to water his grave with the blood of whores, to win the Evil One’s assistance. And you know, those three girls did disappear—”

“And my auntie’s parakeet got sick that week, too,” Alma said, with an impatient clink of her bracelets.

“Is that why Gabriella was crying?” I asked. “Did she know the girls?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think she knew the priest.” Jacinta’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “She knows he can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get Lucifer to bring a new army to Franco.”

I couldn’t help laughing. She’d obviously been reading one of the thrill-mongering pro-Fascist rags known to prey on the superstitious. “So you don’t know why Gabriella is crying at all, do you?”

Jacinta sat up, lifting her chin very primly. “Why would she keep the newspaper clipping about him in her drawer?”

Alma pinched Jacinta’s plump thigh. “Why would you know what’s in her drawer?”

While I carefully folded the last of my silks, Jacinta said, “A friend of mine saw a vapor at the Sagrada cemetery—”

“Steaming horseshit,” Alma declared.

I wished the girls would leave me to my Penguin. And my plans. In six weeks, I should have enough to take me to France on a holiday and then on to England. The Continent could keep its extremes, its Hitlers and bead mumblers. I’d had enough.

Alma got up from her sagging bed. She took my hat from the stand and tried it on, admiring herself in the mirror. “How did you run out of money?”

The hat, an indigo tricorne, looked lovely on her. Too lovely. “The man who brought me here liked to gamble.”

“You gave him your money?” Jacinta asked.

“No, he stole it from my hiding place. Then he lost it, to another newspaperman. Eddie Mercel? He has a famous byline.” But of course they hadn’t heard of him. “Anyway, Dickie had the good grace to die of a heart attack right on the card table.”

This made even Alma laugh. She was responsible for the financial scheme around here, I’d been told. Soldiers from the Loyalist militias were charged a normal fee. Men who had mistreated or knocked up their girlfriends were charged double. Suspected Fascist sympathizers were reported to a militia man. I can’t say I liked the world I was finding myself in, but my curiosity was piqued. And where would I be without curiosity? I’d be in a café on Brighton’s promenade, wiping down tables and accepting the first spotty youth’s offer of six brats and a crumbling terraced house.

“Why didn’t you get it back from this Mercel?” Alma asked.

“He won it fairly. I did ask Eddie for it,” I hastened to add. “Demanded it in fact but—”

“You didn’t get it back,” Alma said sneeringly. She repositioned the hat and posed as if for a photograph. “Vida,” she said, rolling my name around on her tongue. “You should live up to a name like that.”

In Spanish, it meant “life” but for my mother it had meant “visionary.” At the time of my birth, she had still believed that England’s green and reasonable land was everything her English soldier had promised, a paradise where a Russian Jewess could know a life of peace and tolerance.

“Jacinta, I’m going out,” Alma said.

“You haven’t got time to go anywhere!”

“My monthly came early,” she said breezily, then she sauntered out the door, my hat on her head.

I suppose that many brothels are started in times of war but I wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to invest in a Turkish bath, like the one we had in Finsbury back home. Many of the militiamen who came to us were staying in evil little boardinghouses that did not offer the means of a good wash. These men would come to our door with no higher ambition than a bath. They shuffled in, their new boots already on their feet, their parcels of new clothes in their arms. Fortunately, the girls had purchased several tin tubs. Filling bucket and tub was up to the gentlemen themselves.

I should admit I did not become aware of this straight away. On that first evening, I seldom stepped into the salon, or into the hall for that matter. Instead, I stayed in the Blue Suite, one of the six bedrooms on the middle floors (though if the room had any color scheme at all, I was unable to detect it). There I waited for my tick-and-turns. I had thought the girls simpleminded when they said men would come to me without seeing the goods first. But the first militiaman came along soon enough, though “man” is an overstatement. He was barely sixteen, a Spaniard, in fact. He spent himself in my hands while I examined him. He stuttered something, then disappeared like a fawn.

After he’d left, it struck me that here, unlike Carlisle Street, I wouldn’t be relying on regulars. I wouldn’t have to feign pleasure in the hope of persuading some East India banker that I gave better value than the competition. The war, I imagined, would always send along another soldier.

My mind humming pleasantly with this thought, I cracked the door a little, to signal I was ready for the next man. He came along before I had time to touch my book (Mr. Forster’s A Passage to India). It seemed that the militiamen did trust the camaradas to deliver up one red-haired, English-speaking girl. This lad, like the last one, wore a red-and-black scarf, the closest the Anarchist militiamen came to a uniform. His new trousers were excruciatingly stiff. He was scarcely inside the door when he said, in English, “Can you really—”

“It’s my mother tongue, too,” I said.

I was not at all prepared for what happened next. He plopped down on the threadbare chaise, planted his face in his hands, and cried.

“Wh-wh-what’s wrong?” I asked.

It took some minutes—too many minutes—to get him calm again. It seemed that he hadn’t heard a woman speak his own language since he’d left Chicago. He declared me beautiful. To my horror, I contradicted him. He served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—La Quince Brigada—he told me proudly. The Quince Brigade I told him and he laughed heartily at my lame joke. I told myself that the next time I saw him, I would have better jokes to tell.

A little after 3:00 A.M., I went to the loggia, a watery cocoa in my hand. As I entered, I caught a glimpse of Gabriella as she slammed the door to the patio behind her.

“Gabriella, come back!” Jacinta called.

Jacinta was sitting on a dusty wicker sofa, a frown on her face, her maquillage thoroughly wilted at this hour. “Vida, maybe you can figure out why she’s mad at me.”

I had an urge to march upstairs to bed, but I took a seat beside her. No doubt, she had been grilling Gabriella about the deranged Father Abelardo.

“A Captain Hidalgo came to her this evening,” Jacinta said, sighing. “Not for the usual, though. I was passing in the hall and I couldn’t help overhearing his voice.”

“I see.”

“He was calling her a traitor. I listened only because I wanted to find out why all the girls in Gabriella’s old infirmary all quit at the same time. Hidalgo said that all the other girls had the decency to go back to their families. Well, just now I asked Gabriella what Hidalgo thought he was doing, talking to her like that. I was very polite, you see, and—”

The door to the house swung open. Alma walked in, flinging her coat off and clicking her hands as if she wore castañets. She still had my tricorne. Two more girls came in behind her, wearing warm, sturdy robes. They, too, had cocoas.

“I did it, Vida!” Alma said. She plunged a hand into the frothy fichu of her blouse and brought out a roll of pesetas. Licking her fingers, she began counting off the notes.

“My money!” I carefully put my cup down. Then I lunged toward her.

“Not so fast.” she said in English. Apparently, the Yanks had taught her something. “Half for the house, half for you.”

I didn’t like this idea but then she had done the work. “And what about you?”

“De nada.”

I had encountered this in Spain before. Ask a Spaniard for a lift to the station and she’ll take you all the way to France. Though it broke my heart to do it, I offered her half of my half.

Alma shook her head. “You will stay here and teach me English. Reading and writing. Okay?”

I smiled to hide my nervousness. “One doesn’t learn the language of Shakespeare in just a few lessons.”

Her hands had found their way to her hips. “So? How long did it take you to learn the language of Cervantes?”

“I was an unusually quick study.”

“Close the door!” Jacinta said, interrupting us. “You’re letting all the heat out.” One of the girls had stepped out onto the patio.

“I think there’s a swan out here,” the girl called back.

“You need spectacles,” Alma said.

But we all followed her outside, curious to see this renegade swan. The air was crisp for once. All trace of the cold mist we’d had during the day had vanished. There was indeed a flash of white in the poplar’s branches. We all realized, at the same time, that we were looking at a lacy skirt, fluttering in the faint breeze. Gabriella had hung herself.

To me, Gabriella’s suicide was a sign of loss of nerve during wartime. I didn’t let it prevent me from honoring my obligation to Alma or from settling into a routine. Oh, I was homesick at times. To drink a strong cup of tea, to get the newspaper off the steps in the morning, to buy a Penguin in Charing Cross Road, would have been heaven. The only thing I didn’t miss was my old customers at Carlisle Street: junior ministers who railed about racial hygiene; Harley Street doctors who scrutinized your female parts as if they’d like to see them pickled in a pathological museum. Still, there was worse employment. I had once been a typist at three pounds, two shillings a week. In that profession, having a good education means that, as well as typing a young man’s dissertation, you help him write it. If you’re lucky, he’ll buy you a nosegay.

Telling Alma about my old customers helped to usher them into distant memory. Alma and I, the only speakers of English in the house, were like children with a secret code. Alma was a surprise in both languages, however. She loved the revolution and Buster Keaton one-reelers. She yearned for Anarchist brotherhood yet planned to desert to England, and then to America if the Fascists got too close.

“When I get to England,” she said one day, “I’m giving up the life.”

“You’d rather scrub floors? Would this be some penance for leaving Barcelona?”

“I couldn’t do this work anywhere else,” she insisted. “To work this life in England would always remind me of here, where I was happy. Aren’t you happy here? The priests may not think so, but we’re like a tonic for our boys.”

To hear Alma talk, being a prostitute during wartime was like working for the Red Cross. You’d think the war depended on us. I suspected that Alma’s reassurances were for her own benefit; they made her feel less of a coward for not joining her sister at the front.

There was something about Barcelona’s atmosphere of revolutionary hope that put courage into everyone. Even Gary Bartow had joined the militias. His letters were fascinating. The brigadistas had a passion for equality and brotherhood that may have played well in America, for all I knew, but would have gotten them laughed out of London. Mr. Bartow wrote that neither side had enough ammunition to do anything more than hold the line and carry out a raid or two. Lice were a bigger worry than the enemy. Still, hearing of the war, even in its current stalemate, reminded me of how easily I had slept back home.

I told myself that I was sleeping just as easily here. Business was getting brisker all the time. The custom was steady and the competition peculiarly feeble, for Gabriella’s brothel was not the only one to close. Two more followed suit because the girls inside suddenly swore off the trade. If this kept up, I would have a large pot to take back to Britain, where a good many people thought Mussolini was the name of an opera singer.

One spring evening, some of us sat in the salon, the phonograph idle because my friend back home had yet to send us the needle that could not be had in Barcelona for love or money (we had tried both). It was a quiet night. No militia transports had come in that day and the train from Barbastro was keeping to a Spanish timetable. It was due in today but not expected until tomorrow. I was reading a letter from Gary Bartow. He hoped to be on the Barbastro train.

The front door’s buzzer went off. I was having my monthly so it was my turn to officiate. I hauled myself out of the deeply puckered chair.

The man I admitted into the foyer was so peculiar it was hard not to stare. His skin was so pale and taut it looked like it had been glued directly to his bones, with no intervening tissue. His tongue worked in his mouth for a moment, then he said, “Bring me a girl.” The voice was more powerful than I had expected. He held out a roll of pesetas.

“Camarada, wouldn’t you be better off getting a doctor?”

His eyes brightened for a moment, as if blazing with rage. The words, “I got the money,” rattled across his lips.

I walked back into the salon. “This one looks like he’s been put through a wringer,” I whispered, loud enough for them all to hear.

Jacinta put down the penny dreadful she’d been reading, and said, “Last week, I had to take the one with no nose!”

There followed a clamor of excuses from Esmeralda and the other girls. Finally, Alma stood up and left the parlor.

I sat down and picked up the Lorca poem she’d been translating, a likening of the sea to Lucifer. Not content to placidly reflect the sky’s blue depths, the sea desired Heaven’s azure light for itself, and was thus condemned to the endless spasms of waves. Finding the verse an inauspicious omen, I didn’t read the rest of the poem but took to staring at the Chinese clock on the mantelpiece. Its gold orbs seemed not to spin at all. Above it, there hung a painting of two nude women embracing. I looked from the painting to the clock, back to the painting, back to the clock. A dried husk like Alma’s customer could take hours. Some clever inventor, I thought, needs to build a machine that will dangle your book from the ceiling, so you can read while the gent pumps away.

After forty minutes, I decided he’d gotten his money’s worth. I marched up the stairs, then knocked on the door of the Green Suite, the room Alma preferred. “Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

There was no answer. Perhaps she’d decided on another room. Plenty were available on such a slow night. I turned the knob and found to my horror that it was locked. I put my eye to the keyhole but saw only a chair. “Alma! Alma!” I cried. There was no answer. “Jacinta! Esmeralda! Where is the key?”

Pandemonium followed: doors swinging open, nerves jangling, Jacinta shouting that no one had keys to the rooms. No one had ever had them. She ran upstairs, the house’s front and back door keys in her hands.

“Hurry!”

Neither key fitted the lock. She reinserted the first one, jiggled and twisted and worked at it until the latch popped.

Jacinta flung the door open. Before I could see the bed, I saw Jacinta cross herself, the first time anyone in Spain had done this in my presence. Then I looked at the bed.

Alma was straining at the ribbons that bound her hands and feet to the bed. A rag separated her jaws. Her skin—I had always admired its fine, caramel cast—was smothered in a pale, viscous sap. It had soaked the rag in her mouth and glued her eyes shut. I mention her condition first because it was the most important thing to me and because the object on top of her was not comprehensible. My senses denied it. But like a nightmare that begins slowly, the thing gathered detail. The long bones of his feet and legs, lying between her whitened legs, reminded me of scraps tossed out after a feast. Its white hipbones lay caught between her thighs and its rib cage had engulfed her breasts completely, as if the skeleton had not possessed a sternum. The evil grin of its skull lay close to her slippery cheek.

Alma struggled to say something. It sounded like, “my eyes.”

Constantina rushed over to rub Alma’s eyes with the corner of the sheet. “Keep them closed, just for a second,” I said.

I stood over the bed and tried to yank the skeleton away by its feet. The bones snapped off in my hands. I moved around the bed, gripped the hipbone and the rib cage and gently pulled. There was a hideous, sucking sound as the thing came away. I wrapped the bones in a sheet while Constantina finished wiping Alma’s eyelids. “Take that thing downstairs and burn it. Get her a robe, someone!” Esmeralda found a nightgown. It seemed that Jacinta had fled.

Alma opened her eyes. “Vida,” she said plaintively. I helped her put her arms in the gown. She was as limp as warm candle wax.

We scrubbed her with pumice stones until her flesh glowed and the rich, rotting smell of semen was gone. The filling of the bath and the rattle of the boiler were the only sounds we made. Alma did not say a word. Perhaps somewhere there is a language that provides the means to explain what we had seen. But none of us could speak it, so we said nothing at all.

Sometime in the night, I’d heard Jacinta creep back into her bed. I had gone to her for comfort but had found myself comforting her. It seemed that she had never forgotten Gabriella’s hoarded newspaper clipping. In her tormented imagination, the skeleton was the advance guard of Satan’s army, called down by Father Abelardo and his blood-nourished grave. Gabriella, Jacinta insisted, had been bedded by one. Having no better explanation of what we’d seen, I kept watch over Alma throughout the night, lest she wake and become another swan in our trees.

The next morning, Alma’s smile upon waking was bracing. It seemed possible, even likely, that she remembered nothing.

“When does the train from Barbastro come in?” she asked. A sigh came from Jacinta’s bed. She was waking up.

“I imagine it’s already in,” I said.

“Then why are we all sleeping?”

I looked up at the attic windows. Bright morning sunlight rimmed the black shades. “It’s hours until we open, Alma.”

She sat up and glanced at the slumbering figures of the other girls with disapproval. “We should open now.”

“Steady on,” I said. “A girl’s got to have some time off.”

She swung her legs down and pushed up from the cot over my protests. “I will call Santiago,” she said, referring to the station-master. “He’ll pass on the word we’re open.”

I laughed aloud, which was the wrong thing to do, I know, but I’m never at my best when sleep runs short. “You’ll never get the others to vote for that!”

Jacinta was now sitting up, her face long with worry. Alma was at her mirror, washing herself at the basin on the floor and rubbing her feet with perfumed oil. Esmeralda, confused, went to the window and tugged the cord, flooding the attic with light. Everyone was staring at Alma.

“I don’t think it’s good for you to work today,” I said.

She whirled around, eyes blazing. “You dare to say that when you know how they risk their lives for us! How could you refuse a single one of them?”

“I only refuse the ones who can’t pay.” She seemed to flinch away from this. “You aren’t suggesting we give it away, surely.”

Jacinta got up and came to Alma’s side. “Alma, you must rest. Remember Gabriella.”

Alma pushed her away. “She was an hysteric. Why would she have anything to do with what happened to me?”

Everyone was holding her breath and praying that Alma would say what had happened. She dragged her brush through her hair and said, “Who crossed herself last night, I want to know? Who prayed while I was sleeping?” The other girls all lowered their eyes. “You pathetic, ignorant whores. He gave me chloroform. I passed out. Who knows what happened? He had an accomplice. The skeleton was brought in through the window, maybe. Or up the stairs while you sat on your fat behinds. The Fascists torment us to destroy our will! They know we give our men the will to fight!”

Everyone looked relieved beyond measure. Constantina, the youngest of us, stood up from her bed, her shawl about her shoulders. “We could work free. For a day. To boost morale.”

“I would do it for a day,” Jacinta said.

“Listen to yourselves,” I said, furious. “You’re just whores! The Fascists don’t waste a single thought on you. The lack of a nail in a horseshoe will make more difference to the war than all the whores in the world.”

“Get out,” Alma said.

I struggled to remain charitable. “Well, I have got my monthly,” I said evenly. No one spoke to me as I dressed.

I had spent the day languishing in cafés and dress shops. Finally, desperate for someone to talk to, I remembered Mr. Bartow’s letter. I found him in the Hotel Continental savoring his first cocktail in months. Now we were on the Ramblas, strolling beneath the poplars and the curved necks of the streetlamps, dimmed because of worries about air raids.

“I can’t get over how much has changed here,” he said. “Would you look at that storefront!” We were walking beside the window of an exclusive boutique. Rows of bonbon boxes gleamed like gold teeth. “He was selling supplies to militiamen just a few months ago. And have you noticed all the tailored suits in town? It looks like the upper crust are back from whatever country home they retired to when the Anarchists took over.”

“I like the boutiques.”

He shook his head. “It used to be that the people couldn’t do enough for a militiaman, now they duck across the street when they see him coming.”

“You are a dirty lot before you’ve cleaned yourselves up.”

“Then they should offer us baths, not contempt. I’m afraid it’s all going to come apart, Miss Dade.”

“You journalists are all alarmists.”

“Maybe so. But the Loyalists aren’t getting the help of the British or the French and without that they’re doomed. Moscow won’t help as long as it has an alliance with Paris. The Bolsheviks are telling the Communist brigades to forget about Franco and concentrate on keeping Spanish Morocco from falling to the Loyalists. Because if Spanish North Africans obtain self-rule, then all of the Arabs—in the French holdings as well as in the British Near East—will rebel. Don’t you believe it when the British press blathers on about how the Spanish government can’t be supported as long as it harbors ‘extremists.’ English moderation must be music to Hitler’s ears.”

“You’re a lot of fun.”

“So are you,” he said, without my sarcasm. “Are all London working girls as nice as you? No painted nails? No tight skirts?”

I decided to ignore that. “When I was growing up during the Great War, my mother said that a cloud of evil had descended on Europe. Do you think—”

“That’s happening here? What an odd way to put it.”

I relayed every detail of what I’d seen the night before, including Alma’s explanation. “She’s right, of course. I wouldn’t be so concerned if she hadn’t woken up this morning an even more fanatical revolutionary. Out of pure zeal, she’s giving it away today.”

“So much more sensible to do it for money.”

“If the transaction is a fair one.”

“Spoken like a true Englishwoman—all moderation and sweet reason.” He lit another cigarette. “I’ll worry about Hitler devouring your country some other night. Tonight, I’d like to take you back to my room.”

“I’m indisposed.”

He took my hand. “In my room is one of those huge Victorian showers. You know the kind? Like a big monkey bars with steam blasting you from every direction. We could put it to good use.”

“All right,” I said. “If you promise to stay off politics.”

I was surprised to find myself alone in the bed. He was an early riser, I told myself. I got up, made a toga with the sheet, then found my way into the enormous bathroom. He was at the mirror, his back to me. He’d cleared a patch on the steamy glass and was briskly shaving himself. A towel protected his stiff collar.

“You’re up early.”

“Got things to do,” he said. He didn’t even look at me.

Nostalgically, I glanced at the shower, remembering last night. “When do you go back to the front?”

“I’m not going back,” he said. The razor slipped along his cheek. He was bleeding but seemed not to notice.

“You’re deserting?”

He grinned at his cut. “I’m not a coward. I’m going to fight for Franco.”

I stood there, my jaw dangling, I’m sure. He watched his blood turn the shaving lather pink. “Go on, now,” he said. “Get back on the job and stay there.”

I certainly wasn’t going to let him see how disturbed I was. I stepped back into the room and started getting dressed. I could attend to my morning functions in the lady’s room of the hotel lobby.

Instead of taking a cab, I walked to St. Mary’s, my mind filled with all the things I wished I had said. The more I walked, the more bewildered I became. I thought I knew Gary’s type: a recently baptized militiaman so on fire with brotherhood and justice, he’d die smiling for the cause. What could have changed him in a night? In one, single night?

I rounded the last corner and saw the house there as always, the shudders and blinds tight against the morning sun. The sheer familiarity made my skin prickle. I ran to the door.

I knew that something was wrong as soon as I heard the silence inside. I looked in the parlor but found no one there. I walked down the hall, then opened the door to the loggia, just a crack. The little woodstove was dead. I opened the door the rest of the way and found Jacinta on the wicker sofa. She was staring fearfully into the middle distance. Upon seeing me, she burst into tears.

It was some time before Jacinta could win her breath back from her sobs. But eventually the story came out. Dozens of militiamen had queued up outside once the word of free services had gotten out. All of them were dirty. Many were syphilitic. A citizens’ committee came and tried to shut down the infirmary for the day. The girls went out into the street, to jeer at the committee for being bad comrades. Eight or ten men were loitering at the corner.

Jacinta stared at the floor as if a shell were lying there, waiting to explode. “Those boys shot the committee members, one after another. I tell you, Vida, not one comrade survived.”

“Is Alma alive?”

Her expression was full of pity—pity for me, I realized. “After they shot the comrades, they told Alma to get back to work, to make sure Constantina and Esmeralda worked hard, too. If the whores told anyone about their sickness, the men would come back to kill them.”

“We’re not diseased!”

Jacinta shook her head. “You still don’t understand. Alma and the women who touched her spread disloyalty, just like a fever. It turns good militiamen into the murderers of their comrades. I told you the skeletons were just the beginning.”

My mouth was as dry as sand. “You’re talking rubbish, Jacinta.”

“No one can find his bones,” she said hollowly. “Constantina put them in here by the stove, but they could not be found.”

“So? Someone—”

“I think he is back in his grave, growing the flesh to walk the earth again.”

I thought of Gary’s change, of how complete it had been. Would the same thing happen to the next man, and the next? I couldn’t work anywhere. Beneath my skin, I could feel the busy soldiering of bacteria. I suddenly understood why Gabriella had killed herself and why that irate militia captain had called her a traitor. With no hope of a husband and no belief in other work, she had simply chosen a quick death over a slow one.

“Where is Alma?”

Jacinta almost smiled. “She is spitting back at the Fascists. They think they have given her a sickness, but they have given her a weapon, to turn back on the Fascists.” She added something in Catalan, but I had no trouble with her meaning. Alma had gone to the front.

I was sitting on a gun crate in a trench, the notebook and pencil in my hand part of my ruse. I was posing as a lady correspondent in pursuit of a story and a friend. We were a hundred yards as the crow flies from the line of Fascist redoubts. I had learned that Alma, when she had stopped here, had claimed a sister was working in a brothel in Huesca, a town three miles inside the Fascist lines. She had convinced them to let her pass, so she could find her sister and bring her back.

One of the soldiers fed a dried rosemary branch to the fire in the middle of the trench. Overhead, between the planks supporting the trench, the dark indigo sky was thickening to black. I watched three men climb out of the trench, to go dig for potatoes in no-man’s-land. I waited fifteen more minutes and then told a comrade who was laboring over a cookfire that I was crawling to the next trench, to continue “my story.” She gave me two ovoid objects, a little larger than goose eggs, which turned out to be bombs. She showed me how they had two pins, a stiff one to be removed shortly before the approach of danger and a loose one to be removed seven seconds before detonation. She advised me to crawl all the way.

I shouldered my rucksack, then clambered up the ladder and slithered over the sandbags of the parapet, onto the ground. Even in the dark, I could sense that the valley between me and the Fascist lines was a wasteland: bullet-chipped stones, forlorn weeds, a few dwarfed and withered oaks. I could just make out the flag of the Fascist redoubt. The road to Huesca was off to the right of that, I’d been told. I started crawling.

I had gone only a few yards when I noticed an awful, fecal smell. I was burrowing into soil little cleaner than a latrine. In no-man’s-land, I found my special, private fear, a dread of nightsoil and festerment. There was no reason to be here, I told myself. I could take the train to Toulouse and then down into Fascist Spain. I lay there without motion and actually considered doing this. My fear that Alma was demented got me moving again. She needed me. She’d better need me. I would keep her from staying too long in one place. We would work one village and then another, moving on just before the Fascists realized that we were turning their men into traitors.

I had covered ten more yards, perhaps, when I realized how cold the night was. The chill seemed to be falling from the sky and rising from the ground. I glanced up and saw the stars wink out: clouds. I could see a dry Spanish oak, low and spreading, maybe ten paces from me, but beyond that, I could see nothing. Somewhere in the direction I was tending, a gun fired. I saw the distant greenish bloom of what I presumed was a rifle flash. Then blackness. The memory of the rifle flash was all I had to fix my position on. I stood up. Crawling had been a noisy business anyway. Surely it was only sound I had to worry about now. I took a step, then listened. I could feel the bombs in my jacket pocket, not as a physical presence, but as my personal angel of death.

I had covered another forty yards or so when I heard a low grunt of laughter. I dropped to my face, too terrified at first to even worry if I’d somehow disturbed the bombs. Every muscle in my back spasmed, bunching against the bullet I was sure was on its way. But then I heard the sound of digging and remembered about the expedition to recover what potatoes remained from the prewar crop. In my mind, I could hear the song the men had gone out singing:

Heaven only knew what they’d make of me. They’d probably shoot me for a spy. I scrambled away from them, heading for an outcropping of boulders. In the murky night, the stones looked like a fist, thrust up from the earth.

I decided to stay where I was for the moment. They couldn’t dig potatoes all night. I estimated that I was not more than seventy-five yards from the Fascists. If I continued tending toward the east of where I’d seen the rifle flash, then that should take me to the ridge. From there I might be able to see the lights of Huesca.

Over the next few minutes, the clouds seemed to thin slightly. I could make out a large stand of reeds some thirty yards away. A little stupid from my exertions, I found it too easy to let my mind wander, to imagine that the grasses were sugar cane and that I was on a tropical holiday. It seemed entirely natural that the grasses should be swaying, even though there was not a whisper of wind. The night was as silent as a jewel.

The grasses were dividing, separating. The shadows within merged into a single, many-limbed juggernaut, pointing a forest of spikes at the sky. They were men, I realized, with rifles and bayonets. I buried my face into the soil but found I could not keep my gaze away from them. I almost fainted with relief when I saw that the phalanx was not advancing toward me but to the other side of the outcropping in which I cowered.

But the potato diggers would still be there. Infinitely slowly, I dragged myself to a gap in the stones. I could see the men, still stabbing at the ground with their crude sticks. I wanted to scream but could not make myself do it. I saw the three men at the front of the phalanx lower their rifles, pointing them at the Loyalists. But they did not fire.

Before the men could scream, the juggernaut was upon them. Bayonets sliced across throats. With a strength that could not be human, the enemy swarmed over the men, tearing heads from bodies as if they were snapping wings off a chicken. Not a bullet was wasted, not a sound made. The men gathered themselves into a juggernaut again, into a unitary, martial force, a single spearhead aimed at the Loyalist line.

I lay there, motionless, protesting against my inner voice before I even realized what it was telling me. I’m not a soldier, I pleaded. You have to warn them, it said. I got up and took the bombs out of my pockets. I pulled the stiff pin out of each one, twisting them out as the camarada had shown me. I whirled around, panicked because I could not see the knot of men. Then I did see them near the oak I had noticed earlier. I made myself walk forward. The beast did not look back, but moved forward, relentless as a machine. If I could warn the Loyalists at the right time, I thought, then the Fascists would be in range of their machine gun. But what was a machine gun’s range? I had no idea.

When it seemed that I was two-thirds of the way back up the slope on the Loyalist side, I took out the bombs and held them both in one hand, my fingers aching as they splayed to grasp the weapons. I pulled one pin out and lobbed the bomb at the nest of men. It exploded near the group, provoking an instant burst of machine-gun fire, so immediate it sounded spontaneous. I did not wait to be sprayed as well. I ran back down the hill, barely having the presence of mind to disarm the other bomb.

I didn’t want merely to run, I wanted to take wing, to get to Huesca and Alma and have it all over with. I plunged through squalls of mist that swallowed then disgorged me. The enemy may have been following me, or maybe not. I didn’t care. Death would almost be a mercy, I thought; for then it would be over.

Suddenly I was falling, my feet knocked out from under me. I landed hard on my sternum and realized, after considerable kicking and flailing, that I’d tripped over a wire. Then I saw the parapet of a Fascist redoubt. I leapt to my feet, ready to run as fast as my legs could carry me.

“Alto.”

My knees were trembling so hard, I nearly fell again when I saw the soldier’s silhouette, the talon of his bayonet. He was framed by the wash of light from the trench.

“I am lost, señor” I said. “I have to get to Huesca. I have a friend who has gone there. Have you seen her?”

His laugh had a bitter note I didn’t like. “Yes, I’ve seen a woman…” He shifted his rifle and brought out a match, striking it against his boot. He held it up to my face and studied me in the match’s brief flare. I could feel its heat.

I took a deep breath and let my good sense rescue me from the horror I’d seen but a few minutes before. This boy was hardly a child. Surely I could persuade him to let me pass.

“I’m alone,” he said tonelessly.

“We are all alone, señor.”

“I mean, I’m alone in the trench,” he said.

The leer in his voice had been unmistakable. “All right. But you can’t have it for free, soldier.”

I could see him fumbling in his pocket. He threw a few wadded notes at me. “It’s all I’ve got, bitch.” He sounded oddly relieved, as if he hadn’t wanted to force me. I picked up the notes. He stood aside and gestured to the ladder.

I swung a leg over the parapet. At first it seemed that the trench, stretching away for about ten yards, was empty, just as he’d said. Then I stepped onto the ladder and saw the sleeping figure almost directly beneath me. She was curled up on her side, a blanket covering her to the chin, her black hair tangled and stringy. Her skin was chalk white.

“Alma!” She did not turn her head.

I dropped to the ground as soon as I could. Alma seemed to stare at nothing, but she did blink. She was alive.

I rushed to her cot and put a hand on her forehead. She was as cold as a stone. Numbly, I petted her hair. “It’s me. I’m here.”

She looked confused for a moment. I think she tried to smile. She said something but her voice was too soft for me to hear. I put my ear to her mouth. “It takes sides,” she whispered.

I heard the sentry come down the ladder and come to stand behind me. “We can’t use this cot,” he said stupidly.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Our lieutenant, he goes crazy when he finds out she makes him and his men stronger. He says maybe she makes the machine gun a cannon!” He cocked his jaw toward the end of the trench, where a machine gun tripod stood on scaffolding. The boy said, “They ruined her before I could take my turn.”

I lifted the blanket. Blood had completely soaked her torn skirt and the cot underneath was stiff with dried blood. No, I thought, the soldier wouldn’t want to use this bed. I pulled the blanket back up to her chin.

“They put other guns down there, too,” he said petulantly.

Alma was whispering again, her dry lips scarcely parting for the words. “It takes sides.”

“What does, sweetheart?”

“Evil.”

“We can talk later,” I said. It was a stupid, stupid thing to say, but I kept on repeating it, even as her eyes fluttered open and stayed open.

“I have my money right here,” the boy said impatiently. “Are you a lucky whore, too? Will you make me strong?”

I stood up, turning my back to Alma. Now I looked at the boy. What have I felt for my patrons? Apathy, mostly. Passion, sometimes. Affection rather less often. Now I was having my first taste of simple, blue-white hate. I had always been dispensing strength: to the doctors who had gone back rejuvenated to their jars of pickled organs; to the judges who had returned to the bench with the fortitude it takes to put a man to death or to grant him his life. Perhaps they had all been good men; perhaps they had all been bad. How could I know? They never asked me how the strength I gave them was to be used.

The soldier was waiting for his treat. I gave him a hard kick to the privates then scrambled towards the ladder, his screams—“Bitch! Bitch!”—in my ears. I was near the top rung when I felt the ladder tremble with the soldier’s weight. I flung myself over the sandbags of the parapet, rolling onto the stone-sharp ground. I took out the last bomb. Evil is not moderate, I thought; how can I be? I yanked the pins out and lobbed the bomb into the pit.

After making my way back to Barcelona, I made the journey back home, leaving Franco’s nightmare forever, or so I thought. For a time, impressions of Spain sank into the haze of a civilized life: daytrips on trains that ran to schedule; walks along the white brows of cliffs, through meadows where the breezes comb wild-flowers into the grass. Sometimes and without warning, the faces of Alma and Gary would flicker and focus and the haze would lift. Then I would find myself driving my motorcar, careering down every street in London; driving in all weathers, at life-or-death speeds; trailblazing through alleyways to make a new shortcut; learning to read the city as if its streets were braille. Now, when the streetlamps dim to tiny embers and housewives draw the black shades down, when the city is as dark as a hillside in Spain, I steer an ambulance by the light of falling bombs.