The Acrobats Page 3

  If he tried to read a book he soon had to stop as he could not understand the meaning of the print. Once, to convince himself that he had not gone mad, he grabbed a pencil and wrote out the alphabet more than a hundred times. The hell with it, he thought. Never again.

  IV

  Madre mía!

  Slowly María turned towards the other side of the bed, Pepe’s side, towards the window and air and the pinpoint of light that shone from the lamp post, strong and like a star.

  The pain, the stabbing pain in her lungs, had awakened her again. This time, anyway, she had managed an hour’s sleep. The hollow sound of other people’s laughter tinkled on the window pane like a rumour of happiness. She heard the noise of a car starting, again laughter, then the rising drone of the motor. She had been ill for two years now, but it always took her by surprise, the sharp pains that came so quickly. Madre mía, she gasped, madre mía. Again she rolled over in bed, slowly, so as not to aggravate the pain.

  On the dresser, she could distinguish, among the other refuse, the doll her grandmother had sewn for her. But that was so long ago, years and years ago, further back even than the times of the picnics under the olive trees, further back even than the time she had refused to marry Alphonso because of the wart on his nose, further back even than the time of the American, the crazy, happy Negro who had pinched her that day. If only it was true. If only she was going to have a child.

  She coughed – once, twice – and the quick pain came again.

  Outside a drunk was singing.

  Con bombas y con munición

  todos clases de gobiernos a destruir.

  The room was small. The flowery wallpaper had long since faded, and the damp disfiguring blotches on the wall were many years old. Several photos of pompous and ill-at-ease ancestors hung from the walls, all in heavy wooden frames. There was their wedding picture, and a crude landscape of which Pepe was particularly proud. Several drawings that André had done of María were pinned up over the bed. An assortment of plates and cups (they had been part of Maria’s trousseau) had been arranged on a wall shelf. And then a series of six plates had been nailed in a row down the wall, with slogans from Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and El Poema del Cid.

  She heard the door creaking, opening.

  Pepe sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her.

  Her health has improved, he thought. Her face is filling out, and her body also. But the doctor had said, Pepe remembered, that she must be kept warm and have plenty of fresh milk.

  “Are you tired?” she asked.

  Gently he leaned his head up against her swollen belly.

  “Yes,” he said. “A little.”

  “Do you think Luís enjoyed the supper?”

  Luís, who had dined with them earlier in the evening, was an old comrade of Pepe’s, from the days of the war.

  “Of course he did. Why do you ask?”

  “He should get married. He is too bitter.”

  “He is an anarchist. He doesn’t believe in God,” Pepe said.

  “You shouldn’t joke about such things.”

  Pepe grunted.

  “You should pray sometimes.”

  Pepe grunted again.

  “You are going to be a father. Your child will have to reckon with God.”

  “Reckon with God? For money a man may buy and sell God, let alone reckon with Him. God? What God? Can there be a God and He makes it a sin to be poor? Our shepherd! Is that what we fought and died in war for? So that superstitious women might taunt us with the lies of the clergy?” He stopped short. His own anger surprised him. “I’m sorry,” he said tenderly. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”

  “You talk sinfully!”

  “Oh, María. Why do you believe such nonsense?”

  “I believe, that’s all. Does it hurt you?”

  The pain came again. She trembled slightly.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  She fondled his head, running her fingers through his hair. From outside came the warming sound of men and women singing as they passed now and then in gangs below the window. Somebody had a gaita. He sang:

  The miners of El Fondón

  We all wear berets

  With a legend that reads:

  “We have just finished at the mine.”

  It was one of Pepe’s favourite songs.

  Pepe yawned. “André is working again.”

  “Pepe …?”

  “Yes?”

  “What actually happened? Did he really kill the girl?”

  “It’s a long story. Very involved. He … just look at him!” Pepe said angrily. “Do you think he could kill?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  “Wasn’t she a Jewess?”

  “Let’s not talk about it now.”

  Pepe sat up and rolled himself a cigarette. Dreamily he stared into the night. The magic of the Fallas reverberated within him. Only once had power been brandished before him. And now, like the others who were also hungry, he remembered – remembered because workers possessed the streets again, building wooden figures, shouting, dancing. “María! Our child will be a boy. We shall call him Jeem.”

  “If you wish.”

  “Remember? His Spanish was so funny. But that Jeem could play a harmonica. Si hombre! Seeing all that killing made him feel bad, he told me. He thought maybe if someone explained things to Franco, how the people really felt … What a crazy guy! Remember? Do you remember him, María?”

  “I was very young,” María said. “But I remember him.”

  “Do you, María? Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember how Jeem took the coffee from you and pinched your bottom with his big black hand? Madre mía! The way the men around the truck jumped back, everyone so frightened of your old mother. The bitch, she really did turn red in the face!”

  “She was very angry,” María said solemnly.

  “Angry? Hombre! She yelled and waved her fat arms about as if the world was coming to an end. But Jeem just laughed and laughed. Remember how he grabbed her and began to rock her up and down in his arms as if she was a child?”

  “He used to play good songs on the harmonica.”

  Pepe got up and looked out of the window. His face was in the dark and she could not see his black eyes that were wet and sorrowful with remembering. All she could see was his black curly hair, strong in the dim light.

  “The harmonica seemed so important,” Pepe said, sitting down on the bed again. “I got down on my hands and knees and began to search. I searched all over – in the truck, in the mud – but the harmonica had disappeared. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  The pains came again, but she said nothing. She fondled his hair, humming an old song. Finally, she said: “I don’t want it. Not for our boy. I want it to be different for him.”

  The Capronis, the Junkers, zooming and spinning over the slow dying city every night. In Alicante a visiting German destroyer had lit up the harbour for them.

  “Why did he die, María? What did it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re religious. You believe these things happen for a reason.”

  A man was banging on a drum. The window pane rattled. My son is in her belly, Pepe thought, and it is warm and snug for him.

  “It is not enough to say that he died for a cause. Nobody dies for a cause. They die for their women and their family. And he wanted to live for them,” Pepe said.

  She said nothing.

  “Remember? He used to look so funny when he laughed.”

  “Maybe he died for you?”

  He found her solemn face in the dark. Her deep black eyes were without expression and her lovely lips were quiet.

  “For me?”

  “So that you might understand something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  V

  One a.m. or so. Ink, flat as a board, sky. Fog. Moon of the type in demand by sent
imental virgins, i.e. pretty as a postcard moon, harvest moon, moon like from a story in Good Housekeeping. Dripping cold mist rolling up from the sea.

  Hands thrust deeply in his pockets André jostled his way through the Plaza del Caudillo. He tossed himself headlong into the crowds, oblivious of rude comments, anxious only to lose himself in the mob. On the Calle San Fernando he stopped to buy a package of tabaco rubio from an old woman with a hare-lip. Tenderly she called him señorito, whistling the words between blackened teeth, and she tried to sell him a lighter. Remembering what Pepe had told him about these wretched women, how the Guardia Civil had their daughters in payment for sanctioning their illicit activities, he hurriedly bought a cheap lighter and moved on. He had walked only a few steps when he felt foolish, ashamed.

  If anyone had asked him the hour – yesterday, now, tomorrow – he would have replied, ineluctably: “Five Minutes to the End.”

  … five minutes to when the mob plunging madly down the metro steps would be called to a halt, forced to stare into each other’s eyes; five minutes to when the bankers and the priests of liedom would feel the finger of God hot on their backs, the irrevocable what’s what finally demanded … five minutes to when the squint-eyed clerks and the whores humpbacked by sin are told to bring their indifferent copulating to a stop … five minutes until the blood-soaked rags that the swindled mob salutes and dies for are hauled down and burned … five minutes to the big l’addition, service non compris! … five minutes to when you and me, Jack, are gonna be told the score, like it or no – cheat and the boob strictly from hunger who’s always been on the legit … five minutes to when the ynched niggers and the charcoal yids and the rotting-green bodies of the betrayed soldiers get themselves another shot of juice and begin to roam this nogood nolovin world of shot ideas and neon depravity, demanding blood, revenge, no questions asked … five minutes until J C returns with a new mob and new ideas, laughing his lovely head off, his boys selling gaga crosses with ads on the back in colours to match your rug.…

  In the old quarter behind the Plaza del Mercado, crumbling buildings of faded orange and sometimes sickly grey leaned lazily over towards the street. The yellow lights of night illuminated chalk slogans and obscenities that ran in streaks along the damp peeling walls. Discarded old men, lice creeping up their faces freely, snoozed in doorways.

  The stink of stale drainage and decaying fish clogged his nostrils. On the street corners the fat women doughnut vendors sat stirring boiling olive oil in huge cauldrons. He tried to destroy the visual image he still retained of the giant gypsy falla in the Plaza del Caudillo.

  Two Worlds – Worlds, to neither of which he owed true allegiance – would collide and crush him. That, he often felt, made his doom inevitable.

  Often it appeared to André that he belonged to the last generation of men. A generation not lost and not unfound but sought after zealously, sought after so that it might stand up and be counted, perjuring itself and humanity, sought after by the propagandists of a faltering revolution and the rear-guard of a dying civilisation. His intellectual leaders had proven either duds or counterfeits – standing up in the thirties to cheer the revolution hoarsely, and in the fifties sitting down again to write a shy, tinny, blushing yes to capitalistic democracy.

  Nobody could quite believe again that he had grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken. There was going to be another war all right – their war. The Old Gods, newly cleaned and pressed, were being gleefully handled down by the generations that had made an orgy of self-destruction out of the twenties, and an abysmal flop out of the thirties, only to reap the bloody harvest of the forties. They, these prophets of the twenties, growing old without grace or wisdom or beauty; and the Public School revolutionaries of the thirties, plunging us gladly into another dark age rather than admit the fact of their poverty. All of them, screaming No, No, No! – we are guilty, all of us, because we were born you see and that’s a sin.

  This new post-war generation was born far too old for Mah Jong and ballyhoo and bathtub gin. The idea of the twenties they found charming and stupefying, a silly kink in our social history. They came to Paris again, but it was different now. Only the fifty-year-old men-children, returning for maybe the first time since the twenties, attempted to renew the calculated idiocy of their youth abroad, only they boozed until six a.m. in Montmartre. This newer generation, their children, gazed on the pathetic festivities wearily but indulgently, sitting sad and unknowing in the cafés, sitting, saying nothing and going nowhere, today being only the inevitable disappointment of yesterday’s tomorrow, waiting, waiting for something they were at a loss to explain.

  In his anxiety to keep on moving, not to see, he nearly stumbled over a crippled beggar. Both the man’s legs had been severed at the knees: a filthy cotton material was wound around the stumps. He was sprawled out in the street singing an imbecile tune, his skinny arms outstretched as if awaiting crucifixion. Spread out before him in the grime was a weird conglomeration of goods – tobacco, matches, flints, prophylactics, crucifixes, and two tattered novels by Zane Grey. A ragged dog was sniffing at the edge of his tiny universe of wares. Quite suddenly the beggar gave him a swift wallop in the ribs with a clenched fist. Then he began to cackle idiotically, yellow spittle trickling down the sides of his mouth. Several of the passing soldiers and whores joined in the merriment. André followed the track of the dog as he raced down the street amid a shower of kicks.

  VI

  During the war against Hitler heaps of Jews were murdered and made into soap not nearly as good as Lifebuoy or lampshades much better than the crap they try to pass off as the McCoy in department store bargain basements – it’s not really human skin at all now! But in the next war – some people say – the gang will find that commie skin really isn’t as lampshady as the flesh off a kike’s ass.

  Chaim laughed at his own bad joke.

  “I’m drunk,” he mumbled aloud, not caring whether anyone in the crowded club overheard him.

  After so many years in America perhaps it was the perpetual restlessness that was his weakness or perhaps it was simply a sad curiosity that drove Chaim back to Europe in the unfortunate spring of 1946. And then, of course, there had been the thin frightened boy, with a number and a symbol on his arm, who required a passport if he was to join Sarah in the Bronx. It had all been arranged, just as Chaim had promised. So in 1947 Chaim had crossed the Spanish frontier at Port Bou with a forged passport. He had remained in Barcelona for some time, living in a hotel in the Barrio Chino, first working as an interpreter and then as a smuggler. In the autumn of 1949 he had moved to Valencia and purchased the Mocambo Club on the Calle de Ruzafa, or the Calvo Sotelo as it was named after the War of Liberation.

  “I’m drunk.”

  There are many strangers about, Chaim observed. Tourists in town for the Fallas.

  But the regulars were also there – Mariano of the state police who believed there was a Freemason plot to overthrow the last of Catholic governments, Gómez who was sent over nightly by the Tango Club to spread rumours about the Mocambo dancers, Colonel Kraus who always arrived after twelve when his sister was asleep, Sasha who had been decorated by the Czar and now handed out perfumed cards for Casa Rosita, old Carlos who shivered rapturously whenever his Andalusian lover danced – the regulars; the cardboard men, the separated lovers, the broken republicans, the discards, all there, singing songs, embracing each other’s skeletons in the endless search for warmth, begging emotional pennies.

  Chaim walked around the bar towards Toni, but in passing Rosita he favoured her young bottom with a deft pinch. Rosita smiled agreeably. She hoped this vagrant intimacy might lead to greater things.

  Chaim sat down beside Toni.

  “I think I’m drunk,” he said.

  A florid waiter waddled over quickly to the bar and rattled off a series of orders to Ramón. He saw Chaim and turned to him pleadingly, his face flushed, his protuberant eyes red and darkly ringed underne
ath. He pulled out his handkerchief, mopped his brow and wagged his head meaningfully, once towards Chaim, once towards the crowd. “It is too much,” he said. “I have changed my jacket three times in the last hour.”

  Chaim grunted. Then he turned to Toni. “Shien maidele,” he said, “where did you get the kitten?”

  Smiling coyly Toni clutched a scrawny grey kitten to her breast. She tickled his belly with her finger and the kitten struck out playfully with his paws.

  “I found him in the doorway.”

  She held out the kitten.

  “No importa! I believe you.”

  Toni laughed and all her even white teeth showed.

  Her hair was black, her eyes were lovely dark and limpid, her lips were always red and moist. She was a fisherman’s daughter, from the island of Ibiza. The nobility of that island people, and their earthiness, was plainly on her face. Also grace, also indolence. She was small without being short and her body was strong and brown. Toni was beautiful, but it was the beauty of the young.

  “Women always look so indecent when they’re dressed,” Chaim said.

  “Do you think my sweater is too tight?”

  “Don’t try any of that stuff on me, chica.”