Great Lenin, a hard man. Now, when he needed them most, these difficultly acquired disciplines had simply vanished.
He sat down, under the mocking cruciform. The crucifiers were coming. It was another
“The sleep will have done him some good,” said Comrade Commissar Glasanov. “He’ll see the hopelessness of his situation. He’ll see the inevitability of surrender, the rightness of it. You know, Bolodin, I’m somewhat disappointed. I had expected something more impressive.”
Lenny nodded as if a stupid man.
“These old Bolsheviki, at least they were realists. They understood what was required.”
They reached the end of the corridor in the yellow morning light. The door, solid and massive, lay before them.
“Open it,” said Glasanov.
Lenny took the big brass key and inserted it into the hole and felt the tumblers yield to his strength. He pulled the door open. They entered.
“Well, Comrade Levitsky, I hope?” began Glasanov, halting only when he realized Levitsky was gone.
10
ON THE RAMBLAS
Florry slept for a day and a half in a room on the sixth floor of the Hotel Falcon, which he and Sylvia chose, in their delirium, on the strength of one of Julian’s pieces, which had described it as the “hotel of the young and bold.”
When he finally stirred from his dreamless sleep, it was night. Someone was with him in the room.
“Who’s there?” he asked, but he knew her smell.
“It’s me,” she said.
“How long have I been out?”
“Quite some time. I’ve been watching you.”
“God, how boring. I’m ravenous.”
“There’s a curfew. You’ll have to wait for morning.”
“Oh.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine, Sylvia. I’m rather pleased to be alive, come to think of it.”
“I am too. Robert, you saved my life. Do you recall?”
“Oh, that. Good heavens, what a terrible mess. I think I was saving
She sat on the bed.
“We’re all alone.”
She was very near.
“Do you know, Sylvia,” he said, “I’m rather glad I met you.” Then, surprised at his own boldness, he took her to him and kissed her. It felt like he always knew it would, only better. She stood up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m undressing,” she said.
He could see her in the dark, a blur. She was quickly shedding her garments with a kind of athletic simplicity.
She stepped out of her chemise and he could see her breasts in the dark and sense their weight. They were very small and pearshaped and lovely. Her hips were slim, her belly flat and tight. She walked to him and he could smell her sweetness. She had his hand.
“Touch me,” she said, moving it to her breast.
It was warm and full. Beneath it, her heart beat. She was so close. There was nothing else in the world except Sylvia.
“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he could hear himself saying.
Their mouths crushed together; Florry felt himself losing contact with the conscious world and entering a new zone of sensation. Sylvia was tawny, sinewy, and athletic ? very strong, surprisingly strong as she pulled him to the bed. Florry was surprised that in his fumbling rush in the moon-vivid room and among the thunder of images and feelings and experiences that raced across him he didn’t want to miss anything, anything at all. Her breasts, for example, upon which he suddenly felt as if he could spend a lifetime. They were a marvel of economy and grace. He wanted, strangely, to eat them, and he tried eagerly.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, sprawled beneath him. “Oh, God, Florry, that feels so good.”
She became increasingly lyric yet increasingly abstract: he was astonished that she had enough sense to talk ? for she continued, in a froggy voice, to comment upon events ? when language had been banished from his mind.
He put his hand into her cleft, feeling the moist surrender, the eagerness, and it was quite something, the extent to which she’d become smooth and open and liquefied to him; her whole body had liquefied and then began to tense and arch and crack like a whip.
And then there came a time to shut her up at last with a kiss and it felt as if he were at the center of an explosion, so plummy and sweet, so crammed-full, so bloody perfect, like a line of poetry against his skull.
“Hurry, darling,” she whispered. “I can’t wait. God, Florry, hurry.”
He raced on to the act’s finale, entering her and falling through into a different universe.
“Do it,” she commanded, and he completed the exchange, sinking in further, rising to gather strength to sink again. It had become a thing of rising and sinking: high, off, and distant followed by the giddy plunge, the surrender to the gravity of pleasure, and then climbing back up again.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she was saying and the last bond of restraint snapped and the whole universe seemed to transmute into a phenomenon of optics: lights, lights, lights, lights. He felt a screeching moment in which he seemed at last to slide beneath the surface, while at the same time exactly clinging to her as she was to him, as if in recognition that each had only the other in protection against the world.
“Do you know what’s odd?” Sylvia asked the next morning. “It’s the history. It’s everywhere. Can you feel it? One is actually at the
Florry nodded dreamily, although at the moment he would have preferred to find the center of his overalls. They were roomy, Spanish things of one huge piece, rather like an aviator’s or a mechanic’s suit. They were of worn, rough, blue cotton, and they had been donated to the cause of his depleted wardrobe by the POUM, which turned out to control the Hotel Falcon.
POUM stood for the Party of Marxist Unification, in the Spanish, which was more colloquially and less tendentiously translated into English as the Spanish Worker’s Party; its initials were everywhere in the city, as it was one of the largest and most enthusiastic of the several contending revolutionary bodies within Barcelona proper, but it did not quite control the city. It did not even control itself; it did not control anything. It was something more than a splinter group but perhaps not quite a mass movement on the scale of the gigantic union organizations that had dominated Barcelona for so long. In a sense it simply
Down with what was; what would come simply
