An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.
Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yague was well beyond Merida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.
“I have to get through.”
Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.
“If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”
They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.
The thick beard shouted over. “Julio. Your mother needs to make a bed for these two tonight. The woman is a doctor.”
The boy pushed himself up and nodded, and Hoffner followed Mila across the mud.
Inside, the house was old stone, the ceilings too low for a tall man to stand upright. Pots and pans hung from hooks and shelves, and a drinking trough of wood stretched along the back wall. Two young girls sat at a round table, with a few photographs in frames hanging behind them. One showed a man with a mule and a rifle.
The man was seated across the room on a low stool. He was rubbing a cloth along the rifle’s barrel. He looked up when the son called for his mother.
There was silence, and then the sound of an aeroplane from somewhere above. The man set his rifle against the wall and crossed to the doorway. He stepped outside, stared up for several seconds, and then looked out across the fields to the men in their caps and their uniforms-each of them staring up-before he returned. He took the rifle, sat on the stool, and began to rub it again with the cloth.
The mother appeared from the back room in an apron skirt and green blouse of coarse cotton. She was slender, and her hair fell from its ties in thin wisps of brown and gray. In any other place, she and Mila might have been sisters.
She spoke to the boy in a kind of Spanish Portuguese, only a few words making themselves known to Hoffner. The voice was deep and quiet, and she turned to Mila and continued to speak. Hoffner heard the word “
Hoffner nodded, and the woman motioned to the two girls. They followed her out into the courtyard, and the boy sat where they had been. He found a cloth and began to rub his rifle in the way his father rubbed.
Hoffner said to Mila, “Tell him the boy is too young to have a gun.”
She knew why he said it; and she knew there was no point in repeating it.
The father, still focused on his rifle, said, “Will they make such distinctions in who they kill?”
Hoffner watched as the man continued to clean. “No,” said Hoffner. “They won’t.”
“It was a German plane,” the father said, “or Italian. Hard to tell in the dark. He was lost. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll drop his bombs here. For now he saves them for the city.”
“Then you should send your family east.”
“You have a car. You’re more than welcome to take them east if you like.”
“And you’d let me?”
“No.” The father looked over. “If you want to make it to Badajoz, you need to go tonight.”
Hoffner was struck by the sudden candor. “The captain outside thinks otherwise.”
“The captain wants to herd us into trucks and send us back to where you came from, or into Portugal. He’ll take my wife and daughters tomorrow. He’ll get them somewhere safe.”
“But not the boy.”
“If Badajoz falls, a boy with a rifle sitting here won’t make any difference. Neither will his father. So we go to Badajoz with you.”
“You’ll have to talk to the captain about getting me my car.”
“Your car is already halfway to the city,” the man said. “It’s loaded with rifles and ammunition and food. The captain probably drives it himself. He’s very brave. He’ll make three trips tonight, and he’ll hope the fascists choose to sleep before they make their full assault. At dawn he’ll tell you your car was needed, and that you can’t go south, impossible now with Yague only twenty kilometers from the city. He might ask the doctor if she can stomach the war, but you-he’ll tell an old man not to think beyond himself. Do you want to get to Badajoz?”
“Yes.”
“With a boy too young for a rifle?”
“Yes.”
“Then we eat and sleep, and I come for you later.”
At just after 1 a.m. the man shook Hoffner awake. They had laid a straw mattress by the trough, and the smell of garlic and chicken fat was still thick in the air. A dog or goat lay sleeping under the table, and Hoffner looked up to see the man and his son already with their rifles slung across their backs. The man waited until Hoffner was sitting. He then held out a small pistol to him.
“I have my own,” Hoffner said. His hand was throbbing.
“I’ll take it,” said Mila. She was standing somewhere behind the man.
Hoffner looked over. He hadn’t heard her get up. They had slept. There had been no questions last night. She had given him that.
She was in trousers and had borrowed a shoulder wrap from the mother.
The man led them to the back room. His wife was sitting on the bed with the two girls, each in a long nightshirt. The mother’s hair was down across her chest, and she looked much younger. She held out her arms and the father nodded the boy to her, but the boy shook his head. The father reached over, took the boy by the shirt, and pushed him to his mother. There were no tears as she held him, and the boy finally wrapped his arms around her. He then kissed his sisters and stepped back. Hoffner looked away as the boy ran his sleeve across his eyes. The father leaned in and kissed his daughters and his wife. The wife said something too low to be heard, and the father kissed her again and then stepped over to the window. He peered out and climbed through.
He led them across a field and into a gathering of trees. Hoffner smelled the horses before he saw them, two deep brown colts tied to a tree and gnawing at the grass. Each had a blanket where a saddle should have been, but at least they had bits and reins. Mila ran her hand along the nose of the first and then quickly pulled herself up. Hoffner found a stump and brought himself up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed himself into the shallow of her back as she took the horse deeper into the trees. The moon followed them through the branches, and Hoffner let himself find sleep.
They were on an incline of high grass and boulders when first light came. The horses had proved more than worthy, a steady canter for much of the night. No one had said a word. Now it was little more than a walk, the horses’ nostrils heavy with breath and their hides moist and glistening.
The trees had thinned just beyond Villar del Rey, leaving an open sky and white moon to light the fields and scrubland along the way. Hoffner had lost feeling in his right foot an hour ago, but it was better than the shooting
