stand firm. ‘Arriba Espana! Viva la muerte!’ We were stupid with battle. Our faces were all blackened, apart from the eye sockets, which were white. We slept where we stood. The Captain started a final rousing speech: ‘Spain is proud of you. I am proud of you, it is completely my privilege to have commanded you in today’s battle … ‘ He was interrupted by twenty Russian rifles pointing down into our trench.
12th February 1943, Sablino
The first question from the Reds was: ‘Who’s got a watch?’ Our two remaining officers had their watches taken. Four of our wounded were bayonetted where they lay. They marched us down the Moscow- Leningrad road. The scene of devastation was so immense, the Russian casualties so thick on the ground, that it was understandable that every Red we met should be blind drunk. Some of our guards drifted off to various drinking parties on the way. As we reached the river two of the Russians escorted the Captain away for interrogation. That left four men to take us to the barbed-wire corral at Ian Izhora. We didn’t fancy a night out in the open. We talked it through in Spanish and at the signal hit them. A single punch to the throat of the guard nearest me and I was off the log road and running for the peat bog, zig-zagging over the ground. Their aim was wild. We made it to an old anti-tank ditch and ran along it to where our own lines had been. We saw only drunk and sleeping Russians. We made it back to the main road where we heard the words, ‘Alto! ?Quien vive?’ We replied, ‘Espana’, and fell into waiting arms.
13th February 1943
What I saw a few days ago has diminished me. I am less human after what I have seen and done. Glory in battle is a thing of the past. Individual heroics disappear in the miasma of modern warfare, where thundering machines annihilate and vaporize. One is brave and should feel glorious to have even entered the arena. I have and I have survived, and I have never felt more lonely. Even after I ran away from home I was never as lonely as I am now. I know no one and no one knows me. I am cold, but from the inside out. In my wolf-fur coat and bearskin hat I am a lone animal, with no pack, out on the snow plain where the horizon has merged with the landscape so that there is no beginning and no end. I am tired with a tiredness that crushes my bones, so that I only wish to sleep with dreams as white as the snow and in a cold that I know will carry me away painlessly.
9th September 1943
I haven’t written a word since Krasni Bor and now that I read it back I know why. I am gathered under Return Battalion 14 and that gives me the strength to face the page again. Today the Russians told us that the Italians had capitulated. They put up a poster in huge red letters: ‘Espanoles, Italia ha capitulado! Unios a nosotros.’ Some guripas slipped under the wire and tore down the sign and put up their own: ‘No somos Italianos.’ For once the Germans agreed.
My mind is set on home, except I have no home. All I want is to go back to Spain, to sit in the dry heat of Andalusia with a glass of tinto. I decide that I will go to Seville and Seville will be my home.
14th September 1943
We marched away from the front to Volosovo, about 60 km. I expected to be happy, most of the guripas were singing. I am still plagued by fatigue. I hoped that moving away from the front would help, but my spirit has darkened and I can barely speak. I sweat at night, my pillow is sodden even though it is not hot. I never slip into sleep. My dropping off is a series of jolts, of body spasms that start in my middle and crack up into my head like a bullwhip. My left hand shakes and has a tendency to go spastic. I wake up with the feeling that my hands are not my own and I am terrified from the first moment.
I look back through my drawings and it is not the Leningrad skyline with the dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Admiralty spire, nor is it the portraits of my comrades and the Russian prisoners that move me. It is the winter landscapes. Sheets of white paper with the vague smudges of buildings, izbas or pine trees. They are an abstraction of a mental state. A frozen wilderness in which even the certainties have only a wavering presence. I show one to another veteran of the Russian front and he looks at it for some time and I think he’s seen in it what I have, but he hands it back with the words: ‘That’s a funny-looking wolf I am perplexed by this, but eventually it amuses me and it gives me my first glimmer of hope since February.
7th October 1943, Madrid
Today I officially left the Legion after twelve years service. I have a kit bag and a satchel of my books and drawings. I have enough money to last me a year. I am going to Andalucia, to the autumnal light, the piercing blue skies and the sensual heat. I will draw and paint for a year and see what comes of it. I am going to drink wine and learn to be lazy.
Because of the American blockade there’s very little fuel for public transport. I will have to walk to Toledo.
19
Wednesday, 18th April 2001, Falcon’s house, Calle Bailen, Seville
The disasters of sleep — all that free falling and spitting out mouthfuls of teeth and examinations not reached in time and cars with no brakes and precipices with crumbling edges — how do we survive them all? We should die of fright night after night. Falcon came hurtling into the enveloping darkness with these thoughts plummeting down the lift shaft of his mind. Was he surviving them, his own personal disasters? He only survived them by banishing sleep, crashing out of his falling empire and into the cracked glass of his own world.
He went for a run by the dark river. Dawn broke and on the way back he stopped to watch a rowing eight. The hull of the shell sliced through the water, dipping with each lurch of power from the harmonious crew. He wanted to be out there with them, part of their unconsciously brilliant machine. He thought about his own team, its lack of cohesion, its fragmented efforts, and his leadership. He was out of touch, had lost control, was failing to communicate direction to the investigation. He braced himself, dropped to the ground and throughout his fifty press-ups told the cobbles that today would be different.
The Jefatura was silent. He was early again. He glanced down Ramirez’s report. The portero did not remember seeing Eloisa Gomez going into the cemetery, which was not surprising. Serrano had completed his check of all hospitals and medical suppliers and there were no records of thefts or unusual sales. He read through Eloisa Gomez’s autopsy. The Medico Forense had revised her time of death to later on Saturday morning, around 9 a.m. The contents of her stomach revealed a partially digested meal of solomillo, pork fillet, which must have been consumed after midnight. There was also a practically undigested snack of what was probably chocolate con churros. The alcohol content in her blood showed that she’d been drinking most of the night. Falcon imagined the killer taking Eloisa out as if she was his girlfriend, treating her to an expensive dinner, taking her to a bar or club and then the classic early-morning snack — and then what? Back to my place? Maybe he hadn’t chloroformed her but rolled the stocking off her leg, kissing her thigh, her knee, her foot. Then, just as she’d fallen back on the bed to be loved properly, perhaps even for the first time, she’d sensed something and opened her eyes to find his face over her, the black stocking a taut, dark crack between his two fists and his eyes intent with the relish of a live throat struggling and quivering under his restraining hands.
Except that he had chloroformed her. There were traces. Falcon moved on from the stomach and blood analysis. The vagina and anus showed signs of recent sexual activity. There were traces of spermicide, but no semen in the vagina and an oil-based lubricant in the anus, which was distended from frequent penetration.
