been seen before. Those who follow him must share his malevolent will, all of them-Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, aristocrats like Papen, low-class scum like Ernst Rohm, Prussian Junkers like Keitel. Stalin commits his crimes in the name of the good, and I don’t know if that isn’t an even greater horror, because those who follow him act in good faith; they’re not fascists but people who are usually good, and when they realize what the Stalinist horror is, Stalin himself eliminates them. Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, all the comrades of the heroic period. Those who refused to follow Stalin because they preferred to follow true Communism all the way to exile or death: aren’t they heroes-Bukharin, Trot sky, Kamenev? Name one Nazi who’s abandoned Hitler out of fidelity to National Socialism.”
“And what about you, Jorge, my little Spanish boy?”
“Me, Laura, my little Mexican girl, I’m a Spanish intellectual and, if you like, a gentleman, an
“You have a divided soul, my little Spanish gentleman.”
“No, I certainly comprehend the Nazi evil as well as the Stalinist betrayal. But I’m also conscious of the nobility of the Spanish Republic, how it is simply trying to make Spain into a normal modern country, with mutual respect, getting along with one another, and trying to solve our problems, which, damn it all, have been with us since the Goths. And to that essential nobility of the Republic, I sacrifice my doubts, Laura my love. Between the Nazi evil and the Communist betrayal, I’ll choose the Republican heroism of that young gringo (as you call them), that young Jim, who came to the Jarama to die for us.”
“Jorge, I’m not an idiot. Someone else suffered for the three of you. Something else links you, Baltazar, and Vidal.”
(“I have to tell you about Pilar Mendez.”)
Standing with her back to the wall that ran around Santa Fe de Palencia, wrapped in a mantle of savage black skins, her blond hair tossed by the swirling wind from the mountain, Pilar Mendez watched the hilltop bonfires go out one by one. She did not smile to affirm her triumph-treason to her father, victory for her, strengthening her conviction that to help her side was like helping God-though her spirits sank when she heard the footsteps of the three Republican soldiers advancing from the Roman gate to that space of restless dust and bellowing oxen which she, Pilar Mendez, occupied in the name of her God, beyond any political faith, because the Nationals and the Falange were with God and they, the others, her father, Don Alvaro, and the three soldiers, were victims of the devil without knowing it, thinking they were on the good side, it was they, all of them, the reds, who burned down churches and shot priests and raped nuns: Domingo, Vidal, Jorge Maura, and Basilio Baltazar, her love, her burning tenderness, the man in her life, her husband already without any need of sacraments, walking through the dust and the oxen and the wind and the dead fires toward her, the woman standing fast against the wall of the dying city wrapped in a long mantle of dead black animals, a Spanish blonde, a Visigothic goddess with blue eyes and a mane as yellow as the sand in the bullring.
What were these three men going to say to her?
What could they say?
Not a word. Only the sight of Basilio Baltazar like a double arrow of life’s inseparable pain and pleasure. Her lover felt like a price, the price one paid to invert the order of life, which was love, thought Pilar Mendez as she watched the three men approach.
Basilio knelt and wrapped his arms around her knees, endlessly repeating my love my love my cunt my tits don’t take anything away my treasure, Pilar I adore you.
“You, Domingo Vidal, Communist enemy?” asked Pilar to the other man, to strengthen herself against Basilio Baltazar’s amatory grief.
Vidal nodded his shaved head, his militia cap in his hands, as if Pilar were the Virgin of Sorrows.
“You, Jorge Maura, aristocrat traitor, gone over to the reds?”
Jorge embraced her, and she howled like an animal, yet an animal capable of repugnance, but Maura said, I’m not letting you go, you must understand, you’re sentenced to death, understand me?, you’re to be executed at dawn, your own father has ordered you shot, your father the mayor your father Alvaro Mendez, he’s going to kill you despite all our begging, despite your mother…
Pilar Mendez’s insane laugh pulled a horrified Baltazar to his feet. My mother? laughed Pilar like some wild animal, a most beautiful hyena, a Medusa without a gaze, my mother, is there anyone who desires my death more than my badly named mother Clemencia, the pig, she who made me devout until death, she who implanted the idea of sin and hell in me?, that woman doesn’t want my life, she wants my martyr’s death, the death of a virgin who believes, the fool, virgin, Basilio, you hear her, Basilio, what do you win by the fact that Clemencia my mother saw us the afternoon you tore out my virginity, you nibbled it bite by bite, you spit out my bloody membrane as if it were snot or a rotten host, Basilio, remember?, and you penetrated me the way a wolf penetrates a she-wolf from behind, up the ass, without seeing my face; that you remember, in the old house without furniture where you took me, my adored love, my only man, you think you have the right to save me when my own mother wants me dead, a martyr for the Movement, a saint who saves her own conscience, Clemencia the well named, the mother who hates me because I didn’t marry as she wished, I gave myself to a poor boy with suspicious ideas, my handsome, adored Basilio Baltazar, why have you come here, what are you and your friends trying to do, you’ve gone mad, you don’t know you’re all my enemies, you don’t know I’m against you, I’d have all of you shot in the name of Spain and Franco, I don’t want thorns to grow on the old paths of Spanish death, I want to wash them away with my blood…
Vidal brutally covered her mouth as if he were closing a sewer, Maura made her cross her arms, Baltazar again knelt at her feet. Each of them had his own words, but they all said the same thing, we want to save you, come with us, look at the fires that have still not gone out on the hills, we’ll find refuge there, your father has done his duty, he’s given the order for you to be shot at dawn, we aren’t going to do our duty, come with us, let us save you, Pilar, even if the price is our own death.
“Why, Jorge?” asked Laura Diaz.
In spite of the war. In spite of the Republic. In spite of her father’s will. My daughter must die in the name of justice said the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia. She must be saved in the name of love said Basilio Baltazar. She must be saved in spite of political logic said Domingo Vidal. She must be saved in the name of honor said Jorge Maura.
“My two friends looked at me and understood. I didn’t have to explain. It isn’t enough that we do things in the name of love or justice. It is honor that sanctioned us. Honor in exchange for justice? That’s the dilemma I saw on the face of Domingo Vidal. Betrayal or beauty? That’s what Basilio Baltazar’s loving eyes were asking me. I looked at the three of them, stripped of everything but the bare skin of truth, that fatal afternoon against the medieval walls and the Roman gate, surrounded by mountains that were going out, I saw the three, Pilar, Basilio, Domingo, as an emblematic group, Laura, the reason why no one but I understood then and now you too because I’m telling you. This is the reason. The need for beauty supersedes the need for justice. The interlocking trio-woman, lover, adversary-was not resolving itself in either justice or love; it was an act of necessary beauty, based on honor.”
What can the duration of a sculpture be when it is incarnated not by statues but by living beings threatened with death?
Sculptural perfection-honor and beauty triumphing over betrayal and justice-dissolved when Jorge whispered to the woman, Run away with us to the mountains, save yourself, because if you don’t the four of us will die here together, and she, between her clenched teeth, answered, I’m human, I haven’t learned anything; even though Basilio begged, nothing is won without compassion, come with us, run away, there’s time; and she, I’m like a dog for death, I smell it and I follow it until I get killed, I’m not going to give the three of you the satisfaction, I can smell death, all the graves in this country are open, there’s no home left to us but the grave.
“Your father and mother at least. Save yourself for them.”
Pilar stared at them with an incendiary shock on her face and began to laugh insanely. “But you understand nothing. Do you think I’m dying just out of loyalty to the Movement?”
Her laughter kept her apart for a few seconds. “I’m dying so my father and mother will hate each other forever. So they’ll never forgive each other.”
(I have to tell you about Pilar Mendez.)
“I think you’re one of those men who are only loyal to themselves if they’re loyal to their friends,” said Laura, leaning her head against Jorge’s shoulder.
