He looked at deep white creases that ran from Miguel's eyelids to his bearded cheeks, like snow drifting down his face. He would never forget those eyes, because in them he'd learned to see joy, courage, rage, and serenity. There had been times when they'd won and then been thrown back again. Sometimes they'd just lost. But the attitude they should all have was already in the creases in Miguel's face before they won or lost. He learned a lot from Miguel's face. The only thing he'd never seen Miguel do was weep.
He crushed his cigarette on the floor and it sent out a shower of sparks. He asked Miguel why they were losing, and Miguel pointed to the mountains on the frontier and said, "Because our machine guns didn't come from over there."
Then Miguel put out his cigarette, too, and began to murmur a song:
The four generals, the big four generals,
The big four generals, oh Mama,
Who've attacked us old and young…
And he answered, still leaning back on the sandbags:
By Christmas Eve, oh Mama, They'll surely have been hanged…
They sang to kill time. There were many hours like this one in which they stood guard and nothing happened. So they sang. They never had to say, "Let's sing." And no one ever felt embarrassed to sing in front of the others. Exactly as they laughed for no reason, wrestled, or sang along with the fishermen on the beach near Cocuya. Except that now they sang to bolster their courage, even if the words of the song were a bad joke, because the four generals not only hadn't been hanged but had them surrounded in this town with the mountain frontier in their faces. They had no place to go.
The sun began to fade early, at about four in the afternoon, and he hugged his old rifle with its yellow butt and put on his cap. Like Miguel, he wrapped himself up in his scarf. For the past few days he'd been wanting to suggest something to him. Even though his boots were worn, they were still holding up; all Miguel had was an old pair of sandals he'd wrapped with rags and bound up with string. He wanted to say they could take turns with the boots: he one day, Miguel the next. But he didn't have the nerve. The wrinkles in that face said he shouldn't. Now they blew on their fingers, because they knew only too well what it meant to spend a night on an open roof. Then, from the far end of the street came a soldier, one of ours, a Republican running toward us as if he'd popped out of one of the shell holes. He waved his arms and finally fell, face down. Behind him came more Republican soldiers, boots slapping the pockmarked streets. The artillery salvo, which had seemed so far off, suddenly was closer, and from the street below, one of the soldiers shouted: "Weapons, please, give us some guns!"
"Don't stop!" shouted the man leading the soldiers. "Don't make yourself an easy target!"
They passed by at a run, below them, and Miguel and Lorenzo aimed the machine gun at the last of their own soldiers, thinking the enemy would be right on their heels.
"They should be here any time now," he said to Miguel.
"All right, Mexican, do a good job now," said Miguel, holding up the last cartridge belt.
But another machine gun fired first. Two or three blocks away, another hidden machine-gun nest, a Fascist one, had waited for the men to fall back, and now it was raking the street, killing the soldiers. But not their leader, who hit the dirt, shouting: "Get down! You'll never learn!"
He moved the machine gun so he could fire at the hidden enemy gun, and the sun fell behind the mountains. The machine gun, shook his entire body, and Miguel whispered, "Balls just aren't enough. Those blond Arabs over there have better weapons."
Because over their heads airplane motors began to buzz.
"The Caproni are here."
They fought side by side, but it was so dark they couldn't see each other. Miguel reached out and touched his shoulder. For the second time that day, the Italian planes were bombing the town.
"Let's get out of here, Lorenzo. The Caproni are back."
"Where to? Wait. What about the machine gun?"
"What good is it? We don't have any more ammo."
The enemy machine gun had also fallen silent. Below them, a group of women ran by. They couldn't see them, but they could hear them, because they were singing in loud voices despite the fighting:
With Lister and Campesino, With Galán and Modesto,
With Commander Carlos as our guides,
The army of the people is so brave
It will surely turn the tide…
The voices sounded strange, mixed in with the noise of the bombs, but they were stronger than the bombs: the bombs fell sporadically but the singing never stopped. "And it isn't as if they were warlike voices either, Papa, but the voices of women in love. They were singing to the Republican fighters as if they were their lovers, and up on the roof Miguel and I accidentally touched hands and thought the same thing. That they were singing to us, to Miguel and Lorenzo, and that they loved us…"
Then the facade of the bishop's palace collapsed, and they threw themselves on the ground, covered with dust. He thought about Madrid when he'd first arrived, about the cafés filled with people until two or three in the morning, when all they talked about was the war, and how euphoric they all felt and how absolutely sure they'd win, and he thought how Madrid was still holding out and how the women of Madrid made curlers out of bomb fragments…They crawled to the stairway. Miguel was unarmed. He dragged his rifle along. He knew there was only one for every five soldiers. He decided not to leave it behind.
They walked down the spiral staircase.
"I think a baby was crying in one of the rooms. I'm not sure, I might have mistaken the air-raid sirens for wailing."
But he imagined the baby there, abandoned. They felt their way down in the darkness. It was so dark that when they came out on the street it looked like broad daylight. Miguel said, "They shall not pass," and the women answered: "They shall not pass!" The night blinded them, and they must have become disoriented as they walked along, because one of the women ran after them, saying, "Not that way. Come with us."
When they got used to the light of night, they found themselves face down on the sidewalk. The collapsed building shielded them from the enemy machine guns: he breathed in the dust, but he also inhaled the sweat from the girls stretched out next to him. He tried to see their faces. All he saw was a beret and a wool cap, until the girl who'd thrown herself down at his side raised her face and he saw her loose chestnut hair whitened by the plaster from the building, and she said:
"My name's Dolores-Lola."
"I'm Lorenzo. This is Miguel."
"Miguel, that's me."
"We're separated from our group."
"We were in the Fourth Corps."
"How do we get out of here?"
"We'll have to take the long way round and cross the bridge."
"Do you know this place?"
"Miguel knows it."
"Right, I know it."
"Where are you from?"
"I'm Mexican."
"Ah, so it won't be hard to understand each other."
The planes left, and they stood up. Nuri with her beret and María with her wool cap told them their names and they repeated theirs. Dolores was wearing trousers and a jacket; the other two women, overalls and knapsacks. They walked single file down the deserted street, hugging the walls of the tall houses, under dark balconies with their windows open, as if on a summer day. They could hear the interminable sniping, but they didn't know where it came from. A dog barked from an alley, and Miguel tossed a stone at it. An old man, a scarf wrapped around his head, was sitting in his rocker. He didn't look at them as they passed, and they could not understand what he was doing there: was he waiting for someone to come home, or was he waiting for the sun to come up, or what. He didn't look at them.