He breathed deeply. They left the town behind and reached an open field with some bare poplars in it. That autumn no one had raked up the dry leaves and they crackled under their feet. He noticed that the leaves closest to the ground had already turned black from the rains, and he glanced back at the soaking-wet rags wrapped around Miguel's feet. Once again he wanted to offer him his boots, but his comrade was striding along so resolutely on his strong, slim legs that he realized how useless it would be to offer what wasn't needed. In the distance, those dark slopes awaited them. Perhaps then he'd need the boots. Not now. Now the bridge was there, and beneath it ran a turbulent, deep river. They stopped to stare at it.
"I hoped it would be frozen over"-he gestured angrily.
"Spanish rivers never freeze over," murmured Miguel. "They always run."
"Why did you want it to be frozen?" Dolores asked him.
"Well, that way we could have avoided the bridge."
"Why would we want to do that?" said María, and the three women, the question in their eyes, looked like curious little girls.
"Because bridges are usually mined," said Miguel.
The small group did not move. The swift white river swirling at their feet hypnotized them. They stood stock-still. Until Miguel raised his face, looked toward the mountains, and said: "If we cross the bridge, we can get to the mountains and from there to the border. If we don't cross, we'll be shot…"
"Well?" said María, holding back a sob. For the first time, the two men could see her glassy, weary eyes.
"We lost!" shouted Miguel. He clenched his empty fists and walked around as if looking for a rifle on the ground carpeted with blackened leaves. "There's no going back! We've got no planes, no artillery, nothing!"
He did not move. He stood there staring at Miguel until Dolores, Dolores's hot hand, the five fingers she had just taken out of her armpit, clasped the young man's five fingers, and he understood. She sought his eyes, and he saw hers, also for the first time. She blinked, and he saw that her eyes were green, as green as the sea near our land. He saw her with uncombed hair and no makeup, her cheeks red from the cold, her lips full and dry. The other three didn't notice. They walked, she and he, holding hands, and stepped onto the bridge. For a moment, he doubted. She did not. The ten fingers they clasped gave them warmth, the only warmth he'd felt in all those months.
"…the only warmth I felt in all those months of retreat toward Catalonia and the Pyrenees…"
They heard the noise of the river below, and the creak of the bridge's wooden planks. If Miguel and the girls shouted from the other bank, they did not hear them. The bridge grew longer and longer, it seemed to be spanning an ocean and not this rampaging river.
"My heart was beating fast. She must have felt the pounding in my hand, because she put in on her breast, where I could feel the strength of her heart…"
Then they walked side by side, and the bridge grew shorter.
On the other side rose something they hadn't seen a huge, bare elm, beautiful and white. It wasn't covered with snow but with glittering ice. It was so white it glowed like a jewel in the night. He felt the weight of the rifle on his shoulder, the weight of his legs, his leaden feet on the planks; the elm waiting for them seemed so light, luminuous, and white.
"I closed my eyes, Papa, and I opened them, afraid that the tree wouldn't be there anymore…"
Then their feet touched earth, they stopped, they did not look back, both ran toward the elm, without paying attention to the shouts of Miguel and the two girls, without hearing the running feet of their comrades on the bridge, they ran and embraced the naked trunk, white and covered with ice, they shook it, and pearls of cold fell on their heads. They touched hands, embracing it, and they wrenched themselves from their tree to brow and she his neck. She stepped back, so he could see her moist green eyes better, her half-open mouth, before she buried her head in the boy's chest, raised her face to give him her lips, before their comrades surrounded them, but not hugging the tree as they had…
"…how warm, Lola, how warm you are, and how much I already love you."
They made camp in the foothills, below the snow line. Miguel and Lorenzo gathered wood and made a fire. Lorenzo sat next to Lola and held her hand once more. María took a dented cup out of her knapsack, filled it with snow, and let the snow melt over the fire. Then she took out a chunk of goat cheese. Nuri pulled some wrinkled Lipton tea bags out of her bosom, and everyone laughed at the face of the English yachtsman smiling on the labels.
Nuri told how they'd packed the tobacco and condensed milk sent by the Americans before Barcelona fell. Nuri was plump and jolly and had worked before the war in a textile factory, but then María started talking, recalling the days when she'd studied in Madrid and lived in the Student Residence and went out on strike against Primo de Rivera and wept at each new play by García Lorca.
"I'm writing to you with the paper resting on my knees as I listen to these girls talk, and I try to tell them how much I love Spain, and the only thing I can think to talk about is my first visit to Toledo, a city I imagined to be the way EI Greco painted it-enveloped in a thunderstorm, with lightning flashes and greenish clouds, set over a wide Tagus, a city-how shall I put it?-at war against itself. And I found a city bathed in sunlight, a sunny, silent city with its old fortress bombed out, because El Greco's picture-I try to tell them-is all of Spain, and if the Tagus in the real Toledo is narrower, the Tagus of Spain splits the country apart. That's what I've seen here, Papa. That's what I try to tell them…"
That's what he told them, before Miguel told now he'd joined Colonel Asencio's brigade and how hard it had been for him to learn to fight. He told them that everyone in the Republican army was very brave, but they needed more than bravery to win. They had to know how to fight. And amateur soldiers take a long time to understand that there are rules about security and that it's better to go on living so as to go on fighting. Moreover, once they learned how to defend themselves, they still had to learn how to attack. And when they learned all that, they still had to learn the hardest lesson of all, how to master themselves, overcome their habits, their need for comfort. Miguel criticized the anarchists because, he said, they were defeatists, and criticized the arms merchants who promised weapons to the Republic they'd already sold to Franco. He said his greatest sorrow, the one he'd carry to his grave, was that all the workers of the world had not taken up arms to defend Spain, because if Spain lost, it was as if al of them lost. He said that and broke a cigarette in half, giving part of it to the Mexican. They both smoked, he next to Dolores, and he passed his to her so she could smoke, too.
They heard heavy artillery in the distance. From their campsite, they could see a yellowish glow, a fan of dust rising in the night. "Figueras," said Miguel. "They're shelling Figueras."
They looked out toward Figueras. Lola was next to him. She didn't speak to all them. Only to him, in a low voice, as they watched the far-off dust and listened to the noise. She said she was twenty-two, three years older than he, so he pretended to be even older and said he'd already turned twenty-four. She said she was from Albacete and that she'd gone to war to be with her boyfriend. They'd studied together-chemistry-and she followed him, but Franco's Moroccan troops had shot him at Oviedo. He told her he was from Mexico, and that he lived where it was hot, near the sea, a place full of fruit. She asked him to tell her about tropical fruits and laughed at the names she'd never heard and told him that mamey sounded like a poison and guanábana like a bird. He told her he loved horses and when he first came he'd been in the cavalry, but now there were no more horses, or anything else, for that matter. She told him she'd never been on a horse; he tried to explain the pleasure of horseback riding, especially on the beach at dawn, when the air smells of iodine and the north wind is letting up but it's still raining lightly and the foam raised by the horse's hooves mixes with the drizzle, and how he'd ride shirtless, his lips caked with salt. That she liked. She said that maybe he still had the taste of salt on his mouth, and kissed him. The others had gone to sleep next to the fire, which was dying out. He got up to stir it, with Lola's taste fresh in his mouth. He saw that the others had fallen asleep hugging one another to keep warm, and he went back to Lola. She opened his sheepskin-lined jacket, and he clasped his hands around her back, over her rough work shirt, and covered his back with the jacket. She whispered that they should choose a place to meet in case they were separated. He told her they'd meet in a café he knew near the statue of Cybele when they liberated Madrid, and she answered that they'd see each other in Mexico, and he said yes, in the main plaza in the port of Veracruz, under the arches, in the Parroquia Café. They would have coffee and crabs.