Savage Coast (9 page)

“Have you heard the rumors?” he shouted, over the laughter and talk. “All sorts of rumors, already. The English are saying that the Communists have bombed the tracks and that we can't go farther;
and I heard the Frenchman say that the engineer has gone on strike, and won't move the train until he gets some kind of extravagant promise.” He fanned himself with the straw hat. “But come in and meet our team, anyway.” The Hungarians were standing, politeness and warmth ran around their compartment. The fine-faced printer was introduced. “It looks like something real,” he said. “But obviously nobody knows what. You probably ought to find the other Americans.”

“I know one of them,” said Helen. “I wish you'd go down and reassure her. She's on her way to the bullfights, and she turned into jelly when they searched the train.”

“They were absolutely correct to search the train,” the printer answered. “They destroyed some snapshots we were taking, too. Last spring, they said, the Fascists caught a lot of photographs of armed civilians, and anyone whose face was clear got his. They're not taking any chances.”

“But if you've been talking with them—” Helen cried, her face darkening with excitement. “What do they say is happening?”

“They only said that,” the printer told her. He was a young student, from his look, his earnest clear glance, but the marks about his mouth and his darkened, blunt fingers showed how long he had spent at work; he looked straightforward at Helen now, obviously telling all he knew. “They were ordered to go through the train; for all they knew, the girl said, it's just an examination, and we'll go right on through to Barcelona.”

“Yes, certainly,” the manager put in. “They're waiting for us now in Barcelona; at the station!”

“I'll go through and tell Toni,” said Helen.

In the compartment, the heavy man was taking down a bundle from the rack. Toni looked up quickly as Helen came in. “What's up?” he asked, flashing, his face concentrating.

“Did they search the car?”

“Oh, they came through,” said the grandmother, “but they wouldn't bother us in third; what would we be doing with cameras? We're not tourists, to take pictures of our countrymen, if they're having troubles.” She smiled very gently at Helen; “Will you have some sausage with us?” she invited.

“I have a camera in the suitcase,” Helen said.

“All right, let it stay there,” the grandmother stopped her; “you haven't been making a fool of yourself, you're all right.” She was opening the bundle that her son gave her, opening layers and layers of newspaper.

“What's up Helen?” Toni was repeating.

“Your team doesn't know, and they've been speaking to that girl—she's certainly been scaring the people in first.”

“It doesn't matter,” said the grandmother. “Such people get scared if anyone asks them a question.”

“The soldiers left the train the minute we stopped here,” her son remarked. “They're not likely to show up again, either.”

“What do you mean?” asked Helen. “Have they run away?”

“You can't tell about soldiers,” answered the grandmother. “All the generals are the wealthy, here, and all the soldiers belong to the generals. And the generals in Spain are with the church, for the money, for power, for keeping their heel on the land.”

“They can do it too,” interrupted her son, bitterly. “Seventy-five million pesetas to the church a year from the government, and if I have two chickens, I am taxed; and an army that belongs to the officers, not to the state! And this Civil Guard, a handful, what good is that to the government, even when it is Left?” He had his open hand out, shaking; the young boy was looking at it. The father caught his eye. “What place is that to bring a boy into?” he spoke the words out bitterly, his hand still held out, shaking. His mother looked at him with a narrowed, proud look of knowledge, and held her hand out, too.

“Give me a knife to cut the sausage,” she said.

He quieted. They looked at one another.

Toni broke it. “Let's eat in town,” he said. “I'll get the team, and we'll find something.”

“No, you cannot,” said the grandmother. “We have sausage, and almonds, and wine. It is nothing. Stay with us.”

Her son was holding the sausage in the crook of his elbow, sawing at it with his knife, saying nothing, sawing angrily at the meat. He looked up. “Yes, stay,” he said to them, and smiled. “We have enough for all.”

“I'll get a cup for the wine,” Toni sprang up, and was going down the train. “Thank you!”

“Let me get something, too,” Helen said. “Fruit—would you like fruit?” The young boy's face flickered; he knew a few words of French.

“Oh, we have a great deal,” said the grandmother.

“Fruit would be nice,” the big man told her. “And they'll very likely come through with bread. And when your husband brings the cup—”

“Oh, no,” Helen shook her head quickly. “He's not my husband. He's with the Hungarian team . . .”

“Then you'd better stay with us,” said the grandmother, with her kind voice of age and patience. “We may go stay in the town.”

“The town!” Helen echoed vaguely. She looked out the window. The platform was covered now with townspeople, walking idly up and down, staring in through the large windows, as if the train were some tremendous sideshow. She could see a blond pregnant woman going slowly through the crowd, little boys in twos and threes, crowding into the yellow trees, dodging under the train-wheels, running up and through the train-doors, whistling; the men, the boys with bicycles, the grave, white-haired man sitting at the station bench, the gray-haired official with a black band in his
coat lapel; the whole town, promenading, with a strange intense sound of talk in the air. Not the relaxed gossip of fairgrounds, but breaths of danger, importance, secrecy.

“The town!” said Helen. “But what about the train?”

The grandmother looked like a Sibyl as she sat in her corner, turning her small face up, perfectly certain, matter-of-fact. “This train,” she said, raising her hand, palm forward, the wrinkled, small palm waving from side to side, “this train isn't going to move, anymore.”

“
JUST A MINUTE
,” said Helen. “I'll bring something back.”

She wanted to be in the town. The crowd on the station platform was banked thick, as if it were fair-day. She saw the pregnant blonde walking in the other direction now, with a young man whose head appeared over the rest, rough black. The woman would look sidelong at the train, hardly noticing it, as if it were some public building, and continue with her peculiar sailing gait. The little boys were at the coach-windows again, appealing and beggar-faced, calling “
¡Cigarrillos! ¡Cigarrillos!
”

The grandmother was quiet; she knew these towns. “It's not necessary,” she told the girl again. But Helen was already outside, behind the thick line of passengers, whose legs and rears filled the corridors like the hindquarters of domestic animals caged at a feeding-trough. They were hanging from the windows of the train, talking to the people on the near platform. On this side, the crowd was not so heavy, but there were many more guns: armed men stood in groups, smoking. The black sashes, the dark furious hair low over their foreheads, their rope sandals, their controlled silences, contrasting with the train's conversation and acrobatics and the town's promenading, all contributed to one effect. They took on the keepings of a secret romantic soldiery, they seemed to her, struck with the strangeness, to conceal a clue that she must have.

The regular soldiers, in their olive and yellow, had gone. The town and the train faced each other alone.

Once on the platform, in the broad heat, the focus changed: The men with guns were about their business, they were townspeople, they hung around, waiting beneath the row of yellow flowering trees, watching the train. From here, it was the train that was out of place, lying dead in the station. Tourists were leaning from all the windows, even up in first class.

The engine, near the front of the station, was fuming, a gentle ineffectual line of steam ascending.

Hurrying through the crowd, she was very afraid of being left. There were no words. How could she reach any of them without language? She turned to one of the guards, and said, in French, hesitantly, “if the train . . . leaves, will you . . . ?” She saw he did not understand, and pointed, signaling the train, town, herself, the train, the motion that would take it through the station.

The guard laughed, and shook his hand once toward the train, disgusted. “You can go ahead,” he told her.

Helen crossed the little concrete square behind the restrooms. The station gate was snapped open, facing a short wide street that led to the main roadway. On one side, diagonally, a row of houses presented their balconies and gardens to the station. On the other, more impressive ornate buildings confronted the platform, separated by grillwork or a strip of grass. At the end of this short street, the little iron tables of the café covered the sidewalk. They were crowded. Colors snapped in the hot air, filling in the street corner. She walked up, entered the bright crowd, hearing the foreign calls after her, the disjunctive music of the radio, the receding station noises. The street ended immediately. This was the Calle Mayor, crowded in both directions.

Sunday noon!

The whole town was out.

There was not a single empty table, you had to thread your way between, escape the tangle of families, the childrens' games. But Helen could see through the low windows; the inside of the café was quite empty. She split the fringe of long beadstrings that curtained the door.

The café was big and shadowy. An old container, painted a shiny synthetic orange, stood on the counter, unused. But deep in the room, the bar itself took shape, ghostly-white. The proprietor was washing glasses; they flashed quickly. He looked up, his high-domed head stood sharply out; dark glasses, long wine bottles filled the shelves behind him.

Helen saw the piled peaches, the flush of fruit color on the bar. The proprietor asked a question in Catalan, the soft burring sounds and the mixture of
x
's confusing her immediately, throwing her off, by a trick of wrenched concentration fixing her whole attention on the opening words so that she was deafened to the rest. She lost every bit of language. God, she thought! Why should I care about speech this much? The blood pushed up behind her eyes, in her poverty; and then she was over it. She laughed with the man, pointed at the peaches, counted twelve on her fingers.

The proprietor jerked his head back at the train. “
Extranjeros
,” he commented.

A hoot, from the shadow, turned them both, shaken. It was the radio: a man, up a ladder at the side doorway, was rigging up an extra loudspeaker. It hooted again. He turned it down until there was nothing but an even, boiling sound, came down the ladder, winding wire in his hand, and crossed the bar.

The proprietor gave Helen her peaches and change in the new-feeling Spanish coin, and gave the man his glass of wine. As she turned the beadstring aside at the door, she saw him bent over the radio behind the bar.

ON THE STREET
, they were standing at their tables.

One man lifted his little soft-colored child up to the chair so that he could see.

An open truck stood in the middle of the street. The Ford signature on its hood sprang out, plain as a movie-title.

There were nine boys standing in the truck. None of them could be over nineteen. One had a heavy double-barreled hunting piece, five of them carried unmatched rifles, and the rest held their revolvers ready, self-consciously. No two of the weapons were alike.

Helen stood in the doorway, holding the peaches loose in her arms, still feeling as if her tongue were cut out. No speech, no words to reach any of this. She looked at the truck.

The Hungarians crushed in toward the truck. Toni admired the truck; his fist went up automatically, clenched to greet the boys.

They turned to him, the cry in the throat of the very young one, enraged.

One raked his hand down the air, clawing.

The stocky boy raised his double-barreled gun, pointing it at Toni.

He did not recoil, there were too many at his back; he stared up at their faces.

“Aren't you Communists?” he asked, bewildered.

“Communists!” the youngest cried, and his voice broke.

“We're
not
—”

The stocky one broke in. “We are Anarchists.” He was pompous, with a certain defiance.

“We're going to fight in Barcelona”

“To fight!” said Toni. “What for? What do you want, if you're Anarchists?”

“Want?” the little one echoed, again.

The others turned. The driver leaned far out from his cab.

“We want no Fascists,” he said.

“No Fascists,” they agreed, “no money, no law, no generals.”

“All right,” said Toni, “no Fascists, that's excellent. But the rest—”

The driver opened his mouth.

“Never mind,” he said, against his will, clamping his jaw. “We have a United Front.”

Toni's voice came up. The Hungarians were trying to pull him away.

The radio turned on, savage loud, in the café. Shaking the entire street, the music walked through, mastering all motion, Beethoven, the Fifth coming tremendous on the scene.

An old woman rushed frighteningly through the people attached to the back of the truck. From the wide sprung mouth, the cheeks' distortion, it was seen that she was screaming. The music would not permit her shriek.

She laid hold of one of the boys, dragging at his leg, stretching her cheeks again in that blotted-out cry. His face changed; his lips closed twice, mumbling, under the music, as he recognized his mother. No sound came, as if a wind were against them.