He made a conscientious effort to amuse Toño, but it was a relief when Elena took charge of the boy again, and he could go back to brooding. He looked forward to returning to Potes. He wanted to go on patrol, to ride through the mountains, breathless and sweating in the cold. He wanted to hear the Cantabrian accent, thick as a goose-down quilt; he wanted to go out with Guardia Mojica and get drunk on homemade
orujo
. And he
never
wanted to go back to Granada.
He thought that it was only his own impatience to reach their home that made the train seem to go slower and slower, and he pointedly did not look at his watch during the frequent stops. But when night fell they were still far from Madrid, and an hour after the train was scheduled to arrive in Atocha he was forced to face the fact that they were significantly delayed. Tejada glanced at his watch and optimistically hoped that the Santander train with which they had to connect would be equally delayed in starting out.
Elena had brought along lunch but at nine-thirty they still had not reached Madrid, and Toño began to complain again that he was hungry. At ten o’clock the Tejadas investigated the dining car and found that all the tables were full. At eleven they finally had a rapid and overpriced snack, but by this time Toño was unfortunately too tired to fully appreciate it.
By the time they reached Madrid, well after one o’clock in the morning, Tejada was in no mood to trek across the city to the Northern Station to see if there were still trains to Santander. He found a railroad employee, told the man he needed to send an urgent cable on official business, and rousted a sleepy telegraph operator out of bed to send a wire to the Potes post: TRAIN DELAYED. STOP. SPENDING NIGHT IN MADRID. STOP. LEAVING MADRID TOMORROW AFTERNOON.
They found a hotel across the plaza from the train station. Elena sat with Toño long enough to see that he was asleep and then changed into a nightgown. In spite, or perhaps because, of her exhaustion, she did not want to lie down immediately. Instead, she went to the window and stared out at the darkened city. The street lamps made cold puddles of light along the Paseo del Prado, but beyond them the botanical gardens sat in total blackness. She leaned her forehead sideways against the icy glass and was able to catch a glimpse of a few lights twinkling in buildings along the street.
Tomorrow,
she thought,
we’ll take an
afternoon train, and Toño will get to ride the hotel elevator again
.
We
should take him to the park, too, so he gets some exercise. And he’d like
a ride on the Metro. Just a short ride
.
We can take him to the Puerta del
Sol.
She sighed and her breath condensed into a moist ellipse on the windowpane. It would be good to be back in Potes. But returning to Madrid was like returning to an old friend.
She blew on the window again, watching the lights outside blur on the fogged glass. She was not aware of her husband until he put his arms around her. “You’re not cold?”
“A little.” She leaned back against him and clasped her hands over his arms, glad to be embraced and grateful for his warmth. “But it’s good to be here.”
“And a little cold is preferable to going to bed with me.”
Elena swung around, stunned by his tone. “What?”
He avoided her eyes and stared out at the darkened city. When he spoke, his voice was no longer bitter but rather contemplative. “I do good, don’t I?”
“Do good?” Elena echoed, puzzled.
“I mean,” Tejada hesitated, his voice pleading. “I work hard. I try to keep order. I’ve never taken bribes or abused my position. Right?”
“Of course.” Elena’s voice was soothing.
“So why isn’t that enough?” Tejada whispered. “Why am I still such a goddamned stupid son of a bitch?”
“You aren’t!” Elena hugged him ferociously. “You didn’t know that poor girl would kill herself! You thought you’d arranged her escape.”
“I should have
told
her.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t want to take responsibility.” Tejada’s voice shook. “So I pushed the responsibility onto her, and she died a worse death than the one I could have given her. She died like that because I was a coward.”
“You gave her a choice,” Elena comforted.
“I shouldn’t have!” Tejada cried. “I should have made the choice for her. One way or the other.”
“The same way you made a choice for Alejandra, when you sent her to Granada, six years ago?” Elena demanded. “Or the way you’ve made a choice now, to keep her there?”
Tejada breathed deeply. “Look, I didn’t stand in the way of the Encinas kid going to France to study. But Aleja’s my responsibility. It’s for her own good.” He remembered his last conversation with Elena and Carmen before leaving Granada. He had not seriously believed that Cristina Encinas would be willing to take Alejandra or that Carmen would willingly part from her daughter. But he had bowed to Elena’s insistence that he at least discuss the possibility with Carmen. The woman’s pathetic eagerness when she heard the word “France” had shaken him.
“She should grow up a
Spaniard
,” he added a little desperately, knowing that Elena was about to argue the point again.
“Even if it means holding her prisoner against her mother’s wishes?”
“It’s what’s
best
for her.”
“How do you know what’s best for a girl like Aleja?” Elena spoke so gently that the words sounded more like comfort than accusation. “Or like that poor Luisa?”
Tejada knew that somehow Elena’s argument was flawed, but the answer to her question had always seemed so obvious to him that it was difficult to put into words. He looked for something to say. The best thing he could come up with was: “That’s my job.”
“You’re not God,” Elena pointed out, acid.
“I’m not much of a man either,” he retorted.
“Don’t be arrogant.” His wife was serious but firm. “A man can’t make decisions for other people. You have to leave them some freedom of choice.”
Tejada stared out the window and watched clouds speed across the sky, as rapid and insubstantial as the certainties he had built his life on. “If I just . . . let everyone be free,” he said, considering, “then what’s the point of my job? If everyone could get along better without me, what’s the point of my being here?”
“Your job is to enforce the law,” Elena said. “But the law shouldn’t make every decision in a citizen’s life. It can’t. That’s the problem with a dictatorship.”
“What about being a good husband?” Tejada demanded, in too much pain to debate abstractions. “A good father? If I’m
not
responsible for making decisions, how can I take care of you and Toño and do some tiny amount of good to make up for all the bad things I’ve done?”
Elena kissed him on the cheek. “Toño and I depend on you,” she said. “We would be lost without you. But that doesn’t mean we need you to be infallible.”
Tejada knew that she was serious. He loved her, but he had never understood how she could love him—as he believed she did—without sharing his instinctive feeling that a man’s role in a marriage was to protect his wife. A yawning pit of powerlessness far darker than the night threatened to engulf him.
“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“The best you can.”
Tejada gave a laugh that was close to a sob. Elena’s cheek was cold against his but she turned in his arms to stare out at the darkened city once again, impelled by a longing that he only half understood. He held her a little more tightly, wishing hope- lessly that he could restore the prewar capital she had loved—in all its dangerous, chaotic fascination—or give her a longer vacation in Madrid or at least keep her warm against the November chill.
But if the war had never happened, she would love someone else
, he thought.
Even if I could turn back the clock, give her what she
wants, I would lose her. The way we’ll lose Alejandra if we give her what
she wants. I’ll send Alejandra to France, if that will make Elena happy.
I would even support some kind of political “freedom” if it would make
her happy . . . but I can’t, because it would mean losing her.
He peered out the window, wondering what her gaze was searching for in the winter’s night, and saw a few white-gray flakes drift past the glass. When he looked down at the street lamps he saw glittering motes dancing toward the pavement, their motion too slow and irregular to be raindrops. “Look, my love,” he whispered. “I have brought you the snow.”
T
he events and people in this novel are fictitious, but the story of the children’s colonies of Almuñécar is true in all of its tragic details. José Luis Entrala, currently an editor at Granada’s daily newspaper
Ideal
, collected excerpts from his paper’s archives to give a panorama of life in Granada during the Civil War in his book
Granada sitiada 1936-1939; lo que dijo el
diario Ideal sobre la guerra civil
. The book tells the story of the children sent to Almuñécar, with extensive quotes and facsimiles of articles from
Ideal
. I have based the physical and political geography of the city of Granada on Juan Manuel Barrios Rozúa’s
Granada; historia urbana
and Ian Gibson’s guide
En Granada, Su
Granada; guía de la Granada de Federico García Lorca
. (The latter is available in English as
Lorca’s Granada
, and I highly recommend it as a guide for anyone fortunate enough to visit the city.)
The legend of the attempt to bring a “blizzard” of flowers to Sevilla is told in Richard Fletcher’s book
Moorish Spain
. Fletcher adds that the story is “sheer literary convention, of course: similar stories are told of other princesses in other times and places.” Tejada’s use of the story is perhaps ill-advised, but the good lieutenant is incorrigibly literary, dating back to his first conversation with Elena about the
Iliad
in
Death of a Nationalist
.