Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“It’s unlocked.”

The door swung open, revealing the youthful face of one of the New York reporters. “Dangerous, Miss Dade. You never know who might be in the corridor.”

The sight of Gary Bartow put me off my stride a little. He’d been rather cold to me lately. “Would you be a dear and go fetch the porter?”

He smiled, a narrow opening at best. “Where are you really headed, Miss Dade? Poor old Sam Boywold thinks you’re off to Toulouse, but I know for a fact you can’t afford the fare—unless you’ve snagged a little work since the funeral?”

Bartow wasn’t looking me in the eye. I could just imagine how the truth about me was revealed: Dickie’s pudgy fingers are choking a glass stem. Bartow is drawling about the horrors of prostitution. Then Dickie says, “It just so happens that I have some personal experience of the trade…”

I turned to the mirror and blotted my lipstick. I said to Bartow’s reflection: “Do you wish to procure my services?”

“As a translator or a whore?”

Bartow folded his arms, evidently pleased with himself now that he’d insulted me, thereby saluting Motherhood and all that is decent. Some men are so easy to read. You’d think a girl as perceptive as me would be busy in bed, cajoling some journalist into filling Dickie’s shoes. But I had pretended to be an ordinary career girl; now, I wanted nothing more than to sneak away quietly, before more people found out I was a liar.

I pulled on my coat, picked up my portmanteau and my hat-box, all without help. I said as sincerely as I could, “I hope your stay in Barcelona turns out better than mine.”

I was halfway down the hall when I heard him come running after me.

Bartow actually insisted on riding in the taxi with me, though he kept very quiet. The taxi pushed its way past cyclists and donkey carts in the Plaza de Cataluña, keeping a pace that a crawling baby could rival. The buildings were tall and narrow, with iron balconies and triplets of arched windows. A moldy winter distemper had crept up the sallow walls. I wondered at the dearth of motorcars, then remembered reading that the Loyalists had commandeered nearly everything that burned petrol.

The taxi swerved, skirting a water-filled crater in the road. “Did mortar fire do that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Dickie didn’t show you the town? There’re craters all over. And plenty of bullet holes if you look. When the Fascists seized the army, the unions and the Anarchists twisted the government’s arm into giving everyone a gun or two. Though they didn’t have to twist very hard. The government had to make up for the army it had lost to Franco. In Barcelona it was mainly the Anarchists who drove the Fascists out last summer. And while they were at it, they seized the city government.”

“Sheer opportunism.”

“Maybe. But if Uncle Sam ever calls me up to fight for the sake of the future, he’d better ask me what kind of future I want.”

“And he’d better not call collect,” I said, quoting Mr. Durante. I studied our surroundings more closely. The red-and-black flag of the Anarchists and the tricolor of the Spanish government hung from many shop windows. Signs boasting the establishment of a collectiva were everywhere, even on the bootblacks’ boxes. Political posters smothered the walls. What bare masonry you could see was scarred and pitted. Had gunfire really done that?

The taxi pulled up outside a terraced house, a sliver of Gothic architecture that soared skyward. As I got out, Bartow said, “Why don’t you work at the hotel? I’m sure—”

“Wives,” I answered simply. “Some men travel with theirs.”

He looked down at his big, scarred hands. He hadn’t always been a reporter. “Then come and work for me, for heaven’s sake. I don’t trust my translator—”

I tried to smile graciously. “You wouldn’t tell a barber to hang up his towel just because his razor’s been stolen.”

He gave me an embarrassed smile. Before he could say more, I went to join my luggage inside the deep alcove of the house’s entrance. Wrought iron like a skein of black lace protected the door’s window and made it impossible to see inside. I pressed the bell stud. I considered that I’d come to the wrong place, that this was not Saint Mary’s Infirmary. But then I noticed the sign. In handwritten letters, it read, “Patrons are reminded that the women inside are comrades.” I laughed out loud. What did the girls here think a rigid pecker was? Some form of revolutionary salute?

I was still laughing when the bolt clicked back. A young woman appeared and burbled something in Catalan. She wore a tight skirt and an old-fashioned tulle fichu that sculpted her bosom into buoyancy. “Are you in trouble, camarada ? We know someone who can help you.”

I was sure that she did, but it wasn’t an abortionist I needed right now. “I telephoned yesterday. I’m Miss Dade.”

Her smile gave way to a gaze of bold appraisal. Everyone in Loyalist Spain stared at you like that, even the bellboys and lift attendants. I knew what she was thinking. Though I had my coat on, it was easy to tell I was too thin for Spanish tastes.

“May I speak to the proprietor please?”

The woman looked as though she might spit at me. “If you can ask that, you are no comrade.”

At first, I had trouble understanding her meaning. Then the word collectiva hit me with full force. It seemed even the whores had lost their senses. A knocking shop without a madame would be like a war without a general. Who mollified a patron when he couldn’t have the girl he wanted? Who threw the girl out for shamming an illness? And what was to keep the girls from stealing from me?

I pulled myself up straight. If I didn’t find work soon, I wouldn’t have any money to steal. “Make me a comrade, then. Swear me in. I’ll take an oath in blood if I have to.”

She gave a little satisfied grunt. “Come back later. We’re busy right now.”

I didn’t buy it. “I have two grams of Salvaran and the means to dispense it, comrade.” She looked at me quizzically. “Medicine, darling. It’s good for the clap.”

Now I did have her attention. Without a complaint, she helped me get my luggage inside the foyer. It was a dark, stark place, with a mahogany table and a single brass lamp with a fringed, box shade. A long flight of stairs led upward, then curled back on itself, vanishing into the murk. I followed her down a corridor past the staircase. I glanced into the salon. Though the shutters were closed, I could make out satin pillows and brocatelle sofas. Everything was excruciatingly clean. Carlisle Street had been just the same, as if to reassure the gents that syphilis was like ptomaine and could therefore be warred against with brush and bucket.

We went through another door. The light was blinding after the hall. Seven or maybe eight women sat in a room that was half dayroom and half glassed-in loggia, like a greenhouse. Ferns, geraniums and bloodred hyacinths sprouted from every shelf and alcove. There was a child in the middle of the group, seated on a hassock in a cloud of white lace flounces, her face buried in her handkerchief. The sobs were mixed with little gasps of Catalan. Her voice was decidedly unchildlike.

She lifted her face from the hankie. I saw from her bulging forehead that she was a dwarf, with deep-set eyes imprisoned in a whorl of blue paint. She was an improbable schoolgirl in her lace and pigtails. The other women, all in shifts and nightdresses, were clustered around her, trying to get her to drink from a porrón, a beaker that shoots a stream of wine directly into the mouth, bypassing germ-ridden lips. The porrón is ideal for passing around.

One woman, round and rosy in the flesh, looked up and said, “The English girl?” The gaiety in her voice cheered me. She got up, leaving the other women to comfort the dwarf.