Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“ Salud! ” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. Though still in her nightdress, she was painted up like an actress who works on a stage a thousand miles from the audience. “I have been praying for a girl to make the Americans happy. They like them skinny.”

“We shouldn’t let her join,” the one who’d brought me in said. “She doesn’t know what comradeship is.”

“Alma, give her a chance,” said the woman in front of me. “This is Alma Almirall, Miss Dade. I am Jacinta.” She gestured that she would introduce me to the others later. The two of them led me upstairs.

Alma and Jacinta were lounging on the cot next to mine in the house’s stuffy attic dormitory. They eyed my things while I put them away, making me wish I had a lockable case for my silks.

“What’s wrong with the girl downstairs?” I asked.

Alma snorted. “We’d all like to know that. We took her in because we felt sorry for her and now she cries all the time.”

“Don’t listen to Alma,” Jacinta said. “Gabriella has plenty reason to be upset. You might have heard about—”

Alma interrupted with a groan. “The wilder the story, the more Jacinta repeats it. But tell her the Fascists are a kilometer from Madrid and she forgets it before dinner. You know the priest who carved his own throat?”

“Father Abelardo?” I asked. He had bled all over the steps of the Sagrada Familia church—a locked church—I had read. Loyalist Spain had little love for clerics.

Jacinta nodded excitedly. “He bade his followers to water his grave with the blood of whores, to win the Evil One’s assistance. And you know, those three girls did disappear—”

“And my auntie’s parakeet got sick that week, too,” Alma said, with an impatient clink of her bracelets.

“Is that why Gabriella was crying?” I asked. “Did she know the girls?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think she knew the priest.” Jacinta’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “She knows he can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get Lucifer to bring a new army to Franco.”

I couldn’t help laughing. She’d obviously been reading one of the thrill-mongering pro-Fascist rags known to prey on the superstitious. “So you don’t know why Gabriella is crying at all, do you?”

Jacinta sat up, lifting her chin very primly. “Why would she keep the newspaper clipping about him in her drawer?”

Alma pinched Jacinta’s plump thigh. “Why would you know what’s in her drawer?”

While I carefully folded the last of my silks, Jacinta said, “A friend of mine saw a vapor at the Sagrada cemetery—”

“Steaming horseshit,” Alma declared.

I wished the girls would leave me to my Penguin. And my plans. In six weeks, I should have enough to take me to France on a holiday and then on to England. The Continent could keep its extremes, its Hitlers and bead mumblers. I’d had enough.

Alma got up from her sagging bed. She took my hat from the stand and tried it on, admiring herself in the mirror. “How did you run out of money?”

The hat, an indigo tricorne, looked lovely on her. Too lovely. “The man who brought me here liked to gamble.”

“You gave him your money?” Jacinta asked.

“No, he stole it from my hiding place. Then he lost it, to another newspaperman. Eddie Mercel? He has a famous byline.” But of course they hadn’t heard of him. “Anyway, Dickie had the good grace to die of a heart attack right on the card table.”

This made even Alma laugh. She was responsible for the financial scheme around here, I’d been told. Soldiers from the Loyalist militias were charged a normal fee. Men who had mistreated or knocked up their girlfriends were charged double. Suspected Fascist sympathizers were reported to a militia man. I can’t say I liked the world I was finding myself in, but my curiosity was piqued. And where would I be without curiosity? I’d be in a café on Brighton’s promenade, wiping down tables and accepting the first spotty youth’s offer of six brats and a crumbling terraced house.

“Why didn’t you get it back from this Mercel?” Alma asked.

“He won it fairly. I did ask Eddie for it,” I hastened to add. “Demanded it in fact but—”

“You didn’t get it back,” Alma said sneeringly. She repositioned the hat and posed as if for a photograph. “Vida,” she said, rolling my name around on her tongue. “You should live up to a name like that.”

In Spanish, it meant “life” but for my mother it had meant “visionary.” At the time of my birth, she had still believed that England’s green and reasonable land was everything her English soldier had promised, a paradise where a Russian Jewess could know a life of peace and tolerance.

“Jacinta, I’m going out,” Alma said.

“You haven’t got time to go anywhere!”

“My monthly came early,” she said breezily, then she sauntered out the door, my hat on her head.

I suppose that many brothels are started in times of war but I wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to invest in a Turkish bath, like the one we had in Finsbury back home. Many of the militiamen who came to us were staying in evil little boardinghouses that did not offer the means of a good wash. These men would come to our door with no higher ambition than a bath. They shuffled in, their new boots already on their feet, their parcels of new clothes in their arms. Fortunately, the girls had purchased several tin tubs. Filling bucket and tub was up to the gentlemen themselves.

I should admit I did not become aware of this straight away. On that first evening, I seldom stepped into the salon, or into the hall for that matter. Instead, I stayed in the Blue Suite, one of the six bedrooms on the middle floors (though if the room had any color scheme at all, I was unable to detect it). There I waited for my tick-and-turns. I had thought the girls simpleminded when they said men would come to me without seeing the goods first. But the first militiaman came along soon enough, though “man” is an overstatement. He was barely sixteen, a Spaniard, in fact. He spent himself in my hands while I examined him. He stuttered something, then disappeared like a fawn.

After he’d left, it struck me that here, unlike Carlisle Street, I wouldn’t be relying on regulars. I wouldn’t have to feign pleasure in the hope of persuading some East India banker that I gave better value than the competition. The war, I imagined, would always send along another soldier.

My mind humming pleasantly with this thought, I cracked the door a little, to signal I was ready for the next man. He came along before I had time to touch my book (Mr. Forster’s A Passage to India). It seemed that the militiamen did trust the camaradas to deliver up one red-haired, English-speaking girl. This lad, like the last one, wore a red-and-black scarf, the closest the Anarchist militiamen came to a uniform. His new trousers were excruciatingly stiff. He was scarcely inside the door when he said, in English, “Can you really—”

“It’s my mother tongue, too,” I said.

I was not at all prepared for what happened next. He plopped down on the threadbare chaise, planted his face in his hands, and cried.

“Wh-wh-what’s wrong?” I asked.

It took some minutes—too many minutes—to get him calm again. It seemed that he hadn’t heard a woman speak his own language since he’d left Chicago. He declared me beautiful. To my horror, I contradicted him. He served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade— La Quince Brigada —he told me proudly. The Quince Brigade I told him and he laughed heartily at my lame joke. I told myself that the next time I saw him, I would have better jokes to tell.

A little after 3:00 A.M., I went to the loggia, a watery cocoa in my hand. As I entered, I caught a glimpse of Gabriella as she slammed the door to the patio behind her.