Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“Gabriella, come back!” Jacinta called.

Jacinta was sitting on a dusty wicker sofa, a frown on her face, her maquillage thoroughly wilted at this hour. “Vida, maybe you can figure out why she’s mad at me.”

I had an urge to march upstairs to bed, but I took a seat beside her. No doubt, she had been grilling Gabriella about the deranged Father Abelardo.

“A Captain Hidalgo came to her this evening,” Jacinta said, sighing. “Not for the usual, though. I was passing in the hall and I couldn’t help overhearing his voice.”

“I see.”

“He was calling her a traitor. I listened only because I wanted to find out why all the girls in Gabriella’s old infirmary all quit at the same time. Hidalgo said that all the other girls had the decency to go back to their families. Well, just now I asked Gabriella what Hidalgo thought he was doing, talking to her like that. I was very polite, you see, and—”

The door to the house swung open. Alma walked in, flinging her coat off and clicking her hands as if she wore castañets. She still had my tricorne. Two more girls came in behind her, wearing warm, sturdy robes. They, too, had cocoas.

“I did it, Vida!” Alma said. She plunged a hand into the frothy fichu of her blouse and brought out a roll of pesetas. Licking her fingers, she began counting off the notes.

“My money!” I carefully put my cup down. Then I lunged toward her.

“Not so fast.” she said in English. Apparently, the Yanks had taught her something. “Half for the house, half for you.”

I didn’t like this idea but then she had done the work. “And what about you?”

“ De nada .”

I had encountered this in Spain before. Ask a Spaniard for a lift to the station and she’ll take you all the way to France. Though it broke my heart to do it, I offered her half of my half.

Alma shook her head. “You will stay here and teach me English. Reading and writing. Okay ?”

I smiled to hide my nervousness. “One doesn’t learn the language of Shakespeare in just a few lessons.”

Her hands had found their way to her hips. “So? How long did it take you to learn the language of Cervantes?”

“I was an unusually quick study.”

“Close the door!” Jacinta said, interrupting us. “You’re letting all the heat out.” One of the girls had stepped out onto the patio.

“I think there’s a swan out here,” the girl called back.

“You need spectacles,” Alma said.

But we all followed her outside, curious to see this renegade swan. The air was crisp for once. All trace of the cold mist we’d had during the day had vanished. There was indeed a flash of white in the poplar’s branches. We all realized, at the same time, that we were looking at a lacy skirt, fluttering in the faint breeze. Gabriella had hung herself.

To me, Gabriella’s suicide was a sign of loss of nerve during wartime. I didn’t let it prevent me from honoring my obligation to Alma or from settling into a routine. Oh, I was homesick at times. To drink a strong cup of tea, to get the newspaper off the steps in the morning, to buy a Penguin in Charing Cross Road, would have been heaven. The only thing I didn’t miss was my old customers at Carlisle Street: junior ministers who railed about racial hygiene; Harley Street doctors who scrutinized your female parts as if they’d like to see them pickled in a pathological museum. Still, there was worse employment. I had once been a typist at three pounds, two shillings a week. In that profession, having a good education means that, as well as typing a young man’s dissertation, you help him write it. If you’re lucky, he’ll buy you a nosegay.

Telling Alma about my old customers helped to usher them into distant memory. Alma and I, the only speakers of English in the house, were like children with a secret code. Alma was a surprise in both languages, however. She loved the revolution and Buster Keaton one-reelers. She yearned for Anarchist brotherhood yet planned to desert to England, and then to America if the Fascists got too close.

“When I get to England,” she said one day, “I’m giving up the life.”

“You’d rather scrub floors? Would this be some penance for leaving Barcelona?”

“I couldn’t do this work anywhere else,” she insisted. “To work this life in England would always remind me of here, where I was happy. Aren’t you happy here? The priests may not think so, but we’re like a tonic for our boys.”

To hear Alma talk, being a prostitute during wartime was like working for the Red Cross. You’d think the war depended on us. I suspected that Alma’s reassurances were for her own benefit; they made her feel less of a coward for not joining her sister at the front.

There was something about Barcelona’s atmosphere of revolutionary hope that put courage into everyone. Even Gary Bartow had joined the militias. His letters were fascinating. The brigadistas had a passion for equality and brotherhood that may have played well in America, for all I knew, but would have gotten them laughed out of London. Mr. Bartow wrote that neither side had enough ammunition to do anything more than hold the line and carry out a raid or two. Lice were a bigger worry than the enemy. Still, hearing of the war, even in its current stalemate, reminded me of how easily I had slept back home.

I told myself that I was sleeping just as easily here. Business was getting brisker all the time. The custom was steady and the competition peculiarly feeble, for Gabriella’s brothel was not the only one to close. Two more followed suit because the girls inside suddenly swore off the trade. If this kept up, I would have a large pot to take back to Britain, where a good many people thought Mussolini was the name of an opera singer.

One spring evening, some of us sat in the salon, the phonograph idle because my friend back home had yet to send us the needle that could not be had in Barcelona for love or money (we had tried both). It was a quiet night. No militia transports had come in that day and the train from Barbastro was keeping to a Spanish timetable. It was due in today but not expected until tomorrow. I was reading a letter from Gary Bartow. He hoped to be on the Barbastro train.

The front door’s buzzer went off. I was having my monthly so it was my turn to officiate. I hauled myself out of the deeply puckered chair.

The man I admitted into the foyer was so peculiar it was hard not to stare. His skin was so pale and taut it looked like it had been glued directly to his bones, with no intervening tissue. His tongue worked in his mouth for a moment, then he said, “Bring me a girl.” The voice was more powerful than I had expected. He held out a roll of pesetas.

“ Camarada, wouldn’t you be better off getting a doctor?”

His eyes brightened for a moment, as if blazing with rage. The words, “I got the money,” rattled across his lips.

I walked back into the salon. “This one looks like he’s been put through a wringer,” I whispered, loud enough for them all to hear.

Jacinta put down the penny dreadful she’d been reading, and said, “Last week, I had to take the one with no nose!”

There followed a clamor of excuses from Esmeralda and the other girls. Finally, Alma stood up and left the parlor.

I sat down and picked up the Lorca poem she’d been translating, a likening of the sea to Lucifer. Not content to placidly reflect the sky’s blue depths, the sea desired Heaven’s azure light for itself, and was thus condemned to the endless spasms of waves. Finding the verse an inauspicious omen, I didn’t read the rest of the poem but took to staring at the Chinese clock on the mantelpiece. Its gold orbs seemed not to spin at all. Above it, there hung a painting of two nude women embracing. I looked from the painting to the clock, back to the painting, back to the clock. A dried husk like Alma’s customer could take hours. Some clever inventor, I thought, needs to build a machine that will dangle your book from the ceiling, so you can read while the gent pumps away.