Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

After forty minutes, I decided he’d gotten his money’s worth. I marched up the stairs, then knocked on the door of the Green Suite, the room Alma preferred. “Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

There was no answer. Perhaps she’d decided on another room. Plenty were available on such a slow night. I turned the knob and found to my horror that it was locked. I put my eye to the keyhole but saw only a chair. “Alma! Alma!” I cried. There was no answer. “Jacinta! Esmeralda! Where is the key?”

Pandemonium followed: doors swinging open, nerves jangling, Jacinta shouting that no one had keys to the rooms. No one had ever had them. She ran upstairs, the house’s front and back door keys in her hands.

“Hurry!”

Neither key fitted the lock. She reinserted the first one, jiggled and twisted and worked at it until the latch popped.

Jacinta flung the door open. Before I could see the bed, I saw Jacinta cross herself, the first time anyone in Spain had done this in my presence. Then I looked at the bed.

Alma was straining at the ribbons that bound her hands and feet to the bed. A rag separated her jaws. Her skin—I had always admired its fine, caramel cast—was smothered in a pale, viscous sap. It had soaked the rag in her mouth and glued her eyes shut. I mention her condition first because it was the most important thing to me and because the object on top of her was not comprehensible. My senses denied it. But like a nightmare that begins slowly, the thing gathered detail. The long bones of his feet and legs, lying between her whitened legs, reminded me of scraps tossed out after a feast. Its white hipbones lay caught between her thighs and its rib cage had engulfed her breasts completely, as if the skeleton had not possessed a sternum. The evil grin of its skull lay close to her slippery cheek.

Alma struggled to say something. It sounded like, “my eyes.”

Constantina rushed over to rub Alma’s eyes with the corner of the sheet. “Keep them closed, just for a second,” I said.

I stood over the bed and tried to yank the skeleton away by its feet. The bones snapped off in my hands. I moved around the bed, gripped the hipbone and the rib cage and gently pulled. There was a hideous, sucking sound as the thing came away. I wrapped the bones in a sheet while Constantina finished wiping Alma’s eyelids. “Take that thing downstairs and burn it. Get her a robe, someone!” Esmeralda found a nightgown. It seemed that Jacinta had fled.

Alma opened her eyes. “Vida,” she said plaintively. I helped her put her arms in the gown. She was as limp as warm candle wax.

We scrubbed her with pumice stones until her flesh glowed and the rich, rotting smell of semen was gone. The filling of the bath and the rattle of the boiler were the only sounds we made. Alma did not say a word. Perhaps somewhere there is a language that provides the means to explain what we had seen. But none of us could speak it, so we said nothing at all.

Sometime in the night, I’d heard Jacinta creep back into her bed. I had gone to her for comfort but had found myself comforting her. It seemed that she had never forgotten Gabriella’s hoarded newspaper clipping. In her tormented imagination, the skeleton was the advance guard of Satan’s army, called down by Father Abelardo and his blood-nourished grave. Gabriella, Jacinta insisted, had been bedded by one. Having no better explanation of what we’d seen, I kept watch over Alma throughout the night, lest she wake and become another swan in our trees.

The next morning, Alma’s smile upon waking was bracing. It seemed possible, even likely, that she remembered nothing.

“When does the train from Barbastro come in?” she asked. A sigh came from Jacinta’s bed. She was waking up.

“I imagine it’s already in,” I said.

“Then why are we all sleeping?”

I looked up at the attic windows. Bright morning sunlight rimmed the black shades. “It’s hours until we open, Alma.”

She sat up and glanced at the slumbering figures of the other girls with disapproval. “We should open now.”

“Steady on,” I said. “A girl’s got to have some time off.”

She swung her legs down and pushed up from the cot over my protests. “I will call Santiago,” she said, referring to the station-master. “He’ll pass on the word we’re open.”

I laughed aloud, which was the wrong thing to do, I know, but I’m never at my best when sleep runs short. “You’ll never get the others to vote for that!”

Jacinta was now sitting up, her face long with worry. Alma was at her mirror, washing herself at the basin on the floor and rubbing her feet with perfumed oil. Esmeralda, confused, went to the window and tugged the cord, flooding the attic with light. Everyone was staring at Alma.

“I don’t think it’s good for you to work today,” I said.

She whirled around, eyes blazing. “You dare to say that when you know how they risk their lives for us! How could you refuse a single one of them?”

“I only refuse the ones who can’t pay.” She seemed to flinch away from this. “You aren’t suggesting we give it away, surely.”

Jacinta got up and came to Alma’s side. “Alma, you must rest. Remember Gabriella.”

Alma pushed her away. “She was an hysteric. Why would she have anything to do with what happened to me?”

Everyone was holding her breath and praying that Alma would say what had happened. She dragged her brush through her hair and said, “Who crossed herself last night, I want to know? Who prayed while I was sleeping?” The other girls all lowered their eyes. “You pathetic, ignorant whores. He gave me chloroform. I passed out. Who knows what happened? He had an accomplice. The skeleton was brought in through the window, maybe. Or up the stairs while you sat on your fat behinds. The Fascists torment us to destroy our will! They know we give our men the will to fight!”

Everyone looked relieved beyond measure. Constantina, the youngest of us, stood up from her bed, her shawl about her shoulders. “We could work free. For a day. To boost morale.”

“I would do it for a day,” Jacinta said.

“Listen to yourselves,” I said, furious. “You’re just whores! The Fascists don’t waste a single thought on you. The lack of a nail in a horseshoe will make more difference to the war than all the whores in the world.”

“Get out,” Alma said.

I struggled to remain charitable. “Well, I have got my monthly,” I said evenly. No one spoke to me as I dressed.

I had spent the day languishing in cafés and dress shops. Finally, desperate for someone to talk to, I remembered Mr. Bartow’s letter. I found him in the Hotel Continental savoring his first cocktail in months. Now we were on the Ramblas, strolling beneath the poplars and the curved necks of the streetlamps, dimmed because of worries about air raids.

“I can’t get over how much has changed here,” he said. “Would you look at that storefront!” We were walking beside the window of an exclusive boutique. Rows of bonbon boxes gleamed like gold teeth. “He was selling supplies to militiamen just a few months ago. And have you noticed all the tailored suits in town? It looks like the upper crust are back from whatever country home they retired to when the Anarchists took over.”

“I like the boutiques.”

He shook his head. “It used to be that the people couldn’t do enough for a militiaman, now they duck across the street when they see him coming.”

“You are a dirty lot before you’ve cleaned yourselves up.”

“Then they should offer us baths, not contempt. I’m afraid it’s all going to come apart, Miss Dade.”

“You journalists are all alarmists.”

“Maybe so. But the Loyalists aren’t getting the help of the British or the French and without that they’re doomed. Moscow won’t help as long as it has an alliance with Paris. The Bolsheviks are telling the Communist brigades to forget about Franco and concentrate on keeping Spanish Morocco from falling to the Loyalists. Because if Spanish North Africans obtain self-rule, then all of the Arabs—in the French holdings as well as in the British Near East—will rebel. Don’t you believe it when the British press blathers on about how the Spanish government can’t be supported as long as it harbors ‘extremists.’ English moderation must be music to Hitler’s ears.”