Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“Help me not to talk if they take me,” she said, her mouth against the weeds. “Keep me from talking, Enrique. Keep me from ever talking, Vicente.”

Behind her she could hear them going through the weeds like beaters in a rabbit drive. They were spread wide and advancing like skirmishers, flashing their electric torches in the weeds.

“Oh, Enrique,” she said, “help me.”

She brought her hands down from her head and clenched them by her sides. “It is better so,” she thought. “If I run they will shoot. It will be simpler.”

Slowly she got up and ran toward the car. The searchlight was full on her and she ran seeing only it, into its white, blinding eye. She thought this was the best way to do it.

Behind her they were shouting. But there was no shooting. Someone tackled her heavily and she went down. She heard him breathing as he held her.

Someone else took her under the arm and lifted her. Holding her by the two arms they walked her toward the car. They were not rough with her, but they walked her steadily toward the car.

“No,” she said. “No. No.”

“It’s the sister of Vicente Irtube,” said the lieutenant. “She should be useful.”

“She’s been questioned before,” said another.

“Never seriously.”

“No,” she said. “No. No.” She cried aloud, “Help me, Vicente! Help me, help me, Enrique!”

“They’re dead,” said someone. “They won’t help you. Don’t be silly.”

“Yes,” she said. “They will help me. It is the dead that will help me. Oh, yes, yes, yes! It is our dead that will help me!”

“Take a look at Enrique then,” said the lieutenant. “See if he will help you. He’s in the back of that car.”

“He’s helping me now,” the girl, Maria, said. “Can’t you see he’s helping me now? Thank you, Enrique. Oh, thank you!”

“Come on,” said the lieutenant. “She’s crazy. Leave four men to guard the stuff and we will send a truck for it. We’ll take this crazy up to headquarters. She can talk up there.”

“No,” said Maria, taking hold of his sleeve. “Can’t you see everyone is helping me now?”

“No,” said the lieutenant. “You are crazy.”

“No one dies for nothing,” said Maria. “Everyone is helping me now.”

“Get them to help you in about an hour,” said the lieutenant.

“They will,” said Maria. “Please don’t worry. Many, many people are helping me now.”

She sat there holding herself very still against the back of the seat. She seemed now to have a strange confidence. It was the same confidence another girl her age had felt a little more than five hundred years before in the market place of a town called Rouen.

Maria did not think of this. Nor did anyone in the car think of it. The two girls named Jeanne and Maria had nothing in common except this sudden strange confidence which came when they needed it. But all of the policemen in the car felt uncomfortable about Maria now as she sat very straight with her face shining in the arc light.

The cars started and in the back seat of the front car men were putting the machine guns back into the heavy canvas cases, slipping the stocks out and putting them in their diagonal pockets, the barrels with the handgrips in the big flapped pouch, the magazines in the narrow webbed pockets.

The Negro with the flat straw hat came out from the shadow of the house and hailed the first car. He got up into the front seat, making two who rode there beside the driver, and the four cars turned onto the main road that led toward the sea-drive into La Havana.

Sitting crowded on the front seat of the car, the Negro reached under his shirt and put his fingers on the string of blue voodoo beads. He sat without speaking, his fingers holding the beads. He had been a dock worker before he got a job as a stool pigeon for the Havana police and he would get fifty dollars for this night’s work. Fifty dollars is a lot of money now in La Havana, but the Negro could no longer think about the money. He turned his head a little, very slowly, as they came onto the lighted driveway of the Malecon and, looking back, saw the girl’s face, shining proudly, and her head held high.

The Negro was frightened and he put his fingers all the way around the string of blue voodoo beads and held them tight. But they could not help his fear because he was up against an older magic now.

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A LION that lived in Africa with all the other lions. The other lions were all bad lions and every day they ate zebras and wildebeests and every kind of antelope. Sometimes the bad lions ate people too. They ate Swahilis, Umbulus and Wandorobos and they especially liked to eat Hindu traders. All Hindu traders are very fat and delicious to a lion.

But this lion, that we love because he was so good, had wings on his back. Because he had wings on his back the other lions all made fun of him.

“Look at him with the wings on his back,” they would say and then they would all roar with laughter.

“Look at what he eats,” they would say because the good lion only ate pasta and scampi because he was so good.

The bad lions would roar with laughter and eat another Hindu trader and their wives would drink his blood, going lap, lap, lap with their tongues like big cats. They only stopped to growl with laughter or to roar with laughter at the good lion and to snarl at his wings. They were very bad and wicked lions indeed.

But the good lion would sit and fold his wings back and ask politely if he might have a Negroni or an Americano and he always drank that instead of the blood of the Hindu traders. One day he refused to eat eight Masai cattle and only ate some tagliatelli and drank a glass of pomodoro.

This made the wicked lions very angry and one of the lionesses, who was the wickedest of them all and could never get the blood of Hindu traders off her whiskers even when she rubbed her face in the grass, said, “Who are you that you think you are so much better than we are? Where do you come from, you pasta-eating lion? What are you doing here anyway?” She growled at him and they all roared without laughter.

“My father lives in a city where he stands under the clock tower and looks down on a thousand pigeons, all of whom are his subjects. When they fly they make a noise like a rushing river. There are more palaces in my father’s city than in all of Africa and there are four great bronze horses that face him and they all have one foot in the air because they fear him.

“In my father’s city men go on foot or in boats and no real horse would enter the city for fear of my father.”

“Your father was a griffon,” the wicked lioness said, licking her whiskers.

“You are a liar,” one of the wicked lions said. “There is no such city.”

“Pass me a piece of Hindu trader,” another very wicked lion said. “This Masai cattle is too newly killed.”

“You are a worthless liar and the son of a griffon,” the wickedest of all the lionesses said. “And now I think I shall kill you and eat you, wings and all.”

This frightened the good lion very much because he could see her yellow eyes and her tail going up and down and the blood caked on her whiskers and he smelled her breath which was very bad because she never brushed her teeth ever. Also she had old pieces of Hindu trader under her claws.

“Don’t kill me,” the good lion said. “My father is a noble lion and always has been respected and everything is true as I said.”

Just then the wicked lioness sprang at him. But he rose into the air on his wings and circled the group of wicked lions once, with them all roaring and looking at him. He looked down and thought, “What savages these lions are.”