Jessie Burton - The Muse

‘Who’s the traitor?’ Teresa replied, her voice a croak.

‘Do you want me to pour it down your throat myself?’

Teresa stared up at him, still refusing. ‘Gregorio,’ Jorge said. ‘You do it.’

Gregorio was upon her before Teresa could ready herself. He pinned back her arms and drove his knee into her lower back. Pallid and sweating, he grabbed her jaw and hinged it open. ‘Drink it!’ he screamed. The shock of Gregorio turning on her seemed to make Teresa numb with terror, and Jorge worked the neck of the bottle into her mouth with relative ease.

‘Drink it,’ Gregorio hissed. ‘Drink the lot.’

Opening her eyes wide, Teresa turned her head so that Gregorio was forced to meet her gaze, and she kept them open as the contents were emptied down her throat. Some of the villagers ran away at this point, the spell of violence finally broken by this horror.

When the bottle were empty, the men let Teresa go. She gagged, strands of oil falling from the corners of her mouth, pooling into the dust.

‘Who knew we lived next door to the Devil?’ one man near Olive whispered.

‘Go home now, Teresa,’ Jorge said. ‘And try not to shit yourself. If we haven’t found him in the next few days, expect another visit.’

Teresa rose to her feet and stumbled, and Olive pushed past the men to take her by the arm. This time, they didn’t stop her. Teresa sagged against Olive’s side, and the two girls staggered out of the square, the remaining villagers parting to let through this gagging, bald creature, whose bowels might go at any minute, thanks to the dosage of an entire bottle of castor oil.

No one jeered her progress — not even half-heartedly, in the presence of Jorge and Gregorio. No one said a thing, slack-mouthed in horror. They watched the girls up the dusty path, out of the village towards the finca. They kept watching, until they couldn’t see them any more.

Jorge and Gregorio stepped into the truck and revved away in the opposite direction. Gradually, the square fell empty except for the dark clumps of Teresa’s hair, abandoned in the gravel.

Olive bathed Teresa and burned the filthy smock. She dressed her in her own Aran jumper and a pair of blue silk trousers that Sarah donated. Perhaps the beauty of the blue silk was to distract Teresa, but all it did was make her look incongruous; the luxury compared to the woollen jumper and her bald head. By the time Harold came back late from Malaga, Teresa had been administered two of Sarah’s sleeping pills, and she was upstairs in one of the first-floor bedrooms, fast asleep.

Before she could even tell him what had happened in the town square, Harold unburdened what he’d seen in the city. He was very shaken. The roads were terrible, he said. Since the two main bridges had been destroyed, isolating the centre, no one had done anything to fix them. He called it the perverse Buddhism of the Spaniards. Letting fate flow was all very well — but not at the expense of life. For how else could one explain not mending a bridge that might help feed citizens waiting in the city, let alone the troops?

He’d parked outside and walked in on foot, and when he’d finally made it to the centre, there wasn’t much food to be had. No tins at all, no cheese — no cheese! — no cake. He’d managed to find a kilo of sugar and one of weak acorn coffee, a rationed amount of salted cod, some fresh sardines, a box of cigarettes and a feeble chorizo. He said the place was becoming unrecognizable — where once there were hanging baskets were now bombed buildings, the staring faces of the recent homeless, with nowhere to live and little to eat. Although the hotels were still standing — safe enough, for they were locked at night against marauding gangs — certain parts of the city were now nothing more than a smoking shell.

‘The organization’s hopeless,’ he said. ‘It’s a fucking disaster,’ he spat, and his wife and daughter flinched. What was bothering Harold so much — he, who was not from this place, who could leave any moment he wanted?

He told them that the ex-pats who were staying in the city were holed up in the Regina Hotel, but the vast majority of foreigners were leaving on the second wave of destroyers the British Consulate had sent news of. He saw them down at the dock, their passports in hand, travelling trunks scattered around like a game of dominoes. English, Americans, Argentines, Germans and Chileans, some wealthy-looking Spaniards. ‘They’re saying the red wave will strike them, but it’s Mussolini’s bombers overhead,’ he said. ‘The sea might be the only reliable way of sourcing food from now on. I don’t see, with those bridges down, how it’s all going to get in.’

‘We’re too far from the sea here for that to be of any comfort,’ Sarah snapped, picking up the sardines and chorizo and disappearing with them into the pantry. ‘Did you find the flag to purchase, like I asked?’ she called.

‘Don’t you have a clue?’ he shouted back. ‘The air raids, the Italian warships bombing the port? You think I’ll find a Union Jack in the middle of that?’

But despite Malaga’s terrors, Olive believed it was Teresa who really began to unnerve her parents. Her presence was like a dark mass in the first-floor bedroom, and an atmosphere of guilt pervaded the house. Sarah did not know what to do with her, puffing perfume around the girl, bringing all the Vogue s and Harper’s she might desire. On seeing these offerings, Teresa said nothing, fixing Sarah with a surly look. Sarah kept away after that, unwilling to be near such volatility. Harold lugged the gramophone up the stairs, but she played not one of his crackling jazz records.

By the third day in the finca, Teresa had contracted a fever. She lay in bed, muttering, Bist du es? Bist du es? over and over, as Olive dabbed her forehead and prayed a doctor might dare to come. Olive called for Sarah to help, but Sarah did not answer. Teresa’s expression was fixed, her eyes clamped shut, face swollen with fatigue, her skin pale and clammy like a peeled egg.

There was no news of Isaac. Every night in the village, one of the bar owners would turn his wireless towards the hills, so that all those who might be hiding out there in the woods could keep up with the news. General Queipo de Llano, still broadcasting from Seville, told his listeners that he had fifty thousand Italian troops, three banderas of the Foreign Legion, and fifteen thousand North African tribesmen known as the Army of Africa, waiting to come in to Malaga. The report made Olive shiver, but she comforted herself with the idea that Isaac was somewhere near, listening too. She didn’t want him to be in the north, she wanted him here.

Teresa’s fever broke, and she lay on her back in silence for several more days. At night, listening to the whine of the distant bombers, Olive could hear Teresa moving up and down the corridors, a bare-footed catharsis of pacing — but what did she want? Was this a night-time vigil to call back her brother? Why, when he was the reason for her humiliation? Olive remembered Teresa’s scream of rage in the town square, her look of impotence, her terror as Gregorio clutched her. She wondered if, after all this, Teresa really knew where Isaac was.

But Teresa was buried beneath the memory, by day curled up on the bed like a foetus, her face towards the wall. She called for no one. It was a trauma none of them knew what to do with. Olive would wake at dawn and stand in front of a blank canvas, unable to lift the brush. She could not escape the image of the chair in the village square, the smock stained with faeces, Teresa’s head a dull white glow, her feet weaving over the finca hallway. Fearing she might never paint a picture, nor see Isaac again, Olive was ashamed to realize that she couldn’t tell which deprivation struck her deeper. I have been useful to you : Isaac’s words resounded in her head.