The weed pollen was dusty in his face and as he wriggled steadily along, the sand-burrs stabbing his hands and knees sharply and minutely, he heard them coming around the house. They had surrounded it.
He crawled steadily, thinking hard, giving no importance to the pain.
“But why the sirens?” he thought. “Why no third car from the rear? Why no spotlight or a searchlight on this field? Cubans,” he thought. “Can they be this stupid and theatrical? They must have thought there was no one in the house. They must have come only to seize the stuff. But why the sirens?”
Behind him he heard them breaking in the door. They were all around the house. He heard two blasts on a whistle from close to the house and he wriggled steadily on.
“The fools,” he thought. “But they must have found the basket and the dishes by now. What people! What a way to raid a house!”
He was almost to the edge of the lot now and he knew that he must rise and make a dash across the road for the far houses. He had found a way of crawling that hurt little. He could adjust himself to almost any movement. It was the brusque changes that hurt, and he dreaded rising to his feet.
In the weeds he rose on one knee, took the shock of the pain, held through it, and then brought it on again as he drew the other foot alongside his knee in order to rise.
He started to run toward the house across the street, at the back of the next lot, when the clicking on of the searchlight caught him so that he was full in the beam, looking toward it, the blackness a sharp line on either side.
The searchlight was from the police car that had come silently, without siren, and posted itself at one back corner of the lot.
As Enrique rose to his feet, thin, gaunt, sharply outlined in the beam, pulling at the big pistol in the holster under his armpit, the submachine guns opened on him from the darkened car.
The feeling is that of being clubbed across the chest and he only felt the first one. The other clubbing thuds that came were echoes.
He went forward onto his face in the weeds and as he fell, or perhaps it was between the time the searchlight went on and the first bullet reached him, he had one thought. “They are not so stupid. Perhaps something can be done with them.”
If he had had time for another thought it would have been to hope there was no car at the other corner. But there was a car at the other corner and its searchlight was going over the field. Its wide beam was playing over the weeds, where the girl, Maria, lay hidden. In the dark car the machine gunners, their guns poised, followed the sweep of the beam with the fluted, efficient ugliness of the Thompson muzzles.
In the shadow of the tree, behind the darkened car from which the searchlight played, there was a Negro standing. He wore a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat and an alpaca coat. Under his shirt he wore a string of blue voodoo beads. He was standing quietly watching the lights working.
The searchlights played on over the weedfield where the girl lay flat against the ground, her chin in the earth. She had not moved since she heard the burst of firing. She could feel her heart beating against the ground.
“Do you see her?” asked one of the men in the car.
“Let them beat through the weeds for the other side,” the lieutenant in the front seat said. “Hola,” he called to the Negro under the tree. “Go to the house and tell them to beat toward us through the weeds in extended order. Are there only the two?”
“Only two,” the Negro said in a quiet voice. “We have the other one.”
“Go.”
“Yes sir, Lieutenant,” the Negro said.
Holding his straw hat in both hands he started to run along the edge of the field toward the house where, now, lights shone from all the windows.
In the field the girl lay, her hands clasped across the top of her head. “Help me to bear this,” she said into the weeds, speaking to no one, for there was no one there. Then, suddenly, personally, sobbing, “Help me, Vicente. Help me, Felipe. Help me, Chucho. Help me, Arturo. Help me now, Enrique. Help me.”
At one time she would have prayed, but she had lost that and now she needed something.
“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.
The Good Lion
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.”
He circled them once more to make them roar more loudly. Then he swooped low so he could look at the eyes of the wicked lioness who rose on her hind legs to try and catch him. But she missed him with her claws. “Adios,” he said, for he spoke beautiful Spanish, being a lion of culture. “Au revoir,” he called to them in his exemplary French.
They all roared and growled in African lion dialect.
Then the good lion circled higher and higher and set his course for Venice. He alighted in the Piazza and everyone was delighted to see him. He flew up for a moment and kissed his father on both cheeks and saw the horses still had their feeet up and the Basilica looked more beautiful than a soap bubble. The Campanile was in place and the pigeons were going to their nests for the evening.
“How was Africa?” his father said.
“Very savage, father,” the good lion replied.
“We have night lighting here now,” his father said.
“So I see,” the good lion answered like a dutiful son.
“It bothers my eyes a little,” his father confided to him. “Where are you going now, my son?”
“To Harry’s Bar,” the good lion said.
“Remember me to Cipriani and tell him I will be in some day soon to see about my bill,” said his father.
“Yes, father,” said the good lion and he flew down lightly and walked to Harry’s Bar on his own four paws.
In Cipriani’s nothing was changed. All of his friends were there. But he was a little changed himself from being in Africa.
“A Negroni, Signor Barone?” asked Mr. Cipriani.
But the good lion had flown all the way from Africa and Africa had changed him.
“Do you have any Hindu trader sandwiches?” he asked Cipriani.
“No, but I can get some.”
“While you are sending for them, make me a very dry martini.” He added, “With Gordon’s gin.”
“Very good,” said Cipriani. “Very good indeed.”
Now the lion looked about him at the faces of all the nice people and he knew that he was at home but that he had also traveled. He was very happy.
The Faithful Bull
ONE TIME THERE WAS A BULL AND HIS name was not Ferdinand and he cared nothing for flowers. He loved to fight and he fought with all the other bulls of his own age, or any age, and he was a champion.
His horns were as solid as wood and they were as sharply pointed as the quill of a porcupine. They hurt him, at the base, when he fought and he did not care at all. His neck muscles lifted in a great lump that is called in Spanish the morillo and this morillo lifted like a hill when he was ready to fight. He was always ready to fight and his coat was black and shining and his eyes were clear.
Anything made him want to fight and he would fight with deadly seriousness exactly as some people eat or read or go to church. Each time he fought he fought to kill and the other bulls were not afraid of him because they came of good blood and were not afraid. But they had no wish to provoke him. Nor did they wish to fight him.
He was not a bully nor was he wicked, but he liked to fight as men might like to sing or to be the King or the President. He never thought at all. Fighting was his obligation and his duty and his joy.
He fought on the stony, high ground. He fought under the cork-oak trees and he fought in the good pasture by the river. He walked fifteen miles each day from the river to the high, stony ground and he would fight any bull that looked at him. Still he was never angry.
That is not really true, for he was angry inside himself. But he did not know why, because he could not think. He was very noble and he loved to fight.
So what happened to him? The man who owned him, if anyone can own such an animal, knew what a great bull he was and still he was worried because this bull cost him so much money by fighting with other bulls. Each bull was worth over one thousand dollars and after they had fought the great bull they were worth less than two hundred dollars and sometimes less than that.
So the man, who was a good man, decided that he would keep the blood of this bull in all of his stock rather than send him to the ring to be killed. So he selected him for breeding.
But this bull was a strange bull. When they first turned him into the pasture with the b
reeding cows, he saw one who was young and beautiful and slimmer and better muscled and shinier and more lovely than all the others. So, since he could not fight, he fell in love with her and he paid no attention to any of the others. He only wanted to be with her, and the others meant nothing to him at all.
The man who owned the bull ranch hoped that the bull would change, or learn, or be different than he was. But the bull was the same and he loved whom he loved and no one else. He only wanted to be with her, and the others meant nothing to him at all.
So the man sent him away with five other bulls to be killed in the ring, and at least the bull could fight, even though he was faithful. He fought wonderfully and everyone admired him and the man who killed him admired him the most. But the fighting jacket of the man who killed him and who is called the matador was wet through by the end, and his mouth was very dry.
“Que toro más bravo,” the matador said as he handed his sword to his sword handler. He handed it with the hilt up and the blade dripping with the blood from the heart of the brave bull who no longer had any problems of any kind and was being dragged out of the ring by four horses.
“Yes. He was the one the Marqués of Villamayor had to get rid of because he was faithful,” the sword handler, who knew everything, said.
“Perhaps we should all be faithful,” the matador said.
Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog
“AND WHAT DID WE DO THEN?” HE asked her. She told him.
“That part is very strange. I can’t remember that at all.”
“Can you remember the safari leaving?”
“I should. But I don’t. I remember the women going down the trail to the beach for the water with the pots on their heads and I remember the flock of geese the toto drove back and forth to the water. I remember how slowly they all went and they were always going down or coming up. There was a very big tide too and the flats were yellow and the channel ran by the far island. The wind blew all the time and there were no flies and no mosquitoes. There was a roof and a cement floor and the poles that held the roof up, and the wind blew through them all the time. It was cool all day and lovely and cool at night.”