The Invitation(53)

There are things that I see.

I will try not to think of them.

I pretend that my eyes are the lens of a camera. That behind them is nothing but the mechanism of a machine, blinking, viewing, but not processing.

At night I return to the metro station like a rat to its hole. The dim platform is a microcosm of life above ground. There is fear, but here is something I’ve learned: fear is an exhausting thing, and life goes on around it. There are men playing cards, a woman darning something, a boy about my own age colouring in a book.

It is the families I find difficult. They huddle in tight groups. They press together to keep warm. I can remember the compact heat of Tino’s body beside mine as I read to him, his thin arm threaded through mine. How he clung to me, particularly in those final months. Assuming comfort, protection, in which I failed him, in the end.

I can still summon him to me, but never whole – only in the details. The sight of him amidst the green at the end of the garden, the sudden pale oval of his face turning back to look. The intensity of him, bent over one of his strange, beautiful diagrams. And the colour of his hair, darkened slightly from its old, infant blond. He was in a state of transformation, his lines growing sharper in the last year, losing the last softnesses of early childhood. I had seen this at the time as something to mourn; as the end of something. Now I would give anything to see those changes continue. I cannot believe that he will not continue to transform. The boy he could have become, the adult. These possibilities have been extinguished, forever. Most of all, I cannot believe I will never see him again.

So I watch them jealously, the families. These are people who have been bombed out of their homes, who think, perhaps, that they have lost everything. I wonder if they will come to realize that what they have here is everything that matters.

Outside, it is as though two Madrids – the wartime and the peacetime city – are layered over one another. Certain streets have been left almost unblemished. Certain people, too. I glimpse a woman hanging out her washing on a roof terrace, as bombs fall less than half a mile away. I see children playing in the street metres from the spot where a team of soldiers are using picks to dig an unexploded shell from the tarmac. I watch an elderly couple share a pigskin of wine, sitting on the blanket they have spread on the pavement.

But for some the fear has swallowed everything. One night in the metro there is a woman who has been driven mad by the bombing. She shrieks in the darkness, wails, grinds her teeth. People try to persuade her to be quiet – perhaps out of the superstitious idea that she will somehow draw the bombers’ attention upon us. And partly, I think, because the sounds she makes are like an articulation of their own terror. I wonder if they are thinking the same thing as me: that it would be so easy to become like her. To loose the few remaining threads keeping sanity and dignity in check.

There is less and less food. People are less pitying now, less inclined to share their own supplies. Sometimes I queue and come away with nothing. I catch myself worrying for Tino – how I will keep him healthy, strong – and I remember that it is only me now. For a few moments it can be an odd sort of relief. I have nothing to care for, any longer, nothing to protect. Really, I have nothing to live for, now. But it is something beyond my control, this will to survive.

At dusk one evening, on my way back to the station, I see the woman, Maria. I am drawing closer to make sure that it is her, ready to greet her, when I see a man approaching from the other direction. I hear her call out to him. She shifts herself and then I see the white flash of thigh as she draws up her skirt. I turn and walk quickly away.

*

I hear a rumour that people with any claim at all to British heritage, or French, are throwing themselves on the charity of those embassies. They say they have better supplies there. I go to the British Embassy, but am turned away by a young Englishman who seems frightened of me. As though I, a sixteen-year-old girl, could do anything to him. But I have seen this hunger, my own hunger, reflected in the gaze of others, and it is a frightening thing. At one time, it was love that defined me: for Papa, for Tino. Now it is hunger. Something worrying: day by day those memories that I summon are losing their immediacy and clarity. It is a second loss. With it, I lose a little more of myself.

In the hotels, where the foreign correspondents stay, they say they dine on sardines and fresh bread and fruit. On my stone bed, with the dark shuddering around me as the bombs fall, I dream of those sardines, my mouth wet with longing.

A day without food. The city has been picked clean of it. At first, hunger sharpened everything: thoughts became extremely clear. Now, they are fracturing into incoherence. Daily I am growing weaker. Perhaps this will be how it ends.

I return to the metro station. Sometimes, someone has shared something with me there – though it hasn’t happened of late. At the very least, I can lie down in the dark and sleep, and for a few hours postpone the struggle to keep myself alive.

On the way, I pass an entrance to one of the great hotels on the Gran Vía. It is the hotel bar: the smell of the food hits me like an assault. I do not think – I follow it, like a starving dog. The people in here are cleaner, their faces fuller: hunger hasn’t reshaped them yet. There are eyes on me. I am an outrage, among them. But I am almost beyond shame.

The barman is a thin, wiry man with skin like tanned hide, and an abundant dark moustache – compensation, perhaps, for the sparseness of the hair on his pate. He meets me halfway across the room. ‘You can’t come in here.’