Perhaps it arose because of the idea of moral order, of good of right 'n wrong. So when you died, this place attracted the doubters, the sophisticates, the .intellectuals ... the physicists.
The idea made him smile. What a fitting end for the subscribers' list of The New York Review of Books.
Distant rumblings, full of menace, rolled down from the far hills. Markham slogged on. Distant cries of agony came and went on the fitful wind. He wondered if he would see Hemingway again.
It had been sheer good luck to stumble on Hemingway shortly after arriving here.
Hem had understood at least how to get through the routine horrors of this place, had forged an internal refuge from it all. The point, Markham saw, was to endure without accepting, to never let it break your spirit. That was a good path to follow in their previous lives, of course, but it had taken
Markham at least a long while to see that. When you started out, the essential nastiness of life itself was hidden by the zest and dumb joy of youth. When friends started dying, felled by disease or dumb accidents, it sobered you.
Hem had seen that early and gotten it down on paper. What he claimed for his own was a territory of the spirit that you recognized in the gut, nothing to do with intellect at all. Even in Hell, Hem strode like a giant, because most of these rag-doll actors still hadn't comprehended what would get them through. It was one thing to understand your predicament and another, far greater thing entirely, to get through, to not let it blunt your senses or rob you of joy.
His captor shouted, jerking Markham back to the gritty present. A hoarse reply came from the trees above them.
Markham scrambled up the steep clay slope, grabbing at bushes to keep going.
When he stood up at the top, panting, a voice said clearly, "Mierda."
"Anybody here speak English?"
"Sure I do some," a tall man said, stepping from behind some eucalyptus trees.
"Who're you?"
"Person."
Markham glanced at his guard, who came wheezing up the slope, and then back at the tall man, who carried an automatic weapon with a long curved box clip.
"What else is there?"
"Devils."
"I'm no devil."
"You fight on side devils?"
"Don't fight at all."
"What you do here?"
"I was born here. Reborn, you comprehende?"
The tall man laughed lightly, his eyes never leaving Markham. "You do it with Welcome Woman?"
"God no."
"Devils say God too."
So they didn't believe he was just a mortal. "You with Guevara?"
"Maybe."
The tall man rattled off some Spanish to Markham s guard and the guard started back down the arroyo. "Hey, you come." A prod with the automatic.
"Look, I saw Guevara just before I was killed, last time." Markham omitted that Guevara had personally ordered his execution.
"I not see Guevara many days. Where he was?"
"Near the supply depot, that's all I know. He had lots of wild-eyed followers with him, I drink."
The tall man stopped. "That was one, two month ago."
"Really?" Then patching up his body and bringing him back did take time. It was oddly reassuring that even the Devil could apparently not merely snap his asbestos fingers and do everything.
"Gome! Commandante speak."
The tall man marched swiftly up the stony hillside and they came out of the trees into a flat area. Men were resting around campfires, cleaning their weapons. In the distance, down-slope, Markham could see more men crouched behind makeshift barriers of rock and felled trees. They had automatic weapons trained downhill. There was no sun, there never was, but a warming glow seeped down through the ivory clouds that seemed closer from the top of this hill.
Markham was prodded forward until they reached a tell man who was shouting at some others. Abruptly, firing came from down the hill and bullets ricocheted among the boulders higher up. Everybody hit the dirt except for the tall man and Markham. The man noticed this and laughed.
"You not afraid to die again?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I Joaquin," the man said, holding out a hand to shake. "From Spain."
"When?"
"Time of revolution."
"Which one?"
"Anti-fascist."
"That was over half a century ago, where-when-I come from."
Joaquin nodded grimly. "Si, we lost. I did not know this for some years in Hell. But hear Franco gone now."
"Yeah." The firing had stopped and the men around (hem got to their feet, brushing off dirt.
"What is position of church?"
Markham frowned. "In Spain? I don't know, I wasn't much for politics."
Joaquin's eyes narrowed. "Then you renounce the Church?"
"Huh? I don't give a damn about it."
Markham noticed several men nearby bringing their rifles up to ready.
"Say the rosary."
"I don't know it. I'm not Catholic."
"Then are demon." Joaquin smacked his lips and nodded sagely to his men.
"Hey, no-"
Somebody seized him from behind and pushed him downhill. There were three things that looked like telephone booths behind an outcropping of rock and a line of men and women waiting nearby, their hands tied behind them. As Markham stumbled down the hillside he saw that each booth had an open back wall on the downhill side and beyond each was a heap of bodies.
"Jesus, no, I-"
Joaquin ordered him bound and as two men tied his hands from behind Joaquin stepped over and casually punched him in the face. Markham's nose began dripping blood and he grunted with pain but he didn't mind that as much as the pile of bodies downhill.
"Demon feel hurt?" Joaquin asked sarcastically. "Yeah. Look-"
"Hay que tomar la muerte como si fuera asprina!" Joaquin called to his men, laughing. Then to Markham he said in heavily accented English, "You have to take death as aspirin."
"Look, is there some kind of test I can-"
"Demon, bleeds. Must be special demon," Joaquin said.
The men laughed. There was a mean edge to the sound.
"Dammit, I'm no demon at all!"
"Then swear fidelity to God."
"Which God? The Catholic one, or-"
They wrenched him away. "Okay, I vow by almighty God-"
Someone punched him in the stomach and he fell, dust filling his nose. He struggled up and hands thrust him into the line of forlorn people waiting to enter the booths. He gasped, then sneezed. Guards talked in Spanish, making some joke, and prodded him forward.
"Jesus, if they'd only listen..."
"Ah, that's expecting calm logic from a fevered mob," a man in front of him said. He was about Markham's age, with bushy hair, a sharp-nosed incisive face.
Markham recognized him, vaguely. Had he seen him in that grimy town, the one he found just after dropping into Hell? Everything was running together, like a watercolor. He had met Hemingway somewhere, yes, and some Romans ...
He shook his head. "I just got reborn. I damn sure don't want to go through that again."
"Nor I." The accent was British and the man's blue eyes darted about with piercing intelligence.
He wore a badly cut but recognizable du-ee-piece suit which looked ludicrously out of place.
"They grabbed me while I was trying to cut cross-country."
"Getting away from the battle?"
"Yes. Messy tilings. I thought isolation in these hills was clever, but there's some infernal war on."
"It's a revolt. Che Guevara against the local police and the demons." A pained expression. "Oh, not another."
"There've been some before?"
"I've heard such. No one writes down anything, there is no history-just rumors."
"How come they think we're demons?"
"There have been a lot around lately."
"Fighting?" "Precious little I know of that. I try to stay away from the endless battling."