“Alto.”
My knees were trembling so hard, I nearly fell again when I saw the soldier’s silhouette, the talon of his bayonet. He was framed by the wash of light from the trench.
“I am lost, señor” I said. “I have to get to Huesca. I have a friend who has gone there. Have you seen her?”
His laugh had a bitter note I didn’t like. “Yes, I’ve seen a woman…” He shifted his rifle and brought out a match, striking it against his boot. He held it up to my face and studied me in the match’s brief flare. I could feel its heat.
I took a deep breath and let my good sense rescue me from the horror I’d seen but a few minutes before. This boy was hardly a child. Surely I could persuade him to let me pass.
“I’m alone,” he said tonelessly.
“We are all alone, señor.”
“I mean, I’m alone in the trench,” he said.
The leer in his voice had been unmistakable. “All right. But you can’t have it for free, soldier.”
I could see him fumbling in his pocket. He threw a few wadded notes at me. “It’s all I’ve got, bitch.” He sounded oddly relieved, as if he hadn’t wanted to force me. I picked up the notes. He stood aside and gestured to the ladder.
I swung a leg over the parapet. At first it seemed that the trench, stretching away for about ten yards, was empty, just as he’d said. Then I stepped onto the ladder and saw the sleeping figure almost directly beneath me. She was curled up on her side, a blanket covering her to the chin, her black hair tangled and stringy. Her skin was chalk white.
“Alma!” She did not turn her head.
I dropped to the ground as soon as I could. Alma seemed to stare at nothing, but she did blink. She was alive.
I rushed to her cot and put a hand on her forehead. She was as cold as a stone. Numbly, I petted her hair. “It’s me. I’m here.”
She looked confused for a moment. I think she tried to smile. She said something but her voice was too soft for me to hear. I put my ear to her mouth. “It takes sides,” she whispered.
I heard the sentry come down the ladder and come to stand behind me. “We can’t use this cot,” he said stupidly.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Our lieutenant, he goes crazy when he finds out she makes him and his men stronger. He says maybe she makes the machine gun a cannon!” He cocked his jaw toward the end of the trench, where a machine gun tripod stood on scaffolding. The boy said, “They ruined her before I could take my turn.”
I lifted the blanket. Blood had completely soaked her torn skirt and the cot underneath was stiff with dried blood. No, I thought, the soldier wouldn’t want to use this bed. I pulled the blanket back up to her chin.
“They put other guns down there, too,” he said petulantly.
Alma was whispering again, her dry lips scarcely parting for the words. “It takes sides.”
“What does, sweetheart?”
“Evil.”
“We can talk later,” I said. It was a stupid, stupid thing to say, but I kept on repeating it, even as her eyes fluttered open and stayed open.
“I have my money right here,” the boy said impatiently. “Are you a lucky whore, too? Will you make me strong?”
I stood up, turning my back to Alma. Now I looked at the boy. What have I felt for my patrons? Apathy, mostly. Passion, sometimes. Affection rather less often. Now I was having my first taste of simple, blue-white hate. I had always been dispensing strength: to the doctors who had gone back rejuvenated to their jars of pickled organs; to the judges who had returned to the bench with the fortitude it takes to put a man to death or to grant him his life. Perhaps they had all been good men; perhaps they had all been bad. How could I know? They never asked me how the strength I gave them was to be used.
The soldier was waiting for his treat. I gave him a hard kick to the privates then scrambled towards the ladder, his screams—“Bitch! Bitch!”—in my ears. I was near the top rung when I felt the ladder tremble with the soldier’s weight. I flung myself over the sandbags of the parapet, rolling onto the stone-sharp ground. I took out the last bomb. Evil is not moderate, I thought; how can I be? I yanked the pins out and lobbed the bomb into the pit.
After making my way back to Barcelona, I made the journey back home, leaving Franco’s nightmare forever, or so I thought. For a time, impressions of Spain sank into the haze of a civilized life: daytrips on trains that ran to schedule; walks along the white brows of cliffs, through meadows where the breezes comb wild-flowers into the grass. Sometimes and without warning, the faces of Alma and Gary would flicker and focus and the haze would lift. Then I would find myself driving my motorcar, careering down every street in London; driving in all weathers, at life-or-death speeds; trailblazing through alleyways to make a new shortcut; learning to read the city as if its streets were braille. Now, when the streetlamps dim to tiny embers and housewives draw the black shades down, when the city is as dark as a hillside in Spain, I steer an ambulance by the light of falling bombs.
This story is a confluence of fed-ups. Mainly, I was fed up with the way that prostitution is often represented in genre fiction. Before he was assassinated, Benigno Aquino said that whenever he wanted to take the measure of a city’s economic health, he would visit its red-light district and count the prostitutes. Aquino’s sensitivity to cost-benefit calculations is downplayed in much fiction, where romantic love is often seen as the cure for prostitution. By all indications money would be a far more reliable remedy. I was also fed up with Coach, the mass noun I give to the teachers I had back in high school. Coach taught only the Orwell of Animal Farm, suppressing the radical journalist who had fought against Franco.
Armed with my disgruntlements, and with a long-standing desire to set a story in the Barcelona of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, I sat down to juxtapose mercenary soldiers of sex with idealistic soldiers of war. I felt sure that evil would declare its allegiances in the process. I hope I was right.
The Queen of the Apocalypse
SCOTT BRADFIELD
Scott Bradfield is the author of five novels, including What’s Wrong with America, Good Girl Wants It Bad, and The People Who Watched Her Pass By, and two books of short stories, Greetings from Earth: New and Collected Stories and Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance. His fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, TriQuarterly, The Pushcart Prize XVIII: Best of the Small Presses, Black Clock, The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, and the New York Times Book Review. He has written several screenplays, including the script for the film adaptation of his short story “The Secret Life of Houses;” the film received the Viewer’s Choice Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1997. In 2001, he was Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor of Literature at the Free University of Berlin. His recent short film, Greetings from Earth, has been shown at several film festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including the Tribeca and Los Angeles film festivals.
Bradfield lives in London and walks a small white dog in Russell Square.
HARRIET OWEN SPENT HER youth making love to other women’s husbands. She spotted them in supermarkets and shopping plazas, and trapped them with her formidably blue eye-contact. While they solemnly pretended to inspect frozen food and sports equipment, Harriet provided them quick opportunities to introduce themselves, and redetermine who they were while their wives weren’t around. Eventually there occurred brief lapses into soft words, too many margaritas and cigarettes, crying over telephones, sex in elevators. Then, as abruptly as recognition, the harried men went away again. Disconnected their office telephones and sent Harriet personal checks in the mail. For Harriet, affairs with married men were a sort of clock. Whirr, tock, tick. As a result, Harriet always knew what was happening in her life, and what would happen next.