فصل نوزدهم

19

A Cave in the Woods

The rebels had found shelter in a cave about half an hour’s walk from the mill. The trees hid it well and there was just enough room for the dozen men and their belongings: a few bundles of ragged clothes, a pile of tattered books, and blankets far too thin to keep the cold away, the last remnants of lives these men had left behind because they couldn’t say yes to marching boots and Franco’s clean Spain. To choose freedom comes with a high price.

“I’ve brought some Orujo.” Mercedes took the bottle of Vidal’s favorite liquor out of her satchel. “And tobacco and cheese. And there’s mail.” The men who had received letters took the envelopes with shaking hands. As they walked into the back of the cave to read what their loved ones had written, some of the others sniffed longingly at the cheese Mercedes had stolen. The aroma took them back to better times when they’d made their own cheese from their own goats and freedom had not been a luxury to pay for with fear and misery.

The patient Mercedes had brought Ferreira along for was lying on an old cot, reading a tattered book, his head propped on a sleeping bag. The others called him Frenchie and his eyeglasses were the most valuable thing he’d had been able to save of his former belongings. He didn’t look up from his book when Dr. Ferreira bent over his bandaged leg.

“How do you think it’s doing?” he asked Ferreira. “I’ll lose it, right?”

The doctor took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see.”

Ferreira drew comfort from his profession in these dark times: he liked being a healer when most others embraced destruction, but even healing had become a deadly task. The man he’d come to help had sentenced himself to death by joining the men in the woods, and Ferreira knew he was accepting the same sentence for himself by helping the rebels.

He hesitated for a moment before he removed the bloodstained bandage. Even after all these years, he couldn’t get used to the fact he often needed to cause pain to help. Managing to suppress a groan, Frenchie shuddered when the bandage came off and Ferreira wondered how many of these men in the woods regretted joining a fight that looked more and more like a lost cause.

Mercedes had brought a newspaper and Pedro’s friend Tarta delivered some distraction for them all by reading aloud from it. No one knew why Tarta’s tongue couldn’t form words without breaking them into fragments. In Ferreira’s experience a stutter bore witness to a skin too thin to keep the darkness of the world at bay. The soft and sensible ones developed it, the ones who couldn’t help but see and feel it all. Tarta still looked like a boy, always wearing a hint of melancholy on his gentle face, his dark eyes gazing at the world with wonder and bewilderment.

“’British and C-C-Canadian troops disembarked on a small beach in the North of F-Fr . . .’” “France, you idiot,” one of the others snapped, grabbing the newspaper, hiding his own fears of what news it would bring behind cruelty and anger.

“’More than 150,000 soldiers give us hope,’” he read.

Hope . . . Ferreira looked at Frenchie’s shattered leg. A bullet had done the damage, of course. Bullet wounds were a far-too-familiar sight to the doctor by now and this one looked terrible. Luckily the old man couldn’t see the damage. Old? Ferreira mocked himself. Frenchie was probably his age.

“’Under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower . . .’”

Frenchie gasped the moment Ferreira touched his leg. “Is it as bad as I think?”

“Look, Frenchie . . .” Ferreira’s voice was soft with compassion. He took off his glasses in a vain attempt to see things less clearly for a moment. “There is no way to save this leg.” The cave filled with silence. And the wounded man’s fear.

The others surrounded Frenchie as Ferreira opened his bag. At least he had his tools thanks to the fact he also treated the soldiers who’d done this. But he had no anesthetic.

Mercedes made Frenchie drink half the bottle of Vidal’s liquor; not much comfort for a man who was about to have his leg sawed off.

“I’ll do this as quickly as I can with as few cuts as possible.” Ferreira wished he could’ve have made a less pathetic promise.

Frenchie nodded and grabbed Mercedes’s hand. Though not a mother, she played the role for the second time tonight—first for Ofelia, now for a man she barely knew. Mother, sister, wife . . . Mercedes was the only woman the men in the woods had seen in a long time and for some she played all these parts. Like most of the men, she shut her eyes when Ferreira pressed his bone saw against Frenchie’s swollen leg.

“Wait a second, Doctor! Just a second.”

Frenchie gazed one more time at his leg. His choice to fight the marching boots would make him a cripple. Ferreira wondered how that made him feel about his decision. Frenchie inhaled deeply, pressing his lips firmly together, as if that would keep the screams inside, the screams, the despair, the fear . . . then he nodded again.

This time it was Ferreira who had to catch his breath, to pull himself together for the butchery he was about to perform. Sometimes even the healers are turned into butchers by the darkness of this world.