"Pull up my sweater," he said.
"I don't want to."
He pulled up the back and leaned over. "Maria, look there," he said. "That is not from a book."
"I cannot see," she said. "I do not want to see."
"Put your hand across the lower back."
He felt her fingers touch that huge sunken place a baseball could have been pushed through, that grotesque scar from the wound the surgeon had pushed his rubber-gloved fist through in cleaning, which had run from one side of the small of his back through to the other. He felt her touch it and he shrank quickly inside. Then she was holding him tight and kissing him, her lips an island in the sudden white sea of pain that came in a shining, unbearable, rising, blinding wave and swept him clean. The lips there, still there; then overwhelmed, and the pain gone as he sat, alone, wet with sweat and Maria crying and saying, "Oh, Enrique. Forgive me. Please forgive me."
"It is all right," Enrique said. "There is nothing to forgive. But it was not out of any book."
"But does it hurt always?"
"Only when I am touched or jarred."
"And the spinal cord?"
"It was touched a very little. Also the kidneys, but they are all right. The shell fragment went in one side and out the other. There are other wounds lower down and on my legs."
"Enrique, please forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. But it is not nice that I cannot make love and I am sorry that I am not gay."
"We can make love after it is well."
"Yes."
"And it will be well."
"Yes."
"And I will take care of you."
"No. I will take care of you. I do not mind this thing at all. Only the pain of touching or jarring. It does not bother me. Now we must work. We must leave this place now. Everything that is here must be moved tonight. It must be stored in a new and unsuspected place and in one where it will not deteriorate. It will be a long time before we will need it. There is much to be done before we will ever reach that stage again. Many must be educated. These cartridges may no longer serve by then. This climate ruins the primers. And we must go now. I am a fool to have stayed here this long and the fool who put me here will answer to the committee."
"I am to take you there tonight. They thought this house was safe for you to stay today."
"This house is a folly."
"We will go now."
"We should have gone before."
"Kiss me, Enrique."
"We'll do it very carefully," he said.
Then, in the dark on the bed, holding himself carefully, his eyes closed, their lips against each other, the happiness there with no pain, the being home suddenly there with no pain, the being alive returning and no pain, the comfort of being loved and still no pain; so there was a hollowness of loving, now no longer hollow, and the two sets of lips in the dark, pressing so that they were happily and kindly, darkly and warmly at home and without pain in the darkness, there came the siren cutting, suddenly, to rise like all the pain in the world. It was the real siren, not the one of the radio. It was not one siren. It was two. They were coming both ways up the street.
He turned his head and then stood up. He thought that coming home had not lasted very long.
"Go out the door and across the lot," he said. "Go. I can shoot from up here and make a diversion."
"No, you go," she said. "Please, I will stay here to shoot and they will think you're inside."
"Come on" he said. "We'll both go. There's nothing to defend here. This stuff is useless. It's better to get away."
"I want to stay," she said. "I want to protect you."
She reached for the pistol in the holster under his arm and he slapped her face. "Come on. Don't be a silly girl. Come on!"
They were going down the stairs now and he felt her close beside him. He swung the door open and together they stepped out the door and were clear of the building. He turned and locked the door. "Run, Maria," he said. "Across the lot in that direction. Go!"
"I want to go with you."
He slapped her again quickly. "Run. Then dive in the weeds and crawl. Forgive me, Maria. But go. I go the other way. Go," he said. "Damn you. Go."
They started into the weeds at the same time. He ran twenty paces and then, as the police cars stopped in front of the house, the sirens dying, he dropped flat and started to crawl.
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."