Chapter 3

“You still can. Why don’t you?” she said.

But I couldn’t. I could only lower my head into her thighs.

She gasped, squirmed a bit as my tongue touched her wet slit and her tender bud. Her hands shot out to grip the back of my head as she heaved with rhythmic breathing, doing everything she could to not make her noises any louder. “Oh, comme ça,” she whimpered again and again. Just like that. She gripped my head more strongly, and her leg muscles tightened as if she were a clock that I was winding. Then she held in a long inhale, and scrunched up tightly with my face between her legs. Convulsive tremors took her, and then she became violently undone.

I stood, and while watching her stretching out in the aftermath of her ecstasy like a cat stretching out in the sun, I unfastened my skirt, and let it drop to the floor with an erotic slowness. She sat up, as if rousing from sleep, and looked me up and down with a dreamy look, and sighed.

“Don’t just sit there and stare. Put your tongue to good use and have a taste,” I said, surprising myself with how naturally that naughty talk came.

“If you insist,” she responded eagerly.

She rose to her feet, then pinned me against the mirror again (with more care than she had before), and then she kissed me, and went down on me, kissing each breast, playing at them with her mouth until they were raw and tight, and then she dropped to her knees to kiss and gnaw at my thighs.

She was not as careful with my stockings as I was with hers, She practically tore them from my legs but I did not mind. They were cheap and worn. In fact, I enjoyed the desperate way in which she tore at them. And when she had freed my womanhood, she wasted no time in putting her tongue to good use as I demanded.

I found it impossible to hold myself together for long. Moans and squeals came out me uncontrollably. Lucky for me that the train had just started to bank into a long, tight curve, so that the wheels moaned and squealed loudly, otherwise everyone in this car would have heard me. Or perhaps they had heard me anyway. I did not care.

When I came, I uttered a fainting cry. Strength left my legs, and I collapsed. Gabrielle caught me, and brought me into her embrace, and we kissed with our sex glistening on each other’s lips, and we curled into each other like a feline pair on the floor.

It was only then, in the post-mortem of our love-making, did I realized what it was that stopped me killing her, and instead succumb to desire. She was a lost soul just like me, a kindred spirit, as she put it, wandering in the darkness in vain search for reprieve, and in that darkness we had found each other.

After the tender, quiet moment together, we folded the banquette out into a bed, turned down the light, and went under the covers. We held each other wordlessly for maybe an hour, or maybe it was only a few minutes, letting our fingers dance lightly on each others’ skin.

We had passed Zaragoza at some point, and after Zaragoza, when the train had started to squeal along the meandering tracks through the starting foothills of the Pyrenees, I decided to break the turbulent silence with a quiet question.

“Gabrielle, how do you feel?”

“Mmm… I feel as though a wild horse had run through me,” Gabrielle answered.

“Is that a nice feeling?”

“I’d like to say yes, but I suppose I’ll only know for certain by morning.”

“You mean to say that it depends on what my actions are between now and then. Am I the wild horse?”

“Afraid that I’ll murder you in your sleep?”

I placed my chin on her chest to look into her eyes, and indeed I saw no fear in them, only lively oceans.

“Mmm,” I answered which I intended to come out as a sort of warning to her.

She brushed my hair, which had fallen across my face, neatly behind my ears, a fixation that Valentina also had with my messy hair, and so was a fixation I savored.

“If you prefer that I go back to my compartment, I will,” I said lazily.

“You think that I’m afraid of you?”

“You don’t have to be. You can distrust me all the same.”

“I could easily stab you in your sleep as you me, you know? It would be nothing new for me. Do you trust that I won’t?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter.”

I laid my head on her chest with my ear on her soft breast right where her heart was, and I could feel that it had a soft beat.

“So you really do have a death wish,” she said.

“I wouldn’t mind if death came to me. I prefer it to the alternative. Is that the same thing?” I spoke honestly, having no need to speak otherwise. She was silent for a moment before she replied, “with you, I think so.”

“So, I have a death wish.”

For a moment she paused brushing my hair, but then she continued. I felt fear creep into her heart, but then it left. Softly, she muttered, “You’ve lost someone dear and the pain is unbearable.”

Surprised by what she had surmised, I looked up into her eyes again, nodded slowly. My throat went suddenly tight.

I suppose I had the look of wondering how she knew because she smiled wanly and said, “Kindred spirit.”

I laid my head back on her chest. I was struck suddenly with a memory of lying with Valentina beneath the summer stars in the highlands of Peñalara, distinctly remembering that I wanted for life to pause then because we had found for just ourselves a moment of peace in a time and place of unrelenting war. My eyes stung with tears of her memory, so I squeezed them shut, and the tears squeezed out to fall on Gabrielle’s chest, and Gabrielle wrapped her arms around me and held me close to her, and did not bother with the tears.

“Her name was Valentina…,” I whispered.

She did not press for anything more, and I was grateful to her for that, but she did try to cheer me up, or at least distract me from my mourning, possibly to also cheer herself up from thinking about whoever it was she mourned (her big scar she spoke of earlier, I now realized).

“Aurora, if there was one place in the world you can visit. Anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

I laughed as I sniffed away my tears. “Where would I go? What an odd question.”

“Allons donc! It’s not such an odd question. Let’s hear it. Cairo. Buenos Aires. Bora Bora. Any place at all.”

To appease her, I put my mind to it, and could not think immediately of a place, this being another one of those questions I had never really allowed myself to think about, but I thought concertedly about it. I never had a place that intrigued me so much that I dreamt of visiting it save Valentina’s arms, of course, and I nearly said just that to Gabrielle before deciding it was too pitiful thing to say. Then I remembered that Valentina had once told me that she would one day very much like to take me to Porto. She had once lived in Porto, and there was a café by the river there that was her favorite, because the owner was a friendly man who served good wine, and the regulars were friendly people, and it was a good place to watch the boats and barges float by. So, I said to Gabrielle, “Porto. I would very much like to see Porto.”

“Porto… What a lovely choice. And what is the first thing you will do when you get to Porto?”

I smiled at her play with fantasy, and seeing no reason not to, I played along.

“The first thing I will do is find a particular café on the river, a very special café called Miradouro, and I will have myself a nice coffee there, or a glass of wine and watch the boats float by at sunset.”

“Café Miradouro… I’ll remember the name. Maybe I’ll stop by next time I’m in Porto… if I’m ever in Porto again.”

“And what about you? Where would you go?” I asked.

“Porto,” she answered quickly, and when she saw my confusion, she coyly added, “if that is where you will be.”

Perhaps she had said it in jest, but it warmed my heart nonetheless. I kissed her, and I held her tightly, and put my nose into her hair and breathed her in, and for the first time in years, I allowed in a feeling of happiness.

She added, “…then after Porto, well, I’d have to really think about it.”

Given that this was a silly fantasy and nothing more, there was no harm in saying it, so I said to her what was in my heart to say. “Wherever you will go after Porto, I’ll follow.”

The following morning, just as the sky greyed with morning light, the train slowed as it approached its final stop. The conductor came by and knocked on the doors to let us know that it was time to ready ourselves to disembark. The knocking was harsh like the pangs of a terrible hangover. Gabrielle was already dressed and preening herself in the cracked mirror. She had on a flowy white blouse with black polka dots tucked into high-waist trousers. A thin belt cinched her waist, and a black silk scarf drooped from her neck.

“Good morning,” she sang cheerfully seeing that I had woken through the cracked mirror.

I took a moment for the sleep to fade from my mind, and then had a cold sobering thought, as I spotted the slowly passing stone-grey mountains which meant we were near Canfranc Station.

The sobering thought was that I still had my mission, and that if the lives of my comrades… of Valentina… meant anything to me at all, then I must see it to the end. I must stop Gabrielle D’Aubigny from meeting her German contacts, from defecting. I must kill her. This was my oath as a rebel against fascism, and my duty to my comrades who had fallen, and to those who still lived and fought.

Quietly, I dressed, and, while I put on my shoes, I discretely palmed my Astra 300, which I had found still lying on the ground. When the train had come to a squealing stop, I pointed it at Gabrielle’s chest. The shock on her face, twisting into a crestfallen look, broke my heart. Nevertheless, I dutifully put my finger on the trigger.

Gabrielle stood taller. She clasped her hands to her front, as if to wait politely for me to do what I must do. But I couldn’t do it. My finger and the trigger were like the opposite poles of a magnet.

“Why must you go to them?” I asked angrily through gritted teeth, more to goad myself to shoot than to obtain any answer from her. “Why must you go over to the fascists?” My voice cracked.

The train bellowed, which startled me, but did not startle her. She kept her lips shut. She just stood there, tall and proud, her hands still clasped to her front. I prodded again, jabbing the pistol at her. “How much could they possibly pay you to betray your own people?”

“More than all the money in the world,” she finally replied, her voice cutting and coming from her chest with rage. “I’m not doing it for money,” she spat. “Don’t you know that? Or have they not told you?”

When I did not give her an answer, she let out a dismissive snort. “Of course. They told you nothing. And they expect you to obey like a well-heeled dog.”

“They told me all I need to know. They told me you plan to give up the names of our spies in Spain. Do you deny it?”

“No. But I will tell you tell you what they conveniently left out. I’ll tell you that they are jackals that would not bat an eye to sacrifice their own for their ambitions. Claude…,” she paused to swallow, then continued, “…was a patriot. He was a real patriot who would never question what he must do for France, even if it meant his life. Well… they were more than happy to oblige.”

Her eyes were wet now, and her lips quivered. “Those goddamn jackals used his loyalty against him… and his damn naivete. And they fed him to the wolves!”

Her voice shook and broke in a piercing way, as if it hurt her to say what she said.

“So you are willing to do to them what they had done to your husband?”

She nodded in a circling way. “Oh yes. Many times over.”

“How marvelous. With people like you on our side, who needs enemies?”

Gabrielle stuck her chin out. She shot me an ugly scowl full of pure fury. “Think what you would do if you were in my shoes. You wouldn’t go with it quietly and say ‘well, that’s just life’ would you? You haven’t in fact. You joined the French Resistance, haven’t you? Why? Oh, there’s only one answer to that question isn’t there? To hurt the people that hurt you, that took your Valentina away from you forever. Is it so hard for you to believe I wouldn’t do the same? I don’t care who wins anymore. I just want to hurt them all. My heart is dead. They killed it when they killed my Claude. Last night, I thought I felt a bit of life in it again, but that was just a dream, it seems. Nothing but a cruel dream. Well, if you must shoot, then shoot. Now is your chance to do it. Let’s see what it does for you. Let’s see if it brings you peace.”

The gun shook terribly in my hands. My eyes were wetted with tears. All I had to do was pull the trigger. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because if I did, then last night would become, as she suggested, just a cruel dream. And I did not have it in me to let that happen. So, I lowered the gun. I sat on the edge of the bed, and hung my head.

“Adieu, mon cÅ“ur,” she said after a while. The words contained no hint of triumph in them. Nor were they biting. They did not seem like they were even meant for me.

I did not look up to see her leave, but I heard the sliding door open and shut, and the sounds of her heels fading into nothing.