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through Valencia, driving the powerful Ford that was confiscated from some executed aristocrats and which the Catalan communist leaders usually used to get around. The safe conducts, adorned with signatures capable of opening all Republican military controls, had allowed them to reach the side of that rugged mountain of the Sierra de Guadarrama. The temperature, several degrees below zero, had forced them to stay inside the car, covered with blankets and breathing in air polluted by Caridad’s cigarettes, which took Luis to the edge of nausea. When Ramón was at last able to make it down to the safety of the mountainside, bothered by what he considered to be one of his mother’s many customary interferences in his life, his brother Luis was sleeping in the backseat and Caridad, a cigarette in hand, was pacing around the car, kicking rocks and cursing the cold that made her exhale condensed clouds. As soon as she noticed him, the woman enveloped him with her green stare, colder than a night in the sierra, and Ramón remembered that ever since the day they had met again, over a year ago already, his mother had not given him one of those wet kisses that, when he was a child, she used to deposit at the corner of his mouth so that the sweet taste of saliva, with its lingering taste of aniseed, would drip down his taste buds and cause the overwhelming need to keep it in his mouth for longer than the process of his own secretions would allow.
    They had not seen each other for several months, ever since Caridad, convalescing from the wounds she received in Albacete, was commissioned by the party to travel to Mexico to gather material support and moral solidarity for the Republican cause. In that time, the woman had changed. It wasn’t that the movement of her left arm was still limited by the lacerations caused by shelling; nor was it because of the recent news of the death of her son Pablo, an adolescent who she herself had forced to go to the front in Madrid, where he’d been crushed by the crawler tracks of an Italian tank. Ramón attributed it to something more visceral that he would discover that night.
    “I’ve been waiting for you for six hours. The sun is about to come out and I can’t go much longer without some coffee” was how the woman greeted him, focused on crushing a cigarette under her military boot as she looked at the small, shaggy dog accompanying Ramón.
    Cannons roared in the distance and the sound of fighter plane engines was an all-encompassing rumble that descended from the starless sky. Would it snow? Ramón wondered.
    “I couldn’t drop my rifle and come running,” he said. “How are you? How’s Luisito?”
    “Anxious to see you; that’s why I brought him. I’m fine. Where did that dog come from?”
    Ramón smiled and looked at the animal, who was sniffing around the Ford’s wheels.
    “He lives with us in the battalion . . . He’s really taken to me. He’s handsome, right?” And he bent down. “Churro!” he whispered, and the animal approached him, wagging his tail. Ramón stroked his ears as he picked burrs off of him. He looked up. “Why did you come?”
    Caridad looked into his eyes for longer than the young man could bear without averting his gaze, and Ramón stood up.
    “They’ve sent me to ask you something . . .”
    “I can’t believe it . . . You’ve come all the way here to ask me a question?” Ramón tried to sound sarcastic.
    “Well, yes. The only question that matters: What would you be willing to do to defeat fascism, and for socialism? . . . Don’t look at me like that; I’m not kidding. We need to hear you say it.”
    Ramón smiled joylessly. Why was she asking him this?
    “You’re acting like a recruiting officer . . . You and who else need it? Is this a party thing?”
    “Answer and then I’ll explain.” Caridad remained serious.
    “I don’t know, Caridad. Isn’t that what I’m doing now? Risking my life, working for the party . . . Keeping those