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Show The Great Escape • 17 mtermittently, alternating between serious and frivolous subjects, never making the leap from exchange to conversation. The men who milled nearby were bearded or mustached or clean-shaven or unshaven, with long gray hair or short gray hair or hair only in a U from ear to ear around the back. Their faces were lined with deep wrinkles or lined with scars or rough with sun and wind or, rarely, smooth and pale. Their eyes were dark and stern or blue and smiling or enlarged behind thick lenses or half-closed or closed with tears stieaming slowly. I thought that there was nothing to distinguish this group from any other, except that to a man they refused to wear ties. Yet I imagined then suffering and determination, torture or exile, loss and grace and belief in ideals. People came to kiss Teresa, to talk briefly in hushed voices sometimes about Arturo, sometimes about the weather. Sometimes they shook my hand or offered a cheek; other times they ignored me, and I watched the faces, noted smiles and sad, distant, glazed looks, and I guarded my own face, tried to keep it stoic, eyes steady, jaw tight. Teresa stayed with me, talking at intervals, then resting in the heavy silence, waiting for something to happen. After an hour, the sun came up over the eastern rooftops and through the last leaves of tall sycamores shedding bark. It was not exacdy when the music started and two men stood on the building's balcony behind the microphones to read poetry and praises, but it was almost then, close enough for the believers to think it was deliberate, but coincidental enough for the jaded not to notice. I turned and saw under the sun the same wizened faces warmed, looking skyward, squinting, almost smiling. The poems were from anti-Franco Spamards sixty years ago, full of fight and mdignation, short on art but long on zeal. When they brought out the coffin, held low by seven men, and the crowd parted to let pass the hearse, and they put Arturo in and stacked the wreaths on a trailer ahead, one of the seven pall bearers broke down and wept bitterly, holding his face m his hands. He was comforted by a woman nearby. Then we walked slowly behind two black motorcycles and white helmets and three black |