Ebro Unsung
by
Kat Abrams
by
Kat Abrams
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The sound of a gunshot piqued his senses, his eyes flying open. Fascists? His POUM militia?
No stars peered through the velvet canvas that was the sky over the Aragon front. It was
dark, like they had told him hell would be. He couldn't figure his position and tried to turn his
head, only to find it immobilized.
His mouth opened in protest and was immediately filled with the metallic, gritty taste of dirt.
There was a heaviness all around him and panic set in quickly—tied down… no, buried. His
fists clenched in cold terror, tearing madly through the chilled rocky soil. It shifted—he
wasn't in deep—and sprayed like machine-gun fire as he loosed himself from his prison. All
he could hear was the intermittent whine of gunfire, and the rushing gray-brown waters of
the Ebro somewhere in the inky darkness. He thought he should have heard his own gasping
breath, but from himself there was only crushing silence.
-----
The dream had plagued him incessantly, jutting an unwelcome fang into his brain every time
he thought he had turned the corner. It was stupid to try to fight it, stupid to think that there
was any hope that one day, he'd never have to think about the dream, or the truth of its
contents again. Even now, with nearly 70 years and hundreds upon hundreds of miles of
ocean in between him and that muddy riverbank in Spain, the feeling was still real. The chill,
the heaviness, the grit that stuck in his teeth no matter how hard he tried to spit it all out.
Antonio sat up from the cramped, uncomfortable cot, his joints screaming in pain. He
dropped his face into his palms, wiping the sleep from his bleary eyes and trying to create the
reason that the dream had recurred right now, when it wasn't even warranted. There was no
reason, of course. There was never a reason, only the harsh reality of thrashing the covers
around as he relived those first painful undead moments, and waking up with that same urge
to suck in gasping mouthfuls of cool air that would not ever again fill his lungs. Now, some
reminder of his death would come, perhaps as a result of his dream. Or perhaps the dream
was a harbinger, a prophet foretelling when these reminders would manifest.
It didn't really matter. The only thing that it mattered was that it always came back. A sense
of despair vise-clenched in the base of his neck and radiated outward through his limbs. His
eyes caught on the red bandanna on the floor, and the past reached up to wordlessly engulf
him.
-----
The battle had raged on the Ebro for over three months, and the cold had begun to come.
Twelfth October, they had decided to make a desperate push into Francoist territory—
anything to try and turn the tides. The POUM's back had been broken in 1938, but there were
still scattered idealists that fought on, the heavy task of liberating Spain from the fascist
incursion weighing too strongly on their minds to give up now. Antonio de Lamartino was
one of them. Modesto and Lister had proposed the raid, and he did not feel it was his choice
to sit in his tent all evening rather than volunteer to go.
Now, he wasn't so sure he had made the right choice. It was difficult to hear amid the gunfire
and the rustling of booted feet in the forest, and so nearly impossible to keep the Ebro on his
left-hand side, like they had told him to do. The red POUM bandana around his neck was
drenched with the cold sweat that rolled down his forehead.
BANGBANGBANG!
His head snapped to the side—it sounded like a heavy gun, but there was no muzzle-fire in the
night sky to differentiate it from the intermittent flashes of light that came from the firefights
going on wherever a Francoist met a Loyalist.
The forest reeked of death. His brown hair was matted down to his forehead with the fear of
it.
BANGBANGBANG!
White-hot pain screamed through his stomach and lower back. He dropped to his knees, his
gun falling somewhere in the crunching leaves. Another report wailed through the air and
caught him in the shoulder, burrowing its way down into his chest cavity like an unwelcome
metal animal. The roar that split his throat with its intensity was not that of a hare caught in a
trap, but his own. The roar of a dying lion proclaiming that he would not be forgotten.
-----
Antonio knew, though, that he had been forgotten. He had pieced that much together from the
lies Valdez had told him, and eavesdropping silently on the army camp the evening after they
found his body.
Three days after his death, Valdez, an elderly farmer who had been murdered by fanatical
Loyalists, came upon his body and recognized the red POUM bandana around his neck. A
Franco fascist to the core, he had pronounced the curse—the curse that would cause the
unconsecrated, unburied dead to rise again and forever feed on his former brothers.
He had lain for six days in the frigid valley before Ernesto Azaña's band found him. Unable to
carry his body to camp because of the fascist crossfire, they buried him quickly in what
amounted to a shallow ditch, the ignominious end for a brave Spanish warrior.
That night, he had opened his eyes again, and come from the ground with a powerful hunger
burning in his belly. Valdez found him easily, stumbling through the Ebro's forests and
attacking the small animals that had not already fled the fighting. He had filled his creation
with many ideas, only one of which, Antonio concluded, had ever held true. Three words:
"You will suffer."
His fingernails bit into the cold papery skin of his palm as his fist clenched in anger. He
emerged from memory, the wound gaping painfully, and began to hear outside the door of his
shotgun-style house the sound of voices.
He strained to hear. An instinct inside told him before the words became clear that the song
was not in English as he might have expected in Charleston. His stomach spiraled into knots,
as though he was hearing an echo of his past. The song bit into his senses mercilessly,
occupying them to the point of near-frenzy. His fingers tore at his dirty brown hair, mud-
colored eyes wild with the ire seething inside him.
Idiots… outside his door singing some fucking malarial symphony in the middle of the
soaking August heat. He paced the floor and snatched up the local newspaper that had been
crammed through the mail slot, thinking of doing God-knows-what with it… then his eyes
caught on the headline.
"Charleston's Oldest Man to Have Catholic Funeral."
The song suddenly became clearer.
Kyrie eleison… Christe eleison…
He was frantic as the words came back to him from childhood days spent in church.
"Lord have mercy… Christ have mercy," he murmured, before becoming incensed at his
contribution to his own torture.
The footsteps of the processional sounded outside his door. They were headed towards the
Ashley River, still singing the eulogy. His fingers tensed and shredded the newspaper in a
matter of moments, but even the sound of its tearing flesh could not block out the sobriety of
the Kyrie, which pierced his rage as the cold of the Ebro mud had pierced into the murky
depth of his soul.
No one had sung a Kyrie for him.