Manuela doesn’t feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last cities to fall to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which knew him first, felt his cruelty two years before the civil war even began for the rest of Spain. She watches Marvy’s face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn’t her first, but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi’s is mostly British. During the War—how many camps and cities since her capture in ’38?—it was German. She missed the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north—missed the flowers, children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she’s never been, Valencia, this evening’s home…. Ya salimos de España…. Pa’ luchar en otros frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela….

She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the room could be any size, an entire city’s breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.

“Aaahhh, hot damn,” Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last. “Come on, everybody in the pool,” a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela’s ankle and tugging. Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his stomach a loud smack, to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds encompassing—anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace, eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.