Maties Sempere loaded, aimed, and blew apart the brains of another Raven.
Una mañana, me he levantado
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Una me he levantado y he descubierto al invasor
O partisano me voy contigo
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
O partisano me voy contigo porque me siento aquí morir
His deep singing, both hauntingly sad and beautifully hopeful, ruptured the chaos of the lugubrious battlefield. The Land of the Dead, supposedly a place of eternal rest, had been turned into another battlefront in the war to resist the unrelenting depredation of Capital. No one is safe, nothing is sacred. The sniper sighed and loaded another round of bullets and song, but to his surprise, another voice answered the chant:
Y si yo caigo en la guerrilla te dejaré mi fusil
Cava una fosa en la montaña
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Cava una fosa en la montaña a la sombra de una flor
Maties smiled; he was no longer alone in the barricade. They joined their voices in an improvised duet, yet it was almost as if they had done this since the beginning of Time.
Así la gente cuando la vea
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Así la gente cuando la vea gritara revolución
Esta es la historia de un guerrillero
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Es la historia de un guerrillero muerto por la libertad
"What a beautiful song…" The Pale Lady smiled.
"Beautiful indeed," the dead anarchist gifted the Lady a nostalgic smile.
"It sounds like a hopeful mourning. Couldn't be more appropriate for our current situation at Mictlán, don't you agree, querido?"
"There are plenty of good songs for these kinds of times. But this one is special to me."
The Lady sat gracefully next to the sniper, her movements calm, as if the violence surrounding them did not exist. "Death is supposed to be the ultimate peace, yet they want to take even this from us. Just like five hundred years ago…" The Lady of the Dead exhaled a melancholy sigh, "I don't want to be sad today, Maties… so tell me, what makes this song so special to you?"
"I learned it from my Italian comrades of the 'Batallón Garibaldi.' And I taught it to my comrades in Catalonia. We used to sing before battling the Falangists. And it made us feel… invincible." For a moment, the partisan’s eyes filled with proud nostalgia, then a gloomy shadow overtook them. "But we weren't."
"You fought them all your life, and now you have to fight them even in death. I know it isn't fair. Lo lamento, querido."1 She spoke in a mournful tone, before adding a coda, "But keep this in mind, Maties: no defeat is ever definitive. "
"I'm very well aware of that. The story of humanity is the story of class struggle: sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. That is the story of Life itself; why should Death be different? Don't be sad, Catrina. Our history may be sad, but we shouldn't have to be. That is also an act of rebellion."
She smiled, "So even signing can be revolutionary in times like this…"
"Especially in times like this… and this song carries our history. The partisans learned it from the brave mondina women,2 who may have learned from someone else. It is an old song, just like our fight. And just like our fight, we have to keep teaching it; else it will be forgotten."
"'A revolution without music is not worth having'… Trust me, Maties, neither your song nor your fight will be forgotten." The Lady winked and put a hand on the old militant's shoulder.
"Thanks, and I do trust you, Catrina. Pardon that I don't call you neither Lady nor Holy, for such titles bear little respect to an anarchist."
"Death takes the form of whoever is facing it. Most would like to see me as a Queen, an Empress, or a Goddess, and I oblige. But there is written in no law that Death shall not be greeted as a Comrade." The Pale Lady replied with a complicit smile.
"I never thought that fascists would come for us even after death. Yet their ways can only breed insatiable hunger. México gave me refuge from them in Life, and Mictlán sheltered my soul in Death after no one else would take it…" The Catalonian anarchist gripped his rifle tightly, "Catrina, it will be an honor to fight them alongside you."
In another time, at another barricade, Maties spied a street empty of people but full of rubble and broken dreams. Barcelona, once a shining pearl of resistance against the fascist onslaught, had now surrendered to the forces of general Yagüe who advanced without resistance from the south. Yet the last survivors of the militia for the defense of the Raval waited for their imminent death.
The war was ending in Catalonia. If they wanted to live, they should have left this city that no longer wanted them. But their stand in this blasted street, with the last waving red, yellow and purple flag, was a symbolic one.
They were the ones who had chosen to stay behind while thousands fled to the sea or France. They were the ones who would sacrifice themselves for a fatally wounded ideal. They were the ones who had nothing left but the blood in their veins, the breath in their lungs and the rifles between their hands: Three sixteen year olds, members of the “quinta del biberón”, remnants of families destroyed by the italian bombardments; two taciturn members of the so-called “Cábala de Trabajadores Comunistas”,3 a fringe workers union that had flourished in the underside of the city during the Republic and, lastly, him and another veteran of the Battle of the Ebro rounded up the rag-tag group of soldiers.
And thus, they awaited. Under their breath, they hummed the song.
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
O partisano me voy contigo porque me siento aquí morir
Maties passed a bit of bread to Joan, his comrade in arms during the disaster in the Ebro. In an unsurprising display of gallows humor, they had made bets as to whom of them would bite the dust first and who would do it the last. The three kids were not long for this world. And he had a weak right arm ever since a piece of shrapnel had gotten lodged in his shoulder. Thus, he had betted on Joan to be the last one standing. The cabal members were the outlier.
They were Juanjo and Núria. Both of them had been fighting since the beginning and Maties had fought side by side with them. In those occasions, he had learned to not question what his eyes saw. He had heard rumors of events that couldn’t be explained happening in the trenches. Flying beings that slaughtered the International Brigades soldiers in other regions of the country, machines of black metal that ate civilians and cattle to keep working, women who could turn falangistas inside out in the middle of the battlefield, priests whose dead bodies had ascended to the skies in some twisted version of a miracle, and a city that hung upside down somewhere below their feet. In another time, he would have dismissed those claims as obscurantist fearmongering, but his more than frequent, and each time closer and closer, encounters with Núria Torrelles had taught him that truth was stranger than what he thought.
One summer night, under the stars of the Monegros, she had explained that she came from a long line of spiritualists who could commune with the dead. He had laughed then. At first, she showed him drawings of dreams accessed in an ecstatic state of trance. And later she showed him facts by orchestrating an ambush of a patrol of nacionales. A patrol that nobody knew would be there except the family of farmers they had killed a week prior.
She even told him that she could read a willing mind’s thoughts and influence an unwilling mind. And Maties was inclined to believe her.
He had seen Juanjo work once. He had never looked at corpses the same way ever again.
So, Joan had decided to not include them in the bet. They would most likely die on their own terms and they had nothing to say in the matter. Except waiting, and eating their last pieces of bread.
The night came slowly. The moon passed over the Rambles, the stars following in tow. One by one, the children fell asleep while the adults finished their food. Maties didn’t see the figure on the rooftop, and neither did Juanjo. But the sound woke them up from their stupor.
The whirring of a motor from somewhere overhead made him reach out and grab his rifle. His comrade woke up the three kids. Hushed orders traveled behind the barricade. Núria had her eyes closed while Juanjo read from a bloodied parchment. The smallest youngster cast his bloodshot eyes upward. The thought occurred to Maties that perhaps, in a moment of weakness, his inner catholic schoolboy resurfaced and decided to pray. It was the last thing he did.
With a clang, a metal shape landed on him. The splash of blood blinded the companion immediately to his left, whose scream died in his throat, stopped by a sword amputating his trachea.
The last kid fired first. Fired wide, it hit the wall. But it illuminated the scene for a moment.
Maties had seen thousands of shots fired in the last three years. Many were the sun in the night. Many had revealed the position of an enemy that should have remained hidden. Many had marked the end of friends. None had ever scared him like this one did.
It was only a millisecond, but the adrenaline coursing through his veins made him appreciate every detail of the thing that had fallen from the rooftops. She was clad in black metal, brandishing a sword that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum and wore a cloak of dark feathers. The rumbling of the motor came from her, but the most striking thing was the serenity inhabiting her face as she plunged her blade into the last kid.
"Merda!"4 Someone screamed. And then Maties fired the first shot.
The bullet bounced harmlessly against the warrior's armor. The monster dashed at him and raised her sword, but Joan leaped and caught the weapon with his body.
The warrior said nothing as the republican fell limp on her feet. She advanced, blade held high while Maties tried to reload the rifle. The steel caught the last ray of the moon as it fell. "So that's that," he thought. It was, all in all, a noble way to die.
But the arm of the executioner stopped an inch short. She was dragged backwards by the bloodied hands of the three kids. Juanjo's work was cut out for him. His eyes glowed as he moved his arms in queer ways, the slaughtered children moved at his whim, attempting to hold down the monster.
Maties crouched, trying to cradle Joan.
"He guanyat la aposta. Em deus…"5 Were the last words uttered between bloody coughs.
Maties swallowed his last meal clawing its way up his throat and leveled his gun against the struggling warrior's forehead. More than anything else in the war, that instant would be the one etched deepest into his mind. It was the last thing he would see in his deathbed four decades later: the bloodlust-filled eyes of the monster, the corpses of three sixteen-year-olds trying to hold it down, and Juanjo writhing in the back, chanting a weird hymn, unaware of the gun that Núria was pointing at his head.
Two shots on rapid succession. The first splayed the necromancer's brains on a wall lined with propaganda posters. The second came from Maties' bloodied hands as the three corpses fell away and the enemy surged forward. The monster tumbled, her momentum causing her corpse to ram him and splay him against the barricade.
From under the cadaver, he looked up at Núria. She had spent the entire confrontation on the sidelines, and now stood over Juanjo, gun still smoking.
"Traidora!"6 was the only thing he could muster to say. He lifted the gun, pointing at the place where he thought she would have had a heart were she not so heartless. But his finger, trembling, betrayed him on the trigger.
She shushed him.
"Es que jo només vull sobreviure."7
And then the war was over.
The Lady had gone to tend the other souls of her flock. "Maties, come with us. You don't have to fight alone."
"There is a haunter in my nightmares, Lady. It has come for me to this very battlefield, I can feel in my dead heart. And it is mine alone to face it."
"So be it, amigo mío, and be careful."
He had seen them in the distance, among the debris and rubble. The black armor was now clean and shiny, and the feathered cloak had been replaced with a silver cape. They were now pretending to be keepers of peace rather than the emissaries of war—just more white-washing bullshit. Even so far away, he could still recognize them by that rumbling motor, the same one that had stalked his nightmares since that night at Barcelona. Though he lived a long life, he never had a truly peaceful night, not even after he reached Mictlán, for deep, deep inside his heart, he always knew he would have to face it again.
And now the monster was back.
And he…
He was prepared.
Maties shot another round and killed another fascist. He should have moved from the old tower a long time ago, for it was a matter of time before the hunter became the prey, before one of those iron-clad witches emerged from the shadows to rip apart his immortal soul. But he was counting on that. He was used to dancing above that thin line between bravery and foolishness.
Those harpies were silent killers, stealthy predators that struck without warning or mercy. He had woken up so many nights screaming in terror, expecting to find the monster over him. But it was that mechanical rumble, the demonic sound that never truly let him alone, what really fueled his nightmares. It was only by singing that song, the same song of the partisans, of the mondinas, that he could find comfort. But the song never truly drowned the rumbling engine; instead, something more curious happened. The song harmonized with the rumble, it sincretized with it, transmuting it in unexpected ways until it stopped being a source of dread, and instead he embraced it as a lifeline.
Una mañana, me he levantado
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Una me he levantado y he descubierto al invasor
And now, so many years and one life after, he could feel the faint rumble, betraying the killer's presence behind him. And yet Maties kept singing, as if there were no worries in the world.
O partisano me voy contigo
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
O partisano me voy contigo porque me siento aquí morir
The blade of the killer was over him. He felt the coldness of her unholy blade about to pierce his soul, condeming it to forever roam the barren wastelands of Nifelheim. Yet the anarchist smiled, for he had the monster exactly where he wanted. Maties reached for the switch in the pocket of his trench coat, triggering the detonation of all the explosives he had planted in the tower. He felt the fire and the free fall, his body hitting the ground, and the debris landing all around him. But none of that killed him, for he was already dead.
He rose, sore and disoriented, yet still walked determined toward the remains of the tower, drawn by the faint sound of the engine. With his bare hands, he lifted metal and stone until he finally found her. The Valkyrie was mangled; her once fearsome cybernetic body now lay useless, trapped below the wreckage. The white, expressionless mask had cracked, revealing her true, familiar face.
"So you did indeed survive, Núria…" She did gain a stronger body, but the price was losing her talent to read the minds of the dead, and that had been her undoing. Yet, for some reason, Maties no longer felt hate or fear towards her. "I'm… I'm almost glad to see you… Tell me, was it worth it?"
The rage, the hate, the bloodlust, which until now had found home in her face, slowly faded into emptiness. "No Maties, it wasn't." And the rumbling sound of the engine finally went silent.
Maties sat down next to her. In the distance, the battle raged on—shouts, howls, gunfire, and explosions. Nothing had really changed since that night in Barcelona. Maties thought of the revolver still tucked beneath his trench coat. He wondered if this time his finger would tremble and betray him again. No rush to find out, he thought.
"Do you remember this song, Núria?" And as he sang, he felt something akin to joy.
Esta es la historia de un guerrillero
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao
Es la historia de un guerrillero muerto por la libertad.
And then, at least for the two of them, the war was over.
