What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive; an emotion suspended in time, like a blurred photograph—like an insect trapped in amber.
The bomb was dropped by the Nationalist warplanes in the yard of the Santa Lucia school for orphans, a protruding stone structure in the middle of a desertesque nowhere. This was a no-man’s-land on the outskirts of a small Spanish city, one that was inexplicably flooding under sheets of cold, heavy rain, its packed sand road turning to a river of mud and the dry plants on either side of that road soaking up the rainwater like a glass of cold lemonade in June. It was raining hard that January night, as if the sky was crying out against the civil war over which the rain fell, for the lives lost and soon to be lost in those final days of war.
It had rained so hard and so long that night in 1939 that when the Nationalist bomb landed in the schoolyard, her head smashed against the ground and splashed in a puddle that must have been three inches deep. With that splash she tilted slightly to her left, creaking and groaning as if in pain—she creaked and groaned, but did not explode.
That cold rain mixed with crimson in the cracks in the courtyard floor, as the blood was washed away from the face of the boy who stood next to the freshly fallen bomb. He shielded his eyes with his hands, looking into the sky through tears and lightning to see the planes as they flew by overhead. He could hear the quickened beating of his own heart, but also a slower, more syncopated rhythm, that was like a pulse—that was her heartbeat, the ticking of the bomb.
