Throughout the previous few days Antonio had thought only of Franco’s growing dominance in Spain and the way in which his troops seemed to be spreading unstoppably throughout the region. The fact that they were meeting substantial resistance in the north of the country gave those that supported the Republic some hope. If he and his friends did not join the fight against fascism, they might forever regret their inaction.
‘We must go,’ said Antonio. ‘It’s time.’
Resolute, he set off home to make preparations for departure.
Chapter Twenty-one
BY THE TIME Antonio went to tell his mother he was leaving, Mercedes had been on the road for some hours. From Granada, she took the mountain road rather than the main route south, thinking she would meet fewer people that way. Though it was February and the snow was still thick on the mountain tops around her, she had taken off her thick woollen coat. She walked for five hours that day and, but for the extremities of her gloveless fingers, she was almost too warm.
For a short distance between Ventas and Alhama a farmer gave her a lift on his cart. He had just sold two dozen chickens at market and now had space to accommodate a passenger.The smell of livestock hung heavily about him, and Mercedes tried hard not to show her revulsion at the odour of him and the mangy dog that sat between them. There was a comforting normality about riding along next to this weather-beaten man whose hands were raw with cold and crisscrossed with deep tears and scratches.
Mercedes had regularly spent part of her summertime in the countryside outside Granada, and visits to her aunt and uncle in the sierras had been a happy aspect of her childhood. She was familiar enough with the landscape when the trees were in leaf and the meadows flirtatious with wild flowers, but in winter it was chilled and bare. The fields were a greyish brown, waiting for spring crops to be sown, and the road was stony and rutted. The mule’s hoofs regularly slipped on loose shale, which slowed its already lazy pace. The weak afternoon sunlight provided no warmth.
Mercedes knew to trust no one and made little conversation, answering the old man’s questions in monosyllables. She came from Granada and was going to visit her aunt in a village outside Málaga. That was about all she volunteered.
He was no doubt equally untrusting of her, and gave little information about himself.
Once during the journey they were stopped by a Civil Guard patrol.
‘Purpose of journey?’ the interrogator demanded.
Mercedes held her breath. She had prepared herself for this but now that she was faced with the moment, her mouth dried.
‘My daughter and I are on our way back to our farm in Periana. We’ve been to market in Ventas,’ the farmer said cheerfully. ‘Chickens were fetching a good price today.’
There was nothing to suggest that he was lying.An empty cage, the faint whiff of chicken excrement, a girl. They waved him on.
‘Gracias,’ she said quietly when the patrol was well out of earshot. She looked down at the pattern of the road’s rough surface as it moved under the big wooden wheels. She told herself she must still not trust this man and should stick to her fictitious story even if he now appeared to be a friend and knew that she needed some protection.
They travelled on for another hour or so until it was time for the farmer to turn off. His farm was up in the hills; he indicated somewhere in the direction of a wooded area on the horizon.
‘Do you want to stop with us for the night? There would be a warm bed for you and my wife makes a decent enough supper.’
In her exhausted state she was, for a moment, tempted. But what did that invitation convey? Though he had been kind to her, she had no idea who this man was and, wife or no wife, she suddenly felt the full force of her vulnerability. She must keep going towards Málaga.
‘Thank you. But I should press on.’
‘Well, have this anyway,’ he said, reaching behind his seat.‘I shall be enjoying my wife’s cooking in an hour or so. I won’t be needing it.’
She now stood in the road beneath him and reached up to take a small hessian bag. She could feel the reassuring bulk of a small loaf inside and knew that she would be grateful for this the next day. She had nearly run out of the supplies she had stashed away in her pockets and was grateful for replenishments.
Clearly he had not been offended by her refusal of his invitation but she knew it had been better not to be open with him. Gone were the days when you could feel entirely sure of those you knew, let alone strangers. They wished each other well and in moments he had disappeared out of sight.
Once again she was alone. The farmer had said that she was about five kilometres from the main road that would lead her to Málaga, so she decided to keep walking until she reached it before having a rest. If she did not set herself these goals she might never reach her destination.
It was about six in the evening and dark by the time she got to the junction. Hunger was beginning to hammer at her stomach. She sat down by the roadside, leaned against a large stone and reached into the small sack. As well as the loaf there was a lump of cake and an orange.
She tore off a wedge of the now dry and crumbly bread and chewed it slowly, washing it down with swigs of water, for a while oblivious to her surroundings and absorbed entirely in sating her hunger.
Uncertain of the distance to the next village and whether she would able to buy anything to eat there, she hoarded the cake and the orange for later. Protected from the wind, she closed her eyes. Against the dark screen of her closed eyelids, an image of Javier appeared. He was perched on the edge of a low chair, his back curved over his guitar, his eyes cast upwards towards her through the dark mop of his fringe. In her imagination, she felt the warmth of his breath and daydreamed that he was only a few yards away, waiting for her to dance. The temptation to step into the dream began to seduce her. In spite of knowing that she should keep walking and that with each passing hour she might have less chance of finding the man she loved beyond measure, Mercedes lay down and slept.
When Antonio retured to the El Barril, there was one dim light still burning behind the bar. He leaned over to reach the switch and as he did so, a voice startled him.
‘Antonio.’
Obscured in the inky shadows at the back of the café, he could make out the silhouette of a familiar figure. His mother was seated alone at a table.There was enough light filtering in from a gaslamp in the street for him to cross the room without stumbling into tables and chairs. Seeing Concha sitting there alone, his heart pounded with fear and sorrow at what he had to tell her. Could he deal her such a blow?
‘Mother! What are you doing down here so late?’
Now that he was close, he could see a large glass on the table in front of her. This was very unlike Concha. It had always been his father’s job to do the final clearing up in the bar and he knew that Pablo always sat over a drink at the end of the evening and usually a few cigarettes too. But not his mother. She was always so desperately tired in the late evening that she would simply bolt the door and ignore the last glasses on the tables, knowing that Mercedes would make it her first job to clear them away in the morning.
There was no reply from Concha.
‘Mother - why are you still up?’
There would be a good reason for his mother’s change of routine but he was fearful. Everyone lived on edge in this city.
‘Mother?’
Though she was scarcely visible, he could see now that her arms were folded across her body and that she gently swayed. It was almost as though she were rhythmically rocking a baby.
By now Antonio was crouched down next to her, his hands on her shoulders, gently shaking her. Her eyes were closed.
‘What is it? What has happened?’ His voice was insistent.
Concha tried to reply, but her speech was cloudy with cognac and tears. The effort of speaking made her weep all the more. She was incomprehensible with grief.Antonio held her tight and when she was reassured by the firm embrace in which he now held her, the sp
asm of her crying subsided. Eventually when he let her go, she lifted her floral apron to her face and noisily blew her nose.
‘I told her to go,’ she said falteringly.
‘What are you talking about? Who did you tell to go?’
‘Mercedes. I told her to go and find Javier. She will never be happy unless she goes to him.’
‘So you have sent her to Málaga?’ responded Antonio with a note of disbelief.
‘But if she can track down Javier they can go somewhere together. She couldn’t stay here pining like that. I was watching her every day, ageing with grief. This war is awful for all of us but at least Mercedes has a chance of being happy.’
In the darkness, Concha did not see the colour drain from her son’s face.
‘But they’re shelling Málaga,’ he said, his mouth dry with anxiety. ‘I just heard.’
Concha did not seem to hear her son.
He held his mother’s hands between his own. It was pointless castigating her at this moment, though he knew his father would not have hesitated.
‘We’re forced to live with our enemy here,’ she continued. ‘At least she’s given herself the chance of getting away from them.’
Antonio could not disagree. His own view matched hers, almost too closely. He knew that she was right about the sense of impotence that reigned in Granada. Though there had been considerable bloodshed and destruction in the days that followed the coup, the city had been taken over with relative ease and many of its inhabitants regretted that they had not been ready to fight back. Other towns and cities were putting up a much stronger defence.
‘So when did she go?’
‘She packed a few things this morning. She was gone by lunchtime.’
‘And if she’s challenged, what will her story be?’
‘She’ll say that she has an aunt in Málaga . . .’
‘Well, that much is almost true, isn’t it?’
‘. . . and that the aunt is sick and she is planning to bring her back to Granada to nurse her.’
‘It’s plausible enough, I suppose,’ said Antonio, wanting to reassure his mother that she had done the right thing in encouraging his sister to go, though he knew that the whole venture was fraught with potential danger.
In his current role as head of the family, he felt that he should express more anxiety, if not anger, over his sister’s irresponsible behaviour. They sat in silence for a while and then Antonio went over to the bar and poured himself a generous tumbler of brandy. He tipped his head back and swallowed it in a single gulp. The sound of his glass landing on the bar startled his mother from her reverie.
‘Will she come back if she can’t find him? Did she promise?’
Antonio watched his mother’s eyes widen with surprise.
‘Of course she’ll come back!’
He wanted to share Concha’s optimism and now was not the time to fill her with doubt.
He put a protective arm around his mother and swallowed hard. Now was not the right time to reveal his own plans either, but he could not delay for long. He was going to need the protection of a dark night, and tonight’s cloudy sky and new moon would have been perfect for their departure.
In the very early hours of the following day, woken by the cold dawn, Mercedes made some headway along the main road. It felt open and exposed but it was virtually a straight line to Málaga from here.
That afternoon, up ahead in the far distance, she saw a small cloud of dust on the horizon. It moved like a slow, small whirl-wind. There had been nothing on the road going in the other direction for some hours and all she had seen was an occasional bare tree along the way.
As the distance between them diminished, Mercedes could make out human shapes.There were a few donkeys, some of them pulling carts, and their pace seemed painfully slow. They were moving no faster than the most cumbersome float in a Holy Week procession.
Their approach was inexorable though, and she began to wonder how she would pass. This human tide formed a barrier between herself and her destination. It was nearly an hour later, when the distance between them had diminished to a few hundred metres and she could hear the uncanny silence in which they walked, that she asked herself the question, ‘Why?’ Why were all these people on the road, on a chill February afternoon? And why were they so quiet?
It became clear that this was a convoy, a caravan train of people and carts on the move. It was mystifying; they were like a procession that had taken the wrong turning at the feria, or pilgrims making a religious journey from one city to another to carry a precious icon. And even as they neared, Mercedes’ mind could not make sense of what she saw. It was as though a whole village full of families had decided to move house, all at once, and had piled themselves up with everything they owned: chairs, mattresses, pots, trunks, toys. Mules almost disappeared under the weight and bulk of it all.
Once she was face to face with the people who led the way their silence was unnerving. No one seemed to speak.They looked right through her as though she did not exist. They were like sleepwalkers. She stood aside to let them pass. One by one they went by, old, young, the lame, the wounded, children, pregnant women, eyes staring ahead or fixed to the ground. One thing they all shared, apart from a look of fear, was a sense of resignation. There was vacancy in their expression, as though all emotion had been wiped out of them.
For a while Mercedes watched them pass. It was strange to be unnoticed and it did not occur to her to stop anyone to enquire where they were going. Then she noticed a woman who was sitting on her haunches, resting by the side of the road. A child sat close by, mindlessly drawing circles in the dust with a stick. Mercedes saw her opportunity.
‘Excuse me . . . can you tell me where everyone is going?’ she asked gently.
‘Going? Where they’re going?’ The woman’s voice, though feeble, conveyed her incredulity that anyone could be asking this question.
Mercedes rephrased her enquiry. ‘Where have you all come from?’
The woman answered without hesitation. ‘Málaga . . . Málaga . . . Málaga.’ Each time she spoke the word, her voice grew fainter until the final syllable disappeared into a whisper.
‘Málaga,’ repeated Mercedes. Her stomach contracted. She kneeled down beside the woman.‘What has happened in Málaga? Why have you all left?’
Now that they were on the same level, the woman looked at Mercedes for the first time. The quiet crowd continued to file past. No one gave the two women and the grubby child a second look.
‘You don’t know?’
‘No, I’ve come from Granada. I’m on my way to Málaga.What’s going on there?’ Mercedes tried to suppress her anxiety and impatience.
‘Terrible things. Such terrible things.’ There was a catch in the woman’s throat, as though she feared to recount them.
Mercedes was caught between the desire to know the truth and the dread of it too. Her first thought was for Javier. Was he still there? Was he in this vast crowd, making his way out of the city? She needed to know more, and after a few minutes of sitting in silence with this woman, she plied her with another question. She might be her only source of information, since nobody else seemed to be stopping.
‘Tell me. What’s happened?’
‘Do you have any food?’
Mercedes suddenly realised that there was only one thing that preoccupied this woman. Neither the events of the past few days nor her unknown future interested her. It was the stomach-gnawing ache of hunger and the nagging whine of her little son desperate for something to eat that crowded her thoughts.
‘Food? Yes, I do. When did you last eat?’ Mercedes was already reaching into her bag to find the cake and the orange.
‘Javi!’
The small boy glanced up and within a second was upon them, grabbing the cake from his mother’s hand.
‘Stop!’ she snapped at him. ‘Not all at once! Don’t snatch!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mercedes calmly. ‘I don’t need it.’
br /> ‘But I do,’ said the woman weakly. ‘I’m so hungry. Please leave some for me, Javi.’
Her appeal was too late. In his desperation, the child had consumed every last crumb and now his cheeks were almost bursting, leaving him unable to respond.
‘It’s been so hard for him to understand why we’ve been desperately short of food for a few weeks,’ she said tearfully. ‘He’s only three.’