The Return

  There were several episodes when they were challenged by the Civil Guard during their journey. ‘Where have you come from? Where are you going?’ they barked, their polished patent hats perched on top of their heads.These men were experts at detecting the slightest sweat that might break out on an interviewee’s brow, or the way that eyes did not meet their stern look. A shifty glance or a sense of discomfort immediately aroused suspicion and earned protracted questioning.

  Señor Duarte could answer their interrogations honestly enough. He had taken his family out of Republican territory and his destination was his brother’s house in San Sebastián.They correctly deduced that he supported Franco and some of them noticed the woman’s expression, the scent of fear, her silence. It was puzzling but did not bother them. In their view, it did no harm for society if women lived in fear of their husbands. What they were looking for were subversive elements and this woman and her two daughters who feigned disinterest in everything around them seemed harmless enough.

  After a month together, they finally reached the junction in the road where Ana and her parents would go towards her uncle’s village and Mercedes would continue going north towards Bilbao, crossing once again into territory held by the Republicans. Mercedes and Ana tried not to contemplate the next stages of their journeys, which they would be making without each other.

  Señor Duarte’s farewell was perfunctory while the señora’s was warm.

  Their daughter held on to Mercedes as though she might never let go. ‘Promise me that we will meet again,’ Ana urged.

  ‘Of course we will. As soon as I am settled I shall write to you. I have your uncle’s address.’

  Mercedes was determined to control her emotions. Promises of a reunion relieved them from the unimaginable possibility that they might never see each other again. In those weeks they had not been separated for a moment, day or night. No sisters were ever closer.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  IN GRANADA, CONCHA continued to run El Barril. It kept her occupied while the weeks passed with almost intolerable slowness. The routine provided her with the only structure she had in her life now that she had stopped going to see Pablo in prison. In the first months after his arrest, Concha had visited him as regularly as she could, but as the conflict continued, it had become increasingly hard. The roads were dangerous, she was always afraid of arrest, and the journey was taking its physical toll. Two weeks earlier, Pablo had made her promise not to come.

  In the half-light, through a double layer of metal grilling, they had stood and looked at each other in shadowy outline. The distance between them precluded all conversation apart from a few remarks shouted above the din of other couples exchanging information. There could be no sharing of confidences or fears with the guards standing close by. Each visit Concha had observed how her husband seemed visibly diminished, but through the haze of metal she was unable to see how ill he really looked. It was just as well.

  ‘Someone has to keep their strength, querida mia,’ Pablo had said, almost inaudibly through the mesh.

  ‘But it should be me who is locked up,’ she replied.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ scolded Pablo. ‘I would rather be in here than have you in some awful place.’

  Everyone knew what happened in the women’s prisons, and Pablo would have spared his wife at any price. They were shaved and purged with castor oil, often raped and branded. No man would allow his wife to suffer these indignities if there was an option and Pablo never regretted having made this choice.

  ‘Please don’t come,’ he begged. ‘It’s not doing you any good.’

  ‘But what about the food parcels?’

  ‘I’ll survive,’ he said.

  Pablo did not like to tell her that very little usually remained in them by the time the light-fingered guards had checked their contents and handed them over. He knew that his wife would have made the most enormous sacrifices to get these packages of food and tobacco to him and it was better that she was not disillusioned.

  Concha ceased her visits but was endlessly racked by guilt. It could so easily have been her that was tortured and half-starved in a cell, and she carried this thought around with her every minute of the day. She tried to distract herself from thinking too much about what had happened to Pablo, knowing that anger and despair would do nothing to alleviate her situation.

  Another source of anxiety for Concha was the lack of news from her children. Salvador’s mother, Josefina, was the only one with any news of the boys. She had returned to Granada a month after they had left for Madrid only to find a letter from the militia informing her of her son’s death. There was no other information to be had, but she also received two funny and eloquent letters that he had written before his death, describing in detail what they had done. Salvador had a gift for writing and description. She shared these letters with Concha and María Pérez and the three women spent hours together poring over them.

  Concha knew that Mercedes would never have reached Málaga and hoped that she was now somewhere with Javier but too afraid to return to Granada. She was sure that all this uncertainty would be over soon so that they could all be reunited, and she yearned for a letter from her daughter.

  Mercedes realised how independent she had become. She missed her friend Ana, but solitude was something she had grown accustomed to. It seemed a lifetime ago that anyone had looked after her, and the memory of how her brothers had fussed over her was a distant one.

  She was now in the Basque country, which was Republican-held territory, and she calculated that it might be only a few days before she reached Bilbao. Mercedes had her shoes and the dancing dress the café proprietor’s wife had given her in a bag, as well as a few other spare items of clothing that she had been able to afford with the money she was earning. She had not planned to dance once she was on her own, but one night, in a small place that only just qualified as a town, the circumstances seemed right.

  When the bus reached its final destination late that afternoon, Mercedes soon found somewhere to stay. Her room overlooked a side street leading down to the square and, by leaning as far as she safely could out of her window, she caught a glimpse of the activity going on in there. Something seemed to be happening, so she went down to get a closer look.

  It was 19 March. Mercedes was oblivious to the significance of the day. In the small square people were congregating. Two small girls ran around, chasing each other, squealing, rattling their castanets and almost tripping over the flounces of their cheap flamenco skirts. This dusty square, with its gently trickling fountain in the middle, was the centre of their universe. It was the only place they had ever known and Mercedes envied them their oblivion to the events taking place not so far away. Their parents had worked hard to keep them from feeling the effects of the shortages that afflicted the urban areas, and the occasional quiet boom and flash in the night sky from a faraway bombardment seemed a world away to the children of this apparently self-contained community. One or two of them knew the terror of it - their fathers had disappeared in the night - but the community was still functioning as normal.

  Mercedes saw girls sitting on a wall chatting, some plaiting each other’s hair, others spinning around with their fringed shawls. A group of boys eyed them from a distance and occasionally were rewarded with a surreptitious sideways glance cast in their direction. There was a slightly older boy holding a guitar. He was strumming a few notes with the kind of nonchalance only ever achieved by the self-confidently handsome, and when he looked up he noticed Mercedes watching him. She smiled. He was probably not much younger than she, but she felt a hundred years older. She was fearless now and had no hesitation in approaching him.

  ‘Will there be dancing later?’ she asked.

  The disdainful look he gave her provided the answer.With the small wooden stage erected close by, this village was clearly prepared for a fiesta. It would be the first that Mercedes had seen for many months and even if the religious connotations meant little, the ri
tual, music and dancing had their own vibrancy. She would not be able to resist it.

  ‘It’s the feast of San José!’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  Later on in the evening, she saw the young guitarist again, along with an older man, seated on chairs at the edge of the stage. It was around eight o’clock now, and it was the first evening of the year when there had been some warmth left in the air at this time. At which precise moment the stage of gently tuning up turned into the beginning of the alegrías, it was hard to tell, but applause rippled across the crowd.

  The rhythms of the music seemed to come from opposing directions, working against each other and merging again like currents at the confluence of two rivers. Father and son made music that intertwined.They crossed over each other, blended and receded again, pulling back in their original direction.There were sublimely pleasing moments when the two instruments made the sound of one and then moved away from each other back to their own melody. Even the discords seemed harmonious, minor and major chords sometimes engaging in polite collision.

  Mercedes sat close by, patting her knee as she caught the rhythm, and smiled. This music was something sublime. For a while the strife-ridden outside world ceased to exist.

  When this heavenly performance finished, the father looked up to catch Mercedes’ eye. It was her turn. When she had spoken to the older guitarist earlier in the evening, she had learned that he and his son were also outsiders. They had left Sevilla a few months earlier and were biding their time until they returned. It seemed too dangerous at present.

  ‘They’ll be pleased to see someone dancing true flamenco!’ he had said smilingly, showing a huge gap between his front teeth.

  On the small wooden stage, where both boys and girls and one or two older women had already performed, Mercedes’ dance turned into something much more than the usual display of passion and strength that characterised flamenco. The primitive power of her gestures reached out to the audience. There were mutterings of ‘Olé ’ from both men and women, who were astonished by this magnificent dancer. The guitarristas may have made them forget, but Mercedes reminded them that their country was being torn apart. Her movements embodied the anguish they all felt when they thought of the guns and cannons that were being turned against them. After dancing for twenty minutes, she had no more to give. Her final stamp, planted with a mighty ‘crack’ on the wooden boards, was an unmistakable gesture of defiance. ‘We will not submit’ it seemed to say and the audience erupted into applause.

  People were curious about her. Some of the people she talked to that night could not understand why she was making for Bilbao, which they imagined was full of danger.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ enquired the woman whose house she was staying in. ‘You’d be much safer.You can keep that room for a while if you like.’

  ‘You’re so kind,’ answered Mercedes, ‘but I must keep going. My aunt and uncle have been expecting me for a long time.’

  It was simpler to lie than to tell the truth. She had not lost faith in finding Javier even if, in her mind, the image of him was fading. She would wake up in the morning and search her imagination in vain for an image of his face, and sometimes there was nothing at all, hardly an outline. Sometimes she had to take the photograph of him out of her pocket to remind herself of his features, the liquid, oval eyes, the aquiline nose, the beautiful mouth. That perfect moment in Málaga when the picture was taken seemed so long ago, in another lifetime. The image of such a dazzling smile seemed something that would only exist in history books.

  Being separated from everyone she knew, and everywhere that was familiar, had created a growing sense of emptiness. From the moment when the Duarte family had disappeared from view she had felt insubstantial and unconnected with the world. Was it for weeks or months that she had been away? She scarcely knew. There was nothing to measure time against. Its solid framework had turned to dust.

  Perhaps the only thing she knew for certain now was that, having come this far, she had to push on to her destination. She ignored a new but persistent doubt that she would ever find the object of her quest.

  She got up in the dark that morning to be sure of catching the bus that she had been told would take her to her destination. For a few hours the vehicle rattled towards Bilbao. Eventually it dropped her on the edge of the city and it was not long before Mercedes began to realise why her plan to go there had been met with such incredulous looks the previous night.

  She was given a lift from the outskirts by a doctor, who left her in one of the city’s main squares.

  ‘I don’t want to put you off,’ he said politely, ‘but you won’t find things easy in Bilbao. Most people are trying to get out of here.’

  ‘I know,’ answered Mercedes, ‘but here’s where I need to be.’

  The doctor could see that she would not be deterred and he did not ask questions. At least he had done what he could. Like this young woman, he would not be going to Bilbao unless he was compelled, and for him it was a hospital full of wounded that drew him.

  ‘I honestly don’t think it’ll be long before this place falls, so take care of yourself.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said, doing her best to raise a smile. ‘Thanks for bringing me here.’

  The place was in chaos. There were frequent air raids, and a sense of fear and desperation and panic. None of these were things that she had seen in Granada the previous summer, or even in Almería among the traumatised refugees from Málaga.

  Bilbao seemed a world away from some of the small towns where she had stayed, which were physically if not mentally untouched by the conflict. This city was receiving a continual battering. Day and night it was bombarded from the sea and from the air. The port was blockaded and food shortages were at critical level. The diet was rice and cabbage, and unless you were prepared to eat donkey there was no meat. The sight of dead bodies was common. They lay in the streets, lined up like sandbags, and early each morning were ferried to the morgue in carts.

  There was only one reason that she would have come to this hell and that was to follow up the final clue she had for finding Javier. On a small scrap of paper folded inside her purse was an address. It was where she might find him. Even the slimmest possibility filled her with a sense of excitement and she was now impatient to get there.

  The first few people she asked were strangers to the city just as she was. A shopkeeper would be more likely to give her directions and she pushed open the first door she came to. It was a hardware shop but it displayed about as much stock as the average kitchen. Customers were non-existent, but the old shopkeeper still sat in a dark corner by his till, carrying on the pretence that business was as normal. When he heard the chime of the bell he peered over the top of his newspaper.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Mercedes’ eyes needed to get accustomed to the gloom but she followed the source of the voice, bumping into a table loaded with dusty pans as she did so.

  ‘I need to find this street,’ she said, unfolding the paper. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  The old man removed his glasses from his top pocket and carefully put them on. He ran a stubby finger across the address.

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ he said. ‘It’s in the north of the city.’

  On the reverse side of the paper, using a blunt pencil, he drew a map. Then he opened the door of his shop and took Mercedes out onto the pavement, instructing her to follow the road they stood on as far as it went and then to take a series of turns before she met another main road that would lead her eventually to her destination.

  ‘Ask again when you get closer,’ he advised. ‘It will probably take you half an hour.’

  For the first time in weeks, Mercedes felt a surge of optimism and the smile she gave the old man was the first he had seen for a long time.

  It seemed strange to him that this young woman was apparently so excited about visiting the most bomb-ravaged area of his city. He did not have the heart to warn her.


  As Mercedes worked her way towards her destination, meticulously following directions, her smile gradually faded. In each street, the extent of destruction seemed greater than it had been in the previous one. At first, she noticed a few shattered windows, most of them boarded up, but within half an hour of setting out walking, the condition of the buildings was noticeably worsening. By the time she caught a glimpse of the sea and knew she must be close to her destination, many of these apartment blocks were just shells. At best, they comprised the four outside walls, with gaping cavities at the centre, like boxes without lids. At worst they had been razed to the ground. Miscellaneous possessions lay scattered among their ruins: broken furniture and a thousand personal effects left behind in the scramble to evacuate.

  Mercedes had to ask a dozen times if she was going in the right direction. Eventually she found the street name, attached to the first block on the corner. Only this end-building was still standing, the rest of the street was badly damaged. It looked as though a bomb had landed right in the centre of the road and blasted everything within a fifty-metre radius. It was obvious even from where she stood that all the apartments must be empty.Their windows were black and dark, like eye sockets in a skull. She worked out in which block Javier’s aunt and uncle had lived and it was clear that they could no longer be there.