Daughter of Catalonia (12 page)

Madeleine eased her grip on her coffee cup, feeling rather stupid to have been so shaken, especially seeing how calm the man’s sons had remained, although Daniel, she had noticed, had also frozen for a moment. Colette and Philippe were still watching her, their eyes anxious. They exchanged a glance and Madeleine thought, these people didn’t need my visit. I’m an outsider here, stirring up memories and creating tensions. Had I not been here
there wouldn’t have been any outburst from Jean-Pierre. Above all she mustn’t allow these people to worry about her. She spoke as brightly as she could.

‘It’s all right. Please don’t worry about it. It was one of the things I was going to ask, anyway, where my father is buried. I had heard about people being buried where they died, and wondered if that was maybe what had happened to my father.’

‘It did happen,’ agreed Philippe, matching her tone, ‘and quite often. But in Luis’s case his team knew where to find me, and I wasn’t far away. They brought him at night, and I was able to arrange his burial with the local priest. Not the best funeral, unfortunately, just me and a few people from Vermeilla who had ended up in Amélie-les-Bains as well.’ He saw Madeleine’s look of enquiry, and carried on, ‘We only got as far as your departure, didn’t we, when we were talking this morning? Well afterwards, the Germans gradually took over the whole coast, as we expected, and of course Luis left and eventually joined a small Resistance group up above Amélie-les-Bains, in the foothills of the Pyrenees – in the area known as the Vallespir. They were involved mostly in managing escape routes, being so close to Spain, but they did their fair share of sabotage, and they had a real mission to get information out about German movements and installations. Luis used to come down to Vermeilla in secret to gather information, since he wasn’t really being looked for, unlike some others. Then a couple of months later the Germans evacuated most of us out of the village, as Colette said, and I ended up in Amélie-les-Bains where
there was still a school and I could be of some use. We even had a few of our Vermeilla children in the school. That put me closer to Luis, and I used to see him quite often. He would stay some nights, and steal all my food, what little I had. Requisitioning, he called it! I used to tell him to save himself for his visits here, because Colette could always find some rations for him.’

‘German rations,’ Colette grimaced. ‘It was good to be able to give him some of what the Germans should have had. It made me feel less like a collaborator.’ She looked across at Madeleine, her face suddenly inexpressibly sad and tired. ‘It was not a nice time, when the Germans were here, and there were only a very few of us kept here in the village to work, while everyone else was sent away. We felt so isolated, and that’s what got to Jean-Pierre. At first after his accident he used to come downstairs to the bar sometimes, but when the Germans came he retreated upstairs and rarely came down, and became more and more strange.’

Daniel had come silently back into the room while she spoke, and she glanced across at him. ‘He became obsessively worried about Daniel at that time, as well, and didn’t want to let him out. Eventually we sent him up to Amélie-les-Bains to be with Philippe, since at least there he could go to school, and there were other children. There were no children left in Vermeilla, remember?’ Daniel nodded.

‘Luis’s visits helped Jean-Pierre, at least at first. He would bring us news of Daniel, and tell Jean-Pierre not to worry, because the war was almost over, and the Germans
would soon be gone. And of course, eventually they did go, but your father wasn’t here to see it.’

Martin, too, was back in the room by now, slipping silently in from the kitchen, but no one spoke, and there seemed to be nothing to say. It was a peaceful silence, though, and Madeleine no longer felt such an outsider. Her father was a part of Philippe and Colette’s lives, and remembering him was surely natural even if it did stir up painful memories. Eventually Martin moved away from his position by the door, and came towards the table. He went behind his mother and leant his head against the back of hers, his hands on her arms. Colette leant back onto him and stretched tensed shoulders. Philippe watched them with almost proprietorial eyes, a half smile playing on his face.

‘We’ve been very serious,’ he said, ‘but all of these things were over a long time ago, and there’s a lovely afternoon outside.’

‘And a café to run,’ Colette said, and she stood and faced her son. ‘Do you have schoolwork to do? No? Then you can come down and help them clear up after lunch downstairs. Philippe, will you take another coffee downstairs? And you,
ma petite
, you must be tired. Shall Daniel accompany you to your hotel so that you can rest for a while, take a small siesta? Then we can meet again later on. You will eat with us again, no? And we will eat downstairs this evening, just ourselves.’ This was said with emphasis, and a nod towards the corridor leading to Jean-Pierre’s room.

‘Thank you,’ Madeleine mumbled, embarrassed. ‘But
you’ve already been so kind. I should leave you in peace for this evening. Mme Curelée will be preparing food for this evening, I’m sure.’

‘Mme Curelée! What does she know about cooking? No, you will eat with us, and taste what the café can offer you, and meet some of our people. We are here anyway, never anywhere else! As well be with us as eat on your own in that dining room of Anne-Marie Curelée’s! It will at least be a lot livelier.’

‘Me too, then!’ chimed Martin. ‘I eat downstairs this evening. I want some of Jules’s pommes frites, and he was making a fricassee of pork this morning. I saw him!’

Colette’s specially reserved smile softened her face. Philippe too was smiling, Madeleine noticed.

‘My son,’ purred Colette. ‘You are without doubt the most precocious of young men, but yes, you shall eat with us this evening.’

The next two days passed in a whirl for Madeleine. It was a struggle to remember that on Friday morning she had been in Paris. The colours and sounds and people of Vermeilla were so forceful, so vivid, that even
Tante
Louise seemed discreetly tame in comparison.

With Daniel she walked, and sat on the sea wall, and learnt about fishing. They sat with groups of his friends, mainly young men with slicked-back hairstyles. Elvis and Ricky Nelson were all around her, Madeleine thought, with some amusement. But there were also some sharp-tongued girls of about her own age or younger, in long ponytails and wide skirts and long-sleeved blouses, all wearing the standard rope-soled espadrilles. They watched Madeleine warily, eying up her Parisian hairstyle and new fashion summer dresses, and then hunched themselves back into their groups, shoulders turned towards her. I’ve been an
outsider all my life, she wanted to tell them, and I’m not here looking for you. Their little acts of exclusion amused her more than anything else. She preferred the company of the young men, whose badinage seemed uncomplicated and convivial, but even this was for the most part in Catalan, and beyond her grasp.

Daniel was one of this group, of course, and serenely at home with them, but different somehow, and it took some time for Madeleine to work out where the difference lay. In part it was his simple courtesy to everyone. He joked with his friends, but rarely at their expense, and seemed a shade serious next to them. And he spoke differently. He spoke the same French as his brother, educated and thoughtful, although not with Madeleine’s Parisian accent. Daniel might be a fisherman, but he didn’t speak like them, or even entirely like his own parents, and it was clear that Philippe’s influence had been worked on him as well as on the scholarly Martin. Madeleine wondered whether fishing would be his long-term career. He was passionate about it in many ways, and it represented a way of life he believed in, but he seemed a very different, very private person when viewed alongside his robust group of friends.

And yet it was clear that they respected Daniel, and liked him, and they never made fun of him. He was one of them, a friend, and to be accepted rather than questioned. She noticed that they listened to him, and looked for his input. This village and its people were his home as they might not later be home to Martin.

At lunchtime on Sunday Daniel took her to visit his own personal vineyard, about twenty minutes’ walk from
the village, past some bigger houses with gardens, and then along a narrow lane which climbed gently up the hillside. Here all was vineyards, clambering up the slopes, their gnarled vines clinging to the hillside in narrow terraces built up using drystone walls. Daniel’s was a small field tucked in among other smallholdings, all marked by their walled boundaries. From here you had a clear view down over the pink rooftops of the village below to the Mediterranean, blue to the horizon, clear as crystal in the Tramontane wind which freshened the air and cleaned the skies.

Daniel spent many Sundays here when there was no fishing, he explained, pruning and tying the vines, checking for pests, planting and watering new seedlings. Madeleine suspected that he came here also for the peace. The tiny stone
casot
shed in his vineyard held a little wooden chair and a blanket which she thought must be used for quiet siestas in the shade of the single fig tree. When she asked him, he turned on that smile of extraordinary sweetness, and didn’t bother to answer. But he brought out the chair, and the blanket, and they sat and ate together next to the vines, bread with slices of
saucisson
, and little glasses of red wine from a cask stored in the shed, and cherries from the market.

She had bought the cherries with Colette that morning in the marketplace of Vermeilla, suddenly crowded with Sunday stalls selling fruits and vegetables, cheeses, fish, flowers, rolls of cloth in floral designs, espadrilles and earthenware. Colette had bought fish, and a small round sheep’s milk cheese from the Pyrenees. At the stall where they bought the cherries, Colette introduced Madeleine to
the stallholder, who had his own market garden beyond Perpignan. He was a tiny man in his late sixties or seventies, who hopped around with boundless energy and talked with everyone. He had been visiting Vermeilla to sell his produce for over forty years, and had known her father, but especially her mother.

‘She had the sweetest face ever,’ he told her. ‘A gentle woman, and kind. I always saved her the best fruits in season. She was just one of the good people who were no longer around after the war. The last time I saw her or your father was in 1940, before the Pétainistes closed the market and began requisitioning most of my produce. We couldn’t have got down here even if we’d had anything left to exchange so far from home. Colette tells me your mother died recently. I am sorry, Mademoiselle. Very sorry.’

Lots of people remembered and were sorry. Most, of course, had more to worry about in their lives now than old stories of the war years, but they liked to reminisce, and were pleased to meet Luis and Elise’s daughter, whether in the bar, the street or the crowded market square. Everyone loved to talk, provided the conversation was kept off the difficult parts of the war. They’d rebuilt lives, here in Vermeilla, and old scars were not to be scratched. Philippe told her that most people in Vermeilla, as everywhere in Vichy France, had just tried to sit out the war and survive, but most of them had bitter memories of struggle and hunger, and some, of course, had things to hide. They were all, he told her, a mix of good and bad and heroic, just like every day today, but in the war it just mattered that bit more. There was an underlying silence which Madeleine
could almost touch. You had to feel your way through each conversation.

It was easier with Daniel and his friends, who had only known the war as young children. They seemed to know little and care less, and that made things much less complicated. Daniel in particular seemed to take things just as they came, and reacted to everything with that ever serene smile. Walking with him again on the Sunday evening, on her way back to her hotel after eating the fish with Colette, Madeleine thought how easy he was to be with, but wondered at him too. Faced with a younger brother who was so academically gifted, and the cosseted darling of his mother, it didn’t seem to occur to Daniel to feel jealous, or dissatisfied in any way. If Martin challenged or baited him he would always have a reply, but no more than was necessary. At no point had she seen Daniel initiate any teasing, or show any aggression.

With his friends too, as she had seen, he was equally unruffled and easy-going, if always a little reserved. She wondered how many people could claim to know Daniel really well. Philippe, perhaps? Did he have the key to what went on inside Daniel’s quiet head?

With her, Daniel was like an elder brother, attentive and concerned without being overprotective. And he was one of the few who seemed unsurprised by her arrival in Vermeilla. Others in the village had made her very aware of the audacity of what she had done in coming alone to Vermeilla. This was a traditional society, and when they learnt that she had travelled alone from Paris and was staying on her own at the hotel, men’s eyebrows would
twitch, and the women would exclaim in mock admiration.

After one such exclamation Philippe had suggested that she might like to come and stay with him, but reviewing his jumbled home in her mind, and the little room she had once occupied, which was now used as a store, Madeleine was not keen. She no more wanted the memories than she did the constant company, and was rather enjoying the independence of hotel life. She looked up at the placid young man walking beside her, and suddenly asked him.

‘Do you think I have made a mistake in coming to Vermeilla, Daniel? I don’t mean in wanting to meet you all, but in the way I’ve done it? I seem to have shocked some people in Vermeilla, being here as a girl on my own.’

They were nearly in front of the Hotel Bon Repos by now, nothing in Vermeilla being far away, and Daniel therefore stopped. He looked across at the sea wall and gestured, a question in his eyes. She nodded, and they went to sit on it, feet resting on the cobbles. Daniel took an inevitable look along to where the boats were again preparing to go to sea, and his crew mates would soon be waiting for him. Then he turned and gave her his usual smile.

‘It’s a funny place, Vermeilla,’ he answered at last. ‘It’s just a village, set in its ways like other villages around here, but yet at the same time we get some tourists, and so people are more used to seeing different types here. And we always seem to have had people moving in from outside, like
Tonton
Philippe, and my father, of course. If you were a local girl, then you might be more fiercely judged, but since you are not, they just show some surprise,
but then they’ll get used to the situation. They just like to comment, that’s all. You’re the one-day wonder. There’s not much new in this village most days. And you are pretty remarkable, after all.’

He smiled again as he finished, and his eyes flashed in the dimming daylight.

‘Remarkable?’ questioned Madeleine. ‘Do you know, I’ve never known anyone more ordinary than me. I find this whole trip more testing than you could know. My mind’s really overwhelmed at the moment, and I am unsure how to take things, so I don’t want to get anything wrong. And I feel how alone I am, a lot of the time, but I am finding it liberating. I wish you knew how hemmed in I’ve been all my life.’

‘Well, you’re certainly not ordinary, Madeleine.’ Daniel’s voice was even more than usually gentle. ‘I’m lost in admiration. I can’t think of any girl I know who would travel outside this region on her own, let alone to Paris or London, not knowing what she would find, or whether there would be anyone to receive her. I’m not sure I would do it myself! I’ve never been much further than Perpignan in my life, which shows how adventurous I am.’ There was a note of self-derision to his voice, but his smile returned, and he stood up from the wall a little self-consciously.

‘You must be so tired, after all the travelling and then everything that’s happening here. I hope you didn’t find it too tiring walking out to the vineyard today. No? I’m glad. We can maybe do it again one day.’

He leant down and kissed her on each cheek. ‘Sleep well, Madeleine. Is it not tomorrow that you are going
with
Tonton
Philippe to see your father’s grave? At Amélie-les-Bains? I hope that will not be too hard for you. But you’ll have Philippe with you.’

He hesitated a moment, and reached out a hand half towards her, then withdrew it abruptly. His voice was less smooth than usual as he spoke, but the words were quite straightforward. ‘We will see you tomorrow, Madeleine. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Daniel’ she replied, strangely lost for other words. She watched him move off down the quay, calling to the other fishermen, pulling his packet of Gitanes from his pocket as he went, and then she herself slowly moved, towards the hotel and her little room with its
old-fashioned
bed and its patterned tiles, her tiny, private place of solitude and peace.

From this little haven she watched later as Daniel and all the fishermen put to sea for the night, and she began a letter to Robert, with so much to tell since leaving Paris only three days before that she hardly knew where to start. She would wait to send it until she had seen their father’s grave, but for now she wanted to capture the treasured welcome and sense of roots, the daytime noise and the night-time peace, and the discoveries, the learning about Luis Garriga and his young bride, who had come to Vermeilla and made a life which was cut short but not forgotten.

‘I think you should try to come here,’ she wrote. ‘It is almost impossible to describe to you all the people and the colours, and the Mediterranean, and the amazing landscape, and Colette’s bar, and all the little streets around. And it was the strangest experience to be back in our old
apartment. I remembered it so exactly, and Philippe had changed nothing – really nothing at all. There are some things here which are uncanny, and I don’t fully understand why Philippe has chosen to live in the past in this way. He seems to hero-worship Papa, but I’m not sure that would be enough reason for me. He says he just found it easy to move in, and perhaps that explains things, since I don’t think he has much interest in his material environment.

‘I get hints from the Curelées, who run my hotel, that Philippe is thought to be perhaps a little too involved in the lives of Colette and her boys: quickly hushed little remarks that could mean a lot or nothing at all, a bit like
Tante
Louise’s bit of gossip she’d heard. But basically Philippe is a darling, a genuinely lovely man who, I think, just wants simplicity and his close people. You need to meet him, Robert, and also to meet Colette and her family, except maybe her strange husband. Philippe and Colette would be so stunned to meet you too – the living Luis Garriga!’

It was hard to continue after this. Madeleine had such an image of her brother in her mind that she felt desperately adrift all of a sudden. She laid the letter aside to finish tomorrow, after the visit to Amélie-les-Bains. There was still so much to learn about her father and what had happened to him, and yet she was already so tired and saturated with information. She stood at the window and watched the couples walking along the quayside below her, laughing and together, and felt even more alone. As the fishing boats left the harbour the feeling intensified, and the quayside looked oddly deserted in spite of the people still strolling along it.

Melancholy is dangerous nonsense, she thought, and pushed her window open wider to the evening air. The world came closer, and as she breathed deeply her solitude receded and the safe sound of beaching waves reached out to touch her. I didn’t ever think this was going to be easy, she thought. And yet it has already been easier and more fruitful than I could have hoped for.

Just as she turned back from the window to put away her half-finished letter, a knock came to the door. It was Madame Curelée, offering coffee, and a snack should she need it. She gratefully accepted the coffee and went downstairs to take it with them and a new young couple who had arrived that day from Toulouse, and who planned to walk in the Pyrenees but who were first seeking the grave of Antonio Machado, the most famous of all Spanish poets, who was buried in nearby Collioure. The young man was a researcher at the University of Toulouse, he explained, specialising in the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Madeleine vaguely remembered her mother talking about Machado, although she didn’t remember ever seeing any of his work. It seemed that in this area, however, he was famous, and the young man was passionate about him.