The Return (45 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain
Mercedes was surprised by how mechanical it felt to dance just in order to earn money. It was so unlike the emboldening experience of the night in Almería. But coins were tossed into the cup that Ana took around, and the café owner took a handful of change from his till and handed it to her with a smile. His takings had been improved that night.
‘It was so wooden,’ Mercedes lamented to Ana as they went to sleep.
‘Don’t worry,’ consoled Ana. ‘The crowd didn’t notice. They just loved the entertainment.You were better than the dog anyway!’
Mercedes laughed.‘They would have been better off at a puppet show,’ she said.
They repeated the formula in several towns as they journeyed slowly towards Bilbao. Mercedes learned what pleased the audience and what failed to stir them, and discovered a new way of dancing that was competent and functional. Only a few members of the audience noticed how little of herself she gave. She knew that she would never move anyone this way but it was a way of making a living and she was happy to share the money with Ana and her parents. Dance was saving her in a different way now.
During the hours when they were travelling by bus or in a farmer’s truck, Ana’s parents remained mostly silent, and Mercedes often found herself observing Señor Duarte and wondering how hard it was for him to pretend she was his daughter. By the middle of March they had crossed into Nationalist territory. Señor Duarte was even more tense than before. There were informers on every street corner.
‘No more dancing now,’ he said one night to the girls. ‘We don’t know how it will be received here.’
‘But does it matter, Father?’ exclaimed Ana. ‘Everyone loves Mercedes’ dancing, so what’s the harm in it?’
‘It means that people notice us. And we don’t want that. We want to lie as low as possible.’
The nights of dancing had added so much colour to the journey. Mercedes had begun to enjoy the release of each performance and her enthusiasm for it had returned. She was sorry to give it up but understood why the Duartes felt the need to restrict it.
Señor Duarte trusted no one, and it was often difficult to tell where people’s sympathies truly lay, even though they were now well inside Nationalist-held territory.
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.
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.
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 ritual, 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.
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.
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.
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