‘Well, you know you’re welcome to be with us, don’t you?’ ‘I know, I know . . .’
She did not want to be blunt, but her only desire now was to find Javier. The woman whose corpse she had seen hanging from the tree a few miles back had run out of purpose. Mercedes had not.
Once she had helped to settle Manuela and Javi safely in the doorway of a boarded-up shop where they would all sleep at least for the coming night, she went off to explore.
She continually stopped people to ask them whether they had seen Javier, and her picture of him was retrieved from her pocket a hundred times. Once or twice she found someone who thought they had seen him. The
guitarrista
was well known in Málaga and several people were sure they had caught sight of him before they had fled, even if they had not seen him since. At one point her hopes were raised when someone helpfully offered that they had just seen a man with a guitar. Mercedes hastened off in the direction he indicated and soon saw the figure that had been described to her from the back. Her heart missed a beat. Seeing the slim outline of a man carrying a battered guitar case, she hastened after him. She called out and the man turned round. As he did so, she realised that this man bore not the slightest resemblance to Javier. She found herself face to face with a man of more than fifty. She apologised and let him walk away.Tears of disappointment almost choked her.
She retraced her steps to where her companions were. Even with their small number of possessions they had made a neat, open-fronted home around them. Javi was already asleep, sprawled across his mother’s lap. Manuela dozed, her head leaning back against the wooden doorframe. They looked peaceful together.
Mercedes wandered off to see if she could find some more food for them all. She joined two queues, only to be disappointed when what was being sold had run out before she had reached the front. Procuring a few grams of lentils at the end of a third was a triumph.
Almería had once been a beautiful city but she was too tired to notice and was completely unaware of the route she had taken. By the time she had stood in a few queues she had lost track of time. She did not possess a watch, and the sunless afternoon sky gave her no clues. She had been away for perhaps two hours.
As she was beginning to retrace her steps towards the centre of the city, she heard the distant sound of a siren and shortly after that the thud of an explosion and then another, closer this time. A shiny silver aeroplane passed overhead. Surely not here too? Their safe haven had been a very short-lived one.
When she got closer to the main square she could smell burning and sense the chaos, and as she turned the corner she found herself going against the tide, just as she had on the day when she met the procession filing out of Málaga. This time she must fight her way through. Panic rose inside her. In all the time since she had left Granada, she had not felt such fear. She was even more terrified than when they had been bombed on the road. The fleeing crowd were pushing her away, back in the direction she had come from, but she fought against them, manoeuvring herself towards the edge of the street so that she could stop and wait for the stampede to go by.
Eventually this first wave passed and then came the casualties. Some were supported, others were carried, many were lifeless. It was an unnervingly silent parade. Eventually they all passed and, but for a few stragglers, dazed and dusty with particles of fallen masonry, the street was quiet again. Mercedes trembled with fear. Though she had pictured what she would see when she turned the corner into the square, her anguish was no less intense when she saw the reality.
One entire side was bombed to oblivion and every building had collapsed. Not a single wall or pillar remained standing. It was a jumble of angled metalwork, twisted frames and blackened wood. Everything was charred or razed to the ground. Mercedes recalled that the shop that had briefly been Manuela’s home was in the far corner, and she could see the empty space that it once occupied.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .’ she muttered through her tears. She crossed the square quickly and recognised, even from its charred remains, the fragments of the deep green shop front where she had last seen her friends. There was nothing there now except fallen masonry and twisted metal girders.
Mercedes stood motionless.The absence of the two people that she had briefly known but intensely cherished dug a huge hollow inside her.
Someone came up behind her and tapped her on the arm.
She started and swung round. Manuela!
But it was not. It was an old woman.
‘I saw them. I’m sorry. They didn’t have a chance when that beam came down.’
If their shelter had been close to the centre of impact - and the crater nearby suggested it - they might not have suffered.This was Mercedes’ first thought. Javi at least might have been sound asleep. She desperately hoped that this had been the case.
‘Were they your family?’
Mercedes shook her head. She was completely incapable of speech. There was nothing to say even if her contracted throat had allowed it. She simply stood there and stared numbly at the place where her friends had once been.
More than a dozen had been killed in this single raid.Very few of the victims were residents of Almería; the majority were those who, like Manuela and Javi, had trekked for two hundred kilometres, only to perish in a strange city. The Fascist bombers had been efficient. They knew that the streets would be swollen with refugees, sitting targets on the streets, defenceless.
Mercedes looked around. She saw a woman standing in the wreckage of her home. She had watched it fall and now fruit-lessly sifted for possessions in the remains of charred wood and snapped off banisters that had once been on the floor above. If she did not retrieve what she could now, it would not be there for long. There were plenty of the desperate and destitute ready to scavenge dangerous and derelict properties.
Mercedes had considered herself lucky to have avoided machine guns, shells and aerial bombs on the long walk. She wondered why she had been spared in this latest onslaught as well.
In the pockets of her coat were the only possessions she now had: a bag of lentils and half a loaf of bread in one, and in the other her dancing shoes.
Chapter Twenty-three
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER leaving Granada, Antonio and his friends reached the outskirts of Madrid, approaching from the eastern side where Republican militia were in control.The sight of what had happened to the capital was shocking and the hollow, bombed-out buildings stirred them to anger. As their truck passed by, small children looked up at them and waved and women raised the
puño
, the Republican fist. The arrival of every new Republican supporter refreshed the hope that the Fascists could be kept out of their city.
As they queued to sign up for the militia, along with the men with whom they had travelled, they learned more about the situation in the capital city.
‘At least there’s the promise of rations if we join up,’ said one of their companions. ‘I’m looking forward to some decent grub.’
‘I wouldn’t hold out your hopes,’ said another. ‘There might not be much going here . . .’
Since September, Madrid had been full of refugees. Many of the towns surrounding it had been captured, and their terror-stricken populations had descended on the capital, swelling the population to many times its usual size. It was encircled by the enemy, but the ring was not so tight knit that it could not be broken through, thus sustaining the citizens’ belief in freedom. The people of Madrid and the thousands of refugees with their possessions tied in rag bundles hoped that this awful situation would soon be over. They could not live on bread and beans for ever.
In the previous November optimism in Madrid had wavered. More than twenty-five thousand Nationalist troops had planted themselves in the western and southern suburbs, and were reinforced within a few weeks by troops from Germany. The starving people of Madrid could feel the clamp around them tightening and, with food becoming scarcer by the day, belts were drawn in too.
Then rumours circulated that the Republican government had evacuated from Madrid to Valencia. In the abandoned government offices, papers fluttered at empty desks and portraits kept watch on empty corridors. Birds flew in through half-opened windows and drops of pale excrement were now splashed across dark leather chairs. The move was supposedly temporary. Filing cabinets remained half filled and walls of books were undisturbed, dust already gathering round their elaborate-tooled spines and along the fine beading of the wood-panelled walls. High windows prevented the population from seeing inside these silent rooms, but they could imagine them and some were full of despair.
The majority in Madrid realised, though, that the absence of their government did not mean that the city had to fall to Franco, and there was renewed determination among them. Men, women and children would join the fight and from the beginning that was what they did, with small children running errands to the front, and a few brave women swapping their brooms for guns.
The now departed government’s fears that the Fascists were about to enter Madrid were not immediately realised. Franco was held up in Toledo, and meanwhile aid finally arrived from the Soviet Union, as did anti-fascist volunteers from all around the world. Along with the communists, who had been ready to take over the defence of the city when the government left, these International Brigaders helped in the city’s defence.
‘
Salud!
’ they cried.
‘
Salud!
’ the foreigners replied.
There was no common language but this gesture of solidarity and a single word was understood by them all.
Antonio found himself in conversation with a man who was a father of seven children.
‘Until recently, you could let the children play in the streets.
Sometimes things could seem quite normal for a few hours,’ he said ruefully. ‘That’s all changing now.’
Antonio looked round and saw how the buildings were scarred from mortar-fire and pockmarked with bullets. Panic and disorder was instilled by the regular crack of gunfire and the crump of shelling. It was obvious to Antonio that the sweetness of normal life, when things could be taken for granted, had been snatched away and replaced by the constant, stomach-tightening sensation of fear. Morale-boosting propaganda posters were peeling away from the walls, as frayed as their hopes.
‘And you can imagine how much the children enjoyed the first few days when they couldn’t go to school,’ the father continued.
The children already yearned for the old routine, as did their mothers.Their well-ordered lives were like neatly stacked carts of fruit that had been overturned, their contents spilled into the gutter.
Standing in the streets, anxious to fight for these people,Antonio could see how crucial the deceptive guise of normality had become. Between air raids, shoeshine boys could still make a meagre living. Mothers and grandmothers walked through the streets in their best winter clothes, their children in velvet-collared coats either lagging too far behind or running in front to vex their elders. Men in felt hats with scarves at their necks to keep away the February blasts sometimes still took their evening stroll. It might have been the hour of
paseo
on an ordinary day during peaceful times.
At the sound of the siren, women would tighten their grip on the hands of their children and if they had too many to keep an eye on, strangers would stop and help. The great temptation was to look upwards to the sky, to see the planes and even to watch the battle that might take place above them.This was the instinct of children and many were pulled reluctantly into the darkness of the subway, to be hidden before the bombs fell around them screaming. In former times, the subway had been a way of getting from one side of the city to the other. Now, for some, station platforms had become a place of refuge and for others even a permanent home.
Eventually, terrified of what was happening above them but fearful of remaining for too long below, people would come up into the light, emerging into a street where buildings had been dissected like cakes with a carving knife. Perfect cross sections of precious homes were revealed, their treasured interiors now on display for the world to see. Plates and dishes were stubbornly unbroken and waiting to be used, even though their owners might be dead.
Eyes looked up into the privacy of strangers’ lives, to see clothes wafting in the breeze, neat beds unmade by the wind, a dining table teetering on the edge, its chequered cloth still held down with a bowl of artificial flowers, pictures askew, bookcases empty, their contents spewed across the floor, a ticking clock that measured the passing of time before the next bomb blast or the days until this apartment block would be demolished for safety’s sake. A mirror often hung on the back wall, reflecting the destruction. In some places only the façades of buildings remained standing, as fragile as cheap movie sets.