Daughter of Catalonia (14 page)

‘This is it. This was their camp,’ he said baldly.

Madeleine looked round in amazement. ‘But there’s nothing here! I thought there would at least be some shelter, a stream for water, something? Where did they live?’

‘Oh, there was a shed, quite a big one, which they built for themselves. And another small shed where they cooked. But there’s no trace of them now. The wood has all been taken away to be used elsewhere. And they had water. You can’t see it from here, but there’s another path like the one we just came through, on the other side over there, which leads to a small stream which comes from a source further up the hill. It’s often dry in the summer, despite the source, and they had to store water, but in winter they had fresh
supplies. But there weren’t many men here, you know, not like the really big Maquis groups up by Thuir and Prades. They had caves there and old mineshafts they used to live in. Here they were much more out in the open, but they needed some people this side of Canigou, and this close to the border.’

‘Like your father? Philippe tells me he was the
passeur
who guided me and my family over to Spain in November 1942. I remember him, I think. He seemed a really big man, at least to me then, a bit taller than my father, and he took us to a little cottage over the border. There was a man there who took us down in a cart with a donkey to join a train somewhere. I was only six, so I don’t remember the details, but I remember being hidden under a tarpaulin in the cart.’

Jordi smiled his first genuine smile. ‘That would be my father’s cousin, Felip. The rest of the family lived near Jonquera, but Felip lived in the hills near his sheep. He loved helping my father after we had to leave Spain. He felt all the time that he was fighting the Germans that he was also fighting Franco. One Fascist was the same as another, he would say. At first, of course, my father was helping Spaniards to get into France and out of Franco’s hands. It was only later that he started taking people in the other direction. Felip sheltered people going in both directions.’

‘He gave us soup.’ The memory came back to Madeleine suddenly. ‘I was cold, and it was wonderful.’

‘So you were six when you left France?’ This was the first sign of curiosity Jordi had shown.

Madeleine sighed. ‘Yes. We had to leave before the
Germans came, because my parents had both rather incriminated themselves through the work they were doing, and of course my mother was half English, which didn’t help. We were supposed to return after the war was over, but then my father died, so we never came home.’

‘You see here as home?’

‘The only memory I have of family life is of here.’

‘How ironic.’ His voice had a bitter edge, but it didn’t close her out. ‘My only memory of real family life is from before the exodus, the
Retirada
, before we had to flee Spain. From when we arrived in France, life just became more and more complicated.’

Madeleine wanted to ask him about his father, but it was too soon. She stayed on less personal ground.

‘Would you go back to Spain if you could?’

‘Right now? To live under Franco? No. I don’t think I could, and in any case Spaniards who left can’t go back – they get arrested. I slip over the border sometimes to see my family, and they manage all right, but there are too many silences, and watching your neighbour, and gritting your teeth rather than fighting back. I don’t think I could live like that. But one day! One day I’ll be able to go back.’

Madeleine studied Jordi’s rough face twisted in passionate defiance, his dishevelled clothes and unruly hair, and could see his point. She couldn’t picture this belligerent man living quietly under an alien regime. He would make a good resistance fighter himself, but he would need action, not quiet, underground anti-Franco activity.

‘So for now you’re here,’ she said as matter-of-factly as
possible. ‘And you’re running the gallery below where you live?’

‘Yes. I make my living as a potter, making things that will sell to tourists.’ Again his voice had a bitter edge. ‘But when I can find time I’m a sculptor. We weren’t allowed to go to school here, when I came to France, not at first anyway, and then came the war, so there wasn’t much chance of any real schooling. I don’t even write French well, so I’m not much good for anything else. But thankfully we had a neighbour who had a good business making ceramics after the war, and he gave me a job cleaning up and stuff, and then I found I had a talent. It’s a nice soft place, Céret, for selling anything arty. People come all year round to the museum. So after a while I was able to afford the rent on the gallery, but I mostly sell other people’s stuff. It sells better than mine.’

Madeleine felt almost uncomfortable in the face of Jordi’s fierce intensity. He seemed to pin her to the rocks behind them with those unblinking brown eyes. Then he turned away abruptly.

‘Is there anything more you want to know about this place?’ he asked.

Madeleine looked around her. ‘I don’t know what to ask. I find it so strange to think of my father and yours living here for a year and half. It seems incredible.’

‘They weren’t here that long. At first your father was just in a safe house near Céret. My father worked from home in Céret too, until someone denounced him and he had to go into hiding. They had a couple of bases, I think, and kept moving them, but they ended up here about five
months before the end. Just after the New Year, it was, in 1944.’

‘And you were allowed to come up here?’

‘Allowed?’ Jordi laughed, with real humour. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t say I was allowed! I came once with my father and I thought I was going to be shot!’

‘What is that boy doing here?’

The Maquis’ unit commander stood rigid in front of the door of the shed, his face contorted with anger. Jordi shivered in the freezing February air, and tried to make himself as small as possible behind his father.

Enric pointed to the sack of potatoes at his feet. ‘He helped me to carry this up here.’ His voice was unapologetic. ‘He’s of an age where he can be handy. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be. You’ve never complained yet about all the provisions he brings up here on his bike.’

‘But he didn’t bring them here!
You
brought them here. You met him on the road before, and you weren’t stupid enough to bring him all the way to the camp.’

Other men emerged from the rough shed behind the commander, most of them surprisingly young, some dressed in makeshift combats, others in overalls, none of them dressed for the outdoors, having come outside in a hurry at the commander’s words. There would be maybe eight or ten of them, Jordi thought, although he hardly dared to raise his eyes from the scrubby ground at his feet. As a group they could hardly have been more intimidating.

‘The sack was too heavy to carry on my own. He brought fresh bread too, and some cheese. Have a look.’

Enric walked forward, leaving Jordi exposed on his own in the clearing. He didn’t dare move, and fastened his eyes on his father’s back.

‘I don’t care about the cheese, you damned fool! You could have left the stuff hidden down below and it could be collected later. Instead of which you’ve shown a child the way to the camp.’

‘Except he’s not a child,’ Enric protested. ‘He’s only a year younger than young Montagnard here. If I didn’t need him to watch out for his mother he’d be here with me full-time, doing proper guide work.’

‘Well he’s not here, is he!’ the commander snarled. ‘While he’s living down there this camp can be of no interest to him.’

Enric didn’t reply, and a silence hung between the two men. The men by the shed stood equally silent, expressionless but with watchful eyes. Then a figure pushed his way between them and moved forward. Astonished, Jordi recognised Luis, who used to visit them in Céret sometimes when his father still lived at home. So he was here too, with Enric! Jordi hadn’t known – this was something his father hadn’t told him. Luis was a Spaniard too, another Catalan, surely a friend? He had eaten with them many times. Now, Jordi knew, he would have been given some other name, since no one was supposed to know any of the Maquis’ names. He looked Jordi straight in the eye without any apparent recognition.

‘Do you remember how you came up here this afternoon, son?’ His voice was gentler than the commander’s. Jordi gulped, and took courage.

‘No,’ he lied. ‘I was following my father, and all I could see was his back. The sack was heavy, and we had it over both our shoulders. I was right up close behind him. I didn’t have any time to look around me.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then all we have to do is take you back down blindfolded, and there’s no harm done.’ Luis turned to the commander. ‘Would that not work? We take the boy back down, and then we eat his bread, and next time he stays on the road where his father normally meets him.’

Enric was still standing in front of the commander, the cheese and bread in his hands. There was another silence, and no one moved, then the commander barked, ‘Montagnard!’

‘Yes?’

‘Bring a scarf for a blindfold, and get that boy out of here. And boy!’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘You forget you ever came here, or even what your father’s name is, right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And boy!’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you for the provisions. Tell your mother we know what it must cost her to send them to us, when there is so little food for anyone. Thank her for me.’

Jordi grinned at Madeleine. ‘And do you know, he really meant it! He was genuinely grateful. And of course he
wanted to be sure the supplies wouldn’t dry up! But I was glad to get out of there that day, I can tell you!’

‘I bet!’ Madeleine returned the grin, feeling braver herself. It was a glimpse of her father, the merest glimpse, but a good one. ‘So you only came that one time?’

‘Just the once, until after the war.’ Jordi’s grin faded. ‘Then I came back to see where the bastards destroyed my father.’

‘So what happened, Jordi? How did the Germans find the camp?’

Jordi hunched his shoulder in a new gesture of exclusion.

‘They were betrayed,’ he said roughly. ‘It happened all the time.’

He made a move back towards the gap in the cliff side.

‘Come, we have to get back. Philippe is waiting for us, and I have a gallery to run.’

Very few words were exchanged on the way down the hill to the car. Philippe was waiting for them, smoking a Gauloise. He offered one to Jordi, who accepted it, and they stood for a moment smoking in a very male silence. Madeleine crossed to the other side of the road, and looked up at the hill. The entrance to the track was inconspicuous, and further up it, when you reached it, the smaller track leading to the camp itself was almost invisible in the trees. It would have been a thousand to one chance for the hideout to be discovered by the Germans by accident. So they had been betrayed, but by whom? A local, currying favour with the Nazis? Surely there were precious few German sympathisers by the summer of 1944, with the Allies on the verge of retaking France. Or had the resistance group
been infiltrated? Did Jordi know? He had certainly not told her everything he knew.

As they climbed back into the car, Madeleine touched Jordi on the arm and asked, ‘Will you show me your gallery?’

‘If you want,’ was the brief reply, but to her relief his voice was softer again.

The gallery was a tiny space crammed with artwork, paintings by a number of local artists on the walls, and on every available surface sculptures and hand-painted ceramics, most of which were Jordi’s. His sculptures were of sullen peasants and labourers, an enraged, powerful bull and another injured, suffering beast, more anguished than angry. The ceramics were painted with images of labour and heat, and with bodies and lovers, sometimes touching, sometimes at gaze. His work was raw, hot, loaded with colour and completely untempered.

Jordi moved around opening shutters while Philippe and Madeleine wandered and touched. The work seemed to want to be touched. There was no attempt at cool displays or elegant presentation of the works, but the space was light and the colours glowed, and the pieces sat alongside each other in unfashioned harmony. Jordi referred to a new organic movement of art which Madeleine had never heard of, but she thought he didn’t actually follow any movement, just his own basic instinct for beauty and anger.

There was a small room behind the gallery which Jordi used as a workshop. It was dusty, and rather too dark to be ideal for a working studio, but it was surprisingly ordered and well organised, with Jordi’s materials catalogued on
shelves along the walls. It was an intensely physical space which was obviously Jordi’s whole world and possibly his refuge.

Philippe whispered to her that they should get lunch, but it didn’t seem right to move Jordi from this space. She didn’t know what or when he might eat, but she guessed it would be erratic and would completely follow his appetites. She didn’t want to leave. There was too much that this young man had not yet shared with her. He had known her father. Surely he could speak about him? And she wanted to know more about Jordi.

As Philippe made moves to leave, she approached Jordi and planted herself in front of him.

‘Thank you for showing me the camp today, Jordi. You must realise that I am really searching to understand everything that happened to my father and all that surrounded him, all the history I missed. I’ve come a long way to find out – practically run away from my family,’ she laughed, with a new sense of freedom. ‘Could you find the time to meet me again, do you think? To continue our discussion? Could you meet me once more during the short time I have here?’

Jordi contemplated her for a long moment, not unfriendly, just thinking, as if a major decision was involved.

‘All right,’ he replied at last. ‘I’ll meet you.’

Madeleine felt a wave of relief, then surprise as Jordi continued almost aggressively, ‘But not in Vermeilla. Are you scared to go on a motorbike? No? Then I’ll meet you at the entrance to the village tomorrow evening, after I
close up here, and we’ll go somewhere else. Somewhere where we can talk without ghosts. Give me an hour to come to you. I’ll meet you at seven-thirty, is that OK?’