The Return (46 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
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.
The street was deserted, like every single one of these buildings, and she assumed that anyone who had been at home when the bomb landed must be either injured or dead. The last shreds of hope that she had clung to for all those weeks were gradually disappearing. She had wanted so much to find Javier in this city and the irony now was that she hoped he had never reached Bilbao at all. Mercedes felt herself trembling. She was ice-cold, numb with shock.
Her fist closed around the scrap of paper with Javier’s address, moulding it into a hard ball. Later that day she would notice its loss without concern. She was now truly without direction.
The next few hours of Mercedes’ stay in Bilbao were spent in a queue for bread. The length of this straggling line far exceeded any she had seen in Almería or any of the other towns in Republican territory. It snaked down one street and round the corner into another. Mothers with small children tried to deal with the whining of their offspring as best they could, but if they were hungry when they joined the queue, three hours of waiting only worsened the hunger pangs. Patience began to run out, as did the certainty that there would be anything for them at the end.
‘There were nearly a hundred people in front of me yesterday,’ moaned the woman in front of Mercedes, ‘and then the shutters came down. Bang. Nothing.’
‘So what did you do?’ she enquired.
‘What do you think we did?’
The woman’s manner was aggressive and her speech coarse. Mercedes felt obliged to engage in conversation, though she could happily have stood in silence. She was totally preoccupied with thoughts of Javier and merely shrugged in reply.
‘We waited, didn’t we? There was no way we were going to lose our places, so we slept on the pavement.’
The woman was determined to continue, in spite of the fact that Mercedes did nothing to encourage her.
‘And you know what happened then? When we woke up these other people had moved in front of us. Taken our places.’
As she spoke these last words she punched the clenched fist of one hand into the flattened palm of the other. Reliving the moment of finding herself usurped in the queue, she felt her anger returning.
‘So you see, I have to get some of that bread.There’s no choice.’
Mercedes had no doubt that this woman would stop at nothing to feed her family, and her threatening manner suggested that she would resort to violence to do so.
Mercedes was in luck herself that morning. Supplies did not run out before she reached the front of the queue, but she knew nevertheless that the woman resented her because of her admission that she had no dependants. Since strict rationing was not in force, those with children often felt they were inadequately supplied.This woman clearly felt that the world was against her and, worst of all, it was cheating her family. Mercedes could feel the woman’s eyes boring into her as she picked up her loaf from the counter. Such sparks of hostility between people even on the same side was one of the worst aspects of this war.
Despite the feeling of growing desperation there, Mercedes decided not to leave Bilbao immediately. She had done enough travelling and felt there was nowhere else to go. In the days after she had seen the derelict wreck of Javier’s uncle’s home, she allowed herself to hope that he might be elsewhere in the city. It was pointless being in a rush to leave now, and each day she made new enquiries.
One of Mercedes’ immediate needs was for a roof over her head, and she soon found herself in conversation with a mother she met in one of the food queues. María Sánchez was so beset with the grief of losing her husband that she was only too happy to accept the offer of help with her four children in return for accommodation. Mercedes shared a room with the two daughters and soon they were calling her ‘
Tía
’, Aunt.
Tía
’, Aunt.
Chapter Twenty-eight
THE END OF the Battle of Guadalajara in March had marked a break in Franco’s attempts to take the capital and the turning of his attention to the industrial north: the Basque area was still stubbornly resisting. Meanwhile,Antonio and Francisco were back in Madrid, which, though not the focus of Franco’s campaign, still continued to need defence.
They had weeks of relative inactivity, during which they wrote letters, played cards and occasionally engaged in a skirmish. Francisco, as ever, was desperate to be at the centre of the action again, while Antonio tried to be more patient. He was always hungry, not just for bread but also for news of events in other parts of the country. He devoured the daily papers as soon as they appeared on the newsstands.
At the end of March, they heard of the bombing of the defenceless town of Durango. A church had been targeted during Mass and most of the congregation had been killed, along with some nuns and a priest. Worse still, German fighters had strafed fleeing civilians and about two hundred and fifty people were killed. There was another event, however, the destruction of the ancient Basque town of Guernica, that had greater implications for both Antonio and Mercedes, even though they were separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres, and both far from home.
The late April day when the news was broadcast that Guernica had been reduced to a blackened shell was one of the darkest moments in this conflict. Sitting in Madrid’s spring sunshine, Antonio found his hands shaking so violently that he could hardly hold his newspaper. It was a place neither he nor Francisco had ever been to, but the description of its horrific destruction marked a turning point.
‘Look at these pictures,’ he said. There was a catch in his throat as he passed the paper across to Francisco. ‘Look . . .’
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