The Return (50 page)

Read The Return Online

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

BOOK: The Return
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When he came round, the excruciating agony of it all was more than Antonio could bear. He was delirious with the pain and bit down, hard, on his own arm to suppress the need to scream aloud. Supplies of chloroform were running out in the medical tent and the air was thick with screams.There was little more than brandy to anaesthetise these men, whether it was from shrapnel wounds or amputation that they so desperately needed relief. Days or perhaps weeks later, detached from both time and place, he watched himself being eased on to a stretcher and slotted into a compartment of a train specially adapted for the wounded.
 
A while later, emerging slowly from this dream state, he found himself in Barcelona which, though under attack, had still not fallen to Franco. The train had trundled north from the Ebro to take the wounded to safety, the red cross on its roof a plea for clemency to the Fascist pilots that prowled the skies.
 
The process of recovery for Antonio was like the transition from darkness to light. As the weeks went by, the pain gradually decreased, his breathing became deeper, his strength returned; it was like a slow but magnificent dawn. When his eyes remained open for more than a few minutes at a time, he realised that the figures that constantly moved around him were women, not angels.
 
‘So you’re real,’ he said to the girl who held his wrist to take a pulse. For the first time he could feel the cool pressure of her fingers.
 
‘Yes, I’m real,’ she replied, smiling down at him. ‘And so are you.’
 
She had watched the life in this skeletal figure ebb and flow in the past few weeks. It was the same for most of the patients here. It was a matter of luck and the efforts of the nurses, who did their very best as each day more of the dying had arrived to fill the wards to overflowing. The lack of medicine meant that many died unnecessarily.Their malnourished state gave them little resistance to any infection and there were men who had lived through the onslaught of the Ebro, only to be wiped out by gangrene or even typhoid in their hospital beds.
 
Antonio knew nothing of the previous few months’ events but as he emerged once more into the world, he learned of them.The Battle of the Ebro was over. At the end of November, three months after they should have admitted the complete failure of the entire initiative and retreated, the Republican leadership had finally withdrawn what remained of their army. Massively outnumbered and outmanoeuvred at every stage, they had been too stubborn to admit defeat until thirty thousand of their own men lay dead and more than the same number again had been wounded.
 
It was rarely quiet in the ward. Apart from the sheer volume of patients, the sound of conflict infiltrated almost continually. It was quieter than the battlefield, but the bombardment was continual and the thundering cracks of anti-aircraft fire punctuated the occasional moment of peace. As Antonio became more conscious of these sounds, he pondered what was to come next. He was walking a little each day now and gaining strength by the hour, and it was nearly time to leave the confines of this ward, which had become his home. If only he could go to his real home to see his mother. He yearned for sight of her, and his father too, but of this there was no question. Nor was there any possibility of rejoining what remained of his militia. He did not have the strength yet.
 
When the Fascists’ assault on Barcelona intensified, Antonio moved into a hostel. He was with many others just like himself who had been displaced and weakened but who hoped to take up arms again in the future. They were still soldiers.
 
The New Year crept in. 1939. There was no cause for celebration. A sense of the inevitable permeated the streets. The shops had been stripped of food, fuel had run out and the last desperate calls for resistance echoed around empty streets. Barcelona was fatally wounded and nothing could save her now. On 26 January Fascist troops marched in and occupied the almost deserted city.
 
Chapter Thirty-one
 
WHEN BARCELONA FELL, half a million began their journey into exile, all of them weak from months of undernourishment and many recovering from injury.
 
Antonio found himself in the company of another member of the militia,Victor Alves, a young Basque, who had been conscripted at the age of seventeen. Untrained in the use of a rifle, he had been wounded on his first day on the Ebro; his family had left a few weeks earlier for France and he hoped to be reunited with them.
 
There were two possible routes into France and the two men had to weigh them up. The first was over the Pyrenees. For Antonio and Victor, recovering from wounds, the craggy terrain would not be the only problem. Snow would impede them every step of the way. Antonio had heard that children were almost waist deep in it in some places, and the elderly and infirm regularly lost their sticks in the deep drifts. Many slipped and stumbled on the ice and the going was painfully slow.
 
In addition to this, though Antonio and Victor might have had very little to take with them, there were few who had resisted the urge to take some possessions and their discarded chattels buried in the snow created further invisible hazards for those behind them. In the springtime, when the mountain’s white blanket had melted away, there would be a curious trail of bric-a-brac uncovered in the thaw. Useless but sentimental items - a precious perfume bottle or a religious icon - and useful but unsentimental things - a metal cooking pot or a small chair - were scattered along the way.
 
The alternative to the treacherous mountain route was the coast road, though the danger there was the border control.They agreed that they had no alternative but the latter, and set off, part of a huge column of people making their way north.
 
Everyone struggled with household items, blankets, bundles of clothes and anything else they had considered essential for their journey to another life. Women on their own with several children had the most difficulties. Antonio often tried to help. He had brought nothing with him but his rifle. He had no other possessions and was used to living in the same clothes for weeks on end. There were many others, though, who had packed as much into a bag as they could fit and now struggled.
 
‘Let me help you,’ he insisted to one woman, whose own child carried a baby while she fought tearfully with a bag whose handles had snapped under the strain. A third child tripped along next to them, snugly shrouded in several blankets. Between them, Antonio and Victor carried both baby and baggage and soon they were distracting the little boy with a marching song. Antonio thought back to his journey out of Granada with the band of militia when they had sung to boost morale. It had worked then and it worked now.
 
Even Antonio, who had seen the most appalling sights on the battlefield, was still occasionally shocked by what he saw on the way.Women gave birth while female relatives gathered round them to shield with their skirts the mystical moment of entry into the world.
 
‘What a dangerous time to be born,’ muttered Antonio as he heard the plaintive cry of a new-born.
 
It was a two-hundred-kilometre trek, and after a week of walking Antonio finally reached the border at Cerbère. He looked across towards the sea and for a moment felt a flicker of optimism pass through him. The Mediterranean caught the shafts of sunlight that penetrated the heavy February clouds, and in the patches of leaden grey water there were expanses of silvery light. There before them was France, another country. Perhaps they would find a fresh beginning there. In this great exodus, the trail of the ragged and forlorn had to believe in a new start, a promised land. There were some who were indifferent now to their own country, a place where they had neither family nor home nor hope.
 
Though most in this queue had given up their burdens, soldiers clung on to their rifles. There was nothing else they required. Working on the stiff catches through long nights of boredom, they were now confident that these battered Russian weapons would keep them safe.
 
‘What’s happening up ahead?’ asked Victor.
 
‘I don’t know,’ answered Antonio, craning to see over the forest of a thousand mostly behatted heads. ‘Maybe they’ve closed it again.’
 
It had been rumoured that the French had shut the border for a while. They had been overwhelmed by the numbers. The crush of people was now building up behind, but everyone seemed subdued, no one was impatient. They had come this far and just a few metres in front of them was their destination.
 
After an hour or so they began to move forward. Antonio could see the border control and heard the unfamiliar sound of French voices. The harsh tone was not what they had expected.
 
‘
Mettez-les ici!
’
 
The words may have meant nothing but the gesticulation and the pile of guns and possessions to one side of the road said everything. The French were making their message clear. Before they left Spain, the weary exiles were expected to leave their arms behind, and many were being forced to dump their possessions too. A few metres ahead of them, Antonio noticed an old man engaged in a furious altercation. That would be a mistake, he thought to himself, to start a fight with the border guard, especially when you were as frail as this old warrior.What ensued was worse.
 
They made him empty his pockets in front of them and when they noticed his fingers folded into a fist, one of the guards shoved him in the shoulder with his bayonet.
 
‘
Qu’est-ce que vouz faites? Cochon!
’
 
Another grabbed the old man from behind while a third, realising that the fist contained something other than an intention to lash out, prised the bony fingers open one by one until the palm was exposed. What did they expect to find? A handful of gold, a secreted pistol?
 
On his outstretched hand lay nothing more than a small mound of dirt, a pathetic sample of Spain’s soil that he had brought with him over the mountains.
 
‘
Por favor
,’ he pleaded.
 
Before he uttered even the last syllable of his entreaty, the guard had brushed the grit from his hand, sweeping it away in one stroke.The man looked down at the specks of earth, the remnants of his
patria
that traced the veins of his palm.
 
‘
Hijo de puta!
You bastard!’ he cried out, choked, his passion spilling over. ‘Why did you . . . ?’
 
The guards laughed in his face and Antonio stepped forward to hold the man gently by the arm. Tears coursed down his face, but he was still full of fury and poised to lash out. This anger would only provoke these French to further insult and there was nothing to be gained from that now. The precious Spanish soil had already been trampled beneath their boots. The old man was given another shove in the back. If he did not make any further fuss he would soon be in France.
 
Now the guards turned their attention to Antonio. One of them grabbed the end of his rifle. It was a provocative gesture, and totally gratuitous, given that the pile of abandoned weapons by the side of the road was a clear indication that they had to enter France unarmed. It hardly needed reiteration.Antonio handed his over without a word.
 
‘Why should we give them up?’Victor spat under his breath.
 
‘Because we have no choice,’ answered Antonio.
 
‘But why are they making us?’
 
‘Because they’re afraid,’ said Antonio.
 
‘Of what?’ exclaimed Victor incredulously, surveying the emaciated men, women and children around him, some bent double like large snails under the remaining burdens they carried, all of them bowed over with exhaustion.
 
‘How can they be afraid of us?’
 
‘They’re worried that they might be letting in a bunch of armed communists who are going to overrun their country.’
 
‘That’s mad . . .’
 
To some extent it was, and yet they both knew that in among the shambolic ranks of broken militia, there were extremists and that in France rumours of
rojo
behaviour had been wildly exaggerated for the duration of this conflict. For those who had expected a welcome, there was to be only disappointment. The presence of the International Brigades in Spain had given them the idea that support and solidarity from other nations was something they could expect anywhere and everywhere, but it was a false one. The cool brutality of the border guards wiped out the remaining hope they might have had.
 
Once beyond the border post, the road wound down towards the sea.The coast was wild and rocky, the air sharper than in their own country. But the walk was downhill for a while, and that in itself was a relief. The movement of the crowd seemed mechanical now. They were chaperoned by French police who were impatient to move them along.
 

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