The Return (9 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
Sonia sat back.The man’s passion took her aback. He was referring to an event of nearly seventy years ago, and yet it was as though it had taken place yesterday.
‘I can’t give you one single reason why war broke out. The beginning of it all was so confused. People didn’t really know what was happening and they certainly had no idea at the time what it would lead to, or how long it would go on for.’
‘But what triggered it all off - and why was Lorca involved? He was a poet, not a politician, wasn’t he?’
‘I know your questions sound so simple and I would like to give you simple answers, but I can’t. The years leading up to the Civil War were not entirely peaceful. Our country was in turmoil some of the time and the politics were so complicated, most of us couldn’t begin to understand them. People were going hungry, the left-wing government didn’t seem to be doing enough and the army decided to take over. That’s the quick way to explain it.’
‘That sounds fairly black and white.’
‘I can assure you it wasn’t.’
Sonia sipped her coffee. Her interest was engaged and since he appeared to have no other customers, she was tempted to press the elderly man further.
A twelve-strong group of Japanese on a guided tour then arrived and were soon waiting expectantly for their orders to be taken. The elderly man moved away to attend to them and Sonia watched him writing things on his pad.Without his patience it might have been a tortuous business given their lack of both Spanish and English, a language which he spoke with great fluency but a thick accent. No wonder so many menus here were illustrated with garish photographs of unappetising-looking dishes and foaming milkshakes; at least that way foreigners could order just by pointing.
When he brought the drinks and pastries they had ordered, he also came out with another coffee for Sonia; she was touched that he had thought of her.
By now the café was filling up with people and she could tell that the moment had passed for him to devote all his attention to her.
‘
La cuenta, por favor
,’ she said, using most of the words she knew to ask for the bill.
La cuenta, por favor
,’ she said, using most of the words she knew to ask for the bill.
The café owner shook his head. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said.
Sonia smiled. It was a simple gesture and she was touched. She knew instinctively that he was not in the habit of giving away drinks.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It was really interesting talking to you. I might go and look at Lorca’s house. Where is it from here?’
He pointed down the street and said she must turn right at the end of it. It would not take her more than ten minutes to reach La Huerta de San Vicente, the Lorca family’s summer house in the south of the city.
‘It’s pretty,’ he said. ‘And it’s got some good mementoes of the man and his family. It’s a bit cold, though.’
‘Cold?’
‘You’ll see.’
Sonia could not ask him any more questions. He was busy now and had already turned his back to take another order. She rose from her seat, gathered her book, her bag and her map, and edged her way past the other tourists.
As she walked away, the elderly man came after her, for a moment holding on to her arm. There was one more thing he was eager to tell her.
‘You should go up to the cemetery as well,’ he said. ‘Lorca didn’t die there but thousands of others were shot up on that hill.’
‘Thousands?’ she queried.
The old man nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said deliberately. ‘Several thousand. ’
It seemed a huge figure to Sonia, given the scale of this city. Perhaps the old man was a bit soft in the head after all, and telling a tourist to go and look at a municipal graveyard was fairly bizarre too. She nodded politely and smiled. Even if the house of a dead poet exerted some fascination, she had no intention of visiting a burial place.
Sonia followed the directions he had given her, taking the long straight road, Recogidas, towards the edge of town. Shops were now open and snatches of music floated out onto the pavements that now began to fill with young women, arms linked, chattering, pristine carrier bags swinging at their sides. This was the street for youthful fashion, and alluring window displays of high boots, jewel-coloured belts and stylish jackets on blank-faced dummies drew these girls like children to sweetshops.
Walking down the sunny side of a street, which pulsated with a sense that life had never been so good, the café owner’s portrayal of a strife-ridden Spain seemed hard to imagine.Though she was intrigued by what he had told her of the war, Sonia was puzzled that so little evidence of it remained. She had noticed neither plaque nor monument that recorded the events of that period, and the atmosphere all around her did not suggest that these young people were burdened by the past.The historical buildings of the Alhambra might have been what drew most visitors to Granada, but a street such as this showed a Spain that was pressing on into the future, transforming buildings from the previous centuries into futuristic palaces of glass and steel. A few old shop fronts remained with their ornate fascias and the owner’s name etched in gold on black glass, but they were a curiosity deliberately preserved for the sake of nostalgia, not part of this modern Spain.
At the bottom of the street where the shops ended and anonymous blocks of flats were planted in crop-like rows, Sonia could clearly see beyond the city to the green plains of the Vega, the lush pastureland beyond the city. Consulting her city map she turned right and through some gates into a park. It extended over several acres and had been laid out in a style that was somewhere between dreary municipal and Elizabethan knot garden, with sandy pathways running between geometrically arranged borders and low box hedging. The plants had been recently watered. Moisture hung like crystal beads on velvety crimson petals and the heavy scents of rose and lavender mingled in the moist atmosphere.
As far as Sonia could see, the park was empty save for a couple of gardeners and two silver-haired men sitting on a bench, walking sticks propped against their knees. They were deeply engaged in conversation and did not even look up as she passed, nor were they remotely disturbed by the sound of a trumpet that pierced the air. The acoustics of the empty park amplified the sound of the lone musician, who was not busking (there would have been little point, given the paucity of passers-by) but using the space to practise.
According to the guidebook, La Huerta de San Vicente was in the middle of the park and through the dense foliage of a group of trees Sonia could now make out the shape of a white, two-storey dwelling. A few people were clustered outside waiting for the door to be opened.
The house was more modest than she had imagined for a place associated with such a grand name as Federico García Lorca. At eleven o’clock the deep green front door opened, visitors were permitted to file in and a smartly dressed middle-aged woman welcomed them in Spanish. Her manner was that of a housekeeper, thought Sonia, proprietorial yet reverential about the house she looked after.Visitors were expected to treat it like a shrine.
Sonia’s Spanish allowed her to grasp a few things from the speech that the woman trotted out at the beginning of the tour: Lorca had loved this house and had spent many happy summers there - the house was as it had been the day he left in August 1936 to seek safety with his friends in the centre of the city - after his death, the rest of his family had gone into exile - visitors were requested not to use flash photography - they had thirty minutes to look round.
Sonia got the impression that she expected visitors to know about the man and his work, just as a guide in a cathedral would assume tourists might know who he meant by Jesus Christ.
The house was as stark as the information. The walls were white, the ceilings lofty and the floors tiled. For Sonia it had as little soul as the parkland that now surrounded it. It was difficult to imagine lively conversation around the dark wooden dining table, with its hard, high-backed chairs, or to picture Lorca at the cumbersome desk composing poetry. Some of his manuscripts were displayed in a cabinet, the fine, loopy writing illustrated with delicate, coloured drawings. There were interesting portraits on the walls and some of Lorca’s theatre set designs but what it lacked was any sense of who this man was. It was a shell, an empty husk, and Sonia was disappointed. The old man in the café had spoken with such passion about him and she was slightly bemused by how little atmosphere remained in what had once been a family home. Perhaps it filled her with gloom because she had been brought here by the story of the poet’s assassination.
She paused at the postcard display. Only here did something clarify itself. There were several dozen images of a man’s face. Here was the man who had once filled this building with his presence. There was something astonishingly vivid and modern-looking about the face, chocolate-brown eyes meeting not just those of the photographer but of anyone who was standing at the postcard counter all these years later.
His hair was wavy, his brows thick, his skin slightly roughened by acne and his ears stuck out more than he must have liked. He adopted many different guises. In one picture he played the role of uncle, and a niece, who resembled him so closely she might have been his own little daughter, sat on his lap learning to read, a stubby forefinger pointing to a single word. In another he was a sibling, cheerfully posing with his brother and sister, all of them appearing to suppress their laughter for the picture. The warmth of both the day and the affection between them made the image glow. Other pictures showed family groups and glimpses of a long-gone world when children were dressed in cotton pinafores, and babies wore mobcaps, when women engaged in embroidery and men sat in striped deck chairs. There were plenty of pictures that showed a frivolous side to Lorca: in one he posed as a pilot behind a huge image of a bi-plane, and in another a smiling face poked out from behind a huge fairground cartoon of an overweight woman. There was childlike laughter in such photographs, but in others, with a group of intellectuals or with just one other young man, he looked highly serious.
Whatever he was doing - playing the piano, giving speeches, larking about, striking a pose - he was clearly a man who loved life, and a warmth and vitality emanated from these pictures that inspired Sonia in a way that the house itself had failed to. They provided glimpses of precious carefree moments in a life that had been wiped out not long after. For that reason alone they were absorbing.
At the end of the row of postcards, which were ranked along the counter in neat wooden sections, there was one where he stood outside the front door of this very house, with a sharp shadow of bright summer sunshine behind him. Sonia wondered if it had been taken the summer of his arrest and death.
Sonia moved along the row, picking out one each of every image.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the girl on the cash desk.
She had been slightly bemused by the length of time this visitor had hovered. Sometimes the stock in here was pilfered, but that only usually happened when school parties came in and this woman did not look remotely suspicious. When she saw the pile of cards in Sonia’s hand, she leaned over towards a pile of books.
‘If you want so many,’ she said, ‘it makes sense to buy this.’ Sonia took from her the little book she held out and flicked through its pages.All the postcard images and more were contained in it, along with captions and quotes.With a dictionary, she might be able to translate them.
Her eyes rested on the last image of Lorca where he sat, white-suited, at a café table with a stylish-looking woman who wore a beret.A carafe of wine stood on the table in front of them, sunlight streamed down through the branches of trees in full leaf and people sat back in their wicker seats at other tables. This was a portrayal of people at leisure, of Spain at peace.
Below the picture were a few words: ‘
Lo que más me importa es vivir
.’ Sonia did not need a dictionary to translate them: ‘What matters to me most is to live.’
Lo que más me importa es vivir
.’ Sonia did not need a dictionary to translate them: ‘What matters to me most is to live.’
The tragic irony of the words struck her forcibly. All these images of Lorca, in a turban, in an aeroplane, with friends, with family, showed him as a man with a huge appetite for life. It was unimaginable now that any poet could have been important enough to execute. The simple white-washed farmhouse was an image of innocence, frozen in time, a memorial that had been left alone while all in its immediate surroundings had been swept up in a new, forward-looking Spain. It was like a gravestone without a corpse.
She handed over some pesetas for the book and left.
Soon she was back in the hotel. As she pushed the button for the lift, Maggie stepped out of it, radiant after ten hours of uninterrupted dreams.
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