‘It’s been so hard for him to understand why we’ve been desperately short of food for a few weeks,’ she said tearfully. ‘He’s only three.’
Mercedes felt annoyed with this little boy for being greedy. Now she held the orange firmly in her hand and handed it to his mother.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have this.’
The woman peeled it slowly. Each segment was offered first to her child and then to Mercedes and when they declined she put it in her own mouth, maintaining the discipline to consume it slowly and carefully and to enjoy every drop of juice that trickled down her parched throat.
No one else stopped.The crowd just kept passing.The woman was visibly strengthened.
‘I think we should move on now,’ she said generally to the space around her.
Mercedes hesitated. ‘But I don’t think I am going your way,’ she said.
‘Which way are you heading then? Not to Málaga!’
Mercedes shrugged. ‘That was my plan.’
‘Well, if I tell you what has happened there, it might change your mind.’
They stood face to face at the edge of the road.
‘Tell me then,’ said Mercedes, trying to conceal her own distress.
‘Málaga didn’t have a chance,’ the woman began, her face close up to Mercedes’. ‘The port was being bombed, but that wasn’t the worst bit. It was when they arrived in the city - thousands of them. Maybe twenty thousand, that’s what they said.’
‘Who? Who arrived?’
‘Moors, Italians, Fascists, and more trucks and weapons than we had in the whole of our city. It’s been smashed to bits - from the sea, from the air, on the ground . . . And there we were - defenceless. No one had thought to dig any trenches! They were raping the women and hacking off their breasts; they were even killing our children.’
The horror of it all was almost too much for her to describe. The legionaries who arrived were the most vicious of all Franco’s troops and contemptuous of death itself. Most of them had been brutalised by the war in Africa.
‘There were thousands seized,’ she continued. ‘Innocent men like my husband were executed, their bodies left unburied. They mutilated the dead. There was no choice. We had to get out.’
The woman’s description was delivered in rapid bursts and under her breath. She did not need to broadcast the information to those who filed past them.They had all been there and so had her son, who did not need a reminder of the horror of the past days.
There were further atrocities to catalogue and once the woman had begun she seemed determined to tell Mercedes the whole story. She told it without emotion, recounting the facts dispassionately, numb with shock.
Many of the legionaries were already fugitives and criminals when they were recruited and then, further dehumanised by the ferocity with which they were expected to fight, behaved like animals towards their victims. ‘
Viva la muerte!
’ they chanted. ‘Long live death!’ Even among those who fought on the same side, they instilled fear and disgust.
‘The city is on fire. Everything is under threat apart from the Fascists’ houses, of course. There is nothing left for anyone there now. Many of these women are now widows. Look at them! Look at us! We have nothing but the clothes we’re standing in - and the chance to escape.’
Mercedes surveyed the pitiable crowd as they passed. From where she sat at the side of the road, all she saw were countless legs and feet passing in front of her. She did not look at their faces but at the lines of boots, so worn and broken down they might have already walked a thousand miles. The disintegrating leather of old soles provided little protection for blistered flesh. Toes protruded from the remnants of threadbare, rope-soled shoes. One woman appeared to be shod in crimson shoes but when Mercedes looked closely she saw that they were just stained the colour of her own blood. It had saturated the canvas.
Mercedes gazed. She was mesmerised. Old calves bulged purple with varicose veins, young feet were horribly misshapen by swellings and blisters, and, from stumps of feet tightly bound, traces of blood seeped through the folds in bandages. And dozens had limping gaits, their weight supported by sticks or crutches.
She stood dry-mouthed. If she stayed with these people she would probably be safe. She wondered again if Javier might be somewhere in this great moving mass of people and convinced herself that she might find her beloved if she asked around enough and showed everyone she met his photograph. If she went to Málaga it sounded as though she would probably be killed. Her decision was made.With a deep intake of breath, Mercedes turned and faced east.
Night was beginning to fall, but people did not break their journey just because of darkness. They feared that the Fascists would not be content with driving them from their city, and would be pursuing them relentlessly even now.
The moonlight kept the road in front of them visible. There were another one hundred and fifty kilometres to go before they reached Almería, which was their destination, and even for the youngest and fittest, it would be many days before it would even be in sight.
Mercedes walked with the woman, who seemed grateful for some company.
‘I’m Manuela,’ the woman eventually told her. ‘And my little one is Javi.’
The child’s diminutive form of her lover’s name had already endeared the little boy to her. He had ceased to grizzle now that he had eaten and, for a time, his mother took him on her shoulders. Mercedes was amazed at her strength, given that her clothes hung from her emaciated body like a shroud and her cheekbones almost pierced her colourless skin. After a while, seeing that Manuela was exhausted, Mercedes took a turn. Javi’s mother had removed his worn boots and the child’s soft feet bounced on her chest as she walked. Just as she remembered her father doing to her, she held them to make him secure and found much comfort in their warm little pads. She was happy when she realised that his head had slumped on top of hers. He was asleep.
That night, Concha was exhausted too, and desperate for the solace of her bed.The past twenty-four hours had exhausted her. The last of her customers had just gone home and briefly she had propped the door open to dissipate the dense pall of smoke that hung in the air. The temperature had plummeted that night and her breath came out in white plumes as she gave each table a swift, circular wipe.
With the door already open, she was unaware of her son’s entrance and he had to cough to ensure that she was not taken by surprise.
‘Antonio! You’re home early . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she saw the grave look on his face.
He came quickly to the point.‘Look, I have to go away, Mother. I’m hoping it won’t be for long.’
All the things he had had in his mind to say about it being for his father’s sake went unsaid.
‘That’s just what you should do,’ Concha said, disarming her son with her immediate, measured response. ‘I’m glad you told me. I always imagined that you might just slip away into the night.’
For a moment,Antonio was lost for words. His mother’s strength astounded and inspired him.
‘I could never have done that. How would you have known what had happened to me?’
‘But that’s what people are doing, isn’t it?’ replied Concha. ‘It means that when the Guards come to interrogate the parents, they can say: “Gone? Has he? Well, I don’t know where he has gone . . .” with complete innocence.’
Concha felt, as did anyone of Republican leanings, that a crucial point had been reached in this conflict and that Franco’s advance had to be stopped.
Antonio was amazed by his mother’s understanding but questioned whether it might just be the prospect of losing another of her sons that numbed her. Could she differentiate between departure and death, or were the two simply blurring into a general abyss of loss?
‘I don’t want you to tell me anything,’ she pleaded. ‘I don’t want to know - then nothing can be forced out of me. I mustn’t be made to betray you.’
‘Well, I don’t know where we will end up anyway.’
‘We?’
‘Francisco and Salvador are coming with me.’
‘That’s good. There’s strength in numbers.’
Both of them weighed up the ambiguity of Concha’s words. They both knew that it was not manpower where the Republicans lacked strength, but in weaponry. While substantial supplies of arms were coming in to Franco’s forces from Germany and Italy, those fighting for the Republic were deficient in ammunition, not in men.
There was silence for a moment.
‘When are you going?’
‘Tonight,’ he said almost in a whisper.
‘Oh . . .’ Her voice was small, her breathing shallow now. She tried to make light of her son’s imminent departure. ‘Can I pack you something to eat?’
It was a mother’s natural first thought.
Half an hour later he was gone. The air in the room was now crisp and clear, and only then did Concha shut the door. She shivered with cold and dread. Though Antonio had kept it to himself, his mother had a good idea of his destination. She would, though, have endured the slow pulling out of her fingernails before revealing it.
Chapter Twenty-two
THE THIN SLIVER of moon cast little light on the trio as they left the city, allowing them to avoid the keen-eyed attention of the Civil Guard. Getting out of the city without being challenged required a degree of luck and had to be done at the dead of night. They carried just enough food to last until the end of the following day, and no keepsakes to undermine the pretence that they were farm labourers in search of work. If they were searched their story would have to be watertight and even the smallest token - a memento, a photograph - might be used against them. Spare clothes would certainly arouse suspicion and provide enough evidence for arrest.
For most of that night they walked, wanting to put as big a distance as they could between themselves and Granada before day broke; wherever they could, they branched off onto small roads where they were less likely to encounter Nationalist troops.
In the early hours of the following morning they hitched a ride with a truckload of militia; these men were fired up by the prospect of victory over Franco and were certain this could be achieved. The ragged crew they had joined amused themselves with Republican songs and to passers-by raised their clenched fists in salute.Within a few hours Antonio, Francisco and Salvador were being treated like brothers. Now they really felt they were on the move.
Like them, the militiamen were aiming to join the efforts to protect Madrid and had heard that a battle was being fought to the south-east of the capital at Jarama.
‘That’s where we want to be,’ said Francisco. ‘In the thick of things, not here in this truck.’
‘We’ll get there soon enough,’ muttered Antonio, attempting to stretch his legs.
They trundled for one uncomfortable kilometre after another across the open, empty landscape. In some areas there was little to indicate that this was a country at war with anyone, least of all itself. The open sierra seemed undisturbed. Early crops had been sown by some farmers, who were all but oblivious to the political storm that raged around them, but there were other areas where landowners had not bothered and the naked soil lay uncultivated, germinating the hunger that would eventually bite back at them.
Salvador, buffered by Antonio and Francisco, lip-read the conversation around him but took no part in it. No one commented on his silence. Some of them in the truck were half dead with exhaustion. They had come from towns near Sevilla where they had been engaged for months in a campaign of heavy but fruitless resistance, and did not even register his presence, let alone that he was different.This was how Antonio and Francisco planned it; if anyone suspected Salvador was deaf he would not be allowed to fight but they knew how much it meant to him to be there.
For most of the other twenty-one men, there was palpable excitement at the idea that they might now have a purpose.They were riding into Madrid to lift a siege and they sang songs of victory before it had been won.
For a few hours each night, they climbed down from the back of the truck, limbs weary from inaction, aching from the discomfort and continual vibration on the unending, uneven road. Once the bottle had been passed around and the singing had faded, there were a few hours of fitful sleep with nothing between the gravelly earth and their heads but prayerful hands.They could not afford the luxury of using a jacket as a pillow. They needed every layer they had around them if the blood was not to freeze in their veins.