By now, the old man had taken a seat. He was so weak with hunger and exhaustion that his legs could no longer hold him.
Looking into hers with his own watery eyes, he spoke for the first time. ‘Yes, Concha, it’s me. It’s Pablo.’
Now, holding both his hands in hers, she wept. Her head shook from side to side with pure disbelief.
For an hour they sat like this. No one came into the café. It was the dead hour.
Eventually they rose and Concha led her husband up to their bedroom. Pablo lowered himself unsteadily onto the edge of the bed, the left side. It had been empty for so long. His wife helped him undress, removing the ragged clothes that hung off him, and tried to conceal her shock at his emaciated body. His was an unrecognisable torso. She turned back the covers and helped him climb in.The unfamiliar coolness of the sheets chilled him to the bone. Concha followed him into the bed and held him in her arms, transforming the warmth of her body to him until he almost burned. For hours they slept, two slim bodies entwined like stems of a vine. People came and went from the café downstairs, puzzled and mildly concerned by Concha’s absence.
It was not until he woke that Pablo asked after Antonio and Mercedes. Concha had dreaded this moment and had to tell him what she knew: that Antonio was now in prison and that she had heard nothing from Mercedes.
That same day they puzzled over the reasons for Pablo’s release. It had come out of the blue. One night, following the daily reading of the death list, he had been taken to one side and told that he would be leaving the prison as well. What awful trick was this? he had wondered, his heart beating with sheer terror. He had not been able to ask questions, fearing that any response on his part might jeopardise this reprieve.
With the necessary papers to validate his release, he had worked his way back to Granada, by truck and by foot. It had taken him three days. And all the while he had puzzled, why him?
‘Elvira,’ said Concha. ‘I think it was something to do with her.’
‘Elvira?’
‘Elvira Delgado.You must remember.The wife of the matador?’ Concha hesitated.
Pablo seemed to have forgotten so much, so many details from his life before imprisonment. In the past twenty-four hours she had sometimes noticed a blankness in her husband’s expression and it alarmed her. It was as though some part of him had been left behind in his prison cell and had not returned to Granada.
She continued, undeterred. ‘She was Ignacio’s mistress. I believe she used her influence and got her husband to intervene for you. I can’t think of any other explanation.’
Pablo looked thoughtful. He had no recollection of the woman Concha referred to.
‘Well,’ he reflected finally, ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter why or how it happened.’
Concha was right. It was Elvira Delgado’s doing, but there was no question of finding her to say thank you. Any acknowledgement of her involvement would compromise both parties. Many months later Concha passed Elvira in the Plaza de la Trinidad. Concha recognised her from her regular appearances in
El Ideal
, but even if the familiar face had not caught her eye, the vision of glamour in a red, tailored coat extravagantly trimmed with fur would have made her look twice. Others turned to stare. The woman’s full lips were painted to match her crimson outfit and the black hair, piled high on her head, was as glossy as the dark mink that edged her collar.
Concha’s pulse quickened as Elvira approached. It was strange for a mother to come face to face with the sensuality that had so seduced her own son, and to acknowledge its power. No wonder he had taken risks to be with her, thought Concha, as she drew close enough to notice the smooth perfection of her skin and to catch a whiff of her scent. It was tempting to speak to her but the younger woman’s purposeful stride was so very sure. Elvira’s eyes were fixed determinedly ahead of her. She did not look like someone who would take kindly to being accosted in the street. A huge lump had risen in Concha’s throat as she thought of her beautiful son.
Pablo told Concha little about his time in prison. He did not need to. She could imagine it all through the lines on his face and the scars on his back. His entire story, with all its physical and mental torture, was etched on him.
It was not only because he wanted to put those four awful years behind him that made him stay as silent as possible about his time in prison. Pablo also believed that the less he described to his wife, the less she would dwell on what Emilio might have suffered before he died. The prison guards were imaginative in their cruelty and he knew they kept their worst for homosexuals. It was better to keep her mind off the whole subject.
What he hated more than anything now was the sound of tolling bells.
‘That noise,’ he moaned with his head in his hands, ‘I wish someone would just take them away.’
‘But they’re church bells, Pablo. They’ve been there for years and they’re probably going to be there for another few.’
‘Yes, but a few other churches have been burned down, haven’t they? Why couldn’t that one have been?’
The nearby church of Santa Ana was where they had been married and their eldest two children had taken their first communion. It had been a place of such happy and significant memories but was somewhere he could no longer abide. In prison, the collusion of the priest with the torture of its inmates made him as guilty as the guards themselves. His spiteful and cynical offer of last rites to those condemned had made him the most despised individual in the entire institution. Pablo now hated everything to do with the Catholic Church.
In the last prison, where he had spent a whole year, his cell had been in the shadow of a bell tower. Night after night they tolled on the hour, wrecking the precious little sleep he had to remind him of the relentless passage of time.
Each morning when she woke and found Pablo beside her, Concha rejoiced. His presence constantly surprised and thrilled her, and over the coming months she watched him gaining strength and vigour.
A month or so after Pablo’s return, a letter was delivered. It was concise and carefully worded.
Dear Mother,
I have moved to another part of Spain, my glorious
patria
. I shall not be able to come to see you for a while as I am working on a special project for El Caudillo to help rebuild our country. I am at Cualgamuros. As soon as I have permission, I shall invite you to visit.
From your loving son,
Antonio
‘What does it mean?’ asked Concha. ‘What does it really mean?’
The terse words and the formality of tone made it obvious that Antonio was hiding something. His reference to Franco as El Caudillo, ‘the great leader’, had to be ironic. Antonio would never use words that implied such acceptance of the dictator except under duress. The letter bore all the evidence that the writer knew it would be censored.
Pablo read it for himself. It was so strange that his son made no reference to him. He felt he no longer existed.
‘He doesn’t mention you because he assumes you are still imprisoned, ’ said Concha. ‘It’s safer that way. Better not to draw attention to the fact that you have family in prison . . .’
‘I know, you’re right.They’d just use it as an excuse to victimise him.’
They puzzled a little more over what if anything lay between the lines, and wondered what the special project might be. All they deduced was that their son was in a work camp and that he had become one of the hundreds of thousands of men being forced to labour for Spain’s tyrannical new regime.
‘If he’s working at least they’ll want to keep him alive,’ said Concha, trying to sound optimistic for her husband’s sake.
‘Well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps he’ll write again soon and tell us a bit more.’
Neither of them admitted that their stomachs churned with anxiety and they sat down to reply to the letter together.
Antonio was overwhelmed with pleasure when he received the envelope with a Granada postmark. Tears pricked the back of his eyes as he read that his father had been released from prison, and when he reached the sentence where his mother promised to come and visit, he thought his heart would burst. Labourers at Cualgamuros were allowed visitors, and some families even set up home to be close by. It might take Concha a few months to plan but the idea of the visit sustained them all.
Chapter Thirty-four
ANTONIO WROTE BACK. His second letter gave them more detail of what he was actually constructing and he even sent them some money. To give the project legitimacy, labourers were paid a salary, albeit a pittance.
‘There’s something particularly cruel about having to construct a memorial for your enemies,’ said Pablo. ‘It’s a sick joke, really.’
By now Antonio was almost accustomed to the new routine of his life. He was strong and capable of carrying sizeable loads, but there was little to alleviate the tedium. Death and injury were common inside the mountain, and new workers were continually sent in to replace the killed and maimed.
One day Antonio found that he had a new job. It had been his greatest fear. He had tolerated the worst imaginable conditions and pain that will push a man to breaking point, but the irrational fear of being trapped inside a mountain was greater than all of these. Claustrophobia was something he could not control.
Those assigned to the rock face walked in darkness towards their work. The further they went in, the lower Antonio’s temperature dropped. His sweat was cold, all encompassing, dominating his whole body. For the first time in these years of extreme suffering, he had to restrain himself from weeping. It was irrational. It was not the darkness but the oppressive sense of the mountain above him that terrified him witless. So many times before the explosions began, he would have to suppress his desire to scream but occasionally, when they stopped for the stones to fall in front of them, he would allow himself to roar with fear and with the hopelessness of it all, his tears mingling with the filthy sweat that ran down his body and soaked him right down to his boots.
The granite was resistant, but each day they went a little deeper into the darkness. Only a megalomaniac would conceive of such an immense cave of this kind, thought Antonio. It was no less than an underground, man-made cathedral. Sometimes, first thing in the morning, there would be a quiet mystery about it. Before the drilling and the hammering began, he tried to make himself imagine he was going somewhere peaceful, church-like, but soon the terror of claustrophobia overwhelmed him again and he saw himself walking into the centre of the earth, perhaps never again to return.
He endlessly repeated to himself that he would soon be out, but with no light and without a wristwatch, there was no means of knowing when. Eventually he retraced his steps, but each day seemed an eternity.
Weeks turned into months. Progress was slow. In the overall scale they scarcely seemed to have scratched the mountainside. The workers began to learn more about this grand scheme. It was supposed to be finished in one year.
‘That’s about as likely as Franco sending us home for Christmas,’ said Antonio. ‘We’ve already been here for a year, haven’t we? And it looks the same as when we arrived!’
He was right. It would be twenty years before The Valley of the Fallen was completed, and it would take twenty thousand men to finish it.
Each week dozens of workers were dying, killed in explosions, crushed by landslides of rocks, or electrocuted. Many of those who laboured at the rock face itself contracted a sinister disease. As they drilled and hacked at the rock face, the air became filled with dust and, though they held sponges to their faces, microscopic particles of silica found their way through and filled their lungs with crystals.
The work was exhausting and the teams of workers were in a constant state of flux. Friendships were hard to form. On rare occasions someone would be granted their freedom but others were less lucky. The professor had been taken away only a few weeks after their arrival at Cualgamuros. It appeared that he had been guilty of committing many, albeit bogus, crimes against the state, the most offensive of them being that he was an intellectual and a Jew. Even as he had been taken from the hut at the crack of dawn one day, he had smiled at Antonio.