Secrets of Spain Trilogy

by Caroline Angus Baker

  José threw Fermín a stern look. He had beaten a few of those people in his time during heavy-handed arrests. Fermín, however, enjoyed taunting prisoners as they cried for mercy. It was sick, but that was reality.

  “What if we took babies from women who couldn’t care for them? Unmarried women with nowhere to go for care for the children. Together, we would give those children a better life,” José explained.

  “If those women cannot cope, they are free to put their children in the orphanages and let them be raised by the church.”

  José cringed, and so did Fermín. They both knew the pain of being raised by nuns in an orphanage - the loneliness, the humiliation, the beatings, and in Fermín’s case, the unabated sexual abuse. There was little distinction between the concentration camps for enemies of the State, and the orphanages for the children left homeless. Spain wasn’t raising its inhabitants in love and care. At least if they stole the babies, they would go to people who genuinely loved them, wanted them.

  “Doctor,” José said and leaned forward in his uncomfortable wooden chair, “what if we brought the women here? As you say, just one or two a month?”

  “How would you convince them to come here instead of the hospital?”

  “We are the law, we can do as we please,” Fermín said.

  “There are people who hate us, and they also hate the church, and doctors. There are women who feel alienated by society. They can be manipulated,” José said. “Those girls, you know the ones, who roam the streets at night and sell sex. Or the single women who got themselves pregnant and have no husband. Also the women who have been abandoned, or their husbands are in prison. If we can’t convince those women, we can’t convince anyone. We can tell them that they can avoid the hospitals and its religious doctrine if they come here.”

  “Then we tell that them their disgusting Godless lifestyles have poisoned their child, so when the baby is ‘dead’, we blame them for what has happened. If a doctor tells them that, they will believe it. They will have no way of arguing,” Fermín reasoned.

  “This is lying and manipulation in its cruellest form,” Doctor Lugo interrupted the two officers.

  “It’s the manipulation of these women, or the manipulation of your five daughters down in the cells,” Fermín replied. “It’s your choice.”

  11

  Valencia, España ~ Abril de 2010

  A sense of renewal hung over Escondrijo as the entire mountain and beyond bathed in warm sunshine. Las Fallas was over and, as if on cue, spring had swallowed the area. Luna stood still and listened to the total silence of the place; with the children at school, the area outside the old stone masía sat still and undisturbed.

  Her eyes flicked over to Cayetano, who stood with his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked past the limestone cliff edge and out over the plains back towards the city of Valencia. Cayetano’s sunglasses hid his expression, but Luna could see he wasn’t happy. He hadn’t been happy for the last two weeks, since his bullfight, though he had been in Madrid most of that time. The pressure of the financial situation at Rebelión had started to become a heavy burden on the family’s sole successful member. Luna wandered over in his direction and stood next to him, but he didn’t even acknowledge that she was there.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” she asked, to try to break the silence.

  “Just thinking about the cost to make this place livable.”

  “I wasn’t planning on getting it finished straight away. I have enough money to get the project started, at least get a decent roof on the place and get the structure sound. After that I can work on water, power… perhaps that can wait until the cycling season is over…”

  “But how much will it cost?”

  “How long is a piece of string? That’s an impossible question.”

  “And what happens if you can’t afford to fix this place? La chispa, you can’t sink money into it if it means you’re just throwing money away. What about the cost of the land and its upkeep?”

  “Like I said, baby steps.”

  “What about the kids? It’s not practical for them to live out here. What about school? Are you going to drive them an hour each way every day just to get to class?”

  “Some kids take the bus from Valencia out to Puçol to attend private school every day. That can take upwards of an hour by the time they’ve all been collected.”

  “It’s not practical.”

  “The boys might change schools. Giacomo and Enzo could attend school in Puçol instead of heading into Valencia.”

  “Can you see where this is heading?”

  “No, Caya, all I can hear is moaning.”

  “Is the project worth it? Given the time, the cost and the hassle?”

  “It’s what I want. I wanted a country place as a lifetime project. I don’t how it will all work out, but that’s the challenge.”

  “And if I go broke, then what? Who pays?”

  “I pay! I didn’t ask you put a cent into the house! It’s mine.”

  “The wedding is two months away now. Once we’re a couple, everything will be combined.”

  “Still, I’m not asking you, or the business, to put money into Escondrijo. I inherited the house from Alejandro, which gives me a lot of extra money to work on it since I didn’t pay for the place.”

  “You are so stubborn and independent.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Good, I suppose.”

  “What’s the matter? You came back from Madrid miserable again.”

  “I have a lot on my mind.”

  “As you keep reminding me, we’ll be married soon, so you are obligated to tell me your troubles.”

  Cayetano gave her a gentle smile. “Why would you want them?”

  “You’ve taken on my problems. I owe you.”

  “I would like to believe that no one ever owes anyone.”

  “If that was the case, then life would be much easier.”

  “That’s what Papí José said the other day.”

  “Ah, the world’s craziest grandfather. What has he done?”

  “Papí and Papá are thinking about firing staff at Rebelión… or rather, making them redundant. Papá said we can’t fire Miguel, Alonso, Hector or Eduardo because they are family.”

  “Rebelión owes them jobs over others.”

  “Exactly what he said. Of course, that will make the other workers mad, but we are obligated to keep my cousins on, even if they aren’t the best staff. Papí even suggested we close down the business.”

  “Shit! That’s quite a change.”

  “It would change our whole life and family. We are bullfighters and bull breeders. It’s who we are.”

  “How does Paco feel about that?”

  “Papá hates the idea. Papá reminded Papí that he is the boss, and soon I will be in charge. We are bullfighters.”

  “But is José correct? Is the bull industry weighing you down, in a financial sense?”

  “Papí started Rebelión in 1965. It has seen so much. Is it going to be brought down by a financial crisis brought on by greedy political wankers?”

  “Every industry in Spain is on its knees, and it will get worse. I have no idea what will happen to Spain.”

  “Do you ever think you should just quit Spain and go home?”

  “To New Zealand? Never. I think about visiting my parents’ graves, but not about living there. This is my home, and my boys’ future. Many expats may run for it, but not me. Besides, I’m marrying you and you wouldn’t last in New Zealand.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked and flipped his sunglasses up on onto his head.

  “New Zealand is just a very different life, that’s all. I find it hard to believe that José would be willing to throw all his work away.”

  “Me, too! But he was a Guardia Civil member before he opened Rebelión, and he tossed that away. Papí says sometimes you need to sacrifice people and surroundings to survive.”

  “Did he elaborate on what
he did before he bought Rebelión? Did you dare ask?”

  “Papí said he used to live here.”

  “Here, as in Valencia?”

  “Yes, when he was a young officer. But the flood of 1957 changed everything. I wasn’t aware there was a flood.”

  “That is why the park is in a riverbed, because the river flooded and they had to divert it away from the city.”

  “I know that, but only because of coming to visit you here.”

  “A lot of people drowned, and the city got soaked through. The October rains were an annual threat, so they diverted the river, which is dry most of the time.”

  “Well, Papí knows something about 1957. José and Consuela used to live here, and I didn’t know.”

  “Was your mother born here?”

  “No, Inés was born in Madrid, but her brothers were all born in Valencia, all one after another soon after they moved here. Right after the flood, Papí got promoted when Franco came to visit the destruction.”

  “What did a simple Guardia Civil officer do to get praised by the dictator of the country?”

  “Whatever it was, it got him posted back to Madrid, and then he earned enough money to buy a gigantic farm. I didn’t dare ask for any details.”

  “Perhaps you should.”

  “What purpose would that serve? Luna, you weren’t there that day when he talked of his love of raping and killing.”

  “He is your grandfather, and you continue to spend time with him.”

  “If we better understood his life, it might not seem so bad.”

  “A Falange member who killed people for fun? I don’t see how there would be a happy ending.”

  “What about men during war time? Should they all be condemned as murderers, even though they killed for their country? It wasn’t about personal choice. Most had no choice but to sign up and then became killers. Should they all be ostracised?”

  “Is it the same thing as what José did, though?”

  “We won’t know, unless we ask. I don’t want to learn any more about him.”

  “Yeah, bury your head in the sand, that will help,” Luna fired at him. “If your family hadn’t been doing that for years, then the financial collapse of your ‘dynasty’, as you love to call it, wouldn’t have happened. I bet that won’t be in the documentary.”

  “Why are we arguing about this?” Cayetano turned and called as she walked away from him.

  “No idea!”

  Cayetano followed Luna as she walked up the hill through the pine trees that barricaded the house from the rest of the mountain. Luna didn’t acknowledge him as she went in the location of the bodies that they found months earlier. When they left the graves, they had tucked the exposed bones back into the moist earth for protection. The pair tried to pretend they weren’t there, which wasn’t an easy secret to keep.

  Luna stopped in a plain patch of dirt between the white pines. Here was an untold number of bodies; she had seen two skulls, but there might be more. “Never mind your crazy abuelo, what are we going to do about this?”

  Cayetano sighed. “I think we should leave it alone. José would know what to do.”

  “People like José made mass graves like this one. Who knows how many people are in here. The longer we leave it to tell the Guardia Civil about this, the more trouble there might be about the whole thing.”

  “Exactly, so let’s not do anything.”

  Luna turned and faced him. “It’s not as if they’re going to assume we had anything to do with it. We will tell them we found it now.”

  “I can see the headline now – ‘Fat Bullfighter Finds Mass Grave On His Land’. Terrific publicity.”

  Luna shook her head. “Wow, you only think of yourself. These people are dead!”

  “No one cares. What if they were killed in the civil war and hid here, or were murdered and put here during the dictatorship?”

  “Alejandro lived here after the concentration camp at Porta Coeli closed in 1956. If anything happened during his time here, he would have been aware. Alejandro and I walked this whole property, and he said nothing.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t the killer? Alejandro killed your grandfather.”

  “Alejandro was the killer of these people? I don’t think so. His life had been miserable; war, dead wife, estranged family, murdered friends, imprisonment…”

  “Exactly, what if it was revenge?”

  Luna looked at the harmless dirt before her. After all she had learned about Spain in the last nine months, anything was possible. “Then shouldn’t we find out? The date of the bones will tell us the truth.”

  “We will open a can of snails if we do.”

  “Can of worms.”

  “Them, too.”

  “I heard about a guy this happened to, over by Tous Reservoir, not that far from here. The guy was fishing in the dam, and he found a skull and bones in the dirt.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He called the Guardia Civil, who very clumsily gathered the bones in a plastic shopping bag, stomped all over the burial site and then left.”

  “And he wasn’t suspected of murder, or uncovering a government conspiracy to hide victims of oppression?” Cayetano teased.

  “No… it… the bones were 100 years old and were inhabitants of a nearby abandoned stone house up on the mountain before the dam swallowed the place.”

  “Exactly. That could be the same situation here. These days, living at Escondrijo doesn’t cut you off from the villages nearby, or the city. But years ago, it would have been one hell of a journey. So, if someone died, you could just bury them here.”

  “But what if that isn’t the case? What if something ugly happened, and these people got hidden away? There will be families who don’t know what happened to their loved ones.”

  “This isn’t an episode of a crime show, Luna. Chances are, they’re quite old bones of relatives of the people who lived here before Alejandro.”

  “I wonder if we can figure out who they were. The Medina family owned the land before Alejandro.”

  “My ex-wife’s family. Brilliant.”

  “The Medina’s didn’t own it for long. The people before them would be better to track down and study.”

  “That might not be impossible. The Medina family have so much of their family’s life tucked away. They may have the paperwork for the sale of the property, not that it would be much. A name, perhaps.”

  “But to ask the Medina’s that, I would need to tell María that our grandfathers were half-brothers.”

  “Leandro Medina knows the truth and hasn’t told his daughter. We could bypass María again and talk to her father, like last time.”

  “María and I are barely related. Let’s leave that all alone.”

  “I agree. We should pretend like these bodies don’t exist.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “We have for two months.”

  “Just because we haven’t done anything doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  “These people are at peace. Cayetano Ortega and Sofía Pérez are buried by the almond trees, but you don’t seem keen to put them in a cemetery.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re my family, and your family, and this is my home. These people in the mass grave are still in need of finding their way home.”

  “Maybe this is their home, and you can look after them.”

  “Is this because you have a lot of shit going on in Madrid and you don’t need the hassle? You don’t need your fiancé, who has no interest in being on the glossy magazines covers like you do, digging up bodies?”

  “Yes, that’s about right.”

  “Are you more worried how you will appear to the public than you do about people who lie buried and forgotten?”

  Cayetano sighed. “Luna, I only have to look at my father and the pain it caused when we found his natural mother buried out here. I saw the peace that gave him, too. I do care abo
ut these people. But they are at peace, and chances are, so are their families. For all we know, they could be long dead by now. You could cause strangers a lot of heartache if you report this to the police. Do you want anyone digging around here, if you want to keep Sofía and Cayetano’s bodies a secret? What about burying Alejandro’s ashes here, which isn’t legal?”

  The man had a point. “Trust me, I know it’s not okay to have bodies on your land.”

  “Do you think you’re the only person in Spain with this problem? There are people buried everywhere. People have been on the Iberian peninsula for thousands of years. Not every bone found is a sinister crime story. Where your city apartment is now, overlooking an arts and sciences complex, was a swamp at one point, where bodies might have been tossed if burying them was too expensive. Will you move from there, too?”

  “Don’t be rude to me.”

  “I’m not! Luna, these people might have lived here and died here. Let them rest. Maybe if one of the skulls had a bullet hole through it, okay, then we may have a mystery on our hands. But they didn’t.”

  “Perhaps they got one through the chest instead, and we will keep it quiet, so you don’t lose your sunglasses sponsorship, or something.”

  “That was out of line.”

  Luna took a deep breath and paused for a moment. “Sorry.”

  “I’m not trying to fight with you. I’m saying, please, let the dead rest.”

  “What do we do if there are more skeletons around here?”

  “You tell me. Do you want to live here?”

  “Of course.”

  “Alejandro let these people rest, so you should, too.”

  “He would know what to do.”

  Cayetano put his arms around her. “Let all this rest, at least for a little longer.”

  “Seems like we have the imminent financial collapse of Rebelión to worry about first.”

  “I hate to say it, but yes. Spain’s history lies here in the dirt, but the messy future is rearing its ugly head.”

  12

  Valencia, España ~ Abril de 2010