The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  Occasionally Concha visited Pablo. She would leave early in the morning and return at midnight, racked with anxiety at the conditions he was living in, and her fear that Emilio would be facing the same horror. She still had not seen her son.

  Apart from those visits, Concha’s every waking hour was now spent running the café. Recognising that her mother was cracking beneath the strain, Mercedes now offered to help and learned that keeping busy was one way to take her mind away from the absence of so many people she loved.

  They had been informed that Emilio had been moved to a prison near Huelva, which was an even more difficult journey than the one to Cádiz, but the following month Concha was finally able to visit him. She had packed a basket with food and supplies, and was half excited about seeing him and half fearful of the state he might be in.

  When she arrived at the prison, the officer looked at her with disdain.

  ‘Your rations for Ramírez won’t be required,’ he said icily.

  She was handed the death certificate. It stated that Emilio had died of tuberculosis. For so long she had clung to a last shred of hope, but it was now replaced with the uncompromising certainty of death.

  Concha had no recollection of her journey home. Numbness and shock allowed her to function mechanically for the many hours it took to get back to Granada.

  Ignacio had become an increasingly rare presence. The fragmentation of his family should have concerned him but his main interest was one of self-preservation, so as usual only Antonio and Mercedes were there when their mother arrived home.The pallor of her skin and the colourlessness of her lips told them everything. They put her to bed and quietly sat with her through the night. The following day she silently showed them the death certificate. It told them only what they already knew.

  When her mother was away visiting her father, Mercedes ran the café single-handedly but on other days, when she had some time, she went up to the Sacromonte. Dancing was the only part of her life that had any meaning now. She took a risk to do so, given that there were new restrictive rulings on behaviour in Granada. Women were obliged to dress with modesty, to cover their arms and to wear high collars but, more significantly, ‘subversive’ music was banned, as was dancing. The tight tourniquet of the regime made Mercedes want to dance all the more. It was an expression of freedom that she would not allow to be taken away.

  María Rodríguez had limitless patience and an inexhaustible range of footwork sequences to show Mercedes, and she was the first to appreciate that this girl had added new layers to her dancing.The absence of Javier, the death of Emilio and the atmosphere of grief that saturated her home meant that little was required of her imagination when she had to express pathos and loss. It was as real as the floor beneath her feet.

  In Antonio, preoccupied and distant, there was no trace of the smiling older brother that Mercedes remembered. He was now the acting head of the household and was always concerned about Mercedes’ welfare, especially when she returned late from the Sacromonte. This was now a city where dancing was not considered desirable.

  In the shuttered nocturnal gloom of the apartment, the discreet click of a closing door penetrated the silence. To the crime of being late, Mercedes had added the sin of trying to conceal her surreptitious homecoming.

  ‘Mercedes! Where in the name of God have you been?’ came a harsh whisper.

  Antonio emerged from the shadows into the hallway and Mercedes stood facing him, her head bowed, hands concealed behind her back.

  ‘Why are you so late? Why are you doing this to us?’

  He hesitated, suspended in the uncertain space between total despair and uncompromising love for this girl.

  ‘And what are you hiding? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  She held out her hands. Balanced on her flattened palms was a pair of scuffed black shoes, the leather as soft as human skin, their soles worn to transparency.

  He took her wrists gently and held them in his hands. ‘Please, for the very last time I am asking you . . .’ he implored.

  ‘I’m sorry, Antonio,’ she said quietly, her eyes now meeting his. ‘I can’t stop. I can’t help myself.’

  ‘It’s not safe, querida mia, it’s not safe.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ANTONIO AND IGNACIO were now firmly on opposing sides. Francisco Pérez, his close friend, had put it into Antonio’s head that his brother might have had something to do with the betrayal of his father, Luis, and brother, Julio. It had seemed an outrageous accusation at the time, but Antonio had never been able to dismiss it entirely. Ignacio’s close connections with the right-wing element that now held the power in the city certainly left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was in Franco’s camp. He was a celebrity mascot of some of the city’s most vicious perpetrators of injustice and violence.

  Antonio knew he had to exercise the most extreme caution. In spite of their blood kinship, he was aware that his views and friendships with active socialists made him vulnerable with his brother.

  Though Granada was in Nationalist hands, there remained a strong undercurrent of support for the legal Republican government, and there were many people prepared to resist the tyranny under which they were now forced to live. This meant that the atrocities of war were not only perpetrated by supporters of Franco. Murders of people suspected of collaboration with Franco’s troops were commonplace and there were frequently signs of torture to be found on their corpses.

  Some of these incidents began as little more than street brawls, with name-calling, pushing and shoving. Within moments they might turn into full-scale fights between young men who, in many cases, had grown up together kicking a ball in the street. The same maze of narrow streets, with their sweet-sounding names, Silencio, Escuelas, Duquesa, once the location for endless childhood games of hide and seek, became the scene of terrifying pursuit. Doorways, momentary hiding places in those happy times, might now provide refuge and the difference between life and death.

  On a night late in January 1937, Ignacio and three of his friends had spent most of the evening drinking in a bar near the new bullring. It was in the area frequented by supporters of the new regime and a hang-out of the bullfighting crowd, so if Republican sympathisers showed their faces it was likely to lead to trouble. There was a small group of drinkers in the corner who were not known to most of the regulars, and a scent of trouble hung in the air. Even if no one turned to stare, they were all aware of the quartet of slightly scruffily dressed youths, and the barman served them with careful formality, not wishing to engage in conversation.

  Around midnight, the strangers got up to leave. As they walked by, one of them gave the seated Ignacio a hard shove in the shoulder. In any other circumstances it might have been construed as a friendly gesture, but not in these times and not in this bar. It was Enrique García. He and Ignacio had been at school together and had not been the best of friends even then.

  ‘How’s Ignacio?’ Enrique asked. ‘How’s Granada’s number one matador?’

  The last comment was taunting and Ignacio was quick to pick up the innuendo. García’s insinuation that he was involved in the executions that had been taking place in the city infuriated him. For Ignacio, there was a distinction between what he regarded as being a casual informer and actually being an assassin. His own blood lust he saved for the bullring.

  He knew that he should not react. If García was here to pick a fight this would give him just the excuse he needed.

  García towered over Ignacio. Like a picador on horseback the man had a clear advantage. Rarely did Ignacio feel so vulnerable, and he hated this man’s proximity and the menacing way in which he leaned over him as if poised to plunge a pica into his side. If Ignacio was to control his hot-blooded temperament he had better get out of here. Fast.

  ‘Right,’ he said quietly, looking round at his circle of friends. ‘I think it’s time for me to go.’

  A murmur passed around the group. It was relatively early for them to be leaving, but they
could see that Ignacio needed to be on his way.There was unspoken acknowledgement between them that if they accompanied him outside, it might be taken as a sign of aggression. It was clearly preferable for Ignacio to slip away. There was a chance that the situation might diffuse itself if he did so.

  Within seconds he was on the street. In spite of the hour, there was no one else around. Hands in his pockets, he sauntered up San Geronimo towards the cathedral. It was a damp night and the cobblestones glinted in the light of the dim gaslamps. He was not going to hurry.Thinking he heard the sound of another foot-step, he turned his head but there was no one to be seen and he walked on, stubbornly determined not to hasten his step. Close to the top, he turned a sharp right towards one of the city’s busiest streets.

  It was there on the corner that he felt a sharp pain in the side of his neck. Whoever delivered the blow had been waiting for him in a doorway, knowing that his victim would be taking this route to get home. The shock sent him reeling into the gutter. Bent double with pain, his vision blurred and his stomach churned with nausea.A second blow was dealt between his shoulder blades. With great trepidation, his greatest fear being that his handsome face might be struck, he raised his head and saw three more men approaching him. They had appeared from the street parallel to San Geronimo, Santa Paula, and he realised that he had walked into some kind of carefully laid trap.

  There was only one course of action now, and that was to try to escape. Fuelled by a surge of adrenalin, Ignacio began to run. His fitness for the bullring had never been put to such good use. He turned blindly, left and right, losing himself in these streets that he had known so well since boyhood. His sight was still blurred but he kept his eyes to the ground, watching his feet so that he did not trip. In spite of the cool night, a sensation of dampness spread across his body.

  To get his breath back, he crouched in a doorway. He saw that it was not sweat that saturated his shirt, but blood, copious and crimson. He had his own weapon, a bone-handled knife he always carried with him, and though he had not yet had the chance to use it, he now reached inside his jacket to check it was there. His only thought was to get home, but as he tried to get to his feet his legs gave way beneath him.

  He knew now he was the hunted beast, with little chance of getting away unscathed from his adversaries, who were no doubt armed with sharper blades than his. Perhaps he could remain concealed until they called off the chase. In a moment of rare leniency the director of a bullfight will grant a reprieve if he thinks that the bull has showed an outstanding degree of bravery. Ignacio prayed that these rojos might think that he had succeeded in shaking them off and leave him be. Perhaps this was the optimism that a bull carried with him right through to that final moment with the matador: that there will be a last-minute chance of salvation.

  When he had gone into the bar earlier that evening, he had been as unaware of what was to come as a bull entering the ring. Those lefties had planned it all, he now realised, and they thought they knew the outcome, like the ticket-holders at the corrida. The whole evening had taken him through the stages of the bullfight and, as he crouched in that dark doorway, his body was tensed to withstand the final blow that was surely to come. Those moments of truth for the beasts he had brought to their knees passed before him and he knew then the inevitability of his end. There had never been a shred of doubt about the result of this ritual. He had been as trapped as a bull in a ring from the moment of García’s first passing shove to the wounds he had sustained.

  Perhaps this was the last of Ignacio’s coherent thoughts before he began to slide into unconsciousness, his body now slumped so a passer-by might have mistaken him for a sleeping beggar. Dimly, he saw two figures approaching. In his blurred vision of a now fast-fading world, their heads seemed haloed in the lamplight. Perhaps these were angels coming to his rescue.

  In a street called Paz, García seized him by the jacket and swiftly delivered one last knife thrust. This final stab was an unnecessary gesture.You cannot murder a dead man.

  They dragged him by the ankles into the middle of the road so that in the early hours of daylight his body would be discovered; such a killing was as important for its propaganda value as for being a specific act of revenge. From a niche in the wall of a nearby church, a saint gazed down at Ignacio’s body. A broad red trail marked the route from where he had hidden and a trickle of blood found a course between the cobbles and wound its way through them. The rain would have washed it all away by morning.

  Inside the church an effigy of Christ appeared to drip with blood through his neatly pierced side; outside, the life of a real man had ebbed swiftly away through a crude gash in his neck.

  As it was getting light, a message arrived at El Barril. For Concha the sound of hammering on the door immediately evoked the terrible memory of Emilio’s arrest. She had scarcely slept since that night almost six months before, and even when she did, she was roused by the slightest sound, the bang of a shutter in the next street, the stirring of one of her remaining children in his or her bed, a creak on the stair, a stifled cough.

  Antonio was sent to identify the body. It was not as though there could be any doubt.Though he had been savaged with stab wounds, Ignacio’s handsome face was unblemished.

  Dressed in his finest traje de luces, Ignacio was taken from the morgue and driven by horse and carriage up to the cemetery on the hill overlooking the city. Antonio led the funeral cortège. His sister put what little strength she had into supporting her inconsolable mother, bearing her meagre weight against hers.

  For Concha Ramírez, each step was an effort, as though she carried the burden of the coffin herself. At the approach to the cemetery gates she suddenly felt the full force of the irrefutable: that two of her sons were dead. Before this moment, she could cling to some small vestige of hope that none of this was real. It was not a destination she cared to reach. Friends walked silently behind them, heads bent, staring at dirty shoes on the damp road.

  A sizeable crowd turned out for this funeral. Along with the family appeared every bullfighting aficionado within a hundred miles of Granada and the outlying areas. Ignacio’s may not have been a long career but it was a distinguished one, and in a short time he had established a large following. This included a good number of women; some of them were simply nameless admirers in his crowd, but just as many were girls who had been loved by him, whether for a few days or just for one night. His mistress, Elvira, was there too, along with her husband, Pedro Delgado, who had come to pay his respects to one of Andalucía’s finest young fighters. He tried to ignore the copious tears that rolled unchecked down his wife’s cheeks but then noticed that she would have been alone among the women if she had not been crying.

  A stone marked the spot. ‘Tu familia no te olvida.’ There may only have been one corpse, but the grieving was more than enough for two. The Ramírez family shed bitter tears. Concha wept for the loss of not just one but two of her fine sons and mourned them fiercely and equally. Both Emilio and Ignacio had tested the limits of their parents’ tolerance but none of that seemed important now.

  The grief of losing Emilio was as raw on this cold January day as it had been on the day he had been taken from their home, and it seemed as though Concha’s state of mourning might have no end without the presence of a body. This funeral served as a double ceremony for both second- and third-born.

  Though both Antonio and Mercedes were devastated by the loss of their brothers, it was the scale of their mother’s grief that had overwhelmed them. For days she did not eat, speak or sleep, and it seemed that nothing would bring her out of this catatonic state. For a long while she was beyond their reach.

  To lose loved ones on both sides of this conflict was a double misfortune for the Ramírez family, and they were bewildered that they had been dealt this blow.They survived the following weeks in a state of numb disbelief, oblivious to the fact that similar events were now taking place all over their country. For the present it was no consolation that their
s was not the only family enduring such unforeseen horror.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE CRISP DAYS of January had now given way to the damp days of February that wrapped a grey blanket around the city.The sun scarcely penetrated the clouds and the Sierra Nevada had disappeared into the mist. It was as though Granada had no connection with the world outside.

  Eventually, the acute grief in the Ramírez family lessened and the day-to-day business of surviving in a country at war with itself began to distract them.The café had begun to look neglected. Concha’s attempts to keep the place clean and swept were woefully inadequate. Even if she could have managed all alone, anxiety for her husband exhausted her, and a lingering sense of loss over Ignacio and Emilio continued to sap her energy.

  Food shortages were becoming increasingly common and it was a daily struggle to get supplies for her family as well as provisions for the café. El Barril was her children’s inheritance and its survival was now her sole preoccupation. Concha tried not to resent the portly-girthed owners of the grand homes in the Paseo del Salón who always seemed to have plenty to eat when for many it was a period of queues and malnourishment.