People watched them and wondered. No one spoke. Then the bombardment began.
During the months since this conflict had begun, Mercedes had never experienced the feelings of absolute terror that gripped her now. Her mouth filled with the metallic taste of fear, and for a moment the sound of her heart pounding drowned out the cries of alarm that went up around her. Her instinct was to run as hard and fast as she could, but there was nowhere to hide - no cellars or bridges or underground train stations. Nowhere. There was Javi to worry about, in any case, and his mother. She stood rooted to the spot as the planes passed directly overhead, her hands over her ears against the deafening roar.
Mercedes grabbed Manuela, who clasped Javi.They stood locked in this embrace, eyes closed against the world and the horrifying scene unfolding around them. Mercedes could feel the woman’s sharp bones through her clothes. It was as though she might snap. They had nothing to protect them and, like most of the inhabitants of Málaga, so recently traumatised by the horrors of shelling and machine-gun fire in their own city, Manuela was briefly paralysed by the fresh onslaught of fascist aggression.
‘Let’s get off the road,’ shouted Mercedes. ‘It’s our only hope.’
The irony was that the only places to hide along this unwelcoming stretch of road were the craters left in the fields by bombs that had exploded earlier. Many people cowered in them, petrified. At least the bombers had supplied some shelter for their terrorised victims.
Soon bodies lay everywhere like broken dolls.
To the horror and disbelief of everyone on the road that day, there was an even more terrifying method of attack to come. When the bombers had finished their work, fighter planes appeared to claim their next wave of victims. In order to instil more terror, they strafed the roads and then the people themselves.There were blinding flashes all around as bullets drew two lines of flaming dots among the screaming crowd. It was not a challenge for the pilots of those planes; they could have blown their targets apart with their eyes shut.
Mothers whimpered like babies when they saw their own children toppled like skittles. Some were mothers of four or five, and there was no protection that they could offer. In any case, a careful aim could wipe out several people in a single burst.
On one occasion, a two-seater plane came so low that Mercedes caught a glimpse of the pilot and behind him the gunner. People scattered, thinking that they might outrun his bullets but their action was futile.The gunner could easily manoeuvre his machine gun to maximum devastation.The pilot’s face dimpled into a smile as he mowed them down.
Then everything went quiet. The minutes went by and the aeroplanes did not return.
‘I think they’ve gone now,’ Mercedes said, trying to reassure Manuela. ‘We need to be on our way. We don’t know when they might come back.’
The air was filled with the moans of the injured and bereaved. The problem for many now was whether to make an attempt to bury their dead or to continue towards the sanctuary of Almería.The ground was hard and burial was not easy, but some made the attempt. Others just covered the bodies with the only blankets they had, and moved on, taking the guilt and the grieving with them. If it was a mother who had been killed, their children were immediately adopted by others and shepherded onwards and away from the gruesome sight of a parental corpse.
In the previous forty-eight hours, Mercedes had been preoccupied by thoughts of Javier.There had not been a moment when the man she loved did not occupy the central-most place in her mind. It was only when the bombs came crashing around her that she was jolted out of this reverie. Then, for the first time, he had been far from her mind. Even the possibility that the man she loved might be somewhere in this diminishing crowd temporarily seemed of no importance to her. Getting this fragile creature, Manuela, and her son to safety now became her main concern.
Many were maimed, not killed, and a fresh wave of walking wounded was added to those who had limped from Málaga. The journey had to continue and the direction remained the same. There was no turning back and they could not stand still.
Manuela did not speak. For a moment she seemed paralysed by fear, but Mercedes’ firm arm and the feel of her son’s hand pulling on hers brought her to her senses. They resumed their journey.
Where the route turned towards the sea, the waves could be heard bashing against the rocks. The rhythm of nature was oblivious, and once or twice Mercedes saw people lying on a beach and was uncertain whether they were dead or alive. Either way, the sea would sweep them away sooner or later if they did not move. Donkeys lay beside humans, also dying. Swollen tongues protruded from their mouths.
On the fifth day that she had been walking, there was a moment when the sun briefly blazed and the water sparkled. Mercedes found Javi tugging at her skirt and pulling her towards the sea. It seemed to him as though it must be time for play, to toss pebbles into the waves, to dabble his toes into the water.
His childhood would eventually resume, but not yet. It would be too macabre to play among corpses.
‘No, Javi, not now,’ Manuela snapped, picking him up.
‘We’ll go and play in the sea another day,’ said Mercedes, ‘I promise.’
On a day when even the distant sight of a bird aroused terror in her, evoking memories of the planes that had massacred so many of them, she had only one aim: to reach her destination. Her mind was once again turned towards Javier. The thought of him sustained her as they walked these last kilometres, but she needed a new plan to find him.
Some people never made it to Almería. There were the wounded who fell by the way, but also some who took their own lives. Those such as Mercedes, who had gradually slipped towards the back of the exhausted human flow, saw the bodies of those who had shot themselves, and others who had hanged themselves from the trees. They had come this far, but desperation had finally overcome them. Many times Manuela had to hide Javi’s eyes.
On reaching Almería, at the sight of the buildings and the promise of refuge Mercedes was almost overwhelmed with tears of relief. They had all walked far enough to deserve a feast, and her first thoughts were of something to eat. She had daydreamed of fresh bread.
For many people, exhaustion now swept over them. The streets of Almería seemed such a safe place to sleep after the exposed unsheltered road, and the pavements were like mattresses after the rough terrain of the week before. Most people sank down gratefully with whatever family they had left, and some dozed in broad daylight, the buildings around cocooning them like the walls of a room.
As soon as they arrived, Mercedes and Manuela began queuing for bread.
‘Why don’t you go back to Granada to find your family?’ asked Manuela as they were standing together in a queue. ‘Javi and I don’t want to lose you but if we had somewhere else to go, we would.You don’t have to be here.’
Mercedes did not want to return to Granada. It was the least safe option of all. Her family was a marked one. And Javier was not in Granada. It was this single fact that determined her decision. Her only real chance of survival was to stay away, and the only possibility of happiness was to find the man she loved.There was every chance that he would have survived. Javier was younger and stronger than most of the people that she saw around her. If they had escaped from Málaga, would he not have done so too?
‘Half of my family aren’t even in Granada any longer,’ Mercedes reminded Manuela, ‘and I need to carry on looking for Javier. If I don’t keep searching, I’ll never find him, will I?’
Javi was scratching at the ground with a stick, making a zigzag pattern in the dust, oblivious to the conversation going on between them. Mercedes looked down at the top of his dark head and stroked his hair. All she could see from above were his long lashes and the little splayed cushion of his nose. She picked him up from the ground and stroked his soft cheek. Even after all these days without bathing, the child’s skin had a sweetness about it. Holding him was an extraordinary comfort.
‘Well, you know you’re welcome t
o be with us, don’t you?’ ‘I know, I know . . .’
She did not want to be blunt, but her only desire now was to find Javier. The woman whose corpse she had seen hanging from the tree a few miles back had run out of purpose. Mercedes had not.
Once she had helped to settle Manuela and Javi safely in the doorway of a boarded-up shop where they would all sleep at least for the coming night, she went off to explore.
She continually stopped people to ask them whether they had seen Javier, and her picture of him was retrieved from her pocket a hundred times. Once or twice she found someone who thought they had seen him. The guitarrista was well known in Málaga and several people were sure they had caught sight of him before they had fled, even if they had not seen him since. At one point her hopes were raised when someone helpfully offered that they had just seen a man with a guitar. Mercedes hastened off in the direction he indicated and soon saw the figure that had been described to her from the back. Her heart missed a beat. Seeing the slim outline of a man carrying a battered guitar case, she hastened after him. She called out and the man turned round. As he did so, she realised that this man bore not the slightest resemblance to Javier. She found herself face to face with a man of more than fifty. She apologised and let him walk away.Tears of disappointment almost choked her.
She retraced her steps to where her companions were. Even with their small number of possessions they had made a neat, open-fronted home around them. Javi was already asleep, sprawled across his mother’s lap. Manuela dozed, her head leaning back against the wooden doorframe. They looked peaceful together.
Mercedes wandered off to see if she could find some more food for them all. She joined two queues, only to be disappointed when what was being sold had run out before she had reached the front. Procuring a few grams of lentils at the end of a third was a triumph.
Almería had once been a beautiful city but she was too tired to notice and was completely unaware of the route she had taken. By the time she had stood in a few queues she had lost track of time. She did not possess a watch, and the sunless afternoon sky gave her no clues. She had been away for perhaps two hours.
As she was beginning to retrace her steps towards the centre of the city, she heard the distant sound of a siren and shortly after that the thud of an explosion and then another, closer this time. A shiny silver aeroplane passed overhead. Surely not here too? Their safe haven had been a very short-lived one.
When she got closer to the main square she could smell burning and sense the chaos, and as she turned the corner she found herself going against the tide, just as she had on the day when she met the procession filing out of Málaga. This time she must fight her way through. Panic rose inside her. In all the time since she had left Granada, she had not felt such fear. She was even more terrified than when they had been bombed on the road. The fleeing crowd were pushing her away, back in the direction she had come from, but she fought against them, manoeuvring herself towards the edge of the street so that she could stop and wait for the stampede to go by.
Eventually this first wave passed and then came the casualties. Some were supported, others were carried, many were lifeless. It was an unnervingly silent parade. Eventually they all passed and, but for a few stragglers, dazed and dusty with particles of fallen masonry, the street was quiet again. Mercedes trembled with fear. Though she had pictured what she would see when she turned the corner into the square, her anguish was no less intense when she saw the reality.
One entire side was bombed to oblivion and every building had collapsed. Not a single wall or pillar remained standing. It was a jumble of angled metalwork, twisted frames and blackened wood. Everything was charred or razed to the ground. Mercedes recalled that the shop that had briefly been Manuela’s home was in the far corner, and she could see the empty space that it once occupied.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .’ she muttered through her tears. She crossed the square quickly and recognised, even from its charred remains, the fragments of the deep green shop front where she had last seen her friends. There was nothing there now except fallen masonry and twisted metal girders.
Mercedes stood motionless.The absence of the two people that she had briefly known but intensely cherished dug a huge hollow inside her.
Someone came up behind her and tapped her on the arm.
She started and swung round. Manuela!
But it was not. It was an old woman.
‘I saw them. I’m sorry. They didn’t have a chance when that beam came down.’
If their shelter had been close to the centre of impact - and the crater nearby suggested it - they might not have suffered.This was Mercedes’ first thought. Javi at least might have been sound asleep. She desperately hoped that this had been the case.
‘Were they your family?’
Mercedes shook her head. She was completely incapable of speech. There was nothing to say even if her contracted throat had allowed it. She simply stood there and stared numbly at the place where her friends had once been.
More than a dozen had been killed in this single raid.Very few of the victims were residents of Almería; the majority were those who, like Manuela and Javi, had trekked for two hundred kilometres, only to perish in a strange city. The Fascist bombers had been efficient. They knew that the streets would be swollen with refugees, sitting targets on the streets, defenceless.
Mercedes looked around. She saw a woman standing in the wreckage of her home. She had watched it fall and now fruit-lessly sifted for possessions in the remains of charred wood and snapped off banisters that had once been on the floor above. If she did not retrieve what she could now, it would not be there for long. There were plenty of the desperate and destitute ready to scavenge dangerous and derelict properties.
Mercedes had considered herself lucky to have avoided machine guns, shells and aerial bombs on the long walk. She wondered why she had been spared in this latest onslaught as well.
In the pockets of her coat were the only possessions she now had: a bag of lentils and half a loaf of bread in one, and in the other her dancing shoes.
Chapter Twenty-three
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER leaving Granada, Antonio and his friends reached the outskirts of Madrid, approaching from the eastern side where Republican militia were in control.The sight of what had happened to the capital was shocking and the hollow, bombed-out buildings stirred them to anger. As their truck passed by, small children looked up at them and waved and women raised the puño, the Republican fist. The arrival of every new Republican supporter refreshed the hope that the Fascists could be kept out of their city.
As they queued to sign up for the militia, along with the men with whom they had travelled, they learned more about the situation in the capital city.
‘At least there’s the promise of rations if we join up,’ said one of their companions. ‘I’m looking forward to some decent grub.’
‘I wouldn’t hold out your hopes,’ said another. ‘There might not be much going here . . .’
Since September, Madrid had been full of refugees. Many of the towns surrounding it had been captured, and their terror-stricken populations had descended on the capital, swelling the population to many times its usual size. It was encircled by the enemy, but the ring was not so tight knit that it could not be broken through, thus sustaining the citizens’ belief in freedom. The people of Madrid and the thousands of refugees with their possessions tied in rag bundles hoped that this awful situation would soon be over. They could not live on bread and beans for ever.
In the previous November optimism in Madrid had wavered. More than twenty-five thousand Nationalist troops had planted themselves in the western and southern suburbs, and were reinforced within a few weeks by troops from Germany. The starving people of Madrid could feel the clamp around them tightening and, with food becoming scarcer by the day, belts were drawn in too.
Then rumours circulated that the Republican government had evacuated from Mad
rid to Valencia. In the abandoned government offices, papers fluttered at empty desks and portraits kept watch on empty corridors. Birds flew in through half-opened windows and drops of pale excrement were now splashed across dark leather chairs. The move was supposedly temporary. Filing cabinets remained half filled and walls of books were undisturbed, dust already gathering round their elaborate-tooled spines and along the fine beading of the wood-panelled walls. High windows prevented the population from seeing inside these silent rooms, but they could imagine them and some were full of despair.
The majority in Madrid realised, though, that the absence of their government did not mean that the city had to fall to Franco, and there was renewed determination among them. Men, women and children would join the fight and from the beginning that was what they did, with small children running errands to the front, and a few brave women swapping their brooms for guns.
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