The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘Why don’t you apply too?’ suggested Victor, who had just discovered his family had already set sail for Mexico.

  ‘I couldn’t give up on my country,’ said Antonio. ‘My family might not even know I’m alive, but if they do they’ll be expecting me to find my way back.’

  ‘We probably wouldn’t stand a chance of getting a place anyway,’ saidVictor.‘I’ve heard the evacuation committee has been swamped with applications.’

  He was right, the Servicio de Evacuación de Republicanos Españoles received two hundred and fifty thousand requests and only a small number of these could be granted places on the boats that were leaving.Victor was lucky, though. He got a place to go to South America and was soon to embark. His father’s name was recognised by the Servicio and was influential enough to get him passage.

  The French were keen to repatriate all these refugees to whom they had reluctantly given a temporary home and Franco wanted them back too. Loud-hailers sent out messages urging people to cross back over the mountains into a new Spain.

  It was a dilemma for them all. France was threatened by invasion from Germany and, for anyone who stayed, there would be new dangers.

  ‘The one thing I won’t be is a slave for Hitler,’ declared Antonio.

  He decided to take his chance and return to Spain. He would make his way back to Granada. Surely the new regime needed teachers as much as the old? Every day since he had been away he had thought of his parents and wondered what their lives were like. Even though he had continued to send them letters, he had received nothing for over a year but he hoped his father might have been released by now, given that he had committed no crime. Without a photograph of them, their image in his mind had faded. He could recall his mother’s black hair and upright bearing, his father’s rotund stomach and crinkly grey hair, but if he saw them at this moment he feared he would fail to recognise them.

  Many others felt the same urge to go home and, like Antonio, chose to ignore the terrifying reports of executions and arrests. He set out with some other militia who had also fought on the Ebro and who, like him, were eager to leave France, where they had encountered little other than hostility.Their route took them over the Pyrenees and, as they climbed, Antonio took a last look back at the hated beaches. He wondered if he would ever rid himself of the filthy taste of grit or the memories of the gratuitous cruelty he had seen on that sandy wasteland.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  AS HE CAME over the mountains and saw the plains stretching towards Figueres, Antonio had expected to feel a surge of pleasure at the sight of his own beloved patria. No such thing happened. It looked different to him now. Spain was his own country and yet it was a foreign place, somewhere now ruled by a Fascist. He hoped his love for it might be rekindled when he got back to his own city.

  As he stood on this mountain ridge, watching an eagle soaring high into the sky, Antonio looked south. More than nine hundred kilometres southwest of where he stood was Granada. How he envied the bird his power of flight.

  Once they were down the mountain, the men went their separate ways. It was safer that way. Antonio’s plan was to take a route through the bigger towns. It would be more anonymous, and it would give him a greater chance of avoiding curious eyes. There were so many people returning to their homes that he was sure he could slip through incognito. He had not allowed for the watchfulness of either the Civil Guard themselves or for the informers who reported their slightest suspicions about any newcomers.

  It was around eight in the evening when he approached the outskirts of Girona. Night was falling so this seemed a safe enough time, and he had chosen a quiet street to walk down. Seemingly from nowhere, two uniformed men stepped into his path and demanded his name.

  He had no satisfactory papers and his appearance left no room for doubt about which side he had fought on in the recent conflict. It was nothing to do with a uniform or a tell-tale red star badge. These Civil Guards could simply sniff out a supporter of the Republic and former member of their militia, and this was enough to warrant arrest.

  He was incarcerated close to the town of Figueres where conditions were predictably primitive. As he entered prison, Antonio was tossed a rough blanket and cigarettes. He now understood why the latter were considered more important than food. The straw mattress he slept on was infested with lice and the only way of keeping them away from his face at night was to smoke.

  A week later Antonio was summarily tried and sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. For the first time in more than two years he addressed a letter directly to his mother in Granada. The Fascists were happy to guarantee the delivery of missives that further demoralised the families of such subversives as Antonio Ramírez.

  The hardship in prison was no revelation to Antonio. He did sometimes wonder how resistant to physical suffering a man could become without losing his humanity. The sheer discomfort of camping out on stony ground in the freezing temperatures of Teruel, the blazing heat of Brunete, the searing agony of his injury, which had made death look like a welcome escape, and the abject squalor of the early days in the sand camps of France: all of these had left their mark. The scar tissue that formed around these wounds, both physical and mental, was tough, and pain had become an ever-diminishing sensation. Antonio was anaesthetised.

  The prisoners’ food was minimal and monotonous. Breakfast was a bowl of gruel, lunch was beans, and supper the same, sometimes with a fish head or tail. Occasionally there were tinned sardines.

  The months passed. Antonio and most of his fellow prisoners were stubbornly resistant to the cruelty of the guards. A few of them literally pined away, as men do when there is nothing to live for, and no hope of this changing.

  They kept themselves occupied with talk of escape, but the only attempt that had been made had been so cruelly punished, and in view of them all, that they did not have the stomach to repeat it.The screams of those involved seemed still to echo round the yard.

  For a while the most subversive activity they could engage in was a refusal to sing the new regime’s patriotic songs, or to talk during the sermons which they were obliged to listen to in the courtyard. Even for that they could be punished. No excuse was too flimsy for the guards to beat them with loaded riding crops.

  The most terrifying moment of each day was the reading of the saca, when the names were called out of the men who were to be executed the following day. One morning at daybreak, a longer list was called out. This was not the usual dozen or so; this time the names went on and on. There were hundreds. As he stood there in the aching early morning chill, Antonio felt his blood freeze.

  Just as the human brain will pick out the one face it recognises in a crowd, Antonio heard his own name in the almost indistinguishable hum of all the others. Among the monotonous list of Juans and Josés, the words ‘Antonio Ramírez’ jumped out at him.

  There was silence as the list finished.

  ‘All those named - in line!’ the order was barked.

  It took several minutes for the men who had been named to move out and form a queue. Without any further explanation they were herded out of the prison gate. The air reeked of the sour odour of men sweating beneath filthy shirts. It was the smell of fear. Are they really going to kill all of us? Antonio wondered, his legs shaking with such terror that he struggled to control them. There was no time for goodbyes. Instead furtive glances were exchanged between a few of them who had formed a bond during their long period of incarceration together. Those staying looked at those leaving with pity, but all were united in the common determination that the Fascists should not see fear on their faces. It would give them too much satisfaction.

  Antonio found himself being marched out of the prison and towards the town. It was not uncommon for prisoners to be moved from one gaol to another, but in these numbers he knew it was unusual. As they approached the railway station, the great crowd of them was ordered to a halt. He realised that they were going on a journey.

  For many hours,
the train rattled along.

  ‘It’s like being in a crate,’ Antonio heard one man murmur.

  ‘Nice of them to leave the lid off,’ responded another.

  ‘Unlike them really,’ said another sarcastically.

  Even though they were being taken to a new place, the way they were treated was just the same. More than one hundred of them stood in each cage trundling south. Some clung on to the bars, peering through the slats at the changing landscape, which was gradually flattening out as the day went on. Others, stuck in the middle, could see only the sky.

  For a few hours they were lashed by rain but eventually the clouds passed away and Antonio judged from the sun that they were heading roughly south-west. After many hours, the train rattled to a halt and the gates of their cages opened.They tumbled onto the hard, dusty, ground, many of them relieved to rest their exhausted legs.

  A group of armed soldiers stood guard over them, weapons cocked, looking for an opportunity to use them. Even if they had wanted to escape, the landscape provided no opportunities. In one direction there were a few outcrops of rock, in the other, nothing at all.There was nowhere to run. A bullet in the back would have been the reward for anyone trying it.

  With unconcealed contempt, a few lumps of bread were thrown into the middle of them and the prisoners swarmed around it like a shoal of fish, grabbing, snatching, desperate, all remaining dignity gone.

  Antonio watched a dozen men reaching towards the same piece of bread and was sickened by the sight of his own wasted, filthy-nailed hand trying to grab a crust from another man’s fingers. They had been reduced to animals, turning on each other in this way.

  Then they were loaded back into the train and, for many hours more, they trundled on until the train juddered to a halt. There was a momentary stirring among them.

  ‘Where are we?’ shouted someone in the centre.

  ‘What can you see?’ called out another. ‘What’s happening?’

  It was not the end of the journey. Antonio fell out of his cattle cage once again and saw a dozen trucks waiting for them. They were ordered to climb aboard.

  The men were more tightly crammed in than ever, moving in one united motion as the trucks swayed this way and that over bumpy ground. After an hour or so, there was a crunching of gears and the sudden application of brakes. They were all catapulted forwards in one jolt. Doors opened and then slammed shut, bolts were drawn across, there was the sound of shouting, orders, an altercation somewhere. Once again bowels stirred with fear. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, though in the far distance Antonio thought he could see the outskirts of a city.

  There was a general murmuring among the men.

  ‘Seems odd to have brought us all this way just to kill us,’ pondered the man against whom Antonio had been jammed face-to-face for the past four hours. The foul stench of his breath had almost asphyxiated him. He knew that his own could not be sweet, but this old soldier’s toothless mouth and rotting gums had literally made him retch.

  Antonio was about to respond when someone cut across him: ‘I think they would have done away with us by now if that’s what they planned.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ said another pessimistically.

  The debate continued until they were interrupted by an order barked out by one of the soldiers. They were instructed to walk along a track that led from the road and soon they saw their destination. A row of huts now came into view. For many the relief was too much.They wept, certain now that they were going to live another day.

  They were marshalled into rows on a piece of ground in front of the huts and addressed by an army captain, his mean mouth and sharp cheekbones all that they could see of his face. It angered Antonio that his eyes were obscured by the peak of his cap. The crowd was silent, expectant, for the first time optimistic, as they watched his thin lips move.

  ‘Owing to the generosity of our great General Franco, you have undeserved good fortune,’ he said. ‘On this day, you have been given another chance.’

  There was a murmur of relief among the crowd. The tone of this speech disgusted Antonio, but the content of it excited him. The captain continued. He had a message to deliver and he was not going to be deterred.

  ‘You will no doubt have heard that a law has been passed to allow the Redemption of Penalties through labour. For every two days worked, your sentence will be reduced by one day. For scum like some of you, this is more than you deserve, but the Generalissimo has decreed it.’

  He sounded like someone swallowing a bitter pill. Clearly he did not approve of this leniency, and would have preferred to see these men suffer the maximum punishment, but Franco’s word was supreme and he was obliged to carry out orders.

  He continued: ‘More importantly, you have been selected for the most glorious of all tasks.’

  Antonio began to feel apprehensive. He had heard of prisoners being used as forced labour on building projects, such as the reconstruction of towns like Belchite and Brunete, which had been devastated during the conflict. Perhaps this was his fate.

  ‘This is what El Caudillo said when he announced his plans for this project. I quote . . .’

  The captain drew himself up to his full height and adopted an ever more pompous tone.The irony was that his voice was considerably deeper and more masculine than that of Franco, with whose reedy, strangulated tones they were all familiar. ‘“I want this place to have the grandness of the shrines of old . . . to be a restful place of meditation where future generations can pay homage to those who made Spain a better place . . .” ’ His singsong delivery of Franco’s words was almost worshipful, but his voice soon reverted to a harsher tone.

  ‘The place that you have been chosen to construct is The Valley of the Fallen. This monument will commemorate the thousands who died in this fight to save our country from the filthy Reds - the communists, the anarchists, the trade unionists . . .’

  The captain’s voice had gradually risen. He had worked himself up into such a fury of revulsion that his cap shook and the veins stood out on his neck. His hysteria was barely repressed. Those closest to him felt the spray of furious spittle that flew from his lips on the utterance of those last words. He was almost screaming now, though there was little need, given the total silence of his audience.

  Everyone had heard rumours of this plan. What it confirmed to them was that they were in Cualgamuros, not far from Madrid and close to El Escorial, the burial place of the kings. Franco had one clear purpose in this project. Although this place would commemorate the soldiers who had died for his cause, it would principally be a mausoleum for himself. The fanatical, power-intoxicated captain had finished speaking now. He left it to his inferiors to marshal the prisoners into the huts.

  ‘So now we know why they have brought us all this way . . .’ said the old man who had been by Antonio’s side all journey. ‘I suppose it makes a change from being locked up.’

  To some people this old man’s resilience had been a tonic, while for others his relentlessly cheerful voice had begun to grate. After all these months, years even, of hardship, it seemed extraordinary that anyone’s voice could be so completely free of bitterness.

  ‘Yes, it looks as though we’ll see a bit more of the sky,’ Antonio responded, trying to sound positive.

  The hut that was to be their new home was very different from the last prison they had been in, where for days on end they were shut away in a windowless cell, the only light source an electric bulb, which had illuminated them twenty-four hours a day. It was squalid here, but at least there were windows all down one side and two rows of around twenty beds with a decent space between each one.

  ‘This doesn’t look so bad, does it?’

  Above the cacophony of a thousand other men gathering on the scrubby ground outside the huts, all waiting to receive their next instructions, the old man’s cheerful voice challenged Antonio. He wondered why some people were so richly endowed with a cheerful disposition when all around them the world
seemed to be disintegrating.

  Laid out on the straw mattresses were brown uniforms and orders were given to put these on.

  ‘You could get two of me in here,’ said the septuagenarian, rolling up the sleeves and trouser legs. He looked absurd. ‘Lucky there isn’t a mirror.’

  The old man was right. He did look ridiculous, like a child in his father’s clothes. For the first time in perhaps months, Antonio smiled. It was an unfamiliar feeling. His laughter reflex had atrophied many months before.

  ‘How do you manage to be so cheerful all the time,’ he asked, struggling to do up his buttons. His fingers were stiff with cold.

  ‘What,’ said the old man ‘is the point of being any other way?’ Arthritic hands were not making it easy for the older man to fasten his jacket either. ‘What can we do? Nothing. We’re powerless.’

  Antonio thought for a moment before responding. ‘Resist? Escape?’ he suggested.