The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘You know as well as I do what happens to anyone who does. They are destroyed. Completely.’ He spoke the last word emphatically. His tone had changed altogether.‘For me it’s about protecting the human spirit,’ he continued.‘For others it will be about fighting until their dying breath. My resistance to these Fascists is to go along with them, to smile, to show them that they can’t crush my soul, the very core of me.’

  Antonio was surprised by the answer. He had not expected it. Like everyone who had been in that cattle cage, this man had looked like a destitute labourer. Materially, he had even less. He did not even own the clothes he stood up in. His accent and the way he phrased his words suggested something else, though.

  ‘Has it worked,’ enquired Antonio, ‘this approach of yours?’

  ‘So far, yes,’ the old man said. ‘I have no religious faith. You could say that I am an atheist and have been for many years. But a belief in protecting your own essence, believe me, gives you such strength to survive.’

  Antonio looked over the man’s shoulder at the sea of two hundred other men now reduced to a shapeless blur of humanity by the dung-coloured uniform. It was an amorphous mass, where individuality had finally been annihilated, but in its midst were doctors, lawyers, university professors and writers. Perhaps this man was one of these.

  ‘So what did you do before . . . this?’ asked Antonio.

  ‘I am a professor of Philosophy at the University of Madrid,’ he answered unhesitatingly, with a deliberate use of the present tense.

  He continued now, happy to have Antonio’s attention, ‘Look at how many people have been driven to suicide. Probably thousands of them. That’s the greatest victory for the Fascists, isn’t it? One more prisoner condemned to the fires of hell - and one less mouth to feed.’

  The man was so pragmatic, so realistic about their situation that Antonio was almost convinced. He had seen several suicides himself. The worst of these had been only a few days ago in Figueres before they were moved here. A man jumped up to grab the light bulb that hung by a wire from the ceiling and in a swift movement, before he could be stopped by either friend or Fascist, he had struck the bulb on the edge of a chair and plunged the jagged shard into his vein.

  Guards had eventually arrived to drag away his body.They had seen it all before. It was too much bother to shorten the flex.

  ‘Well,’ said the university professor, jamming on the round hat that had sat on top of the uniform. ‘I think we’re meant to get started.’

  His cheerful enthusiasm was, for a moment, infectious.

  ‘You see this?’ he said, pointing up at his hat. The ‘T’ with which it was emblazoned stood for Trabajos Forzados - Forced Labour. It marked him out as a slave.

  ‘Yes,’ responded Antonio. ‘I see it.’

  ‘They can enslave my body,’ the professor said, ‘but my mind is my own.’

  For every individual there had to be a reason to survive and this man seemed to have found his.

  By now the rest of the room had cleared. In spite of their empty stomachs, they were expected to work today. There were two hours until darkness and their enslavers were not going to allow them to be wasted.

  Marching in single file through an area of dense forest, the new arrivals eventually reached the edge of the site. As they came into the immense clearing, the very scale of what they saw shocked them.

  Thousands upon thousands of men worked in gangs.The motion was continuous, streamlined, ordered, and it was clear that they were engaged upon some relentless, gargantuan, never-ending task. As they moved in one direction they bore a load, and then returned empty-handed for another, like ants moving to and from their anthill.

  Antonio’s group was taken towards the vast exposed face of the hillside. At first glance it looked as though they had been assigned to literally move a mountain. The noise was deafening. Occasionally from within they heard a rumble. It was obvious what they were expected to do. A gigantic hole was being made in this towering rock. Any orders would have been inaudible in the cacophony that greeted them. There were piles of stone in front of them. Some men worked at breaking them down with pickaxes. Shards flew everywhere. The rest picked up the fragments in their bare hands and began to carry them away. Frequently, there was the shout of an order, a castigation, a raised stick. It was a vision of hell.

  Antonio’s hope that working in the open was going to give them a glimpse of the sky was soon dashed. The air was opaque with dust. Even the illusion of freedom that had been dangled in front of them that afternoon had evaporated. With one hand the Fascists had given, and with the other they had taken away.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  WHILE ANTONIO WAS building Franco’s tomb, Concha Ramírez was still running El Barril, determined to keep the family business going. Like anyone who had been on the wrong side during the conflict, she suffered from the stigma of having a husband and son in prison. Concha was continually harassed by the Civil Guard and her premises often subject to search and scrutiny. These were purely tactics of intimidation but there was nothing she could do to prevent them. Many of those in her position found that their children could get nothing but menial work, and some, whose children tried to return home after fighting for the Republic, were immediately incarcerated. One of Paquita’s brothers had been executed that month.

  One Thursday afternoon, a few months after Franco declared his victory, Concha was in the kitchen and heard the sound of the café door being pushed open. It had been a busy lunchtime.

  A late customer, she thought with irritation. Hope they aren’t expecting anything to eat.

  She bustled into the bar to tell the latecomer that she had finished serving food, and stopped in her tracks. She tried to speak, to say a name, but nothing came out. Her mouth was dry.

  In spite of his hollow eyes and the unfamiliar stoop of his body, she would have immediately recognised this man in a crowd of a hundred thousand others.

  ‘Pablo,’ she whispered inaudibly.

  He stood there, one hand gripping the back of a chair. He could no more speak than move. Every last shred of energy and willpower had been spent on reaching home. Concha crossed the room and held him in her arms.

  ‘Pablo,’ she whispered. ‘It’s you. I can’t believe it’s you.’

  And that was the truth. Suddenly Concha Ramírez did not trust her own senses. Was this pale shadow her husband? For a moment, she wondered whether this frail, insubstantial being that she held in her arms was even real, or just a figment of her imagination. Perhaps Pablo’s death sentence had finally been carried out and this was just a spectre that appeared to her. Nothing was beyond the realms of possibility in her imagination.

  His silence did not reassure her.

  ‘Tell me if it’s you,’ she persisted.

  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 g
reater 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.