The Return

by Victoria Hislop

  He endlessly repeated to himself that he would soon be out, but with no light and without a wristwatch, there was no means of knowing when. Eventually he retraced his steps, but each day seemed an eternity.

  Weeks turned into months. Progress was slow. In the overall scale they scarcely seemed to have scratched the mountainside. The workers began to learn more about this grand scheme. It was supposed to be finished in one year.

  ‘That’s about as likely as Franco sending us home for Christmas,’ said Antonio. ‘We’ve already been here for a year, haven’t we? And it looks the same as when we arrived!’

  He was right. It would be twenty years before The Valley of the Fallen was completed, and it would take twenty thousand men to finish it.

  Each week dozens of workers were dying, killed in explosions, crushed by landslides of rocks, or electrocuted. Many of those who laboured at the rock face itself contracted a sinister disease. As they drilled and hacked at the rock face, the air became filled with dust and, though they held sponges to their faces, microscopic particles of silica found their way through and filled their lungs with crystals.

  The work was exhausting and the teams of workers were in a constant state of flux. Friendships were hard to form. On rare occasions someone would be granted their freedom but others were less lucky. The professor had been taken away only a few weeks after their arrival at Cualgamuros. It appeared that he had been guilty of committing many, albeit bogus, crimes against the state, the most offensive of them being that he was an intellectual and a Jew. Even as he had been taken from the hut at the crack of dawn one day, he had smiled at Antonio.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said. ‘At least I won’t be going to Mauthausen.’

  Professor Díaz had spent a year in France under German occupation. Many of his fellow Jews had been rounded up and removed to the notorious concentration camp. Antonio had admired Díaz enormously. He was the only person he could have called a friend in this godforsaken place, and even if the man himself faced his execution with stoicism, Antonio was horrified by the prospect of it.

  After this, Antonio made no new friends. At the end of each day, lying exhausted on his straw mattress, he would close his eyes. Only his imagination saved him from insanity. He practised hard to free his mind from this place and they were simple, familiar images he needed. Never of women - such urges had become distant memories now. Usually he was sitting at a table with Francisco and Salvador, there was the alluring fragrance of brandy, the sound of conversation, the sensation of a fresh polvorón crumbling to sweet powder on his tongue. No one could reach him here and eventually he slept.

  It was the man who slept on the mattress next to him that first noticed there was something wrong with Antonio.

  ‘I don’t know whether you cough all day - it’s too noisy to notice - but you’re doing it all night long. Every night.’

  Antonio could detect a note of irritation.

  ‘It’s keeping me awake,’ his neighbour complained.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll try to stop, but I must be doing it in my sleep . . .’ The close, smoke-filled atmosphere of the huts encouraged the spread of germs, as did the dampness in the Guadarrama air, and Antonio was not the only worker who tossed and turned throughout the hours of darkness.

  Within a few weeks, Antonio himself ceased to sleep. All night he sweated, and now, when he coughed, he saw his palm was stained crimson with blood. He was racked with chest pains.

  Antonio was one of many who contracted silicosis. The hated mountain had buried a part of itself within him.

  The sick were not kindly treated and many worked until they collapsed. Antonio intended to do the same but one day his body would no longer obey him. For days he could not lift himself off his sweat-soaked bed. He experienced none of the peace that is meant to descend before you meet your maker and through a haze of delirium, all he felt was anger and frustration.

  One night there was a passing glimpse of his mother. Antonio had some distant recollection of receiving a letter from her to say that she was planning to visit and he wondered if this was her, standing over him with her dark hair and tender smile. He experienced a fleeting moment of peace, but no other angels came for him and even in a state of semi-consciousness he knew that he was losing hold.The priest that sometimes exploited such men for a last-minute conversion did not bother to visit. Antonio was regarded as beyond spiritual reach by the authorities.

  Finally, after some hours of delirium, he was aware of the most terrible, burdensome sadness. He was saturated with tears, sweat and grief, and everything was sliding away from him. Death now rolled in like a high tide and nothing could hold it back.

  Throughout the past year, though they had both been entirely unaware of it, Javier Montero had been living only metres away. Along with his father, he had been rounded up in Málaga when the city was overrun in February 1937 and he had spent the entire duration of the war in prison. His only crime was to be a gypsy and by definition, therefore, a subversive. His path and Antonio’s had almost crossed a hundred times, but both had become so stooped that they rarely looked up. The intervening years had ravaged them both.

  Javier was in a group whose grim task that day was the burial of any dead. Occasionally he caught sight of his once beautiful hands now folded over the handle of a spade, bleeding, calloused, crisscrossed with granite cuts. It had been four years since his slender fingers had wrapped themselves over the fingerboard of his guitar and almost as long since he had heard the sound of music.

  ‘You know, we’re probably the lucky ones,’said his fellow gravedigger as they swung their pickaxes at the hard earth. ‘I reckon this is softer than that granite.’

  ‘I suppose you might be right,’ answered Javier, trying to appreciate the levity in his tone.

  They moved the body into position and lowered it into the grave. There was no shroud and the earth from Javier’s spade fell directly onto the man’s face.These were Antonio’s last rites.There were no rituals on this hillside.

  Neither gravedigger looked but for a few minutes they kept silent. It was the most and the least they could do.

  A few days earlier, Concha had set out from Granada to make the long-promised visit to Cualgamuros. At the entrance she was obliged to register herself and then, having stated her business, was directed to a small building, situated slightly apart from the long rows of dormitory huts, which stretched away into the distance.

  She gave Antonio’s full name and then the sergeant ran his finger down the lists of workers’ names. There were dozens of entries and she stood patiently while he turned page after page. He sighed, apparently bored. Though she could not read any of the names upside down, Concha could see that some of them had lines through them.

  Then his finger came to a stop, halfway down a page.

  ‘Dead,’ he said dispassionately. ‘Last week. Silicosis.’

  Concha’s heart almost stopped beating. His words came like stab wounds.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. She was determined not to show any weakness in front of this man and wandered out blindly, not really knowing where she was going now.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon and some of the workers had returned to their huts after a twelve-hour shift. Javier glanced out of his window. He noticed a woman. Apart from the wives of labourers who had come to live nearby, it was rare to see anyone female, but what made him look twice was that it was a face he thought he recognised. He slipped out of the hut and hastened after her.

  The woman was wandering slowly now and it took only a moment for him to catch her up.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, touching her lightly on the arm.

  Concha assumed it was one of the guards about to reprimand her for wandering into a forbidden area. She stopped. She could feel nothing now, certainly not fear.

  Javier had not been mistaken.Though her hair was now streaked with grey, she was unchanged.

  ‘Señora Ramírez,’ he said.

  It took
Concha a few moments to realise who this skeletal creature actually was. He had changed considerably but the huge distinctive eyes remained the same.

  ‘It’s me. Javier Montero.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ answered Concha, so quietly that birdsong would have drowned out her voice. ‘I know . . .’

  ‘But what are you doing here?’ he asked her.

  The first thing that went through his mind was that Señora Ramírez had learned that he was here and had come with news of Mercedes.

  ‘I came to see Antonio,’ she replied.

  ‘Antonio! He’s here?’

  Concha’s head dropped. She could not answer but the tears that ran down her face told him enough.

  They stood for a while. Javier felt awkward. He wanted to embrace Señora Ramírez as he would his own mother, but it did not seem appropriate. If only he could comfort her in some way.

  It was getting dark now and Concha knew that she would have to leave soon. She must be out of here by nightfall. When her tears had subsided, she finally spoke.There was one thing she must do before she left.

  ‘I don’t suppose you would know where he was buried. I would just like to go there before I leave,’ she said with all the self-control she could muster.

  Javier took her arm. He led her gently towards the burial ground, which was situated a few hundred metres beyond the huts. In the clearing among the trees she could make out the section of ground where the earth had been recently disturbed:

  it was ridged like a ploughed field.They approached the spot and Concha stood for a few moments, her eyes shut, her lips moving in prayer. Javier remained silent as the realisation dawned that Antonio’s burial must have been on his shift. Even the sound of his breathing seemed intrusive.

  Eventually Concha looked up. ‘I must go now,’ she said decisively.

  Javier took her arm again. They passed a number of workers on their way to the gates, who gave him quizzical looks. There was something he was desperate to know and he could not let Señora Ramírez leave without asking her.

  ‘Mercedes . . .’

  Concha had almost forgotten about her daughter in the past hour, but she had known that the moment would come when she had to tell Javier that Mercedes had gone to look for him and never came back.

  ‘I can’t lie to you,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘But if we hear from her I’ll write to you straight away.’

  It was Javier’s turn to be lost for words.

  As the gate clanged shut behind Concha, she shuddered. Drawing her coat tightly around her, she hastened away. In spite of the fact that her son was buried there, she could not get away fast enough.

  One day, an immense cross would soar one hundred and fifty metres into the sky on the mountain top, majestic, arrogant and victorious. With the figures of the holy saints kneeling at its base, it would be positioned above Franco’s tomb and on some days its long shadow would touch the wooded place where Antonio’s body lay in an unmarked grave.

  Part 3

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Granada, 2001

  THE SHADOWS WERE lengthening over the square outside El Barril as Miguel’s words died away. Sonia had almost forgotten where she was. She was astonished by what he had told her.

  ‘But how could all this have happened to one family?’ she asked.

  ‘It wasn’t just the Ramírez family that these things happened to,’ replied Miguel. ‘They weren’t unusual. Not at all. Every Republican family suffered.’

  Miguel’s energy seemed to be flagging, but he had been tireless in the telling of this story. Sonia viewed the café with different eyes now. The sadness of what had happened to these people seemed to linger there.

  The old man had talked for several hours but there was still a part of the story missing. It was the part that she was most curious to know.

  ‘So what did happen to Mercedes?’ she asked. The pictures of the dancer on the wall above them were a constant reminder of why she was really here.

  ‘Mercedes?’ he sounded vague. And Sonia worried for a moment. Perhaps this obliging old man had forgotten of her existence. ‘Mercedes . . . yes. Of course. Mercedes . . .Well, for a long time there was no contact at all because letters could be so incriminating and she felt her mother was probably under enough suspicion without being accused of having a roja for a daughter.’

  ‘So she was still alive then?’ Sonia’s hopes were raised again.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Miguel brightly. ‘Eventually, when it was safer, she began to write letters to Concha here at El Barril.’

  Miguel was rummaging around in a chest next to the till.

  Sonia’s heart beat furiously.

  ‘They’re here somewhere,’ he said.

  Sonia was trembling now. She saw in his hand a neatly tied bundle of letters written by the girl whose photograph had come to obsess her.

  ‘Would you like me to read some of them to you? They’re in Spanish.’ He came to sit down on the chair next to hers.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said quietly, staring at the yellowing dog-eared envelopes he held in his hand.

  He carefully removed a dozen fine airmail sheets from the envelope at the top of the chronologically ordered pile and unfolded them. The letter was dated 1941.

  The script was unfamiliar. Sonia had never seen her mother write by hand. Her illness had made it difficult and in her memory Mary had always used a typewriter.

  The letters from one side of the paper showed through to the other, making the task of reading a challenge. The old man did his best, reciting each sentence in Spanish before translating into rather old-fashioned English.

  Dear Mother,

  I know you will understand why I have not written for so long. It was because I was anxious not to incriminate you. I know I am regarded as a traitor for staying out of Spain and I hope you will forgive me for this. It seemed the safest way for all concerned.

  I want to tell you what happened after I left for England on the Habana four years ago . . .

  With every minute that passed, the expanse of water between Mercedes and her homeland widened.The wind got up not long after they set sail and, as they sailed out into the Bay of Biscay, the waves began to roll.The roughness took everyone by surprise. Many of these children had never been on a boat before, and the violence of the rocking motion terrified them. Many had begun to cry as they sensed their disorientation and were gripped by the first gagging moments of nausea.

  Even the colour of the sea seemed alien. No longer blue, it was now the colour of churned-up mud. Some of the children were immediately sick and as the journey continued even the adults were retching. Soon the decks were slippery with vomit.

  In spite of Mercedes’ protest, Enrique was separated from her and put on an upper deck. For many hours she lost sight of him and felt that she had already failed his mother.

  ‘You aren’t here only to look after those children,’ scolded one of the older assistants.

  She was right. Mercedes’ role on this journey and beyond it was to take care of a bigger group and her concern for just two of the children was frowned upon by several of the teachers and priests.

  That night, the children slept where they could as the boat rolled up and down. Some of them nestled into the bottom of a lifeboat, others curled up on huge coils of rope. Soon Mercedes was incapable of offering them comfort. Queasiness overcame her. When the rough seas became calm again the next day, the relief was immense. The coast of England had been in sight for some time but only when the sea ceased to hurl them around did they notice the thin dark line on the horizon that was Hampshire’s coastline. By six thirty on that second day they were docking at Southampton.

  The dead flat calm of the harbour was complete sanctuary, and as quickly as it had arrived, the awful seasickness disappeared. On the deck of the ship, small hands held on to the railings and peered over to look at this new country. All they could see were the dark harbour walls that loomed over them.

  There was the noisy busi
ness of docking the ship to be completed and they heard the alarming clank of the anchor chain, and huge ropes as thick as arms were thrown down on to the quayside. Grizzled men looked up at them with a mixture of pity and curiosity. They meant no harm. There were shouts in a language they did not recognise, gruff aggressive voices and the bellowing holler of the docker who had to make himself heard above the general cacophony.