The Spanish Promise

by Karen Swan

  Marina frowned. ‘You mean to say my grandfather fought alongside a man who had actively targeted my family?’

  Nathan hesitated, then nodded. ‘It’s looking like that, yes.’

  Charlotte frowned. ‘So you think my grandmother left because she fell in love with a Republican?’

  He gave an uncertain look. ‘Certainly it’s a possibility. It would have been a very volatile, if not outright dangerous thing to do. The political landscape back then was highly charged and inflammatory. The economy was dominated by agriculture, and the landowners – particularly those with estates the size of the Mendozas’ – were autocratic and conservative with a small “c”. They didn’t take kindly to the Second Republic’s radical reforms.’

  ‘Sorry, but this isn’t a period of history I’m familiar with,’ Charlotte interrupted, hoping he might look at her again. ‘What were their radical reforms?’

  His eyes met hers, making her heart double-beat. ‘Giving women the vote, protecting workers’ rights, creation of trade unions . . .’

  ‘. . . Right.’

  He looked back at Marina again. ‘The Mendozas were, predictably, staunchly Nationalist. Felipo Mendoza, your grandmother’s father, had close links with the military. His eldest sons Valentino and Montez briefly fought under General Franco in Morocco. Franco was a personal friend of his.’

  ‘That’s a mighty ally to have.’

  ‘Yes. But it still didn’t save him,’ Nathan shrugged apologetically.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Felipo, Valentino and Montez were murdered in the December of ’36.’

  ‘. . . Murdered – how?’

  ‘A group of rebels broke into the compound one night and dragged them from their beds. They were bundled up here, to where a crowd was waiting and –’ he nodded his head in the direction of the famous Puente Nuevo along the street – ‘they were thrown to their deaths.’

  Marina gasped, sitting back with horrified eyes. The monumental eighteenth-century bridge famously straddled a 120- metre-deep gorge that split the town into two encampments. ‘. . . Was my grandfather involved?’

  Nathan hesitated, then nodded. ‘I believe so, yes. It was widely understood to have been carried out by a group he was connected with, called Hijos de la Noche; they specialized in midnight raids.’

  Charlotte looked down, stunned. If Marina’s grandmother had fallen in love with the man who murdered her family, it was little wonder she had stayed away all these years. Her betrayal was unforgivable.

  ‘And there was a crowd waiting? Like it was a spectator sport?’ Marina repeated, aghast. ‘I cannot believe my grandmother would have fallen in love with a man who tossed her father and brothers from that bridge! He was nothing more than an animal!’

  ‘You need to understand that the relationship between your family and the workers had completely broken down. Tensions had been at breaking point for years beforehand and there had been a sharp increase in the number of altercations in the weeks before the outbreak of war. In the June, for instance, a report was made to the Civil Guard, alleging a man was shot in cold blood by Valentino and Montez Mendoza, but it was never followed up. Shortly after that, a grand fiesta at La Ventilla was disrupted by the slaying of a prize horse in the stables and then, a few weeks later, workers stormed the estate: they killed some of the bulls, plundered the kitchens, reclaimed some of the land. But it was a short-lived victory. Franco invaded the mainland around the same time, reaching Ronda by the end of the summer. When the Nationalists seized the area and the old paternalists’ power was restored, retribution was theirs – and it was merciless.’

  ‘Merciless, how?’

  ‘This bullring?’ He nodded his head in the direction from whence they’d come. ‘If you looked closely – or had known to look – you would see the bullet marks still in the stone wall from where they had the Republican prisoners rounded up and shot.’

  Marina’s mouth opened. ‘No . . .’

  ‘They were herded in, in small groups, and . . . picked off, one by one. There was no escape. Over two hundred men and boys shot. They even invited other landowners and dignitaries along to join in as a way of showing thanks for their support of the rebel cause. Some of the prisoners were guilty simply of being a union member, or the brother of a union member. Or the uncle of a man who had stolen from the orchard because his family were starving . . .’

  ‘“They”? You mean the Mendozas? My family did these things . . . ?’ Marina looked aghast. Shaken.

  ‘There were atrocities on both sides,’ Nathan said quickly. ‘No war is ever as bitter or bloody as a civil war and the Spanish war was no different.’

  Charlotte didn’t know what she could add. She had expected some uncomfortable secrets to be unearthed during this process; every family had them but particularly those that became dynasties – wealth and power were rarely accrued through wholly legitimate means. But this? It was a whole other level.

  Marina looked at Nathan again, her features set in a grim expression. ‘So what happened to my grandfather? After he killed my great-grandfather, I mean . . .’

  ‘It looks like he got away from here and moved up to Madrid. From the records I’ve seen, Jack Quincy was killed in March ’37 in Madrid. American, International Brigade ID, estimated to be mid-thirties. Everything suggests it was him.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Marina asked.

  ‘He was shot during a siege in a church.’

  Marina nodded and fell quiet again. Every revelation was like a punch. To learn that so many of her family had been murdered, were murderers . . .

  ‘So you think Jack and Marina eloped together,’ Charlotte said, seeing how his eyes flashed dangerously at her use of the ‘e’ word. ‘They left Ronda and came to Madrid?’

  ‘That’s what I’m not sure about. I don’t think he can have been the catalyst for her leaving – the dates don’t fit. We know Quincy didn’t arrive in Spain till autumn of ’36 but your grandmother seems to have left the area just before that, in the summer. The last time she was seen publicly here was at the grand fiesta I mentioned. There’s a notice in the local paper at that time speculating that she had gone missing, even rumours she had been kidnapped – this was big bandit country back then. But no ransom was ever demanded and the family made no public comment; war broke out literally a week later so it was forgotten, replaced by much bigger stories – the military campaign was waged in the countryside to begin with and the fascists were merciless: no prisoners of war were taken, there were no wounded. It was a purge. Every man was killed.’ He looked at Marina again, trying to find a silver lining. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if your grandmother left because she truly supported the Republican cause, rather than because she fell in love. If she did, then she almost certainly saved her own life by leaving when she did – the fate of Republican women was almost worse than for the men. Dying was often preferable.’

  ‘How?’ Marina asked, looking dumbfounded.

  He looked down at the table before looking back again. ‘Some were shot. Most were raped. Gang-raped to death. Their heads were shaved. Humiliated by being forced to drink castor oil and then marched around the villages as they lost control of their bowels.’

  Marina slapped her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, trying to push his words away. ‘How do we not know about any of this?’ she asked finally in a quiet voice.

  Nathan shot her a sympathetic look. ‘Because Franco won and ruled for another thirty years. And history is always written by the victors.’ Charlotte looked up at his choice of words. ‘The history he saw to it was written, was carefully edited and . . . sanitized to the fascists’ benefit. The history you have been passed down is only one tiny perspective of how it really happened, written through a narrow, reductive lens. We know some of the truth but not all of it. The full story falls down into cracks we could never know to search. We never get to know everything about a story, even if we’re there ourselves.’

  Charlott
e looked up at his words. He was staring at her, remembering too – she could see it in his eyes. That tutorial. Their first night . . .

  She felt the current surge between them again. It was undeniable – and yet impossible too. She saw it all in his face: the longing. The conflict. The pain.

  He was quiet for a moment before looking back at Marina. ‘There’s a lot that still doesn’t make sense. Your grandmother doesn’t appear to have met Jack in Ronda, yet Felipo Mendoza and his sons were murdered by him in December 1936, even though we know he had already left for Madrid by then – there was simply no way he could have still been in the area and not been caught in the reprisals in the bullring. But, for Quincy to come back here from Madrid at that time would have been incredibly risky. The capital was under siege by then and Franco’s forces had surrounded the city, so crossing the Nationalist lines would have been very, very dangerous. He risked his own life to take theirs and that means it has to have been personal, it wasn’t just war. Something else must have happened between them that we don’t know about yet.’

  Marina stared at him. ‘I can’t believe this is my grandmother we’re talking about. That this was her life,’ she said. ‘How have you even been able to find out all this?’

  ‘It’s my job to know where to look, but I’m working from old military records, newspapers, civic photographs, church records, ledgers, files – but there’s only so much that they will reveal. Like I said, the full truth falls down the cracks; there are some things only your grandmother will ever know and which only she can tell.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Do you feel you’d be able to bring it up with her, now that you have some background?’

  ‘I don’t know. She is always so adamant whenever I’ve tried.’

  ‘But that was before you knew this. If she does feel guilty or ashamed of what her actions meant for her family – and we do know that her husband murdered them – then that may be why she doesn’t feel she can explain them to you. But if you show her you already know, that perhaps you even understand . . .’

  ‘Well, I guess I could always try,’ Marina agreed, staring into her coffee sadly. ‘After all, we can’t help who we fall in love with, right?’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Madrid, February 1937

  Once, the kitchen had been a place from which to steal, small hands swiping strips of iberico ham as they coursed through in planned lightning raids. Once, the kitchen had been a place of refuge from their father when his temper saw him marching through the house, a stick in his hand, never thinking to check the staff areas for them. Once, the kitchen had been a place of comfort and homely aromas when their mother was at parties in the capital. But now, with the siege in full effect, it was the hub of war, the place where they made bombs.

  Marina was boiling up the condensed milk, staring into the frothing whiteness as she stirred. Luciana stood beside her, measuring out the nails like she was sifting flour for a cake, crystals and rocks heaped in buckets beside her; the dynamite was kept in the pantry, away from the heat and any ignition sources. They made a good team: efficient, calm, dextrous, though they didn’t talk much; there didn’t seem to be much to say these days anyway, conversation had become transduced from a means of connecting with people to merely communicating ways to stay alive.

  It was just the two of them now in the girls’ bedroom. Marta’s body had been found the day after she disappeared, a neat hole in her head that had gone in above one ear and come out below the opposite jaw. ‘Sniper’ was all Ivan had said, when he had come in with the news. He had seen a physical description that matched hers in the list that was published daily in the Gaceta newspaper, of the corpses collected off the streets. He and Paloma had followed it up, just to be certain, going to the Dirección General de Seguridad where photographs of the bodies were kept for relatives to check, hoping it was another twenty-one- year-old woman in a blue dress who had died of ‘organic disintegration of the brain’. They had come back with no doubts – it was her.

  That was when everything had changed, the gears shifting up. Paloma had joined the Batallón Femenino del 5th Regimiento de Milicias Populares, the band of women fighting on the front line. Something in her had changed with the death of her friend as she had realized propaganda and night-time excursions weren’t enough any more; Modesto had been right – there was no time for ideological notions when bullets were being peppered from rooftops at women who had gone to buy tomatoes.

  The government urged order and restraint but to Marina, it seemed they were more concerned with promoting their peaceable image to the international community than really eliminating the Nationalist rebellion. With the Assault Guard and Civil Guard defecting to the uprising and the loyalists that remained deployed to the front line, the citizens were sitting ducks: exposed, unprotected and vulnerable. The militias were stepping into the vacuum left by the disintegrating police forces but it was the checas, those political party and trade union squads set up to rout out the fascists in their midst, that had rapidly gained traction and power. Unchecked by any effective leadership or control from the Republican government, they were running wild and running the city.

  Every day brought fresh arrests and executions of the pro-rebel supporters but far from feeling safer, Marina felt her inward terror grow – this was puppet justice, with just the mere suspicion of a right-leaning tendency being enough to condemn a man to death. Luciana had muttered one time, as they packed the bombs carefully as though they were stuffing chickens, that she had heard many of the denunciations simply sprang from sexual jealousy or attempts to evade debts. But in most other cases, it was enough simply to have owned a business or once opposed a strike, to have been a member of the clergy – or be their wife or daughter – or to have expressed support of the repression of the Asturian rising in 1934. If anyone was to discover then that she was a Mendoza of Ronda, a traitor by blood . . .

  The threat of being exposed was ever present. Only last month, she had been shopping in the central market and as she left the meat stall, had bumped straight into two young sisters she immediately recognized from home. Their house had been on the same street as the Esperanzas’, and they had played with Santi and his siblings. Marina had never been introduced to them formally but she knew exactly who they were, for she had seen them many times in church as her family passed by to their pews at the front. The sisters had always looked so neat and tidy in their Sunday-best outfits, with their combed hair and placid expressions, but they didn’t fool her with their goody-two- shoes acts, for Santi would gleefully recount to her their swimming games down by the river, their hiding games in the gorge, their running games in the streets . . . Marina had hated them for it, getting to have the best of her best friend, the freedom to play with him while she was sequestered at La Ventilla with just a governess and her brothers. And she hated them still, for now Santi was dead and there was nothing left of him to be had at all.

  As she had stood, toe-to- toe, with them in the street, there had been a moment of pure instinct in which they all recognized one another as Andalusian sisters, natives from the same homeland; she could see they recognized her but that they couldn’t pinpoint where exactly. They half smiled, knowing they were kin but not yet realizing the bitter divide between them. Her hair, still roughly cut and short on the neck, was the most effective and immediate deterrent to revealing her identity and in the next instant, she had turned away, hoping the narrative attached to her ‘look’ would be enough to reaffirm their instinct that not only was she one of them, but that she had suffered for their shared principles. They would assume she had been captured. Tortured. Abused.

  But she would take no chances – she no longer shopped at that market, nor did she frequent that district now for fear of seeing them again, for if they did subsequently place her, they would effectively be her executioners, of that she had no doubt. It meant she had to walk another two miles across the city to the next market, risking the snipers’ bullets that had dispatched Marta so ruth
lessly; it also meant she could no longer shop with her only remaining friend, for she could think of no viable explanation to give Luciana as to why the central market must now be avoided. She had escaped Ronda’s borders but still, it seemed, she was tethered to her past.

  Taking the milk off the heat, she walked into the pantry to get a stick of dynamite. As she came back out again, she heard the front door slam and she flinched, freezing on the spot.

  ‘Relax, it’s just Ivan,’ Luciana murmured, without looking up. If she had noticed Marina’s growing paranoia, she passed no comment on it. ‘I heard his cough.’

  A few moments later, Ivan walked into the kitchen. He let his bag slide off his shoulder onto the floor as he sank into the chair. His face was dusty, his eyes drooping at the corners wearily, one still puffy from a recent black eye that was taking longer than expected to heal. Marina had patched his shirt at the elbow two nights ago but already there was a fresh tear in it from another scuffle or interrogation and, like Santi’s mother with his shirt, she knew there would be yet more repairs due before the week was out.

  Ivan had been tasked with running a sub-section dedicated to rooting out snipers and saboteurs. He reported to Sindo, who in turn had been appointed deputy secretary of the Cine Europa checa in November, after the start of the siege. It was one of the most feared squads in the city and Sindo was second in the chain of command only to Miguel Modesto, who had finally cast off the pretence of official sanction for this far more powerful role.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ Luciana asked him, setting down the bag of nails and retrieving a glass from the cupboard instead. It was cloudy with soap smears, the water supply increasingly erratic, interrupted by the fascist siege.

  She poured a glass without waiting for his reply and handed it to him. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered, his eyes scanning over the worktop and seeing the boxes of bombs ready for the next mission. It would be the same again tomorrow.