by Mathew Carr
Lawton did not want to tell Mata how happy he was to know that he was not a maniac or a murderer, and he was not sure yet what conclusions to draw from what Quintana had told him.
“It confirms what I said yesterday,” he replied. “These people were killed for their blood. Now all we have to do is find out why.”
“Well I can’t help you now, Harry. I need to go to the office and find out what Rovira wants us to do.”
Just then they saw a large, turbulent crowd walking past the main entrance in the direction of the Parallelo. As they came closer to the street, Lawton saw that some members of the crowd were carrying bottles and cans of kerosene. Mata asked one man where they were going and he replied that they were on their way to burn the Church of San Pau and liberate the tortured.
“What tortured?” Mata asked.
“The young virgins!” the man replied. “The ones the priests and nuns keep in their dungeons!”
Once again Mata looked wearily at Lawton and rolled his eyes, while the crowd continued down the street. “If they carry on like this we’ll be lucky if there’s any of Barcelona left standing by the end of the day,” he said.
“Why doesn’t the army stop it?”
“I have no idea.”
They separated at the entrance to the Plaza Reial, where Mata gave him a set of keys and promised to return in the afternoon. At the hotel Señor Martínez was sitting at the counter in exactly the same position that Lawton had last seen him in.
“Señor Lawton,” he said resentfully. “Once again you go away and don’t tell us when you’re coming back.”
Lawton apologized and paid him for the previous two nights with the money Mata had lent him. The hotelier looked slightly less morose now, and he seemed almost disappointed when Lawton announced that he was checking out of the hotel.
“Your vice-consul came to see you yesterday,” he said. “Señor Smeether. He said he has a message for you.”
“He didn’t say what it was?”
Martínez shook his head. Lawton wondered what had prompted this visit, and he went to his room and packed his bags. On his way up the Ramblas he stopped at the Hotel Internacional, and told Bonnecarrère what Mata had said about the docks. Bonnecarrère agreed that they should be at the harbor at the appointed time. He did not look pleased that Mata was also coming, but he did not object. Lawton agreed to pass by the hotel with Mata at eleven o’clock the next evening, and he continued up the Ramblas toward the consulate. He was not surprised to find it closed. He could hear shots coming from the streets to his left, and a few minutes later the crowds on the Ramblas scattered as a group of mounted soldiers came charging toward them, slashing at them with clubs and the flat of their sabers.
Lawton thought it best to return to Mata’s house and wait to see if things calmed down. By the time he reached the Plaza Catalunya, streams of smoke were rising up out of the city in all directions. More soldiers were streaming into the square on foot and on horseback now, and Lawton saw officers shouting instructions to the artillerymen who were lining up small field guns at the tram station. It would not be good to be out on the streets when they started using those weapons, he thought, and he quickened his pace and walked along the Calle de Las Cortes toward Mata’s street. He had nearly reached it when the sound of a pistol shot made him jump, and he reached instinctively for his own weapon. On the other side of the Passeig de Gràcia he saw tiny dark shapes moving about on the roof of one of the buildings, who seemed to be firing down at something that he could not see. The shooting unnerved him, and he continued to glance warily up at the rooftops as he walked back into Mata’s neighborhood.
Soon he reached Mata’s cool, empty apartment and shut the door behind him. Once again he heard the sounds of ordinary domestic life emanating from the balconies and apartments all around the sunlit courtyard beneath him, as if the residents were unaware of the smoke that stung his nostrils or the dark trails that he could see above the rooftops. There was nothing else to do that day as far as the investigation was concerned, and he took his boots off and stretched out on the sofa.
He had nearly fallen asleep when he heard a loud banging on the door. As he walked back to the front door his first thought was that the police had come again, but when he looked through the peephole he saw Esperanza Claramunt, standing in the hallway, looking agitated and distraught.
“Señorita Claramunt,” he said, opening the door. “Is something wrong?”
Esperanza took off her glasses. Her lips were moving and she seemed to be struggling to form words, before she finally said in a thin, defeated voice, “They’ve got my brother.”
25
Lawton never cried, and he was not comfortable when other people did. As a child he had seen his mother cry so often that he had ended up recoiling from her, rather than trying to soothe her. During the war, he had watched Boer women weep when he and his men burned and ransacked their farms. He had learned to harden himself when he watched them weeping as they buried their children in the internment camps, not only because too many soldiers had died at the hands of their men, but because he had seen the native women wailing at the destruction of their families by the Boers. After a while he had felt no pity at all, to the point when it seemed perfectly natural to follow the orders they were given, and leave Boer women alone in the veld for the Boers to come to their rescue—knowing that such an outcome could not be guaranteed.
It was not until afterward that he looked back and wondered how he could have listened to them weeping and not done anything about it. As a policeman he had come to regard women’s tears as an occasional ordeal, to which he responded with stony indifference or sympathetic detachment, depending on whether he regarded the tears as faked or genuinely heartfelt.
There was no doubt which category Esperanza Claramunt’s tears belonged to. As soon as he shut the door behind her, she let out a choked sob, and Lawton nudged her toward the kitchen and pulled up a chair. Even then she buried her face in her hands and continued to cry while he looked around for a hand towel and waited for her to cry herself out. Finally she wiped her face and told him that her brother had left the house while her mother was sleeping that morning and had not been seen since. Her brother was two years older than she, she said, but he was like a six-year-old child and he never went out in the street without her or her mother.
That morning Esperanza had been out of the house helping with the strike in Gràcia, when her mother woke up to find Eduardo gone. Her mother had spent the morning looking for him, Esperanza said, and she had only just found out what had happened.
“She’s still out looking for him,” she said. “She thinks he’s got lost. Or he might have been shot in the fighting.”
“What fighting?”
“This morning the army attacked the strikers outside the Electricity Factory with a cannon. There were casualties.”
“Have you asked there?”
Esperanza shook her head. “Ugarte warned me that something could happen to Eduardo. I couldn’t tell my mother so I came here to find you and Bernat. I know they’ve taken him and he’s going to end up like the others. And it’s all my fault!”
“Maybe he just wandered off?” Lawton suggested hopefully.
“We would have found him by now. He never goes far, and everybody knows him in the neighborhood.”
“So there’s nothing that could have attracted him?”
Esperanza thought for a moment. “He does love fire,” she said.
“Are there any fires in Gràcia?”
“There are. And there may be more to come.”
“Well then, “Lawton said. “We better go and look for them.”
* * *
Esperanza still seemed dazed as Lawton picked up the pistol and put on his hat and jacket. He wrote a quick note to Mata explaining what had happened and the two of them went back downstairs. By the time they reached the street Esperanza seemed to have recovered some of her composure and her determination, and they walke
d quickly up through the largely deserted streets. The smoke was even more pervasive in Gràcia than it was on the Ramblas, and Esperanza said that a number of monasteries and convents in the neighborhood had been set on fire that afternoon.
“I thought the strike was about the war,” Lawton said.
“It’s not us,” Esperanza replied. “It’s the Radicals—Lerroux’s people. They’ve been telling their cadres to burn church buildings, and now the masses are doing it themselves and we can’t stop them.”
Within a few minutes of entering Gràcia, they reached the first barricade. Lawton counted five men armed with a motley assortment of pistols, hunting rifles, and a Remington carbine defending the pile of cobblestones and furniture. Behind them stones had been heaped up for obvious use as weapons. Lawton found it difficult to believe that artillery had been required to overcome these barriers, and it was obvious that anyone who tried to defend them against a serious military assault would be killed.
He walked on beside Esperanza through the narrow streets with his face screwed up against the billowing smoke, until they reached the Electricity Factory. Outside the main entrance some two dozen soldiers were standing in a line with their rifles at the ready, and another contingent of soldiers was standing next to a small piece of field artillery nearby. Esperanza could not bring herself to speak to the soldiers, but Lawton asked one of their officers if there had been any casualties that morning.
“Of course there were casualties,” the officer snapped. “They were holding Civil Guards hostage! Are you from the foreign newspapers?”
“I’m not,” Lawton said. “I’m looking for a young man who has nothing to do with this. He has Down syndrome and his mother is worried about him. He has Mongol eyes and a large head.”
“I haven’t seen anyone like that,” the officer replied.
For the rest of the afternoon Lawton and Esperanza continued to walk back and forth across Gràcia, asking the same questions over and over again. But there was no sign of Eduardo and no one had heard of him. Esperanza looked increasingly demoralized as they made their way through the barricaded streets and followed the trail of burning convents and monasteries. Whenever they came to a burning building they carefully scanned the crowds of onlookers who stood gazing at the flames with the dreamy fascination of spectators on Bonfire Night.
Lawton was appalled by the destruction, and he was pleased to see that the priests, monks, and nuns who lived in these buildings were not being harmed. In most cases they stood watching helplessly or made half-hearted attempts to remonstrate with the mobs roaming through their buildings carrying cans of paraffin and gasoline. Despite the presence of the soldiers he had seen earlier, the authorities appeared to have abandoned any attempt to prevent the destruction, leaving the arsonists all the time they needed.
By the early evening there was still no sign of Eduardo, and the sky above them was lit up by a lurid red glow that reminded Lawton of the Great Unexplained Event the previous year. Esperanza continued to ask desperately for her brother, but Lawton was beginning to sense that the search was futile. It was nearly ten o’clock when Esperanza said that they should stop looking. She looked utterly crushed now, and Lawton knew there was nothing he could say to make her feel any better. They had not been walking long when an animated group of men and women came toward them.
“Espe!” One young man exclaimed. “Aren’t you going to the Sagrada Familia?”
“Why should I go there?” Esperanza asked wearily.
“For the public meeting! Fabra Rivas is speaking. Patricia saw your brother there earlier.”
“Eduardo was at the Sagrada Familia?” Esperanza stared at him. “She’s sure it was him?”
“That’s what she said.”
A smile of pure delight spread across Esperanza’s face now, and she and Lawton hurried back in the direction they had just come from, through the barricades and faceless crowds that roamed the darkened streets. After about fifteen minutes they came to what looked like an open field, and Lawton heard goats bleating in the darkness as they made their way toward an enormous building whose windowless walls and half-finished towers loomed out of the darkness like the remnants of a breached fortress. On the outskirts of the building thousands of people were listening to a speaker surrounded by men holding lanterns, and Lawton recognized the socialist Fabra Rivas, whom he had seen at the Athenaeum earlier.
Fabra Rivas was talking about the strike, and appeared to be appealing for calm, but Lawton paid no attention to the speech. He followed Esperanza through the crowd, and then suddenly she let out a cry and ran away from him. Lawton was surprised to find the little monk-like man he had last seen in the park overlooking the city sitting on a pillar of stone next to a young man with a large head, who was staring at downtown Barcelona with an expression of rapture and wonder. Even in the darkness Lawton could see tears in Esperanza’s eyes as Eduardo wrapped his arms around her and she covered his head with kisses.
“Thank you for looking after Eduardo, Señor Gaudí,” she said finally. “I’ll take him home now.”
“And you are?” The little man peered up at her myopically.
“Esperanza Claramunt. You knew my father, Rafael Claramunt.”
“Ah, yes.” Gaudí nodded sadly. “I didn’t know this young man was your brother, my child. But he is an innocent in this city of sinners.” He looked out over the burning red sky with a pained expression. “This is truly Satan’s night. He has come to Barcelona and brought his demons with him.”
“Shouldn’t you be home, too, maestro?” Esperanza asked.
“I need to make sure they don’t burn my cathedral,” Gaudí replied. “Go home, child. I’ll be fine here.”
Esperanza thanked him once again. She beamed at Lawton and took her brother’s hand, and the three of them walked happily together back toward Gràcia. From time to time Eduardo stopped and pointed at the sky or a burning building, and let out a roar that reminded Lawton of the sea lions he had seen in London Zoo, but each time Esperanza steered him resolutely home. Finally they reached her mother’s building, and she invited him in for something to eat.
“Bernat will be expecting me,” he said. “But I would like Montero’s address. I’ll take care of him from now on. You look after your brother.”
Esperanza gave him the address. “Thank you,” she said.
“No need to thank me,” he replied. “Glad it turned out all right.”
Esperanza leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek, and Lawton was smiling to himself as he walked through the burning city to Mata’s house. If he achieved nothing else in Barcelona, he thought, at least he had done this, and he hoped that Mata would have some of that strange tomato-stained bread waiting for him.
* * *
At six o’clock Mata left La Veu de Catalunya’s offices. He decided not to take his usual route home up the Ramblas to avoid the mob. Instead he walked east along Escudellers and then turned up the Calle d’Avinyo toward the Plaza Sant Jaume and the city hall. His route was only partly intended to bypass the ongoing mayhem. Even if he could not write about it, he was still curious to confirm the rumors that a revolutionary government had been formed at the city hall, that the cathedral had been set on fire, and that General Santiago was preparing to bring his troops back onto the streets.
Compared with the Raval, the backstreets behind the city hall were quiet and almost tranquil. Mata had not expected to spend so much time downtown, but Rovira had sent his staff out into the streets to take notes on whatever they saw so that they would be ready to write about it when the time came. That afternoon Mata had witnessed the burning of the Church of Santa Maria del Mar, and the convents and monasteries of Sant Frances de Paula, Sant Pau de les Puells, the Caputxins, the Agonizants, and the Church of San Pau de Camp.
It was clear that the protests had unleashed a rage and hatred that went beyond the opposition to the war in Morocco. Even Fabra Rivas had all but admitted to him that the strike committee had lost cont
rol of the strike. Without any clear political goals, the masses had given themselves over to purposeless destruction, superstition, and outrage. At the convent of the Caputxins the mob had disinterred the bodies of long-dead nuns to see if they had been tortured and murdered. At the Dominican monastery he had watched a crowd search in vain for a tunnel where the monks supposedly walked beneath the city to engage in orgies with the Conceptionist sisters.
Isolated from the rest of the country and devoid of government, Barcelona had become a city where nothing could be proven and anything could be believed, where the security forces had abandoned the streets to the mob. Now the Radical Party young barbarians roused their audiences to new outrages; the anarchists put up barricades to seal off their neighborhoods, and even prostitutes and madams now terrorized the nuns who had once humiliated them. There was a kind of mad gaiety about it all, as if the looting and burning had become an extension of the feast of San Juan.
But people were dying and more would die, unless sanity and order could be reimposed. This possibility seemed suddenly more remote, when he arrived in the Plaza Sant Jaume and found another crowd gathered outside the city hall. As Mata came closer he saw a row of open coffins containing the corroded bodies of nuns leaning up against the wall. All of them had the same freakish contortions and distortions of the long-dead, and their hands and feet were tied according to the Hieronymite tradition. In front of them a young man with a cloth cap was haranguing the crowd with the histrionic gestures and absence of logic that Mata had come to expect from the Radicals.
“You see!” he yelled. “This is the eternal life they promised you! The same eternal life they promised these poor young women they murdered and tortured in their dungeons!”
The crowd listened with horrified attention, but Mata felt suddenly weary. There was no point in trying to convince the spectators that nuns would not have done any such thing. His city had gone mad, and he had seen enough for one day. He walked across the square with a heavy heart and turned into the narrow street that led up toward the cathedral. He was about halfway up the street when he heard footsteps behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the dark outline of a man silhouetted against the light from the square. Mata immediately sensed that he was walking with a different purpose to the other people in the streets, and he stopped and turned around, as the man came toward him at the same leisurely pace. Mata was still trying to make out his face when heard the loud pop, like a bottle of champagne, and he felt a hot pain in his chest.