by David Hewson
The girl watched him and said nothing.
‘I used to see a fine family at most of the fights. They had a box, not far from the place where we took the animals into the ring. I remember looking at them and thinking how fortunate, how blessed they seemed, with their fine clothes, their smiles and such beautiful children. Now . . .’ He frowned. ‘I realize what a fool I was to be envious of them. The Lucenas are gone, or so the city thinks.’ He nodded. ‘I don’t recall your first name, but it’s best you keep your last to yourself. For the time being anyway.’
He held out his hand, waiting. He didn’t so much as look at the knife.
‘One cannot go through life without trusting someone, a little of the time anyway,’ the man said. ‘If you wish, I can leave you here. Or you can come with me. The choice is yours.’
He walked to the car and held open the door. She got inside and went with him in silence.
A month after the child Cristina died, a young woman dressed in a modest and faded country shift, her face lined, tanned and leathery, arrived in Jerez in the car of a young man going to train on a bull farm near the coast outside the pueblo blanco of Vejer de la Frontera. The two had barely spoken in the four days she had spent with him and his wife. Nor would they talk again.
The streets were deserted. It was mid-afternoon, but the torpor went beyond this. Jerez was in waiting, praying it had seen the worst of the war, hoping that it would not return.
She sat down on the kerb, tried to work out her bearings, failed, then asked the way of a lone postman walking down the street. He looked at her, told her what she wanted and was glad to go on his way.
Cristina skirted the centre of town, followed a leafy avenue, turned into a side road and recognized the house. It had been three, perhaps four years since she had seen her aunt and uncle. Their home, a middle-class two-storey villa covered in bougainvillaea, with jacaranda trees blooming in the front garden, seemed much smaller than she remembered it. She saw it with the eyes of an adult, recalled it with the memory of a child.
She opened the iron gates and walked down the drive. A man came from round the back of the house, looked at her and started shouting. She stood her ground. It was her uncle, Ramón.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘We have nothing for you. The town is full of beggars. We cannot feed them all.’
Cristina almost obeyed. She felt strange. The world was swaying in front of her. She thought she was going to be sick again.
‘I need a glass of water,’ she said. Ramón held a hoe. He clung to it like a weapon. From her left, she heard the sound of another person. Her aunt Francesca walked up. She was wearing a flowered smock, the kind women wore when cleaning. There was a glass of water in her hand, a curious, seeking expression in her eyes.
The colours, the liquid, danced and swam.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and lifted the glass to her mouth. It was cool and fresh and wonderful and still she felt sick.
Francesca was staring at her, trying to work something out.
‘They are dead,’ said Cristina. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Ramón came closer, tried to see what his wife saw.
‘Who are dead, girl?’ said Francesca.
‘Papa. Mama. Everyone. They killed them. At La Soledad.’
Francesca put a hand to her face, felt the skin, its dryness, its harshness. She peered at the girl in the dirty dress.
‘Cristina?’ Francesca asked, incredulous. ‘Cristina? Is it you?’
But the world was turning black, black and dizzying. It came down in front of her, a curtain falling over her vision. She was unconscious before her body hit the ground.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The early days were a blur. There was a bedroom that became her universe. She could fix the point of every candle, every ornament, remember each flower on the wallpaper, each crucifix, every religious painting hanging there, still and eternal in the shaded interior light. Francesca and Ramón came and went. She would look into their watchful, worried faces and wonder: Do they believe now? What value was family if an observant stranger like Manolo Figuera could detect her true identity beneath the grime of the plains, yet her own flesh and blood . . . ?
It didn’t take long, though. As the dirt and grime of the road disappeared and the lines on her face faded imperceptibly, they began to see a little of the Cristina of old. The lost child.
Ramón tried harder and harder to win her over, to banish the coldness he had first shown when she had walked through the gate looking like any other beggar asking for food. There had been so many since the war. Some were orphans, some were simply abandoned, left to fend for themselves. When the battles began, he had taken Francesca aside, they had talked, they had agreed: we look after our own. Which they did. And to find out that he had nearly rejected just such a one was something akin to a sin, something Ramón tried hard to atone for.
She remembered them from childhood visits to Jerez, and family parties in the city. In the old days, before the war, Ramón almost seemed like another kid. He joined in their games. He spent time with the children when all the other adults simply wanted to forget about them. Why? She had wondered at the time, and Mama had simply said something about ‘their tragedy’. Later, she had found out. They had had a child who died young, little more than an infant. They could have no more. The chance to play with the young, to be near them, was something that let Ramón enter, even for only an hour, a world from which life had excluded him, excluded them, before they had even reached the age of thirty.
The blur started to fade. The days began to have a rhythm. She still felt ill. There was sickness, sudden and incapacitating, normally in the morning. But once she had been ill she recovered. After a while she felt well. No, more than well. She felt fit, full of life. The blood coursed through her with a strength, a vitality she could almost measure. She felt alive, invigorated by the sheer physicality of her body, the very act of being. This was not the same as happiness. She was not sure she had been happy in the past. She did not believe she would be happy in the future. Whatever happiness was, it lay outside her circle of experience. Just as some people could not whistle, she could not feel simple, sudden elation, pleasure at some everyday event. This facility was missing in her and she did not mourn it. Survival, strength, fitness, mental and physical, these were things that mattered. These were within her grasp.
Her appetite was huge. Ramón and Francesca joked about it for a while. Then they began to exchange glances when they joked, and Cristina followed them, secretly, followed their eyes, wondering what hidden messages were being exchanged there. She would eat whatever they brought: milk, eggs, pork, sausage, chicken, potatoes. Whatever the state of the war, they had no difficulty in finding food. Either that, or they gave her the best part of what they had. Later, when she started to leave the room, to walk around the house, spend hours resting in the cool, shady lounge, she realized it was the latter. They had what they could buy, but it was not much. Secretly, without letting her know, they gave most of it to her.
One morning, when the threat of sickness came briefly and then disappeared as inexplicably as it had arrived, she lay on the bed, in her nightgown, and felt her stomach. There was a fullness that had not been there before, a warm bulge above the hair that was comforting to the touch. She put her hand underneath her nightdress, rested it on the flesh and felt a shiver of contentment run through her, though she still did not understand why.
Some time later. The day was overcast. Autumn was on its way. Ramón and Francesca said that the local fighting was over and what remained was so distant that the farmers felt brave enough to collect their crops and drive them into the city. Soon everyone would be out in the fields, bent over the vines and the wheat, heads bowed, straw hats to protect them against the sun. The old ritual would be under way. If they practised it enough, perhaps it would work its magic; the wounds would heal, the country would return to peace, the war itself would be over.
Cristina stroked the bulge,
wondered if she should stop eating so much, then thought, out of nowhere: I do not bleed.
This meant nothing to her. The connections were too hazy, too unexplained. But connections there were.
I do not bleed.
Cristina saw her vision narrow. It was as if walls closed in from the periphery of her sight. There was now nothing for her to see but her body on her bed.
She pulled up the nightdress, high above her hips, felt it ruffle underneath her back, then relaxed back onto the bed. She looked down. There was a distinct shape there, at the base of her stomach. It was real. It curved down from her navel with a growing fullness that seemed so natural, so adult. A year ago, she had only had the beginnings of hair. Now, as she looked at herself, she seemed a grown woman, like a torso from a museum, the kind of carving they had always hurried past, the children sniggering on the way.
Cristina put her hand on her flesh again, touched the heat of her skin, and felt, though she knew it was impossible, a distinct, real movement beneath her fingers.
She squeezed her eyes shut, held her breath for as long as she could. But when she could stand it no longer, when she looked at herself again, regained her breathing, it was the same. This was real. This was Antonio’s parting gift.
She got up, walked out of the room, found Francesca in the kitchen. They looked at each other and Cristina realized she knew already. There was an expression in the woman’s eyes that mixed sympathy and pity. And something else. Something she did not wish the girl to see.
Francesca walked over to her, put her arms around her neck. Cristina felt her aunt’s tears damp upon her skin, but she did not cry. She would be a mother before her fifteenth birthday. There was no room, no space for tears.
Close to midnight on Good Friday, 1937, the child was born in the bedroom of the little house in Jerez. Cristina had stared at the flowers on the ceiling. She had refused to scream, refused to cry out, but in the end that was impossible. The pain was too great. She felt she was being torn apart. Nothing in La Soledad or during the journey through the mountains could compare with the intensity of this sheer physical agony.
She could see the concern on the doctor’s face. This was not ordinary. This was not normal. The baby was moving wrongly, to a position that made no sense. She could feel it – he? she? – inside her, not knowing how to prepare itself, struggling to be free of her. When she pushed, nothing happened, except that the blockage, the agonizing hindrance inside, became more solid, more fixed, more tormenting.
She bit hard on the leather strap they had pushed between her teeth, pushed again, found herself going nowhere. Then she looked up and saw the glint of silver in the dim electric light – two arms, like horns, a shape that was dimly familiar, like something out of a toy chest.
The doctor went back down the bed. She strained forward, trying to peer over the vastness of her belly, sweat running down her forehead, stinging in her eyes. He looked deathly pale as he held the forceps. Then he crossed himself, the silver arms bent down, below her line of vision, and a pain began that was like no other pain she had felt or would ever feel again.
Cristina opened her mouth, let the leather strap fall away from her and felt the scream tear through her head, become everything there was, a red slash of pain and fury. And then it ended. A crimson haze fell in front of her eyes, the room dissolved and with it the agony. The last thing she heard was a tiny, high voice, crying, as if in sympathy. Then the world disappeared, abruptly, and with it the baby’s wail, and all she could hear in the darkness was the rushing of blood through her veins.
It was a week before she felt strong enough to ask. A week in which the past had risen to haunt her. A week of ghosts and spectres, a week in which the dead – her dead – had walked, had looked at her, shaken their heads, then faded away into the dark. They talked about fever. But it was more than that. During that week, Cristina knew, she had flitted between two worlds, never quite fully in either. She did not want to think about what the dead had said to her. She did not want to remember their urgings. When she finally did wake up, she wanted it to be in her world, not in theirs.
There was an Easter decoration over the window. The war was now distant enough for Semana Santa to be marked, albeit in a muted, impoverished fashion. The doctor came only once a day. Ramón and Francesca looked after her constantly, bringing bread and soup and fruit, water with a little wine in it. She was young, she was recovering quickly.
She waited until Francesca was alone and then, in a flat, insistent tone, asked. Her aunt could not look at her. She turned to stare out of the window. Cristina did not need to see her to know there were tears in her eyes.
‘The baby died,’ she said, her back still to the bed. ‘There was nothing the doctor could do to save the poor thing. It was a breech birth. It was impossible.’
She turned, walked to the bed and hugged her niece. Cristina felt oddly detached from the scene. The light was grey and diffused. It did not look real.
‘It was a little boy,’ she said. ‘He was strong, but not strong enough. Be brave. The doctor says you are young, you are strong too. There is no reason, when you are married, why you should not have more children.’
Cristina smiled to herself. But there was a reason . . .
‘And besides, Cristina . . . Had he lived . . . you are not yet fifteen. You could not have hoped to support him.’
Immediately Francesca wished she had never said the words she was thinking. The girl looked at her with a ferocity that was frightening. Hers was not the face of a fourteen-year-old. There was more pain, more experience, more hardness there than Francesca would have wished on someone many times her age.
‘He was my child,’ she said. ‘He belonged to me.’
Francesca picked up the tray with the empty dishes on it, then looked at her niece.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But this, all of this, is something you must put behind you now. Next week, we have arranged for you to go to Cadiz to recuperate. There is a good hotel, run by friends of ours. We will pay. They will look after you well. The sea air, the food, it will get you back on your feet. We have relatives there too. You may not remember them, but they will visit you.’
Cristina shook her head. She did not understand. ‘You want me to leave?’
Francesca tidied the plates on the tray. ‘This has all been a strain for us too. We need some rest. There’s a house in North Africa. In the colony there, Melilla. We bought it some years ago. When you’ve gone we’ll take the ferry from Algeciras. It won’t be for long. We have spoken to the solicitors. They know you’re alive now. There are decent men in control in the city. They are no danger to you, or to any of us. You will inherit your father’s estate, It is quite valuable, but you will not control it until you are twenty-one, of course.’
‘And until then . . .’
She could feel her temper rising. Francesca would not look at her.
‘Until then . . . we must see what happens. When we have all had time to think of these things.’
Seven days later a car arrived to drive her to Cadiz. She lived there, in the same apartment room, with the same quiet, distant family, for the next six years, unvisited by anyone except the lawyers trying to settle the estate and ease the return of a Lucena to Seville. From Ramón and Francesca there was an occasional letter, postmarked Melilla.
When she turned twenty-one the papers came through and she returned to the mansion by the Murillo Gardens. The banyan tree still stood outside looking like a tortured soul. The murmur of Mercury’s fountain was unchanged. Only the streets, more deserted than she remembered, quiet with some unspoken sense of fear, seemed different at first.
Feeling like a returning ghost, she turned the key in the door and walked into her home. It was thick with dirt and the corpses of moths. There was some bomb damage to a corner of the first floor. When she went into her bedroom, she felt, for a moment, fourteen again. She could hear their dead voices, quiet, tense and ready to argue as always downstairs.
>
Clouds of misty dust rose from the sheets when she lay down on her old single bed. On the pillow, now a dingy grey, was a book, bent at the spine, pages uppermost. She picked it up and, with a clarity that astonished her, remembered precisely the part of the story she had reached, where the characters were, the phrases, the very words on the page.
She turned it over and looked at the cover, knowing what it would say. The gold blocking was now dull and peeling, but still it read, in bold capital letters: Kidnapped.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Cristina Lucena lay back in her hospital bed, drained, but somehow satisfied. Maria tried to decode her expression. Beneath the lines of age, beneath the grey pallor, something pleased her. What? Maria tried to examine her own feelings. It was as if something had been transmitted, passed on, and in the act a burden had shifted. She did not fully understand what had taken place between the two of them, what the exchange of this ancient tale meant. Except that it made her uncomfortable. She felt prurient, somehow soiled by being a distant witness to events that still had their currency within the city. Almost marked.
She drew a long line underneath her notes in broad blue ink. What to make of it? What to believe? Three hours had passed since she arrived and she had scarcely noticed. She tried to see beyond the shield that Cristina had drawn around herself, tried and failed.
‘You must be tired,’ she said.
Cristina closed her eyes. ‘Age. Just the weariness of being old. I loathe it.’
Maria poured some water, then helped the old woman to sit up in bed to drink it. Outside was the noise of a brass band, cheap and tinny, making an unsteady progress down the street. The squealing sound of an ambulance whined towards the room, steadied its tone, then descended into the distance.
‘Antonio is dead?’
She closed her eyes again. ‘More than a decade ago. He was ill.’