Asturias

by Brian Caswell

  For a moment I thought he was going to say something, but then I saw the tears begin to well up and he stood and ran into the house.

  I didn’t know whether to follow, or to quit while I was behind.

  In the end I took a deep breath and went in after him.

  He was in the room they’d made up for him at the back of the house. The door was closed, and the only sound I could hear from inside was a sort of dull thumping.

  In another part of the house the two old men were absorbed in their game, unaware that there was anything going on. I listened to the murmur of their voices, and hesitated.

  Finally I knocked. There was no reply, so I eased the door open, moved inside … and stopped.

  Marco was standing in the comer between the wardrobe and the back of the room, slamming his fist again and again into the wall. The plasterboard had collapsed under the onslaught, and his hand was covered in the white powder, which was slowly staining pink with the blood from his tom knuckles.

  But still he didn’t make a sound.

  I went across to him and pulled him away from the wall with both hands. There was no resistance. I spun him around to face me, and I saw the tears pouring out of his eyes and spreading a liquid sheen across his cheeks.

  “Marco?” I said, not trusting my voice to say anything more.

  He wiped his damaged hand across his face, leaving a dark stain on his cheek. I looked into his eyes, afraid of what I might see there. But there was no madness, only a terrible despair.

  “You’re wrong, Claire.” His voice was distant, and though he spoke my name, I felt like a stranger. “There was a lot I could have done.”

  He moved across and sat on the bed, staring at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. I stood next to him, but he didn’t look up. He just kept talking in that strange, distant voice.

  “Three weeks … She was dying, and I spent three weeks away from her. I hardly had time to say goodbye, and then she …” The words trailed off, and I didn’t know how to cross the silence that was stretching between us.

  I waited for him to continue, but he remained silent. Eventually I sat down next to him. Our legs were touching, but he didn’t pull away, so I tried again.

  “It wasn’t your fault. She wanted you to go. It would have killed her to see you throw away your future just to sit by her bed and wait for her to die. She was so damned proud of you … She told me —”

  “You went to see her?” For the first time since he had sat down, he held my gaze.

  “Most days, while you were away. She was happy, Marc. Contented, even. She knew she couldn’t be around to share in your success, but it wasn’t as terrible for her as it could have been.”

  I paused, but he waited for me to go on.

  I was looking at the picture of Melina that he kept on his bedside table, and suddenly I could hear her voice, struggling for volume but strong in spirit. And I knew what to say.

  “She told me once. ‘Claire,’ she said, ‘I did a good job with the boy. Whatever happens, he’ll make it. He’s strong.’ “I looked at him. “Was she wrong?”

  Wrong? He was the strongest kid I’d ever met, but he had to realise it.

  He held my eye, and I felt the tension drain out of his body. I reached out and touched his hand. He didn’t seem to mind, so I took hold of it and squeezed.

  “I didn’t blame myself,” he said, “when my father left. He was a bastard, and I was glad he was gone. Then it was just Mum and me. And that’s how it’s been ever since. Until …”

  “She was proud of you. That’s what you have to hang on to. Guilt will kill you, kid.”

  “I never told her, Claire. In all those years …” He brushed his hair from his face and looked at the photograph. “From the day she threw his things out of the window. For all those years, I was proud of her, too.”

  I put my arm around him and pulled him towards me. He laid his head on my shoulder, and after a few moments I could feel him sob, as the healing tears began.

  29

  JUANA

  “After Ávila, his life … change. Maybe you say it finish.”

  Manuel Moreno watches the traffic surge past on the highway, as the lights change. It is one of his rare excursions across town and he is in an unusually talkative mood.

  And Claire is a good listener. For the entire trip over, she said nothing, preferring to allow the two old men to argue the rights and wrongs of the socialist political strategies of the past half century.

  Sometimes she would smile as one or other of the old combatants made some wild claim, but mostly she just drove the car and listened.

  Now, half an hour later, Harry Friedman is safely delivered to the “Carrington Street Jail”, and the return journey has left her free to ask questions, and draw the old man out.

  “Juana, she try to understan’. Like a sain’, she is. Patien’ …”

  The stroke has left its legacy in the old man’s speech. He slurs the endings of words, and sometimes she struggles to make out his meaning over the noise of the traffic, but she has learned not to ask him to repeat what he says. He is sensitive, and he is likely to stop altogether, and retreat into an embarrassed silence, if she brings it to his attention. And the story of Ardillo has captured her attention. She will not risk interrupting the flow. So she concentrates, and the old man tells the story.

  “For two years she try to love him. To show him it no matter. But he is … like he is forgotten how much he love her. He feels so sorry for himself, he shut her ou’. Like he shut everythin’ ou’. I remember, I watch him once …”

  The lights are green but the girl fails to notice, until a chorus of horns draws the fact to her attention. The old man pauses while she finds the gear, and the car jerks into motion. Then he seems to have lost his train of thought.

  “You watched him?” she prompts, but the old man is staring out of the window and does not appear to hear …

  19 May 1939

  Consuegra

  “Cloths of yellow and red hang from most of the windows of Madrid, as the parade moves down the main —”

  The account of the Nationalist victory parade is cut off in mid-sentence, as Manuel pulls the plug from the wall in frustration and the wireless dies. Beyond the window, Juana stands motionless beside the stone wall in the garden, looking across towards Conchita’s house.

  It stands empty, its windows curtained and its front door agape in an expression of inanimate surprise. She sleeps there still, but she spends as much of the day as possible away from the ghosts that haunt its empty rooms.

  Conchita’s mother has been gone for six weeks. She died on the day that the Nationalists rolled into Madrid, bringing an end to the resistance in the rest of Spain.

  The doctor said it was a fever, but those who knew blamed a broken heart …

  He moves towards the door and out into the garden.

  At the sound of his footsteps Juana turns, as if, perhaps, she is expecting someone else. She leans back onto the wall and pushes the dark hair away from her face.

  “My father wants me to move back to Asturias with the family. Now that it is safe …” She looks towards the house, where Ardillo sits in silence. “I’m thinking of going.”

  “But …” He follows the line of her gaze, and understands.

  “He doesn’t want me, Manuel. I reach for him and he pulls away. I talk to him and he refuses to hear. He’s given up. On life … I think he’s just waiting to die. And I can’t watch him do it.”

  “But he’s lost so much. His music, his —”

  “He’s not the only one, Mannie.” Her voice is hard and angry. “Everyone in Spain has lost ‘so much’! What makes him so damned special? What about Ramon? Or Francisco? They were fifteen years old, for God’s sake! They hadn’t even begun to live … What about you?”

  She looks pointedly across at Conchita’s empty house.

  He follows the line of her gaze, and shakes his head slowly.

  “What about m
e?” As he speaks, he stares at the house which had once meant so much to him. “I miss her like hell. I think I always will. But I don’t blame myself any more. I used to tell myself that it was because of me. That she wouldn’t have been in Ávila if Ardillo and I hadn’t joined the Lorca Group. But nothing is that simple, Juana. Nothing.

  “Conchita made her choice, the same as we did. She chose to be there with me. It was her decision. She was fighting for what she believed in, just like me. Just like you. I can hate myself all I want to, but it still won’t change the fact that she was there. Or that she died. But I didn’t kill her. I didn’t start the war, and I didn’t fire the bullet. I can live with that.”

  She nods, and touches his cheek gently. Then she looks back towards the house.

  “And Ardillo?”

  Manuel shakes his head.

  “I don’t know …”

  Later, when Juana has left, he goes towards the room where his brother sits. The door is open a few centimetres, and the room is in near-darkness.

  But there is enough light for him to see what is taking place.

  Ardillo sits in a chair by the window, but he is not looking out. His gaze is fixed on his useless hand, as if by sheer will he can mend the severed nerves, and make it move again. As his good hand grips the arm of the chair, the knuckles show white in the failing daylight.

  For a moment, standing there, Manuel wants to speak — to call out to his brother and break the tension — but something holds him.

  He watches in silence as Ardillo stands up and moves across to where the guitar leans silently against the wall. He watches his brother reach out and run a finger gently over the strings, so that the six notes ring out individually, resonating in the silence of the room. He sees the tension building in Ardillo’s shoulders as he closes his good hand around the neck of the instrument, and raises it above his head, as if he is about to dash it against the wall.

  But then he freezes.

  Slowly he lowers his arm, and places the guitar gently back against the wall. He sits again and stares out of the window.

  As Manuel turns to leave, he can hear the sound of his brother’s tears …

  “Abuelito … Wake up, old man, you’re home.”

  Alex opens the passenger door, and shakes his grandfather gently, to wake him. Claire has already dosed her door, and moved around to help him out of the car.

  “He fell asleep about twenty minutes ago. He was telling me about his brother, Ardillo.”

  Alex has eased the old man to his feet, and they support him a little as he begins to take in the fact of where he is, and moves towards the house.

  But he is still a little disoriented.

  “No lo vimos ahí …”

  The girl looks confused and frowns a question. The boy shrugs, and they drop back a pace, allowing the old man to move ahead.

  “He said, ‘We didn’t see him there’.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Don’t have a clue. He was probably dreaming. Or remembering. Sometimes it’s about the same thing with him …”

  Later, when they are alone, she puts an arm around his shoulders, and pulls herself close.

  “When did your grandfather get married?” He looks at her, trying to gauge the reason for the question. “It was just something he said.”

  He thinks for a moment.

  “Nineteen forty-two. August, I think …”

  She nods, filing the information. “To Juana?”

  “Yes. Look, I gave you the details of my family tree once before, if I recall. What’s this all —”

  “So they got married a year after Ardillo died.”

  “About … Why?”

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to fit together a few pieces.”

  “Well, when you do — or if he tells you anything — tell me. I’ve never been able to get him to open up on that subject. He just clams up, or starts talking about soccer or something. It’s like … I don’t know. Like he’s hiding something. It’s half a century ago, but …”

  He shrugs, and she lasses him.

  “Maybe it’s just personal.”

  “I guess so,” he replies. “But still …”

  30 July 1939

  Consuegra

  Her hand rests on the small round playing piece, but as she surveys the board, she realises her mistake, and lifts her hand.

  “No cheating!” Manuel laughs as he reaches for her hand. “You touch it, you move it. Who taught you this game, anyway?”

  But she doesn’t answer. She is looking at her hand in his. Suddenly he feels the gentle warmth of her touch, and releases her, but it is too late. What that touch has set in motion is too strong.

  As he leans across to kiss her, the board and the checkers slip from the table and scatter on the floor. Part of him resists, but it is a small part, and the aching loneliness of two long years overwhelms the warning whisper.

  After an age they move apart, and he touches her face.

  “Juana …” he begins. But the sudden look of horror on her face stops the flow of words.

  She is staring fixedly over his shoulder, and what she has seen causes such pain that he turns to look.

  In time to see his brother turn from where he is standing in the doorway and move away towards the back of the house …

  “No lo vimos ahi …”

  As the old man turns in his sleep, the whispered words escape him, and his reaching hand knocks the half-full glass from the bedside table.

  It bounces and rolls, sending out a stream of water which soaks slowly into the old carpet.

  30

  ESCAPE CLAUSE

  MAX’S STORY

  Tim’s little escapade at Rondo’s was the last straw.

  The ironic thing is that this time it probably wasn’t even his fault. From what I could gather, he was just sitting there, listening to the band and getting quietly drunk, when one of his “friends” — he didn’t even know the guy’s name — started a fight with someone who turned out to have a lot of “friends” of his own.

  By the time the police arrived, one of the bouncers had Tim in a headlock. Unfortunately, Tim’s rep had preceded him, and the magistrate wasn’t too concerned with finding out who was actually responsible for starting the fracas.

  And neither was the press.

  There was already a scrapbook of stories on the “wild child” of the band, but the conviction gave them the opportunity to rehash all the old copy, and it read like your typical account of a downhill slide.

  Which was the last thing we needed at the delicate stage of negotiations we’d reached.

  I know. That sort of publicity never hurt the Stones, or INXS, or AC/DC. And it’s actually part of the image for most heavy metal bands. It goes with the tattoos and the “who-gives-a-damn-about-anything-anyway?” attitude.

  But that wasn’t the image we were after, and Symonds, given a choice between image rehabilitation and radical surgery, reached for the scalpel — in the form of “escape clause” 38B (sub-section c), which dealt, in legalistic terms, with “bringing the name of the group into disrepute” and “the abuse of narcotics, amphetamines, alcohol or other mind-altering substances”.

  On the one hand, I could understand his attitude. There was a corporate fortune at stake, and this was one solution to the problem that Tim represented. But it wasn’t the only solution. Tim needed help, but he wasn’t a lost cause. And to cut the kid loose when he was on the slide, while it might save the deal, could spell disaster for him.

  And not only financially. I wasn’t sure what Tim’s mental state was at the time, and I was a hell of a lot closer to the kid than Symonds or his lawyers — or some other “faceless” movers on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

  We owed it to him to try. After all, it was the position our publicity had put him in that had started him on the slide in the first place.

  That was the way I put it to Symonds. Who of course di
dn’t see it that way.

  “What we did, Max,” he said, in that supercilious tone that he uses when he wants to make you feel like a junior “gopher”, “was to give the ungrateful little shit a chance at the big-time. If he couldn’t cut it, that’s not our fault. Or our responsibility. He goes.”

  There was no room for compromise, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say, anyway. But he wasn’t finished. He had to twist the knife.

  “Now you can break it to him, or I can. But if you do it, make sure you let him know that our case is airtight, and all he’ll achieve if he tries to fight it will be to blow any of the money he hasn’t already drunk away on useless legal fees. We start auditioning for a new keyboard player on Monday.”

  CHRISSIE’S STORY

  I called around, but Tim wasn’t in. Or he wasn’t answering the intercom.

  I called his mobile but it was switched off, so I left a few words on his service. Then I scribbled Call me — Chrissie on the back of a Visacard docket and shoved it into his letterbox, but I wasn’t sure he’d do anything about either message.

  I knew him — probably better than anyone. He wasn’t as tough as he tried to make out, and what Symonds had done could easily send him over the edge.

  So after making it halfway home, I had second thoughts. I did a U-tum over a double line, and went back.

  I parked in the street where I could see the entrance to the apartment block, reclined the seat, and waited.

  For maybe an hour.

  When he came out, I almost missed him. It’s not easy to concentrate on watching nothing for that length of time, and I was drifting away when I caught a movement in the doorway.

  By the time I climbed out of the car and ran across the road, he was already in his car, and I had to bang on the window before he realised I was there. He hit a button and the window slid down, but he didn’t really look at me. He was revving the engine slightly, as if he was impatient to go, and suddenly I couldn’t think of a thing to say.