‘Please,’ I said, running up to him. ‘My bag’s been stolen.’ And I explained what had happened.
Far from bursting into action, though, the guard – a young man with a premature paunch and thin beard meant to make him look older – pulled out a small clipboard from inside his jacket and started jotting down some notes.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, exasperated.
‘I’ll need to write a report,’ he said.
Suppressing an urge to strangle him, I wondered aloud if going after the criminals might not be a better idea.
‘No chance of catching them now,’ he said with a cynical, knowing smile. ‘They’re professionals.’
And did part of their scam involve buying him off? I wondered.
‘Come with me,’ the guard said. ‘The office is just over here.’
I knew I was going to need his pieces of paper if I wanted to report any of this later on, but images of the Andalusians scrambling away with my things, then raiding my bank account, selling my credit-card details and identity to the mafia – whatever – flooded my mind. I needed to get out there and run after them. Or just run, burn off the anger coursing through my body. Not sit quietly in a smoky office while someone looking like a heavy-metal fan in a uniform took down my details.
Without saying a word I took off, leaving him behind with his clipboard as I ran to the main entrance, ignoring his calls for me to return. There was just a chance I might catch sight of them. But the late-evening rush hour was in full force, people streaming through the main doors to catch their commuter trains to the outlying towns, or the last AVE to Madrid, and I could barely move through the crush. My eyes darted in all directions as I scanned the crowd. If only I could catch sight of that stupid white hat again.
Outside, the evening lights were coming on, determined bodies pushing forward against me in a tidal wave of end-of-work stress. I was going in the wrong direction, I was in their way. Rage flared as I brushed heavily past bulky shoulders and linked arms, handbags and laden trolleys. Feet pattered past me like an army of ants. No way through, no one to help. I knew the Cádiz couple had gone by now. Out of the building and away, slipping down side alleys, squeezing on to a bus, counting my money. Only an hour before I’d been to a cash machine and taken out a larger amount than usual to invite Kiki for dinner once I arrived in Madrid. Now someone else would be feasting at my expense.
I crouched down against a wall as the crowds passed me by, rushing and charging while I sank into a quiet hole. In the end I knew none of it really mattered: the credit cards could be cancelled and new ones sent out, a new passport could be issued, and the money – well, the money was gone. There was no way of getting it back now. I felt exposed, though, and cheated, cursing myself for being so unaware that I could be robbed from under my very nose. My guts churned as I repeatedly played out how I might have caught them had I only turned round at the right moment.
I began to realize there was something more pressing to be dealt with, though. I had my train ticket for the following morning – there was no chance of changing it now – but apart from loose change, I had nothing to get by with that night. No money and passport meant no hotel and nothing to eat. I was stranded, and facing a hungry night in Saragossa.
For a moment I thought of calling friends for help. Perhaps someone could wire some money to me – but the credit had run out on my mobile phone and the banks would be firmly closed till the morning. I knew no one in Saragossa, not a single contact there, nobody I could call on in an emergency. Salud was abroad and out of reach, most of my friends were away on holiday. Even if I could get in touch with them they would be unable to do anything. I had nothing but what I was standing in, a small leather rucksack filled with dirty clothes, and four euros sixty-six in my trouser pocket.
A few moments later most of that, too, had gone after a quick call to the bank from a phone box. This time the man on the other end had wanted to offer sympathy but I had to cut him short, fearful that my change would run out before the cards were stopped. I stepped out into the oven-heat of late evening, the last light of day fading behind faceless buildings. Still the rush, still the crowds.
I drifted away from the station towards the centre of the city, as if a solution might be found by the act of moving. My legs ached as I came down from the adrenaline rush, my senses aware of little more than the heavy pacing of my feet on the pavement.
Energy seemed to drain from me as though from a leaking tap. It wasn’t the money, or the thought of sleeping rough. Rather, it was that I’d been picked out as a target; I felt vulnerable and alone. I longed to slip, ghost-like, through the streets and houses and disappear.
Headlamps scrambled in my vision into a mesh of streaming fireflies. As I inhaled the exhaust fumes I felt a tightening, dipping sensation in my stomach, my lungs objecting to the foul hot air. Without thinking I turned off the main avenue and into the dark, shadows leaping out from the gaps between the cars parked in tight rows down the length of the tunnel-like street.
An elderly man stepped out of a doorway, and with dulled reactions I crashed into his side as he turned in my direction. With a start I looked up to catch his shocked white-haired head glaring up at me indignantly.
‘Pero ¡bueno!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered after an embarrassing pause. Wires crossing in my head, my Spanish deserted me momentarily, a twisted combination of other half-forgotten languages trying to pass through my lips.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What, are you blind or something?’
‘I just—’
‘Look where you’re fucking going!’
And he charged off in a huff, staring back at me hatefully as I stood motionless, rubbing my arm where it had crashed into his shoulder. I could still smell the sweat on him, the sharpness of tobacco on his breath.
I walked on, down and away from the noise of the main drag,my eyes glancing up at the dirty, cracked blue and white tiles beneath rusty iron balconies jutting out from the buildings above. Strips of posters that had been eroded from the walls by the sun and wind criss-crossed in white and multi-coloured lines, half an eye from a politician seeking re-election, or the corner of full painted lips seductively selling kitchen bleach, just visible against the grimy coating on the stone walls. A young boy held a felt tip against one of the houses and tried to scrawl a word or a design, but threw the pen down into the gutter when it failed to make a mark. In the shadows of scaffolding erected against the facade of one of the buildings, a couple of bearded men with bloodshot eyes wearing smeared grey vests arranged pieces of cardboard and paper beneath them to provide a comfortable space in which to drink and spend the night. They laughed as I passed by, with forced retching cackles.
Smells drifted out of open kitchen windows from dozens of dinners being prepared, the steam lifting the promise of fried garlic, fresh bread and thick red wine into the early night air. I jingled the three inadequate coins left in my pocket and sighed, trying to push from my mind the fantasy of some stranger pitying me and taking me in for the night. Perhaps, I thought, I should just knock on someone’s door. I remembered how one night in England, years before, a young man had done just that to me. It was late – gone two o’clock – and he was walking back home from a night out with his friends. But, and this was the problem, he had no money for a taxi and desperately needed to go to the toilet. I let him in and showed him the bathroom, then went and made him a cup of tea, amused at the surreal situation of having a stranger shitting in my house in the early hours of the morning.
‘You’re a life-saver,’ he’d said into his mug before rushing back into the dark. I’d been on the point of offering him a lift home.
The problem was, at that moment I lacked his nerve.
The streets and buildings came to an abrupt end and I found myself next to a wide avenue and park area that lined the banks of the River Ebro, shadowy trees stretching along the road in the pale-pink street-lights. A stone bench beckoned an
d I sat down. There were fewer people here: the occasional jogger, women walking their dogs. I placed my rucksack beneath my head and lay down, careful that the few remaining items in my pockets didn’t fall out, trying to ignore the increasing complaints coming from my empty stomach. My limbs felt heavy against the rough stone, and my eyes flickered, unable to close properly as the robbery replayed itself ceaselessly inside my head.
The visit to Belchite earlier in the day seemed distant now, but the memory of the ruins returned to my mind: a littered landscape of destruction untouched and unrepaired in order to serve as a permanent reminder of the sweeping chaos of the Civil War. The shattered windows, pock-marked walls and crumbling roofs had been left as they had stood almost seventy years earlier, when Franco’s men gave up their defence of the little Aragonese town and tried to break through the circle of besieging Republican forces and get back to Nationalist territory. Out of six hundred, only around two hundred made it; the others were hunted down in the bleak desert landscape.
Belchite was one of the more visible remains of Spain’s fratricidal conflict, a reminder of the power of bullets, bombs and artillery against ancient stone and human life. The battle which had led to its destruction was one of several launched by the Republic against Franco as a means of diverting his troops away from the north coast, where over the spring and summer months of 1937 he had been steadily and methodically capturing territory that was cut off from the main Republican areas in the east and centre of the country. Madrid had held out against Franco after a lengthy and bloody siege at the end of 1936 and was still in Republican hands, although pressed against the front line in a tense stalemate. Nationalist forces, meanwhile, their energies now concentrated in the north and with considerable assistance from German and Italian troops, had successfully taken first the Basque Country, then Santander, and were soon to capture the remaining Republican region on the northern coast, Asturias.
Brilliantly thought out though the Republican diversionary offensive in Aragon was, the assault had been blighted by chaos and lack of coordination: artillery weapons couldn’t be fired because the wrong-sized shells had been sent; infantry columns had to stop dead in their tracks just miles from their objectives through insufficient back-up; lines were stretched; communications broke down. And as with most of these assaults, Franco’s forces were able to launch a strong counter-attack after initial defeats. By the end of August, the Republicans’ attempt to conquer Saragossa, once an important centre of anarchism, had got bogged down in the small town of Belchite, just over thirty kilometres from the Aragonese capital. Belchite had to be taken at all costs, more for reasons of morale than strategic importance, and Republican dignitaries would come up to watch proceedings from a safe distance as street by street and house by house their soldiers inched forwards.
The church of San Martín had once been a fine example of Mudéjar architecture. Complex geometric patterns in brick had wound up its octagonal bell tower and horseshoe arches had lined the nave. This place of worship became a fortress during the siege, however, being the strongest point from which to defend the town’s northern approach. The Republicans pounded it relentlessly. It had never been touched since.
From a distance it looked as though the elements had worn it away. Walking towards it through the rubble and smashed, deserted streets, I’d noticed a battered cone sitting on top of the tower like a child’s party hat, falling to one side as though the festivities had gone on too long and tiredness was beginning to set in. But as I got closer, I realized that the almost fuzzy effect came from the number of bullets that had been fired into the brickwork. It had been shot up to such an extent that it seemed to be melting in the heat, its edges losing their sharpness as it slowly disintegrated. Except that the process had been frozen, captured in the moment before collapse. Only odd glimpses of the original design work were visible, the rest shattered by the thousands of bullets and mortar shells sent hurtling into the walls. At the entrance, great wooden doors leaned precariously as though about to fall, the studded iron plates that covered them now peeling with rust. On one door someone had painted a homage: ‘Old town of Belchite, young boys no longer walk in your fields, nor shall we hear again the jotas that our fathers sang.’
Trade-union flyers were stuck to the walls, while on the outside of an old shop opposite you could still make out the words of advertisements painted in strong bold letters. Belchite had obviously been a pretty place once, a quiet little town caught in the front line of civil war. The mayor had been killed on one of the first days of the attack, a mortar blast knocking him dead as he held a rifle in his hands. Only days before he’d written to Nationalist troops in Saragossa that there was no hurry in coming to relieve them. ‘If death reaches us before you do it will be welcome.’
The colours now were all ochres, oranges and greys. Wooden beams that had once supported ceilings and floors leaned forlornly out of sighing walls. In the desolate silence, the only sound was the bells on the flocks of sheep grazing in the nearby fields of dry grass. Some houses were shattered or were just empty holes, others still retained a pristine and elegant facade but with the rest of the building missing, like a man with the back of his head shot off. Occasionally you caught a glimpse of scraps of faded blue wallpaper on the inside of what had been a bedroom or parlour – rare sparks of colour in a largely monochrome world. Beyond the town, at the end of a broken street, the flat Martian landscape of the Aragonese desert stretched for miles. In the overgrown central square the old village fountain still stood, dark paint flaking off its rusty heart. This would once have been a congregation point, a place of life. Now the ruins were mostly used by kids from the new town half a mile away, vodka bottles, empty cigarette packets and the smell of piss bearing witness to their late-night parties, despite warnings that the place was unsafe.
And so I had walked around for hours, hot and salty, the sound of a distant afternoon funfair in the new town blowing in on the wind. There were no other visitors to the ruins that day: Belchite was both a reminder and a symbol of forgetting.
Lifting myself up from the bench with a swirling head, trying to grip something that might give me balance, I wondered about going home, back to the farm, leaving all this, the downward path I seemed to have set myself upon. But thoughts of return left me just as empty. I would have nothing but questions and doubts if I went back now. Besides, I had a ticket to Madrid for the following day. That would be my next destination. After that, I would see.
With the setting of the sun the temperature had dropped rapidly, and I felt a chill about my upper arms as I sat in the dark. The atmosphere of the riverbank had changed as well – it was now populated not by the joggers of earlier but by single men walking alone, casting hurried, nervous glances at one another in the shadows with a curious mixture of fear, desire and aggression. As I watched, one of them, a short, elderly man, walked over and sat next to me on the bench. He let out a deep breath, then, staring out across the river, shuffled on his backside towards me and, before I could react, roughly placed his hand on my crotch. I stood bolt upright and looked down at a horrified face, dark whiskers sprouting from plump greasy cheeks.
‘¡Subnormal!’ he shouted at me before I could say anything. I picked up my rucksack and walked away, heart beating with a weary thud.
I wandered aimlessly through the streets for another couple of hours until I found myself unexpectedly in the centre of the old quarter, in the alleyways surrounding the city’s imposing cathedral. Bars were already starting to close, the main square deserted now. For a while I stood still, watching the emptying scene from a shady corner of an abandoned building. As in Belchite earlier in the day, there seemed to be piles of rubble everywhere where houses had once stood, only here it was neglect, not bombs, that had brought destruction. As the finely dressed of Saragossa headed off to their flats and country villas for the night, a different population moved in to fill the vacuum: men with large boots, long hair and skin-tight black trousers, their shoulder
s hunched as they swung bottles by their sides, talking in low voices. The sharp sweet smell of dope drifted in the air. Hidden by the darkness, I felt unable to move, my nerves vibrating like a tuning fork.
From across the square came the sound of shutters being pulled down over the doors and windows of restaurants and bars, their metallic echo like rattling chains. In the distance, occasional cars drifted down barren avenues. From the street I could see lights going off, curtains being drawn across open windows to let the cool air in and keep the night out. I pulled a dirty shirt from my rucksack and put it on over my T-shirt. But still I stayed in my spot, immobilized and fearful, unable to decide where to go or what I should do. I was tired – the idea of walking all night seemed less attractive now. But if I was to rest it would have to be somewhere safe. There was an uneasy air of threat and danger about the world I was watching.
I leaned my head against the broken plaster of the wall that was supporting me, half closing my eyes as I tried to find the energy to move on, a childish hope telling me that if I wished hard enough everything would be all right again. I ignored it, resolving to stay where I was until I fell asleep. There was no point going on any more.
‘Buenas noches.’
A voice spoke behind me. Wearily I turned and saw two policemen standing in the shadows, peering at me inquisitively. Long truncheons hung from their hips, black leather holsters wrapped around their pistols. One of them had a torchlight and was shining it around my face.
I sensed that in their minds I was likely to be either a dealer or a buyer. At that time of night in the city centre there seemed to be few other categories of people about. I had no passport, so if they asked for identification I was going to be in trouble. Memories flooded back of being arrested by the Moroccan soldiers near Ceuta.
They stared at me for a moment, trying to work out what type of a person I was: a pause before either striking down or letting me go.
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