by Carlos Alba
The coffins containing my grandparents’ remains were sitting on the ground next to their graves, draped with ornate purple sashes that would be used to lower them into the ground. The priest looked around expectantly.
‘I’m the only mourner,’ I explained.
I’d been disappointed that Mama and Pablito had decided not to attend. Mama had become more tired and frail since Papa’s death, and I hadn’t really expected her to make the journey, but my brother’s refusal was a surprise. He’d sold his flat and moved in with Mama, and he’d held down a job in a call centre for the past year. I thought he, more than I, would have wanted to make this gesture, but he told me he was starting to get his life back on track and was worried that travelling to Spain would stir up memories of things he’d sooner forget.
Four men, who looked like labourers appeared at the gate and moved slowly towards us. They stopped a few yards away and stood with their backs to the stone wall, their heads bowed respectfully. One, who was wearing a baseball cap, removed it and clutched it tightly to his chest.
I’d provided the priest with as much personal detail about my grandparents as I had been able to collect, which wasn’t much. He explained that he would say a few words about their lives. Since I’d refused the option of a funeral Mass, it would be a short ceremony, consisting of a scriptural verse and a committal prayer, at which point the coffins would be lowered into the ground. He would then recite an intercession – which, he explained, was a prayer to God on behalf of my grandparents – followed by the Lord’s Prayer and a blessing.
‘Would you like me to deliver the service in English?’ he asked.
‘No, in Spanish, please. This isn’t for me – it’s for my father,’ I explained.
His manner was sympathetic, and he took nothing in my knowledge of the Catholic liturgy for granted. He asked if I wanted to conclude the service by taking part in a song, affirming hope in the resurrection, but I politely declined.
As he began the service I became aware of a woman entering through the gates, moving hurriedly across the cemetery. As she moved closer I recognised her from the photographs she’d emailed me. Our eyes met and we smiled at one another.
The priest spoke relatively slowly, but still at a pace that was too quick for me to comprehend, although I’d started night classes in Spanish a few months before and I was already capable of holding basic conversations. I found that much of it was a matter of recognising and liberating what was already buried in my subconscious.
The builders stepped forward and lifted the purple sashes, then lowered one of the coffins into the hole in the ground, an act that appeared to require little exertion, given that it contained only a few bones. They then lifted the other coffin and repeated the procedure. Father Carballo continued speaking as he dropped a handful of dirt on top of the wooden boxes.
I’d spent the past two years harrying, arguing and lobbying municipal officialdom. I’d filled in countless forms, travelled thousands of miles and spent a great deal of money to get to this point. The process had consumed much of my life, yet the burial lasted no longer than a few minutes.
The builders nodded respectfully and sloped off. The priest patted me gently on the shoulder before taking his leave. The woman walked around the graveside until she was quite near me. She had a beautiful face with a warm, intimate smile.
‘Hola, primo,’ she said as we embraced.
‘Hola, Montserrat.’
Although we’d never met, I felt I knew her well already. In our email exchanges it had become clear that there were significant differences in our understandings of the past, and in particular of how our grandparents had died.
She’d informed me early on that Paco, her father, had survived the war and had died only the year before Papa’s death. I in turn had told her everything I knew about Papa’s life – what little I’d learned about his fighting for the Republic in Lerida, the small details of our grandparents’ murder by a Fascist firing squad, our fathers’ flight to Barcelona, the months of squalid, frozen subsistence followed by Paco’s disappearance.
After Papa died, I’d convinced Mama to fill in the gaps of what I knew of his wartime experiences, and while I suspected the story she told was an abridged version, at least it had allowed me to piece together how he’d got from Barcelona to Tangier, where they met.
He and the Gypsy girl had left the city as the Fascist troops entered, staging a mass rally and victory parade in the Plaça de Sant Jaume, which housed the Generalitat, the Catalan parliament. The pair had set off on foot, cold and hungry, spending days walking along the dirt-track roads that linked the fishing villages of the Costa Brava. They slept in ditches, clinging to one another for warmth, and they begged and stole what little food they could. They passed through devastated villages lined with the hollow, bombed-out shells of buildings, whose cobbled streets were strewn with mangled masonry, abandoned possessions and rotting corpses. They couldn’t risk hitching rides with passing cars and trucks because they didn’t know who might stop and quiz them about their identity.
Papa had worked out a cover story for himself: he was a Franquista, travelling to work for his brother, a blacksmith in Almeria. But the Gypsy girl spoke only Catalan, the regional language banned by Franco, which would immediately identify her as a rojo.
Exhausted and close to starvation, they were eventually picked up by a party of Falangist soldiers near the town of Tarragona, less than seventy miles from Barcelona. From there they were taken to a military garrison, where they were locked in neighbouring cells. On the first night Papa heard the anguished screams of the Gypsy girl as she was repeatedly raped. In the early hours of the morning he heard a single gunshot, followed by silence.
Papa remained in the cell for several more weeks. He was given a single daily meal of soup – water flavoured with a small piece of ham and chickpeas – and he was questioned by a succession of junior officers, to whom he repeated his cover story about his brother in Almeria. But clearly they didn’t believe him.
‘Were they violent to him?’ I had asked Mama.
She hadn’t responded. My mind returned to my childhood and the discussion I’d had with Papa after I’d failed to stand up for Jorge at school, when he described the visit of the secret police to the boy’s home in Chile and the abduction of his father. I realised he’d been drawing on his own experiences.
Then one morning, Mama had explained, Papa was woken early, bundled into a truck and driven to a large building in the middle of the countryside which had the appearance of a stately home, but which turned out to be an orphanage run by Jesuits.
It was to be his home for the next four years, where he was taught to love God and Franco. Every morning he was ordered to give the Fascist salute, and if he refused he was beaten and given no food. The same fate awaited him if he spoke Catalan, or if he said anything that was deemed to be critical of Franco or the Catholic Church. He soon learned what to say and what not to say and how to behave if he wanted to survive.
When he was eighteen and legally old enough to leave the orphanage, he set off alone, with no family to care for him and no desire to return to his home village. The only place he could think of to settle was Tangier, where the Gypsy girl had urged him to go four years before.
Montserrat’s father had also been unwilling to discuss the war in any detail. She’d told me how, after Paco had left my father in Barcelona to look for food, he’d been arrested by the Assault Guard and thrown in jail. Many others in his position, vagrants suspected of having fought for Anarchist militias, were shot by the Communists, but with the city on the brink of invasion by Fascist troops, the senior officer had taken a lenient view and set him free after holding him in a cell for a few weeks.
From there he returned to the cave in the park where he and my father had been hiding out, but naturally his brother was gone. Paco fled the city and travelled north, on a treacherous, frozen, hungry journey over the Pyrenees and into France, where he hitched lifts along th
e coast until he arrived at Marseille. There he boarded a boat for Mexico.
But I had known instinctively that Montserrat was holding something back from me. Bad news.
Please, tell me, I had written. I’d rather know.
You said that when our fathers returned to Alguaire after the bombing of Lerida, they were told by villagers that their parents had been shot by Fascist soldiers?
She replied, That’s not what my father told me.
What do you mean? What were you told?
I didn’t heard from her for a couple of days. Please. I want to know, I had prompted.
She eventually wrote back. I was told that immediately before the Fascist shelling, our grandfather was caught by another villager carrying a lantern across the village square, which was forbidden at the time. It was during a blackout, when exposing light of any kind threatened to alert the enemy. There was an accusation that he did it to provide guidance for the Fascist troops, so that they knew where to aim their shells. The suggestion was that he was a secret Franquista. A traitor. After the village was shelled, he and our grandmother were hoisted to the top of the grain store and thrown to their deaths.
There was nothing in Collbató other than a couple of shops that were closed for the siesta, so we agreed to drive into the neighbouring town of Esparreguera a few miles away to find somewhere to talk. I followed her in my hire car into the bustling, modern town centre, and we found a bar. I thanked Montserrat for taking the trouble to come to the ceremony. I appreciated the gesture, I said. She told me she’d been at an academic conference in Paris the week before and had stayed on before flying back to Mexico City.
She placed her hands over mine and stared into my eyes, as though she was trying to draw something out. ‘This is a reunion, in a sense, for both of our fathers,’ she said.
I smiled and nodded.
I still felt embarrassed that my account of my father’s life was so scant. She knew more, but not much.
The waiter arrived with our coffees and we sat silently while he placed them on the table before us. Now that we were in the same room, rather than on the other side of the world from one another, I felt we could get beyond the bare historical facts.
‘Did you never wonder why your father refused to talk about his childhood and his upbringing?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever get the feeling he had something to hide?’
She frowned. ‘He would sometimes answer questions that I asked, but he rarely volunteered the information, and he seldom talked about the war. I could tell he was uncomfortable with it, so I never pushed him for answers though I did learn a little from him.’
I felt comforted that I’d finally met someone who’d shared my experiences, who’d witnessed the same dark silences that had blighted my childhood and my adult relationship with my father, but I was desperate to know more, to find out what else we had in common and what set us apart, how she’d coped with the burden of living with an event that had taken place thirty years before her birth, and whether she’d dealt with it any differently. I wanted to know if she she’d suffered in the same way I had. I wanted to feel vindicated, certain that I’d done everything I could to assuage my father’s anger, hurt, guilt, whatever it was that had made him so unhappy.
‘Did you find that his past, his suffering in the war, had a big influence on the way he behaved towards you?’
She continued to hold her hands over mine but the smile dropped slowly from her face, replaced with a frown.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean, did he do things that weren’t entirely . . . ?’
She continued to stare, and I felt suddenly uncomfortably self-conscious, ashamed that I should be raising negative thoughts about my dead father at such a time.
‘How did he treat your mother . . . I mean, did he . . . ?’
She turned her head like a confused dog, and her eyes crinkled.
‘What I mean is . . . was he angry all the time?’
Her smile returned, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. ‘No, not at all. He was a loving, beautiful man.’
I’d always imagined that my father’s reluctance to return to his homeland, to track down surviving members of his family, was motivated by fear. There was the fear of the enemy, but also, as he’d explained, fear of those supposedly fighting on the same side, who had turned against him and his brother. Perhaps I’d been wrong about that – perhaps he hadn’t been afraid – just ashamed of the sins of his parents. I suggested this to Montserrat and she agreed.
‘It doesn’t matter what side you fought on. People were scared and embarrassed, and they still are, more than seventy years on,’ she said. ‘The elderly people in the villages still know who behaved badly, who took advantage of the war to settle feuds and scores. To this day there are thousands who don’t want to talk about it, not because they can’t remember or because the memory is too painful, but because they or members of their family are killers.’
She recalled the terror that had gripped her father in 1981, when he watched television pictures of the attempted coup from their home in Mexico. Despite being six thousand miles away, he was as terrified as Papa as the events unfolded.
‘When that silly little general stood up in the Cortes, he shouted “Todos, estar en silencio.” “Everybody be quiet.” He meant for everyone in the chamber to be quiet, but a whole generation of Spaniards took his words literally. It set back the cause of reconciliation by twenty years, and even now people are afraid to talk about the war.’
We talked until our coffee went cold, so we ordered some more, and then that went cold as well. She spoke enthusiastically and tenderly about her two teenage daughters and about her husband, who was a dentist in Mexico City. I told her all about Ben, how he was studying politics and history at Edinburgh University, one of the best in Britain, and how proud I was of him. I made brief mention of Cheryl, but I didn’t go into detail. We’d only recently got back together, and I didn’t yet feel able to talk about my marriage easily and confidently.
It was getting dark, and we decided it was time to leave. Montserrat had to drive to Barcelona to catch a flight home. I was going to take a train to Malaga, from where I would take the bus to Algeciras and then travel by ferry across to Tangier. This had been my first trip away since I’d left the paper, and although I’d only been gone for a couple of days, I missed Cheryl and Ben and I wanted to be home.
We walked slowly along the pavement in silence until we arrived at our cars. We embraced and exchanged kisses and I promised to keep in touch. As she turned to leave, I grabbed hold of her arm. I could feel tears running down my face.
‘I visited that building. The grain store, where they were killed,’ I said.
She drew me close to her and wrapped her arms around my neck. ‘Did you?’ she asked gently.
‘No, I mean before I knew that’s where they died. I felt drawn to it the moment I saw it. I knew there was something significant about it. Don’t ask me why.’
She rubbed the back of my head soothingly until I stopped crying.
‘I really need to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll miss my flight.’
I gripped her arm again before she could pull away.
‘Was our grandfather a traitor?’ I asked sobbing.
‘My father insisted he wasn’t. He said it was untrue, a conspiracy by other villagers who had a vendetta against him. But these things happened. It was a civil war. Even if our grandparents were Fascists, our fathers fought bravely for the Republic. That is the memory that you must hold on to.’
23
The night journey to Malaga was cold and monotonous. The air-conditioning in the train was turned up high, and despite numerous requests to the guard, nothing was done about it. Outside was pitch darkness, which meant I couldn’t distract myself with the passing scenery. I sat shivering in my overcoat, exhausted but unable to sleep.
It was mid-morning when the train pulled into Malaga, and as I stepped on to the platform I felt the
soothing comfort of the sun’s rays on my face. I walked the short distance to the bus station and bought a ticket, pleased that I had managed the entire transaction in Spanish. I had almost an hour to kill before the next bus for Algeciras left, so I went into a small cafeteria across the road. It was small and functional, sparsely furnished with a few aluminium tables and chairs and thick with cigarette smoke. A few elderly men were seated silently at the bar, eating small dishes of chipirones a la plancha and slices of tortilla. I bought a coffee and sat at one of the tables. A radio, tuned to a local music station, was playing in the background. A song came on that I recognised. I hadn’t heard it for years, probably not since I was a child, but I knew the singer’s voice, unmistakably, as that of Manolo Escobar.
By the time I boarded the coach I couldn’t keep my eyes open, though I was frequently jolted awake as we chugged heavily over bumps in the coastal roads. It was late afternoon when we pulled into Algeciras, a functional freight port and the gateway between Europe and Africa. On the dirty streets prostitutes openly plied their trade and gangs of young Arab men stood on street corners, smoking cigarettes and offering passers-by Moroccan money at cheap exchange rates.
I made my way to the ferry terminal for the journey across the Strait of Gibraltar. It seemed like an indecently short trip for such a jarring cultural clash. Within forty minutes I’d left behind the safety and affluence of Europe and was thrust into a buzzing, cacophonous whirl of djellabas, donkeys, palm trees and mosques.
I wandered along the Boulevard Mohammed V, the unkempt main drag of Tangier that ran along the seashore. The city was crumbling and dilapidated. The few new structures that existed remained unfinished and barely serviceable. Hotels on the seafront hinted at a former grandeur, but they had not been maintained. This was not the cosmopolitan playground of the rich and cultured in which Papa had worked, and I wondered what he would have made of it all now.