In the solitude of the day, Miguel was happy yet joyless. The civil war drew its lines through the home and ran through him. His father and brother no longer spoke to each other; his mother, racked by anguish, passed on the little that each had to say. The unspoken, hidden presence in the cowshed was a permanent threat which, unknown to him, his mother had used to patch up this fragile truce.
‘If it wasn’t for Antonio, the militiamen would be here every day as they are at Matanzas and El Vicente,’ was her reproach to her unbending husband in private. ‘They’d find the señorita, be sure of that. Your son is our protection, salvation … I pray to the Virgin every night for him. And you – you want to drive him out.’ Though he refused to recognize the first words of criticism she had ever addressed to him, he never again tried to force his son from the house. Other events would soon bring that about.
Caught in the silent cross-fire, Miguel fell silent too; the conflict of loyalties paralysed him. Split between father and brother, he felt threatened and helpless. Nubs of anxiety swelled on the underside of his muteness: soon he came to believe that each was silently censuring him for his betrayal, the failure to give total allegiance. Guilt flowed along the battle lines drawn through his heart. He’d been found wanting in the eyes of men.
Crouched in the shade of an olive, his sling to hand, he knew that even this new place in the world depended each night on his father’s glance when he brought in the small herd. Silence was the only praise he could expect; a curt word or two would prove his inadequacy. He braced himself; approval lay in that silent gaze. He had to succeed – and succeed as the man his father expected: he looked after the goats as though his life depended on them. If that meant stealing a bit of fodder here or there, he was ready to do it. The goats had never looked so good. Little by little, as the lack of reproof confirmed his success, he became less fearful of the evening return. But he was never entirely free of anxiety: the struggle to prove himself was always undermined by the fear of failing. And what he had won during the day served for nothing in the conflict of loyalties by night.
The rumble of artillery behind the mountains was soon heard. He knew – Antonio didn’t hide it from him – that the enemy was advancing. Antonio said they would fight to the end; the trenches being dug on the village slopes were the proof. Franco had been at the gates of Madrid for over two months and the capital still resisted. But when one cold February dawn the enemy attacked from the least expected direction, Miguel saw the frightened militiamen fleeing from the mountains to avoid being cut off; all the efforts of Antonio and the other trade union leaders could not stop them.
That evening, late, Antonio came home exhausted. What he said to his parents Miguel never knew. What he said to him, waking him up, Miguel never forgot: ‘The struggle here is over, Miguelito. Tomorrow the fascists will arrive. But this isn’t the end – it’s only the beginning …’ The big cities, he went on, were anti-fascist strongholds, elsewhere the landworkers had a greater revolutionary spirit than those in Benalamar, the fruit of harsher struggles. The anarcho-syndicalist columns on the Aragon front and in Madrid were strong. ‘The revolution will triumph. But until then I have to leave you to fight with our companions.’ He took hold of his hand as he used to when Miguel was small. ‘You’re too young to come with me. It breaks my heart that you’ll have to live under the fascists. But it won’t be for long. Nothing will happen to you, but my life is in danger. I want to fight – and die if I have to – face to face with the enemy. If I don’t come back, Miguelito, you’ll know that I died for what I believe in. Not our father’s belief in the landlord’s rights, no, but the right of every worker to the land that he works.’
‘But you’ll come back, Antonio, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Miguelito, when our revolution triumphs, I hope so.’
‘You’ll come back and I’ll be waiting for you …’ Suddenly the image came to the boy’s mind: ‘And you’ll tap three times on the shutters with the branch of the fig and I’ll know it is you.’
‘Yes. I’ll climb the tree and tap.’
‘Three times, Antonio. I’ll be waiting. I’ll let you in.’
‘Yes. Now go back to sleep.’
When he awoke Antonio had gone; and he knew in his heart that he would never return.
32
As he reached the square he broke into a run: no one would say he wasn’t a good look-out for the eight pesetas he earned a day. He’d been doing it for three years, and the trot down from the cave was welcome, taking his mind off his empty belly; up in his solitary outpost he could never forget the hunger. Three bitter years since the war ended and a Red Cross telegram, which the town hall clerk read to his father, broke the news which his father passed on without comment, as though he had considered Antonio dead since the day he left. For days Miguel hadn’t believed it. Antonio had promised! Only his mother’s staunchless flow of tears convinced him. Somewhere, in the nebulous regions of the soul, his anger at Antonio’s original flight returned. His brother had abandoned him: left him to stare alone at the blood-stained boulder, left him among those who would, if they could, have shot him. Thank God, something told him, Antonio had escaped; but when José, his goatherding companion, taunted him with Antonio’s flight, the rage rose destructively from deep inside: Antonio would never come back, he didn’t want him back. Antonio had failed him.
The rage brought guilt. Secretly he prepared the señorita’s hiding place in the cowshed, knowing that Antonio would need it. How could he want his brother’s obliteration? Miguel wanted nothing more than his brother’s return.
With the news of his death on the Ebro, the rage was more intense. From the lookout post, the sling cracked in the air and stones ricocheted and clattered down the side of the hill. Deadly bullets. Rocks, scraggly rosemary, thyme, died in the hail. Why had he trusted him? His arm turned in a frenzy, spewing stones into the sun. Who was he trying to kill? Anyone, everyone … His brother’s killers … In the bedrock beneath awareness lay fear: had his own rage killed Antonio? Obliterated him? Suddenly, without knowing why, he flung the sling to the back of the cave and began to cry. The terrible loss was too grievous. Antonio was never coming back.
For weeks he lived in a greyness from which he couldn’t rouse himself. He sat in the cave staring unseeingly at the road below. The señorita, the inspectors, were unimportant: he’d sat there these months waiting, hope against hope, for Antonio; stayed awake at night waiting for the tap, tap, tap on the shutters. Days and nights were shaped, given meaning by hope. And now there was nothing.
33
Three years of peace, three years of drought. Few escaped the hunger now. Bursting through the olive mill’s door he shouted: ‘A car! The inspectors!’ The foreman grabbed the donkey pulling the millstone. Labourers leapt on the wicker baskets of olives and barrels of oil and carried them to their underground hiding place. Miguel knew his next task: to run down the track to turn back the sharecroppers bringing up olives on their donkeys. The señorita’s mill had an official quota of oil it could produce for the village alone. But at night the lorries left with black-market barrels for the town, leaving only the rancid last crushing for the village.
This particular morning the señorita was in the mill. Before Miguel rushed off again, she caught him for a moment with her eyes: ‘Good boy!’ they said. He asked nothing more of her. But his eyes were blank.
When he’d finished warning the sharecroppers, he made himself scarce; the rest of this business had nothing to do with him. He was hungry, had been hungry for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to have a full stomach. When, each evening, he laid his day-wage on the table he knew there was nothing it would buy; the village shops were empty. At home they were down to the last half-sack of maize, and even if it rained they wouldn’t be able to plant because no seed corn was left. He longed for Easter when his mother would make him and Ana the only egg they tasted all year – an egg which curdled his weak stomach and sent him out the back to vomi
t. Every other day of the year his mother took the eggs down to Torre del Mar to exchange on the black market for whatever she could find; that was all that was keeping them alive.
Was this what the war and the killing had been for? Was this why Antonio had died? So that everyone except the señorita and a few others should starve?
That evening his father stopped him by the door. ‘Son, tomorrow you go to your uncle’s in the sierra. Be ready at noon.’ He turned on his heel without another word.
There was no time to say anything. Miguel was stunned. He saw a man on a donkey climbing the track, a woman in black following him, and then the land slid away, fell from him. Familiar objects stood out in misty separation, a posed isolation disconnected them from him. His guts drained. It suddenly seemed as though he didn’t exist, as though he were a child again. Everything that had been gained, the small prominence he had believed secure, disintegrated; the loss was a part of him that had been ripped out.
What had he done to deserve this?
Stocky and silent, his uncle walked ahead; there was too much suffering, too much pain to take heed of a boy’s drawn face, his hurt. He would learn soon enough that he was in luck. The old man let his mind empty, become as blank as the vault of the sky; it was no use thinking, no use feeling, nothing would be changed by it.
The boy plodded behind. It was a five-hour walk along mule tracks to the farm, which lay in a fold on the side of the mountains. Soon they passed the limits of Miguel’s wanderings and he held back his tears. The gnarled olives pointed, reminded him of his loss, and he wanted to turn and run home. But in his mother’s tearful eyes he had seen acceptance, defeat. Momentarily he hated her for what she had agreed to, rejected her for not siding entirely with him; and then, finding that he was rejecting the one person he loved, that without her the loss was insuperable, his guilt overwhelmed him and he hated himself. Everything turned back on him. Unsure of his right to exist, he recognized himself in his insufficiency. How else to explain the loss but to blame himself?
They reached the farmstead at dusk; his uncle had said barely a couple of words and, with not many more, he sent the boy out the next morning with the herd. Up on the mountainside the loss was confirmed: the village had vanished as completely as if it had never existed. He began to cry. No one would hear or know or care. An absence torn from himself, he was no more to anyone than a boulder, a stone, an object as inanimate as the mountain itself. He lay on a rock and cried for a long time.
When, at last, he half-opened his eyes he saw the herd had spread over the mountainside. He scrambled after the goats, numb and yet fearful that something might have happened to one of them, incapable of escaping even this sense of failure. Wildly, he hurled stones at them from his sling and, as the herd reassembled and he saw that his absence had not caused a disaster, began to take relief in the movement of his arm, the accuracy of his aim. For the rest of the day he kept himself from looking behind where the few isolated farmsteads, white in the distant hills, reminded him of what he no longer could see, and kept the herd moving towards the summit.
He returned to the farmstead that night and for a few nights more until his uncle was satisfied; then he was told to take the herd on its summer migration. He left the lonely cottage without regret except for the food which was plentiful. The farmstead was irrigated and his uncle was selling his wheat on the black market while his sons were busy on contraband deals. It was a family richer than Miguel’s, which could well afford to keep him as a poor relative without pay. But its small comforts were no substitute for the home and the village he had lost; without them it was a matter of indifference where he was.
He set out one dawn knowing he wouldn’t return until the autumn, three months away. In the high mountain passes, where there was still grass, the sun burnt down by day and at night it was cold. Wrapped in a skin, he slept huddled among the goats, barely distinguishable from the packed herd. Following the goats in the heat of the day, he kept up at first a self-recriminatory monologue; but after a time even that dried and his mind became baked, hard as the volcanic rock of his surroundings, and it was only in dreams that he rediscovered his loss.
There was no future. Had he thought that this life would continue another two years, he might have revolted. But instead of the future there existed only the past, the past as the future for which he yearned. A return to what he had known. Another of his age might have assumed that this exile was evidence of the past’s irrecuperable ending and sought to escape what had rejected him. He waited. It was always this way: the intimate meaning came from outside. Things happened, others decided and his life was made. He waited for the magical appearance of his father on the rocky skyline one day to call him home as inexplicably as he’d sent him away and there to receive forgiveness. Even this numbed expectation dried up at last.
Instead it was another goatherd who appeared one morning and who stood there, as immobile as a rock, staring at him. In surprise, Miguel threw up his arms and began to run forward; then, remembering himself, he walked slowly, gravely towards the man. He saluted the goatherd, from whose matted hair sharp eyes peered at him. The man made a sound, a squeal. Not understanding, Miguel repeated his greeting; in reply, the goatherd capered like one of his charges, pointing with his fingers at his head. A half-wit, Miguel realized, but it still took him some minutes to comprehend that his companion – the first human he had seen for two months – was also a deaf-mute. Better than nothing, Miguel thought, feeling the pull of unused muscles as he smiled; what else could one expect?
They let their herds graze in common and remained together the rest of the summer. Miguel grew attached to his companion, who lived with the ease of a goat in these barren mountains, who knew instinctively the best pastures to make for, who on a hungry impulse would slaughter a goat and roast it over a fire. They communicated by squeals and signs and occasional caperings and gradually, through the dusty dryness, the boy felt himself stirring: he was alive again, but in a different, animallike way. One evening, seeing himself in a piece of glass the deaf-mute had found, he discovered he looked little different from his companion: matted hair and half-mad, cunning eyes staring out of a drawn, sullen face. All the next day Miguel refused the grunts and squeals and would only talk to his companion, who watched him suspiciously as though he had gone mad. But there was no alternative other than to set off alone again with the herd and he preferred a half-human companionship to that unending solitude. Together they continued their voyage over those infinite wastes, their primitive contact unheard and unseen by anything living but the goats they so closely resembled, until the first frosts came and it was time to separate.
34
He had left his uncle’s farmstead without regrets and returned to discover its comforts: food and a bed and people who talked. If it was not home it was second best. For the village fair he got a couple of days off, and ran most of the way home. The joy at being back was so great that he didn’t immediately notice his family’s reduced straits: hunger gripped them and his mother showed its effects. Miguel’s experiences were distant to her. She chided him for his unkempt appearance without taking account of the reasons for it, and wept for him among many when she prayed for them all. She asked if he got enough to eat – what else was there to ask? – and he said yes, seeing the small ration of corn bread in her hand.
‘Well, they have land and water of their own, they produce for their needs,’ she said.
‘More than that, for the black market as well.’
‘Ay! The black market. The señorita and the mayor are making their fortunes, as though they needed it.’
His mother’s despair was widely shared. He went back to the mountains heavy-hearted. He seemed to belong nowhere now. Either he or his home had changed too much for him to return to the past he had known; but his uncle’s farmstead was not his home, he had no future there. Obscurely he came to realize one thing: he would not follow in his father’s footsteps. He watched his uncle. Though the earth
was poor, there was an abundance of water from springs in the mountain, and by working from dawn until nightfall, his uncle had paid for the farm in ten years. As taciturn as Miguel’s father, he was a great deal shrewder, the nephew observed. He controlled everything, nothing was done without his command. Even the outlaws, when they came down in winter, accorded him their cautious respect, knowing they were dependent on prosperous peasants like him for their security and supplies. And he served his ‘guests’ with shrewd peasant eyes, knowing full well where his interests lay.
That spring Miguel asked his uncle to let him stay on the farmstead to work. The old man’s eyes showed a moment’s surprise at the audacity of the request. Then, angrily, he asked the boy what he thought he was there for, turning away before Miguel could speak. The dependency, in which charity replaced wages, was brutal enough for the boy to understand: it must be escaped one day.
Resentfully, when the time came, he took the herd off, not caring what happened to it, no longer expecting miracles. The barren mountains, the scattered herd under the transparent blue sky, reflected nothing – nothing of himself. He needed something to cling to, some goal intimately his own in whose realization he could imagine himself depending on no one, self-sufficient.
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