I never quite understood why David Martín decided to return to Barcelona during the last days of the war, in January of this year, 1939. The morning he left the house in S’Agaró and disappeared, I thought I would never see him again. When Daniel was born, I left behind the young girl I’d once been and the memory of the time we’d spent together. I’ve lived these years looking no further than caring for Daniel, being the mother I should be for him, and protecting him from a world I have learned to see through David’s eyes. A world of darkness, of resentment and envy, of meanness and hatred. A world in which everything is false and everyone lies. A world that shouldn’t deserve to survive, but a world into which my son has come and from which I need to protect him. I never wanted David to know of Daniel’s existence. The day my son was born, I swore to myself that he would never know who his father had been, because Daniel’s true father, the man who devoted his life to him and brought him up by my side, Juan Sempere, was the best father he could ever have had. I did this because I was convinced that if one day Daniel discovered, or suspected, the truth, he would never forgive me. And even so, I would do it again.
David Martín should never have returned to Barcelona. Deep down I believe that if he did, it was because he somehow suspected the truth. Perhaps that was the real punishment reserved for him by the devil he carried in his soul. The moment he crossed the frontier, we were both doomed.
He was arrested a few months ago after crossing the Pyrenees, then taken to Barcelona, where the cases pending against him were reopened. They also charged him with subversion, treason against the state, and God knows what other absurdities. He was locked up in La Modelo, together with thousands of other prisoners. These days people are murdered and imprisoned in vast numbers in all big cities in Spain, and even more so in Barcelona. It’s open season for revenge, for annihilating the opponent, our great national calling. As was to be expected, the brand-new crusaders of the regime crept out from under the stones and ran to take up positions in the new order of things, ready to climb up the ranks of the new society. Many of them have crossed the lines and changed sides once or even a number of times for convenience and self-interest. No person who has lived through a war with their eyes open can ever again believe we’re better than any wild animal.
One might think that things could get no worse, but there’s no bar low enough for meanness when it holds the reins. An individual appeared on the horizon, someone who seemed to have come to the world to embody the spirit of the times and the place. I imagine there are plenty like him among the scum that always rises to the surface when everything else founders. His name is Mauricio Valls, and, like all great men in small times, he is a nobody.