Begoña stood at the entrance to the house, leaning on her staff as her little mongrel, Rosco, panted nervously at her feet. A straw hat was tied under her chin with a dark-blue scarf, partly shading a worn, landscaped face, and eyes that shone like cinnamon stones from within layers of protecting skin.
‘One of the goats has fallen down a hole.’
Normally her husband brought the herd up here to graze, but today she had taken his place. ‘Hugo’s in the city,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘Doctor’s appointment.’
I grabbed some rope and a knife and stepped out for her to show me the way. The code up here in the mountains was never to ask for help, simply to explain a problem, and people would naturally respond. In their turn they would receive a minimum of thanks – assisting one another was how the community in this sparsely populated landscape survived. Favours were repaid with favours.
‘Where is it?’
I followed in her footsteps as we passed through fields of dry grass and sprouting blue peach-leaved bellflowers. Spring was almost over but the pale almond blossom on the slopes below us still glistened in the sunlight. Small and compact, Begoña skipped over the stones and rocks that pushed out of the thin dry soil, her cloth bag with her water-bottle and food to last the day swinging across her lower back above a wide rump. She and Hugo had both been born up here, in farmhouses across the valley that were now abandoned like the rest of them. I sometimes wondered how long ago that had been: still active, she had an outdoor face that could belong to anyone over fifty.
Begoña had always been more open and keen to chat than Hugo. You had the sense that her husband was happier with his goats, singing in solitude as the herd scattered a trail of droppings and kicked up stones wherever they trotted. Begoña, on the few occasions when she had come up to the farm, had always stopped by to say hello, accepting my offers of red wine from dusty tumblers and telling me stories of life in the valley from when she was a little girl. There used to be more rain here, before the weather started changing. Snow up to your knees every winter. Now you were lucky to get any at all. Used to be a big grape-growing area, but the farmers had switched some years back to olives and almonds, which could cope better with the drier conditions.
Her animals would mill around her, munching their way through everything in my budding garden, Rosco growling them back into place if they strayed too near the fig trees, while she talked on regardless, lapping up the opportunity for conversation as though quenching a great thirst.
‘You need some tomatoes here. They like this soil. My uncle used to grow them up over the other side of the mountain, next to his tobacco plantations. Before everyone left and moved to the towns, that is …’
I loved the remoteness of this area – the mountains of Castellón: it was one of the reasons why Salud and I had looked for a house here in the first place. I’d been living in Spain for some twelve years now, mostly in the city, but the landscape surrounding us here tapped into an enduring vision I had of my adopted homeland: the silence, the spectacular mountain views, the scent of pine forests; often we caught sight of eagles soaring in the sky overhead, brightly coloured butterflies would flutter around our feet, while Spanish ibex, their horns like lyres, would sometimes come to drink at sunset in our little spring on the other side of the hill. Yet for Begoña the silence was a source of sadness. These had all been bustling farms once; now Salud and I were the only ones living so far up the valley, slowly renovating a small group of ancient stone cottages – a mas – that hadn’t been lived in for decades.
The area was rich in history: the Maestrat had once been the battle ground of El Cid, later a domain of the Templars and Hospitallers, presented to the knights as a gift by King James I the Conqueror after winning it from the Moors. Cathar refugees had settled here after being persecuted and all but exterminated in southern France by the early fourteenth century. It was said there were still heretical motifs on the churches from those times, mysterious symbols as little understood as the palaeolithic wall paintings depicting strange fertility dances that decorated some of the caves nearby. This had been the heartland of the ancient Iberians, the ‘swarthy-skinned and curly-haired men’ described by Tacitus, a warrior people who worshipped doves and a sea goddess, and who cremated their dead before burying their ashes in urns.
We walked on over the fields, scampering down the banks of terraces where the old dry-stone walls had crumbled away through lack of care. Even now, there were no telephone wires or electricity pylons to be seen: no signals or reminders of modern, mechanized man.
‘Before my mother was born,’ was all Begoña would say when I asked if she knew when all these terraces had been built. Their imprint was visible on almost all the faces of the surrounding hills and mountains, but many were thickly overgrown. I’d resisted asking when her mother had been born. It wouldn’t have shed much light on the matter anyway. How long before her mother was born? They could have been there for hundreds of years.
The goats bleated and groaned as we covered territory they had already crossed that day. They had eaten the best of the grass already and were now being presented with their own leftovers. Still, they munched on, managing somehow to eat and walk at the same time. Every so often the dog gave a threatening growl.
After a half-hour stroll we passed a ruined old house that stood further down the slope, and turned sharply off the path to descend through gorse and pines sheltering in the shadows of the tallest peak in the valley. The sheer cliff face was a mosaic of orange and pink rock, curling round like the inside of a barrel.
‘Rosco!’ The dog was ordered to keep the animals at bay as we pushed downwards.
‘I don’t usually bring them here,’ Begoña explained. ‘But there’s been so little rain this year.’ She pushed the branches and bushes out of her way with her wooden staff as she followed a path on the hillside I could barely make out.
Halfway down the slope, in the shade of a cluster of holm oaks, was a hole: an irregularly shaped fault in the ground with a fifteen-foot drop to the bottom. Gorse bushes smothered the rim, so that it was almost impossible to see it until we were nearly falling into it ourselves. At the sound of our voices, the fallen goat started bleating.
‘Come round this side,’ Begoña said. ‘There are a few foot-holds.’
She pushed the bushes back as I edged to the side and looked down. The small brown goat was standing on an outcrop of rock near the bottom, bellowing now it could see us, pleading for help. Judging by the way it was standing, it seemed to have broken something.
I climbed down, trying not to fall or push any loose rock down on to the already frightened animal. It didn’t look too difficult. Once I reached the goat, it should be just a matter of tying the rope around its body and hauling it back up.
The creature gave a start as I skipped down the last few feet to reach it, but it seemed to understand that I was there to help, staring up into my face and bleating plaintively as I stroked its head. Begoña threw the rope down to me, keeping hold of one end while I wrapped the other underneath its belly several times and through its legs, following her instructions as to how best to support the animal’s weight. I fumbled with the rope until it felt reasonably secure, finishing off with a reef knot. It was the only knot I could remember, but it seemed to do the trick.
Getting out of the hole proved more difficult than getting in, as the flaky limestone rock easily gave way under my weight, but after a couple of attempts, holding on to clumps of wiry grass growing out of the sides, I was back with Begoña at the top.
‘Bien,’ she said. Wrapping the loose end of the rope around her waist, she started to heave the animal up, her strong arms tensing with the strain. Down in the hole the bleats turned to screams as the goat took off from the ground and immediately crashed into the side. It kicked out at the rock with its knees, unable, it seemed, to straighten its legs and fend off with its hooves. It was already damaged enough, I thought. If we weren’t careful we were going to hurt it even more in trying to save it. Crouching down on the ground, I tried to lift the rope as far as possible from the side of the hole, hoping to spare the animal too many bruises during its ascent. I would have taken the rope myself but Begoña barely paused for breath as she hauled the beast up, her powerful squat body twisting like a spring as, inch by inch, the goat rose towards us.
With a couple more tugs the animal was within my grasp. Grabbing it by the upper part of its front legs I lifted it the final two feet, pushing it in Begoña’s direction for her to take a look. One leg was clearly broken: the goat was hopping around bleating frantically, obviously in some pain. We’d probably have to carry it all the way home. The leg would take time to heal – a few weeks at least.
I bent down to brush the dirt from my legs and glanced into the hole again. It was a long way down. No wonder the poor thing was in such a state.
As I was caught by the sense of falling into this empty void, the bleating behind me stopped. I looked over to where Begoña was attending to the animal, wondering how she had managed to silence it so suddenly. She was wiping her hands on her hips. The goat lay limp on the ground like a rag doll, its eyes half closed, tongue poking out between the teeth of its open mouth.
‘You’ve killed it?’ I asked, trying to check a note of incredulity in my voice.
‘We lost one last year as well,’ she said. ‘Can’t take your eye off them for a second.’
She bent down and with a short swinging motion lifted the dead beast up on to her shoulders, holding it on either side by its legs. Back up the hill Rosco gave a bark, sensing that his mistress was about to return.
I watched for a moment as she pushed her way back up the slope, flicking the bushes aside with her staff to get through as she had done before. On her back the goat’s head flopped like a heavy shopping bag: lifeless, motionless meat. There was no blood; she must have broken its neck while my back was turned. Swift and efficient. I felt dizzy.
Eventually I started up the hill after her, fighting feelings of sentimentality about the fate of the animal. Goats were just goats, I reminded myself. If someone offered me goat stew that evening for dinner I would happily eat it. This was just one goat more. And Begoña, who’d been a goatherd all her life, knew how best to deal with them. They weren’t pets: they were her livelihood. A goat with a broken leg was a liability.
Yes, I thought, but even still.
As this conflict churned inside me, I only half registered that we were not going back up the way we had come. Rather than cutting across the almond orchards, we had walked further down the valley, and round to an area at the side of the mountain I had never been to before. The area was thick with dark-green Austrian pines, their trunks bent out of the sloping ground like the necks of flamingos. Dragonflies fluttered from stone to stone under squat dusty oaks, the shine from whose thick stunted leaves was already baked dry in the heat.
The sweat quickly evaporated from my forehead in the mountain air, and I felt the back of my throat begin to itch. I wondered why Begoña had decided to go back this way. She pushed on, a tanned paw-like hand held out in front of her with a bent finger pointing ahead.
We came out from under the shade of the trees on to an open stretch of land facing east. In the distance a few fields were still being cared for, with rows of almond trees bursting through ploughed pink soil. But mostly this area had been abandoned.
‘You might want to see this,’ Begoña said simply. I looked around – beneath the wild grass there were odd dents in the earth, unnatural creases snaking for a hundred yards or more in the direction of the sun. Away to the left I could make out a dark pit, partially obscured by gorse bushes.
‘This is where the bodies are buried,’ she said.
For a moment I thought she meant a place where they dumped the bodies of goats like the one slung over her shoulders. But something in her expression made me wonder.
‘What bodies?’
The massacre had taken place here in the mountains in the early summer of 1938. In the USA and Britain audiences were flocking to see Errol Flynn at the cinema in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Germany had just absorbed Austria in the Anschluss, the first Superman comics had recently been published, and oil had been discovered for the first time in Saudi Arabia. But Spain at that point was caught up in a vicious and bloody civil war that would cost at least half a million lives, force a similar number into exile, and see the eventual victory and establishment of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring dictators, General Francisco Franco, an austere and ruthless Catholic soldier from the northwest of Spain. A second world war, as many already sensed, was just around the corner, but in the meantime a bloody dress rehearsal was under way on Spanish soil as the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy carried out a proxy war in preparation for the real thing.
By the late spring of 1938 the Spanish Civil War was almost two years old and entering its final phase. General Franco and his supporters, who called themselves the Nationalists, were slowly beating their opponents – the Republicans, defenders of the democratic state Franco was trying to overthrow. The Nationalists were backed by Hitler and Mussolini’s weaponry and soldiers, while the Republicans were relying ever more heavily on their only serious international backer, Stalin. The Republicans were in disarray at this late stage in the war: Franco had reached the Mediterranean and had cut their remaining territory in two. He was now moving his army down the coast towards Valencia.
As I now learned, it was at this point that the front line had reached where I was standing that morning, surrounded by goats on a dry mountainside, a jittery dog scuttling about my feet and a dead animal hanging over the shoulders of my elderly neighbour.
I knew only a little about the war. It was not a subject you talked about much in Spain, where people usually wanted to forget and get on with their lives, even now, almost seventy years since it had begun. Friends had often dismissed the subject as unimportant. It was politics, nothing more, just a scrap between some people on the Left and some others on the Right. And anyway, it was all history, finished. Caught up as I had been by other aspects of the country – the colour and passion of Spain, things that usually drew people here – I had side-stepped this part of Spanish history. I had been too busy enjoying everything that fitted in with my romantic dreams of what Spain was all about: the sensuality of flamenco, the exoticism of the country’s Moorish past
Nonetheless, I was fascinated by what Begoña began to tell me.
‘This is where the Republicans had their last defences,’ she said. ‘These lines here’ – she nodded towards the zigzag markings – ‘were the trenches.’
It wasn’t easy to make them out, with the flat midday light almost obliterating the contours in the landscape. But as she pointed, they began to stand out more clearly: man-made shapes that appeared somehow out of place in their natural surroundings. Mostly filled in now, the trenches were about two metres wide, each stretch some eight or ten metres long before a dogleg bend to another stretch, creating a jagged effect.
Begoña told me how Republican fighters had made a stand out here in the countryside as Franco’s men marched southwards. It was difficult mountainous territory, and while the Nationalists’ capture of the nearby village had been straightforward, the Republicans hoped to slow the advance by leading the enemy out into the hills. They hadn’t lasted more than a few days.
‘Franco’s planes came from over there’ – she pointed towards the northeast – ‘and shot them up.’
The shape of the defences, it seemed, was supposed to offer some protection against a linear attack from the air. But the planes returned again and again, manoeuvring so that their machine-guns could fire the length of each stretch of the trenches.
‘Some managed to escape but most of them were killed.’
There was nothing but wild flowers and birds today; only a lifetime ago, this place had been a killing field. I looked around at our peaceful, pastoral surroundings and struggled to imagine what must have happened that day.
‘And it took place right here?’ I said, as though demanding confirmation from her. Begoña took a swig from her water-bottle and nodded. The dead goat’s head swung limp and senseless on her back, its half-open eyes now mere balls of drying jelly.
I glanced up in the direction from which the Nationalist fighters had approached. In the distance the Penyagolosa, the highest mountain in this part of Spain, once sacred to the Celtic sun-god Lugus, pushed upwards into a cloudless sky. Further up the valley I could make out the whitewashed walls of my own farmhouse glinting in the sun.
‘The bodies,’ I said to Begoña. ‘Are they …?’
‘They’re still here,’ she said matter-of-factly.
I looked again at the trenches and the scarred earth where we were standing. I felt uneasy about walking on people’s graves, thinking about the men who were lying here, about the kind of people they’d been, about their wives and lovers, their children.
‘How many Republicans were here?’ I asked.
About seventy of them were buried there, she told me.
‘I was eight at the time,’ she continued. ‘I came with my mother and brother to sow wheat that morning. We saw the Francoists dig a pit, a fosa, and then throw the bodies in from a lorry on top of each other.’
For the first time I caught the emotion in her voice, a tightening in her throat.
‘My mother didn’t stop weeping all day.’
Only her voice betrayed the depth of her emotion, her face screwed tight as it had been for decades against the sun and the elements. And perhaps, also, against the memories of what she had witnessed here as a little girl. The experience she had had, the event that had occurred here, filled the space around us like lead.
My mind was filling with questions: why had they dumped the bodies here rather than giving them proper burial? What had happened to their families? Why hadn’t anyone moved them since? Franco had been dead for almost thirty years. The country was a democracy once more. Couldn’t a memorial be erected at least? It was disturbing to think that here in this lost, sun-drenched valley, with its fields of wild flowers, the smell of blossom filling the air, bursts of birdsong set against a blanket buzz of honeybees, something so terrible could have happened.
The questions and thoughts filled my mind, but it was almost impossible to speak.
‘I’m the only one left who saw what happened,’ she said at last. Rosco was curled around her feet, looking up at me with mournful eyes. ‘I’m the only one left.’
Grief and sorrow now seemed to flow like an electric current from her skin. If I put a hand on her arm, in some inadequate gesture of sympathy, I was sure I would feel a shock. There was one thing, however, that I had to ask. Why had she brought me here?
‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning away. ‘I don’t know.’
*
I watched her walk away with the herd down the dirt track, the dead goat still on her shoulders, the dog scampering about making sure the rest of the animals moved forwards. From behind, the blue scarf holding down her straw hat looked like a dark gash across the top of her head. The weather seemed to be changing, and from the west a hot suffocating wind was beginning to blow, bringing with it the dust and sand of the plains. It passed over the cliff face and down into the hollow of the valley, circling and tightening before whipping round and surging up into my face in concentrated, melting bursts. My eyes stayed fixed on the old woman’s compact form, her skirts flapping around her ankles as she gradually disappeared into the distance. So much strength and energy seemed to be held within her, it was strange to think that one day, like the men dumped in the field she had shown me, it would be extinguished. It was as though she had given a small part of herself to me by taking me to that place.
I walked back up the slope towards home, but the house, the farm, was different. The change was subtle, but immediate, and the cracks in my vision of what I thought I had were already starting to show. Violence and blood had stained my perfect world.