The bells rang out and people cheered as the Risen Christ, his waxy face pale in the bright sunshine, his right hand raised, ready to bless them, was borne on high out of the church. The scuffed, workaday boots of the fishermen shouldering the heavy, flower-decked float were visible beneath the hems of their scarlet and white cloaks as they shuffled forward. The Saviour Has Risen! Aleluja! Aleluja! All is well with the world. It was a message that the crowd was desperate to hear. A tear or two was wiped away. The priest nodded and smiled upon his flock. Nearly everyone in the village was there; few would dare stay away. Attendance at church was mandatory now that General Franco was in power. The general was a pious man, reputed to attend mass daily and to spend hours on his knees in prayer. Where the moral standards of his citizens were concerned, he had a missionary’s zeal. He was determined to lift his people out of the slack ways they had slumped into and in which they might have remained had he not defeated the Republicans. Censorship was back, the clergy had their hands on the schools again and young men and girls were no longer to be seen out on the paseo hand-in-hand, their bodies brushing against each other as they walked.
Then it was Mary’s turn. This was the moment that the women had been anticipating. They were ready with their cheers. Encarnita, who had been standing back a little, moved forward and she, too, clapped and cheered. It was impossible not to. The men, in charge of this precious float, conscious of the watching eyes of their wives and daughters, were taking great care not to let the virgin wobble. The women tossed up flowers for their lady, who gazed serenely down at them from her lofty perch. Their faces glowed as they looked up at her. She had suffered the loss of a son, like many of them; she understood their pain. Blessed be the Virgin of Almuñecar! Mother of the seas! Sofia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Encarnita’s eyes were as dry as the dust in the road; she had shed so many tears in the last three years that she did not think she could ever weep again.
Once the crowd had fallen in behind the floats Encarnita detached herself. She had told Sofia earlier that she might go for a walk. Sofia did not like her to go walking alone in the campo but she needed to get away from the crowd. And bandits and dropouts from the war, which was what Sofia feared, did not come down as far as the coast. Also, refugees from the war would be Republicans and would not harm her. ‘How can you be sure?’ Sofia had demanded. ‘The war has changed our people. It has brought out the bad blood in them. Men, if they’re desperate, cease to know what is right or wrong.’ But the men tended to lie low in the higher passes of the sierras. It was known that a number of Republican fighters were up there, awaiting their chance to strike back, though Encarnita did not see how they would be able to without being slaughtered. There could not be so very many of them, and they must be ill-equipped, and the army and the Guardia Civil had a firm grip of every town and village. They were often to be seen up by the alcazaba, scanning the campo from the walls. Encarnita resented their presence there. She felt they had violated a place that belonged to her and Sofia.
As she dropped back from the crowd, she felt a hand on her arm and looked round.
‘Does anything ail you, child?’ asked the nun. She was elderly and had lived in Cádiar as a girl, not far from Yegen. Sometimes Encarnita would stop to talk to her, to reminisce about the places of their birth. The almond blossom was what the nun remembered most. ‘Are you not coming with the procession?’
‘I was feeling a little faint, Sister. I need some air.’
‘It is a very emotional experience, is it not, the resurrection of Our Saviour?’
Encarnita nodded.
‘I’ve not seen you at mass for a while. Do you go to confession?’
‘Sometimes.’ She had not been for a while. She hated the stuffiness of the confessional box, preferring to sit in the church when it was quiet. She found it more helpful to talk to her mother than to the priest but the nun would probably think that sinful. Sofia did. Sofia despaired of her state of grace, or lack of it, at times. ‘I’ll go soon,’ Encarnita added, though she was not certain that she would.
‘Good! Vaya con Dios!’ The nun took her hand from Encarnita’s arm and hurried after the procession, her skirts swirling.
On the next corner, Encarnita passed two members of the Guardia Civil, who swivelled round to watch her go. Automatically, she dropped her gaze. Anyone who had had family members fighting for the Republicans was regarded with disfavour and suspicion. Rinaldo had been known as a leader.
‘One moment, Señorita!’
She stopped, looked round. One of the guards was coming strolling towards her, taking his time. He waddled slightly, as if his thighs were rubbing together. Her heart beat quickened.
‘Your papers, Señorita?’
He knew very well who she was and where she lived. He had asked to see her papers before. She took them from her pocket and he perused them, pursing his lips, as he had done the first time.
‘So you were born in Yegen? That’s up in the Alpujarra.’ He made it sound like the moon. He was from Madrid himself and had not been pleased at being posted to a rathole like Almuñecar. He made no secret of it. Guards never worked on their own home ground.
‘What brought you to Almuñecar?’
He knew the answer to that, too.
‘Somebody cut out your tongue? Let me see it! Come on, show me your tongue!’
She let only the very tip of it slide over her lower lip. He put out a stubby index finger and laid it on her tongue, holding it down. She tasted nicotine and sweat and thought she might retch.
‘It’s healthy enough looking, I see, nice and plump and pink. I don’t like girls with skinny tongues. Seems it should be able to talk.’ He lifted his finger, regarded it for a moment, then ran his own tongue over it. ‘Quite sweet. Are you ready to answer me now?’
She swallowed. ‘I came to visit my uncle.’
‘Ah yes, your uncle.’ He came a step closer until she could feel the flow of his breath on her face. She flinched as if struck by a physical blow. His breath was heavy with the stench of beer and tobacco and his face looked blotchy and red beneath the tricorned leather hat. She could see beads of sweat sitting in the open pores of his nose. ‘So, have you any news of this famous uncle of yours? Or should I say, infamous?’
She shook her head.
‘No?’ He smiled. ‘Are you sure about that? You would tell me if you had, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? Come on now, answer me! Don’t start playing dumb with me again. I might just get angry. You’d tell me?’ He engaged her eyes with his.
‘Yes,’ she whispered, feeling as a bird might when confronted by a cat.
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want any trouble?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘You want to be nice to me, don’t you? Of course you do. Maybe I’ll come and visit you sometime. You must be lonely up there all on your own, a pretty chica like you, lying next to the dead. Aren’t you afraid of the ghosts?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not? I like a bold chica. So, tell me, would you like me to pay you a visit? I might even bring you a little present, if you were prepared to be very nice.’ A blob of spittle had formed at the side of his mouth. She thought she had never seen an uglier face in all the nineteen years of her life. ‘What do you say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? No, don’t look away from me!’ He put his hand on her shoulder, letting his hot fat fingers slide down to touch the top of her breast underneath her blouse. He ignored the sniggers of his friend, who was waiting on the opposite side of the road. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll let you go.’ He gave her a little push and she staggered back. ‘For now,’ he added.
Her legs felt like jelly as she walked away. She heard the two men laughing. The street up the hill was deserted except for four or five mangy kittens scavenging in the gutter and one old man who sat on a low wicker chair in his doorway. He was too old to join an Easter procession and even the guards left him alone. He asked her, as he always did when she passed, ‘No word of Rinaldo?’ She shook her head and he sighed and said what a loss all the young men were. His grandson had been killed at the battle of the Ebro and buried there. But, at least, his family knew what had happened to him. ‘The pueblo will never be the same again.’
When Encarnita reached her house she closed and barred the door behind her. Then she sat down on her straw pallet and allowed herself to shake for a few minutes. Following on, came a bout of anger which swept through her like a raging fire. She felt the heat of it in her chest. She thumped the pallet with both fists until she felt gutted and empty. She would keep a knife by the door and if he were to come she would stick it into him as one might to a pig. If she were to confess this murderous thought to the priest would he absolve her sin? Priests the length and breadth of Spain must have had to absolve hundreds of thousands of the blackest of sins. Brothers had murdered brothers, and fathers sons. At times, surely, the priests themselves must have wept in the confessionals.
She rinsed her mouth with a small cupful of water and spat it out in the yard. Then she lifted a small canvas sack and set off again. She was going out to look for fallen fruit, whatever she could find, olives, an orange or two, perhaps even an avocado, if she would be lucky enough to find a ripe one. She would share her pickings with Sofia. Sofia had a nephew who was a fishermen; he would sometimes bring her a fish which she would then share with Encarnita. They helped each other out. The baker gave them the ends of stale loaves. Life would be a little easier, come summer, for then she might be able to find work in the fields.
She took a street that led down to the plaza. Before she reached it she stepped back into a doorway and waited. There seemed to be no sign of the guards. Moving quickly and quietly, she crossed the square.
Once she reached the edge of the village and could see the campo in front of her she began to feel a little easier. She was about to cross the road when she heard the sound of traffic. An open-backed army truck came into view, the rear packed with soldiers, each clutching a rifle close to his body, looking as if he were ready to spring out and fire the moment an order was given. The vehicle slowed and the driver spoke to her through his open window. Had she seen any strangers in the area?
‘No, no one,’ she said.
The army was conducting regular searches over wide sweeps of country, their quarry Republicans on the run. Sometimes, lying awake in the dark, Encarnita would hear shots. They carried out their executions at night and buried their victims in mass graves in the campo. It was said that the poet Lorca lay in one such grave somewhere outside Granada but no one knew where. He had been executed early in the war. It was the not knowing that the relatives of the missing found the most difficult thing to bear. Sofia had been able to put her son to rest and so could mourn him.
‘If you see anyone report it at once to the Guardia Civil!’ snapped the driver.
The engine roared into life and the truck picked up speed, foul smoke belching from its exhaust pipe. The soldiers stared back at her where she stood at the side of the road. They could not be any older than she was, yet some of them had the glazed eyes of the old man who sat on the low wicker chair in her street.
And then, the soldiers were gone. Encarnita crossed the road and ran until she was out of breath, when she slowed her pace to a walk. Out in the campo she missed the company of Cinderella. The goat had died in the winter. She had no money to buy a new one and there was no chance of Don Geraldo coming to her rescue this time. In the beginning she had felt as if Cinderella’s death had severed a link with him but had found that when she took out Señorita Carrington’s picture of Gabriella, her first goat, and looked at it, her mind would travel back to the hillside above Yegen and she would remember the sound of the Englishman and his friends talking and laughing. They had always been so full of life. Were they laughing now? Was anyone laughing? Only the victors. In Republican houses, people were quiet, afraid even to raise their voices.
She often wondered how they were, Don Geraldo and Doña Gamel, if they were living in England, or had stayed in Spain. She thought it unlikely that they would have stayed. Luisa might have heard from Maria and Rosario’s brother, but there had been no news from Yegen since early in the war. Encarnita had received one letter from Miss Osborne, to which she had written a reply, but when she had dropped the envelope into the box she had had the feeling that it might never reach its destination. The postal service had all but collapsed.
She made for an old olive grove that was no longer tended. She harvested a number of its wrinkled fruits and dropped them gratefully into her sack. Further on, she came to a ruined house that had been burned out by the Nationalists; it had housed a Republican and his family. They had all died in the fire, the parents and their three children. Encarnita hated going near the blackened ruin that smelt still of smoke, but there was a good orange tree in the garden and if she did not take the fruit it would drop and wither and Sofia and herself would go hungry. As soon as she had dropped the fruit into the bag she put her back to the place and plunged deeper into the campo. She was going to visit her house.
It was many months since she had been there. During the war it had been difficult to wander off the beaten path. Even now it was dangerous. She had set out to go not long ago but, before reaching the house, she had come across one of the patrols. They had waved her back with their rifles and so, without a word, she had turned and headed for the coast.
She went warily, keeping an eye open for any sign of human life. The house, standing in such an isolated position, was well away from any other kind of habitation. When the broken-down roof came into view, she felt herself smiling. It was still there! Her own special secret place. No one had burned it down. She picked her way between the brambles and thorn bushes that had grown up around it since her last visit. Vegetation had crept up the masonry, too, virtually obscuring it.
She pushed open the splintered door. The first thing that struck her was the noise after the quiet outside. It was the frenzied noise of madly buzzing insects. Many insects. Her eyes took a few minutes to adjust to the light but when they did she saw that someone – it looked like the body of a man – was lying on the floor. He was surrounded by a cloud of flies.