Исабель Альенде - A Long Petal of the Sea

To Victor, who had shared moments of tragedy with Ibarra without him ever losing his defiant smile, his songs and jokes, the gloomy expression on his friend’s face was even more eloquent than his words. Aitor took a small bottle of liquor out of his rucksack, poured it into the watery coffee, and offered it to Victor. “Here, you’re going to need it,” he told him. For a long while he had been searching for the best way to give Victor the sad news about his brother, but in the end could only blurt out that Guillem had died on the eighth of November.

“How?” was all that Victor managed to ask.

“A bomb in the trench. I’m sorry, Victor, I prefer to spare you the details.”

“Tell me what happened,” Victor insisted.

“The bomb blew several men to pieces. There was no time to reconstitute the bodies, so we buried the pieces.”

“So then you weren’t able to identify them.”

“We couldn’t identify them individually, Victor, but we knew who was in the trench. Guillem was one of them.”

“But you can’t be sure, can you?”

“I’m afraid I can,” said Aitor, taking a charred billfold from his rucksack.

Victor carefully opened the billfold, which seemed to be about to fall to pieces. He took out Guillem’s army identity card, and a miraculously intact photograph. It was the image of a young girl standing next to a grand piano. Victor Dalmau remained seated for several minutes at the foot of the camp bed, unable to speak. Aitor didn’t have the heart to embrace him as he would have liked, but sat beside him without moving, also silent.

“It’s his girlfriend, Roser Bruguera. They were going to get married after the war,” said Victor finally.

“I’m so sorry, Victor, but you’ll have to tell her.”

“She’s pregnant: six or seven months, I think. I can’t tell her without being sure that Guillem has died.”

“What more certainty do you need, Victor? Nobody came out of that hellhole alive.”

“But he might not have been there.”

“If that were the case, he would still have his billfold in his pocket, he would be alive somewhere, and we would have news of him. Two months have gone by. Don’t you think the billfold is proof enough?”

That weekend, Victor Dalmau went home to his mother’s house in Barcelona. She received him with arròs negre made with a cup of rice she had bought on the black market, a few cloves of garlic, and an octopus that she bartered for her husband’s watch down at the port. The fishing catch was reserved for the soldiers, and what little was distributed among the civilian population was meant to go to hospitals and children’s centers, although everyone knew there was no shortage on the tables of the politicians or in the hotels and restaurants frequented by the bourgeoisie.

When he saw his mother so thin and shriveled, looking so aged with worry and concern, and a radiant Roser with a bulging stomach and the inner glow that pregnant women have, Victor couldn’t bear to tell them about Guillem’s death; they were still in mourning for Marcel Lluis. He tried to do so several times, but the words froze in his chest, and so he decided to wait until Roser gave birth, or the war came to an end. With a baby in their arms, Carme’s grief at losing her son, and Roser’s at losing her great love, would be more bearable. Or so he thought.

CHAPTER 3

1939

The days of a century passed by

And the hours followed your exile.

—PABLO NERUDA

“Artigas”

CANTO GENERAL

THE DAY NEAR THE END of January in Barcelona when the exodus that became known as the Retreat began, it dawned so cold that water froze in the pipes, vehicles and animals got stuck on the ice, and the sky, shrouded in dark clouds, seemed to be in deep mourning. It was one of the coldest winters in living memory. Franco’s Nationalist troops were advancing down from Tibidabo, and panic gripped the civilian population. Hundreds of Nationalist prisoners were dragged from their cells and shot. Soldiers, many of them wounded, began the trek toward the French border, following thousands upon thousands of civilians: entire families, grandparents, mothers, children, breastfeeding infants, everyone carrying whatever they could take with them. Some traveled in buses or trucks, others on bicycles, horse-drawn carts, horses, or mules, but the majority went on foot, hauling their belongings in sacks, a pitiful procession of the desperate. Behind them they left shuttered homes and treasured objects. Pets followed their owners for some of the way, but soon became lost in the chaos and were left behind.

Victor Dalmau had spent the night evacuating those among the wounded who could be transferred in the few available ambulances, trucks, and trains. Around eight o’clock in the morning, he realized he ought to follow his father’s orders and save his mother and Roser, but he couldn’t abandon his patients. He managed to locate Aitor Ibarra and convince him he should leave with the two women. The Basque driver had an old German motorcycle with a sidecar. In peacetime it had been his pride and joy, but for the past three years he had kept it safe in a friend’s garage, unable to use it due to the shortage of fuel. Given the circumstances, Aitor thought extreme measures were justified, and he stole two jerry cans of gasoline from the hospital. The bike lived up to the reputation of Teutonic technological excellence and kicked into life at the third try, as if it had never spent a day buried in a garage. At half past ten, Aitor turned up outside the Dalmau house, engine roaring and in a cloud of exhaust fumes, having zigzagged with difficulty through the crowds thronging the streets. Carme and Roser were expecting him, because Victor had found a way to alert them. His instructions had been clear: they were to stay close to Ibarra, cross the frontier, and once over it, get in touch with the Red Cross to try to find a friend of his called Elisabeth Eidenbenz, a nurse who could be trusted. She would be their contact point when they were all in France.

The two women had packed warm clothing, a few provisions, and some family photos. Roser was loath to go without Guillem, but reassured herself that she would be able to reunite with him in France. Until the last moment, Carme was also doubtful about whether or not she should leave. She felt incapable of starting a new life elsewhere: she said that nothing lasted forever, however bad, and perhaps they could wait to see how things turned out. Aitor provided her with vivid details of what would happen when the Fascists came. First, there would be flags everywhere, and a solemn Mass in the main square that everybody would be forced to attend. The conquerors would be received with cheers by a crowd of enemies of the Republic who had lain low in the city for three years, and by many more who, impelled by fear, would try to ingratiate themselves and pretend they had never participated in the revolution. We believe in God, we believe in Spain. We believe in Franco. We love God, we love Spain, we love the Generalisimo Francisco Franco. Then the purge would begin. First the Fascists would arrest any combatants they could lay their hands on, wounded or not, along with those denounced by others as collaborators or suspected of any activity considered anti-Spanish or anti-Catholic. This included members of trade unions, left-wing parties, followers of other religions, agnostics, freemasons, teachers at all levels, scientists, philosophers, students of Esperanto, foreigners, Jews, gypsies—and so on in an endless list.

“The reprisals are ferocious, Doña Carme. Did you know they take children from their mothers and put them in orphanages run by nuns in order to indoctrinate them in the one true faith and the values of the fatherland?”