Исабель Альенде - A Long Petal of the Sea

“You must understand, Victor—this isn’t cowardice, it’s a question of survival.”

Marcel Lluis Dalmau wasn’t the only one who had doubts about the future of the Republic, but nobody dared express them openly, because the worst betrayal would be to sow despair or panic among an exhausted population that had already suffered too much.

The next day Professor Marcel Lluis Dalmau was buried. His family wanted this to be a discreet affair because it was not a time for private grief, but the news got out and the Montjuic cemetery was filled with his friends from the Rocinante tavern, university colleagues, and middle-aged former students—all the younger ones were fighting on the battlefronts or were already beneath the earth. Leaning on Victor and Roser, and dressed in deep mourning that included a veil and black stockings despite the June heat, Carme walked behind the coffin containing the love of her life. There were no prayers, eulogies, or tears. Dalmau was given a send-off by some of his former students, who played the second movement of Schubert’s string quintet, its melancholy ideally suited to the occasion, and then sang one of the militia songs he had composed.

CHAPTER 2

1938

Nothing, not even victory,

Can wipe away the terrible hole of blood.

—PABLO NERUDA

“Hymn to the Glory of the People at War”

OFFENDED LANDS

ROSER BRUGUERA FELL IN LOVE for the first time at Professor Dalmau’s house, where he had invited her with the excuse of helping her with her studies, even though both of them knew it was more an act of charity. The professor suspected that his favorite student ate very little and needed a family, especially somebody like Carme, whose maternal instincts found little response in Victor, and none at all in Guillem. Earlier that year, disgusted with the military regime of the boardinghouse for respectable young ladies, Roser had left it to live in the port area of Barceloneta with three girls from the popular militias in the only room she could afford. She was nineteen years old, and while the other girls were only four or five years her senior, they were twenty years older in terms of experience and mentality. The militiawomen, who lived in a very different world from Roser, nicknamed her “the novice” and completely ignored her most of the time. They slept in a bedroom containing four bunk beds (Roser took one of the top bunks), a couple of chairs, a washbowl, jug, chamber pot, a kerosene burner, with nails in the wall to hang their clothes on, and a bathroom shared with the thirty or more lodgers in the house. These cheerful, feisty women enjoyed the freedom of those turbulent times to the fullest. They wore militia uniforms, boots, and berets, but also put on lipstick and curled their hair with tongs heated in a brazier. They trained with sticks or borrowed rifles, desperate to go to the front and defy the enemy face-to-face rather than carry out the transport, supply, cooking, and nursing roles assigned to them with the argument that there were barely enough Soviet and Mexican weapons for the men, and they would be wasted in female hands.

A few months later, when the Nationalist troops had occupied two-thirds of Spain and were continuing their advance, the young women’s desire to be in the vanguard was fulfilled. Two of them would be raped and have their throats cut in an attack by Moroccan troops. The third survived the three years of civil war and the following six of the Second World War, wandering in the shadows from one end of Europe to the other, until she was able to emigrate to the United States in 1950. She ended up in New York married to a Jewish intellectual who had fought in the Lincoln Brigade—but that’s another story.

Guillem Dalmau was a year older than Roser Bruguera. Whereas she lived up to her “novice” nickname with old-fashioned dresses and a serious demeanor, he was cocky and defiant, completely sure of himself. Yet Roser only had to be with him once or twice to realize that hidden beneath his brash exterior lay a childish, confused, romantic heart. Each time Guillem returned to Barcelona he seemed more resolute: there was nothing left of the foolish youth who stole a candelabra. Now he was a mature man, with furrowed brow and a huge charge of contained violence that could explode at the slightest provocation. He would sleep in the barracks but spend a couple of nights at his parents’ house, above all because of the chance of seeing Roser. He congratulated himself that he had avoided the sentimental ties that caused so much anguish to the soldiers separated from their girlfriends or families. He was completely immersed in the war, but his father’s pupil was no danger to his bachelor independence: she was nothing more than an innocent bit of fun. Depending on the angle and the light, Roser could be attractive, but she did nothing to enhance her looks, and her simplicity struck a mysterious chord in Guillem’s soul. He was accustomed to the effect he had on women in general, and was aware he did the same to Roser, even if she was incapable of any coquettishness. The girl is in love with me, and how could it be otherwise: all the poor thing has in her life is the piano and the bakery; she’ll get over it, he thought. “Be careful, Guillem, that girl is sacred, and if I catch you showing her any disrespect…” his father had warned him. “What are you saying, Father! Roser is like a sister to me.” But fortunately, she wasn’t his sister. To judge by the way his parents took care of her, Roser must be a virgin, one of the few remaining in Republican Spain. He wouldn’t dream of going too far with her, but no one could blame him for showing a little tenderness, a brush of knees under the table, an invitation to the movies to touch her in the darkness when she was crying at the film and trembling with shyness and desire. For more daring caresses he could rely on some of his female comrades, experienced and willing militiawomen.

After his brief furloughs in Barcelona, Guillem would return to the front intending to concentrate only on surviving and defeating the enemy, and yet he found it hard to forget Roser Bruguera’s anxious face and clear gaze. Not even in the most silent recesses of his heart would he admit how much he needed her letters, packets of candies, and the socks and scarves she knitted for him. The only photograph he carried in his billfold was of her. Roser was standing beside a piano, possibly during a recital, wearing a modest dark dress with a longer than usual skirt, short sleeves, and a lace collar, an absurd schoolgirl’s dress that hid all her curves. In this black-and-white card, Roser looked distant and blurred, a woman lacking any spark, ageless and expressionless. One had to guess at the contrast between her amber-colored eyes and black hair, her straight Grecian nose, expressive eyebrows, protruding ears, long fingers, the way she smelled of soap: all details that were painful to Guillem when they suddenly engulfed him or invaded him in his sleep. Details that could distract him and cost him his life.

—

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON NINE days after his father’s burial, Guillem Dalmau turned up unannounced in a battered military vehicle. Roser went out to see who it was, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. For a moment she didn’t recognize the thin, haggard man being helped in by two militiawomen. She hadn’t seen him for four months: four months nourishing her hope on the rare phrases he sent her from time to time, describing the fighting in Madrid but without a single affectionate word; messages like reports, on sheets torn out of a notebook, penned in a schoolboy’s handwriting. Everything the same here, you’ll have heard how we’re defending the city, the walls are full of holes like colanders from the mortars, ruins everywhere, the Fascists have Italian and German weapons, they’re so close sometimes we can smell the tobacco they’re smoking, the bastards. We can hear them talking, they shout to provoke us but they’re drunk with fear—apart, that is, from the Moors, who are like hyenas and aren’t afraid of anything. They prefer their butchers’ knives to rifles, hand-to-hand fighting, the taste of blood; the Nationalists receive reinforcements every day, but they don’t advance a single meter; on our side we have no water or electricity and food is in short supply, but we manage; and I’m fine. Half the buildings have collapsed; we are barely able to recover the bodies; they lie where they fall until the next day, when the mortuary attendants come. Not all the children have been evacuated—you should see how stubborn some of the mothers are, they refuse to leave or be separated from their offspring, it makes no sense. How is your piano going? How are my parents? Tell Mother not to worry about me.