Golden Earrings (37 page)

Margarida’s face became serious. ‘We are not dealing with someone who makes civilised compromises. When the Republican side captures rebel soldiers, we feed them and treat them according to military conventions. The democratic justice system still prevails in our zone. When Franco’s forces take over a village that has shown any sort of resistance, they kill everybody without question or a trial. Franco is not interested in saving lives. Therefore we have two choices: either we fight until the growing tension over Czechoslovakia finally brings about a European war and the British and French need us as allies against the Germans; or we get the hell out of here!’

I thought of Gaspar. The last I’d heard of him was what Francesc had managed to find out: that he was alive and well, but posted on the dangerous Aragon front. I could flee to safety but what would happen to him? It frightened me to even consider it.

I turned to Pare and Mama. ‘I think we should leave for France as soon as we can. Margarida and Xavier will go with the Republic to form a government in exile, but we should go now. I have that property in the Dordogne.’

‘And leave everything?’ Mama asked, horrified.

‘
Everything
is not worth our lives, Mama. Plenty of people have already departed the country.’

‘The Cerdà and the de Figueroa families might have cleared out,’ said Pare, his eyes blazing, ‘but we are the Montellas!
We own Barcelona
. If Franco wants it, he’s going to have to negotiate with me!’

‘Don’t be a fool!’ Xavier told him. ‘Franco hates Catalonia and all it stands for. He will crush it and you will simply be a pebble under his feet!’

A few weeks later, I met la Rusa again. She had come to Barcelona on leave. When the military coup had first broken out, women had fought alongside their husbands and brothers in the militias. But as the Republic began to organise a professional army, women were called up to the home front to take men’s places in factories, transport and on farms. However, la Rusa’s role as an ambulance driver kept her close to the front. Xavier had told me that her ambulance was constantly fired upon by German and Italian planes and that she had witnessed stretcher bearers blown to bits by them. ‘The government keeps offering her a role as an entertainer to the troops,’ he’d said. ‘But she refuses. She says she wants to fight with the “real people”. Besides that, the army medical unit wants to hold on to her: she’s proved to be a skilful driver.’ What Xavier didn’t tell me was how much la Rusa had changed.

I found her waiting for me in the café where we had arranged to meet. She was wearing khaki overalls with a red-cross armband and no make-up. Her thick hair was hidden under a beret and, apart from her dramatic eyes and sensual mouth, she looked like any other woman in the street. Her hands and fingers were devoid of jewellery. The only adornment she wore was a pair of golden hooped earrings: the kind the gypsies favour. It was hard to believe that she was one of Spain’s most popular entertainers.

‘Xavier asked me to take you and your family over the border to France if the rebels reach Barcelona,’ she said, reaching into her pocket and taking out a packet of cigarettes. She lit one and stared at me. ‘Your parents won’t go now? That’s foolish. If you go now, you can simply catch a train. You won’t have any trouble getting into France. If you leave it too late, the French might close the border.’

She spoke like she danced: in short, staccato bursts of energy.

‘I can’t leave without my parents,’ I said.

‘Eventually they are going to have to leave,’ she said. ‘Unless they have a death wish!’

La Rusa had always had a hard edge to her personality, but now I sensed a layer of armour around her that was so thick I doubted I would ever be able to penetrate it. In the whole time I had known her, I’d never seen her put a cigarette in her mouth. Now she was chain-smoking and the tips of her fingers were stained yellow. They were Lucky Strikes: foreign cigarettes. She must have had a good contact on the black market. Most people these days were smoking dried maize leaves.

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked her.

She didn’t answer my question directly. She only repeated what Margarida had said. ‘If the rebels come, you’d better get away. If you don’t value your own life enough, then at least think of Julieta.’

While in Barcelona, la Rusa had agreed to do some performances at the old Samovar Club. It seemed strange that in the midst of bombings and the prospect of death, the people of Barcelona still liked to be entertained. Xavier, Margarida and I went to see her at the club a few evenings later. The place was shabby and run-down now. The columns were covered in hand marks and the floor was in need of a polish. The glamorous women in their evening dresses and furs had disappeared too. La Rusa’s audience consisted of soldiers and workers.

When the band walked onto the stage, I half-expected Gaspar to take his place at the piano. But of course he wasn’t there. The thought that anything could happen to him was like a stone in my heart.

La Rusa’s vigorous dancing meant that she had never had a spare ounce of fat on her, but it seemed to me that she was even thinner now: I could see her rib bones through her dress. Her face looked taut with fatigue but she’d lost nothing of her forceful energy. She still managed to mesmerise the audience with her rapid footwork and fiery arm movements. When she finished, she stared down at us as she always had, with that attitude of triumphant arrogance. But I saw something else in her eyes, a kind of cruel passion. Any trace of softness that she’d ever possessed had disappeared. She looked wild, bitter and tragic.

‘I thought la Rusa was put on leave to have a rest?’ Margarida whispered to Xavier. ‘Before the push into Teruel.’

‘She doesn’t know the meaning of rest,’ Xavier said, forcing himself to smile. ‘She reminds me of those ex-soldiers who used to come to Barcelona after the Great War: the ones who had seen so much horror that they could never settle down again.’

After her performance, la Rusa joined us at the table. Xavier lit a cigarette and she took a few puffs before handing it back to him. ‘I go on duty again in a few days,’ she said.

Xavier didn’t look pleased by the news but he didn’t say anything.

‘How is the morale of the men?’ Margarida asked.

La Rusa’s face darkened. ‘How do you expect it to be?’ she snapped. ‘You’ve taken away their revolution. They were fighting for a better life. What should they fight for now? Franco or the Republic? Either one is just another form of capitalism. After the war, everything will be the same for them — the rich will be rich and the poor will starve.’

‘It won’t be that way,’ said Margarida, looking affronted. ‘Whether it’s a revolution or reform, the Republic will be much better for the workers and the poor than Franco ever will be!’

La Rusa didn’t seem to hear my sister. ‘You know, there was a soldier I picked up from the military hospital after an offensive,’ she said. ‘His intestines had been blown out of his abdominal cavity and the doctor had stuffed them back inside as best as he could. The man was dying but do you know what he said to me: “I don’t regret for one moment going to fight. For once I was treated as something better than peasant dirt!”’ La Rusa looked from Xavier to Margarida with piercing scorn. ‘While you’ve been pushing your pens around your desks and making trips to and from Paris, I’ve seen the men who have been dying for a promise … for an ideal … for a
lie
. They’ve been betrayed! Why do you think you have to conscript people for the army now?’

Margarida glanced at Xavier. She looked puzzled and hurt.

Xavier put his hand on la Rusa’s arm. ‘You’re tired,’ he said. ‘Let me take you home.’

La Rusa stood up without protest. But when Xavier took her arm, she didn’t press herself against him the way she used to do. They didn’t look like lovers any more.

‘They used to be so happy together,’ said Margarida, watching them leave the club. ‘This war is killing everything!’

T
here were moments of light in the darkness: flashes of beauty in the horror. At dawn, when the roosters that now lived on almost every balcony on Barcelona began to crow, I would hear Feliu running around in Xavier and Conchita’s apartment upstairs. ‘Pare! Pare!’ I would hear him call excitedly to his father.

My parents had reacted surprisingly calmly to my divorce. Perhaps we’d all developed a greater perspective on everything. Even Conchita stopped being at Xavier’s throat all the time, and as a result he stopped avoiding her. And Margarida no longer bothered needling Conchita.

Xavier was going abroad less frequently these days. ‘The Soviets have given up on us,’ he had told me after his latest trip. ‘Stalin is more interested in what’s happening in Europe and the Japanese invasion of China. We are a lost cause. Even Britain looks like signing a treaty with Italy to keep Mussolini from getting too cosy with Hitler. I’ve told the committee since the beginning that they were wasting time with the English.’

‘Have you given up on the Republic?’ I asked, remembering how he had always been an idealist.

Xavier looked at me seriously. ‘Sometimes I feel as if we all boarded a plane that we knew was going to crash but we got on anyway,’ he said. ‘And other times I feel like the dying soldier that Celestina told us about. I don’t regret for a second that we
tried to build a better country, that we experienced moments of greatness. Perhaps our sacrifice will inspire future generations — or at least help them to learn from our mistakes. It’s for Feliu’s sake that I continue now and won’t give in to defeatism.’

In March 1938, we all went to the Liceu one evening to see a ballet by the Spanish composer Salvador Bacarisse:
Corrida de feria
. I was entranced. It was as though I was a young girl again, sitting in the family box. It made me realise how much I had missed ballet. At the end of the night, I overheard Conchita and Xavier talking while we were waiting for our coats.

‘Are you going away again?’ Conchita asked.

‘I have to travel to Paris next week,’ Xavier said, looking around to make sure Mama and Pare were out of earshot. ‘We’ve got one last ace up our sleeve, although it won’t please Pare. We are going to offer Catalonia to France. If they annex us, I don’t think Franco will challenge it. The French will gain a wealthy industrial region and a port.’

Have we come to that? I thought. Selling ourselves off to the French?

‘I’m sorry that our marriage didn’t turn out to be all we had hoped,’ Xavier added. ‘But I will always make sure that you and Feliu have everything you need. If Barcelona looks like falling before I’ve had a chance to fetch you, I will give instructions to Evelina about how to move you all to a safer place. Please promise me that you will do everything she asks.’

The following evening we were together at dinner again, except for Pare who had sent a message that he had to work late at the factory. Some materials he had been waiting for had only just arrived and he wanted to move them into the factory in time for the morning shift. I stared at my plate of rice and pickled vegetables, knowing that I should be thankful for the cache of black-market goods Xavier had been able to secure when the rest of Barcelona was surviving on ever decreasing rations of bread.

We had gathered in the drawing room after dinner when we heard the air-raid sirens start. Barcelona had been bombed several times before, especially the port. I thanked God that Pare wasn’t at any of his factories in that area.

‘We’d best go to the cellar,’ Xavier said.

He called the servants and we all calmly walked down the stairs. While we believed Franco to be a tyrant, none of us expected him to order the destruction of the city centre. It wasn’t one of his tactics to destroy important buildings. But it soon became obvious that there was something different about this raid.

‘The air sirens are sounding so often, I can’t tell when one raid is finishing and another is starting,’ Margarida said.

Xavier frowned. ‘The explosions are close by. It doesn’t sound as if they are only targeting industrial areas.’

The sirens and explosions continued through the night, and it wasn’t until the following afternoon that quiet descended again. As soon as we returned upstairs, I picked up the telephone receiver but the line was dead.

‘Pare!’ I said to Xavier. ‘I must go and see if he is all right!’

‘You can’t go by yourself,’ he replied, taking our coats from the cupboard.

The horror we found out on the streets would remain in my nightmares forever. Buildings had been reduced to rubble. Those that remained standing had shattered windows. Shop grilles had been twisted out of shape; trams had been overturned. The air was thick with smoke. Soldiers and policemen with shovels and pickaxes were digging into the rubble. I wondered what they were doing, until I heard the screams coming from under the ruins.

Xavier grabbed my arm and steered me away. ‘The buildings are unstable,’ he said. ‘Stay in the middle of the street.’

Trucks were moving through the city, collecting bodies or body parts. I saw a policeman pick up a woman’s arm, its hand still clutching a purse.

‘The housewives were lining up for the food rations. They refused to go to the shelter because they didn’t want to lose their places in the line,’ a man standing nearby told us. He was covered in dust.

I moved as if in a dream. Was this Barcelona? Was this destruction possible? My understanding of the world and how things worked was turned upside down. The front was still far from Barcelona but the war was already here.

The trees, which had been coming into their spring leafiness, were hung with all kinds of things: clothes, tyres, a man’s leg torn from the thigh. The city stank of blood and charred flesh. We passed an orphanage where the bodies of dead children lay in lines on the pavement outside. Apart from the cuts and burns, they looked as though they were sleeping.

Xavier saw a colleague from the diplomatic committee standing in the doorway of his apartment building. ‘I can’t believe Franco did this!’ Xavier said to him. ‘I thought it was the people he hated. I thought he’d try to keep the city itself intact.’

‘It was Italian planes that did it,’ the man replied. ‘Continuously coming and going from Majorca. Mussolini wants to demoralise us.’

The damage became worse the closer we got to Pare’s factory. ‘Oh dear God!’ I said when I saw the main building. Half of it was gone. The rest was black from a fire that was still smouldering. The police were pulling bodies from the wreckage. A makeshift morgue had been set up in one of the storerooms on the site.

‘We are Xavier and Evelina Montella,’ my brother told the policeman standing in front of the storeroom.

The policeman shook his head. ‘I don’t know if your father is in there,’ he said. ‘With some of them it’s hard to tell if they are male or female.’

‘I’ll go in,’ Xavier said to me. ‘You stay here.’

My legs went weak. I crouched down on the pavement, not ashamed to be seen in that undignified position. Surely Pare could not be dead. We were supposed to leave the city before it became dangerous. I tried to imagine the best possible scenario. When the bombings first started, Pare had ordered shelters to be built around all his factories for the workers. I hoped he had used one of them himself the previous night.

Xavier was gone for a long time. Surely that must be a good sign?

I stood up as two policemen came out of the factory carrying a stretcher. The body on it was covered in white ash and at first I thought they were carrying a statue. They came closer and I recognised Pare’s broad forehead and moustache.

‘Oh God, no!’ I cried, running towards the stretcher. ‘Stop! Stop!’

‘Is it someone you know?’ one of the policemen asked as they lowered the stretcher to the ground.

I kneeled beside Pare, tearing my stockings on the rubble. He seemed unhurt apart from a gash above his eye. I took his hand. As I did, I was sure that his face twitched.

‘He’s still alive!’ I said. ‘Look! He moved!’

The policeman placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘Is it your father, senyoreta? I’m sorry but he is dead.’

Xavier came out of the storeroom. When he saw me next to the stretcher, his face dropped. He rushed towards me.

‘It’s Pare,’ I told him. ‘But I’m sure he moved.’ I peered again at Pare’s face for a sign of life.

‘Senyoreta,’ the policeman said softly, ‘it’s an illusion from the shock. I assure you that he is dead.’

I heard the other policeman whisper to Xavier, ‘The back of his head is missing. We had to leave his brain behind.’

Xavier crouched down beside me and wrapped me in his arms. ‘Come, Evelina,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Pare wouldn’t want you to remember him this way.’

I couldn’t move. ‘Pare!’ I cried as Xavier gently lifted me to my feet.

He walked me towards a button shop whose proprietress was standing in the doorway and surveying the damage to the factory with a distressed look on her face.

‘Is it your father?’ she asked us. ‘He was a good man. I’ve done business with him for years.’

Xavier grimaced. ‘Can my sister stay here with you a moment? I have to go back and make arrangements.’

The woman nodded. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked, helping me to a chair. ‘I wanted to boil some water but there is no electricity.’

She talked about the raids and how the terrible whistling of the bombs as they dropped had broken her nerves. She praised my father for the air-raid shelters that he had funded for the neighbourhood.

‘He dug them alongside the women and children when they were constructed a few months ago,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

I shook my head. I hadn’t known that. My father wouldn’t have done something so egalitarian before the war. Obviously what was happening in Spain had changed him.

‘Those shelters saved our lives,’ the woman said. ‘But your father and his workers didn’t have enough warning before the main factory was hit. The pilots must have cut their engines and flown in silently. There was supposed to be a blackout, but unfortunately the factory was lit.’

The woman meant well but I barely heard her. All I could think about was that I would never see Pare again, and that the crypt at the Old Cemetery would have another Montella.

Pare’s death left us with a sense of solitude and anxiety, but no one more so than Mama. ‘I don’t want to live,’ she said. ‘There is no point to my life.’

‘Mama, think of your grandchildren,’ I told her. ‘You must be strong! They need you.’

I thought that Pare’s death would convince Mama to leave Barcelona. Instead, it made her refuse to do so. ‘I can’t leave Leopold,’ she said.

She insisted on visiting the cemetery every day, despite the danger from further air raids. I couldn’t justify asking one of the maids to risk her life by going with her, so I went instead, leaving Conchita in charge of the children. Every time we left the house, I kissed them knowing it might be the last time I would see them. One day, the sirens sounded as we were leaving the cemetery, and Mama and I had to spend three terrifying hours in a crowded, lice-ridden shelter with rats scurrying across the floor and the ground shaking. The whole time I wondered if we would return to see the house on the passeig de Gràcia in ruins.

With Xavier and Margarida away from home much of the time, and Mama unable to function from grief, I had to take charge as mistress of the house. While I could barely think for myself, I had become responsible for everybody.

‘Mama, we cannot go to the cemetery any more while the war is raging,’ I told her. ‘We have to look after the living.’

Mama’s face collapsed and she slumped in her chair as if I had punched her. I hated myself for being so cruel. To not visit Pare’s grave would make Mama feel disloyal. But what could I do? Although I grieved for Pare too, I had to think of the children.

In late spring that year, it was clear that things were getting worse.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Margarida. ‘There aren’t enough weapons to go around and now they are calling up young boys and fathers with children!’

Margarida looked exhausted. She was drained from the late nights she had been spending in parliamentary discussions and debates.

‘Our prime minister thinks that one last heroic effort on the part of the Republican army might finally persuade the allies to help us,’ she said. ‘The Republic’s northern army is going to cross the Ebro River in one massive offensive.’

‘But we don’t have the aeroplanes and weapons that the rebels do,’ I said, horrified. ‘It will be suicide!’

‘Exactly,’ she said bitterly. ‘We are going to send an army of babies and old men to their deaths to get the world’s attention!’

The crossing of the Ebro River turned out to be the final catastrophe for the Republic. After initial gains, the Loyalist army was driven back by the air power given to the rebels by the Germans and Italians. Our old planes and faulty weapons were no match for the ten thousand pounds of bombs that were dropped daily on Republican lines. The northern army of the Republic was wiped out. Then Republican Spain received the most humiliating blow of all: the British signed the Munich Pact with Nazi Germany. If Britain was prepared to sacrifice Czechoslovakia, there was no chance of her coming to our rescue.