The Songs of Manolo Escobar (28 page)

He turned his head slowly towards me.

‘They can also help to find relatives who are still alive.'

He looked pained. ‘And I was thinking, what if Paco didn't die after you left him in Barcelona? What if he survived?'

He smiled lazily. ‘Paco is dead.'

‘They have a website that has thousands of names of people who lost relatives during the Civil War, and it helps them to reunite if they are still alive.'

‘Paco is dead.'

‘But you don't know that. You just assume that because you lost touch.'

He tried to lift a hand to wave me away, but he didn't have the energy, and he closed his eyes. ‘I know,' he said quietly.

I bent down to kiss the side of his face. A tear had rolled down his cheek.

‘Have you had a happy life, Papa?' I asked him.

He sighed. ‘You know when I am happiest?'

‘No, when?'

‘When I am in Tangier.'

‘Why was that?'

‘Because I can still see Spain across the water.'

I returned downstairs. Mama had made coffee that Pablito had laced with cheap brandy from the off-licence. The television was
on, but both of them were asleep. I sat and sipped at my coffee, thinking about what Papa had said. I remembered what Cheryl had told me in the supermarket canteen – that, unlike mine, his actions could be excused because he was still affected by the war.

I considered myself, Pablito and Mama – a self-absorbed workaholic, a dysfunctional semi-inebriate and an exhausted old woman doing her best to keep the whole charade going – and it occurred to me that Cheryl was wrong. The reality was that all of us, in our own ways, continued to bear the scars of the war.

Kevin rang my mobile phone early on Christmas morning, ordering me to take part in a conference call with Uli, from the Glasgow office, within an hour. Uli was keen to start the new year by announcing the paper's move to China, hence the urgency of calling me on Christmas Day, he said. I suspected pissing me off was also an added bonus for him. I didn't have time to make Papa's boiled egg, and when I popped my head around his bedroom door he was fast asleep, so I decided to leave him.

I had a keen sense of the reception that awaited me, and, as expected, the conference call was terse. Uli was in a foul mood because I wouldn't commit to returning to London to handle the media storm that would inevitably be prompted by the announcement of the move. He threatened me with the sack. I told him I'd take him to the cleaners at a tribunal. I also told him I was taping the conversation, which I wasn't, but it was fun hearing him squirm. Knowing that I was leaving anyway gave me a warming sense of empowerment.

I came away from the call smiling. I hadn't felt so cheerful in ages, and I was looking forward to talking with Papa. His reaction to my suggestion of trying to track down his relatives had, I felt, actually been quite positive. He'd dismissed it, but not as vehemently as I'd feared, and I certainly thought it was worth pursuing. I resolved that I would tell him I'd been contacted by Montserrat from Mexico.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the city centre was
post-apocalyptically quiet, so I had no trouble hailing a taxi. The cab approached my parents house' just in time for me to see an ambulance disappear around the corner at the end of the street. I told the cab driver to wait and made my way into the house, which was eerily quiet. I hurried upstairs and opened the door into Papa's bedroom. The duvet and top sheet were stripped back, and the window was wide open. Biting cold air was blowing into the room.

I
stood by the graveside, shivering in the chill of the afternoon. It had been pleasantly warm when I left the hotel in Barcelona earlier in the morning, and I was surprised at how much the temperature dropped the further I drove into the mountains.

I'd fallen in love with Collbató the moment I saw it – a fairytale hamlet nestling at the foot of the silver-grey range, halfway between Barcelona and Lerida, dotted with whitewashed stucco villas and polished pitch-pine chalets. The countryside around it was wooded and lush, and it was difficult to imagine this was the same country that housed the dustbowl of Andalusia.

My family had no connection with the village, but we'd stopped here on a coffee break following Papa's arrest in Alguaire, and I remembered the picturesque cemetery on its gentle slope, enclosed within a square of drystone and flanked by fir trees and tall black pines.

I stood alone, waiting for the priest to arrive. Fermin had asked whether I wanted a humanist celebrant – many of the people the Association dealt with were the relatives of atheists and didn't want a religious service. Mama didn't know if Papa's parents had been religious, so I opted for a Catholic priest to be on the safe side. Papa never went to church, but he had always been tolerant of Mama's faith.

The service was supposed to have started ten minutes earlier – typical Spanish efficiency, I thought – but there didn't appear to be another funeral party waiting to follow us. After another ten minutes or so a small red car drew up outside the gates and a priest got out. He was youthful – I didn't know why, but
I'd been expecting an older man – and he wore a black cassock and an expensive-looking pair of designer glasses. He walked briskly towards me, smiling, and shook me firmly by the hand.

‘How do you do? I'm Father Carballo. I'm sorry I'm late. I was held up making arrangements for a wedding in the cathedral in Lerida,' he said in English.

The coffins containing my grandparents' remains were sitting on the ground next to their graves, draped with ornate purple sashes that would be used to lower them into the ground. The priest looked around expectantly.

‘I'm the only mourner,' I explained.

I'd been disappointed that Mama and Pablito had decided not to attend. Mama had become more tired and frail since Papa's death, and I hadn't really expected her to make the journey, but my brother's refusal was a surprise. He'd sold his flat and moved in with Mama, and he'd held down a job in a call centre for the past year. I thought he, more than I, would have wanted to make this gesture, but he told me he was starting to get his life back on track and was worried that travelling to Spain would stir up memories of things he'd sooner forget.

Four men, who looked like labourers appeared at the gate and moved slowly towards us. They stopped a few yards away and stood with their backs to the stone wall, their heads bowed respectfully. One, who was wearing a baseball cap, removed it and clutched it tightly to his chest.

I'd provided the priest with as much personal detail about my grandparents as I had been able to collect, which wasn't much. He explained that he would say a few words about their lives. Since I'd refused the option of a funeral Mass, it would be a short ceremony, consisting of a scriptural verse and a committal prayer, at which point the coffins would be lowered into the ground. He would then recite an intercession – which, he explained, was a prayer to God on behalf of my grandparents – followed by the Lord's Prayer and a blessing.

‘Would you like me to deliver the service in English?' he asked.

‘No, in Spanish, please. This isn't for me – it's for my father,' I explained.

His manner was sympathetic, and he took nothing in my knowledge of the Catholic liturgy for granted. He asked if I wanted to conclude the service by taking part in a song, affirming hope in the resurrection, but I politely declined.

As he began the service I became aware of a woman entering through the gates, moving hurriedly across the cemetery. As she moved closer I recognised her from the photographs she'd emailed me. Our eyes met and we smiled at one another.

The priest spoke relatively slowly, but still at a pace that was too quick for me to comprehend, although I'd started night classes in Spanish a few months before and I was already capable of holding basic conversations. I found that much of it was a matter of recognising and liberating what was already buried in my subconscious.

The builders stepped forward and lifted the purple sashes, then lowered one of the coffins into the hole in the ground, an act that appeared to require little exertion, given that it contained only a few bones. They then lifted the other coffin and repeated the procedure. Father Carballo continued speaking as he dropped a handful of dirt on top of the wooden boxes.

I'd spent the past two years harrying, arguing and lobbying municipal officialdom. I'd filled in countless forms, travelled thousands of miles and spent a great deal of money to get to this point. The process had consumed much of my life, yet the burial lasted no longer than a few minutes.

The builders nodded respectfully and sloped off. The priest patted me gently on the shoulder before taking his leave. The woman walked around the graveside until she was quite near me. She had a beautiful face with a warm, intimate smile.

‘Hola, primo,'
she said as we embraced.

‘Hola,
Montserrat.'

Although we'd never met, I felt I knew her well already. In our email exchanges it had become clear that there were significant
differences in our understandings of the past, and in particular of how our grandparents had died.

She'd informed me early on that Paco, her father, had survived the war and had died only the year before Papa's death. I in turn had told her everything I knew about Papa's life – what little I'd learned about his fighting for the Republic in Lerida, the small details of our grandparents' murder by a Fascist firing squad, our fathers' flight to Barcelona, the months of squalid, frozen subsistence followed by Paco's disappearance.

After Papa died, I'd convinced Mama to fill in the gaps of what I knew of his wartime experiences, and while I suspected the story she told was an abridged version, at least it had allowed me to piece together how he'd got from Barcelona to Tangier, where they met.

He and the Gypsy girl had left the city as the Fascist troops entered, staging a mass rally and victory parade in the Plaça de Sant Jaume, which housed the Generalitat, the Catalan parliament. The pair had set off on foot, cold and hungry, spending days walking along the dirt-track roads that linked the fishing villages of the Costa Brava. They slept in ditches, clinging to one another for warmth, and they begged and stole what little food they could. They passed through devastated villages lined with the hollow, bombed-out shells of buildings, whose cobbled streets were strewn with mangled masonry, abandoned possessions and rotting corpses. They couldn't risk hitching rides with passing cars and trucks because they didn't know who might stop and quiz them about their identity.

Papa had worked out a cover story for himself: he was a
Franquista,
travelling to work for his brother, a blacksmith in Almeria. But the Gypsy girl spoke only Catalan, the regional language banned by Franco, which would immediately identify her as a
rojo.

Exhausted and close to starvation, they were eventually picked up by a party of Falangist soldiers near the town of Tarragona, less than seventy miles from Barcelona. From there they were taken to a military garrison, where they were locked in neighbouring
cells. On the first night Papa heard the anguished screams of the Gypsy girl as she was repeatedly raped. In the early hours of the morning he heard a single gunshot, followed by silence.

Papa remained in the cell for several more weeks. He was given a single daily meal of soup – water flavoured with a small piece of ham and chickpeas – and he was questioned by a succession of junior officers, to whom he repeated his cover story about his brother in Almeria. But clearly they didn't believe him.

‘Were they violent to him?' I had asked Mama.

She hadn't responded. My mind returned to my childhood and the discussion I'd had with Papa after I'd failed to stand up for Jorge at school, when he described the visit of the secret police to the boy's home in Chile and the abduction of his father. I realised he'd been drawing on his own experiences.

Then one morning, Mama had explained, Papa was woken early, bundled into a truck and driven to a large building in the middle of the countryside which had the appearance of a stately home, but which turned out to be an orphanage run by Jesuits.

It was to be his home for the next four years, where he was taught to love God and Franco. Every morning he was ordered to give the Fascist salute, and if he refused he was beaten and given no food. The same fate awaited him if he spoke Catalan, or if he said anything that was deemed to be critical of Franco or the Catholic Church. He soon learned what to say and what not to say and how to behave if he wanted to survive.

When he was eighteen and legally old enough to leave the orphanage, he set off alone, with no family to care for him and no desire to return to his home village. The only place he could think of to settle was Tangier, where the Gypsy girl had urged him to go four years before.

Montserrat's father had also been unwilling to discuss the war in any detail. She'd told me how, after Paco had left my father in Barcelona to look for food, he'd been arrested by the Assault Guard and thrown in jail. Many others in his position, vagrants suspected of having fought for Anarchist militias, were shot by
the Communists, but with the city on the brink of invasion by Fascist troops, the senior officer had taken a lenient view and set him free after holding him in a cell for a few weeks.

From there he returned to the cave in the park where he and my father had been hiding out, but naturally his brother was gone. Paco fled the city and travelled north, on a treacherous, frozen, hungry journey over the Pyrenees and into France, where he hitched lifts along the coast until he arrived at Marseille. There he boarded a boat for Mexico.

But I had known instinctively that Montserrat was holding something back from me. Bad news.

Please, tell me,
I had written.
I'd rather know.