Toro! Toro! (5 page)

We only had two mules and Chica between all of us, and they were needed to carry what few blankets, what little food we had, as well as the younger children. The food very soon ran out, and then the rain came down, turning the tracks into streams and quagmires. We could only go as fast as the slowest amongst us, two old ladies, twin sisters, from Algar. Uncle Juan told the two old ladies they should ride instead of the children – I heard him – but they refused.

“It is the young that must live, Juan,” one of them said, “not the old. We have had our lives. We have our sticks.” And so they walked, and we children took turns to ride. Sometimes I rode Chica. Uncle Juan often gave me two small children to look after; one rode in front of me, the other clinging on behind. It was good to be riding her again, to feel her warmth and strength beneath me.

One morning, after yet another cold night in the open, we were readying ourselves for another day’s march when I noticed that the two old sisters from Algar hadn’t moved. They were lying together under a tree, hugging each other for warmth. Uncle Juan was crouching over them, trying to rouse them. I went over to him. I knew at once that they were dead. They lay so still, so absolutely
still, one with her forefinger on her lips as if willing the world to hush. When Uncle Juan looked up at me, all the strength was suddenly gone from his eyes, and instead I saw only a deep sadness.

We buried them where they lay. Uncle Juan was never the same after that. I never once saw him smile again. All that great heart seemed to have gone out of him, but nonetheless, I still pinned all my faith, all my hopes on Uncle Juan. To me, to everyone, he was the one person who would bring us through somehow. He led us on, ever deeper into the hills, and from the top of every pass we saw always more hills, higher hills lost in the clouds. And still the rain came down. On we trudged, and as we went others joined us, more freedom fighters, more refugees, till our fifty was nearer two hundred.

One afternoon, as we came out of the woods into a narrow valley with a river running through, the rain stopped and the sudden sun warmed our backs and lifted our spirits. I remember we were singing as we came down into the valley. We saw ahead of us a cluster of farmhouses in a clearing, but it seemed as if the place was deserted.

From out of the houses they appeared, one by one at first, then in twos and threes, in their dozens, fearful, bedraggled and pale. But as they recognised who we were, as they realised we were friends, their faces lit up, and they came running. Uncle Juan and the freedom fighters were greeted like conquering heroes. Stranger hugged stranger. Friends found friends. Bound by common suffering, strangers became
friends. We wept out of sheer joy that we were together, that we were alive.

Almost at once the talk was of the Black Phantom. Everyone knew of him, but only I knew who he was. Only I knew he was Paco. Every time I heard the name the Black Phantom, I felt so sure it was him, so certain that one day Paco and I would meet again.

I was making my way through the crowd of people, walking Chica down to the river for a drink, when I saw a girl standing in front of me, gaping at me wide-eyed. Maria! It was Maria! How long we clung to each other and cried together I do not know.

“And Mother? Father?” I asked her, but she shook her head and walked me to the river. There, on the river bank, as Chica drank her fill, she told me what
had happened – how, when I couldn’t be found that morning, she’d been sent out to find me, how the planes had come, and the house had been hit. She’d run back but there was nothing she could do. The house was ablaze. She couldn’t get near it. She had looked for me everywhere, called for me, and the pigs and the goats and the chickens were running everywhere in a wild panic, and all the time the planes were bombing and strafing. All she could think of was getting away. So she ran and ran. She’d wandered the woods for days before meeting a charcoal burner, who had fed her and cared for her, and brought her here to hide up in the hills with all the others. They’d been here for weeks and weeks, she said, but there was very little food to go round and they were all
terrified that the
Guardia Civil
might come.

“You won’t have to worry about that any more,” I told her, “because Uncle Juan is here with his soldiers, and they’ll look after us.”

“Uncle Juan is here!” she cried; and then she saw him and went running to him, throwing herself into his arms.

The three of us, Uncle Juan with an arm around each of us, sat together that night and we talked under the stars. After a while we fell silent, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts. That was the moment Maria asked me the question I’d been dreading. “You never told me, Antonito. Where were you when the planes came? I looked everywhere.”

The lie I’d prepared came out easily. “I got up early and took Chico for a ride.
I wanted to see Paco. Then I heard the planes, and Chico just bolted. I couldn’t stop her. I tried but she galloped off into the hills, and I clung on.”

“Thank God she did. And thank God you went for a ride that morning,” said Maria. “If you hadn’t, then we’d both be dead, like Mother and Father.”

Uncle Juan drew us closer. “I’ve decided,” he whispered. “You take Chica, and you go tonight, now.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because we are too many here. There’s not enough food to go round. Because sooner or later we’ll be discovered and will have to fight. We will fight, and fight as well as we can. But we are few and they are many. I don’t want you to be here when it happens.” Maria tried to interrupt. “No arguments, Maria. I have thought it all through. It’s the only way.

“I want you to go to Malaga, to my mother’s house – you’ve been there, Maria, you’ll find the way. Kiss her for me, Antonito, and look after her. Be a son to her. Will you do this for me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Follow the river down into the valley. You’ll join the road there. The
Guardia Civil
won’t harm you. You are children. They have children of their own.”

He led us to where Chica stood, white in the moonlight. He held us for a moment, kissed us both on the forehead, then picked us up one by one and sat us astride Chica.

“Go with God,” he whispered, and we rode away along the riverbank and left him there. We kept turning in the saddle to see him, until the darkness took him from us and we were alone.

We did see soldiers, lots of them, but luckily they ignored us. Several times the
Guardia Civil
stopped and questioned us. Maria told them we were visiting our great aunt in Malaga, and each time they nodded us through. Wherever we stopped for the night people fed us and gave us shelter. If I learned one thing on that last journey, and while hiding in the hills with the refugees, it was that men
and women have a capacity for kindness as great if not greater than their capacity for evil.

When at last, after many days’ travel, we reached Malaga and Uncle Juan’s house, I set about doing just what Uncle Juan had told me. I kissed his mother, and made myself a son to her. Together, Maria and I looked after her. I think she knew all along that Uncle Juan would not be coming home. She was strong and proud in her grief. We never did discover what happened to him. Like so many thousands of others in the Civil War, he just disappeared. But he’s not forgotten.

Not forgotten, either, was the Black Phantom. Even in Malaga, in my new school, they had heard of him. There were stories of how he had been seen wandering the streets at night in Cortes,
bellowing defiance, or spotted by a shepherd in the hills outside Jerez, even in the castle keep at Gaucin. He had surprised a column of soldiers, hundreds strong, near Cortes and put them to flight, and chased a
Guardia Civil
officer through the street of El Colminar. Even as a boy I knew the stories couldn’t all be true – though I hoped they were, of course. But the Black Phantom’s survival and the tales of his triumphs kept hope alive even in the depths of our despair as the war was lost. I kept in my heart the hope that one day I might see Paco again, but as time passed it became only the faintest of hopes, based on a story I only half believed.

Great Aunt Nina was as good a mother to me as an old lady could be, and I had Maria, your Great Aunt Maria, who was always my soulmate, my great protector, and my dearest friend. She still is.

A few years later – I would have been nineteen or twenty by then – I had a job cutting cork in the forests near Maracha. I was on my own, and tired after a long day’s work. I’d made myself a small fire, and after supper lay down beside it to sleep, the mules hobbled nearby. I fell asleep easily, and then I dreamed a strange dream, that Paco was lying there beside me, chewing the cud, licking his nose. He was so close I could smell his milky breath. I woke. Paco wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. It had been a dream. But as I got to my feet I noticed the grass
nearby had been flattened. I felt it. It was warm. Then I saw hoof marks, the hoof marks of a massive bull. Paco had found me. We had found each other at last. The Black Phantom was no phantom. I called and I called for him, but he never came.

For years after that, whenever I worked the cork forests, I looked out for Paco, even though I knew it was quite impossible he could still be alive. But it didn’t matter. Once was enough. I was a happy man.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

My grandson’s eyes had not left my face throughout the entire story, but after I’d finished he seemed to think there should be more.

“That was really the very worstest thing?” he asked. He sounded a little disappointed. “Didn’t you ever break any windows?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “I expect so.”

The front door opened, and I heard his mother’s voice. “I’m home,” she called out. Antonito leapt off the bed.

“Secret, Antonito?” I said.

“Secret, Abuelo.” He smiled at me, and was gone out of the room. By the time I reached the top of the stairs he was in his mother’s arms, clinging to her.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” he cried. “I’m really sorry.” He looked up into her face.
“Mum, we won’t ever be in a war, will we?”

“Of course not, Antonito.”

“And you won’t die, will you? You won’t die?”

“Not for a while, I hope,” she replied, and then she saw me standing there. “Abuelo, what brought all this on?”

I shrugged. “Who knows?” I said. “Who knows what goes on in the mind of a child?”

As I was walking in the hills of Andalucia in the south of Spain last autumn, I came, quite by chance, upon a farm where they breed black bulls for the
corrida,
the bullring. The very same day I found myself on a wooded hillside looking down at the ruined village of Sauceda.

This remote village had been bombed and burned out in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War – the first time in Europe that deliberate aerial bombardment of a civilian population had ever happened. Since then, in Guernica, Warsaw, London, Dresden, Hiroshima and thousands of other cities, towns and villages all over the world, this practice has sadly become all too commonplace.

My first glimpse of that herd of magnificent black bulls, and then the sighting of Sauceda in ruins, served to inspire me to sit down and write
Toro! Toro!.
But I had some research to do first, into bullfighting, and into the Spanish Civil War. This terrible war, fought in the 1930s, was a struggle between the socialist left, the Republicans, and the fascist right, the Nationalists, for the control of Spain. After many years of vicious fighting, the Nationalists, under their fascist leader General Franco, won. Only on Franco’s death, in 1975, did Spain become a democracy.

So here’s
Toro! Toro!,
a story of children who lived through that war, a story of Spain, of bulls and bullfighting, of a grandfather (like me) and his grandson.

I hope you enjoy it.

MICHAEL MORPURGO
October 2001