Albi

PART ONE

1

The writing on the wall, September 2016

The old man sits on a rickety chair, his walking stick between his knees, and keeps his eyes down. The hot sun made him dizzy – that and the stiff unfamiliarity of his best clothes – and it’s pleasantly cool in this dusty store-room, but he should have stayed outside. The writing is still there, on the wall above his head, the faint pencil scrawl apparently forgotten even in this year of anniversaries. Forgotten by everyone, except him.

He stares at the red dust spoiling the shine on his shoes and listens to the distant voices as the priest intones, the small crowd gives the responses.

He might have explained his sudden faintness. He was my best friend, that one, he could have said. But it’s a long time since he and Carlos were particular friends. Besides, how much of Carlos can be left in that shiny casket of ashes? That’s the way they send you back from the city these days. Better to stay here in the village and go into the cemetery wall in a coffin. Or over the cliff without one and let the vultures pick your bones clean.

He pokes at the dirt floor with his stick.

It’s no good. He has to look up at the scribble of pencil, fading away for nearly eighty years until it is barely legible:

On the 20th day of September 1938

Comandante Vicente Muñoz Barrosa

took control of El Rincón and surrounding territory

on behalf of the Nationalist Army

Is he the only one left whose skin is burned by those little words, like battery acid eating away the flesh? He turns his face away.

Outside, the priest’s solemn voice drifts on the warm air, the words indistinct.

Through the doorway Alberto can see a human thigh bone, old and yellow, casually propped against the cemetery wall. It must have become separated from its owner when they moved bodies to the ossuary, and now nobody knows which family it belongs to. He looks away. Old ghosts rustle at his back. Bones. It always comes back to bones.

The priest raises his voice in blessing.

A pause. Then the voices start up, ordinary and cheerful, moving down the slope towards the gate. Somebody laughs. That’s how they deal with you when, as Carlos was, you are eighty-nine: a bit of solemnity while they shove you into the chamber in the cemetery wall, a bow and a nod to God, then chatter chatter chatter all the way back down to the village.

Mari-Jé bustles in. Her hair is burnished brass this morning, and bouncy, so that she is unfamiliar, for all that she’s his wife. Her voice is brassy too.

‘Not like you to feel faint, Alberto.’

‘Not faint,’ he says, getting to his feet. ‘A touch dizzy, that’s all. Too much standing around in the sun. Let’s go home. Those sheep will take themselves out if I’m not back soon.’

‘You and your sheep,’ she says. But not crossly. There’ll be coffee and magdelenas in the bar this morning, that’s what she’ll be thinking. And all the city relatives here for the interment. You have to make the most of such moments at this end of the year. After Todos Santos, apart from the odd funeral, the village will be dead until Easter.

‘I don’t know what’s got into you this morning!’ Mari-Jé bangs the broom briskly round the legs of the kitchen table. ‘Carlos wasn’t a friend of yours. I don’t remember you and him so much as passing the time of day.’

He shrugs. She doesn’t appear to notice – she’s too busy whisking her broom along the bottom of the kitchen cupboards.

‘So what are you moping for?’

Her hair-style is subsiding and she hasn’t got her teeth in, but even with a lisp she’s as sharp as ever. She’s a good wife, he reminds himself.

‘We were best friends once.’

‘You and Carlos? When?’

‘In school.’

‘School!’ She comes round under the window and past the sink with her broom. ‘You stopped going when you were seven.’

‘Eight,’ he says. ‘But we were friends afterwards too.’

She stops sweeping and gives him the eye. Seems about to say something, then closes her mouth and starts sweeping again. ‘Well I never heard you talking about him.’ As if that is the subject closed.

A jealous woman, Mari-Jé. Especially of the past she wasn’t there to share. She wasn’t born till he was fifteen.

‘I’m going out,’ he says.

She thumps the broom around his vacated chair.

He walks down towards the river with the old dog at his heels. The streets are empty. The weekend’s visitors will be back in the city by now. He passes the house with the leaning balconies, the deserted forge. Down the white concrete road he goes, out of the village. Raul’s rabbit shed is all shut up. Raul will be sleeping off his Sunday lunch. So will Raul’s son Santi, no doubt, after carousing in the bar late into the night with the city boys. It’s always like that after funerals.

Across the valley, the great wall of the dam is flushed orange in the last rays of the setting sun. As Alberto crosses the meadow the light casts a ghostly glow across the surface of the river.

It’s true, what Mari-Jé said. Carlos was a teenager when he left with his family to work in Valencia. But he came back every August and every Easter for the rest of his life. It wasn’t the leaving that stopped them being friends.

There’s no point thinking about this. Carlos is dead and there’s nothing to be done about the past. He sits on the low wall, his stick between his knees, and stares across at the sun-flushed face of La Guadaña. Every cleft and crevice in the cliffs casts a sharp shadow. There are still marks where the water poured down the rockface in the big storm last April. Don’t think.

Don’t think.

But the names keep coming into his head. Carlos, Pepito, Rafa. Juanito Torrecillas. All dead. Carlos was the last one left, and now he’s gone.

Alberto suddenly sees Carlos, not as the man he became but as the boy he once was – angular, pale-skinned, grubby, his thatch of blonde hair always uncombed, running across this meadow to hide in the bushes along the river-bank. Let’s go and spy on the soldiers, he’d say. And whatever Carlos said, they did it, him and Pepito. However crazy.

The past has got its foot in the door. That night the nightmare comes visiting, the same dream he’s been dreaming, on and off, for nearly eighty years. There are guns in the room, there is hay on the floor, and the abuela is screaming in the chimney corner, but he’s too small and the soldiers are enormous: he can’t do anything for her, though he knows she is going to die. Or maybe she’s dead already. He looks across the room but she has disappeared and the dead fire on the hearth is a nest of bones. A crowd of soldiers looms suddenly between him and the chimney corner, the floor shudders under their boots, he can hear their caps knocking against the ceiling beams. Now his mama is there too, and his papa and his three sisters, cowering so close around him he can scarcely breathe.

In the jostle of dark figures that fills the room he glimpses the hem of a dress, covered in tiny flowers. He reaches out to touch it but the fabric whisks away.

And then the shooting starts.

2

The Soldiers

Alberto wakes with a jolt. He hears the rasping of his own dry sobs as he lies trembling in the dark.

The dream.

He places his hand on his chest and waits for his heart to slow down. A nightmare, he reminds himself. Not reality. Beside him, Mari-Jé stirs, and mumbles.

‘It’s nothing,’ he says.

Nothing?

The dream is not what happened. But it’s no good, he has to go back there to separate the dream from reality. In the real world, the soldiers arrived and there was no shooting. No faces, no uniforms visible, nothing but the tramping of boots as the troops marched through the streets while the villagers hid, blind in their houses with the shutters closed. He drags the jagged shards of memory back to the surface: the noises in the street, the sharp and mysterious clinking and clattering of steel toe-caps on cobbles and the un-nerving silences.

In their house, nobody slept. But nothing happened. Not until morning.

*

Perhaps he’d dozed off, perched on the stiff, upright chair, his head against the wall, because suddenly there was shouting in the next street and a din like the gates of hell being broken open.

‘Rifle butts,’ Papa whispered. ‘On the doors.’

‘Open up!’

Bolts rasped, doors crashed open, heavy boots ran up other people’s stairs. The noises were muffled, then. When you are listening, you fill that space with terrible thoughts. Maybe the abuela was listening too because she started screaming, ‘The devil’s on his way, you sinners! Make way for the devil!’ Loud enough for the soldiers to hear.

‘Quick!’ Papa hissed. ‘Get her into the back room!’

Pilar and Inma pulled their grandmother out of her bed in the front bedroom and dragged her, screeching, through the kitchen into the back of the house, shutting the door behind them.

‘That woman will be the death of me,’ Papa said, his voice sounding strange in the silence left behind.

‘Ramón!’ said Mama. ‘Don’t speak of your mother that way.’

Outside, the soldiers were working their way closer, house by house. The floor trembled under Albi’s bare feet as blows thundered down on their front door. Mama put her hand on Papa’s arm, her face pale in the light of the single candle.

‘Not you, Ramón.’

She ran downstairs.

Albi, squeezed between his sisters and his mama and papa, tried not to look into the muzzles of the guns but his eyes kept going there. In the corner of the kitchen the abuela was slumped on a chair, rocking backwards and forwards and whimpering. The soldiers ignored her.

‘You! Name?’

The gun jerked at Papa.

Albi closed his eyes, but then he heard his papa say, ‘Ramón Álvarez Blanco,’ so he opened his eyes again and saw another soldier writing the answer down in a black book.

‘Age?’

‘Sixty-three.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Farmer.’

‘This woman is your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Name?’

‘María Zapatero Irún,’ Papa said.

‘Age?’

Papa glanced helplessly at Mama, and shrugged.

‘I am fifty-one, señor.’

So many questions, and all of the answers had to be written down. After Albi’s mama, his three sisters. Then it was his turn, but the soldiers didn’t seem interested any more. They were more interested in how many draft animals they owned. Three. How many breeding animals? Nine ewes, one ram, two goats, one cow. And the poultry and the rabbits. How much land, and where? Questions, questions, and all the while the guns waving about, and the fierce voices. Boots loud on the tiled floors, caps brushing the low ceilings.

When the answers had all been written, the soldier in charge made Mama fetch every knife in the house, along with the bill-hooks and the axes and Papa’s gun, and even the old musket which didn’t work any more, until they were all laid out in a row on the kitchen floor. The soldier who’d been doing the writing started tying labels round handles and bundling them into a sack.

Papa said, ‘But señor! How can I kill a sheep without a knife? How can we cut sausage, even?’

The officer in charge stared down at Papa’s leg. Then he raised his eyes to Papa’s face as if to be sure to remember him. But all he said was, ‘Stay out of trouble and you’ll get them back.’ He went to the door. The small knives were still lying on the floor, and the smallest axe.

‘Anyone found carrying a weapon will be shot,’ the soldier said, and then he went away.

Albi’s legs were hurting from sitting all the long day in the shuttered house. His head hurt from the endless whispered arguments and from listening, listening, hour after hour. But all they heard was the soldiers marching about the streets, and once, fierce shouting.

Papa opened the kitchen shutter a crack to spy down on the street.

‘What’s going on?’ Mama whispered.

Papa didn’t reply. He closed the shutter.

In the end they had to lie down and sleep. They couldn’t sit waiting for ever. But they all slept in one room, squashed up together in the three beds, the night heaving with bad dreams.

*

Alberto lies on his back beside Mari-Jé, who is snoring gently. The ache of his limbs and the heaviness of his feet tell him he’s old. The street light shines upwards on the varnished beams and for a moment he is distracted that the beams are no longer whitewashed the way they used to be when his abuela slept in this room. No, that was long ago. The soldiers didn’t shoot anyone in their kitchen. They didn’t shoot anyone anywhere. They took over the village and nobody stopped them. Did a good job at scaring them all shitless, but nobody got killed.

I don’t want to think about this.

But he must. The nightmare is so much worse than the reality was, in the beginning. We were confined to the houses. The soldiers searched for weapons. The next day (or was it the day after?) they made us all go down to the Plaza. That’s all.

*

They woke to the stale darkness of another dawn. The street was already full of noise.

‘Down to the Plaza!’ a voice bellowed right outside their house. ‘Every one of you! Now!’

‘What? The abuela too?’ whispered Mama, over the clatter of people coming out of their houses.

‘You heard them,’ Papa said.

Inma and Mama pulled the abuela out of the bed. In all the noise you could hardly hear her wailing. Albi followed them down the shadowy stairs, his knees weak as water. Outside, he blinked in the grey light. Young Jaime and his little wife Belén were coming out of the house opposite, supporting Old Jaime awkwardly between them because he should be in bed, like the abuela. Belén’s face was white but Young Jaime’s was dark and angry. The crowd swallowed them up.

‘Move!’

Soldiers jabbed with their rifle butts. Albi stumbled, somebody grabbed his hand and squeezed it. Ramona. He was surprised into squeezing back, not caring who might see, until his sister’s hand slipped away in the crush.

In the Plaza there were more soldiers. How many? He couldn’t see to count, there were too many people pushed into the middle of the square, the soldiers crowding them close with their guns like dogs with a flock of sheep. There were nearly seven hundred people living in this village. That was a big number to all be in the same place at the same time.

A shot rang out. The crowd pushed back and suddenly a woman started screaming. A man’s voice hissed, ‘Shut up! Shut up! He was firing into the air!’ and the screaming stopped.

A man was speaking, somewhere at the front. The crowd went very still, listening. It wasn’t a powerful voice but the words were scary. They mustn’t do this and they mustn’t do that. The punishment for this and this will be death, the punishment for that will be imprisonment. And there will be all these other rules besides: curfews, permits, penalties. New words Albi hadn’t heard before. He stared at his bare feet and let the danger-words go straight through his head and out the other side to a place where they didn’t matter.

‘As from tomorrow, the factory and the school will open again,’ the strange voice said. ‘You will return to normal.’

He did hear that. And the bit afterwards, about going to church on Sunday.

3

The Comandante

‘Who were you talking to?,’ asks Mari-Jé, pausing to frown at him over the bundle of sheets on her way to the washing machine.

‘Nobody. I wasn’t talking.’

‘Yes you were. Sounded like Carlos.’ Her voice is suspicious.

He gives her his vague look, the one that stops her probing, usually.

‘I was talking to Perrito,’ he says, when she doesn’t look away. The old dog hears his name and wags his heavy tail on Alberto’s foot without lifting his grizzled snout from his paws. Alberto goes back to paring the curved handle of the new walking stick and his wife disappears into the front basement. It’s obvious she thinks he’s going gaga – he can hear her muttering about it as she slams soap into the dispenser and twists the dial.

Talk about talking to yourself.

It’s quite cold in the back stable but he likes to sit here where he can see up the passage to the street at the front of the house, and at the back, through the door of the corral, down to the neat huerto where the last of the tomatoes gleam in the sunshine. The sheep in the pen keep him company, and so does old Perrito. All his dogs have been called Perrito or Perrita but this one it’s a joke. Perrito has got wolf-hound in him, he’s not small at all.

One of the ewes sighs. Nobody passes in the street. The village is empty.

Mari-Jé steps out into the passageway and stares at him as if he’s surely up to something. He pretends he’s too busy finishing off his new walking stick to notice she’s watching. She sighs, and goes upstairs.

A few minutes later she’s back with another armful of sheets. His guard is down. The funeral, the nightmare last night, and now Mari-Jé with the washing: the nagging memory flips upright suddenly and grabs at his heart. Not Mari-Jé but his mama, standing at the corner of the stairs with a basket of washing at her feet. He is nine-years old, the soldiers have come, and nothing will ever be the same again.

*

‘Albi!’

‘What?’ Reluctantly, he put the rabbit back in her cage and went to see what his mama wanted.

She was standing on the stairs, balancing a basket of washing on the broad step at the corner. ‘Take this.’

Women’s work. He glared, but the girls had gone back to work in the factory this morning and there was nobody else, if you didn’t count Papa, or the abuela. He picked up the basket.

‘Wait.’ She went back up the stairs to the kitchen and came down with another basket, filled to overflowing.

Outside in the street there was nobody – no old people sunning themselves by their front doors, no children playing in the dust, but no soldiers either. His mama locked the door and put the key in the usual place behind the pot of geraniums. Albi hurried after her up the street, hoping the soldiers didn’t find it. He wished he was still in the kitchen with the front door safely bolted from the inside. He knew she was scared too, that was why she didn’t want him to go out with the sheep today. He would have to take them out soon, though. They couldn’t stay indoors for ever, eating precious hay.

Mama stopped so suddenly he nearly bumped into her.

‘Read it to me,’ she whispered, nodding at the piece of paper pinned on the stable door. He put his basket down and glanced over his shoulder. The street was still empty. He stumbled over the words, leaving the long ones out, but it was only what the soldier had said yesterday, about the factory and the school re-opening, and being normal. Mama walked off. He picked up his basket and followed her. As they went past the church he glanced up at the old castillo, perched on its rocky outcrop above the village. That’s where the soldiers will be, he thought. They’ll be watching Mama and me right now. We’ll look like ants walking along a stick.

Down in the deserted Plaza, the slap-slapping of laundry from the wash house was the only sound. There were no voices, as if it was ghosts doing the washing. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, but when they came round the front of the building it was full of women. He wanted to laugh. All those women and not one of them talking? Papa would be amazed.

He followed his mama through the crowd to a space at the back of the wash tank. The familiar faces looked pinched and scared as they bent to their scrubbing, not a child in sight.

His mama nodded to him to put the basket down behind her. He turned to go.

‘You stay,’ she said.

He pulled a face, but he didn’t mind really. It felt safer here than out in the empty streets. He sat cross-legged on the stone bench which ran along the back wall and stared up at the dappled light on the underside of the tiled roof. Nothing had changed but everything was different, the women so silent, the sunlight in the Plaza so empty. Only the swallows were the same, chattering noisily as they dived in and out between the roof beams. A ripple of whispering began, too low for him to hear more than a word here, a word there: Fascists… Nationalists… Rebels… all those words for the bad soldiers who were the Enemy. Whisper whisper, all round the tank. My Pedro says they’re making the old Dormitory into a garrison… Albi pricked up his ears.

‘That’s where the bloody soldiers are today,’ Cristina added, not so quietly.

It felt better, knowing the soldiers were busy outside the village walls. The women slapped and rubbed and dunked their laundry in the tank. Somebody made a curt comment and her neighbours chuckled. The water gurgled and lapped and glugged the same as usual, the whispering became a murmur, the murmuring became a hum. Albi watched the swallows chattering over their heads. The soldiers shouldn’t have come here, not to this village. Not when they had a castle, and old walls round the village to keep the bad soldiers out. But the castillo was a ruin and the village walls were broken in places, and castles and walls only keep you safe if you use them to fire guns at the soldiers to stop them coming in. No gun had been fired against the soldiers here in El Rincón, not a single one. The soldiers had marched in and taken charge while everybody hid in their houses. How could that be? Papa said they were saving their bullets for later, but what use was that when the soldiers had taken all the guns away? ‘The ones they found they did,’ Papa had said, looking at Albi sideways.

Two more women arrived, looking for a space. That would be LaValenciana with old Teresa. Last winter Teresa’s son, Andrés, went to Valencia to join the Republican Army, but two months ago he’d come back to El Rincón with a new wife. Hardly anybody had seen her yet because Andrés’s farm was out of the village, up on the Meseta. Albi stared at this new wife as she followed her mother-in-law round the tank. She was very pretty. Her dress had little buttons all down the front, not like anything the girls in the village wore. She wasn’t wearing the usual canvas espadrilles either, but leather sandals unlike anything he had ever seen, with little heels, and criss-crossing straps over her neat toes.

The Valenciana squeezed into the narrow space between Teresa and Albi’s mama, looking like a chicken that can’t move its wings.

‘We’ve had to leave the Torre and come down to the house in the Placeta,’ Teresa whispered to Mama. ‘The soldiers made us.’

That made Albi’s insides go funny again.

He leaned back against the wall, staring at the backs of the Valenciana’s bare legs. They were smooth and hairless and they weren’t burned brown after a summer working in the sun.

‘Hostia!’ somebody exclaimed on the far side of the tank as the soap shot out of her hands and landed in the water with a splash.

Teresa turned to Albi. ‘Alberto,’ she said, not whispering. ‘This is a job for you.’ The others shushed her but they were laughing.

His mama said quietly, ‘Albi, get the soap for Pepito’s mama.’

He clambered over the parapet into the tank. The water was cold, even though the air outside the wash house was hot. The bottom of the tank was slimy and he had to be careful; he knew they were all waiting for him to fall in. He felt for the soap and handed it to Pepito’s mama, climbing out quickly before anyone could trip him up to make the others laugh. He pushed his way out into the sun to dry off, ducking away from the wet hands that reached out to ruffle his hair.

Angelina cackled. ‘Such sleek black hair that boy has, like a little dog! Always makes me want to stroke him.’

He hurried past her, into the blinding sun, and nearly ran into the man standing outside the wash house.

The hubbub behind him subsided like bubbles bursting. Albi stared down at the brown boots, which had a tiny sun blazing on each toe. Tall leather boots, such as a rich man might wear for riding. He lifted his eyes a little. Above the boots, green-brown cloth, pressed sharp and fierce. He looked a little higher. He got as far as the leather holster with the gun in it, then he stopped looking. He dived back into the wash house, anxious hands reaching out to pull him to safety.

From out in the Plaza the high-pitched voice from yesterday said, ‘Carry on with your work.’

The women did as they were told. Albi leaned against the back wall, his heart pounding. He sank slowly down out of sight. Everything about the soldier was clipped and polished but his voice was pale like a small man’s voice trapped in a big man’s body. Albi stared at the sun-browned legs of the women in front of him, at their faded summer dresses, and the Valenciana’s elegant pale legs and her dress all bright with tiny flowers. The soldier’s boots rang out on the cobbles as he walked first one way, then the other, in front of the wash house. Thwack, thwack, went the soldier’s cane against his thigh. He reminded them they were to return-to-normal-and-that-was-an-order.

‘The Generalissimo intends the new Spain to be a place of hard work and honest citizens,’ the soldier said to nobody in particular. ‘Schooling is the root of good citizenship.’

Albi studied his dirty toenails. Ciudadaña. That was a funny word.

‘So why is that boy not in school?’

He froze. The man must mean him. Nobody moved, nobody said a word.

‘Boy!’

Was there another boy? He looked around, hoping. He tried to stand up but his insides had knotted as hard as dried sausage and his knees wouldn’t work. His mama stepped back until she was standing in front of him. She reached out behind her and put her hand on his knee.

‘Señor Comandante,’ Mama called out (her hand patting Albi quickly, secretly). ‘My son is not in school because he has to look after our sheep and goats.’

In the silence, Albi’s heart fluttered like Mama’s hand on his knee. Not any old soldier, then. A Comandante. How did Mama know that?

The Comandante’s voice said, as if he was making a joke, ‘Sheep? I see no sheep.’

The women stared down at their hands. The water lapped quietly against the stone parapets. Albi shrank a little lower against the wall.

‘Get him a permit from the Ayuntamiento then, not to be in school. All of you, observe the curfew. Remind your husbands: anyone found breaking the curfew will be shot.’

Nobody moved. They listened to the sound of the Comandante’s boots walking away.

Angelina, who was very old, sat down on the edge of the wash tank and started fanning herself with her kerchief. The women who’d finished washing seemed in no hurry to leave. They too sat down on the parapet and fanned themselves, everybody whispering at once.

It was a very strange day. Not normal at all.

*

Alberto gets up stiffly in answer to Mari-Jé’s call. He can smell it still, the homemade soap scumming the cold water in the wash house tanks, the smell of fear and then of relief on the women. He closes his penknife and puts it away in his pocket. Such a strange time that was, after the soldiers came, everybody watching their backs and trying to carry on with their lives while they waited to see what would happen next.

He goes upstairs, the warm smell of ham and chickpeas wafting down to meet him.

Presumably Mama got him a permit. He can’t remember the details now.

4

Normal

Mari-Jé’s mobile rings. She wipes her hands on her apron as she hurries to pick it up.

‘Yes?’ She frowns at the wall, then her face lights up. ‘Rosa!’ And away she goes, settling herself onto a chair for a long chat, talking loudly to be heard over the television. Rosa. Inma’s girl. ‘Yes, yes we’re both well. Apart from your tío having a dizzy spell on Saturday, in the cemetery. The cemetery. Did you not hear? Carlos Perez? No, no. Just the ashes.’

Alberto picks up the TV remote while Mari-Jé is too busy talking to notice. Yet another anniversary programme about the start of the Civil War – Mari-Jé is fascinated by them, but then she wasn’t born until years after the war ended. He flicks through channels. A studio audience, a man telling why he beat up his wife, the audience roars. He clicks again. A tiger stalks through shadows. He lets it stalk.

‘Yes, yes,’ Mari-Jé says, nodding earnestly to Rosa in Seville.

A powerful voice, Mari-Jé has. A country voice. This village was always full of them, from generations of shouting from hillside to hillside. His sisters Pilar and Ramona were the same, but not Mama, and certainly not Inma. Rosa is as soft-spoken now as her mother once was. He can’t hear her half of the conversation. His eyes wander to the old photo on the wall. Inma, with her melodious voice and her kind ways. The strip-light glares in the glass, but he knows exactly what is there in the picture without needing to see it. It was taken the year before the war began. He’s on the far right, not much more than five-years old, big eyes gazing at the camera. Inma is standing behind him with one hand resting on his shoulder. She’s a soft pillowy girl of eighteen in the photograph. Like her sisters standing next to her, her black hair is shoulder length, curled in the style that was fashionable then. Pilar frowns at the camera as if she is about to reprimand the photographer and beautiful Ramona smiles coquettishly, but Inma is plain and comfortable. A homely girl with smiling eyes.

Inma the quiet one.

*

Papa said, ‘Let the boy go, María. He’ll be safe with the permit.’ He reached out and put his hand on Mama’s tightly folded arms. ‘You know I’d go with him if I could.’

Mama looked up then, with a sad little nod.

‘The soldiers won’t touch him. It’s not the small boys they’re interested in, María.’

She gave another little nod of her head, so slight Albi wasn’t sure he’d really seen it. He stared up at them anxiously. His papa must be worried: he didn’t usually talk quietly, or call Mama by her name.

‘Off you go, Albi,’ Papa said. ‘Go out past Ovidio’s garden, they haven’t got sentries there. But stay close to the village. And come back at once if anyone gives you trouble.’

Anyone? It was obvious who Papa meant.

Albi picked up his satchel. Carlos would be brave, or if he wasn’t he would make it look as if he was. Albi could too, if he concentrated. That was what the old schoolmaster always used to say, when Carlos made his chalk screech across the slate. Concentrate.

The sheep and goats pushed at the gate of the pen. Including the lambs there were twenty-one altogether, and he couldn’t hold them. As soon as the gate came open they ran past him into the passage and out onto the street. He had to shout at his dog to bring them back and even when he got in front it was tricky, because La Perrita couldn’t stop them rushing him, and how could he keep an eye out for the soldiers if he was running? But the streets were empty, except for one abuelo hobbling down to his front door. At the corner, by the house with the leaning balconies, Albi glimpsed a woman’s back as she slipped into an alleyway, but nobody else, and after a while the sheep slowed to a trot, and then to a walk, and so did he.

There were two flocks out already, walking up the track towards the cliffs of La Guadaña. He guessed from the numbers of sheep that one of the shepherds was probably Miguel, and the tiny figure higher up the slope might be Ovidio. He could hear sheep bells on this side of the valley too, somewhere above the trees. He certainly wasn’t the only one out.

He had such a funny feeling as soon as he left the narrow twisting streets behind. It was as if the sky had been heavy and now it had lifted up again. He felt safe, that’s what it was. Out here on the terraces he could see, and he could hide if he needed to. He wasn’t trapped in the house like a fox in its earth.

He found a place where he could sit with his back against a rock. If anybody came, he would see them before they saw him. Away to his left the castillo shone bright in the sun, an empty shell. He looked the other way to where the great wall of the dam hung like a white curtain across the Tajubo valley. His heart jumped. There were soldiers there all right. A line of black figures, strung out along the top of the wall, too many to count. What were they doing?

Nothing much. Just moving about.

After a while he got tired of watching. He got out his penknife and began to whittle a stick. The soldiers hadn’t wanted his penknife, even though it could cut a string with a flick of the wrist. They’d looked at it and put it down. Hadn’t they seen how sharp it was? Anyway, he’d let Papa borrow it, next time he wanted to kill a sheep.

He whittled two sticks and sharpened points on them: you could use these to spear a sheep dead. Or a soldier, if you crept up behind him. If the soldier was asleep and didn’t see you coming and you aimed for his throat. Or would it be better to aim for his heart? Where is your heart, anyway? He put his hand on his chest but couldn’t feel his heart beating. Perhaps it had stopped. He whittled another stick.

Later, when the sun began to drop, he put all the sharp sticks in his satchel and whistled to Perrita to bring the sheep to him. If a soldier looked in his bag he’d tell him the penknife was allowed, the other soldiers had let him keep it. And the sticks were for his mama to use in the garden, he would say.

The black figures were still on the dam, moving about on the top of the wall.

Albi, in his corner by the kitchen fire, leaned his head against the wall and felt the voices go fuzzy in his ears. Then they went quiet.

Mama chuckled suddenly. ‘He’s worn out, the poor little thing.’

El pobrecito, she’d called him. He tried to wake up enough to protest, but the voices were murmuring again and if they thought he couldn’t hear because he was asleep he had better listen. He woke his ears up and kept his eyes closed.

Ramona said, ‘But Papa, the factory makes paper, not guns.’

‘Paper for banknotes,’ Papa said. ‘That’ll be Fascist money now.’

Silence.

‘We can’t be sure the war is over,’ Inma said, in her low voice which everybody always listened to, even their papa. ‘It might be Republican money yet.’

‘But Ramon!’ That was Mama speaking. ‘How would we manage if the girls stopped bringing their wages home?’

‘I will not have any child of mine conniving with the enemy!’

Albi opened his eyes. Nobody noticed.

‘Papa, they’ve got a list,’ Pili said. ‘It’s got our names on it. All of us who work in the factory.’

Inma said, ‘She’s right, Papa. They’re saying they’ll march us to the factory if we don’t go of our own free will. And if they do that they won’t pay us.’

A long pause. Then Papa said, his voice tired, ‘It’s not as simple as you make it sound, Inma. The road up to the Meseta isn’t the only reason the Fascists are here. The factory is important too. They want to make sure that paper goes on being made but it’ll be for Fascist banknotes now.’

Nobody said anything.

Was the same fight happening in every house? Albi closed one eye and squinted up at the photograph on the wall above Pili’s head. He was only six the day that picture was taken but he remembered the photograph man as if it was yesterday, going round the village with his camera on its stand, persuading people to pay him to take photographs of them, each family lined up outside their house. It was like magic, the picture in a wooden frame with glass in it and them all inside it. It was still magic, because there they were on the wall, three years later, still fixed in the frame: Abuelo in the middle and next to him the abuela. On either side of them, Mama and Papa upright on their chairs.

He turned his eyes away. That picture was the family they used to be, when Abuelo was still alive and the abuela was a sweet little grandmother with cheeks like apples. Papa still the old Papa. Albi’s sisters in the back row, one two three. And his brother. They weren’t the same family any more.

Papa’s voice rose: Pili was arguing and Papa never liked that.

Albi went to bed.

Next morning the girls went to work as usual. Papa didn’t try to stop them, but as soon as they were out of the house he started shouting at Mama. ‘Don’t you realise? This isn’t just about collaborating! Do you not know what those bloody fascists do to young women?’

Mama’s hand flew to her mouth. She saw Albi standing in the doorway and shook her hand at Papa as if to say Not now! She picked up the broom and started sweeping. Papa didn’t say another word.

What did soldiers do to girls? Albi walked out of the village on the path past the cemetery where there wasn’t a check-point. He couldn’t think of anything they couldn’t do just as badly to boys. Bullets weren’t fussy. It was surely more dangerous going out alone with the sheep than it was going to the factory with a great crowd of other girls, and men too.

When Albi got back with the flock that afternoon, Papa was in Julio’s bar. He came in drunk. So drunk that Mama put him straight to bed and nobody was there to argue when the girls came in from the factory, Papa’s snores so loud they barely heard the soldiers marching up the street at the start of curfew.

The next day the girls went to the factory, and the day after that. And then it was Sunday and they all went to church, even Papa, because the soldiers came with their guns and made them. There wasn’t a priest, there wasn’t a Mass. Just everybody in the church. They stayed in the church a long time not doing anything. El Comandante knelt at the front, praying as if he could save the world, while the soldiers stood by with their guns and stared at the villagers, ready to shoot anyone who caused trouble.

Albi stood between Inma and Papa. He let himself lean just a little bit against Inma. Her arm sneaked round the small of his back. He bowed his head and screwed his eyes up tight to look as if he was praying, but while he was about it he might as well ask God to make sure Papa bowed his head too.

5

Mena

Albi lay on his back, watching the October sun spark among the branches of the evergreen oaks as he listened with half an ear to the soft, rhythmic clanking of the bells. The sound told him the flock was still resting in the shade, chewing the cud.

Mama had made him promise to stay close to the village, but that was stupid. He hadn’t seen any soldiers moving about today, not even on the dam, but there were two sentries right here on the road-block below the castillo. He’d been watching them all afternoon.

He turned his head to see what the soldiers were doing now. Nothing. Just lolling against the barrier and smoking.

Carlos said they must watch the soldiers, even when the soldiers weren’t doing anything. He said it importantly, as if he knew more than Albi. Maybe he did. Carlos was only a year older but he was much taller.

A sudden yelp, like a dog being trodden on, made Albi sit up. Down by the chorreta the sun glinted on the top of a woman’s head. Red-brown hair, all shiny. He stood up – it was the Valenciana. He scrambled down the bank. She was wearing the dress with all the buttons. He jumped across the water channel. She was wearing the sandals, too.

Now he could see the problem. A water-snake lay coiled on the bottom of the chorreta with its head up like a stalk, its snout sticking out of the water. Albi laughed and picked up a long stick.

‘Don’t kill it!’

Don’t kill it? He stared, but she seemed to mean it so he hooked the snake out of the water and carried it downstream. The Valenciana watched him suspiciously until he’d dropped the snake in the bushes. It slithered away, and she set her basket down.

He made himself comfortable on the end of the chorreta wall.

The Valenciana glanced sideways at him. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Alberto. Mostly people call me Albi.’

‘And I am Carmen, but at home I’m called Mena.’

‘Why?’ He’d never heard a Carmen being called Mena before.

She placed a bar of soap on the edge of the parapet. She had fine white hands, with a ring on her wedding finger. Was it gold, like Pili talked about having one day? Mama’s wedding ring was only made of brass.

‘Because my best friend is also called Carmen. She stayed Carmen and I became Mena.’

‘Can I call you Mena?’

As soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t. He poked at a waxy plant growing in a crevice of the wall where he was sitting and his ears went hot. But when he looked up her eyes were smiling. Big dark-brown eyes.

‘If you want to. You know, you look just like my little brother.’

He kicked his heels against the parapet. He’d be ten next year. Then he noticed what she was taking out of the basket and he stopped being cross. His sisters had petticoats with lace on the hems but those were coarse, hand-made things, nothing like this filmy white cloth with lace so delicate you might put your finger through it by mistake. His face went hot now, as well as his ears, but she was too busy plunging