Encarnita's Journey Read online

  At length, he ran out of energy and slumped back. ‘What good did we do?’ he muttered. ‘Were we idiots to think we could do something? It’s all right to talk about standing up for what you believe in but in the end we achieved nothing.’ He’d been left for dead on the battlefield and rescued by a family who had cared for him and hidden him until he had felt fit enough to move on. He had been hoping to make his way to Gibraltar but his strength had given out. Was Gibraltar far? he asked.

  Encarnita did not know. ‘Somewhere past Málaga.’ She remembered Don Geraldo talking about sailing from the port.

  ‘It belongs to the United Kingdom, so if I could just get there I should be able to find a ship that would take me home.’

  It would be too far for him to walk in his present state as well as difficult with Guardia Civil patrols strung along the coast looking for Republicans trying to escape across the sea to North Africa. She thought of the shots in the night.

  ‘You have to take care. No one see you.’

  When she returned to Almuñecar in the late afternoon she ran into the same two guards as she had the day before. She had been lost in thought and had not seen them until she was almost on top of them.

  The one she hated most addressed her. ‘So, Señorita Encarnita, where have you been today?’

  ‘To the campo. To look for olives.’ She opened the sack to show him.

  He put in his fat fist and withdrawing one he bit into it, spitting it out a moment later. ‘Sour! So you’ve been stealing, have you?’

  ‘No. The trees are old. They’re not tended any more.’

  ‘So you say. Can I trust what you say? Can I trust what you tell me about your precious uncle Rinaldo Benet? He’s not hiding out in the campo, is he? If you were found to be helping him you could be shot too, you know that, don’t you?’

  His attention was diverted by the sound of shouts coming from the shore.

  ‘We’d better go and see what’s up,’ said his companion, making a move.

  Encarnita escaped up the hill to Sofia’s house.

  ‘Look!’ Sofia held up a flounder. ‘Juan brought it for us.’

  When they were eating she said, ‘Juan likes you, you know.’

  ‘He is a good man.’

  Sofia glanced at Encarnita. ‘You are quiet this evening?’

  Encarnita shrugged.

  ‘What troubles you?’

  ‘There is a man in the campo,’ Encarnita began, then stopped. She should not burden Sofia with it.

  ‘A man? What kind of man? You had better tell me!’ After Encarnita had finished Sofia said, ‘This is dangerous, Encarnita, you know it is. Just think if you were to be found with him!’

  ‘I have thought. But, Sofia, this man has fought for us! He fought with Pedro and Rinaldo and now he’s wounded and a long way from home, with no one but me to help him.’

  ‘He comes from Scotland, you say? His mother must worry very much for him.’ Sofia sighed. ‘I feel for this woman whom I do not know and will never see. What must she be going through at this very moment? Why do men do this to us, Encarnita!’

  1939

  The campo was out of bounds for Encarnita the following day because of Guardia Civil and army manoeuvres. Trucks were parked all along the main road. From her perch up beside the alcazaba ruins she could see figures running to and fro into the undergrowth. Their voices carried on the still air. The baker had told her that he’d heard a fugitive had been sighted. She trembled in case it might be the Scotsman.

  ‘I hope it is not,’ said Sofia, coming from the cemetery to join her. ‘For your sake.’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell them about me.’

  ‘You know they can make people talk. They’re good at that. He is young, you said?’

  ‘About my age, I think.’

  ‘God help him, that is all I can say.’ Sofia sat down on a lump of stone to rest. Her legs were swollen and bothered her greatly. ‘Get down, here comes a guard!’

  Encarnita slid down the wall to join Sofia. When the guard was a few metres away he stopped.

  ‘What are you two women doing up here?’

  ‘Praying for the dead,’ said Sofia. ‘We are permitted to visit them.’

  ‘But you, girl, you were up on the wall?’

  ‘I heard noises.’

  ‘Mind your own business, do you hear!’ He went lumbering off to join his comrade who had been waiting on the other side of the castle ground. When his back was turned Encarnita stole another quick look over the wall. Activity out in the campo had become more feverish. Soldiers were springing out of the trucks parked along the road and running, heading towards the hills, their rifles spearheading their advance.

  ‘I think they might have found someone. I’m going down to see.’

  Sofia shook her head. ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘I must. In case it’s him.’

  ‘If it is don’t speak to him, for the love of God.’ Sofia crossed herself. ‘Don’t even look at him! Promise me!’

  Encarnita nodded. ‘It could be Rinaldo,’ she said and left Sofia sitting on the wall.

  When she reached the plaza she saw that a number of people were making their way out towards the main road. Many, like herself, had missing relatives. She joined them. At the road, they stopped and waited in silence.

  A few minutes later, a posse of Guardia Civil came into sight. Two of them were dragging a man along the ground between them.

  ‘It’s Marco!’ cried a woman. She was his mother.

  Marco had gone with the other men to fight for the Republicans three years before; he had been amongst the desaparecidos. His limbs looked slack, as if broken, and blood poured down his face. No one was in any doubt that he would not live long. He was not the first to have been dragged out of the hills.

  Encarnita felt a mixture of relief and despair. The sense of relief made her feel guilty, and it did not last long. She had known Marco; he had been a friend of Rinaldo’s, a friendly, easy-going man, well liked by everyone. She could not bear to look at his mother’s face. The sound of the woman’s wailing followed her as she turned and retraced her steps back up the hill to rejoin Sofia.

  The two woman sat together, dry-eyed, unable to spill a tear. They stayed there for some time, motionless, not even speaking, until Sofia said, ‘Let us go and light a candle.’

  ‘Does it do any good, lighting candles?’

  ‘You must not lose your faith, Encarnita. It is the only thing we have to hold on to when times are bad.’

  ‘At this moment General Franco might be lighting a candle too. Praising God for delivering Marco into his hands!’

  ‘Hush, don’t speak about him in that tone of voice. You might be overheard.’

  Encarnita went with Sofia to the church, where several women had already gathered, to pray on their knees for the soul of Marco, as if he were already dead. Encarnita knelt beside them and prayed that Marco would die quickly. There was no sign of the priest.

  She lay awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the Scottish man lying wounded in her little ruined house, imagining how lonely he must feel, so far away from his homeland and everything that was familiar. When she had not come that day he must have thought that she had abandoned him.

  ‘I don’t think you should go to him,’ said Sofia in the morning, knowing that Encarnita would go, nevertheless.

  ‘He needs help.’

  ‘So do we all.’

  ‘But he left his home and came all this way to help us. I’m sure Rinaldo would have wanted me to help him.’

  Sofia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Be careful then, that’s all I can say. And come back well before dark, otherwise I shall be worrying about you.’

  Encarnita kissed her and went up to Rinaldo’s house to fetch a few things. Into her canvas bag she put a cup, another piece of rag, a small bar of hard yellow soap and Don Geraldo’s book, Jack Robinson, thinking the Scotsman might like to read it, to help pass the time when he was alone. The hours must seem
long to him.

  Before going she checked out the terrain from the top of the hill to make sure the Guardia Civil were not out again today. They might well have been, looking for other fugitives, comrades of Marco. It would depend on whether Marco had given his captors any information or not. ‘If they’ve made him talk we can’t blame him,’ Sofia had said. It was likely that Marco’s friends would be further away by now, up in the higher sierras. They would not have hung about or tried to come to his rescue for that would only have ended in a massacre. All seemed quiet in the campo, as far as Encarnita could see and hear from the top of the hill. She decided to risk it.

  She met no one except for an elderly goatherd whom she knew a little. His face was thin and stained a deep chestnut-brown from exposure to the sun. He walked from morning till night with his small flock of skinny-flanked brown goats. Some of them belonged to other people; they gave him one or two pesetas or an egg to walk them for him. Encarnita had often exchanged a few words with him, enough to know on which side he stood. It would be inconceivable, anyway, that a poor goatherd would support the Nationalists.

  He stopped today, wanting to talk, to ask a question. ‘Did they get the man yesterday?’ She nodded and he swore. ‘I saw him running, or trying to. He had a bad leg to start with. I knew he had no chance.’

  ‘Did you see any others with him?’

  The goatherd shook his head.

  ‘I keep hoping for news of my uncle Rinaldo Benet.’

  ‘If I hear anything I’ll tell you. You come this way often, don’t you?’

  She was about to move on when she saw that there was something else he wanted to say. She waited.

  ‘I gave the man some milk.’

  Her heart skipped a beat. ‘The man?’

  ‘In the ruined cottage. He needed food, he was starving.’

  ‘How did you know about the place?’

  ‘I have always known it.’

  Of course he would! She had been stupid to think that no one would ever have come across it, especially a goatherd who wandered all over the campo.

  ‘But don’t worry. I don’t think anyone else will know about it, it’s so well hidden.’

  Encarnita felt uneasy that even he should know. It was not that she did not trust him but, as Sofia had said, the Guardia Civil had ways of making people talk, so that the fewer people who knew anything the better.

  As if reading her mind, he said, ‘No one pays any attention to me. They think I’m in my dotage and because I do nothing but mind goats that I am an imbecile. I let them think it when they ask me questions.’

  ‘And do they, ask you questions?’

  ‘Sometimes. Have I seen anyone? I pretend to be deaf as well as stupid.’

  She put her hand on his ragged sleeve and felt the thinness of his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Be careful,’ he responded, before moving off to round up his straying goats. She listened to the tinkling of their bells until they faded into the distance.

  She approached the house cautiously, pausing to listen before she covered the last stretch of ground and pushed open the door. He was there, almost in the same position that she had left him in.

  ‘Hola!’ He lifted his head and smiled. ‘I thought I wouldn’t see you again.’

  She explained why she had been unable to come the day before and he said he’d thought he’d heard shouting in the distance. She spoke of Marco.

  ‘You see, you must not leave the house!’

  ‘I couldn’t if I tried.’

  She fetched fresh water and gave him a little fruit before setting about cleaning his wounds. He groaned and bit his lip until it bled but he encouraged her to carry on.

  ‘They don’t look good, do they?’ he muttered. Sweat dripped from his brow. ‘A lot of men at the front developed gangrene after they’d been wounded. It was what everyone feared. To lose a leg! And have it sawn off without an anaesthetic.’ He told Encarnita that he had served with an ambulance brigade. Hospital facilities had been limited and ambulances had had an impossible task trying to get round the enemy lines.

  ‘Fascist planes were overhead…you could hear their bloody shells whining…there were wounded everywhere. And then they got us. Direct hit. I was one of the lucky ones, I was thrown clear. I felt as if my brains were being blown out.’ He said that when he got back to Scotland – if, he added – he intended to train as a doctor. He hesitated a moment. ‘I don’t suppose you could get hold of some iodine?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Don’t run any risks because of me. But you’re doing that already, aren’t you, every time you come here? And I’m grateful, I hope you know that.’

  Embarrassed, she looked away. She took Don Geraldo’s book from her sack and handed it to him. ‘For you, may borrow.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Only a little. Too difficult for me. Too many words don’t know.’ She had read only a sentence here and there but she had enjoyed looking at the book and holding it in her hand and remembering those happy times in Yegen when Don Geraldo had sat beside her and taught her to speak his language. It was something she had tried to hold on to during the three terrible years of the war.

  The Scotsman was pleased to have the novel. He admitted that the hours did seem endless at times even though he slept for long stretches. And when he lay awake he worried about his family, especially his mother. ‘She’ll be going through hell, imagining all sorts of things. Not knowing what has happened is the worst thing of all.’

  She nodded. ‘For me, with Rinaldo.’

  ‘You are very fond of your uncle?’

  ‘Only family I have.’

  ‘And he’s missing! That must be terrible for you. And your mother and father?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry. So, do you live alone?’

  ‘No, with good friend, Sofia. But tell me about your family, please.’

  He was happy to talk about them and, while he did, he went far away from her, which she understood. When she remembered Yegen and the people she had grown up amongst she felt like that, as if her mind had spirited her away.

  The Scotsman – she found it difficult to think of him by his name – had a mother who was herself a doctor, and a father who was a lawyer. So they were not a poor family. His older sister was a talented musician, a pianist, and married to a violinist, and they had a child, with a nanny to look after her when they were busy. They played together, this husband and wife, in an orchestra. Encarnita marvelled at the brilliance of all the things he told her and was reminded of Don Geraldo’s friends who had been writers and artists and she wondered if everyone in England and Scotland had such talents. When she asked Conal he laughed.

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘You live in big house?’

  It was so big his mother needed a housekeeper and a cook. They had another house, too, up north, in the mountains. He said that he loved it up there and described the river, telling her how it ran bubbling and golden-brown from the peat when it was in spate and how the hills turned purple in autumn when the heather flowered. He liked to walk in those hills. ‘They are not so high as the Spanish sierras. And summer is not so hot. Scotland is less extreme than Spain. But I like your country too.’

  ‘But not what my country do to you,’ she said sadly.

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘not that.’ They fell silent.

  She imagined that when he did return to Scotland he would never want to come back. His memories of her country would be too unhappy.

  ‘You’re sad, Encarnita.’ He put his finger on her cheek and she felt herself blushing.

  Soon afterwards, she got up to go, saying she would come the next day as long as neither the army or the Guardia Civil were out on patrol. ‘And I bring iodine if I can.’

  The thought of how to get hold of some preoccupied her on her journey back across the campo. It would be too dangerous to ask the doctor. He would want to know why she needed it. She had neve
r had any dealings with him and knew him only by sight. She sought out Sofia in the cemetery and asked her advice, although she could have guessed her reaction beforehand.

  ‘You are asking for trouble! The Guardia Civil will be keeping a close watch on the doctor in case he treats wounded Republicans on the sly. I am sure he is far too wary even to think of it.’ Sofia shook out her duster. She regarded herself as keeper of all the dead now since many no longer had living relatives. ‘You will do this for me, won’t you, Encarnita, when I am here?’

  ‘Of course! But that will not be for a long time yet.’

  ‘My legs are not good. The hill is a sore trial for me.’

  ‘Sofia,’ said Encarnita, ‘you know Marina, don’t you?’ Marina was the doctor’s housekeeper.

  ‘You don’t think I’m going to ask her for iodine for this young man, do you!’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Encarnita wandered off down through the village, trying to think of anyone who might have some iodine in their cupboard, but could not. She saw the tricorned hats bobbing along in the distance, coming her way, and ducked inside the church. She talked to her mother but she seemed not to have any ideas of where to procure iodine, either.

  It was dusk when she finally went back up the hill. Lamps were lit in the windows. The village looked so peaceful that it was difficult to think it had ever been torn apart by war. As Encarnita approached Sofia’s house she smelt fish frying and her mouth watered. Juan must have brought something from his catch.

  Sofia was at the stove and about to flip the fish over in the pan. ‘It’s a big one. Juan is a good lad. You could do worse, Encarnita, I keep telling you that.’

  ‘I don’t want a husband.’

  ‘Every woman wants a husband sooner or later.’

  ‘You have managed well without one for many years.’