Encarnita's Journey Read online

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ muttered Sofia.

  Encarnita washed her body and her hair and put on clean clothes. She spent a few pesetas in the shop buying cheese, sausage and half a loaf of bread. She would gather oranges on the way. They would have a feast.

  She waited until late afternoon to set out again.

  Sofia issued her usual warning to take care and keep her wits about her. ‘Your head’s in a whirl.’

  Near the burnt-out house where Encarnita picked oranges, the two guards were lying in wait.

  The fat one seized her bag and looked inside. ‘And who would all this food be for?’

  ‘I was going to have a picnic.’

  ‘A picnic, eh? Who was going to share it? It’s a lot of food for one.’

  ‘I thought I’d give some to the goatherd.’

  ‘Oh, you did, did you? What would you give a man like him food for?’

  ‘He’s so thin. He looks starved.’

  ‘What a kind chica you are! Trouble is I don’t think you’re telling the truth.’ Suddenly he lifted his hand and slapped her across the face.

  She stepped back, putting her hand to her cheek.

  ‘Now tell me who the food was for? Your uncle?’

  ‘No one.’

  He hit her again, this time across the mouth. ‘Who?’

  She gulped, tasting blood. She shook her head and he lifted his hand again but his companion said, ‘Let her go. We’ll talk to her later. We haven’t got time, we’d better catch up with the others.’

  Go home, they told her, stay in the house and don’t dare to leave it.

  She stumbled as she went, blinded by tears, but when she heard goat bells she sniffed and dried her eyes on the back of her hand. The flock came into view, their keeper close behind.

  He stopped beside a bush and motioned to her to join him. He scanned the landscape before he spoke.

  ‘They’re everywhere, the rats. You’ve come across them, I see. I overheard them talking earlier. They were saying that a man had been sighted near a ruined house.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘They weren’t sure where it was exactly but they’ve called up more forces. I managed to get there before them.’

  ‘You think they’ve found my house?’

  ‘Yes, but I was there first. I told the man to leave with me straightaway.’ The goatherd said that he had shown him how to reach a cave further up the hill.

  ‘How do I get there?’ asked Encarnita.

  ‘You can’t go just now.’

  ‘I must!’

  ‘Not with all the patrols around.’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Don’t! It would be too dangerous. You might even lead them to him.’

  Encarnita was silent now, recognising the truth of what he had said.

  The goatherd added, ‘They may be looking for you after they search the house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He remembered he’d left something. We couldn’t go back. It was too late.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He was worried because it had your name in it.’

  ‘It does!’ Don Geraldo had inscribed on the fly-leaf, ‘To my good friend Encarnita.’

  ‘He also asked me to give you his love.’

  Encarnita thanked the goatherd. He had taken a considerable risk himself, though he waived aside her praises.

  When she arrived home she told Sofia everything. The older woman wasted no time in recriminations. She bathed Encarnita’s lip, put some clean clothes and a food in a bag and rolled up a blanket, then told her to come with her. She knew a safe house, a place where Republicans on the run had been able to lie low until escaping by boat. Encarnita added to the bag her books and the drawing done by Don Geraldo’s friend Carrington.

  They made their way safely through the dark streets until they reached a house with shuttered windows. Sofia glanced around before knocking on the door. After a moment a voice behind it asked who was there.

  ‘It’s me, Sofia. And a friend. We need help.’

  An elderly man let them in, bolting the door behind them, and took them along a passage to a kitchen at the back where his wife sat knitting. No introductions were made and the elderly couple asked no questions, requiring only to know that Encarnita must lie low for a while.

  ‘Until we decide where she can go,’ said Sofia and Encarnita realised then that she would never be able to go back to Sofia’s house.

  ‘I hope they won’t give you a bad time,’ she said anxiously. The Guardia Civil were bound to question Sofia.

  ‘Don’t worry. I will tell them that you ran off into the campo and I have not seen you since. They’ll get nothing more out of me.’

  They kissed and the older woman left without another word.

  Above the kitchen, there was a space under the roof, high enough for someone to sit up in, though not to stand. It was ventilated by an opening in the gable-end wall. The man brought a ladder and climbing up, he dislodged two wooden planks in the ceiling, making a hole for Encarnita to crawl through.

  ‘You can spend some time here in the kitchen with us,’ said the woman. ‘We are quiet people. We are seldom disturbed.’

  Encarnita was exhausted and ready to retreat to her warm eyrie, which smelt of woodsmoke from the stove in the kitchen. She felt stunned. Everything had happened so quickly. She lay on top of Sofia’s blanket and listened to the murmuring of the old couple’s voices below and she thought of Conal. She could not stop thinking about him. She felt deeply afraid for him and imagined him in the hands of the army or the Guardia Civil. When she heard a shot she jerked upright and sat there in the dark, listening to the thudding of her heart. It was a long time before she slept.

  She wakened when she heard the floor boards being shifted and sat up, once again, in alarm. A balding white head bobbed into the space.

  ‘It’s only me. Nothing to worry about. We thought you might like some breakfast and to relieve yourself perhaps.’

  She relieved herself in the yard while the wife kept watch, then she sat with them at the table and shared their bread and coffee. There was little they could talk about, but when the husband said that he had taken a stroll along the front earlier Encarnita asked if he had seen any sign of the Guardia Civil patrols. He had not but had met a man who’d told him that they’d been searching the campo the day before for a fugitive.

  ‘Did he know if they’d found anyone?’

  ‘He didn’t think so and he’s a man who hears most things.’

  That was a relief, if only a partial one. Encarnita felt desperate to go out and track down the goatherd but she knew it was not possible. She found it unbearable to be so confined and helpless.

  ‘Patience, child,’ advised the wife. ‘I’m afraid it’s the only answer.’

  Was that the only answer now for all of them, to sit, resigned and quiet, and wait until some miracle happened and General Franco was brought down? Encarnita did not voice her thoughts as she would have done had she been with Sofia. Sofia would have told her to hush and pray to Our Lady. She missed her friend. She missed even her scolding and their arguments. Her hosts here were kind, but passive. She would not get to know them no matter how long she stayed. Perhaps that was how they had managed to hide fugitives; they had contained their curiosity, or perhaps had had none, so that the people they had hidden had come and gone and left few traces for them to erase.

  The wife taught her to knit socks, which helped to pass some of the time, and Encarnita read her book until each word was lodged deep in her brain. She lived day and night with the boy in the land of counterpane who in her dreams turned into a man with red-gold hair and penetrating blue eyes. When she lay awake in the night she talked to him in her head, telling him that she had not forgotten him, that she would come and find him. During the day she sat for short spells out in the enclosed yard to breathe the air but her lungs felt deprived and her legs restric
ted. Once when she complained of feeling restless, her elderly host said quietly, ‘Imagine what it must be like for our men in prison,’ and she felt ashamed. But what pained her more than anything else was her separation from Conal and not knowing what had happened to him. At times she thought she would go mad, shut up in such a tight space, and she would come down into the kitchen ready to tell her hosts that she must leave, but when she saw their patient faces she had known that she must bear it, for a while yet.

  A week passed, and then another. After four weeks, one evening, after dark, Sofia came. Encarnita fell on her and held her in a tight embrace, reluctant to let go.

  ‘Any news?’

  Sofia shook her head. She had heard nothing, which might mean he had got away.

  ‘Have they been looking for me?’ asked Encarnita.

  ‘Of course. They had the book. I told them you hadn’t come back that day. They probably think you went with him.’

  ‘Good.’ Encarnita wished that she had. She wished that she had risked going to find him in the cave but then she might have risked his life.

  ‘You have to leave Almuñecar, Encarnita. I got word to my sister Arrieta in Nerja, and she has agreed that you can go there. The two guards who knew you have been moved up to Jaén so it’s safer now for you to make a move. I’ve arranged for you to get a lift tomorrow morning with Miguel.’ Miguel was a second cousin of Sofia’s. He delivered vegetables and various other commodities along the coast in an old van. ‘He will be outside at seven o’clock.’

  ‘I wish you could come with me, Sofia!’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  They took a sorrowful farewell of each other and when the door had closed behind Sofia Encarnita wondered how many more people she would have say goodbye to. Her heart felt like a stone in her chest.

  She rose in the morning before first light and made her way into the dark campo. She thought the goatherd would be out with his beasts while the dew was still on the ground. Dawn was breaking when she caught up with them.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he told her. ‘He left two weeks ago, heading west, for Gibraltar. He said to tell you he would come back for you.’

  MOTHERHOOD: NERJA

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1940

  Concepción’s head descended into the light on the first day of the new year. Encarnita thought it no coincidence that her child was being born on this day; it was the date not only of her own birth but also that on which her mother had left the world.

  Arrieta, sister of Sofia, exclaimed as she helped ease out the baby’s head. ‘Its going to be fair!’ When the child’s head had been cleaned they saw that the blond hair was shot through with reddish tints. Arrieta looked at Encarnita, with her black hair and eyes and olive skin. ‘She doesn’t look at all like you. Her skin is as pale as milk.’

  The new young mother nodded. She felt sure, too, that when the baby got round to opening her eyes they would be revealed to be a deep turquoise blue.

  ‘The man, then, was a stranger in these parts,’ observed Arrieta. When Sofia had sent Encarnita to her back in the summer she had simply been told that the girl had to leave Almuñecar. After a while, once it had become obvious that Encarnita was pregnant, Arrieta had thought that possibly the father was a local Almuñecar man with a wife. But Encarnita had said no, he was unmarried, and had added that he was in the war. Arrieta had sensed that there was something more to the affair than this, but had not asked.

  When the priest had accosted Arrieta in the street, asking about the young woman she was harbouring, she had told him that Encarnita’s husband had fought in the war and not returned. It was not an uncommon story. Had she told him that Encarnita was unmarried he might have tried to turn her out of the parish. He had done it before, with the help of the Guardia Civil, just as he’d helped parents to force their pregnant daughters into marriage. The men were similarly coerced, in that, if they refused to marry, they could be jailed. Arrieta had no problem about telling this lie to the priest. She had no more faith in the confessional than Encarnita. Why should she confess to such a man? He was just a man, one who helped to make women’s lives miserable, encouraging them to breed more and more children, and deepen their poverty. She preferred to talk directly to God or to Mary without his interference.

  ‘She is a very pretty baby,’ she said. ‘What will you call her?’

  ‘Concepción Alexandra.’

  ‘Concepción will be enough for such a small thing.’ Arrieta wrapped the new baby in a piece of frayed but clean blanket and put her to her mother’s breast.

  ‘People will wonder, of course. About her colouring. It is not often that men with such hair and fine skin are seen around here.’ She could not recall having seen any.

  ‘That is true,’ agreed Encarnita.

  As far as she knew, there had been no sighting of any reddish-fair-haired men in the area since she had come to Nerja. Conal, like her uncle Rinaldo, would appear to have vanished into the air except that she sensed he had reached safety, whereas, with her uncle, she did not. Her unease about him was deep and troubling. His spirit, wherever he was, was not at peace.

  Sometimes she fancied Conal to be still up in the mountains and that one day he would come down and take her and his child away, to his own country, the land of counterpane where they would be safe from Franco’s Guardia Civil. She dreamed it in her sleep and woke over and over again to face the pain of disappointment. She still trembled when she saw a civil guard and averted her eyes automatically as she was passing. But then most people did, she had noticed, whether young or old, male or female. The sympathies of the inhabitants of Nerja, who earned a poor living by fishing or working in the local sugar factory, had lain for the most part on the Republican side.

  Arrieta’s husband had died fighting with the Republican army. In private life, he had been a fisherman. From her house perched on the cliff top his widow could still see his old, weathered boat lying abandoned on the beach below. When he had returned in the mornings she would go down and help him and his brother – killed, also, in the war – bring in their feeble catch. They had named the boat after her, even though it had not legally belonged to them, but to a local landowner, the owner of a number of boats. The one manned by the two brothers had been in poor shape for a long time before their death and afterwards was allowed to rot where it lay. Few fishermen could afford to buy their own boats, which meant that by the time they gave the proprietors their cut not a great deal remained to share out from the sale of their daily catch. Arrieta said it was no wonder that fishing families were poor.

  Her name was still visible on the side of the boat, just. But in time it would be eroded and the boat itself would fall apart and lie in pieces on the sand. After the death of her husband, their only daughter had married a member of the Guardia Civil, something that would have made him spit had he been around to see it, and which Arrieta herself had found difficult to stomach. Indeed, following the wedding, she had begun to suffer from intermittent bouts of gastroenteritis. The only saving grace in the whole affair was that Angelita and her husband had been sent up north, to Burgos, too far away for them to come back on visits, even if they would have wished to. Arrieta did not speak any more of her daughter. She said that God had sent Encarnita to take her place and for that she gave thanks. And now he had given her a grandchild also.

  ‘We must have her christened soon,’ she said.

  ‘I hope the priest won’t ask any more questions about her father.’

  ‘He can’t make you answer. He’s not the Guardia.’

  ‘I would tell you about her father, Arrieta, except I think maybe it’s better not. I don’t want you to have to lie if you’re questioned.’

  ‘You may tell me what you wish to tell me in all good time. As it is, I have my own ideas, and if they are right they’re dangerous. If you’re asked you must say her father was a Spaniard. I’m sure it must be possible for some Spaniards to have such colouring. In the north, perhaps.’ To Arrieta, the north of
Spain was almost as distant as France or England. ‘It’s a pity, though, that she couldn’t have been born with dark hair and eyes.’

  ‘It’s not a pity at all! I am pleased she is as she is.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I think she would look good in a little cap. I have an old one of Angelita’s in the chest.’ Arrieta ferreted out a cotton, lace-trimmed bonnet, with a ribbon that fastened under the chin. It covered the baby’s red gold hair perfectly. ‘There! That will help keep her out of trouble.’

  Encarnita loved the late evenings when she was awake and Arrieta asleep, and the house was so quiet that only the rhythmic pulsing of the sea could be heard. She would sit by the dying fire and, removing the little bonnet, rejoice in her little girl’s glorious hair. The sight and feel of it brought her closer to Conal. She talked to him inside her head, letting him know that she was reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to his child. Just as his mother had to him.

  ‘One day, Concepción Alexandra,’ she told her, ‘you and I will go to a country far away called Scotland and we will find your papa, Conal Alexander Roderick MacDonald.’ She had always known that some day she would make a journey across the sea, but now she knew where it would take her.

  Not long after coming to live with Arrieta, Encarnita had crossed the boulder-strewn, grey volcanic plain that lay between Nerja and the hills and penetrated a little way into the campo, hoping that she might stumble across Conal, or even find traces of him. He would have had to pass that way when making for Gibraltar. She had looked inside two burnt-out cottages but seen no signs of recent habitation and then gone up into the white hill pueblo of Frigiliana. She had wandered up and down its steep, narrow streets, stopping to talk to anyone prepared to be friendly, old women in black mostly who leant in their doorways or sat outside on hard, upright chairs letting nothing escape them. They had been suspicious at first of Encarnita but after the first few minutes they had softened and allowed themselves to be engaged in limited conversation. From what they had said, no foreigners had come to the village since the early months of the war.