The Songs of Manolo Escobar (29 page)

You said that when our fathers returned to Alguaire after the bombing of Lerida, they were told by villagers that their parents had been shot by Fascist soldiers
?

She replied,
That's not what my father told me.

What do you mean? What were you told?

I didn't heard from her for a couple of days.
Please. I want to know,
I had prompted.

She eventually wrote back.
I was told that immediately before the Fascist shelling, our grandfather was caught by another villager carrying a lantern across the village square, which was forbidden at the time. It was during a blackout, when exposing light of any kind threatened to alert the enemy. There was an accusation that he did it to provide guidance for the Fascist troops, so that they knew where to aim their shells. The suggestion was that he was a secret
Franquista.
A traitor. After the village was shelled, he and our grandmother were hoisted to the top of the grain store and thrown to their deaths.

There was nothing in Collbató other than a couple of shops that were closed for the siesta, so we agreed to drive into the neighbouring town of Esparreguera a few miles away to find somewhere to talk. I followed her in my hire car into the bustling, modern town centre, and we found a bar. I thanked Montserrat for taking the trouble to come to the ceremony. I appreciated the
gesture, I said. She told me she'd been at an academic conference in Paris the week before and had stayed on before flying back to Mexico City.

She placed her hands over mine and stared into my eyes, as though she was trying to draw something out. ‘This is a reunion, in a sense, for both of our fathers,' she said.

I smiled and nodded.

I still felt embarrassed that my account of my father's life was so scant. She knew more, but not much.

The waiter arrived with our coffees and we sat silently while he placed them on the table before us. Now that we were in the same room, rather than on the other side of the world from one another, I felt we could get beyond the bare historical facts.

‘Did you never wonder why your father refused to talk about his childhood and his upbringing?' I asked. ‘Did you ever get the feeling he had something to hide?'

She frowned. ‘He would sometimes answer questions that I asked, but he rarely volunteered the information, and he seldom talked about the war. I could tell he was uncomfortable with it, so I never pushed him for answers though I did learn a little from him.'

I felt comforted that I'd finally met someone who'd shared my experiences, who'd witnessed the same dark silences that had blighted my childhood and my adult relationship with my father, but I was desperate to know more, to find out what else we had in common and what set us apart, how she'd coped with the burden of living with an event that had taken place thirty years before her birth, and whether she'd dealt with it any differently. I wanted to know if she she'd suffered in the same way I had. I wanted to feel vindicated, certain that I'd done everything I could to assuage my father's anger, hurt, guilt, whatever it was that had made him so unhappy.

‘Did you find that his past, his suffering in the war, had a big influence on the way he behaved towards you?'

She continued to hold her hands over mine but the smile dropped slowly from her face, replaced with a frown.

‘I'm not sure what you mean.'

‘I mean, did he do things that weren't entirely . . . ?'

She continued to stare, and I felt suddenly uncomfortably self-conscious, ashamed that I should be raising negative thoughts about my dead father at such a time.

‘How did he treat your mother . . . I mean, did he . . . ?'

She turned her head like a confused dog, and her eyes crinkled.

‘What I mean is . . . was he angry all the time?'

Her smile returned, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. ‘No, not at all. He was a loving, beautiful man.'

I'd always imagined that my father's reluctance to return to his homeland, to track down surviving members of his family, was motivated by fear. There was the fear of the enemy, but also, as he'd explained, fear of those supposedly fighting on the same side, who had turned against him and his brother. Perhaps I'd been wrong about that – perhaps he hadn't been afraid – just ashamed of the sins of his parents. I suggested this to Montserrat and she agreed.

‘It doesn't matter what side you fought on. People were scared and embarrassed, and they still are, more than seventy years on,' she said. ‘The elderly people in the villages still know who behaved badly, who took advantage of the war to settle feuds and scores. To this day there are thousands who don't want to talk about it, not because they can't remember or because the memory is too painful, but because they or members of their family are killers.'

She recalled the terror that had gripped her father in 1981, when he watched television pictures of the attempted coup from their home in Mexico. Despite being six thousand miles away, he was as terrified as Papa as the events unfolded.

‘When that silly little general stood up in the Cortes, he shouted
“Todos, estar en silencio.”
“Everybody be quiet.” He meant for everyone in the chamber to be quiet, but a whole generation of Spaniards took his words literally. It set back the cause of
reconciliation by twenty years, and even now people are afraid to talk about the war.'

We talked until our coffee went cold, so we ordered some more, and then that went cold as well. She spoke enthusiastically and tenderly about her two teenage daughters and about her husband, who was a dentist in Mexico City. I told her all about Ben, how he was studying politics and history at Edinburgh University, one of the best in Britain, and how proud I was of him. I made brief mention of Cheryl, but I didn't go into detail. We'd only recently got back together, and I didn't yet feel able to talk about my marriage easily and confidently.

It was getting dark, and we decided it was time to leave. Montserrat had to drive to Barcelona to catch a flight home. I was going to take a train to Malaga, from where I would take the bus to Algeciras and then travel by ferry across to Tangier. This had been my first trip away since I'd left the paper, and although I'd only been gone for a couple of days, I missed Cheryl and Ben and I wanted to be home.

We walked slowly along the pavement in silence until we arrived at our cars. We embraced and exchanged kisses and I promised to keep in touch. As she turned to leave, I grabbed hold of her arm. I could feel tears running down my face.

‘I visited that building. The grain store, where they were killed,' I said.

She drew me close to her and wrapped her arms around my neck. ‘Did you?' she asked gently.

‘No, I mean before I knew that's where they died. I felt drawn to it the moment I saw it. I knew there was something significant about it. Don't ask me why.'

She rubbed the back of my head soothingly until I stopped crying.

‘I really need to go,' she said. ‘I'll miss my flight.'

I gripped her arm again before she could pull away.

‘Was our grandfather a traitor?' I asked sobbing.

‘My father insisted he wasn't. He said it was untrue, a conspiracy by other villagers who had a vendetta against him. But these things happened. It was a civil war. Even if our grandparents were Fascists, our fathers fought bravely for the Republic. That is the memory that you must hold on to.'

T
he night journey to Malaga was cold and monotonous. The air-conditioning in the train was turned up high, and despite numerous requests to the guard, nothing was done about it. Outside was pitch darkness, which meant I couldn't distract myself with the passing scenery. I sat shivering in my overcoat, exhausted but unable to sleep.

It was mid-morning when the train pulled into Malaga, and as I stepped on to the platform I felt the soothing comfort of the sun's rays on my face. I walked the short distance to the bus station and bought a ticket, pleased that I had managed the entire transaction in Spanish. I had almost an hour to kill before the next bus for Algeciras left, so I went into a small cafeteria across the road. It was small and functional, sparsely furnished with a few aluminium tables and chairs and thick with cigarette smoke. A few elderly men were seated silently at the bar, eating small dishes of
chipirones a la plancha
and slices of
tortilla.
I bought a coffee and sat at one of the tables. A radio, tuned to a local music station, was playing in the background. A song came on that I recognised. I hadn't heard it for years, probably not since I was a child, but I knew the singer's voice, unmistakably, as that of Manolo Escobar.

By the time I boarded the coach I couldn't keep my eyes open, though I was frequently jolted awake as we chugged heavily over bumps in the coastal roads. It was late afternoon when we pulled into Algeciras, a functional freight port and the gateway between Europe and Africa. On the dirty streets prostitutes openly plied their trade and gangs of young Arab men stood on street corners, smoking cigarettes and offering passers-by Moroccan money at cheap exchange rates.

I made my way to the ferry terminal for the journey across the Strait of Gibraltar. It seemed like an indecently short trip for such a jarring cultural clash. Within forty minutes I'd left behind the safety and affluence of Europe and was thrust into a buzzing, cacophonous whirl of djellabas, donkeys, palm trees and mosques.

I wandered along the Boulevard Mohammed V, the unkempt main drag of Tangier that ran along the seashore. The city was crumbling and dilapidated. The few new structures that existed remained unfinished and barely serviceable. Hotels on the seafront hinted at a former grandeur, but they had not been maintained. This was not the cosmopolitan playground of the rich and cultured in which Papa had worked, and I wondered what he would have made of it all now.

The Continental Hotel, where he'd been employed as a waiter and barman, was still there, and I went in for a drink. It was late afternoon and the lounge bar was nearly empty. I chose a seat in front of a large open log fire, admiring the walls that were garnished with intricate Moorish carvings and mosaics. A waiter dressed in a burgundy suit and a white shirt sidled up to me and asked if I'd like a drink. I ordered a beer, and he smiled indulgently before shuffling away.

A large portrait window looked out on to the seafront. Dusk was closing in, but I was still able to see across the misty Mediterranean to the Andalusian coastline. The waiter returned with my bottle of cold beer. He poured a little into a chilled glass and placed the bottle on the table. I imagined Papa doing the same for Beat writers and gun-runners fifty years before.

I drank my beer slowly, almost in a trance, trying to imagine what it would have been like for my father to be here – working in a foreign country, in the shadow of his homeland, too fearful or ashamed to return.

I paid at the bar and said goodbye to the waiter, but as I turned to leave something caught my eye. The room was dimly lit, and I had to lean closer against the bar to see, hanging on the wall
in a dusty frame, an old black-and-white picture of Humphrey Bogart, his signature scrawled across the bottom.

I returned along the seafront to the ferry terminal. I'd planned to stay in Tangier overnight, but I decided I'd seen enough. The trip back was calm. There was hardly anyone on board and I had the whole deck to myself. I leant against the railings and breathed in the salty evening air, watching as the lights of Spain grew closer and closer.