Secrets of Spain Trilogy

by Caroline Angus Baker

  Cayetano narrowed his eyes. “You think there will be a rally, a protest in Puerta del Sol, don’t you?”

  “Then we can gaze upon the glory, of you six storeys high, as we watch Madrid’s reaction to the news.”

  “Let me guess, you’ll be waving a Republican flag, wanting the Third Spanish Republic formed?”

  “What better time? Even old J.C doesn’t want the post anymore.”

  “So? We will still have a King and monarchy.”

  “Let Spain dream for at least one night, Caya. We all need our dreams.”

  “Are you still doing to come upstairs and fulfil my dreams?”

  “Cheesy.”

  “I thought it was clever.”

  Luna chuckled as Cayetano pulled her into his arms again for another gentle kiss. “It’s lucky I love you, Señor because your jokes are terrible.” She led Cayetano out the door of the office and headed for the stairs without another word. Spain’s future could wait.

  ~~~

  Madrid came alive. The young in Spain had mobilised in a space of a few hours. Puerta del Sol, a small yet pivotal space in central Madrid, had filled to the brim with a variety of ages. Whistles blew, drums boomed; people chanted, echoing into the evening. Placards calling for a referendum on independence waved, as did Republican flags, emblazoned with iconic red, yellow and purple stripes. People were smiling. Smiles were sometimes difficult to come by in Spain during the recession. Yes, the people hadn’t changed, but their way of life had. No family, no individual remained untouched, other than the rich one percent of the population, who controlled far more than they deserved. By the time Luna climbed from Cayetano’s Mercedes in Plaza de Santa Ana, 400 metres way from Puerta del Sol, the protest was already in full swing. The cries of desire for a new Spain could be heard loud and clear between the buildings.

  “Do you think you’re dressed for the occasion?” Cayetano knew Luna was ready to make a break for Puerta del Sol.

  “We just go around the corner and down Calle de Espoz y Mina and we’re in Puerta del Sol,” Luna reasoned. She glanced down at her herself. A full-length strapless cocktail dress, a soft flowing fabric of light and dark blues and pale green. Cayetano had to dress as he appeared on the billboard; navy suit, grey shirt and silver tie, more handsome than any man deserved to be. Upstairs, on the roof of the hotel, an entire party of celebrities and business people, anyone who considered themselves important in Madrid, would be waiting. “Where’s your sense of adventure?” Luna opened her purse and pulled out a Republican flag.

  “Did you just have that flag at the ready in case of protest?” Cayetano asked as he locked the car.

  “You never know when Spain may need acts of defiance. You said I needed to get out more.”

  “No, you said,” Cayetano replied as Luna grabbed his hand. They ran like a pair of kids through the busy narrow streets of Madrid, filled with people dressed in casually, smoking in the warm late night air.

  Puerta del Sol looked as it always did come protest time – packed to the brim. Thousands had crammed into the space and the small streets which fed the plaza. The Town Hall building, an austere stone place with terracotta trim around the windows shut tight, flanked by police officers. Policía Municipal officers were dotted around the place, some with a smile on their faces, a sight rarely seen. The Republican flags and signs calling for an end to the monarchy suggested trouble could arise if the police took a disliking to the protest, but instead the mood seemed calm. Signs everywhere stated Spain no longer needed a monarchy, others expecting a Republic, a chance for the people to rule themselves, all signs homemade with urgency. The King, who had delicately moved Spain forward to democracy after Franco died, was abdicating. While Juan Carlos’ son, Felipe, was more popular than his father, it didn’t seem the case with this group. Not all were young; Luna spotted several older women in the crowd, chanting and singing with everyone else. Young children wore flags around their shoulders, and Luna wished her children were there to see the spectacle. Spain wanted its voice heard on this historic day.

  “Your billboard looks great!” Luna cried over the noise. She and Cayetano moved through the throngs of people, dressed light in summer outfits, laughing, smoking and expressing their freedoms for power over their nation. The six-storey-high billboard, replicating how Cayetano looked at that moment, sat opposite the Town Hall building. The international media were there covering the entire thing. Cayetano would be in the shots beamed around the world, an innocuous background to the people embracing a need for change.

  “You go to the party, I might stay here,” Luna said. “I know you have to go.”

  “Please come with me. The people there want to look good for the magazines photos, to promote whatever makes them money.”

  “Aren’t you the same? You’re advertising cologne.”

  “Yeah, for a massive chunk of cash which will come in handy once I’ve retired.”

  “Tonight is a historic night. I don’t want to spend it posing in stupid positions for photos, Caya. Especially with my bashed face.”

  “Neither do I!”

  Luna looked at her husband, hot in his suit. “Okay, let’s go to the party.”

  “I’m sure the protest will still be here once we’ve shown our faces for the cologne company,” Cayetano called out and led his wife back out of Puerta del Sol.

  “I’m sure Sofía will be at a protest in Valencia tonight,” Luna replied.

  “Don’t hate me for not being political, preciosa. I’ve never been political, and I can’t be sorry about it. My family can do as they wish.”

  “We have great lives, Caya. We need to do our bit for those who don’t have the world at their feet. The world has enough greed, yet lacks kindness.”

  “We’ll do our best at the party, drink the free champagne and then go and sit in Puerta del Sol, dressed in our finest.”

  “Deal. It’s a historic day, Caya.”

  “There’s no shortage of those on the horizon.”

  25

  Cuenca, España ~ Junio de 2014

  Luna yawned, widening her eyes, in an effort to wake herself up again. A few consecutive nights standing in the protest in Puerta del Sol left her exhausted. She had joined Jorge and several members of the historical memory association at the protests, calling for the Third Spanish Republic. With Cayetano and the others at bullfights, Elena watched over the youngest Beltráns while Luna and Alysa went to Madrid to protest. It wasn’t that Luna hated the monarchy, they were cousins of hers, but Spain needed a new direction. With corruption scandals by the day, featuring politicians and corporations, no one was happy with the government. Ordinary people squatted in unoccupied apartments, some people went hungry, and schools lacked vital necessities, so all the pomp and stringency of the monarchy seemed archaic and unnecessary.

  But today was a different issue. The old town of Cuenca seemed its usual sleepy self on a bright Saturday afternoon. The place, so beautiful it should have had the same number of tourists as central Barcelona, was quiet. The winding step-laden paths of Calle de San Martín had not a single soul tramping its sights. Luna followed Giacomo and Enzo down the steps; thousands of river stones segmented together to make a jumbled array of surfaces. Slightly rusted handrails clung to the matching retaining walls that held the cliff-side town together. Cayetano followed close behind, Scarlett in his arms. Paco followed his son, his grandson Paquito on his hip. Paco muttered in Spanish to Paquito, who ignored his abuelo’s words and gazed up at the trees that overhung the stair-covered streets of San Martín.

  “Numeros 15 y 16, ¿no?” Enzo asked his mother as they zig-zagged along the puzzle-like street.

  “Sí,” Luna called back as her boys ran down the stairs faster than she liked. When they first found the houses her grandparents lived in, five years ago, the boys needed their hands held on the staircases; now they ran ahead, young men already.

  “It’s taken me five years to get here,” Paco said, as if reading Luna’s mind
. “Five years you have owned these buildings, Luna, and we’ve never even stepped inside the homes.”

  “In fairness, we have been busy,” Cayetano replied, and groaned as he adjusted his daughter in his arms.

  “In fairness or not, the fact is I have let all this stretch out far too long,” Luna sighed. “I’ve let myself get side-tracked by so many things when my mission to find my family should have gotten solved years ago. Yes, we discovered the fates of my grandparents, and your parents, Paco, in 2009, but I have yet to put the whole situation to bed. These houses here in Cuenca, I should have done something with them long ago.”

  “They’re safe and cared for,” Cayetano reasoned with his wife. “The historical trust of the town cares for them.”

  “With my money,” Luna grumbled. “But how can I sell such a piece of our families’ histories? Besides, who would even buy these houses, which are just empty stone shells? A quarter of the country is unemployed. Would you buy these houses?”

  The narrow pedestrian road came to an abrupt end with a fall from the street into the Huescar gorge; the street capped with a small stone fence to prevent falls. No cars could get anywhere near these houses. Number 15 faced the edge, the last house on the street; number 16 sat against the opposite side of the narrow street and leaned against other buildings built further up the hillside. No sun could get between the buildings in the early morning; the four-storey yellow stone buildings sat silently as did the houses that flanked them.

  Luna pulled the keys from her pocket. Alejandro Beltrán had given them to her, part of her inheritance when he died and gave her Escondrijo. “So number 15 first then?”

  Giacomo and Enzo bounced next to their mother as she unlocked the worn, wooden door. The metal lock made an angry thud, unused to being opened, and the whole group wandered indoors. The air was thick with dust; no one ever went inside, other than the heritage listing inspectors once a year. A window over the kitchen had cracked; the wooden frames splintered and weary. A single table with three chairs, the seats pulled out, covered in settled dust. No one had sat at that table for decades. Spider webs confirmed that suspicion. The kitchen, a single wooden bench, looked faded and filthy. A single hand basin on the wooden counter looked dirty. The whole room lacked life and light. Electricity had never been installed. A few books sat on a dusty shelf, as did an oil lamp; rusted and forgotten.

  “This is where I was born,” Paco mumbled as Luna took Paquito from his grandfather. “This is where my mother lived.”

  Luna assumed Paco referred to his adoptive mother, his aunt, also named Luna. His biological parents Alejandro and Sofía also lived here, along with their parents, before the civil war. The floorboards creaked as they moved around the tiny room, almost not big enough for the group. Enzo pulled open a cupboard against the wall, to find it full of cobwebs.

  “You okay, Papá?” Cayetano asked Paco.

  “I suppose,” Paco said with a shrug. “I want to feel a connection to the place, but I can’t. Still, my family lived here, and I can remember my mother describing the place. I suppose this room was the main living area, so through a door was her brother’s bedroom, which he shared with his wife. Mamá’s room was through their room. Upstairs was another bedroom, for her parents. Downstairs was the washroom, though Mamá also did laundry by the river since they only had running water up on the street. Can you imagine that? They still did laundry in the river.” Paco shook his head as he thought of it. “No running water inside and no electricity at all.”

  The floorboards moaned as Paco walked through to the first bedroom and paused. A double bed sat in silence; its frame rusted. He continued to the next room, filled just by a single mattress-free bed. A mark on the wall, a circle, indicated something once hung there; a large hook looked embedded in the stone wall.

  Luna stood at the window and took in the view of the gorge. The San Pablo convent, now a parador for well-off hotel guests, sat quietly in the hot summer sunshine.

  “My mother mentioned the view from her window,” Paco said. “She loved the view in the winter, filled with fog. She told me the love of her life proposed in this house. Mamá didn’t name him, but we all know that to be your grandfather now, Luna.”

  The rooms spoke of a barren life; stone walls, wooden floors, no emotion, nothing. Luna Beltrán had grabbed everything she owned when they fled Cuenca in 1939, though what happened to the mattresses off the beds, no one would know. Luna’s family chest, her whole life, was safe at Rebelión - her wedding dress, for the wedding she never had, her hairbrush, her diaries. Poor Luna Beltrán, along with her brother and sister-in-law, and baby Paco, had fled with everything – which wasn’t much at all.

  Luna left Paquito and Scarlett with their father and headed back through the house with Giacomo and Enzo. They crossed the tiny street and forced the front door to number 16 open. Luna almost had to throw herself against the wooden arch to make the entrance let them indoors. Again, stale air welcomed the trio as they walked around the bottom floor. Once more, wooden floorboards all but laid on the dirt ground below them. Nothing sat in the room; just a single sink with a pipe leading to it, where a water outlet must have once been, assuming it ever worked.

  “What’s this, Mamá?” Giacomo asked, and pointed to a white pot on the ground, kicked into the corner, cobwebs on the dainty flowery design.

  “I think you would call it a chamber pot in English, I’m not sure what the Spanish call them.”

  “What’s a chamber pot?”

  “Before people had toilets…”

  “Eww, say no more,” Enzo cried in dramatic fashion and raised his hand. “We get it.”

  “There would have once been somewhere people would go to empty their pots,” Luna teased and grinned at her son’s dramatic reaction.

  “They lived like this, our family?” Giacomo said with a disgusted face.

  “Yes, your great-grandfather Cayetano, and your great-grandmother Scarlett, lived here in the 1930’s.”

  “During the war,” Giacomo said, and Luna nodded. “And then Scarlett went home to New Zealand. Did they have toilets?”

  “In New Zealand? Yes, they did, even in the small town where she lived, they had the best of everything. Spain was a hard place, especially in the country. Life was very difficult then.”

  “Poor people,” Enzo commiserated. “Did children go to school?”

  “In the years leading up to the war, the Republic had been implementing schooling for all children. For some, it was basic, and they finished not much other than you boys, so they could work and help their families. But things were improving for rural places.”

  Luna and the boys climbed the dark, narrow staircase to the second floor; where a large single bedroom awaited. There was nothing in the room. Stains on the floor suggested a metal bed had been there, but now long gone. Luna stood at the window and looked at number 15 across the street, where her grandfather would have once looked out, to the house of his sweetheart. She brushed her fingers over the dust on the wooden window frame and noticed the initials COM – Cayetano Ortega Medina, her grandfather. Now, he lay in a shallow grave at Escondrijo, 75 years after his murder at the hands of Alejandro Beltrán.

  “Mamá!”

  Luna followed the voice of her sons, to where Giacomo and Enzo had headed up the stairs again to another room. Enzo stood on a ladder, which lead to the fourth level, just an attic, while Giacomo stood at the window with a book in his hands. “Mamá, this is your abuela’s book. It has our name on it. Montgomery, Scarlett Montgomery.”

  Luna took the book from her son and gasped. It was her grandmother’s identification paperwork, from when she was a nurse. She had entered the country under her full name, Scarlett Elizabeth Montgomery. In the photo, black and white, she looked so young, so innocent; her curly red hair pulled into a bun. A nurse, a registered member of the Republican army. It stated her name, date of birth, nationality, rank as a nurse and little else. She had signed up as a nurse in Barcelona, to be
based in Huete, west of Cuenca. The document was faded and damaged by the ravages of time and war. Why had Scarlett left something so valuable behind in Cuenca? To deny her position as a Republican fighter? Scarlett had been more than a nurse; she had defied orders for foreigners to leave Spain in 1938 and fought at Ebro, where her German husband got killed. She stayed in Spain as long as she could, before returning to New Zealand, single and pregnant to a Spaniard, by accident. Cayetano Ortega had loved Luna Beltrán but impregnated Scarlett, married neither and got killed on the day Franco took Spain for himself after almost three years of war.

  “Where did you find this book?” Luna asked her sons.

  “It was sticking out of the floorboards,” Giacomo answered.

  “I guess it took intuitive child eyes to see it,” Luna mumbled and gestured Enzo to stop climbing the rickety ladder to the attic.

  “La chispa?” Luna heard Cayetano call from downstairs. “Can you help me?” his deep voice swirled up the staircases.

  “Let’s go back downstairs, boys, this place is…”

  “Chunga,” Enzo said and left the ladder alone.

  “Dodgy? Yes, it’s not safe, left unattended all these years,” Luna agreed as they headed down the unlit staircase, a flimsy rail available.

  “Will we live here?” Giacomo asked as they hit the second floor.

  “Here? No, honey. The house isn’t right for us.”

  “Someone should live here, make it pretty again,” Enzo said as he raced ahead of his family.

  Scarlett raced to her mother the moment Luna appeared down the stairs. “Sometimes, only Mamá will do,” Cayetano said as Luna scooped up her daughter.

  “I have no problem with that.” Luna kissed her daughter’s cheek. Paquito wriggled to get from Cayetano’s embrace and wandered toward his big brothers, who in classic boy style, were examining the chamber pot from a safe distance.

  “Papá needs time alone,” Cayetano said and slipped an arm around Luna’s waist. “He is sitting at the table across the street, in total silence.”