Encarnita's Journey

by Joan Lingard

  Encarnita also enjoyed serving at the evening dances put on for locals, the better-off ones, not for those such as her uncle and their neighbours, or the destitute family who lived in the vaults under the ruined alcazaba. The girls at these entertainments were fiercely chaperoned. Their parents’ eyes watched every move they made. There would be no favours granted here.

  Encarnita could not imagine her uncle dancing. But perhaps he had in his younger, more carefree days. He was obsessed with meetings and pamphlets. There was to be an election in February and he was predicting that major changes would result from it. He hoped that they would; otherwise, there would be much trouble in the land. He said it would be foolish of him to be too optimistic. People did not give up power without a struggle. When Encarnita was listening to the music of Lorenzo and Jacobo she could forget Rinaldo’s forebodings.

  She asked Lorenzo to look at Miss Osborne’s letter. He read it through to himself first of all, and laughed. ‘She sounds like a very earnest lady. A bit of a frump, I’d say. I bet Jacobo made no conquests there.’ Lorenzo’s Spanish was not good enough to allow him to translate the whole letter. ‘You don’t need to know all that stuff about night classes and mission work! You’re young, Encarnita. Come, dance with me! Life in Almuñecar is better.’ He seized her hands and whirled her round the room until she collapsed, laughing, into a chair.

  Life in Almuñecar did seem good to her, although she could not forget for long that there was another side to it. When she went home and saw the stacks of little grey pieces of paper lying on the kitchen table her stomach would turn over.

  One night, when Rinaldo was out, she went into his room, thinking she heard a noise. There was nothing there. It might have been a mouse, or a rat. She saw that the bed was pulled slightly out from the wall and went to take a closer look in case an animal might be lurking. Something wrapped in sacking was wedged behind it. Gingerly, she eased back the sacking to reveal two rifles and half a dozen hand-grenades.

  ‘What are you doing in here, Encarnita?’

  She jumped and turned to face her uncle in the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered. He was angry, and she had never seen that in him before. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. I thought I heard a noise.’ Her voice tailed off.

  ‘Don’t come in here again, do you understand! You shouldn’t meddle. These are dangerous times.’

  She left the room and he followed her into the kitchen. He sighed. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t have looked.’

  ‘You do believe in what we’re doing, don’t you, Encarnita?’ Rinaldo took hold of her hands and the look in his eyes was fierce as he engaged hers. ‘You believe we must fight for our rights, don’t you? You must! If not, our lives will never change!’

  1936

  The February election brought victory for the Popular Front, a coalition of the Left. Their supporters were out celebrating in the streets, cheering and talking of freedom and fair shares for all. Those who had supported the Monarchists and Falangists and other Right-wing parties were aghast and keeping to their shuttered houses.

  ‘Now we will have our own government,’ cried Pedro, punching his fist in the air. ‘This is for us. For the people!’ The cry was taken up.

  ‘They think they’ve got it all tied up,’ said his mother, Sofia, meeting Encarnita on her way up to the cemetery. Sofia spent much time up there amongst the dead. ‘Do they think the other lot will just sit back and take it? What fools they are! The landowners are never going to give up their estates without a fight. People are tight-fisted when it comes to land.’ A few peasants had taken over some parcels of ground in the campo but that had not gone very far.

  ‘She’s right, of course,’ agreed Rinaldo, when Encarnita repeated what Sofia had said. ‘The struggle is not yet finished. I always told you it would not be simple.’

  To hear this depressed Encarnita. She had been hoping that she would not have to go on worrying about him when he went out to meetings. Sometimes she lay awake until the middle of the night listening for the sound of his step in the street outside.

  ‘Is nothing going to change?’ she asked.

  ‘We have to keep up the pressure,’ said her uncle.

  Some things did change. Political prisoners were released and for a while there was no censorship and books and newspapers were printed unexpurgated. The power of the church appeared to be diminishing. For a start, education was to be taken out of the hands of the clergy and given over to the state. Moral standards began to shift. Freedom was in the air. Young courting couples from decent families walked the streets without chaperones and fishermen and labourers came with their girls to dance in the hotel and were served cheap beer by a smiling Manolo. But, said Rinaldo, all of that was not enough. The poor were still poor and their children were starving. They couldn’t go dancing. The political meetings went on, and the speeches. Discontent mounted. Shop windows were broken, priests spat at in the street. There were acts of sabotage, too, at the ice-making plant and the power station, both owned by a marquis no one had ever set eyes on. The tax collector, along with his wife and furniture, were thrown out of their house by a posse of elderly women, who then, amidst applause, proceeded to dump them in a cart and drive them out into the campo, depositing them beyond the confines of the town. Encarnita watched their eviction and was caught up in the wave of cheering but afterwards she wondered if it had been right to cheer. The taxman’s wife had looked terrified. Encarnita was left with an unpleasant feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘None of this is good for business,’ grumbled the puffing and sighing Herr Christien. ‘When is it all going to settle down?’

  ‘Most people from abroad don’t know what’s going on until they get here,’ said Jacobo. ‘Most people don’t know anything much about Spain.’

  Encarnita was with Jacobo and Lorenzo in the hotel when a boy put his head round the door and yelled that they were burning the holy images from the church on the beach. They dropped everything and went out. An excited crowd had already gathered around the fire, which crackled and spat and licked its booty. The men of the village were there, and their women and children. The children became enflamed themselves and began to chuck stones. Their mothers looked uneasy and Encarnita saw Sofia standing on the edge of the crowd crossing herself.

  ‘The Spanish are far too excitable,’ said Jacobo. ‘It would be for their own good if they would all calm down a bit. Even the girls are talking about politics!’

  But the excitement carried on, taking the form of parades and strikes and, of course, speeches. The speeches stirred the blood. Fascist symbols were daubed on walls. The Republican flag was draped across the balcony of the Town Hall and, underneath, painted in red, were the words: ‘We swear to defend this bandera with the last drop of our blood.’

  The strikes, when called, were solid. No citizen of Almuñecar would dare work. Rinaldo warned Encarnita not even to lift a hand. The staff at the Hotel Mediterráneo sat idling on the beach while Herr Christien struggled in the kitchen to feed his few guests, whose rooms lay uncleaned.

  Every day, a line of peasants could be seen coming in from the campo, on foot and on donkeys, laden with any weaponry they might have, staves, rusty pistols, flintlocks, ready for battle, should battle be necessary.

  ‘Who are they going to fight?’ asked Jacobo.

  ‘Maybe the army,’ said Encarnita uneasily.

  ‘Whose army?’

  Rinaldo was thinking, as each day passed, that conflict was inevitable. He was convinced the Right was planning a counter attack. There were regular reports of violence in the large cities, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia. Strikes and riots were a daily occurrence. In a village along the coast, a group of Falangists, proudly sporting armbands, entered a bar and coolly shot dead five fishermen. The son of a former mayor, a Falangist, was later found in the campo, shot through the head. Fear crept through the streets like a poisonous gas. Lorenzo was ta
lking of going home. He had moved from the hotel into the house of a middle-aged Englishwoman, who had taken him under her wing. Wilma Gregory was literary, according to Lorenzo, and well connected. She had come recently to Almuñecar and had bought a house next to the church with the idea of settling here but was coming to realise that she had picked the wrong time.

  News of an anti-government uprising in Morocco on the 17th of July reached Almuñecar. ‘The Moors have risen up, led by some general called Franco,’ reported Jacobo, who had heard it on the radio. The next day there were similar uprisings in Sevilla and other cities. No one knew exactly what was going on. Rumours flew about. Villagers gathered in the plaza, along with the peasants and their families who had come in from the fields. With them, they had brought their beasts. Sofia moaned about the mess in the pueblo. ‘It’s beginning to look like a farmyard. And smell like one.’ The police, at this point, were making themselves scarce, not knowing which side they were meant to be on, according to Rinaldo. He, along with Manolo and another man, Francisco, known as Frasco El Gato – The Cat – were organising a kind of home guard, a militia, for the protection of Almuñecar against the Fascists.

  One group, led by Manolo, set up a roadblock on the coast and stopped the few vehicles that were abroad. They made a quick arrest: a car that two young men were travelling in was found to contain rifles and grenades. When a Frenchman arrived, flying a white flag, he was able to give them news of Málaga. He told them that the city was half in flames and people were fighting hand-to-hand in the street. Many were fleeing. He had been shot at as he left; the bullet holes in the bodywork of his car were proof of that. He was unable to say who had done the shooting.

  Other members of the militia embarked on house-to-house searches and by the end of the first night they had stacked up a considerable pile of weapons in the plaza. They lit fires and sat around them, discussing tactics and keeping a watchful eye on their cache. They also made some further arrests. Young Falangist males, decked out in lacy shirts, heads held high, were rounded up and taken to the jail, as was the priest, protesting loudly.

  ‘What harm would he do?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘Uncle Rinaldo says he’s a symbol of the old regime,’ said Encarnita.

  ‘Why don’t they let him be, then, if the regime is done for?’

  But it was not done for, they both knew that. They went home to their beds though they did not sleep well. They were wakened at intervals by shots. Cinderella whinnied unhappily in the back yard and tugged at her stake. Encarnita went out to quieten her and stayed for a while beside her looking over the great expanse of sea below, silver in the moonlight. The world seemed so peaceful. And then a new shot rang out and made her jump. She retreated indoors.

  At first light, Rinaldo came home to change his clothes. He said they were going along the coast to help defend Motril against the Fascist rebels; they’d heard they were having trouble.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Encarnita.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

  She pulled on her dress and ran down the hill to see him off. The men had commandeered a number of trucks and were piling aboard. They were in high spirits. Waving their caps and rifles in the air, they sang as they sped away, a song about the sons of the people being oppressed by chains. This injustice cannot go on…They left a deep silence behind them. Encarnita had noticed that El Gato, who was in charge, had had something strapped to his body. Dynamite, Jacobo told her, once they had gone. She shivered even though the sun was up.

  She was on edge all day. After she’d finished her work at the hotel she wandered about the village, unable to settle. The men were not back by the time darkness fell. She sat on a wall down by the sea with Jacobo and Ana, one of the other housemaids, whose brother had gone on the trucks. They listened to the sound of the waves. Some people were out doing the paseo. Hearing a noise overhead Encarnita glanced up and saw a small plane circling. Aircraft were only occasionally to be seen in their skies. She shivered.

  Suddenly, a bright, sweeping light, coming from the sea, almost blinded them and made them recoil. They put up their arms to shield their eyes. The light raked the shore from one end to the other.

  ‘It’s a searchlight!’ said Jacobo. ‘There must be a ship out there!’

  Panic seized for a moment, then the people stilled and, not knowing what else to do, waited.

  The light moved up to main road.

  ‘I can see a truck!’ cried Ana. ‘Look!’

  She was right. The lorries were coming bumping along the coast road, sounding their horns, with the men on their feet, waving again. Their mission had not been successful, but they had survived their first encounter with the enemy. The crowd converged on them, clapping their backs, cheering, with Encarnita amongst them, relieved to see her uncle unhurt.

  Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light from the sea went out, as if someone had pulled a switch. A sigh of relief went up. But a moment later, the shelling began. The people on the shore panicked and for a moment did not know which way to turn. Then they headed for the shelter of the hills. Children stumbled and fell and were urged up and on by their fathers; mothers carried infants bobbing against their shoulders; older people hobbled.

  Within minutes, it was all over. The noise stopped abruptly, though the smell of smoke hung in the air. They halted in their tracks, frozen like statues, half way between their homes and the hill, and listened, uncertain as to what to do. After a little while, when nothing else had happened, they began to creep back down into the village. Nobody had been killed, only frightened. It could have been worse. The next morning they heard that the attack had been a mistake; they had thought the trucks belonged to the rebels. So the attacker was really on their side, a friend, they were told. Apologies were conveyed to them.

  Out of the confusion came a stronger determination for the pueblo to show its colours. The flag of the Republic fluttered from all the main buildings, the bank and the casino amongst them. People cobbled up makeshift flags and banners and draped their doors and windows. Peasants and fishermen took over the empty houses of the better-off, with great plans for turning them into sanatoriums and nursery schools, and even a training college for girls. In this new free society girls were to be given the chance of a proper education.

  The militia set off once again along the coast in lorries, but they were more muted this time. They did not sing. Amongst them went old and young men, and a band of teenage girls armed with hand grenades, showing that women could be equal to men. Rinaldo had asked Encarnita if she wanted to join them.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she had said hesitantly. At whom would she be expected to throw grenades?

  ‘The enemy! The enemy of the people. Surely you know that?’

  ‘But how would you know who is the enemy?’

  ‘It will be obvious.’ Rinaldo had been a little impatient.

  ‘I am on your side,’ she had said to him as he went out of the door. ‘I am for the Republican cause, you don’t have to doubt that.’

  ‘I know. You’re too young, anyway, to stain your hands with blood. Better to stay at home!’

  She felt a little guilty now that she had not gone to give him her physical support, but what use would she have been? Faced with a human being, could she have thrown a grenade? She knew that Pilar would not have wanted her to go. After some agonising, Ana had gone with her brother.

  In the late afternoon, they saw two warships steaming eastward down the coast in the direction of Motril. Encarnita went down to the beach and joined Jacobo. As the evening sky began to change colour the ships commenced shelling the shore to the east of them. They listened to the dull thud, the steady boom, boom of the shells, and felt dull themselves, incapable of feeling. Encarnita stayed down by the sea with Jacobo after the bombardment had ceased.

  ‘Don’t you want to go home?’ asked Encarnita. ‘To Germany?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be so good for me there, either. I’m a Jew, you see. Our leader, Herr Hitler, do
esn’t like Jews.’

  Encarnita had never heard of Herr Hitler.

  ‘You’re lucky. Better not to hear of him.’

  There was to be no jubilant welcome for the homecoming men and women this time. When lorries returned they brought back dead and wounded along with the living. Pedro was dead, and Manolo was missing, as was Ana’s brother. Ana herself had received a stomach wound, but the greater harm had been done to her spirit. She subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and would not leave the house. As for the rebel village, it had not been quelled; the Almuñecar militia had been ill-equipped to cope with the Nationalists’ defence, and the destroyers’ shells, which should have helped them, had missed and landed in the campo behind.

  Rinaldo had a wound in his shoulder, caused by a passing bullet. It was bleeding profusely and the flesh was torn right down to the bone. ‘Superficial,’ he said. He could not complain about something so trivial. He’d seen one of his best friends lying in an alley with his throat cut. After Encarnita had bound up his shoulder he went out and sat in a bar with El Gato and some of the other men, sunk in a mood of deep depression, trying to decide what had gone wrong, apart from the fact that those bastards of warships had let them down.

  Encarnita went up to the alcazaba and crouching in the shelter of a wall she let the tears flow. She wished she were back in Yegen, away from this madness. But perhaps they were fighting each other there too. She knew that some in the village would defend the monarchy and the church to the last while others would not and thought their power too great. But would that be enough for them to go out and kill each other, their friends and neighbours? She could not imagine it. She wished she could talk to Don Geraldo for he might have been able to help her understand why the world had turned crazy. He knew the world. He had travelled far and wide. But perhaps he and Doña Gamel would have left Spain by now and gone back to the peace and quiet of their own country.