Frontier Passage

by Ann Bridge

  Frontier Passage

  A Novel by

  ANN BRIDGE

  To

  G. H. K. C. O’M.

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 THE FAR SIDE—MADRID

  2 THE FAR SIDE—MADRID

  3 THIS SIDE—ST.-JEAN-DE-LUZ

  4 THIS SIDE—ST.-JEAN-DE-LUZ

  5 THE FAR SIDE—ALMADERA

  6 THIS SIDE—ST.-JEAN-DE-LUZ

  7 UNDER—THE GROTTE DE SARE

  8 THE FAR SIDE—ALMADERA AND BARCELONA

  9 THIS SIDE—ST.-JEAN-DE-LUZ

  10 THIS SIDE—ST.-JEAN-DE-LUZ

  11 ON THE CREST

  12 THIS SIDE—AMÉLIE-LES-BAINS

  13 THIS SIDE—PRATS-DE-MOLLO

  A Note on the Author

  Foreword

  This story is pure invention. Though the places and scenery described are real, and though the larger background of events in this novel bears some relation to historical fact, the characters are wholly imaginary, and their actions and adventures have, and had, no sort of counterpart in real life, with one exception—the nameless Republican soldier who threw the packet of cigarettes into the car on the road to Cervère. Since however characters in novels are people, they must live and move, and speak and hold opinions; and in the world of the imagination these characters do so. But the reader is asked to remember that the words and sentiments attributed to them are theirs rather than the author’s, who could not possibly hold so many differing points of view simultaneously—and belong solely in that strange place, the world where Fancy is bred. There is no subject on which outsiders are more ready to pass moral judgements than the Spanish Civil War; and no subject on which the judgement of outsiders is liable to be at once so categorical, so illfounded, and so harmful. For my part, in writing this book, I have been determined to leave it to the Spaniards themselves, and to history, to appraise the true meaning of these tragic years, while attuning my heart and mind to the indestructible significance and nobility of the Spanish attitude to life—and death.

  ANN BRIDGE

  Chapter One

  The Far Side—Madrid

  In each generation, and everywhere, there are always a few people to whom public circumstances are important, not only as they touch them personally, in their individual lives and fortunes, but as they affect the whole character of their time, and the hopes and destinies of mankind at large. Such people are not common; there are women among them as well as men. One knows them by a certain preoccupied look—sometimes a haunted look, almost—and by their speech, of which they are apt to be sparing; when they do speak it is slowly, and with restraint; they are never voluble or violent. Usually they have some historical knowledge, but there are not many of them among the ranks of historians proper, because historians recognise facts without emotion, while these people recognise with satisfaction or dismay, or even despair, the probable tendencies of the events going on about them.

  James Milcom, shaving gloomily in his emergency bedroom in the Telephone Company’s Building in Madrid, during the second winter of the Spanish Civil War, after a night noisy with artillery fire, was a very good example of this type of person. He was a journalist, and represented that mighty daily, the Epoch, in Republican Spain—a job he did admirably, as he did most things to which he set his hand. Foreign assignments had been his specialty for some years past; he had been in Italy and in Germany for long periods since 1932—but here in Republican Spain his work lay where his heart was. He wrote at all times like an angel, but in his long, thoughtful, well-considered articles from Madrid a hidden passion flowered sometimes into passages almost lyrical in their intensity—in the sedate pages of the Epoch they produced an effect as startling as flowers in a Bishop’s hair. As he ran his razor over his lean angular jaw, with the two deep lines running down from the nostrils, round the wide close-lipped mouth to the cleft chin, he stared at the lathered reflection of his big ugly intelligent face with a sort of ferocious desperation, from under his jutting black eyebrows. The grey eyes under the great corrugated forehead were so brilliant and set so deep that they looked penetrating even when he was sleepy, and passionate when he was tranquil. But in fact he was seldom either sleepy or tranquil—he was much more often passionate, burning with a fierce intellectual flame about something: passionately finding out, passionately endeavouring, passionately admiring or contemning. It was that passion which gave him the look of desperation, and sometimes of gloom—the look that had made the Spaniards nick-name him “El Melancolico.” It was also what made him an unusually good—if difficult and individual—journalist. But the Epoch valued him as he deserved; the editorial staff recognised the tremendous quality both of his stuff and of himself, and put up with his eccentricities.

  His thoughts as he shaved were as gloomy as his face. He liked the Spaniards as a race enormously, and hated to see them subject themselves to the worst of all evils that can befall a nation, civil war. But even more he hated and feared the implications which he recognised in this particular civil war. He saw in it the first open threat to humanity at large of that new theory of tyranny, the tyranny of ideas, which he had watched with dismayed repugnance developing, first in Italy and then in Germany, during his years in Rome and Berlin. Then already he had realised that the theory in itself menaced everything that was most admirable and worth preserving in human life, in the countries immediately affected by it, but his hope had been that like a fever it would burn itself out within the organisms that it had attacked. But here in Spain he saw the infection beginning to spread beyond its own borders. Ideas—false, doctrinaire, unrelated to all genuine human values—were what men were fighting about here; the Marxian nonsense of Communism, the even more false, silly, and destructive nonsense of Fascism and Nazism were responsible for the bombardment that had kept him awake last night. Men had fought for foolish things enough in the past, he thought, wiping his razor on a dismally dirty scrap of ragged towel—but frontiers and trading rights and colonies had some sense in them; even dynasties had some degree of actuality. Nothing so madly unreal as this theoretical lunacy had ever before thrown down solid useful buildings, and sent healthy laughing lusting men, with work to do, to their profitless death. He fastened his collar and tie, hitched his braces up over his shoulders, drew on his jacket, stuffed passports, papers, pocket-book, notebook, pipe and tobacco into his pocket, swept some loose change off the dingy cover of his toilet-table and pocketed that too, and pulling on an overcoat, grabbed up his hat and left the room.

  It was still early, barely light, when he emerged into the street; a bitter wind sent little swirls of cold dust round his ankles as he walked. Though he had a car, he used it mostly for longer expeditions, outside the city. Fires and bursting shells seen from the eighth-floor passage-window during the night had given him a rough idea of where the main damage was to be expected, out in the direction of the University City, and towards that he made his way, walking fast. Here and there queues were beginning to form outside the shops—thin lines of women, mostly bareheaded, but a few with shawls drawn over their heads against the cold, bags and baskets on their arms, standing patiently; in the harsh grey light they looked like exhausted ghosts. Oh yes, queues, he thought angrily—that was all part of it, the final fruit of these high-sounding ideological speeches: queues, and lack of clothes and eggs and butter, and pellagra rampant everywhere—he had seen women killed in Madrid in the street during bombardments, because they refused to leave the line to take shelter, fearing to lose their chance of buying what food they could. This was the reverse of the medal, the other side of building jimcrack empires overnight, and screaming about Lebensraum; those were the symptoms, but this was what the patient looked like when he had really got the disease.

&
nbsp; He came after a time to the area of damage. In several streets of medium-sized houses, and round a square, there had been a lot knocked down; heaps of rubble lay where houses had stood; a church had had the end blown off and then had burned out, the grey sky looked in through the charred and still smouldering rafters of the fallen roof upon the blackened ruins of the altar. He made a few notes, and started to walk round to the far side of the church. There were few people about as yet, though some of the usual fuel-scavengers were out already; up by the chancel he passed close to one of them, a woman, prowling among the wreckage, gathering wood for firing. This was a common enough sight in Madrid that winter, desolatingly common; the shawled figure excited no particular interest in Milcom—she was just another of the weary ghosts, like the women in the queues, quietly keeping life going in the most impossible conditions. She was tugging at a piece of wood that was stuck under a block of masonry, and he noticed as he passed that the hand thrust out from under the shabby black shawl was surprisingly white and shapely; with one of his habitual impulses he went over, grasped the piece of timber, wrenched it loose and pulled it out. “There you are, Señora” he said in Spanish, and made to go on.

  To his immense surprise he was answered in English—“Thank you so very much; that is very kind of you.”

  It was very good, very pretty English, but it was not an English woman’s; he turned and stared at the woman with genuine curiosity. She put back her shawl, and he found himself looking into the most beautiful face that he had ever seen. James’s Spanish was more than adequate, it was very good; but it was not amour-propre that prompted his next remark, it was a desire to prolong the conversation and find out who this lovely creature was.

  “De nada,” he said. “How did you know I was English?”

  “Oh, not your Spanish,” said the shawl, swiftly—“but your look; and I saw you writing. You are a journalist, no?”

  James said that he was.

  She looked full at him. Her eyes were a clear grey, under reddish-bronze hair and dark brows, very unusual and very beautiful. She let the piece of wood fall, and drew her shawl together across her breast with that very white hand with a curious gesture; holding it so, she continued to look at him. “May I ask you something?” she said at last.

  Of course, James said.

  “I see that you are kind,” she said hurriedly, “or you would not have helped me. It is milk, tinned milk, that I want so much. I have a little child”—her voice dropped. “It is so hard to get, and she is getting so thin. Even one or two tins—it is easier for foreigners. I know it is a lot to ask,” she added deprecatingly.

  Milcom was embarrassed. He was not in the habit of buying tinned milk, and his English defensive mechanism caused him to say, almost automatically—

  “Could you not get that from the Quakers?—or the relief people?”

  She continued to look at him steadily.

  “That is not so easy for me,” she answered. “I am a White.”

  “Surely they pay no attention to that,” he said, faintly irritated by his embarrassment, or her persistence, or something.

  “They, no—Los Quaqueros are quite impartial,” she said, with a sort of judicial calm which struck him. “But others are not. It is—it is not a very good plan for us to be seen too much in the queues.”

  A White—what was she doing here anyway? And her beauty, and those lovely hands. Curiosity and compassion got the better of Milcom’s negativism.

  “Come and show me where you live,” he said—“and I will see what I can do.”

  He picked up the piece of wood which he had pulled out for her; hastily, she gathered up some other fragments which she had collected—Milcom took these too, and they set off through the ruined streets, under the grey harsh sky. He eyed her as they went. She walked beautifully, with a light rapid graceful step, an unusual thing in Spanish women. She was an aristocrat, obviously—got caught here somehow, he supposed. There were a few Whites in Madrid living “under supervision,” and on the whole they had a pretty thin time of it.

  “Why do you speak English so well?” he said, asking the first question that came into his head.

  “My grandmother was Scottish.”

  “Indeed! And have you been in Scotland?”

  “Twice I was there,” she said—and a little smile; the amused smile of a very sophisticated person at an entertaining recollection played for a moment over her face. “We shot grouse, walking for miles in rows, and killed salmon, sitting in boats. And always it rained.”

  “It generally does,” said Milcom, whom this faithful description of Scottish country-house life caused to smile too. “Have you had breakfast?” he asked abruptly, as they passed a small café.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Nor have I. Let’s come in here and have some.”

  The drab little restaurant was practically empty at that hour; it was not warm, even in there, but it was warmer than outside. The woman took off her shawl before they sat down at one of the small bare tables, and for the first time Milcom got a thorough look at her. She was tall and very slight, with a long slender neck rising finely from rather too narrow shoulders; her hips were narrow too, so that when she stood without her shawl the whole effect was that of an arrow or a wand; her face was long and pale, with a high-bridged delicate nose—the vigorous modelling of the cheek bones and eye-sockets, and the very high square forehead gave it a Gothic look, like a mediaeval statue on the front of a cathedral. In spite of this rather peculiar countenance, she was, undeniably, fantastically beautiful. Her face was vaguely familiar to Milcom; as they began to eat the small hard rolls of white bread—throughout the civil war bread remained white in Madrid—and to drink the milkless, sugarless coffee which a shabby woman set before them, he wondered where he could have seen her before. He asked her how she, a White, came to be in Madrid?

  They had got caught, she said, she and the child, when they went to visit her husband in hospital at D——, in September ’36; he was in the Navarrese Division, was wounded and sent to hospital. It had seemed safe to go and see him, but there was a surprise attack by los Rojos, and they had been taken there. She had a brother in Madrid on the Republican side—“we are so mixed up; it is very complicated,” she said, with another of those little sophisticated smiles—and she had somehow managed to get to him. “While he was living, it was really all right; he managed things for us,” she said simply; “but he was killed six months ago, fighting, and now—it is rather difficult.”

  “And where is your husband now?” Milcom asked.

  “Still in prison, at Almadera—so far as I know. I have heard nothing from him directly, of course, but the last news that my brother got for me, he was recovered, and well.”

  In spite of his antipathy to the cause of General Franco, and therefore to Whites, Milcom found himself rather liking this woman. She was so quiet and direct, and her gift for understatement was almost English. He made some more enquiries into her circumstances, most of which she parried with a gentle courteous skill which indicated a high degree of social training—she was giving nothing away that she could help, he realised, and asking for nothing but his aid in getting some tinned milk for the child. Now that he was able to take her measure, to place her, more or less, the pathos of that first appeal came home to him with fresh force. And why the devil did he feel so sure that he knew her face?

  At last, straight out, he asked her name.

  “Raquel de Verdura,” she said.

  Milcom was uncomfortably certain, afterwards, that at that softly-pronounced name he must have jumped like a shot rabbit. The Condesa de Verdura! The legendary beauty, acclaimed everywhere as the most beautiful woman in Spain, if not in Europe; the great heiress, married to a husband twenty years older than herself, of almost equal wealth and of even more legendary infidelity. No wonder her face was familiar—before the war the social papers had displayed it whenever she appeared in public; and her portrait, by every European artist of note, had
adorned the main picture-shows in Madrid, Paris, London, Berlin, for years past. He looked at her again, thoughtfully, while the stories about her husband and his amours flowed back into his retentive journalist’s memory. At that moment he thought less about how strange it was that this woman, of all women, should be sitting with him in a dirty little café, after he had helped her to scavenge wood like any beggar, out there by the ruined church, than about her herself, and her own life. What had she made of her husband’s so blatant and publicised unfaithfulnesses? Had she minded? Had she in any way recouped herself? With that matchless face before him, and the soft voice still in his ears, confronted with her still dignity and quiet uncomplaining acceptance of intolerable conditions, those were the questions, the personal, unwarranted questions that sprang into his mind. They were to trouble it again arid again in the time to come.

  When they had eaten, he went with her to her home, still carrying the load of wood—which now seemed the most improbable of burdens for the escort of the Condesa de Verdura. It should have been a mink coat, or flowers! And he remembered how she had said, when she begged for a tin of condensed milk—“I know it is a lot to ask.” A lot!—well, in Madrid that winter, a tin of condensed milk was a lot, at that. The “home,” when they reached it, was a wretched place. All that could be said in its favour was that it was in a cellar, which in view of bombardments by night and aerial bombings by day was a definite recommendation, since it made frequent trips to the public shelters less necessary. But it was dark, damp, carpetless; there was a rickety table, one chair and one stool—a rather tumble-down stove in one corner, with a few pieces of wood beside it, a single palliasse on the floor in another; a minute mirror on the wall, a few clothes hanging from nails. It was perfectly neat; one or two cups and plates, and a few jugs and dishes were ranged tidily on an old wooden tea-chest by the stove; there was a tin basin for washing, and a bucket of clean water on the floor; a towel on another nail above. An unshielded electric bulb gave light; the window was of course broken, and had been patched partly with wood, partly with sacking. One thing Milcom found peculiarly touching. In a common earthenware jar on the table some dried wild grasses, and the seed-heads of various common weeds were arranged like a vase of flowers with great taste and skill—in every shade of fawn, beige and deep brown, they made a charming and striking decoration in that miserable room.