Daughter of Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  There was a small room behind the gallery which Jordi used as a workshop. It was dusty, and rather too dark to be ideal for a working studio, but it was surprisingly ordered and well organised, with Jordi’s materials catalogued on shelves along the walls. It was an intensely physical space which was obviously Jordi’s whole world and possibly his refuge.

  Philippe whispered to her that they should get lunch, but it didn’t seem right to move Jordi from this space. She didn’t know what or when he might eat, but she guessed it would be erratic and would completely follow his appetites. She didn’t want to leave. There was too much that this young man had not yet shared with her. He had known her father. Surely he could speak about him? And she wanted to know more about Jordi.

  As Philippe made moves to leave, she approached Jordi and planted herself in front of him.

  ‘Thank you for showing me the camp today, Jordi. You must realise that I am really searching to understand everything that happened to my father and all that surrounded him, all the history I missed. I’ve come a long way to find out – practically run away from my family,’ she laughed, with a new sense of freedom. ‘Could you find the time to meet me again, do you think? To continue our discussion? Could you meet me once more during the short time I have here?’

  Jordi contemplated her for a long moment, not unfriendly, just thinking, as if a major decision was involved.

  ‘All right,’ he replied at last. ‘I’ll meet you.’

  Madeleine felt a wave of relief, then surprise as Jordi continued almost aggressively, ‘But not in Vermeilla. Are you scared to go on a motorbike? No? Then I’ll meet you at the entrance to the village tomorrow evening, after I close up here, and we’ll go somewhere else. Somewhere where we can talk without ghosts. Give me an hour to come to you. I’ll meet you at seven-thirty, is that OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Till tomorrow, then,’ he said, and briefly shook her hand as though she was a stranger. She wondered why he would not come to meet her in Vermeilla. But the point had been won, and he was going to meet her. He hadn’t closed the door on her, and he’d said they were going to talk.

  ‘A demain,’ Madeleine agreed, and the shop bell rang behind them as she and Philippe left the gallery.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was considerably later than seven-thirty when Jordi met her the following evening, but Madeleine knew better than to complain. He pulled up at the junction outside Vermeilla on a small motorbike, and shouted above its rather rattly, clamorous engine for Madeleine to climb up behind him. The motorbike had once been black, but was now a well-worn grey colour, with rather more dust than paint. Madeleine pulled her full cotton skirt around her knees, and sat behind Jordi, putting her arms around him as he told her, and holding on tight despite her embarrassment as the bike throttled away over what seemed like an endless series of bumps in the road.

  Jordi headed along the coast, heading south. The sun was setting on their right, behind the vines in the hillside, and to their left the Mediterranean soon came into view, deepening blue under a cloudless sky. They drove through Collioure without stopping, much to Madeleine’s regret, since she had already heard so much about this beautiful village, bigger and more artistically famous than Vermeilla, and she craned her head to see the medieval castle on her left, dominating and guarding the harbour, before they sped on and up another hill, losing sight of the sea for a while before it came back, a deeper blue than ever on their left, and they were again in the countryside. She wondered where they were going, but after a few more minutes they passed the entrance for Port Vendres, and drove down into the fishing port which Daniel had spoken of only a few days before.

  Port Vendres was a bustling harbour, and Madeleine could see some of the modern fishing boats which Daniel had mentioned, berthed alongside the quay, and further along two bigger boats which looked as though they might be carrying cargo.

  Jordi stopped halfway along the harbour, and parked the motorbike in front of a bar much busier than any in Vermeilla. Inside, fishermen and workmen were finishing glasses of pastis before heading home for dinner, and outside, tables facing the busy road and harbour were serving drinks and food. There didn’t seem to be any tourists here, but a group of men in working clothes were eating fish soup, and a family was busy ordering, their noisy children in imminent danger, Madeleine thought, of running into the road.

  Jordi waved Madeleine towards a table, and sat opposite her.

  ‘I’ve always liked Port Vendres,’ he announced, with obvious satisfaction. ‘It’s a real sort of place, a working port, and full of people like me – migrants from all over, from the north, from Spain, people who don’t go to tourist centres like Collioure or even Vermeilla. They want work, and they go to the big cities, but they have also come to Port Vendres. It’s not so Catalan, perhaps, but it’s not pretentious like Céret, and I like it. I come here sometimes and eat, just for a change.’

  He seemed much happier this evening, freer than yesterday, and he sat with his face to the breeze and breathed in the air, stretching his legs by the side of the little table in a gesture of relaxation.

  ‘It’s a better place to talk, too, if that’s what you want to do. Good neutral ground and everyone’s too busy to be listening in.’

  Was that an opening, Madeleine wondered? She was increasingly curious about this young man, and wanted to ask him questions, but was frightened of seeing his face close over again. The waiter brought a menu and offered drinks, and Jordi ordered pastis for both of them.

  ‘The fish soup here is outstanding,’ he said. ‘Really pungent flavours, and a meal in itself. But don’t let me dictate to you.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ concurred Madeleine. ‘It’s something I haven’t yet eaten locally.’

  The food ordered, the waiter placed the two glasses of pastis before them, and Madeleine added a shot of water and watched it turn the milky colour which had always fascinated her. Gingerly she raised the glass and took a sip. It smelt of aniseed balls, and tasted worse, and she put the glass down hurriedly, her face screwed up in displeasure.

  ‘To think I’ve watched people drinking this and wanted to taste it!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can see why they drink it in ports – it tastes like engine oil! Is this what you drink in Céret, or do you have something more civilised as an aperitif inland?’

  Jordi laughed. ‘Neither!’ he answered. ‘I don’t really go out in Céret, except to go to party meetings.’

  ‘Party?’

  ‘The Communist party. I’m a member. It’s quite common, you know, around here. We don’t even have horns! The Communist party runs most things in Céret, and they don’t turn away Spaniards like me. To me, the Communists are the only people who really speak up for ordinary people in France, and they’re certainly the only party speaking up now, in the mess we’re in. Have you heard about it? De Gaulle being imposed on us as head of state without elections, and all this talk of dissolving the republic. It’s like Franco all over again. Those who crave power will always take advantage when democracy gets in a mess. You can say what you like about the Communists, and them being too tied to Moscow, but they wouldn’t have allowed us to get into such a shambles, you can bet your life on that.’

  He paused, and then gestured in the direction of his beloved Spain, a few kilometres down the road. ‘And as for Spain, if the Communists had been able to control all the anarchists and other disorganised idiots back there, then the Republic wouldn’t have failed, and we wouldn’t have been living under Franco for the last twenty years.’

  Madeleine thought of all she had heard about the Communist party in France. It was a mainstream elected party, she knew, unlike in England, and had been criticised by the Soviets for being too soft. She could imagine Jordi’s embittered heart seeking out the discipline and comradeship offered by the Communists, the last group to stand up to Franco as an organised unit in 1938, just before the child Jordi had found himself on the cold road to exile in France.

&n
bsp; ‘And do you hold any official position?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no! Far more humble. I leave official positions to my French comrades. It’s just a way for me to feel involved, I suppose.’

  His voice had a bitter edge. ‘You really don’t feel you belong here, do you?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘No, I don’t. It’s hard to feel you belong. Great figures like Picasso and Casals get adopted by the French as VIPs, but even they long for home. Your father felt it too, although he was more a part of intellectual life in France. For the ordinary Spaniards like me this will never be home. Even my sister only partly succeeds in being French.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Yes, I have a younger sister. She married a chap from Perpignan and lives up there now, trying to be more French than the French, and not even speaking Catalan. She says it’s a rough language, and her own children only speak French. She tries so hard it’s almost sad.’

  His voice was equally sad as he spoke. Madeleine put down her glass.

  ‘I lost my own Catalan, you know,’ she said. ‘I always spoke Catalan with my father, and then when we had to leave I lost it. I hate it, being in Vermeilla, and hearing the language around me all the time, and not understanding. It makes me feel like a foreigner.’

  Jordi looked at her with new attention. ‘Yes, of course, you too are a displaced person. I keep forgetting. You sound just like any young lady from Paris. But you are a Garriga, after all, a Catalan.’

  ‘A Catalan without a heritage. I know you feel like an outsider here, but at least you grew up knowing where you came from, and in touch with your family in Spain.’

  Jordi grimaced. ‘In a way, perhaps, but it’s only really in recent years that I’ve been able to contact the family again, and I’ve only been able to smuggle myself over the border a couple of times. It’s like I told you – those of us who left aren’t welcome now in Spain, and we can be arrested, so the family seem very remote really, in a different world. And then my father …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My father was a drunk.’ The words were spat from Jordi’s mouth in bitter challenge. ‘Later in his life no one wanted to know him, and he shrank into himself. He would never have made any attempt then to reach his family. We even lost contact with Felip, and later heard that he had died. That’s one of the reasons my sister wanted so much to leave home and forget all about us. It wasn’t much of a house for her to grow up in. And she didn’t really remember my father so much from his earlier years, when he was the greatest father anyone could have asked for.’

  ‘He saved my mother, my brother and me.’ Madeleine’s words were a simple statement.

  ‘And countless others,’ Jordi’s voice rose. ‘And he never took a penny from anyone for helping them, when other passeurs were raking in money. He never lost his values, but he lost his strength. His moral strength, I mean. He hated feeling so weak, and he despised himself, and he took it out on my mother a lot. But she never stopped loving him. She used to tell us we should still be proud of him. And he was in such a lot of pain, a lot of the time.’

  His tone pleaded with Madeleine. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she didn’t dare. How long had it been, she wondered, since anyone had shown him any affection? Probably not since the death of his mother.

  Their soup arrived at this moment, and in the bustle of service Jordi recovered his poise enough to offer croutons and a bowl of spicy mayonnaise rouille to add to the soup, and to order a glass of house wine for each of them.

  Madeleine tasted the soup appreciatively. It was stronger than any fish soup she had tasted before, and the rouille added a burst of heat and garlic. Amidst the sounds of the harbour at night, and the salt smell on the breeze, this bold, fragrant soup seemed to bring together all the tastes and smells of the Mediterranean.

  Madeleine smiled at Jordi, and took up their conversation. ‘How long ago did your mother die?’ she asked him.

  ‘Seven years ago. My sister left soon after. And then it was just me and my father. What about you? Your mother died too, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, just two months ago. That’s what made me come here. I suddenly wanted to find our roots, and so I came back to Vermeilla to find Tonton Philippe.’

  ‘Philippe.’ Jordi spoke the name reflectively. ‘You know, Philippe was one of the people who stayed loyal to my father even after he lost most of his friends. My father respected him enormously. That’s why—’ he broke off abruptly.

  ‘Why what?’ asked Madeleine.

  Jordi said nothing, and gazed intently into his wine glass. There was a silence, and then Madeleine repeated quietly, ‘Why what, Jordi?’

  He looked up at her, and let out a long sigh. Then he answered equally quietly.

  ‘We kept it a secret for all these years, but I decided you had a right to know. You are Luis Garriga’s daughter, and he died that day.’

  He paused, and Madeleine waited, completely silent. Behind them the world seemed to have receded into the dark. They were utterly alone. She didn’t dare move, for fear of breaking this moment when surely some momentous truth was going to be told. After some time Jordi continued.

  ‘I don’t know how much you know about that day. You’ve seen the camp. Well, by May 1944 there were eight or nine men living in the camp, but only your father and mine were there when the Germans came. They had been across to Spain overnight, and were sleeping, but the noise of the German arrival woke them, and they escaped out of the back of the shed and made for the other path which led from the far end of the clearing. That was always the plan if they were to be surprised in that way.

  ‘They’d nearly made it when they were spotted, and the Germans fired, so they hid behind some rocks and fired back. From then on the end was always inevitable. There were far too many Germans and they couldn’t retreat any further towards the path, so the goal was simply to take as many Germans as possible with them, and they didn’t have enough ammunition to take that many. You know that your father was killed, but mine wasn’t. The Germans shot him three times in the arm and chest, and he was taken out unconscious.

  ‘When he woke up he was in a cell in Perpignan, and he told me he knew he was for it. To be captured was a guarantee of torture, and there were cases where people committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be interrogated by the Germans. But my father didn’t have that possibility; he wasn’t even able to move, because of his injuries. He told me they left him there for hours, which was deliberate of course, to leave him alone with his thoughts, and in pain, and without water, so that when they finally came for him his resolve would be weak. And he didn’t know what had happened to Luis, so it was possible that he was in another cell, being interrogated at the same time.’

  Madeleine shifted in her seat, and grasped her napkin tightly in both hands. Jordi paused and laid his hand over hers. His eyes never left her face.

  ‘I’m sorry. None of this is easy to listen to. I won’t go into what they did to my father. He didn’t tell me himself, except when he was too drunk to know what he was saying. But what he did tell me, when he was finally released and fit to talk, was that the guards had confirmed that they had been betrayed. They had taunted him with it, telling him that it was a waste of time protecting the rest of his group, because they had no supporters, and had all been betrayed. And they told him who had done it.’

  Madeleine knew that he was about to say the name of someone she knew, otherwise why did he have to tell her? Someone in Vermeilla, therefore. But who?

  ‘Who, then, Jordi?’ she whispered.

  ‘It was that scoundrel of a barkeeper, Perrens. Jean-Pierre Perrens. He’s the one who killed your father, Madeleine, and who destroyed mine. He ran a bar for the Germans, the collaborating swine. He must have thought he would curry favour, but why, when everyone was holding their breath hoping for liberation? Even collaborators were changing sides in May 1944. My father never understood why he did it, but he knew for sure it was him.’

  M
adeleine sat frozen, gazing intently at Jordi’s face, as though his expression could explain things further. Jean-Pierre. Colette’s husband. The little scene in Colette’s apartment came back to her, and Jean-Pierre’s frightened face asking where they had buried her father. It was believable that it should be him who had betrayed them, for reasons hidden in his twisted mind.

  ‘You know, that makes sense,’ she told Jordi. ‘I met him on Saturday, and when he realised I was Luis’s daughter he got very agitated, and kept asking where Papa was buried. He seemed to be frightened of something, maybe retribution. Colette explained that he felt very isolated during the occupation, being made to stay and work for the Germans when most people in the village were evacuated.’ She fell silent, with that strange little scene replaying again and again in her head.

  ‘Do you think his wife Colette knew that he had betrayed them?’ she asked at last.

  Jordi’s hand was still covering her twisted fingers, but now he removed it and took a final swig from his glass of wine.

  ‘I’d say she must have,’ he replied, with grim decisiveness. ‘You see, there is more to it than just Jean-Pierre Perrens. The guards told my father it was Perrens’ young son who had led them to the camp.’

  ‘What?’ The word was startled out of Madeleine. She stared at Jordi in absolute disbelief. ‘You mean Daniel? But that’s not possible! He would have been nine or ten years old at the time!’

  ‘There were younger children than that who were used to collaborate with the Germans, and to work for the Maquis as well, if it comes to that. I don’t suppose the boy had much choice in the matter, but he did it, that I know. He led the German troops all the way to the camp. So it’s a rather tall order to believe the mother was ignorant, isn’t it?’