The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

It was terrible. He was young and handsome, probably the most sensitive of my children. I could not imagine him pressed into the regimentation of Army life; I could not see him learning to kill scientifically, being taught how it was done. I could not bear the sight of him in uniform. ‘Your father was a soldier,’ he reminded me. ‘Why should I be less than he? He left a great example for us, didn’t he?’

  The sight of the uniform alarmed my mother. She looked at him, trembling violently. ‘Why?’ she asked, again and again. But she could not understand the explanation. ‘The war is over,’ she said. ‘All over. They promised there would be no more wars …’

  The Marquesa viewed him with pride. ‘You have become a man, Martin.’

  * *

  He spent his short leave in Jerez, and the night before he was to return, I made a show of family solidarity by inviting Ignacio, Pedro, their wives, children, the husbands and wives the children had acquired, all to dinner at Los Cisnes. Because of the presence of the Marquesa there, they came, all of them. We went through the usual formalities. For once, the cooks had worked in unison, inspired by the occasion, and the meal was splendid. I had searched the cellars for the best wine. Toasts were drunk: we drank to Spain, and there were tears in the eyes of many of the women as we drank a toast to Martin.

  Afterwards, in the drawing-room, when coffee and brandy were served, Martin, without prompting, brought out his guitar. He had acquired an old instrument, a very good one, mellow and true. It was as if he wanted to offer his own farewell salute to us. Unlike the time at Sanlucar, however, on this occasion there were no restless movements from the younger ones, no tapping of the feet, or snapping of the fingers and demands for flamenco.

  He sat on a chair, wearing his uniform, his foot on a stool. Luisa sat on a low stool near him, her eyes never leaving him. What we heard then was what the years in between had made him. He no longer seemed a gifted amateur, but an artist ‒ a young artist, still being shaped and moulded, but an artist. He played only Spanish music that night, ranging from the tunes of the troubadours to the music of the masters of our century. All the brilliant, exotic, grand, turbulent, troubled history of Spain was there in his fingers, and it held us all silent, spellbound. When, at last, he played flamenco, still no one stirred or moved. When he finished there was no applause; we were still silent, awed.

  Then he rose and walked over to me, holding out the guitar. ‘Take care of it for me, Mother, until it’s all over.’

  He turned to his grandmother, who had sat through the music not touching the brandy at her side, her eyes, suddenly young and brilliant again, devouring Martin. ‘Granny …?’ When he spoke to her she lowered her lids and the unshed tears started down her face. ‘We’ll go upstairs to bed now, shall we, Granny?’

  * *

  It was then I felt compelled to speak to Nanny, to offer her a chance to return to Ireland. She was now nearing eighty, and she was indeed, as Juan rather ruthlessly put it, of not much use to anyone. But she looked at me with her old sharpness when I spoke of leaving.

  ‘Well, I know I’m past my usefulness, Miss Charlie, but is that a good enough reason for packing me up and shipping me out?’

  ‘But you’re always talking of going back ‒ back to Clonmara.’ I wasn’t sure that Elena would receive her at Clonmara, but I counted on Richard's help in settling her somewhere on the estate.

  ‘Clonmara, is it? Oh, Miss Charlie, I only talk about Clonmara to be humouring your poor mother. There’s no going back for me. What’s left to go back to? The old days are finished, Miss Charlie ‒ except in your mother’s mind. I’d be dead in a month if I went back. These old bones would miss the warmth …’

  I had to point out to her the dangers of staying, make sure she understood. She merely shrugged. ‘Miss Charlie, it’s the same for me as for Mr Fletcher. I’ll die in Spain …’

  IV

  In September we brought in the harvest, and yet another cabinet fell, that of Alejandro Lerroux. We had several more ministries in quick succession that year, none of them achieving anything, though promising much to the people. We waited for an Army revolt against the Republicans. I wrote in my diary of the harvest, ‘Normal crop of good quality, average-strength musts.’

  By Christmas Francisco had appeared in Army uniform, and was posted to the Canary Islands. By January 6th, the Cortes was dissolved. We would have more elections.

  When the elections came in February the parties of the Left, Republicans, Socialists and Communists, won a decisive victory over the parties of the Right. The social reform programme, the distribution of land, the anti-clerical movement was resumed. We wondered how long the Army would wait.

  A month later Juan joined the Army and married Leonor, a young relative of General Queipo de Llano, whom he had been courting for a year. It was a hurried, simple ceremony. There was no thought of a large, fashionable church wedding. There had been no such thing in Spain for years. We found a priest, and Juan and Leonor were married surrounded by ranks of the military. It was the final brand we had set upon us. No one could now doubt where this family stood.

  As the wine circulated after the ceremony, as the military men came to pay their respects to the Marquesa as if it were she who was the head of this household, I realised that Maria Luisa was absent, and so was Tomás. That Tomás was missing was not surprising; he was going through the adolescent phase when such affairs are either boring or irritating. He had no sentimentality over brides, and he couldn’t imagine being in love. But Maria Luisa was the heart of such occasions. It was she who kept an eye on the trays of drinks being served, who motioned to servants when a glass was empty, who went back to the kitchen to see that the food on the long buffet table was kept replenished. It was her eagle glance that went over a servant’s uniform, saw the spot on the apron or the grease mark on the white glove. But she, unaccountably, was not there.

  As soon as I decently could I went to look for her. She was not in her room, not in the kitchen, not among those who had spilled over into the early spring sunshine in the garden to view the famous black swans. I found her at last in the little room we used as a kind of household office, where the accounts were examined, the letters written. She lay full length on a sofa. Tomás was with her.

  ‘What is it?’

  Tomás turned with relief to me. ‘I was at the back during the ceremony. I saw Tía Maria Luisa was swaying a bit. She didn’t look well. So I brought her here.’ I saw that he had also brought brandy, but she had touched little of it.

  ‘When I got her here, Mother, she fainted.’

  I bent over her. ‘It’s nothing, Carlota. Just the heat in there. So stuffy. So many people. We should have had more windows open.’

  It hadn’t been particularly warm or stuffy. The big room had not been crowded. The slanting spring sunshine was now fully on her, and I saw, with a sharp stab of guilt, that her face, which had always been sallow and thin, was now yellowish in colour, and the skin was stretched on the sharply etched bones. She looked ill and worn, and I had not noticed.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated. ‘Just getting old, that’s all. One gets funny little spells as one gets older. All the excitement and fuss of getting ready for the wedding ‒ all the military people. One always feels one has to do twice as much for the military, as if they might down-grade Juan a rank or two if things weren’t just right.’ She tried a laugh, which turned out to be a sort of dry rattle. Then she struggled to rise. ‘Now I’ll just go and put my head into the kitchen. You never know when the Marquesa’s people will take it into their heads to start running the place …’

  I thrust her back against the pillows. ‘I’m calling Dr Ramírez in to you.’ He was, of course, among the guests. Ramírez was now retired, but he would come if I asked him. He knew the family so well, he knew the personalities of each of us, and knew that it was wholly unlike Maria Luisa to be here, lying on a sofa, when the house was full of guests.

  She waved a hand which I suddenly saw had become claw-lik
e in its thinness. ‘Oh, don’t disturb him at a time like this. I’ve been to see him. I don’t much care for the new doctor. It’s just what I said ‒ old age, querida. We all get our aches and pains. He gave me a tonic. It really is helping. But he says I can’t expect to be skipping around.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’m ashamed ‒ I haven’t noticed.’ She gave that same dry cackle. ‘It’s charitable of you not to notice, Carlota. We old crows don’t like people noticing such things. We like to pretend we’re as good as ever. Once our usefulness is past, there’s nothing for us. So you just leave me alone, and continue not to notice, and I’ll continue to pretend I’m indispensable to you all.’

  ‘You know you are.’ I fussed about her, making a play of loosening the lace at her throat, but it was already sagging from the fleshless bones. ‘Here, drink a little brandy, will you? And promise me not to go anywhere near the kitchen, or back among the guests. Tomás, you’ll stay with her?’

  ‘What? And have him miss all the fun out there!’ Maria Luisa looked outraged.

  ‘I’ll stay ‒ gladly. All those generals with big bellies make me a bit sick.’ I hadn’t time then to dwell much on his remark. I had guests to think about, and the shadow of Maria Luisa being ill hung on me.

  A few days later, without her knowledge, I visited Dr Ramírez. He shrugged when I questioned him. ‘It’s just as she says, Doña Carlota. She’s not young. You must expect things to get a bit worn out, and we haven’t found a way of putting in new spare parts, like these motor cars. I’ll keep an eye on her. She doesn’t like being fussed over, you know. The worst thing you could do would be to make her feel she wasn’t being useful. That’s all she’s got in her life. She’s devoted to you all, you know. Devoted. The family ‒ God forgive me if I blaspheme ‒ is her religion. She’d gladly die for any of you.’

  I left, not fully reassured. Maria Luisa went on as before, taking her ‘tonic’, assuring me she was quite well. ‘Well enough for my time of life, querida.’ Her appetite was poor. ‘I’m not the first old bird to go off her bird-seed,’ she quipped. But a nagging worry about her was one more thing which darkened those tumultuous and uncertain months. I noticed that Tomás was often at her side; he tried to tempt her to eat and sometimes she did, it seemed to me, just to please him. He was so gentle with her, and yet so irritable with the rest of us. He applied himself to his studies so that Edwin Fletcher had no complaint of him, but he sat silently through meals, not joining in any of the conversation. He listened intently to radio broadcasts of the political situation, read the newspapers avidly, and yet said nothing. Each day he put in target practice. ‘Preparing to be a soldier?’ the Marquesa asked, and did not wait for an answer. And yet, when any of Juan’s fellow officers called ‒ he was stationed at Cadiz ‒ Tomás absented himself. ‘Jealous, I wouldn’t doubt,’ the Marquesa said. ‘Jealous of their uniforms, because he’s too young to get one himself. Just watch him, Carlota. He’ll be the next to go …’

  V

  A joke began to filter through Spain early in July, after a nervous group of Falangists had seized the radio station in Valencia and announced that ‘a National Syndicalist Revolution’ would soon break out. They were gone before the police arrived. Later, in Madrid, when the Prime Minister, Casares Quiroga, was told about the matter, he was reported to have replied, ‘So ‒ there is going to be a rising? Very well, I, for my part, shall take a little lie-down.’

  It was perhaps the last joke before the tragedy.

  * *

  Later we were all to know the sequence of events, but then it was a secret known only to the officers who planned the rising.

  It began in Melilla, in Morocco, where Francisco was then stationed. There the colonels Seguí and Gazapo, on July 17th, arrested their general, Romerales. The officers declared a state of war. There was violent fighting about the casa del pueblo and in the lower-class districts, but the workers were taken by surprise, and they had few arms. Those captured who were known to have resisted the rebellion were shot. Anyone known or suspected of having voted for the Leftist Popular Front in the February elections was in danger of execution.

  Colonel Seguí telephoned his fellow conspirators in Morocco, and also General Franco, who was in Las Palmas in the Canaries. In the early evening telegrams were sent to the garrisons on the mainland of Spain giving the simple and long-awaited password ‒ Sin novedad ‒ As usual.

  At a quarter past five on the morning of July 18th, 1936 Franco issued his manifesto, and Spain was gripped in the mortal coils of civil war.

  * *

  On that hot July morning, all through Andalucia, as was the plan, garrison after garrison followed the lead taken in Morocco. Cadiz, Jerez, Algeciras and La Linea were overrun by the Army, the Falange, and, in most cases, the Civil Guard. Where there was no garrison, the Falange and the Civil Guard would act by themselves, declaring a state of war. Resistance there was, but it was crushed in the next few days by the arrival of the Army of Africa. Seville was in the hands of General Queipo de Llano.

  But we knew it was not over. It had only begun. Madrid and Barcelona would fight; all over Spain, Republicans would fight. From Madrid the woman known as La Pasionaria broadcast, demanding resistance to the insurgent Army and their sympathisers. I listened to the broadcast and remembered with what words she exhorted the women of Spain to fight with knives and burning oil, and how she ended with the words: ‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees! No pasarán!’ They shall not pass!

  The old words used at Verdun were back again, and became the rallying cry of the Republic. I, all my family, and all gathered around me were immediately branded the deadly enemies of that woman and all her kind. No matter how swift the victory of the Army had been in Andalucia, we all sensed that a long struggle lay ahead, and we could not be sure of its outcome.

  After the broadcast, Rafael, the serrano, our watchman, came to tell us that half the guards the Marquesa had hired had deserted, with their weapons. A chill wind seemed to blow through the corridors of Los Cisnes that hot July night.

  ‘What is going on?’ my mother demanded in anguished bewilderment. ‘What is going to happen?’

  We soothed her, but none of us could honestly answer her.

  Chapter Six

  I

  Through all the confusion, through all the tight controls which the Army had placed on the province, Elena and Richard Blodmore somehow made their way to Jerez and to us at Los Cisnes.

  ‘We have come,’ Elena said to the Marquesa, ‘to take you out of here. Out of the country.’

  The Marquesa rapped her stick on the floor. ‘Never! I do not leave. That is final.’

  ‘This is only the beginning,’ Richard argued. ‘Germany and Italy will go for the Right. Russia, of course, will try to intervene for the Left. This is going to be much longer and bigger than you may suppose at this moment.’ Edwin Fletcher nodded his agreement.

  ‘We are safe here. The Army hold Andalucia.’

  ‘The Republicans aren’t yet organised, but they’re a powerful force. Do you think they will be converted overnight because the Army holds the garrisons? They are organising. They’re gathering in small bands now, which will get bigger and bigger as they get more arms. Did you know that German planes have been sent already? Do you expect Russia to watch that happening and do nothing?’

  ‘Guns, planes, tanks ‒ let them send what they want. I will not be moved. I stay!’

  The argument raged for days. Richard was explosive in his frustration. ‘Look at you here! A house full of women! You expect me to go away and leave you?’

  The Marquesa laughed unpleasantly. ‘You could stay and defend us. Or don’t you think the insurgent Army’s cause is the right one? Do you side with the Communists, who choose to call themselves Republicans?’

  ‘I side with no one. I just want to know you’re all out of here safely. Look at you ‒’ He swung around the circle we made sitting in the drawing-room ‒ the Marquesa,
stubborn and old and indifferent to threats or persuasion; Maria Luisa, impassive, saying little, her face sere and yellow, her body skeletally thin, appearing to think that the whole business was academic, my mother bewildered by all the talk, not understanding any of the arguments Richard used, her eyes clouded by drink. The centre and heart of Richard’s plea must surely be Luisa, who sat among us. She was too young to leave to the strains and misfortunes of war. She should grow up as protected as Luis had meant her to be. I knew that if Luis had been here, he would have ordered us all to go. Not for any consideration would he have allowed his precious daughter to be endangered. Tomás, for some reason, absented himself whenever the arguments started up again. He was sixteen; just half-way between boy and man, left with women while his brothers had gone to fight, and probably resenting it bitterly. He was sullen and unreachable, contributing nothing to the decision that had to be made.

  Finally Richard turned to me. ‘You, Charlie! - surely you must see the sense of leaving. You owe it to your family …’

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I don’t know, Richard. I don’t know!’ Then I forced myself to look at him directly. ‘Shall I leave the bodega in their hands? The vineyards? Don Paulo trusted me. Luis trusted me to take care of things. Shall I go and leave it all? Can you answer that for me?’

  ‘I can answer only that if things go wrong here, there may be no bodega. There may be no vineyards. You may, for the sake of possessions that can be destroyed, destroy yourself, your children, your mother … Have you thought that you may be killed? Think of it. I beg you to think of it.’

  ‘And the Marquesa, Richard,’ Elena said with an edge to her voice. ‘I am her only relative. You think I wish to leave her behind?’

  ‘The Marquesa evidently will make her own decisions. I’m appealing to Charlie to see sense for her family.’

  ‘Her family. That’s all you care about. That’s why you’ve come. You think only of her …’

  My mother clapped her hands over her ears. ‘All this shouting ‒ I can’t stand it!’