Lost Cause

by John Wilson

  Barcelona

  Late 1930s

  Dangerous, passionate, dramatic events

  It was a short list. I fired up my computer and typed Rosa Luxemburg into Google and got nearly two million hits. I quickly discovered that she had been a Communist a hundred years ago and was murdered during a revolution in Berlin in 1919, before my grandfather was even born. I found the quote about freedom that he had mentioned, but what did that mean? Then I remembered something. I checked the photograph. The scrawled hammer and sickle on the wall beside the door was the Communist symbol. Rosa Luxemburg was a Communist. Did that mean anything? I wrote Communist? on my list and scored through Rosa Luxemburg. Now for the poems.

  In quotation marks, I typed “They clung like birds to the long expresses that lurch.” I got thirty-eight hits, all from a poem called Spain by someone called W.H. Auden. I typed “The stars are dead. The animals will not look” and got one hundred and thirty-three hits, again all from Auden’s Spain. I found a copy and read the whole long poem. I could make little of it as it jumped from insurance cards and today’s struggle to octaves of radiation. Poetry’s never been my thing. The only fact that might make sense was that the poem was written in 1937. I added 1937? to my list and struck out the poetry fragments on the other page, hoping the address would give me more. It did.

  Google Maps showed me a narrow, cobbled street in something called the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. The little yellow man led me past the walls of old buildings with balconies so close together you could spit across the street. Outside number 71 I stopped and rotated. I almost choked. Right in front of me, filling my computer screen, was the doorway in the photograph.

  There wasn’t anyone standing in the doorway, and the door itself—a heavy, embossed wooden thing—was closed, but there was no mistaking the crown and the shield above it or the carving around it. I stared at it for a long time and then wrote: Photo taken at Carrer de la Portaferrissa, 71. But when?

  The door. Was this where Maria Dolores Calderon Garcia lived—lives? Was she to be my guide? Was she the girl in the photograph? If so, she must be very old now. As old as my grandfather. Was that him beside her? The timing was about right if the photograph was taken in the late 1930s.

  I shook my head. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I must let the clues lead me to answers, but only when I am sure of the answers. That’s what Hercule Poirot would do. I made a mental note to ask Mom if she had any old photographs of Grandfather and moved on.

  My search for “Mac” yielded millions of results and I didn’t even get out of the ones about computers before I got bored. “Pap” was little better. The results were more varied and included a test for cancer, the Peoples’ Action Party in Singapore and the Pan-African Parliament, but nothing that anyone would write on a wall in Spain back in 1937.

  The phrase El fascismo será destruido translated from the Spanish as Fascism will be destroyed. A search for the quote in English only led to a bunch of weird sites about the end of global capitalism and the coming apocalypse. I wrote down Fascism will be destroyed, but only because my list was looking very short. This was another dead end, another lost cause. There was only one more route I could think of to try at the moment.

  I grabbed the photograph and headed for the kitchen, where Mom was preparing spaghetti and meat sauce for supper. “Do you know who this is?” I asked, holding the photograph out.

  I thought she was going to drop the ladle. “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “It was in the envelope that Grandfather gave me,” I said. “Is it him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s him. He’s very young, and I don’t know who the girl is or where it was taken.”

  “It was taken in Barcelona, I think, around 1937 or ’38.”

  “That would make sense. He looks about your age.” Mom turned to look at me. “I never realized how much you look like him.”

  I hadn’t either. It was difficult to get past the weird haircut. “Do you know why he was in Spain then?”

  Mom shook her head. “I know very little about when he was young. I know he flew in the war, but before that? I don’t think he ever spoke about it much.”

  That would have been too easy, I thought. “Thanks,” I said, turning to go back to my room.

  “What is it he wants you to do?” Mom asked as I retreated.

  I gritted my teeth and slowly turned back. Would Mom let me go? I didn’t want to get into it yet. I needed time to figure out how best to present the trip to her. But I couldn’t escape now. I had to say something. “Grandfather wants me to go to Spain.”

  At that moment, DJ came out of his room. He was grinning like his face would crack. “I’m going to climb a mountain in Tanzania,” he said.

  FOUR

  “Family meeting,” Mom said.

  I groaned. Mom lowered the heat under the spaghetti sauce and ushered DJ and me to the kitchen table.

  “Spain? Tanzania?” she asked. “What is going on?”

  “It’s Grandpa’s request,” DJ said, sitting down. “He’s asked me to scatter his ashes from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.”

  “You’re going to Africa to climb a mountain on your own?” Mom said. I was glad that DJ had blurted out his task and was now taking the brunt of Mom’s concern. “That’s insane.”

  “It’s okay,” DJ said calmly. He was always better than me at staying unruffled when talking to Mom. “Grandpa has it all organized. I’ll fly over on my own, but there’s a guide to meet me at the airport and I’ll be escorted on the climb.” I saw Mom flinch at the word climb, but DJ was on it. “Actually, it’s not really a climb, more of a long hike. You just have to take it slowly because of the altitude. And Grandpa’s supplied everything: airline tickets, guides, money, the works. It’ll be a piece of cake. Really.”

  Mom looked slightly mollified, and I silently thanked DJ for being so relaxed and responsible. “What has he asked you to do?” she said, turning to look at me.

  Taking my cue from DJ’s performance, I launched in. “He’s asked me to go to Barcelona to research what he did there in the thirties, when that picture I showed you was taken.” DJ was nodding encouragingly. “He’s paying for an airline ticket and a bank card and he’s given me a contact address.”

  “I don’t know.” Mom looked worried.

  I plunged on. “Barcelona’s much closer, and more civilized, than Kenya, and I’ve got the name of someone at the address who will be my guide while I’m there.” That last bit was stretching the truth, but I didn’t want Mom to worry.

  “He does seem to have organized everything,” she said uncertainly. “I’ll need to think about all this and talk it over with Vicky, Deb and Charlotte.”

  “We’ll be fine, Mom,” DJ said. “We’re responsible seventeen-year-olds, and Grandpa organized everything. We’ll keep in touch and everything will be great. It’ll be a wonderful adventure for us both, and it was Grandpa’s final wish.” DJ could play the emotional card as well as Mom.

  “You’re probably right,” Mom said. “It’s all just a bit sudden and overwhelming. I do want you boys to do what Dad wanted, I just need to get used to the idea. And there will be a lot of details to organize. We’ll talk about all that later.” I noticed a tear forming in the corner of her eye. “I love you boys.”

  “We love you too,” DJ and I answered simultaneously.

  “If it’s okay,” DJ said, “as soon as we get ourselves organized, we’ll come to you for some help. Right, Steve?”

  I nodded. “Sure.” DJ was doing fine, and I was happy to let him run with it.

  “We’ll need to get stuff for our trips: clothes, backpacks, guidebooks, not to mention travel insurance. Stuff like that. Could you help us?”

  It was a stroke of genius on DJ’s part. Mom hated the idea that she might be left out of our lives as we grew up. Make her part of our lives, ask for help and give her a task to do, and she was as happy as anything.

  “Okay.” Mom became businessl
ike again. “That’s a good idea, and I’d be happy to help you both get organized.” She stood up. “But now I have to get the spaghetti on. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  I headed for my room. DJ followed me. “I think we’re okay,” he said as soon as the door closed.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You did an awesome job out there, calming Mom down and getting her to help. D’you really have a guide meeting you?”

  “Yes. You don’t?”

  “I’ve got a name and an address,” I said sheepishly. “Grandfather doesn’t actually say it’s a guide. You won’t tell Mom, will you?”

  DJ laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell. What is it you have to do? My task is easy—climb a mountain. You were kind of vague out there.”

  “Grandfather was kind of vague,” I said. It only took me a moment to decide to share the contents of the envelope with DJ. I owed him for easing the way with Mom, and if I was honest, I was proud of what I had worked out so far. I showed DJ everything and ran through my list of clues and conclusions.

  “It’s not much to go on,” he said when I was done. I felt disappointed at his response, but before I could get annoyed, he went on, “But I suppose that’s what a mystery’s about.”

  “I guess so,” I said, “but I wish I could find out more before I go.”

  DJ smiled slyly. “I think I might be able to help.”

  “How?”

  “The slogan on the wall in the photograph.”

  “The Communist symbol?”

  “Not that,” DJ said, his grin broadening. “The other bit.”

  “Mac and pap? I ran them through Google and only got weird stuff.”

  “Did you run them through together?”

  “No.” I spun round to the keyboard and typed in “mac pap.” The very first hit was a Wikipedia entry for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, commonly known as the Mac-Paps. DJ sat patiently, his smile not fading, while I read the entry.

  The Mac-Paps had been formed in Spain in 1937 by Canadians who had gone there to fight in the civil war. They were a part of the International Brigades, tens of thousands of Socialists and Communists from fifty-three different countries, who had gone to Spain to help the government fight the Fascist Army rebellion. They had fought bravely, but lost and left Spain in 1938.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “I told you to take grade-eleven socials,” DJ said with a laugh. “That field trip to Ottawa—one of the places we went was a memorial to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion on Green Island. Apparently almost sixteen hundred Canadians went to Spain and only half of them came back. Anyway, do you think that might explain what Grandpa was doing in Spain?”

  “Maybe. The timing’s right and a war would certainly have been dangerous enough.” I wrote Mac-Paps on my list. After a moment’s thought, I added a question mark. “Of course, the graffiti could simply have been a coincidence.”

  “You’ll make a good scientist one day. You don’t make assumptions about anything until you’re certain. But didn’t you notice what the Mac-Pap’s motto was?”

  I hurriedly scanned the Wikipedia entry again. “Of course,” I said. “Their motto was, ‘Fascism will be destroyed,’ the slogan written on the back of the photograph.”

  DJ nodded and stood up. “Another piece of your mystery,” he said. “Well, we’ve got a mountain and a mystery. I wonder what the others got.” He moved to the door. “Good luck with the Spanish thing.”

  “Good luck with your mountain.” Just as DJ was leaving, I added, “And thanks for your help.”

  He shoved his head back in and winked broadly at me. “No problem, little brother.”

  “You too, bro,” I said to the closing door.

  I was so happy I couldn’t even get annoyed. DJ had been a big help, with both Mom and the Mac-Paps. I was making progress. Suddenly, the two pieces of poetry fit into the puzzle.

  I understood that they in the first verse must be the volunteers of the International Brigades coming from all over the world to fight. They had clung to expresses, floated over oceans and walked passes to present their lives. But they had been beaten, that was the meaning of History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon. The graffiti wasn’t a coincidence. I scored out the question mark on my list.

  So, my grandfather had gone to fight in a war in Spain in 1937 and 1938; that was dangerous and dramatic. He had been in Barcelona at an address I knew, and he might have been a Communist. I had discovered a lot, and I would learn more about the Mac-Paps, the Spanish Civil War and Communists. But there were still a host of questions that needed answering. Why had he gone? What had he done there? Why had he never spoken of it to anyone? Who was the girl in the photograph? What had Grandfather left at the address? There was still plenty of mystery to keep me interested.

  FIVE

  I squinted out the airplane window at the sun-touched peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains. Had Grandfather trudged all night up narrow valleys and over high passes, terrified that a dislodged rock would alert the border guards? Probably. As far as I could tell from the research I had done since the will reading, most of the foreign volunteers hiked into Spain to join the International Brigades. I was glad to be flying. I was on the last leg of my journey from Canada, an overnight charter flight from Manchester to Barcelona, full of loud tourists headed for the beaches and cheap rum of the Mediterranean coast.

  If my guesses about my grandfather being in Spain in 1937 or ’38 were right, then he was a fairly late arrival in the Spanish war. The fighting had begun in the summer of 1936 when the army had staged a Fascist revolt against the elected Republican government. The army’s shot at grabbing power had failed because the workers in the cities, mainly Madrid and Barcelona, had armed themselves and fought back. The revolt had led to a civil war that had dragged on until 1939. What made the war international was that Hitler in Nazi Germany and Mussolini in Fascist Italy had immediately supported the Spanish army with thousands of soldiers, tanks, planes and weapons.

  The thing that had shocked me when I was reading about the war was how little the democratic countries—Britain, France, the United States and Canada—had done to help the Spanish Republic. They had refused to sell arms or supplies to the Spanish government, even while the German and Italian Fascists were pouring help into the Spanish army. I had discovered that the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had commented in his diary that he thought Hitler was “really one who truly loves his fellow man” and had “nice eyes”! How wrong could someone be? The more I read, the angrier I became. I began to wonder if it was this kind of anger that had made Grandfather go and fight in Spain.

  The plane banked to begin its descent into Barcelona airport, and I was treated to a beautiful view of the sun rising over the broad expanse of the Mediterranean Sea.

  “Look at those beaches,” the middle-aged woman beside me said, leaning over to peer out the window. As we had taken off from Manchester and before I had closed my eyes to feign sleep, she had told me that she was from Wigan in the north of England, looking for “a bit of fun.” Her name was Elsie and she was on a package trip to the Costa Brava with three friends from work. “Two weeks of sun, sand, drink and parties.” She smelled strongly of cheap perfume.

  “You going to look for a young lady?” she said, winking and prodding me knowingly in the ribs as the plane swooped toward the runway.

  “I’m going to find my grandfather,” I replied.

  She seemed disappointed. “Oh. He lives down there then?”

  “He’s dead,” I said, “but I think he fought in a war here a long time ago.”

  Elsie gave me a long look. “Young fella like you shouldn’t be bothering about boring old history. It’s the present that matters, not the past.” She turned to her friend in the seat next to her. “Hey, Edna, this young fella doesn’t know how to have a holiday. What d’you say we take him with us and show him a good time?”

  Edna was younger than Els
ie, but beneath a thick layer of makeup, it was hard to tell by how much. “Come with us, son,” Edna said with a terrifying leer. “I’ll look after you.”

  I must have looked nervous, because Elsie laughed and said, “Don’t worry, lad. I won’t let Edna get her talons into you. But don’t be so serious. Make sure you leave some time for fun.”

  “I will,” I said as the wheels touched down at the end of the runway. I said it confidently, but I was more nervous than I had ever been in my life, arriving alone in a foreign city with only an address that I knew nothing about. What if the person at the address wasn’t interested in helping me? What would I do for the next two weeks? If I thought about it rationally, I knew I would be fine. I had the bank card and some cash, a guidebook and a few basic phrases of Spanish. I would get by, but I felt horribly lonely. And my task made me nervous. I was good at solving problems, specific problems with a concrete answer I could work toward. The problem Grandfather had set me hadn’t been clear. What was I supposed to find out? A part of me wished I was going on a mindless, no-stress holiday on the beach.

  “Come on,” Elsie said to Edna as she stood and rummaged in the overhead bin for her carry-on luggage. “We’re wasting beach time.” She looked back at me as the brightly dressed, cheerfully babbling tourists filed down the plane’s aisle. “If you get bored with the history stuff, we’re at the Hotel Miramar in Lloret de Mar. You find yourself a nice young lady and come and visit us. I hear the disco there plays lots of that hip-hop music you youngsters like.”

  “I’ll try.” I smiled back weakly and grabbed my carry-on bag.

  By the time I had collected my backpack, lined up interminably to be examined by Spanish customs and immigration, and fought my way through the crowds of arriving tourists to the front of the terminal building, I was exhausted even though it was still not quite seven in the morning.