by John Wilson
I felt completely overwhelmed—and impressed. The few Spanish words and phrases I had learned for this trip had been a struggle. I couldn’t imagine learning three languages. Something Laia had said gave me the chance to change the topic. “Where are your mom and dad? You don’t live alone, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” Laia said with a grin. “I live with my mother, but she is away just now helping my grandmother. Grandfather has”—Laia’s brow furrowed as she searched for the right word—“a confusion of the brain.”
“Alzheimer’s,” I volunteered.
“Yes, that’s what it’s called. He cannot live at home anymore, so he must go into a home. My mother and my grandmother are moving him this week. I was going to help, but I stayed because you were coming.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling ridiculously happy that she had. “Is your dad helping as well?”
“My parents separated when I was five years old.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid.
“No need,” Laia said. “Mother says that she married my father too young. They were not well matched and it took some years, and my arrival, I think, for them to see that. He lives in Sevilla. I visit him sometimes, and he sends me presents at Christmas and on my birthday.”
The street we were on abruptly opened out into a small treed square with an ornamental fountain in the center. It was empty apart from a group of small boys kicking around a soccer ball in front of an ornate doorway. The walls on either side of the doorway were heavily chipped and pitted. Even with the noise of the boys, the square exuded a sense of peace and quiet after the bustle of the narrow streets we had been walking along.
“This is cool,” I said.
“It’s your first history lesson,” Laia explained, walking over and sitting on the rim of the fountain. Water ran over the lip of a raised stone bowl and splashed into a green-and-white-tiled basin. “This is Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. It is very old.”
“And peaceful, even with the kids playing.”
“Yes, it is,” Laia agreed. She pointed to the door behind the boys. “That is the church of Sant Felip Neri. It was built in the eighteenth century. During the war, the Fascists bombed Barcelona, and the church was used as a refuge. One day, a bomb landed here and killed twenty children who were sheltering.”
I looked at the boys kicking the ball about and wondered what the bombing had been like. “Is that why the walls are so pitted?”
“No, the bomb fell through the roof and exploded inside. The scars on the walls are from the end of the war. After Barcelona fell to the Fascists, people were brought to this square, lined up over there and shot. See, all the marks are at chest or head height.”
I sat in silence, staring at the bullet holes in the wall and trying to imagine the last moments of the terrified people who had stood in front of it. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked eventually.
“There is a lot of history in Barcelona, and in Spain. Some would say the problem is that we have too much history. History has soaked into everything here—the earth, the walls, the people, even those children playing over there. It’s a violent and sometimes tragic history, and your grandfather was a part of it.
“I don’t know what’s in that book from the suitcase,” she continued, “but I know from Maria that it is from a very brutal and tragic time. I brought you here to show you that because I want you to be certain before we begin that you are prepared to go wherever the book might lead you.”
“I am,” I said, although I wasn’t certain. I had assumed that the quest Grandfather had sent me on was a mystery adventure. I would find out things from the clues I had been given and it would all be fun. Laia seemed to be presenting a much darker side to what I was undertaking. I suppose I should have taken what she said more seriously, but I couldn’t stop one word racing excitedly around my brain. Laia had said she was telling me this before “we” began. The prospect of spending the next two weeks in the company of this incredible girl swamped any worries she was trying to create.
“Okay,” Laia said. “Then I will tell you the idea that I had. Maria once told me that she had known a young man who had fought in the Fifteenth International Brigade. She said she had nursed him after he had been wounded in the battle along the Riu Ebre in 1938.”
“The Ebre?” I interrupted.
“Yes, that’s what we call the Ebro River. You know it?”
“Not really. Someone mentioned it to me once,” I explained, thinking of Aina on the bus from the airport but not wanting to stop Laia’s flow. “Go on.”
“Maria never gave me any details about the soldier or even told me his name, but the look in her eyes when she mentioned him was so sad and faraway that I knew he must have been important to her.”
“My grandfather?”
“I think it must have been. Maria told me this last year and a few days later asked me to go on the Internet and see if I could find an address for an organization of Canadian Spanish Civil War veterans. I found one. I think she used it, and that’s what triggered the response from your grandfather.” Laia fell silent and stared into the sparkling water of the fountain. At last she looked up. “I wish she had sent a letter earlier. Maybe they could have met.”
“That would have been awesome,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. If Maria and my grandfather had met, then I wouldn’t be here now, and there was no way I wanted to change that.
“Anyway,” Laia said, “after Maria told me about the brigader, I spent a long time wondering who he might have been. I found out as much as I could about the war, the Fifteenth Brigade and the battle of the Ebre River. This summer I was going to visit where the battle happened; it’s not too far from the city. When I heard that you were coming, I decided to wait. Perhaps we could tour the battlefields together?”
“Yeah!” I almost shouted. Mentally I slapped myself for being such an idiot and tried to say something intelligent. “If Grandfather mentions places in his journal, we could visit them.”
“We could,” Laia said, her face wreathed in a smile. “You have the journal, and I shall be your tour guide. When I heard you were coming, I did some research and printed out information from a website about the battle. It lists the memorials for the Ebre battle with pictures and maps. We shall use them. They are in Spanish, but I shall translate for you.”
“You can be my guide,” I said, thinking that whoever was helping DJ up his mountain could be nothing like my guide through the history of this strange and complex land. “And we can read the journal as we go, as close to where it was written as possible.”
“That’s a good idea. We can start tomorrow on the train to the Ebre. It’s only a few hours' journey.”
“Yes,” I said, afraid to say more in case I started babbling inanely. All the talk of death and tragedy vanished, replaced by the thought of traveling with Laia.
“Then that’s what we will do,” Laia said, standing. “But I have kept you waiting for pizza long enough. On the way, more history. I will show you my street.”
“Your street?” But Laia was already on her way out of the square. I jumped to my feet and hurried after her.
Laia led the way for about 30 meters down yet another narrow street and then abruptly turned right. I almost bumped into her as I turned the corner.
“Baixada de Santa Eulalia,” she said. “The Descent of Saint Eulalia. She is the patron saint of Barcelona, and her body lies in the cathedral. Perhaps I will show you if we have time.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, still confused as to why this was Laia’s street.
“About three hundred years after Christ, Eulalia was asked by the Romans to deny Him. She refused and was tortured thirteen times, once for every year of her age, ending with decapitation. It is said a dove flew out of her severed neck. Legend has it that it was on this street that she suffered one of her tortures, being rolled along inside a barrel with knives sticking through it. So, the Descent of Saint Eulalia.”
“Another cheerful Barcelona story,” I said. “But why is it your street?”
“That is my name,” Laia said with a mischievous wink. “Laia is a short form of Eulalia. I am named for a saint, just like you, except your Saint Stephen was only stoned to death.” With a laugh, Laia set off again.
JUNE 29
The planes come over in broad daylight, so low I feel I could reach out and touch them. They are black and evil and fly in a V formation like the geese in the fall back home. It is possible to see the bombs fall, small objects that wobble stupidly on the way down. They look harmless until the explosion rips through a building, tearing down walls, shattering windows and shredding clothing and flesh.
If there is time, people run for shelter in the subway, but often the planes appear with no warning. The bombers have complete freedom of the sky, although this morning a solitary squat biplane, a Chato I was told, appeared and attacked. One of the bombers peeled off and limped away, smoke trailing from one engine, but the Chato burst into flames and crashed into the sea.
What good is the pilot’s bravery with the odds so heavily stacked in the enemy’s favor? And it is Canada’s fault! If we, and the United States, Britain and France, supported the Spanish government, there would not be one obsolete Russian fighter but a squadron of modern fighters able to sweep the black German and Italian bombers from the sky.
Oh dear, I am preaching again, but it is hard not to. There are political slogans everywhere, on posters on ruined walls, on the crackling radios that people huddle around for news, in the speeches that we new recruits must listen to every day. It is a time for slogans.
Since the truck brought us down from the mountains, my life has been a chaos of new sensations and experiences. Barcelona is a wonderful city, but it is being steadily ground to dust by the bombers who come every day and every night. The Spanish people I have met are wonderful, coping with the bombs, food shortages, no running water and only occasional electricity with a cheerfulness I couldn’t imagine if this were Toronto. Of course they believe passionately in what they are fighting for, and that makes a huge difference.
We new recruits have been installed in a large ornate building on a street called Ramblas. In a few days we will be taken to our units in the countryside, but first we must be indoctrinated with the correct political ideas. Twice a day we sit and listen to a huge bear of a man with a strong Russian accent—Bob has nicknamed him Winnie the Pooh—explain why we are fighting and how it is a step toward the worldwide workers’ revolution, after which we will all live in a paradise similar to the one in Russia.
Bob scoffs at the whole thing. “We know why we are going to fight,” he says. “We volunteered. We disobeyed our own governments and traveled halfway round the world to risk our lives. I don’t think we need Winnie to tell us.”
Of course he only says this quietly to me. On the first day of lectures, one of the Americans—his name’s Carl and he’s a Communist taxi driver from the Bronx—asked if a rumor he had heard that the International Brigades were to be withdrawn from Spain was true. Winnie flew into a towering rage, yelling and screaming for almost an hour about how that sort of rumormongering only helped the Fascists and how anyone who helped the Fascists would be taken out and shot. No one has asked a question since then.
The Englishman is odd. He insists that his name is Christopher, although the Americans persist in calling him Chris. I think they do it to annoy him. Christopher is tall and blond and speaks as if he has plums stuck in his cheeks. He comes from a very wealthy family and has a First Class Honors Degree in Classics and Romance Literature from Cambridge University. He is also an ardent Communist and hangs on Winnie’s every word.
The Americans, whom Christopher calls Yanks, tease him mercilessly, but he takes it all in good spirits. Their favorite topic is how America had to come to bail England out in the Great War. Christopher simply smiles, thanks them and observes that at least they have showed up for this war on time.
We are a mixed bunch and shouldn’t really be together. Each nationality—American, British, French and German—has their own battalion, but it is not as clear as that. There are so few volunteers now and there were so many casualties in the spring retreats, that it is much more mixed. In fact, I’ve heard that most of the battalions of the International Brigades are made up of Spanish conscripts. Anyway, we are to be kept together. There was some talk of putting us with the Americans in the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, but the decision has been made for us to join the Canadians. I’m pleased.
When we are not listening to Winnie, we are taken out to help clear up bomb damage. It’s hard physical work, but what’s worse is seeing people’s lives reduced to smashed furniture, ripped clothes and torn photographs. Yesterday I found a porcelain doll in the ruins of an apartment. It was beautiful and expensive. What happened to the little girl who treasured this doll?
There is a hospital in the basement of our building run by an American nurse with Spanish help. It’s for soldiers and was busy after the fighting south of here in March and April. At the moment, it’s mostly filled with injured civilians from the bombing. I got talking to one of the Spanish nurses who wanted to practice her English. She said how grateful everyone was that foreigners like me were coming to help the Spanish people. It made me feel very proud. She lives close by and has invited me round for lunch tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.
Much as I like Barcelona, I wish we were going to join the Mac-Paps (the nickname for the Canadian Battalion) and get on with our training. We came here to fight, after all.
NINE
As the train noisily hauled itself out of one more deserted station and continued its rumbling journey through Aragon’s dusty hills, I passed Grandfather’s journal over to Laia. She had asked if she could read it, and I saw no reason why not. My only condition was that I got to read a section first and that she would not read on past where I had got to.
I watched Laia across from me, engrossed in the journal. I could barely sit still for the three-hour journey from Barcelona’s train station, Estació de França, to Flix on the Ebro River. My doubts about what I was undertaking and my concerns about traveling on my own had vanished. Here I was, unraveling my grandfather’s mystery with a beautiful Spanish girl to help me. Perhaps she could become more than simply my guide. DJ was welcome to his mountain.
Laia glanced up and caught the stupid grin on my face as I stared at her. My ears burned with embarrassment, and I hurriedly turned to stare out the window at the endless regimented rows of gnarled olive trees marching across the parched, red hillsides.
After her history lesson yesterday, Laia had taken me to a place on the Ramblas called Café Moka for one of the best pizzas I had ever tasted. However, I was wrong in thinking the history lesson was over. “There was fighting here in 1937,” she had said, “between the Communists and the Anarchists.”
“Why?” I asked. “Weren’t they on the same side?”
“Yes, but it was not as simple as one side or the other. The Communists hated the Anarchists because they would not obey orders without discussing them first. The Communists thought that the Republic had to be centralized and organized to win the war. The Anarchists thought people should make their own decisions, even in war. The English writer George Orwell was here then and got caught up in it all.”
“The guy who wrote Animal Farm?” I asked.
Laia nodded. “He had been wounded and lived across the street from where we are now. When the fighting broke out, he fought against some Communists in this café.”
I looked around at the shiny, clean counters and modern art on the walls.
“It was very different then,” Laia had said.
I was learning that there was history everywhere and that Laia seemed to know most of it.
“Maria told me about the bombing of Barcelona when she was a girl,” Laia said, pulling me back from my memories of our pizza lunch yesterday. She closed the journal and looked out the window on the
far side of the carriage. “There it is,” she said.
I followed her gaze. We were traveling beside a wide brown river flowing sluggishly between high banks. “The Ebro?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It won’t be long until we arrive at Flix.”
“Did Grandfather fight here?”
“I don’t think so, although part of the battle was fought here.” She looked back at me. “Perhaps you need to know the background to the battle your grandfather fought in.”
“How come you know so much history?” I asked.
Laia thought for a minute. “I suppose because we have so much in Europe and a lot of it is violent and has happened in our backyards. But don’t distract me. Your lecture’s about to begin.”
I laughed. If all my teachers were like Laia, I would have taken every socials and history class that was offered.
“By the time your grandfather crossed the mountains, the war was going badly. The Fascists had reached the sea south of here and split the Republic in two. The bombing of Barcelona was intense, the border with France was closed and the port was blockaded by Franco’s navy. The Republic was running out of everything and it was only a matter of time before the Fascists marched down the Ramblas.”
It struck me as strange that Grandfather had chosen this time, when the war was so nearly lost, to come and fight. Maybe the journal would tell me why.
“The only hope was that a war against Fascism would break out in Europe. Then Britain and France would surely have to help Spain.”
“But Grandfather was here in 1938 and the Second World War didn’t start until 1939,” I said, proud to show off what little I had learned about history.
“Yes, but it almost began at Munich the year before.”
I couldn’t compete with Laia. “What happened at Munich?”
“The Munich Agreement?” Laia looked at me. I stared back blankly. “The crisis over Czechoslovakia?”
