A Long Petal of the Sea Read online

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  IT WAS NOT LONG after that he returned to the front. A young militiawoman, her cap tilted to counter the ugliness of her uniform, was waiting for Victor Dalmau at the door to the operating room. The moment he came out, with three days’ growth of beard and his white coat spattered with blood, she gave him a folded piece of paper with a message from the telephone operators. Dalmau had been on his feet for hours; his leg was aching, and he had just realized from the deep rumble in his stomach that he hadn’t eaten since dawn. The work was relentless, but he was grateful for the opportunity to learn in the magnificent aura of Spain’s leading surgeons. In other circumstances, a student like him would never even have gotten near them, but by this stage of the war, studies and diplomas were less valuable than experience; and he had more than his fill of that, as the hospital director assured him when allowing him to assist during surgery. By this time, Dalmau could work for forty hours at a stretch without sleeping, able to keep going thanks to tobacco and chicory coffee, and not even noticing the hindrance of his leg.

  Unfolding the piece of paper the militiawoman had handed him, Victor Dalmau read the message from his mother, Carme. Even though the hospital was only sixty-five kilometers from Barcelona, he had not seen her in seven weeks, because he had not had a single free day when he could take the bus home. Once a week, always at the same time on a Sunday, she called him on the telephone, and on the same day also sent him some sort of gift, chocolate from the International Brigades, a sausage, a bar of soap bought on the black market, occasionally even cigarettes. To Carme the latter were the real treasure, because she couldn’t live without nicotine. He wondered how she managed to get hold of them. Tobacco was so prized that the enemy planes used to drop it from the sky along with loaves of bread, mocking the shortages on the Republican side and showing off the abundance the Nationalists enjoyed.

  A message from his mother on a Thursday could only mean there was an emergency. “I’ll be at the telephone exchange. Call me.” Her son calculated she must have been waiting almost two hours by now, the time he had been busy in the operating theater before he got her message. He went down to the offices in the basement and asked one of the operators to connect him to the Barcelona exchange.

  Carme Dalmau came on the line and, in between bouts of coughing, told her son he had to come home because his father had only a short while to live.

  “What happened to him? He was good and healthy when I last saw him!” Victor exclaimed.

  “His heart has given out. Tell your brother so that he can come to say goodbye as well, because he could be gone before we know it.”

  It took Victor thirty hours to locate Guillem on the Madrid front. When they were finally able to communicate by radio, through a cacophony of static and sidereal crackles, his brother explained it was impossible for him to get leave to go to Barcelona. His voice sounded so distant and weary that Victor barely recognized it.

  “Anybody who can fire a rifle is absolutely needed here, Victor, you know that. The Fascists have more troops and weapons than us, but they’ll not pass,” said Guillem. He was repeating the Republican slogan made popular by a woman named Dolores Ibarruri, appropriately known as La Pasionaria because of her ability to rouse fanatical enthusiasm among the Republicans. Franco had by now occupied most of Spain, but had been unable to take Madrid. Its defense, street by street, house by house, had become the symbol of the war. The Fascists could count on the colonial troops from Morocco, the feared Moors, as well as the formidable aid of Mussolini and Hitler, but the Republicans’ resistance had held them up in the capital. At the outbreak of war, Guillem Dalmau had fought with the Durruti column in Madrid. Back then, the two armies faced each other at the Ciudad Universitaria; they were so close that in some places there was only a street between them; the adversaries could see one another’s faces and hurl insults without even having to shout. According to Guillem, holed up in one of the buildings, the enemy shells had pierced the walls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Liberal Arts, the Faculty of Medicine, and Casa de Velazquez. There was no defense against the shells, he said, but they had calculated that three volumes of philosophy could stop bullets. He was nearby at the death of the legendary anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who had come to fight in Madrid with part of his column after spreading and consolidating the revolution in the Aragon region. He died from a bullet fired point-blank into his chest in dubious circumstances. His column was decimated: more than a thousand militiamen and -women were killed, and among the survivors, Guillem was one of the few left unscathed. Two years later, after fighting on other fronts, he had been sent back to Madrid.

  “Father will understand if you can’t come, Guillem. We’ll be waiting for you at home. Come whenever you can. Even if you don’t see him alive, your presence will be a great comfort to Mother.”

  “I suppose Roser is with them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say hello to her from me. Tell her that her letters go everywhere with me, and that I’m sorry I don’t reply very often.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you, Guillem. Take care of yourself.”

  They said a brief farewell, and Victor was left with a knot in his stomach as he wished for his father to live a little longer, for his brother to return unharmed, for the war to finally end, for the Republic to be saved.

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  THEIR FATHER, PROFESSOR MARCEL Lluis Dalmau, had spent fifty years teaching music. In addition to singlehandedly creating and passionately conducting the Barcelona Youth Orchestra, he had composed a dozen piano concertos, none of which had been played since the start of the war, as well as many songs, some of which were favorites with the militias. He had met his wife, Carme, when she was fifteen years old and dressed in a somber school uniform, and he was a young music teacher twelve years older than she was. Carme was the daughter of a stevedore, a charity pupil of the nuns, who had been preparing her to enter the order since childhood; and they never forgave her for leaving the convent to go off with an atheist good-for-nothing, an anarchist and perhaps even a freemason, who scorned the holy ties of matrimony. After living in sin for several years, until shortly before the birth of Victor, Marcel Lluis and Carme got married to avoid having their child stigmatized as a bastard, which in those days would be a serious obstacle in his life. “If we had had our children now, we wouldn’t have married, because nobody is a bastard in the Republic,” Marcel Lluis Dalmau declared in an inspired moment at the outbreak of hostilities. “If we had had our children now, I would have been pregnant as an old woman, and your children would still be in diapers,” replied Carme.

  Victor and his younger brother, Guillem, were educated at a nonreligious school and grew up in a small house in the Raval district of Barcelona, in a struggling middle-class Catalan home, where their father’s music and their mother’s books took the place of religion. The Dalmaus were not militants in any political party, but their shared mistrust of authority and any sort of government meant they were close to the anarchists. Marcel Lluis instilled in his sons, as well as all kinds of music, a curiosity for science and a passion for social justice. The former led Victor to study medicine, and the latter became an unshakable ideal for Guillem, who from his early days was angry at the world, and preached against big landowners, businessmen, industrialists, aristocrats, and priests—above all, against priests, with more messianic fervor than reasoned arguments. He was cheerful, boisterous, an impulsive giant. This made him a favorite with the girls, who tried in vain to seduce him, because he devoted himself body and soul to sports, bars, and male friends. Defying his parents, he enlisted in the first workers’ militias organized to defend the Republican government against the Fascist rebels. He had the vocation of a soldier, born to wield a weapon and command others who were less resolute than he was.

  His brother, Victor, on the other hand, looked like a poet, with his lanky limbs,
unruly hair, and constantly preoccupied expression. He said little, and always had a book in his hands. At school, Victor had to put up with relentless attacks from other boys—why don’t you become a priest, you faggot—and Guillem would step in, three years younger but much stronger, and always ready for a fistfight in a just cause. Guillem embraced the revolution like a lover, having discovered a cause worth laying down his life for.

  The conservatives and the Catholic Church, who had invested money, propaganda, and apocalyptic sermons from the pulpit in the opposition cause, were defeated at the 1936 general elections by the Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing parties. Spain was split in two as if struck by an axe. Claiming they wanted to restore order to a situation they said was chaotic (even though this was far from the truth), the right wing immediately began plotting with the armed forces to overthrow the legitimate government made up of liberals, socialists, communists, and trade unionists, backed by the enthusiastic support of workers, peasants, and the majority of students and intellectuals. Guillem had struggled to finish high school, and according to his father, a great lover of metaphors, he had an athlete’s physique, the courage of a bullfighter, and the brain of an eight-year-old. The political atmosphere was ideal for Guillem: he took advantage of every opportunity to come to blows with his adversaries, even if he had trouble explaining his ideological position. He continued to find this difficult until he joined the militias, where political indoctrination was as important as training in the use of weapons. Barcelona was divided, the extremes coming together only to attack each other. There were bars, dances, sporting events, and parties for the Left, and others for the Right.

  Even before he enlisted, Guillem was fighting. After clashes with insolent rich kids, he would return home battered and bruised, but contented. His parents had no idea that he went out to burn crops and steal animals from landowners’ farms, to brawl, start fires, and destroy property, until one day he came home with a silver candelabra. His mother snatched it from him and hit him with it; if she had been taller, she would have split her son’s head open, but the candelabra struck him in the middle of his back. Carme forced him to confess to what others knew, but which she had refused to admit until that moment: among other outrages, her son had profaned churches and attacked priests and nuns—in other words, doing exactly what the Nationalists’ propaganda claimed. “Is this what I brought you up for? You’ll make me die of shame, Guillem. Go and give it back at once, do you hear me?” Head bowed, Guillem left with the candelabra wrapped in newspaper.

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  IN JULY 1936, the armed forces rose against the democratic government; the uprising was soon led by General Francisco Franco, whose unremarkable appearance disguised a cold, vengeful, and brutal temperament. His most ambitious dream was to return Spain to past imperial glories; his most pressing one was to put a stop to disorderly democracy and to govern with an iron fist with the help of the armed forces and the Catholic Church. Franco’s rebels were hoping to take over the whole country within a week, but came up against unexpected resistance from the working class, organized in militias and determined to defend the rights they had won. This saw the start of a period of unleashed hatred, vengeance, and terror that was to cost Spain a million lives. The strategy of the men under Franco’s command was to spill as much blood as possible and to spread terror, the only way they could destroy any hint of resistance from the conquered people. By now, Guillem Dalmau was ready to participate fully in the Civil War. It was no longer a question of stealing a candelabra, but of picking up a weapon. Whereas before he had to find pretexts to cause mayhem, now that there was war he had no need to go looking for them. Although the principles inculcated in him at home prevented him from committing atrocities, they did not cause him to defend often-innocent victims from his comrades’ reprisals. Thousands of murders were committed, above all of priests and nuns. This forced many people to seek refuge in France to escape the Red hordes, as the Nationalist press called them. The Republic’s political parties soon gave the order to put a stop to this violence since it ran counter to revolutionary ideals, and yet the abuses continued. Among Franco’s forces, however, the order was the exact opposite: they were to crush and punish people with fire and blood.

  Meanwhile, absorbed in his studies, Victor turned twenty-three; he was still living with his parents, before he was recruited into the Republican Army. At home he would get up at dawn and before leaving for the university prepare breakfast for them, his only contribution to the household chores. He would return very late to eat what his mother had left him in the kitchen—bread, sardines, tomatoes, and coffee—and then continue studying. He stayed aloof from his parents’ political passion and his brother’s fanaticism. “We’re making history. We’re going to rescue Spain from centuries of feudalism. We’re setting an example for Europe, the answer to Hitler and Mussolini,” Marcel Lluis Dalmau would lecture his sons and friends at the Rocinante, a bar that looked gloomy but was lofty in atmosphere, where he met daily with friends to play dominoes and drink the lethal wine. “We’re going to put an end to the privileges of the oligarchy, the Church, the big landowners, and all the other exploiters of the people. We have to defend democracy, but remember that not everything is politics. Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul,” he would maintain.

  Victor agreed with his father in principle, but tried to escape his lectures, which were almost always the same. Nor did Victor talk about politics with his mother; he restricted himself to helping her teach the militiamen literacy in the basement of a brewery. A high school teacher for many years, Carme thought education was as important as bread, and that anyone who could read and write had a duty to teach those abilities to others. For her, the classes they gave the militiamen were no more than her usual routine, but to Victor they were torture. “They’re like donkeys!” he would protest, frustrated at spending two hours on the letter A. “They’re no such thing! These boys have never seen an alphabet. I’d like to see how you’d manage behind a plow,” his mother would respond.

  It was thanks to Carme, afraid her son might end up as a hermit, that from an early age Victor learned to play popular tunes on his guitar. He had a caressing tenor voice that contrasted with his awkward physique and stern expression. Sheltering behind his guitar, he was able to conceal his shyness, avoid banal conversations that irritated him, and yet appear to be joining in with the others. Girls were unaware of his presence until they heard him sing, but when they did, they crowded around and invariably ended up singing along. Afterward they would whisper among themselves that the older Dalmau boy was quite good-looking, even though obviously he couldn’t hold a candle to his brother, Guillem.

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  THE MOST OUTSTANDING PIANIST among Professor Dalmau’s students was Roser Bruguera, a young girl from the village of Santa Fe de Segarra who, had it not been for the generous intervention of Santiago Guzman, would have shepherded goats all her life. Guzman, from an illustrious family that had fallen on hard times thanks to generations of lazy sons who squandered money and land, was spending his last years in an isolated mansion surrounded by mountains and rocks, but full of sentimental memories. He had been a professor of history at the Central University in the days of King Alfonso XII, and remained quite active despite his advanced years. He went out every day, in the fierce August sun and the icy January winds, walking for hours with his pilgrim’s staff, battered leather hat, and hunting dog. His wife was lost in the labyrinths of dementia, and spent her days being cared for inside the house, creating monsters with paper and paint. In the village she was known as the Gentle Lunatic, and that’s what she was: she didn’t cause any problems, apart from her tendency to get lost as she set off toward the horizon, and to paint the walls with her own excrement.

  Roser was about seven years old when, on one of his walks, Don Santiago saw her
looking after a few skinny goats. Exchanging a few words with her was enough for him to realize that she possessed a lively and inquiring mind. The professor and the little goatherd established a strange friendship based on the lessons in culture he gave her, and her desire to learn. One winter’s day, when he came upon her crouched, shivering in a ditch with her three goats, soaked from the rain and flushed with fever, Don Santiago tied up the goats and slung her over his shoulder like a sack, thankful she was so small and weighed so little. Even so, the effort almost killed him, and after a few steps he gave up. Leaving her where she was, he hurried on and called to one of his laborers, who carried her to the house. Don Santiago told his cook to give her something to eat, then instructed his housemaids to prepare a bath and bed for her, and the stable boy to go first to Santa Fe and find the doctor, and then to look for the goats before someone stole them.

  The doctor said the girl had influenza and was malnourished. She also had scabies and lice. Since nobody came to the Guzman house asking after her either on that day or any of the following ones, they assumed she was an orphan, until in the end they asked her directly and she explained that her family lived on the other side of the mountain. In spite of being as frail as a partridge, the young girl recovered rapidly, because she turned out to be stronger than she looked. She allowed them to shave her head to get rid of the lice, and didn’t resist the sulfur treatment they used for the scabies. She ate voraciously and showed signs of having a placid temperament that was at odds with her sad situation.

  In the weeks she spent in the mansion, everyone, from the delirious mistress to all the servants, became deeply attached to her. They had never had a little girl in that stone house, which was haunted by semi-feral cats and ghosts from past ages. The most infatuated was the professor, who was vividly reminded of the privilege of teaching an avid mind, but even he realized that her stay with them could not go on forever. He waited for her to recover completely and to put some flesh on her bones, then decided to visit the far side of the mountain and tell her negligent parents a few hard truths. Ignoring his wife’s pleas, he installed her, well wrapped up, in his carriage and took off.