A Long Petal of the Sea Page 3

  They came to a low muddy shack at the edge of the village, one of many wretched places in the area. The peasants lived on starvation wages, working on the land as serfs for big landowners or the Church. The professor called out, and several frightened children came to the door, followed by a witch dressed in black. She was not, as Don Santiago first thought, the girl’s great-grandmother, but was in fact Roser’s mother. These villagers had never received the visit of a carriage with gleaming horses before, and were dumbstruck when they saw Roser climbing out of it with such a distinguished-looking gentleman. “I’ve come to talk to you about this child,” Don Santiago began in the authoritarian tone that had once struck fear into his university students. Before he could continue, the woman grabbed Roser by the hair and started shouting and slapping her, accusing her of the loss of their goats. The professor immediately understood there was no point reproaching this exhausted woman for anything, and on the spot came up with a plan that would drastically alter the girl’s destiny.

  Roser spent the rest of her childhood in the Guzman mansion, officially adopted and taken in as the mistress’s personal servant, but also as the professor’s pupil. In exchange for helping the maids and bringing the Gentle Lunatic solace, she was given board and an education. The historian shared a good part of his library with her, taught her more than she would have learned in any school, and let her practice on the grand piano once played by his wife, who now could no longer recall what on earth this huge black monster was for. Roser, who during the first seven years of her life had heard no music at all apart from the drunkards’ accordions on Saint John’s Eve, turned out to have an extraordinarily good ear. There was an old cylinder phonograph in the house, but as soon as Don Santiago realized his protégée could play tunes on the piano after listening to them only once, he ordered a modern gramophone from Madrid, together with a collection of records. Within a short time Roser Bruguera, whose feet still didn’t reach the pedals, could play the music from the records with her eyes closed. Delighted, he found her a music teacher in Santa Fe, sent her there three times a week, and personally supervised her practice sessions. Roser, who was able to play anything from memory, didn’t see much point in learning to read music or practicing the same scales for hours, but did so out of respect for her mentor.

  By the time she was fourteen, Roser was far more accomplished than her teacher, and at fifteen Don Santiago installed her in a guest house for young Catholic ladies in Barcelona so that she could continue her music studies. He would have liked to keep her by his side, but his duty as an educator won out over his paternal instinct. He decided that the girl had received a special talent from God, and his role in this world was to help her develop it. It was around this time that the Gentle Lunatic began to fade away, and in the end died without any fuss. Alone in his mansion, Santiago Guzman began increasingly to feel the weight of his years. He had to give up his walks with his pilgrim’s staff and spent his time reading by the hearth. His hunting dog also died, and he was loath to replace it because he didn’t want to die first and leave the animal without a master.

  The arrival of Spain’s Second Republic in 1931 embittered the old man. As soon as the election results favoring the Left became known, King Alfonso XIII left for exile in France, and Don Santiago, monarchist, staunch conservative, and Catholic that he was, saw his world collapsing around him. He could never tolerate the Reds, much less adapt to their vulgar ways: those ruthless people were lackeys of the Soviets who went around burning churches and executing priests. The idea that everyone was equal was fine as a theoretical slogan, he said, but in practice it was an aberration. We are not equal in the eyes of God, because He was the one who created social classes and other distinctions among mankind. The agrarian reform stripped Don Santiago of his land, which was not worth a great deal but had belonged to his family forever. From one day to the next, the peasants began to speak to him without doffing their caps or lowering their eyes. His inferiors’ insolence was more painful than the loss of his land because it was a direct affront to his dignity and the position he had always held in this world. He dismissed all the servants who had lived under his roof for decades, had his library, paintings, other collections, and memorabilia packed up, and closed his house under lock and key. All this filled three moving vans, but he couldn’t take the biggest pieces of furniture or the grand piano, because they wouldn’t fit into his Madrid apartment. A few months later, the Republican mayor of Santa Fe confiscated the house and turned it into an orphanage.

  Among the many grave disappointments and reasons for anger Don Santiago suffered in those years was the transformation of his protégée. Under the bad influence of the troublemakers at the university, and in particular that of a certain Professor Marcel Lluis Dalmau, a communist, socialist, or anarchist—in the end, it was all the same thing—his Roser had turned into a Red. She had left the guest house for young ladies of good repute and was living with some hoydens who dressed as soldiers and practiced free love, which is what promiscuity and indecency had come to be called. He had to admit that Roser never showed him any lack of respect, but since she took it upon herself to ignore his warnings, he naturally had to withdraw his support for her. She wrote him a letter thanking him with all her soul for everything he had done for her, promising she would always follow the right path according to her own principles, and explaining she was working at night in a bakery and continuing to study music by day.

  Don Santiago Guzman, installed in his luxurious Madrid apartment, where he could barely make his way through the clutter of furniture and other objects, and protected from the noise and vulgar uproar in the streets by heavy drapes the color of bull’s blood, socially isolated by his deafness and boundless pride, was blissfully unaware of how the most terrible rancor was surfacing in his country, a rancor that had been feeding on the wretchedness of some and the arrogance of others. He died alone and irate in his apartment in the Salamanca district four months before the uprising spearheaded by Franco’s troops. He was lucid to the end, and so accepting of death that he prepared his own obituary, to avoid some ignorant person publishing untruths about him.

  He said farewell to no one, possibly because there was nobody close to him still alive, but he did remember Roser Bruguera, and in a noble gesture of reconciliation left her the grand piano, which was still being stored in the new orphanage at Santa Fe.

  * * *

  —

  PROFESSOR MARCEL LLUIS DALMAU rapidly distinguished Roser from the rest of his students. In his desire to teach his pupils what he knew of music and life, he slipped in political and philosophical ideas that doubtless had more influence on them than he ever suspected. In this at least Santiago Guzman had been right. Experience had taught Dalmau to beware of those students who had too much facility with music, because as he often said, he had not yet come across any Mozarts. He had seen cases like that of Roser, youngsters with a good ear who could play any instrument, who soon became lazy, convinced this was enough for them to be able to master their art, and therefore could do without study or discipline. More than one ended up earning a living in popular bands, playing at parties, hotels, and restaurants, as what he called “cheap wedding entertainers.” He set out to save Roser Bruguera from this fate, and took her under his wing. When he heard she had been left on her own in Barcelona, he opened the doors of his home to her, and later on when he learned she had inherited a piano and had nowhere to put it, he removed the furniture from his living room and never once objected to her endless practicing of scales during her daily visits to them after her classes. Since Guillem was away at the war, Carme lent her the bed he normally slept in; this meant she could snatch a few hours’ sleep before she went to the bakery at three in the morning to bake loaves for the new day. From lying so often with her head on the pillow of the younger of the Dalmau boys, breathing in traces of Guillem’s manly smell, the girl fell in love with him, and would not allow distance, time, or war
to dissuade her.

  Roser came to be part of the family as easily as if she were a blood relation; she became the daughter the Dalmaus had always wished for. They lived in a modest house, rather gloomy and run down because it had not been looked after for many years, but spacious. When his two sons had gone off to war, Marcel Lluis suggested Roser come to live with them: that way she could reduce her costs, work fewer hours, practice the piano whenever she liked, and at the same time help his wife with the household tasks. Although some years younger than her husband, Carme looked older, because she went around panting for breath and coughing, whereas he was full of energy. “I hardly have the strength to teach the militiamen to read and write, and when that’s no longer absolutely necessary, there’ll be nothing for me to do but die,” she would sigh. In his first year of medical studies, her son Victor diagnosed her lungs as being like cauliflowers. “Damn it, Carme, if you’re going to die, it’ll be because you smoke so much,” complained her husband when he heard her coughing, without taking into account the tobacco he himself smoked or ever imagining that death would come for him first.

  So it happened that Roser Bruguera, who was so close to the Dalmau family, was with the professor when he had a heart attack. She stopped going to her classes, but went on working at the bakery and took turns with Carme to attend him. In the empty hours she would entertain him by playing the piano, filling the house with music that soothed the dying man. She was present when the professor gave his last words of advice to his eldest son.

  “When I’m gone, Victor, you’ll be responsible for your mother and Roser, because Guillem is going to die fighting. We’ve lost the war, my son,” he told him, pausing all the time to draw breath.

  “Don’t say that, Father.”

  “I realized it back in March, when they bombed Barcelona. Those were Italian and German planes. Reason is on our side, but that won’t help stave off defeat. We’re on our own, Victor.”

  “Everything could change if France, England, and the United States intervene.”

  “You can forget the United States: they’re not going to help us in any way. I’ve heard Eleanor Roosevelt has tried to convince her husband to intervene, but the president has public opinion against him.”

  “They can’t all be against it, Father: you can see how many American young men in the Lincoln Brigade have come to Spain and are willing to die alongside us.”

  “They’re idealists, Victor, and there are very few of those in the world. A lot of the bombs that fell on us in March were American.”

  “But Hitler and Mussolini’s Fascism will spread throughout Europe if we don’t stop them here. We cannot lose this war: that would mean the end of all that the people have achieved and a return to the past, to the feudal misery we’ve lived under for centuries.”

  “Listen to me, son: nobody will come to our aid. Even the Soviet Union has abandoned us. Stalin is no longer interested in Spain. And when the Republic falls, the repression will be dreadful. Franco has imposed what he calls cleansing, that is, outright terror, utter hatred, the bloodiest revenge; he won’t negotiate or pardon. His troops are committing unspeakable atrocities…”

  “So are we,” retorted Victor, who had seen a lot.

  “How dare you compare the two! There’ll be a bloodbath in Catalonia. I won’t live to suffer it, my son, but I want to die in peace. You must promise me you’ll take your mother and Roser abroad. The Fascists will take it out on Carme because she teaches soldiers to read and write: they shoot people for a lot less than that. They’ll take revenge on you because you work in an army hospital, and on Roser because she’s a young woman. You know what they do to them, don’t you? They hand them over to the Moors…I’ve got it all planned. You’re to go to France until the situation calms down. In my desk you’ll find a map and some money I’ve saved. Promise me you’ll do as I ask.”

  “I promise, Father,” replied Victor, without any real intention of doing so.

  “You must understand, Victor—this isn’t cowardice, it’s a question of survival.”

  Marcel Lluis Dalmau wasn’t the only one who had doubts about the future of the Republic, but nobody dared express them openly, because the worst betrayal would be to sow despair or panic among an exhausted population that had already suffered too much.

  The next day Professor Marcel Lluis Dalmau was buried. His family wanted this to be a discreet affair because it was not a time for private grief, but the news got out and the Montjuic cemetery was filled with his friends from the Rocinante tavern, university colleagues, and middle-aged former students—all the younger ones were fighting on the battlefronts or were already beneath the earth. Leaning on Victor and Roser, and dressed in deep mourning that included a veil and black stockings despite the June heat, Carme walked behind the coffin containing the love of her life. There were no prayers, eulogies, or tears. Dalmau was given a send-off by some of his former students, who played the second movement of Schubert’s string quintet, its melancholy ideally suited to the occasion, and then sang one of the militia songs he had composed.

  CHAPTER 2

  1938

  Nothing, not even victory,

  Can wipe away the terrible hole of blood.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Hymn to the Glory of the People at War”

  OFFENDED LANDS

  ROSER BRUGUERA FELL IN LOVE for the first time at Professor Dalmau’s house, where he had invited her with the excuse of helping her with her studies, even though both of them knew it was more an act of charity. The professor suspected that his favorite student ate very little and needed a family, especially somebody like Carme, whose maternal instincts found little response in Victor, and none at all in Guillem. Earlier that year, disgusted with the military regime of the boardinghouse for respectable young ladies, Roser had left it to live in the port area of Barceloneta with three girls from the popular militias in the only room she could afford. She was nineteen years old, and while the other girls were only four or five years her senior, they were twenty years older in terms of experience and mentality. The militiawomen, who lived in a very different world from Roser, nicknamed her “the novice” and completely ignored her most of the time. They slept in a bedroom containing four bunk beds (Roser took one of the top bunks), a couple of chairs, a washbowl, jug, chamber pot, a kerosene burner, with nails in the wall to hang their clothes on, and a bathroom shared with the thirty or more lodgers in the house. These cheerful, feisty women enjoyed the freedom of those turbulent times to the fullest. They wore militia uniforms, boots, and berets, but also put on lipstick and curled their hair with tongs heated in a brazier. They trained with sticks or borrowed rifles, desperate to go to the front and defy the enemy face-to-face rather than carry out the transport, supply, cooking, and nursing roles assigned to them with the argument that there were barely enough Soviet and Mexican weapons for the men, and they would be wasted in female hands.

  A few months later, when the Nationalist troops had occupied two-thirds of Spain and were continuing their advance, the young women’s desire to be in the vanguard was fulfilled. Two of them would be raped and have their throats cut in an attack by Moroccan troops. The third survived the three years of civil war and the following six of the Second World War, wandering in the shadows from one end of Europe to the other, until she was able to emigrate to the United States in 1950. She ended up in New York married to a Jewish intellectual who had fought in the Lincoln Brigade—but that’s another story.

  Guillem Dalmau was a year older than Roser Bruguera. Whereas she lived up to her “novice” nickname with old-fashioned dresses and a serious demeanor, he was cocky and defiant, completely sure of himself. Yet Roser only had to be with him once or twice to realize that hidden beneath his brash exterior lay a childish, confused, romantic heart. Each time Guillem returned to Barcelona he seemed more resolute: there was nothing left of the foolish youth who stol
e a candelabra. Now he was a mature man, with furrowed brow and a huge charge of contained violence that could explode at the slightest provocation. He would sleep in the barracks but spend a couple of nights at his parents’ house, above all because of the chance of seeing Roser. He congratulated himself that he had avoided the sentimental ties that caused so much anguish to the soldiers separated from their girlfriends or families. He was completely immersed in the war, but his father’s pupil was no danger to his bachelor independence: she was nothing more than an innocent bit of fun. Depending on the angle and the light, Roser could be attractive, but she did nothing to enhance her looks, and her simplicity struck a mysterious chord in Guillem’s soul. He was accustomed to the effect he had on women in general, and was aware he did the same to Roser, even if she was incapable of any coquettishness. The girl is in love with me, and how could it be otherwise: all the poor thing has in her life is the piano and the bakery; she’ll get over it, he thought. “Be careful, Guillem, that girl is sacred, and if I catch you showing her any disrespect…” his father had warned him. “What are you saying, Father! Roser is like a sister to me.” But fortunately, she wasn’t his sister. To judge by the way his parents took care of her, Roser must be a virgin, one of the few remaining in Republican Spain. He wouldn’t dream of going too far with her, but no one could blame him for showing a little tenderness, a brush of knees under the table, an invitation to the movies to touch her in the darkness when she was crying at the film and trembling with shyness and desire. For more daring caresses he could rely on some of his female comrades, experienced and willing militiawomen.