A Long Petal of the Sea Page 4
After his brief furloughs in Barcelona, Guillem would return to the front intending to concentrate only on surviving and defeating the enemy, and yet he found it hard to forget Roser Bruguera’s anxious face and clear gaze. Not even in the most silent recesses of his heart would he admit how much he needed her letters, packets of candies, and the socks and scarves she knitted for him. The only photograph he carried in his billfold was of her. Roser was standing beside a piano, possibly during a recital, wearing a modest dark dress with a longer than usual skirt, short sleeves, and a lace collar, an absurd schoolgirl’s dress that hid all her curves. In this black-and-white card, Roser looked distant and blurred, a woman lacking any spark, ageless and expressionless. One had to guess at the contrast between her amber-colored eyes and black hair, her straight Grecian nose, expressive eyebrows, protruding ears, long fingers, the way she smelled of soap: all details that were painful to Guillem when they suddenly engulfed him or invaded him in his sleep. Details that could distract him and cost him his life.
* * *
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ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON NINE days after his father’s burial, Guillem Dalmau turned up unannounced in a battered military vehicle. Roser went out to see who it was, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. For a moment she didn’t recognize the thin, haggard man being helped in by two militiawomen. She hadn’t seen him for four months: four months nourishing her hope on the rare phrases he sent her from time to time, describing the fighting in Madrid but without a single affectionate word; messages like reports, on sheets torn out of a notebook, penned in a schoolboy’s handwriting. Everything the same here, you’ll have heard how we’re defending the city, the walls are full of holes like colanders from the mortars, ruins everywhere, the Fascists have Italian and German weapons, they’re so close sometimes we can smell the tobacco they’re smoking, the bastards. We can hear them talking, they shout to provoke us but they’re drunk with fear—apart, that is, from the Moors, who are like hyenas and aren’t afraid of anything. They prefer their butchers’ knives to rifles, hand-to-hand fighting, the taste of blood; the Nationalists receive reinforcements every day, but they don’t advance a single meter; on our side we have no water or electricity and food is in short supply, but we manage; and I’m fine. Half the buildings have collapsed; we are barely able to recover the bodies; they lie where they fall until the next day, when the mortuary attendants come. Not all the children have been evacuated—you should see how stubborn some of the mothers are, they refuse to leave or be separated from their offspring, it makes no sense. How is your piano going? How are my parents? Tell Mother not to worry about me.
“Dear Jesus! What’s happened to you, for God’s sake!” exclaimed Roser on the front doorstep, her Catholic upbringing resurfacing. Guillem didn’t respond: his head was drooping on his chest, his legs unable to support him. Then Carme also appeared from the kitchen, and her terrified cry rose from her feet to her throat, producing an outburst of coughing.
“Stay calm, comrades. He’s not wounded; he’s sick,” one of the militiawomen said firmly.
“This way,” Roser directed, leading them to the room that had once been Guillem’s and which she now occupied. The two women laid him down on the bed and withdrew, only to return a minute later with his rucksack, blanket, and rifle. Then they left, after bidding the family a brief goodbye and good luck. Carme was still coughing desperately, so Roser took off Guillem’s tattered boots and filthy socks, struggling to control the nausea she felt at his stinking body. There was no way they could take him to a hospital, where he would only get infected, or try to find a doctor—doctors were all far too busy with the war wounded.
“We have to wash him, Carme, he’s filthy. I’ll run to the telephone exchange to call Victor,” said the girl, who didn’t want to see Guillem naked, covered in excrement and urine. On the telephone Roser explained the symptoms to Victor: a very high fever, difficulty breathing, diarrhea.
“He groans whenever we touch him. He must be in a lot of pain, in the stomach I think, but the rest of the body as well. You know your brother never complains.”
“It’s typhus, Roser. There’s an epidemic of it among the soldiers. It’s transmitted by lice, fleas, contaminated water, and dirt. I’ll try to come and see him tomorrow, but it’s very hard for me to leave my post. The hospital is full to overflowing—every day we receive dozens of newly wounded people. For now you need to give him boiled water with a little sugar and salt to drink to keep him hydrated, and wrap him in cold damp towels to lower the fever.”
For the next two weeks, Guillem Dalmau was looked after by his mother and Roser, supervised from Manresa by his brother, whom Roser called every day to report on Guillem and receive instructions on how to avoid contagion. They had to get rid of the lice in his clothes—the best way was to burn them—to wash everything with bleach, use different cooking pots for Guillem, and to wash their own hands thoroughly each time they attended him. The first three days were critical. Guillem’s temperature rose to 104 degrees; he was delirious, beside himself with headaches and nausea, his body racked with a dry cough; his feces were a green liquid like pea soup. On the fourth day, his fever abated, but they couldn’t wake him. Victor told them to shake him and force him to drink water, but to let him sleep the rest of the time. He needed to rest and recover.
The main responsibility for looking after him fell on Roser, because Carme, due to her age and the state of her lungs, was more vulnerable to catching the disease. While Roser spent the day at home, reading or knitting beside Guillem’s bed, Carme continued to go out to teach and stand in line for food. Roser went on with her night job, because she was paid with bread. Rations of lentils had been reduced to half a cup per person per day; there were no cats or pigeons left for stews. Roser’s bread was a dark, heavy block that smelled of sawdust; oil had become a luxury item, and was mixed with engine oil to make it go further. Many people grew vegetables in their bathtubs or on their balconies. Family heirlooms and jewels were traded for potatoes and rice.
Although Roser didn’t see her family, she had stayed in touch with a few peasants in the countryside, and so could get vegetables, a piece of goat cheese, a sausage on the rare occasions a pig was killed. Carme’s budget didn’t allow her to buy on the black market, where there were very few foodstuffs, but which was a last resort for cigarettes and soap. Guillem was as skinny as a skeleton, and they had to help him regain his strength, so Carme dipped into the little savings her husband had left and sent Roser back to Santa Fe to buy anything they could put in a soup. She knew Marcel Lluis had intended the money to be used to send the family out of Spain, but the fact was that none of them could seriously consider emigrating. What would they do in France or anywhere else? They couldn’t leave their home, their neighborhood, their language, their relatives and friends. The possibility that they would win the war was increasingly remote, and they had silently resigned themselves to a negotiated peace and Nationalist repression, but even that was preferable to exile. However ruthless Franco was, he couldn’t execute the entire Catalan population.
Roser spent the money on two live chickens. She traveled with them hidden in a sack tied around her waist under her dress so that they wouldn’t be stolen by some desperate person or confiscated by soldiers. Thinking she must be pregnant, the other passengers gave up their seat for her on the bus. She sat there covering the bulge as best she could, praying the birds didn’t start moving around. Carme covered the floor of one of the rooms with sheets of newspaper and they installed the chickens there. They fed them with scraps and leftovers from the Rocinante bar, as well as a little barley and buckwheat Roser smuggled out of the bakery. The birds recovered from the trauma of being in the sack, and soon Guillem could count on one or two eggs for breakfast.
After a few days’ convalescence, their patient wanted to return to life, but had barely enough energy to sit up in bed and listen to Roser play the piano in the living ro
om or read detective novels out loud to him. He had never been much of a reader: as a boy he got through school thanks to his mother, who supervised his homework, and to Victor, who often did it for him. At the front in Madrid, where he found himself growing bored in endless waits while nothing happened, it would have been wonderful to have Roser read to him. There were more than enough books, but to him the words seemed to dance all over the page. During pauses in her reading, he told Roser about his life as a soldier, about the volunteers from more than fifty countries who had come to Spain to fight and die in a war that wasn’t theirs, about the Americans in the Lincoln Brigade who were always in the vanguard, and always the first to fall. “They say that more than thirty-five thousand men and several hundred women from other countries came to fight against Fascism. That’s how important our war is, Roser.” He told her about how the corridors of the buildings were full of rubble, garbage, dust, and broken glass. “In the quiet moments we teach and we learn. Mother would be in her element teaching the boys who can’t read or write; lots of them have never been to school.”
What he didn’t mention to Roser were the rats and lice, the feces, urine, and blood, the wounded comrades waiting hours losing blood until the stretcher-bearers could reach them, the hunger and mess tins with hard beans and cold coffee, how some comrades were irrationally brave and faced the bullets nonchalantly, whereas others were terrified, especially the youngest, the newest arrivals, the boys in the Baby Bottle Conscription. Fortunately, he had not had to fight alongside any of them because he would have died of pity. Much less did he confess to Roser the mass executions carried out by his own comrades: how they tied enemy prisoners together in pairs, took them off in a truck to some waste ground, shot them on the spot, and then buried them in mass graves. More than two thousand in Madrid alone.
* * *
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IT WAS THE START of summer. Night fell later, and the days grew longer in hot, languid hours. Guillem and Roser spent so much time together they came to know each other very well. However much they shared reading or conversing, there were lengthy silences steeped in a sweet feeling of intimacy. After supper, Roser would lie down on the bed she now shared with Carme and sleep until three in the morning. Then she would set off for the bakery to prepare the bread that was handed out as rations at first light.
The news on the radio, in the papers, and from the loudspeakers in the streets was always optimistic. The air was filled with the militias’ songs and the incendiary speeches of La Pasionaria: better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees. There was never any talk of an enemy advance: it was always called a tactical withdrawal. Nor was there any mention of the rationing and shortages of almost everything, from food to medicine. Victor Dalmau gave his family a more realistic account than the one from the loudspeakers. He could judge how the war was going by the trainloads of wounded and the numbers of dead that mounted up tragically in the hospital. “I have to get back to the front,” Guillem would say, but couldn’t even get his boots on before collapsing back on the bed, exhausted.
The daily rituals of caring for Guillem through the miseries of typhus, washing him with a sponge, emptying the chamber pot, feeding him with spoonfuls of a child’s pap, watching over his sleep and then washing him again, emptying the pot, and feeding him in an endless routine of concern and affection, only strengthened Roser’s conviction that he was the only man she could love. She was sure there could be nobody else.
On the ninth day of his convalescence, seeing how much better he looked, Roser understood she had no more excuses for keeping him in bed, where she could have him all to herself. Guillem would very soon have to return to the front. There had been such huge losses in the past year that the Republican Army was recruiting adolescents, old men, and evil-looking prisoners who were given the choice of either going to the front or rotting in jail. Roser announced to Guillem that it was time for him to get up, and the first step would be a good bath. She heated water in the biggest pan in the kitchen, helped Guillem into the washtub, soaped him from his hair down to his feet, and afterward rinsed him and dried him until he was pink and shiny. She knew him so well by now that she didn’t even notice his nakedness. For his part, Guillem was no longer embarrassed in front of her; in Roser’s hands he was returning to childhood.
I’m going to marry her when the war is over, he told himself in a moment of profound gratitude. Until then, nothing had been further from his mind than putting down roots and getting married. The war had saved him from planning any possible future. I’m not made for peace, he had told himself, far better to be a soldier than a factory worker—and what else could he do with no education and such an impetuous character? But Roser, with her freshness and innocence, her unflagging kindness, had gotten under his skin. The image of her accompanied him in the trenches, and the more he remembered her, the more he needed her and the prettier she seemed. In the worst days of typhus, when he was drowning in a tide of pain and fear, he clung desperately to Roser to stay afloat. In his confused state, his only compass was her concerned face leaning over him; his only anchor her wild eyes that suddenly became smiling and gentle.
This first bath in the washtub brought Guillem back to the land of the living, after many days sweating at death’s door. He returned to life thanks to being rubbed with the soapy cloth, the foam in his hair, the buckets of warm water, and Roser’s hands on his body, the hands of a pianist: strong, gentle, precise. He surrendered completely, thankfully. She dried him, helped him into a pair of his father’s pajamas, shaved him, and cut his hair and his fingernails, which had grown into claws. Guillem still had sunken cheeks and red eyes, but he was no longer the scarecrow who had arrived at the house dragged along by two militiawomen. Then Roser heated what was left of the coffee from breakfast and poured in a splash of brandy, to give herself courage.
“I’m ready for us to go out and dance,” said Guillem when he saw himself in the mirror.
“You’re ready to go back to bed,” announced Roser, handing him a cup. “With me,” she added.
“What did you say?”
“You heard.”
“You can’t be thinking of…”
“Of exactly the same as you ought to be thinking,” she replied, pulling her dress up over her head.
“What are you doing? Mother could be back at any minute.”
“It’s Sunday. Carme is dancing sardanas in the square, and then she’ll go and line up at the telephone exchange to call Victor.”
“I might infect you…”
“If you didn’t infect me at the start, it’s not likely to happen now. That’s enough excuses. Get a move on, Guillem,” Roser ordered him, slipping off her bra and panties, and pushing him aside to get into bed.
Never before had she appeared naked in front of a man, but she had lost her shyness in these days of being forced to live with rationing, in a permanent state of alert, mistrusting neighbors and friends, with the angel of death always hovering nearby. Her virginity, so prized at the nuns’ school, now weighed on her at twenty like a blemish. Nothing was certain; the future did not exist; all they had was this moment to savor before the war snatched it from them.
* * *
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DEFEAT BECAME CLEAR WITH the battle of the River Ebro. It began in July 1938, lasted four months, and left more than thirty thousand dead. Among them would be Guillem Dalmau.
The Republicans’ situation was desperate: their only hope was that France and Great Britain would intervene on their behalf, but the days went by without any sign of this happening. In order to gain time, the Republicans concentrated all their efforts and the bulk of their troops in a crossing of the River Ebro. The idea was to thrust into enemy territory and occupy it, seize their supplies and ammunition, demonstrate to the world that the war was not lost and that with the necessary aid, Spain could defeat Fascism. Eighty thousand men were transported stealthily
by night to the eastern bank of the river. Their task was to cross it and confront the enemy forces, who were far superior in numbers and weaponry. Guillem was part of the mixed brigades of the 45th International Division, fighting alongside English, American, and Canadian volunteers. They were the advance guard, the shock troops, what they themselves called the cannon fodder. They were fighting in rugged terrain and with harsh summer weather, the enemy in front of them, the river at their backs, and German and Italian planes in the skies above them.
This surprise attack gave the Republicans an initial advantage. Arriving at the front, the soldiers crossed the river on improvised craft, pulling along terrified, loaded-down mules. The engineers built pontoon bridges that were bombed by day and replaced by night. In the vanguard, Guillem spent days with no food or water when the supply chain failed. He went weeks without bathing, sleeping on the rocks, sick from sunstroke and diarrhea, constantly exposed to enemy fire, mosquitoes, and rats that ate anything they could find and attacked anybody who fell. The hunger, thirst, churning guts, and exhaustion were made worse by the fierce summer heat. Guillem was so dehydrated he no longer produced any sweat. His skin was burned, cracked, and blackened, as leathery as a lizard’s. He sometimes spent hours crouching, rifle in hand, jaws clenched, every fiber of his body taut as he waited for death, until his legs gave out under him. He thought he must have been weakened by the bout of typhus, and was no longer as strong as he once had been. His comrades were falling at a terrifying rate, and he wondered when it would be his turn. The wounded were evacuated at night in vehicles without lights to avoid being strafed by enemy planes; some of the most badly wounded begged to be given the coup de grâce, because the possibility of falling into enemy hands was worse than a thousand deaths. The bodies that couldn’t be removed before they began to stink under the merciless sun were covered with stones or burned, as were the horses and mules: it was impossible to dig graves in this rocky ground, where the earth was as hard as cement. Guillem risked exposure to bullets and grenades to reach the bodies and rescue some kind of personal item to send back to their families.