For weeks, rumours seeped on ahead, wraith-like. They rustled through the olive groves at first, too remote and far-fetched to be believed. But as the soldiers got closer so the rumours threw up dust on stony roads, stamped their way down streets and round corners, eventually making their way up the stairs and into the study of Doctor Alvaro.
Soldiers, Spanish soldiers, were on their way. They were marching into Spanish towns and Spanish villages, shooting Spanish men, Spanish women and Spanish children.
The stories were too preposterous to be believed.
The doctor was in shock. Reason told him this shouldn’t be happening – couldn’t be happening. Yet slowly, forced to dredge through the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind, he had to accept that what he was hearing was true. It was a madness, no doubt. He hoped his country would be cured of it soon.
Outside in their village nothing had changed. The sky was still blue. The sun still scorched the fields. The English boy’s skin was still red. Maria still talked to her friend Paloma under the olive tree, for the moment. When the world looked the same today as it did yesterday it was hard to imagine it otherwise. But civil war was marching its way inexorably towards them. Doctor Alvaro knew that it would leave nothing, and no one, unscathed.
Though not everyone feared its arrival.
‘At last! Thank heavens!’
The morning after the rebel forces rose up in Madrid the newspapers were full of it. This was what Don Felipe had been waiting for, ever since his return to the estate. The coup. At last the boil that to him was Republican Spain was about to be lanced. Left-leaning, liberal, lax, it had threatened to destroy everything he and his wife held dear, to rob them of their God-given power and wealth. Not any longer. An atmosphere of breezy excitement permeated every room of the house, even in the stultifying heat of the summer.
Don Felipe attended the emergency meetings in the village to calm proceedings and offer himself up as the voice of reason. The rebellion was coming. And it would save them. Spain would soon be great again. And his farm, no longer prey to the evils of land reform, nor held captive to the destructive demands of workers, would return to its former glory. In a world where everyone knew their place there would be work for everyone.
‘We really must decide on the guests for the dinner,’ Dona Sofίa said to her husband when he returned from the latest village meeting. Don Felipe entered the living room, waving his hand dismissively.
‘There’s a change in the air already,’ he started. He was in no mood for discussing social plans now. It might be guests his wife started with but then she would go on to the menu, the table, the dress … No. He’d felt a growing respect directed at him at the meeting today and he had no desire to dilute the pride this instilled within his breast with a discussion about chiffon or crêpe de chine, chicken or rabbit. He looked anywhere but at his wife so as to avoid the look of utter disappointment that he knew to be on her face.
‘We’re on the brink of greatness again. I feel it,’ he said, determined not to give in to his wife by answering her. ‘Order is returning, I can taste it. With each meeting at the town hall there are fewer dissenting voices. As for the ones that persist, they aren’t as excitable as they used to be.’
‘It’s done. Luis has enlisted in the rebel army,’ Dona Sofίa said with quiet acceptance. ‘Funny how our side is called rebel,’ she sighed. ‘I always think of those terrible communists in Russia with their frightful revolution whenever I hear the word. Can’t we be called something else? I find it such a disturbing, ugly word.’ And with that, having given up on getting her husband to engage in dinner party planning, she handed Luis’ letter over to him to read.
She’d been expecting news of her son’s entrance into the army for days, and although she told herself she was delighted about it, there was something in her that urged caution.
‘I’ve also had word from my father’s friend, Captain Garcia, that he will be in charge of the regiment – Luis’ regiment – when they come to Fuentes.’ Dona Sofίa held out another letter. She attempted to squeeze out a broad smile but could manage only subdued pride.
‘The … the … the … It will turn out well, won’t it, Felipe?’ she asked, unable to bring herself to say the word. War. She’d wanted it to come. Dreamt Luis would sign up for it. But now that he had … flames of truth licked around Dona Sofίa’s icy heart causing a stammer of doubt to creep into her voice.
‘Luis. A soldier. Why, that’s excellent news darling,’ her husband boomed with confidence. He allowed his eyes to meet hers for the first time since entering the room. ‘Of course everything with be all right,’ he thundered with blind belief. ‘Spain will be for the Spanish once more. The Russians have been pulling the government’s strings for far too long. The Republic will be crushed at last.’
‘Will it be so very dangerous?’ his wife asked, still perturbed. ‘The w-w-war?’
‘No,’ he roared. ‘But it will be glorious. Glorious, I tell you Sofίa. We will win the war and crush the rats, snakes and spineless creatures that have tried to ruin this great homeland of ours with their Marxist ways.’
Dona Sofίa felt a fingernail drag itself lightly down her back. War. Its meaning exploded within her mind. ‘Will it be dangerous?’ she asked again, suddenly afraid what war might mean for her son.
‘No, my love. It will be over before it’s begun,’ Don Felipe said. His brow furrowed, vaguely irritated by his wife’s momentary lack of enthusiasm: not least because it threatened to cast a shadow over his own optimism. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I suggest you draw up a list of the people you want to come to dinner when Captain Garcia is here.’
‘Oh, that reminds me,’ she said as an afterthought. ‘The Captain says that he wants you to draw up a list of troublemakers. Standard procedure. He wants to make sure that once secured, he leaves our village in good hands, disarms the bad. But, apparently, you know about this already.’
Summer in southern Spain, always hot, usually calm, often sleepy, turned into a screaming hell as rebel soldiers scourged it with their fire and brimstone rain. The region was hit hard, leaving troughs of devastation so deep that rivers of agony trailed in their wake. This too was standard procedure. The earth and people were scorched to ensure that once regained by the rebels the country would never fall back into left-wing hands. For every rebel killed, ten from the opposing side would be destroyed. And that was a promise.
Yet before this hell was let loose upon Fuentes a strange calm descended upon the village and its inhabitants. Many found it unsettling, oppressive. While for the owners of Cortijo del Bosque it heralded a return to the proper order of things, their workers were quiet. Some called it cowed. Little matter the word used to describe it. The point was that this was how Don Felipe (and Dona Sofίa, in spite of her occasional pangs of conscience) liked it. Troops – ‘our troops’ – were bringing with them a new future that, not just Felipe and Sofίa, but landowners all over Spain believed would be the heroic restoration of a golden past. All talk of reading and rights would soon evaporate, becoming nothing more substantial than a quivering mirage in the heat of the day.
As for Dona Sofίa’s pain triggered by concerns for her son, that too would be rendered equally insubstantial once replaced by the excitement elicited by the planning and preparation required for their ‘very special’ dinner party.
‘I really do believe that no guest will have been to a dinner as truly splendid as the one we’re having, Felipe!’ Dona Sofίa beamed as she clapped her hands together and brought her index fingers to rest on her chin.
Her husband nodded as he read an article about Britain and France and their