‘I can hear them—-’
‘No one’s coming,’ I soothed, but she was unnerving me. I needed air, and her voice was so odd and desperate. ‘Don’t be scared,’ I said. ‘Quick, are you still there? You can trust me, I promise.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Listen, Quick. I’ll be there soon. Quick?’
The line had gone dead. Feeling sick, I pushed my way out of the phone box, and hurried to the nearest Tube.
September 1936
18
It was still warm by late September, the air in Arazuelo still heavy with honeysuckle, the earth reddened and cracked. Lying beneath this beauteous landscape was sour matter, but it still didn’t feel like war; not how the Schlosses thought war was supposed to be. It was something worse, a localized, persistent terror. Italian and German bombers would fly overhead, shooting at stationary planes on airfields, at Malaga port, at petrol tanks. But there was a strange sense of limbo, an intermittent hope that all this would be tied up soon, that the Republican government would sort a resistance against these nationalist rebels and their foreign allies, who were stretching their reach across the country.
The nationalists had gained control of Old Castile, Leon, Oviedo, Alava, Navarre, Galicia, Zaragoza, the Canaries and all the Balearics, except Menorca. In the south, they had seized Cadiz, Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Huelva. Malaga was still in the Republican zone – as was Arazuelo – but nevertheless, the rebels felt very near.
Harold would drive into Malaga in order to bring back supplies. He said some shops and bars would be open, whilst others were closed, and the trains and buses would mysteriously cease their timetables with no warning. Nothing was stable, no one was even wearing neckties any more, for such flourishes were taken as a sign of bourgeois tendency and might make you a target for the reds. Harold hoped the worst the Anarchists might do was steal his car, vehicles requisitioned ‘for the cause’, petrol siphoned off for trucks, elegant motors left to rust.
The days were bearable; the worst was the nights. The family lay awake in the finca as gunshots peppered the fields, ever nearer. Each side of the growing battle saw the other as a faceless, viral mass contaminating the body politic, requiring excision from society. Right--wing and left--wing gangs were taking the law into their own hands, removing opponents from their homes, leaving them in unmarked graves amongst the hills and groves.
In many instances, politics was the cover for personal vendetta and family feud. Most of the right--wing terror was directed against those who had influenced the violence against the priests and the factory owners back in 1934 – union leaders, prominent anti--clericals, several Republican mayors. And yet – mechanics, butchers, doctors, builders, labourers, barbers, they too were ‘taken for a walk’, as the phrase came to be known. And it wasn’t just men. Certain women who had become teachers under the Republic were removed, as were known anarchist’s wives. None of it was legal, of course, and there seemed no means of stopping it, when hate and power were in play.
As for the rogue elements on the left – despite the posters Harold had seen plastered around Malaga, imploring them to stop shaming their political and trade organizations and to cease their brutalities – they went for retired civil guards, Catholic sympathizers, -people they knew to be rich, -people they believed to be rich. Their houses were looted, their property damaged – and it was this that often struck first into the fearful imagination of the middle classes, rather than the chance they would be shot.
The Schlosses did not fear for themselves. They thought no one would touch them, as foreigners. They were nothing do with all this. Death was taking place beyond their villages, outside municipal authority and the sight of the -people. The violence in the country – against both the body of a village and a villager’s bullet--riddled corpse – was concealed, although everyone knew it was there. But because you couldn’t see it, you carried on. It was odd, Olive thought – how you could live alongside this; how you could know all this was happening, and still not want to leave.
She had long ago abandoned trying to listen to the BBC to seek the facts, for it offered little more than an improbable--sounding hybrid of information from Madrid and Seville, adding it together and dividing it by London. Yet the Republican government stations were one long barrage of victory speeches and claims of triumph, which were rather undermined by actual events. Granada’s frequency always crackled, not a word could be heard – and the same applied to the northern cities, whose radio waves could not penetrate the southern mountains.
The city of Malaga, however, was constantly broadcasting denials, rumours and myths; Republican calls to arms, meeting times and orders to build a new Spain, free of fascists. And on the other side, the alarming nationalist invective was a frequency in Seville. In the daytime, it would play music and personal announcements, as if there was no conflict going on at all. But by night, the insurgents would broadcast, and although there was still much bombast and warmongering in it, Olive used it to deduce the changing state of her adopted country’s fortunes. She listened as Queipo de Llano, the general who had first broadcast from Seville, maintained his unrelenting bloodthirstiness, crying out that there was a cancer in Spain, a body of infidels that only death would remove.