While other six-year-old boys might be pulling the wings off flies, Tino is content to watch his bees for hours, learning their secrets. On any given day, if you were to look from the windows of the kitchen, you would be able to see the top of his head above the stone wall that separates the main part of the garden from the hives. There are six hives in total, producing far more honey than we would ever be able to eat ourselves. They were another fleeting interest of Papa’s. Luckily, Tino’s love for the bees has far outlasted his.
To my eyes the movements of the insects appear aimless. But Tino has explained to me that the bees are organized, incredibly so. There are patterns to their movements, varying from season to season, that he is learning to read. He has told me about the queen, the female workers, the male drones. How they build and clean their hive, how they make, dry and store the honey, how they could make a new queen, if they needed one, in a special cell in the honeycomb. The ordinary worker-bee larva becomes something extraordinary, becomes a mother. Just sometimes I think that if we could make ourselves a new mother – or if we could make me into a real adult – things might be easier for us.
That evening, when we camped in the garden, above all of the other nighttime sounds I remember that of Tino’s breathing, fast with the wonder of it all. I felt his hand reach for mine, and I took it, and held it tight.
‘Can you see them?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
We watched them, the dancing points of light, for so long that even when I closed my eyes I could see them there, imprinted somewhere behind my eyelids.
That, then, is the last good memory. It has taken me a while to bring myself to remember past that point.
July 1936
It is a few weeks later, a July morning. I discover Papa listening to the radio. When I ask him if he wants me to make him a coffee – he drinks several cups a day, thick and black in the Turkish style – he makes a quieting motion with one hand. I listen with him, to see what it is that has him so excited.
There has been an incident, in Morocco, the announcer says. A young soldier has led some soldiers into an uprising there. They are trying to make their way to Spain. This is not the thing that frightens me; the man on the radio insists that it will be snuffed out within twenty-four hours – if that. The frightening thing is my father’s face, when he turns to look at me.
‘It’s coming,’ he says. ‘I knew it would happen. I’ve been saying it for the last year. But they’ve become complacent.’
‘But the man says—’
‘He says what they think people want to hear.’
‘Hear what?’ We turn, and see Tino, trailed by his elderly cat, Se?or Bombón.
My father is, I think, about to tell him – but I get there first. ‘Nothing, Tino,’ I say now. ‘It’s nothing.’ For what is the point in a six-year-old worrying over something that does not concern him, that will be over before it has even begun? Especially a child who has terrible nightmares already: whose imagination is an overly fertile place. Even innocuous-sounding phrases – a chance mention by my father of ‘the trees in the distance’ turned those trees into one of his great fears. When he woke up screaming one night and I went to ask what the matter was, all he would say, as he clung to me, was: ‘los árboles, los árboles’. Sometimes, still, he wets the bed – a thing that we have to keep a secret from Papa, because Tino can’t bear the shame of him finding out.
Now, when he looks unconvinced, I say: ‘I’ve been wondering, something, Tino. About the bees. Perhaps you could explain it to me?’
It is a low trick, perhaps, but it works.
How long, though, will I be able to hide it from him? Because the thing is not crushed. Not in twenty-four hours, not in forty-eight. It spreads to the mainland. It moves through the country like a forest fire, snatching new fuel to feast upon. Seville, Cordoba, Saragossa, Papa tells me: all have fallen to these men they call the rebels. There are soldiers, trained marksmen, marching from their barracks to massacre unarmed townspeople. Besides the Spanish soldiers – known for their skill in the fine art of killing – there are the Moorish soldiers, known too for their talent, but also for their absolute lack of mercy.
Often, now, we hear the roar of aircraft above us. Tino will run out into the garden and watch them with a kind of wonder. And there is something awesome in them: in their speed and deadly grace. They are German, Papa says: Adolf Hitler is sending them to help the rebels. Mussolini, of Italy, is sending tanks and soldiers.
We are not their target, yet. Some other small town is, perhaps – or one of the big cities. How long before that changes?
Even as I understood the danger, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would come. Or that even if it did it would only sear us a little, it couldn’t change us. The thing we had, our happiness, was too sacred. The arrogance of imagining that I was unchangeable. That what we had was stronger, somehow, than this thing that had engulfed the whole country. That was a hard lesson to learn.
PART TWO
7
Liguria, 1953