Tell the Moon to Come Out Read online

  Nick must then either have dozed or passed out briefly, for he came round to hear two female voices buzzing about his head.

  Can you stand up? Try. Lean on us. That’s right, lad. Just a few steps…

  A few steps, and the brilliant sun hit him in the eyes again.

  ‘My sister lives just round the corner,’ said Sister Encarnata.

  Between them, Isabel and the nun supported him out of the church and across the square into a narrow street. They entered a building and climbed some stairs, and after that he was not sure what was happening. When he surfaced again he found he was lying on a bed and a woman in black was hovering near. And then came Sister Encarnata, bearing a basin of water. She started to sponge off his arms and legs with cool water while Isabel held a cup to his lips.

  ‘Try to drink,’ she urged.

  He gagged.

  ‘There’s a little salt in it. You need salt.’

  Each sip was an effort. His lips, his throat were parched, like sandpaper left out in the sun. For the next few hours he drifted in and out of consciousness, at times hearing voices that sounded garbled and made no sense at all.

  He was delirious throughout the night, but in the morning he awoke with a clear head. The room no longer swam and tilted before his eyes. It was small, with white walls and covered half-way up with tiles in blue, green and yellow. They looked familiar. He thought his grandparents might have had similar tiles in their house in Nerja. They were common in Andalusia. The only furniture in the room, apart from the bed, was a wicker chair and a small table on which stood a glass half filled with water. On the opposite wall hung a large crucifix flanked by two religious pictures, one of Jesus on the cross, the other of his mother, Mary, in a sky-blue dress with a gold halo. Nick reached out his hand and lifted the glass and drank until he had drained it dry.

  The door opened, and a woman put her head round. It was the woman in a black dress whom he had seen before. He was to learn that she was yet another war widow, though he never found out on which side her husband had fought. He did not want to know.

  ‘I’m Doña Rosalía, Encarnata’s sister. And how are you this morning, Rinaldo? Looking much better, I see.’

  For a moment he thought she was speaking to someone else, then he remembered the name on his fake passport. ‘I am, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like something to eat? I have a nice brown egg I can give you.’ She had a cousin living in a village just outside Málaga who brought her a few eggs every week. ‘I’m lucky. And I was early in the queue for the baker’s and got a fresh loaf!’

  She brought him a thick slice of the new bread, the egg lightly boiled and a cup of milk. She propped a pillow behind him. ‘Now eat! You need to build your strength.’ He smiled, remembering Marina, his first ministering angel.

  There seemed to be no sign of Isabel. Had she gone? The fear that one morning he might wake to find she had disappeared had never been far from his mind. After all, why would she want to stay with him? Everywhere he took her he led her into danger.

  ‘Your sister has gone to church with Encarnata,’ said Doña Rosalía. ‘They should be back soon. She is such a lovely girl, Claudia. I would have liked to have had a daughter like her myself.’

  Nick had just finished his breakfast when they returned. Isabel was wearing a black lace scarf over her hair. She came to him.

  ‘It’s wonderful to see you looking more like yourself. You’ve been doing a lot of raving in the night.’

  ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘All sorts of things. But you kept going on about somewhere called Cómpeta.’

  Twenty-Two

  On leaving the coast, the road to Cómpeta wound up into the mountains. For a while it would climb, then come down again, then go up, and all the time, on their left-hand side, there was a steep drop into the valley below. All around the mountains rose majestically and every now and then they spied a cluster of white houses perched high up, a remote village, reachable only by a precipitous track. Nick was amazed that people could live up there at all, so cut off from the world. The living must be poor.

  They had been lucky and had got a lift with a neighbour of Doña Rosalía’s as far as Caleta de Velez, a small fishing village. They had stayed a week in Doña Rosalía’s flat, which had given Nick time to recover his strength fully. The nun’s presence had made the house safe. No one was going to challenge her or come barging in with a search warrant. Neither Sister Encarnata nor Doña Rosalía had asked many questions. Nick and Isabel had told them they were planning to go and look for relatives living up in the hills, since they had not been able to find their grandparents. Apart from that, whatever the two women suspected, they knew nothing and would have nothing to report should they be questioned.

  At midday, with the sun at its height, they stopped for lunch. Isabel laid out the bread, cheese and figs given to them by Doña Rosalía and two ripe oranges they’d picked up earlier from the ground. Eating their picnic in the shade of a small grove of old gnarled olive trees, they looked back at the wide blue panorama of the Mediterranean Sea sparkling in the distance. It was so peaceful up here after war-torn Málaga. The grass was burnt brown by the sun but lavender, rosemary and thyme flourished, as did little deep-blue delphiniums and purple loosestrife. Before sitting down they had rubbed their hands with lavender sprigs to refresh them. Thistles abounded too, and ling heather, both of them reminding Nick of his native land. And there were prickly pears, with their thick plate-like prickly leaves shooting in all directions, the fruit ready for picking. There was no dust and no rubble. And it was quiet. The only sounds they could hear were the buzz of insects, the tinkle of goat bells somewhere near by, the noise of the wind.

  Nick was relieved, too, to be in the open air again. Doña Rosalía had been more than kind, but after a week inside, going out only on short, nervous forays and accompanied always by the two women, he had felt cooped up like a bird in a cage, desperate to stretch his wings again.

  ‘You’re a country boy.’ Isabel smiled at him.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. Growing up in my little village I always dreamt of going to live in the city.’

  ‘To Madrid?’

  ‘I suppose. But it’s in a mess now, isn’t it? Everywhere is in Spain.’ Her voice darkened.

  ‘Not out here. It’s beautiful up here. You can forget wars up here.’

  The goat bells were coming closer and soon the herdsman came into sight over the crest of the hill, leading his little flock. There were about forty beasts in all, small and thin in the flank, as the herdsman himself was. His clothes hung almost in tatters and his face was burnt a dark mahogany by the sun. Nick remembered his father telling him that often the herds would walk all day, from dawn to dusk, seeking new pastures, covering many miles.

  The herdsman greeted them; they responded and he stopped, though the goats continued to move about restlessly, nibbling grasses and shoots and rattling their bells.

  ‘Going far?’

  ‘Cómpeta.’

  ‘That’s my village. It’s a good walk away.’

  ‘We’ll make it by nightfall, though?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Easily.’ Then came the inevitable question. ‘You know people there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nick hesitated, but he thought that most people in this area would have supported the Republicans. ‘The Torres family.’

  ‘Gil Torres?’

  Nick nodded.

  ‘He is a relative?’

  ‘A second cousin.’

  ‘He’s a good man.’ The herdsman put his thumb and forefinger together and held them up. ‘He’s all right. A good journey to you both!’

  The flock went on its way.

  ‘He belonged to the right side, thank goodness,’ said Nick, adding, on seeing the expression on Isabel’s face, ‘Now you couldn’t say the Nationalists had right on their side. They were Fascists.’

  ‘And the other side were Communists. Is one any better t
han the other?’

  ‘They weren’t all Communists. My dad was a Socialist. Anyway, Communism began because the poor and the workers had hardly any rights. No wonder the rich didn’t like it when they lost the election to the Left. So they started up a revolution. They didn’t want to lose their privileges.’

  ‘It’s not that simple. And not all Nationalists are rich.’

  ‘But look at the people you had supporting you! Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler hates Jews. He wants to conquer Europe. He’s already into Poland.’

  ‘And you had Stalin. He’s got plenty of blood on his hands. My father says he’s out to conquer Europe and the rest of the world if he can get away with it.’

  Their argument had become heated; they were glaring at each other. For a moment Nick hated Isabel for the fact that she had not been on the Republican side, his father’s side, and he was appalled that he should feel this blind hate. He looked away from her, down into the valley where a donkey was plodding peacefully along with a load of straw on its back, a man in blue overalls walking behind, prodding it with a stick. Further on two oxen, roped together, were pulling a cart. The world moved slowly here. It was difficult to believe that war had ever troubled it.

  How could Isabel possibly be for the Fascists and Franco?

  She sighed. ‘This is crazy, the two of us sitting up here in this beautiful place arguing about politics. Of course I don’t approve of everything that went on. I hated all of it. I hate war! I hate people killing each other! But what was I to do? Stand in the street and shout, “Down with Franco!”? My father was in the Civil Guard, on Franco’s side, don’t forget.’

  How could he forget? Her father’s hands were stained with his blood; the marks on his back showed where the sergeant’s booted feet had landed. But reason told Nick, now that he was cooling down, that Isabel could not be held responsible for anything her father had done, any more than he could for his. It was more than likely that his father would have blood on his hands too. Nick turned back to her. ‘You’re right. It’s too good a day for quarrelling.’ He drew her to him and kissed her.

  They could not linger long, they must move on, even though the sun was high and it was siesta time for southerners. The going would be slow. They were wearing wide-brimmed straw hats provided by Doña Rosalía, who had delivered them a lecture on the perils of sunstroke, an unnecessary lecture as far as Nick was concerned.

  The little white village of Sayalonga appeared to be asleep as they passed by, apart from a barking dog that came snapping at their heels but did not follow them far. The narrow dusty road continued to twist and turn and climb higher and higher into the sierras. They saw a griffin vulture passing overhead and a great bustard. They were conscious of being in wild, remote country. A man on a donkey passed them going in the opposite direction and then another one leading a mule with panniers filled to the top with vegetables and, later, came a noisy motor bike travelling perilously close to the edge of the road. The verges were ragged and the drop to the valley below almost vertical. Even to look down made them feel dizzy.

  After a while they were forced to take another break. They threw down their packs and slept for two hours in the shade of an overhanging rock, awaking in a stupor from the heat. They opened their eyes to find two men standing in front of them, feet astride, in a pose that suggested intimidation, with pistols tucked into the belts at their waist.

  Nick and Isabel felt intimidated. They stayed where they were on the ground, making no move to get up, hardly daring to raise their eyes to look the men in the face. They were certainly not Civil Guard or police. Their trousers were baggy and creased and their boots scuffed and well worn. They must be outlaws, bandits who roamed the hills.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ asked the taller of the two.

  ‘We’re on our way to Cómpeta,’ said Nick, easing himself up into a sitting position where he felt a little less vulnerable.

  ‘Cómpeta, eh? So what are you going there for?’

  ‘To visit relatives.’

  ‘And who would they be?’

  Nick hesitated but thought it unlikely the men would be supporters of General Franco, any more than the goatherd had been. ‘The Torres family.’

  ‘Gil Torres?’ The man sank down on to his haunches so that he was eye to eye with Nick. He had long hair and several days’ growth of beard on his chin. He was a wild-looking character. ‘I know Gil.’

  ‘He’s my father’s cousin.’

  ‘In that case…’ The man extended a calloused hand and Nick took it. ‘You are friends then. We will escort you to the edge of the village.’

  The sun was dropping as they neared their destination, flooding the sierras with pink light, making Nick and Isabel catch their breath in wonder.

  ‘There it is, that’s Cómpeta,’ said their long-haired guide, pointing at the opposite side of the valley, where a rash of white houses sprawled down the hillside, surrounded by vineyards.

  They were ready to part, the men to go back into the hills, Nick and Isabel to move on and look for the Torres household.

  ‘Tell Gil, Diego sends him his respects,’ said their guide.

  ‘And Silvestre,’ added the other man.

  They said their farewells and Nick and Isabel turned towards Cómpeta, their steps quickening as they reached the outskirts of the village. There were people about. Old men sat on benches, smoking, leaning on their sticks. A few younger ones lounged outside a bar. Women, some middle-aged, some elderly, many in black, strolled arm-in-arm, in pairs, deep in conversation. It was the time of day for the paseo, when the older members of the community left their houses to take the air. Later, the young ones would come out, girls linked together, boys walking separately. They might stop and exchange a bit of banter. It was the only chance they had of meeting. Courtships were carried on in this way. Nick was aware that in these villages the idea of him travelling alone with a girl would be strongly disapproved of, if it were known that they were not brother and sister.

  In her village, said Isabel, no one went out on the paseo any more. People were too crushed to want to parade themselves in public. And some did not want to see their neighbours. The divisions and betrayals had been too great.

  Nick recognized the steep street that led up to the main square. The Plaza de la Almijara. The name meant a place for drying out olives and perhaps it had been that originally, going back to the time when the Moors had ruled this part of Spain. Flowers hung from black wrought-iron balconies. War had not stopped the flowers growing.

  They saw a small bar and approached a man standing at the door.

  ‘Gil Torres?’ he said. He turned and shouted into the bar behind him, ‘Gil! Someone here looking for you.’

  A moment later a greying, bearded man, tall for a southern Spaniard, emerged. He looked questioningly at the two strangers, then his gaze narrowed and he said to Nick, ‘I think I know you, don’t I?’

  Nick nodded.

  Gil Torres embraced him. ‘You’re his spitting image!’

  ‘My father – is he –?’

  Keeping an arm round Nick’s shoulder, Gil said, ‘Come home with me and I will tell you.’

  Twenty-Three

  The Torres family lived in a two-storeyed terraced house on an upper level of the village and consisted of Gil’s wife Luisa, their daughter Carmen, who was thirteen, and their son, Antonio, who was seventeen, and tall, like his father. Luisa seemed a cheerful woman; she had a ready smile, though Nick thought there was something sad in her look. She was wearing black, which was not unusual for village women. His grandmother always had; she’d said it didn’t show the dirt.

  ‘You won’t remember your cousin,’ Gil said to his children, as he brought in the visitors. ‘You were very young when he came to stay with us before. This is Nicolás, the son of my cousin Sebastián. And this is his friend Isabel.’

  After much exclaiming and embracing of Nick, eyes were turned curiously on Isabel, who had stood back quietly during the fa
mily reunion.

  ‘Isabel saved my life,’ said Nick and she flushed, the colour showing even through the deep brown of her cheeks.

  ‘Then we have much to be grateful to her for,’ said Luisa, smiling at them both. ‘You must have had a long hot walk to get here, so would you like to wash?’

  ‘First,’ said Nick, ‘I want to know about my father. Please!’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gil.

  ‘He was here, wasn’t he? I was told so in Málaga.’

  ‘Yes, he was brought here by his friend Carlos, an ambulance driver.’

  Poor, poor Carlos, Nick thought again, with a knot in his throat. At this moment he could not bear to tell them what had happened to this brave man who had risked his life to bring his father up here into the mountains, and in the end had lost it.

  ‘He was in a very bad way, your father,’ said Gil.

  ‘Is he –?’ Nick took a deep breath. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘He stayed with us for a few days and then Antonio and I took him down to the coast on a donkey. We left him at a friend’s house in Nerja, someone he’d known since he was a boy and could trust totally. He was desperate to try to get back to Scotland. He thought if he could get to the coast, then maybe –’ Gil shrugged. ‘Maybe it will have been possible. But the coast is closely watched, the guards are everywhere. They skulk about, like rats ready for the kill. But who knows? Some do manage to get away. The trouble for your father was that he was too weak to make it on his own.’

  Nick remembered the men up in the hills and told how they’d been kind enough to guide Isabel and himself down to Cómpeta. ‘Diego and Silvestre send their respects. Are they bandits?’

  ‘Bandits?’ said Gil. ‘No, not them. They’re anti-Franco guerrillas. There are a number of them round here. They operate mostly at night. They are known as niños de la noche, even though they are no longer children.’ Children of the night.