A Long Petal of the Sea(14)

And in the midst of that hell, where they couldn’t rely on even the most essential supplies, every so often an ambulance appeared with a sack of mail. The driver was Aitor Ibarra, who had set himself this task to raise the combatants’ spirits. Personal correspondence was one of the lowest priorities on the Ebro front, and in fact most of the men did not receive letters: those in the International Brigades because they were so far from their loved ones, and many of the Spaniards, especially those from the south, because they came from families where no one could read or write. But Guillem Dalmau did have someone to write to him. Aitor would joke he was risking his life to bring letters to a single recipient. Sometimes he handed Guillem a thick packet of several letters tied up with a string. There were always one or two from Guillem’s mother and brother, but most came from Roser. She would write one or two paragraphs every day until she had filled a couple of pages, then put them in an envelope and take it to the military mail office, singing to herself the most popular militia song: If you want to write you know where I’ll be Third Mixed Brigade / in the first line of fire. She had no idea that Ibarra greeted Guillem with the same or a similar song when he handed him the letters. The Basque sang even when he was asleep to ward off fear and beguile his good luck fairy.



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AFTER CONQUERING MOST OF the country, Franco’s troops continued their inexorable advance; it was obvious that Catalonia would fall as well. Panic gripped Barcelona; many made preparations to leave, lots more had already done so. In mid-January 1939, Aitor Ibarra arrived at Manresa hospital in a battered truck with nineteen gravely wounded men. There had been twenty-one when they started out, but two had died on the journey, and their bodies had been left by the wayside. Some doctors had already fled the city, while those who remained were trying to avoid panic among their patients. The members of the Republican government had also chosen to go into exile, hoping to continue to govern from Paris. This finally undermined the spirit of the civilian population. By now, the Nationalists were less than twenty-five kilometers from Barcelona.



Ibarra had gone fifty hours without sleeping. After delivering his pitiful cargo, he collapsed, exhausted, into Victor Dalmau’s arms when the doctor came out to receive the wounded. Victor installed Aitor in what he called his regal chamber—a camp bed, kerosene lamp, and chamber pot constituted his entire lodging ever since he had begun living in the hospital in order to save time. Some hours later, when there was a lull in the frenetic activity in the operating theater, Victor took his friend a bowl of lentil soup, the dried sausage his mother had sent him that week, and a pot of chicory coffee. He had difficulty waking up Aitor, but still dizzy with fatigue, the Basque ate voraciously and told him in detail about the battle of the Ebro, which Victor already knew about in outline from the accounts of all the injured he had treated in the previous months. The Republican Army had been decimated and, according to Ibarra, it only remained for them to prepare for the final defeat. “In the hundred and fifteen days of combat, more than ten thousand of our men died. I don’t know how many thousands more were taken prisoner, or how many civilian victims there were in the bombed towns and villages, and that’s not counting the losses among the enemy,” added the Basque. As Professor Marcel Lluis Dalmau had predicted before he died, the war was lost. There would be no negotiated peace, as the Republican high command was claiming; Franco would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. “Don’t believe the Francoist propaganda: there’ll be no mercy or justice. There’ll be a bloodbath, just like there has been in the rest of the country. We’re done for.”



To Victor, who had shared moments of tragedy with Ibarra without him ever losing his defiant smile, his songs and jokes, the gloomy expression on his friend’s face was even more eloquent than his words. Aitor took a small bottle of liquor out of his rucksack, poured it into the watery coffee, and offered it to Victor. “Here, you’re going to need it,” he told him. For a long while he had been searching for the best way to give Victor the sad news about his brother, but in the end could only blurt out that Guillem had died on the eighth of November.

“How?” was all that Victor managed to ask.

“A bomb in the trench. I’m sorry, Victor, I prefer to spare you the details.”

“Tell me what happened,” Victor insisted.

“The bomb blew several men to pieces. There was no time to reconstitute the bodies, so we buried the pieces.”

“So then you weren’t able to identify them.”

“We couldn’t identify them individually, Victor, but we knew who was in the trench. Guillem was one of them.”

“But you can’t be sure, can you?”

“I’m afraid I can,” said Aitor, taking a charred billfold from his rucksack.

Victor carefully opened the billfold, which seemed to be about to fall to pieces. He took out Guillem’s army identity card, and a miraculously intact photograph. It was the image of a young girl standing next to a grand piano. Victor Dalmau remained seated for several minutes at the foot of the camp bed, unable to speak. Aitor didn’t have the heart to embrace him as he would have liked, but sat beside him without moving, also silent.

“It’s his girlfriend, Roser Bruguera. They were going to get married after the war,” said Victor finally.