A Long Petal of the Sea(31)
Victor stayed in the camp with a small team of doctors and nurses, because on that infernal beach they had a mission: to serve the sick, the wounded, and the crazy. The legend that he had restarted the heart of a dead young soldier at the Estacion del Norte had preceded him, and this gave his patients a blind trust in him, although he always insisted that if they were seriously ill they should see one of the doctors. There were never enough hours in the day for his work. The boredom and depression that were the scourge of most of the prisoners didn’t affect him: on the contrary, he found in his work a stimulus that was close to happiness. He was as skinny and weak as the rest of the men in the camp, but didn’t feel hungry, and more than once gave his ration of dried cod to someone else. His comrades said he must have been eating sand. He began work at first light, but after sunset still had several hours to fill, so he would pick up his guitar and sing. He had done so only rarely during the years of the Civil War, but he remembered the romantic ballads his mother had taught him to combat his shyness, and of course revolutionary songs, during which others joined in for the chorus. The guitar had belonged to a youngster from Andalusia who kept it with him throughout the war, went into exile without letting go of it, and played it at Argeles-sur-Mer until the end of February, when he was carried off by pneumonia. Victor cared for him in his final days, and so the boy left him the instrument by way of inheritance. It was one of the few real instruments in the camp; most were fantasy ones whose sounds were imitated by men who were good mimics.
As the months went by, overcrowding in the camp gradually diminished. The old and infirm died off and were buried in a cemetery adjacent to the camp. The luckiest among the prisoners obtained sponsors and visas to emigrate to Mexico and South America. Many of the soldiers joined the French Foreign Legion, despite its brutal discipline and its reputation for harboring criminals, since anything was better than remaining in the camp. Those with suitable qualifications were recruited for the Foreign Workers Companies created to replace the French workforce called up in preparation for the coming war. Later on, others were to go to the Soviet Union to fight with the Red Army or join the French Resistance, and thousands of them died in Nazi death camps or Stalin’s gulags.
One day in April 1939, when the unbearable winter cold had given way to spring and the first warmth of summer was on the horizon, Victor was called to the camp commander’s office. He had a visitor. It was Aitor Ibarra, wearing a straw boater and white shoes. It was almost a minute before Aitor recognized Victor in the ragged scarecrow standing in front of him. When he did, they embraced with great emotion, both with moist eyes.
“You can’t imagine the trouble I’ve had finding you, brother, you’re not on any list; I thought you were dead,” Aitor said.
“Almost. And you: how come you’re all dressed up as a pimp?”
“As a businessman, you mean. I’ll tell you later.”
“Tell me first what happened to my mother and Roser.”
Aitor told him how Carme had disappeared. He had made inquiries but had not heard anything concrete, except that she had not returned to Barcelona. The Dalmau house had been commandeered, and another family was living there now. He had good news about Roser, though. He briefly told Victor about how they had escaped from Barcelona, then crossed the peaks of the Pyrenees on foot, and how they were separated after reaching France. For a while, he’d had no news of her.
“I escaped as soon as I could, Victor. I don’t know why you haven’t tried: it’s easy.”
“They need me here.”
“Thinking like that means you’ll always be in trouble.”
“That’s true, but what can I do? Tell me about Roser.”
“I had no difficulty finding her once I remembered the name of your friend the nurse. Roser was here, in this same camp, but she got out thanks to Elisabeth Eidenbenz. She’s living in Perpignan with a family who took her in, working as a seamstress and giving piano lessons. She had a healthy baby boy, who’s a month old already and is a fine-looking fellow.”
Aitor had got by as ever, buying and selling. During the war he got hold of the most saleable items, from cigarettes and sugar to shoes and morphine, and bartered them for other things in an exchange that was laborious but always left him with a profit. He also picked up real treasures, similar to the German pistol and the American penknife that had impressed Roser so much. He would never have relinquished them, and was still angry when he remembered how they were taken from him. Eventually he had managed to get in touch with some distant cousins who had emigrated to Venezuela several years earlier, and they were going to sponsor him and find him work in that country. Thanks to his innate talent he had already saved enough money for the passage and visa.
“I’m leaving in a week, Victor. We have to get out of Europe as quickly as possible: another war is on the horizon, and it will be far worse than the last one. As soon as I get to Venezuela I’ll sort out the paperwork so that you can emigrate, and I’ll send you the boat ticket.”
“I can’t leave Roser and her child.”
“For them as well, of course.”
Aitor’s visit left Victor speechless for several days. He was convinced he was trapped yet again, stuck in limbo, unable to control his fate. After hours walking on the beach, weighing up his responsibility to the sick in the camp, he decided that the moment had come to give priority to his responsibility toward Roser, her child, and his own destiny. On April 1, Franco, as Caudillo of Spain (a title he had bestowed on himself in December 1936), had declared an end to the war that had lasted nine hundred and eighty-four days. France and Great Britain had recognized his government. Victor’s homeland was lost; there was no hope of returning.