A Long Petal of the Sea(60)

Carme was waiting for them at Andorra la Vella bus station, sitting ramrod-stiff on a bench, smoking as ever. She was dressed in mourning for the dead, for those lost, and for Spain, wearing an absurd hat, and with a bag on her lap out of which poked the head of a little white dog.

The three adults had no difficulty recognizing one another, because none of them had changed a great deal over the ten years they had been apart. Roser was the same as before, although she had adopted a style suited to her position; Carme found herself slightly intimidated by this confident, well-dressed woman wearing makeup. She had last seen her on a terrible night, when she was pregnant, exhausted, and shivering with cold in a motorcycle sidecar. The only one reduced to tears of emotion was Victor; the two women greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek, as though they had seen each other the day before, and as if the war and exile had been insignificant episodes in their otherwise tranquil existences.



“You must be Marcel. I’m your àvia. Are you hungry?” was the grandmother’s way of greeting her grandson. Without waiting for his reply, she handed him a sweet roll from her voluminous bag, where the dog sat beside the cakes. Fascinated, Marcel studied the complicated geography of àvia’s wrinkles, her yellow, nicotine-stained teeth, her stiff, gray hair poking like straw from her hat, and her twisted, arthritic fingers. It seemed to him that if she had had antennae, she could have been one of his aliens.

They rode with her in a twenty-year-old taxi that wheezed its way through a city nestling between mountains. According to Carme, this was the capital of spying and smuggling, practically the only two profitable enterprises in those years. She herself dabbled in the latter, because to be a spy you had to have good connections with the European powers and the Americans. More than four years had passed since World War Two ended in 1945, and the devastated cities were recuperating from hunger and ruin, but there were still hordes of refugees and displaced people searching for their place in the world. She explained that during the war Andorra had been a nest of spies, and thanks to the Cold War, it still was. In the past it had been an escape route for those fleeing the Germans, especially Jews and escaped prisoners, who were sometimes betrayed by their guides and ended up murdered or handed over to their enemy to be robbed of the money and jewels they were carrying. “There are several shepherds who became rich all of a sudden, and every year when the thaw comes, bodies appear, their wrists tied with wire,” said the taxi driver, who joined in their conversation. After the war, it was German officers and Nazi sympathizers who passed through Andorra, fleeing to possible destinations in South America. They were hoping to cross into Spain and receive help from Franco. “As for smuggling, it’s almost nothing, just a service to society,” Carme insisted. “Tobacco, alcohol, and little things like that, nothing dangerous.”



Installed in the rustic house that Carme shared with the peasant couple who had saved her life, they sat down to eat a tasty rabbit and chickpea stew with two porrones of red wine and told one another of all their adventures during the previous decade. In the Retreat, when the grandmother decided she didn’t have the strength to go on and the idea of exile was unbearable, she abandoned Roser and Aitor Ibarra to lie down and die of cold as far away from them as possible. To her great regret, she woke the next morning, stiff and ravenous but more alive than she would have wished. She remained where she was, motionless, while all around her the throng of fugitives dragged itself along, in ever decreasing numbers, until by evening she found herself alone, curled up like a snail on the frozen ground.

Carme told them she couldn’t remember what she felt, but she realized it’s hard to die, and to invite death is cowardice. Her husband was dead, and so too perhaps were her two sons, but Roser and Guillem’s child was still alive. That made her determined to go on, but she couldn’t raise herself from the ground. Then a stray puppy came by, following the trail of the refugees, and she let it snuggle up alongside her for some warmth. That animal was her salvation. An hour or two later, a peasant couple, who had sold their produce to the stragglers in the refugee column and were returning home, heard the dog whining and mistook it for a baby. When they saw Carme, they came to her aid.

She lived with them, working the land with great effort and poor results, until the family’s eldest son took them to Andorra. They spent the Second World War there, smuggling anything that came their way between Spain and France, including people, if the opportunity arose.



“Is this the same dog?” asked Marcel, who had it on his lap.

“The very same. He must be eleven years old, and he’s going to live many more. He’s called Gosset.”

“That’s not a name. It means ‘little dog’ in Catalan.”

“It’s name enough. He doesn’t need another one,” his grandmother retorted between two drags on her cigarette.



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DURING THE MEAL, Carme told them she had found them at long last thanks to Elisabeth Eidenbenz, who had returned to Vienna, still completely devoted to her mission of helping women and children. Vienna had been ferociously bombed, and when she arrived shortly after the end of the war, its starving inhabitants were digging in the garbage for food while hundreds of lost children were living like rats among the ruins of what had once been the most beautiful of imperial cities. In the south of France in 1940, Elisabeth had carried out her plan to create a model maternity home in an abandoned mansion in Elne, close to Perpignan, where she took in pregnant women so that they could give birth in safety. At first these had been Spanish women rescued from the concentration camps, then later Jews, gypsies, and other women escaping from the Nazis. Protected by the Red Cross, the Elne maternity home was meant to stay neutral and not aid political refugees, but Elisabeth paid little attention to this, despite being closely watched. As a result, the Gestapo closed the home in 1944. By then, she had managed to save more than six hundred babies.