I met him in Santona, a little coastal village in northern Spain that straddles the border of modern civilization. Here, the streets are still the exclusive domain of the saunterer, and when the village council decided a few years ago to let some ducks loose in the municipal pond, they found them all gone the next morning, skillfully clubbed and plucked, their meat hissing in so many frying pans, no doubt. The only jobs are fishing jobs, and a few people find employment in a special department of the government: a huge prison from which escape is almost impossible. In the seventies, some of the inmates were still convicts from the civil war.
The day the civil war broke out, a hooting pick-up drove through his village. In the back were boys of his age, around eighteen, who shouted: "Come on! The reds are burning our churches and raping the nuns! We have to defend ourselves!" They drove to the front, high up in the mountains, where the warring parties engaged in a daily exchange of bullets and curses. He had no experience with guns and became a cook. One day he was returning from the mountain stream with two buckets full of water when a stray bullet hit his butt. He lay in a field hospital and received a medal.
After the war they made him a guard in a forced-labour camp. High on the Meseta, in a landscape that could only have been created out of despair, the prisoners were cutting a road through the rocks with primitive instruments. In this camp he met an old friend of his, who had fought on the other side and was sentenced to hard labour for life. "What happened?" he asked. "When the civil war broke out, I was visiting my family in a village up north," he replied. "A pick-up drove by with boys like you and me. 'The fascists are murdering the workers!' they shouted. 'We have to defend ourselves!' And I jumped on right away."
Near the camp there was an inn, where guards and prisoners alike stretched their weary legs in the evening. The innkeeper himself had a son who never returned from the civil war. He didn't even know on which side he had fought: presumably jumped on the same sort of pick-up and then tumbled headlong in a nameless grave. Each time his gaze wandered over the prisoners and guards he thought: Are you the potential murderer of my son? Or are you the one who was with him when the fatal bullet struck?
It was as if his tearing doubt materialized in his two daughters. They fell in love, one with a guard, the other with his friend, the prisoner. They were married in the mountain chapel, where once a week a priest came to celebrate mass. It was a frugal ceremony, no wine, no banquet.
The road finished, he was transferred to a prison for long-term convicts. They sold the inn and bought a drugstore in the coastal village where the prison was - his own salary wasn't sufficient to support two families. In the beginning the innkeeper manned the store, and when he grew too old, his daughters took turns serving the customers and looking after each other's children. They shared everything, their children grew up like brothers and sisters. After a while the prison regime became more lenient, and some civil war convicts were allowed to go home, first on the weekends, later each night. Then the two friends would sit silently in the little room behind the store, while the innkeeper, old and deaf, stared at them from his rocking chair with the same look he used to cast on the guards and prisoners in his inn.
When Franco died, they were both released: he retired, and his friend got amnesty. I look at them as they sit together on a bench on the waterfront, two wizened old men, chewing their palillos. Two old colleagues, their children used to think they went off to work together in the morning. An unasked question pops up in my mind: given the choice, would they repeat their lives?
Copyright © 1991 Jos den Bekker.