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25

Easter

It wasn’t quite business as usual in the days that followed, but nor did anyone get murdered in their beds. The Guardia enforced the law with their usual brutality, and in Madrid, the new government dithered. The Agrarian Reform Institute that it set up was a talking shop that didn’t stop the landowners cutting wages and refusing work to union members. Braceros starved under the rule of the new government just as much as they had under the old.

The newspapers were full of stories of brawls and assassinations on the streets of the great cities, where left- and right-wing militias mounted machine guns on their motor cars and terrorized each other’s neighborhoods, and there were constant rumors of guns and grenades packed in wine barrels or stacked up chimneys or stored in buckets hanging in underground wells, ready to be used by the Socialists or the Anarchists or the right-wing Falange to seize power. But nothing happened. The rumors remained rumors, the violence was far away, and life in the village went on as before, strained but essentially unchanged.

Elena recovered and resumed her daily attendance at the church, where Don Vincente and his ladies were making preparations for the great Easter feria—the most important day in the village’s calendar. There were repairs to be made to the costumes of the Virgin and the saints, and a magnificent new canopy was being embroidered for the Virgin’s throne. The vestry had become like a miniature textile factory as the ladies sat in a semicircle under the skylight, plying their needles in honor of the Lord.

And Antonio was getting ready to leave for the army. On his last evening, he sat with Theo in the square and watched the girls walking the paseo with their novios , just as they had done on their first night together nearly two years earlier.

It was cooler and the sunset had come earlier, but otherwise it felt as if nothing had changed. Just as before, Maria was absent, with only the location of her banishment having switched from South to North, and Don Fadrique and his dandified son were sitting at the same table of honor at the front of the café, with Antonio’s father dancing attendance on them and catering to their every whim.

Pedrito was even dressed in the same all-white costume he had worn on that first night, and it looked just as absurd now as it had then. Even more, perhaps, because the cacique’s tailor had had to let the trousers out several inches to accommodate Pedrito’s expanding stomach, although the young man still had a long way to go before he could rival his father’s gigantic waist. Now he sat back in his chair with his legs splayed out, looking like he owned the place—which was not far from the truth, as Don Fadrique had negotiated a share in the café’s thriving profits as part of Maria’s dowry.

Antonio’s father frowned, as he always did when he saw his son sitting with Theo, and called him over to the cacique’s table. Theo could hear their conversation from where he was sitting.

“Shake the hand of your brother-in-law and your father-in-law,” Senor Bernardo ordered Antonio.

“Maria’s not married yet, Papa,” Antonio protested mildly, and his father’s scowl returned for a moment, until Don Fadrique intervened in that soft, soothing tone that Theo remembered from when he had eavesdropped on his visit to Andrew two summers before. “But they will be,” he said, smiling. “I can assure you of that.” And he reached across the table to clasp Antonio’s hand in his pudgy fist, as if he were a king claiming power over a new subject. His son’s marriage to Maria would unite the two families, and he wanted to leave no doubt in Antonio’s mind about who was going to be the head of the clan.

“I hear you are leaving tomorrow for Barcelona,” he said.

Antonio nodded.

“I wish you good fortune and hope you will follow in your father’s footsteps and make Spain proud of you,” said the cacique, raising his glass.

Senor Bernardo beamed. “He will, Don Fadrique, but I hope he can keep both his legs while he’s doing it and not just one like his papa.” He laughed uproariously at his own joke and then snapped his finger to a waiter to bring more wine.

“A toast,” he boomed, handing around glasses. “To Spain. ?Arriba Espana! ”

The cacique rose to his feet, and Pedrito reluctantly followed him. He resented the way Antonio had usurped his father’s attention and he jostled him as he got up, hoping that Antonio would make a fool of himself by spilling his wine. But his action had the opposite of its intended effect. Antonio held his glass still and it was Pedrito who upturned his, staining his white jacket crimson as the deep Rioja red soaked into the cloth.

He was furious and immediately began to abuse Antonio, blaming him for the accident, but the cacique stopped his son in mid-flow. “It was your fault. Now fill your glass,” he ordered him, and then turned back to Antonio and Bernardo, raising his own. “To Pedro and Maria,” he said and drained his wine in a single gulp.

Theo shuddered. He had tried hard every day to keep to his resolution and forget about Maria, but that hadn’t stopped him from unconsciously keeping alive a hope that something would happen to stop her marriage to the horrible Pedrito. The overheard conversation extinguished that hope, and in despair he gazed up at the stars, wishing he was anywhere but where he was.

When he looked back down, a familiar face caught his eye, illuminated by a streetlight. Primitivo was standing by the same wall where Theo had first seen him two summers before. He had grown a beard and wore a cheap hat pulled down over his eyes, but Theo was sure it was him. And then in the next moment he moved out of the light and was gone.

Antonio came to the house the next day, wearing his new olive-wool uniform, looking like he’d already become someone else.

“Come and see me in Barcelona,” he said. “It’s a beautiful city, and I can get a weekend’s leave to show you the sights. They say it’s where dreams come true. There’s certainly more chance of it happening there than in this place, where nothing’s changed since the Moors were driven out.”

He laughed and they embraced, and then after Antonio had gone, Theo experienced the same sadness that he’d felt when he parted from Esmond. His life seemed to be a succession of separations from those he loved, leaving him lonelier each time than he’d been before.

Antonio was right. He was suffocating in the village with no friends and nothing to do. He made up his mind to ask his stepfather for money to go traveling to Barcelona, and perhaps across the frontier into France, and was about to make his request when his mother forestalled him by announcing at lunch early in April that the banns for Maria’s marriage to Don Fadrique’s son had been read in church that morning.

“I thought she was away in the North. Has she come back?” asked Theo, trying to make his voice sound unconcerned and neutral.

“Yes. Don Vincente is going to marry them in the church on the Sunday after Easter. It’s going to be quite an occasion, with no expense spared, and the church will be beautiful with the spring flowers. I’m looking forward to it,” said Elena happily.

Theo breathed hard, fighting to keep control of his emotions. He’d resolved to live without Maria, but how could he do that when she was now only a few hundred yards away, locked up in her father’s house, about to be sacrificed on the altar of his financial and social ambitions? It felt like condoning a murder.

He could feel his stepfather’s eyes on him as his mother chattered on about the wedding, oblivious to the pain she was causing her son.

“It’s a good match for the girl,” she said. “And her father. He’s going up in the world.”

“I’m sorry,” Theo said, unable to bear any more. He pushed his plate away and stood up. “I’m not feeling well.”

Elena looked alarmed. “What’s the matter, Theo? You’re never unwell. Is it something you’ve eaten?” she asked anxiously.

But he was already at the door. “It’s nothing. I just need some air. That’s all,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

Outside, he ran down the winding streets past the church to Maria’s house. It was just below the main square, a stone’s throw from the café. Despite his long friendship with Antonio, he had never been inside, and he had no idea which room was Maria’s. At the front, the windows were shuttered against the noonday sun, so he walked around to the street behind and gazed up over the white wall of the garden to where a chestnut tree obscured his view of the back of the house. Halfway along was a black wrought iron gate with a silver mesh across the bars to stop people looking in. He tried the handle, but it was locked.

She was here. He knew it. Perhaps she could see him if he stood back from the wall. Or hear him if he called. It was hard to shout when everything all around was silent, but he forced himself.

“Maria! Maria! It’s me: Theo. Can you hear me? Open your window if you can.”

His words felt like stones dropped into a black well with no bottom, and there was no reply, until suddenly, magically, the gate opened.

Theo’s heart leaped. It was her. It had to be. But instead he found himself face-to-face with Bernardo Alvarez, red with fury.

“Come here,” he shouted, taking hold of Theo’s sleeve. “I’ll teach you to come barking round here like a dog after a bitch.”

But Theo twisted away and ran. Behind him, he could hear Maria’s father’s booming voice: “Stay away from my daughter! Next time I’ll take my whip to you, you hear me?”

Theo fully expected Senor Alvarez to complain to his stepfather, but nothing happened, and he sensed that this was because the café owner had decided that he posed no threat to the forthcoming nuptials.

He didn’t know how Alvarez was going to make his daughter say yes at the necessary moment, but no doubt he and the cacique had a plan. Months of merciless confinement might well have broken her spirit.

And Theo was powerless to rescue her. The knowledge was a hard emptiness inside his chest and he took to running so as not to think, pounding up and down the hills as lizards slithered out of his way. He met no one. The town had turned inward, waiting in a taut, curled-up silence for the coming of Easter.

On Maundy Thursday night, he went with his mother and stepfather to church. Andrew had insisted. “You have to see the procession,” he told Theo in the voice he reserved for requests that brooked no denial. “When I was a boy here, I would long for it and fear it in equal measure, and then dream about it for weeks afterward. And the Mass is a part of the whole: the one without the other is like a story without its beginning. You’ll see.”

Theo was amazed. The church, usually half empty, was now full to overflowing. It was as if the population had taken a collective decision to suspend its disbelief for this one day.

In the square outside, latecomers kneeled under the stars on the stony ground and joined the long queue to receive the host from Don Vincente, who was dressed in a gleaming white chasuble trimmed with gold.

Afterward, the servers stripped the altars bare and draped the statues and the pulpit in black cloth, while chosen men stepped forward and lowered the crucified Christ from above the empty tabernacle and walked slowly out of the church and into the night.

Behind them, a small group of white-robed figures stepped forward out of the shadows and took their place at the head of the procession. They must have been at the back of the church, because Theo had not seen them before. They wore high conical cloth hats that entirely covered their faces except for eye slits and looked exactly like the American Klansmen that Theo had seen in newsreels in New York when he was a boy, except that these men were barefoot and several wore chains around their ankles. Two more walked bent forward and with their arms outstretched, tied to the horizontal beams of crude wooden crosses carried on their backs, making them look like strange white birds of prey.

Astonished, Theo turned to his stepfather, who smiled and put his finger to his lips. “I’ll tell you afterward,” he said. “For now, walk and watch. And stay silent.”

No one was speaking, and the only sound was the rhythmic funereal beating of a single drum, except for bursts of sudden wailing song offered up by people kneeling in the gutters as the crucified Christ went swaying past, lit by tall candles and esparto torches. The air was thick with the smell of incense and burning wax.

They had entered the barrio. There was no moon, but in the starlight, Theo recognized the shadowy outlines of the square with Jesús’s father’s shop, where he had spent so much of the previous summer. Down farther, they left the last hovel houses behind them and halted in front of the stone calvary that stood in the grove of olive trees at the entrance to the village.

The bearers carefully set the cross on the ground and the villagers gathered around in a semicircle, bowed their heads, and prayed. In the dancing lights, the village was Palestine and the olive grove where they were standing was the Garden of Gethsemane.

Theo looked at his mother and saw tears streaming down her face as she knelt on the hard ground with the other women, and in that moment he did not share her faith, but he understood it. He leaned down and took her small hand to help her to her feet, and in years afterward, when he wanted to recall her to his memory, it was to this moment that he often returned.

Andrew kept his promise to explain the men in white. In the salon the next day, he took down old leather-bound books from the shelves and laid them open on the low table in front of the fire.

“It began with the Inquisition and the autos-da-fé,” he told Theo, pointing to a picture of a crowded medieval square and men wearing tall conical hats being paraded in front of a platform on which two robed men sat on thrones with a cross set up behind them. “The hats are capirotes . The prisoners wore them as a humiliation when they were taken out from the dungeons to hear their sentences being read. Their crimes were written on them and on the yellow sack shirts they wore underneath. If there were red flames drawn, it meant they might be burnt.”

“What crimes were they accused of?” Theo asked.

“Sorcery and heresy sometimes, but usually it was apostasy. Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 unless they converted to Christianity, and if they carried on practicing their faith in secret, then they were handed over to the Inquisition, who tortured and burnt them because the Church and the Crown required Spain to be pure. Limpieza —cleaning—they called it. See,” Andrew said, pointing to pictures of torments in the other books, from which Theo recoiled. “As I told you before, this is a cruel country.”

He paused, shaking his head, before he went on: “Later, after the Inquisition was disbanded, penitents—or nazarenos , as they called themselves—wore the capirotes but extended them into hoods to cover their faces so as to hide their shame. But then they raise them on Easter Sunday when all is forgiven, and you can see who they really are.” Andrew laughed.

On Sunday morning they returned to the church, waiting outside until the doors opened on the stroke of eight o’clock. Six men in black suits emerged, carrying a golden throne at shoulder height, on which a life-size alabaster statue of the Virgin was seated under the newly finished embroidered silk canopy. No expense had been spared. The Virgin was wearing a silver crown and a shimmering green gown with a long train that flowed over the back of the float to where it was being held up by two other men, also dressed in black. One of them was Pedrito. Theo hadn’t recognized him at first without his white suit, and he laughed at the way he had been given the lightest load to carry. But Pedrito didn’t see the joke. He walked carefully with his head held high. Carrying the Virgin and her train was the greatest honor the village could bestow on its men, and he basked in his moment of glory.

Behind Pedrito, the nazarenos fell into step, although this time without their crosses and chains, followed by the donas in black, who included Elena, wearing a long lace veil, and the villagers bringing up the rear. They all walked in silence but with a suppressed joy that made this daylight procession entirely different from the one on Thursday night. Theo could see that some people were carrying trumpets and drums, and several had rifles over their shoulders.

At the head of the procession, the statue of Mary bobbed her crowned head. She had found the tomb empty, and now she was out seeking her son.

When they got to the calvary, a different Christ was waiting for them. The dead man on the cross had been replaced by a beatific, standing Savior dressed in a green robe like his mother and holding a sheaf of barley in his right hand and a bunch of flowers in his left. The land, too, had been redeemed from the death of winter and brought back to life.

Slowly the Virgin was lowered from her throne and made to curtsy to Jesus. Three times up and down, and on the third his arms reached out on strings toward her, and everyone erupted into cheering. “ ?Viva la Purisima! ?Viva El Senor! ” they shouted, and beat their drums and blew their trumpets and fired their rifles into the air. Above them in the village the church bells, silent since Thursday, answered the cacophony with peals of celebration, and the nazarenos pulled back their hoods, blinking and smiling in the morning sunshine.

After a few minutes, the bearers raised up the statues and began to climb the hill, but one of their number was missing. Behind them, voices were crying out in alarm as they gathered around a figure lying on the ground. Face up, glassy-eyed, covered with the rose petals that everyone had thrown at the moment of the statues’ embrace, Pedrito lay motionless with a crimson stain spreading out over his white shirtfront. In just the same place where the wine had spilled on him a few days before.

Theo took off running. Past the crowd and the olive trees where he saw a nazareno ’s robe and hood hanging tangled in the branches, and up through the empty streets. Faster and faster until he got to Maria’s house. There was no sign of movement at the front, but at the back he almost fell over a bicycle that was lying on its side, discarded on the ground. And up ahead, by the open garden gate, he could see two figures on horseback.

“Wait!” he shouted, running after them. “Wait!”

They turned. Primitivo had blood on his hands, and Maria was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, with her golden-brown hair blown up around her face and her blue eyes wild with excitement.

“We can’t,” she said.

“Do you know what he did?” Theo asked breathlessly, pointing at Primitivo.

“Yes,” she said. And there was ecstasy in her voice, as if she had been enraptured by the unexpected absoluteness of the deed.

Primitivo sat up in his saddle, breathing in her admiration.

“Where are you going?” Theo asked.

“Barcelona,” she said. “Once we’re through the hills.”

“Why are you telling him?” Primitivo demanded angrily. He looked like he wanted to knife Theo too.

“Because he’s one of us,” she said. “He saved us. Remember?”

“Have you any money?” Theo asked.

“Just a little,” she said, shaking her head.

He looked down at his wrist and took off his watch, handing it up to her. “It’s worth a lot,” he said. “The case and the dial are gold.”

“Thank you,” she said, and leaning down, she kissed him and ran her finger over his face down from his forehead to his chin, sealing him like an envelope.

“Don’t forget me!” she said. And turning her horse, she rode away.