just men. Certain women who had become teachers under the Republic were removed, as were known anarchists’ wives. None of it was legal, of course, but there seemed no means of stopping it, when hate and power were in play.
As for the rogue elements on the left – despite the posters Harold had seen plastered around Malaga, imploring them to stop shaming their political and trade organizations and to cease their brutalities – they went for retired civil guards, Catholic sympathizers, people they knew to be rich, people they believed to be rich. Houses were looted, their property damaged – and it was this fear that often struck first into the imagination of the middle classes, rather than the chance they would be shot.
The Schlosses did not fear for themselves. They thought no one would touch them, as foreigners. They were nothing to do with all this. Death was taking place beyond their village, outside municipal authority and the sight of the people. The violence in the country – against both the body of a village and a villager’s bullet-riddled corpse – was concealed, although everyone knew it was there. Because you couldn’t see it, you carried on. It was odd, Olive thought, how you could live alongside this; how you could know all this was happening, and still not want to leave.
She had long ago abandoned trying to listen to the BBC to seek the facts, for it offered little more than an improbable-sounding hybrid of information from Madrid and Seville, adding it together and dividing it by London. Yet the Republican government stations were one long barrage of victory speeches and claims of triumph, which were rather undermined by actual events. Granada’s frequency always crackled, not a word could be heard – and the same applied to the northern cities, whose radio waves could not penetrate the southern mountains.
The city of Malaga, however, was constantly broadcasting denials, rumours and myths; Republican calls to arms, meeting times and orders to build a new Spain, free of fascists. And on the other side, the alarming nationalist invective was a frequency in Seville. In the daytime, it would play music and personal announcements, as if there was no conflict going on at all. But by night, the insurgents would broadcast, and although there was still much bombast and warmongering in it, Olive used it to deduce the changing state of her adopted country’s fortunes. She listened as Queipo de Llano, the general who had first broadcast from Seville, maintained his unrelenting bloodthirstiness, crying out that there was a cancer in Spain, a body of infidels that only death would remove.
It was unnerving, all of it; and yet there were heartening stories of people refusing to do exactly what the generals wanted. Teresa reported how a priest in the neighbouring village prevented a Falangist gang from shooting the atheists in his parish. She had also heard rumours of leftists reprimanding Anarchists for trying to burn down the local church, even hiding right-wing neighbours in their bread ovens, protecting them from certain death when the radicals turned up.
Olive, listening to these tales, could see how most people were massed in the middle. They wanted no disturbance, desperate just to live their lives away from these demonstrations of power, talks of purge, of brutality sprayed in blood against a whitewashed wall. But their desire couldn’t change the truth of Arazuelo’s atmosphere. She would walk into the village and see people’s pinched faces, worrying who was going to defend whom when Arazuelo’s day of reckoning finally came.
Isaac purchased a rifle in Malaga from a trade-union contact, who was fond of poaching his boss’s boar. He reinforced the bolt across the cottage door, but he knew this would mean nothing to someone determined to get him. More ‘people of interest’ to the nationalist rebels had left their villages to hide out in the countryside, or join the militias run by the Communist party in Malaga. But this wasn’t far enough for Teresa. She wanted him to leave.
‘I think you should go north,’ she said. ‘You’ve made too many enemies here. You don’t fit. The left won’t trust you because of our father, and the right don’t trust you for not being his legitimate son.’
Isaac regarded his sister, the new severity in her face. ‘You don’t fit here either, Tere,’ he said.
‘But you’re the one who put a bullet through the Madonna. You’re the one who’s spent his life teaching peasants their rights. You’re the one—’