We heard the roar of a herd of bison, but none of us batted an eyelid: it’s always the same when the Madrid Express comes in. The railway station is very near, and the whole district adjusts its clocks – more or less accurately – according to Renfe’s earthquake chart.

“It’s seven o’clock,” says Odilo, butting in on Mungo, a customer who used the afternoon to come and do some passport photos.

In a quarter of an hour, the Northern goods train, which normally registers a much lower intensity, will depart, but this arrival just now is still shaking the rolls of film that invade the shelves in the display case. It’s a tip from the locomotive, which carries on coughing and spluttering at the platform for a while.

“It was only fourteen minutes late today,” remarks Mamede, the tram-driver who after a day’s work goes back to his apartment on trolleybus number 10, a Hispano-Suiza which does the route from Porta Real to Os Mallos.

I don’t talk much at this time, having filled my boss, Odilo Querentes, in on what’s been happening. It’s in the afternoons when he goes out with his Leica slung over his shoulder to shoot half a roll of what he calls “my things”, which then become postcards, if he’s been lucky, or end up in the containers of quince paste he uses as filing cabinets, if the hunting was poor.

He spends the early hours of the morning in the lab, developing or doing studio portraits if there’s a customer with special requests, as is always the case with those who want to arouse streams of tears in their relatives in America. On the other hand, if the customer’s only asking for passport photos, I can sometimes look after them myself, as I just did with Mungo Ures.

Having propped the pole he uses for lighting streetlamps – and for dousing them in the morning – against the wall, the conceited man checked himself out a hundred times in front of the mirror. The mirror was too low, so he had to bend down a bit, but he didn’t conclude his examination until he’d managed to hide his bald patch by raking what little hair he had left with all the skill of an experienced sweeper.

“Bibiana, make me look like an artist,” he said.

He then said my name a couple of times, “Bibiana Brea, Bibiana Brea,” before continuing, “The prettiest assistant in all the city. I just love the way you look now, with that long, billowy mane,” he likes to extract words from forgotten corners of the dictionary, “but you were much prettier last year with that haircut like Ava Gardner. You were a monument waiting to be erected on the Obelisk.” When Mungo comes out with such things, my skin goes the colour of wine, Bordeaux perhaps.

It’s just as well Mamede Aneiros then came in with a blue cloth jacket that erased my astonished face from the shop-window mirror. He only said “afternoon” (he tends to keep chitchat down to a minimum) as he turned to stop the door banging. Then, as I flicked my ponytail behind me, I noticed his eyes on the anchor embroidered on the front of my white dress, savouring my rotundities. I didn’t have to go red, however, because he was the one, feeling more embarrassed than me, who diverted his eyes’ compliments to the calendar on the wall.

“Deportivo just signed Dagoberto Moll again,” Mungo never passes up an opportunity to talk about football, and there’s a healthy harvest of fresh news today. “He’s been brought in by the new manager, Ernesto Pons, to boss it about on the playing field.”

“That player’s finished,” Odilo joins the fray, and I know I have no choice but to endure another episode of the unmissable, unending series of men’s revelries. “We’d do better to give a chance to some of the youngsters, like that Amancio they discovered playing in the Amateur League.”

“What position does he play in?” insists Mamede, more so as not to be left out than because he has any real interest in the matter.

“On the wing,” explains Mungo. “He was a real hit at Victoria, Polo’s hardly an option in that position, but I suspect Pons doesn’t have it in him to give him a place on the first team.”

“It’s seven o’clock,” says Odilo as the Madrid Express sets the whole district vibrating. Even the radio, which was talking to itself on the mantelpiece, raises its voice in response to the racket. It was broadcasting the pips, and it follows this with an orchestral tune very much in line with the modern American style making such inroads in the dancehalls. Then it’s Enrique Mariñas’ voice which makes itself heard.

The presenter, a veritable institution in the city, emits a greeting from Riazor Stadium: “Spanish National Radio will bring you the first official act of the Caudillo, Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde, after his arrival yesterday at the Pazo de Meirás, where he will spend another summer with his family.

“The Head of State chose to inaugurate some well-deserved holidays in this his native region by playing a game of golf on the greens at A Zapateira, from where he is now arriving at the stadium, dear listeners.

“On its feet, Riazor gives a warm round of applause to the Caudillo and his entourage as they occupy their seats in the director’s box.

“We can see the Cardinal-Archbishop of Santiago, the Captain General of the 8th Military Region, the Admiral of the Cantabrian Maritime Department, the Civil Governor and Provincial Head of the Movement, the Trades Union Provincial Delegate…

“And of course the mayor of the host city.

“Not a single authority wanted to miss this match between the national selections of Spain and Portugal. Both teams are now coming out onto the playing field.

“As is the Count of Fenosa and Member of Parliament Don Pedro Barrié de la Maza, whose job it is to perform the ceremonial kick-off…”

Ding-dong…

The announcement of the departure of the Northern goods train, which is just leaving, slips into the shop from the loudspeaker on the platform, and Mamede pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to see what time it is: “Quarter past seven. At least Renfe is punctual when it comes to departures.”

Mungo carries on waxing lyrical about Deportivo’s shortcomings: “They should put another youngster, Gantes, in goal. Up front, Reija still has enough in him to provide some good assists. As for the rest, they should transfer the ones they can and give a kick up the bum to those who aren’t good for anything.”

At this point a deathly silence falls on the shop and we stare at each other. Mamede’s mouth falls open like a mailbox. His unhideable fingers are a gag on Mungo’s lips. Mungo reacts by clasping his head in a way that wrecks his hair’s plank mould. I let out a Lady of Mt Carmel, and my boss rushes to turn up the volume.

“Democratic Spain here. Attention, co-citizens of all ideologies, we interrupt the broadcasting of this match to read out a joint declaration by the forces opposed to the Fascist regime. The groups that make up the National Union for the Republic, to the Spanish people:

“May this action, with which those of us in the guerrilla movement bid a final farewell to the armed struggle, serve as an invitation to all those who feel the ideals of a just society running through their veins to back the National Political Strike that will be called. The time has come for all weapons, including ours, to fall silent, to let the people speak…”

Some individual shots, followed by the blast of a machine gun, interrupt the intruder’s words, and our silence becomes even more deathly when a shrill, high-pitched tone follows that voice which advocates what so many families have resigned themselves to not hoping for, even in their wildest dreams. I let out another Lady of Mt Carmel, and the echo of the final detonations is broken in the look of these people, with perhaps a “Long Live the Republic!” that has been stuck in their throats for many a long year.

“Is there nobody here?” asks Mateo Lan as he enters the shop. He comes to while away the time and to tell dangerous stories (hardly anything gets stuck in his throat). As always, he hasn’t shaved in days; as hardly ever, he is accompanied by Camilo, the local seamstress Lola’s boy.

“Shussssh…” respond those inside, and Mateo, who is brought a stool by Camilo, doesn’t understand: “Could somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

The owner, who has turned off the radio, is just about to do this when Camilo, dark and attractive as a firebrand, gives Mungo a nudge and all of us, me included, turn to face the door, rolling out an imaginary carpet so the woman coming in can drag her feet over it. It’s Trina, who sings in the boîte at the Embajador. These brutes claim she’s a real female, though I’m not quite sure what that means. There are also those who say she likes me.

* * *

Patients are in the habit of leaving the sanatorium feet first. Today, since for the first time in ages I had enough energy to go for a walk, I ventured into the furthest building, where I saw two vast rows of coffins, a vision which served to confirm the obvious: my own appointment with destiny.

Of a morning, the gardener loads a coffin onto his wheelbarrow and transports it down melancholy paths, the ones we sick people rarely get to visit, to a room which that very afternoon will be occupied by another unfortunate. They will have removed the dead person by the time the new patient arrives, but you could say the echo of the hammer that sealed the box still clings to the small mirror with its white frame.

On the mattress protector there may even be the sickly batik of a red gobbet its owner didn’t have time to deposit in the spittoon. How revolting. Even without that stain, however, multiple flecks of phlegm adhere with unusual obstinacy to the porcelain of those omnipresent vessels, which, like everything else, heralds an enormous revulsion towards ourselves.

I remember when I dared to undertake yesterday’s outing the temperature was delicious, I almost didn’t need the gown, but I wanted to put it on in order to conceal the network of blue, transparent veins the tarantula of evil has woven on my neck. Glasses smashed by fits of coughing, coughing which isn’t necessarily cruel.

When it is cruel, when it’s an unstoppable tornado, I notice how it tears cells out of my lungs, sticks pins into my temples, destroys my throat with axe blows. And everything is etched on my body, so, even though I’m not all that cold, shame drives me to cover myself at all times. Like today, despite the wonderful weather we’re having at the end of a pleasant summer. 72 days already as an inpatient of Oza.

“How’s it going today?”

María, my wife, arrived just after lunch, as on the previous 71 days. She did this like always: walking to save the peseta and 25 cents of the tram; taking off her new shoes after Catro Camiños so as not to wear them out unnecessarily. It’s as if I could see her: in the selfsame basket with the apples I never eat, she carefully places the shoes, wrapping them in a cloth so they won’t come into contact with the pieces of fruit. Then, leaving the Castros lookout behind, she cuts across Lazareto Beach, where she almost always sees a bather she knows and tells them about me.

Finally, at the entrance to the sanatorium, she sits on the stone bench, brushes the sand off her feet and replaces the shoes to look presentable. At this point in time, she also evicts the slightest hint of pessimism that I know affects her solitude at home from her mind. At this point in time, she is ready to greet everybody with a resounding “good afternoon”.

Here, next to me, she never stops talking positively. She gives me strokes of docility, suggests shared plans for the morrow, and is capable of coming up with new blandishments every day. That is how it is each afternoon, the two of us alone, almost always in room 47, until Dr Segade comes around, dishing out white lies.

“How did he respond to treatment today?” asks María.

“More or less well…”

“How long are you going to keep him here?” she insists.

The years did not pass in vain for us, but her face retains embers of the soft beauty with which she stopped my potential suicide’s impulses when we met. In the last moment she will put on a headscarf and look younger, and I will be able to imagine her as when I loved her without corners, morning and night, breathing. Why can’t I still?

“Tranquillity and good food,” remarks the doctor, as always when he leaves. I carry on thinking about María.

The grey hair of today did not exist, nor the wrinkles – they respected her quite a lot more than me, the wrinkles – and she hadn’t lost those kilos whose absence reveals a heavy load of concerns. Life wasn’t easy; actually, it was quite difficult. But we were young, possessed by an ideal, and no obstacle was impossible.

As today, María did other walks back then. I was on the sixth floor of Carabanchel with a death penalty that was then commuted to twelve years. She was working in two houses in Atocha and would bring me sandwiches and flattery, her words of love. And I, in my cell, understood all my fellow prisoners envied me. And she, in the world, did what she could to make sure everyone envied us.

From her visits there remained thick sweaters she herself had knitted, pies she’d cooked the night before, jars of aspirin for my frequent migraines… Also, in the warden’s office, pages of signatures she’d forced out of neighbours on trips she made home to be with her parents. Those papers denied many things that were true, but I was touched that they should demand the release of a Red: me, Cosme Leis.

Sometimes she would turn up with other papers. Sheets of handwritten poems, verses she went and copied down in the Athenaeum library. Verses like cheques María would give me so I could travel first-class through the tunnel of prison nights. Hypnotic poetry, incendiary like our love, which I committed to memory: poetry, love.

Why did my feelings gradually wane, María fade away? Why am I relieved every time she says, “Cosme, see you tomorrow”? Why do I hardly have any pangs of conscience because of my betrayal of her steady loyalty through all these difficult years? They are questions without an answer I repeat to myself at this hour, when she has gone.

Today, my strength permits me the daring act of going for a walk in this prison in Oza. Until I get further than before I was operated on, and for a moment everything vanishes: the nuns in the corridors with their pillowcases and ironed towels; the doctors and the dumb consolation of their set phrases; and she, Elisenda.

The two rows of coffins capture my attention. Which is destined for me? If I go closer, I won’t find the date, but I’m sure I’ll be able to read my name written on one of them in chalk. And yet my steps no longer permit me to carry on. There before me is the certainty of tomorrow, which gets stuck in my throat with a ball of air. Followed by dyspnoea.

The worst part is it’s just an aperitif, and when I sit down to recover, I witness a scene that cuts the ground from under my feet: the nurse on my floor, Elisenda, drags a man I do not know to the storeroom with the coffins. He kisses her, and she does not repel his adhesive hands, which remove her gown, her underwear – white flags to show she has surrendered.

I have spent the last weeks of my life secretly in love with Elisenda, who is a comrade, my only contact with the party cells in Coruña. Obviously I cannot bear what I’m seeing and do not wish to offer indulgence to anything – to their games, which carry them off to regions of pleasure I hope are not reasonably satisfactory; to their speech, which I have no trouble interpreting because I am familiar with what comes before.

“Remember they’ll ask you if you know how to use it.”

“Don’t worry, the only thing I have to tell them is not to implicate me.”

“Remember to wear a waistcoat,” adds the nurse. “It’ll be at seven, tomorrow at seven in the evening.”

I drag myself away as best I can before they retrieve their clothes. I don’t know where I get the strength to escape that nightmare; I cannot say how it is I am not struck down on the spot. And yet I make it to my door, 47. In the distance, the early evening lights of the city. A plume of smoke climbs from a boat towards the sky, where there are no longer any seagulls.

A torrent of blood is unleashed in my insides, and I place my mouth over a bucket, which I fill halfway while assuming I also will leave this sanatorium feet first. It doesn’t last long, and that’s what stops me working out what kind of cataclysm the next steps lead to.

I make my way towards the phone. When I reach it, I ask to be put through to the police.

I have spoken to them.

After that, it took me three ampoules just to get to sleep.

* * *

Spanish National Radio has part of the studios of its north-western broadcasting station in a modernist building surrounded by palm trees. It’s a quarter to seven, and the cock pigeons on the pavements irradiate seduction while the females offer little resistance. The evening would be placid were it not for the cacophony of loud noises a flock of starlings husks against the sky.

They also imprint the product of their quick relief on the central avenue in the gardens. That is why people have sought shelter beneath the awnings of fairground stalls and walking along the pavement is now easier. Something Recarei, the forty-year-old in a full-length suit, celebrates infinitely.

He has gone past the two merry-go-rounds, which emitted notes from their music boxes through the loudspeaker, and as he comes alongside the platform with the bumper cars he checks his comrades can follow the plan. Rilo and Trasbache have already reached the big wheel – their gestures on the other side of the latticework confirm this. He finds Tobío, the youngest, crouched down behind the stall that offers photographs in a minute – his gesture also calms him down.

This group of four men, only four, is all that remains of the Galician Maquis, that stubborn disobedience of years of penitence which in a couple of hours is due to be a completed episode of national history. Recarei realized long ago they were swimming against the current. Recarei saw all the others abandon the cause because of fatigue or orders from Paris. But Recarei could not but continue until today.

Today is far from being the tomorrow we fought for from all the yesterdays, he thinks. It’s really just a date to round off the entry, even if it’s only a few lines, I think I have a right to in the future encyclopaedia of this fucked country, he muses as well, as he reaches the top of the stairs and signals to the others to follow him.

“May God grant us a good evening,” he says, and when the janitor replies, “Good evening, Father,” is when Rilo and Trasbache and Tobío take charge of the lobby, trusting in the persuasive capacity of their rusty weapons.

Recarei lifts his cassock and, with the Kalashnikov in his hand, aims at the janitor, ordering him to take them to the broadcasting station’s control post. “Hail Mary Most Pure,” he greets the strange retinue of employees they come across in the corridors. “Conceived without sin,” they seem to reply mentally before Rilo locks them up in the studio with the piano.

“Do you know how to use that…?” the trabucaire priest asks the man in the waistcoat.

That was what they had agreed: you have to address the man in the waistcoat, but you mustn’t implicate him. He will be responsible for handling the console and getting the microphone ready.

“Yes. What do you want from me?”

“Open it up so it’s ready to speak.”

The Riazor technician is stunned, and Trasbache, as he settles down on the other side of the aquarium, asks the guy in the waistcoat:

“Hey you, will they hear this in the whole of Spain?”

The technician nods. He is seized by a fear that was far from his thoughts when he had a good motive to say yes, he would collaborate. Despite this, he clears the line for Recarei: “Democratic Spain here…”

The studios face the bay, and Tobío’s eyes wander from the Ferry Terminal to the liner preparing to take another two hundred emigrants to Venezuela the next day. Through Tobío’s mind there processes a lengthy collection of preparatory rites with which he endeavoured to turn the tide of fortune in their favour. He had picked out his sky-blue shirt, put on different coloured socks and hung his amulet around his neck.

Trasbache had come up at this point: “Why all this ceremony?” The youngest member of the group, with a breath that was also the sigh of a self-absorbed dreamer, had pushed the hair off his forehead: “I want luck to be on our side on this mission.” Trasbache had come out with an ironic smile: “There’s no need to be superstitious, it brings bad luck.”

The Customs building, which he could see while keeping the staff at a safe distance, reminded Trasbache of the prison in Porto de Santa María, where he spent two years, after the three in Ocaña. His right cheek had yet to be split by a large scar, and he would send kilometric letters of extensive love and limited struggle to his wife, who always replied by stoking the fire.

It was only after he was released that he found out his daughter had written all those answers, taking the place of her dead mother. He had been surprised she’d never been to see him, but had wanted to put this down to the scarcities of that period which the letters gave as an excuse. Then, on learning the truth, he lost all interest and decided to join the guerrilla movement.

For him now is the armed police’s first volley. An impact that causes him to draw a brushstroke of blood across the tiles as he heads for the control post with the intention of bidding farewell to his contact. It’s just that this is also Rilo’s initial reaction on realizing he is cornered, and his is the projectile that switches off the current in the heart of the guy who was marked out to be the comrade nurse’s destiny.

Rilo had been distracted by the wake of the only freighter the pilot was helping to guide into harbour. A few boats bobbed around it, and the rowing of these little vessels reminded him of the rustle of unending skirts.

The fire of repression brings the swing of memory to a standstill at its peak and, on seeing they have shut Recarei up forever and Trasbache won’t be walking anymore, Rilo asks Tobío to tell the others not to wait for them. “Get ready to die,” he adds, even though the young lad can’t hear him because he has already stuck his head out of the window. An exasperated shout, “Go!”, is the last thing the last man in the commando manages to emit before a couple of cocky blasts from the machine gun finally put paid to so much determination: “Go!”

* * *

Recarei isn’t coming.

Artieda prolonged the third of his meetings by more than thirty minutes. He was in shirt sleeves, despite the viciousness of the wind, his elbows propped against a milestone and a heap of crushed cigarette butts at his feet. The sun was behind him, and he whiled away the time drawing the outline of his silhouette with his eyes, a stain like the prints his friend Ibarrola produced for the pages of Mundo Obrero.

It was a still shadow that went quite a lot further than the gravel in the ditch, almost to the white line that marked the border with the road, and only fizzled out when he heard the splutter of an approaching engine. He then crouched down behind some broom bushes.

One would have said he exerted complete control over his nerves, but after two unsuccessful attempts he felt his pulse running away with him. So he decided to occupy the final wait by taking a walk in the locality. To begin with, as a precaution, he sought out shortcuts that were asps in the ferns, coriander and red clover, but this only occupied a quarter of an hour.

He then wandered down cart tracks, the ruts of the wheels like two parallel rails, and stayed in this other place a little longer, putting the darkest blackberries from the brambles in his mouth. In the end, since the people from the few neighbouring houses were probably all working, he dared to walk towards the road, which took him to the estuary.

The tide was out. The strips of watery paper drawn on the sand were a bristly coat of armour from the rays of an indifferent sun. He was in his own country, but Artieda felt like a foreigner and at that moment decided to sit down. From the jacket draped over his left arm – he had buried his hand in the niche of the pocket when he started walking – he took out a small package.

He removed the wrapping and opened the bread. He positioned the sardines to his taste, instinctively closed his eyes and took the first bite. He hadn’t eaten for more than a day, but he wasn’t hungry. The only reason he’d bought that sandwich was because a woman had asked him to when he was waiting at the taxi rank: “It’s the only one I have left. It’s yours for two pesetas fifty.”

He looked around, searching for a spring; the lack of success, however, made him get up. On his watch, he saw there were twenty minutes before the last of the three appointments, and this encouraged him to head upstream. The atmosphere imposed by the branches of ash and alder afforded him a pleasurable widening, a sensation which increased when he was able to descend to some stepping stones and kneel to slake his thirst.

The foreigner discovered that the ford created a clearing in the vegetation. There, when a sun bouncing off the palm of the water hurt his eyes, the foreigner made a visor with his hands and got ready to return to the meeting point. He was in for a desperate wait, a metaphor for his foreigner’s existence.

Recarei isn’t coming, he concludes after a good while. Recarei or any other comrade, and I’m going to run out of time if I have to go back to the town on foot. Though it doesn’t matter much now, Artieda says to himself, because the only important thing is to get the guerrilla fighters to safety. As for the rest, if we don’t turn up, the captain doesn’t need to be implicated, he’ll just leave on the next high tide.

What matters least is being right about any decisions he has to make while on the move. Where to go – to the city I came from or the one in the mission? Will the documentation I have be valid if the group has been captured? If I stay in the Mariña until the panorama has cleared, what will I say to the Civil Guard when it turns up, as it surely will?

Artieda decides to dispel doubts in a Rousseauian fashion by walking to the first village where he can find an inn. He has been in worse situations and always managed to avoid prison, even the police station. And yet everything now is slightly different: Recarei isn’t going to make the appointment and he’s been waiting longer than is prudent. It’s time to leave, he thinks.

A blue-coloured Opel Kapitän comes up alongside the telegraph pole. It’s the only car that’s stopped, and it would be his were it not for the fact there is only a woman driver inside. Artieda lights his last cigarette, and when he senses from twenty feet that nervousness is going to make the woman pull away is when he finally decides to show himself.

She watches him approach. He is a tall, slim man. With glasses, his face is sharpened like an unruly thought. He also has tufts of white hair and a moderately curved back, but his appearance inspires confidence. That’s why she says, “Have you been waiting long?”

He is completely taken aback by the driver’s accent, and yet he’s almost made up his mind to reveal his identity. A foreigner, the foreigner he felt himself to be just a moment ago, talking to another foreigner, most probably English. “I didn’t think anyone was coming,” he replies.

He then lowers his head to the height of the window and notices the headband holding back her hair, the unbuttoned jumper and the freckles revealed by her cleavage. Despite the fact he has always taken care to adhere to the safety rules involved in clandestine warfare, he is tempted to open the passenger door and blurt out, “What happened to Recarei?” But it’s only a second because what he is about to ask doesn’t exceed the bounds of prudence.

“Don’t you have something to say?”

The English woman has forgotten the password and suspects he won’t be willing to give her much time to remember.

“It had something to do with birds,” she garbles, and Artieda thinks that should do it, but he’s going to insist she remember the exact phrase (“there are a lot of sparrows in these parts”). It’s just that suddenly the sound of another car is heard in the distance, which abruptly brings matters to a head: he tells her to stick the Opel in the branch that leads to the railway halt.

The orography in this diversion is pleasantly healthy, especially when they realize that the bothersome car, a Fiat Topolino, has driven straight past. She introduces herself, “My name is Susan Temple,” and then fills him in on the outcome of the mission. “They’re probably all dead.” To which she adds the following footnote, “It was never a good idea from the start.”

Artieda enters a shifting form of mutism that is so restless the stranger cannot help breaking it:

“Where would you like me to take you?”

“They’re waiting for us on board the Trona,” the ship that did the route between Vigo and Bilbao, “but the safest thing would be not to appear.”

Had things gone according to plan, the driver, having dropped them in Ribadeo, would have taken the car back to Coruña. Susan’s lover, Mamede Aneiros, had left the keys for her in the ignition inside the Tram Company’s garage. The car belonged to the company and, had things proceeded smoothly, nobody would have noticed its absence until Monday, by which time it would have been back. The way things turned out, however, the number plate “C-9.430” is the best clue they can offer the enemy.

They resolve to abandon the car. Artieda tells the English woman to go to the halt while he stays behind to remove the plates. The branch is a long avenue overshadowed by two rows of oriental planes, and the man, though in theory his task is to attend to other affairs, can’t help following the woman with his eyes the whole way.

The hair in bunches, the emerald-coloured jumper, the rustic dress made pregnant by the breeze, and the striking moccasins. When she crouches down inside the stone hut, he thinks she looks like the leading character in a spy film. He then gets down to work while keeping a lookout.

At this point she lets out a cry. Her intention is to stop the first train going past, and one is just about to do so. Artieda hears, and runs and runs until he reaches her. It doesn’t matter which direction it’s going in, Ferrol or Gijón. Or what kind of train it is. The main thing is to say goodbye to that place as soon as possible.

Fate, or destiny, has it that the convoy is heading east. There are four passenger carriages and two goods carriages, and they realize fate, or destiny, is being kind when the ticket inspector who charges them for two tickets to Gijón tells a neighbouring passenger they are travelling without a detachment of guards.

They decide they will separate in Gijón, where Susan will make the return journey while he carries on to a city he doesn’t specify. They are in a carriage without shotguns, surrounded by chatterboxes doing short trips, and Artieda allows the early morning to seal his eyes with the restorative effect of a long overdue siesta.

“Don’t sleep,” the English woman asks him. “Everybody’s got off, and I need to talk.”

“The less we know about each other, the better. Besides, I got up very early today.”

“I bet it wasn’t as early as me.”

They shouldn’t be telling each other these things, but what harm can there be in an insignificant conversation? “I got up at a quarter to seven,” he says.

“Well, I got up at six on the dot,” she wins and grants herself the right to relate all her actions during the day.

When the alarm clock went off, the sun had yet to appear in Fisterra and only the crumbs of the stars’ clarity put a somnambulant light in the sky of Bornalle, the remote village she withdrew to when her first great love changed her life.

She lives from the academy she set up in the basement of her house and had to write a note to leave on the door for her pupils: “There are no classes today. They will start again on 2nd September.” As for the rest, that dawn did not offer insurmountable reticences and the day was already fair by the time she headed to Muros, which meant she only had to apply the dynamo to the rim of her bike for a couple of minutes. Until the sun took flight in a disciplined fashion and in the properly established way.

A Finisterre bus was waiting for her in the town at half past eight, which would arrive in Coruña in time for lunch. She had done this journey many times, to meet up with Mamede, but that was the first occasion on which she was doing it in order to take part in an episode of the resistance. She was afraid.

She calmed down a bit when she found everything in order at the company garage, meaning all she missed was a kiss from her current great love when she turned on the ignition. Mamede Aneiros, however, was at the wheel of trolleybus number 10 at that precise moment, and this would serve as an alibi.

Susan wanted to be a hero at the National Radio. Four lives depended on her, and not even the shots or the roar of battle were enough to divert her determination. Only when several squads of armed police arrived from the stadium, and the situation became untenable, was she left with no choice but to heed what Tobío’s exasperation shouted out to her: “Go!”

She escaped police reinforcements on the quays, dodging heaps of iron ore and mountains of salt in her flight. There was just one police van following her, and the only difficulty that almost meant she got caught was the lack of petrol. She didn’t dare fill up the tank until she’d gone past Betanzos.

“I knew I was running the risk they would catch me, but I got lucky and my pursuers went in the direction of Madrid after Ponte Nova. I had taken the turning for the Mariña.”

Had it not been for the laxity of his drowsiness, Artieda would never have allowed Susan to go into such detail. The good thing was he would hardly remember a thing and chatting had freed her of demons, so everybody was happy.

“Gijón!” came the announcement over the loudspeakers.

“We’ll part ways here,” he finally woke up. A languid gesture preceded his lethargic activity. “We’ll get off together, but say goodbye before I go and buy another ticket.”

Smoke invaded the platform, the passengers stepped in revolting soot, and an annoying background hum made any attempt at conversation useless. They were the only ones not carrying baggage. Just a superhuman fear, which nobody could see. A panic that would weigh down their paths for the coming days, at least.

“What’s your name?”

“Artieda.”

“I know that. What else?”

“Just Artieda.”

* * *

A traditional song slips without words over lips bitten by disappointment. “Santa Bárbara” perhaps, sung at the request of the stowaway in a barge travelling up the Nervión of memory without permission. A song he should never have remembered, because all it does is air the defeats of a defeated existence. A tune that escapes from his hands as he listlessly loosens the knot of his tie.

A single man took possession of the only thing he has in the world: this rented room in a cheap hotel in Indautxu Square. The landlady thinks he’s a travelling salesman after that explanation, “I travel the branch of tinned food.” Now, indoors, he is only surrounded by the redundancy of a couple of suitcases, which contain nothing but past newspapers, together with his only jacket, hanging on the hook on the door, and some other belongings that can be reduced to a couple of shirts and changes of clothes he has spread over the mattress.

Lazy rays glint against the basin in the bathroom, the glare of a reflection explodes on the nickel of the tap, and from the wardrobe mirror comes an image of dusk in his city which arouses that song again, “Santa Bárbara”, injecting his spirit with the chloroform of this end to a long Sunday afternoon in Bilbao.

With nothing to occupy him, awaiting instructions that may arrive at any time, a single man sits on his bed. He is going to play patience and thinks, I’ve done this so many times I know fifty or sixty ways of playing patience.

Before dealing the cards, he empties his pockets on the cloth on the bedside table. The bits and pieces surround a bottle whose upturned lid serves as a thimble and he pours himself a tipple. He then sits down, lights a cigarette and thinks, I must be the world’s foremost authority on patience.

One after another, they all turn up. He also thinks, Lucky at cards… And again, Perhaps patience is not a game. There have been several tipples, almost a pack of cigarettes, and the single man is beginning to float in a disarranged, sticky lethargy. He then tries to refresh the atmosphere by opening the window a little. An unsummoned mist has daubed the violet hour by now, and he distractedly breathes in wet, thick air that only enlivens him in the beginning. He sees himself getting ready to fight to open a means of escape in another of his many nights of balancing the books.

On closing the window, he takes a first furtive glance in the mirror. This is followed by a longer one as he takes off his tie and sees his hair, which is normally moist, is very tousled, so he smooths it down. Like this, watching himself, he unbuttons his shirt and drops his trousers. What appears is a dark, thin body already in its later years. He sees himself as a stranger: Let me introduce you to Artieda.

It’s a good time to reread the day’s newspapers, which carry information about Recarei’s death, but say nothing of Susan. Is she safe? He retraces the episode of his arrival at Concordia Station, his early-morning steps along Hurtado de Amézaga. The brevity of broken sleep in this very room… The walk he never should have gone for in Doña Casilda Park, after lunch.

In the end, he grabs a small notebook and writes imprudently, “I was the man you saw on the tram. I wanted to ask you if you have another child, if you live better now, if the farmhands are well. And yet all I can tell you is don’t talk about me even to your husband. And I think about you a lot.”

It’s a note to leave in the cemetery, camouflaged somehow next to their mother’s niche. He’d felt the urge to write it straightaway, but had almost immediately resolved not to do so. However, he didn’t stop turning the matter over, pulling the petals off endless daisies: I’ll do it; no, I won’t.

All because after lunch, in an attempt to give a couple of suspicious-looking types the slip, he had been forced to hop on that tram. It was when he paid that he saw her, on one of the back seats. He was quick to look away at the plasma of soft toffee floating on the river, but when he moved towards the back he couldn’t help flicking his eyes towards where she was anxiously awaiting definitive confirmation.

After their eyes collided, Artieda resisted the urge to come close which Begoña had initiated, and she, with a gesture of resignation, let him know she understood the reason for his apparent rejection. They hadn’t seen each other in years, half their lives, but couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to shorten that distance. So it was Artieda jumped out into the street at the next stop.

He had seen his sister Begoña, the only family he had left in Bilbao, and hadn’t been able to give her a hug. Is all that sacrifice worthwhile? He was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier, on one of his many missions in the city. Will we ever escape this nightmare? The sense of unease carried on torturing him the whole evening, in a second-run cinema. It continued now, without end, on a night of settling accounts.

Snippets of voices of a handful of friends – he doesn’t know where or when they come from – confuse his thoughts. It’s a hail of shooting stars on the insomnia of tirelessly interwoven patience. Witnesses of renunciations from a lifetime of renunciations. Knife wounds clandestinity forces him to heal in silence, consuming the pus of emotion in isolation.

It is only when a lazy sun appears on the horizon that he learns what is expected of him from an envelope that is slipped under the door. “There has to be a report on what happened in Coruña. You will travel by train, at eleven o’clock tonight. During the trip, use the documentation you already have. On the concourse, keep a copy of ABC visible, and a pack of Ideales. Be careful.”

* * *

I read to Mateo from the Hoja del Lunes in my clearest voice. The old man is wearing some patched up nankeen trousers and a loose, checked flannel shirt. He sometimes removes his feet from the espadrilles and compulsively squeezes the faded cloth of the cap in his hands. Others, he stretches his braces and lets go of them to awaken his swollen skin with brief whiplashes.

“Keep reading,” he reprimands me when I pause to gaze with impunity at that look he has of a lazy bear crouching on its stool. He seems to be trying to get his blindness to gulp down a few remnants of the adolescent light with which the day has begun, but the whole of him is just a magnetic tape recording sentences.

“My throat is dry,” I apologize.

“Boy,” he says to Camilo, “bring Bibiana a glass of water.”

He has a few of us charitable souls so that, especially by reading the press aloud, we can supply him with the alms of words that shorten the lengthy hours of his days. He says mine, which he calls barefoot, is the voice that sounds best, so he’s in the habit of abusing a certain person more than the rest.

“Don’t stop, Camilo will be here in a jiffy.”

Obsessive as only he can be, he established the custom of reading back to front. So it’s only now I reach the front page, where there’s a four-column headline, “Spain has lived more peacefully since Saturday.” And then, “Recarei and his band of gunmen shot dead in a confrontation with the security forces.”

“La Voz published it yesterday,” insists Mungo, the lamplighter, who has come to get his photos.

“But with a lot less information,” retorts Mateo, who lets me omit whole paragraphs from the description of events. The Movement’s version is an article of faith for this newspaper as well, and the old man ignores it. The only part where he refuses to do without a comma is the biographies that come under the epigraph “The lives of four delinquents”.

I start reading Recarei’s, and Mateo keeps on saying, “False,” after each affirmation from the Hoja. “False,” again and again, with an indignation that stops me continuing when I get to Tobío, who I knew from the local district and because, like me, he was from a family of sailors.

“His father and mine,” I remark, “fished together in the Gran Sol.”

It’s something everybody knows and I am excused from reading further.

Mungo continues while I wipe away a tear, punishing my eyes against the wall, where they are pardoned by the portraits I myself, fed up of seeing everyday faces in the shop, picked up at a couple of cinemas. Photos which Odilo then framed.

I greet my favourite, Cary Grant. And Spencer Tracy, and Glenn Ford, and Henry Fonda. Or Paco Rabal. I greet Liz Taylor, and Lauren Bacall, and Sarita Montiel. In short, it’s a jaunt in the stars that precedes the anonymity of local faces, which I greet as well. I then start ordering the rolls of film by brand name: Kodak and Perutz, imported; Valca and Negra, made in Spain.

Mateo’s voice intervenes:

“False and false. A thousand times false.”

The old man darts his resigned eyes here and there in the hope his smell or hearing will succeed in pinpointing our presences.

“I’m going to tell you something.”

His supplementary senses are enough for the children, whom he locates against the display case, but he is confused by Mungo, who is just leaving. Until he hears his farewell, and this calms him.

“I knew that guy Rilo.”

Only Camilo Dubra and his friend Varelita are still with me, and together we prepare to travel through high-risk territory. There are certainties that give off rumours, and vice versa. Rows of legends the local district shrouds until a faint light dilutes them down to nothing. But Mateo always rescues them, because he is the memory of our lives. And his stories are part of our lives.

The old man’s voice continues.

“Now you’re going to think of something,” his voice endeavours to rise. “It has to do with Rilo, whom I met during the years of the Republic. We both worked at the Tabacos factory, though we didn’t have much to do with each other until the Popular Front’s campaign in ’36. He was twenty years younger than me and took me to his house a couple of times to see if someone his own age could change his father’s ideas. His father was very right-wing.”

I see the pavement: no clothes are hanging out. I also see the door of the shop is almost closed, which means he can carry on turning the handle of memory.

“Bear in mind we Reds won those elections. Back then, Rilo was one of the good guys, his father one of the bad ones. Then that lot revolted and with the help of the Krauts won the war. With the arrival of Franco, the saint turned out to be the father, and Rilo was cast as the devil.”

Mateo Lan lowers his voice, “You know why I’m telling you this?” He recovers it right away, without waiting for a response from anybody. (It’s obvious all judgements are in uproar, polluted by time, confused in the heads of people. The old man doesn’t need a word from us to pick up speed in one of his dangerous soliloquies.)

“I’m going to tell you about the real baddies…”

“Leave it now.”

Odilo, who comes in at this point, interrupts his stinking confession. Lan puts on his cap and gets up from his corner. Varelita offers to guide him.

“What cold hands you have, Mr Homer,” which is Mungo Ures’ nickname for him.

“Allow me to introduce Lady Trina,” remarks Camilo, opening the door for the singer.

She has dyed her hair. We examine her with the same studiousness we would apply to girls in the movies: the dress with the straps which leaves her shoulders bare; the lipstick on her thick, fleshy lips; the morocco leather shoes. Nothing in common with the woman in the half-body portraits Odilo took of her the other day.

“Here are your photos,” I say to her.

Trina – deliberately, I think – strokes my hands with her fingers as she takes the envelope. She then has a quick look at the photos and asks for our opinion.

“I’m afraid they don’t do you justice,” apologizes Odilo.

“Thank you for the compliment, but they do… It’s just I had bags and looked a bit scruffy that day.”

The strangest thing is seeing dark hair that now glints golden with the colour of sand. She’s pretty, Trina, with eyes that appear to have grasshoppers in them, always ready to leap about. Her neck immediately makes you hanker after more, and those furtive fingers steal another caress when I hand back the photos.

“You look divine,” I remark, and she fixes me with a gaze that is so insistent I find it more disturbing than a man’s.

As soon as I can, I move away, grabbing the ends of some locks in my left hand and twirling them in my right, unhealthily restless.

“Stop milking your hairstyle,” interjects Trina, putting on sunglasses behind which she hides everything that just a second earlier oozed a vixen’s cautiousness.

She has already taken her leave when the door opens again, setting straight a text that beforehand could only be read with the covers back to front. “Querentes Photography,” it says on the glass when another woman who has nothing to do with the cinema adds a final backstitch to the scene that flustered me so much.

It’s Fefa Dubra, who has come looking for her brother, Camilo.

“Always the same. There’s not a day I don’t catch you skipping class.”

Text © Luís Rei Núñez

Translation © Jonathan Dunne