Authors: Victoria Hislop

Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain

The Return (64 page)

BOOK: The Return

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She wrote several drafts of the letter, many of them much longer, but this simple, uncomplicated note seemed to express all that she wanted to say. It was left on the kitchen table. That was the first place James would go to on Friday, when he arrived from the airport and needed a drink.

She had already packed a suitcase, essentially containing favourite clothes that had not gone to the charity shop, and ordered a cab for the following morning.

At five o’clock, the alarm went off. After she had showered and made the bed impeccably, Sonia went downstairs. Taking a final, sad glance around, she dragged her case over the threshold, double-locked the door and posted the key back through the letterbox. She walked towards the waiting car.

Flying north to south later that morning, she watched the changing landscape of Spain through the plane window. She observed the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees melting into gentle foothills and then giving way to the vast open expanses of land now cultivated on an almost industrial scale. Images of Jarama, Guadalajara and Brunete flashed through her mind but the scars of warfare had long since been erased.

When the plane began its descent from a cloudless sky, she thought of how many weeks it had taken her mother to travel the same distance. For Mercedes it had been months, for her less than an hour. There was a glimpse of Granada in the distance as they came in to land and her heart raced with anticipation.

The plane was half full so it was only moments before Sonia was at the top of the steps and feeling the sweet warmth of the Andalucian breeze on her face. Soon she was crossing the tarmac. It was only a short distance to the terminal building and she knew that Miguel was waiting for her.

Her footsteps were light. Her heart was dancing.

Author’s Note

The military coup led by General Francisco Franco in July 1936 in Spain was meant to be swift and decisive. Instead, it led to a three-year civil war that devastated the country. Half a million people died and an equal number went into exile, some of them never to return. After 1939, hundreds of thousands of Republicans still languished in prison and many faced the firing squad and burial in unmarked graves. Those who had fought against Franco experienced years of repression and even when the fascist dictator died in 1975, many people in Spain still maintained their silence about their experiences.

Under the Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Francoists, a new Law of Historical Memory was passed in October 2007. The law formally condemns Franco’s uprising and dictatorship, bans symbols and references to the regime on public buildings and orders the removal of monuments honouring Franco. It also declares the political trials of Franco’s opponents during the dictatorship to be illegitimate and obliges town halls to facilitate the exhumation of bodies of those buried in unmarked graves.

The ‘
pacto de olvido
’, the pact of forgetting, is finally being broken.

Victoria Hislop
June 2008