Vallehermoso, Spain
14 July 1974
The sheep didn’t care that the dictator was dying.
We’d set off early and were already high on the ridge by mid-morning, the flock scattered across dry slopes that crackled underfoot. Vallehermoso crouched below in its usual silence, the whitewashed walls already sweating in the morning heat, the church tower throwing a shadow across the square. From up here, you could see the whole valley – the olive groves like rusted chainmail, the dry riverbeds tracing pale veins through the land, and the pine hills beyond. Beautiful, people say. Vallehermoso, beautiful valley. And it is beautiful, in a way. But it’s also a tough, unforgiving place – scorched in summer, frozen in winter, and hard the whole year through. That’s what has kept it the way it is.
I had the transistor clipped to my belt, more out of habit than hope. The reception was awful in the hills, but every now and then it would crackle into life, buzzing with static before giving way to the same sombre voice saying the same sombre thing. The fabled Generalissimo was in trouble, they said, in hospital, his condition complicado and delicado. They’d been repeating it for weeks. And the news reports had found their echo in the bar, in the square, in whispers before Don Pedro’s church service began – people talking as if the ground was about to shift. But up in the hills, nothing had changed. The sheep clattered along the trails just as they always had, stubborn and aimless. The dogs kept pace, half-alert, half-bored. And I, as always, followed step after wearying step – boots on the scorched, stubborn earth, lost in my thoughts.
It’s impossible to come up here and not be pulled deep into your own head. The stillness, like the heat, envelops you to such an extent that you can’t help but stew. I’d come to Vallehermoso in ’39 to escape my past, but these hills simply wouldn’t let me. Whenever I found myself up here, I’d be drawn back into it – my thoughts dominated by what I’d seen, what I’d lost, what I’d had to leave behind. Even now, nearly forty years on, memories of the war years break through all too often – quiet assaults that I feel coming but can never quite repel. But lately, it must be said, my thoughts have drifted forwards more than back – to the end of things, to my own slow unwinding. I can feel it in my legs, in the way the hills steal my breath more quickly now, in the quiet strain of each climb. I find myself wondering how many seasons I’ve left in me. What I’ll do with the sheep. With the dogs.
These were the thoughts preoccupying me today. Why, without realising, I’d brought the sheep further than I should, up to a patch of exposed scrubland that clearly hadn’t been grazed in years. A forbidding sort of place, dominated by angry clumps of thorny esparto and desiccated almond trees gone to rot. The kind of spot the sheep don’t like and Vallehermoso locals don’t need to be told to avoid. I paused for a moment, scanning the slope ahead and weighing my options – wondering whether to retrace our path to the terraces below or push on to another ridge over to the east with decent grazing and a little shade.
As I did so, Martín, my youngest dog, wandered off – twenty metres or so – and began nosing around aimlessly near the base of one of the gnarled almond trunks. Then, suddenly, he began to dig – frantically, furiously – at the hard, sunbaked ground. I didn’t think much of it at first – he was always after rabbits – but he was so frenzied, so insistent, that I became worried he’d cut his paws on something sharp. And we were too far from the village to risk that.
“Martín!” I called, and gave a short, sharp whistle.
But he didn’t even flinch. Just kept digging, flinging soil, dust and stones behind him in wild bursts.
I muttered under my breath, cursed my knees, and began hobbling over. By the time I reached him, he’d already torn a decent hole in the earth – maybe fifty centimetres wide, close to twenty deep. No small feat in soil like this, but Martín, for all his youth and idiocy, was a powerful beast. Spanish mastiff, just over a year old. All muscle and drool and enthusiasm. Bred to take on wolves, but with the brain of a goat.
I banged the tip of my vara – my stick – on the ground beside him. “That’s enough!”
He froze, ears pinned back in submission. Then, after fixing me with a stare that said I’d ruined his fun, he slunk away to join the other, more sensible, dogs in a solitary patch of shade they’d found behind the only living gorse in sight.
I knelt, joints aching, and studied the hollow. The surface layer was the usual mix of grit and root and dust. But, beneath it, the earth looked different. A bit looser than normal and much, much darker – a deep, russet red. The most unusual thing, though, was the scattering of stones at the base of the hollow. To my mind, they appeared to have been arranged by hand rather than by nature – possibly as some kind of covering, or seal. This, coupled with the energy with which Martín had attacked the earth, left me thinking there could be something else down there. Buried. Hidden.
Eventually, I stood, joints cracking, and wiped my palms on my trousers. In the moment I’d given myself to think things through, I’d determined to leave the mystery – if indeed there was a mystery – alone. As I turned to leave, though, something else caught my eye. Not more than a few steps away, at the base of the gnarled almond tree, rested more stones – this time a small, sun-bleached pile of them. The way they sat – balanced in three neat rows against the tree – was odd. There was no wind strong enough, no animal clever enough, to have done it.
As I moved closer to get a better look, I noticed the mark. It was carved low into the tree’s bark, about a foot above the stones. Faint and worn down by the sun and time, but still visible. Just two thin lines, intersecting at an angle. Not big, not obvious. Not left for others, I thought. Just a memory left behind for one man to find again, should he need to. An insurance policy, I bet, should the stones have moved.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I turned, glanced again at the hollow and, almost in spite of myself, found myself walking back to it. My joints were too stiff and sore for me to kneel now, so I stood at the edge, peering in. I lowered my stick into the hole and began to scrape the stones out towards the edges. A firmer prod and a twist in the cleared centre broke through the crust of the soil beneath. And that’s when I saw it: a glimpse of dark leather, and the faint glint of a rusted metal clasp. A wallet.
After catching my breath, I crouched, knees screaming and heart pounding, and reached in. The wallet came loose more easily than I expected, as if the ground had been waiting to give it up. The leather was cracked and flaking, but the wallet itself was still intact – still clasped shut, in fact. I brushed the dust off and stared at it for a second, unsure. Then I flicked open the clasp, took another deep breath, and opened it.
Inside, there was no money, nor any papers that told me who it had belonged to. All there was, tucked away in the back section, was a folded scrap of oilskin – cracked where it had been creased – and, tucked within it, a photograph, somehow preserved by time and darkness.
In it, two men stood side by side in uniform, arms slung loosely around one another, faces bright with youth and lit further by broad smiles. Friends, clearly. The taller one, with his mop of wild hair and crooked teeth, I couldn’t place. But the second man, well, I recognised him at once. Much younger and thinner, sure. Sharper in the jawline. But it was unmistakably him. You simply don’t forget a face like that. Not when you’ve seen it smile and scowl and sermonise from the Ayuntamiento steps for more than thirty years. Not when it belongs to the man who, as General Franco’s man in town, runs Vallehermoso like his own private kingdom.
It was the mayor, Don Eugenio Morales. Only, to my eyes, he seemed to be wearing the wrong uniform.
