Bay of Secrets by Rosanna Ley

Matilde’s bed late at night. ‘What have we done?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Matilde soothed. ‘We have done nothing.’
    But they all knew that three houses down the street had been hit. The families of two of Julia’s closest friends had died; many others were killed and wounded. Buildings were destroyed. The city was in turmoil. And Julia knew why, because she had heard her own father say it.
Barcelona is being bombed for what they call its Republican sins.
The Nationalists had hit back.
    The whole family was in shock. But this was only the beginning.
    At the start of the following year Franco’s troops closed in and they all had to hide in their homes in terror as Fascist troops paraded down the city streets.
    ‘Save us, save us,’ Paloma cried in terror. Even she was too scared to go out and look at them.
    Julia watched her mother cry and she saw her father hold her hand and comfort her. ‘Do not be scared, my love,’ he said to her. ‘At least we have been spared.’
    ‘But for what?’ Julia’s mother cried. ‘What will become of us? Will we ever be safe again?’
    Julia’s father could not answer that – because he did not know.
    But like everyone else, after the city had been taken, he took care to sever his connections with the people who had become the wrong people to know, the dangerous people to be affiliated with. Julia understood why it had to be done. Everyone did the same. People scurried around, heads down, eyes averted. And anyone with the wrong political connections had to leave Barcelona – fast.
    In March, Madrid fell, and then Valencia.
    ‘It is all over,’ Julia’s father said. ‘
Dulce Jesús!
’ He swore, but in capitulation rather than anger.
    He was right. On 1 April, the last of the Republican forces surrendered and Nationalist victory was proclaimed.
    *
    One night, a few weeks after they’d listened to the victory ceremony on the radio, after Julia had gone to bed, as the cathedral bells tolled midnight, she heard the rise and fall of her parents’ voices once again. She pulled her robe around her and sat huddled on the stair to listen. It scared her. The words poured from her father in a stream – like lava from a volcano; it was as if he had to talk or he would go mad. He spoke of political militants and ‘Bolshevik infection’. Of the madmen, the tramps and the beggars who kept all their worldly goods in a bundle underneath the arches of Calle Fernando. And of the prison camps such as Montjuïc Castle and the continuing executions there; of those who had been tortured and yet still lived with the scars. His voice rose in panic; it grew louder and then faded. Her mother was trying to soothe him; Julia could hear her voice, could imagine herstroking his hair from his face, drawing him to her for comfort.
    She sighed as she returned to her bed. Since the war nothing was the same. How could it be? Spain’s economy was in tatters. Bridges, railways, roads, all was in chaos. But it was more than that. After what she had heard last night, Julia was worrying for her father’s sanity.
    That night they had eaten their fill but it had not been a happy family meal.
    ‘Where did you get the food?’ her mother had asked Papa.
    ‘I earnt it,’ he replied. His eyes were wild.
    He did not have to say more. Chaos had brought corruption and since the end of the war the black market had flourished. Beans, meat, olive oil, flour … They were all hard to procure and cost so much more than the official levy.
    Had Papa earnt it? What exactly had he done? Julia had seen how hard he had to look for work – despite the destruction that lay around them, despite the desperate need for rebuilding. His shoulders seemed to hunch lower with every day. And she knew from what she had overheard that he had to be careful who he worked for and that people had to be cautious about who they employed. Please God he would not be thought a former left-wing sympathiser.
    ‘We all know,’ she had heard