Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  Across the city bells rang. Doves rose from the roof of the house overlooking the courtyard, wheeled and returned. It was somewhere near the middle of the day. A smell of frying fish drifted over the walls. The only other smell—other than the horses and horse dung—was the smoke from the cigar the Spanish officer was smoking as he leaned against a pillar on the other side of the courtyard. He and Calley had arrived at almost the same moment, though from different ends of the street. Coming in, each had silently chosen which side of the courtyard to wait on, had eyed each other, briefly, across the sheer fall of light between them, then ignored the other’s existence. Time crawled, the hours passed. There was nowhere in the world, perhaps, where nothing could happen in quite the way it could in Lisbon.

  Then, from above, came the sound of a door opening and the head and shoulders of a man looked at them from over the white parapet at the top of the steps. He came down the steps to the courtyard. When he arrived he looked suddenly lost, as though he had entered some new element, had slid into water or from water into air. He was wearing a black coat thick enough for the cool of an English April. He moved forward, cautiously, peering through his glasses at the figures on the bench under the blue flowers.

  “Are these people the witnesses?” he asked. An English voice and a voice fresh from England. It was not clear who he was addressing. Perhaps he did not see very much through his glasses, was not yet accustomed to seeing life in the shadows.

  The Spanish officer pushed himself away from his pillar. “Yes,” he said. “These are the witnesses.”

  The man stared at him, this figure, half gorgeous, half absurd in the canary-yellow uniform of a Spanish cavalry regiment. He nodded, then hurried back to the stairs and hurried up them. At the top he paused to catch his breath, then disappeared through the double doors into the upper apartments.

  The Spanish officer returned to his pillar, his smoking. Now that Calley had heard his voice he felt a new interest in him, and turning himself a little, shifting on the block of dressed stone he was using for a seat, he observed the man without seeming to. It was his habit, when looking at any stranger, to think first of how, in a fight, he would overcome him. His own build was slight—you do not grow tall, do not grow broad shoulders living as he had lived as a boy. Despite this, there were very few he thought he could not take, if only because of his willingness to start at a pitch most had no stomach for. He was not a fantasist. He had put himself to the test many times. The Spaniard, he was sure, would give him no trouble. But that voice. He had liked that voice. An accent, though not a strong one, not like those among them you could make no sense of even when they were speaking fluent English. He wondered if he might ask him for a cigar. Not wise, of course, to ask a British officer for a smoke, not wise at all, but Spanish officers were men in fancy dress. They did not need to be treated with the same care.

  He was pondering this, picking his words, when he felt himself observed in turn, and flicking his gaze to the side he saw that it was the woman with the child. She looked down the moment he caught her, stared at the ground from beneath thick black brows. It did not trouble him, or it did not trouble him greatly. To her, surely, one English soldier was very like another. Even so. He stood up and walked to where, in the wall by the steps, water trickled into a basin. On the tiles above the basin there were images of birds in a kind of paradise. A tin scoop hung from a peg. He filled the scoop with water and walked over to the bench where the woman was sitting. Her head was covered with a cloth, a scarf, but from under its folds flowed a heavy plait of black hair that lay like a fish tail across her right breast. Only when he stood above her, did she look up at him. He offered her the scoop. He even leaned down a little so she could look hard into his face, so that she could not avoid it.

  “Go on,” he said. Then a word they all knew, “Agua.”

  She took the scoop, held it stupidly for a moment, as though she had no idea what it was, then gave some of the water to the child and took some for herself. Calley indicated that she should pass it to the men. The men drank from the scoop in turn. They had long, serious faces, like the faces of horses or mules. They uttered their thanks to Calley, spoke out of their chests. After a few seconds the woman added her own quiet “Gracias.”

  They were all watching him now. He had created a piece of theatre. He had shaped their thinking. He returned the scoop to its nail and went back to his stone in the shade, sat there, brushing the white dust from his boots with the side of his hand.

  The doors to the apartments were opened again, and again the man in the black coat peered over the wall at them before descending on his errand. What was he? Some sort of lawyer’s clerk? A scrivener? He stood on the bottom step. “The inquiry,” he said, looking left and right as if Bonaparte himself might be lurking behind one of the potted lemon trees, “calls Lieutenant Medina, Corporal Calley and the witnesses. If you please. Gentlemen.”

  When Medina stepped out of the shade his uniform caught the light and for a moment he had no edges. He gestured to the witnesses. They stood. “No tengan miedo,” he said. Don’t be afraid. Then he turned to Calley. There was, perhaps, a year or two between them in age, neither yet the far side of thirty. “They have kept us waiting so long,” he said. “Let us hope they will be brief.”

  They went up—the black coat, Medina, the witnesses, Calley. At the top of the stairs both doors to the apartments were open. They filed inside. The man in the black coat pulled the doors shut.

  It was a long room with a low, carved ceiling. A wooden floor, dark and old and polished. Three windows with shutters that let in small, complicated geometries of brightness. Between the windows were paintings. In one of them a woman held out a human heart or some version of a human heart.

  The new arrivals stood by their chairs. Facing them—at a distance of three or four strides—was a table, and sitting behind it were three men, two in British army uniforms, the third in civilian dress. One of the army men Calley knew already, a captain called Henderson who had interviewed him a week ago at the barracks. A list of questions, Calley playing the respectful halfwit, the honest veteran recovering from his hardships, until he had begun to see what it was they wanted and that it wasn’t him. After that they went on more quickly.

  The man in the centre spoke first. “I am Colonel Riviere. This is Captain Henderson. And this gentleman is Don Ignacio Alvarez, who is here to represent the interests of Junta Suprema. No one is on trial. This is an inquiry, not a court martial. There will be no written record. Our single intention”—he paused, as though the single intention had momentarily escaped him—“is to know the truth, as far as we are able, of the events that took place at the village of Los Morales during the recent retreat of the British army to Corunna. We will hear from the witnesses. We will hear the testimony of Corporal Calley. Lieutenant Medina, who has served as a liaison officer with the British army, will act as our translator. Perhaps you would begin now, Lieutenant, by giving the witnesses the sense of what I have just said. Tell them please they should speak freely. They have nothing to fear from us. Be seated, all of you.”

  They sat. Calley was nearest the door; next to him were the witnesses, then Medina, who leaned in towards the witnesses and spoke to them rapidly in a low voice. Calley sat with his right side turned a little towards the table to display his corporal’s chevrons and the merit badge above them he had sewn on with meticulous care the previous evening.

  The colonel was studying his papers, though the light must have made reading them difficult. He did not have the appearance of a man who revelled in his part. Henderson was impassive, a soldier waiting for orders. Don Ignacio examined his watch, then shut the watch and shut his eyes. It was only when Medina finished speaking that Calley noticed what he should have noticed the moment he entered the room. There was a door behind the table. It was part open, and though the place it led to was dark as night, why—in a matter where all were much concerned with s
ecrecy—should the door be open at all?

  The colonel looked up at Medina. “Yes?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Medina.

  And so it began. Questions from the table to the witnesses, the questions translated by Medina and answered by one or other of the male witnesses. Then the process in reverse, a cumbersome business made less so by Medina’s quickness, his fluency. Now and then his English had an old-world feel to it as if he had learned it from a speaker of the last century rather than the present one but there was no confusion and not once was he asked to repeat himself. Most tellingly, it seemed he made no attempt to alter or refine what the witnesses said, and as a consequence, as the questioning continued, those who spoke from behind the table, and those who answered from the chairs, no longer looked at Medina but only at each other.

  There was an attempt by the colonel to establish a date. The best that could be managed was that the events took place at some point during the first week of January. Not a Sunday.

  “It was still light when they arrived?”

  “It was the time between the light and the dark.”

  “It was dusk?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how many did you see? Did you count them?”

  “No. But it looked like twenty.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Maybe more, maybe less.”

  “They came on horses?”

  A shake of the head. “Only one with a horse.”

  “Very well. We will come to that, the horseman, in due course. What was the first thing the men did in the village?”

  “They shot Vitor Ramirez.”

  “Why did they shoot him?”

  “He would not give them bread.”

  “He refused?”

  “He had no bread.”

  “What happened after the man was shot?”

  “They burned his house.”

  “And then?”

  “They killed his son, Lino.”

  “How old was he?”

  The male witnesses conferred. “Twelve years old.”

  “And then?”

  “They brought the people out of their houses. The men they killed. The women they took away.”

  “How many men did they kill?”

  “We have buried nineteen.”

  “They were all shot?”

  “Some they hanged.”

  “Hanged? Where?”

  “The tree in the plaza.”

  “Were any of the women killed?”

  “They were not killed.”

  “Where were they taken?”

  “Into the houses.”

  “Their own houses?”

  “To whatever house was near.”

  “And they were attacked? They were outraged?”

  Here Lieutenant Medina paused, or rather he held the gaze of the colonel half a second longer as if to be quite sure of what he meant. To the witnesses they heard him use the word violar. The men nodded.

  “And how long,” asked the colonel, “did the men, the soldiers, stay at the village?”

  “They left two hours before it was light.”

  “And before they left did they burn any more of the houses?”

  “Nearly every one.”

  “Is there a church in the village?”

  “There is.”

  “Did they burn the church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they left?”

  “They left. Yes.”

  “And how did you survive? The three of you?”

  “We were hiding on the hill.”

  “You could see the village clearly from the hill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you speak French?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell the English language from the French language?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the soldiers spoke English?”

  “Yes.”

  The colonel nodded. He ran a finger up the centre of his brow, smoothing it. He looked at Captain Henderson, then back to the witnesses. “Was there a man who commanded the soldiers? One who led them?”

  “There was.”

  “He arrived on horseback?”

  “Yes.”

  “What colour was his coat?”

  The men turned to each other. No one had explained what their relationship was or their relationship to the woman and child. “A grey coat or a black coat. Brown perhaps.”

  “And on his head?”

  “A hat of fur.”

  “Fur? You are sure? You could see that from the hill?”

  “We were not on the hill when they arrived.”

  “Can you describe this man? The commander?”

  “He had a moustache.”

  “Light? Dark? As light as Captain Henderson’s hair?”

  It was not, they thought, as light as the captain’s hair. Nor as dark as their own.

  “Did you see him attack anyone? Did the officer shoot at anyone or strike them with his sword?”

  “We did not see that.”

  “When the others were being killed, where was he?”

  “He went into Benito’s house.”

  “And where was this Benito?”

  “With us. On the hill.”

  “His house was burned too?”

  “It was not.”

  “Did you at any time see the commander attempt to stop the killing of the men and the burning of the houses?”

  “No.”

  “He remained in the house? In Benito’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “From the house he would have heard the shooting?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did he stay in the house?”

  A shrug. “Perhaps one hour.”

  “And then he came out?”

  “A soldier came to fetch him.”

  “And he came out then?”

  “Not the first time. The soldier called for him but he did not come out.”

  “So the soldier went away?”

  “Yes.”

  “And came back later?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this time he came out? The officer?”

  “He did.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He went with the soldier to the priest’s house.”

  “The priest was there?”

  “The priest left long ago.”

  “Who lives in the house now?”

  “A widow and her daughter.”

  “And the officer went into this house? The priest’s house?”

  “He did.”

  “He stayed there a long time?”

  “A little time.”

  “A minute? Five minutes? Ten?”

  Here the witnesses seemed at a loss, as though minutes were a measure of time they had few dealings with. They began a discussion between themselves. It had a thoughtful, almost philosophical air.

  “Lieutenant Medina,” said the colonel. “All we are looking for is an estimate. Something to guide our thinking as to what may or may not have happened in the house.”

  One of the witnesses, the younger man, held up a hand, thumb folded, fingers spread. Five minutes.

  “And these women,” said the colonel. “Where are these women? The widow and her daughter? I should like to hear what they have to say.”

  “The widow,” said Henderson, “is bedridden. Her daughter looks after her.”

  “And the daughter. Has she made an accusation? Concerning the officer?”

  “She has,” answered Henderson, “said nothing at all.”

  “Nothing?”


  “Apparently not.”

  “Well, let us move on.” The colonel looked across at the witnesses again. It was hard to say what his view of them was, how far he trusted them. It was hard to say what his view of any of it was, except that perhaps he wished himself elsewhere.

  “So the officer was in the house for five minutes and then came out. Came out alone?”

  “He came out with the one he went in with. Later the others came out.”

  “There were other soldiers in the widow’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten. Twelve.”

  “And then they left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the officer seem to give orders to the men? Did the men obey him?”

  The witnesses shrugged.

  “Were the soldiers drunk?”

  “Those who could find wine.”

  “Do you think the officer was drunk?”

  “He drank wine in Benito’s house.”

  “You know this?”

  “He found Benito’s wine.”

  “It was hidden?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else was hidden in the village? Was food hidden?”

  It was the younger man’s answer that Medina translated. “What we do not hide will be taken from us. Then we will have nothing. We will starve.”

  “Thank you,” said the colonel, sitting back in his chair. “I have no more questions. Don Ignacio. You wish to question the witnesses?”

  Don Ignacio unlaced his long fingers. He had beautiful boots. Where the light fell on them you could see the leather was almost red. “I am trying to imagine,” he said, “how these people have suffered.”

  “Indeed,” said the colonel. He waited, as though he assumed Don Ignacio’s words were the preface to something. When nothing came he turned back to the witnesses. “If you go with this gentleman”—he pointed to the man in the black coat—“he will take you to where you can eat. I would like to thank you for the long journey you have made to answer our questions. And my thanks to you, Lieutenant. A most disagreeable task for all of us.”