Walking to France took nine days. Travelling alone, through Franco’s Spain, Joao kept to country roads, avoided contact with anyone. He’d brought a simple sheet of canvas and some rope, furtively assembling makeshift cover in woodlands, on three nights when it rained.
Once the bivouacs were serviceable, giving a little shelter to lay down under, with the a single blanket he'd also brought for bedding, his pack as pillow, there was too much time to think. Sleep was elusive. At least during long days his thoughts could stay active, engaged, vigilant. Failing any immediate danger, he could just focus on footfall after footfall, the rhythm of his steps, journey and destination.
At night he worried. Would they question Gloria? How bad would it be?
He’d very deliberately avoided telling her any of the plan’s detail, the route, even when they would go. She knew though, could clearly sense, it would be soon and suspected he would go with his brother.
Caution and worry had been etched into her face, hid behind her eyes. They both knew all too well how easy it was to fall foul of the bufos, those who would protect themselves, currying favour with state police, overt and secret, by informing on others.
So, voice was not given to thought, even when it seemed no one could possibly be within hearing distance.
It was the trick all regimes like Salazar’s played. Fear was as much policing force as any physical presence.
Some it made silent.
Others showed themselves all too eager to other, to point fingers, to stress their own conformity. They’d even give every impression of celebrating it, immersing themselves in community centres, founded by the state. Insidiously twisting the notion of such a thing, defining accepted cultural activity, rewriting folk tradition, then frothing it up to culminate in so-called people’s parades and marches.
It seemed easy for them to find an ear. No need to whisper or steal glances, to question anyone who didn’t take the path they did. Yet fear still beat in their hearts, policed their thoughts, their actions.
No amount of engagement with, capitulation to, the Estado Novo could quell it. Even when, after time, none of it was new, when it came to seem like all there was, all there had ever been. Friends, family, acquaintances, strangers, no matter how many names, activities, alleged or actual, they gave, informed upon, nothing stilled it.
Even for those whose complicity, outwardly, moved from seeming unease into outright acceptance, becoming official informers, known, suspected or unbeknownst to those around them, but given an acknowledged role by the regime and its operatives. Some joined the police, outwardly enforcing the state’s will with it still coursing through their veins.
In a landscape of fear, some gave into what seemed like a need, to appear apex in their predatory instincts. Some became so, others just were, are.
Eventually, when the whole thing fell in on itself, could sustain itself no longer, its fulcrum, the focal point of the ‘great leader’, as guilty of political prestidigitation as any, collapsed in on himself too, was shown as capable of human frailty as any, there were those, much later, who for decades had given every impression of being true believers, were in positions of power, who confessed to deep, suppressed fear motivating all they did. Everywhere, it first leads to compromise, then, increment by increment, to quashing of any authentic self, to corruption of it in self-perpetuating denial.
Visceral, animal fear, vigilance, though, could also sustain hope, was the other place to put it, to channel it into. It was possible to give the impression of conformity whilst holding true to yourself, to your own mind, stilling thoughts, so they didn’t spill over into incautious words or deeds. But allowing them to run a course uncorrupted.
This was how Joao had persisted, waiting, keeping mostly to his own counsel, taking no part in rash activities, even though the guilt of not being seen to actively resist, of not expressing outwardly what he thought and knew to be right, inside, gnawed away at him. When Agostino, his brother, chastised him, called him a coward and no words would pass his lips in retort, it chafed.
He watched him seeming to escape, find solace in drunkenness, using it to become unfiltered. To seem, somehow, loosened in the restraints, to dampen considerations others made.
Joao knew his brother. So, he would listen, feel the sting of every word and yet be resolute.
To retort, to rebuke, was not his way. Too many times, Agostino found himself in bare cells, beaten and bruised, head aching equally from fists, sticks and the aftereffects of too much cheap wine.
Then, when he was released, less and less people would talk to him. Eventually no café owner would serve him. First locally, then in a wider and wider radius around the village, he became known and shunned.
Allowing him to walk the streets again, after every drunken rant against the Estado, against Salazar, all their works and agents, became a machination of fear too. Surely, after that, after what he had said, out loud what everyone else let remain quiet, what everyone heard, him, just there, back again, roaming around, drinking, shouting, staring back at them when he caught them looking, it must be a ruse.
He must be working with them. They were using him as means to get others, with sympathies for the words he used, to voice their support. Then they too would wake up in the night, being taken from their beds.
Others did not return. So, why else was Agostino allowed to keep doing what he did?
He must be working with them. Assertions, repeated, whispered again and again, conspiratorially, until a ring of truth resounded in them, around them.
Some said, even the drunkenness was an act. The wine had to be bought, with money, from where? Replies differed. It wasn’t paid for; it was given to him by other covert collaborators. It wasn’t even wine, just grape juice, staining his lips. Stories, conceived in fear, grew more elaborate.
He rinsed his mouth, doused his clothes, between drinking fake wine, with pure spirits, kept below counters of compromised establishments, cafes, shops, to make the smell real, to authenticate the pretence. Joao knew his brother, knew the stories for the lies they were, saw the fear behind them, just as he saw it in Agostino’s eyes.
He knew too, somewhere, he featured in them. They are so different those brothers, Agostino, loud and brash, challenging always, a drunkard maybe, an agent possibly.
They knew, they thought, when the younger brother beat against the byre door, beyond which, they knew, Joao often slept, tasked with returning and feeding the cows housed there each evening, then leading them to pasture in the early morning, still there as dark came, it made sense for him to bed down, in the cramped upper floor where feed was stored, they knew. Other villagers watched, listened, they knew.
Suspicion rippled through their fearful story telling, twisted echoes of every tale ever told, of human caution, passed through generation after generation, echoing, was in fact partly true. Agostino’s drunkenness was a ruse, an assumed character, a role he played.
So were Joao’s quiet, dutiful actions. Both of them watched back, listened, played their parts, convincing because they rooted them in past truths. As a youth, Agostino had run wild, eschewing his farm duties, leaving double for Joao.
It was easy to draw lines, from past to present, convince them they had the truth of it, if only they could be sure. To lead stories, dancing with fear, from their heads, into the world.
When they were boys, their mother, would have them act out plays. Once, as a young girl, she had brief ideas of becoming an actress, before life took its turns. Well before the big twist it took was forced upon them, and all hopes were dashed, smothered, choked before they could breathe.
They would perform them for her and their three aunts. Two her sisters, one their father’s. To amuse them, to entertain them as they sat, first teasing, then spinning or weaving yarn.
And as the whole process went on, cloth made, it would be cut and stitched, made into clothes. Some were coarse, made from their sheep wool. They all wore some of it.
Others, finer, were made to be sold on. Some came from the few precious goats their father had somehow found at a far away market, before they were born.
With both, the boys understood how each step in the process worked, how wool on the animal’s back became a shirt on theirs, or on some more affluent back altogether. With the linen, they only really knew the first and last steps.
Flowers and stalks in the field were harvested. They were excluded, the yield too delicate to chance their unpractised, curious, troublesome fingers on. Then some was soaked in big tanks, right there, in the fields too.
They were forbidden from playing near them, so nothing could be spoiled or damaged by chance. They never knew when or why, but eventually, it all disappeared into the barn.
Sometimes they snuck in and watched, from behind bales, but still didn’t really understand what happened there. The adults concentrated so hard, never saw them watching, listening, growing bored.
Despite seeing some of the steps, they didn’t understand, not really, how the flowers and stalks became cloth. It just seemed to magically appear in their mother and aunts hands, as they cut it into shapes.
Their father’s sister kept a room, above their grandfather’s shop, where they had always sold things grown or made on the farm. The shop, the room, seemed impossibly old to them. It had been their grandfather’s grandfather’s. Old, old.
They had never been allowed in the room upstairs, even though, sometimes, as they grew a little older, more trusted, they would carry stock from the farm to town, to the shop. Some was cloth, wool, which would be taken up to the room by their grandfather, their aunt overseeing, making sure his coarse hands were careful with it. But they would be kept downstairs or outside, where they would drink the fresh water, sometimes lemonade their grandfather would give them, telling them to drink it and get straight back.
Sometimes, when they tarried longer, before returning home, they saw women and men go into the room by another door, outside, on the street. A little sign hung outside, with a strange word written on it.
They would sneak over, looking at it. Turning the letters over in their heads, trying to make the sounds.
They came to know it as something to do with what their mother and aunts did, with the cloth, with the wool and the shapes. Unfamiliar as they were, not like the simple sounds of the farm, they had to wait, listen, to hear them said how they should be.
Eventually it was Agostino, the younger brother’s triumph. He’d heard his aunt say it a night or two before, while Joao was outside, in the casa de banho. He kept it there, in his head, like a precious stone, found in the dust, magic in the mundane.
He thought it was right, it was the word they’d seen, on the sign, but couldn’t be sure, until they stood, again, looking at it. Joao intent, mumbling, older.
Hoping to understand, not just for himself, but because of the responsibility he could always feel inside. Had done since the first days of Agostino’s life, since he arrived squalling and mewling, his mother seeming worn out by it as soon as it began.
So, it became, seeing it, seeing him, hearing him, wanting to please his mother, his duty. He could instruct his younger brother, tell him what he had learned, in and of the things they now shared. So, they could make sense of them, place them, arrange them, in their world.
Then Agostino brought it out that day, the first time he had done such a thing, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, flourishing it for his brother to see, his triumph. Atelier, he said, just how he’d heard his aunt say.
It still seemed like a secret word and Joao knew it was right, the sound. He smiled down at his bright, grinning, clever little brother. Eventually, in bed at night, a few days later, Agostino shared how he knew, but in that moment and for a little time after, he just enjoyed how his brother looked at him.
It was the same look, there hidden behind his eyes, he gave him, years later, as they watched, listened, planned. And amidst it, in their heads only, knowing it played inside the others’, sharing memories. Not spoken, but shared, nonetheless.
They remembered the smells too, strong. As their father and his brothers would stretch, soften and tan hide, saved from when cows, goats or sheep had been slaughtered and butchered by them, in the outbuildings.
Where they’d sneak around, sometimes hiding just because it was more fun. Other times, the men inviting them over, explaining what was done, so they could learn and one day do it too.
Then the leathers they made would pass inside. To the place where the women worked with the cloth and the shapes, making something new from them, something to pass out into the world.
Somewhere, the boys liked to think, amid the magic of their mother and aunts' fingers, hands, casting spells in weave and stitch, cut and shape, they added an extra ingredient no one else could.
When the women did their work and they were brought in to entertain them all by their mother, when she would laugh as they acted out a play for them, in its tone, its cadence, as her hands still moved, they made magic too. It would pass into the cloth, a sleeve, a finger of a glove, then out into the word too, along with it, part of it, woven in.
They were asked to do it, it was their contribution, entertaining the women as they did their delicate, magical work. They became good at acting a part. Some were there, made up for them to make their own, in the few books their mother had.
Others came form stories she told them in their younger years, characters they found themselves drawn to. Heroes or villains.
Others still though, they found they could act out more convincingly, even though they had less appeal, at first. They could make a game of it though, see in the characters parts of other people they knew, familiar traits they saw in family, friends, villagers, even, eventually what they saw in the women and men which went into the room, upstairs from the shop.
It was a skill set they did not know, could not know, then would serve them well in those later years. They drew upon their mummery like muscle memory.
Remembering, not always whole and conscious, but there, still, like they could brush a hand against it, feel it, just briefly, passing. The warmth of a fire, logs crackling, in the big room, their bellies full, smiling family, busy hands, glinting eyes, crinkling, wrinkling as they laughed and groaned, watching them, not in fear, not then, only love. As real as it was, had been, the memories true for them both, then it seemed a distant, barely recalled dream.
The suspicions of other villagers were not true for the reasons they might think, as they whispered them, one to another. Agostino, the younger brother but, over time, seeming to start the day he spoke the secret word, the one he’d held in his head, waiting to reveal, having become the more accomplished actor, would seem gone, not himself, even to Joao, who knew.
His brother could lose himself in another personality, in a way Joao could not. Still able to be himself inside it, to survey the world from there, backstage, while someone else stood front of house. His keen senses, sharp, penetrating intellect, his insight, from behind, inner, calibrating actions and words performed outside.
They, the words, the actions accompanying them, were always, just as they were that day, exactly right. He was not part of any group, then, part of any active resistance, though thoughts of offering one had begun to grow.
He knew no other names, no information on anyone, in those days, to give his jailers, though he became adept at knowing, of acting out, just how much to say. How to give them every impression of knowing too little to be useful and not enough to be dangerous.
It allowed the agents and police to think they were using him, to spread fear and rumour. Whilst they beat, then goaded and gloated, he watched, saw their routines, shift patterns, local hierarchies and power structures, from the inside seemingly in drunken or bruised stupor.
Joao, every bit as sharp a mind, if of a different character, and only slightly less practised an actor, was his foil. It came easy to them, each step, scene or part a kind of comfort, stirring memory and familial affections.
So, he would give every impression, to any fearful and over vigilant neighbour, of just tolerating his drunken, loud brother enough. Surly, with just a few of the right words, just practical enough, then forceful enough, but almost inevitably, of course it all derived from their unwritten script.
Agostino would lunge at him, sometimes faking blows, attempting to gain entry, entreating him, just for tonight, a bed in the hay, a roof overhead, for me, your only brother. And while he did, his hand would slip, where no one could possibly see, into a pocket, inside a cuff as he tugged on a shirt sleeve, combining their erstwhile stagecraft with another unlikely skill set, brought forward from childhood into the much stranger, more sinister times in which they then lived.
Unwittingly, between them, their parents had quietly conspired to fashion the means of their resistance.
When, as they grew older, their father sent them, with a herd or flock, to far pasture, they would camp there with them, often for weeks, eventually for a month or two a time. While they were there, he needed to know how the livestock fared, were faring.
So, as his father and grand father before had done, he would have them take homing pigeons from his flock with them. They would strap them to their mule, which carried their tackle and tack, in ancient baskets, long served in this generational task.
For the purpose they would serve, he taught them a code, symbols and abbreviations, honed and perfected, as he had learned it from his forebears. It was necessary not to teach just the code but also how to write it. In small, barely legible, cramped but, when viewed under the magnifying glass he kept for just this purpose, clear hieroglyphic characters, letters and signs.
Their family had long made a parchment for this purpose too. Stomach and intestine lining, from all of the animals slaughtered, was scraped and stripped, then laid in thin layers, crossed over one another, stretched as far as it could go, by increments, as it dried, until it formed rough sheets.
These would then be cut into long, thin strips, and rolled into tape like cylinders. Sharpening a stick end, to be burned in their evening cooking and warming fires, served as writing implement for them, as it had also their father, grandfather and his father before.
They would wind messages written on it inside metal ring clips around the pigeons' legs, before dispatching them homeward. Now though, both the code and parchment could not be trusted, to anyone else, even to birds.
Using it only between themselves, the brothers passed each other messages, information, this way, patiently, over months, eventually years, burning or shredding them into animal feed after receipt. They knew others, with their own family codes, must do something similar but no one else knew theirs. Even if a scrap of message was found, which it never was, no one but the two of them, with their father dying or dead by the time they used it this way, could understand it.
Had something, some scrap, been found? Agostino beaten, perhaps, into revealing their code?
Joao worried, alone in the northern Spanish countryside. Sleeping fitfully, waking sharply, ready to run, with every wind rustle or twig snap.
He had only known where and when to go because of the risks Agostino took before, so he could make his thorough plans. Due solely to his brother’s subtle subterfuge.
Despite even the necessary partial alcohol addiction and reliance required to perpetuate the ruse, the necessary disguise of his actions, Agostino had always also remained the more physically fit of the two brothers.
It was what allowed him to enact perhaps the most audacious aspect of their plan, what brought it to fruition. He had given every appearance of making his own escape, alone, giving Joao just enough information to pass on, when questioned and no more.
Where he told them Agostino would be, was not where he would have been. Over the years, as part of his remaining more physically fit, his brother had perfected a system he called ‘the lope’.