In December 1937, during the icy cold of the battle for Teruel, Victor Dalmau was assigned to a heroic ambulance giving first aid to the wounded, while the driver, Aitor Ibarra, an immortal Basque who was constantly singing to himself and laughing out loud to mock death, somehow managed to maneuver the vehicle along shattered roads. Dalmau trusted that the Basque’s good luck, which had allowed him to emerge unscathed from a thousand close scrapes, would be sufficient for both of them. To avoid being bombed, they often traveled at night. If there was no moon, somebody walked in front of the ambulance with a flashlight to illuminate the road, while Victor attended to the injured inside the vehicle with what limited supplies he had, by the light of another flashlight. They constantly defied the obstacle-strewn terrain and temperatures many degrees below freezing, crawling forward slowly like worms through the ice, sinking into the snow, pushing the ambulance up slopes or out of ditches and bomb craters, dodging lengths of twisted iron and frozen bodies of mules, amid strafing by Nationalist machine guns and bombs from the German Condor Legion planes swooping low above their heads. Nothing could distract Victor Dalmau from his determination to keep the men in his care alive, even if they were bleeding to death in front of his eyes. He was infected by the crazy stoicism of Aitor Ibarra, who always drove on untroubled, and had a joke for every occasion.
From the ambulance, Dalmau was sent to the field hospital that had been set up in some caves in Teruel to protect it from the bombs. There the staff worked by candlelight, rags soaked in engine oil, and kerosene lamps. They fended off the cold with braziers pushed under the operating tables, although that didn’t stop the frozen instruments from sticking to their hands. The surgeons operated quickly on those they could patch up and send to the hospital centers, knowing full well that many would die on the way. The others, who were beyond all help, were left to await death with morphine—when there was any, since it was always in short supply; ether was rationed as well. If there was nothing else to relieve the dreadfully wounded men who cried out in pain, Victor would give them aspirin, telling them it was a powerful American drug. The bandages were washed with melted ice and snow and then reused. The most thankless task was disposing of the piles of amputated legs and arms; Victor could never get used to the smell of burning flesh.
It was at Teruel that he ran into Elisabeth Eidenbenz for the second time. They had met during the battle for Madrid, where she had arrived as a volunteer for the Association to Aid Children in War. She was a twenty-four-year-old Swiss nurse with the face of a Renaissance virgin and the courage of a battle-hardened veteran. Victor had been half in love with her in Madrid, and would have been so entirely if only she had given him the slightest encouragement. However, nothing could divert this young woman from her mission: to lessen the suffering of children in these awful times. Over the months since he had first met her, she had lost the innocence she had arrived with. Her character had been toughened by her struggles against military bureaucracy and men’s stupidity; she kept her compassion and kindness for the women and children in her care. In a lull between two enemy attacks, Victor bumped into her next to one of the food supply trucks. “Hello there, do you remember me?” Elisabeth greeted him in a Spanish enriched by guttural German sounds. Of course he remembered her, but seeing her left him dumbstruck. She looked more mature and more beautiful than ever. They sat on a piece of concrete rubble; he began to smoke, and she drank tea from a canteen.
“What’s become of your friend Aitor?” she asked him.
“He’s still around in the thick of it, without a scratch.”
“He’s not afraid of anything. Say hello to him from me.”
“What plans do you have for when this war is over?” Victor asked.
“To find another one. There’s always war somewhere in the world. What about you?”
“If you like, we could get married,” he suggested, overcome with shyness.
She laughed, and for a moment became a Renaissance maiden once more.
“Not on your life, man. I’m not going to get married to you or anyone else. I don’t have time for love.”
“Maybe you will change your mind. Do you think we’ll meet again?”
“Without a doubt, if we survive. You can count on me, Victor, if there’s any way I can help you…”
“The same goes for me. May I kiss you?”
“No.”
* * *
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IT WAS IN THE Teruel caves that Victor acquired nerves of steel and the medical knowledge that no university could have offered him. He learned that you can get used to almost anything—to blood (so much blood!), surgery without anesthetics, the stench of gangrene, filth, the endless flood of wounded soldiers, sometimes women and children as well—while at the same time an age-old weariness sapped your will, and worst of all, you had to confront the insidious suspicion that all this sacrifice might be in vain. And it was there, as he was pulling the dead and wounded from the ruins of a bombardment, that the delayed collapse of a wall smashed his left leg.
He was seen by an English doctor from the International Brigades. Anyone else would have opted for a rapid amputation, but the Englishman had just begun his shift and had been able to rest for a few hours. He stammered an order to the nurse and made ready to reset the broken bones. “You’re lucky, my lad. Supplies from the Red Cross arrived yesterday, so we can put you to sleep,” said the nurse, covering his face with the ether mask.
Victor attributed the accident to the fact that Aitor Ibarra and his lucky star had not been with him to protect him. Aitor was the one who had taken him to the train that brought him to Valencia together with dozens of other wounded men. Victor’s leg was immobilized by lengths of wood kept in place by bandages—his flesh wounds meant it couldn’t be encased in plaster. He was wrapped in a blanket, shivering from cold and fever, and tormented by every jolt of the train, but grateful that he was in a better state than most of those lying with him on the floor of the wagon. Aitor had given him his last cigarettes, as well as a dose of morphine that he made Victor promise to use only in a dire emergency, because he wouldn’t get any more. In the hospital at Valencia, they congratulated him on the good work the English doctor had done. If there were no complications, his leg would be like new, although a little shorter than the other one, they told him.
Once the wounds began to heal and he could stand using a crutch, they set his leg in plaster and sent him to Barcelona. He stayed at his parents’ home playing endless games of chess with his father until he could move about unaided, and then went back to work at a local hospital, where he attended civilians. To him, this was like being on vacation; compared to what he had experienced on the battlefront, it was a paradise of cleanliness and efficiency.
He stayed there until the following spring, when he was sent to Sant Andreu in Manresa. He said goodbye to his parents, and to Roser Bruguera, the music student the Dalmau family had taken in. During the weeks of his convalescence, Victor had come to think of her as one of the family. This modest, likeable girl who spent endless hours in piano practice had provided the company that Marcel Lluis and Carme were in need of ever since their own children had left home.