Free The Return by Victoria Hislop

was tempted to press the elderly man further.
     
    A twelve-strong group of Japanese on a guided tour then arrived and were soon waiting expectantly for their orders to be taken. The elderly man moved away to attend to them and Sonia watched him writing things on his pad.Without his patience it might have been a tortuous business given their lack of both Spanish and English, a language which he spoke with great fluency but a thick accent. No wonder so many menus here were illustrated with garish photographs of unappetising-looking dishes and foaming milkshakes; at least that way foreigners could order just by pointing.
     
    When he brought the drinks and pastries they had ordered, he also came out with another coffee for Sonia; she was touched that he had thought of her.
     
    By now the café was filling up with people and she could tell that the moment had passed for him to devote all his attention to her.
     
    ‘ La cuenta, por favor ,’ she said, using most of the words she knew to ask for the bill.
     
    The café owner shook his head. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said.
     
    Sonia smiled. It was a simple gesture and she was touched. She knew instinctively that he was not in the habit of giving away drinks.
     
    ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It was really interesting talking to you. I might go and look at Lorca’s house. Where is it from here?’
     
    He pointed down the street and said she must turn right at the end of it. It would not take her more than ten minutes to reach La Huerta de San Vicente, the Lorca family’s summer house in the south of the city.
     
    ‘It’s pretty,’ he said. ‘And it’s got some good mementoes of the man and his family. It’s a bit cold, though.’
     
    ‘Cold?’
     
    ‘You’ll see.’
     
    Sonia could not ask him any more questions. He was busy now and had already turned his back to take another order. She rose from her seat, gathered her book, her bag and her map, and edged her way past the other tourists.
     
    As she walked away, the elderly man came after her, for a moment holding on to her arm. There was one more thing he was eager to tell her.
     
    ‘You should go up to the cemetery as well,’ he said. ‘Lorca didn’t die there but thousands of others were shot up on that hill.’
     
    ‘Thousands?’ she queried.
     
    The old man nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said deliberately. ‘Several thousand. ’
     
    It seemed a huge figure to Sonia, given the scale of this city. Perhaps the old man was a bit soft in the head after all, and telling a tourist to go and look at a municipal graveyard was fairly bizarre too. She nodded politely and smiled. Even if the house of a dead poet exerted some fascination, she had no intention of visiting a burial place.
     
    Sonia followed the directions he had given her, taking the long straight road, Recogidas, towards the edge of town. Shops were now open and snatches of music floated out onto the pavements that now began to fill with young women, arms linked, chattering, pristine carrier bags swinging at their sides. This was the street for youthful fashion, and alluring window displays of high boots, jewel-coloured belts and stylish jackets on blank-faced dummies drew these girls like children to sweetshops.
     
    Walking down the sunny side of a street, which pulsated with a sense that life had never been so good, the café owner’s portrayal of a strife-ridden Spain seemed hard to imagine.Though she was intrigued by what he had told her of the war, Sonia was puzzled that so little evidence of it remained. She had noticed neither plaque nor monument that recorded the events of that period, and the atmosphere all around her did not suggest that these young people were burdened by the past.The historical buildings of the Alhambra might have been what drew most visitors to Granada, but a street such as this showed a Spain that was pressing on into the future, transforming buildings from the previous centuries into futuristic palaces of glass and