Free The Return by Victoria Hislop Page B

presence. There was something astonishingly vivid and modern-looking about the face, chocolate-brown eyes meeting not just those of the photographer but of anyone who was standing at the postcard counter all these years later.
     
    His hair was wavy, his brows thick, his skin slightly roughened by acne and his ears stuck out more than he must have liked. He adopted many different guises. In one picture he played the role of uncle, and a niece, who resembled him so closely she might have been his own little daughter, sat on his lap learning to read, a stubby forefinger pointing to a single word. In another he was a sibling, cheerfully posing with his brother and sister, all of them appearing to suppress their laughter for the picture. The warmth of both the day and the affection between them made the image glow. Other pictures showed family groups and glimpses of a long-gone world when children were dressed in cotton pinafores, and babies wore mobcaps, when women engaged in embroidery and men sat in striped deck chairs. There were plenty of pictures that showed a frivolous side to Lorca: in one he posed as a pilot behind a huge image of a bi-plane, and in another a smiling face poked out from behind a huge fairground cartoon of an overweight woman. There was childlike laughter in such photographs, but in others, with a group of intellectuals or with just one other young man, he looked highly serious.
     
    Whatever he was doing - playing the piano, giving speeches, larking about, striking a pose - he was clearly a man who loved life, and a warmth and vitality emanated from these pictures that inspired Sonia in a way that the house itself had failed to. They provided glimpses of precious carefree moments in a life that had been wiped out not long after. For that reason alone they were absorbing.
     
    At the end of the row of postcards, which were ranked along the counter in neat wooden sections, there was one where he stood outside the front door of this very house, with a sharp shadow of bright summer sunshine behind him. Sonia wondered if it had been taken the summer of his arrest and death.
     
    Sonia moved along the row, picking out one each of every image.
     
    ‘Can I help you?’ asked the girl on the cash desk.
     
    She had been slightly bemused by the length of time this visitor had hovered. Sometimes the stock in here was pilfered, but that only usually happened when school parties came in and this woman did not look remotely suspicious. When she saw the pile of cards in Sonia’s hand, she leaned over towards a pile of books.
     
    ‘If you want so many,’ she said, ‘it makes sense to buy this.’ Sonia took from her the little book she held out and flicked through its pages.All the postcard images and more were contained in it, along with captions and quotes.With a dictionary, she might be able to translate them.
     
    Her eyes rested on the last image of Lorca where he sat, white-suited, at a café table with a stylish-looking woman who wore a beret.A carafe of wine stood on the table in front of them, sunlight streamed down through the branches of trees in full leaf and people sat back in their wicker seats at other tables. This was a portrayal of people at leisure, of Spain at peace.
     
    Below the picture were a few words: ‘ Lo que más me importa es vivir .’ Sonia did not need a dictionary to translate them: ‘What matters to me most is to live.’
     
    The tragic irony of the words struck her forcibly. All these images of Lorca, in a turban, in an aeroplane, with friends, with family, showed him as a man with a huge appetite for life. It was unimaginable now that any poet could have been important enough to execute. The simple white-washed farmhouse was an image of innocence, frozen in time, a memorial that had been left alone while all in its immediate surroundings had been swept up in a new, forward-looking Spain. It was like a gravestone without a corpse.
     
    She handed over some pesetas for the book