"The wheel keeps turning round!
 The wheel keeps turning round!
 And no-one can stop it turning!"
 

That damn chorus had been going round my head since my alarm radio had woken me with it.  God knows why it stuck in my mind; it was not even a good tune.  At last the old man opened the door.

"Oh it's you young man.  That's all right then.  Come in, come in. I thought you were that busybody Lydia asking after me again."

I shook the offered hand and ducked through the low opening cut into the huge doors. Guiding me along the dark passageway he led me further into the house.  This surprised me, because all our previous negotiations had taken place in the stable like entrance of the building.

"How are you Senyor Alemany?"  I asked as we entered his shadowy living room.
"None of your Senyors," he snapped.  "Call me Josep.  Right, so here we are.  It's not cold, so I've not lit the stove."

He indicated the armchair he obviously expected me to sit on and dropped himself into another.  During the next few seconds I managed to glance around the place.  Sunshine beamed dustily through one small window, revealing a tiny room which seemed overfed with furniture.  It was all as bourgeois as I might have expected, down to the long shelves of unread reference books and two water colours of the village, painted some years apart.  But curiously, these flanked an ornately framed painting of a pair of black, military style boots against a pale green background.  An odd subject for oil, I thought. Josep's question brought my swift assessment of the room to an end.

"Are you cold?" he asked, adjusting his beret.
 "No," I replied, "I'm not cold.  It has been mild these last few days, hasn't it?"

 He nodded and asked:
"So what is it this time?"
I explained about the plaster that frequently fell from the ceiling whenever my upstairs neighbour crossed his living room.

"Can't you fix it yourself lad?"' he queried.

I explained that my knowledge of plastering ran to filling in the odd crack, but anything else was beyond me. He sighed and sat back in his chair.

"So it's a job for a professional then?  Pity, because plasterers are damn difficult to get hold of.   Too much work in this town, that's the problem."

As a landlord, I had always found Senyor Alemany reasonable; if not over eager to spend money on his property.  In the six months I had been his tenant he had agreed to pay for paint, as long as I did the decorating; and electrical fittings, as long as I did the installation.  But he never seemed keen on paying for tradesmen to do a proper job.  Whether this was for the reasons he'd just stated, or for some more occult reason connected with the various feuds that I knew were common in the town, I could only guess.

 There seemed no point in prolonging the visit.  I would have to ask around to see if I could find anyone with a knowledge of plastering who would be willing to do me a favour.  As I hate asking for favours, I knew this could take some time.  I shrugged and placed my hands on my chair ready to make my excuses and leave.

"Look, do you have to go? Would you like a little drop of something or-"
"Sorry, I must be off.   I'd love to stop and chat but I've got to go and see the mother of one of my students."

He gave me a skeptical look.  I felt an urge to own up but resisted it.  Standing, I said:

"Well, let me know if you manage to contact a plasterer, won't you?"
"Yes, of course," he sighed, rising himself. "You never know, miracles might happen.  The Red Sea might part again and a host of plasterers might descend from on high, pallets at the ready, singing Joshua fought the battle of Jericho."

I smiled and tapped him on the arm.

I was just stepping out of the door into the pitch black corridor, when I stopped short.  I had glanced over at the picture of the boots and was surprised to note their sense of solidity.

"They look so real,"  I said out loud.
"What do?"
 "These boots."
"Probably because they are."

Curiosity struggled with impatience.  Curiosity won.

"Why are they hanging up there?"  I asked.
"Well,"  he said, in a tone of triumph. "I'll tell you the story over a drink.  How does that sound?"

I glanced up again at the boots.

"That sounds fine," I replied, returning to the armchair.
"And Senyora whatever her name is?" he grinned.
"Can wait,"  I nodded.

Ignoring my protests Josep poured us both a generous measure of brandy.  I half expected - "Once upon a time" - but got a question instead.

"What did your parents do in the civil war?"
"Mine were too young,"  I said.  "They were just children when all that happened."
"And I suppose the civil war is not something you're very interested in."

Sensing that I might yet lose the story of those framed boots,  I interjected with a little white lie.
"Oh no, on the contrary, I'm quite interested in history."
"History!"  he said, laughing.  "Ha!  You know that's the funny thing about getting on, your memory and your experiences, which you count as contemporary, become the next lot's history.  It makes me feel like a fossil when you use that word.   Tell me, how old are you?  Twenty-three?   Twenty-four?"

I held up five fingers.

"O.K.   That means you are just old enough to remember the dying days of our beloved leader, but too young to have seen him at his megalomaniac best.   I suppose you've got a right to say events twenty or more years before you were born are history.   It is just difficult for me to come to terms with.  I close my eyes and there it all is - the banners, the flags and the posters of a short lived attempt to make people want to take responsibility for their own lives.   Huh!  I don't know why Franco and his cronies bothered to wage a war against that.  It was doomed right from the start.  No-one wants real democracy.   Real democracy means endless meetings to decide everything.  But meetings are meetings aren't they?  Boring by their very nature.  Imagine today trying to drag people away from their televisions to attend regular meetings.   It wasn't much different then.  If Franco had bided his time the whole experiment would have died from lack of interest."

He paused, momentarily lost in some venomous memory.

"You weren't a politico then?"  I questioned.
"Me?  No.  Besides I was only seventeen in thirty six and-"

 I did a quick mental calculation and felt like congratulating him on his good health.

"-I'd been close to mother church as a lad.   Helped out in the services, joined the choir, that sort of thing.  I wasn't a bad singer.  I stayed in the choir for a few years.  Did solos and that.  Trouble was, the damn priest gets it into his head that I'm made for the seminary."

He took a long swig of brandy.

"Now I knew better.   Even at fourteen I was eyeing up the village girls."

He paused abruptly and asked:

"Are you religious by the way?"
"Not at all.  My Dad was against it and my Mother indifferent and-"  He interrupted.
"So anyway, me and the church fell out after old Father Jaume tried to fix things with my Dad.  Things got very tense.  I left the choir and had to put up with my family's indignation for a while.   Then, with that popular front business, the church became very unpopular in many quarters; at last I think even my dad heaved a sigh of relief that number three son had not become a boy martyr."

He got up, refilled his glass and sat back down.

"Where was I?"
"Your escape from martyrdom,"  I prompted.
"Ah yes.  So amid all this chaos that passed for the new order of thirty-five to thirty-six, I kept my head down.   I was neither this nor that.   Other lads joined the young socialists or the catholic youth patriots or whatever, but me?   I just continued with my studies and helped out with finances by doing whatever odd jobs I could get hold of.  Mother never allowed any of us to discuss politics in the house and I was glad of that; no matter how artificial my brothers said it was.

Mother was a junior school teacher and Father a bank clerk.  They had both studied hard to escape from what they considered to be peasant stock.  We never saw much of our relatives for that reason.  The only family we kept in touch with was my mother's sister Anna who lived in Barcelona.   She'd made what they called a good marriage; which meant she lived miserably with a pedantic, but well-off, husband.   My mother used to idolize her daughter Bea.  I think she would have swapped all three of her argumentative sons for one obedient daughter.  I remember that they hardly ever visited their home villages.  I had a fistful of Uncles and Aunts who I had never seen."

"Oh, you weren't from the village then?" I queried.
"Me?  Yes, I am.  Born and bred.   But no, they came from...  Er, she was from the coast near Castelló and he was from a village near Tarrega way.  Both my parents moved here because of work."

I smiled inwardly at the repeating pattern of history that brought me here.

"My mother was a shrewd woman, careful with her money. She got friendly with a fellow immigrant, a bank clerk and one thing led to another.  I was the third of three.   My elder brothers Manel and Jordi and me.  Is this boring you?"

 I replied honestly.

"No not at all.   I can't see where it's going but-"
"Neither could I,"  he interposed, "that's what I'm getting at.  Now, my brothers excepted, we kept our heads down during the immediate pre-war years.   Mother resisted attempts to politicize her lessons and Father would issue dire warnings about runaway inflation on the German model.   But then the eighteenth of July happened and...  You've read your history books I suppose?"

I assured him that I was aware of the broad outline of the war.  Delving, as I said it, into vague memories of the conflicting pre and post Franco versions we'd been treated to in school.

"Then you'll know,"  he continued, "that here in Catalunya after the Franquists had failed to take over, there was a complete upheaval.  The meetings complex became fashionable again and this time it really took off.   Every damn thing was collectivized and you had to sit for hours listening to some self important committee tying themselves up in knots before you could get anything done.

Hell, as in any war it had its good points.  That feeling of bonding together against a common enemy was probably the closest many people ever got to feeling part of the human race and not just petty, squabbling, self-centered, what's-my-neighbour-up-to individuals.   But even that wore pretty thin when the rebels started winning more and more ground and the food ran short.

My parents wanted us to avoid it all, but my brothers joined up in the militias and my mother banned the two of them from the house.  Jordi's young wife, who had been a regular pal of my mother's, stopped coming round then and when Jordi got his first, and only leave, we never saw him.   I'm not saying that I was indifferent to the war.  No, I wanted the Republic to win, but I wasn't too keen on dying in the process.   As it happened, the choice got taken out of my hands.  I got called up."

He paused, then asked me.

"Where did you do your military service?"

I hate this question and if it comes up in public I usually change the subject.   Face to face with Josep's openness I simply replied:

"I didn't.   Flat feet."
 He laughed.
"Good for you.  But I suppose they'll still have you on reserve."
"I don't think so," I countered.
 "Bound to,"  he unsettlingly stated.   "They'd soon have you square bashing if they got themselves into another mess.   Not that there'll be much use for  infantry in the next one."
"I can't see us getting involved in a war these days."
"Famous last words,"  he said, returning to his story.  "So, there I was, saying good-bye to my parents at the station.   They were both dressed in black I remember, like it was my funeral they were attending. The train was full of poor sods in the same boat as me.

We got to the barracks late in the evening.  It wasn't really a barracks, it had been a Jesuit college before the war, but it was probably more comfortable than most recruits could've expected in our circumstances.  Four of us to a room and decent enough food.  We didn't do much in the way of basic training, though we did a lot of marching up and down on the parade ground.  We didn't do any rifle practice either, but we did do rifle drill with dummy rifles.  God knows why they teach you all that drill?  You never off load your rifle by numbers under fire.  If someone starts shooting at you, the last thing you're going to do is present arms.  No, the nearest we got to real training was having the dismantling and re-assembling of a rifle demonstrated for us by an N.C.O.  I was at the back, some twenty metres away.  We didn't actually lay our hands on a real gun until the day they issued them; which was the day we were sent to the front.

There were many Catalans in my group, but also a couple of Extremeños and a young Basque who had been even more apolitical than me till his grandparents had been killed when the Krauts levelled Guernica.  Realizing the north would soon be lost, he had made his way on foot over into France.  Then he walked almost the full length of the Pyrenees, till he came to where the border led into government held territory.  He was a big lad, built like a plough boy, a jovial giant.  He had a stock of the crudest jokes imaginable and said they lost a lot in translation.  He got killed guarding the retreat from the Ebro.   Do you know I've forgotten his name.  Now that annoys me.  It was some barely pronounceable Basque name that I took great pains to learn."

While he paused, intent on remembering the forgotten name, I glanced at my watch.  I was in no hurry, but I wondered if he was going to give me a detailed account of his entire personal contribution to the Republican defeat.  He gave up on the name.

"It'll come to me.   So, the next morning we are sent down to the old chapel to get kitted out in our uniforms.  It was very much one of those quick glance at you - "Yes, this'll do you.  Sign here". - jobs.   The corporal in charge kept saying: "No changes made" as he handed you over your battle dress.   There was a lot of swapping going on amongst the blokes and I can't help smiling when I picture it again.  Two hundred blokes milling around a gutted chapel in their shirt tails, trying each other's pants or jackets on, until they were more or less satisfied.   Then an orderly brought the first of the boots out of the back."

"Now perhaps he'll get to the point", I thought.

"Again the little corporal insisted that no changes would be made, but this time the interchange was studied, slow and serious.  At least among the farm boys it was anyway.  You see, you can put up with a jacket whose sleeves you have to turn up, or trousers that pinch your wedding tackle a bit, but boots are another thing altogether.   For a soldier, his boots are his most prized possession; more important than his rifle even.   If you've got to foot slog hundreds of kilometres with all your gear; squelch through muddy trenches or run across uneven sun baked fields avoiding rocks, all of which you often did under fire from front, side, above and behind; well, your boots can mean the difference between burial and seeing the day out.

I didn't twig why the farm boys were being so fussy about footwear.   I got given a pair that pinched my toes and managed to swap them with a fellow who had been an actor.  His were big on me, but not as bad as on him and I thought - rather too big than too small.   A mistake I was to pay dearly for, because with boots that are too small you get a couple of weeks of annoying blisters, but then the leather softens up and they end up clinging to the contours of your feet.  With boots that are too big, it just gets worse.  You either rattle about in them, scraping whole layers of skin raw beneath your socks, if you're lucky enough to have socks that is, or else you spend time and energy wrapping your feet in newspaper, or packing the space out with rag.  This padding then shifts position like it has a mind of its own and wants to find just those points that will cause you the most pain when you still have ten kilometres of forced march to go.   Newspaper also gets wet and disintegrates.  Your constant movement rubs it into a kind of paste that slides between your toes and feels like you are walking through dog turds.   Worse still, you seldom found reason to take your boots off when you were dug in somewhere, and so you'd sleep in them.   Naturally the goo would dry out and you'd find it murder to move the next morning, being literally glued into your boots.

I remember one time I'd stuffed a cheap quality anarchist leaflet into my left boot.   It fell apart, but when it dried out it was full of tiny splinters, like bleeding thorns they were.   They dug themselves into the skin and caused potentially gangrenous sores to appear all over my foot.   Took weeks to get the damn things out too.   So, as you can see, boots are damn important."

I nodded, and sensing he needed reassuring again said:

"Fascinating."  He launched back into his story.

"When we marched down to the station to catch the train that was to take us near to the front there was no public send off, there was none of the cheering that had hailed the militias off to war a year earlier.  People looked on in silence.  One or two raised a clenched fist in salute and one woman I saw even furtively crossed herself, but on the whole our departure was greeted by silence."

He dramatically held his breath, underscoring the moment, then he abruptly continued:

"I quickly found further reason still to hate those boots in the summer months that we spent being shifted around the front.  Us government troops were replacing a century of political militias who had held the line until then, see."

I must have looked puzzled because he went on to explain:

"That's how the militia were organized.  A hundred to a hundred and twenty men under a delegated centurion.  Fifteen centuries formed a column.  Funny model for a revolutionary army to adopt, that of Imperial Rome, isn't it?"

I smiled and nodded, he continued.

"It was fairly quiet at first, but then we got thrown into an offensive that pushed our lines forward about twenty kilometres at enormous cost.   We only held the new positions for a few weeks, but that's another story.   Anyway, it was here, outside some god forsaken little town tucked into a bend on the river, that I got my first taste of that barbaric slaughter we call battle.

Now a battle for me had been imagined in terms of organized attacks in which the stronger of two forces overwhelmed the other.  The victors took prisoners, tore down the enemy's flag and put up their own.   They, the enemy, would be recognized by their uniforms, insignia and weaponry; and of course you knew what one of your lot looked like.

Well, imagine a foggy dawn in which you're running, half blind, behind an advancing armoured car which is firing irregularly into the gloom.  Huh! Armoured car?  That's a laugh.   Now I remember, the armoured corps were late for the push; so we improvised with bits of corrugated iron lashed onto the body of whatever car came to hand.  The tanks turned up the next day, but too late because the Fascists had found time to bring up reinforcements.   That meant our advance halted, surprise was lost and we had no chance of making the breakthrough to Saragossa.   God knows why the tanks were late, probably some political argument amongst the officers and crews.

Anyway, there I was, terrified, but running forward.  Shots being fired from all directions, as the enemy rattled off machine guns at us from somewhere up ahead and the fellows behind us, seeing shapes appear and disappear in the mist, fire, in case it's a counter attack.  Fun eh?  Then a late artillery bombardment starts up and all hell breaks loose.

Now, these damn boots of mine hadn't been too bad in the days before the advance.  I'd finally got all the little splinters out and hadn't been in too much pain from my sores.  But suddenly, as I panted hard to keep in the cover of that animated shanty hut in front of me, my feet start to rattle about in my boots.  Then the padding suddenly pushed up under my arches.  A sharp stab in the right sole and I stumbled forward flat on my face.   A bloke beside me thought I'd been hit and stops to bend down to see what he can do for me; strictly against orders of course.   So, as he did, I saw him jerk backwards to the left and collapse by my side.   He had been shot hadn't he?   So I crawled over to him to take a look.  Chest wound, pretty gruesome.  My first sight of blood.  I was surprised, because instead of being sick, or fainting, or any of the other things I thought I might do in those circumstances, I stayed calm and detached.  Seeing I could do little for him, I stumbled on into the mist ignoring the pain in my feet.

I'd got cut off from the main thrust and followed the sloping bank down towards the river.   A figure ahead of me stopped and raised his rifle to his shoulder.  Only then did I realize that I was his target.  I dropped, rolled to one side and heard the snap of his bullet close by me.  I swung my weapon upwards, firing off a shot as I did so.   Poor bugger, he ran straight into it.  The terrifying thing was that I didn't know whether he was one of theirs or one of ours.  For a long time I couldn't move.  But eventually, I hobbled over to him and confirmed that he had been one of theirs.   I thought I'd feel relief; but it didn't make any difference.   He shuddered repeatedly and I watched him, in spite of myself, fascinated.   How long he stayed like that I can't tell you, but I can say that I just sat down beside him and stared at his strangeness."

"Why do you say strangeness?"  I interrupted.
"Well, maybe strange isn't the right word,"  Josep continued. "It was that otherness of someone you don't know  caught in an intimate situation.  Er...  Have you ever been to the zoo?"
"A while back."
"And have you ever looked one of those creatures in the eye and felt a weird feeling at the way it looks at you?"
"Well no,"  I confessed. "But I think I know what you mean.  I used to feel something similar when I looked at my neighbour's cat and-"   He butted in.
"Well it was like that with this dying soldier.  He was a very normal looking bloke.   Nothing special.   About my build I noticed.   About my height too.   In fact the more I looked at him the more I felt myself identifying with him.   Christ, if you'd stood us back to back on a dark night we'd have been each other's shadow.

Then my eyes were drawn to his feet.   He had a fairly new pair of foreign boots on.   I stared and stared at them until the decision made itself.   His trembling had stopped, but still not knowing whether he was dead or not, I leaned down and carefully unlaced them.   Using my bayonet, I cut my own laces and with some pain and difficulty managed to remove my boots.   It was the first time they'd been off my feet in over a fortnight.   Despite the battle around me, I slowly wriggled into his boots, as if I had all the time in the world, and laced them up.   They fitted like the proverbial gloves.   And do you know what?  They were still warm.   Still warm from his feet!    I knelt beside his head and I don't know why, but I made the sign of the cross on his forehead.   Funny thing for an atheist soldier to do eh?   Then I stood up, gave him a last look, noticing - lord knows why - that his socks were carefully darned.  After reloading my rifle, I slung it onto my shoulder and ran off into the mist."

"Amazing story,"  I said. "So, those are the same boots, eh?  Well, thanks for telling me the story.  I'll be off now then."

So saying I laid my nearly empty glass on the arm of the chair and got unsteadily to my feet.

"Oh no, that's not the end," smiled Josep, his best ancient mariner gleam in his eyes.  "That's just the beginning."

 Just then there was a knock on the door.

"You just stay there young man, I'll go and see who it is.  With a bit of luck it'll be Nuria come to fix us some lunch."
"Us?"
"Of course. You'll stay for lunch now, won't you?"
I sighed.  Was there any point trying to resist?
"If you insist Seny-   Josep."
"Oh I do," he said, and shuffled out of the room kicking his left leg out from him a few times to remove a certain stiffness.

Nuria turned out to be his brother Manel's daughter who often cooked Josep's lunch.   I had seen Nuria around the village.  She was a very cheerful woman of about fifty; well preserved and with a good figure.   I also knew that Nuria had a stunning looking daughter with dark hair, a dark complexion but with pale blue eyes.   I had been her secret admirer since bumping into her in the bread shop some months before, but we had never spoken.

"What a pity her daughter hasn't accompanied mum on her errand of mercy," I thought.
I learned in the course of the meal that she often did.   Josep, mid forkful, seemed to be reading my mind.

"She's a nice girl Neus, you don't know her do you?"
"No, I don't," I responded.  "But I have seen her around and she seems a nice girl."
"`I'll have to introduce you sometime," said Josep, his grin growing broader.  "You two would get on.   She's just finishing her university course."
"Really," I answered, not hiding my interest now.  "What's she been studying?"

He looked lost for words for the first time and asked Nuria, who had sat smiling at me throughout the meal, hardly saying a word.

"`English philology."
"Interesting," I stated.  "Yes, English is the in thing today.  Though personally, I've never been able to get my tongue around it."
"`Ah yes, but she's had help from a good teacher and-" Nuria stopped short after a glance from Josep who broke the momentary silence.
"She played the piano when she was younger too."
"Only to grade three,"  Nuria insisted.

The rest of the dinner was spent swapping gentle gossip about the village, or discussing my antecedents again for Nuria's benefit.  I sensed that the Civil War was not something that Nuria wished to hear about.  I also felt I was being weighed up by the pair of them in some way.

As the wine steadily diminished, I did begin to wish that I hadn't sank the two huge brandies earlier.  I felt a bit unsteady and at one point I knocked the wine jug over and sent it crashing to the floor.

"I think it might be wise if we left the cognac out of the coffee, don't you?" suggested my host.
 I readily agreed.

After brushing up the broken glass, Nuria brought us coffee, then made her excuses and left.   After she'd gone I expected Josep to continue with his story, but he began to ramble on a bit, after half an hour or so, he lapsed into silence and dropped off to sleep.

The stillness in the room oppressed me; as did the musty darkness that seeped into the house as the sun shifted position and no longer threw cutting beams in through the window.   It was an embarrassing situation.  If I let him sleep on, would he be offended?  If I stayed, how long might he be unconscious?  And if I woke him up, how would he react? Josep suddenly grunted and started to snore.  I looked at my watch, it was late.  The first of my evening classes would start soon.
Dreading the thought, I wrote him a hurried thank you note and placed it on the table.

As I left the room I had to pass the boots that had started the story.  Giving in to a strong desire, I reached out and touched them.  I took a last glance at my sleeping host and his den as I stood swaying in an alcohol induced haze.  Suddenly, I saw every object take its place in a completed mosaic.  Everything in the room confirming a small town conventionality  which his parents, had they still been alive, would have felt at home in.  Everything that is, except those boots.

I closed the door quietly and stumbled through the unlit passage into the huge entrance hall.   Unlatching the door, I slipped out into the evening sunshine.   The fresh, early evening breeze helped to clear my head and ease the desire I had felt, as I made my unsteady exit, to insult an excellent meal by bringing it up again all over the pavement.  Classes that evening were murder.