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A corporal of the Guardia Civil is shot in 1939 Madrid. A frightened seven-year-old, Maria Alejandra, sees the body and drops her school books. She repacks them but loses her notebook. Notebooks are precious in post-civil war Madrid. Aleja will be chastised and punished for losing hers and will not get another for the remainder of the school year. Tia Viviana, who takes care of Aleja after school, goes out near curfew to recover the notebook. When Guardia Sgt Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon sees a woman in a red dress leaning over the body of his slain friend, he shoots the woman, and the case is considered closed. "A Red did it and we got the Red." He confiscates the notebook, thinking it has something to do with the case, and gets his commendation for solving the murder. However, Tejada is a man with a conscience and as he digs deeper, he finds inconsistencies. The book is traced to Aleja, her mother is taken into custody and Tejada, finding it hard to believe that a school notebook is so precious, takes the child into care to try to find out what really happened. As he digs into the story, his Nationalist Francoite loyalties being to melt . He is from a wealthy Salamanca family and has never before been exposed to the conditions under which most Republicans (communists, poor people) have had to live. In this, the short period during which a Civil War was used to test weapons of mass destruction for the future World War to come, and the conflict itself, Tejada begins to feel his loyalties shift. This is a superb first novel by 25-year-old Pawel who makes us feel the poverty of the bombed-out city and the arrogance of the men on top. One can understand why so many young Americans went to Spain to fight for the Republicans, even though they would later be ostracized by Joe McCarthy and his ilk. It will be interesting to see if Pawel can continue the scholarship and the empathy with the characters at the high level shown in this novel.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, February 2004
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