The Crowded Grave

because they married into the family firm, but the father and his sons still use ‘Longoria’ as their middle name. The old granddad and his brother died years ago, and the brother’s kids moved to Lorraine after the war to get jobs in the mines. Big in the Resistance, both of them, and lifelong Communists, even when they had their own business. The young ones, it’s just business. You know Lebrun, Bruno. He was on the council a few years ago, called himself a Gaullist. His little sister was the radical, the one that went into TV in Paris.”
    “Any of them still got family they visit back in Spain?” Carlos asked.
    “Not the Spaniards, not that I know of. The Portuguese, now, they’re different, always going home and saving money to build houses back home. They still call it home, some of them. But the Spaniards, at least the ones around here, were determined to make themselves French as soon as they could.”
    “Any names that you recognize?” asked Carlos, handing across the list that he and Bruno had looked at earlier.
    “This is a good one, Joe,” said Bruno, raising his glass as Joe went through the names. “What year is it?”
    “The ’99, a good hot April and May so I picked the walnuts early, first week of June. And I had that eau-de-vie from all those peaches we had the previous year, so I cut down on the sugar. I’ve still got a few bottles left.” He looked up at Carlos and handed back the list. “There’s nothing here worth bothering about.”
    “Is there anybody else you’ve heard of, maybe outside this immediate region, who still talks about Spain and politics?”
    “Just that old comrades’ group from the civil war that used to meet in Périgueux every year, sometime around the end of March. I think it was the anniversary of the fall of Madrid. The old Lebrun brothers used to go. But I haven’t even heard about that in twenty years.” Joe paused. “It’s a long time ago.”
    “Not for some of them,” Carlos said, “the ones with long memories who think it was less to do with Franco than with Spanish domination.”
    Very long memories indeed, thought Bruno, doing the math in his head. Anybody who’d fought in the Spanish Civil War would be in his nineties by now. And modern Spain had been a democracy for as long as Bruno could remember. He sipped at his drink, wondering what made people into militant separatists in a democracy. In France maybe there were still a few hotheads left in Corsica and maybe one or two in Brittany, but mostly it was about dressing up in regional costumes,reenacting folk dances and publishing poems in languages that fewer and fewer people spoke.
    “The only person I ever heard talking about Basques around here was Anita, that schoolteacher who came from Perpignan. You remember her, Bruno, she taught at the infants’ school and then lived with Jan the blacksmith, the Danish guy. She used to talk about Basques and Bretons and Rwanda and Kosovo and I don’t know where else. She was a great one for causes.”
    “There was some talk of Breton militants having links with ETA,” said Carlos, perking up.
    “Not this one,” said Joe. “She wasn’t so much a leftie, more on the environment and human rights and getting up petitions for political prisoners all over the place. Died of breast cancer, must be four or five years ago. She was a nice woman, all the kids liked her.”
    He held up the bottle, offering another glass. Bruno shook his head, and Carlos followed his lead and rose, thanking Joe for his time. As they left, Joe poured himself another glass and went back to his seed catalog. In the courtyard, his dog opened a single, watchful eye as the visitors walked past him, and then he went back to sleep.
    After three useless visits to families who had almost forgotten their Spanish roots, Bruno dropped Carlos at his hotel and drove to the rugby stadium. Some thirty or so young men, the first and second teams and reserves, were trotting back and forth on the field, warming up. Teddy was jogging alongside Laurent from the post office, the tallest man on the St. Denis team and a line-out specialist. The baron rose from his perch alongside some cronies and joined Bruno in the dressing room to watch him slip into a tracksuit and trainers.
    “Where’s the girl?” Bruno asked.
    “She’s been asleep all afternoon. Best thing for her,” the baron replied. “Your Welshman looks useful. He borrowed a spare pair of cleats from Laurent, the only feet