The Man Upstairs

When solicitous old friends asked Manuel Cortes Quero, 63, how he was feeling, he replied: "These shoes are killing me." With good reason. For the past 30 years Cortes has been shoeless, padding around in carpet slippers in an upstairs room of his house in Mijas, above the seaport of Malaga. His self-imposed imprisonment ended last week when Generalissimo Francisco Franco ordered an amnesty for all survivors of the losing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War of three decades ago.

Cortes had not only served on the Republican side but, even worse, had before the war been elected mayor of the Andalusian village of Mijas, running on the ticket of the moderate Socialist Workers party. When the army revolted against the republic, bloodletting took place in rural Mijas in retaliation. Recalling those events, Cortes says now: "I had no forces of order at my disposal. I was helpless to stop them. But they were not crimes by the people here. Others came from the outside."

Walled Up. When the war ended in 1939, the Republican units disintegrated. Thousands of ex-soldiers, fearful of the victors' vengeance, fled across the French border. Cortes found himself in Valencia, far from the safety of any international border. Besides, his wife Juliana and his infant daughter Maria were back in Mijas. Then Corts was, in a sense, paroled by the victorious Falangists: he was given a railway ticket and told to return to Mijas, there to report to an office that was judging local Republicans.

Cortes made his way back to his village by night, circling through outlying fields until he was directly above Mijas, which clings to a clifflike promontory above the Mediterranean. He moved cautiously past his neighbors' shuttered houses and knocked softly at his father's door. Juliana and the baby were quickly sent for, but his wife was dismayed by Manuel's reluctant decision to follow orders and turn himself in. "Don't go," she said. "Don't even think about it. They'll kill you."

Cortes spent the next two years virtually walled up in his father's house--hidden in a hollow space of 3 ft. by 6 ft., originally intended as a cupboard. "Sometimes I would come out at night," he says, "but the house was often searched in those days." Then, in 1941, the landlord told the family that they must leave the house and find another. They managed to find one with a conveniently similar wall cupboard elsewhere in the town, and Cortes made the move by night, dressed in women's clothes, his head shawled. The same ruse was successfully adopted ten years later, when the family moved to their present home in Mijas.

Warm Abrazos. There, Corts was hidden in an upper room, small, bare--containing only a bed, a chair, an electric heater, a radio and a single picture of Jesus Christ. Though the years stretched out in a monotony of sameness, there was always the fear of detection. With his father now dead, Cortes realized that each pack of cigarettes, each shirt his wife bought could give them away. Juliana became a peddler and would go down to Malaga to sell Mijas' hemp products and to buy miscellaneous goods and clothes for resale in Mijas, so that an extra shirt or trousers caused no comment. In fact, when local searches for Cortes failed, the police believed that he was hiding out in Malaga and that Juliana's journeys were a pretext to see him. Entirely unknown to her, she was followed by plainclothes men in the years after the war.

His wife's job created a job for Cortes. Hidden as he was, he could at last make himself useful, tying strips of esparto grass into bundles that Juliana sold for home weaving. Once he took sick with violent stomach cramps. He described the pain in detail to Juliana, "until she could feel it herself." She then went to the local doctor, told him about the pain as if it were her own and brought the medicine prescribed home to her husband.

Freedom after 30 years has had an understandably numbing effect on Cortes.

He seems strangely unaffected by both the warm abrazos of old friends who had thought him dead, and by the shiny new skyscrapers of Malaga, the neon lights and the blaring sock-it-to-'em jukeboxes. What he likes best of all is to slip off the uncomfortable shoes as he takes the sun in the tiny inner patio prohibited to him for so many years. Sitting there, at peace with himself and the world, Cortes says: "At last, for me, the war is over."

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