(2 of 2)
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, Cortés realized that each pack of cigarettes, each shirt his wife bought could give them away. Juliana became a peddler and would go down to Málaga 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 Cortés failed, the police believed that he was hiding out in Málaga 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 Cortés. 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 Cortés.
He seems strangely unaffected by both the warm abrazos of old friends who had thought him dead, and by the shiny new skyscrapers of Málaga, 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, Cortés says: "At last, for me, the war is over."