John Masters (35 page)
Authors: The Rock
It was a beautiful gun, but of course by the thin trumpeter's day quite useless. The time for a testing of Gibraltar's defenses was not yet at hand, fortunately. The British Navy was modern, reasonably efficient (though far from being the terrible instrument of Nelson's day), and enormously numerous; but by the end of the century the ground defenses were out of date and faced with an insoluble problem. The main line of defense had been drawn back from the sea wall to halfway up the Rock, where several modem big guns were installed; but other batteries looked like something left over from the American Civil War: and in some of the galleries cannon and cannonballs which had seen service in the Great Siege were still in position and on the books. Still, the fortress could throw a powerful weight of metal onto attacking ships or the Spanish mainland. The insoluble problem was that the Spanish mainland could now throw a powerful weight of metal back, not at the fortress' guns—they couldn't harm them much—but at the harbor.
To question the impregnability of Gibraltar at this time, after all it had been through, was, as someone said, equivalent to speaking disrespectfully about the equator. There is little doubt that it was in fact impregnable; but if it could not be used as a naval base and port, its impregnability was of no value. Nevertheless, when the Royal Navy surveyed its worldwide position in 1890, it decided to put larger and more modem facilities into Gibraltar to service and repair warships and to protect ships in harbor against mines, torpedoes, and submarines. As soon as the plans for the new dockyard on the western side were announced and work begun in 1895, anxious critics pointed out that the facilities and any ships using them would be subject to the direct fire of Spanish guns mounted in the semicircle of hills all around and now all within easy range. Parliament appointed a committee under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson to investigate. The committee concluded that the new dockyard was wrongly sited and that another one must be built at once on the east side of Gibraltar, where the mass of the rock itself would protect it from everything except perhaps high-angle howitzers. The government took careful note of this view and went on with the western site, the work being done by Spanish laborers under the supervision of British technicians. The only concession to the "western" threat was to put the oil fuel tanks on the east side and run a rail tunnel clear through the Rock near sea level, linking them with the harbor.
The critics now raised the general question of Gibraltar's real value to England, and there were again discussions about exchanging it for Minorca, one of the Canary Islands, or Ceuta.
Nothing came of any of it. The New Dockyard was completed—308 acres of sheltered anchorage, coaling facilities, three dry docks, all kinds of cranes, shops, forges. In view of its total vulnerability to Spanish fire, one must assume that its defense, in 1902, rested on a tit-for-tat threat, i.e., if Spain bombarded Gibraltar, the British fleet would bombard Santander, Cadiz, Cartagena, Barcelona, Bilbao, San Sebastian, Malaga, and a dozen other cities vulnerable to sea power. In other words, Gibraltar was to be protected by the general power of England, not the other way round.
In 1902 the Boer War—a focal theme for much of the long-massing anti-British sentiment in Europe—came to an end. England was again at peace. In Gibraltar officers, soldiers, merchants, traders, laborers, and petty bourgeois lived their ordinary lives in an extraordinary place. Though there were still brothels on the Rock, many favored the more open and
alegre
atmosphere of the establishments in La Linea, a city grown up, just across the Neutral Ground, for the sole purpose of feeding off, and on, Gibraltar's needs. Some of the girls of La Linea were public and cheap. Some were private and expensive. From there one got an extraordinarily clear view of Gibraltar, close up, seen from below....
The ivory figurine of a naked woman, which hung over the head of her bed where the devout often had a crucifix, blurred and enlarged before her eyes. It always did in these final seconds of ecstasy, seeming to bless her lust. She spread herself, crying out, took him into her heart with a convulsion of her muscles, wrapped arms and legs about him, and immediately began to come in shivering transports. She felt his teeth in her neck, a sharp pain, and held him tighter. Minutes, hours later, the spasms calmed into long trembling waves. He was rolling off her. She held him, whispering, "Stay," but he got up, lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply.
She could see him, back and front and side, in four full-length mirrors on the wall, and herself in another on the ceiling. He plucked her dress off a chair and slowly swirled it around him in a
paso natural.
He was insolently graceful, with narrow hips and long gypsy hair. Her neck hurt where he had bitten her.
"I need money, Dolores," he said.
"Again?"
"I have no work now. The count dismissed fifty of us. He needs money to serve the king, he said, so he could not afford to pay us."
She sighed and slipped out of bed, found a key in her purse, and opened a drawer of the ornate escritoire. "I will give you a hundred pesetas," she said.
"Make it two hundred," he said. "I have to live."
She shrugged and gave him the money. He was pulling on his trousers. She stood naked in front of him, wishing he would touch her breasts or enter again into the aching emptiness. But he sprawled in a chair, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip. "Put on my shoes," he commanded.
She knelt before him and slipped one battered, cracked brown shoe onto his bare foot. "You should go to Pablo Larios' stables," she said. "I heard he needs a man to look after the English hounds. You are good with dogs."
She picked up his other foot.
"I might," he said, "just to get a little money so I can leave La Linea for good." He put his foot on her shoulder and pushed hard, sending her flying over backward. "I'm going to be a
torero?"
he cried, striding away from her with the exaggerated, mincing walk a matador uses in the ring to show his dominance over the bull.
"El Gato Moreno
—the Black Cat."
"You're nothing but a gypsy," she said.
He brought the lighted end of his cigarette close to her nipple, so close that she felt the heat of it. She did not cringe, and he suddenly stooped, kissed the nipple, and swaggered out.
She went slowly to the window, pulled back the edge of one long velvet curtain an inch and watched him leave the front door. She heard him calling his dog. "Cabo? Cabo! Come!" Beyond the lights of the last houses of La Linea, beyond the lights at the frontier, Gibraltar glittered like a magic city in the sky.
She drew the curtain and said in an ordinary speaking voice, "Who's first, Juana?" She looked at the calendar: January 8, 1902. It would be...
The old maid waddled in from a side door. "Tomas Lopez. He's waiting."
"Ten minutes, Juana." She douched herself in the ornate bathroom, using a herbal concoction an old gypsy woman had recommended to her. It had not failed her yet, either with disease or pregnancy, and she had been at this trade thirteen years now—just half her life.
She dressed again and went through the side door into another bedroom identical to the first, even to the maroon curtains and the precise pattern of the heavy frames of the mirrors. Juana set to cleaning the bathroom and remaking the bed in the first room. These details cost money and took trouble, but they marked the difference between a whore and a courtesan.
Tomas Lopez was solid, square, about forty, a little grizzled. He liked a glass of wine and a little conversation before attending to business. Dolores did not mind humoring him, as his more particular demands, unlike those of most of her clients, were very simple.
He sipped the wine carefully. "That Court of Inquiry the English sent out are said to think that the dockyard could be made useless by our Spanish guns. That is a serious matter."
"Yes?" she said. "You mean they have wasted all that money?"
"Of course, yes. But perhaps they will close it. We will lose our positions. Not everyone can say, 'I work in the English dockyard, I receive so many pounds a week,' you understand."
"Naturally," she said. Tomas Lopez was Andalusian and poor, so the appearance, the position, mattered more to him than the reality.
"It is from my wages, and the goods I smuggle out every day, that I am able to visit you once a month. And that is known to all of the men, of course. It is not everyone who can afford your kindness."
"You are generous. All know it."
"A man's position, his wife's virtue, these have value. The Gibraltarians look down their noses at us because we work with our hands and go home dirty. To them it is only valuable that the wife should employ a cleaning woman. A Spanish woman, naturally, for
their
women won't demean themselves."
He got up and took off his coat. He had to have the lights out and would only approach her from behind. She pulled off her drawers, flipped up the back of her skirt, leaned over the bed, and waited.
Afterward he paid and gave her a bottle of Scotch whisky, his usual gift, smuggled out of Gibraltar. She poured him another glass of wine.
"I shall win the dog show," he said. He saw her look of mystification and said, "The English prince and princess are visiting Gibraltar to attend a dog show. The important class is for smooth-haired fox terriers. My Manolo is of pure race, and he will win. Unless the Freemasons rob us. Father O'Callaghan of the Gibraltar church says the Freemasons are at the bottom of all our troubles. He says they sent out the Court of Inquiry to do away with our positions.... The prize is fifty English pounds."
"Enough to buy a nice little bit of land," she said. "Yes," he said. "And to improve the situation still further, my wife is going to seek work as a cleaning woman on the Rock. Unfortunately, my dog Manolo has not been well. There is time for him to recover. Nevertheless, I am looking for another dog, in case Manolo should still be showing the effects of Ms sickness. And there is the judge to be taken into consideration, of course."
She said, "But the judge is Don Pablo Larios. There's not enough money in the world to bribe Don Pablo, especially in anything to do with sport, or the English."
"Money is not the only value in a gentleman's eyes," Tomas said. "Indeed, with a rich and great
caballero
like Don Pablo, it is the least.... But what is Don Pablo's passion? Rare books? A new plant? Or wine? I must find out. But my position in the dockyard does not throw me much into his company."
"There's a young fellow called Paco Santangel who's going to work quite closely with him, at the hunt stables," she said. "I imagine he could find out, for a consideration." Tomas Lopez shot her a shrewd peasant look, "I see. Well, perhaps. Though I am not a rich man." He drained the wine, got up, and bowed formally. "Senorita, a thousand thanks."
She said mischievously, "If the English prince and princess are coming to Gibraltar, perhaps it is to close the dockyard and give the Rock back to Spain."
"No, no, they are coming for the dog show," he said firmly.
Senorita Falcon was a superb-looking woman, the deputy chief of police thought—high-bridged aquiline nose, strong eyebrows, oval face, good lips, and intense, deep blue eyes. He'd seen her naked, too, when duty had made him burst in to "surprise" her with a man they wanted—her breasts were high and a little small, but some liked them that way. Her hair was dense, strong, almost blue-black. When it fell to her shoulders, it looked like black wine on the thick, creamy white of her skin. The same with her pubic hair, a thick black pelt, clearly limited, and the strong tufts in her armpits, all amazingly definite against the skin. If she had not chosen this profession, she could have married almost anyone in Spain. Well, "chosen" was a cruel word. No one knew her past or where she came from, but there would certainly have been a seduction, a child perhaps, banishment, disgrace. That was, sadly, the way of the world.
He rose to go, saying, "You are a very beautiful woman, senorita."
"Not that it ever stirs you," she pouted, tapping him with the envelope. He took it and dropped it into his pocket. His hand was on the door. "By the way, young Paco Santangel is not, how shall I say? Threatening you, is he? He has no money. He visits. One wonders...."
"No," she said. "He is a friend."
The deputy chief of police bowed himself out. Poor woman. They all had one, usually six or seven years younger, like this half-gypsy lad. It was, sadly, the way of the world.
Dolores yawned. She knew who was coming—Carlos Firpo, the Gibraltarian—because Juana had reminded her to drink an extra two glasses of lemonade and not relieve herself. Juana showed him in five minutes later. At once he started to pant and slaver and undo his trousers, as he always did. And she, as always, held out her hand and waited. Only after he gave her the money and she had put it away did she respond to his urgency. She spread a heavy towel on the tiled floor at the foot of the bed, and he lay down quickly on it, naked, holding his erect penis in one hand and muttering obscene words in Spanish and English. She took off her drawers and danced around him, holding up her skirt. His eyes glazed, and he spoke louder, his hand jerking on his penis. She knelt over him....
After a time he sighed, "Marvelous!"
"I try to please," she said.
He went into the bathroom and began washing himself with great energy, as though to eradicate any trace of what, so recently, he had craved for. "I've got a job," he said. "Crewman on one of Mr. Torrenti's fast new steamers." She said, "Doesn't your brother the shopkeeper still support you?"
"Oh yes, but with the new child my wife needs a cleaning woman, and now we can afford it. We got one today. A woman called Maria Lopez."
He came out and began to dress. He was short, with a long nose and wide mouth and a little potbelly, though he was only thirty-three. He spoke Gibraltarian Spanish, with many English words. He always seemed aggrieved and ready to take offence.