Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (36 page)

In the village square I came on a great studded door bearing the sign: ‘Posada de Nuestra Senora.’ I pushed the door open and entered a whitewashed courtyard hanging with geraniums and crowded with mules and asses. There was bedlam in the courtyard – mules stamping, asses braying, chickens cackling, and children fighting. A fat old crone, crouching by the fire in the corner, was stirring soup in a large black cauldron, and as she seemed to be in charge I went up to her and made a sign for food. Without a word she lifted a ladleful of the soup and held it up to my mouth. I tasted and choked; it was hot, strong, and acrid with smoke and herbs. The old lady peered at me sharply through the fumes of the fire. She was bent, leather-skinned, bearded and fanged, and looked like a watchful moose. I wiped my burnt mouth, nodded my head, and said ‘Good’ in clear loud English. She took a long pull herself, her moustached lips working, her eyes rolling back in her skull. Then she spat briskly into the fire, turned her head abruptly and roared out in a deep hoarse voice – and a barefooted boy, dressed only in a shirt, came and tugged my sleeve and led me to see the bedrooms.

Later I was sitting in the courtyard under the swinging light-bulbs, hungrily watching the supper cooking, when the innkeeper came out, a towel round his waist, and began to scrub his young son in the horse-trough. The infant screamed, the old crone roared, the father shouted, sang, and lathered. Then suddenly, as by a whim, he shoved the child under the water and left him to see what he’d do. The screams were cut off as though by a knife, while the old woman and the father watched him. In a fierce choking silence the child fought the water, kicking and struggling like a small brown frog, eyes open, mouth working, his whole body grappling with the sudden inexplicable threat of death. He was about one year old, but for a moment seemed ageless, facing terror alone and dumb. Then just as he was about to give in, the woman picked up a bucket and threw it at the father’s head, and at that he snatched up the child, tossed him in the air, smothered him with kisses, and carried him away.

Supper was laid at last on the long wooden table set out under the open sky. When it was ready the innkeeper, with a sweep of his arm, invited me to join them. Carters and drovers gathered quickly round the table, and a girl dealt out loaves to each of us, and we ate the stew from a common dish, scooping it up with our bread. The old woman sat beside me and roared at me continuously, pinching my legs and thumping me in the belly and urging me on to eat.

Half-way through supper we were joined by two shifty-eyed men who came in carrying a new-skinned lamb. They looked starved, desperate, and poor as dogs, and their shirts hung in rags from their shoulders. They approached us in silence and nobody greeted them, nor did they seem to expect it. They dropped the bleeding lamb at the far end of the table, threw themselves down, and called for wine. Then they began to tear at the carcass,cramming the meat in their mouths and darting fugitive looks over their shoulders. Their movements had all the sharp snapping nervousness of beasts at a kill, crouching low and cracking the bones with their teeth. When a girl had brought them their wine, they were left to themselves – their meal was their own secret business.

At our end of the table, supper was prolonged and noisy, and I didn’t know whether it was night or morning. By now I was gorged with stew and warmed to idiocy by wine; I was the stranger, but I felt at home. In each face around me I seemed to recognize characters from my own village: the carters, innkeepers, the dust-covered farmboys, grandmothers, and girls, they were all here. I felt like a child crawling on the edge of some rousing family life which I had yet to grow to understand. And I think they felt it too, for they treated me like a child – grinning, shouting, acting dumb-shows to please me, and smoothing my way with continual tit-bits and indulgencies.

At last supper was over. The women swept the dishes away, and the carters curled up on the ground to sleep. The two outcasts lay snoring across their end of the table, their faces buried in a debris of bones. I rose from my chair and stumbled away to my room, where I found six beds, full of men and fleas. Fowls were roosting in the rafters, and an old man lay fully clothed on the floor, fast asleep, with a goat tethered to his ankle. The room was stifling, but the straw bed was soft. And there I slept, my head roaring with Spain

That was just one night, an early one on my journey, and also my first inn, like many others to come. From then on the days merged into a continuous movement of sun and shadow, hunger and thirst, fatigue and sleep, all fused and welded into one coloured mass by the violent heat of that Spanish summer.

I had come now out of the hills of Galicia, along high bare tracks overhanging the sheltered valleys where thick grass grew and herds of panting sheep gathered at noon by white-pebbled streams. I had skirted the mountains of Leon, coming through shaded oak-woods and groves of fig and almond, along great shelves of rock where wooden ox-carts laboured and boys in broad hats went leaping up the hillsides pursuing their scattered flocks. I’d come through poor stone villages, full of wind and dust, where mobs of children convoyed me through the streets, and where priests and women quickly crossed themselves when they saw me, and there was nothing to buy except sunflower seeds. And I’d come down at last to the rich plain of the Douro, with its fields of copper earth, its violent outcrops of poppies running in bloodstained bandannas across acres of rasping wheat.

After the green of the hills the light here was lethal; it thumped the head and screwed up the eyes. I was burnt by the sun, and bug-ridden from the inns – but I was also slowly beginning to pick up the language. Listening to people on the road I noticed that their guttural flow had begun to break up and detach into words and phrases: ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘bread and wine’, ‘how much?’ ‘too much; shame…’ So without more inhibition I started talking to everyone, offering anything that came to mind, and many a sombre patriarch jogging towards me on his mule would be met by some stumbling salutation, and would raise a stiff grave hand in defence and greeting, and bid me go with God.

I finally reached Zamora early one Saturday evening, after a blistering day through the wheatfields. The town stood neatly stacked on its rocky hill, a ripple of orange roofs and walls, somewhat decrepit now, but still giving off something of the medieval sternness and isolated watchfulness of its past. Around its rocky site curled the track of the Douro, a leathery arm of wrinkled mud, laced down the middle with a vein of green water in which some half-naked boys were bathing.

Brick-red with road-dust I padded into the square and sat down under a shady plane tree. After the long day’s walk my back was sheeted with sweat and my bag was like a load of stones. I slipped it to the ground and sucked in the hot still air; the evening was thunderous and swimming with flies. There was almost no one in the square except a few old women and a man selling mineral water. Seeing my parched condition, he came and gave me a bottle, but refused to take any payment. The pink scented juice tasted like effervescent hair-oil, but it instantly revived me.

As I sat there, scratching, and wondering where I would spend the night, I suddenly heard the sound of music coming from a nearby street – not the Spanish kind, but waltzy gusts of Strauss played on accordion, flute, and fiddle. Curious, I went off to have a look, and found three blond young men bashing out a back-street concert in the midst of a crowd of wide-mouthed children. Men had halted their mules, women stood listening in doorways or hung from balconies overhead. The syrupy beer-hall strains of ‘Vienna Woods’ swept incongruously round the Spanish houses, but the boys were doing well – pennies tumbled from windows or were tossed over the heads of the children, to be caught with a flourish in the fiddler’s hat with heavily accented thanks.

It was a significant moment, and I was cheered by the sight, as this was how I, too, hoped to live. It seemed that I’d come to the right country, poor as it was; the pennies were few, but they were generously given. And music was clearly welcome in this Spanish street, the faces softened with pleasure as they listened.

When they’d finished their playing, the boys spotted me in the crowd, nodded gaily, and addressed me in German. I explained where I came from, which wasn’t what they expected, then we sat on the pavement and chattered in broken English. They were about my own age, and displayed a highstrung energy, busy eyes, and a kind of canine sharpness. They were from Hamburg, they said, and had been in Spain two years, had circled it twice and were planning to circle it again. They called themselves students, and said there were a large number in the country, playing instruments and living rough – partly for fun, and partly to get out of Germany: I was the first ‘student’ they’d met from England. Meanwhile, they introduced themselves – Artur, Rudi, and Heinrich – and invited me to spend the evening with them.

After I, in turn, had given them an account of myself, and they had examined my clothes and blisters, they took me to a shop to buy some cool light sandals, and picked out a beggar on whom to bestow my boots. Then we went to a bar to count out the concert money and drink some of the thin warm, local beer. Artur was full of advice, and seemed to know Zamora well. ‘Is beaudival place, but poor as church rats. Tomorrow is going away.’

Germans, of course, had been the folk-devils of my childhood, the bogies of all our games. These ragged young lads, noisily sucking their beer, were the first real Germans I’d ever met. Artur was their leader, and played the violin. He was tall, curly with a long mobile throat, sunken cheeks, and feverish blue eyes. He talked with a jerking vitality that seemed close to hysteria, face sweating, eyes rolling, his speech often broken into by jagged rasps of consumptive coughing. Rudi was young and quieter, and sat stroking his accordion and humming tunes through his fat red lips. Heinrich, the flautist, was as agreeable as a dog, and sat panting at Artur’s feet – strung-up, on edge, and watching him intently, ready for any game or change of humour. He was a clown, if needed, and poured Artur’s beer, and carried his supply of paper handkerchiefs.

‘Now for the danze!’ cried Artur. Night had fallen already, and the boys had a job at the local dance-hall. ‘Are making the music,’ he said. ‘Ya, one – two – three! Are drinking the beer and coming many girls. Afterwards good essen, and you can be sleeping in our room, very cheap, you can imagine.’

So we took my things to the lodging house, then headed for the dance-hall down by the river. The town was palely lit by naked yellow bulbs which gave an impression of curried moonlight. As we went down the narrow cobble-stepped streets, Rudi struck up on his accordion, playing wild banshee scales designed to advertise the dance and to summon the youth of the town. He succeeded too: sleeping pigeons took off, dogs barked, and windows flew open, and very soon we had a procession of well-brushed customers hurrying along behind us.

‘Look, I say!’ cried Artur excitedly, gripping my arm and sawing the air with it. ‘See are coming many boys and girls. You shall make danze with them all, nothing forbidden, you understand.’

The dance-hall was a kind of broken-down warehouse propped up on the river bank, just a bare wooden shack dressed with a few old chairs and some primitive decorations. When you stepped on the floorboards they went off like fireworks, raising little puffballs of peppery dust, and there were holes in the roof through which you could see the stars whenever the dust allowed it. Around the walls hung pictures of half-naked women, clenching roses in desperate teeth, and wearing loose cardboard flaps round their ample loins which the curious could raise to reveal slogans for beer. There was also an improvised bar, some strings of paper carnations, and a platform draped with the Spanish flag.

As they poured into the room, the dancers immediately segregated themselves, girls down one side, boys down the other. Considerably quieter now than they had been in the street, the boys looked pale and anxious, rubbing their hands on their knees, tapping their neat little feet, and gazing at the girls with potent gloom. The girls were far more self-possessed, knowing their worth on such occasions, settling plump in their chairs like bags of sweets, stickily scented and tied with ribbons.

The band tuned up noisily, then Artur swayed to his feet and announced a pasodoble. The barriers fell at once, and the dancing began and the noise it made was soon as loud as the band. The boys stamped like bulls, the girls twirled and shuffled, dust rose, and the floorboards jumped. Caught face to face, away from their neutral corners, the dancers grappled in passionate strife – but as soon as the music ended, the girls turned chastely away, leaving the boys flatfooted.

For an hour or so I sat on the platform with the band sharing their gifts of bottled beer. It was warm, scummy, and rather sour, but it had a lively effect on Artur. Soon his fiddle was soaring above the sounds of the flute, departing on a life of its own, playing thin little tunes of Bavarian extraction which only he and I could hear. For a while, eyes closed, he was no longer with us, he was away in the forest snows.

Suddenly he looked at me.

‘Is not good time?’ he shouted. ‘But why is not danzing, yah?’ He looked round the room, spotted an unused girl, and called her over to join me.

What with my blistered feet, and the beer in my head, it was as much as I could do to stand up. But the girl took charge – she just wrapped her damp arms round me, propped me snugly erect with her bosom, and away we went over the flapping floorboards as though skating on Venetian blinds. This stumbling movement, together with the unexpected nearness of the girl, did nothing to lessen my feeling of drunkenness. Several times I would have fallen, but the girl was like scaffolding, like a straitjacket of cushioned bones. Helpless, half-crippled, half-anaesthetized by her scent, I scuffled after her, praying for the end. She was tough and beautiful, but I could think of nothing to say to her – except Help, I feel sick and hungry. Finally the waltz was over, and the girl led me back to my chair and seated me carefully in it. As she left me she drew her finger down the length of my body as though sealing an envelope.