Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (37 page)

It was long after midnight before the dancers went home, fading crushed and bruised into the darkness. Suddenly there was no one in the hall but the Germans and myself, and the waiters picking up empty bottles. The floor was littered with paper carnations, and white dust covered everything like frost.

‘Eating now,’ croaked Artur. He leaned exhausted against the wall, bathed in sweat, trembling like a race-horse. Heinrich took off his jacket and threw it round Artur’s shoulders, and we went out into the starlit street. As soon as the cold air met us, Artur’s coughing began, and we followed it like a deathknell up through the silent town to the cafe where supper was waiting.

Artur had fixed it: roast kid and beans – a miracle at this hour of the morning. We slumped round the table, weary and famished, and an old woman brought us some wine. Then we gorged ourselves, using our fingers and winking at one another. The meat had a flavour and tenderness I shall never forget, it came off the bone like petals from a rose.

It seemed that nothing could quieten Artur now. He giggled, whinnied, and coughed out his lungs; his eyes rolled and his lips were flecked. But gradually the food and the wine composed and drowsed him. Heinrich held him by the shoulders and cradled his head. Rudi sang softly at the other end of the table. It was nearly dawn, but no one wished to move. We felt pitiful and sentimental.

We carried Artur like a corpse to the room upstairs, which had four beds, but no light or windows. Someone found a candle, and we lay Artur down, took off his boots, and Heinrich wiped his forehead. Nobody spoke any more, or even whispered; we went to our beds and Rudi blew out the candle. I lay sleepless for a while in the death-room darkness, my first and last night in Zamora, listening to the choking rattle of Artur’s breath, and the sound of Heinrich weeping.

It was a short sleep and a brutal waking, roused by Artur’s reluctant resurrection. While he sat swaying on his bed racked by paroxysms of coughing, his face the colour of crumpled pewter.

We revived him slowly in the tavern below, and then decided that it was time for us to leave. One night of music and dance had emptied the coffers of the city so far as the German boys were concerned. ‘Is poor as church rats,’ repeated Artur painfully. ‘Is better going, you can imagine.’

At midday we packed and walked out of the town and paused for a moment at a fork in the road – one way leading north to Leon and Oviedo, and the other eastward to Valladolid. This was where we parted. The boys were going to Leon, where they would join some other ‘students’, while I’d chosen Valladolid, not because I knew anything about it, but because I liked the sound of its syllables.

At the waste edge of Zamora, a dismal litter of dust with donkeys grazing among bones and bottles, the boys formally shook my hand. The bare tight-laced city rose moodily behind us, its twelfth-century cathedral looking bleached like driftwood.

‘Goodbye,’ spluttered Artur. ‘We see you again and again.’ We went our different ways.

Almost immediately I regretted the cool alleys of the town, the scrubbed taverns and frothy fruit-drinks. By the afternoon I was out in the plain, in an electric haze of heat, walking a white dust road as straight as a canal, banked by shimmering wheat and poppies. For mile after mile I saw neither man nor beast; the world seemed to be burnt out, drained and dead; and the blinding white road, narrowing away to the horizon, began to fill me with curious illusions. I felt I was treading the rim of a burning wheel, kicking it behind me step by step, feet scorched and blistered, yet not advancing an inch, pinned for ever at this sweltering spot. For hours, it seemed, I had the same poppy beside me, the same cluster of brittle wheat, the same goldleaf lizard flickering around my toes, the same ant-hill under the bank. The thick silent dust, lifted by shudders of heat rather than by the presence of any wind, crept into my sandals and between my toes, stuck like rime to my lips and eyelashes, and dropped into the breathless cups of the roadside poppies to fill them with a cool white mirage of snow. All around me was silence, deep and dazed, except for the gritty rustle of the wheat. I walked head down, not daring to look at the sky, which by now seemed to be one huge sun.

That Zamoran wheat-plain was my first taste of Spanish heat – the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover. Exposed to its rasping tongue, I learned soon enough one of the obvious truths of summer, that no man, beast, or bird – and indeed very few insects – moved much at that time of the day.

About five o’clock, after some four hours on the road, I at last saw a break in the landscape – a red clay village, dry as the earth around it and compact as a termite’s nest. I have forgotten its name, and can find nothing marked there on the map, but it occured at just the right moment.

I stumbled out of the wheatfield on to this evening village to find it in the drowsy grip of harvest. The sun was low already and a coppery dust filled the air, slashed by smouldering shafts of light. In a cleared space by the roadside the menfolk were threshing, driving little sleigh-carts over the scattered sheaves, each drawn by a mule wearing garlands of leaves to keep off the sleepy flies. Women and girls, in broad hats and veils, looking as mysterious as Minoan dancers, stood in graceful circles winnowing the grain in the wind, tossing and catching it in its drifts of gold.Rhythmically working at their various jobs, and gilded from head to foot with chaff, the villagers clustered together round the threshing floor like a swarm of summer-laden bees.

Some of them shouted a greeting as I approached, while the women paused to line up and stare; then children ran from the alleys and encircled me and ushered me noisily into the village.

‘Look at the foreigner!’ they cried, as though they had made me up. ‘Look at the rubio who’s come today.’ They aped my walk, and grinned and beckoned, and finally led me to the village inn.

It was much like the others, with a great oak door. The children pushed it open and stood courteously aside. Nodding and beaming, with brilliant smiles of reassurance, they gestured for me to go in.

So I went inside, and found the usual spacious barn hanging with freshly watered flowers. A few low chairs stood around the walls, and there was a table and tiled stove in the corner. All was cool and bare. Chickens pecked at the floor and swallows flashed from the high arched ceiling.

A middle-aged woman sat just inside the door, stitching at a piece of lace. She was fleshy, but handsome, with the strong brooding eyes and confident mouth of the matriarch. The children crowded the doorway, watching me expectantly as though I was a firework just about to go off, while the small ones at the back jumped up and down in order to get a better view. ‘Dona Maria!’ they shouted. ‘We have brought you a Frenchman. Dona Maria, look at him!’

The woman put down her sewing and thanked them politely, then let out a screech that sent them scattering up the street. After which she considered me for a moment over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles, then said: ‘Rest, and I’ll get you some food.’

I slumped down at the table and lay with my head in my arms, listening voluptuously to the woman’s movements: the rattle of the pan on the fire, the crack of an eggshell, the hiss of frying oil. Sweat dripped from my hair and ran over my hands, and my head was swimming with heat, with throbbing visions of the white dust road and the brassy glare of the fields.

Presently the woman pushed some fried eggs before me, and poured me a glass of purple wine. Then she returned to her sewing and was joined by a girl, and together they sat and watched me. In that great bare room under the diving swallows, I ate the honoured meal of the stranger, while the women murmured together in low furred voices, their needles darting like silver fish.

At dusk an old man came in from threshing, shaking the chaff from his hair. He poured himself some wine and sat down at the table.

‘What have we?’ he asked the woman.

She dropped her hands in her lap, and looked at me again, sharply but protectively.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘He comes from somewhere away. A poor devil who is walking the world.’

The man filled up my glass and jerked his thumb to his mouth. ‘Drink, and may it give you strength.’

‘You want to sleep here tonight?’ asked Dona Maria after a while.

‘How much?’

‘For a straw sack – two pennies.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then I will sleep with you.’

‘No – you will sleep on the sack.’

The old man wheezed, the girl covered her face, and the woman piled her sewing on top of her head. Then with a click of her tongue she heaved her bulk from the chair and skipped lightly towards the stove.

Two dusty young men came through the open door, leading a pig and a sheep on a rope. ‘My sons,’ said the woman. They poured water over their heads, then filled up the trough for the animals. Mother and daughter set the table for supper, while the old man continued to pour me wine. Then with formal excuses and requests for forgiveness, the family began its meal.

The evening now was close and smoky. The lamp was lit, and the great doors shut. I was getting used to this pattern of Spanish life, which could have been that of England two centuries earlier. This house, like so many others I’d seen already, held nothing more than was useful for living – no fuss of furniture and unnecessary decoration – being as self-contained as the Ark. Pots, pans, the chairs and tables, the manger and drinking-trough, all were of wood, stone, or potter’s clay, simply shaped and polished like tools. At the end of the day, the doors and windows admitted all the creatures of the family: father, son, daughter, cousin, the donkey, the pig, the hen, even the harvest mouse and the nesting swallow, bedded together at the fall of darkness.

So it was with us in this nameless village; night found us wrapped in this glowing barn, family and stranger gathered round the long bare table to a smell of woodsmoke, food, and animals. Across the whitewashed walls the shadows of man and beast flickered huge like ancestral ghosts, which since the days of the caves have haunted the corners of fantasy, but which the electric light has killed.

We sat close together, the men drinking and smoking, elbows at rest among the empty plates. It was the short drowsy space between work and sleep, with nothing left of the day but gossip. Dona Maria, who was cobbling a piece of tattered harness, dominated the table with her thick warm voice, telling tales which to me were inscrutable, alas, but which to the others seemed vaguely familiar. The old man was a motionless mask in the shadows, though he showed a tooth in an occasional cackle. The sons sat near me, nudging me politely in the ribs and nodding their heads whenever the mother made a joke. The daughter, sitting close to the only lamp, buried her fingers in her sewing and listened, raising her huge Arab eyes every moment or so, to meet my glance of dumb conjecture.

I was half drunk now; in fact I felt like a bonfire, full of dull smoke and hot congestion. My eyes were hopelessly moored to those small neat breasts, rocking sadly to their rise and fall, till she seemed to be floating before me on waves of breath, naked as a Negress in her tight black dress.

But the brothers surrounded me, and Dona Maria crouched near, watching me with warm but suspicious indulgence. So I sat and swayed in my drowsy conflagration, fitting sentences together in my mind, then producing them slowly, like a string of ill-knotted flags, for the family’s polite astonishment.