Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (38 page)

Suddenly, one of the sons spotted my rolled-up blanket with the violin sticking out of it. ‘Musical’ he cried, and went and fetched the bundle and laid it gingerly on the table before me.

‘Yes, man,’ said the mother. ‘Come, divert us a little. Touch us a little tune.’ The old man woke up, and the daughter put down her sewing, lifted her head, and even smiled.

There was nothing else for it. I sat down on the ground and tore drunkenly into an Irish reel. They listened, open-mouthed, unable to make head or tail of it; I might have been playing a Tibetan prayer-wheel. Then I tried a woozy fandango which I’d picked up in Zamora, and comprehension jerked them to life. The girl stiffened her body, the boys grabbed a handful of spoons and began slapping them across their knees, and the woman leapt to her feet and started stamping the ground, raising great clouds of dust around me. Not to be outdone, the old man left the shadows, struck a posture, and faced the woman. Dona Maria all flesh, he thin as a straw, together they began a dance of merciless contest, while the boys thumped their spoons, the woman shouted ‘Ha!’ and the hens flew squawking under the table.

It was no longer just a moment of middle-aged horseplay. The old man danced as if his life was at stake. While the woman was suddenly transformed, her great lumpen body becoming a thing of controlled and savage power. Moving with majestic assurance, her head thrown back, her feet pawing the ground like an animal, she stamped and postured round her small hopping husband as if she would tread him into oblivion. The dance was soon over, but while it lasted she was a woman unsheathed and terrible. The old man fell back, threw up his hands in defeat, and retired gasping to the safety of the walls.

The woman was left alone, and the mantle fell from her, and she stood like a girl, mopping her face and giggling, deprecating her performance with little hen-like duckings an4 surprised shakings of her head.

‘This is not for an old woman. My bones ache,’ she said.

‘Egyptian!’ hissed the man from the shadows.

The sons asked me for another tune, and this time they danced together, with linked arms, rather sedate and formal. The daughter came quietly and sat on the floor beside me, watching my fingers as I played. The scent of her nearness swam troublesomely around me with a mixture of pig’s lard and sharp clean lavender.

The evening’s routine had been broken, and no one seemed eager to sleep. So some further celebration was possible. The girl was asked to sing, and she did as she was told, in a flat unaffected voice. The songs were simple and moving, and probably local; anyway. I’ve never heard them since. She sang them innocently, without art, taking breath like a child, often in the middle of a word. Staring blankly before her,” without movement or expression, she simply went through each one, then stopped – as though she’d really no idea what the songs were about, only that they were using her to be heard.

With the singing over, we sat in silence for a while, hearing only the trembling sound of the lamp. Then the woman grunted and spoke, and the boys got up from the table and fetched the mattresses and laid them down by the wall.

‘You sleep there,’ said the mother. ‘My sons will watch you.’ She pulled knowingly at one of her eyelids. ‘Come then,’ she added, and the girl rose from her knees and followed her quickly to another part of the house, while the husband’s crinkled old face simply disappeared from the air, soundlessly, like a snuffed-out candle.

I was ready for sleep, and stretched myself out on the floor while the boys went and bolted the door Then they came, fully-clothed, and lay down on each side of me, settling their limbs with little grunts.

The boys were up early, at about half past four, coughing and stamping around the barn. The doors were thrown open to let in the cold pink dawn, and the animals were driven out to the fields. I was still heavy with wine and would have liked more sleep, but it was made clear that the day had started, and soon the girl was about with her birch-twig broom sweeping the chickens across my face.

So I got up from the floor and shook the straw from my clothes, and the girl kicked my mattress into the corner. Then she led me out into the yard, showed me how to use the pump, went through the motions of lathering her face, gave me a piece of soap as hard as a stone, and then departed to light the stove.

Breakfast was a wedge of dry bread and a bowl of soup-thick coffee floating with fatty gobs of goat’s milk. By the time I’d swallowed it, it was six o’clock, and all the village was on the move. Framed in the open doorway great golden wagons went swaying down the cobbled street, followed by soft-padding strings of tasselled donkeys, the sun shining red through their ears.

As I stood ready to leave. I heard a shout behind me: ‘Where is he? Where is the stranger?’ – and Dona Maria strode forth, wildly disarrayed from her bed, and thrust a handful of figs into my shirt. ‘Say nothing of that. Nothing at all,’ she growled. ‘What a night the old one had.’ I gave her the coppers I owed her, and she considered them distractedly for a moment, weighing them in her hand as if about to return them. Then she changed her mind, popped them under her skirt, slapped me on the back, and wished me goodbye.

Down by the river, under an olive tree, a group of girls were drawing water. The girl from the inn was among them, and their voices rang sharp, like a clashing of knives on stone. As I came down the lane their chattering stopped, and they turned their heads all together to watch me. Caught in this alert, surprised, almost pastoral attitude, they offered me an unblinking cluster of eyes, intent and expressionless as the eyes of calves, and desolating too. I padded past quickly, and nobody moved, but their eyes followed me like the eyes in a painting. I remember their blank shining pupils, like pebbles in water. The girl from the inn gave no sign that she knew me.

Out in the plain once more, head down to the dust, I walked fast to make the most of the morning. Not that I’d any particular need to hurry, but the girls had unsettled me to the point of believing that a little hard walking would balance the mind. After a couple of hours or so, still in the grip of a romantic melancholy, I stopped by a little roadside shrine, which announced that a boy, aged ten, had been killed on this spot by a madman, and asked travellers to pray for them both.

I ate the cool green figs which Dona Maria had given me, then walked on for another hour. The monotony of the plain, and the height of the wheat around me, restricted the view to only a few yards, so that I was unprepared for the sudden appearance of Toro – an ancient, eroded, red-walled town spread along the top of a huge flat boulder. The plain ended here in a series of geological convulsions that had thrown up gigantic shelves of rock, raw red in colour and the size of islands, rising abruptly to several hundred feet. Perched on one of the sharpest of these, and scattered along its crumbling edge, Toro looked like dried blood on a rusty sword. The cliff dropped sheer to the bed of the river and was littered with the debris of generations.

Clambering up to the town, in the hard noon silence, I was ready to find it deserted, or to see some Pompeii-like waste long blasted by doom and inhabited only by cats and asses. On the contrary – half-ruined though it certainly was – the town was buzzing with life, with whitewashed hovels brimming with rackety families, children running through holes in the walls, busy shops and cafe flourishing behind broken-down doors, and the streets crowded with elegant walkers.

I sat in a chair outside the Cafe Espafiol and watched the parade go by. Each strolling young man was a pocket dandy, carefully buttoned in spite of the heat; each girl a crisp, freshly laundered doll, flamboyantly lacy around neck and knees; and it was curious to see so much almost Edwardian fashion blooming on such an arid shelf of rock. A public show of clothes was obviously the first thing here, in spite of the poverty and ruin of the place, where the poorest tin shack seemed to produce its immaculate debutante,picking her way casually among the offal, superbly dressed for display by a busy task-force of aunts sewing and ironing behind the scenes.

As I sat there watching I was approached by a thin young man who snatched off his beret and bowed.

‘I am Billette, mister – at your orders,’ he said; then he stood by my chair and waited. He wore a tattered blue suit which seemed to cover his limbs like a cobweb, and his hand clutched a sheaf of tickets.

I offered him a drink, and he sat down beside me, apologizing for any derangement. Then, with a twopenny beer in his hand, he became officially my friend and interpreter of the scene before me. Speaking slowly, carefully, with icy detachment, he indicated the passing dandies.

‘Senoritos!’ he said. ‘From the University of Valladolid. Lawyers and doctors every one. We have many of them. But it makes no difference. We are still ruined, and die.’

Clutching his glass with long spatulate fingers, he shivered and blinked at the sunlight. Why had I come to Toro? I had the right, of course. The world was free for young ‘Frenchmen’ like me. Tonight, he said, the town would hold a holy procession; I ought to see it, but I should forgive him for mentioning it.

Then he pulled himself together. ‘We are the strongest city in the plain,’ he said, ‘and also very holy. We have saints in the church more beautiful than anybody. The people lead sacred lives… Look there, for instance.’ He jerked his head dolefully and pointed up the street.

I saw a ten-year-old child, dressed like a bride, come mincing along the pavement – a wedding-cake toy capped with a halo of flowers and carrying lilies in her white-gloved hands. She advanced with jaunty solemnity, eyes demurely composed, accompanied by two large women in black, and when the sun fell on her she suddenly blazed like a starshell with a brilliant incandescent light.

‘See her,’ said Billette. ‘Another virgin for the Carmelites. We offer one up almost every day.’

All down the street the child was embraced and saluted, while she dropped her eyes and tried to suppress her excitement; old men doffed their hats, mothers held babies towards her, children ran up and kissed her cheek.

‘We are a holy town, as you see,’ said my companion. ‘Our girls marry Christ from the cradle. Where do they go? Into the caverns of the Church. We shan’t see this one again.’

He may have been pulling my leg, of course; it was probably nothing more than her first communion. Yet as the child danced away among her dark attendants she seemed to leave an unhealthy flush behind her.

Throughout the afternoon I drowsed behind the cafe curtains, hiding from the worst of the heat. The streets were empty now except for a few thin dogs hugging the walls for an inch of shade. All else was silence, blinding white, while the sun moved high over the town, destroyer, putrifier, scavenger of the hovels and breeder of swarming ills.

At the first breath of evening I went off with Billette to look at the castle on the edge of the town. ‘Morisco,’ he explained; a bit of infidel terrorism now rapidly returning to dust… He led me nimbly among the eroded dungeons – ‘the sepulchres of the Cristianos’ – whose bones, he said, were now in the church (and seemed to be lavishly surrounded with excrement).

Here I was approached by another young man who had been poking distractedly among the ruins – a slim womanish figure, wielding a gold-topped cane and carrying a portfolio under his arm. He spoke in a delicate dancing language of his own, a kind of two-step between French and English. He was not from Toro, oh no! – a brutish place. (Billette stood listening with jealous incomprehension.) No, he was an art-master from Valencia, and exploited his leisure by executing ornamental lettering for churches. ‘Regard!’ he said sharply, and opened the portfolio to reveal some particularly lurid examples of his art. ‘At this, I am known to be a master. But today I flower in a desert…”

Leaning against the crumbling ramparts and gazing at the river below us, he worked himself into a lather of bitterness, bewailing the age of profanity in which he was doomed to live, together with the cowardice of the modern Church. There was no taste, no reverence for ornamental lettering any more, at least not for such devotional work as his. They preferred the gaudy shams of the cheap printers of Madrid, which the Church was buying in bulk like stamps. Where were the bishops and cardinals of old? he cried, those patrons of artistic piety? the holy princes of Christendom whose sainted hands once raised the artist to the floors of Heaven?

Billette was clearly impressed by the noise the other was making and watched him with shining eyes, while the young man sighed, panted, and twisted his eloquent limbs into shuddering postures of outrage. How could he possibly live under such shame and neglect, and continue to keep up his little house in Valencia? Soon he would be reduced to such crimes as mottoes and calendars, which would kill his aged mother.

All this was in French and English. Billette gaped with admiration, recognizing the other’s passion, if not the sense. Accepting the sound of protest as something he must obviously share, he touched the young man’s arm and began to quieten and console him. A curious calm descended as they whispered together, leaning close in the setting sun. Then with an excuse they left me, and wandered off hand in hand, brothers of a momentary confusion.

Back in Toro the evening deepened with a hot green light as the town prepared for the coming procession. Huge banners and shawls swung down from the balconies, all decorated in Grand Guignol fashion, some stitched with black crosses, others tied at the corners with gigantic bows of crepe. Townsfolk, and stove-hatted peasants from the plain, were already crowding along the pavements, some with small buttoned cushions and stools to kneel on, all gazing in silence up the street.