Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (39 page)

The bells, which for an hour had been crashing out a jangle of discords, suddenly stopped with a humming abruptness. At this signal the multitude went quite still, fixing its eyes on the distant church. A heap of gold at noon, it was now a dark blue shadow, hanging in the air like a wisp of incense. The silence increased, and even the cries of the children began instinctively to smother themselves. Then the doors were thrown open on to a sparkling darkness, like a cave full of summer fireflies, as several hundred candles streamed away from the altar and came fluttering towards the street.

Slowly, to the sound of a drum and trumpet, the shuffling procession emerged, and the crush of spectators standing nearest the church fell to their knees as though they’d been sprayed with bullets. The dry beat of the drum and naked wail of the trumpet sounded as alien as I could wish, conjuring up in the glow of this semi-African twilight an extraordinary feeling of fear and magic.

Was it the death of their saint they were so lugubriously celebrating with their black banners and dripping candles? Her image came riding high in the heart of the procession, a glittering figure of painted wood, bobbing her crowned head stiffly, left and right, to the kneeling crowds in the gutters. Her bearers sweated under their jewelled load, grunting patiently into their lacy shirt-fronts, while two lines of young women scuffled along behind, nasally chanting some tuneless dirge.

As the image approached us, protestations and tears rose spontaneously from the crowd around me. Then the saint drew level and I saw her face, rose-tinted, pretty as a sugared sweet, with the smooth head perched on a little doll-like body heavily tented in robes of velvet.

Whoever she was, this prim painted mannikin dominated the town with an undeniable presence, and as she passed on her way she seemed to trail behind a gigantic swathe of absolution. Praise, thanks, and supplication followed her, passionately uttered by young and old. Clearly, to all eyes, she was the living Saint, Sister of the Virgin, Intimate of Christ, Eternal Mediator with the Ghost of God and Compassionate Mother of Toro.

With a dying cry in the distance the image passed from sight, the drum and the trumpet faded, and the last of the girls shuffled by, their candles wilting and guttering, leaving behind in the street the spent faces of the peasants, a smell of wax, burnt wick, and exhaustion. There was a short hushed pause, then the heavy soul-laden blanket was lifted like a cloud from the town. Suddenly everyone was nodding and smiling at one another, gathering up their children and cushions, and remarking how well the Saint had looked today – so comely, so linda, such an excellent colour – and making ready to enjoy themselves.

The solemn wake was over. The streets filled immediately with promenaders spreading from wall to wall. The lights were switched on – strings of small coloured bulbs that looped everywhere like skeins of fruit – and all the life of Toro began to pass beneath them, up and down and around, friend shown to friend, foe to foe, wife to lover, each to all. For a while I wandered invisibly among them, submerged by their self-absorption; and suddenly found myself wishing for a face I knew, for Stroud on a Saturday night…

The next day I remember only vaguely. It was one of the hottest of that Spanish summer. No doubt I should have stayed at the inn till the worst was over, but the journey had become a habit.

Toro was deserted when I left it, its shutters still drawn, and a brassy glare hung over the plain. The road ran through the wheat as straight as a meridian, like a knife-cut through a russet apple, and I followed it east towards the morning sun, which was already huge and bloated. After a while, being outdoors became a hallucination, and one felt there was no longer any air to breathe, only clinkered fumes and blasts of sulphur that seemed to rise through cracks in the ground. I remember stopping for water at silent farms where even the dogs were too exhausted to snarl, and where the water was scooped up from wells and irrigation ditches and handed to me warm and green.

The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One’s blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sh6et of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in,and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me. I began to forget what I was doing on the road at all; I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes.

By mid-morning I was in a state of developing madness, possessed by pounding deliriums of thirst, my brain running and reeling through all the usual obsessions that are said to accompany the man in the desert. Fantasies of water rose up and wrapped me in cool wet leaves, or pressed the thought of cucumber peel across my stinging eyes and filled my mouth with dripping moss. I began to drink monsoons and winter mists, to lick up the first fat drops of thunder, to lie down naked on deep-sea sponges and rub my lips against the scales of fish. I saw the steamy, damp-uddered cows of home planting their pink-lily mouths in the brook, then standing, knee-deep among dragonflies, whipping the reeds with their tasselled tails. Images bubbled up green from valleys of shining rain and fields of storm-crushed grass, with streams running down from the lime-cold hills into buttery swamps of flowers. I heard my mother again in her summer kitchen splashing water on garden salads, heard the gulping gush of the garden pump and swans’ wings beating the lake…

The rest of the day was a blur. I remember seeing the spire of a church rising from the plain like the jet of a fountain. Then there was a shower of eucalyptus trees brushing against a roadside tavern, and I was at a bar calling for bottles of pop.

‘No, no! You mustn’t drink. You will fall down dead.’ The woman threw up her hands at the sight of me, then turned, alarmed, to shout at a couple of well-dressed gentlemen eating radishes at a table in the corner.

The older man bowed
‘Alemdn? Francais?
The lady is right – you are too hot for drinking.’

‘He will drop at our feet. Just look at his face.’ Everybody tutted and shook their heads.

I could only stand there croaking, desperate with thirst. Somebody gave me some ice to suck. Then I was told to rest and cool off, while they asked me the usual questions: where I came from, where I was going.

At my reply, the woman threw up her hands again. ‘On foot? It is not to be thought of!’ The gentlemen started an argument, spitting out radishes at each other like furious exclamations. ‘If he’s English, he’s the first walking Englishman I’ve seen,’ said one. ‘They walk all over the place,’ said the other. ‘Up and down mountainsides. Round and round the poles.’ ‘Yes, yes – but they do not walk in Spain.’

I heard their voices fading and booming around me. My head felt feverish, tight, and bursting. Then someone was leaning over me. ‘Enough of the excremental walking. Holy Mother of God, give the young man a little drink. If he lives, and still wishes to go to the city, we will take him in the car.’

The first mouthful of mineral water burst in my throat and cascaded like frosted stars. Then I was given a plate of ham, several glasses of sherry, and a deep languor spread through my limbs. I remember no more of my benefactors, or what they said; only the drowsy glories of drinking. Later, much later, I was lifted to my feet and half-led, half-carried outside. Then, stretched fast asleep in the back of the car, I was driven like a corpse to Valladolid.

Valladolid: a dark square city hard as its syllables – a shut box, full of the pious dust and preserved breath of its dead whose expended passions once ruled a world which now seemed of no importance. The motor car had dropped me in the middle of it, on this evening of red stale dust, to find myself surrounded by churches and crypt-like streets bound by the rigidity of sixteenth-century stone. There was little life to be seen in the listless alleys, and the street lamps were hooded by a mysterious thickness of the light. I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city – that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.

I stood for a while in the plaza, resting my knapsack against a wall and recovering from the fevered stupors of the day. Silent rope-soled creatures passed shadowless by. I was oppressed by the heavy vacuum around me. This was one of the major cities of Castilla la Vieja – a name ringing with cold chisels and chains. It was here, a priest told me later, that Marghanita de Jarandilla looked from her prison tower and wept tears of gold into the laps of beggars; and it was here, to the altar of San Martin, that a poor cripple from Vallaverde crawled with his severe
d leg and carved a magnificent crucifix out of the bone. A city of expired fanaticisms and murdered adorations – of the delicate and elaborate Moors, of Ferdinand and Isabella, of the deceived Columbus, and the gentle, crispbrained Cervantes. Against the lives of all these rose the present darkness, the gloom of the drawn oven, the cold closed lamp.

Night was on this city, and upon me too. So I went off to look for a bed. Down a narrow lane I suddenly came on the barracks – a great pile of medieval granite. Groups of ragged young conscripts lay about on the pavement, crouching in hazy circles of lamplight, scratching, spitting, playing tattered cards, and passing their penniless time. I asked them where I might find a lodging, and they pointed across the road.

‘Try the Borracho,’ said one.

‘An ogre,’ said another.

‘But don’t mind him. He’s got beds of brass.’

I found the Borracho sitting in a filthy room swilling wine from a goat-skin bag. A naked child lay asleep on the table beside him with its head pillowed in a half-cut pumpkin. The Borracho had spiky grey hair and the looks of a second murderer. His face was as dark and greasy as a pickled walnut and a moustache curled round his lip like an adder.

I asked for a bed, and he just glowered at me.

‘Go sleep in the river,’ he said.

He took another loud drink, wiped the wine-bag across his mouth, slumped in his chair, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again and saw me still standing there, he struck the table, napped his arms, and cried: ‘Shoo!’

But I wouldn’t budge. It was almost midnight now, and all I wanted to do was sleep. I repeated my question and the man suddenly crumpled up and quite childishly began to cry. His fleshy lips curled back and he grizzled like an infant, looking piteously about him for comfort. I offered him a cigarette and he took it between his long black nails, without looking at it, and ripped it down the middle. Then rolling tobacco and paper into a neat little ball, he popped them into his mouth.

‘What about a bed then?’ I asked.

He looked at me with hatred, but eventually got to his feet.

‘There’s only one,’ he said. ‘And may you be pleased to die in it.’ And he jerked his head towards the door.

The narrow stairs dripped with greasy mysterious oils and had a feverish rotten smell. They seemed specially designed to lead the visitor to some act of depressed or despairing madness. I climbed them with a mixture of obstinacy and dread, the Borracho wheezing behind me. Half-way up, in a recess, another small pale child sat carving a potato into the shape of a doll, and as we approached she turned, gave us a quick look of panic, and bit off its little head.

The brass bed was magnificent, as the soldiers had promised, and stood about six feet high, with knobs on. It was the only piece of furniture in a room which otherwise seemed to have been devastated by violent tenants. The light from the street lamps decorated the walls with liquid dilating shapes, and the young soldiers were still visible on the pavement outside, some of them fast asleep. The Borracho had recovered his truculence and threw the key at my feet, demanding the rent in advance. Then he fished in his pocket, gave me a candle-end, and said he didn’t mind if I burned down the house.