Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (40 page)

When he’d gone, I sat on the bed and swung my feet and ate my last bit of bread and cheese. I was feeling easier now, in spite of the savagery of the place. I was established. I had a room in this city.

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a boy singing in the street below The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be wakened – and as I lay there listening, with the sun filtering across me. I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

The boy was leaning against a lamp-post beneath the barrack walls and carrying a basket slung over his shoulders. He was about twelve years old, thin, and scrub-headed, and was obviously singing for what he could get. But he sang with the whole of his body, his eyes tight-closed, his bare throat rippling in the sunlight, and his voice had a nasal wail that obliterated the city around him – the voice of Islam, aimed at the sky and pitched to an empty landscape. Unshaven soldiers, half-dressed and quiet, leaned listening from the barrack windows. Some of them threw him bits of bread and slices of orange, and when he’d finished he gathered them up in the basket.

Valladolid had a better face this morning. The mask of red dust had been wiped away in the night and an innocent radiance glittered over the heavy buildings. The sky was a blank hard blue, almost chemically bright, stretched for another day of heat. I bought a handful of fruit and collected some letters from the post office, then found a cafe down by the fishmarket. As I ate my breakfast I opened my letters, which were the first I’d received in Spain. I was surrounded by stale odours of melting ice, by housewives with dripping baskets, by banks of prawns and the dead eyes of fish, each one an ocean sealed and sunless. My letters from home spoke of whist-drives and marrows, of serene and distant gossip. But none of them called me back and it looked as though I was here for good. The time had come for me to make some money.

I’d been told that street-fiddlers in Spain would need a licence – though not every city demanded it. So off I went, after breakfast, to the city hall, which looked like a bankrupt casino. Soldiers with fixed bayonets sat around on the stairs, and hungry dogs ran in and out like messengers, while the usual motionless queues of silent peasants waited for officials who would never appear. Doubting that there would be a queue for fiddlers that morning, I climbed the stairs and opened the first door I came to.

The room inside was large and crowded with heavy presidential furniture. At a desk by the window sat a reed-thin man – or rather he inclined himself parallel to it, his feet on a cabinet, a cigar in his mouth, and a chessboard across his knees. I could see his long hooked profile, like a Leonardo drawing, and one pensive downcast eye. He moved a few pawns and hummed a little, then swung in his chair towards me – and his face, seen front-on, almost disappeared from view, so unusually thin he was. I was aware of two raised eyebrows and an expression of courtly inquiry which seemed entirely unsupported by flesh.

‘You are lost, perhaps?’

‘I’d like to see the Mayor,’ I said.

‘So would I. So would all the world.’

‘Is he away?’

The man giggled, and a convulsion ran up his body like an air-bubble up a spout.

‘Yes, he’s away. He’s gone to the madhouse.’

I said I was sorry, but he raised his hand.

‘Oh, no. He is happy. Who wouldn’t be in such a place? Biscuits and chocolate at all hours of the day. Nuns to talk to, and coloured wool to play with… At least, so they say.’ He looked secretively at his cigar. ‘But you see me here. If I can help…’

When I told him what I wanted, he gave a little musical squeak and his eyebrows jumped with pleasure.

‘How charming,’ he murmured. ‘But of course you shall. One moment – Manolo, please!’

A swarthy young man, dressed in trousers and pyjama-top, entered softly from another room.

‘Find me a licence, Manolito.’

‘What kind of licence?’

‘Oh, any kind. Only make it a nice one.’

‘Then permit me, Don Ignacio.’ The young man grasped his chief by the legs, hoisted them from the cabinet, and searched the papers beneath them. Meanwhile Don Ignacio reclined indolently, his legs stuck in the air, beaming upon me and singing ‘rumpty-dum-diddle’.

‘To sell water,’ murmured the clerk. ‘To erect a small tomb… to beat gold… to press juniper berries… ah, here we have it, I do believe. Don Ignacio, with your permission…’

He replaced his chief’s legs on the cabinet and handed him a kind of finely engraved cheque-book, together with pen and ink. Don Ignacio doubled up and began to write, rolling his tongue and grunting with effort. Delicate scrolls and decorations ran over the paper, feathery tendrils in violet ink; then the thing was finished, dusted and sealed, and signed with a delicious flourish.

‘There,’ said Don Ignacio. ‘The city is yours. Rumpty-dum-diddle-de-ay.’

I studied my licence and was pleased with it. It looked like a Royal Charter. Headed with an engraving of lions and a scarlet seal, it formally proclaimed:
‘that,
by using the powers attributed to and conferred upon the Mayorality, and by virtue of the precepts of the Municipal Bye-laws and the appropriate tariffs due to the said most Excellent Ayuntamiento; a licence is hereby granted to Don Lorenzo Le, that he may walk and offer concerts through the streets of this City, and the public squares of the same,
provided always
that he does not in any manner cause riot, demonstrations, or prejudice the free movement of traffic and persons…’

‘That will be half a peseta,’ said Don Ignacio mildly, swinging his feet back on to the top of the desk. Then he invited me to join him in a game of chess, the question of the fee was forgotten.

Later, armed with my licence, I went back to the Borracho’s to fetch my violin and get to work. A woman was scrubbing the courtyard, and she straightened up as I entered and raised an arm to push back her hair. Her handsome, muddy, exhausted face showed that she was expecting someone else. ‘Have you seen him?’ she asked. I shook my head, and her eyes went grey and listless. To get to my room I had to step over three naked children who sat weeping in pools of water. Even in his absence the deadly stench of the Borracho permeated the place like gas.

After repairing my fiddle, and dusting off the new straw hat which I’d bought in Zamora market, I went out – for the first time in a Spanish town – to try my luck in the streets. I found a busy lane, placed my hat on the ground, and struck up a rusty tune. According to my experience in England, money should then have dropped into the hat; but it didn’t work out that way here. No sooner had I started to play than everybody stopped what they were doing and gathered round me in a silent mass, blocking the traffic, blotting out the sun, and treading my new hat into the ground. Again and again I fished it from under their feet, straightened it out, and moved somewhere else. But as soon as I struck up afresh, the crowd re-formed and encircled me, and I saw in their scorched brown faces an expression I was soon to know well – a soft relaxed childishness and staring pleasure, an abandonment of time to a moment’s spectacle.

This was all very well, but I was making no money – and there was scarcely room even to swing my arm. Every so often I was compelled to break off, and to attempt a wheedling speech, begging the multitude to have the kindness to walk up and down just a little, or at least to draw back and reveal my hat. A number of lounging soldiers, half-understanding, began to shout what I said at the others. The others screamed back, telling them to shut up and listen. In the meantime, nobody moved.

Presently a policeman appeared, his unbuttoned tunic revealing a damp and hairy chest. He had a dirty rifle slung over his shoulder and was sucking a yellow toothpick.

‘German?’

‘No, English.’

‘Licence?’

‘Yes.’

He gave it a slumberous, heavy-lidded glance. Then, shifting his gun to his other shoulder, he hooked my hat on to the toe of his boot, kicked it high in the air, caught it, shook it, and turned crossly upon the crowd.

‘Have you no shame?’ he demanded. ‘Or are you beggars of this town? Look, not a penny, not a dried garbanzo. Have you no dignity to be standing her? Either pay, or go.’

Giggling uneasily, the crowd backed away. There was the tinkle of a coin on the pavement. The policeman picked it up, dropped it into the hat, and handed it to me with a bow.

‘Milk from dry udders,’ he said loftily. ‘You are welcome. Now please continue…’

I did so for a while, not made too happy by his support, while he held back the crowd with his gun. But from then on I used the trick which I’d learned in Southampton – I made sure the hat was properly baited beforehand. Nobody kicked over a hat with pennies in it, they just stood delicately around the brim. I learned some other lessons, too. That men were less responsive than women – unless approached in a cafe, when they paid with the gestures of noblemen. That any Spanish tune worked immediately, and called up ready smiles, while any other kind of music – Schubert excepted – was met by blank stares and bewilderment. Most important of all, I learned when to stop and move on, to spread myself around – a lesson taught me by a bootblack no higher than my knee who had been on the edge of the crowd all morning.

‘You play much,’ he said finally.

‘Why, is it no good?’

‘Good enough – but much, too much. Play less for the money. A couple of strophes will do. Then you will reach more people during the day.’

He was right, of course, especially where pavement cafes were concerned, whose clients liked a continuously changing scene. It was enough to make oneself known, followed by a quick whip round, and then to go off somewhere else.

At midday I stopped, having made about three pesetas. The heat by now was driving everyone indoors. So I bought a bottle of wine and a bag of plums and took them down by the river. There, under the mulberry trees, where some thin grass grew, I sat watching the slow green flow of the water. The shade from the trees lay on my hands and legs like pieces of cool wet velvet, and all sounds ceased, save for the piercing stutter of the cicadas which seemed to be nailing the heat to the ground.

I drowsed off presently with a half-eaten plum in my hand, and the bottle of wine untasted. Spanish afternoon-sleep was new to me, and I woke dazed, my limbs glutted with stupor. It was about five o’clock. A girl was wading in the river, her brown legs shining like caramel; while on the opposite bank, in a cloud of red dust, a boy was driving some mules to drink.

The hours had been eaten away, and evening had started, but I was content to lie where I was, to watch the drinking mules, and the girl in the river, and the boy, who was watching the girl. She walked gracefully, thigh-deep, balancing some washing on her head, while the boy stood on one leg leaning against a stick. He began to call out and taunt her, and the girl answered back, and their voices were sharp as the cries of moorhens. The cries continued for a while, bouncing hard on the water, almost visible in the dark red light; then suddenly the shouting ceased, and the girl turned in the river and began to cross to the other side, wading strong and deep towards the waiting boy, her short legs stockinged with mud…

I went back to the town that evening in a mood of gauzy unreality, of vague unthinking enchantment. I remember kicking a melon along the street and feeling the air brush round my body. I wandered idly about in a state of aimless benignity, loving all things, even this baleful city – with its rancid shadows and scabby dogs, sweating pavements and offal-filled gutters; its blue-smocked ancients, remote as coolies; its children dozing in doorways, and its women surrounded by aromas of cooking fat, lemons, and chemical violets. I played no music that night, but went from bar to bar, drinking glasses of clotted wine. I was feverish, drowsy, and sentimental. I still had a touch of the sun.

The following morning the light-headedness continued, a curious suspension of focus. I returned to the market for breakfast, among sudden uproars and silences, with churchbells kicking in the throbbing towers. Eating bread and sausage, my back to the church wall, I was aware only of this point of time, the arrested moment of casual detail, the unsorted rubbish of now. I felt the heat of the sun dampened by draughts of ice blowing from fish-boxes stacked near by. I remember a yawning cat – a pin-cushion of teeth and whiskers – sitting on a palm leaf in the gutter. A man said ‘Good morning’ and passed out of my life, stepping on a petal as though extinguishing a match. I saw an empty wine-barrel roll out of a tavern door, turn slowly, and roll back in again. I saw a hole in the road suddenly wink like a cyclops as a shadow flowered in and out of it. A boy lifted his shirt and scratched his belly, a housewife picked up and put down an orange, and a mule stopped in the road, looked straight into my face, and wrinkled up his wet brown-papery nostrils.

For several more days the city moved somnambulantly before me, like a series of engravings seen through watery glass. I worked the streets and cafes, and made a few pesetas, but I knew I would not stay long. Its alternate elations and leaden ugliness set up uneasy hallucinations. Particularly of the poverty and waste symbolized by that mass of young conscripts gasping away their summer in the city barracks.