Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (41 page)

Locked up all day, peering from the narrow windows, or drilled to exhaustion on the burning square, in the evenings they were released in stupefied droves to possess the half-empty town. Across the plaza – an arena of silted tramlines – they shuffled like clowns in their crumpled khaki, circling, heads down, with nothing to spend or do, imprisoned by ennui and simple lust. In their cardboard boots they clumped up and down, kicking idly at invisible obstructions. Some languished in groups under the feeble lamps, sucking dead fags among the whirling flies. A few, the lucky ones, stood with tense sick faces fingering the tin jewellery around the necks of their girls. But the rest, the majority, without cigarettes or girls, just stood where they were and whistled – making that sad thin sound which is the sign of young soldiers everywhere, standing about in shut streets on rainy Sundays, on midnight platforms where no trains come, guarding forgotten dumps in abandoned bases or empty petrol-tins in a desert – the sound of their wish to be anywhere but there, the breath of the pointless hours expiring.

Living at the Borracho’s, across the street from the barracks, I saw much of these scarecrow troops. I saw the garbage they fed on, the way their youth was humbled, the way they were condemned to spend their time. Bug-hunting, stealing, gambling with thirds of a farthing, quarrelling, bled grey with boredom – sometimes, perhaps, soothed by a lucky friendship, stretched quietly with another boy; or seeking solitary relief in a jog-trot of poetry, or a sudden ejaculation of sex-choked song. Or, when pressures grew too great, going down in the dark to the river to press a whore to the hard wet gravel, then returning barefooted, ready for jail, having paid with their cardboard boots.

Soldiers, priests, and an outer fringe of beggars – three silent and separate categories; there were times at night, with the red dust blowing in from the plain, when there seemed to be no one else but these in the city. The soldiers and beggars groped among the great blank buildings, invisible to each other’s miseries, invisible also to the sleek black priests slipping down alleys like padded cats.

But the beggars I remember as something special to Valladolid, something it had nursed to a peak of malformation and horror. One saw little of them by day; they seemed to be let out only at night, surreptitiously, like mad relations. Then limping, scuffling, hopping, and creeping, they came slowly out of the shadows, advancing towards one at pavement-level to a rhythmic chanting of moans and whispers. Here were old men, youths and shrivelled children; creatures of every imaginable curse and deformity – blind, dumb, without hands, without feet, covered with sores, dragging their bodies like sacks.

There was almost nothing for them in the streets except to act out their mutilations, sightlessly begging the empty air, holding up stumps of arms, pointing to empty eye-sockets, wrapping and unwrapping the worst of their sores. The children were especially quiet, mute concentrations of martyrdom, unable to envisage the stretch of doom ahead. They stood numbly apart, gazing through red-filmed eyes and holding out tiny wrinkled palms.

Young and old were like emanations of the stifling medievalism of this pious and cloistered city; infected by its stones, like the pock-marked effigies of its churches, and part of one of the more general blasphemies of Spain.

My last night in Valladolid sustained the sick fever of the place. Too hot to sleep, I stayed late in the bars and got rid of most of my money; then, about two in the morning, I went back to the inn to find it in a state of uproar.

The huge front door had been ripped from its hinges and lay in splinters across the street. The three youngest children were huddled inside, half naked, moaning with fear – while the Borracho’s wife, storm centre of the scene, stood screaming at the foot of the stairs. Previously I’d only seen her as a listless drudge, now she was roused to a terrible stature, brandishing a spade in her hand like a two-edged sword, her eyes mad-yellow and full of sparks.

She turned towards me as I entered and made a blind gesture of fury, holding the spade out in front of her.

‘I will kill him!’ she cried. ‘He is bad – bad!’

One of the children ran towards her, pressing against her legs, and she looked down at it with a squinting, distracted gaze as though she’d never seen it before.

‘He comes home like a pig, and I lock him out. But he breaks down the door and tries to love Elvira – ELVIRA!’ She turned suddenly and screamed out the name, beating the ground with the flat of the spade. ‘Daughter! Daughter!…’ The spade rang like a bell. ‘I will smash his cojones against his teeth!’

‘Where is he?’ I said.

She looked savagely up the stairs and went mad again, beating the walls with frenzy

‘Are you dead yet?’ she screamed. ‘You prince of pigs! Shame of fathers throughout the world…’

She stood there shaking, her face green in the lamplight, the sweat glistening in her tangled hair. I took the spade from her hands, and was surprised how easily she surrendered it. Then left her and went upstairs.

I found the Borracho on the landing, about half-way up, sprawled on his back, wet with blood and wine. He lay like a slaughtered bull, breathing in painful gasps and weeping to himself in the dark.

‘Help me,’ he whimpered.

I dragged him across to my room, and lit a candle. One side of his face was smashed and bleeding. I sponged and cleaned him as best I could, covered him with a coat, and went to bed.

The room, the house, the whole of the city, seemed suddenly corroded with misery. The Borracho lay on the floor, phlegm bubbling in his throat, drunkenly whispering his daughter’s name.

There are certain places one leaves never expecting to see again, and I don’t ever wish to return to that city. I rose at dawn and went to the patio pump and washed it from my hands and face. Then with my bags on my back I passed through the damp flushed streets and entered once more into the open country.

Where should I go now? It didn’t matter. Anywhere south would do. Segovia, Madrid, the heart of Castile lay before me, and that was the direction I took. After the shuttered town, the landscape seemed to have broken from prison and rolled free and glittering away. Green oaks like rocks lay scattered among the cornfields, with peasants chest-deep in the wheat. It was the peak of harvest, and figures of extraordinary brilliance were spread across the fields like butterflies, working alone or in clusters, and dressed to the pitch of the light – blue shirts and trousers, and with broad gold hats tied with green and scarlet cloths. Submerged in the wheat, sickles flickered like fish, with rhythmic flashes of blue and silver; and, as I passed, men straightened and shielded their eyes, silently watching me go, or a hand was raised in salute, showing among its sun-black fingers the glittering sickle like a curved sixth nail.

After the cramped shames of the city it was like a gulp of pure water to be back in this open landscape, in the rustling silence of the naked plain, its heaving solitude of raw burnt light.

Then, towards evening. I came to a village of mud – little more than a tumble of earth in a gulley. Few of the houses were whole, few had glass in their windows, most of the roofs were stuffed with sacking. They stood broken and bandaged, half-supporting each other like survivors from an old lost war.

The door of the inn this time was simply patched with a sheep-hurdle, and a wolfhound lay across the threshold. When the innkeeper appeared I asked if I could stay the night.

‘The world is free,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

He gave me a loaf, and a rusty tin of sardines which I cut open with my knife. Two shabby Civil Guards were playing cards in a corner, their guns spread out on the table. Fat pink faces, small black eyes, cheating and quarrelling, they watched me darkly. When I’d finished my supper I began to write some notes, which they seemed to consider an act of reckless defiance. Throwing down their cards and picking up their guns they strode noisily across to my table. The notebook was snatched from my hand, sniffed at, shaken, thumped hard, and held upside down. A volley of questions followed, baffled and truculent. What was all this? they asked. They didn’t like the look of it. Where was I from? – and where were my documents? Speak up! I had much to answer for. A muddy half-hour was spent in this oafish wrangle, while the innkeeper watched us from a hole in the wall. Finally my indecipherable writing, and the stupidity of my replies, drove them glowering back to their corner.

I had already learned to be wary of the Civil Guards, who were the poison dwarfs of Spain. They would suddenly ride down upon you on their sleek black horses, far out in the open country, and crowd around you, all leather and guns, and put you through a bullying interrogation. Most of them were afraid, and lived in a social vacuum which could only be filled with violence; they had few friends in this country and were suspicious of strangers and indeed of anyone on the road. When challenged by one of them, I took deliberate pains never to allow the issue to become clear between us; for they were alarmed by confusion, and by their superiors, and could usually be relied on to melt away rather than be caught in a complicated situation with a foreigner.

So for the rest of the night these two left me alone. I wrote, and they drank and quarrelled. Finally the landlord brought me over a glass of brandy, and said that the world was free and he only wished he could write. An innocent remark, but made with a twisted mouth, and loud enough for the Guards to hear.

I’d been almost a month on the road since I landed at Vigo, and was now finding the going better. At first I’d hobbled, but my blisters had hardened and at last I could walk without pain. I developed a long loping stride which covered some twenty miles a day, an easy monotonous pace – slightly faster than the mule-trains strung along the route, though slower than trotting asses. On these straight Spanish roads, so empty of motor cars, we moved between horizons like ships at sea, often remaining for hours within sight of each other, gradually losing or gaining ground. The mule-trains at that time were the caravans of Castile, one of the threads of the country’s life – teams of small tasselled animals drawing high blue carts brightly painted with vines and flowers. As gaudy as barges or wedding floats, mounted on squealing five-foot wheels, they worked from city to city at three miles an hour – a rhythm unchanged since the days of Hannibal – carrying charcoal, firewood, wineskins, olives, oil, old iron, and gossip. The drivers were a race apart, born and bred on the road, and recognizable by their flat, almost Siberian faces. With long whips and short legs, they travelled like Arabs, some with boys to look after their comforts, and slept at noon in hammocks slung between the wheels, rocking gently to the pace of the mules, and then spent their nights round fires among the open rocks or wrapped in harness in the courtyards of inns. They were the hereditary newsbearers of the Spanish plains, old as the wheel and separate in their ways as gypsies.

I followed this straight southern track for several days, living on figs and ears of wheat. Sometimes I’d hide from the sun under the wayside poplars, face downwards, watching the ants. There was really no hurry. I was going nowhere. Nowhere at all but here.Close to the spicy warmth of this foreign ground a few inches away from my face. Never in my life had I felt so fat with time, so free of the need to be moving or doing. For hours I could watch some manic ant dragging a piece of orange peel through the grass, pushing and pulling against impossible barriers in a confused and directionless frenzy.

Then one day I noticed a long low cloud lifting slowly above the southern horizon, a purple haze above the quivering plain – the first sign of the approaching Sierras. After the monotonous wheatfields it was like a landfall, the distant coastline of another country, and as I walked, it climbed steadily till it filled half the sky – the immense east-west barrier of the Guadarramas.