Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (42 page)

Already cool winds were blowing down from its peaks, and the plain was lifting into little hills, and by the next afternoon I’d left the wheat behind me and entered a world of Nordic pinewoods. Here I slipped off the heat like a sweat-soaked shirt and slept an hour among the resinous trees – a fresh green smell as sweet as menthol compared with the animal reek of the plain. I noticed that each tree, slashed with a pattern of fishbone cuts, was bleeding gum into little cups. The wounded trunks seemed to be running with drops of amber, stinging the air with their piercing scent, while some of the older trees, bled dry and abandoned, curled in spirals like burning paper. But it was a good place to sleep; the wood was empty of flies, who had learned to avoid its sticky snares, and the afternoon sun sucked up the flavour of each tree till the whole wood swam in incense like a church.

The villages in the foothills were full of flowers and fountains, but none of them had any food. I remember Cuellar, Shulomonon, and Naval de Oro – places of steep craggy lanes and leaf-smothered towers and old doors pitted with gigantic keyholes. But all I got to eat from the lot of them was a piece of goat’s cheese as hard as a stone.

I remember coming to one village whose streets were black with priests, and its taverns full of seething atheists. Some stood in a doorway heaving stones at the church, others sang obscenities about the bishop. Then a group cornered me in a tavern to complain about their Roman fountain – a naked goddess carved from local marble. Once, they said, she lay in the square, and jets of water sprang out of her breasts. Most beautiful to behold – but the priests had smashed her with hammers and buried her remains in the hills.

They were only shepherds, they said, but theirs was an artistic village; and they pointed out two pictures hanging on the tavern wall. Each was an original, painted on canvas, and the colour of uncooked meat: one was of a broken puppet, labelled ‘The Show is Ended’; and the other of a sedate Victorian family, father, mother, and beribboned little girl, watching a dog bleed to death on the carpet. ‘We love art, my beauty,’ said one of the shepherds. Later, he tried to kiss me.

The wine in Shulomonon was raw and bitter, but cost less than a penny a glass. While sipping some of this, I met an English woman from Walsall, who had just spent five weeks touring Morocco with her husband. She looked worn out and bewildered. Her husband was asleep in the street. She asked for news of the Royal Family.

Early one evening I left the last of these villages and headed for Segovia, about six miles away. As I climbed the hill I saw some girls sitting in the mouth of a cave, facing the sunset, sewing and singing. ‘My boy is sharp as salt,’ they sang, ‘with a house full of gold and silver.’

At this point I got a lift in a farmer’s cart, which was loaded with sacks of chaff. As we lumbered along, the farmer talked about work and looked at my hands out of the corner of his eyes. ‘It is different in some countries, I believe,’ he said. ‘But God gave us a country we must fight like a lion.’ Suddenly he gave a loud cry, lashed the mules with his whip, and aimed the cart straight up the hillside, leaving the road altogether to follow some ancient track which climbed sheer among the boulders. The mules kicked and slithered, dug their hind-legs into the ground, and spread their haunches like thin black frogs, panting and straining, while the cart rocked like a ship and I clung to the farmer’s belt. Half an hour later, with the wheels bouncing off rocks and the mules in a lather of sweat, we reached the top of the rise and saw the city below us, and the farmer locked the wheels for the downhill slide.

Segovia was a city in a valley of stones – a compact, half-forgotten heap of architectural splendours built for the glory of some other time. Here were churches, castles, and medieval walls standing sharp in the evening light, but all dwarfed by that extraordinary phenomenon of masonry, the Roman aqueduct, which overshadowed the whole. It came looping from the hills in a series of arches, some rising to over a hundred feet, and composed of blocks of granite weighing several tons and held together by their weight alone. This imperial gesture, built to carry water from a spring ten miles away, still strode across the valley with massive grace, a hundred vistas framed by its soaring arches, to enter the city at last high above the rooftops, stepping like a mammoth among the houses.

‘The Aqueduct,’ said the farmer, pointing with his whip, in case by chance I had failed to notice it. But to me, not having heard about it before, it came as a unique and visual shock.

‘It’s like a bridge,’ he went on. ‘You could drive across it. I once crossed it with a coach and horses.’

‘Wouldn’t it be too narrow?’ I asked.

He looked at me sharply.

‘I drove across it in a narrow coach.’

Entering the city by the Puerto de Santiago, the farmer gave me some carobs and wished me a good night’s rest. I found an inn tucked away under the aqueduct, conveniently roofed by one of its arches – a vast cave-like place of naked granite smelling warmly of pigs and horses.

Segovia was mounted on rock and still partly boxed in by its Roman-Iberian walls, a small snug city of steep-stepping streets which seemed to ignore the invention of the wheel. There was time before supper to explore some of these alleys, dappled with pools of warm red lamplight, where naked children darted into their tattered houses like pheasants into nests of bracken. At close quarters, the aqueduct seemed both benevolent and mad, its jets of masonry vaulting the sky, and the huge blocked feet coming down on the town and throwing everything out of scale.

After a supper of beans and mutton, served in a cloud of woodsmoke, I was invited out into the plaza to watch a midnight cine. Here, once again, the aqueduct came into use, with a cotton sheet strung from one of its pillars, on to which a pale beam of light, filtering from an opposite window, projected an ancient and jittery melodrama. Half the town, it seemed, had turned out for the show, carrying footstools and little chairs, while children swarmed on the rooftops and hung in clusters from the trees, their dark heads shining like elderberries.

The film’s epic simplicity nickered across the Roman wall, vague and dim as a legend, but each turn of the plot was followed with gusto, people jumping up and down in their seats, bombarding the distant shadows with advice and warning, mixed with occasional shouts of outrage. The appearance of the villain was met by darts and stones, the doltish hero by exasperation, while a tide of seething concern was reserved for the plight of the heroine who spent a vigorously distressful time. During most of the film she hung from ropes in a tower, subject to the tireless affronts of the villain, but when the hero finally bestirred himself and disembowelled the villain with a knife, the audience was satisfied and went to bed.

I was not long in Segovia, and haven’t been back there since, but I still recall some of its quieter melancholies – the cool depths of the cathedral, clean and bare, full of wide and curving spaces, and the huge stained-glass windows hanging like hazed chrysanthemums in the amber distances of its height. Also the small black pigs running in and out of shop doorways – often apparently the only customers; and the storks roosting gravely on the chimney-pots, gazing across the valley like bony Arabs.

Then one afternoon, just outside the city walls, I found the little church of the local Virgin, a macabre memorial lying at the foot of the Pefia Grajera – the desolate ‘Cliff of Crows’. This granite rock, smothered with croaking birds, was also Segovia’s cliff of blood, one of the many such places of easy death to be found on the edge of Spanish towns. From here, in the past, Segovia had been in the habit of tossing into the gorge its felons, adulterers, and heretics; thus suiting poverty and indolence by saving the price of a bullet or the extra effort of a sword-thrust. A strolling priest took pains to give me these local tit-bits, as well as to explain the significance of the birds on the cliff; pointing out that the slain, in any case, belonged to the world of the damned and that the crows were the ghosts of their godless souls.

The priest seemed drawn to this noisome place, and stayed with me for a while, gazing with a soft little smile at the fouled-up cliff where the birds rustled and flapped like bats. He mentioned the thirteenth-century heroine, Maria del Salto, a beautiful Jewess accused of adultery. ‘Having been cast from the rock in the usual manner,’ he said, ‘she called on the Virgin to prove her innocence, and was compassionately halted while still in mid-air and allowed to float unhurt to the ground.’ The little church in the gorge was built to commemorate the miracle – with no effect on later victims, apparently. But what I remember now is not the sedate little church, but the rock like a bruise above it, its bloodstained face and exhausted crevices haunted by the harsh dry voices of the birds.

Segovia left me with the echo of that carrion-infested place, together with the hollow reverberations of the aqueduct. And with one other, the last, as I walked out of the town and passed the silent and shuttered bullring, and saw a white-faced matador being carried to his car, weeping softly, attended by whispering friends…

A few miles south of Segovia, at the foot of the Sierras, I came on the royal gardens of La Granja – acres of writhing statues, walks, and fountains rising from the dust like a mirage. It was a grandiose folly, as large as Versailles and even more extravagant, and I found it in the peak of bloom and entirely deserted except for a few old gardeners with brooms.

A hundred fountains were playing, filling the sky with rainbows and creating an extraordinary dreamlike clamour. Marble gods and wood-nymphs, dolphins and dragons, their anatomies studded with pipes and nozzles, directed complex cascades at one another or shot them high above the flowering trees. Everything that could be done with water seemed to be going on here, almost to the point of hydromania. Lakes, pools, jets, and falls, flooded grottoes and exotic canals, all throbbed and surged at different levels, reflecting classical arbours, paths, and terraces, or running like cooling milk down the statuary.

Yet there was nobody to see it. Nobody but me – except, of course, for the gardeners, who went shuffling about as though under some timeless instruction, preparing for the return of some long-dead queen.

I stayed in the gardens for an hour or more, furtively paddling among the trickling leaves. The fountains, I learned later, played only on rare occasions, and I don’t know why they played that day. It was like the winding-up of some monarch’s toy, of which the owner had rapidly tired, and which now lay abandoned at the foot of the mountain together with its aged keepers. The fact was that La Granja, when looked at closely, was more than a little vulgar – a royal inflation of a suburban mind, a costly exercise with gnomes and toadstools.

It took me two days to cross the Sierra Guadarrama, as through another season and another country, climbing a magnificent road of granite blocks to a point almost two miles high. Here were racing brooks, great shadowy forests, and fallen boulders covered with flowering creepers. It seemed already autumn here; clouds rolled down the summits, dropping cool intermittent showers,while shepherds scrambled about, followed by wolf-like dogs, and the air smelt freshly of resin and honey.

I spent the first night in a grove of oak trees, lying on leaves as wet as Wales, under a heavy dew and a cold sharp moon and surrounded by the continuous bells of sheep. In the morning I woke shivering to eat a breakfast of goat’s cheese, which the night had soaked and softened, then watched the sunlight move slowly down the trunks of the pine trees, dark red, as though they bled from the top. Near by was a waterfall pouring into a bowl of rock, where I stripped and took a short sharp bathe. It was snow-cold, brutal, and revivifying, secluded among the trees, and when I’d finished I sat naked on a mossy stone, slowly drying in the rising sun. I seemed to be in a pocket of northern Europe, full of the cold splendour of Finnish gods. A green haze of pine-dust floated in shafts of sunlight and squirrels swung and chattered above me. Gulping the fine dry air and sniffing the pitch-pine mountain, I was perhaps never so alive and so alone again.

By midday I’d climbed to the six thousand feet pass of Puerto de Navacerrado, where I rested awhile under towering peaks that were dusted with summer snow. Great banks of cloud rolled up the northern slopes, broke over the ridges, and disappeared; while before me, through the pass, I saw a new country emerge – the immense plain of La Mancha, stretching flat as a cowhide and smudged like a sore with distant Madrid.

Crossing the Sierra was not just a stage on my journey, in spite of the physical barrier. It was also one of those sudden, jerky advances in life, which once made closes the past for ever. It was a frontier for me in more ways than one, and not till I’d passed it did I feel really involved in Spain.

The Sierra, like the moon, had two distinct faces: the north one aloof and cold in its shadow, a place of green thickets and alpine silence, while to the south the mountain was just a raw burnt rock, the cliffs stripped bare by the sun – which Madrid seemed to use as a kind of backyard wall on which to scribble slogans for cofiac and nightclubs. The north side had a pastoral stillness, a veiled purity and calm; while the blistered south, though at least ten miles from the city, already reeked of the waste of the streets.

Even so, I was impatient to reach Madrid, and hurried my way towards it, stumbling down pathways of broken shale, naked of grass or trees, while the peaks of the mountains slipped back into the clouds, sealing off all I had been till then. One more night on the slopes, then I reached the main road – a clutter of cafes, shacks, and tyre-dumps. And here I was given a lift by two racy young booksellers who were driving a van loaded with Latin missals. The young men, very gay, presented me with their cards and pointed out all the brothels as we bowled into Madrid; where they dropped me at last, at about ten in the morning, in the heart of the city, the heart of Spain.