Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (43 page)

Madrid struck me at first as being all tram-bells and wire, false marble and dilapidation. Counting London, it was only the second major city I’d seen, and I slipped into it as into the jaws of a lion. It had a lion’s breath, too; something fetid and spicy, mixed with straw and the decayed juices of meat. The Gran Via itself had a lion’s roar, though inflated, like a circus animal’s – wide, self-conscious, and somewhat seedy, and lined with buildings like broken teeth.

These wide show-streets displayed all that pomp and vacuity one associated with Latin-America – political parade-grounds driven between wedding-cake mansions and bearing the names of presidents, historical dates, and virtues. Close behind them, however, ran the living lanes of the city, narrow alleys stuffed with carts and beggars, with thin little housemaids and tubercular children, beautiful and covered with sores.

I went first to the post office to collect my letters, which I found filed under ‘E’ for ‘Esquire’ – one from a newspaper with a third prize for a poem, and one from my mother hoping my feet were dry. Then I walked round the back-streets near the Puerta del Sol, looking for a likely inn, and found one at last, as old as Chaucer, with a cowshed in the cellar. The proprietor wrote my name in a big black book,copying it from my mother’s envelope, then handed me a door- key as large as a spade and said my room would cost sixpence a night.

By now it was noon, with almost everyone under cover, in the bars and moistly shaded cafes, at this hour when Madrid properly came into its own – a dewdrop on the grid-iron plain. Most other capitals, in such heat, would still have been an inferno of duty, full of damp shopgirls and exhausted clerks. But not here, for Madrid knew when to say No, and draw its shutters against the sun.

This, of course, was also the habit in other Spanish cities; but here it had reached a peak of particular genius. For Madrid at that time, if not today, was a city of a thousand exquisite taverns – water-cooled, barrel-lined, and cavernously spacious, cheap and affectionately run, in whose traditional shade the men, at least, spent a half of their waking time.

Stepping in from the torrid street, you met a band of cool air like fruit-peel pressed to your brow, and entered a cloistered grotto laden with the tang of shellfish, wet tiles, and wine-soaked wood. There was no waiting, no crowding; the place was yours; potboys took your orders with ringing cries; and men stood at their ease holding goblets of sherry, with plenty of time to drink them, while piled round the counters – succulently arranged in dishes or enthroned on great blocks of ice – lay banquets of seafood: craggy oysters, crabs, calamares heaped in golden rings, fresh lobsters twitching on beds of palm-leaves, bowls of mussels, and feathery shrimps. Also on offer would be the little sizzling saucers of kidney or roasted sparrow, snails, fried squid, hot prawns in garlic, stewed pork or belly of lamb. Nobody drank without eating – it would have been thought uncivilized (and may have been one of the reasons why no one was drunk). But then this seafood, after all, was some of the best in the world, land-locked Madrid’s particular miracle, freshly gathered that morning from the far-away shores – the Mediterranean,,Biscay, Atlantic – and rushed to the capital in special trains which pushed everything else into the sidings.

That’s how I remember it: under the terracotta roofs, a proliferation of caves of ice. With carters, porters, watchmen, taxi-drivers, sleek dandies, and plump officials sipping their golden wines, fastidiously peeling a prawn, biting into the tart pink flesh of a lobster, tasting the living brine of half-forgotten seas, of half-remembered empires, while the surge of conversation continued like bubbling water under the framed pictures of bulls and heroes. It was a way of life evolved like a honeycomb and buried away from the burning sky; and perhaps no other city at that time had so successfully come to terms with this particular priority of pleasure.

But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one’s time.

I felt that Madrid was a city where I might make some money, so I went to the Town Hall to get the usual permission. The man examined my violin, hummed a few bars of //
Trovatore,
and said I should go to the Commissariat of Police. This was in another part of the city and got me nowhere, for I was passed on immediately to the Ministry of Agriculture. The officials were drowsily kind, rolled me cigarettes and asked me what I thought of Madrid, but although they seemed to approve of the idea of concerts in the streets, none of them could find the necessary form to permit it. But in the end it didn’t matter; I was thanked for making the proper approaches and it was suggested I could go ahead without it.

So when the air cooled that evening, I went to the older part of the city, to the teeming cliffs above the Manzanares. There was scarcely any traffic; streets were intimate as courtyards, with lamplit arches smelling of wine and woodsmoke. And all were alive with that dense coming and going of a people too poor really to be going anywhere, content to walk up and down within sight of their neighbours, chewing carobs and sunflower seeds.

I melted easily enough into the evening crowds, playing alone but not entirely ignored. People walked from the shops to give me an apple or orange, and women threw paper-wrapped gifts from the balconies. ‘Regard the young man. Find him a morsel, for Jesus’ – and pennies and biscuits came scattering down.

Givers and receivers seemed to be equal here. It was a world of exchanges rather than charity. Stallholders swapped with their neighbours, or ate their own wares, and barmen poured out drinks for each other. Beggars were everywhere, sitting propped against walls, carefully inspecting one another’s parcels, while around them ran rouged and painted children wearing their mothers’ skirts and shoes.

This was a part of Madrid where I spent much of my time, especially those nights when nobody slept, sitting around till dawn on their little pavement chairs waiting for a breath of air from the Sierras. All was snug, drowsy, and closely wrapped, like life in some public bed. I remember the cries and conversations that rose and fell, looping from door to door:

‘I buy ropes and iron, cottons and silks! I buy saucepans, nails, and keys!’

‘Paco’s no value. He’s a mala lengua. He knows nothing but to sell old eggs.’

‘She comes from Genoa – or her people did. He’s from Burgos. He spies for the Guardia

‘I have fritas, gambas, and pajaritos – fresh little mouthfuls, gentlemen . ..’

‘Immaculada! – whore, where have you been all night? Whose mattress you been pressing then?…’

There seemed no programme to life in these narrow alleys; nothing stopped and all hours were the same: always some mumbling old woman buying a half-litre of beans, a girl at a window, a child at the breast, some boy down a side-street silently torturing another, some family round a table eating…

And whenever I returned to my inn, no matter how late it might be, most of the carters would still be awake. The innkeeper would give me some coppers, or a glass of brandy, and suggest I play them a tune

One night, I remember, a gentleman in a grey frock-coat came down from his room to listen, and stood close behind me, nodding and smiling to the music and sticking long silver pins through his throat.

Another night as I played, an old clock in the courtyard suddenly shuddered and struck fourteen.

‘It’s gone mad,’ said the innkeeper. ‘It hasn’t struck for years.’ And he went over and hit it with a bottle.

My bedroom was a cell without any windows, and had bedbugs as big as beetles. Lying down was to be ridden, racked, and eaten, to scratch and fight for breath. It was clear why everyone stayed awake in this city. Only in the streets and courtyards could one breathe at night, and the heat brought the beds alive.

Mornings, however, were miracles of renewal, well worth the short night’s inferno. Then the sky was an infinity of bubble-blue, pure as a diamond seen through water, restoring to life the sleepless sufferers who emerged with faces shining like plates. Washed stones and wet dung scented the morning streets, together with the delicate tang of pine. Raised close to the sky, the city sparkled, as though among the first to receive its light. Indeed Madrid, the highest capital in Europe, was a crystal platform at this early hour, and the clarity of the air may have been the cause of a number of local obsessions – the people’s concern for truth, their naked and pitiless mysticism, their fascination with pleasure and death. They were certainly lofty in their love of the city, putting it first among the many proverbs. ‘From the provinces to Madrid – but from Madrid to the sky,’ said one with ascending pride. Also: ‘When I die, please God, let me go to Heaven, but have a little window to look back on Madrid.’ Standing on its mile-high plateau their city was considered to be the top rung of a ladder reaching just this side of paradise.

Mornings in the posada were the best time of the day, with the walls dripping with watered flowers, I used to sit in the doorway, facing the street, while the girl Concha went to buy my breakfast; then when she returned she’d squat on the bench beside me and start pinning and curling her hair. Concha was a husky young widow from Aranjuez and spent most of the daytime idling about, waiting for the return of her boy-friend from the Asturias who brought her presents of jam and butter. In the meantime she was willing to do my marketing for me, so long as she could keep back a bit for herself.

She was in her ripe middle twenties, and I thought her mature and beautiful – though well out of reach of my years. Her heavy gold hair looked like a load of straw, and would have looked even better if she’d dyed it more often. She would ask me the usual questions. ‘Why are you alone? Have you no wife or piccaneeky?’ Sometimes she’d pour some fish-oil into the palms of my hands and get me to massage her hair with it. I’d be content to sit out the morning at this indolent task, while the carts rattled past in the street, and feel her leaning against me, heavy and silent, oblivious to the passing cries of the carters. ..

Finally, one morning, towards the end of my stay, I noticed her hot lazy eyes wandering over me. My clothes, she said, were without class or dignity and not proper for an Englishman. What I needed, at least, was a new pair of trousers, and she said she’d get some from a gentleman she knew. ‘You will have them tonight, I promise you. Then you will be able to walk in the street with honour.’

That evening, in fact, I did well with the fiddle and spent the rest of the night in the bars. The hot still air sharpened the taste of the wine and sent me wandering from street to street, glad to be alone in this open city with all the benefits of no identity.

I began at the Calle Echegaray – a raffish little lane, half Goya, half Edwardian plush, with cafe-brothels full of painted mirrors, crippled minstrels, and lacquered girls. The narrow ditch-like alley was crowded with gypsies, watchmen, touts, and lechers, and with youths gazing aghast at the girls in the windows, without the money to buy them. Inside, the lucky ones – the paunchy bald clubmen, and spoiled sefioritos spending their mothers’ pin-money – had beer and prawns, a girl at each shoulder, a bootblack crouched at their feet, buying the fat court-life for a few pesetas in the midst of a clamour of crones and beggars.

I found a less brassy bar at the end of the street, one designed for quieter, more twilit drinking – but voluptuously furnished and decorated throughout with a Victorian amalgam of blood and sex. Varnished posters on the walls, the colour of old smoked salmon, announced: ‘Toros en Valencia, 1911’; or showed Theda Bara-type beauties in black lace mantillas, roses pressed to their naked bosoms, sensuously posturing to a background of dying bullfighters, and choking bulls stretched on crimson sands.

In this bar the wine was poured from a great stone jar, and served by an old man who’d lost a leg in the bullring. He carried his grumbles and miseries like a guttering candle from one group of drinkers to another.

Someone mentioned Belmonte and Domingo Ortega, the two rival stars of the day.

‘They are nothing,’ he growled. ‘Thieves and catch-pennies both. Don’t speak of them to me. There are no men or bulls alive in Spain any more. Only pretty little boys with kittens.’

The wine was thick and strong, and I was still not used to it. The bar began to change dimensions. I was suddenly aware of the beauty of my finger-nail, of people who addressed me, then disappeared.

A little man by my side was boasting in a sing-song voice of his home in the north of Spain. He was short, like a Welshman, with a sad chapel face, and was clearly enjoying his exile. He hated the void of Castile, the burnt-up desert; he came from a land of plenty. ‘In the Asturias,’ he was saying, while his companions giggled, ‘there are three special kinds of green. The dark green of night, the clear green of water, and the pale fresh green of a corpse…’

Another man near by suddenly spun round upon me and thrust his red butcher-face at mine.

‘Long live Spain and Germany!’ he said, raising his fist. ‘Death to America! And long live Napoleon!’

‘Napoleon’s dead,’ I said primly.

He gave me a cunning look

‘Oh, no; we believe he’s alive.’ He raised his fist again. ‘But death to France too! – and if you’re a Frenchman, excuse me…’