Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (46 page)

I lived in an evil old posada whose galleries were packed with sailors, beggars, and pimps; and there was little to do all day except sit round in the dust while the scorching winds blew in from the Atlantic.

The police said it was forbidden to play music in the streets for money, so sometimes I played for nothing. Or I went round the cafes with a blind brother and sister who helped out my fiddle with a couple of goat-skin drums. When we were lucky we were rewarded with a few scraps of food, otherwise we played to amuse ourselves, or simply sat round talking, drinking from cracked tin cups, and eating prawns out of screws of paper.

I seemed to meet no one in Cadiz except the blind and the crippled, the diseased, the deaf and dumb, whose condition was so hopeless they scarcely bothered to complain but treated it all as a twisted joke. They told me tittering tales of others even more wretched than themselves – the homeless who lived in the Arab drains, who lay down at night among rats and excrement and were washed out to sea twice a year by the floods. They told me of families who scraped the tavern floors for shellfish and took it home to boil for soup, and of others who lived by trapping cats and dogs and roasting them on fires of driftwood. They even took me one night to a tenement near the cathedral and pointed out a howling man on the rooftop, who was pretending to be a ghost in order to terrorize the landlord and thereby reduce the rents.

I’d been travelling through Spain in a romantic haze, but as I came south the taste grew more bitter. Cadiz at that time was nothing but a rotting hulk on the edge of a disease-ridden tropic sea; its people dismayed, half-mad, consoled only by vicious humour, prisoners rather than citizens.

Since I left the Campbells in Toledo I’d been almost a month on the road; a month of vintage September weather; travelling in easy stages through autumnal landscapes which seemed to be moistly wrapped in fruit-skins. I’d been glad to be back on my solitary marches, edging mindlessly from village to town, sleeping in thickets, in oases of rushes, under tall reeds, to the smell of water. South of Toledo there was green country still – green trees against brick-red earth, trees so intense they seemed to throw green shade and turn the dust around them to grass.

There were purple evenings, juicy as grapes, the thin moon cutting a cloud like a knife; and dawns of quick sudden thunder when I’d wake in the dark to splashes of rain pouring from cracks of lightning, then walk on to a village to sit cold and alone, waiting for it to wake and sell me some bread, watching the grey light lifting, a man opening a stable, the first girls coming to the square for water.

Out in the open country it grew dark early, and then there was nothing to do but sleep. As the sun went down, I’d turn into a field and curl up like a roosting bird, then wake in the morning soaked with dew, before the first farmer or the sun was up, and take to the road to get warm, through a smell of damp herbs, with the bent dawn moon still shining.

In the valley of the Guadiana I saw herds of black bulls grazing in fields of orange dust, and square white farms, like desert strongholds, protected by packs of savage dogs. Somewhere here, in a barn, under a roof crusted with swallows’ nests, a mother and daughter cooked me a supper of eggs, while a horse watched me eating, chickens walked on the table, and an old man in the hay lay dying.

Then as I approached Valdepefias a carter offered me a lift, exclaiming that no stranger should walk while he rode, and proudly answered my gift of a cigarette by giving me in exchange a miniature cucumber. On our way to the town we stopped at a village fair and watched the performance of an open-air circus, which consisted of a monkey, a camel, an Arab, a snake, and two painted little boys with trumpets.

Valdeperias was a surprise: a small graceful town surrounded by rich vineyards and prosperous villas – a pocket of good fortune which seemed to produce without effort some of the most genial wines in Spain. The town had an air of privileged well-being, like an oil-well in a desert of hardship; the old men and children had extra flesh on their bones, and even the dogs seemed to shine with fat.

It was also a friendly town, where people welcomed my violin and encouraged me to play as though I’d come to a wedding, drawing back their shutters, leaning over their balconies, and rewarding me with food and money. I remember playing in the evenings to houses of blue and white, while women approached me with cups of wine, and the pork-fattened shopkeepers broke off from kissing their children to bring me parcels of ham and olives.

Then one night, as I was having my supper in the square, three young men invited me to a brothel. They addressed me as ‘Maestro’, and introduced themselves formally: Antonio, Amistad, and Julio. I would be doing them a bounty, they said, and led me off through the town, waving their arms and making spry little dances.

Somewhere out in the suburbs we came to an old dark house, windowless, with a heavy door. The boys kicked it delicately with their pointed shoes and made low-pitched animal cries. Their teeth shone as they waited, and heat seemed to rise from the ground. The house appeared to be empty. Then the door was opened at last by a girl in a dressing-gown, sleepily eating chips.

‘Guapos,’ she said, in a warm flat voice, holding her arm across the doorway.

‘We’ve brought music,’ said Julio. ‘Let us in, Consuelito.’

‘Why not?’ yawned the girl, and we entered.

Inside was a bare little patio roofed by a trellis of vines and hung with a string of coloured light-bulbs. ‘We are always expected, you understand,’ said Julio. ‘But they will be diverted if you play a little.’

A half-dressed young girl sat at the foot of the stairs polishing her toenails with a hairbrush. Two others were sprawled at a table poring over the pages of a comic. The patio wore an air of low-lit ennui.

Consuelito bolted the door, took another mouthful of chips, then threw back her head and shrieked ‘Grandpa!’ at which a giggling old greybeard trotted immediately from the kitchen bearing a trayful of wine and food.

He gave us a frisky welcome, fussily filling our glasses, beating off the flies as if they were ravens, calling us masters, dukes, princes, kings, and commanding his granddaughters to stiffen their backs.

When we were comfortably settled, the old man took the violin from my hands and returned it with a little bow. ‘Enchant us,’ he said, and slipped me some money. The girls rose slowly to their feet and joined us.

I remember the whoosh of the wine going through my limbs, the throbbing and familiar fires, as I sat with my feet across the table scraping out waltzes and pasodobles. Julio beat time with a couple of spoons, Antonio tapped his teeth with a knife, while Amistad, already as pink as a prawn, sang away in a sickly tenor.

Business steadily grew brisker as the night advanced; the front door was increasingly kicked; there were whispers, shadowy figures stumbling their way upstairs, the sounds of boots and bare feet overhead. Grandpa found an accordion, which he gave to Antonio, and together we kept up our wheezy concert. Meanwhile the beaming old man half-drowned us with wine and said we were an honour to the house.

During short intervals of quiet the girls rejoined us, yawning and re-settling their hair, nibbling our food and chattering together in voices that were hoarse and furry with sleep. They were sturdy girls, with ruddy hands and faces, and strong absentminded bodies, and judging from their appearance one might have thought they earned their bread in the fields rather than in this breathless and shuttered house. Two were sisters, the other two cousins, and they were all in their early teens. We seemed to be the youngest visitors they had that night, most of the others being middle-aged farmers.

The four girls and Grandpa made up an intimate establishment which for a brothel appeared strangely muted. I’d expected noise, livid flesh, drunken voices, obscenities, or a kind of hang-dog, ravenous shame. Instead there was this casual atmosphere of neighbourly visiting, hosted by these vague and sleepy girls: subdued talk, a little music, an air of domestic eroticism, with unhurried comings and goings.

At last there was silence in the house, and a gleam of dawn in the patio. I sat fuddled with wine in my chair. The boys were asleep at the table, and Grandpa lay asleep on the floor, curled up like a wrinkled child. The youngest of the cotton-wrapped girls came and shook him by the arm. ‘Grandpa, the farmers have gone,’ she said. The old man woke up, whispered something in her ear, winked at me, and went to sleep again.

The girl shrugged, yawned, and came across to my table. I felt her lean soft and drowsily against me. She put a long brown finger to the neck of my shirt and drew it slowly down my body. Little shocks ran through me, see-saw surges of feeling, warm vaultings of sleepy comfort. The girl’s wandering finger, tipped with precocious cunning, seemed the only thing left alive in the world, and moved absently about me, loosening knots in my flesh, then tying them up again.

A few days later, in a village south of Valdepefias, I ran into Romero, a young tramp like myself, who was carrying his goods wrapped in a bundle of sailcloth and explained that he was on the road for his health. When he heard what I was doing he threw up his arms and said that was just the thing. He would go with me anywhere, he said, collect the money when I played, scrounge me food, and show me the country.

As I’d been alone for some time it seemed a good idea, so we left the village together – Romero prancing beside me, talking of ways to make money, boasting of his spectacular skill as a cook, of the various tricks he knew of enticing fowls from farmers, and of begging from nuns in convents. He was a handsome young man, witty and unscrupulous, and I felt he had some useful things to teach me. We camped the first night on a threshing floor – a circle of flagstones in the middle of a field – and lay side by side under a single blanket watching the large red sun go down. I still remember the moment: the sun huge on the horizon and the silhouette of a horseman passing slowly across it, with Romero whispering and rolling me cigarettes, and his warmth as the evening cooled.

My pleasure in his company lasted about three days, then soured and diminished quickly. No longer could I imagine myself prince of the road, the lone ranger my fancy preferred. I’d developed an ingrowing taste for the vanity of solitude, and Romero’s presence cut into this sharply. Besides, he was sluggish and lazy, was always whining for vino and complaining about his feet. Certainly he detested walking, and after a mile or so would throw himself down and kick like a baby; so after lunch one day, while he was sleeping by the roadside, I put some money in his shoe and left him.

It was an extraordinary relief to be on my own again, and I made for the hills as fast as I could. But he must have awoken soon after, for presently I heard a distant shout, and there he was, coming in furious pursuit. Throughout the rest of the day I caught glimpses of him in the distance, a small toiling figure, head down and determined, scurrying indignantly along in the dust. Feeling both guilty and hunted, I quickened my pace, and gradually he fell away. There was one last cry, as from an abandoned wife, and I never saw him again.

Then I came to the Sierra Morena – one more of those east-west ramparts which go ranging across Spain and divide its people into separate races. Behind me was Old Castile and the Gothic north; beyond, the Sierra the spiced blur of Andalusia.

A peasant stopped me in the foothills (a twinge of agony on his face at the sight of my road-worn feet) and piled my bags on his mule, gave me a stick, and said he would show me the way up the mountain. We climbed for three hours, up a rope-ladder of goat tracks which led up through a wilderness of rocks – a great jumble of boulders, large as houses, which seemed to have been thrown about by giants. The mule and I stumbled, but my guide climbed ahead of us, light-footed, never looking back. Sometimes he nodded towards the crags and made a reference to bandits. Occasionally we saw a goat-herd sitting brown and alone.

At last we pushed through the peaks and came to a misty plateau with a chill breeze blowing across it. Here was my companion’s village – a huddle of rough-stone hovels, primitively rounded and tufted with dripping moss. A few diseased-looking sheep, with ribs like radiators, wandered in and out of the houses.

When they heard us coming the villagers gathered in the mist and waited for my companion to explain who I was. After he’d done this briefly, as best he could, they gave me a meal of bread and curds. Then, with a muted apology, my guide took the violin from its bag and handed it to me delicately, like a new-born lamb. I was now used to this reception – the ritual gift of food, followed by the offered instrument and the expectant silence.