Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (47 page)

I remember the villagers as they listened, blankets held to their throats, dribbles of damp lying along their eyebrows. I felt I could have been with some lost tribal remnant of seventeenth-century Scotland, during one of their pauses between famine and massacre – the children standing barefooted in puddles of dew, old women wrapped in their rancid sheepskins, and the short shaggy men whose squinting faces seemed stuck between a smile and a snarl.

When I’d finished playing, they filled my bottle with wine and stuffed some stone-hard cheese in my pocket. Then we said goodbye, and I left them standing on the ridge of the plateau like a cluster of wind-bent thorn bushes.

South of the Sierra the mists rolled away, and I met a new kind of heat, brutal and hard, carrying the smell of another continent. As I came down the mountain this heat piled up, pushing against me with blasts of sand, so that I walked half-blind, my tongue dry as a carob bean, obsessed once again by thirst. These were ominous days of nerve-bending sirocco, with peasants wrapped up to the eyes, during which I was savagely bitten by a demented dog with eyes like yellow gas. The southern slopes of the Sierras were flaking in the wind, parched as a rusty furnace, but far down in the valley, running in slow green coils, I could see at last the tree-lined Guadalquivir. Viewed from the blistered heights it was a mirage-river, which I remember putting into a short rough poem:

Rinsed sweat from the bare Sierras

courses a curled furrow in the dust

a sun-dazed wanderer

staggering to the sea…

When I reached the river at sundown I found it red, not green – shallow red water running between banks of red earth under a heavy scarlet sky, with flocks of red goats coming down to drink in clouds of vermilion dust. Naked boys, with bodies like copper pennies, splashed about in the shining mud, and all around was the rich and water-fed valley – shimmering eucalyptus, gardens of figs and peaches, orchards of plums fringed by tropical cacti, with loads of fat blackberries along the side of the road which 1 picked and ate for supper.

Entering the province of Andalusia through fields of ripening melons, I saw the first signs of the southern people: men in tall Cordobese hats, blue shirts, scarlet waistbands, and girls with smouldering Arab faces. Villages had Moorish names – Andujar, Pedro Abad – and an air of proud though listless anarchy. In the main square of one fully exposed to the populace, I saw two prisoners in an iron cage, puffing cheerily at cigarettes, blowing smoke through the bars, and shouting obscenities at the passers-by.

At this point on the road I might have continued south to Granada, which was only two or three days away. Instead I turned west and followed the Guadalquivir, which added several months to my journey, and took me to the sea the roundabout way and affected everything that was later to happen to me.

Ever since childhood I’d imagined myself walking down a white dusty road through groves of orange trees to a city called Seville. This fantasy may have been induced by the Cotswold damp, or by something my mother had told me, but it was one of several such cliches which had brought me to Spain, and now as I approached the city on this autumn morning it was as though I was simply following some old direction.

In fact there was no white road, not even a gold-clustered orange tree, but Seville itself was dazzling – a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses fanning out from each bank of the river. The Moorish occupation had bequeathed the affection for water around which so many of even the poorest dwellings were built – a thousand miniature patios set with inexhaustible fountains which fell trickling upon ferns and leaves, each a nest of green repeated in endless variations around this theme of domestic oasis. Here the rippling of water replaced the coal fire of the north as a symbol of home and comfort, while its whispering presence, seen through grilles and doorways, gave an impression of perpetual afternoon, each house turning its back on the blazing street outside to lie coiled around its moss-cool centre.

Seville was no paradise, even so. There was the customary squalor behind it – children and beggars sleeping out in the gutters under a coating of disease and filth. By day their condition seemed somewhat less intolerable, and they presented a jaunty face to the world. All were part of the city – the adored Seville – to which even the beggars claimed pride of belonging, and where ragged little girls would raise their thin brown arms and dance rapturously at the least excuse. It was a city of traditional alegria, where gaiety was almost a civic duty, something which rich and poor wore with arrogant finesse simply because the rest of Spain expected it. Like the Viennese, the Sevillanas lived under this burden of legend, and were forced into carefree excesses, compelled to flounce and swagger as the embodiment of Andalusia in spite of frequent attacks of liverish exhaustion.

I lived in Seville on fruit and dried fish, and slept at night in a yard in Triana – that ramshackle barrio on the north bank of the river which was once a gypsy ghetto. In my day it still had a seedy vigour, full of tile-makers and free-range poultry, of medieval stables bursting with panniered donkeys, squabbling wives and cooking pots. Stately cockerels with brilliant combs and feathers strutted like Aztecs about the rooftops, while from my yard I could hear the incessant throb of guitars being practised in shuttered rooms.

Seville in the morning was white and gold, the gold-lit river reflecting the Toro de Oro, with flashes of sun striking the Giralda Tower and the spires of the prostrate cathedral. The interior of the cathedral was a bronze half-light, a huge cavern of private penance, with an occasional old woman hobbling about on her knees, mumbling a string of prayers, or some transfixed girl standing in a posture of agony, arms stretched before the bleeding Christ.

At the morning market I bought cactus fruit, dripping with juice and shot full of seeds, sold by a garrulous old man who entertained his customers with long histories about the rivers of Spain. But his tales, told in dialect, were less intelligible to me than those of the deaf-mute boy Alonso, who I also met in the market and whose restless face and body built up images like a silent movie. He described his family in mime, patting their several heads, and suddenly one could see them in a row beside him – his handsome father, his coughing consumptive mother, fighting brothers, and sly young sister. There was also a sickly baby, its head lolling back, and two dead ones, packed into little boxes – the boy set their limbs stiffly, sprinkled them with prayers, closed their eyes, and laid them away with a shrug.

In the market, too, I met Queipo, a beggar, whose hand had been bitten off by a mad dog in Madrid. Sometimes he’d lift up the red and wrinkled stump, bare his teeth, and bark at it savagely. Otherwise he was a rational companion, and showed me round the town and introduced me to the cheapest cafes. We used to meet at midday, count out our money, and spend it on wine and fishballs, then go down to the quayside, climb into a half-sunken boat, and doze through the afternoon.

The Seville quays were unpretentious, and seemed no more nautical than a coal-wharf in Birmingham. The Guadalquivir, at this point, was rather like the Thames at Richmond, and was about as busy as the Paddington Canal. Yet it was from this narrow river, fifty miles from the sea, that Columbus sailed to discover America, followed a few years later by the leaking caravelles of Magellan, one of which was the first to encircle the world. Indeed, the waterfront at Seville, with its paddling boys and orange-boats, and its mossy provincial stones, was for almost five hundred years – till the coming of space-aimed rockets – history’s most significant launching-pad.

Queipo loved the quays. He wanted to go to Honolulu, he said. He pointed to his stump. ‘But I can only swim in circles.’ He had a family of fourteen, who lived in a cave in the country, and there was another child on the way. He spoke of his ageing wife with awe and impatience; she defeated all his attempts at control. ‘I knew it was no good,’ he growled, ‘when she put that lace on her camisole.’ She was over fifty, but still boundingly fertile. Two of his younger sons came into the city each day carrying a bucket wired to a pole, which Quiepo filled with meat-hash and orange skins and other scraps he’d begged from the cafes.

At night, when Queipo had returned to his cave, I’d walk back across the bridge to Triana, and sit on the cool flat roof of the Cafe Faro, and eat chips and gaze at the river. It seemed to be the only place in the city’s bowl of heat where there was the slightest movement of air. The lights on the river collapsed, distended, and coiled hotly like electric eels. Sounds rose from the streets: the shouts of the sleepless children, the throb of music, an occasional scream. This was a city absorbed in a boxed life of its own; strangers were few and almost ignored. Seville lived for itself, split into two halves, one riding on the back of the other.

Until now, I’d accepted this country without question, as though visiting a half-crazed family. I’d seen the fat bug-eyed rich gazing glassily from their clubs, men scrabbling for scraps in the market, dainty upper-class virgins riding to church in carriages, beggar-women giving birth in doorways. Naive and uncritical, I’d thought it part of the scene, not asking whether it was right or wrong. But it was in Seville, on the bridge, watching the river at midnight, that I got the first hint of coming trouble. A young sailor approached me with a ‘Hello, Johnny’, and asked for a cigarette. He spoke the kind of English he’d learned on a Cardiff coal boat, spitting it out as though it hurt his tongue. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said, ‘but if you want to see blood, stick around – you’re going to see plenty.’

Life in Cádiz was too acrid to hold me for long, so after a few days I left it and turned eastwards at last, heading along the bare coastal shelf of Andalusia.

Behind me the white fish-hook bay impaled the last tides of the Atlantic, still smelling of herring shoals, but the milky green waves swept steadily towards the Straits through which the Mediterranean would presently bloom. Already a generation old, I was still ignorant of the sea, unused to this sudden unearthly neutrality, and the dizzy sweep of the water gave me a feeling of vertigo, so that I kept carefully to the middle of the road.

Between the mountains and the sea, the country was a dried-up prairie, dun-coloured, smoking with dust. Thin wiry grass bent to the day-long winds which covered them with a ghostly film of salt, while far away to the north one could see the black dots of bulls wandering over the plain like buffaloes.

I spent almost a week in this Arizona-type landscape. It seemed forsaken, and most of the time I was alone. Sometimes I met a solitary horseman, or a veiled woman on a donkey who raised her hand to avert my evil eye. Or I would pass some roadside villagers treading the dregs of their grapes in the sour tail-end of the vintage. It was a joyless scene – the men and girls, bare-legged, circling together in a kind of trance, stamping the scummy vats with their blue-stained feet and uttering little grunts and cries of exhaustion.

I remember sleeping one night in a hill-top cemetery, my face stroked by the beams of a lighthouse, then taking breakfast next morning in a village wineshop where I heard the first talk of war. The faces of the fishermen were dull and grey as they rolled the harsh dry word between them. They spoke of war in Abyssinia; meaningless to me, who hadn’t seen a newspaper for almost three months.

Past Cape Trafalgar, the Straits narrowed visibly, the winds died, and the sea grew calmer. Then Africa appeared, and the skeins of the currents grew closer, crawling with little ships. Between the jaws of two continents they met and mingled, slowly filtering in and out, some heading back into the Mediterranean’s calm blue womb, others breaking out into the grey Atlantic.

I arrived at Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, to find it still skulking behind its Arab walls. Once a Barbary stronghold and master of the Straits, it now lay stranded, a bit of washed-up Africa, a decayed abstraction of Casbah-like alleys wandering among blind and shuttered houses.

I found a cafe on the beach where I watched the sun go down, almost audibly, into a gulf of purple. The bar was crowded with fishermen, morose and silent, all gazing across the Straits. In the distant dusk one saw the orange smudge of Tangier break into little lights, then the night’s heavy heat closed in upon us, prickling the face and hands.

The young fisherman at my table accepted a drink, and I asked him about the town. At first he was formal. ‘It is very handsome,’ he said; ‘very historic, as you can see.’ But he couldn’t keep it up, and soon relaxed into truculence. ‘It’s like all the world. We have no work, no boats. The women prostrate themselves.’