Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (48 page)

We were joined quite soon by a mysterious dandy who invited us to share his bottle of whisky. He had rings on his fingers, wore a white silk shirt, and spoke English with an American accent. ‘I am Cuban,’ he said. ‘You know the type. We are very wild kind of men. All we are innerested in is dames and revolutions – OK?’ He wriggled with self-delight.

Suddenly he turned to the young fisherman, handed him a carton of cigarettes, and spoke to him in a rapid whisper. The fisherman listened, spat, shrugged his shoulders, then got up and went to the door. He whistled twice, and from the shadow of an upturned boat another shadow detached itself. The Cuban left the half-bottle of whisky behind him and went to the waiting girl on the beach.

The country east of Tarifa was high, bare, and brown as a mangy lion, with kites and vultures turning slowly overhead, square-winged, like electric fans. It was a scrub-covered wilderness, rippling with wind, but heartless, empty of life, except for occasional hunters who appeared suddenly with muskets, fired at nothing, then went away.

All day, as I climbed the twisting road, I heard the explosions rolling round the hills, the echoing crack of a gun followed by long empty silences like the fag-end of a war. At the top of the rise the country levelled into a kind of platform – a lofty gallery above the Straits – from which one could watch the slow blue currents of the Mediterranean snaking towards the Atlantic’s green forked tongue. Africa was now so near one could see the veins in the rocks running up the massive face of Morocco, with the afternoon sun peeling away the shadows to reveal deep and mysterious crevices. From Tangier, the panorama swept east to Ceuta and back into the mint-green hills of the Rif – the Barbary Coast, inscrutable threshold of violence, which made me feel capable of extreme adventures.

Instead I slept for an hour in the withered gorse, and woke to find a gunman standing over me. ‘How d’you do?’ I said foolishly, flustered, in English. The man giggled, and crept away.

Later the mountain road dropped into a narrow valley full of sea-mist and stunted cork trees, where flocks of damp sheep with long Cotswold faces wandered among strands of glittering cobwebs. The place was green and chill, curiously familiar, like a pocket of western England. And sure enough, as I climbed to the next high peak, there was Gibraltar crouching low in the distance.

Africa, Spain, and the great sweep of the bay, all shone with a fierce bronze light. But not Gibraltar: it lay apart like an interloper, as though it had been towed out from Portsmouth and anchored offshore still wearing its own grey roof of weather. Slate-coloured, aloof, surrounded by a scattering of warships and fringed by its dockyard cranes, the Rock lay shadowed beneath a plate of cloud, immersed in a private rainstorm.

I went no farther that night, but camped out on the hilltop, content to stay where I was. The vista below me spread from Ronda to the Rif, a classical arrangement of sea and rock, with the mouth of the Mediterranean pierced by the wash of ships tracing a course as old as Homer. Kites and kestrels swung silently overhead, smouldering in the evening sun; and as twilight approached, the Pillars of Hercules turned purple and the sea poured between them in a flush of lavender. Alone, with my back to a sun-warmed rock, I finished the last of my food, gazing where Africa and Europe touched fingertips in this merging of day and night.

Suddenly it was dark, and Gibraltar became a heap of diamonds, and Algeciras stretched out claws of light. Then a huge moon rose straight out of the sea, and hung motionless, like a frozen bloom. The wind rose too, funnelling from the Atlantic, and I wrapped in my blanket, shivering with cold.

The Port of Algeciras had a potency and charm which I’d found nowhere else till then. It was a scruffy little town built round an open drain and smelling of fruit skins and rotten fish. There were a few brawling bars and modest brothels; otherwise the chief activity was smuggling. At most street-corners one would be offered exotic items of merchandise unavailable anywhere else in Spain – mouldy chocolate, laddered stockings, damp American cigarettes, leaky Parkers, and fake Swiss watches.

But for all its disreputable purposes and confidence-trickery, it seemed to be a town entirely free of malice, and even the worst of its crooks were so untrained in malevolence that no one was expected to take them seriously. In its position as a bridge between Europe and Morocco, the port could have equalled Marseilles in evil, but its heart wasn’t in it, in spite of the opportunities, and it preferred small transgressions with lesser rewards.

Algeciras was a clearing-house for odds and ends, and I stayed there about two weeks. I remember the fishing boats at dawn bringing in tunny from the Azores, the markets full of melons and butterflies, the international freaks drinking themselves into multilingual stupors, the sly yachts running gold to Tangier… I spent part of my time with a gang of youths who earned their living spiking handbags with fish-hooks, who got rid of their loot in the bars and brothels, and begged their meals at the local convent. The leader of the gang was a ‘globe-trotter’ from Lisbon, who claimed to be walking round the world. But he was always slipping back home to fetch something he’d forgotten and had taken two years to get as far as this.

For myself, I thought it best to stick to the fiddle, and here the town was rewarding enough. My patrons were varied, and their approach was direct. I was often taken aside and asked for a favourite tune. Schubert, for some reason, was most popular here, followed by local ballads of mystical sex. One night I was taken to a boat to play to a Chinese cook, who baked me a bag of biscuits in return. I was also asked for ‘On With the Motley’ by a Cardiff stoker, and ‘Ave Maria’ by a party of drunken priests. Another night a young smuggler invited me to serenade his invalid mistress, after which I was rewarded with a wrist-watch which ticked madly for an hour and then exploded in a shower of wheels.

I was half in love with Algeciras and its miniature villainies, and felt I could have stayed on there indefinitely. But part of my plan at that time was still to follow the coast round Spain, so I had to leave it and get on to Malaga.

But first of all there remained the question of Gibraltar, only twenty minutes across the bay. Too near to resist, I thought I’d drop in for the afternoon, present my passport, and have some tea. The old paddle-wheel ferry carried me across the water, smooth as oil and leaping with dolphins, while I enjoyed the boat’s brief passage of tax-free drinking, with brandy a penny a glass.

To travellers from England, Gibraltar is an oriental bazaar, but coming in from Spain I found it more like Torquay – the same helmeted police, tall angular women, and a cosy smell of provincial groceries. I’d forgotten how much the atmosphere of home depended on white bread, soap, and soup-squares. Even in this conclave of Maltese–Genoese–Indians, one sensed the pressure of cooking-steam.

My welcome at the colony was not what I expected. The port officials looked me up and down with doubt. The rest of the travellers were passed briskly through the barrier while I was put on one side like an infected apple. Clipped phone calls were made to remoter authorities, warily seeking advice. ‘Oh, his passport’s all right. No, he’s not broke, exactly. Well, you know. Well, sort of… Yes…’

Finally I was taken in a truck to see the Chief of Police, a worried but kindly man. ‘But who
are
you?’ he kept saying. ‘It’s rather difficult here. You must try to realize our position. It doesn’t
do,
you know – if you’ll forgive my saying so. Nothing personal, you understand…’

Anyway, it was agreed that I could stay for a day or two, if I slept in the police station, where they could keep an eye on me. So I was given a clean little cell, a cake of soap, and I played dominoes with the prisoners in the evenings. I wasn’t under arrest, exactly; I was allowed out in the daytime so long as I reported back at night. But the restriction was tedious, and after a few days of bacon and eggs, a policeman conducted me back to the frontier.

Leaving Gibraltar was like escaping from an elder brother in charge of an open jail. I crossed the land-bridge at La Linea and climbed up to San Roque – exiled home of the Spanish mayors of Gibraltar. Looking back, I could see the Rock still capped by its cloud, grey as a gun-turret, dripping with mist – while the mainland around lay under the beating sun, jagged with mountains as blue as clinkers. Spain enclosed me once more with its anarchic indifference, asking no discipline but the discipline of manners. I was back on the road, cushioned by its unswept dust, and by my anonymity, which would raise no eyebrows.

It took five days to Malaga, walking the switch-back road between the mountains and the sea, five days pushing on through the dazzling light to a reek of hot seaweed, thyme, and shellfish. I passed through occasional cork-woods smoking with the camp-fires of gypsies squatting by little streams, through scented beanfields rushing with milky water and villages screened under veils of fishnets. Ruined watch-towers, some fluttering with sleepy ravens, marked the headlands along the way, while below them the rocks and the sea lay motionless, locked together in a fume of heat.

Nothing moved inland except the running channels of water laid out by the Moors eight centuries before. The road rippled before me, and distant villages in the mountains shone like pinches of salt on silk. Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head, and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.

When twilight came I slept where I was, on the shore or some rock-strewn headland, and woke to the copper glow of the rising sun coming slowly across the sea. Mornings were pure resurrection, which I could watch sitting up, still wrapped like a corpse in my blanket, seeing the blood-warm light soak back into the Sierras, slowly re-animating their ash-grey cheeks, and feeling the cold of the ground drain away beneath me as the sunrise reached my body.

Then from far out to sea, through the melting mist, would emerge a white-sailed fishing fleet, voiceless, timeless, quiet as air, drifting inshore like bits of paper. But they were often ships of despair; they brought little with them, perhaps a few baskets of poor sardines. The women waited, then turned and went away in silence. The red-eyed fishermen threw themselves down on the sand.

The road to Malaga followed a beautiful but exhausted shore, seemingly forgotten by the world. I remember the names – San Pedro, Estepona, Marbella, and Fuengirola… They were saltfish villages, thin-ribbed, sea-hating, cursing their place in the sun. At that time one could have bought the whole coast for a shilling. Not Emperors could buy it now.

From its name, I expected Malaga to be a kind of turreted stronghold, half Saracen, half Corsair-pirate. Instead I found an untidy city on the banks of a dried-up river, facing a modern commercial harbour, the streets full of cafes and slummy bars, and its finest building the post office.

I stayed at an inn by the dried-up river, where I shared a courtyard with about a dozen families. Cooking went on all day at their separate fires, in pots mounted on little stones. The reek of fat and charcoal was always in the nostrils, giving one a pungent sense of well-being – though the presence of the fires was more comforting than the food, which was usually a gruel of unmentionable scraps.

But the posada was home, and I bedded down in my place with the mules and wives and children. Honour, not modesty, was what we lived by here, together with a watchful sense of protection. Food and drink might be shared at any time, but each man’s goods were sacred – these could be left all day, piled in a heap by the wall, and no one, not even a dog, would touch them.

The courtyard was mostly occupied by mountain people who had come down to the city to sell baskets and cloth – the beautiful hand-woven blankets of the Alpujarras, half Arab, half Mexican in style, decorated with bold abstractions in scarlet and black or sprinkled with geometrical peacocks.

The men of the Alpujarras were wiry as Bulgars, but with hazed out-of-focus eyes, as though being cooped up in the city and temporarily robbed of their distances had also robbed them of their power of sight. The women dressed in stiff garments of black and tan, which gave them the look of Homeric Greeks, while the young girls were the most graceful I’d ever seen, light-footed and nimble as deer, with long floating arms and articulate bodies which turned every movement into a ritual dance. When at rest they would stand, narrow hips thrust sideways, instinctively forming a saddle for child or water-jar, half-shading their eyes with a leaf-brown hand as though still dazzled by the Sierra snows.

Squatting together in the courtyard, on the dung-coated cobbles, we were like a wandering tribe at rest. There would be shouts, cries, snarls, and laughter, mixed with the formal obscenities and blessings. ‘Carmencita! Come! – I pollute your mother…’ ‘A pinch of salt? – what grace and sympathy.’ ‘May my testicles wither, but I agree with you, man…’ ‘God’s codpiece, you’re very kind.’

Old women, as shrivelled as carob beans, joined in the shouting with tongues like razors; or sat watchfully chewing with that timeless rhythm of the aged, folding their faces like old felt hats. The children ran free, squirming under the horses, half-naked in their grimy vests. The men sat apart, smoking and drinking, mending a sandal or piece of harness, talking ceaselessly together with the dry throaty rattle of pebbles being rolled down a gully.

When it rained I would spend the whole day in their company, sitting under the gallery, watching the heavy sky. The mules steamed gently, the balconies dripped. We drew closer, bored but secure. A woman mended my shirt and folded it up at my feet. Another asked questions about my sisters. A child of eight knelt beside me and peered into the holes of my ears. ‘Maria, cuno, do not molest the Frenchman!’ Sometimes a half-mad girl stood weeping in the rain while the men teased and taunted her. The huge eyes puckered, melting with slow slack tears. She made no attempt to escape.