Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (49 page)

When night came, the light-bulbs were dim and ghostly. People sank back into their shadows. Eyes only were visible, touched by the red of the fires, sleepily slatted like the eyes of bats. Blankets were spread on the stones, families stretched out together – the girls in the centre with the younger children. Everyone sighed and settled, curling up on their sides, talk dying with the dying fires. Then nothing would be heard but the occasional shudder of a mule, the sudden wrestling of man and wife.

The rains stopped, and I went out again with the fiddle and began playing under the dripping palm trees. Malaga was full of foreigners – effeminate Dutch, sandy Germans, mackintoshed Frenchmen, and English debs. I lazily wandered among them playing tunes of all nations and being rewarded with drinks and money. Most of the visitors, it was clear, were not strangers to each other, but formed a snug expatriate colony, moving from table to table, bar to bar, in constantly changing liaisons.

All, that is, save the English debs, who sat separately, wearing little hats, keeping one eye on the Consul and talking musically of Mummy while sipping glasses of pallid tea. Seeing them under the palms in the warm autumn haze, cool as doves in their tennis white, what hungers they started for their cream-of-wheat textures, tang of toothpaste around the lips, and that particular rainswept grey of their English eyes, only noticeable when abroad.

But it was the young Germans, a complex and mysterious crowd, who outnumbered the rest of the colony. Most seemed to be engaged in inexplicable errands and few were as poor as they looked. But they were friendly enough, and I began to see quite a lot of them in their hideouts behind the cathedral. There was Karl, from Hamburg, for whom I wrote love-letters. (He loved Mrs Lucas, an English widow.) And Heinz, a teacher (said to be a stool-pigeon and agent, though I never gathered for what). There were also three Bavarians who paraded the streets in sackcloth and sandals as though on their way to the scaffold. And Walter and Shulamith, two Jewish refugees, who had walked from Berlin carrying their one-year-old child. I see them today as part of the shadow of the times, and most of them obviously led double lives. They suspected me too, and were always trying to catch me out, hinting at roles I was supposed to be playing. But for all their apparent gaiety and solidarity as a group, they were more suspicious of one another.

The moist hot days began to fill up the city with a kind of amiable lethargy. Gypsies from the river started to rob the markets, and nobody tried to stop them. Children swarmed in the belfries, madly ringing the bells, and nobody interfered. Even the mules stopped working and wandered aimlessly round the streets like sightseers in from the country.

One stifling midday I decided to climb to the Castle to get some air and perhaps a view of the sea. Hovels scattered the hillside, stacked one above the other, and women sat on the doorsteps fanning themselves with cardboard. They flashed bright gold teeth when they saw me coming, and called out friendly invitations. Then one of them beckoned me indoors and offered me her giant daughter, who lay sprawled on a huge brass bed. The sight of the girl and the bed, packed into that tiny room, was like some familiar ‘Alice’ nightmare. I could only smile and stutter, clutching the doorpost and pretending not to understand. ‘Love!’ cried the mother, shaking the bed till it rattled, while the girl bounced slowly like a basking whale. I complimented the woman and made some excuse, saying that it was too early in the day. ‘Light of heaven!’ she cried, ‘what else is there to do?’ Fortunately, it was impossible even to get into the room.

Much of destitute Malaga, like this hillside slum, lived directly off the dockyard. By day the poor went to the ships for food; at night the sailors came into the town. I met a group of them one evening, straight off a British tanker, four short little battered men, who I saw straggling down a street in single file calling to each other like ships in a fog. ‘Where we goin’ then, Geordie?’ ‘Dunno, Jock – bash on.’ They were carrying bars of carbolic soap.

I took them to a tavern at the back of the market, where we swapped the soap for bottles of brandy. The local soap, at that time, was like millstone grit, and ships’ carbolic was better than money. With the drink in their hands, the sailors relaxed, opened their shirts, and began to beam and sweat. Their talk built up quickly in spurts of dialect; vigorous, clipped, and funny; composed of that fusillade of fantasy, filth, and insult which marked them together as British mates.

Jock, Geordie, Lenny, and Bill; two were from Liverpool, two from Glasgow. They were all older than I was, yet they addressed me with careful courtesy, tempering their oaths as they did so. But their main concern, having come safely ashore, was that they should get enough to drink. So they drank like maniacs, their faces shining with purpose, grabbing bottles, knocking over glasses, mixing brandy, anis, wine, and beer in one frantic obliterating rout.

Semi-paralysis was the target, and there were no middle stages, no songs or tears or fights. Geordie, the stoker, was the first to go, sliding slowly down from his chair. ‘Y’know, I loved that woman,’ he said from the floor. ‘I loved that woman, y’know. Know what I mean?…’ He clutched the leg of a passing fisherman. ‘It’s the truth – I loved that woman…’ Jock and Bill soon joined him, blank-eyed and speechless, falling crumpled across each other. Then it was Lenny’s turn. ‘I’m on duty,’ he said, got up, and walked into the wall.

It was long after midnight when I got them back to their ship and stowed them away in their bunks. I was far gone too, and the watchman let me sleep on board – that is, if he noticed the difference. The next morning the sailors were bright as larks, plunging their heads into buckets of water. ‘Up the spout we was, the lot of us.’ They gave me a breakfast of mutton chops.

The rain returned, with great black thunderstorms rolling daily in from the sea. So I exchanged the exposure of the open courtyard at the inn for a six-bedded room upstairs, where for a peseta a night one could sleep in damp grey sheets under a bent and dripping roof. My companions were artists from a travelling circus, temporarily stranded by the weather, including an asthmatic ventriloquist who talked in his sleep (and ours), four dwarfs who shared one bed, and a white-whiskered bird-tamer who slept by himself, fully clothed, in top hat and boots.

Another inmate was Avelino, a student from Ronda, who occupied a dark little room down the passage. He was a tense young man, with the soft eyes of a lemur and a tormented blue-furred face. He used to creep nervously about on the tips of his toes, fingering a rosary made of plumstones.

Perhaps he saw in me someone lost to heaven, a sorry exile without god or country; anyway, I soon became the object of his inexhaustible attention, a chosen burden for charity.

Tirelessly, speechless, and self-effacing, for a week he was my day-long shadow. If I was eating in a cafe, I’d see him watching me from the doorway, and when I left I’d find that he’d paid the bill. If I was fiddling in the street, he’d march silently up and down, dropping pennies into my hat as he passed. If I was writing in my room he’d suddenly steal up behind me and place a lighted cigarette between my lips.

There were also the discreet little gifts I’d find laid on my bed: a bunch of flowers, some tobacco, a shirt; and then one morning, a poem, neatly pinned to the pillow, freshly written in a copperplate hand: ‘He sleeps, the young man, far from his home and people, forgetting his doleful life, not knowing that tomorrow his music will be torn by the winds and scattered above the rooftops.’

At the end of the week, Avelino broke his silence, saying that he’d worked out a plan for our future. He would start a school, and I would join him. He’d teach Ethics and Philosophy; and I, English and Art – and so take my proper place in the world. ‘You would wear a suit and cravat, and walk proudly in the streets, and bow to your friends and call “Adios”. And they would reply “Adios”, and give you respects. It would be cultured and very gracious…’

His voice suddenly faded. He tore a crucifix from his shirt, covered it with kisses, and fled from the room. They told me next morning that he’d gone back to Ronda, having given his money and clothes to the porter.

During my last days in Malaga I was faced by a near disaster – my violin suddenly broke in my hands. Over-exposure to the sun seemed to have weakened the joints, and the instrument simply fell to pieces.

Friends at the posada did what they could to help, melting glue in their cooking pots. The violin, which by now looked like a mess of chicken bones, was reassembled and the joints reset. For several days it lay strapped-up under my bed, rolled in sacking and weighted with stones. But the joints wouldn’t hold, and as soon as the strings were tightened, the whole thing fell apart again.

I was anxious. Without the violin I knew of no other way to live, and I would soon be out of money. It had all been too easy, wherever I happened to be, scraping out a few odd tunes for a meal; now I wandered round Malaga in a kind of daze, as though I’d lost the use of my hands. There seemed only one thing to be done – join the crew of some ship, leave Spain, and perhaps go back home.

Fortunately, this wasn’t necessary. A liner arrived in the bay carrying five hundred British tourists, and I set up as a guide, arranging for cut-rate taxis, English teas, and excursions to the hills. I was doing quite well, and thought this might see me through the winter, when the local guides ganged up on me. If I didn’t go back to my fiddle-playing, they said, they would throw me into the harbour.

So I was stuck again. But another stroke of luck saved me. I met a young German from the School of Languages. Did I know anyone, by chance, who wanted a violin? He had one he didn’t need. It belonged to his girl-friend and she’d run off with a Swede. He gave it to me for nothing.

As December closed in I decided to hole-up for the winter at Almuñécar, sixty miles east of Málaga. It was a tumbling little village built on an outcrop of rock in the midst of a pebbly delta, backed by a bandsaw of mountains and fronted by a grey strip of sand which some hoped would be an attraction for tourists.

There were two hotels, one of them run by a Swiss, who offered me hospitality in return for certain odd-job duties, which included helping in the kitchen, mending doors and windows, and playing the violin in the saloon at night. The hotel was new, but had been built on the beach, so that the waves broke over the windows, and already the fine concrete walls were beginning to crumble and the proprietor was drawn with worry.

Herr Brandt must have been something of a pioneer on the coast, but he’d arrived twenty years too soon, and I found him on the verge of a nervous breakdown, convinced that his investment was at the mercy of anarchists. He was always washing his hands, then washing the soap, and changing all the locks on the doors. But he was resourceful, almost desperate, at running his business, and while the neighbouring hotel shut down for the winter he was determined to keep his going, turning its booming rooms into a centre for the local gentry, for musical teas, buffet suppers, and dancing.

So I was enrolled ón the staff and encouraged to get some new clothes. Then I was given a room in the attic with a Jewish boy from Cologne – ‘Don Jacobo’, as the housemaids called him.

Jacobo was in his twenties, short and tubby, with a Hitler moustache and a rubbery bounce. Already bald at the crown, he had a tuft of hair on his forehead which rose and fell with emotion, and had to be plastered in place with heavy slicks of oil and sometimes even with lard. He was a boon to Herr Brandt, acting as interpreter, tout, hotel secretary, boot-boy, and gigolo. He also played the accordion which, together with my fiddle, made up the hotel band.