Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (50 page)

Jacobo spoke English with slapdash gusto, worrying the words like a terrier. The first time I met him he was on his hands and knees, pawing frantically through a pile of laundry.

‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I am having many disgusts with the washwife – she has forlorn me my new chemise. And tonight, you see, I was having a girl from the village – she was coming from suppertime.’

He knew everyone in Almufiecar and everyone liked him. He could be convincing in several languages. He had a kind of liquorice charm, both yielding and elastic, and in spite of his looks was considered a dandy.

I remember being woken late one night, soon after I arrived, to find him powdering his head in the mirror. He was dressed in a long blue gown, like a Chinaman, and smelt richly of exotic oils. Seeing he’d disturbed me, he gave a fat little giggle and laid a finger along his lips.

‘Say nothing, my friend. I am expecting downstairs. Anybody is waiting for me in this hotel.’

Anybody, it seemed, was a widow from Paris, who’d come for the day and stayed three weeks, during which we spent a succession of broken nights, with Jacobo on call like a doctor.

Each morning we practised together on the roof, working up a selection of musical tit-bits. Jacobo was a nimble accordionist and played the instrument with windy pleasure; it seemed well suited to his pneumatic passions. Quite soon we’d developed a reasonable repertoire, enough to satisfy Herr Brandt’s demands – operatic arias for the tea-rooms, serenades for the evening, pasodobles and tangos for dancing.

The Sunday before Christmas we gave our first Grand Concert, but this was ruined by exploding wine-bottles, a series of reverberating incidents due to faulty supplies which put our audience in disarray We had somewhat more success with our weekend dances, which were held in a kind of white-tiled washhouse downstairs. These were formal affairs, full of suppressed sexuality, but controlled by rigid Andalusian manners. The chaperoned girls sat on display round the walls, pretty as coloured paper, quivering to the music with butterfly vibrations which soon brought the young men in from the night. Approaches could only be made through a watchful third party – mother, brother, or aunt – but the dances, though stilted, concealed much emotional grappling, and for a while were the height of fashion.

Almuriecar itself, built of stone steps from the delta, was grey, almost gloomily Welsh. The streets were steep, roughly paved, and crossed by crude little arches, while the square was like a cobbled farmyard. Part of the castle was a cemetery, part of the Town Hall a jail, but past glories were eroding fast.

In the days of the Moors, Almufiecar had been a front-line fortress standing high in the mouth of the delta, guarding the rich river valley which wound up through the Sierra towards the Islamic paradise of Granada. Several centuries later, it was also the point of farewell for the defeated caliphs when they were driven from Spain, and a wave-battered cross standing on an offshore rock celebrated the spot where they sailed away.

Apart from a few merchants, landowners, and officials from Granada, everybody now in the village was poor, and the ruined castle on the hill seemed to serve as a perpetual reminder that not they, but someone else, had conquered. The peasants had only two ways of living, and both were loaded against them – the sugar canes and the offshore fishing.

The strip of dirty grey sand dividing the land from the sea was a frontier between two kinds of poverty. The sugar canes in the delta, rustling dryly in the wind, were a deception even at harvest time, for the best they could offer was a few weeks’ work and in the meantime the men stood idle.

But the land was rich compared with the sea, which nourished only a scattering of poor sardines. There were no boats or equipment for deep-sea fishing, the village was chained to the offshore wastes, shallow, denuded, too desperately fished to provide anything but constant reproaches.

I remember the cold red mornings, just before sunrise, when the fishermen came down to the beach, padding softly through the mist in their rope-soled shoes, or bare-footed, with feet like ink. Two boats would put out into the sullen sea, indigo shadows against the dawn, while the men rowed madly, dipping their long oars deep and calling hoarsely to one another.

At least thirty more men would remain waiting ashore, watching the rowers with screwed-up eyes. The boats were racing the fish, paying the net out fast in an attempt to encircle what few there were. Painfully they spread it across the sea in a long and bobbing line, then turned and rowed back, dragging the two loose ends – which was when the men on the beach went to work.

In two teams, trousers rolled, they splashed into the waves and seized each end of the sagging net. Then for an hour they hauled in, panting their way up the beach, bent double, clawing the sand with their toes, the leaders running back to join the end of the line, each man silent, his face to the ground. The two long files of fishermen trudging out of the water might have been coolies or Egyptian slaves, slowly drawing behind them the weight of a net which encircled almost a quarter of a mile of sea.

It was labour without mercy, dignity, or reward, and the men hauled at the net without hope, each one grunting and straining in the horizontal position of a beast, his face to the buttocks of the man in front. It was a grinding hour of expended strength, too mindless even for comradeship. When the cod-end at last had been dragged ashore, the men gathered round it in silence, while the few kilos of sardines, a heap of dirty silver, died flickering in the sand.

The auctioneer arrived, unshaven, in his pyjamas, and a dismal price was set. Perhaps fifty pesetas – half to the owner of the boats and the rest between forty men. Sometimes the price was so low that no sale was made, and the men divided the fish between them, slowly counting them out into forty little heaps, a sandy fistful for each man’s family. ‘

Set against this background, the hotel on the beach was a tawdry interjection, out of scale and taste. I continued to work and sleep there, and eat my meals, but spent as much time as I could in the village.

It had little to offer, except for the people, who had all the time in the world. The little cave-like shops had almost nothing to sell save sandals and sunflower seeds; strangely enough there was a bookshop, though it only had four books – Milton, Homer, Andreyev, and Machado.

Physically, the villagers showed the strong Arab blood which the Catholic conquest had been unable to dispel – the old women stark and black as desert matriarchs, their bodies loaded with unhealthy fat; the men small and bony, like dried-up birds, perched moodily round the edge of the sea. The men spent much of the day just staring at their hands and sucking cigarettes made of beech leaves – a tongue-blistering smoke flavoured with the juice of sugar cane and some hot harsh root from the hills. The only people with jobs seemed to be the village girls, most of them in service to the richer families, where for a bed in a cupboard and a couple of pounds a year they were expected to run the whole house and keep the men from the brothels.

As elsewhere on the coast, the villagers were infected with fatalism, a kind of subdued and deliberate apathy. Only sometimes in the eyes of the younger men did one see the violent hopes they lived for. The children, on the other hand, were a different race, inhabiting a brief but confident gaiety – beautiful verminous creatures with strong white teeth and diseased red-lidded eyes. Prancing about in their rags, snatching what food they could get,they never whined but lived on charm, were pampered, indulged, and smothered with easy love, and punished only for rude manners to strangers.

The bad weather came, the hills disappeared in mist, and the village began to look more like Wales than ever. Gutters splashed and gurgled, people crept about in sacking, and the rain fell solidly, like cold wet lead.

There were no clients in the hotel, no boats on the sea, so I went like everybody else to the bars. Here I’d find Manolo the waiter, Felipe the chef, and ‘Gambas’ the crippled porter, and always a group of young fishermen with wet sand on their feet, and a few labourers down from the farms. We drank crude brandy mixed with boiling water, often a cheaper drink than wine, and ate morunos – little dishes of hot pig flesh, cut from the fat and stewed in sauce.

Mostly we talked, with the rain drumming the windows and the drinks steaming along the bar. Conversations were oblique, full of hints and proverbs, well guarded by careful custom. Figures in authority were never exactly named but referred to in cipher, usually by their sexual parts. Opinions and judgements were also cloaked in metaphor, phrases of folklore dipped from a common well.

‘He who sleeps with a dog gets up with fleas.’

‘Horns are visible to every man but the wearer.’

Or when the barmaid, carrying washing, stumbled on to an old man’s lap: ‘God always sends nuts to the toothless.’

During those cold soggy days, ducking from bar to bar, one met the usual town eccentrics. There was Manolo’s brother, who always carried a pebble in his mouth because it prolonged the taste of the brandy And Jorge, who’d trained a sparrow to sip other men’s drinks and then carry them to his mouth by the beakful. When the bird died, said Jorge, he would weep weep, weep. Every man in the bar agreed. There was also Pau, a young fisherman who was teaching himself to write by using the tavern wall as a copybook, but who sometimes exploded with frustration and beat the wall with his fist till his knuckles ran with blood.

Occasionally a day turned unhealthy, when idleness and ennui led to an outburst of mirthless riot. Then the village idiot would be seized, and strapped to a chair, and tormented until he screamed. Wine would be poured on his head, or a man would hold him by the ears while another spread his face with mustard. After a session of this everyone looked flushed and relaxed. Even the Civil Guard would come in to watch.

At other times the men would grow quiet and gentle, standing with arms round each other’s shoulders, someone singing in a voice that seemed to come from far away, a muted falsetto cry. In spite of our long hours in the bars there was almost no drunkenness, perhaps due to the spacious rhythm of our drinking. But being less used to the brandy, it would sometimes hit me hard, till I found myself staring at the room in wonder. I’d see a gypsy come in wearing a great red mouth as though he’d bitten into a harvest moon. Such were moments of that pure, almost virginal intoxication, to which all subsequent drinking tries in vain to return.

Manolo the waiter protected me when I was drunk and humoured me like a grandfather. One night, I remember, during a particularly flashy thunderstorm, the sky spitting with electric sparks, he telephoned the lighthouse and asked them to stop fooling about, saying the Englishman didn’t like it…

Manolo was about thirty years old, handsome as a playboy, but moody and idealistic. He was the leader of a group of fishermen and labourers into which I was gradually admitted. We met in a pink-washed room at the back of the bar and talked about the world to come – a world without church or government or army, where each man alone would be his private government.

It was a simple, one-syllable view of life, as black and white as childhood, and as Manolo talked, the fishermen listened, bobbing their heads up and down like corks. Their fathers had never heard or known such promises. Centuries of darkness stood behind them. Now it was January 1936, and these things were suddenly thinkable, possible, even within their reach.

But first, said Manolo, there must be death and dissolution; much had to be destroyed and cleared away. Felipe, the chef, who liked food and girls, was the pacifier, preaching love and reason. No guns, he said; they dishonoured the flesh; and no destruction, which dishonoured the mind. Everyone knew, all the same, that there were now guns in the village which hadn’t been there before.

Life must start clean, Manolo said, if only for the children’s sake. Not till the tyrants had been destroyed, and their infection burned from the ground, could love and freedom etcetera… His apocalyptic phrases fell like hammer strokes – but every so often the spirit went out of him. Then he would double up at the table as if in sudden pain, beating his fists together. ‘They’ll stop us,’ he’d groan. ‘They’ll bring in the army. We haven’t got a chance.’

Behind the radiant plans and surges of optimism hovered this sick and desperate disquiet. All of them seemed to feel it at some time or other, and it made their meetings even more tragic. In spite of the naive abstractions, these were councils of war, aimed at the local enemy they knew. Sometimes Manolo would come in with his pockets bulging with pamphlets, which he’d spread carefully around the table. They were crudely printed, on ash-grey paper, but might have been tablets handed down from the Prophets. Each man would pore over them, stroking the letters or slowly spelling out the words. The fraternal greetings in scarlet, the drawings of heroic workers with banners, were strange new myths in their lives. So was the spirited advice on the reorganizing of farms and fisheries once victory was won. Yet they knew, as they read, that this was no easy paradise. The village would burn for it first.

‘Lorenzo,’ said Manolo, with a touch of shame in his voice. ‘We are going to need the help of all the world.’

Winter went out with the ‘kissing of Christ’s feet’, preceded by a sombre procession with torches. The black-edged notices had gone up around the village, jostling the grafitti for revolution – ‘Besapies al Santissimo Cristo de la Buena Muerte en su Capilla de la Patrona.’ Sacred Christ of the Good Death, in the chapel on the hill, in a cleft of rock just below the castle.