Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (51 page)

The women and girls came wailing through the streets, stumbling barefooted over the slaty cobbles, bearing the terrible image upon their shoulders like a drowned man brought from the sea. The Christ was carved from old wood the colour of moonlight, transfixed in a rigor of ugly death, his wounds wetly shining with fresh red paint, his face cavernous and decomposed.

The women took it in turns, bent double like crones and gasping under their load, jerking the awkward figure round the narrow corners while its nailed arms scraped along the walls. Most of the men, it seemed, had stayed away that night; this was an occasion for female mourning. The pitch-pine torches dripped, and bubbled, and fires of brushwood dotted the hill. A high-pitched wailing possessed the village, threading moodily among the houses, while the flames of the torches threw up primitive shadows, giant flickerings of garish light, covering the women’s faces with convulsive masks, half sorrow, half grinning gargoyle.

I followed the procession till it reached the chapel, where a stern young priest was waiting. The Crucifix was propped among stones and surrounded by flares. The women went down on their knees. Then the priest addressed us, saying how unique were the faithful and how damned the materialists of today. There were cries of ‘Piedad!’ ‘Seiior!’, and ‘Salvame!’, and lilies were tied to the feet of the Christ. He towered woodenly above us in the light of the torches, his toes already shining from the lips of the women.

In February came the Election, with a victory for the socialists. This was not deliverance, merely a letting up of confusion. An end to years of listening and waiting’ for something to happen. Suddenly everything was out in the open.

A Popular Front, they said: a People’s Government at last.

Manolo went about with his face lit up. The peasants and fishermen stood all day in the plaza, talking more openly now, but tense. The result of the election had given them power, but it was still too hot to grasp. The news, in fact, was not victory for anyone but a declaration of war.

Almunecar, like Spain, was split down the middle, and the two sides drew apart, on guard. Little happened at first – the fishermen took over a boat, the peasants commandeered some land. Meanwhile the owners lay low and sat whispering in the casino, peering through the curtained windows, and waiting.

Spring came in with a rush of snow-water from the Sierras which carried a long red stain out to sea. A young girl died and was taken round in an open coffin on a last visit from house to house. I remember her smooth quiet face, as green as moss, and the cotton wool in her nostrils like puffs of frozen breath.

A kind of brilliant green film suddenly broke over the fields, sheets of wild flowers covering the dried-up hills – orchids spiking the dust, rocks crowned with anemones, almond blossom exploding like popcorn. The uneasiness in the village was part of this spring, like a rush of blood to the head, bringing with it a curious relaxation of behaviour and manners, a new freedom among the sexes.

Jacobo and I still organized the hotel dances, but their flavour was different now. Gone were the stiff and sweltering little marriage markets, with their chaperones and wax-haired suitors; now the floor was commanded by young fishermen and labourers, casual in sky-blue shirts, who swung their cotton-dressed girls through the stamping fox-trots in an embrace of assured possession.

Herr Brandt, more jumpy and nervous than ever, read the signs and admitted them free. They drank the cheap fizzy beer rather than the high-toned sherry, and Manolo served them with comradely pride. Together with the chef and the porter he more or less ran the hotel now, and treated Herr Brandt with scrupulous insolence, too proud to rob him, but making it clear all the same that these new clients were the only ones that mattered.

So the boys and girls of Almunecar used our rackety dances to explore their new-found liberties. During the warm spring evenings they clung earnestly together, as though intimacy was a new invention, dancing, holding hands, or walking in couples along the shore, arms entwined, watching each other’s faces.

There were also other freedoms. Books and films appeared, unmutilated by Church or State, bringing to the peasants of the coast, for the first time in generations, a keen breath of the outside world. For a while there was a complete lifting of censorship, even in newspapers and magazines. But most of all it was the air of carnality, the brief clearing away of taboos, which seemed to possess the village – a sudden frank, even frantic, pursuit of lust, bred from a sense of impending peril.

Early one morning I got word from Manolo asking me to meet him in a bar. I found him head down in a corner with two comrades from Malaga, diminutive and clerk-like men.

‘Lorenzo,’ said Manolo. ‘We want you to do something for us.’

The strangers looked at me doubtfully.

‘If he can do it, that is.’

‘Of course he can do it,’ said Manolo. ‘He has legs like a bull. Mountains are nothing to him.’

It was simple enough; they wanted me to take an innocent-sounding message to a farmer up in the hills, telling him when to expect a delivery of seed-potatoes – in other words, hand-grenades.

‘You’re always walking about,’ Manolo said dryly. ‘Of course you’ll be seen, but no one will wonder.’

I said I’d go, so they drew me a Red Indian map, dotted with rocks and streams and haystacks, with a series of arrows leading through fishbone forests to the lonely farm on the hill. It was about eight miles inland, at the foot of the Sierra; somewhere I’d always wanted to go. Manolo gave me a half-bottle of cofiac, and I set out through the fresh spring landscape, which was full of the sound of gushing water.

The journey took about three hours and I saw no one on the way, only congregations of dishevelled storks, who kept dropping out of the sky like wind-biuw n umbrella* .uv.1 stumbling about in disorder. The map was all right as far as it went, but suddenly the path petered out in a bog. I could see the farm just ahead, but found there was a flooded river between us which Manolo hadn’t bothered to mention.

At that moment a young man crept out of breast-high reeds as though he’d been expecting me. He gave me a quick sharp look, then shouted across the river:

‘From Almunecar! Send Ignacio!’

I saw the farm door open and a woman run out. Then a horseman appeared and galloped down the hill. Without drawing rein, he reached the bank of the river, plunged in, and swam across towards me.

Horse and rider for a moment seemed to sink from sight, but the horse swam low and fast, his wet mouth gaping with enormous teeth, his nostrils snorting for breath. When he reached our side he rose magnificently from the water and came floundering among the reeds, while the rider slid slowly out of the saddle and stood grinning in the mud.

‘Ignacio,’ he said. ‘At your service. Do what I say and you won’t get wet.’

He turned the horse round, helped me on to its back, and told me to kneel on the wooden saddle. Then he leapt up in front of me, straddling the horse’s neck, and advised me to hang on to his belt.

The horse bucked and staggered among the rushes, then appeared to step into a bottomless hole. We sank deep in the river, which seemed as wide ar the Congo, and headed back for the other side. The flood raced around us, tossing up pale green scum, and little waves whipped over the saddle. My boots filled with water and I felt my knees grow cold – it was like floating on top of a cupboard.

The farmer’s wife was standing on the opposite bank, and she gave me her apron to dry myself. Then we walked up to the house where the farmer himself was waiting, a stiff old man in a high-crowned hat. ‘Blasco Vallegas,’ he said, removing his hat for a moment and holding it across his stomach. I gave him Manolo’s message, at which he nodded briefly and asked me to stay to lunch.

First he showed me the farm – a structure of uncut boulders packed with clay and thatched with bulrushes.

‘I built it myself,’ said the farmer, ‘with these very hands – when I married, forty years ago. My wife brought the stones from the Sierra on her head. Apart from herself, it was all she brought.’

He led me into the kitchen, where we sat on little chairs and drank wine out of leather cups. The room was a mazy violence of light and shade which dazzled the eyes at first, but slowly the jigsaw began to fit together and the details reveal themselves, The floor was of trodden earth, the furniture shaped by axes, and chickens perched blinking on the backs of the chairs. A pig slept in one corner, and a girl knelt in another burning her head with a lighted candle.

‘My daughter,’ said Blasco. ‘She molests herself.’

The girl moaned ‘Ay!’ as though in agreement.

‘She is curing a headache or some such trouble. She weighs heavily upon us all.’

He shrugged her away and poured me another cup of wine, then went to a wooden chest by the wall. He rummaged inside for a moment and returned with a pig-skin bag which he emptied upon the table.

‘Look!’ he said, sorting out the objects with his fingers and separating two of them. One was a small bronze figure of a naked goddess, and the other a rusty iron bracelet. He said he’d turned them up ploughing, together with other things now lost, including the jewelled tooth of a ‘Moroccan Princess’.

‘Do you know how long we have lived in these hills?’ he asked. ‘Since the very sun was made. Since before kings and altars, or the Virgin herself was a mother. Since there were leopards in the caves…’

Vallegas didn’t look like a patriarch, he was too thin and dried, but he managed to talk like one.

‘Everything you see around you has come from these,’ he said, holding up his hands, then striking his loins. There was the farm, and his five grown sons out working – whom I would see when it was time to eat – Ignacio with the horses, Curron down by the river, and three others up on the hill. His daughters were gracious, too – ‘Except that one with the headache.’ He referred to his wife as his breastbone.

But although he’d made everything, he owned nothing here – forty years working the land for others. Tomorrow might be different, he said, squinting out of the window. Tomorrow, when the ‘potatoes’ came.

Rocking quietly in his chair, the old man seemed to be talking to himself, recalling riots that had stirred the past – ploughing up derelict land in times of famine, soldiers coming to destroy the crops, Civil Guards on horses the size of elephants riding down the women and children. Starvation, martyrdom, jail, massacre, the slaughter of animals, homesteads burning… The soldiers, he thought, would be on their side now; and the Civil Guard with the Devil, as usual.

As he talked, he sat stroking a piece of painted glass, a miniature portrait of the Holy Family, which he said had been tied round his neck the day he was born and which he’d carried with him ever since.

When the sons returned, we sat down to eat, and the little kitchen was crammed like a horsebox. The mother served up a pot of migas stew – a thick porridge of maize sprinkled with dried sardines, filling, but tasting of sack-cloth. Blasco ate in silence, with toothless attention, his face working like a tent in the wind, while the sons lowered their heads and ravenously gobbled, plugging their mouths with bread. It was a serious meal without conversation, the jug of wine passing formally among us. Meanwhile the women waited in the background; the mother squatting by the stove and tossing scraps of food to the pig: the girl standing behind her father, patiently watching his plate, her forehead blackened by candlesmoke.

As soon as the meal was over the men relaxed, grunting and stretching their legs. Ignacio spat on his hands and cleaned his sister’s face. Another took a gun and went out to shoot partridges.

‘There are many partridges here,’ the youngest boy told me. ‘Also rabbits, wild pig, and deer. But we may not touch the deer. They belong to the Duke.’

‘To who?’ barked the father.

The boy paused, open-mouthed, swallowed, and began again.

‘We may touch the deer – if we can find them,’ he said. ‘They belong to anybody now, I think.’

The weeks leading towards summer were hot and steely, and except for the radios in the bars, crackling with political speeches, the village seemed entirely cut off from the world. The coast road to Malaga lay empty in the sun. Few people went anywhere, the air of listening returned, and the mountains moved closer like a ring of bayonets. A slow brew of expectation simmered over the houses, raising poisonous bubbles that exploded every so often in little outbreaks of irrelevant violence.

First the ice plant was sabotaged and the power station blown up – both of which belonged to a marquis. In spite of the inconvenience, everyone seemed to enjoy these gestures, and the whiff of dynamite was considered a tonic. A number of shops were looted, their windows broken, and the word
boicot
painted across the doors; a few stray priests were insulted in the streets, and a store of wine barrels rolled into the sea. Next, a group of old women went to the house of the tax collector and tossed his furniture into the street, after which they piled him and his wife on top of a cart and drove them out of town.

Then one morning the church was set on fire. ‘They’ve done it at last!’ cried Manolo. We hurried through the streets, which were full of the sweet scent of woodsmoke, and joined the villagers crowding the square. The church tower was blazing like a cardboard box, and most of the watchers seemed in a state of rapture.