Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (52 page)

I remember the faces of the fishermen, awed but beaming, and their satisfied grunts at each burst of flame. Sensing the mood of their fathers, the children ran wild, bombarding the church with showers of stones. Only the women stayed silent, squinting sideways at their men, waiting for some stroke of doom to fall.

A week later came Feast Day, and a quick change of heart. The smoke-blackened church was filled with lilies. The images of Christ and the Virgin were brought out into the sunlight and loaded as usual on to the fishermen’s backs. Anonymous, invisible, hidden beneath the embroidered drapes, they shuffled once more up and down the streets, sweating, bent double beneath their canopied burdens, the Church’s traditional porters.

As the procession moved by, a peasant tore off his cap and threw himself on his knees with outspread arms.

‘Holy Mother, Maria, intercede with your Son! Queen of Heaven, strike me dead! Blessed be the Virgin of Almunecar, mother of the seas. Do not forsake us. Live for ever.’

It was a day of tears and breast-beating, a day of contrition. The invincible Christ had risen again – the private Christ of Almunecar, scorched and defiled, yet returning to forgive his sons. Rocking, swaying, borne on rafts of wild iris, the holy images passed in triumph, preceded by the plump, red-bonneted, skirted priests, and the young girls with their trays of petals.

All was normal again. A brass band played. Rich and poor mixed their cries together. The peasants knelt with bowed heads or raised their contorted faces. ‘Maria, salvame!’

Profanity, sacrilege, had been a passing madness. This was the Faith as it had always been. Then, a few days later, the church was fired again, and this time burned to a shell.

It was now the middle of May, and tension increased in the village as the news from Madrid grew more threatening and vague. To the peasants of Almunecar, the visionary promises of February seemed to have dried up in the heat. There were strikes,parades, shows of proletarian force, boys and girls marching in coloured shirts, arms raised in salute, clenched fists and slogans, painted banners and challenging speeches.

When there was a strike it was total, enforced by the police, and the fishermen picketed the sea. One saw rich old women dragging their laundry to the river, or queueing up at the village wells. At the hotel, the chambermaids sat gossiping in the sun while the chef stayed home with his wife; Herr Brandt did the cooking, wrapped in Manolo’s apron, and the guests slept in unmade beds.

Each day more peasants came in from the country, massing in the square to be on hand for trouble. Many of them brought guns slung over their shoulder, sticking out of their waistbands, or tied to the saddles of donkeys – flintlocks, pistols, and old rusty muskets which might have been saved from the Peninsular War.

The split village now emerged in clearer focus and its two factions declared themselves, confronting each other at last in black and white – labelled for convenience, ‘Fascist’ or ‘Communist’. The ‘Fascists’ seemed ready to accept the name, this being frankly what they aspired to, with the Falange already organized as a fighting group, a swaggering spearhead of upperclass vengeance, whose crude fascist symbols, Italian-inspired, were now appearing on walls and doorways.

The ‘Communist’ label, on the other hand, was too rough and ready, a clumsy reach-me-down which properly fitted no one. The farm labourers, fishermen, and handful of industrial workers all had local but separate interests. Each considered his struggle to be far older than communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.

In fact, I don’t remember meeting an official Communist in Almunecar- though ‘communism’ was a word in the bars. Manolo, who was a leader, had no political status at all, but was a romantic anarchist of his own invention. The local flag of revolution was the Republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red: ‘We swear to defend this bandera with the last drop of our blood.’ Sombre and ominous words.

Yet the government they supported must have seemed remote to many, being composed entirely of middle-class politicians – without a Communist, Anarchist, or even a Socialist anywhere in its cabinet. The peasants looked to this government because their hopes lay with it, hopes they thought to realize for the first time in centuries, an opportunity to shift some of the balances which had so long weighed against them, more than against anyone else in Europe.

Spain was a wasted country of neglected land – much of it held by a handful of men, some of whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire. Peasants could work this land for a shilling a day, perhaps for a third of the year, then go hungry. It was this simple incongruity that they hoped to correct; this, and a clearing of the air, perhaps some return of dignity, some razing of the barriers of ignorance which still stood as high as the Pyrenees.

A Spanish schoolmaster at this time knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk. Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church – credulity, guilt, and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning.

All this could be brought about now by an act of their government and the peaceful process of law. There was nothing to stop it. Except for that powerful minority who would rather the country first bled to death.

June came in full blast, with the heat bouncing off the sea as from a buckled sheet of tin. All day in the bars the radios spat and crackled – violence in Madrid, demonstrations in Valencia, strikes and riots in Barcelona.

I met Manolo in the street on his way back from a meeting, and he laid a shaking hand on my shoulder.

‘Are you going?’

‘Where?’

‘Home to your country.’

‘No.’

‘The roads are still open if you want to go.’

That morning a group of Falangists in the neighbouring village walked into a bar and shot five fishermen. The murderers, wearing arm-bands, escaped in a car to Granada. Almunecar lay silent, like a shuttered camp.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country with Jacobo. Daylight nightingales were singing by the river. The air was brassy, thunderous, and only a thread of brown water ran trickling down the river bed. Some girls we knew had been gathering poppies in the field, and now they came down the path towards us, walking slowly in the heat, the red flowers wilting at their breasts, looking as though their bodies had been raked by knives.

An hour or so later we returned by another path and found two children standing under the bridge. They stood stiffly, holding hands, staring at the figure of a man who lay sprawled on the river bank. We recognized him as a local Falangist, a boy of about twenty, whose father had once been mayor. He had been shot through the head, and lay staring back at the children, flies gathering around his mouth.

It started in the middle of July. There were no announcements, no newspapers, just a whispering in the street and the sound of a woman weeping.

I was now living near the church, in the house of an expatriate English writer, who’d lent me a room overlooking the bay, and as I went out that morning I saw a woman lying face-down on the pavement, beating the ground with her hands. A group of neighbours stood by, making no attempt to move her – her attendants rather than comforters. They said she was weeping for her son – a young conscript in Morocco, who to her was already dead.

Down at Manolo’s bar he told me what he knew; a see-saw of fact and fantasy. There had been anti-government uprisings in the garrisons of Spanish Morocco – at Melilla, Tetuan, and Larache. On the other hand, said Manolo, there was nothing to worry about, the situation was under control… General Francisco Franco, ‘the butcher of the Asturian miners’, had flown from the Canaries to lead the rebels. There were reports of other risings in Saragossa, Madrid, and Seville .. . But, no, the government had put them down. Franco himself was dead, had been brought down in the sea, had been arrested, assassinated, shot… Even so, Moorish troops were pouring into the south of Spain… But they would be slaughtered before they could advance an inch…

Indeed, there was no firm news. The cafe radios were silent, or jammed, or stridently at odds with each other. People gathered in the streets, staring up at the sky as though expecting to see some great proclamation written across it. And as always – impelled by the oldest instinct of the countryside – the fields emptied and peasants poured into the village, bringing their wives and children, their sheep and goats, and settling them down under the castle walls. Some of the men brought guns, but most were unarmed. They crowded the plaza, simply waiting to be used, standing with their backs to the Town Hall, shoulder to shoulder with the fishermen, as though ready to defend it with their bodies. There was no authority yet; theirs was just a defensive laager drawn up spontaneously in the face of the unknown. Meanwhile Manolo, and El Gato (the leader of one of the new-formed unions) started to organize some kind of militia.

The police had suddenly disappeared and the village was on its own: government supporters facing the enemy within. A round of searches began among the houses of suspected ‘fascists’. Manolo took men to barricade the coastal road. Then in the afternoon there arrived the first car from Malaga, driving fast and smothered with dust. It was stopped at the road-block and Manolo’s bayonets surrounded it, pricking open the doors and windows. A couple of white-faced young men were hurried off to jail, while rifles and grenades were dug out of the boot. Later, a Frenchman drove up in a battered Fiat with a white flag tied on the roof. He said half Malaga was in flames and that there was fighting in the streets. He didn’t know which side was winning, or even where he was going, but he showed us a score of bullet holes in the back of his car.

Night brought more rumours, smuggled in with the dark, along the coast road and down from the hills. Granada was held by the rebels, and so was our neighbour, Altofaro. The fate of Malaga was still unknown. Meanwhile, our confused little fortress seemed to be caught between the mountains and the sea, with fires spreading on either side.

The militia were busy that night, determined that there should be no rising in Almufiecar. The house-to-house searching of suspects began to reveal the little caches of arms so carefully hidden for months – packed in wine barrels in cellars, hung in baskets down wells, in cupboards, in clocks, up chimneys. The loot was piled in the plaza and guarded by El Gato’s militia – the best arms they were to get in the war.

A wave of summary arrests also began that evening. Elegant and resigned in their lacy white shirts, the young ‘sefioritos’ sat waiting in the paseo. When the patrols approached them, they rose casually to their feet, crushed out their cigarettes and strolled away under guard. The priest was rounded up too, and I saw him brought flustered from his house and led off to jail with the others. Few of the local ‘fascists’ attempted either to escape or hide. The hour was too late for that.

‘There was a plot,’ said Manolo in the bar that night. ‘Now we have them tied like mules.’ He looked drained, pallid, and his face seemed to have burned down to the wick. He knew that bloodshed was imminent. El Gato poured him some brandy, saying he would need it for the executions, but Manolo only shook his head. El Gato was a large, noisy, rather teasing man, and tonight he was drinking heavily. ‘You need fire,’ he said. ‘You are vengeance like a trickle of ice-water.’ Manolo turned away with a ghastly smile.