Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (53 page)

These two ill-assorted men were now in control of the village, and the bar was their headquarters – with men coming and going, raising arms in salute, bringing reports, and carrying messages. Malaga would hold, said El Gato, and if Granada attacked from the north they would find Almunecar a nest of swords. Their chief concern was Altofaro, only ten miles down the coast and near enough to Africa to be used as a beach-head. If the rebels made a landing there they could out-flank Malaga from the east, and then Almunecar might become the key to the war. Manolo and El Gato, having no facts to confine them, began to expand before each other’s eyes, grew vast as generals, became emperors of armies, possible liberators of the entire peninsula.

Walking home after midnight, I saw a heavy guard round the prison and another round the captured arsenal. The militia were bivouacked in the street, crouching over flickering woodfires, their faces outlined in red – high cheekbones, pitted eyes, hungry sunken cheeks, soldiers of Goya come alive again.

Early next morning, four truckloads of militia drove off to Altofaro to attack the rebels. They swung singing through the streets in their bright blue shirts, waving their caps as though going to a fair. El Gato was in charge, dynamite strapped to his body; the others shared a musket between three. Once they were over the hill, we expected to hear the sounds of war break out, but the morning passed in silence.

About noon, a white aircraft swung in low from the sea, circled the village, and flew away again – leaving the clear blue sky scarred with a new foreboding above a mass of upturned faces. Many felt, till that moment, their village to be secure and forgotten; now the eye of war had spied them out.

Throughout the afternoon nothing happened. Families ate their meals in the street, seeking the assurance of one another’s company. Once again the fierce sunlight obliterated everything it fell on, burning all colours to an ashen glare. When people stepped out of their houses they seemed to evaporate for a moment, as if the light had turned them to vapour; and when they passed into shadow they disappeared again, like stepping into a hole in the ground. That afternoon of waiting was the hottest I’ve known. Fear lay panting in the street like a dog. It was as though El Gato and his men had been swallowed up in silence, or had followed the war to another country.

But war was not far away, and after nightfall, unexpectedly, it paid its first mad call on Almunecar. A destroyer crept into the bay, unseen by anyone, and suddenly began probing the shore with its searchlight. The beam swept over the hills, up and down the ‘ coast, and finally picked out the village and pinned it against the darkness. Held by the blazing eye, opening so ominously from the sea, the people experienced a moment of naked panic. There seemed nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, so they hurried down to the beach, and stood motionless in the glare, facing the invisible warship and raising their arms in a kind of massed entreaty. As the searchlight played over them they remained stiffly at attention, just letting themselves be seen. In the face of the unknown, all they could do was to offer themselves in this posture of speechless acquiescence. Such pitiless brightness had never lit up their night before: friend or foe, it was a light of terror.

For a while nothing happened. The warship just sat in the darkness stroking its searchlight up and down the shore. To get a better view, I joined a group of boys who’d already climbed on to the castle wall. We could see the whole of Almufiecar below us – the crowds on the beach and the spoke of light turning on its invisible hub. As we watched, it began to play over the nearby hills and move again along the coastal road. Suddenly it picked out a lorry heading towards the village, then three more, all packed with men. The beam lazily followed them, as though escorting them home, lighting up their rifles like little thorns. One could hear distant shouting above the sound of the engines – it was El Gato’s militia coming back at last.

The trucks roared into the village, horns stridently blowing, and pulled up in the warship’s pool of light. The beam was abruptly switched off, followed by a moment of absolute darkness. Then there came a blinding flash from the sea.

Silence. It was as though a great fuse had blown. Then the mountains behind us thundered, a thunder that boomed and cannoned from peak to peak and tumbled in the valleys like showers of stones. There was another flash, another explosion, another hot blast of air. For a moment we imagined it might be some kind of salute to the militia. Then we heard the tearing scream of a shell.

The searchlight came on again. We could see the crowds on the beaches surging inland like a muddy wave. The destroyer fired once more, misting its searchlight with smoke, and we were no longer in doubt about its intentions. A house on our right suddenly shuddered, rose a foot in the air, and slowly collapsed like a puff-ball. A bundle of stones and trees leapt up by the river. A pall of dust drifted over the village.

After half a dozen more salvoes, the firing broke off; inexplicably, since we seemed to be at their mercy. Then the shocked silence in the village began to fill with a curious whispering and rustling, the sound of a multitude on the move. In the naked beam of the searchlight we saw them come stumbling up the streets,bent double, crying and moaning, mothers and fathers dragging their children behind then., old folk tottering and falling down.

As the village ran for the hills, looking for patches of darkness, we saw a small boat put out from the shore, with two squat figures inside it sitting hunched at their oars and rowing frantically towards the ship.

And that was the end of the bombardment. The destroyer was found to be friendly. It had all been an unfortunate error of war. A case of mistaken identity; the captain sent his apologies, slipped anchor, and sailed quietly away – leaving a few gaps in the houses, a few dead in the streets, and most of the population scattered across the hillsides.

When the sun rose next morning Almunecar had transformed itself, with flags fluttering from every rooftop. Every scrap of old cloth within the spectrum of red, from orange, vermilion to purple, had been hastily cut into squares and run up on poles to make it clear on which side we stood. Even the houses of the ‘fascists’ wore scarlet that morning, as did the casino, the bank, and the church. In the face of any more trigger-happy assaults made by passing friends, it was thought as well to take no chances.

But the village seemed purged, curiously enough, by its night of fire. One heard no blame laid against the warship. In spite of the ruins and the dead, the capricious savagery of the bombardment was accepted as one of the traditional blows of fate. Almunecar, if anything, felt enlarged by the ordeal; it now had wounds to boast of, had smelt the hot reek of powder, stared down the muzzle of guns, and known itself to survive. There was satisfaction, too, in the fact that the destroyer was theirs, and had splendidly shown its powers.

We learned that it was El Gato and the mayor who had stopped the shelling last night, the only ones to keep their heads. They had rowed out alone along the path of the searchlight and asked what in the hell was going on. The captain explained that he’d simply mixed up his villages and mistaken us for the rebel-held Altofaro. Moreover, he’d thought the militia were attacking, rather than returning home, and he’d only meant to help. (In fact, El Gato’s expedition itself was also revealed to have been a fiasco: the men had forgotten their ammunition.)

Now that Almuiiecar had come out under the scarlet banner, the morning was one of mounting action. This was the day when the peasants and fishermen openly took over the village, commandeering the houses of suspects and the empty villas of the rich and painting across them their plans for a new millennium. ‘Here will be the Nursery School.’ ‘Here will be the House of Culture.’ ‘Here will be a Sanatorium for Women.’ ‘Workers, Respect this House for Agricultural Science.’ ‘Here will be a Training College for Girls’. Each of the large bold words was painstakingly written in red, a memoranda of a brief and innocent euphoria. For who among the crowds could guess, as they gathered in the streets to read them, that these naive hopes would later be treated as outrage?

Meanwhile the militia were massing for a new attack on Altofaro, undeterred by yesterday’s failure. They formed up raggedly in the square, polishing their guns on their trousers and watched by a scattering of wide-eyed dogs and boys. Manolo and El Gato, in long blue overalls, marched up and down the ranks; Manolo pale and stern, El Gato loud and jovial, teasing the men with macabre jokes. The militia were mixed, some old and grizzled, others young, bright-faced, and swaggering. There was also a platoon of teenage girls armed with hand-grenades. Nobody joked with them.

About noon the militia climbed into their open lorries and rattled off up the coastal road, standing stiff and straight, arms raised in salute, calm, but not singing now. We watched the swirl of white dust climb the side of the hill and hang over the ridge in the hot still air. After they’d gone, the village was left in a kind of limbo, not knowing what to do.

I went and sat in a bar, feeling bereft and impotent, as though robbed of some great occasion. I’d seen those silent men and muscular stiff-lipped girls riding to a war just down the road, to a blaze of battle under a burning sky offering all the trappings of heroic carnage. That special adrenalin in the young which makes war easy, and welcomes it, drew me voluptuously towards Altofaro.

Then why hadn’t I gone? It would not have been difficult. Manolo would have arranged the thing in a moment. Even so, I hung back, as from some family affair in which I still doubted I had a part.

On the way back to the house I found Emilia, one of our neighbours, raging up and down the street. Her brother had just been arrested as a spy, and she was indulging in a public ecstasy of fury – against him, not against the authorities. She didn’t doubt his guilt; he had done it for money; he was always a bestia, a sinverguenza. Here was someone at last on whom she could blame the war, someone palpable, close to home. ‘Give me my brother!’ she cried, opening her hands like claws, clutching and strangling the air. ‘Give him to me for just a little moment, let me squeeze out his tiny life!’

Crazed and dishevelled, she ran down to the jail and beat on the bars with her fists. ‘Suckler of snakes!’ she shouted. ‘Polluter of our mother! Give me a gun, and I’ll shoot him myself!’ The guards laughed at her antics but didn’t turn her away; instead they quietly opened the gates. Emilia disappeared inside, and when we saw her again, an hour later, she was calmly smoking a pipe on her doorstep.

Later that afternoon we heard the sound of distant gunfire, snapping like pods in the hills. The day was dead calm and the firing came to the ears with dry little displacements of air. Then about four o’clock, two more warships appeared, steaming slowly towards the east. El Gato had boasted they’d come; he’d arranged it by radio, he said, but nobody had believed him. Now the ships moved quietly along the coast and anchored about six miles away, standing in line astern and facing the rebel port which lay just hidden behind the headland.

Once again the village crowded on to the beach to watch. The evening was hazy and peacock-coloured; delicate hues ran slowly over the sea and sky and melted together like oil. The destroyers lay low on the horizon, slender as floating leaves, insubstantial as the air around them. Lights winked, there was a glitter of sun on metal, then little flashes ran along the ships, twinkling eruptions of fire that suddenly starred the air then vanished without a sound… The shelling of Altofaro had begun; curiously muted at first, its force softened by heat and distance. Then the sound of the explosions reached us, round and hollow, bouncing dully across the water.

The villagers watched in silence, showing no sign of excitement, but rather with a mixture of morbid compassion. Dim, muffled shudders came from behind the headland as the shells began to strike home. The bombardment continued for about an hour, then the ships steamed away, leaving a column of smoke in the air, a black greasy pall that slowly mounted the sky and spread grubbily over the twilit hills.

Long after the firing had died, and darkness fallen, the villagers still lingered along the shore, standing trance-like, rigid, strangely dumb, just staring towards the east. Once again they seemed to be tasting the fumes and the sulphur, and sensing the heat of the guns they knew, but this time the salvoes had been turned elsewhere, and the terror was in their name.

It was not victory, however; there was no victory on the coast that night. Altofaro had not been destroyed, nor had it even surrendered. When the militia returned, round about midnight, there was no singing or cheering welcome. The wounded, the shocked, the dying, and the dead were unloaded in bitter silence. Manolo was missing, and El Gato walked speechlessly away trailing his rifle like a broken limb. Something had gone wrong, something which had not been thought possible when the militia first took up arms.

Under the pale street lamps, amid the weeping and curses, the simple truth was being uncovered. After the day’s massacre at Altofaro, and the clumsy impotence of the warships – whose shells appeared to have fallen harmlessly in open country – it was being learned again that men needed more than courage, anger, slogans, convictions, or even a just cause when they went to war. The village became aware that night, not for the first time in its history, that a people’s army could be defeated.

The next morning they blew up the bridges on the coastal roads and so far as one could tell we were now cut off. In Almuiiecar it was a day of nervousness and shame which led to further outbreaks of mindless violence. As I walked down to the cafe to get news of Manolo, I saw that the casino had been sacked and burned.