Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (59 page)

The Welsh, in their huddles, were talking Welsh. The Durham miners were protesting about the food. The Scot, who seemed to have found some brandy from somewhere, was rising on the peak of spluttering Olympian disdain.

‘We gotta anni-hi-late the lot of ‘em,’ he growled. ‘Teach ‘em political authority. Or wipe ‘em all out. Thas what we gotta do.’

‘’E’s so drunk,’ said Danny, “e don’t know which side ‘e’s on yet – do ya, you ‘eathen bastard?’

Two young men, in dark suits, were playing chess on the ground, using stones in scratched squares in the sand. They were solemn, concerned, and cast disapproving glances at Doug. They talked together formally, in the accents of clerks.

This, again, was not quite what I’d expected. In this special army I’d imagined a shoulder-to-shoulder brotherhood, a brave camaraderie joined in one purpose, not this fragmentation of national groups scattered around the courtyard talking wanly only to each other. Indeed, they seemed to share a mutual air of unease and watchfulness, of distrust and even dislike.

I left Danny and Doug and wandered casually around, pretending I’d been here for weeks. But the pattern of that first morning was to be repeated during the whole length of my stay. The French crooks crouched in corners, shrugging and scowling; the Poles sat in princely silence sunning their beautiful cheekbones. The Czechs scribbled pamphlets and passed them to each other for correction; while the Russians seemed to come and go mysteriously as by tricks of the light. The British played cards and swore.

But we were a young and unclassifiable bunch on the whole, with mixed motives and humours, waiting to test our nerves in new fields of belief. The Castle and its courtyard was our starting-point – a square of pale sunlight surrounded by snow.

How had we all got here? Some by boat, some by illegal train-shuttles from France, but most smuggled from Perpignan by lorry. I hadn’t known, in my solitary ignorance, that there was this well-organized traffic for volunteers running from London through Paris into Spain. Which was why I’d done the daft thing and come on my own, and even chosen winter to do it. None the less, I heard later that my progress had not gone altogether unnoticed.I must have been watched through France, and all the way from Perpignan. Of that 1 was never entirely certain, but if it was true it probably saved my life.

About one o’clock that first day somebody hit a barrel with a stick and we filed into a long shed for a meal. A couple of old women handed us tin plates and spoons, then ladled out bean soup from a vat. Bean soup hot and chunky, with an interesting admixture of tar, but to me a gluttonous reward after almost two weeks of near famine in the cave.

I remembered again the concentration of the senses, of smell and flavour, that hunger brings to appetite, and with each steaming spoonful I was also aware of the grime of the unscrubbed table, the rusting metal of the soup plate, the sharp frozen landscape outside, almost the fatness of each bean.

The meal was a holiday hour, like at a refugee camp, although there were overtones of an open prison. The men sat huddled, heads down, rapidly spooning their soup, or hobbling around looking for bread; reasonably good-humoured in their ragged, unshaven selves, but showing none of the fire and spirit I thought they should have. It seemed we mixed at these meals – except for the French and the Russians, who sat down, got up, and moved about in a taciturn, self-watchful cadre.

When we’d finished eating I joined a small group outside, sitting cross-legged in the weak afternoon sunlight – Doug, Danny, Ulli, a Dutchman, and Ben Shapiro, a bouncing Brooklyn Jew. We propped ourselves stiffly against a row of white-painted oil-drums, and those with capes wrapped them around themselves.

First we sat in silence, inert. There seemed to be no discipline or programme. No one of any seeming authority came near us.

Doug said, ‘I’ve been here ten days, and I’ve still not handled a gun.’

‘I’ve not seen one,’ said Ulli.

‘Too dangerous to leave lying around for the likes of you,’ said Doug.

‘I have five at home,’ said Ulli. ‘For ducks on the water. If I’m knowing here they’re needing, I am bringing all of them with me.’

We sat idly a little longer, then we were called in to a lecture given by a pink-faced Belgian in a long black mackintosh. With a series of maps and slogans he was proving that Franco had lost the war, when the lecture seemed to peter out through a sudden lack of interest.

‘Tomorrow is political education,’ he said. ‘Now is free time to go down to the town. Class dismissed.’ And he picked up his maps and left.

About six of us sauntered through the Castle gates. The sentry had propped up his rifle against the wall. We found him playing with some children in the road outside and he raised a clenched fist as we passed.

Figueras had once been a fine hill town, with ordered streets and pretty houses, and open spaces for walking in the evening. War had shrivelled and emptied it, covered it with a sort of grey hapless grime so that even the windows seemed to have no reflections. The gathering twilight also seemed to bring an unnatural silence, as if all life had gone into hiding.

Down near the station, however, were a couple of low-roofed taverns, bare and cold, with streaming wet floors. Doug and Ulli led me first into one, and then into the other, where they were clearly already well known and where the stooping old women behind the bar threw up their hands at the sight of them.

They were not the taverns I remembered – those with great sweating wine-casks and glistening bottles labelled with posturing bullfighters. Indeed, I could see no drink at all, so in the second bar I asked for some coffee, and was given a glass of hot brown silt tasting of leather and rust.

‘Leave all tha’,’ said Doug, ‘an’ come along wi’ us.’ We went down some steps into a dim-lit cellar whose walls were covered with anarchist posters – vivid stark images of fists and faces, mouths crying defiance, shouting blasts for freedom, guns and flags held high, banners billowing with slogans, all in bright, hard, primary colours.

A thin old man in a corner quickly turned his back on us as we entered, bent low, and tried to hide something under his cloak. There was a brief flapping and squawking from between his legs as he furtively pushed a chicken into a sack.

‘All right, Josepe,’ said Ulli, poking round the littered cellar. ‘Where is it? Out with it, man.’

‘Ay – ay,’ wheezed the ancient. ‘Again the Frenchman, by God! Why don’t you go away to your country?’

Ulli, in Spanish, and Doug, with black Scots oaths, began to bully and tease the old man till he folded and scrabbled across the room. Mumbling of foreign evils and the curses of war, he searched through some sacking and turned up a stained goatskin flask.

We sat on the floor and passed it round between us. It was a country conac, vitriolic and burning.

Josepe kept the struggling chicken huddled under his cloak and watched us peevishly while we drank. The black hairy flask smelt richly of goat and resin, the conac of bitter oils. But it stung, and warmed us deep inside, just right for three men sitting on a cellar floor.

‘Bless this place,’ Doug grunted, wiping his mouth. ‘I never wanna leave it – never.’

Danny came suddenly down the steps on his little web-like feet, noiseless, nose-poking, apologetic.

‘Well, ’oo’d a’ believed it?’ he giggled. “Ere we are again then, eh? Got a drop left for me? No offence, a’ course.’

Doug looked at him with distaste, but passed him the conac. Danny nodded jerkily to each of us, and drank.

Only a few days in Spain, ripe for Freedom and the Cause, and here we were, squatting in the cellar of a northern tavern, bullying a crazed old man and getting drunk.

When we’d emptied a third leather flask, Josepe begged plaintively for payment, and Doug gave him a new hundred peseta note.

‘No, no!’ whimpered Josepe, waving it away.

‘Guid government money,’ said Doug, screwing it into his hand. ‘Take it mon – it’s a soldier’s wages.’

The old man bunched up his knees and hissed and grizzled, pushing at Doug with his tiny fists.

‘No, no!’ he wailed. ‘It is not to be borne! Carmelita! Eulalia! Come!’

A slim gliding figure, as light as a greyhound, moved softly down the cellar steps. The man reached out a shaking hand and gripped the girl by the shoulder while the chicken broke from his cloak and flew into the wall.

‘Where’ve you been, whore?’ he growled, pinching the girl viciously. ‘Why did you leave me again to the Frenchmen?’

She turned her head towards us.

‘Give him something,’ she whispered. ‘Belt, scarf, cigarettes – anything. But quickly; he’s going mad.’

The girl wore the tight black dress of the villages, and had long Spanish-Indian eyes. She pushed the old man up the stairs and told him to go to bed. Doug, Ulli and Danny followed behind him, singing brokenly and urging him on.

A winter sunset glow shone through a high grille in the wall, and I was aware, behind the sharp smell of cofiac, of something softer and muskier. The young girl, crouching low in the shadows, had loosened her dress and was pouring brandy over her bare bruised shoulder.

She rubbed the liquor into her flesh with long brown fingers and watched me warily as she did so. Her eyes were like slivers of painted glass, glinting in the setting sun. I heard the boys upstairs stamping and singing to the breathy music of an old accordion. But I couldn’t join them. I was trapped down here, in this place, this cellar, to the smell of cofiac and this sleek animal girl.

She was stroking, almost licking, her upper arms, like a cat, her neck arched, her dark head bowed. She raised her eyes again, and we just stared at each other before I sat down beside her. Without a word, she handed me the flask of coiiac, turned her bare shoulder towards me, and waited. Her skin was mottled by small purple bruises that ran backwards under her dress. I poured some drops of coiiac into the palm of my hand and began to rub it awkwardly over her damp hot flesh. The girl sighed and stiffened, then swayed against me, leading me into a rhythm of her own.

The frayed black dress was now loose at the edges and gave way jerkily to my clumsy fingers. The girl’s eyes were fixed on mine with a kind of rapt impatience. With a slight swerve of her shoulders she offered more flesh for healing. I rubbed more cofiac into the palms of my hands. Slowly, as my touch followed her, she lay back on the sacking. The boys upstairs were singing ‘Home on the Range’.

Apart from the quick stopping and starting of her breath, the girl was silent. The red blanket of sunset moved over her. Her thin dancer’s body was now almost bare to the waist and revealed all the wispy fineness of a Persian print. It seemed that in some perverse way she wished to show both her beauty and its blemishes. Or perhaps she didn’t care. She held my hands still for a moment.

‘Frenchman,’ she said thickly.

‘English,’ I said woodenly.

She shrugged, and whispered a light bubbling profanity – not Catalan but pure Andaluz. Her finger and thumb closed on my wrist like a manacle. Her body met mine with the quick twist of a snake.

When the square of sunset had at last moved away and died, we lay panting gently, and desert dry. I took a swig from the goatskin and offered it to her. She shook her head, but lay close as though to keep me warm. A short while ago she had been a thing of panicky gasps and whimpers. Now she looked into my eyes like a mother.

‘My little blond man,’ she said tenderly. ‘Young, so young.’

‘How old are you, then?’ I asked.

‘Fifteen… sixteen – who knows?’ She sat up suddenly, still only half-dressed, her delicate bruised shoulders arched proudly.

‘I kill him.’

‘Who?’

‘The old one. The grandfather. He maltreats… Thank God for the war.’

The chicken, huddled fluffily against the wall in the corner, seemed now to be asleep. The girl turned and tidied me briskly, then tidied herself, settling her clothes around her sweet small limbs. Then she lifted her long loose hair and fastened it into a shining bun. The stamping and singing upstairs had stopped.

I was astonished that this hour had been so simple yet secret, the opening and closing of velvet doors. Eulalia was not the sort of Spanish girl I’d known in the past – the noisy steel-edged virgins flirting from the safety of upstairs windows, or loud arm-in-arm with other girls in the paseo, sensual, cheeky, confident of their powers, but scared to be alone with a man.