The Europe That Was (10 page)

‘Now let's sit down. It must be seldom that you get a real hot tip straight from the horse's mouth and a jug of first-class stuff to go with it. If you don't mind me saying so, I've watched the scent of that wine making you more human every minute.'

The visitor grinned, then pulled himself together with military solemnity and declared that he had no time for gossip.

‘This is going to be worth your while, captain. I'll tell you for a start one man whom Sarvary is likely to be seeing—his wife's cousin. You didn't know that, did you? And you're in charge of the investigation.'

‘Not yet,' the visitor admitted, ‘but I shall be. It's every man for himself in the police, and I like to wait for the best minute to put in my report. Now you help me, and I won't forget you. What would you say if I told you I'm on to a connection between Sarvary and this very house?'

‘Your very good health!' exclaimed the consulting engineer, raising his glass. ‘Is that so? Well, well, now let me see! First of all I'll fix up my Margit, and then I'm with you. I can't have such a cook upset,' he explained. ‘You can't expect a little artist to work without a drink in her heart. Look here, sweetheart, here's an address! You go there and tell them to deliver another barrel of red this evening. And you must need a rest after all this. Take the afternoon off if you want to.'

He scribbled a note and gave it to Margit. She had never seen her employer so cordial. She was hurt that he had never smiled at her as genuinely as he was smiling at this filthy crook from the corner café, and hurt, too, even if she were to be compensated, that the pair of them should calmly sit down and drink up the rest of her wine. She said to herself that it was unfeeling. Just unfeeling, that was all. Not even enough to excuse a toss of the head.

‘But I can't stop long,' the visitor protested. ‘I don't want to take my eyes off this street.'

‘Splendid! Splendid! It's good to know that our safety is in your hands. But why not telephone one of your sergeants and tell him to check all movements in and out of this house in your absence? A good chance to see whether he knows his job! He won't know you are here and you can watch him through the curtains.'

Margit put her kerchief over her head and went out, leaving the two to their sly grins and good-fellowship. It was just like men, she thought, to sit down and souse on somebody else's wine and pretend they were catching enemies of the State. It didn't make any difference—townee or peasant, consulting engineer or communist, they were all the same. Wine and pinching people where people were roundest and sacrificing the helpless.

She delivered her employer's note at the address he had given her. It was a cheerless, obscure, commercial office without the heartening smell of liquor or the noisy group of customers welcome to try out many more vintages than they ever meant to buy. Well, nothing was sold any longer as, traditionally, it ought to be sold.

She called on a friend who might have comforted her, but wasn't in. Boozing, too probably. Then she idled away the afternoon in public gardens and at a public meeting. After two hours she went home. It was all very well to tell her to take the afternoon off, but who would get the supper, she would like to know.

Her employer was asleep. The gentleman from the corner café had gone. Neither of them had made any attempt to mop up the lake of wine and its meandering streams, so she set to work on the kitchen. She forced herself (for she was economical) to dip a fine white cloth in the deepest pool and to squeeze it into a glass in case the wine should be still drinkable. It certainly wasn't. She was ashamed and determined
to clean her floor much more thoroughly than usual, especially after chopping meat.

Then three hefty men brought up her new barrel. They did not talk much, and they would not accept a drink. They weren't at all like the delivery-men she used to know. The three rolled away the old barrel down the passage. She wondered what wood her brother was using for staves. But perhaps the barrel seemed so heavy because the delivery-men didn't get enough to eat. That must be it. In these days they made criminals into policemen and boys of good family into porters. After that, all the tides of complication receded from her little personal island.

There was a flurry of nervousness when some police came to inquire about the gentleman from the corner café, who, it seemed, had disappeared. Her kind employer told her not to be frightened by them but to describe her interrogation just as it had happened.

‘The only thing I shouldn't say if I were you, Margit,' he warned her, ‘is that the man stayed on a little here after he telephoned his sergeant that he had gone. We don't want him to make trouble for us when he turns up again, do we?'

So Margit said nothing at all of that, and the police found the incident of the wine tap so comic that they paid very little attention to her. She disapproved of their behaviour. It was typically masculine and insensitive. But—taking the rough with the smooth, as she put it—she couldn't complain. The new barrel of wine did not carry in it the love of a brother, but at least she would be able to taste, whenever she sat down to her meals, the remarkable generosity of her master.

SPAIN

WATER OF ITURRIGORRI

The SS
Capitan Segarra
rested her five thousand tons of patch-painted black iron against the Bilbao dockside, heeling over wearily against the piles as the ebb tide slipped down river from under her. The fenders crackled and creaked. Capstans, spurting steam, chugged into their ragtime rhythm. The discharge gang swarmed over her, like hungry flies on an overweighted beast of burden.

She had to be emptied that day, for she carried a perishable cargo of crated Canary bananas. The dockers tore it out of her, racing against the fresh heat of the early morning. They were dressed so much alike that they gave the impression of a squad of soldiers; black
boina
on the head, wide red sash at the waist, blue trousers and rope sandals. Only in their shirts was there variety; they were of many shades of blue, mauve, yellow and green.

Apart from the bustle around the
Capitan Segarra
the riverside was still. It was a public holiday. The ships moored stem to stern along the wharf were dressed with flags. Here and there a watchman sat under the shade of a tarpaulin contentedly occupied with the rolling of one cigarette after another. The three
txistulari
marched along the waterfront—a drummer, a piper, and between them the leader of the band playing a drum with one hand and holding a pipe to his mouth with the other. The citizens, lying late in bed, were awakened by the gay Basque melodies which proclaimed a fiesta.

There was a halt in the discharge while the men below took the covers off another deck. Juan el Viruelas thrust a great hand into his sash and drew out tobacco and cigarette paper. He was a burly, pockmarked man with an expression of disgusted kindliness.

‘Where's El Pirata?' he asked.

‘I told him to come,' said the foreman.

‘You told him? I spit on his mother! He's the man to lift these crates. Why isn't he here,
capataz?
'

‘Who knows?' answered the foreman, turning away with the haughtiness of the petty official who has risen deservedly, but recently, from the ranks.

‘He's still in the Sevillana,' said the oldest of the dockers.

He was nicknamed ‘El Cura'—the priest—from his hollow cheeks, his blue chin, and his body emaciated by the forced fasts of poverty. It
was still useful, like an old rope worn thin.

‘What the hell is he doing in the Sevillana?'

The Sevillana was a house of ill-repute. A chorus of stevedores explained to Viruelas what El Pirata was doing there. Juan el Viruelas burst into a stream of profanity. It was interrupted by a sharp bellow from Evaristo, the crane mechanic, forty feet above their heads: ‘Stand clear!'

Viruelas leapt aside, and El Cura took up his post facing him. A sling of six crates thumped on to the ground between them. They became twin parts of a machine for loading porters, a four-handed engine which swung up each crate from the ground and lowered it precisely on to a human back bowed to receive it. As they bent down to lift the last of the sling, a hand loosened the sash round Viruelas' waist. When he heaved, the coils loosened and slid. He grabbed at his falling trousers, leaving one corner of the crate without support.

‘Mind!' shouted El Cura.

Viruelas's hand stopped half-way and flashed back to the falling crate. His trousers fell around his ankles. The riverside shouted with laughter.

‘I spit in the milk!' exclaimed Viruelas—it was his oath when he was really angry. ‘Who did that?'

‘El Pirata! El Pirata!'

Juan el Viruelas lowered the crate to the waiting back, wound himself into his sash, and turned on El Pirata.

‘You want me to kill you?' he stormed.

El Pirata swayed on his feet like the high round funnel of a tramp steamer in a gale. He was six and a half feet tall, broad in proportion, and lordly drunk. He was bred a deep-sea fisherman, not a labourer. Though of age to succeed his father in the command of the family launch and to raise a third generation of sons within the thick, sea-silencing walls of the family cottage, he had chosen to taste the freedom of the townsman. He came to Bilbao to scatter his wild oats more magnificently than they might be sown in Arminza; neither the single tavern nor the chirruping sisterly girls of that little village offered a field for the exuberant harvest he desired. Manual labour he detested. It was too easy and too poorly paid—an insult to his manhood. But there was no alternative. He could not read or write.

He was pure Basque, and his great head was rich with the marks of race: grey eyes, and dark, straight hair; a full-lipped hearty mouth; a long hawk's nose whose chiselled fineness contrasted with the heavy curves of the high cheekbones. There was a kind of devil-may-care pride in the very flesh. His
boina
dripped gallantly over one ear. His sash was vivid crimson and wider than the ordinary. He wore gold rings in his ears and an orange shirt. Because of his dress they called him ‘El Pirata'—the Pirate.

‘Come on!' said El Pirata. ‘Come on, Viruelas!'

‘You're drunk!' remarked Viruelas disgustedly; he had no intention of fighting El Pirata, but had meant to satisfy himself by all the dramatic preliminaries.

‘And what then, Juanito? And why aren't you drunk too?'

‘Because he's a decent fellow,' interrupted the foreman.

‘Is today a fiesta,
capataz?
' asked El Pirata, trying to get him into focus.

‘
Si, señor
,' the foreman answered with exaggerated politeness—he too was feeling a grievance at having to work on a public holiday.

‘Why?' asked El Pirata.

‘How why?'

‘Why's a fiesta?'

‘God knows,' said the foreman.

‘No,' replied El Pirata. ‘So's to get drunk the night before. That's why's a fiesta.'

He hiccupped wildly and slapped the foreman on the back.

‘But I'm a man of my word, that's what I am! I say I'm coming to work. I come to work.'

‘You can't work like that.'

‘You, what do you know?' retorted El Pirata. ‘Stand out of the way there,
capataz
!'

El Pirata attacked the sling that had just descended. Without help he swung a two-hundred-pound crate on to his back, carried it away, and stacked it. He dealt with all six as quickly as Viruelas, El Cura, and the gang of porters. Then he pushed El Cura aside and took his place with Viruelas. The two grinned at one another. Evaristo stuck his oily head over the edge of his box to admire the two muscular backs whose pace he would follow.

‘
Olé
. El Pirata!' he cheered.

‘
Olé!
' answered the gang.

There was no shade. The white sun smote upon the white concrete of the wharf. Particles of straw mingled with the dust that spurted up under the wheels of the loaded waggons; the dry mixture stung into the throats of the workers. Paint blistered on the
Capitan Segarra's
rails, and the distant piping of the
txistulari
died away in the heat. The men worked swiftly, savagely, thirstily. Then, a little after eleven: ‘Water of Iturrigorri! Water of Iturrigorri!'

A girl's voice called the words, rising and falling on the melancholy minor scale of a pedlar's cry. Between the calls she blew a little horn which echoed along the deserted waterfront.

‘La Rubia! It's La Rubia, I spit on her little body!' cried Viruelas affectionately. ‘Bless the girl! Who'd have thought she'd be here on a fiesta?'

‘She's a comrade!' shouted El Pirata. ‘She's a worker! I say so! I, El Pirata!'

‘You think a lot of her,' grumbled Viruelas, almost accusingly.

‘I think a lot of—a lot of…' El Pirata paused. Whenever he stopped working, the scene of his labour whirled round him; he waited for it to be still. ‘… a lot of soli—solidarity!'

La Rubia came round the bend of the wharf into sight. She was seventeen, but no taller than a girl often. Yet all her fully ripened body was built to scale; she was a perfect miniature of a woman. La Rubia had only two garments—a blouse pulled tightly down into a skirt of sacking. Her fair hair was laden with dust; her feet and legs were bare; her face was dirty. A piquant dirty face it was: snub nose, grey Basque eyes, a high, wrinkled forehead, and a flower of a mouth that the effort of scraping a living out of the docks had hardened into a downward curve at the corners.

She was a virgin—there wasn't a docker on the wharfs of Bilbao who had any doubt about it—but apart from that she was much as the other waterfront women, haggard and strident workers continually with child, their own wombs serving them as an inspiration for rough humour. La Rubia was brazen and foul-mouthed as they, for she had walked the docks during half her short life; but, unlike them, she was accustomed to respect. The dockers had petted and protected her as a child. When she became a woman she demanded from them the same consideration; she enforced it with blistering language and a total lack of sentiment. Her power was easily held, for she was loved because of her trade. La Rubia was a water-carrier.

She was the only water-carrier in Bilbao. Indeed, she had invented the profession for and by herself. She supplied a demand which the numerous riverside taverns would not satisfy. For a
perra chica
, the smallest Spanish coin, she sold a pint of water with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of sherbet.

At her side walked a donkey towing a little cart to which was lashed a thirty-gallon barrel. The barrel had been filled at the spring of Iturrigorri. To the true Bilbaino that water was worth its price without the lemon; the very word was cooling—the very thought of Iturrigorri, where a full stream of icy water dashed out of the mountainside into a sunless pool overhung with ferns. La Rubia kept up the illusion. The barrel was decked with moss and greenery, and over it waved fronds of bracken freshly picked from the hillside. Between the donkey's ears was fastened a tall fern like an ostrich plume. The little beast resembled its mistress; it was diminutive, very dirty, and it would stand no nonsense.

She came abreast of the
Capitan Segarra
and blew her horn.

‘
Agua de Iturrigorri! Agua de Iturrigorri!'

‘
Hola
, beautiful!' shouted El Pirata.

The daily competition of badinage between La Rubia and El Pirata was the delight of the wharf and of the contestants themselves.

‘Whom are you calling beautiful, son?' asked La Rubia aggressively, drawing herself up to her full height of four feet six inches.

‘He's drunk,' said Viruelas.

‘Shall I tell you where he was last night?' asked El Cura.

‘You, what do you know?' answered El Pirata, with a shade of anger in his favourite expression of disdain.

‘Of course he's drunk,' La Rubia said. ‘Last night was the night before a fiesta.'

‘She knows me, the little one!' El Pirata exclaimed delightedly. ‘How she knows me!'

La Rubia's cheeks flushed under the powder of dust.

‘There are many like you,' she replied, implying that she took no particular interest in El Pirata.

She turned away to attend to the customers who crowded round her. Her hard fresh voice dominated the rattle of the discharge.

‘No money, El Cura? Drink, man! Pay me next time! … You wish it were wine, Juanito? Water for thirst and wine for pleasure! … Mind your hands,
capataz
! They are walking where they shouldn't …
Hola
, El Pirata, why don't you come? Are you so drunk you can't see the barrel?'

‘I see it,' said El Pirata. ‘I see it,
salerosa
! But I don't want a wash.'

He plunged a hairy hand into his shirt and searched among the objects next to his skin. He used his shirt as a general pocket. It hung out over his sash in lumps, each of which represented a personal possession. He drew out a bottle of beer and, closing his mouth on the neck, wrenched off the cap between his teeth. The gang shouted their admiration. They never tired of this trick.

‘He's stronger than the devil!' El Cura exclaimed.

‘
Quiá!
' said La Rubia contemptuously.

El Pirata felt vaguely that La Rubia was not impressed. He zigzagged toward the barrel, swept her into his arms and held her above his head like a child, with his hands upon her hips.

‘
Bruto! Bárbaro!
Let me go!'

She grabbed a wisp of black hair and wrenched it out of his scalp. Those of the gang who stood idling slouched swiftly on to El Pirata. The sullen wrath of El Cura deepened the wrinkles of his face. Viruelas bristled, and dropped his hand to the knife hilt that protruded from his sash.

El Pirata lowered La Rubia to the ground and looked at the circle of furious faces. He did not know why they were angry with him; he was at peace with everyone when he was drunk. His mind struggled to gain some concept of what was happening in the exterior world. One emotion chased another over his bewildered, mobile face. Viruelas pulled out his tobacco-pouch instead of his knife; it was impossible to quarrel with a man like that.

At last El Pirata understood what he had done.

‘It was a joke,' he said perplexedly. ‘A little joke, that's all! Pardon,
señorita
!'

He turned to the men around him.

‘Look!' he said. ‘I didn't mean to touch her. I just picked her up. Just picked her up …'

He paused. El Pirata had no means of expressing fine distinctions. He knew that he had not meant to insult La Rubia, but it was hard to explain.

‘… Picked her up like …' He sought desperately for an example.

He swayed toward the cart, slipped off the traces, and drew the donkey from the shafts. Then he put his shoulder under its belly and heaved. The donkey shot up in the air. A hand on each flank, he held the little beast above his head and grinned. He had explained himself—his mates would understand that it was just his desire for violent action which had made him lay hands on La Rubia. The donkey kicked wildly. A foreleg landed in the pit of El Pirata's stomach. He crumpled and dropped.