Napier has a story which I think illustrates it very well of something he saw when he was marching into Spain with Wellington. They were passing through a country where both armies had been marching to and fro and everything had been consumed and destroyed. They came one day to a large country house, and went in on the chance of finding something to eat still remaining. No one answered their knock so they went in and walked through the house until they came to a large room where they found seventeen people, twelve already dead, the rest dying of starvation. The dead had been neatly laid out with their hands folded on their breasts, and the living were sitting beside them patiently waiting for the end. Napier says that the English soldiers tried to save them with the small means at their command, and one man, though far gone, was anxious to eat and live; but the women were quite indifferent, they had already resigned themselves and were only waiting quietly and patiently for death.
I cannot, as I say, praise too highly or too often Don Carlos’s courage and good temper and patience during this period which must have been so horrible for him. But there was something that did rather trouble us about his attitude to it all, and that was what I can only call a sort of good natured ferocity. When we were talking about the burning of houses in Malaga and we were explaining just which houses had been destroyed, it came out in a way that startled while it amused us.
‘They burned that big book shop,’ we said. ‘You know, that one near the Café Ingles.’ ‘Bueno!’ said Don Carlos approvingly, ‘We would have burnt that too.’
‘And they burned the Conservative Press – what was it called, the Union Something-or-other –?’ ‘Bueno!’ said Don Carlos with real enthusiasm this time, ‘We would have burnt that too. Much too middle-of-the-road, not out-and-out enough! Bueno! y que mas?’ ‘Good! and what else –?’
It was quite natural, I quite realised, that Don Carlos should sometimes dream of revenge, surrounded as he was by enemies. But his light-hearted references to the thousands they were going to shoot when they got to Malaga rather horrified us. We could not help feeling that it was just what was going to happen. This gay ferocity, and the increasing numbers of people and classes who became included in the term canalla, and were to be ‘liquidated’ sooner or later made us feel that on both sides Reason had been the first casualty: it depressed us a good deal. And Gerald who was both very humane and easily excited (and who could hardly stand the killing that was going on already) became extremely agitated sometimes (the situation was getting on all our nerves of course), and scenes were, with difficulty, avoided by tact and good feeling on both sides. But I must remark at this point that with so many reasons for being revengeful, Don Carlos was infinitely more reasonable, humane and understanding than so many of the foreign partisans of both sides I have encountered since, who fight their battles with such sound and fury in the Press of the world.
Finally as might have been expected everything came to a head. One morning there was an air raid on Malaga just at dawn, and Gerald and Enrique and I were watching it from the balcony. It was exciting at that distance with the crashing bombs, the anti-aircraft guns going off, the rattle of machine-guns and popping of revolvers, and the fighting planes from the field near us getting up belatedly. Suddenly after one bomb there was a tremendous flare-up near the sea, flames and black smoke began to pour up in a really appalling fire. A large heavy-oil dump had been hit.
We were horrified for we knew from often having passed the spot on the train that the heavy oil and petrol supplies, in very large quantities as Malaga is quite an important port, were concentrated in that one section near the sea, and one of the poor quarters of the city is built all around it. What would happen to that poor quarter if the large petrol tanks began to explode as seemed likely, frightened us to think of.
‘Let’s go up on the roof, perhaps we can see better there,’ said Gerald much distressed. We went up on the roof and found Don Carlos and the boys already there. Don Carlos was almost dancing with excitement and pleasure over this Nationalist success. It was perfectly natural that he should be glad, I realised even then; but his happy mood clashed badly with our anxiety for the poor people in the suburbs of Malaga. And then Don Carlos, who was supposed to be in Malaga, had been seen in our house, delighting in the bombing, by people in the street, and had compromised us about as badly as possible and had made it infinitely more difficult to save him. Gerald was livid with exasperation and there was a painful scene while he explained bitterly the harm that had been done.
‘I must go and find out what is happening,’ he said as soon as we had calmed down and had some coffee, so we went down to the Village Square, but found as we expected that all buses and trains had been stopped by order: both the road and railroad track passed close to the fire. So Gerald borrowed a bicycle and went off. All the time the black smoke and red flames poured up unceasingly like an infernal fountain. In fact the fire burned without slackening for two days, and at night Malaga and the mountains behind it looked as if they had been painted in scarlet. The BBC that evening informed us that ‘Malaga has probably been completely destroyed.’ The flames had been seen for miles out to sea.
But what was extraordinary was that this terrific fire was entirely prevented from spreading. All the able-bodied men in Malaga turned out to pile wet sea-sand deeply over the underground petrol containers, some of the heavy oil which was in tanks above ground was run away into the sea; and the courage and enterprise of the Malagueñans saved their city from an appalling disaster.
Gerald came back a few hours later in a painful state of nervous horror. Even before he left we had heard that one bomb had not failed to find victims. There had always been a large gypsy encampment on the outskirts of Malaga and we had often enjoyed seeing them there, the children playing about in the dry earth, the mules eating a little dry fodder from the ground and the women nursing their babies or stirring the black pots which hung above the little fires. That morning a large bomb fell in the middle of the camp just when they were gathered together to eat their morning meal. Of the forty gypsies, only one, a terrified little girl, was left alive.
When they were telling us about it in the Square the villagers kept saying ‘Oh! the poor Hungaros! What did they have to do with this war?’ Hungaros means Hungarians (it is the name the Spaniards call foreign gypsies by) and some of the men added with their pathetic ignorance: ‘Won’t the Hungarian Consul do something about it?’
Gerald had arrived at the encampment before what was left of the gypsies had been cleared away. The ground was sodden with blood and covered with mangled, blackened bodies, and arms and legs and heads, torn off by the explosion and horribly littering the earth. Even when I passed the place a day or two later the earth was still dark with blood and the bodies of the poor dead mules still lay with their legs sticking straight up in the air and would have seemed absurdly like abandoned toys except for the odour of corruption beginning to taint the air.
Gerald, as I say, had come back from Malaga in a rather painfully nervous state. It was unfortunate that as he came up the street he caught the faint raucous sound of Seville broadcasting. Don Carlos was most unwisely listening to the Nationalist news; for it had been forbidden to listen in to the other side at that time, and of course our position was so delicate that we should have been particularly careful not to offend in any way. Gerald in his excited state felt outraged by the fact that Don Carlos appeared that day to be trying to make it as difficult as possible to save him. Then there was a further concealed cause of friction in the fact that the C—s did not seem to us to be as anxious to leave the country as we were to get them out. We did not like to insist all the time on the danger they were in: it seemed cruel to do so. And yet we could not help feeling that they did not properly appreciate how critical it all was. Afterwards we realised that we had done Don Carlos an injustice. He saw the danger even more clearly than we did. But his amazing courage made him able to treat the whole thing with apparent light-heartedness, since he believed that
it was impossible for him to get out of the country, and probably fatal for him to try.
When Gerald came upstairs his mind full of horrible impressions, and heard the jubilant voice of the Seville broadcaster announcing their triumph, there was, as one might have expected, a painful scene.
It was natural that Don Carlos could not share our horror. He was sorry about the gypsies of course, but he could not help being pleased about the heavy-oil fire: it was an important Nationalist success. That kind of thing after all is the purpose of air raids. Whereas Gerald loathed air raids and did not want them to be successful anywhere. The wanton destruction of the poor gypsies, however unintentional, seemed particularly shocking: they had seemed so happily outside modern civilisation and its horrors.
That day as I was standing on the balcony watching the flame and smoke I heard high voices and saw a strange procession coming down the street. It was a small group of women, both young and old but all dark and handsome and dressed in the bright coloured cotton dresses with flounced skirts the Spanish gypsies wear. They were gypsies from the mountain who had heard of the tragedy and were coming down to Malaga to find out who had been killed – what mother or father, sister or brother, child or grandchild they had lost.
They came by with long strides and wild, strained faces, and with their torn dresses and long black hair loose and streaming in the wind they looked like frenzied Maenads; and at first I could hardly tell that the wild exalted look they wore was not an expression of religious ecstasy, but of an extremity of horror and fear.
Chapter 13
I HAVE SPOKEN of our friend the baker Juan. And at this point I should tell what happened to Juan. But I do not want to write about it, for my mind still avoids thinking of it even now as one might avoid touching an old but still sensitive scar. Perhaps I will come to it gradually by just talking about Juan.
Juan was a charming man, a bachelor of I suppose fifty or a little more, rather short but strong and muscular, and always smartly dressed in Sevillian style – snow-white shirt turned down around the neck without a collar but often with a white silk neckerchief, black trousers, made tight around the knees, a wide black sash bound tightly around the waist, and a black coat, thrown loosely over the shoulders in summer like a cape; the whole costume crowned with a wide stiff-brimmed hat of light grey felt. In fact to look at him, he might have been a breeder of bulls or at any rate a learned amateur of bullfighting. But really he had only a mild interest in bullfighting, his passion was for horses, and he always had one or two good ones. He really took more interest in his horses and his dogs and his farm than in his bakery, though he baked the best bread in the world, I truly believe, notable even among the wonderful breads of Andalucia, where to say That village has bad bread is almost as damning as to say That village has a bad water which removes it at once beyond the realm of civilised dwelling places.
I remember Maria taking a drink of water from the village well at Adra once when we visited that place. She had never left her mountains before and might well have been overcome by her first sight of the sea, falling in foam beneath her. However, all she said when she first viewed its endless blue waters was ‘Can you wash clothes in it?’ ‘No,’ we had to reply apologetically. ‘Is it useful for irrigation?’ she enquired again. ‘No,’ we were still obliged to reply. After which Maria lost interest in it, and turning her attention to the water she knew, went to taste a cupful from the big well in the square where some women were filling their pitchers. She just tasted it, and poured the rest of the water away.
‘This village,’ she said, ‘has a bad water,’ and the women quailed before her, for, poor things, they knew that it was true.
Even now when I pick up the peculiar loaves, apparently made of an unattractive mixture of bleached sawdust and plaster-of-Paris, which we are forced to buy as bread in England for want of anything better, I daily regret Juan’s bread. It is not that I ‘want better bread than is made of wheat’ as Cervantes says. I only want bread – and in England I am given something else. In Spain if I asked for bread I would get it. And Juan’s bread was as honest as he was. It was as good as bread.
Juan, as I said, was a bachelor which is unusual in Spain, and he lived with a charming old mother of eighty-three. The village said that he had never married because he had had an unhappy love affair in his youth. He had fallen in love with a girl of another village, and she had loved him too, so the villagers said, but he was poor and her father was a wealthy man, and in the end she was married off to a richer suitor. But Juan never married, though he was an admirer of women, nor did he have a mistress. He lived with his old mother, and when he rode by in the village fiestas on his handsome horse, it was his niece who rode behind him dressed in her frilled Andalucian costume with flowers in her hair.
Juan used to come to see us from time to time and advise us about our fruit trees and crops, and we always both liked and admired him for he was a most attractive man. He was a conservative of a moderate sort and a devout Catholic; but he deplored the large neglected estates and the horrible poverty and lack of employment in Andalucia, and particularly the exploitation of the workers and the lack of security of the small farmers, who hired a bit of land and when they had improved it a little were often asked exorbitant rent on the score of the improvements they had made themselves, or saw it rented over their heads to someone with more means, as Juan told us with severe disapproval had been done many times in our village formerly, pointing out as we walked the orange trees and olive trees now tall and bearing, planted by the poor tenants who had been dispossessed.
‘Something will have to be done!’ he would say. It was a common saying in Spain. ‘Hunger rules!’
Juan’s family at one time had been much richer, and he was related to all sorts of people both rich and poor. His forefathers, I gathered, had ruined themselves in the common Spanish way, by having enormous families and dividing up their lands and money between such large numbers that in the end there was practically nothing left. I remember Juan taking us to see a fine house near the village once. ‘My great-grandfather built that house for himself,’ he remarked casually.
‘But what a pity you haven’t got it,’ I said regretfully.
‘Oh! I don’t care much about houses,’ Juan said indifferently. ‘It’s good land I like, a good irrigated piece like the one I have by the river, and then my horses and my dogs. In summer it’s as much as I do if I go inside to see to the men in the bakery for a little while in the day and to sleep for a few hours at night. I’m out before it’s daylight and after it’s dark. Any four walls with a chimney in the corner would do for me if you left me my garden and my orchard and my vineyard.’ He had the true Spanish passion for planting things and watching them grow.
Enrique couldn’t even imagine anyone ever growing tired of being in a garden. He thought that with a garden like ours we all had happiness and amusement for our whole lives. Irrigating alone was a delightful occupation for two or three hours a day – I must say we used to love it too. We would watch with a sort of fascination the water beginning to bubble up in the middle of the flower beds just where Enrique wanted it from the pipes that ran underground from bed to bed; and then the watering of the fields, a carefully directed stream down the first furrow until that was full, then a few clever strokes with a hoe, a little dam built here, a new passage opened there, and the water streaming down to fill another furrow, led off sometimes by small canals to fill little moats around the fruit trees which stood in rows along the high orchard wall. ‘Oh! there’s always distraction in a garden!’ as Enrique said, especially in a garden in Spain.
When we had visitors from England they had to spend their first evening watching the irrigating. It was as it were an initiation rite. But whether they ever caught the inner meaning of the Mystery of which Enrique was Initiate and Chief Priest, I do not know. Gerald and I were at least neophytes.
This Spanish feeling for land, for water, for sun, air, bread, olives, wine, all the simpl
e and good ‘gifts and creatures’ as the prayer-book says is wonderfully expressed, I think, in a sixteenth-century folk-song – so Spanish, so unlike the folk-songs of other races. It is called ‘Labradores de Castilla’.
Esta si que es siega de vida
Esta si que es siega de flor.
Hoy segadores de España
Venid a ver a la Moraña
Trigo blanco y sin Argaña
Que de verlo es bendicion.
It is very difficult to translate it and catch any of the meaning and the feeling in it. Literally it says:
This, this is the sowing of life
This, this is the sowing of the flower.
Today sowers of Spain
Come to see at the Moraña
Corn that is white and without tares,
To see it is a benediction!
There is the voice of the true Spain, the lover of the land and of the flocks, of corn and wine and bread.
I write this here when I am speaking of Juan because he was such a true Spaniard, such a lover of the land, and a grower of corn and baker of bread. And when I think of these fundamental necessities of life as they are in Spain, and of the simplicity and happiness of the very act of living there, I cannot help remembering him – against my will, for I have so many painful thoughts connected with his memory now that I do not want to think of him at all. His ghost comes unbidden into my mind ‘in his habit as he lived’, and I see him walking about our garden with us on a bright Sunday morning, praising the beans, criticising the pruning of the oranges, but always kindly, while Enrique drank in eagerly praise, criticism and advice. I can see Juan’s very smile and hear the very tone of his voice saying: ‘You should buy some of the new American orange trees from the Agricultural Station. They are very dear, but they are worth it: there have never been oranges like that in Spain before! As to your vines – don’t bother about them. I will get you cuttings of the best vines when your stock is ready for grafting. I have a friend –’ In Spain one always had a friend, Juan was one of ours.
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