by David Rees
He was popular with the men in his force, who liked his lenient ways and his knowledge of the city and its people. They felt at ease with a boss whose origins were, as theirs were in many instances, working-class. He laughed a great deal ― was jolly and optimistic. His wife and daughter worshipped him. The only sad thing about his marriage was that Mez, after Carmen’s birth twenty years ago, had not produced any more children. She was, however, only just forty: there was still time, and they still kept at it, even though the idea of a brother or a sister for Carmen almost a generation’s difference in age was unusual.
Tolerance was one of his favourite words. He used it frequently with Pérez, his deputy, whose temper was not as docile as his own; ‘But of course,’ he would add,
‘I know tolerance has its limits ― inside every velvet glove there ought to be an iron fist.’ This would often lead them on to talk about the state of the nation, which was not good for the deputy chief of police’s blood pressure: he was thin, hyperactive, and suffered from indigestion. There were limits to Miguel’s tolerance, however; blind spots. He couldn’t stand homosexuals. ‘Why don’t we shoot these people?’ he said on one occasion. ‘They have no balls.’ This remark was made to a friend in a café; Pedro Badajoz, who was sitting at the next table, overheard it. Pedro glanced at his own crotch, then at Miguel’s. He had no doubts, he said to himself contemptuously, that he would win, hands down so to speak, in any competition to do with that. The chief of police, he concluded, was not someone to be trusted, however genial he appeared to be.
Miguel Goicoechea later said to General Araquistain that Pedro and Pablo Badajoz were, in all likelihood, queer. This got back by a roundabout route to Pedro, who was furious.
The mayor’s plush red sofa sagged visibly under Don Miguel’s vast weight. ‘José, why don’t you get a fan installed? You have electricity.’ He mopped his brow, and sighed.
‘Are you hot?’ The mayor was surprised. In the south of Spain, in late April, he didn’t consider such a device necessary.
‘I’m sweating!’ Miguel said. ‘I’ve had the fan on in my office all day.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t even know where the fan is. In the cellar, I suppose.’
Bishop Guzmán leaned across and gave the chief of police a newspaper. ‘Why don’t you use that?’ he suggested.
Instead of using it, Miguel began to read it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to! Peasants seize land at Cácares. Nobody stops them… Strikes in Madrid… Attempted murder of well-known anarchist … in Barcelona, of all places! Deputies fight in the Cortes … disgusting! Ought to be shot.’
‘That’s why I called this meeting,’ José said, ‘though it’s quiet here. I’m worried about the rumours.’
‘What rumours?’ the bishop asked.
‘Plots, counter-plots…’
‘All talk.’
‘Maybe.’ The mayor frowned, and drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I’ve nothing definite to tell you, no news to pass on … but it does occur to me that something may happen. If it does, I want the three of us to ensure that there’ll be no violence in Zahara. That we’ll use every power we have to maintain the peace.’
‘It goes without saying,’ the bishop said. ‘I’m surprised, José, you should doubt it.’
‘I don’t doubt it. The point is … if there is trouble, the three of us should act together. Consultations. Agreements.’
‘I’d welcome a Falangist take-over.’ Miguel said. ‘But not if it means wholesale blood-letting.’
‘The Falange, much as I dislike it, behaves itself here. Marches and slogans, no more than that. It’s all been very tranquil. So far. Miguel, what about the soldiers? General Araquistain: you see him on official business; you know him socially. Where does he stand?’ There was a regiment stationed at Zahara, as there was in any town of some size. The army was never at the frontiers, defending Spain from a possible external attack; it was dotted about the country, keeping an eye on the inhabitants. It had frequently embroiled itself in politics, probably through sheer boredom. Each garrison was commanded by a general. This meant there were an awful lot of generals. In Zahara, the army was at its most visible when it appeared to be doing nothing: recruits on their days off drinking in bars or chatting up girls loitering on balconies; colonels in vaudeville uniforms staring out of the windows of nineteenth-century hotels, a glass of gin in one hand, an expression of immense tedium on their faces; and when it was doing something ― parading on the festivals of saints ― it seemed to be more like a chorus from a pantomime than a guardian of, or a threat to, national security.
‘I suppose you’re asking,’ Miguel said, ‘if Araquistain and his units would stay loyal to the Republic. I don’t know. No … I really don’t know.’ (For the mayor looked doubtful.) The general gives little away to me. We’ve never discussed politics. In any case, I don’t know if I would stay loyal. It all depends on what happens. I might well support a bloodless coup.’
‘But not a violent one.’
‘No. Definitely not! Araquistain is secretive. And has no sense of humour. He doesn’t much like being in Zahara. Castilians think of us as living in the Stone Age… He’s from Burgos… Well, you know what they are up there. The only gossip I’ve ever heard about him is that he doesn’t get on very well with his wife.’
‘Tomás?’
‘I’m not the general’s confessor,’ the bishop said, ‘And if I was, I wouldn’t say anything, obviously. My only contact with him is on Sundays, He comes to Mass and sits in a front pew of the cathedral; afterwards, at the door, we exchange polite meaningless words.’ There was a long silence. ‘José, I think your fears are imaginary. Nothing very terrible is going to happen.’ The police chief nodded in agreement.
There was another silence. Miguel looked at the clock. ‘If there’s not much else, José … Iñez is cooking roast suckling pig.’
The mayor, who seemed to be lost in gloomy thoughts, said after a while, ‘Of course, Miguel. Of course.’
‘José,’ the bishop said, ‘could Pedro look at my car tomorrow? It’s gone wrong again, and he’s so good with it. I need it for Thursday … I have an appointment in Granada.’
‘I hardly ever see him these days,’ José said. ‘You had best call at the garage yourself, Tomás. It’s the young that bother me: what kind of a country are they going to inherit?’
Tomás did not answer. Miguel shrugged his shoulders.
It was an enchanted place, Stephen said to himself, a holy place, one of the most beautiful spots on planet Earth; unreal, dream-like. It was a waterfall tumbling down a mountain. It didn’t quite begin at the summit of the mountain, which was a sheer jagged cliff, too steep for buildings, but perched on its top was a solid old tower put there by Arabs in the tenth century ― Zahara’s early importance was a fortress, one of the bastions the Moors constructed to keep the Christians out of the kingdom of Granada. You could climb up to the tower: a staircase of steps that zigzagged through an almond orchard, wound through prickly pear, and avoided the worst excesses of the cliff. At the tower’s foot there were six plane trees, a bizarre reminder of London, underneath them stone seats for the weary traveller. Then the tower itself, a set of simple domed rooms on two floors — forlorn and empty — and stairs that led to the roof, which was safe to stand on, and battlemented: it commanded the most spectacular view he had ever seen. Immediately, the ancient quarters of the city — whitewashed walls, the ridges of terra cotta roofs like umbrella spines or spiders’ webs, and a labyrinth of narrow, twisting lanes that opened into tree-shaded squares (every one with a fountain) then closed again into dark, secret alleys. The Casa Badajoz was from here a lithe white dolls’ house, almost indistinguishable from a thousand others. He could see the tiny restored mosque with its superb gardens, and the cathedral — eighteenth century, unremarkable and crumbling outside, on its spires storks’ nests, flowers, and two crooked crosses; but inside it was a miracle.
Beyond the old city was the nineteenth-century expansion, much less engaging. Zahara had once thrived on quinces: the most delicious in all Spain, it was said, exported from here to every part of the country, but most of the trees had died or been cut down long ago. The building of the railway and the discovery of copper in the eighteen eighties had given a new injection of life, but the copper had run out in recent years, and Zahara was beginning to adjust itself to being no more than a very large pueblo, the administrative centre of an unimportant province. Its greatest export now was unemployment — men drifting to less stagnant cities to look for work.
The view on all sides was of immense distances. Fold upon fold of mountain fell away, rose up again into soaring peaks, miles off on the far side of the valley. Clinging to other mountains were other pueblos — Santa Ana del Monte, San Nicolas del Puerto, mere villages compared with Zahara. The prevailing colour was green, but in less than a month this would change: to gold as the land burned in the heat, was parched for lack of rain. Row on neat row of olives — toy trees in white earth. The blue of the sky was intense, impossible to look at for more than a few seconds for it hurt the eyes, as did the brilliance of the sun: this was Andalucía, El Andaluz, the Country of Light.
Turning, Stephen saw another view. The tower, despite the vast area it dominated, was not on the highest peak; beyond the south-west side of the city mountains rose to much dizzier summits, no faded green even half-way up: just bare rock, patient in the heat. On some crags there was snow. The one way out of this end of the city was a road that tacked like a thread of cotton up to a pass far above where he was standing. An impossible road, a line up a mountain a child would draw; no vehicle or mule could surely manage it, would even need to travel so high and so dangerously ― but it went somewhere: to Grazalema, the eyrie to which the Arabs retreated when Zahara succumbed to the Catholic Kings. Grazalema, the impenetrable median of the Kingdom of Granada, couldn’t be seen from here. Maybe Pedro would take him one afternoon, or at least to the top of the pass. Pedro’s car, on that road, would be a fly crawling up a wall.
He returned to the foot of the tower eventually, then down through the unattractive prickly pear, into Zahara. How different life in a Spanish city was from an English city! It was not yet the hour of the siesta, so the streets were thronged with people. Here the windows looked into the streets, rarely at the amazing views the backs of the houses permitted. Doors, except during the siesta, were always open, so the street became an extension of the living room; all its inhabitants were like one large family. It was where men and women gossiped, quarrelled, laughed (but Spaniards, he began to realise, though friendly, direct, and polite, did not laugh much); where beggars accosted, children played, business was done, bargains were struck; where old men with berets and walking-sticks just stood, and old women in black, faces as lined as the dried-up beds of prehistoric lakes, then tired grey hair drawn back into buns, sat on doorsteps; where policemen, looking ferocious with pistol, truncheon and helmet, but whose natures were courteous and their manners impeccable, idly scratched their crotches. So many young men. In pairs: they touched, they walked, an arm on a companion’s shoulder. They looked at Stephen, as if wanting something or questioning who he was. They talked to girls, but the physical intimacy they shared with each other was absent. Quite unlike England.
And it was so noisy! No Spaniard ever spoke with bated breath. The hard, metallic sounds of the language chaotically filled the streets, sputtered like machine-gun fire. The same in the bars, which were deafening, a chorus of voices arguing politics and bullfights. A bar was another extension of the living room, despite the litter on the floors, the occasional drunk, the ranks of fat pigs’ thighs that dangled from the ceiling, waiting to be sliced into the incredibly tough slabs of ham that were so popular, despite the absence of women — who only seemed to come in to deliver a message or to drag their men away home.
So a civil war, Stephen said to himself, would be like a family quarrel, with all the horrible tortures and wounds only families inflict on their members; almost a process of self-mutilation. Spanish people, he knew, were invariably passionate for the destiny of their families, their towns. Spain, they thought, should mirror that family, that town.
The young men in tight trousers, white shirts open at the neck: they dressed to show off their buttocks, their genitals, the hair on their chests. They all had hairy chests. It was like a taunt: Stephen, blond and smooth-skinned, considered himself an oddity.
He sat down in the Plaza de las Ranas, a square that was Arab in design, with flowers and shrubs enclosed in diamonds and crescents by box hedges, the walk-ways Moorish tiles, an octagonal fountain in the middle — stone frogs on its walls spouting water. The square was full of boys, ten-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, playing Christians versus Moors. Their slim brown legs flashed like lances as they ran, or tensed with repressed energy as they kneeled, soldier-fashion, behind the fountain or the shrubs. Beautiful legs, Stephen thought, despite the scars and scabs of childhood accidents — not that he desired them sexually: he was imagining how much more beautiful they would be in a decade or so, when he would desire them sexually. In particular, the two leaders Inocencio and Luis, who were older than the rest, fourteen perhaps. The weapons the children were using were an ingenious device: balloons filled with water. When thrown they burst, and water sprayed everywhere. Some of the boys could hurl them great distances, more than Stephen (who had no physical, sporting skills) could throw anything. He envied them their easy grace, their maleness. He felt he lacked such qualities.
Tired of their game, the boys took to chucking their bombs at any girl who happened to be crossing the square. Invariably it took her by surprise: water suddenly spurting from her shoes, or ricocheting from a tree to give her an unexpected cold shower. Even if she was angry, she did not retaliate — she just ran off into the distance. The boys would giggle helplessly and Stephen, too, was unable to stifle his laughter. Then there were no more girls around. Inocencio hurled a bomb as far and as hard as he possibly could, right out of the square and into one of the lanes where it smacked into the windscreen of a parked car with a very satisfying splat. Luis, who had led the Infidels, was impressed. Eventually, maybe for no reason at all, or because there was nothing else to do, the boys began attacking each other indiscriminately, not Christians and Moors this time, but all-out war no-holds-barred close-quarters fighting. Tempers flared. Fists thudded. Every kid, in five minutes, was soaking wet from balloons that had hit him in the back, on the head, on the knees. Stephen hurried away, fearing that he, at any moment, would be soaked too.
In the lanes there was the scent of jasmine — sweet, then after a while too sweet: sickly. Lemon trees. Boogainvillaea. Clop-clop-clop of horses’ hooves on cobbles. Water from a fountain sparkling in the sun: it made him feel thirsty. Light through a window revealed a terrace overgrown with green creeper. Stench of horse shit. The smell of coffee from a bar. He was returning to the Casa Badajoz, but he went a long way round in order to see Pedro, who was working on a truck.
One afternoon a week ago he had hitched a lift to Granada. He’d been told by a friend at Cambridge that the Café de los Dos Toros was the place. He found it easily, and saw at once that it was quite different from any other Spanish café he’d visited. It had settees, a carpet, and its prices were dear. But was it the place? The clientèle were not the people he was looking for, he thought. A man at a table by the window seemed to be writing a poem. After a while the barman said, ‘Do you want to drink in the other room?’
There’s another room?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes.’ The barman smiled, and showed him the way.
In this inner, smaller room a teenage boy was waving a fan. Another was flapping his wrists. He knew now that it was the place: relieved, he ordered a beer. And was astonished, when he glanced up, to see Pedro staring at him, a very unsure expression on his face. He did not answer Stephen’s nod with any gesture at all. He was considering, Stephen supposed, wh
y the Inglés was there; an accident, or deliberate? Feared there would be some mention of it to the family? And why was Pedro there? Not to discuss a bill for car maintenance.
A quarter of an hour went by. Then Pedro came over, and murmured in a voice not much above a whisper: ‘I know somewhere more private. Will you come?’
They drove back to Zahara.
Excited beyond belief, he followed Pedro up to the tower. His legs shook so much he was almost unable to climb the steps. To look at, this man was his ideal: tall, with black hair and dark eyes; high cheek-bones, a face that seemed to register every sensitivity. The mouth was a little thin, perhaps. Older than he was — that was important: a man’s body, not a teenager’s. The man seemed to be happy inside that body; it was strong, energetic, and muscled from hard physical work.
The sun had set long since, and the enormous sky was studded with stars. Pedro took his hand, and helped him through the seemingly impenetrable blackness of the fort, up the stairs and onto the roof.
‘Is it safe?’ Stephen asked.
‘Yes. I’ve been up here … a few times.’
Stephen had never made love. He had had sex, also at night and in the open air, furtively, in parks and on commons, with unknown, unseen men. He’d never been kissed in this way; no one had allowed him such leisurely slowness. Later, Pedro leaned him over the battlements. His breathing, in Stephen’s ear, was like a horse at full stretch. Stephen, when it flooded inside him, and his own surged at the same second, thought the stars danced.
He was in love with Pedro. He hadn’t loved before, not allowed himself to do so. The magic of Zahara was the catalyst.
Pedro was not the only member of the Badajoz family to be homosexual. The youngest son was too; and he worried about it less than Pedro did. Pablo didn’t in the least care that he preferred men: all he wanted was to be a little older, independent and away from home, so that he could begin to live life to the full. Pedro, however, feared discovery. He would lose all his friends, be made an object of derision. He never took Stephen upstairs to his room above the garage. The other mechanics would wonder why he was doing so.