Mister Roberts

by Alexei Sayle

  Stanley took a track leading upwards to the cave where the Moors had hidden from the Inquisition and where Adey was waiting with whoever was looking for Mister Roberts.

  It was a little before midnight, a few minutes prior to the day of the matanza when the brown Nissan swung into the parking place just outside the village walls. Most of the lanes between the houses were too narrow to get cars down so drivers had to park at the top of the village then walk. Donna tumbled out of the driver’s seat and Mister Roberts climbed more slowly from the passenger side. Donna was full of twitchy energy ‘Jesus!’ she said, stretching her back. ‘What a day’

  On the other side Mister Roberts slowly closed the car door with solemn deliberation.

  ‘Let’s get the stuff out of the back,’ Donna said.

  Together they opened the rear of the Nissan and took out four overflowing supermarket bags. After closing up the car they carried these to Donna’s house. The couple encountered nobody on the way since everyone in the village was getting an early night in preparation for the matanza.

  Unlocking the door Donna whispered to Mister Roberts, ‘Let’s keep the noise down, Stan’ll be in bed by now.’

  Once inside the kitchen Donna switched on the light then, with feverish animation, tipped the contents of the bags onto the wooden table. There were mostly small denomination Euro notes, greasy and crumpled but also a tangle of cheap gold and silver necklaces, bracelets and rings. She turned to Mister Roberts.

  ‘Do you want to get out of that thing?’

  Slowly he shook his head.

  ‘Please yourself.’

  With trembling hands Donna ran her fingers over the money and the jewellery.

  ‘Now, I’m going to pile this lot up here and this is going to be Stanley’s share. He’ll be amazed when he comes down and sees all this, won’t he?’

  After a second Mister Roberts nodded.

  ‘I mean, after a while he’ll see I did the right thing, don’t you think? After I tell him what we’ve been doing?’

  Again after a second Mister Roberts nodded.

  ‘And you’ll never hurt him?’

  This time there was a longer pause before the big man moved his head slowly up and down.

  ‘OK,’ Donna said. ‘Great, let’s get the rest of this stuff upstairs. You know, suddenly I feel exhausted.’

  The matanza dawned cold and clear. It started early for both the British and the Spanish communities but for once there was little overlap in their activities, the British either stayed locked in their homes all day or crowded into Bar Noche Azul as soon as it opened, running there with hands covering their eyes in case they caught a glimpse of what the locals were up to.

  The Brits often complained that it was typical Spanish showing off, that they couldn’t kill their pig somewhere quiet but had to do it in the middle of the road where everybody could see. But Laurence sometimes wondered whether there wasn’t another explanation: right up until the nineteenth century people in these parts could be burnt alive for having Arab or Jewish blood in their families so if you wanted to show everybody you had absolutely no connection with Muslims or Jews, then killing and eating a pig in the middle of the road was a pretty good way to do it.

  The Spanish woke at 6 a.m. and walked or drove out into the campo to their fincas from where the pigs they’d been keeping all year were brought back, either trussed up in the backs of pickup trucks or dragged squealing and kicking into the village, tied by steel strings to stop them running away A little while later the families whose pig was kept behind their house rose, and they too hauled their animals out into the street.

  Waiting for them was a wooden table called a banco and strong men who had been deputed to lift the pig squealing onto it. Once the animal was wrenched onto the table they tried to hold it still, as if they were wrestling a naked, screaming dwarf. Next a man called the matarife, the slaughterman, stepped forward with a sharp knife and killed the pig with a single cut to the throat. Immediately women with bowls rushed forward to catch the blood that gushed from the dying animal’s throat. This blood would later be used in the morcillas served to the Brits in Bar Noche Azul.

  Soon the homes of all the Spanish came to resemble butcher’s shops or the homes of particularly busy serial killers: rooms crammed full of basins of intestines, trays of meat, buckets brimming with blood and fresh, dripping hams hanging from the ceiling beams.

  Engrossed in their work the sight of Stanley alongside the African who sold stuff around the valley, a Victorian gentleman in a top hat and a pretty Victorian lady wearing a crinoline skirt walking purposefully down the main street did not disturb them all that much. They guessed it must be some English holiday practice they hadn’t come across before, that on 7 January you were visited in your home by a couple wearing fancy dress and accompanied by a black man. Still, deeply superstitious as they were, some Spaniards wondered if it was an augury that something odd was going to happen today.

  In Bar Noche Azul the two TVs and the stereo were turned up even higher than usual to try and drown out the screaming of the pigs, the curses of the men and the rushing and sizzling sounds of the blow torches that were used to singe the hairs off the animals’ skin. The British could do nothing to stop the smell of burning flesh and scorched hair from seeping through the tightly closed doors, except to attempt to dull their senses with drink. Every time somebody came in they would shout at them, ‘Shut the door! Shut the door!’

  Fabien and Armando had taken their children to see the slaughter and had left the bar in the care of a disgruntled, inefficient and lazy nephew so the Comunidad Ingles were having difficulty getting enough anaesthetising alcohol down their throats. For once there was not a single Spanish customer in there. Frank, Kirsten, Li Tang, Janet, Miriam, Leonard and Laurence had all arrived by eight thirty Only Nige wasn’t present, she hated the matanza so much that she’d driven to Algeciras the night before and caught the ferry to the Spanish Muslim colony of Melilla.

  Donna had appeared about nine with Mister Roberts walking silently behind her. To Laurence she seemed very wound up. When the disgruntled nephew was too slow in serving her she pushed her way behind the bar, accompanied by the giant boyfriend, and they began rapidly serving everyone with drinks. The nephew thought about interfering but one look at Donna’s companion rapidly changed his mind.

  ‘Look,’ she said to the boy, ‘why don’t you sod off to the matanza? I’m going to pay for everybody’s drinks all day, I’m sure Armando and Fabien won’t mind.’

  For further emphasis Donna produced from her back pocket a wad of wrinkled Euros and waved it under the boy’s nose. The teenager needed no more encouragement to scuttle out of the back door, which Donna locked behind him. Turning back to the British she announced, ‘Right, you bastards, let’s get this party started!’

  There was a momentary hesitation. Laurence rose asking, ‘Donna are you sure you want to be paying for everybody?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ she said. ‘I’m feeling generous. I’ve just come into a bit of money, as you can see, and I’d like to spend it on my friends.’

  The lure of free drink was too strong for them. Laurence said, ‘Well, all right then.’

  And they all put in their orders.

  La Matanza

  A little while later the day was beginning to turn into another of those stop/start DVDs and Laurence was just thinking that somehow this party was a lot like the day when Mister Roberts first appeared and they’d all got drunk after dumping Sergei at the clinic in Durcal, when, seemingly simultaneous with that thought, the door crashed open and framed in the doorway was the oddest little group he’d ever seen. At the front, as if he was somehow their leader, was little Stanley looking all strange and nervous, his fists clenching and unclenching. Behind him was Adey the African merchant and behind him stood a man and a woman, who to Laurence, in his confused, drunken state, looked very similar to two characters he’d designed clothes for years back for a film about the life of the yo
ung wife of Karl Marx that had come out at exactly the same time as another film about the life of the young wife of Karl Marx. Neither film was a success though both had won awards at different film festivals in Venezuela.

  The group advanced until they stood amongst the tables and chairs, halfway between the counter and the door. Detaching himself, Stanley approached the bar and picking up the remote controls which lay on top of the pile of Spanish newspapers switched off the two TVs and the stereo. In the sudden silence it felt as if they were all passengers in a speeding train that had come to an abrupt halt in the middle of the countryside. Then the sounds from outside, the screaming and the sizzling began to filter in and Miriam jumped up shouting, ‘Turn up the sound! Turn up the sound! Turn the sound back on!’ like an overexcited teenager whose music programme had been switched off.

  ‘Be quiet, please, Miriam,’ Adey said without turning his head.

  Frank who became belligerent and racist when he was drunk, rose and weaving towards the group shouted, ‘Hey, mind how you speak to a white woman, boy!’

  With what appeared to be a minimum of effort the woman in the bonnet took hold of him as he passed, and with the flat of her hand pushed him back down causing his wooden chair to shatter into splinters beneath him and his head to bounce off the floor, sending Frank into unconsciousness.

  This got the attention of even the most drink-sozzled; everyone stopped talking and stared at the strange quartet.

  Stanley planted himself in front of his mother and Mister Roberts. ‘These people, they want him back,’ he said.

  Donna appeared self-possessed, though Laurence noticed she kept her hands flat on the sticky bartop and her eyes flickered around the room, from the two Victorians to the gaggle of watching Brits to Mister Roberts and then back to her son.

  ‘Not once, for a minute, did I think you’d do this,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s say I’m doing it for your own good.’

  Donna smiled a sad little smile. ‘That’s what I said to you, wasn’t it? I suppose it’s what everyone says. Funny though, with everybody going around doing good, how the world’s so messed up.’

  Stanley had thought he possessed all kinds of sophisticated arguments which he’d planned to deploy against his mother but found himself simply saying, ‘He was mine. You had no right to take him.’

  Rather than the hysterical shouting he was expecting, Donna, in return, looked directly at him and asked in a calm voice, ‘That’s it? I took your toy away?’

  ‘No, there’s other stuff. I can’t remember right now … It’s all about …’ With some confusion the boy looked at Adey and his two companions but they remained immobile, waiting for a signal from him. For the moment this was his play On the way he had told them that his mother was likely to fly into a rage and they should perhaps let him try and persuade her to give up Mister Roberts without provoking a fight but now her calm had thrown him.

  Laurence, struggling to understand what was going on, recalled when he had first come to live in Spain, when his understanding of the language had been quite patchy He would read a newspaper article in El País or ABC and think that he’d understood it completely, certain that it was about an elephant which had escaped from a zoo in Seville and had trampled on a car, then he would read it again a little later and would be just as convinced that in fact it was about the EU and its policy towards the performing arts. This argument between Donna and Stanley was a lot like that. Constantly shifting. At one moment it seemed to be about some object that Mister Roberts possessed then a few seconds later it appeared to be about the man himself.

  Donna continued, seizing the moment of her son’s uncertainty, ‘After you said you were going to let me down with Mister Roberts, I understood you didn’t have what it takes to help us make our fortune. I’d have to do it all myself. Honestly it’s nothing to be ashamed of Stanley, being weak, but I need strong people around me, around us. I thought back to that day in Granada with the gypsies. There were so many of them and they were so fierce in looking out for each other.’

  Laurence was completely perplexed by this swerve into talk about gypsies; any sense he’d had of what was going on evaporated.

  Donna said, ‘It struck me, that’s what we needed:

  a big bunch of people who’d sacrifice themselves for him, for us. Where do you find people prepared to do that? Then it hit me. I mean once you think of it, it’s obvious, isn’t it Stan? Religion! People when they get religion, even really clever or talented people, will do the most stupid things. Footballers kiss the soil and make crosses on their chests before a game, scientists walk on their knees to Santiago de Compostella, doctors drive their cars into airport departure halls and blow themselves up.

  ‘Now the one thing they put some effort into teaching us at school was religion. They had believers from loads of faiths come in to give us talks: there was an African who worshipped stones, a white witch who worked in telesales during the day I saw one of our guest speakers recently on the telly, broadcasting from a cave in Pakistan.

  ‘All these people believed just on the basis of what they had read or what someone had told them. So I’m thinking: wouldn’t it be much more powerful if somebody could perform real miracles, right in front of people? That’d convert them on the spot. What wouldn’t they do for you then? Get Mister Roberts in front of a mob and he would be able to do things there’d be no explanation for. You might as well call them miracles, because that’s how they’d seem. Then that crowd would become his disciples. Do whatever we told them to without giving it a moment’s thought. Now who would Mister Roberts’ followers be?

  ‘Well, disciples always seem to come from the dispossessed, the poor and the ugly I guess the rich and handsome are pretty satisfied with whatever set-up they’re born into.

  ‘So who’s the dispossessed around here? Not the Spanish anymore, maybe thirty years ago, but not now. The gypsies? Well, there’s a problem with that. So who? Who would it be?’

  As she’d gone on Donna’s delivery had become more impassioned; all those in the bar, though they hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about, were transfixed by her fervour. Sometimes, when Laurence had worked on a film, he could recall witnessing a moment of pure magic. The assistant director would call action on a take which required an actor to complete a long and complex monologue. Slowly, with the camera whirring and the lights gently clicking, everybody on the set gradually got drawn into the majesty of what was happening. Of course, the words themselves played a part, the words cast a spell. But there was also something monumental in the sight of this person struggling to deliver what they had to say, while coping with so many obstacles of memory and self-consciousness. Inevitably, when they finished, the actor would receive a spontaneous round of applause. So it was with Donna’s speech.

  Though he still had no idea what she was going on about, as Donna continued to plead her case a majestic and demented grandeur had crept into what she was saying.

  Laurence reminded himself that in the viewing theatre the next morning, when the previous day’s filming was reviewed, the footage of the speech which had gained the round of applause always now appeared overblown, bombastic and fake and never made it into the final cut of the movie.

  ‘So,’ Donna continued. ‘I reckon the closest we’ve got to Biblical slaves round here are those South Americans who work up in the plasticas. Think about it. They’re forced from their home country they live in terrible conditions, everybody despises them. At first I didn’t know where to find any but then remembered whenever I drove to the coast with Laurence he’d go on and on about the spread of the plasticas.’ She turned to him with a crooked smile. ‘Do you remember, Laurence? You’d say you often saw little groups of them in the Latin American products aisle at Carrefour.

  ‘So that’s where we went yesterday I half expected that they wouldn’t be there, but there was a little clump of them, just like Laurence said, small brown men and women, silently fingering the packets of enchilada
s.

  ‘It’s an odd thing to try and say to people you don’t know, “Hello, this is God, or the son of God or God’s best friend. I want you to follow him and become his disciples.” I just stood there staring at the little group of Incas and they stared back.

  ‘But at least they didn’t move. It was Mister Roberts who kept them there of course, they were so small and he was so big and he has this … well, everybody can feel it … this presence.

  ‘Do you remember? Years ago, when you landed at Malaga airport a little van would pull onto the runway, in front of the plane, with a flashing orange sign on its roof that said, “Sigame, Sigame” — “Follow me, Follow me”. I just said that to them:

  “Follow me”. They sort of consulted together without speaking, looking at each other with their blank faces but then Mister Roberts signalled to them and they trouped off after us. We went through canned goods, household products, the fish counter, sliced meats, until we came to the salad aisle. I stopped them there in front of all the beautiful coloured leaves, crammed into their crinkly packets. “This is the fruit of your labours,” I said. “You picked these salads in temperatures hotter than an oven, the air was full of poison and they paid you nothing.” I indicated Mister Roberts. “And he feels pity for you. But he is also angry because you shouldn’t do this work. You help them strangle the rivers and contaminate the soil. He is here to take you out of slavery Look,” I said, “look at the strength he has.” Then Mister Roberts, without me even telling him to, picked up the whole lettuce section and threw it all the way into dairy products. Then the security guards came running with their batons drawn and when I looked back all the South Americans had legged it.’

  Here Donna lapsed into silence giving no sign that she was ever going to continue until Stanley was forced to ask, ‘So what happened?’