The windows were already open, as they had been all night. Down in the green and flowery garden, Juan was watering the pots and the fat waiter – there was a fat one and a thin one – was putting yellow cushions on the white iron chairs and brushing fallen leaves and petals off the white iron tables. On one of the tiny patches of grass, Juan’s dog, a cheerful small mongrel with an absurdly curly tail, sat and scratched. Her clients would like that dog, Frances thought, just as they would like the spilling stone jars of pelargoniums and the plumbago that wound gracefully round the wrought-iron balustrades. All that would be missing, for them, would be deckchairs, in which to read fat novels and fatter biographies and three-day-old copies of the Daily Telegraph, bought in Málaga. She must tell Juan about the deckchairs; she would tell him that they were an English eccentricity, as necessary to a certain type of English person as marmalade for breakfast.
Below the garden, the falling roofs of the village were pale-apricot in the early sun. The washing was, of course, already out, and so were a few cats, and there was that particular sound of Spanish sweeping, bristles on stones, and the echoing sound too, of hoofs in narrow alleys, mules and men going out into the fields for the day. The mules lived, Frances had noticed, in stables that were such integral parts of the houses of Mojas that they were simply like downstairs rooms, and sometimes the family bicycles and motor bikes lived there too in a companionable way. It seemed such a natural life, so uncontrived, so properly concerned with the business of actual living, so rooted in these rolling, reddish hills and mountains with their olive groves and almond orchards and sudden, neat green vegetable plots, as brilliant as billiard tables. But it was poor too, Luis had said, poor and harsh still, and, when Juan had advertised for waiters, thirty-seven boys from local villages had come to Mojas, seeking one of the only two positions on offer.
‘The sun is a deceiver,’ Luis said. ‘It makes people from the north think that life must be easy. You would be amazed how monotonous is the diet of the people of this village.’
It was a sobering thought. So, too, was the memory of the dream with Lizzie in it, running and crying. Frances went back to her rumpled bed, sat on the edge of it, picked up the bedside telephone and asked for an outside line.
‘Frances! Oh Frances, how lovely!’
‘I dreamed about you,’ Frances said. ‘And it was a worrying dream and so I’m ringing. Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ Lizzie said.
‘Lizzie? Really?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘We had to do the end-of-year accounts and you know how they are—’
‘Rob said at Christmas that they mightn’t be very good.’
‘They aren’t.’
‘Seriously not good?’
There was a small, crackling pause.
‘Lizzie?’
‘I think I’ll have to get a job,’ Lizzie said. ‘To help pay the mortgage. It isn’t a big deal. I don’t want to waste expensive telephone time—’
‘A job? But you’ve got a job, in the Gallery—’
‘An outside job. Rob and Jenny can manage the Gallery between them. Rob asked me if I’d like to get a job or I’d like him to, and I chose me and now I feel rather awful, as if I’m taking the easy option.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Yesterday, I suppose. I went to see Juliet. We could ask Dad for a loan but Rob doesn’t want to, and I don’t really.’
‘Can I help?’
‘Frances, you haven’t got any money—’
‘I’ve got some, enough to help a little—’
‘No. You’re sweet, but no. We mustn’t get this out of proportion, heaps of people are in the same boat. We just have to change our lives a bit and that’s the hard part because we didn’t think we’d ever have to. Don’t let’s talk about it any more, it’s so depressing and it’s pouring with rain here. Are you having a lovely time?’
‘I’m afraid I am—’
‘Why are you afraid?’
‘Because I feel a pig, when you aren’t having a lovely time at all.’
‘Frances,’ Lizzie said sternly, ‘I really am not as small-minded as that. What’s it like?’
‘Sunny,’ Frances said. ‘Simple, charming and quite fierce too. Spain seems to be fierce.’
‘Even your Mr Whatsit Moreno?’
‘No,’ Frances said. ‘He isn’t fierce. He’s—’
‘What?’
‘Wonderful,’ Frances said.
‘Frances—’
‘I’m very happy, you know.’
‘Frances, what’s happening?’
‘Nothing’s happening,’ Frances said. ‘Except he takes me to look at things and we talk a lot, and I make arrangements with the manager here, business arrangements.’
‘Frances!’ Lizzie called from wet England. ‘Frances, are you falling for him?’
‘Yes,’ Frances said. ‘And for Spain and this village and—’
‘And what?’
‘For myself. I really like myself here.’
‘You sound quite unhinged!’ Lizzie cried.
‘Well, I’m not. I’m just relaxed and happy.’
‘Please be careful!’
‘Lizzie, I’m thirty-eight, you know.’
‘I do know. I’m sorry. Is it – very sunny?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m so pleased for you, really I am—’
‘I’ll be home at the weekend, or soon after. Then we’ll talk properly. I know thinking about you isn’t much help—’
‘It is. I went to see Juliet because I couldn’t see you.’
‘But you’ve got Rob to talk to—’
There was another tiny pause.
‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Ring me when you get back. Don’t worry about us, we’re fine really. Bless you for ringing, it’s a big help, truly. Bye, Frances.’
Frances heard the tiny click as the telephone receiver went down in Langworth. She should have asked Lizzie what kind of job she was thinking of, she should have asked after Rob who was so prone to anxiety and would be, at the moment, so much in need of Lizzie to reassure him. She should – stop this, Frances said sternly to herself, stop this at once. Lizzie’s misfortunes are not your fault, you stupid, over-emotional, guilt-ridden …
There was a knock at the door. Frances pulled up a slipped nightgown strap.
‘Yes?’
‘Good morning,’ Luis said from the other side of the door. ‘I saw your curtains were open. Are you going to eat breakfast?’
‘You bet.’
‘May we eat it together?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I will go down’, he said, ‘and wait for you.’
‘I’ll be ten minutes.’
‘This is Spain,’ Luis said. ‘Do I have to remind you all the time? Ten minutes, one hour—’
She was laughing. She tipped herself sideways into the heap of sheets and laughed and laughed.
‘Don’t laugh with yourself,’ Luis said. ‘It is so selfish,’ but his voice sounded as if he were laughing too. Then she heard him going down the staircase outside into the little courtyard below and she thought she heard him singing.
‘I want to take you to Mirasol,’ Luis said. ‘The road will be very rough, over the hills—’
‘Why don’t we walk?’
‘Walk? Frances, it is perhaps ten kilometres!’
‘So? Can’t you walk that far? Think how good it would be for those three extra kilos.’
He patted his stomach.
‘I am fond of them now—’
‘Let’s compromise. We’ll take the car part of the way, and walk the rest.’
‘This is a terrible prospect,’ Luis said.
‘You are just lazy.’
‘In my youth, I play beautiful tennis, really beautiful—’
‘That doesn’t interest me at all. I want to walk in these hills and I want you to come with me. After all, I must be able to tell my clients that the walking is good, from firs
t-hand experience. Why are we going to Mirasol, anyway?’
‘There is something to show you.’
‘A church? A castle?’
‘No,’ Luis said. ‘Something simple and sad. Go and get your hat.’
When she came downstairs again with her hat in her hand, Luis and Juan were standing in the tiny white courtyard off the bar, where weeping figs grew and where hotel guests drank glasses of iced sherry before dinner.
‘We have water problems, Juan says. They are the curse of this region. Two of the roof tanks didn’t fill in the night.’ He turned and spoke rapidly to Juan. ‘Frances, we may have to go to Motril later, to shout at the authorities, but we will do that after Mirasol.’
‘Do you want to do that first, the water, I mean?’
‘No,’ Luis said. He smiled at Juan. ‘Juan is the manager here, the water is his problem. It is merely mine to pay for it. Come.’
Out in the little square, Luis’s car, blond with dust, waited under an acacia tree. It was too early for the old men, so the square was empty apart from a hen in one corner, investigating the contents of a litter bin through the wire mesh, and a spindly cat in another, watching the hen with a show of elaborate indifference. The bar was shuttered, so was the post office, a decayed Baroque building with great lumps of plaster moulding missing from its façade, and only the single shop gave faint signs of life, the plastic strips that screened its open doorway half-heartedly against flies twitching in the slight breeze.
Luis drove out of the village to the north-east, first through the maze-like lanes, no wider than passages in a house, with their glimpes of courtyards and flowers and dark workshops and darker interiors, and then through a few more open streets where businessmen from Motril had built themselves raw and ugly modern villas behind fearsome fortified walls and grilles. In front of some lay great holes which might one day become swimming pools, and beside all of them were double garages. It was, Frances thought, almost a Spanish Langworth, with a dangerous philistine fringe of new building threatening the timeless old heart. Beyond the new villas, the village cemetery lay like a little township of its own, secure behind white walls topped with apricot-coloured tiles, and guarded by an imposing chapel and a sentinel host of cypress trees.
‘When the last mayor of Mojas was buried here,’ Luis said, ‘every single person in the village came out to his funeral. He lived in the house that is now the posada and he ruled the village like a tyrant. The house had no sanitation and every morning, four men would carry him out, in his wooden chair, to the fields, and when he had finished, they carried him back again. They feared him and they hated him, and when he died, the village mourned for him, every man and woman and child. They raised a subscription for a statue of him to be put in the village plaza, but the priest would not allow it because he said that the man had been a communist.’
‘What happened to the money?’
‘It vanished,’ Luis said.
‘Do you think the priest took it?’
‘Frances,’ Luis said, smiling. ‘That is a most improper suggestion.’
A track branched off from the road beyond the cemetery, a track of soft, brick-coloured dust, winding among the darker, still brickish stretches of an almond orchard. It ran along the side of a shallow hill, dipped into a small, domesticated valley where an old man and a young man were weeding a meticulous potato patch beside a ruined house, and then rose again through a miniature gorge, walled in red-and-ochre cliffs, to a kind of summit, a knoll tufted with wiry herbs. Beyond the summit lay a spectacular view, a series of sweeping slopes and valleys, threaded with the pale lines of tracks that linked the scattered buildings across the landscape like beads on a necklace. There were no visible roads, no pylons, no plastic-roofed greenhouse developments, no signs that this vast old tract of territory was inhabited by anything other than simple man and beast. In the distance, perhaps three miles away, hanging on a hillside above a wooded gorge, was a significant white village, the bell tower of its church sharp against the rising slope behind it. Luis stopped the car.
‘Mirasol,’ he said.
‘Can we walk now?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We can walk.’
The air outside the car smelled of thyme. It was very quiet, except for the soft little wind and for the sound that Frances had come to love, of a distant herd of goats, all bells and bleating. She put on her hat, the streamers of the scarf fluttering in the wind behind her. Luis watched her.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘for some of your English walking.’
They walked mostly in silence. The track was soft underfoot, taking them gently down into the valley among bright clumps of broom and thorn bushes tangled up with wild sweet peas, sharp mauve-pink among the prickles. Every so often, they passed a little vegetable patch drinking greedily from a sudden spring, lines of tomatoes and beans neatly braced against criss-cross lattices of bamboo, fronds of carrot tops in orderly rows, clumps of potato and courgette. Some of them had a solitary man working in them, his mule tethered beneath a tree, but most of them were empty, as bright and symmetrical as samplers. Once, Frances’s hat was blown off by a capricious gust, and Luis rescued it from a disagreeable tree laden with small leathery leaves and bunches of long leathery pods, and once Luis decreed a rest on a nearby rock, and Frances sat on the turf beside him and told him about Barbara running away to North Africa to be a hippie, which had seemed – and still did seem, in retrospect – like a bid for freedom, but, if so, it was a bid that had come to nothing.
‘It was as if she took the cork out of a bottle when she went away, and then she just put the cork back in when she came home.’
Luis wanted to know if Frances looked like her mother.
‘Not very. She is dark and quite severe-looking. My father is fair. At least, he was, now he is just grey.’
‘I am going grey,’ Luis said.
‘Are you? Do you mind?’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Of course I do.’
The climb up to Mirasol was steeper than it looked. The track became stonier, and darkened by woodland, climbing sharply up the rocky slope in twists and turns. Luis began to complain, but Frances simply climbed ahead of him, in and out of the sun and shadow and, when she reached the top and the junction with the roughly metalled road, sat on a boulder and waited for him.
‘That was terrible,’ he said, emerging, panting.
‘It would have been terrible for the car too,’ Frances said. ‘Think of the suspension.’ She waited for him to get his breath. ‘Tell me about this village.’
She looked along the metalled road. The first few houses of Mirasol clung to the steep slopes either side of it, half-buried or perilously balanced, whitewashed, shuttered, secret.
‘It was Republican,’ Luis said, ‘in the Civil War.’
‘Poor place,’ Frances said. ‘It was a fearful war.’
They began to walk along the road towards the village. It was a lovely road, dipping up and down along the hillside so that the old houses with their balconies and their shutters and their pierced wooden screens so redolent of their Moorish past were scattered up and down the slopes, only accessible by whitewashed steps and paths as narrow and vertical as drainpipes. The inhabitants of Mirasol were plainly green-fingered, because vines and tangles of climbing nasturtium and bougainvillaea swarmed over walls and roofs and every step and terrace had its pot of flowers.
‘But there are no people,’ Frances said, amazed.
‘No. You never see them.’
Frances looked up. The sun hung there, a polished coin in the calm sky. She looked along the swerving street. Everything was picturesque and charming, and also, mysteriously, sinister.
‘Why does it feel like this? Why does it feel so sombre?’
‘Come,’ Luis said. He took her hand.
‘Where are we going? Why have you brought me?’
He turned off the road and began to lead her up a steep flight of steps beside, and then behind, the church. The walls e
ither side of the steps were white and blank and the space between them was so narrow that Luis had to go ahead, pulling Frances behind him like a child. They went up and up, past shut gates and shut doors, past openings to other alleys, past a tiny wired-in courtyard where a yellow-eyed German Shepherd dog watched them go by in silent resignation, and then they came out on to a kind of platform at the top, a rough space above the village and below a cliff of brownish rock. They were both gasping for breath.
‘Look,’ Luis said, panting and pointing. Frances turned. Below them, the roofs and flowers of Mirasol cascaded down into the dark gorge below with dizzying steepness.
‘Did you bring me up here for this? For another view?’
‘No,’ Luis said.
‘What then?’
‘I have something to show you.’
He came beside her and took her elbow in his warm hand.
‘Over here.’
They walked across the stony platform. It hugged the curve of the hill, turning eastwards as the cliff turned.
‘There,’ Luis said, pointing again with his free hand.
Frances looked. Along the cliff wall, at heights varying from four feet to six feet from the ground, were painted crosses, crude, roughly painted crosses, dull-red against the rock, dozens of them, crowded and clustered together, all different sizes.
‘What are they?’
‘Memorials,’ Luis said. ‘This village was Republican. Franco’s Nationalist troops raided the village, and brought every man and boy up here, and shot them, against this wall. The village has never recovered.’
Frances took her arm out of his grasp and walked to the edge of the platform.
‘Are you shocked?’ he said.
‘Of course I am,’ she cried furiously. ‘Shocked and angry. Who wouldn’t be?’
Luis came close to her again.
‘In the thirties, when my father was a young man, Spain was a symbol, for the whole world, of divided beliefs. You were right to call our Civil War fearful, of course it was, it was about hope and despair. You English now have no good word to say for Franco, to you he is a fascist monster. To me he was indeed a despot, and I believe that tyranny is a second-rate ideology, but he was not a monster. After the fall of France, Frances, in the last World War, when I was a child and you were not yet born, he refused to ally himself with Hitler. He saved Spain from the Nazis and he would not let them close the Mediterranean, so the rest of Europe owes something to him for that at least. Of course, this is a terrible place, but it is not evil in its terror, it is tragic.’
A Spanish Lover Page 15