* *
I consulted with Sister Mercedes the next morning. ‘She is very bad, I’m afraid. I think it is time to send for the priest.’
He came, the priest from Santa Maria de la Asunción, across the plaza, bearing the Eucharist, an acolyte walking before him ringing a little bell to inform passers-by that the Sacrament was being carried. Some, the older ones, fell on their knees. Many ignored it. Maria Luisa received him at the open door of the house with a lighted candle. We gave him a few moments alone with the sick woman, in case there should be a chance for confession, but she did not speak. Then we knelt as she was anointed, and received the Sacrament. During this time Don Paulo remained in the sitting-room. I found him there, kneeling, still after the priest had gone.
‘I try to pray, and my words are dry, like barren earth.’
VI
No one could say afterwards quite how it had started, or why. The Plaza de Asturias was bounded by a district where some of the poor of Jerez lived, those whose roosters and hens challenged the bells of the city’s churches in the mornings. They lived in crumbling buildings too closely huddled together, they carried their water up long flights of stairs, their children cried in the night. There was never enough work, except at harvest time, and then, they said, the wages were too low. It was a time when such complaints were becoming vocal. At nights the cantinas sounded to the rumble of discontent. They talked much, Andy told me, of the landowners and of the Church, which was the greatest landowner of all. It may have started with an argument or a piece of rhetoric over a glass of wine. It ended and that was all we knew, with a march whose target was the church of Santa Maria de la Asunción, across the plaza from my mother’s house.
We heard the low murmur of their sound from the back rooms of the house, that frightening sound of a mob that has no definition. Andy appeared at once to report to us, coming only to the door of the nursery where Maria Luisa and I were cooking our meal. Everyone in the house had instructions to come no closer to us than that. ‘There’s some sort of disturbance, Miss Charlie. Speeches and such on the church steps. People throwing stones at the church door. Sounds to me as if a couple of them out there would like to burn it.’
‘Dear God,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘Has it come here?’ We all knew what she referred to. Fresh in the minds of all of us were the stories of convent-burnings all over Spain, the rising vocal scream of anti-clericalism that came from a people who thought the Church too oppressive and too rich, saw the Church as guarding the long-established rights of the few over the many. But that it should have come here, to Jerez, seemed unthinkable. All that, we believed, was for other places, big industrial cities where the people went on strike for more money and better conditions. But what did the vineyards have to do with the factories of Barcelona?
‘The doors are closed, Andy? ‒ and all the shutters?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, Miss Charlie. But just say your prayers that they don’t turn around and charge this way. Those old doors would give if a fly pushed them, and so would the shutters. Wouldn’t say any of that grillework on the windows would stand much handling, either. So rusty it’d come away in your hand.’
‘Andy, you know what you have to do. You can get out through the gate at the back of the stables.’ It was the gate where Carlos had once come in. ‘Take everyone. Manuela, the children, Serafina, Paco. Make them all go. They should go to Don Luis. At once. Don’t wait to pack anything. If you go one at a time you’ll mix with the crowd. They won’t notice.’
‘And leave you here Miss Charlie? I’ll not do that! Manuela and the family will go. You both could go if you wanted to.’ Then he shrugged as he read the expression on my face. ‘I can see you won’t leave her.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the room where the sick woman lay ‘Well ‒ I’ll get everyone off, and do what I can to wedge a few braces against the front doors ‒ not that that’ll do much good.’ He directed another grim and exasperated stare towards the sick-room. ‘And it’s not the best of all times to be having a nun in the house, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘I do mind, Andy. She’s an old woman, and she’s never harmed anyone in her life. And perhaps we could stand a few of her prayers.’
He indicated with a gesture that it was none of his responsibility, even though he made it his business. ‘We shall at least have one man with us,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘But we have a greater weapon. If it gets out of hand, and they start pushing their way in here, just shout one word ‒ tifoidea ‒ typhoid! That will clear them quicker than cannon.’ She marched off to warn Sister Mercedes, who took the news with a nod, and her usual unshakable calm, as if she had this and much more still to expect from life.
‘God’s will,’ she said. I stood in the doorway as she tried to take the temperature of the delirious woman in the bed. ‘For this one,’ she added, ‘God’s will must soon be known. She is worse. When that godless rabble outside has cleared, we must send for Dr Ramírez. Not that he can do much now. But at least we must be sure all has been done …’
I lighted a candle and went through to the disused part of the house that overlooked the square. When I reached one of the front upstairs rooms, I snuffed the candle, and with some difficulty because of its stiffness, slightly opened one of the shutters.
It wasn’t so terrible as it had sounded. A few hundred people, some with torchlights burning, had gathered in the plaza. But it was a small plaza, and the size of the crowd seemed intimidating. I became aware of Andy’s worry when I realised once more that in size the façade of the house just about equalled that of the church opposite. Although the place was shabby and run-down, and belonged to a woman who was known to be almost perpetually in debt, if the mob turned away through fear from the sacrilege of burning the church, this house was the next natural target. After all, debts or not, it represented the inequality of wealth and poverty in Andalucia, and through all of Spain. I listened to the chant that had become a distinguishable word. ‘Tierra!’ Land! The peasant’s eternal cry. They had no land; they wanted land. All their lives they and all the generations they could remember had worked the land of others, or they had toiled at something they could never own. Many times before they had demanded reform and reform had not come. Under the dictator Primo de Rivera reform had been promised, but there had been no action. In this house which was falling down around me, I thought of what riches my mother must seem to have, even though she was poor. But she owned this house, had owned a vineyard, had a stud in the country. Her daughter was married to a rich man. Her grandchildren were godchildren of one of the richest women in Spain. I looked at those burning torches, and fear gripped me.
It was over quite soon. The Civil Guard had been called. They came in lorries and on horse. It needed so few of them to disperse the crowd. A few shots fired in the air. Some people falling, the others fleeing down the side-streets that led to the barrio. There were shouts, orders, screams. The flaring torchlights were suddenly gone. I saw one fly through the air towards the street doors of the house, but it fell far short of its target ‒ if in fact the house had ever been the target. The people were running, running. They had no weapons to turn and fight. The horses of the Civil Guard were reined in. The plaza was suddenly almost deserted. A few rapid commands. The Guard made no attempt to pursue the people into the side-streets. They would stay just long enough to prevent them reassembling, to give a show of guarding the church. It had been nothing much after all. Just a little civil disturbance, of the kind that was taking place all over Spain these days ‒ indeed, all over the world. This one had begun quickly, and ended quickly. I could imagine the talk there would be tomorrow through the town, and what the newspapers would say. Just a little firmness was necessary and the people would do as they were told. In time there would be reform ‒ in time, but not too quickly. They would say chaos came from too much haste.
But I had seen my first glimpse of hate and need, had heard the cry of anger. The crowd had been hungry for more than food. I shivered in th
e warm night air.
The Civil Guard had regrouped. I listened to the sound of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles. Those who had come by the lorries were gathering around them again. I saw the cigarettes come out, and the flare of the matches. And of those few who had fallen before the swift rush of the Guard, some had not risen. I saw four dark, crumpled shapes lying there below me, shapes indistinguishable as men or women in the dim light. The flaring torch that had been thrown towards the house had been extinguished. The plaza was now almost totally in darkness. I closed the shutter, and fumbled my way back through the dark corridors of the house.
* *
We had been expecting the commander of the Guard to come to the house; he would be enquiring if all was well. I told Andy to open when we heard the old bell clanging in the courtyard. I stood back a little as Andy opened up, prepared to warn the man that he or his men should not come closer. But when Andy slowly opened the big door it was not just the commander who stood there. Behind him four of his men were grouped, their rifles slung over their shoulders, and between them they bore the limp form of a man. The commander recognised me as I moved out into the light. ‘Doña Carlota … a terrible misfortune …’
They shuffled forward. ‘He must have been caught here when the disturbance began. One of the anarchists, the anti-Christs, must have recognised him. They are like that ‒ animals!’
The commander was admitting nothing. It could as easily have been a blow from one of his own men’s truncheons as from the clubs some in the crowd had carried. Whichever it was, it had been a blow of tremendous power. Luis’s skull had cracked under it, and he must have died very quickly, for there was little blood.
They moved forward into the courtyard and laid him on the stone bench surrounding the fountain, straightening his dusty clothes, one of them even crossing his arms across his breast. There was no talk of a doctor. They were very sure he was dead.
Then one of them, awkwardly, proffered a mangled bunch of flowers. ‘I found this by his side. My sympathy, señora. He was a much respected gentleman.’
I looked at the bruised blossoms Luis had come to the Plaza de Asturias to give me.
* *
Sister Mercedes performed the task which was so often hers, of washing him and laying him out. The terrible wound that had splintered his skull, she covered with a large linen square tied about his head. It gave him a faintly rakish look, a look he had never had in life. I sat beside him, and took his cold hand in mine, stunned, unbelieving. When Maria Luisa tried to take away the flowers I held, I resisted her. ‘Leave them. They were his last gift.’
* *
I had left the windows of the room open where he lay, and the false dawn had come, that silent time before even the first cock of the barrio had begun to crow, when Sister Mercedes came to tell me that the lady, her patient, had died.
VII
There were two burials to attend. Luis’s coffin was followed by half of Jerez after a solemn Requiem Mass had been sung in the Collegiate church. The Civil Guard turned out to honour him. There were delegations from Seville, from all the sherry shippers, from every convent and religious order in the area, because he had been generous with his help. Four of Jerez’s most beautiful black-plumed horses pulled the hearse. I could never forget how brightly the sun shone on the open carriages laden with flowers which had been sent. Along the route of the cortège the shops and cantinas closed. People jostled for space on the balconies above.
I lost Luis among all the ceremony of mourning that followed him. Don Paulo rode in the carriage with me, but I was still alone.
* *
The other Requiem Mass had been offered at the church of Santa Maria de la Asunción across the plaza from my mother’s house. It was very early in the morning, and only the few old women with their black dresses and shawls who regularly attended early Mass were there. There was only one carriage to carry Don Paulo, Maria Luisa and myself. There was one wreath. I followed the body of my grandfather’s wife to her grave with bitterness. Indirectly she had cost the life of Luis, and I found it hard to forgive. But she had been my grandfather’s wife, and must be laid to rest with dignity.
Anyone who was up early that morning in the town and who might have wondered about the identity and importance of the person who was followed by the Marques de Santander and the widow of Don Luis would not have their curiosity satisfied. Later, when a stone was erected to mark her grave the words told nothing. Una Dama Desconocida. An Unknown Lady. Even in death Don Paulo could not acknowledge his daughter, nor I the wife of my grandfather.
Chapter Three
I went through all the motions of mourning that are demanded in Spain, but they meant nothing because Luis himself was not there to know them. I found myself talking to him at times, beginning to discuss something, and turning, almost in anger, to realise that he was missing. There was a great hollow at the centre of my life, and almost the worst hurt was realising that I had probably not managed to make him understand how important he had been to me. Perhaps I had not fully known it myself, and I cursed myself. ‘I should have made him know,’ I said to myself, ‘but I didn’t realise …’ I kept thinking of that last bunch of flowers. I looked at myself fully in the mirror one day after weeks of not noticing how I looked. I saw a thin woman, with gaunt hollows at her cheeks. ‘A bag of dried old bones rattling together with nothing soft at the centre,’ I said to the woman in the mirror. ‘You must have loved him, Charlie. Not the way you loved Richard ‒ but you did love him. I wonder if he ever knew. Too late to tell him now. No way to show it …’ I turned away from the stranger in the mirror. No point in looking there any longer. The face of Luis would not appear in it behind me.
I went to the bodega often, but never to the sala de degustación ‒ that would have been too painful, and would have been unseemly in a newly-widowed woman. But I found there some of the peace that had deserted me with Luis’s death. Very often Don Paulo fell into step with me. We discussed the business of the bodega, but little else. The talk had little meaning. We were simply companions to each other, reaching out in the only way we knew. ‘Most women go to church to pray,’ Don Paulo said. ‘You come here.’
‘What should I pray for?’ I demanded of him. ‘That Luis come back? We know that cannot be. That he is in Paradise? That must be certain. He was a good man. What should I pray for ‒ tell me? For resignation? If I am resigned, then I stop mourning him. I will never stop mourning him. God, they say, never gives anything one asks for oneself …’
‘Come and have a copita,’ he answered roughly. ‘In my office.’ It was his way of offering sympathy, or was it, perhaps, a vain attempt to fill the gap? In his office we would drink a copita together, talk about the children, the state of the vines, the prospects for the harvest. We talked of politics ‒ distant politics, the rumble we now heard through Spain; we talked of the Church, in which Don Paulo still believed, but more as a political force than a spiritual one, and we talked of Communism, which he abominated. We talked of nothing, and everything. Sometimes I looked with amazement at the old man seated across from me and wondered if it were possible that, finally, we were growing to be friends.
But through bodega gossip, the town knew of my walking along the aisles between the butts. They knew and they talked. ‘It’s a pity, Carlota,’ Maria Luisa said, ‘that you cannot do your walking in your own garden at home. That anyone could understand. But at the bodega …? You know they are saying again that all the Blodmores are a little crazy.’
‘Let them say. I’ll walk where I choose. I like the bodega. It calms me to walk there.’
She shrugged. ‘Well so long as it is only Don Paulo you walk with. Oh, yes, everyone knows that too. You walk with your father-in-law, and talk. That’s all right. When the year of mourning is up, just watch for the other men who will want to do the walking with you.’
‘Aren’t two marriages enough, Maria Luisa? And don’t you think they might not only be saying that all the Blodmores are
a little mad, but also that they are more than just a little unlucky?’
‘I never heard that the thought of perhaps a little ill luck trailing a woman ever kept off the men. Not when there is some money involved. The thought of money dissolves all sorts of fears, querida. They will be looking at you, and thinking that Luis left you well off. Even the young ones ‒ the ones who haven’t been married yet. You don’t have to settle for a widower with children, querida. You could be attractive again, if you put a little flesh on your bones. If you would learn to smile again ‒ that is, when the proper time comes. After all, you’re only thirty-four. Not old …’
‘Would you settle for just any man in order to be married?’ I snapped at her.
She shrugged. ‘Well, since no one ever asked me, nor there ever seemed the remotest possibility of being asked, I can’t answer.’ Then she paused and added slowly, ‘Perhaps I have become too content in my niche with your family, querida. Perhaps I am so long past hope that I forget what it is. But no …! If I were you, I wouldn’t settle for just any man.’ She nodded. ‘You are right, Carlota. You do not have to settle for any man who offers, or barter yourself away …’
I ended the conversation because I was in danger of saying too much. There was only one man I would settle for, and he I could not have. There was a finality about it. I did not even answer the letter of sympathy, written with such excruciating care that the pain showed through the conventional words, which Richard Blodmore wrote me. We seemed further apart than ever. I had two more children, and the memory of a husband I had loved, in my own fashion. Thirty-four, Maria Luisa had reminded me. It seemed young, and yet it was old. So much passion burned up with Carlos, so much tenderness expended with Luis, and the love that had belonged to Richard Blodmore all these years largely wasted, like the river in spate which rushes to the sea, leaving the dry land about it parched.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 46