DROUGHT
Drought
RONALD FRASER
First published by Verso 2015
© Estate of Ronald Fraser 2015
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-897-7 (PB)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-898-4 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-899-1 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fraser, Ronald, 1930–2012.
Drought : a novel / Ronald Fraser.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-897-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78168-898-4 (ebk)
1. British – Spain – Fiction. 2. Spain – History – Civil War, 1936–1939 – Fiction. 3. Spain – History – 1939–1975 – Fiction. I. Title.
PR6106.R45446D86 2015
823’.92–dc23
2015006190
Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Drought
Contents
A Note in Time
I. Words
1
2
3
4
5
II. Water
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
III. The Search
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
IV. Miguel
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
A Note in Time
I visited Benalamar this year, in memory of my friend and colleague John Black. In its small way, the trip was a tribute to the influence he had on my life; and (though I have only recently discovered it) a recognition of the influence Benalamar had on his.
I’d read – who hasn’t? – that the surrounding countryside had become one of the sought-after residential tourist areas in this part of Spain. Even so, I was surprised. Driving up from Torre del Mar on the coast, I barely recognized John’s description of the countryside as it was thirty years ago. Large houses hidden by walls and eucalyptus, svelte lawns and swimming pools rapidly glimpsed, an eighteen-hole golf course had turned it into something more like a country club estate. Evidently, John’s fears (and the dreams of his contemporary, Bob, a London property developer) had come true.
Consulting the hand-drawn map that John had left with the manuscript, I looked for Miguel’s farmstead and found it, I think: a foreigner’s low-slung ranch-house stood on the terraces where Miguel’s crops had shrivelled in that summer of drought. The cottage was gone, perhaps never rebuilt.
Round a corner the village suddenly appeared, cubes of white and red-brown tiles, cascading down its hill and I recognized it instantly from what I had read. The square, its bare earth tiled over, appeared as I’d imagined, the fountain now splashing water from its five spouts. Now there were no men standing against the walls waiting for work. In their place a swarm of tourists followed a guide. I discovered John’s house; it had been turned into a souvenir shop. Bob’s, if I located it correctly, was a tourist restaurant. My wife and children would gladly have spent the rest of the holiday in the new four-star hotel with swimming pool, sauna, tennis courts on the outskirts of the village. They fell in love with Benalamar. But I refused to stay more than one night, a night I spent re-reading John’s script.
We both knew he was dying, but we seldom referred to it. He wanted to continue working until the end, to ‘die in harness’ as he once said, and I admired his courage. There was, therefore, no sense of finality when one day he came into my office and said he’d be grateful if I could keep this folder for him. He handed it to me, and I saw it contained a typescript with many emendations in his small handwriting. ‘Of course,’ I said. And as an afterthought: ‘Have you started writing again?’ He laughed. ‘No, it’s an old thing I found the other day. My flat is overflowing with scripts as it is.’
I put the folder in a drawer and, to my shame, forgot about it. I was heavily engaged at the time in negotiations with the American conglomerate that was proposing to buy out our publishing firm; and it was only some months later, after John’s death at the early age of fifty-seven, that I remembered it. I was sorting through his personal papers in the office for his nephew and executor, and the script came to mind. Before handing it over I took it home to read.
John was my oldest friend; we first met on a London newspaper over thirty years ago, and on his return from Spain I helped to get him a job at the publishers where I had found work. Despite our closeness, he rarely, if ever, spoke of his time in Benalamar where he had gone to recuperate from a mysterious illness. The script was all the more interesting when I discovered that it concerned his experiences there.
Reading it, I understood why he preferred not to talk of those times: his involvement in the suicide of the sharecropper, Miguel, was a bitter moment and I think left deep scars, deeper perhaps than he deserved to bear. I also understood why he came to consider indifference (to society, to others) a cardinal sin and became a committed socialist. The roots lay in that summer in Benalamar.
Of almost as great fascination to me was the picture he drew of a village living in a pre-modern era; or perhaps more accurately, of Andalusian rural life on the cusp of – and resisting – modernization. A modernization which, as I think he only partly foresaw, was a new form of colonization: mass tourism. It was hard to believe that the events he witnessed, and to some extent participated in, should have happened only thirty years ago.
He was then twenty-seven, and his script bears the marks of his youth. I recognize myself in much of what he writes: we were a great deal more ingenuous (and also more deferential) than the young of today. There have been many welcome changes since then. A young man today would surely not be content to attempt a straightforward reconstruction of another’s life, as John tried to do with Miguel: he would have Lacan at his elbow; or Paul Auster looking over his shoulder. There would be a contemporaneous sense of the uncertainties of the age. But (and I feel the need to insist) John’s narrative, in its endeavour to comprehend and explain Miguel’s life, would have struck his own contemporaries as a familiar enterprise rooted in a Sartrean optimism that the unknown, the uncertain can be explained (although in this case at an imaginary level).
It is not my place to comment further; I am surely not my friend’s best judge. But there is one part of the story that is history, and its impact, I fear, may be insufficiently understood by a new generation of readers from John’s brief comments. I’m referring to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, in collusion with Israel, in 1956 after Nasser, the Egyptian leader, nationalized the Suez Canal. Though Britain was still involved in colonial wars, it was the first outright British invasion of a sovereign state since the end of the second world wa
r. In that period of decolonization, Britain had suddenly returned – in a move planned secretly and almost alone by Eden, the Tory prime minister, who believed Nasser was another Hitler – to its imperial, gunboat past.
For once, the Labour Party stood firm in opposition, and found many people like John and me, unquantifiable liberals, supporting it. John, who was then a junior leader writer on the paper, was thrust into writing editorials supporting the invasion – having to deputize for his senior, who was ill – and his reaction was one of impotent rage. My anger led me to resign. It was the only time I can recall that we reacted in very different ways. Suez, and the almost contemporaneous crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who only three years before had uttered his (partial) indictment of Stalin’s excesses, was the sharp awakening for many of my generation, as the Vietnam war in the late sixties was for a future generation. West and East seemed equally contemptible in our eyes.
The following morning, helped by an amiable town hall official who spoke excellent English, I succeeded in locating Dolores. She is seventy now and lives in the house where she lived thirty years ago. It took her a moment to recall John’s name. But then it returned:
‘Ah, Sr John! Yes! And you are his friend!’ She greeted me warmly. ‘How is he? He wouldn’t recognize the village today.’ Everything was so much better now, she went on expansively, as she showed me round her house and its renovated interior. Among the many other things – three-piece suite and TV set in the small downstairs room – the house had running water from the village mains.
‘And now everyone has work building, the land is barely farmed any more, there ’s no need to irrigate …’ The return of democracy after Franco’s death had brought a socialist town hall which was working for the people. And tourism was thriving.
I continued to put off the moment I knew had to come and asked about some of the people who figured in John’s time here: the señorita, María Burgos, whose actions were largely responsible for what happened that summer, died fifteen years ago. Her heirs sold all her land, including El Mayorazgo, to foreigners. Ana married a mechanic and lived on the coast. Dolores herself had worked as a cook in one of the new foreigners’ homes until she retired. No one had heard of Bob for years; he ’d built a few houses and one day disappeared.
When I told her about John she threw up her hands and tears came to her eyes. ‘So young, so young!’ Sitting down, she dabbed at her cheeks. Had it been the old illness? No, I said, he’d recovered from that. ‘Ay! Poor man. It’s the best who go first.’
She recalled some of her memories and I was touched by her evident affection for him. I told her all that there was to tell of John’s life after she’d known him, and we left each other deeply moved.
I walked through the village until I came to where John’s map indicated a threshing floor and the start of the track down to El Mayorazgo. I found myself standing on the edge of a car park searching for a faint trace between new houses; and far down, looking for a landmark, I found what I took to be the dam on which Bob had gambled everything, a gash in the ravine, abandoned and empty, it seemed. A jagged line of rock showed where, probably, it had been repaired after the final catastrophe. Above it, the houses he had evidently built as part of his development were small, almost insignificant beside the latest accretions. Like many a pioneer, he seemed not to have benefited from his dreams; he had been before his time and seemed to have vanished in time like so much else.
Then I thought I could just make out a part of the track cutting its way down the side of the rock to the watercourse and through the hills to El Mayorazgo. Here John had so often stood before beginning the steep walk down; or turned round, after the long climb back, to look at the rounded hills below. Amidst the tourist cars, I tried to imagine myself in his place at that moment when his story begins.
David Symmons
London, 1989
I. Words
1
And then, on the mule track far below, the coffin appeared.
‘Ay! They’re bringing him up now.’
Borne on indistinguishable shoulders, the coffin was no more than a wavering smudge as it emerged into the sunlight on this side of the hills. Behind it a few small figures walked.
‘They’ve stopped, they’re changing shoulders now.’
The foreigner stared. In the shade of the rock, where the cortege had halted, he saw only an uncertain movement, a fusion of figures. Sweat condensed on his back.
‘There’s the carob tree, señor, by the watercourse.’ Gnarled fingers stabbed down towards the earth. ‘That’s where they found him.’
‘I know.’
He turned his back on the old man to mourn in silence this unnecessary death and his part in it; but the sight of the coffin brought anger instead. He drew his eyes away. In the dry watercourse, beyond the olives on Bob’s land, the dam’s empty grey wall cut a gash in the hills. The sky was drained, the earth parched. When he looked again, the coffin was coming out of the shade and starting the long ascent.
The sharecropper’s voice came at him again:
‘They’ll cut that tree down. The señorita has given permission, they say. Poor man, after what she did to him.’
‘The water,’ the foreigner mumbled. ‘He wanted work …’
The old man didn’t hear. ‘She forced him to go back on the deal, break his word.’ He swore. ‘Who’d sharecrop for her?’
‘There’s plenty would,’ said the voice of another who had approached unheard. ‘Now Miguel’s gone, you’ll see. El Mayorazgo is her best farm.’
‘Be that as it may, she’ll break any sharecropper who takes it on.’
They looked down. The coffin swayed on the mule track, the men’s shoulders moving together under the weight, their sandals kicking up dust. At each turn of the traverse they struggled to bring the coffin round.
‘They say it had nothing to do with the deal,’ the second man said suddenly. ‘It was because his betrothed broke off their engagement.’
‘Ech! What man kills himself for a woman!’ the old man replied.
The foreigner started to say something, but the others were arguing and paid no heed. Shoulders straining, the coffin was making its painful way up the last traverse. No words came to his mind, not even a whispered farewell. He turned to go, the incipient fever misting his vision, and staggered a few steps before recovering sufficiently to walk down the whitewashed street to the square. Recognizing the symptoms, he leant against the fountain’s stone lip where the water once flowed, and felt reality fall away. Before he knew it, Bob was beside him, leading him by the arm into the bar and putting a brandy in front of him.
‘You look as if you need it. What’s wrong, John?’
He felt the liquid burning his stomach, knowing it was the worst thing he could take, and managed a smile.
‘It’s the Suez sickness …’
Bob looked at him, wondering if this was one of those newspaper jokes. John was the Oxbridge type he normally didn’t have time for unless he was a client. A proper illness ought to have a proper name. But there wasn’t any doubt he was ill, he’d seen him through the bar window clinging to the fountain as though he was about to fall.
‘It’s probably the sun. You ought to wear a hat … Anyway, I’ve got a bit of good news that’ll cheer you up. María Burgos has agreed a deal for the channel across her land. We’ll get the water to the dam in a couple of weeks. The worst’s over now. You’ll see, we’ll put this place on the map.’
‘Ah!’ Behind Bob’s head the faded advertisement turned grey, the monkey on the bottle, ANIS DEL MONO, and above, hanging from the beams, the legs of ham like dusty stones. ‘Bob, haven’t you heard? About Miguel Alarcón?’
‘Who? Oh, the man who committed suicide. Yes, I heard, terrible thing.’
‘He was the one I told you about. He wanted work on the dam.’
‘That’s who it was. I remember. Still, he wouldn’t have killed himself over that; there
are plenty of people who need work here. Ah, there’s Salvador.’
The foreman’s deeply lined face appeared at the bar. Behind him were the half dozen men working on the dam. Bob said he had been down to the site and found no one there. The foreman’s hemp sandals stirred on the tiles.
‘Sí, señor Bob, it’s the custom for a funeral. Miguel Alarcón was buried this afternoon.’
‘Buried?’ sniggered one of the workmen.
Bob asked if he knew why he had killed himself.
‘They say María Burgos, his landlord, made Miguel break off a deal to sell a calf to a neighbour. Because of the drought he couldn’t grow enough fodder to keep it. To break a deal, señor, is to betray your word as a man …’
‘No, it was the girl, I tell you,’ broke in the tall workman.
‘Qué va, hombre! Miguel wasn’t the sort …’
The voices circled repetitively, fused, going nowhere. More men pushed into the bar. Beyond them, in the square, the simpleton’s dark profiled face and white raincoat paced back and forth in front of a crowd of men who suddenly fell back before a black-clothed figure: eyes fixed as always, Bible held close to his chest, his narrow strides carried him past as though the men didn’t exist. Instead of turning as usual to pace back again, he vanished into his house, the studded door slamming behind him.
‘He knows no shame.’
The men’s voices were sullen, anonymous now. ‘He made them take the back streets to the cemetery. The mayor wouldn’t let the coffin through. They pulled stones out to make a hole in the wall to push through … Ay! They buried him like a dog …’
It was then that John’s head seemed to empty out and his legs gave way. He knew what was about to happen and clutched at the bar.
2
Dolores gave a little cry and ran forward. With Bob’s help she laid him on the iron bedstead; his eyes were closed and his face drained of colour. The coldness of his limbs and his whispered, insistent refusal of a doctor surprised her. What if he died on her hands? His hoarse reassurances did little to calm her: it had happened before, everything would be all right. Looking at him, she wasn’t so sure.
Drought Page 1