Yet when the thing was explained, the purpose made clear, I saw it unquestioningly, gratefully even, given a distaste for the absurd; the explanation was simple enough.
A stocky man in faded blue trousers, his head on one side, he stood in front of me under the pines. I noticed the sling but didn’t recognize him; it must have been several weeks later because I don’t remember returning that way until Bob started clearing the watercourse in preparation for the dam. There was water still, splashing over a drystone wall and onto the track where it ran to waste. More dripped through the joints in the strips of guttering that carried the flow over the watercourse where the white sand absorbed it. On the low hill, the earth was crumbling shale or perhaps it was earth becoming rock again; the umbrella pines made a fragrant shade. I sat looking at the small farmstead in the hollow below, at the terrace of corn where nothing moved.
His ‘buenas tardes’ startled me from a half sleep in which I had become part of the hot afternoon silence. He seemed to be smiling, but then it didn’t seem so. ‘Resting? It’s cool under these pines.’ He sat on his haunches looking at me. His eyes were cool, they took in my lightweight trousers and drip-dry shirt, and I got up.
‘Excuse me, is this your land?’
‘Mine or anyone else’s, it makes no difference. You’re from the village?’
I nodded. Under the sombrero his face was dark, high-cheekboned. His eyes were blue. ‘I saw you, I remember now, using that thing one afternoon in the corn. I couldn’t make out what you were doing.’
‘Ah!’ He held out the sling as though I were questioning it. ‘Sparrows.’ He must have seen my face because he repeated it.
I laughed. ‘You mean …’
‘Look!’ Out of the sun, in a swoop of black specks, a flock of birds dropped on the corn, the stalks quivering as they picked the ears. He bent for a stone and the sling whirled, exploding with a crack. ‘At this rate there won’t be an ear left.’ Then after a time he added: ‘The crop isn’t worth anything, there hasn’t been any rain.’
‘And that’s the only way to keep the birds off?’
He glanced at me questioningly, I remember. ‘Yes.’ Then he laughed a rolling laugh I came to know, as though the idea had just struck him. ‘They don’t leave you in peace.’
The sun slanted across his face under the hat as we stood looking down at the farmstead, a low, whitewashed cottage with pitched roofs of moss green and red rounded tiles. Below it the terraces, not more than a few feet across, fell away to the bowl where the earth was cross-hatched with a pattern of furrows. I let my eyes linger on the design: a central ridge, darkened by shadow, from which the furrows branched out in parallel curves to another dark line from which their curve was reversed. From here on the hill it was like a geometric composition in earth. The soil looked good.
Average, he said, as long as there was water. He turned towards the mountains as though a cloud might appear. Their colour had changed from vermilion to purple and the sun caught the haze that lay in their folds, silhouetting range upon range against an empty sky. He shrugged his shoulders. They were stooped too, but broader than mine; beside him I always felt gangly. In his heavy hemp sandals the colour of earth, he stood there as though he had grown out of the land.
Below, a figure in black came out of the house and looked through the olives and almonds along the edge of the terrace. When she shouted, it was a harsh, drawn-out cry. Mi-gu-el! His voice answered hers, turning the ‘voy’ into a full-throated cry that carried to the hills. He laughed. ‘Well, it’s time, adió!’ and he picked up the digging hoe he had leant against the tree and moved down the hillside, very light on his feet, as though the rocks and stones were footholds in the earth.
5
There was a knock at the granary door and Dolores’s face appeared. ‘But señor, what are you doing? And in here too, where it is already so hot!’ Her words, her face suggested that she had seen the Resurrection, and as though to confirm it, John got out of his chair.
‘I’m feeling better, thank you,’ he said, but she would have none of it, and insisted on bustling him into the front room where it was cooler.
‘You must be more careful, you’ve been very ill. And now I’ll make you your breakfast.’
As she went into the kitchen she thought, once again, how much he looked like the few Englishmen she’d seen in the picture magazines that occasionally reached the village from Madrid. The blond hair swept back from his forehead, his broad-set blue eyes and straight nose … But the lower half of his face seemed to have come from another mould: his mouth and chin were weakly filled in, as though the mould hadn’t had time to set.
Her observation would not have surprised John, who had often remarked, as though his inner flaw were a visible stigma, on the fleeting aspect of his jaw and chin, and had thought of growing a beard to hide it. But inertia, abetted perhaps by the fact that beards were unfashionable, had kept him from disguising himself.
Idly waiting for her to return, he picked up the book closest to hand and turned the pages. It was one of the many he had read lying in the shade of a eucalyptus or pine – Sartre’s Baudelaire – on his afternoon walks, and his eye now caught a sentence he had underlined: If, contrary to received opinion, men only ever had the life they deserved … Again the phrase brought on vertigo: could it be true? Everything that happened was a choice of the self, an ineluctable destiny spun out of scores, thousands of decisions, small and large? A life made behind one’s back, as it were. Was it true – true of Miguel?
Agitatedly John paced up and down the small room. No – such a view took no account of what had been done to him; on the other hand, it was he, Miguel, who had chosen … Chosen? Did one choose …?
Dolores’s return broke into his chaotic thoughts. Drinking the barley coffee and goat’s milk, spreading the waxy, yellow margarine on the bread, he tried to push these thoughts down: what was the use, one would never know now. Dolores was still hovering, as though afraid to leave him alone.
‘Dolores, did Ana come here one day?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Ana?’
‘Yes, Ana, Miguel’s sister. Before all this happened.’
‘Ah, she passed by one day, I remember, yes. She stopped to talk. She was going to the shop for material for a new dress she was going to make for the feria. Poor thing, she won’t be able to wear it now.’
‘Oh! She didn’t say anything about wanting to see me?’
‘No.’ Dolores bent to take the coffee glass from the table, looking puzzled; but she didn’t ask, why this question? Any more than Miguel had ever questioned a question. At that moment a motorbike’s roar obliterated the morning calm, followed shortly by a determined rap on the door, and Bob walked in without waiting for an answer.
‘Well, John, how’re you feeling? Better by the looks of it. That’s good. I meant to come by yesterday only I was laying out the channel.’ He accepted the coffee Dolores offered him, sat down on the creaky wood-and-rush chair and looked at John. ‘The dam will be finished in a month. I put another six men on yesterday.’
‘More men!’
‘Yes, they’re working piece rates, it’ll come out quicker and cheaper this way.’
‘But Bob!’
‘But what?’
‘I was thinking about Miguel Alarcón. Christ, that’s all he wanted and you said there wasn’t a job.’
‘Oh yes. Well, we hadn’t got María Burgos’s agreement then, had we?’ His eyes met John’s. ‘I heard more about it yesterday, John. It was definitely because the girl jilted him, there’s no doubt at all, everyone says so. He had been acting strangely since she threw him over.’
‘His mother’s bringing charges, did you know?’
‘So rumour has it. You know how people here talk. In fact I hope it’s true. That funeral was scandalous, like something out of the Middle Ages. It’s bad enough throwing the bones out of the cemetery when the relatives can’t pay.’ His eyes narrowed, as they did when he contemplated an inj
ustice, then as suddenly flashed in his broad, sunburnt face. ‘I’d like to see the priest and the mayor sacked, the bastards.’
‘Little hope of that, I should think,’ John answered tartly. ‘Franco’s Spain isn’t exactly a democracy, is it?’ For some reason he regretted his sharpness of tone. Evidently Bob didn’t know what Dolores had told him. I shan’t tell him either, John thought. ‘And the water? You really think that had nothing to do with Miguel’s suicide?’
‘No. They’re used to that sort of thing, they’ve always had droughts.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure, Bob, I want to find out.’
‘Ask the people, they’ll tell you. And even supposing it was the water, you know it can’t happen again, not with the dam.’
‘That doesn’t help him.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, John, you’re becoming obsessed just because you happened to know him.’ His tone was cutting, contemptuous.
‘Maybe. But this wasn’t part of the plan, was it?’
Another sharp answer was forming on Bob’s tongue when he thought better of it. ‘You’ve been ill, John, that’s the trouble. You’ll see things differently when you’re better. Listen, I think I’ll be able to get some of the men started on my house in a couple of weeks. I had an idea the other day for yours, it’ll fit nicely on the site. I’ll show you when you come down.’
Before John could think what to say, Bob was gone, hammering down the stairs; and soon the roar of his motorbike was sending sound waves reverberating down the narrow street.
II. Water
6
10 September
Perhaps Bob is right, perhaps it’s becoming an obsession. If I hadn’t known Miguel, if he hadn’t come up to ask for help, this past would remain a perpetual, indifferent present. But now the present has reordered the past, given it new meanings. Like Suez. That’s what Pavese’s phrase really means. My life has come out of books; the written seems more real than what I live. Bob isn’t like that, I suppose it’s what I admire in him. But now he feels I am obsessively betraying the past, one he thought I shared with him. I can’t help it, I have to know.
Had I been more aware, I see now, there were things I could have understood then, but they seemed to make so little difference: a pitcher of water a day which Dolores fetched, which was in its place under the washstand, I didn’t need more. Water, I remember, to be taken for granted, like the hills and the heat, like the hole in the square we peered down one morning in early June, the men who had gathered at the news making way for the two foreigners to look, as though eyes could tap the source in the mountain and restore the flow. So this was where the water had come from, this hole under the slab I had so often crossed on my way down to see Miguel, and now, as mysteriously, no longer appeared. We crowded round uselessly to look at the echoing tunnel whose rough-hewn dry walls were already warm, the men’s faces worn as though the earth had got under the skin. And then someone said:
‘They’ll deepen the borehole.’
And another: ‘What’s the use, this one has always given out.’
And a third: ‘It’s the señorita’s new borehole that’s taken the water.’
‘Hombre! She hasn’t hit water either.’
All round us their voices came in short, heavy bursts; they didn’t move when they spoke. The sun was full on the square, on their threadbare cotton trousers and shirts, their earth-coloured sombreros. As though simulating a passion to break the dead hours of waiting for work, they repeated the same arguments again and again. There was nothing to be done. Water, or the lack of it, were facts of nature, immutable.
Idly my mind turned to Miguel. He had been right, the water hadn’t lasted, I wasn’t going to see the terraces flowing with water again.
Bob took my arm, leading me clear.
‘Well, that’s that, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That’s the end of the dam.’
‘No. Look, there’s the other borehole, the one that bloke – what’s his name? Miguel, that’s right – told you about. I’ve been out there to look at it. They didn’t hit water as quickly as they expected, and they’ve run out of money. A lot of the owners, including María Burgos, wouldn’t put any more money in, so the drilling has stopped. I’m going to see about it.’ In a few quick strides he was across the square, calling over his shoulder, ‘Stop by tonight,’ and for a moment, watching his broad-shouldered figure disappear, I was moved by his unquenchable spirit. Ah well, he had his reasons, I thought, his land, a house to build …
I turned to go, an unfinished page waiting for me in the granary. Crossing the beaten-earth square, I recalled my arrival three months earlier by taxi, a 1929 Buick that bounced and groaned its way up from the coast and finally steamed to a triumphant halt by these bitter orange trees. In Torre del Mar, on the coast, a few English were living; I’d no desire to be another exile among them and was leaving after a few days. It was early March but the sun already seemed to have the weight of summer.
Cursing the potholes and a foreigner’s whim, the driver’s sole exclamation of pleasure, more to himself than to me, came at the sight of water foaming down the side of the dirt road, where figures in black, bent over their washing, stood up and stared, following the car’s slow ascent, and children and dogs rushed out of a farmhouse. I followed the water, like quicksilver in the sun, seeing the two Guardia Civil in their black tricornes and uniforms the colour of the agave they stood beside, turning their heads slowly in the cloud of dust to watch as the taxi took a curve. And there, opening below, was a bowl of earth, cross-hatched with furrows, where a man stood staring up at the road. Behind was a white farmstead, like all the rest, and a hill with three umbrella pines. It might have been Miguel, though I can’t be sure, I was looking more at the earth than at the man. A half dozen more curves and suddenly, like a vision of Braque, the village appeared – a series of dazzling white cubes and sienna-brown tiles piled at random angles up the sides of a hill that rose steeply to a ruined fortress or church at the top. I gasped. Beyond, range upon range of mountains etched in vermilion and shadowed blues against the afternoon sky.
The taxi plunged into a narrow cobbled street, there was a flow of white and sunlight ricocheting off walls, the sudden glimpse of jasmine in a darkened patio, a figure in black caught in the sun, and then the curving down to the square where pools of shadow lay under the orange trees.
Dazzled by whiteness and a sense of enclosure as people gathered round to stare, I was disconcerted to see an English face push through the crowd. ‘They don’t see many cars up here,’ an unmistakably North London voice said. ‘And even fewer foreigners.’
He picked up my typewriter and led me into the bar. His square-cut features, the chin especially, and the broad nose made me think of a boxer; his eyes were a very pale blue, slightly sharp. He was evidently at home in the bar, and two beers and tapas of some undeterminable meat appeared instantly. He asked where I was from, and said he came from Camden Town, a surveyor turned estate agent who’d done well, so I was led to understand, out of the recent property boom. Camden Town was coming up. ‘But I’ve had enough. A bit of the quiet life is what I need now. I’ve bought some land here, got it pretty cheap, and I’m going to build myself a house.’
And I, thinking the light in the bar was like weathered wood, taking in the faded Manolete poster, the Mono advertisement, the dusty hams hanging from the beams, only half listened. Everything seemed covered in an air of fragrant desuetude and freshness at once. For the first time since leaving London I knew I had chosen right. I looked through the door to where two or three men sat in pyjama tops and others stood in the shade of the wall, saw the white walls broken by barred rectangles and squares, felt the world dropping away in the afternoon sun.
My thoughts were interrupted by his asking if I had somewhere to stay. No, I confessed, taken aback by my lack of prevision. Well, he could fix it. He called the bar owner and began a rapid-fire negotiation. ‘Can you make ten bob a day? Yes. OK. You’ll like this
house, needs a bit of doing up, bit primitive, but you won’t get much better here. Come on …’
And so, thanks to Bob, I found myself in possession of two furnished rooms, the granary, a waterless, seatless lavatory in a bare room large enough to swing several cats, and a kitchen. It was the granary that won my heart, and I quickly moved in a table and chair and set up my typewriter. My happiness at being so rapidly installed was mixed with a measure of irritation at being immediately indebted to Bob.
The next morning Dolores appeared; again, Bob seemed to have made the arrangements, if I understood her correctly. I determined in future to keep to myself; with the start of the promised self-examination, I had plenty to occupy me.
A week or so after my arrival, he dropped in. ‘Haven’t seen you around. What’ve you been doing with yourself?’ I mumbled some excuse. ‘Well, come up for a meal tonight. You know where my place is? Last but one house.’
I had no ready excuse and that evening I found myself sitting on the terrace of the old house he had rented, more spacious, though not better equipped, than mine. I thanked him for finding me Dolores. Bob laughed.
Drought Page 3