Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  ‘Is there a lot left?’ I heard Miguel ask.

  ‘A hundred metres at least, cousin,’ replied the taller of the two; ‘there’s rock before the marble.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what I thought.’

  With a side-glance at me, the miner remarked to Miguel that it needed a pneumatic drill: by hand they were advancing only a couple of metres a day. I made a mental note to tell Bob. But were they sure of water? They stared at my ignorance.

  ‘Of course. The water runs in the marble.’ Miguel’s cousin got to his feet to show me where the borehole should have been, had the mayor not insisted on a change of plan to suit his own purposes. He was digging a well that hadn’t struck water and was now tunnelling out from the shaft towards the marble vein. The new borehole was a threat. The change he ordered had been the cause of delay, unforeseen expense and the eventual collapse of the initial project. ‘If it weren’t for Sr Bob we wouldn’t be working now … We’ll strike water here; it’s just harder work.’

  Tunnelling from a well was against the law. ‘Can’t anyone do anything about it?’ I found myself asking.

  ‘Hombre!’ the tall miner exclaimed. I saw Miguel looking away as though dissociating himself from the conversation; the other miner was crumbling earth in his fingers.

  ‘Well?’

  The miner shrugged. A small village, he proffered, and I saw the doubt in his eyes. I glanced at Miguel, determined to impress him: ‘There’s the law, isn’t there?’

  The miner’s mouth opened on yellowing teeth and he spat. ‘How would the rich get fat if they didn’t eat what belongs to others?’ he said, pressing thumb and middle finger together in a gesture of carrying food to his mouth. The other laughed, but Miguel still looked at the ground.

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘Look,’ the miner’s exclamation pressed against me, ‘tomorrow you need a permit, a bit of paper, a favour – work, and who do you go to? Nothing, no more than a day’s work, a signature perhaps. What does it cost?’ He turned to Miguel questioningly as though to ask if I understood.

  ‘Yes,’ Miguel frowned.

  The second miner grinned. ‘That’s how it is. A small village like this, you keep quiet about what you know.’

  ‘Look at his señorita,’ Miguel’s cousin went on. ‘She wouldn’t pay her share when they ran into difficulties digging this borehole.’

  ‘He knows, Manolo, he knows,’ Miguel muttered irritably.

  ‘Well then, cousin, we’ll show her when we hit water, eh?’

  ‘It won’t be for me,’ he replied in the same voice.

  ‘Vaya, Miguel!’ He looked shocked. ‘Don’t lose heart.’ The miners exchanged glances: they too must have heard about the señorita’s plans to refuse to allow a channel across her land.

  Quickly, to redress the balance, I exclaimed: ‘There’ll be water from the dam whatever the cost,’ looking at Miguel, trying to catch his eye.

  ‘There you are, cousin,’ the miner laughed. ‘Let the foreigners take over and we’ll work for them. People like Sr Bob …’

  I felt a flow of confidence, ridiculous now, as I thought of everything Bob had achieved since that day by the empty hole in the square: days spent getting the farmers together, hours of bargaining in the back room of the bar, trips to Granada for the necessary permission. Though I had done nothing, the miners’ regard for him seemed to extend to me.

  ‘And they’ll buy the land at a good price, like him,’ said the other. ‘Thirty pesetas a square metre. At that you’d be rich, Miguelito, eh?’

  ‘It’s not mine to sell. If it were …,’ and that quizzical expression hung on his face.

  ‘But if she sells you’ll get a share, it’s the law. Not that you need it, you’ve got plenty put by.’

  ‘Who, me? Me? Not a button, look!’ Miguel made as if to turn out his pockets, obviously putting on an act that, expected or not, made the miners guffaw. A faint smile came to his lips.

  Ah-ha shouted the men, stamping their boots, not in his pocket, ah no, but in the savings bank. They roared so hard I didn’t catch the joke, which seemed to concern the land in some way. Then his cousin nudged me: ‘Miguel’s a rich man, did you know that?’ and I saw Miguel’s face caught in a stare that seemed to be signalling something I didn’t understand. His cousin turned out his pocket. ‘Full – full of holes,’ he quipped. ‘Qué me cago en diez, one of these days the lottery will turn up.’

  ‘And in a couple of months you’d be back where you are now,’ said the other. ‘The señorita keeps hers, she knows the trick. Buy some land, then you’ll eat: tomatoes and cabbage like that skinflint.’

  ‘Like her? You call that a life. They should have put her out of her misery when they had the chance.’ I saw Miguel’s face darken, and the miner saw too. ‘Come, cousin, it’s only a joke. That was the war, now we’re all at peace, eh?’

  Then the other turned to Miguel, saying he too had worked in her olive mill during the hunger years, he must remember. ‘Half the minimum wage and never a bonus, eighteen hours a day, so she could get the oil out on the black market at night.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The impatience returned to Miguel’s voice, as though he had heard it before.

  ‘Come on,’ said the cousin. The smoke had cleared. He tapped Miguel on the shoulder. ‘Come and have a look.’ He nodded to the tunnel.

  ‘No, cousin, no …’

  ‘Frightened then?’

  ‘Ugh! Underground – no.’

  ‘We’ll all be underground soon enough as it is, eh?’ Manolo laughed. ‘Ah, don’t worry, cousin, she’ll change her mind when she sees the stream we’re going to strike.’

  ‘If God wills. Adió.’ The intonation sounded like Ana’s.

  ‘If God wills or not,’ said the other from the tunnel, but Miguel appeared not to hear.

  I left him more cheerful than when we had come. The weight seemed to have lifted, at least so it appeared; but I never asked him to go to the borehole again, so I can’t have been sure, can’t have been, no. Alone I returned several times …

  12

  15 September

  They knew it would take a month of tunnelling yet, even with the pneumatic drill that Bob got from somewhere. Though he hid it under his usual display of confidence, I could see his concern. He was in deeper than he’d bargained for when he started the dam; striking water was going to cost a lot more than he’d planned. Perhaps that was why, when we went one night to see María Burgos, he was less than his normal self. I had no such excuse.

  I went in expecting a tyrant and found a small, pale, rather desiccated woman whom life seemed to have cheated, in the gloomy parlour behind the brass-studded door, which had opened a crack to show a wrinkled face I imagined was hers and shut with a slam to leave us waiting outside. Bob and I exchanged glances. But the face was a servant’s and when María Burgos appeared in the parlour to which we’d been admitted finally, she contrasted with the sullen face that had refused us entry at first.

  We sat on the uncomfortable upright chairs. Bob explained.

  ‘Ah yes, water,’ she said, sounding rather helpless, ‘the water.’ She breathed a deep sigh. ‘The dam, yes,’ she said, ‘yes, of course …’ and a look of weary anticipation came on her face; it was as though all the world came asking favours of her which, with a faint smile, she granted as best she could. She, a solitary woman in a world of men, she who had hoped the borehole could be dug, who had done what she could, but the farmers …

  Bob nodded appreciatively, knowing the mutual distrust, the unwillingness to pay, the quarrels he had pacified only by taking on the burden himself, by staking a large sum. A burden she, as a woman, had wearied of, deciding on a well with her cousin, the mayor, from which they hoped for water soon. ‘With the cost, with the cost of everything nowadays, it didn’t make sense to sink more money into the borehole. The people, you see …’ and her voice was confiding, soliciting agreement which we gave, in tacit understanding that, unlike the peasants, we could reach
a civilized resolution.

  But she committed herself to nothing – not that Bob asked for commitments, content, it seemed, to talk over the question, convinced that her interests were his. ‘Ah, of course, of course,’ she breathed. ‘And with the coming of foreigners,’ she smiled at her own delicacy, ‘the land costs more. But the land – ah, the land doesn’t produce more.’

  Well, El Mayorazgo and her other farms would benefit soon, I put in, trying to give my voice the determination I sought.

  Ah, of course, I knew the farm, sometimes went down that way, didn’t I? The faint smile, her very best farm, the farm her father had entailed to her, hence the name, Inheritance. ‘How productive it was in my father’s time, but now …’ Her voice left a sense of disillusion in the air, an illusion of people’s honesty shattered, of small reward for favours granted. After so much … Then her voice took on an edge: the young no longer wanted to work as their fathers had done, they wanted something for nothing and if they couldn’t get it they took it as though it were theirs. That wasn’t the way. ‘When I was young things were different,’ and the edge was gone from her voice which now expressed sorrow, her eyes bewildered suspicion: the world she looked into, disappointed and dry, was a place of men threatening, cheating her of her rights. She had cause, her eyes seemed to say from across the dim room, fixing on mine.

  Oh no, I protested to myself, not wanting to cause open disagreement when agreement was what mattered most. Miguel wasn’t like that. But then the silenced assertion brought its own doubt: could I be sure? There were always two sides to everything, and the wheat – those missing fanegas he’d told me about …

  Her best farm, she repeated, which had prospered under old Alarcón, to whom her father had granted it when Miguel’s sister was dying. Ah, she raised her hands in a deprecatory gesture that indicated this could be of little interest to us. What could one do, a woman alone?

  Uninterested, concerned that she was forgetting or evading the reason for our coming, Bob returned the conversation to the water, the channel, the dam. He ran over the quantities of water to be stored, the hours of irrigating this would mean, the benefits for her farms: a glorious, if ill-defined promised land that moved his whole being as if in a dream, at which she smiled – indulgently, it seemed, reasonably, it seemed, saying only that she must have time to consider and would let us know soon.

  Even now, to throw off the spell – though we knew we had achieved little – I have to remind myself of her acts, not her words. Though her words too, in throwing a shadow on Miguel, were destructive, it was her acts – or rather her inaction – that caused the greatest harm. Bob waited for an answer that didn’t come, believing that when he struck water she’d see the immediate advantage of allowing a channel across her land. In retrospect, a terrible mistake.

  It took nearly a month to hit water. Often, of an afternoon, I went to watch the miners at work. Their quick-witted irony saw through things, which to Miguel, in his circular routines, seemed closed. The local notables were a particular source of their gossip and I learnt much about the venalities by which they kept themselves in power. But when it came to politics, the miners clammed up: ‘De política na’,’ they’d say, and it wasn’t any easier to get them to talk about the civil war. Both had been youths then and claimed to have understood nothing of what was going on. They were prepared to talk about the chaos during the first days and their fear at seeing armed villagers patrolling the streets (one even with a sword he’d taken from a notable’s house); they remembered the free distribution of food from the collective warehouse in the gutted church, and mass meetings in the square to elect village leaders. But the impression they gave was one of such disorganization that ‘there was no way it could succeed.’ We talked of many other things too, but never of Miguel.

  One afternoon, crouched behind them in the low, narrow shaft, I watched the drill boring into the rocks. Suddenly it gave, the miners stumbled forward, jerked back; as the bit came out a jet of water shot from the hole as though from a punctured wineskin. I shouted, the miners grinned. More drill holes, more water pulsing with pressure. Miguel’s cousin opened a cigarette case, took out three or four cigarettes, broke them open revealing a condom in each and, smiling, encased sticks of dynamite in them. He tamped the water-proofed dynamite into each hole, lit the fuses, and shouted ‘Run!’ Stooping, I ran the two hundred metres of blackness, the miners splashing behind, until, in the glare of the entrance, we heard the sharp crack followed by a rumble of rock.

  The next day the church bell rang and the villagers poured out to see. By then the water was sweeping from the mouth, cascading onto the track from where it plunged into one of the many ravines that cut through the land, making a shimmering pool that overflowed uselessly between rocks and oleander while the land baked in the heat. At last María Burgos’s answer came: 250,000 pesetas for the right to cross her land. Bob rejected it outright, intermediaries went back and forth, neither side moved. Immured in her house, she seemed indifferent to the fate of the land at her feet. Bob was angry.

  ‘They want it both ways, want me to do everything for them and take me for a ride.’

  The strain was beginning to tell. He’d expected her to give the right without payment in exchange for the water she’d get; now, she was asking not only a price, but a price so insultingly high that it was like a rebuff, Bob thought, a public blow to his good intentions.

  Why did she do it? The punitive price was obviously meant to be rejected out of hand. It wasn’t a question of money alone, therefore, and even less of striking a rational deal that would benefit her farms; no, it appeared she needed publicly to defy anyone who threatened her power and patronage as landlord. Everyone knew that her sharecroppers would soon be more dependent for their irrigation on Bob, who’d have the largest supply of water in Benalamar, than on her. But she could still show them who was the real power in the land, she could leave water to run to waste. As long as she continued to drag slender profits out of impoverished sharecroppers and soil, she would not bend before the power of an intruder’s capital and his willingness to invest.

  Bob retaliated, of course. He’d charge her 200,000 pesetas for the water for her farms. Stalemate. It went on like that for over three weeks. I kept out of it. I’d done what I could in loaning Bob a few hundred pounds I had spare for the cost of the borehole, a loan guaranteed by a plot of Bob’s land that I could sell at a profit, so he said, once there was water. I’d even imagined building a small house, giving up the paper and living freelance.

  But such dreams are gone. In those three weeks, it must have been, something broke in Miguel. And I don’t know what it was because I didn’t go down to El Mayorazgo any more.

  13

  No, in truth it had been even longer … As John leaned back in the chair, his head began to unmoor, drifting weightlessly. The ache which he had tried to ignore was now unmistakable. He got up unsteadily: Dolores was right, he ought to get out. He went into the bedroom where the smell of recently washed tiles and the pale light behind the closed shutters recalled, as always, a sub-aqueous world. With relief he lay on the bed, looking up at the tintype of Jesus he’d been meaning for months to remove, and tried to sleep.

  Fitfully, his mind turned while his body cried out for rest. What was the point? Trying to recreate the Miguel he had known before anything else was known, trying to fix him on the page as though this activity were an end in itself. And what, finally, did he know of Miguel? The pages contained more about himself. All this lyrical activity was nothing but a stratagem, a ruse for tranquillizing the present, exorcising guilt, solidifying the past into a meaning. But there were other meanings he’d balked at. The truth, a simple little truth: Ana.

  Instead of going to El Mayorazgo, he waited for her every afternoon on the track above the dam. Carrying a water jar, she had to go up every afternoon now, he discovered, to fetch water from the donkey man in the village. He waited for the faded red skirt to appear through the pines, waited to f
eel her brush past on the track.

  She was inaccessible, unknowable, they never exchanged a word. Her face was more beautifully impassive than any woman’s he had known. He could read nothing into it. What was she thinking? From the first afternoon at El Mayorazgo, John had sensed not indifference but an acute awareness of his presence. His skin tingled with it, his body came alive; the airwaves were full of uncertain messages: fascination, desire, danger. He watched her without letting her see, his eyes wandering over her body, her small breasts, brown legs. She knew, he was sure: messages came back from deep below her motionless face. He attracted her, but he’d have to do more, he was unknown, a foreigner. There was danger here. He never caught her looking at him.

  In the shade of the pines he waited for her. Below in the gorge was the pretext for being in the same place each afternoon, the place where constantly he imagined tearing down the wall she put between them; imagining the instant of struggle, the collapse under the pines, the discovery of small brown breasts under his hand, so intimate now, under the sunwashed black blouse; smelling her sweat, dominating the inaccessible, penetrating the impenetrable, taking the unknown otherness for himself. He wanted her rapidly, wordlessly, the red skirt pulled up over her brown thighs; wanted to see her face break in passion, hear her long-drawn-out moan.

  But as Ana approached, he always stepped back, away from the eyes that stared as though at a rock, an obstacle from which she moved with a harsh ‘adió’ drawn from the back of her throat, along the rim of the gorge. Once he followed her for a way, apologizing that he hadn’t been down to El Mayorazgo for a while – how was Miguel? Without stopping, she replied that he was all right, and the tone of her voice told him to stay where he was: she couldn’t be seen alone with him. And he watched her with longing as she started the climb in the sun, her hip protruding to take the water jar, her body barely moving under the skirt and the blouse stained with sweat under the arm hooked round the jar.