Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  He knew why he wanted her: for the same reason that he pursued young working-class women in London. They were bodies for pleasure, born to serve, poor, screened by an invisible glass, and doubly dominated (he believed) by sex and that English thing he despised and yet used: class. Carried away, he took his pleasure, but afterwards inevitably felt a sense of despair.

  It shamed him now to think that he could have wanted Ana like that. Miguel’s sister! How often, too, he had wished that she, and not Dolores, had come to work for him! He was even more ashamed that he hadn’t written the truth. For if she had come to see him that night instead of Miguel; if she’d said, the crops have dried up, there’s no fodder left, Miguel needs a job on the dam, it’s his only hope left of making enough to get through the rest of the year, John would have done anything she’d asked for, everything that was needed. Got Miguel a job on the dam, done it to impress her. Given her what she wanted in the hope …

  John got off the bed. His head still ached and there was a bitter taste in his mouth. Below the window, children played hopscotch to the tune of ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ and the lottery-seller was calling his numbers. The cries went through his head. So, yes, that was the reason he hadn’t done what was needed. A masturbatory fantasy had been more important to him than helping a friend. Here was self-interest more invidious and fatal for being kept secret than any Bob so willingly admitted to. He felt himself cheapened, the way he’d felt his friends were cheapened when, as soldiers in occupied Germany, they’d bought a woman for a packet of cigarettes or a chocolate bar.

  Gloomily he looked down at the stiff-legged children hopping, thinking of the months of self-examination, the piles of pages accumulated on the granary floor. Even as he was writing them he was deceiving himself! Taking refuge as always in the sly shuffling off of responsibility, letting it slip from his drooping shoulders as though the fit were too loose – no, nothing had changed.

  In fact, he was shocked to realize, he’d done everything to ensure that nothing should change. Hunched over the tea leaves of his past, he’d justified his indifference to the present by the importance of understanding himself. The present, the afternoons with Miguel, had been a passing spectacle, a side show, compared to the passion of the morning task. Until the fateful flaws were uncovered there was no point in thinking of change.

  One of the children caught sight of him at the window and pointed him out. John moved rapidly, closing the shutters, and sat at the table, his head in his hands, his narrowly constructed world beyond the point of repair. One might have expected that, as he surveyed the debris, his belief in writing as discovery and cure would have been swept away with the rest. But it survived and he clung to it. The method had been wrong but the means were right, he assured himself, determined to see his only form of expression survive the disaster. And there was proof! He had put aside the self-examination when guilt and despair had driven him to write about Miguel; and the unexpected result had been to reach a fresh awareness of himself.

  Somewhere, in the direction he had unknowingly taken, he sensed a way forward. Stop picking at the scabs of his own past, as his mother would say (a blunt countrywoman whom he had never once surprised in a moment of introspection or heard utter a word of self-doubt); and live in the present. Perhaps.

  The roar of Bob’s motorbike outside shattered his thoughts – unmistakable because it was the only motorbike in the village. An ancient charcoal-burning taxi and the doctor’s petrol-driven car made up the remainder of Benalamar’s motorized fleet. For the rest – mail, foodstuffs, even water now – came by donkey or was carried on foot.

  The bike’s engine stopped and Bob came pounding up the stairs. The anger showed in his face as he appeared at the door. He thrust a piece of paper in John’s hand: it was a summons to appear at the town hall. ‘Jesus Christ! After all the trouble they’ve given me,’ he exploded. ‘They can stuff it.’

  John was in no mood to sympathize with his anger. And moreover hadn’t Bob got what he wanted in the end? A deal with María Burgos to channel the water across her land. It had cost him a lot, but not as much as she had originally asked. María Burgos had made her point, John supposed, had realized that it was detrimental to her power to go on being seen as the person mainly responsible for sending the hard-won water to waste. The agreement with Bob was designed to ensure that her power over her sharecroppers was in no way weakened; it was they who were going to have to pay for the water the farms used from the dam. Her own take for the right to cross her land she had kindly reduced to 100,000 pesetas. Even though this remained a scandalously large amount, Bob reckoned he would not, finally, be out of pocket: in a couple of years he’d get back from the sharecroppers the money he was paying in instalments to María Burgos. And he could now start, he was convinced, to sell plots through his Camden Town estate agency. That was why June, his wife, had gone back to London, he said, though John suspected there were other reasons, too.

  When Bob told him of the deal, John had been too ill to take it in. Later, thinking of Miguel, he’d been angry: why had Bob let María Burgos get away with it again? He and John had already succumbed once to her person and forgotten the landlord in her; and Miguel had paid with his life for that disastrous mistake. Now it was all her sharecroppers who were going to have to pay. Maybe, John thought hopefully, they would refuse. But then maybe, after all, it was better to have water, extra water that they wouldn’t have had without Bob. Maybe … And then he’d given way to his own feelings of guilt.

  John glanced at the town hall summons in his hand. ‘Why don’t you tear it up?’ he said. ‘Forget it, forget these people, this place.’

  Bob looked shocked. ‘You can’t be serious!’ Despite all the set-backs, Bob’s faith in Benalamar’s future continued unshaken. John had often wondered why he didn’t take his ideas to Torre del Mar on the coast where foreigners’ houses were beginning to sprout: he was surely more likely to make a success there. But Torre del Mar was a run-down sort of place and the beach was grotty, Bob thought; Benalamar and its people, on the other hand, had an ‘undefinable natural simplicity’ that had touched his heart.

  ‘Well, then, what are you going to do about it?’ John waved the summons gloomily. Even before the answer came, he saw from the look in Bob’s eye what it would be.

  ‘I was thinking, would you mind going for me? Just to see what they’re up to. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain anything. Just say I couldn’t make it, I had to go down to Torre del Mar.’

  It was on the tip of John’s tongue to say no when, begrudgingly, he replied: ‘All right. When is it?’

  ‘This evening at six. Thanks. I knew you wouldn’t mind.’

  14

  There was still time enough before he had to go to the town hall. He had to get out, exercise his legs, which felt like a pair of old spindles. Think. As he put on his rope sandals, discoloured by earth and sweat, the memory of his past walks brought a flash of pain: but today he’d take a different path, explore something new.

  The afternoon sun struck him in the face and for a moment he feared its weight, looking for shade, and finding a narrow strip beside the houses down which he walked like – it occurred to him – a soldier protecting himself from enemy fire. He laughed, pleased to see himself from the outside again. Instead of going through the square, he turned down a narrow street of day-labourers’ houses that he usually avoided because people stared and once children ran after him, shouting and pointing as though he were some extra-terrestrial being.

  Everything now was quiet, however, and the cobbled street between the low rows of white houses, which here and there incorporated live rock in their facades and formed odd angles (as though their builders had used the accidents of terrain to their profit), lay in the shade. The smell of cooking, rosemary and thyme mixed with rancid olive oil, filled the air. From a few doors away an old woman in black emerged into the street; the c
hildren were inside in the cool.

  To his surprise the woman stopped in front of him, blocking his way. She lifted a hand towards his head.

  ‘You’re blond,’ she said. Her fingers touched his eyebrows. ‘A true blond.’ Her crinkled face broke into a smile. ‘It’s not dye.’

  ‘No, señora,’ he laughed, ‘it’s real,’ and he walked on, his good humour suddenly recovered, down the track, which started at the end of the street. In the sun again the air was sweating with heat, cicadas whistled in the olives, grasshoppers leapt with a flash of red wings. He ought to wear a hat, he reflected, then remembered that he hadn’t owned one since that joyful day he turned in his National Service uniform. Well, he’d go back if he got too hot and tired.

  Soon, indeed, John felt the sun heavy on his head and sat in the shade of an olive. Trying to remember where this track led, he followed its zigzagging course down from the village from where, already distantly, came children’s cries and the dull clatter of the blacksmith’s hammer. Suddenly it seemed to him that the path was a meaningless, insignificant trace trodden in the face of the rock, a thread of dust. The thing before it’s known … His sandals kicked at the earth; meaningless, unless one knew where it went, the purpose for its going, its end …

  Without his wanting it, the memory of Miguel returned on the edge of his vision. Blurred, uncentred. Seen like this, Miguel, too, was without meaning, like that first day slinging stones under the tree. To understand someone, he thought, you needed to see them at the centre of the picture, looking out at the world through their own eyes; see what they saw, the aims they set themselves, the hopes, ambiguities and resistances of their world: their meaning to themselves and to others …

  John shrugged. It was too late now, there was nothing to go on, he would have had to try to understand then. He thought back to that moment watching Miguel chasing off sparrows; once explained, the purpose was clear enough, clear enough to take it as Miguel explained it, unquestioningly. But he’d never thought, he realized, to ask what the unspoken side of this action meant: the sort of life in which a man wastes himself scaring off birds all day from corn so thin you can see the earth between the stalks. Where a landlord takes half a man’s work and water is scarce and allowed to waste, and a man kills himself for it.

  John got up, it was time to be going back. He wanted to lie down for an hour before going to the town hall. Poverty, he thought, seeing the climb that awaited him and, at the same time, the figure of a man crouching in the shade of a tree on the track ahead. Half a dozen goats were feeding nearby. As he approached, he recognized the man: the sharecropper from Matanzas, one of the señorita’s other farms, whom Miguel called Culebra, a nickname, John supposed, from the tongue flicked like an adder’s from between his lips. It was he, John remembered, who had told Miguel that the señorita wasn’t going to let the channel cross her land.

  They exchanged a ‘good afternoon’ and John continued on his way, wondering why the sharecropper was this far from his farmstead. To find something to feed his goats, probably, he thought. He glanced back and saw Culebra, on his haunches, watching him. Then the old man got up and threw a stone at one of the animals that was gnawing an almond tree a few yards from where John stood.

  ‘They poison the tree, it’s in their mouths,’ he shouted, walking towards John. ‘They’ll eat anything, they kill the trees.’

  John nodded. He was about to walk on but the dark-skinned old face, a tangle of wrinkles spreading out from one that was more like a cut running from the edge of his eye to his unshaven chin, was already upon him.

  ‘The land’s lost this year,’ he said, his tongue darting out between his thin lips.

  ‘There’ll be water when the channel’s made up.’

  The old man shook his head. It would come too late, there was nothing left to irrigate.

  Bob had looked everywhere for piping, John knew, and suddenly there was none to be found. He’d decided instead to cut the channel by hand, a longer job because there was live rock to be blasted.

  ‘If your señorita had more sense you’d have had water long ago,’ John replied curtly. ‘Look at what happened to Miguel.’

  ‘Ay! Poor man. His betrothed threw him over. He said he was lost and killed himself for her.’

  ‘And the water?’ John tried to repress a mounting anger.

  Culebra’s lips pulled back over three stumps, chuckling. A man didn’t kill himself because there was no water. ‘If they did there’d be none of us left … No, señor, two nights before he was all over the village looking for her. My nephew saw him, he was half mad already.’

  The old man’s certainty silenced John, who felt his eyes, hooded against the sun, watching him. Culebra bent down to pick up a stone, which he flung with a shout at one of the goats. Well, he thought, what was the point of arguing, it was over and done with. Then a flaw in the old man’s certainty surfaced from the back of his mind: Miguel wasn’t mad or half mad when he came to ask for work on the dam. Something happened after that, and that something was the señorita who made him go back on the deal …

  ‘Ah no, it wasn’t like that,’ the old man replied. He had been in the village when Miguel paid over the money for the calf. ‘“Here, look,” says the señorita, “you’ve cheated yourself, fifty pesetas of this is yours.” “My head’s no good,” says Miguel, “I can’t add any more.” She insisted and he took the money. “If there’s no fodder for the calf, it’s best to sell it now while it’s still got some meat on it,” she says. That’s how it was.’

  Confused and angry, John stared at Culebra’s red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t believe him, had never liked the look of the man. If that was the case, he said coldly, why had Miguel fetched the calf back?

  ‘Who can tell what a man has in his head at a time like that? At sunrise on Wednesday, Miguelito went to my brother-in-law’s house. “The deal’s off,” he says, and he gave him the money back. My brother-in-law needn’t have let him have it, a man’s word is his word, but he could see Miguelito was lost. It was the girl that bewitched him. He was crazy for her and she didn’t want him; she went off to work for a foreigner on the coast. Ay! Women! A man keeps them down or they bury him, that’s the truth.’ Culebra bleated like one of his goats mounting another, his eyes moistening on the red rims.

  A splinter of doubt pricked in John’s mind. Could this be true? But if it was, if Miguel had handed over half the money to the señorita, how had he paid to get the calf back?

  The old man’s tongue flicked out. ‘That’s it, that’s it, he was out of his mind. He must have repaid it out of his own money. He had money all right, there was no reason for him not to last out the drought.’ El Mayorazgo always produced well, it was one of the señorita’s best farms. He remembered her father, old Gil Burgos, terracing the land. In the bad years then, lots of people had emigrated, and those who stayed had to borrow to buy from his shop. When they couldn’t repay, he took their farms, and so became owner of all this land. ‘He knew a thing or two. And when the Reds came they found him in the village. He was too stubborn to hide, very stubborn he was. You see that rock down there, that’s where they shot him.’

  ‘Most likely,’ suggested John, remembering his private fascination with the Spanish civil war at Cambridge, ‘they were people whose land he had taken.’

  ‘Na! They weren’t from here, they came from Torre del Mar. It was like that then, these people didn’t know what they were doing. No one in Benalamar would have shot him, he was respected too much. Even Miguel’s brother, Antonio, made sure the señorita wasn’t found.’

  ‘Miguel’s brother? What happened?’ John tried to recall whether Miguel had mentioned a brother.

  ‘He never gave away her hiding place, you see …’ The señorita had been hidden at El Mayorazgo by Miguel’s father. Antonio knew she was there, of course. As head of the revolutionary militia he could have turned her in, but each time they went looking for her he was the one who ensured she wasn’t found. ‘A bunch of
granujas they were, but Antonio was a good lad despite his ideas.’

  ‘Did they look hard for her?’

  ‘Of course. They searched Matanzas several times. The revolutionary committee was in charge. They took over all Gil Burgos’s farms and half the crops, and we were working for them. Granujas, without discipline. At threshing time they came with guns for the share of the crop. One of them asked me how many hours a day I was working and I told them, “What do you think, from first light to dark.” And he said there was no need, I wasn’t working for a landlord any more, I could work half as hard.’

  The old man took out a grey handkerchief and wiped his mouth. ‘It only lasted six months and then our force came and all those bandits were shot over there in the same place by the rock.’

  ‘And Antonio? What happened to him?’

  ‘Escaped, never came back. Killed in the war, they say. Thank God, the señorita survived … She was born to the land.’ As a little girl, he remembered her accompanying her father to inspect the crops. She was his favourite and old Gil made sure she’d inherit the best of his land. ‘And I’m grateful for it, she’s always been good to us.’

  John could take no more. As a parting shot, he asked the old man if he’d pay for extra water from the dam, as the señorita had agreed in her deal with Bob.

  ‘Pay? Na! Once the channel’s built there’ll be water enough from the borehole. Na! Nobody needs a dam.’

  III. The Search

  15

  His hopes of a rest gone, John hurried to the town hall, an old and beautiful building next to the square. Before going in through the thick double doors, flanked by a pair of sumptuous caryatids, he glanced again at the plaque embedded in the wall. Its celebration of Benalamar’s Liberation from The Marxist Hordes by Franco’s Imperial Crusade always repelled and fascinated him: like Medusa, the histrionic inscription seemed to petrify history with its vacant, triumphal eyes.