‘José,’ John called. There seemed no point now in going down to Bughleigh’s. ‘Have you got a minute?’
‘Sí, señor.’
They moved into the shade of a carob where the air changed not only in temperature but in quality, becoming like water. John gave him a cigarette which he lit, scratching the wheel on the flint of a cord lighter.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a few things? You knew Miguel, didn’t you?’
For nearly two hours they sat under the tree talking. At last, John thought, as he climbed up the track, the small spark might have lit.
24
20 September
José and Miguel were childhood friends. One of José’s earliest memories was not of their games but – his voice dropped to a whisper – the day the church was fired! Miguel’s mother must have brought him up to the village and left him in José’s house because the two of them ran out together to watch. They were only small, five or six. There were people rushing everywhere, some piling religious objects in the square to set fire to them, others secretly trying to save whatever they could find. Men armed with shotguns were shouting, women crying. It was frightening, a bad thing to see …
And then suddenly Antonio, Miguel’s brother, appeared; the two boys hid, and they heard him shouting at the men: ‘What are you doing? Is this the revolution we’ve been waiting for so long? The revolution isn’t made with stupidities like this.’ But some of the men pointed their guns at him and told him to shut up. Even he couldn’t stop them.
The two boys had run home frightened, not daring to say what they’d seen … José paused and rolled a cigarette which he offered to me. Then he said:
‘One other time, I remember, we were together in the square. A village assembly, something to do with the revolution.’ Antonio got up on the fountain and spoke – about the land, was it? – and lots of labourers cheered. The land for those who worked it. When he jumped down he saw Miguel in the crowd and lifted him onto his shoulder, almost covering him in a red and black neckerchief. Miguel was so proud he repeated the moment endlessly to José. But his father was angry when he heard of it, Miguel told him.
Antonio always treated Miguel affectionately. José remembered him taking the boy by the hand and walking together, showing him insects and small animals. He was always talking, telling Miguel things. He got angry if Miguel broke off a fly’s wing. ‘But when the revolution, as they called it, ended and our forces came, Antonio vanished.’
The year before Miguel’s father got El Mayorazgo, José’s father had a stroke of luck and was able to rent a farmstead from a colonel who never visited the land he’d won at cards. Rearing a calf each year paid the rent, so José’s family was better off than Miguel’s. Even so, the farmstead couldn’t support José’s three older brothers who had to go out day-labouring whenever they could find work until they were called up by the Franquista army. The civil war was still being fought elsewhere; in Benalamar it was over.
The two boys were virtual neighbours again. Their fathers sent the seven-year-olds out to tend small flocks of goats which they often pastured together. But sometimes Miguel vanished for days looking for fresh pastures. His goats, José recalled, were always the best fed and biggest … ‘I expect he’d learnt a few tricks from his father who’d been a goatherd. We only quarrelled once, when I caught him breaking off branches of a carob on my grandfather’s land, the land Sr Bob bought, to feed his goats, but in a few days we were friends again.’
The day the war ended for Benalamar there was uproar in the village; the church bell pealed all day long, victorious shouts and the sound of martial music swept in gusts over the countryside. The revolutionary militiamen had fled in disarray, and the sharecroppers and small-holders flocked to join in the celebrations. A lorry-load of soldiers and falangists churned up the dirt road to take the village where the local falangists had come out of hiding and were already in command. That night, José started awake at the sound of half a dozen rifle volleys. He feared the war had started again; the next morning his father told him not to be stupid.
‘Did you hear them?’ he asked Miguel as they joined their flocks. Miguel nodded. ‘What were they shooting, rabbits?’
Miguel called his goats. ‘Come on, there’s pasture by the boulder.’
José didn’t understand. He wanted to play hopscotch in the dust with Miguel or kick the bag filled with old bits of cloth which served as a football. But Miguel was already walking on.
They both went barefoot, their shirts and trousers cut down from older brothers’, worn and patched. Miguel wore a battered sombrero that came down over his ears – which José envied and often tried to snatch from his head because he never took it off. But now he just followed him.
By the boulder Miguel stopped and pointed.
José saw blood staining the rock. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘Blood.’
‘But of what animal’s?’
Neither could take his eyes off the red stains.
‘Look there,’ said Miguel pointing at the freshly turned earth. ‘That’s where the falangists buried them.’
‘Come on, let’s go.’ Trembling, José grabbed the goats’ tether and pulled them away. He remembers his fear to this day. ‘Miguel!’ he shouted. ‘Vamos!’
But when José looked back he saw Miguel standing there with his eyes under the sombrero fixed on the rock; that day he didn’t see him again.
‘Could he have thought his brother Antonio was one of those who’d been shot?’
‘No. Because one day I asked him where Antonio was. And he said, “I’m not telling …”
“That’s because you don’t know, burro!”
“I know. Antonio told me where he was going. He told me what he had to do. The night before he left he explained it to me. So, stupid!”’
José made a grab for his hat. ‘If you know so much, tell me why he ran away.’
‘He didn’t. My brother’s not a coward like those who run off and hide.’ Miguel punched José on the arm: ‘He’s gone to fight.’
‘A las barricadas, a las barricadas …’ José chanted defiantly at him. ‘He’s a Red. And when he comes back …’
The next thing José knew he was flat on his back with Miguel standing over him. ‘He isn’t,’ he cried, ‘he’s never coming back.’ And José saw the tears of rage in his eyes.
After that José didn’t remember him talking about Antonio. ‘And I didn’t ask, either. My father said we should forget what had happened, it was better not to talk about it. No one talked about it. Everything was peaceful, just as it had always been, the trouble-makers were gone.’ José had come to forget Miguel had a brother until the war ended and people from the Red side started to come back. A lot of them were court-martialled, some were shot and many went to prison, José remembered. But Antonio never came back and José never asked what had happened.
‘It was perhaps just as well he didn’t return,’ I said.
‘Well, he never got on with his father, that’s for sure,’ José replied, mistaking my meaning. One day he’d brought his goats up the track to wait for Miguel and he’d seen the two men standing under the vine. The old man was shouting at Antonio and raised his arm as though to strike him. Antonio went on talking quietly, José could hear what he said. It was the time of the revolution and the collective; Antonio was telling him he should join.
As José watched the two men, Miguel came round from the back with the goats and stood looking at his brother and father. Then his father shouted at him to get the goats out to pasture, and he rounded them up and joined José without a word.
‘What’s wrong with your father?’ José asked when they were out of earshot.
‘Nothing. Antonio should show more respect.’
‘You mean, he sided with his father!’ I exclaimed.
‘Miguel always respected his father, it’s natural, isn’t it? A son doesn’t quarrel with what his father says.’
‘Was he like his
father?’
‘No, he was smaller, his father was a tall man. Once, they say, he carried a dead man on his back five leagues over the mountains without stopping. Another goatherd who was killed by a landslide.’
‘In character, I meant.’
‘Character? Well, Miguel laughed a lot and I never saw his father even smile. Miguel was a good neighbour, you know; he always had time to lend a hand if you asked; he’d come and see if there was anything you needed. His father wasn’t like that, he kept to himself. He’d been a goatherd and was used to being on his own, I suppose, it’s a different life. Gone for three months up to the high pastures in summer, back again in the autumn, always moving. He didn’t have to depend on neighbours as we do at times.’
By the time the war ended in 1939, both Miguel and José were nine and old enough to be earning. They became look-outs for the señorita’s olive mill, which was shipping out black-market oil. The boys took it in turns to sit in a cave by the church to watch for a car; if one came it could only be an inspector’s, and they ran to the mill to give warning. Then, on top of the aftermath of war came drought and the hunger years. José was lucky to get a job with a miner digging a well half a day’s walk away; stuck in water all day, earning twelve pesetas, ten for his father and two for himself. Miguel was sent by his father to the sierra to herd his uncle’s goats, and José didn’t see him for a year and a half.
‘There were outlaws in the sierra then, weren’t there?’
‘Yes, and there still were until a few years ago.’ José came across them sometimes when he smuggled tobacco over the mountains to the villages beyond. They’d call out from their hiding place for him to stop, and to be on the safe side he’d give them some tobacco. There were a good two dozen of them, mainly Reds, he thought, who’d fled to the mountains when the Franquista forces took this part of Spain, and they were armed with rifles and pistols. They had spies everywhere and anyone who informed on them was in certain danger. Once in a while, until he knew he’d been killed in the war, José wondered if Antonio were among them.
By now things were so bad in the village that some people died of the complications of malnutrition. Then came salvation of a kind: the sierra was to be planted with pines. Miguel, who’d returned after his uncle was killed by the outlaws, José and most of the villagers were soon working on the slopes closest to Benalamar.
This was when José saw Miguel change. The boy who, like his father, rarely smiled, was now a cheerful, lively and determined youth. It was Miguel who said they should be ashamed to sign for their wages with thumbprints, and organized lessons in the evening from the lame schoolmaster.
‘Come on,’ he said to José, ‘you don’t want to end up an illiterate sharecropper. It’s time to learn something now.’ After a time José joined him, but Miguel was already so far advanced that he knew he could never catch up. Miguel learnt to read and write and do sums so fast it seemed to José he had them already in his head. When he got an idea he wouldn’t let it go. But he’d always laugh and joke about it, too.
José’s gentle eyes lit up at the memory of Miguel’s carefree success. This was a Miguel I had never seen.
‘Well, with a foreigner he’d be more formal perhaps, but with his friends he was always laughing and joking,’ José replied. Until the last days when he changed, and became more like the boy he’d been: withdrawn and unsmiling. José thought it was because of Juana, his novia. He knew they’d quarrelled, but didn’t think much about it. Miguel rarely spoke about it to him.
‘Why was that, do you think?’
‘Perhaps he was ashamed …’
‘Have you got a novia, José? Yes? What would you do if she left you?’
‘Left me!’ His head jerked up. ‘My novia – no, she wouldn’t so much as talk to another man … Miguel shouldn’t have trusted Juana, she’d been betrothed once before.’
‘You wouldn’t trust a man who’d had more than one novia?’
‘Ah, that’s not the same, is it? A man and a woman are different.’ He rubbed his cigarette out on a rock, taking care to see no embers remained.
I repressed a flash of anger. ‘What I meant, José, is what does a man feel if it happens?’
‘Ah, to get himself or her out of the way. There was one here, two or three years ago it must have been, who waited for his former betrothed by the spring and stabbed her to death. And then he hanged himself.’
‘But not everyone is capable of killing, are they?’
‘No … But then a man suffers inside, his self-respect is gone, he doesn’t want to be seen. That’s how it was with Miguel, his pride must have suffered, any man’s would, especially after taking her on when she’d been betrothed before. Even all the money he’d put by didn’t help in the end because it was his self-respect that had gone.’
‘What was he saving for, do you think? Did he ever say?’
‘No, never … Ay yes! Not so long ago, he said he was going to buy a gold bracelet. If Juana didn’t want it, he’d give it to another female. It must have been after she broke off with him. But if he bought it he didn’t give it to anyone else that I know of.’
‘If you had a lot of money saved, what would you do, José?’
‘Me? Well, I’ll never have it, so it’s not worth thinking about. Until the dam, I only had casual work, going round at night looking for a job for the next day and as often as not the work had already been given. There are so many looking for work that if ever a farm comes up to sharecrop there’s a rush.’
‘There’s no other future?’
‘You can’t think of a future, there’s only today and how to get through it. Once, when I was doing my military service in the north, I thought of crossing over to France. But not long before they caught someone who tried. And when a man’s away, the pueblo is what he yearns for, yet here …’
Had Miguel done military service at the same time? No, José said, he was excused as the only son. But there was something about him wanting to join the army once and his father wouldn’t sign the papers. So Miguel had stayed; it was just as well, José said, because not long after, his father died of a heart attack in the fields and Miguel took over El Mayorazgo.
An inescapable emptiness opened before me. Everything seemed cut off, frontiers, future, new possibilities. People stayed on, clung to the soil as the only handhold in life, fearful of spinning off the face of the earth.
‘So people stay … If a farm came your way would you be willing to sharecrop?’
‘Of course. If there was a farm free … With a bit of land you can grow enough for yourself most years to get by. That’s the main thing, what else is there?’
‘And if you owned your own farm you’d get by that much better. I’ve been wondering whether that was what Miguel was trying to achieve.’
‘To have land for yourself is what everyone wants, you’re independent then. But here most of the land is in the hands of a few. In any case, he never spoke of things like that … No, poor guy, nothing turned out right for him in the end. Everything came at once, the drought, the novia and the señorita breaking off the deal. I suppose something got in his head …’
25
On an impulse, that afternoon John went to see Tío Bigote. The old man was sitting plaiting esparto by the door of the red cottage and paid no attention to his approach. Coming down the hill in front of the house, John saw, to his surprise, a few rows of young maize growing close to the borehole on a terrace that elsewhere had turned to dust. From the borehole a thin trickle of water meandered, accumulated in a small pool and was swallowed up by the earth.
John stopped a few paces in front of the old man and only then did he look up. The extravagant moustache flaring out under the craggy nose, the deep-set eyes beneath the sombrero, reminded him of pictures of nineteenth-century Andalusian bandits. He was not a man one approached with ease. John commented on his fortune in still having water.
‘Three years’ hard tunnelling, if that’s fortune,’ he replied cur
tly.
Well, John said, it was fortune today; the work had paid off.
‘A man with foresight’s worth two without.’ Tío Bigote went on plaiting. John looked around; in the shed at the side of the house he saw two calves tied up. He’d managed well: was one Miguel’s?
No, those were his. ‘And why do you ask?’
‘Because Miguel sold you his …’
‘And I returned it as everyone knows.’
‘Why?’
He raised his head slowly and stared at John; his eyes were as hard as bullets. ‘A man’s deals are his own business.’
Of course, John replied. He didn’t mean to intrude, but he was interested in Miguel. Had he said why he was breaking the deal?
‘A man doesn’t go back on his word.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
The old man was silent. Then: ‘And what is your interest in Miguel?’
‘He was a friend.’
‘You are asking many questions, it’s said.’
Maybe. John shrugged.
‘I gave the calf back to his sister. Miguel didn’t ask. And that’s all I have to say.’
Dismissed, John walked back up the track until he found a eucalyptus out of sight of the red cottage and sat in its shade. The conversation, concluded so abruptly, had rattled him. Was the old man hiding something? It seemed like it. But what was there to hide? Wasn’t the implication rather that he’d been willing to listen to Ana where he would have refused Miguel? To a woman, who hadn’t given – perhaps couldn’t give – her word rather than to a man who had given his? Probably. In any case, Tío Bigote had a reputation as a difficult, taciturn man. All the same, John realized, he’d missed a chance: he hadn’t asked how he came to be one of the few who owned a farm, how he had overcome the obstacle that others faced. He was on the point of returning when he thought better of it; he might catch Tío Bigote in a more communicative mood another day.
In any case, his relative prosperity was evident. A trickle of water to grow maize for two calves. Money enough presumably to buy extra fodder. Independence. The one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind.
Drought Page 11