Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  ‘Why didn’t Miguel tell me, Ana? I could have explained. I’ve never tried to buy land.’

  ‘My brother asked favours of no one, he had too much respect. You had money to buy …’

  ‘Respect! Respect that leads to this! My God, he came to ask for work on the dam. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘No!’ For the first time she looked me in the eye. ‘No, he came to ask about Tío Bigote’s land, but he couldn’t bring himself to it …’ Again I saw Miguel diffidently standing by the granary door while I looked at him indifferently. ‘I begged him to see you, tell you what was happening. When he came back he said he’d asked you for work. He was ashamed to ask favours he couldn’t return.’ Watching me scrabbling to pick up the typewritten sheets the gust of hot wind blew on the floor around his feet. Bending down himself to help gather these incomprehensible bits of paper, leaving with my faint promise to ask Bob for a day-labourer’s job on the dam.

  ‘There’s been a terrible mistake, Ana. I never spoke to Tío Bigote or anyone else about buying his farm.’

  But she was too distraught to listen. ‘Why did you keep coming down, señorito, why? Making trouble for my brother.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Walking, talking, watching – nothing else. A way to spend the hot afternoons …

  ‘That was all he wanted,’ she cried. ‘His own farm – and you …’

  ‘I understand, yes.’ But other things also had happened. The water drying up, the señorita’s refusal to allow a channel across her land …

  ‘With good crops this year my brother would have had the extra money he needed. I know, he told me.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  For once she didn’t immediately answer. Suddenly she raised her eyes from the ground and said: ‘So you should know, señorito, what you did. When the water flowed to waste he went over there’ – pointing in the direction of the watercourse below the new borehole – ‘and threw himself in it. I pulled him out. I think he meant to drown himself.’

  I shuddered. The fever in my head was rising, I feared I might not last out. Defensively, I said: ‘If the señorita had agreed promptly to the channel across her land Miguel would have had water. You know that.’

  ‘What difference would it have made? Tío Bigote knew that a foreigner would pay more. Like your friend. And with the dam …’

  ‘The dam?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you understand. Antonio Ríos told Tío Bigote to wait until the dam was finished. You’d be sure then to pay an even better price.’

  ‘And that’s why, I suppose, your mother put in charges against the dam.’

  ‘Yes.’ Moving back, defiant. ‘Yes, you and the other foreigner will never finish it now.’

  ‘Is that what Miguel would have wanted, Ana?’

  ‘Yes, yes. He had no confidence in it.’

  ‘He never told me.’

  ‘Why should he?’ She was implacable, unyielding. ‘He didn’t want trouble. All he wanted was for us to live in peace.’

  ‘You call this peace? This fight with the land, the landlord, the water. Your older brother, Antonio, wouldn’t have called this peace, I’m sure.’

  It was perhaps desperation that drove me so far. She moved towards me, her face contorted and her arm raised as though about to strike out.

  ‘None of this would have happened if …’ she hissed.

  ‘Yes, go on.’

  ‘If you hadn’t come. We would have been free of the señorita, free of everyone.’ And a despairing exultation rose in her cry.

  30

  23 September

  Can one believe that by the mere fact of existing one can make land prices rise? By the mere fact of walking of an afternoon in the countryside shatter someone’s life? That doing nothing, just being, could have such undreamt-of consequences? Is this the ultimate irony of indifference? An indifference I took to be sufficient protection against being identified as a foreigner, wealthy and land-seeking, the foreigner Bob is. Plainly, it wasn’t enough. Indifference, I suppose, never is.

  They – who exactly? – used a foreigner for their own ends, I believe. Or rather, they used my refusal to define myself clearly for purposes I never intended. A foreigner’s afternoon walks weren’t innocent, were they? My interest in the land was open to other interpretations than my own. My friendship with Bob put me in the same bag. Miguel must have shared their view. The irony of the known that remains unknown: even the most intimately known – oneself.

  Is it exaggerated, nonetheless, to see María Burgos behind all this? Perhaps. But if she wanted to keep Miguel on her land, prevent him from realizing his dream, she and her agents could not have found a better accomplice than me.

  This morning I thought of leaving Benalamar immediately. The idea came after eighteen hours in bed, where I collapsed on returning from Ana’s. But I have the feeling now that, their purpose having been achieved, my leaving or staying is immaterial. The terrible damage has been done, and it can’t be undone. I shall stay: to write about Miguel.

  IV. Miguel

  31

  A sudden effulgence, like the soundless flare from a cannon’s mouth, gave him plenty of warning: a quarter of an hour at least before the car, whose roof blazed in the sun as it emerged on this side of the hills, reached the village. Standing in the cave he watched the black speck trailing dust far below. The inspectors! Miguel prepared to trot down to the olive mill (only in the last stretch did he run), but first he narrowed his eyes against the winter sun. The last but one car to make its slow way up the road had been not the inspectors but a taxi with men clinging to the roof and running boards; on the point of leaving his lookout too soon, he’d almost failed to see them. His heart beat with fear: the ragged men returning from the war, the war on the other side, had clambered from the roof and poured out of the taxi by the time he pushed his way through the crowd, anxiously searching among them for a face. Round the taxi, mothers and wives were crying at the sight of their men, touching them unbelievingly: the men who’d fled the village in time to get to the other side, their side which suddenly had no longer been here but there in another world unimaginable to Miguel beyond the mountains.

  Antonio wasn’t among the returning soldiers. The hope beyond hope that Miguel slowly learned to forget as he wandered in search of pasture for the goats had returned in the long, fruitless hours on the lookout for a car. He turned away from the frightening homecoming, seeing (as the wailing women had seen) the casual but well-known spectators who’d gathered at a slight distance to watch in silence. By that evening not one of the returned men was at home with his family; and by the following morning most were on their way back to mass court-martials in the town.

  When Antonio returned, it wouldn’t be like this; he’d walk through the night. The branch of the fig rustling against the closed shutter of the granary where they shared a bed … Rustle, tap three times, rustle again … It was the signal he awaited, unbelievingly and yet certainly: and the night it came he’d creep silently down, past the room where his father snored and Ana gave little cries in her sleep and his mother’s eyes, he imagined, were watchfully awake, and step outside. There he’d be! Joyously, he’d run into his open arms.

  Time and again in the lonely cave he imagined the scene as Antonio clasped him, then broke away, slapping him on the back. ‘Miguelito! How you’ve grown! You’re a man now!’

  A shiver of pride ran down his back under his brother’s hand. ‘Everything’s ready in the cowshed, Antonio,’ he said, trying to hide the tremor in his voice. ‘Father doesn’t know.’

  ‘Well, what was good enough for her will be good enough for me,’ he laughed. But first he wanted to know everything that had happened since he left. Gravely, as though in his brother’s absence he had assumed his gravity but not his joy, Miguel told him: the echoing shots by the boulder the night he left, the men returning now, the señorita’s charges against him …

  ‘So that was her thanks! Do you remember the night you saw h
er?’ Miguel nodded. How well he remembered! – without remembering whether it was a dream or had really happened. ‘I couldn’t tell you, you were still a child. You might have said something somewhere. And that would have been the end of her – and maybe me too!’

  At the beginning there’d been such commotion, so much confusion, so many men coming and going with newly seized weapons – shotguns and old pistols and even a sabre taken from one of the landlords’ houses – that the slow-turning world seemed to have been stood on its head. Antonio, at the heart of the unknown, vanished – helping to reduce the Guardia Civil barracks, he later found out – leaving Miguel, excited and frightened, in this crazily spinning world. Armed men patrolled the countryside, requisitioned crops; landlords disappeared; the gutted church became the collective’s warehouse … Monolithically aloof, his father continued as though nothing were happening, while (to the boy’s dismay) his mother’s anxiety was all too evident.

  On one of those first nights before Antonio returned, Miguel was woken by noises from the cowshed which abutted onto the house. He listened: low voices, an object dully falling, the scuffle of feet and sacks being moved. Frightened, he pulled the thin blanket round his head.

  When his father went out early the next morning and he was alone with his mother, he told her what he’d heard. His mother was as close to him as his father was distant; he loved her without fear and she loved her youngest son with an indulgence she had had little enough time to express in the years before Carmela died. She demanded nothing of him except that he remain her child – a child she always feared losing. In the name of my love, love your dependence on me, she might have said had she ever thought of expressing their relationship in words.

  Her sharpness was more shocking for being unaccustomed.

  ‘You didn’t hear anything. You were dreaming.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You heard nothing,’ she repeated, even more sharply. ‘Nothing.’

  For a moment he was silenced; then, fully aware of the risk he was running, he said: ‘I heard voices.’ He saw the fear and anger on her face. The next moment her hand hit out and he reeled back.

  ‘Stupid!’ she shouted. ‘Never, ever, another word about it – to anyone, do you understand? You’ll bring them down on us if you do.’

  Her terror sank him in a chasm without foothold. Unwillingly, he’d made her suffer, brought danger to the house. He went out and wandered alone. Was his mother capable of such betrayal of love?

  The cowshed door was now kept firmly shut and he gave it a wide berth. At home he noticed a new tension; only Antonio in his brief moments there was his usual confident self. Even their father, so apparently in control of himself, seemed always on the alert. These were fearsome times.

  Who could say then why his need to pee one night took him to the cowshed instead of the privy on the other side of the house. Half asleep, he heard a muffled cry and stumbled into her squatting figure; a hand grabbed his leg: ‘Ssshh … who are you?’ He was too terrified to answer. ‘Miguelito?’ He nodded soundlessly. ‘Come here,’ the voice whispered. ‘Come close.’ She had her hand on his neck and he had no choice. ‘Do you know who I am?’ He shook his head; but he thought he recognized the voice. Without a word she pulled him into the muggy cowshed where, to his surprise, he saw a long, deep pit, lit by an oil taper, beneath the fodder rack. A plank and sacks of dried maize had been pushed aside. The bottom was covered by a cotton mattress.

  The flickering flame, hidden from outside, threw grotesque shadows over the sleeping cows’ flanks and on her face.

  ‘Now do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yes, señorita …’ He recognized only her face; the rest of her was disguised by a farmworker’s trousers and shirt, her hair cut short like a man’s. He shivered despite the heat.

  ‘Miguelito,’ she began softly, ‘your father is a good man. He is on our side. You must respect him always.’ She looked at him intently, still holding him by the neck. ‘On our side,’ she repeated, ‘the side of law and order. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, señorita.’

  Suddenly her voice changed. ‘Whose farm is this?’ she asked abruptly. He didn’t reply quickly enough and he felt her tighten her grip on him.

  ‘Don Gil, your father, señorita.’

  ‘And what did your brother and his cowards do to him?’

  Miguel didn’t dare answer.

  ‘What did they do?’ She shook him ferociously with both hands. ‘They killed him – an innocent old man – for nothing. Nothing. What did he ever do to them? Nothing. And they shot him in cold blood like the criminals they are.’

  The shadows flickered over her face and her eyes gleamed. And then Miguel saw they had filled with tears. She wiped them away brusquely.

  ‘Now do you understand why you mustn’t listen to your brother? He is a bad man like them all. And God will have his vengeance on them when order is restored. For the godless cannot win a crusade, the godless who assassinate and burn churches.’

  For a moment Miguel recalled that frightening moment in the square where people were throwing statues, pews, vestments – anything that would burn – onto the bonfire they’d just lit. Drifts of smoke came from the church but there was little or nothing inside that would catch. He imagined his mother standing where he was, desolate, throwing herself on her knees weeping. An overwhelming sense of sin took hold of him: a collective desecration whose sin was his own by the sole fact of witnessing it. Guilt drained him of all feeling except a bloodied hollowness inside.

  He looked at the señorita mutely. Antonio was suddenly standing on the fountain shouting at the people that they were doing wrong, telling them to stop. The guilt was washed back to its hidden source by a wave of pride. His Antonio was saying what he felt: ordering the people to end all this wrong-doing. But it was useless; men pointed their guns at him and told him to leave. Doing right was rewarded with wrong.

  ‘Who owns El Mayorazgo now?’

  He was silent.

  ‘The señorita owns it, it is mine,’ she said triumphantly. ‘My father – may his soul rest in peace – set it aside for me as a young girl. I was the only one who accompanied him everywhere, for whom the land meant anything. It is mine – and it’s going to stay mine as long as I live.’

  She too was silent now, but her eyes never left his. Her presence mesmerized him.

  ‘Your brother thinks he is going to take this, take all the farms from me – the “land for those who work it” he tells the people who are too ignorant to know better. I tell you he won’t.’ So great was the vehemence in her voice that she seemed to have Antonio in front of her instead of a child. ‘Now you know why you must never listen to your brother. He is a criminal.’

  Then, as though aware of danger, her tone lowered. ‘But you are a good boy, nearly a man. You’ll be working soon. One day, if you take after your father, as you must, you may work this land for me as he did for my father. But for that you must forget you saw me. It is a dream. I’m not here, never have been.’

  As rapidly as he’d been pulled into the cowshed, a sharp push in the back expelled him.

  In their bed Antonio was snoring gently. Miguel touched, shook him but he wouldn’t wake up. At first light, Antonio was already pulling on his trousers, stooping so as not to hit his head on the cane ceiling. Miguel was about to tell him when something held him back. Inevitably, his brother would ask what she’d said; how could he tell him?

  ‘Time to get the goats out.’ Antonio leant over the bed to tap him on the shoulder. ‘I’m off to the collective. Tell our mother for me.’ Then he was gone and it was too late. Miguel kept the monstrous secret, unaware that his brother was doing everything in his power to save her; nor in the years to come, when the señorita’s prophecy came true, did he ever refer to that terrifying night.

  But as he wandered in search of pasture he tried to make sense of this contradictory world. Who was right, who wrong? The señorita frightened him, but her words abou
t his brother he rejected with instinctive outrage. Antonio was his companion of childhood. But then there was his father who had turned on Antonio in blind anger at his son’s insistence that El Mayorazgo become part of the collective. Their father rose from the table, his hand went to his belt as though Antonio were a boy he could still thrash, and he ordered him out of the house.

  ‘I shall go,’ Antonio replied calmly, ‘when I’ve finished my supper. There are more important things happening here, and all over Spain, than depend on a single man’s …’

  His father’s hand crashed on the table, crashed through Miguel. ‘This Republic of yours is responsible for what has happened. Now go!’

  ‘It’s no Republic of mine!’ Antonio looked up from his plate. ‘But now we workers hold power, there’s the difference.’

  His father glowered at him, at Miguel too lest, the boy felt, he was siding with his brother. ‘A son doesn’t argue with his father,’ he said in a voice that might have been engraved in stone. And then he walked out of the house.

  The assured world of familiar duties and respect collapsed round Miguel’s ears. Antonio went on eating as though nothing had happened, his mother sitting opposite him stunned beyond words. Miguel yearned suddenly to run after his father to reassure him that he was not part of this betrayal. For only a few days earlier his father had entrusted him for the first time with a task that gave him a place in the world. Leading in the few goats left from the original herd he’d had to sell, he looked at Miguel as though seeing him for the first time other than as a child.

  ‘Tomorrow you take the goats to pasture. You’re man enough now for that.’

  His heart leapt, but he said nothing. His father didn’t need unnecessary words. Soon after dawn the next morning he had the goats out and set off for the best pasture; these bleating, butting animals would be the living proof that he merited his father’s trust and repaid it, wordlessly, with respect.

  So where was the good, where the bad? He remembered his joy when, in the square, Antonio furled him in the red and black neckerchief, remembered the times when his brother took him by the hand and they went looking for insects and small animals on the terraces by the house. ‘Look at that snail,’ he’d say before Miguel had seen it. ‘See how perfect the shell is.’ He ran his finger over the polished case. ‘That’s how nature is, perfect, everything in its place. It’s only us who can’t match nature.’ His brother who knew everything and shared it with him, his companion who was closer to him than his father. But Antonio frightened him too, by his defiance, for always the boy feared that the punishment to come would fall on him; he was too small to stand up to the patriarch who could be won over only by silent and dutiful respect. He felt (and always would feel) a sense of inadequacy: the impossibility of standing against the world like his brother or, like his father, of towering above it.