Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  ‘After all these months what’s another week or two?’

  He stared at the blond who contemptuously refused to recognize the limit he’d reached, twisted him because he knew there was nothing he could do. His mouth opened to speak but the words failed to come.

  ‘What’s the point of leaving the farmstead now? Be patient.’

  ‘I can’t …’ The wind’s roar suppressed the words, the sheets of paper whirled through the air and beat at his face, fell at his feet. The foreigner was scrambling on his knees, his unintelligible world galvanized round the bits of paper which uncomprehendingly Miguel stooped to pick up. Exclusive, excluding, the foreigner’s small, hermetic world closed in on him.

  ‘Thank you … My work,’ the blond gasped, trying to order the papers.

  His hand reached for the door as the blond backed round a circle of hope, even as he said he couldn’t hold out hope. Ah! The last illusion was too dear to be shattered by this demeaning voice coming out of the dark, too precious still to be confirmed in its hopelessness. He opened the door and went down the stairs, the rejection confirmed, the void sealing him in.

  Most probably it was Ana who took the next step. For her the blond’s words would have little weight, must not be allowed to undermine her brother’s tenuous improvement. The calf had to be sold. Tío Bigote might be able to buy it and at the same time …

  While the blond’s repudiation had struck at his roots, the first of more decisive ones to come, he did not live it as the total loss of himself. Ana’s determination could blind him still, and he allowed her to take him to see Tío Bigote.

  The old man, one could guess (for no one has said what happened), was surprised to be offered the calf but too shrewd to refuse it; he had enough foodstuff stored to hold out through the drought and, moreover, he was able to knock down the price. Without the customary bargaining, without even a word, Miguel nodded agreement. Then Ana, seeing that he wouldn’t speak, asked the old man herself and, his earth-worn face more than ever dissimulating surprise, he would have replied:

  ‘Ah, now there’s water and what with the dam, it will be worth a bit more for a foreigner to buy.’

  Some phrase of the sort would have been enough. Hearing no more than was expected Miguel walked blindly away, leaving Ana alone and defenceless before the old man. She saw her mistake – and later her hatred of the foreigner was in part perhaps explicable as a projection of her self-hatred for what she had done – and ran after him. When she reached the farmstead she found he had gone.

  45

  Ultimate lucidity

  Barely aware, he had set off up the track to the village. Miguel had not seen Juana since her visit to the farmstead, but he knew that this Friday evening she was due from the coast. Despair narrowed will to a single goal: to have proof of the miracle by her agreement to stay. In this narrowed vision, Tío Bigote and the blond existed as goads: his failure there could still be made good if proof of her constancy could be assured.

  Bitter though it was, Casa Colorada’s loss could be sustained without loss of esteem in others’ eyes: no one could reproach him for not gaining what few could ever have as nearly attained, and for perhaps the first time he saw through a part of the falsehood he had created himself: a man’s self-sufficiency, dignity and pride did not come from money or owning land, but persisted and were proved in a stony endurance, a rock-like observance of certain rights, among them a man’s dominion over a woman. If Casa Colorada were to have been proof of himself in her eyes, the loss could be surpassed and survived if Juana were to prove his self-sufficiency in others’ eyes.

  In anguish he walked past her house, returned, walked past the closed door again. A surge of hope, shot through with fear, overcame him: on this moment was staked all that remained, and he lifted his hand to knock on the door.

  We know what happened, we know her reasons. Miguel never knew, but the difference was small. Had she had the courage to tell him, would he have responded by laying the blame of inconstancy where it was deserved? It seems doubtful; in the event even this escape was denied by the unopened door, by the tangible exclusion that derided all hope. He stumbled away. If there had been hope it was because he had hoped; if there was none it was because he was nothing. Self-recrimination bore down remorselessly, was transformed obscurely into a logic of guilt: failure to act like a man merited a punishment to fit the nonbeing he was.

  Tormented by his reasoning, he got up exhausted the next morning before the sun rose and walked without knowing where, obsessively impelled by the torture of thoughts that the movement was meant to resolve and evade.

  Hearing the cows still in the stalls next to the room, Ana got up and looked for him. From the threshing floor, the countryside opened away and in that motionless expanse under the pale dawn sky she saw his hunched figure by the place where the water still poured uselessly down. She started to run and screamed as he fell, his arms outstretched in a futile embrace, seeing him splash like an animal trapped, getting to him as his face lifted for air and pulling at him with the strength of despair. He came out of the watercourse without resisting her, without saying a word, and all that day until evening she never let him out of her sight.

  Would he have drowned if it had not been for her? Was this the punishment or was it a desperate appeal to be saved from the self-punishment he meant to inflict?

  All that day the cold sensation of sinking, the dreaded water and then the escape, stirred an insensate flicker of self-exculpation and hope. That evening, hearing from Pepe that Juana had not been at her house the evening before, he returned to the village, and again was refused.

  The impossibility now of eluding his loss and exclusion – his worthlessness made real in the barred door behind which she sat – gave a further dimension to the self-punishment he was about to inflict. In destroying himself he would destroy her in him, the accusing eyes would be stilled for ever and she, the permanent reflection of his guilt, would in turn become a permanent figure of guilt. She would stand condemned by all but a few (like Dolores), repudiated and punished by them, not by him. In destroying himself he destroyed her, destroyed the bond that chained him to his guilt, destroyed everyone who was linked to that guilt. Those who had gone unpunished for his loss would be castigated by his self-punishing death.

  But even now he could not leave undone the tasks that remained to be done; no one should say of him that at the end he had failed what was due. And in these last, deliberate acts of delivering the calf, delivering the señorita’s share of the money, ensuring Ana fetched the calf back when ordered to, is reflected the full intent of his final act: absolute order for the rupture of order to be absolute. His suicide, I believe, then, was intended to be understood precisely as the deliberate summation of what was his due.

  In the grey light of the parlour behind the closed door he laid the money carefully on the mahogany table and stepped back, head bowed, for her to count and return his share of the notes. There was a silence of which he was unaware: she was looking and unforgivingly seeing his brother in him.

  ‘You’ve miscounted, Miguel.’ The voice was quiet, had an edge. ‘You’ve shortchanged yourself.’

  ‘Eh?’ His head rose slowly. He stammered something that was meant as an excuse, in the torment of guilt he sensed a new cause of threat: the exposure of insufficiency at its most determinedly masked point, the reputation built up over years of hard work: an irreproachable man in every aspect of work. His head hung again, knowing his guilt: the deal was bad, should never have been made …

  ‘Shortchange yourself if you want, but you won’t shortchange me.’

  And then it began. With the self-righteous anger of those whose right is to command, whose right is embodied in the property they own, she lashed at this man, whose only right was to labour and make her a profit from her land. What right had he to sell Tío Bigote the calf cheap? What right to sell what was hers because he wanted to buy Tío Bigote’s land? What right to listen to that foreigner’s words,
to think he could benefit from their dam? What right, what right?

  None. She saw his eyes staring hollowly like a dumb animal’s and the pain incensed her to a fury she wouldn’t try to contain. A sharecropper who existed only thanks to her, to whom she had kept her promise made when he was a child, who had the effrontery to think that he could leave her at will to buy his own land … For the first and only time she flung at him the scene in the cowshed when, as a small boy, she had warned him of his future as he cowered in her grasp. And he, what had he done? Paid no heed to her words, taken advantage of her because she was a woman defenceless in this world of men. Worse, he’d betrayed his own father for his brother’s ways, believing that he had the right to the land he worked. Such arrogance, like his brother’s, must and would be cut down.

  Never before had she such cause for unleashing her woman’s and landlord’s revenge, and her anger reached out for the words that destroy.

  Hearing, he heard nothing but his confirmed guilt. Scoundrel! She screamed again and again, and his eyes were frenzied with the desire to escape, to negate the destruction by destroying himself, as he stood there without moving, incapable of reflex. Without shame, without honour, all maleness destroyed, the void torn apart by the truth of disgrace, vomiting out the bloodied offence …

  ‘Take these,’ she threw the notes at his feet, ‘take them and fetch the calf back. Now get out.’

  He stumbled into the street. There was nothing left. Friends called him for coffee and he went by without answering, his face deathly pale. Before him he saw the open shop. Guilt and recrimination fled into a frozen calm, and he waited in the doorway until the few customers left. His mind had cleared, the pain was gone. Testing the rope between his arms he smiled. Neither doubt nor hesitation imperilled his will. A few yards from the shop he stopped in front of Juana’s house. The door was shut, he didn’t knock. He was free, dependent on no one, self-sufficient at last. There would be no failure. He smiled again: with pride, with honour, without disgrace.

  46

  Closures

  John stared out of the window at the rain. Below, a man half ran beneath a piece of sacking uselessly held over his head. With each step his feet disappeared under the water, which foamed round his ankles; the street was a torrent.

  Drained, totally consumed by the account of Miguel’s last hours, John was only slowly beginning to return to himself. As his sense of autonomy revived it was accompanied by a deep grief; for the first time, he mourned his friend.

  There was anger in his mourning, too. Miguel had gone to his self-inflicted death with pride and honour, self-sufficient at last. Or so it had seemed to John. The failures of Juana, María Burgos and of himself were indisputable; but the values for which, in this account, Miguel had died did not seem to merit such sacrifice. Miguel could well still be alive, he thought angrily. But after a time his anger had slackened and he was overcome by sadness. It made no more sense to condemn Miguel for his values than to blame him for having lived in this society.

  Mourning for a friend he still believed he could have saved, he felt Miguel as a part of him now. He would never outlive that sense of guilt; but it no longer dominated because, deep in him, Miguel lived on – standing in the middle of the terrace, the centre of his world, watching the soil turn dark as the water flowed slowly along the furrow. A passion …

  This inner image of Miguel John owed to his obsession. Originating in guilt, the obsession had changed course during the writing. From being an attempt to understand Miguel, it had become a passion to explore whether he could convincingly bring him to life on paper. Could John persuade a mythical reader (he thought now of Dave), apprised of the same few facts as himself, that this was how Miguel’s life might have been? A fiction. But when all was said and done, was it possible to understand another person totally? Weren’t even those closest to us an on-going invention sustained by our own subjective perceptions? Wasn’t each of us invented by the other – and probably in as great a measure by ourselves?

  Smiling, he recalled Genet’s rejection of Sartre’s ‘saintly’, voluminous exegesis of him, and wondered which of the two was closer to the truth: subject or author. The subject, of course, he was tempted to say, in good common sense. But did it not make equally good sense to refuse a person’s self-characterization as the sole criterion of character? Couldn’t imagination, well focused and empathetic, come closer to reality than a subject’s own view of himself? Closer, also, than a compilation of biographical facts? Perhaps then, as he’d always wanted to believe, the novel was the privileged site of understanding the being of others.

  If this were so, he had been slow to recognize that seeing the world through Miguel’s eyes had provided a new focus on his own life. His deep-rooted indifference had emerged more clearly in writing about Miguel than in any of the pages he’d devoted to writing about himself. This deeply paralysing sense of uselessness, this inner vacuum, which brought with it the impossibility of believing that his acts mattered to anyone, was the fundamental flaw he’d been searching for. It had been there all the while in front of his eyes and he’d refused to recognize it. But as he relived his relationship with Miguel and Bob, with Dolores too, he’d been made aware of its recurring pattern, which expressed itself in his passive role; yet this passivity was also a form of activity, allowing him to shrug off others’ problems in the knowledge that what he, John, did made not a ha’penny worth of difference in the real world.

  He got up and put the folder with Miguel’s story into the half-packed suitcase, on top of the pages of self-examination. He would never need to return to either again. On the floor under the window the pool of water was growing wider; water dripped from the bedroom ceiling; everything was damp. Now it remained only to act on his new-found awareness, he thought, as he went to the wardrobe to fetch his few clothes and put them in the suitcase. It was a gesture, no more, because his intended departure, already postponed by the rain, appeared no more imminent than it had for the past several days. The village’s charcoal-burning taxi was held up by flooding in Torre del Mar. Over the mountains, Dolores had heard on the radio, a flash flood had swept two people to their deaths when a bridge collapsed.

  Revelling in the rain, the sound of water cascading down the village streets and pouring off onto the land, he had at the beginning gone out every day. The fury of this unexpected onslaught excited him. New ravines opened in the earth to take the flow, the watercourses were churning with mud-coloured water. From a distance, he saw the water tumbling down Bob’s watercourse and he imagined the dam filling in the depths of the gorge; it brought with it an ambivalent sense of satisfaction. Perhaps, after all, to store some of this immense, wasted fall would bring benefits to those other sharecroppers who would need it next year.

  But he hadn’t ventured down the track to the gorge. Now that he had finished writing about Miguel, he knew that his relationship with Benalamar was at an end. This land was a vice for people like him who needed suffering and harshness to feel themselves come alive. To try to become one with it was a form of escapism, a vicarious way of not being, as the attempt to write about Miguel had finally demonstrated to him.

  Preferring the downpour to the sodden atmosphere of the house, he decided now to go out. From the doorway he saw that the top part of the village was lost in cloud while in front of him the rain fell perpendicular on the watery street. In a few steps from his house he was soaked through. The square was under several feet of water and people had piled what they could in front of their doors to keep out the flood.

  Skirting the square, he went down the street that led to the start of the track. From the threshing floor he saw that a giant boulder had been dislodged by the rain and crashed over several terraces below, uprooting a large carob tree in its fall. The land was riven with fissures cut by the rushing water, which carried with it great quantities of topsoil, leaving behind it a litter of stones.

  In the distance he heard a booming noise that could only be water, and
thought he saw people on the track by the gap in the hills. He wiped the water out of his eyes. No, it was too far to see clearly enough through the rain. The booming grew louder, coming definitely from below, and suddenly he knew what it was and began to run, slipping and stumbling down the track. But before he had gone more than half way, an enormous series of crashes, like hundreds of boulders being torn from their bearings, thundered in the air, followed instantly by a tidal roar. ‘Oh God!’ he moaned and slipped to the ground.

  Before his eyes the land below the hills seemed to vanish as the water burst from the dam, unfurling for a moment in a slow-motion wave before it caught the momentum of its own weight. Behind the white crest the water rushed on, almost indistinguishable in colour from the earth. Now he saw clearly that people were running through the gap in the hills, and he thought he could hear their cries. In a moment he was on his feet and stumbling again down the track in the near-blinding rain.

  In the gap, he caught sight of several faces he knew but couldn’t name, who shouted incomprehensibly at him. He ran on until he came out on the track above the gorge. It was immediately apparent what had happened: the top third of the stone wall, which lacked the protection of the unfinished concrete wall, had given way under the weight of water, which had backed up to the top. There were no conduits to channel it away. One part of the stone wall hung like a broken arm, a stream of water still flowing round it, while the other had crashed and disappeared into the water below.

  Fearfully, John looked down beyond the wall. Matanzas and El Vicente were still standing, he saw, but … He wiped the rain from his face, disbelieving: was that roofless broken shell surrounded by water all that remained of El Mayorazgo? In a panic he started to run. Casa Colorada had vanished, he saw as he rounded the corner and almost fell over Ana.