by Laurie Lee
As the evening wore on, and more wine was drunk, Pepe grew more and more excited. He seized a straw hat and a broom and became a most agile clown. With rolling eyes and a perfectly controlled body he aped the Civil Governor and the Governor’s wife, a crab caught in a trap, the soldiers of Napoleon, and the ‘Due de Vellinton’. The last two, brushing aside a hundred and fifty years with a few superb gestures, brought down the house as though they were the most topical of jokes.
Flushed with triumph now, Pepe looked round the bar seeking for further inspiration, and his eyes fell on Kati. She was the only woman there. He snatched off his hat and pressed it to his heart, then advanced towards me, and bowed.
‘With your permission,’ he said, ‘I am you.’
He stood close beside me and turned towards Kati; and with hands and body and fluid voice sang immediate love-songs right into her eyes. From then on, Pepe and I were drinking out of the same bottle. He was I. His arm was about my shoulder. ‘With your permission,’ he said, and began a new verse. He reeked of wine and olives, of garlic and the sea. He reeked also of glory. And he looked into Kati’s eyes and sang songs of such touching tenderness and grace, such delicate perfection, that I grieve that I can no longer remember them.
I loved that man, and envied him. He inhabited still the pure sources of feeling that once animated us all. For us, of course, they are increasingly clogged by each new triumph of enlightenment and comfort. But for Pepe, and for many others like him in Spain, they are still preserved by the paradoxes of poverty, illiteracy, bad roads and the great silences of the mountains and the sea.
Later that evening I walked the streets alone, too bright with wine to feel the need of sleep. There was a curious music in the air and a stamping of feet in the darkness, and as I stood in the plaza an army of young men suddenly appeared and came marching towards me, singing lustily. They were bearing guitars, mandolines, cymbals, flutes and drums of pigskin which growled when you stroked them. ‘We are going to a wedding,’ cried the leader, and invited me to go with them. Very glad of a wedding on such a night, I accepted without hesitation. I was given a pigskin drum to stroke, and I fell in behind, and we all marched away to the fishermen’s suburb, playing loudly as we went.
It was a warm, dark winter night and the season for serenading was in full swing. On every hand the town was alive with it. Women and children leaned out of rose-red windows to watch us as we passed by. We began to meet other bands marching and counter-marching about the town. Sometimes they crossed our paths with hideous discord and then just faded away into the darkness. At others, they met us head on in narrow streets, and no one would give way, and then what stiff-necked rivalry there was, what tightening of strings and jutting of jaws, what glorious bedlam as we all stood breast to breast, sweating and thumping our instruments and each trying to outplay the other.
We left the town at last, and climbed the high ground above the harbour, the wind in our teeth, the lights far below us, and the young men arguing all the way. We reached the fishermen’s suburb, where the wedding was, and halted, with some ceremony, outside a darkened house. Here we banged on the door, struck warning chords, shouted and kicked the walls. At first nothing happened; then a grey old man, roused from his sleep, poked his head from a window and cursed us all roundly. We had come, it seemed, to the wrong house.
Then we found, at last, the wedding-party, and were welcomed with cheers and wine. Here was a crowded room full of sweating girls, clambering children, and stiff old ladies as black and brittle as charcoal. There were pieces of ham handed round on toothpicks, Gibraltar biscuits and Tangier sweets, speeches, introductions, song and dance, and a beaming bride and a scratching groom.
The band placed itself in the middle of the room and played a programme of martial music well nigh drowned by the pigskin drums. The walls of the little room seemed to bend outwards with noise, the children screamed, the girls cowered in the corners, and the sweat ran down from the ceiling. Then, after more drink, ham and speeches, enthusiasm waned, and we were shown the street.
Here we paused for a while In argument, for there was still work to be done. Where now should we go and who else should we honour? Girls’ names were proposed, attacked, fought for, won or abandoned. And such names they were on the Spanish air, exotic, round, baroque and many-flavoured, a litany of virtues, a calendar of saints. Finally we accepted six of them, those best loved by the loudest in the band, and set off to serenade them.
It was now about two o’clock in the morning. Other grunting bands still marched about the town. We trailed over waste ground, under bridges, along railway lines, through darkened squares. From time to time we paused under a window, banged on a door, and struck up a military march. Sometimes we were ignored. Sometimes a sleepy girl would drag herself from her warm bed, lean drowsily over the balcony, and scratch and yawn good-naturedly in our faces. When this happened one of us would detach himself. Quick, then, were the words of love whispered up from the street, while the rest of the band, for a discreet moment, stood silently aside. Then, with a crash of chords and a growl of the pigskins, we were off again to the next. Until the light of dawn we proceeded thus. The serenading season had begun indeed, and few virgins in the town got much sleep that night. Very few of the rest of us either. And for days my fingers were sore from those pigskin drums.
One stormy but invigorating morning we set out to walk to Tarifa, the old Arab town lying twelve miles along the coast in the direction of Càdiz. Armed with coñac against the cold, we climbed slowly into the mountains, while a stiff wind blew in from the Atlantic bearing strong salt smells of northern weather. Ahead of us lay the Sierra of the Moon and on our left the Sierra of Gazelles, high and dark, shrouded with storms and eagles.
It was a morning of mysterious monotones; black rocks above and a blacker sea beneath. We saw one little girl burning leaves by the side of the road and an old man whipping acorns out of a tree. We saw the smoke of a charcoal burner blowing raggedly out of the cork forest and heard the crack of a rifle down in a ravine. Otherwise we were alone in the world, save for the eagles that dropped out of the crags to look at us.
This coast road winds through iron-coloured rocks to a mountain pass above Tarifa, and for two hours we saw no sign of traffic on it. Then a farmer in a mule-cart came rattling out of a field, and, seeing us toiling over the stones, he stopped and offered us a lift. We climbed to the top of a load of potatoes and sat beside him. He was a fat and bristly fellow, with a waistband of broad black silk in which he stored tobacco, cheese and olives for the journey. All this he shared with us, and as we went he talked comfortably about his affairs.
He was once, it seemed, a great landowner hereabouts, possessing twelve farms and twelve sons, all famous and worth much gold. Then four of the farms were lost in a lawsuit, and four of the sons in the Civil War. But that was not the end of him. There was still a son for each remaining farm, and he was master of them all. He was a big farmer, he said, and grew everything. There were potatoes here, cork trees farther on, maize down by the mad-house, and olives in the valley of toads. There was also a garden for tomatoes, an onion patch, a mill, a vineyard and a ruined chapel full of fattened pigs.
‘Buy land and breed sons,’ he said, ‘and you can’t go wrong. Come war and thieves and ruined harvests – they don’t signify at all.’ He thumped himself hard in the loins. ‘If a man’s got strong blood, like me, and scatters his seed wide enough, that man must flourish. Such is the truth and I tell it to you.’
So we continued, in the greatest satisfaction, till we came down at last out of the hills to the white town jutting on the sea. The farmer left us here and drove on into the farther country, and we turned towards Tarifa and stood below the walls.
This town, small as a village, is the most southerly point in Europe, yet the air it wears is not of Europe at all. We approached the narrow Moorish gateway, where the road runs through the walls. ‘Most royal, most loyal city of Tarifa’, it said, on coloured tile
s above. For this coastal stronghold, built for Islam, was recaptured and held by Spain long before the Moors were driven out of Europe. So it stood for years among the alien spears, a scene of bloody sieges, betrayal and massacre. But it remained the outpost of the Catholic Kings and never again surrendered.
We passed through the gateway and into the city, and the sun broke through and shone. Tarifa, within the walls, was packed as tight as a box of bricks. But the small square houses, decorated with delicate ironwork and built round tiny flowering patios, gave an impression of miniature spaciousness, a garden enclosed, an ancient perfection preserved in poverty and love.
For Tarifa was quite obviously poor. Once a name of terror in the Straits, a nest for the sea-raiders who once dominated these waters, the city lies harmless now like a wrecked and gilded barge. But the gilt is fresh, and flowers hang bright from the balconies, and the air in the streets has the clean golden silence of perpetual afternoon.
Most Spanish towns are lapped with noise, with wagons and motor-horns, donkeys and tinkers, and the ceaseless clamour of café conversation. But here there was an almost unearthly silence, cool and becalmed, a silence of no time. We threaded around the narrow cobbled alleys, and small dogs slept in shadows as though bred only for sleep. A few brown girls stood motionless by a fountain, unspeaking, stilled with secrets. A few dark men stole quietly through archways and disappeared into the profound gloom of shuttered patios. A few dark eyes watched us through the grilles of windows. And a solitary beggar girl, with huge dumb eyes, followed us slowly with a smile.
I felt we had stepped aside from all the activity of the earth and entered a charmed and voiceless world, a world where people lived as hushed as plants, taking their life from the sun without a sound. The Spanish kings may well have recovered this town in 1392, but Tarifa remained almost mystically oriental, the women wore veils of silence, and the men walked cloaked in shadow and the sun.
Down a narrow street, near an empty plaza, we ate our midday meal. The beggar child watched us through the window for a while, then, picking up a piece of charcoal from the road, began to draw pictures on the white wall opposite. She drew an ass, a lion and a tree full of birds. When we had finished our meal she came and took us by the hand and led us to them.
As we fingered the birds and stroked the lion’s mane she gazed up at us with great eyes swimming in shadows.
‘What would you like best in all the world?’ I asked.
‘To sail a ship in the night,’ she answered.
‘And where would you go?’
‘Away, to find my father.’
She came with us down to the seashore, and we sat together on the white sands, eating oranges and pastries and watching the long rollers coming in from the Bermudas.
Then we said good-bye and walked out of the town and got a lift in a motor-car back to Algeciras. As we returned through the stormy mountains, a gale blowing now and rain coming on, our driver, who was a horse-doctor, spoke passionately about the loss of Gibraltar, but he said that Churchill was a good man and might hand it back to Spain any day now.
During the days that followed, a raging storm blew up out of the Straits, accompanied by a harsh east wind. Gibraltar Rock, trailing a perpetual plume of cloud, looked like a stricken battleship on fire. The bay leapt and seethed with green and milky waves. The fishermen crouched miserably in doorways, watching their boats as parents watch sick children. And the Civil Guards drew cloaks over their noses and flapped about like wounded birds.
Rafael, the page-boy, ran in and out of the hotel with doom on his face, his proud new uniform shrinking rapidly.
‘Ay! Ay!’ he moaned. ‘What wind! What tempest!’
I asked him if this was usual weather.
‘Rare as a green dog,’ he said, shaking himself.
It meant an end to all normal life in the town. No boats would put out, so there was a lack of fresh fish. No one would go into the streets if they could help it, and those who must stole awfully about, wrapped up to the eyes with scarves as though the wind spelt plague. Another consequence of the storm was the glut of stranded travellers in the hotel. There was no way across the Straits save by the Algeciras ferries, and all travellers by train from Europe to Morocco came here to catch these boats. But with such seas running the boats refused to sail.
Suddenly, therefore, the bars and dining-rooms of the hotel were full of the lost and surprised from all over Europe. They sat around all day, staring at the walls, nibbling nuts and waiting for deliverance. Unprepared as they were for more than an hour in Algeciras, the delay seemed to rob them of all power to express themselves, and the waiters kept running to me in despair to ask the French for flan, the German for banana, or the English for soft-boiled eggs.
There was a wide variety among the travellers: a Huguenot hotel-keeper from Dublin, going to Tangier for his blood-pressure; a poor American painter with his French-Arab wife; three caravaning Swedes; a Norwegian-American and her two blonde daughters; an ex-sailor from Alamos in trouble with the police; and a thin, pale, pendantic young civil servant from the Channel Islands.
The effects of the delay upon them were also various, and at times quite startling. The Huguenot hotel-keeper drank brandy all day long and blew up paper bags to test his wind. The Norwegian and her daughters tiptoed in shocked horror about the passages, pale and martyred by the plumbing. One of the Swedes, in gritty English, made love to the sailor and was punched on the nose. And the American painter, in bad French, sat quarrelling with his wife over the works of Donatello, striking the table every so often and crying out to the amazed fishermen: ‘Jeeze, ain’t she dumb though? She jus’ don’t know from Harry! Good ker-ripes!’
But the prim young man from the Channel Islands was probably in a worse state than any of them. He was making a rapid tour of France, Spain and Morocco, every stage of which he had worked out beforehand to the split second. Delay was calamity. For two miserable days he sat in the hall, checking his timetables, making nervous calculations in his notebook, looking at the clock, and clucking. For two days he would not eat, because eating in Algeciras was not included in his itinerary. The second evening we forced him to have dinner with us, and afterwards to try some coñac. Quite soon, in a kind of white-faced desperation, growing more and more formal, he grew more and more drunk. In the end, speaking with Whitehall precision, he broke down altogether.
‘In my position,’ he said, ‘as Assistant to the Postmaster, I am assured … of an adequate salary. And later, of course … of a pension … concomitant with my grade. And yet … The tears streamed down his face. ‘What does it all mean? I would like to be famous, my name to be remembered. But how? I ask, but how?’
We picked him up – and his time-table – off the floor, and put them both to bed.
Among others stranded in the port were several shaggy groups of yachtsmen – British, French and Italian. One met them in the bars at night, a false-faced lot, all drinking heavily, all wearing braided caps. The French and Italians looked like film extras, with an anxious shiftiness about them as theatrical as greasepaint. The British included young men with polar beards, middle-aged captains with flaring faces and half-drowned eyes, and several ageless girls whom the captains always introduced as their pursers. They were quarrelsome and intensely suspicious of each other, and although they seemed to hang together, the presence of a stranger revealed some queer cracks in their solidarity.
A young man would lead me darkly aside. ‘You want gin?’ he’d say. ‘Loads of it aboard. You sell it, and we’ll go fifty-fifty. Have to hit the old man on the head though. He keeps the key, the sot.’
A girl would lead me to another corner. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through,’ she’d whisper hoarsely. ‘He nearly pushed me overboard in the Bay. Said it was an accident, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Never did trust the swine. Wish I’d stayed in Rep.’
From time to time there would be high words, blows, tears and sentimental reconciliations. Then the ski
pper, drinking rum, would embrace everyone. ‘I got the best crew in the world,’ he’d say. ‘They love me like a dad.’ Then there were nods, winks, obscure allusions, expressing a sense of shared mission, secret and dangerous. They were a shabby lot, but they all seemed to have plenty of money, to be bound on long mysterious voyages, and yet to have been stuck in the Straits for months. There was no doubt at all about it. Something more than the pure call of the sea had brought them to these waters.
Across the bay stood rich Gibraltar. Across the Straits the free port of Tangiers. For the forbidden goods they had to offer, Spain was starved. So the yachts and fishing-boats ran to and fro on the dark nights, and Algeciras was their clearing-house. Watches, fountain-pens, nylons, cigarettes, sweets, cocoa and canned meats: here, in this town, I could buy them any day, untaxed and hot from the smugglers’ hands.
The organization was smooth but implacable, and the right form of bribe had always to be observed. One morning, as I was dressing, I heard the crack of a rifle, and looking out of the window saw a young man spread-eagled on the pavement below. ‘A contrabandista,’ said the chambermaid, shaking out the sheets. But he was only a poor workman, a lone hand who had failed to obey the rules. So the green-cloaked policemen dumped his body in a cart and wheeled him like rubbish away.
But in crowded Algeciras hundreds of other young men stood around in the streets all day. They were not fishermen, or labourers, and their pockets were stuffed with American cigarettes. Every morning an army of thousands – cooks and washerwomen, ostlers, dockers, roadmen, waiters, gardeners and guides – went across to Gibraltar to work. Every evening back they came, bulging like clowns with their loot. So they and their wives drank rich cocoa on cold nights, and their daughters wore stockings of silk, and the children sometimes ate chocolate. Nowhere else in Spain were these things either seen or tasted, at least not by the poor.