by Laurie Lee
‘Ah, Federico!’ he said, in a changed voice. ‘There was a man! – an angel of the arts, a veritable torrent of inspiration. He was a treasury of talent – writing, drawing, singing, playing the piano, everything he did captured the imagination of us all and transformed our souls. He talked like a god, and when he sang the gypsies were dumb, they sat transfixed and wept real tears. He was a spirit. He lived like a star. He seemed on fire. I was the companion of his youth, and night after night we walked by the river and he talking till dawn. He had three imperatives for poetry: “Luz, alma y vida”; and he loved Spain with his bones. Those wonderful records he made with Argentinita, he playing the piano and she singing his words ! – to hear them now is to be scalded with fire and grief. He was all beauty and genius, was Federico. But he did not belong to this world. He travelled to America and made a lot of money, but the success shamed him. When he came back he said to me, “José,” he said, “once upon a time I had no money, but my pockets were stuffed with poems. Now my pockets are stuffed with dollars, but I have no poems any more.”’
As he was talking we were joined by two other friends of Lorca, both successful writers, and one the brother of a leading Spanish poet. Don José led them into the conversation, and how sentimental they grew, how they praised ‘Federico’s’ memory and how they protested their love. They sang me his verses and wrote out in my notebook some of the words of his fandanguillos. Even Horsehead joined in, and for a time we seemed at ease. But when suddenly I mentioned his death, how swiftly their attitudes changed. What evasions, excuses and tortuous explanations followed. They all talked at once, pulling up their chairs, tapping me on the knee, and blowing their hot breath in my face. It was an accident, it was a private murder, it was a case of mistaken identity, it was a blunder by a Civil Guard who has since been punished – every story was different, except in its effort to prove that the killing had not been political.
But in the first hysteria of the Civil War, when some cities stood for, and some against, the rebel Franco, it was those with the guns who did the killing. And it seems that Lorca, in Francoheld Granada, was a marked man from the very beginning. For he wrote verses to traditional tunes which anyone could sing. They were sung widely, particularly by the poor, who do most of the singing in Spain. They were even sung by the anti-Franco armies. So Lorca was considered to be a red poet. He had also written several popular poems attacking the brutal Civil Guard. Many a man was shot for less cause in those first days. So Lorca was taken out on to the hills one morning and shot too. Excuses remain, and reasons are vague, but the poet is dead, and the guilt is Granada’s.
5. Castillo of the Sugar Canes
We had come down now to the warm south coast, to a small fishing village which I shall call Castillo – though this is not its name. Many years ago, in the summer of 1936, I had lived in this place. I was there when General Franco made his journey from Morocco and the Civil War exploded along the coast. I saw this poverty-stricken Castillo lift its head out of the smoke and clamour of those days and feed, for a brief hour, on sharp hot fantasies of a better world. I had come back now, as I knew I must one day, to see what the years had done to the town. I found it starved and humiliated, the glory gone, and the workers of the sugar fields and the sea hopeless and silent.
Castillo was once a pirate stronghold, standing on a fortress rock in the mouth of an estuary, surrounded by water and hooded by mountains. The estuary, now, was dry; the castle ruined and stuffed with graves; and the town, stripped of its pirates and Barbary jewels, depressed and desolate. The silted estuary now grew crops of sugar cane, and the ragged shore was littered with broken boats. The fishing was niggardly, and the sugar offered little more than a month’s work a year. For the rest of the time the townsfolk scavenged among the rocks or sat watching the sea and praying for miraculous shoals.
We put up at the white, square, crumbling hotel where, during my earlier visit, I had worked as porter and minstrel. The hotel was empty now and a wind of chill ghosts blew through the passages. We were offered our choice of rooms and took the best one, which had a balcony overhanging the sea. Below the windows a group of exhausted fishermen lay face downwards on the sand, sprawled out like starfish sleeping. Behind the hotel the promenade of cheap café’s, which once hummed with the talk of a world republic, now gaped at the sea with the empty eyes of beggars. The fountain was choked with refuse, goats browsed in the ornamental gardens, the sugar canes rattled like bones on the wind, and the dark-blue mountains stood close around, sharp and jagged, like a cordon of police.
A silence as of sickness hung over the place now, and I remembered Castillo as I had seen it long ago. A summer of rage and optimism, of murder and lofty hopes, when the hill-peasants and the fishermen, heirs to generations of anonymous submission, had suddenly found guns in their hands and unimaginable aspirations in their breasts. I saw them shoot the fish merchants, drive the sugar planters into the hills, barricade the mountain roads, and set up the flag of their commune over the Town Hall. ‘This flag,’ they said, ‘will be defended to the last drop of our blood.’ And so, indeed, it was. The smoke of violence and excess filled the streets in those first days. They looted the food shops, tore down the sugar factory, wrecked and burnt the Casino. I saw a grand piano, like a monstrous symbol, blazing one morning outside the church. As it burned, the tense wires inside it snapped and jangled, while the keys, like teeth, spilled broken onto the cobbles.
The destructive frenzy soon wore itself out The committee of the commune took over all the big houses that had been abandoned by their owners, and across the walls, in letters of scarlet, they chalked their naive ambitions. ‘In this house we shall make a school for the women.’ ‘Here shall be founded a club for the young.’ ‘This house is reserved as a hospital of rest.’ ‘This house shall be the orphanage.’ The committee sat night and day in the Town Hall, their guns on the table, confident that their enemies would be defeated; in the meantime drawing up an impossible, spring-like way of life.
Their plans were swiftly doomed. Very soon the yellow snub-nosed tanks came clanking along the road from Malaga, Italian bombers swooped over the Sierras, German warships shelled from the sea. The town fell; and the firing squads cut short the brave words of the committee; the big houses were restored to their owners, the writing was scrubbed off the walls; and Castillo’s summer dream was over.
Everything now was as it had been before – though perhaps a little more ignoble, more ground in dust. As I walked through the town time past hung heavy on my feet. The face of a generation had disappeared completely. A few old women recognized me, throwing up their hands with an exclamation, then came running towards me with lowered voices as though we shared a secret. But of the men I had known there was little news, and such as there was, confused. Most of them, it seemed, were either dead or fled. The old women peered up at me with red-rimmed, clouded eyes, and each tale they told was different. My ex-boss, the hotel-keeper, who used to pray for Franco in his office, had been shot as a red spy; he had died of pneumonia in prison; he had escaped to France. Lalo, the hotel porter, had been killed on the barricades in Málaga; he ran a bar in Lyon; he was a barber in Jaén. Young Paco, the blond dynamiter of enemy tanks, was still a local fisherman – you could run into him at any time; no, he had blown himself up; he had married and gone to Majorca. Luiz, the carpenter, had betrayed his comrades and been stoned to death; he lived in Vélez Malaga; he sold chickens in Granada …
In the end I gave up. There was no point in making any further inquiries. Nobody lied deliberately, but nobody wished to seem certain of the truth. For the truth, in itself, was unendurable.
I was restless and haunted in Castillo, and slept badly. Often I would go out before dawn and sit on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, watching the dark sea’s motions in the night. The slender strip of beach, gauzy with its nets, drew a sharp dividing frontier between the pure classic spaces of water and Castillo’s earthy wretchedness. Time after time I sat thus, hunc
hed up in my chair, watching new days grow slowly from the east. The moving patterns of these Mediterranean mornings seemed as formal as a sacred play. Each dawn brought the same sensations, the same dry whiff of ancient shores, the same slow Eastern look into the worlds of Egypt and the Phoenicians …
At first there was nothing – a profound blue darkness running deep, laced by skeins of starlight and pale phosphorescent flashes. This four o’clock hour was a moment of utter silence, the indrawn breath of dark, the absolute, trance-like balance between night and day. Then, when it seemed that nothing would ever move or live or know the light again, a sudden hot wind would run over the invisible water. It was like a fore-blast of the turning world, an intimation that its rocks and seas and surfaces still stirred against the sun. One strained one’s eyes, scarce breathing, searching for a sign. Presently it came. Far in the east at last the horizon hardened, an imperceptible line dividing sky and sea, sharp as a diamond cut on glass. A dark bubble of cloud revealed itself, warmed slowly, flushing from within like a seed growing, a kernel ripening, a clinker hot with a locked-in fire. Gradually the cloud throbbed red with light, then suddenly caught the still unrisen sun and burst like an expanding bomb. Flares and streamers began to fall into the sea, setting all things on fire. After the long unthinking darkness everything now began to happen at once. The stars snapped shut, the sky bled green, vermilion tides ran over the water, the hills around took on the colour of firebrick, and the great sun drew himself at last raw and dripping from the waves. Scarlet, purple and clinker-blue, the morning, smelling of thyme and goats, of charcoal, splintered rock and man’s long sojourn around this lake, returned with a calling of dogs, the cough of asses and the hoarse speech of the fishermen going down to the working sea.
Some fishermen, of course, had been there all night, fishing far out with lamps; and now, in the overlapping light of dawn, they returned from the deep water to meet their poorer brothers setting out to fish the inshore shallows. In from the horizon, across the chill, flat, crimson silence, the little fleet came throbbing to the shore. As the vessels grounded, the fishermen of the night sprang red-legged into the water, wading ashore with cries and coughing, while a team of oxen, backing into the waves, hauled each boat up the sands.
Then the poor scratch fishermen of the morning took over, setting out in their long curved boats and rowing like madmen across the copper sea. The dark silhouettes of their craft, and of the bent men rowing, looked as old as Greece and revolved against the coloured water like ancient paintings on a pot. A man in the boat’s high stern paid out a net, while the crew rowed lustily to his cries, kicking up little flames of spray. A net was laid in an arc off-shore, tethered to the land by its separate ends. Then two gangs of short, bandy-legged little men took these ends and began to haul it in again. It was a kind of slave labour, to be witnessed every morning. Panting, swearing, yelping and groaning, they toiled up the beach, while the heavy net, inch by inch, was laboriously hauled ashore.
After two hours of this mule-train labour the centre of the net, buoyed up by barrels, could be seen approaching the beach. Women and children began to appear in little groups on the sands, watching the net with intense black eyes. This was the peak moment of their day, moment of possible miracle though familiar disappointment, moment when the unknown catch of fish was drawn wallowing ashore. The women watched in silence, but excitement grew among the fishermen. The cries of the hauling men were louder, hoarser; their naked toes clawed deeper in the sand, they heaved, and threshed and tumbled, bending so low their beards almost scraped the ground. The boat crew ran up and down along the edge of the waves, barking like dogs and skipping in and out of the water. And all eyes were fixed on the patch of rippling foam where the long funnel of net rolled submerged with its catch.
At last, with a final burst, it was drawn ashore, a slack, black, serpentine shape twinkling with tiny scales. Seized and emptied upon the sand, before the watching eyes of the wives, the harvest was little enough – a pink mass of glutinous jellyfish and a few kilos of quivering sardines. The watchers and the exhausted fishermen drew in their breath, gazing silently at the wretched heap, and in it saw their poverty confirmed. For a while they stood in a ring, unspeaking, gazing down, while a Civil Guard, with cloak and rifle, drew near and shadowed all.
The disposal of the fish was a simple matter. Brown, scaly fingers sorted them into little heaps about the sand. Then the leader of the crew, in a croaking fatal voice, began to auction them on the spot. He mentioned a figure almost with shame. Two damp-faced dealers, bleary from their beds, approached and stood listlessly watching. ‘Seventy-five,’ said the fisherman, ‘seventy-four … seventy-three …’ As the price fell, so did his voice, as though he could not bear the women to hear such obscenities on his lips. At last, when his husky offer could sink no lower, one of the dealers nodded briefly, spat, and shovelled some loose change into the leader’s hand. It was all over; the pathetic price was shared, and the stunted men, still blown from their long labours, took their few pence in silence.
We watched four such auctions on four successive days and not once did the catch fetch more than thirty shillings. Half of this went to the owner of the boat and the rest was divided among some twenty men. By then there was scarcely enough left to buy bread with. On the worst mornings, when the price went down and down and there were no takers, the auctioneer would break off at last, click his teeth and stare at the mountains. This was the signal for the fishermen to share the catch among themselves. Then the sardines were counted out on the sands, scooped up into the aprons of the wives and borne away home. The children and the workless were left to scratch in the sand for the small fry which had passed unnoticed, and these they ate raw on the spot.
The morning’s fishing, beginning at dawn, was usually over by ten o’clock. From then on the men had nothing to do. So they spent their time lying face down on the sand, a row of jetsam above the shining sea, sleeping the ebb of their lives. The night fishermen caught bigger fish – rose-coloured salmonetti, species of mackerel, octopus and sometimes even tunny – but there was little profit in these either. A single dealer bought them for the Granada market and, lacking competition, he made his own prices.
It must be said that the men of Castillo were poor fishermen and even worse sailors. Their methods were antique, arduous and ineffective. They would only fish in the calmest waters. They often set out in a flurry of hysteria, swamped their boats, fouled their nets, fell overboard and were the most uncertain judges of weather. But the sterile waters were their worst enemy.
When the clamour of the morning’s fishing was over, the town went quiet, and we sat on the balcony waiting for breakfast. No matter how long we waited we knew it wouldn’t come till the hotel taps started whistling. Then Rosario, the chambermaid, would appear jubilantly before us.
‘They’ve turned the water on!’ she’d cry. ‘But a little patience now and I will bring you your coffee.’
Half an hour later, a drumming of cloven hooves could be heard passing down the dusty street, and Rosario would appear again.
‘The goats have come !’ she’d announce rapturously. ‘Now we have milk.’
And half an hour after that, proudly, as though each were a personal triumph of organization in the face of a long siege, the two sweet glasses of yellow coffee would be set before us. So it was every morning.
The days we spent here were spacious, slow and quiet. Still weak from my fever, I spent much of the daylight hours drinking white wine and watching the sea. Already, though it was only January, the sun had marched northwards and strengthened, throwing each day upon the waves a trail of jagged stars so dazzling they bruised the eyes. The warmth of the sun fell on us like a treasure, and the daylight moved over the sea in great, slow transpositions of colour, dying each night in purple dusks. The cliffs and mountains soaked up the sunsets like red sponges and the distant ragged edge of the Sierras shone blue as a blunted saw.
After dark a boy would come an
d sing to us. The hotel-keeper and his wife brought sardines and olives, the porter fetched wine, Rosario pushed back the beds and she and Kati danced. Later, the shutters were opened to admit the moon and we ended the night with story-telling. So passed the long casual days of my convalescence; the sea with its patterns of boats and men, the girls dancing in the dusk, the boy singing his tragic songs along the path of the moon, and the haunted presence of the town around us, smouldering in the dark.
Sitting one morning outside a sea-front café, eating cooked liver and drinking the golden wine, we caught sight of a striking figure advancing up the street towards us. He was a tall man, wide hipped and narrow shouldered, shaped like a sherry cask, and on the top of his large smooth head he wore a black beret hardly bigger than a button. But what particularly drew one’s attention was not so much his size as his booming voice and the extravagant, almost royal gestures with which he saluted everyone in his path. To each of these, man, woman, child and dog, he bellowed greetings as he came, and his face was lit by a vast and insane smile. Loose-lipped and flabby-handed, rolling and posturing on his tiny feet, he looked a terror.
‘Watch him,’ we said, as he approached. He caught our eye, stopped dead, spun his great bulk on the points of his shoes, swept off his hat, and bowed.