by Laurie Lee
‘Distinguished visitors!’ he boomed. ‘Welcome to Castillo. Do you wish to pass a pleasant hour? Honour me then with your company, and I will show you my beautiful farm.’
Like ships becalmed, our slack sails stirred to his gusty voice; we rose, and to the winds of his pleasantries rode helplessly down the street before him.
‘I am Don Paco,’ he said. ‘All the world knows me. They will tell you I have the best farm on the southern coast. I am loved by everyone and respected much. I am their father.’
We approached a group of washerwomen by the fountain. ‘Ha! ladies,’ he cried. They recoiled, broke up and ran scurrying into their houses. A dim old man came shuffling round the corner. Don Paco caught him by the shirt and pinned him against the wall.
‘Well, uncle!’ he bawled. ‘Not dead yet? I never thought you’d get through the winter. It’s a miracle.’
The old man wheezed and spluttered, wriggling in the other’s grip.
‘And how’s that shameless daughter of yours?’ Don Paco went on. ‘Still breeding? Terrible she is. Thighs like serpents. Tell her from me she ought to be in the zoo.’
He hit the old man pleasantly in the stomach while the latter raised a thin defensive arm and cowered away.
‘What a man you are with your dogs and daughters. Don’t forget you owe me money – five duros it is now. Never mind, you can work it off. Come to the farm six o’clock tomorrow morning. Good idea. Good-bye.’
Don Paco released his grip and the old man crawled away, coughing and groaning as though he had been kicked by a horse. We left the town and Don Paco led us down a narrow lane shuttered on each side by tall green sugar-canes. The lane was waterlogged from a night of storm and we picked our way wetly along it.
‘What a paradise!’ cried Don Paco, skipping across a gigantic pothole. ‘The most beautiful place in Europe and the best climate in the world.’ He slipped on a pebble and went in up to his ankles in creamy mud. ‘Have you not found it so?’
‘Superb,’ I said. ‘Apart from the rain.’
‘Nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘It never rains here. Mist and dew sometimes – but never rain.’ He surveyed the flooded lane at his feet. ‘This water comes from the Sierras – taste it’ – he dipped a finger gingerly in the mud, licked it, gave a little shudder – ‘pure snow, delicious, gift of heaven.’ We went on. ‘I tell you, Castillo wants for nothing. Sun, fruit, flowers all the year round. And so healthy. Have you ever felt better than you do at this moment?’
‘Wonderful.’ I said. ‘Apart from a cold.’
‘A cold !’ snorted the man. ‘Impossible. What you have is a slight nasal irritation due to the abundance of flowers in the place. No one has colds in Castillo. No one is ill.’ He laughed. ‘People live so long we have to shoot them. Out of kindness.’
We had come now to a walled garden, high, spiked and feudal. We paused before a wooden doorway. Don Paco kicked it open and it collapsed in a cloud of dust. Stepping over the ruin, Don Paco threw out his arms.
‘Behold,’ he said, ‘my farm – el Rancho Grande.’
We saw an acre of land, square and well-watered, and set out with fruit trees and flowering broad beans. In a shed by the gateway a fat black pig lay perched on a pile of dung. Don Paco approached him with a loving cry. The pig grunted to his feet and ran squealing into a corner. Don Paco entered the sty, calling smooth endearments and making kissing noises with his lips.
‘Look at him,’ he crooned. ‘Isn’t he an angel?’ He broke a loose piece off the feeding-trough and scratched the pig’s back with it. The cornered pig made a scampering half-turn, snorting in terror. Don Paco glanced back at us over his shoulder, beaming with fatuous delight. ‘Look how contented he is to see me,’ he said. ‘All day he cries for me. All day he waits for me to come. Ay, the lovely darling. Tomorrow I will kill him.’
We walked up a pathway lined with white roses. Violets and tiny strawberries grew together on a bank. A fountain played under a soaring chestnut and birds sang loud in the branches. Don Paco gathered a bunch of the roses and gave them to me with a rolling bow.
‘For your señora,’ he said properly, and I passed them to Kati, who stood at his elbow. So we went round the tiny garden that was his farm, snug and green in a desert of rock. Strawberries, a withered custard apple, a handful of jasmine, all were showered on Kati, but always, of course, through me, with my permission. For Don Paco, farmer and booming bully, had a delicate sense of manners.
Next day a terrible thing happened. The night was hot and we played cards on the terrace above the moonlit milky water. The boy on the sand below us sang softly a list of griefs, and far out under the horizon a cluster of fishing-lamps burned red in the violet dark. The town was quiet, the cafés empty; even the radios had been turned off.
Suddenly we heard screams of laughter in the passage and plump Rosario come staggering in. She threw herself on the bed, tore off a boot and began to fan herself with it. For a while she sat shaking, unable to speak.
‘Ay, what an occurrence,’ she said at last, ‘what an event more than anything.’ She paused and wagged her head helplessly, exploding with giggles. ‘My uncle it was. Pedro, the old one. He went out with the boats tonight as usual, but drunk as a mule. When they got three miles out they anchored, but poor Uncle Pedro, muddled in the head, he thought they’d just come home. So up he gets, says Good-night all, steps over the side, and hasn’t been seen since.’
She went off, hooting, to tell the rest of the house. But poor Uncle Pedro, he’d come home all right. They found him, three days later, washed up in a neighbouring cove and already half-devoured by the fish. It was the biggest joke of the year in Castillo.
Our friend Don Paco, for all his pig-scratching and clownish antics, was one of the town’s upper crust, owning much property and feared by all. There were several others of his breed in Castillo – Marco, the thin-lipped lecherous Mayor, who also ran the Casino; Díaz, the head of the fishing syndicate; and Villamarta, the sugar man, who owned the factory and the fields. These, with the Church, rode high and prosperously above the general poverty of the town. Theirs was the power and the glory, and they abused it in the usual, casual way, ignoring the fates of all past tyrannies and making their pile while the going was good. They seemed quite indifferent to what had gone before, what surely must come again. In one generation the Casino had three times been burnt to the ground by desperate fishermen, the sugar factory had twice been laid in ruins, the church had several times been well scorched by frenzied villagers. Yet Don Paco, Marco, Díaz, Villamarta and the Church still flourished. When revolt threatened, they knew what to do; when the storm broke, they ran before it; they hid themselves till its violence was spent; and in the end they returned stronger than ever. The Casino and the sugar factory were restored. Villamarta raised a new villa, superbly vulgar, to dominate the town. And the Church, bearing its scorched images through the streets on holy days, saw the wretched incendiaries fall on their knees before them and weep for repentance.
We had come back to Castillo at a time of its periodic humiliation. The peasants of the field and the sea were beaten, and they lay low. Talking with them at night in the small bars inside the town, one saw their faces change at the mention of certain powers. Then their hoarse, African voices would sink to a whisper, they would shake their heads, put their fingers to their lips, clasp their hands together as though manacled, and go through the mime of a firing squad. The shadow of the Civil Guard, the long gun, the green satanic cloak, the black hat with its, sombre wings – all these lay on them darkly. Meanwhile, they hacked at the sugar canes in the heat of the morning, or scratched for food among the rocks, or rowed out their lungs on the blood-red sea.
But in their salty, sunburnt eyes, in the twist of their copper lips, and in their silences, one saw what they could not say – a savage past, an inglorious present, a future choked with unmentionable hopes.
6. Second View – Algeciras
The morning we left Castillo the
sun was bright and pitiless, probing into the rags of the beggars and into the town’s old wounds. The boatmen sprawled abandoned on the beach, the sea lay flat, clutching its miserable fish, the church and castle crumbled over all.
In our well-loaded bus we drove out westward, winding along the high coast road. And immediately the air cleared, shame and depression faded, and the deception of the light restored our spirits. It was a day of early spring, fragrant as water. Goat flocks browsed on the new-sprung herbs and blossoming almonds threw over the hills a veil of the lightest coral.
We were heading for Algeciras, along the Malaga road, and I was impatient to return to that blistering smuggler’s town. It was along this same road, thyme-scented above the sea, that I had come walking an age ago before the wars, happy alone and in no hurry. Into these same olive groves, in a languor of lavender evenings, I climbed with my bread and wine to sleep rapturously among the rocks in a golden lust of exhaustion. It gave me a pain in the side to look at that landscape now.
We made a rapid journey along the coast, hundreds of feet above the dizzy sea. Boats with curved sails stood out on the blue water, Egyptian in outline, bird-like in shadow. The mountains to the north pursued us with purple peaks and clawed at the sea with great outcrops of rock across which we skipped on slender bridges. Then the wide bay of Malaga appeared with its sugar-coated villas and flowers and fermentations; and we paused here for a while, and drank the thick sweet wine.
Then on we went through stormier weather, by green and seething seas, plunging from sunshine to sunshine through marching walls of rain. At last, in the distant mists to seaward, like a ghost-ship far out on the horizon, a shaft of sunlight struck the slopes of Gibraltar and dressed it in golden fire. We raced through sparkling cork forests, through herds of black pigs, and over the sandy bed of the River Guadiaro. We climbed to a pass, saw Africa nose up out of the twilight, looked down at the dark currents snaking through the Straits, and passed under the Sierra de los Gazules. Then Algeciras was there, and we came down round the rusty roofs, bumped and blared through the cobbled streets, and pulled up finally on the familiar quayside.
We were back. After three months among the great white cities of Andalusia we had returned to our starting-point – this corrupt and raffish town which was to us the darling of them all. The evening harbour smelt sweetly of remembered shellfish, sherry and smuggled tobacco. Porters, touts, bootblacks and contrabandistas, addressing us by name, bore our bags and guitars into the ‘Queen of the Sea’. A dozen girls from the attics descended upon Kati with cries and embraces. Ramón and Manolo advanced to wring my hand, eyes clamped politely, compliments flew, and we were given our old room overlooking the bay. Thus we settled down to blow the rest of our money, and to wait for a passing ship to take us home.
In the mornings the bay was aflame. The sun leaned low on powerful haunches and licked the Sierras with its lion’s tongue, leaving them red, rock-bare and raw. But Gibraltar, though leashed to the mainland by its strip of sand, seemed somehow to escape its livid breath, remaining cool and foreign, as though by protocol. I watched it from my balcony as I drank my breakfast. It lay on the waters like a glass-blue prawn, or crouched like a dog and threw off aircraft like fleas. Often it would spin from the cloudless Spanish skies a particular ball of mist which set it apart from the naked mainland and invested it daily with its own grey roof of English weather. Gun-metal faced, disciplined and dour, it could never do less than command our respect. But Algeciras, the foot-pad, beggarly poet thriving so seamily in its shadow, was, it must be said, invariably better company.
Kati returned to her friends in the attics, to that white-starched world of muted love songs, sibilant gossip and endless needlework. Meanwhile I went back to the streets, to walk in the tang of the town and yield to those shiftless pleasures I never could resist.
I was shaved each morning by an old man whose shop faced the fishing-boats. His hands on the face were lighter than feathers, his brush moved over the skin as though in a cloud of warm air, and his razor left one glowing and renewed. He talked as he worked of the cities of the Incas, of Spain’s old glories and the countlessness of the stars. And in the intervals between customers he took up the guitar and played it like a master.
Afterwards I went to the taverns and drank their golden sherries. In one, a group of men were discussing the baking of bread. They spoke with bright eyes, each echoing the other’s wonder, as though describing a miracle. The best bread is like this, it comes from the wheat of Mora, it is shaped thus, marked thus, placed in the oven so. The fire must be spread wide, sprinkled with charcoal, glowing like the crust of the sun. The baked bread opens thus, turns cream and gold like a ripe chrysanthemum, is crisp yet tender to the teeth, and tastes like manna. The best bread is from Portonegro, the old man Charro bakes it, his loaves are like girls’ breasts, all milk and sunshine. To eat such bread one wants neither fruit nor meat. No, it is a meal in itself. And so it went. Such rapt remembering of skill and flavour, such poetry of gesture, scooping, rolling, shaping the loaves. Here was speech and movement not yet enslaved by either jargon or the machine; phrases out of Homer and the Bible, by men who had read neither.
In another tavern a slender whore stood weeping and drinking by the bar. Her face was white and scarred round the eyes and mouth, and she wore a halo of tangled hair. Her smooth red dress clung tightly to her body as though she had been dipped in wax. ‘I dreamed last night of my dead father,’ she was saying. ‘He was beautiful. Like a lovely horse. The only man I ever loved. He is dead. There are no men left in the world.’ She hung over the bar and wept into her wine, with eyes for no one, speaking to herself.
Out in the street the market buzzed and murmured, slashed here and there by the sharp cries of a fish-seller. I wandered here and saw a madman, hooded in a cloak, run through the crowd. Every so often he would pause and uncover his cropped head and raise his ravaged face to the sky and howl and stick pins in his throat. Women went up to him and thrust bread in his pockets. The boys and children laughed.
Also in the market-place there was a ballad singer, chanting some recent crime from Alicante. It was a dull crime on the whole, about a schoolboy, beautiful and good, whose mother gave him a peseta each morning to buy a cake. He saved up the money instead and bought a lottery ticket. He won, and in his excitement told his schoolmaster, who murdered him to get the prize. Thirty-seven verses, to a rigid air, told us the tale, demanding our pity and horror. A listening crowd drank up the awful song, nodding among themselves when the last verse pointed out how many evil deeds were committed for money. A printed sheet of the words could be bought for a penny.
Near the Post Office a boy came up to me with a bird in his hands, a yellow-crested bird with slack wings and rolling, unconscious eyes. ‘It is a jay,’ said a bootblack, watching. The boy held it up for me to see but its head hung down limply. ‘Is it dying?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said the boy, ‘it is always like that – a sad bird.’ And he buttoned it up in his shirt, leaving the dull head bobbing out like a sick old man in bed.
Up in the Plaza Alta I met Manolo, who was walking hands clasped with a blond young man. ‘I want you to meet Isidro,’ said Manolo. ‘He is my special friend. We have been walking in the park discussing philosophy – but things very deep.’ Isidro shook my hand and smiled, as though I would hardly believe how deep those things were. He had a long sensitive face, a limping foot, and was a baker by profession. We sat down at a café table under a shrivelled orange tree and Manolo wrote down for me a selection of the afternoon’s philosophical findings. These told me that the world was round, that God was love, that night must fall, five beans make a poor meal, and death comes to all men in the end. After that, we took a bottle of wine and faced each other, flexing our wits for the task before us. Then each in turn wrote an epigram on the table-top, and the best in each round was recorded in a book. By the coming of dusk we had squared many a circle and dazzled ourselves with our brains. What low whistles and shaking of h
eads there were at our brilliance. It was as good as dominoes or dice.
A tubby little American had arrived at the hotel, on leave from Africa, where he had been building air-bases. He had small blue eyes, a chubby face, a simple drawl, and his name was Ben. He seemed lone and lost and not at all sure why he had come to Spain in the first place, except that he had wanted to get out of Africa. Africa terrified him. That night we ate together, and he gazed at us with popping eyes, breathless and sweating, as though amazed to find himself still alive.
‘Ah just don’t fancy that Africa at all,’ he said. ‘No sah. Them folks had me real scared.’ He puffed out his lips and looked over his shoulder. ‘Ah can’t understand it. Them Frenchies seem to hate us Americans. Charge us six times over for a drink and then insult us cause we don’t know the lingo. As fer them Arabs!’ His eyes went round and wide. ‘Why, they’ll kill you fer two dollars.’
After dinner we sat round on the terrace drinking coffee and coñac.
‘Does me good talkin’ to you folks,’ he said. ‘Keeps me out of trouble. Not that I aim to do much drinkin’ anyhow. Ah’m right off it, you unnerstand.’
He was forty-nine, and a grandfather, he said; married when he was fourteen to a girl of twenty-three. She was home in California, but when he spoke of her she seemed to sit at his trembling elbow.
‘Nevah drink back home,’ he said. ‘Mah wife won’t let me. Not since that time in San Diego. Got drunk there one night. Boy, it was terrible. Ah was drivin’ home an’ got picked up by a patrol man. He said he was goin’ to take me in – so ah hit ’im!’ He clenched his fist and hit out, then dropped his eyes and giggled, afraid of himself.
‘Liquor makes me wild,’ he said shyly. ‘Ah’m part Cherokee, ya see. Look at mah cheek-bones.’
In the fume of the red-lit café he raised his head, and we looked, and sure enough he was Cherokee, his cheek-bones naked in the night, his small eyes bright and mad.