by Laurie Lee
‘Ah thought that patrol man was doin’ me an injustice,’ he went on, ‘so ah knocked him down. He fell on the curb there an’ it peeled his head right back. Ah was in real trouble then, believe me. But ah got me a crooked lawyer an’ a crooked judge an’ they charged me a thousand dollars an’ told me to get out of town. Boy, ah was lucky. Ah could have done time for what I did that night.’
We were going to a cabaret and asked him to come with us. But he excused himself, trembling slightly. He said he’d have another coñac and go to bed. We left him there looking small and lost, chastened by memory.
The next morning there was a great stir among the chambermaids. They came giggling to our room to tell us that the American was lying in bed covered with lipstick, groaning, moaning, and ringing bells, and that nobody could understand what he said.
I went to his room to see what I could do. The round, childish face lay on the pillow, pink and ashamed, and a trembling hand tried to cover his red-smeared mouth.
‘Am ah glad to see you,’ he shuddered. ‘Ah’m in real trouble. Just walked out fer a little drink last night an’ got mah wallet stolen. Had all mah money in it – tickets, passport an’ everything. God damn it, they even poisoned mah liquor!’ He held his head in his hands. ‘What am ah goin’ to do now?’
I went downstairs to make some enquiries, and they told me what had happened. When the bar closed last night, Ben had persuaded the barman to take him to a dance hall. There he had danced with the girls, treated everybody, got very drunk and disappeared. Later some fishermen had found him in a brothel where he was causing quite a sensation. He had nailed his wallet to the wall and was saying that the girl who could kick that high could have it. After that he’d passed out, and the fishermen had taken charge of both Ben and his wallet and carried him home. The wallet they’d left in his boots.
And sure enough there it was. Ben took it from me with shaking hands and fumbled feverishly, but clumsily, through its contents. Everything was intact, including 500 dollars cash. He almost sobbed with relief; then pulled himself together and thought he’d like some breakfast – not much, just ham and eggs and cawfee.
Kati went off to the kitchen to’ arrange this for him, and we didn’t see him again till noon. The Seville bus was due to leave, and the porter had loaded the American’s bags on it, when suddenly we saw him coming briskly down the street carrying a great armful of irises and daises.
‘Ah brought these few blooms for your lady, sah,’ he said, and handed them to her with solemn dignity. He was shaved and spruce now, a southern gentleman. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you mam, an’ you sah. You’ve been real kind to me. If evah you’re in California …’
He took off his snap-brimmed hat, exposed his rosy pate to the sun, bowed, then mounted the bus. With a drunken lurch it bore him away, carrying him to his doom.
Isidro, the baker-philosopher, had now met Kati and fallen in love with her. Each day he hobbled up the street to bring us gifts of new-baked bread. When we met at the cafés in the evening to write our epigrams he was dignified and sad, his manners always perfect, though his written thoughts veered from abstract considerations of the cosmos to those of romantic though melancholy speculation. Manolo, the waiter, treated him as a sick man and was tender, like a nurse. But night and day Isidro haunted the quayside in front of the hotel, walking slowly up and down and trailing his limp leg after him. Our room began to burst with bread, and smuggling it out to the beggars became a major conspiracy. Mysterious serenaders appeared under our window, hired by the baker, who hovered ghost-like in a doorway while they played. The daily gift of loaves grew more and more exotic in shape, their crusts decorated with hearts and flowers, with moons and stars, with pretty angels, even with our names – though these never appeared together on the same loaf.
Then, early one morning, Isidro appeared at the door in his best suit, tense and smiling, with a jar of wine in his hand. It was his saint’s day, he said, and his father had given him a holiday. So he had arranged a picnic in the cork-woods and he invited us to come. Manolo, of course, was with him, standing a little aside like a keeper, and with his great dog’s eyes he signalled that we must accept.
But we were glad to go. It was a hot and hazy day, and Isidro promised us trees and water. So we bought some fruit, and a bottle of coñac, and took a conveyance into the hills. It was a different country there from the dusty coast; a wooded valley, green and fresh, with grass and flowers among rocks and a mountain stream running cool. The valley was narrow, almost a gorge, and birds flashed through the cork trees like motes before the eye. The shining stream slipped smoothly, silently, over the tumbled boulders; brown and white goats passed by with swinging bells, and high overhead, in the blue lane of the sky, dark eagles circled slowly.
We sat ourselves down on sun-warm rocks and passed the wine-cask round. Warmth and idleness ran languorously through our bodies. Isidro unwrapped cheese and meat and a huge loaf which he had baked the night before, and all our names were worked across the crust, entwined in leaves and lilies. So we ate, and drank, and stretched out under the trees, and floated the wine in the stream to keep it cool. Meanwhile Manolo, rather drunk, sang sad songs of the Asturias, which was his home, and Isidro, in the intervals, gazed into the water and explained portentously the symbolism of it.
From the forested heights of these mountains, they told us, one could see the whole of the Straits; the ships passing, the leaping dolphins and the tides sliding in from the Atlantic like long blue snakes. One could see westward into the Gulf of Cadiz and far south into the mint-green hills of Morocco.
‘In Morocco,’ said Isidro, gazing mournfully at Kati, ‘the women cover their faces, and all wives are kept hidden.’
‘A good thing,’ said Manolo primly.
They told us of the life in the higher valleys here, and of the robbers who inhabited them. Kidnapping was their special line, and they were particularly fond of merchants and bankers, whom they carried off and held for ransom, hiding them in cunning discomfort till the money was paid,
‘Love is a bandit,’ said Isidro heavily.
‘And the heart its ransom,’ added Manolo mechanically.
They told us of the hermits who lived here in caves, old bearded men who spent their days in prayer, living on nuts and berries. They were holy men, fleeing the temptations of the flesh.
‘I would be a hermit,’ said Isidro.
‘It is a life of torment,’ said Manolo.
‘But less cruel than the world,’ said Isidro, gazing again at Kati.
So we passed the afternoon, finishing the wine slowly to a pleasant mixture of high thoughts and romantic melancholy. Then at last, in a blue dusk, we left the valley and walked back to the town. A curved moon, like a quartered orange, hung low over Morocco, and the wide sky filled with big bright stars. We discussed them, and the cosmic spaces between, to which sexless abstractions Isidro’s mind seemed happily to have returned. We passed under the great arches of the Viaduct and entered the town in the chill of the night wind, and the lights of Gibraltar filled the bay like a spiral nebulae.
There are bars in Algeciras where a glass of wine and a plate of shrimps cost only twopence; where it takes an hour to spend a shilling; where a bootblack has only to see you to press drinks upon you; and where processions of strangers are for ever offering you glasses of coñac with proud gestures of courtly friendship. Any attempt to return the favour is discouraged by a shocked shaking of the head. You are a traveller, they say; it is our privilege to make you welcome. In the face of such formal hospitality there is nothing to be done but to drink and talk of bulls, answer questions about one’s country, and discuss politics by vague allusions.
It was in one such bar that I met Ricardo, of Bilbao. He was a lean, military-looking young man, with a thin black moustache and a sharp blue suit. He was a commercial traveller, and his clean, classical Spanish cut through the husky Andalusian dialect like a sword. But he was a nervous man, always looking over
his shoulder, constantly moving me away from suspicious persons, his bright eyes never still. As we drank and talked he summed me up, seemed to find me safe, and slowly revealed himself. As a captain in the Republican Army he had fought against Franco. He had been captured at last and sentenced to death. By some casual mistake of book-keeping the sentence was never carried out; he was abandoned in jail and forgotten. For many days he lay alone in the darkness of a small underground cell in some fortress near Teruel. He lived by chewing straw and licking the water from the walls. At last, with a metal cup, he made a tunnel and escaped. He found friends who clothed him, the war ended, he took a new name and got a job. From then on he has travelled like a ghost around the south of Spain, unable to return to his family.
I thought it mad of him to tell me all this, but he seemed eager to talk. We moved restlessly from bar to bar. He could not keep still, and kept pointing out to me people he knew (or suspected) to be secret police or informers. And all the time he talked, while his eyes went dark and wet, his body shook and his voice broke with despair.
Ricardo was an educated man, slender in thought and body, sincere, sentimental in the best sense, and a believer once in heaven and hell. He still could not understand what went wrong. The aspirations of his comrades in arms had seemed so honest and simple. How, he asked, could these hopes have been termed criminal, how could they have been condemned and abandoned by the world, to be met only by bombs and bullets, imprisonment and massacre? He talked of the miners of Asturias, their naive ambitions, their bewilderment when the world named them mobsters, bandits, outlaws. Their friends from abroad sent them nothing but poems, greetings and votes of solidarity. The rest came with fire and explosives. So they fought the tanks with bare hands and bottles, threw rocks at the machine-guns, and shot at the dive-bombers with ancient muskets. It was then that they realized the futility of good intentions. For they were defeated. They were bound, fettered, stripped and starved. They were herded into bull-rings, lined up against the walls of churches, and shot as though diseased. And when the first paroxysms of their conquerors had passed, having slaughtered a million or so of these amazed but simple men, the rest were imprisoned and left, crowded like rats in holes in the ground, till they fought each other for what food there was and saw even their comradeship degraded.
It was fifteen years now since the end of that civil war, yet the prisons were still full, while young wives grew old slaving for bread to feed their ageing men.
‘All we wished for,’ said Ricardo, ‘was an honest life. A life of clean breath and happy conscience. We wished to raise ourselves a few steps from the dust only. Why were those in the high chairs so terrified? We in Spain were the first victims of that fear. Hired gunmen were sent against us, and they slaughtered the best of us. Why did none of you stop this thing? It was the beginning of evil. All the world is a prison now. And the spirit of man is polluted.’
Ricardo, in his bright suit, his pockets stuffed with pamphlets praising his firm’s sardines, was the living shame of his age, hiding from the secret police and from his conscience. He could not forgive himself for having been spared, but it was too late to be a martyr now.
Meanwhile the police moved here and there; the hoarse fishermen in the taverns lowered their voices and made tormented jokes about the Powers; and the generals drove to Mass in their big black cars and back through saluting streets.
It was early March and spring had come. The skies were full of the swoop and squeak of swallows. Geraniums flowered on all the houses, and in the fields the beans were up and the wheat was a bright high green. In the heat of the day we walked to the beach which lay two miles out of the town. A green dust of herbs lay over the hills and small flowers grew on the cliffs. Through long hot days we lay on the beach, sleeping and bathing at intervals, while large white cows walked the sands before us and an old crone gathered seaweed.
Above the sea the strong sun climbed the sky, and the coastal cities of Morocco shone white as apparitions, like flickering crystals, like cameos set in glass. There was no wind, and the small tide came in like a sigh, stealing imperceptibly across the weed-green stones. I dozed easily in the wine-scented heat, and woke to see Kati standing in the still water like a carved Greek statue cut off at the thigh. Along the soft blue edge of the horizon ships moved like cut-out toys – tankers tramps and battleships, and liners heading for home.
They were gentle days; days torn from this March summer which would mean an extra summer in our lives. On the cliffs there were goats and horses nibbling the new-sprung green, and the sonorous chime of the goat-bells was like a musical skin over the landscape.
Our way back to the town lay through fields of wheat, and here, upon eminences overlooking the sea, we found elaborate concrete gun-sites, set to command the Straits, newly built but already decaying. Lizards inhabited them only, and flowers grew over the gun-slits. Inside, on the wall of one, was written: ‘Here I loved Manuela.’
Entering the town we visited the families who lived in the ruins of the unfinished Casino. A network of girders stood at the sea’s edge, and these, with the aid of tarpaulins, the families had made into homes. It was an active, noisy little suburb, running with pigs and children. The children had named me ‘Man of Iron’ because they once found me sleeping among thistles. When I pass by now they punch me and say ‘Dong!’ then hop and skip, pretending they’ve hurt their hands. The women take in washing, which they hang on the girders to dry. The men sit idly, watching their children run, amazed at the fecundity of their loins, the sterility of their life.
A company of singers and dancers had come to the theatre by the bull-ring. They were heading for North Africa, but paused here for a night to earn their passage money. The troupe was led by Caracol and his lustrous daughter Luisa Ortega, and although the show was not due to begin till midnight we drank black coffee and went to see it.
The theatre was uncomfortable and shabby – rows of hard chairs, a urine-scented bar, a floor littered with unswept popcorn shells, and a bare-board stage curtained with orange paper. But nobody cared much about the setting; a show of this nature enjoyed an immediate acceptance by the audience and the company itself was well aware of this and showed a superb confidence in consequence.
After the usual delays the lights went down to an empty stage, and to a nervous whispering of guitars, unseen and fluent, warming up in the wings with the murmur of tropical insects. Such tentative exploration of phrasing and technique was the formal prelude on such occasions, building up atmosphere and tightening our expectant nerves. At last the rhythms strengthened, striking imperative chords, calling the dancers forth, till one by one they entered, erect and vibrant, each different yet perfect, moving with a stylized nobility and grace that was rigid with tradition and devotion to the dance. They were all young girls, and their dark hair, threaded with flowers, was greased and watered in shining curls. They all wore crucifixes, and their flounced dresses were fantastic – all white, or red, or black – and they moved across the darkened stage like figures of fire and ice, trembling, flickering, weaving and stamping, upright as flame and supple as smoke, blown hot and cold by the throbbing breath of the guitars. The girls’ faces were all alike, masks of Araby, heavily painted, but each possessing a formal perfection that was real, based on the Moorish brow and cheek-bone, the tormented mouth, the huge and slanting eyes. And the severe setting of their hair, coiled like tar around the flowers, broke loose always in the frenzy of the dance and fell in wet curls over the naked shoulders.
These dancers, who were they? – nameless girls of Seville and Ronda, no better than most, but moving with the enthralled precision of priestesses, lost in the magic of every step. Here were none of the glazed smiles and loose kicking of the legs that passes for dancing on northern stages. For in Spain all girls danced, and most danced well, but you did not dance in public unless your dancing reached this trance-like passion and control. The level of popular criticism was too high to suffer anything but the best.
The rest of the night was devoted to that most fundamental, most mysterious of all encounters in Andalusian folk-music – the cante flamenco. Three people only take part and the stage itself is reduced to bareness. First comes the guitarist, a neutral, dark-suited figure, carrying his instrument in one hand and a kitchen chair in another. He places the chair in the shadows, sits himself comfortably, leans his cheek close to the guitar and spreads his white fingers over the strings. He strikes a few chords in the darkness, speculatively, warming his hands and his imagination together. Presently the music becomes more confident and free, the crisp strokes of the rhythms more challenging. At that moment the singer walks into the light, stands with closed eyes, and begins to moan in the back of his throat as though testing the muscles of his voice. The audience goes deathly quiet, for what is coming has never been heard before, and will never be heard again. Suddenly the singer takes a gasp of breath, throws back his head and hits a high barbaric note, a naked wail of sand and desert, serpentine, prehensile. Shuddering then, with contorted and screwed-up face, he moves into the first verse of his song. It is a lament of passion, an animal cry, thrown out, as it were, over burning rocks, a call half-lost in air, but imperative and terrible. At first, in this wilderness, he remains alone, writhing in the toils of his words, whipped to more frenzied utterance by the invisible lash of the guitar.