Drought Read online

  John stretched out on the warm earth, as he used to do with a book, looking up at the sunlight tingeing the transparent leaves. Perhaps, he thought, the old man’s tight-lipped brusqueness was like Miguel’s father’s. One could imagine him also never taking his hat off indoors or out. The same sort of pride in his self-sufficiency; a personal autarky demanding constant assertion; curt commands to his sons in order to stave off challenges to his authority. Beneath it all, fear that the edifice could collapse.

  John tried to imagine Miguel’s childhood … One could take the memories of others, he reflected, and turn them inside out, see them from Miguel the child’s point of view. But memories weren’t ‘the thing once known’. They were the thing as it’s remembered as having been known, almost inevitably re-elaborated over the years … And could one be sure that Miguel had lived those events in the way others remembered them?

  There was another option: take these memories as scattered indications and trace the lines between them. Like one of those puzzles in which points have to be linked to reveal the image waiting to be disclosed. But here there were no numbers indicating the points. To draw across the gaps required a leap of the imagination; a leap with both feet on the ground.

  He began the long climb back. Themes, not lines; existential links between the things already known … And then suddenly he wondered what the hell he was doing, turning Miguel’s life into a puzzle of lines. Where had this abstraction come from? Was it connected to the fascination he felt in collecting stories about Miguel? The feeling that he was living through and for these stories, denying his own existence except as a recipient of others’ stories? Living vicariously, but more intensely than when his nose was plunged in a book, the collector now of others’ lives? Ah yes, all this was comforting because it allowed him to deny his own problems, his guilt, in the name of a superior objective, the search for Miguel. His original guilty obsession had covered its tracks, he saw, and reappeared under the guise of the intellectual determined to solve a puzzle – Miguel’s death.

  The dust was hot underfoot and his shirt clung to his back. Guilt was, and remained, the reason for this passion to bring Miguel back to life in some way, he thought. And he’d best recognize it lest blindness led him to fall into other traps.

  These thoughts, not surprisingly, brought him up against a blank wall. Recognizing repressed motivations told him nothing about how he might proceed. Would it be better to try simply to feel Miguel’s childhood – imagine it? Let his mind flow round it until he found a path to pursue? But wasn’t there something equally abstract in thinking that such a random process would lead anywhere?

  Perplexed, he found the shade of an olive. Until he had the nub of an insight his imagination would fail him, that much he knew. It was no good pretending there was a bone to chew, he had to have one. Something tangible, real, a structure of some sort. He began the climb up the path again.

  Forgetting the heat and dust, thoughts started to flow through his head as sometimes they did when he was walking. Speculative reality fused with imagination as he thought of Miguel’s childhood … Third of four children, Miguel before the war was certainly too young to have helped his father in the fields like Antonio. But also probably too old to receive baby Ana’s attention and too healthy to need fussing over like his sick sister. Perhaps then he’d found no distinct place of his own, especially in his father’s distant eyes.

  If anyone gave him a place it would be Antonio, who instructed and confided in him, suggested that life held other possibilities from those their father unquestioningly accepted. But it would have been a contentious place. Antonio’s beliefs challenged the father, threatened family disruption. The civil war would have drawn a front line between the two men. At stake was a future being fought over on battlefields beyond the mountains; there were no neutrals now.

  John fell into a rhythmic walk that carried his feet effortlessly upwards, unaware of anything now but a mythic past unravelling in his head.

  These two men, self-willed, each tacitly demanding the boy’s allegiance. Loyalty to one is betrayal of the other, a betrayal of filial/fraternal love. The boy is split. Faced with choosing one or the other – an impossible choice – he will take sides, now with his father (‘Antonio should show more respect’), now with his brother when they’re out of earshot; but nothing heals the sense that he’s unworthy of, insufficient to, either.

  The brief revolution is defeated, shot down and buried. Antonio is forced to escape; he has led Miguel so far and then abandons him, and the boy reacts with rage. By the age of seven he has lost a brother and sister. His father is right: hiding the señorita in his cowshed, he staked his life on a future where nothing would change. The world is a quantum from which his job is to wrest a daily subsistence: self-sufficiency, the small world where his word is still law. He has not changed.

  Even before Antonio flees, Miguel is out minding goats. His father needs him. Scouring the countryside for pasture where other children want to play, he is determined to make a success of the task. He has a place now – a value – in his father’s eyes. By the time he’s nine, he’s earning his first day-wage for the family as the señorita’s look-out. Despite the difficult times, he perhaps feels more secure than in the past: each evening he hands over his wage to his mother with a certain pride. But drought and the post-war chaos bring wide-spread hunger; money buys nothing any longer. Without warning, his father orders his exile to the mountains. There he loses everything that is familiar: family, farmstead and village. An eleven-year-old in the sierra’s wilderness, he possibly even loses a sense of himself. It takes another loss – his uncle’s death at the hands of the outlaws – to bring him back to El Mayorazgo.

  John found himself in the street leading to his house. These thoughts, he knew, would lose their intimate congruence as soon as he put them on paper, lie uncertainly there waiting to be given a content that was no longer inherent in them. Signposts, which as in his childhood during the war, had been pointed in arbitrary directions to confuse the invader. And there were still so few of them. Next to nothing was known about Miguel’s mother, for example, other than that she was a warm and loving woman whom Antonio loved and admired. Maybe both sons shared a closeness with her that made good the distance between them and their father. But her love was powerless before the patriarchal authoritarianism that ruled her sons.

  Tomorrow, he told himself as he climbed the stairs wearily, he’d have to go down to the coast to see Juana. And every day it became more necessary to talk to Ana. He opened the granary door – what a relief it would be to be able to write without ever having to put a word on the page! – and saw, propped against the typewriter, a note in Bob’s scratchy handwriting asking him to come by as soon as possible.

  26

  He was surprisingly calm for a change. He’d been to the town and hired good lawyers who had assured him that the case would go his way. Expert witnesses would prove that the dam was no threat to the safety of the farms, he’d draw up plans – there was no problem at all.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ John said. ‘What’s been happening?’

  Bob explained. The mayor had used the pretext of Miguel’s mother’s charges to order work stopped. Bob’s lawyers maintained he had no right to do so. It was an obvious ploy to pressure Bob into providing water for the village. The case brought by Miguel’s mother would have to be heard but it would be confined to her charges about the dam, not water for the village. She wouldn’t win because once he’d drawn plans it would be clear her allegations were groundless. As for expropriation, the mayor would first have to prove that there were no alternative sources of village water. ‘He can’t do that while he’s digging his own well and has done nothing about deepening the old village borehole, can he?’ Bob smiled, looking satisfied with himself.

  ‘But what about water for the village? That’s the real priority.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bob. But he’d worked out that to get water from his borehole would cost the village
more in pumping, piping and building a reservoir than to deepen the old one in the village square. ‘That’s why that expropriation business was just a con.’

  ‘I see.’ John had no way of judging Bob’s claim. But something else had surprised him. Had Bob been building the dam without plans?

  ‘Of course. It’s the sort of thing you can do in your head. But they’ll want to see some drawings. I’d be glad if you’d attend the case, your Spanish is better than mine and it’d be good if there were two of us – a combined front, you know.’

  ‘I see.’ Bob’s involvement of him had come to irritate John. ‘I don’t know about the combined front,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, it’s us against them when the chips are down.’

  ‘I thought it was supposed to be us with them.’

  ‘Yes, but if they don’t want it that way …’

  ‘They? It’s been María Burgos, the mayor and now Miguel’s mother. They’re the only people who’ve caused trouble.’

  ‘Well, María Burgos is on our side now,’ Bob answered with a laugh.

  ‘I don’t see how she can be on our side if we’re on the others’.’

  Bob heard the edge in John’s voice and replied equally sharply: ‘Who’re you talking about?’

  ‘Her sharecroppers, for one.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’re going to benefit as much from the dam as she will.’

  ‘Once they’ve paid you for the water, that’s part of your deal with María Burgos, isn’t it?’

  ‘What d’you want me to do – give it to them?’ Bob stared at him. Both were angry now.

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘D’you know how much they stand to make by having all that water from the dam? A fortune! They can irrigate terraces they’ve never irrigated, grow two or three crops a year, plant new things.’

  ‘And make María Burgos a fortune.’ John remembered Miguel’s bitterness at seeing Bob’s land untilled; he didn’t know the first thing about farming, wasn’t interested. ‘Actually,’ John added provocatively, ‘you could make the dam over to them and just keep the water you need.’

  ‘What’s got into you? You know bloody well they wouldn’t maintain it; in a year or two it’d be useless, silted up, neglected.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that. It’s what Eden said about the Suez Canal, remember? A backward lot like the Egyptians couldn’t run such a thing, soon there wouldn’t be a ship able to use it. But they seem to have managed to keep it open, haven’t they?’

  ‘With the help of a lot of foreign technicians, I’ll bet. But I’m not here to talk about that, I’m concerned about the water and the dam. I don’t understand your attitude either. When you first came, you were shocked at the poverty. I remember your face when you saw the men bringing in brushwood. I thought you wanted to help do something about it, that’s why I’ve involved you all along in the dam.’

  ‘Uh! I no longer think you can benefit everyone in a set-up that’s designed to benefit some more than others.’

  ‘I never said everyone was going to benefit,’ Bob replied. ‘I said we could begin to change things here. And that’s what I still believe.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m not interested in helping María Burgos. Kindness, good intentions – aid, if you like – are tied to particular interests, that’s what I’ve come to see.’

  Christ! Bob thought. How typical of these middle-class Oxbridge hair-splitters: they can’t wipe their own arses! But he needed John and so all he said was: ‘Of course, there are particular interests. That’s what runs the world. You’re not so utopian as to think that isn’t the case, are you?’

  ‘Let’s be concrete, Bob. You had to compromise with María Burgos because she’s the largest landowner here. How do you know there aren’t going to be other compromises if you develop your land?’

  ‘Well, I’ll be concrete, to use your expression. Does the land provide work for everyone? No. Does the village? No. There are only two ways of trying to change that, as I see it. Make the land more fertile with irrigation and provide work by building. And who’s going to build if it isn’t the foreigners? It’s starting already on the coast and it’s going to get big.’ His eyes shone with an intensity John recognized as conviction, if not necessarily honesty. ‘Would you rather see the dam unfinished, people out of work, hungry?’

  ‘You’re putting words in my mouth. The point I’m making is about ownership, property.’

  ‘That’s the logic of what you’re saying,’ Bob interrupted. ‘Leave things as they are. Live here like a tourist, pity these poor sods and when you go home entertain your dinner guests with stories of their poverty. Well, I’m not like that. I’ve learnt that if you want to get something done you’ve got to do it yourself.’

  ‘On others’ behalf?’ John paused. Others, he was about to say, had tried to change things for themselves twenty years ago – but he could already hear Bob laughing: and look what happened to them! Instead he said: ‘I don’t believe tourism is a basis of development. It’ll provide work for a couple of years and that’s it.’

  ‘What do you want: General Motors to set up an assembly plant?’ Bob retorted. ‘That would be development?’

  ‘No. I don’t know the answer, except that I don’t think it lies just with you or me.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to lie with them, does it? They couldn’t even get water out of the ground.’ He fell silent, his eyes vacating the conversation: he might have foreseen, he thought, that John would become a windbag. They all did. No wonder England was in a mess. There were plenty, too many, like John in the Labour Party talking socialism and doing sweet FA about it. Get your hands dirty, mate, he wanted to say to them …

  He looked at John: it was now or never.

  ‘OK,’ he said acquiescently, ‘I’m in further than I bargained for, I’ve got my hands dirty. Bound to when you try to get something done – agreed? I’m not complaining, I honestly believe what I’m doing will bring improvements. You can disagree, but I can’t think you’d really rather see the dam left unfinished.’

  ‘Who’s talking about leaving it unfinished?’

  ‘I am.’ He was almost out of money, he explained, and now, on top of everything else, he had to pay the lawyers. Bughleigh wouldn’t make a down payment until he saw the dam filled. ‘This is why I wanted to talk to you. Buy another plot, a couple if you can, and next year with water you’ll be able to sell them at double the price. I guarantee you that.’

  ‘I’m not a gambler, Bob.’

  ‘There’s no gamble in it. Or rather only one. Do you want to bring some sort of prosperity to Benalamar or not? Are you going to go back on everything you said and I thought you believed? Worse still, destroy one of the few hopes there is? That’s the gamble.’

  ‘You’ve loaded the question all right, but that’s not the point. I haven’t got any spare cash, it’s as simple as that.’

  Bob knew he was lying, it was written all over his face.

  ‘All right,’ he shrugged, lifting himself out of the chair. ‘It’s a pity after all this to be left facing both ways, eh? The case is Friday week at five. Are you coming?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘I’ll see you there, if not before.’

  On his way home, John reflected on the curiosity of Bob’s use of the words ‘dirty hands’. Surely he’d never heard of Sartre’s play, Bob didn’t read … This petty vengeance failed to tranquillize his conscience, however. Was he right to jeopardize the dam? Was that what Miguel would have wanted? Were hastily defined principles more important than water?

  Unsure of himself, he went to the granary to fetch a book. He remembered underlining the sentence where among Baudelaire’s many torments, Sartre locates the poet’s real affliction: indifference – the basic impossibility of taking himself or his acts as mattering seriously … An inner vacuum that, as he listened to himself arguing with Bob, had again been revealed. It was more important to him to fill this vacuum with speculation
s about Miguel and the past than to do something concrete about the future. Indifference was the easy way out, always had been. For what, in the last resort, did motives matter – even Bob’s suspect motives – if they created conditions that would make Miguel’s plight impossible in the future? Tomorrow, he decided, he’d write Bob a note; but first he’d go down to the coast.

  27

  21 September

  Juana came to the gate, as impassive as I’d expected: the señor had gone out but would be coming back soon, so I said I would wait. After a time I followed her into the kitchen and asked for a drink of water. She fetched a glass and, with a certain nonchalance, opened a drink cupboard and indicated the bottles. I shook my head. ‘Just water?’ Her eyes were mocking.

  ‘Even if it isn’t as good as Benalamar water.’

  ‘There’s none to compare with it,’ she said and we began to talk fitfully about the village. I was almost sure she wouldn’t have heard the news of the mayor’s and priest’s dismissals last night, though in the village no one had been talking of anything else. Everyone had a different story, but there was common agreement that Miguel’s mother had had something to do with it: the scandal of Miguel’s burial was too great to cover up, it appears. I kept the news to myself to use at an opportune moment.

  Evasive – no, laconic, sharp – Juana stood by the Aga, and I felt her consciousness of the desire she aroused and held away, tantalizingly. I envied Miguel, pitied him. Her beauty, her luxuriant body, seemed to demand attention, her own as much as others’, quite unlike Ana’s unawareness. She fenced, parrying with irony; but when at last I told her, her guard fell.

  ‘Madre mia! Dismissed? Because of …?’

  ‘Yes, it was enough.’

  ‘It was enough what they did,’ she murmured, seeming not to know which way to turn. And then she blurted: ‘I couldn’t know he would do such a thing. He knew it was over, I gave the bracelet back.’