Drought Read online

  ‘Does she come on her own? Yes? Perhaps they’re getting used to us.’

  He’d been hard pushed at the beginning to find anyone, he recalled: it was almost impossible to get a village woman to work for a man on his own. Until his wife came out, his cook always came chaperoned by a young girl. So he’d taken the trouble of asking his cook, who had persuaded her cousin Dolores to take on the job. ‘Now that June’s gone back to London for a visit I half expect to see the chaperone turn up again.’

  He refilled my glass and began to describe the house he was planning to build. Water was one of the main problems. At the moment there was plenty and it ran to waste in the watercourse because no one was irrigating – it was, as I’ve said, not yet quite spring. But for three or four months in the summer there was never enough. It was scandalous. ‘I can’t understand why they don’t do something about it. Eight months of waste and four months of shortage. And this has been the third dry winter in a row.’

  At that moment the men carrying bales of brushwood on their heads started to come by. Narrowing, Bob’s eyes watched this strange and pitiful procession bent so low under the weight that only the men’s feet dragging in the dust showed. We had both seen it before and yet it never failed to leave its mark. I knew such poverty existed, had even written about aid to the Third World, but I’d never seen it until coming here, that was the difference.

  ‘You know how far they carry that wood?’ Bob asked, breaking the silence. From the top of the mountains, three hours’ walk. And as if that wasn’t enough, they had to hawk the firewood from door to door when they got to the village, often forced to exchange it for a bit of bread. For a while, until the last man had gone, there was silence again.

  ‘We were poor, I remember that as a kid before the war,’ he said suddenly. ‘My father was out of work a lot of the time. Still was when I went into the RAF in 1940. We didn’t have that much to eat, but it was never like this.’

  For a moment I hoped he would leave it at that, but he went on, talking of the men who stand uselessly in the square waiting for work that never comes; of the carriers running fish up from the coast in sacks strapped round their foreheads; of men who are beaten up in the Guardia Civil barracks for gathering wild esparto grass in the mountains to keep themselves alive – esparto that a well-known falangist in the town claims as his private property …

  He glanced at me; I saw now that the day when, on an impulse, I disembarked in Gibraltar from the Alexandria-bound freighter, I hadn’t given a thought to the present. I felt better and I’d had enough of the sea, the cramped quarters, needed to feel land under my feet again. And it was the past of the civil war that had once interested me …

  ‘Living here brings you up short. Did you hear what Macmillan said the other day? We’ve never had it so good in Britain, he said. No thanks to him and his Tories, it was Labour, the Welfare State we can thank for that. It’s something I’ll never forget, the first time I voted. They could do with a bit of that here.’

  In the last evening light the land fell away in front of us: scattered terraces of barley and alfalfa shone green among the soft, barren hills, and isolated trees were in flower along their edges. If all the land were as fertile as those terraces, Bob said. And why not? The water so arduously mined from the mountain, in the way learnt from the Moors, was wasted, not conserved … With enough water there’d be enough work – and suddenly surging forward into the idea of a reservoir, Bob carried me on into valleys green with alfalfa, covered by fruit trees, rich with cattle, where there would be work for all. An end to drought. His eyes shone with the vision; this dry, cracking earth made green, farmers exporting their crops; and he – no, now it was us – in this swollen dream surveying the meaning of our presence here. A revolution of water and work; the desert blooming in a joyful Swiss scene that was darkened by an uncomfortable thought: hadn’t he just shown me a model of his house, hadn’t it a waterflow through it? A gallery with a fountain, a pool?

  He smiled. ‘That’s right. What gets done in this world without a bit of self-interest? It’s human nature after all.’ But he wouldn’t need a tenth of the reservoir, the rest would go to the farms. ‘Twenty-five million gallons. The watercourse goes through my land, and I’m going to build a dam. It’ll put an end to this stupid situation, help the people to help themselves. It’s a good investment all round, good for the village, good for everyone.’

  Struck by the logic of it, infused by the dream, I couldn’t help then but agree. Yet simultaneously a nub of doubt formed; Bob’s frankness about his motives was perhaps a little too frank for my taste, but this was of less concern than the fear of allowing myself to get carried away by schemes that would distract from my self-examination. For all my expressions of agreement, I knew that I wouldn’t fully involve myself in his plans. I wasn’t capable of sustaining his sort of vision. As usual, I’d be an observer.

  7

  11 September

  Bob was in a hurry, and had men scraping and blasting rock in the watercourse. His hope was to build fast enough to catch some of the water running to waste before the irrigating season fully began. There was little time, just enough to build a single retaining wall to hold a few million gallons; the second, exterior wall would have to come later. He couldn’t know then that, within two months, there’d be no water at all. But Miguel knew that the flow was lessening.

  Once the work in the watercourse began, I used to go down through the hills most afternoons and past the dam site to El Mayorazgo half a mile below. Aware from a distance of my approach, Miguel made no sign that he’d seen me, and my advance became tentative to the point of turning back. He continued to look absorbed in the maize or tomatoes at his feet. When I was only a few feet away, he’d turn, saying, ‘Hola! Out for a walk?’ or something like that. A slight, diffident smile sometimes. ‘It’s hot for walking today,’ he’d add, seeming to understand the need but not the choice of the hottest part of the day. And I’d reply, the heat was what I liked, it was why I’d come here, which was not the whole truth or even a part, but what could I tell him?

  Perhaps it was because I was brought up in a countryside where greens fade into greens and villages melt into valleys that I liked the bold contours of this parched land, the small, precise terraces cut out of the hills on top of which, dominating the countryside, the villages stand. I’d left that other countryside as soon as I could. It said nothing to me; nor, to my father’s despair, did his solicitor’s practice in the neighbouring town. But in this landscape I felt at home, it freed something in me, though I was never able to explain it to Miguel.

  I’d sit at the edge of the terrace watching him hoe the green stalks of maize or tie up tomatoes; occasionally I’d ask about the crops he was growing and he, I remember, often laughed, looking at me curiously, his head to one side, as though such questions had never been asked. Breaking off an unwanted stem or changing the water’s flow with a quick scoop of his hoe, he’d say, ‘Well, it’s not the custom’ or something of the kind.

  He demanded nothing of me nor I of him. What, it seemed then, would he have demanded of me, he who was so apparently self-contained, who was always working? Even his stillness seemed activity somehow.

  He was irrigating already, I remember, an early crop of tomatoes and maize. It was this I most liked to watch. He talked more, had little to do but watch the water splash onto the terrace and flow steadily between the diagonal furrows. The water worked for him, maybe that’s why. One afternoon, I remember, we went together, he with his hoe over his shoulder, walking slowly, deliberately up the hill and through the pines until we came to the boulder where, only a couple of weeks ago, the men carrying his coffin stopped to change shoulders. Resting there, we looked across at Bob’s land and I remember him saying that it was a shame to leave it untilled. It was good land, had grown good crops in the past, and this year not even the olives had been picked. I agreed; I couldn’t understand Bob’s neglect. Yet in front of Miguel I became oddly defensive, as
though implicated in Bob’s indifference, and said something evasive to which he didn’t reply.

  Swinging his hoe into the damp earth by the boulder, he scooped out the mud to divert the water which backed up bubbling, beginning its flow in the earth channel. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, pushing the sombrero back over his black hair, and I felt the sweat running uselessly down the back of my neck. ‘It’s hot today,’ he said, and we started back. The water nudged its way along the ditch, barely a foot wide, filling the heat cracks, soaking into the dry bottom in a sluggish flow preceded by small heaps of debris that were overtaken by the faster rush, the water turning clearer, till stopped by a stone which Miguel hooked out, his hoe working to scrape and patch. Haphazardly following the terrain, the ditch disappeared into an expanse of white stones and the water slowed, gurgled and vanished.

  ‘There’s half an hour’s water lost before it reaches El Mayorazgo.’ We paused, Miguel’s hoe scraped at the stone, then he walked on. Most of the water drained away there, he said over his shoulder, and I asked why they didn’t put in pipes or something, and he replied that there had been talk of it but the landowners couldn’t agree. The earth crumbled under our feet, we slid down it to the terraces and sat in the shade waiting for the water to come down the chute in the rock and tentatively ripple out in the earth. My eyes followed the pattern which wound back and forth, losing themselves in the dark lines where the water flowed and which bore to the dry ridges an exact relationship I wanted to grasp until I was aware only of the furrows fusing with my gaze.

  The shout rang out from somewhere below and I struggled up. Miguel was standing in the middle of the terrace, the hoe over his shoulder. There was still a narrow plot beside the house that was dry; by now the flow was running round the edge of the terrace, dammed with a scoop of mud, and disappearing over the stone wall to the farmstead below. Coming over to me he remarked, casually it seemed, ‘The water won’t hold out the summer.’ His head was held to one side, eyes motionless under raised eyebrows – an expression that sometimes seemed like an exclamation mark printed on his face, but at other times more like an unspoken question. He hung like that for a moment until, as though waking: ‘unless the new borehole …’

  ‘Oh,’ I replied uncertainly, unsure where the water came from.

  ‘It’s behind that carob up there,’ pointing up to a distant tree on the mountainside; work had been stopped on it some time ago, I heard him say; and then, speaking fast, he added something I didn’t understand, which became clear only later, about some people not wanting to lay out money to continue the drilling, though the water was certain. ‘It takes a lot of money to dig a borehole,’ he concluded.

  We moved from the shade and the sun bore down on us with a leaden weight, and perhaps I said ‘Oh’ or else looked at my watch, thinking of the long, shadeless climb up the track. From the pines, looking back, I saw him below, and heard the sound, like an axe on wood, of his hoe splitting the earth.

  8

  (When I went down to lunch an hour ago, Dolores, with a certain sternness in her voice, said I ought to go out more. ‘The granary is too hot, you’ll make yourself ill again.’ I reassured her, though I’m not that sure: a dull headache has come back.

  She said no more until, bringing in the last plate, she told me people had seen Miguel’s mother going into the magistrate’s house in Torre del Mar. ‘And she didn’t have her basket of eggs with her.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Dolores, what does that mean?’

  ‘It means she was on other business than usual …’ Miguel’s mother, she explained, regularly sold eggs to some of the better-off in Torre del Mar. But if she went in not to sell eggs then she had other business with the magistrate.

  ‘The charges, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, señor, that’s what they say.’

  ‘Well, we can only see what happens,’ I replied and returned to my lunch. This isn’t my business anymore, if it ever was. I need to finish writing; there isn’t much left to say.)

  11 September (cont’d)

  On the way down to El Mayorazgo in the afternoons, there was the activity in the ravine to watch. Rising from nothing, where nothing had been, the dam slowly began to take shape, the gorge scraped and blasted clean. It gave me pleasure to watch the wall grow, the ease with which the two masons laid the irregular white stone as though it were brick. The men, ceaselessly mixing cement by hand, joked and laughed; and Bob – always Bob – directed things, working alongside them, to the men’s astonishment at first. His building talk, during moments of rest, was often meaningless to me, but I appreciated it as I appreciated what was produced from the incessant labour below, as the concept, the structure from which this thing would be realized. Beside him, beside his practised experience, his boundless energy, my position seemed tenuous, but he never made any comment. There was satisfaction enough in the thought that one day the ravine would fill and the hills would burst into green. And then I would continue on down to the farmstead below.

  It must have been early still, for the water was flowing when, in answer to some question perhaps, Miguel mentioned that for the past eight years, since his father’s death, he had been responsible for the farmstead and his mother and sister. We were walking down the track to the cottage, I remember, he in front, and he turned, the exclamation or question stamped on his face, his eyes quite still, the suspended moment rapidly broken as he bent to fling a stone into the corn. I watched the sparrows rise, only to drop again somewhere. Yes, he had been only a year or two older than his sister was now, he’d worked alone until she could help, unable to hire a day-labourer since the señorita refused to pay a wage …

  ‘Señorita? But I always thought this land was yours.’

  ‘Qué va! If it were … All this is hers and that over there, and that as well, and the pasture hills …’ He pointed out the white farmsteads, El Vicente and Matanzas, beyond the watercourse, and to the hills beyond. ‘And another farm on the other side of the road, there’s the house there …’ until it seemed that all the surrounding land belonged to her, with the exception of Bob’s land above. Did no one farm their own land? Yes, there were some, there was Tío Bigote in the red-washed farmstead just beyond, hadn’t I been there? He twisted an imaginary moustache to recall him for me, and I remembered the old man and the surprising red cottage, the colour of bull’s blood, where once in a while I had found a carob’s shade on the edge of the land. I laughed, imitating his gesture. Why did he paint the cottage red? A whim, Miguel said, a curious man. And that was true, for I remembered an afternoon when I came upon him irrigating and he strode over to where I stood watching, a tall, upright man with this big moustache, and more as a command than an invitation, told me to come. He took me to the edge of the terrace and showed me where the water flowed out, sparklingly fresh, from a borehole cut horizontally in the earth. ‘Drink, drink!’ he ordered, and I bent down and drank, exclaiming my praise, escaping as soon as I could for I had difficulty understanding his speech.

  ‘His land is good, plenty of water,’ Miguel said. ‘Better than this.’ With a growl he flung another stone and a flight of sparrows took off. ‘They’ll get the little that’s left, they and the rats. And the señorita’s half …’

  Half to her? Of course, it was her land, half of everything went to her. Once a week she rode down on the donkey to fetch something he’d grown, to estimate the coming crops. Last summer she’d calculated sixty fanegas of wheat, but when he had threshed and the grain had been measured, there had been fifty-four. She had come herself and searched the farmstead, the attic, the cowshed. Before she did he had told her, if she found a kilo of wheat she could have the whole crop.

  ‘And you put up with that sort of thing?’

  ‘Ah! The half’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’

  ‘All the same, there’s a limit …’

  A limit? Again that momentary look of silent exclamation. That was different, wasn’t it? Because, in the years after th
e civil war, he remembered, when on top of everything else there’d been no water for three years, the people ate grass, weeds, anything they could lay their hands on. There was starvation then; even those with land only just got by.

  And then he surprised me by suddenly laughing. ‘The only egg we ate all year then was on Easter Sunday. My mother put one aside for each of us. The rest she had to sell. All year we waited for that day, we were so hungry. And for nothing. Our stomachs were so weak that as soon as we ate the egg we went behind the house and vomited it up. We were famished, I never thought it would end.’

  Well at least things were better now, I said. ‘Ah yes, for some, of course.’ He wiped his forehead on the shirt-sleeve he always kept buttoned at the wrist. ‘You couldn’t go lower than in those years.’ Then he walked on, his broad shoulders slightly bowed, and I noticed again coming from behind that it was impossible to be sure of his age. His head sat solidly, almost without neck, on his shoulders, and his stride seemed accustomed to a constant lifting of weight.

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘Ten, eleven,’ he said.

  ‘We must be roughly the same age then,’ I replied, ‘twenty-seven, twenty-eight.’ He smiled agreement, and I felt his blue eyes on me wonderingly. His glance seemed then to be measuring a physical difference, the difference of strength and tread and resistance to sun. It lasted only a second, the time to make me aware. But when now I remember that full-eyed stare, I think he was not looking at me but at my condition: what was I doing, I who was free to live as I wanted, here in the hills? I who could sit in the square or the cafes of Torre del Mar watching the girls, what was I doing when I picked up his hoe and thumped it in the hard, dry earth? Or asked about water? Or looked at the olives? At best, I suppose, I might be like Bob; that would make sense of a sort to him. Otherwise I was a meaningless irruption into his world, a foreigner who appeared and as suddenly disappeared, who was outside the routine of the land and the turning of seasons as he was on the fringe of a world encompassed by the granary’s mud-coloured walls …