Drought Read online

  Was it that afternoon or another that I saw her for the first time close up – one afternoon, in the shade of the vine in front of the cottage, when Miguel gave me the water jar and I held it up as I’d seen him do, and the jet of water splashed over my face. Miguel threw back his head and laughed. A young woman, whom I’d only glimpsed in the distance, came out of the door and stared. ‘Look,’ Miguel said, and he picked up the jar, the water arching from the spout against the green of the vine and setting his Adam’s apple bobbing on the flow. I tried again, choking. ‘Fetch a glass, girl,’ he said. ‘There’s no better water than this anywhere.’ She held out the glass, waiting with eyes down until I returned it to her; somehow the water tasted less cool.

  ‘I’ll have to learn,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’ Under his curious expression there was a smile. ‘Ana, fetch some chairs.’ She went through the low door into the cottage where, following her, my eyes caught sight of a tintype on the wall: an insipid frizzed blonde trailing a rose against a background of a white ocean liner and blue sea. What dreams, I wondered, were contained in this vapid print? Ana was prettier, alive, real, I thought, as she returned with a rush chair in each hand. She went to sit on a brick bench built into the side of the cottage, where she picked up a sheet she was embroidering. From behind dark glasses I watched her, but her eyes never left the needle: she was motionlessly distant, impassive, her face high-cheekboned like Miguel’s, darker, smaller, though, under a rim of black hair. Her eyes, too, were dark, nearly black.

  I felt Miguel watching me, heard him say something about Bob and the dam. Yes, I replied, taking my eyes off Ana, it was going to be big, solve all the problems of irrigating at last.

  ‘And the water?’

  Ah, I replied, Bob had got it all worked out, and I explained his plans. ‘It’ll store a hundred million litres when it’s finished.’ I heard my voice rise so that Ana would hear. ‘And the water is going to be for all these farms. You’ll never go short again.’

  But Ana didn’t look up. ‘The water’s drying up,’ he said.

  ‘But there’s still enough,’ I answered confidently, ‘and most of it is running to waste.’

  He shrugged. From somewhere came the sound of a cow lowing, and Miguel’s chair scraped. He said something to Ana and she looked up and pointed to the rocky slope surmounted by the pines. Without a word he got up, and I followed him. We went up the slope to where the two cows and the calf were tethered; it was on my way home.

  As he loosened the rope from a rock, I asked if he made money from cattle. Fattening a calf, yes, he said; the cows were for ploughing. In bad years a calf was the only money he’d make. The señorita wanted him to fatten more but she wouldn’t pay for a new shed. One couldn’t keep livestock in bad conditions; but if he built a shed, it would remain her property. Again his eyes fixed in that stare which sometimes I think was a challenge to dispute what he said.

  ‘And half of what you make on a calf would go to her anyway,’ I said. There was nothing now to dispute. ‘How much does El Mayorazgo make in a year?’

  He told me down to the last centimo, referring to accounts which he kept, and it worked out at about three hundred pounds a year. But he didn’t get even half. ‘She won’t pay for fodder or manure; the earth is worn out.’ He untethered the calf and then suddenly turned; his face was twisted: ‘You have to give too, you can’t only take.’ The words came out flat, almost half-spoken. Then the contorted expression returned to the usual open-eyed stare and I wondered if I hadn’t been mistaken. I waited, but he said nothing more.

  On the way up to the village I tried to imagine what it was like working twelve or more hours a day and knowing that six belonged to the landlord for the privilege of farming her land; better than nothing – and ‘nothing’ were those who stood in the square all day waiting for work – was that what it meant? And what then was ‘something’? A plot of one’s own? Everything was relative, depending on where one stood.

  I walked up the last of the steep track, the sandals I had bought – like Miguel’s ones – gripping the earth. Above me the village spiralled up to the fortress-like church on the top, a burnt ruin inside, its exterior unmarked. My thoughts turned to Ana, then unexpectedly went back: I remembered someone, perhaps Bob, telling me something I’d subsequently seen for myself: the higher up you went in those streets, the bigger, the wealthier the houses became. The richest, María Burgos among them, lived at the top. Below them, in cascading layers, you looked down on a scale until you reached the poorest day-labourers’ houses on the bottom flank. Yes, I thought, that was what it was really about; and for the first time perhaps, looking back down the track, I saw not a landscape but the small farmsteads, the land itself.

  9

  12 September

  I had another reason for going to El Mayorazgo now, and it’s not one I’ve been ready to admit: the hope of seeing Ana. Sometimes she’d sit under the vine sewing, but more often than not she was inside the cottage or out somewhere with the cows, and I’d stay with Miguel on one of the terraces he was working. I caught glimpses of her more than I saw her; but when I did, her fine-boned face and dark eyes fascinated me. Or was it the impassivity of that face, the distance she kept? I longed to say something to her, but could never find the easy word, let alone the half-mocking, half-joking phrases that come so readily here. One of the young workers on the dam, I remember, called out something to her once as she passed on the track above and she, without stopping, answered something sharp that made all the men laugh. But when I was with Miguel she rarely spoke.

  Except once, on an afternoon that comes vividly to mind now. Ana wasn’t sitting in her place on the bench, nor did she come out of the house or from where I could see the cows tethered. She appeared unexpectedly on the track from the village. As she approached I felt Miguel looking at her and then, harsh and sudden, he swore. She raised her hand to her hair, stammering something. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ he said angrily.

  ‘How do you want me to work with my hair in my eyes?’ she answered sullenly.

  ‘You’re not one of those from the town,’ he retorted, not looking at her.

  ‘Ay! What do you think? Herding cows!’

  ‘They look like men with their hair short, you can’t tell the difference. Come here.’

  She moved towards him. ‘There’s hardly any been cut, just where the ends die,’ she protested. She turned round to him, her hair falling over her neck.

  ‘The next time you do it, I’ll hit you,’ he said hoarsely.

  Ana laughed. ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘You’ve got beautiful hair. Go on, get up there and fetch the cows down.’

  Ana went out into the sun where she stood for a moment, caught by the heat. Then, in her faded red skirt and black blouse that had seen too much drying in the sun, she started up the track between the terraces. Her brown legs carried her so easily that she seemed to float.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ he shouted after her.

  Suddenly, from a distance already, she turned and shouted back angrily: ‘Save that for her,’ and, with a shake of her head, continued up the track.

  I didn’t know what to make of this outburst, so violent and personal that I couldn’t be certain I’d understood their Andalusian Spanish, which Miguel always spoke slowly to me. I waited in silence, watching her climb the hill and hearing her barren song echoing among the rocks. It was the only time I saw him in anger, lose control of himself. He didn’t speak, nor did he ever refer to it again.

  10

  13 September

  For several days I didn’t go down; the scene remained in my mind, disturbing the tranquillity I went to the farmstead to find. But then the water dried up and everything changed. I found Miguel bent over the corn, the sickle flashing through the stems, the thin sheaves falling behind him on the dry earth.

  ‘Hola! Out for a walk?’ I caught an edge of derision in his tone, and said I’d come down to look at the dam: the retaining wall w
as already several metres high. ‘Ah!’ He took off his hat and wiped his face. ‘They’re still working then?’ He knew the answer as well as I. Picking up the sickle he moved into the shade of the carob. ‘Ay! The heat this year, I don’t know …’

  His voice seemed drained, flat. I put it down to the reaping, the sun pressing down. Trying to rouse him, I said Bob had already put two miners to work on the new borehole; with a bit of luck the dam would still fill. He and all the farms would have plenty of water. One hundred million litres …

  ‘My brother had that idea …’ He bent down and I saw that the shirt was sticking to his back. The stone whirled across the terrace and fell with a crash in the corn. ‘During the war: a reservoir – but it didn’t come to anything.’ For a moment, that full-eyed stare, questioning or exclaiming, I was never sure.

  ‘But this is real,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the retaining wall they’re building.’

  ‘Ah!’

  From high up on the slope came the sound of cow-bells; Ana was bringing the cattle down. Miguel picked up his hook and began to reap again, the sheaves thrown from his arm with the regularity of a machine. He appeared to be going faster each minute as if to make up for wasted time, bent in the face of the sun which slanted over the western sierra, range upon range of shadow in the sky. Once, long before, I remember, I asked him if he had ever been to the sierra, and he laughed. He knew the mountains like the back of his hand, from the time when aged eleven or twelve, in the years of hunger, he had been a goatherd alone all summer with his uncle’s herd. An undertone of loneliness, even fear – not so much of the work but of separation from the familiar land – lay in his voice as he talked of the sierra’s vastness, his months in the company of a demented young goatherd encountered by chance, and the occasional uneasy acquaintanceship with a band of outlaws … Memories of loss and desolation that he preferred to elude finally by laughing them off.

  But those were other times. Now he didn’t laugh, looking up at the two cows and the calf coming slowly across the stubble, their bony flanks showing jagged. Ana was already by the cottage.

  ‘Ah, it’s time already.’ He flung down the sickle and walked towards the house, past the terrace of tomatoes where the canes threw long shadows in the sun that was setting with a metallic glint.

  When we were nearly past I noticed that the tomatoes were the colour of tobacco, the vines brittle. ‘They’re drying up,’ I said, immediately struck by the futility of the words.

  ‘They’re finished.’ This time he didn’t stop, didn’t look round. I let him go on. The terrace of withering plants, which I had watched him carefully tie to the canes, irrigate, distressed me. Row upon row, the fruit already hanging in clusters, the crop was dying, the work going to waste. I looked at the furrows, the patterns drawn for the flow of water, which had turned powdery grey, dried out and useless, and an inertia settled on me. I summoned up anger to fight it. Miguel was sitting under the vine, staring at the tiles, Ana was by the low door. I stopped in front of him, but it was as much her I was addressing.

  ‘The dam will mean forty or more hours of water for El Mayorazgo. Of the hundred million litres, you’ll get at least one-fifth, twenty million litres. We’ve worked it out …’ Hadn’t I calculated the amount with Bob, revelling in the figures, which seemed more real than the water itself?

  ‘That much?’ said Ana.

  The old woman came out of the door, a black shadow, and stood beside Ana, staring.

  ‘If the borehole strikes water soon, it’ll fill up this summer. If not, it’ll catch the winter rain.’ I looked to Ana for approbation, felt her as though she were next to me.

  But she paid no attention. ‘There’s hardly any fodder left, the calf will have to be sold,’ she said harshly.

  ‘Ay! Ay!’ The old woman screeched.

  An idea suddenly occurred to me. ‘Why don’t you sell the calf in Torre del Mar where there are plenty of foreigners? The price will be higher.’

  Ana glanced at me, seemingly surprised. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. For the first time I felt she was openly acknowledging me. ‘We can cut out the village middlemen, Miguel.’

  Lost in thought, he didn’t reply. Then: ‘Ah! Ana, those apricots …’

  She looked at him; there was concern in her eyes, I thought. Without a word she picked up a basket and disappeared.

  He watched her go, then his head dropped and he stared at the tiles. ‘There won’t be any water, they say the señorita is against.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She won’t let a channel across her land. The water from the new borehole won’t reach the dam.’

  ‘But if the water’s to reach here, which is lower …’ Then I understood; she was prepared to see her own farms go without water rather than allow the dam to fill. No water was going to cross her land.

  ‘Son, didn’t I tell you!’ the old woman cried. ‘The mistress wouldn’t give you a needle to take a thorn from your hand. Didn’t I tell you?’ Miguel ignored her.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘The people, Culebra, the sharecropper who works Matanzas.’ He gestured to the farmstead that stood out white on the far side of the watercourse.

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘Yes?’ His head cocked to one side and his lips fixed in a smile. Ana came close with the basket. ‘Well…?’ Miguel looked at her and I thought perhaps he knew what I felt. She held out the basket. ‘They’re for you.’ Our hands touched for a moment. I looked into her face, I could have put my hands round it, then we both looked away.

  ‘How much do I owe?’

  ‘Hombre, what nonsense!’ His anger was mocking.

  ‘Well, thank you … Look, let’s go up and have a look at the borehole when you’ve got time.’ I got up to go. ‘You’ll get water, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘If God wills,’ he replied. I heard Ana’s deep ‘Adió’ from under the vine and the old woman piped, ‘Go with God,’ and I started the climb to the pine trees and the dam to talk to Bob.

  * * *

  He seemed unconcerned. ‘It’s not in her interest, after all, is it?’ He pulled on his shirt; his sun-tanned torso was covered with stone dust. ‘Still … it might be as well to forestall trouble. I’ll go and see her.’ I said I’d go too if that was all right. ‘Fine, fine. Yes, that’s the best thing to do.’ I thought of the things that had to be said; abstractedly, Bob took an apricot from the basket I held out. A part of Ana. ‘Yes, it’s obviously in her interest, she’ll see it all right.’

  We walked together up the watercourse, following the men who had ended their day’s work. The dam was rising more quickly than Bob had imagined, even at his most optimistic. He was full of praise for the men’s ability, their will to work; at the moment they were putting in ten hours a day, with no question of overtime, or the legal minimum wage: ten bob a day for the masons, five for the labourers.

  ‘Twenty-five million gallons, John!’ He pointed to the level the water would reach, the line he had calculated so many times. Together we saw the grey rocks disappear, the hills bright with fruit trees, the dry cracking earth vanquished at last. ‘All this will be green, grass instead of dust …’ His arm swept in a wide arc over his land, lingering on sites where, I knew, more houses would stand. A vision of villas, of foreigners living in them, which might one day come true but which then, in the exclusiveness of that sweeping arm, cut me short: would there be water enough for the rest? ‘You see, Bob, I was telling this bloke an hour ago …’ Bob’s confidence overrode my disquiet, I hear the words still: ‘Don’t worry, he’ll have more than he needs.’

  11

  A future which for others may still come true, though I seem not to care. There was something abstract about it, even then, something too personal, which the sight of the parched slopes, the burning sky, the thought of Miguel managed to hide. A daydream that reality was certain to shatter.

  The borehole was an omen, perhaps; it took longer to strike water than Bob had foreseen.
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  I persuaded Miguel to go with me one afternoon to look at the tunnelling. Shouldering his hoe, he started up the track to the pines, and as we came over the hill and saw the dam below, he stopped. From the gorge came the sound of hammering and shouts; a crude scaffolding was being put up to take the wall higher. I could see Bob moving about, naked to the waist, among the weathered blue cottons. Miguel, I remember, stood looking down as though he hadn’t seen it before, silent, staring.

  ‘It’s going to be big,’ he said at last. ‘One hundred million litres?’ Another silence. ‘Will it hold?’

  ‘Of course …’ His anxiety seemed foolish; this was only the first of two walls. Wasn’t Bob an expert, a quantity surveyor?

  ‘Ah yes,’ and now he smiled, ‘if not we’ll all end up in the sea.’

  I laughed, defensively perhaps, and he picked up his hoe and walked on. Where the track turns off, he paused for another look and murmured something, then he was cutting across the rock several yards ahead of me. I took his half-heard words about the foreigners providing work as approval; now I wonder whether he didn’t mean something else. Not the money spent on the dam but the threat it contained? The señorita’s reaction, the certain revenge? That afternoon there was a resistance in him I hadn’t noticed before, like a heavy weight lying between us. It came out in his words to the miners, who sat waiting in front of the gallery for the fumes from the charges to clear.

  There was nothing to see in the tunnel beyond a few feet. No sign of water. Raising their stewpots towards us, the two miners invited us to share their meal. Their faces were lined, unshaven, streaked with yellow earth, and they wore trousers cut short at the knee.