Drought Page 8

  Smiling despite himself, he went into the whitewashed hall: Bob a Perseus, the dam a Pegasus risen from the Gorgon’s blood? Not much chance, he thought, as a man in a shabby grey uniform asked what he wanted and told him to wait. He sat on a bench. No one else was about, the place was as somnolent as a graveyard. For three-quarters of an hour he waited for the uniformed man to return, falling at last into a somnolence of his own. The hurried return from the walk had tired him and he regretted being held up arguing with the old man down there.

  His dozy thoughts took curious twists, coming from nowhere, overlapping, sliding sideways, vanishing almost before he had time to catch them. Fleeting figures, symbols: A→B→C→D, word plays … Enjoying the random glimpses, he made no attempt to think his thoughts, feeling at one with himself: flashes of nonsense – the chain of reason enchains – came and went in joyful abandon, connecting out of nowhere with: A:B:C:D …

  Roused at last by the grey uniform, forgetful of where he was, he wondered vaguely whether this was what Heine had meant about poetic inspiration: listening to an inner self and consciously rejecting nine-tenths of what flowed up. Or was it not Heine but another poet? The uniform pointed towards a closed door and John walked across: Pavese’s phrase about the things before they were known, the things once known, ended with the words, to become aware, to make history. Why had he forgotten that? He knocked and a voice summoned him in. Expecting to find the mayor, he saw instead the town hall clerk, Ignacio, elderly, fretful, who rose from behind the desk and invited John to sit down. On the wall above hung a picture of the jowly Generalissimo and on another the languid profile of José Antonio, founder of the Falange.

  John took the proffered seat. How incongruous it seemed, suddenly to be sitting in an office full of musty things, yellowing papers, stale conversations like overfull ashtrays when, outside, the land was scorched and water had still not reached the farms. Waiting for the droning voice to come to the point, which was being approached in loops of small talk, John observed Ignacio, head of a village administration of one. Rumpled black suit flecked with ash, black tie, an ancient typewriter – symbols of power: the ability to write, to fill in official forms, applications, the power of paying out old age pensions for which the fortunate recipients left him a tip. (Ignacio has to eat, the miners said; he gets only half a salary, graciously offered by the state-appointed clerk who left for urban pleasures many years ago, keeping the other half of his stipend and putting Ignacio in his place. No one wants to come here, no one wants to stay. Pueblo perdido, perdido …)

  Shifting position behind the desk, and with it the conversation, Ignacio casually referred to the dam and the water; just as casually, John expressed his regret that neither had anything to do with him. Ignacio’s narrow face barely registered surprise. Raising his hand in a conciliatory gesture, he said it was regrettable that certain difficulties had arisen. For the good of the village, for all concerned. Naturally, everyone shared his concern, John replied.

  The clerk’s black eyes flickered over John’s face, not unfriendly. ‘There is a law, you understand, that enables such works whose usefulness is in the public interest to be taken over …’ The phrase seemed to come from some yellowing tome.

  ‘Ah, a dam for a life, perhaps.’

  For once Ignacio looked taken aback. John recognized that the retort had been too sharp for anyone’s good.

  ‘Miguel Alarcón?’ the clerk responded quietly, recovering himself. Yes. A tragic case, unfortunately not uncommon these days; in the past few years there had been at least two other cases, and in both of them the women concerned had been killed first. Then, returning to his subject, he added: ‘Don Manolo, our mayor, would wish to use his good offices in everyone’s best interest …’

  ‘Yes, I see. Well, to be of use to the public the dam will first have to be completed and then to get water. There’s still the channel to make …’

  The clerk’s dry laugh acknowledged the remark; for a moment the two seemed to be sharing a joke.

  ‘But there is water. And the village, as you know, has none.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ John realized he’d been following the wrong track. ‘Of course. But would there be any water at all had not considerable effort and investment been made?’

  ‘Certainly, these things cost a lot of money. Such works as a dam, a borehole,’ he said. ‘In any case, I only wished you to know the position the law takes.’ He paused; John was about to thank him and get up, when he continued: ‘Sometimes it may be difficult for foreigners to understand our country. Did you know Spain before the civil war?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘No, you were too young, of course … Well, much has changed since then. I often think that nowadays conflict and war are all one reads about in the papers. Last year the British and French with the Jews for the Suez Canal, then the Russians and Hungary. But none of these can equal in tragedy a civil war. Brothers fighting against each other, there is nothing worse.’

  He sucked in his teeth and his eyes appeared far away.

  ‘In your country there are many conflicts, many strikes, isn’t it so? This is how it was here before the war. With you, the conflicts do not lead to war, but here … The politicians were out for themselves, for power and fame, they didn’t want peace.’

  Where, John wondered, were these old man’s ramblings leading? He leant back against the wooden frame of the chair. As clearly as though the words were written in the air above Ignacio’s head, he saw what he had to do: find a different way to write about Miguel.

  ‘Power and fame! Often I think of your Shakespeare, our Cervantes, writers who didn’t seek publicity – men honoured only after their deaths. We are fortunate today because we have one man to honour in his lifetime, General Franco. Yes, there is a man who lives simply, who lives for Spain, who doesn’t seek publicity.’

  John expelled a deep breath. Almost automatically he turned his mind off the clerk’s speech and let it take in his new idea, inhale it with deepening satisfaction: the sense of purpose that only a few hours earlier had lain shattered with the realization that he’d put fantasy above the reality of helping Miguel was partially restored. Now, he thought, I’ll create a monument to Miguel.

  Ignoring John’s sigh, Ignacio continued: ‘Before General Franco, there was never a stable government, all the time people were going round shooting each other. And then the Caudillo said peace, quiet, everyone get on with their own business and that’s how it has been. Under him Spain won’t fight wars. There aren’t conflicts. Peace – that is Franco’s genius, peace.’

  Peace, thought John, having returned his mind to the clerk, peace in our time; whose peace, whose time? A dictator’s peace, Miguel’s peace. What he was going to write would be more like a war memorial than a tribute to peace.

  ‘So it is his example we must follow, always seeking peace,’ concluded the clerk, rising from his chair. As John made rapidly for the door, Ignacio added: ‘In a small pueblo like this, it is always preferable to keep things among ourselves,’ and John noted what he thought was a touch of complicity in his voice.

  Smiling to himself, he walked with renewed confidence down the street. The explorer’s passion that had locked him day after day in the granary flowed again through his veins. Fearful yet exhilarated, he saw himself forsaking the familiar yet uncertain terrain of his past – and a good thing, too! – to enter an unknown, uncentred maze in which, somewhere, lay hidden the flaw that had brought Miguel to destroy himself. If he could find it he’d weld the fragmented moments of a life into a coherent, living whole. It would be his tribute, his farewell salute to Miguel.

  Carried away, his usual wary nature failed him at this point. The guilt and despair that had driven him in the past days to write about Miguel were genuine enough, even if they had produced little more than a nostalgic lament. But what could one say of the concept of a memorial, a farewell salute? For whom, in truth, was the tribute intended? For himself, of course! It was nothing other th
an a memorial to his guilt, repressed or sublimated in this apparently objective endeavour. But John remained serenely unaware of the deception he was practising on himself.

  He stepped into the bar. Had someone mentioned the deception, had he indeed thought of it himself, he might well have replied: well, and how many other base emotions have provided the fertilizer for books, paintings, even music perhaps? But he’d have been on the defensive. As it was, the question that began to daunt him now was, How? How could he find out enough about Miguel to write such a tribute?

  The bar was full of labourers, standing, talking, playing dominoes at drinkless tables. At the counter he found three or four of the men from the dam among the few who had money for a drink. They hadn’t seen Bob all day, they said, inviting him to a beer. John declined with thanks and went up to Bob’s house. It was in darkness, the motorbike not parked in its usual place, and he returned leisurely to the square and sat on a step by the dry fountain.

  A great harvest moon was climbing up the sky, silvering the white walls. One would have to gather every sort of possible fact about Miguel’s life, he thought, about his childhood, adolescence, the years after his father’s death when he farmed El Mayorazgo alone – and these past months. He’d have to start questioning people, like a reporter, because there were no other apparent sources. For a moment he cursed his bad luck at never having been a reporter – a police reporter especially – instead of a sub-editor and leader writer. But he could learn.

  Across the square, at a table outside the bar, he noticed the usual quartet taking the evening air: Don Manolo, the doctor, the falangist trade union chief and the baker, who doubled as justice of the peace. Two people, the priest and the sergeant of the Guardia Civil, were missing from this group, which ran village affairs, but then neither usually joined the others at the bar.

  The square at this time in the evening was exclusively male; only on Sunday evenings did it fill with couples in a slow, endless promenade round its narrow confines. Rich and poor, old and young, girls arm in arm, ogling young men, children – all in their Sunday best – showed themselves off. For a couple of hours they circled on themselves, enclosed like the village itself in a world of its own. Beyond these walls nothing else seemed to exist.

  The village was the centre of their world. A number, John knew, walked or rode occasionally to Torre del Mar; very few ever got as far as the town. Every evening, when he could, Miguel, like the other small farmers, came up to the village. It wasn’t hard to imagine, after all, that this was the closest to urban life, urbanity, that most of them would ever know. It needed a leap of the imagination, however, to feel what it meant.

  To his surprise, the flashes of nonsense which had come from nowhere while he waited in the town hall suddenly seemed to make sense. His attempt to understand Miguel’s death had been focused solely on cause and effect: A→B→C. The chain of linear reasoning was false. It had made his suicide appear a fatality, ‘explained’ by events, when in fact, it was in the way Miguel lived this constellation of events (A:B:C) that the fatal flaw could be found. Was it possible to discover something like that – how, inside himself, he’d lived things? And who would know – for sure, that is? His mother? Ana? Perhaps, but his mother wasn’t going to talk, and Ana …!

  John looked at the moon nailed above the rooftops, its light making the square appear even smaller. He’d sat here many more evenings than Dolores knew, enjoying the English characteristic of seeing without being seen. From now on asking questions without appearing to ask them was going to be his task, so that his enquiries didn’t anger or scare people off. It was no business of his, was it, to be stirring things up in a place that lived under the Pax Generalissima.

  At that moment, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the simpleton’s white raincoat across the square and heard the words, ‘Santa María, pray for us … Santa María …’ and remembered that on nights of full moon the man often took himself for a priest and preached sermons from the rock. Then he’d come down to the square and pace back and forth, imitating the priest: twelve paces this way, twelve paces back, for hours on end, without anyone taking any notice.

  He was, people said, a cousin of María Burgos, though his narrow Mexican-Indian face seemed to belie it. From the miners’ stories, John knew of the more spectacular venalities of the people sitting at the table across the square. In his private practice the doctor received (thanks to the mayor’s munificence) the salaries of the two state doctors who had been unwilling to stay in Benalamar. During a typhoid epidemic, he’d charged ignorant peasants for inoculations that were free; and when he bought himself the first automobile to be owned in the village, it was quickly dubbed with that ready wit of the Andalusian poor, ‘the people’s car’.

  But the priest, Don Salvador (who never deigned to speak to foreigners or to most of his parishioners either as he paced up and down the square in a cassock reading his breviary), had obliged the doctor to return the money. As for the mayor, everyone knew that beneath the ‘Don’ lay the village noodle-maker of his youth and the black marketeer of the hunger years, who sold the rationed flour he was supposed to distribute and invested his illicit gains in farmsteads let out for sharecropping.

  Just then the simpleton stopped in front of the table and began waving his arms. What was he doing, begging? But there were no beggars here; John remembered having asked Miguel once and he had laughed: who would there be to beg from in Benalamar? No, it was more like a sermon the simpleton was giving. The doctor told him off loudly, but he didn’t move. The mayor, his heavy head sunk in the neck of the pyjama top he was wearing, got up and walked away silently. Men’s faces appeared at the window of the bar. The simpleton resumed his pacing. It was probably a family affair, thought John.

  But the white raincoat suddenly stopped again, the arms waving like a mechanical saint’s. The doctor shouted. Plain and clear came the simpleton’s voice: ‘Confess, confess the sin of taking from the poor. Renounce thy car paid for by the people, thou …’

  Shrugging, trying to grin, the doctor got up and followed the mayor. The simpleton was saying the things that everyone knew but that the miners said couldn’t be said. A mad prosecutor, flapping his arms, bowing his head, pacing again, oblivious of the eyes fastened on him. The union boss got up casually and, as casually, walked out of the square. The baker didn’t move quickly enough: the simpleton stopped in front of him and, reaching into his raincoat, pulled out what looked like a revolver.

  ‘And thou for thy murders…!’

  ‘No!’ cried the baker. But men from the bar had already grabbed the hand, and there was a shout, then guffaws. They raised the revolver and John saw it was a large key.

  White in the face, the baker slunk away, while the impossible raincoat resumed its pacing. John was laughing to himself when the rustle of a black cassock almost brushed his face. The white-coated arms went up in what looked like readiness to embrace the priest, but instead the simpleton’s high-pitched voice cried: ‘Hypocrite!’

  ‘Get inside,’ the priest ordered.

  ‘Hypocrite! Thou who refuse burial to the poor.’

  ‘Get inside immediately,’ the priest hissed, brushing past the uplifted arms.

  ‘Thou hast betrayed the word.’

  ‘Desgraciado!’

  ‘The word. The wor–’ Eyes sightless, he was standing staring at John. Then twice, very clearly, he repeated, ‘the bell …’ and turned away to resume his pacing, in silence now.

  The bar was full of men still laughing as John passed them on his way home. A pleasant anticipation warmed him as he thought of tomorrow. A new start always gave him a heady feeling. Who knew where it would lead, what it would produce? Perhaps even things (as a mere by-product, of course) about himself, as writing about Miguel had already done.

  16

  Bent over the stove preparing breakfast, Dolores didn’t hear John come in, and she jumped, smoothing down her faded blue dress, her eyes as startled as a hare’s.

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sp; ‘Did you want your coffee? It’ll be ready in a minute.’ She put a hand to her hair.

  ‘That’s all right, there’s no hurry.’

  She saw he was smiling, his eyes bright. She wondered what he was doing in the kitchen where he’d only been once or twice and never this early. His presence surprised her all the more because, since he’d returned to the granary in these last days, he’d become distant again, as though absorbed in himself.

  ‘Do you know what happened last night in the square?’ he said, launching into an account of what he’d seen. Dolores nodded: everyone in the village knew, she’d heard about it from a neighbour before going to bed. ‘So is it only the mad who can tell the truth here?’ he laughed.

  ‘Your coffee is ready. I’ll bring it to you.’

  But no, he’d have it in the kitchen, he said unexpectedly, and sat down at the table. There was another chair and he asked her to sit down and have her breakfast. Taken aback, Dolores shook her head: thank you, but she had hers later. She remained standing by the stove, unsure what to make of this turn of events.

  John, evidently, was determined to chat. It made a pleasant change, she thought; he was looking well again, his face was newly sunburnt so he must have gone out. She’d guessed right, because he started to tell her he’d taken her advice and gone for a walk yesterday afternoon and met Culebra by chance.

  Dolores listened to John’s account, not wanting to say anything. There were many things better not spoken of, especially to a foreigner, and she remembered that she might have said too much in the past. One shouldn’t talk about politics – ‘de política na’, it was dangerous – and she’d managed not to say anything about the simpleton. But Culebra’s story angered her. Still she said nothing.

  John observed her silence and went on talking, confiding in her about his conversation with Ignacio, the town hall clerk. He laughed as he described the scene in the dusty office and the clerk’s disquisition on peace. Then he recalled his fascinated horror at the plaque on the town hall wall. ‘Marxist Hordes,’ he repeated, ‘Imperial Crusade.’ And he told her how at Cambridge a tutor’s remark, tossed off with customary arrogance, that the wartime Republic had been nothing but a Communist front, set him to reading. (The civil war, of course, was too contemporary an event to have figured in the degree.) For a term or two his fascination with the war, which he remembered distantly from his childhood led him to learn enough Spanish to read some of the memoirs and reportage in the original; but then, under pressure of exams, the interest withered and he hadn’t returned to the subject.