A Spanish Lover (20 page)

‘What happened to the money?'

‘It vanished,' Luis said.

‘Do you think the priest took it?'

‘Frances,' Luis said, smiling. ‘That is a most improper suggestion.'

A track branched off from the road beyond the cemetery, a track of soft, brick-coloured dust, winding among the darker, still brickish stretches of an almond orchard. It ran along the side of a shallow hill, dipped
into
a small, domesticated valley where an old man and a young man were weeding a meticulous potato patch beside a ruined house, and then rose again through a miniature gorge, walled in red-and-ochre cliffs, to a kind of summit, a knoll tufted with wiry herbs. Beyond the summit lay a spectacular view, a series of sweeping slopes and valleys, threaded with the pale lines of tracks that linked the scattered buildings across the landscape like beads on a necklace. There were no visible roads, no pylons, no plastic-roofed greenhouse developments, no signs that this vast old tract of territory was inhabited by anything other than simple man and beast. In the distance, perhaps three miles away, hanging on a hillside above a wooded gorge, was a significant white village, the bell tower of its church sharp against the rising slope behind it. Luis stopped the car.

‘Mirasol,' he said.

‘Can we walk now?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘We can walk.'

The air outside the car smelled of thyme. It was very quiet, except for the soft little wind and for the sound that Frances had come to love, of a distant herd of goats, all bells and bleating. She put on her hat, the streamers of the scarf fluttering in the wind behind her. Luis watched her.

‘Now,' he said, ‘for some of your English walking.'

They walked mostly in silence. The track was soft underfoot, taking them gently down into the valley among bright clumps of broom and thorn bushes tangled up with wild sweet peas, sharp mauve-pink among the prickles. Every so often, they passed a little vegetable patch drinking greedily from a sudden spring, lines of tomatoes and beans neatly braced against criss-cross lattices of bamboo, fronds of carrot tops in orderly rows, clumps of potato and courgette. Some of them had a solitary man working in them, his
mule
tethered beneath a tree, but most of them were empty, as bright and symmetrical as samplers. Once, Frances's hat was blown off by a capricious gust, and Luis rescued it from a disagreeable tree laden with small leathery leaves and bunches of long leathery pods, and once Luis decreed a rest on a nearby rock, and Frances sat on the turf beside him and told him about Barbara running away to North Africa to be a hippie, which had seemed – and still did seem, in retrospect – like a bid for freedom, but, if so, it was a bid that had come to nothing.

‘It was as if she took the cork out of a bottle when she went away, and then she just put the cork back in when she came home.'

Luis wanted to know if Frances looked like her mother.

‘Not very. She is dark and quite severe-looking. My father is fair. At least, he was, now he is just grey.'

‘I am going grey,' Luis said.

‘Are you? Do you mind?'

‘Yes,' he said, smiling. ‘Of course I do.'

The climb up to Mirasol was steeper than it looked. The track became stonier, and darkened by woodland, climbing sharply up the rocky slope in twists and turns. Luis began to complain, but Frances simply climbed ahead of him, in and out of the sun and shadow and, when she reached the top and the junction with the roughly metalled road, sat on a boulder and waited for him.

‘That was terrible,' he said, emerging, panting.

‘It would have been terrible for the car too,' Frances said. ‘Think of the suspension.' She waited for him to get his breath. ‘Tell me about this village.'

She looked along the metalled road. The first few houses of Mirasol clung to the steep slopes either side of it, half-buried or perilously balanced, whitewashed, shuttered, secret.

‘It was Republican,' Luis said, ‘in the Civil War.'

‘Poor place,' Frances said. ‘It was a fearful war.'

They began to walk along the road towards the village. It was a lovely road, dipping up and down along the hillside so that the old houses with their balconies and their shutters and their pierced wooden screens so redolent of their Moorish past were scattered up and down the slopes, only accessible by whitewashed steps and paths as narrow and vertical as drainpipes. The inhabitants of Mirasol were plainly green-fingered, because vines and tangles of climbing nasturtium and bougainvillaea swarmed over walls and roofs and every step and terrace had its pot of flowers.

‘But there are no people,' Frances said, amazed.

‘No. You never see them.'

Frances looked up. The sun hung there, a polished coin in the calm sky. She looked along the swerving street. Everything was picturesque and charming, and also, mysteriously, sinister.

‘Why does it feel like this? Why does it feel so sombre?'

‘Come,' Luis said. He took her hand.

‘Where are we going? Why have you brought me?'

He turned off the road and began to lead her up a steep flight of steps beside, and then behind, the church. The walls either side of the steps were white and blank and the space between them was so narrow that Luis had to go ahead, pulling Frances behind him like a child. They went up and up, past shut gates and shut doors, past openings to other alleys, past a tiny wired-in courtyard where a yellow-eyed German Shepherd dog watched them go by in silent resignation, and then they came out on to a kind of platform at the top, a rough space above the village and below a cliff of brownish rock. They were both gasping for breath.

‘Look,' Luis said, panting and pointing. Frances turned. Below them, the roofs and flowers of Mirasol cascaded down into the dark gorge below with dizzying steepness.

‘Did you bring me up here for this? For another view?'

‘No,' Luis said.

‘What then?'

‘I have something to show you.'

He came beside her and took her elbow in his warm hand.

‘Over here.'

They walked across the stony platform. It hugged the curve of the hill, turning eastwards as the cliff turned.

‘There,' Luis said, pointing again with his free hand.

Frances looked. Along the cliff wall, at heights varying from four feet to six feet from the ground, were painted crosses, crude, roughly painted crosses, dull-red against the rock, dozens of them, crowded and clustered together, all different sizes.

‘What are they?'

‘Memorials,' Luis said. ‘This village was Republican. Franco's Nationalist troops raided the village, and brought every man and boy up here, and shot them, against this wall. The village has never recovered.'

Frances took her arm out of his grasp and walked to the edge of the platform.

‘Are you shocked?' he said.

‘Of course I am,' she cried furiously. ‘Shocked and angry. Who wouldn't be?'

Luis came close to her again.

‘In the thirties, when my father was a young man, Spain was a symbol, for the whole world, of divided beliefs. You were right to call our Civil War fearful, of course it was, it was about hope and despair. You
English
now have no good word to say for Franco, to you he is a fascist monster. To me he was indeed a despot, and I believe that tyranny is a second-rate ideology, but he was not a monster. After the fall of France, Frances, in the last World War, when I was a child and you were not yet born, he refused to ally himself with Hitler. He saved Spain from the Nazis and he would not let them close the Mediterranean, so the rest of Europe owes something to him for that at least. Of course, this is a terrible place, but it is not evil in its terror, it is tragic.'

Frances looked at him.

‘Why are you telling me all this? Why did you bring me here and lecture me like this?'

He took both her hands. He leaned towards her and his eyes shone as they had shone at her across the café table in Granada.

‘Because you must understand, Frances, about Spain, about the Spanish. I have shown you charming things, pretty things, ancient things, curious things. You have seen my hotel, and its garden, you have seen a little of Granada, you have smiled at some of the people who work for me, but that is not enough. It isn't enough to see the sunshine, it isn't even enough to see the magnificence, you have to see too how melancholy Spain is, how stubborn, and proud and full of violent conflicts of opinion. You have to
understand
.'

His vehemence vibrated through his hands to hers. She said, almost in a whisper, ‘Why do I have to understand?'

‘Because', he said, ‘you must know what you are taking on if we are to become lovers.'

‘Luis—'

‘It is not easy, you see, between races. I know something of yours. I want to be sure, for both our sakes, that you understand a little of mine.'

For a second, everything about her seemed to
fracture
, the sky, the dreadful cliff, the swooping valley, Luis's face. Then he let go of her hands and pulled her into his arms, holding her hard against him. Her hat slipped from her head and went skittering away across the platform like a kite.

‘Frances,
amor
—'

‘Shh,' she said. She put up her face to be kissed, tilting just a little because she was very nearly as tall as he was. He kissed her. She flung her arms around him, pushing herself against him, longing for him.

‘I can't believe this, I can't believe—'

He kissed her again and then he flung his head back, laughing, his teeth shining in the sun.

‘What is it?' she cried indignantly. ‘What's so funny?'

‘Oh!' he said, kissing her again. ‘Oh, you English! Can't you even tell the difference between a joke and joy?'

In the night, most surprisingly, it rained. Frances lay in Luis's arms and listened to it falling on the oval-grey leaves of the eucalyptus trees and the fringed green ones of the acacias, and visualized the grateful grass and flowers and the shining wet stones of the terraces. She lay very still, conscious of his sleeping, conscious of her quite unspeakable happiness and sense of deliverance, conscious, with a kind of joyful physical understanding, of this warm damp night in southern Spain.

They had made love twice. Or, to be more accurate, Luis had made love to Frances and then she and he had made love together. The first time he had told her not to talk.

‘I want you just to feel things, sense things. I don't want you to think, you think too much, Frances. It wasn't an intellectual decision that we fell in love, was it? Of course not. Nor will the making love, it will be a
matter
of the instincts, the imagination. So, in your own words, shut up.'

Afterwards she had said, ‘Oh but, Luis, you are married!'

‘Frances, I am not divorced. I haven't made love with José's mother for fifteen years, since I was thirty-three.'

But she couldn't really care. It wasn't just the glory of the moment that was so wonderful, it was the feeling – a feeling she could never remember having had before – that this was just the beginning, that Luis was going to show her things, help her to see things about herself that she had never seen.

‘We are a stupid age,' Luis had said at dinner (oh, such a dinner when she knew, with almost unbearable excitement, what lay ahead), ‘we are so mechanistic, so scientific, that we don't pay attention to our instincts and we are so
wrong
. Look at you.'

‘Me?'

‘Yes, you. Look at you. Full of lovely things you were never trained to see. Too much hidden in you.'

‘Do you mean inhibition?'

‘Only partly. I mean more this word I love now, this “sensible”. I mean knowing your feelings, enjoying them. You are not eating.'

‘I don't seem—'

‘Are you afraid?'

‘Only', she said looking at him with her straight gaze, ‘that you will find me dull.'

‘
Dull?
'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I haven't had a very exciting life, sexually speaking, so of course I naturally assume I may be rather dull.'

‘You are mad,' he said, ‘quite mad. What do you think I make love with? My eyes only? Like some
boy?
'

She began to giggle.

‘No, of course not, not just eyes—'

‘This is very indecent talk, Señorita.'

‘I can't help it. I'm disgustingly happy. I'm not responsible for anything I do or say.'

He regarded her. She was wearing a narrow black dress – not narrow enough but better than almost everything else she possessed – and a long string of amber and silver beads, and silver earrings.

‘I will never tire of looking at you,' he said. ‘Your face is – is full of your personality. You are—' He stopped, searching for exactly the right phrase and then he said urgently, ‘You are so honest, Frances. I never knew a woman so honest. Even when you hide things, you never hide them to deceive me.'

She looked down. Heavens, if this was love, no wonder people did such daft things for it, wrecking their domestic lives, throwing up their career prospects, starting wars.

‘Do the staff here all know?'

‘Of course they do. I expect they have taken bets in the kitchen—'

‘Luis, have you ever—?'

‘Brought a woman here before? Never. It is my refuge. Always, I confine women to Sevilla, between the hours of eight in the evening and two in the morning. You are a great nuisance. You have broken all my rules.'

‘And you mine. No married men, no using business for pleasure—'

‘No foreigners?'

‘Certainly no foreigners.'

‘Frances.'

His feet trapped one of hers under the table.

‘Frances, I am afraid I cannot wait one minute longer.'

Then this. This room, and this dark carved bed and the white sheets and the whispering curtains and the release and the love, and now the rain on the warm
dark
earth filling the air with scents. Frances turned a little, moved Luis's lower arm so that she shouldn't crush it, arranged his other one to hold her across her side and breast, and slept.