Bridle the Wind (20 page)

To steer my mind away from anxious thoughts, I recommenced teaching English to Juan and found that he was a lightning-quick pupil, able to remember all that he had learned yesterday and eager to acquire more. I taught him many of the ballads which I had heard, as a tiny boy, from my father, when I believed him to be a stableman; and various others that I had learned from the English sailor, Sam, who accompanied me from Llanes to Plymouth.

Juan speedily caught the English words and pronunciation; he seemed to have a wonderful facility for remembering such things.

‘You have a great gift for learning, Juan,' I told him with truth.

‘Well,' he said seriously, ‘I wish to be able to write poems in many languages. That is my intention.'

‘Poetry? You wish to write
poetry?
I was somewhat confounded at the ambition of putting his talent to such a use.

‘I already do write poetry in French and Euskar.' His tone was a trifle haughty. ‘I am a poet! And when I am grown, that is what I hope to do most in the world. That is – ‘He stopped abruptly.

‘But –!' Poetry is not proper work for a practical person, for a grown man, is what I first intended to say. Looking at Juan's resolute eyes and tight-pressed lips, however, I amended my remark to ‘How could you ever make a living by writing poetry? I am sure poets are not well paid. Cervantes was a great writer. But he did not make a living from writing
Don Quixote
!'

‘People will wish to buy
my
poems,' said Juan stoutly.

‘But suppose that you should marry? How could you ever support a family?'

‘I shall never marry,' he said quickly. ‘I have other intentions. And perhaps my Uncle León may leave me a sum of money so that I may be independent.'

I thought of the wide uplands of Villaverde which would one day be mine, and the care and trouble of looking after such an estate.

‘A mighty easy life, yours will be! Doing nothing but write poems all day, and living just as you please.'

‘Writing poetry is not at all easy!' retorted Juan, firing up. ‘Sometimes you can fret and sweat and frown, and feel as if you were pushing your whole soul out of your body, and yet hardly one line comes as it ought.'

Well, then, I thought, why not find some other
occupation, something more useful in the world, be a merchant or a lawyer? But I knew what trouble would follow if I uttered such a sentiment aloud, so instead I asked, ‘Can you recite a poem that you have made up? I should indeed like to hear one.'

‘They are mostly in Euskara,' he replied. ‘Basque is a wonderful language for poetry. But I will try to translate one into English as we go along, and then I will say it to you.'

Now, faintly, ahead of us we began to hear the jingling of bells, and after a while half a dozen lean wolfish dogs loped up and sniffed around us with lowered heads until I flourished my
makhila
at them, whereupon they slunk farther off but continued to eye us hungrily.

Presently their owners came in sight: a long gipsy caravan, trains of horses, mules, and asses, some led, some driven, by a dozen men and women – dark, swarthy, and somewhat Moorish in their appearance, with gold rings in their ears and black tangled ringlets. The old
zingaro
, or leader of the tribe, had a massive grey beard, and his bushy grizzled hair was confined in a netted bag. The men wore red canvas breeches, deerskin jackets, and sandals that laced up to the knee. Some had wolfskins over their shoulders, which gave them a fierce appearance. The women wore striped skirts and petticoats, and carried musical instruments, tambours and mandolins. They had brilliantly coloured shawls knotted over heads and shoulders. Two of the younger ones displayed golden arrows
passed through their knotted black locks as a sign that they were unmarried.

‘Egg-en-noon,'
we greeted them in Euskara, but the old
zingaro
replied in excellent French: ‘Bonjour, messieurs! How can I serve the young gentlemen?' And he looked very sharply at us, especially at Juan, with his twinkling black eyes.

We said that we wished to buy a couple of ponies. The
zingaro
nodded to a pair of the younger men, and they led forward six or seven tiny beasts.

‘Why! They are hardly bigger than dogs!' said I.

‘They are
pottoka
– mountain ponies,' Juan informed me. ‘My Uncle León had several. They will be quite suitable for our purpose, as they can find their way over any kind of country. They are strong as oxen, sagacious, and obedient.'

This, to me, seemed just as well; nobody would select the
pottoka
for their looks: they have huge heads, pot bellies, short knobby legs, not particularly straight, and coats so thick and rough that they resemble sheep or bears rather than ponies. Compared to my Spanish grandfather's Andalusian steeds, or the magnificent hunters of Arab descent that I had seen in England, these were like dwarfs or gnomes rather than ponies – mounts more suitable for Cagots than for ordinary people.

I daresay I regarded them somewhat superciliously, for Juan nipped my arm and whispered, ‘Do not curl your lip so, or the old
capo
will take offence and clap half as much again on the price.'

After long consideration, we selected a pair: one,
a bay, the most handsome of the string, with something of spirit in his eye; he flung up his head and lashed out at the boy who led him; the other, a piebald with particoloured hooves, a white face, and a black forelock. Juan took a mighty fancy to this one and urged me in a whisper to make an offer for him.

I had chaffered for horses before, on my grandfather's estate and during my journey to England; so I commenced by telling the
zingaro
that these two appeared to be the best of a very poor string, but that, nonetheless, they seemed wretched, slow-paced, knock-kneed, broken-winded beasts, hardly appropriate for such noble riders as we, and we would feel it a condescension to offer him ten shillings for the pair. At this his eyes and hands flew up to heaven; he exclaimed that it must be our intention to ruin him, either that or we were joking, and named a sum six times as much, which I then divided by three. We continued dickering in this manner for about forty minutes, carefully examining the two ponies point by point, breaking off sometimes to converse about the weather, the country, the condition of the mountain passes, then beginning again. At last our bargaining was concluded by my offering a gold guinea for the two beasts, with their harness (a sum about double what I had first named, and a third of what had been asked). I thought it was a little more than they were worth, but felt that we had made not too bad a bargain. The
zingaro
gripped my hand in his, and the sale was concluded.

Meanwhile a couple of girls had lit a fire, pounded chocolate, heated water, brought out flat cakes of unleavened bread and earthenware cups; presently they offered us a dish of
miga
– breadcrumbs steeped in water, sprinkled first with salt, then with hot oil in which garlic has been scattered – as well as cups of hot chocolate. Of which we were glad to partake, for our breakfast had been scanty, and the walk long.

While we sipped our chocolate one of the gipsy girls began to play on her mandolin and sing, a barbaric chant not unlike the flamenco singing of Spain. After that the
capo
invited us to contribute a song, so I obliged with an English ballad about a faithful farmer's son that I had been used to singing with my friend Sam. This was received with friendly applause. Then Juan explained with signs that he could not sing for them since he had hurt his throat, but he then, after some hesitation, proceeded to recite a Basque ballad about a poor girl who was sent away from her home to marry the king of Hungary and there died of grief for her Basque sweetheart. I could not understand it all, but caught a word here and a word there. Juan recited the poem in a kind of whisper, softly, but very affectingly, and the gipsies listened to it in most concentrated silence, with deep frowns and sighs of appreciation. At the conclusion Juan received quite an ovation, one of the girls kissed him, and the old
capo,
taking one of the younger men on one side, gave him some instructions,
which ended in our bay pony being led away and replaced by a black one.

‘Better for you – this one!' explained the chief with a grin. By which, a little abashed, I gathered that the bay must suffer from some defect which we would only have discovered later, when the vendors were far away.

‘So we have your poetry to thank for saving us from a bad bargain,' I said to Juan, after the money had been handed over, farewells cordially exchanged, and the gipsies had continued on their journey toward St Jean, while we, in high spirits, astride our new mounts, rode on eastward. Juan had taken the piebald, I mounted the shaggy black, who proved to have more energy in him than had shown at first appearance.

Juan looked a little smug, smiling over his pony's particoloured mane, but he said only, ‘That was a fine song about the farmer's son, Felix. You must teach me the words.'

Thinking of the gipsies on their way to St Jean, I said in sudden anxiety, ‘You do not suppose that the gipsies will tell the Gente about us?'

‘No. The Gente have nothing to do with gipsies. Neither trusts the other. The gipsies do not mingle with other people. They move about the country on their own concerns. When I was with the Gente I heard them speaking of gipsies with dislike and suspicion.'

‘Tell me your ballad about the king of Hungary,' I invited him. ‘For I caught only one word in three of the Euskara.'

‘It is not my ballad,' he explained carefully. ‘It is an old one from Tardets. I heard it from our cook, Barbe.' Then, to my utter astonishment, after a fairly long pause for thought, he gave a rendering of it in English, as follows:

‘But that is wonderful!' I cried. ‘Juan, you really are a clever boy! I could no more turn a French
poem into a Spanish one than I could take wing and fly over those mountains.'

To my surprise Juan did not seem particularly impressed or gratified by my words of praise. He took them quite as a matter of course. Indeed he rather put my congratulations to one side, and treated me, instead, to a lecture on the wretched lot of girls, especially in the Basque country.

‘I know the happenings of that ballad took place long ago – if they are real at all – but girls, even of good family, are still bought and sold like cattle at a fair.'

‘I do not know any girls,' said I, ‘save a miller's daughter in Galicia and a blacksmith's daughter in Llanes. And
she
was able to suit herself about marrying the man she loved. But it is true,' I added, ‘that her father liked the man, too. If he had not, I suppose it might have been otherwise.'

‘If I had had a sister,' said Juan, ‘she would have been given in marriage without her wishes being consulted at all. And she would never have been free, as we are, to ride about the world and see strange places.'

‘Unless she was married off to the king of Hungary,' I pointed out.

He laughed. ‘Yes, that is true! But I daresay the king of Hungary was old and hideous, with breath that stank of rotten onions. And once married to him, she would have been a prisoner. I had a cousin,' he went on, ‘who wished to become a nun. She had vowed it. But her family intended her to marry, despite her wish to enter a convent.'

‘Why should she wish such a thing?' The question came from me half idly.
I
would never wish to enter a monastery, part of my mind was thinking. How glad I was to get away from St Just! And another part of my attention was concerned with my new pony, who, though so small, was amazingly strong, and not at all prepared to agree that, in our relationship, I was to be the master.

‘Why? To pray for the soul of her aunt, who had died tragically. And because – because the life she had was not to her liking.'

‘How strange! When there is so much to do -so many things to see!'

I guided the steps of my pony through a shallow, rocky brook –
gaves,
the Basques call them.

Juan said, ‘For boys, yes. Girls are not so lucky. If I had a sister, she must stay at home, and mind her sewing, and marry some person she had never met, chosen by her family because of his wealth.'

‘True,' said I. ‘Well, I am glad that I am not a girl. Come up, son of Satan!' and I dragged at the enormous head of my tiny mount, who was trying to take a late breakfast from the ferny riverbank.

We rode on, slowly enough, getting accustomed to our new mounts, and trying to decide what names to give them. Juan finally decided that his must be called Harlequin, because of the black and white patches, while I, after some experience of my pony's temper, gave him the name of el Demonio; he was strong and full of spring, had a far better action than might have been expected from his uncouth appearance, had great sagacity,
and also a wide range of vicious tricks, doing his best to break my leg against tree trunks, or taking a sudden bolt under low branches in the hope of dashing out my brains, so that I had continual battles with him, and must belabour him briskly on various occasions with my
makhila
before he learned to obey me. Harlequin was more docile; his faults were sulkiness and cowardice. He slouched along as slowly as possible unless continually kicked and urged on his way; and when the
gaves
that we crossed appeared to be more than knee-deep, his eyes had to be blindfolded by wrapping the blanket over his head before he would consent to cross. Despite these drawbacks, Juan's delight in his new belonging was like that of a child with a new toy: at our rest stops he carefully led Harlequin to the best forage, found him handfuls of tender grass, brushed the pony's coat with a wisp of bracken until it shone like a magpie, and, as we rode, would be continually patting and encouraging him with a flow of nonsense talk.