Rose for Winter (11 page)

Then I remember waking one evening to a more normal consciousness to find the grandmother holding my hand, her creased, dried-walnut face rocking gently over me. A guitar played softly in a distant room, sad and cool, like dripping water. The town seemed unusually silent.

‘Do not worry yourself, Lorenzo,' said the old woman. ‘Resign yourself to the Holy Mother and make your peace. Whatever happens we will look after Kati. She is a good girl and works well and all the world loves her. She shall stay with us and be our daughter. Do not worry about her.'

She blessed me and left me, saying that Don Porfino would make all the arrangements. Presently came the jaunty Sorda, who squinted brightly upon me.

‘Ay, Lorenzo,' she said. ‘How lucky you are. Everybody is saying what a beautiful widow the señora will make. Even now the students make speeches to her. She will never want for a husband. Do not concern yourself about her.'

Unmoved, I fell asleep, but when I woke again, much later, it was to find Kati sitting by my bed, most calm and silent, dressed all in sombre black. She sat stiffly, in the waiting posture of the grandmother; her hands were folded in resignation, and her great eyes said Farewell. It was night, and very quiet, and yet I seemed to hear, from outside the door, the low whispering of the students patiently waiting also.

A sudden rage consumed me. I sat bolt upright like Lazarus in his sheets.

‘Take that stuff off!' I cried. ‘And clear those bastards off the stairs!' Kati jumped to her feet as though a ghost had spoken. There was a moment's silence; then I heard the stumbling of the suitors as they stampeded into the street.

From then on I improved rapidly. I no longer heard the night-bird screeching over the town. The sounds from the streets were healthy; and the trotting of donkeys, tinkling of bells, the motorhorns, cockerels and stirring of distant trains all suggested a likely tomorrow.

Each day I read books with more interest and grumbled more vigorously. From the kitchen I was constantly supplied with hot-water bottles, hot milk, hot lemon, coffee and coñac. Two of the senior students, half doctors that they were, seeing me mend, fought one last rearguard action. They came with black bags and hypodermic needles and prepared a nameless injection; but I drove them from the room. After that the fact of my survival was accepted by everyone, all was forgiven, and the students brought me presents and even entertained me with card-playing and dominoes.

When at last I left my bed I spent my convalescence in the kitchen with the women. Here it was warm among the banks of stoves, and I was restored by roasted steaks and generous draughts of wine. Each morning the servants and the grandmother peeled several hundredweights of potatoes while Kati fried them for the famished students. For the rest we sat round a brazier of glowing charcoal and sipped liqueurs, and talked. The conversation of the women was curiously inflammable, often obscene, flaring up sometimes into screaming rows which changed as quickly into squawks of laughter. They discussed love, murder, the price of meat, the fatness of Franco and the parts of their men. If ever I tried to say anything, the grandmother would hush her daughters imperiously. ‘You must listen to Lorenzo,' she would say politely. ‘He knows life with his bones.' But how they knew it, those women, illiterate as they were, croaking together over their stoves like a chorus of witches reviewing the turning world.

So passed our days in that rank warm kitchen, while the great pans hissed on the stove, and Trini and Kati stood side by side, shaking and prodding the spitting meat. Armies of cockroaches marched over the walls. Sacks of potatoes were peeled and eaten. Bottles were drunk, and histories told. It was the women's world, and men had no part in it unless they wanted something – food, or warmth, or money. Sometimes Trini's three sons would appear, but fleetingly, for they lived at the clubs. Enrique, the youngest, was a mathematical genius and scorned all women. Manolo, the next, was a neurotic, given to sudden shaking rages, and was denied nothing. But Juan, the handsome eldest, was the pride of all, though he spoke little to any of them. He had seduced La Sorda when she first came to the house, but now he took no interest in her. When he came for his meals she would raise her head for a moment and watch him with her short-sighted eyes, then shrug her shoulders and return to her work.

But Don Porfino, the moody melancholic patron, had disappeared altogether from the scene. His wet, wine-sodden face no longer appeared in the mornings to wish me a grizzly day. For three weeks he had shut himself up in his room, with drawn blinds, cut off from life and from the light of the sun. No one could tell me why; and he never appeared again. Later, back in England, we heard by letter that he had remained for six months shut up in that room, drinking, reading comics, but never stirring. Then, one morning, he had cut his throat with a razor.

The day before we left Granada I at last succeeded in meeting the great Don José B., once a friend of the poet Lorca, and now one of the rulers of the city. The meeting was arranged by a poor journalist named ‘Horsehead' who fed at the ‘House of Peace' and worked as a hack for the Falangists. The negotiations had taken a month to complete, and Horsehead had treated the whole affair as a major conspiracy, planning each move with bated breath, for he was frightened and nervous, and Don José was a powerful man, and Lorca a tricky subject. However, in the end he fixed it, and came to my room with trembling limbs to announce that owing to his influence, and because of my esteemed interest in literature, the great man would see me.

I was taken that night to an opulent club near the Puerta Real and shown into a private room. Don José, a tall, grey, handsome man in his late fifties, greeted me with courtesy and warmth. He enquired after my fever, ordered coñac and biscuits, and invited me to sit with him at a wide window overlooking the moonlit mountains. There, in his rich classical Spanish, he talked at some length about literature and music and the gardens of the Generalife. The forbidden subject hung fire. Meanwhile, Horse-head sat at a respectable distance away, his hat perched on his knee, watching us with agonized eyes and twisting his nervous hands. Don José talked on and on, and seemed to grow more and more embarrassed. At last I gave him an opening, and he seized it gladly, and his face grew tender and haunted.

‘Ah, Federico!' he said, in a changed voice. ‘There was a man! – an angel of the arts, a veritable torrent of inspiration. He was a treasury of talent – writing, drawing, singing, playing the piano, everything he did captured the imagination of us all and transformed our souls. He talked like a god, and when he sang the gypsies were dumb, they sat transfixed and wept real tears. He was a spirit. He lived like a star. He seemed on fire. I was the companion of his youth, and night after night we walked by the river and he talking till dawn. He had three imperatives for poetry: “Luz, alma y vida”; and he loved Spain with his bones. Those wonderful records he made with Argentinita, he playing the piano and she singing his words ! – to hear them now is to be scalded with fire and grief. He was all beauty and genius, was Federico. But he did not belong to this world. He travelled to America and made a lot of money, but the success shamed him. When he came back he said to me, “José,” he said, “once upon a time I had no money, but my pockets were stuffed with poems. Now my pockets are stuffed with dollars, but I have no poems any more.”'

As he was talking we were joined by two other friends of Lorca, both successful writers, and one the brother of a leading Spanish poet. Don José led them into the conversation, and how sentimental they grew, how they praised ‘Federico's' memory and how they protested their love. They sang me his verses and wrote out in my notebook some of the words of his fandanguillos. Even Horsehead joined in, and for a time we seemed at ease. But when suddenly I mentioned his death, how swiftly their attitudes changed. What evasions, excuses and tortuous explanations followed. They all talked at once, pulling up their chairs, tapping me on the knee, and blowing their hot breath in my face. It was an accident, it was a private murder, it was a case of mistaken identity, it was a blunder by a Civil Guard who has since been punished – every story was different, except in its effort to prove that the killing had not been political.

But in the first hysteria of the Civil War, when some cities stood for, and some against, the rebel Franco, it was those with the guns who did the killing. And it seems that Lorca, in Francoheld Granada, was a marked man from the very beginning. For he wrote verses to traditional tunes which anyone could sing. They were sung widely, particularly by the poor, who do most of the singing in Spain. They were even sung by the anti-Franco armies. So Lorca was considered to be a red poet. He had also written several popular poems attacking the brutal Civil Guard. Many a man was shot for less cause in those first days. So Lorca was taken out on to the hills one morning and shot too. Excuses remain, and reasons are vague, but the poet is dead, and the guilt is Granada's.

5. Castillo of the Sugar Canes

We had come down now to the warm south coast, to a small fishing village which I shall call Castillo – though this is not its name. Many years ago, in the summer of 1936, I had lived in this place. I was there when General Franco made his journey from Morocco and the Civil War exploded along the coast. I saw this poverty-stricken Castillo lift its head out of the smoke and clamour of those days and feed, for a brief hour, on sharp hot fantasies of a better world. I had come back now, as I knew I must one day, to see what the years had done to the town. I found it starved and humiliated, the glory gone, and the workers of the sugar fields and the sea hopeless and silent.

Castillo was once a pirate stronghold, standing on a fortress rock in the mouth of an estuary, surrounded by water and hooded by mountains. The estuary, now, was dry; the castle ruined and stuffed with graves; and the town, stripped of its pirates and Barbary jewels, depressed and desolate. The silted estuary now grew crops of sugar cane, and the ragged shore was littered with broken boats. The fishing was niggardly, and the sugar offered little more than a month's work a year. For the rest of the time the townsfolk scavenged among the rocks or sat watching the sea and praying for miraculous shoals.

We put up at the white, square, crumbling hotel where, during my earlier visit, I had worked as porter and minstrel. The hotel was empty now and a wind of chill ghosts blew through the passages. We were offered our choice of rooms and took the best one, which had a balcony overhanging the sea. Below the windows a group of exhausted fishermen lay face downwards on the sand, sprawled out like starfish sleeping. Behind the hotel the promenade of cheap café's, which once hummed with the talk of a world republic, now gaped at the sea with the empty eyes of beggars. The fountain was choked with refuse, goats browsed in the ornamental gardens, the sugar canes rattled like bones on the wind, and the dark-blue mountains stood close around, sharp and jagged, like a cordon of police.

A silence as of sickness hung over the place now, and I remembered Castillo as I had seen it long ago. A summer of rage and optimism, of murder and lofty hopes, when the hill-peasants and the fishermen, heirs to generations of anonymous submission, had suddenly found guns in their hands and unimaginable aspirations in their breasts. I saw them shoot the fish merchants, drive the sugar planters into the hills, barricade the mountain roads, and set up the flag of their commune over the Town Hall. ‘This flag,' they said, ‘will be defended to the last drop of our blood.' And so, indeed, it was. The smoke of violence and excess filled the streets in those first days. They looted the food shops, tore down the sugar factory, wrecked and burnt the Casino. I saw a grand piano, like a monstrous symbol, blazing one morning outside the church. As it burned, the tense wires inside it snapped and jangled, while the keys, like teeth, spilled broken onto the cobbles.

The destructive frenzy soon wore itself out The committee of the commune took over all the big houses that had been abandoned by their owners, and across the walls, in letters of scarlet, they chalked their naive ambitions. ‘In this house we shall make a school for the women.' ‘Here shall be founded a club for the young.' ‘This house is reserved as a hospital of rest.' ‘This house shall be the orphanage.' The committee sat night and day in the Town Hall, their guns on the table, confident that their enemies would be defeated; in the meantime drawing up an impossible, spring-like way of life.

Their plans were swiftly doomed. Very soon the yellow snub-nosed tanks came clanking along the road from Malaga, Italian bombers swooped over the Sierras, German warships shelled from the sea. The town fell; and the firing squads cut short the brave words of the committee; the big houses were restored to their owners, the writing was scrubbed off the walls; and Castillo's summer dream was over.

Everything now was as it had been before – though perhaps a little more ignoble, more ground in dust. As I walked through the town time past hung heavy on my feet. The face of a generation had disappeared completely. A few old women recognized me, throwing up their hands with an exclamation, then came running towards me with lowered voices as though we shared a secret. But of the men I had known there was little news, and such as there was, confused. Most of them, it seemed, were either dead or fled. The old women peered up at me with red-rimmed, clouded eyes, and each tale they told was different. My ex-boss, the hotel-keeper, who used to pray for Franco in his office, had been shot as a red spy; he had died of pneumonia in prison; he had escaped to France. Lalo, the hotel porter, had been killed on the barricades in Málaga; he ran a bar in Lyon; he was a barber in Jaén. Young Paco, the blond dynamiter of enemy tanks, was still a local fisherman – you could run into him at any time; no, he had blown himself up; he had married and gone to Majorca. Luiz, the carpenter, had betrayed his comrades and been stoned to death; he lived in Vélez Malaga; he sold chickens in Granada …