Rose for Winter (2 page)

‘You wan' good Swiss?' he said hurriedly. ‘You wan' Park-air Fifty-one? Come on, fella. Cost you nothin'. Is very cheap. Is contrabando.'

I paused to take him in. Meanwhile, he kept edging away, looking quickly to right and to left, like a wild animal at a water-hole, too nervous to drink.

Ah, contrabando. Sweet fruit of Algeciras. I dodged behind him and slipped into my hotel. I was back indeed, and there was a loud ticking in my ears.

In our hotel we were soon part of the furniture, polished each day by the curious courtesies of the staff. Ramón, the manager, revealed from behind his brooding face a quiet almost tender sense of humour. At dinner the next night he gave me a cigarette – a cheap, strong local brand tasting of tar and feathers.

‘We call them “forget-me-nots”, he said. ‘If you forget them – they go out'

‘I'll never forget this one,' I said, and he laughed from his throat like a laugh from a tomb.

Manolo, our waiter, on the other hand, never laughed at all. He was a young man of about twenty-two, with a small thin body and a long large head, which made him look as though he had been carved for a cathedral niche. He had beautiful eyelashes and dark wet eyes that seemed to be focused perpetually upon some distant vista of voluptuous melancholy.

He served each meal as though he were serving Mass, with many little bows and elaborate flourishes of the napkin. He always brought me the fattest prawns, because he knew I liked them. And on the second night, without a word of warning and with only the slightest of smiles on his curved lips, he presented me with a poem.

It was written out in immaculate copperplate handwriting such as I have never seen before, except on a five-pound note. There were about thirty lines to the poem, and its subject was love. I read it through in silence, while Manolo rocked gently on his heels, his head on one side, like a waiter who waits for a client to pronounce on a sauce. At last I asked him where he got it.

‘It is mine,' he said. ‘I am a poet. I wrote it but yesterday at a late hour of the night. It is beautiful.'

I agreed that it was so, and I said that it was full of fine thoughts, too. And that was enough for Manolo. From then on he brought me a new poem every day. At the hotel he worked continuously from eleven in the morning to twelve o'clock at night. Yet every morning there was a new poem laid out on my table beautifully inscribed in that flowing hand. There were poems to God, to his boy friend, to anxiety, to the Catholic Kings, to anarchy, and to ‘our unquiet love'.

‘What inspiration,' I said at last.

‘It is sensibility,' he answered simply. ‘I have much of it.'

We no longer professed any interest in food; our conversations assumed a higher plane. Previously, Manolo had been in the habit of gliding up to our table and inclining his mouth to my ear to warn me about the fish or the rice. Now, approaching me in the same confidential manner, he would whisper hoarsely: ‘Love is an earthquake of happiness, of which the heart is the epicentre.' Or ‘What is Youth save Hope? What is Age except Regret?' Following such pronouncements he would cock his head sideways for a moment, raise a knowing black eyebrow, then glide without another word back to the service-hatch.

This was provocation, of course, and put me on my mettle, so that in my imperfect Spanish I wrestled with epigrams to astonish him also. There followed days in which we never met without exchanging pensamientos in hushed, grave tones. ‘God is a fable writ in holy water,' he would whisper, passing me with a bowl of soup. I would savour this with a low ‘Ah!', and we would nod solemnly to each other, then go on about our business. Presently, on my way out into the street, I might find him standing by the door, taking a breath of air. He would draw back, bowing slightly. ‘Love's dart is like a mosquito,' I would hiss in his ear, ‘for both engender fever.' At this his body would stiffen for a moment, struck still with the truth of my words, then he would shake his head and sigh heavily, giving me a look of professional admiration. For Manolo, flicking the dishes with his butterfly napkin, or gazing blindly at the ceiling with his melting eyes, was, at all times, a professional indeed.

On another night we went out to the ‘Street of the Two Brothers', to a wine cave that had attracted us by its shabby look and by the merry sounds we heard coming from within. The place was nothing more than a low-arched drinking tunnel, full of fishermen, dim lights and flickering gothic shadows. There were no glass-topped tables here, no cubist mirrors, paper flowers, brass barmaids and chromium-plated pin-tables. The tavern was stripped down to the bare boards of good fellowship – a whitewashed wall, a rough wooden bar, wine in great vats and men in tempestuous good humour.

We entered to the cry of a fisherman singing an ecstatic fandango that shivered the roots of one's hair. The singer, who was leaning against a huge sweating barrel of amontillado, was a short wiry little man, scrub-haired, swarthy faced, with a profile from Egypt. He wore a blue jersey and torn linen trousers, and he was surrounded by a rapt group of friends whose shining weather-beaten faces were creased in the very excesses of pleasure.

We drank black wine at sixpence a bottle and listened to him. He stood there stiffly, his eyes closed, his dark face raised to the light, singing with a powerful controlled passion that shook his whole body through. At the beginning of each verse his limbs convulsed, as though gathering their strength; and at the end he reached such shuddering paroxysms of intricate invention that the whole room roared with praise. He sang through the nose, with the high-pitched cry of Africa, and he sang with the most natural grief and happiness, varying the words with little phrases of his own full of sly wickedness and tragic beauty.

They told me his name was Pepe, and that he came from Huelva, the old Phoenician port east of Cadiz. And from the look of his sharp dark face and slanting eyes, remote as a buried mask, he might easily have been one of the founders of that city. He looked as though he had landed that day from a voyage that began five thousand years before. And he sang – making up the words as he went along – of boats and storms, of saints and monsters, of mysterious longings and mysterious loves. He sang, too, a saetas I shall never forget, a savage impromptu of adoration to the Virgin, harsh, scalp-raising, and accompanied by sonorous drum-beats on an empty barrel.

As the evening wore on, and more wine was drunk, Pepe grew more and more excited. He seized a straw hat and a broom and became a most agile clown. With rolling eyes and a perfectly controlled body he aped the Civil Governor and the Governor's wife, a crab caught in a trap, the soldiers of Napoleon, and the ‘Due de Vellinton'. The last two, brushing aside a hundred and fifty years with a few superb gestures, brought down the house as though they were the most topical of jokes.

Flushed with triumph now, Pepe looked round the bar seeking for further inspiration, and his eyes fell on Kati. She was the only woman there. He snatched off his hat and pressed it to his heart, then advanced towards me, and bowed.

‘With your permission,' he said, ‘I am you.'

He stood close beside me and turned towards Kati; and with hands and body and fluid voice sang immediate love-songs right into her eyes. From then on, Pepe and I were drinking out of the same bottle. He was I. His arm was about my shoulder. ‘With your permission,' he said, and began a new verse. He reeked of wine and olives, of garlic and the sea. He reeked also of glory. And he looked into Kati's eyes and sang songs of such touching tenderness and grace, such delicate perfection, that I grieve that I can no longer remember them.

I loved that man, and envied him. He inhabited still the pure sources of feeling that once animated us all. For us, of course, they are increasingly clogged by each new triumph of enlightenment and comfort. But for Pepe, and for many others like him in Spain, they are still preserved by the paradoxes of poverty, illiteracy, bad roads and the great silences of the mountains and the sea.

Later that evening I walked the streets alone, too bright with wine to feel the need of sleep. There was a curious music in the air and a stamping of feet in the darkness, and as I stood in the plaza an army of young men suddenly appeared and came marching towards me, singing lustily. They were bearing guitars, mandolines, cymbals, flutes and drums of pigskin which growled when you stroked them. ‘We are going to a wedding,' cried the leader, and invited me to go with them. Very glad of a wedding on such a night, I accepted without hesitation. I was given a pigskin drum to stroke, and I fell in behind, and we all marched away to the fishermen's suburb, playing loudly as we went.

It was a warm, dark winter night and the season for serenading was in full swing. On every hand the town was alive with it. Women and children leaned out of rose-red windows to watch us as we passed by. We began to meet other bands marching and counter-marching about the town. Sometimes they crossed our paths with hideous discord and then just faded away into the darkness. At others, they met us head on in narrow streets, and no one would give way, and then what stiff-necked rivalry there was, what tightening of strings and jutting of jaws, what glorious bedlam as we all stood breast to breast, sweating and thumping our instruments and each trying to outplay the other.

We left the town at last, and climbed the high ground above the harbour, the wind in our teeth, the lights far below us, and the young men arguing all the way. We reached the fishermen's suburb, where the wedding was, and halted, with some ceremony, outside a darkened house. Here we banged on the door, struck warning chords, shouted and kicked the walls. At first nothing happened; then a grey old man, roused from his sleep, poked his head from a window and cursed us all roundly. We had come, it seemed, to the wrong house.

Then we found, at last, the wedding-party, and were welcomed with cheers and wine. Here was a crowded room full of sweating girls, clambering children, and stiff old ladies as black and brittle as charcoal. There were pieces of ham handed round on toothpicks, Gibraltar biscuits and Tangier sweets, speeches, introductions, song and dance, and a beaming bride and a scratching groom.

The band placed itself in the middle of the room and played a programme of martial music well nigh drowned by the pigskin drums. The walls of the little room seemed to bend outwards with noise, the children screamed, the girls cowered in the corners, and the sweat ran down from the ceiling. Then, after more drink, ham and speeches, enthusiasm waned, and we were shown the street.

Here we paused for a while In argument, for there was still work to be done. Where now should we go and who else should we honour? Girls' names were proposed, attacked, fought for, won or abandoned. And such names they were on the Spanish air, exotic, round, baroque and many-flavoured, a litany of virtues, a calendar of saints. Finally we accepted six of them, those best loved by the loudest in the band, and set off to serenade them.

It was now about two o'clock in the morning. Other grunting bands still marched about the town. We trailed over waste ground, under bridges, along railway lines, through darkened squares. From time to time we paused under a window, banged on a door, and struck up a military march. Sometimes we were ignored. Sometimes a sleepy girl would drag herself from her warm bed, lean drowsily over the balcony, and scratch and yawn good-naturedly in our faces. When this happened one of us would detach himself. Quick, then, were the words of love whispered up from the street, while the rest of the band, for a discreet moment, stood silently aside. Then, with a crash of chords and a growl of the pigskins, we were off again to the next. Until the light of dawn we proceeded thus. The serenading season had begun indeed, and few virgins in the town got much sleep that night. Very few of the rest of us either. And for days my fingers were sore from those pigskin drums.

One stormy but invigorating morning we set out to walk to Tarifa, the old Arab town lying twelve miles along the coast in the direction of Càdiz. Armed with coñac against the cold, we climbed slowly into the mountains, while a stiff wind blew in from the Atlantic bearing strong salt smells of northern weather. Ahead of us lay the Sierra of the Moon and on our left the Sierra of Gazelles, high and dark, shrouded with storms and eagles.

It was a morning of mysterious monotones; black rocks above and a blacker sea beneath. We saw one little girl burning leaves by the side of the road and an old man whipping acorns out of a tree. We saw the smoke of a charcoal burner blowing raggedly out of the cork forest and heard the crack of a rifle down in a ravine. Otherwise we were alone in the world, save for the eagles that dropped out of the crags to look at us.

This coast road winds through iron-coloured rocks to a mountain pass above Tarifa, and for two hours we saw no sign of traffic on it. Then a farmer in a mule-cart came rattling out of a field, and, seeing us toiling over the stones, he stopped and offered us a lift. We climbed to the top of a load of potatoes and sat beside him. He was a fat and bristly fellow, with a waistband of broad black silk in which he stored tobacco, cheese and olives for the journey. All this he shared with us, and as we went he talked comfortably about his affairs.

He was once, it seemed, a great landowner hereabouts, possessing twelve farms and twelve sons, all famous and worth much gold. Then four of the farms were lost in a lawsuit, and four of the sons in the Civil War. But that was not the end of him. There was still a son for each remaining farm, and he was master of them all. He was a big farmer, he said, and grew everything. There were potatoes here, cork trees farther on, maize down by the mad-house, and olives in the valley of toads. There was also a garden for tomatoes, an onion patch, a mill, a vineyard and a ruined chapel full of fattened pigs.

‘Buy land and breed sons,' he said, ‘and you can't go wrong. Come war and thieves and ruined harvests – they don't signify at all.' He thumped himself hard in the loins. ‘If a man's got strong blood, like me, and scatters his seed wide enough, that man must flourish. Such is the truth and I tell it to you.'