Rose for Winter (3 page)

So we continued, in the greatest satisfaction, till we came down at last out of the hills to the white town jutting on the sea. The farmer left us here and drove on into the farther country, and we turned towards Tarifa and stood below the walls.

This town, small as a village, is the most southerly point in Europe, yet the air it wears is not of Europe at all. We approached the narrow Moorish gateway, where the road runs through the walls. ‘Most royal, most loyal city of Tarifa', it said, on coloured tiles above. For this coastal stronghold, built for Islam, was recaptured and held by Spain long before the Moors were driven out of Europe. So it stood for years among the alien spears, a scene of bloody sieges, betrayal and massacre. But it remained the outpost of the Catholic Kings and never again surrendered.

We passed through the gateway and into the city, and the sun broke through and shone. Tarifa, within the walls, was packed as tight as a box of bricks. But the small square houses, decorated with delicate ironwork and built round tiny flowering patios, gave an impression of miniature spaciousness, a garden enclosed, an ancient perfection preserved in poverty and love.

For Tarifa was quite obviously poor. Once a name of terror in the Straits, a nest for the sea-raiders who once dominated these waters, the city lies harmless now like a wrecked and gilded barge. But the gilt is fresh, and flowers hang bright from the balconies, and the air in the streets has the clean golden silence of perpetual afternoon.

Most Spanish towns are lapped with noise, with wagons and motor-horns, donkeys and tinkers, and the ceaseless clamour of café conversation. But here there was an almost unearthly silence, cool and becalmed, a silence of no time. We threaded around the narrow cobbled alleys, and small dogs slept in shadows as though bred only for sleep. A few brown girls stood motionless by a fountain, unspeaking, stilled with secrets. A few dark men stole quietly through archways and disappeared into the profound gloom of shuttered patios. A few dark eyes watched us through the grilles of windows. And a solitary beggar girl, with huge dumb eyes, followed us slowly with a smile.

I felt we had stepped aside from all the activity of the earth and entered a charmed and voiceless world, a world where people lived as hushed as plants, taking their life from the sun without a sound. The Spanish kings may well have recovered this town in 1392, but Tarifa remained almost mystically oriental, the women wore veils of silence, and the men walked cloaked in shadow and the sun.

Down a narrow street, near an empty plaza, we ate our midday meal. The beggar child watched us through the window for a while, then, picking up a piece of charcoal from the road, began to draw pictures on the white wall opposite. She drew an ass, a lion and a tree full of birds. When we had finished our meal she came and took us by the hand and led us to them.

As we fingered the birds and stroked the lion's mane she gazed up at us with great eyes swimming in shadows.

‘What would you like best in all the world?' I asked.

‘To sail a ship in the night,' she answered.

‘And where would you go?'

‘Away, to find my father.'

She came with us down to the seashore, and we sat together on the white sands, eating oranges and pastries and watching the long rollers coming in from the Bermudas.

Then we said good-bye and walked out of the town and got a lift in a motor-car back to Algeciras. As we returned through the stormy mountains, a gale blowing now and rain coming on, our driver, who was a horse-doctor, spoke passionately about the loss of Gibraltar, but he said that Churchill was a good man and might hand it back to Spain any day now.

During the days that followed, a raging storm blew up out of the Straits, accompanied by a harsh east wind. Gibraltar Rock, trailing a perpetual plume of cloud, looked like a stricken battleship on fire. The bay leapt and seethed with green and milky waves. The fishermen crouched miserably in doorways, watching their boats as parents watch sick children. And the Civil Guards drew cloaks over their noses and flapped about like wounded birds.

Rafael, the page-boy, ran in and out of the hotel with doom on his face, his proud new uniform shrinking rapidly.

‘Ay! Ay!' he moaned. ‘What wind! What tempest!'

I asked him if this was usual weather.

‘Rare as a green dog,' he said, shaking himself.

It meant an end to all normal life in the town. No boats would put out, so there was a lack of fresh fish. No one would go into the streets if they could help it, and those who must stole awfully about, wrapped up to the eyes with scarves as though the wind spelt plague. Another consequence of the storm was the glut of stranded travellers in the hotel. There was no way across the Straits save by the Algeciras ferries, and all travellers by train from Europe to Morocco came here to catch these boats. But with such seas running the boats refused to sail.

Suddenly, therefore, the bars and dining-rooms of the hotel were full of the lost and surprised from all over Europe. They sat around all day, staring at the walls, nibbling nuts and waiting for deliverance. Unprepared as they were for more than an hour in Algeciras, the delay seemed to rob them of all power to express themselves, and the waiters kept running to me in despair to ask the French for flan, the German for banana, or the English for soft-boiled eggs.

There was a wide variety among the travellers: a Huguenot hotel-keeper from Dublin, going to Tangier for his blood-pressure; a poor American painter with his French-Arab wife; three caravaning Swedes; a Norwegian-American and her two blonde daughters; an ex-sailor from Alamos in trouble with the police; and a thin, pale, pendantic young civil servant from the Channel Islands.

The effects of the delay upon them were also various, and at times quite startling. The Huguenot hotel-keeper drank brandy all day long and blew up paper bags to test his wind. The Norwegian and her daughters tiptoed in shocked horror about the passages, pale and martyred by the plumbing. One of the Swedes, in gritty English, made love to the sailor and was punched on the nose. And the American painter, in bad French, sat quarrelling with his wife over the works of Donatello, striking the table every so often and crying out to the amazed fishermen: ‘Jeeze, ain't she dumb though? She jus' don't know from Harry! Good ker-ripes!'

But the prim young man from the Channel Islands was probably in a worse state than any of them. He was making a rapid tour of France, Spain and Morocco, every stage of which he had worked out beforehand to the split second. Delay was calamity. For two miserable days he sat in the hall, checking his timetables, making nervous calculations in his notebook, looking at the clock, and clucking. For two days he would not eat, because eating in Algeciras was not included in his itinerary. The second evening we forced him to have dinner with us, and afterwards to try some coñac. Quite soon, in a kind of white-faced desperation, growing more and more formal, he grew more and more drunk. In the end, speaking with Whitehall precision, he broke down altogether.

‘In my position,' he said, ‘as Assistant to the Postmaster, I am assured … of an adequate salary. And later, of course … of a pension … concomitant with my grade. And yet … The tears streamed down his face. ‘What does it all mean? I would like to be famous, my name to be remembered. But how? I ask, but how?'

We picked him up – and his time-table – off the floor, and put them both to bed.

Among others stranded in the port were several shaggy groups of yachtsmen – British, French and Italian. One met them in the bars at night, a false-faced lot, all drinking heavily, all wearing braided caps. The French and Italians looked like film extras, with an anxious shiftiness about them as theatrical as greasepaint. The British included young men with polar beards, middle-aged captains with flaring faces and half-drowned eyes, and several ageless girls whom the captains always introduced as their pursers. They were quarrelsome and intensely suspicious of each other, and although they seemed to hang together, the presence of a stranger revealed some queer cracks in their solidarity.

A young man would lead me darkly aside. ‘You want gin?' he'd say. ‘Loads of it aboard. You sell it, and we'll go fifty-fifty. Have to hit the old man on the head though. He keeps the key, the sot.'

A girl would lead me to another corner. ‘You don't know what I've been through,' she'd whisper hoarsely. ‘He nearly pushed me overboard in the Bay. Said it was an accident, but I wouldn't put it past him. Never did trust the swine. Wish I'd stayed in Rep.'

From time to time there would be high words, blows, tears and sentimental reconciliations. Then the skipper, drinking rum, would embrace everyone. ‘I got the best crew in the world,' he'd say. ‘They love me like a dad.' Then there were nods, winks, obscure allusions, expressing a sense of shared mission, secret and dangerous. They were a shabby lot, but they all seemed to have plenty of money, to be bound on long mysterious voyages, and yet to have been stuck in the Straits for months. There was no doubt at all about it. Something more than the pure call of the sea had brought them to these waters.

Across the bay stood rich Gibraltar. Across the Straits the free port of Tangiers. For the forbidden goods they had to offer, Spain was starved. So the yachts and fishing-boats ran to and fro on the dark nights, and Algeciras was their clearing-house. Watches, fountain-pens, nylons, cigarettes, sweets, cocoa and canned meats: here, in this town, I could buy them any day, untaxed and hot from the smugglers' hands.

The organization was smooth but implacable, and the right form of bribe had always to be observed. One morning, as I was dressing, I heard the crack of a rifle, and looking out of the window saw a young man spread-eagled on the pavement below. ‘A contrabandista,' said the chambermaid, shaking out the sheets. But he was only a poor workman, a lone hand who had failed to obey the rules. So the green-cloaked policemen dumped his body in a cart and wheeled him like rubbish away.

But in crowded Algeciras hundreds of other young men stood around in the streets all day. They were not fishermen, or labourers, and their pockets were stuffed with American cigarettes. Every morning an army of thousands – cooks and washerwomen, ostlers, dockers, roadmen, waiters, gardeners and guides – went across to Gibraltar to work. Every evening back they came, bulging like clowns with their loot. So they and their wives drank rich cocoa on cold nights, and their daughters wore stockings of silk, and the children sometimes ate chocolate. Nowhere else in Spain were these things either seen or tasted, at least not by the poor.

Gibraltar, that juicy pear-drop of rock hanging from dry Spain's southern tip, was captured by the British some two and a half centuries ago. Many of the original Spanish inhabitants fled to the mainland, and most of them settled in this town. Never, never did they cease to grieve their loss and shame. And yet …

‘Do you know what the people of Algeciras are called?' asked Ramón, handing me some chewing-gum. ‘Los Especiales – the favoured ones. They talk a lot about “our Gibraltar” and “the Spanish Rock”. They cry and stick out their teeth. But I'll tell you something.' He paused, and laid a finger along his nose. ‘They wouldn't have it back for the world, you know. It would be the ruin of them.'

2. Choirs and Bulls – Seville

In an afternoon of gale and storm we left Algeciras and took the motor-bus for Seville, a hundred miles to the north. Africa and the Straits had disappeared in a driving whirl of cloud and the sky was the colour of octopus ink. Our road was a bad one, narrow, cratered and steep, and it took us straight up into the Sierra de los Gazules, a dark region of craggy forests where no birds sing.

From a distance these mountains look like a herd of driven animals, lean, diseased and beaten to the bone. Near at hand they revealed a shuttered, oppressed world, particularly so this stormy day, under its heavy sky. There was something about the streaming rocks and wet, lead-coloured trees that gave one a sense of unnatural freedoms, of a desolate secret life. Indeed, as one expected, it was a place of bandits; and we had two Civil Guards, fully armed, riding with us for our protection.

These two did not impress us, however. They were green, sick-looking youths and they rode with an air of misery. As we bumped up the rocky forest road they crouched low and peered anxiously out of the windows, while yellow home-made cigarettes hung wet from their loose lips. They were here on sufferance of course, and they knew it. For the bandits were as indigenous to these parts as the wild boar and stag, and when they struck they did so with the fine assurance of those who are indulging an ancient privilege. Moreover, their ranks had been stiffened of late by an influx of escaped prisoners and political outlaws. Oh, yes, they were bad men, said a neighbour, hugging his fat lap. Along this very road, this very winter, several unhappy travellers had been shamefully murdered. It was a natural peril of the mountains. But the señores were not to fear; the Civil Guards were valiant, and the bandits never attacked foreigners anyway, it was not their custom.

On this occasion, somewhat to our disappointment, we were not attacked at all. It was not bandit weather; and we did not see so much as a living creature in all those mountains. When at last we came out of them and descended into the plain, the Civil Guards said how lucky we were, and we said how lucky they were, and in an atmosphere of mutual congratulation they left us and took another bus back to the coast.

The storm here left us also. As neat as a ruled line drawn across the sky, the black clouds ended and radiant blue began. We came to Alcalá de los Gazules, a terraced town of bright white houses hung with red flowers and roofed with gold. White pigeons floated like thistledown in the sky above, and sunshine came off the walls with the force of an electric flare. We stopped here, and sat by the roadside, drinking wine and screwing up our eyes.

Later we began to cross the plain that rolls gently towards the Guadalquivir. It was brown as a camel and smelt of fine herbs. There were walled farms here and there, and wooden crosses by the roadside; herds of black bulls roamed slowly in bronze pastures, a castle stood up sharply from the cone of a dead volcano, and above, in the wide sky, two white flamingos flew.