Rose for Winter (6 page)

The crowd rose to its feet with one loud cry. Hats, caps, cushions, even raincoats, were thrown into the ring. The young man stood among these tributes and smiled palely at the crowd. Then he came, sword in hand, and bowed low to the President and to Gloria. Colour and intoxication had returned to the girl's cheeks; she stood up and clapped him wildly and threw him a box of cigars. His triumph was hers; it was the least she could do.

The rest of the afternoon was a sorry sight, an anti-climax. The fifth bull wouldn't fight, and just wandered miserably about the ring looking for a way out; he retreated when challenged, and leaned sickly against the barriers when wounded. The sixth and last was a fine animal, but he had a wretched opponent whom he treated with contempt. After a few hysterical passes, during which the new torero lost both his cape and his head, the bull turned irritably upon him, tossed him twenty feet across the ring, split his thigh and trampled on him. A volunteer took his place for the kill, bungled it, and was booed from the ring. Finally the bull was dispatched by an attendant's dagger.

Meanwhile the hero of the afternoon, who had been awarded two ears, was called to the President's box to meet the guests of honour. We saw him standing on one leg drinking sherry with Gloria, whose great eyes, running over his body, promised more dangers than any bull.

Our last nights in Seville now moved timeless, unsorted, gliding gently one into the other. I remember sitting in the Garden of Hercules at dusk, writing, sipping wine and being stroked on the nose by a whore. I remember walking the narrow crowded Sierpes, that serpent street of various temptations, listening to the hot voices of the youths undressing their fabulous and imaginary mistresses. Or exploring the dark, shut, oriental side-streets, where the locked-up girls gazed out at the world through heavily barred windows. The slow time dripped musically from fountains, wine-barrels and the guitarist's fingers. We moved through musky orange gardens, or down the Alamedas eating sweets, or watched the thick waters of the Guadalquivir brushing Triana's blue-glazed walls. These were nights turning towards Christmas, fresh, cold, with glittering pendulous stars.

A small boy stood in the doorway of a wine shop, thin, barefooted, with short and scruffy hair. The girl with him also had cropped hair, so that her head looked as though it were covered with scorched grass; she was about eleven years old, but her dark slanting eyes were as quick and frisky as fish. The boy had come to sing. He screwed himself up and sang in a high passionate wail, throbbing, trembling, tearing his heart out. He seemed to be singing himself to death, as though each song was a paroxysm which diminished and bled his frail young body. And while he sang the girl perpetually watched him, anxious and maternal, echoing each phrase of his song with mute contortions of her lips. Afterwards she took him by the hand and led him round, charming us all for alms. But they preferred to be paid in monkey-nuts, which they could eat.

It was the time now when the streets were full of such children, when the ragged half-naked urchins from the hovels of Triana came out in force and filled the town with carols. In busy gangs they roamed about, carrying a host of home-made instruments – tambourines, castanets, drumskins, and tins which they scraped with sticks. At a word they would surround one and sing a whole concert for a penny. They were of all ages from four to fourteen, and they threw back their heads and sang with the ease and eagerness of angels, striking clear cool harmonies, and beating out the most subtle rhythms on their assorted instruments. Some blew into water-jars, making deep base notes; some rattled dried peas in boxes; others shook loose tin-lids threaded on a stick. I never tired of listening to them, for I had never heard or seen anything like them before. Their singing was as precise as though they had rehearsed for months, yet naturally spontaneous and barbaric, as though the tidings they brought were new, the joy still fresh.

The night before we left Seville I walked late in the streets alone. It was past midnight; men were repairing an empty road and there was a wet moon over the Cathedral. As I headed at last for home I ran suddenly into another of these gangs. They were sitting in an alley, warming their bare feet round a fire of burning paper. When I called to them they came crowding around me, squealing like starlings, grinning and arranging themselves in order. Their leader, a boy of ten, muttered a few instructions. Then they sang me five ecstatic carols, their smiles wiped away, their faces set in a kind of soft unconscious rapture. Here again, as in the others I had heard, was the same order, expertness and love. A girl of five took a solo, singing through the short tangles of her hair in a voice of such hoarse sweetness one felt shriven of all one's sins. As she sang, the others watched her with solemn eyes, their lips pursed ready for the chorus. In this shabby street, lit by the lamp above, their bronze heads seemed disembodied, like Botticelli spirits, floating and singing in the air. They sang of a star in the sky; of Christ and the Virgin; of Triana (across the river); and of Bethlehem (across the hill). And looking and listening to this ragged lot, I believed all their bright songs told me. For they lived near the heart of all these things, and knew what it was to sleep on straw in stables.

3. The City of the Sun – Ecija

We came to the city of the sun on the night of a full moon which rose like a tide over the azulejo towers and hollow rat-filled palaces. We had journeyed for five hours from Seville's December cold, but as we dropped down into Ecija the gusty winds went still, and the moonlight seemed to collect in warm pools along the little streets and to drip off the white walls with a visual texture as smooth and as tender as oil.

The centre of the city, antique and antic now with the social stir of the evening, greeted us with a glare and jostle that owed nothing to neon lights and motor-horns but was all of a natural piece, homespun and roughly local. It was the hour of paseo: boys to their girls called neat-turned adorations; loud cries from gritty throats celebrated' the reunion of friends who had not seen each other for at least thirty minutes; lottery-ticket sellers chanted their chances of fortune; and a hoarse town-crier with drum and trumpet, announced a sale of mules. Around the square there were palm trees, white arches and blind secret windows; and it seemed as though the Moors had only left that morning.

It did not take us long to find our footing here. No sooner had we unloaded our bags upon the pavement, than six strong boys surrounded us, and with loud and eager civility promised to carry us to the lodgings of princes. They had tattered clothes, bare feet and the dark shapely faces of Arabs, they shouted and flashed their moonlit teeth and before we knew what was happening each had seized an article of luggage and all made off in different directions.

We were saved from this dilemma by a late arrival on the scene – a porter with a monstrous square head, sad eyes and a capacity for tempestuous rages. Screaming into the night, he called back every boy, stripped each of his load, piled it back on the pavement, checked it and then, with a miraculous arrangement of arms and legs, shouldered the lot and with a crooked smile staggered away before us to the Hotel Comercio, which he represented.

The Hotel Comercio was about as commercial as the cave of Ali Baba. Around the vast shadowy patio, shepherds, in fleece-lined coats, sat eating and drinking. Boot-blacks on their knees seized and polished the boots of anyone who stood for a moment near them. Two farmers were tasting each other's crop of olives and spitting them out with epithets of disgust And a magnificent gypsy wandered among the throng selling silver Virgins and cures for love. The hotel office was a glass box, set like a fish-tank in the corner of the patio. Enclosed within its shining walls sat a handsome Sevillana to welcome us. She had heavily made-up eyes, a bursting poppy mouth, and hair like two gallons of coal tar. She left her crystal office and showed us to a bedroom full of white pillars, arches and fretted wooden panelling, for which, with food, we were asked to pay the price of one indifferent meal in a Knightsbridge café.

After a supper of squid and goat's flesh, we went out into the street and watched the moon flashing on the azulejo towers. They stood around in a rich mysterious company, brooding and glittering above the city roofs with ornate, unearthly presences. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all of a similar decayed magnificence, and every few minutes one or other shivered to the stroke of a bell which told one nothing dependable about the time but which filled the night air with a succession of soft feathery sounds as from magical beings who called to each other.

As we walked through the brilliant midnight streets birds on the warm walls sang as though it were day. And little beggar girls came up out of the shadows and smiled at us and asked us our names. Astride their hips each carried a sleeping babe, the body of each was smoke-black under its rags, their dark curls were caught in tangles which only scissors would ever unravel, their feet were bare, their eyes diseased, but their smiles were the roundest in the world.

With them we went to the booths under the arcades and bought cakes, nuts and sunflower seeds. With them we sat round the moon-twinkling fountain and ate a second supper. It was a gay ravenous meal, and the sleeping infants were awakened and forced to share it. Pieces of sugar cake were pressed to their drowsy mouths; with eyes still closed they chewed and swallowed, they groaned and gasped in half a dream, they were coated with sleep like fur. But the young mothers, by shakes and cries and kisses, made sure the little ones knew what they were eating. It would have been improper otherwise.

The next morning was golden with inevitable sun, and Ecija was at last revealed in all its decayed and gilded splendour. Ecija is a small country town between Seville and Cordova. The Romans called it Astigi, the ‘city of the sun'; but Paco, the hotel porter, calls it ‘the frying pan of the world'. Lying in a depression among the hills it is like a lake of sun, a reservoir of heat. It has a river, but never a breeze. In summer it is so hot that the very natives fall dead in the streets. Even this morning, in mid-December, the sun had the warmth of an English May, though faintly water-cooled to give it freshness.

As we walked abroad again and looked about us the daylit towers seemed to be stuck all over with wet violets, a moist and effervescent blue as though they were still sweating from the moonlight they had absorbed the night before. All round the square, under the African palms, old men, wearing black Cordobese hats, sat in stiff rows like figures at a judgement. Late in their life though it may have been, these ancients still had a sharp eye for a pretty woman. As Kati walked by, they looked at her hard from under their hats. ‘Behold!' said one, ‘how like a ham she is.' ‘Oh, for a knife and fork!' cried a second. ‘Silence,' growled a third. ‘Don't you see that she is a married woman?' ‘Ah,' said the first with a sigh, ‘but that she were a widow for only five hours'.

Soon the beggar children espied us again, and came running across the square, shouting our names and shaking out their verminous black locks. The infants hanging from their hips were now sleepily awake, peering around them with little red eyes. We all went down to the river-bank and sat by the water, and the children talked about their lives.

Isabela, the eldest, led the conversation, as she led in all things. She was about twelve years old, had a golden grimy face, and a manner of supreme and pretty confidence in the world.

‘Our family is stupendous,' she said. ‘There are ten of us and we live in one room. We have a table and chair and we cook in the street.' She began to giggle. ‘We haven't a bed. We sleep on straw. And for this room we pay four shillings a month.'

She was not complaining so much as asking us to share in a joke. But one of the company, a boy with a diseased skin, considered she was boasting.

‘I pay nothing for my house,' he said. ‘It is mine.'

‘It's not,' said Isabela, ‘it's your mother's.'

‘Well that's the same.'

‘Anyway, it's not much of a house – all tins and palm leaves.'

‘But it is ours,' said the boy.

The children all began to flow with information, competing with and contradicting each other. I asked them what their fathers did. They were all dead. ‘Mine.' ‘Mine, too.' ‘And mine.' ‘Yes, it is true. All dead.' They announced the fact with bright smiles, making gestures of sleeping with their hands. One had died of a cold, one of a fever, another apparently of eating beans. Two had been shot –
bang! bang!
– but I could not gather by whom. Yet I believed them, for Spain is a country of dead fathers, and today there are a million young widows in that country who will never see a second husband.

Another girl, up to her thighs in the river, was washing her brother's head. Her dark-brown face was tender and beautiful, and her thick hair, matted with dirt and straw, gave her the ageless look of a bronze sculpture.

‘We sleep in a bed in our house,' she said. ‘Three at the top and two at the bottom. And if we don't bring home ten reales every day we are beaten.'

Everybody squirmed with laughter at this. Filthy radiant faces were convulsed. It was obviously a private joke. Only the diseased boy looked solemn.

‘Nobody beats me,' he said. ‘I buy all my own clothes.'

At the mention of clothes, the girl in the river lifted her dirty coloured dress and began to catalogue the sources of her garments. Behold the torn dress, given; the short tattered vest, given; the canvas rag of shoes, bought from the mother of Carmencita, who died. ‘They are good,' she said, ‘and I wear nothing else.'

There, by the river, we spent the sunny morning. The thick green waters went slowly by, like summer grasses flowing in a breeze. The girls chattered. And the diseased boy lay back, and gazed up through the eucalyptus trees, and sang in a voice as gentle as a bird's, over and over again, this pretty song: