The Eldorado Network (5 page)

'No, I-'

'As I recall, the young man from the dry cleaners had a moustache.'

'I was room service,' Luis said sulkily. 'I brought you your damned breakfast.'

She retracted her finger. 'I don't remember. Have another cake.'

'I don't want your damned cake,' snapped Luis. 'I don't suppose it interests you, but the only reason I'm staying here is that I want to save you from that raving gorilla of a husband.' His face was stiff with dedication. A crumb clung to his lower lip.

'Gorillas do not rave,' she said, 'and my husband is in Rio de Janeiro. Wipe your mouth.'

Luis dragged his knuckles across his lips. 'Then who the hell was that?' he demanded.

She looked at him as if he were ten years old and asking for more pocket-money. 'Just a toy,1 she said. A waiter strolled by, paused, smiled enquiringly, glanced at Luis, and moved on, elegant as a shark. 'And I suppose he's just a toy as well.' Luis said bitterly.

'All men are toys.' She reopened her magazine.

Luis heaved himself to his feet and trudged away. He felt hopelessly weighed down by disappointment and disillusion: everything he had lived for was wasted. His life was in ruins. At the same time the scorch-marks of insult and rejection hurt, they stung, they scarred. She hadn't even given him the status of a toy. Blackbeard was a toy. Luis was nothing, nothing] He reached the door and turned for a final look. That flaring red hair glowed like the treacherous bloom of a poisonous plant. He marched all the way back and stood staring down.

'The trouble with you,' he told her in a low, thick voice, 'is you can't tell a toy from a man.'

'And the trouble with you,' she replied in a clear, calm voice which several other people could hear, 'is you think a free fuck is as good as an introduction.'

Luis turned brick-red and walked from the room on legs that felt like stilts. He walked out of the hotel, and then he walked out of Valencia too. The whole town was a disaster, a shattering and humiliating disaster. Escape, escape! That was all he could think of.

Four hours of hard, unbroken walking took him deep into the countryside. From time to time he tormented himself by remembering in relentless detail exactly how she had delighted him and destroyed him, until the sunny suburbs blurred and streaked before his eyes and he had to blow hi? nose. Then at other times it was all remote history, and the day became blank and ordinary. But distressed or composed , he kept on walking, tramping steadily westward until his feet throbbed and his knees ached and the setting sun made him squint into a kaleidoscope of splintered reds and yellows.

The prolonged effort purified him. When he stopped, he felt empty and weary; but whole again.

It was a little village: San Luis de"something; a good omen maybe. Church with a busted clock; white cottages; dirt square; fountain with a piddling, plashing jet and a tiny thicket of bamboo growing out of the water. He sat against a wall and uttered a long sigh of relief.

The village was coming to life in the early evening. Kids chased each other to the point of breathlessness; regrouped; plotted; chased each other some more. Orange blossom scented the air. Five black-shawled women sat around a threshold and cracked almond-shells. Their little hammers made a soft stuttering. Somewhere out of sight a donkey manufactured its painful eeee-aw, eeee-aw, sounding more like the rusty straining of a village pump than the real thing. Luis fingered the cool, fine dust and watched the sky grow purple, the deep smooth purple of an over-ripe plum. This, he knew, was where he wanted to live. San Luis de whatever-it-was had an easy, comforting atmosphere. Strength was seeping back into his limbs. Yes, this was the place to be. Luis gradually realised that he had left home.

Good. He had grown up at last.

A man strolled over and looked down at him. The man was a strong, middleaged peasant: clumping boots, blue overalls, beret, a face as work-worn as old harness.

'Why are you sitting here?' he asked. There was no threat, only curiosity.

'Because I am tired,' Luis replied.

'Your fine clothes will get dirty.'

'True.' His best suit made Luis conspicuous. 'I don't care,' he said.

'Are you from the police?'

Luis started. 'Certainly not.' He was half-flattered, half-alarmed.

'The secret police, then?'

'No, no.' Luis glanced up nervously at the man's powerful silhouette.

'Then why have you come to our village?'

Luis quickly considered four or five dishonest explanations and fell back on the truth. 'To escape a woman,' he announced with dignity and feeling.

The peasant laughed and helped Luis to his feet. 'That's a good reason, a very good reason. Come and have a drink.' Halfway across the square he paused. 'If you had been from the secret police I would have beaten your brains out,' he said.

'If I had been from the secret police I would have had no need of brains,' Luis replied. The peasant laughed all the way to the bar. That night Luis got monumentally and ecstatically drunk.

He stayed five days in the village. They were wonderful days. He had enough money to buy meals for himself and wine for anyone -- money he owned for his hotel room  --  and he slept in the nearest heap of straw. By day there was always someone to talk to, some gentle job to help with: picking oranges, gutting fish, plucking chickens, collecting eggs. By night there was wine and food and more wine. He became unwashed, unbrushed, unworried, unhurried. Fifty or sixty villagers were his friends. He belonged there, like the piddling fountain and the rusty donkey and the church with the busted clock. Until his money ran out.

There was no question of living off his new friends; he knew how poor they were. The alternative was work. But work meant getting up at dawn and doing somebody else's drudgery all damn day. Picking oranges for an hour was amusing. Picking oranges for a living would be deadening.

Luis gave it some thought, and next morning he said goodbye and set out westwards, away from Valencia. He walked steadily for an hour. His tongue began to feel dry, and his belly grumbled for food. He wanted a bath. His underwear itched. He felt lonely for someone to talk to. The world seemed huge, and hugely empty. A bus hurried towards him, destination Valencia, and roared past. He stood and watched it diminish in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes, until it twitched over a short bridge and was lost to sight. Now the countryside seemed even huger and emptier. A butterfly ambled down the road, also heading for Valencia. Luis gave in and followed it.

It was seven in the evening when he slipped through the back door. His mother was busy playing the piano  -- Beethoven, for a change -- and there was no sign of his father. Luis went quietly upstairs and took a long hot bath. An hour later he came out smelling of half-a-dozen urban oils and unguents. The sheer luxury of fresh, crisp clothing made him smile at his reflection. He looked older, he decided. Older and stronger.

On his way downstairs he met his mother, coming up. She had a headache: he could tell by the way she pressed a handkerchief to her forehead. 'We must get a better piano,' she said, not stopping. 'I simply cannot go on playing that thing, it's intolerable.'

Luis watched her limp up the stairs, 'Where's father?' he called.

'Working late, I expect.' She went into her room.

They had not missed him.

Later, Luis realised that this was not so very surprising: his life and theirs had ceased to touch at many points. If they failed to see him at breakfast or at night, they assumed he was working strange new hours at some strange new job. He had not sought out their company when he was briefly at home, so why should he expect them to seek out his? In a way perhaps it was flattering, perhaps it showed that they trusted him. Nevertheless he felt unexpectedly saddened. Of course he wanted complete freedom, but did it have to come so fast? Why could he not have a choice? Or a fight, even? He felt like going to his parents and saying Look I know I took my independence but that doesn't mean you had to give it to me, does it? Anyway I'm sure I'm ready to be a damned adult. I'm not sure I even like the idea . . .

But it was too late now to begin that sort of discussion.

His experiences at the hotel had taught Luis that it was possible to get more out of a job than just money. He did three months as a van-boy for a delivery company: boring work, jumping in and out of a truck all day and getting nipped by dogs twice a week and being raped by lovely lonely housewives never. After hours he hung around and helped the mechanics service the vehicles. That was the extra reward. In six weeks he knew how a truck engine worked and what to check if it didn't. In two months he could drive. Around the parking area, slowly.

Then, in the summer of 1935, with their usual unsurprising suddenness, Spanish Railways transferred Senor Cabrillo to Granada. Valencia was glad of it and Luis was not sorry. There was little more for him to learn about the racketing guts of a delivery truck, and in Valencia the danger always existed that he might turn a corner and meet the demon redhead and her toy gorilla.

In Granada he talked a small garage into hiring him, and quickly mastered the basic secrets of Ford and Citroen and Fiat. On the strength of that he moved up to a bigger garage which specialised in Alfas and Mercedes. After six months there, he borrowed a sober hat and dark glasses, lied about his age, and go{ a driving licence. A week later he was a taxi-driver, specialising in English and American tourists.

Thus Luis Cabrillo: now seventeen and a half years old taller than average, not unattractive, with no visible scars but plenty of invisible ones, mis-educated, self-taught, physically fit, few family ties, restless for change, impatient with authority, hungry for excitement, and eager to achieve . . . well, something, God-knew-what, anything, as long as it won him admiration, popularity and fame. Also money. Driving a taxi was better than draining sump-oil into an inspection pit, but it did not exercise his imagination, enthusiasm and courage which (he felt) were limitless. Above all he wanted to test his courage. He was afraid that perhaps courage decayed, like muscle, unless it got used. Sadly he saw precious little prospect of excitement and adventure in Granada, or anywhere else in Spain. He was thinking moodily of becoming a racing driver, or a diamond prospector in South America, or a deck-hand on a whaler; when overnight the Civil War broke out and saved him.

The car raced down the hill and slithered into the village square, its wheels carving out brown wings of water, and coasted to a halt. Luis Cabrillo played a cheerful tattoo on the horn. 'Home of the heroes of Jarama!' he announced. 'A great Government victory! For you, this is big news.'

In the back, three newspaper correspondents peered through the rain at the broken buildings. A mongrel dog came to a doorway, looked once at the car, and went back inside.

'You mean the dog?' asked Milton Townsend of the Chicago Daily News. 'I never interview a dog unless he comes from Illinois. Either that or he's a wounded machine-gunner.'

'Or, ideally, both,' said Nicholas Barker, London News Chronicle.

'For both, the dog gets his picture taken too.' The American wiped mist from the window. 'My God,' he muttered. 'I've seen some picturesque enchanting fairytale Castilian villages in my time, but this is one hell of a dump. No bar even.'

'I told you war was hell,' said Barker.

'Listen, let's go back to Madrid. Luis, drive us back to Madrid.'

'Big story,' Luis said enthusiastically. 'Heroes of Jarama. In the church.'

'Heroes of Jarama,' Townsend grumbled. 'How can you have heroes without a victory? What kind of a big story is that?'

The third journalist was a French-Canadian freelance named Jean-Pierre Dru. 'Let's go look in the goddam church,' he said. 'I need some heroes and there may be booze, too.'

They ran through the rain and shouldered open the creaking, iron-studded doors. The air inside was warm. The church was half-full of soldiers, sprawling on the floor or sitting against the walls. They seemed relaxed and happy. A fire shimmered on the chancel steps, wavering from soft red to light purple to gold as the draught from a shattered window played on it. There was no smoke: it had been good, hard wood from the broken pulpit which lay nearby. Except for the massive baptismal font, every other sign of religion had been destroyed or defaced long ago. An officer  -- the only man whose cap and trousers matched his tunic  -- stood on the font. He was making a speech.

'. . . and this valiant attack,' he said as the journalists and Luis came in, 'was also preceded by a long and powerful artillery bombardment.'

The men cheered, drowning his flat, insistent voice. His face remained expressionless.

'Latest reports confirm,' he went on, 'that the entire rebel fascist forces are in retreat at all points along the Andalusian front.'

Cheers again.

'The situation in Madrid is extremely good. Fresh reinforcements of tanks, planes and artillery are arriving daily.'

More cheers.

'Everywhere in Spain the' illegal and anti-democratic forces of repression are bleeding to death on the bayonets of our courageous and freedom-loving fellow-workers . . .'

Prolonged, excited and deafening cheering. The soldiers lay on their backs and roared approval. They hammered their mess-tins against the flagstones. They hooked their fingers in their mouths and whistled until their eyes bulged.

The officer stood on the font and waited. Despite the uproar he was still boot-faced. He opened his mouth. The racket immediately redoubled. After a few moments he climbed down. At once the cheering subsided like a collapsing marquee. Within seconds it was just a gentle rumble of conversation. Soldiers began standing and stretching and walking about.

The visitors came forward and introduced themselves. The officer said he was Harry Summers, political commissar for the 2nd English Battalion of the 15th International Brigade.

'Battalion?' said Jean-Pierre Dru. 'This is a battalion?' There were fewer than two hundred men in the church.

'Jarama was a severe test,' Summers said.