New and Collected Stories (49 page)

When the plains of Murcia laid a straight road in front of them, it wasn't much after midday. What did hunger matter with progress so good? The roaring of the engine sometimes created a dangerous speed, but maybe it would get them to Tangier. Nothing could be really wrong with a three-month old car – so he drove it into the remotest part of Spain, sublime indifference and sublime confidence blinding him.

He shot through Villa Oveja at five o'clock. The town stood on a hill, so gear had to be changed, causing such a bellowing of the engine that people stared as if expecting the luggage-racked car to go up any second like the Bomb, that Chris had fought so hard to get banned. The speed increased so much that he daren't take his foot from the brake even when going uphill.

The houses looked miserable and dull, a few doorways opening into cobblestoned
entradas.
By one an old woman sat cutting up vegetables; a group of children were playing by another; and a woman with folded arms looked as if waiting for some fast car full of purpose and direction to take her away. Pools of muddy water lay around, though no rain had fallen for weeks. A petrol pump stood like a one-armed veteran of the Civil War outside an open motor workshop – several men busy within at the bonnet of a Leyland lorry. ‘These Spanish towns give me the creeps,' he said, hooting a child out of the way.

He waved a farewell at the last house. Between there and Almeria the earth, under its reafforestation skin of cactus and weed, was yellow with sand, desert to be traversed at high speed with eyes half-closed. The road looped the hills, to the left sheer wall and to the right precipices that fell into approaching dusk. Earth and rocks generated a silence that reminded him of mountains anywhere. He almost expected to see snow around the next bend.

In spite of the faulty engine he felt snug and safe in his sturdy car, all set to reach the coast in a couple of hours. The road ahead looked like a black lace fallen from Satan's boot in heaven. No healthy tune was played by the sandy wind, and the unguarded drop on the right was enough to scare any driver, yet kilometres were a shorter measure than miles, would soon roll him into the comfort of a big meal and a night's hotel.

On a steep deserted curve the car failed to change gear. Chris thought it a temporary flash of overheated temper from the clutch mechanism, but, trying again – before the loaded car rolled off the precipice – drew a screech of igniting steel from within the gearbox.

He was stopped from trying the gears once more by a warning yell from Jane, pulled the handbrake firmly up. The car still rolled, its two back wheels at the cliff edge, so he pressed with all his force on the footbrake as well, and held it there, sweat piling out on to the skin of his face. They sat, the engine switched off.

Wind was the only noise, a weird hooting brazen hill-wind from which the sun had already extricated itself. ‘All we can do,' he said, ‘is hope somebody will pass, so that we can get help.'

‘Don't you know
anything
about this bloody car? We can't sit here all night.' Her face was wound up like a spring, life only in her righteous words. It was as if all day the toil of the road had been preparing them for just this.

‘Only that it shouldn't have gone wrong, being two months old.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘British is best. You know I told you to buy a Volkswagen. What do you
think
is wrong with it?'

‘I don't know. I absolutely don't bloody well know.'

‘I believe you. My God! You've got the stupidity to bring me and a baby right across Europe in a car without knowing the first thing about it. I think you're mad to risk all our lives like this. You haven't even got a proper driving licence.' The wind, too, moaned its just rebuke. But the honeyed sound of another motor on the mountain road filtered into the horsepower of their bickering. Its healthy and forceful noise drew closer, a machine that knew where it was going, its four-stroke cycle fearlessly cutting through the silence. While he searched for a telling response to her tirade, Jane put her arm out, waving the car to stop.

It was a Volkswagen (of course, he thought, it bloody well had to be), a field-grey low-axled turtle with windows, so fresh-washed and polished that it might just have rolled off the conveyor line. Its driver leaned out while the engine still turned: ‘
Que ha pasado?
'

Chris told him: the car had stopped, and it wasn't possible to change gear, or get it going at all. The Volkswagen had a Spanish number plate, and the driver's Spanish, though grammatical, was undermined by another accent. He got out, motioned Chris to do the same. He was a tall, well-built man dressed in khaki slacks and a light-blue open-necked jersey-shirt a size too small: his chest tended to bulge through it and gave the impression of more muscle than he really had. His bare arms were tanned, and on one was a small white mark where a wristwatch had been. There was a more subtle tan to his face, as if it had done a slow change from lobster red to a parchment colour, oil-soaked and wind-worn after a lot of travel.

To Chris he seemed like a rescuing angel, yet there was a cast of sadness, of disappointment underlying his face that, with a man of his middle-age, was no passing expression. It was a mark that life had grown on him over the years, and for good reason, since there was also something of great strength in his features. As if to deny all this – yet in a weird way confirming it more – he had a broad forehead, and the eyes and mouth of an alert benign cat, and like so many short-sighted Germans who wore rimless spectacles he had that dazed and distant look that managed to combine stupidity and ruthlessness.

He sat in the driver's seat, released the brake, and signalled Chris to push. ‘
Harémos la vuelta.
'

Jane stayed inside, rigid from the danger they had been in, weary in every vein after days travelling with a baby that was feeding from herself. She turned now and again to tuck the sheet under the baby. The man beside her deftly manoeuvred the car to the safe side of the road, and faced it towards the bend leading back to Villa Oveja.

He started the engine. The turnover was healthy, and the wheels moved. Chris saw the car sliding away, wife, luggage, and baby fifty yards down the road. He was too tired to be afraid they would vanish for ever and leave him utterly alone in the middle of these darkening peaks. He lit a cigarette, in a vagrant slap-happy wind that, he had time to think, would never have allowed him to do so in a more normal situation.

The car stopped, then started again, and the man tried to change gear, which brought a further roaring screech from the steel discs within. He stopped the car, leaned from the window and looked with bland objective sadness at Chris. Hand on the wheel, he spoke English for the first time, but in an unmistakable German accent. He grinned and said, a high-pitched rhythmical rise and fall, a telegraphic rendering of disaster that was to haunt Chris a long time:

‘England, your car has snapped!'

II

‘Lucky for you, England, I am the owner of the garage in Villa Oveja. A towing-rope in my car will drag you there in five minutes.

‘My name is Guzman – allowing me to introduce myself. If I hadn't come along and seen your break-up you would perhaps have waited all night, because this is the loneliest Iberian road. I only come this way once a week, so you are double lucky. I go to the next town to see my other garage branch, confirm that the Spaniard I have set to run it doesn't trick me too much. He is my friend, as far as I can have a friend in this country where, due to unsought-for happenings, I have spent nearly the same years as my native Germany. But I find my second garage is not doing too wrong. The Spaniards are good mechanics, a very adjustable people. Even without spare parts they have the genius to get an engine living – though under such a system it can't last long before being carried back again. Still, they are clever. I taught my mechanics all I know: I myself was once able to pick tank engines into morsels, under even more trying conditions than here. I trained mechanics well, and one answered by taking his knowledge to Madrid, where I don't doubt he got an excellent job – the crooked, ungrateful. He was the most brainful, so what could he do except trick me? I would have done the same in his place. The others, they are fools for not escaping with my knowledge, and so they will never get on to the summit. Likewise they aren't much use for me. But we will fix your car good once we get right back to the town, have no fear of it.

‘You say it is only three months old? Ah, England, no German car would be such a bad boy after three months. This Volkswagen I have had two years, and not a nut and bolt has slipped out of place. I never boast about myself, but the Volkswagen is a good car, that any rational human being can trust. It is made with intelligence. It is fast and hard, has a marvellous honest engine, that sounds to last a thousand years pulling through these mountains. Even on scorched days I like to drive with all my windows shut-closed, listening to the engine nuzzling swift along like a happy cat-bitch. I sweat like rivers, but the sound is beautiful. A good car, and anything goes wrong, so you take the lid off, and all its insides are there for the eye to see and the hand-spanner to work at. Whereas your English cars are difficult to treat with. A nut and bolt loose, a pipe snapped, and if you don't burn the fingers you surely sprain the wrist trying to get at the injured fix. It's as if your designers hide them on purpose. Why? It isn't rational why, in a people's car that is so common. A car should be natural to expose and easy to understand. On the other hand you can't say that because a car is new nothing should happen to it. Even an English car. That is unrealistic. You should say: This car is new, therefore I must not let anything happen to it. A car is a rational human being like yourself.

‘Thank you. I've always had a wanton for English cigarettes, as I have for the language. The tobacco is more subtle than the brutal odours of the Spanish. Language is our best lanes of communication, England, and whenever I meet travellers like yourself I take advantage from it.

‘You don't like the shape of the Volkswagen? Ah, England! That is the prime mistake in choosing a car. You English are so aesthetic, so biased. When I was walking through north Spain just after the war – before the ink was dry on the armistice signatures, ha, ha! – I was very poor and had no financial money – and in spite of the beautiful landscapes and marvellous towns with walls and churches, I sold my golden spectacles to a bruto farmer so that I can buy sufficing bread and sausage to feed me to Madrid. I didn't see the pleasant things so clearly, and being minus them the print in my Baedeker handbook blurred my eyes, but here I am today. So what does the shape of a car mean? That you like it? That you don't wear spectacles yet, so you'll never have to sell them, you say? Oh, I am laughing. Oh, oh, oh! But England, excuse me wagging the big finger at you, but one day you may not be so fortunate.

‘Ah! So! Marvellous, as you say: clever Guzman has flipped into second gear, and maybe I do not need my towing rope to get you back to town. I don't think you were so glad in all your life to meet a German, were you, England? Stray Germans like me are not so current in Spain nowadays.'

Shadows took the place of wind. A calm dusk slunk like an idling panther from the hips and peaks of the mountains. A few yellow lamps shone from the outlying white houses of Villa Oveja. Both cars descended the looping road, then crept up to the lights like prodigal moths.

As he stopped outside Guzman's garage, Chris remembered his ironic goodbye of an hour ago. A small crowd gathered, who'd perhaps witnessed other motorists give that final contemptuous hand-wave, only to draggle back in this forlorn manner. God's judgement, I suppose they think, the religious bastards. Guzman finished his inspection, sunlight seeming to shine on his glasses even in semi-darkness – which also hid what might be a smile: ‘England, I will take you to a hotel where you can stay all night – with your wife and child.'

‘All night!' Chris had expected this, so his exclamation wasn't so sharp.

‘Maybe two whole nights, England.'

Jane's words were clipped with hysteria: ‘I won't spend two nights in this awful dump.' The crowd recognized the livelier inflections of a quarrel, grew livelier themselves. Guzman's smile was less hidden: ‘Rationally speaking, it must be difficult travelling with a family-wife. However, you will find the Hotel Universal modest but comfortable, I'm sure.'

‘Listen,' Chris said, ‘can't you fix this clutch tonight?' He turned to Jane: ‘We could still be in Almeria by twelve.'

‘Forget it,' she said. ‘This is what …'

‘… comes of leaving England with a car you know nothing about? Oh for God's sake!'

Guzman's heavy accent sometimes rose to an almost feminine pitch, and now came remorselessly in: ‘England, if I might suggest …'

The hotel room smelled of carbolic and Flit; it was scrupulously clean. Every piece of luggage was unloaded and stacked on the spacious landing of the second floor – a ramshackle heap surrounded by thriving able-bodied aspidistras. The room dosed so heavily with Flit gave Jane a headache. Rooms with bath were non-existent, but a handbasin was available, and became sufficient during their three days there.

Off the squalor of the main road were narrow, cobblestoned streets. White-faced houses with over-hanging balconies were neat and well cared for. The streets channelled you into a spacious square, where the obligatory church, the necessary town hall, and the useful
telegrafos,
emphasized the importance of the locality. While Guzman's tame mechanics worked on the car Chris and Jane sat in the cool dining room and listened to Guzman himself. On either side of the door leading to the kitchen were two bird cages, as large as prisons, with an austere primitive beauty about the handiwork of them. In each was a hook-beaked tropical bird, and while he talked Guzman now and again rolled up a ball of bread that was left over from dinner and threw it with such swift accuracy at the cage that it was caught by the scissor-beak that seemed eternally poked without.