Olura (2 page)

I told her to wait while I rolled up my trousers and tried out the channel. It was three feet deep; soft, sticky sand at the bottom added another six inches.

‘You could do it if you took them off,’ she said.

Well, but what about you?’

‘Oh, I was hoping for a swim.’

She took off the crimson cloak and rolled it into a bundle. She was wearing a severe blue swim-suit with a loose sweater over it.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘My shirt,’ I pointed out, ‘is very short, and …’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of highly shockable Spaniards on the other side.’

‘I see.’

‘And I refuse to sit at a café table in soaked trousers and this gale.’

‘Put my cloak on,’ she suggested, ‘and hold it up as high as you can without shocking Spaniards.’

I was most unwilling to be watched on an open beach—for villagers, though invisible, are always fascinated by the antics of foreigners—while putting on a woman’s red cloak and
taking off my trousers under it. But I had to. I am sensitive to making myself in any way noticeable. She didn’t seem to give a damn. I tried to square her free and easy manners with her
reserve in the hotel and verged, I think, on the right answer: that if she felt something was worth doing, she was completely uninhibited in her approach to it.

We crossed—she splashing along confidently, I looking like an old woman going out to pawn her husband’s pants. Behind a convenient rock I returned to masculinity and handed back the
cloak.

She was wrong about the prawns. They did
not
taste like any others—as you, Sequerra, will agree. Possibly for her they did. She had no interest in food and drink.

We talked easily but without intimacy. She appeared to have a mind of high quality, though untrained. She cared too much about vague service to her fellows and too little about knowledge, like
so many of the generation ten years younger than my own. Opinionated? A bit of a prig? Well, if she was, I could hardly distinguish it, for she possessed all the social graces.

There was a continual roar of speech and laughter from the bar behind the terrace. The crew of the
María de Urquijo
, the launch now high and dry in the channel, were drinking
away their leisure while fishing was impossible. She thought the racket extravagantly loud. I may have replied that I was glad there were still men in the world who did not care how much noise they
made. Basques when speaking Spanish, as these were, are more full-mouthed than in their own language.

We stayed an hour and crossed back to our home sands by a knee-deep paddle. On the open beach the wind was too fierce for conversation and too cold to stop and watch the savage seas meeting land
for the first time on their journey from Labrador. In any case we had seen all we wanted of that frustrated fury from the hotel windows. Plainly she thought so too, especially as rain was now
pouring down.

She went straight up to her room to change, and I might have imagined that she had had enough of me as well, though she thanked me sweetly for prawns and my company. She had put on again her
manner for public places, as if she had been too short-sighted to be sure of any of us and taken refuge in a comprehensive smile.

The Hostal de las Olas was a hotel with some pretensions to luxury: one of the show-pieces of the Spanish Tourist Office. The guests were pleasantly cosmopolitan, pleasantly prosperous, without
belonging in any sense to what I believe is called the International Set for whom the prices of the Hostal would not have been enough. They were far too high for me. Mere longing for a hot bath
took me there in the first place, and a windfall in the shape of unexpected royalties from the paperback of my
Iberian Migrations
enabled me to stay on.

I had been wandering about from farm to village
fonda
in the remoter valleys of Vizcaya, and had then spent a couple of weeks at Eibar. I speak and write Euzkadi—Basque, that
is—with ease and purity, but I had noticed that in discussing the techniques of modern industry I was sometimes unsure of the form of Spanish loan-words. That was why I chose busy Eibar where
such discussions are hardly avoidable. I deprecate philologists who are content with book knowledge. If my subject were English Literature I should feel a fraud unless I could converse without
effort in idiomatic Elizabethan.

A succession of gales, confining us to the hotel lounge and bar when we should have been dispersed along the beaches, enhanced that easy pleasure which we took in our fellow holiday-makers. Sea
and a shade of boredom produced that eagerness to talk and be talked at which is more common on board ships than in hotels. There were an affable German publisher with his pretty wife and daughter
and a number of genial French families with a papa who had arrived near the top of his profession and could afford to do himself well. The handful of English and the few Spaniards kept as a rule to
themselves, through fear, I think, of being forced to speak a foreign language—though in fact some of them may have had far more fluency than the rest of us who misused each other’s
languages atrociously but in the best of good humour.

My most frequent companions were two unattached Frenchmen. Major Vigny, a parachutist, had been a security officer in Algeria and had, I gathered, been forcibly retired by de Gaulle. He spoke
excellent Berber, and this—my tastes being what they are—compensated for his political opinions which were some thirty years out of date. His constant companion, introduced to me as des
Aunes, was more reserved. He had a very courteous air of authority and I suspected that he might be a General. In the absence of any experience entitling me to recognise French Generals, it is
probable that I was merely going by the respect which Commandant Vigny paid to him.

When I came downstairs after changing damp shirt and sweater, I found Vigny in the bar, endeavouring to be polite to the weather while leaving no doubt that he thought it a deliberate insult to
the French. He had the same attitude to the lunch hour. He complained that eating at 2.30 made him drink too much too early. Evidently he had only recently arrived in Spain. Des Aunes, on the other
hand, had no more objection than I to lunching even at three, which suggested that he had been longer in the country. It was a fair speculation that he might have belonged to the O.A.S and found it
healthier to live in exile.

I joined Vigny at the window, placing my
fino
on the sill alongside his Cinzano.

‘I see that you are very English after all,’ he said. ‘You can amuse yourself in the rain.’

‘In our cloistered existence,’ I replied, ‘we keep our first youth longer than the military.’

‘Take it from me, Professor—you won’t have any luck.’

It was never any good explaining to him that I was not a professor, merely a Fellow of my College. And I dislike the everyday use of the doctorate, especially when on holiday among the English.
One tends to be cornered at the bar by comparative strangers and asked secretively if any reliable remedy is known for piles.

‘I haven’t given a thought to the possibilities,’ I said, not quite truly. ‘But why shouldn’t they be there?’

‘Her tastes are notorious.’

I was surprised that he knew anything about her. He had never made any remark when he saw her passing through the lounge.

‘You don’t read your papers then?’ he asked.

‘Recently, no.’

‘You should have seen her photograph often enough in the last three years.’

‘I have an incurable habit of reading. It leaves me little time to look at the pictures. Who is she?’

‘Olura Manoli,’ he said.

‘Olura. Let me see. Yes. She sits in the street, and her father is a wealthy Bolivian. Or is she the movie star who is so remarkably casual about having babies?’

‘She does sit in the streets. Her father was Sir Theodore Manoli. And she has no babies.’

‘My dear Commandant, that’s not my fault,’ I said, observing that my ignorance of Miss Manoli had thoroughly annoyed him. ‘And I have at least heard of her
father.’

‘She is a lot more important than that old plutocrat.’

It was my turn to be annoyed, for I remembered that Sir Theodore was a rich Greek shipowner who had taken British nationality some time in the nineteen-thirties and had splendidly deserved his
knighthood which no doubt meant far more to him than the rest of us. He had worked himself into the grave for his adopted country and had—or so his biographer maintained—direct access
to Churchill on any question of merchant shipping during the war.

‘At her age importance can only depend on the effrontery of one’s public relations officer,’ I replied.

Vigny gave a short military laugh and looked as if he would like to spit.

‘I endure you,’ he said, ‘only because your smile reminds me of the more unpleasant portraits of Voltaire.’

‘Another Cinzano?’ I suggested.

‘Thank you. No.’

‘Well, what’s she famous for?’

‘She has a marked sympathy for Africans.’

‘Political or personal?’

‘Woman is never wholly a political animal.’

A typically closed and Gallic remark! I shouldn’t have invited it.

‘Africans should be encouraged to see the pleasantest possible aspects of our civilisation,’ I said, ‘if, as it appears, they insist on adopting it. Personally I hope they will
invent something of a more genial simplicity.’

‘Such as new forms of famine and disease, for example? But there appears, thank God, to be some lunch,’ he said and left me.

Lunch did not hold for me its usual pleasures, when between courses—excellent though somewhat denationalised to suit the palates of foreigners—I could chat with Vigny and des Aunes
on my left or exchange more formal courtesies with the large round table on my right which just accommodated a Portuguese family. The Frenchmen were uncommunicative. The family was distracted by
its too prettified six-year-old daughter who refused to eat because she was not getting enough attention. She got it all right.

Olura sat opposite to me some twenty feet away. I could not take my eyes off her. I kept on staring and trying not to be caught like a child, and eventually received a child’s rebuke. She
rested her head on her hand and stared me down with a half-smile as much as to say: take a good look once and for all, and get on with your lunch. I felt absurdly angry with myself and with her,
and let her leave the dining-room first so that I should not have to pass her table. I swore that wealthy socialites were not for me.

Des Aunes and Vigny who never missed a trick—the French in any summer hotel have a positively feminine genius for detecting everyone’s embarrassments—watched me with discreet
enjoyment. Vigny managed to say
I told you so
by a mere cock of the eyebrow. I took to drink. It seemed to me that my waiter had a sympathetic air of comprehension as he replaced the empty
bottle with a new one. By this time I was oversensitive to deaf-and-dumb language.

After a long siesta I found that the gale had gone down and that the evening was grey and still. The surf was formidable, thundering in under a light mist of its own making, for there was no
wind to blow away the spume. This was inviting, so I went out along the beach for a bathe. There was not a soul in sight except a pair of the Civil Guard who made soundless, frantic signs for me to
come in. No doubt my seal-like play with the waves looked foolhardy from a distance, but I know when the surf—it was worse than the night which you will remember—can be made to do my
work for me. I was brought up as a boy on North Cornish beaches.

I returned to the hotel, spent an hour or two writing up my notes on traces of Arabic in the spoken Basque of Alava, and went down to the lounge at the beginning of dusk. I noticed that the few
British were huddled together near the bar under protection of the usual barricade of chair and sofa backs. They seemed singularly sheep-like, and I looked around for the wolf. It was, of course,
Olura.

She sat in the opposite corner, chatting gaily with a shadow and exquisitely dressed in white. That extremely expensive simplicity is as obvious to any man of taste as to a woman; we are capable
of appreciating the picture, while knowing little or nothing about the brushwork. When I looked again at the shadow, I saw that the darkness against the folds of an undrawn curtain was due not to
dusk but to race. I was pretty sure that I recognised that distinguished head and beard. If so, Olura’s exceptional elegance could be explained. It was the correct gesture towards a Prime
Minister.

Social confidence being now restored by waves and work, I gave her a formal bow and a more comradely smile. She at once beckoned me over and introduced me to Leopold Mgwana. He was taller and
lither than I had imagined him. The pointed, black, closely-curled beard was a more integral part of his fine, bony head than it appeared when lovingly exaggerated by the charcoal of cartoonists;
they also made him a forest negroid which he wasn’t. His nose and cheek-bones showed a strong Nilotic strain. Power in the flesh and power as one expects it to be are never the same; but
there was no mistaking the air of purpose, benevolence and integrity which always won for him a sourly admiring Press in spite of his somewhat personal interpretation of democracy.

As we chatted, it became clear that Olura had been waiting for him, that it was she who had selected the hotel and had come down ahead of him to assure herself that it really was the sort of
place where he could relax. Vigny’s uncharitable suggestion passed through my mind, for Mgwana was only in his early forties. Even though ruffled by slight jealousy, I was inclined to
disbelieve it. Olura’s attitude to Mgwana was not unlike that of a first-class personal secretary to her boss. Between them was easy and genuine friendship.

His tranquillity impressed me. He did not in the least withdraw himself; but he was impassive as a shield of black steel, behind which roared a conveyor belt accepting, rejecting, always
obedient to a pattern of press buttons which his own deeper self had set. The pattern, I should guess, was defensible even when wrong. No politician, after all, can be sure that his objectives are
socially and economically valid. We in the universities are better qualified to tell. But what we cannot do and he can is to put such power into a creed that it digests his errors without doing
much harm to the ideal.