Rose for Winter (7 page)

How beautiful is my truelove
,

How beautiful when she sleeps
.

She is like a red poppy

Within the green wheat
.

Ecija at noon was a city of black and gold – gold of the roofs and towers in the sun, and black of the shadowed alleys and of the widows passing through them. A breathless provincial quiet hung over the tiny world, choking the young men as they walked like prisoners to the churches. Yet beneath all this, the stones and the flesh, the pagan world lay close. Enrique, the savage old barber in the square, could talk about Astigi as though it were just around the corner. Under the prim paths of the municipal gardens, he told me, lay an elaborate Roman pavement of gladiators, goddesses and leopards. In his youth an old Roman fountain still played in the city square, a thing of erotic beauty with four stone naiads whose naked breasts gushed water. ‘Preciosa,' he said. ‘More beautiful than the moon.' These naiads, though loved by all, were condemned at last by a bishop, and taken away and buried in the mountains. ‘But you must see the mosaics in the Town Hall,' he said. ‘Women and bulls. Gods and tigers. They also are preciosa.'

So we went to the Town Hall with him, and there on the floor of the Council Chamber (once a convent, and before that a Roman villa) lay a mosaic of most voluptuous refinement. Across the neck of a prancing bull reclined a superb Europa, and around them paraded bearded gods, carrying whips and branches of green leaves. There were also nymphs, flowers, animals and birds. The floor was dusty, so a porter came and emptied a bucket of water over it. The colours of the mosaics sprang instantly alive, the nymphs shivered, the flowers opened, Europa seemed to draw in breath and arch her peach-fed body, and the bull's rich flanks steamed darkly.

‘Ay!' said the porter, gazing down. ‘Behold that now. Some mornings I come in here, with my mind elsewhere, and I could swear a naked woman lies on the Council floor. I have wanted to cry out. It is like a miracle.' He sighed, and scratched himself under his smock, and departed, rattling his bucket against his thigh.

After luncheon we walked to the edge of the town to see the bull-ring. It stood in a circle of old white walls surrounded by tinkling goats. We knocked at a door in the wall and entered a small garden, where an old woman was cleaning a brass bedstead with sand. She had a red face like a paper lantern which crumpled when she smiled at us. ‘Enter,' she said. ‘Look about you, and I will send my sister.' We climbed some steps and pushed open a crumbling door and passed into the bull-ring. Big, empty, harsh and haunted, for two thousand years this saucer of stone and sand had been dedicated to one purpose, and even in this naked daylight it still exuded a sharp mystery of blood.

The little bent sister arrived to show us round. She had no hair, was courteous and sad, and talked of the greatness of other times. We walked across the silent arena, now overgrown with grass. She showed us where the bulls were herded before battle, eight stalls of stone with heavy doors which could be raised in safety from above. Here, once, came the greatest bulls of the Guadalquivir, and the greatest names fought them. All was decay and desertion now. The stalls were white with the droppings of birds; the door-pulleys were frayed and broken; a wrought-iron bull's-head over the entrance wore a flaking skin of rust.

‘In summer,' said the old sister, ‘when it is possible, and if the agriculture is right, and if the campesinos have money – then we hold a corrida.' Her hairless eyes blinked about her with anxious pride, and the bright sun shone on the broken seats, the weeds and the grass, and on the sagging doorway to the pits through which the huge black bulls once made their thundering entrances. ‘You should have come thirty years ago,' she said. ‘How precious it was.' She talked with a faint whispering sadness, her head on one side, half smiling, remembering and listening to the time; hearing again the dead crowds roar on those electric afternoons; sitting once more in her Easter dress, the round flesh back on her shrunken bones, her cheeks flushed from a dedication. She was the shrivelled spirit of the place. She fluttered her hands in sun and shadow. Here men and bulls had died before her eyes. And the flowers in summer were most beautiful to see. There, in that courtyard, they quartered the dead beasts – the best in Spain, the biggest and most barbarous. To that little room, she said, El Chico was carried, blood on his shirt, sweat on his long green face. In her comb and shawl she had run to the well, fetched water for him, and held his hand in his final panic. But he died. Those summers were all hot dust and glory. Would the agriculture ever be right again? Would the farmers ever return from the hills calling again for bulls? She shook her frail head and wondered and locked the great door and took us back to the little garden. There she gave us two sweet oranges from a tree, and wished us good-bye. She would not accept a tip.

On our last night in Ecija came a message from the telephone exchange to say that the Superintendent had killed a pig and that we must go and help to eat it. The Superintendent, an old friend now, was a lady of rare vitality who knew and could sing the whole of ‘The Fair Maid of Perth'. She had six nieces to help her with the telephones, and the exchange was a merry place, much given to gossip, card-playing and long delays. We arrived to find the telephone lines choked, and a great feast of pork, butter-cakes and coñac spread out among the instruments. All the nieces were screechingly gay, except for the beautiful Lola, whose boy friend, a dentist, was late.

This boy was normally her greatest pride, for he was a youth of some versatility and could, it was claimed, speak English. This was true enough, in a way. But although his voice was perfectly normal when talking Spanish, he spoke English in a faint, high-pitched, tinny whine which was well-nigh indecipherable. This mystified me at first, until I discovered that he had learnt his English from an antique pre-1920 gramophone and could only be said to be suffering from too good an ear.

But this dentist was devoted to Lola, and spent most of the hours of courtship in his surgery gazing into her mouth. They thus enjoyed a unique, almost speechless intimacy. Yet tonight, when he arrived, Lola blazed with fire and fury and would have nothing to do with him. For a while he did card tricks, to try to curry favour, but no one took any notice. Meanwhile the aunt entertained by dancing, dressing up and singing down the telephones. But still Lola's great eyes glowered above the feast. The aunt wrung her hands in dismay and brought more pork, even photographs of her dead relations. Until the dentist, grown desperate at last, threw down his cards and produced from his pocket a plaster cast of Lola's teeth. ‘Here you are,' he said, blushing angrily. ‘I had meant to give it you for Christmas.' But all was now well. Everyone exclaimed with admiration, and Lola took his arm, laughing deep in her throat, and would not leave his side again for the rest of the evening.

Meanwhile, as the coñac warmed us, there was dancing in the patio, where the pig's corpse swung white in the moonlight. We danced till three; the nieces did the sevillana; the aunt recited ‘The Siege of Saragossa'; the telephone lights twinkled unheeded; and we ate the whole side of the pig.

Next day we left in a horse and carriage, with pork chops in our hands. Paco, the hotel porter, gave us a parting present – a poem specially and laboriously written in red chalk capitals on the back of our bill. It combined tributes to Kati's beauty with, somehow, a lament on the death of Manolete. Then we rattled away through the cobbled streets to the shouts of the beggar children.

At the outskirts of Ecija we paused, briefly, to look back at the city. It lay in its little pool of sunlight, eternally gilded, eternally drowned. The ghostly bells called dryly to each other, and the ornate towers rose high above the clay like the stumps of once exotic flowers left from some other summer.

4. The House of Peace – Granada

Granada is probably the most beautiful and haunting of all Spanish cities; an African paradise set under the Sierras like a rose preserved in snow. Here the art of the nomad Arab, bred in the raw heat of deserts, reached a cool and miraculous perfection. For here, on the scented hills above the green gorge of the Darro, he found at last those phantoms of desire long sought for in mirage and wilderness – snow, water, trees and nightingales. So on these slopes he carved his palaces, shaping them like tents on slender marble poles and hanging the ceilings with decorations like icicles and the walls with mosaics rich as Bokhara rugs. And here, among the closed courts of orange trees and fountains, steeped in the languors of poetry and intrigue, he achieved for a while a short sweet heaven before the austere swords of the Catholic Kings drove him back to Africa and to oblivion.

But Granada never recovered from this flight of the Moors, nor saw again such glory. When the cross-bearing Spaniards returned to their mountain city they found it transformed by alien graces and stained by a delicate voluptuousness which they could neither understand nor forgive. So they purged the contaminated inhabitants by massacre and persecution; and in the courts of the palaces they stabled their mules and horses. But the inheritors of Granada, even today, are not at home in the city; it is still dominated by the spirit of Islam. Fascinated and repelled by it, they cannot destroy it, but remain to inhabit an atmosphere which fills them with a kind of sad astonishment, a mixture of jealousy and pride. The people of Granada in fact, are known throughout Andalusia as a people apart, cursed with moods which reduce them at times to almost murderous melancholy.

Our first day in the city was lit by the dead white light of reflected snow, and after the soft-blown airs of Ecija, we were immediately chilled by it. The hotel was starched and fireless, so we walked out to warm our blood. We went across the Darro gorge and up the Alhambra hill, climbing a rain-torn path behind the Palace. Here, an oasis in the dry burnt south, were green trees, banks of ivy, flowers and gushing water. A bird sang a thin cold song, and the Palace glowed with a winter redness among its leaves. Climbing, and skirting the great wall, we came out on to a rocky cemetery road leading to the high place of the dead. Groups of mourners, laden with chrysanthemums, were going to the graves, and the road was strewn with gold and purple petals which exuded mournful odours under foot.

On the crest of the hill we sat down, with our backs to the cemetery wall, and looked out across the Vega. This was the highest point in the city, a favourite site for graves, and the view was tremendous. A thousand feet below us stretched the wide and populous plain, shafted with light and scattered with smoky villages. In the clear air one saw tiny figures, as though in a landscape by Breughel, scampering about in streets and squares. It was Christmas Eve, and a muttering air of holiday came up to us on bursts of the wind.

Across the plain, and huge to our northern eyes, stood the long range of the Sierra Nevadas, half-filling the whole sky. The foot-hills climbed in writhing terraces, great granite rocks threw shadows ten miles long, and the snow peaks, crisp as crystal, flashed among drifting clouds like a string of jagged moons.

In spite of its magnificent prospect the cemetery hill was not a popular place to live. Mourners and lovers walked darkly among the cacti and stunted olives. There was a solitary farm, high up; and here and there, though hidden among the rocks, a few brushwood hovels built by beggars. Otherwise the hill was left to the dead.

It was therefore rather surprising to see, on the edge of a cliff near by, a large brass bedstead with a woman and child lying on it. Pots and pans were scattered about the ground, but there was no sign of any habitation near. The woman lay silent, gazing at the sky, and the small child slept at her breast. Strange and surrealist it was, the naked bed, the child so still, the woman so unconscious of us. What could they be doing, exposed on the hilltop thus?

We were wondering about this, when suddenly, from the ground under our feet, appeared a boy with a basket of stones. He was about thirteen, very poor, barefooted, with dusty hair and a suit of clothes sewn together with string. He emptied the stones on the ground near by, and saluted us gravely.

‘Where did you spring from?' I asked.

‘Out of the ground,' he said, pointing downwards with a blackened thumb.

‘That's what I thought,' I said. ‘What are you doing? Golddigging?'

‘No gold there,' he said. ‘Only stones. We are making a cave. Much work it is. Ay!'

‘What is it for?' I asked.

He straightened his shoulders and lifted his head.

‘It is our house. We shall live there. See my mother and sister on the bed? They are waiting to go in. Tonight all will be done. It will be a stupendous cave, tall, wide and will have a chimney. It will be the best cave in Granada.'

‘Where did you live before?' I said.

‘Down there, by the river,' he said. ‘But a bad house, full of rain and frogs. Three sisters died coughing, and the landlord took all our furniture. But the cave shall be much better, dry, with a strong roof. When we move in we shall have a feast.'

While the boy was talking we heard a hoarse muted voice calling from under the ground. At first the boy took no notice. Then we saw a man come out of a hole and crawl on his belly among the rocks. We also saw that the man had no legs.

‘That is my father,' said the boy. ‘He is very strong.'

He picked up his basket and left us, and it began to rain. The man and the boy crawled back into the ground, and immediately we heard the sound of the pick-axe under our feet. The woman on the bed lay waiting, making no sound. The rain fell on her face but she seemed not to notice it. The small child slept.

In a narrow street near the Cathedral we found a cheap café called ‘The House of Peace'. And quite a find it was. For a shilling one could have soup, steak and chips, and fruit. A bottle of white wine, fetched from a near-by tavern, cost fourpence extra, and was as strong as a blow on the head. The company was mixed and noisy – mostly carters and thin hungry medical students – and in time we got to know it well.