The Collected Stories (14 page)

‘English,’ the postmaster shouted, reek of garlic and absinthe on his breath. He continued loudly in a garbled imitation of English, and started to slowly count out the letters for the foreigners of the place. As he counted each letter he shouted his imitation English but he counted slowly so that the man could read the names and take any letter addressed to him; he could have taken any letter he wished, for all the postmaster would know, but there was only one letter for him, it was from London, and a letter for his wife from her old theatre. The postmaster’s performance was meant to impress
the women with his knowledge of English, but they winked and laughed throughout. As the man left he heard a woman shout some bawdry at the postmaster and his threats to clear the post offfice.

He went back over the stripped rock and clay to the café and waited until the beer came before opening his letter, a letter from his publisher enclosing reviews of his last book. It was never easy to read reviews, and he read through them quickly when the beer came. It was much like listening to talk about yourself from another room, and the listener cares little about the quality of the talk as long as it is praise. Always the poor reviews rankled and remained, they were probably nearer the truth in the long run. To publish was to expose oneself, naked, in an open market, and if the praise was acceptable he could hardly complain of the ridicule, since one always had the choice to stay in original obscurity.

The editor’s letter was an inquiry about how the new book was coming along; in the sun of Spain it should ripen into something exciting. In the sun of Spain not a line had been written or was likely to be.

‘I have known writers who failed. Who stopped writing. And they stank to themselves and to everybody else,’ had once been said to him when he hadn’t written for a long time.

‘Why don’t you stink, then?’ he’d asked.

‘I have no talent. I never began.’

‘Couldn’t I become a doctor and do a great deal more good in the world?’

‘Yes, but you’d rot.’ He remembered the argument had grown rancorous.

‘I’ll rot anyhow.’

‘I know writers who failed. It’s a failure worse than any other. But if it happened our friendship wouldn’t change. That is separate.’

‘Why should it be worse than any other?’

‘I don’t know. It’s more personal than any other. Perhaps the egotism is so fierce to begin with.’

‘It’s a load of balls in my opinion.’

‘Besides, you’re too old to change.’

That was true. He was too old. He paid at the counter. He would fill the red plastic container at the fontana and go down to Garrucha and drink cognac until the fishing boats came in.

The man had two friends: Tomás who owned the café on the harbour, and José, an old sailor with whom he drank, buying almost all the drinks; and in return José insisted on helping him buy fish when the boats came in. The day José’s small pension came each month was the one day he bought the drinks.

The café was open but deserted, not even Tomás’s son was behind the bar, so he sat outside at the red iron table and stared out on the sea that showed no sign of the returning fishing boats. He was glad to have to delay drinking; he had too great a want of cognac to sink this day out of sight.

No one passed in the white dust of the harbour, the starved greyhounds panted with lolling tongues in the shade, and he sat for half an hour until the slow flop-flop-flop of Tomás’s slippers, the heels trodden down, came from the room behind the bar.

After shaking hands Tomás yawned out towards the empty sea, and then laid his head on his palm in a gesture that he’d been sleeping.

‘Mucho calor.’
The man nodded.

‘Mucho, mucho calor.’

Tomás clapped his hands and his son came from the back of the café. He shouted an order and lowered his short stout body, the eyes puffed from sleep, into a chair at the table. The boy brought two cognacs, a beer and coffee on a tray.

They were on the second drink when José came. He wore a black beret and white shoes and a threadbare but neat blue suit. Cognac and coffee were brought for him by the boy and he started to talk to the man in English.

‘Is the
señora
not well?’ he asked.

‘She’s well but she doesn’t like to go out so much since the accident.’

‘
Malo
, that accident,
malo
.’ Both of them nodded. Then Tomás started to speak very rapidly to José. The man could not follow all the words. One fishing boat, a black speck, had appeared far out.

‘Tomás wants to know if that President Kennedy who was shot in America was a rich man?’ José turned to translate after rapid speech in Spanish.

‘Very rich.’

‘Richer than El Cordobés?’

‘Much, much richer than El Cordobés.’

‘He had someone to leave his money to?’

‘He had a large family.’ José translated the answers for Tomás.

There were now three boats coming home and pale flashes of gulls were visible behind the first boat. Both men nodded with satisfaction at the information that President Kennedy had a large family to leave his money to.

‘Tomás says it is a very good thing that a rich man has a large family to leave his money to when he dies,’ José said.

The gulls flashed in the late sun as they dived for the guts behind the boats as they came in, and when the fish boxes were landed José bought a kilo of gambas. They’d a last drink at the bar before the man left. Once he came to the dirt-track he drove very slowly, his reactions slow and stiff from the alcohol.

A candle burned between the two wine glasses, and onion and parsley were already sprinkled on the sliced tomatoes in the long yellow dish on the table. She was humming at the stove, making notes on papers scattered between the cooking utensils. She moved towards him when he came in with the white string bag of gambas and the plastic container of water.

‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘If one is energetic and works one doesn’t want to stay in bed and cry.’

He poured the water equally into the clay jars, jars carried on women’s heads in pictures of Egypt, that stood in a wooden stand beneath the stairs.

‘The table and house look very beautiful,’ he said.

‘One can work at the same time as cook so that one isn’t just a domestic animal.’

‘You are doing the translations, then?’

‘I was afraid of it but now I feel well and started it after you left.’

‘I saw Tomás and José and got this letter for you.’ He was at a loss how to respond to her happiness. He would not show her his letter or the reviews. The chances were they would disturb her too much. He knew she had a dread that her life would be lost in his, and it would break this peace.

‘They want as much translation as I can do for them. They say I am the best translator they have.’ She burst out of the intensity of her reading, once or twice gloating like a child.

They ate with the door closed because of the sharksmell, but they could hear the sea, and they drank white local wine with the shellfish and tomatoes and bread. She was full of plans and happy all through the meal, but after they’d eaten footsteps sounded on the path to the door, and a bicycle scraped against the wall. When he opened the door it was one of the local
guardia.
He asked for water. The man invited him in and offered him a chair. He laid his rifle against the stairs and sat at the table. They spoke in stumbling Spanish, the sea filling each silence, the drops of water sweating through the porous clay of the jars into the dish beneath the stand. As the
guardia
finished each cigarette, he ground it under his boot, twisting the heel until he’d ground it into the tiles in some misguided idea of courtesy. The last time he’d come they’d to scrape the tobacco from the tiles.

His boots were large and broken, the tops rising well above the ankles.

‘Are the boots not too heavy for the heat?’ the man asked after following the crushing of another cigarette butt.

‘Much, much too heavy.’

‘Why do you wear them, then?’

‘It’s regulations.’

‘Do they cost much?’

‘They cost very much.’ He named an exorbitant price.

‘Why don’t you buy a cheaper, lighter pair in the shop?’

‘It’s not allowed. The government has given the monopoly to this man. All the
guardia
have to buy off the monopoly. They can charge what they like.’

‘It’s horrible,’ the woman said in indignation.

‘It’s not fair but it is the way it is,’ the man answered.

‘It is the way it is,’ the
guardia
said as he rose, screwing his last cigarette butt carefully into the floor and taking the gun from where it leaned against the stairs. The man saw him to the door, watched his bicycle light waver into the night, before he shut the door on the sharksmell.

‘This country is horrible. It is a crime to live here,’ the woman said as soon as he came back to the table.

‘The people are not.’

‘They are if they accept it. As the German people were with the Nazis.’

‘Maybe they don’t have much choice.’

‘You are one of them. And you give me no support. You let that man come in and ruin the evening. Don’t you know that there are some people who cannot live if they have to think about the possibility of someone always being about to enter their room? I am one of these. And you give me no protection.’ She was sobbing as she went towards the stairs.

The man watched her go. He said or did nothing but refill his wine glass to the brim from the Soberano bottle.

‘Will you come with me to Garrucha?’ he asked.

‘There’s no solutions going places,’ she retorted. ‘You buy me five postcards that you say I might like to send to my friends or you ask me to come to Garrucha and you think things are as good as they can be. Why don’t you go back to yourself? Do you know that remorse originally meant going back to oneself before the word was poisoned by the popes?’

‘I don’t believe there are solutions.’

‘There are solutions if one tries hard enough. It’s the same old negativism you’ve been drilled to accept.’

‘It’d be nice for me if you came to Garrucha.’ He wanted to avoid argument at any cost. ‘I thought it’d be nice to sit at the café and watch the sea and wait for the boats to come in to buy fish.’

‘You want me to come with you, then?’

‘I do.’

‘That’s different.’ She was suddenly lit with pleasure. ‘I don’t want to go to Garrucha but I want you to want me to go to Garrucha. You’ll wait for me to get ready?’

She took a half-hour to change into yellow sandals and a dress of dark blue denim that buttoned down the front and had a pocket over each breast. She asked many times as she changed if the make-up concealed the scar below the eye, but she was happy on the Vespa and sang a marching song in her own language.

José sat at the red table outside the café and was awkward in the
woman’s presence until the talk came round to the Civil War.

‘Yes. We shot the two priests at Garrucha. We took them out and shot them against the wall of the church. And we’d shoot them again if we got the chance,’ José confided.

‘Good, good.’ The woman nodded vigorously.

‘They say the communists lost the war,’ José’s excitement brought Tomás out of the café. ‘The communists did not lose the war. The people of Spain lost the war. The fascists won it.’

José translated what he’d said for Tomás who nodded in his lazy way.

‘Tomás is communist too but he has to be careful since he has a café,’ José explained.

‘I’m communist as well.’ The woman pulled vigorously at her cigarette.

‘How did you escape, José?’ the man asked. ‘When it ended?’

‘I got to Valencia, travelling at night, and got on a boat there.’

‘Why don’t the Spanish do something, overthrow that fascist government?’ the woman asked in nervous indignation. José spread his hands.

‘The people of Spain are tired,’ he said.

A jeep came along the harbour. The magistrate and his glandular son and two farmhands were in the jeep. When the magistrate saw the woman he stopped and got out.

‘You are the foreigners in Casa Smith.’ He introduced himself. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I’ve heard about you.’

Tomás melted back into the café, and José went stiff on the chair.

‘I know English. I like foreigners. I hate Spanish scum,’ the magistrate said. He was grey and lean, a glare in the eyes that sees nothing but his own obsessions.

‘You will have a drink with me? Yes?’ He waved and without waiting for answer he ordered three cognacs, shouting the order into the bar. Tomás’s son came with the three cognacs on a tray.

‘I like foreigners. I hate Spanish scum.’ The magistrate drank.

‘These are my friends,’ the man said, and was about to move his cognac towards José when the old sailor’s hand forbade it. José sat in petrified dignity on the chair.

‘You do not know enough about Spain,’ the magistrate shouted. ‘Drink.’

The man looked at José who made no movement and when the
magistrate shouted again, ‘Drink,’ they both drank in bewilderment.

‘We drink and now we go to see my peaches. I give you the first and finest peaches of the summer.’

‘I have the Vespa,’ the man said.

‘There’s plenty of place.’ He gestured towards the jeep.

‘I have to be back for the boats.’

‘The jeep will take you back for the boats. Come. I give you the first and finest peaches of the summer.’

A large spraying machine on metal wheels stood inside the gate of the peach orchard, and the rows of trees ran farther than the eye could follow, the loose red earth of the irrigation channels between the rows.

‘Thousands of trees.’ The magistrate waved an arm, and when he shouted at the two workmen they ran and turned several water taps on. Water is magic in the south of Spain. As it gushed into the channels, the red clay drinking it as fast as it ran, the magistrate’s frenzy increased. The glandular son sat bored and overcome in the jeep.

‘I have water for my trees,’ he shouted as he waved an arm towards the white moorish village that hung on the side of the mountain, ‘and these scum do not have water for their houses,’ he laughed in crazy triumph. ‘You like my peach trees?’