Quince

by David Rees

  ‘Let’s try something else,’ Stephen said.

  But they became proficient, fairly rapidly, in those areas of interest any two young men might have in common ― the cinema, alcohol, tobacco, pop songs, the United States, cars, the parts of the body (particularly the sexual parts); and, as they were intelligent beings, in various aspects of English and Spanish history, politics, geography and literature. But the language of feeling was much more difficult. It was easy, Stephen realised, to make up scores of sentences like ‘There are an awful lot of peasants in Rumania,’ or ‘Send the concierge to the station to fetch my hatboxes,’ but how could he express, so as to be understood, the extraordinary emotion he had felt on entering Zahara’s cathedral for the first time; how could they ― if the occasion arose, which he assumed, it almost certainly would not ― talk about sexual experience, love, hope, ambition? It wouldn’t be easy, though Pablo was surprisingly uninhibited. ‘What’s the English for masturbation?’ he risked, then added, ‘Do you do it often? I do. Every day!’ He looked at Stephen inquiringly. But whatever the questions in those eyes were, the problem of language as much as anything else prevented them from being asked aloud.

  These lessons, if that is what they were, took place anywhere ― in one of the rooms in the Casa Badajoz, the garden, the streets and cafés of the city ― and they were successful because both young men quickly grew to like and respect each other. They were often still talking, in a mixture of English and Spanish, long past midnight. Stephen slept in Carlos’s room, which adjoined Pablo’s; the door between they usually left open, and, from their respective beds, they chatted into the small hours. The Badajoz parents were very pleased with the way it was going.

  Stephen also liked the mayor and his wife, Cristina, though he saw little of José except at meal-times. The rapport between the members of the family was vastly different from his own, and fascinating to watch. For here, in this backward part of a backward country, was an appealing absence of reserve, of standing on ceremony; in its place a much more modern idea of parent-child and husband-wife relationships than he had ever found in Reading. The Badajoz household was socialist atheist and enthusiastic for the twentieth century, whereas his own parents were conservative and rigid in their ideas: it wasn’t altogether unexpected― though England and Spain were hierarchical, static societies, whole sections of the Spanish population were in a state of revolutionary zeal and ferment. He could see how much José and Cristina still loved each other, not only because they held hands and kissed ― his parents never showed affection, either in public or at home: whatever did they do in their bedroom, he asked himself; had he been dumped on them by a Spanish stork? ― but their disagreements, for example, were aired as often as the unity they could present. They teased each other, praised each other, shouted, laughed, banged fists on the table. Eddie and Millie Faith always pretended they agreed about everything; they never argued or mocked. Pablo was allowed a liberty that astonished Stephen. No restrictions were placed on his movements; no questions, other than of a most general nature, were asked about what he had been doing or where he had been. And he seemed to have the freedom to say what he liked on any subject, even on that great taboo (in England) between parents and children: sex. Though, Stephen noticed, this subject was never personal; not revealing of himself, nor demanding information about his parents ― it was more on such things as the torrid, clandestine affair between two of the neighbours, or the occasion he had been accosted by a whore in the Plaza Andalucía, and how he had dealt with it.

  The Badajoz family were passionate, vibrant, loving. Ideal, Stephen thought. He was immensely envious. Yet neither parent had the least suspicion of the sexual orientation of two of their sons. No parent in the world, he imagined, could cope with that. He was thinking only of Pedro in this context; he hadn’t any idea ― yet ― that Pablo was the same.

  When Pedro ate with them, the atmosphere was a little different ― more argumentative. Politics dominated the talk on these occasions, but without the usual smooth flow of agreement that parliamentary, democratic, republican socialism was the only way ahead, and that a putsch might attempt to stop it: Pedro was an anarchist. He belonged to the Confederación National de Trabajo, the anarcho-syndicalist trades union, and was as convinced as any right-wing army general that the democratic institutions of the state should be destroyed. The state, he said, was evil, as it demanded obedience and exerted repressive authority. In its place there should be self-governing communes that would decide for themselves how their pueblo ought to be run. Religion should be abolished, and parliaments, and the legal system ― criminals would be punished according to the wishes of the commune. Private property would not exist, nor marriage, illiteracy, inequality between the sexes, bureaucracy. ‘And men and women will be free,’ he said, ‘to sleep with whoever they like, when they like, in any way they like.’

  ‘They do that now,’ his father said. Though not many of them admit it.’

  ‘As for love … it’s a venereal disease. I’d recommend a transfer to a different commune.’ He laughed.

  ‘Do you think your mother and I are diseased?’

  ‘In your case … it’s a benign tumour.’

  ‘You talk such utter nonsense,’ Cristina said. She contributed little, on the whole, to these disputes, and her intervention signalled that she wanted the subject changed. The conversation shifted to an unexplosive topic, the flamenco dancing at the Café de la Paz.

  Though she could, and sometimes did, involve herself in the family’s torrent of words and emotions, her inner serenity always seemed unruffled. A tall, beautiful woman, with big hips and large breasts: earth mother, Stephen thought, though she would not have liked that description. At forty-seven she still looked young ― face unbred, dark hair without a streak of grey in it ― having money meant she’d avoided the causes of premature ageing (poverty, hardship, illness) that afflicted so many Spanish women. Her background was bourgeois. Her father, who was dead ― as was her mother ― had been a civil servant. She had inherited money from them: it had bought the Casa Badajoz and its life-style. She was more intellectual than José, a great reader, particularly of poetry and drama; they had met in Madrid, where he was working at the time, and she was acting in productions of avant garde plays. A middle-class fastidiousness showed now and then ― her comment to Pedro and Pablo one night at dinner on the way they ate was, ‘Why do you both gulp your food like that? You sound as if you’re mixing concrete.’

  Despite her acceptance of the traditional roles of housewife and mother, Cristina was in some ways unconventional. Though atheistic like José, she was nonetheless a spiritual person, had flirted, briefly, with Buddhism, was much given to meditation, and in the privacy of her room practised yoga. She was very rarely influenced by anyone else’s opinions, and radiated a sense of conviction that she was always right. There was nothing cynical in her view of the world, despite the chaos that was the hallmark of the period. The Republic, she thought, given half a chance, would turn out to be stable and enduring, like the other democracies. Pedro’s politics she regarded as a temporary neurosis. He’d change when he grew up a bit, probably when he fell in love. That son in particular, she felt, needed the support of a good woman’s affection.

  It would happen.

  Were Cristina an American in the sixties, she would have been a hippie; were she an Englishwoman in the eighties, she’d have been a vegetarian, non-smoking, S.D.P.-voting, keep-fit, intellectual feminist, with qualifications in a subject like Social Studies ― which is exactly what her granddaughters, Isabella’s children, turned out to be. But it was 1936: she was the wife of the socialist mayor of Zahara de los Membrillos.

  It was not so easy to talk to her on her own, Stephen found, as it was to José, Pedro, and Pablo. What the males of the family thought and felt seemed clear-cut and obvious; like most Spaniards they loved words ― needed them as much as they required food and drink. Cristina was not driven by this obsession. Perhaps she was a
little shy of an Englishman in the house (she had never met one before, not even his father, José‘s old friend), was unsure of his wants, tastes, cast of mind; she preferred to communicate physically ― with a smile, a gesture, a nod of the head. Her dialogue was with the way people moved, the look on their faces, the tension ― or lack of it ― their bodies suggested.

  When they did talk, it was on uncontroversial subjects. Classical music, for instance: they found they both liked Requiems. Cristina argued the case for Mozart and Fauré; Stephen, Berlioz and Verdi. ‘The Verdi is overwhelming,’ he said. ‘A colossal experience. I cannot imagine anybody doing it better.’

  ‘Mozart.’

  ‘Too … small in scale.’

  ‘Size is everything? Verdi… it’s a mixture of opera and Catholic sanctity. It smells of incense. It’s not serious.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘No. You are.’ She smiled, and ruffled his hair.

  The problem was Stephen’s. He was reticent with most women, particularly those who enjoyed being inside their own bodies. (His mother, of course, had a body, though she never seemed to be aware of this fact.) Or who were overtly sexual: had he been accosted by a whore in the Plaza Andalucía he wouldn’t have been able, like Pablo, to hold a teasing dialogue about how much, how long, how often, and how pleasurable ― this, Pablo’s account of it to his parents ― he’d have simply run away.

  As for love, it’s a disease, Pedro had said. Ominous words: the explanation, Stephen thought, was he couldn’t accept his homosexuality, was terrified of falling in love with a man. Edited out the possibility. It was presumably why he sometimes would not arrange to meet; ‘I have to be out of town tonight,’ he would say, though he never gave a reason. It meant Pedro didn’t love him, which, at the moment, Stephen wanted more than anything else in the world. This didn’t block his feelings, however; if anything, it strengthened them. On his way to see Pedro at the tower, his heart invariably fluttered, his stomach lurched, his legs were water. Teenage nonsense, he told himself, and he was twenty! But he hadn’t felt like this in his teenage years. At least when they made love the butterflies stopped; the tension drained out of him.

  Pedro was quite happy, when Stephen suggested it to drive to the top of the pass on the Grazalema road. ‘We’ll go on to Grazalema itself,’ he said. ‘We could have a drink there.’

  ‘No mysterious errands out of town today?’

  Pedro grinned. ‘None.’

  ‘What do you do, out of town?’

  ‘I… I have friends I need to keep in touch with.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Rojo de la Frontera.’

  Stephen thought he had never experienced such joy: an open car, the warm wind on his skin, and one astonishing view after another as they bumped up the zigzag thread of a road; yes, a fly on a wall. Towering grey crags above seemed on the point of bursting apart; a waterfall apparently tumbled out of the sky: fingers of rock beckoned towards some even more majestic revelation. And below, Zahara was now a toy town, little white squares and oblongs; olive orchards were a pattern of dark dots: mountains beyond he had never seen, never realised were there, soared. If Pedro drove a little too quickly for Stephen’s liking, was an inch or two away from a dramatic drop to certain death on the hairpin twists of this unfenced road, Stephen was not unduly fearful ― a glance at the capable hands on the wheel, or the flexing of muscle in the leg as it braked or let in the clutch, was sufficient to reassure him that all was obviously well, that nothing could harm either of them: this man was a god.

  At the top of the pass, silence: as thick and as tangible as Tomás Guzmán felt in the cathedral the evening before its reconsecration. Sky. Rock. Distance. Cloud so near it could almost be touched. The only movement was below them, ravens circling far off, their cries inaudible. They stared, silent themselves, for ten minutes or more.

  Then Pedro kissed him, stroked him, began to undress him. ‘We’d hear a car long before it got to the top.’ he said.

  There were no cars.

  Stephen said, later, ‘Do you think I should be transferred to a different commune?’ Pedro did not understand the reference, so he explained: ‘I’m suffering from an incurable disease.’

  ‘Ah.’ Pedro smiled. ‘Not a good idea. The town would be the poorer if you left. Are you certain it’s … incurable?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  Grazalema was a disappointment. In theory it was enchanting; a place to which that road pointed, threading up a wall, must surely be magical ― Boabdil’s last defence against the Catholic Kings, an even more secure fortress than Zahara. But Boabdil had abandoned it and fled to Granada, holing up uselessly in the Alhambra.

  It turned out to be a fairly unromantic, whitewashed pueblo, pretty enough, but without Zahara’s charm and excitement. Some places one should never visit, Stephen said to himself; the reality was a poor second to the coinage of the imagination. They stood in a café, much like any other Spanish café, and drank the same kind of beer they would have drunk in Zahara.

  Pedro sensed his thoughts. ‘You were hoping for something extraordinary, weren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I was. Yes.’

  ‘It’s the same with love. If you and I lived together, which in Andalucía is impossible’ ― I don’t see why, Stephen said to himself ― ‘what makes you think that eating together, sleeping together, doing everything together, would be nicer than what we have now?’

  ‘You mean an occasional good fuck in high-up, open-air places?’

  Pedro laughed. ‘You’re British; you’re going home in three months’ time.’

  ‘Maybe if there’s a coup … a civil war … it will be different.’

  ‘You see us fighting side by side, male lovers, as in Ancient Greece?’

  Stephen thought for a moment. ‘Yes.’ he said.

  Pedro laughed again, loud and long this time. He finished his beer, and picked up the car keys. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

  THREE

  During the night of Monday, July the thirteenth, Calvo Sotelo, a former cabinet minister, now a prominent member of the parliamentary opposition, was taken from his flat in Madrid and shot dead by one of the guards who had arrested him. Assassinations, bombings, church burnings, destruction of property, and battles between the police and men on strike were all too common since the victory of the Popular Front in the February elections. The army, though anxious to rescue Spain from the ‘chaos’ of democracy, had been hesitant. But Calvo Sotelo’s murder was the last straw ― they decided to act. General Mola, then in Navarre, was the director-in-chief of the proposed ‘action.’

  The murder was the one topic of conversation in Zahara’s streets and cafés. There was a feeling of inevitability in the air, of doom and excitement: something awful was about to happen. Quite what, nobody was sure: would it come from the left or the right? Only one thing was certain - the Republic itself was threatened; it could even be on the point of disintegration. Most of Zahara’s inhabitants passionately believed in the Republic ― they were working-class and socialist. But they had no way of defending it; they had few guns. The middle classes, even those who believed in democratic institutions, did not go out into the streets. They sensed danger.

  Stephen called at the garage, but Pedro was not there. ‘He’s out of town this week,’ one of the mechanics said. ‘He won’t be back till … I don’t know when.’

  ‘He never told me!’ Stephen felt hurt ― betrayed, almost.

  When he reported this to the Casa Badajoz, José said, ‘He doesn’t have to give us an account of his movements.

  It’s a free country, and he’s an adult.’

  ‘I hope he’s all right,’ Cristina said.

  ‘He’s probably much safer, at the moment, out of town than in it.’

  On July the fourteenth General Araquistain made a long-distance phone call. He chatted with General Mola for a quarter of an hour.

 
‘What do you make of it?’ Miguel Goicoechea asked. He sat down on the wall outside the cathedral, and mopped his brow. It was dreadfully hot. July and August, in his opinion, were months that should be removed from the calendar; Zahara at this time of the year was a frying-pan.

  Tomás Guzmán as usual looked unperturbed by the heat, despite the heavy purple cassock he was compelled to wear. ‘We must all stay calm,’ he said. ‘We’re in God’s hands.’

  The words sounded hollow, even to his own ears; Miguel seemed to find them contemptible. ‘What’s God going to do about it? I don’t imagine He will assume the powers of the Republic.’

  ‘Miguel, that is blasphemous!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tomás … my apologies,’ The chief of police shifted his legs, then scratched his balls. ‘I just wish none of this was happening.’

  ‘Nothing is happening.’

  ‘I don’t want revolutions and all that kind of palaver … I’ve spent the morning locking anarchists up in the jail. Oh, I suppose I’ll let them out when their heels have cooled; they weren’t burning churches … just telling ordinary men and women in the street to be ready to take over the functions of the state. The crowd laughed at them. Serious offence, sedition … but I’ve known some of them half my life!’

  ‘Did they include Pedro Badajoz?’

  ‘No. I don’t know where he is. Up to no good, sure, and it would be extremely awkward if I had to arrest him… Tomás, why do people make things difficult for me? I run this town with a fair and even hand. What’s so wrong with a quiet family life? A good woman, sons, daughters … dinner on the table… a few drinks with friends. Why doesn’t Pedro take a leaf out of his father’s book? Not that I agree with José‘s politics, but that really doesn’t matter very much. People have a right to their own views, so long as they don’t harm others.’ He paused, then said, ‘Pedro is queer.’