THE YOUNG SPANIARD

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Do you want a porter?’

  ‘I should see a chemist in Barcelona. It’s a big city, it might be your last chance to get something really effective.’

  Eventually he succeeded in eliciting from her that she was being met by a friend. He left her, after exchanging good wishes for the holiday, and managed to get a taxi. As the taxi swung round the yard he had a glimpse of her, still waiting by one of the entrances with her case at her feet. She looked rather forlorn. He resisted the desire to go back. After all, she had decided to come here, she must be capable of looking after herself; and even if she wasn’t, there was nothing he could do about it. Tomorrow, he would be in Seville.

  Chapter Two

  It was sultry in Barcelona, The sky was the colour of steel above the leaves of the plane trees. The town sweated an odour compounded of drains, oil fat and garlic. In the bar at the new hotel in the Ramblas, Milo Pacheco ordered another drink and lit a cigarette. His hand trembled slightly and the blue eyes, narrowed over the flame, were vacant. The barman watched him. There was no one to interest Milo in the bar; only an American tourist whose conversational possibilities he had already exhausted and a German woman whose husband he had antagonized. He took his drink and wandered into the adjacent lounge in search of some relief from his boredom. He paused for a moment to look at one of the display cases which lined the walls of the room: brooches, bracelets and miniature swords in toledo, some of the work good, much of it trashy, but prices going up all the time. There were not many people about; it was four o’clock, a dead time in hotels in Barcelona. Near by, however, a girl was hunched in a chair writing. She looked rather disorganized, bulging handbag at her feet, coat and scarf slung over the back of the chair. He studied her. A tourist, only recently arrived. Nationality? The face told him that she was English, but the generous curves of her body surprised him. Probably sending a letter home—‘Arrived safely: Barcelona wonderful’. She looked the kind who would find everything wonderful until life proved it otherwise. He walked behind her and more from habit than interest glanced over her shoulder to check on what she was writing.

  ‘. . . however, it will probably turn out all right. I’m here, that’s the main thing. And I wasn’t the only person travelling 1st. after all! There was a man in my compartment. A Scot, thirtyish, rather joyless, who looked at the landscape as though he was giving it marks . . .’

  She turned suddenly, fumbling for something in her coat pocket, and saw Milo. It didn’t seem to worry her that he was reading the letter and as Milo saw nothing wrong in it either, he smiled and asked:

  ‘Are you staying here long, se señorita?’

  ‘Not at this hotel, I hope.’ She sounded as though she didn’t think much of Barcelona’s latest wonder. ‘But I shall be in Barcelona for nearly three months.’

  ‘Nearly three months! Then you will really be able to see something of this part of the country. And there is nowhere like Catalonia. Some people talk about Andalucía—but I wouldn’t give you anything for Andalucía; there is nothing there at all, nothing . . . and the people are all lazy and liars, not much better than the gypsies.’ He picked up a pamphlet from one of the tables; it was really too hot to get on the subject of the gypsies. ‘You must go to Montserrat—a very nice trip.’

  ‘Is it a mountain?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is the monastery you go to see— the monastery and the black virgin. The mountain is not all that much of a mountain. Not to me, at any rate. But then, I like the real mountains. I used to live in them, you see.’

  She looked at him uncertainly and he registered comic outrage.

  ‘You don’t believe me? But I was known as the Tiger of the Mountains, señorita.’

  She laughed, now sure that she did not believe him, and Milo laughed, too, and went away towards the foyer.

  His head was beginning to feel heavy and his thoughts weren’t any too clear. Once this would have been fatal to him; but there was no danger now, no point in keeping alert. So what did it matter? The intellect alone was not something which seemed to Milo to be worth nourishing. He paused by one of the windows, watching a tram rattle by and the flower sellers in the rambla half-asleep by their stalls. Perhaps there would be a storm to freshen the air, to send a wind from the hills bearing the faint smell of thyme or rosemary. His conversation with the girl had aroused old longings. Usually he fostered the nostalgia which brought memories crowding back; since it was all that was left, he welcomed the sadness. But for the first time in a long while it had a sharpness that he did not find so pleasant. He turned away from the window. Why yearn for air so rare that his lungs would not stand it? He looked down at his glass and reminded himself that there were other good things in life.

  Someone had come into the foyer. Milo strolled across to the reception desk to examine some postcards and listen to the conversation: anything to break the afternoon’s monotony. The man had a deep voice, with a slight, but controlled lilt.

  ‘I want to see Miss Winston.’

  ‘Miss Winston not stay here,’ the clerk intoned without bothering to look up.

  Milo, now really interested, came a little nearer so that he could see the visitor in the mirror behind the reception desk. He saw a tall, sandy-haired man, with a beak of a nose that would catch the sun painfully, and eyes that, in spite of weariness, were bluer and more alert than Milo’s. The voice became crisp, the lilt was almost non-existent.

  ‘I know that Miss Winston has stayed here for at least a year, ever since the hotel opened, in fact; she . . .’

  The clerk deigned to look up but was still bored.

  ‘She stay here for a year, yes. But she does not stay here now. She has apartment.’

  The telephone at his side rang and he swivelled round to answer it. The sandy-haired man looked dismayed, as though the change in Miss Winston’s arrangements was a matter of extreme concern to him. Perhaps he did not like the word ‘apartment’? Yet Milo fancied that he did not look so much shocked as exasperated. Milo decided it was time that he intervened, for amusement’s sake, and in order to satisfy what little remained of his professional curiosity.

  ‘Rose will be at work now,’ he said idly. ‘You can get her at the travel office.’

  ‘Oh.’ The man looked at Milo in surprise and did not seem sure that he liked what he saw. ‘You know her?’

  ‘We all know Rose.’

  There was a pause. Milo smiled, gratified by the other’s troubled expression. He did not elaborate on his cryptic remark, but said:

  ‘Would you like to telephone her? I can give you the number.’

  The man produced a pencil and took some paper from the counter; as he wrote the number down he enquired:

  ‘I expect you are in the travel business yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  Milo finished his drink. He enjoyed creating an air of mystery and he knew that it was a mistake to satisfy another person’s curiosity, however innocent. But he was becoming curious himself, so he said:

  ‘You are a friend of Miss Winston’s?’

  The other man did not believe in satisfying curiosity either. He answered, ‘no’. There was a trace of amusement in the slight pucker of the mouth, but it was the obstinacy of the eyes that Milo noticed particularly.

  Milo watched thoughtfully as the man walked towards the telephone booths. He had been a good judge of men; it was an ability that he had not bothered to exercise as much as he might have done in his present job, but the instinct was there still. ‘You should judge a man according to the kind of enemy he would be,’ he had once said. ‘Then you make fewer mistakes,’ He was not sure what kind of an enemy this man would be, but he knew that, long ago, he would have said to himself: ‘I shall have to reckon with him one day.’ He did not attempt to analyse his reaction; if you had gifts of instinct you should not deaden them beneath a mass of intellectual garbage.

  He strolled across to the telephone booth; but the door was tightly shut and there was no hope of overh
earing anything. It did not matter. There would be time to find out anything that he needed to know; there was always time here, where life stagnated in the indolent heat of the city. The man, now talking with such apparent impatience, would learn that once he had been here for a few days. Milo sat in a chair and allowed himself to doze.

  James put down the receiver and looked at his watch. ‘Seven o’clock,’ the clear, impersonal voice had said. ‘Not before seven because I can’t get away until then.’ The train left at 7.45, so he would have to spend a night in Barcelona after all. He had over¬simplified matters ridiculously, imagining that Rose would be ready to fit into his tight time schedule, whereas in reality it was he who must fit into Rose’s schedule. Rose lived here; it was a fact that he had overlooked. Her life must by now have arranged itself into some kind of pattern in which he had no part; probably she was even now cursing his intrusion.

  He came out of the telephone booth and looked around the reception hall, which was light and airy and as impersonal as an airways terminal. He was damned if he was going to spend the night here! Not that he intended to be romantic about Spain, he was not proposing to indulge in a lot of nonsense about ‘atmosphere’; but just the same . . . He almost tripped over the feet of the shady individual who had given him Rose’s telephone number; the man was asleep and did not stir. James went into the street. He had left his luggage at the station while he lunched; he would leave it there until he had seen Rose. She would be able to suggest a suitable hotel, unpretentious but respectable.

  Respectable. He frowned, waiting for a tram to pass, and then made his way, still frowning, towards the shade of the rambla. It was habitual to him to frown, he had one of those foreheads that creases at the slightest pretext, and what with the heat, the delay in the journey, and . . .’

  ‘We all know Rose’. It was true that the remark had not been accompanied by a leer; nevertheless, it had not been entirely innocent. The man had not been an innocent character. James comforted himself with the thought that at least he was middle-aged; he could not possibly be the ‘young Spaniard’ with whom Rose had got herself involved.

  He walked slowly up the rambla; he had picked up a plan of Barcelona in the hotel foyer and he studied it to ensure that he was heading in the right direction. He had three hours. There was the Sagrada Familia, the cathedral, the Spanish Village . . . This was the kind of thing he had intended to avoid, this relentless planning of his time so that not one moment was wasted. Here and there, on either side of the streets which bordered the rambla, were cafés at which people were drinking; he looked at the people, slumped comfortably in canvas chairs, and thought how pleasant it must be to have the kind of temperament that allowed one to sit and watch the world go by. Why was it that with him there was always a pressing need to hurry? Even now, on a holiday that was in the nature of a rest cure, he could not relax because he was afraid that if he did so he would start asking questions about Rose. The interfering, stranger in the hotel had threatened to endow Rose with personality. James wanted to avoid that. Rose was nothing to him; she was shadowy, insubstantial, uninteresting. He would concentrate on sight-seeing.

  He put the plan back in his pocket and walked on towards the Plaza de Cataluña. It was not unlike Trafalgar Square, fountains and people feeding the pigeons. He decided to walk to the Sagrada Familia whose fantastic spires had attracted his attention as the train came into Barcelona. It proved a longer walk than he had expected and he was not pleased when he eventually arrived to discover that the building was little more than a shell. A notice outside referred to fund needed for its completion and there was a sketch showing the final scheme. He went into the small chapel, but could not look around because a service was in progress, people were kneeling on the bare stone floor, old women in black, business men in city clothes, young girls with scarves over their heads. He sat on a chair at the back. It was dark and sombre after the brightness outside. The priest’s voice droned on. James had a feeling of depth and himself descending into it which was undoubtedly due to his having lunched inadequately. He watched a candle guttering in a shrine near by; between the bars of the shrine were wax moulds, a hand, a foot, something that looked like a kidney. He must have seen this sort of thing before in Italy, surely? But there was so much else to see there, such a blaze of colour, so much warmth and richness. A blanket seemed to have come down over his mind. This was so alien; he had never felt so out of touch intellectually in a country. And yet, not completely out of touch, because at some level he responded to the darkness. A woman in front of him rose, bowed and turned; for a moment as she passed him her wrinkled face was caught in the flickering light of a candle. Drama, he thought to himself, that’s the answer! It appeals to one’s sense of drama; the darkness challenges the golden light, the sombre aspect of the people conflicts with the sun-drenched splendour of the landscape. This is a country without compromise, without harmony. How Lawrence would have loved it! And James was suddenly involved in one of those arguments within himself which arose because Lawrence was a writer of whom he did not approve— Lawrence’s sense of drama being altogether too uncontrolled—but with whom he had nevertheless a certain sympathy. He stayed longer in the chapel than he had intended and when he went out there was no time to walk back. He caught a bus which crawled interminably round the outer suburbs before depositing him at the station. It was six-thirty; no time to see the cathedral, time only to walk back to the Plaza de Cataluña where he was to meet Rose.

  The storm had not broken although the sky had grown more sickly; the shutters of a few windows in the hotels had been thrown back, but there was not as yet an evening breeze to cool the rooms. The flower stalls were tattered, but the shops were bright and busy. He had a glimpse of his face in a barber’s window, the bridge of his nose had caught the sun just above the bar of the sun glasses.

  For once, he was disinclined to hurry. One must adjust to the tempo of the place; it was no use tearing up the Ramblas as though it was Sauchiehall Street and he on his way to meet Elaine. And if Rose was anything like her mother, she would not be there yet.

  She was not there. He found the café without difficulty and sat down to wait for her. There were only a couple of American tourists and one or two elderly Spaniards at the tables. He looked across the square, beyond the glitter of the fountains, to the Paseo de Gracia. He had passed a Bavarian restaurant there, clean and fresh- looking, with light wooden tables. Perhaps he could take Rose there? The food would not be too exotic.

  A big, blonde woman was coming towards him; he was rising to his feet when she diverged to the right and greeted a friend in German. He sat down again. A dark, vivacious girl came from the centre of the square; she walked straight past the café and was followed by two thin, insignificant girls, one pale and the other dark and sallow. The pale girl detached herself as she reached the café and came towards the tables. James was still watching her when a voice beside him said:

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’

  She was already seated and arranging a light blue stole around her shoulders before he could collect himself.

  ‘How did you recognize me?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s no one else it could be.’

  Apparently it had not occurred to her that he might have been late. Her head was bent forward, bright auburn hair flicked up from the nape of her neck. When she had finished arranging the stole to her satisfaction, she turned to him. He saw a small, composed face from which green eyes looked at him without candour. She spoke in the same light, impersonal voice that had greeted him over the telephone.

  ‘I hope you didn’t have a dull afternoon? Did you go to the bull-fight?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t appeal to me. I went to . . .’

  ‘One gets over that in time. I was a bit squeamish at first. It all depends on the matador, you know; if he’s a good matador he will make the kill quickly and decisively. If he isn’t good, and fails once or twice, it can be rather nasty; the Spaniards don’t lik
e that, either.’

  ‘Nor the bull, one imagines.’

  She looked at him blankly. He noticed that there were no lines of laughter in the smooth, creamy skin; there was very little, in fact, to betray individuality, to give a clue to temperament or character. It was difficult to realize that she was his cousin; he had seldom felt so remote from a person.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.

  She gave the matter careful thought. ‘Yes. I think I would.’

  When the waiter came she asked for cinzano with ice. The waiter smiled as though he knew her and she flicked him a little, secret glance before turning to James and saying in her clear, high voice that sounded as though she was making an announcement over a loud-speaker:

  ‘Is this your first visit to Barcelona?’

  ‘This is my first visit to Spain.’

  The stole had slipped from her shoulders. She was wearing a cotton blouse, cut low to reveal smooth, honey-coloured shoulders. She drew a thin, silver pendant from the valley between her breasts and twisted the chain round her fingers.

  ‘Not everyone likes Spain,’ she said.

  ‘But you like it?’

  The drinks came. She sipped her cinzano, considered Spain gravely and then pronounced:

  ‘On the whole, I like it.’

  She played with the pendant in silence for a moment, watched by the waiter who was leaning against a nearby table. She was pretty, James supposed; but the complete lack of spontaneity made her a dull companion. As his boredom increased, his spirits began to rise.

  ‘Is there somewhere we could have a meal?’ he asked. ‘I was wondering about . . .’

  ‘I’m meeting a friend. Perhaps you would join us?’ She glanced over her smooth brown shoulder in the direction of the Ramblas. It was not a pressing invitation, but she seemed to assume that it had been accepted. ‘He won’t be here for a minute or two, if you don’t mind waiting.’

  He did not mind waiting. He finished his drink and insisted on ordering for both of them again. He felt quite light-headed with relief. She was all that he had wanted her to be, shadowy, insubstantial, completely uninteresting; the evening would get worse and worse, conversation would become more and more vapid, until in the end he would go back to whatever hotel he found and forget all his problems in the best sleep he had had for months. And tomorrow he would go away with an easy conscience. She was too shallow to disturb the mind, too shallow for danger, for . . .