THE YOUNG SPANIARD

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘But I didn’t leave to have a baby.’

  ‘Well—for whatever reason—I could still go back.’

  ‘Even if you had broken the law?’

  She shivered as a gust of wind buffeted the rocks spraying sand across her wet body. She raised herself on one elbow, absently dusting away the sand, and gazed down at him.

  ‘Is that what you have done?’

  He reached up and caught hold of her hand as she continued to flick at the sand.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I have done. Why don’t you lie down instead of brushing sand all over me? It’s like trying to sunbathe with a restless puppy romping around.’

  ‘Mightn’t it be better to put things right?’

  He gave a mock sigh and closed his eyes. He realized that she had already decided how his predicament should be handled. He listened, amused and a little touched, as she went on:

  ‘It’s better than running away all the time. You’ll have to face it eventually.’

  Her voice was gentle and concerned; he was not irritated by the time-worn phrases because her sincerity gave them a certain freshness.

  ‘I should go back if I were you.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Why, to France, of course.’

  ‘I didn’t come from France.’

  She looked at him in surprise, pushing her hair back from her face so that the water spattered across his chest. ‘But you are French, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m a French Algerian.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’

  The breeze had died down again and it was very hot. She moved on to one of the boulders and sat there, her shoulders sloping forward slightly, looking rather like the little mermaid on the rock as she stared out to sea engaged in the slow process of reorientating her ideas. After a while, she said:

  ‘You mean you don’t support the present government in France?’

  ‘You might put it that way.’

  She glanced at him in a puzzled, worried way, and he thought how pleasing this gentle concern was, so remote from political considerations. He sat up and clasped his arms around his knees.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have thought much about this, Frangcon. So you wouldn’t know all the issues that are involved.’

  Rather to his annoyance, she cut into his little homily before he had time to develop it.

  ‘I think General de Gaulle is right.’

  Her gaze was still gentle, but there was a rather more definite expression in the eyes than he had expected. He was reminded of one of his quieter students whose stubborn individuality had given more trouble than any of the more brilliant members of the group.

  ‘Countries are like children,’ she said. ‘They grow up and then you have to let them go their own way, make their own mistakes if need be. Algeria belongs to the Algerians.’

  His eyes hardened. ‘I am an Algerian.’

  ‘Then you have to learn to live with the other Algerians. I know it’s difficult . . .’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it at all,’ he said impatiently. ‘You are probably thinking that the situation is a parallel with the Indian affair; it’s not. You held India, as you are so proud of proclaiming, with a handful of men. The situation in Algeria is totally different; the French Algerian population is . . .’

  ‘Well, if they are anything like the Anglo-Indians, I haven’t much sympathy with them. I knew an Anglo-Indian family very well and they made me furious. They talked about the Indians as though they were an inferior race, as though . . .’

  Automatically, his mind closed to the argument. She would never understand his reasoning; the only person who could be made to understand on the intellectual level was James Kerr. And yet, as she went on, gently moulding the complexities of his situation into the trite generalities with which she was familiar, he felt a desperate need to cut through the soft tissue of sentimentality to the hard bone beneath. He lay back and said quietly, staring up at the sky directly above which was blue and cloudless:

  ‘I should like to tell you a story, if I may.’

  ‘It won’t change anything.’ She was a little put-out that he had not been listening to her, ‘You mustn’t think I don’t sympathize, because I do. It’s your home and . . .’

  ‘This is a story about a village which was not my home.’

  Something in his voice stopped her at once. She looked down at him. The excitement of what he was about to do made him very tense and the change in his face astonished her; it seemed all bone, as though the mask of flesh had been stripped aside. She was conscious, not so much of what he said but of the effect which the events which he related had had on him. The village was as remote as a ghost town in which only one human being moves; it was only later that it came into its own in her mind.

  ‘I have forgotten its name,’ he said. And this was true; he had never spoken the name from that day to this and now he could not recall it. ‘But I remember the place well. There were hills and between the hills there was an olive grove, and where the olive grove thinned out into scrub there was a straggling village. We came to it one afternoon. It was very hot, much hotter than it ever is here, the kind of heat that covers everything with fine white dust, even the sun itself is bleached. The earth was so hot it scorched through our thin shoes and the stone wall that ran along one side of the olive grove was too hot to sit on when we stopped to mark our position. There were no sounds from the village except the shouts of children; these villages stagnate in the middle of the day.

  ‘I was one of the first to come into the village from the south. You wouldn’t recognize it as a street, it was just a baked track between the houses and it smelt like a sewer. The dogs ran away. For some reason, the children wanted to be friendly. I never can think why that happened, usually they run away, too. But these children came running up to us led by a boy of about six who was crying out that he had caught a snake. He was lying, of course, but he bragged about it, making himself important in front of the other children. He was also making a lot of noise. That would bring the women out because they would know from the tone of his voice that he was speaking to strangers. So we had to kill the children first. Surprise was essential, yon see.’ He put a hand to his cheek and fingered the scar. ‘One of them had an old knife—he made quite a fight of it, as you can see. After that the rest of our party moved in from the west and the east and the north. We killed everyone in the village and then we burnt the houses. Then we went back through the olive grove; there was a house there, in the middle of it. One or two of the others went in there and I waited under the trees. I can remember that very vividly, because up to then I did not seem to have taken in what was happening. But I remember how still the olive trees were and the dust on the leaves and the sun burning across my shoulders. Then a child began to scream. After a while, it was silent again.’

  Fragcon, too, was silent. He felt satiated, no longer interested in her reaction. When she said, ‘Why did you do this?’ he answered indifferently:

  ‘Whenever anyone in the villages helped us, the rebels made an example of them. We couldn’t let it go. We had to make our own example. It was that kind of a war.’

  She turned her head away, staring across the tawny sand, shadowed now by the rocks.

  ‘I’ve heard of these things, of course. Lidice—places like that. But it was so horrible one couldn’t take it in. I suppose . . .’

  ‘Lidice!’

  He had become rigid. She put her hand out and touched his shoulder.

  ‘Raoul, what is it?’

  He turned away and was sick. Afterwards she tried to comfort him but he would not allow her to touch him.

  Chapter Twelve

  By early evening the rain had come. In Barcelona it was drenching down, striking hard on the pavements, flooding the gutters; people crowded the hotel entrances to watch it, rather as people in England watch the first fall of snow. But, in spite of the distant rolls of thunder, the sky remained an unbroken charcoal colour and the
rain brought no freshness to the air. Inside the Britannica tourist office it was as damp as the inside of an aquarium: The staff behaved rather like fishes; their faces swam up to the glass partitions which separated the inner offices from the main foyer where the counters were, mouths open, eyes popping. Then they encountered the gaze of the manager, Mr Colman, and the eyes hooded, the faces swam away only to reappear as soon as his back was turned. Mr Colman was aware of all this; although it irritated him he supposed they were not to blame—it was not every day they had an official visit from the police. He stood outside his office at the entrance to the foyer where the main business with the public was enacted. The rain, he noticed unhappily, had brought everyone indoors; there were a lot of people making idle enquiries.

  ‘You will want to look round here, I suppose?’ he asked resignedly.

  The fat Captain nodded.

  ‘I can’t think what kind of an impression it will create,’ Mr Colman muttered in English.

  The Captain’s English was very poor, but the look on Mr Colman’s face was as expressive as that of a chef who has been ordered to introduce bad meat into his speciality for the day.

  ‘This is happening in all the other offices,’ he assured Mr Colman. ‘We go to all the tourist agencies.’

  Mr Colman, not much comforted by this assurance that hereafter trade generally would be bad, asked:

  ‘How do you want to go about this?’

  ‘You have given me an idea of how your office works. I should now like to see for myself, perhaps ask a few questions. It will all be done very tactfully. No interference. I shall simply observe.’

  They moved into the foyer where the Captain proceeded to demonstrate his observing technique. He marched up to a customer who was making enquiries about a visit to the Costa Brava, leant on the counter, fist supporting his chin and gazed unblinkingly at the clerk who was doing the booking. After a few minutes of silent fellowship the clerk’s nerve broke and Mr Colman heard him telling the customer that he would have to travel to San Feliu de Guixols by way of Genoa. The Captain moved along the counter and Mr Colman watched Señor Valletta taking down the airways catalogue in order to look up trains for Paris. The Captain obligingly pointed out the error.

  Miss Winston’s reactions were the most lamentable of all. Mr Colman, who believed in keeping a certain distance from his staff, had always admired what he saw of Miss Winston as he passed to and fro across the foyer. He liked her air of cool efficiency, her immaculate dress, her concise way of imparting information. If anyone might have been expected to rise to the occasion, it was surely Miss Winston.

  In fact, Miss Winston did the exact opposite. When the Captain gravitated to the section of the counter where she was explaining the details of the Montserrat tour to a group of Norwegians, she stopped speaking, her face went blank, her eyes took on the glazed look of an actress who has forgotten her lines and is deaf to the prompt.

  ‘It is all right,’ the Captain assured her. ‘Please to carry on.’

  Miss Winston declined to carry on and subsided languidly on to the floor. The Captain had scooped her up before Mr Colman could reach the scene, and Mr Colman, anxious to get the body out of the way as quickly as possible, suggested that it would be cooler in his office. The Captain strode across the floor followed by one of his henchmen who kicked back the door of Mr Colman’s office with unnecessary force.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ said Mr Colman, as the Captain deposited Miss Winston in the armchair. ‘It’s the heat, you know. We’re all feeling the heat.’

  He grasped Miss Winston firmly by the nape of the neck and bent her forward. Her blouse gaped open and he hastily abandoned first aid in favour of decorum. The Captain regarded him reproachfully.

  ‘Brandy?’ he suggested.

  Mr Colman did not keep brandy in his office and he was reluctant to leave Miss Winston with the Captain and his assistant. On the other hand, the situation seemed to be moving beyond his control; he, too, was becoming subject to swimming sensations. He said:

  ‘I’ll get my secretary to bring some brandy in.’

  The need to surface somewhere where he could breathe deeply and think in peace was imperative. He dived for the door. Outside his office he was immediately pinned against the wall by an angry American who had missed his ’plane. Mr Colman, gazing at a placard which proclaimed ‘Britannica never lets you down’, decided that the wrath of America must be appeased at whatever personal inconvenience. Nevertheless, as he led the American to a quiet corner, he managed to attract the attention of his secretary, Mrs Brady, and by a few urgent facial contortions indicated to her the need to go to Miss Winston’s aid. Mrs Brady, correctly interpreting his signals to mean that something unpleasant was happening in his office, went and locked herself in the toilet.

  So it was left to the Captain to revive Rose which he did by holding a piece of burnt paper beneath her nostrils. He hoped that his subordinate, José, would be impressed by the propriety of his methods; but this cynical young man merely inferred that the Captain was not anxious to trespass on Milo Pacheco’s territory.

  While Rose coughed and moaned and rolled her head from side to side, the Captain told José to see that they were not disturbed. He did this because he intended to produce his own flask of brandy and did not want to be interrupted by Mrs Brady. Rose, who was beginning to focus better now, watched as José strolled across to the door and hung Mr Colman’s ‘Engaged’ notice on it. The action seemed to her to have sinister implications and little beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

  ‘There is no need to be frightened,’ the Captain assured her while José closed the door and leant against it in a pose that was all too familiar. Rose regarded the Captain so vacantly that he said:

  ‘You do speak Spanish?’

  She nodded her head, but the eyes remained vacant. Not a very intelligent chica, he thought. He handed her the flask of brandy and she drank a little; some of the brandy trickled down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of her hand while she regarded him rather furtively.

  ‘You like to drink?’ The Captain retrieved his flask. ‘I like to drink, too. And José also. And sometimes when we drink we are not very careful, eh?’ He gave a deep sigh and put the flask back in his pocket. ‘Everyone understands this.’

  The girl appeared not to understand. She was biting her lip and staring at the Captain with the uneasy fascination with which she might have regarded a performing elephant. The Captain went on being laboriously subtle while José strolled across to the window which was steaming up in the humid atmosphere. The Captain was saying:

  ‘Someone approaches you—at a party, perhaps. He asks things of you and you help him because you are in good spirits and it does not seem very serious at the time. Yes?’

  ‘No.’

  The Captain tried again.

  ‘People make use of you. That is unfair.’ He scowled blackly. ‘Very unfair. We should be sympathetic, you understand?’

  The girl shook her head, slowly, as though easing the neck muscles; she enunciated thickly: ‘I don’t understand.’

  José yawned and drew a rude picture with his forefinger on the window. The back of the Captain’s neck went red. He took out a cigar and spent some moments lighting it, his eyes fixed broodily on the girl’s legs. José gave her ten seconds before she began to fidget with her skirt. She seemed to have lost control of her limbs, however, because she just crouched back in her chair so still that she might have been holding her breath. What did the little fool think they could do to her here? José wondered. But as the Captain’s methods seemed to be having some effect José supposed he might as well give him a little support so he strolled across and did a bit of staring, too. It wasn’t very rewarding. He wondered, as he looked at the first button of her blouse, whether the Captain was right about Milo Pacheco; the girl didn’t seem very promising to him. Sometimes when they were scared it aroused a kind of excitement in you; but there was something mean about her. The Captain
said suddenly:

  ‘You have been friendly with Manual Arroja?’

  ‘I went out with him once or twice.’

  ‘And Juan Urillo who works with “Viaje”?’

  ‘I’ve met him at parties.’

  ‘You keep bad company.’

  ‘Everyone knows Juan. Marie at the cash desk sees much more of him than I do.’

  José laughed; the Captain said smoothly:

  ‘I will speak to Marie. As you have been helpful about her, she may reciprocate with a little information about you.’

  ‘What she doesn’t know, she’ll make up,’ Rose said sharply. ‘Everyone knows she’s as big a liar as Juan himself.’

  There were footsteps in the corridor. The door opened to admit Mr Colman looking alarmed and holding the ‘Engaged’ notice in his hand. The Captain assured him that Miss Winston had been most helpful. José obligingly took the notice from Mr Colman so that the Captain could shake him by the hand. When he had finished with Mr Colman’s hand, the Captain took Miss Winston’s.

  ‘If you should remember anything, or if something happens that worries you, you will come to us, won’t you? You can do it through your friend Milo if you like.’ It occurred to him that he might do Milo a good turn; they had little in common but in this respect he was sure that they would understand each other. He smiled meaningly at Miss Winston and said: ‘He is good to those who are good to him.’

  When the door closed behind the two policemen, Mr Colman asked nervously:

  ‘Are you all right. Miss Winston?’

  She smoothed her skirt down and said:

  ‘Quite all right, thank you, Mr Colman.’

  Mr Colman gazed down at his desk.

  ‘The Captain seemed to be particularly anxious to question you.’

  ‘It seems that one or two of the Spanish people I have met may be in trouble.’ Her voice quavered a little; Mr Colman was not sure whether this was because she was distressed or merely short of breath. ‘One never knows where one is with them, does one? I mean, their politics are so involved.’