The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Nat’rally thar’s a sight o’ things bin writ that hain’t never occurred. Like ol’ Uncle Durham uster say that every time a story crossed water it doubled itself.

  “Did you-uns ever hear o’ Phil Morris’s defeat? That’s a true un. Phil, like the rest o’ us, was in a kinda o’ mixed-up business. Hit’d be hard to say what kinda business it’d be with one thing an’ another an’ nothin’ reg’lar.

  “Waal, we was up in the woods and thar was snow on the ground and the country ‘most friz up. We lit a fire and Phil sits him down and offs with his boots to kinda rest up his feet like.

  “Waal, durin’ the night one of them boots gets pushed into the fire and burned up. An’ in the mornin’ Phil sent up a great hollerin’, and had to make him moccasins out of his leggins and walk back sixteen miles in ’em. And ever since they have called that place Phil Morris’s defeat.”

  A rending explosion of dynamite on the new road shook the town, and there was a short brushing of wind in the trees and the tossing up of a few birds.

  “That’s the deefeninest n’ise,” said the man. “Muster bin like that in France. Was you-uns ever in France? Uh huh. French is heathians.”

  “It’s hot in the sun,” I said.

  “Waal now, I’ll tell ye, I hain’t bin out in the sun yet today. Reckon I’ll be broguin’ round a bit.”

  And he backed obliquely down the stairs, brown boot first.

  (1925, 1989)

  FROM

  Marching Spain

  THE VENTA DE LA SEGURA

  It was important to attain the next hill, to advance upon the retiring ranges, to attack them, strike through them, and see what lay beyond. To sit and rest by the wayside was to let precious excitement of living and diamond minutes pour through the fingers wastefully. Instead of resting during the heat of the day I marched through it. And it was heat: a vertical wall of cerulean throwing out a fire that branded the skin, throbbed in the ears and immersed the earth in a brilliant presence weighing upon everything and silencing it. I would cross the Sierra de San Pedro rising before Caceres, and teased myself with the idea of reaching that town itself, thirty-nine miles from my starting-place.

  I knew such a march to be beyond my powers, but who does not play the hero and exaggerate the magnitude and ardours of his task? I walked savagely in those early days, and men jogging high on bulging mules and donkeys up the long, red loops of road, stared at me in stupefaction and remembered only as an afterthought to say “Vaya usted con Dios,” the eternal “Walk with God” of Spain. I struck trees with my stick, splitting bark, bruising nettles. I sang loudly everything I could think of, and imagined so many adventures that my heart was beating loudly with the rotund excitement. I was leading a glorious invisible army, and each swoop of the road before me rose brassily like a heralding bugle challenge.

  In the unheroic moments when I made my imagination admit I could not reach Caceres that night, I decided that in the pass of the Sierra I could stay at the Venta de Clavin, of which a carter had told me. There was not an inch of shade on the road. The sun was riding on my shoulders. Around me camped the wilderness hills, dark as gypsies and, in the great distances, wild ranges waved and crinkled like intense licking flames at the summits. It was as if the earth were a huge pan frying between the curled, violet flames of the mountains.

  I was marching through one of those immense uninhabited wildernesses, the despoplados of Extremadura. The sunlight crackled and split and splintered among the oak scrub and blazed spurting like blinding gas flare from the great boulders. Lizards leapt up in vivid rain from my feet, and there were the cries of frightened birds breaking like rods of fountain water among the trees. At the feet of the trees was the common multitude of spring grass, and on it the trees stood in their tilted pools of shadow. One passed walking from pool to pool quietly in the grass like a leaf gliding over the dabbled pebbles of a clear stream.

  After some miles I heard the familiar aqueous talking of sheep bells in the wilderness, and at last overtook the outskirts of an enormous flock of sheep babbling northward. There were four huge dogs, like mastiffs, with them, and I saw the shepherd, a weird man clothed in fantastic bits of sheepskin and cowhide, lichened with age, walking high on wooden clogs over the turf and carrying besides a crook and a leathern botero of wine.

  We greeted each other, and I walked with him among the trees. He told me he was driving sheep twenty-five miles, and would do half the distance that day. His master then sent the sheep northward for the summer by train to Leon, so he had only to put them on the train, for which he said he was grateful, as he used to have to drive them northward all the way, on foot.

  “And you are walking to Caceres?” said he. “If you walk well and if the sun does not get too hot,” he said, looking up appraisingly at that enemy, “you will arrive before midnight. Another eight leagues. And you have no beasts!”

  A man bent up and straddling with the gait of an olive tree. Forty miles was nothing to him!

  He was one of that great number of itinerant shepherds who twice yearly drive their huge flocks across Spain, spearing the night-black hills with their red fires and sleeping in huts made of mud and branches. Creatures solitary and silent as animals. The flocks spend their winter in the south, where the climate is mild and the pasturage fresh; but in May, when the sun empowers himself of the south, they are driven over Extremadura and La Mancha to the northern provinces. The custom is an ancient one, and came to be called La Mesta, and there was an authoritative Council of the Mesta which looked after the rights and privileges of the wanderers. Although the Council has been abolished this hundred years, the cañada de paso or sheepwalk, ninety paces wide, is still left on either side of the great roads.

  It has always been assumed that the custom of La Mesta originated in the days when the victorious Spaniards drove the Moors out of Extremadura, razed and devastated until the region became so depopulated by the sword and the plagues that vast territories, at one time as many as fifty districts, were left unclaimed. It was to these the highland shepherds descended with their flocks and the long seasonal migration began. Some flocks travelled between two and four leagues a day. There were endless disputes between the shepherds and the surviving resident farmers, but the Council of the Mesta was powerful enough to protect the shepherds. The Council no longer exists, but as my shepherd showed, the custom survives, and although he was taking his flock to the train, most of the shepherds I met thereafter were proceeding on foot, for it was early May and the northward trek of two or three hundred miles had begun. It was one of those dust-raising armies of sheep that deceived Don Quixote. Northward, as I walked, swelled that lake of bells.

  At six in the evening I completed my twenty-three miles at the Venta, a disappointing hovel in a clearing of the red hills. The sun banged down like a hot bell. Men in the woods were loading cork bark on to carts. They gave me water in the Venta, and asked me the usual questions. Who was I? Where had I come from? Where was I going? What was my trade? Was I married?

  To tell the peasants I was an author would have meant nothing to them. They would have considered authorship a suspicious kind of crime. I told them I was an itinerant photographer, and that I took photographs of interesting sights and sold these photographs in England. But why was I walking? A train journey across Spain costs!—ay, what it costs! The beardy, gravelly voiced innkeeper pulled a piece of bread and garlic out of his waistband. He knew how much things could cost!

  I sat with the family in the yard. I gleaned there was another inn with the promising name of Venta de la Segura, less than a league away they said, in the plain on the other side of the pass. I felt that Venta could not be quite so filthy as this one, and after an hour’s rest, the sun being lower and the cool lengthening with the shadows which now pierced the road, I descended to the plain in which the Venta lay.

  A miraculous floor of emerald that plain was with the road now white—for in the hills it had been grinding red—breaking it like a sensi
tive vein in marble, or a slight line of spent foam in a calm sea. Young, brief crops of beryl rippled in it. I breathed the evening ecstasying fields, slender exhalations of serenity and paradise. Before my eyes the level swathes of the Vega lay back to the pale beams of the hills of Caceres, fifteen miles away.

  The devil take those cork-gathering innkeepers at the Venta de Clavin, for there was no sign of another inn for some miles. Night came quickly; dark, moonless night and cold. There were no trees, no landmarks, only the grey dimming sea of plain on either side of the road in which my feet churned up a great foam of dust. My spirits began to fall. I had walked twenty-seven miles. My feet were sore, my body was aching, and the straps of my haversack cut my shoulders. Where was the bombast, where was the pace of the burning, golden daytime when I had ridden early over the red Sierra like a gay boat over a sea? The stroke of my heels was now muffled by the dust. I was walking upon a cloud-white path of silence.

  Out of the darkness a man tapped by on a donkey. He stopped singing to stare at me, and, when I hailed him, said the Segura was a league away, and that I should know it when I saw it because there were three trees—the only trees for miles and miles—and a ruined tower which people called the Torre del Moro.

  At nine o’clock I saw a light scratching the darkness like a pin, but I seemed to get no nearer to it. Left, right. Left, right. Hunger pulling and biting at one like a pack of wolves. Feet burning. I was the only sound in that plain. At last I saw the three trees and the tower, tower and trees, tower and trees, and the forms of the buildings. The light had gone, perhaps it had never been there. The place appeared to be abandoned. There were no windows, no doors. No sound but the crackling chorus of frogs in some pond. Opaque night. Nothing.

  The ruined tower delivered its muffled blow of darkness in the face of the star-populated heavens. Not a very cheerful destination for one who had walked about thirty miles out of the frying-pan of the Sierra into the fire of the plain; and talking of frying-pans, oh, for some food. My eyes groped the darkness for sight of door or light, and as I stood there the air was suddenly twisted into the spiralling caterwaul of a peacock. A vulgar, gaudy cry. Where there are peacocks there are men, I argued. (There is nothing so comforting as poor logic.) I felt my way across a mass of rock, turf, and cart tracks, towards the smallest of the buildings, and was rewarded by an open door.

  The building was a small stone hut. I stepped inside. The place was in darkness, but I heard voices from a room within. I might have been in a stable or a workshop, for I knocked into a bench with an iron vice on it and came to a couple of stone steps rising to an inner room. A man came out of the inner to the outer darkness and asked me what I wanted.

  “There is no Venta here,” he said. “Though they call this the Segura, because we sell brandy to carriers and to the labourers in the fields. I am the blacksmith. There is no Venta between here and Caceres, three leagues away. We certainly cannot give you a bed for the good reason that we have none. We can give you something to eat, yes. If you don’t want much, because we are poor people.”

  A woman now appeared from the passage with a yellow oil-flare in her hand smoking, hungering green fumes of burning olive oil, that struck the room and splintered it with shadows, like a window starred by a stone. I was in the smithy itself. She set the flare down on a bench and I saw a twitching forge, the shaking stacks of iron, the benches jumping in the light.

  “No, there is nothing here,” said she.

  She was small, stout, and young with large calf-like gaping eyes, and she wore over her shoulders a pink and green embroidered shawl, knotted so tightly at the waist that it seemed to make a humpback of her. Her candle-pale face was framed in her braided hair, and her earrings jingled and jumped like two grotesque, gilt animals, from her ears.

  I took off my pack and sat down on the floor exhausted. The man and his wife watched me anxiously. I asked for water. She brought this. Water cold as swords piercing me. I shivered. Then I told the smith who I was, where I had come from, where I was going to, what my trade was, how my family was, and that I was not a Portuguese. He became very interested and friendly, and was amazed at the distance I had walked, and was very worried at not having a bed to offer me. He told the woman, his wife, to get me something to eat—eggs, sausage, something or other. He sat on the anvil, and his block of shadow wobbled like a fantastic black cloud over the walls. He said perhaps I could sleep with the labourers in the tower. He asked me had I been to Madrid, where the traffic was tremendous, passing, he said, like a flight of parrots?

  The smithy was roofed with boughs of trees. The floor was of earth and cobbles. I smelled frying, and in time the woman brought me a fine plate of eggs fried in oil, and gave me a round of bread as hard as a rock and some water in a tin. We sat talking.

  A carter came in. A man whitened with dust, and with curly black hair tumbled in bushes over his eyes, which bloomed wildly through them. He called hoarsely for brandy, and his voice was garlic and crumbled like earth as though speaking were too much for it. He wore corduroy, and leather, brass-studded facing to his trousers. He sat down on the floor and stared at me, biting bits off his whip. He could contain his curiosity no longer. He asked me, “Has the friend any gold or silver?”

  I was mystified.

  “Has he any gold or silver, the companion?” he asked again.

  “Money?” I ventured.

  “I thought the friend might have brought some gold with him,” said the carter, watching my face.

  “Ah,” said the smith, “what he means is, have you any contraband? He thinks you are a Portuguese smuggler, and that you have smuggled gold earrings and ornaments across the frontier, which is so near.”

  The smith explained all about me, but the carter was not convinced.

  “Many people come over the border at night—it is not too far—and bring gold and silver,” he said doubtfully.

  “Yes,” said the smith, and explained again what I did, but the carter only glared, and said it struck him as fantastic that a man should travel from his own country and on foot from Badajoz and not bring contraband. All the Portuguese brought contraband.

  We talked and argued till nearly midnight. Then the smith went out with the carter, and left his wife and me sitting on the doorstep.

  A taut, clear wind was stretched across the darkness, and the stars were scattered from horizon to horizon, like the night fires of a myriad shepherd camps on an immense plain. Fires like a multitude of jewels, and when one raised one’s arms to the heavens the stars shone like rings upon the fingers. One had the sense of omnipotence and of the incalculable riches of the heart, and again the sense of blackest loneliness. The tower was crowned like a king with a diadem of stars.

  The woman sat at the door. She was pretty and tired. Her voice was slow and weary. Again and again she sighed, “Ay! Ay!”

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Have you any children?”

  “No.”

  “Ay. No children either. No children. How lonely life is without children. Seven years I have been married and I have no children,” she said blankly. “Ay! And your wife is alone? Ay! Poor creature, to be alone. And you wander alone? Like the shepherds who never see their families. What a life for them. Ay, poor creatures. And is your wife older than you? I am older than my husband. I am two years older. It is better for the woman to be older. Ay, it is better, much better. Ay de mi! It is better, because thus there is more confidence in the house,” she said. “Ay de mi! I travelled twenty miles to-day on a donkey to the market and I am tired out. It is wonderful to go to the city.”

  Her husband came back with two big sacks of straw. “Antonio,” she said, “he is married and he has no children either.” She looked blankly at him like a pretty cow.

  “I am sorry,” he said to me. “God has given us no children either,” he said.

  He then presented me with two sacks of straw. “I am sorry to have to ask you to
sleep here, but we have no bed,” he said. We laid the sacks on the floor. He turned out his two greyhounds and bolted the door.

  An old man appeared tottering with a stick at the inner door and walked across to what was evidently a bedroom on the opposite side of the smithy. He looked like the smith’s father. The smith and his wife and two younger brothers followed him in, shut the door, and left me in darkness, with polite “good-nights,” to make the best of a bad job on the sacks, having previously covered me with two vivid red and yellow mule blankets which smelled strongly of their owners. I slept under a boarded-up window near the door. The night was very cold. My limbs stiffened quickly and every turn was agony.

  I dozed for a while, but the smithy and its surroundings, which had been so quiet a few hours before, now became as lively as the tuning-up of an orchestra. A flock of sheep, their bells babbling loudly, were penned at the back of the smithy; and near-by was a pen of goats, with bells too, but on a higher, shriller note. The bells of yoked oxen nodded tolling by the tower. Country dogs began barking like artillery, or solitarily howling; and the smith’s greyhounds spent hours jumping up at the door and sniffling and whining around. Little pittering ballets of mice ran about the thatch and the benches tearing up paper—the heavens rending like calico—and once or twice the creatures chased across me as though I were nothing but a mountain range on the floor. To add to this minute uproar and dancing, the peacock gouged the air with his twisty cry. I lay musing. The floor had begun to make itself felt through the sack, and a host of insects advanced from the straw and took possession of me like Lilliputians.

  At four o’clock I was awakened most dramatically out of my stupor by one of the greyhounds, which, in fury and despair, had leaped at the boarded window above my head, burst the boards in, and landed plumb on top of me. In the confusion the beast became entangled with my legs, and though I kicked him savagely and sent him away yelping, he insisted on coming back and licking my face. He then curled himself up on my feet and slept. He kept me warm. At five o’clock the bedroom latch clicked up and out stepped the smith. Obviously he had slept in all his clothes.