The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘I won’t tell him,’ said Viruelas, understanding her trouble, ‘but I can’t stop the others telling him.’

  ‘Then amuse yourselves well!’ answered La Rubia bitterly: she knew that she would lose her standing with them. ‘Adiós, Viruelas, and thanks!’

  ‘Adiós, chica!’

  She harnessed the donkey and walked away.

  Half an hour later the last sling came up out of the hold. The men put on their jackets, looking amazedly at the high stacks of crates with which their labour had covered the wharf. Finding El Pirata asleep, they laughed and went on their way. Viruelas woke him up, intending to see him home. He was sober and thirsty. He picked up a quart can which La Rubia had left under a mat of green leaves and drained it.

  ‘Was she angry with me?’

  ‘To me,’ replied Viruelas casually, ‘it appears that she was not.’

  They spent the afternoon together in the garden of the Bilbao brewery, but El Pirata could learn no more from Viruelas about La Rubia’s behaviour.

  Next morning the gang were down in the hold of the Capitan Segarra, loading her with iron rails. They had been at work for some minutes when El Pirata strolled up the gangway. He considered it his right to be late if he wanted to be. As he was the hardest and strongest worker of the lot, no foreman ever disputed the odd minutes with him. He looked down into the hold, waiting until the rail which was being lowered into position should be clear of the ladder.

  ‘Here’s El Pirata!’ announced El Cura, catching sight of him.

  ‘How’s your girl this morning?’ asked the foreman.

  ‘Where does the donkey sleep?’ shouted Evaristo, leaning out over space.

  ‘The ugly have all the luck,’ grumbled another.

  ‘Leave the riverside in peace, pirate!’

  ‘For him the flower of the wharf, eh?’

  El Pirata stared down on to the upturned, mocking faces. ‘The world has gone mad,’ he remarked cheerfully.

  ‘Only one is mad, and that’s a girl,’ growled Viruelas.

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘He doesn’t know the name of his own novia,’ said the foreman.

  El Pirata did not. He clambered down into the hold and began to work. His mates gave him no peace, but he bore the running fire of comment in good-humoured silence; it was only by listening that he could find out what had happened. He thought at first that they had unearthed some joyous tale of his exploits in the Sevillana, but it was soon clear that the novia whose affections he had won was La Rubia.

  ‘Bet you’re the first man she’s ever kissed!’ said El Cura.

  El Pirata was startled out of his pose. ‘She kissed me?’ he asked.

  ‘She thought you were dying,’ Viruelas explained.

  ‘Assuredly she kissed you,’ said El Cura. ‘I saw it. Several times.’

  ‘May your eyes rot! And to think I couldn’t kiss her back!’

  ‘Pity the girl hasn’t got a brother,’ Viruelas said.

  ‘What in hell does she want a brother for now?’

  ‘He’d cut your guts out.’

  ‘You, what do you know?’ replied El Pirata, shrugging his shoulders.

  The grabs jingled and clicked as they fastened on to another rail. In the moment of silence before the crane and its pulleys purred into life La Rubia’s voice floated down into the hold.

  ‘Agua de Iturrigorri! Agua de Iturrigorri!’

  El Pirata hitched his boina over the other ear and swaggered. El Cura winked at the skies. Evaristo caught the wink and translated it correctly. With the rail suspended in mid-air, he switched off the current.

  ‘Hoist away!’ shouted the foreman.

  Evaristo climbed out on to the platform; with pretended concern he poked an oil-can into the maze of pulleys.

  ‘Cable’s jammed!’ he answered.

  The men who were working in the hold came up on deck. La Rubia and her cart were alongside the ship.

  ‘Here’s your novio!’ the foreman said, digging El Pirata in the ribs.

  La Rubia spat. ‘There’s no man on the wharf who can call himself my novio!’ she answered.

  ‘Wish the donkey would kick me!’ exclaimed the foreman.

  ‘Are you set on it being the donkey?’ asked El Pirata, using the provocative second person singular and drawing back his foot.

  ‘Santisima Virgen! Do you think you’re fighting for a woman in the Sevillana?’ La Rubia snapped.

  El Pirata ignored the rebuke. The foreman had already stepped back into the crowd.

  ‘Viruelas, El Cura, you don’t understand,’ he said simply. ‘I’m going to marry the girl.’

  El Cura took the remark as a joke and wanted to share it. He cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted up: ‘Oiga, Evaristo! El Pirata is going to marry La Rubia!’

  ‘And drink water!’ Evaristo laughed.

  ‘But since I tell you I am going to marry her!’ roared El Pirata.

  ‘Marry me? Me?’ La Rubia murmured, frightened for the first time in her life by the overbearing masculinity of her customers. ‘I—I’m too small.’

  ‘And what does a fisherman want with a big wife?’ replied El Pirata. ‘You, I can carry you out to the boats like this!’

  He leaped from the deck to the wharf, and caught up La Rubia in his arms so that her head was on a level with his own.

  ‘He’s going to fish for sardines and use her as bait,’ the foreman suggested.

  ‘Cabrón!’ screamed La Rubia.

  She writhed in El Pirata’s grip and sprayed the whole wharf with insults. She leaned her body over his confining arm as if it were the edge of a pulpit and cursed them all to hell.

  El Pirata held her fast and smiled. He was not worried any longer because his mates chose to have a bit of fun. He was thinking of the hanging nets and the boats and the swell eddying over the slipway of Arminza. Why hadn’t he asked her to marry him before? He’d only been waiting for such a girl—hadn’t his father said that a fisherman couldn’t make money without a wife? She was very small, yes! But she could sell fish and hold her own with the wives of Arminza. Dios, she could do that! (‘Be quiet, chica! Have you no shame?’) Oh, these women! Didn’t she understand that the wharf was laughing at him, not her?

  ‘You, El Cura! Doesn’t she deserve to be married, or what?’

  El Cura had not looked at the question in that light. He was just contrasting their figures and enjoying the fun of it. ‘Yes, man! Of course she deserves it!’

  ‘She’s worth more than El Pirata,’ said Viruelas.

  ‘You, what do you know?’ answered La Rubia disdainfully.

  The foreman slapped his thigh.

  ‘Good girl!’ he shouted admiringly. ‘Good girl!’

  The feeling of the gang swept into sincerity. The great male still stood before them with his little woman tucked up in one arm, but they were no longer figures of fun. La Rubia had stood up for her man. She had dared to protect him—and in his own words. They were real; they were mates, those two. They had put on the dignity of Roman matrimony. The men crowded round El Pirata, slapping him on the back, showering La Rubia with barbarous compliments.

  ‘Olé, La Rubia! Olé la agua de Iturrigorri!’ they shouted.

  THREE OF CASTILE

  They were big, worn men, still young if one looked closely. They had not come any great distance—some twenty miles on various battered wheels and four more on their feet—but in time they had travelled much farther: out of black industry and back to boyhood in the green and silent valleys on their own high border of Old Castile. They were three dockers from the wharves of Bilbao, proud of their strength, since they had nothing much else to be proud of, and dryly aware that they were only willing animals whom society would feed reluctantly when that strength was gone.

  It was a public holiday. The Cock, the Monk and the Fly, starting out with a vague intention, unexpressed, of getting well rid of the port and its roaring Basques, wandered south-westwards into the mountains, acceptin
g any casual friendships and casual transport which offered the objective of still another tavern. A rolling walk over the soft summer dust landed them, with a brand-new evening thirst, in the village of Agudas. The dark Rioja was cheap. Each of them trickled half a litre of it straight down his throat.

  Dancing in the plaza had begun, but was half-hearted; so the arrival of strangers was a welcome event, though very properly disguised by the contemptuous glances and pretended laughter of the girls. Many of them were partnering each other, for marriageable youths left the remote village early for the towns of the Ebro or the iron foundries of Bilbao.

  El Mosco—the Fly—effected satisfactory introductions. He was persistent. That was how he got his nickname.

  They were three excellent little girls: fair-haired and muscular, modest with their rotundities in front and glorying in those behind. They crowned the day. No denying it. They belonged to the hills as irrevocably as the dockers’ usual girls—when they could afford any—belonged to the rubbish dump at the back of the power station.

  The Cock—el Gallo—full of a momentary ambition for all he was not, took refuge in imagination.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he announced, ‘we are off to Cape Town.’

  He was tall and graceful, with straight, black hair; and it was natural for him to provide the touch of romance which his appearance promised. Normally he had the shyness of the athlete, and preferred that his routine of physical labour and drink should not be complicated by women. But, once supplied with those desirable and explosive comforts, his reactions were incalculable.

  ‘Are you a sailor?’ his girl asked.

  ‘I? I am the First Officer of the Artxanda Mendi. And my friends here …’

  El Gallo hesitated while he examined them through the noble haze of wine and affection. The Monk—el Fraile—suggested respectability. He was broad, snub-nosed and looked as if he might make a humorous and kindly husband. His immense fore-arms and responsible face at once provided the right profession.

  ‘My friend is the Chief Engineer. And this other is his Second.’

  ‘It is a big ship?’

  ‘Neither too big nor too small, like you who are as high as my heart. Five thousand tons. And to think we sail tomorrow!’

  ‘I have never been on a ship,’ said the prettiest of the three girls, whom el Mosco had annexed, ‘nor have any of us.’

  ‘Then come and see one! You shall all go down the river with us and we will land you with the pilot at Portugalete.’

  ‘It is not certain we sail tomorrow,’ said el Fraile giving him a kick under the table. ‘It could be next week. The captain told me.’

  ‘Tomorrow at midday!’ el Gallo shouted. ‘Nothing is more certain!’

  And certain it was. At noon, or soon after, the Artxanda Mendi would go down the River Nervion on the first of the ebb. For three days their gang had been loading her with iron rails, awkward and dangerous in the slings.

  The Cock’s fantasy was possible. If he had ever learned to read easily, what he claimed could have been true. There was no class difference of speech and little of dress to give him away. A ship’s officer who had drifted up to Agudas on a public holiday, homesick for his mountains and looking for simple fun in a village square would have worn, like the three dockers, a beret and a bright single-coloured shirt buttoned up at the collar without a tie. Trousers of blue cotton were improbable, but not to the innocent.

  The Monk and the Fly caught the infection. When they had listened to themselves long enough, they believed themselves. Ship’s routine, at any rate in harbour, was second nature to them and they had drunk with enough seamen in their time to be familiar with foreign ports. Girls and men were charmed by these technicians of the sea returning so genially to the haunts and ways of their youth. Agudas was turned into a paradise of free wine, continually reappearing in the empty jug.

  A little before midnight the three dockers danced their way to the main road. When they awoke in a dry ditch and peered over the edge of it at Bilbao and the steep valley of the Nervion, they retained some vague memory of a sympathetic acquaintance who had given them a lift in his ox-cart and discharged them above the town. It was seven in the morning. They walked automatically down to the port gates and checked in for work.

  Since they could hold their liquor and had slept on clean weeds they were not in such a nightmare condition as the rest of their gang unloading the Florinda, round from Vigo with general cargo. Their heads were beyond being disturbed by the rattle of derricks, the startling coughs of steam capstans and the stench of the dried cod which powdered them with nauseous grey dust. They lowered their backs for loads and carried them. It was easier to work than not to work. In the next berth lay the Artxandra Mendi, hatches closed, heat shimmering above her orange funnel.

  At ten o’clock there was a break. El Gallo looked in his pockets. ‘Any money?’ he asked.

  El Fraile belched in answer.

  ‘And you, Mosco?’

  The Fly ran nervous hands over his spare, wiry body as if he were cleaning his wings. As a forlorn hope he looked for a lost copper coin in his shoes. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘We were robbed?’

  ‘Perhaps in our sleep.’

  After an interval for thought the Monk remarked: ‘We spent it.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘We were in the mountains!’ the Fly protested virtuously.

  ‘Haven’t we enough for a bread?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Women!’ the Cock complained. ‘Without doubt!’

  ‘There were not.’

  ‘But there was dancing.’

  ‘Perhaps. It was a fiesta. What I would give for coffee and a bread!’

  El Gallo shook his shining black crest and stirred it with his fingers. ‘We could not have been dancing alone,’ he said.

  ‘You were. On the road.’

  ‘The road from where?’

  ‘Agudas!’ shouted el Mosco triumphantly.

  ‘It comes back to me,’ said el Gallo as one recovering a dream.

  ‘And nothing would content you but to be mate of that black bitch there!’

  ‘It’s true I have imagination.’

  ‘You should be on a newspaper!’

  ‘What are we to do if they come to the ship?’ asked el Fraile, wrinkling the leather of his anxious clerical forehead which had also fitted the part of chief engineer.

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘Won’t they? Look at it, man! All three together with leave from their mothers! Why not? Why shouldn’t they come? A ride in the ship, and off with the pilot. Nothing more reasonable. In their best clothes and all pinti-painted!’

  ‘It won’t be the first time we’ve made a date with women and not turned up,’ the Fly reminded them.

  ‘But they are not women!’ roared the Cock.

  ‘True. They are not, so to say, women.’

  ‘We must see the First Officer,’ said the Monk seriously.

  ‘And how the devil are we going to see the First Officer? Whoever heard of three dockers calling on the First Officer? And if the foreman catches us looking round the cabins of the Artxanda Mendi …’

  ‘He knows very well that we are honest.’

  ‘Perhaps. But he knows we could have no honest reason for being there.’

  ‘The mate is bound to go on shore. We might catch him.’

  ‘Knock off!’ the Cock ordered. ‘All three to the gates!’

  ‘And how do we eat?’ asked the Monk, foreseeing the certain result of deserting their gang in the middle of an urgent job.

  ‘Eating has nothing to do with it,’ the Cock replied. ‘This is a point of honour.’

  He rose from the pile of straw on which the three were reclining, hitched his beret over one ear and approached the foreman.

  ‘We’re off,’ he said, ‘with apologies. A private affair, capataz.’

  The foreman looked up into the impudent face, hollowed and etched by dissipation and hunger.

 
‘If you want a drink, Gallo, get it! Back in ten minutes, and I say nothing!’

  The fly searched his usually fertile brain for a convincing excuse. He was too tired. He could think of nothing but an aunt’s funeral. It would not do.

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth, capataz,’ he said. ‘We can’t help it.’

  ‘An affair of delicacy,’ the Monk explained.

  ‘I spit on your delicacies! Listen, Fraile, you are a responsible man! I know that none of you three has a peseta after a fiesta. Do you want to starve? If you let me down now when we have to empty the Florinda I must make up the gang and there’ll be no work for you for a week.’

  ‘We could work in the holds,’ el Fraile suggested to his companions. ‘They won’t see us there.’

  ‘Who won’t see you? What’s up? A little trouble with the police?’ the foreman asked.

  ‘Them? They don’t mix it with me!’ the Cock crowed, and turned to the Monk. ‘You—haven’t you got any sense? It’s not a question of being seen or not being seen. We have to meet a certain person at the gates.’

  ‘True,’ answered el Fraile. ‘I had forgotten. Our excuses, capataz, but there is no remedy.’

  They slouched off, responding with quite unnatural politeness to the threats and curses of the puzzled foreman. Outside the gates they leaned wearily against a truck and watched the brisk traffic of men who had breakfasted—clerks, seamen, agents and customs officers.

  They had not long to wait. The First Officer of the Artxanda Mendi strolled out through the gates. The hatch covers were on and he had time for a last taste of the shore before the turn of the tide. He had the same gallant build and colouring as the Cock, though shorter and not so gaunt.

  ‘No hands wanted,’ he said automatically as the three approached him, and then recognized them as belonging to the gang of labourers who had loaded his ship.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A word with your lordship. Nothing more,’ said el Fraile with most formal courtesy.

  The First Officer was held by his air of solidity. ‘Well? But it’s no good coming to me with complaints. See the agent of the Line!’