The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  Along with the births of my children, I marked the seasons and the years by the work done in the vineyards. The tasks and demands they made seemed endless; in this way too they were like my children, my family. The preparation of the new ground in August, the agosta; the levelling, marking out and planting about January; the cavabién, the second tilling in March; the golpe-lleno, the third tilling in May to catch what weeds had been missed in the cavabién and stop the soil from hardening; the bina in July, a fourth tilling, held to be very important in Jerez not only to destroy weeds, but to make the soil impervious to the heat of the summer and help it retain the moisture the vines would need through those next months; then the desgrama, the weeding in August of the first year of the vines, to get rid of anything that had survived the agosta.

  For me there was yet no harvest, so we would go on to the deserpia, the first tilling of the agricultural year after the harvest. It began when the grass has started to grow after the first autumn rain. We dug square holes to expose the soil to the air, and to absorb the rainfall. Then came the desbraga in December, when we dug a fifteen-centimetre trench around the young plant and cut the surface roots, which prevented the vine from getting too thick at ground level and produced a uniform thickness higher up to allow for grafting; the unwanted shoots from the last year were also pruned.

  However far gone in pregnancy I was, I still came to the vineyards each year in the August of their own first year when the vitally important grafting, the injerta was done. It was then that the buds of the native vine, mostly the Palomino and the Pedro Ximeniz were grafted on to the American root stock. The grafts were done at ground level, the graft bound up with raffia, and the earth heaped up around it, so that the whole hillside looked as if it were the unbelievably neat work of busy moles. ‘The earth holds out the cold of winter and the east winds,’ Antonio said to me, proud to be displaying his knowledge. He was now almost as fanatical as I about the work of the vineyards. All his life, as had Mateo, he had been associated with the vines, but it had carried little interest except as a way to earn money. The responsibility had never been his, the heartache if the vines failed had never troubled him except as it affected the prosperity of the whole district. He had never looked forward more than one season at a time. Now, like myself, he must wait four or five years until our first harvest, he must wait, with patience, the long years until the vineyards returned the money and the toil that had been poured into them. One day he would be the true foreman of the whole hillside of vines that belonged to Doña Carlota; he was as impatient for that day as I.

  The most heartbreaking task was when we went over the ground of a newly planted vineyard in October, examined all the vines to find and mark those which had failed, and must be replaced. This was called the repaso. As much as fifteen per cent failed in the early years of the vineyard. I was appalled to see this, but Don Luis, with the philosophic attitude of a man who has lived his life with the vines, shrugged; it was always so. I was stunned, and at times frightened by the amount of work that had to be done. I had undertaken so light-heartedly what I did not understand. Luis smiled. ‘That is what youth is for, Carlota. If you never dare, what can you win? We all worry ‒ we learn to live with it. But also here in Jerez we have the saying “The colt and the vine ‒ let someone else breed them.” And yet we go on …’

  I could not have gone on without him. His foreman, Mateo, was now my friend, as was Antonio. He was a broad, squat, barrel of a man, always grinning at me with eyes half-closed against the sun. Unlike Antonio, though, he seemed to find it amusing that I should want to concern myself with the problems, the endless difficulties and labour of starting and cultivating a vineyard. He had lived with such back-breaking labour, under the cruel heat of the summer sun, and the rains of the winter, all his life. He knew and cared for nothing else. But I ‒ I was a stranger, and a lady. Why did I come out in the August heat, and in the cold wind to view the vines? He indicated that it could safely be left all to him; he and his men, and the anxious Antonio, would see it all through. Did I not trust him? he wanted to know. Did I not trust the word and experience of Don Luis? Better stay at home and have my babies in comfort and peace. Those who insisted on planting vineyards were mad, but by such madness he had lived all his life. So he grinned, and he shrugged.

  My own worry, my excitement, my impatience, became infectious. I did not dare, in Carlos’s presence, to talk about the vineyards ‒ better to let him think of it as some harmless hobby, almost a whim of a perpetually pregnant woman who had to be humoured. Occasionally he came to inspect the vines, slapping Antonio good-naturedly on the back, and praising his growing expertise. He knew there was some loose arrangement by which we used the labourers from Don Luis’s vineyards, and that Maria Luisa and Don Ramon between them somehow found the money. But Don Luis, as an older man, and his father’s partner, was not to be questioned. If the arrangement suited him, it must be all right, Carlos probably thought. So beyond these few visits, he did not bother about the vineyards, and I did not bother him. It was Amelia who was my confidante. I found myself leaning more and more on her, and she responded with growing closeness. She had made her journey to Vienna, had travelled back in a leisurely fashion to Jerez ‒ had seen Paris and London with Luis. She had brought back many new gowns, and presents for us all, especially for her godchild by proxy, Juan. She would talk little of the time in Vienna. ‘I am no better ‒ and no worse. They don’t know what it is ‒ or have no name to tell me.’ She shrugged. ‘If Luis knows, he does not tell me either. They say I am anaemic. It is strange to eat, as I force myself to do, and sometimes not have the strength to put one foot in front of the other. I take all the disgusting medicines, they do more tests, and then they murmur about too many white cells in my blood ‒ and they can do nothing.’ But her journey away from Jerez had altered her subtly. She dismissed her role as an invalid impatiently. ‘I will do what I can. I will live every minute there is.’ She was interested, as she had been from the beginning, in my vineyard project. She approved of Luis’s financing a large part of it. ‘I hope he does not charge you interest, because he enjoys it more than anything else. Luis loves his vines. And his heart is with anyone brave enough to start out on that path. And a woman, too …’ She knew little about the business of viticulture, and until now had cared little. And then, as I began talking of the unending work demanded, naming each one of the tasks, she began to know them as well. The third year, in August, in the little cool that the morning hours gave, she insisted on being driven to the vineyard to watch the grafting. Mateo bowed almost to the ground when she made her appearance; until now she had been the unseen wife of Don Luis, a great lady who was said to be ill with some mysterious illness that did not get better or worse. We were driven up to the house, and Conceptión gave us breakfast. Amelia walked through the bare rooms, surveyed the courtyard bright with bougainvillaea and geraniums, drank Antonio’s own rather crude wine, and smiled. ‘I should come more often. It is quiet ‒ and yet everything is growing, and full of life. It is clever of you to have discovered that, Carlota. It gives you something, doesn’t it? … something besides Carlos and your family.’ She looked at me sharply, and she seemed almost to know the unspoken dream of my heart. Did she, in some mysterious way, know that these vineyards were an attempt to replace the emptiness, the part that was left vacant by the absence of Richard Blodmore? I turned away from her.

  ‘I name each section for my children. Next year’s planting will be named for you, Amelia.’

  She had been standing beside the window, and now she lifted the cotton curtain and gazed down the long, even slope, across to the vineyard house her husband owned. ‘Luis also loves the vines. He also tries to put them in place of what he cannot have.’ She dropped the curtain. ‘I wish before I die I could give him a child. Of all things, Luis would like to have a child.’

  ‘You will not die, Amelia. Not for a long time. And as for a child ‒ you are still very young. There is plenty of time.’
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  ‘There isn’t plenty of time. This thing in my blood, in the marrow of my bones, cannot be resisted forever. It seems to be quiet now, but I know it will come again, and be worse. When I am so feeble, any illness could take me. I am prepared for it. And as for Luis … My dear Luis is not like other men. As weak as I am, I still might bear him a child if only he could give me a child.’ She walked to the table and drank swiftly of Antonio’s raw wine. ‘Since we have married, Carlota, there has been no possibility of a child. It seems I have not in me what is required to rouse such a man as Luis …’ Her hand trembled so violently that when she put the glass down it crashed against the edge of the table, broke, and the wine spilled.

  ‘Carlota ‒ I am still a virgin!’

  The intensity of her despair was in her voice. Pepita, who loved Amelia, lumbered across the room to her, and thrust her big head under Amelia’s hand. This expression of uninformed sympathy from a dumb animal seemed to undo the tight knot of her self-discipline. I watched, heart-broken for her, as she sank down on her knees and put her face on the shoulder of the big dog and wept.

  II

  We hardly noticed when the first talk of the possibility of war began; certainly we paid little attention to it. Those who travelled back and forth to London for the sherry business, along with the gifts they unwrapped, also brought out tales of the Kaiser’s army, of the Kaiser’s new navy, which he seemed to want to play with like a little boy; they repeated the talk of the solemn men who didn’t like such things, said they were bad for business and wrote letters about it to the London Times. There was some nostalgia for King Edward, who had seemed to be able to keep his German nephew, the Kaiser, from being too insufferable. It all seemed very like the travellers’ tales that had been brought back to Clonmara when anyone had been abroad, just something to talk about. We listened, and tended our vines in our little corner of the world that seemed so untroubled. And so it came to the peaceful autumn of 1913, the last year before the world was turned upside down, and we were invited to visit the Marquesa de Pontevedra at Sanlucar, and to be among the party that would cross the Guadalquivir each day to join in the autumn culling of the deer herds in the great preserve of Doñana.

  We dared not refuse. Only Carlos was anxious to go, but then he was not of a nervous disposition. He saw it only as a mark of favour. My mother seemed a little flustered. The Marquesa was one of the few people who ever seemed to unnerve her; but still she was excited, as always, by the prospect of a party. She began to look out all her dresses, and begged Maria Luisa for the money for some new ones. She cleaned the guns that Richard Blodmore had given to her, and went out to Don Luis’s hacienda to get some target practice. Despite her drinking, she still possessed her uncannily true aim, which she seemed to have inherited from my grandfather. She was delighted with her success and looked forward as much to the shooting as to the social life.

  I thought there was more than a touch of malice in the Marquesa’s invitation. It wasn’t possible that she knew of my feeling for Richard Blodmore, but she must have guessed how we felt about his possession of Clonmara; she must have known that Carlos and Don Paulo had once thought of the possibility of Elena as Carlos’s wife, and Elena had been given to Richard. So she had blended her wine with bitter grapes when she informed us that the gathering at Sanlucar was to mark the visit to Jerez of Lord and Lady Blodmore, and their two young sons.

  For once I was not pregnant. Francisco had been born a year ago, and I had been mercifully free since then. I had resumed the shape I had almost forgotten I possessed. When I took out my habit the waist was even a little loose. ‘You look peaked,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘Having three babies so quickly cannot be good for any woman.’ I looked at my face in the mirror and it seemed the face of a woman, not a girl; even my hair had darkened, as if one day it might be like my mother’s. I wondered how I would appear to Richard Blodmore, and how he would appear to me. Would we look at each other and wonder what had possessed us in those mad moments at Clonmara? Would he appear to be as settled into domesticity as I did? Would it all seem a useless, foolish dream, the image of a man and a girl on a shore and in a rose garden? I told myself that that was how it would be. There were memories, but faded ones. I must expect no more. But still I fussed as the seamstress took tucks in the habit, and agreed when Maria Luisa decreed that I must have some new dresses. ‘Nothing but babies for three years … you need something to brighten you up.’ So she juggled the books a little, deferred paying some bills for a while longer, and was satisfied that neither I nor my mother would be a disgrace to our house.

  Don Luis and Amelia had also been invited. Carlos had told us with delight that neither of his half-brothers, Ignacio and Pedro, had been invited. Some of the grandest names in Jerez society were to be there, either as guests of the Marquesa at Sanlucar, or of the Duque de Tarifa at the Coto Doñana. It was the custom of King Alfonso to join the hunting party each autumn at the Palacio de Doñana. It was one of the few times that the Marquesa made herself available to Jerez society, and Don Paulo would be there in his seldom executed role as her husband, the official host of her gathering.

  I both longed for, and dreaded, the first breath of coolness in the air after the heat of the summer. October would bring the tremendous migration of birds from northern Europe to winter in Doñana’s marshes. I would see, Don Luis told me, if I was lucky, the beautiful Spanish lynx, and the Imperial Eagle, the true monarchs of Doñana. I would see the wild boar, the herds of red and fallow deer.

  There were vipers in Doñana, Amelia said; I must be very careful where I put my feet, I must be wary. I must not stray from the party; I must not get lost. These were the beauties and dangers of Doñana. Only my mother knew the other danger to me. While I helped her pack she touched my hand briefly. ‘It won’t matter seeing him again, will it, Charlie? I mean … it’s all over now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. All over.’

  III

  So it was among many other people that I saw Richard Blodmore for the first time since he had come to the lodge of Clonmara to bid us good-bye, and give us the final gift of Balthasar and Half Moon. We were gathered in the grand salon of the palacio of the Marquesa at Sanlucar. There were many guests, greeting each other, talking about the prospects of the weather and hunting, who had died, married or been born since they had last gathered in that place. There was talk, noise, laughter, the sound of glasses clinking, the sound of a guitar lost in an alcove. I looked across the room and saw Richard Blodmore, and everything else faded and went out of focus. The sounds fell to a low-pitched hum; for an instant every movement seemed to halt, the outlines of things, of both people and objects, grew blurred, and went flat. All that had dimension was the figure of Richard Blodmore; only he seemed real. All around him had a fuzzy, dream-like quality.

  He saw me at the same time, as if he had been compelled to turn in my direction. He moved towards me, a strange, sharp movement in that unmoving, almost noiseless crowd.

  ‘Charlie!’ How loud his voice was. Surely everyone would turn and stare at us. ‘Charlie …?’ he said again. It was as if I woke from a dream. The sounds, the noise, the music, the movement was restored. And I knew I had been wrong. It was not all over.

  ‘How … how is it at Clonmara?’ I managed to say.

  ‘Clonmara misses you, Charlie. The roses flourish, but they seem to have no scent. I miss you, Charlie.’

  Wildly dangerous words to say in the midst of this gathering, but they told me that for him it was not all over, either.

  IV

  Doñana is a wilderness on the edge of the Atlantic; it is like no place I had ever imagined on earth. It is desert and forest; it is marsh and dune and sea. It is the haunt of the soaring Imperial Eagle, and the crawling snake, the fleet beauty of the fallow deer and the brute ugliness of the wild boar. It is the last domain of the Spanish lynx. In summer its wetlands are baked to a seamed, cracked nothingness, and in winter the sun is blacked out by the flight of a hundred thousand bi
rds. It is earth and high heaven.

  It is the place next to Clonmara and my vineyards that I loved best; it is the place where I knew finally that I could truly love no other man than Richard Blodmore.

  About ten days in all we spent there, crossing the Guadalquivir river each morning from the Marquesa’s palacio at Sanlucar. This was the first time I had seen Doñana, and in the years to come I would visit it in every season of the year. But this year it was the autumn. The rains had filled the marshes ‒ the Spanish use the word las marismas which seemed to me more to convey the dream-like quality of the landscape as it looked now with the winter green covering the mudflats. Wherever I looked there was an unbroken surface of soft, waving green, green that teemed with the wild life that lived off it, and yet it was life that was rarely seen. A deer crouching in its cover would suddenly be flushed ‒ a flash of white, the roar of guns, and then the mad whirring of wings as birds beat their way to safety. Sometimes the sky seemed stained pink with the colour of flamingos in flight. There was blood and slaughter; there was the tranquil beauty of navigating the marshes in a cajón, a flat-bottomed skiff, fastened to the tail of a muscular marsh horse who traversed the shallow water with ease, as had been done at Doñana since there had been men and horses, time out of mind.