‘You may finally have succeeded in making a Republican of him,’ Maria Luisa said.
The idea of school in Seville was abandoned when, in August, General Sanjurjo seized Seville for the Rightist movement. The revolt was quickly suppressed, but there were many who expressed approval of it. Jerez did not like the radical legislation of the new regime. They did not like it when they heard that the property of the rebels had been confiscated and divided up among the peasants.
‘And a lot of good that will do them,’ the Marquesa scoffed. ‘What will they get when it is divided ‒ the leg of a mule each?’ But the idea of school in Seville was dropped. ‘He is wayward, that boy. Even in the strictest place who knows what ideas he may get. Better get Edwin Fletcher back again.’
Edwin had taken a post teaching the son of the Williams family, coaching him for entrance to his English school. I had wanted him to stay on with Luisa when Tomás had gone to school, but he had refused. ‘I would do anything for you, Carlota, and you know it. But I can’t become a governess to a young lady, however much I love her.’
‘What shall we do without you, Edwin? All of us?’
‘You will manage, Carlota.’
But the Williams boy was ready for school in September, and so Edwin returned to Los Cisnes. He looked at the sunburned, hard lean youth before him, the sun-bleached hair with its ragged cut, the powerful shoulders, the hardened hands. ‘Well, you’ve become a man while my back was turned, Tomás.’
A wide grin split Tomás’s face as he grasped Edwin’s hand in a grip that made Edwin flinch slightly. ‘You’ll take me back then, Mr Fletcher. I’ve learned a lot of things at Doñana. I’ve dissected a few specimens. Granny had bought me a microscope.’
‘I’m not much up on biology, Tomás.’
‘Then we’ll learn together, Mr Fletcher. You should hear the things that happened at Doñana! I rode bareback most of the time, you know. They taught me all kinds of things I couldn’t have learned in England. I don’t need all that fussy stuff, you know. Look, come up to the schoolroom. There’s a lot to show you.’ Then he gestured towards his sister. ‘All right, Luisa. You can come too. You don’t mind, do you, Mr Fletcher? It’s odd for girls to be as curious as she is, but she didn’t even mind the photographs of the vipers at Doñana. And you’ll be teaching both of us again, won’t you? Luisa’s awfully glad to get rid of that English governess she had. She was turning her into a cissy. I’ve got some lizards in solution. Come on, Luisa …’
They went off, the three of them, Edwin helpless between the two whom he loved most. I heard their voices fading off as they went up the stairs, each trying to out-talk the other.
Maria Luisa smiled faintly. ‘The Marquesa will have to be a little more ingenious in thinking out her punishments. The boy has been in heaven, and now he’s telling Edwin and Luisa what the angels are like.’
III
The political upheavals in Spain in the next years brought Elena Blodmore to Jerez a number of times, her object always that of persuading the Marquesa to leave the country. The granting of autonomy to Catalonia meant that the Marquesa’s factories and business interests there were severely threatened. I witnessed one interview between the Marquesa and her niece on a day when she had arrived unannounced in Jerez, and, not finding her aunt at Las Fuentes, had come to the bodega, where the Marquesa and I were in Don Paulo’s office examining the latest balance sheets produced by Ignacio. The Marquesa was contemptuously impatient with her niece’s suggestions. ‘I am not the sort to go into exile just because a few anarchists say they will take away my property,’ the Marquesa snapped at her. ‘Why should I leave? They can only take so much.’
But the great radical rising in Barcelona, which was repressed by government troops, spread to other cities. It indicated that growing impatience of the people with the slowness of the reform movement.
‘They can take your life,’ Elena answered.
The Marquesa shrugged. ‘There is not much more of that to take. And God, or the devil will take it ‒ which I cannot say.’
‘Come back to Clonmara with me.’
‘I thought you had a revolution of your own going on there.’ Elena visibly fought her impatience. ‘All that’s over. The country’s going through a hard time because England has raised tariff barriers, but no one’s being shot out of hand. There aren’t riots and assassinations any more.’
But Elena was forced to withdraw. ‘Well, if you’re murdered in your bed …’
Maria Luisa smiled when I reported the interview to her. ‘That one doesn’t entirely get her own way with the old woman. She wants her at Clonmara because there she’ll be completely under her influence. Of course, when Elena tries next time, she may succeed. The Marquesa is not now, and never has been, a loved personage. She smacks too much of the old days. She reeks of the aristocracy, and that can be dangerous in these days.’
The Marquesa learned that fact on the night a mob burned Las Fuentes. It happened as spontaneously as the scene I had witnessed from the window at the Plaza de Asturias ‒ at least it appeared to be spontaneous, but Maria Luisa darkly recalled the long-ago existence of La Mano Negra, the Black Hand, and then the terrible night in Jerez when a mob of more than four thousand sacked shops and killed the shopkeepers. ‘But that was 1892, or thereabouts. The trouble is that so many of these Andalucian peasants have gone to Barcelona looking for work, and the Marquesa is too well known in both places.’
It must have been a desperate hour for the old woman when she fled Las Fuentes. The house was close enough to the outskirts of the town for the word to spread quickly of what was happening and for the glow in the sky to bring more people to watch, and possibly, to enjoy. The Civil Guard was there quickly also, but not quickly enough to prevent one of the Marquesa’s servants from being beaten to death. The Guard cleared a path through the riotous crowd for the old fire-fighting engines, but the roof of the house was well ablaze, and in the morning only the blackened walls were left. The Marquesa had been led away through the fields at the back of the house when the first of the mob had appeared. She had resisted her servants’ efforts to make her leave until the first burning torch had crashed through one of the unshuttered windows on the first floor. She came to Los Cisnes, reluctantly, I thought. It galled her to be driven out, and perhaps even more it galled her to accept hospitality.
She was weary, dusty, but almost unshaken as she received a report later from the head of the Civil Guard. Maria Luisa had offered brandy and coffee, and the Marquesa even poured it herself with a steady hand.
‘The furniture, the pictures, the tapestries ‒ all gone. Don Paulo’s collection of clocks all gone. Those barbarians! What good does it do them? And my man, Alvaro, dead. He was a good man. He did his duty. A watchman all his life he’s been. And for that he gets death.’
The man listening to her nodded gravely. ‘We will find his killers. But there were guns among the crowd. The times are troubled, Marquesa.’
‘What times have not been troubled?’ she almost spat at him. ‘We must resist.’
So, finally, she came under my roof, and against all expectations, there she remained. ‘We are stronger if we stand together. If I go to Sanlucar, they will burn that. Perhaps they will burn it whether I am there or not. They tell me to stay away from Galicia, at least for the time being. I shall impose myself on you, Carlota.’
We had little choice, but it made an uneasy household. She was immediately offered hospitality by Ignacio and Pedro, and a dozen other families in Jerez, and all over the country. ‘To go to Madrid is madness,’ Edwin Fletcher counselled. ‘There you will not have an easy night’s rest. And if anything really serious starts, you could be trapped. Whoever seeks to rule Spain must have Madrid.’
She settled down among us, but she was little used to a household of which she was not automatically the head. She had brought her own servants with her, and that created clashes between our own and hers. There were scenes with pans banged about in the k
itchen, and the odd dish hurled at the offending head. She was used to her own chef, and he stayed on, which offended my cook. I called my staff and begged for patience.
‘She is an old lady. Change is not easy for her,’ I said.
There was some muttering, and one or two left my service. I had a feeling they would have done so whatever had happened. The country was rapidly taking sides, and we were automatically assumed to be of the far Right. Perhaps some went out of their own conviction, of the belief that a Republic had no place for such as we. But it was possible that they went in simple fear for their own safety. A house that was likely to burn about one’s head does not make for peaceful sleep.
Elena was back in Jerez as soon as she heard what had happened. She stayed with us at Los Cisnes. ‘Now will you come? This is no safer than Las Fuentes.’
‘There is no safe place in Spain, Elena, but that will not cause me to leave. We have trebled the guard about the house. They are armed.’
‘And you think the mob is not armed? Come to Clonmara.’
‘No,’ the old woman said. ‘Here I stay.’
And she did, seated at my right hand at the dining-table, resentful that she had not been given Luis’s place at the other end. But that had been my mother’s place since Luis’s death, and I would not have it changed. So on most nights we were five women seated with Juan and Tomás about that long table, on which the silver still shone, and the crystal gleamed. We were waited on by white-gloved servants. The violence and agitation all over the country seemed safely shut away outside those guarded walls, but it was an illusion only. My mother had, by now, completely lost track of the events of those years. She knew little and cared less that Catalonia was going to have its own elections; she knew nothing about the demands of the Basques. She didn’t understand the new laws passed, or why the convents and churches were burned, why the priests and nuns were turned out, and the buildings given over to secular use. But her delicate mental balance sensed the tension, and she herself grew more tense. She drank more, and we did not try to stop her. Even the Marquesa concurred in this. ‘If it gives her relief, let her have it. Perhaps it is a mercy not to understand.’
The Marquesa read the newspapers thoroughly each day, and enjoyed debating their contents with Juan and Edwin Fletcher at lunch. She whooped with triumph when, at the first regular elections for the Cortes held in 1933 the groups of the Right won forty-four per cent of the vote, while the Left got only twenty-one per cent. ‘There! ‒ the people have more sense than one sometimes gives them credit for. They know which side their bread’s buttered on.’
‘They often don’t have bread,’ Tomás commented.
‘Ho, ho, my little radical!’ the Marquesa answered. ‘Just look around you in the world and see that it has always been thus. Do they have more bread in Russia now because there is no Czar? They have less, we are informed.’
But Tomás usually didn’t join the arguments. He grew grave and silent in those years in which we watched a series of coalition ministries come and go, all more or less helpless and unpopular. Tomás worked hard at the lessons Edwin Fletcher set him, but without the spontaneous outbursts of boisterousness that had always made his company both a joy and a trial. He listened to the political arguments, read the newspapers, and said little. Each day he joined in the target-shooting practice which the Marquesa had established for her staff of guards, and for any other who cared to join. Edwin Fletcher was one of them; Juan, who had always been a good shot, practised regularly, and challenged and encouraged Francisco, who was now back in Jerez and who had a less keen eye than his brother. My mother joined sometimes, happy that she could still handle a gun and fire accurately, though she thought of it only as a test of skill, with no purpose of defence. She made a point of cleaning and loading her own guns; she was meticulous about returning them to the locked room where the household guns and ammunition were stored and whose keys were held by Maria Luisa. We set up targets on the other side of the lake, as far from the house as possible, but still the noise reached us, and added to the tension that these days hung over most households in Spain.
Then one morning as we walked to the target area we found Luis’s peach trees, which he had grown beautifully espaliered on the wall of the vegetable garden, had been wrecked. They had been hacked away from the wall, and lay broken and already withered. The empty space of the wall had been daubed in huge black threatening letters. Muerte. Death.
* *
Elena came again to Jerez after a series of crises had convulsed the country in 1934. A Catholic and Monarchist party had formed a cabinet, and two days later Catalonia declared its independence. This rising was again suppressed by government troops, and then came the insurrection of the miners in the Asturias. We heard stories, and only half believed them, of the brutality with which these risings were put down. Elena, however, had access to uncensored reports in newspapers we never saw, and she was alarmed.
She came to Los Cisnes to argue with the Marquesa. ‘Will you now come?’
‘Why should I? Aren’t the right people back in control? What do I have to fear?’
Elena sighed with impatience. ‘Oh, don’t you see? This government can’t last. There’s been trouble enough. There’s much worse to come. There’s nothing but anarchy ahead for Spain. You’ve no right to expose yourself in this way. No right!’
The old woman looked at her, her face cold with anger. ‘Who says what my rights are or are not? Since when, Elena, did you begin to give me orders?’
Elena left, dissatisfied and frustrated. Her last words to me were bitter. ‘She stays because you assure her it is safe. She’s an old woman now, and she listens to whomever is closest. You’ve used your time well, Carlota, but she has never been anyone’s fool.’
‘Only a fool would count her that, Elena. And I am no fool, either.’
The Marquesa continued to visit the bodega. In fact, with the country in its present state of turmoil, she derived, it seemed, some pleasure from the relative tranquillity of the place. But that was also the year in which I had to note in my diary, ‘Very abundant crop, but gathered by inexperienced workers. Strike in vineyards and bodegas. Musts of high strength.’ We were not immune, no more than anyone in the country. When the strike ended we could no longer look into the faces of the bodega and vineyard workers, and be sure they were friendly faces. And yet, I thought, we were all so dependent on each other. I watched the shoots begin to appear on the vines the next spring with a sense of deep depression and apprehension. It began to seem that Spain would never have a stable government. I looked at the new vineyards which the Marquesa and I had caused to be planted. We had invested in the future, but I no longer saw the future in clear and simple terms. It was ever more possible that it would not be a matter of battling only against the various problems of tending the vines, gathering the harvests, selecting and grading the musts, replenishing the solera. Forces quite beyond the ones we knew and were used to, weather, drought and disease, might decree otherwise. As I feared the phylloxera and the oidium, I feared the things that might come, either quietly or with violence, to steal the vineyards.
I was startled, on my return from such a tour, to find that Luisa was at rifle practice. I turned on Edwin Fletcher. ‘How can you let her? What ideas are you putting into her head?’
He shrugged, and did not apologise. ‘Have you forgotten how old Luisa is? She is almost fifteen. To know how to handle a gun is no disadvantage in Spain these days. Would you object if she were learning to hunt deer in Doñana?’
‘This is different. She is so young yet, Edwin. Do we have to make her afraid?’
‘I hope no one, boy or girl, I’ve ever taught will not be able to look around them and see ‒ make their own decisions. Ignorance breeds the worst fear of all.’
‘Leave her alone, Mother,’ Tomás broke in. ‘A girl must be able to protect herself. Who knows when she might have to?’ I lay awake that night and thought of Luis, and his precious, his miracle child
, Luisa. It would have grieved him to see her exposed to what she heard every day, to stand near that disfigured wall where his peach trees had been massacred. He had thought to make her life like that of a fairy princess. Nothing evil or painful was ever to have touched it. But there had been no fairy godmother at her christening to grant such a gift. Instead she had for a godmother a woman whose name was hated in many places, whose very presence among us placed us the more in danger. But my delicate little flower, Luisa, was learning to shoulder a gun along with her brother. Who could blame me if, in moments of weakness, I yearned for the simpler days that were gone?
III
Almost the worst heartbreak of those troubled years was the day Martin reappeared at Los Cisnes in the uniform of an Army subaltern. We had thought him still in Paris, and I had written chiding letters to him, complaining of his long silence. ‘I’ve been in Morocco, Mother, doing my training.’
‘You, Martin! You are the last one to go into the Army. You were made for … for music, for study …’
‘I think if one would have the freedom for such things as music and books, one is going to have to fight for it. The Army is the only organised force. Outside of it is only anarchy. There is going to be war, Mother. I want to know how to fight, and I want to fight with the Army. I will not have the Communists telling me how my life is to go. Don’t forget I’ve heard a lot of Marxist theory talked in the places I’ve been. We all must do this, or do that. I prefer to choose. So I have chosen the Army.’
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 52
