Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  For days John lay so motionless that when she peered round the door she feared the worst. His eyes were always shut and, afraid he’d stopped breathing, she slipped quietly over to the bed. Then, sometimes, he opened his eyes, no more than a chink, and, relieved, she went from the room. She was coming to feel a certain warmth for the young man.

  In the six months she had worked for him, they’d barely exchanged more than a few words. He thanked her politely when he came down to eat, punctiliously paying her first for the food she had bought from the market in the morning, then opening a book without seeming to notice what he ate. He left everything to her, she could do as she pleased. He spent most of his time in the airless, almost lightless granary hammering away on a typewriter. Always alone. It was enough to make anyone ill. If he recovered, he’d have to live a healthier life, go out, enjoy himself more, like Sr Bob.

  His illness made him vulnerable, more human. When she brought in the broth that was all he would eat, gratitude broke through the formality and reserve of the past. A fleeting smile accompanied his near-voiceless thanks. Once, as she stood by the bed, he attempted to say something. The words came out so muddled that she was confused. ‘The men’ – what men? – ‘couldn’t’ – ‘the dam’. At the end she caught the name Miguel. There was no strength in his voice, his eyes were dull, and perhaps he knew he was making no sense for he collapsed on the pillow motionless again. She straightened the sheet, the room was cool – as cool as she could make it in the sweltering heat – the shutters closed over the glassless windows, and the pitcher of fresh water on the commode. She couldn’t do more. Thank God, the heat must soon lessen, the terrible shameless summer end.

  Gratefully, John heard the door shut and immediately wished she had remained. At first her constant attention deepened the despair that always accompanied the illness. Depression consumed all sense of being. Engulfed by a permanent stark now, tomorrow – the self of tomorrow, the becoming – collapsed into itself. Life – not the philosophical proposition but his own life – was without meaning. Drifting without compass, horizon or stars, he knew this more intimately than anything.

  His only defence was the inertness of driftwood; it prevented him from being plunged to the bottom for good. But nothing could stop the waves of memory washing over him: Miguel by the door, beret in hand, saying the crops had dried up, the calf was going to be sold, asking for a day-labourer’s job on the dam.

  ‘You’ve come to the wrong person,’ he heard himself say again. ‘The dam’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Ah! I thought …’ Miguel’s eyes showed both disbelief and acceptance.

  ‘No … Look, it’s only a question of time … María Burgos can’t go on refusing water to her own farms. She’s bound to strike a deal.’

  John had tried to believe his own words, to inspire Miguel with a confidence he no longer felt. Ever since the village water had dried up three months before, in June, the land had been scalped to the bone by the heat and drought. Bob had rapidly begun work on a borehole that landowners had previously abandoned before striking water, and again it had taken longer than he had expected. He needed water to fill the 25-million-gallon dam he was building. When, in the first week of August, water was at last struck, María Burgos, Miguel’s landlord, had demanded a punitive sum from Bob for the right to channel across her land to the dam. In doing so, she had denied water to Miguel and her other sharecroppers. For over three weeks, as intermediaries negotiated about the channel, the newly tapped water had gushed uselessly down a ravine. It was in this situation that Miguel suddenly appeared in John’s house to ask for a job on the dam.

  ‘Wait a bit longer. After all these months what’s another week or two?’

  Miguel stood there in silence, apparently not hearing John’s words. And then, down the mountain, came a rush of hot wind and the foolscap pages on the table went flying. John had scampered to pick them up, relieved not to have to say more. Miguel was confused, bending to gather up sheets round his feet. John wanted him to go. ‘All right,’ he’d said at last, ‘I know Bob isn’t taking anyone on at the moment. The way things are with María Burgos there’s no point. But I’ll ask him for you. Tomorrow …’

  Miguel’s hand was on the door. Through the roar of the wind, John heard his footsteps on the stairs and began ordering the typewritten sheets. The next day, true enough, he had mentioned it to Bob, but without pressing the matter. He could, should have said, take him on, he needs it, pay him out of what you owe me. It’s only five bob a day.

  But he hadn’t. The idea hadn’t even occurred to him. And a few days later Miguel was dead.

  3

  John struggled to raise himself on the straw pillow. The depression brought rage in its wake: rage at Miguel for implicating him in his death, for taking his revenge in so accusing and uncontestable a way. Christ, a few days was all he had to wait! Last Monday, the day he killed himself, María Burgos and Bob reached agreement. He had died without knowing it. Why couldn’t he wait?

  The rage was so intense that, in a small lucid space beneath, he saw its irrationality. He was raging at Miguel to deny his own inevitable sense of guilt. A job on the dam would have given him breathing space, saved his life. That was all he’d asked of a friend. The final straw in a summer of disasters. And he’d been turned away.

  John cried, overcome with remorse. The tears, for once, silenced the other self that normally watched him. He slumped in the bed, not caring whether Dolores discovered him in this state.

  He must have cried himself to sleep because suddenly he awoke sweating with the thought already formed: it was she, wasn’t it, who’d cut off hope. María Burgos! Refusing him water, breaking the deal when she’d left him no option but to sell the calf, she had shown nothing but disdain for his plight. Yes, it was she who had to carry the blame for his suicide.

  John lay back in relief. Pushing a fringe of matted hair from his eyes, a small fissure opened in the back wall of his mind. If it hadn’t been for the dam, would she have acted like that? In those long waterless months, wasn’t that the real cause of this nightmare: the dam? Bob’s grandiose plans? Hadn’t Miguel always predicted her almost certain reaction against it – and most probably at his cost?

  But what was it then the other men had said? A quarrel with his betrothed. What betrothed? Miguel had never spoken about being engaged.

  John attempted to control the thoughts that chased, mouth to tail, behind his closed eyelids. To give them an order, a causality that would, once and for all, assign them their proper responsibility. Even as he tried, they turned on him: the ordering of things seemed no more than another way of denying guilt.

  ‘Dolores!’ he called, but his voice was too weak.

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes. He needed her to slow down the thoughts, her presence soothed him. With a patience he, of all people, had no right to expect, Dolores looked after him as no one else had. She never asked what was wrong, what illness he had. He’d been shunted through enough London hospital departments to know that no doctor could tell him. An illness without a medical name was an illness that didn’t exist. Everyone needed a medical name to feel safe. Everyone, except Dolores.

  He heard her breaking brushwood in the kitchen and called out again; but the cracking and swishing of rosemary went on as before.

  Once more he tried to order his thoughts and, as though its underpinnings were giving way, his head threatened to collapse. He recognized the symptom: it was how the illness had started. He’d staggered back to the office after an attack of flu to find that his closest friend, Dave, had resigned over the paper’s policy on the Suez crisis. He had wanted to follow him. The editor’s chauvinist fervour sickened him, but he’d been sickened still more by his own lack of resolve in writing the leaders demanded. (‘This newspaper, this country will not stand by while another petty dictator tears up international agreements …’) Yet his only act of defiance had been to bet the editor ten shillings that Eden would be out of power w
ithin a couple of months. He had never collected his money because on the day of his return to the office he had had his first collapse.

  He reached out for the water jug but it was too heavy to lift. The total exhaustion was like an unending flu. Each time he’d recovered and gone back to work, his head had drained away on the editorial floor. At last, with a paternal pat on the back, the editor had told him to take an extended holiday; his job would be waiting for him on his return. He hadn’t called it sick leave, John had noted, too worn out to smile but grateful to be leaving, he didn’t know where. Somewhere, anywhere, so long as he could find a time in which not to have to think on command.

  Nothing here, he thought, trying to read patterns in the cracked blue wash above the bed, had come between him and himself. In the six months that he’d spent in Benalamar the sickness had vanished. Every morning, in the muddy light of the granary, he’d sat at his typewriter, convinced of the need to discover in his ordinary enough English middle-class childhood the fatal flaw that would explain his passivity. To find it was the task he’d set himself from the day of his arrival in the village last March; and until he had done so he intended to stay in Benalamar. The flaw’s most recent manifestation could be summed up in a few words: where Dave acted, he, John, fell ill … But this syndrome, which had served as the starting point of his self-examination, had not as yet led to the vital discovery – or in consequence to the cure. For the question was not just to discover the flaw but to expel it, like a foreign object, from his being.

  With a conviction bordering on the fanatic, he believed that writing was the only possible means of achieving both aims. Once the flaw had been pinned down in words, exactly defined, it would be a relatively easy task to uproot it in himself. This fiction, fed by his youthful knowledge of books rather than life, had at least once a fortnight led him to think that he had definitively impaled the flaw on a shaft of words. Leaning back in his chair, he would examine it with satisfied curiosity until, to his horror, he saw it diffusing like a blot of ink across the page, lacking precision, contour, content, the amplitude to take in all exceptions. He hadn’t been discouraged. The following morning found him again at the granary table. Was it not Flaubert who had said that inspiration consisted of taking one’s place at one’s desk every day at the same hour?

  On the ochre wall above the table he had pinned a cutting from The Times: ‘It was when I faced the British invasion that I felt what that icy, effortless indifference and superiority in Englishmen like myself had done to the rest of the world …’ They were words he wished he had written himself. Each time he had read them he’d hunched over the typewriter with renewed passion until, with the daily ration of pages achieved, he allowed himself to plan his afternoon walk, preferring the solitariness of the countryside to the village, a solitariness almost unbroken until he encountered Miguel.

  On those spring afternoons down at El Mayorazgo, watching the water flow like liquid mercury through the channels and furrows Miguel geometrically hoed, the earth turning black round the tomato vines, he had been filled with a child-like stillness he thought he had forgotten. The air was heat-stilled, the hills shimmered under an implacable sun, a mineral silence fell on the earth. Up above the three pines on the hill, the ascending white lines of the village were drained of colour. Riveted by the heat and the water’s flow or the arc of Miguel’s hoe through the air, John watched him from the shade of a carob. As still and enduring as the land’s hot silence, it seemed, Miguel’s face under the sombrero looked up with the same quiet words, the same slight smile …

  He shut his eyes. Again he had been a passive observer, refusing to commit himself. Even to an elementary act of human kindness when Miguel needed it most. That was the truth, that’s why it had come to this. He felt himself going under.

  ‘Dolores!’

  ‘Sí, señor.’ She stood in the doorway at last.

  ‘Please, could you fetch me a glass of water. And open the shutters.’

  The light hurt John’s eyes, but it was better than the perpetual penumbra. The water was cool and he drank it gratefully. Dolores watched him, thinking he was looking better, his blue eyes less dull. Feeling the warmth of her gaze, John looked at her: dark hair, fine features – but how lined her face was, how old could she be? Not more than forty, surely. He gave her the glass. ‘Thank you, Dolores. Thank you for everything.’ She smiled, stood as though waiting, and he searched for something more to say; in the end all he could find was to ask whether the farms were getting water now,

  ‘No. Miguel’s mother is bringing charges against the building of the dam.’

  ‘Charges! What charges? Against whom?’

  ‘I don’t know. She says the dam is unsafe, that it’s responsible for Miguel’s death. You heard how they buried him? Ay! They wouldn’t have dared if he had been rich. But the rich don’t kill themselves, those who have money can do what they want.’ Her voice was harsh, monotonous like the land burnt by the sun.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to him now.’

  ‘He was a man, señor, even in death the poor have a right …’ From outside came the familiar cries of the fish-vendor, the waterman with his donkey, the blind lottery-seller. Dolores’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘They killed him, señor, and buried him like an animal.’

  ‘They, Dolores? Who do you mean?’

  ‘They … No, the señorita, María Burgos. For years she has cheated that family. Didn’t she make him go back on the deal after Miguel had given his word? He had to ask Tío Bigote for the calf back. She’s without shame.’

  ‘But the water, the dam?’ John’s voice was so low she barely heard.

  ‘If she had wanted he could have had water. Hasn’t the water been flowing since San Jenaro’s day? María Burgos used the dam to get money out of Sr Bob. She didn’t care about Miguel or anyone else.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for the dam, he’d have had water, is that what you’re saying, Dolores?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she’d have found something else. But that’s what Miguel’s mother thinks.’

  ‘And so she’s bringing charges.’ She nodded. There was a long silence. Finally John summoned the courage to add: ‘Perhaps there were other reasons.’

  ‘You mean Juana, his betrothed?’

  ‘Well, yes …’ She didn’t understand, didn’t know that Miguel had asked him for a job. Sinking back on the pillow, closing his eyes, John barely heard her reply.

  4

  At dawn, as the donkeys’ hooves clipped over the cobbles under his window, John awoke to an unexpected surge of energy. He lay still for a while. In the past this sudden flow had sometimes been a false augury and drained away as rapidly as it had come. But now, under its sustaining power, he got up and went into the granary next door. Shining through the small window, the first rays of the sun lit the adobe ceiling and the beams of dried agave shoots and fell in a blood-red patch on the tiled floor.

  He stared uncomprehendingly at the sheet of paper in the typewriter; the words it contained seemed meaningless. How was it that, in apparently so short a time, they had drained of all content? Was it the sickness, he wondered, realizing that he had no exact idea of how long he had been ill. He looked for a calendar. Saturday, 9 September, it must be, at a guess, because yesterday was almost certainly a Friday – Dolores had said there was only fish to be had. Twelve days of illness, twelve days then since Miguel died and was buried: Monday, 28 August, he’d never forget. Twelve days, no time at all, and yet it felt like eternity.

  He leafed through the typewritten sheets stacked on the table and then put them on the floor. The self-examination that had engaged so much of his energy seemed suddenly irrelevant. For a long while he sat staring at the clean sheet he had put in the machine; he knew he had to write about Miguel, to uncover cause and effect in order finally to be able to accept his death. Who could have believed six months ago that this calm, smiling man would kill himself? John stared at the paper: where to begin?

  T
he things before they were known, he typed at last, the things once known … The problem is always the same – to reason, to become aware …

  Underneath, he added: Cesare Pavese, his diary.

  Then: How can one understand the things before they are known? Seen from outside, everything is relative, equal – equally absurd or gratuitous – without a meaning other than what one wants to give it. Beautiful even. I remember, for example (things before they were known), when one afternoon in the shade of a tree, I was roused from half-sleep and sat up to look, to take pleasure in watching something unknown, becoming aware slowly of movement and sound, a whirring of stones that fell with a thud in the corn. Rippling, the thin stalks closed over the sound. The afternoon sun lay full on the terrace, leaving only a patch of shade under an olive where the man stood; beyond, like liquefied heat, the vapour shimmered over the hills. The man bent again, fastening the stone, and his arm looped in a slow circle which gathered speed until the stone was released with the crack of a rifle. Then he stood motionless, watching. In the corn nothing happened, a few birds fluttered, there was silence again. I lay back against the tree. Every few minutes the man stooped for a stone to send through the sunlight; an hour passed. The stones fell in a wide arc, as though pursuing a pattern, varied indefinitely, aimed by the slow, deliberate movement under the tree. Then a girl appeared round the back of the farmstead, across the terrace from him, and started to clap. The rhythm was fast and insistent and the sound reverberated in the hills. The stones continued to whirl and crash more rapidly than before, as though the girl’s quick beat had sharpened the urgency, but neither showed any awareness of the other’s presence. In the corn nothing moved. The girl faced the terrace, her clapping directed at it with ferocious monotony, her hands at the height of her face. A woman in black came out of the house and took her place next to the girl and started to beat on a tin can. She held a stick in one hand. The stones flailed into the dry earth under the stalks. Now the man started to shout, long hoarse cries that rang out over the beating of the old woman’s tin, over the girl’s shrill cries, up to the pines. The three stood facing the corn, concentrated on something under the vast sky, in feverish isolation from the rest of the land, which shimmered in heat-stricken silence. In a movement of incantation, the girl raised her arms above her head and ran forward a few steps as though about to throw herself in the corn. Then she stepped back and began clapping again. She repeated the movements at regular intervals and, as the old woman’s drumbeat reached a fury, lunged with outstretched arms and yellow sombrero into the corn. Her red skirt made a splash of ceremonial colour, the shouts and the beating galvanized her dance. Like fragments of silence, a few specks winged away in the sun.