Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  Dolores remained by the stove, nodding occasionally but bewildered as to the purpose of this unexpected talk. Against her will, she found herself lulled into an intimacy closer than when he’d been ill. He seemed to be offering something she couldn’t return. To ease her mind, she broke more brushwood across her knee and put it into the stove, and when she turned round John was sitting with his eyes half closed and in silence. She waited for him to speak again, but he said nothing. For minutes that seemed like hours he sat, half looking at her. She shuffled, thought of asking if he wanted more coffee, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. Momentarily she wondered if he was ill again, but she knew it wasn’t that. There was nothing but his silence. It entered her with the power of an alien dream, overwhelming her with the urge to break its hold. She was as frightened of silence as most of us are.

  ‘Culebra, what does he know?’

  She had to shake herself free of the fear. And then came the questions, one after another, soft-spoken and unremitting, while he sat there motionless, his eyes fixed on hers. Before long, she found herself turning away to dab at her eyes; then at last, to her shame, she burst into tears.

  17

  16 September

  Dolores said: ‘Culebra, what does he know? He wants to put all the blame on Miguel’s betrothed because he has his relations with the señorita to mind. She and he are as close as these two fingers of mine. She got him off after he slashed the sharecropper at El Vicente across the neck with a hoe and sent him to hospital for several months. It was a wonder he didn’t die. Culebra was stealing his water and the other man came to protest. No, you can’t take Culebra’s word for anything, everyone knows that. And in any case, if Juana were to blame, more likely Miguel would have killed her first, don’t you think?’

  ‘Um…!’

  It had happened a couple of times before, she continued, but Miguel hadn’t laid a hand on Juana as far as she knew. True, they’d quarrelled, but what couple didn’t when they were betrothed?

  ‘What did they quarrel about?’

  ‘People said it was because she went down to the coast to work and Miguel wanted her back. But I don’t know, people say all sorts of things like – like that she was seen talking to a man down there, that sort of thing.’

  ‘So what Culebra said was true. Who is she?’

  ‘Juana Moréno.’ No, the reason people blamed her was that she was betrothed before and threw over her novio. ‘That’s not in her favour, is it? The men say, you see the sort of girl she is, what can you expect of her, but it’s not her they ought to blame, it’s not her fault, she –’

  ‘What’s Juana like?’

  ‘Like? Well, dark, about my height, quite pretty.’

  ‘I mean as a person.’

  ‘Oh. Gay, I suppose, yes, not that she’s got anything to be gay about now.’ For several years when she was little more than a child Juana had worked in the bakery next to Dolores’s house to help out her widowed mother who had nothing. Juana had always seemed cheerful despite the hardships.

  ‘Were they planning to get married soon?’

  She didn’t think so. Miguel hadn’t bought the furniture; he probably wasn’t thinking of getting married for two or three years. ‘He wasn’t like most of the men, was he? Because, although he had the farmstead, he had his mother and sister to support, he had to think of them first.’

  What had happened to Juana’s father, I asked.

  For a long instant Dolores didn’t reply. She looked out of the window as though, I thought, to see if anyone was passing. Then, in a whisper, she said he’d been shot.

  One of the leading militants of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, he was too ill to flee when the village fell. The local falangists dragged him out of bed and shot him with a dozen others.

  ‘The people here shot a number of landlords, didn’t they?’

  ‘Some people who called themselves anarchists came from Torre del Mar to clean up the village. We were sheltering falangistas, they said. The first time Antonio managed to get them to leave, but they came back again when he wasn’t here.’

  ‘Antonio?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t Miguel tell you? My betrothed, his brother.’

  ‘Your betrothed! Go on.’

  ‘He was only eighteen when he had to flee the village. We’d been engaged seven months.’

  ‘What did he do that he had to leave?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she cried. ‘But he’d have been shot if he’d stayed. It was the saddest day of my life, seeing him go. And yet I knew he had to.’ She turned and lifted her apron to dab away a tear, hoping I wouldn’t see.

  I said: ‘Let’s start from the beginning. I want to get this straight.’

  Little by little her account began to come clear. Antonio was the eldest son, twelve years older than Miguel. Against his father’s strong opposition, he joined the Libertarian Youth in his teens. Dolores became a member eighteen months later. From the start, she liked this cheerful, joking youth who even then seemed to take nothing for granted. There were many young girls who had their eye on him by the time he had to go out day-labouring because El Mayorazgo couldn’t provide work for two pairs of hands. Much of the time he was out of work or on strike. The landlords pulled up their vines, telling the labourers their Republic could feed them. Antonio led the labourers into the vineyards. She watched him growing in militancy – he was a member of the CNT now – and stature; he saw everything so clearly.

  One day he stopped her in the street. ‘This evening we’ll walk out,’ he said just like that.

  ‘Oh! What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Because you’re the one I want.’

  ‘And supposing you’re not the one I want?’ she’d replied. But the flush that came to her cheeks told them both she was lying. They walked out together that evening; a year later, just before the war, they were betrothed.

  It lasted only a few months. ‘I knew happiness once and I shall never know it again.’

  She broke down sobbing, her face hidden in her apron, the sound of Antonio’s name repeated again and again. Unresisting, she sat on the chair I held out for her. For a moment I laid a hand on her shaking shoulders, then thought better of it.

  18

  Later

  My silence this time gave her a space and the time to relive her sadness. At last, wiping away the tears, she said she was sorry she’d cried, she hadn’t wanted to. She got up and stirred the embers in the stove and put on more brushwood. The smell of rosemary and sage filled the kitchen. After a time she brought the coffee pot to the table and poured us each a glass. The goats’ milk tasted creamy and sour.

  Then in a low voice she said: ‘Antonio was one of the last to leave the village before it fell; he knew his fate if he stayed.’ For days and days she had cried, it was the end of her world. During the civil war she’d had two letters from him, via the Red Cross, but it was only at the end of the war that she learnt he’d been killed on the Ebro. He never gave up his ideals, he believed in the revolution until the end.

  How had he reacted to the start of the military uprising, I asked.

  By then he was one of the CNT’s leading militants in Benalamar, she said. He was among those who attacked and reduced the Guardia Civil barracks. When the guards came out with their hands up, one of the attackers shot the sergeant dead. Antonio knocked the shotgun out of his companion’s hand. ‘If you want to kill fascists, go and kill them in open combat,’ he shouted, but it was too late.

  ‘He had always been against killing; he believed the landowners’ land should be taken but not their lives. “What’s the reason for sending them up there,” he pointed towards the sky, “when they can learn to work down here for the first time in their lives?” The land must be for those who work it, not for those who own it. The labourers should take over all the land and work it collectively. How often he said to me: “That’s the only way we can control our own lives, ensure that what we produce remains ours to deal with for the good of al
l. But not egoistically, like the bourgeois. No!”’

  ‘Did he make it work?’

  ‘He helped to organize a collective on the big estates in the plain. All the produce was distributed free in the village, so much per head. We felt such joy: the revolution had happened! We were free, no one had to work for anyone else, when you went out to till the collective’s land you weren’t thinking of the cacique or boss.

  ‘But Antonio couldn’t do anything with the sharecroppers. He tried to persuade his father that he’d be better off if all the sharecroppers put their land together, worked together. “Look,” he told him, “we’ll get mechanical threshers so you don’t have to thresh by hand any more, we’ll have one cowherd and a new cowshed so each of you doesn’t have to waste time, we’ll cement the irrigation channels … And half the produce won’t go to the landlord any more.”

  ‘But his father wouldn’t listen. He believed in the old ways. As a young man he had served the Burgos family; he and María were the same age. Antonio told me she’d wanted to marry him, but he turned her down. For a long time his father didn’t speak to him.’

  ‘Did he ever mention the collective building a dam?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Perhaps. He was full of ideas, always thinking of something new, of the future. But it only lasted six months here, there wasn’t time …’

  And his father had hidden María Burgos?

  Yes, it was true, though Antonio had never said anything even to Dolores. She found out only when the Franquista military took the village and suddenly the señorita reappeared. She’d escaped in the first days when some of the extremist youth were looking to round up the landlords. That’s when they set fire to the church … María Burgos got out of her house at night dressed as a man and escaped to El Mayorazgo. The old man had a hiding place ready for her underneath the cowshed.

  ‘So it was all prepared?’

  Dolores nodded. ‘There was great hatred among the labourers for the landowners. It got even worse just before the war when the owners boycotted the workers. So the señorita must have known what was coming … Antonio always kept the revolutionary militia away from El Mayorazgo.

  ‘He saved her life,’ I exclaimed. ‘He could have turned her in.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘At the end of the war the señorita put in charges against him. He would have been shot if he’d come back. They shot so many, ten times as many as the landlords who were killed. The crucifix and the rifle, they said, but it was the rifle they used. If he had to die, I’m glad he died fighting the enemy face to face.’

  19

  16 September, evening

  Dolores was worn out, her face drawn and flushed from crying. I still had many questions in my mind. Miguel, his mother and father, the señorita … For a moment I thought of pushing her further, then decided against.

  ‘You’re tired. Let’s leave it there for now. This afternoon we’ll talk some more.’

  She nodded. ‘I must go to the market to buy lunch. I don’t know if the fish vendors have come.’

  ‘Get whatever you can,’ I said, and went up to the granary. I wanted to write down the conversation as accurately as I could before I forgot. Her hatred of María Burgos had solid reasons, I now saw, and it would have to be taken into account in anything she said. Was this perhaps why she refused to give real credence to the idea of the quarrel between Miguel and Juana?

  In the afternoon we sat in the kitchen again. She seemed more relaxed, as though the worst had past. The heat came through the open window in waves deflected from the walls across the narrow street which was silent in the somnolent after-lunch hour …

  ‘Tell me about Miguel’s father,’ I said.

  ‘What was there to tell?’ she replied. He was one of the old sort, he’d had his own herd of goats until Carmela, Antonio and Miguel’s sister, fell ill, and he’d had to sell the herd to pay for medicines. She died and he was left without anything. He went to see the señorita’s father, old Gil, in his cloth shop. The sharecropper at El Mayorazgo had just died too, and he, who had never asked a favour in his life, now asked Gil the favour of his life. For the first time anyone could remember, indoors or out, he took off his hat. If he didn’t get to his knees it was because for no one in this world or the next had he ever fallen so low. Removing his hat was a sign not of deference but respect for a peer. He uttered his request in a few, plain words, as was his custom, and without explanation or justification. Austere, self-contained, he looked Gil straight in the eye. No one was certain whether Gil knew that his daughter had wanted to marry him once; nor why he granted the favour when there were so many others he could have chosen instead of a goatherd down on his luck.

  Once, in his presence, Dolores recalled, Antonio attacked the landlords who were refusing the labourers work. His father rose from the table. ‘You’ve brought it on yourselves, this is a Republic of disorder. I’ve known worse times and you may yet, too. Go and join your own.’ Antonio got up and left. ‘He’d been disrespectful, one should never argue with one’s father.’

  ‘Was he harder than most?’

  She didn’t know about most, but he was much harder than her own father, for example, who’d always been loving to his children.

  ‘And the mother?’

  ‘Very devout – but a warm, loving woman whom Antonio worshipped. A real countrywoman who could carry seven sheaves of wheat from the farthest terrace to the threshing ring. “She had to work hard, much too hard, at El Mayorazgo when I was small,” Antonio had said. “Ana was almost born in the fields.” He never wanted to see a woman have to work like that again.’

  ‘When Miguel was Antonio’s age, did he have the same sort of character?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Dolores replied. ‘But Miguel was more – how shall I say – the more withdrawn of the two, you could never be sure what he was thinking. Antonio was more of a fighter, he wouldn’t have done what Miguel did. He would have told María Burgos what he thought, the way he told any landlord when there was trouble. But I didn’t know Miguel the way I knew Antonio. He was only young then. I remember during the hunger years when his father sent him as a goatherd to his uncle in the mountains, a terrible thing happened. Miguel – he was only eleven or twelve – came down from the mountains and found his uncle had been killed by the outlaws; people said they suspected he had informed on them. Imagine it! Terrible! Coming into the house to find the outlaws still there and his uncle dead. Poor child, I remember when his father fetched him back, his hair was hanging to his shoulders and he looked like something wild. Alone in the mountains with those goats, and the outlaws – even in times as bad as that a child shouldn’t be sent to the sierra. His father could have found him something here. But that was how the father was.’

  ‘I told you what Culebra said, that the señorita didn’t make Miguel go back on the deal. Why do you say she did?’

  ‘Because I know!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Her servant told me. She was standing outside the door. The señorita gave him back the fifty pesetas he’d added up wrong. Then she said, “You can cheat yourself, but don’t try to cheat me. Fetch the calf back, I didn’t say you could sell it.” She called him a lot of bad names, and he went out the door as white in the face as if he were already dead.’

  Neither of us said anything. Her eyes were shining with tears of rage – and triumph too – and the silence belonged to her.

  20

  In the square, the past hung heavier than the present with its familiar street sights. Returning donkeys, a flock of goats being driven into a house, the men coming in bowed under the weight of firewood – the eternal evening scene – appeared suddenly with the unreality of a stage set onto which he’d walked from the hidden workings backstage. John looked at the men and saw each with his own history within him, unspoken, silenced perhaps. That old man standing against the wall had lived through a revolution and civil war, barbarous shootings, hunger years; what did he, who would never appear in
history books, have to tell? Or that middle-aged labourer who must have been only a child then?

  They could, if they wished, tell what it felt like, the intimate taste of hope and despair. They’d survived. And then John realized how little he still knew about Miguel. Dolores had left him with one incisive memory, but that was of Juan Alarcón’s younger boy, the little brother of her beloved Antonio. He needed to find someone who had known Miguel well.

  John was already closer than he suspected. Later, as he lay resting, he shuffled and reshuffled the memories of his conversations with Miguel. Then, for the first time, it seemed, he noticed a name that repeated – but for which, unusually, he had no association. Pepe … Pepe … familiar, freely named, just unknown to him. With sudden energy, he rose and left the house, heading towards the bar. ‘Juanico will know!’

  21

  Pepe el Conejero. The barman knew him, of course, and agreed to arrange a meeting. In the bar the next evening, John found a young man with a slender, open face, confident brown eyes and a firm handshake. He didn’t remember seeing him before, though Pepe said he worked on the dam; but then it was a long time since John had been down to the site. Opposite Pepe sat Cristobal whom John knew well by sight, for he was the man who called to Ana in the afternoons when she walked by on the track above the gorge, and he’d envied the ease of his flirtation with her.