Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  Until a few weeks ago, Pepe had sharecropped a farmstead beyond El Mayorazgo in the hills. This year was the worst he had known in eleven years of sharecropping. He’d arranged to sell his last calf a month ago down on the coast when the farmstead’s owner, Culito, said no, the calf wasn’t to go.

  ‘We were standing in there at the bar, I gave the counter a bang with my fist, so hard all the glasses shook. “The calf’s going tomorrow because I’ve made the deal.” He knew what I meant. Last year he lost me two thousand pesetas by holding out for more when I’d made the deal. He didn’t say anything, he could see I was serious. Later Juanico asked how I could be so disrespectful to the landowner and I told him I’d do the same to anyone except my father whom I respect.’

  Pepe’s face, which had resisted the furrowed immobility of the men in the square, registered disgust. A month ago he’d gone to ask Bob’s foreman for work on the dam. ‘If it wasn’t for Sr Bob I don’t know where I’d be. The landlords here see the people in the bar and they say, “The sharecroppers are cheating us, they must be if they’ve got a duro to spend.” They don’t want a man to live.’

  It wasn’t like this in Torre del Mar where the people owned their own land, put in Cristobal. Pepe nodded: there a man could live like a human, take a day off now and then, go to the town.

  The moment had come; looking at Pepe, John spoke quietly.

  The señorita? Of course she was worse, Pepe replied, she was richer. ‘If it had been me I’d have told her what to do. Once a man has given his word on a deal, win or lose, he doesn’t go back on it. Miguel was like that – only he never talked back to her, he had too much respect. He went out of her door and a friend – Pedrico, it was – called to him to have a coffee. “I don’t want any,” he said, and he was white in the face. Pedrico had never seen him like that.’

  A question came to John out of the blue. Could she have objected to his selling the calf to Tío Bigote?

  Pepe looked dubious. In the past, Miguel and he had always sold their calves in the village. But this time Miguel must have seen he could get as good a price from his neighbour. ‘Miguel always worked everything out, he struck better bargains than any of us. He made a lot of money because he was the best farmer around here …’ He’d plant an early crop of maize, the same with tomatoes – last year he’d made ten thousand pesetas for his early tomatoes; a lorry came specially from Granada to collect them. Imagine that! No one here had ever done anything like it before. ‘Miguel noted down all his expenses, he kept accounts, not like the rest of us; he even noted down the date he crossed a cow.

  ‘Everything came easy to him. I remember last year when he was irrigating at night he’d turn the water into the alfalfa, jump on his bicycle and ride up to see his novia, then he’d come pelting down to change the water to another terrace and ride up again. And when I shouted, “Are you irrigating, Miguel?” he shouted down from above, “Yes, I’m irrigating from up here, look!”’

  Pepe’s face broke into a smile at the memory. Miguel had been happy and carefree then.

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘Miguel took the quarrel with his betrothed badly, that was the truth,’ Pepe replied. ‘It was just a tiff, the sort of thing that happens to everyone, but one night a month or so ago, on their way down the track together, Miguel said: “Pepe, I’m lost …”’

  Pepe told him not to be foolish. ‘“We’re all lost,” I said. I’d heard something of the quarrel, but a man doesn’t take that sort of thing to heart.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have let her go down to the coast, that was the start of the trouble,’ put in Cristobal sharply. Someone had seen her wearing trousers in the foreigner’s garden. ‘In trousers, yes. If Miguel had known.’

  ‘Trousers?’ John asked.

  ‘Yes. Trousers are for men, aren’t they? And not only that, she rode the foreigner’s horse on the beach and swam in the pool. It was becoming a scandal, people in the village were beginning to talk. That was when her mother went to fetch her back.’

  Walking up from the coast, Juana and her mother had stopped at El Mayorazgo for a drink of water. Miguel was there. He and Juana had had a fight the weekend before about her cutting her hair. ‘Juana shouldn’t have gone to see him. It’s not the custom, a novia doesn’t go to see a man when they’ve quarrelled, eh Pepe?’

  Pepe nodded. ‘Yes, Miguel was angry because she had had her hair cut like a foreign woman.’

  John smiled to himself, and then the memory returned of Ana coming down the track and Miguel’s anger over her hair.

  ‘Who does Juana work for?’

  ‘They say he’s a marquis or a lord, he was at the fiesta Sr Bob gave at the dam. A tall man with a moustache …’

  Lord Bughleigh, of course, staggering up on rubber legs to declaim Dante in Italian – who could forget it? He stood on a chair, swaying, never missing a line and without his usual stammer. The cheers at the end united for the first time the separate worlds of the dam workers and the foreigners up from the coast for the event, none of whom had understood a word. Then he fell down and the cheers broke out again.

  John remembered going down to the coast with Bob later to see him, Bob hoping to entice him to buy a plot, because other people would be certain to follow his example. And – Christ! – it must have been Juana who served dinner. Yes, a pretty girl with an olive-skinned face, it was coming back; provocative eyes and a way of walking that made Bob stare. My lord’s mouth opened and closed several times before he got out: ‘A sensation, my dear f-fellow. A complete tra-transformation – try my rum special – I take pr-pride in the change. An excellent horsewoman, na-native ability.’

  Everyone’s eyes had fixed on her generous body as she brought in the next course. Juana! John hardly heard what Cristobal was saying:

  ‘And Miguel thought because she’d gone to El Mayorazgo after their quarrel it meant she loved him. He should have known better. He’d already bought her a bracelet which she refused. Three nights in a row before he killed himself he came up to the village to see her, but she never came out of her house. That’s when he started to go mad.’

  ‘No, hombre, no.’ Pepe turned on him, and a group of men in the bar slowly turned to look. ‘She wasn’t at home, that’s all it was.’

  How had Miguel come to know her, John asked.

  Juana was his wife’s best friend, Pepe said. She was the only woman Pepe had ever known Miguel pluck up the courage to talk to. ‘Now and again he’d see one he liked and he’d say, “I’ll try her,” but when the time came he always went home. “Another time perhaps …”’ And yet he was lively, always making jokes. But he didn’t know how to talk, make compliments to a girl, though in other ways he was more of a man than any Pepe knew.

  But once he got up the courage, she was the only woman for him. At first, he hadn’t wanted her to go down to the coast, Pepe said. ‘I told him it was better that she didn’t go. But later he changed his mind, thinking she could earn well and save money working for a foreigner.’

  ‘A girl who’s broken with one betrothed can’t be trusted,’ said Cristobal, as though stating an eternal truth. Pepe ignored him.

  What else had Miguel said?

  Pepe sat silent for a time. Then he said: ‘When I told him I was leaving Culito to see if I could get work on the dam, I encouraged him to come with me. But he said he wanted to wait. If he’d done what I said this wouldn’t have happened, that’s what I think. But with the money he’d got saved up, I thought, he could buy fodder, hold out for a few months.’

  ‘He never said anything more to you about getting work on the dam?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he say anything else? Anything at all?’

  Pepe shook his head. It was true, Miguel hadn’t talked much towards the end, but Pepe thought he told him everything because they were friends.

  When had he seen him last?

  ‘Two nights before … He was
dispirited, yes, but I thought it was one of those things that would pass. It’s true, I hadn’t seen him like that before, he was usually so carefree. I never thought he could do anything like this.’

  ‘Never saw any signs before?’

  ‘Never. He was the last person I would have believed it of.’

  ‘Then why did he do it?’

  Pepe shook his head sadly. He didn’t know. When Miguel came out of the señorita’s house, he went down the street to Josefa’s shop. Pepe heard this later from her. He stood in the doorway for a while, looking in. There were other customers and she didn’t think much of it at the time, though later she remembered how white he looked. She wondered if he’d had a bit too much to drink. ‘Then he went in and said he needed some rope. She saw he was sober, and put a coil on the counter. He stretched it between his arms and tested it. “Stronger than that,” he said, smiling. She’ll remember that smile all her life, she says. He found the rope he wanted and paid for it. “I wouldn’t have sold it to him if I’d known why he wanted it. Never. Except for his pallor he looked the Miguel I’d always known, the young man who always knew his mind.”’

  22

  18 September

  I pulled out the last sheet of Pepe’s words from the typewriter and went to the window. It was 3 a.m. and the street was dead to the world. For a few hours the village slept in a silence mocked by the brightness of the moon which hung like an African mask overhead.

  On a new sheet of paper I jotted:

  Five hours of talk and only a slender yield of first-hand evidence. Miguel’s joviality in the past came as a surprise. But after the quarrel he felt ‘lost’; those who’ve insisted on the importance of the break with Juana are right. Then there’s his decision not to accompany Pepe to work on the dam. It’s puzzling. What was there to wait for at El Mayorazgo? The wait must have proved fruitless because when he came, finally, to ask me for work on the dam, he had no other hope. Two nights before the end he was ‘dispirited’, it was the night after he saw I wasn’t going to help. He said nothing of this to Pepe.

  All the rest is circumstantial: the cause of the quarrel, his attempts to see Juana three nights running and his visit, on the third and last night, to María Burgos. Only someone very close to Miguel – Ana perhaps – could provide indisputable facts. Daunting as the thought is at the moment, I shall have to talk to her.

  If one looks beyond ‘facts’, however, one could say that these talks have yielded some unexpected results. By comparison, as it were.

  This, for example: compare Pepe with Miguel. Pepe demonstrated that it’s possible for a sharecropper to stand up to his landlord and make him give way. Perhaps Pepe is exceptional; but Miguel had as much cause for complaint. He ‘respected the señorita too much,’ Pepe says.

  Then contrast Miguel’s inability to stand up to María Burgos with his decisiveness as her sharecropper: innovative, shrewd, prepared to take calculated risks. He must have made more money for her (as both must have known) than any other sharecropper. But it gave him no confidence to stand up to her, one has to conclude.

  There’s another comparison which Pepe himself made. Miguel was not like other village men in his relationship with women. He betrayed a lack of assertiveness towards individual women and, simultaneously, an assertion of male dominance over the role of women. He filled only half the male role as defined here.

  And finally, the contrast with his older brother and his father, as described by Dolores. Antonio resolute, rebellious, militant. His father authoritarian, proud, stubbornly refusing change. Both, without doubt, ‘men’, the men who dominated Miguel’s childhood, and difficult to live up to. Each, almost certainly, setting a different example to the boy. Miguel, one can imagine, may have felt he could never be the ‘man’ both his father and his brother expected him to be.

  Whichever way one looks at it, these ‘differentials’ represent no real advance. Reduced to a series of comparisons with others, Miguel, the man with a hoe on a terrace of corn standing in the centre of his own world, vanishes. This fragmentary evidence will only make sense when restored to the way he made his own life.

  23

  Two days later John got up his courage and set off to walk down the familiar track to the coast. His talks with Dolores and Pepe had made him realize that the search for Miguel was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated; the idea of creating a ‘memorial’ to Miguel was plainly an illusion. At best, he saw now, the attempt to give meaning to Miguel’s life was no more than an effort to make up for the meaning he had not accorded him in life. An unworthy return, an indulgence perhaps – a writer’s (or lover’s) impossible desire to be inside the other, to taste life from there. It was imperative now to talk to people who had entered his world with such desire.

  Nonetheless, the prospect of the forthcoming encounter with Juana made John nervous. She would look at him, he imagined, with eyes narrowing, thinking he’d come to make trouble. A foreigner! ‘No, I’ve nothing to say, I don’t know anything,’ and her face would close in peasant blankness over the wrought-iron gate and he’d be left looking at the clipped English lawn and weeping willow, at gardeners watering the hybrid teas Bughleigh was proud of having imported from England. And Juana would turn her back and walk away down the marble path into the house and the kitchen my lord likes to show off: Aga, refrigerator, oak table specially hauled from London – and the opportunity would be lost.

  That was to be avoided. It would be better to ask for Bughleigh straight away – the pretext of Bob’s plans would do – and ask his advice. All these people on the coast loved to talk about their deals. He’d heard them at Bob’s fiesta at the dam down there still just out of sight. Each trying to outbid the other with the claim to have bought cheapest and, in a rabid auction of English common sense, relate the most outrageous story of Spanish inefficiency, ignorance and sloth.

  ‘Of course, land up here in Benalamar is cheaper, but it’s not liveable, what!’

  ‘Only a question of time before it develops. Bob’s going to urbanize all this land, don’t you know? Lay out roads, gardens … Good value, I’d say. Plenty of water what with the dam.’

  ‘But can they build, that’s what I say. I had to show my workmen what a toilet roll holder was for.’

  Amidst the guffaws, the wine flowed from the carafes the muleteers silently unloaded before joining the workmen in their patched and bleached cottons at the other end of the trestle tables. Two distinct worlds. And then a Knightsbridge voice:

  ‘You’ll be laying out a golf course, won’t you, Bob? Look at this land, it’d make a perfect eighteen holes …’

  Bob smiled defensively at the jibe. Under the table the not-so-Knightsbridge wife rubbed her leg against John’s.

  ‘What a wonderful country this is! I know, it’s not really modern but that’s what makes it so charming.’

  A stupefied Bughleigh rose onto his chair and, amid cheers, started to declaim. The ruined blonde’s hand wandered to John’s thigh. ‘Why don’t we ever see you down on the coast?’ she whispered drunkenly.

  At the other end, the workmen had got a boy from one of the farms drunk and he was sprawled on his face.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to make love in that ruined castle outside Torre del Mar. Fifteenth century!’ Her hand fumbled with his fly. At that moment, along the rim of the gorge, John saw Ana passing; she didn’t look down but she couldn’t help but hear the revelling below. He got up suddenly, the wine swirling in his head, thinking to call out to her; just then Bughleigh collapsed amidst cheers and he sat down again.

  ‘My God, he bores you so with his poetry,’ the woman said in John’s ear. ‘Nothing he likes better than being wanked off while he’s reading – who is it? Ah, Dante, that’s right.’

  John imagined she had the information first hand in every sense, and thought it wisest to escape before, manu militari, she ambushed him …

  This arid earth a golf course! The morning air, as he walked down the track now, w
as as clear as a lens, the silence mineral sharp. Everything was visible and yet somehow invisible, and he realized with a shock that there was no one about on the terraces, which stood out in sharp relief. No activity, no men working, hoeing, breaking the earth to give a visible meaning to the terraces which, in silence and dust, seemed to be reverting soundlessly, endlessly to nature again. A couple of tethered goats came towards him anxiously, hopefully, as though no human had passed this way. Below, the white dots of farmsteads, close by yet separate, each just large enough in ordinary times for a family to subsist on half of what was produced; now no sound came from them.

  To his surprise he saw a line of men emerging from the watercourse, raising dust on the track. Gauging his footholds rock to rock, John hurried down to meet them, knowing they must be from the dam. In front walked the foreman, old Salvador, with his hooked nose set in a deeply wrinkled face.

  ‘Hola, Salvador! What’s happening?’

  The foreman lifted his sombrero and wiped his forehead. The other men piled up behind him and spread out.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They came and stopped the work. They say charges have been laid against the dam.’

  ‘What? Who came?’

  ‘The Guardia Civil.’ His voice was expressionless; the others stood staring beneath the straw rims of their hats.

  ‘Miguel Alarcón’s mother?’ John asked. ‘No, the mayor’s order they said.’

  Bewildered, John sat on a rock and wiped his face. Then he asked the foreman what he was going to do.

  ‘Go and inform Sr Bob, that’s all we can do.’

  ‘Yes, good. He’ll know what to do.’ But what was there to do? Things had gone further than he’d imagined. He watched the men going off; the last to move was José, with whom John had once sheltered, laughing together, as a shower of stones hurtled over them when they were dynamiting rock for the dam. He came from the farm below El Mayorazgo.