‘You never suspected?’
‘No, never. Those last nights when he came to my house in the village I didn’t show myself. What more could I do?’
‘Given him hope, perhaps.’
‘Hope? For nothing? No. He shouldn’t have insisted, he was – ah! One shouldn’t speak of the dead in this way … I can’t forgive, he killed something, wanting everything his way.’ Her hand went to her forehead, smoothed her hair. The agitation didn’t show yet, was constrained by the gesture.
‘What was it?’
‘Everything. He couldn’t see that I’ve got a life. He was stupid, like all of them. What he wanted was one of those women who stays at home sewing all day, submissives who say yes to your face and no behind your back. I’m not like that.’
The words cut her off like a door slamming. We stood for a time. ‘You didn’t love him?’ I said at last.
‘No.’ Suddenly she was no longer a mask. Her voice fell: her mother had pressed her to marry Miguel, who was a good match, a sharecropper with money, and because she respected her mother … ‘I tried but I couldn’t. My eyes have been opened.’
‘Opened?’
‘Yes,’ and she looked round the large kitchen, ‘opened. The foreigners are showing us that things can be different, they treat us like humans, even if we are poor and have to work. The señoritos have no respect for us. Fifty pesetas a month and what’s left on the plate …’
I shook my head, thinking of Dolores and the superficiality of the comment. She meant she wouldn’t exchange this house for Miguel’s farmstead.
She didn’t deny it. ‘Until the foreigners came there was nothing, no hope. But now there’s work, more money, new things. In the village the people point at me, I know. Miguel worried about the things the neighbours said. But why should I? I told him, they’ve got nothing else to do, what is there in the pueblo? We should go to the town. But he wouldn’t.’
‘And that’s when you broke with him?’
Yes, she said, but there’d been trouble before: his ordering her not to ride, not to cut her hair, not to wear trousers. ‘Madre mia! There was no freedom.’
‘He was jealous, perhaps.’ She flashed a glance to see what I meant and understood.
‘People think the worst,’ she answered tartly. ‘If an employer treats you like a human being they start to gossip. That’s how it is here.’
‘Was he worse than the others?’
‘No, not at the beginning, he was more gentle, timid …’ She reflected. ‘If he had remained – ah, why do I say this? He seemed nervous with women, I don’t know why, the other men used to laugh at him and the girls kept away. He didn’t know how to talk … So they said straight away I was after his money. Stupid … After a time he began to change, I don’t know whether it was because of his friends or his mother. It was as though once he was sure of me he wanted me to do everything he said. They probably told him that a novia must watch what the people say. That was the trouble, he wasn’t strong enough. The others think they’re born to it, but with him it was different, he thought he couldn’t be a man if he didn’t do what the others do.’
She spoke very rapidly, almost in a whisper. Our voices were murmurs covered by the swishing of the sprinkler watering the lawn.
‘He didn’t want to leave?’
She shook her head, she had tried to persuade him but he wouldn’t hear of it. He had his family to support. ‘And with that María Burgos who prays in church she’ll live for ever to go on robbing.’ Miguel became annoyed when she spoke the truth, and told her not to say it again. ‘And what are you going to do with the money the señorita doesn’t take?’ – and he had said, ‘With money you can buy what you want.’ She had said, ‘Remember the hunger years, there was money but nothing to buy,’ and he’d answered, ‘With land and a pair of arms you can live.’ – ‘In the same way as now?’ ‘Better,’ he’d smiled.
‘What did it mean?’
‘He thought one day he’d have enough money to buy a farm. That’s what he said once.’ Juana gave an impression of unconcern; he had refused her what she wanted, there was no more to be said. Then, unexpectedly, she added: ‘He wasn’t one for spending money, it cost him an effort. Saving was easy, but not spending, he was strange that way. He had a lot of money. The bracelet must have a cost a lot but …’ She shrugged.
‘You don’t regret anything?’ The dispassion, the distance she took in talking about him was disconcerting; her agitation came only when she felt herself implicated.
‘Regret? Yes, how can I not regret? But I don’t blame myself. I never lied, he knew what I thought. I didn’t wish him any harm, the harm he did was to himself.’
‘You might have prevented it. The people say –’ I caught myself and stopped. ‘I mean, why did you go to El Mayorazgo after you’d broken with him, it isn’t the custom, is it?’
‘Let the people say what they want, they’ve been talking about me since I was little because of my father. But if you want to know it was my mother’s doing. She was thirsty from the walk up, and she took the opportunity of stopping at the farm. She wanted me to patch things up with Miguel and that was her way of trying. It was a mistake and I regret it.’
She turned to look out of the window but there was no one there.
‘It gave him hope …’
‘I didn’t see him again. He was stubborn, once he had an idea he wouldn’t let go.’
‘He loved you, didn’t he?’
‘That was his way. He had an idea … It was a mistake from the start. I’m sorry it happened, but especially I pity his mother and sister. The family has had no luck. Miguel needed a country girl, someone like his sister, born to the country.’
‘But …’ The distinction seemed untenable; surely everyone in Benalamar was more or less born to the country.
‘Ah no, the village isn’t the countryside,’ she said in a tone that made me smile. ‘Some of the people who live in the country don’t come up to the village more than once a month. Not much happens in the village, but there’s even less in the country. That’s why I wanted to go to the town. If Miguel had agreed, perhaps then today …’ For the first time a slender chance appeared in her eyes, a hope that as rapidly vanished. ‘No,’ she said, picking up a saucepan, ‘it couldn’t have been. He would never leave.’
‘And you wouldn’t stay?’
‘No. Not in the way he wanted me to.’
‘The land meant that much to him?’
‘The land or his idea.’
‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know, it was there but he couldn’t say it. I think his mother and sister were part of it, they didn’t like my being his novia, they made me feel it.’
Was this another self-justification? A way of excusing her part? Impossible to tell. The bland manner, the new reasons, reasons whose logic remained opaque at each turn, made me suspicious. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘How can one know? Perhaps they were frightened he would leave.’
‘They knew you wanted to?’
‘Yes. But they knew he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t leave them. His mother, especially, she was always telling him things. Warning him about me, saying I’d come between them.’
‘Were they that close?’
‘As close as two fingers. Miguel wouldn’t do anything without asking her, he let her treat him like a child. That was another thing that got on my nerves. He was always going to be hers more than mine.’
‘He was the only man left in the family, I suppose.’
‘Yes, and he wanted to act like a man with me but he couldn’t get over being her child still.’
What was his mother like, I asked. She answered with the usual physical description. I insisted: ‘As a person …’
‘All right, I suppose. She’s got a hard hand, that’s for sure. When the old man was still alive, she didn’t have much to say for herself. But once he was dead she took over. She once turned the señorita away from the farmhouse when she came loo
king for crops. “Whose home is this?” she said to her, barring the door. “Mine. And people only come in when I invite them.” Of course, the señorita was hidden in the house during the war so she owed them a bit of respect. Not that she ever showed it, from what Miguel told me.’
‘Isn’t she a religious woman?’
‘Yes. Well, she’ll have learnt now. The second time round …’
‘What do you mean?’
Surprised that I didn’t know, she described how, on Miguel’s father’s death of a heart attack, the priest refused to bury him in holy ground because he hadn’t received absolution. Miguel pleaded with the priest to no avail. At last he said: ‘My father was more devout than any of those you see crossing themselves in church today – they were all Reds.’ The priest took the point: it was well known that his own father had been one of those ‘Reds’.
‘Did Miguel ever talk to you about Antonio?’
‘No, he never mentioned him. I can remember him because he was a friend of my father’s, he used to come to our house often when I was a child. They were in the same thing together, you know what I mean. Antonio was lucky unlike – ’
The garden gate opened and she stopped, bending over the Aga, clattering saucepans, as Bughleigh came up the path. Smooth and pink, his face appeared round the door. Sober, affable, he showed me out of the kitchen, apologizing for his absence and insisting that I have a drink. We had to go out to look at his latest gadget for watering roses, at the sundial he was making, a horse he’d just bought. A tour of the domain. He was delighted I’d come, I must have a swim, stay for lunch … Loneliness exaggerated the insistence in his voice, the futility of his attempts to find something to keep himself engaged … Is this what’s going to happen in Benalamar one day?
When I got back I wrote Bob a note: ‘Think the problem’s solved, Bughleigh will put up the money. Leave it to you. Best, John.’
28
Later
Further jottings: indications.
Twin aims: Land: contesting the general fate, abstracting himself from María Burgos’s domain, Miguel’s project (at last confirmed) was to secure what few have achieved: a farm of his own. Marriage: transcending the area of least personal confidence, he attempted to secure, in Juana, the self-assurance of a wife. Money made both possible; and was made possible by his success as a farmer. Whatever its origins, his obsessive saving became part of a conscious project; careful of money, he was simultaneously carefree of time and trouble, a good neighbour.
Inter-related aims: establishing himself in the two vital areas of life, he would secure self-sufficiency where there had always been lack: his own master of woman and land.
Two losses: instead of fusing, the aims became antagonistic: to be the master of one he must renounce the other. This summer the two broke irremediably apart, in Juana’s refusal to act the role, in María Burgos’s refusal to act anything but the role; each betrayed him.
Or so he might have conceived it. Suddenly prepared, in an apparent reversal, to splash everything on a bracelet, repaying them by a show of success, imitating the rich, the foreigner.
Fatal flaws: Taking the blame for the betrayal on himself, as though he were its cause. Guilt. A man’s man – joking and laughing – he wasn’t ‘man’ enough to ‘talk’ to a woman; the head of the family was still a boy in his mother’s eyes. Inadequacy. The child who was split, the adolescent whose future was decided for him. Rage. The young man who angrily projected goals to prove his adequacy as a man. Fetishization. The man who came so close to realizing those aims that their loss was the insufferable loss of himself. Despair. Inadequacy, guilt, rage turned back on themselves …
Speculations, that’s all. If they were true, one would have to know why they were true.
Tomorrow, I’ll try to find Ana.
29
22 September
Irony, they say, is the soul of modernism, though I think of it rather as the hidden tension between the thing before and after it’s known. Pavese knew a thing or two about irony. A writer and poet who became a Communist in the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s, he never believed he was a good enough Communist. Mussolini, however, believed in his Communism and dispatched him to internal exile. Too fine a writer to believe in ‘socialist art’, too critical an intellectual to believe in the inexorable progress of history, he nonetheless remained a Communist. Lonely, uncertain of himself, he was desperate for a lasting relationship with a woman. But the only profound relationship he ever enjoyed was with his native Piedmont (how often he compares its soft, smooth hills to women’s breasts!). Finally, a few years ago, he fell in love with an American actress. The love wasn’t returned and he committed suicide …
Why am I saying this? Because today that hidden tension snapped and left me defenceless. Even the ‘known’, it turns out, was not sufficiently known … Perhaps nothing is ever definitively known and the irony … But I’m intellectualizing to put off the moment, delay it. This is how it happened.
From the pine hill I saw Ana alone on the terrace below. Unsure whether I could face the two women together, I’d hoped to find her without her mother. The time when I used to wait for her on the path where I was standing now seemed like another era. She was wearing black except for her straw hat – a dust-stained black dress that was too small and made her look childish, gawky somehow. A dog jumped up from her feet and came barking at me, churning up the dust.
I stopped a few yards away. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘Buenas tardes.’ Her voice expressed the usual indifference and she barely looked at me.
‘I’ve been meaning to come down before to say how sorry I am.’
‘Sorry! It makes no difference. Everything is over.’
‘Yes, I know. If I had known before …’
Her lips opened to say something, then she looked away. I felt she was about to reproach the banality of my condolences. What was it she wanted to say?
‘Nothing. It’s all over.’ She stooped, felt for a stone and flung it underarm over the dry earth.
‘Ana, one day things will be different.’
‘No! How can they be with him gone! You can’t understand. All the years he suffered and worked …’
‘For what, Ana?’
‘Why do you ask when you already know?’
‘To buy a farm, wasn’t it?’ As I stepped towards her she moved back, as though to stay out of reach.
‘I told my brother –’
‘That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it, Ana?’
‘What difference does it make to you, señorito, if my brother wanted land, if he was going to buy the farm?’
‘Is that what he’d always wanted?’
‘Always. Always, since he was young in the sierra. There weren’t any foreigners then.’ Her eyes, the irises almost as dark as the pupils, stared with anger. Let it pass, I thought, keep her talking.
‘So it was in the mountains that he first had that dream. He never changed?’
‘No. Not even when the foreigners came.’ Now the dog, fangs showing, seemed to sense what she was feeling and slid forward from her feet.
‘But he had other plans, too, didn’t he?’ I said, ignoring the dog. I wasn’t going to let her escape. ‘Juana, I mean.’
‘That girl wasn’t important to him.’ Abruptly, she turned away. ‘He was too good for her.’
‘Maybe. But he wanted to marry her, didn’t he?’
‘My Miguel wouldn’t have married her. She only wanted him for his money. To have a good time in the town. She’s without shame.’
‘She was the only woman he ever approached, Ana.’
‘What do you mean?’ Her hand went to her face and a smudge appeared under her eyes which were staring into the distance.
‘I mean, he didn’t find it easy to talk to a woman, did he?’
‘He didn’t want to. He was happy as he was.’
‘He tried to see her those last nights.’
‘Because she’s shameless. S
he came to El Mayorazgo to make trouble for him. My mother told him he didn’t need a woman like that. We gave him all he needed, all.’
The motherly love, sisterly devotion, domestic comfort, without having to leave the family, I thought. Softly, I said: ‘Ana, do you remember once when I came down and Miguel was showing me how to drink from the pitcher? Or another afternoon perhaps, and he argued with you …’
‘Ay! Why do you come down here to remind me of this?’ Gulping, her eyes filled with tears and she buried her head in her hands.
‘Ana, I only meant –’
She sprang away from my touch.
‘I loved him. I didn’t betray him … I knew everything he was thinking. I loved him so much. I couldn’t do anything.’
‘What was there to do?’
‘No! You could have …’
My head started to drain.
‘You don’t know what you did! You, señorito!’
‘But Ana, the job, the water – I tried …’
‘No, the land. Tío Bigote’s. He wouldn’t sell at the price.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Tío Bigote’s!’ she screamed. ‘He put the price up for you. Miguel hadn’t the money.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You were looking for land, everyone said so. Tío Bigote’s is the only farm you could buy. Why else were you always coming down here?’
Oh Christ, I thought. ‘I came down to see Miguel, you …’
Her tear-stained eyes showed no sign of belief. Guilt turned into anger: ‘Who said I was looking for land?’
‘Everyone. That’s what the foreigners want.’
‘Ana, who?’
‘Culebra saw you talking with Tío Bigote. Antonio Ríos, too, he was dealing for him.’
‘Antonio Ríos,’ I said, remembering the middleman who negotiated Bob’s purchase of land, and his casual remark one day in the bar: there’s a good farm, Sr John, down in the hills going cheap. Ah, I replied, which one is that? I’ll take you down, you’ll see … Just then Bob appeared and I never gave the matter another thought.
Drought Page 13
