Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  Nothing presented itself except the deaf-mute, with whom he joined up again. For a time he lost himself in prancing and squealing, glad of the company but always watching himself, aware of how little it took to sink to an animal-like state. He didn’t want to see himself or be seen in that condition, and when one evening the men appeared, as though they had sprung from the ground, his fear was as much of his unmanly state as of their guns and rapid approach. He stood his ground while the deaf-mute fled. The men sent him to fetch his companion, and then ordered the two of them to slaughter several goats, prepared a fire and sat roasting the best cuts. It was evident they meant the goatherds no harm and Miguel sat with them, taking the contraband tobacco they were handing round. He looked at the grizzled, sun-beaten faces, thinking that some of them might have been at the farmstead, when one of them sprang out from some distant memory. The man caught his eye:

  ‘Who are you, boy, where do you come from?’ Miguel told him and the man laughed. ‘Juan the goatherd’s son, eh? Antonio’s brother. From across the street …’

  Gaunter, older – an old man almost, it seemed – Fernando had been his brother’s friend and companion. He moved round to Miguel’s side and questioned him about the village, appearing to know as much if not more than Miguel had to tell. The other men were busy eating and teasing the deaf-mute who smiled and squealed.

  ‘Antonio died for the revolution,’ he said. ‘You can be proud of him. He wasn’t one of those who renounced their ideas.’

  Miguel looked at him. Was that all there was? To be proud of his brother for getting killed with unchanged ideals? The old rage rose in him and he began to crack brushwood across his knee, throwing it on the fire. If Antonio had come back …

  ‘When he had the time he worked on the collectives behind the lines. That’s where our revolution was consolidating, in the agrarian collectives. “This is the future made real,” Antonio used to say.’

  ‘There’s only those with their own land and the falangistas who are getting rich now,’ Miguel mumbled.

  ‘And the priests … But this lot won’t last long. Look at what’s happening to their German and Italian allies. They’re losing the war to the Russians and Americans and when they do, things will change here.’

  The flames flickered on Fernando’s vulpine face; Miguel understood little of what he was saying: the second world war, the revolution that would spring to life once the fascists were gone … Later, when the men vanished in the dark and the conversation turned in his head, he thought of his brother. Antonio could have been alive in these mountains, Antonio could have been talking to him.

  The outlaws returned many times and when they didn’t come Miguel and the deaf-mute slaughtered goats for themselves. From his companion Miguel learnt that the hides could be sold and every fortnight the boy set off for a village on the other side of the sierra. The money he shared with the deaf-mute, careful to hide his part in the lining of his coat where, at any moment, he could feel its satisfactory bulge. In those few worn, dirty notes he felt himself turned into worth; they made good the inadequacy he feared most in himself.

  It was of the land and the landless that Fernando almost always spoke. For sharecroppers he had little but disdain: ‘slaves of the landlord’, they were frightened of progress. The real struggle lay between the few who owned much and the many who owned nothing but the force of their arms. ‘And it was we, the labourers, who made the agrarian revolution …’

  The frosts came late, it was early winter before Miguel returned to his uncle’s. There he had to explain the loss of a dozen goats, many of which he had killed himself. His uncle listened without a word to the boy’s account of the outlaws ordering them to be slaughtered.

  ‘The hides?’ the old man asked sharply.

  ‘They took them.’ The lie was as transparent to his uncle as it was to him. But the old man turned away and it was never mentioned again.

  All that winter, close by on the flanks of the sierra, he thought of escape from the mountains and goats. He imagined a world in which he would create what his father had failed to make. An obscure dream at first, little more than a feeling, it gradually took shape, the comforting, secure form of land, given reality by all he had heard. Antonio’s voice spoke long-forgotten words in his ear: The land for those who work it … Yes: a farmstead like his uncle’s, only close to the village where he would prove himself worthy in the only way everyone understood: as a self-sufficient, independent, authoritative man.

  This was an aim so distant, so abstract for a thirteen-year-old that it might have been impossible for another to sustain. But he, with his acute awareness of reality as belonging to others, must (if Ana is right) make such a leap – a flight – from reality into an imaginary world of his own. Out of the shadowy childhood of insufficiency had emerged at last a choice that was his own, which would nullify the insufficiency that was its cause.

  In the harsh years ahead, the years of day-labouring when there was work, the years of planting pines in the sierra, the aim would recede or he wouldn’t have tried to escape by volunteering for the army. But when his father tore up the papers, confirming once more his powerlessness to decide his own future, he knew he was destined to sharecrop El Mayorazgo. The aim returned with force, as though indeed it had been waiting for him, and he rediscovered it with an ah! of surprise as the future’s hidden meaning. Until the day Tío Bigote dropped the hint it remained a distant if definite aim; distant because its very importance to him would lead him to fear his inability to realize it; definite because, to overcome fear, he would forget in the course of the years that the aim had originated in him. To admit that the idea was his would entail admitting also that it was his to revoke – an arbitrary idea, tainted by his own inner sense of inadequacy. Instead, projected outside himself, it solidified like earth turning to stone, and returned to him as a demand that must be fulfilled. So the plough follows the line of the furrow that has already been inscribed in the earth. Until the day when it became a potential reality requiring him to act. Then the actual choice would reawaken the fear, the barely dormant self-doubt, fill him with anxiety that impeded decision, with guilt at this inability to act … His ‘idea’, Juana said. His relationship to her was lived in much the same way as his attitude to the land.

  Those times were still a long way ahead. As he came down the mountainside that winter evening, the decision was fresh in his mind. Without thinking, without noticing the silence, he locked the herd in the pen and went into the cottage. In no time, he staggered out and began to run, the fleeting picture engraved on his mind: his uncle, two cousins, his aunt hanging from the rafters with halters round their necks. He reached the next farmstead two miles away and babbled that the family had committed suicide; then he collapsed.

  His father came for him and he was taken home. He had terrible nightmares and it was many days before anyone dared tell him the truth. The family had been killed by the outlaws who suspected the old man of betraying them to the Guardia Civil. His absence with the herd was all that had saved him.

  35

  John lay in bed later than usual. Miguel’s childhood ‘story’ had poured out with such surprising rapidity that it had seemed to be waiting, already written, within him. The flow of words had continued uninterrupted until the end when, exhausted and unable to say where it had come from, he fell into bed. A sense of achievement accompanied his slow waking, his body aching as pleasantly as after a boyhood athletic triumph. At last, he thought sleepily, at last he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do! His passion to bring Miguel to life, the Miguel of childhood he’d never known, had been attained. Now there remained the Miguel he’d known.

  Before long, as his mind focused, the satisfaction gave way to second thoughts: who could say whether the story accurately portrayed Miguel’s childhood, was anything more than a fiction? The few known elements of Miguel’s childhood had readily lent themselves to John’s interpretation; but there was so little to go on that another interpret
ation could be equally valid. There was no way of knowing, of being sure, he thought uncomfortably.

  But that, too, was inevitable: there’d always be more than one possible interpretation of any life, any event, he reassured himself. The reader would have to judge; he hadn’t played at God, pretending to know more than the reader. No! No! Everything that he’d learnt from his talks about Miguel had been noted down. Anyone could use these notes to propose a different interpretation, write a different account. More than that no writer could offer.

  His slightly ridiculous anxiety made him laugh all of a sudden. A reader! And who would that be? He hadn’t written his account to be read, and here he was vindicating it by invoking a mythical reader. It was laughable, even more so than his anxiety.

  The laughter ended in waking him up fully. For a while he had been faintly aware of some change: now he distinctly felt that in place of the usual crystalline morning light there was a heaviness in the air. He got out of bed and, opening the shutters, the sensation was confirmed: a mass of cloud hung over the village. As he was looking at this unaccustomed sight, the first drop of rain fell. A single drop, as big as a marble, which hit the wall in front and streaked the whitewash a dusty red. Another gob splashed the cobbles. Soon large, isolated drops were banging on the roof and running down the walls, staining everything.

  He ran downstairs shouting for Dolores. ‘It’s raining!’ She was hurriedly bringing in the wash she had left out overnight.

  ‘It’s raining mud, that’s what it’s raining,’ she said angrily, looking at the stained sheets. ‘From the Sahara.’

  ‘But it’ll do the earth good.’

  ‘No, it’s a shower, nothing more.’

  She was right; but the clouds didn’t lift, and in the afternoon, on his way to the town hall for Bob’s hearing, another shower caught him in the middle of the street. His face and shirt were streaked with drying desert dust as he took his place on a narrow bench next to Bob.

  Opposite, so close he could have touched her, sat Miguel’s mother staring stonily at the three men on the dais: the black-suited baker and Justice of the Peace (feeling for the matchstick stuck in the book at a page he’d spent time trying to find), a shopkeeper, and a man unknown to John. Her raisin-shrivelled face gave nothing away.

  In a monotonous, almost incomprehensible voice, the baker read out the litigants’ statements and counter-statements, thick fingers mistaking the pages, the voice continuing uninterrupted for a non-sequential sentence or two. Bob shuffled his feet, irked by the clumsy procedure; the two sharecroppers accompanying Miguel’s mother sat open-mouthed on either side of her. She never moved.

  There, within arm’s length, was an I that had held secret desires and hopes for Miguel. There, in that skull, out of reach, lived memories of him. Her child. Always, until the end. Dependent on her. Transparent to her gaze. Unlike Antonio or Carmela, he was the one who had always needed her most …

  John shook himself out of the fantasy. He wanted to tap those memories the way you’d tap a wine barrel, letting the past gush out of its own accord. She would never talk to him, that was sure. The argument of her case, even in the baker’s monotone, was bitter: she accused Bob of not having secured the statutory permissions needed to construct the dam, and demanded that it be torn down as a public menace. Foreigners had no right to use their land to such a purpose … A heavy legal hand had patently drafted her case.

  Had she seen Miguel’s anxiety even before he was aware of it? Seen the self-doubt in his eyes and, deep beneath it, fear. Could he find the money? Would Tío Bigote take seven thousand? But he’d lose Juana if he stayed on the land. ‘Son, think of yourself, think of us.’ He wouldn’t leave them for that woman and the town …

  ‘Are the statements approved?’ The baker looked at both benches in turn. The crucifix over the dais seemed to ascend from his bald head between the Generalissimo’s jowl and the dreamy profile of Antonio Primo de Rivera. Miguel’s mother whispered to the man on her left, sat as though recasting everything in her mind, and said firmly:

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’ Bob’s voice was a bit edgy.

  The baker put a hand to the book in front of him, felt for the matchstick and opened it. He held the page for the shopkeeper and then for the unknown man to read. Both glanced at it cursorily. ‘Yes, it is clear. It is as provided for,’ said the baker closing the book. ‘Yes. That is all. The hearing is concluded.’

  ‘Concluded! But how?’ Bob was on his feet. ‘What is the verdict?’

  ‘In due course, Sr Bob, it shall be made known.’

  ‘But this is ridiculous.’

  ‘It is as laid down. The proceedings are clear.’

  ‘What about the work on the dam? Can it go on?’

  ‘For the moment the matter rests as it is.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The hearing is concluded. A report will be made.’

  Miguel’s mother got up.

  ‘It’s no use arguing, Bob,’ John said.

  ‘I’ve never heard anything so stupid. What sort of law is this?’

  ‘Patience, it’s a Spanish virtue.’

  ‘Patience be buggered! I’m going to get my lawyers to come up and sort this lot out.’ He shook off John’s hand and stormed through the door into the bright sunlight that had replaced the Saharan clouds.

  John followed him out. Miguel’s mother had disappeared. He thought for a moment of sitting in the square to enjoy the freshness of the air. Instead, he took the side street that led to the threshing floor and the start of the track down to the hills; here no one would disturb him.

  Seeing Miguel’s mother had reminded John of how much he would never know. Could never know. Of her and Ana’s hatred …

  There was nothing he could do except ignore it, push it to the back of his mind lest it interfered in some way with his obsession to finish writing. He had now to concentrate on Miguel at El Mayorazgo during these past months. On the self-inflicted death that seemed so futile at the time, but which he’d come to see as a conscious act, intelligible by what it sought to achieve: the attempt as in all human action to go beyond what exists even in the moment of destroying himself.

  Such might be the logic of the process, John thought; but what had it meant to Miguel as he lived through those weeks and days?

  36

  Anxiety

  Seven thousand … Gushing down the channel, tentatively edging forward between the tomatoes, the water’s flow sent a sense of well-being through him, easing the tension. It was a moment of rest, of coolness soaking the roots to be sucked into the freshly forming fruit, one of the few moments when the crop didn’t need the weight of his hoe. What joy water brought! Through the trellis of canes the sun made an intricate pattern of shadow in which, like a ball spinning, the calculations revolved: two thousand five hundred, his share of the crop, if the water held. Five in the bank. Offer Tío Bigote seven, maybe he’ll take seven and a half, no, it’s worth more, but if the price of tomatoes drops this year …

  He sucked in his lower lip and stared at the water nudging forward, feeling its way, exploring the heat cracks, filling them, pushing on. May, only a month since he’d started irrigating and it was half last year’s flow. He tried to order his thoughts, which, in the days since Tío Bigote spoke, had circled interminably, indecisively through him. Why couldn’t he decide? There was the goal and he wanted it with an intensity so great that doubt proliferated like nettles in the over-fertile desire. Would the crop fetch as much as last year? Even if Tío Bigote took seven and half he’d have spent every last peseta saved, and what would there be to carry them through? His mother, Ana, what would they say? Juana? Nubs of anxiety formed. If he spent everything she’d have to wait … ‘Always the land, Miguel, that’s all you think of, that means more to you than getting married.’

  Scooping up earth, his hoe changed the flow. The smell of wet earth rose to block off the heat, a curtain of freshness to which the plants added their pungent green sm
ell. Every detail of Tío Bigote’s farmstead that lay out of sight beyond the hill came to mind: seven good terraces, smaller than El Mayorazgo, but better for early tomatoes, enough land to raise a couple of calves, nothing to share. Good earth the old man had manured properly, unlike the señorita’s farms, but he was getting too old, that’s why he wanted to sell, he won’t sell it cheap, not good land like that, he’ll want more than seven and a half and with its own borehole – seven and a half, to get even that the water must hold. Pacing. Five in the bank, two and a half to find …

  Was the old man already speaking to others, dropping the same hint – to others who wouldn’t stare at him mumbling, ‘So you’ll be wanting to sell?’ – letting him walk away, saying over his shoulder, ‘When the offer’s right,’ and not even going to see him that night or the next.

  His hand reached for the child’s ruled notebook in his shirt pocket and thumbed the pages: five thousand duros for last year’s crop, there in his own hand. Pleasure welled up: the crowd of neighbours come to watch the crates being loaded high on the lorry, the best price in Benalamar anyone could remember, the first time a lorry had come from Granada for a crop. ‘And how about ours then?’ some of the sharecroppers asked. With self-satisfaction concealed under the neighbourliness for which he was known, he spoke to the comprador for all of them except Tío Bigote, who stood on the edge and who, everyone knew, would go on loading his mule and selling the crop, basket by basket, day after day, in the village shops. But the comprador shook his head: none of the others’ was early enough. He felt the men’s eyes on him as they watched the notes being counted, placed in his hands, counted again. ‘Hombre! You’re making a fortune.’ Pepe clapped him on the back.