Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  ‘The foreigners bring work but they take our land.’

  The blond said nothing. In silence they walked on. Hadn’t he heard or did he choose to ignore the words? Would he still deny the truth? Ech! It no longer mattered. His fingers stroked the gold in his pocket, caressing his possession of her, her oneness with him, the life’s propitiatory offering he was wagering on a future together. Nothing else was of importance now …

  Madre! Memories haunted by failure, doomed from the start.

  ‘Miguel!’ Ana’s shadow fell on the wheat; in the echoing vault the hand was stretched out. ‘Miguel, when are you going to sell the calf? It’s a month now …’

  Alone with her, his silence must break. He looked unseeingly at her. Juana’s closeness in place of theirs. In trying he had destroyed the closeness within: mother and Ana had been betrayed, to be true to her was to be false to them, false to himself who was bound to them; in breaking this he had broken with them, shattered the closeness and was rightly condemned.

  She laid a hand on his arm but it touched nothing in him. ‘Miguel,’ she repeated, ‘Miguel, it’s me.’ In the silence her eyes implored him to speak. Gift of repentance and promise, substitute for the land, moment of hope paid for in despair, the bracelet lay meaningless in his hand. Rejecting it, she rejected him, the self that was true: the yielding creature who tried to melt into her, to suck tenderness from a gratifying breast. Madre! Unworthy of such tenderness as only a woman, a mother, could give.

  She heard the sigh, thought she knew the cause, unaware of the bracelet that lay in his pocket. ‘Mother was worried, don’t take it to heart.’ He stared, silent, her words falling like stones. ‘Miguel, mother didn’t mean it,’ she cried, trying to get through the blankness to something alive, unaware that the silence hid only hollowness inside. Yet she, not their mother, had seen his bowed face, seen him whiten and cringe as she had cried out their dependence on him, his obligation to them, as though for the sake of another he was forsaking them; had felt their mother trying to pull him back, restore the common bond that since their father’s death they had tacitly shared. Meaning only to warn him, had she unthinkingly destroyed the bond a mother’s tenderness had forged? A tender dependency the more pervasively dominant the more patent the domination of the father’s world; a sweet necessity with its roots deep in the past the father’s death had served to strengthen; a source of submission he had tried to escape by seeking it in another without destroying its source …

  Seeing into the emptiness, the women had judged: bowed before mother, novia, señorita, he accepted the ineluctable guilt, the recriminations, the confirmation of solitude into which a hand stretched uselessly to offer itself.

  Ana’s hand dropped. Despairingly she wondered what ought to be done, rejecting the idea, as she walked away, of telling Pepe: the family web, just the three of them, had borne the world too long to be broken now by the admission that something was happening they couldn’t sustain. She looked back at him as the church bells started to peal, saw him standing there motionless and began to run. ‘Water!’ she cried. ‘They’ve hit water, Miguel.’

  In the silence the bells pealed distantly in him, confirming what had been done that self-recrimination could no longer elude.

  ‘Miguel! Miguel!’ Her arm was pulling him. ‘Don’t you hear?’

  Yes, beneath the peals he heard the single, slow toll of absolute peace, passivity reunited beyond strife with itself, the sole means of evading the inescapable truth. He allowed her to lead him blindly across the terrace: to finish once and for all, there was nothing else. Certainty illuminated the void with a distant light; a pinpoint of certitude that deepened the emptiness. The light was a goal he could not yet reach; inhibition protected him from the power to act, from realizing the way to escape. Rounding the corner, they stopped, overwhelmed. The light pulsed violently against his eyes and he seemed, without moving, to stretch out to her, to run towards Juana who sat under the vine. Through the haze he saw her smiling at him, waiting for him. He swayed; forgiven, she had come back for him. Shaking off Ana’s hand, he moved towards her and –

  43

  Dolores burst through the granary door crying, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming, señor!’ Her face was alight with excitement, in strange contradiction to the feelings she had expressed over the past weeks concerning the event. But now that the civil governor and his cortege had actually arrived she seemed overwhelmed.

  Looking down the street from his bedroom window, John saw the officials in their falangist white jackets and blue shirts getting out of big black cars which, with their motorcycle escort, filled the square. The new mayor, similarly attired, and other village dignitaries had gathered to meet them. Villagers gawked at this unaccustomed display, whose pretext was the inauguration of Benalamar’s first public lighting. Massive angled steel brackets, painted silver and carrying lamps large enough to illuminate a city street, had been bolted to the facades of houses in the square which, on the mayor’s express orders, had all been newly whitewashed. Pots of flowers hung from the walls as the result of another municipal ordinance. And, it was rumoured, the streets and square were to be concreted over shortly.

  The new mayor was a forward-looking man, Bob said. Though he shared some of Bob’s convictions about Benalamar’s possibilities, the village coffers were as empty as under his predecessor. To pay for his ‘modernization’ plan he had slapped new taxes on houses and on fish sold in the village, and taken a number of people off the municipal poor list. It was these arbitrary measures that brought adverse comments from Dolores, who more than once claimed that the village was better off under the old mayor. Moreover, she saw the reduction of the poor list as a mayoral swindle because the newly ‘non-poor’ would now have to pay for their medical prescriptions. ‘As far as I know,’ she said derisively, ‘there’s only one chemist here, and he and the doctor are as thick as two thieves. And who is the chemist? Well, he just happens to be the new mayor!’

  John had paid little attention to these changes or to Dolores’s comments. But the sight of the crowd in the street induced him to leave his house for the first time in a number of days. He made for the bar, which was deserted except for a man leaning against the counter. John recognized Manolo, Miguel’s cousin, the miner, whom he hadn’t seen since they’d struck water, and greeted him warmly. ‘Not going out there to watch the show?’

  ‘Na! Not with that bunch of rogues.’ Manolo called for a beer and passed it to John. ‘They live off our backs. The people here forget easily … You were friendly with my cousin, weren’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t help him when he needed it.’

  ‘Ah!’ He appeared surprised. ‘Well, I wasn’t here. When I heard the news I didn’t believe it. But I thought straight away, the señorita’s to blame.’

  ‘Yes? I’m not sure any one person’s to blame. He wanted to buy Casa Colorada, did you know that? And to stop him someone put it about that I was going to buy it.’

  ‘I heard, yes.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Perhaps it was another foreigner. Look how the land is being sold on the coast.’

  Another foreigner! Bob? No, it couldn’t be, he hadn’t the money.

  ‘He needed that farm, Manolo, the same as he needed the novia.’

  ‘The land, yes. There’s no sharecropper who doesn’t need his own land because the land should be for those who work it. But as long as these’ – nodding at the square – ‘keep things as they are it’ll never happen.’

  ‘And the novia!’

  ‘She wasn’t any good for him, she’s without shame. Going to El Mayorazgo like that after what she’d already done. No, he didn’t need her.’ Manolo drank down his beer and John ordered another. ‘Poor cousin, he went mad when the water came and threw himself in the watercourse.’

  ‘His world shut in on him, projects that were vital to him were cut off.’

  ‘If the señorita hadn’t been out only for herself he could have
had water. That’s what I say.’

  ‘No one here commits suicide for lack of water. Isn’t that what everyone says? There must have been more reasons than that.’

  ‘You mean, he lost the will to live?’

  ‘Perhaps. No, because when the world shuts in, when there’s no future left, one’s cut off from acting and even suicide becomes an impossible act. It must be when the will to act returns because of some change that really changes nothing …’

  Manolo stared at him uncomprehendingly. At that moment ranks of white jackets and blue shirts went past the windows and people shouted out, ‘Viva Franco! Viva Franco!’

  ‘Ech! The señorita made him go back on his word. A man’s word. When she said fetch the calf back he obeyed. He had no fight in him, that was the trouble, and she knew it.’

  ‘And the novia, didn’t she know it too? Both these women.’

  He paused to drink. ‘The fact is, Miguel was too good for her, too good for them all. It’s painful to think how he must have suffered to have done what he did.’

  A flash of light, so strong that it almost burnt the eyes, lit up the cavernous bar and the square outside. Clapping broke out and more cheers for the Generalissimo. Men began to push into the bar. ‘Eh, Manolo, what do you think of the lights?’

  ‘It’s the new age,’ he laughed, ‘we’re all going to be modern now.’ And then, with a sharp look at John before the men closed in, he added: ‘You can change a novia, señor, but you can’t change a landlord. That’s why the señorita’s to blame.’

  In the street John saw Bob’s figure looming over the crowd which was waiting for the cortege to leave. The motorcycle outriders were already in position, the roar of their engines reverberating in the small square. In an instant the cars and their outriders were sweeping down the brightly lit street, bringing to an end a visit that had lasted half an hour at most.

  Bob was walking towards him with Ignacio, the town hall secretary. For a moment the three of them stood exchanging pleasantries; then Bob begged Ignacio’s permission to talk to John.

  ‘Well, things are now really looking up,’ Bob said when they were alone. ‘My lawyers have been here and sorted things out, the mayor has been very cooperative. We were able to do him a little favour, you see.’ The mayor had understood that the cost of taking water for the village from the new borehole would be too high. Bob had helped him get engineers up who had assured him there was plenty of water to be had from the old borehole if they dug another hundred metres into the mountainside. ‘The mayor’s well in with the civil governor, as you can see, and he’s getting a special credit to do the work.’

  ‘Was that the end of the legal case?’ John asked, and Bob nodded. ‘That’s good. The village’ll have water and you can start work again on the dam.’

  ‘Well, not immediately. It seemed best not to offend certain susceptibilities before they start deepening the village borehole. That was the agreement,’ Bob replied.

  ‘Ah-ha!’

  ‘It’ll only be a short time. In fact, I wanted to tell you I’m going to Tangier for a bit of a holiday. I’ll be back, of course, before work on the dam starts again. But you know the way people here exaggerate – if I told them they’d probably think I was going for good. So if you hear anything said, perhaps you’d put people straight.’

  There was a frankness that wasn’t quite frank in his look. But John no longer cared. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, have a good time.’

  ‘Thanks. Oh, by the way, if anything happens you can get me care of American Express. I’m leaving tonight.’ He raised his hand in mock salute over the heads of the crowd.

  John turned to go home. As he pushed open the street door he felt the first drops of rain, a thinner, more persistent rain than on the previous occasion. In the granary he heard it falling steadily on the tile roof and beginning to course over the gutter spout. By the time he went to bed it was dripping through the mud and cane ceiling at the far end of the granary.

  In the morning rivulets were running down the village streets and pools of water lay on the granary floor. John got a bucket and Dolores saucepans, and the sound of Chinese torture began. At noon the rain lifted, only to resume an hour later with a violent thunderstorm that rumbled over the village and mountains for the rest of the afternoon and evening. The accompanying rain was torrential. By nightfall the streets were awash, a portion of the granary ceiling had fallen in, and it was still raining.

  Dolores insisted that John move his work table into the bedroom. Reluctantly he agreed. It irritated him to have withstood the granary’s heat and dim light for so long only to be driven out by rain. Rain! A month ago a downpour like this would have solved so many problems; now, it seemed to him little more than an annoying distraction. Outside, as he wrote, he could hear the rain beating against the shutters.

  44

  Remission negated

  And then, as Miguel turned for the third night from Juana’s closed door, the idea suddenly locked, and in the cold lucid light that flooded the void the fragments of despair were fused and surpassed in a movement beyond the exclusions towards the inescapable choice, to transcend destruction by destroying himself. Without hesitation and without other recourse, he moved, unaware of the eyes but aware of their truth, hearing the certainty without hearing the words, down the street to the shop and then on through the square to the top of the track …

  To follow his steps to the end is too painful now; but he cannot be left a victim of fate, as though his choice were explained by the force of events, by lack of some will to continue to live. One has to believe that his act was not a meaningless consequence of repudiation, exclusion and loss but a way of assuming and overcoming these.

  Juana’s impossible visit, a miracle that nothing could have led him to expect, was taken as a sign of redeemed possibility, a tender equivalent of the humility and forgiveness the bracelet had been intended to mean. And although he couldn’t speak, the walls of the narrowing void must have been breached as he reached out to her within this new space that joined and yet kept them apart still. Possibility: she was there; but possibility, too, as what isn’t yet – a lack to be filled, a goal to reach. Long after she’d gone this goal crystallized.

  It was most probably then that he spoke to Ana, not about Juana, but about the farm. A fear haunted his speaking of her lest Ana, suspicious of this unsanctioned visit, cast doubt on the miraculous hope whose foundation was faith, not contentious fact. For a miracle is faith in the impossible. And Ana, as joyful to hear him speak as she was confused, was more joyful still and still further confused by the plan that was being revealed.

  ‘Ay Miguel! What are you saying? That you’re going to free us?’

  ‘No, sister, no.’ No sooner had he raised her hopes than he shattered them with unverified doubts.

  ‘But perhaps it isn’t true. Ask Tío Bigote!’

  Immediately inhibition clamped down, a prevention of action that defended the self from the anguished uncertainty of the results of his acts. To go to him now would be to expose insufficiency to self-sufficient strength. ‘No, no,’ he shook his head.

  ‘Well, ask the blond then!’

  She understood a man’s reluctance to ask favours of equals, but the foreigner was nothing in this network of respect. He saw that; yet he hesitated, for while the blond could not exclude him as a man in the way of Tío Bigote or Pepe, a single word from him could still shatter hope. Moreover, the bracelet was still in his pocket: could he bring himself to return it? Would the jeweller in Torre del Mar pay him in full?

  ‘Ask the blond! Ask him!’ she insisted.

  ‘No.’ But something inside him said yes. Yet it was several days before he went up, for although a perspective had opened within it, the depression hadn’t vanished. Moments of anguish and inhibition, moments of self-reproach and destruction persisted despite – or rather because of – the newfound possibility of acting. Before he could go he had to find some innocuous excuse; over the followin
g days it must have come to him that, if there was no work on the land, he could earn a labourer’s day-wage on the dam. The figures revolved in his head, were entered mentally in the notebook where their solidity brought assurance that he, so unsure of the validity of his existence, existed indisputably.

  He came up to ask first for work, then to ask about the farm. But immediately he entered the granary he knew his mistake, saw it in the irritated look, heard it in the cold, distant voice. The blond sat hunched over a stack of paper in the darkened room, and Miguel was taken aback, felt confidence drain away. Standing dazed, by the door, he stammered an excuse. The blond got up slowly and offered him a chair; he shook his head. In the thickening despair he heard the other’s questions about the land, the calf.

  ‘What! Haven’t you sold it yet?’ The foreigner’s voice cut through to the guilty emptiness within, revealing its indifference to even that guilt in its cold invulnerability.

  ‘Tomorrow, yes, I’ll …’ In his own voice he heard the self-condemnation that was holding him back. Blankly he said: ‘I’ve come to ask for work on the dam.’

  The burst of sudden laughter, the blond’s exclamation, seared confirmation across the screen of his mind, cauterizing the membrane of hope that held the void from closing in. ‘Ah, I thought …’

  ‘The señorita will change her mind … The water can’t run to waste all summer,’ the blond said determinedly.

  ‘No.’ Now his hatred swept over her as well, was repressed and turned on himself in recriminations intended for everyone who refused to recognize their blame for his plight. Had the instinct of anger not been repressed in fear of an annihilating retort from those who (like his father) were dominant over him, his retaliation would have been as swift and brusque as it was with Ana. Instead, the repression bred guilt for his failure to say what he felt, and the failure, proving his insufficiency, bred a yet deeper guilt.