A Necessary Action (4 page)

Now he’s going to start asking questions again, thought Willi Mohr with weary despair.

Sergeant Tornilla rose, smiled and put out his hand.

‘This has been a pleasant conversation. Sometime perhaps I’ll come and look at your paintings. And now, we’ll meet again, I’m sure.’

Willi Mohr swayed as he rose. He was soaked in sweat and everything shimmered in front of his eyes. The other man looked
exactly as he had when he had risen from his chair the first time, an eternity ago.

‘Just one more thing. Your passport. I’ll keep it for the time being. If you want to go somewhere, perhaps you’ll come here. Come when you like. They’re bagatelles, I know, but …’

He shrugged apologetically. Smiling.

Then he walked to the door and politely held it open.

Willi Mohr stood in the porch, which seemed light in comparison with the room he had just been in.

Outside the sun was shining radiantly.

The tall officer came into the porch. He looked recently risen and newly shaven, but his forehead was already sweaty. When he saw Willi Mohr, he stopped and said uncertainly: ‘I’m sorry. A mistake, wasn’t it?’

He opened the door to the interrogation room and went in. Before the door closed, Willi Mohr saw Sergeant Tornilla once more.

He was sitting at his desk writing. Between the forefinger and the middle finger of his left hand was a lighted cigarette, and his face was hard and serious.

Willi Mohr walked unsteadily out into the sunlight.

Sergeant Tornilla was carrying on a conversation with his superior. Three remarks each.

‘Well?’ said Lieutenant Pujol.

‘Someone had given him some water.’

‘What do you think?’

‘If he hasn’t done it, then he will.’

‘Might you be mistaken?’

‘Hardly.’

Willi Mohr walked through the town, a long gangling figure in a faded shirt, paint-spotted khaki trousers and sandals. His straw hat threw a dark shadow across his sunburnt face. He was tired, but his physical energies remained. Although he was walking very slowly, his steps were light and purposeful.

On the Avenida Generalissimo Franco he met several men who were on their way to road construction work up in the mountains, heavy, unbelievably badly-paid assisted work which was carried out almost wholly without the help of machines and progressed very slowly. They were walking in silence, staring ahead with empty eyes. They were carrying straw baskets containing water-jars and bits of bread, the same baskets they would be using for their work a little later on.

Look at their faces. They are simple workers, but happy, for their faith, for the miracle of being alive …

He lies, thought Willi Mohr.

Then he thought about another remark—the one about his shirt.

It takes great certainty in observation to be able to identify a fifteen-year-old Hitler Jugend shirt, washed-out and faded and with all the badges removed.

It struck Willi Mohr that he had answered all the questions quite truthfully, even those which dealt with the event of three days ago. Santiago Alemany had come at about five o’clock in the afternoon and stayed for a while, but they had not spoken to each other. He had parked his fish-van outside and gone into the house and looked round, especially in the kitchen. Then he had sat down on the bottom step and played with the cat. Several times he had opened his mouth to say something, but evidently had then changed his mind. When he had gone, three dirty hundred-peseta notes had lain on the steps. All the time, Willi Mohr had sat at his easel and worked on a painting of a house and some cacti. Santiago had said good-day and good-bye and possibly a few words, but Willi Mohr had just nodded twice. He
had let the money lie there for two days, and then he had picked it up and paid his bill at the tienda.

Forty minutes after he had left the guard-post, Willi Mohr was standing in front of the house in Barrio Son Jofre. When he opened the door, the cat came up to him and brushed against his legs, and the bitch rushed out on to the floor. She whined and cringed and wagged her tail. She must have been very hungry and thirsty, just as he was.

The house in Barrio Son Jofre was built on two floors and had three rooms, apart from the kitchen. From the large room on the ground floor a stone staircase led up to the first floor. Of the two rooms above, the larger was well kept but the smaller was more or less uninhabitable. The floor was broken and part of it had fallen through into the kitchen. In the whole house there were only two pieces of furniture, a large brown wooden bedstead upstairs and a rattan chair with a woven cane seat downstairs. There was a mattress downstairs too, and a blanket, and about twenty paintings. Most of them lay on the floor, but some were fastened to the walls with drawing-pins. Beside the chair stood a metal paraffin lamp, and on a piece of sacking in one corner lay some clothes and other personal possessions. The downstairs floor was carefully swept, but upstairs, where no one had been for a long time, there was a thick layer of greyish stone-dust over everything.

Willi Mohr poured out some water into an earthenware bowl for the bitch and put some dry pieces of bread into it. Then he thrust his hand in amongst the pups and took out his pistol and the notebook. The weapon felt heavy and damp and he weighed it in his hand as he went into the room. He stood still in the middle of the floor and said to himself: ‘What the hell
did
he want anyhow?’

And after a pause: ‘He’ll fetch me down there again and before that I must kill the other one too.’

He leafed through the notebook. The first page was dated the
thirtieth of July the year before, the day after Hugo had gone. He had written several pages on the first days and then the notes grew briefer and briefer, and after the fourth of September they ceased altogether. On the following pages he had jotted down figures and small sketches and then there was another note. The handwriting was firm and quite legible.

16th December, 8 a.m. Yesterday I waited all the afternoon and evening in the puerto but they did not come back. It was past two in the morning when I got home.

After this date there were a lot more notes and now the notebook was almost full.

Willi Mohr bit his lower lip and slowly shook his head.

Then he put the things back in their usual place under the mattress, took off his clothes and lay down on his back, naked, his hands clasped behind his head.

He thought: Tomorrow I’ll kill the pups. I’ll pick out the one with the best markings and keep it. The others I’ll kill.

Just before he fell asleep he thought about the truck and the day the Scandinavians were drinking at Jacinto’s bar. Fourteen months had gone by since then.

The truck was a re-built 1931 model Fiat-camioneta. It had no fenders and no hood and the driver’s cabin and back had been stripped and replaced with two wooden seats rather like park benches. All these alterations had been made purposefully, to make the vehicle lighter and more useful as transport for people on bad roads.

The vehicle had a history, as it had come to Spain during the Civil War with General Bergonzoli’s first blackshirt division and had fallen into the hands of the worker’s militia after the battle at Brihuega in March, 1937. But no one knew anything about that now, so the camioneta was not considered of any historical value.

Dan Pedersen had taken it over from an acquaintance who was a builder in Santa Margarita and although it was twenty-five years old, it functioned quite satisfactorily.

The road ran in long curves down the mountainside and down there, on the other side of the bay, the houses of the fishing settlement lay piled up along the quay. The surface of the water was calm and blue and sunlit, and out by the pier a number of people could be seen bathing. Several white yachts lay by the harbour wall and farther in, along the quay itself, were half a dozen dirty yellow trawlers with their nets draped like mourning veils round their masts. Despite the distance, one could see groups of lightly-clad tourists standing on the quay, looking at the fishing-boats.

It was the beginning of August and very hot. The truck rolled swiftly down, its engine switched off, and all that could be heard was the squeal of the mechanical brakes and the noise of stones striking the underneath of the vehicle. The road was narrow and
rough, but then it also led to the most distant and isolated houses in the community.

There were three people in the truck. Dan Pedersen, who was driving, and beside him Siglinde, his wife. On the bench behind sat Willi Mohr, his straw hat pulled down over his forehead as protection against the clouds of dust. Now and again he had to use both arms and legs against the bodywork to prevent himself from being thrown off on the sharp corners.

He was looking at the girl’s slim, sunburnt neck and when the breeze raised her short blond hair, he saw a string of small drops of sweat along the roots of her hair. He also saw that the hairs were darker at the roots and realized that she had bleached her hair and wondered why.

‘Don’t drive so damned fast,’ said Siglinde. ‘The dust’s choking me.’

Dan did not reply. He thought: The Scandinavians have got their money and now they’re drinking at Jacinto’s. They’ve forgotten that they owe me two thousand pesetas and that I’ve not paid the rent for two months and have hardly enough money for food. But they’ve also forgotten that this is a pretty small place and that one finds things out almost at once. And now they’ve damn well got to pay up. Hope I can get hold of Santiago and Ramon, for there’s going to be a row, and the German here’s not much use. He’s only good for sitting goggling at Siglinde when she’s sunbathing, and why not, as that’s what I’d do too, if I didn’t already know what she looks like all over.

Dan Pedersen did in fact use the term Scandinavians, but with a certain contempt, forgetting that he himself belonged to that same group.

At this time of the year there were perhaps a couple of hundred foreigners in the puerto and about a dozen of them were residents, people of various nationalities, mostly painters or writers, or at least pretending to be, and most of them were Swedes or Finns. Among them was a small group which never had any money. They were the Scandinavians. They were very fond of their liquor.

Siglinde thought: There’s going to be trouble, I know it, as I know Dan, and I hope we meet Santiago or Ramon on the way, because this German’s not much use, although he seems kind,
and he can’t paint either, poor thing, and it’s hell Dan let him come and live with us, so that now I can’t sunbathe naked.

She was a young woman of fairly ordinary nordic type, healthy and strong and moderately beautiful. She was wearing pants and bra, dusty thonged sandals and a pale blue dress with shoulder-straps. She was blond and grey-eyed and much more sunburnt than genuine blondes usually get.

The man in the back seat stared coolly at her bare shoulders and held a silent monologue with himself.

What on earth have I got to do with these people? I’m as indifferent to them as they are to me. But what could I do when Hugo went and I was left with nowhere to live and not a word of the language? Stay at a boarding-house? Then my money would not have been enough and I was to stay here a year and paint. I said I would and I’m going to. Even if it is meaningless, really. Anyhow, I can’t understand what people like Hugo see in this country and this sort of place. It’s warm, but that’s about all. Now these people are expecting me to help them in some private row, and I suppose I ought to, as I’ve lived with them for a week. I don’t know what it’s all about but what does that matter.

They had come down on to the smooth shore road which ran in a curve round the inner part of the bay, connecting the village with the little group of houses lying near the lighthouse and the pier. Dan started the engine, which rattled alarmingly. He drove quickly and carelessly round the bay.

Two nights earlier a couple of fishing-boats had happened to get a shoal of turtles in their nets, and halfway to the village the damaged nets were stretched out on a rack which was about a hundred yards long. The nets took up one half of the road and about every ten yards men and women were sitting mending the holes.

At the third net-mender, Dan Pedersen braked the camioneta and stopped.

‘Hullo,’ he said.

When the shadow of the vehicle fell over him, Santiago Alemany raised his head, and with two fingers pushed his straw hat off his forehead. He was sitting with his legs stretched out in the sun-scorched gravel and had stretched the net out by hooking his big toe in one of the holes.

‘What’s up?’ he said.

‘The Scandinavians have got their money and are drinking at Jacinto’s.’

‘I heard. Even when you sit here, you get to know everything.’

‘Are you coming with us?’

Santiago Alemany carefully worked the net loose and rose. His movements had a studied leisureliness, giving him a kind of grandeur, although he was bare-footed and rather dirty from the work, and although his faded clothes were of a very indefinite colour.

He was twenty-seven, roughly the same age as the people in the truck, and had calm light-brown eyes, a broad forehead and not especially dark hair.

He is well built, thought Siglinde, who often thought about such things.

‘A calamity,’ he said, gesturing towards the net. ‘This ought to be finished today. Or tomorrow.’

He laughed, took out a crumpled packet of Ideales and handed them round. Everyone took one except Willi Mohr, who had not yet got used to the pungent local tobacco. And the fact that he did not understand what they were talking about also put him into a state of apathetic passivity.

Santiago climbed up on the truck and sat down beside Willi Mohr.

‘Let’s take little brother with us,’ he said. ‘He’s useful … in this sort of situation.’

When the truck started up, the nearest net-mender turned his head and called behind him, without ceasing to work:

‘Now Santiago’s gone off with the foreigners again—as usual.’