Tomb in Seville (8 page)

We arrived in Camillas in the early afternoon. What was remarkable about this small town was that back at the end of the nineteenth century the leading citizen was a villain who carried out a massive fraud by which most of its inhabitants were ruined. After this he escaped to Holland where he started a religious sect known as The Unseen Power. This was to become the most influential of many such movements in the Low Countries. Returning to Camillas some years later, he put things right with all his victims and left a memory of his presence in the shape of a nativity play. This, despite the disapproval of the Holy Church, continued to attract immense local audiences, and even foreign pilgrims, until its final suppression.

Our arrival coincided with the day when the long-awaited advance of the ‘Red Army’ was to take place. The critics were already murmuring that this had been too long delayed. A revolutionary citizens’ army, bolstered so strongly as it had been by enthusiasm and ideals, might only four days earlier have routed an uninspired opposition. The loss of the four days had given the Government the time it needed to ready itself for action, but nevertheless, Camillas with its flower bombardments, parading volunteers, the captured cannon, and the brass band still managed to be in good heart.

There was a bust of Lenin, brushed over with aluminium paint, on the café table and a small red flag was given away free with a cup of coffee. The scene was one of nervous good humour. Four smallish teenage girls in soldiers’ uniforms were surrounded by admirers, and we arrived at the moment when they had decided to shear a few inches off the tunics’ sleeves to smarten them up. A middle-aged captain with a greying walrus moustache was in command here, and I waited my turn to ask him a question. ‘How far away are the Fascists at the moment?’

‘No way of knowing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got them on the run. Getting out while they can. That’s if we let them. Are you a volunteer?’

‘No, my friend is,’ I told him.

‘They told me about him. English, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, we’ll be going after them any minute now. You ought to come along with us anyway. Be quite an experience.’

‘Thanks. Perhaps I will,’ I said.

The moment had come. I decided to tackle Eugene on his volunteer obsession, and I took him aside. ‘I gave your father a promise to look after you,’ I said, ‘and that naturally included bringing you back alive.’

He laughed. ‘That’s understood,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to let him down.’

‘What you don’t seem to be able to see is that the Red Army we’ve been hearing so much about is a figment of the imagination. They were supposed to have entered Madrid by today. Where are they?’

‘I’ve just listened to the six o’clock news,’ he said. ‘They were reported to have occupied Tetuan this morning.’

‘I listened to the eight o’clock news,’ I told him. ‘Nothing was said about it. The locals don’t take these stories seriously any more. What they
do
believe is that a thousand of the new Assault Guards took over the central area of the city yesterday.’

‘We shall have to wait and see,’ Eugene said. ‘In the meantime, have they told you about Casas Viejas?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What about it?’

‘It’s a village in the hills five or six miles from here. It was occupied a week or two ago by the Liberation Army. We could go and see it for ourselves if you like. The road is open. Why don’t we do that?’

‘I’ll do a deal with you,’ I told him. ‘Your father provided all the necessary funds for this trip, the objective so far as he was concerned being the pilgrimage to Seville. I can’t see myself going back to break the news to him that you’ve joined a revolutionary army. I’ll go to Casas Viejas with you and talk to the Liberation Army people, but after that we must either go on to Seville, or I personally shall feel obliged to turn round and go home.’

‘What happens about the tickets and the money?’

‘I’ll have to think about that. It’s his money. It would be a question of ringing him up and finding out what he wants done. You have to realise that the responsibility is mine.’

‘So there’s nothing for it really?’

‘No, not really.’

‘But you wouldn’t object to going over to Casas Viejas?’

‘No, why should I? It should be an interesting experience.’

I had read somewhere that twenty-odd villages scattered throughout Spain bore this name. It meant simply that they were old. Nothing was said about starving to death. It was a place name likely to be found among the swamps of a river delta, or the barren lower slopes of a mountain range, or in a borderland area of a province subject to invasion by starving soldiers from across the frontier.

The café-owner’s younger brother, who was an enthusiastic Red, was happy to run us over there in his veteran Seat through a landscape turning into a wilderness within a mile of the village. A few twisted oaks had been able to root themselves among the rocks, but were shortly to be smothered by a dense growth of spiny bushes. I asked the driver what was the attraction of the place. Why on earth did people go there? ‘The mountains,’ he explained. ‘The Guadarramas. Tourists come here for the view. We bottle up the water from the river down there and sell it for the nerves.’

Casas Viejas was round the next corner and proved to be just as expected. Order of a kind has to exist in these old places by the simple fact that everything worth having is kept, and nothing’s thrown away. There is no rubbish. This could have been a village scene put together for an exhibition and tidied up every morning before the show opened. It was empty and silent, with its people housed in hutments with minute, square windows built as high as they could be from the ground, and a massive door sagging on its hinges. A notice stuck to a shed in the tiny square said, ‘Viva España Soviética.’ An old man, with a woman at his back, was at a door. The man bowed. ‘There’s no one here to talk to you but us people,’ he said.

‘Which direction did they take?’ the driver asked. ‘The People’s Army, I mean.’

The man straightened up to point ahead. ‘They went up that road,’ he said, ‘and then the next turning to the left just before you get to the top of the hill.’

‘There should have been a fair number of them,’ I told him. ‘People’s Army men with red flashes on their tunics.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘red flashes as you say. I don’t know one army from another, but I noticed the flashes. I’m only on holiday up here for a couple of days. Mind you, you couldn’t get an army up that road. This wasn’t an army. It was just a few soldiers.’

‘Give me a rough idea how many. Fifty? A hundred?’

‘Well, say fifty. Maybe less. This wasn’t an army of any kind. Red or otherwise. You could say there was a half-company of soldiers at most. Some didn’t even have guns. If the Guards go after them they won’t stand a chance.’

‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘What Guards are you talking about?’

‘The Assault Guards from Madrid.’

‘What, here?’

‘There’s a few of them down past the village. They came in when I was down there and pulled in off the road behind the Egg-Cup Hill.’

‘But what are they doing there?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing.’ He smiled as if at his inner thoughts. ‘Just waiting’s my guess.’

‘They’re waiting,’ Eugene said, ‘to take our friends in the rear.’

By the greatest possible luck the driver who’d given us the lift was still there and quite happy to take us to the junction with the Madrid road. ‘I’m a widower,’ he said, ‘with nothing to do with my time. I’ll have to leave you to look after yourselves at the turning to Madrid. If the Guards catch me with you they’ll blow my van apart. Used to be a football ground up there once, but the people lost interest and it’s all thorn bushes now. The Guards go up in their four-wheel drives but you’d never get anywhere in an old wreck like this. Lucky you came after they’ve just done the autumn cut-back of the jungle, otherwise you’d never even get through.’

It was three or four hundred yards to the turn-off but when we were halfway there we were already breathing in the sharp odour of the sap still oozing from cut stems. The opening into what was left of the bushes would have taken two cars but it soon narrowed to a bottle-neck and Eugene, who suffered from hay-fever, began to sneeze. Rodrigo, our driver, was proud of the barbarity of the past. ‘Used to be a prison camp up here,’ he said. ‘That was before my time. Rapists were given six months in an open camp. The way they made them work they couldn’t breathe properly. Most of them died of lung trouble before they could finish their sentence.’

The van, picking its way in low gear round the stumps, overheated, lost power, and finally we stopped. Rodrigo lifted the bonnet and let it drop. He switched off the engine and looked at his watch. There was a moment of silence, then we heard the roar of a powerful car climbing the hill, with no possible doubt that the Assault Guards were on our track. ‘Better make a run for it,’ Rodrigo said. ‘I’ll stay with the car.’

For a moment at least, the Assault Guards would be held up by Rodrigo’s van, before they butted it aside with their powerful vehicle. We decided to run for it, cutting across country as far as we could before making a cautious return to the road. We were ready with a story that we were collecting specimens for a natural history magazine and I had warned Eugene to throw his party card away, which he refused to do.

Clambering down an easy slope where the thorn bushes were less of a thicket, we were suddenly alarmed by a burst of gunfire behind us and overtaken by panic we tried to tear our way through. It was a mistake I was to regret, for strands of barbed wire tore into the muscles and veins of my left leg, leaving an open wound.

The immediate problem was to deal with that wound. Once back in Madrid, I attended the City Hospital, where, despite the problems arising from casualties of the revolt, a doctor saw me immediately and did all he could with the damage. Having applied the necessary dressings he warned me to keep the limb well exercised, and thought that daily walks undertaken in a vigorous manner would be a good thing. ‘Get out of the city,’ he said, ‘and go for a good, fast stroll down a country road. I may still decide to put that leg in plaster,’ and this, a few days later, he did.

On the whole we had had a lucky escape. Eugene had been torn by the thorns, although he had escaped the barbed wire, and although Rodrigo’s van had been battered by the Assault Guards he was still able to drive it away next day.

It was at this point that it became clear to us both that the existence of the Red Army poised somewhere in the outer suburbs for its descent upon the capital was the stuff of dreams, and that normality was about to return to the capital; the sight of its citizens walking in its streets with their hands held high would eventually be forgotten. Nevertheless the official State of Alarm was to continue. Armoured cars and even light tanks cruised aimlessly in the suburbs. Places of entertainment suspected of having favoured the old so-called Fascist regime still remained shuttered. No trains ran and public transport outside urban areas had yet to be restored. The Assault Guards, who had spent much of the revolt sheltering in doorways, now made their presence felt, chasing revolutionaries off the scene and pulling down old red flags that had been overlooked. The revolt, it was generally believed, had been within an ace of success and was only, as it seemed at this time, likely to fail through divisions that had risen between the leaders of too many factions.

T
HE COUNTRY WALK RECOMMENDED
at the hospital had to be put off for a few days, for despite what was generally accepted as the collapse of the revolt, normal life had not been restored. An hour’s stroll in the central streets of the capital was still likely to be disturbed by the sound of distant shots. A suicide squad held out for most of a morning in the working-class suburb of Tetuan. A car rammed into a police station after the driver had leapt to safety and the house of a leading right-wing politician was set on fire.

In discussing the matter of a therapeutic walk the people at the hospital suggested the Toledo road, which in view of the fact that the State of Alarm was still in force was presumed to be clear of its normal volume of traffic. Taxis were not included in restrictions on travel so we hired one to take us to an area recommended for its scenery. Once there, we walked for a hundred yards or so, followed in my case by a short rest in the taxi before recommencing the walk.

The walk turned out to be of great interest and provided an opportunity to analyse that sense of the fantastic which the Spanish landscape seldom failed to produce.

I came to the conclusion that this visual effect originates partly in the dryness of the air which leaves the remotest corners of the plains unsoftened by distance, and in its turn produces an almost eerie feeling of proximity with the very limits of vision. With this went a kind of suppression of irrelevant detail, a directness and evenness of colouring, and something of a stylisation of light and shade in the manner of a travel poster. The hollows and hillocks, and the rare line of poplars, appeared to arrange themselves in rhythmic patterns. The fields reeled away in all directions, forming immaculate designs in pale gold and silver. Summer had long since withered away in a single week, and the sun glittered with chilly brilliance in the dark blue sky.

By turning through a complete circle one could observe every form of agricultural and pastoral activity. In one corner the plains were being ploughed and sown, in another they were winnowing the grain, and in a vineyard they gathered the last of the grapes. Knowing nothing of the southern European agricultural routine, these juxtapositions struck me with surprise.

Villages lay in depressions showing only their rooftops, or capped wide hummocks of grass. They were clean-cut and self-contained, like models in relief maps. Oases of trees marked the spots where there were wells. Each clump concealed a waterwheel where a blindfolded mule turned in circles from morning to night. A herd of black sheep passed across the foreground. My impression was that I could almost have hit one of them with a stone. Yet the illusory distances of Spain had reduced them almost to the size of insects.