Death's Other Kingdom E-Book

Gamel Woolsey

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 257

Beschreibung

As Malaga goes up in flames in 1936 and the Civil War begins its monstrous destruction, Gamel Woolsey, an American poet, watches fear stalk through a traditional Spanish village. The villagers, wishing simply to be left to cultivate their cabbages, are caught in a cycle of violence which provokes hatred, anger and a thirst for revenge in even the most peaceful of souls. This humane and sympathetic account puts the people of Spain first, whatever their political persuasion, and gives a gripping and harrowing account of the emotional effects of war in general, and of civil war in particular.

Leseprobe

Death’s Other Kingdom

A Spanish Village on the Eve of the Civil War

GAMEL WOOLSEY

With an afterword by Michael Jacobs

To My Mother B. G. W.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Afterword

Copyright

Chapter 1

IT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAY of the summer – in all the rummage box of time there could hardly have been found a more beautiful day. The sky at dawn was cloudless and the ‘pink band’ of the tropics, the band of rosy light which ascends the sky from the horizon at twilight, rose to the zenith and faded into the growing light. Then the sun rose suddenly with a leap into the air: the long hot southern day had begun.

Enrique, our gardener, was already at work irrigating the tomatoes. As soon as the disc of the sun appeared, he stooped to tie up a straying tomato plant and went to shut off the water at the cistern. Then, without a moment’s rest, he began to dig up the caked earth around the roots of the rose bushes; for the garden was his pride and his joy.

‘Va a hacer calor hoy!’ he said, wiping his forehead. ‘Today it’s going to be hot!’ I saw him still working as I stood in my bathing-suit looking down from the landing, too late as usual to bathe in the cistern, for Enrique always would irrigate before dawn – he said the morning sun burned the wet leaves. So we could only take a shower-bath in the fountain, deliciously cold and shivery under the thin spray of cold water from the sierra.

I always loved waking in Spain. The sun fell in stripes from the slatted shutters on to the red and white diamonded tiles of the floor. Noises from the street below floated up; the pattering feet of the milk goats sounded like rain drops, and their plaintive Maaaaaaaaa trembled up, while they were being milked into our milk cans. A melancholy call ‘Pescao – de – lo – bueno –’ came up from the fish sellers, their hampers full of fresh fish just coming up from the sea on their lean donkeys. Another came crying the inevitable ‘Hay sardinas – y – boqueronis –’ the food of the poor, the cheapest of fishes.

More street cries ‘Hay uvas frescas y gordas –’ ‘grapes fresh and plump –’. ‘Tomates y pimientos gordos –’ ‘tomatoes and big pimentos’. Melons, lettuces, plums, squashes, peaches and pumpkins were passing, a perfect harvest festival going by on donkeys. All the delicious fruits of the rich vega of Malaga. From time to time we could hear Maria, our cook-housekeeper, bargaining, raising her voice in horror because melons were a farthing more today. But really we hardly bought anything in the way of fruit or vegetables, for Enrique’s pride was to produce more of everything than we could possibly eat and give the superabundance to our neighbours who had no gardens.

We ate breakfast as usual in the garden by the fountain. The late summer flowers were ablaze, enormous dahlias like bursting rockets, and beds of zinnias in all the colours of a pastel rainbow, and twice as big as English ones, beds of odd crimson cockscombs, beds of everlastings, beds of brown and yellow daisies, big sunflowers against the garden wall. They were all rich warm colours, all overblowing as if ripe for a harvest of flowers. Far away we could hear the sound of mules galloping around the threshing floor over a carpet of golden corn: later in the evening when the levante rose they would winnow the grain with winnowing fans.

That day lunch was rather a fiesta for we had little red salmonetes, the most delicious of all the Mediterranean fish, but very dear – Maria groaned for they cost eightpence a pound. After these came the freshest of lettuces just picked in the garden and Enrique’s ripe red tomatoes. There was the wine of the country, a very good white wine, and the marvellous Spanish country bread, firm in texture and tasting of ripe wheat; and of course to end with great bowls of fruit, grapes and peaches and melons. I do not know why I should remember this so well except that it was the last day we ever had like that.

The heat in the afternoon was intense, but it was a lovely wide sunny heat spread from horizon to horizon under the blue cloudless sky. We had no one staying with us, and it was nice to be alone again, for we had had visitors all spring. So many of our friends had come out to see our newly bought farmhouse where we hoped to live cheaply and at peace on the produce of our own gardens and orchards, far from the troubles of Europe in this remote Iberia where nothing ever changed.

It was lovely to have nothing in the world to do, and simply bask in the day like lizards in the shade of the high white garden wall. The house itself was a rough two-story farmhouse, probably very old. The walls were four feet thick, built of stone and rubble and plastered outside and in. They insulated us from heat in the summer – I cannot say from cold in the winter, for the pure white walls (with occasional splashes of bright colour from old glass pictures of the saints, and shelves of old Spanish pottery) and the smooth diamond tiles under foot, looked and were singularly chilly on a wet dark day in winter. Then the only warm place was the inside of a huge old fireplace in which we sat. But in hot weather nothing is so lovely as a big Andalucian house, gay with bright flowers, fresh, immaculate and cool in any weather.

Before tea that day we bathed in the irrigation cistern which had filled again: it was just long enough for four strokes, and the fresh mountain water always running was cold and crystal clear. We looked at the sea as we stood on the balcony after dressing and longed to be swimming in it, but it was much too far away to walk to in such heat, though the Mediterranean looked more lovely, more classical than ever. It was blue and still as a lake, and along the shore with its lace edging of foam the little fishing boats were sailing home, distant tiny white-sailed butterfly boats, sailing through this still fixed classical beauty – Ulysses returning – the Argonauts sailing home with the golden fleece.

We sat in the patio for tea by the fountain in the shade of the house. As we sat drinking our tea, but eating nothing, for food and tea never seem to go together in Spain in summer, the servants gathered round and stood leaning on the fountain and the cistern talking to us like retainers in a Shakespearian play. As they arrived we asked them to join us in eating ‘Quieren ustedes comer?’ ‘Gracias, que se sientan bien.’ They politely refused. ‘Thank you, may it do you good,’ with the beautiful manners of Spain where even a beggar by the road eating dry bread offers it courteously to the rich passer-by and is as courteously refused.

‘Is there any news?’ we asked Enrique, who had been to visit a gardener friend. ‘Very little,’ he said. ‘The workers in the Oxide of Iron factory who struck and got twelve pesetas a day last month, are now striking for fifteen. It is too much – who can pay fifteen pesetas a day!’

It was a fabulous sum to Enrique who had earned three pesetas a day in the Alpujarras when he was lucky enough to be working at all, and now lived comfortably and put by money on the 120 pesetas a month he got from us. Of course he had his cottage and his electric light free, and all the vegetables and fruit he could eat from the garden.

He was twenty-five and still a bachelor – Maria our cook-housekeeper was his mother and lived with him in the gardener’s cottage. Her daughter Pilar, a melancholy widow, lived in our house with her ugly little girl and did most of the work. Gerald, my husband, had brought them from the Alpujarras and they were devoted to him. Maria’s father had been gardener to an uncle of his who had a house in the Sierra Nevada back of Granada where we had often stayed with him. And in their eyes we were all practically Granadinos together, a great bond between us in this foreign country of Malaga. For a village in Spain is a unity; its inhabitants are like members of a clan, they have a close and indissoluble bond. ‘My village’ is constantly in the mouth of a Spanish countryman. It is more than ‘my country’.

The house at Churriana in 1935

Maria was tall and rather thin and still handsome at fifty-four, which is old for a Spanish woman. Her thick hair was still black and her smooth olive skin tightly drawn over the strong bones of the face. She always wore a black silk handkerchief over her hair and was always dressed in black. I suppose it had originally been mourning for her husband ‘dead and in glory’ for twenty years, but now like all old countrywomen of the ancient school in Spain, she always wore it as the only suitable wear for this woeful world.

She was rather a severe character, rather an old Roman. Devoted to our interests and very indulgent to our oddities after her fashion, she was hard upon mankind in general and spent a great deal of time in disapproving. Novedad – Novelty was her horror. Anything new was suspect. She would not have had a leaf change. And she spoke of novedad with the same intense disapproval as an old lady in the south whom I once, as a little girl, heard hold forth on a new electric tram service which was taking the place of the old mule-drawn cars. ‘I have no use,’ she said, ‘for these newfangled Northern ideas.’ Maria ought to have been in her service.

Enrique, her son, was a very different character. He was a gentle, charming young man and loved flowers like a Linnaeus. He had hardly ever seen garden flowers except in pots in his native village in the Sierra Nevada, and our garden and orchard looked to him like the Garden of Eden. You could see him standing sometimes when he was not at work gazing up into a flowering orange tree with a sort of ecstatic wonder on his face as if he were waking in the morning of the world. The Spanish love of the land is far stronger even than that of the French, and to keep them from the soil by not cultivating the big estates and the waste land of Spain is like starving them amidst plenty.

Pilar, Maria’s daughter, was a rather wan widow with one ugly little four-year-old daughter. Her life had been sad. She had married a poor labourer, a ‘foreigner’ from another village who had been a bad lot, ill-treated her, got into trouble and deserted her. Finally she had heard that he was dead. She had had to live with Maria and at Maria’s expense, and until we bought our Malaga house and brought them all down with us to this land of plenty, they had suffered often from hunger and cold in their high mountain village. Maria had disapproved of the marriage and blamed Pilar for the outcome, and treated her severely, though like all Spaniards she loved children too much to be anything but kind and indulgent to her little granddaughter, the result of it. But Pilar’s sad, patient face, which seemed ready to silently endure hunger, cold and privations of every kind, always seemed to me like an illustration for the life of the Spanish poor. Without being beautiful in any usual sense of the word, it had its own bleak austere beauty, like the beauty of some austere Spanish landscapes, where the grey granite and the yellow earth mount with bare unbroken noble lines to the sky without a tree, or, one would have said, a flower, and yet the grey fragrant herbs clinging to the barren slopes feed great flocks of goats that pass with all their bells ringing, and myriads of bees droning through the bright day.

That afternoon Pilar was leaning, as she often did, on the back of my chair as we talked. This position, affectionate and familiar and also claiming protection, seemed always to me very characteristic of the relations of Spanish servants and masters at their best. They were our ‘family’ in the old sense of the word, as when the disgraced Wolsey asks Henry to remember his ‘family’, his household retainers. And their relation to us was not one of monthly payments, of hiring and giving notice. We could as soon have given our own children notice. Pilar one day was scolding the poor little four-year-old. ‘Don’t scold her so hard for such a little thing,’ I protested. ‘I want to bring her up to do me credit when she is your servant,’ Pilar said, ‘not to be my shame.’ The poor little Mariquilla was already appointed to serve my older years. And if we both live there is no doubt but that she will.

Tea was over, and the servants scattered to their various tasks. Enrique to stirring up the caked hot earth in the zinnia beds to give the roots air, and preparing for his evening irrigating, which he would not begin until after the sun had set, Maria to prepare the evening meal, a great cazuela of chicken, rice and all sorts of green vegetables, and onions, tomatoes and peppers all cooked together in a huge earthenware pot over a charcoal fire, and one of the most delicious meals imaginable. I saw Pilar and the little Mariquilla crossing the garden on their way to feed the chickens and rabbits, carrying bundles of alfalfa and a basket of maize and kitchen scraps. They were laughing over some childish joke, escaped for the moment from Maria’s severe eye. Poor Pilar was wearing an old dress of mine which I had just given her, and which she had hurriedly altered to fit. Clothes were her one frivolity, and her timid pride was entirely set in them. She liked to go to the shops in the village wearing a new dress and nice leather shoes, but also wearing an apron to show that she was appearing in her role of servant in a big house of the English, and that if she were going to pay a visit, or to shop in Malaga, she could wear something much better. She had lately begun appearing in an old coat of mine, to my distress, leaving off the graceful peasant shawl.

A lovely little wind was blowing from the sea, and the ‘pink band’ was rising to the zenith; there it spreads, fades, and evening comes. We went out to the end of the garden and sat in a little mirador on top of the wall so that we could look out over the world beyond, over a lovely field of green maize already growing tall, to the olive yards stretching away towards the distant blue mountains. To our left rose grey, stony hills covered with grey herbs that fill the air with aromatic scents of rosemary, thyme and lavender wherever you walk on them. I could hear a sheep bell that seemed as if it came from a thousand miles away, it was so thin and far away sounding. The bats had come out and were flitting like black butterflies among the sharp-winged swallows which were performing their airy evening dance. The sky was yellow with soft diffused light pouring up from under the edge of the world.

Some labourers going home through the field called their friendly greeting. ‘Buenas noches, Don Geraldo,’ ‘Buenas noches, Señora!’ ‘Vaya usted con Dios.’ ‘Go with God,’ we answered. Two young workmen came by after them. ‘Salud!’ they called, the Popular Front greeting, ‘Salud!’ Gerald answered rather half-heartedly, but I answered them too, ‘Go with God.’ ‘Salud’ seemed curt and ugly after the soft ‘Buenas noches’, and the splendid ‘Vaya usted con Dios’. Surely the most beautiful greeting in any language. And the young men’s voices seemed to have an aggressive ring, and their harsh ‘Salud’, though it was spoken with friendly smiles, seemed to break rudely through the lovely evening sights and sounds like an aggression from other worlds of factories, labour troubles and strikes. The evening was too lovely to be thinking of agrarian reforms and the doubtful future of Spain.

The first star had appeared and the scent of the huge night-smelling datura blossoms came drifting towards us; the little green flowers of the dama-de-noche were opening in the darkness and their lovely scent began to fill the air.

The sounds of the village came floating up to us, dogs barking, children playing, women calling; and the bitter-sweet scent of burning herbs mixed with the scent of flowers in the darkening air. The lovely day was over, the tranquil evening drew into a peaceful tender night.

Chapter 2

SOMEONE WAS SINGING ‘London Bridge is Burning Down, Burning Down –’ They’re getting it all wrong, I thought. ‘It’s falling down, isn’t it? Or is it burning down?’

Then I started awake. Maria was standing at the foot of the bed. ‘Why are you sleeping,’ she said, ‘when Malaga is burning down?’

We leapt out of bed asking ‘What has happened? What is it?’ still half asleep.

‘There’s been a rising,’ she said, ‘and they’ve set fire to the city.’

We rushed to the window.

Malaga lying spread out across the bay was under a pall of smoke. The city was hidden and the smoke drifted far out over the sea. Malaga is burning down.

‘But what has happened?’ we kept asking and no one could tell us. Lorries full of armed workmen began to appear, rushing down the road. As they passed they threw up their left arms in the Popular Front salute, the clenched left fist and bent arm. With the pistols in their right hands, loaded and cocked and ready to go off, they waved to us gaily.

‘Someone will get killed soon,’ said Enrique sardonically, ‘and it won’t be a Fascist, but one of us if we don’t stay indoors.’

‘Salud!’ yelled a passing lorry with brandished fists and waving pistols. ‘Salud!’ we yelled back. The lorries came thicker and faster, brandishing pistols, bristling with rifles, singing the ‘Internationale’. They were chalked with the initials of all the Left parties, UGT Socialists, CNT Anarcho-Syndicalists, FAI the extreme Anarchists.

In the front of one lorry stood a young Anarchist like the figurehead of a ship. He held the Red and Black Flag clasped to his breast. His eyes had ceased to see the village street, the passing cars: they saw close to him, just ahead, the Future World! Man free and happy, man just and good, work for all, bread for all, love for all. In his dream he was leading us all to the future world. Man’s Promised Land.

‘Salud! Salud!’ The lorries went thundering by. Where were they going? They knew as little as we did. The Revolution from the Right, thwarted in its inception, had given birth to the Revolution from the Left. Hope and promise were in the air – you could see that for them ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ And the lorries thundered by in a never ending stream. And the day went on, bright and hot, with hope and determination in the air.

What had happened, we kept on asking, and got various confused accounts. There had been a fight between some soldiers who tried to seize the Government buildings and the Guardias de Asalto and the soldiers had deserted their officers. Then in the early dawn the poor quarters rose and burnt a lot of houses, two hundred houses, four hundred houses. We ate our cazuela for supper and went to bed, but we could not sleep much. Lorries dashed by, lights glared in the windows, cries, shouts, grinding of brakes. Salud! – Salud! – the Revolution.

‘Salud!’, roaring engines, grinding brakes, a distant rifle shot. Daylight again. Has anyone slept? The same lorries are dashing by. Grimy but happy, the young men wave their pistols and throw up their clenched fists in a gesture of triumph. Malaga is in the hands of the workers. And the pale smoke still hangs like a pall and drifts far out to sea.

As we were eating breakfast a patrol arrived searching for arms. But they knew us and refused to search our house. The English, they said, were the friends of Spain. So we all had some aguardiente and they left. Salud! Salud! Later when Gerald had gone out to visit a friend, a second patrol arrived. They were strangers from Malaga and hammered on the big front door. I went down to receive them with the servants behind me and they came in with their guns held forward as if boarding a pirate. The young leader to my intense delight was armed with a child’s toy gilt sword. I looked behind me, the servants to my surprise and displeasure had disappeared completely; so I showed the little band upstairs myself. They went into my bedroom, and the young leader opened a bureau drawer: it was unfortunately filled with my silk underclothes. Overcome with modesty he hurried from the scene of embarrassment leaving all the other drawers and chests unopened.

We went downstairs again and into the dining-room where the young leader with evident apprehension opened the drawer of an old table. It was full of headless dolls, the property of Pilar’s little daughter. The young leader felt that Fate was mocking him, and his companions certainly were. The servants had reappeared, and ushered the patrol out, all but the leader on a broad grin. Salud! Salud!

‘Where were you?’ I asked the servants.

‘Oh, we were just hiding the silver and your jewellery,’ they said. The distrust of Spaniards for other Spaniards is bottomless and blinds them often to reality. I could see at a glance that the young leader with his toy sword was a fanatic of the purest water. The Koh-i-noor would not have tempted him while he was doing his duty. He might have killed me in the pursuit of Anarchy, but he would never have stolen from me. But I did not argue the point uselessly with the servants. All strange Spaniards from other towns were probably robbers to them. The innocent stupid English, they think, do not understand these things; and so are always robbed and cheated.

All that morning the lorries roared and thundered and hailed Saluds with undiminished zeal. In the afternoon our village friends, the carpenters and masons and gardeners began to visit us. There was a rumour, they came to warn us of it, that house burning was going to spread, a band of extremists from the city were said to be coming to burn down some local houses.

‘They wouldn’t burn ours?’ we asked with some doubt.

‘Claro que no!’ they said surprised. The idea of anyone however fanatical burning the houses of the innocent and slightly ridiculous English had never entered their heads.

‘But they’ll burn your neighbour’s house, old Don Cristober’s. He is a Fascist. And with this wind it might catch your roof; but we’ll stay and help. We’d better borrow buckets and have some brooms and some buckets of sand ready.’ We were to be calmly prepared for what seemed to us all a natural catastrophe.

Gerald mourned a little. ‘It’s such a beautiful old house,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is a pity,’ said Juan the carpenter with resignation. ‘I do all their work and the wood is very good. It is a pity.’ But cyclones and civil wars are all felt as ‘acts of God’, or acts of the devil – there is no use protesting against anything that happens in them.

Crowds of people were gathering in the street. Don Cristober’s old gardener and his witchlike wife came to us to ask us if we could not do something to help them. Gerald told them when the house-burning party came they had better suggest their burning the furniture (which was awful anyway) and leaving the house, which might be used for a school or hospital. ‘Then at least you’ll save the house and also keep a roof over your own heads,’ he said. Time passed and nothing happened, so we went up on the roof to look at Malaga – the smoke still streamed out from the town like a long woeful banner trailing out on the air to tell of disaster.

We were looking towards the distant sea when suddenly from a big white house not far away sprang up a thin white column of smoke – ‘oh, Lord, it’s come,’ I thought with that sickening feeling of the worst arriving. The smoke got thicker and thicker, eddying in clouds – then a red flame appeared, then a great burst of flame and smoke, the roof had fallen in. Far away to the left a second column of smoke appeared. We waited rather grimly, but no one came, nothing happened, no more fires appeared.

‘Not a good day for burning houses,’ said Gerald, making me laugh, for he sounded as if he were apologising for them. The thermometer stood at ninety-four degrees and it was breathless – ‘so hot standing round a fire. Perhaps they’ll come tonight. Fires are much finer at night anyway.’ But that evening a sinister rumour began to run about the village, so sinister that everyone forgot all about burning houses.

‘El Tercio!’ ‘El Tercio is coming!’ From the tone of the voices we heard in the street they might have been saying ‘Hell has opened!’ ‘Lucifer and his legions are upon us!’ For it was a Legion that was coming.

El Tercio (The Force) is the Foreign Legion, the only regular soldiers, except twelve thousand Moors, that Spain possessed. I do not know if they deserve the dread the people showed of them. But there were ugly tales of what they did at Oviedo. There were only six thousand of them, but they made up in courage and ferocity for their lack of numbers, and I have heard foreign soldiers say that they would take on the Prussian Guard or their own weight in wild cats.

This was the Legion worthy of Lucifer that was expected, and the expectation ran like a cold wave of horror through the countryside. No one went to bed. Everyone was abroad on the road watching the red flare of Malaga, listening if they could hear on the distant highway the tramp of the approaching enemy. And the whisper ‘El Tercio, El Tercio’ ran from mouth to mouth in a tone of blood-curdling fear that communicated itself to us in spite of ourselves, chilling our blood, echoing fearfully in our unwilling ears.

We went at last to bed hearing the splutter and misfiring of a little aeroplane droning bravely off to blow up bridges and hinder the Legion’s advance. The lorries were still rushing by – some to go towards Algeçiras carrying eager youths to defend their villages, some into the mountains to defend the passes against the ‘Fascists’, who had ceased already to be Don Fulano (Don Somebody-or-other) and his sons and nephews and cousins, and become a quite mythical figure of wickedness and horror rather like the figure of the ‘Red’ in the mind of a Daily Mail reader. Figures of fun, ‘Hodadoddys’ of the mind’s cabbage garden, figures to laugh at if they were not used to frighten all reason out of the air.

The dark night was lit by the glow from Malaga, and the ruddy dark was suddenly punctured by the white flare of headlights rushing by. As I sank into a deeper darkness of sleep – I heard a voice below whisper ‘El Tercio’ like the voice of fear itself.

Chapter 3

MORNING CAME, and nothing had happened after all. The Legion, they now said, was far away near Algeçiras. Everything was going to be all right. They would be kept there. The Moors, except the few that had crossed, would be kept in Africa. But there was a more sober look about things. There were more lorries on the road than ever, but they had a new determined air, as if they had something serious to do, somewhere important to go.

The kitchen was full of poor old countrywomen who had already begun to see Moors behind every bush and had come for protection and consolation. That day for the first time we flew our English flag. We had bought it at the Army and Navy Stores for just such occasions if they should eventuate. But we had not liked to put it up before because we had no Spanish flag to fly with it. But Pilar had hastily run one up out of odds and ends of old coloured dresses and we hung them both out on the balcony where they were received with enthusiasm by the passing lorries. And it was a great comfort to the servants and to all our poor neighbours, who said ‘Now the house is sacred. No one can touch it.’

‘Let’s go to Torremolinos to see Gray and find out what has happened,’ Gerald said.

Gray was an American friend, a journalist, who had taken a villa in Torremolinos, a village by the sea where there is a large English colony eked out with foreigners of other nationalities. Gray was trying to write a book on the confused subject of modern Spanish politics and so we felt that he ought to understand better than the rest of us what was really happening.

‘It’s dreadfully hot,’ I said. There were no buses running and the very thought of those long dusty miles under this burning sky made me tired and thirsty.