SOMETIME IN
ANDALUSIA
Michael Clifford
Copyright© Michael Clifford, 2011
Sometime in Andalusia
Michael Clifford
© Copyright 2011 by Michael Clifford
Smashwords edition
Being in Andalusia, not caring anymore
Unquoted source
To all those long-lost friends, with thanks for the memories
PROLOGUE: SPAIN, 1937
IT WAS A HOT afternoon when we entered the village and the nightmare began. We were fifty-strong, us and the Spaniards. There had been little fighting, most of the enemy had cleared off that morning, and none of us got hurt. I was thankful for that. We hadn’t done much shooting at all since I’d arrived in Spain on that leaky ship from Galway, except that time our own allies, the Spaniards we were there to help, had fired on us by mistake.
Rolando was by me the whole time, good bloke, I got on better with him then any of the Irish; by then I was wishing I’d stayed back in Dublin anyway. As we marched into that village – can’t remember its name and it’s better so – the Spanish sun was making my dyed uniform stink. The rifle wasn’t that heavy, I hadn’t fired it once. Ahead was the village, shining white in the sun, beautiful with those brown mountains around. We should have stayed up there.
There was some local big-wig up in front with the comandante, the Spanish bloke who was our captain. I had no idea what they were blabbering about, I’d never learnt enough of the brogue to follow. I knew that we were there to help this lot and that was enough. So you can guess the shock I had when we marched in and the locals were hiding; what the hell was going on? Paddy, my pal, said it was because they didn’t know who they could trust. How right they were.
The big-wig was shouting something; the comandante translated it for us. ‘You get these people from their houses!’ It was an order, no mistaking it. We obeyed, he had the machine gun, and we knew would happen if we didn’t do what he said.
Rolando went with me, as we got some families from their homes, while Paddy and the others did the others. The people were hiding in cupboards, under floorboards, anywhere they could find. ‘Come now, my loves, no need to be frightened, we’ve come to rescue you,’ I said as we urged them out. They just looked at me but Rolando said something in Spanish, and that made them move. Whatever he said made their tanned faces turn pale: men, women, kids, the lot of them. I remember one girl, with beautiful brown eyes, who looked at me as we told her to go out.
I thought we were going to celebrate with them, but they’d already done that before we came. In the village square we could see where they’d had a fire burning, and all around were bones. ‘They’ve eaten the bulls,’ Rolando whispered to me. ‘His bulls . . .’ he nodded at the big-wig.
‘And why did they eat the bulls then?’ asked Paddy. Stupid question.
‘Because they have no food since a long time,’ Rolando answered without looking at us.
The big-wig was furious. I’d never seen a man so angry, and since then I still haven’t. His face was red, he was shouting something at the commandante. The captain just nodded and turned to us and waved.
‘We must put these people together,’ whispered Rolando.
We did just that. All those village folks, more than a hundred, we herded into a circle, like they were cattle. The big-wig was still fuming. ‘He is angry because those bulls were valuable,’ Rolando explained. ‘And the villagers have eaten them.’
Under that hot Spanish sun I went cold as it dawned on me what was going to happen. The big-wig was going through the group, still shouting, pulling some men out and shoving them on the ground. Those men pleaded, clasping their hands to the big-wig and crying something.
‘These men, they say that they have always been loyal to this landowner, and done much for him.’
‘Hell, we’re going have to shoot them!’ said Paddy.
I told him in the Irish that he should say his rifle was jammed, just like I was going to do.
The woman with the brown eyes was looking at me; maybe she’d believed my words, because of how I’d said them, when I said we’d come to save her. I couldn’t make out why she was playing with the cross around her neck. Was one of those blokes on the ground her husband, her brother?
The commandante barked something and Rolando said we must form a circle. ‘When he waves again, we must start to shoot them.’
‘And how can we do that? Those blokes on the ground – ’
‘We don’t fire at them, these are the men the landowner is saving, they have worked for him in the past. We kill the rest of the people.’
The woman with brown eyes was still looking at me as the signal came; I have never forgotten her eyes. I tried to make out my rifle was jammed as everyone else started firing, all those shots from fifty rifles together, nearly deafening me. But Rolando nudged me in the back: ‘You must fire, or the commandante will kill you.’ The commandante was just standing by his machine gun, with the big-wig, and looking on.
In front of me, the bodies of those villagers, who’d killed the bulls because they had nothing else to eat, burst bloodily open as the bullets tore into them. I tried to aim my shots above their heads, to the side, anywhere, but I must have hit someone. Their screams were like something out of Hell itself. At the end of it those poor, hungry people were lying about on the ground, near what was left of the bulls, as the smoke from our guns floated above them.
That same night, Paddy and me deserted.
SPAIN, SPRING 1974
THE FIRST DAY
A MYSTICAL WOMAN, who years later was to flutter briefly through my life, would tell me that there were no such things as coincidences. What we perceived as chance encounters were, she would whisper with full sincerity, if not the hand of God then the result of some unsolved dilemma in an earlier life. But a psychologist whose seminars I was attending at the same time declared that the only amazing thing about coincidences was how often they didn’t happen. Every day, he would explain with the enthusiasm of someone who had stumbled upon a piece of unknown wisdom, we pass by countless people and places which have some significance for us; it is only because of some arbitrary event at the same time that we occasionally notice them and try to see a meaning in the encounter.
If Priz had done her job and checked the documents of the entire class before we left London that day – an omission which, if not the hand of God, was ‘the arbitrary event’ – I would never have had to give Ronaldo González a second thought. For me, he would have remained forever an unknown, overweight, Spanish airport official working at a desk in a side office. Who knows, if I hadn’t noticed Ronaldo that day, or he hadn’t had reason to notice me, the events of the following week might have taken a different turn.
‘Hey, look in that bloke’s office, there’s a picture of Franco! He looks a right evil bastard! It true he was Adolf’s mate?’
‘That’s enough Charlie, and the rest of you! Get on through or you’re all on the next plane back!’
‘Yes, miss . . . ’
The girls, most of them hobbling in their platform shoes, got their passports stamped first and were followed by the boys who just grinned at the young official in the passport booth, but thankfully made no more provocative remarks. It was then that I noticed Manny timidly hanging back, as if he knew that something was wrong. But it was only after Priz started barking at him to hurry his arse through that the discussions began, and it was clear that something serious was up. My colleague’s face was as colourful as her ankle-length skirt when she came striding back over to me, leaving the class of fifth-formers on the other side of the passport control booth free to wander off and cause their first aggro in Spain.
‘Robert, Manny’s passport wasn’t stamped before he got chucked out of Uganda.’ She pushed the green-covered Ugandan passport into my hand, open at the page from which a snapshot of Manny Patel, two years younger, gazed awkwardly out. On the page alongside it was announced in bold print that the passport was valid for all countries of the world ‘except Uganda’, the last having been added in blue ballpoint. Priz shook back her light brown hair, still as long as it must have been in her flower power days. ‘What Idi Amin began, Francisco Franco is going to finish. What are we going to do now?’
‘I thought we’d agreed back at school . . .’
‘Yes, but . . . ’
‘We’ll all have to go back home, that’s what we’ll have to do now.’
She looked at me, for the first time ever noticing an angry tone in my voice. The rest of the class were watching us in puzzlement from the other side of passport control, all dressed up in the best clothes which fifteen year-olds from a London comprehensive school could afford in 1974. The three sixth-formers, who were still standing near us, listened to our discussion as if they were journalists wondering how to refashion the details for some tabloid.
‘If they don’t let Manny in, he’ll be put on the next plane back. And one of us will have to go with him, we’re responsible,’ I reminded her.
‘So what?’
Was that what she used to say in the communes? ‘Listen Priz, I know what you’re going through at the moment but we’re here under school rules, so at least two teachers must be with a class. Even if you or I took him home and came back on the next plane . . .’
It was at that moment that the man at the desk in the side office, obviously wondering what the excitement was all about, emerged and looked at us over his tinted glasses. The younger official in the passport booth, one of two in a hall where the only other fixture was a poster announcing that Barclaycard was also in Malaga, popped his head out and explained that we were a school group from London. From his tone it was clear he was speaking to his superior.
‘Buenos días, Señor,’ I said to the senior passport official, as if friendliness and politeness could solve any problem in the world.
‘Buenas tardes, Señor,’ replied, the large, solid-looking figure. He looked me up and down as if wondering why a young man in shirt and tie, and wearing a tweed jacket to boot, should be arriving in Spain in the company of a middle-aged hippy and a dozen-plus loud teenagers in cheap clothes. He held his podgy fingers out, wagging that I should hand over my own passport.
‘¿Hay una problema con el pasaporte del niño?’
‘Sí . . .’
The official flicked open my own passport. He examined it carefully, and I knew from experience on the East German border that he wanted to convince himself that the chap with glasses in the photo was also the one without them standing before him. ‘You are the teacher of these children here?’ he asked in accented English.
‘Yes, I am the teacher of this class. I teach them Spanish in London, and they’ve come here to practice the language. The Asian boy with the invalid passport, his family was expelled from Uganda a couple of years ago, in 1972, along with thousands of other Asian families.’
The official nodded, but just continued to read my passport as if it was an enthralling bedtime story. Something was fascinating him. ‘Your name, Señor, is Robert Joseph Winter and you were born in London in 1943?’
‘Yes . . .’ My interrogator, because that is what I suddenly felt he was, was somewhere between fifty and sixty with hair which was artificially jet-black.
‘Your father’s name, it is Joseph Winter also?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘Why is that relevant?’ That portrait of Franco in the office behind was suddenly growing bigger, those pokey little eyes of Europe’s last Fascist dictator drilling into my soul. I had first come to Spain when the passport controls were much stricter but this was the first time that the question had come.
‘Was your father ever here in Andalusia, Mr Winter?’
I hesitated too long before replying that I believed my father had never been to Spain. But border officials, like policemen, quickly learn to tell when somebody is lying. The overweight official looked at me with a smile which could have been friendly or cynical.
‘Where is the Indian boy with the passport problem?’
Hearing the cue, Priz shoved Manny forward. Signalling to the bewildered boy to hand over his passport, the official took both his and mine over to the control booth. I heard whispers and then the sound of two documents being stamped before our passports were shoved out through the opening in the window. The passport supervisor nodded Manny through. Priz followed, and then the sixth-formers who glanced at each other as if the three of them were sharing a secret. The portly official came out of the passport booth and examined me one last time. ‘My name is Ronaldo González, Mr Winter. Vaya con dios. ’
And with that he nodded that I should go on and join the class of teenagers waiting for me.
‘What was that about, Robert?’ demanded Priz, for once staying and waiting for an answer. I said nothing, still cold from what I imagined a close brush with death must be like. Before I could even begin to think about how to fumble an answer the next incident occurred, which only later - when I realised what could have happened - made me wonder about the power of chance occurrences or whether we were in the hands of some higher force. The three customs officials, unlike Ronaldo González, wearing grey uniforms and with hands on shiny black holsters, had been watching the class march by without understanding a word of the Cockney abuse which was being hurled in their direction. But when the three sixth-formers came they shouted at Michael; maybe because he was older than the others, maybe because he was taller, maybe because he was black.
‘Purpose of your trip?’ squeaked one of the grey mice.
‘Development studies,’ Michael announced in his Jamaican sing-song with an irony which I would only appreciate some days later, after I’d lived an entire lifetime. The customs bonzo threw Michael’s case open and started to ruffle through his multi-coloured sun shirts while the young man himself just stood there, his right hand cradling an orange plastic bag from Mo’s Motown Music Mart on Portobello Road.
‘Why you bring music records?’
‘I’m a disc jockey. You like reggae, mister?’
The customs officer snorted and pushed the suitcase shut. Michael grabbed it with one hand and rejoined the other sixth-formers, Alexander and Elaine, who’d been looking on without showing silently.
‘Shit, what’s going on here?’ Priz shoved her sunglasses up her long nose as we emerged into the sunshine of Andalusia. ‘Ten minutes in this country and already pulled up twice. Look at our coach driver, if he’s not in the fascist party . . .’ Thankfully, the driver didn’t show any unexpected interest as he tossed our suitcases in to the hold. ‘Who was the passport dude? What did he want from you?’
Nobody else was within earshot. The kids were milling around, throwing their arms open as they experienced real sunshine for the first time in their lives. So I told her. She’d never have left me in peace over the next fortnight if I hadn’t. ‘My father was here during the Spanish Civil War, back before I was born. Right here near Malaga.’
She pulled her shades off again. ‘What? Was he in the fighting?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘So your old man was in the International Brigade? He fought against Franco! But that’s fab! You should be proud!’
If she had been speaking any louder they would have heard her in Madrid. ‘Obviously it hasn’t been forgotten. I don’t know who that Ronaldo González is . . . Let’s just hope the kids make no trouble here, or – ’
‘Fat chance. The word “aggro” was invented for them. Let’s get on this old bus. But if that guy back there was fighting with your father against Franco, how come he’s now working for Franco’s government? He’s a passport official.’
That had already occured to me. ‘Some people did find a way of getting rehabilitated . . . ’
‘You mean they sold their soul or something?’
I didn’t have time to answer because I had to ask the class sitting to sit down as the ancient coach rumbled off. Priz, for her part, shouted to those at the back to get their smelly arses on the seats. The bus turned onto the motorway which led along the Costa del Sol, a carriageway full of smoking Seats cars, all smaller than Minis but seemingly stuffed full of dark-haired families. And the heat; it was still spring but, after a rain-soaked London, coming into the warmth and early evening light was like walking from a cold shower into a solarium. To the west the sun was already low over the enticing blue of the Mediterranean, but for us it could have been midday.
‘Wasn’t it Federico Garcia Lorca who said that the day only begins in Andalusia when the sun goes down?’
Elaine had invited herself to take the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle from me, her eyes – little bigger than the pickles on her face – watching for my reaction. Her brown cardigan, a shade darker than her hair, was as always pulled closed as if to conceal something.
‘I wouldn’t mention Garcia Lopez too often, Elaine, you know what happened to him.’
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t say what I want, Mr Winter.’
‘You’re right.But this country is still ruled by a –’ I hesitated to say the word ‘-dictator. Even if he’s past his prime. Anyway, I’m glad you and Michael and Alexander came with us, even if you’re not in the Spanish class. Three sixth-formers can help us keep this troop under control.’
Almost on cue Charlie shouted out: ‘Let’s have a bullfight, with Andrew as the bull.’ I didn’t need to look around to know that he was just relaying what Steven was whispering in his ear, just as it had been Steven on the plane who had urged Charlie to run towards the cockpit door which, almost three decades before 9/11, had been enticingly open and shout: ‘This is a hijack, take us to Cuba!’
We were coming into Torremolinos, the dreamy white-washed villas which Sylvia had predicted being displaced by monolithic apartment blocks and half-finished hotels. ‘Didn’t you see this kind of thing when you were in the Soviet Union, Elaine?’
Before Elaine could attempt to justify socialist planning Seamus, two or three rows behind, jumped up and sung: ‘Sure, I’d love to have me mammy here, she’d love this place. Her and the Boys.’
A tall figure jumped up from behind Elaine and jerked along the aisle to where Seamus was leaning against the seat in front. ‘One day you’re going to talk about “the Boys” once too often you fool, and somebody is going to crush you like an ant.’ Without needing to steady himself Alexander was back in his seat within seconds, licking his tobacco paper and looking at all around as if daring somebody to say something.
‘Alexander’s right,’ I said to the nearest person, who was still Elaine. ‘This country’s tense enough at the moment, what with their Prime Minister getting blown up last Christmas. Nobody wants to hear how wonderful terrorists are.’
‘I’d like to blow this place up though, get a butcher’s of it all,’ hissed Steven. It was the first time he’d said anything with his own lips since we’d landed, and I’d been praying it would stay that way for the next fortnight. He’d changed back into that blue football jersey with the emblem of Chelsea FC which, the girls whispered among themselves, went well with his golden blonde hair. The hair which matched his misleadingly cherubic face. Only those steel-grey eyes betrayed his real character, which I could sense would one day cause somebody’s death. I just didn’t realise at then that that day would be sooner than I thought. ‘It ain’t what we was expecting. Shit.’
The Hotel Don Carlos, I had warned the whole class back at school, would be nothing like the heavenly-white establishments with deep-blue swimming pools which shone out of Thomson’s holiday brochures. Hidden at the end of an alley which led off from the garish main street, it must have seemed like a holiday in Purgatory to the British suburban families who invaded Torremolinos in the summer.
‘I hope this place has got a bar, and that it’s open right now,’ muttered Priz. ‘Jacqueline! That’s my beauty case! What would you need such a thing for, may I ask?’
A couple of locals poked their heads out of a bar as we marched or sloundered along the alley with its small bars and restaurants. When we reached the hotel door another man, unshaven and too dark to be a Spaniard, emerged from a primitive souvenir shop next door and started counting something with his fingers.
‘I imagine he’s working out how much money he’ll earn from us.’ We all came to a halt in the hotel reception, no larger than a medium-sized office and decorated like a cheap flower shop. I didn’t need to announce our arrival. ‘I’ll give you all your room keys and then in one hour we’ll meet down here,’ I said as soon as I thought I had everyone’s attention.
‘Right, all of you,’ boomed Priz as if I needed her as translator. ‘You’ll get up to your rooms and be back down here at seven o’clock. Seven o’clock Spanish time, and not a minute late.’ In same-sex pairs they disappeared into the coffin-sized lift, each moaning about who they’d been billeted with. ‘Frankly, I don’t give a shit if Andrew farts, Charlie wanks off or Sylvia plays reggae the whole time. Just get to your rooms and keep your traps shut!’
It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon, cinco de la tarde as they put it in Andalusia. Exactly eight days away from the moment when my life would change forever.
7 pm
‘GET YOURSELF a drink too, Robert,’ Priz barked as I entered the open plan lounge, a sea of sofas, covered in mustard-coloured plastic, interspersed with equally-artificial plants. In an era when air-conditioning was still a luxury a large fan, which might have worked once, hung from the ceiling. Along one wall was a long counter which, going by the shelves of bottles behind, I assumed to be the bar. ‘I’m still eager to know what your old man did down here forty years ago.’
‘Actually, Priz, I don’t think we should talk too loudly about it.’
She lit one of those Rothmans with which she polluted the staff room back at North Kensington Secondary School. At least it was tobacco she was smoking. ‘I really want to hear about it. Was he a socialist, your father, or an anarchist?’
‘What do you think? By the way, didn’t we agree there’d be no smoking in front of the kids?’
‘Sure. But they haven’t forgotten your dad here, have they? Maybe this time tomorrow the civil guard will be torturing you in a dungeon somewhere. Just tell me first where you put our tickets home.’
‘Let’s talk about something else.’ I had allowed myself a whisky and soda which I knew I would never drink to the end. ‘Why were the three sixth-formers suddenly so eager to come, do you think?’
‘How should I know? Alexander came up to me a couple of weeks ago and asked if there were any free places left. It was the right moment, because it was just after Jake the Ripper got expelled for threatening Bates with a knife in her chemistry class, and King Kong Kenny got caught disappearing during the PE lesson for the umpteenth time, so that meant we had seats to fill. It’s good those three are with us otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to make up the numbers, and had to cancel the whole stunt.’
‘I just find it odd, I must admit. None of our troop are great linguists, they’re just here because they have to do some foreign language. But Alexander and Elaine are interested in history and politics, and Michael is the science type.’
A loud crash from the direction of the reception told us that the kids were coming back down to start moaning about something or other. The most popular complaint turned out to be that the rooms didn’t have balconies and that they could only look onto the alleyway below, with its bars and souvenir shops. ‘You’re here to learn Spanish,’ I reminded them, ‘you can have a sunny holiday some other time.’
‘So get that through your thick skulls. Robert, did you arrange with the manager that we could use the disco for briefings?’
‘Yes I did, Mrs Sauermann. Would you be so kind as to wait here and direct all the pupils down there?’
Priz took another swig of gin as I found the set of stairs which led down to the windowless cavern which was the hotel dance room. Somebody had already switched on the spotlights for us, but Priz’s reference to torture chambers had suddenly made me sensitive to anything subterranean. When the headmaster, who at that moment would have been enjoying Saturday afternoon in his garden in Ealing, had suggested that she be the one to accompany me on this first school trip abroad, I had protested: ‘Priscilla Sauermann and I don’t work well together.’
That may be, Mr Winter, Thommy Thompson had replied without looking up from his desk, but she was the only other member of staff who was proficient in Spanish.
By about a quarter past seven the whole class had appeared, not a minute earlier than I’d actually expected them to come. Standing on the podium at the front of the disco, where I imagined dance shows were sometimes performed, I felt as if I was back in the classroom even if the red and blue disco lights did distort my view somewhat. ‘Right,’ I began, ‘is everyone happy?’ The first mistake.
Seventeen voices started shouting at me at once, the sixth-formers having settled around a table apart from everyone else. ‘Sir, you put me in with a right poofta;’ ‘Seamus stinks like something rotten down the market;’ ‘Miss, can we get Crossroads on the telly here?’ But the best was the shock that, having got twin bed rooms, they had to sleep in what looked like a matrimonial double bed. Charlie really wanted to borrow a saw from somewhere and cut his in two. It would have gone on if Leroy hadn’t jumped up.
‘Hey you guys listen,’ he shouted, the disco lights dancing across the red, yellow and green of his Rastafarian tank-top. ‘We all got these problems, each one of us. That ain’t no honeymoon bed we got, they all have two mattresses, two blankets and everything else. If anyone don’t wash we chuck them in the sea. And Crossroads is shit anyway. Mr Winter?’
I nodded my thanks to Leroy, as Priz waved a finger at Seamus. Any other teacher would have told him to take off the badge he’d stuck on his green shirt but she probably just wanted to show she thought it was really cool and right on. Alexander noticed it too and glared at him as he fingered the hair on his face which was fast becoming a beard. He got up and, marching over to where Seamus was crouching on the steps, bellowed: ‘That would be just like walking around here with a sticker saying “Support the Basque Freedom Fighters”. Take it off you fool, nobody here gives a shit about the IRA.’
Yes, it was just like being back in the classroom, where every second I regretted not having stayed at Cambridge to take a PhD and eventually land a fellowship.
Priz stood up, like an actress who couldn’t wait for her cue. ‘I just want to say something to the girls . . Whatever you do, my lovelies, don’t go out on the streets in those things you’ve changed into. Well, what most of you have changed into.’ Jacqueline looked down at her feet. Bernice and Elaine, still in the clothes they’d been wearing since we’d got on the school coach outside North Ken that morning, didn’t react. ‘The blokes here will be coming up and touching your tits. The Spaniards still think the women dress to please the men, and if they see you all done up like tarts they’ll take it as an open invitation.’
Ian laid his head on Debbie’s shoulder, rolled his eyes and sniggered something; probably along the lines of: How would she know? Who’s ever tried to touch her up? But Priz had brought up the delicate subject of how to behave, and so that was the moment for me to say something which I should have mentioned before, and which since the airport had filled me with even more unease than before.
‘Whatever you do,’ I began, hoping that the gaudy light hid me from looking too pale, ‘don’t come into contact with the Guarda Civil, those ones who walk around in the olive-green uniforms and have those shiny black leather hats which are folded up at the back.’ I could have added what my father had once told me about the civil guard, but suddenly I didn’t want to mention him there and then. ‘If you’ve got a problem go to one of the municipal policemen, the ones in grey uniforms. And another thing don’t talk about politics. Not one word about Gibraltar, Franco or wherever.’ I knew that such an admonition would only be the green light for some of them to go out and start abusing Franco, but I had to do my duty to save those who were a bit more level-headed; the diplomats would hopefully do their best to save the rest. ‘This country is on a state of high alert since they assassinated the Prime Minister a few months ago.’ And then, in words the relevancy of which would only much later become clearer, ‘I don’t want any of you doing your best to provoke a second Spanish Civil war.’
I then came to what was the whole point of that school trip to Spain. With Priz watching and doing nothing else, I handed out the sheets with Spanish questions and phrases which I’d rolled off on the duplicator back at North Ken. As the kids took the sheets, by snatching or otherwise, a heated discussion broke out as to who had actually paid the full £50 for the trip and who’d managed to get a grant from the local education authority. ‘My dad’s a manager, we don’t need to beg,’ Andrew announced as if anyone was in the least bit interested in his self-delusions. I was probably the only one who knew that, apart from the three sixth-formers, only Steven, Bernice and Manny had had to cough up the full amount.
‘Okay, listen everybody please,’ I tried to continue.
‘Shut up the lot of you!’ shrieked Priz.
I held up the waxed sheets with the purple, typewritten script and explained that they should use it as a guide for practising their Spanish on the streets. That was why those kids were there, courtesy of the London ratepayer.
‘Right, any more questions?’
Once again a cascade of excited voices threatened to engulf us. Apart from the sixth-formers only Little Lenny and Weirdo Malcolm, as they were both known, sat still. Priz took the initiative – probably more from oncoming boredom than anything else – and told everyone to shut up again. Pointing at Ian she asked: ’What do you want?’
Ian heaved himself up, a tall, well-built young man who did sometimes seem clumsy. ‘Guv, me and the lads, right, we want to know if we can see a bullfight here.’
The other boys nodded in agreement while the girls pulled disgusted faces. Once again, Priz was quicker to reply than I was. ‘What do you lot want to see a bullfight for? Number one, it’s expensive. Number two, it’s fuck- . . . flipping cruel. The bull has no chance, and it gets cut up for meat at the end anyway. But if you all really want it we can send you up to Pamplona when they let the bulls loose in the streets. Then you can see who wins and who loses. If you really want to see something typically Spanish-’ Priz, with her very personal sense of priorities, got up, looked around and found an ashtray where she stubbed out her cigarette before continuing, ‘There’s a flamenco show at this hotel tonight. Check it out. You can work off your aggression dancing that.’
Steven leaned forward from his perch on the steps and whispered something in Charlie’s ear. Charlie immediately jeered: ‘Boring, boring!’
Sylvia, who was sitting next to Charlie, nudged him and sang out in her own Scots-Caribbean Creole: ‘You shut your arse, wee man!’
The discussion ended, I told them all that the restaurant was at the top of the hotel, and that supper would begin right away. All of the kids found the enthusiasm to make their way up the stairs, except for one of them who remained sitting, watching me.
‘What is it, Bernice?’
Bernice was occupying the only hardback chair in the dance room, her knees jutting forward from under her thick skirt. Waiting until everyone else had cleared off as fast as they could, she began: ‘I can’t do it, sir.’ Her arms, folded across the jacket of the two piece suit which was a dark green in normal light, didn’t move.
Priz, already having grabbed her bag, obviously wanted to get upstairs too. ‘Can’t do what, you silly little girl?’
‘I can’t go out and speak Spanish, they’ll all laugh at me.’ Her lips hardly seemed to speak as she moved. Those eyes, painted with an eye shadow which was neither as dark nor as shiny as her hair, remained fixed on us. Or on me. ‘If I speak Spanish, they’ll all answer in English, and I’ll feel stupid.’
‘Yes of course you will, Bernice, we all feel embarrassed when that happens. Just carry on speaking in Spanish. If it does all get too complicated Mrs Sauermann or myself will always be nearby and come and explain that you want to practice Spanish.’
Either satisfied with my answer, or not being able to think of any other reason to hang around, Bernice left, ascending the steps gracefully. ‘Robert, that girl is like something out of a Hammer Horror film.’ Priz had the habit of smirking and squinting when she thought she’d caught someone out. ‘Don’t you think we’re going to reignite the Peninsula Wars with these kids here?’
I had started to gather up the remaining worksheets when somebody else started to come down the stairs. Slow, unhurried steps as if there was all the time in the world. ‘How do you think I got my degree in modern languages then? By just reading Cervantes or Moliére in the original? It’s no wonder English kids give up learning foreign languages; every time they try to speak them they get put down or are made to feel stupid by someone wanting to practice their English.’
‘Buenas tardes, Señor. Buenas tardes, Señora.’
If it hadn’t been for Bernice, Priz and I wouldn’t have been there when the other couple appeared in the disco. Both of the newcomers looked surprised to find other people there. The man looked as if he was older than fifty, muzzled air crowning a squat face across which stretched a long moustache. His skin, wrinkled and pockmarked, was testimony to the harmful effects of too much sunlight. The woman was much younger, probably in her mid-twenties, putting her somewhere in age between me and my pupils. She nodded, a curious smile across her face as I replied: ‘Buenas tardes.’
Priz was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, the lounge around her beginning to come to life as the other guests returned to the hotel. ‘Come on, let’s have dinner and then get a gin without tonic.’
And with that the first hour separating me from that fateful Sunday of the following weekend came to an end. The countdown had begun.
8 pm
IF I HAD KNOWN then about the dark-eyed stranger who was to give me the shivers I would have ordered a stiff drink straight away. For the entire class, dinner in the Hotel Don Carlos had been a new experience, sitting at tables as waiters and waitresses attended them. Charlie, of course, couldn’t resist the temptation to snap his fingers, until Priz shouted that she’d chuck him on the next bloody plane home. Then came the big moment, when we gave the kids permission to go out and start exploring Torremolinos for themselves. To a man they charged out of the hotel, almost breaking the glass doors as they banged them open one after the other. I followed Priz back to the bar which by then had acquired the excitement of a New Orleans funeral jazz parade, in contrast to the Presbyterian wake of two hours earlier.
He was sitting in one of the armchairs. A couple of years older than me, he was far more immaculately-dressed than I could ever have afforded. When he first saw me, he seemed to sniff at the brown corduroy blazer with leather elbow pads which I’d put on; my normal teacher’s uniform. His jet-black hair was combed back in a way I could never do with my brown, still slightly curly, locks. He observed Priz and me as we entered, his dark eyes watching over long fingers which were clasped contemplatively in front of his face, as though he wanted to ask questions to which he already knew the answers. I had a sudden sense of déjà vu; where had I seen that face, that expression before?
‘What’s your poison, Robert?’
‘Why don’t we go down and watch the flamenco show?’
‘I’d find it cool, I guess, but the bar’s up here. You go down and tell me about it later.’
Without waiting to see if I was being watched, or even to satisfy myself that his curiosity was merely that of one stranger taking an interest in another, I descended into what shortly before had been the briefing room for my Spanish class. The red and blue lights, which had distorted the kids faces, had been extinguished. The cavernous disco was in darkness, as if waiting for some deity to announce that there should be light. And there was light, not because Heaven had spoken, but because my eyes had become adjusted enough to perceive the faint yellow halo of a circle, right there where a short while before I had been standing.
‘Who said this was going to be a flamenco show, than? It’s nothing like what we saw down the pub that night.’ So there were other Londoners in the hotel.
I found a seat somewhere else, where genuine Spanish voices were whispering: ‘Sí, sí. Es flamenco . . . verdad.’
The room was alive. People were smoking, not the Rothman’s which kept Priz from a nervous breakdown, but the cigar smoke and black tobacco which Spaniards enjoyed. Impossible to imagine three decades on, but at that time the smoke was normal and a reminder that I was somewhere, and among people, many people In short, that poisonous smoke created atmosphere in a good way as well as bad.
A bright spotlight suddenly illuminated the podium, as if a new age was about to dawn. I was surprised that the young woman still looked the same as when I’d encountered her on the steps an hour or so earlier, although she was now covered by a red, layered flamenco dress. She didn’t have painted red cheeks or a rose planted in her hair, in the way that other flamenco dancers in tourist traps normally overdid their shows, but I already knew, or felt, that this woman didn’t need such gimmicks. She was too genuine. From somewhere in the darkness around a male voice began to wail to the sound of a guitar, as if crying for some long-lost love. The woman jerked, threw her hands behind her, and swirled her veil of black hair. None of it seemed practiced or rehearsed. She was letting out what she was feeling. Somebody, probably the disappointed tourist, began to clap; an intrusion which would have destroyed the atmosphere if the real aficionados hadn’t started to clap too, each clap in tune with the woman’s movements as they released the ecstasy they were living.
‘Spain is a mystery,’ my father had once said, ‘be there a hundred years and you’ll still never know it.’ As I watched the woman on the stage, the woman lost in another world, I could feel Spain around me, a land of white-washed villages where life was still dominated by devotion to the Holy Mother, where people were friendly but not used to strangers, where sex before marriage was a sin but where children could marry at any age.
‘Me llamo Juanita.’
The flamenco dancer didn’t seem in the least bit curious as to why an unknown Englishman should suddenly come up after the show and ask her name. I just supposed that she was used to people coming up after her show and asking her questions. Whatever, I found the name ‘Juanita’ charming enough, even if it somehow did suit her.For all I knew then, it might just have been her stage name.
‘Where did you learn to dance like that, Señorita?’ I was speaking to her in Spanish, as she and her guitarist were packing up their things. The rest of the audience had already trickled away upstairs, also by what they had experienced.
Juanita replied that she had never learnt to dance. She only expressed what was in her soul. I wanted to ask her more, to know what she felt, what did she think when she danced. But then, for the first time, she looked straight at me, and asked if I was the English school teacher.
I hesitated. ‘Sí. ¿Cómo sabe eso?’ Had the whole of Andalusia been told that the son of Robert Winter senior was there?
Her dark eyes, slightly slanted in that Andalusian manner, and small mouth gave nothing away. She had seen the group with many children, she explained, many of them looking African. The answer was understandable enough; at that time a school group with several black pupils would have been noticeable enough, even in Torremolinos. Then she smiled, and told me how she would love to learn English.
I told her that we would be there, in the Hotel Don Carlos for two weeks, and that I would be happy to teach her in that time. She made no reply to my offer, but just went on to say how difficult it was for her to understand English people when they spoke. However when I spoke, she added with a look which could have been either inquisitive or a complement, she heard a man who spoke English differently. Was that how Prince Charles spoke, she wondered?
‘After you have changed your clothes, Señorita, maybe I could invite you to a drink upstairs?’
In the years which have passed since, I have never been able to understand how I was able to say that so spontaneously. With Juanita it had seemed so natural, as if I knew that she should would either accept, or decline without hurting my feelings. She looked around at her guitarist – it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have been her husband or lover, because he looked so much older – but he just shrugged his shoulders, as if to say ‘don’t mind me chica.’
‘Then I‘ll see you upstairs as soon as you are ready.’ Her eyes, as well as her lips, smiled an acceptance.
I made my way back up to the lounge, thrilled that the flamenco dancer who had so entranced me had accepted my invitation. I hurried up the stairs, back to the existence I’d left behind a short while before. The silent stranger was still there, still sitting in the same seat, still watching me, a reminder that I didn’t know anyone who was here, not even Juanita. That dampened my spirits again.
‘Where the fuck have you been, Robert? Steven’s started to make an arse of himself already.’ Priz nodded towards the reception where Charlie and Seamus were doing their best to stop Steven from keeling over. ‘Bring him in here,’ she snapped.
‘But he’s already as drunk as a –’
‘Just get him seated somewhere, anywhere.’ She happened to be waving an empty glass of her own.
Charlie and Seamus dragged Steven, cursing and swearing, into the lounge. The whole room froze in mid-syllable to watch the new show. The other boys pushed him onto the first free sofa they found, his breath stinking of spirits. And his father ran a pub?
‘Get your shitty fingers off me, Winter, or I’ll get me old man onto you.’
The audience of holidaymakers, and the locals who could understand, smirked in Schadenfreude. Only the cold-eyed stranger didn’t seem amused. If the boy had spoken to me like that back at North Ken I would have whacked him one as hard as the Ministry of Education guidelines – and my anger – would have allowed. They say that a person’s true character shows through when they’re intoxicated; Steven’s grey eyes burned at me with the hate he’d shown every teacher.
The rest of the class had turned up, none of them too eager to help. Priz, glass cast aside, pushed through and bent down. ‘Steven, listen. Do you see that guy over there, the one with the funny eyes who’s watching us? He’s in the Spanish secret police, and if you don’t get up to bed right now – ’
‘Bollocks to him, and bollocks to the fucking General- ’
I hadn’t noticed the sixth-formers coming, but suddenly Alexander and Michael were behind Priz. Without a word they pulled Steven up, Michael clasping his long hand over the troublemaker’s mouth before he could utter another explosive word. ‘We’ll heave him up to his room, Mr Winter. Leave it to us.’ All around the class froze in surprise, except for Leroy, the only one who knew that Michael took self-defence lessons.
‘We’d better come with you. Mrs Sauerman?’
Charlie, who was sharing a room with Steven, wanted to come too but I decided he would be one aggravation too many. There was only room for, at the most, three people in the lift anyway. Alexander and Michael were both tall and thin, and nobody cared much if we squashed Steven in the process. A lesser man than Alex might have been embarrassed at Steven remarking that he was going stiff being pressed up against him.
Priz followed us up by using the stairs. Whether it was because she wanted to help or because she didn’t want to miss the action wasn’t quite clear. ‘Why did you say that chap down by the bar is in the Spanish secret police?’ I asked. We’d managed to get Steven to his room and dump him on the bed. Nobody had the least desire to try and undress him so we just left him on the bed to drop off, hopefully in more senses than one. I had sent Alexander and Michael back down to the lounge to try and restore order.
‘You mean that dishy guy in the neat suit and sleeked back hair?’ Priz and I were back in the lift, its brown walls now thankfully much further away than during the ride up. ‘I said that just to scare the shit out of Steven. And besides . . .’ she paused before continuing, ‘I think I did hear one of the barmen muttering something about him. The barman even used the word muerte, means death in case you’ve forgotten. Why? Not getting worried, are we old man?’
‘No, of course not. But don’t you think it’s odd – ’
The outside door was suddenly pulled open as the lift thudded to a stop on the ground floor. A group of girls with Glasgow accents had no intention of letting us out before they crammed in, but a harsh look from Priz made them step back. Why couldn’t she have them same effect on teenagers? ‘Well Robert, I think it’s time we chased the rest of them all up to bed. The night is still young for me.’
I spotted Juanita as soon as I entered the lounge. Priz went straight to the kids, who were assembled in a threatening group. ‘Excuse me, Señorita, but you understand I have my duties.’ She was waiting at the bar, back in her dark trousers and white blouse, with a glass of something already in front of her. I wanted to forget everything else and sit there with her, but I could see that the kids were getting restless again. It was an agonising decision, but I had to take it.
‘Lo me siento. But I must get back to the children before there is any more trouble. Buenas noches.’
‘Buenas noches . . .’
She didn’t seem put out, but then I guessed she was used to tourists standing her up. I added that I hoped we would meet again, and she answered that it was possible.
From a sofa nearby, completely alone and obviously ill at ease in that hotel bar lounge, a middle-aged nun, dressed as black as death but with a pink, cherubic face and small, pebble spectacles perched upon her squat nose, followed our conversation with interest.
With the sudden urge to start kicking arses I hurried over to the kids. But I kept my cool because I could feel eyes drilling into me, and I didn’t want to invite trouble just yet. The stranger looked coldly up at me when I walked past his table, and flicked ash from his cigar. I thought for an instant that the man was going to say something, but he didn’t. Such is the power of false impressions. On the table in front of him, I suddenly noticed, was a set of Rosary beads, as black as the night and with a crucifix at the end which was disproportionately large. Maybe it had been added on only so that the bearer could know it was there when he needed religious comfort. The man looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, a cold glance that looked as if it had already drawn blood somewhere. No wonder the barmen had decided he represented Death.
Eventually the whole class was in bed and I was alone in my own room, looking out on a scene which was literally a thousand miles away from the view out of my flat in Earl’s Court. Like everyone else in the hotel I could see, hear and smell the alleyway below. Young men came and went from the hotel and bars along the alley, shouting hoarsely as they did so; guitar music was playing somewhere down there, as Andalusia came to life. And there was the ever-present smell of frying fish. Looking up, a half-moon tried to shine its light down on the white canyon between the two wings of the Hotel Don Carlos. It was a warm spring night, and the calming air from the Mediterranean not too far away came in through the open window. Looking back over thirty years I know that that evening marked the beginning of an abrupt end to my long, drawn-out youth.
Priz and I had had remarkably little difficulty in herding the kids off to bed. Frustratingly little difficulty, when I remembered I’d had to cancel a date. They were tired, and for many it was to be a new freedom to share a room with a classmate instead of with a brother, sister or parent. I was left alone to think about the day and what it had brought me. To arrive back in a country I’d been to many times before but this time with a group of under-age responsibilities, as well as one adult liability, and to have my presence noticed by someone who knew my father’s name and what he’d done there forty years before. Maybe it had been good fortune that Manny’s passport hadn’t been in order, otherwise we would all have just passed through. But Ronaldo González, whoever he was, might still have noticed my arrival and I would have been none the wiser. What, if any, connection did it have with the sinister-looking stranger down in the lounge, the one who really did look as if he could kill me?
But on the positive side there was Juanita, who I couldn’t get out of my mind and yet – as is so often in such moments – whose face I couldn’t picture. It was all such a cauldron of emotions, and a warning of what was to come. The following two weeks were to turn my whole picture of the world and the people in it upside down, a fortnight which was going to bring excitement, tension and passion. As well as tragedy.
THE SECOND DAY
OUR SECOND DAY IN SPAIN got off to a misleadingly good start. I made a discovery which, for one brief instant, was to put my mind at ease. Priz and I had followed the kids out of the Don Carlos and through the sunlit, gaudy-coloured streets of Torremolinos. ‘Even if we can’t stop the little sods causing trouble, we might as well be there to watch,’ she sniggered.
All around us the town was slowly coming to life, as shops and small eateries opened up and waited for the first holidaymaking, free-spending customers of the morning. ‘If we were up in the mountains, in a real Andalusian village, that smell of leather would be real.’
‘At least you’re dressed for the part, Robert.’ She nodded at my kipper tie.
‘When have you ever seen me without a tie?’ I enquired. ‘I know you’re comfortable in your psychedelic skirt, but I’m a teacher on duty.’
‘You don’t believe that yourself.’ We had reached the beach, where the boys had started to take their tops off and plomp themselves down on the sand. It was if they had been awake during Mr. Harding’s geography lessons and believed his assertion that the new ice age could start any day, and so everyone should make the most of the sun now. ‘Everyone can see that you’d rather be somewhere, or something, else. Who are you really, Robert? Sometimes I think you need to dress like something out of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ because you need a mask, you need to convince yourself.’ She lowered her sunglasses and giggled. ‘Isn’t it terrible when your ex was a psychoanalyst?’
‘In case my real self emerges, as your ex might put it, I did bring some T-shirts along.’
‘It could be that you’ll need them soon enough, old man . . . how did you get on with the flamenco dancer last night?’ She’d pushed her glasses back up along her long nose, so that her eyes - the mirrors of her soul, the giveaway to what she was thinking and feeling - were hidden once more. ‘Some of the girls were also down in the disco, they saw you go and try to chat her up.’
‘And how’s your hangover, Priz?’ Events on the beach were suddenly giving me the chance to change the subject. ‘I hope that doesn’t make our lot ask again about going to a bullfight.’ A group of Spanish teenagers were running around in the sand, and running towards a small man who was holding a blanket out and spinning daintily around. Bronze-skinned girls, obviously part of the group, screeched ‘¡Ole!’ at each successful pass. ‘Did you know that the nearest thing they’ve got in Spain to the RSPCA is a society for the protection of animals and plants, and that it only worries about the plants?’
‘Don’t we know this Spanish gang from somewhere?’
‘Oh hell, Charlie’s going to get in on the act.’ As anyone would have expected, Charlie – urged on by the others – handed his bifocals to Manny and got ready to charge at the red capa. The‘¡Ole!’ from the Spanish girls was noticeably less enthusiastic as he hit the cape, tripped and fell onto the sand. His own classmates jeered and clapped. The only person to show concern was the beach bullfighter.
‘Didn’t we see that bloke yesterday, Robert?’
The fresh air from the sea was making me more alert than the dusty atmosphere back at the hotel could ever have done. The bullfighter, prancing around in tight trousers and a half-open, equally tight white shirt, was waving his hands about as he explained something to Charlie. My initial reaction was to stay where I was, but Priz took the lead and stepped onto the soft sand. I followed, immediately deciding that it couldn’t compromise my professional image if I were to wear sandals on the beach instead of my leather-patented Clark’s. The rest of our boys, tempted now that Charlie the buffoon had taken the lead, were getting up and daring each other to have a bash. The bullfighter waved his capa enticingly as, one by one, they charged through. The enthusiastic cries of the Spanish girls, their tanned skin glistening in the sun, suddenly grew louder.
‘I’ve got the feeling that there’s trouble coming,’ hissed Priz, more in relish than concern. Some yards away the Spanish boys were looking on and shouting encouragement. All except one.
‘That nun there, with the Spanish group. Wasn’t she getting pissed in the bar last night?’
It was the nun who had been watching the polite exchange between Juanita and me after we’d taken Steven up to his room. ‘I wouldn’t say she was exactly enjoying herself yesterday evening . . .’