I HAVE SPOKEN of our friend the baker Juan. And at this point I should tell what happened to Juan. But I do not want to write about it, for my mind still avoids thinking of it even now as one might avoid touching an old but still sensitive scar. Perhaps I will come to it gradually by just talking about Juan.
Juan was a charming man, a bachelor of I suppose fifty or a little more, rather short but strong and muscular, and always smartly dressed in Sevillian style – snow-white shirt turned down around the neck without a collar but often with a white silk neckerchief, black trousers, made tight around the knees, a wide black sash bound tightly around the waist, and a black coat, thrown loosely over the shoulders in summer like a cape; the whole costume crowned with a wide stiff-brimmed hat of light grey felt. In fact to look at him, he might have been a breeder of bulls or at any rate a learned amateur of bullfighting. But really he had only a mild interest in bullfighting, his passion was for horses, and he always had one or two good ones. He really took more interest in his horses and his dogs and his farm than in his bakery, though he baked the best bread in the world, I truly believe, notable even among the wonderful breads of Andalucia, where to say That village has bad bread is almost as damning as to say That village has a bad water which removes it at once beyond the realm of civilised dwelling places.
I remember Maria taking a drink of water from the village well at Adra once when we visited that place. She had never left her mountains before and might well have been overcome by her first sight of the sea, falling in foam beneath her. However, all she said when she first viewed its endless blue waters was ‘Can you wash clothes in it?’ ‘No,’ we had to reply apologetically. ‘Is it useful for irrigation?’ she enquired again. ‘No,’ we were still obliged to reply. After which Maria lost interest in it, and turning her attention to the water she knew, went to taste a cupful from the big well in the square where some women were filling their pitchers. She just tasted it, and poured the rest of the water away.
‘This village,’ she said, ‘has a bad water,’ and the women quailed before her, for, poor things, they knew that it was true.
Even now when I pick up the peculiar loaves, apparently made of an unattractive mixture of bleached sawdust and plaster-of-Paris, which we are forced to buy as bread in England for want of anything better, I daily regret Juan’s bread. It is not that I ‘want better bread than is made of wheat’ as Cervantes says. I only want bread – and in England I am given something else. In Spain if I asked for bread I would get it. And Juan’s bread was as honest as he was. It was as good as bread.
Juan, as I said, was a bachelor which is unusual in Spain, and he lived with a charming old mother of eighty-three. The village said that he had never married because he had had an unhappy love affair in his youth. He had fallen in love with a girl of another village, and she had loved him too, so the villagers said, but he was poor and her father was a wealthy man, and in the end she was married off to a richer suitor. But Juan never married, though he was an admirer of women, nor did he have a mistress. He lived with his old mother, and when he rode by in the village fiestas on his handsome horse, it was his niece who rode behind him dressed in her frilled Andalucian costume with flowers in her hair.
Juan used to come to see us from time to time and advise us about our fruit trees and crops, and we always both liked and admired him for he was a most attractive man. He was a conservative of a moderate sort and a devout Catholic; but he deplored the large neglected estates and the horrible poverty and lack of employment in Andalucia, and particularly the exploitation of the workers and the lack of security of the small farmers, who hired a bit of land and when they had improved it a little were often asked exorbitant rent on the score of the improvements they had made themselves, or saw it rented over their heads to someone with more means, as Juan told us with severe disapproval had been done many times in our village formerly, pointing out as we walked the orange trees and olive trees now tall and bearing, planted by the poor tenants who had been dispossessed.
‘Something will have to be done!’ he would say. It was a common saying in Spain. ‘Hunger rules!’
Juan’s family at one time had been much richer, and he was related to all sorts of people both rich and poor. His forefathers, I gathered, had ruined themselves in the common Spanish way, by having enormous families and dividing up their lands and money between such large numbers that in the end there was practically nothing left. I remember Juan taking us to see a fine house near the village once. ‘My great-grandfather built that house for himself,’ he remarked casually.
‘But what a pity you haven’t got it,’ I said regretfully.
‘Oh! I don’t care much about houses,’ Juan said indifferently. ‘It’s good land I like, a good irrigated piece like the one I have by the river, and then my horses and my dogs. In summer it’s as much as I do if I go inside to see to the men in the bakery for a little while in the day and to sleep for a few hours at night. I’m out before it’s daylight and after it’s dark. Any four walls with a chimney in the corner would do for me if you left me my garden and my orchard and my vineyard.’ He had the true Spanish passion for planting things and watching them grow.
Enrique couldn’t even imagine anyone ever growing tired of being in a garden. He thought that with a garden like ours we all had happiness and amusement for our whole lives. Irrigating alone was a delightful occupation for two or three hours a day – I must say we used to love it too. We would watch with a sort of fascination the water beginning to bubble up in the middle of the flower beds just where Enrique wanted it from the pipes that ran underground from bed to bed; and then the watering of the fields, a carefully directed stream down the first furrow until that was full, then a few clever strokes with a hoe, a little dam built here, a new passage opened there, and the water streaming down to fill another furrow, led off sometimes by small canals to fill little moats around the fruit trees which stood in rows along the high orchard wall. ‘Oh! there’s always distraction in a garden!’ as Enrique said, especially in a garden in Spain.
When we had visitors from England they had to spend their first evening watching the irrigating. It was as it were an initiation rite. But whether they ever caught the inner meaning of the Mystery of which Enrique was Initiate and Chief Priest, I do not know. Gerald and I were at least neophytes.
This Spanish feeling for land, for water, for sun, air, bread, olives, wine, all the simple and good ‘gifts and creatures’ as the prayer-book says is wonderfully expressed, I think, in a sixteenth-century folk-song – so Spanish, so unlike the folk-songs of other races. It is called ‘Labradores de Castilla’.
Esta si que es siega de vida
Esta si que es siega de flor.
Hoy segadores de España
Venid a ver a la Moraña
Trigo blanco y sin Argaña
Que de verlo es bendicion.
It is very difficult to translate it and catch any of the meaning and the feeling in it. Literally it says:
This, this is the sowing of life
This, this is the sowing of the flower.
Today sowers of Spain
Come to see at the Moraña
Corn that is white and without tares,
To see it is a benediction!
There is the voice of the true Spain, the lover of the land and of the flocks, of corn and wine and bread.
I write this here when I am speaking of Juan because he was such a true Spaniard, such a lover of the land, and a grower of corn and baker of bread. And when I think of these fundamental necessities of life as they are in Spain, and of the simplicity and happiness of the very act of living there, I cannot help remembering him – against my will, for I have so many painful thoughts connected with his memory now that I do not want to think of him at all. His ghost comes unbidden into my mind ‘in his habit as he lived’, and I see him walking about our garden with us on a bright Sunday morning, praising the beans, criticising the pruning of the oranges, but always kindly, while Enrique drank in eagerly praise, criticism and advice. I can see Juan’s very smile and hear the very tone of his voice saying: ‘You should buy some of the new American orange trees from the Agricultural Station. They are very dear, but they are worth it: there have never been oranges like that in Spain before! As to your vines – don’t bother about them. I will get you cuttings of the best vines when your stock is ready for grafting. I have a friend –’ In Spain one always had a friend, Juan was one of ours.
We could hardly believe it at first when we were told that Juan was ‘wanted’ by the extremists. But during the first week after the rising, an attempt was made to arrest him and several other poor men of the village and put them in Malaga prison under ‘detentive arrest’. They were all middle-aged or elderly men in quite humble circumstances, and none of them I should imagine had had anything whatever to do with the risings. They were chiefly men who had been sergeants in the army or in the Civil Guard, and were supposed to have been cruel or repressive in their behaviour. Juan was much the most prosperous of them, and he was only the village baker with a few acres of land. It was not really for class reasons that people were murdered, in our village at any rate. It was for political hatreds or old venganzas. Juan had belonged to Gil Robles’ Accion Catolica party, and had acted as electioneering agent and I suppose bought votes for it. That was his death sentence.
The village protested vigorously over this attack upon its rights, and won the first struggle over the fate of her hijos. It was agreed that they were to be allowed to stay in their homes, and that the village committee was to be responsible for them and to see that they did not try to escape. This was before Don Carlos and his family came to us, and we had the idea of having Juan stay in our house with the consent of the Committee, as being somewhat safer for him if the Terrorists made one of their night raids. But he preferred staying at home, as he said he had done nothing wrong and had nothing to be ashamed of, he was a member of a Centre party and not an extremist of any kind, he would stay in his own house.
At that time things were not so bad as they became later, and we hoped that he would be all right as he was popular in the village and had so many guarantees and safe-conducts from various sources. Later when we had the C— family with us it would have been impossible for us to have him. We were only just able to save Don Carlos by trading on our prestige as British subjects almost beyond what it would bear. I do not think it would have been possible for us to have kept Don Carlos even a week longer than we did. To take in Juan as well would have been very dangerous for them all.
Juan had some other English friends, fellow horse-lovers, who had a farm in the sierra and had remained on it, but he decided not to go to them when the question arose, because he said it would not be a good place to hide if they should come. But I think his decision not to go was partly due to unwillingness to leave his village. I remember how poor Maria and Pilar used to say at that time: ‘Oh! Señora, if we were only all safe at home in Our Village!’
Don Carlos and Gerald and I were always inclined to think that Juan’s best plan would probably be simply to go to Malaga and stay at one of the larger hotels in the middle of the town for a while. Except during one week when the terror was at its height these hotels were particularly safe places. They were locked and guarded at night, and while they were sometimes searched by militia, etc., during the day, it was not such searchers that Juan had to fear; his various safe-conducts would have protected him from anyone with the shadow of a legal authority, it was only the secret night murderers he had to dread. – But I do not know why I go over and over this when it is too late – I have even thought that if Juan had been a man of the active courage of Don Carlos he might have got safely over to the other side, crossing the sierra towards Algeçiras. It cannot have been very well guarded, and once he got out of the immediate district he would not have been recognised, and might have passed as a countryman travelling on business. He could have got passes and safe-conducts of all sorts. But the horrible change in everyone around him paralysed his energies, as a rabbit becomes paralysed at the approach of a snake.
For the change must have been dreadful to him. One by one his friends fell away, only his family, and they fearfully, shared his isolation. No one came near him, everyone avoided him. He sat in a little yard behind his house alone or with his one faithful friend, an almost half-witted man he had been kind to. There he sat through the long days, or lay through the longer nights in his room above. What a burden of suffering men and women have borne during this war!
When I was a child and used to read books about the Indian Mutiny certain names came to have for me a curiously sorrowful ring, a sad undertone seemed to sound when they were spoken – Lucknow – Cawnpore. I have found since the Civil War began that certain names of Spanish cities have for me now this same sorrowful tone which sounds in my mind when I see them or hear them spoken – Badajos – Malaga – Toledo. Even Granada, whose charming name (which means pomegranate) used to call to my mind only the most delightful days spent among its bright squares and climbing streets, or hanging over the Alhambra wall gazing down fascinated on the city spread below while all the sounds of the south, the playing children, the calling women, the street cries, the cathedral bells, the crowing of the cocks floated up to us, sounds sadly now. It was our favourite city, and in the old days when we had been for months in the high wilds of the Sierra Nevada, and started off at last for an expedition to it, I used to understand Browning’s peasant who keeps saying ‘Oh! a day in the City Square is the greatest pleasure in life!’ But now what a melancholy ring it seems to have – Granada – how sadly the syllables fall. And it is the same with all the Andalucian cities I have loved. Cordoba – Antequera – Almeria – they all have the same sorrowful sound.
When Don Carlos first arrived Juan came to visit him one day. He came a back way across fields because he said he would not return the Left Front salute if it were made to him, as it was almost sure to be, on the road from some passing lorry. Don Carlos whose courage was of a gayer kind did not sympathise with this stubborn attitude. ‘I wish I had a duro for every time I’ve held up my arm,’ he said. He had been caught in the trouble in Malaga when it began and had spent the evening saluting. I wanted to find out how close the watch kept on Juan was, and reconnoitring around the house, I found under the front windows trying to pick up a bit of the conversation in the sala a sort of spy-guard, a haggard old man sitting on a wheelbarrow in most unconvincing idleness. So I went out and talked to him, about the weather, about the bombing, about anything that came into my head, until he finally gave it up and went away. But a little later when I looked out he had returned again, so I sent Enrique out who invited him to come in and sit down in the kitchen if he was tired, which drove him away. But though the old spy amused us, he made us feel that the situation was worse than we had thought, and Juan did not repeat his visit which he realised was probably not well looked upon at a gathering of suspected persons.
Juan hardly ever went out after that. He sat all day in his house or in his backyard under the trees alone or with his poor friend, whose heart was better than his head. I remember a visit we paid him. We were talking as usual about his situation, and he spoke with a kind of horror of how his friends had fallen away, ‘all except this one’ he added, smiling at the faithful creature who sat beside him.
It was clear to us that the horror he felt was not simply at his own position. It was a sort of horror at the baseness and cowardice quite ordinarily decent kindly people can show when they feel themselves in danger, at the change that civil war can produce in hearts and minds.
When we got up to go that afternoon Juan looked at me as we said goodbye, and something in his whole nature called out to me so clearly that I felt as if he had spoken and said, ‘What is it?’ He answered me with a look which expressed more than I would have thought it possible to so express – something of real horror at the nature of the world as it was revealed to him, of a passionate all-consuming wish to wake at last from this nightmare he lived in – and then the connection between us was broken, and he only said hopelessly, ‘Nada – nada –’ ‘Nothing – nothing –’
We all wanted Juan to go to Malaga, we were sure that he would be safer there, where the Guardias de Asalto and Militia were strong enough to give real protection to people with safe-conducts. But fear made him irresolute, he could not decide. And then one night we came back from Malaga and heard that he had gone suddenly no one knew where. He had wanted to see us before he left, and unluckily we had been away. I do not know whether he wanted to come to us in his desperation or whether it was only to say goodbye. For some weeks we heard that he was in hiding somewhere, and we hoped that he might manage to hide successfully until things became safe again, or until the Nationalists took the city (an event which we all realised from the beginning was only a matter of time), as he had so many relatives of all classes and conditions – one for instance was an aviator at the local airfield. Many people did so manage to hide. The priest of our village, a young man who was generally liked as a good priest who was kind to the poor, got away to Malaga at the outbreak of trouble and hid successfully until the city was taken. He dressed as a workman, and, Don Carlos wrote us after the taking when he had returned, was bold enough even to go about the streets with a red handkerchief tied around his neck! His friend spread a story that he had escaped to Almeria where some of his family were known to live, which made him the less likely to be looked for. We hoped for a time that something like that would happen with Juan.
But the Terrorists grew impatient and announced that if they could not find Juan they would take his brother-in-law. It shows what a primitive race the Spaniards are in some ways that they were not much surprised or even much shocked at the idea of killing a member of his family in Juan’s place. What did shock them was that they should talk of taking a brother-in-law – a brother, yes, they said, of course that would have been natural; but a brother-in-law is not really related. These were common tactics in the civil war, I am told, on both sides, for getting the man who was wanted. He almost always gave himself up to save someone else from suffering in his place: if he did not for some reason, at least they had a relative to kill or put in prison.
A few days later Maria came in and said angrily: ‘They have killed Juan!’
It seemed that he had been hiding in a cave near a village up the valley; and some of his family had been secretly bringing him food at night. And he might have hidden there safely for a long time, but a friend gave him away, a friend who owed him money. Juan was shot. I hope he was killed instantly. After the first shock of horror at Maria’s words I was conscious of a bitter relief. At least his long agony was over and Juan was safely dead.
Sometimes still in the night in those hours when there is nothing to distract us and the mind repeats its old troubles, I torment myself by going over and over the memories of that time – thinking that we might have saved Juan – that he might have saved himself – if he had acted differently.
Juan – Juan – my mind repeats, and the darkness answers Nada – Nada –