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VI.Visitor From the Past

        Up to the age of 40, it had always been my philosophy that it was best never to stop still or even look back. It was the code of the footloose adventurer. But upon coming half-way in the journey of life, as Dante put it, the feeling that I had already seen quite a bit led me to start doing just those two things. In fact, I began to want something I had never really had: my own home, but less in the sense of "house" than "place".

        I returned to Europe, from the West Indies, in 1981, and spent the first two years in France. I had gone there hoping to continue with my arts and crafts business on the Côte d'Azur but, for purely economic reasons, ended up becoming a translator in Paris instead. Then I unexpectedly received a modest but regular monthly sum of money that made it possible to live without working for quite a few years, but not in Paris. I asked my benefactor - who knew me well - where I should go and the answer was "Spain". So I went to have a look, it being understood that Spain for me meant this particular corner of it.

        When, that damp spring morning, I got on the bus at the El Tocón railway station - fifth stop on the Granada-Algeciras line - it had been almost 21 years since I left Montefrio for the last time. A few letters with the villagers had been exchanged after my departure, because Lilo had melodramatically written to Maria the peanut peddler that "Lorenzo's heart is dead", and the naïve lady went about announcing my biological death, until a letter commissioned by Manolo reached me in Paris asking for a confirmation. I recognized my ex-girlfriend's sturm und drang and wrote back explaining that all she meant was that I was a heartless bastard for having left her. But after that, I relegated Montefrio to the magical past, and all contact was lost. There were so many other things, and places, that vied for my attention, then!

        Manolo was the person I most wanted to see but, since he would now be 70, it was my turn to feel worried, as the bus began to climb north through the pine forests. I turned to the elderly farmer sitting next to me, in his grey cotton suit and straw hat, and asked nervously if Manuel Avila was still alive. His answer itself was a spiritual return to Montefrio: "¡Si lo está", he croaked enthusiastically, "y muy buena persona es!" - Yes, and a fine fellow he is too. In the local way of thinking, to have just answered straightforwardly "Yes, he is alive" without adding a rhetorical word of praise might have suggested that he wouldn't regret it if Manolo were dead.

        Having read and heard so much about how Spain had changed since the sixties, I was satisfied to see that although Montefrio had changed too, it had done so much less than the other places I had seen on my journey south from Madrid. There were the same well-groomed olive groves and spectacular approach, as the castle and village seem to rise up from the valley below, and the odd-shaped Plaza was still odd-shaped. However, the whitewashed fronts of the buildings, once warped and lumpy, had almost all been rebuilt and straightened out, although it took me a moment to realize it. It was like meeting an old man one had known for years, just after he has been fitted with a set of disturbingly perfect false teeth.

        The house we had lived in still stood in 1983, with the same door that we had unlocked with the big key we were given by the owner in Cordoba. Manolo no longer lived in the same house nearby, but the woman there _ who said to my surprise that she had once been my cleaning lady - told me he would not be found in his current house either, but at his sister's on the Calle Alta, above his nephew's shoe shop. A little boy was instructed to take me there. A few minutes later I stood in a sombre room lined with shoe boxes, where a plump, balding man excitedly said he remembered me, before rushing upstairs to call his uncle.

        Manolo was not so enchanted, and with good reason - I had never once written in all that time, apart from the "I am alive" letter. He glanced at me unsmilingly and sat down without saying a word. For a moment I wretchedly thought he was going to tell me to go to hell, but after a while he grunted "Pensé que te habían matao - I thought they had killed you". This did not mean that he hadn't received my only letter but was, I realized, one of those set phrases of which the Andalucians are so fond, which one says to people in similar situations.

        I began to apologize, but he motioned me to stop. He had rapped my knuckles for being such a rascal, but he knew he would have done just the same if he had gone away, and what I had been up to for the past 21 years didn't interest him anyway. In fact, he immediately made it clear that there were only two subjects which he felt could possibly interest anyone: flamenco singing, and his ailments. As soon as he had taken full stock of my presence, he began lecturing me on both of them, a bit of one and then a bit of the other.

        He looked very dignified in his retirement clothes, dark suit with prize-winning gold guitar-shaped pin in the lapel and neatly trimmed grey-white hair. He told me that he had been recently installed with a pace-maker (the villagers joked about it, saying he "had a guitar in his breast" ) and suffered from a host of afflictions which made it totally impossible for him to sing - in spite of which he sang, in short bursts, all day long.

        In fact, Manolo had become such a hypochondriac that when I told him so one day, he pounced avidly on what he thought was a new pathological condition and shouted, "You're right, I've got that too!", until I explained what it meant and his triumph turned to bitter indignation.

        Long-suffering Maria was in Barcelona taking care of their two sons who worked in an office, and I was told that they now officially resided there. But since Manolo couldn't stand Barcelona, he in fact spent half of his time back in the village, sleeping in the empty house on the Calle Baja but spending the day at his sister's, above the shoe shop which belonged to his nephew Pepe Cunao.

        For the tormented artist, Montefrio was the lesser of two evils. When I met him one wet and icy winter morning by the round church in the Plaza, just after he had returned in Yo-Yo's mini-bus, I imprudently asked him if he was "happier" in Montefrio or Barcelona. He cast me a withering glance and snarled, "¡No estoy bien en ninguna parte! - I'm not happy anywhere!" I knew what he meant. One has to live somewhere on the face of the earth, and for Manolo - as well as for me, it soon proved - Montefrio was it.

        However, the one who made me decide to return to stay was not Manolo but kind, innocent, brotherly Cristobal, the panaero who delivered the bread to the farms. Early the next morning I was sitting on the toilet in La Fonda, where I had taken a room for the night _ the same room No. 5, I realized once inside, where Lilo had beaten her head on the tiled floor - when the staircase leading up from the street reverberated with a series of great shouts.

        Someone had told the good man I was back, and he had raced over from the bakery. He still looked just like one of his rough loaves of bread, except with a little more flour sprinkled on top and more yeast in the dough. I was hugged, stroked, shouted at, hugged again and, within minutes, bundled into the already ancient van in which he now delivered his bread to the farms.

        Off we bounced down the dirt roads. The mule had been sent to pasture many years ago, and the van made too much noise for him to sing as we went along, but not to talk, or rather shout. I was confronted with the big question that everyone was asking of me, "Where is Lilo?", since, to my dismay, they had all been fondly remembering us as an inseparable unit.

        I awkwardly explained that I had not seen her since a few months after leaving Montefrio, in other words, since almost as long as I had not seen them. The next question was an incredulous "Why?", and all I could do was mumble about life taking us on different paths, which the women, especially, took very poorly. For the villagers, you may treat your wife as badly as you wish, but you never leave her. However, I soon devised an answer for the men, which met with their hearty approval. I explained that I was very young then and "still longed to meet many other women".

        Maria Platillo Volante, my old friend told me, had also moved to Barcelona, where her five undernourished children, transformed by the industrial boom into essential manpower, had found work in factories and were dutifully looking after her in her old age. She returned once a year, I was told, in a tiny jelly-bean of a car to see her relatives and buy olive oil and garbanzos to take back to her Catalonian tenement flat. I would soon have to confront her reproachful looks too, when she interrogated me about Lilo.

        Melchor the gypsy worked in a brewery in Barcelona operating the machine that put the labels on the cans, and was "fat and very well". He had married a paya, a non-gypsy woman, as well. His brother José had moved to a nearby town, Valderrubios, where he still sold horses. I would soon be embraced and interrogated by them all...

        It was when Cristobal stopped to attend to some almond trees of his that I realized what I would do. He was grafting "sweet almond" shoots onto a tree which he said was "bitter", when I saw across the ravine a woman with a straw hat washing clothes under a fig tree, in front of a crooked white house. Down below by the creek a boy was calling up to his mother, in the perfect silence of the cactus and olive trees. I said to Cristobal, "I want to live in a house like that".

        Three months later I was back in my grey Fiat van with its Alpes-Maritime licence plates, loaded with everything I owned, including an electric typewriter and a gas-powered camping fridge newly purchased at La Samaritaine. After a few days of driving about in the bread truck, with Cristobal pointing first to one uninhabited cortijo and then to another, I chose an old mule-drivers' tavern, called El Ventorro del Toril, on the road between Algarinejo and Montefrio, because it had a sweeping view of the Milanos Valley. It had never been rented so the price I was asked was a very modest one.

        There, I settled down to finish writing my life story, the still unfinished manuscript of which I later, half on purpose, managed to lose. My amorous ventures were more consequential, if not precisely more successful than my literary ones, however, and within a month of my arrival I had fallen in love with a problematic young woman from a nearby town, whose destiny I believed for a while to be entwined with mine. To the point that I began to look for a cortijo to buy, because, having just been expelled from university, she felt that she could make a go of a business that was then the rage among the hippie set.

        This was a "farm school", where city children were indoctrinated to the joys of rural living by city adults over the weekend, milking goats and hunting for eggs in the chicken pen. Some time later, I wrote the story of my adventures with Rocio but mislaid it, too, perhaps for the better. Suffice it to say that after she and her whimsical granja escuela had gone by the board, what remained was something totally new for me, with my anarchistic aversion to the ownership of anything that, like the Jew and his fiddle, cannot be carried about with one: the determination to have a house of my own.

        It happened at the livestock fair of June, two years after my return, while I was living in another, half-ruined cortijo, but free of charge because it belonged to my friend Pepe Cañete. I was inspecting a rather puny mare, which a local man called Yo-Yo (the father of the one with the mini-bus) wanted urgently to sell me.

        I explained that I couldn't buy a horse because I didn't have a cortijo to keep it in. Yo-Yo, with an entrepreneurial gleam in his eye, asked what sort of house I was looking for. Small plot of land, good roof, beautiful views, low price... a moment later I was on the back of his motorbike, bumping down another carril.

        There it stood, like a chalk-white balcony overlooking the Sierra de Parapanda and the plain of Granada, nestling among oak and almond and fig trees. My self-appointed real estate agent said it was owned by five brothers, all of whom had moved to Barcelona except one, who was ready to part with it for a price I could afford.

        The next day the house was mine, although, for some reason which I am unable to remember, I never did buy the mare.

 

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