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The Malign Spirits

        It may seem paradoxical, but I have often felt that all I lack in order to believe is faith. Even though I was never even baptised, I doubt that many certified genuflectors feel the shudder of awe which overcomes me when I hear the haunting chant of the monks of the Monastery of Silos, or stand before the disembodied beauty of a medieval church in the hills of Catalonia. But just when I most long to throw myself into the arms of the Almighty, something always holds me back. As the philosopher George Santayana said, "scepticism is the chastity of the intellect", and in this, at least, I have kept my virginity.

        Occultism and black magic have also fascinated me although I was never convinced of their physical power over matter. The years I lived in Brazil and Haiti afforded me unforgettable nights of voodoo, macumba and candomblé, but for me it was all cultural slumming, dipping my toes into the primeval ignorance of my prehistoric forefathers. The Haitian peasant girl who cleaned my house had a spell cast to make me marry her, but, as the parish priest scolded her when he got wind of it, she should have known that such things don't work on men like "Monsieur Laurent".

        However, here in my relatively civilized corner of the European Union, I have in fact experienced a number of things which are inexplicable from the standpoint of scientific reason. But, attempting to be reasonable about the unreasonable, I should describe the various circumstances which I am persuaded brought them on.

        I lived then in my cortijo near Montefrio, facing the Sierra de Parapanda. The house stands mid-way between the village cemetery, 800 metres to the west, and a recently excavated medieval burial ground, from the obscure Visigothic period of Spain's history, belonging to the archaeological site known as Las Peñas de los Gitanos, for which Montefrío is famous. Therefore I am well surrounded by the dead, ranging from the tierno or tender variety, to the añejo or aged, dried out kind, to borrow from the local ham terminology.

        Furthermore, as I learned many years after buying the house, the previous owner died violently in the stable when his mule reared up and drove a metal yolk into his chest. That is why his superstitious sons chose to sell the house for a very small sum to the first interested party who came along, which happened to be me.

        However, all this on its own is not sufficient explanation for the strange events which took place in 1988 and 1989, during the short time when I lived in the company of the blessed creature, all being said and done, who brought Nina into the world. Cassilda is a handsome Afro-Brazilian woman who is an adept of the Scientific Spiritism movement, founded by the 19th century Belgian parapsychologist Alain Kardec. In Brazil, where Kardec has his greatest following, Cassilda acted as a medium in seances, conversing with the dead. In the light of this, I can only conclude that her presence here between the two burial grounds, and sleeping every night in the same stable (transformed by me into a cosy bedroom) where Morcón, the nickname of the ill-fated farmer, died, must have summoned some mischievous spirit - perhaps even Morcón's - who wanted to pull the leg of the new, rational and materialistic owner of the place.

        There were three occurrences, each one more astonishing than the other. The first two were during the summer of Cassilda's pregnancy, when, in less than 24 hours, three water tumblers broke all on their own. The glasses were of the very tough material called duralex which we all use, and none of them either before or after ever broke in my house unless they fell on the floor, and not always then.

        The first one literally crumbled in Cassilda's hands while she was washing the dishes. A few moments later, the second one burst into pieces before my eyes, on the kitchen shelf, as I was sweeping the floor behind her. But the third was the strangest of the lot. Before turning in for the night I had the habit of filling a glass with drinking water (the cortijo was not yet hooked up to the village water supply), and leaving it next to the bathroom sink to brush my teeth with the next morning. But the next morning all I found was... tiny pieces of glass flung all over the floor of the bathroom, and a little puddle of water.

        We were still living in Brazil then, and when we went back at the end of the summer, I bought a digital watch as a gift for the fellow who cleaned our flat in Rio, from an import shop in Madrid. The shop-keeper explained that the watch was turned off, and I saw for myself that the figures in the indicator were set to "00:00". The day after we got back, Carlos came to dust the apartment, and when he was done, he put the watch on his wrist, thanked me and headed for the door. "Wait", I said, "let's look at the manual so that we can set it to the right time". "But it's already set at the right time", he answered, and in truth, the watch was working and correctly set, even though nobody had touched it since we arrived.

        It would have been incredible enough for a watch purchased in Madrid to set itself in motion at European time, but the fact that it had done so at Rio de Janeiro time left me deeply excited, since I had always hoped that one day it would be given to me to receive a sign from the beyond. At the end of that summer I had picked up a strange little man on the road who said he was going to the farms to rid them of "malign spirits", and after hearing about my experiences offered to do the same for me. I politely refused because, I said, and I meant it, what I wanted was more of them. But the strangest event of all took place when we returned at the end of the next year to settle in Spain, bringing with us our new-born daughter. At least it was strange for me, since the only thing which astonished Cassilda was that I found it all so astonishing.

        It was a rainy autumn - a phenomenon which, at this writing, after seven years of severe drought, seems almost as strange as glasses which break on their own and watches which set themselves. The dirt track to my cortijo was deep in mud and I had to leave my car on the Cemetery Road and walk in and out in rubber boots. One afternoon I went to the village and bought, at the shop of Juanín Ramos, a dozen eggs which, as usual, I asked his wife Remedios to put in a cardboard egg box, but having none she gave them to me loose in a plastic bag. I placed the bag very carefully in the small knapsack I was carrying, which I shouldered as gingerly as possible. Next I went to the hardware store to buy a light switch of the type called a "pear" which one hangs by the bed for the night lamp, and which looks rather like a small yellow egg.

        With the thirteen "eggs" in my knapsack, therefore, I dropped in on an old friend of mine, where I immediately got into a lively conversation and, forgetting all about my fragile cargo, tossed my knapsack onto a chair to have a glass of wine. By the time I left it was dark outside. I carelessly shouldered my knapsack, still forgetting the eggs. I left the car on the highway and walked down the track, below the cemetery wall, sliding and stumbling in the dark and the kilometre of mud and water which led to the house. Cassilda was waiting for me by the fire, and when I entered, peeling off my raincoat, the first thing she said was, "Did you bring the eggs for the omelette?".

        When I remembered the eggs, I groaned, realizing that not a single one could have possibly survived the obstacle course I had been on. I put the knapsack on the table under the light, took out the plastic bag and saw... that all the eggs were whole and white. I took them out one by one, and in amazement saw that none of the twelve eggs had the slightest crack. Then I remembered the electric switch.

        But when I searched with my hand in the bottom of the knapsack, I only felt what seemed to be a few loose scraps of broken china. I shook the knapsack upside down and out fell the scraps of plastic which had been the "pear", before it was shattered by something forcibly equivalent to the blow of a hammer. All that was left intact was the switch's inner metal mechanism.

        The fact that a single very resistant object should break and twelve other very fragile ones should not, after all 13 of them had undergone the same treatment, is truly incredible, and all I can say, after witnessing it for myself, is that no longer disbelieve as sceptically as I did before. But there is more to this story, although when I wrote the above it seemed as if Cassilda´s departure, several years later, marked the end of it.

        First, I have to tell you something about the man whom I am persuaded was the ghost, and whom I knew quite intimately. When I returned to Montefrio in 1983 one of the first things I did was to visit the house where Lilo and I had spent those two summers twenty years before. After the owner died dramatically in a railway station in France, it was bought by a versatile and restless fellow called Nono Lucena, who had just married a truly loveable and trusting creature called Paquita.

        When I made my reappearance on the scene they were the middle-aged parents of two girls, one of whom was at University in Granada. Soon our lives were entwined in several different ways, and, although the real reason for my visits was the elder daughter, Nono took me under his wing and became the man I asked for advice every time a decision had to be made regarding matters such as the purchase of the farmhouse, and its subsequent restoration.

        Nono was quite unlike any other of the village men, both in appearance and personality, since he was pink-faced, almost Germanic, and irrepressibly carefree and mercurial. He did a bit of everything, cutting glass for windows and frames, speculating on property, and playing the trumpet in the municipal band. In the past he had also plied the trades of pastrymaker and truck driver, but one thing is certain, he clearly thought he was several notches smarter than anyone else in town, and had a reputation for getting into some unsound business deals. When he tried to get me to put up the money for one of his schemes and I refused, he took it quite badly and our relations began perceptibly to cool.

        But there was another force at play, which as usual was sex. Nono knew that I was having an affair with one of his daughter´s student friends, Rocio, and was clearly envious, being only five or six years older than me and still very lively in that respect. We knew that he was looking for a chance to fly the marital coop for something more exciting than good old faithful Paquita and one fine day, to the town´s stupefaction, he did it.

        Men in Montefrio mistreat their wives, even beat them, and sometimes never even speak to them, but they do not, ever, leave them. When word went around that Nono Lucena had left his virtuous wife for a widow he had met in Granada, his friends swore that they would punch him in the nose if he dared turned up in town again, and he never did, at least not until three years later when a sudden illness swept him away and his body was brought back for burial.

        I was in Santiago de Compostela interpreting at a conference when I learned about it from a friend over the phone, but I can't say that the news upset me very much, and not only because I am unsentimental about death. The only time I had heard from him since he left his wife was when he phoned me from Granada to ask if I would buy his house. Since one of the main things I had against him was precisely the fact that, five or six years before, he had demolished the splendid old house and replaced it with a modern facsimile, I made no bones of saying I wasn´t interested and he gruffly said, Very well, and hung up. In any case, the house was no longer his to sell since Paquita was living there, alone.

        Although the burial took place on the afternoon of my return from Santiago, I had already decided not to attend it, both because I dislike going to funerals in general and because it had been so long that I had even seen the man. In any case, my car broke down several miles before reaching the farmhouse and I had to walk a long stretch in the sun carrying a suitcase with a portable computer in it, before my cleaning woman's nephew drove past and took me home. When my mechanic came to the house to get the key, he said that the long row of cars which we could see moving up the road from Granada was escorting Nono's remains to the cemetery next door, and told me that he would join in before towing my car to his garage, asking if I was going to come along. I shrugged my shoulders and said that I had no special reason to bury Nono and was more concerned with the fate of my clutch plate, that afternoon, than anything else.

        Now, in Montefrio one is expected to go to one's friends' burials, no matter how little one really cared for them. The reason is not only to say farewell and pay one's respects, but also to ensure that when you yourself go, the event will be well attended. There is also, I am persuaded, a superstitious feeling that the dead man would hold it against you if he happened to be looking on from wherever he is. And the villagers have such a horror of anything related to death and the dead that, almost as soon as one of them is buried, his or her name is never mentioned again, not even to say how much one misses them or what a fine person he or she was. Years must pass before the person has become an abstract memory, no longer associated with the mass of putrefaction which all only too vividly imagine, up on the hill in its box.

        Nono Lucena was buried on a Saturday and by next Wednesday strange things started happening at the cortijo, when the water supply, electricity and telephone all went off at approximately the same time. The water supply is piped in from the town and the telephone is wired in on the poles I had installed, but I produce my own electricity with solar panels, which charge a series of powerful truck batteries. The fact that no water came out of the taps seemed amazing, because the dial on the water meter out on the highway, a kilometer away, was spinning at full speed, indicating that water was indeed flowing constantly through my pipes, but to where? The fact that the batteries were flat out also seemed amazing, because they were fairly new and the sun had been shining for weeks. And although the telephone mechanic arrived, fiddled with some wires and got a dial tone, his van had barely disappeared among the olive trees when it went dead again. All of this was especially annoying because I had tenants in the loft apartment, and they had to carry buckets of water from a holding tank to flush their toilet.

        I cannot remember what I did to get the phone and the batteries working again, because the explanation for the water cutoff was so astounding that it obfuscated everything else in my mind. The next morning I was standing on my terrace when I heard the noise of... flowing water. It came from the storage shed just down the hill, which I had built when I restored the farm. There was a tap in it, but the door was locked tight – in fact, my friend Gerardo, the carpenter, had just installed a new lock and given me the only keys to it. I ran down and saw a stream of water pouring out from under the door. When I went inside, the tap was wide open. Since the pressure from the main is very low at my farmhouse, all of the water was pouring out into the shed.

        No one could have entered without the key, or causing damage to the lock, and who, among the living, would have wanted to, anyway? Also, the faucet was a heavy-duty one, requiring some force to turn, and could never have opened on its own.

        That was when I thought of Nono. He had been advising me, ten years before, when I had the water installed in the house, and built the storage shed. He was, in fact, one of the few people who had known that there was a tap inside it at all. It could only have been "him" who went through the door to open the tap, as it now seemed clear that it was "him" who had drained the power from the batteries and cut off my telephone. He was angry with me for not having attended his funeral, and wanted to get back at me by wreaking havoc in my home.

        I called Cassilda and asked her what I should do. Her advise was to put some flowers on his grave and to "speak" to him, to tell him that he should go away, move on into the other world, and leave this one to the living. My mechanic explained where the crypt was, and helped me cut some gladiolas from his garden in town. That very afternoon Nina and I shimmied over the graveyard wall and I did as her mother had said. And after that, all went back to that ill-defined state which people call "normal".

        It is nice to know that Nono Lucena's death, at the premature age of about 55, even had one positive result. Paquita, who had spent the past three years feeling humiliated and lonely, saw his "return" to Montefrio as an effective, if ineffectual, reconciliation. If she had lost him in life, in death he was hers again. Her husband was up there in the cemetery where he was supposed to be, where she could mourn him properly, and his escapade with that widow in Granada was soon forgotten.

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