Days of Your Fathers (20 page)

He really couldn't blame them. The price offered by a Hamburg tourist agency for a strip of his foreshore had so pleasantly surprised him that he cabled his acceptance and signed the documents without remembering his own romantic view of geography. His education had left him permanently muddled between the points of the compass. Eagerly following in his school books the westward track of the conquistadores, the Pacific, the Philippines and even India appeared to him obviously west of Spain, the world east of Spain stopping somewhere about the Persian Gulf. His mental block was a mere question of semantics and impossible to refute; but on the dry land of a surveyor it was a nuisance, a disease, a curse. He believed that he had sold the eastern headland when he had actually sold the western.

The mistake hurt his pride – not his ancestral pride which hardly existed, but his self-respect as an enterprising young businessman with a taste for public relations. And he was appalled to find how irrevocably his error had grown. The foundations of a luxury hotel and the terracing of the approach road were already recognisable on the headland.
The walls of a single-storied service wing – staff quarters, laundry, store-rooms and garage – were awaiting the roof. Bustling about the whole disaster with Teutonic efficiency was the able Herr Carl Kuchler who had chosen the site and would be ready within a year to receive the hotel coaches full of citron-blooming compatriots impatient to toast their white navels and patronise the Mediterranean.

On his third day home Gil de Villanueva obeyed the summons of the Civil Governor. Official displeasure was easier to face than all those unofficial silences. He drove to the provincial capital and parked his car with a final cavalier gesture in the space reserved for the Governor himself.

The Palace restored his faith in himself and his society. It was entirely unfitted for the enlightened, modern administration of a province. The Ministry of the Interior wished, he knew, to build a glass-and-concrete block of government offices, whereupon the Ministry of Tourism, always eager to turn the useless and beautiful into a superb hotel, would have gladly taken over the Palace. But nobody – thank God! – had yet had the heart to change its traditional function.

This treasure of Spanish baroque, its crumbling yellow stone combining elegance with power, had even affected the Governor's appearance. The distinguished twentieth-century lawyer, who had never been gravely disturbed if some remains of his lunch were visible on his waistcoat in the afternoon, was now all courtly and fastidious. He wore the same perfectly cut black suits that he had always worn, but he treated the cloth as if it were lace and black velvet. He had suppressed the grey-and-black moustache which gave him a certain air of authority in the clubs and cafés of Madrid, and now showed an austere and scholarly upper lip. When he was annoyed – and at the moment he was very annoyed indeed – the lip was as long as if it had been painted by El Greco.

He frowned upon the young man, the far too self-satisfied young man, sitting opposite his tremendous desk of olive wood and mahogany. Both were dwarfed by the sheer space of the Governor's office and its lofty stone walls hung with
tapestries and pictures, some of them in place since the reign of Philip III, some lent by the paternal State.

‘As a grandee of Spain you ought to be ashamed of yourself!' Don Baltasar announced. ‘Because of your continued absence from your estates, irresponsible attorneys have been able to sell to a speculator the land promised by your father to the Municipality of Lazalaya.'

‘Nobody could regret it more than I do, Excellency. If your colleagues of the Law – excuse me, your former colleagues – could ever draw up a conveyance making it clear exactly what one is selling, it wouldn't have happened.'

The Count appeared completely unimpressed by his surroundings. The casual air of good breeding, which he could no more help than his distinctively Spanish narrow face and slim physique, contained neither disrespect nor undue reverence. He was in fact thinking that the grave magnificence framing Don Baltasar would have suited his own tastes and appearance a great deal better; it was a pity that he could not consider the arts of government as anything but a joke.

‘I am prepared to grant that under the influence of feminine and other distractions you did not read the conveyance with due care,' said the Civil Governor severely. ‘But what you have done is to allow a lousy German tourist agent to put up a hotel where the Municipality proposed to build a mole and a fish market whenever they could raise the capital. You, the Conde de Villanueva, have broken a contract!'

‘There was nothing in writing, was there?'

‘In dealing with your father it was not necessary to put anything in writing. And he was not, I will again impress on you, an absentee landlord.'

‘Your Excellency talks as if we still owned half the province instead of just a farm at Lazalaya.'

‘The principle is the same.'

‘With respect, it is not the same. My father fed and educated his family by running a small estate with extreme efficiency. Myself I am a disaster as a farmer. So I leave the management to a bailiff and meanwhile sell sherry in New
York, thereby adding to the country's exports. And I refuse to be called an absentee landlord,' Gil went on, adding a calculated warmth to his defence. ‘If I am, why don't you people expropriate me? Exactly! Because it isn't worth the trouble for four hundred hectares of land upon which, I may point out, the labourers are known to be well paid, happy, well-housed – and no monkey business with the social security. I also remind you that on my last visit I was publicly congratulated by the local Syndicate of Agricultural Workers.'

‘They were all as drunk as owls,' replied the Civil Governor, ‘and so were you.'

‘The ancient democracy of Spain …'

‘I can do without a lecture on politics. The point is you sold it.'

‘Your Excellency should not have allowed it.'

‘I wasn't asked. It all went through the Ministry of Tourism.'

‘Lack of liaison, I shall complain to the Chief of State through my Syndicate.'

‘You haven't got a Syndicate.'

‘I have. Employees of the Wine Industry. And if it hasn't enough nuisance value, I'll stand for the Municipality of Lazalaya. I'm sure to be elected, however much you try to cook the returns.'

‘I do not cook the returns.'

‘And your Excellency will find himself governing Guinea with only two retired generals for company.'

‘I tell you I never had a chance to intervene,' Don Baltasar insisted, picking up a symbolic file and slapping it with his other hand.

‘I accept your word. I am glad you have the decency to apologise.'

‘It is not an apology.'

‘Well, it sounded like one. Am I, once and for all, an absentee landlord?'

‘In spirit, no.'

‘That will do, Excellency. I am now prepared to help.'

‘I wish you would stop calling me Excellency.'

‘You started it, my dear uncle, by addressing me as Conde de Villanueva. The least I expected was exile and a fine.'

‘You know very well, Gil, that my powers are limited.'

‘To whatever you can get away with. Why don't you compel this Kuchler to sell the land back to the Municipality?'

‘Because I can't and should be sacked if I tried. I must remind you that it is deliberate Government Policy, executed in practice by the Ministry of Tourism, to turn Spain into a holiday camp for all Europe. Foreign Exchange, the Family, Employment …'

‘I don't see all the males of Lazalaya becoming waiters.'

‘Nor do I! Nor do I!' said the Civil Governor, making the considerable circuit of his desk and putting an arm round the shoulders of his nephew. ‘All I can suggest is that you show a sense of responsibility in future, and by active cooperation with your decent fellow citizens endeavour to revive in them some respect for the family. I need not say that I am entirely at the disposition of the Municipality of Lazalaya.'

Gil de Villanueva drove slowly back along the excellent road which was – economically speaking – the cause of all the trouble. It had been built by his grandfather in the days of family prosperity, and for a long generation had been used only by mule carts and the Villanueva automobile. Lazalaya had never had any reason for existence except that it existed.

The road and the rapid increase of fast and efficient transport had at least suggested that the town ought to be originating traffic rather than receiving it at a dead end. Fish was the answer – an imaginative answer, since Lazalaya had always ignored the sea. The coast was grim and rocky without a sheltered anchorage. Still, only two miles away, there was a shallow cove where a small and active community of inshore fishermen worked their rowing boats from a semicircular beach and supplied by donkey and pack basket the town and its surrounding villages. Given a breakwater of a hundred metres to protect the cove from the prevailing south-easterly winds, Lazalaya could become the only fishing port on a long, inhospitable shore.

Civil War had prevented the development; then lack of capital. Neither Lazalaya or the Villanuevas had any money. The central and provincial governments were fully occupied by more essential schemes. Meanwhile the road had attracted Herr Kuchler and a few adventurous tourists – at any rate to the extent that it was now safer to ride a donkey on the right rather than down the middle.

Gil de Villanueva stopped and got out on the crest of the low range which separated the narrow coastal plain from the endless inland miles of scrub and poor cornland. In his own territory he felt a car to be a confinement of the spirit; he preferred the old-fashioned view from the back of a horse.

Below him to his right – west, damn it! – was the compact little town, its lack of any brick or concrete suburbs revealing that it had not the least excuse for growth. To his left was the great, green oblong of the Villanueva farm, separated from the prevailing yellows of the countryside by a plastered stone wall – an extravagantly expensive method of fencing which dated from the time when labour cost little. The fertility within the wall reminded him of his father who had created it. And that unpleasantly emphasized what his father would have thought of him.

A remarkable vehicle was pounding unconcernedly up the hairpin bends of the road. The front of it was a twin-engined motorcycle with its handlebars enclosed in a cabin; the back was that of a small van. It belonged to the mayor, and had indeed been built by him in his own workshop. Since he was the smith, coachbuilder and wheelwright of Lazalaya and described himself as Engineer, it was a striking advertisement for his crafts. Forged iron and sound timber made it indestructible, and on such a hill would probably have made it immoveable if not for an additional gear of three massive cogs and shafts. Even so, the steady climbing was mysterious, for the home-made first gear must have weighed nearly as much as the engine.

Gil's first instinct was to turn round and escape the meeting. He was humiliated to think that the mayor might not even stop to talk. But such cowardice would not do,
really would not do. So he placed his own car more or less in the middle of the road, and himself posed sadly and romantically upon a roadside rock.

Don Jaime Caruncho halted his shuddering chimera, and at least exchanged compliments.

‘And what are you thinking about up there?' he asked. ‘Lunch?'

‘Far from it, Jaime. I am recovering from an interview with the Civil Governor.'

‘What was His Excellency's opinion?'

‘Of me?'

‘That I can guess. Of what should be done.'

‘Civil Governors, my dear Jaime, only think what they think they ought to think. That is why they are appointed. All I can tell you is that he would rather have fish than a hotel.'

‘Are you sure of that?'

‘Of course. He drew himself up to his full width and ordered me to cooperate with decent people.'

‘Then I will try to find a use for you.'

‘Anything you like,' said Gil, joining the mayor in the road and absent-mindedly patting the vehicle. ‘Where are you going?'

‘To buy a second-hand dynamo.'

‘Second-hand dynamos don't work.'

‘They do when I have repaired them.'

‘If I were to accompany you in the back of the van …'

‘No. For the time being we should continue to appear on the worst possible terms.'

‘How right you are, Jaime! The strength of you natural leaders is in the instinctive reactions which allow you time to think.'

‘Enough compliments! Do you agree with us that this hotel will be a disaster for the morale of Lazalaya?'

Gil did not. He thought that both the influence and the economic effects of the hotel would be excellent. But what mattered was the site for the long-promised breakwater.

‘Jaime, I always accept expert opinion,' he answered
cautiously. ‘This Kuchler, however, is a heretic and will not.'

‘He must answer to God for it. Meanwhile you can ask him to dinner.'

‘What do you want me to say?'

‘Nothing! Nothing! Just to look mysterious if he asks your opinion on some curiosities that I have told him. He is very interested in the atrocious past of Lazalaya, and it seems to me that he is too sure of the future. Some of those exaggerations you loose off when you have been drinking would do no harm.'

‘Anything else?'

‘We will see how it goes. Well, I'm off. On your way back take a look at the house in the Travesía de San Bartolomeo where Kuchler is staying. Something may occur to you.'

When he reached Lazalaya, Gil walked slowly through the Travesia. Nothing whatever occurred to him, except that Jaime would never take action without the approval of his friends, the priests. He was a conservative of conservatives, an ardent and practising churchman and above suspicion. Reliability without speed. The Vehicle was a true expression of his character – though it might be as well to remember that within his workshop Jaime was ruthless with his materials.