Tomb in Seville (12 page)

S
UDDENLY, AT THE END
of a long day, we had come to the end of Portugal. Its colour, its mystery and its splendid wilderness were no more. Forests had become managed woodlands, rivers were bridged, villages were encircled by cabbage patches and advertisements for coffee were stencilled on walls. What was to be expected of Villa Real de Santo Antonio, we had enquired of our fellow travellers. They had shrugged their shoulders, preferring evidently not to be the bearers of ill-tidings.

Despite the grandiose name it appeared more as an untidy village with dogs disputing the rubbish in its streets, and most of the inhabitants looked like criminal suspects temporarily free while awaiting imprisonment in chains or deportation. The problem facing normal inhabitants at this moment was the closure of the frontier, provoking, as we were to discover, a species of claustrophobia. We had been met by a member of the council who led the way to a Portuguese version of a Nissen hut that was to be placed at our disposal.

Following our inspection of this, I put the question, ‘Do foreign tourists come here?’

His reply was, ‘Sometimes earlier in the year, yes—but at this time the weather is not good.’

‘How do they occupy themselves?’

‘The café is open two nights out of three,’ he said. ‘On Saturday evenings there is a cinema show. Those wishing to stay on for a repeat of the programme must book a day in advance.’

‘And are there other attractions?’ I asked.

‘When it is possible to visit Spain, day trips are available, but now with the State of Alarm these are no longer possible and it has become a little more dull.’

At least we discovered Villa Real possessed a public telephone and we got through to Gordon Street for the first time in a week. Ernesto came on the line. ‘How was it then? You go to Seville?’

‘No. This is Portugal. We’re still on the way.’

‘How much longer this take?’

‘Not long, Ernesto. Didn’t you hear? The Spanish closed the frontier. Some more fighting started up. As soon as they let us through we’ll be there in a day.’

‘You call me then, huh? You tell me how things are. I am waiting.’

A notice left on the hut door informed us that we must present ourselves at the office of the Chief of the International Police who we found in his cabin down on the waterfront, thumbing through a collection of mug shots of wanted criminals before pasting them in an album.

He was most affable as well as consolatory over our situation. The enemy in Villa Real, he told us, and as we had already supposed, was boredom. There was very little to occupy body or mind. Undesirable persons attempted to take refuge here, he said, and two prisons had been made ready to deal with them. A prisoner could choose to pay twenty-five escudos a day for a higher category of incarceration. For the ordinary lock-up you paid nothing, but, said the Police Chief, it had to be admitted that conditions were not good.

In a speech punctuated by hearty laughs and recommendations to a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, the Chief saw nothing for it in our case but a return to Lisbon, where he had no doubt that we could get a boat back to England. It was a point of view underlined at that moment by the sound of distant gunfire.

He described the case of two other stranded foreigners who at that moment were to be seen approaching us across the otherwise deserted waterfront. The short one, he told us, was a recently released Polish criminal who had been given three days to leave the country, the other a somewhat mysterious German whose visa was about to expire and who was faced with the possible alternative of joining the Pole or waiting in the rat-infested non-paying prison. This by no means affected the Police Chief’s social attitude towards them, and while we were discussing the immediate future of all involved they dropped in for a chat and a smoke. There were introductions, cigarettes were passed round, and there was a general conversation about the quality of the film shown the evening before.

After this the Pole and the German went off while the Chief indicated by a gesture that he wished us to stay. I began to suspect that he was a lonely man. He had no objection to talking about himself, and he told us that he had studied criminology at Coimbra, mistakenly as he now believed, as it had provided little of the excitement he had expected. The motives of safe breakers could not possibly have less to do with the skills called for in keeping an eye on a national frontier, and he readily admitted that so far as he was concerned life’s battle was one against boredom. Take the case of the German, he said. He was travelling on a forged passport, yet proved upon examination to be a statistician who was visiting the area in search of rare medicinal plants. The Pole had actually murdered somebody and, having admitted that he found real criminals more interesting than normal members of the community, it was clear that the Chief was attracted like a moth to the flame by the drama of this man’s life.

‘The Spanish situation,’ the Chief said, ‘has provided a little excitement in our dull existences, but even the Spanish cannot go on fighting each other for ever. Any day now the frontier will open up again and we’ll be checking shopkeepers from Huelva down here on three-day all-in holiday trips. So what do we do to liven things up?’ asked the Chief, appealing like a beggar with outstretched hands to his audience. ‘Students from Faro Conventual Academy are coming over to sing Songs of Praise to us next week. There must be some way we can return to real life.’

Later in the day Security HQ Coimbra came through on the phone to the Chief with the news that in future foreigners arriving without visas would be deported. ‘They made up their minds at last,’ the Chief said.

‘So that’s the end of our two friends,’ I suggested.

‘Inevitably,’ he said. ‘And not too soon.’

‘So when’s this likely to happen?’

‘As soon as anything does in this country. Remember the frontier’s still closed and there’s no sign of the Spanish changing their minds.’

‘What does the frontier consist of?’ Eugene asked. ‘Some sort of wall, or fence?’

‘No, it’s the further bank of the Guadiana River,’ the Chief explained. ‘The Spanish have frontier posts, and patrol it with searchlights at night.’

‘But do they really manage to keep the foreigners out?’ Eugene wondered aloud, and the Chief shook his head.

‘They do their best,’ he said, ‘but the fact is there’s a constant stream crossing over.’

‘Why should that be, with all the trouble in Spain?’

‘Foreigners come here because it’s cheap. They stay in the best hotels and pay what they would in village inns in their own country. In Portugal they can afford champagne with every meal. This is the cheapest country in Europe.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I told him.

‘But the trouble is nothing exciting ever happens. In Spain, as we all know, the reverse is the case. Cross the frontier to Huelva and you have about a one in ten chance of getting your brains blown out. Remarkably enough, some people seem ready to take the risk.’

‘But all the same the river frontier idea doesn’t work,’ I said.

‘It works down here at the river’s mouth with a Spanish sentry every two hundred metres, but all you have to do is to get someone to drive you upstream, say forty-odd kilometres as far as San Lucar, where there are no posts at all, and get a boatman to row you across.’

T
HE MOOD IN THE
café that evening was subdued. The lady in charge of the business (generally regarded as the only pretty woman in Villa Real) had been tempted away to join the staff of what was suspected of being a brothel. With this loss, all the services offered by the café fell into decline, and, worst of all, the food had become inedible.

Surprisingly, in view of the disappointing news, the Chief calling in for his evening brandy and snack seemed more than usually optimistic, despite having decided to surrender a plate of eggs, Albufeira-style, to the dogs waiting at the door. ‘The deportations are going ahead after all,’ he said. ‘No problem. It looks like being easier than expected, and quite a break so far as I’m concerned. Why don’t you come along too? Assuming you haven’t changed your minds about Spain, there’s no easier way.’

‘Sounds like wonderful news,’ I said. ‘One way or another, as I told you, we have to get to Seville.’

‘We lead dull lives,’ the Chief said. ‘For once here’s a chance of a little excitement, with no risk to anyone.’

‘Is this your original idea?’ I asked. ‘The one about driving up the N122 to Sanlucar and then crossing the river.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s too far and too complicated. This isn’t half the distance. We stay on the N122 but only as far as the Beliche River which flows into the Guadiana. With luck we’ll find a boatman on the river to take us across to the far shore. At this point you’re in Spanish territory with a cart-track leading to the main Huelva road. There’s plenty of local traffic. With luck you’ll be in Huelva tonight.’

‘What happens to the deportees?’

‘That’s up to you. Probably better to dump them as soon as possible. Four people travelling together attract more attention than two.’

Next morning the police van was under our window at dawn—that sleepy and slow-moving hour in south Portugal, imbued with the regeneration of memory and the sounds of things past. The Chief was buoyed with high spirits and the promise of even the mildest of adventures. The deportees were crammed into the back; unnecessarily handcuffed for the occasion, they viewed the outside world with indifference.

‘So far, so good,’ the Chief said, and a backwards jerk of the head suggested the promise of partial victory. ‘Now all that matters is whether we shall have the good luck to find a boat … Well, we shall see.’

The N122 went straight ahead, plunging resolutely into the flatlands where human purpose—perhaps from fear of invaders from Spain—appeared largely to have been abandoned. Only the great medieval pile of the fortress, Castro Marim, had survived, and perhaps even defeated Spanish incursions. Or possibly the freebooters from Spain found little inducement here to persist in their invasions. This was territory long-since deserted, and in the morning shadows the great castle shared with a single buffalo a landscape of water, mists and sky. It was less than an hour to the Beliche River, which uncoiled through innumerable curves down from the mountains of the north to straighten itself finally among the sheep south of Azinhal.

Our relief when this small town came distantly into view was very great. Greater still was the sight of the Beliche bridge and of the promised boatman and his boat tied up by the bank where the river curved away into thin forest, with a glimpse between the tree trunks of the distant mountains of Spain. We clambered down a slight elevation for a better view of the river. Below us a great spread of smooth water appeared to slide rather than flow through sun-scorched terrain stretching to the far horizon. In this prospect, and at that moment only, floating bunches of leaves indicated the speed and direction of the current.

The boatman greeted us with huge enthusiasm although obviously as a matter of habit, turning his head slightly away when he spoke. It was a tic clearly induced by a disfiguring birthmark on his left cheek, and I was reminded that it was the compassionate habit of the rural Portuguese to grant such jobs as his to persons suffering from physical defects.

The Chief explained our presence and asked whether any problems were likely to arise in the crossing to Spain. The boatman assured us that none would. ‘In fact we might even run into a taxi driver from Huelva cruising on the other side in hope of picking up a fare.’ He would be quite happy to carry us across the Guadiana, he said—all the more as he had just been able to pick up a cheap two-stroke outboard engine able to cope with the river’s strong currents following the autumn rains.

We asked whether he knew the positions of the Spanish frontier posts, to which he replied that he would not expect to stay long in business if he did not. And did many Portuguese risk crossing the frontier? ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Many things are cheaper in Spain, so naturally people cross the river to buy them.’ And the Spanish? Did they cross over, too? He shook his head. ‘The girls in the cantinas here are cheaper, but they say it’s easy to pick up something calling for a trip to the doctor, so the Spanish boys stay where they are.’

We sipped a harsh Portuguese sherry while our friend went through a list of attractions—many of them unique—which the Guadiana had to offer. For the most part they were only accessible to fishermen and collectors of wildlife who sometimes sneaked, armed to the teeth, across the frontier from Spain.

The Guadiana was seen locally as unique and extraordinary in every way.

‘I do not expect you to do anything but cast scorn on the local belief in water-sprites,’ our informant said, ‘but it is remarkable how many persons of at least average education laugh and change the subject whenever it is brought up. In some areas local fishermen attempt to bribe the water-nymphs by casting edible luxuries into the river before entreating them to help with the catch. Our fishermen baptise their children without the presence of a priest who they believe would rob them of access to Almighty God.’ Our friend shook his head, ‘We only bring up these topics in the case of outsiders who wish to know something of our life. Above all we are conscious of the heavenly powers. You will see our fishermen at prayer before casting their lines, and every one of them bows to the river whenever a fish is caught.’

We clambered aboard and the boat took off heading south through the last of the mountain scenery where the Guadiana roared and splashed through the narrow ravines. It was to be the part of our journey that provided Eugene, as a keen amateur naturalist, with constant interest and some degree of excitement. The river’s colour offered an endless variation of soft greys and greens. Bright flowers dropped by some unknown species of tree rotated like tiny wheels on the surface as they slipped by. Where the current slowed, fishermen up to their knees in water had placed themselves in the shade of every second or third tree. Curiously these fishers seemed to have disguised themselves with coolie hats like Japanese in a picture by Hiroshege. It was a scene in which little had changed for centuries.