Some Stay, Some Run
The advantages of running away
In March 1987 I was in Madrid
(I know I have some photo slides – it was that long ago – from this journey, but I have yet to find them. If I do, I will post them!)
Sometimes running away is the best option. I mean physically removing oneself. Better than staying behind and inflicting more misery on yourself and others – that is just running away psychologically. Of course sometimes that is the only option. Children and other prisoners do it all the time. Blank your guards.
After wars a lot of men run away. I wrote in a previous post about the Falklands war veteran, or Malvinas War as he would put it, who had disappeared up a remote rough track in northern Argentina. But I think the urge seizes us at other times too. In the late winter of 1986 I was studying to be a teacher and that involved two months in Madrid teaching in a secondary school. The students were not like anything I had ever encountered before in Britain. They were well-adjusted, personable and intelligent. They didn’t appear to hate all teachers and want to extract maximum revenge on them, as gaolers deserved. It came as a shock to me, a comprehensive school survivor. Imagine sitting on the wall with Mr McFee or Mr Marchant, men who had physically attacked me for ‘pratting about’, but that’s what I would do during breaks at the secundaria: sit on a wall and have a laugh with the teenagers, talk rubbish, try to get a bit of Spanish into my head.
Before school, most mornings, I would join the catedrática (head of department) in a café near the gates and gulp down a cortado con churros (coffee and doughnuts). If a schoolkid came in, she would chat to them like a friend and say things like, “Tell your mother, I’ll see her on Friday in the wine bar.” Once she invited me to lunch with her husband, who she laughingly referred to as a “real Francista”. I had to look it up. It meant he was a supporter of Franco and the nationalists, a fascist. Their apartment was enormous and decorated with all the restraint and minimalism of Louis XVI. Every chair was a gilded monstrosity with lions paws, the windows were swagged and tailed and cinched with sumptuously heavy hangings, the floors knee deep in rugs and the walls groaning under the weight of dark portraits in flamboyant frames.
Her husband was much older than her and had been the head of sugar imports during Franco’s rule. He was charismatic and hugely entertaining. By the time I got to the table I was already drunk and needed a footman to pull my chair back for me. Luckily there were several available. Innumerable courses later I staggered to a sofa, accepted a fat cuban cigar, and tried to sober up with shots of something called sambuca. It was a drink I had never heard of, but Don Magnifico assured me it was medicinal.
I lived with two other teachers in a flat on Fuencarral, then the red light district and extremely run-down. It was the height of la movida, the bacchanallian reaction to the end of fascist rule. Drugs were sold openly below our balcony. A man as gnarled as an ancient olive tree sold piles of porn magazines to housewives. People danced all night on the bar downstairs. You could get a glass of home-made vermouth at dawn and roam the city on a cheap ticket that displayed the message, ‘For 3000 pesetas you may mount everything’. I ate in a cheap restaurant where the owner would flick his false teeth out and suck them back in every few minutes. At those grotesque moments he looked like the horse in Picasso’s Guernica painting.
After two months I had to run away. I wasn’t used to being in schools that weren’t gaols. The relentless drinking and sleepless nights were wreaking havoc. But this was a harsh winter and it was March. I went south to Seville and then to a small town called Orgiva in the foothills of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. I was in pursuit of another man who had run away: Gerald Brenan.
Brenan and I did not have much in common except a dislike of gaolers and a penchant for running away. He was born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in 1894 and went to boarding school which he hated. He first ran away to China, but only got as far as Bosnia which seems like a respectable result. On the outbreak of WWI he signed up and served in France for the entire war. When he was demobbed in 1919 he ran away again, this time to Yegen, a tiny village on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. He stayed all through the twenties, then wrote South From Grenada about his experiences. I had it in my rucksack.
On April Fools Day I set off walking from Orgiva. There were steep green hillsides and white villages. After some time I decided I was tired and would wait for the bus to Capiliera. An old man came out a field and sat next to me on a railing. I asked if this was the correct place to wait for the bus. He nodded and asked if I was, “ippi”. It took a while for me to realise he meant hippy. He asked if New York was larger than Madrid. A mini-bus went racing past. I asked if that was the Capiliera bus. He told me it was. I asked why it had not stopped. He told me I had to put out my hand.
I gave up on buses after that and just walked.
I stayed in Pampaniera and Bubion before I reached Capiliera. Each village seemed populated with old ladies dressed in black skirt, black stockings, black jumper and black cardigan. They sat on doorsteps and chatted. At Pitres I came across a dead horse lying in the road and in the next field an old man was digging a grave watched by a woman and two small children. I approached ready to offer condolences, but to my surprise they were all laughing.
“Did it get killed on the road?” I asked.
This sent them all into hysterical laughter until the woman managed to splutter, “No, it died of a disease,” whereupon the old man had to lie down on the grass in case his sides split with mirth.
As I entered the village a dog came rushing out at me, grabbed my arm and pulled me into the house which turned out to be a bar. I ended up staying there. The owner admitted he trained the dog to kidnap customers off the street. The bar had two other people in it: a village idiot who was laughing at the second man whose face was horribly disfigured. He was laughing at the idiot. I felt like I was trapped in one of Bob Dylan’s longer and more ornate masterpieces.
When I reached Trevelez, the highest village in Spain, I stepped into a bar to eat. Four old men played cards by the stove. I watched the square from the window. Where the sun touched, old ladies in black came out to sit. When it moved, they followed it. When it was gone, they scuttled home. I was told of a room to rent and went down through the village. A loose horse followed me. I took hold of its bridle and walked it back up. As soon as I set off, it followed again. When I reached the house with a small card in the window announcing the room for rent, the horse followed me inside. It turned out it lived there. The landlady’s Spanish was incomprehensible to me so she had to demonstrate how to turn on the light in the room: by screwing in the lightbulb. The horse had a room downstairs. I stayed an extra day because a heavy snowfall had cut off the village. In all it took almost a week to reach Yegen and when I did I took a room in the village bar and slept for a day huddled under heavy blankets.
I decided I would stay in Brenan’s village for a while. One day I walked down into the valley below. I passed men driving mules through terraced fields of almonds and olives. There were irrigation channels that had been built by the Moors. The people here, I was told, came from Asturias when the reconquest pushed the Moors out. I headed towards the village of Yator, but got lost in a tangled gorge of crags and tors. In places were huge mud slides. I splashed through the river and followed a lone goat into a chaotic area of eroded gulches and mud pans. In places stood towers of gravel. Eventually I came to a small patch of green and order was restored. There was a stone house amid groves of trees and an old man working the ground with a hoe.
He stopped work. I approached. He dropped the hoe. I waved. He started stumbling backwards. I shouted hello. He stopped retreating.
He had a craggy lined face under a wool cap and was grinning when I finally got close.
“Lo siento,” he apologised, “I saw you like that, walking. I never see anyone here. I thought you were the ghost of El Brenan.”
His name was Antonio and he remembered Gerald Brenan very well. He had been a boy then, but the Englishman had regularly passed their house. He showed me inside. “Built by the Moors!” he said, pulling from a cupboard a freshly baked wheel of bread, some cheese and stone jar of red wine. We sat down and ate. He told me his life. Born here. Fought for three years in the Civil War. “Terrible years.” Father died here. Mother died here. Married with four children. Wife died. Children emigrated. It sounded dire, but he was a cheerful man.
Up in Yegen I had been adopted by the bar-owner family. “The last Englishman stayed 14 years,” they laughed, “Now you must stay longer. Anyway, you are too thin for this weather.”
Maria began a programme of fattening me up. At breakfast I would keep saying ‘no more’ but she would keep bringing more and more tostadas. With each plate came a glass of copper-coloured wine, there was meat stew for lunch, then rabbit and fish for dinner. Always brandy.
I tried to leave one day, but Esteban, the owner was adamant I could not. When I agreed, he brightened up. “I’ll show you my donkeys later.” They were spectacularly well-dressed animals, adorned with scarlet embroidered bridles and harnesses. Esteban walked me around the fields, picking herbs and stuffing them in his mouth. “El Brenan lived there,” he pointed, “And had a good garden of vegetables.”
He showed me a stone with a seat carved into it. “Brenan wrote about this spot.”
I went back to that seat every evening after that. Esteban suggested buying a dilapidated house and some land. I toyed with the idea. Brenan had had an affair with his housekeeper. I imagined growing almonds and cherries using the ancient irrigation system. I could make cheese and walk down to see Antonio. My Spanish would improve. The housekeeper would start to look rather appealing.
One night three old men carrying musical instruments walked in the bar and, after drinking a jug of wine, started playing. Esteban danced with Maria. During a lull the old lute player beckoned me over. “I have sung and played here since I was a boy, since the time El Brenan called me to sing for him.”
I left Yegen after a week. Unlike El Brenan I still had some running to do and I didn’t want to be his ghost. I waved to Esteban and Maria until I turned the corner and they were out of sight.