Rose for Winter Read Free Page A

beside me and turned towards Kati; and with hands and body and fluid voice sang immediate love-songs right into her eyes. From then on, Pepe and I were drinking out of the same bottle. He was I. His arm was about my shoulder. ‘With your permission,’ he said, and began a new verse. He reeked of wine and olives, of garlic and the sea. He reeked also of glory. And he looked into Kati’s eyes and sang songs of such touching tenderness and grace, such delicate perfection, that I grieve that I can no longer remember them.
    I loved that man, and envied him. He inhabited still the pure sources of feeling that once animated us all. For us, of course, they are increasingly clogged by each new triumph of enlightenment and comfort. But for Pepe, and for many others like him in Spain, they are still preserved by the paradoxes of poverty, illiteracy, bad roads and the great silences of the mountains and the sea.
    Later that evening I walked the streets alone, too bright with wine to feel the need of sleep. There was a curious music in the air and a stamping of feet in the darkness, and as I stood in the plaza an army of young men suddenly appeared and came marching towards me, singing lustily. They were bearing guitars, mandolines, cymbals, flutes and drums of pigskin which growled when you stroked them. ‘We are going to a wedding,’ cried the leader, and invited me to go with them. Very glad of a wedding on such a night, I accepted without hesitation. I was given a pigskin drum to stroke, and I fell in behind, and we all marched away to the fishermen’s suburb, playing loudly as we went.
    It was a warm, dark winter night and the season for serenading was in full swing. On every hand the town was alive with it. Women and children leaned out of rose-red windows to watch us as we passed by. We began to meet other bands marching and counter-marching about the town. Sometimes they crossed our paths with hideous discord and then just faded away into the darkness. At others, they met us head on in narrow streets, and no one would give way, and then what stiff-necked rivalry there was, what tightening of strings and jutting of jaws, what glorious bedlam as we all stood breast to breast, sweating and thumping our instruments and each trying to outplay the other.
    We left the town at last, and climbed the high ground above the harbour, the wind in our teeth, the lights far below us, and the young men arguing all the way. We reached the fishermen’s suburb, where the wedding was, and halted, with some ceremony, outside a darkened house. Here we banged on the door, struck warning chords, shouted and kicked the walls. At first nothing happened; then a grey old man, roused from his sleep, poked his head from a window and cursed us all roundly. We had come, it seemed, to the wrong house.
    Then we found, at last, the wedding-party, and were welcomed with cheers and wine. Here was a crowded room full of sweating girls, clambering children, and stiff old ladies as black and brittle as charcoal. There were pieces of ham handed round on toothpicks, Gibraltar biscuits and Tangier sweets, speeches, introductions, song and dance, and a beaming bride and a scratching groom.
    The band placed itself in the middle of the room and played a programme of martial music well nigh drowned by the pigskin drums. The walls of the little room seemed to bend outwards with noise, the children screamed, the girls cowered in the corners, and the sweat ran down from the ceiling. Then, after more drink, ham and speeches, enthusiasm waned, and we were shown the street.
    Here we paused for a while In argument, for there was still work to be done. Where now should we go and who else should we honour? Girls’ names were proposed, attacked, fought for, won or abandoned. And such names they were on the Spanish air, exotic, round, baroque and many-flavoured, a litany of virtues, a calendar of saints. Finally we accepted six of them, those best loved by