Rose for Winter Read Free Page B

the loudest in the band, and set off to serenade them.
    It was now about two o’clock in the morning. Other grunting bands still marched about the town. We trailed over waste ground, under bridges, along railway lines, through darkened squares. From time to time we paused under a window, banged on a door, and struck up a military march. Sometimes we were ignored. Sometimes a sleepy girl would drag herself from her warm bed, lean drowsily over the balcony, and scratch and yawn good-naturedly in our faces. When this happened one of us would detach himself. Quick, then, were the words of love whispered up from the street, while the rest of the band, for a discreet moment, stood silently aside. Then, with a crash of chords and a growl of the pigskins, we were off again to the next. Until the light of dawn we proceeded thus. The serenading season had begun indeed, and few virgins in the town got much sleep that night. Very few of the rest of us either. And for days my fingers were sore from those pigskin drums.
    One stormy but invigorating morning we set out to walk to Tarifa, the old Arab town lying twelve miles along the coast in the direction of Càdiz. Armed with coñac against the cold, we climbed slowly into the mountains, while a stiff wind blew in from the Atlantic bearing strong salt smells of northern weather. Ahead of us lay the Sierra of the Moon and on our left the Sierra of Gazelles, high and dark, shrouded with storms and eagles.
    It was a morning of mysterious monotones; black rocks above and a blacker sea beneath. We saw one little girl burning leaves by the side of the road and an old man whipping acorns out of a tree. We saw the smoke of a charcoal burner blowing raggedly out of the cork forest and heard the crack of a rifle down in a ravine. Otherwise we were alone in the world, save for the eagles that dropped out of the crags to look at us.
    This coast road winds through iron-coloured rocks to a mountain pass above Tarifa, and for two hours we saw no sign of traffic on it. Then a farmer in a mule-cart came rattling out of a field, and, seeing us toiling over the stones, he stopped and offered us a lift. We climbed to the top of a load of potatoes and sat beside him. He was a fat and bristly fellow, with a waistband of broad black silk in which he stored tobacco, cheese and olives for the journey. All this he shared with us, and as we went he talked comfortably about his affairs.
    He was once, it seemed, a great landowner hereabouts, possessing twelve farms and twelve sons, all famous and worth much gold. Then four of the farms were lost in a lawsuit, and four of the sons in the Civil War. But that was not the end of him. There was still a son for each remaining farm, and he was master of them all. He was a big farmer, he said, and grew everything. There were potatoes here, cork trees farther on, maize down by the mad-house, and olives in the valley of toads. There was also a garden for tomatoes, an onion patch, a mill, a vineyard and a ruined chapel full of fattened pigs.
    â€˜Buy land and breed sons,’ he said, ‘and you can’t go wrong. Come war and thieves and ruined harvests – they don’t signify at all.’ He thumped himself hard in the loins. ‘If a man’s got strong blood, like me, and scatters his seed wide enough, that man must flourish. Such is the truth and I tell it to you.’
    So we continued, in the greatest satisfaction, till we came down at last out of the hills to the white town jutting on the sea. The farmer left us here and drove on into the farther country, and we turned towards Tarifa and stood below the walls.
    This town, small as a village, is the most southerly point in Europe, yet the air it wears is not of Europe at all. We approached the narrow Moorish gateway, where the road runs through the walls. ‘Most royal, most loyal city of Tarifa’, it said, on coloured tiles above. For this coastal stronghold, built for Islam, was