Tomb in Seville Read Free

fought even on the streets of Madrid.

CHAPTER 2
    T HE HOTEL MANAGER, ENRICO , seemed to have taken a liking to us, and with time on his hands, due to the State of Alarm emptying three-quarters of his rooms, he was happy to conduct us round the formal gardens known as La Concha. These were normally out of bounds to members of the male sex for several hours during the day. This, he explained, was to protect the privacy of several hundred wet nurses who, with their charges held to their bosoms, took over the more secluded areas of the park in the early afternoon. Enrico timed the operation like a military manoeuvre, enabling us to slip in and out of the cover of the hedges and remain uninvolved. Screened as we were among the leaves, not an eye appeared to have been raised in our direction as rows of mammae on all sides were unslung and then, with drill-like precision, duly put away.
    The wet nurses were followed at a discreet distance by a horde of young children with their attendant servants. The servants, Enrico told us, were all Basques, tall and muscular young fellows, dressed, in order not to be confused with visitors, in uniforms displaying fashions of the last century. These included pigtails tied with immense bows and shirts with leg o’mutton sleeves. When on rare occasions—usually by mistake—ordinary visitors happened to wander into these secluded areas at this busy hour, these servants were trained to greet them with welcoming smiles and low bows.
    Enrico had invented a new attraction for the town’s visitors. He employed pigtail-wearing servants from La Concha, dressed in their nineteenth-century livery as before, but also carrying lanterns, to accompany hotel guests on sight-seeing tours of the town by night. It was a project, however, that lost business and had to be abandoned.
    I cornered Enrico again. ‘Can you think of any way out of here? Even if we could get only a few miles along the road to Seville it would be something.’
    ‘But you’d never do it,’ he said. ‘The only place you might be able to get to from here is Pamplona.’
    ‘It’s in the wrong direction,’ I pointed out.
    ‘It’s in the only direction. You wouldn’t get a mile along the Seville highway. Pamplona’s on a side road.’
    ‘But why Pamplona? What’s it got to offer?’
    ‘Its insignificance. It’s the old Spain. Something out of the past. Nobody bothers about the place. They won’t even notice you’re there. Be polite to the old people and buy the kids a few sweets. The place is run by a sergeant in the Civil Guard. He’s fifty-eight and gets all the sleep he can. In Pamplona they still bury people standing upright. About twenty or thirty families live in caves.’
    ‘How does going to Pamplona help us get to Seville?’ I wanted to know.
    ‘Well at the moment it doesn’t,’ Enrico said, ‘but it’s the sort of place where it’s easy to make yourself liked, which means that if they can do anything for you they will. And that includes finding some way of getting to Seville.’
    ‘Doesn’t the State of Alarm bother them?’
    ‘No way of knowing, but if it does I’d guess the pressure is a lot less than in San Sebastián.’
    A van with an official pass stuck on the windscreen was delivering meat to Pamplona that afternoon. ‘So why not take a chance?’ Enrico suggested. ‘You’ve nothing to lose. The police have got plenty to keep them occupied just now without bothering about you.’ The van was parked in a street at the back of the hotel and the driver looked in the other direction while we pulled up the flap at the back and clambered in.
    The road took us through pleasantly mountainous countryside dotted with wooden houses, half extinguished, in the Tyrolean fashion, by their eaves. Beauty was once again under the protection of poverty. There was no money about, the driver said, as we bumped along round the holes as deep as baths that kept the tourists away. An eagle, tearing at some small