Guns in the Village

Thelma was still sleeping the sleep of the dead as Sweden got
dressed. As he moved about the tiny room, as though he was walking on
eggshells, he tried not to think about what had happened in the course
of the night. All he had wanted, after all, was to get one over on
Anthony, but somehow the thing had spiralled out of control and instead
of getting her down the hill, they had ended up at his pension, where
she spent the night.
And of course, he felt now that it was a mistake, a mistake he was
inclined to accept with the sanguinity of hindsight because there was
nothing more to be done about it, other than bare the consequences. And
he wondered, searching about for his clothes, whether he was destined
to continue to make these kinds of mistakes where women were
concerned.
It was like turning onto the wrong street and daring not to believe
that it could be wrong, and hoping through some process of miracle that
it would nonetheless turn out to be the right one. But it was still the
wrong street, even if he couldn't say exactly why it was wrong. It just
felt wrong.
When at last he was dressed, and still Thelma hadn't woken, he was at
odds what to do, other than shake her.
He shook her, albeit gently enough.
She turned over, looked at him out of her sleep, and asked, "What time
is it?"
It was approaching eleven o'clock, he said, thinking maybe that would
stir her, but instead she half groaned, half purred, and pulled the
covers over her head. If he didn't mind, she wasn't ready to get up,
she said.
"Stay as long as you like," he said.
He was going to get some breakfast before going into the mountains,
and promising to meet her later in the evening, probably at the Indalo,
he put on the straw hat and proceeded to make his way down to the
square. He was still mulling over the consequences of his night of
indiscretion, and thinking what a strange turn of phrase that was, when
suddenly, as he came into the arch way, he met several armed men
carrying rifles.
To his surprise, more armed men were in the square, where he took a
vacant table outside the ice cream bar.
An Englishman, sporting a pencil thin moustache, was certain it was
because of the Gypsies that the guardia was there. Others disagreed.
They doubted that it had anything to do with the Gypsies or the
tourists, even though a few windows had been broken, but something to
do with politics in Madrid.
"But at least now they'll stay away, the buggers," said the
Englishman, as though that was all that mattered. "With the Guardia
here we won't be seeing the likes of them any time soon."
After ordering what amounted to breakfast, a croissant and a cafe con
leche, both of which he consumed very quickly, Sweden left and started
off into the mountains. He was no higher than the first rung, however,
and wondering whether Thelma was dressed yet, when he began to feel a
mixture of feelings that disturbed him.
He thought of the guns he had seen in the village, and in the square,
and was reminded of the pervasiveness of guns in Magendo, and the
meaningless nightly rounds of submachine gun fire somewhere off in the
distance.
At first it had kept him permanently on alert, and finally he had
grown used to it. Just how used to it he hadn't realized until
confronted with the quiet of the desert, it seemed, or the fact that
nights now, as he had in Mbera, found him walking the streets of the
village with a freedom and ease unheard of by comparison. He thought in
someway now that he missed that nightly intrusion into his sleep, the
way one might miss a particular food that was no longer available, or
an ambience, even a way of feeling which one had inadvertently grown to
accept, or even trust. And in Magendo he had trusted the machine gun
fire to be there, had trusted it to break disquietingly onto the night
like a burst of fireworks.
But remembering the guns in Magendo was not what disturbed him, he
thought. They were simply a fact. It was some otherness, something more
specific, which may or may not have to do with guns at all. But
whatever it was, he felt it like a fever, one that was alternately hot,
then cold, and posited oddly on the back of his neck. And he was back
to that dream he had had, of the thing that was shinny and cold. It was
a panga. He saw it clearly as he came to the second rung, but it stood
out in isolation, like a specimen or an artefact encased in glass. But
he had no doubt now as to what it was, even though he was no more the
wiser as to what it could mean. And the fact that it should be buried
in some covered over well of memory made it all the more
disturbing.
When he came down again it was siesta time, and the square was empty
but for two Guardia. They watched him curiously as he moved past
them.
Reaching his pension, he was surprised to find Thelma, who he had
promised to meet later that evening, sitting on the step waiting for
him. She had gone home and changed, and was dressed for the beach,
wearing a bright red and white polka-a-dot skirt over her swimsuit. She
thought he might want to accompany her, she said, but was genuinely
surprised when he said he didn't swim.
She looked at him, and her expression was serious and concerned. To
her swimming was something that came naturally, at least from the age
of three when her father had taken her to the swimming baths in
Balham.
" Surely that can't be right," she said.
"Afraid so," he shrugged apologetically
"But everybody swims," she said.
"Perhaps where you come from," he said. "But where I come from
everybody doesn't swim, at least I don't."
"Then I'll teach you," she said, and her tone was strangely
imperative, as though it were a matter of life and death, this thing
which he could not do and which suddenly she had taken into her charge
to remedy.
The idea of spending time on the beach hadn't so much as occurred to
him, much less the idea of learning to swim. Since coming into the
village, he had yet to venture further than the mountains. The sea he
was quite content to gazed at from afar. And while Thelma's utter
seriously somewhat amused him, he could not deny that learning to swim
made sense, and he agreed to go. On the way, as he didn't have any
swimming trunks, they stopped off at Casa Paradisio, where he borrowed
a pair from Pedro, who warned him to be careful.
"The typewriter hats are not good for people like us," he said.
"So I gather. What's brought them out of the woodwork you
think?"
"Politics. It is the fucking Spanish politics. They want to raise the
Caudillo from the dead, to show they are still powerful. Who knows,
maybe they don't think he is dead. But you must be careful while
they're in the village. You must stay out of their way."
Sweden thought of what the Englishman had said about the gypsies going
underground as long as the Guardia was there. And now he heard it in
Pedro's admonition that said, if ever it needed to be said, that he
could do worse than to take his warning to heart. If they were bad news
for gypsies, then certainly they would be bad news for him as
well.
But staying out of their way? It seemed more a matter of their staying
of his way. Apart from becoming invisible, which he wasn't inclined to
do, how could he be anything other than a sore thumb that would stick
out whether he wanted it or not? It was the same as the weather, which
you could do nothing about. The best you could do was grin and bare
it.
"Then you must grin and bare it," Pedro advised him. "Otherwise they
will educate you."
Thelma placed the swimming trunks into the straw basket with her own
things, and they walked quietly down to the beach. At the bridge, two
Guardia passed cigarettes between them. To Thelma they were something
untoward thathad come out of the woodwork, which she did not like the
looks of, rather like something that had come up through the drains in
the bathtub. To Sweden, much the same as Pedro, it was something worse,
if as yet indeterminate. Whereas for Anthony, it was a chance to get on
everyone's nerves, because now he began to talk of the good old days,
when he had first come there and the Caudillo was then still in
power.
What had happened since, as far as he could see, was that things had
now started to go backwards, and so far backwards had they gone that
pretty soon, if people weren't careful, communists would be running the
country. That was your liberalism in a nutshell. He saw it at every
turn. The country was going down the plug-hole, a view he proclaimed
all the louder as no one, apart from himself, seemed to share it. Like
a kind of hobbyhorse, it seemed to charge him, this ability to be on
the wrong side of common sentiment. And the further that distance took
him, the more people heard it and wised they hadn't, or now ignored it
in the knowledge that all they could do was ignore it, as he was not
going to go away. He had become a fly that just wasn't going to leave
the room, an irritant that you sniped at from time to time with a vain
brush to the ear.
But some days, clearly, can be worse that others.
Unlike Pedro, Sweden wasn't impelled to go into hiding, or even to
openly speak of the reason Pedro had warned him to be careful. It was
the ways of white people which he accepted with the philosophical pinch
of salt, where-ever he found himself, for it was likewise the ways of
the world to the extent that Europe had left its imprimatur. It made
him by default a particular kind of fugitive, and authority was always
the first to pinpoint it. It could only be a question of when and
how.
Perhaps for that reason he wasn't surprised when on a chaotic
afternoon in the Indalo three GUARDIA singled him out for questioning.
The questions were benign and innocuous, and for the most part
meaningless, and he answered them with a nonchalance that concealed his
irritation at being mistaken for a Moroccan, even though he was wearing
a Moroccan hat. It was enough to make him want to hit out at something,
and when Anthony came in shortly afterwards and started to climb on his
hobby horse about the good old days, Sweden gave him two choices:
either shut up, or he'd knock his block off.
The conviction in this threat surprised even Sweden. Certainly it was
not lost on Anthony. Had he been prepared for it, Anthony might have
responded differently. Instead it had come upon him like a ton of
bricks, rather as if someone had stepped from a dark corner, and when
he least expected it had frightened the living daylights out of him by
shouting boo. Even the diplomatic Migel could not resist a sman as
Anthony all but spun on his heels and stormed as far as the door, and
would surely have been out of it but for the fact of inertia. That is
to say, the door struck him with such force it knocked him to the
floor. In his rush to get out of it, he had walked right into it, his
attempted exit having coincided with the with the equally determined
entrance at that moment of the two remaining tourists who had not gone
on to Malaga with the rest of their party.
Anthony wasted no time attempting to get to his feet, to in fact
salvage at least a modicum of his lost dignity, but the door had
severely stunned him. He reached out blindly for something to help pull
him from the floor, and grabbing the edge of the table, managed only to
bring the table down on top of him. His objective now was to get the
hell out of Endalo any way he could, and with a speed that would
somehow negate the fact that he had even been there, but all he was
managing was a comedy of errors. He fought off the table as though it
were an animate assailant, going so far as finally to give it a hardy
kick, before at last he gained the elusive door. Outside he felt the
pain where the door had struck him, and the side of his face was
already beginning to swell. He could still hear the laughter inside the
Endalo as he made his way down the hill.
Anthony wondered later, sitting glumly in his studio, if he had stayed
whether in fact Sweden really would have hit him. Somehow it would have
been better than walking into a door. He could imagine the story
spreading through the village, and he saw himself becoming a laughing
stock. The very idea that Sweden should have bested him like that made
his blood boil. For that he would have to get him good and proper. But
he knew now that it wasn't a good idea to come near him, for try as he
might, he couldn't escape the fact that Sweden had indeed frightened
him. He dipped the paintbrush forcefully into the blob of red paint on
the palate that sat beside the easel on a small table and applied it to
the canvas, and suddenly he was working.
There was no question about it, he thought then, working the paint
vigorously into the canvas, had he not turned tail and run, the man
would have pulverised him, and for what, all because he had made a
little joke. That just went to show the man really was dangerous. He
had the swollen battered face to prove it. It felt like an inflated
balloon. And yet, in a way that only he could understand, the pain felt
good. It wasn't the first time he had been thwacked, though never
before by a door, and nor was it the first time he had had the good
sense to turn tail and run. But in this instance it was the who that
mattered. That was the thing that made it....?
He looked at the apple taking shape amid the cornucopia of spilled
fruit. It was as red as blood, but it did not look savorous. He dipped
the brush into the blob of white paint, and as he began to apply it to
the canvas, he thought, "Savorous. Revenge will be savorous. A good
juicy apple savorous."
To date he hadn't spoken a word about Thelma's obvious attachment to
Sweden. He knew her too well to as much as mention it. He would be
throwing honey to a bear. But surely she would ask what happened to
him, and he would simply drop the penny. That should cool things down a
bit between them, give her something to think about. After all, what
need could she have for a man who couldn't take a little joke, a man
who was violent enough to have pummelled him into a door. He would lay
it on nice and thick. Sure he ran. What else were you supposed to do
when faced with a madman? Stand there and let him kill you?
The thought wasn't worth contemplating.
Anthony leaned back on the stool and looked at the apple, the other
fruit arrayed around it, and the big fish-like mouth of the cornucopia.
The fruit was falling just about right, forming a perfect hill that
spilled down onto the table out of the large generous mouth. But still
there was something about the apple that was niggling and
unsatisfactory. It was the red he wasn't satisfied with, and it still
wasn't savorous enough. It was the red of a fire hydrant, and too
purely an apple, and it sat up on the hill like a sore thumb, didn't
roll down properly. Always at this stage in a painting when he could
see himself on the verge of completing it, something would spark, or
flatten out, and he found himself momentarily lost. And thus it was now
with the apple.
He stood up and walked aimlessly around the studio before lying down
on the rickety couch. Trying to work the whole thing out of his head as
he saw it before returning to the canvas, his thoughts drifted back to
the Indalo, and feeling the swollen left side of his face, he began to
think about revenge.
When he moved back to the canvas, Sweden's hat, which now loomed large
in his mind's eye, dissolved into his problem with the apple, and yet
the two seemed somehow one and the same. "The man is too fucking erect
for him," he thought, glaring at the canvas, and then he saw
immediately what the problem was. The apple was withstanding gravity.
Too fucking erect. And with an attack borne of resolution, he began to
work it integrally into the body of the spilled fruit when something
even more inspiring struck him. He removed the canvas from the easel,
replaced it with a fresh one he had primed only the day before, and
began from scratch.