Texts

ANISETOS BESEN

Written in the Castillo
San Rafael de Valderrama,
La Herradura,Granada, Spain, 18 August 1993
 
(c) 1993/2012 by Gerhard Charles Rump
 
The Marquis of St Cyr stood
before the Revolutionary Court.
The Sansculotte asked him
after his name.
"I am the Marquis de Saint Cyr".
"There are no more marquises."
"De Saint Cyr."
"There is no more "de"."
"Well - Saint Cyr."
"There are no more saints."
"Cyr." "There are no more "sires"..."
 
 
It was floating quite limply. He floated on the water of the pool like a soft rag left over from last Tuesday's major cleaning. That would have been a good way of describing how he felt. Just a week ago, he had said goodbye to the steel and glass towers of international business life in Germany's banking metropolis of Frankfurt. He had joined Helga and Michael in San Rafael to spend four sun-drenched weeks on holiday in the tropical valley of La Herradura. The Castillo San Rafael de Valderrama was an almost surreal and extremely wonderful place, half hidden between jacaranda, avocado, papaya and other trees, in the middle of the terraced mountains, brown, grey, burnt yellow by the Andalusian sun and the drought, speckled dark green by the irrigated olive and almond trees that were laid around the hills like strange chains of giant corals. And it had all started just as he had imagined: heat, sunshine, good food, a little wine, and plenty of time to draw new strength from the depths of his soul, to be able to toil again for eleven long months for the money he absolutely needed to live.
 
He did not take part in the painting and pottery courses offered to the other guests of the house. He would probably have been interested in having a few lessons on the guitar to improve his flamenco playing. But he had found time to make a small drawing of the white-walled house, the oldest parts of which dated back to Phoenician times. He had paid a lot of attention to detail, to the various flower pots, the old farming tools. Even the broom that Aniseto, the caretaker, always used, was leaning against the wall and gave the drawing a very picturesque atmosphere. Michael, the master of the house and painter, had looked at it for a long time, patted him on the back and said, "Well, St Cyr, it's a nice illustration. Even Aniseto's broom is on it. But you're telling an incredibly long story..." So St Cyr knew that Michael didn't particularly like the drawing, although he recognised his drawing skills in principle. Well, he'd never claimed to be an artist - it was just that he'd had a few drawing lessons in the course of his upbringing, just like any 19th century English gentleman. Sometimes there is very little difference between the Grand Tourist and the advertising executive of the later half of the 20th century.
 
 
 
The day after the drawing was made, he had seen her for the first time. Since then, his peace of mind was gone and his recovery jeopardised. She wasn't too tall, maybe 1.65 metres, but she had a wonderfully shaped body that was fitted into a rather tight-fitting black dress. Her face wasn't country pretty, but he found it extremely attractive with its exciting and unsettling combination of girlish cuteness and snooty "gitano" severity. He melted when he followed the flow of her shiny black hair with his eyes and at the first glance into the unfathomable depth of her black eyes he had felt something inside him crack and he had known immediately that this crack would never be repaired. Much to his own astonishment, he made contact with her very quickly, although the speed of his progress would have been judged a complete standstill from the vantage point of a Frankfurt disco. Her name was Carmen - that didn't bother him so much, although he was still glad she wasn't called "Maria". Carmen worked a little at the finca, although it wasn't entirely clear what she was actually responsible for and how regularly she fulfilled her obligations. One day it seemed that she was the cook, but the next day she was changing the linen in the guest rooms and on the third day she was watering the banana plants and the many flowers.
 
She didn't necessarily fit the image of an Andalusian farmer's daughter. But what she actually was was very difficult to understand. Michael was quite reluctant to say much about her, and Helga wasn't necessarily prepared to deal with the subject either. Helga said that Carmen helped her a lot with her artistic pottery, but that was almost all she wanted to say about her. St Cyr, curious as he was, was not in a position to ask her himself, although he would have loved to. He had sensed something of a mysterious vulnerability about her from the start, in a way that was hard to pin down, and he didn't want to delve too deeply for fear of hurting her. He pieced together an incomplete mosaic from various bits and pieces of information about her and learnt that Carmen had probably had a good education, paid for by a rich uncle who had some boats travelling back and forth between the mainland and Morocco with a cargo that probably never appeared on any official document. Apparently she had spent some years in Madrid studying architecture, but St Cyr had yet to find out if any building erected on the surface of the earth had been designed by her.
 
He tried to spend as much time as possible with her or near her, driven by his wild longing to see her face, feel her tender touch, smell her naturally fragrant hair and hear her ripe voice resonating through him, almost as if he were standing right next to the ringing main bell of Granada Cathedral, and to taste her soft skin when, in an obviously ironic and ultimately very unprecocious way, he bent to kiss her hand in greeting, touching it ever so lightly with his open, yearning lips. When she was away running an errand or preparing the sound for Helga in the studio or preparing some Andalusian speciality in the kitchen, he cooled himself and his passion by swimming in the fresh water of the pool and slowly gliding past some musazees and the very pretty lemon trees - just like a saloon lion that had turned into an alligator from the Everglades. Although the pool was only about 20 metres long, it seemed longer than a kilometre to him, and when he dived into the deep end to get his sun-heated head under water, he thought how wonderful it would be to drown in Carmen's tenderness.
 
St Cyr was a kind of "Fabianus Cunctator" in matters of love and he preferred it when women actively expressed their interest in him. But he sensed that this would never be the case with Carmen. So his courtship of her became clearer from day to day, and even a Romeo from a Frankfurt disco would have had to admit that he was making some progress. It wasn't that much, though, and by the end of his second week in San Rafael he felt that time was running out. He knew very well that he had no chance of realising his plans if he went away for even a few days and then came back again. He found himself trapped in a perfect now-or-never situation, and he felt all the more miserable knowing that everything that happened to him was his own fault.
 
On Saturday, he walked up the stony path that connected San Rafael with La Herradura, sweating in the humid heat of the tropical valley and looking forward to a refreshing sangría. The white towers of the finca slowly drew closer. Suddenly he was surprised by a small, black stripe across the driveway arch that he had never seen there before. The end was a little thick and a thin line emerged from it. He couldn't imagine what it was, quickened his pace and felt strangely drawn to this black mark, an irritating stain on the lily-white surface of the tower. When he got close enough to see what this dark object was, he paused, completely caught up in incomprehensible astonishment: someone had fixed Aniseto's broom over the access gate, as if it meant something that should not be understood by everyone, only by those who participated in the possibly very strange rites that were still alive in the remote valleys of the Sierra Bética. He decided to ask Carmen about it, but didn't get the chance and then somehow forgot about it. When he asked her on Sunday, she looked at him with a face that showed a strange mixture of fear and joy. "No me preguntes," she said, and turned away. Later she behaved as if nothing had ever irritated her in the slightest.
 
After a dinner of queso manchego, tomatoes, white bread and red wine, he sat on the small terrace at the back of the finca's courtyard and tried to play some flamenco melodies on Michael's cedar guitar. At first his fingers were still stiff, didn't get on with the instrument and the chords sounded flat and impure. But it wasn't too long before his hands were skilfully handling the strings and the valley filled with music, almost otherworldly, as it seemed to have no particular source. His flamenco was simply there. He began with a sorrowful aii-ya-iih, and sang a Moorish melody to his playing, and the words spoke of his sorrowful courtship of Carmen, he sang to the olive and almond trees on the barren hills and it was as if the branches were lowering to listen. He told them that he felt like a dead cat in the street, whose trail of blood was a shining path to hell, and he sang that his love was a stillborn cry that had never seen the mountains - mi amor es la eclipse de un grito que nunca ha visto las montañas. When his song was over and he was retuning the instrument, he heard footsteps approaching him from the darkness under the palm trees. It must have been Carmen. And it was her, an almost fiery apparition of a mystical woman, conjured up from the unknown by the sound of his music and his "duende", the power of his imagination. She must have been in bed because she wasn't wearing her usual clothes. She had only slipped into a pair of black shoes adorned with a golden ribbon and had thrown on a black, richly embroidered mantón de Manila - nothing more.
 
She walked towards him, but stopped just before him. She looked at him with eyes full of black fire, threw her head back and put on the haughtiest face a man had ever seen. St Cyr sank like a stone before her power, but he still managed to whisper "baila mi" and began to play. She killed him gently with a look that no one had ever seen before, began to move, at first slightly reluctantly, with a tense grace, commanding and dominating kingdoms with just a faint movement of her little finger. She made herself dance a flamenco, drumming the strength and power of passion from the tiled floor, her body twisting in controlled convulsions, writhing as if gripped by voluptuous longing, and her hands flew quickly around her, writing all the fairy tales of love and death in the warm air of the Andalusian summer night. The brief flash of her perfect, evenly tanned body, which St Cyr saw when the mantón was too slow to follow Carmen's movements and therefore left her beauty uncovered for a split second, stung St Cyr's eyes. But it was long enough to widen the crack inside him, with more force than frost and water have or the powerful blow of a stone crusher's wedge. He lost all sense of time and only stopped playing when he had so exhausted himself that he could not have coaxed a single chord from the instrument.
 
Carmen stood before him, panting, piercing him with her eyes and expressing a perfectly balanced mixture of love and hate. St Cyr put down the guitar, stood up carefully and walked slowly towards her, taking the four steps it took to close the distance between them to zero, almost reluctantly. His eyes were still looking into hers as he put his arms around her and lowered his head, closing his eyes and kissing her on her slightly parted lips. It went through him like an electric shock, a cutting sensation of red heat shot through his head. A deep darkness fell around him, which was only gradually illuminated by streams of glowing plasma that re-energised his body. When he finally let go of her, she reinforced the parting by gently pushing his arms away She sent him a brief smile, flashed her black-diamond eyes again and whispered "buenas noches", put on her haughty face again and was swallowed up by the dark night in the mountains at practically the same moment.
 
Over the next week, there were many gentle moments full of tenderness and a growing intimacy between the two. He prepared her bananas from the local harvest, oranges and cherries. There was laughter, there were kisses and exchanges of tenderness. He often told her "te quiero" and she laughed, clearly in serious doubt as to whether she should believe him. As the week drew to a close, Carmen became noticeably more tense. She didn't reject him, it was just that she wasn't in the same cheerful mood as in the days before. There seemed to be a kind of melancholy around her. Only sometimes she threw her head back and smiled at him as if there had never been any evil in this world.
 
On Saturday morning, Aniseto's broom could once again be seen above the front gate. Carmen came through the courtyard and St Cyr stopped her in front of the door to the Jacaranda room, looked straight at her and held her by the shoulders. "What do you mean Aniseto's broom is hanging over the front gate? Tell me and tell the truth, please." She looked at him a little angrily and hissed, "El alimón!" She tore herself away from him and was gone in an instant. El alimón? wondered St Cyr. He had heard of this strange form of pleasure before, but he would never have thought that it would still be practised at the end of the 20th century. He didn't quite understand it, as it normally required a proper bullring. The bullring in Almuñecar, the nearest large town, had long since closed, and the next one was in Motril, which was quite a long way away. And there was certainly no "alimón" there, and in the mountains, there would hardly be an area big enough for it. "El alimón" - that was once a kind of corrida, but a very special one. No picadores, no banderilleros, just two toreros, but without a muleta, without the red scarf. The two toreros have to face the unweakened bull, and one of them has the role of the living muleta, the living red scarf. They have to harmonise perfectly with each other, understand each other without words - or it could mean the death of both of them. The last real Alimón was probably fought long before the last war. And so St Cyr found it a little strange that Carmen should mention such a thing. He had now become a little more observant than he usually was, he noticed that the people who worked on the finca simply disappeared, they didn't say goodbye as usual, they were suddenly no longer there. Only the guests were still there - they didn't notice anything anyway and continued to mould their clay and splash watercolours on the rough surface of white paper to create sad caricatures of the natural beauty of the surroundings. When it was almost dark, St Cyr decided to check on the possible Alimón in the mountains. He left the courtyard through the pink gate at the north end of the garden, following a narrow footpath up a terraced, very steep hill that had not been cultivated for at least the last five years. The partly walled terraces already showed signs of the first stages of decay. He climbed up to the half-abandoned finca at the top of the hill, which was only imperfectly protected by a circle of fig-bearing opuntias. Behind the building, which had only the depth of a single room, he looked out over the mountain landscape, which was slowly sinking into the comforting darkness of the night. And as a light and gentle breeze brushed a curl of cool air from his forehead, he imagined that it had been the touch of Mother Night's wingtip that had flown past - and he realised that you never knew which of her two children you would meet. He looked out over the night landscape of the southern Sierra Bética and noticed the reflection of a fire a few hills to the north. He hesitated for a moment, but then made his way there, stumbling over stones and occasionally pricking his legs on a cactus he hadn't seen in the darkness. Now and again he lost sight of the fiery reflection when he crossed the bottom of one of the many small intersecting hollows. Then again, after reaching the top of another hill, he could see it bright and clear. He even thought he could hear voices shouting Hola! or Olé! or some local expression he didn't recognise. However, no music could be heard. It was pitch dark by the time he had managed to climb the last hill between him and the source of the fiery light. He renewed his efforts and when he reached the top, he was disappointed to realise that there was no light to be seen. He stood on the highest elevation in the area, pumping cool mountain air into his panting lungs, looking around in every direction, and all he could see was the deepest blackness, so deep and bottomless that even the stars in the clear sky could not brighten it. There he stood, the true emperor of nothingness, king of emptiness, ruler of all nothingness. For a while he remained motionless, then he sat down on the ground to recover from the disappointment and the effort and the hill became the true throne of the kingdom of futile labours of love. He didn't want to go back to the finca. He decided to spend the night on the bare mountain. His bed of dry grass, dirt and gravel was not very cosy, he looked into the best of nights, and his thoughts revolved around Carmen, but they were disturbed by the sound of many feet marching down a hill in the distance, mixed with a few suppressed voices. He even thought he recognised Carmen's voice, but at the same moment he understood that it was more likely his senses and his imagination that had combined to fool him. The faint sounds faded into silence. He didn't even realise that his thoughts had long since turned into dreams.
 
The coolness of the morning woke him early. The world around him was grey and overcast. He stretched, as a cat would have done, and made his way back to San Rafael. Carmen ran towards him as he appeared in the doorway of the pink gate. "¿De onde vienes?" - Where have you been. He told her. She shook her head in disbelief, took him by the hand and led him to the small terrace where she had danced for him. Yes, she admitted. There had been an "Alimón" the previous night. But a slightly different one. But she didn't want to tell him what the other one really was, he would find out soon enough, or maybe not.
 
Yes, it had happened, quite close to where he had been. But he could have reached the place if he hadn't climbed up and down the hills, but had taken the old wagon road that started from the abandoned finca and met the old country road to Granada after a few kilometres. Shortly before that, there was a bend in the road where there was a small, flat plain - that was the place. However, it would be dangerous for him to watch the Alimón - it was an illegal affair and everyone involved preferred to keep the circle of "aficionados" small and then control it. "But how do you get a bull up there?" Carmen laughed, and her laughter sounded as if it had the silky lustre of precious pearls. She told him that it was not an alimón with bulls, but with hombres - men. St Cyr was shocked. She described it, feeling that she had to. His desire to know more about it was so strong that it could not be ignored. She told him that an arena would be marked by four fires in the corners. Four men would stand in the centre of the arena - two against two. Two with a long knife, tied together so they couldn't escape, the others as their living shields, unarmed and unprotected. The only protection they had was the intuitive understanding with their partner, the unity of the two - and, of course, the rule that the fighters with the knife were not allowed to hit them. If they did, they lost money, or even the whole fight. Bets would be placed on the pairs of fighters, large amounts - the winning pair could, at least occasionally, earn more money in one evening of fighting than in a year of honest labour. That was all she wanted to say. "Come and watch, but it's your own risk. Make sure no one discovers you." The rest of the week was full of the happiness of young love for St Cyr, disturbed only occasionally by the thoughts he had wondering what Carmen was doing at "el alimón" and why she was going there at all.
 
The last week of his stay in San Rafael was slowly coming to an end. Carmen had her occasional melancholy moments and a slight but noticeable insecurity in her behaviour. He had asked her to love him after all and said that he was willing to try to unite their two destinies. "Maybe tomorrow," had been her reply. Carmen had disappeared on Friday. Even before Aniseto's broom had found its traditional Saturday spot above the front gate. St Cyr had been nervous the whole time. When the expected evening finally arrived, he hurried out through the pink gate, scrambling up the hill to the abandoned finca. It was getting dark when he reached the bend in the old carriage road. Now he walked more carefully, taking care not to make a sound. He began to hear voices, excited cries floating through the space between the hills. The flickering reflection of fire lit up the rocky wall of a large hill to his right. He approached slowly, absolutely silently. Suddenly the view of the scene he had hoped to see opened up. A small, flat plain, a square patch cut out of it, marked by lines of small stones and brightly burning fires at each corner. There were perhaps a hundred spectators crouched around this makeshift arena, their faces flickering in ghostly tones with the light of the fires. Four men were in the centre of the arena, young men, in their late twenties or early thirties, at least that's how it seemed to him. Their bodies were full of tension, they moved in pairs around each other in a circle, watching each other with an almost painful concentration, with a wild, irrepressible glow in their faces. In each case, the man moving behind the other held a long, flashing knife in his hand, which he moved from left to right and occasionally thrust forwards to strike the other. They could not run away because their bodies were tied together with a strong leather rope at waist level. The unarmed men were their living shields, in effect, protecting the knife-wielders from the stabs of the others, who they were not allowed to hit - he remembered that if they hit, they would either lose money or the whole game. It was a haunting scene. The deadly tension between the combatants and the occasional excited screams of the spectators, the palpable presence of bloodshed and death, the night and the traumatic lighting from the fires all combined to create an incredible impression of an extreme existence.
 
The flashing thrusts of the fighters' gleaming knives became more frequent, but appeared less controlled. One of the knife-wielders wore white trousers, the other grey. The grey-shirted fighter suddenly lunged forward to stab the other, but the protector threw himself in his path, but too fast or too late for the knifeman to stop his thrust. A painful contortion disfigured the defender who had been hit. A red stain appeared on the shirt on his chest, and the spectators groaned in disappointment. But the fight continued. An old man, evidently some sort of referee, shouted something St Cyr did not understand and, making some gestures that were as it were incomprehensible, he showed a white stone in his hand, which he held high in the air for everyone to see. A few knife thrusts later, the protector of the white-shirted fighter was hit for the second time. His shirt, once white, became more and more of a wet red rag. But the fight was still going on. The grey fighter had become very nervous, it seemed, and his attempts to hit the other were just as nervous. The white fighter almost hit the grey fighter's protector a few times, but each time he had managed to stay a fraction of an inch away from the grey fighter's skin, which was rewarded with applauding murmurs from the ghostly crowd. St Cyr realised that he only saw men, although he was convinced that he had heard female voices as well. At least near the arena there were no women to be seen, and certainly not Carmen. He looked around a few times, safely hidden in the deep darkness between the rocks. As he turned his attention back to the fight, he saw the grey fighter make a nervous movement and hit the white man's protector for the third time. A cry of angry disappointment filled the air, the referee held a third stone in the air and the fighters left the arena, the wounded protector was led a little further away and apparently his wounds were treated, but St Cyr was unable to tell whether this was by men or women.
 
Four more men stepped into the square. One red and one brown fighter, two protectors in white. The red fighter's face was marked by a long scar on his left cheek - it started almost below his ear and extended to his forehead. It had obviously been a minor miracle that the knife thrust in that fight in the past had spared his eye. The four of them began a very fierce fight, their faces glowing with power and energy, hatred and loathing. It was quite obvious that this was not just a fight for money. There was definitely more to it than met the eye. The brown fighter very quickly threw his knife into his left hand behind the back of his bright white protector and thrust it forwards in a flash, at a moment when the red fighter and his protector were not expecting it. The full length of the silvery steel disappeared into the red fighter's chest. An excited cry arose like a huge wave, and St Cyr had also let out a loud scream of terror and excitement. Suddenly there were torches around him and he was discovered - surrounded by dark-faced men who stared grimly at him, at him, the intruder, the uninvited witness to their malicious conversation. They held him with strong arms. The excitement of having discovered an intruder had completely replaced the excitement of the fighter's death. The screams died down to a murmur and St Cyr didn't know what was going to happen now. After what seemed like an eternity, the old referee came to him and spoke to him in Andalusian Spanish. He didn't understand everything the man had said, but he had realised that he had to fight for his life. He was led into the ring and was tied to the brown-clad winner of the last fight with the strong leather rope at the end of the red loser. The leather rope at his end was still wet with the blood of the dead fighter. The white-clad protector stood in front of the brown fighter and St Cyr faced the two of them alone. He looked around and saw only darkness and fire, the spectators blending completely with the surroundings and forming four impenetrable walls that trapped him in this Spanish mountain nightmare. The referee asked in a hoarse but very high-pitched voice if there was anyone who wanted to take on the role of protector for the intruder in the fight. It was quite obvious that nobody took pity on him and wanted to risk their health for the stranger. The referee asked again - and he got an answer. Carmen appeared in the darkness and a wave of disbelieving murmurs rose in the arena as she approached him. She gave him a very enigmatic look - and it seemed that her eyes were more penetrating than ever, yet covered with a crystalline lid, like a deep, dangerous well. She took her place in front of him, almost touching him with her back. The referee approached her and gave St Cyr a long knife in his right hand. Now he knew that the unexpected moment of truth had arrived.

Written in the Castillo

San Rafael de Valderrama,

La Herradura,Granada, Spain, 18 August 1993

(c) 1993/2012 by Gerhard Charles Rump

Aniseto's Broom 

Aniseto's Broom

Written at the Castillo San Rafael de Valderrama, La                                 Herradura, Granada, Spain, August 18th, 1993

(c) 1993/2012 by Gerhard Charles Rump

The Marquis of St Cyr stood before the revolutionary tribunal. The sansculotte asked his name. "Le Marquis de Saint Cyr". "There aren't any Marquis any more." "De Saint Cyr. "There aren't any "de" any more." "Saint Cyr, then". "There aren't any saints any more." "Cyr." "There aren't any "Sire" any more..."

His stroke was not powerful. He floated in the pool like a limp cloth left from last Tuesday's cleaning. Which would express how he felt. Only a week ago he had said good bye to the steel and glass towers of international business back in Germany's banking metropolis of Frankfurt. Now he stayed at Helga and Michael's guest house at San Rafael to spend four weeks of sun-drenched holidays in the tropical valley of La Herradura. The Castillo San Rafael de Valderrama was an almost unreal and extremely beautiful place, half hidden between jacaranda, avocado, papaya and other trees in the midst of terraced mountains burnt brown, grey and yellow by the Andalusian sun and the drought, spotted dark green by the irrigated olive and almond trees lining the hills like a strange sort of giant corals. And it had started out like he had imagined it would: heat, sunshine, good food, some wine, plenty of time to pump up new powers from deep inside in order to be able to face another eleven months of huffing and puffing for the money to keep one going.

He did not take part in the painting and pottery courses offered to the other guests. He would have been interested, though, in some lessons to brush up his playing skills of the flamenco guitar. But he had found time, nevertheless, to make a little drawing of the whitewalled house, the oldest parts of which dated back to the time of the Phenicians. He had given a lot of attention to details, the assorted flowerpots, the ancient rural tools and even the broom of Aniseto the caretaker, leaning against the wall, giving an immensely picturesque flavour to the scene. Michael, the landlord and painter, had looked at it for a long time, patted him on the back and said: "Well, St. Cyr, it's a nice illustration. Even Aniseto's broom is there. But what a long story you tell..." So St. Cyr knew that Michael didn't like it too much, although he appreciated his drawing skills. Well, he had never pretended to be an artist - he only had been given a number of drawing lessons in the course of his education. Like any English Gentleman of the 19th Century. Sometimes there are very few differences between the Grand Tourist and the advertising director of the latter half of the 20th Century.

But the day after he had made the drawing he had seen her for the first time. Since then, his tranquillity was gone and his recreation at risk. She was not too tall, maybe 5'6″, but she had a wonderfully shaped body clad in a rather tightly fitting black dress. Her face was not beautiful in the usual sense, but he found it extremely attractive with its thrilling and disturbing combination of girlish sweetness and haughty gitano severity. He melted, following the flow of her shiny black hair with his eyes and, on first looking into the fathomless depth of her black eyes, he had felt something crack in him and instantly knew that this crack would never be mended again. Much to his surprise he had made fast progress in establishing contact with her, although it would, from a Frankfurt disco point of view, have been interpreted as a complete standstill. Her name was Carmen - he did not care too much about that, but he was somehow glad she was not called "Maria". Carmen did some work around the finca, although it wasn't clear what her responsibilities were and how regularly she went about them. One day she seemed to be the cook, only to change the bedclothes in the guest rooms the next day, and to water the bananas and the multitude of flowers on the third.

She wasn't what you expected from an Andalusian peasant daughter. But what she was, was difficult to understand. Michael showed himself to be unwilling to tell much about her, and Helga didn't really want to touch the subject either. Helga said that Carmen helped her a lot in her artistic pottery work, but that was about all she was willing to disclose about her. St Cyr, curious as he was, however, didn't have the strength to ask her directly what he was dying to know. He had felt, from the very beginning, an air of mysterious vulnerability about her, and he didn't want to probe to deeply into that, in order not to hurt her. From fragments of information he learned that Carmen seemed to have been given a good education, sponsored by a rich uncle who ran a few boats between the mainland and Morocco, their hulls concealing cargo not to be found on any official list. She must have spent some years in Madrid to become an architect, but St Cyr had not yet found out whether any structure erected on the earth's surface so far was of her design.

He tried to spend as much time with her - or near her - as possible, propelled by his raging desire to see her face, feel her soft touch, smell her naturally perfumed hair, hear her mellow voice which reverberated through him almost as if he stood right next to the ringing main bell of Granada cathedral, and taste her smooth skin, when, in an overtly ironic and basically ungentlemanly manner, he bowed and kissed her hand in greeting her, touching her lightly with his parted lips so full of wanting. When she was away on an errand, or preparing clay in Helga's studio or in the kitchen cooking some Andalusian dish, he cooled his passion floating in the cool waters of the pool, slowly gliding past some musacea and very pretty lemon trees like a lounge lizard who had turned into an everglade alligator. Although the pool was just about 70 feet long, it seemed to him more than a mile and when he dived down at the deep end to submerge his sun-heated head, he thought how wonderful it would be to drown in Carmen's caresses.

St Cyr was a kind of Fabianus Cunctator in love matters and rather had it the way that women actively showed their interest in him, but he felt that it wouldn't work at all with Carmen. So from day to day his courtship became more and more obvious, and even a Frankfurt disco Romeo would have conceded that some progress was made. It wasn't much, though, and by the end of his second week he sensed that he was running out of time. He knew dead sure that there was no chance of accomplishing his plans in coming back after even just a short business break. He found himself trapped in a perfect "now-or-never" situation, and he felt all the more miserable as he knew that all he was was of his own making.

On Saturday he came up walking the stony track leading down to La Herradura, sweating in the tropical valley's damp heat and looking forward to a refreshing sangr¡a at San Rafael. The white towers of the finca were slowly drawing nearer. Suddenly St Cyr was startled by a small black strip across the entrance arch he had never seen there before. It had a butt end and a thin line. He couldn't imagine at all what it was, and he paced up, strangely attracted by the black mark, a mesmerising spot of disturbance in the tower's lily-white surface. When he was near enough to see what the dark object was, he stopped, caught in uncomprehending amazement: Someone had pinned Aniseto's broom over the entrance arch, just as if to signify something which was not meant to be understood by everybody, only by those initiated to whatever strange rites still followed in the deserted valleys of the Sierra Bética. He decided to ask Carmen about it, but found no occasion and then, somehow, he forgot. When he asked her on Sunday she gazed at him, her face a strange mixture of fear and joy. "No me preguntas" - don't ask, she said and turned away. Later she acted as if there had never been anything to disturb her.

After the evening treat of queso manchego, tomatoes, white bread and red wine, he sat on the little terrace at the far end of the finca's court, trying to play some flamenco airs on Michael's cedarwood guitar. At first his fingers were ill at ease with the instrument and the chords seemed flat and impure. But it didn't take too long for his hands to nimbly work the strings and the valley filled with music, almost unearthly, as it didn't seem to have a distinctive source. His flamenco was just there. Starting with a suffering Ayee-ya-eeh, he sang a moorish melody to his playing, the words speaking about his painful courtship of Carmen, addressing the olive and almond trees on the barren terraced mountains, and it was as if they lowered their branches to listen. He told them that he saw himself as a dead cat in the street, his trail of blood a shining path to hell, and he sang that his love was a stillborn cry which had never seen the mountains - mi amor es la eclipse de un grito que nunca a visto las montañas. When he had finished and started to adjust the instrument's tuning, he heard footsteps coming towards him from the dark beneath the palm trees. It must be Carmen. And there she was, the fiery apparition of a mystical woman, conjured up from the unknown by the sound of his music and "duende", the charm and charisma of his performance. Carmen must have already been to bed as she did not wear her usual dress. She had only slipped into a pair of black shoes braced by a golden band and had thrown a black, richly embroidered mantón de Manila around her body - nothing more.

Carmen walked up to him, stopping a few steps short. She looked at him with eyes of black fire, threw her head back and put on the haughtiest face a man had ever seen. St Cyr sank beneath her power like a stone, but he pressed "baila, baila mi" from his lips and started to play. Killing him softly with a look no one had ever seen before, Carmen reluctantly began to move, with a tense grace, commanding and dominating empires with the faint movement of her little finger. She moved herself into stomping out a flamenco, drumming the power of passion from the tiled floor, her body in transports twirling, twisting as if seized by lustful longing, and her hands swiftly flying around her, writing all tales of love and death into the warm air of the Andalusian summer night. St Cyr's eyes were stabbed by short glimpses of her perfect and tanned body which he caught when the mantón was too slow to follow Carmen's movements and left her beauty exposed for the fraction of a second. Long enough, however, to work on the crack inside him, more forceful than frost and water or the powerful thrust of a stonecutter's wedge. He lost all sense of time and only stopped when he felt that he was unable to strum out one more chord.

Carmen stood before him, panting, piercing him with her eyes, expressing a perfectly balanced mixture of love and hate. St Cyr put the guitar down, got up cautiously and gently moved towards her, slowly walking the four steps necessary to zero the distance between them. His eyes still fixed to hers he put his arms around her, lowered his head, and closing his eyes he kissed her slightly parted lips. He was electrified, a slashing sensation of red heat shot through his head. A deep blackness fell around him, which was only lightened by and by through streams of shining plasma, which re-energised his body. When he let her go, finally, she enforced the parting by gently pushing his arms away from her. She beamed a short smile, flashed her black diamond eyes and whispered "buenas noches", put on her haughty air again and was almost instantly swallowed by the dark mountain night.

The next week saw some sweet moments of tenderness and growing intimacy between the two. He fed her bananas from the local crop, oranges and cherries. There was laughter, there were kisses and caresses. He told her many times "te quiero" and she laughed, obviously in serious doubt whether to believe him or not. As the week drew to a close, Carmen became noticeably more tense. Not that she pushed him away, she simply wasn't in the light mood she had been in the days before. There was a kind of gloom about her. Only sometimes she would toss her head back and smile at him as if there had never been anything bad in this world. 

Saturday morning saw Aniseto's broom up above the arch again. Carmen came up the courtyard, and St Cyr stopped in her way at the door of the jacaranda room, looked her straight into her eyes, held her by the shoulders. "What is it, with Aniseto's broom up the arch? Tell me, and no lies, please!" She looked scornfully at him, hissed "El alimón!", tore away from him and was gone. "El alimón?" wondered St Cyr. He had heard about this strange kind of amusement, but he would never have thought that it would still be practised at the end of the 20th century. He couldn't make much sense of it because it usually took place in a fully-fledged plaza de toros. The plaza de toros of nearby Almunecar was long gone, the nearest was at Motril, quite a few miles away. And there was no "alimón" for sure. Any place in the mountains wouldn't be big enough. "El alimón" - that used to be a corrida, but a special one. No picadores. No banderilleros. Only two toreros, but without a muleta, the crimson cloth. The two toreros face the unweakened bull together, one of the two serving as a living muleta. They have to be harmony in perfection, understand each other without words - otherwise it could be the death of both. The last real alimón had probably taken place some time before the last war. So it struck St Cyr as strange that Carmen should mention it. His senses heightened, he noticed that the people of the finca vanished. They did not leave as they did on the other days, the just disappeared. Except of course for the guests - they didn't notice anything and kept on moulding their clay and splashing watercolour on to rough surfaced white paper in mournful caricature of the natural beauty of the surroundings. When it had become almost dark, St Cyr decided to look for the possible mountain alimón. He passed through the pink door at the north end of the garden, followed a narrow footpath up a steep and terraced hill which had not been cultivated for at least five years, the partly walled terraces being in the first stage of decay. He climbed up to the half derelict, deserted finca on the top of the nearest hill, imperfectly protected by a circle of fruit-bearing opuntias. Behind the one-room deep building he looked over the mountain landscape slowly sinking into the night's soothing blackness. And when a slight and tender movement of a somewhat cooler air gingerly stroked a lock on his forehead, he imagined it was the touch of the tip of the wing of mother night flying by - and he realised he would never know which of her two children he would meet.

Looking over the nightly landscape of the southern Sierra Bética he noticed the shine of fire a few hills further north. He hesitated for a moment, but then set forth towards it, stumbling over stones and occasionally stinging his legs on a cactus he had not seen in the dark. Sometimes he lost sight of the fiery shine, when he was in the deep bottom of the many little criss-crossing valleys. Then, after having reached another hilltop, he saw it bright and clear. He even thought he heard voices crying Hóla! or Olé! or some local expression unknown to him. There wasn't any music to be heard, however. It was pitch dark when he was halfway up the last hill hiding the source of the fiery light from his eyes. He renewed his efforts and made it to the top of the hill only to find that there wasn't any light anymore. He stood upon the highest hill of the area, pumping cool mountain air into his panting lungs, looked around in full circle and all he could see was the darkest black, so deep and fathomless even the stars in the clear sky were unable to light it. There he stood, the veritable emperor of nothing, king of the void, the lord of emptiness. He remained motionless for a while, then sat down on the ground, resting from disillusionment and labour, making the hill the very throne of the realm of failure. He had no wish of going back down to the finca. He was bent to spend the night on the barren mountain. Only half cosy on his bed of dry grass, dirt and gravel, looking into the starriest of nights, his thoughts circled around Carmen, but were disturbed by the distant sound of many feet marching downhill, some hushed voices. He even thought he recognised Carmen's voice, but at the same time he realised that it was more likely that his senses and his imagination had conspired to fool him. The faint sounds dwindled into silence. He did not notice that his thoughts had long turned into dreams.

The chill of the morning woke him early. The world around him was grey and misty. He stretched himself, like a cat will do sometimes, then began his way back to San Rafael. Carmen came running towards him as he appeared in the frame of the pink door. "¨De onde vienes? - Where have you been?" He told her. She shook her head in disbelief, took him by the hand an lead him to the little terrace where she had danced for him. Yes, she confessed. There had been an "alimón" last night. But of a different kind. She wouldn't tell, however, what it exactly was. He would find out in time. Or maybe better not. It had been held quite near where he had been. He would have reached the place had he not climbed up and down the hills but taken the old cart-road instead, which lead away from the finca only to hit the ancient road to Granada after a few miles. Before that, it took a turn into a small flat area - that was the place. It would , however, be dangerous for him to watch the "alimón" - it was an illegal practice and those involved in it preferred to keep the circle of aficionados under control. "But how do you get a bull up there?" Carmen laughed, and her laughter rang with the silky seam of precious pearls. She told him that it was not an alimón with bulls but with hombres - men. St Cyr was shocked. She described it, as she felt she had to, his desire to know more about it was too strong to be neglected. She told him that there was a ring marked by four fires. Four people would stand in the middle - two against two. Two with a long knife, the other two their living shields, unarmed, unprotected. The only protection they had was their intuitive understanding of each other, the oneness of the two - and, of course, that the knife bearers were not allowed to stab them - or they would lose money or the fight. Bets would be placed on the fighting pairs, high amounts of pesetas - the winning pair could, on occasions, take more money than a year's honest wages. More she would not disclose. "Come and see, but at your own risk. Don't let yourself be seen." The rest of week was fresh love's bliss for St Cyr, only occasionally disturbed by thoughts of what Carmen would do at "el alimón" and why she would want to go there.

The last week of his stay at San Rafael drew to a close. Carmen had her occasional instants of gloom and a slight but noticeable uneasiness about her. He had asked her to make love together, and that he was willing to try to put their two fates together. "Maybe tomorrow" had been her answer. Carmen had disappeared on Friday, even before Aniseto's broom had found its traditional Saturday place above the entrance arch. St Cyr was nervous the whole time. When the awaited evening came at last, he hurried out of the pink door and scrambled up the hill to the deserted finca. Night fell as he reached the turn of the cart-road. He set his steps more carefully, anxious not to make a sound. He began to hear voices, shouts of excitement came floating through the space between the hills. There was the flickering shine of fire on the rocky wall of a big hill on the right. He approached slowly, in perfect silence. The suddenly the view opened and showed him the scene he had hoped to see: A flat area, a square patch marked by lines of stones and brightly burning fires at each corner. Maybe a hundred people gathering around the ramshackle arena, their faces shining in ghostly hues in the light of the fires. There were four people in the middle of the pit, young men, in their late twenties or early thirties, so it seemed to him. Their bodies in full tension, moving about circularly in pairs, around each other, eyeing each other with painful concentration, a wild and untamed glow in their faces. The man walking behind the other held a long, shiny knife in his hand, switching it from right to left, jabbing it and jerking it forward in order to stab the other one. They could not run away, as their bodies were bound together by a strong leather rope at the hips. The unarmed men served as living shields, indeed, protecting the knife-bearer from the stabs of the other, which he had to stop short of the protector - if not, he was in danger of losing, either money or the whole game. It was a hallucinating scene. The deadly tension between the fighters and the occasional shouts of excitement, the tangible presence of bloodshed and death, the night and the dramatic illumination of the fires all added up to a formidable experience of extreme existence.

The lightning jabs with the shiny knife of the fighters became more frequent, but seemed less controlled. One of the knife-bearers wore a pair of white trousers, the other man's were grey. The grey-trousered fighter suddenly jerked himself forward to stab the other, but the protector threw himself in the way, but too fast, or too late, for the stabber to stop the jab short. A painful distortion disfigured the stabbed protector's face. A red spot appeared on the shirt on his chest, there were moans of disappointment among the spectators. But the fight went on. An old man, obviously some kind of umpire, shouted something St Cyr did not understand, and, making some equally incomprehensible gestures, showed a white stone in his hand, holding it up into the air for everybody to see. A few jabs later, the protector of the white-trousered fighter was stabbed a second time - his once white shirt gradually becoming more and more of a wet-coloured red one. But still the fight went on. The grey fighter had become nervous, it seemed, as nervous were his tries to get at the other. The white fighter almost touched the grey's protector a few times, but every time he had managed to stay a fraction of an inch away from the man's skin, rewarded by appreciative murmurs from the ghostly crowd. St Cyr noticed that he could only see men, although he was convinced that he had heard female voices. There didn't seem to be any women near the pit, let alone Carmen. He looked around several times, safely hidden in the deep dark between the rocks. When he turned his eyes to the fight again, he saw the grey fighter making a nervous move and stab the white fighter's protector a third time. A cry of angry disappointment filled the air, the umpire tossed up a third stone and the fighters left the arena, the wounded protector was lead a few yards away and his wounds seemed to be treated, but St Cyr was unable to make out whether by men or by women.

Four more men entered the square. A red and a brown fighter, two protectors in white. The red fighter's face showed a long scar on the left cheek - starting almost under the ear and stretching up to the forehead. It had probably been a small wonder that the jab of the knife in that fight in the past had spared his eye. The four went about their business furiously, their faces gleaming with power and energy, hatred and disgust. It was quite obvious that this was not just a fight for money, there definitely was more to it than met the eye. The brown fighter threw his knife into his left hand behind the back of his shiny white protector and thrust it forward in a flash, catching the red one and his protector unawares. The silvery steel vanished full length in the red fighter's chest. A cry of excitement rose like a giant wave, also St Cyr had cried out loud in terror and excitement. All of a sudden there were torches all around him and he found himself detected - surrounded by men with dark faces grimly staring at him, the intruder, unwanted witness to their vicious entertainment. They held him with strong arms. The excitement of the discovery of an intruder had completely superseded the excitement of death. The cries dwindled to murmurs, and St Cyr did not know what was going on. After what seemed to him an eternity, the old umpire came up to him and explained something to him in Andalusian Spanish. He did not understand all the old man said, but he understood as much as that he had to fight for his life. He was led into the ring and tied to the brown-clad winner of the last fight with the strong leather rope at the end of the red loser, the leather still wet with the dead fighter's blood. The white protector took his place in front of the brown fighter, St Cyr faced the two alone. Looking around he only saw darkness and fire, the spectators blending with the surroundings to form four impenetrable walls holding him captive in this Spanish mountain nightmare. The umpire asked, in a hoarse and high-pitched voice if there was anybody wanting to act as the protector of the intruder. Obviously nobody pitied him and wanted to risk his health for the stranger. The umpire asked again - and got an answer. Carmen appeared out of the darkness, raising a tide of unbelieving murmur around the arena she stepped towards him. She gave him an uninterpretable look - it seemed her eyes were more piercing than ever, yet covered with a crystal lid like a dangerously deep well. She took her position in front of him, almost touching him with her back. The umpire walked towards them and placed a long knife into St Cyr's right hand. He knew that this was the unexpected moment of truth.