The only stranger in town
Christopher Howse
THE FACTORY OF LIGHT: LIFE IN AN ANDALUSIAN VILLAGE by Michael Jacobs John Murray, £17.99, pp. 274, ISBN 0719561639 Astrange Englishman has settled in the village. Of course Frailes is the best village in the world. We are a town, really. We have a mayor, even if we are only 1,500 people. But has he no village of his own? No other foreigners stay here.
He is called Maiquel. He is tall and very polite and so learned that he translates 100 coplas of Lope de Vega every day before breakfast. He can't drive. He doesn't say much about his family. It is sad he is all on his own. He took a room above the discotheque Oh!. He told someone that the walls shook and the bed moved because of the force of the music. That woman Paqui runs a pension above the disco, but the Englishman is the only one who stays there. Nothing there works — no heating, no electrics. nothing. Paqui has a soft heart but no sense; since her husband left she has been a disaster.
That is no place for a lettered man to spend his days, so of course Maiquel took up with El Sereno. That's what we call Manuel Ruiz Lopez. A sereno was a man like a nightwatchman who used to look after the keys to the tenements to let you in late at night. Of course he knew everybody's business. Just like Manuel. He's old now. nearly 80, but very lively, very simpatico, with a great natural grace of manners. He likes the ladies, but he never married, perhaps because he is looked after by his two sisters. They never married either, but they cook for him. No, they don't take their meals with him and his friends, but they're always coming in and out of the kitchen and fussing over the men. It's funny, because El Sereno says he is a socialist and an atheist, and has no time for the church here, but he is very loyal to the town, to Frailes, and he likes the old ways. Frailes is not picturesque like Carmona, but we don't rush about madly like they do in Granada.
So Maiquel does his learned work in the summer-house — it's more like a shed — in the garden belonging to El Sereno, high above the town. I don't know when he does his work, though, because he is always meeting people in the street for a chat, and he spends a lot of time in the bar La Cueva with Merce and her husband Cano. She is very simpatico, a dreamer. She'll lose her job as a social worker if she doesn't keep in with those people at the town hall. But she is too warm-hearted; she is a good friend to the poor, even that man who sleeps on the floor in the disused factory.
And now they say Maiquel has written a book all about Frailes, about how he got the movie star from the Fifties, Sara Montiel, to come for the grand reopening of the cinema — closed for 30 years. Fifty years ago we thought she was as beautiful as the Virgin, though the priest said she had the morals of the Devil. So the whole village came out to see her, and officials from the city of Alcala la Real and important people, writers and artists, friends of Maiquel from Seville and even America.
But it seems to me that Maiquel was looking for something else apart from a cinema spectacular — after all the cinema closed again after that day. He was always asking questions about El Custodio, the healer who must have died a few years after the cinema closed the first time. Well, we do have healers round here, men who see things, who have seen the Virgin as clearly as I see you now. And if they lay their hands on you, it makes you shiver and then a warmth goes through you like a gulp of brandy on a cold winter's morning. Maiquel said that he was saved from death in a car crash in England because he had a photograph of El Custodio in his wallet. But he never got to the bottom of it all. He found out too that there are a lot of Masons and a lot of spiritualists round here as well, and a lot of suicides. People hang themselves from the branches of the walnut trees. Dear God, what a thing to do!
Now Maiquel has gone back to England for a bit and everyone there is reading his book. and I think they will learn exactly what we are like in Frailes. The things he says about people! But it's all true. We are famous, but will that get us jobs? The young people are moving away. They don't want to work hard picking olives and they don't want to live in dark little houses here when they can get a modern flat in Alcala or a catering job in Majorca.
The world changes. Maiquel has bought an old house high up above the town, and I'm glad, for he is a very human person, a lucky person too. Did I tell you about the day he sang and the heavens broke with a cloudburst that ended a drought of a year? He is writing another book, but he has promised it won't be about how he mends his house.
Christopher Howse is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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