BOOK EXCERPTS

EXCERPT FROM SUNNY SIDE UP

Pueblo life was fixed, immutable. Hoofbeats were our alarm-clock. They started even before dawn. Men came pacing down the street with their mules, urging them on to the fields.

The hooves clashed and echoed on the rough cobbles so that they seemed to be thumping right through our living room. In fact, seeing a mule walk out of one of our neighbour’s front doors was nothing out of the ordinary. Many were lodged in stables at the back of the dwellings and each morning an esparto mat would be laid across the living room tiles so that they could walk through to the street.

The daily routine was one of the most reassuring features of village life. A weathered old man from the remote sierras would halt his mule and produce fresh, creamy goat cheeses from his baskets. The cries of an itinerant cobbler or the whitewash vendor offering newly-fired blocks of lime regularly echoed over the cobbles. Occasionally a plump gypsy woman with jet-black hair and golden earrings knocked at the door, selling flowers, shawls, or trinkets.

From our terrace we looked down on a patchwork of ridiculously tiny fields. They were a triumph of human tenacity, created out of rocky infertile slopes by years of labour. First stone walls were built and then tons of earth carted in to construct the “bancal”, a terraced plot where sugar cane, sweet potatoes, beans and tomatoes flourished.

Crop succeeded crop year-round for there was no real winter here at the southern edge of Europe. Irrigation channels traced glittering slivers of light between the fields, bringing water from the mountains as they had since Moorish times.

Beyond the fields, a thousand or so feet below us, lay the Mediterranean, shining like an ingot of beaten silver.

Here, one felt, nothing would ever change.

And then the 21st century arrived…

*EXTRACT FROM BETWEEN TWO FIRES

It was one of those winter days the citizens of Granada take for granted, cold but bathed in dazzling light. A day to bring to mind the sentiments of the 20th-century’s most famous granadino, the poet García Lorca, who once noted: “The hours are longer and sweeter there than in any other Spanish town.” Lorca met his death  in the madness of the Spanish Civil War and on this brilliant morning members of another firing squad were preparing their weapons. The first rays of the sun were gilding the snows of the Sierra Nevada that towers above the city when, at 7am, with the temperature close to freezing point, they escorted a prisoner to the municipal cemetery.

The ritual was brief and brutal. The shots rang out and the condemned man, blindfolded and erect but almost certainly destroyed by months of interrogation, slumped to the ground, where an officer applied the coup de grace. The inhabitants of Granada went about their business, unaware of the death of a legend in their city. Peace had descended on southern Spain, the peace of death. The years of struggle were over. The execution of José Muñoz Lozano, nom de guerre El Roberto, removed one of the most troublesome thorns nagging the Franco regime…
For more excerpts from Between Two Fires, click on “Between Two Fires text” in the Blogroll.

*Excerpt from Typhoon Season
Hong Kong, 1980
It was late evening as Leung Kam-tin guided his craft towards Aberdeen, the fishing port on Hong Kong island. Two of the crew squatted amidships filleting fish while his wife was swilling water over the foredeck, angrily chasing away their two young sons who were frolicking with the dog. Yat-man, idle as ever, was lolling somewhere below deck. He might be a cousin but why Kam-tin had ever been so foolish as to employ him he could not say.
But at any rate it had been a good catch and the sea, after a recent squall, was as smooth as grease. The diesel engine pushed the junk steadily through the water. Skirting the bleak shores of Lamma Island, Kam-tin opened the throttle a fraction and the flotilla of junks all around also seemed to quicken their pace towards the glow of distant light. Flat though the sea was, storm warnings had been posted and nobody was lingering this evening.
“Ayaaah!”
A loud cry from his wife interrupted his thoughts. In the act of hauling up a bucket of sea-water, she had stiffened and she was pointing excitedly at something in the water. A black bundle floating almost directly in their path.
Kam-tin detached a lantern from the stern and held it out so that a circle of light spread over the water as the object bumped the junk’s side. It appeared to be wrapped in sacking and was virtually submerged, but by its shape…
Kam-tin spün the wheel and then cut the engine.
His wife, in floppy blue pants and blouse, dodged excitedly from one side of the junk to the other trying to catch a glimpse of the object. She thrust a pole into Yat-man’s hands. In surly fashion he groped over the side, hooked, missed, hooked again, and grunting with the effort hauled the bundle half out of the water.
“It’s heavy. Give me a hand.”
Kam-tin sprang to help him and between the two of them they levered the bundle aboard. The sacking lay dripping on the deck and they stood gazing at it warily for a few moments. Then Kam-tin produced a knife and leaned over the bundle, slashing at the ropes binding it. He pulled at the edge of the sacking and the object tumbled free from its wrappings on to the deck.
He stepped back with an oath as the others looked on in horror. It was the body of a man, but a man without a face…