The Moors Last Sigh

could not say ‘dog’, or ‘where?’, or ‘I am a man’. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup.
    ‘Benengeli,’ I repeated, throwing my bag into the back of the third cab, and followed it in with Jawaharlal under my arm. The driver grinned a great golden-toothed smile. Those of his teeth that were not made of gold had been filed into menacing triangular shapes. But he seemed a pleasant enough sort. He pointed at himself. ‘Vivar.’ He pointed towards the mountains. ‘Benengeli.’ He pointed at his car. ‘Okay, pardner. Less mak’ track.’ We were both citizens of the world, I realised. Our common language was the broken argot of dreadful American films.
    The village of Benengeli lies in the Alpujarras, a spur of the Sierra Morena which separates Andalusia from La Mancha. As we climbed up into those hills I saw many dogs criss-crossing the road. Afterwards I learned that foreigners would settle here for a while, with their families and pets, and then, in their fickle, rootless fashion, depart, abandoning their dogs to their fates. The region was full of starving, disappointed Andalusian dogs. When I heard this I started pointing them out to Jawaharlal. ‘Think yourself lucky,’ I would say. ‘There, but for the grace.’
    We entered the small town of Avellaneda, famous for its three-hundred-year-old bull-ring, and Vivar the driver accelerated. ‘Town of thieves,’ he explained. ‘Bad medicine.’ The next settlement was Erasmo, a village smaller than Avellaneda, but substantial enough to boast a sizeable school building over whose doorway were inscribed the words Lectura – locura . I asked the driver if he could translate, and after some hesitations he found the words. ‘Reading, lectura. Lectura , reading,’ he said proudly.
    ‘And locura?’
    ‘Is madness, pardner.’
    A woman in black, swathed in a rebozo, peered at us suspiciously as we bumped along Erasmo’s cobbled streets. Some sort of passionate meeting was taking place under a spreading tree in a square. Slogans and banners were everywhere. I copied several of them down. I had supposed them to be political utterances, but they turned out to be far more unusual. ‘Men are so necessarily mad that it would be crazy, through a further twist of madness, not to be mad oneself,’ said one banner. Another pronounced: ‘Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be certain of any truth.’ And a third, more pithily: ‘All is possible.’ It seemed that a philosophy class from a nearby university had conceived the notion of meeting in this village, because of its name, to discuss the radical, sceptical notions of Blaise Pascal, the old folly-praiser Erasmus himself, and Marsilio Ficino, among others. The frenzy and ardour of the philosophers was so great that it gathered crowds. The villagers of Erasmo enjoyed taking sides in the great debates. – Yes, the world was what the case was! – No, it wasn’t! – Yes, the cow was in the field when one did not regard it! – No, somebody could easily have left open the gate! – Item, personality was homogeneous and men were to be held responsible for their acts! – Quite the reverse: we were such contradictory entities that the concept of personality itself ceased, under close scrutiny, to have meaning! – God existed! – God was dead! – One might, indeed one was obliged to, speak confidently of the eternalness of eternal verities: of the absolute-ness of absolutes! – Good grief, but that was the purest drivel; relatively speaking, of course! – And in the matter of how a gentleman should arrange himself within his undergarments, all leading authorities have concluded that he must dress to the left. – Ridiculous! It is well known that, for the true philosopher, only the right will do. – The big end of the egg is best! – Absurd, sirrah! The little end, always! – ‘Up!’ I say. – But it is clear, my dear sir, that the only accurate statement is ‘Down.’ – Well, then, ‘In.’ – ‘Out!’ – ‘Out!’ – ‘In!’ …
    ‘Some kinda funny folks in thees ol’ burg,’ opined Vivar, as we left town.
    According to my map Benengeli was the next village; but when we left Erasmo the road started heading down the hill instead of up and along. I gathered from Vivar that ever since the Franco period, when Erasmo had been for the republic and Benengeli for the Falange, an undimmed hatred had stood between the inhabitants of Erasmo and