The Moors Last Sigh

those of Benengeli, a hatred so deep that they had refused to permit a road to be built between the two villages. (When Franco died the people of Erasmo had held a party, but Benengeli’s folk had been plunged into deep mourning, except for the large community of ‘parasites’ or expatriates, who didn’t even know what had happened until they started receiving worried phone calls from friends abroad.)
    So we had to drive a long way down Erasmo’s hill and a long way up the next one. At the place where the road from Erasmo met the much grander, four-lane highway to Benengeli there stood a large, gracious property ringed by pomegranate trees and jasmine in bloom. Hummingbirds hung in the gateway. In the distance you could hear the pleasing thwock of tennis balls. The sign over the arched gateway read Pancho Vialactada Campo de Tenis .
    ‘That Pancho, huh,’ said Vivar, jerking his thumb. ‘One major hombre.’
    Vialactada, a Mexican by birth, was one of the greats from the pre-open era, playing with Hoad and Rosewall and Gonzalez on the pro circuit, and barred, therefore, from the Grand Slam events which he would surely have dominated. He had been a sort of glorious phantom, hovering at the edges of the limelight while lesser men held the great trophies aloft. He had died of stomach cancer several years ago.
    So this is where he wound up, teaching serve-and-volley to rich matrons, I thought: another limbo. This was the end of his transglobal pilgrimage; what would be the end of mine?
    Though I could hear the tennis balls, there was not a player to be seen on the red clay courts. There must be more courts out of our field of vision, I decided. ‘Who runs the club now?’ I asked Vivar, and he nodded fervently, smiling his monstrous smile.
    ‘Yes, Vialactada, of course,’ he insisted. ‘Ees Pancho’s spread. The same.’

    I tried to imagine this landscape as it might have been when our remote ancestors had been here. There was not so much to subtract from the scenery – the road, the black silhouette of an Osborne bull watching me from a height, some electricity pylons and telephone poles, a few Seat cars and Renault vans. Benengeli, a ribbon of white walls and red roofs, lay above us on its hillside, looking much as it would have looked all those centuries ago. I am a Jew from Spain, like the philosopher Maimonides , I told myself, to see if the words rang true. They sounded hollow. Maimonides’s ghost laughed at me. I am like the Catholicised Córdoba mosque , I experimented. A piece of Eastern architecture with a Baroque cathedral stuck in the middle of it . That sounded wrong, too. I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to nothing. That sounded better. That felt true. All my ties had loosened. I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away. A place that did not bind, but dissolved.
    I saw Vasco’s folly, its red walls dominating the crest of the hill above the town. I was particularly struck by its high, high tower, which looked like something out of a fairy story. It was crowned by a gigantic heron’s nest, though I could not see any of those haughty, majestic birds. No doubt Vasco had bribed the local planning officers to allow him to build something so out of keeping with the low whitewashed coolness of the other houses in the area. The edifice was as high as the twin towers adorning the Benengeli church; Vasco had set himself up as God’s rival, and this, too, I learned, had made him many enemies in the town. I instructed Vivar the cabbie to take me to the ‘Little Alhambra’ and he made his way through the village’s winding streets, which were deserted, probably because it was the time of the siesta. However, the air was full of the noise of traffic and pedestrians – shouts, klaxons, the squeal of brakes. Round each corner I expected to find a bustle of people, or a traffic jam, or both. But we seemed by some chance to be avoiding that area of the village. Indeed, we were lost. When we had gone past a certain bar, La Gobernadora, for the third time, I decided to pay off the taxicab and make my way on foot, in spite of my weariness and the buzzing, achy ‘jet-lag’ disturbance in my head. The cabbie was annoyed to be dismissed so brusquely, and it is possible that in my ignorance of the local currency and customs I may have under-tipped.
    ‘May you never find what you seek,’ he shouted after me, in perfect English, making the sign of horns with his left hand.