Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

father died before I was old enough to know him. As I said, there were just the three of us, and we had no other family anywhere near. I say no family; we didn’t even have any neighbours, it was that far out. Then, when I was eight years old, my brother ten, our mother fell ill and went to a hospital in Granada. The doctors told her that she would not leave there and would die there very soon. Her last wish was to see her sons before she died, so somehow she managed to find a taxi driver to come to the Contraviesa and take us back with him to Granada. Somehow he managed to find us and took us away with him to the hospital. When we arrived in the city – and we had never been in a city before – our mother was already dead. The taxi driver told us we owed him eight thousand pesetas.’
    ‘Eight thousand pesetas,’ I cried. ‘But that’s more than you paid for this farm.’
    ‘That’s what he said we owed him, eight thousand pesetas . How were my brother and I to know what this meant? We were children, and had never earned so much as a single peseta in all our lives.’
    ‘But the man was a monster, to take such cruel advantage of a couple of children … and children who had just lost their mother. I can’t believe that anybody could be so vicious.’
    ‘Well,’ said Rogelio quietly, ‘That was what this man wanted, and my brother and I vowed that we would pay him every peseta of what we owed him … and we did.’
    He looked up and smiled in the gentle way he had. I wanted to weep. I thought of those two children alone in the world and walking from Granada back to the Contraviesa; it would have taken them two or three days probably, with no money, no food. And I thought of the monstrous heartlessness of the taxi driver. And then I looked at Rogelio; he was trimming with a razor-sharp knife, a handle for his axe. He bore no rancour, was not eaten to his soul with desire for vengeance against this appalling injustice. This gentle and unassuming countryman had come through a most terrible trial, a trial that would have destroyed most men by twisting their hearts with bitterness. It’s surprising where one finds such deep wells of strength and courage.
    ‘So how did you pay off the debt?’
    ‘We worked at whatever we could find for years and years, keeping nothing for ourselves, until it was finally paid.’
    After he had told me the story, I drove back down the hill to the river. The very landscape looked different; I could hardly help superimposing upon it the recent pastwith its poverty, its cruelty and its misery … and the glorious counterpoint to all those evils, that makes us what we are: strength, generosity of spirit, joyfulness, goodness. In South America they have a saying, which I fear they have often needed to see them through the long years of misery: ‘
Los buenos, somos más
’ – ‘The good, there are more of us.’
    For a long time afterwards I would mull over this story of Rogelio’s. It moved me deeply, but I found that whenever I tried to relate it to others great gaps seemed to appear in the narrative begging to be filled. How had the children managed to find their way home? How had they not only supported themselves but managed to pay off such a huge debt? No doubt Rogelio had told me but I had failed, as a result of my shaky language skills and sieve-like memory, to note them. There was also the problem that I was, and always have been, a rather passive listener. I have none of that editorial acuteness that good interviewers have, who can distance themselves enough to lob in a note of enquiry.
    The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I should revisit this story with Rogelio. In fact, the episode had revived a dormant but cherished ambition that I had nurtured long before I’d written any stories of my own: to collect the tales told by the old folk about life on the mountain farms when they were teeming with people. I used fondly to imagine myself trudging the