Death in the Sun by Adam Creed Page B

dust, the engine roar now distant in the folds of the sierra. ‘Why is that, Edu?’
    ‘People should know their station.’
    ‘They say his father went crazy up in the mountains, living with goats and his brain frying in the sun.’
    ‘Rubio? He went away and he came back with that woman. That’s what sent him mad.’
    ‘A fatal unsuitability,’ says Staffe.
    ‘Fatal?’
    ‘A figure of speech.’ Staffe drinks his coffee, and the two of them look across the sierra to the clouds thrown up by the car. ‘You didn’t get on with Rubio either?’
    ‘A man should be able to control his heart.’
    Edu looks up at the sun and dabs his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘This summer never ends. We need rain for the land. Look at my balsa. ’ He points towards the circular, concrete water reserve which is three-quarters empty. ‘I have to tend to my beans.’
    ‘Rubio couldn’t control his heart? What about his wife?’
    Edu looks at Staffe the way a kind-hearted man with empty pockets would regard a beggar. ‘You worry me, with all the questions. People here – they’re not going to like it. Here, the past stays where it is.’
    Staffe wonders if he should ask Edu about Marie’s water, but he decides against it. Instead, he says, ‘It looks as if you’ll be getting your Academy.’
    ‘No Academy of mine. They’re all cunts – after money and not minding if they have to whore their history to someone else’s culture.’
    ‘But the Academy will honour the village’s traditions. It will help secure its future. Tourists will come.’
    ‘It’ll be all about that bastard Barrington, and nothing about our way of life.’
    ‘But it’s going to happen, isn’t it?’
    ‘Not if we can help it. We’re all right the way we are. Hey! If you want some real Spanish culture, you should come to my matanza – fuck the foreign painters. Wednesday, at nine sharp and bring some of your fancy whisky.’
    *
    Manolo puts his finger into her ear and Suki moans. She moves her head in a small figure of eight to get his finger just where she wants it and she gives off a long sigh of satisfaction. Then she licks Manolo and unplugs herself from him, jumps off the seat of his Bultaco and gambols up the hillside, but she soon runs out of steam. She’s getting on now and he remembers how he and his father came by her. She filled the gap left by Astrid.
    The gap Astrid left had grown with time. She had disappeared before and‚ to begin with‚ this time seemed no different. It was autumn; the time she liked to go to Morocco. If she wanted winter, she’d never have left Germany, she said. So Octobers were for Tangier and Chefchouen. But this time she didn’t take Barrington because he was dying and Jackson remained, and her son‚ his brother‚ Agustín was already in Germany – reclaimed, it seems, by his and Manolo’s grandparents. Manolo never went, nor Rubio. They had the goats.
    He can see Africa now, like a strip of lean in the fat of the tocino ham. He should have insisted on going with his mother; things might have been different. Astrid might be here now and his father not with the nuns in the madhouse. At the very least, he might understand more why she abandoned them.
    He thinks, how strange that Agustín should have come back. But then, not strange at all. He had to come back some time, but all he could talk about was Astrid and where she might be. Indeed, he seemed preoccupied with the notion that their mother was dead, which meant that Manolo couldn’t take him to see Rubio because, of all the things in his small world that Rubio can’t bear, it’s talk of Astrid.
    Manolo knows that you can love someone too much. He knows that it is better to not be with someone than to love them too much, to make it impossible for them to live alongside you.
    He looks across to his goats and knows they will be just fine. The winter was wet and there is plenty to go at, still, on the mountain. It’s Suki he worries about. And