The Trevor Truculence: Amorous Adventures Among the Phoenician Antiquities in the South of Spain

By Peter Kelton

The Trevor Truculence

Amorous Adventures Among the Phoenician Antiquities

in the South of Spain

This novel thrust an ancient Spanish fishing village that dates from the Phoenician era about 800 BC suddenly into the modern world as foreigners disrupt traditions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Kelton DBA as Edit Ink
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780692176719

Peter Kelton

Peter Kelton writes fiction when he's between news jobs and has written for some of the world's largest news organizations. Most of his work has been in New York. He has critiqued more than 450 novels in a national column and has written six novels of his own in a unique erudite literary fiction style of adventure, mystery, suspense and satire. He grew up in Texas, served overseas in the US Army and returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent. He currently divides his time between his homes in East St. Louis, IL and Querétaro, Mexico. He has ghost written for more than 100 clients and is a top-rated writer for the Upwork free-lance agency.

Book preview

Chapter One

My eyes see her flushed face, her twinkling olive eyes. I am just close enough in the cobbled street to sense her fragrance as she blossoms from a darkened wood door set in a dazzling white wall. Yes, I was close enough to sense that unmistakable, insidious odor of love made fast and furiously. Was Ghee Hassin behind the door? I imagined him rising, washing, smoking a black Celta, pouring a glass of red wine, stroking his tangled reddish beard, finding her earring there.

She steals away. It has become a custom here in this small village. I do not follow. We live and let live, for we are all foreigners and up to our ears in intrigues in a foreign land.

Her name is Jagata, young wife of the Chilean author. They are new arrivals.

Jagata wears a full ruffled skirt of the flamenco style but patterned after the cuando. I watch her ruffle down the cobblestone lane and vanish around a corner. Her scent lingers. Their story; she flung herself off the stage of the Chilean national ballet into his arms and they eloped. Politics in Chile are brutal, his father big on it, her father in the opposite camp — time to get out of Santiago de Chile.

This incestuous village rises gradually from the Mediterranean, whiter than any postcard photograph. Its most recent inhabitants are Spanish, having reclaimed it when the Moors left 500 years ago. Hassin may be the only Arab here, but he’s legally French.

Today is special. My wife Evelyn carries a dead fetus. I am to tell her at four o’clock, after her nap. The doctor, his name is Ricardo; he listened and found no life signs or sounds. As the village retreats from the sea, it moves inland up the approaches to the mountains that rise between the sea and Granada. There’s a spring several miles up a narrow mule trail.

It’s the source of water for the village.

Night lingers into dawn. Manuel, my landlord, guides his mule away from the house — clop, clop, and clop. The smell of mule shit wafts everywhere. Evelyn still sleeps upstairs in our apartment, above Manuel’s wife and lovely daughter, Carmina. I haven’t told Evelyn yet. Bad news waits. Here we say, if you can put off till day-after-tomorrow what you could do tomorrow, well, do it.

We are going to picnic at the spring, perhaps 30 villagers. It’s their annual celebration of the end of the Spanish Civil War. They honor the fallen thusly. No foreigner has ever been invited until now. Why me? Simple, I have fathered a child in Manuel’s house. I am now a villager. They honor me beside the fallen.

This dawn, wives are superfluous. Mules are essential. At the main road I dismount, follow Manuel into the farmers bodega. We villagers are in this together — espresso coffee, shots of cognac, repeatedly. It no longer matters who won the war. We are Spaniards together. Never is a word uttered about the handful of foreigners who have moved into the village to escape the world.

If anything, we are dismissed. Extranjeros. A shrug of the shoulder, eyes rolled. The ways of the foreigners are not the ways of Spain.

At my third coffee chased with cognac I begin to feel dizzy. There is much laughter in this tightly packed bar. The jokes deal with the tomato crop, mules, wives, even the Guardia Civil — one stands at the end of the bar, clearly drunk, his black hat tilted back. An incongruous scent of lilac water and fresh soap wafts through the bodega to garnish the air of cognac and coffee. The cigarette smoke floats in a bluish haze you could cut with a scythe.

My fellow Spaniards are farmers. The village fishermen are still at sea, their triangular lateen sails cocked as they have been by coastal fishermen in the Mediterranean since the Roman Empire. They are a breed apart. They live and die by the sea.

The ritual of coffee and cognac goes on among the farming population until the sun begins to rise. Their crops are tomatoes grown in small hillside plots fertilized with mule excrement. At harvest they flood the market and every kind of truck imaginable comes in from Málaga over a narrow, perilous road that hugs the jagged coastal cliffs. They will carry tomatoes to the ships that will in turn carry tomatoes to England. For a month or two, everyone profits. Evelyn can buy a kilo of tomatoes for pennies.

Women do the marketing. Men do the drinking. Our few foreign women also do the marketing. The worldly Gerda, who pens what she calls trashy romances, had kindly guided Evelyn through the marketing routine. Gerda owns a house on the single main lane named Generalissimo Francisco Franco but always referred to as Calle Pintada.

It was down this painted street that the very cute little Jagata hustled after a portrait sitting with our Arabian French painter Ghee Hassin. Surely soon Gerda will take her under her wing and advise her to do her fucking at night. We don’t want to upset the locals.

The flight of the little Chilean dancer lingered in my mind all through the mule trip to the spring. We have been seemingly reduced to flesh hunters in our self-imposed isolation, we few extranjeros. The potent secret of our raw sexual urges is as closely guarded as the formulas that grow the tomatoes, although that appears to be just mule shit, sand and sun.

Lawrence Durrell blamed lust on the city of Alexandria in a quartet of novels. Yet we know, according Alex, our resident Irish writer, that Durrell’s novel The Black Book foretold his obsession. Alexandria, the jewel of the Mediterranean, became a convenient medium. How such things can infiltrate my mind while slogging along a narrow pathway on the back of a mule probably has more to do with three espressos and three cognacs than the metaphysics of the Alexandria Quartet.

The bulging burlap bags slung across the mule behind me keep jerking and kicking. I have no idea what’s in them; perhaps chickens for the Arroz a la Paella that Manuel said we’d make at the spring. Several of the mules carry paella pans and others are loaded with 5-gallon jugs of local wine.

Our caravan sloshes down into a narrow crevice of a shallow creek that cuts between shear bronze cliffs that rise toward the now blue sky. I want to walk through the crystal water with the rest of the men, each leading a mule over the pebble bed, but Manuel insists I stay put. I try to keep my knees pulled up like a race jockey, so they won’t be scraped by the walls. When we emerge from the canyon the mules clamber up onto solid ground and behold — we have arrived at the spring, the end of a two-hour journey. We are in a wilderness, the foothills of the mountains, where not even the Guardia Civil dare to venture.

Manuel and the other farmers immediately break into teams. Some gather wood and start a fire, others uncork the wine jugs, and still others set large stones around the fire to support the paella pans. Their sounds herald a determined glee, pans banging on rock.

A circle forms around the fire and one by one the men settle to the ground, cross legged, and the jugs are passed around. I take a swig and pass the heavy jug to the man on my left. He smiles and salutes me. Stories begin to be told, passing around the circle, about the men who are not here. Each time a name is mentioned, a toast is raised in his honor, and I know that I am honored to be here. Only the doctor and I know the bad news. It will have to be aborted.

When it’s my turn to tell a story, I simply raise the jug, shouting Viva España!

That goes over very well. Pablo, he is a true person of our village, says Manuel. He has pride in the conception of a child in the apartment above his head. I imagine him and his wife snickering at our copulating sounds from above.

Two men are struggling with the kicking burlap bags behind me. I turn to see them assassinate a rabbit. Whack on the back of the head with a club. I watch them repeat the process six times on six rabbits, never missing. Then a large knife cuts a circle around the rabbits’ middle. One-man tugs at the gray fur skin from the rear and the second man pulls at the fur from the front — and zip, the skinless animal falls into a paella pan. A third man chops the carcasses into chunks of bloody raw meat and distributes them to the different pans. Rice is added with olive oil and water and the pans are set to cook. Delicate saffron threads, plucked from crocus flowers and dried, float and settle into the roiling golden yellow mix.

We return to storytelling with much wine-fed animation. I have no sense of time and barely any sense of this place — a bramble grassy meadow. The wine is vino terrano made of local grapes and carries a musty flavor typical of the Muscat grape. I think the only previous time I’d heard of Muscatel — something to do with the Bowery in New York where my old artist friend Arthur lived in a walk-up studio. At night the bums argue over that last swig, I swear it, Arthur had said. But here there is no swearing. A cool mountain breeze fans the fire, smoke floats above us in thin gray wisps. I smell the paella. A grizzled man across the circle begins to sing a high-pitched arching song where the words merge into one long vibrating chant. Others keep the off-key syncopated time with irregular clapping hands. This is another world, fuzzy.

The sun is high. It must be noon. Hours have sloshed away. We stagger about with tin plates of rabbit Paella and, having eaten our fill, lie about on the trampled grass and sleep deeply, knapping until the sun begins to set. I have never been so out of it in my life. We all seem to wake up about the same time and pack away our picnic in burlap bags, heading home down the trail away from the spring, fuzzy headed to a man. In my mouth an odd taste.

I am told that treasure lies buried in caves above the spring, dug in there to keep it safe during the war. Most of the men who buried it died in the war. Is that the truth? I ask Manuel, a veteran, from the back of his mule. He glanced back over his shoulder and said, smiling through yellowed teeth, We looked. We have not found it. His eyes told me otherwise; he had no history of telling other than the truth, but his noble Spanish nature I had already seen tempted. He farmed but speculated in lands he got for little after the war. He owned several rent houses. I sensed he was changing with the times.

Slovenly fat Alex has that typical Irish perseverance when it comes to rooting out the truth. He claims the local white powder we all ingest in tea comes from those hidden caves and that the sense of an aphrodisiac it causes is only a hallucination. Jill takes it, I take it, but we’re oversexed anyway. It’s all in your mind. But obviously, someone knows where it is.

Then why ingest it? I ask. Oversexed is hard to imagine. I see a large overwrought tub of a man, swollen about his reddened eyes, a squinting look when he talks, always piercingly direct at you, probing for the truth, unraveling lies with Irish mirth and fingering a brownish Van Dyke goatee below his mustache. Jill is slim. Alex fat as a hog, makes me think of Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca.

Do you know we’ve come all the way here to try it? Very expensive proposition, could have easily stayed in Dublin, saved a pretty penny. But we’re here and it’s a fucking good hallucination, anyway. How’s Evelyn?

Ricardo says the baby’s dead.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. How does she feel?

We haven’t told her yet. Tomorrow, I think.

We are sitting comfortably in wicker chairs in Alex’s backyard in a shady grape arbor perched on a cliff. We overlook the sea. Below are the yellowish crushed-shell sandy beaches where the fishermen sleep after a night at the nets. His wife Jill has gone to market with Gerda and waddling Evelyn, leaving us to ingest the mid-morning sea air and gossip. Yes, gossip. We are all writers but never discuss what we are working on. We gossip about our women and villagers and the never-ending pursuit of money, which none of us have.

We heard about the village from Trevor. We were in Cape Town. He’d gotten a postcard from Gerda.

How long has Gerda been here?

Far as I know, she was the first foreigner, she and that tall asshole, Dick something-or-other. He’s gone now, kited some checks, and stole her blind.

She’s alone now?

Paul, really — you Americans! his fat face blurts out. Why are you always so surprised by life?

I didn’t know Dick had left.

Yes, I’d say about a week ago, ‘Hail fellow well met,’ as the English would say.

Alex reaches up, pulls a grape from a hanging bunch, and offers me a grape. I take it, hold it in my hand, admiring the oval shape. I ask, What would the Irish say?

Probably say the same thing, says Alex, pulling on his lower lip. He chuckles at his answer. Yes, we’re destined to mimic the English. It’s our way of denying them.

I offer, His name was Dick Wiley, from California, I believe.

"Yes, that was it. Showed me an article he’d published in Sunset magazine. Not exactly the Paris Review."

So, Gerda’s alone, you say?

For the moment, but don’t show interest. I believe Jill told me Trevor’s likely to show up any day now. They stay in touch, postcards, you know.

The village is its own postcard — old women in black white-washing houses with long-handled brooms (at first the houses appear blue, turn white as it dries). A large promontory juts into the sea, forming what has become known as the Balcony of Europe. Alex wrote a novel with that title — beastly colonial attitude throughout, pretentious piffle, rutting foreigners drinking in a lot of bars, an absolute bore, but praised in Europe. I say the emperor’s new clothes.

In the early evening the town plaza becomes the paseo — families walking its length out toward the sea to the edge of the balcony, then turning, strolling arm in arm back toward their village, near the church steps. Each late autumn the white cattle egrets return from the north on the same day, circling the steeple. No one knows why. But it is always the same day, has been for as long as anyone can remember.

Ask about the birds, the answer will