Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (16 page)

‘I think I’m pregnant, Chris,’ she said. It was an otherwise perfectly normal day. We were standing on the
tinao
sorting out a sack of almonds and watching the sheep munching their way through the wilderness.

‘Pregnant,’ I repeated absently.

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘You’re having a baby . . . but . . . but . .?’

I shuffled my feet before her, not quite sure how to arrange my limbs and features. There was too long a moment of confusion before I managed the right sort of grin and hugged her with exaggerated care.

‘God, that’s wonderful . . . I . . . er . . . hell, I hardly know what to say . . .’ We laughed nervously. This is said to be one of the key moments in life, and there I was messing it up.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby. I did. Children had for a long time been part of the grand plan in moving to El Valero, but despite our best efforts they hadn’t turned up and in the meantime other plans and pleasures had come creeping into the space I had reserved for fatherhood. I wondered, too, if we were really the right sort of people to take on this awesome responsibility. Was the eccentric lifestyle we had chosen the right thing for a creature as delicate as a baby? Running beneath all this disquiet was a deep vein of delight that I was scrabbling to reach.

That evening we opened a better bottle of wine than we might otherwise have drunk and illuminated our omelette and tomato salad with a candle and some flowers. Our supper conversation ranged over the new rogue element that we would now have to take into our calculations, but our words were carefully chosen so as not to tempt fate by anything too emphatic. If we hadn’t known ourselves to be sublimely content we might have each thought the other just a little depressed.

A few days later I telephoned my mother to tell her the news. This would be her first grandchild.

‘It appears, Mum, that at long last you’re going to be a grand-mother.’

She was silent for an instant, and then she seemed to burst with happiness. I had never experienced anybody ‘bursting with happiness’ before and even filtered through international telephone cables, or zinging through the ionosphere, it blew me away. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘who knows what this baby will be like, or what my part in its existence will do to me? But just to hear that happiness in my mother’s voice makes it all worthwhile.’

I told Domingo, too, apropos of nothing. ‘
En hora buena
– congratulations,’ he replied, then added in an unusually thoughtful tone, ‘I’ve told you before that a baby is what you need at El Valero. You’ll get lonely all by yourselves on the wrong side of the river.’ And he returned to swatting a horsefly that was gorging itself on the blood of Bottom’s belly.

At the beginning of October I went to Sweden to spend a month shearing sheep. It may seem odd to go sheep-shearing in a Nordic country just as the winter comes on, but this was the way the Swedes liked it. I would go in October when the sheep were about to be housed for the winter, and then again in March just before they lambed. Swedish sheep, or most of them at any rate, need shearing twice a year, which was fine for me from a financial point of view, but a source of grief to the Swedish sheep-farmers, who had to pay for two shearings and earned nothing at all for the wool.

I had been going to Sweden twice a year for fifteen years but somehow, despite having some good friends there, that Nordic utopia had failed altogether to find a place in my heart. I found myself swamped by the lugubrium of the uncontaminated but dreary landscape and bored by the dullness of its spiritless towns and cities. I would drive sometimes for days through interminable pine forests in the snow to get to far-off farms where I would shear flocks of black sheep in dark barns beneath the dismal light of the glowering northern sky. The money was spectacularly good (and we would be needing it with a baby to take care of) but it was hard to stay cheerful.

During my previous trips Ana had looked after the farm on her own – ‘
Ay, que valiente!
’ local people would say when they heard. ‘To stay all on your own in a terrible place like that,
ay por dios!
’ But this time a friend of our Dutch neighbours, Belinda, a woman we had come to know well, offered to stay with Ana and keep her company. Belinda was a handy sort of a woman who amongst other things knew a thing or two about midwifery. The shearing usually took about a month, and Ana had calculated that the baby would arrive round about the middle of November. Without the presence of Belinda I think we both would have felt a little uneasy.

Sweden passed even slower than usual that month, but at last I had completed the business and, with a boosted bank balance and a bag stuffed with pickled fish, smoked salmon and Swedish cheese-slicers, found myself back on the bus to Órgiva. It hauled its way up the long winding inclines from the coast into the mountains south of Granada just as the last rays of evening sunshine were setting on the snow-clad peaks. What a wonderful place to be born, I thought.

It was dark by the time I arrived at the bus station but Ana was there to meet me. She had been showing clear signs of the presence of somebody else inside her when I left and now there was no mistaking her condition. She moved self-consciously, with a slight backward lean to counterweight the swelling dome of her belly. We embraced tentatively and I stood back to admire the extraordinary phenomenon of two-persons-in-one.

‘I’m certainly glad to have you back, I don’t think it’s going to be long now,’ she said as I started up the Landrover.

‘I’m glad, too, I can tell you. God, it’s good to be home.’

The occasional absence is a great tonic for any relationship. I was always pleased to see Ana, but after a month in Sweden thinking shadowy thoughts of antenatal emergencies – well, I was ecstatic. She looked good and healthy, too, blooming as the cliché goes, and surprisingly at ease with the drama ahead.

Back at the farm, the sheep also looked fat and happy, and the dark green globes of the oranges on the trees were full of the promise of sweet fruit about to ripen. The ground beneath the odd fig tree that the sheep couldn’t get to was spattered with rotten purple fruit.

It took Ana to point out to me that there was also a rather bare look to the place. She really seemed quite concerned. In my absence, the sheep had been getting out of control, working their way through the farm, clearing the undergrowth and mowing the grass down to the level of the dust. That in itself was no cause for alarm but Ana pointed out places where the stone walls of the terracing had begun to crumble and fall, leaving dusty paths and hillocks of earth and stones.

Sheep tend not to go round the end of a wall to get on or off a terrace – they all jump up or down together in the middle – and a hundred and more little hooves at a time had started to take their toll. They had also climbed onto the wire protectors I had put round the new apricot trees, and nibbled the tops off. They had invaded the garden and eaten the buddleia and all the palm trees we’d put in; and then finally they had burst into and laid waste the holy of holies, Ana’s vegetable patch. They didn’t think much of the aubergines and chillis but had wolfed the rest.

‘I fear they’re going to turn the place into a desert,’ said Ana gloomily.

‘Maybe that would be better than the jungle it would be without them.’

‘I think I prefer the jungle with its flowers and greenery.’

‘Yes, you’re right . . . but I’m sure we’ll find a way of dealing with them,’ I said, stretching lazily out on my favourite corner of the terrace. ‘You can’t get everything right first try, can you?’

I’m not quite sure how I expected to spend those last fleeting moments of freedom before parenthood began; sitting, perhaps, on the terrace with Ana, sipping tea and indulging in whatever reveries the landscape triggered. I hadn’t imagined that I would be cast out each morning to wander the farm clutching a bucket of watered-down dog-turd.

Canina
, as this concoction is known, was recommended to Ana as an excellent sheep deterrent and she was determined that I should liberally spatter each of our trees with it. Now, I was as concerned as Ana about the future of our orange and olive trees, and I knew better than to interfere with the nesting instincts of a very pregnant woman, but it was beyond me to accept this task with good grace.

Skill is paramount in the dousing and flicking of the esparto grass brush and there are obvious and unsavoury consequences to getting it wrong. I suffered all of them. There was also the disheartening knowledge that the deterrent effect would wear off, especially after a heavy rain, and that the moment you finish coating the last tree the sheep will be beginning some tentative nibbles at the first.

My afternoons were equally hectic. These were spent erecting some rudimentary fences to guide the sheep away from the vulnerable areas on the farm, beginning with the stalag perimeter fence that Ana had designed for her vegetable patch. If Ana had ever had a soft spot for sheep, those days were past. A stoical tolerance was the best they could hope for now.

CHLOË AND THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

‘LOOK, I’M SORRY, BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO LEAVE THE ROOM. IF you faint again and fall and crack your head on the tiles, there’s nothing we can do for you. We’ve got too much going on to worry about you.’

So I left and gazed morosely out of the corridor window at the earth-moving machines pecking away like huge birds at the footings of Granada’s new ring road, and tried to blot out for a moment the image of Ana sweating and heaving in the hospital delivery theatre. And what was it all for? So that the lives we had both been rather enjoying could change in some irrevocable way, perhaps for the worse? Had there been a beer-can handy I would have kicked out at it malevolently. But the immaculate corridors of the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception offered no such solace.

The drama had begun the night before. Ana had shaken me awake at two in the morning complaining that her waters had burst. I was to bring her some tea and digestive biscuits and then get the car ready while she cleaned the bathroom. Obviously, I had misheard about the bathroom. Weren’t we supposed to drive like the wind to the city, screeching to a halt in the hospital forecourt? Apparently not. It was half past two on that mild November night before Ana handed me a wet floorcloth and bucket and at last let me help her into the Landrover.

A full moon was hanging above the dark citrus leaves as we bumped and rattled our way out of the valley towards sleeping Granada. At the bend by the road to the dump in Lanjarón we were brought to a halt – some men were blasting the hill away in the interest of road safety. We had to turn round and drive back through Órgiva, out across the Seven-Eye bridge, and make a long detour to Granada via the coast.

The still night air, scented with pine, had a dream-like quality, and the impression was heightened by soft shadows and silver light. Neither of us have forgotten the beauty of that journey. We stopped so that Ana could have a pee and look at the moon for a bit before we joined the main road for the long haul up the mountains to Granada. She was having contractions every five minutes or so by then, but kept assuring me that they were mild and not really too painful.

As we entered the city the first grey light of dawn spread down from the mountains to join the streetlights. I pulled straight into the hospital emergency bay.

‘You can’t park here,’ said Ana. ‘This is for emergencies.’

‘But we are an emergency, surely?’

‘Do as I say. Park the car in the ordinary people’s car park over there.’

‘Very well, dear.’ It seemed unwise to argue with Ana when she was having contractions.

We walked unhurriedly through the doors of the emergency department. I felt small and unimportant as they took Ana’s details. Modern man is supposed to be present at the birth of his babies, and I, true to form, was keen to be there and hold Ana’s hand should she require such a service. But this innovation had not yet arrived in provincial Spain, so in order to get in I had to stoop to trickery.

‘I must be with my wife because she doesn’t speak Spanish and I may have to translate for her,’ I lied. Ana had just given her details in perfectly fluent Castellano.

‘It is not normal, but if you must.’

‘I must,’ I insisted, and then Ana was whisked away.

Soon I was ushered into a brightly lit theatre, where I found Ana, clad in a white smock and lying with her legs dangling from stirrups, on top of a strange, green contraption. The arrangement put me in mind of a modern ducking stool. Beside her a bank of electronic boxes hummed and beeped and glittered with lights.

I hadn’t given much thought to the subject of birthing rooms until then. One of the travellers in the valley had regaled us with the details of a birth in a candle-lit teepee, where bongodrummers and untrained flautists had provided ambient music, while seventeen women linked hands around the labouring woman and circled her, chanting. Such descriptions, coupled with our fears of being cut off by the river, did a lot to reinforce our choice of an early admission to a hospital in Granada. As I looked around, however, I felt rather wistful about the teepee.

Ana smiled nervously at me through a tangle of wires and held out her hand. Two stocky young men in leather bomber-jackets entered.

‘Hola,’ they grinned. ‘We’re the midwives.’

They washed and changed in a businesslike manner and connected Ana to what they said was a digital contraction-measuring device. Each time she had a contraction, which was every couple of minutes now, red lights flashed on the machine and a reading of the intensity of the contraction appeared on the screen. ‘2’ it said quietly, then ‘2’ again . . . and again ‘2’. Ana was contracting comfortably. Somebody inside her was languorously considering making an entrance.

But these ‘2’s were not good enough for the midwives, so they plumbed Ana into some sort of a drip. ‘16’ screamed the machine, as in an instant the gentle contractions became body-bursting convulsions. ‘16’ . . . ‘19’ – oh Lord, I thought she was going to burst. It was hot and airless in that awful place. My legs buckled slowly beneath me.

I’ll spare you the details. Ana’s last stage of labour ran for an hour and a half, which I’m told is not much, but seemed to me an eternity of pain. Ana sweated and pushed and said she thought her eyes were going to burst. I squeezed her hand and fainted yet again. So they sent me out to stand in the corridor.

It really did seem awful. Those moments that should have been full of joy and wonder – the arrival of a new person on earth – were clouded over by images of Ana convulsed with pain. When I returned from my exile in the corridor, I could see that the midwives were getting worried; they kept trying to contact the head of the gynaecology department for help but the man was nowhere to be found. The contraction machine flashed astronomical numbers. A device hooked up to the baby, measuring heartbeats, pulses, whatever, registered lower and lower. Its warning lights started flashing. Electronic alarms went off. ‘Don’t faint – don’t faint,’ I muttered to myself, keeping hold of Ana’s hand. They were all too busy to notice when I picked myself up yet again from the floor.

And then a great heave and at last it was out. Ana sagged, limp and exhausted but still alive. A blue rubbery thing was plonked on a towel on the sideboard.

‘
Es normal?
’ I asked. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the blue thing yet; I was interested only in Ana.

‘
Si, es normal.
’

I slipped out to buy flowers and wine – anything to restore some cheer after the ordeal in that dreadful chamber. When I returned Ana was lying in stiff white sheets. She smiled feebly. Beside her bed was a cot with the sheet drawn fully up over its small occupant’s head. I gave her the flowers and kissed her more tenderly than I had done in a long time. I thought I’d almost lost her.

‘You’d better have a look at the baby,’ she said after a while.

Without much enthusiasm I rose and pulled back the sheet. There was that hideous purple head with thin strands of wet hair clagged to the top. I looked down at the sleeping baby. Surely you couldn’t love such a thing . . . or could you? Something was happening . . . it was as if a wave of warm emotion washed over me. I trembled as I gazed at the little creature. I was transfixed, enslaved. All the hormones and juices that had so far failed to turn up and do their stuff engulfed me in a tide of love. I plumped back down on the bed, flaccid and speechless, and tried to tell Ana what was happening. The words wouldn’t come out. ‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘It’s just happened to me too.’

It was some hours before I could wrench myself away from the side of the cot and drive back to feed the animals. I had momentous news to impart.

Chloë had arrived among us.

A few days later we bundled Chloë up and drove her home. El Valero seemed a rough, brutish home for such a delicate little creature. The sunshine and the flowers, the lovely view of rivers and mountains and the profound peace of the place seemed too easily eclipsed by the scorpions and centipedes, the snakes and eagles, the smothery cats lying in her cradle, the huge dogs looking with predatory interest at the small baby.

Beaune, we knew, would be safe, but we were a little worried that Bonka would be jealous of the new arrival and perhaps vent her spleen by eating her. In the event there was nothing to fear. Bonka started by appearing to be completely unaware of Chloë’s existence, and then, when this attitude became unsustainable, accepted her as a fully fledged member of the household. Chloë adored both the dogs and seemed to adopt Beaune as an extension of herself, rolling about with her and curling up to sleep in her basket, so that it was with difficulty that we managed to persuade her that she was really human. We scotched the cats’ natural instinct to smother her by draping a fruit-net over the cradle. As for the attentions of the scorpions and centipedes and other undesirables, we just kept our fingers crossed.

Chloë seemed to thrive in her harsh environment. A constant stream of well-wishers, drawn by the magic of a new baby, braved the rigours of the river and the valley track to come and see her. One afternoon Domingo turned up with his parents bearing bags of sugar. Sugar is a traditional gift for newborn babies here in the Alpujarra. Expira was ecstatic about Chloë, showing her approval in the time-honoured way by pinching the poor little thing’s cheeks and clucking over her.

‘I told you that you must have babies,’ she enthused, ‘and now look what a precious little sweet thing you’ve gone and produced! You must have more, there’s no time to lose.’

Domingo, who had at first confined himself to glancing occasionally at Chloë from behind his parent’s back, stepped forward and gathered her gently and skilfully in his arms. He did it like someone who has practised all his life, cradling her head as he rocked her. I wasn’t that good at it myself yet, having only just had the technique demonstrated to me in the hospital, and looked on in wonder as Domingo strolled outside with her, carefully shielding her face from the harsh sunlight.

We saw quite a lot of Domingo during Chloë’s first months and he would often sweep her up from her blanket and take her for a short walk on the hill by the house. She seemed as contented in his arms as in her own mother’s. A part of me envied him this facility – I was fine with Chloë but no good at all with other people’s babies. However, most of all I was saddened by Domingo’s conviction that he would never become a father himself.

‘It’s impossible,’ he would say tersely, putting an end to the subject. ‘I barely make enough money to keep myself alive. How could I ever support a wife and children?’

There seemed a terrible earnestness in Domingo’s words. He had clearly resigned himself to remaining a bachelor, rather than risk bringing up children in poverty, and it hurt me sorely to see it. You don’t have to be a particularly good judge of character to recognise what a great father Domingo would make. But then Domingo had grown up in a different world from the one I had known. He had witnessed what hunger and deprivation could do to families.

As those first months passed and we all settled into our new existence together, I realised just what friends had meant when they tried to explain to me the joy of having one’s own child. No matter how eloquently it had been described, nobody had been able to get anywhere near the real experience. We looked back on all our previous worries about how our lives would be changed and disrupted, and were shocked by how irrelevant those thoughts now seemed. It was as if we had just been handed the key to crack the next part of the code of existence. The various loves in me grew and grew, and all as a result of this new being who had come to stay in our home. And to think that we might have gone through life without ever having let this happen to us.

Chloë’s first word was ‘Beaune’. She pronounced it with such relish that her fool of a father was enchanted, despite having to wait some weeks to gain equal footing with the dog. Her first sentence, when it came, also concerned Beaune, but it was heartrending to hear.

Ana and Chloë had come to the bus-stop to meet me when I returned from another autumn sheep-shearing season in Sweden. ‘Beaune,’ Chloë squeaked as I lifted her up for a hug. ‘Beaune gone.’

It was true. Beaune had succumbed to a form of distemper only a week after I had left, and had died within days. Ana was absolutely desolate and so was Chloë. Arriving at the farm we processed solemnly, Chloë pointing the way, to the patch on a neglected olive terrace where Ana had buried her dog.

In the consoling way that nature sometimes contrives, we discovered that week that Bonka was pregnant. She produced a litter of eight puppies, of which we kept two; one because it had the same markings as its mother, the other because it had one ear sticking up and the other drooping down. They were known as Barkis and Bodger and became Chloë’s constant companions as they grew up together.

As a farm-girl, birth and death came to be part of Chloë’s everyday experience. She watched lambs being born before she was one year old, and seemed to take in her stride the dispersal of the rest of Bonka’s puppies and the dispatching of the odd chicken or sheep.