Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (4 page)

Bernardo looked in danger of choking on his wine. ‘He and his people have been desperate to sell that place for years,’ he said, ‘and they couldn’t get to town quick enough. He was about to give it to Domingo for a million – then you came along and gave him five. He must have thought you fell off a Christmas tree! I mean who the hell was going to buy a place that has no access, no running water, no electricity – and that huge patch of land to work? I must say I think it very bold of you to have bought it. Or maybe you are a complete lunatic?’

‘I’m at least half-lunatic,’ I volunteered. ‘But we’ll manage somehow. It’s an exciting challenge, and anyway, it beats being an insurance clerk working in an office.’

‘Yes, but you don’t look to me like an insurance clerk.’

‘No, but I might have been . . .’ and I recalled with a shudder the six months I’d once spent in an office.

‘Well, it’s good to have you here, though we’ll miss Pedro and Maria,’ said Isabel. ‘Maria used to spend a lot of time over here with me, pouring her heart out while we did the washing together. She’s nice.’

‘And Pedro,’ I added. ‘I love the way he sings in the valley all alone except for his beasts. He’s a natural.’

‘He’s a natural bad character,’ said Isabel, laughing. ‘A likeable rogue, you could say, but there’s a darker side to him. I’d hate to imagine all his wife has had to put up with.’

‘He’s always been a very good neighbour to us,’ countered Bernardo. ‘He’s helped me out when I’ve had a problem no end of times, generous with his time and always good for a laugh. Mind you, I’ve helped him out, too. We’ve done a lot of work together. I cleaned the whole of his
acequia
– his water channels – with him this spring. Well, I cleaned it with Maria actually, while he walked with his beasts.’

‘It makes me sick the way that lazy swine just sits on his horse “walking with the beasts” all day,’ said Isabel.

‘Lazy?’ I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable at the consensus forming about my new mentor. ‘That man is strong as an ox and works like no one I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

‘He’s good at putting on a show,’ replied Isabel. ‘But that’ll be for your benefit. He likes to make the right impression. He’s got a bad reputation in the valley, and it’s justified. I’ve had a lot of trouble with him.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘He comes round here a lot when Bernardo’s out. Says he’s desperate to make love to me and if I don’t let him he’ll shoot himself, and the swine always carries his shotgun with him. “You’ll have my blood on your hands!” he says. Well, I tell you I don’t fancy him much – he’s so old and fat and ugly – and I tell him that, too. So off he goes in a temper, and when he gets round the corner he fires his gun. Of course I rush out to see if he’s really shot himself, and when I get round the corner there he is with a big grin on his face. I can’t help laughing at it, but it’s no joke really because he’s so damn big.’

‘At least he’s slow, though,’ said Bernardo, quietly. ‘His legs are bad so it wouldn’t be too difficult to get away. Anyway we’re none of us quite as good as we’d like to be. More wine?’

I worked my way drunkenly home, down the path to the river, in the early hours of the morning. It was a hot night, lit only by the stars and, as a reward for not tumbling all of the way down the steep descent, I treated myself to an hour flat on my back on a warm rock in the middle of the river. The nearest street-lighting was far away, so no dull glow marred the perfect blackness of the night sky, and more stars than I had ever seen glowed and winked. I saw literally dozens of shooting stars.

It must have been the Perseids: mid-August is usually the time for this shower of meteors to pass. But I didn’t know about such things then and, anyway, my mind was too occupied with everything I’d heard to think of astronomy. ‘It must always be like this on summer nights,’ I thought fancifully as I dripped a crooked trail of water up towards the house.

A routine soon began to establish itself on the farm. In the morning Pedro and I would tour the terraces and collect the figs that had fallen from the trees in the night. We gathered them in buckets, soft and deep purple and squashy, and took them up to the pigs who lived in a pen at the end of the house. In the pen they had a mud-pool, a dust-bath and a cool corner shaded by a thick roof, where they panted away the heat of the day. Pigs love figs and they would squabble and bounce about with glee as we emptied about half a hundredweight of the luscious fruit into their stone troughs. Everyone around here keeps pigs, fattening them through the year and killing them, at the traditional matanzas, in the fly-free days of winter.

One day Pedro returned from an expedition outside the valley, his horse laden with huge green cannonballs. Water-melon. ‘So the pigs don’t get bored with the figs,’ he explained, cutting each melon into four and tossing them at the ecstatic creatures. ‘They’re giving them away in the
vega
now, before they plough the rest of the crop in.’

After fig-picking we would cut maize with sickles. The fields below the river were bright with a crop of forage maize, the brightest of the greens at this time of year. We gathered great handfuls of it and severed it at ground level with a curved pull of the sickle.

‘Hold it like this, man, or you’ll give yourself a nasty cut. You must treat the sickle with great respect.’

Having cut bundles far too heavy for a man to carry, we would hoist them onto our shoulders and trudge bent double up the hill to dump them in the troughs in the various buildings that served as stabling for the cows.

We would get these jobs out of the way before the sun touched the fields. Then I would prepare the
papas a lo pobre
or just a couple of thick slices of ham, bread and wine. ‘Strong food!’ roared Pedro with a manly guffaw. ‘Eat strong food!’

Strong food in these parts is chickens’ heads, ham fat, pig’s blood pudding, raw peppers and garlic,
chumbos
(prickly pear), stale bread and wine. A great deal of manly merit accrues from the eating of strong food and the merit increases the earlier it is taken in the day. Thus a man who can stomach a burnt chicken’s head and a hot pepper with a hunk of stale country bread and wash it down with a couple of glasses of
costa
– and do so with relish at breakfast – is a man to be reckoned with.

This was Pedro’s preferred diet. He offered me a chicken’s head one morning, a ghastly-looking burnt thing with charred feathers on it that he had taken from the fire, waving it under my nose with a grin.

‘Strong food for the guest of honour!’

When I demurred, he popped it into his own mouth and crunched it up, a glow of satisfaction suffusing his broad features. In the end I forced myself to submit to such staples for breakfast. It seemed somehow inappropriate to puddle about with cornflakes and milk while others were quite properly devouring more masculine stuff.

After breakfast I would wash the plates, glasses and cutlery on a log of wood by the oil-drum beneath the pomegranate tree. Pedro showed me how it should be done and we were none too fastidious about the quality of the work, except that we always placed a cloth over the crockery laid out to dry, to keep the flies off. After breakfast I was free to entertain myself as I would, while Pedro sat on his horse in the river ‘walking the beasts’. One day I followed the hose from where it dribbled in the drum to its source. Down the hill and up the Cádiar river, snaking in and out of eroded cliffs and swinging across steep drops, it passed a ruined house, no more than a pile of stones, on the boundary of the property, then turned into a deep dead canyon. Nothing grew there on the parched earth but cracked thorns and sinister creepers: capers, as I discovered later. The rocks were coated in a white scale and a deathly sort of silence reigned. High in a barren cleft was a pool; the water dribbled from it through a slimy plastic pipe into a rusty oil-drum. At the bottom of the drum was a hole, and stuffed through the hole, with a bung of rags and string, was the source of the El Valero water supply.

I had for some time puzzled over the fact of the water supply reaching only to below the house, and the well-appointed bathroom had also remained something of a mystery. It was all properly plumbed in – lavatory, bidet, shower and basin – and a copper pipe led through the roof to an oil-drum that was so rusty that it no longer had any discernible form.

Eventually I raised the subject with Pedro.

‘The water used to reach the roof and fill that drum, but it doesn’t go that high any more.’

He wouldn’t expand on that.

‘We used to light a fire under the oil-drum and that way we had hot water. It was wonderful.’

During the hours when Pedro couldn’t think of any work for me to do about the farm, I would go for walks, explore the farm and imagine living here, an idea that still seemed very far from reality. Or I would visit people or sometimes walk into town, an hour and a half away.

This amazed Pedro.

‘What on earth do you want to go to the town for? Eating and drinking? Why, we have all the food and drink we could desire right here, and it costs nothing. It’s better too – here you know what you’re eating, but Lord knows what sort of filth those thieves from the town will be giving you – and then taking your money . . .

‘Watching passers-by on their evening promenade? Now look here, Cristóbal’ – and here he adopted a tone of great moment – ‘You listen here. You are a married man and have a very fine and attractive wife. I am but a simple man, but one thing I can tell you from the bottom of my heart is that you must have respect for your woman. Bad behaviour with other women is a monstrous and terrible vice and brings with it only misery for everyone. You listen to my words because this is really important.’

He thumped his stick on the ground to emphasise the gravity of what he said and looked at me with deep concern.

‘Look, I only said that I liked to admire passers-by. I didn’t say I would go to bed with them.’

He raised his eyes to heaven in anguish at the very suggestion of such an idea.

‘You too, Pedro, have a delightful family and a very fine wife.’

‘She’s alright,’ he grinned. ‘Bit dry if you know what I mean.’

‘Pedro!’ I remonstrated, using the same lugubrious tone of concern that he had used on me. ‘Pedro, one does not describe one’s woman as “dry”.’

‘Bah!’ he spat.

BRIDGE BUILDING

‘WE’RE GOING TO TOWN FOR LUNCH AT THE NEW
CORTIJO
,’ Pedro announced one morning. ‘You can ride the other horse.’

I hesitated. It was a while since I’d ridden a horse and I wasn’t sure if I could remember how it was done. Pedro dismissed such piffling worries. Anyway, he added, he would be leading me.

We gathered food for the beasts, who would remain all day in their stables, and loaded the panniers on Pedro’s horse with a couple of hundredweight of pot-plants along with odd sticks and bits of wire, twisted and lashed into arcane forms. When the horse was fully laden, Pedro neatly swung his enormous bulk off his mounting-stone onto the top of the load. The horse raised its eyebrows. I sat on the straw and canvas pack-saddle on the lesser horse while Pedro held a rope from its head-collar.

‘Can’t I have some reins, something to hold on to?’

‘Hell no! If you hold the reins that horse will take off like a thunderbolt and kill you good and dead. You’ve really got to know how to ride to hold the reins on that horse. Hold on to the saddle.’

I shrugged, resigned, but not altogether sure what to do with those parts of my body that were not occupied with the business of staying on the horse.

‘What’s it called?’

‘Brown.’

‘Brown?’

‘Brown. It’s a brown horse,’ said Pedro absently.

One of the dogs was called Brown too; it was a brown dog.

‘Yee-haa Brown!!’ I cried gaily as we lurched off, the dogs weaving amongst our feet. The horse and its canine namesake looked at me quizzically.

We wound down the path through the oranges and almonds and out into the riverbed where we scuffed among the hot rocks and splashed through the river. The sun blazed down on us from a cloudless sky. In euphoric mood I found myself musing on the idea of waiting in the cold drizzle of an early morning railway-station with hundreds of other besuited businessmen, waiting for the daily ride to the treadmill. ‘Whatever comes of this decision,’ I thought, ‘it has to be better than that.’

The horses stepped delicately down the stony river. The still pines that covered the slopes made the air almost suffocating with their resinous scent. Brown and I were both covered with a film of sweat, and a cloud of happy flies kept station around our heads. The view from the river was wonderful and once I’d got the hang of balancing on the horse (which did not seem quite the fiery creature described by his owner) I was able to gaze around me and enjoy the scenery. You can’t do this on foot in the river as the head must be constantly bowed to monitor the progress of the feet.

Soon, though, we left the riverbed and passing through a narrow defile between two walled orange groves our little band stepped out onto the public highway. We would pass through two villages and countless fields full of farmers before reaching town. Now a mounted rider tends to feel a certain superiority over his humbler pedestrian fellows, by virtue of the advantage of height and also a certain arrogance which the horse, or some horses at any rate, bestow upon their rider. If, however, you are a fully grown man and you are being led on a horse, the effect is considerably diminished. You feel in fact like a prisoner of war, the scurvy dreg of some vanquished foe.

This feeling swamped me the first time one of the toilers in the fields straightened up and turned to watch us go by, our sorry procession of a man, two horses, four scrofulous curs, a thousand flies and a prisoner. How could I assume some kind of dignity in this humiliating position? Snatches of riding lessons popped helpfully up from the dim recesses of memory; the sort of things you never forget: ‘Knees in tight, toes up, heels down, back straight and head held erect in a straight line between the horse’s ears, a keen and alert mien in the direction of travel.’

I did all these things, first with my arms folded, then with my hands on my hips, then with one hand on my hip and the other wiping sweat from my brow in the way that I imagined a proper horseman would. I nonchalantly scratched parts of my body but soon ran out of parts to scratch. Shielding my eyes from the sun occupied one arm for a useful period. I tried swatting a few flies from the horse’s flanks, which helped a bit with the dignity, but I was fighting a losing battle.

It simply cannot be done, the maintaining of the merest speck of self-esteem while being led on a mangy pack-horse along a road lined with one’s future neighbours, every one of them a natural horseman. Pedro knew this. In fact I soon realised that he must have planned the whole thing for my humiliation.

He made the most of his ploy, hailing everybody we passed to draw attention to Pedro the Conqueror and that extraordinary helpless bag of a foreigner he’d got himself. I could imagine the talk in the valley all too well. ‘Romero has got himself this rich foreigner’ – all foreigners are assumed to be rich – ‘and he pulls him about on that bony old pack-horse like a sack of beans. Poor chap seems to be infested with some sort of vermin. Never stops scratching.’

I withered and died inwardly a thousand times. Slowly, ambling by the back ways and stopping to visit just about everybody who lived on the route, we headed for town. Pedro was also trying to get rid of a dog. We turned up a track, to a house or a field or a garden, where a man would be working, usually back bent to his vegetables. Pedro would draw up his horse; mine would lurch to a stop. ‘Eh, Juan. You want a dog?’

The
campesino
in question would slowly raise himself and turn to face Pedro. ‘Romero. Good day.’

Then his gaze would turn towards the pack-horse and its helpless load, and the care-worn country face would wrinkle with bemusement. ‘What’s this?’

‘This is the foreigner who has bought El Valero.’

‘Buenos dias, mucho gusto,’ I would rabbit, wriggling like a clockwork monkey and hoping in vain to assert myself as a human presence.

‘No, I don’t want a dog and certainly not that dog.’

‘Hell of a good dog. Its mother killed a wolf. Fearless hunter.’

‘I don’t hunt any more, and besides there are no wolves here.’

‘This dog’s mother finished off the last one.’

‘Even so, I don’t want it,’ and he bent back to his work. ‘Go with God, Romero – and your foreigner.’

We would then at last turn away, Romero reaching up with his walking-stick to pull down the branch of a plum tree for us to guzzle. Then on to the next neighbour for the same discussion about the dog, with almost exactly the same dialogue. Pedro was doing a fine job of presenting me to local society.

My feeling of wretchedness grew as we progressed. Finally, as we approached the hill leading up to Órgiva, I wondered how I could wriggle out of being presented to the entire town in the same fashion. We passed a peach tree. Romero reached up with his stick and plucked a few glorious ripe peaches without stopping. He turned in his saddle and with a grin tossed me one. I lunged at it, leaning over from the saddle, and rolled neatly off the horse. Romero politely looked the other way.

‘I’ll walk for a bit now, Pedro. Arse getting sore.’

‘As you wish.’ And we set off again, me on foot with the curs at the back of the procession. I wondered that Pedro didn’t have me roped up – to stop me getting lost in town.

With the pittance I had paid him for El Valero, Pedro had bought a house with a big garden and a stable just on the outskirts of town. It looked like a concrete garage, with its green tin roll-down door. But it had running water and electricity, two modern conveniences that Maria had barely dreamed of before.

We found Maria crouched in a corner of the garage over a fire of sticks. A pot of stew bubbled on a tripod over the flames and peppers roasted in the ashes. We sat on a stone wall beneath the shade of a vine and ate salad and bread, and drank wine while Maria finished the cooking. One small glass of wine and I forgot the whole humiliating business of the ride to town and was brimming with affection for my jolly host. We talked of manly things, of horses and knives and ropes, and crops and watering and hunting and wine. Maria brought dishes of meat and peppers to the table. Pedro loaded my plate with the choicest pieces.

‘Eat meat.’

Then he helped himself, while Maria crouched beside him and picked at bits from his plate. This seemed to be their preferred way of eating, she like one of those birds that pick the ticks off the backs of hippopotami.

‘Delicious, Maria, a wonderful feast.’

‘It is wretched food but we are poor people. We are poorer now that we have sold our beloved Valero – and for the misery of money that you paid – but what could we do?’ she smiled.

‘Uuoouaargh!’ agreed Pedro, working on a huge piece of meat with his molars. ‘You’ve bought paradise – all that air, rich in waters, fine soil, sweet fruits and peace – and for nothing. Eat more meat!’ And again my plate was heaped with meat.

Pedro seemed to think it necessary to repeat this mantra to me at least once a day. ‘And look what we have now . . . nothing,’ he would warm to the theme. ‘A dump of a house, a feeble little plot of land, not even enough for the potatoes.’

‘Come now, Pedro, it’s really very nice – look at all these fruit trees . . . and so convenient for the town, Maria. Life will be so much easier for you here: you won’t have to haul water from the river, there are no
acequias
to clean, no steep hills to climb, none of the pains of country life . . . ’ I rattled on.

‘No scorpions,’ offered Maria.

‘No what?’

‘Scorpions.’

‘Are there scorpions?’

‘Of course. The place is crawling with scorpions.’

‘
Si claro!
’ echoed Pedro with a smirk. ‘You’ll never be short of a scorpion at El Valero. Sometimes in the summer I’ve had to pour boiling water on the walls to get rid of them all. The walls are running with scorpions.’ He scrabbled his fingers graphically across the table-top.

‘And snakes,’ he continued happily. ‘Not too many up at the house, but the valley is alive with them. Thick as my thigh, some of them.’

‘Poisonous snakes?’

‘No, not so poisonous . . . but dangerous. Chap in the valley had his leg broken by a snake last year.’

‘How? How the hell can a snake break your leg?’

‘Well, it’s mostly when they’re on heat. They get aggressive and come steaming at you through the undergrowth, lift their heads up and whop you the most almighty blow. They can knock you clean off your feet.’

Dark shadows clouded my dreams of the sunny farm bright with geraniums and orange blossom. A valley teeming with murderous snakes guarding the entrance to a place of stones and scorpions. Ana was going to love this.

It was clear that if we were going to keep at least one foot in the twentieth century when we moved to El Valero, we would need to use a car of some sort. We would also need to improve on the loose arrangement of poles and boulders that currently spanned the river. I had a vague fantasy of leaving El Valero as it was, solitary and untouched by the modern world, and managing with a mule or horses. But pressure was being applied by people whose inclination was more to the practical than the romantic. I had bowed to this pressure before I came in August, promising to see to the building of a road and a new bridge.

Oddly enough I’d never before had the opportunity to build a road, nor a bridge, and I spent a fair few hours wandering about, looking in what I thought was a knowledgeable sort of a way at the possible sites for them. But it was no good. I hadn’t a clue about such things and trying to think my way into them just didn’t seem to have any effect. I walked over to discuss the matter with Bernardo.

‘Domingo is your man,’ he advised. ‘He knows how to do everything.’

So we went along to see Domingo.

As the Rio Trevélez tumbles from its sunless cleft in the mountains and rushes into the broader valley, the first farm it passes is the Cortijo La Colmena. The Melero family have been living there since the time of Domingo’s great-grandfather, but they don’t own it. As with so many houses and so much land in Andalucía, it is owned by families who live in Madrid or Barcelona and have never even seen the place. Every year Domingo’s landlord collects the munificent sum of fifteen hundred pesetas – around five pounds. The tenant pays his own rates, another four thousand pesetas, and is responsible for any repairs or improvements to the place.

For this modest outlay Domingo enjoys the benefit of a house perched up at the end of the valley with a spectacular view of the rivers and mountains; stabling for his handful of sheep, pigs and a donkey; a highly productive vegetable patch, a small vineyard and every sort of fruit tree you can imagine. He also has the fields sloping down to the river, groves of almonds and olives, and rank upon rank of oranges and lemons. All this he cares for seemingly without effort, ambling round the valley on his donkey trailing his feet in the scrub, or lying in the shade of a fruit tree admiring his sheep, or on a really hot summer day in the
acequia
or watering channels, sleeping in its cool water lashed to a root like a boat moored in the reeds.