Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (5 page)

Domingo lives with his parents, Expira and Domingo – or Old Man Domingo as people call him. Old Man Domingo is a tiny man, leathery with sun and hard work, with a face that cracks constantly into a warm smile.

Bernardo introduced us. We bowed and shook hands. ‘
Mucho
gusto en conocerle
– pleased to meet you,’ I said.

Then I turned to Expira, a well-built woman in her fifties who would not very long ago have been a real beauty. She had lovely gay eyes and the smile of someone whose beauty runs right through, like seaside rock.

Domingo himself was sitting on the ground, filing the chain of a monster chainsaw. He greeted me with a friendly grin.

We sat on low chairs around a cable drum. These cable drums are ubiquitous here; they make very good tables. The Sevillana, the electricity-generating company of Andalucía, has a generating station and a storehouse in the valley. So all the surrounding farms are liberally bestowed with the detritus of power generation. Over the years Pedro Romero had built an impressive collection of hawsers, girders, tensioning devices, ceramic insulators, steel rods and cables. ‘You can always find some use for such things and if you don’t nick it when you can, it won’t be there when you need it for something,’ he had explained.

Expira carefully placed a sack over their drum, its lively colours showing its provenance as a sugar refinery on the coast, and served us with wine, bread, olives and ham. It was that hour of day . . . although exactly which hour of the day that is, I cannot quite say, as it always seems to be that time. We sat in a cloud of flies – there has to be some flaw in every paradise and flies had clearly been allocated to mine – and talked about the river and the valley and farming.

‘So you’re going to live at El Valero, are you?’ asked Old Man Domingo.

‘Yes, we’re moving down in the winter.’

‘El Valero is a good farm,’ he mused. ‘Plenty of sun and air and rich in water . . . ’

‘So they say.’

‘The pity is that it’s on the wrong side of the river. That river can swell with winter storms and you could be completely cut off for weeks or more. There was a woman died over there not too long ago. Her appendix swelled up: she was in great pain. They tried to get her across the river with the mules, but the current was too strong, knocked the mules over, so she died. Horrible.’

‘Yes, and then there was Rafaela,’ added Expira. ‘You know Rafaela Fernández, the deaf one’s daughter – she died in childbirth at El Valero. The river got up and took the bridge away. You’ll have to do something about it. It’s too dangerous living there with no bridge.’

From here all we could see was a thin red trickle curling between the boulders in the riverbed.

‘It’s been a dry summer,’ continued Old Man Domingo. ‘Catastrophic. Hasn’t rained a drop since March. It just doesn’t rain like it used to do. Even in summer it used to rain, though it just did a lot of damage then, no good at all. I remember one summer a few years ago, along came a cloudburst . . . it was a bright, clear day and nothing but a dribble of water in the river, like now, and then suddenly there was a great rush of water and the river was full of dead pigs and goats and mules. The water actually went over the top of the Seven-Eye bridge down below the town. Yes, it certainly knew how to rain in those days.’

‘If it doesn’t rain any more then I needn’t bother to do anything about the bridge,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘But you never know what’s going to happen in the future. There could be a thunderstorm tomorrow. You can never trust the river. You should build a bridge and a road in and a road out up the back way in case the river takes the bridge.’ This was from Domingo, who had put aside his chainsaw and was drawing up a seat by the cable drum.

‘Up the back? You mean put a road right up that mountain?!’

‘It’s not that far. Three or four bends will take you up to the mining road at the top. A good digging machine would do it in a couple of days.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll have to put in a road and a bridge. But a bridge is going to be an expensive and difficult business . . . ’ ‘No, no, no, cost you pennies,’ he declared. ‘Just a few eucalyptus beams thrown across and a couple of piers made with some cement and river stones. You don’t want to spend any money building in the river. Whatever you build is bound to get washed away.’

‘Right then, some eucalyptus beams . . . ’

‘That’s simple enough,’ said Domingo. ‘Now is the waning of the August moon – just the time for cutting eucalyptus beams. Cut them at any other time, apart perhaps from the waning of the January moon, and they’ll rot. Juan Salquero owns that eucalyptus grove down the river there. I’ll square it with him and we’ll cut them tomorrow. To do the job really well we’ll want five fifteen-metre beams.’

Next morning I arrived to find Domingo forty feet up a tree with his chainsaw – no gloves, no ropes, just his usual outfit of ragged sneakers, thin trousers and shirt. He had wedged himself in a fork and was leaning out with his foot hooked round a branch. The huge chainsaw, an ancient and terrible machine, unencumbered by any modern safety devices, was gnawing ferociously away at a thick trunk of poplar that was in the way of the operation.

Domingo really was a phenomenon. When he was around, things that appeared impossible got done as if by magic. In no time at all we, or rather he, had cut down five huge straighttrunked eucalyptus, trimmed them up and taken the bark off them, then covered them with brush so the sun didn’t bake them too quickly. There they would lie until winter when we would find some way of hauling them out of the wood to wherever we decided to put the bridge.

I hadn’t fancied using the chainsaw myself so I did the trimming with a hand-axe, and the peeling of the bark. We worked away through the morning until Domingo called a halt. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Let’s go and drink a glass of wine on the terrace. It’s too hot out here now.’

So we went up to Domingo’s place where Old Man Domingo was sitting on a box not too far from a jug of wine, making baskets out of esparto grass.

‘For my niece,’ he explained. ‘She has a restaurant in Granada. Wins cookery prizes. She likes to have lots of esparto baskets all over the place, goodness knows why! Her customers are all doctors and professors and what have you. She’s just round the corner from the university. She says they feel at home with all these things from the country. Me, what do I know?’

The middle of the day was, like every other middle of the day, scorching hot, but up on the Meleros’ terrace we were fanned by a gentle breeze and the roof was shaded by a giant eucalyptus. The air shimmered in the valley below us. I could see Pedro and his train of beasts heading up the path from the river for their siesta. From the olive groves on the western slope came the clink of a plough and the sound of Bernardo cursing his mule. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Expira. ‘We’re poor as can be and life is nothing but drudgery and pain, but I love this view.’ She smiled as she swatted at a cloud of flies with a dishcloth.

‘Yes, beautiful,’ I agreed. ‘I can hardly believe that we’re really going to come and live here.’

‘Do you have any children?’ she asked.

‘No, but we’re thinking about it.’

‘Thinking about it won’t do any good. You must have children, you’ll be so lonely otherwise all the way over there on your own. The valley needs more children. I need more children. My grandchildren are in Barcelona and I only see them once a year, and this one’ – she indicated her son – ‘this one doesn’t seem to want to get married. You couldn’t perhaps find some girl from “over there” for Domingo to marry, could you?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I laughed.

I had fulfilled a part of my brief. The new bridge was under way, even to the extent of something practical being done about it – the cutting of the beams. Next, Domingo and I headed off into the Alpujarras in search of a machine-man to build the road.

In the car Domingo explained all there was to be known about machines. There were pits into which the unwary and uninformed could easily drop. There were machine-men who were crooks; there were machine-men who were incompetent; some were too timid and some were too reckless, and some even were unreliable. And then of course there were the machines. Domingo’s
bête noire
was the machine with rubber wheels.

‘Whatever we end up with, we don’t want a machine with rubber wheels. They’re no good. Estéban has one with rubbers, and he’s a good driver, but he’s a crook so we won’t go to him.’

‘Didn’t you say that Estéban was a friend of yours?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘But you just said he was a crook.’

‘Even crooks need friends, and anyway I like him, crook or no.

His machine is old, though, and completely knackered, another reason it’d be no good. You don’t want an old machine. You’ll pay the same hourly rate but the thing will get tired and won’t work as hard as a younger one. And of course you don’t want a new machine either, because a man with a new machine will be frightened to scratch the paintwork and he won’t push it hard enough.’

My head was spinning with the complexities of the task. We sped back and forth through the mountains, stopping everywhere a machine-man had been spotted. We interviewed dozens of machine-men in bars, or in pyjamas at their doors after midnight, inspecting critically their plant and discussing the merits of various arms, blades, buckets, tracks, wheels, shovels and grabs.

Eventually we settled on Pepe Pilili and his machine. Between Órgiva and Lanjarón is a
tasca
, a thing too humble to be classified as a bar or
venta
– a sort of wayside watering-hole – and beside it is a little
ermita
or wayside chapel, decked in flowers. Long after midnight and a fruitless evening searching for a machine, we pulled up.

‘Pepe Pilili lives here. He has a machine,’ Domingo announced.

Pepe was there in the bar, cuddling his new baby. Once acquainted, you wouldn’t forget Pepe Pilili. He was tall with thick blond hair and cocky as a sparrow.

‘No problem, my friend. I’ll do your road for you. Start tomorrow evening.’

We celebrated our pact with sangria, a mixture of red wine, lemonade and brandy. You don’t get much sangria in the Alpujarras, which made the occasion a particular treat. Then Domingo and I returned home in jubilant mood. On the way Domingo confided to me that Pepe’s machine, a JCB, had rubber wheels, that it had been delivered from the factory only the week before, and that Pepe had never actually driven a machine in his life. ‘It’ll be alright, though,’ we assured each other. ‘You can’t afford to be too fussy in these matters.’

A week later Pepe Pilili turned up with his shiny new machine. To a man like myself, lately come to the business of appraising such apparatus, it looked businesslike – despite its immaculate paintwork and rubber wheels. It splashed across the river, made itself a ramp to get up the sandy bank, devoured a clump of bushes, the last obstacle to arriving on the farm, and there it stood, gleaming in the last rays of the evening sun.

Pedro and his goats shuffled up to give it a critical scrutiny. ‘What do you think, Pedro?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you feel a bit sad that the world is about to thrust its grubby arm into El Valero, and cut a road through these timeless terraces?’

‘The Host, no! This is the future, man. This is what El Valero needs. I’d have done it years ago if it hadn’t been for my people. Pity about the machine, though.’

‘What’s wrong with the machine?’

‘It’s got rubber wheels.’

Domingo steered his donkey through the scrub to come and supervise. ‘We’ll start with that bank there, Pepe. Off you go – and cut in as close to the almond as you can. We want to waste as little good land as possible.’

Pepe launched his machine at the bank indicated by Domingo. I disappeared up to the house to fetch some beer. Coming down I was surprised to see the JCB in an unusual attitude. It was lying on its side at the bottom of the bank. Pepe was scratching his head beside it, Pedro was sniggering, and Domingo was scornfully explaining to Pepe just what he should have done.

‘Get it up on its feet again and start the bank from the top this time.’

‘How in God’s name am I going to get it back on its feet again?’ Pepe’s cockiness was more or less unruffled but I could see that he was shaken by what could have been a horrible accident. ‘With the arm, of course. That’s what the arm’s for.’

‘I don’t know, Domingo – you try.’

‘Me? I’ve never driven a machine.’

Saying which he clambered into the cab and started the engine. As he tried out the controls to see which did what, the machine wriggled about on the ground like one of those one-legged grasshoppers. Then slowly it raised itself on its arm, wobbled about a bit – a clever twitch of the bucket – and bonk, it bounced back onto its rubbers.

‘There,’ said Domingo, climbing from the cab rather pleased with himself. ‘No damage, still works.’

Pepe climbed back in and attacked the bank again rather timidly from the top. The rest of us sat on the grass with our beer and watched. As I looked up from this little earth bank, my eyes scanned the huge expanse of rocky hill that we would have to cut through to get to the old mining road at the top. To be truthful, Pepe and his machine and its wretched rubbers were not the ones for the job.

Next day we headed off in search of another machine-man Domingo knew of – Andreas of Torvizcón. We arrived in the town and were directed to his house, where his wife told us that he was out cutting tracks in the Contraviesa ten kilometres from town. After an hour or so of cruising about on the dusty tracks through the almond groves and vineyards that cloak the hills of the great counterscarp of the Sierra Nevada, we found him. Domingo hailed him and there followed the usual half-hour of unfathomable conversation which, strain as I might, I couldn’t catch a word of. Then the machine-man came over to me and shook hands.

‘I’m the man for your job,’ he said with a grin. ‘Want to see what my machine and I can do?’