Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (9 page)

With that awful clarity that comes when your self-delusions have just collapsed in a heap, I knew that Pepe was right. Now that Pedro had given up the farm, he was quite capable of dismissing us with the utmost contempt. I knew this because I had heard him speak in the same way about countless others. Odd that it had never struck me as heartless before.

Pepe was studying me with concern. ‘Ask Domingo,’ he urged. ‘He’ll give you the same advice.’ I didn’t need to. For once I was considering Pedro from Ana’s point of view, with all her doubts corroborated. ‘Don’t worry, Pepe,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve heard it all before. You’re not the first person who has tried to warn me about Pedro.’

It was true. Besides Ana, almost everyone I knew – Isabel, Domingo, Encarna, Georgina – had hinted that I was being too trusting or indulgent towards Romero, although none of them had ever backed their case with much detail. You don’t easily spread ill-feeling about a neighbour, no matter how much you might dislike him. Once he had left the farm, however, our neighbours lost their reluctance to tell us what they knew of him. Listening as one sorry tale followed another, I started to realise how alone I had been in my estimation of him.

Ana was the only one who showed me any sympathy. ‘I think you brought out the best in him, Chris,’ she said. ‘He really seemed to enjoy impressing you and he did it so well. No wonder you were taken in.’

‘But Ana, how could I have been such a lousy judge of character?’ I groaned.

‘Because you don’t much care to judge people’s characters,’ she answered after a moment’s thought. ‘It’s a strength, you know, as well as a weakness.’

It was small consolation.

DOMINGO AND THE SEARCH FOR BEAMS

IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER THE PIGS HAD FOLLOWED PEDRO TO town that Domingo paid his first visit to the house. We had always assumed that he had avoided crossing our threshold out of shyness or some obscure article of etiquette. It hadn’t occurred to us that the Melero family objected to visiting Pedro and had been waiting for him to leave before indulging their curiosity as to what we were up to.

Proudly, I showed Domingo our innovations with the running water and the heater in the bathroom. He nodded, showing that he had no absolute objection to the apparatus. But the wooden bed – that was a mistake. We’d be eaten alive in a bed like that.

Domingo then took out his knife and jabbed it into a ceiling beam. ‘It’s rotten,’ he declared, illustrating the point by dislodging a shower of dust and mouldy splinters. ‘The
launa
hasn’t been raked and the water’s seeped through. It could fall about your ears at any moment.’

‘Oh Lord, do you think they’re all like that?’ I asked, wondering what had happened to neighbourly small-talk.

‘No. Only a few beams are rotten right through but you might as well replace the lot. Chestnut’s the thing for roofing beams. I know where we can find a good supply.’

And thus the job was conceived. Our first winter remains with me now as one long search for roofing beams. Domingo fell naturally into the role of guide, introducing me to my new world of villages and mountains as we ranged to and fro in search of this elusive but desirable building material.

Alpujarran architecture is a simple affair consisting of the more or less orderly re-arrangement of the materials that either grow to hand or lie randomly scattered around. The proportions are dictated by a simple equation; the width is the maximum supporting capacity of a chestnut, poplar or eucalyptus beam, with a thick layer of wet
launa
(the oily grey almost waterproof clay that runs in seams throughout the Alpujarras) on top. This comes to approximately three and a half metres. The height is limited by the extent to which an Alpujarran man can lift stones, and, as most are short of stature, rarely exceeds one metre eighty from floor to beam-seats. Length is curtailed by the groundspace available and windows are calculated to let in just enough light to grope around in at midday, while excluding the extraneous rays that might otherwise consume the inhabitants. The whole, in a village, has to mesh with a mass of other similar dwellings huddled like the hexagons of a beehive. What you end up with is something between a square box and a stone railway carriage.

When my mother first saw a photograph of my newly purchased home she was appalled. ‘I had hoped that you might end up living in a Queen Anne house,’ she lamented. ‘I’ve always liked Queen Anne. But here you are, living in . . . living in what I can only describe as a stable.’

To be honest, elegance and sophistication are not the adjectives that spring to mind when describing Alpujarran architecture. The charm of the style lies in its simplicity. The variations on the basic design and the simple ornament that the inhabitants add to their homes often result in creations of great beauty. The first time I saw Alpujarran architecture I was unimpressed but slowly it wheedled its way into my heart, and now . . . well, I should feel very uncomfortable indeed living behind leaded windows beneath a gabled roof.

The simple box-type structure is identical to that found in the Berber villages of Morocco – it was the Berbers who brought this kind of building to the region – and similar to all the vernacular architecture of the Middle East. Its great advantage is its cheapness. The doors and windows are the only parts of a house that have to be bought for money; the rest has merely to be hewn or hacked down, or gathered and hauled up from the river.

The walls are stone, mortared with mud, and should have a minimum thickness of sixty centimetres, preferably a metre. This keeps out heat in the summer and cold in the winter. The lintels and beams are wooden, eucalyptus or poplar if you live down in the river valleys, or sweet chestnut, the best of all, if you live above a thousand metres where the chestnut forests girdle the high villages. In the Low Alpujarra a mat of canes is fixed on top of the beams. The canes are lashed together with woven ropes of esparto grass which grows wild everywhere. The canes too grow in abundance in the rivers, as do the trees for the beams. On the cane mat is laid a thick layer of brush – oleander, genista, broom, thyme – and then finally comes the layer of
launa
. You should always lay your
launa
during the waning moon to get it to settle properly and give you as watertight a roof as possible – but, of course, never on a Friday.

A hundred years ago the stone walls would have been left bare, but these days most of the houses are whitewashed, outside and in. There are two reasons for this: it reduces the heat inside by several degrees on a hot summer day; and the lime, particularly the
cal viva
that comes in the form of white rocks that you must steep in a drum of water, where they hiss and bubble, has a strong disinfectant effect.

It was a bitterly cold day when we set off in search of beams. We headed west towards Lanjarón and then wound up a steep track by the river. I eased the old Landrover gently around bend after bend, higher and higher, until we ran out of road altogether. Domingo, with a thin jacket thrown over his shirt as a sole concession to the weather, leapt out to greet an elderly shepherd who had stepped from beneath the trees to watch us pass. We were in luck, it seemed; the old man had just that moment been thinking of selling off a load of chestnut for beams. He jabbed a gnarled index finger towards a patch of forest on a ridge near the skyline.

Onwards and upwards we clambered beneath the dappled shade of huge trees. There were patches of snow among the fallen leaves and ice on the banks of the river. Our friend’s chestnut forest was in a magnificent spot, not far beneath the high snow-peaks and with a view of the sea way to the south, but the wood was no good. A fire had recently rampaged through that section of the mountain, leaving the trees half-deadened and black, and their girth was mostly enormous. We were looking for a hundred beams. Domingo reckoned there was not a dozen to be had in all that expanse of forest. Chestnuts must be coppiced and looked after to make good building material. This wood had been utterly neglected. And besides there was the cutting and carting to think of. It was a long and difficult journey for a mule to carry each beam down to the nearest point of access for a lorry. We thanked the owner for his time and returned to the valley.

‘If you want beams,’ said a man in a bar, ‘then Martín of Trevélez is your man. He has hundreds.’

So we drove to Trevélez to track down Martín, whose beams turned out to be ready cut and stacked by the river. The price he was asking sounded reasonable enough and, leaving us to inspect his stack, he said that if we wanted to discuss terms he would be in the bar in the square at two. We did not join him. Every one of the beams was rotten: chewed over by worms, ravished by mephitic fungi, or twisted or knotty or thick. ‘He’ll have a job to sell that lot for firewood,’ Domingo commented.

Still, it had been an enjoyable trip, and we had some ham and some wine in Trevélez before setting out on the high mountain road home. It was then that Domingo, as ever, surprised me. ‘My uncle Eduardo has chestnut woods above Capileira,’ he said. ‘He’d be keen to sell you some beams.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything about him before?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s interesting to see what other beams there are about and I always enjoy a trip to Trevélez. Besides, Eduardo wouldn’t have been home until now. We can go and visit him now, on the way back.’

And so we did, turning off and up towards Capileira, highest of the three villages of the Poqueira Gorge. It’s a pretty place, with little white box-like houses huddled around a church like chicks beneath a hen’s wing. But it’s the setting that steals your breath. From high on the terraced slopes of the gorge the horizon spreads north over the great white cirque of Veleta, a soft stole of cloud nestling below its peaks. To the south, a wide mountain pass opens onto the Mediterranean and on a clear winter’s day you can just about make out the peaks of the Rif Mountains across the straits in Morocco.

For some years now the village has been a popular retreat for artists and bohemians from as far afield as Japan and Mexico, although it is still mostly inhabited by the indigenous agricultural population. This ensures that the lanes are kept spattered with a fragrant coating of mule and sheep turds, and that tucked among the gorgeous renovated dwellings you still find the cruder contrivances of the indigenous inhabitants for housing chickens and pigs.

The strains of Debussy were floating from a newly carpentered window as we made our way across the main square and along a narrow, cobbled alley. Domingo knocked on the heavy studded wooden door of a shabby but pretty village house. It was opened by a dark bundle of a woman who exclaimed in delight at her unexpected visitor.

‘Come in, nephew, come in,’ she cried, pulling Domingo forward, with both hands clamped around his shoulders. ‘It’s not often we see you up here. Let me look at you. Ah, so handsome and yet what good is a face like this if you refuse to find yourself a wife?’ She emphasised the point by grabbing fiercely at his cheek.

Domingo smiled and bent to kiss her, apparently used to this sort of welcome. Behind her, in a dimly lit room, three or four men were leaning over a steaming pot stabbing at bits of goat meat with their knives.

‘I’ve brought you this foreigner, my new neighbour Cristóbal,’ Domingo announced.

The knives hung momentarily in the air as the group of men turned to stare at me.

‘An honour, much pleasure, enchanted,’ growled the eldest of them, whom I took to be Eduardo. From what I could make out in the gloom, there was a strong family resemblance between this man and at least two of the other men grouped around the table. They were lean as nails, short, sinewy and clearly used to hard work and weather. Each had a nose so prominent that their other facial features seemed to skulk in its shadow.

‘Come and eat goat,’ commanded Eduardo, clattering back his chair to make room for us at the table. Domingo took out his pocket-knife, a long blade with an edge like a razor, and began slicing and stabbing at the meat as others were doing. Uncertainly, I drew my own knife from my pocket – a pruning knife, rounded at the end and blunt – and tried in vain to skewer a few bony lumps. I didn’t tell them that from my earliest years my mother had forbidden me utterly to eat from my knife and that I hadn’t developed the skill.

The company stopped eating and watched me with interest. ‘You do it like this, Cristóbal,’ offered Domingo, but Eduardo had lost patience with his inept guest. ‘Give the man a fork and bring him some wine, woman,’ he ordered, ‘He can’t eat, he’s dry.’ A glass of
costa
appeared. Eduardo looked at me steadily as I took a swig. ‘My nephew tells me that you’ve got a machine for shearing sheep,’ he ventured. ‘People round here say such things fry your flock.’

An animated discussion began. I spoke a little boastfully of shearing hundreds of sheep in a day with the foreign gadget. Domingo said he’d give it a try come the spring. The others seemed less convinced. Then Domingo, as if to clinch the matter, threw in the information that I played the guitar.

This brought an enthusiastic thump on the table from Eduardo. ‘Hah! Now you’re talking. Manuel, we have a musician in the house. Bring out the guitars.’

Manuel did as he was told, handing one to his father and then sitting beside him with the other. They tuned up roughly, fingered some chords and lolloped into an Alpujarran folk tune.

Now, much as I would like to write of how Orpheus himself never plucked a string as exquisitely as those work-hardened fingers of old Eduardo, and of how I was spellbound by the earthy players’ mastery of their instruments and by the simple loveliness of the song, I cannot deny the truth. The music was a foul dirge and its progress marred by venomous oaths from Eduardo as Manuel unerringly missed his cue. Father and son scowled at each other throughout the performance, consumed with spleen at the other’s incompetence.

At last the dreadful thing came to a close. ‘Beautiful,’ I sighed. ‘You don’t know any more, do you?’

Eduardo and Manuel examined me through narrowed eyes.

‘Alright, give him another . . .’

It served me right. I speared a piece of goat and pretended to be carried away by the beat, tapping my foot in a futile attempt to pick out a rhythm. As I tapped I masticated furiously at the detestable lump of goat-gristle in my mouth. The song shuddered to its demise and the players once again eyed me inquisitively. But this time my integrity as a music critic was saved by the goat-gristle which had conveniently lodged itself in my windpipe. One half of the rubbery lump was stuck halfway down while the other, joined to the first by a strong piece of animal elastic, remained in my mouth. I burbled and spluttered while everyone looked on in consternation.