Parrot in the Pepper Tree (18 page)

The homeopathy did, however, seem to have one curious side-effect. It changed Porca’s architectural interests from wood, as his main nesting material, to metal. He became suddenly a formidably armed creature, hurtling to and fro in the air with a pair of nail scissors dangling from his beak, or a steel trussing-needle with which he bombed the cats. Off went the car-keys, a flow of small change — the twenty-five peseta piece has a hole in he middle and makes a simply marvellous addition to any nest — and most of the kitchen cutlery.

These activities left the kitchen denuded of cutlery, and if anyone but Ana were foolish enough to stoop and borrow, say, a teaspoon, Porca would launch a ferocious attack. But the metalwork made the nests look slightly more interesting, albeit, to my untrained eye, unpromising places to nurture little parakeets.

As well as being violent, aggressive and bone-headed, Porca is also insistently demanding, like a child. He can’t actually speak, which is probably a blessing, but he does a passing imitation of
Que pasa?
(What’s happening?) and has a quiet
meep
noise which for a fleeting moment makes him seem quite sweet and appealing. There’s also a special cooing sound that he uses in an attempt to entice Ana into one of his newly-created nests.
Chicka-cheeoo, Chick-a-cheeo,
he croons while gazing imploringly into Ana’s eyes. Now, Ana is not what you’d call a big woman but the chance of her fitting into Porca’s nest beneath the kitchen shelf is almost as remote as her laying the longed-for egg.

Porca’s demands reach fever pitch when Ana and I take a siesta and shut him out of the room. In order to catch our attention when we’re just slipping away into sleep during the hottest hours of the day, he has hit upon the notion of perching on the utensil-rack above the cooker. The cooker is made of tin and it makes a pleasing crash when hit by, say, a heavy steel ladle, or the fish-slice or the big serving spoon. When Porca has finished nudging all the utensils off the rack — there are ten or so to get through —he flies to the bathroom door and sits on the handle squawking fit to bust. He can carry on squawking for ten whole minutes without stopping, and it’s a sound that could easily wake, and considerably annoy, the dead.

A lie-in of a morning is not much easier to achieve, for Porca has learned how to open the bathroom door. As mentioned, he spends the night roosting on the shower tap in the bathroom, and as soon as it is light enough for him to fly, he opens the door — not quite as much of an achievement as it sounds, because I accidentally fitted the door backwards, so you only have to push it to open it, but have to operate the handle to close it. Anyway, Porca gets down on the floor and with all his tiny might, heaves and pushes until it opens. He then flies over to our bed, pecks me on whatever part of my body he finds protruding from the bedclothes, and having succeeded in driving me away, proceeds to get suggestive with Ana on the pillow. Grumbling and grunting, I shamble to the kitchen to put the kettle on. When I take Ana her morning cup of tea I get attacked again by the parrot. And thus starts another day.

Though Porca’s talent lies in destruction, there are just a few positive aspects to having him around. For one, he’s a constant source of fascination, even in his choice of locomotion — flying, hitching lifts on people and animals, riding head down in Ana’s pocket, or walking brazenly along the floor, ignoring the predatory stares of the dogs and cats — it all adds spice to our lives here. For another, Porca seems in a perverse way to be licking us all into shape. I’ve noticed that I’ve become distinctly less confrontational with Porca around. It has been ages now since it occurred to me to place the blue toothmug on the washing machine cover. Chloë, too, seems to have become more philosophical about life’s random injustices, particularly those taking the form of parrot attacks, while Ana seems to cope reasonably well with being treated as the acme of perfection.

There’s no doubt about it. Much as Porca makes me suffer, I’d find it hard not to have a parrot in the family now.

‘HOMBRE!
YOU’VE GOT TO BE JOKING! I CAN’T GET PAST THERE. THIS is a car, not a mule. I’ll wait.’ There was a lorry slewed across the track, its ramp down on the bank. Four men were trying to persuade a bullock to get in, but understandably it didn’t want to go. Standing tethered nearby was the mother of the bullock, a gentle liquid-eyed creature with horns and a soft wet muzzle. She watched the proceedings with sad incomprehension.

The lorry belonged to Antonio, Manolo’s cousin. The cattle belonged to Juan Diáz, who farms up on Carrasco.

‘Are you getting a good price for him, Juan?’ I asked.

‘No, Cristóbal. Price not good. Farmers very, very poor. Butcher very rich man.’

‘That always seems to be the way. He’s a beautiful bull.’

‘Beautiful bull. Big big balls.’ And he patted the pendulous bag. ‘Very delicious eat. He boy. Mummy there.’ He indicated the cow. ‘She come make him happy.’

Juan Diáz is a man who knows his farming. His farm is a delight to visit, always green and trim and well cultivated, with healthy trees and fine crops. It is just down the valley from Bernardo, who speaks Alpujarran Spanish as fluently as anyone I’ve met, but is treated by Juan, like the rest of us foreigners, as if he were on his first day at language school.

Bernardo told me how one day he was standing around, talking to Domingo, when Juan Diáz appeared, striding round the bend on his way back from town.

‘Morning Juan. Not a bad day,’ offered Bernardo.

‘No rain. Very bad, very bad. Sun pretty but not good. Trees and plants dry. Farmers poor.

‘I heard the forecast this morning. They say there’s a possibility of rain towards the end of the week.’

‘Maybe rain. Maybe not rain. We not know…’

Domingo, who had been staring in bafflement at Juan during this exchange, interrupted. ‘Why in the name of the Host are you talking in that strange way, Juan? I’ve never heard anything like it! Bernardo here is not a half-wit?

‘No. Not half-wit. Foreigner, not Spanish. Not understand?

‘But Bernardo speaks Spanish as well as you or I do?

Juan was in a difficult predicament here; he didn’t know whether to speak normally for Domingo, or to maintain the pidgin Spanish for the benefit of poor benighted Bernardo, who might speak good Spanish, but was unalterably a foreigner.

Anyway, Domingo’s criticism made not the slightest difference. Juan never speaks to a foreigner except in his extraordinary baby talk. I have quite long conversations with him sometimes, when I give him a lift into town for example. His strangely reduced speech drives me to seek out the most colloquial expressions that I can find.

‘Morning Juan, hop in, save you a bit of a walk?

‘Very kind, Cristóbal. Orgiva far. Juan old. Legs bad.’

‘And what takes you to town on this lovely morning, Juan?’

‘You do, Cristóbal, in your car. Very big, very fast?

‘No, I mean why are you going?’

‘See doctor. Juan ill.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Hands hurt. Not work well.’ He showed me his huge cracked hands.

‘Too much work, cold water. Also legs bad?

And on we go. If I live near Juan for the rest of my life, he will never address me in any other manner. But it is meant kindly: a language contrived to be as considerate as possible to a linguistic simpleton. Juan manages to speak almost entirely without recourse to verbs, and on the odd occasion when there is no other way out, he uses only the simple form. The nouns are kept basic, and the article, definite or indefinite, is omitted.

This form of speech might be undemanding, but it’s also severely limiting. You can’t get very deep into abstract subjects without using verbs.

One autumn night a badger came and ravaged our vegetable patch. I wandered over the river and told Bernardo my woes. ‘The man you should talk to about badgers,’ he said at once, ‘is Juan Diáz. He knows all there is to know about them.’ So I set off to talk to Juan about the badger problem. Chloë, who goes to school with a Diáz granddaughter, came along for the ride.

We found Juan grubbing up the little walnut trees that had sown themselves all over his terraces. He straightened up, brushed some of the dirt from his hand and gave Chloë a fond pat.
‘Hola, guapisima!’
he greeted her — ‘Hello, Most Beautiful.’

Then he turned to me with a concentrated smile on his face. ‘Big tree. Little babies. One day big trees, too,’ he said, indicating the saplings. ‘You plant at El Valero. Babies now, one day walnut forest? As an aside to Chloë he asked, ‘Do you think your mother would like some? She has a way with trees.’

Like many of our neighbours, Juan makes a distinction between Chloë, born and bred in the Alpujarras, and rank outsiders like ourselves. Chloë’s accent helps, of course — she speaks Spanish with the slightly lisping style, thin on consonants, that’s favoured in these parts, and she peppers it with playground idioms. Ana and I could never hope to catch up.

‘That’s very kind,’ I broke in, nonetheless. ‘Ana loves walnut trees. But Juan, we have come to see you on this fine afternoon because we have a problem with a badger — well, I think it’s a badger at any rate. It’s eating our vegetables. Bernardo says you know all about badgers. So do you have any idea what we can do to keep this one off the vegetable patch?’

‘Badger very bad. Motorcycle clutch cable…’ Juan drew a circle in the air and mimed pulling it tight.

‘Pardon?’

‘Moto clutch cable. Very good thing. With moto clutch you kill him good and dead.’

‘There must be something more to it than that? You’ve omitted to explain something, perhaps?’ I asked, a little pompously.

‘It’s to make a trap with, Daddy,’ Chloë hissed. ‘The badger runs into it and gets caught, maybe even strangled? She fixed me with her sternest expression as she said this. Chloë and Ana share some very firm opinions on the morality of traps, though in deference to Juan, she was trying to keep these to herself.

‘Chloë right,’ Juan added, beaming obliviously. Then, as if all his fears had been confirmed about having to communicate with the intellectual dregs of Europe, he continued miming and mouthing his explanation. ‘Find where badger come. Same place always. Clutch cable in path, badger come, neck through loop —caught! Bang! Dead! Simple, no?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘But why do you need a clutch cable?’

Juan gave me that look people use when they decide to start painstakingly from the beginning again.

‘Daddy wants to know why you chose a clutch cable rather than anything else?’ Chloë lisped, rushing to the rescue.

‘Because there’s a heap of them going begging in the road outside Daniel’s moto repair shop and they’ll do as well as anything else,’ Juan confided to her.

So that was how you dealt with the badger problem, clearly and succinctly explained. Yet there was one niggling matter still left unresolved. ‘Chloë?’ I asked, as we bumped our way back across the ford in the river. ‘Do you know the Spanish for snare?’

Chloë made a face. ‘No I don’t, and I don’t think I want to either. They’re horrid things, Daddy, and really hurt the animals. We shouldn’t use anything like that at El Valero,’ she announced and then resumed sucking thoughtfully the boiled sweet that Juan had spirited out of the pocket of his overalls.

Though I like to think that my Spanish vocabulary has, by now, expanded to fit most of the needs of Alpujarran living, I have discovered that it is — well — full of snares.

Animals, particularly, are a sea of uncertainty.
Comadreja, garduña, jineta, gato clavo, hurón,
are all names of creatures that exist in an area of uncertain identities, often distinguished only by the size of hole they can squeeze through to get at your poultry. I’m sure similar confusions exist with the English equivalent — stoats, weasels, martens, jennets, ferrets, and so on.

Then, if you move one size or so down the ladder of threatening animals you arrive in the even more interesting linguistic territory of the
bichos.
Now,
bicho
is one of my favourite Spanish words. It should refer to creatures round about the insect size bracket — as in ‘there are
bichos
in this bed and they are eating me alive’ — but it can be expanded to encompass smallish non-insects, like rodents, and under exceptional circumstances its borders might even stretch to a cat or even a dog. With the licence that being a foreigner and having a wretchedly imperfect grasp of the language permits me, I have even managed a cow and a horse, and by adding the suffix
—aco
have made the thing sound formidable, menacing even.
‘Vaya bicharaco!’
1 might exclaim — ‘Blimey, what a creature!’