Parrot in the Pepper Tree (25 page)

After a long time a very important-looking character in a tweed jacket and a tie came round the corner. ‘At last,’ we said to each other. ‘This’ll be Juan-Manuel Baldomero.’

We stood up, shook hands, introduced ourselves and showed him the letter, which he scanned with a rather exaggerated air of concentration. Then he looked at us over the top of his glasses and read it again, and finally, with his head still buried beneath the letter, he ushered us into the office. We sat down on straight wooden chairs opposite the desk.

‘Well, then…’ he said, whisking his glasses off. ‘You’ll need to see Juan-Manuel Baldomero about this.’

‘Yes, but he’s having his coffee,’ we replied.

‘Indeed he is,’ said our new friend. ‘Still, you might as well wait in the office. It’s more comfortable and, while you’re at it, you can cast your eye over this lot.’ He fished about on the desk and pushed across a green file, as thick as a brick on its side.

‘But what will Juan-Manuel Baldomero say when he finds two strangers sitting at his desk leafing about in his files?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he won’t mind a bit. I’ll see if I can find him for you,’ he said, and disappeared up the corridor, leaving us alone in the office with the file.

By now, there was about an hour left before the office would close for lunch, so Ana and I set urgently to rooting about in the file, pleased to be down to business at last. Most of the contents were complete gobbledegook: reams of administrative memos, pages of graphs and tables and pie-charts, heaps of letters from one ‘most excellent body’ to another, heaving with respectful esteem and couched in the most impenetrable jargon. It takes a certain sort of person, well versed in the arts of administration to flick quickly through such a pile without getting swamped. Within minutes my eyes were glazing over. Ana, though, who has some nebulous qualification in business studies, seemed rather better at it.

‘What are we actually after?’ I asked her, setting down my half of the file papers.

‘Anything at all about El Valero, the rivers and the hydroelectric scheme,’ she whispered conspiratorially. ‘The company that proposed it was called
Saltos de Sierra Nevada.’

‘Here’s
Saltos de Sierra Nevada,’
I cried out, rather pleased to have stumbled so quickly upon it. There was a whole batch of papers about the project.

We pored eagerly over them, page after page of permissions and prognostications and measurements; and then, towards the back, we came across a page entitled
Acequia del Valero.
‘Fancy that,’ I said to Ana. ‘A whole page devoted to us!’

I shut up and we both read the page and looked at the drawing. It seemed to me that the
Saltos de Sierra Nevada
project was by no means shelved but that the company had instead backed down a bit and were scaling down the scheme. Ana and I sat back for a moment to digest the information.

I broke the silence. ‘Well… it’s bad but not dreadful, you know. The plant won’t encroach so much on the river and it’ll be less of an eyesore…’ I trailed off.

Ana wasn’t listening. She was studying the back of the page and her face had drained of colour.

‘What is it, what’s the matter?’ I exclaimed.

She pushed the page in front of me. There was a drawing of a dam, with detailed elevations and map references. It was headed ‘Proposed Retention Dam at El Cerrado del Granadino’ and beneath the drawing was a letter saying that
Saltos de Sierra Nevada
would move their proposed hydroelectric station to allow for the rise in the riverbed occasioned by the construction of the new dam. They would not demand any indemnification from the water authority for this loss.

Ana had gone quiet. El Granadino is scarcely a kilometre downriver from us, and what we were looking at was a proposal for the damming of our valley: the very dam I had feared, ever since buying the farm. The proposal was specific. The dam was not about water or hydroelectricity. Its function was something altogether different; it was a filter to stop silt and boulders continuing down to the vast new barrage at Rules, near the coast. Rules was one of Spain’s largest ever engineering works, with a span of 900 metres and a budget of 40,000 million pesetas.

We were a small detail in this great project but the paper in front of us mapped out our valley’s role in the scheme. The Granadino filter dam was to be fifty metres high and porous, so ultimately the valley would be flooded not by water but by silt building up behind the dam. This would rise to the 425-metre contour line, marked in bold on the map. The hillock at the bottom of our farm was marked as 404 metres. We could lose the whole of El Valero.

As Ana and I looked at one another in disbelief, another important man in a tweed jacket and tie appeared in the doorway. He introduced himself to us as Juan-Manuel Baldomero.

‘Ah, so you’re looking at the
expediente
— the file,’ he said. ‘Have you found anything of interest to you?’

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact we have,’ I replied.

He looked down at the file and rubbed his thumb through his moustache. ‘Hmm, El Granadino — the retention dam.’

‘It’s just downriver from our farm,’ I blurted out. ‘At those heights it looks like it’s going to bury our whole farm under silt. We need to know if this is going to happen — and if so, when.’

‘You can imagine it matters a lot to us,’ Ana added quietly.

Baldomero rubbed his moustache again. ‘Well,’ he enunciated carefully. ‘You do speak Spanish, I take it?’

‘We do,’ we said.

At this moment, the man who had shown us into the office came in and moved across to join our group standing around the desk. He picked up the file and took a quick glance at the offending page. It was clearly a familiar sight.

‘Well,’ continued Baldomero. ‘You must realise that at the moment this is no more than a possibility. None of the permissions have been granted. There’s nothing happening.’ And he went on to explain that there were any number of hurdles at which a project of this magnitude might stumble, so it was a little premature to worry about farming under water or indeed silt.

It was a sympathetic speech and would have been extremely reassuring if we had been able to believe it. Ana had, by now, fixed her gaze on the first man with the tweed jacket. He seemed to understand that his opinion was also needed here and, in a slightly more succinct way, repeated his colleague’s observations.

‘Yes, it’s true. There’s nothing definite yet, and even in a worst case scenario — the very worst from your perspective — it would take many years for the river to dislodge enough silt to seriously threaten your land.’

‘How many?’ asked Ana.

Mr Tweed looked puzzled.

‘Years,’ she explained.

He shrugged and spread his hands. ‘How can anyone say? The river is unreliable. Really, all we can do is keep you informed. And although, of course, I can’t give you any guarantees, this scheme really shouldn’t be a major worry for you.

These repeated reassurances were becoming ever more disconcerting. ‘Look…’ I said, slightly more loudly than intended. Ana shot me a glance. ‘Look — we’ve planned to live the rest of our lives on this farm. Do you recommend that we continue with this plan, that we plant trees, build things, invest our time and savings on it? We need to know.’

The two men looked at a survey map that Baldomero had opened on the desk. It was a very large-scale map with all the contour lines clearly marked.

‘I’m not sure we’re in a position to give a definite answer to that. There’s too much uncertainty. We’ll know a lot more about it in a year’s time,’ Baldomero answered.

‘But if it were you, would you sink most of your savings into the place?’ asked Ana looking directly at Mr Tweed.

There was a pause.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think I would.’

Then it was lunchtime. Ana and I found a bar not far from the
Confederación
and settled down to take in the enormity of what we had just discovered. We ordered a bottle of wine and some sort of fish; Malaga’s seafood is legendary, but we might as well have been chewing cold fish fingers. I took Ana’s hand beneath the table and squeezed it and gave her a sad sort of smile.

‘Oh well, it could be a lot worse!’ I said.

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ she smiled thinly back.

‘I knew you knew I was going to say it — that’s why I said it. But you know what I think?’ I added.

‘No, tell me,’ said Ana.

‘Well, it’s one hell of a big valley. It’ll take a long time to fill up. My guess is that it would take an age to reach even the sheep shed. And by then you, me and maybe even Chloe will be too old to care. And so will the sheep.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she muttered.

Still, we made a decision over that lunch. We would find out all we could about the dam project and, if necessary, we’d try to fight it. But we wouldn’t drag each other and Chloe into despondency. We resolved there and then to be positive and the first positive step we’d take would be to consult the local environmental group.

And so saying, we walked briskly out of the restaurant talking animatedly and with great good humour about subjects that didn’t interest us in the slightest.

DOMINGO WAS THE FIRST PERSON WE CONSULTED ABOUT THE DAM proposal, but his reaction was a disappointment. Typical of rural Spaniards when faced with the might of the state, he was phlegmatic and fatalistic. ‘Who can tell,’ he shrugged. ‘If they build their dam, perhaps it won’t work, perhaps it will. But there’s no stopping big projects. We country people count for nothing with the men in power.’ This was the view in Tijolas, too: you don’t have a chance with authority.

The next week, however, we ran into Gary, a carpenter friend from Capileira, who told us about the
Unión Verde Alpujarreña,
or ‘Green Union,’ of which he was a member. He suggested we take our information along for the group’s consideration: we were pleased with this idea; it seemed like a good positive step.

But as it turned out, we never did get to address the UVA, for a few days later we met Gary again and he had a sorry tale. He had gone along to the monthly meeting intent on telling the group about the dam threat, and hoping to get a proposal of his own adopted — something simple for the group to get their teeth into. His proposal involved clearing the heaps of rubbish that had accumulated over the years around the spring by the village of Ferreirola. Gary figured this was an undertaking that ought just about to fall within the group’s organisational abilities. When he arrived at the meeting, though, nursing his proposal, the group was already locked in impassioned debate. The issue on the agenda was a sweeping one: a world-wide ban on the production of plastics. After an hour or more of furious polemic, during which Gary tried several times, unsuccessfully, to table his proposal, the plastics motion was put to the vote.

‘It was the first motion that was ever carried unanimously in the whole history of the group,’ said Gary with a resigned grin. ‘There was some doubt as to how they were going to implement it, but that was soon forgotten when the treasurer stood up to give account of the financial situation. The UVA were virtually without funds: in fact, there was only enough to buy the assembled company a round or two of drinks. So we voted to disband and adjourn to the bar, and again it was passed unanimously.’

‘But where does that leave us?’ we wondered.

‘You could always try José-Luis and his
Colectivo Ecologista
in Tablones,’ suggested Gary. ‘They’d probably be a whole lot more effective than the UVA, anyway.’

The
Colectivo Ecologista,
Gary told us, were serious people. They would know how to get proper investigations underway, and José-Luis was a real force — not just a bar-radical. He was an activist to the core, a big bear of a man who earned his living teaching would-be plumbers in Albuñol, a town surrounded by a hideous sea of plastic greenhouses. He had moved down to the

Alpujarras from Santander, in northern Spain, and even after five years’ residence he was still considered an outsider by his neighbours. However, he devoted almost all his free time to local environmental issues, and had gained a reputation for exposing corrupt and illegal development schemes, and putting a spanner in their works. His weapons were a certain legal acumen, an ability to see through the obfuscations of bureaucracy, and a deafness to threats and backhanders.