Parrot in the Pepper Tree (26 page)

No sooner had Gary instilled the idea of contacting José-Luis than I began to hear of him from all quarters. The
Colectivo
had, it seemed, quite a track record. The year before they had launched a protest against plans to build an asphalt factory at Tablones that would have poisoned the air and almost certainly contaminated the river if it had gone ahead. The plans were found to be illegal and had to be shelved. So too had the plans to exploit a nearby site for a quarry: the fear, this time, being that the dust would spread for miles over the farm land, choking trees and crops. José-Luis had discovered, among other irregularities, that the projected site was
Patrimonio de Juventud,
held in trust for the youth of the municipality, and thus couldn’t be touched. He had aired this issue, among others, to the council, and the Mayor had called a halt.

It was with a deal of curiosity, and some hope, then, that I made my way on a sultry summer’s evening to Tablones and out along the riverbed of the Guadalfeo, looking for José Luis’s house. I had no very clear idea of the sort of place I expected an environmental activist to live in, but I was a little surprised to find the patio of his single-storey house surrounded by chicken wire (the previous owner, apparently, used it as a chicken run). Behind the wire a little girl was playing with some clothes pegs while her mother folded sheets. The front door was open and she gestured me inside with a friendly smile and wave, leaving me to follow a trail of cigarette smoke to a small windowless room that formed the HQ of
El Colectivo Ecologista y Cultural Guadalfeo.
Here, wedged between piles of books, ashtrays and affidavits, sat José-Luis, staring intently at a computer screen.

‘Hola,
welcome. You must be Cristóbal,’ he said, wresting his attention from the screen long enough to shake my hand, flick a butt into the bin and run a newly rolled cigarette across his tongue. ‘What do you think of this?’

Without further preamble he swung his massive frame back towards the screen and clicked on a picture, revealing a vast, yellow expanse of greenhouse plastic spreading across a series of fields down to the coast.

‘Not very nice, is it?’ he observed, ‘especially for the labourers who have to live and breathe the foul concentrations of toxins all day. That’s why they use Moroccan immigrants, you know. They can coerce them into staying, and no one’s going to bother much about the respiratory problems they get.’ And José-Luis launched into a catalogue of environmental and human damage wreaked by the greenhouse entrepreneurs, talking with passion about the tips of empty agro-chemical drums, the rocketing crime rate generated by this new business, and his fears that the dirty sea of plastic would soon start to encroach on the Alpujarras.

José-Luis seemed so engaged by this issue, and it seemed so fulsome a disaster, despite its boon to the local economy, that I felt reluctant to divert his attention to a lesser problem, such as our threatened dam. But he had heard about our interview in Malaga and he wanted to know everything about it.

‘Well.., perhaps you’ll have a look at this,’ I began apologetically, placing a piece of paper on the table beside his ashtray.

‘What on earth is it?’ he asked, peering closely at it through a fog of smoke. ‘It looks to me like a design for an aquarium.

It was in fact my sketch of the plan that we had seen in the file at the
Confederación Hidrográfica.

‘It’s the dam.’

‘Ah, so it is… and where exactly is it to be built?’

‘Just upriver from us, by El Granadino.’

José-Luis blew away a bit of ash that had fallen on the sheet and studied it through narrowed eyes. ‘Go on, then, tell me everything you know about it.’

So I told him what the dam was and how we had discovered it and what the tweed men had said about it.

José-Luis frowned. ‘By the look of this, you and probably a few others are going to lose a sizeable part of your farms,’ he said. ‘And the whole eco-system of the valley will be screwed, good and proper.

‘That’s right.’

‘Well then, we’d better do something about it, hadn’t we?’

In Andalucia, the preferred method for dealing with threats to the environment, or any other assault on the public interest, is to have a fiesta. This can achieve a number of goals at once: it can raise money, it can build public awareness of an issue, and, last but not least, everybody gets to have a good time.

Once José-Luis was on the case, the
Colectivo
swung swiftly into action. A fiesta committee was formed; posters with the date and venue were printed and distributed; beer, wine and mountains of meat were ordered; and musicians, the sort willing to play for free, were booked. The venue, perhaps, didn’t have an altogether ecological ring — Tablones cement-works — but it was the nearest thing to a flat patch of land that Tablones could offer. The date was a Saturday in mid-August.

The allotted night was starry and hot — it always is in August. Ana sold tickets for the food and drink, while I worked on the
pinchitos,
the kebab stall. The wine was not of the best but, with the night heat stoking the barbecue to an inferno, you drank whatever you could get. I drained my paper cup again and again, keeping pace with Abu Bakr, opposite, who was gulping mint tea at the halal
pinchitos
stall set up for the Muslim contingent.

For my own
pinchitos,
I had prepared an exotic marinade of ginger, garlic, onions, chillies, soy sauce, honey and sherry. This wasn’t as good as I had hoped, as I overdid the sherry, with the result that the marinade didn’t stick to the meat at all. Also my pork cubes were too big, meaning that the sweet wet meat was burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Still, most of the diners were too drunk to notice.

First on, as darkness fell, was a Cuban band composed of Spanish and Germans, with a French singer whose voice put me in mind of Billie Holiday. Musically, they were as good as the evening got, but they were near inaudible as the
colectivista
in charge of the sound system hadn’t yet arrived. Still, the night was young and as midnight passed, the amplification cranked into action, and revellers arrived from all across the Alpujarras and from as far away as Motril and Granada.

José-Luis shouldered his way through the throng, grinning exultantly and greeting people with great thumps on the back, leaving a trail of spluttered pork and wine. ‘There’s a good thousand people here — maybe two!’ he yelled, as a sudden burst of bass and drums announced the next act.

A thrash metal band had taken to the stage. They were José-Luis’s plumbing students and strong candidates for the worst band in Andalucia. The lead singer leapt about the stage yelling indecipherable lyrics against a cacophony of white noise that became more painful by the minute. Even the Spanish hardcore, who could chat over a hurricane, seemed to be cowering away from the speaker stacks. But the band were so delighted to be playing that there seemed no way of ever getting them off. Then at last someone hit upon the idea of pulling the plug and a sigh of relief rose from the crowd.

Ana came across for a
pinchito,
with a big grin on her face. ‘Good turn-out, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There must be at least five hundred here! It’s an amazing start.’

My reply was cut off by a fearful screech and yowl of microphone feedback as José-Luis prepared to address the crowd.

‘Friends and comrades!!’ he yelled. ‘You know why we’re here tonight. We’re here to save the Alpujarras.’ A cheer went up from the revellers. ‘We’re here to save the Alpujarras from the sharks and from the vultures’— the cheer grew— ‘from the speculators and the property developers, from the callous industrialists who are trying to destroy our mountains…

José-Luis was good at this; he was a born orator and the crowd was already on his side. This being the Alpujarras, the bulk of it was made up of alternative lifestylers — anarchists, artists, healers, herbalists, meditators, vegans, ovo-lacto-vegetarians and the like — along with a sprinkling of skinheads and thugs, up for a Saturday night of thrash metal and kebabs. Still, there was a feeling of euphoria, and as José-Luis hunkered down into a harangue about the threats to the Alpujarran environment — the dam, the asphalt plant, the piping of the rivers — the crowd’s rumblings became a roar and fists were raised in the air. It looked like the vultures and the sharks were well out of their league this time.

The crowd had been continuing to swell, and the demand for meat had long overtaken supply — even my oriental-style kebabs were getting wolfed down — while the wine, the beer and the
Cuba Libres
poured across the counters in ever more gargantuan quantities. Through the meat smoke, I smiled a slightly stupefied smile at Ana. I was just the tiniest bit fuddled with wine, but things were looking good and we were all having a hell of a good time. A local reggae band were doing their stuff, and their flashing lights illuminated the clouds of dust billowing from the dancers’ feet. I weaved unsteadily through the crowd and whirled Ana away in a dipping, hopping, arm-waving stumble of a dance.

After the bills had been paid, the fiesta actually turned a modest profit, and the
Colectivo
set about spending it, producing pamphlets and posters, featuring the slogan
Acequias SI! Dique NO!
— ‘Irrigation-canals YES! Dyke NO!’ Well, it sounded okay in the Spanish, and the activists made sure that every tree, sign and building throughout the Alpujarras proclaimed their message.

Meetings were also held to raise the consciousness of those unable to benefit from the fiesta. In remote villages across the Alpujarras, tiny gaggles of locals would gather beneath the poplars and chestnuts to hear José-Luis describe the environmental threats facing the region. I’d like to say that they were whipped up into a frenzy of defiance and immediately pledged their support but most often they seemed indifferent to matters far from their own farms and grazing.

Inevitably, perhaps, our optimism began to wane and as autumn turned to winter, the campaign against the dam began gradually to lose its momentum. For a few weeks, hope was rekindled when a specialist lawyer agreed to look into the case, but he proved unable to find a legal challenge that he thought would stick. His opinion was that we might hold up proceedings for short periods, at great cost and, possibly, some personal risk, but he doubted we could ever bring the dam to an effective halt.

Ana, who had become an avid reader of
El Ecologista,
the magazine of the Spanish Ecology movement, had been following the progress of a similar dam being built at Itoiz, in Navarra. It presented a salutary picture. Apparently, the opposition to this huge and unpopular project had strong European support and had won all the necessary legal battles to get the dam shelved.

But the State decided to sweep aside the legal challenges and go ahead with it anyway — while handing out stiff prison sentences to many of the eco-activists involved. It was depressing to discover that Domingo had grounds for his pessimism. The State seemed, indeed, to do as it pleased.

José-Luis didn’t try to hide his disappointment when I told him that I thought we should stop battling on with a project that had no chance of success. Such talk wasn’t in his repertoire. However, even the
Colectivo
began to seem resigned to losing this particular battle, and soon their funds and energies were again channelled into campaigns against the plastic greenhouses.

So, as we moved towards winter, Ana and I resigned ourselves to the putative dam. It wasn’t good for our own future, wasn’t good for the valley either, but we could see that in order to stop the Rules reservoir clogging up with sludge and boulders and uprooted trees, lesser dams like ours would be needed to work as river silt traps. Deeper arguments as to whether Rules itself was a benefit — enabling the dry coastal towns to indulge in yet more tourist Gormenghasts, golf-courses and greenhouses — seemed academic in view of the fact that it was almost complete.

Besides, there were things to do. It looked as if we were going to harvest a bumper crop of olives this year and the ground beneath the trees had become a jungle of brambles and thorny pomegranate shoots. That needed clearing. There was Christmas on the way, too, with hordes of friends and family coming to stay; we would need to fix up some accommodation in the other house, which was in a state of serious dilapidation.

From time to time to time I would catch Ana looking a little pensive or preoccupied as she gazed out over the familiar view of the rivers and the gorge, but as we busied ourselves with these tasks, the threat slipped ever further from our minds.