Parrot in the Pepper Tree (9 page)

The moon moved on down and slipped behind Cerro Negro, ‘Black Hill’, and the sky filled with stars. I gazed up at the Milky Way, and remembered when I was a child lying awake and listening to the terrors of night, the shifts and cracks made by my parents’ old house, or more probably by fearful fiends and things too horrible to name who were inching their way out from under the bed. I was always a little surprised to see the sun shining through the curtains in the morning, and to know I had made it through yet another night. But over the years I became accustomed to surviving, and this was the first night for a long time that I had been unsure of.

As I considered the stars in those dark hours that come before dawn, I began to feel a little more confident of making it through to morning. And then I heard him — of course, he would choose the darkest hour. He was creeping through the bushes on the hill above me. He could see me from there before I saw him. I froze with fear, fished again for my glasses and waited shivering by the bed, hefting the mattock. I could hear his breath, he was that close. Then a careful footfall and the breaking of a bush. I gripped the mattock hard. I heard him cough —and then an enormous fart. No man could fart that loud, not even the formidable Juan. It was Lola, the horse, and now I could hear her munching happily amongst the rosemary.

A distant cock crowed and then another, and the scops owl stopped booping. The sunlight filtered through, a fly settled on my nose, and I knew it was morning. Juan wouldn’t come now. He didn’t come the next night either.

I told Manolo about the business and he looked earnestly at me. ‘Juan?’ he said. ‘Juan! You don’t want to mess with Juan — he’s a maniac. He kills people for fun! You know he killed old Pepe Diáz, don’t you? He’s known for fighting — even the Guardia Civil are frightened of him — well, they’re frightened of everybody but they’re particularly frightened of Juan. He carries a
navajón
— a ten-inch knife — in his boot. He’s bad news. Cristóbal, you’re in real trouble now.

‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘That’s very reassuring. How do you know all this, anyway?’

Manolo rolled his eyes. ‘I worked for Juan last year, mucking the dung out of his sheep-stables. He’s a strong bastard. He could lift a mule up with one hand. And he has a terrible temper — I’d sooner mess with a wild boar than with that Juan.’

‘Still,’ I replied, keeping a front of optimism. ‘He didn’t come and get me last night, nor the night before. I don’t think he’ll bother to come and kill me now. I may have got away with it..?

‘Oh, I wouldn’t count on that. He’ll probably get you at the Feria — the summer fair. That’s when these things are done here. He’ll be drunk and spoiling for a fight and he’ll be furious about losing his blonde. Yes, Feria’s when he’ll get you.’ Manolo smiled happily at me.

Orgiva Feria — the town’s big festival — was the following week. The business with Juan might make it a little more interesting than usual. Feria is a time of unbelievable cacophony, when the townsfolk go overboard indulging their passion for noise. There’s a fairground where each and every ride has its own sound system, each more ear-splitting than the last. The streets are lined with brightly-lit sweet stalls and lottery stalls where you can win polyester day-glo cuddly toys, and these too have their own music, pumped out at about ten times the decibel level that strikes you stone deaf. The bars in the plaza, meanwhile, have sound systems the size of small houses, which thunder and rattle day and night, making it impossible to hold the faintest trace of conversation. Yet the locals just sit there chatting away as though nothing were happening. It’s my belief that the Spanish have better evolved ears than the rest of us.

As if the noise isn’t enough, Feria is also the time of year when the wind gets up. It comes trickling over the top of the Contraviesa, building up speed as it races through the gullies and canyons, then roars uphill from the Seven-Eye Bridge and howls into town, carrying plastic bags and beercans before it. It moans and wails round every corner, thick with grit and gravel which stings your eyes and gets in your nose and sets your teeth on edge as you eat the public paella in the plaza.

The only saving grace of the Orgiva Feria is the
pinchito
stall in the funfair, where you can lean against the tin bar hour after hour, munching your way through spicy skewers of pork and drinking warm dry sherry from a paper cup. It’s the thought of this — and the fact that Chloë enjoys hanging out at the fair with her schoolfriends — that keeps me going back each year. And besides, this Feria I had to show my face. I wasn’t going to let myself be bullied into missing the festive delights by some homicidal shepherd… even if he could lift a mule with one hand, and even if he did carry a ten-inch
navajón.

Almost as soon as Ana, Chloë and I arrived in town, I spotted Juan chatting with a couple of friends in the street. I was all for stepping over to him straight away and giving my masculinity an airing, but Ana made this impossible by walking off and leaving me with Chloë. A smart move. She knew I wouldn’t consider a brawl the most edifying spectacle for my six-year-old daughter.

After Chloë had gone off with her friends, I settled down for a stint at the
pinchito
stall, and waited to run into Juan. Manolo and Domingo were both at the bar, and Domingo comfortingly assured me that Juan reckoned I had been Petra’s lover — why else would I interfere? — and that his anger was still festering.

Juan, however, didn’t show up again.

In the town a few weeks after Feria I ran into Petra for the first time since the night of violence. She embraced me warmly.

‘For Chrissake lay off, Petra!’ I said, backing off ‘You want to try and get me killed again?’

‘No, don’t worry about it, Chris. I just wanted to thank you for being so wonderful that night?

‘It’s all very well to say “Don’t worry”, but there’s a dangerous maniac out there with a big knife and if he sees his blonde all over me in the high street then I’m meat.’

‘Oh, Juan is alright. He’s not a dangerous maniac at all. In fact I must rush because I’m just going to pick him up and take him to hospital…’

‘You what?!’

‘He’s got kidney stones and the pain makes him crazy. That was partly what made him so aggressive that night; he was crazy with pain and I had refused to take him to hospital?

‘Petra, why on earth didn’t you say any of this then?’ I asked, appalled.

‘Perhaps I was wrong that night. Juan is usually as gentle as a lamb. Anyway I must fly. Bye!’

I told Manolo what Petra had said. ‘Oh — Juan is alright,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t actually kill Pepe Diáz either, it was a heart attack. No, there’s no doubt about it, Juan wouldn’t have harmed you.’

I looked at him sideways.

‘And what about the
navajón
he keeps in his boots?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he answered with a smile. ‘I’ve never had any cause to look inside them.’

SO FAR AT EL VALERO WE HAVE RESISTED THE CALL OF THE MOBILE phone. Its appeal is admittedly limited, since a mobile wouldn’t work where we live, surrounded as we are by a ring of mountains. But I’m a little uneasy in any case with telephone technology; I once wasted a morning trying to make a phone call from a friend’s house using the TV remote control. Ana, too, is something of a Luddite. She won’t have anything to do with computers, for example. Not long ago, someone gave her an old IBM golf-ball typewriter which is as big and heavy as a small traction engine. She was delighted with it even though it spatters any paper that passes through it with gobbets of light engine oil. ‘This is the future,’ she announced as she heaved the thing through the doorway.

For many years we had no phone at all at El Valero. We wrote letters to our friends and received letters in return, and on the odd occasion when there was something pressing, we would go to the telephone-house in Tíjolas. An enterprising family in the village had invested in a telephone meter. This enabled them to provide a public service and, with an astronomical multiplication of the already ruinous Telefónica rate, to turn a nice profit. However much they charged, though, the telephone-house was not a place for a relaxed call. The phone and its meter were mounted on the wall of the family sitting room, between a picture of the Bleeding Heart and a bunch of faded plastic flowers. Callers were clearly intruders on family life.

The quickest way to get to the telephone-house in those days was to trek down the river, the road being particularly bad. So a telephone call became quite a performance. First there was the bracing hour-long walk, crashing through the cane brakes and sloshing thigh-deep in fast-flowing water. Then there was the problem of insinuating yourself into a stranger’s home and trying not to drip river water onto the scrubbed floor.

The usual routine was to announce your arrival with a shout — or, at least that’s what the locals would do. I tended to be a bit hesitant, asking in excessively formal language ‘if perhaps I might make use, for a short time, of the telephone.’ The telephone-woman would then look me up and down disapprovingly, lingering with particular distaste on my sodden shoes, before gesturing with an imperious motion that I was to follow her through the fly-curtain. Once inside the gloomy sitting room, she would click the meter back to nought and then stand beside it, arms folded, glaring at me. On a really bad day, other members of the family would gather and glare, too.

As I dialled the exotic foreign number, I would stand tight to the wall and grin vacuously at the watchers as the phone rang away at the other end of the line. It would ring and ring —Telefónica gives you a minute — then stop. For the full minute everybody would stare at me.

‘No reply,’ I’d say to the telephone-woman.

‘He didn’t get a reply,’ she’d translate for the benefit of the others. They’d grunt at the news and shuffle out.

And then I would head back up the river, jogging and leaping rocks to try and get back before nightfall.

Ana and I made do with letters and the Tíjolas telephone-house for our first six years in Spain — including the time of Chloë’s birth, which in retrospect may have been a bit rash. But we were happy enough with the arrangement and agreed that life was probably better without a phone — even if we could have had one, which we couldn’t. For Telefónica, a corporation with little zest for philanthropy, was not going to run a land line all the way out to the valley and across the river just for us.

Then one early summer’s day in Granada we passed a shop promoting a new type of radio telephone. We went in to take a look and, like a couple of country bumpkins, were signing up before we knew it. It seemed almost too good to be true. We could purchase a brand new radio handset and base at a special price, grant-aided for outlying rural properties, and within a week an engineer would come to see about installing it.

And so he did, arriving hot and flustered after the walk from the bridge and complaining that the battery on his receiving apparatus was flat. He grumbled around the place for a further half hour, doing all that he could to make us feel guilty for the inconvenience we were causing him by our decision to install a telephone in a remote
cortijo.
He seemed to grow crosser by the minute until, finally, he pronounced, like some terrible indictment: ‘No, it won’t work. There’s no signal anywhere in the house. You’re just too far from everywhere.’

‘But you just said your battery was flat,’ I pointed out.

‘Claro
— but that has nothing at all to do with it’, he growled.

‘Wait, there is just a faint signal right over there — it’s almost too feeble to hear but it’s the best you’re going to get out in this godforsaken place. This spot right here is where you must have your telephone.’ He looked at us with a sort of triumph.

‘We can’t put a telephone there,’ we gasped. ‘That’s right in the middle of the
chumbo.’

Now, the
chumbo
(or more properly
chumbera)
is a prickly pear, a plant that adorns almost every
cortijo
in the peninsula. In the sixteenth century, when it was brought back along with agaves and gold and silver from the Americas, it was discovered not only to have tasty fruit but to have the extraordinary property of absorbing shit. The
chumbo
became an essential component of every country property, and it is a convenience rural folk find hard to give up. Last year a shepherd in Torvizcón, up the Cádiar river, showed me around his newly-modernised
cortijo.
Proudly he opened every door and displayed all the innovations: the TV, the chandelier, the fitted kitchen, until with a flourish he opened wide the door to the lavatory: ‘And here,’ he said, ‘is the toilet, with running water and everything. We fitted it last year’ — he looked at me to check that I was paying attention — ‘but thanks be to God, we have not yet had to make use of it!’