None of this, however, cut any mustard with the eco-fundamentalists of Órgiva, who for months picked arguments with me about the havoc I was wreaking in the delicate balance between man and nature.
WALKING WITH THE WATER
ALONG THE CONTOUR LINES OF THE MOUNTAINS, A RIBBON OF bright green foliage delineates the acequias of the Alpujarras, an ancient system of irrigation channels that carry the rainwater and snowmelt from the high peaks to the valley farms. Debate smoulders as to whether it was the Romans two thousand years ago, or the Moors some eight hundred years later, who first built these channels. But whoever brought the idea here, it is, along with the terracing of the hills, the most important man-made element in the beauty of this landscape.
The principle behind this system of irrigation is simple: the rain and snow which falls in the huge catchment area of the mountains seeps down into vast aquifers or underground seams of water whence it is released slowly through the year to feed the rivers and springs which rise on the lower slopes. The acequias then channel off this water, carrying it at a gentle gradient down to the farms and villages below.
There is a lot of leakage involved but this is all part of the scheme of things. As the water runs along the channel it seeps through the earth and the cracks and the mole-holes to water the wild plants and the trees that grow along its banks. The root systems of these plants form mats that support the banks of the channels and stop them crumbling into the abyss below. Attempts to improve on nature by concreting parts of the acequias tend to do more harm than good. The plants bordering the channel dry up, the root system rots and loses its binding power, and the weight of the concrete and the water cause the whole thing to subside and distort the all-important levels.
There are literally hundreds of miles of acequias in the Alpujarras, and the paths along their banks, lined with grasses and a rich variety of alpine flowers – gentians, campanula, digitalis, saxifrage – make wonderful walking, with occasional heart-stopping views of the cirque of mountain peaks that rise to Veleta and Mulhacén. High in the mountains, way above the villages, the channels are wide streams of clear rushing water, ice-cold and, lying far above any possible source of contamination, delicious to drink. Lower down, where the acequias have their mouths in the valleys and gorges of the rivers, are dramatic stretches where the channels are cut into the rock of sheer cliff faces hundreds of feet high. These stretches were cut long ago with hammers and chisels by men suspended on ropes from the cliffs above.
In places the acequias flow along aqueducts mounted on walls of stone, built on hillsides too steep even to teeter on, let alone build a stone wall. The water rushes through tunnels full of bats and huge moths and out into the dazzling sunlight or on through shaded woods to plunge into impenetrable jungles of razor-edged leaves and thorny barbs.
Hundreds of small farmers depend on these acequias and so an organised social system has grown up to ensure an equitable supply. Each acequia has its president, elected each year, its treasurer, and its acequero. The president presides over the democratic process of decision-making, resolves disputes and liaises with the water authority. The treasurer takes the water-fees, agreed upon every year by the waterers to cover costs of maintenance and improvements. The acequero walks the full length of the acequia every day and is responsible for its smooth running, keeping an eye on leaks and danger points, and ensuring that each waterer shuts his water off at the right moment without running over into the next man’s time.
If your land has water rights from a certain acequia, you are allotted a certain time and a certain quantity of water. You may be unlucky (or out of favour with the water president) and come up with, say, seventeen minutes of one third of the acequia at ten past three on Thursday mornings. Accordingly you plod out to your orange grove and your vegetables with your torch stuck in your mouth and your mattock over your shoulder. At ten past three – not nine minutes nor eleven minutes past – you pull the hatch and let the great body of water tumble through onto your land. The partidor, a simple construction of bricks and mortar, ensures that you only get a third of the water available.
If you don’t have a tank in which to store your quota, you must race frantically around in the dark, chopping with your mattock at the little dams and dykes and channels, ensuring that each tree gets a thorough soaking and every trench of vegetables fills to the brim. On a night with a full moon this job can be a delight, as ripples spread silver across the surface of the black water to an accompaniment of trickling streams. But a tank is more practical and anyone with a little spare cash installs one so they can fill it with their seventeen minutes of water and irrigate their land at leisure the next day.
El Valero, standing alone on the far side of the river, is unusual in that it has its own acequia – which is to say the potential for twenty-four hours of water seven days a week. There are no acequia dues to pay either, on the basis that if we want the water we have to clear the channels ourselves – a deal that struck me as very generous when it was first explained but which I’ve since come to have my doubts about. Pedro Romero had, predictably, been none too zealous in his duties as custodian of the El Valero acequia, although Maria, with occasional help from Bernardo, did what she could to coax a little more water to the farm through the silted-up channels, overgrown thickets and crumbling stone aqueducts.
When we first arrived to take possession of the farm, the acequia was in a dismal state. I almost despaired of ever getting it going again, as neighbours shook their heads and warned of its difficulties. Part of the problem is that it is entirely seasonal. Its mouth, a mile upriver from the farm, consists of a pool in the river, created by a makeshift dam of boulders and boughs, rusting sheets of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting. This gets swept away every year by the winter rains and has to be rebuilt every spring along with the cleaning of the channel.
The dam guides the water into the narrow mouth of the acequia where it begins a rapid descent down through a bed of red earth and through an alley of tall poplars. As the river drops away, it flows on across a scrub-covered hill, charting its course through tunnels of bramble, shallow grey bogs of reeds, and stretches of ground so barren that nothing will grow except capers. Finally, the water disappears into a tunnel beneath the farm’s ancient threshing floor to emerge between the roots of an old fig tree, almost crystal clear, having deposited its red sludge along the channel.
From there it pours in a succession of cascades across a steep meadow known to us as Seven Scorpions (we tried to clear the field of stones just after we moved in, and under each of the first seven stones we lifted, we found a scorpion). Then, at last, it makes its way down along the edge of orange terraces and back into the river.
By the end of April, a distinct reluctance in the rainfall, and the feverish activity to be seen on the other acequias, alerted me to the necessity of getting some water through to the farm. As ever, I went across the river to see what Domingo had to say about the matter.
He was sitting on his tinao, or terrace, with his cousin Antonio and both were hacking away industriously with their knives, absorbed in the business of making little model ploughs. This was a rather odd notion that Domingo had hit upon to make a bit of money – a friend who ran a bar in the mountains had promised to display them on the wall and sell them. Tangles of copper wire, nuts and bolts and a big pot of varnish lay in disarray on the floor among the cats and the potatoes. Antonio’s work station was supplied with a much depleted bottle of costa to which he was addressing himself with relish.
‘It’s his vice,’ explained Domingo, blowing the shavings off a tiny wooden wedge he had just carved. ‘He’s no good without it . . . and he’s not a lot of good with it either. Look at this, man! How the hell are you going to plough with a thing like that? Look here, it’s twisted, it’ll run off to the side . . . ’ and he seized the model Antonio was working on and waved it disdainfully in the air towards me.
Antonio grinned good-naturedly and shook my hand. ‘Encantado ,�
�� he said in greeting, taking the tiny plough back from Domingo and placing it carefully on the pile of finished models. ‘I can’t see anyone’s going to plough with it anyway, cousin – it’s too damn small!’ he added to Domingo as he drained down his glass of costa .
Eventually, I explained the reason for my visit to Domingo, who immediately volunteered his and Antonio’s assistance – ‘if he’s sober’ – in clearing my acequia, and suggested we start the next week.
I had my misgivings about the prospect of employing Antonio but there was little choice in the matter, and, in any case, my doubts proved unfounded. Antonio, even half-drunk, proved to be a man who worked with the capacity of a mechanical digger, and was cheerful with it, commenting on life in philosophical asides. The only problem was keeping him sober for more than a few days at a time, for, away from Domingo’s watchful company, Antonio went on paralytic blinders of drinking.
When the two turned up, on the Monday morning agreed, Domingo gave me a stern warning about his cousin’s contract of employment. ‘Don’t pay him anything,’ he instructed. ‘As soon as you give him money he’ll be off and that’ll be the last you or I will see of him.’
‘But I’ve got to pay the bloke,’ I protested. ‘I can’t let him work for nothing.’
‘Well, save it up and pay him when the job’s finished. And don’t give it to him all in one lump either.’
It was kindly advice and with a hint of self-interest, too. Domingo told me how time and again he had found Antonio slumped in the gutter in one of the mountain villages, often badly cut from falling hard on the cobbles. He would haul him, soaked in wine and urine, into his car and take him down to La Colmena and nurse him back to some semblance of life. Antonio would return the favour, helping him with work around the farm. Then one day he’d be off, up early in the morning for the four-hour climb up to his home village of Bubión, stopping on the way at Las Cañadillas to enjoy a litre or two of wine with another cousin who kept a few goats and liked to encourage Antonio in his habit.
Domingo and Antonio turned up for the acequia task armed with picks, shovels, mattocks and sickles, and accompanied by two more peones – day labourers – Manolo, a young muleteer from the village with a mop of blue-black hair and a winning smile, and Paquito, whose dreamy look made me wonder if he was quite with us in this world. But they assured me that with a sickle in his hand he would perform in spectacular fashion.
We climbed the hill behind the house and dropped down into the barranco that leads to the tunnel. Paquito and Antonio pitched straight in with their sickles, clearing the overhanging mat of vegetation. I fought my way a few yards up the acequia to where there was a particularly nasty-looking patch of scrub. Grasping in my gloved hand a fistful of barbs and thorns, I hacked away with the sickle, entangling myself in a procession of hostile plants. First the brambles took hold of me, then the trumpet-vine, and as I was flailing about trying to extract myself from those fearsome tendrils, a pomegranate branch would bend forward and poke me in the eye, or a pampas grass would neatly slice into my neck. There wasn’t a good-natured plant among the whole contorted tangle. I was getting nowhere, so I left the clearing and took up the shovel at the back of the gang.
Manolo and Paquito seemed to have no such problems with the jungle of plants and steadily disappeared into the distance, leaving the banks neatly trimmed behind them. Domingo and Antonio followed behind, clearing the silt and re-cutting the bed of the channel, while I sweated and heaved at the back, shovelling out the debris. With the exception of the shoveller, who soon lost ground, the team moved along at an easy walking pace.
It was humbling to watch them. Every five minutes or so I would straighten up to ease the agony in my back and wipe the stinging sweat from my eyes; the others stayed down and just kept on going. At the end of the day we ambled back along the smooth hollowed ground to the farm. ‘Have we really cleared all this?’ I wondered in disbelief as vista after vista of neatly opened channel appeared around each bend like a well-manicured woodland walk.
The second day was slower as we mulled over how we were going to negotiate the dreadful stretch that ran below El Avispero, an assault course of man-eating brambles and rubble-strewn rockfalls. But somehow we got through it and towards evening found ourselves easing through the softer earth and gentler vegetation of the Barranco del Pino. By noon on the third day we had emerged at the poplar alley below the dam.
There remained only the opening of the sluice to let the water come pouring into the newly cleaned channel and work its way down to our farm. Domingo calculated that it would take five hours to get there, which left plenty of time to have lunch and clear all the channels on the farm itself before it arrived. I was delegated to walk with the water and see that the twigs and leaves cut and fallen from the undergrowth didn’t clog up the tunnels.
While other tasks sink into drudgery with constant repetition, I never fail to delight in walking with the water. I sneak ahead of its course and sit down to suck a stem of grass and contemplate the peace, keeping an eye on the dry bed of the acequia and an ear open for the gentle rustling of what is initially unrecognisable as water. It appears as a whispering mosaic of dried leaves, petals, turdlets and twigs. Pink and white and golden, it creeps quietly along, filling the hollows with a little rush and easing up slowly to consume the high places. It was a thrill, that first day, watching as the water gathered and swelled and saturated the dry earth. It crept up the bank, pouring into the ant-hills and mole-runs, and little by little turned into a full-blown stream. Seeing it, I would splash through to the head and race around the next corner to await the miracle all over again.
Watering is a measure of manhood in the Alpujarras. A man who knows not the watering no sirve – he’s useless. Domingo said to me one day in a fit of pique: ‘You, Cristóbal, do not know the watering. You do not understand the water.’ These were the harshest words he could have chosen, a vicious accusation impugning my worth. I think he had a hangover but the cut went straight to my heart. Wounded, I sat beneath a tree wondering about the watering. Maybe he was right. At the time of this attack I had been running the farm for only three years or so – no time to know the watering.
What I knew was that water had a tendency to run downhill, and when left to its own devices would always work its way to where you didn’t want it, eroding terraces, destroying walls and exposing the roots of trees. If you saturated a terrace too much it could collapse with a noise like thunder, leaving a mess of tumbled earth and stones and trees on the terrace below, a disgrace that’s difficult to hide and a lot of work to repair.
But when the watering goes well there’s nothing quite like it. Building dams and channels of mud in the streams in the woods was my favourite occupation as a boy and I count myself lucky to be able to enjoy the same thing as an adult. In summer I water in rubber sandals, so while the rest of my body is burning, my feet and ankles are drenched in cool water. With my mattock I open the sluice in the main channel, moving the little dam of earth and stones from the bank to the middle of the acequia. The brown swirling water brims over the side of the pool and then courses along the channels of the field and eases across the grass. Like a great amoeba the head of the water parts to go round the high spots, then slowly consumes them, darkening the pale dust before rejoining the stream. As the water reaches the trees and sinks to the roots, they seem to sigh, releasing clouds of scent.
I then wander about with my mattock adjusting the flow, tossing a stone into a too fast-flowing freshet, delivering a fierce chop with the mattock to increase a feeble flow. Eventually the distribution is nicely organised, with the water flowing just right to spread out and reach the bottom of the field in a few hours. Then along comes Beaune and flops down in the stream to cool off. The water, dammed by the dog, overflows the banks and messes the whole system up, so I have to start all over again. As evening falls, the swallows wing down from the houses and the rocks and skim above the water, wolfing the uncountable insects that cling t
o the tops of the grass-blades like sailors on the masts of sunken ships.
I love the watering and I’m hoping that by the time I’ve notched up twenty or thirty years’ practice my neighbour might even admit that I know it.
CATS AND PIGEONS
‘THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO,’ ANA announced, looking decisively up from a book with a cat on the cover, ‘is to get those cats sorted out. We can’t be surrounded by creatures like that. It’ll make us miserable. They must be rehabilitated.’
Besides a few rusting plant tins, the camalas and the brick, Pedro had left us two cats. You don’t move cats; they take root. There was a starving husk of an old mother, and the feeble wisp that was her offspring. The poor little creature had never had the opportunity to be a kitten; it was born straight into a world of hunger and blows. They were grey tabbies with much of their fur scorched from seeking warmth in the hot ashes of the fire.
They slunk around, weak with hunger and worms, the picture of dejection. Pedro hadn’t cared much for his dogs – even his three familiars, Tiger, Brown and Buffoon – but cats were beyond consideration. They were allowed to attach themselves to the house only because, according to Pedro, they were the most fantastic ratters. It was hard to believe from the lifeless way in which they slouched about the place. Ana was right; their miserable plight was already getting to me.
Our initial task was to tame them so that we could get flea-collars over their heads and worm them. Ana is good with animals. It took about three days before they got the hang of being fed, and three days after that I found Ana stroking them on her lap.
We had thought that the business of the flea-collars would be all but impossible – feral creatures such as these would never accept such trappings of domesticity. In the event they both stood still and bowed their heads meekly to receive the collars. They almost seemed to know that this was a mark of being taken over by people who cared for them – or was that too foolish a notion? From there it was but a short step to a swift jab of wormer in the scruff of the neck.
Driving Over Lemons Page 11