Driving Over Lemons

by Chris Stewart

  Were it not for my steadfast faith in the skills of Domingo I might have curled up and wept. But I knew I would enjoy the work ahead with my mentor-neighbour. Not that Domingo was a sensitive teacher; the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him. If I laid a stone that did not conform to his idea of the correct postura he would shout at me. ‘No!! Not like that. Dick in vinegar, man! If you lay them like that the wall will be shit, and when we come to put the roof on it’ll fall down.’ Then he would stump around to my side of the wall, grab the offending stone and thump it down so that it sat correctly.

  ‘Ah, like that you mean . . .’

  Building in stone is a very inexact science. Each stone has seven posturas, local wisdom has it, and none of them is ever exactly right for where you want the stone to be. So the placing of each stone is a compromise and over each one a taxing decision must be made. It’s very wearing on the mind, but there is a tremendous satisfaction in seeing a wall rising steadily from the ground, as if by organic extension of the soil itself.

  Little by little I learned, and Domingo was able to spend less time shouting at me and more placing his own stones. My job was to mix the cement and lay the inside of the walls, while Domingo saw to the more important outside facing. He seemed to be very good at it and in not too many days we stood back to admire a straight and imposing piece of masonry the very size, girth and essence of a wall.

  ‘Where did you learn to build in stone like this?’ I asked. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Why, here, working with you,’ he replied, as if surprised by the implication that he had ever wielded a trowel before. But he’d often seen it done, he hastened to assure me.

  In the event it didn’t seem to matter that we were two entire novices. Domingo’s unshakeable self-confidence infected me, and within a couple of weeks we were both cocky and halfway competent builders. The architectural side of things we dealt with on pieces of scrap paper with a biro and a tape measure. Domingo had all sorts of fanciful notions of long-beamed porticos and stone pillars and arches, but I reckoned his plans were a little too ambitious for our humble mountain home.

  We took a break before starting work on the extension walls where the new kitchen was to be sited. Domingo had fallen behind with his farmwork and I too needed to catch up on tasks left undone. But then on the day we were due to restart, Domingo failed to turn up. I humped a few stones about on my own but made so little progress it seemed a waste of time. He didn’t turn up the day after either. When I finally found him he seemed troubled.

  ‘What happened to you on Monday?’

  ‘I was in hospital in Granada. My mother’s been taken ill.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Cancer of the kidneys. They say she won’t last more than a couple of weeks.’ The last words were stifled in an attempt to prevent the tears breaking through.

  I stared back appalled. This couldn’t be true. Expira was so healthy, such a solid, comfortable presence. How could she be dying? Domingo, in defeated tones that were heartwrenching to hear, told me a few sketchy details about Expira’s mysterious pains and an emergency referral from the doctor’s surgery. I groped around for some words of comfort and reassurance but there was nothing I could find in either language that came even close to the mark. Expira would have known what to say, but Expira was in hospital.

  The thought prompted me to be practical. I arranged to go over and feed his livestock for him before taking some food and a few extra toiletries to the hospital the next day. Then I went back to break the news to Ana.

  The next morning we met Domingo in the bar of the Hospital of the Virgin of the Snows. He had black bags beneath his eyes and had obviously been weeping.

  ‘All my mother’s relatives have come down from Barcelona and Zaragoza,’ he told us. ‘And all her sisters from the Alpujarra. They’re here, waiting . . .

  ‘They say it won’t be long now,’ he added quietly, as we trudged forlornly along the broad hospital corridors. As we approached Expira’s ward the corridor seemed to fill with black-clad figures. They were bent in attitudes of unutterable dejection; some of the old women keened quietly as they rocked to and fro. The men stood with their hands in their pockets looking down at the lino floor and wondering what to say. Some children were trying hard to play through the thickening atmosphere of gloom. ‘Shsshh!’ their parents admonished them.

  Old Man Domingo was there, rocking quietly back and forth, his eyes downcast. We shook hands and mumbled . . . I didn’t know what condolences were in Spanish – only felicitations.

  Then Domingo ushered us through the swing-doors and over to Expira’s bed. She was propped up against a huge pillow and, startlingly, she looked absolutely radiant. In fact, I’d never seen her looking so well. Perhaps it was partly the contrast of her tanned face against the white of the hospital nightgown and sheets. I wasn’t used to seeing Expira clad in white. But nonetheless, this was not the deathbed scene I had dreaded.

  Expira dissolved into a huge smile and embraced us warmly. ‘Ay, how wonderful to see a couple of cheerful faces! Everybody here is so gloomy it makes me feel miserable. I wish they’d just clear off and leave me in peace but they won’t. They just hang around getting glummer and glummer.’

  We gave her the bags of grapes and peaches that we’d brought along for her. ‘Well, you look pretty good to me, Expira – you look wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘And I feel fine too. I’m having a good rest. It hurts me a bit here, mostly when I laugh, but with all these muttonheads around me I don’t get much chance of that.’ She indicated the members of her extended family peering round the door.

  We sat on her bed, one on either side, and did what we could to bring a little cheer to what Domingo reckoned were his mother’s last few days.

  Later, as we left the hospital, he explained. ‘They’re going to operate on Friday on the growth on her kidney, but even if it’s successful it will only give her another week or so, another week of pain and misery.’

  ‘She doesn’t look that miserable to me, Domingo. She looks better than I’ve seen her for a long time. Are you quite sure about this?’

  ‘It’s what the doctor told us.’

  We didn’t know what to think. We’d both been deeply upset at the news of Expira’s illness and its desperate prognosis, but felt our hearts lightened by the state in which we’d seen her.

  ‘She certainly doesn’t look like a dying woman to me,’ said Ana emphatically.

  On Saturday morning I went across to La Colmena to see Domingo. He would break his vigil every day to come home and feed the chickens and rabbits and partridges and pigs. I found him whistling as he poked food through the bars of the tiny cage where an unfortunate male partridge lived out its miserable existence.

  ‘How did the operation go?’

  He turned around and grinned a grin I hadn’t seen for a long time. ‘She’s alright. Much better. It wasn’t cancer at all.’ Apparently, at the end of the operation, while all the family were keeping tearful vigil outside the theatre, the doors suddenly flew open and a doctor burst out beaming. It wasn’t cancer at all, just a stone in the kidneys. There was no danger. Expira would spend a day or two in the hospital recovering from the operation, then she could go home.

  Of course there was much rejoicing at Expira’s miracle, but Domingo and his father had had a serious shock. Things could never go back to being quite the way they were before Expira’s hospitalisation. As if by magic they gathered all their apparently scant resources and bought a flat in town – for cash. Expira needed rest from the relentless labour of running a cortijo and looking after the men in her family, and Domingo was determined that she should get it. The flat was immediately furnished with a freezer, a washing-machine and a huge TV whose colour system offered pictures in tones of red or green.

  Expira and Old Man Domingo treated the flat with suspicion. We went to see it, and the radiant and newly recovered Expira showed us proudly around, pointing out the more impressive fe
atures: the chandelier – sine qua non of all modern Spanish homes (and especially the poorest), and the bathroom with all its myriad methods of dispensing miraculous running water. ‘It tastes disgusting – filthy water, you can’t drink it,’ said Expira laughing happily.

  Old Man Domingo extricated himself from the leatherette sofa, where he had been sitting mesmerised in a detached sort of a way by the nonsense that was unfolding in shades of iridescent green on the telly. ‘Come,’ he beckoned, and led us outside to his domain. Beyond the flat’s kitchen door was a patch of land the size of a bedsheet – already laying claim as the most intensive patch of cultivation in Europe. There was once a fashion for writing postcards with the writing crossing in two directions, in order I suppose to get more on the card. This was just what Old Man Domingo had done with his plot.

  ‘Look,’ he said, proudly. ‘Here are the aubergines and the tomatoes and do you not see the little peppers?’

  Indeed we did, crammed tightly into their lovingly prepared ridges and furrows, criss-crossed by the young aubergines and the little tomatoes already tied to their first step up the canes. The Meleros were not thinking of living permanently in the flat, it was just a bolt-hole for when things got too rough out at the cortijo, somewhere Expira could take things a little easier, but nevertheless the priority was to get the vegetables in.

  We sat on the sofa and drank a glass of wine.

  ‘Life in the cortijo is hard,’ said Expira. ‘All that dust and dirt and the flies and the wretched animals, and here it’s easy – why, four strokes of the broom and the place is spotless. But there’s nothing to do except sit and look at that horrible television. There isn’t even a view to make you happy,’ she declared, pointing through the window at the wall of the next block of flats. ‘You couldn’t live here long or you’d go crazy.’

  In the new circumstances of his mother’s close encounter with the glory and her convalescence in town, Domingo couldn’t spare much time for the building work at El Valero. He had too much work of his own to do and in any case, he explained, I knew the business well enough by now to carry on by myself.

  I had indeed learned both techniques and confidence from Domingo’s idiosyncratic tuition, and perhaps he was right, maybe I could rebuild a house alone. But building a stone house on your own is a job that would take for ever. I needed help. As luck would have it, help wasn’t too far off.

  An hour’s walk up the Cádiar river lies Puerto Jubiley, a tiny, more or less abandoned village that straddles the river just before it enters the gorge. Ana and I used to walk up there every now and then to give the dog an airing. The shade cast by the steep cliffs and the swiftly flowing water cool the air in the gorge so on a hot night it is like walking up a cool river of air. Because few people use the river-path these days, the wild creatures that inhabit the cliffs and hills come down without fear to the water to drink. You are almost certain to see ibex, boar or eagles, or just water-snakes, frogs, turtles and lizards.

  One evening, Ana and I were taking a walk through the small riverside vega of neatly cultivated maize and alfalfa fields that form a bright patchwork of green among the canebreaks at the border of the outlying ruins of the village. A couple stood squinting suspiciously into the evening sun at us from the front of one of the first of the tumble-down houses.

  ‘Hola, buenas tardes,’ we said, returning their suspicious look. They didn’t look anything like our idea of Spanish villagers, too fair, too obviously . . . English.

  ‘Buenas tardes,’ they replied. ‘You don’t look Spanish at all.’

  Cathy and John turned out to be long-term refugees from English life, having moved to Spain a decade earlier and, after living for a couple of years near Seville, settled upon this remote spot. On that first meeting – tea followed by wine – we all found ourselves resenting our shared Englishness. After all, we were more or less next-door neighbours and none of us had come to Spain to live next door to our compatriots.

  Still, it wasn’t long before we forgave each other’s origins and a friendship developed. Cathy and John lived in circumstances like our own, and were also doing up their ramshackle village house bit by bit, with the limited sums of money they earned through teaching English, doing building work and carpentry, and acting as guides through the arcane web of Spanish administration for other foreigners buying property in the area.

  We hit upon a work-exchange arrangement together. Once a week I would ride up to the Puerto and spend a day labouring on our new friends’ house, retailing the information I had picked up from Domingo’s building lessons. And in return we had the benefit of John and Cathy’s skills in plumbing, electrics, plastering and carpentry. At El Valero, tasks with pipes which had before seemed fantastically complex were painlessly completed. An electrical system was installed to work off the new solar panels I had bought in Granada, and little by little the house shed its peasant rags and started to move into what remained of the twentieth century.

  However, with just the three of us working sporadically, and with occasional help from Ana, progress was pathetically slow. I couldn’t see us getting the house finished in less than a couple of years. We had to take some action to speed things along. So at the instigation of Carole, my level-headed sister in London, I placed an advertisement in New Zealand House to see if I could persuade some itinerant Kiwis to lend a hand. They would be offered a laughable pay-packet but a chance to see a bit of Andalucía, eat a lot of home-cooked food and drink as much costa as they dared. I had worked with New Zealanders in fencing and shearing gangs in Britain and admired their easygoing cheerfulness and propensity for enjoying hard work.

  We got more than seventy-five replies. Carole shortlisted them and conducted interviews using a checklist that I had supplied her with. Then I did the final interviews myself from the phone office in Órgiva.

  So we found ourselves once again in company at El Valero, living with four strong Kiwis: David and Gitte, Keith and Diane. I took over Domingo’s role and laid the all-important outside stones while shouting at the others till they got their stones right. The system worked well and before long, with the benefit of all the talents and skills of the team, plus Cathy and John’s groundwork, the house started to take shape.

  ‘Spontaneous Architecture,’ Keith called it. He had trained as an architectural draughtsman in New Zealand and was initially horrified by the way we flouted conventional design procedures. The height of the risers of the patio stairs, for example, was governed by the size of the stones we were using to build them, and almost everything else was likewise designed to fit the materials to hand. Water-pipes were left exposed and electric cables were run along the surface of the walls, rather than being needlessly chased into the stone.

  It took about five months to complete the house, with the stone floors laid, the new chestnut beams hoisted into position, and cleaned and oiled with the requisite twelve coats of linseed oil, the plumbing all set to go, and all the rustic woodwork neatly scarfed together. The centrepiece was an elegant fireplace with a moulded chimney and a curved olive lintel, built to the specifications of one Count Rumford, an enthusiast for open fires who had experimented with hearth designs in the late nineteenth century in America. He had come up with the perfect proportions to get the smoke away and up the chimney and the heat out into the room. Our homespun version of the same was a joy to behold.

  We had a celebration dinner to admire the finished work – a ‘roof-shout’ the Kiwis called it. Cathy and John had thoughtfully provided some champagne and in the glow of bonhomie that such bottles produce, Keith announced that he and Diane were going to use our Spontaneous Architectural principles on the house they planned to build in New Zealand.

  Then a hush descended as I stooped to light the great stack of rosemary and olive logs that we had laid in the grate. The little flame from the match leapt into the kindling and in seconds became a blazing roar that boomed in the chimney, illuminating the room with a dancing ruddy glow. I couldn’t help but feel a
little weepy. It was almost as if I was setting in motion the heart of our new home.

  DOGS AND SHEEP

  AS AUTUMN MOVED INTO WINTER, SNOW FELL IN THE HIGH sierra and the olives turned through purple to shiny black on the trees. It rained and the countryside started to look a little greener, the plants less withered and dusty. Following the example of our neighbours, we set to work harvesting our first olive crop, beating down the ripe fruit with long canes and gathering them in nets spread beneath the trees.

  A proper olive-picker will beat every last fruit from the tree, risking life and limb if necessary to creep out along a flimsy branch and whop a single recalcitrant olive. We weren’t up to such exacting standards and risked losing respect by leaving several kilos dangling from the more awkward branches. One of the fortunate things, however, about living in a remote spot like El Valero is that few people pass by and you can get away with the odd bit of botching.

  By the time we had got round all of the trees we had picked about five hundred kilos, which we sacked up, separating out all the leaves and twigs, heaved onto the Landrover, and drove to the mill in Bayacas. This is one of the few mills where they press the olives cold, which gives a much better quality of oil. The rate is about four to one, that is to say, you get a litre of oil for every four kilos of olives you deliver. A hundred and twenty litres would be enough for a year’s supply with plenty left over to present to our less agriculturally-minded friends. This was our first stab at self-sufficiency and we couldn’t help but feel a little smug about the results.

  By December the snow line had crept round to the peaks of the Contraviesa to the south, clipping the southern wind with an icy chill. The farmwork had settled into a lull and Ana and I were casting about for other projects. Bonka came bounding to the top of our list. She was a sheepdog puppy owned by some English friends of ours who live on a hillside surrounded by almond trees above the Río Chico. They were looking for homes for their new litter of puppies and as we’d always admired the affectionate mother, and were keen to find a companion for Beaune, we decided to stop off and look them over.