Driving Over Lemons

by Chris Stewart

  Now I knew that Amanda was serious about the flies because I had heard from a woman who had once stayed at her house that she experienced similar tender feelings towards scorpions. Scorpions do not as a rule like water but for some reason they would come scuttling in from all corners of the surrounding country to fall into Amanda’s pond and drown. So distressed was Amanda by this that she had a net prepared to fish out the poor mites, as she called them, and return them to the world of stones and scrub from whence they came.

  My informant had good reason to be impressed by these actions. She had been stung on the mouth by one of Amanda’s poor mites in bed. This was despite the fact that she was a woman at peace with herself and her surroundings, although naturally anyone would lose a certain amount of faith in their surroundings after an event like that. It did seem a shame that not all creatures shared Amanda’s vision of the universe.

  Amanda and Malcolm had arrived early for lunch and we had been showing them around Ana’s vegetable patch. Ana edged the conversation tactfully away from our wanton slaughter of flies and onto the safer ground of natural fertilisers, as we prised Chloë from her sandpit and walked up to the house.

  ‘Isn’t it one of God’s greatest miracles that the dung of the beasts carries all the elements essential to the growth of the plants that feed the very creatures that produce the manure that feeds the plants . . . and so on,’ I rabbitted, anxious to display my organic credentials. ‘The more I think of that particular fact, the more delighted I am by the organisation of the universe.’ ‘Being vegans, of course, we don’t use animal manure,’ Malcolm replied, ‘only our own excreta – and seaweed.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You’re making a bit of a rod for your own back there, aren’t you, Malcolm?’ I suggested. ‘I mean, importing seaweed when you’re living in the mountains surrounded by copiously dunging animals?’

  ‘Yes, it makes things much more difficult, of course, but we try not to use the products of any animal that is exploited. Animals should be wild and free like us.’

  I looked hard at Malcolm. Wild and free were not the first two adjectives I would have hit upon.

  ‘We don’t wear leather shoes or woollen clothes, either.’

  ‘Well, it certainly is a hard path you choose. But lunch must be ready now. Ana has prepared a meal that we hope will be acceptable in every way. It’s amazing how you have to think to do it.’

  Ana had indeed excelled herself. She presented us with a delicious-looking dish of aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and garlic, all bubbling together in a spicy sauce of soya-milk yoghurt.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t possibly eat that.’

  ‘You what?!’

  ‘We don’t eat peppers or aubergines or tomatoes or potatoes. All those vegetables are Solanaceae, members of the deadly nightshade family. They’re poisonous.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy the garlic then, just pick around the rest.’

  The first thing you hear is a whistle that sounds like a tutubia, except that tutubias rarely come down to the river, preferring the scrub high in the hills. Then comes a rolling river of bells and you realise that it’s Rodrigo calling to his goats. Up the river they come, in a dozen or more streams, picking their way over ledges and boulders or browsing by the water’s edge while Rodrigo waits above the bank, keeping watch from beneath the brim of his ancient straw hat.

  There’s truth in what Amanda says about the destructive capacity of goats. Sheep are bad enough but goats are in a different league. A goat will stand on its back legs and reach eight feet in the air, ripping all the leaves and branches off the trees to that height. They are prodigious climbers and scramblers, sure-footed and fearless beyond belief, and their delicate pointed feet are like little jackhammers, scrabbling away earth banks, stone walls and the edges of terraces.

  Kid, however, is delicious to eat, fetching a higher price than lamb, and on terrain where no other creature could survive, goats sustain themselves and produce a couple of litres of milk a day – not just ordinary milk, but milk with almost miraculous properties of healing and nourishment. So, in spite of the opposition of the ecologists there will always be goats and their goatherds in the Alpujarras.

  I often walk across the lemon terrace and down the rocky ramp into the riverbed to pass the time of day with Rodrigo.

  ‘Hola!’ I greet him.

  ‘Qué?’ he asks.

  That ‘qué?’ means ‘what?’, but not just an ordinary ‘what?’ It is delivered expansively, the head cocked, the palms upturned and stretched wide, and spoken loud and long. It means ‘How are you doing? How’s the wife and the little one? How’s your life and how is the farming and the crops?’ I can’t say it like Rodrigo does. It takes many years of walking with only goats and your own thoughts for company before you can manage the delivery of that particular ‘qué’. I have to be more specific.

  ‘How’s your wife, Rodrigo?’

  ‘Ay, Cristóbal, she’s bad, very bad. She can hardly walk now, she’s had a hard life.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘You see, Cristóbal, life is but a breath. We come into this vale of sorrow, we’re here four days, and if we get a chance to do some little good, do someone a favour, then we’ve done well and we can be a little happy perhaps. But then we’re cut down and gone, just bones and dust. In truth we’re no different from the dumb beasts, these goats I walk with.’

  A pronouncement like this is best received in silence. I know Rodrigo well enough by now to respect the sincerity behind his awkward philosophising. Rodrigo has a truly generous spirit.

  ‘I saw you talking with the Englishwomen yesterday. Were they saying things about me and the goats?’

  ‘Well, mainly they were talking about the goats, Rodrigo. They don’t like them at all, that’s sure. It appears that they busy themselves out on the hill planting retama and then your goats come along and eat it.’

  ‘Cristóbal, why would anyone want to plant retama in the secano? I can’t see it.’

  ‘It’s strange, I know, but they say it is good for the soil – it stops the erosion. Anyway, I think they’d rather you didn’t take your goats near their place.’

  ‘There is a Via Pecuaria there and I have to pass it to get to the land above El Picacho. One is entitled to graze the Via Pecuaria. Look, Cristóbal, I don’t want to be a bad neighbour to them – if they want to plant retama on the hill then that’s fine with me, but there’s not so much grazing about that I can afford to leave a secano like El Picacho. As the goats pass they will of course eat the young retama; it’s only natural. You see my point?’

  ‘I do, I do.’

  And thus continues the endless battle between the ecologists and the pastoralists.

  Rodrigo gets lonely in the river. He walks all day every day of the year with his goats, and he’s done so in these mountains and valleys for fifty years. He has seen whole weather cycles change the face of his world. Years of drought when his pencil-thin animals had to scuff in the dust for the tiniest shoot – years when he needed all his herder’s skill to seek out the places where, after months or even years without rain, some barely perceptible mist of moisture might remain. And years when for months at a time he couldn’t get his horse across the swollen river, and had to go all the way down to the Seven-Eye bridge to get to his goat stable. Those were the easy years, he told me, when he could sit on a stone not a mile from his stable, with a couple of fertiliser bags tied over his head and shoulders – the preferred way of keeping off the lashing rain – and watch his goats gorge themselves.

  Rodrigo had resigned himself to this harsh and lonely existence. It would never have occurred to him that one day his load might be lightened by someone to help – and least of all a frail-looking Dutch sculptress. But that’s how it worked out.

  Antonia, the Dutchwoman in question, had begun spending her summers at La Hoya, a crumbling farmhouse, just down the valley from El Valero. The day we met her, on her first summer
in the valley, she had walked up the riverbed with her big smelly old dog and was trailing from terrace to terrace behind our ram, looking out from a wide-brimmed hat and moulding his shape in a lump of wax that she was working with her fingers.

  ‘I’ll separate him and shut him in for you if you like,’ I offered.

  ‘No, I prefer to watch him moving around with the flock. I get a more natural result that way.’

  The ram seemed to take a dim view of being modelled, moving off as soon as Antonia got a good vantage, and leading her on a stumbling trail around the stony meadow. The business was further complicated by the heat of the day, because the wax kept melting, and every fifteen minutes or so Antonia had to dip it in the cooling water of the acequia. When she got back, of course, the flock had disappeared, and by the time she had found them the wax had started melting again. So I gave her a bucket which she filled with water and carried around with her.

  By this method Antonia was able to make a certain amount of progress, and slowly the models took shape. She made a lot of sheep that summer, along with some bulls and goats – and a wonderful rendering of Domingo’s donkey, Bottom. When she returned to Holland to cast some of her models in bronze, she left a little menagerie of wax figures in a drawer in our house, to the great delight of Chloë.

  Rodrigo lives high above La Hoya at La Valenciana, about an hour and a half on horseback, but stables his goats at the lower farm. Each morning, having seen to the needs of the cows, the pigs, the chickens and the horse, he saddles up and moves off down the steep hill. Arriving at La Hoya, he ministers to any goats that need attention, then takes them out into the river or up onto the hills. Even in the scorching heat of summer he never takes a siesta; there’d be no time to fit it in. Goats don’t mind the heat at all.

  All of a sudden a slight variation appeared in the monotony of Rodrigo’s existence. La Antonia, as he called her, took to walking with him in the river, occasionally fashioning an animal in wax as they progressed. Rodrigo must be the only goatherd in Spain with a model of a billy-goat cast personally for him in bronze; it’s an expensive process. When there was goatwork to be done, injections, wormings, washings and so on, Antonia would often spend the whole morning helping, and goatwork is a lot easier with two people than with one. On the odd occasion when it was necessary to put an animal out of its misery for one reason or another, Antonia would even kill goats for Rodrigo with a knife. Alpujarreños do not like to kill animals. I have to do the same on occasion for Domingo.

  Antonia made a difference to Rodrigo’s life, day to day, but when Rodrigo’s wife, Carmen, fell ill and was rushed to hospital in Granada, her presence became vital. After shutting the goats in for the night, Antonia would drive Rodrigo home, help him tend to the other animals, then take him to Granada and stay there while he spent the whole night sitting beside his sick wife’s bed. This is the custom here, the family is expected to deal with much of the nursing.

  The vigil continued for nine days, and then Carmen came home, at least a little better. Since then La Antonia has become an adored honorary member of their family. When she goes to spend the night with them at La Valenciana it’s only with the greatest reluctance that they let her go. I’ve never been inside Carmen and Rodrigo’s home but Ana has. She went up there one day with Antonia and of course Carmen invited them in. It proved impossible to escape without eating and drinking all of the most delicious and precious consumable items in the house. Ana said it was like visiting with the queen.

  Antonia spends long spells in Holland, earning money for her work in Spain, drumming up patronage and commissions, and doing the bronze castings for the figures she makes. When she leaves the valley on these trips, Rodrigo walks with his goats and weeps a little. ‘I think God sent me the Antonia, Cristóbal,’ he confided to me. While she’s away he besieges us for news of her and judges minutely when a postcard might be expected.

  Antonia is a real artist and she puts as much energy and artistry into her life as she does into her work. She gives and gives, and despite the fact that she’s not very robust, nothing is too much trouble for her. And so life repays her, people love her. She’s the only foreigner I know here who simply by being true to herself has become a part of the Alpujarra.

  HERBS AND HUSBANDRY

  IF WE HAD WORRIES ABOUT CHLOË – BEYOND HER SURVIVAL amid the scorpions and other terrors to infant life – it was that she might become lonely on an isolated farm with just her doting, middle-aged parents for company. She seemed happy enough consorting with the rude beasts that surrounded her, conducting scientific observations of the mole crickets and ants, and making the acquaintance of all the plants and shrubs that grew on the farm. But there are some games that can only be satisfactorily played with friends of the same species. Chloë, we knew, would sooner or later be needing a playmate. Luckily she found one – as close to hand as you can get at El Valero – in Rosa, Bernardo and Isabel’s youngest daughter, ‘given light’ to a year before Chloë at their home in the farm across the river. From the day they met, Chloë and Rosa claimed one another as sisters and would keep themselves peacefully amused with such useful occupations as tossing cassette tapes into the lavatory or throwing stones at the sheep. Rosa couldn’t speak English and, as Chloë hadn’t a word of Dutch, they communicated in Spanish. Having a daughter who was a native Granadina and fluent in Spanish helped to contribute to our sense of being finally settled. ‘You’ve sown your seed here – you’re one of us now,’ Old Man Domingo had told me.

  Life was beginning to run more or less smoothly. We made enough money from the sheep, the seed-collecting and the shearing to get by and had begun to nurture plans to convert the disused house on the other side of the river near Domingo’s house into a holiday cottage. Our home, while still far from opulent, was in good enough repair to keep the rain off in winter and the worst of the heat out in summer, while the farm was moving slowly towards some semblance of order and health. There was one blot, however, that was threatening to disturb the careful equilibrium that underpinned our domestic harmony. The dogs and the sheep were at war.

  Bodger and Barkis had grown into a pair of massive but amiable mongrels. They were even bigger than the now full-grown Bonka, and in this, in the broad flatness of their noses and their bovine dispositions, I detected the hand of Rosa’s dog, Cees, who had recently been sent to his maker after a grisly episode involving some chickens.

  Bodger’s ears had remained in the one-up-one-down configuration which left him as endearing as when he was a pup, and Barkis was also a beauty. Unfortunately Barkis was exceptionally dim. There wasn’t an educable cluster of neurons in the whole of his thick skull, and he was an incorrigible chaser of sheep. Once he’d had a taste of the whole flock flying in panic up the hill, heads down and feet flailing madly in the dust, he couldn’t resist; he had to make them repeat the performance every time he saw them. It drove me to distraction. No shepherd can allow such an abuse of their flock and after emerging from the house to find them yet again stranded on a nearby hillock, quivering with fear, I snapped.

  ‘Right, that’s enough, Ana. I’m going to shoot the bugger! Look, he’s chased the sheep up the bloody hill again. They’re terrified, the whole flock is a bundle of nerves.’

  ‘Go on, give him one more chance, please.’

  ‘I’ve given the sod chance after chance. I’ve been patient. I’ve been nice to him. I’ve shouted at him. I’ve whopped him. I’ve tried training him. But he’s completely dim-witted. It’s no use, he’s got to go. I hate to do it because he’s a lovely dog, but if I don’t do something now he’s going to start killing sheep, and I’m not having that.’

  Ana and Chloë watched aghast as I stomped off across the valley to borrow Domingo’s shotgun. My intentions were absolutely fixed. I was going to shoot that brainless cur and put an end once and for all to the terrorising of my sheep. But Domingo wasn’t in, so I stomped back, secretly rather glad.

  Trudging up the path to the terrace where we ha
d buried Beaune, I came across Chloë, inexpertly digging with her sand spade. ‘We’ll have to bury Barkis, won’t we, daddy?’ she asked, gazing down with dread seriousness at the hamster-sized hole she’d just completed.

  ‘No Chloë, I’m not going to shoot Barkis,’ I answered, lifting her onto my shoulders, out of the way of scrutinising a face wracked with guilt. Ana was up at the house getting ready to visit 199 all the dog-owners who might be persuaded to offer a home to Barkis. Janet promised to give the matter some thought.

  Meanwhile, Barkis, oblivious of his reprieve, excelled himself by chasing the whole flock down the river to La Herradura, and then straight up the steep slope of La Serreta on the other side of the Cádiar river. I didn’t see the wretched episode but Rodrigo the goatherd had watched the entire proceedings and had been decidedly unimpressed.

  Manolo del Granadino broke the news of the exodus to me when I bumped into him later that day in town. He said he had seen the sheep grazing just above the almond groves of El Enjambre. There would be trouble if I didn’t get them down as soon as possible, he reckoned.

  ‘They’ll come off the hill raiding at night and destroy all the vegetables of the vega, then you’ll be for it.’

  ‘I think you’re being a little over-dramatic there, Manolo, but you’re right, I’d better get up there and do something about it.’ It was an odd notion, the idea of sheep as night-raiders, coming down like the Assyrian horde on the ranks of the valley farmers’ vegetables . . . hiding in the inaccessible hills by day.

  On the way back from town Ana drove me up to the Venta del Enjambre and left me there with a banana, a pinch of bread and a swig of water. I gathered up a stout stick and set off down the barranco, peering around for the sheep and straining my ears for the bells. It was a lovely, warm February afternoon, the sun veiled by thin cloud. I strolled down the track to La Hoya and stood by the river watching Ana and Chloë disappear round the hill and out of sight. No sign of the sheep, though. I doubled back the way I had come and after about ten minutes caught the distant bongling of bells. The flock was moving along the skyline, high above me. There was no way to get up to them from where I stood as the entire hill face was covered in chest-high gorse, so I changed direction and tramped eastwards in the hopes of finding a path.