I ordered their fish stew with potato, El nostre suquet de gallineta, or, in Spanish, Nuestro suquet de gallineta. Suquet in Provençal is ‘port’. Coastbound from our farm, a district of the old town of Cannes, lies Le Suquet, probably the site of the first anchorage. In French a galette is a pancake, originally made of buckwheat. I accompanied my dish with a glass, a copa, of locally produced vino blanco though I might have chosen a glass of Cava, Spain’s answer to champagne, which I learned from my attractive auburn-haired waitress was a local Catalan wine. Also on the menu was Catalan chocolate mousse with arbequina olive oil and sea salt.
‘Do Catalans believe that it was the Phocaeans who brought the olive to this coast?’ I asked her.
Dressed in black with a burnt-orange half-pinafore tied at her waist, an earthy colour that lifted the severity of her beautiful features, she replied, ‘The arbequina olive was imported from Palestine in the eighteenth century.’
I was intrigued, but she knew no more of ancient trees.
Our conversation was a potpourri of languages, almost oriental-sounding. My waitress’s English was faltering, though less so than my rusty Spanish, but we managed. She hailed from a neighbouring pueblo, ‘born and bred’. Slender, dark, striking: high-boned with sunken cheeks and mesmerising, slightly nervous eyes, green as a cat’s in the night. Her mother tongue was Catalan, she claimed with pride, though she spoke fluent Spanish.
Was she the proprietress? She laughed, shaking her head, softening, and pointed to a distinguished middle-aged gentleman on the terrace. Wearing a suit, he was orchestrating the spring-cleaning of garden furniture and seemed unperturbed when a stray hosepipe soaked his trousers and polished shoes. He was also Catalan, also born within spitting distance of his hotel.
The view beyond the window fanned out across the Golf de Roses. Beneath a luminously silver sun, the pleated sea was empty save for a single distant boat. The mighty north wind, la Tramuntana, was known to create havoc on this coast. Similar to our mistral, it could blow forcefully for three, sometimes five, full days. Ships, off the coast of Cadaqués, ripped by the reefs, had sunk at its bidding, but today all was calm. On shore the languorous flop of waves against the beach vied with yells from a gaggle of arriving school children bending and dipping like birds, shell-seeking. Overhead, gulls swooped and glided.
Round the headland from the fishing town of Roses lay Cadaqués and then Cap de Creus National Park. I had hoped to find one work of Salvador Dalí’s that contained an olive tree, to justify a visit to that stretch of coast, but I had not been successful. Federico García Lorca, friend to both Dalí and his sister, Ana Maria, visited them at their house near Cadaqués in 1927, penning ‘Ode to Salvador Dalí’ in which he described the painter as master of ‘an olive-coloured voice’.
Brushing at his sodden trousers, the proprietor, now with manicured wife, was seating himself alongside a quartet of diners. The room, noisy with clattering cutlery, was animated. Discreetly insinuating itself into the conviviality was the music of a stringed instrument: the Sarabande in the fourth of the six Bach cello suites, performed by Catalan cellist Pablo (Pau) Casals. A great fan, here I was listening to him, albeit a recording, on his native soil. I put down my pen and tuned in, still observing the midday comings and goings of this surprisingly good guesthouse, and I concluded that the choice of record was no accident.
Casals quit Spain in 1939 after the defeat of the Republicans, vowing never to return until Franco, Nationalist leader and future dictator, had been ousted. For a time he settled close to home in the French border village of Prades, but eventually moved to Puerto Rico, the birthplace of his cherished mother, where in 1973, at the age of ninety-six, he died, just two years before the long-awaited demise of Franco. The year of Casals’ death coincided with that of another Pablo, the marginally younger, ninety-three-year-old Picasso, also in self-imposed exile from Spain. Neither artist had returned to native soil for decades. Casals endured a thirty-four-year exile, while Picasso’s lasted five years longer. Living in France, the painter had last set eyes on his mother country in 1934.
In that Catalan dining room I recalled a touching tale about Casals.
One of Casals’ many ambitions had been to found an orchestra, a spearhead for Barcelona, creating music with which the region could identify and be proud of. He had achieved this by 1920 and, in spite of growing international recognition and commitments, he continued to perform with and conduct the orchestra on a regular basis, until 1936; then, while rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, news arrived at the rehearsal rooms that their concert of the following evening, for which they were preparing, had been cancelled. Franco’s armies were moving north, taking the country. The fighting would soon be on the streets of their capital. Casals was advised to disband immediately, definitively, to send his musicians back to their families. With heavy heart he assented but begged, before doing so, one final favour of the orchestra he had fine-tuned over sixteen years. He asked them to complete the work, to play through to the last movement before separating. It would be a dignified finale, a more elegant leave-taking, expressed through their music. All agreed. And once the final notes of the symphony had sounded, his compatriots packed up their instruments and left, each to his own home. They were never to reconvene, never to play together again.
The mood in the dining room was subdued now. The establishment had an understated elegance about it, a gentility, but I had the sense, and I think not mere fancy, that running deep within these people was a defiance, a spirit of individuality, of their hard-won Catalan identity. George Orwell wrote that in Catalonia everyone eventually took sides. Here, the choice seemed immutable.
I would have liked to linger, spend a night at the hotel blanco, watch the dawn come up in golden streaks across the eastward-greeting bay, tease out conversation about the little-spoken-of war years and its effects upon olive farming, but a post-prandial walk before the evening bus to Girona and onwards to Barcelona was all that was left to me.
The narrow track between beach and ruins, shaded by pines, led to the islet, now attached to the mainland, where the palaiopolis had once existed and where today stands the medieval village of Sant Martí d’Empúries. Along this stretch had once existed the ancient Greek harbour, long since silted up. In 1992, when the Olympic Games were held in Barcelona, it was here that the torch was brought ashore. The path I was treading at the water’s edge had been laid for the occasion. Seated on a large rock, communing with the waves, was a lone mustachioed figure in a woollen hat. Clad in clingy Spandex cycling shorts, he spun his body as I passed, calling, ‘buenos días’. I nodded, continuing. He rose, treading the sand in my direction.
Sant Martí, lapped betwixt siesta and the season. End of January, mid-afternoon. The medieval town was boarded up, deserted. Even the eleventh-century church had bolted its doors. I was anxious for signs of life; the woollen-hatted fellow was on my heels. I argued that this was mere coincidence, but he was tailing me. On this deserted adjunct to the mainland, there was no one. I barely registered the walled enclave, hurrying as I was along a path in a direction I had not considered. Retracing my steps would have involved meeting him head-on. I cut inland towards fields and agricultural holdings, citrus-scented. He gained on me. I grew jittery, rounded a bend where a convergence of trees hid me for the time it took for me to make a decision. In among the stand, to the left, was an escape route. I stepped fast into what proved to be an open-air garden centre with dozens of potted lemon slips and patchwork plots of recently planted vegetables. I looked for a worker, for anyone, but in vain. I slid behind a tree while the stooped, gangly stalker strode on past my shelter. I realised then that, had he clocked my escape into this nest of plants and utensils, had he followed me in, I would have been cornered. Heart thumping, I waited until he was well out of sight, then slipped from my cover, retracing my original route, skirting Sant Martí, intent on the white hotel. I was perspiring, my heart rate was increasing when, like fire in dry grass, ten me
tres ahead to the right, he reappeared. Hovering, watching, arms dangling, then pacing in my direction. I had travelled through so many lands deemed dangerous for a lone woman and now, in northern Spain, pootling about a picturesque coastline where fear and physical threat had been far from my thoughts, suddenly I was alarmed.
I skipped from the path, thudded on to the beach where the sand slowed me; then, heartened, I sighted the hotel, two, three hundred yards ahead. I felt safer in the open. Thick-trunked pines obscured the path. The cries of voices. A quartet, adults and children, had joined the track; must have arrived by the shortcut the stalker had taken. He was loitering among the trees, eyes glued on me. They overtook him. I ran, heaving feet in the sand, and leapt back on to the way directly behind them. They were striding fast, power walking. I picked up pace to tag along, trying not to draw attention to myself. I glanced behind me. The stranger was still coming after me, like a surly bull. In no time our unlikely caravan had reached the hotel. The family continued on, hugging the curve of the bay. I fled inside and buried myself in the loos until I had regained composure. In the dining room, I gulped coffee while the oddball paced the bay, waiting for me to resurface. What could he possibly want? Surely not to attack or rob me in broad daylight? I asked my waitress if she had seen him before. She frowned, shook her head. One of the construction team, she offered, was finishing work. A handsome young man in overalls covered in plaster and sweat. He gave me a lift to the bus station in L’Escala.
It was close to 10 p.m. when the hotel, ours until yesterday, slid open its doors. I was exhausted, missing Michel. Worn out, unexpectedly insecure, I judged myself ill-equipped for the several months’ journey that lay ahead. The knowledge that I had so recently completed the eastern circuit did little to alleviate doubts.
A late rise due to procrastination was followed by a postponement of my departure. Instead, I walked. To the waterfront, to the Olympic port, hunting the headless fish. Frank Gehry’s. Fashioned out of latticed steel, I came upon it within a crowded complex of shops and blocks, plonked there as though no one at the municipality had known what to do with it. Its immense fishing-net frame shone coppery in the sunlight. I was saddened by it, not elated, this tailed torso trapped in space, nailed to its spot, unable to fly or swim. An accurate description of my own state that day. And then to Antonio Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece, his vast and exquisitely detailed basilica, the Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, where he worked exclusively, obsessively, between 1909 until his death in 1926, and is buried within it. Gaudí, I read, spoke Catalan, refusing all his life to communicate in Spanish. I sat at a stall across the street from his temple at twilight, sipping beer, watching the rising towers light up, reminding me of organ pipes; poetic madness looming skywards.
Late that night, strolling nowhere in particular, lost within a barrio, the neighbourhood known in Catalan as L’Eixample, I pushed open a door to what I had thought was a restaurant and found myself staring into a bar. I asked if they served food and the bartender, a man in a suit rather than a uniform who had hurried to greet me – that, or block my entrance – shook his head. The few guests, half a dozen, bemused expressions, looked my way, as though my arrival had disrupted intimate exchanges. It was curious. The gathering, such as it was, seemed well heeled but of another era. A forties’ film noir, an Edward Hopper painting. A woman, long-haired, blonde, swept up to the left, hanging heavily on the right, smoking, leaning low over the table. Her cropped-haired companion sat with his back to me. Three striped suits on stools at the bar, late thirties. The space was compact, low-ceilinged. I had the idea I had walked into a private club. I was intrigued.
‘May I have a glass of wine?’ I was disinclined to leave until I had discovered more. Again the bartender shook his head. ‘Apologies, disculpeme, only whisky.’ With that he closed the door, shutting me out. I lingered a moment in the darkened street looking for a sign, some clue, but nothing was posted. I returned after dinner but I was unable to relocate the door. I felt as though I had glimpsed Camino Real.
I ate my last meal in Barcelona at a modest family restaurant close to where I was staying. The menu was in Catalan. The furniture was carved hardwood, heavy. Two gently spinning fans hung from a white-painted, ribbed ceiling. Square tables, white linen cloths, two or three rock-hard hams dangling from the rafters, close by the espresso machine. The waiters and waitresses wore white jackets. Frilled caps perched on the women’s heads, and always aprons. It was sombre, old-fashioned, yet inviting.
My simple meal consisted of potato and onion tortilla served with an undressed salad, ensalada, with chunks of tuna, sausage and onion. When I requested garlic, my waiter smiled, shaking his head. ‘You have onion, that’s sufficient.’
‘Olive oil then, please, and a glass of Rioja.’
Two bottles were delivered. The oil was Catalan from arbequina fruits, green, peppery, good.
Here, the waiter was more accommodating, informative.
‘The arbequina oil business in the north is in crisis.’ Vast acreages, he claimed, were being abandoned. Irrigation was the problem.
The wine label read Cune Rioja 2003 Crianza. I wondered about crianza.
‘It’s the ageing. Crianza is “upbringing”, “breeding”.’
The wine-governing body, Denominación de Origen, operated a standards watchdog in the way the French olive and wine institutions oversee the AOC we have been honoured with for our oil.
‘A crianza must have aged for minimum two years. In the provinces where the rules are stricter, it is essential that at least one of those years is in oak cask. Beyond crianza comes reserva and then the highest accolade, gran reserva.’
Still suffering ‘stage-fright’, but it was time to hit the road. My tree was calling. At the estación de autobuses nord the following morning I bought a one-way ticket to the city of Santander, a popular tourist resort on the Atlantic coast in the north-eastern provincia of Cantabria. From there, a local bus to connect me to the medieval town of Santillana del Mar. I expected to arrive in time for dinner. Including one brief stop in Bilbao, the journey to Santander was a little over nine hours. I grabbed a creamy 6 a.m. café con leche and a croissant at the bus station cafeteria where, stamped on the paper napkins, I found an advertisement for Rentokil. I could not remember when I had last consumed such quantities of milk (with my daily shots of café con leche), bread, eggs and potatoes in the tortillas. Hoisting my bag into the hold, I felt a stab of regret at leaving Barcelona, at saying adiós to Catalonia. Where I was heading was a far cry from Spain’s olive regions. It was a long shot. I was hoping to unearth some ancient plant history.
A handful of us boarding. A shrivelled old man, crutches, a Basque beret tilted sideways on his head, big as an umbrella. Allocated to me was an aisle seat, two rows from the front. The fifty-seater was almost empty. I shuffled down through the bus and chose a position halfway. After I had installed myself, arranging reading, writing material on the free place at my side, I settled by the window and began to relax. Moments later, a robust fellow with a tattoo snaking from beneath his white T-shirt and winding round his neck as though strangling him, stopped alongside my assumed position.
‘You are in my spot,’ he announced.
‘The coach is empty,’ I replied. ‘Does it matter?’
‘That asiento is mine.’ He rattled a flimsy docket at me, evidence of his claim. I looked up at the overhead rack and the adjoining seat, gently insinuating the inconveniences of shifting. Unmoved, he waited, glassy-eyed beneath big, bushy eyebrows and a wild head of hair so plastered with gel it shone like coal. Eventually, I gathered up my materials and proceeded to the rear. The last of the passengers hurried aboard studying his ticket gravely, spotted his designated pew alongside the tattooed traveller and plonked himself there, leaving entire rows empty. I had not expected it of the Spanish. I had imagined a more carefree attitude.
Once through the hellish traffic circulating the outer suburbs, travelling south towards Tarragona bef
ore turning westwards in the direction of Lleida (Lérida), there unfolded a countryside carved up by jumbles of roads, concrete bridges and railway lines held high on ugly, concrete-piered viaducts traversing gullies and yet more roads.
Afterwards, pleasing images beyond the windows. South of Barcelona, first sightings of olive trees, juniors, and vines and almonds, typically Mediterranean. Pale pink almonds, one or two in each vineyard, powder puffs of colour in the wintery fields. Many Catalan farmers planted one or two in the groves, said the waitress at Empúries; it contributed a hint of almond flavour, a uniqueness to the oil. I had never heard that before.
The first days of February: gentle weather; a T-shirt, no cardigan. It was nineteen months since I had begun this trek, searching for the ancient roots of the olive, its impact on Mediterranean peoples. A tapestry of cultures, living together, interwoven. I dreamed unlikely dreams: a western tree as old as the Bechealehs, an organic way of life, clues from the past to enlighten us …
Inland now through startling landscape; mauve-rust mountains, dramatic backdrops. Along the Costa Brava, the lovely fincas were sandstone. Here, white haciendas, ensconced within vineyards, and silhouettes of lone olives. This was not one of Spain’s most renowned olive-producing regions. Quaint iron wells, built on stone, rusted wellheads; farmsteads veiled by stands of pencil-thin cypresses, a hint of Italy, of Tuscany. Alternatively, the haciendas stood alone, imposing, within fields of stubby wooded vine stock, soil the tones of baked biscuits, nothing to conceal them. The streams, rivulets, wadis, were dry, surprising in this winter season. Terracotta-tiled slanting roofs; backgrounds of mountains; wineries, haciendas. The Catalan wine industry made its mark on the international map in the late nineteenth century when France’s highly lucrative business was wiped out by the Phylloxera, a grape pest that feeds off the roots of vines. Native to North America, the insect had inadvertently been carried over on cargo ships transporting New World grape stock. Within a decade, the plague had spread across the European continent. France alone lost three-quarters of its wine production. Some French viticulturists grew so desperate they buried a toad at the foot of every plant in the hope that they would eat the sap-sucking aphids. Few areas were spared except those whose stock grew on sandy soils. These the bug did not infest. Catalan winegrowers, I do not know why, fared better than most though the northern areas of the Costa Brava around Cap de Creus suffered. Barcelona and its surrounding territories were already enjoying a renewed boom period and this foreign agricultural crisis gave an added kick to their economy when Catalan merchants and vintners found they were able to double the prices of their wines and ship them far afield.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 4