The brothers’ promotional material claimed that the reason their oil was so exceptional was that they still hand-picked from every tree – ‘a skilled gatherer can clean a tree in twenty minutes’ – and because they were still pressing the old-fashioned way at a mill their family had purchased from a local duke in 1795. Their premises were situated behind an arched gateway within the town of Baena. Unfortunately, every time I telephoned I had fallen upon their manager. The brothers were away.
Where could they both be in this crucial season of pressing and pruning? In Russia, I eventually learned, touring, lecturing on olive oil. Vanguards for the future Spanish markets.
The tractor and trailer led me, as I had guessed it might, directly through the open gates of an olive mill, an almazara. The sign announced the Cooperativa Olivarera de Baena, the local olive farmers’ cooperative. I was right at the pulse, the heart of this liquid kingdom. I pulled over alongside a row of smart four-wheelers and tired old vans decked out with nets, tools, strimming utensils, every requirement any oilman could possibly dream of, grabbed my camera and took a stroll round the back where I heard powerful rumblings of heavy-duty machinery.
This was a mammoth plant, both an impressive and a disturbing sight: at least a dozen chutes, sorting arms, iron steps, ladders, wheels, shunting belts and queues of farmers waiting in line to dispose of their leafy pickings. Some negotiating brimming-with-fruit trailers the size of small bungalows. Men in overalls and peaked caps yelled above the thunderous roar of machines, directing the process. There were weathered old codgers, young bored-looking blokes smoking, iron bridges that led from one section of the plant to the next. Gleaming stainless steel containers in rows, each containing probably five thousand litres of freshly pressed oil … it was endless, while all around us in the warm mid-February winter sunlight were stark hillsides clad in olive trees.
I attempted to strike up a conversation with one or two of the men waiting in line but they were not interested. So, after a few snaps, I went inside the mill itself. I expected to be sent packing – that or at least an enquiry as to my identity and purpose – but I continued pointing a camera wherever I felt like it. The scent of the oleaginous paste being churned and crushed hit me instantly. It was so powerfully pongy and tangy, I felt I had been steeped in it. A couple of the blue-overalled employees paused, leaning over their shunting trolleys, but when I smiled and nodded they did the same and continued with their contribution to this ancient ritual. A tiled, low-temperature room set apart contained two long rows of lofty, polished stainless steel drums. I calculated that there in front of me was sealed a minimum of 120,000 litres of oil. In the olden days, or even back home in France when we first got involved in the oil business, this would have been the darkened corner where maybe half a dozen twenty-litre demijohns filled with newly pressed juice had been stored to settle.
It was dazzlingly industrialised, as though I was on an immense oil rig somewhere. There was not a woman in sight. This was male territory. I decided to leave them to it. I felt troubled. The organic brothers were still not back from their travels; I had missed their shop and tour-of-mill opening hours and the surrounding, weedlessly regimented hillsides only added to my concern. Before quitting Baena, I made one final stop in the centre of the hilly town where a few broad-trunked trees grew and a quartet of life-sized bronze figures were harvesting olives on a strip of grass as though in a field. What was remarkable was that I had seen not an inch of grass anywhere, not a rogue blade, aside from this one green patch turfed up as a memorial to a method of farming that was fast dying. Here, at the centre of the world’s twenty-first-century olive kingdom, a still life, frozen images, recalled the olive story. Fleeting moments of an ancient tradition, but nothing of its poetry.
My first sighting of the Sierra Nevada with its snowcapped peaks that never melted left me longing to share this exquisite moment with Michel. Granada was an indulgence, a present to myself. I was not going to pass through Andalucía without spending at least one day at the Alhambra. A granada is a pomegranate and the fruit is the symbol of the city. I suspect that this tree with its startling carmine-red flowers was a Moorish legacy.
My entry through Granada’s rush-hour suburbs was unimpressive and I made a last-minute decision not to stay downtown but to go immediately to the hilltop where the Alhambra palace and gardens stood. Alhambra is Al Qal ‘a al-Hamra or, rather mundanely in translation, Red Fort, which does not begin to describe its magnificence. I checked into the Alhambra Palace Hotel, too big and too expensive even with a knockdown room rate, but the receptionists were friendly and it was within easy walking distance of the fort, which, as soon as the car was parked and bag dropped, I set out for. I needed no ticket. Entry was not possible at this late hour – booth closed – but I could wander freely about the grounds. I hurried through the Puerta del Vino, which in the sixteenth century (after the expulsion of the Moors) was the entrance to a wine cellar and from there, crossing the Plaza de los Aljibes, I found myself before the walls of the old fortress, the Alcazaba. From its summit, a spectacular view. One of those worth-the-whole-trip moments. I watched the sun go down, the evening’s veil falling lightly upon the white city at my feet, lanterns lighting up, dogs howling, women screaming at bawling children, an occasional bottle smashing, down in the extended valley, the vega, Granada’s vast and fertile plain, much of which has been eaten into now by city sprawl. Views in every direction. In the distance, the snowy caps of the sierras. Their snowmelts fed the three rivers that surrounded Granada, and they watered the groves and the city. A mighty bell on the Torre de la Vela close to where I was leaning had, until recently, been rung at specific hours of the day, sounding far and wide across the outstretched plains. But it had not been calling the faithful to prayer. It bade the labourers begin the watering of the parched red earth. Al-Hamra also described the colour of the soil, from which they baked their red bricks.
During the Middle Ages, heavy seasonal rains and the melted snows washed layers of silt on to these plains and it was with this earth that the Moors, renowned for their horticultural and irrigational skills, created fertile valley lands. During the years of struggle between Christians and Muslims, when the Catholic monarchs were fighting to regain Spain, they laid waste to these well-planted plains in an attempt to starve the Arab farmers off their land and deny food supplies to the city of Granada. Many fled; the fields were left untended. It was the beginning of the end for the vega. It never regained the same levels of productivity.
Turning my eyes towards the dipping sun, westwards across the vega, somewhere lay Fuente Vaqueros, the village where Federico García Lorca, Spain’s greatest twentieth-century poet and dramatist, was born to wealthy landowners in 1898. The family had moved to Granada when he was barely a teenager, but his writing was forever imbued with rurality, the earth, the olive trees, the farms of his childhood. Riding with his brother in a mule cart, they had paid visits to Granada, his ‘city of dreams’.
I strolled through the open spaces of the fort, views in every direction. Couples passed by, families, too, taking in the evening air, marking the paseo. The sky was velvet-grey; it was warm for February. I could hear water running from several directions and, eyes closed, I might have believed that I was in the Levant. I felt enveloped by beauty. The perfumed nights of the Orient. Spain smelled sweet, like every black-haired girl with a fragrant flower nuzzling at her ear. From the day I had arrived over a month earlier, I had been seduced by the country’s perfumes, and it was not yet spring. Up here were box bushes and tall spreading bay trees. I walked alone, without fear, relishing the quietude and I felt an immense sense of belonging, of completion. On the other hand, reflecting, I felt helpless at the potential erosion of this earth.
From Lorca’s The Gypsy and the Wind:
The sea darkens and roars,
While the olive trees turn pale.
The flutes of darkness sound.
Returning to the hotel by a shadowed pebble pathway, thre
e adolescent boys approached. I skipped aside to let them pass. One danced a two-step, veered my way, begged a cigarette. ‘I don’t smoke.’
His fluffed-skinned face broke into a grin and he bowed a good evening, ‘buenas tardes, señora’. He must have been ten or eleven.
I had read of the hotel’s theatre, designed in neo-Moorish decor, and was keen to see it. The receptionist, when I made the request, was more than happy to accompany me to the basement. It was unoccupied, silent, and she left me to wander without constraint. The auditorium was intimate, perfect for café theatre. It seated one hundred and sixty and these days was used for conventions. I stood on the modest stage with its swept-back, red velvet curtains, its oval proscenium arch, enjoying the fact that on 7 June 1922, the twenty-four-year-old Federico García Lorca, not long out of university, who loved music, particularly gypsy music, as much as poetry and drama, had participated in an evening of words and song right here. Lorca had long been a particular favourite of mine. I had first come across his work, his plays, when I was at drama school in London and we, as students, had performed (crucified!) Blood Wedding. I had known nothing of olives then or the world of the Mediterranean and I had absolutely no idea that my future would lie in this direction, but his words, images, those plays, had embedded themselves deep within me.
The legendary Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, perhaps the father of modern classical guitar, also an Andalucían, from Linares in Jaén, had been on the bill that night, too. So successful was the soirée, that it launched Lorca’s career. When the receptionist returned, I asked her whether she knew anything about that June performance.
‘I’ve never heard of those men,’ she answered, ‘but loads of famous people’ve performed here.’
‘Really?’
‘We had Engelbert Humperdinck once, and, another time, the King of Spain.’
Beneath a starlit sky I wound down the hillside from the Anteque ruella Baja, descending in semi-circles, lost among pretty ruellas until, almost by chance, I found myself at my intended destination, the Plaza Nueva. Granada, jewel in the Moorish crown and their impenetrable stronghold, was the last city in Spain to be reconquered by the Catholics when, after a relentless siege throughout the winter of 1491, the Nasrid king, Boabdil – the Nasrids were the last Muslim dynasty to rule southern Spain – accepted defeat and surrendered the keys of the city to the offending armies. Spain’s Reconquista had, after centuries, finally been accomplished. This square, Plaza Nueva, was built as a memorial to that victory and in order to underline the power of the new Christian rule, a monumental bonfire was lit in the plaza, fed by the entire library of 80,000 books that had lined the walls of the Granada Muslim University.
From the plaza, after a glass of wine, where I was plied with more complimentary tapas dishes than I could manage but the waiters could not offer me an explanation for the origin of tapa, I strolled aimlessly, surprised by the many English voices in the bars. I ate alone in a taberna, strolled some more and eventually got lost again, this time in an insalubrious barrio where smashed bottles lay about the cobbles and graffiti and blood smeared the walls. I felt a little afraid, even more so when I picked up pace at the sound of raucous, drunken callings somewhere behind me and found myself running into a cul-de-sac that reeked of stale beer and urine and where weeds the size of healthy shrubs were growing in hillocks of composting debris.
The following day, sunny and warm, this first-time visitor was at the ticket booth before opening. The Alhambra: a bewitchment that I resolved hereon to experience regularly. I was seduced, but so much to take in. I focused on plants, fountains, the cloudless blue sky visible above the Patio de los Arrayanes, the call of doves, a neatly clipped balustrade of myrtle bushes, enticing views through arched windows to the cubed white houses of the Albaicín quarter, the original city, and the sublime Palacios Nazaríes. I took a break at the Courtyard of the Lions, el Patio de los Leones, the heart of the harem’s daily life. Disappointingly, the renowned club-faced cats had been removed for restoration, the fountains were dry and the courtyard was no longer planted up with aromatic shrubs and herbs. The American writer and diplomat, Washington Irving, who wrote Tales of the Alhambra and was rather a legend in this part of Spain, eulogised this complex. He fantasised about the delicate arm of a hidden princess, beckoning with dark, soulful eyes from behind latticed shutters. Which is all very well, but those women were forcefully cloistered. Nonetheless, the architecture was dazzling. A spot in which to linger out of the heat of high summer, fingers rippling through cool fountain waters. Here, the harem’s occupants had idled away their fruitless days, or walked the gallery above, gossiping together, awaiting the call to the boss’s bedroom.
Onwards, hiking to the Generalife, an Italianate summer palace with gardens, conceived above terraced orchards on a high platform of land. It was a maze of patios, stairways, balconies, artificial pools, secreted belvederes and blossoming flowers. The concept of ‘garden’ was a Muslim one. They aspired to create ‘gardens’, a partnership of plants and water, as a representation of Paradise on earth. Lusty-leafed bushes, delicate, sweetly scented flowers, running streams beneath canopies of tall trees that shaded them from the blistering heat. And this must have seemed like paradise to peoples whose history, whose genes, were born in arid desert lands.
I was still thinking about the picture Dr Mendoza had painted of a world without water, an unproductive earth. It seemed all the more shocking here, amidst such lushness.
Standing atop the Escalera del Agua, a curving staircase with water burbling down its stone balustrades, I felt the sun beating on my back. In the distance, snow glistened on the Nevada caps. Out across the vega hung a pollution haze the colour of unripened olives. Do the rivers of Granada still flow through the orange and olive groves? How different, if at all, would Andalucía be today, with its critical irrigation issues, if the Moors had not fled? Are we losing vital knowledge, I asked myself.
The city’s mongrels were silent, sleeping in the noonday sun. In the background, a melody of languages from other visitors. All about me, water was tinkling, falling, running, swirling. Shafts of soft sunlight fell across the burnished, pre-spring foliage. The scent of juniper wafted heavenwards while feral cats were crouching at the poolsides where large carp swam blithely to and fro, frogs plopped into ponds at the first footstep. The ‘gardens’ of an enchanted palace.
In the Patio of the Sultan’s Wife, Patio de la Sultana, I stood beneath a seven-hundred-year-old cypress tree. It bore a plaque, witness to a royal adultery. Adultery, or a harmless flirtation? Beneath the silent branches of this cypress, a junior back then, Zoraya, the sultana, met with her lover, Hamet, until the lovers’ trysts became known to the sultan. Entering this walled garden, dedicated to his beloved queen, the sultan discovered his favourite wife in the arms of another. Out was dragged the cuckolding rogue. There and then, Hamet and sixteen princes of his clan were condemned to death. Legend has it that the fountain in the Sala de los Abencerrajes, where the men were slain, has been eternally stained with their blood. Or perhaps it was rust. I descended to the Christian palace of Carlos V, watched my second Granadian sunset and bade adios to the heights of the Alhambra.
Down among Moorish houses and mansions, in the pretty narrow streets of the Albaicín district, the historic Arab quarter where the city of Granada was born, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I learned an interesting detail from Gian-Carlo, a striking, black-haired Sicilian gardener I struck up conversation with in a bar. A ‘carmen’ was originally a vine or vineyard. In traditional Andalucían houses, it became the enclosed, vine-bowered courtyard. The carmens were spring, autumn, late evening retreats. There, nightingales sang, perfumes reeked, vines were fecund with fruit. And when the sun declined, taking with it the blistering temperatures, and one by one the stars appeared, the neighbouring locals took up their guitars. All around the streets of the old city quarter, music played and folk in their carmens tuned in to the gypsies. I had hoped to hear the fla
mencos echoing round the alleys but on this evening they were silent. The roar of motorbikes, yes, but no guitars, no nightingales, only sparrows.
Víznar was but a short drive from Granada, ten kilometres to the north-east. I asked directions of the rubicund porter. Up to that point he had been friendly, but I had the distinct impression that the very mention of Víznar caused a shift in his mood.
In 1928, Federico García Lorca had written a series of poems, today fabulously set to music, El Romancero de Gitano, his anthology of gypsy ballads. These had brought him international renown and a trip to New York. Returning in 1931, he set up his own travelling theatre company, Teatro Barraca, and began to write his greatest theatrical material. Masterpieces, plays that rang with gypsy folklore and, most poignantly, the plight of women in rural societies, repressed sexually and emotionally, constrained by Church and family. Those early years of the thirties were a rich and fertile period for Spain: the advent of the republic. Attitudes were changing fast, almost daily. The monarchy was down and it looked as though, after centuries, the stranglehold of the Church and the heavy conservatism that had for so long been associated with this country, including the feudalism of absentee landlords and dynastic farming families, were finally to be cast aside.
That was until July 1936, when, in Lorca’s own words, the ‘flutes of darkness’ sounded.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 12