The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  I got snarled up behind transport lorries and my progress was laborious. I cut inland again when the coast road grew too depressing, but lost my way hopelessly on secondary routes. I had hoped to make at least a brief stop in Málaga – it boasts an eminent olive-oil past and much of its produce today is deemed fine, a guest at the spa had informed me – but my schedule was tight now. Mardi Gras was only a day away. If I was intending to stick to my goal I needed to keep moving. Torremolinos was stupefying; I had never encountered such construction. A Hellopolis! Much of these major tourist spots, built by or for holidaymakers from the north, stand on olive and almond orchards, dating back to Roman if not Phoenician times. As the ‘hungry years’ drew to a close, local farmers and fishermen were grateful to sell their holdings at any price, to any bidder, foreigner or otherwise. And for those who had olive farms close to the sea, a new door was opening: tourism. At that time, olive oil was not fashionable, not remunerative. Spain’s future, the quick peseta, the opportunity to interact with easy-living foreigners after years of oppression, lay in massive deforestation, in construction, Benidormisation.

  After Marbella, once through the high-life resorts the mountains grew green again. Nature! It was a relief to spot herds of grazing goats on the hillsides. After the Costa del Golf, another Costa of Construction, my first sighting of Gibraltar looming large and, from such a distance, resembling a camel’s saddle. Above it, floating like a displaced flag, was a narrow plume of smoke.

  I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at a roadside shack east of Algeciras and overheard a plumpish woman, rouged cheeks, with Liverpudlian accent talking to a pensioner, her father perhaps, and a small boy as they tucked into chips, prawn salads and beer: ‘When I git me own house, I’m gonna buy a bottle of olive oil and put it in it.’

  Tarifa: the southernmost point of Spain and continental Europe. Tarifa: the first port in history to levy charges against boat owners for the use of the docks, and possibly the origin of the word ‘tariff’. West of the city, I stepped out of the car to inhale the fresh, briny air coming in from across the Gibraltar Strait, aqueous gateway to Morocco, where I was heading in just a few days’ time. There were a few wet-suited bodies on boards bobbing in the rollers; gulls were circling in the warm sunlight, gannets scavenging. I had reached the Atlantic once more. From Altamira with its prehistoric artists, weeks ago now, to Tarifa on the Costa de la Luz, the Coast of Light, this wilder expanse of sea, on my way to unearth secrets of a fabled silver city.

  Hereon after the coast was less constructed, the resorts, bungalow homes, seasonal rents were inhabited by surfers and a hardier, saltier tourist. The wind was blowing in off the water, swirling the sand into whorls, bending and twisting the untamed vegetation with its force. This was the Levanter. It had transported the galleys of 3000 years ago, perhaps even earlier, from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean through the two Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta in Morocco) to an Iberian river people rich in untold mineral wealth. It had considerable influence, often blowing hard for days along this Cádiz shoreline, creating an almost persistent cloud over the Rock of Gibraltar. For a brief spell in the 1680s the diarist Samuel Pepys had been Commissioner of Tangier. He described the Levanter as being so forceful that it bored holes in the stones of the fortress walls. It was known to be a twister.

  Cádiz, where the inhabitants call themselves gaditanos, claims to be the oldest continually inhabited city in Europe. It was founded by early sea-going Phoenicians from Tyre, a port city in southern Lebanon, in 1100 BC. Hungry for the local metals, they founded their settlement on a small island that is separated from the mainland by an intermediate island, Isla de León, and they named it Gadir, ‘fortress’ or ‘walled stronghold’. Interestingly, I learned later in Morocco that agadir means ‘wall’ in Berber languages. Agadir, Morocco.

  Located at the mouth of the Guadalete River, near the entrance to the mighty Guadalquivir River valley and the ancient city of Tartessus, they chose their base with expertise. Gadir served as their principal port in the vicinity and it was from here that they loaded and despatched their long-oared galleys (better adapted to these seas than sailing ships) with precious silver and iron. The local Iberians possessed these resources in abundance: alluvial tin panned from their rivers since early times, a little gold but, above all, they had silver running through the confluences of waters, the ‘unlimited, silver-rooted springs of the river Tartessus’, according to the Greek geographer Strabo. The iron was obtained from Tartessian mines situated further inland at the mouth of the Río Tinto, the Red River, so named because it flows a deep, almost blood red. The scale of the operations was enormous, sufficient to justify journeys that involved crossing the entire width of the Mediterranean. A galley’s round trip, from Tyre and back home again, was calculated to take three years. From Cádiz, the boats possibly travelled onwards to trade. They did not stay: the Phoenicians were not colonists. They were merchants, pioneers, seafarers, who brought with them new skills and the experiences of an advanced civilisation.

  A blustery early evening greeted my arrival into Cádiz, penetrating the suburbs and new town first where the streets had been decked out with paper lanterns and an assortment of party frippery, all flagging ‘¡Esto es Carnaval!’ Continuing on, I crossed from the mainland by a narrow channel to the Isla de León and then to the island where the original city was born. Old Cádiz sits at the tip of a peninsula that on a map resembles a slightly crooked finger. Between mainland and peninsula, the curved, enclosed bay is a natural harbour. It would have been an ideal placement for the Phoenicians’ galleys: a protection against fierce Atlantic winds and marauding pirates.

  I was fairly exhausted after a full day’s driving but sightings of the old city walls and ocean rollers lifted my spirits. I had been looking forward to Cádiz for a very long time. First, practicalities. I had made no booking and a room during carnival proved impossible so I was obliged to settle for the state-owned, higher-end-of-the-range Parador Atlántico. It was situated at the tip of the island finger, on a westerly nub of southern Europe, braving the Levanters, alongside a tropical park, so I was not too unhappy.

  At reception, a notice apologised for the noise and the music: ‘Sorry for all, but this is carnaval!’

  Along with my key I was handed a map marking the locations and approximate times of the evening’s festivities.

  ‘Of course, with carnaval, you must expect anything or nothing,’ the weary receptionist warned me. ‘Frankly, I’ll be glad when it’s all over. The racket is enough to drive you loco.’

  Spain is renowned for its noise and I had been exposed to almost deafening decibel levels on a regular basis throughout the past weeks, but carnival in Cádiz left me feeling as though an express train had run through the centre of my head.

  Once settled in a room with view of sea and lighthouse, I set off, party map in pocket, striding by the city ramparts, listening to the crashing waves, towards the barrios of the old city, the casco antiguo, a maze of wafer-thin lanes and stonewalled alleyways, decorated with flowerpots, fanning out on to neat plazas where much of the action was due to take place. In spite of the fact that our farm is only half an hour’s drive from Nice, we had never participated in its carnival, which boasts a colourful parade. I had visited Brazil on several occasions but not during its pre-Lent fiestas. So, this was my first carnival. I had chosen it because Cádiz is judged by most to be Spain’s liveliest and most anarchic city and I hoped it might include some ancient history of the place. What had surprised me when I saw the schedule was that it was not due to end on Ash Wednesday. Whether for reasons of tourism or other, I did not know, but it continued a full ten days into the fasting forty. An act of anarchy in itself, perhaps?

  I wandered the lanes, hunting the fun, and my first thought was that the passages were so narrow in the casco antiguo that no parade of any substance could pass through. Stalls rigged up in front of grocery shops or bodegas were offering beer, Andalucían-style fast foods a
nd boxes of confetti, but everywhere seemed pretty dead. Until I turned a corner into a small high-walled plaza and came face to face with a dozen musicians, plastered in make-up. Several sported impressive textile phalluses (each more than a foot in length) while others, butch blokes, were in high heels and skirts, all with insane wigs. This group was a chirigota, a musical comedy act full of wordplays, satire and risqué badinage.

  After a little tuning up and general faffing about, they broke into raucous song accompanied by plastic and metal kazoos, bass drums, whistles, guitars, basically any hardware that would create a racket. They intoned, recited and sang in what I think was a local dialect ditties that were hard for me to comprehend, but were evidently bawdy or controversial judging by the gathering crowds, appearing now from every nook and cranny, which roared, laughed, retorted and whistled. Soon, I was surrounded, hemmed in. Everyone was screaming, many in costumes, clutching open bottles, falling about. The mood struck me as similar to student rag week, an inebriated gaiety, and I extricated myself, pushing and shoving until, after turning circles in the old town, where children peered down incredulously upon the events from first-floor balcony windows, I found that every corner offered another version of the same thing. Perhaps I was tired, perhaps carnival was not to be experienced alone, perhaps the following day, Mardi Gras, was to be the big event. A little after eleven, I made my way back to the water and strolled sedately along the seafront. After close to two months in Spain I had become accustomed to its aromatic, seductive scents, but Cádiz stank, an unpleasant concoction of feral cats, urine, vomit and stale alcohol. Groups of youngsters living in trucks or caravans were seated at the kerb’s edge smoking dope, swigging booze from bottles, singing and strumming their guitars. The lighthouse in the distance was blinking.

  The Greeks, who arrived here after the Phoenicians, invented the lighthouse when they built a tall tower on the island of Pharos in the Alexandrian harbour in approximately 290 BC. So mighty was the tower, standing at approximately 135 metres (one of the tallest structures on earth), that it was nominated the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After cracks, weather damage and losses to its height from various natural disasters, it was finally destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth century AD. After 1500 years of guiding mariners safely in and out of that antique harbour, nature laid it to rest. Recently sections of it have been recovered from the Alexandrian seabed, but still little is known of its light source. At its pinnacle, in the beacon chamber, it was thought that a mirror reflected sunlight during the day while a fire oriented the approaching ships by night. The light was visible from a hundred nautical miles out to sea. For a long while that fire was believed to have been fed with logs, delivered by pack animals clambering three lofty tiers. Later, this interpretation was judged unrealistic. It would have been a fire risk and spectacularly labour intensive to transport so much timber. Timber that, due to Egypt’s dearth of forests, would have been imported, possibly from nearby Lebanon. How about that it was fuelled by oil, certainly in its earlier years? Why not? Olive oil fuelled the lights of the cities of both ancient Alexandria and Rome, so why not the Egyptian lighthouse? It was a Greek architect, Sosatros’, vision and by that stage, the third century BC, the Greeks were master olive farmers.

  I was curious about this windy Cádiz peninsula, about how the galleys and sailing ships negotiated the exposed, frequently tempestuous sweep into the bay, to drop anchor here. Rudimentary forms of beacon lighting had been in use prior to the Pharos of Alexandria, but might the Phoenicians have taught the local people, the Iberians, to create light from oil? Before Alexander the Great had conquered coastal Egypt and founded the city of Alexandria in 331 BC, the Egyptians had lit their lamps with a wick made of linen dampened in castor, sesame or safflower oil. Although there have been claims that olive cultivation began around the Nile, it is far more probable that the Greeks, certainly the Phoenicians and, before them, the original Canaanites, introduced the Egyptians to olive oil.

  But what could the Phoenicians offer in exchange for those shiploads of silver they so coveted? Was it their rich knowledge of civilisation, their alphabet? They were skilled shipbuilders, too. Right into the twentieth century, fishermen around the Cádiz area used to carve a horse’s head on the bows of their boats, a direct throwback to early Phoenician designs.

  Back at the hotel, too early for bed, I strolled to the coffee shop, careful to avoid the bar where a handful of pensioners were tippling sherry and listening to a pianist in a long straggly wig and party hat, his contribution to carnival, playing ‘Sealed With a Kiss’. The coffee shop was hardly livelier. I ordered mineral water and pulled out Simon’s paper on olive cultivation. Moments later, a man in dark glasses, figure-hugging white shirt and silk scarf wound tightly round his neck strode up to the counter, ordered a Martini, plonked himself at my table and smiled obsequiously. ‘Mind if I join you?’ He spoke in English but with an accent I could not place.

  ‘I’m working,’ I told him plainly.

  ‘Well, I’ll just drink this and one more and then I’ll be on my way.’ He called to the waitress and ordered another for himself and a white wine for me. ‘And put whatever else she’s had on my bill, too.’

  I thanked him politely and rose. He must have noticed my papers because he told me quickly as I turned that, although he was an interior designer by profession, his hobby was working as an olive-taster.

  He had caught my interest. ‘Where?’

  ‘Puglia, southern Italy.’

  I found him unpleasant but the coincidence was extraordinary given that I had that very evening, before going out, arranged a meeting with an olive-disease expert from Puglia. I sat down again, still refusing the drink.

  ‘I hate Mardi Gras with its unmistakable stench of urine,’ he announced. He was Scottish-Italian. ‘Puglia is the olive centre of the world.’

  ‘Spain produces more fruit,’ I countered.

  ‘Their farms lack soul, they lack the vital ingredient that makes for the finest oil: passion. Go to Puglia, see the trees, how they are pruned with love, with creativity. Nowhere understands the art of olive farming the way the pugliesi do. Here they are boring so deep and so frequently for water that it is not being replaced. In certain areas, it is sea water that is replenishing subterraneanly. Salt water. Mass production in agriculture is one of the gravest dangers of our time. Consider mad cow disease. Sleep with me.’

  I bade him goodnight and left.

  ‘It’s a good offer,’ he called after me. ‘Consider your age.’

  Within my room, after a long phone conversation with Michel, the incessant blinking of the lighthouse, a reminder of the city’s maritime roots, left me awake. I had to agree with the obnoxious stranger that Spain’s factory approach to olive farming was troubling me, dampening my enthusiasm. Intensive farming leached tradition, destroyed rural ways of life, traded short-term gain against a tomorrow that was marching inexorably towards a hot, barren earth.

  But what could I do?

  The following morning, Tuesday, Mardi Gras, the city was so silent it might have died or its inhabitants fled from the plague. The rank odours of partying and raw fish hung in the salted Atlantic wind. I had been dreaming of visiting this city of crumbling grandeur for many a year and I was now saddened that I had chosen carnival time. The wind coming in off the ocean was blowing vigorously, a challenge to the hangovers. It had rained in the night and washed the streets but it had not rid the heart of the old city, with its labyrinthine lanes, of rancidity. Soggy streamers, confetti and smashed oranges lay in between the cobbles; every step was treacherous. I went in search of the archaeological museum, housed in the grounds of what had been a vegetable garden in an earlier incarnation, but closed until the afternoon. It was midday, mezio. Shutters began slowly to unroll. The cold metallic clunk matched the chilled noon. Traders appeared, approaching this day of Mardi Gras with lethargy, heavy heads, disinterest. Men in hats with paunches sat in silence reading newspapers, tiny
cups of black Arabic coffee on the small round tables in front of them. The high-level noises and bustle of Spain had conked out. I mooched about admiring the architecture with its faded elegance, then hugged the seawall, breathing the heaving swell of water slapping the ramparts, its fine spray showering me, and chanced upon the immense, tangle-rooted Ficus gigante trees brought to the city by Christopher Columbus on a return trip from the Americas. Six hundred years old but almost as impressive, as gorgon-like and expansive as the Bechealeh olives.

  In 1492, the same year as the heartbroken Moor Boadbil lost his treasured Granada to the Catholic monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, Christopher Columbus set sail from Cádiz for the Americas. Through his discoveries in the colonies of Latin America, Spain found new wealth, new power. The might of Catholic Spain turned its attention across the blustery Atlantic Ocean intent on gold and imperialism. Coincidentally, Christopher Columbus, who came from a family of Italian weavers, had a favourite uncle who was a lighthouse keeper. It was he who had inspired the navigator’s seafaring dreams.

  In a small park at the waterside, beneath another of the magnificent ficus trees, I came upon a bust of José Marti. I found it surprising that he should be here, he who liberated Cuba from the Spanish and who is revered by all Cubans as a national hero. It was a reminder to me that Cádiz had long been respected for its liberalism and tolerance, which was quite possibly evident in the anarchic carnival songs, sketches and agitprop that I, because of insufficient language skills, was unable to appreciate. The city had been a fierce opponent of Franco though it swiftly fell to his army after he had landed on this southern coast.