Afterwards, the troupe returned to street garb and, hanging about near their table, my insignificant bill settled, I walked across to congratulate the gypsies, as I would actors after any show. Close up, they were very different. Save for the sheen of perspiration on their unshowered skins, the shine, the magic had departed. What remained was seedy, sad, flabby, several middle aged, and I guessed, as they nodded their indifferent acknowledgement to my praise, that they were headed home to backstreets or rundown tower blocks on the city’s outskirts. One, the lighter-skinned Indian-looking fellow, was pacing about. All the stillness and centre of concentration dispelled. He was twitchy, lacking quietude, and I asked myself whether he was anxious to get going, to score drugs. Another resembled a lonely old homosexual with mascara bleeding beneath his eyes.
I went back outside and walked the deserted lanes, footsteps echoing, slowly to the car, neither stolen nor damaged, of course. I settled into the driving seat and closed the safety belt over me, but did not immediately start the engine. I was experiencing a mixture of emotions – elation at having witnessed such charged performances with raw, authentic energies and a sadness for what it must mean to be a gypsy, an outsider, in twenty-first-century Spain.
I awoke to driving rain, hardly the most propitious start to a boat trip up the Guadalquivir River. As I left Jerez, the vineyards on the rolling hills with their special chalky soil known as albariza, that partially contributes to the unique flavour of sherry, were hidden behind a blanket of fog. This was the weather named by the ancient dwellers of the Mediterranean – imbribus atris, dark rains, torrential downpours with low clouds that cut off the sun and screened the views. It was very disappointing. How different it must look during summer and the autumn season of grape-picking, vendimia, when the scorching weather has waned and the fields are filled with fruit and harvesters.
The Phoenicians brought the vine to this region. Once the Romans had gained control of the peninsula, they shipped tall jugs of the brew to all corners of their empire, including Rome itself. The boat journey between Gades, the Romanisation of Gadir, now Cádiz, to Ostia, along the shores of Rome, took nine days. The Moors, being Muslim, were not imbibers and the wine industry might have fallen into ruin when Islam gained control had it not been for British merchants who arrived in the fourteenth century and, seduced by the wines of Xerez (pronounced ‘sherrish’ by the Arabs), launched the ‘sherrish’ grape in England and sherry was born. Even today, the British, followed by the Dutch, are the greatest drinkers of these particular sacks.
The weather delayed me. A route which the evening before had been straightforward was complicated now, confusing. While I was thinking about soil or peering out into the darkness at inviting cortijos on rolling plains and long, soft slopes peppered with rows of winter vines, I took a wrong turn on the outskirts of Sanlúcar and ended up in its harbour of Bonanza. A huddle of fishermen tried to signal that I needed the porto pesqueria, three miles downstream, not this larger port where fleets of small trawlers were docked. Both Columbus and Magellan set forth from here on major voyages, I remembered, but I could not delay. Eventually, after getting lost down backstreets several more times, I drove into sleepy Sanlúcar where not one beach bar was open and tracked down a much-needed cup of coffee behind the esplanade at a dingy little counter where two men were serving while another pair sat sullenly on high stools drinking café con leche and watching television. Both were eating breakfast, toasted bread dripping with olive oil. I ordered the same. The men looked at me in amazement. The oil was sharp, of poor quality.
While we waited on the grubby, white-sand beach for our boat, the Real Ferdinand, to be readied, the rain began to ease, the sky to clear. Gruff-faced fellows with umbrellas and bulldogs on sturdy chains strode by, a Japanese woman bore down upon an unsuspecting sparrow, chasing it to and fro in attempts to photograph the terrified creature, while retired, hollow-faced fishermen in caps sat about smoking: the morning traffic along the strand. As we were pulling anchor, a large party of Spaniards arrived, loud and excitable. Our number comprised the newly boarded group, two lesbians from Brittany and myself. The Spaniards were hollering, unable to concentrate as the vessel heeled and began to nose sedately upstream. Here, where our boat was chugging, was the broad mouth of this mighty river, the port of entry for some of the greatest maritime civilisations in Western history. It was an impressive ingress, not as monumental as the Amazon perhaps, but substantial just the same. The Moors called it Wadi-Al-Kabir, the big river. Originally, there had been two arms surging powerfully into the ocean. Today, there was just the one, heavily polluted.
We floated by Bonanza. Two forestry rangers were accompanying us. Sabrina spoke English, the other Spanish. Sabrina, from Sevilla, early twenties, enthusiastic, clad in wet-weather gear, confirmed that both Columbus and Magellan had embarked on grand voyages from here. She pointed out the lighthouse and a large shed used for fish auctioning. In this end-of-February season, before the long dry months, the exposed mud and sandbanks were ideal feeding grounds for flocks of breeding birds, both migratory and endemic, and she promised us sightings of many. The Spaniards were feeding crisps to gulls, and photographing them as they swooped and skidded alongside us, snatching greedily at the goodies before beating a hasty retreat. Fortunately, a few drops of rain again sent the entire Spanish troupe scuttling and fleeing to the lower deck, to a television lounge where they enjoyed our entire four-hour transit in front of a prerecorded video. This left me alone with the French women and Sabrina, whose knowledge of the local wildlife was formidable. We talked of olives and the history of the area.
‘There’s a post within the park, an alternative entrance, with tourist office, known as Acebuche,’ she informed me.
‘Acebuche?’ Wild olive. ‘How did the post acquire its name?’
She did not know, but guessed it had been inspired by a particular tree still growing there.
‘Is it wild? How old is it?’ I was pulling out my map of Doñana, scrabbling to locate Acebuche. Was this to be my Phoenician treasure? My Western relative of the Lebanese mighties? ‘Are we going there?’
She shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that old. Several centuries,’ was all she could tell me. ‘I think it’s cultivated.’ She had no other information.
During one of two forays we made into the drenched parklands, wild boar and fallow deer were grazing. Although we were bordering the Atlantic, the landscape was Mediterranean. I learned that seashells from the Atlantic had, over millennia, been washed inland. Silt and sand from the riverbanks had also clogged up the waterways. I thought of the Phoenicians and their murex molluscs used for their famous purple dye, prized by the Romans. I felt convinced that beneath the earth on which we were standing lay layers of shells, of river silt, subterranean pellicules of history. We found cork beehives. They dated to the Middle Ages, but the method of fashioning them and the use of the cork oak were far older.
‘This region contains many habitats: lagoons, salinas, scrubland, salt marshes, dehesas.’
I asked Sabrina about the dehesas.
‘Forests of evergreen holm oak, encina. It’s a prehistoric tree and along with the olive, carob and cork oak defines the Mediterranean topography.’
‘And where the holm and cork oaks grew was to be found the wild olive.’ If there were dehesa forests then I felt sure that at some point these coastal regions were swathed in wild olives. I was trying to picture those early exchanges between Tartessian Iberians and the merchant sailors from the east. Had the sailors known that the wild olive grew in abundance here? Had its discovery proved a bonus, its cultivation an added skill to trade?
‘All are essential trees for enrichening the soils found in these lower arid regions of Spain,’ explained Sabrina. ‘Similar to the wild olive, the holm will regrow from a stump, important after forest fires in this waterless climate. Its longevity is not as renowned as the olive; still, there are surviving holm oaks that date back seven hundred years. Many consider these fore
sts, cork, holm and olive, to be the original primeval Mediterranean forests.’
In prehistory, when the cave peoples of Altamira were around, much of Spain was covered in holm, but as time went on and man evolved, thousands of acres of these trees were felled for firewood, charcoal, logging, building homes and, later, agricultural purposes. ‘Unfortunately, because the trees frequently survived in poor, arid soils the agricultural crops planted in their place didn’t do well and, eventually, the land was abandoned. Instead of the trees, scrub plants grew up, which is what we know today as the maquis and garrigue. However, elsewhere the holms were only thinned out and within the spaces grew cork oak, which gives its acorns in winter, thus offering food supply year round to sheep and cattle but, most importantly in Spain, to the delicious Iberian black pigs which graze within the dehesas and feed exclusively on acorns.’
‘And what of the “monte negro”, those low, humid areas within the national park, which in olden days were forested by luxuriant spreads of cork and wild olive trees. What happened to those forests?’
Sabrina could not tell me. She was not a historian. ‘Ask the captain later,’ she said.
The outlying life consisted of wild white horses, tall juniper bushes, umbrella pines: Mediterranean. A black stork, I saw, and gorgeous purple herons perched on wooden landing posts on the riverbanks. The list of birds within the parklands was rich, exhaustive. While we talked, I was leaning over the side, looking back towards the single mouth of the Guadalquivir spilling its mighty, now polluted, gallons into the ocean. I was photographing cormorants and keeping my eyes peeled for the Spanish imperial eagle, rare, with less than a dozen breeding pairs still in existence.
By the time we tied up alongside an area of swamplands, marismas, the rain was heavy, curtaining off the views from the boat. These marismas were originally lakelands, known to the Romans as Ligustinus. Apart from myself and the girls from Brittany, no one fancied getting drenched. Here were flamingos, not a rarity for me as a frequenter of the Camargue. We crouched among tall reeds, hiding out of sight from the birds but eventually, thanks to the appalling weather and the discomfort, the excursion was abandoned and the boat returned to Sanlúcar where the Spaniards disembarked hastily in search of sustenance. I stayed aboard with the two women and the captain who served us hot coffee from his flask while the wind whipped at the tarpaulin cover and I was reminded of the howling banshees back in Ireland. It was then that we spotted four ospreys.
‘So what of Tartessus?’ I asked the florid-faced captain. ‘I’m fascinated by those earliest encounters. The arrival of the shallow-keeled galleys, oak-oared, transporting men from the east. The reaction of the Iberians standing on the shores. This river flowing silver, and why they allowed the strangers to load up their boats.’
‘The kingdom of Tartessus was said to be rich beyond all dreams. It was a fabulous land, a land of the imagination. Its rivers and estuaries, according to the stories, flowed silver. Even its king bore the title, Arganthonios, “The Silver One”. Classical and biblical writers had eulogised its wealth. It was Tarshish in the Bible. But few believed in it. Until navigators, treasure hunters, who sailed here, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and returned to the east with fantastic tales of a river running with silver and gold, of rich and pleasant men, of fine bulls and fertile plains …’
I glanced outside at the rain, the lack of fertile plains, wondering about these fine bulls and the bulls of the Minoans. ‘So do you believe that Tartessus lies here?’ I asked.
‘Buried beneath these forever shifting wetlands, yes. Maybe right here where the Real Ferdinand is rocking in the wind.’
‘Might it have been their alphabet that the Phoenicians traded for silver?’
Our skipper, pouring shots of brandy now, shrugged, waved his head. ‘The Tartessians were famed for their literature. They spoke a language that is extinct. Few traces remain.’
I had not known this. The Phoenicians gave their alphabet to the Greeks who passed it on to the Romans and so on until it became the root of our modern alphabet, but these people could read, write.
‘They had music, too. Their primitive dances were also renowned.’
I had heard this. Surely seeds of the music from this silver city evolved into flamenco? The Romans were always keen for the women from this region to dance for them. The girls from Cádiz, who even then used castanets, were frequently hauled off to Rome to entertain in the Imperial City.
‘Do you believe it was the Phoenicians who discovered the city?’
‘Yes, and there might have been an earlier encounter.’
‘Minoans?’
The captain was not sure.
‘I have a suggestion and wonder what you think …’
I proposed that whether in those far-off biblical days it was the Phoenicians or the Minoans, well over a thousand years earlier, who had sailed up this mighty river with herons along its fecund banks, the art of olive cultivation, of grafting, was surely a skill delivered here, and with it came the possibility of reaping liquid gold. From the river flowed rich deposits of silver and from the grafted wild trees sprung the makings of a delicate, edible gold. The strangers from the east disembarked on to these sands, bringing in tall clay pots a golden oil, one that was consumable, could be used for cooking, for preserving food, for medicinal purposes, perfumes, too, also for light. Then the sailors discovered – or perhaps they already knew – that the silvery-leafed tree, the wild olive, the acebuche, was growing here.
‘We will teach you to work your silver trees, to create your own liquid gold,’ they promised, ‘and we will transport the oil and sell it for you. In return, we will take your silver from the water …’ Silver for liquid gold: that might have seemed a fair exchange.
The mysterious disappearance of Tartessus, this wealthy, mythical kingdom, somewhere around the sixth century BC has never been explained. Some claim the Carthaginian-Phoenicians were angry with the Tartessians for trading with the Greeks and expressed their displeasure by razing the metropolis to the ground.
The captain shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Others suggest that Tartessus fell victim to conflicts between Greeks, Carthaginians and Celts, all greedy for the silver and tin mines. Whatever the true story, today not a single trace of this shining city remains and, like the Minoan civilisation in Crete, no conclusive explanation has been found for its disappearance. Both are candidates for the lost city of Atlantis.
The rain was chucking it down now, waves slapping hard against the boat’s hull. The captain, the two ladies from Brittany and myself had hunkered down for the afternoon, drinking but not excessively, kicking around ideas on history to make historians turn in their graves.
The captain raised his glass. ‘To Atlantis,’ he winked.
MOROCCO
At Algeciras I bought a one-way ticket and joined the straggly crowd, predominantly Arabs, awaiting the ferry to Tangier. In front of me, an old, wizened pensioner in green woollen hat and rose-pink slippers patterned with blue hearts. Behind me, a Moroccan living in Essex, forties, stocky, balding, talking English to the back of my head. I was too tired to engage. He spotted my passport.
‘Irish. Are you a Catholic?’
Twenty of his friends, he claimed, had married Irish Catholics, each of whom ‘without the slightest prompting’ had converted to Islam and covered themselves, which he judged ‘terrific’. Disrobing a woman of her veil, headgear and long skirts before sex was an arousal that beat all experiences, he was confiding to my hair. The queue shuffled forward while we waited for the boat to be prepared. This was not a conversation I wished to engage in and I tried to lose him but he stuck limpet-like to my shoulder, and I grew suspicious.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 17