by A Long Walk in the High Hills- The Story of a House, a Dog
To my astonishment, Erland glibly announces, ‘The drilling machine can go down a few more metres, it will be a risk, mind, it doesn’t normally go that deep, but do you want me to do it? It will cost more.’ Erland is obviously ratcheting up the drama and enjoying every ounce of this affair; I suppose I can’t blame him.
‘Yes, of course,’ I finally demur.
When the phone rings half an hour later, he can hardly speak. ‘We’ve got it. Tons and tons of water, from deep down. It was so touch and go, I can’t believe it, but we’ve struck a great seam.’
‘Well, thank God for that,’ is all I am able to muster.
The next few weeks are frenzied, first, filming for The Clothes Show, a surprise success in the UK, then on to Switzerland for West 57th on the track of a US fugitive – West 57th, by the way, would also like an update on the Loch Ness Monster and Jack the Ripper as well as a profile of the Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov in Bilbao and another with Prince Charles at Sandringham. When I eventually manage to get to Mallorca in late January, aware that my relationship with my neighbours is now a bit dodgy, I’m ready for a rest.
The island couldn’t be more inviting, dressed as if for a wedding, with pink and white blossom adorning every almond tree and because there isn’t a breath of wind, there it will shimmer, like confetti, for almost a month. This is La Calma d’Enero, the calm of January, the lull at the beginning of the year when blue skies and short, sunny days bring everyone out into the fields to make bonfires and be busy It was this gentle weather that enticed Chopin over a hundred years ago to a cold monastery in Valldemossa further up the island where, in spite of angry locals who didn’t like him and the onset of rain which nearly killed him, he managed to compose some of his loveliest preludes. Some things never change.
I’m dreading Kendi and what I’ll find after all these weeks away and even wonder whether she’ll still be there, but as I round the corner into the road leading towards my house I can’t believe it, the old man is talking animatedly to someone and he has Kendi with him, on a lead. Her ears are pricked and she looks happy to be included in whatever they are discussing. I would love to stop and say hello to her, but the old man, as usual, doesn’t look inviting so I ease past and suddenly I feel much, much better.
The looming problem of truculent neighbours lifts at the thought that maybe this could be the start of something good for poor Kendi if her owner has started taking her for walks. Maybe I can ask if I can take her into the hills one day as well, so that we can explore and find new walks together. My delight at the sight of Kendi off her chain doesn’t diminish even when I discover that while I’ve been away the walls and furniture of the old house have been covered in a white, powdery mould from damp.
Opening the creaking shutters to let in freshness will help and anyway, my first job before I shake off the television cobwebs is to inspect my new water supply which I notice has had its own little house built at the edge of the field. Erland has been working hard. He’s already had the water tested and I gather I owe Gunther an apology because, although drinkable, once the water is exposed to air it does indeed turn shit-brown. There’s iron in the water which has to settle before it turns crystal clear which means another deposito will have to be dug close by. Compared to this, I’m beginning to think Santiago with his water bowser is a luxury I won’t be able to do without. Nothing on the island is ever straightforward.
There’s a big blue-black bee sucking the juice out of the jasmine, its weight flattening the petals. I have never seen a bee like it, glistening and buzzing around the garden in the morning sun. I am so taken up with this huge bug that I hardly notice the man inspecting my house.
Erland is with him and he’s smiling. ‘Meet my good friend Boris,’ he says. ‘You asked for a builder, well, Boris is the one who is going to help you restore your house now you’ve got plenty of water.’ And like a cat that’s proudly nabbed a big fat mouse, Erland thrusts Boris at me and slopes off.
Boris is German and a bit fey so it takes a little while before he gathers enough momentum to tell me what he’d like to do with the house. It doesn’t help that I’m suspicious. His hands don’t look like a builder’s hands, his fingers, constantly fidgeting with a strand of long silvery hair that keeps flopping over his eyes, are tapered and manicured. He doesn’t have the physique of a builder either. Boris is delicate and is kitted out in a vibrant orange smock over pale blue trousers and yellow espadrilles. I’d lay any amount of money that I’m looking at another artist. Turns out he is and, as I will discover, a good one too, but to earn a living he has to build and is keen to get his talented hands on my place, the sooner the better.
I try dampening his enthusiasm, there is no electricity, but it doesn’t put him off. He can handle the generator left by Johnny, he says assertively, prising open the dunny where the clapped-out machine resides, and now that I have water, he enthuses, we can pump enough to mix cement. He wants to bring out the beauty of the old finca, to give me special places outside where I can sit and relax surrounded by nature.
‘What I want to know,’ I interject, before he gets too carried away, ‘is can you make it vermin proof?’
‘Vat do you mean?’ he demands in a thick German accent.
‘Rats jump about on my roof,’ I say, ‘and any moment I fear they’ll be in the house co-habiting with me. How can you stop them?’
Boris then launches off into a rhapsody about the kind of rats I have. They are not real rats, he says, not the kind you find in Britain. They are almond rats, shy nocturnal creatures which live on a diet of almonds and are so timid they will never, ever come in the house. I must not ‘vorry’. He will be back in a few days with his team of men to point the stone at the front of the house and ‘We will forget about the rats.’
Wagtails are busy flipping grubs, blackbirds and robins are rummaging in the acid yellow flowers of the alfalfa which has sprung up in dense clumps in the field and I need essentials from the village shop. I have a deep basket with leather straps hanging on an old farm implement behind the door – it has menacing metal spikes embedded in a plank of old pine and, hung up high on the wall, is perfect for hats and coats and things. It’s also a bit lethal if I’m not careful.
The basket and I trip off down the road to my favourite colmada behind the church. Here Elena and her parents supply the village with everything, from oranges in season to freshly baked bread. Elena has long dark hair and is fiery. She’s not yet twenty and keeps a firm eye on her father, any shirking and she bustles him up like a bee. Elena’s father is one of two bakers in the village and spends long nights and sleep-filled days in his bakehouse next to the shop. Sometimes, particularly in the summer, the oven heat is so overwhelming customers have to shake him awake if they want to buy bread. He is a kind man, who’ll shrug a little and smile at the inconvenience of being caught nodding off. There are not many who can stand the dual heat of an oven and a hot humid summer and I sometimes wonder whether the villagers really appreciate this treasure in their midst. It won’t be long before the big bakeries take over, I’m sure.
The shop, where all the womenfolk of the village gather to chat, is long and narrow and also stifling hot in summer, protected against flies with long strands of silver chain at the door which tinkle when a customer comes in. The boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables are stacked so I’m able to dive in and help myself, local tomatoes, mushrooms, plums in season, anything grown in the district is sold here along with produce picked up every other day by Elena from the teeming Mercat Olivar, the main market in Palma. There is always a leg of ham on display, ready to be carved, and whole Manchego cheeses, but I have to arrive early if I want to get served quickly. Being polite is a bit risky. If I let one of the local ladies in before me I’ll be there most of the morning as she goes over every piece of fruit or remembers, just as I think she’s on her way out the door, to pass on a particularly juicy bit of gossip to whoever else is in the shop.
Today, I’m in luck, th
e colmada is empty, it is deliciously cool and I am in and out with bread and enough tomatoes and oranges to last a week. I’ve been told the best oranges are those grown in tierra roja, the red earth around the towns of Santa Maria and Manacor in the middle of the island, as they’re sweeter than those grown in the tierra blanca of Soller and Deia on the coast. I’m not sure I can yet tell the difference, all I know is that they are at their juiciest just now and Elena has tubs full.
The Tabac – or tobacconist – in the square sells the local English newspaper, the Majorca Daily Bulletin, along with pencils and paper and stamps. Today, the front page is filled with a poor forecast for the tourist season and a list of local markets. I pull off a chunk of still warm bread and read the weather is set to be fair for the rest of the month. Which is all I need to be happy.
The next few days are spent picking big yellow mushrooms in the fields and planning which bits of the house I want to have restored. Like the dunny, for example, which is claustrophobic and smells mousy. I’m learning more about Boris and how brilliant he is at transforming old fincas with his artist’s eye for the romance and antiquity of a place so I hope he might also makeover the bathroom, which is about to part company from the rest of the house, so big is the crack through which I can now definitely see daylight.
I have no inclination, in my daydreams, to consider the odd behaviour of my neighbours, although I notice Francine, Gunther’s wife, is not acknowledging me if our cars pass on the road. Apparently the Mallorquín way of greeting someone unknown is to tip the head back, raise the eyebrows and not smile to prevent any unwelcome intrusion. I am beginning to get used to Francine’s adaptation of this admirable technique, which I’ve come round to believing saves a lot of energy. I think I smile too much after all those hours on the breakfast sofa greeting guests. It would be wonderful not to, sometimes, but if I’m serious about this I’m going to have to practise lifting my eyebrows a bit more meaningfully.
Francine has a thick mop of dark wavy hair, she’s slim, has an aquiline profile and is also pretty nifty on her feet. She has a herd of goats which she rounds up by running up and down the hill, leaping sure-footedly from rock to rock, although I notice the goats make their own way home in single file to be milked by her at night, their bells reverberating in my sleep. Francine works diligently to produce soft bite-size cheeses for Gunther, which no one else gets much of a chance to taste. He swallows them whole. She keeps the goats, who keep down the scrub, just for him.
It’s a dewy January morning when Boris and his building team decide they’re going to begin work. Boris arrives first at half past eight in a rattling old Renault followed by Rafa, Mario, and Carlos buzzing behind on their mopeds. Rafa has vivid red hair, pale skin and is a dead ringer for that other redhead, Jaime I. Rafa really does look like the statue of the conqueror on his horse adorning the main square, the Plaza d’Espana in Palma; he has a powerful upper body which is just as well because Rafa is also Boris’s labourer.
His other worker, tall, supple, dark-eyed Mario, fled from his home on mainland Spain when a nuclear power plant went up nearby and has not gone back, preferring to stay on the island and toil, although gardening is his first love. Mario will tenderly move even a weed to a safer place if he thinks it’s going to get squashed by a JCB, a rare and remarkable thing in a builder.
And Carlos with his sweet face and flat cap is introduced as Boris’s cement expert. It will take a while for me to understand there’s a skill to laying cement in Mallorca where even for the smallest job extra thickness and extra reinforcement is essential because the earth expands and contracts so forcefully in the heat. Carlos attempts to keep Boris right, as the artist in Boris will happily slap earth-coloured Mallorquîn cement, freehand, on almost every wall if he can get away with it.
This morning, perhaps because it’s damp, the genny jibs a bit but soon, with a little coaxing from the choke, a purring and then a chugging gets the gang underway and I am despatched to Andratx to pick up enough fuel to last a week.
The market town of Andratx with its grid of sunburned terraced houses concertinaed in streets laid out over a thousand years ago, is still trim and interesting. Dominated by its great church and an imposing castle, there are bakeries on almost every corner, cool courtyards behind high garden walls, polished brass on oiled pine front doors; it hasn’t changed much since Ludwig Salvator, an Austrian archduke, left Viennese court life behind to settle in Mallorca. ‘Andratx, Roman Andrachium,’ he wrote in 1867, ‘is inhabited mostly by seafarers and shows kindness and prosperity to quite a special degree. Happy, content faces smile at the onlooker from every house; it is just one of those places where anyone would be glad to settle.’
I bet generations of Mallorquíns have been grateful to bed down here at the foot of its mountain, Puig de Galatzo, protected a little from pirates who came ashore at the port three miles down the road to murder and massacre and take into slavery anyone left standing. A particularly brutal raid by bandits from the Barbary Coast in 1553 is still vividly remembered by townspeople who dress up as Moors and Christians every August to re-enact their 450-year-old battle. As always, the Christians win.
Unspoiled towns like Andratx are forever under siege. It’s hard, on this January morning, to believe that having got almost to the end of the twentieth century in such fine shape Andratx won’t look like this much longer. In the years ahead a local mayor and his planning officer will be caught and sent to gaol, but not before large chunks of the old town have been destroyed and ugly and incongruous apartment blocks have been given the go-ahead like bad teeth in a once perfect smile.
The Andratx wisteria – one of the finest specimens I have ever seen in the centre of the town – will go the same way, eventually being cut down to make way for a savings bank. It smothers a coffee bar now, on the corner where the weekly market meets each Wednesday, twisting its way round street lanterns and electricity wires all the way up the road. In spring its pure, delicious purple attracts hundreds of bees, today it’s getting an annual trim from a group of fellows wobbling volubly on step-ladders. I make a note that I should certainly find a place at my house to plant a wisteria like this as it obviously loves the climate so much.
When I get back to the house with my haul of fuel there’s much muttering going on. The men have stopped work. Lauren, I see, has turned up and is talking to Boris who looks sheepish. ‘Er, I have news for you,’ he blusters as I stagger up the stone steps with the petrol, ‘Ve have no generator. It has gone.’
‘Gone, where’s it gone?’
‘Johnny has taken it. He came up here half an hour ago and says it’s his and he vants it back.’
‘And you let him just take it?’
‘Veil, it vas his.’
Lauren quickly says she can’t offer me hers because she needs it.
‘But why on earth would Johnny want his old genny back?’ I demand to know, fuming now. ‘A machine which is absolutely essential to the running of this wreck of a house . . .’ and then, ‘I thought, in any case, he was supposed to be going back to the UK?’
All four guys look at the ground for any sliver of inspiration as I rant on about how mean and miserable can a person get, to come and nick a sodding generator. Or words to that effect.
Mario then does the only thing reasonable under the circumstances – he offers to go and borrow one until I am able to find a replacement. In other words, he’s outta here. Which leaves me with the others, Carlos and Rafa, who grab their baskets with fruit and water and go squat near the bread oven to have their lunch.
Boris and Lauren don’t bother to try and placate me, it’s obvious this is the kind of behaviour they’re used to. Lauren, in any case, has come to see if she might nick Boris for an hour or so to fix her water pump but before he slinks off to help her, I want to know the form. How come Boris gave in so willingly to Johnny when I’m the one paying the wages?
Lauren says they all go back a long way because, for God’s sake, they all arrived
together, but before she can fill me in, Boris quickly changes tack. He’s looking worried. ‘Let’s forget about Johnny,’ he says. ‘Ve have plenty of work to do and Mario vill find another generator.’
Lauren shrugs as Boris prattles on about how he can envisage a lovely iron trellis at the front of the house to carry the vine now threatening to squash the makeshift structure it currently leans on. ‘Ve von’t need a generator for that, vill ve?’ he says, hoping to flatten my rage.
Lauren meanwhile has spotted an opportunity to inflict one of her crushing bon mots instead.
‘What you need to realise, if you want to understand Boris is this,’ she drawls, turning to me, ‘there are two Germans in this valley who were once friends. One is Gunther,’ she nods in the direction of Gunther’s house, ‘and the other is Boris. One is a neurotic,’ Lauren pauses, ‘and the other a psychotic’
For a second I consider which one might best fit the bill but Boris beats me to it.
‘And vich von am I?’ he asks anxiously, giving the game away.
The rest of the day is spent hacking loose lime plaster from between the stones, so that by nightfall Boris’s team have covered everything in yellow dust. Mario has returned, happy at finding someone prepared to lend a generator, and Boris has got over his neuroses to stay and talk me through the intricacies of choosing the right model. The conversation kicks off okay but then, as he starts getting technical about voltage and power surges and whether diesel or petrol is best, I start feeling low and as the light fades Boris delivers his own coup de grâce. ‘Ve von’t find a genny in Mallorca built to last. Best bring one out from Britain.’ I’m ready to pack it in.
By next morning, after a blissful sleep, things look different. It can’t be that difficult to get my hands on a generator. After all, the island resounds with the unrelenting din of them. As I make my way downstairs, treading barefoot on the tiles to boil a kettle, I notice there’s half a lemon lying, once again, on the kitchen floor. The lemon is a bit odd. I can’t work out how it’s got there two mornings running, but there’s enough left on the worktop to salvage a slice for my tea before the men arrive and I can go on the hunt for a new generator.