Virginity Despoiled

by Charles Brett

  Inma had expected accusations and insults from Lili. Her passive dejection was appalling. She had to do something.

  "Inma? Are you still there?"

  "Just thinking. Thinking about Yuste."

  "I'm sorry about Ana's grandmother. I read her mother also died. That must've been awful for you both. How's Ana? Didn't she arrange a reconciliation between you and her grandmother?"

  "She did."

  Inma marvelled at how Lili could think of others in the midst of ruin. She made a decision.

  "Would you like a break from Úbeda and the flies? Could you get away?"

  "I'm dying to get away. You don't know what misery is unless you are here."

  "Would you like to borrow Yuste for a week or two?"

  "By myself? No. Only if you're there. The day and night I spent by myself there wasn't much fun after you rushed off to Madrid. I'm not trying to insult or be ungrateful. It's your house. I was a stranger in it, a guest without a guide."

  "I couldn't take as much as a week off right now. A long weekend sound okay?"

  "Anything, please! I need to be away from Enrique."

  "But you said he behaved generously when he learnt of –"

  "Yes, but he pines for Ana and at the same time has the daughter of his father's housekeeper mooning over him. It's a dilemma he can't resolve and I can't do it for him."

  "Lucky man. Sort of."

  Lili cackled. Although weak, it provided the first sign of humour in their conversation.

  "If I had to choose between Ana and María I wouldn't know what to do. One tall, effortlessly clever and well-mannered, while the other's the sultry playmate of his childhood."

  "What? They were at it when kids?"

  "No, no, no!"

  Lili reassured Inma that María and Enrique were friends as children and teenagers and had remained close until Enrique moved to Úbeda to escape his father. When María went to university in Seville, in Enrique's telling, they grew apart. While uncertain, Lili believed her appearance had cast a fat wrench into María's carefully-wrought plans. When Enrique's father died, María must have thought her tide had swept in, except Lili arrived and supervised the sale of the Córdoba house, which María and her mother had coveted.

  "María stood back when I moved in with Enrique in Úbeda. She married but was divorced. Enrique must have told her something, for shortly after I moved back into our separate suites, María reopened her interest."

  "She's patient?"

  "Persistent. And smart. Actually, I respect her, except when she's enveloping Enrique. He doesn't seem to notice. All in all, that pair are sufficient reason why it'd be good to escape. If you can bear my misery?"

  "I've been there too, if in a different way. Let me know when you can make it. I'll clear a long weekend, say Thursday evening to Monday?"

  Saturday, Córdoba

  María screamed in frustration. For almost two weeks, after the cameras and accessories arrived, she'd tried to build a prototype system to sort olives. Almost all her spare time had gone into working on this, and not a little at work, where the architect's office wasn't busy.

  Her one break had been to visit Enrique. It was unsuccessful, mostly because it had been akin to murder for her not to mention what she hoped to do. This was especially hard as the visit came just after initial successes in pairing cameras to both the Arduino board and the Raspberry Pi. She'd seen images of olives on both her main monitor and the tiny one bought as part of the accessory kits. With that 'phase' complete, the first fundamental worked. But she'd dare not say a word to Enrique in case she erected false hopes.

  All had gone pear-shaped. The decision to focus on the Arduino now looked wrong even if it was cheaper and simpler. There had appeared to be a better range of tools for the software. But she had misunderstood the nature of the Arduino as a board level computer. María had to do almost everything in software herself. Her first major trial came with the gates. She needed one that discarded an infected olive into a bucket while another permitted a good olive to roll onwards to the mill. The logic wasn't the challenge, the code was.

  Once this was solved the issue arose of sorting the good olives from the bad. As hard as she had beavered away María could not persuade the Arduino to make consistent decisions. She would not decide whether it was a problem in the recognition software, which she'd modified from a code snippet found on the Internet, or a flaw in her own code or a failure somewhere in her logic.

  What María did know was that she was going round in a circle. That circle was beginning to look repetitive. If she didn't break out soon she'd be stuck. Well and truly stuck. This would be enough to give up.

  She grunted. This was not turning out as she hoped. Her desire was to rescue Enrique and sweep him off to fulfil her childhood dreams. She acknowledged this was romantic guff but it had always been her and her late mother's dream – one that Lili had prevented.

  María decided to give herself one more attempt with the Arduino. If this failed her only alternatives were either to start all over again with the Raspberry Pi or surrender.

  At this moment giving up was more attractive. She was tired and miserable, which was not a constructive combination for encouraging creativity. Also, the thought of having to repeat everything already done with the Arduino on the Raspberry Pi held few attractions, even if the second of these behaved more like a full-blown computer. "There's only so much anyone can do," she muttered to herself.

  She switched off the salon light and headed to the kitchen. She would have a drink, go to bed, and try to sleep rather than constantly run through the permutations. Tomorrow was Sunday – decision day.

  In her guts María felt discouraged and pessimistic. Two long weeks had produced nothing of substance. If this continued, and if she was to replace Lili and displace Ana in Enrique's affections, she would need some other mechanism. The trouble was she knew that conventional female wiles bounced off Enrique like raindrops. The way to his heart was not via romantic slush or his stomach; it was through his olive trees and their fruit. Rescue them and all must surely come good.

  María shook her head, unable to convince herself. Her good intentions were unravelling. There seemed little she could do.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Autumn, the following week

  Monday: Úbeda

  Enrique began his daily duty in his Super High Density grove. Up and down the trellis lines he inspected the olives. As the day before, and the days before that, he selected random olives to cut, to double check. So far all remained well. Even without signs of infestation he should spray again. The kaolin mix worked.

  Better still the traps surrounding the grove showed declining fly numbers. The sustained heat was wreaking havoc on the flies' activities but it meant his olives would be smaller than ideal. Enrique thanked his insistence on installing the drip water feeding system, which compensated to some extent for the dryness that had settled for ten days now over the Guadalquivir valley.

  "Enrique? Enrique? Where are you? God I hate these olive plants masquerading as vines! Enrique?"

  A sloppy smile wrinkled Enrique's face. Only one person could own that combination of brusque tone and petulance. It crossed his mind to duck deeper within the long trellises. Before he could act it was too late.

  "There you are! Didn't you hear me?"

  "Buenos días, Soledad, how lovely to see you."

  Soledad scowled. She couldn't cope with compliments or people making polite conversation. Nearly everyone had switched off her at one time or another.

  "Lili told me I'd find you here, hiding amongst these revolting pseudo-olive trees. They should be growing grapes. They're absurd."

  "Not at all. They may yet save Olivos Ramos y Tremblay."

  "Only because you sprayed before the flies emerged."

  "True. Anyhow, rather than repeat our never-resolved debate about the merits of olives grown by trellis, how can I help?"

  This flummoxed Soledad further. She wasn't used to
having her flow interrupted by charm. Insults, yes. Male aggression, yes. Irritation towards her, yes. To hide her discomfort she dug into her suitcase of a handbag to produce three small tins.

  "What do you make of these?"

  Enrique accepted the tins. He removed the top from the first. In it lay a solitary, dried and sliced olive. He shut the lid and inspected the second, finding the same, and again with the third.

  "You mystify me. Olives?"

  "Clever boy! Even I can tell that. But what sort of olives? Tell me what you see."

  Enrique checked again, leaving all three tins open. He re-inspected each and was struck by a difference.

  "This looks like a Picual infested by a fruit fly egg which didn't mature."

  "And the other two?"

  "That's what baffles me. They've the same dead eggs, so they were also infected. But the two olives don't look like Picual or Arbequina. Where did you get them?"

  "Your eye is good. Your knowledge of cultivars isn't. Where did I get them? One was brought to me by José Luis. The others I found when searching and it didn't take me long once José Luis offered a clue."

  "What clue?"

  "He said one of his people found the first alongside one of the roads running alongside his farm. I mean a public road, not one of our private caminos. I found mine in a ditch by the road."

  "So?"

  "The key, my impatient young friend, lies in the cultivar. If we agree they're not Arbequina or Picual, what are they?"

  "No idea."

  "You're ignorant. You shouldn't be. I –"

  "Soledad, in the nicest possible way, stop wasting my time. Tell me."

  "Both are Blanquetas."

  "No one grows those round here. Not that I've heard of. They're from the Levante, towards Alicante and Valencia. "

  "Exactly."

  Enrique wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It was hot even at nine in the morning. He chased ideas in his head. Soledad waited, the corners of her mouth rising in amused anticipation.

  "Are you suggesting what I think you are?"

  "Which would be?"

  "Someone has brought Blanquetas from the Levante and infected them?"

  "Or brought already infected Blanquetas?"

  "Why would anyone want to do that?"

  "By the way, only you know so far. I'm not telling everyone yet. Would you look around to see if you find any on your property? By my reckoning, if you do, three locations would provide justification to start a larger hunt."

  "What baffles me is not only why but how?"

  "You mean why should anyone want to do this? Presumably to ruin a harvest given that the olive fruit fly is specific to olives. To what other end I can't conceive. As to how, I'm as clueless. Throwing a few dozen infected olives out of a car window shouldn't produce the damage we're suffering."

  "I agree. But that suggests ... No, I get ahead of myself. Shall we go look? Just in case?"

  In perplexed silence they walked towards the nearby road. Enrique took one side and Soledad the other. They pushed and poked at the edges but found nothing.

  After 100 metres they reversed direction. They continued further this time, climbing and then descending a small rise.

  On the descent Soledad exclaimed, "Look at this! I think I've two more."

  Before Enrique joined her, he finished brushing aside some longer undergrowth at least a dozen metres from the nearest trellis. He pulled out what would once have been a light-green olive. He sliced it open to find an un-ripened egg.

  He crossed the road to Soledad, holding out his hand with his find. She did likewise.

  "Snap!"

  "So what now?"

  "A good question, young man. We need more evidence for sure. I need to work out how best to ask others to look, but without detailing why."

  Her voice tailed off as she and Enrique headed back to her car. He was lost in contemplation. How would Lili react?

  Friday: Tallinn and Saaremaa

  Kjersti disliked the drab Estonian countryside. Beside her Oleg, for they'd agreed this was his real name back in Benidorm, drove a four-wheel drive Toyota suitable for going cross-country. So far they had not needed such a capability.

  On the map Kjersti followed the road from Tallinn. It ran south-west towards Pärnu and onto Riga in Latvia. Early on Oleg had turned off towards Virtsu, the jumping-off point for the island of Saaremaa. Beyond the windscreen the land was flat and uninteresting, quite different from her Norwegian mountains. Trees and unkempt fields spread across a landscape with the occasional bedraggled hamlet, rather than prosperous villages.

  Oleg was quiet. Kjersti didn't object. There would be time enough to wind each other up before tomorrow's race. Her friend Kateriina would also start, but she wouldn't last. Kateriina was a competent 10K runner and said she'd prepared for the 50K. Kjersti didn't believe she had the commitment. 50K was further than a marathon. It took a certain stubbornness, like she and Oleg shared.

  They bypassed Virtsu to arrive at the port where a ferry was arriving from Kuivastu on the far side of the strait. After buying tickets they joined the middle lane of waiting vehicles. Once moored, the ferry's forward gate opened and a deluge of buses, trucks and cars poured off in three parallel lanes. Part of the main deck lifted for more cars to emerge from a lower deck using the left most lane. Meanwhile, with the upper deck clear, the first of the waiting vehicles started to board using the right two lanes.

  By the time Oleg had parked and invited Kjersti for coffee on the deck far above she could feel the ship lurch as she departed. Kjersti checked her watch. About five minutes in total to moor, unload, load and cast off. She had never encountered such an efficient vehicular ballet. She said as much to Oleg when he brought their coffees to where she stood outside enjoying the sun. The weather forecast for tomorrow was good, predicting light clouds but not too warm. The one snag might be humidity. Kjersti would have to keep up her liquid intake.

  She was regretting her suggestion to Oleg. It wasn't the same as in Benidorm where she had delighted in the unexpected competition, as well as her seduction, not that she had ever hinted this was her objective. Looking back, the pleasure was in the literal chase, the two weeks of running together. That had been far more fun than the consummation. He was a gritty competitor when he wasn't stealing minutes. Of their time in bed she remembered him as functional and fastidious, with an overt distaste for the messier side effects of copulation.

  The good news for her, though Oleg didn't know it, was she would sleep in Kateriina's room. Oleg would have the spare room. This arrangement kept her options open. She could stay with Kateriina or join Oleg, depending on her fancy. Kateriina had suggested this open solution.

  Oleg's response, to her comment about the speed of loading, forced her to pay attention. She hoped he thought her entranced by the view of Saaremaa drawing close. She pandered to that to ask him how much further it was to Kuressaare.

  "About an hour, once we leave the port."

  "That's good. We can have lunch with Kateriina and then drive tomorrow's 50K route?"

  "You know where to go?"

  "Of course."

  She was mock offended. Didn't he recall how she'd prepared in Benidorm?

  "It starts from Sõrve Lighthouse. We run back to Kuressaare."

  "From the southernmost tip, where the Germans had an emplacement in the last world war?"

  "Okay, Oleg. You've done your homework. The buses leave Kuressaare at eight tomorrow morning, with the race starting at ten."

  "Yes, and this time I'll beat you if it kills me."

  That at least was the Benidorm Oleg. Fire had reappeared. If Kjersti could wind him up further today, and with Kateriina's help this evening, who knows what the race might bring. Reasonably sure she could outrun him, even on the flat, there existed the spice of uncertainty.

  The ferry manoeuvred into Kuivastu's dock. They hastened to the big Toyota to be in time for the exit ballet to recommence. Within a couple of minut
es they were heading down the road to Kuressaare. This time the countryside seemed prettier to Kjersti, feeling warmer and somehow more open.

  As Kjersti dozed she revisited talking with her neighbour on the flight from Helsinki. The conversation had been varied and international, of the type she relished. When they'd left the plane she'd found herself chasing a fast-walking woman taller if not as slim as herself. They'd exchanged business cards and made the usual noises about meeting in the future. She would like it to happen but knew it was improbable.

  Oleg nudged her awake to ask for directions. Kjersti phoned Kateriina and gave Oleg instructions to head for the signposted centre of Kuressaare and the pizza place opposite the Raegalerii. Minutes later, she was hugging Kateriina and introducing Oleg.

  Friday: Úbeda

  Soledad and José Luis sipped their cafés. Enrique appeared from outside. The heat continued though it was no longer as hot as earlier in the week. He ordered before joining them.

  "Have you found anything more?"

  José Luis and Soledad regarded each other, neither willing to speak first. Eventually Soledad began.

  "Not only all around Úbeda, but also some in Antequera. Others had noticed the strange olives. They hadn't cut them open or made any connection."

  "Is this sufficient to go to the authorities?"

  José Luis jumped in, saying, "We doubt it. It's too fantastical. We need more than a few dried Blanqueta olives with dead eggs inside. Soledad and I believe we have to progress our own investigations first. If we do find anything of substance that is when we hand over our evidence."

  "It may not be so simple," argued Enrique.

  "Why not?"

  Enrique launched into a summary of the arguments he'd had again and again with Lili after explaining about Soledad and José Luis's discovery of the Blanquetas. Lili was overjoyed, having been told of finding similar Blanquetas on their own land. Enrique hadn't understood.