Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  Simon’s green roof seemed a logical step for us. Already the walls of the house are so covered in ivy and wisteria that the sun barely touches them at all in summer, and this makes a spectacular difference to the temperature inside the house. With an extra layer of vegetation on the roof, we would be cool in summer and warm in winter – as cucumbers and toast – for no running cost at all. These, too, were powerful considerations for Ana.

  The dyed-in-the-wool Manolo took a little more convincing. When we broke the news to him, he grinned his broadest grin and looked from Ana to me and then back to Ana, waiting to see who would crack first and admit that we were ‘taking his hair’, as the Spanish have it. ‘You want to put grass on the roof?’ he repeated incredulously and waited. ‘You mean grass … on the roof?’, he tried again, but still we simply agreed that this was indeed the plan. For days he continued his bewildered refrain of ‘Grass … on the roof?’, breaking off into a chuckle and shake of the head. I’ve no doubt that in the ensuing weeks he drummed up free drinks from Tíjola to Órgiva using just those four hilarious words.

  Eager to proceed, we pored over the Internet for details. In Tokyo, Osaka and Kuala Lumpur green rooves were quite the thing, but it turned out that Freiburg in Germany had the most advanced projects, so much of our information came from there and little by little our plans took root.

  The first thing we had to do was to properly waterproof and reinforce all the rooves in question by covering them in a layer of steel-mesh-reinforced concrete, then a welded layer of PVC. This detracted somewhat from our green credentials, as PVC is hardly an ecologically sound material, but one must be pragmatic. On top of the PVC went another layer of waterproof concrete, then a special felt, like old army blankets, and on top of all that a layer that looked like plastic eggboxes. These held water for a good long period of time. The eggboxes were covered with fine filter cloth and then a deep layer of soil mixed with balls of arlita. Simon said the soil should be as inert as possible, for some reason which still escapes me.

  Arlita is exploded balls of clay, like Sugar Puffs: they’re water-retentive and excellent for growing plants, but their main advantage is that they lighten the load. With unadulterated soil you run the risk, when it rains, of the roof becoming waterlogged, the weight being too much for the supporting beams, and the whole shebang crashing into the room below.

  The arlita came all the way from Barcelona in enormous sacks on the back of a truck and Domingo came down to the river to ferry the sacks across on his tractor. It was clear that he was interested – anything remotely innovative piques his curiosity, but he usually prefers not to show it. That day, however, he asked me a few laconic questions about the project, which for him is akin to wild enthusiasm.

  Clearly something was up, but he waited until we had loaded the last batch to fill me in. ‘The papers came through from Madrid yesterday. I’ve bought the farm,’ he said.

  It was a simple enough sentence and delivered in the same manner that one might announce the purchase of a new pig. I looked at Domingo, my mouth open in amazement while he grinned sheepishly and traced a pattern in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. ‘Domingo! I had no idea,’ I cried. ‘¡Enhorabuena! Congratulations, I’m delighted.’

  And I was. For Domingo was the only farmer in the valley who hadn’t – until this moment – owned his own land, and he was without doubt the most passionate lover of the land. Both he and his father before him had rented their farm for a peppercorn rent from landowners in Madrid who had never even seen the place. For many years he had been trying to negotiate to buy the farm off them, with absolutely no success, but finally he had done it. It was impossible to overestimate just how much a thing like this meant. Country people have an insatiable hunger for land; now at last Domingo could put into practice his own projects for improving his home and the land that surrounded it. I grabbed him and gave him a hug. Someone needed to be emotional about this extraordinary event, and it certainly wasn’t going to be Domingo himself.

  The fact that Domingo hadn’t actually derided our scheme with the green rooves, and had even lent a hand with the arlita, brought a change of heart in Manolo, who soon made tentative comments that he thought the scheme, though harebrained, might just stand a chance of success.

  The insulation and waterproofing layers were complete. Now it was time to plant the roof with drought- and heat-resistant plants. This was Ana’s scheme and was inspired by her finding a spectacularly beautiful succulent in the semi-desert of Almería. How any plant could survive such conditions seemed little short of miraculous. Ana identified it as a Sedum and set about rooting scores of cuttings in her nursery. She then cast about for other plants that might thrive in the taxing conditions of a flat roof in the Andalucian summer. They included Mesembrianthemum, Carpobrotus, Crassula and a whole lot of others that I still don’t know the names of.

  Now that the roof is established, lavender, several thymes and alyssum have sown themselves in profusion, and the aerial view of our house has taken on the look of a rather scruffy hanging garden, particularly now that I have sown the roof of the cámara, the annexe where we keep our library, with wheat, barley and poppies.

  The green roof is a thing of great beauty and, because we had Simon as master of the works, it is also professionally done and ought to last us a lifetime. As a consequence we now have one of the very few rooves in the Alpujarra that does not leak when it rains. This is a terrific advantage, and it really does have the effect of keeping the interior of the house cooler in summer and warmer in winter. As Manolo is fond of pointing out to all-comers, ‘El techo verde es lo suyo’ – ‘A green roof is the way to go.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW EL VALERO GOT ITS NAME

  ONE OF THE KEY PRINCIPLES country living is always to have time for one’s neighbours … though it’s not always an easy one to follow. One day recently I was hurtling out of the valley, late for an appointment with the dentist. Antonio, Domingo’s cousin, was sauntering down the track and signalled me to stop. I wound down the window and he leaned on it, idly flipping the long end of his horse’s leading rope and grinning. It was one of those grins with a little more depth and complexity than his everyday grin; there was purpose of some sort behind it.

  ‘We could do with a little rain,’ I offered, non-committally.

  ‘No, no, no, it’s fine. Plenty of grazing still. You’ll be OK over at El Valero, anyway …’

  He seemed to be pacing out some sort of a conversational treasure map, unsure of which line to follow. He continued: ‘I’ll tell you why El Valero got its name …’

  Lawd, I thought. I’ve lived here for God knows how many years now and I’m late for the dentist, and he goes and chooses this moment to tell me how my farm got its name.

  ‘It’s got to do with grazing, you know, vale – valero. The grazing’s good, even in a dry year … Ah, and you know that mule of Juan’s?’ He had found whatever it was he had been looking for and slipped into gear.

  ‘Which Juan?’

  ‘You know Juan Gomarota, the big one …’ (Gomarota means ‘broken rubber’ and is Juan’s slightly cruel apodo or nickname).

  ‘Ah, that Juan … I didn’t know he had a mule.’

  ‘He doesn’t, but he did once. Anyway, that mule was a hell of a worker. It used to belong to a shepherd who rented the grazing at El Valero one winter. There was nothing for the sheep to eat anywhere – you think you’ve seen dry, well, this is nothing. He had three hundred and fifty sheep and they were thin as pencils, hungry like snails on a mirror; they were in a terrible state. So in that dry, dry winter he brought his whole flock to El Valero for the grazing. There’s always retama and albaida and romero there (broom, anthyllis and rosemary) Anyway, the flock recovered, and in a short time they were fat as butter, and the grazing lasted them all year. It’s good, your hill. Thus the name: El Valero.’

  He had got this wrong actually. I had often wondered about the farm’s name but so far as I could discover, it doe
sn’t mean anything. It’s Campuzano, the hill on whose slope our farm lies, that is named for the quality of its grazing: campo sano – healthy land.

  I slipped the clutch an inch, to make the car lurch towards the waiting dentist.

  Antonio wasn’t having it, though. He was in full flow now. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, hanging on imperviously to the lurching car. ‘The shepherd had two boys and they were wild, and one of them had a bicycle …’

  ‘Aah,’ I interjected. I’m not good at letting people get on with monologues uninterrupted, and I felt that the various ‘hmms’ that I’d so far offered were not sufficiently encouraging – although the last thing I wanted to do was to encourage him. I wanted to get to the dentist; I hadn’t been for nine years and I had a throbbing tooth. But the bicycle was a good touch, an unexpected narrative element. There never have been many bicycles in the Alpujarra – it’s not bicycling country, and also the nature of the indigenes is such that a bicycle would have been considered a rather racy and even improper thing. I put the handbrake on.

  ‘What they did was tie the bicycle to the mule’s tail and in this way they rode all over the Alpujarras, one on the mule and one on the bike. Of course, their father gave them a belting when he found out, but they had a lot of fun in the meantime. When they sold the mule, Fat Juan bought it. He said it was great to work with, except that it went berserk at the sight of a wheelbarrow or a concrete mixer.’

  I said that I didn’t believe they had actually tied a concrete mixer to its tail. ‘No,’ said Antonio. ‘But a concrete mixer has a wheel and I suppose in the eyes of a mule that makes it similar to a bicycle.’

  As a story the whole thing wasn’t up to much. I’ve heard worse, but on a scale of one to ten I’d give it two, or perhaps three. And these days I get told a lot of stories. The locals know that I write books about the Alpujarras, and the notion of having your story written down seems to exercise a peculiar appeal. They don’t seem to expect any reward but, of course, the stories aren’t always good ones, and they are not always told when you want to hear them.

  Indeed, I had no sooner managed to shake Antonio off and was racing toward the town, driving like a banshee with the toothache, when just past the banana grove at El Granadino my old friend José Parra – a man who, rather oddly, keeps a lorry in his front room – leapt out into the road before me.

  ‘Cristóbal, qué tal? Hey, I’ve got something to tell you …’

  I looked pointedly at my watch. José Parra looked as if whatever he was about to tell me had been carefully rehearsed. ‘You know there used to be a mill up the river beyond your place …’

  I arrived an hour late for the dentist, which, as it happened, was no bad thing, as he too was behind, so I only had to wait another twenty minutes.

  Occasionally, though in truth not often, someone will tell me a story that etches itself deep into my mind and either illuminates or throws long shadows over the place I call home. Such a story was told to me by Rogelio, a sheep farmer who lives up on Cerro Negro, the Black Hill.

  Rogelio is the mildest of men, with white hair and apple cheeks and his farm is a fine example of how an Alpujarran farm ought to be run: the trees are all neatly pruned with an axe, and at their feet are stacked little piles of firewood; runnels and rills of clear water burble along earth channels and cascade over stone walls even to the far corner of the most distant terrace. Well-tended crops delight the critical eye. It speaks of hard work, a deep love of the land, and plenty of good home produce.

  I have known him for years, for he had a little flock of sheep that I used to shear and, although it barely repaid the cost of the petrol to drive up to his farm, I relished the few afternoons we spent together. Inevitably the day arrived when I had to announce that I was hanging up my shears and would no longer be able to shear the flock. He took this stoically and, after I had finished, invited me to watch the sun dropping low on the Contraviesa and share a few glasses of rough country wine. We had been sitting for a while in contemplative silence when I asked him if he had always lived at La Palma, his cortijo.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I bought this farm forty-five years ago for five thousand pesetas. I was born way over there,’ and he indicated the great range of rolling blue hills that we were overlooking down to the south. ‘We lived in a very remote spot, just the three of us, my brother my mother and me.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘My father died before I was old enough to know him. As I said, there were just the three of us, and we had no other family anywhere near. I say no family; we didn’t even have any neighbours, it was that far out. Then, when I was eight years old, my brother ten, our mother fell ill and went to a hospital in Granada. The doctors told her that she would not leave there and would die there very soon. Her last wish was to see her sons before she died, so somehow she managed to find a taxi driver to come to the Contraviesa and take us back with him to Granada. Somehow he managed to find us and took us away with him to the hospital. When we arrived in the city – and we had never been in a city before – our mother was already dead. The taxi driver told us we owed him eight thousand pesetas.’

  ‘Eight thousand pesetas,’ I cried. ‘But that’s more than you paid for this farm.’

  ‘That’s what he said we owed him, eight thousand pesetas. How were my brother and I to know what this meant? We were children, and had never earned so much as a single peseta in all our lives.’

  ‘But the man was a monster, to take such cruel advantage of a couple of children … and children who had just lost their mother. I can’t believe that anybody could be so vicious.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rogelio quietly, ‘That was what this man wanted, and my brother and I vowed that we would pay him every peseta of what we owed him … and we did.’

  He looked up and smiled in the gentle way he had. I wanted to weep. I thought of those two children alone in the world and walking from Granada back to the Contraviesa; it would have taken them two or three days probably, with no money, no food. And I thought of the monstrous heartlessness of the taxi driver. And then I looked at Rogelio; he was trimming with a razor-sharp knife, a handle for his axe. He bore no rancour, was not eaten to his soul with desire for vengeance against this appalling injustice. This gentle and unassuming countryman had come through a most terrible trial, a trial that would have destroyed most men by twisting their hearts with bitterness. It’s surprising where one finds such deep wells of strength and courage.

  ‘So how did you pay off the debt?’

  ‘We worked at whatever we could find for years and years, keeping nothing for ourselves, until it was finally paid.’

  After he had told me the story, I drove back down the hill to the river. The very landscape looked different; I could hardly help superimposing upon it the recent past with its poverty, its cruelty and its misery … and the glorious counterpoint to all those evils, that makes us what we are: strength, generosity of spirit, joyfulness, goodness. In South America they have a saying, which I fear they have often needed to see them through the long years of misery: ‘Los buenos, somos más’ – ‘The good, there are more of us.’

  For a long time afterwards I would mull over this story of Rogelio’s. It moved me deeply, but I found that whenever I tried to relate it to others great gaps seemed to appear in the narrative begging to be filled. How had the children managed to find their way home? How had they not only supported themselves but managed to pay off such a huge debt? No doubt Rogelio had told me but I had failed, as a result of my shaky language skills and sieve-like memory, to note them. There was also the problem that I was, and always have been, a rather passive listener. I have none of that editorial acuteness that good interviewers have, who can distance themselves enough to lob in a note of enquiry.

  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I should revisit this story with Rogelio. In fact, the episode had revived a dormant but cherished ambition that I had nurtured long before I’d written any stories of m
y own: to collect the tales told by the old folk about life on the mountain farms when they were teeming with people. I used fondly to imagine myself trudging the rocky ways of the Alpujarra (an activity like this ought to be done on foot to give it respectability and authenticity) armed with pen and notebook and perhaps a tiny, unobtrusive tape recorder. I would seek out the old folks with stories to tell, and they, bent over their mattocks, or leaning on the bar in remote village taverns, would share with me their stories of the past. Anthropological ethnography, I think the term is. Now, with the passing of the years, the old ambition had taken on a new urgency. The old folk, many of them left as the sole original occupants of mountain villages or near-derelict farms, were disappearing fast, and with it my chance to offer this community some writing of lasting cultural value.

  My mind was set. But, as so often happens, other more pressing tasks intervened and I found myself delaying and then delaying again the launch of my grand project and, as I was no longer shearing, I had no other reason to go up to Cerro Negro. I didn’t see Rogelio for a long time. And then, one day, not long after the hunters had slain the boar, our dogs, Bumble and Bao, decided to head off into the hills on their own and disappeared.

  I had made myself hoarse from shouting their names, and was pretty fed up with searching, when an Englishwoman who lived up on Cerro Negro rang to say that Ana was lying beneath the shade of a hedge in her garden and could I go and fetch her. Having established that she was talking not about my wife but one of our dogs (who have collars with the name ‘Ana’ and our telephone number), I set out, initially irked by having this long errand. Then I realized that the hedge in question was not far from Rogelio’s farm. This was too good an opportunity. I would visit him and flesh out the story I had begun. I printed it out and, armed with a brand-new pen and notebook, and a dog-lead, set off.