Now that we could communicate with the outside world, Chloé decided that the period of her confinement was up and it was high time she got back to society. We had all wallowed in the unexpected ‘quality time’ with one another. The fire in the hearth through the long evenings, the candlelight glowing on the white stone walls, conversation, music, home-cooked food and some good wine. I am easily pleased but I imagine that by the end of the week Chloé might have found our homespun entertainments beginning to wear a little thin. So our daughter put the wheels in motion for her escape to the world over the other side of the river. Domingo had taken the electric-blue platform off, so I fixed up the bo’sun’s chair again and in ten minutes we were all three of us across the river, where some friends had arrived with a borrowed mule to take Chloé and her bags up to the road, the track to the river being now impassable for cars.
As we hugged one another goodbye, Bumble, our big white Spanish mastiff, appeared beside us, battered and bedraggled. I could hardly believe that she had launched herself into the raging water and struggled across for no other reason than that we happened briefly to be on the other side. It was little short of a miracle that she had survived. Chloé, delighted by this heroic gesture, smothered her with a big display of affection, while Ana and I tried to disguise our anxiety as to how on earth we’d manage to get the brainless creature home.
Bumble is an enormously strong dog, affectionately known as ‘The Lifter’, for her endearing habit of thrusting her enormous nose deep into the crotch of unsuspecting visitors and, with a heave of her powerful neck, lifting them off the ground. There are some who find this good-natured demonstration of affection embarrassing; we find it a hoot. But there was little lift left in that poor shaken creature shivering and whimpering beside us.
We looked around, appalled at the possibility that Bumble’s little terrier companion, Bao, might have tried the same stunt, because he would immediately have been whipped away by the river. But with great relief we spotted him standing anxiously by the cable on the home bank, watching us with that quizzical tilt of the head with which dogs express bafflement.
So Chloé headed off for Granada, and we applied ourselves to the problem of how we were going to persuade Bumble to cross that river again. There was no way we could carry her across on the bo’sun’s chair; we’re talking about a sixty-kilo wriggling mass of dog here. Ana and I swung ourselves across and called to Bumble. But she wasn’t having any of it: she took a look at the river, decided against it, and headed downstream.
We followed her, calling and calling. She kept stopping and looking at the river as if assessing where might be a safer spot to cross. And there were better places and worse: in places, you would be battered to death in seconds by the water careering over the rocks, and then there were calmer stretches where you just might stand a chance of swimming across before the current hurled you upon the next heap of rocks. She was clearly still exhausted and terrified by her first crossing, and she continued downstream till the river crashed against a cliff and there was no way past, then turned and headed back up, with us still in pursuit on the other bank.
It’s about half a kilometre between the cable and the cliff, and as rough and rocky as you could imagine. There was a spot here that looked good – or at any rate less bad. We stopped and concentrated all we could on trying to persuade the pea-brained animal to come across. We shouted into the noise of the water, and we begged and we cajoled and we jumped up and down with all the energy we could muster, for darkness was falling now and not much time remained. Bumble looked at us piteously, tried the river with a toe, and stepped back. We howled. She stepped in again, a little further this time, and was instantly knocked off her feet, disappearing beneath the water as she roiled away down the river only to be smacked hard against a rock. Somehow she righted herself and staggered out of the water on the same side as she had entered.
‘Let’s try walking away,’ suggested Ana. ‘She might pluck up courage if she sees us going home.’ So we did, looking back over our shoulders and calling out as we clambered across the rocks. The pitiful creature gazed at us imploringly as we abandoned her, then hurled herself one more time into the water. We raced back to the bank and howled encouragement. Again she vanished beneath the water, hurled downstream by its awful force. We were quiet for a moment … and then we saw her again, scrabbling with her claws to haul herself onto a flattish rock in the middle of the river. She slipped and half fell, but her desperation saved her and she heaved herself up and lay limp and exhausted on the rock.
The dog was not more than a dozen metres from us now. We watched her in the dying light, panting in a state of dazed terror, letting her rest a little to recover some strength. And then we yelled together and yelled and yelled at her to throw herself in just one more time and give it all she’d got and she’d be here. She struggled to her feet and moved to the edge of the rock … but on the wrong side; she seemed about to head back where she had come from. Ana and I nearly went berserk, screaming our very lungs out. If she got this wrong she would be done for. The river on the far side of the rock was wider and nastier; she had already done the harder bit … and now it looked like she was going back. ‘BUUMMMBBLE, YOU BRAINLESS BERK! HEEEEERE, OVER HERE!’
She sniffed the water, stumbled, and unsteadily shuffled round to look at us, frantic with fear. Ana was almost in tears by now and I was beside myself. And then the wretched dog threw herself into the water towards us. She vanished instantly, dragged under by the current. That awful infinitesimal moment seemed to stretch on and on as we waited to see her head above the water again, but we could see nothing.
We stumbled on downriver over the boulders, peering desperately into the gathering gloom and the tumult for some sight of her, but there was nothing, and we couldn’t risk getting any closer to those terrible waters. But still we yelled Bumble’s name, as if resisting the thought that we had had our last sight of her.
And then, after twenty or so minutes of this, we stopped. It was dark now. We could barely see the boulders in front of us. We had to accept that she had gone. Another dog down. That’s how it is with dogs: they die on you. You have to get over it, and she had had a good innings. I was deeply upset, though. Bumble may have been something of a bimbo but she was affectionate and dependable. Wherever I went, she’d be with me, thumping that enormous tail of hers, making us laugh with her nonsensical notions and habits. Ay, Bumble … taken by the river.
I put my arm round Ana’s shoulders and we stood there in silence, enveloped by the roaring of the river, as a few more minutes passed. And then, as if by some unspoken agreement, we turned and started to pick our way back towards the house. By the big Eucalyptus tree we stopped and looked back once more towards the river in the dark.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least it was quick. I guess it’s not a bad way to go. And she never got incontinent, like old dogs do …’ Ana was silent. I warmed to my theme. ‘She’s a big dog. You don’t want a dog that big being incontinent about the place, do you?’
I had thought I might try and make Ana laugh – although the conceit was not a particularly funny one, and it was hardly a time for levity. A respectable period ought to elapse before one dwelt upon the humorous aspect of a dog’s death. And then I laughed. I laughed and laughed. Because there, pale and sodden in the darkness, was the great bedraggled berk of a dog, panting and feebly attempting to wag her tail. We threw ourselves upon her. One hell of a dog, that one.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS
THE FLYING FOX AS A MEANS for getting to and from your home is not for everyone. But I like the surge of adrenalin it adds to a shopping trip into town, and find it oddly reassuring, knowing that we remain in touch with the slower pleasures of rural life. The inordinate amount of time it takes to do such simple tasks as bring in supplies of sheep-feed provides the perfect excuse not to have to tackle the more taxing tasks that hem me in … bookwork, the writing of articles, the chasing of deadlines
and suchlike. It sounds foolish, but I genuinely enjoyed our time of having no bridge, when everybody and everything had to be winched in.
But our enforced isolation was all too short-lived. There were pressures from all sides. Domingo wanted a bridge to move his sheep easily from one side of the river to the other; the hunters wanted a bridge to come across to our side and massacre the few remaining thrushes, turtledoves and partridges; the Alpujarran authorities wanted a bridge, as it’s the only way to cross the river on the GR7 walking path; and, for some unfathomable reason, Ana wanted a bridge, too. And so a new bridge was built.
I have written about the building of bridges before, so I won’t burden you with all the details, except to say that I believe this bridge will be the last we build. Domingo was, as ever, the master of the works, and this time, perhaps as a consequence of his new status as a property owner in the valley, he decided to abandon the old Alpujarran tradition of not spending any money on the river. This time he and I shelled out for a couple of substantial RSJs (Rolled Steel Joists), with double-T frames, and some steel sheets to weld across them. We built the new bridge higher above the river than ever before, and raised the joists upon a couple of massive piers of stone, concrete and reinforcing steel. This brutally engineered construct creates an unspeakable clanging and clattering even when the most meagre nocturnal creature creeps timidly across. And when Domingo’s whole flock of two or three hundred sheep goes galloping across, the iron thunder rolls away down the river and fills the valley with its horrid cacophony.
This bridge may last for ever but I feel a little ashamed of it. Bridges should be beautiful, like temples; they have their being at points of geographical, mystical and social significance, where the ways meet the water. I have seen the ‘wind and rain bridges’ of Guangxi in China, painstakingly constructed from wood, without the use of a single steel nail; I’ve seen Pont Neuf in Paris, and the Rialto in Venice, to say nothing of hundreds of more unassuming beauties that just get on uncomplainingly with the noble business of transporting people and goods across the water. There’s nothing noble about our bridge, though, with its artless assemblage of junk.
It took us two days to build the bridge, or rather, for me to assist Domingo in its construction. For, despite having been involved in the building of countless bridges over the past twenty years, I don’t seem to have moved one rung up the ladder of seniority and am always given the most menial of tasks, the erk’s work.
In this case it was the gathering and humping of heaps of enormous rocks for infill and the construction of the piers. As the work progressed, the supply of acceptable and useful stones became ever scarcer, ever further up the river from the site of the works, and so each stagger and stumble along the rocky water’s edge, hugging a rock as big as a small pig, became more of an agony. We are all of us older now than when we built earlier bridges, and the youthful horseplay and capering that lightened our load in those days has given way to a generalised grumbling and groaning and clutching of aching backs and bones. Still, I wouldn’t want it any other way. When the day comes that we can no longer throw a bridge across the river, that’ll be the day to throw in the towel and move to suburbia.
It wasn’t a big job to fix up a bridge, but the acequia was a very different matter. The river had swept the whole irrigation channel away, leaving only the steep rock upon which, by some long-forgotten wizardry, it had been built. Looking at where its course had been, I could only marvel at how the ancients had been able to achieve it. The rock was hard granite and smooth like the side of a whale. Somehow, in the way that swallows will build a nest on a vertical wall with spittle and mud, my farming predecessors had managed to drill holes with hammers and chisels, drive wooden pegs in and run beams along the pegs. On top of the beams they had started with tiny stones and earth, and little by little incorporated greater stones until finally they had a channel which they lined with clay or launa to waterproof it. Every winter the swelling of the river would bring down silt, and, as this was cleared out and carefully piled upon the fragile banks, plants began to grow, and little by little their root systems bound the banks and walls together.
By the time we came along, maybe a thousand years after this process was started, there were poplar trees with the girth of a wine barrel growing all along the acequia. Its precarious origins had vanished beneath a solid mass of earth and vegetation.
To rebuild the wrecked acequia in such manner would have been impossible without a team of skilled labourers and spending huge sums of money. But to lose it felt like a dereliction of duty. The acequia is a monument of the same vintage as the Alhambra. It may lack something of the Alhambra’s architectural distinction, but for a small farm it was pretty good, and I would be the first in a very long line of farmers to abandon it. I felt worse still when I thought of all the hundreds of hours that Manolo and I and others had spent maintaining the irrigation channel. I had sweated buckets and nearly broken my back cleaning that acequia, and often walked along it, too, just for the sheer pleasure. As well as being a thing of singular beauty, with its own ecosystem of plants and tiny creatures, the acequia was the very lifeblood of the farm.
By April the moisture from the copious winter rains was dwindling as the spring sunshine warmed the earth. If the trees and crops on the terraces were to survive, we would soon have to find a way of watering. Manolo, who is good at this sort of thing, reckoned that we could cut a new acequia, but much lower than the old one, which of course would have the disadvantage that it wouldn’t take water to the higher parts of the farm. He had walked the heap of boulders and riverine rubble that now formed the bank of the river, and established where the channel could join it.
When I saw the spot, though, I realised that it would be quite impossible: it would take a team of men six months to move all the boulders and dig the channel. ‘It can’t be done, Manolo; there’s no way you and I can shift that lot. We’d need a machine, and I really can’t see how a machine would be able to get anywhere near the river here.’
It looked horribly like the end of the line for my belovèd El Valero, at least as a functioning farm. But Manolo was not to be deterred. ‘Pepe Pilili’s in the valley,’ he said. ‘I saw him as I came in this morning; he’s fixing up the track. Why don’t you go over and see him. He’ll do the job for us.’
So I crossed the valley to where Pepe was working, and he said he’d come that afternoon to have a look.
‘God, the river’s made a mess of this valley,’ he announced, as he scrambled up from the bridge.
‘I know that, Pepe. I don’t need to hear that again. Just tell me if you could get your machine across the river and if you could cut me a new acequia here.’
We all walked along the bank towards the gorge, Pepe limping a little.
‘No trouble. I’ll be over tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see what we can do.’
Pepe Pilili used to be cocky and completely incompetent – he had tried and failed to build a road for us when we first moved to El Valero. But after many years of messing about in machines, years which he reckons have wrecked his health, for he hobbles like a crone, he is now cocky, bold and skilled.
‘So,’ I reported to Manolo. ‘Pepe will get it all sorted out for us.’
‘As I told you,’ said Manolo with a broad grin. ‘The only problem now is the permission. You need a permit from the Confederación Hidrográfica to work in the river.’
‘Well, I can hardly get a permit before tomorrow, can I? And when was the last time you saw an inspector from the Confederación Hidrográfica? I’ve been here for more than twenty years and I’ve never seen one.’
Manolo laughed. ‘You’re right: I’ve never seen one either. But if one were to come, he’d have your balls. You know how it is with the authorities.’
In fact, it was three days before Pepe battled his way through the river to our farm – still no time for a permit – and no mean feat of JCB manoeuvring, as there was still a whole lot of water raging on down.
For a few hours I peered at my laptop screen, opening and closing files and deleting the odd email, but my heart was not in it; I wanted to be down by the river where the action was, watching the machine work. So, late in the morning, I headed back down. On the way I met Manolo, who was striding up the track with a huge grin on his face.
‘Hola, Manolo,’ I said. ‘¿Qué pasa? How’s it coming along?’
‘Bad,’ he said. ‘You’re in trouble. Big, big trouble. The river inspectors are here. And they don’t like what’s going on, not one little bit. They are very, very angry, and they’ve stopped Pepe working and they want to see you.’ His grin threatened to part the hemispheres of his head.
Together we turned and strode down to face the music, although it wasn’t really Manolo’s music. It was me who would be carrying the can. With each step I could feel myself winding up into a tighter and tighter knot of defensive fury. ‘How dare these bastards come and stop me trying to save my farm,’ I growled darkly to myself. ‘I’m not going to take this lying down … not bloody likely. I’ve got my rights. I’ll hit them with some plain truths.’ By the time I got to where Pepe’s JCB was standing idle. I’d dispensed with the plain truths idea and was ready for rage.
Last Days of the Bus Club Page 14