Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  Two mild-mannered youths, about Chloé’s age, stepped forward to greet me, each with a sympathetic grin. The wind spilled from my sails, and we all shook hands and introduced ourselves.

  ‘So what’s going on down here?’ one of them asked. ‘Have you got permission from the Confederación Hidrográfica to do this?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. The job had to be done, and there happened to be the machine in the valley, so we just got on with it.’

  ‘You are aware’, the gentle youth apologised, ‘that you need permission to undertake any work in the riverbed?’

  ‘Of course – and I’m sorry that I haven’t got permission. But it was a matter of getting things done. As you can see, the river has destroyed everything here and I’m just doing what I can to get some water to my farm.’

  ‘Claro – we can see that – and we really do understand that there are extenuating circumstances. To tell you the truth, I don’t blame you at all. But I’m afraid that because we’ve seen what you’re up to here, we have to put in a report.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said miserably. ‘Can we finish the job, though?’

  ‘Well, that’s up to you. I can’t give you permission. But what I suggest is that, to make things easier, you might want to go and see our boss in Granada, explain the situation.’ I wrote the boss’s details on a piece of paper resting on the bonnet of their car. We talked a little more of the river and the flood and the unspeakable things that people did in the river without permission, and then they drove away.

  ‘What are we going to do then, Cristóbal?’ asked Pepe.

  ‘Finish the job off. They’ve gone now. Ya que estamos en el baile, bailemos.’ Which translates, rather lamely, as ‘Now we’re at the dance, let’s dance’. It is not perhaps as good an expression as being hung for a sheep as a goat (which of course would be particularly apt in these parts), but it’s how the Spanish put it. And they like this sort of thing. A saying is a refrán in Spanish, and cultured speakers are described, approvingly, as muy refraneros.

  Not long afterwards I took the bull by the horns – cogí el toro por los cuernos (as the refrán has it) – and set off to see the Hidrográfica boss in Granada. I knew that the fines imposed by the river authority for unauthorised messing with the river could be ruinous. And rightly so, for the water of the rivers is a public resource that should belong to everybody, and yet there are no end of villains, both private and corporate, who are engaged in siphoning off more than their fair share. It’s hardly unreasonable to expect to have to get authorisation for any use of the public resource. However, I did hear later that a friend whose acequia had similarly been damaged in the flood, had applied for permission and that permission did not come through for eighteen months. Of course, all the trees that he needed to water were dead by then. So I felt a certain justification in pitching in and getting on with the job.

  Nonetheless, every day I was regaled by new horror stories of farmers ruined by colossal fines for the most minimal infraction of the rules. For some time Hidrográfica fines were Manolo’s sole topic of conversation, which rather ruined the pleasure of our hour of manualidades. Schadenfreude, as I think I have said somewhere before, is a common trait in the Alpujarra, a good-natured delight, even hilarity, when things go desperately wrong for the neighbours. That’s not to say that they won’t pitch in and help out with great generosity and enthusiasm to make whatever it was that went wrong go right again.

  If you’re feeling remotely in need of an uplifting experience, the austere seat of the River Authority in Granada would be the wrong place to look for it. The offices are dark and slightly grubby, with not the least attempt to create a pleasing environment for work or visitors, no decorations except for a few torn posters announcing union meetings and the odd exhortation not to waste water. I felt a little nervous, in the way I tend to feel when entering a hostile environment, because, let’s face it, public administrative bodies are pretty hostile environments, and the plywood-partitioned rooms and frosted glass of the tenth floor did nothing to allay that feeling.

  I had an appointment for the start of business at 8.30am, but when I arrived – on the dot – there were some men already in there. I kicked my heels in the corridor, trying to feign interest in boxes of papers and photocopiers. I couldn’t sit down and read a book, firstly because I was too agitated to concentrate and, secondly, there wasn’t a chair … and besides, I hadn’t brought a book.

  After a while the men left and I walked into the office, about as depressing as an office can be, and with an incumbent to match. The Confederación Hidrográfica official was short, I think, although it was hard to tell, as he was sitting behind a desk and seemed reluctant to rise and greet me. He had a beard and was dressed in a brown shirt and tie.

  The official barely registered my entrance and it transpired that he didn’t know anything about my case and nor was he much interested by it. After listening a little, while signing papers in a file in front of him, he suggested dismissively that I go to the floor below and talk to the secretaries about applying for permission retrospectively. I was a little surprised by his brusqueness, but what did I expect? I was the felon, after all, and he was a funcionario, a civil servant, one of a section of society well known in Spain for their dismissive attitude to the public.

  Things were different on the floor below. There was a lot more femininity, for a start, with four women hovering around what seemed to be an information desk. One of them smiled and asked how she could help me. I told her my sorry tale while the rest stopped what they were doing to listen. The first woman, Consuelo her name was, gazed at me intently until I had finished, at which point she piped up with: ‘You’re the one who wrote that book, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied a little surprised.

  ‘I liked the book,’ she said, smiling even more warmly. ‘So, if there’s ever anything I can do to help, then I’d be happy to do it.’ And so saying, she ushered me to an office at the end of the passage and introduced me, with all the pride and care you might reserve for a favourite brother, to the older woman behind the desk. ‘She’ll tell you the best way to present your case,’ I was reassured.

  And indeed she did. I went home with instructions to prepare, in triplicate, a sketch of the site, a photo of the site before and after the work was carried out, a description of the site, a description of the work to be carried out, a sketch of the farm, a sketch of the river, an account of why I had failed to follow the correct procedures, a photocopy of the deeds of the farm, a photocopy of my identity document, a photograph of me, a document sworn in front of a public notary to say that I was who I said I was, and another to say that the photo resembled the person it purported to be, which was me … There was something else, too, but I forgot what it was.

  I drove home over the hills, eager to get going, and a couple of days later I sent the whole shebang in a big, buff certified envelope to the Confederación Hidrográfica, and sat back to await results.

  Now of course one doesn’t expect a quick reply from such a body and, as the weeks fled by, I might almost have forgotten all about the whole episode, were it not for Manolo reviving the subject in ever more spectacularly gloomy terms during Manualidades.

  ‘A man in Tablones had to sell his car and all his goats to pay the fine – and that was just for shifting a couple of rocks in the river. Juan Barquero knows a man who had to sell his farm and move away to another province … You might even have to go to prison,’ he added happily, while I hammered yet another almond into smithereens.

  About six weeks later I found stuffed in my post office box a certified letter from the river authority. It told me that I had failed to append one of the required documents in appropriate form, and would I do the whole thing again and do it properly this time. The document conveying to me this information ran to five pages of incomprehensible codswallop. I scanned it in a perfunctory manner. At the end it said something about six months’ grace. I took this to mean that I didn’t hav
e to lift another finger until the expiry of the six months, and having duly noted five months and twenty-nine days thence in my diary, forgot all about it. Well, ‘forgot all about it’ may be not entirely appropriate, given that twice a week during Manualidades I was reminded in the most lurid terms of the potential nightmare ramifications of my misdeed. Domingo and Juan Barquero had taken up this refrain, too, and so every time I bumped into one or other of them I would be regaled with the same litany.

  So on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth month after that initial notification, I fished out the document from what is affectionately known by my women as my ‘toy box’. Having not seen it for a bit, I scanned the document with a little more care and comprehension. Lord knows where I had got the ‘six months’ from. It said that I had but ten days from receipt of the registered letter to get the whole business in order … thus I was five months and nineteen days too late. Manolo and Domingo and Juan would be ecstatic. The shit was really going to hit the fan now.

  I was seized with anguish about this, for, according to my friends and informants, this default would probably multiply by ten the already ruinous ramifications of my original crime. Failing to read the document correctly was no defence, as it is, apparently, the duty of the citizen to be properly informed. The whole thing made me feel very uneasy and nervous, and each passing week only added to my agitation about the outcome of my case.

  And then I sat back and thought about it: more than six months had passed since I had failed to provide the authority with the correctly and duly filled-in forms … Perhaps they had forgotten.

  ‘No, they never forget,’ Manolo kindly assured me as he sliced off a thick lump of chorizo to go with his beer. ‘Sometimes they let it go on for years, and all the time the fine is increasing and you don’t even know. It’s a bad business, a bad business.’ And he shook his head in a feeble attempt at fellow feeling.

  Lost in thought I attacked a few more habas. ‘I tell you what, Manolo: I’m just going to let it slide, forget the whole cussed issue. Sod ’em, I did my best, and if that’s not good enough for them, well … well …’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Well … we’ll just see what happens.’ And at that I scooped the habas and their outer shells into the same bucket, thus wasting a good half hour’s work.

  Despite my bravado, I was quite seriously worried. Stressed, in fact. As the worry grew, I started to come out in boils, and all manner of unpleasant ailments began to assail my person. This thing was in me and doing me harm.

  Then one day notification of a registered letter arrived in my post office box from Medio Ambiente – the Environment Department. I was on my way out, going away for a week, so I decided not to accept the letter then; I would pick it up when I came back. Of course, by the time I did come back, the post office, in their inimitable way, had returned the letter to the sender. The direst forebodings began to haunt me. I didn’t need corroboration from my neighbours to know that I had gone too far this time. The administration would be really riled up and out to get me for all I had got. I found it hard to get to sleep at night.

  They kept me in this awful suspense for another month, and then there it was, a pink slip back in the post office box. I collected the letter from the desk, signed for it, and went to sit down in a bar so that I would not fall over when I discovered the terrible truth. I ordered a coffee and looked at the envelope for a bit, then tore into it. ‘LEVE’ was the first word I saw, because it was in capitals. Leve means ‘light’ … it seemed that my misdemeanour was being considered by the administration as ‘light’, i.e. not serious. I read on. The denouement was on the last of five pages: if within thirty days you have not appealed against our decision, you must pay a fine of ninety euros. Ninety euros! That was probably about a fifth of what the original permission would have cost me, had I applied for it.

  This was as good a piece of news as the news that somebody wants ninety euros off you can be. I resolved to pay the fine without further ado, and accordingly scanned the rest of the letter to see how one went about paying it. It seemed that I would need a form called Modelo 047. I went back to the post office, because sometimes you can pay these things through that august institution, but no, they hadn’t the first idea what a Modelo 047 was, or how to go about paying the fine.

  ‘Try the bank,’ they suggested.

  Our local bank in Órgiva moves with the times. Given that a fair proportion of their clientele is English-speaking, they have decided to get in on the act. The first manifestation of this forward-looking policy was a big poster in the bank and a set of fliers in a heap on the counter. These advertised ‘On-Linen Banking’, and underneath the announcement of this unusual service, the baldly mendacious statement, ‘We Speak English’. They don’t speak English. Apart from the very charming Augustín, who can greet you with a garbled and almost unrecognisable ‘goomorrnin’, and might on occasions be persuaded to count from one to ten, nobody has a word of anything but Spanish. So if you go in there hoping to do your banking – on linen or anything else – in English, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

  That’s OK. They’re nice people and do what they can to run a halfway decent bank. As a consequence of once having had a bestselling book, we are treated in the bank as high rollers, and Augustín in particular is always at pains to ensure that our every whim is catered for. He seems to be in a constant state of agitation about the parlous state of our accounts, the utter fiscal chaos that reigns amongst them, the complete disregard for sensible banking practice. Now, the rates of interest paid to its customers by our bank are exiguous to say the least; you’d make more money if you lent it to a goat. But even so, our cavalier attitude is a source of constant distress to Augustín, and he is always on the lookout for one or other of us to ‘have a talk about it’.

  He got hold of Ana a few months ago; she was in the bank and unable to slither away quickly enough.

  ‘Ana,’ said Augustín, ‘I think that between us we could make a better job of organising your financial situation.’

  ‘Claro, Augustín,’ she said, trying to sidle off.

  ‘We need to maximise the growth potential of your deposits,’ he continued. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’

  Ana did understand what he was saying, but he thought he would illustrate the point with metaphor anyway.

  ‘Just think of the bank as a chestnut tree, and your accounts are like the chestnuts, or a cherry tree if you like, and cherries. Then think of yourselves as squirrels, or badgers perhaps …’

  On and on went the convoluted wildlife talk, sporadically illustrated with graphs and tables that bore no resemblance whatever to badgers and squirrels. Ana could make neither head nor tail of what he was on about, and was only able to get away by promising to send me in to discuss matters.

  Thus betrayed by my own wife, I was unable to go anywhere near the bank for a long time. You’ll think us foolish perhaps, but sexing up the performance of our bank affairs would mean the difference between, say, a taxable interest of ten euros forty-seven cents per annum, and one of seventeen euros fifty-three. And a long session with Augustín droning on about cherries and chestnuts and farmers and their lemon trees, over a matter of seven euros and six cents – well, it hardly seemed worth the candle.

  But to cut to the chase: having drawn a blank with the Modelo 047 at the post office, where they hadn’t a clue about it, and in the town hall, where Mari-Ángeles the lady mayor was out having coffee, I decided to try the bank, in the hope that Augustín might not be waiting for me.

  To check that he wasn’t there I peered through the double-doored security airlock (a curious invention that means you can’t get in while another person is trying to come out). It was rather dark in there. There was a figure waiting for the electronic permission to burst out into the rarefied atmosphere of the high street, with its smell of coffee, roasting chicken and patchouli oil. And then, bang! – the door flew open – and there like some sort of fairy godmother stood Augus
tín. He looked at me censoriously.

  ‘Goomorrnin Cristóbal,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, Augustín … er, I was just going into the bank,’ I explained, purposefully.

  ‘What for, Cristóbal? Can I be of help?’

  ‘Um, no, I don’t want to molest you during your coffee break.’

  ‘No, let me see. What is it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a fine that I have to pay to Medio Ambiente. It’s not a lot of money but I can’t work out how to go about paying it and nobody seems able to help me. I need, apparently, to get hold of a Modelo 047.’

  ‘047?’ said Augustín with a chuckle. ‘That’s easy: you just download it from the Internet, fill it in. All they want is your name and address and the amount of money to be paid and that’s it, pan comido.’

  ‘Simple as that?’

  ‘Simple as that. Here, give it to me and I’ll do it after my coffee; it’ll only take a minute.’

  ‘A thousand thanks, Augustín, that’s so kind of you,’ and I was almost on the verge of adding, ‘maybe we could sit down for a bit and see if we can’t make some sense of our bank accounts’, but some blessed angel drew me back from the brink. So I went off into the town to deal with a few other pressing matters.

  When I passed the bank again – Órgiva is not such a big town that you can go anywhere without repeatedly passing the bank – there were no customers, so I decided to nip in and check that the transaction had gone through.

  ‘Ah, Cristóbal,’ said Augustín. ‘I haven’t done it yet; I got busy. We’ll do it right now.’ And he moused about with the computer on his desk. He scrolled down, clicked a bit, and moused some more … a bit more fast-mousing and a couple of clicks. He frowned, reached for the form I had given him, scanned it a bit, frowned some more and returned to mousing.