She gave me a withering look and flounced off to join the swelling multitude.
After another half-hour of cussing and swearing I decided to wire the wretched rods together. By the time I got down to the valley, the guests were all there, passing round the very last of the salads. They had cooked flatbread on the stones of the fire and with this they had polished off the bucketfuls of Middle Eastern delicacies that we had prepared for them.
The only person who was hungry now was me. I felt justifiably a little piqued; it was, after all, my birthday and, while I was buggering about with the welder, I had missed the music and the puppetry and every last leaf and grain of the side dishes. To make matters worse, everyone was singing the praises of a fabulous dish of ‘sushi’ – a delicately spiced roll of mushed avocado and pickled vegetables rolled up in seaweed and sliced – that the crudo-vegans had brought. In their generosity they had saved me a few delicious mouthfuls, fending off hungry hordes to do so. I swallowed them in the worst possible grace.
It took a long time to cook the lambs, but, as the fragrance of the roasting meat mingled with the night air and I sipped from a bottle of sparkling Barranco Oscuro cava, I began to relax and luxuriate in the atmosphere of growing bonhomie. Most of the guests had gone, leaving my family, some guitar-playing friends and a few Spanish carnivores to group around the warmth of the fire. The moon rose over the Serreta and a pale mist from the river swirled amongst the tamarisks and the rocks as we sat murmuring and masticating into the night.
STEPS AND WATERFALLS
THESE DAYS CHLOË NO LONGER spends Saturday nights at home involved in edifying conversation with her parents. She goes to town, and often ends up staying the night there, with one of her coterie of schoolfriends. Town is where the action happens, and we have to drive her to and fro ever more frequently. Being unsure as to the exact nature of the ‘action’, and seeking to be the responsible parent, I asked her one evening, as we headed towards Órgiva, ‘Just what exactly is it that you and your friends do in town on a Saturday night?’
‘Oh nothing really…’ said Chloë. A silence while I mulled over this surprising information. She had told me that the previous weekend they had not gone to bed until three in the morning.
‘But you must do something, surely?’ I prompted. ‘I mean, you can’t spin nothing out till three a.m., can you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Chloë was playing with the buttons on her accursed mobile phone.
‘Then what?’ I continued my probe.
‘What what?’
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, we… hang out…’
‘Where do you hang out?’
A brief hiatus as she performed some tricky digital manoeuvre. ‘Just now our place is on the peldaño – the steps – of the bank.’
‘Which one?’
‘Banco del Espiritu Santo – up the Plaza. But we’re hoping to move somewhere closer to the centre.’
It all started to become clear. It was a phenomenon I had observed many times in Órgiva. As day turns to evening, the steps of the various shops and banks become occupied by gangs of teenage girls, who chew pipas – sunflower seeds – and gaze with regal detachment upon the world. The incumbents of each step receive visitors, mainly testosterone-sodden youths with space-monster haircuts and 49cc mopeds with the silencers removed. At times other gangs, or pandillas as they are called, temporarily forsake their own pitch to come and pay court to a rival, and then the pavement becomes impassable, blocked by the multitude of scantily clad girls, the shoal of 49ers nudging the kerb, and the growing mounds of ejaculated pipa shells.
Although I had registered this scene, I had never imagined it as being a part of Chloë’s life. It had all seemed a rather desperate business: the poor kids huddled in shop doorways in all weather, watching life – or what passes for life in a one-horse town like Órgiva – go by.
‘So where are you thinking of moving to?’ I continued my line of enquiry.
‘We’re hoping to get the shoe shop by the dentist, although I know that Claudia and her friends are after it, too. Mari and Lourdes are moving on. They’ve got one of the best peldaños of all – the driving school on the other side of the traffic lights. From there it’s only one step to the top place in town, the peldaño de la chuchería, the sweetshop steps.’
‘So how is it you all go moving round like this? Surely if one group has the best peldaño, then they’re not going to want to give it up to anybody else.’
Chloë gave me a withering look. ‘Oh, Dad, you don’t understand anything…’
‘Perhaps not, but I’d very much like to. I’m intrigued.’
‘Sandra and her friends – you know, the ones who hang out now on the peldaño de la chuchería – well they’re nearly old enough to be allowed into the discoteca.’
‘So what do you do all night when you’re hanging out on a peldaño?’ I wasn’t going to give up…
‘Charlamos – we chat about stuff…’
‘What stuff?’
‘Oh, just stuff. You know… Hey, let’s play adivinanzas…’
So we played adivinanzas – a guessing game in rhyme – for the rest of the journey. I had been given all the information I was going to get.
Thinking about that conversation on the way back to the farm, I began to see the business of the steps a little more from Chloë’s perspective. What had appeared to me a dismal waste of time, sitting about with nothing to do and nowhere to go, was looking at things with blinkered English eyes, entirely forgetting that Spain has an outdoor and gregarious culture. The nights are usually warm, everyone’s up late and, in adult life, you’re expected to drift around the local bars together, endlessly joining and rejoining your friends. Hanging out in doorways and on steps with a few bags of sunflower seeds is just the way that a young Spanish teenager starts off.
Of course, I reflected, there are worries that the bags of pipas might one day get substituted for stronger substances, which are pretty rife even in the mountain villages of the Alpujarras. But there was no sign that any of Chloë’s crew were going off those particular rails. And, being a small town, there’s always someone looking out for you; it would be a reckless teenager who tried to give Chloë trouble, knowing that Manolo and his friends were in town. All in all, it seemed a definite improvement on the more intense and debauched teenage party scene in England. And it was certainly an improvement on my own upbringing. Packed off to boarding school on the first day I could tie my own shoelaces, I was confined to a lonely existence in the holidays, with no friends within a thirty-mile radius of my home. It was only by the merest stroke of luck that I managed to get a leg up into the business of mating.
Of course, there would be more worries ahead as Chloë grew older and hanging out on the peldaños gave way to discotecas – and a whole set of new baggage. But, right now, the peldaños seemed comfortingly benign and, in their way, they seemed a peculiarly graphic illustration of the stages of independent life. First the steps, then the discos, then the bars.
And then?
It dawned upon me that there was another peldaño, oddly close in spirit to the young teenage phenomenon. At the entrance and exit of every small town and village in Spain, you will see sitting on a bench a gaggle of old men with their sticks and hats. There they sit all morning, discussing the local issues of the day and watching the world as it passes. At lunchtime they rise slowly to their three feet and totter home. They sleep away the hot hours of the afternoon and, as the evening starts to cool, they return and remain there through the freshening hours of the night.
For the seventeen years I have lived in Spain, I have viewed these old folks with a certain detachment: a thing inconceivably far away in time and of no concern to me. But it seemed to me, as I reflected on the sweetshop steps and discotecas and benches, that the business of ageing is not a continuous process, like a river flowing steadily down to the sea. It’s more a succession of waterfalls, some cataclysmic, some almost inconse
quential, with peaceful stretches of flat water in between.
Not long ago I felt the pull of one of those falls, easing me ever downwards towards the latter peldaños of life. The plan for the day – and it was a hot summer day – had been for Ana, myself, Chloë and her cousin Lauren, who was over from London, to drive off to Granada and there improve our understanding of the universe by visiting the Parque de las Ciencias, a sort of high-class theme park devoted to the wonders of science. This could have been pretty exciting – at my stage in life, this is one of the few sorts of theme park you can get enthusiastic about – had the excursion not inexorably degenerated into a day-long shopping trip. I played along as best I could, but it soon became impossible to hide my dejection at being dragged along upon this most fatuous and detestable of human activities.
At some stage my increasing moroseness became intolerable to my shopping companions, and I was given a dispensation to slip off and sit in a bar. I found the right sort of bar in a shady corner near the Paseo del Salón, and sat down outside with a coffee. I had just managed to get my newspaper properly folded for a read when a doddery old boy shuffled in and asked if he might sit in the only remaining chair, which was next to mine. He was one of those urban Andalusians who wear a grey three-piece suit and matching cordobés hat even on the most blistering-hot summer day, and he brandished an elegant wild olivewood cane. ‘You’re most welcome,’ I said, with the patronising smile one dishes out to the extremely aged, and then returned to my paper.
After a certain amount of huffing and puffing, he leaned over to me and announced, in the way that such people will, ‘I’m ninety-five years old, you know.’
I looked at him critically for a moment, then said, in order to make him feel better about things, ‘Well I never would have believed it; you’re looking good, though.’
He didn’t look too good, as a matter of fact. He was pudgy about the face and there wasn’t a lot of hair on the top of his head; there was a wart on the side of his nose, and he wheezed a bit. But then, I suppose, at ninety-five – and here was a person who, if memory serves, would have been around not long after the second Carlist war – you’re lucky to be here at all. ‘Oh, I do what I can to keep myself going,’ he informed me.
By now I realised that I wasn’t going to get any more reading done, so I stuffed the newspaper back into my bag and eased my chair round so I was half-facing him. He peered at me with a quizzical look.
‘You’re not one of us, are you? I can tell from your accent. Where are you from?’
‘I’m English,’ I replied.
‘Oh,’ he said, nodding his head and peering at me. ‘Retired out here, have you?’
That hit me a bit in one of the places where it hurts, but I decided to humour the old fool.
‘Well, yes, in a sense I have, I suppose. Although I seem to do more work now than…’
‘Your wife still alive?’ the crap-noddled old boggart interrupted.
‘Well, she certainly was when I last saw her,’ I replied, getting a bit cross now.
‘Got a family, have you, then?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have,’ I said testily. ‘I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.’
At this he drew back in astonishment and stared hard at me. I could see him mentally subtracting fourteen from ninety-five and coming up with the figure of eighty-one, and wondering how the hell I could have managed at such an advanced age to get it up.
I paid for my coffee and got up to leave.
‘It’s been very nice talking to you,’ I hissed, and hurried off to rejoin the pandilla of shopping womenfolk, with my ego just the tiniest bit bruised.
THE ALMOND BLOSSOM APPRECIATION SOCIETY
TEN SACKS OF SHEEP MIX, one of barley and one of wheat for the chickens, some horse mix, and a bag each of biscuits for the dogs and cats. I looked at the great weight groaning in the back of the car and, satisfied with my agricultural credentials, slammed the back door in a cloud of dust. A big white van had drawn up opposite the feed centre. The driver was leaning on his elbow and looking at me. ‘Cristóbal – por dónde andas?’ growled a deep, well-modulated voice.
‘Paco… it’s you!’ I responded, recognising the figure at the wheel. ‘You’re looking good, and I see you’ve joined the bearded men.’ Por dónde andas? – literally ‘Where do you walk?’ – is a hard one to answer, though I suspect it’s a rhetorical greeting, and I have always responded to it as such. I crossed the street and took Paco’s hand. His face burst into a great smile beneath the new beard.
‘Qué dice el hombre?’ he said.
Now, Qué dice el hombre? – ‘What does the man say?’ – is an even more abstruse sort of a greeting in my opinion than por dónde andas? I mean, what is the man supposed to say in reply to that? I’m always a little flummoxed by these formulaic Spanish greetings, fearing that despite years of residence I still don’t quite pass muster in this most basic communication.
‘Great to see you, Paco,’ I offered. ‘It’s been a long time, and apart from the fungal growth you look well. And how about Consuelo and Paz?’
‘We’re all well, by the grace of God. But I’ve had a thought, Cristóbal, and here is my thought: do you not think it a good idea that we should go again to the hills of the Contraviesa and enjoy the beauty of the almond blossom?’
‘Hell yes, Paco. I was thinking of ringing you to suggest it, because it’s already fading on the lower hills…’
‘There’s still time: if we go higher we’ve still got a couple of weeks.’
Paco is my only country Spanish friend who would suggest such a thing. Other country people I know are not unaware of the beauty of nature and the countryside around them; they just live and work amongst it, rather than taking active steps to seek it out. The idea of walking into the hills to find the most spectacular grove of blossoming almonds would no more occur to them than it would occur to a commuter to hop off a train a stop early simply to admire the station. ‘I’ll give you a ring next week, then, and we’ll make a date,’ I said, and Paco slipped the van into gear and rolled round the corner.
Paco Sanchez is remarkable in lots of ways. He was born into a farming family in Torvizcón, where he lives to this day. His father made his living from growing vegetables, and as a child Paco would always be with him in the huerto, watching and learning. At eighteen he pulled together enough money to buy a team of mules, with which he scraped a desperately hard living ploughing the steep hills around the village.
There was some wild gene in his make-up, though, that made Paco a Communist, a seeker and a traveller, and with Consuelo, his bride from the village, he left home to seek his fortune in Switzerland. They worked as farm labourers, wherever they could find a job, and saved pretty much every Swiss franc they earned. The scheme was conceived to return to Spain with enough money to buy a patch of land – for Paco’s father had been a jornalero, a day worker with little land of his own. After several years the couple came back to Torvizcón with the funds to buy a house in the village, a fertile plot of alluvial silt down in the river, a small grove of olives and a whole hillside of almond trees up on the Contraviesa. In those days nobody wanted to buy property in the countryside, let alone farm it, so it was cheap.
They lost no time in making the land pay, and within a very few years were running a thriving business. Paco had been fired up with new notions from his time in Switzerland and was probably the first man in the Alpujarras to espouse the cause of organic agriculture, which contributed even more to his neighbours’ conviction that he was a dangerous radical. At the time this was flying in the face of the wind, as all his contemporaries were embracing the racy modern chemical way of farming. Paco told me that he was doing nothing new; he was simply putting into practice all that he had learned from his father. In those days, everybody had farmed organically – nobody could afford the new chemicals and artificial fertilisers – so results were achieved by dint of skill, observation and a grinding round of work.
Paco and Consuelo were good at what they did, and had the imagination and confidence to look beyond the local market to sell their produce. They discovered an organic food outlet in Germany and started gearing their output to its tastes. They produced pan de higo (fig bread), almonds and jams and conserves of every sort of fruit; they pickled peppers and capers and dried tomatoes in the sun, as well as apricots, persimmons and loquats. Preserved olives they sold by the bucket, and olive oil and even the odd crate of Paco’s home-made wine – which, if the truth be told, was a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Every month or so a van would come down from the organic co-operative in Germany and return laden with the delicious products of Paco and Consuelo’s industry. On the proceeds, they bought a big white van of their own and, not without misgivings, exchanged the team of mules for a small bulldozer.
But one of the effects of Paco’s wild gene, and avid reading on ecological matters, was to make him a little radical and even puritanical in his aims. The business of shipping the delights of the Alpujarras all the way to Hamburg for the benefit of its well-heeled denizens didn’t seem quite right to him. So he decided to set up a local co-operative in order to bring together the increasing number of organic growers and consumers in the Alpujarras.
I don’t know how Paco had the energy, after long hot days spent labouring amongst his fruit and vegetables and then driving around the Alpujarras to distribute boxes of produce, but somehow he managed to convene a meeting of interested parties. As I had written a book, it was felt I would ‘lend weight’ to the proceedings, so I was nominated to be vocal, or spokesperson, with special responsibility for co-ordinating the livestock sector. I was, in fact, the only member with any livestock, beyond the odd chicken, which meant that I had to co-ordinate myself. This was not as easy as you’d think, due to my tendency to fall asleep once the first item on the agenda was called and to doze quietly all the way through to ‘any other business’ – the inevitable result of a combination of hot night air, alcohol and the drone of voices arguing interminably over fine procedural points. At the first meeting I jerked awake to discover my vote was required to establish the name of the group. Paco had suggested ‘Alcaparra’, meaning ‘caper’, which struck me as a fine name for an agricultural co-operative. There wasn’t much competition so Alcaparra it was, and I was able to return to my slumbers.
The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 18