Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  I heard the panting of an animal somewhere behind me, in the opposite direction from where the shot had come, and then the scuttling of hooves. A wild boar, almost certainly. There I was planting away obliviously while hunter and beast were playing a lethal game of hide and seek around me.

  I started running around, scanning the land for the hunters. Though I was clearly visible in my bright worker’s overalls, they were probably dressed in camouflage green, and I couldn’t catch sight of them. Perhaps they had realised what had happened and had hidden out of embarrassment. I trudged back to my saplings; tree-planting had never seemed such a dangerous activity.

  Half an hour later I saw the hunters – a pair of them – walking nonchalantly down our road, stepping out from the protection of the bush and into full view, albeit a good way off. For a moment I fantasised about having a rifle myself, and taking a potshot at them. Arcadio had said once that out here on the mountain, although it might seem we were on our own, someone was always watching you. I just didn’t think he meant through the crosshairs of a telescopic lens.

  Some minutes later, once the hunters had left, I was surprised to hear birds singing in the trees. I had only subconsciously remarked earlier that the mountain seemed deathly quiet that morning. Now I began to wonder why. I felt sure the birds kept silent whenever hunters were about, who often took potshots at thrushes and other medium-sized birds. But were they even cleverer than that? Could they distinguish between humans who were a threat and those who weren’t? I had a fleeting sense of being accepted by the natural world around me, and its gift was the birdsong that now echoed around my ears.

  As I was finishing my fifteenth tree, the sun dipped over the horizon and the temperature dropped. I packed up and headed back to the farmhouse. I had planted less than a tenth of the trees. I was dog-tired and decided to call it a day. I would just have to push on with it over the coming weeks.

  *

  There is an ebb and flow as I get used to the mountain – growing into it, and then withdrawing, as the scale of what needs to be done hits me, or my confidence or energy levels decrease. It has something to do with identity as well – part of the process of becoming the person who lives out here, and who can work the land – not just becoming a farmer, or a botanist, or ‘country’ person, as opposed to a ‘town’ person – there’s more to it than that: almost an expanding and contracting of the self as it takes on board what this entails. I told Arcadio about my plan to plant a truffle forest on our land. ‘We were all beginners once,’ he said.

  *

  ‘We need to ritually purify your land,’ Marina said as she poured herself out of Concha’s little van once it came to a halt under the oak tree. ‘I can feel something here that needs cleansing, moving on. We’ll need four twigs of rosemary.’

  It had taken some persuasion to get them to come up to our farm. Not that they weren’t curious to see it, but there was always something, some previous engagement or obstacle, in the way. And a reluctance, on Concha’s part I thought, to move out of her own domain. A new kingdom meant different rules, and she felt more comfortable ruling over her own. In the end only she and Marina had come along: El Clossa was working, Africa wasn’t feeling well and Pau had stayed behind to look after her.

  Concha got out of her van and immediately rummaged around in the pockets of her striped woollen cardigan for her cigarettes. Lighting one, she inhaled deeply, looked around at the mountains and farmhouses as though inspecting the place, then smiled broadly.

  ‘This is special,’ she said. ‘But if Marina says it needs purifying, then it needs purifying. You don’t mess with her.’

  The sun had already passed behind the Picosa and dusk was falling.

  ‘We’ll have to get a move on,’ Marina said, ‘if we want to get it done before dark.’

  Salud and I said nothing, unsure as to what ritual she was intending to perform.

  ‘We need to go to the four corners of your land,’ she said.

  I tried to explain to her how difficult that would be: there were still huge areas we hadn’t managed to get to ourselves – either prevented from getting through by the weeds and gorse bushes, or else unable to scale the cliff-face without some kind of climbing gear.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘The nearest we can get to them as possible. It’ll still work.’

  ‘Let’s start over here,’ I said.

  ‘That bush,’ Marina said. ‘Perfect.’ And she trotted over to a slope by one of the ruins to where a handful of rosemary plants were growing, their pale-blue flowers fading in the evening light. Scrambling up the stony path, she broke some twigs off and then came back to join us, a bright red velvet scarf pulled round her neck contrasting violently with her green hair and the dark blue T-shirt stretched over her huge form. Pink blotches formed on her exposed upper arms above her elbow from the cold. Concha blew smoke in her direction.

  ‘Ready, cariño?’ she said.

  ‘What’s the rosemary for?’ Salud asked.

  ‘It’s a powerful plant,’ Concha said. ‘Lots of cleansing and healing properties. De las virtudes del romero, se puede escribir un libro entero – You could write a book on the virtues of rosemary.’ It sounded like a proverb. ‘People round here use it for reviving tired muscles. But it’s also used for this.’

  The four of us walked over to a group of elm trees round the back of the house. This was roughly the edge of our land on the northern side.

  ‘Let’s stand back a bit,’ Concha said as Marina got into position. We stumbled backwards over some brambles and stalks of wild fennel. For a moment my attention was distracted, making a mental note to bring the strimmer round here sometime: the place was a jungle.

  Marina was holding one of the twigs of rosemary in her hands and rolling the stem between the palms of her hands. ‘Elms?’ she said, looking up at the naked trees towering over her: two of the older ones had died some years before and stood like weird skeletons behind her.

  I nodded and she raised her hands towards them, as though in greeting.

  ‘Good,’ she said. I thought about asking her if it made a difference what kind of trees they were, but she had already started the ritual, circling anti-clockwise, head bent down, arms stretched, the rosemary now in her left hand whizzing through the air in a waving arc. A song seemed to be coming from her mouth, long discordant notes. Then, still spinning, she arched down, pulled her head up, closed her eyes and drew her lips together to make a vibrating sound like a baby. I could sense Salud desperately trying to catch my eye, but resisted turning round. Marina might not manage to frighten away any evil spirits, but at least there was a chance that if any were watching they might die laughing.

  Suddenly she stopped dead, silent. Salud gave a jump. I watched carefully in case Marina fell over after so much exertion, but she was stock-still, barely moving. She drew out a cigarette lighter to the rosemary and set in on fire. It was still green and fresh, but surprisingly it sparkled and gave off small blue flames for a second or two before extinguishing and letting off a trail of smoke.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ Concha said. ‘Blue flame is where the spirits are captured, then they can be released.’

  Marina was spinning again, this time the other way around, a faint trail of smoke from the rosemary tracing a circle around her before dissipating into the air. She turned five or six times, then stopped again, breathing heavily. I stepped forward to talk to her, to thank her.

  ‘Wait,’ said Concha. ‘She hasn’t finished yet.’

  I stepped back again to my place and watched as Marina bent down and stuck the remainder of the rosemary twig in the ground, holding it upright with a couple of stones. Then she stood up, undid the cord holding up her baggy trousers, pulled them down with her knickers in a swift, efficient motion, crouched over the rosemary and urinated on it. Her huge behind had a pale, almost ghoul-like quality to it in the reduced light.

  ‘That’s to seal the spell,’ Concha said. ‘They can’t come back now
. Ever.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Salud said.

  It took almost an hour in the fading light to reach the other three corners of our land and repeat the ritual, first Concha, then I – reluctantly – dousing the smoking rosemary as Marina had done the first time

  Our last corner to purify was back down the track, where it crossed the gorge. I had always liked this little area: two large old oak trees stood over it giving it plentiful shade, while a great rock, ten metres high and about the same breadth, sat there at the edge of the gulley behind them, a huge presence. It must have fallen thousands, perhaps millions, of years before from the cliff-face above it and come to a final rest here. It was, I thought, a perfect place for boyhood games: climbing and hide and seek.

  Again the mad circling and lighting of the rosemary. Salud refused to take part, though, and so I had to jump in at the last minute and piss on the damn thing in her place.

  ‘Wait!’ said Marina as we were all about to head back to the house. It was almost dark now. There was a moment’s silence as we turned to look at her.

  ‘I can feel spirits here – duendes,’ Marina said finally.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘Here, underneath these trees. They come from’ – she turned around and pointed dramatically – ‘that stone.’ It was the large rock half shaded by the branches of the oaks.

  Duende is a generic Spanish term for spirit or earth spirit – often translated into English as ‘goblin’, but with a much wider meaning. In flamenco it refers to the ineffable experience of power and other-worldliness that can only be produced in the very best performances, while across the country duendes can refer to anything from water nymphs to ‘little people’ living invisibly side by side with us. It is similar to the Middle Eastern concept of ‘jinn’. I had no idea if such things existed, but now someone was seriously suggesting there was a whole community of them living at the bottom of our garden.

  ‘Duendes,’ I said.

  ‘That,’ Marina growled, ‘is a Duende Stone.’

  ‘A place through which they can travel from their dimension into our own,’ Concha said before I could ask.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Is that good?’

  After dinner was over we sat around the kitchen table chatting for a while, Concha asking about the dinosaur hunt with El Clossa.

  ‘These people have no sensibility, cariño,’ she said before I could say very much. ‘How could you build an electric sub-station on such a beautiful site? Apart from its sheer ugliness and inappropriateness, it will interfere with the energies there.’

  It was clear she wasn’t referring to the ones that powered your fridge or cooker.

  ‘These things will be lost for ever – they can’t be brought back.’

  ‘Talking of energies,’ Marina said, ‘take a look at this.’

  Sitting next to Concha, set slightly back, Marina was hunched over something held in her hand concentrating hard. I leaned over to get a closer look, and saw a tiny pendulum swinging rapidly from her fingers.

  ‘There’s someone here,’ Marina said with a knowing smile, her head perfectly still over the nervously twitching bead suspended from her fingers.

  Salud shuffled in her seat.

  ‘A girl,’ said Marina. ‘Perhaps ten or twelve years old. She’s wearing a little apron, like they used to in the 1920s and 1930s.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Salud, getting to her feet.

  ‘Here, cariño,’ Concha said. ‘Right here.’

  ‘Are you saying there’s a ghost in this house?’ Salud said. I could see where this was going: first the bugs and the bees. Now I was going to have to convince her to cohabit with the spirit of a long-dead schoolgirl as well. Duendes were one thing, but now this? Salud could cope with armed men wandering around our land on a Sunday morning – that was fine, it was tangible. But spooky things like spiders and phantoms …? I could already see myself sleeping alone that night, Salud driving down the mountain at top speed back to the certainties of the city.

  ‘I can see a tree, right here, behind the house,’ Marina went on. ‘That’s where she is. She died up here and they planted a tree where they buried her.’

  Silence, the pendulum spinning, then darting and changing direction. Marina nodded.

  ‘She had TB. After the war. She was sad because her elder brother died fighting at the front. Used to live here with her and her parents.’

  We spent most of that night lying awake in bed: me trying to convince Salud there were no such things as ghosts; she trying to convince herself she really enjoyed life out on a mountain.

  The next day I went scouting around the back of the house. On her way out Marina had quickly pointed at a tree and identified it as the one under which the girl was supposedly buried. I kicked around the base of it, as though half expecting to uncover a finger pointing out at me or something. The tree could be the right age – less than a hundred years old, I reckoned, but there were a few others planted in the same area of about the same age: nothing seemed to say this was a special spot, a place where someone might have buried their little girl.

  Still pondering this, I heard Arcadio’s Land Rover pull up on the era behind me. The car door opened and he walked over to where I was standing.

  ‘You don’t know about some people here in the 1920s or 1930s losing a little girl, do you?’ He was certainly old enough, I thought, to have been around then, and would have heard something. ‘Died of tuberculosis?’

  ‘Little girl?’ he said. ‘Don’t know anything about that.’

  I heaved a sigh of relief. Duendes, ghosts. Those bloody witches had virtually lost us a good night’s sleep with all their stories. I looked forward to telling Salud when I saw her. Creepy-crawlies were one thing. The supernatural was something else.

  ‘There was a boy, though,’ Arcadio said. My smile dropped. ‘Son of the farmer who used to live up here.’ He looked me straight with his small, intense yellow eyes.

  ‘Sent him to the front during the war. Got killed near Teruel. Family never got over it.’

  I tried to speak, but couldn’t say anything.

  ‘Terrible thing, war,’ he said.

  Part II

  Air

  The Story of the Charcoal-burner’s Daughter

  ONCE UPON A time there was a poor old charcoal-burner who lived in the forest with his daughter. One day, not having anything to eat, the charcoal-burner went to the King to ask for alms. The King was very impressed by the way the man spoke.

  ‘How did you learn to talk like that?’ he asked.

  ‘From my daughter,’ said the charcoal-burner. ‘Poverty and hunger have made her the cleverest in all the land.’

  ‘If that is so,’ said the King, ‘I shall marry her myself. Here,’ he said, ‘take these eggs and tell your daughter to hatch them so that we may have chickens for when we are married.’

  So the charcoal-burner took the eggs back to his home and gave them to his daughter, telling her everything that had happened. The daughter, though, weighed the eggs in her hands and realised they had been hard-boiled. It was a trick.

  ‘Let me sleep on it, father,’ she said, ‘and I will come up with a solution.’

  The next morning she took a handful of oats and ground them into flour.

  ‘You see this?’ she said to her father. ‘I want you to go to the King and tell him to sow this so that we might have oats to feed the chickens we shall have when we are married.’

  The charcoal-burner did as she said and gave the message to the King. The King was very surprised. But he thought for a moment, and he pulled out a piece of cloth which he proceeded to cut up into tiny pieces.

  ‘Take this to your daughter, and tell her to make swaddling clothes out of it for our first-born child, God willing,’ he said.

  ‘How on earth will my daughter get out of this one?’ thought the charcoal-burner. And he took the rags back to his home in the forest and told his daughter what had happened.

  ‘Let m
e sleep on it, father,’ she said. ‘And I will come up with a solution.’

  The next morning she took some branches of wood and broke them into little twigs.

  ‘Take these to the King,’ she told her father, ‘and tell him to make a cradle out of them for our first-born child.’

  The charcoal-burner did as she asked, and gave the message to the King. Once again the King was speechless on hearing the reply. But he thought for a moment and said: ‘Take this basket back to your daughter, and tell her to fill it with laughter.’

  The poor old charcoal-burner trudged back to the forest.

  ‘He’s really done it this time,’ he thought. And he tried laughing into the basket himself, ha-ha-ha. But every time he looked inside to see if it was still there the laughter seemed to have slipped away.

  When he got back home he told his daughter what had happened.

  ‘Let me sleep on it, father,’ she said.

  The next morning she told her father to go and catch three dozen small birds and place them inside the basket, and cover them with a cloth.

  ‘Take it to the King when he is sitting down for dinner,’ she said, ‘and say it is from me, and that he is to remove the cloth.’

  Now it so turned out that that evening the King had invited a large number of guests to dinner. The charcoal-burner did as his daughter asked and he placed the covered basket in front of the King. But when the King lifted the cloth, all the little birds flew up into the air and darted around the dining hall. Everyone dived for cover; cups of wine were sent flying, food fell to the floor and in the panic all the guests landed in a heap on top of one another. And they thought it was so funny, they laughed and laughed until some of them couldn’t even stand up.