After a few minutes, we finished, and an enormous great lump of squashed beeswax was sitting on top of the netting at the mouth of the bowl, the last drops of the honey slowly filtering down.
‘Leave it like that in a safe place overnight,’ Arcadio said. ‘By morning it’ll all be through. Got a fairly good amount there – almost a couple of kilos.’
A few bees had already found us and were buzzing around energetically as we walked over to the house to wash our hands. We should leave the tools and the frames outside, Arcadio said. The bees themselves would clean them up for us as they tried to recuperate tiny lost amounts of the food supplies we had so arrogantly stolen from them.
I poured him some wine and we sat down for a moment. The honey bowl was inside a cupboard where we hoped neither the bees – nor anything else – would be able to find it.
‘They want me to have an operation,’ Arcadio said with a funny smile. I had no idea there was anything wrong with him.
‘My eye,’ he said. ‘Got a cataract in my left eye.’
‘Can you see anything with it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m totally blind on this side.’ And he raised a finger to his affected eye. It was so difficult even to see his eyes sometimes, with all the folds of skin, it was no wonder I hadn’t noticed anything wrong before.
‘And your right eye?’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s not too bad,’ he said. ‘Need that one for driving.’ He laughed. He knew the tracks round here as though they were an extension of himself, so he could probably drive round with no vision at all if need be. Up here in the mountains it still seemed perfectly reasonable for a half-blind eightysomething-year-old to be put-putting around in an ancient Land Rover. Perhaps the authorities simply didn’t know, but down in the city his licence would have been revoked before you could blink. Come to think of it, for a second I wondered if Arcadio even had a licence to revoke in the first place.
‘When’s the operation, then?’ I said.
‘Might be next week. Say they’re going to let me know,’ he said.
I could tell he was frightened.
‘I’ve heard it’s very quick and simple for removing cataracts,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
His herbs had kept him going all these years. Unfortunately, I doubted there was a herbal cure for cataracts.
‘Don’t like doctors,’ he said. ‘Never been to one in my life.’
He stopped for a moment as I walked him back to his car. He looked out over the valley. It didn’t matter how much of it he could see, I thought. This landscape was so much a part of him.
‘My daughter wants me to move into the village with her,’ he said. ‘Says I’m getting too old to live in the mas.’
He put a finger into his right eye and rubbed it hard.
‘But there’s too much hustle and bustle in the town.’
The ‘town’ had barely a thousand people living in it.
‘I like the silence here.’
*
Salud came back from a walk with her pockets stuffed with caracoles – snails.
‘They’ve all come out with the rain,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of them.’
She tossed her catch into a bucket with some water in the bottom and put a lid on tightly.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Coming to get some more?’
We picked up a couple of baskets and headed out into the damp afternoon air. Snails with spiral stripes on their shells were easy to find – many were simply sliding slowly across the paths in front of us, while turning up leaves and poking around bushes produced dozens more.
‘Don’t pick them if they’re near ivy or cypress trees,’ Salud said. ‘Snails love them but it makes them poisonous for humans.’
I’d seen bigger ones, what locals sometimes referred to as Moros – Moorish snails. But these were large enough and would do for a couple of meals at least. I just hoped Salud remembered all the steps of the complicated process of preparing them for eating. Get it wrong, I seemed to remember, and you might regret it for some time. Some of the snails were eyeing me somewhat suspiciously as I popped them in the basket. What if they’d been tucking into some venomous toadstools just moments before? There was no way of telling.
Thankfully, Salud had done this dozens of times as a girl back home, so it came as second nature to go through the steps of cleaning them.
Firstly, we had to purge them on the inside. This was done by leaving them for about three days in the bucket with a plate of water, some flour and a few twigs of rosemary. On this forced diet, they eventually crapped out anything they might have eaten over the previous few days that could interfere with a human digestive system. Also, the rosemary imparted a subtle flavour when eventually you got round to eating them.
Once they had been purified in this way, you had to wash them on the outside. This involved rinsing them in water mixed with a bit of salt and vinegar. Not surprisingly, the snails didn’t take too kindly to this, and quickly vanished into their shells at the first whiff of the acidic, salty water. So that led to the next technique – engañarles – ‘tricking them’ to come out into the open again, so that when you ate them there was actually something sticking out of the shells to grab hold of. To do this we took a large pan of fresh water and placed them inside. The contrast to the vinegar solution of earlier made them pop their heads out again, not without some degree of relief. What they didn’t realise, though, is that the pan was on a low flame to heat the water. Just when they’d all come back to normal and were slithering all over each other, we turned the heat up to full, and they were very quickly boiled to death. After five minutes or so, the snails were now fully purged and edible and ready to be added to a dish.
There are hundreds of different ways of cooking with snails at this stage, mostly involving preparing special sauces for them. Anything but the dreaded French method of cooking them with garlic butter, an idea repugnant to most self-respecting Spaniards. The most common recipe is usually a variant of the following.
For a largeish dish with enough for about four or five people, depending on appetite, you need about half a kilo of snails, a handful of jamón serrano, cut up into little cubes, three good-sized ripe tomatoes, two onions, a handful of almonds, three or four cloves of garlic, a chilli pepper, paprika, a bay leaf, saffron, salt and parsley.
Put some olive oil in a large pan and turn the heat to medium-high. Add the chopped onion and tomatoes (these can be skinned, but it really doesn’t matter). Once the onion has sweated a little, add the sliced garlic, bay leaf and the chilli pepper – chopped if you like the dish quite spicy; leave it whole if not. Add a pinch or two of salt, then simmer for about twenty minutes, stirring regularly. Once the sauce has thickened and the onions have properly softened, add the jamón serrano pieces, a pinch of saffron and about half a teaspoon of paprika, depending on taste. Stir in well and then add the snails. Crush the almonds in a mortar and pestle and add to the sauce, then cook for another ten minutes over a low heat. When done, pour the snails and their sauce into a terracotta dish, placing the bay leaf and the chilli in the middle as decoration. Eat with bread and a good Rioja or Ribera del Duero.
Some like to add mint to the above recipe, which gives an unusual, almost Moorish flavour to the dish.
*
Over a month had gone by since I’d seen Concha. She’d been busy with preparations for the local elections, while life on the farm had kept me tied down for a few weeks. When I found I had an afternoon free I drove over to her mas to pay a visit.
I didn’t follow local politics: it seemed too much part of a world I was keen to move away from. But word reached me nonetheless that her party hadn’t done very well on election night. Words like ‘disaster’ were being bandied about. Meanwhile, the politicians associated with the worst kind of exploitation of the land appeared to be rubbing their hands with glee.
I found her alone, sitting on the front step of her house, staring out at the horizon. The last
of the irises were beginning to wilt and fade, while the late orange light cast a glow over the front of the house. She pulled hard on her cigarette as I walked over.
‘Bueno,’ she said. ‘¿Has venido a ver lo que queda? – Come to see what’s left?’
She didn’t get up. I sat down gently on the doorstep beside her.
‘I heard the election didn’t go too well.’
‘That’s the least of it,’ she said.
She bent her head down and seemed about to say something, then checked herself. The cigarette smoke curled around her face, sifting through her hair before lifting up and being carried away by the breeze.
‘We’d never done so bad in an election,’ she said after a pause. ‘Got fewer votes than last time.’
She flicked the ash to the floor by her feet.
‘But that’s just the bloody election. There’ll be another one. This Concha doesn’t believe in defeat.’
Above the trees in front of us martins were circling frantically, hunting down their evening meals, screaming like tiny jet planes as they raced past.
‘How about your job at the town hall?’ I asked.
‘They can’t sack me,’ she said. ‘But they can make life very difficult for me if they want.’
A weighty, dark cloud seemed to hang over her as she sank into her depression. I had often sensed an insecurity in her about her life in the mountains: she dealt with it by keeping herself busy and by surrounding herself with other people – the commune acted as a kind of buffer.
‘Africa had a baby,’ she said at last, opening her packet of cigarettes and lighting another. ‘A boy.’
‘Oh, fantastic,’ I said. ‘Where are they? Are they here?’ The house seemed curiously quiet for the home of a new-born child.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said, looking blankly out towards the hills.
‘They’re no longer living here?’ I asked.
‘Pau’s brother turned up,’ she said. ‘He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, down on the coast. Came up here, told Pau he was a sinner, then carted him and Africa off back to his place. Said they’d help look after the baby, and this was no kind of place to bring him up.’
Pau had seemed so rooted in the mountains; I could hardly believe it.
‘Pau needs a structure, something to tell him what’s right and what’s wrong,’ Concha said. ‘That was the problem: he needs order, otherwise he starts going off the rails. The Jehovahs will give them everything they need. We’ll probably see him up here in a couple of years’ time selling bibles.’
Pau the radical, from eco-warrior to Bible-basher in one quick move. It was odd, but somehow, as I thought about it, it seemed to fit a pattern. Here he had had a community and a cause, and now down with his brother on the coast it looked like he’d found something very similar. Same beast, just a different saddle.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Not only had she been wiped out in the polls, the commune which formed such a large part of her life was breaking up around her as well.
‘Oh, I don’t care about them,’ she said gruffly. ‘Better off without them anyway.’
‘How does Marina feel about it?’ I said.
She turned and looked at me with surprise. ‘Marina?’ she said. ‘Ay, cariño, I can see you really don’t know anything that’s been going on.’
She got up wearily from the doorstep, knees cracking loudly. Outside it was starting to get chilly as the sun dipped over the tops of the hills.
I lit a fire as she pulled out a bottle and started pouring herself a large measure of orujo in a grimy glass. Taking a sip, she closed her eyes, breathed out, then leaned back against the sofa and smiled broadly.
‘Ah,’ she cried. The inside of the house was a mess, and the smell of cat’s piss seemed stronger than ever. The colourful blankets and rugs usually covering the sofas were falling on the floor; empty wine bottles rolled about in a corner; ashtrays were piled high and overflowed with butts and torn packets of Rizlas. A scene of long, indulgent nights.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said at last, ‘that my beloved Marina decided this was the best time for her to move on as well.’
‘You’ve split up?’ I said.
‘In a manner of speaking.’
I looked around again at the debris of the living room: there was meaning now behind the chaos. ‘This was after Pau and Africa had gone?’ I asked.
‘After the election; after Pau’s flight to Egypt with the baby Jesus.’
‘Where’s she gone?’ I said.
‘Somewhere near Barcelona,’ she answered. ‘Reckons she’s going to open a car saleroom up there.’
I almost choked. Marina, the witch, was going to sell cars?
‘Said she saw it in a dream. She was going to go to Barcelona and make her fortune selling second-hand Seats. It was a message from the angels, and she couldn’t ignore it.’
‘Even if it meant leaving you.’
‘It was in order to leave me,’ she said. Her glass was empty. She picked up the bottle from the floor near her feet and filled it again.
‘Oh, look, it’s too complicated to go into now. Marina’s complicated. It’s all complicated.’
‘What about El Clossa?’ I said.
‘Oh, he’s a love. He still comes round. Helped me drink those bottles last night.’ She waved with her hand at the empties in the corner.
‘He hasn’t threatened to disappear, then.’
‘El Clossa? Nah.’ She put her glass down amid the piles of cigarette ends in the ashtray, looked in vain for a cigarette in an empty packet, then threw it on the fire.
‘Perhaps I’ll seduce him,’ she said. ‘Sex with Marina was getting boring anyway.’
*
One of the most common sights around the masos of the area, as you walk over the mountains after the April rains, are the banks of deep violet irises tucked under windowsills or along the edges of ancient footpaths, long abandoned and now barely visible. So much of the life of the masovers was channelled into simply surviving in a difficult environment that there was little time and energy left over for the beautification of their surroundings. Yet they did manage to plant irises, and there is a local folktale about the flower which may explain why it was so popular in rural areas.
Once upon a time there was a king who was very ill, and he sent his three sons out to find an iris for him, as that was the only thing in the world that could cure him. Whoever found the flower, he told them, would be named Crown Prince.
The eldest one set off first, and after a short while he came across an old hag along the path.
‘Could you give alms to a poor old woman?’ she called out as he approached.
‘A fine mess we’d be in if we gave alms to people every time they asked for them,’ said the prince.
And he stepped past the old woman without giving her anything.
‘Are there any irises down this way,’ he asked behind his back as he was walking away.
‘That depends on you,’ said the old woman. But the prince took no notice and carried on his way.
The next day the second prince set off to find the precious flower, and not long afterwards he came across the old hag.
‘Could you give alms to a poor old woman?’ she called out as he approached.
‘I haven’t got any money on me,’ said the second prince, and he went on his way.
The next day the third prince set off, and like his brothers, he soon came across the old woman.
‘Could you give alms?’ she called out as he approached. The young prince looked into his empty bag and then handed it over to her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m off to find an iris,’ said the prince. ‘My father needs it, for he is very ill, but I don’t know where to look for it.’
‘I can help you,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s up there, on the top of that far, steep mountain.’ And she pointed the way he needed to take.
Back home, the three brothers were gathered again. The young prince said nothing about finding the iris, but his elder brother suspected him and so he searched his things, and there he discovered the iris, carefully stashed away. Furious, the eldest prince decided to kill his little brother on the spot. Ignoring the pleas of the second brother to spare him, he dug a hole in a sandbank nearby and threw him in, and raced off with the iris to give it to the King. Soon afterwards he was declared Crown Prince and heir to the throne.
But in his rush to get rid of his little brother, he didn’t realise that he’d left one of his fingers still poking up out of the ground.
Now a few days later a shepherd was walking in the area where the young prince had been buried, and he spotted a white reed growing out of a sandbank that would make for a perfect flute. So he picked the reed and started to play. But instead of the musical notes he’d expected, out came a mysterious voice singing:
Toca, toca, bon pastor
toca, toca i no m’anomenes,
per la flor del lliri blau
m’han mort en riu d’arenes.
Play on, play on good shepherd,
Play, but do not mention my name,
For the sake of the iris flower
My death in this sandbank is to blame.
Now the shepherd thought this was the strangest thing, but he carried on playing, and the same mysterious voice kept sounding out, until soon he found himself outside the walls of the palace, where the King, now cured, was looking out for his youngest son, who appeared to have vanished. The King heard the strange song coming from the shepherd’s flute, and he began to realise what had happened.
‘Where did you find that flute?’ he called out to the shepherd.
‘Down by the sandbanks,’ came the reply.
So the King gathered his courtiers and the two eldest princes, and ordered them to ride with him to the sandbanks, the shepherd beside them playing his flute all the while. And when they came to where the young prince was buried, and the second brother rode his horse over the spot, the song of the shepherd’s flute suddenly changed:
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