‘Are they?’ he said with a smile. ‘I don’t know. All we’ve done is make a circle. That’s easy. The ancient Iberians used to bless their animals at sacred sites in the mountains, so perhaps that’s part of the festival’s origins as well.’
The lamb chops were ready. We sat at the table, some salad in a bowl, a bottle of wine, bread, dollops of Faustino’s fresh all i oli placed at the edge of our plates, and the chops piled high on a tray in the centre. We dived in, gobbling them down with sticky, greasy fingers. The all i oli was so strong I thought I was going to hallucinate.
Afterwards, Salud cut chunks of sweet red watermelon and we cooled our mouths. Faustino threw the bones to the dog, picking off some remaining strands of meat and feeding them to the cat. She miaowed contentedly, her heavy purring filling the room as she ate. The dog sat in a corner, cracking the bones apart with his teeth.
‘Sorry, Dimoni,’ Faustino said to the songbird in its cage. ‘Nothing for you.’
The bird sang out and fluttered its wings. It already seemed to be falling asleep.
‘Dimoni?’ Salud asked.
‘She’s a little devil,’ Faustino said, and gave a chesty laugh.
We cleared away the plates and tidied up before heading out to the covered patio. Salud and I sat on the old leather sofa; Faustino drew up a wicker chair. He pulled out a buckskin pouch where he kept his tobacco and started rolling another cigarette, carefully and lovingly moulding and forming it in his fingers before putting it in his mouth, lighting it and breathing in. After a few moments he let the smoke pour out thickly through his nostrils and seemed to relax deeply into his chair.
‘Keep it all in special boxes, one for each month,’ he said. ‘Make sure I don’t run out that way. Have to ration it otherwise I’d smoke a whole year’s supply in a week.’
He laughed again, the laugh turning into a cough that seemed to catch hold of him and shake his skinny frame until we thought it might crack. His face went bright red, pale-blue eyes staring out in near panic. Salud rushed up and got him a glass of water. He took it from her and drank, then smiled again.
‘Who said laughing was supposed to be good for you?’ he said.
I sensed that Salud could feel it, too: a desire born out of concern and sympathy to ask if he was really all right, if there was something we could possibly do; and an understanding that if he was truly ill the last thing he would want was for us to know the details, or to act as nursemaids. We kept a respectful, if uncomfortable, silence.
Faustino finished smoking. I got up from the sofa and walked to the edge of the patio. The sun had already gone down behind us some time ago, but there was still a faint light in the sky, and a landscape of shadows stretched out into the distance. A very occasional light was visible here and there where villages or the odd inhabited mas stood.
‘That must be where the pelegríns of Les Useres come up from in April,’ I said, pointing out to the south-east. We hadn’t seen El Clossa since that day. After Concha’s commune fell apart he had been keeping his head down. Usually we’d have bumped into each other at some point by now – either in the village, or else out and about in the countryside.
‘Did you do the pilgrimage this year?’ Faustino asked. I nodded.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s important, the pilgrimage. The people here haven’t lost their connection to the earth. And although it’s specifically meant for the village of Les Useres, it’s important for everyone in this area, passing through or near so many of the other villages on its way to San Juan. Further north, in the village of Catí, there’s another similar event the following weekend. Although that can turn into a bit more of a drunken orgy than this one: they’re probably linked to old springtime fertility rites.’
The crucial point, he insisted, was that it was all to do with rain. April was traditionally the wettest month up here, whereas on the coast it was October. We needed the rain for the crops and for the land itself to come to life briefly between the death of winter and the sleep of summer. Water was the most important element, the one that was most lacking, and the one that alone could make the earth sing.
‘Those gorges and gulleys and empty riverbeds,’ he said. ‘They can lie empty, waiting for it to rain all year. And then, if all goes well, for perhaps just a few weeks, or days even, if enough rain falls, they come into their own, the land begins to make sense. You know,’ he said looking me in the eye, ‘it was the waterfall and the stream that brought you here.’
I still remembered the thrill of that morning when I’d first seen the water cascading down our mountainside, and my scrambling walk up and over through the forest, until I’d eventually ended up here. The waterfall had only lasted for a couple more days, but for that brief time it was as if it had always meant to be, as if in those two or three days the landscape had reached a point of fleeting perfection.
And so the spring pilgrimages were a necessity: a call for the heavens to open and bring the rain that the land so needed to keep the delicate, fragile cycle in motion. Without rain, without water, there was no life.
Without quite knowing how, I understood at that moment that by ‘life’ he didn’t just mean the word in the strictly biological sense. There was more to what he was saying than a simple, natural truth.
He got up and brought out more truffle brandy. On more than one occasion, now, I’d had the feeling of slipping into a different world when at his house. But whether it was the powerful alcohol, or else something about him, the place and the stories he had to tell, I could never say. Rather than a simple mas, it sometimes felt more like a castle in a fairy tale, high up in the clouds, away from the world of day-today existence. Perhaps it was just the brandy. But I could sense it as soon as I arrived, before even drinking a drop.
‘Tonight, however,’ he said when he’d filled our glasses, ‘isn’t about rain or water. It’s about making contact with the underworld.’
He sat down in his chair again and began his story.
‘Tonight is the night when the great Avenc can appear on the slopes of Penyagolosa, right where we are now. A deep, bottomless, fiery chasm that opens up suddenly and closes again, never appearing twice in the same place. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll see it here before the night is out. The Avenc always swallows up an animal – usually a sheep or goat that has wandered off from the rest and is never seen again. Once there was a shepherd here who saw one of his flock vanish as the Avenc gaped open on the night of San Juan. He rushed up to the edge of the hole and looked down, but saw nothing but a strange orange glow. Curious, he threw down some shears attached to the end of the rope to see if he could touch the bottom. But down and down he let the rope fall, until he had no more, but still the shears hadn’t touched anything. So the shepherd started to haul it back up again, but this time it was far heavier than to start with. Eventually, as he strained and pulled the rope back up, just as he was getting to the end, he saw that a giant featherless chicken had bitten on to the shears and that he was bearing its weight as well. With a shout he let go and the rope and the monster fell back into the Avenc. Now the shepherd didn’t stop running till he got back to the village, where he told them everything that had happened. But the villagers just laughed. The shepherd was insistent, though, and so the next day a group of them went out with him to find the bottomless chasm he said had opened up the previous night. But when they got to the spot they found that there was no great hole, as the shepherd claimed. Although they did find the rope, with the shears attached to the end of it.
‘Everyone laughed at the poor shepherd, and said he had obviously fallen asleep and dreamed it all. But strangely enough, exactly a year later, on the Night of San Juan, but in a different part of the mountain, a similar thing happened when a man lost his mule down a mysterious hole in the ground that seemed to open and close, swallowing the poor animal up. Now the local people don’t laugh when they hear such stories, and they put it down to the Avenc, which thankfully only appears once a year.
‘
Some say the chasm is a passageway to the Underworld itself, and that flames shoot out, burning up anyone nearby caught unawares. And that horrible beasts can appear, dragons and dinosaurs, breathing fire through their nostrils. Nobody, they say, should be on the slopes of Penyagolosa on the Night of San Juan, for they might never see the light of the following day.’
The Story of how the Rosemary Flower turned Blue
PEOPLE TELL THE story of how one morning, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was walking alone through the mountains when it started to rain very heavily – one of those sudden showers that blow in from the coast, and then just as quickly blow away again. As there were no houses or shelters in sight, she ran as quickly as she could to an overhang in a nearby rockface.
After a few minutes the rain stopped and the sun came out again, but Mary’s sea-blue cloak had got wet, and so she looked for somewhere to lay it out to dry for a few minutes. The gorse bushes, with their bright yellow flowers, were too harsh and prickly and told her they would not be the place to hang out her cloak. The holm oak trees, with their bright green leaves shining wet in the sunshine, offered to help, but their branches were too high for Mary to reach.
Then the thyme spoke up from down below.
‘Lay your cloak on me,’ it said.
‘You are very kind,’ said Mary, ‘and your scent is sweet, and your mauve flowers very pretty, but I fear you are too close to the ground, and my cloak will almost certainly get dirty and muddy if I lay it on you.’
It was then that she caught sight of another bush nearby that she hadn’t noticed before. It stood alone, neither prickly, nor too high, nor too low to the ground. Its flowers were pale white, with almost no colour at all.
‘Who are you?’ asked Mary.
‘I have no name,’ said the plant, ‘nor pretty bright colours for my flowers. But you may lay your cloak on me, if you like, and in this sunshine it shall be dry in a moment. And I shall scent it with my perfume, for it is the only thing I have to give.’
So Mary lay her cloak over the bush, and in less time than it takes to tell, it was dry again. And when she placed it once more over her shoulders, she breathed in the wonderful refreshing scent the plant had imbued it with.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But it is not right that you have no name, nor colour for your flowers.’ And so, as she spoke, the pale flowers of the bush began to turn blue, just like the cloak that a few moments before had been lying on them
‘And from henceforth,’ said Mary, ‘you shall be known as Rosemary.’
And so she went on her way. And from that day on, the bush has always had bright blue flowers, and gone by the name of ros mariae, the Dew of Mary.
JULY
The Latin month Iulius is known as Tamuz in Syriac and Mordadmah in Persian, and is made up of thirty-one days. It is a time for harvesting seeds: from the marshmallow, the safflower, lemon balm, lettuce, basil, garden cress, purslane, melons, cucumbers and gherkins. Pomegranates begin to ripen and dates start turning red. It is a good time to work the land around the base of olive trees, as the dust thereby produced is good for the olives themselves. This should be done just before, during, or shortly after sunrise, as the dust at this time of day will be cooler. According to the Agricultura Nabatea, any cracks that appear in the ground during this time should be filled or covered over to prevent the heat of the day from reaching and adversely affecting any tree roots. It is said that this is not a good time for planting trees or seeds because of the hot weather, although in Seville I have seen orach sown at this time of year, and cabbages and chard are transplanted.
Ibn al-Awam, Kitab al-Falaha, The Book of Agriculture, 12th century
FOLLOWING IBN AL-AWAM’S advice, I got up early this morning to churn up some of the soil around the base of the olive trees. Although I didn’t quite make it for sunrise itself, it was still early in the day and the worst of the heat had yet to make itself felt. Great weeds have built up over the past weeks and months, so it gave me an excuse to take some of those out at the same time. Most of them look like some variety of fennel, great skinny stalks stretching up to around six or seven feet. The green flowery heads give off a pleasant scent when I crush them between my fingers, but digging around in the ground I’ve yet to find nice bulbous bits for eating that I’m used to finding in the markets. Perhaps this is some other kind of variety.
I tried not to dig too deep around the olive trees, for fear of damaging the roots, but a hoe is perfect for this kind of work, angled as it is so that it just scrapes up the top layer of soil. I still marvel sometimes at how versatile this simple, ancient tool can be.
There was plenty of dust, all right, as the ground is becoming increasingly dry again, and I had to break away a couple of times from the cloud I’d created just to be able to breathe properly. Quite what good this is doing to the olives beyond killing any competing weeds I can’t say. Perhaps the dust coating makes them less appetising for the birds, or protects them against disease, or the sun. Anyway, we’ll see next December if it has worked. Already there seem to be far more olives on the trees this year than last. Whether they’ll hold out till harvest time is another matter, though. Last summer a freak hailstorm wiped them out. There’s a saying: Aguas por San Juan quitan vino, aceite y pan – If it rains around midsummer, there’ll be no wine, oil or bread. The sun has been shining constantly now for the past three weeks, so at least we’re all right on that score.
If the soil feels so dry, though, it’s not just because of the lack of rain. The downpours of April and May and then a few more into early June drenched the whole area. It’s the intensity of the sun itself, I think, which drains the land of its moisture. Perhaps not the most earth-shattering observation, but being up here you can almost feel the liquids being sucked out by the harsh white light of midday – not only from the soil and plants, but from your skin and body. The flies have made a dramatic comeback, and buzz hyperactively around our mouths in search of a precious drop of moisture. And I can almost sympathise with them while swatting them dead – there’s so little of it up here. The only place in the world where I have come across such fast, death-defying flies was in the Sahara. It makes me realise how vulnerable this landscape is: an annual downpour or two is all that keeps it from turning into desert. Any change for the worse in the weather patterns and in a matter of five to ten years it would be unrecognisable.
Still, with my eyes fixed on no further than next spring, I’ve planted some iris bulbs near the house – perhaps my last gardening act before the autumn, and the new farmer’s year. I was surprised when Arcadio told me a couple of months back that now was a good moment to plant them – I would have thought November would have been a better time, and that’s certainly what it says on the packet. But I’ve come to trust him. If he says summer is better, then a summer planting it shall be. Once I’d buried them in the soil, I gave the bulbs a thorough, late evening watering, with sharp mental images of them brightening up the hillside next spring.
*
I hadn’t seen Arcadio for a while: I knew he’d been called some time around now for his operation as part of the national rush to get things ‘done’ before the great August holiday, when almost everything – including hospitals, it seems – either closes down or works part-time. I looked out a few times to see if his green Land Rover was heading our way from further down the valley, but there was no sign of him. I would have heard, I thought, if something had happened. It was a simple operation, and, although I knew he was frightened, there was surely nothing that could go wrong.
The days passed, though, and still he didn’t show up. Eventually I decided to pop over on my way down to the village one day. Although I knew where he lived, he had always been the one to come up and see me: it was a strange experience going to his house.
Arcadio had a mas among a group of other houses just off the road, near the bank of the river. A small, old dog was sitting by the door when I drove up, barely raising its head as I walked over and parted the chain
curtain to knock on the door. A few plants lined the whitewashed steps, and fresh light-blue paint had been brushed around the doorway and windows in the traditional fashion.
There was a long pause, and I was about to walk away, assuming no one was there, when I heard movements inside. Finally, the door was opened and there stood Arcadio.
‘Home,’ he said with a smile when he saw me. He looked tired, and his slippered feet shuffled along the floor as I followed him into the house.
The room was dark and bare, a cold, tiled floor and unadorned walls. He sat down next to a small round table with a lace cloth covered by a glass top and pointed for me to pull up a chair. A jug of water stood next to a vase with some drying herbs stuck in it.
‘M’han deixat fet pols,’ he said. ‘They’ve screwed me up.’
The shutters were down on the only window: it kept the heat out, but it felt miserable. I wondered if he’d been told to protect his eyes from the sunlight as they recovered from the operation.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Ah, the operation went fine,’ he said. ‘Took out the cataracts. I was only in there for half an hour.’
He got up and shuffled to the kitchen, where he opened the fridge, took out a bottle of cold wine and poured a glass for me.
‘Not having one yourself?’ I asked. He shook his head.
I tried to look in his eyes to see if there was any noticeable difference from before, but in the poor light it was almost impossible to see.
‘So your eye’s better now?’ I asked.
He chuckled. ‘That’s the problem. I can see too well.’
He scratched the side of his nose and laid his hand out on the table.
‘Can’t drive any more,’ he said. ‘Me dona por – I’m frightened.’
For years the cataracts had been growing slowly in his eyes, and he had simply grown used to them, driving up and down the same old tracks and roads as he had done for so many years. He knew this valley better than anyone. He didn’t need eyes to be able to move around. But now that they’d been given back to him, the acuteness of this new-found sense had thrown him. He couldn’t drive up the valley any more: it was too dangerous.
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