A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  I walked along the road, cut dramatically into the rock here above the river, for another kilometre, then slithered and slipped down the steep path that led to the acequia. Here the air was cooled by the racing water, as I made my way along the bank beneath the shade of the eucalyptus.

  Finally I took the track that dropped down to the riverbed and started making my way upriver towards the bridge. On the shingle flat by the river I spotted a figure, a short, powerfully built man in a straw hat and torn shirt. He was crouching, half hidden in the scrub, seemingly absorbed by something on the ground. It was my neighbour, Domingo.

  Domingo saw me as I spotted him and beckoned me over. He was bending pensively over a sick-looking sheep, poking her here and there. He pulled back an eyelid and peered in.

  ‘It’s the same old thing,’ he said without looking up, ‘eyes like potatoes. Look, there’s no colour in them?

  Domingo has no talent at all for greetings.

  The sheep lay there heaving and looking resigned in the way that sheep do. ‘She looks a bit off colour,’ I observed, thinking in fact that she was a goner.

  ‘She is,’ he replied, grinning up at me. ‘I thought it might be the liver. I’ve noticed some cysts appearing on the liver of one or two of the sheep that have died recently. But they also had stomachs full of albaida, so it’s hard to know what finished them off.’ (Albaida is Anthyllis cytisoides, a yellow flowering shrub that covers the hills, and at this time of year is thick with flowers and seeds — a tasty, high-protein snack if nibbled in moderation but often fatal if gorged upon.)

  ‘How the hell do you know that, Domingo?’ I exclaimed. ‘You need an autopsy to find out that sort of stuff.’

  Domingo shrugged. ‘Well, they’re no good to anyone when they’re dead, are they? You might as well open them up and have a look inside.’ Then he slapped the sheep on the side and rolled her over onto her belly.

  ‘She’ll be okay though — she’s not too far gone yet.’

  He stood up and stretched, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his arm, and I watched as the sheep tottered drunkenly off to slump in the shade beneath a tamarisk tree. I’m not bad at diagnosing ovine ailments, but Domingo it seemed, was in the advanced class.

  ‘So,’ he said, smiling broadly and holding out a hand, ‘How was Sweden?’

  ‘It wasn’t too bad,’ I answered and, spurred on by his unusually expansive opening, I told him all about my contract to write a book. He listened quietly.

  ‘Hmm, sounds good if you like that sort of thing,’ he commented, and then started on about some dispute over grazing. I felt oddly disappointed by his lack of interest.

  ‘And what about you, Domingo, how’s things over your side of the river? And how’s Antonia?’

  ‘We’re alright,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been doing some other things as well. Maybe you should come and have a look. Why don’t you come…’ — he looked down, poking a stone about with his sneaker — ‘…come to dinner, all of you, tomorrow night?

  And that was it, a simple invitation, rather awkwardly given. But I think we both recognised it as something different. Never in the thirteen years that I’d lived in the valley had Domingo invited me formally to a meal. It was obvious that each of our lives had tilted slightly on its axis. Here was I with a book deal and here was Domingo issuing dinner invitations.

  I looked at him quizzically for a moment.

  ‘Well… yes, of course we’ll come,’ I said.

  We stood together for a little longer while Domingo expanded on the problems he was having with some hunters and landowners on the hill behind us. Then he untied his donkey from the bunch of reeds where she was tethered, mounted and trotted off up the track. I walked on towards the bridge lost in thought about Domingo and the quirk of fate that had paired him off with a sculptress from Holland.

  For close on forty years, Domingo had led a quiet, rather lonely existence on his family farm. He seemed contented enough, but the life and the work barely tapped his keen intelligence and thirst for new ideas and knowledge. A brief spell working in a factory in Barcelona put paid to whatever wanderlust he might have had and instead he set about learning what he could of north European notions and ways from his foreign neighbours — Bernardo and Isabel, a Dutch couple who lived at La Cenicera just down the valley, and ourselves.

  Then one summer a freckly, auburn-haired Dutchwoman called Antonia arrived. She was making sculptures of the various animals she encountered in our valley, and she stayed on, in a makeshift home in the abandoned farmhouse at La Herradura. Domingo’s sheep occasionally grazed the Herradura, but the summer Antonia moved in they became a fixture, grazing the place till it looked like a billiard table. By the time the rains began in October, Domingo had persuaded Antonia to move in with him at his farm, and immediately set about rebuilding the house to accommodate his first and only love and her work.

  Antonia returned to Holland for much of the winter, to drum up commissions and see to the casting in bronze of her models, but she came back to the valley in early spring. Ana had written to me that they had become inseparable, and were currently working together re-organising Domingo’s shabby old cortijo. I was intrigued to see what was happening.

  I crossed our rickety wooden bridge and reached the greenery of the river fields. At the top are the giant plumes of the eucalyptus wood, towering over the olives that ring the alfalfa field. The alfalfa itself is the deepest green you can imagine, and scattered with little blue flowers, the very sight of which cools you on a summer day. The track passes here through a virtual tunnel of huge bramble-bushes, tamarisks and broom, and then the hill up to the house starts.

  This is the point where I always begin to worry about my homecoming. Will Ana and Chloë be as pleased to see me as I like to think they would, or will they be cool and a little resentful as I turn up and muscle back into their lives, just as they had got used to being without me? Will they be disappointed to find that after all these long weeks apart, I’m still just the same ordinary bloke they knew before? As I trudged up the hill I started to brood on these thoughts, and then came the dogs, tearing down the hill wagging their tails in insane delight, jumping up and covering me with dust and slobber. They knew who I was, and didn’t give a stuff that I was ordinary. I took heart.

  Then with barely a moment for me to fling out my arms, Chloë came cannoning into my chest. I looked up from this melee of arms, legs and paws to see Ana smiling from the terrace. Chloë looked up at the same moment and we all grinned a little shyly at each other.

  The next evening, with a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, and swinging Chloë along between us with the other, we ambled across the valley to Domingo and Antonia’s farmhouse. From behind we could hear the distant howling of the dogs, who took a dim view of being tied up on the terrace. The air was a lot cooler down in the valley and a barely perceptible breeze brought us the heady scent of the flowering retama along with an occasional whiff of sheep dung.

  Domingo’s tinao — the small covered patio that constitutes the main living space of all Alpujarran houses — had a lot more herbage and greenery than I remembered, and the gloomy old kitchen now had a skylight, a recent innovation consisting of a hole bashed in the roof covered by the windscreen of the old Mercedes van that had lain for as long as I could remember in the bushes by his chicken shed. This had improved things to the extent that you could see what you were doing in the kitchen. Before, Domingo’s mother had performed her kitchen duties more by feel and instinct.

  We drew up our chairs to the table, in the middle of which stood a jam jar, with one of those pretty home bottling labels stuck across the front. I picked it up and idly turned it. The label, written in careful script, read Quince and Walnut Marmalade. ‘It’s good, but I think I put too much quince in that one,’ said Domingo. ‘Here, this one’s better, you should take this one home with you,’ and he handed me a new jar from the shelf. The label this time read Loquat and Ginger.

  ‘Who
did the labels?’ I asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Domingo.

  ‘Domingo has some funny ideas about jam,’ commented Antonia, as if experimenting with jams was the most natural occupation for an Alpujarran shepherd. ‘But sometimes they really do work. That one there is delicious? Ana looked studiedly at me, and kicked me under the table to stop me gaping, while Antonia began serving us all some mysterious concoction that she had prepared. It was spicy with ginger and fresh coriander in it. As its oriental flavours burst within me, I reflected on the fact that something odd was happening in our small valley.

  After eating, we went to look at the ‘studio’, which Domingo was in the process of converting from the room where they used to keep the pigs. Chloë and Ana wandered about admiring the bronzes — some of them were old friends, including a fine model of Lola, and a fearsome wild boar. Ana picked up a new one — a beautifully modelled ibex, and turned to show it to me, cradling it carefully in her hand.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ asked Antonia, grinning.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ we replied simultaneously. ‘One of your very best, Antonia,’ I added. ‘It really captures the grace of an ibex?

  ‘The foundry workers thought so, too, and they don’t usually comment on the stuff they cast,’ she added. ‘I’d be flattered if it was mine? And she turned to smile at Domingo. ‘He doesn’t realise what a talent he has.’

  Ana and I stared incredulously from the ibex to the sculptor. This was further extraordinary news and I struggled to take in its full import. Ana, as usual, was one step ahead.

  ‘You mean you made it?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Bah, it’s nothing,’ Domingo shrugged. ‘I just watched it for a while and copied it.’ Then, warming to the role of exhibiting artist, he fetched down the various bulls, ibex and horses that he had modelled in wax, using tools that he had made for himself out of wood and cane.

  If Antonia felt at all uneasy about Domingo’s emergence as a fellow sculptor, then she hid it well. I remembered how I had taught Domingo to shear sheep, and how the pupil had outstripped his master within a very short time.

  ‘I thought I’d have a go selling some of them,’ continued Domingo. ‘Antonia thinks she can get some of my animals into a gallery on the coast. Maybe it’s something I can do when my bones get too old for chasing sheep up and down these mountains all day?

  Back at El Valero, I decided the time had come to take my own new career by the horns. I got up uncharacteristically early and plunged myself into my morning tasks. I had been inspired by Domingo’s example and today was the day I was going to sort myself out a study and become a writer.

  First, Ana got her morning cup of tea rather earlier than she might have wished; then I fed the chickens, then the pigeons, then I went down to the stable to let the sheep out. Having done that, I took the path that skirts the house to a low building just below the ancient threshing floor and pushed open the wooden door. This was the cámara — the store-room — where Pedro Romero, the last owner of the farm, had kept his dry goods. When we first arrived, it had been festooned with strings of peppers, onions, garlic and yellowing hunks of tocino — pig fat. On the floor were piles of salt, heaps of maize husks, sacks of grain and, in the corner, an ancient iron machine with a flywheel and a handle for de-husking cobs.

  The husking machine was still there in the corner, surrounded now by a different detritus: old flower-pots, boxes of clothes and superannuated toys and dusty books — and a guitar, waiting upon my whim, like a well-loved dog. This was going to be the place where I would sit and write my book.

  I heaved the corn husking machine out of the way, blew the dust off the table and gave it a scrub with an old tee-shirt. Then I sat down, sharpened some pencils, filled my pen and fished about for the right sort of paper to get started on. With a flourish, I wrote the words El Libro at the top of the page.

  I paused and looked at it for a moment with pleasure, then looked out of the window at the pigeons flying round the eucalyptus tree. At the foot of the eucalyptus tree is Ana’s kitchen garden. I caught sight of a small movement in the corner by the strawberries… Hell and damnation! It was a sheep! The sheep were attacking the vegetable patch! Quick as a flash I bared out of the door and down the hill. This could have the makings of a grade A disaster. Ana would be furious, and the sheep, whose popularity with my womenfolk was already at a pretty low ebb, would run the risk of being expelled from the farm.

  ‘What’s happening?’ shouted Ana as I flailed past the house.

  ‘Nothing, I’m just going for a walk!’ I yelled, disappearing in a cloud of dust and exuberantly barking dogs down the track.

  ‘If those wretched sheep are on the vegetable patch again..? Ana began, but the threat was drowned out by the sound of me leaping over the fence and crashing through the salsola bushes.

  Between the dogs and me, and with a good deal of yelling and barking, we managed to get the sheep out of the vegetables with only a little collateral damage. With foul oaths I drove them away and then set to patching up the holes they had come through.

  So much for my first morning as a writer.

  That first month back at home passed in a torment of delays and interruptions as I tried to take my first literary steps. There were farm jobs that had stacked up in my absence: the acequias needed clearing, the stable wanted mucking out, and there was a crop of alfalfa that needed scything. Chloë needed to be ferried to and from the school bus stop at the other end of the valley, and the fencing around Ana’s vegetable patch needed mending properly, and the car needed taking to pieces — and then someone needed to be found to put it back together again. And so it went on and on and on until, as often happens, a breaking point was reached and I was forced to look for help.

  The day I finally decided that things were getting out of hand, and that some sort of action would have to be taken, was marked by a singular event. I had crossed the valley early one afternoon with the idea of seeing Bernardo before collecting Chloë from the school bus. I can’t remember why, because I had certainly put aside that time for writing, but no doubt I had some pressing neighbourly matters to discuss.

  Cutting up from the valley, the path to Bernardo’s winds through a wilderness of bushes, trees and cacti, enmeshed in climbers and creeping plants. There’s a gravelly corner that squeezes between a steep cliff and a chumbo, or prickly pear; if you slip up here, you must make a split second decision on whether to roll down the cliff or fall into the chumbo and spend the next month extracting millions of microscopic barbs. This time I negotiated the corner without mishap, then panted up the last stretch to the road, where I found Bernardo gazing up into the branches of a tall fig tree that overhung the path.

  He grinned ruefully at me and stroked the stubble of his upturned chin. I stopped beside him.

  ‘Hola Bernardo, que tal?’

  ‘Good morning, Cristóbal, it’s okay, I don’t complain. But I have a small problem here?

  ‘And what might that be?’

  By way of an answer he indicated the crown of the fig tree. I looked up into the branches, shading my eyes from the sun with my hand. There was what appeared to be a small dog, high up in the tree. I looked quizzically at Bernardo.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s der Moffli.’

  ‘Yes, I can see it’s the Moffli, but what on earth is it doing up in that tree?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Bernardo with a certain solemnity.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, relieved to have found an explanation for the odd look of the dog, though this shed little light as to how it got up there. The Moffli was Bernardo’s family pet, a little Pekinese dog, much beloved by the children. Initially there’d been two — called the Mofflis after a Dutch cartoon-strip — but the first had succumbed to some illness the year before, to the great distress of the children. And now it appeared that the other one had gone the same way.

  ‘He died last night,’ explained Bernardo. ‘The last little Moffli. I didn’t want the ch
ildren to see him, so I decided to wait and throw him into the barranco while they were at school. Well, I swung him round and round, you know, like this’ — he made a circular motion with his arm — ‘and then I let him go… but I think I got the timing wrong.

  Bernardo looked away from the tree and turned towards me, and to our shame we both spluttered with laughter. Immediately Bernardo clamped a hand over his mouth and gestured me to hush. ‘No, no — it’s very sad,’ he said, ‘and a terrible problem. The tree is right over the path the children take from the school bus. Imagine how upsetting it would be if they looked up and saw the Moffli up there?’

  As if on cue, Moffli lifted on a gentle zephyr and began to rock in his resting place. I could see now the gravity of it all.

  ‘But how to get him down,’ pondered Bernardo, ‘before the children get home?’

  ‘We could throw stones at him and see if we can knock him off,’ I suggested.

  Bernardo liked the idea, so we gathered a pile of rocks and set about hurling them at the unfortunate dog. Despite the odd lucky hit, gratifying in its way, the only effect was to push the Moffli even deeper into his cleft.

  ‘No,’ pronounced Bernardo at last. ‘It’s not working. We’ll just have to think of something else.’

  At that moment, the sound of an engine and a cloud of dust on the corner heralded the arrival of the school bus. I had a choice to make. I could run up to meet the children and improvise some distraction, or I could make myself scarce and loop down to meet Chloë at the bridge. I chose the latter.

  Perhaps to atone for this outburst of un-neighbourly cowardice, I promised myself that I would write late into the night and continue working on the book all the way through the next day, an easy enough resolution to make while wandering back to the farm in the late afternoon. We had dinner and I retreated to the cámara. On the way I noticed the sheep had not yet returned to the farm: they were still out on the hillside behind the house. Night was falling and I began to worry about the risk of leaving them up there; there was a full moon and the creatures of the wild would be raving and seething with malevolence. The poor sheep, who seem more or less unaffected by the moon, wouldn’t stand a chance. So I gathered a stick and Bumble and Big and stepped out up the hill.