I sighed, looked unenthusiastically at the cheap plastic computer, and then settled again to scribbling in my exercise book. A small wheel in the caverns of my brain creaked into action; I unscrewed my pen and wrote a short sentence. Then I refilled the pen and listened to the sounds of the farm. I could make out Manolo chugging about on the tractor down by the eucalyptus tree, and reflected bitterly that chugging about the place on a tractor was where I wanted to be, rather than staring at a piece of paper, trying to earn money to pay Manolo to do it. Then the engine noise disappeared, and I could hear the cooing of the doves and the backdrop of a million cicadas.
The air inside the cámara became stifling as the midday sun toasted the thin concrete roof. Spreading my elbows wide on the desk, I laid my head on a cushioned bit of my upper arm and drifted away into a pleasant sleep. The next thing I knew, there was a whistling outside, and the door burst open with a resounding crash. Manolo stood there with a slightly bemused smile.
‘Tas escribiendo? — you’re writing?’
‘Well, I’m trying to. What are you at down there?’
‘I’ve ploughed the stable field and sown it with grass..?
‘Have you harrowed it?’
‘No, I’ll bring the mules tomorrow for that. And I’ve watered the alfalfa — the pipes were blocked so I had to dismantle them all to get the muck out — clogged solid they were. It’s that wind, it filled the acequia with sticks and leaves and oleander petals and they all got sucked into the pipe. When are you going to make that filter you keep talking about?’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can get round to it tomorrow…’
‘Bueno. And I’ve rearranged the haystack and fixed the rams water drinker and tied up the tomatoes…’
I looked at the piece of paper before me on the desk. Manolo was edging forward, trying to catch a glimpse of my morning’s work. I covered it with my arm.
Manolo surveyed the room. ‘Lots of books,’ he observed.
‘Yes, I suppose there are?
‘How’s your book coming along, then?’
I looked down at my desk and thought of Manolo’s awesome morning’s achievements. On the piece of paper was written:
Chapter 1. Arrive at El Valero — I took my pen and added a full stop. ‘Not bad,’ I lied. ‘Not bad?
At five or six o’clock, the heat begins to abate a little and the day’s farmwork comes to an end. Manolo had come up to the house for a beer. We were sitting on the patio, Manolo surrounded by adoring dogs, patting them in turn with affectionate blows of the hand, me sipping mint tea beside him, discussing what we needed to do around the farm.
‘You’ll need to get some abono artificial to fertilise the alfalfa,’ Manolo said.
‘No, Manolo,’ I replied. ‘You know that we’re registering as organic producers. So we can’t use chemicals of any sort, nor abono artificial?
‘We’ll put dung on, then…’
‘Yes, dung and compost..?
‘No abono, then? It does seem such a pity not to spread just a little bit of abono.’
‘Look, Manolo. You know that people around here use far too many chemicals. It runs off into the river and poisons the fish. And the birds too. You remember what this place was like when you first used to come and clear the acequia. Romero had the place so soaked in poisonous chemicals that you never heard a bird sing — and now listen..?
We sat and listened. Mingling with the low roar of the river and the breeze in the eucalyptus were the songs of golden orioles, blackbirds, larks of one persuasion or another, and even a late nightingale.
‘You don’t hear birds singing in Tíjolas,’ offered Manolo. ‘And you’re right, they get poisoned by the chemicals. Every day I find half a dozen dead birds?
‘Exactly — and it was just those birds that would have eaten the insects that destroy the crops. You need a balance between nature and agriculture, and once you start blasting the place with chemicals, you destroy that balance and the pests get out of control. And I think it’s worth it to harvest just a little less of each crop simply for the pleasure of the birdsong.’
‘It is. You’re right.., but it does seem a pity not to put just a little fertiliser on the alfalfa.’
We ordered a load of organic fertiliser to be shipped all the way from Barcelona, which mollified Manolo a bit. It was worm humus or some such thing — a sooty, powdery peat with apparently extraordinary powers of water retention, which is what you want here, because the water retention factor of our land is nil. A kilo of this stuff was supposed to retain ten litres of water.
I see my discussions with Manolo as a crusade for the planet. If we can convince him of the benefits of organic husbandry, then he will go down and preach to the village, and when Tíjolas falls, it won’t be long afterwards that Tablones, Las Barreras, and even Orgiva may start to see things in a different light.
One day in June, it seemed as if the breakthrough had in fact come. Manolo thundered up the steps and burst through the fly-curtain. ‘Look at this, will you?!’ he gasped. He was cradling a huge and perfect melon. ‘Vaya meloncillo!’ he enthused — what a lovely melonkin. ‘And without a touch of abono!’ he added, as if the whole thing had been his idea.
(Before I go further I ought to explain that one of the major idiosyncrasies of Spanish and particularly Andaluz, that variant of the language spoken in these parts, is the constant and excessive use of the diminutive, rendered by the suffixes -ito or -illo: a kind of equivalent to the English -let or -kin as in piglet or lambkin. But size isn’t really the issue here, as it’s more of an expression of enthusiasm for the object in question. Among country folk in particular this can get quite out of control. Un vinillo, a winelet, is not unreasonable as a snifter of wine, but un vasito de agüilla, a glasslet of waterkin? Needless to say, a whopping great melonkin barely counts as a contradiction in terms.)
That summer, as if to hammer home the organic message, we had our first bumper harvest of potatoes. All notion of other work had to be put aside, as we attempted to make the most of our vegetable bonanza. I found this a bit frustrating because I’d finally pulled my finger out and composed enough pages on the computer to send a disk to my publishing friends, and they were waiting for more. But the call of the potatoes was urgent, and each evening we devoted more and more time to bagging and washing the crop, hurling any blighted spuds into the chumbo. Ana and I worked together, with occasional help from Chloë, and as the evenings went by, stooped over piles of potatoes and bowls of vile water, we occasionally wondered if it was worth it. A potato sells for a peseta, or not much more, and we’d be lucky to bag a hundred potatoes an hour between us. It was, as you may imagine, dull and unrewarding labour, but that is what farming is all about. Potato after potato after potato, each washed in two changes of water and dried in the sun.
We stacked them in an outhouse, where it was dark and quite cool, and we set to making potato dishes to celebrate our home produce. Rosemary potatoes — blasted in the oven with oil, a whole bush of rosemary, garlic and olives; aligot — a light cloud of boiled spud puréed with cheese and cream and garlic and whipped until it has to be held down in the pan to stop it floating away; and we even tried a recipe for a pudding — essentially mashed potatoes with chocolate sauce — which was not a success.
And then the potatoes got blight. Pools of mephitic black muck appeared on the floor by the sacks, and when we tipped them out we recoiled in horror. A potato with the blight becomes an evil-smelling sludge. You poke a finger through the skin and it is like sewage. It makes you think of the misery of the Irish potato famine: the crowds of starving poor looking on in desperation as the clamps were opened, only to be met by a poisonous white ooze; and the thousands who lay dying green-mouthed from the grass they tried to eat while the fat ships sailed down the Liffey bursting with crates of food for export to the English. Market forces would save the day. A blighted potato puts me in mind of that…
Manolo, as if to compensate us for our misfortune
with the potatoes, stepped up his gifts of food and fruit from his patch of land in Tijolas. He would pick his way across the bridge laden with plastic bags of fresh goat’s cheese, as well as tomatoes, onions, aubergines and the leathery local green peppers.
Manolo had become, if we stopped to think about it, a part of our family. As well as all his farmwork, he would also help with getting Chloë to and from school. I tended to do the morning run, and would occasionally combine it with a trip to the post office with the next instalment of the book, and Manolo would often meet the school bus at the end of the day. He used an old trail bike that a friend had left on the farm, and handled it like a horse, coaxing it skilfully around the boulders and dips in the river. My own technique was a bit reckless and had landed Chloë and me in the river on more than one occasion.
That summer Antonia had returned to Domingo’s house from one of her short trips to Holland with an old family pet —an African Grey parrot called Yacko. Manolo was picking Chloë up on the motorbike when he heard about this newcomer and together they decided to go and pay it a visit.
The week before, Domingo had found on the road a spiky creature that he had never seen before. He had rolled it in a sack and taken it home. And then he had walked over to see if I had a clue as to what it might be. ‘It’s an erizo,’ I said, rather pleased with myself for knowing the Spanish for a hedgehog, and I told him the usual stuff about feeding it on saucers of milk, and that it would be riddled with fleas. Domingo decided to adopt it.
When Chloë and Manolo got to Domingo’s farmhouse, there was nobody about. They couldn’t find the parrot but they did find the hedgehog. Like Domingo, Manolo had never seen a hedgehog before, and his notions about parrots were, understandably, sketchy. Together, he and Chloë stood peering at the creature, rolled as it was into a ball of prickles. ‘Do you suppose, asked Manolo quietly, ‘that this is Domingo’s parrot?’
WAITING FOR JUAN
WANDERING UP TO THE HOUSE FOR A MORNING BREAK, MANOLO has a habit of whistling some utterly tuneless tune about three seconds before he bursts through the fly-curtain of our kitchen. The tune is a considerate warning but it is not quite enough to prevent me from being caught in the act — in flagrante fregantis, Ana calls it — or, up to the elbows in the washing-up. Manolo pauses, a blush of embarrassment spreading across his face as he gazes first at Ana reading a newspaper on the sofa and then at me soaked in suds at the sink.
‘Tas fregando..?’ he offers. ‘You’re washing up?’
‘Yup,’ I concur. ‘Fregando… washing up.’
He nods his head as if to register this anomaly.
Later at lunchtime, as often as not, Manolo will whistle again and arrive to find me standing at the stove.
‘Tas cocinando — you’re cooking?’
‘Yup — cocinando,’ I reply.
Now I love to cook. I consider it one of life’s great pleasures, and one that can only be enhanced by constant practice, and I don’t much mind washing a few plates and saucepans afterwards. Ana as it happens detests both jobs but has a peculiar tolerance towards tidying up, shopping and laundry, which I exploit to the full. And so we carve up the daily round in a reasonably equal manner.
This is not, however, the norm for Alpujarran men. When men work, they work like mules all day long, but when they finish that’s it — they relax and have a drink and ease their aching limbs, while their wives, fresh from a round of chores, gardening and fieldwork, wait on them. Of course there are some men who might help out in the garden, do their bit with the childcare, or even try a few culinary ideas — witness Domingo’s jam making. But this is fairly unusual stuff. It would take a brave man to interrupt talk of hunting or water rights in a village bar with a new recipe for chestnut soufflé.
To be honest, a part of me withers whenever Manolo catches me in the kitchen. There’s a certain tone to his ‘tas fregando that makes me question myself, wonder if all is as it should be in the masculinity stakes. Not that Manolo says anything specific, mind you, but his tone and slightly shamed look has a peculiarly crumpling effect. He reminds me, I fear, of my own reactions to Eduardo, a fundamentalist fruitarian who squats in a half-built house in the vega of Tíjolas. Eduardo is a fundamentalist in that he not only survives exclusively on fruit, but only eats windfalls; ‘the tree must give its fruit without the duress of plucking,’ as he puts it. As you might imagine, this is hardly a strengthening diet, and if the trees are unusually generous then he has to ferry his trawl home in small sacks like an ant carrying scraps from a leaf.
None of this should matter, except there are odd moments in life when a macho reputation does have some use. For instance, on the summer after my return from Sweden, when word got round that Juan Gallego, a local shepherd, had got it into his head to murder first his ex-lover and then me.
This episode began one July evening on the road outside Orgiva. I was standing by the car, talking to a cousin of Manolo’s, when suddenly there was a yelling and shouting and a woman came stumbling round the corner in a state of hysteria.
‘Please help,’ she babbled in Spanish. ‘He’s going to kill her —he’s gone really crazy — go now, please..!’
‘Walt,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you want me to do and where and what’s happening…’
‘Just go, now, please, over there!’ she implored.
So I got in the car and headed off in the direction the woman had indicated, wondering what on earth I was letting myself in for, but knowing I had to go anyway. After about a kilometre I came across two people standing by the side of the road. One was Petra, a slight Danish woman with long, light brown hair, which she had swept in front of her face in a vain attempt to hide behind it. The other was her lover Juan, a man I knew a little as a result of having sheared his sheep a few times. Though barely taller than Petra, Juan seemed somehow to be towering over her with a look of clenched menace.
Petra acknowledged my arrival with a terrified glance. ‘Please don’t leave me alone with him, Chris, he’s going to kill me?
‘Cristóbal, what are you doing here?’ demanded Juan with a look of fury.
I got out of the car and Petra explained as well as she could what was going on. ‘I’m leaving him, Chris. I can’t stand his moods and his wildness any more. And he can’t accept that I’m leaving like this so he keeps grabbing me and shaking me and trying to make me say I’ll stay. And now he says he’s going to kill me — we’ve called the police but just please don’t leave me alone with him. Stay till the police get here?
Petra was crying now and rubbing her bruised arms. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay until you tell me I can go.’
All this we said in English. It didn’t seem necessary somehow to translate it for the benefit of Juan.
‘What are you saying? Speak Spanish,’ he shouted.
‘Petra is telling me what’s going on and I’m staying here until she says I can go,’ I said to Juan.
‘You can go now. I don’t want you here?
‘No. Here I stay till Petra says I can go,’ I repeated.
Juan bristled — a stocky man, with teeth mostly knocked out, nose well broken and a stubbly moustache. He muscled up to me. I held my ground.
‘Cristóbal, a man does not get in the way of another man and his woman,’ he snarled.
‘He does, Juan, when there is violence, so here I stay.’
Little by little, as our group moved back and forth between the house, from which Petra was getting her belongings, and the van where she was stowing them, Juan began to get aggressive with me. He didn’t hit me, but there was a lot of the pushing and shoving with chest puffed out that men do as a prelude to slamming their fists into each others’ faces. ‘We used to be friends, Cristóbal,’ Juan growled. ‘But now you have a serious enemy.
Anyway, I did my stuff and stuck to Petra like glue, and after about half an hour a Guardia Civil patrol car appeared and two policemen got out. One was a pleasant-faced young man who was obviously a trainee, the other a lit
tle runt of a man with a thick grey moustache and a strut like a bantam-cock.
‘Show me your papers, passport…’ he snapped at Petra. ‘And you,’ he turned to me. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m staying to make sure that my friend doesn’t get hurt.’
‘Well, you can clear off now,’ he said, with a look of distaste.
‘I’m staying until this woman says I can go,’ I told him with what I hoped was an answering sneer. It was immediately obvious this noble little custodian of the law thought that if Juan wanted to beat up his girlfriend then that was his own affair and none of us should be interfering.
The bantam disappeared into the house with Petra to check her papers, and Juan and I were left outside in the dark with the young apprentice. Juan was still being aggressive towards me. ‘You’re not going to arrive home alive tonight, Cristóbal,’ he said. ‘Juan,’ I warned him. ‘It’s all very well to threaten a man, but to do it in front of the Señor Guardia here is surely foolishness, no?’ I was a little emboldened by the young policeman’s cosh and his gun and his silly green hat.
In the end the Guardia escorted Petra to the police station, and as she left she assured me that she had friends who would collect her and that she would be alright. ‘Thanks, Chris,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine now.’
I drove home. Ana and I sat outside eating a late supper, as you do on hot summer nights, while Chloë dozed on the sofa. Halfway through the meal, the phone rang. Ana answered it. ‘I want to speak to Cristóbal’ said an angry voice. Ana passed me the telephone. ‘Diga — speak,’ I said, only to hear the phone slammed down. ‘That’ll be Juan,’ I confided. ‘Checking to see if I’m at home so he can come round and kill me.’
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree Page 5