The call somehow put a damper on the rest of the meal. We lapsed into silence and you could hear the clinking of the cutlery and the burbling of wine being poured into glasses. At midnight, Ana rose from the table. ‘I’m sure it’ll be alright, Chris, but give me a shout if you hear anything worrying,’ she said, as lightly as she could manage, then gave me a surprisingly tender goodnight kiss and took herself and Chloë off to bed. I repaired to the roof, where I often slept on hot summer nights, and placed a mattock beneath my bed.
Now, a mattock is a pretty uncompromising tool. A good blow to the head would be likely to end in serious injury or death. Still, I reckoned if Juan were going to make the effort to come all the way out here in the middle of the night, he was not just coming to bring me a bunch of flowers. He was going to fix me good. He had seemed just as much riled by my role in the evening’s episode as over the loss of Petra. Pride was at stake.
One of the odd things about this event was that I felt a kind of guilt, as if I had offended some base animal instinct and that Juan was right to seek to duff me up or worse. I wondered how I would have felt had the situation been reversed. Surely I would have been glad to have someone there stopping me throwing punches — I mean, once I’d calmed down? Wouldn’t I? I’d have given a lot to know at that moment whether Juan was of the same mind.
The roof I had chosen as summer bedroom has a sweeping view of all sides and is set a little higher than the rest of the house. Juan would not be able to see me in my bed unless he had decided to creep up from behind, but that would mean a very long, very deliberate tramp over the mountains. The moon was not far off the full so I would see my enemy long before he saw me — assuming, that is, that I didn’t fall asleep.
What should you wear in bed when you’re waiting for someone to come and kill you? It was a hot night and what I usually wear on a hot night is nothing. But it wouldn’t do to have to pull on clothes as a prelude to defending myself, while a naked man wielding a mattock is a far from formidable looking opponent. I decided on a tee-shirt and underpants as my battle costume, with a pair of sandals ready to slip on, under the bed by my weapon.
I lay down on my back and looked up at the bright sky. It was too light to sleep like that, so I rolled over and peered over the pillow at the moonlit rivers and valleys. I tried to breathe quietly so I could hear any furtive footfalls above the quiet swish of the river. Then I got fed up lying that way and rolled over again giving the mattock a quick fingering just to make sure.
It was a bad business, this. It seemed such unwarranted bad luck to find myself preparing to fight for my life in my underpants with a mattock on a rooftop in the moonlight. Life, which had hitherto seemed pretty good, suddenly seemed even sweeter. I fingered my mattock again and rolled over. There was a car creeping into the valley. I could see the lights in the dark rocks above La Herradura. This was it. It was late; who else would be coming in at this time of night? I had a good fifteen minutes till he got here, assuming that he left his car on the other side of the river — and he would do that because he would hardly drive all the way up to the farm and thus lose what he believed was the advantage of surprise.
I slipped into my trousers, buckled my sandals and grabbed the mattock, then I sat on the bed for a bit. All was silence now; the car had disappeared into the valley. I weighed up the mattock. Now, how do you hit a man with a mattock? Do you crack him over the head with the back of it? Or do you go for no holds barred, finish him off in one, cleave the bastard down through the middle with the blade?
I wasn’t sure, but probably the technique would become clear as the combat heated up. I crept up the hill to look over to the river bridge. I just caught the lights heading off up the track to Carrasco. Not Juan at all, some midnight visitor for our neighbours across the river.
Back to bed. I thought about Petra and Juan. I had thought their affair was romantic — but maybe not. Petra was a generous soul, sexy and optimistic and always game for something interesting. She had come out to Orgiva after growing tired of an office job in Copenhagen, and fallen in with a Spanish-Moroccan bloke from Ceuta. Together they travelled back and forth to Morocco, trawling for artefacts which they would sell at a stall in the market. Then Paco, the partner, decided he was going to India to do some work on his karma, while Petra took up with an installation artist and part-time welder, whom she had met in Alicante. All seemed to go well for a while and she would return in high spirits with her new lover to stay with friends in the mountain villages. And then one day, I was out wandering in the hills of the Contraviesa when I found myself in the middle of a big flock of sheep. Standing at the back, tending them with a stick and a couple of scruffy-looking dogs, was Petra — the very same Petra who had once worked as a stationery buyer for a mobile phone company.
The sheep, she said, belonged to Juan. I knew Juan a little and had found him a quiet, reserved sort of a man. I liked him. Petra went on to tell me how she had cast her lot with him and moved into his ramshackle cortijo to share the shepherd’s life. Sometimes I would come across her in town in her van, loading up with sacks of feed and shepherd’s necessities. And then she told me how the two of them had left the flock in the charge of a cousin or two, and headed off round Spain in the van for a holiday — a thing Juan never would have dreamed of doing before.
So, all in all, it seemed that Petra enriched Juan’s life, and Juan and his pastoral existence was really something of a revelation to Petra. ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, Chris,’ she would tell me eagerly. ‘It’s opened out a whole new world for me. I can’t tell you the pleasure I get from living up on the mountain with the sheep, getting to know this new way of life.’ Her eyes would glisten with excitement as she said this, so I knew it was so.
And now here I was, alone in the moonlight with my mattock, waiting for Juan, who was on his way to kill me. I couldn’t help but feel disillusioned about it all. I rolled over and listened to the sounds of the night. An insect hummed, another whined and stopped near my ear. A scops owl started its monotonous booping from the river — boop…boop…boop — a noise to drive you to distraction. Ana’s Aunt Ruth from Brighton came to stay with us one weekend. ‘Are you sure there’s not a factory of some sort around here?’ she had asked, peering fearfully into the unrelieved blackness of the mountain night. ‘Not as far as we know,’ said Ana acidly. ‘But that noise,’ said Ruth, ‘it sounds so like people clocking off.’
I listened to the scops owl and thought a bit about Aunt Ruth’s visit. She had enthused about the farm: ‘How wonderful to live so wild and free in the mountains, drinking water from the spring, so far from the hurly-burly, the hustle and bustle, well out of the rat-race, and not stuck in the concrete jungle in an endless traffic jam.’ She hooked one cliché after another. Later we discovered she had so feared the water from the spring that she had cleaned her teeth in lemonade.
I fell asleep for a while, but all of a sudden I was aware of the dogs barking furiously — the intruder-bark. Back into the trousers, grab the mattock, feel around for my glasses by the bed-leg. The dogs were going crazy; somebody was lurking around the house. This was it. ‘Right, you bastard! Come and get it!’ I said out loud to myself, taking courage from the ring of these words and their sense of impending violence. I peered down from the roof. Nothing, not a sound. Still the dogs were at it, infuriated by some presence.
And then I heard it. It was the call of a fox in the valley, that little howl of feral yearning, the distillation of all the wildness, savagery and horror of the night, a call that thrills your very blood — and drives the dogs bonkers. It’s the call of the wild and it makes the dogs feel guilty of a moral dereliction as they slumber on the rug by the fire. It reminds them of the way they should be — not consorting with cats, slurping dog-food and biscuits for breakfast, and walking to heel on the end of a lead. ‘Come to me,’ the fox calls, ‘this is how life should be lived, racing through the woods on starlit nights, massacring runs of obese hens, delighting in their cries of terror.
Come on, you unfit, molly-coddled slobs, come and get it.’ Of course it drives the dogs to distraction.
I returned to my bed, almost regretful at the lack of action. And sleep did not come easily. The night was just too exciting and, besides, if Juan did succeed in sticking me with his knife, then this might be the last night I would ever see. It seemed a pity to waste it in sleep.
The moon moved on down and slipped behind Cerro Negro, ‘Black Hill’, and the sky filled with stars. I gazed up at the Milky Way, and remembered when I was a child lying awake and listening to the terrors of night, the shifts and cracks made by my parents’ old house, or more probably by fearful fiends and things too horrible to name who were inching their way out from under the bed. I was always a little surprised to see the sun shining through the curtains in the morning, and to know I had made it through yet another night. But over the years I became accustomed to surviving, and this was the first night for a long time that I had been unsure of.
As I considered the stars in those dark hours that come before dawn, I began to feel a little more confident of making it through to morning. And then I heard him — of course, he would choose the darkest hour. He was creeping through the bushes on the hill above me. He could see me from there before I saw him. I froze with fear, fished again for my glasses and waited shivering by the bed, hefting the mattock. I could hear his breath, he was that close. Then a careful footfall and the breaking of a bush. I gripped the mattock hard. I heard him cough —and then an enormous fart. No man could fart that loud, not even the formidable Juan. It was Lola, the horse, and now I could hear her munching happily amongst the rosemary.
A distant cock crowed and then another, and the scops owl stopped booping. The sunlight filtered through, a fly settled on my nose, and I knew it was morning. Juan wouldn’t come now. He didn’t come the next night either.
I told Manolo about the business and he looked earnestly at me. ‘Juan?’ he said. ‘Juan! You don’t want to mess with Juan — he’s a maniac. He kills people for fun! You know he killed old Pepe Diáz, don’t you? He’s known for fighting — even the Guardia Civil are frightened of him — well, they’re frightened of everybody but they’re particularly frightened of Juan. He carries a navajón — a ten-inch knife — in his boot. He’s bad news. Cristóbal, you’re in real trouble now.
‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘That’s very reassuring. How do you know all this, anyway?’
Manolo rolled his eyes. ‘I worked for Juan last year, mucking the dung out of his sheep-stables. He’s a strong bastard. He could lift a mule up with one hand. And he has a terrible temper — I’d sooner mess with a wild boar than with that Juan.’
‘Still,’ I replied, keeping a front of optimism. ‘He didn’t come and get me last night, nor the night before. I don’t think he’ll bother to come and kill me now. I may have got away with it..?
‘Oh, I wouldn’t count on that. He’ll probably get you at the Feria — the summer fair. That’s when these things are done here. He’ll be drunk and spoiling for a fight and he’ll be furious about losing his blonde. Yes, Feria’s when he’ll get you.’ Manolo smiled happily at me.
Orgiva Feria — the town’s big festival — was the following week. The business with Juan might make it a little more interesting than usual. Feria is a time of unbelievable cacophony, when the townsfolk go overboard indulging their passion for noise. There’s a fairground where each and every ride has its own sound system, each more ear-splitting than the last. The streets are lined with brightly-lit sweet stalls and lottery stalls where you can win polyester day-glo cuddly toys, and these too have their own music, pumped out at about ten times the decibel level that strikes you stone deaf. The bars in the plaza, meanwhile, have sound systems the size of small houses, which thunder and rattle day and night, making it impossible to hold the faintest trace of conversation. Yet the locals just sit there chatting away as though nothing were happening. It’s my belief that the Spanish have better evolved ears than the rest of us.
As if the noise isn’t enough, Feria is also the time of year when the wind gets up. It comes trickling over the top of the Contraviesa, building up speed as it races through the gullies and canyons, then roars uphill from the Seven-Eye Bridge and howls into town, carrying plastic bags and beercans before it. It moans and wails round every corner, thick with grit and gravel which stings your eyes and gets in your nose and sets your teeth on edge as you eat the public paella in the plaza.
The only saving grace of the Orgiva Feria is the pinchito stall in the funfair, where you can lean against the tin bar hour after hour, munching your way through spicy skewers of pork and drinking warm dry sherry from a paper cup. It’s the thought of this — and the fact that Chloë enjoys hanging out at the fair with her schoolfriends — that keeps me going back each year. And besides, this Feria I had to show my face. I wasn’t going to let myself be bullied into missing the festive delights by some homicidal shepherd… even if he could lift a mule with one hand, and even if he did carry a ten-inch navajón.
Almost as soon as Ana, Chloë and I arrived in town, I spotted Juan chatting with a couple of friends in the street. I was all for stepping over to him straight away and giving my masculinity an airing, but Ana made this impossible by walking off and leaving me with Chloë. A smart move. She knew I wouldn’t consider a brawl the most edifying spectacle for my six-year-old daughter.
After Chloë had gone off with her friends, I settled down for a stint at the pinchito stall, and waited to run into Juan. Manolo and Domingo were both at the bar, and Domingo comfortingly assured me that Juan reckoned I had been Petra’s lover — why else would I interfere? — and that his anger was still festering.
Juan, however, didn’t show up again.
In the town a few weeks after Feria I ran into Petra for the first time since the night of violence. She embraced me warmly.
‘For Chrissake lay off, Petra!’ I said, backing off ‘You want to try and get me killed again?’
‘No, don’t worry about it, Chris. I just wanted to thank you for being so wonderful that night?
‘It’s all very well to say “Don’t worry”, but there’s a dangerous maniac out there with a big knife and if he sees his blonde all over me in the high street then I’m meat.’
‘Oh, Juan is alright. He’s not a dangerous maniac at all. In fact I must rush because I’m just going to pick him up and take him to hospital…’
‘You what?!’
‘He’s got kidney stones and the pain makes him crazy. That was partly what made him so aggressive that night; he was crazy with pain and I had refused to take him to hospital?
‘Petra, why on earth didn’t you say any of this then?’ I asked, appalled.
‘Perhaps I was wrong that night. Juan is usually as gentle as a lamb. Anyway I must fly. Bye!’
I told Manolo what Petra had said. ‘Oh — Juan is alright,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t actually kill Pepe Diáz either, it was a heart attack. No, there’s no doubt about it, Juan wouldn’t have harmed you.’
I looked at him sideways.
‘And what about the navajón he keeps in his boots?’ I asked.
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he answered with a smile. ‘I’ve never had any cause to look inside them.’
TELEPHONY
SO FAR AT EL VALERO WE HAVE RESISTED THE CALL OF THE MOBILE phone. Its appeal is admittedly limited, since a mobile wouldn’t work where we live, surrounded as we are by a ring of mountains. But I’m a little uneasy in any case with telephone technology; I once wasted a morning trying to make a phone call from a friend’s house using the TV remote control. Ana, too, is something of a Luddite. She won’t have anything to do with computers, for example. Not long ago, someone gave her an old IBM golf-ball typewriter which is as big and heavy as a small traction engine. She was delighted with it even though it spatters any paper that passes through it with gobbets of light engine oil. ‘This is the future,’ she announced as she heaved the th
ing through the doorway.
For many years we had no phone at all at El Valero. We wrote letters to our friends and received letters in return, and on the odd occasion when there was something pressing, we would go to the telephone-house in Tíjolas. An enterprising family in the village had invested in a telephone meter. This enabled them to provide a public service and, with an astronomical multiplication of the already ruinous Telefónica rate, to turn a nice profit. However much they charged, though, the telephone-house was not a place for a relaxed call. The phone and its meter were mounted on the wall of the family sitting room, between a picture of the Bleeding Heart and a bunch of faded plastic flowers. Callers were clearly intruders on family life.
The quickest way to get to the telephone-house in those days was to trek down the river, the road being particularly bad. So a telephone call became quite a performance. First there was the bracing hour-long walk, crashing through the cane brakes and sloshing thigh-deep in fast-flowing water. Then there was the problem of insinuating yourself into a stranger’s home and trying not to drip river water onto the scrubbed floor.
The usual routine was to announce your arrival with a shout — or, at least that’s what the locals would do. I tended to be a bit hesitant, asking in excessively formal language ‘if perhaps I might make use, for a short time, of the telephone.’ The telephone-woman would then look me up and down disapprovingly, lingering with particular distaste on my sodden shoes, before gesturing with an imperious motion that I was to follow her through the fly-curtain. Once inside the gloomy sitting room, she would click the meter back to nought and then stand beside it, arms folded, glaring at me. On a really bad day, other members of the family would gather and glare, too.
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree Page 6