A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  Though Porca’s talent lies in destruction, there are just a few positive aspects to having him around. For one, he’s a constant source of fascination, even in his choice of locomotion — flying, hitching lifts on people and animals, riding head down in Ana’s pocket, or walking brazenly along the floor, ignoring the predatory stares of the dogs and cats — it all adds spice to our lives here. For another, Porca seems in a perverse way to be licking us all into shape. I’ve noticed that I’ve become distinctly less confrontational with Porca around. It has been ages now since it occurred to me to place the blue toothmug on the washing machine cover. Chloë, too, seems to have become more philosophical about life’s random injustices, particularly those taking the form of parrot attacks, while Ana seems to cope reasonably well with being treated as the acme of perfection.

  There’s no doubt about it. Much as Porca makes me suffer, I’d find it hard not to have a parrot in the family now.

  ETHICS AND ANTI-CLERICALISM

  ‘HOMBRE! YOU’VE GOT TO BE JOKING! I CAN’T GET PAST THERE. THIS is a car, not a mule. I’ll wait.’ There was a lorry slewed across the track, its ramp down on the bank. Four men were trying to persuade a bullock to get in, but understandably it didn’t want to go. Standing tethered nearby was the mother of the bullock, a gentle liquid-eyed creature with horns and a soft wet muzzle. She watched the proceedings with sad incomprehension.

  The lorry belonged to Antonio, Manolo’s cousin. The cattle belonged to Juan Diáz, who farms up on Carrasco.

  ‘Are you getting a good price for him, Juan?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Cristóbal. Price not good. Farmers very, very poor. Butcher very rich man.’

  ‘That always seems to be the way. He’s a beautiful bull.’

  ‘Beautiful bull. Big big balls.’ And he patted the pendulous bag. ‘Very delicious eat. He boy. Mummy there.’ He indicated the cow. ‘She come make him happy.’

  Juan Diáz is a man who knows his farming. His farm is a delight to visit, always green and trim and well cultivated, with healthy trees and fine crops. It is just down the valley from Bernardo, who speaks Alpujarran Spanish as fluently as anyone I’ve met, but is treated by Juan, like the rest of us foreigners, as if he were on his first day at language school.

  Bernardo told me how one day he was standing around, talking to Domingo, when Juan Diáz appeared, striding round the bend on his way back from town.

  ‘Morning Juan. Not a bad day,’ offered Bernardo.

  ‘No rain. Very bad, very bad. Sun pretty but not good. Trees and plants dry. Farmers poor.

  ‘I heard the forecast this morning. They say there’s a possibility of rain towards the end of the week.’

  ‘Maybe rain. Maybe not rain. We not know…’

  Domingo, who had been staring in bafflement at Juan during this exchange, interrupted. ‘Why in the name of the Host are you talking in that strange way, Juan? I’ve never heard anything like it! Bernardo here is not a half-wit?

  ‘No. Not half-wit. Foreigner, not Spanish. Not understand?

  ‘But Bernardo speaks Spanish as well as you or I do?

  Juan was in a difficult predicament here; he didn’t know whether to speak normally for Domingo, or to maintain the pidgin Spanish for the benefit of poor benighted Bernardo, who might speak good Spanish, but was unalterably a foreigner.

  Anyway, Domingo’s criticism made not the slightest difference. Juan never speaks to a foreigner except in his extraordinary baby talk. I have quite long conversations with him sometimes, when I give him a lift into town for example. His strangely reduced speech drives me to seek out the most colloquial expressions that I can find.

  ‘Morning Juan, hop in, save you a bit of a walk?

  ‘Very kind, Cristóbal. Orgiva far. Juan old. Legs bad.’

  ‘And what takes you to town on this lovely morning, Juan?’

  ‘You do, Cristóbal, in your car. Very big, very fast?

  ‘No, I mean why are you going?’

  ‘See doctor. Juan ill.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Hands hurt. Not work well.’ He showed me his huge cracked hands.

  ‘Too much work, cold water. Also legs bad?

  And on we go. If I live near Juan for the rest of my life, he will never address me in any other manner. But it is meant kindly: a language contrived to be as considerate as possible to a linguistic simpleton. Juan manages to speak almost entirely without recourse to verbs, and on the odd occasion when there is no other way out, he uses only the simple form. The nouns are kept basic, and the article, definite or indefinite, is omitted.

  This form of speech might be undemanding, but it’s also severely limiting. You can’t get very deep into abstract subjects without using verbs.

  One autumn night a badger came and ravaged our vegetable patch. I wandered over the river and told Bernardo my woes. ‘The man you should talk to about badgers,’ he said at once, ‘is Juan Diáz. He knows all there is to know about them.’ So I set off to talk to Juan about the badger problem. Chloë, who goes to school with a Diáz granddaughter, came along for the ride.

  We found Juan grubbing up the little walnut trees that had sown themselves all over his terraces. He straightened up, brushed some of the dirt from his hand and gave Chloë a fond pat. ‘Hola, guapisima!’ he greeted her — ‘Hello, Most Beautiful.’

  Then he turned to me with a concentrated smile on his face. ‘Big tree. Little babies. One day big trees, too,’ he said, indicating the saplings. ‘You plant at El Valero. Babies now, one day walnut forest? As an aside to Chloë he asked, ‘Do you think your mother would like some? She has a way with trees.’

  Like many of our neighbours, Juan makes a distinction between Chloë, born and bred in the Alpujarras, and rank outsiders like ourselves. Chloë’s accent helps, of course — she speaks Spanish with the slightly lisping style, thin on consonants, that’s favoured in these parts, and she peppers it with playground idioms. Ana and I could never hope to catch up.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ I broke in, nonetheless. ‘Ana loves walnut trees. But Juan, we have come to see you on this fine afternoon because we have a problem with a badger — well, I think it’s a badger at any rate. It’s eating our vegetables. Bernardo says you know all about badgers. So do you have any idea what we can do to keep this one off the vegetable patch?’

  ‘Badger very bad. Motorcycle clutch cable…’ Juan drew a circle in the air and mimed pulling it tight.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Moto clutch cable. Very good thing. With moto clutch you kill him good and dead.’

  ‘There must be something more to it than that? You’ve omitted to explain something, perhaps?’ I asked, a little pompously.

  ‘It’s to make a trap with, Daddy,’ Chloë hissed. ‘The badger runs into it and gets caught, maybe even strangled? She fixed me with her sternest expression as she said this. Chloë and Ana share some very firm opinions on the morality of traps, though in deference to Juan, she was trying to keep these to herself.

  ‘Chloë right,’ Juan added, beaming obliviously. Then, as if all his fears had been confirmed about having to communicate with the intellectual dregs of Europe, he continued miming and mouthing his explanation. ‘Find where badger come. Same place always. Clutch cable in path, badger come, neck through loop —caught! Bang! Dead! Simple, no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘But why do you need a clutch cable?’

  Juan gave me that look people use when they decide to start painstakingly from the beginning again.

  ‘Daddy wants to know why you chose a clutch cable rather than anything else?’ Chloë lisped, rushing to the rescue.

  ‘Because there’s a heap of them going begging in the road outside Daniel’s moto repair shop and they’ll do as well as anything else,’ Juan confided to her.

  So that was how you dealt with the badger problem, clearly and succinctly explained. Yet there was one niggling matter still left unresolved. ‘Chloë?’ I asked, as we bumped our way back
across the ford in the river. ‘Do you know the Spanish for snare?’

  Chloë made a face. ‘No I don’t, and I don’t think I want to either. They’re horrid things, Daddy, and really hurt the animals. We shouldn’t use anything like that at El Valero,’ she announced and then resumed sucking thoughtfully the boiled sweet that Juan had spirited out of the pocket of his overalls.

  Though I like to think that my Spanish vocabulary has, by now, expanded to fit most of the needs of Alpujarran living, I have discovered that it is — well — full of snares.

  Animals, particularly, are a sea of uncertainty. Comadreja, garduña, jineta, gato clavo, hurón, are all names of creatures that exist in an area of uncertain identities, often distinguished only by the size of hole they can squeeze through to get at your poultry. I’m sure similar confusions exist with the English equivalent — stoats, weasels, martens, jennets, ferrets, and so on.

  Then, if you move one size or so down the ladder of threatening animals you arrive in the even more interesting linguistic territory of the bichos. Now, bicho is one of my favourite Spanish words. It should refer to creatures round about the insect size bracket — as in ‘there are bichos in this bed and they are eating me alive’ — but it can be expanded to encompass smallish non-insects, like rodents, and under exceptional circumstances its borders might even stretch to a cat or even a dog. With the licence that being a foreigner and having a wretchedly imperfect grasp of the language permits me, I have even managed a cow and a horse, and by adding the suffix —aco have made the thing sound formidable, menacing even. ‘Vaya bicharaco!’ 1 might exclaim — ‘Blimey, what a creature!’

  Yet these are all minor linguistic inconveniences, compared to the minefield of the written letter or note.

  If you live your whole life in the country you were born in, you are unlikely to be greatly taxed by the problem of writing notes to school bus drivers. Of course you may have to do it, but you will probably be able to dash it off without a moment’s thought:

  To Whom it May Concern:

  My daughter, Chloe, will not be returning with the school bus this afternoon as she will be engaged in after-school activities in town. Thank you for your co-operation.

  Yours sincerely, Christopher Stewart (father).

  I imagine they go something like that, dashed off in haste, though I’m not altogether sure as I’ve never had to do one in English. Here in Andalucia, it’s very different.

  ‘Chris, can you write a note for the school bus driver?’ Ana asked one day. It was not an unfamiliar request.

  ‘Why, dear?’ I answered, stalling as usual.

  ‘Because Chloë is staying after school tomorrow with Alba-Teresa and Laura-Maria.’

  ‘Can’t we just tell the driver?’

  ‘No, we really have to do it properly. You must remember what happened before?’

  Ana was referring to an occasion on which we were blamed for keeping six children incarcerated on a bus on a sweltering afternoon, all because we had failed to pass on a note saying that Chloë was staying behind for a dance class. The fact that Ana had already alerted the bus driver to this on two separate occasions was of no account. Poor Chloë had to suffer a week of frosty looks and comments from the assembled parents before the spotlight fell onto some other poor noteless sap. So these days we always write to the school bus driver and to Mari-Carmen who is the loader and checker at the school end.

  ‘Well, why can’t you write the note then?’ I countered.

  ‘Because I’m busy and, besides, I thought you were supposed to be the writer in the family?

  Ana’s dig seemed a little below the belt but I resigned myself to the task and set to finding a suitable piece of paper to write the note on. The paper shouldn’t be too big, as the sort of note I planned to write wouldn’t occupy very much space, and a big piece of paper would draw attention to this. It shouldn’t be too small either, as this would give an impression of impecuniousness or, worse, meanness — neither of which are the sort of impression you want to make on school bus drivers. Having unsuccessfully combed the house and all its outbuildings for the right-sized piece of paper, I hit on the notion of cutting one to the exact dimensions required — creating a sort of bespoke bus driver’s note page. The cutting, of course, had to be just so. I tried with our ancient pair of scissors, some knives, a ruler, folding and tearing.

  Eventually I achieved the perfect piece of paper, found my pen, and sat down to compose. I thought for a bit. Muy Pino mio, I wrote — ‘Very Pine Mine.’ This was a standard beginning but I didn’t like it much; something didn’t quite click, and besides I wasn’t sure who was driving the bus that week. There were three potential drivers: Pino, Moya, or Jordi. It was too late to ask Chloë, who was fast asleep.

  I crossed out Muy Pino mio — but no, that was no good, I couldn’t have crossings out. I crumpled the paper and took up another sheet. This time I’d do it first in rough. A part of the problem is that Spanish letter writing has a tendency to be rather formal, and the writing of formal business Spanish seems to be mired in lunacy. I caught a whiff of business Spanish once in a book I was learning from, and just that brief exposure seems to have contaminated my style.

  Estimado señor — ‘Esteemed Sir’ — I began again. It had a nice ring to it but was perhaps a bit heavy. It would have to go. I crossed it out and with a flourish wrote Querido amigo, ‘Beloved Friend? I considered this uncertainly for a while, doubting its literary merit. And that was another problem; people in town knew that I had had some success abroad as a writer, so the contents of this note might not just be between me and the addressee. There was the awful possibility that the note would be passed around all the bus drivers to be mulled over, criticised, admired or reviled. In my worst, most paranoid, imaginings I could see my note pinned to the public notice board in the Ayuntamiento, the Town Hall, as an example. I had to get this right.

  I thought hard about the note for some time with no success. Then I drank my share of a bottle of wine to see if I could find any inspiration there, but it only induced a desire to go to bed. Probably the inspiration would come during the night and I could just dash it off in the morning. Of course I spent the night rolling about in anguish, tormented by various combinations of address. ‘Esteemed Friend, Beloved Sir, Most Excellent Bus Driver… Very Bus Driver Mine…’

  Next morning I rose early to prepare Ana’s morning cup of tea, get Chloë’s breakfast, and do some more work on the note.

  Hola Jordi, I started. Chloë had told me that Jordi was on this week, and Jordi, being younger and more modern than Pino or Moya, would more than likely be happy with a less formal approach. Hi Jordi, With this letter I inform you that my daughter Chloë will not be returning with the school bus this evening, but will be staying on in town.

  I wasn’t wild about the construction but it would have to do given the approaching deadline. ‘Will not be returning’: that ought really to be in the subjunctive as it referred to an act contemplated in an uncertain future and was also referred to at one remove. That seemed like a good case for a subjunctive. But it would be such a bunfight dredging up the appropriate subjunctive that I decided to let it slide. Jordi wouldn’t mind.

  But how to finish the note? It wasn’t a business letter, and I knew Jordi pretty well, so it wouldn’t be necessary to roll out all the ornate religious stuff about ‘God Guarding the Recipient Through Many Years’ — a formal but surprisingly common sign-off in Spanish letters. This left the following options: atentamente (sincerely), un saludo (a salute), un abrazo (a hug), un beso or besos (a kiss or kisses). This last I dismissed out of hand. I liked Jordi but not quite that much.

  Un saludo, Cristóbal.

  With a sigh of relief I hunted about for an envelope, then headed off to take Chloë to the school bus. I was pleased to discover that it was indeed being driven by Jordi.

  ‘Morning, Jordi, here’s a note for you,’ I announced.

  ‘Oh yeah, what’s it about?’

  �
�It’s just to tell you that Chloë isn’t coming on the school bus this afternoon.’

  ‘OK. I’ll remember that?

  ‘Yes, but take the note.’

  ‘But you’ve just told me. I don’t need the note.’

  ‘Go on, take the note.’

  ‘No. What do I need a note for?’

  ‘It’s the proper way to do it … I have to give you a note.’

  ‘It’s really not necessary, Cristóbal …’

  ‘Look, Jordi, I’ve been up half the bleeding night writing this note, I’m certainly not going to take it home with me.’

  ‘Tranquilo, Cristóbal, tranquilo. There, I’ve got your note.’ And he took the envelope and stuffed it in the sun visor.

  Satisfied with a job well done, I stood and watched as the bus disappeared round the cliff in a cloud of dust and a rattle and clank of the loose fittings. Had I known what further authorial chores awaited, I’d have been a lot less complacent.

  One of the reasons that Ana had no time for notewriting was that she was preparing to meet her mother for the weekend in Malaga, leaving me to look after Chloë, the farm and animals. I fed the livestock and, before settling down for a long day’s grind staring at the computer, set about making some pancake mix for Chloë. If you do pancakes you can always get children on your side, which I find sets the whole business of childcare off on the right footing.

  At six I headed across the valley to fetch Chloë from a school-friend’s house. ‘Guess what we’re having for supper tonight,’ I said as we walked together down to the river.