A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  ‘Well,’ continued Baldomero. ‘You must realise that at the moment this is no more than a possibility. None of the permissions have been granted. There’s nothing happening.’ And he went on to explain that there were any number of hurdles at which a project of this magnitude might stumble, so it was a little premature to worry about farming under water or indeed silt.

  It was a sympathetic speech and would have been extremely reassuring if we had been able to believe it. Ana had, by now, fixed her gaze on the first man with the tweed jacket. He seemed to understand that his opinion was also needed here and, in a slightly more succinct way, repeated his colleague’s observations.

  ‘Yes, it’s true. There’s nothing definite yet, and even in a worst case scenario — the very worst from your perspective — it would take many years for the river to dislodge enough silt to seriously threaten your land.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Ana.

  Mr Tweed looked puzzled.

  ‘Years,’ she explained.

  He shrugged and spread his hands. ‘How can anyone say? The river is unreliable. Really, all we can do is keep you informed. And although, of course, I can’t give you any guarantees, this scheme really shouldn’t be a major worry for you.

  These repeated reassurances were becoming ever more disconcerting. ‘Look…’ I said, slightly more loudly than intended. Ana shot me a glance. ‘Look — we’ve planned to live the rest of our lives on this farm. Do you recommend that we continue with this plan, that we plant trees, build things, invest our time and savings on it? We need to know.’

  The two men looked at a survey map that Baldomero had opened on the desk. It was a very large-scale map with all the contour lines clearly marked.

  ‘I’m not sure we’re in a position to give a definite answer to that. There’s too much uncertainty. We’ll know a lot more about it in a year’s time,’ Baldomero answered.

  ‘But if it were you, would you sink most of your savings into the place?’ asked Ana looking directly at Mr Tweed.

  There was a pause.

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I don’t think I would.’

  Then it was lunchtime. Ana and I found a bar not far from the Confederación and settled down to take in the enormity of what we had just discovered. We ordered a bottle of wine and some sort of fish; Malaga’s seafood is legendary, but we might as well have been chewing cold fish fingers. I took Ana’s hand beneath the table and squeezed it and gave her a sad sort of smile.

  ‘Oh well, it could be a lot worse!’ I said.

  ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ she smiled thinly back.

  ‘I knew you knew I was going to say it — that’s why I said it. But you know what I think?’ I added.

  ‘No, tell me,’ said Ana.

  ‘Well, it’s one hell of a big valley. It’ll take a long time to fill up. My guess is that it would take an age to reach even the sheep shed. And by then you, me and maybe even Chloe will be too old to care. And so will the sheep.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ she muttered.

  Still, we made a decision over that lunch. We would find out all we could about the dam project and, if necessary, we’d try to fight it. But we wouldn’t drag each other and Chloe into despondency. We resolved there and then to be positive and the first positive step we’d take would be to consult the local environmental group.

  And so saying, we walked briskly out of the restaurant talking animatedly and with great good humour about subjects that didn’t interest us in the slightest.

  DEFENDERS OF THE RIVER

  DOMINGO WAS THE FIRST PERSON WE CONSULTED ABOUT THE DAM proposal, but his reaction was a disappointment. Typical of rural Spaniards when faced with the might of the state, he was phlegmatic and fatalistic. ‘Who can tell,’ he shrugged. ‘If they build their dam, perhaps it won’t work, perhaps it will. But there’s no stopping big projects. We country people count for nothing with the men in power.’ This was the view in Tijolas, too: you don’t have a chance with authority.

  The next week, however, we ran into Gary, a carpenter friend from Capileira, who told us about the Unión Verde Alpujarreña, or ‘Green Union,’ of which he was a member. He suggested we take our information along for the group’s consideration: we were pleased with this idea; it seemed like a good positive step.

  But as it turned out, we never did get to address the UVA, for a few days later we met Gary again and he had a sorry tale. He had gone along to the monthly meeting intent on telling the group about the dam threat, and hoping to get a proposal of his own adopted — something simple for the group to get their teeth into. His proposal involved clearing the heaps of rubbish that had accumulated over the years around the spring by the village of Ferreirola. Gary figured this was an undertaking that ought just about to fall within the group’s organisational abilities. When he arrived at the meeting, though, nursing his proposal, the group was already locked in impassioned debate. The issue on the agenda was a sweeping one: a world-wide ban on the production of plastics. After an hour or more of furious polemic, during which Gary tried several times, unsuccessfully, to table his proposal, the plastics motion was put to the vote.

  ‘It was the first motion that was ever carried unanimously in the whole history of the group,’ said Gary with a resigned grin. ‘There was some doubt as to how they were going to implement it, but that was soon forgotten when the treasurer stood up to give account of the financial situation. The UVA were virtually without funds: in fact, there was only enough to buy the assembled company a round or two of drinks. So we voted to disband and adjourn to the bar, and again it was passed unanimously.’

  ‘But where does that leave us?’ we wondered.

  ‘You could always try José-Luis and his Colectivo Ecologista in Tablones,’ suggested Gary. ‘They’d probably be a whole lot more effective than the UVA, anyway.’

  The Colectivo Ecologista, Gary told us, were serious people. They would know how to get proper investigations underway, and José-Luis was a real force — not just a bar-radical. He was an activist to the core, a big bear of a man who earned his living teaching would-be plumbers in Albuñol, a town surrounded by a hideous sea of plastic greenhouses. He had moved down to the

  Alpujarras from Santander, in northern Spain, and even after five years’ residence he was still considered an outsider by his neighbours. However, he devoted almost all his free time to local environmental issues, and had gained a reputation for exposing corrupt and illegal development schemes, and putting a spanner in their works. His weapons were a certain legal acumen, an ability to see through the obfuscations of bureaucracy, and a deafness to threats and backhanders.

  No sooner had Gary instilled the idea of contacting José-Luis than I began to hear of him from all quarters. The Colectivo had, it seemed, quite a track record. The year before they had launched a protest against plans to build an asphalt factory at Tablones that would have poisoned the air and almost certainly contaminated the river if it had gone ahead. The plans were found to be illegal and had to be shelved. So too had the plans to exploit a nearby site for a quarry: the fear, this time, being that the dust would spread for miles over the farm land, choking trees and crops. José-Luis had discovered, among other irregularities, that the projected site was Patrimonio de Juventud, held in trust for the youth of the municipality, and thus couldn’t be touched. He had aired this issue, among others, to the council, and the Mayor had called a halt.

  It was with a deal of curiosity, and some hope, then, that I made my way on a sultry summer’s evening to Tablones and out along the riverbed of the Guadalfeo, looking for José Luis’s house. I had no very clear idea of the sort of place I expected an environmental activist to live in, but I was a little surprised to find the patio of his single-storey house surrounded by chicken wire (the previous owner, apparently, used it as a chicken run). Behind the wire a little girl was playing with some clothes pegs while her mother folded sheets. The front door was open and she gestured me inside with a friendly smile
and wave, leaving me to follow a trail of cigarette smoke to a small windowless room that formed the HQ of El Colectivo Ecologista y Cultural Guadalfeo. Here, wedged between piles of books, ashtrays and affidavits, sat José-Luis, staring intently at a computer screen.

  ‘Hola, welcome. You must be Cristóbal,’ he said, wresting his attention from the screen long enough to shake my hand, flick a butt into the bin and run a newly rolled cigarette across his tongue. ‘What do you think of this?’

  Without further preamble he swung his massive frame back towards the screen and clicked on a picture, revealing a vast, yellow expanse of greenhouse plastic spreading across a series of fields down to the coast.

  ‘Not very nice, is it?’ he observed, ‘especially for the labourers who have to live and breathe the foul concentrations of toxins all day. That’s why they use Moroccan immigrants, you know. They can coerce them into staying, and no one’s going to bother much about the respiratory problems they get.’ And José-Luis launched into a catalogue of environmental and human damage wreaked by the greenhouse entrepreneurs, talking with passion about the tips of empty agro-chemical drums, the rocketing crime rate generated by this new business, and his fears that the dirty sea of plastic would soon start to encroach on the Alpujarras.

  José-Luis seemed so engaged by this issue, and it seemed so fulsome a disaster, despite its boon to the local economy, that I felt reluctant to divert his attention to a lesser problem, such as our threatened dam. But he had heard about our interview in Malaga and he wanted to know everything about it.

  ‘Well.., perhaps you’ll have a look at this,’ I began apologetically, placing a piece of paper on the table beside his ashtray.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ he asked, peering closely at it through a fog of smoke. ‘It looks to me like a design for an aquarium.

  It was in fact my sketch of the plan that we had seen in the file at the Confederación Hidrográfica.

  ‘It’s the dam.’

  ‘Ah, so it is… and where exactly is it to be built?’

  ‘Just upriver from us, by El Granadino.’

  José-Luis blew away a bit of ash that had fallen on the sheet and studied it through narrowed eyes. ‘Go on, then, tell me everything you know about it.’

  So I told him what the dam was and how we had discovered it and what the tweed men had said about it.

  José-Luis frowned. ‘By the look of this, you and probably a few others are going to lose a sizeable part of your farms,’ he said. ‘And the whole eco-system of the valley will be screwed, good and proper.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well then, we’d better do something about it, hadn’t we?’

  In Andalucia, the preferred method for dealing with threats to the environment, or any other assault on the public interest, is to have a fiesta. This can achieve a number of goals at once: it can raise money, it can build public awareness of an issue, and, last but not least, everybody gets to have a good time.

  Once José-Luis was on the case, the Colectivo swung swiftly into action. A fiesta committee was formed; posters with the date and venue were printed and distributed; beer, wine and mountains of meat were ordered; and musicians, the sort willing to play for free, were booked. The venue, perhaps, didn’t have an altogether ecological ring — Tablones cement-works — but it was the nearest thing to a flat patch of land that Tablones could offer. The date was a Saturday in mid-August.

  The allotted night was starry and hot — it always is in August. Ana sold tickets for the food and drink, while I worked on the pinchitos, the kebab stall. The wine was not of the best but, with the night heat stoking the barbecue to an inferno, you drank whatever you could get. I drained my paper cup again and again, keeping pace with Abu Bakr, opposite, who was gulping mint tea at the halal pinchitos stall set up for the Muslim contingent.

  For my own pinchitos, I had prepared an exotic marinade of ginger, garlic, onions, chillies, soy sauce, honey and sherry. This wasn’t as good as I had hoped, as I overdid the sherry, with the result that the marinade didn’t stick to the meat at all. Also my pork cubes were too big, meaning that the sweet wet meat was burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Still, most of the diners were too drunk to notice.

  First on, as darkness fell, was a Cuban band composed of Spanish and Germans, with a French singer whose voice put me in mind of Billie Holiday. Musically, they were as good as the evening got, but they were near inaudible as the colectivista in charge of the sound system hadn’t yet arrived. Still, the night was young and as midnight passed, the amplification cranked into action, and revellers arrived from all across the Alpujarras and from as far away as Motril and Granada.

  José-Luis shouldered his way through the throng, grinning exultantly and greeting people with great thumps on the back, leaving a trail of spluttered pork and wine. ‘There’s a good thousand people here — maybe two!’ he yelled, as a sudden burst of bass and drums announced the next act.

  A thrash metal band had taken to the stage. They were José-Luis’s plumbing students and strong candidates for the worst band in Andalucia. The lead singer leapt about the stage yelling indecipherable lyrics against a cacophony of white noise that became more painful by the minute. Even the Spanish hardcore, who could chat over a hurricane, seemed to be cowering away from the speaker stacks. But the band were so delighted to be playing that there seemed no way of ever getting them off. Then at last someone hit upon the idea of pulling the plug and a sigh of relief rose from the crowd.

  Ana came across for a pinchito, with a big grin on her face. ‘Good turn-out, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘There must be at least five hundred here! It’s an amazing start.’

  My reply was cut off by a fearful screech and yowl of microphone feedback as José-Luis prepared to address the crowd.

  ‘Friends and comrades!!’ he yelled. ‘You know why we’re here tonight. We’re here to save the Alpujarras.’ A cheer went up from the revellers. ‘We’re here to save the Alpujarras from the sharks and from the vultures’— the cheer grew— ‘from the speculators and the property developers, from the callous industrialists who are trying to destroy our mountains…

  José-Luis was good at this; he was a born orator and the crowd was already on his side. This being the Alpujarras, the bulk of it was made up of alternative lifestylers — anarchists, artists, healers, herbalists, meditators, vegans, ovo-lacto-vegetarians and the like — along with a sprinkling of skinheads and thugs, up for a Saturday night of thrash metal and kebabs. Still, there was a feeling of euphoria, and as José-Luis hunkered down into a harangue about the threats to the Alpujarran environment — the dam, the asphalt plant, the piping of the rivers — the crowd’s rumblings became a roar and fists were raised in the air. It looked like the vultures and the sharks were well out of their league this time.

  The crowd had been continuing to swell, and the demand for meat had long overtaken supply — even my oriental-style kebabs were getting wolfed down — while the wine, the beer and the Cuba Libres poured across the counters in ever more gargantuan quantities. Through the meat smoke, I smiled a slightly stupefied smile at Ana. I was just the tiniest bit fuddled with wine, but things were looking good and we were all having a hell of a good time. A local reggae band were doing their stuff, and their flashing lights illuminated the clouds of dust billowing from the dancers’ feet. I weaved unsteadily through the crowd and whirled Ana away in a dipping, hopping, arm-waving stumble of a dance.

  After the bills had been paid, the fiesta actually turned a modest profit, and the Colectivo set about spending it, producing pamphlets and posters, featuring the slogan Acequias SI! Dique NO! — ‘Irrigation-canals YES! Dyke NO!’ Well, it sounded okay in the Spanish, and the activists made sure that every tree, sign and building throughout the Alpujarras proclaimed their message.

  Meetings were also held to raise the consciousness of those unable to benefit from the fiesta. In remote villages across the Alpujarras, tiny gaggles of locals would gather beneath the poplar
s and chestnuts to hear José-Luis describe the environmental threats facing the region. I’d like to say that they were whipped up into a frenzy of defiance and immediately pledged their support but most often they seemed indifferent to matters far from their own farms and grazing.

  Inevitably, perhaps, our optimism began to wane and as autumn turned to winter, the campaign against the dam began gradually to lose its momentum. For a few weeks, hope was rekindled when a specialist lawyer agreed to look into the case, but he proved unable to find a legal challenge that he thought would stick. His opinion was that we might hold up proceedings for short periods, at great cost and, possibly, some personal risk, but he doubted we could ever bring the dam to an effective halt.

  Ana, who had become an avid reader of El Ecologista, the magazine of the Spanish Ecology movement, had been following the progress of a similar dam being built at Itoiz, in Navarra. It presented a salutary picture. Apparently, the opposition to this huge and unpopular project had strong European support and had won all the necessary legal battles to get the dam shelved.

  But the State decided to sweep aside the legal challenges and go ahead with it anyway — while handing out stiff prison sentences to many of the eco-activists involved. It was depressing to discover that Domingo had grounds for his pessimism. The State seemed, indeed, to do as it pleased.

  José-Luis didn’t try to hide his disappointment when I told him that I thought we should stop battling on with a project that had no chance of success. Such talk wasn’t in his repertoire. However, even the Colectivo began to seem resigned to losing this particular battle, and soon their funds and energies were again channelled into campaigns against the plastic greenhouses.