A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  So, as we moved towards winter, Ana and I resigned ourselves to the putative dam. It wasn’t good for our own future, wasn’t good for the valley either, but we could see that in order to stop the Rules reservoir clogging up with sludge and boulders and uprooted trees, lesser dams like ours would be needed to work as river silt traps. Deeper arguments as to whether Rules itself was a benefit — enabling the dry coastal towns to indulge in yet more tourist Gormenghasts, golf-courses and greenhouses — seemed academic in view of the fact that it was almost complete.

  Besides, there were things to do. It looked as if we were going to harvest a bumper crop of olives this year and the ground beneath the trees had become a jungle of brambles and thorny pomegranate shoots. That needed clearing. There was Christmas on the way, too, with hordes of friends and family coming to stay; we would need to fix up some accommodation in the other house, which was in a state of serious dilapidation.

  From time to time to time I would catch Ana looking a little pensive or preoccupied as she gazed out over the familiar view of the rivers and the gorge, but as we busied ourselves with these tasks, the threat slipped ever further from our minds.

  COMFORT AND JOY

  FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE WE HAD MOVED TO SPAIN, ANA AND I had money for a proper Christmas bash. A royalty cheque from the book had arrived and we were pretty dazzled by it. In the past we’d had good times, but we had owed much to the generosity of our families, friends and neighbours, who would come tottering across the bridge over the festive season, bearing bags stuffed with sweets and hams and wines, and little surprises for Chloe. We would reciprocate as much as we could, of course, but there are only so many clove-and-orange pomanders that an average sock-drawer can hold, while esparto-grass bottle-coolers and preserved lemons are not the sort of presents to repeat each year. But this time we could foot the bill ourselves, buy Chloë treats and welcome our friends with all the hospitality we wished. It felt quite a privilege.

  Inevitably, perhaps, as we wallowed in a new-found luxury, Ana and I would find ourselves mulling over less salubrious

  Christmases we’d endured in the past. Perhaps we needed to remind ourselves that life hadn’t always been sunshine and lemons. Whatever, there was one Christmas that we both kept returning to: it was just after Chloe turned three and, as festivities go, it really was a washout.

  That year had been exceptionally dry. The summer had burned itself out much later than usual, leaving the countryside limp and desiccated. Each day, we would stare up at the blue bowl of the sky, pinning our hopes to every wisp of haze or tiny cloud that ventured along, only to watch it disappear without trace. And then at last the weather broke. We sighed with relief as the rain started, and even went to stand in the wet, holding up Chloë, so that she could marvel at the tiny droplets that fell around her and beaded our hair.

  The whole valley seemed to exude a new scent of wet dust and pines, while trees that had become pale and shrivelled turned green and then greener still as the rain washed the dust from their leaves. The trickle of the rivers soon rose to a respectable roaring and even the birds seemed pleased and flapped about the place chirping and trilling happily as if they’d won an audition to do so.

  But it kept on raining and gradually the whole Alpujarras turned to porridge. Clouds and mists shrouded the valley and all the landmarks we knew disappeared. The bridge was among them, swept away downriver and cutting us off from any chance of visitors. For days we couldn’t even see the mountains around us — we seemed to be alone on a misty bog of an island.

  To make matters worse, Christmas loomed on the horizon. ‘There’s only ten days to go,’ said Ana, one morning. ‘Soon we’ll be getting all that needle-knee music…’

  ‘All that what?’

  ‘Needle-knee music — you know, organ introductions to Christmas carols,’ Ana explained, as if this was the only possible blot on the winter’s horizon.

  The ground around the house got so sodden that the water table rose and the kitchen was flooded with three inches of water. So too was Ana’s end of the bedroom. We were wet and cold and bored and sniffling with colds.

  Alpujarran architecture was not conceived with rain in mind and doesn’t cope well with it. A frequent topic of conversation and indeed a measure of a certain sort of respectability is the quantity of buckets you have in your house collecting drips from the roof. One day I counted twenty-three receptacles dotted around the house — buckets and bowls and tins and tubs. They were worst at night; just as they filled up, one of us or one of the dogs would blunder into them, sloshing pints of muddy water over the floor. This was a regular occurrence, as the solar power system had given out and we moved like ghosts through the grey gloom or by the light of a few feeble candle-stubs. The fire, fuelled by wet black wood, filled the room with smoke and offered but a feeble and malevolent glow.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad,’ Bernardo told me later. ‘We too had many drips from the roof. There was one right in the middle of the bed so I had to sleep with a bucket, holding it on my chest, like so’ — and he mimed balancing a bucket on his ribcage — ‘and every hour, I’d have to get up and go and tip it out into the bath.’ 1 felt that all my efforts in the matter of drip-catching were as naught compared to Bernardo’s heroic endurance.

  The days drew into weeks and the dripping went on in the house and the mist and the rain went on outside. We kept Chloë dry by sleeping on or sitting in the wet bits ourselves, and we read her stories by candlelight and made pancakes, but little by little we were getting gloomier. ‘It looks like it’s brightening up a bit at last,’ I would announce each morning as I looked through streaming windows at an unrelenting sea of cloud, but even I was beginning to lose heart.

  I mused at the time that, if we had been rich, there might have been some way out of it. Perhaps we could have checked into a dry hotel. But we couldn’t actually get across the bridge — in fact, we no longer had a bridge — and even if we had got across the river it was difficult to imagine a hotel welcoming us with our entourage of dogs, cats, horses, sheep and chickens. No, you couldn’t buy your way out of this one. And besides, we weren’t rich — at that very moment we didn’t have more than a few hundred pesetas.

  We weren’t terminally broke. There was money somewhere in the pipeline — sheep subsidy, lamb sales, holiday cottage lets —but nothing to bail us out right then and there. I remember doing an audit of our resources. We had a tank of petrol in the car, a sack of onions, a sack of potatoes whose tendrils were making the larder an impenetrable thicket, fifty litres of olive oil in plastic drums, a month’s chicken feed, and a few vegetables battling their way through on the vegetable patch. Oh — and we had a whole lot of olives and trees laden with oranges. We weren’t going to go hungry, we just had no cash for Christmas.

  The main problem was the lack of electricity. With not enough sun to charge our solar batteries there was nothing we could do to relieve the damp gloom — we couldn’t even listen to music or story tapes in the dark. It’s true that I had my guitar but I wasn’t really in the mood for playing and Ana and Chloë were very definitely not in the mood for listening. A Christmas day around a blazing fire would be something to look forward to, but sitting in Wellington boots on the wooden chairs (the foam rubber sofa had become a sponge), choking on the smoke from the sodden hearth, fell rather short of the mark.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Something will turn up.’ Ana gave me one of the most withering looks I can recall and even Chloë looked just a shade unconvinced.

  One good thing was that we weren’t completely cut off. We had rigged up what we called the ‘Flying Fox’ — a rope and pulley —to get across the river, so we made the occasional foray to town. A few days before Christmas I swung over and walked into town to gather a few cheap provisions and check the post office box.

  There was a scattering of letters and cards from family and friends and a thin airmail letter from Florida, with the name of an American friend of my mother’s on t
he back. I had always called her an aunt but I don’t think there was any actual kinship involved and I had last met her when I was at school. As I opened it, something green fluttered onto the street. It was a hundred-dollar bill. Aunt Dawn had heard that we were struggling to make ends meet and hoped the money might come in use.

  When I had recovered myself, I dashed off one of Orgiva’s finest Christmas cards to Aunt Dawn, and — savouring one of life’s great moments — pondered how to spend the windfall. The obvious answer was a battery charger, a big powerful one that we could hook up to our generator. We would enjoy Christmas with needle-knee music and electric light — what unimaginable gaiety! I had seen a battery charger in Granada that looked just right and 1 figured the hundred dollars might just cover it.

  The next day was Christmas Eve and just before dawn I set off in the barrelling rain on my excursion to Granada. I had left our ancient Land Rover, Black Bess, in what looked like a safe spot on the back route out, about an hour and a half’s walk above the house. I trudged up the mountain with an umbrella and a backpack, round and round the bends as the rain sheeted on down.

  Arriving at the car I was so saturated with water that with each step gouts of water spurted from my boots. There was nothing dry enough even to wipe my glasses on. But Black Bess rattled into action and as we moved off up through the pines the rain stopped and the impenetrable mass of cloud lifted, parted and thinned. An hour later, as I pulled into Mecina Fondales to see if I could borrow some dry clothes from a friend, the sun had burnt through the skies and the world was humming and steaming in its yellow warmth.

  In Granada, the sky reformed and called in reinforcements to bathe the city in torrents. However, I was in good spirits and, armed with my windfall, I strode in and bought the battery charger. Only 12,000 pesetas! I couldn’t believe my luck. There would be enough left over to buy something special to eat, and perhaps a silver ball to hang from the festive frond of Aleppo Pine that stood dripping in the corner of the lounge.

  I went to a shop and bought a couple of bottles of good red wine, some chocolate tree-decorations and two pheasants. You don’t see many pheasants round here so they were a special treat. In fact, we hadn’t had a pheasant since our days in a tied cottage by a dual carriageway in the South of England. There Ana had had an admirer who was a gamekeeper, and sometimes as a token of his hopeless love he would festoon the porch with slaughtered gamebirds. Coming home in the dark, our faces would be flapped by pheasants hanging in the lilac trees by the gate. We feasted on them till we could face them no more.

  From Granada, Black Bess and I sloshed back through the rain to the Alpujarras. The pathetic little wedges of windscreen cleaned by the wipers were woefully inadequate to see by, and the heater soon gave up its battle against the mist-shrouded windows. The rattle of the car and the hiss of the rubber on the road and the roaring of the useless heater and the rain drumming on the roof contrived to turn me into a quaking wreck by the time I reached the holm-oak. This tree marked the spot where the track was no longer safe, and I pulled in, switched the engine off, and shut my eyes in the black silence. I thought of Chloë and Ana in our dismal home deep in the valley below me. And then, unable to help myself, I fell asleep.

  When I awoke all was quiet, the rain had stopped battering the roof, and half a moon and Venus sailed together amongst the fast scudding clouds. The battery charger was huge and heavy. By sailor-like art I lashed it to the outside of my backpack and heaved it up on to my back. Then I slung the pheasants over my shoulder and set off on the long haul down the hill. I started off bouncing but in minutes I was creeping. The slightest jar or jog in a step would crash the sharp steel cover of the charger into the back of my hip. It took an hour and a half to descend the track, rough at the best of times and worse than I had ever seen it, with great ruts cut by the rain, and scattered landslide boulders.

  The pheasants flapped in resignation and the charger rubbed me raw, but it was a beautiful night. As I came over the brow of the hill I stopped in awe at the sight of the deep black valley and far below the two rivers raging like molten silver out through the gorge at El Granadino and down past the vega of Tijolas to the Seven-Eye Bridge. I squatted by a rock to relieve my shoulders of the burning weight and held my breath to hear the silence and the distant sound of waters. Suddenly there was the sound of a huge creature galloping past. I stood up, startled, in an agonisingly awkward jerk, and looked around to see the rump of a wild boar disappearing into the brush. It had been right beside me and I could almost feel the heat of its breath.

  An hour more of careful downhill creeping and I whistled to get the dogs barking. They raced up the hill to greet me, wagging their tails with simple delight. We reached the house together and I strung the pheasants up by the neck on the porch — that’s what you do with pheasants — and put the charger in the shed ready to connect up on Christmas Day. Then Ana, Chloë and I spent a quiet Christmas Eve evening, sitting erect on wooden chairs in our Wellingtons, opening cards and reading out bits of letters, and guzzling the chocolate decorations that didn’t fit on the pine branch.

  We awoke late next morning and — oh, Christmas miracle — the sun shone down from a clear morning sky, illuminating the folds of the Contraviesa in shades of green and gold. I was excited about giving Chloë her present even though it was only a homemade doll’s bed that I’d knocked together. I had made it of white wood and painted a tasteful floral motif on the headboard, while Ana had made matching sheets and blankets and pillows. Chloë was thrilled with it — especially as we had somehow kept the sheets and blankets dry — and with the traditional stocking presents that Ana had wrapped for her, consisting of a mandarin or two, some almonds, some figs, some sweets and a piece of coal wrapped in silver paper. It’s a simple truth but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make children happy. The spirit of Christmas had arrived, and with the feast ahead, the wine and the battery charger, I felt full of festivity.

  I threw open the door to let the sunshine in — and there on the porch, twirling on thin strings, were the heads of the pheasants. I had remembered hanging whole pheasants there the night before… perhaps they had rotted at the neck and fallen. No, there was nothing on the ground. The ghastly realisation dawned upon me. The dogs had eaten the bodies, feathers and all, leaving us with just the heads twirling on the porch.

  I had wanted the pheasants to be a surprise for Ana and had said nothing the night before. She saw me staring open-mouthed through the door, and came over and put her arm round me. ‘Oh, Chris, how lovely, you bought pheasants for our Christmas lunch…’

  ‘Yes.., but.., now there’s only the.., the…’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

  ‘Heads — you mean heads, don’t you? I suppose you bought whole pheasants and hung them up here where the dogs could get them.’

  ‘Yes…’ I whispered

  ‘Never mind. It’s the thought that counts and it was a really lovely thought. Anyway we can always make a soup from the heads — with some fried potatoes and eggs it’ll do well enough for a Christmas dinner.’

  Miserably, I trudged off to connect the battery charger up to our power system. It didn’t work at all, not a spark. There was some fundamental malfunction, or else I had been sold a dud.

  Still, at least the dogs hadn’t drunk the wine. Ana decorated the dogs with bits of tinsel, we had fried eggs and potatoes for lunch, and we all went and sat by the river in the sunshine. I’ve spent worse Christmas days.

  A NIGHT UP THE MOUNTAIN

  JUST BENEATH THE PEAK OF MULHACÉN, WHICH AT 3450M IS THE highest peak in the Sierra Nevada, indeed in the whole Iberian peninsula, are the borreguiles. In days gone by, a lamb was not considered fit to be eaten until it had passed a summer grazing on the sweet grasses that cloak these high mountain meadows —hence the name, from borrego, which means a lamb.

  There are a dozen or so borreguiles below the southwest side of the peak. Each one is a great bowl of a watermeadow, enclosed by rock
walls and communicating by waterfalls to the meadows below and above. They differ in the arrangement of the various elements. Some have a waterfall dropping straight into a lagoon and then two or three rills of water meandering through the grass to the lip, where they cascade over the edge to the meadow below. Another may have its lagoon in the centre, and a single torrent of water feeding it and draining it, and there’s one that has a steep bank of grass for its waterfall.

  Common to them all is the perfect peace, the almost supernatural clarity of the water and the springiness of the deep green grass. By August, though, even up here the vegetation starts to wither as the high mountain waters dry out. The shrivelling and crisping starts on the perimeter and creeps towards the centre, until there is just a thin stain of green around the lagoon — and then nothing, as even the water of the lagoon is sucked into the air by the summer sun, leaving a dry bed of stones. Then with the autumn rains, the borreguiles green up again, just in time to be buried beneath a couple of metres of snow until the following summer.

  The time to see the borreguiles is late May to late July — that’s spring in the high sierra — and somehow, the very fleeting nature of this beauty makes it all the more appealing. In early July, almost a year after our dam fiesta, I walked up to the meadows from the village of Capileira. As I clambered up over the lip, I was struck dumb by what I saw. The grass was no longer green, it was a sheet of livid blue — a blue so dazzling it seemed to come from outside the normal spectrum of perception. These were the Sierra Nevada gentians. I had heard about them but this was the first time I had ever seen them. There were two varieties in bloom — the ultramarine Gentiana verna, and the delicate, almost luminescent Gentiana alpina.