Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (10 page)

‘Drink wine. Hit him on the back. No, give him water. Give him bread . . . ’

Something must have worked because I managed at last to reunite the two ends and gain breath, though not enough to deliver my opinion of their latest piece.

‘Now you do it,’ said Eduardo, handing me the guitar with a hint of menace in his voice.

‘Oh, I’m really not fit to . . . It would be difficult to follow that last piece . . . I only really play for myself.’

‘Play, man – play!’

I played.

‘He can play,’ they nodded to one another.

I played some very basic flamenco, very badly.

‘He plays Spanish music.’

As I struggled to the end of my piece, wincing at the wrong notes and bodged fingerings, I realised that nobody was listening anyway. Domingo was telling them of my plans to run a flock of sheep at El Valero.

‘Sheep? Down there? They’ll roast. You can’t keep sheep in the valleys. Goats yes, but sheep – sheep are not meant to be kept in hot river valleys. If you want sheep you should give them to us to look after for you. They’ll be happy here in the cool of the mountains. We can make a good price for you. We’ve got endless grazing up here.’

Domingo looked at me meaningfully. ‘Sheep do fine in the valleys,’ he said.

‘What do you know about sheep, cousin? You haven’t enough sheep to graze in a flower pot!’

‘There are plenty of good-sized flocks around Órgiva,’ Domingo answered. ‘They never come up to the tops and they do perfectly alright.’

‘All that heat and dust – it’s a shame for a sheep. There’s no air to breathe.’

This was standard talk from mountain shepherds but, as Domingo had said, there were indeed large flocks down in the valleys. They never went to the mountains in the summer and still they thrived.

We moved on to the subject of chestnut beams.

‘Why, we have a whole forest full, just above the old abandoned village. You’ll need to cut them but they’re good beams, and there’s a good mule-track to the village from there. Four hundred pesetas a metre is all I’m asking.’

It seemed a very fair deal so the next day we went to inspect the beams. They were just what we needed and as December drew to a close, Domingo and I made frequent journeys to the forest, to scramble about in the crisp, clear mountain air with the chainsaw. We would make a day of these expeditions, admiring the view while cooking sausages and
tocino
over a wood fire.

THE TIME OF MATANZAS

WINTER IN THE ALPUJARRAS IS THE SEASON FOR
MATANZAS
OR pig killings. Any other time and the flies and wasps would amass in a frenzy of looting and spoil the neighbourly business of slaughter. For the same reason the day’s grim deed starts early in the cool of the morning.

There were four matanzas in the valley during our first winter, beginning with Manolo’s down at El Granadino near the entrance to the gorge. His pigs were to be dispatched between Christmas and New Year. I remembered Manolo well from my ride as bonded foreigner on Pedro’s old nag. Unlike most of the new acquaintances I had made that day, he had insisted on being introduced to me by name and even lingered on to exchange a few words in carefully enunciated Spanish. Such kindness left a deep impression. So when Domingo brought word that we would be welcome to attend Manolo’s matanza, I was more than inclined to go along.

Ana was less sure. She could think of few good reasons to prise herself out of bed before dawn on a nippy winter’s morning, and witnessing the death throes of a pig was certainly not one of them. However, duty to one’s neighbour is an argument that rarely fails with Ana (suspending for a moment the possibility that one’s neighbour’s pigs might also have a claim) and on the appointed day we stirred early from the matrimonial bed and headed down the river.

Seven on a winter’s morning in the riverbed is cold. With nowhere else to go, all the cold air in the mountains gathers at the bottom of the valley and contrives to numb and freeze the extremities of any traveller who might happen along. For a brief moment, though, it is also very beautiful. As the first rays of the morning sun touch the high cliffs of the Contraviesa, they shine rose and gold and the gentle light floods the curves and folds of the hills below. It somehow frees your mind from the preoccupations it might have with the early symptoms of frostbite. The sun was still way below the cliffs of the gorge when we arrived at El Granadino, but fires had already been lit and blue curls of woodsmoke rose into the cold air. The quiet of the morning was broken by the sound of men droning on about vegetables and hunting escapades, and women belabouring chickens and children.

We climbed onto the patio where everybody stood up to shake our hands very formally before Manolo, with the same studied attention to syllables, ushered us towards two straight-backed chairs in a dark room. A twig fire smoked quietly in the corner. The men were fortifying themselves with anis, brandy and sweet cakes – difficult stuff to get down so early in the morning, but it seemed that to kill a pig you needed a deep lode of alcohol coursing around the system.

Ana, being a foreigner, was exonerated from the drudgesome lot of the women – the washing-up, the serving and preparation of dainties – and admitted into the august company of the men and their conversation about the pigs and other animals they had killed. She didn’t contribute much to the talk as she had never killed a pig, and her thoughts about hunting would hardly have been welcome. So she stifled a couple of yawns while I nursed my second anis and grappled with that vertiginous feeling you get when you’d like to join in but know that you have nothing to say.

Soon the men tired of the cakes and liquor.

‘
A la faena
! On with the job!’

We all trooped out in manly fashion to kill four enormous pigs.

Now to persuade a pig to come out of its sty and be killed is a desperate business. The owner goes inside and with sweet words attempts to cajole the pig into allowing him to slip a noose round its trotter. He then tries to pull the pig from the cosy darkness of its pit out into the glaring sunlight of a yard filled with men hooting encouragement, where great pots of water are bubbling, hot fires are smoking and gleaming knives clash against the sharpening-stones. Of course he can never achieve this, as the pig is not only understandably reluctant to go but also weighs a good hundred kilos, most of it solid muscle. It digs its three free trotters into the mud and refuses to budge.

Everybody knows this is going to happen because it always does happen. Yet everybody always knows better than everybody else what should have been done to prevent it. Eventually, with four men on the rope, and two behind controlling the tail, the poor creature is hauled into the open.

The pig-killing table is ready. The pig-killer stands by with his terrible hook. An upward thrust and the hook jabs in, deep into the underjaw. The pig shrieks and becomes powerless. It can only follow the merciless hook. The killer drags the pig alongside the table and the men all gather round. They grab it by the arms and legs and tail and heave it up onto the rough boards, kicking and squealing. Ropes lash it into position where it subsides into a sort of despairing resignation.

‘Bring the buckets; wash the neck; here with the hose!’

There’s a lull as the pig heaves quietly and the killer pokes about under its throat to find the propitious spot for the knife-thrust. Blish! In goes the knife – a twist – and the blood gushes into the bucket, stirred by a stout woman to stop it clotting. The pig heaves and lashes out and whinnies, and the men who are leaning on the pig to persuade it to stay on the table look at one another with knowing looks as it goes limp and the life passes from the body. Then one of them gives it a slap to signal that the worst is over.

‘That’s good and gone, then.’

Everybody relaxes their grip.

It’s a horrible business, and the very thought of that hook makes me shiver, but there’s an undeniable fascination to the slaughter as well: that same mix of repulsion and excitement that you find at bullfights. And there comes a moment when the horror of the thing evaporates. All of a sudden the living creature shrieking out its last breaths becomes an inanimate leather bag, a thing you can poke at with almost no compunction.

A strange bonhomie emerges at this time. Faces taut with tension relax into broad smiles and a ribald humour bubbles out. Even the most shy or taciturn in the group bandy jokes or allow themselves the odd snigger as they lay into the leather bag, scorching it with brands of bolina, an oily bush that burns like a blowtorch, and scraping off the burnt hairs. After twenty minutes of tolerable hard work with the knives flashing and the bolina blazing, in goes the
camala
and the dead pig is hoisted aloft just above dog-height for the killer to gut and split.

Then the women appear with their bowls to catch each organ or piece of tripe that comes slithering out and whisk it away to start the long process of transforming it into a panoply of sausages – longaniza, salchichón, chorizo, chicharrones, tocino,
morcilla
, and so on.

By this stage it is reckoned that the men are in need of sustenance so a feast of
chicharrones
is brought out, and washed down with anis and
costa
.
Chicharrones
are the fatty excrescences which appear all the way along the long intestine. Fried in olive oil until the outside is crispy, they are absolutely delicious, and they are better still on their reappearance as a cake –
torta de
chicharrones
– a big, sweet, sumptuous doughy bun, shot through with gobbets of intestine fat. I looked around for Ana to share this gastronomic delight but she had her back to me, rather determinedly I thought, leaning over a bowl of offal that Expira was preparing.

And so we moved on to the next pig, which happened more or less as the first had – a little more efficiently in that the team were getting their eye in, though the advantage was lessened by a steady course towards alcoholic oblivion. The sun dragged up over the hill, bathing the whole ghastly proceeding in warm light. The second pig dispatched, a third and then a fourth were pulled from the stable, hooked, jabbed, bled, scorched, scraped, split and hung. Round and round went the goatskin wine-bottle, washing down pig-fatty dishes. More improbable and fantastical became the tales of pig killings and feats of manly prowess.

Ana tapped my shoulder and gave me one of her old-fashioned looks as if to ask when this long ordeal would be over. I raised a heavy-lidded eye and tried to clear my brain of some heroic fantasy that had lodged itself where rational thought used to loiter. She seemed to be signalling to me from an immeasurable distance and the gestures were hard to decipher. My stomach felt as if a great glutinous stone had somehow found its way in and my head was thrumming, verging on a storm of a headache.

Just before darkness fell there was a general dispensation for everyone to go home to feed their pigs, shut their mules and chickens in, change clothes and come back for the real feasting. A pig or two is supposed to supply just about all the pigmeat needs of a family through the coming year, but it seemed to me that the whole lot was going to be wolfed by the guests and helpers on the first day. Still, I suppose there must be something left over.

Ana and I staggered back up the river in the fading light.

‘You’re not serious about going back, are you?’

‘Well, I really think we ought to . . . ’

‘What, come all the way back down the river in the dark just to hear more of those ridiculous stories and eat that dreadful fatty muck? You must be bonkers!’

Ana is nothing if not honest. Sometimes also she is right.

‘I must admit that at the moment I would rather die than let any member of the pig family or parts of it pass my lips. And I don’t want any more wine either . . . ’

‘You certainly don’t.’

‘We might feel better about it in a couple of hours, let’s see.’

In a couple of hours we were both fast asleep, dreaming of nut cutlets and spinach quiche, boiled cucumber and radishes with brown rice . . .

COUNTING SHEEP

IN SPRING THE BLOSSOMING OF THE ORANGE TREES TAKES YOU unawares. At first only a pale haze becomes apparent across the dark green of the leaves. This is the green of the flower-buds. Then all of a sudden the buds are transformed into exquisite white five-petalled stars, radiating from cream-yellow pistils and stamens. The scent is delicate and heady, and when each tree becomes a mass of white flowers an almost tangible mist of orange blossom hangs in the air.

The blossom lasts for weeks, scenting April, May and June, and all this time the trees are alive with the insistent buzzing of bees. Then as the flowers wither a tiny green orange appears in the centre of each one, a perfect miniature replica of the fully formed fruit. Were each orangelet to grow its course, the average tree would be laden with from twenty to thirty tons of fruit, but the breezes, birds and the marvellous mechanisms of the tree itself do their bit to cull them. The ground beneath becomes a mosaic of flowers and orangelets. Our neighbours spread sheets beneath the trees to catch the flowers for orange blossom tea,
flor
de azahara, which apparently helps you to sleep.

The trees were reaching an early floral crescendo when Domingo swung his donkey, Bottom, up the hill towards the house. (Bottom is not, of course, the name Domingo uses for his beast. He calls it
burra
– donkey. But we dubbed it Bottom, one morning, and the literary and scatological associations have kept the name going for us.)

Our neighbour had some news to impart.

‘My uncle Arsenio wants you to shear his sheep with that machine you keep in the stable. I told him he ought to. I said this is the way things are going to be in the future, so he might as well start now.’

This came as a surprise. ‘But I thought your family were against the idea?’ I reminded him.

‘That was Eduardo, he knows nothing. No, Arsenio’s willing to give it a go. His flock will be ready for us a week after tomorrow. He lives at Los Caracoles over there.’ Domingo pointed above the trees towards the high hills.

This may not seem the most momentous of exchanges but it meant a great deal to me. I was, for the first time, being offered a part to play in the life of the Alpujarras. No longer would I be an outsider observing, but I could step inside the scene and become one of the observed. This was something I had yearned to do in all my years of travelling. Perhaps, if this really took off, I might even acquire an
apodo
, or nickname, like the locals: Cristóbal El Pelador – the peeler – had a nice ring to it. The money would be a help, too, if I got to do a number of flocks, and there was also the excitement of introducing something new. Few of the shepherds in the high valleys had witnessed the wonders of mechanised shearing and they would be looking to me to point out the path of progress.

I spent a happy week checking over my aged machinery and lapsing into vainglorious reveries whenever the bongling of a passing flock caught my ears.

The great day arrived and in the hazy light of an early May morning Domingo and I loaded the Landrover and set out for the High Alpujarra, stopping for a quick coffee in Órgiva to launch the journey.

At Soportújar we turned off the tarmac road and began a serpentine ascent along the
camino forestal
, a dirt track bordered by dusty cypresses and acacias, that leads into the hills. A dozen or more hairpin bends and we passed a painted wooden sign bearing the words O-Sel-Ling and a rough but well-trodden path winding up from the track. This was the turning to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Al Atalaya.

You may think that there’s something askew with your organs of perception when, in a small Spanish agricultural town, one which sports beans and potatoes in the municipal flowerbeds, you come across a shaven-headed monk, trudging along in full burgundy robe and dusty boots. But in fact your eyes do not deceive you.

In 1985 a son was born in a Granada hospital to a Spanish Buddhist couple living in the Alpujarras. The boy, who was named Osel Hita Torres, ‘Osel’ meaning ‘Clear Light’ in Tibetan, was discovered to be the reincarnation of Lama Thubten Yeshe, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s leading disseminators in the Western world, who had died eleven months earlier in California. Osel himself no longer graces his native soil, having been whisked off to Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama in exile. However, the monastery that was founded in his name thrives as a Buddhist retreat and temple of meditation, drawing countless Western acolytes and the occasional exalted member of the Tibetan theocracy-in-waiting.

I peered about in the hopes of seeing one such holy man, but none materialised. Domingo, for whom Lama Buddhism was a subject of very little interest, hardly registered the monastery turning – though even he drew in his breath as we rounded the hill. Below us, flooded in morning light, spread the Poqueira gorge with its three lovely villages seeping blue woodsmoke into the still air.

We kept on climbing, past mountain meadows studded with poppies, margaritas, convolvulus and purple vetch, while the valleys and villages below grew blue and misty. I could see El Valero with its green river-fields far below us, perhaps four or five miles as the crow flies, but a good hour’s drive. At last Domingo directed me to stop, beside a sheep yard on a steep hill. I turned the engine off and listened to the mountain soundscape: distant goat bells and barking dogs, cocks crowing in the villages below, and larks and tutubias twittering high above the field where we stood.

Domingo was unusually quiet.

‘I’m thinking,’ he explained.

‘What about?’

‘My uncle Arsenio.’

‘Oh?’

‘He’s a bad lot. We’ll have to keep our eyes open. He’ll find some way of cheating you for sure.’

‘But he’s your family.’

‘He’s still a bad lot. I don’t know of anyone worse, really.’

‘Thanks a lot, Domingo, seems like you’ve fixed me up with a real winner for a first job!’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on him.’

Arsenio was not in fact a blood relative of Domingo. He had been lucky enough to marry one of Expira’s seven sisters who, for some reason best known only to themselves, deemed it desirable to gain influence in the high mountains by marrying shepherds. So Domingo is related through a network of influential aunts to everyone who is anyone in the Alpujarran sheep world. I couldn’t have had a better introduction.

As Domingo expounded on his disreputable relations, we became aware of Arsenio’s flock of sheep coming up for the shearing. They took shape as a pale blur against the dark of the trees, then came into focus as a sizable flock of sheep, with yapping dogs and shouting men at its edges. At that moment the last thing I felt like doing was to spend the day shearing sheep. I wanted to stroll through the meadows and head up towards the great fields of snow that skirted the peaks of the Sierra Nevada.

Also, to be honest, I was just a touch nervous about how the day was going to work out. ‘You don’t tie them up, then?’ a shepherd had asked me earlier in the spring.

‘Hell no! You can’t shear a sheep when it’s tied up.’

‘But they’ll jump and struggle and be up and bugger off.’

‘Well, I must have shorn a hundred and fifty thousand sheep in my time and I’ve not had to tie one up yet.’

‘Maybe so, but that’s in foreign parts. Here the sheep are different; they’re wild.’

Domingo had put the word about that this cocky foreigner was not only going to shear a hundred and fifty sheep in a day by himself . . . but he was going to do it without tying them up! Such hubris deserved a serious downfall.

‘This your foreigner, then, Domingo? Does he speak Spanish?’

Arsenio was the very essence of Alpujarreño shepherd – tiny, sinewy and leathery brown. His knobbly features split into a grin as he pumped my arm vigorously.

‘Lovely place you’ve got here, Arsenio.’

A look of utter bafflement came over his face.

‘What’s your foreigner say, Domingo?’

‘He says he likes it here.’

‘Heh heh, wonderful, marvellous. Right, let’s eat something.’

‘Er . . . we’ve just had breakfast actually. Couldn’t we . . . ’

‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’

It was pointless trying to communicate directly with Arsenio. He was of the persuasion – and he’s not alone in this – that anyone who is not from the Alpujarras will be incomprehensible. He disconnected the moment I spoke, looking at Domingo as if I had said something disgusting, and waiting for him to repeat my words.

The news of my shearing machine had spread through high pastoral circles and quite a gathering had formed to watch the promised spectacle. Whoever heard of shearing a sheep without tying it up? Domingo had found himself a right madman for the job, that was for sure.

There were perhaps a dozen shepherds in attendance, all with sticks, all with hats and leather shoulder-bags, all with grubby fags of home-grown
churrasco
hanging on their lips, and all leering at me horribly.

I made a bit of a song and dance for the audience over setting up the gear: carefully positioning the board to shear on, inspecting the cables to the generator and heavy electric motor, and fiddling about in a box full of machinery parts. It’s difficult to resist being a bit prima donna-ish at times.

‘So that’s it, is it? The shearing machine. How does it work, do you think?’

‘It’s done by the electric – and that’s the harm of it. It shocks the sheep. Bloke over Dúrcal way had his sheep shorn by the electric and they all died, every one of them fried to a frazzle. You just wait.’

‘Fernando of Torvizcón used a mechanical machine one year and it took so much wool off the sheep that they all got sunburn. It’s not natural.’

‘No, natural it ain’t, and you’ve stuck your neck out here, Arsenio. I wonder how many sheep you’ll have tomorrow,’ added another shepherd with undisguised relish.

‘It’ll save a lot of work . . . ’ I glanced from the corner of my eye to see who this modern-minded man was. ‘. . . and in a couple of years time there won’t be a shepherd in the Alpujarra using hand-shears. You mark my words.’

The defector turned out to be José, Domingo’s cousin, who often came to stay at the Melero household. He gave me a little courage. ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of either electrocution or sunstroke,’ I assured the crowd.

Twelve moist cigarette butts swivelled towards Domingo and quivered as they spoke: ‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’

I gave a hitch to my trousers, checked the machine, and dived for the first sheep, tipping her with a practised flip onto her bum, ready for the shears.

‘You wait, she’ll kick the eggs off the bugger, serve him right!’ But as luck would have it, the sheep turned nicely and sat meekly between my knees. I pulled the cord. The shears zinged into life and I plunged them into the wool. It peeled off like butter, the sheep perfectly compliant and co-operative. About forty-five seconds – there wasn’t much wool on her – and I helped her to her feet with a neat pressure of the right knee. A professional-looking twist to the tension head on the shears . . .

‘What seems to be the hold-up? Where’s the next sheep?’

The first sheep of a day’s shearing hurts. All your limbs are stiff and you can only reach the distant bits of rump and tail with the greatest effort. But it only takes one sheep to warm up. The second sheep of the day is a pleasure – all your energy and strength are there to help and just moving through the various postures of the first sheep has loosened up all the necessary muscles in your body.

The trouble, though, is that after the first three, or perhaps five, the repetitiveness of the job starts to get to you. There is a set technique. Each sheep is put through an identical series of positions and the cutter passes over the body in a more or less identical series of strokes, or ‘blows’ as they’re known in the trade. It takes about fifty blows to shear a fully woolled sheep. These sparsely woolled mountain ones took about twenty. I could have done the job in my sleep.

By the time you get to the fiftieth sheep the boredom gets spiced by jabs of pain as the muscles in your lower back begin to burn and scream a bit. Top class shearers, the sort who shear four hundred sheep a day, seven days a week, suffer from wool-burn. The friction of the wool passing over the back of the cutting hand takes all the skin off the knuckles and they bleed constantly. In Spain the main enemies are heat and dust. You can’t work in the sun; it sucks the energy from you in a matter of minutes. But even in the shade you work drenched in sweat and eventually become tarred and feathered with dung-dust and wisps of wool.

Another sheep was brought to the board and away I went. Domingo crouched beside me, watching intently; the crowd muttered and mumbled amongst themselves. This sheep had a tail. Most sheep are docked, for reasons that I won’t go into here. Tails are awful. It can cost you a good ten seconds of excruciating bending to do a tail. What’s difficult is getting the wool off the tip, because that’s the part you hold it by and you have to steer clear of your fingers.