Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (11 page)

‘Leave the tip of the tail on,’ said Domingo. ‘It’s the custom here to leave a great clump of wool on the tip. Helps with the flies.’

So I did. It made the job much easier. I couldn’t resist a smirk, though, at the sight of all those shorn sheep with their poodle-cut tails. Arsenio and Pepe, darting in and out of the flock to grab each new sheep for the shearing, had pained looks on their faces.

‘What’s the matter? Shearing not good enough for you?’

‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

The sun rose higher in the sky; the sweat ran off me and onto the sheep; the pile of grubby wool beside me grew higher, and the proportion of shorn poodle-tails to woolly ones steadily increased. I sheared what seemed like a hundred or so and then we stopped for lunch.

Pepe’s wife Angustias, who was about three times as big as he was, had lumbered up from their farm way below, laden with bags and baskets of provisions. Ana had turned up, too, and was surveying the scene still flushed from her long climb. We washed our hands in a nearby stream and sat down to a picnic in the shade of a huge cherry tree.

Sheep-shearing is a grimy old job, but it does take you to some beautiful places. We gazed up towards the immense snow-covered crags of the cirque of Veleta under a sky the colour of cornflowers. Angustias passed round some bottles of what is euphemistically known as ‘coarse country wine’, and some beer that had been cooling in the stream, and laid out a spread of olives and omelette, sausages of various denominations,
jamón
and bread.

‘You are the one doing the work, Cristóbal, you must eat more,’ she urged, ‘before this lazy lot finish it all.’

‘No, I’d love to – thank you very much – it’s quite delicious, but I find it hard to bend down and work if I’ve eaten too much.’

Angustias understood foreigners perfectly well.

‘Perhaps you can explain something to me?’ she began. ‘I meet a lot of foreigners right here at the farm. They get off the bus in the village and then get lost looking for that monastery of theirs. They look so starved and yet when I give them some
tocino
like this,’ and she pointed at some wodges of pig fat presented with all the delicacy of a plate of petit fours, ‘or maybe a nice piece of chorizo they just push it to the side of the plate and nibble at the bread. Why do they do this, when they seem so hungry?’

‘If they’re looking for the monastery then they’re probably Buddhists, and
tocino
may not have quite the same appeal for them as it does for you and me.’

‘Buddhists you say . . . well, perhaps they are, but what in the name of the Virgin do they put in their stomachs? They all look so thin and pale, like they lived under stones. A gust of wind could blow them away.’

‘So far as I know they eat boiled vegetables, and brown rice, and as a special treat perhaps some nuts.’

‘Ay the poor things, what a terrible life. Though perhaps it would be better for me if I also ate a bit less. I’d like to be small and slim like you, Ana, but what can I do? I do so love the white meat of the ham. Do you think that it is so very fattening?’ ‘Perhaps it is a little,’ said Ana, gazing with feminine fellow feeling at Angustias’ massive body. ‘Yes, the white meat of the ham is not the thing for slimming.’

I got up, stretched and looked without enthusiasm over the gate at the fifty-odd sheep that were left to shear. It was time to start work again so I flapped carefully down the hill in my shearing moccasins to turn the generator on. When I arrived, Domingo was on the board with a sheep, holding it more or less right and shearing it more or less efficiently.

‘You’ve done this before, Domingo.’

‘No, but it can’t be that difficult, and I’ve been watching you all morning.’ In not more than a couple of minutes the sheep was done and happily scratching itself with the rest of the flock. Domingo grabbed another one and sheared it without too much difficulty, and pretty neatly too.

‘Come on, man, I don’t believe you’ve never done this before. It takes years to do it that well.’

‘Well, I’ve done a few with the hand-shears, tying them up and that, but this is a much better way of doing it.’

That afternoon he sheared about a dozen sheep, without sweating and without his back hurting. For a beginner that really is pretty remarkable.

‘I’ll buy you a second-hand machine from England and we’ll set up and shear the sheep of the Alpujarras together.’

‘If you like.’ Domingo is nothing if not phlegmatic.

By early evening we had finished and the flock rushed gladly from the stable to graze for a couple of hours in the meadows where the shadows of the trees were already growing longer.

‘One hundred and forty-seven sheep. How much?’ asked Arsenio.

‘Hundred pesetas a sheep . . . ’

‘Sounds like a lot of money to me.’

‘That’s fourteen thousand seven hundred pesetas.’

Cash, it seemed, Arsenio could well understand. He counted out fifteen notes of a thousand and handed them to me.

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t any change.’

‘Don’t worry, we’re all workers together. Heh, heh. We can let that slip or adjust the account next year: what do you say?’

‘Well, fine. Thanks a lot.’

‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’

We stopped the car on the corner of the hill, a spot from where we could look down to the valley where we lived. Sitting in the deep grass we watched the hills change colour. ‘My uncle screwed you,’ said Domingo, sucking on a long stem of grass.

‘How? It all seemed fine to me.’

‘There were a hundred and fifty-one sheep.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I counted them this morning.’

‘You might have made a mistake?’

‘Impossible,’ he replied with characteristic modesty. ‘At lunchtime Pepe snuck into the stable and hid four shorn sheep in a little back room. He’d have hidden more if he hadn’t seen me looking over the gate.’

‘I can’t believe they’d go to such trouble to save four hundred pesetas, and besides, he gave me three hundred pesetas on top of the money agreed.’

‘That’s the way my uncle is. He’ll do anything to get the better of somebody; it doesn’t matter who you are. That’s why I told you to leave the pom-pom on the tip of the tails. That made him really wild. There’s nothing a shepherd hates more than bits of wool left on his sheep. And he and Pepe are particularly sensitive about that.’

‘I saw Pepe hacking away at the pom-poms with a pair of scissors as we left,’ said Ana.

‘Oh yes, they’ll have to take them all off. They couldn’t bear to have another shepherd see the flock looking like that. Hah, that really made them mad, that did!’

‘So Arsenio has screwed us out of four hundred pesetas, but given me three hundred because I didn’t have the change – that’s one hundred profit . . . and we had a good lunch . . . ’

‘It was
regular
– alright.’

‘
Regular
or not, I thought it was a good lunch, and most of his sheep have got ridiculous-looking pom-poms on their tails . . . so who’s the winner today?’

‘I think maybe we are today,’ said Domingo with a grin, and we jumped up and walked back to the car. ‘But watch out, because nobody ever gets the better of Arsenio, and he really is as bad as they come.’

From snippets I gathered from Domingo and his cousins over the following weeks, it seemed that my sheep-shearing trial had not gone badly. Nothing much was said, mind you, but the plain fact that none of the sheep had subsequently died took the wind from the sails of the luddite lobby, and messages of interest started to reach me from other shepherds. It was a heady endorsement, if a trifle low-key, and left me quite off my guard for the attack that was to come from another quarter.

Andrew, one of a small band of New Age travellers who had parked an ancient Bedford truck in our riverbed and was canvassing the local farms for work, saw the whole thing in a quite different light.

‘There’s something seriously wrong with your head, man, if you think it’s okay to just come here and kill off all the old traditions with that machine of yours.’

The passion of this tirade amazed me. Andrew wasn’t the sort to waste karmic energy on such an outburst. In fact he’d pared down his Mancunian brogue to the barest essentials necessary to accept a job, tell you whose round it was in the bar, and refuse food with meat in it. Besides, machines were his thing. For a whole day I had crouched next to him, passing him bits of assorted grease-covered metal while he tinkered beneath our Landrover.

‘But this is progress,’ I protested. ‘Can’t you see it benefits everybody?’

‘Benefits you, maybe. What about the shepherds who come together to do the work, have a bit of a laugh and joke about it, get bevvied up, talk about the sheep, and that? What about their traditions? Gone down the pan, that’s what.’

‘Look, you’ve obviously never been near a sheep if you believe that drivel. Ask a shepherd if he fancies the prospect of a day’s shearing and listen to what he says. Shearing is a pain and even if they do numb the pain with gallons of foul wine, it’s no fun at all bending over bony, grubby sheep all day and snipping away with those ridiculous scissors they use to shear twenty or maybe thirty sheep. No, this is a good thing for the shepherds, and a lot easier on the poor sheep, too.’

Though I would never have admitted it to Andrew, I was not without qualms about the particular bit of progress I was spear-heading. For centuries the mountain shepherds had gathered, ten or twenty of them at a time, to shear together, and there was, as Andrew pointed out, a certain bonhomie to the occasion, with plenty of wine and a goat or lamb killed to finish the day. But there were also grease boils and huge blisters and swollen wrists and aching backs and the flies, dust and dung. The shepherds hated it and, from what Domingo had to say, couldn’t do away with their social tradition fast enough.

The proof was that once I had demonstrated the efficacy of my machinery they started beating a path to my door – and, as you may have gathered, the path to my door is not even close to the route you might take on a stroll back from your local bar. It’s a path that takes determined beating.

None of this, however, cut any mustard with the eco-fundamentalists of Órgiva, who for months picked arguments with me about the havoc I was wreaking in the delicate balance between man and nature.

WALKING WITH THE WATER

ALONG THE CONTOUR LINES OF THE MOUNTAINS, A RIBBON OF bright green foliage delineates the
acequias
of the Alpujarras, an ancient system of irrigation channels that carry the rainwater and snowmelt from the high peaks to the valley farms. Debate smoulders as to whether it was the Romans two thousand years ago, or the Moors some eight hundred years later, who first built these channels. But whoever brought the idea here, it is, along with the terracing of the hills, the most important man-made element in the beauty of this landscape.

The principle behind this system of irrigation is simple: the rain and snow which falls in the huge catchment area of the mountains seeps down into vast aquifers or underground seams of water whence it is released slowly through the year to feed the rivers and springs which rise on the lower slopes. The
acequias
then channel off this water, carrying it at a gentle gradient down to the farms and villages below.

There is a lot of leakage involved but this is all part of the scheme of things. As the water runs along the channel it seeps through the earth and the cracks and the mole-holes to water the wild plants and the trees that grow along its banks. The root systems of these plants form mats that support the banks of the channels and stop them crumbling into the abyss below. Attempts to improve on nature by concreting parts of the
acequias
tend to do more harm than good. The plants bordering the channel dry up, the root system rots and loses its binding power, and the weight of the concrete and the water cause the whole thing to subside and distort the all-important levels.

There are literally hundreds of miles of
acequias
in the Alpujarras, and the paths along their banks, lined with grasses and a rich variety of alpine flowers – gentians, campanula, digitalis, saxifrage – make wonderful walking, with occasional heart-stopping views of the cirque of mountain peaks that rise to Veleta and Mulhacén. High in the mountains, way above the villages, the channels are wide streams of clear rushing water, ice-cold and, lying far above any possible source of contamination, delicious to drink. Lower down, where the
acequias
have their mouths in the valleys and gorges of the rivers, are dramatic stretches where the channels are cut into the rock of sheer cliff faces hundreds of feet high. These stretches were cut long ago with hammers and chisels by men suspended on ropes from the cliffs above.

In places the
acequias
flow along aqueducts mounted on walls of stone, built on hillsides too steep even to teeter on, let alone build a stone wall. The water rushes through tunnels full of bats and huge moths and out into the dazzling sunlight or on through shaded woods to plunge into impenetrable jungles of razor-edged leaves and thorny barbs.

Hundreds of small farmers depend on these
acequias
and so an organised social system has grown up to ensure an equitable supply. Each
acequia
has its president, elected each year, its treasurer, and its
acequero
. The president presides over the democratic process of decision-making, resolves disputes and liaises with the water authority. The treasurer takes the water-fees, agreed upon every year by the waterers to cover costs of maintenance and improvements. The
acequero
walks the full length of the
acequia
every day and is responsible for its smooth running, keeping an eye on leaks and danger points, and ensuring that each waterer shuts his water off at the right moment without running over into the next man’s time.

If your land has water rights from a certain
acequia
, you are allotted a certain time and a certain quantity of water. You may be unlucky (or out of favour with the water president) and come up with, say, seventeen minutes of one third of the
acequia
at ten past three on Thursday mornings. Accordingly you plod out to your orange grove and your vegetables with your torch stuck in your mouth and your mattock over your shoulder. At ten past three – not nine minutes nor eleven minutes past – you pull the hatch and let the great body of water tumble through onto your land. The
partidor
, a simple construction of bricks and mortar, ensures that you only get a third of the water available.

If you don’t have a tank in which to store your quota, you must race frantically around in the dark, chopping with your mattock at the little dams and dykes and channels, ensuring that each tree gets a thorough soaking and every trench of vegetables fills to the brim. On a night with a full moon this job can be a delight, as ripples spread silver across the surface of the black water to an accompaniment of trickling streams. But a tank is more practical and anyone with a little spare cash installs one so they can fill it with their seventeen minutes of water and irrigate their land at leisure the next day.

El Valero, standing alone on the far side of the river, is unusual in that it has its own
acequia
– which is to say the potential for twenty-four hours of water seven days a week. There are no
acequia
dues to pay either, on the basis that if we want the water we have to clear the channels ourselves – a deal that struck me as very generous when it was first explained but which I’ve since come to have my doubts about. Pedro Romero had, predictably, been none too zealous in his duties as custodian of the El Valero
acequia
, although Maria, with occasional help from Bernardo, did what she could to coax a little more water to the farm through the silted-up channels, overgrown thickets and crumbling stone aqueducts.

When we first arrived to take possession of the farm, the
acequia
was in a dismal state. I almost despaired of ever getting it going again, as neighbours shook their heads and warned of its difficulties. Part of the problem is that it is entirely seasonal. Its mouth, a mile upriver from the farm, consists of a pool in the river, created by a makeshift dam of boulders and boughs, rusting sheets of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting. This gets swept away every year by the winter rains and has to be rebuilt every spring along with the cleaning of the channel.

The dam guides the water into the narrow mouth of the
acequia
where it begins a rapid descent down through a bed of red earth and through an alley of tall poplars. As the river drops away, it flows on across a scrub-covered hill, charting its course through tunnels of bramble, shallow grey bogs of reeds, and stretches of ground so barren that nothing will grow except capers. Finally, the water disappears into a tunnel beneath the farm’s ancient threshing floor to emerge between the roots of an old fig tree, almost crystal clear, having deposited its red sludge along the channel.

From there it pours in a succession of cascades across a steep meadow known to us as Seven Scorpions (we tried to clear the field of stones just after we moved in, and under each of the first seven stones we lifted, we found a scorpion). Then, at last, it makes its way down along the edge of orange terraces and back into the river.

By the end of April, a distinct reluctance in the rainfall, and the feverish activity to be seen on the other
acequias
, alerted me to the necessity of getting some water through to the farm. As ever, I went across the river to see what Domingo had to say about the matter.

He was sitting on his
tinao
, or terrace, with his cousin Antonio and both were hacking away industriously with their knives, absorbed in the business of making little model ploughs. This was a rather odd notion that Domingo had hit upon to make a bit of money – a friend who ran a bar in the mountains had promised to display them on the wall and sell them. Tangles of copper wire, nuts and bolts and a big pot of varnish lay in disarray on the floor among the cats and the potatoes. Antonio’s work station was supplied with a much depleted bottle of
costa
to which he was addressing himself with relish.

‘It’s his vice,’ explained Domingo, blowing the shavings off a tiny wooden wedge he had just carved. ‘He’s no good without it . . . and he’s not a lot of good with it either. Look at this, man! How the hell are you going to plough with a thing like that? Look here, it’s twisted, it’ll run off to the side . . . ’ and he seized the model Antonio was working on and waved it disdainfully in the air towards me.

Antonio grinned good-naturedly and shook my hand. ‘
Encantado
,’ he said in greeting, taking the tiny plough back from Domingo and placing it carefully on the pile of finished models. ‘I can’t see anyone’s going to plough with it anyway, cousin – it’s too damn small!’ he added to Domingo as he drained down his glass of
costa
.

Eventually, I explained the reason for my visit to Domingo, who immediately volunteered his and Antonio’s assistance – ‘if he’s sober’ – in clearing my
acequia
, and suggested we start the next week.

I had my misgivings about the prospect of employing Antonio but there was little choice in the matter, and, in any case, my doubts proved unfounded. Antonio, even half-drunk, proved to be a man who worked with the capacity of a mechanical digger, and was cheerful with it, commenting on life in philosophical asides. The only problem was keeping him sober for more than a few days at a time, for, away from Domingo’s watchful company, Antonio went on paralytic blinders of drinking.

When the two turned up, on the Monday morning agreed, Domingo gave me a stern warning about his cousin’s contract of employment. ‘Don’t pay him anything,’ he instructed. ‘As soon as you give him money he’ll be off and that’ll be the last you or I will see of him.’

‘But I’ve got to pay the bloke,’ I protested. ‘I can’t let him work for nothing.’

‘Well, save it up and pay him when the job’s finished. And don’t give it to him all in one lump either.’

It was kindly advice and with a hint of self-interest, too. Domingo told me how time and again he had found Antonio slumped in the gutter in one of the mountain villages, often badly cut from falling hard on the cobbles. He would haul him, soaked in wine and urine, into his car and take him down to La Colmena and nurse him back to some semblance of life. Antonio would return the favour, helping him with work around the farm. Then one day he’d be off, up early in the morning for the four-hour climb up to his home village of Bubión, stopping on the way at Las Cañadillas to enjoy a litre or two of wine with another cousin who kept a few goats and liked to encourage Antonio in his habit.

Domingo and Antonio turned up for the
acequia
task armed with picks, shovels, mattocks and sickles, and accompanied by two more
peones
– day labourers – Manolo, a young muleteer from the village with a mop of blue-black hair and a winning smile, and Paquito, whose dreamy look made me wonder if he was quite with us in this world. But they assured me that with a sickle in his hand he would perform in spectacular fashion.

We climbed the hill behind the house and dropped down into the
barranco
that leads to the tunnel. Paquito and Antonio pitched straight in with their sickles, clearing the overhanging mat of vegetation. I fought my way a few yards up the
acequia
to where there was a particularly nasty-looking patch of scrub. Grasping in my gloved hand a fistful of barbs and thorns, I hacked away with the sickle, entangling myself in a procession of hostile plants. First the brambles took hold of me, then the trumpet-vine, and as I was flailing about trying to extract myself from those fearsome tendrils, a pomegranate branch would bend forward and poke me in the eye, or a pampas grass would neatly slice into my neck. There wasn’t a good-natured plant among the whole contorted tangle. I was getting nowhere, so I left the clearing and took up the shovel at the back of the gang.

Manolo and Paquito seemed to have no such problems with the jungle of plants and steadily disappeared into the distance, leaving the banks neatly trimmed behind them. Domingo and Antonio followed behind, clearing the silt and re-cutting the bed of the channel, while I sweated and heaved at the back, shovelling out the debris. With the exception of the shoveller, who soon lost ground, the team moved along at an easy walking pace.

It was humbling to watch them. Every five minutes or so I would straighten up to ease the agony in my back and wipe the stinging sweat from my eyes; the others stayed down and just kept on going. At the end of the day we ambled back along the smooth hollowed ground to the farm. ‘Have we really cleared all this?’ I wondered in disbelief as vista after vista of neatly opened channel appeared around each bend like a well-manicured woodland walk.

The second day was slower as we mulled over how we were going to negotiate the dreadful stretch that ran below El Avispero, an assault course of man-eating brambles and rubble-strewn rockfalls. But somehow we got through it and towards evening found ourselves easing through the softer earth and gentler vegetation of the Barranco del Pino. By noon on the third day we had emerged at the poplar alley below the dam.