Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (12 page)

There remained only the opening of the sluice to let the water come pouring into the newly cleaned channel and work its way down to our farm. Domingo calculated that it would take five hours to get there, which left plenty of time to have lunch and clear all the channels on the farm itself before it arrived. I was delegated to walk with the water and see that the twigs and leaves cut and fallen from the undergrowth didn’t clog up the tunnels.

While other tasks sink into drudgery with constant repetition, I never fail to delight in walking with the water. I sneak ahead of its course and sit down to suck a stem of grass and contemplate the peace, keeping an eye on the dry bed of the
acequia
and an ear open for the gentle rustling of what is initially unrecognisable as water. It appears as a whispering mosaic of dried leaves, petals, turdlets and twigs. Pink and white and golden, it creeps quietly along, filling the hollows with a little rush and easing up slowly to consume the high places. It was a thrill, that first day, watching as the water gathered and swelled and saturated the dry earth. It crept up the bank, pouring into the ant-hills and mole-runs, and little by little turned into a full-blown stream. Seeing it, I would splash through to the head and race around the next corner to await the miracle all over again.

Watering is a measure of manhood in the Alpujarras. A man who knows not the watering
no sirve
– he’s useless. Domingo said to me one day in a fit of pique: ‘You, Cristóbal, do not know the watering. You do not understand the water.’ These were the harshest words he could have chosen, a vicious accusation impugning my worth. I think he had a hangover but the cut went straight to my heart. Wounded, I sat beneath a tree wondering about the watering. Maybe he was right. At the time of this attack I had been running the farm for only three years or so – no time to know the watering.

What I knew was that water had a tendency to run downhill, and when left to its own devices would always work its way to where you didn’t want it, eroding terraces, destroying walls and exposing the roots of trees. If you saturated a terrace too much it could collapse with a noise like thunder, leaving a mess of tumbled earth and stones and trees on the terrace below, a disgrace that’s difficult to hide and a lot of work to repair.

But when the watering goes well there’s nothing quite like it. Building dams and channels of mud in the streams in the woods was my favourite occupation as a boy and I count myself lucky to be able to enjoy the same thing as an adult. In summer I water in rubber sandals, so while the rest of my body is burning, my feet and ankles are drenched in cool water. With my mattock I open the sluice in the main channel, moving the little dam of earth and stones from the bank to the middle of the
acequia
. The brown swirling water brims over the side of the pool and then courses along the channels of the field and eases across the grass. Like a great amoeba the head of the water parts to go round the high spots, then slowly consumes them, darkening the pale dust before rejoining the stream. As the water reaches the trees and sinks to the roots, they seem to sigh, releasing clouds of scent.

I then wander about with my mattock adjusting the flow, tossing a stone into a too fast-flowing freshet, delivering a fierce chop with the mattock to increase a feeble flow. Eventually the distribution is nicely organised, with the water flowing just right to spread out and reach the bottom of the field in a few hours. Then along comes Beaune and flops down in the stream to cool off. The water, dammed by the dog, overflows the banks and messes the whole system up, so I have to start all over again. As evening falls, the swallows wing down from the houses and the rocks and skim above the water, wolfing the uncountable insects that cling to the tops of the grass-blades like sailors on the masts of sunken ships.

I love the watering and I’m hoping that by the time I’ve notched up twenty or thirty years’ practice my neighbour might even admit that I know it.

CATS AND PIGEONS

‘THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO,’ ANA announced, looking decisively up from a book with a cat on the cover, ‘is to get those cats sorted out. We can’t be surrounded by creatures like that. It’ll make us miserable. They must be rehabilitated.’

Besides a few rusting plant tins, the
camalas
and the brick, Pedro had left us two cats. You don’t move cats; they take root. There was a starving husk of an old mother, and the feeble wisp that was her offspring. The poor little creature had never had the opportunity to be a kitten; it was born straight into a world of hunger and blows. They were grey tabbies with much of their fur scorched from seeking warmth in the hot ashes of the fire.

They slunk around, weak with hunger and worms, the picture of dejection. Pedro hadn’t cared much for his dogs – even his three familiars, Tiger, Brown and Buffoon – but cats were beyond consideration. They were allowed to attach themselves to the house only because, according to Pedro, they were the most fantastic ratters. It was hard to believe from the lifeless way in which they slouched about the place. Ana was right; their miserable plight was already getting to me.

Our initial task was to tame them so that we could get flea-collars over their heads and worm them. Ana is good with animals. It took about three days before they got the hang of being fed, and three days after that I found Ana stroking them on her lap.

We had thought that the business of the flea-collars would be all but impossible – feral creatures such as these would never accept such trappings of domesticity. In the event they both stood still and bowed their heads meekly to receive the collars. They almost seemed to know that this was a mark of being taken over by people who cared for them – or was that too foolish a notion? From there it was but a short step to a swift jab of wormer in the scruff of the neck.

Almost as we watched, the starveling creatures started a dim blooming. Their sunken sides filled out and their ribs disappeared, the scorched and patchy fur took on a lustre as some vestige of feline pride returned, and they even began to groom themselves.

Cats should have names and, for some reason best forgotten, these became Brenda and Elfine. Elfine, as her condition improved, started to develop what cat-lovers call ‘personality’. One cat is much like another to me but I couldn’t resist a sneaking affection for her. Brenda, the mother, was too far gone to bother much with personality development and remained something of an embarrassment to her more socially mobile offspring until one fateful day in the summer when a generous visitor was good enough to bring us a cold-bag full of smoked salmon. The mechanism of the cold-bag failed, or someone left the lid off in a hot car, with the result that the contents were declared to be ‘suspicious’. Brenda died shortly afterwards of a surfeit of smoked salmon. Smoked salmon is, by a long head, my favourite food and I like to think that she departed this life with a gratified smacking of lips.

Elfine continued to thrive, and when she wasn’t dozing she became, indeed, a great ratter. Or at least we think she did. The presence of rats and mice had been evidenced by their turds, little black pellets dotted about all over the house and terrace. Soon they disappeared altogether, which led us to one of two conclusions; either she was killing rats and mice very effectively or she was eating their turds.

That spring and summer of our first year were stockpiled with projects. We had a home to rebuild and equip to modern tastes, an irrigation system to learn how to use, vegetables to nurture through to their first harvest, trees to prune, and fruit to pick. All of these were absorbing and necessary tasks and would have commanded our undivided attention had we not taken a walk along the riverbed one dewy morning and coincided with the weekly visit of the poultry man.

Every Saturday a large, cheerful-looking man in a big white van would turn up at first light at El Granadino, having driven all the way from Ciudad Real, three hundred kilometres distant. His van was equipped with special compartments stuffed full of every sort of poultry you could possibly desire: partridges, chickens of every description, ducks, geese and guinea-fowl, turkeys and quails, even peacocks. The first time we met him it brought a sort of poultry mania upon us. We drooled over the life-enhancing possibilities of these creatures that we could – for only a few pesetas – admit into our family orbit.

Returning home that night to give the dog and cat something to eat we were both struck by an indefinable feeling of loneliness, as if the farm had become somehow depleted in our absence. Beaune and Elfine did the best they could. It simply wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t lay eggs.

The next Saturday we bought a couple of guinea-fowl and some quails and sped home, eager to introduce them to our circle. A few days later, Bernardo, moved by our poultry-keeping zeal, donated some chickens. Apparently they were rather special ones imported from Holland. They were fat and white and beautiful – for chickens that is – and the meat of them was said to be quite sublime. They were also supposed to lay eggs faster than you could count them.

‘You’ve got a run prepared for them?’ Bernardo asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered, thinking of the roughshod contraption I’d prepared in the stable below the house, ‘all ready to go. But how shall I get them home?’

‘We’ll tie their feet together and make a loop in the string and you can carry them by that. How’s that sound?’

‘Alright,’ I said, not altogether convinced.

‘Right, ready? I’ll go in and grab them and pass them out to you. Don’t, whatever you do, let them go.’

Amidst a cacophonous cackling and squawking Bernardo insinuated his well-nourished frame through the tiny doorway of his chicken-run. He grabbed two, we tied them up, and I set off across the valley to the new Valero poultry-house.

It seems silly to be so sensitive in the matter of chickens but I found this method of transport rather barbaric. The confusion of the poor creatures as they sped along upside-down, heads just above ground level and feet pinched by the string, caused me distress. So I raced back across the valley with them, stumbling over stones, leaping over the rocks and hurtling across the uneven ground, keeping the chickens as steady and level as I could. Home I ran, alone in a grotesque egg-and-spoon race.

Arriving at El Valero, I scrabbled with the knots on the strings and feverishly loosed the cruel bonds. The chickens clucked and scuttled off into the shadows of their new home, quite unperturbed by the whole episode. I watched with pleasure as they made themselves at home, and then went to spend a pleasant hour delving in the ‘eggs’ chapters of my cookery books. ‘Elizabeth David reckons there are 685 ways of dressing eggs in the French kitchen,’ I announced.

The fever was truly upon us. Next to arrive were a couple of pairs of
palomas
– stock doves – which Old Man Domingo gave us. They arrived in a shoebox. In they went, into the stable beneath our bedroom where they gladdened our nights with their interminable clucking and shuffling and flapping and cooing. Old Man Domingo had said that it wouldn’t take them long to get used to their new home.

‘Just feed them inside for a few days, then open the hatch and let them go. They’ll be back, you see if they aren’t.’

So for a few days they joined in the chaos of our mixed bag of poultry, and then with trepidation we left their hatch open. Of course, nothing happened. However, after three days, they at last managed to find the hole, fluttered out and sat on the roof, blinking in the sunshine; a black one, a grey one and two white ones. They launched off into the plains of air above the valley, soaring and wheeling and stumbling in the currents with the unaccustomed use of their wings. Then they came back to sit on the roof and think about it, and then whoosh – off to do it again. They were a wonderful sight. They really did seem to get as much pleasure from flying as I like to think I would. I spent hours watching them, nature’s perfect complement to these little white farms high up on the sides of the valleys. But the next day a hurricane came, and as it thrashed and tattered the leaves of the eucalyptus and the ivy, it blew the poor little things away. I was desolate. However, a few days later three of the birds limped back home from wherever the wind had blown them. The other had been eaten, we reckoned, by an eagle.

Pigeons are supposed to breed amazingly fast. Old Man Domingo had calculated that with the two pairs he’d given us we could expect over eighty squabs a year, and that they should start breeding within a month. But things didn’t seem to work out quite as planned. We waited for weeks for one to go broody, watching eagerly for signs of amorous activity. It became apparent that the dark one, at least, was different from the others. Its two companions would sit together on the roof, while the dark one, who was slightly bigger, would sit some way off on its own and eye them up. Then it would sidle towards them nefariously, at which the two would jump off the roof.

‘Do you suppose he’s the male, Ana, and that this is what passes for an amorous advance in the pigeon world?’

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure he’s the male. But it doesn’t look very promising, does it?’

Nonetheless, the male slowly began to get more insistent, and the females more compliant. This resulted in his jumping on them and pecking them ferociously in the back of the neck. It all looked rather unpleasant and we stopped observing them. However, some weeks later an egg was hatched and produced a live baby pigeon. This tiny creature was the first domestic animal born at El Valero during our time there – a poignant moment in its way. I was feeding the poultry and pigeons in the morning when I discovered a scrawny, damp little thing in the nesting box and raced up to tell Ana.

‘Guess what? I think there’s a baby pigeon at last!’

Ana was as excited as I was and dropped everything to come and investigate.

‘It’s no beauty, is it?’ she commented. ‘Do you suppose it really is a pigeon?’

‘Well, its father’s a pigeon, its mother’s a pigeon, and there it is sitting in a pigeon’s nest – I can’t see what else it could be!’

‘Maybe it’s a cuckoo . . . ’

Ana had a point. It was a most unprepossessing bird, blackish-brown with tatty feathers and very peculiar proportions as to the head and body. It was hard to believe that it could have sprung from the egg of such a pretty creature as a pigeon.

‘No. Cuckoos lay their eggs in nests in the wild – not in stables. I think it is a pigeon.’

It was indeed. It had taken about three months for our pigeon population to increase from four . . . to four. I began to see Old Man Domingo’s forecasts as an optimistic target. At this rate we would be lucky to dine on one pigeon pie a year. In fact, it began to dawn on us that the poultry department as a whole was failing to thrive. We were putting in a fair quantity of the recommended input but there didn’t seem to be much output at all. A general reluctance to breed or increase or grow, or even to lay eggs, had taken over. Clearly something was amiss. We did some observing, and some thinking, and came to the conclusion that it was mutual antipathy that was affecting performance.

The quails, the smallest of the menagerie, were frightened of the chickens; the chickens didn’t like the guinea-fowl or the pigeons, though they could live with the quails; the guinea-fowl were indifferent to the pigeons but were terrified of the quails and hated the chickens; the pigeons were affected by the guineafowls’ terror of the quails, nervous of the possibility of a chicken –quail alliance, piqued by the indifference of the guinea-fowl, and shared everybody else’s dislike of the chickens.

It wouldn’t do; action needed to be taken. So we designed and built a contraption that came to be known as the Quail Recreation Facility – QRF for short. If we could get the quails out of the equation we might be able to make some sense out of the rest of it all.

We consulted a number of works on the subject and slowly a design appeared. The three factors we had to bear in mind in the construction were happiness, security and portability. In order to get maximum performance from our quails we decided that we needed to simulate, as far as possible within the confines of a wired-in box, the conditions they enjoyed in the wild.

We came up with a sort of portable ark with an enclosed nesting-box and night-quarters at one end, served by a cunningly contrived trapdoor. The other end was wired in, but the bottom was open to allow the incumbents access to whatever piece of ground the thing was standing on. A mesh skirt, weighted down with stones, surrounded the outside area. The finished thing seemed to me to be the very acme of modern, enlightened poultry-keeping.

The quails, sadly, had other ideas. When we introduced them to their new home, they beetled straight into a corner of the nesting-box and there lurked disconsolate and depressed. Then after a week or so of this unpromising behaviour they at last managed to experience one of the few conditions that quails enjoy in the wild, that of being eaten by a fox.