Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (15 page)

‘You’re talking silly, man!’ said Domingo. ‘You can’t possibly build it there; the ground is soft and as soon as the river gets up it’ll wash it away.’

‘This is the spot,’ said José, stamping the ground a few metres upriver of the old bridge. ‘It’s the narrowest point and the ground’s good and solid.’

‘Solid – the Host! If you build it there it’ll be swept away in days. There’s never been a bridge there.’

‘Yes, it must be upstream, over there by the oleander – there the river won’t move . . .’

‘No, the most important thing is to take advantage of that boulder and use it as a pier, that way we’ll . . .’

‘I shit on the Host man! If you build the bridge there no one will cross it in safety.’

‘And how many bridges have you built?’

‘Well, you can listen to me if you want, and I’m telling you . . .’

The polemic raged ever more ferociously and as one idea supplanted another, and the debate spun into a number of simultaneous arguments, the only thing everyone seemed to agree about was that Romero must have been either mad or drunk to choose such a ridiculous spot to build his bridge. The site was so utterly lacking in any of the desirable qualities, that the idea of simply rebuilding it didn’t even merit consideration.

In the end, of course, we rebuilt it precisely where it was. Pedro had, perhaps, known something about his river.

First, with the help of twelve strong men all pulling and pushing in different directions we hauled the great eucalyptus trunks from the wood where Domingo and I had stacked them so many moons before. Then we rebuilt the first pier. We carried huge rocks over and dumped them in the edge of the river, everyone vying to heave the largest rock, reckless of almost certain hernias. Then we cut oleander and broom and branches of eucalyptus and made a thick bed of brush on top of the stones. Then another heavy bed of stones, then more brush and so on until we had a new pier jutting out over the river about five feet above the water-level.

The beams cost us a lot of effort to haul into place. We managed to heave the first one so that it jutted from the pier about two thirds of the way across the river. Everybody sat on it while Domingo, who had inevitably taken over the running of the operation, wobbled out along it with a rope. He leaped for the far bank and fell in the river.

‘The Host! It’s freezing!’

This was the signal for all the more impetuous men to try their luck. They all fell in the water but kept on going until it was decided that there were not enough men left to sit on the beam for support. Then we heaved it into its final position. It was too short. It lay with its far end well short of the bank.

No matter. Everybody slithered across it and set to rebuilding a great jutting pier on the far bank. Finally, after about four hours of work, we had two stout beams laid firmly from one rock-built pier to the other. We all sat on the bank, admiring the grace and elegance of our handiwork. It looked good and it cost nothing, but it was still almost impossible to cross in safety. I spent the next day gathering driftwood and nailing it across the beams to provide a flattish walkway. Domingo disapproved of the nails because they cost money.

‘You don’t spend money on the river. What’s in the river is the river’s. Sooner or later it will just rise up and sweep the lot off down to the sea.’ I should have lashed the driftwood to the beams with ropes of woven esparto grass. That would have satisfied him.

The design of our new footbridge might have been basic but it had an intrinsic beauty and the driftwood walkway gave it a rather picturesque Himalayan look; simply to look at it made you want to cross it.

Sheep, however, have different sensibilities and, after discussing the matter with Domingo, I decided that it would be better to postpone introducing the new flock to El Valero and let them settle in first in a stable prepared on the town side of the river, beside La Colmena.

No groom preparing a nuptial chamber for the arrival of his bride could have taken more care than I did in fixing the temporary stable. I mucked it out, scrubbed and disinfected it, and spent good money installing an automatic water-trough, a contrivance never before seen in the Alpujarra. As a finishing touch I roped up an old iron bedstead across the door and then waited, admiring my handiwork. The sheep arrived, and one by one I carried them down from the lorry, across the threshold. They huddled in a corner in the shadows.

Every day I walked across the river to feed the sheep their barley-straw and grains and to get them used to my presence. When I arrived, they would be lying trim, white and woolly, basking in the winter sunlight where it shone in shafts through the door and windows of the stable. As I entered, they would bound away in a panic and huddle in the far corner. Some days I would sit in the sunshine by the door and read or write letters. As they grew used to the idea of my being there, they gradually resumed their places and lay heaving gently, eyeing me with suspicion. If I moved a limb to scratch or turn a page they would stampede for the corner again and huddle in a mass of panting wool with seventy-four eyes and one resentful look directed at me.

Progress was slow. The sheep didn’t seem to be getting used to me at all and I wondered how or if I could control the flock when I finally let them out of the stable and into the countryside. I had no dog. A normal established flock would have its
mansa
– its tame sheep – who would stick to the heels of the shepherd, and lead the rest of the flock. These lambs, having come from various different flocks, and being mostly young and therefore having no flocking instinct, would flee to the edges of the valley as soon as I opened the door.

After an abortive episode, best forgotten, with a couple of goats, Domingo suggested I marry the sheep up with his flock. We stuffed Domingo’s dozen or so older ewes into the stable and fed them all together. It worked a treat; the next day, when we let them all out to graze on the hill above La Colmena, they stayed calmly together. Every day we took one or two of Domingo’s sheep out, until we were left with just one.

‘You can have that scraggy old thing,’ said Old Man Domingo, to whom it belonged. ‘It’s never had a lamb but once and that was years ago. That sheep is good for nothing, but it’ll be fine for your flock leader.’

The sheep in question was a bony old creature, with lop-ears, a permanent string of snot, and a craven look. She was also extremely wily. By a combination of cunning and thinness she managed time and again to insinuate herself into the special creep reserved for the ewe-lambs and wolf their extra rations. The creep was a fenced-off part of the stable with a tiny gap that only the lambs could get through. In the end we tied a stick to a piece of string around her neck, which would jam in the hole.

Thus our flock leader came to be known as Stick. She wore her impediment proudly like a badge of office as she tripped sniffling along at the head of the little flock, slavishly following the shepherd.

At the end of the sheep’s first month, I took them up the hill to graze on the damp rosemary and thyme while I stood watching them through the wet mist, leaning on a crook. Below me wisps of cloud ebbed and flowed around the valley. As the sheep trod on the plants they released clouds of scent. From around the next ridge I could hear the bells of Domingo’s tiny flock mingling with the rushing of the rivers.

Domingo appeared from below, dressed in his usual floppy blue cotton trousers and jacket and decomposing sneakers. We sat together on a wet rock.

‘I can more or less manage the flock now with the help of Stick,’ I told him. A heavy sneeze and a flying gobbet of mucus reminded me of the presence of that august animal. ‘I might try and take them across to El Valero later on if I can persuade them to cross the bridge.’

‘They’ll be fine,’ Domingo pronounced. ‘Mine cross it now with no trouble at all.’ We looked down on the bridge far below us, tiny and insubstantial in the distance.

That evening I took Stick at the head of the flock down to the river. Domingo followed behind. We all walked straight across the bridge except for one lamb – and there always is one – which decided not to chance the bridge but instead hurled itself into the racing river. I fished it out about fifty metres downstream, bedraggled and knocked about a bit by the rocks but otherwise unhurt. Waving good-bye to Domingo we set out slowly across the valley towards the stable at El Valero.

The morning after our successful crossing, I got up early, shaved, put on a clean T-shirt and went to let the sheep out to graze for the first time on El Valero soil, a lovingly prepared sward of grass in the river-fields.

There I sat on a bank by the stream, gazing at them as they stood up to their knees in grass and wild flowers beneath the orange trees. Sadly, the sheep didn’t like it one bit. They stood there looking at me, wondering what to do. The poor creatures were right out of their element. As lambs they had spent their whole lives shut in stables eating straw and grains, and their mothers were mountain sheep, used to scuffling about on the hills in search of dry mouthfuls of woody aromatic plants. Worried that I had made a serious miscalculation, I led them out of the fields and up into the dusty
secano
. They bounded happily into the scrub, and busied themselves nibbling at the sweet-scented herbs while I watched disconsolately, wondering what on earth I’d do with the lush grazing that I had so painstakingly nurtured.

Little by little, though, the sheep adapted themselves to my whims and came to start each day with a session on the grass. After a few days I no longer even had to walk them there. I would just open the stable gate in the morning and shut them in at night. They would spend the day ranging between the grass and the
secano
as the mood took them, and the farm rang to the sound of their bells during all the daylight hours.

Only Stick, having been used to following a shepherd all her life, seemed out of sorts. For months she would attach herself to anybody who happened to be passing through the farm, much to the discomfiture of occasional hikers making their way down from the hills.

BREEDING

OUR FIRST LAMBS WERE BORN IN APRIL. ON A BRIGHT SPRING morning I pushed open the stable door and discovered a steaming bundle of wet wool lying in the straw. A ewe was licking it happily and making the snickering noises that show maternal devotion in the ovine world. It was a small moment of triumph. Over the next two weeks El Valero shrank to the confines of the stable as Ana and I hung about the ewes ready to help them through any obstetric difficulty. Few showed an interest in the service. Unlike their overdomesticated British counterparts, the Segureñas have an independent nature. They seemed happy to wait for the stable door to creak shut again before depositing their slithery offspring, quietly and without much fuss, into nests that they had scrabbled in the straw.

Inevitably, one or two did need a bit of help and Ana was ready to oblige. Ana is good at lambing, her hands are smaller than mine and better suited to the agonisingly constricted manipulations between the ewe’s pelvic bones to get the head or feet into the correct position for the exit. I was pleased to see her getting so involved after all her reservations about my sheep venture, although she was still far from enthusiastic about my plans for the expansion of the flock.

We kept the ewes and lambs penned close together for the first few days so the lambs could gather strength and bond strongly with their mothers; then we let them out.

‘You shouldn’t let the lambs out,’ said Domingo.

‘Why ever not?’

‘The sun will eat them, and their lungs will fill with dust. Dealers round here don’t like to buy lambs with the dirt of the
campo
on them.’

‘What should we be doing, then?’

‘You should separate them from the ewes when you let the sheep out in the morning, and leave the lambs in the stable.’

I looked at other shepherds’ arrangements for this. Their lambs had a pretty dismal existence, shut in all day long in a stable where no ray of sunshine entered, though the little creatures were indomitable. Not even the most cramped and mephitic hell-hole can kill the joy of young animals. The slightest irregularity in the dung-packed floor became a hillock from which they would leap and, however tightly packed together, they lost no opportunity for racing round and high-tailing their legs in the air.

It was undeniable that the sun wouldn’t eat the lambs in the stables, nor would their lungs clog with dust, and they certainly wouldn’t lose weight through excessive exercise. They could address themselves precociously and earnestly to the business of eating high-protein concentrates and getting to killing weight as fast as possible.

Ana and I walked down to the river-fields to see how they were getting on. The newborn lambs were wandering about, gingerly sniffing the grass, startled by the terrors of snails, grasshoppers and butterflies. The older lambs, still snowy white and tiny, had gathered in a group and were busy hurtling in a mass along the raised bank of the
acequia
only to stop all of a sudden, turn back and race to their mothers, grab a quick drink of milk and fall asleep in the sunshine.

It was a sight to move even the stoniest-hearted profiteer and we decided to keep the lambs out. They have a short enough life anyway and I couldn’t deny them some joy of it, not even in the interest of efficient husbandry.

A few weeks later I came home to find Domingo sitting on our terrace waiting to introduce me to his ‘friend’ Antonio Moya. As I climbed up the steps, sweating and dishevelled, the way I look after the lightest task, the creature seated beside Domingo uncoiled and advanced towards me, hand outstretched. It was enchanted to meet me; it had heard much about my exalted reputation and in the flesh I made such reports seem as shadows.

I stared open-mouthed at my flatterer, smooth-chested and meticulously groomed in his crisp white shirt, and gleaming with gold. Domingo’s friend was the dealer El Moreno: the dark one. I found it difficult to believe that a man with such a face could possibly deal on business terms with the general public. His smile could have been applied with the briefest burst of an aerosol, his eyes lacked the warmth of a cobra’s, and every line of his features, the dimple on his brow, the creases beside his mouth, the very set of his ears, spelt deceit.

‘Such a beautiful farm . . . and what a lovely house. You must be very happy here.’ He addressed me as one would a bat, staring at the shit-encrusted cave where it lived.

‘It suits us.’

‘I should think it does! You foreigners are so much cleverer than we Spanish.’

‘And why would that be?’

‘You choose such wonderful places to live. Domingo says you have some fine lambs to sell.’ His smile narrowed.

‘They’re not bad, but they’re not ready to sell yet.’

‘I have seen them and I will give you a very fair price for them.’

‘And how much would that be?’

‘Five thousand apiece for the lot.’

‘They’re not ready yet.’

‘I’ll take them as they are.’

‘Not for five thousand you won’t.’

‘But they’re
camperos
, they’ve got the dust of the field on them.’

‘I don’t care, I’m not selling them till they’re finished and it won’t be at a price like that.’

There followed a rapidly delivered tirade of blandishments, against which I stood my ground admirably.

‘Well, Cristóbal, it has been a pleasure – no, an honour – to do business with you. Until we meet again.’ And El Moreno strode off with Domingo, cursing insistently in his ear as far as I could make out.

‘So that was your friend El Moreno?’ I said next day to Domingo, a little puzzled by the apparent alliance.

‘Yes, we used to work together. He lost his driving licence, so I used to drive him round, visiting shepherds, and he taught me all the tricks of the trade.’

‘It must help a lot, knowing a dealer you can trust.’

‘Trust? You must be joking! Sooner trust the serpent himself.’

‘But you told me he was a friend . . . ’

‘Well, yes, he is, but he’d still screw me, just like anybody else. He screws everybody.’

‘But what sort of friendship is that, for heaven’s sake?’

‘He does it for my own good, he says. It keeps me on my toes and teaches me a useful lesson. That way I avoid the pitfalls of being screwed by other dealers.’

‘It seems to me an awful way to carry on. Are all dealers such shameless shits?’

‘It’s their job; it’s the way the system works. They make their living by smooth talking, guile, knowing how to spin a story. It’s a skill, just like whatever skill it is that you have that enables you to make a living from whatever it is that you do.’

Domingo has always been a little unsure as to how we make ends meet, as indeed am I.

‘And by the same token it’s a part of the shepherd’s skill to cope with sharp dealers like El Moreno. A shepherd can’t survive if he only knows how to walk with his sheep. He must also know how to sell them. It’s the way life is, pitting one’s wits against others. Take my cousin Manuel, for instance. Manuel is a hopeless case. He sold all his lambs to El Moreno the other day for four thousand. That’s Manuel stuffed for the year now, penniless!’

‘And you stood and watched?’

‘Of course. I drove Moreno there.’

‘And you didn’t raise a finger to stop Manuel being screwed?’

‘It’s nature, isn’t it? There’s no point in saving a beetle from a blackbird . . . ’

‘But if the beetle happens to be your cousin . . .?’

‘Bah! you have to learn from the blackbird.’

El Moreno must have heard on the bush telegraph that the lambs were still for sale. The next time I saw him he turned up alone, considering himself now on terms of sufficient intimacy to dispense with the guidance of Domingo. It was five in the afternoon and we were sitting on the
tinao
with a couple of English friends who had driven over from Órgiva.

El Moreno clapped me on the back and told me of how he was barely able to contain his delight at seeing me again, made himself known and agreeable to the rest of the company, and sat down to drink wine while we all took tea. Our friends were enchanted by him. Within ten minutes the assembled company were hanging on his every word and vying for his attention.

It was then that he introduced the subject of the lambs. ‘Let’s go down and have a look at them and see how they’ve got on,’ he suggested.

We leaned on the stable gate and gazed into the crowded pen.

I waited for Moreno to get the deal rolling . . . nothing. He considered the lambs in glum silence. I was the first to break.

‘Well?’

‘Well, they haven’t grown much, have they?’

‘They’ll be a good twenty kilos.’

‘Never!’

‘They weigh heavy, these Segureñas. All meat, you know.’

‘So, how much do you want for them?’

‘They are a good weight, and unless I’m mistaken the price has gone up . . . so if you take them all you can have them for six thousand pesetas each . . . ’

‘No good, the price is much lower than that.’

‘ . . . but if you want to select the best, then seven thousand.’

El Moreno shook his head and slipped into gear. ‘Hold this.’ He proferred a heavy bundle of notes. ‘I’m offering you four thousand five hundred – that’s nine hundred duros – and how many did you say there were? Thirty-seven lambs? That makes thirty-three thousand, three hundred duros – here it is in notes. Go on, count it . . .’

Now I consider myself fast enough with mental arithmetic for a negotiation on the price of some sheep, but I clearly wasn’t in the same league as El Moreno. His speed and accuracy were astonishing. He knew he had the advantage over me in this, but he was deliberately adding to my confusion by calculating partly in pesetas and partly in duros.

A duro is five pesetas and a common unit of currency throughout Spain. Often older people cannot compute in simple pesetas; one day in the bakery I heard a customer saying, ‘What do I owe you, Mari-Carmen?’ ‘Three hundred and ninety-five pesetas,’ came the reply. ‘Don’t be silly woman. What’s that in duros?’ ‘Seventy-nine.’ ‘Right then. Now we understand one another.’ As El Moreno spread the money, I kept my hands firmly behind my back and looked at the wall so as not to be hypnotised by that great wad of notes.

‘Hold these!’

‘Look, I’m not taking four thousand five hundred, nor five thousand. I said six.’

‘Alright then, if you must’ – and he grabbed my arm and slapped a tempting ten-thousand-peseta note into my quivering palm. Then he began counting again, interleaving crisp large notes with smaller grubbier ones of much lower denomination, and all the time switching between duros and pesetas in a low hypnotic numerical chant.

‘Umm . . . I’ve lost count.’

‘Right, let’s start again, ten, twenty, thirty,’ and off he went, slapping note after note on the pile.

The lambs considered us with suspicion from their huddle in the corner of the pen. Moreno had me right where he wanted. Apart from the dazzling arithmetical gymnastics his trick seemed to have something to do with making sure that I was always holding some of his money, and never giving a straight answer to my questions.

‘I’ve lost it,’ I pleaded. ‘How much are you offering me now anyway?’

‘I’m giving you a hell of a good deal here, you won’t get nine hundred and eighty duros anywhere else and that’s my top price.’

‘Well, I’m not selling them below five thousand five hundred. You know as well as I do that they’re a gift at that.’

‘Look, you’ve dragged me all the way out here . . .’

‘You invited yourself.’

‘I’ve come all this way and wasted a lot of time. I’m a busy man and I haven’t time for this sort of foolery.’ Saying which he strode off angrily down the hill. I started up towards the house.

‘Dammit,’ I muttered to myself. I couldn’t afford to lose the sale. ‘Perhaps I asked too much . . .’ I turned to find Moreno at my elbow.

‘Here, hold your hand out – count this – five, seven . . .’

I sold them in the end for five thousand two hundred apiece: that is to say one thousand and forty duros. The price for the lot was one hundred and ninety-two thousand four hundred pesetas – or thirty-eight thousand four hundred and eighty duros. Thank heavens Spanish sheep dealers don’t have guineas, pounds, shillings and pence in their armoury.

The buyer pays about ten percent as a deposit and then pays the rest when he comes to fetch the lambs. The next day El Moreno turned up with a lorry and four confederates. We counted the lambs from the stable into the lorry. Now you wouldn’t have thought that a dispute could arise over the matter of counting thirty-seven lambs one by one. But it did. So skilled were these men in the art of deceit that I seriously doubted my own ability to count.

Five thousand two hundred pesetas was far from being a good price for the lambs, and it might seem odd that I eventually decided to do business with a man whom I so utterly mistrusted. I had a good reason, though. We had had no better offer and we needed the money. Not long after El Moreno’s first visit, Ana had made an announcement that forcibly brought home to us the value of ready cash.