Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (17 page)

As she approached two, one of her favourite treats was an expedition to the cave in the river to see the dead goat. An ailing goat from one of the flocks that grazed in the riverbed had crept into a cave to die where the rivers join. We came across the carcass, bloated and torn by wild animals, evil-smelling and moving with a living mat of flies. The eyes were long gone. The goat gazed across the reeds through bloody sockets.

‘I must keep her from this ghastly sight,’ I thought, trying to insinuate myself between Chloë and the cave.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, jabbing an imperious finger towards the cave.

‘What’s what?’

‘That, there.’

‘Oh, that. It’s just a dead goat.’

‘Chloë see goat,’ she insisted, dragging me by the arm towards the cave.

She was delighted by it. She had none of the revulsion that we adults feel for such things. Every day she would clamour to go and see the dead goat, as it slowly decomposed and disappeared, gnawed away by foxes and birds and dog. I too came to look forward to our expeditions, to see how the thing was progressing, the goat’s very solid presence reverting gradually to nothing. Had we lived in the city we would perhaps have gone every day to the park. The advantages of country living are not all immediately obvious.

‘Who made us, Daddy?’ Chloë sprung the question a few weeks after her second birthday.

‘I’m not sure about that one, Chloë,’ I countered. ‘I think your mother knows, though.’

With skill and tact I deflect the more awkward questions to the higher authority. I like to think, though, that I make a slightly better showing on the simpler ones.

‘Air isn’t anything, is it?’ Chloë asked one day.

I was rather pleased with that question from a two-year-old. I have read that when Aldous Huxley was six, he was seen to be lost in thought, and when asked what he was thinking about, he had replied ‘skin’. To be thinking about air before reaching three was good, I thought. It showed an aptitude for reflection, a curiosity that would set her off on the right track for the various improbable futures I have planned for her. I would have to deal with this question seriously.

‘Yes, it is something, as a matter of fact.’

‘What then?’

‘Well, it’s lots of things, mostly gases . . . ’

‘What’s gases?’

‘Well – er – gases are rather like air . . . you can’t see them . . . or not usually, though I suppose some look like smoke. Gas comes in the orange bottles we use for the cooker . . . er . . .’

‘Can you tie my Barbie’s hair?’

‘Alright.’

As I tied the wretched Barbie’s ponytail, cackfingered, I thought about the inadequacy of my answer. What the hell was air anyway? How could I better explain gases? I’d made a muck of that one – probably arrested her development.

Chloë looked on thoughtfully as I fumbled with the detestable doll. ‘Houses aren’t anything, are they?’

I turned round and looked at our house. It wasn’t much but it was certainly something, and I was rather proud of having built it. I thought of the stones we had hauled up from the river, heaved onto the scaffolding, and – not unskilfully – eased into place. It’s difficult to estimate the weight of a stone house, but surely it must be a hundred tons or more.

‘Well, this house is something; it’s stones and cement and sand and water and wood and canes and mud . . . and lots of work.’ She mused on this for a while.

‘Which Barbie do you think is the more beauty, this one or the pink one?’

FRIENDS AND FOREIGNERS

HOWEVER MUCH YOU MAY FIGHT AGAINST IT, IF YOU LIVE abroad where there are other expatriates, you become part of what is known as the Foreign Community. Initially, I struggled hard against this notion but as the years passed I grew more relaxed about my status as a foreigner and more willing to appreciate the ties that, by language, humour and shared experience, bound me to my compatriots.

Being a part of a foreign community is a bit like being at school. Among other things seniority bestows respect. In our part of the Alpujarras, the most senior member by age, time served, and a natural proclivity towards seniority, was Janet. She had moved here in the early Seventies and built a large house on the outskirts of Tijolas, at the beginning of our valley, which she proceeded to enclose with a highly imposing wall.

Romero once told me with a smirk of how a horsedealer of his acquaintance had once scaled these walls. He tethered his horse nearby and swung himself up with the aid of a stout creeper and a handy tree. His intention, once inside the garden, was undoubtedly to surprise the lady occupant, but his plan went badly wrong. As he dropped from the wall into the shrubbery, he was set upon by Janet’s pack of Appenzeller dogs, one of which gave him a nasty bite in the arse. He flew back over the wall and rode painfully into town where he promptly denounced Janet to the police for keeping a dangerous animal.

For those with less nefarious intentions there’s a small blue door that you can knock upon. Ana and I, having been invited to lunch by Janet the summer after we moved to El Valero, knocked and waited politely, as befits newcomers visiting the gentry. The top half of the door flew open to reveal her pack of slavering dogs. Janet stood amongst them, knuckles clenched round the handle of a long leather whip which she flailed to left and right, cursing the dogs roundly.

‘Come in, come in, quickly, quickly, and don’t mind the dogs. Just keep your hands above your heads, they’ll get used to you. Down, you bugger!’ And with a deft boot and a lash of the whip she floored a particularly disagreeable specimen that was hovering around our throats.

We shuffled in, hands up, and the door slammed behind us. ‘Welcome, my dears!’ shouted Janet above the awful din. ‘Wait there a minute while I deal with these brutes. Some meat should keep them quiet.’ She disappeared with the dogs at her heels, leaving us trembling by the door. Soon she returned with half a dozen split cow’s heads, red and meaty, which she hurled onto the lawn. The dogs crashed through the shrubbery and leapt in slobberous delight upon the head-bones.

‘These are my children, you see,’ beamed Janet as she discarded her whip. ‘Now, what shall we drink before lunch?’

We settled for wine and sat down at the table beneath a vine-covered trellis – one of a sequence of DIY-looking follies. Lawns dotted with exotic trees rolled across to a huge stone-flagged pool with a classical gazebo at the end. We sipped our wine and gasped politely at the garden.

‘You must excuse me a minute, I’m just putting the finishing touches to the lunch. Help yourselves to more wine.’

We helped ourselves and went to admire a fish-pond, full of fish and frogs, among them a tiny green tree-frog that Janet had imported from exotic climes. Sitting down again I noticed a snake lying by the pond contentedly eating a fish.

‘Now there’s a most singular phenomenon,’ I remarked to Ana.

‘Perhaps we should say something . . . ’

‘Janet, is there supposed to be a snake eating fish by the pond?’

‘What?’ from the kitchen.

‘A snake, there’s a snake eating your fish.’

She shot out of the kitchen. ‘A snake? Where? . . . so there is. I know him – he’s been taking all the fish for the last couple of months. This time I’m going to fix the bastard. Wait, Chris, hold him there while I get something to kill him with. I know what’ll settle his hash! Hang on there, don’t whatever you do let him go!’ and she shot back into the kitchen.

I looked quizzically at Ana, and back at the snake.

‘How the hell am I supposed to keep it there?’

The snake fortunately didn’t seem much disposed to move. It was still peacefully eating its fish . . . or rather Janet’s fish. I could hear a frenzied rummaging in the kitchen, and furious cries.

‘Where oh where is the bloody meat tenderiser? Where in the name of hell has the thing gone?! . . . there it is! Is he still there, Chris? You still got him?’

‘Yes, still here.’

She came hurtling out of the kitchen, brandishing the meat-tenderiser, leapt into the bushes and lunged for the snake with her weapon, whereupon the head of the utensil fell off.

‘Buggery! Now the head’s come off! Can’t they make decent tools in this accursed country? And now the bloody snake’s slithered off again.’

She sat down at the table and took a slug of wine.

‘Oh well, it was a damn good try. Perhaps I’ll get him next time. Right, let there be luncheon!’

And she produced a sumptuous six-course Indian meal, all freshly prepared. As we worked our way through it she told us the story of her life. How she was thwarted by the Mau Mau uprising in her attempts to qualify as a vet in Kenya, and forced instead to study the subject at home, coming through with a pretty thorough knowledge of animal ailments and their treatment. She now runs a free clinic from her home and does a first-rate job of fixing up all the local cats, dogs and horses. Doing this she enjoys her happiest hours.

When she is not attending to sick animals, Janet told us, she studies. She was currently working through maths and physics and veterinary science, and in order to prevent her outlook on life becoming too earnest, was reading Swiss satirical magazines in French and German. Try as I might, I found it impossible to imagine the Swiss as a fund of satirical humour. I said as much to Janet. ‘Yes . . . yes, Chris, you’re perfectly right. They don’t have any humour at all. In fact, the Swiss have the sort of sense of humour you’d expect a dog to have!’

Thank heavens for Janet, she’s a true eccentric and, for all her bluffness, unfailingly generous. She has also become a staunch friend of Chloë’s. ‘I’ve never had much time for babies, Ana,’ she boomed on her first visit after Chloë’s birth. ‘Animals are a lot less trouble and serve you better too as a general rule. But I have to say that’s a damn fine baby you’ve got there. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to knit it a parrot. Nice little fellow like that, what it needs is a proper woollen parrot. I used to be pretty good at knitting years ago, you know, but it got in the way of the veterinary studies, so I stopped it.’

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks a bright woollen parrot, an amorphous woollen bag with a couple of flaps on the side and two buttons for the eyes, turned up. Janet had also knitted a white tam-o-shanter – to keep the little fellow’s head warm. Stuffed with straw it would have made a handy pack-saddle for a donkey. But that was not all: she had also carpentered a beautiful high-chair with the seat upholstered apparently in some rare tribal cloth, and made a wooden chest to keep Chloë’s clothes in. Treasured gifts.

There seems to be a preponderance of eccentric women among the foreigners here. Some of them have husbands in tow, but they tend to be vapid creatures who fade into the background and are of little account. Amanda and Malcolm are one such couple: typical, in their way, of the Órgiva New Agers. Malcolm has long white hair and a penchant for loose flowing clothes. Rodrigo, whose flock of goats ravages the wilderness around Amanda and Malcolm’s land, is unable to accept that Malcolm is a man. Rodrigo always refers to them, and he refers to them a lot, as there are constant disputes between them, as ‘those two Englishwomen’.

Before coming to Spain, Amanda made a living as an organic farmer on the Welsh borders, and in the Alpujarras she was soon recognised among the ex-pat community as the person to consult on all matters horticultural and botanical. I sought her out one hot June morning to ask her advice about
Lavatera olbia
, a flowering shrub that is indigenous to central and western Andalucía. A friend in England, who is a seed-merchant, had started giving us the odd order for wild flower seeds, and had asked for a kilo of the
lavatera
. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a single specimen of the plant. So I set out with Chloë gurgling away on the seat beside me, on an expedition to try Amanda’s botanical expertise.

I came upon her, clad in white muslin, thumping away with a mattock in her vegetable patch. As I bounced along the rough mountain track that led to her home, she straightened up as she saw me, swept the hair from her eyes and asked: ‘Who is this that comes to visit me when the moon is rising in Aquarius?’ People had told me about Amanda’s enthusiasm for astrology but even so the question caught me off my guard. I looked down to see if Chloë could shed any light on the issue, but she had succumbed to the noonday heat and fallen fast asleep.

‘Er . . . my name’s Chris, Chris Stewart. I’m told you’re an expert botanist. I need some information about some plants that might grow around here.’

‘People are very kind to say that. I’m sure it’s not true, but let’s have some tea anyway and I’ll see if I can help you out.’

Amanda had not come across any of the
lavatera
I was after but was clearly a repository of knowledge on Alpujarran flora. We drank tea beneath a rose-covered arbour and talked about botany, the mountains and Rodrigo, as we gazed across the Mediterranean at the faint outline of the Rif in Morocco. Chloë, meanwhile, dozed on in my lap.

‘Rodrigo is too bad, you know, his goats are absolutely destroying the countryside. I’ve told him about it time and again but he takes not a blind bit of notice. Soon Rodrigo and his wretched goats will have us living in a desert. You do know, don’t you, that the Sahara Desert was a green and fertile garden until Rodrigo and his ilk started having their way with it?’

‘I had heard of such a thing, yes.’

‘Well, the answer, I’m convinced, is to plant retama all over the dry parts of the mountains. Retama will put up with pretty much anything . . . except goats.’

‘Retama? You can’t be serious!’

Retama is a tall woody shrub with long silver leaves and deep roots. In spring it scents the hills and valleys throughout southern Spain with its pendulous showers of yellow blooms. There’s an awful lot of it about and it’s of little apparent use. Persuading Rodrigo to plant retama on the hills would be like trying to get a British dairy-farmer to sow docks and thistles.

‘I’m perfectly serious,’ she insisted. ‘Retama is the thing. I have actually had a talk with Rodrigo about my idea, and I do believe he is slowly coming round to it.’

‘I’m the first one to approve of a bit of original thinking,’ I said, trying not to be dismissive, ‘but I can’t really see the idea taking root, so to speak. Retama is pretty, and it’s drought-resistant with those long long roots, but beyond providing a bit of seed and frond for the goats to . . . ’

‘Wretched goats! I’m not going to plant it for the goats, Chris. In order to build up a viable ecology in this area we must start to get the goats out of the equation.’

We talked around the subject until it was exhausted, Chloë was awake, and her supper beckoned. I made my excuses, casting a lunch invitation for Sunday as I started the Landrover. ‘Oh – and bring your . . . bring, er . . . ’

‘Malcolm, you mean Malcolm, I take it. Yes, I’ll bring him, too.’

‘That,’ said Amanda, pushing back the sleeves of her muslin dress and jabbing at the fly-trap that I’d hung on the stable wall,‘that is a disgusting contraption. How could you do that?’

The offending trap was an American patent and a device of which I was rather proud. It consisted of a plastic bag full of water and some mephitic muck that is apparently so irresistible to flies that they crawl happily through a plastic funnel in order to drown themselves alongside a sodden and evil-smelling mass of their peers. I was lured into buying it by the bizarre testimonial emblazoned across the packet: ‘With your wonderful fly-trap we were able to enjoy our annual barbecue without flies. Where we have our barbecue is right by the hogpens!’

‘Surely, Amanda, one has to draw the line somewhere,’ I protested, ‘and flies fall a long way beneath the line I’ve drawn. Look at the misery they cause the horses and sheep, to say nothing of the misery they cause us.’

‘Us? You, you mean. Flies don’t bother me at all, nor Malcolm.’ A snort of assent sounded behind my left shoulder. ‘If you’re at peace with yourself and the world around you, then the flies won’t trouble you. It’s as simple as that.’

Now I knew that Amanda was serious about the flies because I had heard from a woman who had once stayed at her house that she experienced similar tender feelings towards scorpions. Scorpions do not as a rule like water but for some reason they would come scuttling in from all corners of the surrounding country to fall into Amanda’s pond and drown. So distressed was Amanda by this that she had a net prepared to fish out the poor mites, as she called them, and return them to the world of stones and scrub from whence they came.