Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (18 page)

My informant had good reason to be impressed by these actions. She had been stung on the mouth by one of Amanda’s poor mites in bed. This was despite the fact that she was a woman at peace with herself and her surroundings, although naturally anyone would lose a certain amount of faith in their surroundings after an event like that. It did seem a shame that not all creatures shared Amanda’s vision of the universe.

Amanda and Malcolm had arrived early for lunch and we had been showing them around Ana’s vegetable patch. Ana edged the conversation tactfully away from our wanton slaughter of flies and onto the safer ground of natural fertilisers, as we prised Chloë from her sandpit and walked up to the house.

‘Isn’t it one of God’s greatest miracles that the dung of the beasts carries all the elements essential to the growth of the plants that feed the very creatures that produce the manure that feeds the plants . . . and so on,’ I rabbitted, anxious to display my organic credentials. ‘The more I think of that particular fact, the more delighted I am by the organisation of the universe.’ ‘Being vegans, of course, we don’t use animal manure,’ Malcolm replied, ‘only our own excreta – and seaweed.’

There was a pause.

‘You’re making a bit of a rod for your own back there, aren’t you, Malcolm?’ I suggested. ‘I mean, importing seaweed when you’re living in the mountains surrounded by copiously dunging animals?’

‘Yes, it makes things much more difficult, of course, but we try not to use the products of any animal that is exploited. Animals should be wild and free like us.’

I looked hard at Malcolm. Wild and free were not the first two adjectives I would have hit upon.

‘We don’t wear leather shoes or woollen clothes, either.’

‘Well, it certainly is a hard path you choose. But lunch must be ready now. Ana has prepared a meal that we hope will be acceptable in every way. It’s amazing how you have to think to do it.’

Ana had indeed excelled herself. She presented us with a delicious-looking dish of aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and garlic, all bubbling together in a spicy sauce of soya-milk yoghurt.

‘I’m afraid we can’t possibly eat that.’

‘You what?!’

‘We don’t eat peppers or aubergines or tomatoes or potatoes. All those vegetables are
Solanaceae
, members of the deadly nightshade family. They’re poisonous.’

‘You’ll enjoy the garlic then, just pick around the rest.’

The first thing you hear is a whistle that sounds like a tutubia, except that tutubias rarely come down to the river, preferring the scrub high in the hills. Then comes a rolling river of bells and you realise that it’s Rodrigo calling to his goats. Up the river they come, in a dozen or more streams, picking their way over ledges and boulders or browsing by the water’s edge while Rodrigo waits above the bank, keeping watch from beneath the brim of his ancient straw hat.

There’s truth in what Amanda says about the destructive capacity of goats. Sheep are bad enough but goats are in a different league. A goat will stand on its back legs and reach eight feet in the air, ripping all the leaves and branches off the trees to that height. They are prodigious climbers and scramblers, sure-footed and fearless beyond belief, and their delicate pointed feet are like little jackhammers, scrabbling away earth banks, stone walls and the edges of terraces.

Kid, however, is delicious to eat, fetching a higher price than lamb, and on terrain where no other creature could survive, goats sustain themselves and produce a couple of litres of milk a day – not just ordinary milk, but milk with almost miraculous properties of healing and nourishment. So, in spite of the opposition of the ecologists there will always be goats and their goatherds in the Alpujarras.

I often walk across the lemon terrace and down the rocky ramp into the riverbed to pass the time of day with Rodrigo.

‘Hola!’ I greet him.

‘Qué?’ he asks.

That ‘qué?’ means ‘what?’, but not just an ordinary ‘what?’ It is delivered expansively, the head cocked, the palms upturned and stretched wide, and spoken loud and long. It means ‘How are you doing? How’s the wife and the little one? How’s your life and how is the farming and the crops?’ I can’t say it like Rodrigo does. It takes many years of walking with only goats and your own thoughts for company before you can manage the delivery of that particular ‘qué’. I have to be more specific.

‘How’s your wife, Rodrigo?’

‘Ay, Cristóbal, she’s bad, very bad. She can hardly walk now, she’s had a hard life.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘You see, Cristóbal, life is but a breath. We come into this vale of sorrow, we’re here four days, and if we get a chance to do some little good, do someone a favour, then we’ve done well and we can be a little happy perhaps. But then we’re cut down and gone, just bones and dust. In truth we’re no different from the dumb beasts, these goats I walk with.’

A pronouncement like this is best received in silence. I know Rodrigo well enough by now to respect the sincerity behind his awkward philosophising. Rodrigo has a truly generous spirit.

‘I saw you talking with the Englishwomen yesterday. Were they saying things about me and the goats?’

‘Well, mainly they were talking about the goats, Rodrigo. They don’t like them at all, that’s sure. It appears that they busy themselves out on the hill planting retama and then your goats come along and eat it.’

‘Cristóbal, why would anyone want to plant retama in the
secano
? I can’t see it.’

‘It’s strange, I know, but they say it is good for the soil – it stops the erosion. Anyway, I think they’d rather you didn’t take your goats near their place.’

‘There is a Via Pecuaria there and I have to pass it to get to the land above El Picacho. One is entitled to graze the Via Pecuaria. Look, Cristóbal, I don’t want to be a bad neighbour to them – if they want to plant retama on the hill then that’s fine with me, but there’s not so much grazing about that I can afford to leave a
secano
like El Picacho. As the goats pass they will of course eat the young retama; it’s only natural. You see my point?’

‘I do, I do.’

And thus continues the endless battle between the ecologists and the pastoralists.

Rodrigo gets lonely in the river. He walks all day every day of the year with his goats, and he’s done so in these mountains and valleys for fifty years. He has seen whole weather cycles change the face of his world. Years of drought when his pencil-thin animals had to scuff in the dust for the tiniest shoot – years when he needed all his herder’s skill to seek out the places where, after months or even years without rain, some barely perceptible mist of moisture might remain. And years when for months at a time he couldn’t get his horse across the swollen river, and had to go all the way down to the Seven-Eye bridge to get to his goat stable. Those were the easy years, he told me, when he could sit on a stone not a mile from his stable, with a couple of fertiliser bags tied over his head and shoulders – the preferred way of keeping off the lashing rain – and watch his goats gorge themselves.

Rodrigo had resigned himself to this harsh and lonely existence. It would never have occurred to him that one day his load might be lightened by someone to help – and least of all a frail-looking Dutch sculptress. But that’s how it worked out.

Antonia, the Dutchwoman in question, had begun spending her summers at La Hoya, a crumbling farmhouse, just down the valley from El Valero. The day we met her, on her first summer in the valley, she had walked up the riverbed with her big smelly old dog and was trailing from terrace to terrace behind our ram, looking out from a wide-brimmed hat and moulding his shape in a lump of wax that she was working with her fingers.

‘I’ll separate him and shut him in for you if you like,’ I offered.

‘No, I prefer to watch him moving around with the flock. I get a more natural result that way.’

The ram seemed to take a dim view of being modelled, moving off as soon as Antonia got a good vantage, and leading her on a stumbling trail around the stony meadow. The business was further complicated by the heat of the day, because the wax kept melting, and every fifteen minutes or so Antonia had to dip it in the cooling water of the
acequia
. When she got back, of course, the flock had disappeared, and by the time she had found them the wax had started melting again. So I gave her a bucket which she filled with water and carried around with her.

By this method Antonia was able to make a certain amount of progress, and slowly the models took shape. She made a lot of sheep that summer, along with some bulls and goats – and a wonderful rendering of Domingo’s donkey, Bottom. When she returned to Holland to cast some of her models in bronze, she left a little menagerie of wax figures in a drawer in our house, to the great delight of Chloë.

Rodrigo lives high above La Hoya at La Valenciana, about an hour and a half on horseback, but stables his goats at the lower farm. Each morning, having seen to the needs of the cows, the pigs, the chickens and the horse, he saddles up and moves off down the steep hill. Arriving at La Hoya, he ministers to any goats that need attention, then takes them out into the river or up onto the hills. Even in the scorching heat of summer he never takes a siesta; there’d be no time to fit it in. Goats don’t mind the heat at all.

All of a sudden a slight variation appeared in the monotony of Rodrigo’s existence. La Antonia, as he called her, took to walking with him in the river, occasionally fashioning an animal in wax as they progressed. Rodrigo must be the only goatherd in Spain with a model of a billy-goat cast personally for him in bronze; it’s an expensive process. When there was goatwork to be done, injections, wormings, washings and so on, Antonia would often spend the whole morning helping, and goatwork is a lot easier with two people than with one. On the odd occasion when it was necessary to put an animal out of its misery for one reason or another, Antonia would even kill goats for Rodrigo with a knife. Alpujarreños do not like to kill animals. I have to do the same on occasion for Domingo.

Antonia made a difference to Rodrigo’s life, day to day, but when Rodrigo’s wife, Carmen, fell ill and was rushed to hospital in Granada, her presence became vital. After shutting the goats in for the night, Antonia would drive Rodrigo home, help him tend to the other animals, then take him to Granada and stay there while he spent the whole night sitting beside his sick wife’s bed. This is the custom here, the family is expected to deal with much of the nursing.

The vigil continued for nine days, and then Carmen came home, at least a little better. Since then La Antonia has become an adored honorary member of their family. When she goes to spend the night with them at La Valenciana it’s only with the greatest reluctance that they let her go. I’ve never been inside Carmen and Rodrigo’s home but Ana has. She went up there one day with Antonia and of course Carmen invited them in. It proved impossible to escape without eating and drinking all of the most delicious and precious consumable items in the house. Ana said it was like visiting with the queen.

Antonia spends long spells in Holland, earning money for her work in Spain, drumming up patronage and commissions, and doing the bronze castings for the figures she makes. When she leaves the valley on these trips, Rodrigo walks with his goats and weeps a little. ‘I think God sent me the Antonia, Cristóbal,’ he confided to me. While she’s away he besieges us for news of her and judges minutely when a postcard might be expected.

Antonia is a real artist and she puts as much energy and artistry into her life as she does into her work. She gives and gives, and despite the fact that she’s not very robust, nothing is too much trouble for her. And so life repays her, people love her. She’s the only foreigner I know here who simply by being true to herself has become a part of the Alpujarra.

HERBS AND HUSBANDRY

IF WE HAD WORRIES ABOUT CHLOË – BEYOND HER SURVIVAL amid the scorpions and other terrors to infant life – it was that she might become lonely on an isolated farm with just her doting, middle-aged parents for company. She seemed happy enough consorting with the rude beasts that surrounded her, conducting scientific observations of the mole crickets and ants, and making the acquaintance of all the plants and shrubs that grew on the farm. But there are some games that can only be satisfactorily played with friends of the same species. Chloë, we knew, would sooner or later be needing a playmate. Luckily she found one – as close to hand as you can get at El Valero – in Rosa, Bernardo and Isabel’s youngest daughter, ‘given light’ to a year before Chloë at their home in the farm across the river. From the day they met, Chloë and Rosa claimed one another as sisters and would keep themselves peacefully amused with such useful occupations as tossing cassette tapes into the lavatory or throwing stones at the sheep. Rosa couldn’t speak English and, as Chloë hadn’t a word of Dutch, they communicated in Spanish. Having a daughter who was a native Granadina and fluent in Spanish helped to contribute to our sense of being finally settled. ‘You’ve sown your seed here – you’re one of us now,’ Old Man Domingo had told me.

Life was beginning to run more or less smoothly. We made enough money from the sheep, the seed-collecting and the shearing to get by and had begun to nurture plans to convert the disused house on the other side of the river near Domingo’s house into a holiday cottage. Our home, while still far from opulent, was in good enough repair to keep the rain off in winter and the worst of the heat out in summer, while the farm was moving slowly towards some semblance of order and health. There was one blot, however, that was threatening to disturb the careful equilibrium that underpinned our domestic harmony. The dogs and the sheep were at war.

Bodger and Barkis had grown into a pair of massive but amiable mongrels. They were even bigger than the now full-grown Bonka, and in this, in the broad flatness of their noses and their bovine dispositions, I detected the hand of Rosa’s dog, Cees, who had recently been sent to his maker after a grisly episode involving some chickens.

Bodger’s ears had remained in the one-up-one-down configuration which left him as endearing as when he was a pup, and Barkis was also a beauty. Unfortunately Barkis was exceptionally dim. There wasn’t an educable cluster of neurons in the whole of his thick skull, and he was an incorrigible chaser of sheep. Once he’d had a taste of the whole flock flying in panic up the hill, heads down and feet flailing madly in the dust, he couldn’t resist; he had to make them repeat the performance every time he saw them. It drove me to distraction. No shepherd can allow such an abuse of their flock and after emerging from the house to find them yet again stranded on a nearby hillock, quivering with fear, I snapped.

‘Right, that’s enough, Ana. I’m going to shoot the bugger! Look, he’s chased the sheep up the bloody hill again. They’re terrified, the whole flock is a bundle of nerves.’

‘Go on, give him one more chance, please.’

‘I’ve given the sod chance after chance. I’ve been patient. I’ve been nice to him. I’ve shouted at him. I’ve whopped him. I’ve tried training him. But he’s completely dim-witted. It’s no use, he’s got to go. I hate to do it because he’s a lovely dog, but if I don’t do something now he’s going to start killing sheep, and I’m not having that.’

Ana and Chloë watched aghast as I stomped off across the valley to borrow Domingo’s shotgun. My intentions were absolutely fixed. I was going to shoot that brainless cur and put an end once and for all to the terrorising of my sheep. But Domingo wasn’t in, so I stomped back, secretly rather glad.

Trudging up the path to the terrace where we had buried Beaune, I came across Chloë, inexpertly digging with her sand spade. ‘We’ll have to bury Barkis, won’t we, daddy?’ she asked, gazing down with dread seriousness at the hamster-sized hole she’d just completed.

‘No Chloë, I’m not going to shoot Barkis,’ I answered, lifting her onto my shoulders, out of the way of scrutinising a face wracked with guilt. Ana was up at the house getting ready to visit 199 all the dog-owners who might be persuaded to offer a home to Barkis. Janet promised to give the matter some thought.

Meanwhile, Barkis, oblivious of his reprieve, excelled himself by chasing the whole flock down the river to La Herradura, and then straight up the steep slope of La Serreta on the other side of the Cádiar river. I didn’t see the wretched episode but Rodrigo the goatherd had watched the entire proceedings and had been decidedly unimpressed.

Manolo del Granadino broke the news of the exodus to me when I bumped into him later that day in town. He said he had seen the sheep grazing just above the almond groves of El Enjambre. There would be trouble if I didn’t get them down as soon as possible, he reckoned.

‘They’ll come off the hill raiding at night and destroy all the vegetables of the
vega
, then you’ll be for it.’

‘I think you’re being a little over-dramatic there, Manolo, but you’re right, I’d better get up there and do something about it.’ It was an odd notion, the idea of sheep as night-raiders, coming down like the Assyrian horde on the ranks of the valley farmers’ vegetables . . . hiding in the inaccessible hills by day.

On the way back from town Ana drove me up to the Venta del Enjambre and left me there with a banana, a pinch of bread and a swig of water. I gathered up a stout stick and set off down the
barranco
, peering around for the sheep and straining my ears for the bells. It was a lovely, warm February afternoon, the sun veiled by thin cloud. I strolled down the track to La Hoya and stood by the river watching Ana and Chloë disappear round the hill and out of sight. No sign of the sheep, though. I doubled back the way I had come and after about ten minutes caught the distant bongling of bells. The flock was moving along the skyline, high above me. There was no way to get up to them from where I stood as the entire hill face was covered in chest-high gorse, so I changed direction and tramped eastwards in the hopes of finding a path.

Reaching the pass at the eastern end of the hill I had no option left but to pick my way downriver along the route by which I intended to bring the flock back. Still no path. Exasperated, I struck straight up the steep rock-toothed ridge, clambering on and on through the pine- and rosemary-scented air until, at last, on the summit I discovered a feeble path, that seemingly started nowhere and ran along the ridge from peak to peak.

I sat down to regain my breath and, basking in the late afternoon sunshine, surveyed the scene below. Tiny El Valero was just visible to the trained eye, out beyond the river. Way off to the north were fields of snow shrouding the high peaks, with storm-clouds rolling around them; but where I was sitting was perfect peace, the rivers dimmed to a gentle sussuration, the odd tutubia skeetering away and screeching. I smiled to myself at the thought that the sheep had lured me up to this spot to allow me to enjoy an afternoon’s ramble.

As if to crown the moment I heard the distant tinkle of sheep-bells. There they were, a mile off, tiny specks in the scrub, not far from where I’d seen them earlier. I struck down through the two hidden valleys with their tumbled fortifications – the Serreta had been a Republican redoubt during the last months of the Civil War – and across a long scree-slope waist-high with rosemary. Creeping up, I remonstrated gently with my charges: ‘This is no place for sheep, for heaven’s sake! Goats maybe, but sheep, no. What on earth do you find to eat here anyway? There’s not a stitch of grass.’

Looking around, I started wondering in earnest how I was going to get them down. They didn’t want to go down, I could see that. ‘Right, let’s go home,’ I said, and did a little clucking and whooping. Some of the sheep moved off rather unconvincingly in one direction.

I took stock of the situation. I didn’t know where we were, nor did I know the lie of the land. Everywhere there were smaller or greater precipices, and with the waist-high scrub you couldn’t see them until you were plunging headlong over. The sheep that I was about to throw a rock at, to get them to move along, could be teetering on the very edge of a sheer drop. I skirted around them to have a look. They were.

So with oaths and stones I turned them around and we headed steadily back along the hill the way I had come. It was hell getting them underway. ‘Haaii!’ I shouted, waving my stick, and a dozen sheep would move forward. The rest would look at them without much interest, then amble off down the hill, grazing as they went, so I hurtled down through the thorns and rocks to threaten the lower part of the flock. These moved off reluctantly in the right direction. Meanwhile the top lot had stopped and were heading higher up towards some nasty-looking rocks. I leaped back up again and headed them more or less in the right direction. Meanwhile, the lower part of the flock . . . I cursed myself for being fool enough not to have a proper sheepdog.

Still, by throwing stones and whooping and shouting, I managed to move them all onto the faintly discernible ridge path. As we picked our way gingerly along, I chatted to them to keep them relaxed and in a good mood. ‘Just keep moving along there nicely now, girls. That’s lovely, nice and steady now. Find your own way along, no hurry, plenty of daylight left,’ and suchlike.

The views from that ridge were breathtaking but knowing that if I were to slip I would probably go hurtling over the edge somewhat dulled my appreciation. Luckily I have a fair head for heights, and the sheep, well, they leave such trivial worries to the shepherd. The leaders of the flock insisted on sticking slavishly to the exact ridge path, which meant climbing up to, and then clambering down from, the very pinnacle of every one of the jagged peaks of this saw-toothed little range. We must have cut a farcical figure from below as we moved along, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

With the setting of the sun, the full extent of my predicament began to dawn upon me. Here I was at the back, or sometimes in the middle, of a slowly moving flock of sheep, high on a precipitous mountaintop from which I had no clear idea of the way down. With the deepening shadows, the contours of the slopes which had earlier filled me with such delight took on an increasing menace. If we reached the eastern end of the range, there was, as I well knew, no way down for a sheep. Even if I did manage to get them down to road level – and I could see the road, a fine grey ribbon far, far below, with tiny cars and lorries whispering along it – I would somehow have to turn them towards the river, and away from the lush vegetable fields of the
vega
at the bottom. No easy feat for one exhausted shepherd. I would just have to leave the whole thing to chance.

The sun sank lower, black clouds fouled the sky, the night drew deeper and the sheep ambled along ever more slowly. My thoughts were by now of the blackest. The plants I had enjoyed earlier plucked spitefully at me as I passed, while rocks seemed to shoot from the ground to wrack my ankles.

‘We ought to cut down to the right here,’ I announced to the sheep, ‘because although it looks a hellish descent, it’s certainly a lot easier than the face at the end – and whatever you do, sheep, don’t you even think about the north side! That way lies despair.’ The urge to talk aloud at that fearful moment, even to sheep, was irresistible.

The sheep didn’t much like the look of the north side either. It was an awesome prospect of steep rocky slopes, covered in thick scrub, with cliffs that plunged hundreds of feet to the river. Running through the bushes on their left flank, I redoubled my efforts, hurling rocks and yelling like a banshee. ‘Down there – down there, you stupid buggers. Look, I know it looks grim, but take my word for it, it’s a lot less bloody grim than what’s ahead of you if you keep on along that ridge!’ They looked at me, chewing insolently, and moved on straight up the edge of the next, last and highest peak.

‘Bloody Nora! You brainless shits – look at the mess you’ve got us into now! How in the name of Beelzebub are we going to get down off this?’ The cars spinning silently along the road below had their lights on now. A quarter moon sailed among the threatening clouds.

As I moved round, stumbling across the north side of the peak, the sheep at the back turned quietly round and trotted off back the way we had just come. I stopped and stared after them in horror. A Sisyphean vision swam into view of an eternity of walking back and forth along the skyline of this ridge with my dim-witted animals. The flock was fragmenting little by little, some moving back the way we had come, some thinking about the north face, one or two eating on the slope I wanted them to go down, but most of them just standing and looking thoughtfully into the gathering night.

I tried one final burst of frenzied activity, leaping back and forth over the ankle-cracking rocks in the dark, howling and yelling and thrashing the scrub with my stick. It was no good. I had to admit defeat for the night, anyway, and slithered off down that horrible slope.