Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (20 page)

‘Juliette wouldn’t have had to dig the damn hole.’

‘No, she would very sensibly have got some man to do it for her. It wants to be a lot deeper than that . . . and finish the sides off nicely. I’m going to gather herbs.’

When she returned from the herb-gathering, Ana looked disdainfully at the hole. It wasn’t as Juliette had ordained but it would have to do. Ana and Chloë watched from a safe distance while I boned the meat. You don’t do jobs like this in summer, and for a very good reason. I worked in a cloud of flies and wasps. It’s not pleasant having two or three dozen wasps wandering about on your hands, but fortunately they were too engorged in blood and meat to care much about stinging. Soon I was left with a couple of buckets full of glistening meat, black with flies and wasps. I rinsed it carefully under the tap to wash off the flies’ eggs. Ana meanwhile had exerted herself and laid a mat of herbs of one sort or another in the hole.

‘Place the meat on the mat of herbs, then I’ll lay some rosemary, lemon thyme, southernwood and rue on top.’

‘That sounds like the same ingredients you give the dogs to worm them – and just about everything else too.’

‘Well, whatever the recipe, it’s supposed to preserve the meat and all its nourishing qualities for at least three months, and to protect it from insect attack. I’m sure it’s the answer.’

She placed the herbs on the meat in the hole. ‘Now you must place heavy stones on top to stop the wild creatures digging it up, it says here, and then fill the hole in.’

You can imagine our excitement when, six weeks later, the time came to exhume the preserved meat and feed it to the dogs. I cleared the earth away and then heaved the stones from the hole. There lay the protective herb matting, miraculously intact. It soon became apparent though, as we lifted the layer of herbs, that there was no meat inside. It had vanished without trace, not a stain, nor a shred, nor a particle of flesh remained. The hole was perfectly undisturbed, not even so much as a scrabble mark. We all stood and gaped in bafflement at the empty hole with its useful herbal matting.

‘Where’s it gone, Daddy?’ asked Chloë with a touching faith that I was somehow lurking at the bottom of this mystery.

‘I don’t know, Chloë. I thought you might have come and gobbled it up in the night.’

‘EEEyuk,’ she squealed, running behind some bushes as if to hide from the thought.

‘Well, that was certainly a useful exercise. I can’t wait till the next sheep drops dead so we can do it again.’

‘Mmm,’ said Ana. ‘You win some, you lose some, and being facetious won’t make a blind bit of difference.’

We haven’t repeated the meat-preserving recipe; it doesn’t seem like time well spent and I rather like the thought of keeping one notable failure up my sleeve to throw back at Juliette should her rule prove too tyrannical. As for the rotting bones on the terrace, we just garden round them now.

MARKET FORCES

ONE EVENING AFTER A LONG DAY’S SHEARING, DOMINGO AND I and a gang of high sierra shepherds were sitting in Ernesto’s Bar in the woods below Pampaneira, eating tapas of meat from the grill –
carne a la brasa
– and doing some earnest
costa
tasting. The conversation had turned to how much we all loved our
ganado
: our flocks. Odd though it may seem, this is a fairly popular topic of conversation hereabouts.

As the shepherds droned eloquently on about their feelings for their charges, I noticed Ernesto’s son watching me. He was fairly well gone and seemed to be plucking up the courage to ask me a question. Finally on his way back from the bar he lurched towards me and whispered breathily in my ear, ‘Do you too love the
ganado
?’ ‘I cannot deny it but I do,’ I whispered in reply, and we smiled bashfully at one another.

Domingo caught the undertone. ‘What do you mean?’ he interrupted. ‘You don’t even know your own sheep. When did you last walk with them? You’ve been putting up fences to do your job for you. Those sheep of yours wouldn’t even follow you if you wanted them to. That’s not loving the
ganado
.’

These were wounding words, but I couldn’t deny that there was a certain truth in them. Since the fiasco of the lost flock I had been busy erecting fences over a large swathe of the
secano
precisely so that I could shrug off the more wearisome duties of the shepherd and get on with more pressing jobs on the farm. Also neither I nor the sheep had quite mastered the easy technique of the Alpujarran shepherd who strides at the head of a flock, whistling for the sheep to follow. Instead I would be left bringing up the rear, shouting and pitching stones. It wasn’t the most flattering comparison. My sheep were in good condition, well kept and produced a good number of lambs, but then no one was criticising my sheep. I shrank back under these mortifying reflections and waited for Domingo’s show of pique to pass and for the conversation to turn to other matters.

Soon enough the tender eulogising of sheep had shifted into an angry tirade against the dealers. Everyone, it seemed, had fared badly at the last round of selling and all were swearing to hold out for a better price next time.

‘I don’t see why we should bother with the dealers at all,’ I piped up. ‘We can’t do worse than we’re doing now if we cut out the middle man and sell our lambs ourselves.’ It was a bold outburst in such company but I rather enjoyed the lull it created in the conversation. ‘When the dealers get a knockdown price they take the lambs to Baza to turn over a quick profit,’ I continued recklessly, ‘so why shouldn’t we try our luck selling direct? I know I’m going to give it a go.’ A few seconds before I hadn’t known anything of the sort but the looks of startled interest on the faces around me had transformed the vague idea that had been hovering at the back of my mind into a one-man mission. It felt good to be back in the role of innovator again.

Baza market is the largest livestock market in Andalucía, set on a high plateau about three hours’ drive away in the north of the province. The dealers who frequent it are a hard-bitten crowd and trying to offload lambs direct would be tricky and contentious even without the handicap of being a foreigner and a relative novice to the trade. But I couldn’t back out now.

‘The dealers won’t like it a bit,’ announced one of the shepherds, his eyes glinting with excitement at the thought. ‘No,’ said another, ‘but it’s something that’s got to come, they can’t go on screwing us for ever.’

‘Well, the dealers can look after themselves,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got forty good lambs that are ready to go. Does anyone want to come with me?’

Perhaps I hadn’t phrased the question clearly enough because the debate raged on in abstract terms without anyone actually answering it. Domingo’s voice, however, eventually cut through the bluster. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘You have a word with Baltasar about his trailer. We can give it a try at the market a week tomorrow.’

Baltasar, one of my sheep-shearing cronies, has a powerful four-wheel-drive truck and a livestock trailer. He agreed to take us to Baza Market because he needed to stock up on hay-racks and things for his flock. So, on a sharp winter’s evening, we loaded the lambs into the trailer and, as a counterweight, stuffed the car with various people who had decided to come along for the ride. Baltasar drove; then there was Domingo and his cousin Kiki, a lad I’d not met before, for the good reason that he was just out of jail for an episode involving a sawn-off shotgun and a discotheque; and lastly Baltasar’s father, Manuel. Naturally I was stumping up for the expedition.

We set off in a leisurely fashion at about nine o’clock in order to get to the market at midnight. This was some unfathomable notion of Domingo’s. The market started at six in the morning but Domingo reckoned it was best to get there before the rush started; midnight seemed a bit excessive to everybody else but Domingo was adamant. In the event, as ever, it took a while to get away. As we passed through Órgiva we were flagged down for a chat by every passer-by who happened to know Domingo or Baltasar, or anyone who was simply curious about the trailerload of lambs. By the time we finally left the town it seemed that all its inhabitants knew of my madcap plan to sidestep the local dealers and sell the lambs direct at Baza market.

The same thing happened in Lanjarón, Baltasar’s home town, but at last we were away, leaving the mountain roads of the Alpujarra and grumbling slowly up the long hills that lead to Granada. The cool evening had become a freezing night, so the heater was on and the car was full of soporific fug. Soon everyone was asleep except Baltasar, Manuel and me. Baltasar was awake because he was driving, Manuel was awake because he was holding forth in an unbroken narrative, and I was awake because I was too polite to go to sleep when someone was talking to me. The others had heard it all before.

Manuel is a
curandero
– something between a faith healer and a barefoot doctor. His speciality is bones, muscles and the nervous system. He is known throughout Andalucía and I have heard of his successes from Málaga to Jaén. He is a fine-looking man with a bearing of unpretentious dignity, and despite his tiny frame he possesses an almost supernatural strength as well as a limitless capacity for talking. He sat in front with Baltasar. It was his car, so he was accorded that dignity, although he never would presume to try and drive the thing. Like reading and writing, driving is the province of a younger, more advanced, technologically literate class of person.

As he spoke he twisted round in the tall seat to address me and make sure I was still listening. ‘Well yes,’ he explained when I broke the monologue with a question. ‘There was a doctor in the town shortly after the war, and he didn’t like me practising at all. He made life as difficult as he could, got the Guardia Civil to harass us: he was friends with the town
comandante
. The church doesn’t like
curanderos
, you see, and the doctor, as well as being a second-rate practitioner who only attended the needs of the rich people of the town (and that badly) the doctor was a very churchy man. So I could only practise with the greatest difficulty. One winter, the Guardia locked me up in the town jail for three weeks – no heating and not enough to eat – and gave me a thorough beating, too.’

‘But it didn’t make you want to give up the healing?’

‘No, it’s a gift, the healing. Like the gifts of sight or hearing it’s hard to stop using them. People come to me with their pains and their sicknesses and I know I can help them. So I do; I can’t help it. I don’t take any money for it, only what people want to give, but I do get an awful lot of pleasure from it.

‘Anyway, late one night there was a knock at the door. When I opened it I found a woman wrapped from head to foot in a dark blanket. I led her in to the light, and as I turned to look at her I understood why she had covered herself so. She was the wife of the
comandante
. She told me she was in great pain with her legs; she hadn’t slept for weeks from the pain and the doctor had told her there was nothing he could do.

‘I soon discovered what was wrong with her; it was trapped nerves, the poor woman could hardly walk. I treated her several times during the course of the week – she always came at night and hidden, it wouldn’t do for the wife of the
comandante
to be seen consorting with
curanderos
– and at the end of the week she was completely better, not a trace of pain. From then on I never had any more trouble with the Guardia.’

Manuel’s stories were too good to doze through. He told them well, fluently and with a fine sense of balance and dramatic timing. Those who cannot read or write have the advantage in this; the ability to keep a long story in one’s head tends to diminish with literacy.

He launched into another story about what happened to the doctor – of course he got his come-uppance – and I had no doubt that the story was true. Then he moved on to a tale about another doctor. Various people of the town, the butcher Sevillano, the baker, the café owner who had been nursed by a donkey, all wandered in and out of the narrative. He kept up non-stop, wriggling round every few minutes to see that I was still listening. I crouched forward to catch his quiet voice above the thrum of the engine and rumbling of the trailer.

As we turned east and ground up towards the Puerto del Lobo, I realised that the monologue had shifted into new territory. The workaday world he described was being infiltrated by new and unlikely characters. A fisherman appeared on the scene. Lanjarón is high in the mountains and twenty miles inland; one thing it does not have is a fishing fleet. Then came elements that seemed somehow strangely familiar. With some surprise I realised that Manuel had moved seamlessly into the Tales of the Arabian Nights. The jealous doctor and the venal priests were soon eclipsed by a procession of princes and djinns and viziers and sages.

We swung through the main gate of the market not long after midnight.

‘You’re the first here,’ said the half-frozen man in the gatehouse. ‘Five hundred pesetas and you can have a pen right at the top, best position of all.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said, handing over the money. ‘Good thing, getting here early.’ Baltasar grunted. Everyone else was fast asleep.

We pulled across the empty concrete plain of the market yard and stopped by the top row of pens. Baltasar switched off the engine, stretched and groaned. I opened the door to get out and stretch my legs – and immediately closed it again. I didn’t know Spain got this cold. It wasn’t till I read the next day’s paper, which quotes Baza as one of the extremes of temperature for Andalucía, that I found out that it was ten degrees below zero.

Apparently the human body gives off the equivalent of a kilowatt of heat, so five of us ought to have heated up that car like a steam-bath. It didn’t work. Everyone was awake within five minutes, teeth chattering, squirming this way and that, unbearably uncomfortable. ‘Surely there’s a bar or somewhere where we can go and sit in the warm?’

‘Not till later.’

‘Run the engine then, for heaven’s sake, man!’

‘Not now, I can’t keep it running all morning.’

At four o’clock the bar opened. It was ten degrees below outside; it was ten degrees below inside. The bar was a huge, stone-floored, white, neon-lit shed designed to be cool on hot summer mornings. We left the door open; there didn’t seem to be much point in shutting it. The bartender came in, shivering and complaining bitterly. We drank brandies to occupy ourselves while the coffee machine got up steam. The barman went out and returned with some olive logs with which he lit a barbecue in the corner by the kitchen door. We all edged towards it. A couple of girls stumbled in, just out of deep sleep and marginally on the right side of hypothermia. They stood by the now blazing barbecue and surveyed the customers with indifference.

At around four-thirty others started to dribble in. Heavily-swaddled lorry drivers and shepherds. A dealer, noisy in a sharp suit and quilted anorak, holding forth to his entourage of toadies. A short man in a leather jacket and beret limped in and sat on a chair near the fire.

‘You’ve got a nasty limp there!’ said Manuel enthusiastically.

The beret looked at him in astonishment, for although it is the custom in Spain not to deny people their afflictions, it’s not usually done quite so directly. ‘It is a nasty limp,’ he said slowly. ‘And what’s it to you?’

‘I take an interest in such afflictions. I make them better. What’s wrong with the leg?’

‘Well, they’re both bad, been like it for twenty years now. The doctors say it comes from the cold on these mountains and they can’t do anything about it.’

‘Can you straighten them both out like that?’

‘No.’

‘Bend them like this?’

‘No, not that way either.’

‘What you need is to do exercises. I do them every day, and look at me; the cold hasn’t even got to me yet.’