Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (3 page)

‘Well, that’s enough of that,’ I grinned. ‘I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy TV . . . but really it’s no substitute for the – er – for the sweet milk of good conversation . . . is it?’

A thick silence ensued. I felt like a dead pig in a tea-room. I pinched my leg again. I enjoy the sound of my own voice, but this was getting too much even for my thick skin.

‘Well, er . . . how does it feel to be going to live in the
cortijo
near the town? It’ll be very nice for you, I’m sure.’

‘It’s a nightmare,’ wailed Maria. ‘A death. We belong here in our beloved Valero. We are happy here. But we had to sell it and you bought it for less than nothing. We are poor people and now we are poorer – what can we do?’ And she spread her hands in that gesture of hers that indicated despair. All this she spoke with a warm and engaging smile.

‘Oh dear, I don’t want to drive you from your home. We’re not going to be moving in for a while. You can stay here all summer. No, for heaven’s sake, you can stay as long as . . . ’ A fierce cough from Ana drowned the rest.

We resumed the silence, Romero staring fixedly at Ana, until I was spurred into a fresh conversational gambit by a strong smell wafting through the window on the stiff breeze.

‘Goats! Got goats here, have you?’

‘Yes, goats.’

‘They’ve got goats here, Ana.’

‘How interesting.’

‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ asked Maria.

‘Oh please,’ we chorused, desperate for some event, some ritual to break the deadlock.

Pedro and Maria both leaped up and shot outside with a saucepan and a torch, slamming the door after them. Ana and I looked at each other in silence for a minute.

‘It’s going to be goat’s milk,’ whispered Ana. For some reason, she didn’t want to be caught talking while our hosts were out of the room. ‘They’re going to milk a goat and give us the milk in a glass as if it came from a bottle.’

Maria and Pedro, however, had no such pretensions. Below us we heard a thumping and scuffling, a dark oath and the fart of a goat: then the metallic hiss as the two thin streams of milk spurted into the saucepan. Soon, but not too soon, for I think they too were trying to string the thing out as long as they could, our hosts returned with a saucepanful of white foam.

‘Ah – milk,’ I said fatuously. ‘Would it perhaps be goat’s milk?’

‘Of course. Now we must boil it.’

Maria took a camping stove and placed the saucepan on it. We all gathered round to watch.

‘They’re boiling the milk, Ana.’

‘Look, apart from the fact that I can see they’re boiling the milk, I happen to have studied Spanish for several years. I can more or less catch the drift of what’s going on.’

Maria explained that the milk had to be brought to the boil three times before it could be drunk. ‘Malta fever.’

This entertainment spun things out for a good twenty minutes, then we drank the horrible stuff. Romero stretched and yawned. I found myself talking again.

‘Well, it’s been a truly wonderful evening but . . . well, we’re so tired we can hardly think straight. Time for bed, I think.’

Everybody agreed enthusiastically. Down the hill, beneath the pomegranate tree, Ana and I cleaned our teeth with the water that dribbled into the drum. It was a clear night with a sliver of bright moon lighting the rivers below us. The pines on the hill opposite were roaring in a high wind.

‘Lord in heaven,’ hissed Ana in the dark. ‘How long are we staying here?’

‘Five days, it was supposed to be.’

‘Well, I don’t think I can stand another evening like that. I suppose you enjoyed it because it was “the real thing”?’

‘Enjoyed might be too strong a word. Perhaps we’d better go to town for the next few nights. I’ll make some excuse.’

That night the wind rose still higher. It roared through the open bedroom window and blew a chair over. On the chair were Ana’s clothes and her glass of water.

I had worried that the business of the wind and the chair might have been the end of our whole Andalucian escapade – that is if we hadn’t spent our every last bean buying the place and thus burned our boats. But no.

‘I think it’s wonderful,’ said Ana. ‘Though I do have certain reservations.’

‘And what, pray, might they be?’

She then read to me from a long list of reservations she had prepared. It included recommendations regarding the road, the access, the water – which had not impressed her in its existing state despite the four-piece bathroom suite – and a number of other quibbles too petty to relate.

‘Very well,’ I muttered absently. ‘I’ll get all that seen to.’

A SUMMER APPRENTICESHIP

BACK IN ENGLAND WE HAD TO SPLICE ALL THE FRAYING ENDS of the existence we were about to abandon. In practical terms this meant clearing our farm cottage and working out the last few months of our various jobs.

This was a much easier task for me as I had been leading a more or less itinerant life for the last few years. Most years, I would disappear abroad for two or three months to help research a travel guide – I had been sent to China and Turkey, as well as Spain. Between times, I made a bit of money strumming a guitar in a Russian restaurant in London, and shearing and looking after sheep on the local farms. Then each Spring and Autumn, when the coffers got low, I would take off to Sweden for a few weeks, pursuing more lucrative shearing contracts.

Ana, however, had deeper roots to ease up – literally so, as she had been running a small horticultural business and needed to search around for someone to manage it in her stead. There was also a great deal of paperwork to gather – most importantly the sheaves of obscure documents that were needed for permission to take Ana’s beloved familiar, a black labrador-cross known as Beaune, and a few of her treasured plants along with us.

All this we reckoned would take nine months. Just time enough to prepare our relatives and friends for the fact that we would no longer be living amongst them. After six months, however, I found I could wait no longer and, under the thin pretence of learning from the incumbent how to run the farm, I took a cheap flight to Spain to see if El Valero was really there.

It was August, a punishingly hot month that year, and, arriving on the bus at Órgiva, I picked my way out of town along an almost dry riverbed. I had a small bag – you don’t need much in summer in Andalucía – and, perhaps a little less practically, a guitar in a case.

Towards noon I caught sight of the terraces of El Valero spreading above the riverbed. The farm looked wonderful – and this was the worst time to see it. In the middle of the day the August sun bakes all colour from the landscape. What appear in the slanting rays of morning and evening as misty hills, with clefts and pinnacles of glowing rock, reveal themselves as shadowless wastes of scrub and thorn. Best to ignore the evidence of one’s eyes and enjoy only the impressions at either end of the day.

I made a meal out of crossing the river below the farm, drenching myself from head to foot in cool water before climbing towards the house to find Romero. I had written to him, telling him I wanted to spend a month on the farm learning whatever he could teach me about it, and I supposed that his daughter had read the letter for him, for few country people over fifty here have an inkling about their written language.

As I climbed across the last terrace where the horses were tethered short in the shade of olive trees, I heard a familiar voice croaking out a song from the house. There was Romero sitting on his terrace, throwing stale bread to the dogs in the dust. He got up and lumbered towards me with a big grin. ‘You’ve come – and what’s this? We shall have music.
Estupendo
.’

‘It’s good to be here, Pedro,’ I panted, wiping away the sweat that drenched my face.

‘It’s good that you’ve come. My people have left to live in town and it gets lonely up here, though of course I have the beasts – and there’s always God. And then we have the rivers and the mountains – hah, this is indeed paradise – I shall never leave. Come on in, I’m just making lunch.’

We ducked our heads and passed through a doorway into the gloom. It was cooler in the tiny dark room, despite a fire blazing on the hearthstone. The air outside was simmering around forty degrees as we pulled two low chairs up to the flames. I watched as Pedro dazzled me with his artistry in the preparation of his staple fare,
papas a lo pobre
– ‘poor man’s potatoes’.

First he put a deep frying-pan, hideously greasy and blackened, onto a tripod over the flames and into it poured what I judged to be two coffee-cupfuls (after-dinner size) of olive oil. Then with his pocket knife he hacked up a couple of onions, without being too delicate in the matter of peeling them. As they fizzled gladly in the oil, he pulled to pieces a whole head of garlic and tossed the lot into the pan.

‘Don’t you peel the cloves?’ I asked.

‘Lord no! If you don’t peel them they don’t burn, and they keep their flavour better. Less work too.’

He’s right as a matter of fact.

He then took a bucket in which were potatoes hygienically swimming in water; these he had peeled. Squatting over the fire, sweat pouring from his huge body, he chopped them roughly – great coarse chips, straight into the spitting oil. When the pan was brimful he stirred it about a bit with a stick and added some twigs to the fire for a better blaze. In a basket hanging from a pole were green and red peppers. Taking five or six small ones, he again tossed them in whole.

‘Right, that can look after itself for a bit now,’ said Pedro, giving it a quick stir, and proceeded to the laying of the table. A wobbly wooden cable drum stood on the terrace. Upon this he placed an old fish-tin which he filled with a huge fistful of olives and a dozen pickled chilli peppers. From a paper sack he took a round loaf of bread like a river-stone and cut it into quarters, returning two to the sack. Then he put two bent forks and two tumblers on the table and went to check the main dish. I sat down and poured wine from the plastic bottle and ate an olive – pickled with lots of garlic, lots of salt and a little less of thyme, lavender and heaven knows what else. A swig of the thick brown wine washed it down.

Gazing absently past the slobbering dogs and down the steep hill, I watched the two rivers curl from the gorge. The hills to the south were almost invisible in the haze of the heat. Another slug of wine and a deep, deep sigh. This was about to be one of those unforgettable meals.

Pedro emerged grinning with the sizzling pan which he plonked onto a tile carefully placed to prevent it staining the cable drum. Then he fetched a huge greasy ham, cut two enormous fatty wodges, and put it back on a hook on a beam. He then sat down on the step, took a swig of wine, and sighed with contentment.

I jabbed into the pan with my fork, gnawed on my ham, gulped my brown wine and chatted to my amiable host. The food was delicious. I did a lot of the cooking that month and it was almost always
papas a lo pobre
, which Pedro favoured for breakfast, lunch and supper, each time with the statutory two glasses of wine. But I never managed quite the same effect with the dish as Pedro achieved.

‘You’ve bought paradise,’ he sighed. ‘And for nothing. It was a gift. Here you have the finest air and water in the world. I’ve been around a bit,’ and he indicated various spots in the surrounding hills, all visible from the house, ‘but I’ve never found anywhere like this.’

‘If you love it like you say you do, Pedro, why did you sell it?’

‘My people. My people don’t like it here. If it weren’t for my people I’d stay here for ever. Here there’s the best of everything in the world. There’s rich soil – it’ll give you the best vegetables you’ll ever eat; there’s fruit drooping on the trees, sweet water from the spring, and all this glorious fresh air.’

We screwed up our eyes and looked out through the shimmering air onto fields baked by the ferocious sun.

‘Nobody will bother you out here; you won’t have to worry about the bad milk of the town.’

‘The what?’ I asked.

‘The people of the town, they’re rotten right through – not to be trusted, screw you soon as look at you. Nothing, let me tell you, Cristóbal, is as important as being honest and straightforward and treating people right . . . but what do they care? You just be careful of them. Play some guitar.’

I needed no more asking. I took the guitar from its case, tuned it, and pottered into a flamenco piece. Pedro rocked back on his chair, listening with half-closed eyes, then started clapping and singing quietly. He sang badly, disjointed couplets delivered in a cracked groan of a voice, and the guitar-playing was all out of time and with the wrong chords. But we enjoyed it.

Pedro was the first to break off. He hauled himself to his feet, picked up the hunks of stale bread and ham fat from his plate and flung them at the creatures surrounding the table. The meal had come to a close.

‘It’s too hot to walk with the beasts,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going to sleep.’

I slept too, or tried to sleep, on a mattress on the floor of the big house, but the flies kept me awake. They were everywhere. I swatted at them and cussed and tossed and turned and all to no avail. I must have slept eventually, though, because I awoke in a boiling sweat to the sound of Pedro’s voice ringing round the hills. I hauled my sopping body from beneath the thin sheet and blinked into the blinding light. Seven o’clock, the afternoon gone, but now not only was the sun burning fiercely from high in the sky, but all the hills and rocks were giving back as good as they had got and radiating heat vengefully back into the air. The air, sandwiched between its tormentors, had given up and lay draped over the valley like a rag.

Accustoming my eyes to the glare, I leaned over the terrace and spotted Pedro sitting motionless on his horse down by the river, surrounded by his little group of acolytes. He was singing.

Somewhere in the valley a frog was singing

Polish up my fine crystal glasses . . .

A couple of terraces below the house was to be found one of the miracles of El Valero, a torrent of water that rushed out from a rock and tumbled into a little pool below. I sat in the pool and poured bucketful after bucketful over my head and body. There was a soapdish and a bottle of shampoo and towels and some washing hanging from a wire strung between two acacia trees. Without needing to put shoes or clothes on, I could take just five paces and pick oranges, mandarins, figs or grapes, fresh from the trees. I cooled them in the waterfall and stuffed myself.

From this vantage point I could see a farm in the shade on the west side of the valley. It was a low white building half-buried in surrounding clouds of olive trees. There lived Bernardo and Isabel and their children, a Dutch family fled from Rotterdam to farm olives and a few goats. That evening I went to introduce myself to valley society.

A couple of flimsy poles spanned the river and led to the foot of the steep path that wound up the hill to the Dutch couple’s farm. As I stumbled across the stony lower terraces, an improbable procession emerged from the shrubbery of the terrace above. The motive force was a team of several goats, a mule and a sheep, all harnessed by the forefoot and connected by long ropes to a sort of human maypole: a large amiable-looking man who hadn’t shaved that day, nor the day before, clad in T-shirt, floral Bermuda shorts and Wellington boots. Two children were running up the grassy slope behind him, each swinging a brightly coloured plastic bucket. The whole scene was oddly reminiscent of a television advertisement for breakfast cereal.

Suddenly they spied me. ‘Whooa!’ roared Bernardo, for it was he. The mule stopped, two goats passed it on the left, one passed between its legs, and the sheep darted down a bank on the right.

I climbed up to greet him.

‘You must be the lunatic who’s bought El Valero. We’ve heard about you,’ he said with a chuckle, attempting to hold out his right hand but failing. ‘Welcome to the valley. Wait while I put these creatures away and I can greet you properly.’

He set patiently about untangling the chaos of ropes and began distributing his animals among their various night quarters. ‘So, are you going to come and live here, or just stay here for the summer holidays?’ he asked, leading me to the terrace where Isabel, his wife, was already laying out some tapas.

‘We’re going to live here and try and farm the place.’

‘Good. I hate to see more land abandoned. Wine for our new neighbour. We’ll drink, if one needs any excuse to drink wine, to new life in the valley.’

Bernardo and Isabel were certainly doing their bit for new life in the valley. They had moved here five years before with their young son Fabian; a daughter, Maite, a sweet-faced child with long tresses of auburn hair, was born shortly after they arrived, and unless I was mistaken Isabel would be ‘giving light’, as the Spanish put it, again within a month or two. They had bought their farm derelict and abandoned and, with ferocious hard work and the dreamy enthusiasm which city people bring to country living, were turning it little by little into a working farm and a pleasure garden for the children.

There was much to talk about as we drank copious quantities of wine, the same brown stuff Pedro and I had been drinking over the river:
costa
as they call it, in deference to its being grown on the slopes above the coast. I felt relaxed and easy with these people who, with their big booming laughs and infectious good nature, filled the empty space in the valley they had come to occupy.

They told me how pleased Romero was to sell the place and I began to put them right, explaining how he was forever moaning about how much he loved the place and hated to be parted from it – and ‘especially for the misery of money I paid him.’