Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain (7 page)

I sat on the bed, checking that Ana had not succumbed to the lethal effects of the night breeze. She seemed alright.

‘Where’s my tea?’ she said.

‘Do you really want a morning cup of tea?’

She weighed this carefully. ‘No, definitely not.’

‘I think Pedro is making
papas a lo pobre
and you could wash it down with a couple of glasses of
costa
.’

‘I’d rather die.’

‘It would appear that you nearly did, me also, and we nearly did for Pedro into the bargain. He says the night wind is absolutely lethal and you should never sleep with the windows open.’ ‘That man talks more cock than a cartload of hens. Really, I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’

I assumed a pained expression at Ana’s choice of language.

‘Of course, of course, but you never know.’

Ana got up, Beaune bounded off the bed, and the three of us went outside and watched the morning sun play with the shadows on the hills opposite. From below came the smell of frying potatoes, onions and garlic – strong food.

A notion was forming in my head that the right thing to do on the first morning of our new life would be to climb the hill behind the house and survey our new domain together.

‘I can’t see why we have to clamber all the way up there to see the farm which is down here,’ said Ana.

‘Well, for one thing, it’s a natural and wholesome human urge to want to get to the top of whatever hill one sees. Without that urge we would scarcely be human . . . would we?’

‘That urge, as you put it, is utterly lacking in me.’

‘Don’t you long to know what’s over on the other side of a mountain?’

‘In the unlikely event of my curiosity being that strong, I think it would be far more sensible to drive round and see whatever it is as it’s meant to be seen,’ Ana countered. ‘Viewed from its own level ground.’

Bernardo has an interesting comment on this subject. He too used to be possessed by that admirable urge to climb to the peak of whatever prominence he encountered, but living in the mountains changed all that and now he has not the least desire to climb even the humblest hillock. In fifteen years, he admits, he has never even seen the top of his own land, finding more than enough to occupy himself at the bottom of it. Still, such sentiments lay well ahead of me and I eventually cajoled Ana into the climb by dwelling on the healthy exercise the dog would get from such an expedition.

Beaune raced gleefully into the scrub leaving us to climb slowly up behind her towards a concrete blockhouse perched at the hill’s summit. Amazingly enough, this blockhouse once presided over an aerial cableway that fifty years ago transported minerals across the valley, from the Minas del Conjuro ten kilometres to the east, out to the port of Motril thirty kilometres to the southwest.

Once at the top, Ana seemed well pleased with the view. You lose the sound of the rivers up on the heights and a curious silence reigns, punctuated only by the cries of the tutubias and the breezes sighing in the broom. Beaune’s fur and our trousers were coated in scent from the bushes of rosemary we had bashed through and the fragrance was made more interesting by the addition of lavender and several varieties of thyme, tinged by the odd clump of evil-smelling rue.

Far below, the clear water of the gently flowing Cádiar river mingled with the darker rushing waters of the Río Trevélez and together crashed and tumbled down the rocky bed to the gorge at El Granadino. In the easternmost of the three triangles made by the joining of the rivers lay El Valero. We sat on a hummock and traced the edge of the land as it fell steeply almost to the water’s edge on the south side, and flattened into wide river-fields on the north.

Back at the farm, with half the morning still ahead, I bounced across the river in the Landrover to fetch another load of our ridiculous and embarrassing worldly goods from the trailer. It was doubly embarrassing now, for the occupants of the few houses nearby had gathered to pass muttered comments on each item as it emerged.

‘That must be their pig-killing table.’

‘No! Do they really use things like that over there?’

In fact it was our dining table, a fine piece of joinery that I had once hauled back from an antique shop for Ana’s birthday. Interestingly, nobody seemed to want to hazard a guess about my electric sheep-shearing equipment, which was greeted with a puzzled silence.

Chastened by this reception of our possessions, I crept up the river again to unload in front of Pedro, who subjected each and every object to yet more critical commentary. I thanked the unseen powers that had made us leave Ana’s collection of china toads and turtles by a roadside in England, when our trailer had proved too heavy to budge.

By the end of the morning I had moved our remaining gear from the trailer and installed it in the house. Ana, with a dust-pan and brush and some jam-jars full of flowers, had made the place into some semblance of a home. As I rumbled up the track with the last load, she was sitting with Pedro, eating lunch.

‘Pedro and I have drawn up a list of what we need,’ Ana announced. ‘Running water, that’s the main thing,’ asserted Pedro. ‘Proper civilised people like you should not be without running water.’

I gaped. Since when had he transformed himself into such an advocate of modern living? But Ana was away. ‘You must have had running water here once?’ she asked Pedro. ‘ What about the oil-drum on the bathroom roof?’

‘Ah, we used to fill that up with buckets from below. The old spring we used would never reach that high. What you must do is buy some hose and run it to one of the springs on the other side of the valley, in the
barranco
. I’ve been wanting to do that for years but you know how it is: my people, they wouldn’t hear of it. They won’t part with a penny, my people.’

‘That’s a hell of a long way to run a hose,’ I objected. ‘And besides, we don’t have any rights to that water.’

‘Lord, that doesn’t matter!’ Pedro scoffed. ‘That’s lost water, anyone can have it. You’ll be alright with that. As for the distance, well, it’s less than a thousand metres, and it should be high enough to give you good pressure in the bathroom. It’s fine sweet water too, you can drink it. You’ll have spring water to drink in your own house and plenty left over for watering. You’ll be able to turn the place into a paradise. The first thing is to get a new oil-drum for the bathroom roof. Then Ana will need a cooker – she can’t possibly cook like me over this disgusting twig fire. And you’ll need a fridge to keep the beer cold.’

‘I think he’s more or less got the priorities right,’ said Ana with a grin.

‘Water, cooker and fridge; then we’ll get some food in and we’ll be away. We’ll go into town after lunch.’

So we went to town in search of an oil-drum and cooker. I couldn’t whip up a great deal of enthusiasm for the fridge, as the weather was pretty cool at the end of November, and I’ve never liked cold beer. I also rather liked the romance of cooking in a dark corner over a twig fire. Ana was adamant, however, so we searched out a gas cooker. Of course there were no oil-drums to be had in town, so we had to buy a big new plastic one. A roll of hose, some sausage and some wine – these last despite Pedro’s earnest protestations – completed the day’s purchases.

‘Why on earth you want to pay good money to buy food beats me,’ said Pedro with a pained look when we got back with our purchases. ‘The farm is bursting with good food and we have lots of wine. There’s a whole clamp of potatoes under a pile of brushwood by the acacia trees. There’s sacks of onions, lots of garlic, peppers and tomatoes still on the plants, and aubergines too, as well as olives and oranges and ham . . . and,
vaya
, there you have it –
papas a lo pobre
. . . Of course, occasionally it is no bad thing to buy a tin of tuna or sardines to add to the potatoes, you know, vary the diet a bit, but this habit of buying all this unnecessary food, it hurts me a lot.’

Pedro’s insistence that running water in a house was worth some expenditure of energy and money may have been out of character but he had a point. Ana was certainly convinced, so the next day I set to fixing up some sort of system. I carried the tank up to the saddle of the hill above the house and connected the hose to a more or less round hole that I’d punched and filed in the bottom. Then I rolled the hose down the hill and, with a length of wire and an old bit of rubber tubing, connected it to the bit of copper pipe that stuck out of the bathroom roof. Then with some string, a rag, and a plastic bag, I stuffed up the hole in the bottom of the tank.

After this we gathered every bucket and tub and bottle and drum we could find, and headed in the Landrover down to the river. We filled them all and crept back along the stony riverbed towards the house. A great bounce up the hill by the entrance to the lower fields and we lost half the water at one huge slop. It took us twenty minutes of careful creeping to get back to the tank. What remained was about fifty litres. It didn’t look much swilling about at the bottom of a five-hundred-litre tank but it would do to get us started. I ran down to the bathroom and called Ana in to watch as I turned on the tap . . . Nothing, not even a burble, emerged.

‘I can’t understand it. It’s so simple, surely it has to work. There must be some factor I’ve left out of my calculations.’

‘
Abejorros
,’ said Pedro from the doorway. ‘The pipes are probably full of
abejorros
nests.’

Abejorros
are like huge black and blue bees. They wobble clumsily about on hopelessly inadequate but very beautiful blue wings. Opinion differs as to whether they sting or not. They give the impression of being able to deliver a very nasty sting indeed, but as I’ve never been stung by one myself, I give them the benefit of the doubt. They build their nests in any interesting hole that presents itself, mainly hollow canes, but also in pipes and hoses if they are left idle for long enough. When we disconnected the hose and poked a piece of wire into the copper pipe we found it was stuffed full of dead
abejorros
and their nests.

I scraped out the detritus and reconnected the pipes. Back down to the bathroom, a little disconcertedly this time, as I couldn’t help noticing that there hadn’t been a drop of water anywhere near the insects. Again I turned on the tap. Again the humiliating silence. Now I know nothing about plumbing, and the world of Johnson couplers, header-tanks and back-pressure is one that I’d rather leave the lid on. But at least one elementary notion had rubbed off on me from school physics: water apparently always runs downhill. This law didn’t seem to be holding good here. I looked desperately at Pedro, who was picking his teeth with his knife, leaning on the doorpost.

‘Air in the pipe.’

‘Of course there’s air in the pipe, but what can I do about it?’

‘Suck the tap.’

‘I can’t suck the tap. I can’t get my head in the bloody sink!’

‘Disconnect the shower and suck that.’

So I sucked the shower until my head went red. There was a horrible noise of blubbering and slobbering, a whoof of air, and out came a dribble of brown water.

‘Something’s happening!’ I yelled. The brown dribble stopped. More air hissed out, the pipe snaked about a bit, coughed, then – mercy be! – a clear jet of water shot from the shower-hose.

Jubilation indeed. Running water had finally arrived in the bathroom of El Valero.

‘It’s not really running water,’ cautioned Ana. ‘Not if you have to drive all the way down to the river to fetch it.’

‘Look, you turn on the tap – water comes out of it. That’s running water in my book.’

But Ana was pleased and I could see it.

‘This is the future,’ said Pedro portentously. ‘We must celebrate, but first let’s eat and drink.’

‘Wait, I must wash my hands with running water in the sink.’ I turned the tap on lovingly, and roiled and moiled my hands in the glorious jet of clear water. Rarely had I taken so much pleasure in that simple ritual. I stepped outside the dimly lit bathroom into the dazzling daylight, and there on the way down to lunch I enjoyed a vision of El Valero with shooting fountains and chuckling rills, silver-tapped sinks spurting sweet water, and gently bubbling bidets.

Still, I brooded a little over Ana’s denigration of my new water system. She was right; you couldn’t really call it running water if you had to drive down to the river to fetch it. Pedro’s description of the ‘lost water’ spring seemed like it might hold the answer. I decided to consult Domingo.

As ever, Domingo was happy to lend a hand and, furthermore, he knew the best spring and the best way to go about the job. Within a couple of days we had a concrete tank built to catch the water from a spring we had selected over on the other side of the valley. From it we ran rolls of polyethylene hose I had bought in Granada, down through the thickets of brambles and canebreaks, out across the river, and up the hill to our house. There, with the aid of a stone and a piece of string, we connected the hose to the plastic water tank.

The next day the tank was ready to be filled and after a few hours of messing about with the air and
abejorros
, we had water gushing continuously from the taps. It seems fickle but from that moment my enchantment with the oil drum by the pomegranate tree, and its trickle of filthy water, evaporated.

Before long, we began to harbour thoughts of even greater indulgence – a hot shower in our own bathroom. Hitherto we had walked all the way across the valley to make use of Bernardo’s. ‘Feel free to come and use our shower whenever you want,’ he had offered. ‘There’s a dead goat in it at the moment. Just try not to get soap on the goat, will you?’

There was indeed a goat hanging from the shower-pipe, spread-eagled without its skin and innards. The shower was the only place he could be sure that the flies wouldn’t get at the meat, so there it hung until it was ready for the pot. It swung about jauntily and nudged you when you were least expecting it. Now prim and proper I am not, and it was very kind of Bernardo to let us share his bathroom facilities, but the goat pushed me fast in the direction of a water-heater of our own. The solution was simple. We went to Órgiva and bought one.