Sacred Sierra (37 page)

‘So he lived out his last years in virtual self-imprisonment, surrounded by his library of over a thousand books, occasionally leaving Peñíscola to come up here to the mountains, but usually staying in his safe hideaway. A moderate man, some say a vegetarian, and greatly loved by the local people. When he visited Morella on one occasion, the town was infested with flies, but Papa Luna put a curse on them, and there’s never been a fly seen there since.

‘And so it went on, until, in 1423, at the age of ninety-five, he finally died, having outlived five of his rivals. The church bells rang out spontaneously, while mourners noted how his body smelled of flowers. Some of his followers tried to carry on for a while, and one of his four cardinals was named pope, but after a few years they realised it was a lost cause, and in the town of San Mateo, just inland from the coast, the Avignon line rejoined the rest of the Church.

‘Not that they don’t insist round here that he really was the true pope –
our
pope. They say that when there’s a full moon you can see Papa Luna’s ghost walking the ramparts of Peñíscola shouting
¡El verdadero papa soy yo!
. The waves that beat against the rocks below the castle, you see, are actually sea-spirits of the people who followed him into exile, and whenever Papa Luna is annoyed a great plume of sea spray shoots up from a tunnel running underneath the castle that they call the
Bufador
. The worst instance, as you can imagine, was when an Italian took his name – Benedict XIII – on becoming pope back in the eighteenth century. As Papa Luna had been declared an anti-pope, the name was free for future use, you see.’

*

Arcadio was still waiting for the hospital to call him in for his eye operation.

‘Keep putting it off,’ he said. ‘Got more important cases to deal with.’

It suited him, fearful as he was, that they should take their time, but all the while it extended the stress of waiting for it all to be over with. Still he carried on as usual, driving around the valley with impaired vision in only one eye, scouting around his almond groves, checking out his beehives. He’d come up every now and again, and we’d sit under the oak tree for a while drinking wine from scratchy tumblers, sometimes talking, at others simply looking out over the valley and watching the birds. There were some new arrivals now, migratory birds that came up here to spend the summer. On a couple of evenings now I’d heard the distinctive triple call of a hoopoe, or a
pu-put
, as Arcadio called it.

‘They never hunt those,’ he said. ‘Smell awful, like carrion, even before they’re dead.’

One afternoon he pointed down at the little brown balls, like nuts, that always littered the ground beneath the oak tree. I hadn’t paid them much attention before.

‘Got plenty of oak-galls here,’ he said, picking one up and crushing it in his short, thick fingers. A thick, yellowy powder fell out and was caught up by the breeze.

What exactly were they?

‘Insects try to get inside the oak,’ he explained. ‘Burrow into the wood. So the oak protects itself by making this
galla
around it. The tree keeps itself clean of bugs, and the bug gets a place to lay its eggs.’

I held one in my hand. It was a dull, almost greyish-brown colour on the outside, with a hard, rough surface. Inside, though, there was a soft, powdery sponge.

‘See the little hole?’ Arcadio said. ‘That’s where the insect gets inside.’

I turned it over, then looked up at the branches above: there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them, jutting out from almost every twig, like Christmas decorations, but where the lights had been switched off.

‘Can you use them for anything?’ I asked. It seemed nothing here, no plant or stone, was without its value. In Arcadio’s world they were bound to be a cure for stomachache, or fevers, or something.

He paused for a moment, rolling one of them between the palms of his hands.

‘I’ve heard they once made ink out of them,’ he said. ‘Never done it myself, so I can’t tell you what else you need.’

Ink! An idea in me began to stir.

‘Not a great one for writing, me,’ he grinned. ‘Only went to school for three months, back when I was seven. Father wanted me working in the fields, so he pulled me out and brought me back to the
mas
.’

I looked at all the oak-galls lying around, and the great quantities still hanging from the branches above. There was probably enough here to start an ink factory. I would have to find out how to make it. It was probably something to do with tannins – I imagined the oak-galls were stuffed with them.

I already knew what I wanted to use it for. Faustino’s stories played on my mind, repeating themselves over and again as I worked on the land, did repairs on the house, cooked meals, or as I was going to sleep. I’d repeat them to Salud to keep them fresh and help memorise them, jotting down a few notes, like a sketch, of the outline. But with ink from the oak-galls I would write them down properly. It seemed only fitting that ink made from the local earth should be used to record his earth tales.

Perhaps, I thought, Faustino would know about making ink from oak-galls. But I didn’t have to ask. The answer came, curiously enough, from Jordi, the postman.

‘They used to make ink like that during the Republic, back in the thirties,’ he said. For some reason – I can’t remember why – the topic of oak-galls came up in conversation during one of our chats when I went down to collect the mail.

‘The government was keen to increase learning and education,’ he said. ‘Built schools all over the place. The levels of illiteracy back then were scandalous.’

‘And they used oak-galls to produce ink?’ I said.

‘Cheaper that way. They wanted to help the children learn to write.’

I jotted down the basic recipe from what he could remember of it and hurried back to the
mas
to try it out. It went like this.

The ‘inkiness’ of the ink came from the tannins in the oak-galls, as I had suspected, but the trick was extracting them and then turning them into something with which you could write. For this process, the two other main ingredients were some rusty nails and some vinegar.

On my first attempt, as an experiment, I crushed five or six oak-galls in a bag with a hammer, and then poured the powdery mix into a jar with about half a litre of white-wine vinegar. Then I added the rusty nails. Apparently, the acetic acid of the vinegar on the nails produced iron sulphate, which reacted with the tannins.

I let it sit for a few days, occasionally checking to see whether anything had happened. Eventually, after almost a week, I took it out to see whether the process had worked. It smelled very sharp, and quite unpleasant. I fished out the nails with a fork, drained the ink into a container, and then threw away the pulp of the oak-galls that had sifted to the bottom.

I didn’t have a large amount, nor did I have the right kind of pen for writing with. So, not being able to find a feather, I whittled a piece of wood into a sharp point and dipped it into the ink.

I wouldn’t have won any handwriting prizes with what came out, but the marks made on the paper were definitely ink-like, and blotchy, the ink growing distinctly darker as it dried. After a few attempts I managed to scratch out a few half-legible words. After all the hundreds of thousands I had written with ballpoint pens bought for ten pence at the corner shop, or picked up accidentally from God knows where, not since I had written my first letters in primary school had I felt such joy at the simple act of making words on a page. The fact that you could barely read them, and that they made no sense, was irrelevant. My own ink from my own tree was making those marks.

A proper pen, paper and some blotting paper. It was time to start writing down Faustino’s stories.

*

It was midsummer’s eve,
la noche de San Juan
. I drove up with Salud through the mountains on the now familiar trail to Faustino’s place, up behind the farm and towards the peak of Penyagolosa, across empty,
rocky
fields and through pine forests full of mistletoe. The sun stood over the western horizon, a purply light hovering over the hills and sierras far into the plains of central Spain beyond. Jays, their brightly coloured wings flashing in the lengthening shadows, struck out in threes and fours as we bumped along.

When we arrived, we found Faustino face-down on the floor. He didn’t move when we called through the open doorway. For a moment we were unsure what to do. Was he praying? Perhaps he’d smoked too much home-grown tobacco. The dog and the cat were nowhere to be seen, while his songbird was hopping about frantically inside her cage. The door at the back of the kitchen was open, and it looked through to what seemed to be a study, or library: bookcases covered the walls from floor to ceiling, while hundreds of books were piled in towers, loose papers with handwriting on them scattered about the place.

I looked back at Faustino.

‘Oh, my God,’ Salud started. ‘You don’t think …’

‘Faustino!’ I called. There was no response, his body motionless on the ground.

I stepped through the doorway and walked towards him, my heart pumping. God forbid he should have had some kind of attack up here. Very gently and slowly I lowered my hand to feel him and see if he was all right. When my fingers were no less than an inch from him he jumped up with a start.

‘Oh!’ he said, looking up at us as though we were something odd and exotic. ‘You’re here already.’

He pulled himself up and on to his feet, and smiled, his pale-blue eyes like sapphires.

I thought it best not to say anything, but Salud was more concerned.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘Is there anything you want us to do?’

For a moment I thought he might snap at her, but he simply beamed back.

‘I’m fine, my dear. Very kind of you to ask.’

He pulled his hair tight into the rubber band that held his ponytail, then tripped over to a wooden cupboard at the back of the kitchen and started pulling out some glasses. Salud gave me a look.

‘Drink?’ he said. ‘Tonight is an important night.’

We drank an aperitif, clinking glasses in a triangle like an alcoholic version of the Three Musketeers.

‘To San Juan,’ Faustino said.

‘San Juan,’ we echoed.

Faustino clapped his hands.

‘Right. To work.’

I pulled out some lamb chops we’d brought, placed them on a wire rack and started cooking them over the open fire, clearing away a patch of embers to one side. Faustino pulled out a large pestle made from a single lump of marble and started crushing cloves of garlic in it with a wooden mortar, pouring in the occasional drop of olive oil as he quickly pressed and stirred.

‘The best garlic mayonnaise –
all i oli
,’ he said, ‘has to be made fresh just before eating. That way it doesn’t oxidise and change its flavour.’

Salud leaned over to offer to do it for him: she was still worried about him. But now he seemed to sparkle with life, without the slightest indication that he’d been lying face-down on the cold stone floor only moments before, dead to the world.

‘Open the wine,’ he said to her. ‘The corkscrew’s in the drawer.’

It was never made clear if he recognised me from that first time when I’d gone to see him, so many years before, when he’d chased me away from his
mas
in no uncertain terms. I felt it best not to bring it up, not to ask. The fragile bond that had grown up between us so quickly might be lost or broken. But part of me couldn’t help wondering if I really would have understood or absorbed anything of his stories if he’d told them to me back then – a simple, adventure-seeking day tripper. Having lived up at the farm for the past few months, I had the feeling of starting to sink roots into this earth myself. Before, it would have meant little to me.

A smell of lightly burnt lamb fat wafted through the room as I turned over the chops. The dog and cat came in from outside to join in, curious at the cooking sounds and scents.

‘I’ve got some watermelon for later,’ Faustino said.

‘Ah, my favourite.’ Salud’s eyes lit up.

‘It is the tradition to eat it tonight. Part of the San Juan festivities.’

Down on the coast, we were used to the usual midsummer
celebrations
, where bonfires and fireworks were let off on the beach, the whole city, it seemed, heading out to the seashore to set up barbecues and dip their feet in the water at midnight for good luck. The traffic jams up and down the coastal roads stretched for miles. Up here in the mountains, however, in the vicinity of Penyagolosa, a mountain linked to St John himself, they did things differently.

‘Here it’s all to do with magic and magical rituals,’ Faustino said, still beating away energetically at the
all i oli
.

‘Some say the mountain was originally sacred to the ancient Celtic god of light and the sun, Lug, or Lugus. So Penyagolosa would have been something like Penyalugosa – Lug’s Mount. But the consonants got switched round. When the Romans came, they associated Lug with their god Mercury, but whether from there, once the Christians took over, he became St John …? Perhaps.’

Often the link between pagan deities and Christian saints was fairly clear, he said. The feast of the Virgin Mary was held on 15 August, while the ancients had celebrated 13 August as the day of the goddess Diana – also a virgin. The parallels between the two were emphasised by the fact that the moon was the symbol for both, while Mary was said to have died at Ephesus, the site of the great temple to Diana/Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In the end, however, there were almost certainly elements of many ancient goddesses in the character of the Madonna. The link between Lug/Mercury and St John, on the other hand, was more difficult to determine.

‘The Christian saints are a colourful and elemental enough pantheon as it is,’ he said, ‘without working out all the time who they might be derived from. These mythological characters have always been with us, and although they may change their names and appearance every so often, they never go away. John the Baptist is fascinating in himself, perhaps even more so than either Mercury or the little-understood Lug.’