Sacred Sierra (38 page)

According to local legend, he said, everyone who had witnessed St John’s execution was condemned to dance Salome’s dance for the rest of eternity. And they could only be seen, out up on the mountain, on that very evening. But anyone who caught sight of these grotesque, whirling figures would be sent mad, or die of fright on the spot, unless they called out in time for protection from St John himself.

‘So we’ll be staying in tonight, then?’ said Salud with a laugh.

I remembered the bonfires of the feast of Sant Antoni, back in January, and how Concha and El Clossa had hinted at connections between the Christian and the pagan midwinter festivals. I wondered if Faustino knew anything about it.

Fire was an obvious symbol of light and the sun, he explained, but was commonly associated, like water, with purification. The dates didn’t exactly coincide, but the Roman purification festival
Februa
was held in the middle of the following month, to which it had given its name. So there might be a link there. Back then young men dressed in skins had beaten the local girls with sticks to make them fertile, much as they did today during Sant Antoni. But also
fiebre
, or fever, came from the same root, the idea that the burning and sweating of a fever purified the body in some way. This in turn made one think of ‘St Anthony’s fire’, an old name for ergotism. Which brought us back to the midwinter festival of Sant Antoni.

‘So they’re linked,’ I said.

‘Are they?’ he said with a smile. ‘I don’t know. All we’ve done is make a circle. That’s easy. The ancient Iberians used to bless their animals at sacred sites in the mountains, so perhaps that’s part of the festival’s origins as well.’

The lamb chops were ready. We sat at the table, some salad in a bowl, a bottle of wine, bread, dollops of Faustino’s fresh
all i oli
placed at the edge of our plates, and the chops piled high on a tray in the centre. We dived in, gobbling them down with sticky, greasy fingers. The
all i oli
was so strong I thought I was going to hallucinate.

Afterwards, Salud cut chunks of sweet red watermelon and we cooled our mouths. Faustino threw the bones to the dog, picking off some remaining strands of meat and feeding them to the cat. She miaowed contentedly, her heavy purring filling the room as she ate. The dog sat in a corner, cracking the bones apart with his teeth.

‘Sorry, Dimoni,’ Faustino said to the songbird in its cage. ‘Nothing for you.’

The bird sang out and fluttered its wings. It already seemed to be falling asleep.

‘Dimoni?’ Salud asked.

‘She’s a little devil,’ Faustino said, and gave a chesty laugh.

We cleared away the plates and tidied up before heading out to the covered patio. Salud and I sat on the old leather sofa; Faustino drew up a wicker chair. He pulled out a buckskin pouch where he kept his tobacco and started rolling another cigarette, carefully and lovingly moulding and forming it in his fingers before putting it in his mouth, lighting it and breathing in. After a few moments he let the smoke pour out thickly through his nostrils and seemed to relax deeply into his chair.

‘Keep it all in special boxes, one for each month,’ he said. ‘Make sure I don’t run out that way. Have to ration it otherwise I’d smoke a whole year’s supply in a week.’

He laughed again, the laugh turning into a cough that seemed to catch hold of him and shake his skinny frame until we thought it might crack. His face went bright red, pale-blue eyes staring out in near panic. Salud rushed up and got him a glass of water. He took it from her and drank, then smiled again.

‘Who said laughing was supposed to be good for you?’ he said.

I sensed that Salud could feel it, too: a desire born out of concern and sympathy to ask if he was really all right, if there was something we could possibly do; and an understanding that if he was truly ill the last thing he would want was for us to know the details, or to act as nursemaids. We kept a respectful, if uncomfortable, silence.

Faustino finished smoking. I got up from the sofa and walked to the edge of the patio. The sun had already gone down behind us some time ago, but there was still a faint light in the sky, and a landscape of shadows stretched out into the distance. A very occasional light was visible here and there where villages or the odd inhabited
mas
stood.

‘That must be where the pelegríns of Les Useres come up from in April,’ I said, pointing out to the south-east. We hadn’t seen El Clossa since that day. After Concha’s commune fell apart he had been keeping his head down. Usually we’d have bumped into each other at some point by now – either in the village, or else out and about in the countryside.

‘Did you do the pilgrimage this year?’ Faustino asked. I nodded.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s important, the pilgrimage. The people here
haven’t
lost their connection to the earth. And although it’s specifically meant for the village of Les Useres, it’s important for everyone in this area, passing through or near so many of the other villages on its way to San Juan. Further north, in the village of Catí, there’s another similar event the following weekend. Although that can turn into a bit more of a drunken orgy than this one: they’re probably linked to old springtime fertility rites.’

The crucial point, he insisted, was that it was all to do with rain. April was traditionally the wettest month up here, whereas on the coast it was October. We needed the rain for the crops and for the land itself to come to life briefly between the death of winter and the sleep of summer. Water was the most important element, the one that was most lacking, and the one that alone could make the earth sing.

‘Those gorges and gulleys and empty riverbeds,’ he said. ‘They can lie empty, waiting for it to rain all year. And then, if all goes well, for perhaps just a few weeks, or days even, if enough rain falls, they come into their own, the land begins to make sense. You know,’ he said looking me in the eye, ‘it was the waterfall and the stream that brought you here.’

I still remembered the thrill of that morning when I’d first seen the water cascading down our mountainside, and my scrambling walk up and over through the forest, until I’d eventually ended up here. The waterfall had only lasted for a couple more days, but for that brief time it was as if it had always meant to be, as if in those two or three days the landscape had reached a point of fleeting perfection.

And so the spring pilgrimages were a necessity: a call for the heavens to open and bring the rain that the land so needed to keep the delicate, fragile cycle in motion. Without rain, without water, there was no life.

Without quite knowing how, I understood at that moment that by ‘life’ he didn’t just mean the word in the strictly biological sense. There was more to what he was saying than a simple, natural truth.

He got up and brought out more truffle brandy. On more than one occasion, now, I’d had the feeling of slipping into a different world when at his house. But whether it was the powerful alcohol, or else something about him, the place and the stories he had to tell, I could never say. Rather than a simple
mas
, it sometimes felt more like a castle
in
a fairy tale, high up in the clouds, away from the world of day-today existence. Perhaps it was just the brandy. But I could sense it as soon as I arrived, before even drinking a drop.

‘Tonight, however,’ he said when he’d filled our glasses, ‘isn’t about rain or water. It’s about making contact with the underworld.’

He sat down in his chair again and began his story.

‘Tonight is the night when the great
Avenc
can appear on the slopes of Penyagolosa, right where we are now. A deep, bottomless, fiery chasm that opens up suddenly and closes again, never appearing twice in the same place. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll see it here before the night is out. The
Avenc
always swallows up an animal – usually a sheep or goat that has wandered off from the rest and is never seen again. Once there was a shepherd here who saw one of his flock vanish as the
Avenc
gaped open on the night of San Juan. He rushed up to the edge of the hole and looked down, but saw nothing but a strange orange glow. Curious, he threw down some shears attached to the end of the rope to see if he could touch the bottom. But down and down he let the rope fall, until he had no more, but still the shears hadn’t touched anything. So the shepherd started to haul it back up again, but this time it was far heavier than to start with. Eventually, as he strained and pulled the rope back up, just as he was getting to the end, he saw that a giant featherless chicken had bitten on to the shears and that he was bearing its weight as well. With a shout he let go and the rope and the monster fell back into the
Avenc
. Now the shepherd didn’t stop running till he got back to the village, where he told them everything that had happened. But the villagers just laughed. The shepherd was insistent, though, and so the next day a group of them went out with him to find the bottomless chasm he said had opened up the previous night. But when they got to the spot they found that there was no great hole, as the shepherd claimed. Although they did find the rope, with the shears attached to the end of it.

‘Everyone laughed at the poor shepherd, and said he had obviously fallen asleep and dreamed it all. But strangely enough, exactly a year later, on the Night of San Juan, but in a different part of the mountain, a similar thing happened when a man lost his mule down a mysterious hole in the ground that seemed to open and close, swallowing the poor
animal
up. Now the local people don’t laugh when they hear such stories, and they put it down to the
Avenc
, which thankfully only appears once a year.

‘Some say the chasm is a passageway to the Underworld itself, and that flames shoot out, burning up anyone nearby caught unawares. And that horrible beasts can appear, dragons and dinosaurs, breathing fire through their nostrils. Nobody, they say, should be on the slopes of Penyagolosa on the Night of San Juan, for they might never see the light of the following
day
.’

The Story of how the Rosemary Flower turned Blue

PEOPLE TELL THE
story of how one morning, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was walking alone through the mountains when it started to rain very heavily – one of those sudden showers that blow in from the coast, and then just as quickly blow away again. As there were no houses or shelters in sight, she ran as quickly as she could to an overhang in a nearby rockface.

After a few minutes the rain stopped and the sun came out again, but Mary’s sea-blue cloak had got wet, and so she looked for somewhere to lay it out to dry for a few minutes. The gorse bushes, with their bright yellow flowers, were too harsh and prickly and told her they would not be the place to hang out her cloak. The holm oak trees, with their bright green leaves shining wet in the sunshine, offered to help, but their branches were too high for Mary to reach.

Then the thyme spoke up from down below.

‘Lay your cloak on me,’ it said.

‘You are very kind,’ said Mary, ‘and your scent is sweet, and your mauve flowers very pretty, but I fear you are too close to the ground, and my cloak will almost certainly get dirty and muddy if I lay it on you.’

It was then that she caught sight of another bush nearby that she hadn’t noticed before. It stood alone, neither prickly, nor too high, nor too low to the ground. Its flowers were pale white, with almost no colour at all.

‘Who are you?’ asked Mary.

‘I have no name,’ said the plant, ‘nor pretty bright colours for my flowers. But you may lay your cloak on me, if you like, and in this sunshine it shall be dry in a moment. And I shall scent it with my perfume, for it is the only thing I have to give.’

So Mary lay her cloak over the bush, and in less time than it takes to tell, it was dry again. And when she placed it once more over her
shoulders
, she breathed in the wonderful refreshing scent the plant had imbued it with.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But it is not right that you have no name, nor colour for your flowers.’ And so, as she spoke, the pale flowers of the bush began to turn blue, just like the cloak that a few moments before had been lying on them

‘And from henceforth,’ said Mary, ‘you shall be known as Rosemary.’

And so she went on her way. And from that day on, the bush has always had bright blue flowers, and gone by the name of
ros mariae
, the Dew of Mary.

JULY

The Latin month
Iulius
is known as
Tamuz
in Syriac and
Mordadmah
in Persian, and is made up of thirty-one days. It is a time for harvesting seeds: from the marshmallow, the safflower, lemon balm, lettuce, basil, garden cress, purslane, melons, cucumbers and gherkins. Pomegranates begin to ripen and dates start turning red. It is a good time to work the land around the base of olive trees, as the dust thereby produced is good for the olives themselves. This should be done just before, during, or shortly after sunrise, as the dust at this time of day will be cooler. According to the
Agricultura Nabatea,
any cracks that appear in the ground during this time should be filled or covered over to prevent the heat of the day from reaching and adversely affecting any tree roots. It is said that this is not a good time for planting trees or seeds because of the hot weather, although in Seville I have seen orach sown at this time of year, and cabbages and chard are transplanted
.