Driving Over Lemons Part 3

After breakfast I would wash the plates, gla.s.ses and cutlery on a log of wood by the oil-drum beneath the pomegranate tree. Pedro showed me how it should be done and we were none too fastidious about the quality of the work, except that we always placed a cloth over the crockery laid out to dry, to keep the flies off. After breakfast I was free to entertain myself as I would, while Pedro sat on his horse in the river 'walking the beasts'. One day I followed the hose from where it dribbled in the drum to its source. Down the hill and up the Cadiar river, snaking in and out of eroded cliffs and swinging across steep drops, it pa.s.sed a ruined house, no more than a pile of stones, on the boundary of the property, then turned into a deep dead canyon. Nothing grew there on the parched earth but cracked thorns and sinister creepers: capers, as I discovered later. The rocks were coated in a white scale and a deathly sort of silence reigned. High in a barren cleft was a pool; the water dribbled from it through a slimy plastic pipe into a rusty oil-drum. At the bottom of the drum was a hole, and stuffed through the hole, with a bung of rags and string, was the source of the El Valero water supply.

I had for some time puzzled over the fact of the water supply reaching only to below the house, and the well-appointed bathroom had also remained something of a mystery. It was all properly plumbed in lavatory, bidet, shower and basin and a copper pipe led through the roof to an oil-drum that was so rusty that it no longer had any discernible form.

Eventually I raised the subject with Pedro.

'The water used to reach the roof and fill that drum, but it doesn't go that high any more.'

He wouldn't expand on that.

'We used to light a fire under the oil-drum and that way we had hot water. It was wonderful.'

During the hours when Pedro couldn't think of any work for me to do about the farm, I would go for walks, explore the farm and imagine living here, an idea that still seemed very far from reality. Or I would visit people or sometimes walk into town, an hour and a half away.

This amazed Pedro.

'What on earth do you want to go to the town for? Eating and drinking? Why, we have all the food and drink we could desire right here, and it costs nothing. It's better too here you know what you're eating, but Lord knows what sort of filth those thieves from the town will be giving you and then taking your money . . .

'Watching pa.s.sers-by on their evening promenade? Now look here, Cristobal' and here he adopted a tone of great moment 'You listen here. You are a married man and have a very fine and attractive wife. I am but a simple man, but one thing I can tell you from the bottom of my heart is that you must have respect for your woman. Bad behaviour with other women is a monstrous and terrible vice and brings with it only misery for everyone. You listen to my words because this is really important.'

He thumped his stick on the ground to emphasise the gravity of what he said and looked at me with deep concern.

'Look, I only said that I liked to admire pa.s.sers-by. I didn't say I would go to bed with them.'

He raised his eyes to heaven in anguish at the very suggestion of such an idea.

'You too, Pedro, have a delightful family and a very fine wife.'

'She's alright,' he grinned. 'Bit dry if you know what I mean.'

'Pedro!' I remonstrated, using the same lugubrious tone of concern that he had used on me. 'Pedro, one does not describe one's woman as "dry".'

'Bah!' he spat.

BRIDGE BUILDING.

'WE'RE GOING TO TOWN FOR LUNCH AT THE NEW CORTIJO CORTIJO,' Pedro announced one morning. 'You can ride the other horse.'

I hesitated. It was a while since I'd ridden a horse and I wasn't sure if I could remember how it was done. Pedro dismissed such piffling worries. Anyway, he added, he would be leading me.

We gathered food for the beasts, who would remain all day in their stables, and loaded the panniers on Pedro's horse with a couple of hundredweight of pot-plants along with odd sticks and bits of wire, twisted and lashed into arcane forms. When the horse was fully laden, Pedro neatly swung his enormous bulk off his mounting-stone onto the top of the load. The horse raised its eyebrows. I sat on the straw and canvas pack-saddle on the lesser horse while Pedro held a rope from its head-collar.

'Can't I have some reins, something to hold on to?'

'h.e.l.l no! If you hold the reins that horse will take off like a thunderbolt and kill you good and dead. You've really got to know how to ride to hold the reins on that horse. Hold on to the saddle.'

I shrugged, resigned, but not altogether sure what to do with those parts of my body that were not occupied with the business of staying on the horse.

'What's it called?'

'Brown.'

'Brown?'

'Brown. It's a brown horse,' said Pedro absently.

One of the dogs was called Brown too; it was a brown dog.

'Yee-haa Brown!!' I cried gaily as we lurched off, the dogs weaving amongst our feet. The horse and its canine namesake looked at me quizzically.

We wound down the path through the oranges and almonds and out into the riverbed where we scuffed among the hot rocks and splashed through the river. The sun blazed down on us from a cloudless sky. In euphoric mood I found myself musing on the idea of waiting in the cold drizzle of an early morning railway-station with hundreds of other besuited businessmen, waiting for the daily ride to the treadmill. 'Whatever comes of this decision,' I thought, 'it has to be better than that.'

The horses stepped delicately down the stony river. The still pines that covered the slopes made the air almost suffocating with their resinous scent. Brown and I were both covered with a film of sweat, and a cloud of happy flies kept station around our heads. The view from the river was wonderful and once I'd got the hang of balancing on the horse (which did not seem quite the fiery creature described by his owner) I was able to gaze around me and enjoy the scenery. You can't do this on foot in the river as the head must be constantly bowed to monitor the progress of the feet.

Soon, though, we left the riverbed and pa.s.sing through a narrow defile between two walled orange groves our little band stepped out onto the public highway. We would pa.s.s through two villages and countless fields full of farmers before reaching town. Now a mounted rider tends to feel a certain superiority over his humbler pedestrian fellows, by virtue of the advantage of height and also a certain arrogance which the horse, or some horses at any rate, bestow upon their rider. If, however, you are a fully grown man and you are being led on a horse, the effect is considerably diminished. You feel in fact like a prisoner of war, the scurvy dreg of some vanquished foe.

This feeling swamped me the first time one of the toilers in the fields straightened up and turned to watch us go by, our sorry procession of a man, two horses, four scrofulous curs, a thousand flies and a prisoner. How could I a.s.sume some kind of dignity in this humiliating position? s.n.a.t.c.hes of riding lessons popped helpfully up from the dim recesses of memory; the sort of things you never forget: 'Knees in tight, toes up, heels down, back straight and head held erect in a straight line between the horse's ears, a keen and alert mien in the direction of travel.'

I did all these things, first with my arms folded, then with my hands on my hips, then with one hand on my hip and the other wiping sweat from my brow in the way that I imagined a proper horseman would. I nonchalantly scratched parts of my body but soon ran out of parts to scratch. Shielding my eyes from the sun occupied one arm for a useful period. I tried swatting a few flies from the horse's flanks, which helped a bit with the dignity, but I was fighting a losing battle.

It simply cannot be done, the maintaining of the merest speck of self-esteem while being led on a mangy pack-horse along a road lined with one's future neighbours, every one of them a natural horseman. Pedro knew this. In fact I soon realised that he must have planned the whole thing for my humiliation.

He made the most of his ploy, hailing everybody we pa.s.sed to draw attention to Pedro the Conqueror and that extraordinary helpless bag of a foreigner he'd got himself. I could imagine the talk in the valley all too well. 'Romero has got himself this rich foreigner' all foreigners are a.s.sumed to be rich 'and he pulls him about on that bony old pack-horse like a sack of beans. Poor chap seems to be infested with some sort of vermin. Never stops scratching.'

I withered and died inwardly a thousand times. Slowly, ambling by the back ways and stopping to visit just about everybody who lived on the route, we headed for town. Pedro was also trying to get rid of a dog. We turned up a track, to a house or a field or a garden, where a man would be working, usually back bent to his vegetables. Pedro would draw up his horse; mine would lurch to a stop. 'Eh, Juan. You want a dog?'

The campesino campesino in question would slowly raise himself and turn to face Pedro. 'Romero. Good day.' in question would slowly raise himself and turn to face Pedro. 'Romero. Good day.'

Then his gaze would turn towards the pack-horse and its helpless load, and the care-worn country face would wrinkle with bemus.e.m.e.nt. 'What's this?'

'This is the foreigner who has bought El Valero.'

'Buenos dias, mucho gusto,' I would rabbit, wriggling like a clockwork monkey and hoping in vain to a.s.sert myself as a human presence.

'No, I don't want a dog and certainly not that dog.'

'h.e.l.l of a good dog. Its mother killed a wolf. Fearless hunter.'

'I don't hunt any more, and besides there are no wolves here.'

'This dog's mother finished off the last one.'

'Even so, I don't want it,' and he bent back to his work. 'Go with G.o.d, Romero and your foreigner.'

We would then at last turn away, Romero reaching up with his walking-stick to pull down the branch of a plum tree for us to guzzle. Then on to the next neighbour for the same discussion about the dog, with almost exactly the same dialogue. Pedro was doing a fine job of presenting me to local society.

My feeling of wretchedness grew as we progressed. Finally, as we approached the hill leading up to orgiva, I wondered how I could wriggle out of being presented to the entire town in the same fashion. We pa.s.sed a peach tree. Romero reached up with his stick and plucked a few glorious ripe peaches without stopping. He turned in his saddle and with a grin tossed me one. I lunged at it, leaning over from the saddle, and rolled neatly off the horse. Romero politely looked the other way.

'I'll walk for a bit now, Pedro. a.r.s.e getting sore.'

'As you wish.' And we set off again, me on foot with the curs at the back of the procession. I wondered that Pedro didn't have me roped up to stop me getting lost in town.

With the pittance I had paid him for El Valero, Pedro had bought a house with a big garden and a stable just on the outskirts of town. It looked like a concrete garage, with its green tin roll-down door. But it had running water and electricity, two modern conveniences that Maria had barely dreamed of before.

We found Maria crouched in a corner of the garage over a fire of sticks. A pot of stew bubbled on a tripod over the flames and peppers roasted in the ashes. We sat on a stone wall beneath the shade of a vine and ate salad and bread, and drank wine while Maria finished the cooking. One small gla.s.s of wine and I forgot the whole humiliating business of the ride to town and was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with affection for my jolly host. We talked of manly things, of horses and knives and ropes, and crops and watering and hunting and wine. Maria brought dishes of meat and peppers to the table. Pedro loaded my plate with the choicest pieces.

'Eat meat.'

Then he helped himself, while Maria crouched beside him and picked at bits from his plate. This seemed to be their preferred way of eating, she like one of those birds that pick the ticks off the backs of hippopotami.

'Delicious, Maria, a wonderful feast.'

'It is wretched food but we are poor people. We are poorer now that we have sold our beloved Valero and for the misery of money that you paid but what could we do?' she smiled.

'Uuoouaargh!' agreed Pedro, working on a huge piece of meat with his molars. 'You've bought paradise all that air, rich in waters, fine soil, sweet fruits and peace and for nothing. Eat more meat!' And again my plate was heaped with meat.

Pedro seemed to think it necessary to repeat this mantra to me at least once a day. 'And look what we have now . . . nothing,' he would warm to the theme. 'A dump of a house, a feeble little plot of land, not even enough for the potatoes.'

'Come now, Pedro, it's really very nice look at all these fruit trees . . . and so convenient for the town, Maria. Life will be so much easier for you here: you won't have to haul water from the river, there are no acequias acequias to clean, no steep hills to climb, none of the pains of country life . . . ' I rattled on. to clean, no steep hills to climb, none of the pains of country life . . . ' I rattled on.

'No scorpions,' offered Maria.

'No what?'

'Scorpions.'

'Are there scorpions?'

'Of course. The place is crawling with scorpions.'

'Si claro!' echoed Pedro with a smirk. 'You'll never be short of a scorpion at El Valero. Sometimes in the summer I've had to pour boiling water on the walls to get rid of them all. The walls are running with scorpions.' He scrabbled his fingers graphically across the table-top.

'And snakes,' he continued happily. 'Not too many up at the house, but the valley is alive with them. Thick as my thigh, some of them.'

'Poisonous snakes?'

'No, not so poisonous . . . but dangerous. Chap in the valley had his leg broken by a snake last year.'

'How? How the h.e.l.l can a snake break your leg?'

'Well, it's mostly when they're on heat. They get aggressive and come steaming at you through the undergrowth, lift their heads up and whop you the most almighty blow. They can knock you clean off your feet.'

Dark shadows clouded my dreams of the sunny farm bright with geraniums and orange blossom. A valley teeming with murderous snakes guarding the entrance to a place of stones and scorpions. Ana was going to love this.

It was clear that if we were going to keep at least one foot in the twentieth century when we moved to El Valero, we would need to use a car of some sort. We would also need to improve on the loose arrangement of poles and boulders that currently spanned the river. I had a vague fantasy of leaving El Valero as it was, solitary and untouched by the modern world, and managing with a mule or horses. But pressure was being applied by people whose inclination was more to the practical than the romantic. I had bowed to this pressure before I came in August, promising to see to the building of a road and a new bridge.

Oddly enough I'd never before had the opportunity to build a road, nor a bridge, and I spent a fair few hours wandering about, looking in what I thought was a knowledgeable sort of a way at the possible sites for them. But it was no good. I hadn't a clue about such things and trying to think my way into them just didn't seem to have any effect. I walked over to discuss the matter with Bernardo.

'Domingo is your man,' he advised. 'He knows how to do everything.'

So we went along to see Domingo.

As the Rio Trevelez tumbles from its sunless cleft in the mountains and rushes into the broader valley, the first farm it pa.s.ses is the Cortijo La Colmena. The Melero family have been living there since the time of Domingo's great-grandfather, but they don't own it. As with so many houses and so much land in Andalucia, it is owned by families who live in Madrid or Barcelona and have never even seen the place. Every year Domingo's landlord collects the munificent sum of fifteen hundred pesetas around five pounds. The tenant pays his own rates, another four thousand pesetas, and is responsible for any repairs or improvements to the place.

For this modest outlay Domingo enjoys the benefit of a house perched up at the end of the valley with a spectacular view of the rivers and mountains; stabling for his handful of sheep, pigs and a donkey; a highly productive vegetable patch, a small vineyard and every sort of fruit tree you can imagine. He also has the fields sloping down to the river, groves of almonds and olives, and rank upon rank of oranges and lemons. All this he cares for seemingly without effort, ambling round the valley on his donkey trailing his feet in the scrub, or lying in the shade of a fruit tree admiring his sheep, or on a really hot summer day in the acequia acequia or watering channels, sleeping in its cool water lashed to a root like a boat moored in the reeds. or watering channels, sleeping in its cool water lashed to a root like a boat moored in the reeds.

Domingo lives with his parents, Expira and Domingo or Old Man Domingo as people call him. Old Man Domingo is a tiny man, leathery with sun and hard work, with a face that cracks constantly into a warm smile.

Bernardo introduced us. We bowed and shook hands. 'Mucho gusto en conocerle gusto en conocerle pleased to meet you,' I said. pleased to meet you,' I said.

Then I turned to Expira, a well-built woman in her fifties who would not very long ago have been a real beauty. She had lovely gay eyes and the smile of someone whose beauty runs right through, like seaside rock.

Domingo himself was sitting on the ground, filing the chain of a monster chainsaw. He greeted me with a friendly grin.

We sat on low chairs around a cable drum. These cable drums are ubiquitous here; they make very good tables. The Sevillana, the electricity-generating company of Andalucia, has a generating station and a storehouse in the valley. So all the surrounding farms are liberally bestowed with the detritus of power generation. Over the years Pedro Romero had built an impressive collection of hawsers, girders, tensioning devices, ceramic insulators, steel rods and cables. 'You can always find some use for such things and if you don't nick it when you can, it won't be there when you need it for something,' he had explained.

Expira carefully placed a sack over their drum, its lively colours showing its provenance as a sugar refinery on the coast, and served us with wine, bread, olives and ham. It was that hour of day . . . although exactly which hour of the day that is, I cannot quite say, as it always seems to be that time. We sat in a cloud of flies there has to be some flaw in every paradise and flies had clearly been allocated to mine and talked about the river and the valley and farming.

'So you're going to live at El Valero, are you?' asked Old Man Domingo.

'Yes, we're moving down in the winter.'

'El Valero is a good farm,' he mused. 'Plenty of sun and air and rich in water . . . '

'So they say.'

'The pity is that it's on the wrong side of the river. That river can swell with winter storms and you could be completely cut off for weeks or more. There was a woman died over there not too long ago. Her appendix swelled up: she was in great pain. They tried to get her across the river with the mules, but the current was too strong, knocked the mules over, so she died. Horrible.'

'Yes, and then there was Rafaela,' added Expira. 'You know Rafaela Fernandez, the deaf one's daughter she died in childbirth at El Valero. The river got up and took the bridge away. You'll have to do something about it. It's too dangerous living there with no bridge.'

From here all we could see was a thin red trickle curling between the boulders in the riverbed.

'It's been a dry summer,' continued Old Man Domingo. 'Catastrophic. Hasn't rained a drop since March. It just doesn't rain like it used to do. Even in summer it used to rain, though it just did a lot of damage then, no good at all. I remember one summer a few years ago, along came a cloudburst . . . it was a bright, clear day and nothing but a dribble of water in the river, like now, and then suddenly there was a great rush of water and the river was full of dead pigs and goats and mules. The water actually went over the top of the Seven-Eye bridge down below the town. Yes, it certainly knew how to rain in those days.'

'If it doesn't rain any more then I needn't bother to do anything about the bridge,' I suggested hopefully.

'But you never know what's going to happen in the future. There could be a thunderstorm tomorrow. You can never trust the river. You should build a bridge and a road in and a road out up the back way in case the river takes the bridge.' This was from Domingo, who had put aside his chainsaw and was drawing up a seat by the cable drum.

'Up the back? You mean put a road right up that mountain?!'

'It's not that far. Three or four bends will take you up to the mining road at the top. A good digging machine would do it in a couple of days.'

'Well,' I said. 'Then we'll have to put in a road and a bridge. But a bridge is going to be an expensive and difficult business . . . ' 'No, no, no, cost you pennies,' he declared. 'Just a few eucalyptus beams thrown across and a couple of piers made with some cement and river stones. You don't want to spend any money building in the river. Whatever you build is bound to get washed away.'

'Right then, some eucalyptus beams . . . '