Driving Over Lemons

by Chris Stewart

  ‘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.

  There was no stopping us now. We had running water, a heater, a cooker and a road. We were fast becoming slaves again to all the things we had come to this benighted spot to flee.

  LOSTILLUSIONS

  ANA AND I WANDERED ENDLESSLY AROUND THE FARM, EATING oranges and discussing what we might do with the various terraces and fields, what to change and what to leave, what to plant and what to grub up. Our relationship was already exhibiting signs of the primeval conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists. Ana had visions of ordered rows of vegetables and fruit, neatly criss-crossed by well-tended walkways, a wilderness garden deep in wild flowers, with daffodils and cyclamen nodding on the grassy banks of the acequia. My heart was set on the idea of a flock of sheep scuffling across our shared idyll, with me the shepherd striding after them in a cloud of dust. I discussed the sheep idea with Domingo. The conversation left him looking thoughtful.

  There was little we could do, however, in those winter months but look on while Pedro conducted the day-to-day running of our farm. Admittedly this didn’t amount to much more than feeding his pigs and then wandering around in the riverbed with the cows and goats. Yet he managed to inject such an air of industrious self-importance into these tasks that I felt inhibited and left out. I liked Pedro. I liked hearing his fund of odd stories and incomprehensible jokes, and the knowledge he passed on about the farm, but slowly and inexorably I began to move towards Ana’s point of view on how good it would be to have the place to ourselves.

  Ana, for her part, had developed the habit of melting into whatever task she was undertaking, almost like a mirage, whenever Pedro happened to approach. This could have been dismissed as characteristic reserve on her part except that she was always open and attentive with the Melero family; taking time to stroll with Expira on her daily water-carrying trips to the spring, or listening with genuine interest to any gardening advice from Old Man Domingo. With Domingo, too, she discovered a natural sympathy. He seemed to forget his painful shyness in her company and they would talk animatedly together of plants, animals and country topics.

  Pedro noted the distinction and it did little to improve the atmosphere of our immediate domestic circle. The evening meal, in particular, had become strained. Not that there was any spoken antagonism – everyone was scrupulously polite, passing round the costa bottle and offering first pickings at the oily potatoes – but it was beyond my social talents to prevent a cloying silence descending. Beaune did well out of these meals. Throwing scraps became our only light relief.

  In the end it was Pedro’s refusal to try anything other than papas a lo pobre, and our hankering after more varied fare, that gave us the excuse to edge apart. Two camps established themselves. Pedro prepared his potatoes over his twig fire, while we concocted more cosmopolitan dishes on the new gas cooker. I still walked down to share a glass or two of costa with him at the end of the meal but never managed to rekindle the easy camaraderie of the summer. Pedro invariably would break off in the middle of some discussion about the farm and lumber off to the store-room where he now slept entombed among his hams and sausages and dried peppers.

  While he took pains to avoid any actual talk of leaving, Pedro would haul out bits of his paraphernalia to load onto the Landrover whenever it looked as if we might be driving into town. Odd pieces of wood, bent rusty poles, tangled gobbets of wire and numberless artefacts made of esparto grass, rope, sacking, leather and string were carefully packed and placed in the back for us to offload with Maria at the other end. And with each journey Pedro’s presence diminished a tiny bit.

  One day he piled his horse with flowers and pots – the place was festooned with gay geraniums, cacti and succulents, sprouting exuberantly from rusty paint-cans, oil-drums and breeze-blocks – and stuffed the panniers so full that I thought the poor horse would collapse. Then, clutching a favourite cactus in a terracotta pot, he heaved his own great bulk onto the top of the load, cracked his stick across the animal’s fleshless flanks, and lurched down the valley towards the town.

  We didn’t see Pedro again for almost a week, and as the days passed I became aware of how daunted he made me feel. For the first time since we had arrived, we felt the farm was truly our own and the realisation left each of us almost light-headed.

  Ana was the first to seize the initiative. She suggested we sow some vegetables. We ran a hose from the tank down to the terrace below the track and there decided to create our plot. Pedro’s system was an odd one; there seemed, so far as I could gather, to be different vegetables scattered about in different fields and terraces all over the farm. In his years at El Valero he had established which particular patch suited each vegetable best. So there was a patch of onions growing on the terrace by the Cádiar river; the peppers, hot ones, mild ones, bell ones, little leathery ones, grew in a triangle in the field above; potatoes grew down in the fields that bordered the other river and the garlic occupied an idyllic spot by the waterfall.

  It gave the place an Eden-like quality, in that as you wandered among fruit trees, knee-deep in grass and flowers, you would come across a potato or perhaps an aubergine; these latter grew in a sunny spot beside the apricot tree. The disadvantage of the system was that it was impossible to work on the vegetables in any concerted fashion and it was a constant battle to keep the foraging beasts out of the crops. Pedro had weighed up the pros and cons and decided in favour of the Eden option. We decided to clump everything together on one terrace and see how it went.

  The soil was stony and dry, and it needed a lot of hard chopping with the mattock to break down. It was heavy work but we attacked it with ferocious enthusiasm, and little by little transformed a part of the unpromising patch to a fine workable tilth in which to sow our beans. We both felt deeply satisfied with this first attempt to start running the farm along our own lines. With a long groan I straightened up to stretch my back and looked straight into the eyes of Pedro, who was standing, mouth open, on the track above us. Ana, kneeling beside me, bent her head lower to the task.

  ‘The Host! You can’t grow vegetables there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The soil’s wrong – too much launa on that terrace . . . and not enough sun. Look, it’s all shaded by those oranges and olives.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s half past five in the evening . . .’

  ‘And what’s that you’re sowing?’

  ‘Beans.’

  ‘What beans?’

  ‘Broad beans.’

  ‘They’ll be no good.’

  ‘Why not, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Wrong phase of the moon.’

  Not a flicker from Ana as she trowelled in yet another bean.

  ‘Look at this, too – you don’t make ridges like that. Here, I’ll show you how.’ And down he came with his mattock, grunting with each blow as along went the ridge as if by magic.

  ‘You must sow your peppers this week,’ he said and disappeared up the track to the house.

  All rural occupations in the Al
pujarras have their allotted day, with the odd adjustment to accommodate the waxing and waning of the moon or the falling of a Friday. Thus the year always starts with the sowing of garlic on the 1st of January; then you prune your vines on the 24th or 25th depending on where you live. Most tasks are governed by the saint’s day, as are many meteorological and cosmic phenomena such as the disappearance on St John’s Day of the clouds of horseflies that plague the village of Fregenite.

  The system is perfectly logical. It’s a lot easier to remember a saint’s day, which is something that everybody has had drummed into them from birth, than a mere date. Thus the enormous burden of information which unlettered peasants must keep in their heads is reduced. With the assistance of the saints they know by heart what should be done and when.

  For one reason or another – bad organisation, forgetfulness, laziness – I don’t always get the day quite right. Last year I was pruning vines on January 29, rather pleased with myself for being so close to the right day. Josefina from the village was passing by. She stopped and watched me censoriously for a minute. ‘You should prune vines on the 25th.’

  ‘I know, but I’m only four days late. That’s not too bad, is it?’

  ‘We always prune ours on the 25th, rain or shine; that way we don’t get any pests or diseases.’

  ‘You mean you don’t have to use any sprays and chemicals?’

  ‘Are you mad? We blast them with every fungicide and pesticide we can lay our hands on.’

  By which you can see how important it is to get the day right.

  One morning, after a long time ratching around in the various sheds, stables and stores with which El Valero is honeycombed, Pedro turned up on our terrace where we were breakfasting on muesli, a thing he couldn’t abide. He had come to take his leave. Shuffling and looking bashfully down, he held out a couple of bits of wood adzed to a vague shape and notched at each end. ‘These are for you. You may have them as a parting gift.’