Domingo was unusually quiet.
‘I’m thinking,’ he explained.
‘What about?’
‘My uncle Arsenio.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s a bad lot. We’ll have to keep our eyes open. He’ll find some way of cheating you for sure.’
‘But he’s your family.’
‘He’s still a bad lot. I don’t know of anyone worse, really.’
‘Thanks a lot, Domingo, seems like you’ve fixed me up with a real winner for a first job!’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on him.’
Arsenio was not in fact a blood relative of Domingo. He had been lucky enough to marry one of Expira’s seven sisters who, for some reason best known only to themselves, deemed it desirable to gain influence in the high mountains by marrying shepherds. So Domingo is related through a network of influential aunts to everyone who is anyone in the Alpujarran sheep world. I couldn’t have had a better introduction.
As Domingo expounded on his disreputable relations, we became aware of Arsenio’s flock of sheep coming up for the shearing. They took shape as a pale blur against the dark of the trees, then came into focus as a sizable flock of sheep, with yapping dogs and shouting men at its edges. At that moment the last thing I felt like doing was to spend the day shearing sheep. I wanted to stroll through the meadows and head up towards the great fields of snow that skirted the peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
Also, to be honest, I was just a touch nervous about how the day was going to work out. ‘You don’t tie them up, then?’ a shepherd had asked me earlier in the spring.
‘Hell no! You can’t shear a sheep when it’s tied up.’
‘But they’ll jump and struggle and be up and bugger off.’
‘Well, I must have shorn a hundred and fifty thousand sheep in my time and I’ve not had to tie one up yet.’
‘Maybe so, but that’s in foreign parts. Here the sheep are different; they’re wild.’
Domingo had put the word about that this cocky foreigner was not only going to shear a hundred and fifty sheep in a day by himself . . . but he was going to do it without tying them up! Such hubris deserved a serious downfall.
‘This your foreigner, then, Domingo? Does he speak Spanish?’
Arsenio was the very essence of Alpujarreño shepherd – tiny, sinewy and leathery brown. His knobbly features split into a grin as he pumped my arm vigorously.
‘Lovely place you’ve got here, Arsenio.’
A look of utter bafflement came over his face.
‘What’s your foreigner say, Domingo?’
‘He says he likes it here.’
‘Heh heh, wonderful, marvellous. Right, let’s eat something.’
‘Er . . . we’ve just had breakfast actually. Couldn’t we . . . ’
‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’
It was pointless trying to communicate directly with Arsenio. He was of the persuasion – and he’s not alone in this – that anyone who is not from the Alpujarras will be incomprehensible. He disconnected the moment I spoke, looking at Domingo as if I had said something disgusting, and waiting for him to repeat my words.
The news of my shearing machine had spread through high pastoral circles and quite a gathering had formed to watch the promised spectacle. Whoever heard of shearing a sheep without tying it up? Domingo had found himself a right madman for the job, that was for sure.
There were perhaps a dozen shepherds in attendance, all with sticks, all with hats and leather shoulder-bags, all with grubby fags of home-grown churrasco hanging on their lips, and all leering at me horribly.
I made a bit of a song and dance for the audience over setting up the gear: carefully positioning the board to shear on, inspecting the cables to the generator and heavy electric motor, and fiddling about in a box full of machinery parts. It’s difficult to resist being a bit prima donna-ish at times.
‘So that’s it, is it? The shearing machine. How does it work, do you think?’
‘It’s done by the electric – and that’s the harm of it. It shocks the sheep. Bloke over Dúrcal way had his sheep shorn by the electric and they all died, every one of them fried to a frazzle. You just wait.’
‘Fernando of Torvizcón used a mechanical machine one year and it took so much wool off the sheep that they all got sunburn. It’s not natural.’
‘No, natural it ain’t, and you’ve stuck your neck out here, Arsenio. I wonder how many sheep you’ll have tomorrow,’ added another shepherd with undisguised relish.
‘It’ll save a lot of work . . . ’ I glanced from the corner of my eye to see who this modern-minded man was. ‘. . . and in a couple of years time there won’t be a shepherd in the Alpujarra using hand-shears. You mark my words.’
The defector turned out to be José, Domingo’s cousin, who often came to stay at the Melero household. He gave me a little courage. ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of either electrocution or sunstroke,’ I assured the crowd.
Twelve moist cigarette butts swivelled towards Domingo and quivered as they spoke: ‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’
I gave a hitch to my trousers, checked the machine, and dived for the first sheep, tipping her with a practised flip onto her bum, ready for the shears.
‘You wait, she’ll kick the eggs off the bugger, serve him right!’ But as luck would have it, the sheep turned nicely and sat meekly between my knees. I pulled the cord. The shears zinged into life and I plunged them into the wool. It peeled off like butter, the sheep perfectly compliant and co-operative. About forty-five seconds – there wasn’t much wool on her – and I helped her to her feet with a neat pressure of the right knee. A professional-looking twist to the tension head on the shears . . .
‘What seems to be the hold-up? Where’s the next sheep?’
The first sheep of a day’s shearing hurts. All your limbs are stiff and you can only reach the distant bits of rump and tail with the greatest effort. But it only takes one sheep to warm up. The second sheep of the day is a pleasure – all your energy and strength are there to help and just moving through the various postures of the first sheep has loosened up all the necessary muscles in your body.
The trouble, though, is that after the first three, or perhaps five, the repetitiveness of the job starts to get to you. There is a set technique. Each sheep is put through an identical series of positions and the cutter passes over the body in a more or less identical series of strokes, or ‘blows’ as they’re known in the trade. It takes about fifty blows to shear a fully woolled sheep. These sparsely woolled mountain ones took about twenty. I could have done the job in my sleep.
By the time you get to the fiftieth sheep the boredom gets spiced by jabs of pain as the muscles in your lower back begin to burn and scream a bit. Top class shearers, the sort who shear four hundred sheep a day, seven days a week, suffer from wool-burn. The friction of the wool passing over the back of the cutting hand takes all the skin off the knuckles and they bleed constantly. In Spain the main enemies are heat and dust. You can’t work in the sun; it sucks the energy from you in a matter of minutes. But even in the shade you work drenched in sweat and eventually become tarred and feathered with dung-dust and wisps of wool.
Another sheep was brought to the board and away I went. Domingo crouched beside me, watching intently; the crowd muttered and mumbled amongst themselves. This sheep had a tail. Most sheep are docked, for reasons that I won’t go into here. Tails are awful. It can cost you a good ten seconds of excruciating bending to do a tail. What’s difficult is getting the wool off the tip, because that’s the part you hold it by and you have to steer clear of your fingers.
‘Leave the tip of the tail on,’ said Domingo. ‘It’s the custom here to leave a great clump of wool on the tip. Helps with the flies.’
So I did. It made the job much easier. I couldn’t resist a smirk, though, at the sight of all those shorn sheep with their poodle-cut tails. Arsenio and Pepe, darting in and out of the flock to grab each
new sheep for the shearing, had pained looks on their faces.
‘What’s the matter? Shearing not good enough for you?’
‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
The sun rose higher in the sky; the sweat ran off me and onto the sheep; the pile of grubby wool beside me grew higher, and the proportion of shorn poodle-tails to woolly ones steadily increased. I sheared what seemed like a hundred or so and then we stopped for lunch.
Pepe’s wife Angustias, who was about three times as big as he was, had lumbered up from their farm way below, laden with bags and baskets of provisions. Ana had turned up, too, and was surveying the scene still flushed from her long climb. We washed our hands in a nearby stream and sat down to a picnic in the shade of a huge cherry tree.
Sheep-shearing is a grimy old job, but it does take you to some beautiful places. We gazed up towards the immense snow-covered crags of the cirque of Veleta under a sky the colour of cornflowers. Angustias passed round some bottles of what is euphemistically known as ‘coarse country wine’, and some beer that had been cooling in the stream, and laid out a spread of olives and omelette, sausages of various denominations, jamón and bread.
‘You are the one doing the work, Cristóbal, you must eat more,’ she urged, ‘before this lazy lot finish it all.’
‘No, I’d love to – thank you very much – it’s quite delicious, but I find it hard to bend down and work if I’ve eaten too much.’
Angustias understood foreigners perfectly well.
‘Perhaps you can explain something to me?’ she began. ‘I meet a lot of foreigners right here at the farm. They get off the bus in the village and then get lost looking for that monastery of theirs. They look so starved and yet when I give them some tocino like this,’ and she pointed at some wodges of pig fat presented with all the delicacy of a plate of petit fours, ‘or maybe a nice piece of chorizo they just push it to the side of the plate and nibble at the bread. Why do they do this, when they seem so hungry?’
‘If they’re looking for the monastery then they’re probably Buddhists, and tocino may not have quite the same appeal for them as it does for you and me.’
‘Buddhists you say . . . well, perhaps they are, but what in the name of the Virgin do they put in their stomachs? They all look so thin and pale, like they lived under stones. A gust of wind could blow them away.’
‘So far as I know they eat boiled vegetables, and brown rice, and as a special treat perhaps some nuts.’
‘Ay the poor things, what a terrible life. Though perhaps it would be better for me if I also ate a bit less. I’d like to be small and slim like you, Ana, but what can I do? I do so love the white meat of the ham. Do you think that it is so very fattening?’ ‘Perhaps it is a little,’ said Ana, gazing with feminine fellow feeling at Angustias’ massive body. ‘Yes, the white meat of the ham is not the thing for slimming.’
I got up, stretched and looked without enthusiasm over the gate at the fifty-odd sheep that were left to shear. It was time to start work again so I flapped carefully down the hill in my shearing moccasins to turn the generator on. When I arrived, Domingo was on the board with a sheep, holding it more or less right and shearing it more or less efficiently.
‘You’ve done this before, Domingo.’
‘No, but it can’t be that difficult, and I’ve been watching you all morning.’ In not more than a couple of minutes the sheep was done and happily scratching itself with the rest of the flock. Domingo grabbed another one and sheared it without too much difficulty, and pretty neatly too.
‘Come on, man, I don’t believe you’ve never done this before. It takes years to do it that well.’
‘Well, I’ve done a few with the hand-shears, tying them up and that, but this is a much better way of doing it.’
That afternoon he sheared about a dozen sheep, without sweating and without his back hurting. For a beginner that really is pretty remarkable.
‘I’ll buy you a second-hand machine from England and we’ll set up and shear the sheep of the Alpujarras together.’
‘If you like.’ Domingo is nothing if not phlegmatic.
By early evening we had finished and the flock rushed gladly from the stable to graze for a couple of hours in the meadows where the shadows of the trees were already growing longer.
‘One hundred and forty-seven sheep. How much?’ asked Arsenio.
‘Hundred pesetas a sheep . . . ’
‘Sounds like a lot of money to me.’
‘That’s fourteen thousand seven hundred pesetas.’
Cash, it seemed, Arsenio could well understand. He counted out fifteen notes of a thousand and handed them to me.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t any change.’
‘Don’t worry, we’re all workers together. Heh, heh. We can let that slip or adjust the account next year: what do you say?’
‘Well, fine. Thanks a lot.’
‘What’s he saying, Domingo?’
We stopped the car on the corner of the hill, a spot from where we could look down to the valley where we lived. Sitting in the deep grass we watched the hills change colour. ‘My uncle screwed you,’ said Domingo, sucking on a long stem of grass.
‘How? It all seemed fine to me.’
‘There were a hundred and fifty-one sheep.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I counted them this morning.’
‘You might have made a mistake?’
‘Impossible,’ he replied with characteristic modesty. ‘At lunchtime Pepe snuck into the stable and hid four shorn sheep in a little back room. He’d have hidden more if he hadn’t seen me looking over the gate.’
‘I can’t believe they’d go to such trouble to save four hundred pesetas, and besides, he gave me three hundred pesetas on top of the money agreed.’
‘That’s the way my uncle is. He’ll do anything to get the better of somebody; it doesn’t matter who you are. That’s why I told you to leave the pom-pom on the tip of the tails. That made him really wild. There’s nothing a shepherd hates more than bits of wool left on his sheep. And he and Pepe are particularly sensitive about that.’
‘I saw Pepe hacking away at the pom-poms with a pair of scissors as we left,’ said Ana.
‘Oh yes, they’ll have to take them all off. They couldn’t bear to have another shepherd see the flock looking like that. Hah, that really made them mad, that did!’
‘So Arsenio has screwed us out of four hundred pesetas, but given me three hundred because I didn’t have the change – that’s one hundred profit . . . and we had a good lunch . . . ’
‘It was regular – alright.’
‘Regular or not, I thought it was a good lunch, and most of his sheep have got ridiculous-looking pom-poms on their tails . . . so who’s the winner today?’
‘I think maybe we are today,’ said Domingo with a grin, and we jumped up and walked back to the car. ‘But watch out, because nobody ever gets the better of Arsenio, and he really is as bad as they come.’
From snippets I gathered from Domingo and his cousins over the following weeks, it seemed that my sheep-shearing trial had not gone badly. Nothing much was said, mind you, but the plain fact that none of the sheep had subsequently died took the wind from the sails of the luddite lobby, and messages of interest started to reach me from other shepherds. It was a heady endorsement, if a trifle low-key, and left me quite off my guard for the attack that was to come from another quarter.
Andrew, one of a small band of New Age travellers who had parked an ancient Bedford truck in our riverbed and was canvassing the local farms for work, saw the whole thing in a quite different light.
‘There’s something seriously wrong with your head, man, if you think it’s okay to just come here and kill off all the old traditions with that machine of yours.’
The passion of this tirade amazed me. Andrew wasn’t the sort to waste karmic energy on such an outburst. In fact he’d pared down his Mancunian brogue to th
e barest essentials necessary to accept a job, tell you whose round it was in the bar, and refuse food with meat in it. Besides, machines were his thing. For a whole day I had crouched next to him, passing him bits of assorted grease-covered metal while he tinkered beneath our Landrover.
‘But this is progress,’ I protested. ‘Can’t you see it benefits everybody?’
‘Benefits you, maybe. What about the shepherds who come together to do the work, have a bit of a laugh and joke about it, get bevvied up, talk about the sheep, and that? What about their traditions? Gone down the pan, that’s what.’
‘Look, you’ve obviously never been near a sheep if you believe that drivel. Ask a shepherd if he fancies the prospect of a day’s shearing and listen to what he says. Shearing is a pain and even if they do numb the pain with gallons of foul wine, it’s no fun at all bending over bony, grubby sheep all day and snipping away with those ridiculous scissors they use to shear twenty or maybe thirty sheep. No, this is a good thing for the shepherds, and a lot easier on the poor sheep, too.’
Though I would never have admitted it to Andrew, I was not without qualms about the particular bit of progress I was spear-heading. For centuries the mountain shepherds had gathered, ten or twenty of them at a time, to shear together, and there was, as Andrew pointed out, a certain bonhomie to the occasion, with plenty of wine and a goat or lamb killed to finish the day. But there were also grease boils and huge blisters and swollen wrists and aching backs and the flies, dust and dung. The shepherds hated it and, from what Domingo had to say, couldn’t do away with their social tradition fast enough.
The proof was that once I had demonstrated the efficacy of my machinery they started beating a path to my door – and, as you may have gathered, the path to my door is not even close to the route you might take on a stroll back from your local bar. It’s a path that takes determined beating.
Driving Over Lemons Page 10
