The ibex had been found hiding in a bush by the ford one evening. It was stricken with the sarcoptic mange, a skin disease that the wild ibexes had picked up from flocks of sheep and goats. At the time the mange was sweeping through the ibex population and causing great concern to the Nature Protection Agency. Domingo suggested that we haul it across the river and take it to the Agency vet in town. We caught it, lashed the poor creature’s feet together and hung it from the shackle. Then we swung it across the river and dumped it in the back of Pepe’s Landrover, to the consternation of his dogs who were crammed to one side to make room. The vet bathed the ibex, vaccinated it and then released it a week later fully recovered. It took poor Pepe another week, however, to rid his dogs of the scourge.
When the rain finally stopped and the clouds lifted, we set about drying out the house, a matter of dragging outside anything that could be lifted and flinging open the doors and windows to let the sun and wind blast through. Then we began picking up the threads of our daily life. One afternoon, as I was hacking the finishing touches to a drainage channel from the sodden stable-yard, I was surprised to see Antonia walking up the path. ‘Hello,’ she said in her carefully intoned English. ‘I have brought something for you people all alone with no bridge. See, here are some cakes – and this bottle, I think, will cheer you up.’ It was always a pleasure to see Antonia and she was right about the Dutch gin, but it amazed me that she had appeared at all. ‘How did you get across the river?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me you can use the cable on your own?’
‘Domingo helped me,’ she answered simply. ‘He will come and join us, he is making the cable more strong. He wants to borrow something.’
Sure enough, Domingo soon sauntered up the hill, casting critical glances at my attempts – too little and too late – to make flood channels. He sat down with us and drank some tea, a thing he very rarely does, and even helped himself to one of Antonia’s cakes. Neither Ana nor I had ever known him to eat cake in our house before.
‘I want to borrow the fencing pliers.’
‘Of course. Why, what are you doing?’
‘Putting up a bit of fencing to stop the sheep shitting on Antonia’s terrace,’ he replied as if it was a routine farming chore.
That autumn Antonia had moved into the house at La Herradura, just across the valley, to get away from the turmoil of the building of a new battery rabbit and chicken farm at La Hoya. The owner of La Herradura was pleased to have Antonia living in the house at a peppercorn rent, as houses here seem to show their appreciation of a human presence by being slower to fall down. Domingo’s flock, unable to cross the river, was grazing that winter at La Herradura, and the sheep, all two hundred of them, liked to gather in a tight huddle on Antonia’s patio to shelter from the rain; hence the problem with the sheep-shit.
Domingo apparently needed to borrow a lot of tools for whatever it was that he was doing at La Herradura because he accompanied Antonia on almost all of her trips back and forth to the house. We grew used to seeing them walking together up to our patio and, if it surprised us that Domingo seemed rather more sociable than before, and Antonia somehow happier and more spirited, we neither of us felt inclined to comment on it.
By the middle of April the water level had gone down enough for us to build a new bridge. Domingo and I, with Bottom dragging the heavy green beams, built it in a short day, a considerable achievement I thought. I had no more illusions about its permanency. I had learned my lesson about building in the river. As the snow on the high mountains melted with the heat of early summer, the river rose again, giving the new bridge a battering, but leaving it this time where it was. Then the river settled down to its summer level, flowing peacefully down the valley. Having shown us its wrath, it was a good neighbour again.
The summer that followed the rains was a rather more auspicous season. The sheep thrived on the lush grasses that now covered the hill, giving us a fine yield of lambs. The holiday cottage that we called El Duque, the old name for the land on that side of the river, was occupied week after week by guests who were delighted with the beauty of the exuberantly blooming countryside. Our seed-merchant friend from Sussex came to stay, bringing a huge order for scores of different varieties, and the plants that were to bear the seeds responded to the mood of optimism by flowering in spectacular fashion. We felt ready for anything.
In September Chloë was due to start school. She was not quite four but Rosa had started the year before and Chloë was desperate to join her. She felt none of the trepidation of her parents about her coming ordeal. The day your first child starts school is a staging post of life, one of the many leaps into the abyss. We were horribly wistful at the thought of our only daughter lurching away from us in the Órgiva school bus but tried to make a decent show of sharing her excitement at becoming a proper Spanish schoolgirl.
August nights can be hot. You sit outside, scantily dressed for coolness, and the sweat still pours off you, while the frenzied screaming of the cicadas and other hot-night creatures makes your head reel.
That summer there was one spectacularly sultry night. Sleep would have been impossible so, after a late supper, we three – along with the two dogs – went down to the Cádiar for a midnight bathe. The moon was full to illuminate our path and we took some candles to light the shadows by the river.
There was a pool in the river which we had made by spanning the gap between a couple of rocks with some tree-trunks, and filling in the dam with stones and brushwood. We set the candles on the dam and slipped into the cool water. Swimming upstream a little, we drifted back with the lazy current and watched the moonlight and the candle-flames glittering in the ripples on the dark surface of the water. The canes and willows on the banks stood motionless in the breathless heat of the night. The dogs sat patiently by the water and Chloë, sitting like a mermaid on a rock, droned sleepily on through a succession of Spanish nursery rhymes that Rosa had taught her.
All of a sudden the dogs leapt to their feet and growled, staring into the distance up the river. The moon had sunk behind the Serreta now, and apart from the pool of light made by our candles, the river was in darkness. I shivered a little anxiously, wondering what might be out there. We peered into the shadows but could see nothing. And then little by little a pale mist seemed to fill the valley. It swelled and then shrank, and then started to take on a more solid form as it moved closer towards us. We stood and stared, transfixed.
Bonka started to bark furiously, and then I heard the bells. It was Domingo’s sheep moving down the moonlit river. I could just make out the tall shape of Bottom with her huge ears erect, at the head of the flock. As they drew closer I could make out Domingo riding the donkey; and behind him, with her arms around his waist and her head sleepy on his shoulder, was Antonia.
We slid like alligators back into the river and grinned at one another as they passed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham, my editors and publishers, for their encouragement, advice and friendship. They must at times have regretted the day we first sat munching oranges beside the river, discussing a book – but if they did, they never let it show. Thanks also to Carole Stewart and Andrew Hogg for helping this book and its author along in a hundred different ways; to Domingo and his family; to Antonia and ‘los del Puerto’ for their unstinting friendship and neighbourly help; and to the ever-inspiring, ever-welcoming Ortega family, who run the Bar Mirasierra, my ‘office’ in Órgiva. Above all, of course, warmest thanks to Ana and Chloë, who have put up with me, curbed my excesses, stopped me getting uppity, and provided so much of the material that you have just read.
Chris Stewart
DRIVING OVER LEMONS
Chris Stewart lives in Spain with his wife, Ana, and his daughter, Chloë.
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, MAY 2001
Copyright © 1999 by Chris Stewart
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon
are trade
marks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Stewart, Chris, 1951–
Driving over lemons: an optimist in Andalucía / Chris Stewart
p. cm.
1. Alpujarra Region (Spain)—Description and travel. 2. Alpujarra
Region (Spain)—Social life and customs. 3. Stewart, Chris, 1951—
homes and haunts—Spain—Alpujarra Region. 4. Country life—
Spain—Alpujarra Region. I. Title
DP302.A38 S74 2000
946’.8—dc21 99-056675
Author photograph © Andrew Crowley/Camera Press/Retna, Ltd.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42568-3
v3.0
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