The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Federico slipped home to spend the summer with friends and family in Granada. Tragically, it coincided with Franco’s arrival on 16 July from the Canary Islands via Spanish Morocco. Franco’s military uprising against the democratically elected left-wing government, the Popular Front, was under way. The future dictator with his army of Berbers landed in the south and moved north, taking the country as they progressed. It was no time at all before Granada, one of the first cities to fall, was besieged and the Falangists, Franco’s fascist party, took control. Executions were under way. Gangs, thugs, death squads, las escuadras negras, sought out their enemies and gunned them down in cold blood. Lorca was a public figure, a charismatic young man in his late thirties. He was an outspoken Republican sympathiser and he was a practising homosexual who spent his life performing with his theatre for the peasantry who loved his works, frequenting ports and hanging out with gypsies. In short, a radical leftist homosexual and enemy of the conservative state.

  ‘Homosexuals will be killed like dogs,’ General Quiepo de Llano, one of the voices of the Falangists, had promised. He was true to his word.

  Granada, August 1936; Lorca was dragged from the home of the poet, Luis Rosales, where he had gone into hiding (the house is now the Hotel Reina Cristina). The precise details of all that happened over the next couple of days, before his execution, are obscure. Some accounts say that he was thrown into the back of a lorry where he was handcuffed to another political prisoner and carted away to jail. Others say that he was driven off in the car of a local Falangist sympathiser. Wherever he was detained, two days later, at dawn on the morning of 19 August, he was taken to the outskirts of Víznar, at the foot of a ravine – so evocative of his own poetry – where a lone olive tree stood. He was in the company of three others, all declared enemies of the fascist regime. The executions were carried out by a Falangist death squad. One of the assassins later boasted that he had shot Lorca, as he clung to that olive tree, ‘twice in the arse for being a poof’.

  Lorca died beneath that olive tree. What became of his body has been the subject of speculation for generations. Some argue that he was tossed into a mass grave at Barranco de Víznar. Others suspect that his family, who refuse to give consent for the exhumation of that grave, dug up their hero and buried him privately on their estate. At the end of the civil war in 1939 Spain was littered with unmarked graves. The Falangists never admitted to Lorca’s murder. A news item stated that his body had been discovered on the road between Víznar and Alfacar and that he had died of ‘war wounds’. Franco banned Lorca’s work. Wherever his bones lie today, Lorca’s murder remains an inglorious stain on modern Spanish history.

  A fellow poet and friend of Lorca’s, Jorge Guillen, wrote that when Lorca was close, the weather was neither hot nor cold; rather, it was ‘Federico weather’.

  I felt those rays. It was mid-February yet an inviting, blessed day. I found Víznar without difficulty, set high within olive groves and natural sierra parkland. Víznar, originally a small village, a pueblo blanco, where a sprawl of rather bland, uniform white habitations had recently been constructed. No sign led a visitor to the Parque Federico García Lorca. Within the town, I drove hilly streets looking for a bar or a passing individual, a shop, a mechanic or labourer at work, but the entire village was closed up. I checked my watch. It was not a weekend and not yet midday, so, puzzling. I circled streets twice, passed through a central square with the principal church in one corner, but still not a soul. It was as though the villagers had sealed themselves away. Were the inhabitants bored with Lorca pilgrims? Was this a score in Víznar history that they were tired of being associated with? After making the circuit once more, passing through horseshoe arches, descending streets that were more suitable for mules, I returned to the central plaza and stepped out of the car. A post office ahead, closed, but no bar, no meeting point other than the church whose doors were locked. The air was clear, sharp, cooler at this altitude. I wandered until eventually a solitary figure in brown trousers, check shirt, cap, approached, climbing from the direction I had first covered. Under his arm, two sticks of bread. I crossed and asked the route to the Memorial Park. No flicker of warmth enlivened his expression, as though he resented my question, my presence here.

  ‘It’s not here,’ he replied.

  ‘But this is Víznar?’

  ‘It’s not close to the village,’ he muttered.

  For a moment, I felt sympathy. I was about to ask if he knew anyone who had been alive in 1936, who remembered that day, that dawn, over seventy years ago, but he had already continued on his way.

  I proceeded out of town along the narrow, winding descents, ascents of the white-walled ruellas. I drew up beside a woman carrying baskets. She confirmed that I was on the right road. ‘But,’ she warned, ‘there are many bends, curves, mas climbing. It will not be easy.’ She had spoken the word mas, much, in English.

  Beyond the village, I pulled over, taking photographs of the hilltop settlement beneath which terraced groves of olives and blossoming almonds sloped down the mountainside. I climbed up and down dried gullies where dead leaves lay rustling, ravines that were fed by the snows of the Sierra Nevada, looking for solitary olive trees, hoping for a clue. I had a photocopied print in my wallet that I had found on the Internet of a spiralling olive that was captioned ‘Close to this tree lie the remains of Lorca’. Judging from the photograph, it hardly looked old enough to have borne witness to that bloody sunrise. In any case, I found no olive that resembled it.

  Spiralling ever higher, I peered out for a signpost, but the road remained unmarked. Eventually, the park. I pulled over. In front of me was a flank of several three- and four-storey blocks of flats and another under construction. After a completely empty road with not a ruin or shepherd’s cote to dot the horizon, these constructions had been thrown up directly in front of the Federico García Lorca Memorial Park. I wondered at the permit that had allowed it. The grounds themselves were massively disappointing: a concrete, melancholy affair, lacking flowers, where the overriding impression was one of neglect. At its centre was a fountain, bleak, silent, without water. The dry channels that were fed from its base were blocked with poplar leaves, rotting, forgotten for months. A granite stone marked the spot that is purported to be where Lorca’s assassination took place. There were no olive trees, solitary or otherwise. It stood above the olive groves, curtained by pines climbing the high-altitude hillsides. Beyond Lorca territory.

  Seventy years and six months after his murder, I walked alone in this place, pacing from one memorial plaque to the next, reading the words of the man who perhaps captured the hearts and confusions of the olive-farming southerners of Spain better than anyone before or since. But this park was not Lorca’s; it was honouring all those who had lost their lives during the civil war. And Lorca would have wanted it so. He was a brother, a son of Spain.

  I drew out a scruffy page I had printed off. Dark hair, lightly slicked, parted to the side, Lorca in evening dress resembled a young Dirk Bogarde in Hollywood. Then, from the same wallet, words I read aloud to the stark hills with the wind gusting against the broom and the leafless poplar trees. These lines were written by Lorca himself, the last stanza of a poem entitled Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. With them, Federico might have been writing his own eulogy. I wanted him and the soft silvery light through the distant olive trees which, from where I was standing were partially blocked out, to have the last word on his death because the reassuring fact is that Lorca’s voice lives on. No bullet or censor could have silenced him.

  It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born

  An Andalucían so true, so rich in adventure.

  I sing of his elegance with words that groan,

  And I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.

  *

  I felt a need for open spaces. The route to Almería cut through a vast, arid, bouldered landscape. I stopped the car on several occasions to take in the rocky scenery, to breathe. My
destination was the Mediterranean coast. It had been a while since I had seen the sea. Although today Almería was not renowned for its olives, it was a chunk of land that had been tramped over by almost every trader, coloniser and pirate. Cartagena had originally been the Phoenician Qart Hadast. Yet to look at the landscape, you could believe that no man had ever made it to this part of Spain. Here was spaghetti western territory, dry desert lands with not a habitation to break the isolation.

  I made a brief sandwich stop in Guadix, east of Granada, fretted with caves and coated in a film of red dust. Harsh central plains, opulent mining districts. Guadix is believed to have seen ancient settlements as far back as Palaeolithic (Stone Age) times. Thousands of years later, in 45 BC, Julius Caesar set up camp, calling it Julia Gemella Acci, to mine the silver in the surrounding hillsides. Later, the Moors settled and built a town that almost rivalled Granada. It was they who renamed it Guadh-Haix, or River of Life. I took a brief walk by the river where they had planted lines of mulberry trees from which grew up a vibrant silk industry. I was surprised to find the caves still inhabited. Many had been transformed into stalls selling pottery and brightly coloured ceramics to tourists. Others ranged from hovels to curious little whitewashed houses. Even today, these homes changed hands by verbal contracts only, nothing in writing; its community stood witness to all verbal agreements. The town had suffered greatly during the civil war and both Republicans and Nationalists had left reminders of their grisly work.

  Gently descending in a south-easterly direction, I drove through irrigated desert zones; undulating expanses of green, of vineyards farmed along lower reaches of the Sierra Nevada. The almonds were in full blossom, in fields shared by silvery olives. Exquisite against the rich red sandstone of the snow-capped Nevadas.

  By the time I was skirting Almería, night had fallen. I took the exit for the country town of Pechina. A Peruvian barman back in Córdoba had recommended a converted monastery somewhere nearby. I asked directions of a man in his garden. The request amused him.

  ‘Cross the motorway, follow the corkscrew road. Be warned it’s steep and there are no street lights.’

  Blasted into the mountainside, the ascent proved nerve-racking. I almost turned back, but it was late. I was tired, hungry. The end of the road, quite literally, delivered a village with unrivalled views to the distant Mediterranean. I saw little of the surroundings that evening. The monastery, or bishop’s palace, had been converted into a spa, a balneario. I found myself at the reception of an eighteenth-century, two-storey building, constructed on the ruins of a Moorish and, prior to that, Roman bathhouse. The original marble baths in the basement were still in use. I secured the last room, a refurbished monk’s cell in a medieval setting. The cells abutted the upper gallery. Beneath was a central courtyard with furniture of sorts and a caged, yellow-crested bird. At an altitude of 461 metres it was cold, wintry, but the room had heating and hot water. It was basic but, apart from the screeching cockatoo, tranquil.

  The dining room, a converted chapel of pseudo-Moorish design with tiles to shoulder height and cream arabesque patterns above, was dedicated to house guests. The woman who had welcomed me at reception, broad of beam and world-weary, had donned an apron and was now the waitress, or chef, or both. At the table opposite, an elderly Englishman in the company of a small boy and a young woman who was asleep on his shoulder. His Oxbridge accent reverberated round the high vaulted spaces and dominated the room.

  ‘Holidays in France,’ the old man opined, ‘were always so much better.’

  ‘Why was that, Gramps?’

  ‘The food, dear boy, the food.’

  Three other tables were occupied by Andaluzes, staying for the weekend to take the waters. After dinner I took a stroll round the village, which consisted of a cluster of houses and one bar. I dropped in for a glass, out of curiosity rather than thirst, and found the family at table: beshawled grandmother, husband, wife, teenage boy who suffered from some physical affliction, eating dinner in front of a blaring TV perched high behind the drinks counter. Apart from myself, there were no other customers and my entry was greeted with bewilderment.

  ‘Are you open?’

  All adults nodded and the father, purple nose as big as a courgette, wearing a brown trilby, rose. I ordered a glass of wine and took a swig, wishing them buen apetito. They watched me, calibrating, scouring my features as though I had come from another planet. Specks of sand-grit freckled the counter. The wine was bitter, corked. Out of politeness I drank what I could, left a few euros and bade them goodnight. Outside, a handful of stick-legged boys were kicking a football about beneath a street lamp. Dogs barked, a cat was ripping black rubbish bags to shreds, spreading orange skins and empty fish tins across the street. Behind the hotel was a sprawling, half-constructed oriental-styled building, abandoned. In front, a few palm trees and a line of camping cars and caravans with predominantly German number plates. That was it.

  The hot springs of Sierra Alhamilla, thermal and curative, were discovered by the Phoenicians, or possibly considerably earlier, and then later by the Romans who constructed the underground marble baths. In 711 came the Moors who irrigated the Valley of Andarax that lay at the feet of the village, southwards to the sea. Here, they planted up oases of palm trees, the vestiges of which I found when walking later. I also found cave dwellings. A few had been fixed up with doors. They did not appear to be inhabited now. No one could tell me who had occupied them. In South from Granada, Gerald Brenan asked himself whether Odysseus might not have sheltered in certain of the Andalucían caves during his long and weary travels. Who knows? This corner of Spain had been inhabited for millennia. Personally, I had a hunch that the Minoans, those mythical bull- and olive-worshipping, peace-loving people from Crete, brought the olive tree here, but there is no proof of that. Or the Mycenaeans (neighbours of Odysseus), who took the lovely island between mainland Greece and Africa from the Minoans: might they have sailed with silvery saplings this far west? Might Odysseus have returned home and talked of this unique place?

  During weekends, Andalucíans flocked here to refuel, fill plastic bottles and containers from the springs that flowed at a consistent 58 degrees Celsius and at the rate of 603 litres per minute. The few residents hereabouts also used it for washing their laundry. The Germans and other travellers seemed to be taking advantage of it for everything: tea, laundry, washing, open-air showers … When the queue at the village well, fuente, had lessened, I put my hand to the volcanic waters rushing forth and found that they were indeed boiling hot. The morning was fine with a light wind and barely a cloud hanging over the sea. The location, fifteen kilometres outside the city of Almería, marked the entrance to a vast and natural, protected mountain range, the Sierra de Alhamilla Park: 8500 hectares of sparsely populated, high-peak slopelands. Really magnificent, dramatic and undiscovered. The couple at the hotel told me later that only fifty permanent residents, including themselves, lived within the park environs.

  I was hunting for botanical footprints, Roman ruins or, even better, Phoenician, and found many skeletons of buildings, tumbledown terraces, drystone like ours, that would originally have been for olive and almond orchards. Sad-looking, wrung-out palms were clinging to life in among the garrigue, and a few stunted wild olives, acebuche to the Spanish, barely bigger than gooseberry bushes. Cacti survived alongside flowering thyme, clumps of other aromatic herbs and rubble. Evidently, there had been high-level agricultural activity here at stages throughout history. I wondered about the mountainside’s magic waters. Had this always been desert territory? Or was this an example of soil erosion? I pictured a future world in which we travelled for miles with plastic containers to queue for water.

  Intermittent blasts throughout the morning were accompanied by columns of black smoke rising from beyond the wrinkled folds of hills. It was an army base east of Almería at Viator. I stepped off the winding tarmacked path and began to hike up a mule track where, after a kilometre or two, I came upon a chain with swin
ging sign attached to two green pillars. It read: FINCA PARTICULAR, PROHIBIDO EL PASO. PRIVATE FARM NO ENTRY. In smaller lettering in Spanish: Boundary patrolled by rural guards. Private lands. Authorised vehicles only. Nothing prevented access either side of the pillars so I kept going, continuing on a few metres until I was barred by a locked iron gate. I hesitated, looked about into dusty emptiness, and then climbed over it. Ascending mountain curves, I found myself within the grounds of a secreted olive farm. I proceeded slowly up a winding sand track, fully aware that I was trespassing. ‘If someone encroached like this at our place …’ I was thinking, but as unexpected discoveries go this was too good to ignore. The olive trees were irrigated with ground pipes fed from crudely fenced-in water sources. They were in extremely good health and possibly several decades old. The earth at the feet of the trees was dry and crumbly, off-white like limestone. There was no one about so I continued on up to the first house, the original property. It was a decaying white cube, a typical southern Mediterranean home with a painted green door, surrounded by cacti and agave plants and a leafless fig tree. To one side was a terrace with an overhanging wooden trellis where a vine must have grown. It was abandoned but attractive, a romantic idyll of rural Spain. Fifty yards higher, past crumbling stone outhouses, was the present home, a modern incarnation of the original. I turned to look back down the mountainside and was stunned by the view. It swept right across the Valley of Andarax to the sea. On either side rose the rust-brown, grey and purple folds of the hills, southern sierras, falling away to the Mediterranean. And what silence in this Almerían olive grove. I was curious as to why the property was so heavily guarded. There seemed to be nothing of immense value here, unless … yes, the water.

  Over a quick bite at the hotel I learned from an impoverished looking waiter that water was the source of more acrimony hereabouts than anything else and that not far from this village a man had killed his own brother because the fellow had rerouted, or cut off, the natural direction of a spring. I set off again, descending a steep gradient into the valley, following the flow of the springs, the path alongside which the Moors had created their irrigation channels, their acequias (as-saquiya in Arabic, water carrier), and installed their palm groves, many of which were still in existence, if rather scrappily. Olive groves had been planted, far more recently, across a canyon-like shelf of land with an oriental Saharan-scape. Originally, the water had traced a gully south to the flat plains, the vega inland of the sea. But there had been so much strife between families and neighbours over the rights that, today, a municipal body managed the flows. Each household or holding was entitled to water for a designated number of days per month, anything from one to two or perhaps even five. The monastery, now spa resort, had negotiated thirteen days. Their triumph had caused fury within the village and its environs.