The catch-all (or catch-most) welfare system that exists in northern Europe has no equivalent in Spain: you pick up benefit for a certain period, depending upon how long you have worked, but it soon ends and you are thrown upon the mercy of family and friends. As I write, there are more than a million households in the country where nobody has work; there is absolutely no money coming in at all. It’s hard to imagine of twenty-first-century Spain, but people are hungry.
I kept on cracking nuts. It was what we call the Hora de Manualidades – Handicraft Hour – the time that Manolo comes up for a drink at the end of the day’s work. He enjoys a bit of company at the end of the day because he usually works on his own, and manual farm work gets lonely. Manolo drinks beer and we drink a Turkish sort of tea; we neither of us drink beer, and five in the afternoon seems a little early to start on the wine.
Sometimes we sit for as much as an hour, chatting in a desultory sort of a way. Manolo, it has to be said, is not the world’s greatest conversationalist, so when on the odd occasion we run out of subjects of mutual interest, we lapse into long and comfortable silences. We have found that these are more agreeable on both sides if we are engaged in some sort of activity, something that is compatible with the desultory drone of intermittent conversation … and, of course, it gets things done.
The most obvious manualidad is almond-cracking. I bring to the table a bucket of Marconas, my favourite almond, sweet, fat and easy to crack. I spread an old towel and a cracked piece of marble on the table, and take a hammer I keep specially for the purpose. I spill a heap of almonds on the table and we set to cracking them. In an hour Ana and I between us can do a kilo – and that’s a lot of almonds. Afterwards I blanch them, slip the inner skin off, toast them and mix them with a little olive oil, ground salt and pimentón. I defy you to come up with a simpler or more delicious thing, and all it costs is our labour, because we happen to have our own Marcona trees.
It has to be said, though, that the constant crack of the hammer doesn’t aid conversation. So sometimes Ana will do some sewing; I might find something broken to fix. At various times there is garlic to string, or onions or home-grown tobacco. Or there is the satisfying task of shucking habas, broad beans. We eat the tender young beans and put the pods in a bucket for the sheep, who love them, and at the end of the season get to eat the plants, too.
These are timeless farm activities. If you talk to the old folks of the Alpujarra about the way things were before modern times, they all remember gathering at cortijos to share the task of shucking or ‘podding’ habas, shucking maize, stringing garlic and peeling onions. After the habas were shucked, or the onions peeled, inevitably somebody would bring out a guitar or a mandolin and everybody would end up dancing on the roof in the moonlight … which upon not a few occasions would lead conveniently to that other pleasurable cooperative activity of getting together to fix a broken roof.
I don’t wish to appear too cynical about this, as the idea of dancing by moonlight on a flat roof in the remoter fastnesses of the Alpujarras to the sound of a mandolin, after a long hard day of habas-shucking, is about as romantic a thing as I can think of. And life in rural Spain, as we know, was unbelievably hard back then; there were few luxuries, and the idea of being delicate about eating would not have been well considered. Which perhaps explains the pained expression that Manolo adopted when we took to the somewhat refined manualidad of ‘double-podding’ habas.
Now, this is an activity that seems almost wilfully wasteful of time – ‘una mariconada’ (an unmanly frippery), as Manolo pronounced it the first time I set to the task. However, I’m not so sure. As everybody knows, unless you pick it very early in its life cycle, the broad bean has a detestable flavour, like overcooked liver; it dries the mouth and leaves the palate with a disgusting after taste. The reason for this is the bean’s coarse, grey-green outer skin. If, however, you blanch your habas for a couple of minutes, and then proceed to slip them out of their skins, you get the most exquisitely delectable food – bright green, tender and deliciously flavoured. It’s a lot of work, and a bit boring … but it takes only seventeen minutes to prepare enough for four servings.
It’s much like the business of squeezing altramuces out of their skins and into your mouth, and people pay good money for that. Altramuces are curious yellow beans with no flavour that are unaccountably popular as a tapa in Sevilla. The technique is to squeeze them with your fingers and let the inner part of the bean shoot into your mouth, leaving the outer skin between your fingers. It’s a dish, and an activity, that wears thin very quickly … unless you happen to be from Sevilla.
The whole broad bean business had particular relevance that year, as Manolo, for some reason known only to himself, had sown about half an acre of habas, and we had had the most successful crop I had ever seen. Habas do well here, and it’s the staple diet during the earlier part of the year. But even in this bumper year, when we could have picked every bean in its tiny delectable state, we found ourselves double-podding, for Ana insisted we pick the horrible old coarse ones first – so as not to waste them. What this means, of course, is that by the time you have got through the big horrible ones, the thin tender sweet ones have all in their turn become fat and horrible. It’s the same with the raspberries, later on. Ana insists we eat the over-ripe fruit before we’re allowed to get at the nice juicy fresh ones. By the time we get round to picking them they are rotten, too, so we only get to eat rotten raspberries … just like the ’orrible ’abbers. It’s a deeply flawed system.
But to return to the task in hand. Before the second shucking of the habas, you have to get the beans out of their big pod. Ths is not unpleasant work and you can get through it tolerably quickly. But Ana considers it one of those jobs that must be combined with other activity, and, outside of our hour with Manolo, the best activity to combine it with is listening to audiobooks. Again I’m a little ambivalent about this as I have a sneaking, fastidious sort of a suspicion that I am detracting from the meaningfulness of both activities by combining them. However, that spring we had sackloads of habas to shuck, and so we both settled down with a bowl between our knees and headphones on our heads. You may perhaps wonder why we could not listen to the book together, as would seem to be logical. This was because, although we were listening to the same book (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers … and I defy you to come up with a finer novel), we were at different stages of it, on account of my having snaffled a couple of tapes to take on a car journey to Granada. I was therefore way ahead of Ana and as I didn’t want to hear the earlier bits all over again, and she didn’t want to skip any of the intevening parts, we had to resort to separate audio equipment.
So imagine us, if you will, of an evening, me sitting on the pouff, the Wife on the sofa, both engrossed in the story being read separately to us. Between us the bucket of unshucked habas was diminishing slowly, while the piles of podded beans in the bowls between our respective knees grew at an equal rate. Our faces were rapt in earnest concentration, except for every now and then when one or other of us would have a comment to make, more often than not upon the size or shape of some spectacular pod.
Ana would kick me and, as I looked up, signal to me to turn off my little tape player. I would fumble at the controls and eventually achieve this simple task. Then I would take the headphones off and look at her expectantly. She had already gone through similar motions. Then she would hold up a bean. ‘Look at this one,’ she would say. ’How about that for a big bean?’ I would chuckle obligingly and, having ascertained that she didn’t want to comment any further upon the morphology of the bean in question, would return to my tape … until several minutes later I too might find myself sufficiently moved by the shape of a bean to want to put the whole process in motion again.
Of course, this procedure detracts to a certain extent from the sense of continuity of the book … it’s as I said, I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. And when I think of those Alpujarreños of old sitting
round together shucking habas and talking by the light of the fire, waiting for the moon and the mandolin … well, I know what they mean, those old folks, when they say they reckon that we have lost something.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE RAIN IN SPAIN
THE LOCALS SAY THAT IT IS autumn rains that do the most damage. The sweet showers of the new year seep lightly into the earth to nourish the shallow-rooted spring flowers, making the country glorious with colour and scent. But autumn rains, falling, as they sometimes do in this steep country, in opaque and thunderous sheets, can flay the daylights out of the land. The shaly earth, lashed by a merciless barrage, crumbles and dissolves, forming grey rivulets that snake into ever greater rivulets. And the greater rivulets become torrents and cascades, tearing the sodden land into gullies and chasms, abysses and gorges. At which point the water, now thick and grey and slow-moving, with the sludge it has gathered in its headlong downhill rush, pours, along with a hundred thousand other torrents, into the mother of all torrents: the river.
Spain, of course, with the exception of lush and sodden Galicia in the Atlantic northwest, is a country racked with droughts. And the southeastern quadrant of the Peninsula, which includes Almería, Murcia and our own province of Granada, is probably the driest part of Europe, with a rainfall not much greater than that of the Sahara Desert. And, although the following statement tends rather to the emotional than the statistical, of these driest parts of the dry, the driest of all is where we have chosen to make our stand: the Alpujarra. In fact it is only the presence of the snows on the peaks, and the aquifers beneath the Sierra Nevada, and the beautiful and intricate systems of irrigation devised by the Romans and the Moors, that keep our lush green valleys from becoming desert.
We often feel that we’re living on the edge, on the delicately balanced frontier of a changing climate. The mean annual temperature in the Peninsula has been higher these last few years than since the records began in about 1850, and not a winter passes without the violence of the weather causing mayhem and fatalities in some part of the country. Sometimes there’s a warning, a vision of the way things might go. In 1995, for instance, the year scheduled for the World Downhill Skiing Championships on the Sierra Nevada, there fell not a flake of snow, and the event had to be postponed for a year. The old boys who while away their days sitting at the entrances to the villages came out in force to announce that never before had such a thing been seen. Everybody shook their heads and, with earnest looks, predicted cataclysm and doom, although it has to be admitted that these are scenarios much discussed and enjoyed in the Alpujarra. Throughout the whole of that winter there was no rain and no snow, but in the summer, through the miracle of those bountiful aquifers, the springs and rivers kept on flowing. In 1996, it rained well and there was a thick cap of snow on the mountains.
So you never really know. Except in summer, when you can be fairly certain that between May and September you will have an unbroken succession of cloudless days, the weather in Andalucía does more or less what it will. ‘¡Ay qué calor!’ the Spanish groan, even when it’s not really that hot at all. The English may admit to a dull fascination with the weather, but the Spanish border on the obsessive in their weather commentary, which is an odd thing, since in summer every day is a cloudless day and the sun beats on down as predictably as ever.
After the agony of August is over, the first thing one does at the start of each day is scan the sky for sight of a cloud, that first harbinger of blessed rain. This is an activity fraught with frustration. The great black cloudbanks roll in from the west, spun off the mid-Atlantic lows, and usually spill their rain over Portugal, Huelva and Cádiz; Málaga might benefit from the last drops, but by the time they loom over us they’re all bluster, dry as a bone. It’s the hardest thing to bear when you’re desperate for rain, those clouds seemingly charged with moisture.
And so it was, in Chloé’s second year at college, that September crept in dry as a cracked stick, and it didn’t rain in October either. Even in November it only registered a couple of litres, according to Domingo’s rain gauge – a wheelbarrow whose dimensions, he reckons, roughly correspond to the required square metre. (This is the way that rainfall is measured in Spain: the litres that fall upon a square metre.) Halfway up the side of the barrow, at roughly the point where fifteen litres would fill it, depending of course on the levelness, or otherwise, of the ground upon which the barrow is parked, is a small hole that releases water at a known rate, increasing with the rise in pressure as the water approaches the top and thus the awesome maximum capacity of the device. The unlettered Domingo, who is a person much given to such abstruse calculations, knows exactly how to calculate the sliding scale of water loss.
We have a rain gauge, too, a green plastic cone with a short spike in the bottom to stick in the earth. If it rains too much, it gets top-heavy and falls over in the wet mud. It’s a cheap bit of kit, made of poor quality brittle plastic and poorly calibrated; but if we wanted a proper quality rain gauge, we would have to shell out about a hundred and forty euros, which seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a calibrated plastic cone. Of course we’re talking about a professional rain gauge here; if you wanted to submit your findings to some learnèd body, then this is what you would have to have. And besides, you would have to be the sort of person who would be prepared to commit himself to getting up early in the morning – because for some unfathomable reason these sorts of things always have to be done early in the morning – at the same time every day on all the days of the year, read your rain gauge and send off the fruits of your investigations to the learned body.
Now I know that this is the way that we humans and our society achieve excellence and progress: by assiduousness and scrupulous attention to detail, and fortunately there are heaps of people who are really good at this sort of thing … but not me. I know full well that to have to spring out of bed on three hundred and forty days of the year simply to inform some learned body that once again there was not a single drop of moisture in the bottom of my rain gauge, well, I just wouldn’t have it in me, and being the sort of person I am, would be inclined to linger on in bed and spice up the dispiriting readings with a few exciting extra millimetres.
Anyway, Domingo’s wheelbarrow and even our flimsy plastic cone were well up to the task of gauging the pathetic amount of rainfall we had in November. December was no better either: short, dry, sunny days; lunch on the terrace. We told friends and family in less favoured parts of the world, where it was gloomy and wet – England, mostly – how glorious our weather was.
Chloé came home from Granada for Christmas. I fetched her from the bus stop in Órgiva. These are some of my favourite moments in life, that small involuntary welling of the heart that must be how dogs feel when they lower their ears and wag their tail. I don’t have the same mastery of my ears, and my tail is purely vestigial, but the feeling is there, manifesting itself throughout my thorax whenever I see Chloé or Ana after an absence.
On the journey home, Chloé tried to explain to me the niceties of ‘Pragmatics’, one of the more unfathomable subjects of her translation and interpretation course, which I happily pretended to understand. This was not going to be a long visit – Chloé intended to head back to the city on Boxing Day – but we knew the score by now and felt happy and pleased to be granted this brief shred of her life. On the night of her arrival, the 23rd of December, to our intense relief and delight, the drought broke and the heavens finally opened. We sat by the fire, the three of us, tucking in to a dish of boar – the last frozen cuts we’d saved for the festivities – and double-shucked habas, rejoicing in the waterproofing effect of the green rooves, and listening to the rain as it thundered on the earth of the roof, danced zapateados on the skylight, and roared on the corrugated iron of the porch.
This was rain like we had never heard rain before, though, and it made me uneasy. By two in the morning the sound of the roaring of the river that came up from the valley drowned even the infernal t
hundering of the rain on the roof. I lay wide awake in bed, wondering what we would find in the morning. At four on the morning of Christmas Eve the river sounded as if it were raging from the gorge like the hordes of Beelzebub. The phone rang. Nobody rings you that early in the morning unless there’s something really serious going on. I was awake anyway, racked by now with worry as the awful roaring in the valley swelled in a hellish crescendo. It was Domingo.
‘Cristóbal,’ he said, darkly. ‘Can you get me the keys to your car?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, although I had a pretty good idea what he did mean.
‘I’ve been down to the river and it’s tearing away the ground beneath the wheels. In half an hour, maybe sooner, you’re going to lose your car.’
The car is parked on the far side of the river, on the highest ground in the riverbed, about five metres above the bridge. The keys hang on the back of the kitchen door.
Domingo continued: ‘The bridge has gone; you’ve lost your acequia, your water supply, and the track on both sides of the river. The river has completely changed course and is about to take away the fields at the bottom of your farm. It’s still growing, and there’s no way of knowing what it’s going to do. Have you got a set of keys over this side?’
I could tell from the measured way that he was speaking that he was uncharacteristically rattled. I imagined that he had been out all night, rushing around the place fixing leaks and shuffling sheep about, and drenched to the skin, as his waterproof wear is not of the best.
Last Days of the Bus Club Page 12
