Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  The book, which I leafed through while the antiquarian hovered by my elbow, was the travel diary of two artists wandering through Spain in the 1920s. The drawings were exquisite, both in subject and execution. So this was Spain, the land south of the Pyrenees. I had to go there and see it for myself. I turned over a few more pages, and then made a decision. ‘I’ll have it,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid this a very rare limited edition and rather expensive,’ the bookseller whispered gravely. ‘I cannot offer it for less than one hundred and twenty pounds.’ It was a staggering amount, but I was smitten. I asked if I might put down a deposit of five pounds and pay the rest in instalments over the ensuing months.

  And that’s what I did. I saved all the money I could over the next six months and then returned to Traylens to claim my book. I have it to this day, and the spell it cast upon me sent me south after the harvest was in, hitch-hiking first to Dover, then Paris, then working the vendange down in Cognac to help pay for the journey, and finally slipping across the border at Roncesvalles and making my way down onto the plains of Navarra. That was more than forty years ago. The power of books: they have made me think what I think, live where I live, and be who I am.

  Ana, too, I reflected. In fact, it may have been her declaiming poetry by the fireside in a pub in the wintry Surrey countryside on our first date that made me think she might be the right sort of girl for me.

  Then, before we left for Spain, we both agonised over how we were going to support our thirst for reading in the out-of-the-way corner we’d found. This of course was long before the days of online book-buying. Our lucky break came just a few days before we set out, when we came upon the Crawley Lions’ Club fundraiser. They had stuffed a church hall with books and, wandering in, Ana and I were like kids in a sweetshop, pouncing on new titles and old favourites, tottering to and fro with stacks wedged under our chins, until at the end of the morning we had amassed a couple of hundred books. The whole lot cost us less than twenty pounds and we loaded them into our trailer, throwing out extraneous pots and pans and lamp stands to make room.

  At El Valero we cleared out the room on the roof, known as the cámara – the only dry outhouse we had, where the previous incumbents had stored their salt, maize, hams, cereals and beans – and set to work putting up shelves and arranging our haul in some sort of order. Then we stepped back and considered our library, wondering if we would ever find time to read them.

  All of this, I thought, might provide some material for the talk.

  I entered the town, found the venue and parked the car. As I had suspected, it was not exactly Carnegie Hall: it was, in fact, a primary school. A couple of jolly women, shortish and rotund, were going in as I turned up.

  ‘Are you the writer, come to talk to us?’ they asked, in that wonderfully unselfconscious way that the Spanish have.

  ‘That’s the way it looks,’ I said diffidently. We introduced ourselves. They said they were encantadas to meet me but I sensed somehow that they were just the slightest bit disappointed. Perhaps I wasn’t quite up to the author photo on the book, or lacking in writerly gravitas. It was hard to pin it down.

  We moved into the classroom where the event was to take place and my heart sank. It was like an echo chamber, each sound horribly magnified and distorted by the nature and texture of the walls, floors and ceiling, and taking long agonising minutes to dissipate. I found it impossible to make out what anyone was saying, or even what I was saying myself. Chloé’s classrooms in Orgiva were like this, too, and I had often thought it a wonder that she or anybody else had ever been able to hear anything, let alone learn. Ana and I had been along to a couple of those evenings where the teachers talk to you about how wonderful – or not – your child is, but, given that we had been unable to make out a single word that was said to us, we abandoned the practice and never went again, thereafter ignominiously accepting Chloé’s own reports of her aptitude as a pupil.

  The noise in this classroom was right off the scale, as a couple of dozen women and a bevy of young children were giving it all they had got. But as I tried to work out what was going on, a good looking middle aged woman in a track suit grabbed me by the hand and, pulling me down towards her, kissed me on both cheeks. So far so good, I thought. Then she looked around in apparent consternation. ‘But where’s Ana?’ she asked. ‘We’d hoped you’d bring Ana along to meet us.’

  ‘Ah, I’m afraid she couldn’t join me. Ana’s home at the farm, looking after the animals.’ It was an excuse of course. Authors don’t normally turn up to readings with the cast of their books in tow, even if they are married to them.

  ‘Ay que pena. She’s at home looking after everything,’ sighed the tracksuited woman, shaking her head before retreating to share the disappointing news. It wasn’t quite the boost you look for at a public appearance but I’ve learnt to expect this sort of response from women readers. In fact, we have come to call it the ‘Santa Ana effect’.

  Ana is by a long head the favourite character among my Spanish women readers, who empathise with her attempts to inject a little reality into my blithely optimistic plans. I can’t cavil at this, as Ana is a favourite character of mine too – it’s why I took up with her. One of the great privileges of writing is that people lend you their imaginations and enter emotionally into the world you describe. But it’s a rum thing when they assume that, despite my having introduced them to everything they know about Ana, they have a better understanding and appreciation of her qualities than I do. If Ana comes across to them as more patient, wise, steady and well-judging than me, then surely that’s because I have told them so.

  By now everybody was moving chairs and desks around, and the crashing and trumpeting as the chair legs graunched on the tiled floor, and everybody yelled suggestions as to the best way to arrange the seating, sent the noise level clean through the roof. I was placed on the teacher’s platform and sat there like a lemon, attempting to collect my thoughts, when I became aware of a woman mouthing something at me, the content of which was entirely lost in the appalling din. She seemed to be gesturing at a mobile phone she was grasping in her hand. I grinned at her and gave her a thumbs-up, in admiration of her phone, though it looked to me a fairly standard model and not worth holding up a literary talk over. At this she shook it with renewed urgency, as if she wanted me to take it from her. I looked at her quizzically. What, in the name of the Host, could she be after? I put my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want the damn telephone. I had seen enough of it. But still she looked at me beseechingly, shaking it ever more insistently.

  I reached gingerly out to take the phone, as if it were a snake in a box. I don’t like my own mobile phone, let alone other people’s and I looked at it suspiciously. The evening sun was streaming through the windows and I couldn’t see a thing, just a black screen with motes of dust.

  The phone owner, who seemed to exercise what passed for authority here, called imperiously for silence. ‘It’s Celia,’ she shouted, and, as if the words exerted a mesmerising influence, the room fell suddenly still … you could hear a pin drop, or at least a football cannoning off the door at the back where the kids had retreated.

  ‘Ah, Celia!’ they all cried gladly.

  It was like this: Celia was the woman on the far end of the telephone. It was she, as founder of the book group, who had set this gig up, but at the last minute she had had to go into hospital to redo a botched operation on her leg, poor woman. So I was to speak to Celia using this device in front of my audience.

  Now, this is not the way I like to do things. When using the phone I prefer to seek the privacy of a quiet corner or, for preference, a telephone box. But there was no way out of it: I could hardly refuse, given that the poor woman was in hospital and, if the owner of the phone was to be believed, she was dead keen to speak to me. Accordingly I raised the accursed object to my ear.

  ‘Hola, Celia,’ I said hesitantly. Two dozen eavesdroppers craned forward expectantly.

  I thought I
heard a distant croak … but perhaps not. I tried again. ‘Hola, Celia. ¿Qué tal?’ How’s it going?

  Not too good, I would have imagined, given that she was back where they had already botched up one operation on her leg. But what do you say?

  This time there was a distant croak, as of a person a long way away in a hospital ward talking on a mobile telephone. Of course, I was quite unable to make out what she was saying. I adjusted the phone to get my ear nearer the actual hole where the voice ought to come out. The audience was getting excited now, egging me on to new feats of telephony. I smiled ingratiatingly at them, then thought better of it and put on a hospital sort of a face, full of mournfulness and concern. I listened for a bit to the indistinct croaking of the device. After a while I decided to say something. ‘Well, it certainly is good to be here in Domingo Pérez,’ I hazarded. ‘It’s a shame you can’t be here with us, though, Celia. How’s the leg?’

  A certain amount of sighing from the audience gave me the impression that things weren’t perhaps too well with poor Celia’s leg. And then all of a sudden I got the hole in the right place and I could hear Celia clear as day.

  ‘I’m so pleased you have been able to come,’ she was saying. ‘Is Ana with you? I’d love to hear her voice.’

  ‘Er, no, I’m sorry. Ana’s at home.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame, our readers will be disappointed; they really were looking forward to meeting her.’

  More mournful looks from the audience confirmed that this was, indeed, the case. The phone, as phones inevitably do, had started to break up, allowing me an entirely acceptable, if rather clichéd, excuse for bringing matters to a close. My attempts to do so were more or less drowned out by all the women in the audience shouting greetings and encouragement to poor Celia and her leg. The noise had returned to its former deafening levels. I returned the phone to its owner, who had been leaning into my ear beside me.

  It was time for the talk. I spoke for a bit about how I had come to write a book and what it all meant to me, and then read out a couple of short passages. I had made it clear at the beginning – as if this were necessary – that I preferred a conversation with everybody joining in, as opposed to a monologue with myself, so, except for the time when I was reading, it was pretty hard to get a word in at all.

  My adrenalin, or whatever it is that enables one to make a fool of oneself in public, carried me through this ostensibly solo part of the evening, and when the time came to announce questions, and throw the baton entirely to the floor, I sighed and stretched with relief, ready to relax as the ‘questions’ rolled.

  The beauty of talking to Spanish readers is that they generally prefer the sound of their own voices to yours, and most of them have come along to get their own oar in rather than just to sit passively. They can’t help it; it’s the way they are. So, when you open the talk to questions, a forest of hands rises from the audience. And the questions tend to take the form of long and convoluted statements, endlessly qualified and elaborated upon. ‘My question’, the false questioner might begin, ‘has three parts’, or five, or worse. Of course, by the time the so-called ‘question’ grinds to its end, a period that can last as long as twenty minutes, you have entirely forgotten what the beginning was about. But that doesn’t matter, as nobody really wants an answer anyway.

  This evening, however, proved slightly different.

  A hand shot up ahead of the others. It belonged to a thin woman with thick spectacles sitting at the back. She had not joined in the general hubbub hitherto, but now she looked me in the eye, cleared her throat and, without any preamble, asked an unusually concise and carefully considered question: ‘How does your wife put up with you, that poor, poor woman?’

  ‘Ay yes, she must be a saint,’ concurred three or four more voices.

  ‘Santa Ana,’ someone said … as I knew they would.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ORANGES AND LEMONS

  ONE AUTUMN AFTERNOON a certain Manuel Martín Archilla turned up at our house; he was a man of unexceptional stature and was accompanied by his six-foot-four son. He had, he told me, been born at El Valero fifty-seven years ago, and lived the first six years of his life here. ‘There was an almond tree there,’ he said, as we exchanged opening pleasantries, ‘and this is where my father kept his goats … but everything is much smaller than I remember.’

  I showed him around the farm with some pride, but also a touch of embarrassment as I indicated each trapping of luxury and lasciviousness – running water, telephone, gas cooker, a hammock strung between two trees … broadband Internet aerial. He followed me around slowly, sometimes shaking his head in what I supposed was wonderment.

  ‘There were five families living here back then,’ he announced. I thought this over for a moment, and calculated that it would probably have meant twenty-five people living where now there were just the two of us, with occasional visits from Chloé, rattling about like peas on a drum.

  Not only that, but those ten parents and fifteen children would have lived almost entirely off what the farm could produce. The 1940s and 1950s were years of wretched deprivation in the countryside. There would have been no cash to buy anything beyond the basics; there was barely enough for clothes. Domingo’s mother, Expira, had told me that at six years old she was sent out barefoot on the hills, amongst the thorns and flints, tending the family’s goats. And because she had no shoes she could not go to school, for the Church, who ran the dismal excuse for an education system, stipulated that you had to wear shoes to go to school.

  ‘This is where my family lived,’ exclaimed Manuel, ‘and in there lived my aunt and her family. There used to be another door here, and another family lived in there.’

  The room in which Manuel’s family had lived was our larder, a tiny outhouse which we had reclaimed from rats. It has no windows, just a small skylight, and the room is half-cave, built into the rock. In one corner is an old wine-press; in another a bread oven. It was hard to imagine how a family could have fitted in here.

  Manuel did not make any judgements. He didn’t go on about how lush and lovely we had made the place, nor did he excoriate us for sullying the primitive but pristine world he had known with our modernities and urban aberrations. I thought that he would like to potter about a bit on his own, so I disappeared into the kitchen to do some chores, telling him to make himself at home. He thanked me with a smile as he wandered away, followed doggedly by his bemused and rather beautiful son. The poor boy had only ever known the urban whirl of Barcelona, and was making heavy weather of feigning interest in where there had been an almond tree or a big pomegranate – or where goats or chickens had had their being fifty years ago.

  A little later on, Manuel came back to take his leave. I wanted to talk to him for a bit, ask him a whole lot of questions about how life had been back in the 1950s, but he could not stay, he said, as his wife, who had absolutely refused to cross the bridge and had no interest whatever in country life, was waiting for him in the car.

  ‘I do remember the oranges, though,’ he said. ‘El Valero always grew the sweetest of oranges, and I see that you are looking after the old trees.’ This was true. We have been putting a lot of work into the trees, grafting better varieties onto the indifferent ones, pruning drastically, working well-rotted dung and compost into the earth around their roots, and being assiduous about regular watering.

  Just before Manuel left, I remembered to ask him, ‘Can you cast any light on the origin of the name, El Valero?’

  He looked at me in surprise. ‘Yes, of course. The farm was named after my grandfather, Paco Valero, who lived here.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Just that.’

  It was a rather disappointing conclusion to the mystery. However, I thought to myself, the farm has always been known for the quality of its oranges. I’d always suspected that: our Washingtonia navels are about as delicious as a delicious orange gets.

  When we first arrived at El Valero, we wanted to work th
e place properly as a farm. It was both our dream and a necessity; we had sunk what money we had into buying the place. We were younger then and bursting with energy, and we threw ourselves vigorously into the work.

  Under the censorious supervision of Pedro, the previous incumbent of the farm, whom we had somehow acquired along with the land, we harvested each and every orange and lemon we could get hold of. This seemed the right thing to do, as everybody in the village of Tíjola down the road was harvesting their citrus. It took us four days. We stuffed the beautiful fruit into huge hessian sacks and hauled them across the river to where the buyer from Lecrin Valley Citrus was waiting with his lorry and his romana – a primitive ‘hook, weight and bar’ scale in use since Roman times to weigh the harvest. We got 11,000 pesetas for the entire crop; roughly fifty quid.

  It was a far from encouraging result: fifty quid wasn’t very much even in the 1980s, and it felt like scant recompense for the eight man-days we had spent on the job. But undeterred we set about trying our hand at the summer almond harvest. The almond trees on the hillside above the farm had been more or less abandoned and so many had reverted to bitter almonds, as they do in the wild. Actually, it was a bit more troublesome than that, as they often had some branches of bitter almonds and some sweet. Now, you can’t tell the difference between a sweet almond and a bitter one just by looking at it; you have to taste them. And, worse than that, it takes time for the bitterness to develop in your mouth, so you have to make a proper job of mastication, really grind them up with those molars. Then and only then do you know if you’ve got a sweet almond, which is as subtly delicious as a nut can be … or a bitter almond, a thing which all of a sudden fills your mouth with the vilest bile, tasting intensely of cyanide and vomit. Forgive me, but that’s the way it is with a bitter almond. They are good for nothing – or almost nothing. Curiously enough, a tiny proportion of bitter almonds is added to the sweet to give flavour to marzipan.