Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  You can get used to anything, though, and it was said that the old folks of the Alpujarra developed a taste for bitter almonds, to the extent that there were, for many years, posters published by the state against the practice. Twenty bitter almonds will kill you, they said. For they don’t just taste of cyanide; the amygdalin in almonds is converted by enzymes in your stomach to cyanide itself.

  Naturally it fell to me to check out the almonds, to sample each tree for sweetness or bitterness. Ana would watch me for telltale signs as I masticated furiously. If my features were suffused with sweet relief, we would spread the net and attack the tree with our long canes; if, as was more often the case, I started to gag and retch and spit out the bitter, bitter paste, we would move on, pick another representative-looking almond, and I would squat down and crack it open with a stone and bite into it.

  Of course, I don’t know what cyanide tastes like, but bitter almonds certainly taste like what you imagine cyanide would taste like. And by the end of the first morning I had such a god-awful bellyache that we decided to abandon the almond harvest altogether. In years to come we would lop the almond trunks just above sheep height and graft onto them good sweet varieties like Marcona, but that year I wasn’t going to go down with cyanide poisoning just for the handful of pesetas that our miserable crop would bring in.

  It seemed unlikely that we would be able to make anything but the most meagre living from the fruits of the farm, so for years we muddled along living off our wits, the income from sheep-shearing, seed-collecting, and whatever else happened to come along before we happened on a lucky crop of books. As for the oranges and lemons, well, we helped ourselves to what we wanted, and just left the rest on the trees for the beauty of it.

  Somebody once asked me – in the way that people do – what I most loved about living in Spain. I pondered for a bit, considering the culture, the people, the sunshine, the architecture, the music, the cities, the landscape (there are a whole lot of good reasons to enjoy living in Spain). But eventually I came to the conclusion that the one thing I really could not do without was having my own orange trees. Apart from the beauty of those gorgeous oranges shining from amongst the deep, dark foliage, there’s the delight of idly picking one as you pass a tree, and meditatively peeling and eating it segment by segment. Things have reached such a pretty pass that I can’t bring myself to eat an orange even if it’s been in a bowl for just one night – it tastes stale. It’s the same with orange juice – we have to squeeze our own into the glass.

  Citrus trees are unique and extraordinary in that they bear ripe fruit for many months of the year, at the same time even as the blossom and the tiny ripening fruit of the next crop. We eat the first of our oranges at the end of November, and we are still picking them from the tree and eating them at the end of June, when they remain firm and juicy, although there tends to be quite a high incidence of maggots in the fruit by July.

  As for lemons, well, they fruit nearly all year round, although by the end of August they are well past their best. This manifests itself in a most curious way: the pips start to germinate and, when you cut a lemon open, you find tiny green lemon trees inside, complete with roots and leaves. It seems beyond belief that anything can live in, and be nourished by, the sharp acidity of a lemon. At this stage they also start to taste rather disagreeable. Juan Barquero has some late lemons by the river, though, and these tide us over until our own trees come back into production. Lemons, of course, are another thing I would not want to be without.

  When the wind blows in the winter, which it often does, it knocks the ripe oranges off the trees. With a strong wind they fall in thousands, and the earth beneath the trees becomes a carpet of fallen fruit – orange, obviously, and lemon-yellow beneath the lemon trees. It’s disheartening to see a large part of your winter’s crop lying on the ground, but the sheep are in heaven. I let them out of their shed in the morning and they gallop off as one, an amorphous woolly mob racing round the terraces hoovering up the fallen fruit. The funny side of this is that sheep have only a lower set of teeth, so that when they bite into the oranges, they get them stuck on their teeth – and they can be dislodged only with difficulty. Sometimes the whole flock can be seen standing around in a state of bafflement and confusion, each sheep with an orange stuck firmly on the end of its nose. We, who live so far away from our fellow man, are easily amused.

  A darker side of this becomes apparent the next day, though, when you find the flock lurking in the sheep-shed, too lame to walk, their flanks heaving, and looking miserable. Fortunately this phenomenon doesn’t last long, and a few hours later all trace of lameness will have vanished. It is due to the citric acid, which goes straight to their joints. I believe musicians are urged to avoid orange juice for this very reason, in case they can’t hold their instruments.

  I suppose it’s possible that the sheep weigh up the pros and cons and decide that it’s worth putting up with the temporary lameness for the exquisite delight of the oranges; there are not so many exquisite delights in the life of a sheep. On the other hand, maybe they just forget, and each time they see that carpet of fallen fruit they think it’s the first time. I have read that fish can remember things for thirty seconds (what, one wonders?), and sheep, love them though I do, are not that much higher up the evolutionary scale than fish.

  If you’re lucky enough to own a farm, albeit a not entirely feasible peasant farm that you maintain mainly for the pleasure of the sheep, you can’t help feeling that it ought to be able to produce crops for people beyond its incumbents, and at least defray its running costs. Ana and I believe fervently in this dream and we have kept El Valero ticking over, hoping that one fine day we might no longer just live on the land, but from it, too. After long and careful consideration, Ana decided that there were two ways in which we would achieve this goal. We would apply for organic certification, thereby increasing the market value of our produce, and we would greatly develop the fruit-growing potential of our land. Oranges were the obvious crop to start with, as we knew these were of a high quality, but once we’d established our market we’d expand into pomegranates, a fashionable miracle food that had the advantage of growing spectacularly well in El Valero soil.

  In Spain, to become organically certified, you need to have kept your farm free from agrochemicals and petroleum-based fertilisers for five years, to ensure that no residues still linger in the soil. From the beginning of that period no product must be used that is deemed unacceptable by the governing body, the CAAE (Comité Andaluz de Agricultura Ecológica). This includes seeds – which must be from organic sources – as well as fertilisers, pesticides and sprays. You also have to keep a book in which to note down assiduously all your agricultural operations and activities. Once a year an inspector comes to snoop around the place for signs of any of the forbidden chemicals and check that you have filled in the requisite pages.

  Given that we had been running the farm on sound natural and ecological principles for the last twenty years and had not only banished agrochemicals but had been derided by our neighbours for doing so, we should have been rather smug about these checks. Yet, unaccountably the thought of the inspector calling left us apprehensive. There’s something about being inspected that triggers a guilty consience, even if the visit involves nothing more than a morning entertaining an idealistic young man, brimming with interesting ideas gleaned from agricultural college.

  The usual pattern is that we wander round the terraces counting trees and sheep; pick some fruit and eat it; then have coffee together while he tut-tuts over the fact that we haven’t filled in the operations book … and then we fill it in together, with careful fabrications. It’s hard to remember exactly when you did what, and, indeed, why. Finally he signs us off and walks back to his car with vows of undying friendship and a bag of earth for analysis, to make sure there has been no skulduggery.

  The sheep, though they tick almost all the organic boxes, are kept out of the equation as I’m loath to fully commit t
o a regime that might leave them defenceless against their fiercest or most tenacious foes. Take fleas, for instance. There will always be fleas about if you live amongst cats and dogs and sheep, and most of the time they are manageable, but every so often – and there’s no knowing when – some mysterious combination of elements causes them to multiply exponentially, and what you get is a nightmarish explosion of the flea population. It starts in the sheep-shed, where one day you walk in and look down to find your legs and trousers literally black with fleas. You rush out, tug off your trousers and submerge them in a bucket of water with a big stone to keep them down. Meanwhile, the dogs go in for a nose round in the sheep-shed, and come out caked from head to toe in a living mat of fleas. The dogs sleep in our bedroom, and within days the connubial bed itself has become what the locals call a pulgatorio, where a pulga is a flea. You can’t sleep at night for the tickling of hosts of tiny creatures all over your body, and your every waking hour becomes a torment of itching and scratching.

  And even the water treatment with the trousers is to little avail. I have left trousers beneath the water for ten days, only to discover when I put them on again that they were still alive with fleas. The cunning creatures creep into the tucks and seams, where there may remain the tiniest air pocket, and there they hole up waiting for the day. When you put the trousers on, they lie low for a bit, until the warmth of your body awakens whatever notions it is that fleas have, and they come skittering out of their hiding places and head for the warmer and more enticing parts of your body, notably your nether abdomen. And there they play havoc with your parts, doing whatever foul things it is that they do.

  You can’t mess about with fleas. It’s no good spraying them with preparations of mares’ tail, nettles or garlic soaked in spring water; you’ve got to hit the bastards hard with some virulent chemical. Similarly it’s no use pussy-footing with the intestinal parasites to which sheep are prone; you need strong stuff to combat these. The sheep graze, when not on the hill, in a river valley: ideal conditions for parasitical snails, which they ingest with the plants that grow in the riverbed. In order to keep the flock in good health, we have to zap them at least once a year.

  Fortunately, the sheep don’t seem to mind being left out of the organic regime. And it matters not a jot when it comes to selling them, as we have more than enough customers with a taste for hill-and herb-reared lamb.

  You might imagine that after a wait of five years there would be some sort of fanfare about making the grade as organic fruit producers – a ceremony, perhaps a little like getting a university degree, with capes and mortarboards, to welcome you into the exalted community. Yet all we received from CAAE to confirm that the conversion process was complete were a stack of new forms to fill in, more pages in which to note down our agricultural activities, and some stickers. These sport the CAAE logo – a green leaf and a yellow celestial orb. It didn’t seem much, and yet in the days that followed I noticed a subtle shift in my estimation of our farm and, by association, my self-esteem as a fruit grower. Our oranges had undergone no greater change than ripening slightly from one day to next, yet they seemed to glow with added lustre. All of a sudden they were no longer run-of-the-mill oranges from a mountain farm, but properly certified organic fruit – more prized than, say, the identical crop hanging from identical branches on Juan Barquero’s side of the river.

  If truth be told, though, I’m a little unsure about organic farming: I believe that without the agrochemicals the land takes less of hammering and that with careful and thoughtful management the soil should become ever more productive, ever richer with humus, and easier to till. I also believe that the soil is, along with the fish of the sea and the forests, one of the fundamental inheritances of man, so looking after it properly is unquestionably the right thing to do. But I am unconvinced that it can feed the population of the world. It’s hard to imagine how the great grain-growing prairies of Russia and the Americas can be farmed without the addition of artificial fertilisers, nor how the quantities of food necessary to feed the burgeoning urban billions can be produced with the addition of nothing more than compost and dung.

  However, a tiny mountain farm like ours does not lend itself to the practice of agribusiness, and so, gladly, and perhaps appropriately, we have gone organic. And indeed, a few weeks after the stickers arrived we got a call from Federico, our local representative of an ecological fruit-buying company based on the Almerian coast. At least, that was what we thought he said. It was hard to know exactly, as he insisted on speaking in a bizarre approximation of English, with random German- or Dutch-sounding words. It seemed that the only language he was unwilling to hazard was his own. After several false starts, he eventually used just enough Spanish for us to infer that he and a man called Antonio, possibly his boss, would come the following Tuesday and take a look at our fruit.

  A couple of days later, Federico and Antonio came clattering over the bridge. Antonio, a short, solid-looking man, dressed in blue overalls, had the quiet authoritative manner of an experienced farmer. He seemed hugely relieved to discover that we spoke Spanish and immediately fell into a discussion with Ana about her plans to develop fruit growing on the farm. Meanwhile Federico bobbed and weaved around us, interjecting the odd comment in cod-English.

  Antonio was a man who liked to keep his cards close to his chest, but even he seemed impressed by our Washingtonias. Everyone is. ‘How many kilos can you give me of good, unblemished fruit?’ he asked, gazing thoughtfully up at a tree through the thicket of leaves. We estimated about five hundred and, after a few more questions, impeded by a few more unfathomable sallies from Federico, we finally struck a deal. He would pay us a euro per kilo.

  This sounded to us like good money, certainly more than we’d ever been offered in the past. Antonio had also shown an interest in the pomegranate harvest – an up-and-coming market, apparently – although being a citrus man himself he offered to put us in touch with a pomegranate expert when we felt that the trees were ready. The fruit market is highly specialised in this way.

  We harvested the oranges and lemons on two warm sunny days in March. Antonio brought us a couple of hundred plastic crates, and Ana, I and Christophe, a French friend and enthusiast for organic farming, set to the harvest. We started with the lemons, picking only the perfect ones. If you see lemons on sale in shops and markets, you may be unaware of the extremely varied morphology of the lemon. There are some really weird lemons about, in particular what are known as ‘Hand of Buddha’ lemons, which resemble nothing so much as an octopus. Occasionally you get one of these aberrations on a normal lemon tree. Others are less spectacular, but still too weird to be considered acceptable. Lemon trees have wicked thorns, too, and many fruit are damaged by the effect of the wind rubbing the fruit on the thorns. So all in all only about sixty percent were acceptable to the buyer. The rest we left on the trees.

  Christophe and I climbed ladders and clambered about in the thorny trees, filling sacks tied around our waists with what we thought were the most perfect fruit. Then Ana, down on the ground, would inspect each one and put it in a crate for selling or in a reject sack. As one might expect, her word was final, and nearly every time we tried to argue the case for a marginal lemon, our plea was rejected.

  We filled about thirty crates with perfect, gleaming, yellow lemons, and then started on the oranges. It was the same process, except that we have many more orange trees and they are, if anything, even more thorny. Ana again subjected the picked fruit to the same draconian selection process, and at the end of the second day we loaded the crates onto the back of the Land Rover and drove them across the river to where Antonio was waiting. He was impressed by the rigorous quality control Ana had instigated. It looked like the harvest would bring in a profit at last – not huge, but a sign that the farm might begin to pay for its upkeep.

  As well as our harvest, we ended up with dozens of sacks filled to the top with slightly blemished oranges. This would have been depressing if we hadn’
t already done a bit of research and discovered that the food bank in Granada was only too pleased to take any oranges that were spare – and they didn’t give a tinker’s toss about the blemishes. These city food banks are feeding millions in Spain at the moment and they need every bit of help they can get. It felt good to know that none of our labour would be wasted and that the reject fruit would have its own social value rather than having to be discarded like the windfalls.

  In celebratory mood after delivering the properly shaped citrus to Antonio, we packed the Land Rover again, this time with the sacks of misshapen but equally delicious fruit, and drove off to Granada. The food bank was in a shed-like building in the centre of town and staffed by a small gang of volunteers, most of them recent immigrants from Africa or Latin America. As I parked up alongside, two tall Nigerian men and a sturdy-looking Colombian woman hurried out to help unload the sacks. They had made a large holding pen for the produce out of stacked tins and milk cartons in the centre of the hall, and tipped the oranges in to form an appealing centrepiece. ‘These’ll be gone within a couple of days,’ they cheerfully told me.

  Rounding the bend to the river track on the way home we noticed Domingo hard at work in the field beside his house. Domingo, despite initial scepticism about organic farming, had also begun the conversion process for certification and had only another two years to go. Since gaining the deeds for the farm he had been working tirelessly, fencing in and cultivating parts of his land for his latest projects: the expansion of a nursery specialising in local Alpujarran plants and the cultivation of a small plantation of goji berris, a shrub of Chinese origin, for the wholefood market.