The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

  I crouched down and scanned this piece of formidable medieval military architecture for tell tale signs. Cagarrutas… there were cagarrutas all the way up the steps. They must have been nervous. They couldn’t have got through the wooden gate, but a patch of heavily scuffed earth at the top of the wall attested to the fact that they had walked up the steps and then leapt the remaining wall. Fifty sheep – that’s two hundred scrabbly little hooves… The evidence wasn’t hard to see.

  Later that morning, Manolo turned up; I found him crouched down among the remains of the vegetable patch. He turned and looked at me as he heard me enter. There was a diplomatic edge to his usual grin of greeting. ‘The sheep been here, then?’ he said, perhaps a little unnecessarily.

  ‘The buggers jumped up the wall. They’ve been here all night. They’ve had the lot. A bad business…’

  ‘A bad business,’ repeated Manolo, tossing a bunch of ravaged radishes onto the compost heap. ‘But not as bad as all that – a lot of this ought to come back. Maybe not those cabbages, but you don’t like cabbages anyway; you told me so yourself.’

  ‘No… You’re right. None of us do. I don’t know why Ana plants them. We usually end up giving them to the sheep anyway.’

  ‘Well, there you go, then,’ said Manolo matter-of-factly, ‘and the tomatoes and garlic will be fine, the sheep didn’t manage to break through onto the triangle patch.’ I hadn’t thought to check but this was a huge relief to hear. ‘Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have this all sorted out, and in a month you won’t even remember the sheep were here,’ he promised.

  A COUPLE OF PRIMATES

  AS A NA RESTORED HER EQUANIMITY and the integrity of her vegetable patch by spending the cool of the day clearing beds, I would head down to the fields to cut bundles of fresh alfalfa for the sheep. This is one of my very favourite jobs. I used to cut the crop with a Grim Reaper-style scythe, but Manolo so ridiculed my scythe work that I’ve come round to his traditional Alpujarran way – down on my knees with the hoz (pronounced ‘oth’) or sickle. It’s slow work, and a little tedious, but it does groom the land in a most appealing way. The cut part of the field is left mown like a lawn, while the face of the tall, uncut alfalfa curls away like steep green cliffs and headlands. And the kneeling also puts you in touch with the insect world, that population supposed to dwarf human numbers by several million to one.

  The technique is to kneel on one knee, grasp a handful of alfalfa with your left hand and sever it at the base with the sickle, repeating the process over and over again until you have a huge green bundle to hoist on your shoulders. I like to haul it straight up to the stable, where the sheep fall ecstatically upon it – there’s nothing sheep like more than alfalfa.

  I remember when I was young and of a more contemplative cast of mind, I would lie on the edge of a pond, looking through the shadow of my head into the depths of the water. At first I’d see nothing, but little by little, as my eyes became accustomed to the scale of this microscopic universe, I’d begin to see the teeming population of improbable animalcules – like some tiny version of the Serengeti. Hosts of infinitesimal creatures, flippered and legged and feelered and finned, perhaps even with tiny tooth and claw, but more probably armed with suckers and cilia and palps and invasive ovipositors. Daphne there were, and hydra, and paramecia (if that’s the correct plural of paramecium); also water fleas and pond skaters and beetles, spiders and boatmen.

  Well, it’s a similar thing with the alfalfa field: after a while I get bored with the repetitiveness of the work, lay down my sickle and hunker down to see what’s going on at ground level. The alfalfa becomes a towering rainforest and slowly, in the dark of its depths, the jungle population is revealed. Creatures that are metallic green and scarlet and yellow scurry about like a spill of coloured beads in constant motion. Infinitesimal spiders, pale like ghosts, cast slender lianas and lines from the forest canopy to the floor, and spin webs for the capture of creatures so tiny as to be beyond human imagination. Beetles of every persuasion scuttle to and fro with peculiar purpose, and everywhere are columns of ants, engaged in their unfathomable tasks. More sinister are the hairy black caterpillars, giants wriggling through the green penumbra; Manolo tells me these huge beasts can reach plague proportions and devour whole crops of alfalfa, though, touch wood, that has never happened to us.

  Higher in the canopy are the ladybirds, thousands of them, all welcome allies in the battle against the piojos – aphids – in the orange trees. And fluttering above the canopy are clouds of small blue butterflies; they look as if the alfalfa flowers themselves, which are a similar blue, have taken wing and come to life.

  It was lucky that, in order to fit in with Ana’s astrological plans, our tomatoes had been moved to the sheep-proof triangle patch by the alfalfa, for a summer without tomatoes would be unthinkable. Above all else, tomatoes are the basis for gazpacho and, in common with most of the population of Andalucía, we make and eat gazpacho almost every day from July till September.

  People are passionate about the way to make true gazpacho, or their own version of it: there are those who abhor, for example, the use of a cucumber; others who insist upon the juice of a lemon rather than vinegar. I add a fistful of basil and mint and leave the peppers out – and Domingo, who, it has to be said makes a good and gutsy gazpacho, tells me that the secret is to add a dash of honey. Now, part of the beauty of gazpacho – for us, at any rate – is the fact that in summer we can usually gather all the ingredients, apart from the honey, fresh from the garden. This lends the dish an extra sanctimonious appeal.

  Using honey from our own hives would, doubtless, be an even greater pleasure, and well-intentioned people have for years suggested we keep bees. And maybe we should, but then these same folk also counsel us to keep goats and make our own cheese, plough with our own mules, slaughter pigs for the pork and sausages, make our own wine and yoghurt and jams, and plait our own esparto grass into ropes and baskets. No thanks, we reply: we want more free time rather than less.

  It’s curious how enthusiastic friends can be about ideas that would fill our lives with more work and drudgery; things they wouldn’t dream of doing themselves, but that seem to them just the thing to keep us from succumbing to boredom in our rural idyll. I have to admit, though, that we do feel a little tempted by bees; it would seem like the right thing to do for the farm. Bees are somehow fundamental to existence – why, Albert Einstein himself reckoned that if the bees went humanity would soon follow. But our farm is thick with wild bees anyway, and sometimes the humming from the eucalyptus or the blossoming oranges rivals even the sound of the rivers.

  So for the present we leave beekeeping to the beekeepers. And besides, the whole business of keeping bees is fraught with difficulties. There’s the crop plane that sprays the valley with dimethoate, which is fatal to bees, and then there are the inevitable diseases which take their toll, not to mention the depredations of the abejarucos, the bee-eaters. The valley swarms with these beautiful birds. They live in the holes in the rocks above our neighbour’s farm, La Herradura, and swoop down across the road as you drive past, winging their way out high across the valley. This gives you the opportunity to watch them from above as they twist and turn and hover and stall. And as the sun catches them they shine with all the colours of the most florid parrots you could imagine. The abejarucos are the most spectacularly exotic creatures that live here, and they fill us with wonder and delight. Of course the beekeepers take a different view, because bee-eaters do eat an awful lot of bees.

  Chloë has become party to Domingo’s affectation of putting honey in the gazpacho, and to humour her I usually add a spoonful or two. But that month our supplies ran out, and on a whim I decided to walk up to collect supplies from Juan Díaz, our favoured beekeeper, who lives high on Carrasco, the lush spring-watered hill that bounds the valley on its western side. I could have taken the car I suppose, but it wouldn’t have been the same; there was a certain romance in the idea of slogging up a hill on a
hot summer day to fetch a pot of honey.

  By the time I reached the little grove of walnut trees below Juan Díaz’s cortijo, my shirt was sticking to my skin and the cotton rag with which I wipe the sweat from my brow was limp and sodden. The sun hung motionless directly overhead, burning my nose and ears, and the super-heated air lay still and heavy. I stopped beneath the shade of a tree and looked out across the gulf of still air to Campuzano, the waterless hill on our own side of the valley. It had been eighteen months now without a drop of rain and the scrub-covered slopes were dull with that yellowish pallor of dying vegetation.

  Approaching the house, I passed an open-cast rubbish dump, the universal element of a traditional Alpujarran farm, and called out to announce my presence. The Díaz house is, like many in the Alpujarras, built on a camino or mule track, so in following the way you pass right through its porch. Receiving no reply, I ducked under the overhanging vine and passed through to where the track continued on the other side.

  There, holding a tin bucket, stood Juan’s wife, Encarna, a strong, bright-eyed sixty-year-old, who was wearing, in spite of the heat, an apron over an old floral printed dress, over a pair of woollen trousers.

  ‘Hola, vecino,’ she cried – Hallo, neighbour. ‘And what brings you up this way?’

  ‘Hola, Encarna… Qué tal?’

  She wiped her hands on the apron and shook my hand. ‘Hot,’ she said – the Spanish talk about the weather just as much as the British – ‘Hot, and still no rain. It’s all going to ruin… but what can we do? We must just put up with what we’re given, no?’

  This particular philosophical discourse is an almost formulaic greeting, and doesn’t really require an answer.

  Juan was apparently seeing to his bees in the little poplar copse just up the slope behind the house. ‘Go and find him,’ she urged. ‘He loves to show people the hives.’

  ‘Okay, I will’, I answered and walked apprehensively off in the direction she indicated.

  Juan Díaz, a tall, thin man whose grey hair and aquiline nose were hidden under a large veil, was leaning over a wooden box in the spindly shade of the poplars, engaged in one of those arcane tasks that beekeepers do. Half of him was obscured by a cloud of smoke and bees. He saw me and nodded his head discreetly in greeting. ‘Come on over and take a look, Cristóbal, but gently,’ he intoned.

  ‘Not bloody likely, Juan. It’s alright for you – you’re veiled.’

  ‘So you’re nervous of the little bee, then?’

  Spanish bees tend to be aggressive, so I don’t feel in the least feeble declining to poke around them without a veil. I watched from a safe distance as Juan broke the propolis seal of a hive and lifted its lid. The murmuring of the bees rose a little in pitch and the hundreds of bees that obscured his person turned into thousands. They crawled all over him, scores of them moving on his bare hands. He seemed perfectly calm, moving with a measured delicacy. Actually I thought it unlikely that a bee could get its sting into Juan’s hands anyway, given the cracked-leather texture of his work-hardened skin. He had told me that he cauterised the deep fissures that followed the folds of his hands and fingers by filling them with gunpowder – yes, gunpowder from a shotgun cartridge – and setting light to it. Juan Díaz was hard.

  ‘What are you doing there, Juan?’ I called in a manner calculated not to aerate bees. He was silent for a while as he performed a particularly tricky part of the operation. Eventually he said: ‘I’m looking for the queen. I think she may have escaped into the upper part of the hive. But I’ll leave it for now. It can take a long time to find a lost queen.’

  He gently put back the lid and exchanged his veil for a battered straw hat proclaiming his affiliation to the ‘Caja Rural’ – the Country Bank – and came forward to shake my hand. Then he led me to the small store at the back of the house where he kept his honey. Most of the year’s crop was still settling in a big plastic tub. On the surface was a thick crust of pollen, dead bees, flakes of wax and general detritus from the hive.

  ‘This,’ said Juan, dipping his finger and licking it, ‘is the best stuff of all. But the honey-buying public prefer it without the dead bees.’ He fetched me out one of the few remaining jars of the previous year’s honey, and took off the lid for me to approve. The honey was dark and thick like malt, and gave off a heady scent of orange and almond blossom, mountain herbs and that mysterious essence of the bee.

  Juan had some watering to see to before we could stop for a drink, so picking up his mattock he strode towards his terrace of maize. I followed him into the forest of tall stems, laced with rivulets of running water, as he gave here a chop, there a poke with his mattock, adjusting the flow across the stony earth. It was cool and lush, a dim green penumbra of respite from the dust and glare outside. The plants, thick with leaf, towered way above our heads, and each was hung with several fat cobs of corn. I couldn’t help wondering where all the water was coming from, as there was not this much water at the moment in the whole acequia. ‘I have a tank now,’ he explained, with a noticeable glint of pride. ‘Come, I’ll show it to you.’

  As we walked, he asked me about the high pastures which he’d heard were very dry. ‘There’s nothing there, not a stitch of grazing,’ I told him and then voiced my worries about Antonio Rodríguez, whose sheep grazed the land up there. ‘It must be desperate for him,’ I said, ‘trying to keep this new flock of sheep alive. I don’t know how he manages… And being all on his own, too, it must weigh hard on him.’

  I had got to know Antonio a decade ago, when I spent five days and nights with him helping to take his sheep down from the mountains to the coast at Almuñecar – a transhumance, as it is called, now virtually extinct in Spain. Even then it was hard going, crossing not just hillsides but dual carriageways. Antonio is the gentlest of souls, a man whose heart brims with goodness and generosity, and at forty-five he longs for a wife and children. Vain hope, because local girls don’t want anything to do with the life of a shepherd; it’s just too damn hard.

  ‘But he’s not on his own,’ said Juan, looking at me in surprise. ‘For all his troubles, Antonio is happy as can be; he’s absolutely head over heels in love with his little daughter. She’ll be coming on for two by now.’

  ‘Daughter? I didn’t even know he had a woman…’ I burbled.

  ‘Yes, he’s been married three years now. His wife is Moroccan from the High Atlas; she’s no stranger to the hard life – she loves it up there. You couldn’t find a happier family.’

  This, I thought to myself, is about the best news I’ve heard all year. It seemed so unexpected and yet so right. And then, emerging again into the sunlight, Juan led me up a steep path, at the top of which we found ourselves looking into an enormous circular concrete tank. He turned to me for my reaction.

  I considered the construction in silence for a moment, then, as its enormity registered, exclaimed: ‘Hombre! That is one hell of a tank, Juan. Must be half a million litres.’

  ‘Six hundred thousand,’ he said proudly. ‘It cost five pesetas a litre to construct. Three million, I ended up paying.’ Spain uses the euro now, but sums of this magnitude are still calculated in pesetas – and this, £15,000 near enough, was an enormous sum of money for a subsistence farmer to spend.

  Juan showed me the outlet, where a small river was gushing from the tap and flowing down a channel to course among the maize. It was an impressive set-up, and the maize looked good and healthy, but it also seemed a huge amount of effort. Surely, I suggested, it would work out cheaper and easier to dispense with the crop altogether and buy in grain from the feed centre.

  ‘That’s true, Cristóbal, but you never know what you’re getting in those sacks,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘It probably comes from America and therefore it’s probably genetically modified, and I don’t think we’re ready for that in the Alpujarras yet. I keep my own seed from year to year. Also there’s more to a crop of maize than the grain: there’s the leaf for forage for the mule, and the stalks for bedding
, and once we’ve taken the grain from the cobs, the panochas make good fuel for the fire. And besides…’ – he paused a moment for emphasis – ‘I like my field of maize. It’s green and cool in the summer. A cortijo is not a proper cortijo without a summer crop of maize.’

  So that was it: it was as much an aesthetic, even an existential decision, a simple matter of keeping the pigs, mule and poultry happy. In my heart I applauded it. ‘But what about the wild boar?’ I asked. Everybody knows that if you grow maize or potatoes, you’re certain to have your crop destroyed by the jabali. There’s nothing in this world they like better than those succulent tubers and sweet cobs.

  ‘I’ve installed an electric fence,’ he explained. ‘They’re terrified of electricity. I’ve grown corn here five years now with not a whisper of trouble.’

  This was the first time I had heard of anybody using an electric fence in the Alpujarras. Juan was embracing modernity, the pragmatic approach, with his concrete tank and his electric fence, while hanging on tenaciously to the traditional ways. Juan and Encarna work ferociously hard all the hours of the day and every day of the week except for Thursday mornings, when they walk down to the road and hitch a lift into town to go to market. And they work like this to sustain their traditional, self-sufficient way of life, almost as if it were an end in itself.

  I looked at the low whitewashed house with its thick stone walls, the hens scratching about in the dust, the magnificent vine drooping with fat green grapes, the geraniums bursting exuberantly from old pots and tins, and was reminded of the simple unselfconscious beauty that I had first loved about the Alpujarras. It’s true that it isn’t to everybody’s taste – the poverty and apparent shabbiness put some people off – but there is an integrity to this beauty that has to be sifted from the rubbish and the thorns and dust. Moving to the edge of the terrace I looked down across the valley at our own farm, and wondered if we too had managed to preserve its intrinsic charm.