Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  The morning is best for making out details to the west of the house, as the sun rises over the Talaia mountain to the east and drapes its first rays over the steep gorge, near the spring. Rising a little more, it catches the water of the spring and brings the trees there into focus, their shadows stretching long and high up the slope behind them. Driven by the surge of dawn, the birds are still singing by this point, but by eleven, or midday, when the sun is high over the valley and the light becomes a flattened white, blanching everything beneath it into near non-existence, they fall silent. In fact nothing seems to move during the few hours when the sun is at its zenith. We are not far from the beginning of autumn now, but except for the marked shortening of the days there is still little sign of it: the sun still burns and drives every living thing to seek shelter. By four or five o’clock, though, when the sun is moving closer towards the peak of the Picosa to the west, and the colours are softening, the heat no longer so punishing, a second chorus, like a second dawn, can be heard. Gentler this time, with fewer participants: perhaps a cuckoo down in the valley. Not long now and they will be migrating south for winter. This has always been my favourite time of day, but here evening takes on new textures. I look out once more, our work for the day finished, at the slowly moving, slowly transforming landscape laid out in front of us like a magic carpet. By now the ibex have usually emerged from their midday hideaways: they skip their way down the rocks to the spring to drink, or trot along the track that leads past the house, their grey-brown coats, black tails and vast horns standing out against the pale white of the stones. They appear to have grown used to us, watching us from safe distances, daring to approach the houses when they think no one is here. Their sharp whistle, which they use when startled, has become another part of our acoustic landscape.

  I watch the shadow run towards us as the sun finally passes out of view. Sunset here comes relatively early, but we are recompensed with an extended dusk. In the half-light we sit and look out towards the village at the bottom of the valley, catching the last of the sun’s rays. Its whitewashed walls glow yellow and orange, like a jewel: close enough to feel accessible, far enough away to feel apart, separate and on our own. We have not left the world, we’re simply watching it from another vantage point. There’s life enough here under the rocks and trees: perhaps, I sometimes wonder, even more than in the city we have – for the time being – gladly left behind.

  *

  Once the bulk of the building work on the house had been done, we moved into the farm on a more full-time basis, with plans to turn our attention to the land and to start slowly trying to transform it. The beginning of our new life coincided with the tail end of the fig season. Much of our time in these early days was still spent plastering, painting, replacing and securing some of the terracotta tiles on the older sections of the house, collecting firewood for the months ahead. But in the late afternoon and early evening we would make time simply to wander about the mountainside, slowly familiarising ourselves with the complex terrain. We had to pump water up regularly from the spring to a deposit, an aljub, near the house, so we’d head down to the gulley where it lay, scrambling over the rocks, trying in vain to identify some of the thousands of plants that surrounded us. Salud would dip her fingers in the small pool where the water collected after spilling out from the mountainside, while I fiddled with the pump, trying to wrest it into life so that we could wash and clean over the coming few days. Often the pipe leading back up to the house would split or crack, and I spent a lot of time patching it up, quickly having to learn basic plumbing skills so that we wouldn’t run out of water. Each time I managed to pump some up successfully – perhaps two or three thousand litres a go – I felt a great sense of achievement: now when we turned on the taps we knew exactly where the water had come from and the effort that had gone in to getting it up to the house.

  When not working on the pump, we’d head on to the terraces and seek out isolated fig trees among the long grass and bushes to collect the last of their delicious fruits. By now figs were rotting on the branches, or had been sucked dry by wasps or ants, but there were still enough ripe ones left for us to fill a dark wicker basket Salud had found lying inside one of the ruined houses. They were almost bursting, their sticky red insides wonderfully sweet and soft. The trees grew randomly across the terraces: some grouped near the house, others by the almond trees, and yet more scattered over the wilder areas of our land, sprouting up spontaneously, it seemed, with long spindly finger-branches and broad green leaves. Most were quite short, and looked more like bushes than trees. I wondered if they, too, had fallen victim to the forest fire and had since revived and grown in this chaotic fashion. Still, walking around the fields with handfuls of rich fruit in our grasp gave us the feeling of children living in a blessed semi-paradise.

  One afternoon, as we were exploring the land on the east side of the house, sitting by an oak tree, we caught sight of a car driving along the dirt track below us. We had quickly grown so used to being alone up there, with nothing but mountain goats to keep us company, that seeing another human being always came as something of a surprise, as though it broke a trance or a dream state into which we had fallen. After a few moments the car – an old dark green Land Rover – stopped on the edge of an orchard that lay some way in the distance and a man got out. He went to the back of the vehicle, picked out some tools and then walked over towards the trees. From where we sat, it seemed he was picking something off the branches.

  ‘That,’ I said after a lengthy pause, ‘is our neighbour.’ It was a strange word to use in such an uninhabited place: the nearest houses with people actually living in them were at least four miles away, down the valley towards the village. But the behaviour of the man working away in the fading light below us made it clear that while the other farmhouses dotted around the hillsides might have been abandoned, some fields were still being tended.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Salud after another pause, ‘we should go and say hello.’

  Fifteen minutes later, after scrambling down crumbling terrace walls and fighting our way through thick and not always friendly plant life, we were standing in front of a short, elderly man of stocky build, dark blue slippers on his feet and sharp yellow eyes that squinted through narrow folds in the hardened, tanned skin of his face. He gazed steadily at us as we approached and I thrust my hand out towards him, introducing ourselves as the owners of the next-door farm.

  He hesitated for a moment and then placed a rough, relaxed paw into mine.

  ‘Arcadio. They told me someone new was up at the place,’ he said. His voice was uneven, rough-edged, as though it might fail him at any moment. His age was hard to guess: he could be anything from sixty to eighty, I thought. For a moment it looked as though there was nothing more to be said, but a hint of a smile was just visible on his thin, downturned mouth. I looked around at the trees surrounding us: short, stunted, with sharp-looking branches; they seemed to have been made in his image.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to harvest your almonds,’ he said. So that’s what they were: the green, felt-like fruits hanging in clusters from the branches actually contained nuts. ‘You’ve got a hundred and thirteen almond trees up there: could bring in a nice load.’

  I tried to hide my concern that he knew more about our farm than we did. ‘About a hundred’ was all we had been told when we got the place. What else did he know that we didn’t?

  ‘Is that what you’re doing here?’ I said. ‘Harvesting?’

  His face creaked into a wry smile.

  ‘How do you do it?’ Salud asked. ‘Just pick them with your hands? Or do you have to beat the tree to make the almonds fall down?’

  I’d been hoping she’d already know this, that she might have picked it up somewhere from the general stock of farming knowledge of her childhood. But oranges, it seemed, had been the only fruit in her household: anything to do with any other type of crop was a black hole.

  Arcadio was smiling again, not entirely pleasantl
y, I thought.

  ‘I’ll come up tomorrow and harvest them for you,’ he said, pointing to our almond trees with his thumb. ‘You can watch.’

  ‘That man,’ I said as we walked back up to the farm after saying our goodbyes, ‘is going to run rings round us.’

  At eight the following day I was alerted to his arrival by the sound of his Land Rover heaving its way slowly up the mountain road. We just had time to bolt down some breakfast before stepping outside to meet him on the flat piece of ground that lay just above the house.

  There was no ‘hello’, barely a greeting of any kind, just a nod of the head and a low, barely audible kind of animal call: ‘Iéeah.’

  He pointed at the ground beneath our feet. ‘This is where we used to bring all the produce from the terraces,’ he said.

  I looked down, not quite grasping what he meant. ‘This is the era,’ he explained. ‘Everything that was harvested was brought here and placed in a big pile before being taken to the village, to the market.’

  With all the steep slopes and narrow terraces that surrounded us, I had always been struck by this rare flat stretch of land which acted as a kind of plaza for the tiny hamlet that was now our home. We used it as a convenient place to park the car or to store building materials, but it seemed it was no accident in the landscape, and had played an important role at the heart of the communities that had once lived up here. I glanced around at it with a new-found respect: we would have to clear it up and make something of it. Right now it was a bit of a dump.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’d better get started.’ I looked over towards the east and the peak of the Talaia: the rising sun was just clipping the top and scattering its light over the farm: we only had a few hours before it would become uncomfortably hot to work.

  Salud nudged me in the ribs.

  ‘Would you like some coffee first?’ she asked Arcadio with a smile. For some reason she didn’t share the slight unease I had about the man.

  Arcadio gave a cough, although I quickly realised it was a sort of strangled laugh.

  ‘Don’t drink coffee,’ he said, and from a shapeless bag he carried over his shoulder he pulled out a soft leather gourd with a little black spout which he proceeded to lift above his mouth and then squeeze, forcing out a thin red liquid into his mouth.

  ‘Ah,’ said Salud, ‘you’ve brought your bota with you.’

  ‘Only drink wine,’ Arcadio said. ‘Want some?’ And he thrust it into my hand.

  I’d seen Spanish men often enough drinking from a bota. There was a trick in squirting the liquid directly into your mouth and then timing it so that you pulled away and closed your mouth without spilling a drop. There were even some who could just keep pouring the stuff down their throats seemingly without pausing for breath, swallowing continuously with upturned head. Try as I might, it was a technique I had never quite mastered, but that morning I didn’t care: a shot of wine at eight in the morning seemed an eminently sensible way to start the day. So I squirted, and drank – and the working day began.

  Arcadio was all tuts and mumbling as we walked down from the era towards our almond trees. We had spent so much time working on the house, there’d been little time for doing anything yet on the land. Now, simply by walking beside him, I felt I was looking at it all with new eyes. Weeds were growing neck-high in places, while the almond trees, far from being neat and stunted like the ones on his land, were stretching branches high into the sky: too high, I now saw, to be able to reach for harvesting. I could see that pruning fruit trees was a skill I would have to master if things were going to move forwards up here. I looked over at Salud as we trotted behind Arcadio: from the expression on her face I could tell she was thinking the same thing.

  ‘We’ll just forget about those ones up there,’ Arcadio said pointing to some terraces climbing up the mountainside. With a shock I realised there were more almond trees up there as well – and I’d never even noticed. The path to them was completely blocked by a bramble bush that had spilled out from behind a pine tree and was threatening to take over most of the terrace itself. I quickly counted – there must have been around twenty trees up there, now out of reach. It seemed absurd that we should call this farm our own: our lack of knowledge about what was actually here, about the very crops and plants that had been cultivated, was embarrassing. There was a vast amount to learn.

  Arcadio was carrying a basket, while Salud had picked up a canvas sack. Seizing one of the branches roughly with his left hand, Arcadio pulled it down towards the ground and started grabbing handfuls of almonds, tossing them into his basket. His aim was fairly haphazard, with more than a few missing the target and getting lost in the weeds and grass around the base of the tree.

  I was expecting some kind of farmer’s insider knowledge on how best to harvest almonds, but all it seemed to involve was grabbing the things with your hands and pulling them off with a sharp tug. Salud gave me a look and we went off to a neighbouring tree to start harvesting ourselves. I waited for a moment, watching Arcadio just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, then went over to join Salud.

  The green skins wrapped around the nutshells were soft and velvety to the touch, with a coating of fine hair, but the branches of the tree were sharp and gnarled, with little thorns poking out at irregular intervals.

  ‘Wild boar love this,’ Arcadio called over as we started filling our sack. ‘Pull your trees down if they could to get the almonds. Already done some damage.’ And he pointed at another tree further down the terrace: one of the branches had fallen to the ground and was hanging by a thread from the main trunk; the leaves had died and the earth where it lay seemed to be scuffed.

  ‘Had a feast with that. Be back for more.’

  Until this point ‘wild boar’ had only been a concept for us. We knew there were some roaming around the mountains, and had heard that they might pop over our way occasionally, but this was the first time we had evidence of their actual presence – and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘The wild boar did that?’ Salud asked incredulously, indignation and fear in her voice.

  ‘They’re after food,’ Arcadio said. ‘Almonds are easy for them: rip the branches off and then eat all they want. Got whole families of them living up there.’ He pointed towards the upper section of the gulley that cleaved the side of our mountain, a dense dark-green area thick with trees and bushes.

  There was a pause as we took this in. I had two mental images of wild boar: one as frightened, harmless creatures that always ended up as banquet material in Asterix comic books; the other as fierce, territorial beasts that could charge and kill a man. I had the feeling the comic-book version was not entirely accurate.

  ‘Shooting them’s the best thing,’ Arcadio said. ‘Hunters’ll come up once the season’s started. Nothing but trouble, those boar.’

  Wild man-eating beasts, and now the prospect of armed men wandering around our land taking potshots at them: rather than a farm in Spain, it was beginning to feel more like some kind of safari park.

  We carried on stripping the trees of their fruit as the shadows shortened and the sun rose higher in the sky, Salud and I carefully picking each almond and placing it in the sack, Arcadio ripping them off in handfuls along with clumps of leaves and bits of twig and tossing them carelessly into his basket. By the time we had had finished one tree, he was already on his fourth.

  ‘Perhaps there is some trick,’ I said.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Salud and a soft, muffled ‘¡ay!’. From the tone I knew something was wrong: she was never one to scream or make a fuss. I looked round and saw her holding one hand tightly while blood was oozing out from between her fingers.

  ‘Bloody thorns,’ she said.

  The cut had stretched along her finger and looked deep, lips of skin parting and exposing the bloody mass underneath.

  ‘I need to sit down,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I’ll go to the house and get some iodine.’

  ‘Wa
it,’ said Arcadio. He had walked over and was kneeling down to take a look at Salud’s hand.

  ‘Almond thorn?’ he asked. She nodded. The blood was still flowing thickly, dripping over her clothes and drying in ugly brown stains. Arcadio walked towards a nearby terrace wall and bent down as though looking for something. Then he knelt, pulled up part of a plant he’d found, and stuffed the leaves into his mouth to chew. For a few seconds of confusion we watched him masticating like a cow. It had seemed he was about to do something to help the cut on Salud’s finger, now I started to wonder if he’d changed his mind and was simply having a hillman’s snack.

  Finally he spat a dark green gob into the palm of his hand, looked at it for a moment as though to gauge its usefulness, then walked over towards Salud again. Taking her hand he started spreading the gunge on to her bleeding finger.

  ‘Should slow it down,’ he said. ‘Might take some of the pain away as well.’

  I watched his spittle mix freely with her blood.

  ‘It’s stopping,’ Salud said. ‘It feels sharp, as though it’s drying up.’

  Arcadio stood up.

  ‘Should be fine by tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Bruguerola. Makes it heal quicker.’

  Later that night we sat at the kitchen table next to the remains of dinner and an empty bottle of wine, a large sack of almonds on the floor beside us. We’d bandaged Salud’s hand up, but barely a drop of blood had appeared since Arcadio’s intervention.