‘Something in the leaves must make the bleeding stop,’ Salud said. I wondered what it might be, and how Arcadio had got to know about it. What other medicinal treasures were we walking over every time we stepped out of the front door? The grasses and weeds choking up the mountainside started to appear in a different light.
We’d carried on all morning, stopping only for a short break at midday before picking almonds late into the afternoon. It wasn’t a strenuous job in itself, but had become so after several hours, when my arms and hands began to complain from so much lifting and grabbing. Salud had slowed down a bit after cutting her hand, only collecting the almonds that had fallen to the ground.
For a while we stared down at the enormous pile of nuts at our feet, the inevitable question ‘Now what?’ hanging wordlessly in the air. What on earth were we supposed to do with them all? Sell them? Where? Who to? How much should we charge? The complexities of a simple task farmers all over the world had been carrying out for several millennia held us paralysed for a moment. One of us should have asked Arcadio, but it had slipped both our minds.
‘What does your father do with his oranges?’ I asked Salud.
She thought for a moment. ‘The local co-operative takes them from him and then gives him money depending on quality, weight, that kind of thing.’ She pushed her hair back behind her ear. ‘They rip him off. In the shops they sell for over ten times the price he gets for them. Sometimes he ends up just giving them away.’
So here we were with a pile of almonds we had nowhere to take, and even if we did find anyone to buy them they’d probably only give us a pittance for them. Farming was looking less attractive as a way of life by the minute. We should stick to planting trees, I thought.
‘Whatever we do with them,’ Salud said, ‘we can’t just leave them like this. We’ll have to break them open, get rid of the shells.’
She stood up, walked over to where I kept the tools, picked up a couple of hammers and then came back to the table. I looked down at the overflowing sack with a renewed horror. This was going to take a very, very long time.
‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the hammer into my reluctant fist. ‘Get cracking.’
It was four o’clock in the morning when I woke up, my head resting on the kitchen table, a small pool of dribble forming from my half-open mouth. Salud had collapsed on the sofa. Beside me was a large bowl of shell-less almonds. I smiled, before looking down and realising there was an even bigger pile of unshelled almonds still waiting for us in the sack. I gave a groan and went to pick Salud up and take her to bed.
Arcadio returned the next day unannounced. Our bodies ached by now from sitting bent over the table trying to crack open the almonds without breaking what was inside. I had about a 50 per cent hit rate; Salud was doing only slightly better. We were, however, at least managing to get close to the bottom of the sack.
Arcadio looked unimpressed when he saw how many almonds we had. ‘Bad year,’ he said enigmatically. I thought we’d done rather well. ‘Too much rain last spring,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘Affects the blossom. Almonds don’t grow right.’
And he bent over to pick up the bowls of nuts we’d shelled and started pouring them into a bag.
‘Er …’ I started.
‘Be back this afternoon,’ he said. And with that he was gone, our almonds now sitting in the bag tossed over his shoulder.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said. Had we just been robbed under our very noses?
‘It’s all right,’ Salud said. ‘He’ll come back. Just watch.’
I had no choice but to trust her instinct.
Some time after lunch we heard the sound of Arcadio’s car chugging back up our road. Salud smiled.
‘Let’s see what story he’s got to tell,’ she said.
Moments later the old farmer was back in our kitchen.
‘Here,’ he said, holding something out in his hand. ‘It’s all I could get for them at the village co-op. As I said, it’s a bad year.’
He pushed the money forward again and Salud eventually reached out with her bandaged hand to take it from him.
‘Hundred euros,’ he said. He pronounced the word strangely – ‘ebros’ – as though still not quite used to this weird new currency that had been around now for six or seven years.
I looked into his small, yellow eyes and somehow knew that he was telling the truth: he’d gone and sold the almonds for us and this was exactly the amount of money he’d got for them: no secret cut for himself.
‘Thank you,’ said Salud.
‘Brought you this,’ he said, and he pulled out a small jam jar from his jacket pocket with a creamy-brown paste inside.
‘For your hand,’ he said to Salud.
‘Is it – is it herbal, like the stuff you used yesterday? Salud asked.
‘Made it myself,’ he said nodding. ‘You can use that for anything – any skin problems,’ he said. ‘Just rub it on at night.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘Helps the healing.’
*
Understanding of the scale of my ignorance is growing by the day. Planting trees seems such a simple operation at first: get tree, dig hole, put tree in it, then wait twenty or thirty years. Do this several hundred times and you’ll end up with a wood, or a small forest. But there are endless questions before you can get to this stage. Which trees? Will they be suited to the soil? The altitude? The weather conditions here? This is a Mediterranean climate, which means long, dry summers, so anything I plant has to be drought-proof. Which seems simple enough, until I realise there are all kinds of sub-categories of ‘Mediterranean’ with prefixes like ‘meso’ or ‘supra’. Some trees will be all right in one, but not another. But I don’t even know which one we’re in! And then there are the winters to consider: it gets cold here – I’m sure temperatures regularly drop to around minus five in late December and early January. So anything we put in the ground has to be able to cope with that as well. All of which makes me start wondering how anything grows up here at all.
One place to start would be to look around at what’s already here, but again I end up running into more brick walls, not least the fact that I can barely identify a single plant species on our land. I know which are the almond trees, but only because they were the first ones to be pointed out to me, that plus the fact that we’ve got about a hundred of them. Show me an almond tree elsewhere, though, and I might be stumped to recognise it.
And then there’s all this business about mulching and pruning and God knows what. In desperation I’ve turned to Ibn al-Awam, the only complete book on agriculture I’ve got on my shelves. Although it remains to be seen how much help a medieval Andalusian farmer can give me.
The Kitab al-Falaha – The Book of Agriculture – is a Moorish masterpiece from the twelfth century, sometimes described as ‘the greatest of all medieval treatises on agriculture’. A two-volume work by a Sevillian gentleman farmer, Yahya ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Awam, it was rediscovered in the mid-eighteenth century in the Escorial library just north of Madrid, having lain forgotten for hundreds of years. The book was a detailed manual for running a farm, with tips on everything from irrigation of the land to keeping horses and even bees. It was written in a surprisingly technical, almost scientific style: ‘I establish no principle in my work that I have not first proved by experiment on repeated occasions,’ the author asserted. This didn’t prevent him from adding all kinds of eccentric ideas about farming and land management, however. (If you want to grow coriander without sowing any seeds, take the testicles of a goat and plant them in the earth and water them. Later you will see coriander grow up where no seeds had been planted.) And it was filled with quotations and tips from his Greek- and Latin- as well as Arabic-speaking predecessors. One of the interesting things one could gleam from his writing was how the weather had probably changed since his time: one of his recommendations, for example, was that almonds should be picked in August, an indication, perhaps, that the month hadn’t been quite as ho
t then as it is today.
Apart from the fact that he lived in the Aljarafe district of Seville – a city four hundred miles to the south-west of our farm, significantly hotter today than where we were – little was known about Ibn al-Awam himself. He was mentioned only by two other authors of his period, Ibn Khaldun and the geographer Al-Qalqashandi. Yet his book, sometimes described as a ‘mosaic’ made up from works by previous agriculturalists, was one of the best-known and best-loved works on farming to have been passed down from the golden age of Spanish gardens – the Moorish period, which lasted from the early 700s to the end of the fifteenth century. The standards of agriculture were so high during this time they were not surpassed until the nineteenth century, with the development of modern chemistry. During the Enlightenment, the Spanish authorities became so worried about the decline of agricultural standards that they commissioned a translation of Ibn al-Awam’s work. So in 1802 José Banqueri brought out the first edition in a European language. A copy of this, bought on a whim years before, had been gathering dust on my bookshelves, waiting patiently, it now appeared, for me finally to notice it, take it down and delve into the rich, detailed natural world it set out, page after page. Ibn al-Awam was a wonderful observer – in many ways a man before his time. Or was it simply that our view of his time was misjudged? Certain words and phrases dated him – I didn’t have a team of labourers – or slaves – to hand, as he obviously had, to carry out the operations he described, nor would his observations on how to use a lance and shield on horseback prove particularly useful, despite making fascinating reading. Yet I often had the sense of dealing with a near contemporary, a fact highlighted by the absence of reminders of the ‘modern’ world around us on the mountain. It would be wrong to describe him as a friend – there is a formality and distance in his writing which prevents such a degree of intimacy, despite his very personal musings on topics such as the curative powers of rue for epilepsy or the use of squills for warding off lions and wolves – but as time passed and I dipped into him more and more, his presence grew. He became almost like a kindly guardian to whom I might turn in times of need for quiet, gently guiding advice drawn from hard-won personal experience.
The farmer’s year, I was delighted to learn from him, began in September. I was virtually clueless about what I was doing, but had managed to get something right, even if unawares. I decided to follow his advice where I could: fate, it seemed, had already done much to bring us together at the opportune moment.
*
If I was going to plant trees up on the mountainside, I would have to start preparing the land. Regardless of the question of which particular trees might thrive in which particular area, there were huge swathes of weeds which had to be dealt with first. And unfortunately they weren’t the usual kind of plants for which the word ‘weed’ seems adequate or even appropriate: ‘toughs’ might have been a better name for them, given that I was dealing almost exclusively with brambles and gorse bushes. There were several hectares of the stuff to be got rid of – and given the difficulty of the terrain I was going to have to do it by hand: no tractors or large weed-destroying machines could make it up to the terraces, and we were against the idea of using herbicides or any weedkillers.
‘Probably wouldn’t do much to them anyway,’ Salud’s father had said when the subject came up once. ‘Too well established. Either that or you spray a sulphide which’ll make all the goats miscarry.’
So hand-weeding it had to be – on a massive scale. The brambles were the easier to deal with: I’d found a big scythe-like tool with a sharp cutting edge which I set about them with. It was exhausting work, but you could slice through quite a large amount in a fairly short time. The problem was with the gorse: the bushes were growing about eight feet high in places and had trunks as thick as a man’s arm. It took a huge amount of effort, and no small number of scratches and cuts from the incredibly sharp needles to fell just one of the bastards – and there were several thousand of them to dispose of.
There was no choice: I was going to have to get tooled up – with the one piece of machinery I could manage to get up on to the terraced fields: a heavy-duty brush-cutter.
When you’re not used to them, heavy power tools can produce a mixed sense of awe, fear and excitement. Excitement at holding something so powerful in your hands; awe at the sight of what it can do in such a short time; and fear of what it might end up doing to you if you get it just slightly wrong. We were lucky enough in that one of Salud’s cousins had a shop selling exactly what we needed, supplying me not only with a man-sized strimmer I could barely lift, but the helmet, face mask, shin protectors and ultra-thick gloves I would also require if I was to come out of the experience of using it alive. I was also given a crash course in the workings of it and what to do if we had any problems – vital information when you’re stuck at the top of a mountain an hour’s drive from the nearest mechanic.
‘Don’t worry too much,’ Salud’s cousin said as he saw the expression of incomprehension on my face. ‘If it starts playing up just call me and hold the phone next to the strimmer: I should be able to tell you what’s wrong with it just from the sound it’s making.’
Fully kitted out, I set out from the house the next day looking like a rejected extra from Mad Max, stiff, with my extra thick protective trousers making it even more difficult to climb up the narrow, rocky track to the gorse-infested terraces. Brambles tore at my arms from the sides, as though aware of what was about to happen and trying to force me back. I brushed past them as nonchalantly as possible: this was my land and it was about time I started showing them who was boss. The reign of weed terror was about to come to an end and a new dawn of clear fields and freshly planted trees was about to begin. The battle was going to be long and fierce, but I had my mighty brush-cutter in my hands and no one was going to hold me back.
I fired up the strimmer and it roared into life. Clipping it to my harness, I closed the face mask on my helmet and stood to face the first gorse bush: a monster a yard and a half wide and a foot higher than myself, daring me to take it on. I pressed the accelerator, raised my weapon high and then brought it down on the fearsome beast. A shuddering pulsed up my arms as the spinning blades made contact with the gorse, then in a flash all was flying needles and spraying vegetation as the machine descended almost of its own volition in a zigzag motion down the entire height of the bush, chopping and cutting mercilessly, until moments later I was looking down at a pile of mulched gorse at my feet, the sorry stump of its once proud trunk poking pathetically out of the ground until, with another swoop, that too was gone and the gorse was no more. I took my finger off the accelerator and paused for breath. The whole process had taken less than thirty seconds and this once menacing foe now lay defeated beneath me. I was covered with debris from the kill, but was exhilarated at my victory. Man over vegetable: there was no holding me back now. The other gorse bushes seemed to cower before me as I approached them, aware for the first time of their own mortality. With a bloodthirsty grin I pulled on the accelerator once more and dived into the fray.
After two or three hours, I had managed to clear one terraced field: a once impenetrable corner of the farm was now accessible, perhaps for the first time in years. There was still a seemingly infinite amount of land to clear, but I had made a start, and, most importantly, I now had the necessary tool to carry out the job.
In my excitement and concentration, I hadn’t realised in all this time that it had started to rain. Clouds of humidity were rising off my overheated body as, tired but happy, I turned to look over what I’d done and head back to the house to dry off. I switched the strimmer off and crunched my way over piles of dead gorse bushes. I was still quite amazed at how the machine pulped them like this. Rather than simply cutting them down, it reduced them to virtually nothing. I looked up above the wall running by my side to the next terrace to be dealt with: I would return here the following day and continue.
The rain was falling quite hard now and I dr
opped my head to protect my eyes: the wind was blowing up and starting to whip the droplets into strange whorls which flew into my face. For a moment I lost my sense of direction as I turned my head away from the rain: if I could just get to the shelter of the nearest pine trees I would be all right.
But suddenly my heart was in my mouth – the earth gave way beneath my feet and I was falling. Before I knew what had happened, I landed with a hard crack on my side, the strimmer crashing on top of me. I gave a low groan, the air kicked from my lungs. The helmet, still on my head, had bashed against a stone; the sound rang inside my brain like a bell. In the split second that followed I gave thanks I was still wearing it and that the strimmer blades, now resting gently against my shins, were mercilessly motionless.
I picked myself up with a cough, quickly checking that everything was working. I was lucky to have got away with nothing worse than a shock. Looking up against the rain I could see that the dry-stone wall holding up the terrace I had been walking on had simply crumbled away, and pieces of it were now lying around me in a pile. The gap in the tract of land I had just cleared seemed to stare defiantly: one minute the terrace had been there, and now it was gone, its remains lying in a heap of rubble around my feet.
With a sigh I trudged off back in the direction of the house, sore and getting wetter by the moment. The nagging thought in the back of my mind was that the very gorse bushes I’d been so happily chopping down had actually been holding the terrace up in place. And now, with the rain, in a moment a huge chunk of it had been washed away. At the very least it looked as though I was going to have to add dry-stone walling to the increasing list of skills I had to master if I was going to manage the land with any degree of success. Steps forward and steps back. I pushed it all from my mind, thoughts of hot showers and a cold beer leading me home.
Sacred Sierra Page 4
