Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  ‘Here,’ she said, passing it to her son. ‘Take this out for salting.’

  The boy threw the hide over his shoulder, staining his cheek with dark congealing boar’s blood as he carried it outside.

  The boar was considerably smaller now it had been shorn of its hair and skin. Lean and naked, taut red muscle tissue pushed through odd rare patches of white-yellow fat. There was something pathetic about it, as though it were only half the animal it had been. How had something so powerful and so fearsome once existed in this body? I tried to imagine it running through the mountains – only hours before. But the creature was now little more than food, meat. And soon even that would be taken away from it.

  Teresa started slicing quickly down the middle of the boar’s abdomen, its innards slopping heavily out of the fresh wound. Grey intestines curled and slid around a heavy wine-coloured liver, pink heart. Sergio stepped forward and caught them as they oozed out of the animal’s body, as though being forcibly ejected. The two women who had come out with Teresa then pulled out metal trays and buckets and scooped them up, Teresa cutting at the rectum where the intestines were still attached to the inside of the body.

  The men standing watching gave a cheer.

  ‘Look at that.’

  ‘We’ll get a nice load out of this.’

  Already their minds were casting forward to the salamis and cured meats that would be made from the guts.

  An intense, sharp smell of blood and shit filled the garage, almost blotting out the wood smoke as Teresa joined the other two women carrying the innards to a deep, narrow sink at the side to begin washing them. Squeezing the intestines in their hands they started pushing out the remaining faecal matter in preparation for stuffing them again for making sausages.

  Sergio now held the knife and approached the remaining carcass. A pool of blood had formed at his feet, below the now ridiculous looking head.

  ‘She always leaves this bit to me,’ he said with a grin. One or two of the others laughed. He plunged the knife into the flesh around the neck, struggling for a moment with the vertebrae, gritting his teeth as he stabbed and twisted, trying to loosen the head from the rest of the body.

  ‘Iéeah,’ came a low call of encouragement from the men.

  ‘Venga, Sergio.’

  The tone was flat: these men didn’t go in for public demonstrations of emotion. It might almost have been be mocking, sarcastic, but from the looks in their eyes there seemed to be no ironical intent. Straight, no-nonsense, almost bovine.

  With a final cut the head came free, and with it a last gushing of blood, a few remaining faint drips tapping the pool below with the vestiges of life of a once vital, vigorous beast. Sergio lifted the head up and showed it to us all like a trophy.

  ‘Seen better ones,’ he said with false modesty. ‘Still going on the wall, though.’

  A sharp chill came over me as I stared at this prize weighing heavily in his arms, detached, now mocked and set to be put on display. Deep, animal fear. I sank the last drops of red wine stewing in the bottom of my glass.

  A new bottle was passed round along with plates of food, but for me it was time to go. I shook Arcadio’s hand: he was staying.

  ‘The vet’s got to test the meat first before we can eat any of it,’ Sergio said as I said my goodbyes. ‘Check for any germs and stuff. Once we get the all clear we’ll start dividing it up. Come on round tomorrow and I’ll see if there are any sausages spare.’

  The boy was already smoking a few bits and pieces over the fire in the yard, poking and turning them on a grill with a blackened fork. The smell was delicious.

  I drove back to the farm, hungry and disturbed.

  *

  I am enjoying the silence up here more and more. Partly because it is not a complete silence. There is the sound of my own heart and breathing, then beyond that come the sounds of the world around: occasional birdsong, breezes blowing through the pine trees, perhaps a stone loosened by an ibex skipping down the cliff-face. Some birds make a sound as they fly – a kind of whooping noise as they speed overhead. I rarely manage to see them: by the time I have heard them they have moved on. They seem to be of a dark-brown colour, as well, so they can easily be lost against the mountain background. Some kind of swift, perhaps? They seem larger; perhaps a roqueret – a crag martin? There is a sense of something alive in the silence – a living landscape that whispers to you quietly. Make too much noise and you won’t be able to hear it. Many landscapes roar at you – birds twitter incessantly, cows and sheep moan aloud, rivers gurgle past. Here there is little of that. And yet the place does not feel dead for lack of aural stimulation: rather, it invites you to attune your hearing, stretch your capacity, and capture the quieter sounds that it has to offer. Here, at this time of year, birdsong is an event: in other circumstances I would barely have noticed the pair of coal tits which have made the oak tree their home. Nor would the owls hooting in the early hours of the night have made much impression. In the city I may be surrounded at any time by a thousand dogs, all within a hundred yards or even less, yet I am oblivious to them. Here I know there is a dog living in an old house in the next valley – a house I cannot even see – while at least two wild dogs have the run of the hills around the farm. Silence reduces space and distance. In the absence of noise, any noise becomes important, or has some significance, or even a message. I can hear cars coming up the mountain from several miles away. The tinkling of bells means either the cows and bulls near La Caseta de Ramonet on the other side of the riverbed, or else the goatherd somewhere in the vicinity. The distant sound of clanging metal means the old man is working up at the quarry. Very occasionally – perhaps about once a month – he sets off a charge to loosen the rock, and the explosion echoes and rolls down the river valley like boiling water.

  The change from the norm takes some getting used to. I still sometimes find myself rushing out to see who might be about to ‘invade’ our space when I hear what sounds like a car coming up the hill. Some aspects of ‘Englishness’ are shed quite easily, others less so, and it is only now I realise how deeply entrenched in me is the idea of my home being a castle. I am having to lose some of this, though, and accept that others can and do come up here, and there’s not much I can do about it. As time goes by, I slowly adapt: I’ve got into the habit of leaving the chain at the bottom of our track unlocked – anyone can get through now. Before, I used to pull it across and padlock it religiously: I didn’t want to see anyone while I was up here, and if anyone did dare to appear they were immediately classed as an intruder, unwelcome. My assumption was that people only showed up in order to take something away from me – my privacy, my possessions, my freedom, whatever. That still might happen, but I’m trying to learn to be less possessive about this place. I am a visitor, just like any other person. My time will end here one day, then someone else may or may not live here after me, just as many others have done so in the past. The mountain, however, just lives on, with occasional changes to its outer skin – terraces come and go, as do crops, and even trees. Legally it is mine, but I do not own the mountain; it can never belong to us in any real sense at all.

  *

  I was invited to visit the truffle market at Sarrión, held near the Mora de Rubielos railway station, starting at around eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. I was told it ran through till about four in the morning. All outside and all in the dark. Come alone.

  I arrived at the agreed time, wondering at the air of mystery. At first it was hard to spot a ‘market’ of any sort taking place: there were few people around, and nothing to see except a virtually empty car park. But as an outsider, I was unlikely to see anything anyway, because once they’d caught sight of me the dealers would vanish or made themselves invisible. Or at least that’s what I’d been given to expect.

  My contact was waiting for me: a builder who owned a house up there – a friend of a friend, who, with the promise of a few drinks and after telling him over the telephone I had my own plantatio
n up and running, opened up gradually and offered to take me down to where the dealers hung out. He was a buyer: possibly a useful contact in a few years’ time when I started getting my own crop.

  From the comments and looks – the sheer tension – it started to became apparent that the whole thing was run almost like a drug market: huge amounts of money were involved; there was a wary, nervous atmosphere; and the unannounced but very real presence of weapons of some sort – knives almost certainly, but probably a few shotguns as well. The dealers were often the kind who also hunted, so it wasn’t unlikely they should have a rifle or a twelve-bore hidden under a blanket in the boot of the car.

  A bar stood to one side of the car park, but it was almost empty. We went inside for a drink, knocking back a couple of brandies to keep us warm in the sub-zero temperatures. We were very high up, near the local ski-runs, and snow lay thick on the ground, icicles hanging from the awning of the bar. We seemed to be waiting for some sign or some moment when it might be all right to venture out and see if there was some ‘action’ taking place, but I was unclear what the sign was, or if we would have to wait there all night. My contact repeated the Truffle King’s comments about it being a bad year for truffles, what with the strange weather. The season that year would be very short – perhaps only another couple of weeks or so. It was mid-January – truffles were usually to be had until late February or even later sometimes.

  I’d read about the clandestine nature of truffle dealing in other countries, but this seemed even more under the counter and obscure than I had imagined. Perhaps a certain suspiciousness in the local character. Salud’s father had been right in general: the mountain people of Castellón were fairly tight-lipped about most things, untrusting and always looking out for a chance themselves, a quality brought on, one imagined, by the harshness of the surroundings. I’d heard an anecdote about an old local man effectively stealing some fields from his neighbour by taking advantage of a loophole in the land registry, even though his neighbour was a doctor and had once saved his life by giving him first aid while he was having a heart attack. That meant nothing to people here: you got what you could by screwing the other guy, even if you owed him your life.

  I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with drug markets I’d come across in the past. But even scoring dope or cocaine hadn’t been quite as difficult as this. In such environments you knew a place to go and before long someone approached you – it was, after all, a market, and they wanted to sell their produce. Here it was as though the sellers would run as soon as they spotted a possible buyer.

  After a third drink it was beginning to feel decidedly warmer. I thought about having a bite to eat to soak things up a bit, perhaps crawling over to one of the more comfortable looking chairs away from the bar and having a bit of a snooze until it was time actually to ‘see’ something. But my contact suddenly slipped from his chair and moved very quickly towards the door. I was slow to react and he was outside and moving out into the car park before I realised what was going on. The moment had mysteriously arrived. I scurried out and crunched through the crusted snow in his footsteps. He stopped and I caught up with him. Without turning his head he said, ‘Can you see it?’

  I couldn’t see a damned thing, but his eyes were clearly focused on something in the middle distance. I blinked and stared, closed my eyes for a few seconds, hoping they would adjust to the darkness, then opened them again to see just the faintest of lights flickering out there among the few parked cars. Around it were several figures, perhaps three or four, huddled together.

  ‘That’s it,’ my contact said. Some barely perceptible hand movements were taking place, a cough, a low voice, then the light was switched off and everyone moved away in separate directions. It had finished as soon as it had begun.

  ‘That’s it?’ It was so quick I could scarcely believe it. My contact had already turned away and was walking back towards the bar.

  ‘Move!’ he said, catching my hesitation. The tension was there – no one wanted to be taken for the wrong sort round here. What were they worried about, I wondered, as we shuffled back towards the bright lights of the bar. Policemen? Tax officials? Perhaps dodgy truffle dealers selling some of the plain-tasting Chinese variety. Spend a few thousand on some of those and you wouldn’t be very happy. Might even be tempted to reach for your shotgun.

  My contact gave a low grunt as we reached the bar. One of the men involved in the transaction we had just seen had arrived at the door at the same time. He winked at my contact, then frowned as he saw me coming up close behind.

  ‘With me,’ my contact said. The other man nodded, but his suspicion was plain to see. Once inside I offered him a drink but he refused point-blank.

  I thought of heading off, but my contact held me back. He wanted to give it time, see if the other man might warm over the course of the evening. He was a seller, and had some plantations near here. It might be useful for me to talk to him. But it was going to take some time.

  The truffle dealer talked to the barman and occasionally to my contact. After a few minutes I decided to go to the loo.

  When I came back the atmosphere had changed. As soon as I sat down the dealer pulled his stool over and started to speak. ‘So you’ve planted some truffle trees. How many?’

  It was a start. I called to the barman. This time the dealer accepted my offer, and we struck up a conversation. And over the course of the next hour he let me in to the secrets of the truffle world.

  *

  The winds here are given names, and are considered to have unique characteristics. They can be drawn on a dial-figure, called a rosa dels vents. Starting from the north and circling clockwise, they are as follows.

  The Tramuntana, the fierce, cold north wind which comes from behind the Pyrenees – from across the mountains: transmontanus in Latin. A Tramuntana can blow for days and days, arriving suddenly in the autumn to bring a swift end to the remains of summer, but the skies it creates are of an intense, sparkling blue, with visibility so clear you can see as far as the Montgó in Denia, or the Columbrete Islands off the Castellón coast. Traditionally it will only blow for an odd number of days, so if it passes into a second day you know it will still be there the next morning; if it continues for a fourth day, it will carry on into the fifth, and so on. It is said that this wind can drive people mad.

  The Gregal, a generally cold wind which blows from the north-east. Sailors used to watch out for it as it was ideal for setting sail for Greece, hence the name, the ‘Greek wind’. Modern fishermen are less fond of it, however, especially for the storms it can produce. Their attitude is neatly summed up in the proverb: Vent de gregal, mal – ‘the Gregal is a bad wind’.

  The Llevant, or Levante in Castilian, comes from the east. This is the basic wind from the sea, and the name is commonly used to describe any breeze coming roughly from that direction, in opposition to the Ponent, which comes from inland, from the west. If it is not too strong, it can be a soothing, slightly humid wind, warming in winter and cooling in the summer: the wind that blows when all is right with the world and everything is in its place. Yet it is known also for its high waves and occasional stormy weather. It often picks up in the evening, as the local saying goes: el Llevant s’alça tard i es gita dejorn – ‘the Llevant gets up late and goes to bed in the morning’. The name refers to the movement of the sun in the east ‘rising’.

  The Xaloc comes from across the Sahara from the south-east, and its name comes from the Arabic sharq, meaning ‘east’. It is a hot, humid wind which leaves a film of dust and sand over everything, especially if it brings rain with it. Plou fang, as people say here, meaning ‘It’s raining mud’. Sailors like it, as long as it doesn’t come in too hard: Vent de xaloc, ni massa ni poc, goes the cry, almost like a prayer – the Xaloc wind: neither too strong nor too gentle.

  The Migjorn, the ‘midday’ wind, blows directly from the south, but because of its rarity is often confused with the Xaloc and Garbí. It is an unloved wind,
considered good neither for sailing nor fishing.

  The Garbí, or Llebeig, blows in from the south-west, often bringing heavy rains. It is common at dawn, but as with other winds blowing from inland it has a bad reputation: Vent de Llebeig, perdut et veig – ‘With a Llebeig you’ll get lost’, as the sailors say. The name comes from the Arabic gharb, meaning ‘west’.

  The Ponent, or Poniente in Castilian, blows in directly from the west. It is the archetypal ‘ill-wind’, to the extent that all anyone has to say is ‘Fa Ponent’ and everything from a headache to a bad harvest to a fall on the stock exchange can be explained away. The wind is invariably dry, blowing in over the Spanish plains, causing temperatures to nose-dive in winter and soar in summer. A Ponent during the summer months can turn most places into ghost towns, as people either flee to somewhere cooler or shut themselves inside their homes, drawing the blinds and shutters against the choking oven heat. Reflecting a general dislike of anything that comes their way from the west, another local proverb says, De ponent, ni vent ni gent – ‘Neither wind nor people from the west’. The name refers to the ‘setting’ of the sun.

  The Cerç, or Mestral, comes from the north-west. A cold, dry wind, it is particularly disliked by farmers for the crop-destroying frosts it can bring with it. If the cold itself doesn’t do damage to new shoots, the ice crystals of the frost intensify the sun’s rays, ‘burning’ the blossom of fruit trees. Ha fet mes mal que el Mestral, as they say – ‘It’s done more harm than the Mestral’.

  Of all these, the prevailing winds, thankfully, are the Llevant and Xaloc combined, the most loved of the family, although the Ponent can come a close second. Penyagolosa, whose peak is about six kilometres from the farm, shelters us from the worst of the northerly winds, but the Tramuntana, which blows strongest towards the end of February and into March, can cause great damage, often uprooting trees, Arcadio says. Much of the firewood used for the following winter comes from trees broken into pieces by these winds.