Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  Down in the hollow, where the road came up to the farm, a car was approaching. I caught a flash of it before it disappeared behind a pine tree. God forbid that the police should come here to evict me, I thought. I’ve only just arrived and I need more time. I carried on clearing away as though I hadn’t seen anything. Whatever I could do would be of some help. But even now, amid the panic, awareness of the sheer futility of what I was doing faced with the scale of the fire raging just a few miles away was beginning to sink in. A blaze like this would engulf the house in minutes.

  I heard a familiar clatter from behind, and a voice.

  ‘It’s a big one, this time.’

  It was El Clossa, skipping down towards me. He pulled out a bottle of wine, half full.

  ‘Here, drink some of this.’

  I gulped it down, hungry and thirsty.

  ‘There’s nothing to eat,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have time to stop for any food.’

  He put his arm on my shoulder. ‘Clearing up? I’ll give you a hand. Oh, by the way,’ he added. ‘There was another car behind me. Might be someone else coming. Looked like a green Land Rover.’

  I ran up to the era in time to find Arcadio pulling up next to El Clossa’s car.

  ‘Thought I better come up and see how you were,’ he said opening the door and getting out. His expression was the same as always: still, calm, unmoved, despite the fire and smoke.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t drive any more,’ I said.

  ‘Pah!’ he snorted. ‘They weren’t going to get me moving to the village.’ He looked at the car and placed his hand on the bonnet. ‘I’m getting used to it again. Just do a little bit every day, get further and further each time. That bend near the top still gets me nervous sometimes, but I just shut my eyes and pretend I’ve got my cataracts back. That way it doesn’t bother me.’

  There were probably few people in the world, I thought, who could genuinely claim to drive better with their eyes closed, but I was standing next to one of them now.

  ‘What do you reckon about the fire?’ I said. If there was anyone who could predict what might happen over the next few hours it was probably Arcadio. Heaven knows how many fires he’d seen in his time here.

  He looked in the direction of the house, where El Clossa was bending down and picking up a few tools to be stored away.

  ‘Clearing up?’ he said. I nodded. He shrugged, then frowned. ‘It might help.’

  The cloud seemed to be thickening, more ash falling on our heads.

  ‘I’m going down to check my almond trees,’ he said. ‘It would be a shame if we lost those this year. Looked like we were going to have a good crop.’

  He climbed back into his car and wound the window down.

  ‘Can’t stay here long,’ he said. ‘Might not be much time.’

  Looking back on that day, so much of what I did and the decisions I made now appear frankly stupid, but the emotions that gripped me proved so strong it was only days later that a clearer idea emerged of how I might have gone about things. After Arcadio’s warning I went back to the house and carried on clearing away as best as I could with El Clossa’s help. It was hard work, with only half a bottle of wine between us to keep us going, and the heat of the day and smoke from the fire draining us of almost all our energy. Eventually it seemed there was nothing else we could feasibly do. The area immediately around the edge of the house was now relatively clear, but as El Clossa warned me, when the fires burned with this intensity, they could jump.

  ‘It’s not just a slow, steady advance,’ he said looking me straight in the eye, as though aware I was in some kind of trance-like state from the panic. ‘Once the fire reaches the top there,’ he pointed at the Talaia, just on the other side of the valley, ‘it’ll start coming down that side and then jump across to here before it even reaches the bottom. I’ve seen it happen – a bunch of trees that’s separate from the rest of the incendio will just burst into flame spontaneously.’

  I was thankful he didn’t say it outright, but I knew he was telling me to get out of there while I still could. And in the meantime he was risking himself by coming here to help me. I’d missed his company since the commune had broken up and he’d kept to himself. It meant a lot to me that he should have turned up that day.

  Still, two powerful and deeply rooted impulses were at loggerheads within me: the urge to stay here on my property and defend it, at whatever cost, and the instinct of survival. There was so much of me on this mountain and in this farm now, though. To leave it behind to be burnt to a cinder felt like leaving a child. For the first time I could understand the stories of people dying in forest fires because they refused to leave their homes. It made no sense from the outside: how could anyone be so stupid. Yet now I was close to doing the same myself. What little rational thought was left to me was clear about what I had to do. But even so there was something I needed to do first before I could abandon the place for good.

  El Clossa left and I drove behind him, heading for the village. His last words to me rang in my brain. ‘You can’t stay here tonight,’ he’d said, gripping me by the arms and almost shaking me. ‘Whatever happens, do not stay the night here.’

  It was already getting dark as I reached the village. The streets were lined with old widows in black staring up at the hillside from which the fire was moving towards them. I dashed into the ironmonger’s just as they were about to close and bought a new padlock.

  A couple of women and an old man stopped me as I came out. They knew who I was and where I lived, although I couldn’t remember ever having seen them before.

  They wanted news. What was it like up there? I told them what I’d seen, about the smoke, the flames, and how it was coming down very quickly this way.

  ‘It’s all going to be wiped out,’ the old man said. ‘Hasn’t been a fire up here for fifteen years, it was bound to happen.’

  One of the women leaned up and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  I charged back up to the house. In the darkness the flames glowed ominously from the next valley. The helicopters and planes would be on their last flights: there was nothing to be done now except wait until the first light of dawn and start again.

  Back at the house I forced myself to imagine that by the following morning none of this would remain. I looked at the walls my friends and I had built, at the roof we’d put on, not once, but twice. At all the windows and doors my father had made for us, the great pine table. All the debris of a life lived up here over the past months: books, scraps of paper with recipes, a carpet given to us by a friend, a weathervane that was still sitting by the fire waiting to be attached to an outside wall. And all about to be lost. There was no time; I had to go: the flames were visible now from the house. But I had to take something with me, save something from the coming flames. I couldn’t just let this all disappear. There was so much I wanted to take: I’d take it all if I could. But I had to run.

  I arrived back in Valencia late that night, exhausted and shaking. Salud came down into the street to help me unload.

  ‘How does it look?’ she said. I shook my head, barely able to say anything. She opened the back of the car and started pulling out some of the things I’d brought with me.

  It was only when I caught the expression of surprise and confusion on her face that it began to dawn on me.

  ‘The chainsaws,’ she said. She peered into the car to see what else there was before turning back to me.

  ‘And the strimmers.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is that it?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘You don’t think …’ she started, then stopped. ‘Come on.’ We picked up the things and carried them up to the flat. Seeing these power tools suddenly placed on the floor in the spare room gave me a jolt, and for a moment I seemed to come out of the trance that had gripped me since the morning.

  ‘What,’ I said turning to her, ‘am I going to do with a couple of chainsaws and strimm
ers if the fire does reach our land? There won’t be anything left to saw or strim.’

  I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. Of all the things I could have picked up and brought with me. Salud put her arms around me and sighed.

  ‘We’ll just keep listening to the radio,’ she said.

  *

  Time passed: it felt like an age. The trees darkened, a twilight world forming under the shade. It was cold, finally cold, but for the first time the air on my skin was unwelcome. I needed to shake myself awake. Standing on the mound of the ice-house, in the middle of the small clearing, it was as though Faustino had never been there. Had I found this place by accident on my own? How on earth had I got here?

  I looked up through the break in the trees. The peak of the mountain was visible up ahead, inviting me to climb. How long had I waited for this moment? The day when I would finally reach up to touch the keystone of this wondrous landscape that had taken me in. So many times I had said to myself that the next day, or the next, I would climb Penyagolosa, yet every time I had failed to carry out my promise. Today, though, I would succeed.

  I leapt off the mound and headed straight into the trees. The peak was no more than a few hundred metres above where I was now. In an hour, perhaps less, I would be at the summit.

  After a few minutes the forest came to an abrupt end and I stepped out on to the rocky north face of the mountain. A handful of juniper bushes were dotted about, poking through the rough gravelly earth like traffic bollards. The air was suddenly warm again and I looked out to the west, and the view of the slowly sinking sun drifting over the high Spanish plains in the distance: there was just time to get to the top of the mountain and back again before it got too dark. Behind me, the Maestrat, the land of the Templars and Cathars, stretched to the north and east, great chains of barren hills slicing through wide tracts of fields falling away to the coast where they were captured by the deep blue of the sea.

  I pushed on up the slope, my feet slipping in places, finding a path as best I could. The summit seemed so very close: if I ran I could be there in just a second. The forest and the coolness of the ice-house were now fading memories. How long had I been down there? I should have been sailing up here always, lifted by the breeze and carried to the point I had been circling all this time, yet never reaching in to grasp.

  The climb seemed to go on and on, always continuing on the same line, the same degree of slope. It had been an optical illusion, perhaps, the sensation that it was barely a stone’s throw away.

  I was sweating now, my legs tiring a little. They had grown stronger over this year, slowly getting used to the constant up and down: whenever I wanted to work on the land, get the water, pick some herbs for dinner. This was steep, though, and the summit was further than I had anticipated.

  To the east the view of the sea grew wider as I rose higher and higher. The day was clear, although the haze of a summer evening cast a blanket over the landscape, blurring some of the view. The sun was dropping mercifully low, however, and an orange, honey-glow was settling on the rocks and stones.

  The gravelly earth came to an end and I found myself on a well-worn path. Even the bushes had disappeared now and I pushed myself on to the top, lungs bursting, sweat trickling through my eyebrows. After a few more minutes the peak itself came into view. Perched on the top was a tiny building – a lookout for the local foresters. I forced my way up the final stretch, panting heavily now, yet so close. Finally, I scrambled up the last few yards to the top. I walked up to the foresters’ lookout and peered through the window: no one was there; I had the mountaintop to myself.

  From the summit I could now look down towards the south of the mountain. The Cabeço Roig stood some way down to the left, a great dome, like a giant mushroom. Beyond it, at the far edge of the massif of which Penyagolosa was the heart, sat our farm, out of view from here, yet nestling in the slopes of the valley that cut its way through the land before stretching away towards the coastal plains. Back towards the top of the valley the village of Xodos perched on the edge of its outcrop of rock. It had been some time since I had been to see the Truffle King. Within a few months the cold would have returned and he would be out with his dog sniffing for black nuggets of gold. Just beyond the village, further towards the coast, a cloud of yellow dust was visible, coughed up by the diggers working at the site of the new airport. This was a privileged moment: not long now, and these clear, silent skies would soon be filled with budget flights spewing out their sun-seeking fumes.

  To the south, the mountains of the Sierra de Espadán, one of the last corners of Moorish Spain, rose up proudly from the plains, stretching up and back towards the banks of the Millars River. I held out my hand, trying to trace the contours of its hills and mountains with my fingertips.

  This was my vantage point: here I could finally see the land I had been exploring and digging my hands into over the past months, laid out at my feet like a magic carpet. Where else would we go together, I wondered, this landscape and I. The adventure had only just begun: there was so much else out there to discover.

  I had to get back down the mountain again before it got too dark, but I sat for a moment on the edge of a rock, staring out at the great world circling around the mountain like a spinning top. Whole areas I barely knew or had yet to explore seemed to shine out like jewels. I felt I might melt into the rock myself here and become one with the earth.

  Something near my feet caught my eye: a shell. It looked like an ear. I bent down and rubbed my finger over it: an ancient mussel, once living in the sea, now fossilised and set here at the top of a mountain in stone for millions of years. It was buried in an amalgam of stone and grit, but by chipping away underneath for a few moments I was able to break it free and lift it up. It was no more than the size of two of my fingers. I wondered about the world it had seen when it had been formed and lived in an ancient sea. What convulsions and changes had it been through to end up here, on the summit of Penyagolosa? What stories did it have to tell?

  I lifted it up and brought it close to my ear. Perhaps, if I listened …

  BEGINNING, AGAIN

  The last of the guests had gone, and Salud and I were alone again in our mas, the debris from the party scattered around the kitchen and terrace outside. We stood by the door, watching as the trail of cars slipped away down the mountainside, down to the riverbed and then away along the valley and back to the village and beyond. The sun was slowly working its way towards the peak of the Picosa: soon the evening shade would settle over us, the temperatures quickly dropping now we were in late September. Quiet and peace descended once again on our little world. My thumb twitched over the ring on my left hand, testing it, feeling its smoothness, its roundness, trying to get used to this new, strange element.

  Neither of us moved, breathing in the still, fresh air, the silence penetrating our skin as the noise of music, shouting and laughter of just a few moments before slowly ebbed from the walls and sank into the earth. A robin was fluttering between the branches of the olive trees on the terrace below. Before long it would be time to harvest them again.

  After a ceremony near Valencia, we’d had a more informal party up at the mas, friends from the local area joining us as we toasted our new status as a married couple. Already, only a few hours in, it felt as though something had changed, despite my expectations that everything would carry on as normal: something to do with a wholeness that perhaps had not quite been there before. Salud, I knew, felt the same.

  ‘Bueno, ya está,’ Salud said. ‘That’s it.’ Preparations for the wedding had overtaken us over the past month, all done in haste at the last minute, as ever with us; I’d even had to write the speech for the official marrying us in the seconds before the actual ceremony – it was his first time and he was a bit nervous, he told me, having been out drinking till five the previous morning. Still, it had gone off smoothly. Or at least that’s what people told me. Now a happy exhaustion came over us: for the time being we could ignore the c
all of the clearing and washing up behind us. The view of the valley in front, as so often before at this special time of day, had captured us and seemed to carry us to a different world.

  I looked over towards the Talaia on the other side of the valley, and for a moment I shivered as I remembered the great ball of black, billowing smoke that had risen from it only a few weeks past. The sense of fear and panic had gone now, but an echo of it still remained. One day we might not be so lucky. The firemen had managed to put the blaze out the night I had left here, saving our valley, and the village with it. But just in time. Ministers from Madrid had been helicoptered in to oversee the operation; over 6000 hectares of mountainside had been burnt. It had been the biggest forest fire of the summer on the Spanish mainland. And they had stopped it right on our doorstep. From here you would never even know that it had happened, but I’d driven over to the other side of the Talaia since; a weird, blackened landscape, the trees and bushes reduced to stumps of charcoal. Thankfully – and I didn’t know how – the sanctuary of Sant Miquel de les Torrocelles had been saved, but much of the pathway for the Pelegríns of Les Useres had been wiped out. It would be a very different pilgrimage to Sant Joan next year.

  After glistening for a second on the mountain peak, the sun finally dipped out of sight, and we were struck by a wall of cold air. Time to get back inside. My eyes fell on some of the glasses of the home-made hooch I’d been pouring for our guests. Most of them were empty, but a few had only been half-drunk, it seemed. It was powerful stuff – I could already feel my own liver complaining from drinking too much of it. Perhaps my dreams of setting up a moonshine empire would have to wait. Might have to work a bit more on the recipe first.

  Slowly, reluctantly, we began to pick up the pieces. It had been fun: a guitar had been produced at one point, a few tunes were played. Salud had been persuaded to dance for a while. Concha had sung more of her folk songs, El Clossa beating out the rhythm for her with his crutches. They’d both seemed happier than I’d seen them for a while. The commune was slowly fading to memory: we didn’t talk about the others any more.