A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  One night, I drove Jaime and Gudrun to a Celtic music night in a bar in the hills. I found myself a comfy spot at the bar while Jaime took his brick and sat squarely in front of the band refusing any offer of a beer. Gudrun, meanwhile, moved around the crowd at the back, grooving to the music. They ignored one another altogether until in the back of the car on the way home, by sundry gropings, Gudrun made her intentions clear.

  Next morning, while Gudrun sat outside on the terrace smoking her breakfast cigarette, Jaime sat down to breakfast with us. ‘Jesus, she’s a real tiger in bed, man!’ he observed. I raised my eyebrows at Ana. We had already noticed Gudrun’s air and had been indulging in an enjoyable sotto voce debate about which were the absolutely certain signs of passion, and which were incidental. For instance, was rubbing your neck more certain than smirking at the muesli?

  Jaime, though, was not one for such subtleties. ‘I’m goin’ to need a whole lot of condoms, man,’ he announced. ‘Ana — when you go into town can you get me some condoms? Five packs ought to do.’ Then he added, musing smugly to himself, ‘God, what a body! It’s just perfection, man… hey, make that ten packs, will you?’

  Ana and I both went to town the next day. I remembered the condoms, and our wwoofers’ relationship bloomed, with Jaime regaling us with frequent and explicit accounts of their doings. Romantic it was not. In fact, Jaime seemed to regard the arrangement mainly as a practical expedient for storing up some sex, camel-like, for the next lean period: ‘She knows, man, because I told her, that this is definitely a relationship with an expiry date.’

  Of course it was rather difficult to elicit from Gudrun how she felt about it but I sort of resented Jaime’s coolness. I didn’t think for a minute that Gudrun was a poor suffering dupe; she had instigated the relationship in the first place and had managed to get across to Ana that she treated it as no more than a holiday fling. But I like to see a bit of warmth and vulnerability between young lovers, and apart from the fact that we were always tripping over them snogging or groping one another, neither of them seemed to evince much tenderness. I wanted to see Jaime torn on the rack of passion. It was for his own good.

  At the time I knew Jaime, he seemed like a water-boatman, flitting about on the surface of the deep pool of life. I felt he needed to be more like those silvery bottom-feeders that glide among the depths. From the surface of the water you can’t see the bottom, only the sky reflected. And that’s a pretty false impression to rely on.

  Whatever my misgivings about Jaime and Gudrun’s emotional life, they made a terrific gardening team. Gudrun seemed utterly in sympathy with Ana’s horticultural aspirations and they just had to exchange a few vowel sounds over breakfast and Gudrun would know exactly what to do. Jaime, meanwhile, was engaged in the construction of a new path that would wind down from the house to the vegetable patch across a tiny rivulet of water that occasionally swelled to a stream.

  In Gudrun’s hands the plants were safe, while Jaime had designed a path and a little bridge of bound logs that was zen-like in its beauty. Jaime was an imaginative artist; whatever task he took on would be transformed into a creative masterpiece. Of course this wasn’t always entirely convenient. Once the latch broke on our front door and he offered to replace it. After three days of having our home open and vulnerable to the elements and ravening beasts we were presented with one of the most beautifully shaped and engineered latches ever to grace a front door. Even now I feel guilty if I use it too roughly, as if at any moment it will be recalled to its rightful place in a gallery.

  Sometimes Jaime joined us for meals, but usually he catered for himself. He was no great cook but knew, he insisted, exactly the necessary intake of calories per day that would keep him in good shape. At the beginning of the week he prepared a big saucepan of vegetable slop into which he put just about everything he could lay his hands on. He would heat this up daily and serve himself two ladlefuls for supper. He calculated it to last a whole week so he only had to cook once in that time.

  It has to be said that Jaime was in remarkably good shape. Throughout the summer months he wandered about clad in the most minuscule of shorts so he could get a good even tan. He carried not an ounce of spare fat and had the muscular tone extremely well developed — tight belly-muscles with not a hint of flab, broad well-defined pectorals, good-looking meaty biceps, triceps, quadriceps, the whole bit.

  Manolo, perhaps due to his keen appreciation of the fruits of the pig, is not quite as slender as he might be, although his ample layer of padding conceals an almost superhuman strength that Jaime could never hope to match. However, that summer Manolo gave Jaime’s physique some consideration. For the first time ever we saw Manolo without his shirt on — that is something almost no true Alpujarran does. Manolo also considered the food that Jaime brought down to eat in the shade of the fig tree, and after a certain amount of discussion with Jaime about diet and its effect upon the physique, his packed lunch began to change. Vegetables, salads and fruit began to make an appearance and the immense slabs of tocino — pig fat — and stews played a less prominent part. Manolo figured that a modification of the physique might also have a beneficial effect upon his love-life, which was going through something of a lean period.

  ‘It’s a pity, you know, that Gudrun fancies me,’ Jaime announced one morning, ‘because she’d be just the girl for Manolo. I’ve told him that he’s welcome to ask her. I’m not at all possessive.’ Manolo was standing a few steps behind, smiling good-humouredly at his new mentor.

  ‘That’s generous of you, Jaime,’ I answered, ‘but don’t you think Gudrun might have a say in this?’

  Manolo, for his part, had a daring scheme he wanted to float with Gudrun. His elderly mother had been laid up at home following a knee operation and he thought Gudrun might like to extend her stay in the valley and take a job as lady’s companion.

  ‘Come on, Manolo,’ I tried to bring him down to earth. ‘Gudrun doesn’t speak a word of Spanish! What the hell are she and your mother going to do together all day?’ The thought defied imagination.

  Manolo pondered this a moment.

  ‘They can watch television, he answered brightly.

  I still couldn’t see it working but Jaime pronounced it a great idea and said he would put it to Gudrun that very night.

  Fortunately for all concerned that was the last we heard of it.

  Indeed, a few weeks later, Gudrun returned to Germany to embark on a nursing course.

  If Manolo and Jaime were upset by her departure, then they hid it well, or perhaps I simply didn’t notice the obvious signs. Throughout the spring that gradually unfolded, something new cropped up that, for a while, absorbed me utterly. I had an eco folly to build.

  AN ECO FOLLY

  THE ORIGINS OF OUR ECO FOLLY CAN BE DATED TO AN EARLY SPRING morning when I took the dogs for a walk up on the hillside behind the house. I noticed the slight figure of a man, high above me, picking his way down through the scrub. He stopped and began waving and jabbing an arm in the direction of the gorge as if he wanted me to look at something, but I couldn’t make out what it might be. It was one of those days with barely a whisper of wind and only the odd tutubía dipping its way across a cloudless sky. Then I saw it: a surge of water was rolling down the Cádiar river, roaring as it came. Within minutes the whole riverbed was a pinkish-brown flood, dotted with clumps of bushes and trees that had been torn from the hills. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the torrent subsided and the river returned to its normal steady sussuration.

  I had heard about the awesome erosion of flash floods before but had never seen it in action. There must have been a violent and sudden rainstorm up in the hills of the Contraviesa, as the river was coloured by the red earth washed off its steep slopes. The water had been so thick with earth and sand that it had moved almost in slow motion, like a river of treacle, rearranging the topography of our riverbed.

  I turned to look up the hill and saw the man who had been waving, approaching along the pa
th. He was wearing a purple tracksuit and hopped over the stones with an agility that seemed at odds with his mop of curly grey hair. I noticed that he was carrying a stylish-looking retractable umbrella.

  ‘Hallo,’ the man said in English.

  ‘Hallo,’ I replied, looking with curiosity at the umbrella.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s a Japanese design, very compact…’ he offered, marking my interest. ‘I had an idea a storm might break, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so far up.’ And he talked at length about the phenomenon of flash-flooding, pointing out just why he thought the river had taken the course that it had.

  I was fascinated by this display of hydrographical knowledge and stood there, nodding and putting in the odd question. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘I’m going back to my van. I’ve parked it about two kilometres up river — beyond that cortijo there,’ and he pointed towards El Valero. ‘It’s Chris and Ana’s place, if you know them..?’

  ‘I do, I do…indeed I am them, or one of them.’

  ‘Really? That’s most felicitous,’ he paused, savouring the word. ‘I’d been intending to come over and introduce myself to you.’

  ‘Felicitous indeed,’ I said. ‘Who are you, then?’

  ‘I’m Trev,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Not Trevor. Trev.’

  I said I was pleased to meet him and suggested we walk back to the farm together. I was anxious to see what damage the flood had done to the river terrace. As we walked, Trev told me about his work as an itinerant ecological engineer and how he thought it possible that we might be in need of his services. I told him I wasn’t sure exactly what an ecological engineer did — but if he could help me improve the efficiency of my solar power panels or improve on the shaky functioning of the chumbo — well, we could certainly use some help. Trev nodded at this but said that he preferred to put his mind to something more concrete —metaphorically speaking, he added hastily. He’d tell me what was possible when we’d had a look over the land.

  We stopped at the house, where I made Trev a cup of herbal tea. When I carried it out onto the patio, I saw that he had walked down to the terrace by Ana’s vegetable patch and was pacing slowly to and fro. Every now and again he would stop, look up at the sun and rub the side of his nose with his index finger; this, it appeared, was his preferred mode of thinking. Porca, who likes to keep an eye on his territory, was flitting between the branches of a large fig tree and studying the intruder.

  ‘I’ve had a good look at your solar panels and your water systems,’ Trev announced as I joined him. ‘And I can see what you mean about the chumbo. It’s a bit honky down there, isn’t it? What you need is a reed-bed to clean up your waste.’ Then, reaching out for his cup, he peered up into the branches of the fig: ‘Ah — a Quaker Parakeet, I do like those,’ he said, before resuming his flow. ‘I reckon we’re going to have to think laterally about fusing alternative and traditional technology in this place. It’s a great spot to do it, mind — really very promising for the right sort of project.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I said slowly. I noticed how he had said we and indeed this seemed like good innovative talk. ‘So what eco-scheme do you think we should go for?’

  ‘Well, it won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but I could help you build something bold and experimental — something that would really enhance as well as interact with the environment. If you’re interested, of course.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ I said. ‘So, what is it?!’

  ‘A swimming pool,’ he replied.

  I looked at Trev incredulously.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘What in hell would I want with one of those? If I want to swim, I can swim in the river, for Heaven’s sake.’

  He met my gaze with a quizzical look. ‘That’s not such a great prospect today,’ he said, indicating with a nod of his head the devastation in the riverbed below.

  It was true. The flood and its sludge had carried away all trace of our swimming-hole, created with a bit of tractor-shovelling from Manolo and a precarious dam of boulders. It would take a long, hot day’s work to collect the boulders for another.

  Trev folded an arm across his stomach, rested the other elbow in the cup of his hand and resumed fondling his nose. ‘I think maybe there’s a bit of confusion as to what I mean by the term swimming pool.’

  It turned out that ‘swimming pool’ was in fact entirely the wrong term for the concept Trev had in mind for El Valero. ‘I’m not thinking of digging a rectangular hole in the ground…’ he explained, ‘…painting it turquoise and filling it full of chemicals. Oh no, I’m not into that at all. I’m thinking of bringing water closer to your home, creating an eco-sphere — one that you can swim in, mind — that will be natural and clean and yet not have a drop of chlorine in it.’

  And Trev went on to explain why chlorine was the very bane of the planet; how aerosols and fridges and bovine flatulence were good for the ozone layer compared to what the chlorine in people’s swimming pools was doing. Then he began to sketch the idea that he had been developing for just such a client as myself, who appreciated ecology, who treated his farm and landscape as a kind of garden, who had notions about leaving the earth enriched rather than denuded and impoverished.

  There was a real beauty about Trev’s ideas and it all sounded a long way from swimming pool salesmanship. He imagined our eco-sphere (for swimming) as a pool of crystalline water, filtered by secondary pools filled with a cleansing jungle of lilies, reeds, rushes and water-mints. Schools of delicious fish, later to be harvested for the household, would cruise to and fro devouring the organisms and micro-organisms inimical to the purity of our pond. A great bolster of raw untreated sheep’s wool would float upon the surface of the reed-pool to suck up all the gunk that fouled the water from sunburn oil and other unguents. And any organism or clod of muck that escaped this formidable net was to be lofted by a solar-powered waterwheel up to an immense stone bottle filled with selected sands and sifted earths from long before the dawn of man. (You could buy this stuff, apparently, in bags from swimming pool shops.)

  From the great bottle the filtered water would meander along stone runnels where the action of the sun’s rays upon the thinly spread flow would knock any surviving bacteria on the head. Then the pure water would cascade over a fall of sun-baked stones back into the main pool. The whole was to be constructed using natural and locally-occurring materials; the shapes were to be organic and uplifting; the landscaping with stone and plants indigenous and exotic; and the project could be completed with an unpretentious pavilion of pisé and thatch.

  It was clearly a mad, ludicrously complex scheme, and one based on a whole rake of optimistic assumptions. No one in their right mind would ever commission such a project.

  I engaged Trev and his scheme on the spot.

  I whiled away the rest of the morning in vainglorious thoughts of El Valero as a showpiece of eco-technology. Sitting on the terrace beside the vegetable patch — an auspicious spot according to Trev — I pictured Ana, Chloe and me floating happily among the lilies and gazing out across the mountains and rivers, while carp darted in the depths beneath.

  My pleasant daydream was dispelled by the hoot of the car and the sound of dogs barking. Ana and Chloe were back from Orgiva. Jaime and Manolo had also come up to the house to collect some tools, and we all sat down on the terrace to have a drink in the shade. I could hardly contain myself and burst at once into an account of the flood, my meeting with Trev, and our bold new plans for reshaping the landscape of El Valero.

  Chloe was thrilled. ‘Our very own swimming pool,’ she cheered, hopping around in excitement and setting the dogs off again. Bathing in the river, apparently, held no great charm for an eight-year-old. She pointed out that it wasn’t easy to practise your strokes on a sludgy river bottom with water barely reaching the top of your knees, and as the riverbed is quite wide, it means you get hot and dusty again before you’ve made it back to your towel hanging in
the willow tree, let alone the house. Her only concern about Trev’s eco-scheme was whether the pool would be ready in time for her friend Hannah’s visit the next weekend.

  Ana, once she’d digested the fact that I was serious about the project, and had indeed good as commissioned it, was also inclined to be positive, particularly about its botanical aspect. ‘It does sound beautiful,’ she conceded, ‘and I’ve always liked the idea of El Valero having its own grand folly. But how do you know it will work? You seem to be taking an awful lot on trust. And what do you actually know about this man Trevor and his earthly works?’

  I had to concede that I didn’t know much. Trev and I had talked a little that morning about his previous projects and his chosen life. He had, for the past five years, been dividing his time between England, the Pyrenees and the Alpujarras, moving from one to the other in a customised van-cum-home-cum-office, stopping for however long a project involved. For the last couple of months he had been working at Cortijo Romero, an alternative therapy centre just outside Orgiva. The centre specialised in personal development courses, rebirthing, yoga, circle-dances and the like. Trev had designed and installed a complex underfloor heating system for the therapy rooms. ‘And what could be more important?’ I asked rhetorically, ‘if you’re casting off the shackles of your hidebound ego, than a nice, warm floor to do it on?’

  Ana seemed to agree but said she’d be keen to hear how the system worked when winter arrived and it was actually switched on. However, Jaime was straightforwardly enthusiastic. He seemed to understand the workings of the project better than any of us and was keen to see how it all pieced together. ‘I doubt I’ll be here to take a dip in it, though, man,’ he said. ‘This is going to be a tricky project to get right; it could take months.’