Parrot in the Pepper Tree (16 page)

When I returned from this literary trip, which included a few book-signings in local shops as well looking up my old sheep-farming friends, Ana and Chloë checked me closely for signs of uppity-ness. Chloë enjoyed hearing me recount how I had signed books for complete strangers in bookshops but seemed anxious that I might have become changed in some subtle, irreversible way.

I knew what she meant. Interest in authors struck me as being a fleeting, giddy-making thing. The phone rang, and in proof of how suggestible I’d become, I picked it up expecting it to be a journalist pressing for an interview. Instead it was José Guerrero, my shearing partner.

‘YOU’RE BACK FROM OVER THERE. GOOD,’ he shouted. ‘TOMORROW WE’RE GOING SHEEP-SHEARING!’

‘No we’re not. I’ve just this minute got home.’

‘NO MATTER, THESE SHEEP HAVE GOT TO BE DONE. SEE YOU AT FIVE-THIRTY IN RAMÓN’S BAR.’

‘Look, I don’t want to go shearing tomorrow; I’ve already been away and now I want to get to know my family again.’

‘I’M COUNTING ON YOU, CRISTOBAL. YOU CAN GET TO KNOW YOUR FAMILY ON THURSDAY.’

‘Why can’t you shear them yourself?’

But it was too late; the other end of the line was dead.

Chloë wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about my heading straight off shearing, but Ana understood. She knows that I’ve never been able to refuse José Guerrero any favour.

José is an original. He hides a nature of quiet thoughtfulness and warmth beneath a brash bumptious exterior. A couple of years ago he was diagnosed with cancer of the lymphatic system, which probably explains his curiously cadaverous appearance. His way of coping with the disease is to hurl himself into a life of constant frenzy. To be with him is exhausting; he burns you up with his relentless energy. The technique seems to work, though; the disease seems unable to take the pace, and each time I see him he is just a little better, taking a few less pills.

Both Ana and I felt that a day’s grubby manual work with José Guererro might help to bring me back to earth from the rarefied realms that I had been inhabiting.

At five o’clock in the morning there’s not a stitch of light in the sky, just the stars, and on that particular morning there was no moon. I rolled quietly from the bed and stumbled around trying to find my tee-shirt and jeans, then crept out of the house into the hot, dark morning. Trudging along the track, I strained to catch the sound of the nightingales singing over the crunch of the gravel and roar of the river. All around the great bellies of the mountains stood dense black against the imperceptibly greying sky. The pale yellow bloom of the
gallomba
lining the track glowed feebly and the scent of its flowers filled the night. Then I crossed the bridge, climbed into the car, and, flicking on the headlights, extinguished the spell of the morning.

In Ramón’s the usual early morning suspects sat along the bar addressing themselves quietly to their coffees,
manzanillas,
anis and brandies. There was no sign of José so I took a stool and ordered an orange juice. A young man in a shiny tracksuit came in and started cracking jokes about football in a loud voice. The other members of the bar seemed to enjoy it, but my thoughts were drifting back to home and bed. Whatever had made me want to do sheep-shearing, on a day that the TV weather lady was just saying would be around thirty-five degrees?

At half past six, José stepped into the bar and slumped down beside me. ‘You’re right on time,’ he said. ‘Good — let’s go.’ I knew he had said five-thirty but there seemed no point in arguing the point. José had overslept but he’s a man who doesn’t like to admit mistakes, and to be honest, he looked a bit rough, and like he didn’t need an argument.

I slung my bag into the cramped and fetid cab of José’s van and squeezed in after it. He started the engine and slipped a tape into the machine. Full volume, hideously distorted.

‘You’ll like this, Babykin…’ he announced.

‘What?’

‘La música
— it’s Baby Kin…’

‘Ah, you mean BB King?’

‘Sí, claro
— I just got this tape. Listen, it’s an Elmore James song.

José is crazy about the blues. Well, so am I, at a decent hour of the day. But José seems to have some sort of short circuit in his sensibility system so that he enjoys it blasted out at full volume even at dawn. Inspired by Babykin’s guitar riffs, he thrashed the little tin van mercilessly up the Sierra de Lújar.

It was a hot morning even now, before the sun had risen, and we had both windows open which dispelled a little the miasma of sheepshit and cigarette smoke. As we climbed higher, the snow-capped crests of the Sierra Nevada began to reveal themselves, and beneath them the grey of the high mountains looming above the dim blue folds of the valleys. We wound on and on up the narrow mountain road, through thick banks of deep grass and flowers, over the little pass above Camacho, and headed east along the ridge and up to the highest point along the road, Haza del Lino. Here we stopped at the bar to ask the way.

‘Is Blas here?’ José asked the dark-eyed beauty behind the bar.

‘No, he’s up in the Sierra?

‘But he’s expecting me today. Didn’t he get the message?’

‘Mother!’ called the girl. A woman fresh from the frying in the kitchen peered round the door at José.

‘Ah yes. I didn’t give Blas your message because he didn’t come home last night.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘No way of knowing.’ The two women looked at one another doubtfully, then at José.

‘How do we find him, then?’ he asked.

‘It’s very difficult, the mother began, with a look that made it seem like it really was very difficult.

‘How, then?’

‘Well, you go along the road towards Venta de Tarugo… and then you take the first right…’

‘No, you’re better off going past Tarugo and left,’ offered an old man who sat at the bar.

‘Manuel, what do you know? It’s much quicker going down and then up…’

‘Manuel has a point, though…’ butted in another customer.

And so it went on, a melee of passionate and apparently contradictory advice, until at last we emerged with a piece of paper marked with what looked like runes, and a self-appointed guide, called Miguelillo, who seemed to have a very sketchy command of local geography. However, he purported to know just where we would find Blas.

Miguelillo got in the front and I stretched out across the back seat and watched the world, or that part of it composed of the Sierra de la Contraviesa, zoom by through the side windows. We turned down to Venta de Tarugo along a lovely little road, with flowers and grasses growing through the tarmac.

We could see the sun now hanging fiercely over the distant Sierra de Gador. Every bend we wound around took us into almost complete blindness, the white light of the sun enhanced by the disgusting state of José’s windscreen and the fact that both sun-visors had long ago dropped off. To either side stretched rolling hills of vines, short stocks with long dark shadows cast by the low sun. A few men were out in the vineyards in the early morning cool, one man tiny and alone in a sea of vines, hacking away at the weeds with his mattock — a truly Herculean labour. Nobody lived here. I couldn’t imagine even sheep living here. On we went, and on and on. There were few side-turnings, no villages, no houses, nothing but the vines.

Miguelillo looked increasingly bemused and it soon became clear that he scarcely knew who Blas was, let alone where he could be found. He was one of those people, and they are to be found everywhere in rural Spain, who hang around in bars waiting for something interesting to happen — say a ride in a car somewhere. Just in case we were left in any doubt as to his usefulness, he told us he had a psychological disorder that made him violent from time to time. He was alright mostly, but when he got wound up, he just couldn’t stop himself. He said it made it difficult for him to hold down a proper job. He told us all this with a smile that would charm your worst aunt.

José, too, was all smiles, as he turned to Miguelillo and addressed him:

‘Hombre,’
he said. ‘All this is very bad luck, and me and my friend here count it a great privilege to have you with us as a guide today — even though you haven’t the first idea where the hell we are. But I’m just taking this opportunity to let you know that if you step just one tiny little step out of line, we will have no hesitation in hanging you by the balls from one of these cork trees. Cristóbal in the back there now is very quiet and gentle-mannered, but he gets evil when he’s riled up, and there’s no stopping him. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Miguelillo understood perfectly and said that he thought it extremely unlikely that he would turn nasty. I just watched the flowers of the roadside racing by outside the side-windows, and hoped that I wouldn’t have to get evil.

Not long afterwards, after a couple of wrong turnings and no help at all from Miguelillo, who had decided to get out at a crossroads where there was a big shady fig tree, we happened upon the
cortijo
where we were to do our stuff. In order to try and build up some momentum I flung open the door and leapt out into the warm sunshine of the yard. A line of big dark men in blue boiler suits considered our arrival through a curtain of cigarette smoke, and beneath a walnut tree a couple of thin dogs scratched themselves on bits of rusty agricultural detritus.

‘How could anyone want to be anything other than a sheep-shearer?’ I exclaimed to José, as we set up the machinery in the barn below.

The day started to unfold in just the way that such days do, the heat increasing and the sweat running and the flies swarming over us. But it didn’t bother us at all because the sheep were perfect. They sheared like a hot knife through butter, the wool furling off neat and clean. José, singing to himself, turned on the speed to make a competition of it. I speeded up, too, and all morning we raced through those wonderful fat sheep together. As the day drew on and the sheep heated up and started sweating, it got better still. A hot, fat, sweaty sheep is a shearer’s dream. By mid-afternoon we had finished the job, and were down at the house sharing a meal with the shepherd and his family.

Later we loaded the clobber back in the van and headed off down the track. Miguelillo was still sitting beneath his fig tree at the crossroads. José pulled up and looked at him, bathing him in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘I suppose you want to show us the way back now?’

Miguelillo thought about it a bit, then, seeing me looking at him from the passenger seat, decided against it.

‘Gracias
— but I’ve got a few things to attend to first. I’ll make my own way back.’

OUTSIDE OUR HOLIDAY COTTAGE, EL DUQUE, ISA FALSE PEPPER TREE. We planted it as a seed, a little thing encased in what looks like a red peppercorn — but isn’t.
Schinus molle
(the Latin name) grows at an astonishing rate. Within three years it had become a full-blown tree with a thick peppery-barked trunk and a great mass of pendulous green foliage set with little clouds of false red peppercorns. You could happily doze and while away the afternoon hours in its shade. It hangs over the cottage gate.

One July morning, as Ana was passing beneath the pepper tree with a sack of washing in her arms, something bright green and feathery fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. It was a parrot — not a bird you see much of in Andalucia. It perched quietly and looked at her, its head on one side, and stayed there as she opened and loaded the boot of the car. ‘Hallo,’ said Ana, who is not a person to be caught off guard by an event like this. ‘Do you want to come home with me, then?’

The parrot shuffled closer to her head and nibbled her ear in what she took to be a friendly way. ‘Well, it would be a fine thing to have our very own parrot, but let’s go and see if Antonia knows anything about you first,’ Ana suggested.