Parrot in the Pepper Tree (22 page)

Gudrun was a country girl from somewhere up in the turnip belt to the northwest of Berlin and had written us a pleasant and articulate letter asking if she could come and work on our farm for two or three weeks, as a volunteer. Then, a few days after receiving our invitation, she rang us to say she was on the way. I was dispatched to collect her from the bus stop.

A dozen or so people got off the bus that evening and dispersed into the dark streets, but none of them seemed to be Gudrun — not that I had any idea what she looked like. And then I spotted a lanky, blonde woman with a backpack trudging up the road. I strode after her.

‘Would you be Gudrun?’ I asked. She half turned and looked at me open-mouthed and baffled. We stared at one another in the gathering dark. The seconds moved towards a minute. Oh Lord, I thought. It’s a bloke and he’s not pleased to be confused with some Gudrun.

‘Gudrun?’ I said again weakly.

She looked at me a little longer. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Hi, I’m Chris, good to meet you, how was your journey?’ I said, assuming that the ‘oh’ meant she was indeed Gudrun.

‘Ohh,’ she said again, with a slightly different inflection.

Maybe she’s deaf, I thought, though she hadn’t mentioned that in the letter. I took her pack and she followed me meekly down to the car.

On the journey home I tried my best to engage Gudrun in conversation, enunciating everything with the most precise elocution. But it soon became clear that the problem wasn’t deafness at all. Gudrun spoke not a word of Spanish and barely any English — and I had a sneaking feeling that even in German she might not be a very communicative person. Not that I could tell, exactly, as my schoolboy German barely counted as human communication.
‘Heute machen wir einen Ausflug nach Boppard
—Today we are going on an excursion to Boppard,’ was about all I could muster, and it got us nowhere.

On arrival home Gudrun gave Ana a warm smile and disappeared to her room without a drink or a meal or anything. Ana and I stood looking at each other, wondering. ‘Maybe she’ll improve, suggested Ana.

‘Well, I certainly hope so. She’s not going to be a ball of fun unless she does!’ I said.

Next day, after a rather morose communal breakfast, Ana somehow managed to get the idea across to Gudrun that she wanted the vegetable patch weeded. Gudrun duly disappeared for the rest of the morning, and weeded the vegetable patch like a whirlwind. She was certainly one hell of a weeder. Ana made her coffee and they drank it together and smoked cigarettes, and in some indefinable non-verbal way they began to bond.

Perhaps as a result of Ana’s prompting, Gudrun seemed to find me an amusing specimen, and would snigger whenever I came near her. I would smile blankly back, and little by little a limited relationship was established, aided by Gudrun’s ‘Ohs’ and my occasional resurrection of the Boppard travel plans.

It may have been the infantile speech we were reduced to, but Gudrun seemed much younger than her twenty-five years. She was tall and etiolated in the way that adolescents look after a sudden growth spurt, and she had thick blonde hair that fell on either side of her face, framing a surprisingly broad smile. Little by little we came to like Gudrun, and as she began to feel more comfortable with us, she warmed and blossomed a little, and we saw more of the smiles. So Gudrun stayed on, sleeping in a storeroom that had been turned into a bedroom, and weeding and weeding.

Jaime was a very different kind of
wwoofer:
a young urban Spaniard from Madrid. When he first arrived amongst us he strode up to Manolo, who is still a long way from being modern and urban, gripped him in a firm handshake and, looking straight and clear into his eyes, said ‘Hi, I’m Jaime.’ Manolo looked forlornly at Ana for help.

Jaime was equally direct with the rest of us, addressing anyone he met, colloquially, in their own language. He was completely fluent in English, which he spoke with a transatlantic accent, picked up from a string of English-speaking girlfriends that stretched from Goa to Marin County. He was forever expanding his vocabulary, asking us questions that seriously taxed our knowledge of our own language. His main failing was that he couldn’t bear to be wrong — and most particularly to be shown up as wrong, especially by a woman.

One day Ana and Jaime were looking at the dog kennel, which is a sort of nondescript brownish red. ‘Tell me, Ana,’ began Jaime. ‘What’s that colour in English? In Spanish it’s
granate.’

‘Well, it’s a sort of reddish brown, not really a colour at all,’ she answered.

‘Yeah, but what’s the name of it?’

‘Doesn’t have a name.

‘C’mon, you can’t be serious, man, that’s a specific colour.’

‘No it isn’t, it’s brownish. And if there is a name for it then I don’t know it.’ Ana was rising to the argument.

‘Look, man… in Spanish it’s
granate.
Everybody knows that. There’s not a person in the whole goddam length and breadth of Spain who doesn’t know what that colour is.’

Jaime was beginning to get agitated and at just that moment there came a ‘meep’ sound from the
chumbo
and Manolo appeared with Porca on his shoulder. Porca likes Manolo.

‘Look, now you’ll see,’ Jaime began to shout. ‘I’ll ask Manolo what colour it is… Hey Manolo, what colour is the dog kennel?’

Manolo looked uncertainly from Jaime to the dog kennel and back.

‘Go on, tell us. What colour is it?’

‘Well, it’s a sort of reddish brown … isn’t it?’

‘No, man! You know perfectly well what colour it is! C’mon man, give me a break.’

‘Then it’s brown.’

‘Jesus man! You know that colour. It’s
granate,
isn’t it.’

‘Granate,’
murmured Manolo, toying with the word.

‘There, see, Ana, he said it. Everyone knows that word…’

Jaime prides himself upon his disciplined state of being, so it’s always fun to see if you can get him riled up and knock him off the perch of his karma. He does a lot of work on it — tai chi and meditation, mainly — and, it has to be admitted, manages to achieve a fair degree of self-control.

In the evenings the rest of us would tend to slouch around on the sofa with a glass of wine or cup of chocolate, languorously talking, reading and listening to music by the fire. Jaime would arrive late, having completed his gruelling spiritual and physical workout sessions, offer everyone a polite good evening, then take his brick (he carries a wooden brick around with him) and plant it on the floor in the middle of the room. Lowering himself onto his brick he’d assume a half-lotus position with back ramrod straight. He would refuse a glass of wine but accept a glass of water for later, and there he would sit, speaking when spoken to, but otherwise staring fixedly at the flames of the fire, chanting mantras — quietly so as not to upset anybody. Needless to say, it drove us to distraction.

Sex was something that Jaime also claimed to be in control of. He was thirty-three and a very good-looking young man, with an Adonis-like physique — the result, so he told me, of rigorous physical workouts in his youth — and he had a philosophical approach to the temptations of the flesh. ‘Well, of course I’m just a human being like everyone else and once in a while I need a woman,’ he confided. ‘Who doesn’t? But you know, man, when you need a thing it very often comes along. The rest of the time I learn to live without it. If you don’t.., well, sex is a destructive force and it can throw you right out of your chosen path.’

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?’