Parrot in the Pepper Tree (28 page)

I had wanted the pheasants to be a surprise for Ana and had said nothing the night before. She saw me staring open-mouthed through the door, and came over and put her arm round me. ‘Oh, Chris, how lovely, you bought pheasants for our Christmas lunch…’

‘Yes.., but.., now there’s only the.., the…’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

‘Heads — you mean heads, don’t you? I suppose you bought whole pheasants and hung them up here where the dogs could get them.’

‘Yes…’ I whispered

‘Never mind. It’s the thought that counts and it was a really lovely thought. Anyway we can always make a soup from the heads — with some fried potatoes and eggs it’ll do well enough for a Christmas dinner.’

Miserably, I trudged off to connect the battery charger up to our power system. It didn’t work at all, not a spark. There was some fundamental malfunction, or else I had been sold a dud.

Still, at least the dogs hadn’t drunk the wine. Ana decorated the dogs with bits of tinsel, we had fried eggs and potatoes for lunch, and we all went and sat by the river in the sunshine. I’ve spent worse Christmas days.

JUST BENEATH THE PEAK OF MULHACÉN, WHICH AT 3450M IS THE highest peak in the Sierra Nevada, indeed in the whole Iberian peninsula, are the
borreguiles.
In days gone by, a lamb was not considered fit to be eaten until it had passed a summer grazing on the sweet grasses that cloak these high mountain meadows —hence the name, from
borrego,
which means a lamb.

There are a dozen or so
borreguiles
below the southwest side of the peak. Each one is a great bowl of a watermeadow, enclosed by rock walls and communicating by waterfalls to the meadows below and above. They differ in the arrangement of the various elements. Some have a waterfall dropping straight into a lagoon and then two or three rills of water meandering through the grass to the lip, where they cascade over the edge to the meadow below. Another may have its lagoon in the centre, and a single torrent of water feeding it and draining it, and there’s one that has a steep bank of grass for its waterfall.

Common to them all is the perfect peace, the almost supernatural clarity of the water and the springiness of the deep green grass. By August, though, even up here the vegetation starts to wither as the high mountain waters dry out. The shrivelling and crisping starts on the perimeter and creeps towards the centre, until there is just a thin stain of green around the lagoon — and then nothing, as even the water of the lagoon is sucked into the air by the summer sun, leaving a dry bed of stones. Then with the autumn rains, the
borreguiles
green up again, just in time to be buried beneath a couple of metres of snow until the following summer.

The time to see the
borreguiles
is late May to late July — that’s spring in the high sierra — and somehow, the very fleeting nature of this beauty makes it all the more appealing. In early July, almost a year after our dam fiesta, I walked up to the meadows from the village of Capileira. As I clambered up over the lip, I was struck dumb by what I saw. The grass was no longer green, it was a sheet of livid blue — a blue so dazzling it seemed to come from outside the normal spectrum of perception. These were the Sierra Nevada gentians. I had heard about them but this was the first time I had ever seen them. There were two varieties in bloom — the ultramarine
Gentiana verna,
and the delicate, almost luminescent
Gentiana alpina.

There are some things so strong you just have to share them —and those gentians were strong. As I picked my way down, I wondered how I could entice Ana and Chloë up the mountain. Like the locals, they both tend to regard walking strictly as a means of getting around, and not a pleasure for its own sake. Putting across the idea of a six-hour relentlessly uphill slog would test my powers of persuasion to the limits. But a climb up here to see the magical blue haze of the gentians seemed exactly what we all needed to shake off our worries.

Chloë, as it happened, was busy; she had an overnight stay coming up with a schoolfriend in Orgiva. But Ana seemed quite taken with the idea and, with Chloë away, was even happy to consider camping out for a night. There was nothing to prevent us setting off together the next day.

For all the splendours of the flowers and mountain scenery in store, I had a nagging worry that I might have underplayed the rigours of the day ahead. ‘It’s not really that far,’ I had assured Ana. ‘And it’s not as steep as all that, and anyway, when you get there it’s so wonderful that you forget instantly how far and how steep it was — which, of course, it wasn’t.’

Ana receives such pronouncements with an understandable suspicion, developed over some twenty-five years of knocking around with me. But I wondered if she had applied quite the right level of scepticism. Still, I really did feel it would be worth it once we were up at the meadows: for the pleasure Ana would take from spending time there, and for the pleasure I would get from her pleasure. There was also something symbolic about the whole trip, for the
borreguiles
are the source of the Poqueira, the river that waters our farm and supplies the springs from which we drink and wash and water the flowers of our patio.

We set out as soon as we had fed the dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, horses and sheep. Porca the parrot set out with us, on Ana’s shoulder, until we reached the river and she sent him wheeling off. We climbed into the car and headed off for Pampaneira, one of the high Alpujarran villages, where our walk to the
borreguiles
would begin. Within the hour we were fortifying ourselves in the square with coffee and
roscos
— dry buns which look tantalisingly like doughnuts, but aren’t — and gazing up past the churchtower at the distant peak of Veleta, which was not where we were going, but was a similar distance away.

We made our way up through the cobbled alleys of the village and up the steep woodland path to the hamlet of Bubión. From there it was just a mile, still climbing hard, through the meadows to Capileira, the highest village at nearly 1300 metres above sea-level. When I reached the village plaza, wheezing like a rusty bellows, Ana was waiting for me, sitting serenely on a bench. This annoyed me a bit, as you may imagine. ‘You must learn to pace yourself,’ I gasped.

‘This is a nice place. Why don’t we spend the rest of the day here — we could do some shopping,’ teased Ana. I ignored her and, slinging my pack, marched resolutely out of the village in the direction of up. We climbed on, for hours, through pinewoods and along
acequias.
The sun was burning fiercely and the shade of the trees and even the sound of the water was a blessing.

Later, we sat beneath a pine tree and drank water from the bottles in my pack — just below the boil — and ate the usual stuff that you eat on a mountain picnic — ham and
chorizo,
olives, tomatoes, bread, and then halva, dates and about three kilos of cherries to finish. Then we slept.

The picnic pine tree was the last one; after lunch we were walking above the treeline. The sun had moved well down from its zenith, and was burning our left legs, our left arms and the left side of our faces. In the far distance we could make out the Refugio del Poqueira and, just beyond the hut, the steep river valley that we would climb to get to the
borreguiles.

‘We’re not going all the way up there, are we?’ asked Ana.

‘You’ve done nothing but moan since we set off this morning,’ I baited her, without a shred of justification. In fact, Ana had cheerfully led the way almost all day.

There was a treat in store for us as we walked up the long steady incline towards the refuge: the thymes and
puas
of what botanists call the ‘hedgehog zone’ were in flower. The term is a good one, as the low-growing spiky plants do indeed look like a vast multitude of hedgehogs. The path and its borders were a mass of pink and white domes, made up of the most exquisite densely-packed little flowers. Ana had never seen the like of it, as she hadn’t been this high. I’d seen the plants and had dismissed them as rather dull, but now, in all their flowering glory, they were dazzling. The air was full of butterflies, too, some as big as your hand, and whenever we came to the tiniest patch of moisture, there would be literally clouds of Small Blues. They carpeted the ground as we approached, and as we passed they would lift in their thousands into the air, creating their own infinitesimal mountain breeze.

I grinned at Ana and she smiled back, a smile of pure delight and happiness. It was already worth it, though I knew that there was still one hell of a haul to get up to the
borreguiles,
where we planned to spend the night. The Spanish have a saying: ‘If you would feel like a king, take your friends to a place of beauty that you know.’ It sounds better in Spanish — and it’s true.

Hours later the sun had dropped behind the peak of Veleta and the valleys were full of shadows. Ana and I were trudging on in a ponderous silence, having climbed for nearly six hours and more than 5,000 feet. I was determined that we should reach the
borreguiles
by nightfall.

This final valley, where the new-born Poqueira river tumbled among the rocks and the grass, was as steep and difficult as the first hill of the morning, only now there was not much energy left in us. However, at long last we crawled up and over into the lowest of the meadows. It was almost dark and the few gentians that were in this meadow had gone to sleep, with their petals tightly wrapped against the cold of the coming night.

Ana and I slumped on a rock, warm still from the hot sunshine of the day, and there we lay until the icy cold of the night air moved us. I set about unpacking the backpack. Sleeping bags, sweaters, bottles of water — now icy cold — food, a torch, sticking plasters, moisturising cream… ‘Moisturising cream! What the hell do you want with moisturising cream?’

Ana said she wasn’t going anywhere without moisturiser.

‘That’s all very well, but I’m the poor goon who has to carry the stuff!’

‘Well, if you like I’ll carry it down,’ she offered.

We found a soft bed for the sleeping bags and laid our aching limbs down to get what rest we could. An hour or maybe two hours later, after endless rollings over and wriggling and other attempts to get comfortable, the full moon rose over the black rocks to the east. Our little valley flooded with the cold silver light. I rolled over again and looked at Ana.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No, of course not.’

We got up and peered over the rim of the meadow. Below us lay the Alpujarras, bathed in moonlight. There was a mist that swirled in the valleys like a sea of milk, and the hills like dark islands, the Isles of the Blessed, so it seemed. The scene was cloaked in deep silence, until a dog, somewhere in the vastness of the night, started to bark. The call was taken up by a dozen other distant dogs, and for a little while the valleys rang with the sound; then the silence stole back over the night.

We watched without a word, hardly breathing for fear of breaking the spell. Then Ana shivered a little.

‘God, to think that we live down there, in that.’

I grunted. When you’ve known one another a long time, sometimes a grunt is all you need.

‘It’s amazing, a privilege,’ she continued as we pulled our sleeping bags around us.

I grunted again and re-arranged an arm that was losing circulation across her shoulder.

The valleys of the Alpujarras were immediately beneath us, then to the south, rearing dark from the mists, lay the great mass of the Contraviesa and the Sierra de Lújar. If we raised our eyes above the coastal hills, we could see the moonlight on the distant Mediterranean.

‘Chris,’ Ana whispered.

I paused.

‘You know they’re going to go ahead and build the dam in the valley, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered into the darkness. ‘Yes, I do.’

For the first time since we’d heard the news it seemed somehow bearable. We talked into the night, liberated by saying the unsaid, and found we had drawn much the same conclusions. We wanted to stay, even if the water and silt ate away at the farm, and so did Chloë, as far as we could tell. Whatever happened we’d first try and adapt our lives around it. We had roots here now and upping and leaving wasn’t the option it had once been.