Parrot in the Pepper Tree (5 page)

I paused and looked at it for a moment with pleasure, then looked out of the window at the pigeons flying round the eucalyptus tree. At the foot of the eucalyptus tree is Ana’s kitchen garden. I caught sight of a small movement in the corner by the strawberries… Hell and damnation! It was a sheep! The sheep were attacking the vegetable patch! Quick as a flash I bared out of the door and down the hill. This could have the makings of a grade A disaster. Ana would be furious, and the sheep, whose popularity with my womenfolk was already at a pretty low ebb, would run the risk of being expelled from the farm.

‘What’s happening?’ shouted Ana as I flailed past the house.

‘Nothing, I’m just going for a walk!’ I yelled, disappearing in a cloud of dust and exuberantly barking dogs down the track.

‘If those wretched sheep are on the vegetable patch again..? Ana began, but the threat was drowned out by the sound of me leaping over the fence and crashing through the salsola bushes.

Between the dogs and me, and with a good deal of yelling and barking, we managed to get the sheep out of the vegetables with only a little collateral damage. With foul oaths I drove them away and then set to patching up the holes they had come through.

So much for my first morning as a writer.

That first month back at home passed in a torment of delays and interruptions as I tried to take my first literary steps. There were farm jobs that had stacked up in my absence: the
acequias
needed clearing, the stable wanted mucking out, and there was a crop of alfalfa that needed scything. Chloë needed to be ferried to and from the school bus stop at the other end of the valley, and the fencing around Ana’s vegetable patch needed mending properly, and the car needed taking to pieces — and then someone needed to be found to put it back together again. And so it went on and on and on until, as often happens, a breaking point was reached and I was forced to look for help.

The day I finally decided that things were getting out of hand, and that some sort of action would have to be taken, was marked by a singular event. I had crossed the valley early one afternoon with the idea of seeing Bernardo before collecting Chloë from the school bus. I can’t remember why, because I had certainly put aside that time for writing, but no doubt I had some pressing neighbourly matters to discuss.

Cutting up from the valley, the path to Bernardo’s winds through a wilderness of bushes, trees and cacti, enmeshed in climbers and creeping plants. There’s a gravelly corner that squeezes between a steep cliff and a
chumbo,
or prickly pear; if you slip up here, you must make a split second decision on whether to roll down the cliff or fall into the
chumbo
and spend the next month extracting millions of microscopic barbs. This time I negotiated the corner without mishap, then panted up the last stretch to the road, where I found Bernardo gazing up into the branches of a tall fig tree that overhung the path.

He grinned ruefully at me and stroked the stubble of his upturned chin. I stopped beside him.

‘Hola Bernardo, que tal?’

‘Good morning, Cristóbal, it’s okay, I don’t complain. But I have a small problem here?

‘And what might that be?’

By way of an answer he indicated the crown of the fig tree. I looked up into the branches, shading my eyes from the sun with my hand. There was what appeared to be a small dog, high up in the tree. I looked quizzically at Bernardo.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s der Moffli.’

‘Yes, I can see it’s the Moffli, but what on earth is it doing up in that tree?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Bernardo with a certain solemnity.

‘Ah,’ I said, relieved to have found an explanation for the odd look of the dog, though this shed little light as to how it got up there. The Moffli was Bernardo’s family pet, a little Pekinese dog, much beloved by the children. Initially there’d been two — called the Mofflis after a Dutch cartoon-strip — but the first had succumbed to some illness the year before, to the great distress of the children. And now it appeared that the other one had gone the same way.

‘He died last night,’ explained Bernardo. ‘The last little Moffli. I didn’t want the children to see him, so I decided to wait and throw him into the
barranco
while they were at school. Well, I swung him round and round, you know, like this’ — he made a circular motion with his arm — ‘and then I let him go… but I think I got the timing wrong.

Bernardo looked away from the tree and turned towards me, and to our shame we both spluttered with laughter. Immediately Bernardo clamped a hand over his mouth and gestured me to hush. ‘No, no — it’s very sad,’ he said, ‘and a terrible problem. The tree is right over the path the children take from the school bus. Imagine how upsetting it would be if they looked up and saw the Moffli up there?’

As if on cue, Moffli lifted on a gentle zephyr and began to rock in his resting place. I could see now the gravity of it all.

‘But how to get him down,’ pondered Bernardo, ‘before the children get home?’

‘We could throw stones at him and see if we can knock him off,’ I suggested.

Bernardo liked the idea, so we gathered a pile of rocks and set about hurling them at the unfortunate dog. Despite the odd lucky hit, gratifying in its way, the only effect was to push the Moffli even deeper into his cleft.

‘No,’ pronounced Bernardo at last. ‘It’s not working. We’ll just have to think of something else.’

At that moment, the sound of an engine and a cloud of dust on the corner heralded the arrival of the school bus. I had a choice to make. I could run up to meet the children and improvise some distraction, or I could make myself scarce and loop down to meet Chloë at the bridge. I chose the latter.

Perhaps to atone for this outburst of un-neighbourly cowardice, I promised myself that I would write late into the night and continue working on the book all the way through the next day, an easy enough resolution to make while wandering back to the farm in the late afternoon. We had dinner and I retreated to the
cámara.
On the way I noticed the sheep had not yet returned to the farm: they were still out on the hillside behind the house. Night was falling and I began to worry about the risk of leaving them up there; there was a full moon and the creatures of the wild would be raving and seething with malevolence. The poor sheep, who seem more or less unaffected by the moon, wouldn’t stand a chance. So I gathered a stick and Bumble and Big and stepped out up the hill.

The dogs raced happily into the scrub while I walked round the gentler gradients of the track, stopping every now and then to strain my ears into the silence, to try and catch the bongling of a bell. There was nothing and soon darkness fell. I trudged on up the rough track, my eyes adjusting to the faint light of the stars. Still not a sign nor sound of the sheep. Then the faint pallor that loomed over the high scarp to the east burst into the great glowing disc of the full moon, dazzling white against the blackness of the cliffs. The dogs hurtled to and fro, panting in the scrub, frightening partridges which rose hysterically into the air and clattered away down the hill. Bumble looked like a spectral dog, huge and white in the moonlight with her dark shadow moving beside her in the pale dust.

All of a sudden I heard a bell, distinct and near, no more than fifty metres off. I stood stock-still. Silence. The dogs came and stood beside me and together the three of us stood motionless, staring into the darkness. The bell was not repeated; the hill remained wreathed in silence.

We stood still, straining our ears for the slightest sound of the sheep. I breathed through my mouth — it makes less noise — and for a moment, instead of an enfeebled middle-aged European in glasses, I felt like a Masai warrior, lord of the hill before me and silent in the mountain night.

Soon, though, I grew tired of the warrior stance. There was the sound of dogs, barking in the distance, and I caught the wild cry of foxes way across the hill. I continued climbing, leaving the valley and heading for the pinewoods. This was bliss for the dogs, and I can think of few better ways to spend a moonlit night than wandering around in the mountains, but it was getting late, and I had already blown a night’s work. Still, I could hardly sit and write while my sheep were being hunted around the mountainside by packs of lunatic wild dogs.

In spite of my misgivings, I finally had to admit that I was beaten. I had spent most of the night quartering the hill to no avail, and there was always the possibility — and it wouldn’t be the first time — that the flock had cut round and taken another route back down to the stable.

The house was in darkness as I passed it. Ana had gone to bed. I continued down to the stable. There was absolute silence but as I bent down to peer through the window, this was broken by a shuffling and a bongle of a bell. There they were, the sods, safe in their beds. I remonstrated with them furiously, for wasting my night. ‘Please, just don’t do it again,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m trying to get something done which could be of some benefit to us all — new hayracks, a better class of grain, just think of it..? The sheep just looked at me, insolently chewing like yobboes in a yard.

The next day I slumped on my desk, exhausted from the night and a little demoralised. Perhaps I should forget this idea of becoming a writer. If the business of everyday living took up so much of my time — and that of course was a perennial problem of living in a remote
cortijo
— then how on earth would I find the extra time to do anything creative? Soon the telephone would ring and it would be my friend and shearing partner José Guerrero, announcing the start of the shearing season: two months and more of solid grinding work that would leave me drained like a rusty bucket. It was as if a half-realised dream was already starting to vanish.

Then Ana came up with a solution. I should use the advance I’d been given to employ someone to help out on the farm. It was crazy to try and stretch myself, and wasn’t that what an advance was for anyway, to buy me a little more time to write? It was a faultless idea that had only one fault. We didn’t know anyone we could ask. Good farm labour is in short supply these days in the Alpujarras, and El Valero, being on the wrong side of the river, was not the most sought-after or social place to work.

‘You should ask Manolo — he’s a good worker,’ said Domingo, whose advice I sought.

‘Manolo del Molinillo, you mean?’

‘Yes, there’s nobody else as good, but you know that from when he helped clear out the
acequia
a couple of years ago with his father. And he’s good with sheep, too.’

‘I know Manolo well,’ I said despondently, ‘and I know what you’re saying is true. But he’s one person I can’t employ…’

‘Why not?’

‘Well…’ I began — I hadn’t wanted to mention this — ‘Manolo still hasn’t paid me for that shearing I did for him last year.

‘I can’t believe that of Manolo. There’s not a drop of dishonesty in him…’

‘That’s what I used to think,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s a bit difficult asking someone to work for you when they owe you money…

‘Not nearly as difficult as when you owe them money,’ answered Domingo, before turning to go. He had some work he wanted to finish off in his studio.

PACO DE LA CHARCA — PACO OF THE MARSH — LIVES BETWEEN EL Valero and Orgiva, in a
cortijo
which, as the name would suggest, is set in a marsh. He shares this unenviable terrain with three or four hundred sheep which root around eating a lot of watermint and reeds and other bog-plants, as well as plenty of willow. I have shorn Paco’s sheep for many years and have got to know him fairly well. He is not a true Alpujarreño, having moved here from Iznalloz, up in the hills to the north of Granada, but you’d not know it from his talk, which, when I’m around at least, seems to consist of fulminating against people from anywhere beyond the confines of Orgiva, and, in particular, foreigners.

‘You come here and infest our land, murder our language! The Host! I can’t understand a single word you say! You’re good for nothing, apart from shearing sheep and you’re not very good at that! Look at that sheep! What sort of shearing do you call that? I suppose you’re going to charge me full rate for that one!