Parrot in the Pepper Tree (7 page)

‘Tas escribiendo?
— you’re writing?’

‘Well, I’m trying to. What are you at down there?’

‘I’ve ploughed the stable field and sown it with grass..?

‘Have you harrowed it?’

‘No, I’ll bring the mules tomorrow for that. And I’ve watered the alfalfa — the pipes were blocked so I had to dismantle them all to get the muck out — clogged solid they were. It’s that wind, it filled the
acequia
with sticks and leaves and oleander petals and they all got sucked into the pipe. When are you going to make that filter you keep talking about?’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can get round to it tomorrow…’

‘Bueno.
And I’ve rearranged the haystack and fixed the rams water drinker and tied up the tomatoes…’

I looked at the piece of paper before me on the desk. Manolo was edging forward, trying to catch a glimpse of my morning’s work. I covered it with my arm.

Manolo surveyed the room. ‘Lots of books,’ he observed.

‘Yes, I suppose there are?

‘How’s your book coming along, then?’

I looked down at my desk and thought of Manolo’s awesome morning’s achievements. On the piece of paper was written:

Chapter 1. Arrive at El Valero
— I took my pen and added a full stop. ‘Not bad,’ I lied. ‘Not bad?

At five or six o’clock, the heat begins to abate a little and the day’s farmwork comes to an end. Manolo had come up to the house for a beer. We were sitting on the patio, Manolo surrounded by adoring dogs, patting them in turn with affectionate blows of the hand, me sipping mint tea beside him, discussing what we needed to do around the farm.

‘You’ll need to get some
abono artificial
to fertilise the alfalfa,’ Manolo said.

‘No, Manolo,’ I replied. ‘You know that we’re registering as organic producers. So we can’t use chemicals of any sort, nor
abono artificial?

‘We’ll put dung on, then…’

‘Yes, dung and compost..?

‘No
abono,
then? It does seem such a pity not to spread just a little bit of
abono.’

‘Look, Manolo. You know that people around here use far too many chemicals. It runs off into the river and poisons the fish. And the birds too. You remember what this place was like when you first used to come and clear the
acequia.
Romero had the place so soaked in poisonous chemicals that you never heard a bird sing — and now listen..?

We sat and listened. Mingling with the low roar of the river and the breeze in the eucalyptus were the songs of golden orioles, blackbirds, larks of one persuasion or another, and even a late nightingale.

‘You don’t hear birds singing in Tíjolas,’ offered Manolo. ‘And you’re right, they get poisoned by the chemicals. Every day I find half a dozen dead birds?

‘Exactly — and it was just those birds that would have eaten the insects that destroy the crops. You need a balance between nature and agriculture, and once you start blasting the place with chemicals, you destroy that balance and the pests get out of control. And I think it’s worth it to harvest just a little less of each crop simply for the pleasure of the birdsong.’

‘It is. You’re right.., but it does seem a pity not to put just a little fertiliser on the alfalfa.’

We ordered a load of organic fertiliser to be shipped all the way from Barcelona, which mollified Manolo a bit. It was worm humus or some such thing — a sooty, powdery peat with apparently extraordinary powers of water retention, which is what you want here, because the water retention factor of our land is nil. A kilo of this stuff was supposed to retain ten litres of water.

I see my discussions with Manolo as a crusade for the planet. If we can convince him of the benefits of organic husbandry, then he will go down and preach to the village, and when Tíjolas falls, it won’t be long afterwards that Tablones, Las Barreras, and even Orgiva may start to see things in a different light.

One day in June, it seemed as if the breakthrough had in fact come. Manolo thundered up the steps and burst through the fly-curtain. ‘Look at this, will you?!’ he gasped. He was cradling a huge and perfect melon.
‘Vaya meloncillo!’
he enthused — what a lovely melonkin. ‘And without a touch of
abono!’
he added, as if the whole thing had been his idea.

(Before I go further I ought to explain that one of the major idiosyncrasies of Spanish and particularly
Andaluz,
that variant of the language spoken in these parts, is the constant and excessive use of the diminutive, rendered by the suffixes
-ito
or
-illo:
a kind of equivalent to the English
-let
or
-kin
as in piglet or lambkin. But size isn’t really the issue here, as it’s more of an expression of enthusiasm for the object in question. Among country folk in particular this can get quite out of control.
Un vinillo,
a winelet, is not unreasonable as a snifter of wine, but
un vasito de agüilla,
a glasslet of waterkin? Needless to say, a whopping great melonkin barely counts as a contradiction in terms.)

That summer, as if to hammer home the organic message, we had our first bumper harvest of potatoes. All notion of other work had to be put aside, as we attempted to make the most of our vegetable bonanza. I found this a bit frustrating because I’d finally pulled my finger out and composed enough pages on the computer to send a disk to my publishing friends, and they were waiting for more. But the call of the potatoes was urgent, and each evening we devoted more and more time to bagging and washing the crop, hurling any blighted spuds into the
chumbo.
Ana and I worked together, with occasional help from Chloë, and as the evenings went by, stooped over piles of potatoes and bowls of vile water, we occasionally wondered if it was worth it. A potato sells for a peseta, or not much more, and we’d be lucky to bag a hundred potatoes an hour between us. It was, as you may imagine, dull and unrewarding labour, but that is what farming is all about. Potato after potato after potato, each washed in two changes of water and dried in the sun.

We stacked them in an outhouse, where it was dark and quite cool, and we set to making potato dishes to celebrate our home produce. Rosemary potatoes — blasted in the oven with oil, a whole bush of rosemary, garlic and olives; aligot — a light cloud of boiled spud puréed with cheese and cream and garlic and whipped until it has to be held down in the pan to stop it floating away; and we even tried a recipe for a pudding — essentially mashed potatoes with chocolate sauce — which was not a success.

And then the potatoes got blight. Pools of mephitic black muck appeared on the floor by the sacks, and when we tipped them out we recoiled in horror. A potato with the blight becomes an evil-smelling sludge. You poke a finger through the skin and it is like sewage. It makes you think of the misery of the Irish potato famine: the crowds of starving poor looking on in desperation as the clamps were opened, only to be met by a poisonous white ooze; and the thousands who lay dying green-mouthed from the grass they tried to eat while the fat ships sailed down the Liffey bursting with crates of food for export to the English. Market forces would save the day. A blighted potato puts me in mind of that…

Manolo, as if to compensate us for our misfortune with the potatoes, stepped up his gifts of food and fruit from his patch of land in Tijolas. He would pick his way across the bridge laden with plastic bags of fresh goat’s cheese, as well as tomatoes, onions, aubergines and the leathery local green peppers.

Manolo had become, if we stopped to think about it, a part of our family. As well as all his farmwork, he would also help with getting Chloë to and from school. I tended to do the morning run, and would occasionally combine it with a trip to the post office with the next instalment of the book, and Manolo would often meet the school bus at the end of the day. He used an old trail bike that a friend had left on the farm, and handled it like a horse, coaxing it skilfully around the boulders and dips in the river. My own technique was a bit reckless and had landed Chloë and me in the river on more than one occasion.

That summer Antonia had returned to Domingo’s house from one of her short trips to Holland with an old family pet —an African Grey parrot called Yacko. Manolo was picking Chloë up on the motorbike when he heard about this newcomer and together they decided to go and pay it a visit.

The week before, Domingo had found on the road a spiky creature that he had never seen before. He had rolled it in a sack and taken it home. And then he had walked over to see if I had a clue as to what it might be. ‘It’s an
erizo,’
I said, rather pleased with myself for knowing the Spanish for a hedgehog, and I told him the usual stuff about feeding it on saucers of milk, and that it would be riddled with fleas. Domingo decided to adopt it.

When Chloë and Manolo got to Domingo’s farmhouse, there was nobody about. They couldn’t find the parrot but they did find the hedgehog. Like Domingo, Manolo had never seen a hedgehog before, and his notions about parrots were, understandably, sketchy. Together, he and Chloë stood peering at the creature, rolled as it was into a ball of prickles. ‘Do you suppose, asked Manolo quietly, ‘that this is Domingo’s parrot?’

WANDERING UP TO THE HOUSE FOR A MORNING BREAK, MANOLO has a habit of whistling some utterly tuneless tune about three seconds before he bursts through the fly-curtain of our kitchen. The tune is a considerate warning but it is not quite enough to prevent me from being caught in the act —
in flagrante fregantis,
Ana calls it — or, up to the elbows in the washing-up. Manolo pauses, a blush of embarrassment spreading across his face as he gazes first at Ana reading a newspaper on the sofa and then at me soaked in suds at the sink.

‘Tas fregando..?’
he offers. ‘You’re washing up?’

‘Yup,’ I concur.
‘Fregando…
washing up.’

He nods his head as if to register this anomaly.

Later at lunchtime, as often as not, Manolo will whistle again and arrive to find me standing at the stove.

‘Tas cocinando
— you’re cooking?’

‘Yup —
cocinando,’
I reply.

Now I love to cook. I consider it one of life’s great pleasures, and one that can only be enhanced by constant practice, and I don’t much mind washing a few plates and saucepans afterwards. Ana as it happens detests both jobs but has a peculiar tolerance towards tidying up, shopping and laundry, which I exploit to the full. And so we carve up the daily round in a reasonably equal manner.

This is not, however, the norm for Alpujarran men. When men work, they work like mules all day long, but when they finish that’s it — they relax and have a drink and ease their aching limbs, while their wives, fresh from a round of chores, gardening and fieldwork, wait on them. Of course there are some men who might help out in the garden, do their bit with the childcare, or even try a few culinary ideas — witness Domingo’s jam making. But this is fairly unusual stuff. It would take a brave man to interrupt talk of hunting or water rights in a village bar with a new recipe for chestnut soufflé.

To be honest, a part of me withers whenever Manolo catches me in the kitchen. There’s a certain tone to his
‘tas fregando
that makes me question myself, wonder if all is as it should be in the masculinity stakes. Not that Manolo says anything specific, mind you, but his tone and slightly shamed look has a peculiarly crumpling effect. He reminds me, I fear, of my own reactions to Eduardo, a fundamentalist fruitarian who squats in a half-built house in the
vega
of Tíjolas. Eduardo is a fundamentalist in that he not only survives exclusively on fruit, but only eats windfalls; ‘the tree must give its fruit without the duress of plucking,’ as he puts it. As you might imagine, this is hardly a strengthening diet, and if the trees are unusually generous then he has to ferry his trawl home in small sacks like an ant carrying scraps from a leaf.

None of this should matter, except there are odd moments in life when a macho reputation does have some use. For instance, on the summer after my return from Sweden, when word got round that Juan Gallego, a local shepherd, had got it into his head to murder first his ex-lover and then me.