Sacred Sierra (18 page)

Planting the truffle trees seems an endless task. The Truffle King mentioned the best time for planting was now, after the ‘change’ of the January moon, i.e. after the full moon has passed and it begins to wane. I asked Arcadio what he thought.

‘Any time’s a good time to plant,’ he said, ‘because you’re planting. And that’s good.

‘Answer’s in the land, in the soil,’ he said. ‘Listen to the plants, to the land: they’ll tell you what they want in the end.’

*

I recognised Sergio as one of the hunters who had been up to the farm, spinning the wheels of his red and white Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive as he sped up and down the mountain track, curly black hair greased to his scalp.

‘Glad you could come,’ he said in a high, strained voice as he shook my hand. ‘Arcadio said he’d bring you along.’

We stood inside an unpainted breeze-block garage with a cement floor, the doors open wide to let in a shaft of light from the afternoon sun. Six or seven men dressed in the usual hunter’s garb stood in a circle in the centre; they greeted the ancient Arcadio warmly, then nodded in my direction.

‘Thought it might interest him to see this,’ I heard Arcadio explaining to them. Their faces relaxed: there was a reason for my being there, and although Arcadio wasn’t a hunter himself his age and knowledge of the land meant he was more than enough of a guarantor.

‘Got this one at midday,’ Sergio said with a lardy smile. ‘Ninety kilos.’

From a beam in the centre of the garage hung the body of a wild boar, its hind legs tied to a piece of wood which was hooked up to a chain. Its eyes were partially open, staring down at the floor, but lifeless and dulled, its exposed belly making it look vulnerable, defeated.

‘The shot went through here,’ Sergio said, pointing at a gash-like wound in the animal’s shoulder, barely visible through the thick brown hair. For a moment it felt like a forensic examination of a murder victim.

‘Right,’ he said rubbing his hands. ‘Call Teresa. Let’s get started.’

There were shouts from inside the house next door and presently a portly woman wearing an apron, with glasses and a face that looked as though it had been crushed between two rocks, came out from a side door, flanked by two other women. In her hands she brandished a knife.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ she said, expertly slicing the knife up and down a sharpener.

‘Sergio’s wife,’ Arcadio explained as the powerful little woman approached the dead animal in a resigned, businesslike manner. ‘She always does the skinning.’

‘Get those two a drink,’ Sergio called to a young lad hovering in the background, who scampered off, bringing back with him a bottle of wine and some glasses. He had something of the same, vertically challenged face of the woman with the knife.

‘Sergio’s son?’ I asked Arcadio. He nodded.

I noticed that the others had knocked back a few glasses already, their faces pink, splashes of wine on the floor where they’d been less careful when pouring.

‘Help yourselves to whatever you want,’ Sergio said grandiosely. Outside, in the yard beyond the garage a group of youngsters, perhaps friends of Sergio’s son, were lighting a fire on the ground, the scent of wood smoke drifting in on the breeze as crackling flames began to lick the twigs and kindling.

Teresa wasted no time. Stepping up to the boar, she started making deft cuts in its skin, as though slicing through butter. First on the legs, then up the belly and around the head, across the back of the neck.

‘We’ll keep the head for a trophy,’ Sergio said, ‘although it’s not very big, this one. Got a whole collection inside. I’ll show you after. Been hunting all over the world, me. Just got back from South Africa a couple of weeks back. Great hunting there.’

From the speed and efficiency of her movements, it was clear that Teresa had done this many times before. You still heard people speak of the
matanza del cerdo
– the annual ritual killing of a pig in each Spanish household, a ceremony dating back hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. It had become particularly important during the time of the Reconquest and the terror of the Inquisition in the
sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, when proving you were a Christian, and not a Muslim or Jew, by eating copious amounts of pork, could mean the difference between life and death. The tradition was largely dying out now, but Salud had told me how her mother had still followed it until quite recently, giving it up only in the past twenty years or so. Out here, deep in the countryside of Castellón, it was still very much alive. Although today it would be boar’s meat going into the sausages and pâtés that would be produced over the course of the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Teresa finished slicing up the boar and reached up to its hind legs. Grabbing hold of tufts of hair, she began to pull, and the skin started to peel away, exposing a white, pinkish underneath. With a couple of tugs it stripped to around halfway down its back with a wrenching sound, before she stepped up, cut away some more between the flesh and the skin as though to loosen it, and then heaved again. Finishing her slicing around the head, the whole skin was soon ripped from the animal’s body.

‘Here,’ she said, passing it to her son. ‘Take this out for salting.’

The boy threw the hide over his shoulder, staining his cheek with dark congealing boar’s blood as he carried it outside.

The boar was considerably smaller now it had been shorn of its hair and skin. Lean and naked, taut red muscle tissue pushed through odd rare patches of white-yellow fat. There was something pathetic about it, as though it were only half the animal it had been. How had something so powerful and so fearsome once existed in this body? I tried to imagine it running through the mountains – only hours before. But the creature was now little more than food, meat. And soon even that would be taken away from it.

Teresa started slicing quickly down the middle of the boar’s abdomen, its innards slopping heavily out of the fresh wound. Grey intestines curled and slid around a heavy wine-coloured liver, pink heart. Sergio stepped forward and caught them as they oozed out of the animal’s body, as though being forcibly ejected. The two women who had come out with Teresa then pulled out metal trays and buckets and scooped them up, Teresa cutting at the rectum where the intestines were still attached to the inside of the body.

The men standing watching gave a cheer.

‘Look at that.’

‘We’ll get a nice load out of this.’

Already their minds were casting forward to the salamis and cured meats that would be made from the guts.

An intense, sharp smell of blood and shit filled the garage, almost blotting out the wood smoke as Teresa joined the other two women carrying the innards to a deep, narrow sink at the side to begin washing them. Squeezing the intestines in their hands they started pushing out the remaining faecal matter in preparation for stuffing them again for making sausages.

Sergio now held the knife and approached the remaining carcass. A pool of blood had formed at his feet, below the now ridiculous looking head.

‘She always leaves this bit to me,’ he said with a grin. One or two of the others laughed. He plunged the knife into the flesh around the neck, struggling for a moment with the vertebrae, gritting his teeth as he stabbed and twisted, trying to loosen the head from the rest of the body.

‘
Iéeah
,’ came a low call of encouragement from the men.

‘
Venga
, Sergio.’

The tone was flat: these men didn’t go in for public demonstrations of emotion. It might almost have been be mocking, sarcastic, but from the looks in their eyes there seemed to be no ironical intent. Straight, no-nonsense, almost bovine.

With a final cut the head came free, and with it a last gushing of blood, a few remaining faint drips tapping the pool below with the vestiges of life of a once vital, vigorous beast. Sergio lifted the head up and showed it to us all like a trophy.

‘Seen better ones,’ he said with false modesty. ‘Still going on the wall, though.’

A sharp chill came over me as I stared at this prize weighing heavily in his arms, detached, now mocked and set to be put on display. Deep, animal fear. I sank the last drops of red wine stewing in the bottom of my glass.

A new bottle was passed round along with plates of food, but for me it was time to go. I shook Arcadio’s hand: he was staying.

‘The vet’s got to test the meat first before we can eat any of it,’ Sergio said as I said my goodbyes. ‘Check for any germs and stuff. Once we get the all clear we’ll start dividing it up. Come on round tomorrow and I’ll see if there are any sausages spare.’

The boy was already smoking a few bits and pieces over the fire in the yard, poking and turning them on a grill with a blackened fork. The smell was delicious.

I drove back to the farm, hungry and disturbed.

*

I am enjoying the silence up here more and more. Partly because it is not a complete silence. There is the sound of my own heart and breathing, then beyond that come the sounds of the world around: occasional birdsong, breezes blowing through the pine trees, perhaps a stone loosened by an ibex skipping down the cliff-face. Some birds make a sound as they fly – a kind of whooping noise as they speed overhead. I rarely manage to see them: by the time I have heard them they have moved on. They seem to be of a dark-brown colour, as well, so they can easily be lost against the mountain background. Some kind of swift, perhaps? They seem larger; perhaps a
roqueret
– a crag martin? There is a sense of something alive in the silence – a living landscape that whispers to you quietly. Make too much noise and you won’t be able to hear it. Many landscapes roar at you – birds twitter incessantly, cows and sheep moan aloud, rivers gurgle past. Here there is little of that. And yet the place does not feel dead for lack of aural stimulation: rather, it invites you to attune your hearing, stretch your capacity, and capture the quieter sounds that it has to offer. Here, at this time of year, birdsong is an event: in other circumstances I would barely have noticed the pair of coal tits which have made the oak tree their home. Nor would the owls hooting in the early hours of the night have made much impression. In the city I may be surrounded at any time by a thousand dogs, all within a hundred yards or even less, yet I am oblivious to them. Here I know there is a dog living in an old house in the next valley – a house I cannot even see – while at least two wild dogs have the run of the hills around the farm. Silence reduces space and distance. In the absence of noise, any noise becomes important, or has some significance, or even a message. I can hear cars coming up the
mountain
from several miles away. The tinkling of bells means either the cows and bulls near La Caseta de Ramonet on the other side of the riverbed, or else the goatherd somewhere in the vicinity. The distant sound of clanging metal means the old man is working up at the quarry. Very occasionally – perhaps about once a month – he sets off a charge to loosen the rock, and the explosion echoes and rolls down the river valley like boiling water.

The change from the norm takes some getting used to. I still sometimes find myself rushing out to see who might be about to ‘invade’ our space when I hear what sounds like a car coming up the hill. Some aspects of ‘Englishness’ are shed quite easily, others less so, and it is only now I realise how deeply entrenched in me is the idea of my home being a castle. I am having to lose some of this, though, and accept that others can and do come up here, and there’s not much I can do about it. As time goes by, I slowly adapt: I’ve got into the habit of leaving the chain at the bottom of our track unlocked – anyone can get through now. Before, I used to pull it across and padlock it religiously: I didn’t want to see anyone while I was up here, and if anyone did dare to appear they were immediately classed as an intruder, unwelcome. My assumption was that people only showed up in order to take something away from me – my privacy, my possessions, my freedom, whatever. That still might happen, but I’m trying to learn to be less possessive about this place. I am a visitor, just like any other person. My time will end here one day, then someone else may or may not live here after me, just as many others have done so in the past. The mountain, however, just lives on, with occasional changes to its outer skin – terraces come and go, as do crops, and even trees. Legally it is mine, but I do not own the mountain; it can never belong to us in any real sense at all.

*

I was invited to visit the truffle market at Sarrión, held near the Mora de Rubielos railway station, starting at around eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. I was told it ran through till about four in the morning. All outside and all in the dark. Come alone.

I arrived at the agreed time, wondering at the air of mystery. At first it was hard to spot a ‘market’ of any sort taking place: there were few
people
around, and nothing to see except a virtually empty car park. But as an outsider, I was unlikely to see anything anyway, because once they’d caught sight of me the dealers would vanish or made themselves invisible. Or at least that’s what I’d been given to expect.

My contact was waiting for me: a builder who owned a house up there – a friend of a friend, who, with the promise of a few drinks and after telling him over the telephone I had my own plantation up and running, opened up gradually and offered to take me down to where the dealers hung out. He was a buyer: possibly a useful contact in a few years’ time when I started getting my own crop.

From the comments and looks – the sheer tension – it started to became apparent that the whole thing was run almost like a drug market: huge amounts of money were involved; there was a wary, nervous atmosphere; and the unannounced but very real presence of weapons of some sort – knives almost certainly, but probably a few shotguns as well. The dealers were often the kind who also hunted, so it wasn’t unlikely they should have a rifle or a twelve-bore hidden under a blanket in the boot of the car.

A bar stood to one side of the car park, but it was almost empty. We went inside for a drink, knocking back a couple of brandies to keep us warm in the sub-zero temperatures. We were very high up, near the local ski-runs, and snow lay thick on the ground, icicles hanging from the awning of the bar. We seemed to be waiting for some sign or some moment when it might be all right to venture out and see if there was some ‘action’ taking place, but I was unclear what the sign was, or if we would have to wait there all night. My contact repeated the Truffle King’s comments about it being a bad year for truffles, what with the strange weather. The season that year would be very short – perhaps only another couple of weeks or so. It was mid-January – truffles were usually to be had until late February or even later sometimes.