Sacred Sierra (6 page)

The farmer’s year, I was delighted to learn from him, began in September. I was virtually clueless about what I was doing, but had managed to get something right, even if unawares. I decided to follow his advice where I could: fate, it seemed, had already done much to bring us together at the opportune moment.

*

If I was going to plant trees up on the mountainside, I would have to start preparing the land. Regardless of the question of which particular trees might thrive in which particular area, there were huge swathes of weeds which had to be dealt with first. And unfortunately they weren’t the usual kind of plants for which the word ‘weed’ seems adequate or even appropriate: ‘toughs’ might have been a better name for them, given that I was dealing almost exclusively with brambles and gorse bushes. There were several hectares of the stuff to be got rid of – and given the difficulty of the terrain I was going to have to do it by hand: no tractors or large weed-destroying machines could make it up to the terraces, and we were against the idea of using herbicides or any weedkillers.

‘Probably wouldn’t do much to them anyway,’ Salud’s father had
said
when the subject came up once. ‘Too well established. Either that or you spray a sulphide which’ll make all the goats miscarry.’

So hand-weeding it had to be – on a massive scale. The brambles were the easier to deal with: I’d found a big scythe-like tool with a sharp cutting edge which I set about them with. It was exhausting work, but you could slice through quite a large amount in a fairly short time. The problem was with the gorse: the bushes were growing about eight feet high in places and had trunks as thick as a man’s arm. It took a huge amount of effort, and no small number of scratches and cuts from the incredibly sharp needles to fell just one of the bastards – and there were several thousand of them to dispose of.

There was no choice: I was going to have to get tooled up – with the one piece of machinery I could manage to get up on to the terraced fields: a heavy-duty brush-cutter.

When you’re not used to them, heavy power tools can produce a mixed sense of awe, fear and excitement. Excitement at holding something so powerful in your hands; awe at the sight of what it can do in such a short time; and fear of what it might end up doing to you if you get it just slightly wrong. We were lucky enough in that one of Salud’s cousins had a shop selling exactly what we needed, supplying me not only with a man-sized strimmer I could barely lift, but the helmet, face mask, shin protectors and ultra-thick gloves I would also require if I was to come out of the experience of using it alive. I was also given a crash course in the workings of it and what to do if we had any problems – vital information when you’re stuck at the top of a mountain an hour’s drive from the nearest mechanic.

‘Don’t worry too much,’ Salud’s cousin said as he saw the expression of incomprehension on my face. ‘If it starts playing up just call me and hold the phone next to the strimmer: I should be able to tell you what’s wrong with it just from the sound it’s making.’

Fully kitted out, I set out from the house the next day looking like a rejected extra from
Mad Max
, stiff, with my extra thick protective trousers making it even more difficult to climb up the narrow, rocky track to the gorse-infested terraces. Brambles tore at my arms from the sides, as though aware of what was about to happen and trying to force me back. I brushed past them as nonchalantly as possible: this was my
land
and it was about time I started showing them who was boss. The reign of weed terror was about to come to an end and a new dawn of clear fields and freshly planted trees was about to begin. The battle was going to be long and fierce, but I had my mighty brush-cutter in my hands and no one was going to hold me back.

I fired up the strimmer and it roared into life. Clipping it to my harness, I closed the face mask on my helmet and stood to face the first gorse bush: a monster a yard and a half wide and a foot higher than myself, daring me to take it on. I pressed the accelerator, raised my weapon high and then brought it down on the fearsome beast. A shuddering pulsed up my arms as the spinning blades made contact with the gorse, then in a flash all was flying needles and spraying vegetation as the machine descended almost of its own volition in a zigzag motion down the entire height of the bush, chopping and cutting mercilessly, until moments later I was looking down at a pile of mulched gorse at my feet, the sorry stump of its once proud trunk poking pathetically out of the ground until, with another swoop, that too was gone and the gorse was no more. I took my finger off the accelerator and paused for breath. The whole process had taken less than thirty seconds and this once menacing foe now lay defeated beneath me. I was covered with debris from the kill, but was exhilarated at my victory. Man over vegetable: there was no holding me back now. The other gorse bushes seemed to cower before me as I approached them, aware for the first time of their own mortality. With a bloodthirsty grin I pulled on the accelerator once more and dived into the fray.

After two or three hours, I had managed to clear one terraced field: a once impenetrable corner of the farm was now accessible, perhaps for the first time in years. There was still a seemingly infinite amount of land to clear, but I had made a start, and, most importantly, I now had the necessary tool to carry out the job.

In my excitement and concentration, I hadn’t realised in all this time that it had started to rain. Clouds of humidity were rising off my overheated body as, tired but happy, I turned to look over what I’d done and head back to the house to dry off. I switched the strimmer off and crunched my way over piles of dead gorse bushes. I was still quite amazed at how the machine pulped them like this. Rather than simply
cutting
them down, it reduced them to virtually nothing. I looked up above the wall running by my side to the next terrace to be dealt with: I would return here the following day and continue.

The rain was falling quite hard now and I dropped my head to protect my eyes: the wind was blowing up and starting to whip the droplets into strange whorls which flew into my face. For a moment I lost my sense of direction as I turned my head away from the rain: if I could just get to the shelter of the nearest pine trees I would be all right.

But suddenly my heart was in my mouth – the earth gave way beneath my feet and I was falling. Before I knew what had happened, I landed with a hard crack on my side, the strimmer crashing on top of me. I gave a low groan, the air kicked from my lungs. The helmet, still on my head, had bashed against a stone; the sound rang inside my brain like a bell. In the split second that followed I gave thanks I was still wearing it and that the strimmer blades, now resting gently against my shins, were mercilessly motionless.

I picked myself up with a cough, quickly checking that everything was working. I was lucky to have got away with nothing worse than a shock. Looking up against the rain I could see that the dry-stone wall holding up the terrace I had been walking on had simply crumbled away, and pieces of it were now lying around me in a pile. The gap in the tract of land I had just cleared seemed to stare defiantly: one minute the terrace had been there, and now it was gone, its remains lying in a heap of rubble around my feet.

With a sigh I trudged off back in the direction of the house, sore and getting wetter by the moment. The nagging thought in the back of my mind was that the very gorse bushes I’d been so happily chopping down had actually been holding the terrace up in place. And now, with the rain, in a moment a huge chunk of it had been washed away. At the very least it looked as though I was going to have to add dry-stone walling to the increasing list of skills I had to master if I was going to manage the land with any degree of success. Steps forward and steps back. I pushed it all from my mind, thoughts of hot showers and a cold beer leading me home.

*

Arcadio is coming round more regularly, popping over for an hour or so every few days. We are slowly getting used to each other, and he’s beginning to teach me the names of some of the trees here. He only knows them in Valencian, so I have to look up the Castilian and English names once he’s gone (and sometimes the Latin, while I’m at it). Slowly, very slowly, I feel the land is becoming less of a nameless, mysterious wilderness. But as is so often the case, the more I pick up, the more I realise how much there is to learn; knowledge, when it comes, only does so in small, less than satisfactory, bursts. I have bought a few books on plants and wildlife to help me along, but I find I can pick up a huge amount just by wandering around with Arcadio for half an hour. The mountainside is home to several types of oak tree, it appears: the ordinary type, such as the one overhanging the patio, and holm oaks, or holly oaks, which are evergreen and very well suited to the Mediterranean climate. They have small, round, prickly leaves, like holly, and were used for making ships, according to Arcadio. I told him I’m interested in planting trees, in trying to recover something of the forests that grew here before the fire. He mentioned the pine trees that had previously covered these hillsides.

‘But planting more pines is like planting matches,’ he said. ‘Burn like buggery. Better off with more oaks. Harder, denser wood – not that you’ll ever get to see them fully grown in your lifetime, though,’ he laughed. ‘Perhaps not even your children. Grandchildren maybe.’

*

There was hardly a sound. The street lights had been switched off and a hush fell on the crowd as it huddled around the edge of the village square, waiting. I saw a gap at the top of one of the wooden scaffolds nearby and climbed up to watch next to a couple of teenage boys with wild, energised looks.

‘
Ahora viene
,’ they said as I lifted myself up beside them. ‘It’s coming.’

A single light was now shining down on the empty stage below, while in the middle of the sawdust-covered floor a small metal cage, just big enough to accommodate possibly two people inside had been erected. It was painted red, but large ugly scratches up and down the thick, solid bars bore witness to the hammering it had received on previous occasions. Doubtless it had saved countless lives over the years.

Some of the boys on the other side of the square were already breaking away from the relative safety of similar cages lining the edge in anticipation of the spectacle to begin. Naked from the waist up, they held their T-shirts in one hand and darted sharply in and out, as though practising their moves for when the moment came, with cheers of encouragement from their friends and girlfriends behind them. For a second I wondered about going in myself, feeling the intense thrill of mortal danger, but held back: I would wait and see how my body reacted once the bull finally appeared: which would be the stronger emotion – excitement or chilling fear?

‘Are you going to go down?’ I asked the boys beside me.

‘
Claro
– of course.’

It was, I told myself, a teenagers’ thing, not something someone in his late thirties should be getting involved in. Until I saw a man clearly the other side of fifty suddenly dash out of his cage and back in again, just as the young boys were doing, his paunch bouncing like a medicine ball above the thin leather belt holding up his trousers.

September had drawn to a close and the village was celebrating the feast of its patron saint, the Archangel Michael, marking the end of the harvest period. The centre had been cut off and fenced in for the big event. Our first proper month on the farm had ended, but already it felt as if we had been there far longer. I was confident we could manage with what we had taken on, but had niggling doubts nonetheless. The problem with steep learning curves, I thought as I looked out at the ring, was exactly that – they were steep.

At that moment the bull charged suddenly into the square, catching us all unawares. There was a scream and a surge in the noise of the crowd as it darted out from a side road into the open. It was smaller than the half-tonne animals used in professional bullfights, but it had the same dull, deadly expression, the same powerful body that could toss a grown man high into the air, and the same smell of dung, sweat and blood about it. What was different, though, was the presence of great torches on the end of each horn above his head, their fiery light illuminating the bull’s face and reflecting from his black, empty eyes. A
bou embolat
– a ‘fireball bull’. It was the most terrifying sight: in the heart of the blackened night here was this ancient symbol of fertility, like the
sun
bursting out in a proud, violent blaze looking for new blood to help irrigate the barren land.

Memories of what I’d read about the ancient symbolism of bulls and bullfighting flew from my mind as the creature started crashing wildly about the square, enraged by the flames bursting from the ends of its horns, and by the young men buzzing around it like flies. I stood transfixed on the scaffold as it was quickly surrounded by six or seven of them darting and dodging in front of it and then flying back as fast as their legs could carry them to the safety of the cages. Two boys were already inside the central cage, leaning out and waving their T-shirts at the bull, trying to catch its attention, and then whipping their bodies back as it turned sharply and charged at them. CRACK – the bull’s head crashed against the heavy steel bars and for a moment one of the torches got entangled round it. There was another scream as the crowd realised the bull was caught and would almost certainly bring the cage crashing to the floor with its incredible strength, before, with a jerk, it set itself free and started hurtling again through the crowd.

There was a sudden collective intake of breath as its golden horns brushed inches away from a young lad, arching his back as far as he could from danger as he sped towards the barriers. An ancient, sobbing fear masked his face as he ran, distorting his features into a harrowing grimace, only for a great smile to break out once he’d dodged his would-be killer and rejoined his group. Within seconds he was back in the ring, but this time making doubly sure, I noticed, to keep his distance.