The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 3

  ‘W-well, this is an opportunity,’ declared Michael to everyone. ‘We can’t have opera, but we can have literature. Chris has most kindly agreed to read to you from his m-marvellous book.’ It was hardly on a par with Verdi, I felt, and nor did it seem right, somehow, to be offering this black-leg labour. But we headed to a bar in the Barrio Santa Cruz, ordered a dozen bottles of house wine, and had a genuinely jolly evening of it.

  We read the next morning, however, that the conductor at the Opera, exasperated by the intransigence of the musicians, had walked onto the stage, swished his tails over the edge of the piano stool and played the entire work of La Traviata as a solo piano recital. The crowd were ecstatic and the press proclaimed it one of the city’s greatest ever cultural events. I don’t think I was the only one who felt a bit short-changed.

  FENCING FOR BEGINNERS

  NOT LONG AFTER I RETURNED from Seville, I was standing beside the cooker, gathering the nerve to flip a frying pan full of tortilla de patatas onto a plate, when the phone rang.

  ‘Telephone…’ Chloë called out.

  ‘Well it won’t be for me, so I’m not getting it,’ said Ana.

  ‘Nor am I – I’m busy,’ I muttered, pushing some bits of potato back into the amorphous mound.

  ‘Well, it won’t be for me, as everyone calls me on my mobile,’ Chloë noted smugly.

  ‘Well it’ll just have to ring, that’s all,’ I insisted. And so it did, bleating from its place in the draughty corner by the door.

  ‘Look,’ argued Ana, ‘if it’s really important, then whoever it is will ring back, won’t they?’

  The phone finally stopped ringing, and with a simultaneous sigh we turned our attention to the neat round disc of egg and potatoes that I had plonked on the table. Then it rang again. Everybody looked at one another accusingly. At last, Chloë broke the silence: ‘It must be important; they’ve called back.’

  ‘Aha, but how can you be sure it’s the same person? It might be someone else,’ I suggested.

  It was Ana who finally snapped. Glaring at us she pushed back her chair and went over to the telephone.

  ‘Hola, dígame,’ she growled in the grumpy tone she uses to intimidate time-wasters. Then, turning towards the phone with a surprised smile, she relaxed and her voice took on a new note of warmth. From this subtle shift in tone, Chloë and I deduced that it was Antonia.

  ‘That was Antonia,’ she announced when she finally rejoined us. ‘She was ringing from Holland to say that Yacko has escaped…’ Antonia was the Dutch sculptor who had been living for the last six years with our neighbour Domingo, in the farm across the river. Yacko was her parrot.

  ‘How could he, though?’ I asked. ‘I thought she clipped his feathers.’

  ‘They grow back. You have to keep doing it regularly. Anyway, she’s desperate. Domingo, apparently, has spent all day trying to capture the bird, but whenever he gets close Yacko just flits away to the next tree. It was partly his idea that she phoned. They think I’ll be more successful.’

  It was hard to imagine Domingo abandoning his flock of sheep for a day to wander about the hillside looking for his girlfriend’s parrot; and from what I’d gathered, he had never been very keen on Antonia’s parrots in the first place. But it was his fault that Yacko had escaped, and Antonia was frantic, saying that she would have to fly back early from Holland if the bird wasn’t recaptured. Antonia had gone back to visit the foundry she uses, near Utrecht, to have some models cast in bronze – one of them a rather fine centaur that Domingo had posed for (the top half, of course).

  ‘She must be crazy,’ I hazarded. ‘For the cost of a plane ticket she could buy herself half a dozen African Greys and much finer specimens than that one.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point, though, Chris,’ Ana replied frostily. And, as if to echo her words, Porca, who had been sitting on my shoulder, leaned forward to take a pull from my wineglass. (Those who have read before of my abysmal relationship with Ana’s parakeet will note that we have reached an uneasy truce – he is willing to tolerate me in order to enjoy my facilities, such as broader shoulders for a perch and a more readily available glass of wine (I top mine up more frequently than Ana.)

  ‘I promised I’d give it a try,’ said Ana, ‘but how I’m going to find a grey parrot amongst the olive groves of El Duque, let alone catch it, is anybody’s guess.’

  She had a point. A grey parrot amongst all those silvery leaves would be pretty well camouflaged.

  ‘Oh, well. We’d better turn in early and start at first light before he gets restless,’ she concluded, with a note of resignation.

  It didn’t seem worth commenting on, but I couldn’t actually recall having volunteered for the expedition.

  At a quarter past nine, which is as close to first light as Ana gets, we shut the dogs in the house and set off across the valley. I wasn’t quite sure what my role was supposed to be; I’m blind as a plaster cat, as the Spanish would have it, and thus was hardly likely to spot the errant bird. But Ana seemed to think that an extra pair of hands and eyes, however short-sighted, might turn out to be useful.

  As we crossed the river I looked up at the great expanse of terraced hillside that rises from El Duque up to Cerro Negro, at what must be a couple of thousand silver-grey olive trees, growing amongst the greyish rock and stone and the dusty grey vegetation. It seemed impossible that we’d find a small grey parrot in all that lot. He could be anywhere by now.

  ‘I can’t see how we’re going to find Domingo,’ I mused as we left the path and struck up the hill. ‘Let alone the parrot.’

  ‘Don’t be so feeble… There’s Domingo anyway.’ And there he was, wandering amongst Bernardo’s olive groves, a muscular figure, in old jeans and a threadbare shirt, scanning the horizon with one hand shading his eyes. He saw us and beckoned us over, a brief smile of relief flitting across his features.

  ‘Hola, Domingo. How’s it going? Any luck?’

  ‘Nada, nada… Every time I get near him he ups and hops off into the next tree. I was trying to catch him all of yesterday, and today I’ve not caught sight of him. Trouble is, he doesn’t like me much – but then, I don’t like him so much, either. I tell you, I’ve had it with parrots. Maybe you’ll have more luck, Ana,’ he said turning towards her. ‘Your voice is similar – if you call him, maybe he’ll fly to you.’

  So we split up and ambled to and fro amongst the olive trees, Domingo and I keeping quiet, and Ana calling every now and then ‘Yacko, Yacko’, in imitation of that peculiar way the Dutch have of speaking with the tongue cloven to the roof of the mouth and the lips not moving. It sounded quite authentic.

  After ten minutes or so, we regrouped.

  ‘Tell me some words in Dutch, Chris,’ Ana demanded.

  I’d lived in Amsterdam during a mis-spent period of my youth and could still summon up something of the language. I reeled off obediently one of the few phrases that had somehow stuck in my mind.

  ‘So what does all that mean?’

  ‘Not too much mayonnaise on the chips, please,’ I confessed.

  Ana raised an eyebrow. ‘Chris,’ she said with an exasperated look, ‘can you just try and take this seriously?’

  The morning drew on with the sun moving high over the hills of the Contraviesa, casting deep shadows among the olive trees and glinting off the Cádiar River as it snaked along the gorge below. I sat in the shade, drowsily following my wife’s voice calling in a slightly stagey accent from the terraces below. ‘Yacko, Yacko, kom hier, Yacko. Kom hier, alsjijblieft’ (Yacko, Yacko, come here, if you please), she cried – a dull but courteous admonishment which suited the bird rather well.

  Antonia actually has two African Greys. One is an ancient bird who has been in her family for over thirty years, and who can’t fly at all as he has lost most of his feathers. He seems content to scuttle about behind the fridge, imitating the radio, which he does uncannily well, and muttering the word ‘Yacko’ to himself – Yacko being his name. Then there’s
the younger one, the escapee we were looking for; his name is Yacko, too. Yacko, apparently, means ‘African Grey’ in Dutch. Luckily this was unlikely to cause any confusion here, as Yacko was probably the only Dutch-speaking African Grey loose in our valley at the time.

  It struck me, as I waited for the bird to respond to his lacklustre tag, that the Dutch approach to choosing a name was not so very far removed from that of the rural Spanish. People here take a similarly literal approach: ‘Mulo’, for example, is the name of choice for a mule, and ‘Burro’ (meaning ‘donkey’) for a donkey. And if those names are taken, then there is always the colour of the beast to fall back on: ‘Pardo’ (‘brown’) or ‘Negro’ (‘black’), for instance.

  At least that is how it has been for generations, although changes are creeping in. I know an Irish architect who lives in a village in the high Alpujarras and keeps a mule called ‘Preciosa’. He told me that his neighbours were so taken with this name for a mule that they’d followed suit and given more imaginative names to their own dogs, mules and even (in one instance) goats. And then there was Manolo, who helps out with the farm work at El Valero. He told me that he was thinking of buying a mule from an English couple in the town: ‘It’s called Pinfloy,’ he confided, looking baffled, wondering if I could shed some light on the matter. I couldn’t, though some time later I met the couple, who asked fondly after their mule, ‘Pink Floyd’. Manolo had by then renamed the animal ‘Tordo’, which is the traditional name for white mules. ‘It’s a lot easier to shout than “Pinfloy”,’ he explained.

  My reverie at this point was suddenly interrupted by an urgent call from Ana. She had spotted Yacko. He was sitting contemplating the fruits of freedom from the branch of an olive tree not a stone’s throw from where I was sitting. We all crept silently towards the tree from our respective places. There he was, grey as dust with a flash of bright red tail… Now to catch the bugger. I was told to stand stock still, being the likeliest to balls up the operation, while Ana took up position below the tree and began to coax the wretched bird down in her faux-Dutch.

  The dim-witted creature seemed to be fooled, and edged closer to Ana to get a better look. Meanwhile Domingo, in accordance with our prearranged plan, crept out along the branch towards the parrot. Beneath his weight the branch lowered towards Ana, who held out the special stick that Antonia uses for training parrots (not to hit them with, but as a portable perch). Yacko stepped meekly onto the stick and thence to Ana’s shoulder, where he stared at her fixedly for a bit, wondering if he might not have made a mistake. But, too late – at that instant Domingo leapt and flung his jacket over the foolish bird.

  We’d done it. The mission had been a success. With the infuriated creature squawking and screeching from inside the jacket, we walked down towards La Colmena, Domingo’s house. We were all feeling rather pleased with ourselves, and the usually phlegmatic Domingo seemed almost light-headed with relief. Suddenly he could look forward with pleasure, rather than dread, to his partner’s return. I could sense, too, that Ana, a person of normally modest demeanour, was rather proud of her own part in the adventure.

  ‘We should celebrate,’ I declared, although my own part in the triumph was slightly harder to discern. ‘A glass of wine is just what we need.’

  ‘I really should be taking the sheep out. I don’t like to leave them penned in too long,’ Domingo demurred. Then in an entirely uncharacteristic change of heart: ‘Well, a glass or two first won’t do any harm.’

  Domingo spends most of his time walking in the valley and hills with his sheep. That’s what you have to do when your flock grows too large to graze on your farm, and at getting on for three-hundred-and-fifty sheep, he has built up one of the largest flocks in the area. On rare occasions – when he needs to drive to Málaga to pick up Antonia or drop off a sculpture at a gallery, for instance – he will let the sheep loose for a few hours in a field of sorghum and forage maize that he’s fenced off specially for those occasions. But he has simply too many sheep to leave grazing in the same place for long.

  Now, there’s a certain romance in ranging the hills all day with one’s flock, getting to know intimately every rock and tree, and Domingo takes a real pleasure in the beauty of the landscape. He loves to amble amongst the cliffs at the top of Campuzano, and on summer nights, when Antonia can join him, to sleep beneath the stars high in the wild meadows of El Picacho. But there are also serious drawbacks to having to graze sheep in this way. When you’re out walking with the flock, that’s more or less all you can do; you can’t linger at home with your partner, or read, or finish a piece of sculpting, or mend your tractor. And although Domingo and Antonia rarely complain about their lot, I know that there are days – especially when Antonia is about to leave for Holland – when they long to spend more time together.

  Antonia also worries that Domingo is neglecting his considerable artistic talent. She’s convinced that he is a gifted sculptor in his own right – he is certainly the only shepherd we know who exhibits bronzes in prestigious galleries in Granada and on the coast, but he insists that the flock must come first. ‘We don’t own this piece of land we live on; these sheep are the only security we have,’ he explains in his gentle but firm manner. ‘Maybe people want bronze sculptures, and maybe they won’t, but they’ll always need lamb.’

  And there is an end of it.

  Although I was the one who introduced sheep into our valley, I had always assumed that I would keep a modest flock and fence them in. There are, after all, only so many sheep a farm can sustain without being turned into a dusty desert and I knew I couldn’t take them grazing – I don’t have the sort of fortitude to stick with it and ignore all other temptations. Had I known, though, what a Herculean task the fencing of El Valero would become, I might well have shelved my pastoral plans altogether.

  Our farm sits on a steep fold of mountainside that slopes down from a lower peak of the Sierra Nevada, through wild scrubland and almond groves; from there it drops into a river valley on one side and a sheer gorge on the other. This is an awful lot of perimeter to cover, so I limited myself to fencing the riverbed edge to stop the sheep from paddling across the ford and tucking into the orchards and vegetable crops of our neighbours. Few at the time would have bothered with fences other than to keep the wild boar out of their maize or alfalfa. The land at the bottom of the farm is flat, with a decent track running alongside to transport wire and poles, so in just a few days I managed to string together a more or less serviceable fence and position some appropriately Alpujarran bedsteads as gates.

  To my great surprise the sheep seemed impressed by the barrier and kept away from it. Too far away, in fact, because they upped and disappeared instead over the topmost part of our land to roam across the wild scrubland at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Time and again I’d have to slog all the way up to the lower peaks, aptly known as Los Peñones Tristes – The Sad Rocks – to try and coax them down. Eventually, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to fence the hillside as well.

  Now, the hillside above our farm is not just steep, but is made up of uneven and broken rock covered with barely an inch and a half of topsoil. It would be hard to imagine a worse place to try hammering in fence posts. But I was younger then, and full of enthusiasm about creating the first sheep enclosures in the Alpujarras. So I plunged myself into the work with a will, loading five thick steel rods onto my shoulder, trudging up the projected fence-line, and dropping a post off every half dozen paces.

  It was heavy, back-breaking work that became significantly harder with each load. By the end of the third day I was scrabbling up an almost perpendicular quarter-mile with the rods before I could even begin to pace out the land and drop them off. At the end of the week both my shoulders were bleeding and raw, and my thigh muscles were as hard as bones.

  Next there was the business of making holes and hammering in the posts, more often than not into solid rock. That took me a good day, and a bit of the next morning. Then I decided I
deserved a day off, before I got started with setting up the strainers and stringing the wires.

  Including the day off, it took me two full weeks to fence from the slope by the house up to the top and then along the upper border of our land. On the fifteenth day, in order to admire my handiwork, I walked up the completed side and along the top and sat down in the scrub to contemplate the long run down to the river on the south side of the farm. It was the roughest, most tormented piece of hillside I had ever seen; it made the part I had already done seem like fencing a children’s playground. I looked at it long and hard, thought about it for a bit… and decided to have nothing further to do with the job. Maybe the sheep wouldn’t like the look of the land, either, and steer away from that side of the farm.

  When Ana found out that I had fenced just two sides of the farm and left the third side to chance, she gave me a withering look. ‘Surely’, she had the temerity to suggest, ‘an unfinished ring-fence is no fence at all?’ She did have a point, but when I suggested that perhaps she herself might like to get up there and finish it off, she backed down.

  The very next day the sheep ambled up the hill, keeping close to the fenceline, which they regarded with some curiosity. When they got to the top they turned around the last fence post and continued their inspection, this time ambling downhill on the other side. Then, after fifty metres or so, they dropped straight down into a steep barranco, and left the farm, spending the day ranging to and fro on the heights above the Trevélez River. Of course, when they returned in the evening they couldn’t find their way back in. I had succeeded in fencing them out.

  So that was the reward for my labours: a hard day rounding up the flock and marching them back up the mountainside in order to guide them back around the fence. However, over the next few weeks and months, the sheep gradually got the measure of the farm’s limits and a contentment to stay within it. These days, they very rarely take it into their heads to make a sortie far into the hills, and when they do they usually find the right way back, using the now rather slack pieces of wire as a half-hearted visual prompt. They have developed what hill farmers call ‘heft’, a flock’s communal knowledge of its grazing boundaries.