The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 6

  Paco reluctantly led the goat away and returned with another animal.

  ‘Paco, what the hell are you up to? I’m not shearing that!’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Paco sulkily. ‘It’s a sheep, isn’t it? Even you’ve got to admit that.’

  ‘Yes, it is a sheep, Paco – but it hasn’t a stitch of wool on it. I sheared this one half an hour ago!’ We examined the naked sheep, with trail marks from the shears on its flanks, standing forlornly in front of me, and I cast a glance at José, who had let his last sheep wander off and was rocking helpless with laughter. ‘It’s the numbers, Cristóbal,’ he gasped. ‘Haven’t you been counting?’

  Of course: once you get beyond two-hundred-and-fifty sheep the price per animal goes down by a small percentage which has quite a significant effect on the whole day’s pay. One or two short and the shepherd misses out on the price drop, while one or two over means that the shearers take the hit. It might seem a rough way to cost things, but that’s how it’s always been. Astute shepherds often borrow extra sheep to take them over the threshold, but poor Paco, who was almost a dozen sheep short of a discount, probably hadn’t a clue that he’d lost so many of his charges until he brought them out for shearing.

  In fairness, it is tricky to know where you are, numerically speaking, with sheep. Cows are easy to count, but not so sheep. With all that wool you get an impression of a numberless mass, and then, although I hesitate to say this within earshot of the animal, they are somewhat… dispensable. If you have a big flock you can lose half a dozen without even knowing it. Sheep are very prone to dying of one thing or another – The Diseases of Sheep is by some way the thickest book in our library – as well as getting lost or straying into another flock. Of course, the converse is also true, and if you’re lucky you may actually benefit from strays who unwittingly – and unwitting is the way of sheep – swell the numbers of your flock. Or you may get prodigal sheep that return to the flock: a ewe may lamb alone out on the hill somewhere, and trot back to the flock months later with her lamb in tow. All of which is to say that counting sheep is far from being an exact science.

  I placed my shears back on the board and turned to face Paco. ‘Look, let’s split the difference,’ I said. I might on another day have offered the full discount, but the heat and exhaustion and the farce of the goats and shorn sheep had got to me. And, for this day, at least, I had had more than enough.

  Normally, at the end of a run of shearing, you can throw yourself down in the pile of wool and there subside limp and drained, contemplating a job well done. But we couldn’t do that here, not in the tick-infested wool we had just shorn, so instead we had to sit on a stone in the hot evening sun. Paco begrudgingly handed each of us a tin of warm beer, which we sipped while watching him count, with trembling hands, the notes he owed us.

  With a beer inside us, I revived enough to dismantle the machinery and pack up, while José cleaned off the combs and cutters and set up the grinding wheel. At which moment a tough, dapper little man with short grey hair appeared panting through the woods, followed by a couple of beautiful and very woolly Pyrenean mountain dogs. ‘Are you… the shearers?’ he gasped, wiping his face with a crisp, white cloth.

  I could see what was coming. Goats, shorn sheep, dogs: it was becoming a theme of the day.

  ‘Yes,’ we said noncommittally.

  ‘I… I’m… so glad I caught you,’ he continued, still panting. ‘Could you… take the wool off these… dogs for me?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said José, ‘but we’ve taken down all the gear and…’

  ‘But look here, I’ve just climbed all the way up here from the village to get these dogs sheared…’

  ‘We don’t do dogs,’ I said matter-of-factly.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t do dogs?’ He was getting heated and a little aggressive. ‘You’re the shearers, aren’t you? These dogs need shearing and I’ve just busted a gut getting all the way up here. How dare you tell me you don’t do dogs!’

  José had his head in his box, packing his gear.

  ‘Look, it’s simple,’ I repeated. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble but it’s hardly any fault of ours and, as I said, we don’t do dogs. This gear isn’t designed for…’

  ‘Hey, you,’ he snarled, looking at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You’re not one of us. Where are you from? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m from England but I live here,’ I answered blithely, unscrewing the head of my machine.

  ‘Oh, so you’re one of those bloody foreigners then, are you?’

  ‘Well,’ I said brightly, ‘I’ve lived here for a long time but I wasn’t born here so I guess that makes me a foreigner, but my daughter was born here so she’s a native…’

  ‘You foreigners – you come here and pollute our culture – what you ought to be doing is do your job then fuck off back where you came from. We don’t need you here taking the homes and land away from honest farmers!’

  This was irresistible and I leapt gleefully into the fray. ‘Pollute your culture? If you know anything about your culture at all, you’d know it’s been enriched by foreigners for centuries and would be a shrivelled and half-arsed thing without them.’

  Our new friend’s eyes nearly burst out of their sockets at this, and he seemed almost to hop with rage. He turned towards José, who kept his head down, bent over the sharpening wheel. ‘Who is this… this… person?’ he spluttered.

  ‘Oh,’ said José, still intent upon the fast spinning wheel. ‘I shear with him, he’s a friend of mine.’

  The little man stood between us, breathing deeply, looking from me, sitting in the sun cradling my shears, to José crouched over the grinding wheel. Finally he calmed down a bit and said with just a touch of a whine: ‘Look, I really need to get these dogs clipped, and…’

  ‘I already said’ – I interrupted – ‘we don’t do dogs.’

  ‘I’m not talking to you!’ he snapped.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said José standing up and stretching. ‘But the foreigner’s the boss. I do what he tells me, and it looks like he doesn’t want us to shear your dogs.’ He smiled pleasantly, trying to bring the argument down a gear.

  ‘Right,’ snarled the little man as he thumped back down the track into the woods. ‘I’ll not forget this. You’ll be hearing from me.’ And, so saying, he disappeared amongst the trees.

  ‘He was a laugh, wasn’t he?’ I said to José, as we watched him out of sight.

  ‘No, he wasn’t – he was serious. I know that man a little bit, and I certainly know the type. He’s one of those hijo de puta ham barons from Trevélez. People like that expect to get what they want; and when they don’t get it, they get nasty.’

  ‘Lord, I thought he was just messing about…’

  ‘No, not a bit of it; that’s the way those people are. Up here, they run things. They do exactly as they like and they don’t let people stand in their way, especially not foreigners. They’re the bastards who tip their used salt into the river instead of loading it up and taking it down to the sea.’

  ‘Well, a bit of salt in the water’s not too much of a threat. I’m not going to be shaking in my boots about that.’

  ‘I would be – they tip dozens of tons in, and the water of the Trevélez River is high in salts anyway. My father lost a whole orchard of apricot trees because these bastards tipped their waste salt into the river. A small trick like that could lay your farm to waste.’

  All in all, it hadn’t been the best of days.

  The heat of July grew more and more intense, the short nights barely giving respite to the burning air, as one long stultifying day rolled into another. July and August are the hardest months to bear in the Alpujarras, as the swelling heat is given voice by the ceaseless screaming of the cicadas, and even the smallest task drains you of all your energy. It’s a time when all right-minded people cave in after lunch and take a long, deep siesta.

  However, this simple pleasure is not always as easy to achieve as you migh
t think, because the heart of summer is also the time that visitors start arriving. For some reason people from the northern hemisphere like nothing better than to stalk across mountains in the fierce midday heat, arrive on the terrace of a complete stranger and blast their hopes of waking naturally from a siesta. In the past month I had been dragged from my slumbers by, amongst others, a Danish hiker, a German ornithologist, and a man from Dorset who told me that he had borrowed my last book from the library and read most of it, and would I mind signing his map and posing for a photograph?

  So it was that one August afternoon, replete with gazpacho, tortilla and salad, and pleasantly lulled by wine, I retreated to my bed, in the hope of sleeping undisturbed. I was lying on my back in bed – that being the best way of dissipating heat (and why dogs in summer lie with their bellies in the air) – and was peering lazily behind closed eyelids at the thoughts ambling through my mind. This is a trick I’ve discovered to slip more quickly into a light doze. You try not to follow any thoughts in a conscious way but just watch as they go by. Little by little, as you lie bathed in sweat, the thoughts become more disjointed, their rationality dissolves, rogue elements appear, and you find yourself skimming the upper hills of dreaming before descending into the valleys. This is a delicious moment, the moment before you dip into sleep. You say to yourself, ‘I must be asleep because that last thought didn’t make sense,’ and then all of a sudden you’ve overcome the curse of the heat, and you’re deep down in the veils of Morpheus, cloaked in mindless sleep.

  At this point, often as not, a fly will attempt to dart up one of your nostrils, jarring you straight back to irritable wakefulness. You get up and shut the shutters – houseflies don’t fly in the dark – but once disturbed it is not easy to regain that sweet oblivion. You manage at last and, ah, such pleasure, and then all of a sudden there impinges on your consciousness a shuffling, as human noises are heard moving forward on the terrace – perhaps a ‘Hello, there!’ or a whispered ‘Do you think anyone’s in?’ A visitor has arrived.

  Grumbling to myself, I ratch about for something to cover my ghastly nakedness and stumble out into the glaring light to face my uninvited guest. ‘Oh-h,’ they greet me, a slightly falling note if it’s someone who is clutching my book, as they register an older and less amiable-looking version of the author than the man on the book jacket. I usually offer a cup of tea, which is what people unaccountably seem to want on a blistering summer afternoon, especially if they’re English.

  Yet this time things seemed different. The visitors didn’t call out at all and their silence unnerved me. Then I picked out whispers, very quiet and urgent, and it occurred to me that this could be the ham baron’s henchmen come to teach me a lesson.

  I nudged Ana awake, raising a finger to my lips. Then I pulled on a pair of shorts and crept carefully to the front door. I peered out… Nothing. Then I caught sight of some figures at the bottom of the steps to the house. With relief, I realised that they weren’t marauding heavies at all, but four young men, all of them just as nervous as I was. A thin youth with dark features and curly, matted hair seemed to be the spokesman. He stepped up to the edge of the terrace and hesitantly, in a hoarse voice, asked for some water. The others waited in the shade of the pomegranate tree to see how I reacted.

  ‘Of course. Come up and I’ll get you some,’ I said, smiling in a manner that I hoped might put them at ease, and beckoned to them to come and sit on the patio. The youth stepped back and seemed to be conducting a mimed conference with the others, with the result that they stepped tentatively up behind him. If it wasn’t already obvious from their features that they were Moroccan immigrants (‘without papers,’ as they say in Spanish) the shabby sports bags they clutched gave them away. I dredged up the tiny bit of Arabic I knew.

  ‘Salaam alekum,’ I said – welcome; ‘Alekum Salaam,’ they answered uncertainly. It helped to galvanise the other three who, dusty and dishevelled like the first, moved closer to the table and chairs in the shade of the vine.

  I went into the house to fetch a jug of water. When I returned, they were still standing around uneasily, holding on to their bags. ‘Go on, sit down,’ I said in Spanish, and placed the tray and jug and glasses on the table. Warily they moved to the chairs, perching on the edge as if still unsure.

  The exhausted look on their faces told of a long and arduous journey, doubtless lasting many days. And they were clearly terrified of being reported to the authorities and deported. As well they might be, for, by sitting these destitute young men down and giving them water, I was breaking the law.

  ‘You speak Spanish?’ I asked, anxious to reassure my wary guests. Three of them looked in bafflement at the first, who shrugged apologetically.

  ‘Aah, parlez vous français?’ I tried.

  ‘Oui, un peu…’ he said as he gulped the water. I refilled their glasses.

  ‘Je m’appelle Christophe,’ I said, holding out my hand to the French speaker.

  He bowed a little and shook my hand, afterwards placing it over his heart in that warm Moroccan way. ‘I am Hamid, and these are my friends Mustapha, Aziz, and also Hamid.’

  We each shook hands, bowing and touching our respective hearts. Ana emerged then from the darkness of the house. They all stood up and repeated the hand-shaking process. It appeared that it was only the first Hamid who spoke anything but Arabic or Berber, so we communicated in French through him.

  ‘We have come from Algeciras,’ he said.

  ‘How are you travelling?’

  ‘On foot, through the mountains. It is safer from the police.’

  ‘On foot, all the way from Algeciras! That’s halfway across the country! How long have you been walking?’

  Hamid turned to his friends and they exchanged opinions on this in Arabic.

  ‘We have walked for ten days, I think. We are going to El Ejido, monsieur. We know people who work there.’

  ‘That is a hard place,’ I replied. I knew a little of El Ejido and its hothouse fruit and vegetable industry, and wondered if it really would provide a better life than the one they were escaping. And yet it was impossible not to admire these determined youths. They were clearly exhausted, hungry, thirsty and destitute, and here they were wandering through a land whose language they didn’t speak, ever at risk of being caught by police patrols. They were seeking hope and opportunity – a future with the dignity of work.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Ana.

  ‘We are a little hungry,’ replied Hamid.

  Ana got up to go to the kitchen. As she did, she noticed that they were all eyeing the packet of cigarettes she had left on the table. She smiled and pushed it across to Hamid. They fell hungrily upon the packet, and somehow the tiny act of generosity, the ritual and the sweet smoke of freshly lit tobacco worked a magical effect. The fear seemed to fall away, there was a tangible feeling of relief, as they pulled the calming smoke deep into their lungs. (I suppose that’s the way it is with snouts; I’ve never managed to smoke one, so I don’t know.)

  Soon Ana had a meal on the table for them. There was a tureen of thick gazpacho, a buttery, yellow omelette made with our own farm eggs, thick slabs of bread and butter and honey. It was a bit short on the meat, but all we had in the house was bacon and ham and sausages of pig. Still, the four of them set to the food like thin wolves. Pausing briefly, Hamid told us that they had not eaten a thing for two days. They had no food, no money and, worst of all, no tobacco.

  We watched them as they ate. They were painfully thin and, from what I could gather from Hamid, were village boys from the desert border area in the south, where unemployment is endemic and secondary education rare. Quite probably each of these boys represented the investments of a whole village, or at least of an extended family. People would have scraped together their assets and given them to these ill-prepared young men so that they could find work in the distant fastness of Fortress Europe, and send home what money they were able to put aside. They didn’t look much – who of us would after t
en days in the mountains with barely a thing to eat? – and yet these boys bore upon their shoulders huge burdens of hope, and were risking their lives to bring these dreams to fruition.

  It was shocking to reflect, given their appearance, that things were going well for Hamid and his party, thus far. They had survived the appallingly treacherous sea journey, on some barely seaworthy boat; they had travelled east for ten days without being caught by the Guardia Civil patrols; and now they had fallen in with us. The tobacco and food were visibly reviving the group, but still their eyes darted narrowly about, casting glances around at the farm, and us, and searching for warning signs. I wanted to say something to convince Hamid of our good intentions, but it wasn’t that easy, particularly in French. You can’t say: ‘We mean you no harm.’ It sounds silly. ‘Don’t worry; you’re safe with us.’ Not much better.

  As the group finished their meal and talked among themselves in Berber, Ana and I discussed what to do. El Ejido is a wretched place: acres and acres of greenhouses, where Moroccan and other illegal migrants work in dire conditions, for pitiful wages. It was awful to think of them ending up there, but they seemed determined and we had no other plan we could offer in its place. Reaching El Ejido, however, would be no simple matter. There remained a good four days’ walk over some pretty rough and broken countryside. Ana looked thoughtful.

  ‘We can at least take the trauma out of the journey,’ she said. ‘We could drive them there – or you could. You could wait for nightfall and then go the back way, via Cádiar.’ Ana’s caution was as much for my sake as for the Moroccans. Helping illegal immigrants is against the law, and carries the possibilities of a prison sentence and confiscation of one’s car. It seemed unlikely that I’d be caught, but nonetheless it would be best not to be too obvious about it.

  Getting this plan across to Hamid and his friends was by no means easy. I could sense that they still did not trust us – and why should they? Okay, we had shown them some kindness, but the water, the meal, it could all be some kind of trap. Eventually, though, we managed to persuade them that they should go and rest for a few hours in the cámara, an annexe where I work, up above the house, and where there are beds and couches for visitors. I would come up and fetch them when it got dark, then drive them to El Ejido or wherever they wanted to go next. Grabbing their bags, the Moroccans followed me up along the path that skirted the border of succulents surrounding the house. They kept their guard up and, at a bend in the path, where the view opens up to reveal the river bed, a strange and quiet commotion broke out.