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  ‘Do you speak German, Cristóbal?’

  ‘A bit. Why?’

  ‘Get yourself down here, I’ve got a job for you.’

  Thus I found myself creeping among the wards of the Virgin of the Snows hospital looking for a German girl called Lotta, who had had an accident and spoke not one word of Spanish. I felt pretty important: I was actually on a mission.

  I found Lotta, without a problem, in a second-floor ward. She looked like an enormous porcelain doll, her head swollen and bandaged, and she lay staring in an agitated sort of way out of the window. She was fine, she said, in spite of a crack on the skull, but was desperately worried about her dog. It transpired that she was hitching around Spain with her dog and had taken the animal for a walk one night, when it upped and took off after a cat. It heaved her over the side of a bridge and she fell into the dry riverbed. The dog rocketed off after the cat, and when she regained consciousness it was nowhere to be found.

  The accident had taken place a hundred kilometres to the northeast, but she had been brought to the Granada hospital for a spot of remodelling on her poor swollen head, which had taken a hell of a blow. She didn’t seem to mind about that at all, even when I told her, translating for the charming young doctor, that if things didn’t go right she might need extra surgery to make sure her eyes stayed in line.

  ‘I’ve got to get out of here and find my dog,’ she said. In her ward, across the aisle, was a little girl, sad and quiet and sick and hooked up to a number of bottles and electronic devices. Beside her bed sat her mother, a tiny countrywoman. She had sat there for three days and nights, she said. That’s what you do in Spanish hospitals: you have to provide your own nursing. This woman was the very essence of tenderness and care, and, as if it were not enough to comfort her poor little daughter, she was tormented with worry for Lotta’s plight. My arrival and the opening of a conduit of communication released a torrent of concern. It had been unbearable for her, she said, to sit there and see poor Lotta so damaged and broken and so far from her mother, and to be unable to speak words of comfort to her.

  Lotta said that the mother had in fact talked to her ceaselessly, but with her own lack of Spanish, communication had been limited to loving squeezes of Lotta’s hand. Apparently, by barking, Lotta had managed to get the idea of the dog across, but what part the dog played in the drama had remained a mystery to Angustias, which the mother told me was her name. With Lotta’s permission I filled Angustias in on the mysteries of Lotta’s situation, and Lotta on the diagnosis of Angustias’s daughter – a form of hepatitis, but one that seemed to be slowly improving.

  Better news was to come for Lotta, too. A male nurse at the little health centre in Cuevas del Campo, where she had received initial treatment, had found her dog waiting outside and was looking after it in his own home. He reassured her that he would be happy to keep the pet until Lotta was well enough to make the journey back. This put Lotta’s mind at rest sufficiently for her to promise that she wouldn’t discharge herself there and then.

  By the time I got back to Aguas de Cartuja, Granada Acoge had closed for lunch. I found the staff in the bar nearby, clustered in a group around Charo and Mati. Charo beckoned me over and, after hearing about the events of the morning, continued with her suggestion that I write something for their magazine.

  I promised to think about it. Then I went home and thought about it. One of the things that had struck me about the Moroccan lads was the hardship of the journey they had undergone, through mountains and remote paths with scarce food or water, wearing just a worn pair of trainers. I decided to walk the route that they might have followed on their way through the mountains, and write an article about it for Charo’s magazine. I got very excited about this idea and resolved, in order to give the undertaking at least the appearance of authenticity, to wear an old pair of cheap trainers, perhaps even flip-flops, and to carry my needments in a small sports bag – in short, the uniform of the poor Moroccan immigrant.

  ‘That’s a great idea, Chris. Maybe you could also sell it to one of the papers, and raise more funds,’ Charo enthused. ‘And think how nice it will be to do something different from all those light little comedies about sheep and parrots.’

  It is a hell of a journey that the Moroccan and African immigrants undertake. Nothing perhaps, given that some travel up from Ghana or Sierra Leone. However, three hundred kilometres or more in mountainous country, as an illegal, looking out for the police, is not a Sunday stroll, as I found myself explaining, a few days later, to Michael Jacobs. ‘Perhaps I’ll compromise the purity of the concept a little and abandon the flip-flops,’ I mused, dwelling on the detail. ‘Flip-flops are hell in the mountains.’

  ‘Well, I think we should… g-go for as much authenticity as possible. I wonder if it would help Granada Acoge if we each wrote a piece on the walk?’

  ‘You mean, you want to come too?’

  ‘W-well, if you d-didn’t mind. Y-yes, I’d love to come.’

  I thought about it briefly. It would be nice to have company on this lengthy and gruelling trip, and Michael was a serious person, in agreement with me as to the objectives of the expedition and its underlying philosophies. ‘Of course. That would be great.’

  And so our expedition was conceived. Two writers would set out in the footsteps of the Moroccans who had turned up at my farm, making their way through the hostile mountains of Andalucía to the promised land of El Ejido in the east. By this shift we would highlight the predicament of the illegal immigrant and air questions on the complacency of us denizens of Fortress Europe. It was a heady notion – at last, a form of activism I could act upon.

  As is so often the case, Michael just happened to know exactly the person we should meet – a professor of Ecology called Manolo, who worked at the University of Seville and who was an expert on the Parque de los Alcornocales – Spain’s largest national park – a swathe of forest that cuts north from the strip of coastline where the Moroccan launches tend to land. We arranged to meet up at his house near Seville, where he kindly supplied us with a compass and maps and drove us into the mountains to Alcalá de los Gazules, the start of our walk.

  At Alcalá the rain came down in sheets, the streets were ankle-deep in rushing waters. I bought an umbrella. ‘Vogue’, it said – ‘Vogue Windproof’. It seemed a somewhat inauspicious way to begin the journey.

  AUTHENTICITY WILL OUT

  AS THE RAIN LASHED DOWN ON ALCALÁ, we ducked into a bar, but there were so many people in there sheltering from the downpour that there was no room to open our map. We went outside onto a terrace protected by a canvas awning so that Manolo could draw our route, but the air itself was so damp that within minutes the map was sodden, and wherever he so much as touched it with his pencil the point made a grubby hole.

  Manolo knew the Alcornocales well, having grown up in the region and worked there as a park warden before joining the University of Seville. He explained to us in minute detail the route we should take. ‘Now at the first bifurcation of the path, by a big rock, don’t take it, but keep on until the main path turns left and starts to climb. The important thing is at all times to keep the peak of Aljibe on your left and the radar dome of Pico de las Yeguas on your right – that way you can’t possibly go wrong.’ And he made a couple of big wet holes with his pencil in the remains of our map. ‘I must be getting home to my family now. Any problems, just give me a ring on my mobile.’ And he sloshed off into the wet, black night.

  I couldn’t help but feel that we were already losing a certain amount of authenticity. Not many immigrants would have the benefit of a briefing from a former park warden. And none would have the luxury of spending a wet night, as we did, in the hostal above the bar. Not that it was exactly high life. In the room we were offered, water was dripping through the ceiling and down the wire to the dim bare bulb; the bathroom was soft and green with mould; the floor was awash; and there was an interesting design feature consisting of a window that opened directly onto a concrete w
all. But the room next door looked even worse, from a glimpse through the open door, where a group of men in vests were sitting around coughing and watching TV. A good night’s sleep seemed unlikely, so we set out for a last night on the town, before our journey.

  Dominguito’s was the place to eat in Alcalá, according to the barman downstairs, and when the rain slackened for a moment that was where we went. Dominguito was a lugubrious sort of a man with protuberant ears and thick glasses. He thrust a tapa towards us with our drinks. Michael, as ever, recovered his spirits. ‘The seafood’ll be g-good here,’ he enthused. ‘So we ought to try the prawns… Also you get fantastically good ham – the woods are full of p-pigs, so a ración of jamón ibérico would be nice. Cádiz produces interesting white wines, too, so we’ll have a b-bottle or two of the Gadir Blanco…’

  I was happy to leave the choice to Michael, who can talk of the regional gastronomy of Spain as others might discuss football. But again I was assailed by a shadow of concern that the purity of our expedition was being compromised by a very un-Moroccan feasting on ham and wine. Still, I like ham and wine a lot, and as all the Moroccans I know approve of a bit of feasting when the chance arises, I thought I’d indulge myself just this once.

  That night, the electricity in our room kept on fizzing, even when the light was off. The water dripped irregularly through the hole in the ceiling. The men in vests next door had turned the television up so they could hear it above the sound of their coughing. Michael was fast asleep within thirty seconds of hitting the bed – and he snored like a bastard. I lay there, listening to all these noises and thinking in a disjointed sort of a way of what an interesting exercise it would be to write them all down in musical notation.

  The morning found us back at Dominguito’s, which had been recommended to us as the best bar in town for breakfast – again by the barman at the hostal, whose ears also stuck out a lot. I suspected him of being Dominguito’s brother.

  ‘What they have for b-breakfast in this region,’ said Michael, ‘is manteca colorá. It’s wonderful – you should try it on t-toast.’

  Manteca colorá is the orange pig-fat butter that in Andalucía you see the more Spanish type of Spaniard smearing thick on his tostada in the morning. He’ll be washing it down with a coñac or two to get himself bounced into the day. I had always viewed manteca colorá with suspicion – it’s pretty suspicious-looking stuff, coming as it does in white, off-grey or orange – and in all my time in Spain I had never once tried it. But Michael’s features were suffused with pleasure as he stuffed the ghastly-looking mush into his face. ‘G-go on,’ he burbled with his mouth full. ‘It’ll set us up nicely for the day’s walk.’

  Gingerly I smeared a smidgen upon my toast and took a bite. In a rather gross, atavistic way, it was delicious. I helped myself to a little more, then a lot more, until my tostada groaned beneath the weight of livid orange fat. I felt a slight biliousness, and yet at the same time a hit of energy from the dead pig coursing through my veins. Michael was right: this was exactly what you needed to set you up for a day’s trudge. Once again, though, I couldn’t help noting that few genuine arrivals from North Africa would fancy pig-fat butter at the start of their day.

  There were a dozen or so men at the bar. Michael regaled them all with the details of our projected undertaking, and asked for their advice. This was not such a good idea, I thought, as it would serve only to confuse the already convoluted directions we had got from Manolo. And, sure enough, the ensuing babble chased away my few shreds of certainty.

  At least it had stopped raining though, and, pausing only to buy a few supermarket victuals (a cheese Michael liked the look of, some ham, a bag of olives, and another of dates) we hoisted our laden packs onto our shoulders and trudged off along the road. If truth be told, I was actually the one doing the hoisting, because, instead of the authentic sports bag, I had brought with me a proper backpack, whereas Michael had borrowed a bright red cotton duffel bag, with straps that were just bits of string. This was authentic gear, and, even with just a toothbrush and some food, the straps were already cutting into his shoulders.

  As we walked, the sun burst through a gap in the rolling black clouds and in an instant the air was thick with huge flying ants. There were so many of them that you couldn’t help breathe them in – although they were so large that they didn’t quite fit up your nostril and thus were able to make good their escape. It was an eerie scene, and the more so as the sun dried the vegetation and the very earth started to steam.

  Soon we reached a venta – a roadside inn. ‘We could stop for a c-coffee here, perhaps, no?’ suggested Michael. ‘And we could ask the way…’

  ‘Heavens, man, we’ve only been walking for fifteen minutes… But yes, why not?’

  So we stopped and dropped our packs. There was nobody about except for a fat lout who was propelling a mop about the place with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. The lout looked at us without interest and shambled behind the bar to get a head of steam up in the coffee machine. Michael got the map out, and the notepad upon which Manolo had sketched the route. In the cold light of day and at the head of the trail it looked more baffling than ever. There was a sketch of what looked like railway sidings, a pine tree (beside which Manolo had written ‘pino’) and a rock (labelled ‘tajo’), then a long, wiggly dotted line that passed neatly through the spiral binding of my notebook to our destination on the next page.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Michael in an unconvincing sort of way.

  ‘What we know for sure,’ I assured him, ‘in fact the only thing we know for sure, is that we have to keep the peak of Aljibe on our right at all times.’

  ‘N-no, left,’ said Michael.

  ‘I’m sure he said right, Michael.’

  ‘N-no. He said we had to keep ourselves on the right of it… thus it’ll b-be on our left.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. But how are we to know which one Aljibe is?’

  ‘It’s got a radar d-dome on the top.’

  ‘No, that’s the Sierra de las Yeguas, and we have to keep either right or left of that…’

  Michael looked uncertainly at the map and scratched his head. ‘What’s that p-pine tree there for?’

  ‘I can’t remember what Manolo said about the pine tree. It’s very nicely drawn. Maybe it’s just a particularly good one.’

  We finished our coffee and Michael tried asking the lout for directions, but to no avail. Still, with our hearts full of ill-founded optimism, we plunged into the park. Within an hour, we had lost all trace of a path and were blundering about up to our chests in the exuberant vegetation of the cork oak forest.

  Now, a cork oak forest may be a pleasant thing to look upon, with its exotic tangle of flowering cistus, dog roses and gorse, but it’s a rotten place to be blundering about in. It was no longer a matter of keeping peaks on our right or left; we couldn’t see beyond the next tree trunk, let alone out of the woods. Our boots had become caked with heavy mud; we were scratched and bleeding, confused and a little irritated by the way things were going.

  We came to the top of a rise, where we could see above the trees. ‘B-bloody hell,’ said Michael. ‘It looks like the middle of the Tasmanian rainforest.’

  It was an odd parallel to draw, as neither of us had ever been anywhere near Tasmania, and what we were looking at was cork oaks. But I knew what he meant. On all sides of us stretched an unbroken forest of trees, seemingly trackless, without clearings or breaks. A small flock of vultures circled aimlessly above a distant rise. A little disenchanted, we plunged back into the trees, heading, insofar as possible, to the northeast – where in sixty kilometres or so the forest would come to an end.

  We clambered carefully through barbed-wire fences, scrambled in and out of overgrown ravines, and slogged up steep slopes, all deep beneath the canopy of trees. I stopped for a minute, obeying the call of nature; then, hurrying along to catch up, burst through a clump of oleander to find Michael rooted to the spot, staring intently ahead.


  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Without speaking he indicated a sign nailed to a tree: ‘Toros Bravos’, it said – Fighting Bulls.

  ‘We can’t p-possibly go on through here…’ Michel hissed. ‘I’m terrified of toros bravos.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about it,’ I said putting my arm on Michael’s shoulder. ‘That sign is just there to frighten us.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Chris,’ he replied, with studied calm. ‘I think it’s there so if we get gored to d-death we can’t blame anyone.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, reassuringly. ‘There’s no bulls in sight, and besides, there are lots of trees… If anything should happen, all we have to do is find a tree and shin up it. That’s what you do with bulls.’

  The truth is that, if aroused, the toro bravo is one of the most aggressive animals on the planet – they are, of course, selected for the trait – and an awful lot more people get gored in the Spanish countryside than in the bullrings. So Michael’s fears were pretty well founded. However, we had to get through this place, and besides, as I reassured him, there are often signs indicating the presence of toros bravos when in fact there aren’t any bulls at all. Michael still seemed reluctant to move, but after I changed tack and suggested that the bulls were most likely to appear close to the sign where we were standing, he agreed to keep going. As we tramped on apprehensively, I mused over whether this would be a good moment to mention the unhelpful colour of his rucksack – which, you may recall, was a vivid red.

  The bulls failed to materialise, and who could blame them? For although the Parque de los Alcornocales is held in high esteem for its beauty, wildness and the variety of its flora and fauna, the corner that we had chosen to explore was distinguished by little other than heavy mud, aggressive vegetation and the apparent absence of any paths.