Sacred Sierra (40 page)

From all this, two useful facts had stuck in my mind: 1) the evaporation point of ethanol, the good stuff, was 78 degrees, and 2) the evaporation point of methanol, the stuff that made you blind, was about 65 degrees. Still, I had something to go on.

After scouring my library, and calling a few people I thought might know something about the process, I came up with a rough idea of what I had to do. It was only a first try: best not to get too fussy about what came out at the end. There would be time for refinement. The problem was going to be keeping a check on the temperature. That way I could monitor what was coming out: whether it was ethanol or methanol. The still hadn’t come with a thermometer built in, so I had to improvise by placing one used for baking in a hole at the side and bunging it up with a cork, the dial poking out through the middle so we could read it. Many of the sources I had consulted suggested making my own brew first and then distilling from that, but I knew from previous home-brewing experiences that this could be a lengthy and sometimes dangerous process: one of my friends had ended up in hospital with a busted gut after drinking some of my ‘beer’ at a party. I decided instead to let someone else take care of that side of things: our first experiments would be carried out using some cheap wine picked up from the village, where they sold it in five-litre jugs. The resulting nectar would, I predicted, be a highly drinkable
aguardiente
, or firewater, the Spanish equivalent of grappa.

I emptied the jug of wine into the still and set it up over the hob. Again, I had been told that this was best done outside, with logs of holm oak for firewood as this kept a constant, long-lasting heat. But it was late July: not only would making a fire be uncomfortable at such a hot time of year, it was highly dangerous. At the first sign of smoke the local firemen would descend on us. I sealed all the pipes with flour paste and then placed the cooling spiral and its container to one side with a pipe flowing in and out to keep the water circulating and prevent it from overheating.

If all went well the hooch would pour out of the bottom of the cooling spiral and drip down into a pan I had set on a chair just beneath
it
. I kept a cup to catch the first drops – the head – which would be thrown away. The still came with a special compartment which allowed you to place herbs above the evaporating wine, the steam catching some of their essence and thus flavouring the liquor. At the last moment I decided to add some, rushing out of the door and grabbing a few handfuls of thyme and some of the fennel stalks that sprang up all over the place.

I lit the gas, put it on a low flame, and sat watching the thermometer. For what seemed like a very long time it didn’t move. Then slowly it began to rise. The still was making an incredible sound, like a wheezing kettle, as it heated up. The beautiful copper colour of the outside was quickly being dirtied by the flames, but I liked the idea that we were actually using it rather than treating it as a decoration: this was what it was meant for.

After a lengthy wait the temperature finally began to move towards the magic figure of 78 degrees. I expected it to pause just before, at around 65 degrees, for a moment, when the first drops might start to form and spill out from the end of the cooling spiral. This, in theory, would be methanol. But nothing emerged at this stage, and still the thermometer kept moving up. So no poison, then. What would eventually drip out of the tube should be highly drinkable ethanol, flavoured, I hoped, with some of the herbs I had thrown in to steam with it.

The thermometer hit 78 degrees and nothing happened. Then 80, 85 … Still nothing. Finally, as it got close to 89 degrees, the first drops began to appear at the end of the tube and started dripping into the pan below. A strange smell began to fill the kitchen, and Salud quickly reached for all the remaining windows that weren’t already open. I was so excited, though, that I barely noticed. This was just the beginning, I thought. In years to come people would talk about this historic day when the first bottle of
Maestrazgo Moonshine
, as I had decided to call it in the end, was made. We could even write a little story about it and put it on the back label, along with claims about it being made from a secret recipe handed down over the ages, and how we only used local ingredients, with no pesticides or E numbers, or any of the other things we were supposed to jump up and down about these days. The fact that
the
basic ingredient was someone else’s plonk was a minor detail. We could get round that.

After about twenty minutes of evaporation, around half a litre of liquor was now sitting in the pan. I reasoned that the temperature was showing higher than it should because it was measuring the heat at the bottom of the still, nearest the flame of the hob, and not on the surface, which was where the alcohol would be evaporating. Or at least that was the only way it made sense. But now the temperature was rising again: we’d got through the ethanol and water was starting to evaporate instead. It was time to turn everything off. I took the pan and poured the contents into a bottle, then left it on the table to cool while I cleared away. It was at this point that I noticed that the smell in the kitchen was really quite strong, and not entirely pleasant. There was something sharp and yeasty about it. I only hoped it would blow away soon, or else my new career as a distiller of fine liquors could be short-lived, at least if Salud had anything to do with it.

Once the hooch had cooled to room temperature, I screwed on the cap and placed it in the freezer to cool some more. It would bring out the best of it, I told myself, if we drank it at the right temperature. Too warm and we could hardly be surprised if it was undrinkable.

After dinner that evening I brought it out, carefully picking up a couple of shot glasses from the cupboard and placing them on the table in front of Salud. She smiled nervously.

‘Do I have to?’ she said.

‘This is a great day. How often have you drunk home-made
aguardiente
?’

‘Too often,’ came the reply.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, and unscrewed the cap.

The liquid flowed out thickly, like vodka. Good sign, I thought. Then I raised the glass to have a sniff. To be honest, I couldn’t detect anything of the herbs I had thrown in to flavour it: all that hit me was a choking waft of alcoholic fumes.

‘Ho, ho,’ I said, ‘looks like we’re in for a fun evening.’

Salud’s eyes were watering just from the smell of it. We looked at each other as though for the last time before jumping off a cliff.

‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘To our first thousand bottles.’

‘I’m not sure if I should,’ she said sniffing it again suspiciously. ‘Remember what happened to Miguel when he drank your beer …’

‘It’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve learned from my mistakes.’

We raised our glasses, counted to three, and then knocked it back.

*

The mule was a bad-tempered animal which seemed to like nothing more than to nip viciously at Faustino as he led him along the path. His purple, swollen fingers looked as if they were painful enough, but Faustino simply laughed, looking for crumbs of something in his pockets to try to assuage him.

‘It’s still too hot,’ he said calling over to me as I followed behind them. ‘He thinks we should wait another hour or two to let the sun go down.’

It was already past six in the evening, but I was more on the mule’s side on this one. The heat of mid-afternoon still sat over us like a heavy cloud in the lifeless air, while every stone and rock was hot to the touch, radiating the energy of the sun absorbed over the course of the day. I wiped away drops of sweat forming on my temples – the first of many to come.

‘Don’t worry,’ Faustino said to the mule. ‘It’ll be fine once we get under the trees, and then we can cool ourselves down when we get to the spring.’

I tried to keep my distance from the mule’s hind legs: if he wasn’t satisfied with biting chunks out of Faustino’s fingers he was more than capable of taking a kick at me in his rage. The empty plastic water jugs Faustino had slung over his back made a deep drumming sound as they beat against one another with each step.

We crossed a grassy field – now quickly drying out in the intense summer light – and made our way down from the
mas
and towards the edge of the pine forest that stretched away down one side of a long, straight gorge. A mere half an hour from here, Faustino had told me, was a secret spring that no one knew about, where he grew his tobacco plants.

‘So I can water them easily.’

As soon as we stepped into the shade of the forest the temperature dropped, and within minutes I could feel the sweat on my brow begin
to
dry. The mule calmed down a little, and merely shook his head from time to time as the occasional fly buzzed around his eyes.

‘You’ll be glad of the exercise,’ Faustino said. ‘Don’t get out enough.’

The pine trees soared high above our heads: straight poles with an umbrella of foliage at the top forming a dark, green canopy to filter out the sun. The forests of the slopes of the Penyagolosa were well known for being rare ecosystems. There were supposed to be more than a thousand varieties of plants up here – more than in the whole of Ireland – and many of them unique to the area.

‘Some people say this forest is
encantado
– enchanted,’ Faustino said, as though reading my thoughts.

‘Is it?’ I asked. If anyone would know it would be him.

He turned round and grinned at me.

‘Don’t you find it enchanting?’

It was a special place: cool and still, and with that peaceful, contemplative quality that some forests have, sometimes captured and refined, you felt, in the great Gothic cathedrals, or in the mosques of the Islamic golden age.

‘When I die,’ Faustino said, ‘I want someone to bring my ashes up here, pack them in an almighty firework and then set it off from somewhere inside this forest.’

The mule stopped in its tracks, shuddered and then brayed loudly, its pained voice echoing around the trees.

‘It’s all right, Bruno,’ he said, patting the side of the animal’s face. ‘You can come along as well if you like. We can’t let you end up in the dog-meat factory. They wouldn’t take you anyway: you’re too old.’

The mule blew hard through its nostrils and then reluctantly began to move on again.

‘That’s it,’ Faustino whispered to him. ‘Of course,’ he said turning towards me again, ‘they’d never allow it. It would be a fire risk, they’d say. I’ll probably end up getting toasted in the usual fashion and put in a neat little box somewhere.’

Silently I wondered how long he had left. He talked about it as though it was something he expected to happen in the fairly near future. Again I looked at his skinny form, the gaunt, drawn look in his
face
, his mysteriously swollen hands. The appearance of frailty about him was in such contrast with the essential vitality that seemed to radiate from him, and his physical strength. Anyone else who looked that weak should be lying down in hospital on a drip. Yet when I was with him he never stopped. Was knowledge of impending death giving him so much energy, some kind of psychological charge? Or was it simply that he wasn’t that ill in the first place?

We continued down through the trees along the side of the gorge. The pine trees were beginning to thin out and gnarled oak trees with oversized leaves took their place.

‘
Roure reboll
–
quercus pyrenaica
,’ Faustino said as he walked up to one and stroked the bark, giving the name in both Valencian and Latin. ‘One of our very own varieties of oak. You can tell it by its large leaves.’

The area had first come to botanists’ attention, he said, thanks to the research carried out two hundred years before by Antonio José Cavanilles, a Valencian natural scientist and leading figure of the Spanish Enlightenment. He’d spent time up here as part of the research into his magnum opus,
Observaciones sobre la historia natural, geografía, agricultura, población y frutos del Reyno de Valencia
, a botanical portrait of the old Kingdom of Valencia, the first of its kind to be done in Spain. Thanks to him we had a clear idea not only of the natural habitat of two centuries ago, but also a brief description of every town and village, with a rough idea of how many people there were and the crops they grew.

‘Cavanilles used to say he could only come up here to Penyagolosa between June and September,’ Faustino said. ‘Because for the rest of the year it was like midwinter up here. The top of Penyagolosa,’ he went on, pointing instinctively in the direction of the peak, invisible from where we were owing to the density of the forest, ‘was covered in snow all year round.’

It was very different from today, when we were lucky to get one coating a year in midwinter perhaps. Two hundred years on, this was most definitely a hotter part of the world than it had once been.

‘It’s lucky for me the place is heating up,’ Faustino said. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to grow my tobacco up here otherwise.’

We stepped from the shade of the forest and out into a field. We were in a kind of dell, and the heat seemed to have been trapped there. Bits of dirt found their way through the gaps in my walking sandals as we cut across dry, scratchy long grass.

‘Down here is the perfect spot for it,’ he went on. ‘It’s warm and sunny, as you can see. Look, it’s south-facing. There’s a constant supply of water. And, what’s more, no one else even knows it exists.’

From somewhere below I could hear a trickling sound. Wherever his secret plantation was, it was probably somewhere close by.

‘Water’s important, you see,’ he said. ‘It always has been.’

Many of the old oracles of the ancient world, he said, were next to natural springs or rivers: Per-Wadjet, Delphi, Siwa. All the old theatres in Shakespeare’s London as well.

‘You should know that: Holywell, Clerkenwell, Sadler’s Wells – all near sacred wells. And then there are all those folk tales about the fountain of eternal youth, etcetera. There’s often something making a link between stories and water.’