Sacred Sierra (5 page)

The green skins wrapped around the nutshells were soft and velvety to the touch, with a coating of fine hair, but the branches of the tree were sharp and gnarled, with little thorns poking out at irregular intervals.

‘Wild boar love this,’ Arcadio called over as we started filling our sack. ‘Pull your trees down if they could to get the almonds. Already done some damage.’ And he pointed at another tree further down the terrace: one of the branches had fallen to the ground and was hanging by a thread from the main trunk; the leaves had died and the earth where it lay seemed to be scuffed.

‘Had a feast with that. Be back for more.’

Until this point ‘wild boar’ had only been a concept for us. We knew there were some roaming around the mountains, and had heard that they might pop over our way occasionally, but this was the first time we had evidence of their actual presence – and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

‘The wild boar did that?’ Salud asked incredulously, indignation and fear in her voice.

‘They’re after food,’ Arcadio said. ‘Almonds are easy for them: rip the branches off and then eat all they want. Got whole families of them living up there.’ He pointed towards the upper section of the gulley that cleaved the side of our mountain, a dense dark-green area thick with trees and bushes.

There was a pause as we took this in. I had two mental images of wild boar: one as frightened, harmless creatures that always ended up as banquet material in
Asterix
comic books; the other as fierce, territorial beasts that could charge and kill a man. I had the feeling the comic-book version was not entirely accurate.

‘Shooting them’s the best thing,’ Arcadio said. ‘Hunters’ll come up once the season’s started. Nothing but trouble, those boar.’

Wild man-eating beasts, and now the prospect of armed men wandering around our land taking potshots at them: rather than a farm in Spain, it was beginning to feel more like some kind of safari park.

We carried on stripping the trees of their fruit as the shadows shortened and the sun rose higher in the sky, Salud and I carefully picking each almond and placing it in the sack, Arcadio ripping them off in handfuls along with clumps of leaves and bits of twig and tossing them carelessly into his basket. By the time we had had finished one tree, he was already on his fourth.

‘Perhaps there
is
some trick,’ I said.

I heard a sharp intake of breath from Salud and a soft, muffled ‘
¡ay!
’. From the tone I knew something was wrong: she was never one to scream or make a fuss. I looked round and saw her holding one hand tightly while blood was oozing out from between her fingers.

‘Bloody thorns,’ she said.

The cut had stretched along her finger and looked deep, lips of skin parting and exposing the bloody mass underneath.

‘I need to sit down,’ she said quietly.

‘I’ll go to the house and get some iodine.’

‘Wait,’ said Arcadio. He had walked over and was kneeling down to take a look at Salud’s hand.

‘Almond thorn?’ he asked. She nodded. The blood was still flowing thickly, dripping over her clothes and drying in ugly brown stains. Arcadio walked towards a nearby terrace wall and bent down as though looking for something. Then he knelt, pulled up part of a plant he’d found, and stuffed the leaves into his mouth to chew. For a few seconds of confusion we watched him masticating like a cow. It had seemed he was about to do something to help the cut on Salud’s finger, now I started to wonder if he’d changed his mind and was simply having a hillman’s snack.

Finally he spat a dark green gob into the palm of his hand, looked at it for a moment as though to gauge its usefulness, then walked over towards Salud again. Taking her hand he started spreading the gunge on to her bleeding finger.

‘Should slow it down,’ he said. ‘Might take some of the pain away as well.’

I watched his spittle mix freely with her blood.

‘It’s stopping,’ Salud said. ‘It feels sharp, as though it’s drying up.’

Arcadio stood up.

‘Should be fine by tomorrow,’ he said. ‘
Bruguerola
. Makes it heal quicker.’

Later that night we sat at the kitchen table next to the remains of dinner and an empty bottle of wine, a large sack of almonds on the floor beside us. We’d bandaged Salud’s hand up, but barely a drop of blood had appeared since Arcadio’s intervention.

‘Something in the leaves must make the bleeding stop,’ Salud said. I wondered what it might be, and how Arcadio had got to know about it. What other medicinal treasures were we walking over every time we stepped out of the front door? The grasses and weeds choking up the mountainside started to appear in a different light.

We’d carried on all morning, stopping only for a short break at midday before picking almonds late into the afternoon. It wasn’t a strenuous job in itself, but had become so after several hours, when my arms and hands began to complain from so much lifting and grabbing.
Salud
had slowed down a bit after cutting her hand, only collecting the almonds that had fallen to the ground.

For a while we stared down at the enormous pile of nuts at our feet, the inevitable question ‘Now what?’ hanging wordlessly in the air. What on earth were we supposed to do with them all? Sell them? Where? Who to? How much should we charge? The complexities of a simple task farmers all over the world had been carrying out for several millennia held us paralysed for a moment. One of us should have asked Arcadio, but it had slipped both our minds.

‘What does your father do with his oranges?’ I asked Salud.

She thought for a moment. ‘The local co-operative takes them from him and then gives him money depending on quality, weight, that kind of thing.’ She pushed her hair back behind her ear. ‘They rip him off. In the shops they sell for over ten times the price he gets for them. Sometimes he ends up just giving them away.’

So here we were with a pile of almonds we had nowhere to take, and even if we did find anyone to buy them they’d probably only give us a pittance for them. Farming was looking less attractive as a way of life by the minute. We should stick to planting trees, I thought.

‘Whatever we do with them,’ Salud said, ‘we can’t just leave them like this. We’ll have to break them open, get rid of the shells.’

She stood up, walked over to where I kept the tools, picked up a couple of hammers and then came back to the table. I looked down at the overflowing sack with a renewed horror. This was going to take a very, very long time.

‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the hammer into my reluctant fist. ‘Get cracking.’

It was four o’clock in the morning when I woke up, my head resting on the kitchen table, a small pool of dribble forming from my half-open mouth. Salud had collapsed on the sofa. Beside me was a large bowl of shell-less almonds. I smiled, before looking down and realising there was an even bigger pile of unshelled almonds still waiting for us in the sack. I gave a groan and went to pick Salud up and take her to bed.

Arcadio returned the next day unannounced. Our bodies ached by now from sitting bent over the table trying to crack open the almonds
without
breaking what was inside. I had about a 50 per cent hit rate; Salud was doing only slightly better. We were, however, at least managing to get close to the bottom of the sack.

Arcadio looked unimpressed when he saw how many almonds we had. ‘Bad year,’ he said enigmatically. I thought we’d done rather well. ‘Too much rain last spring,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘Affects the blossom. Almonds don’t grow right.’

And he bent over to pick up the bowls of nuts we’d shelled and started pouring them into a bag.

‘Er …’ I started.

‘Be back this afternoon,’ he said. And with that he was gone, our almonds now sitting in the bag tossed over his shoulder.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I said. Had we just been robbed under our very noses?

‘It’s all right,’ Salud said. ‘He’ll come back. Just watch.’

I had no choice but to trust her instinct.

Some time after lunch we heard the sound of Arcadio’s car chugging back up our road. Salud smiled.

‘Let’s see what story he’s got to tell,’ she said.

Moments later the old farmer was back in our kitchen.

‘Here,’ he said, holding something out in his hand. ‘It’s all I could get for them at the village co-op. As I said, it’s a bad year.’

He pushed the money forward again and Salud eventually reached out with her bandaged hand to take it from him.

‘Hundred euros,’ he said. He pronounced the word strangely – ‘
ebros
’ – as though still not quite used to this weird new currency that had been around now for six or seven years.

I looked into his small, yellow eyes and somehow knew that he was telling the truth: he’d gone and sold the almonds for us and this was exactly the amount of money he’d got for them: no secret cut for himself.

‘Thank you,’ said Salud.

‘Brought you this,’ he said, and he pulled out a small jam jar from his jacket pocket with a creamy-brown paste inside.

‘For your hand,’ he said to Salud.

‘Is it – is it herbal, like the stuff you used yesterday? Salud asked.

‘Made it myself,’ he said nodding. ‘You can use that for anything –
any
skin problems,’ he said. ‘Just rub it on at night.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘Helps the healing.’

*

Understanding of the scale of my ignorance is growing by the day. Planting trees seems such a simple operation at first: get tree, dig hole, put tree in it, then wait twenty or thirty years. Do this several hundred times and you’ll end up with a wood, or a small forest. But there are endless questions before you can get to this stage. Which trees? Will they be suited to the soil? The altitude? The weather conditions here? This is a Mediterranean climate, which means long, dry summers, so anything I plant has to be drought-proof. Which seems simple enough, until I realise there are all kinds of sub-categories of ‘Mediterranean’ with prefixes like ‘meso’ or ‘supra’. Some trees will be all right in one, but not another. But I don’t even know which one we’re in! And then there are the winters to consider: it gets cold here – I’m sure temperatures regularly drop to around minus five in late December and early January. So anything we put in the ground has to be able to cope with that as well. All of which makes me start wondering how anything grows up here at all.

One place to start would be to look around at what’s already here, but again I end up running into more brick walls, not least the fact that I can barely identify a single plant species on our land. I know which are the almond trees, but only because they were the first ones to be pointed out to me, that plus the fact that we’ve got about a hundred of them. Show me an almond tree elsewhere, though, and I might be stumped to recognise it.

And then there’s all this business about mulching and pruning and God knows what. In desperation I’ve turned to Ibn al-Awam, the only complete book on agriculture I’ve got on my shelves. Although it remains to be seen how much help a medieval Andalusian farmer can give me.

The
Kitab al-Falaha
– The Book of Agriculture – is a Moorish masterpiece from the twelfth century, sometimes described as ‘the greatest of all medieval treatises on agriculture’. A two-volume work by a Sevillian gentleman farmer, Yahya ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Awam, it
was
rediscovered in the mid-eighteenth century in the Escorial library just north of Madrid, having lain forgotten for hundreds of years. The book was a detailed manual for running a farm, with tips on everything from irrigation of the land to keeping horses and even bees. It was written in a surprisingly technical, almost scientific style: ‘I establish no principle in my work that I have not first proved by experiment on repeated occasions,’ the author asserted. This didn’t prevent him from adding all kinds of eccentric ideas about farming and land management, however. (
If you want to grow coriander without sowing any seeds, take the testicles of a goat and plant them in the earth and water them. Later you will see coriander grow up where no seeds had been planted
.) And it was filled with quotations and tips from his Greek- and Latin- as well as Arabic-speaking predecessors. One of the interesting things one could gleam from his writing was how the weather had probably changed since his time: one of his recommendations, for example, was that almonds should be picked in August, an indication, perhaps, that the month hadn’t been quite as hot then as it is today.

Apart from the fact that he lived in the Aljarafe district of Seville – a city four hundred miles to the south-west of our farm, significantly hotter today than where we were – little was known about Ibn al-Awam himself. He was mentioned only by two other authors of his period, Ibn Khaldun and the geographer Al-Qalqashandi. Yet his book, sometimes described as a ‘mosaic’ made up from works by previous agriculturalists, was one of the best-known and best-loved works on farming to have been passed down from the golden age of Spanish gardens – the Moorish period, which lasted from the early 700s to the end of the fifteenth century. The standards of agriculture were so high during this time they were not surpassed until the nineteenth century, with the development of modern chemistry. During the Enlightenment, the Spanish authorities became so worried about the decline of agricultural standards that they commissioned a translation of Ibn al-Awam’s work. So in 1802 José Banqueri brought out the first edition in a European language. A copy of this, bought on a whim years before, had been gathering dust on my bookshelves, waiting patiently, it now appeared, for me finally to notice it, take it down and delve into the rich, detailed natural world it set out, page
after
page. Ibn al-Awam was a wonderful observer – in many ways a man before his time. Or was it simply that our view of his time was misjudged? Certain words and phrases dated him – I didn’t have a team of labourers – or slaves – to hand, as he obviously had, to carry out the operations he described, nor would his observations on how to use a lance and shield on horseback prove particularly useful, despite making fascinating reading. Yet I often had the sense of dealing with a near contemporary, a fact highlighted by the absence of reminders of the ‘modern’ world around us on the mountain. It would be wrong to describe him as a friend – there is a formality and distance in his writing which prevents such a degree of intimacy, despite his very personal musings on topics such as the curative powers of rue for epilepsy or the use of squills for warding off lions and wolves – but as time passed and I dipped into him more and more, his presence grew. He became almost like a kindly guardian to whom I might turn in times of need for quiet, gently guiding advice drawn from hard-won personal experience.