The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (13 page)

‘Jeezus, Michael! Did you see that? I’m telling you, you could live a hundred years and you’ll never see anything like that again. Bloody hell!… I mean, God… I mean… I can’t believe I’ve seen what I’ve just seen…’ I babbled on.

But even Michael, one of the least ornithologically aware people I knew, had stood up, open mouthed, letting the orange knife clatter down the hillside.

At last, on our fourth day of trekking, we crossed the plateau that leads to the valley below Ronda – which we had revised as our target, a waymark perhaps one quarter of the immigrants’ way to El Ejido. The hill town was a most welcome sight, although from a distance, through my sweat-and dust-caked spectacles, it looked like a smear of
white guano on the top of a rock, such as you’d expect from a colony of gannets.

We slogged across the valley, and little by little the euphoria induced by the sight of our goal started to vanish and gave way to a morose silence. As we approached Ronda, I became ever more conscious of how dirty, evil-smelling and sore I was. My companion looked, if possible, even less edifying than I did. He was limping and blistered, and the string that held his pack had lacerated his shoulders. I kept a good distance ahead of him, so I wouldn’t be affected by his groans of pain.

As we reached a curious no-man’s land down by the town dump, the way parted and there was a signpost – the first we had seen since Alcalá. One way said ‘
Ronda
–
20
minutos
’, and the other ‘
Ronda
–
30
minutos
’. Tired and sore though we were, we chose the longer, which Michael thought looked more promising from the landscape point of view.

An hour’s limping later and we had crossed the great gorge and were hobbling into the nearest bar. One drink led to another, and the rich smell of the tapas and the jollity of the bar soon entrapped us, weakened as we were. We forgot our pains and our filthy state, and steeped ourselves in food and drink. It was unthinkable to imagine what it must be like to arrive tired and hungry in such a town and to stay hidden until a safe way out presented itself.

For Michael and me, the route on was simple: we caught an early-morning train to Granada. As the train threaded its way through those hidden parts of Andalucía where it seems that only trains can go, I opened a heavy-lidded eye and looked at my walking companion, who was deep in a book he was supposed to be reviewing.

‘Y’know what?’ I said, in a ruminative frame of mind. ‘I can’t help feeling that we lost track of the original purpose of our journey.’

Michael looked up and studied me thoughtfully.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right, but the truth is that you can’t really get to grips with the difficulties Moroccans have in Spain unless you know a bit about the life they leave behind, don’t you think?’ And with a grunt and a readjustment of his eyebrows, he returned to his book. 

G
RAHAM
G
REENE AND THE
C
OBRAS

 
I
N AN EFFORT TO MAKE ENDS MEET
when we first came to Spain, seventeen years ago, Ana and I used to collect seeds for our friend, Carl, who ran a mail-order seed company from his home in Sussex. As Ana knew something about botany, I tended to be the unfortunate erk who had the brains boiled out of him on hot Spanish
hillsides
, bent with my sacks and secateurs, while she toiled amongst the reference books and told me where to go and what to look for. If the location was somewhere nice and the picking not too disagreeable, then she would come along too.

Once in a burst of optimism, ill-founded as it turned out, we took an order for ten kilos of lavender seed. The seeds of the lavender in question,
Lavandula stoechas
, are
like dust, and we spent weeks cutting plants in the hills, stuffing them into sacks, and emptying them onto our flat roof to dry in the sun. The whole roof was covered in a scented cloud of lavender. We dried it and trod it and sifted and fanned it, and little by little, grain by grain, the black pile of infinitesimal seeds started to appear. It was like panning for gold, because for each kilo we were to be paid £200. If we could achieve the full amount, then the boost to our fragile economy would be enormous. But we never did quite manage the order – like Zeno’s paradoxes, the pile of seeds accumulated at a slower and slower rate, and was periodically depleted by gusts of wind.

We might have despaired if Carl hadn’t come up with an even better route to financial security. We could collect an order of Moroccan broom instead. Now, Moroccan broom, or Cytisus battandieri, is a lovely plant – a big silver-leafed bush with sweet-scented yellow racemes draping down like wisteria blooms – and Carl had seen the most
beautiful
specimens carpeting the forest floor in a clearing just outside a small Middle Atlas town called Azrou. It would be easy to find, he assured me. He had jotted down some directions and drawn a map of sorts, and there would be no problem picking or shipping them out, as no
restrictions
existed between Morocco and Spain. He’d pay me the princely sum of £3,500 for ten kilos – and the same again the following year if all went according to plan.

Well, we were in no position to turn down an offer like that. So, at the end of August, which is just about when the broom starts to release its seeds, I crossed over to Tangier and took the night train to Fez, where I could pick up a bus to Azrou.

It was late morning and the heat at the Fez bus station seemed to come straight from the desert. At length I found the Azrou bus, clambered in and slid into a spare seat. It seemed about to leave, but there we sat, slowly baking in the midday sun, while passengers squeezed into the aisle until further movement was impossible. The sweat poured off me in rivers and my head was pounding by the time the driver climbed in and started the engine. He looked around at the multitude of passengers, eager for motion and air, then got out again and disappeared for another twenty minutes, leaving us half asphyxiated by fumes. Nobody seemed to mind, though, and eventually he returned and we set off slowly across the shimmering stony hills towards Azrou. The wind that came in through the window was so hot it seemed to shrivel the very hairs in my nostrils.

Azrou means ‘rock’ in Berber. It takes its name from a huge rock in the middle of the town, upon which is written AZROU in huge letters. Below the rock there is a line of cheap cafés and basic hotels. I checked into one of them, on the promise of a cold tap in my room, and, after a splash, set off in the soft evening light in the direction suggested by Carl’s map. I had two photos of the plant I was seeking and a photocopied map of the area. For an hour and a half I climbed uphill and into the forest. The holly oaks and hawthorns that grew along the lower slopes soon gave way to the great blue Atlantic cedars. It really was like a
fairytale
forest, the traveller dwarfed by the immensity of the huge trees. The air was still and hot, but the distant blue fronds at the top of the trees lifted and fell in the gentlest of breezes.

I wandered here and there, startled occasionally by scufflings and slitherings, and awed by the beauty of the forest. But there was no sign of
Cytisus battandieri
, and as the gloom settled deeper and the first star appeared in the jagged shreds of sky above the treetops, I decided to give up and return to the town. I was disappointed and a little uneasy: I had invested what for us was a substantial sum of money in this trip and, if I didn’t come home with these seeds, we would have a seriously hard winter.

Still, I had only just arrived and maybe the next morning, after food and rest, things would turn out right. I settled into one of the cafés below the hotel; open to the street, they were bathed in the scent of smoke, roasting meat, coriander and diesel fumes. I picked a table in a tiled room at the back, where I could sit alone, and ordered a tumbler of sweet green tea – stuffed with mint like seaweed in the Sargasso Sea – and a mutton kebab from the grill outside. A ceiling fan hummed lazily, doing its best to keep the flies on the move, and, slurping my tea in anticipation of the meal ahead, I took my book out from my bag and read all the extraneous bits on the cover and inside, delaying the pleasure of beginning.

It was
The Captain and the Enemy
– Graham Greene’s last novel. I savoured its opening sentence: ‘I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time.’ Well, what an opening! I had read once that the
New Statesman
ran an annual competition to submit the first line of a novel in the style of Graham Greene, and that Greene submitted these very words under a pseudonym. Amused when it failed to win, he had the
delicious satisfaction of using the words at the start of his next novel.

My dinner was before me now and I sighed a sigh of contentment as I slipped beneath the glorious spell of being alone and far from home, well fed, and embarking upon a new book.

‘Hallo, my friend. Where are you from?’

I froze, then buried my head deeper into the book. I wanted to read and eat. I was too tired to deal with some stranger’s curiosity. Maybe he was not addressing me and would soon go away.

‘Is the book you are a-reading a good one? Tell me, my friend. Where are you from?’

My interrogator had drawn so close I could feel his breath on my face. Without looking up, and with a very bad grace, I grunted, ‘I’m English,’ and read determinedly on. But it was no good: I’d already lost the thread. ‘Aha, English,’ echoed my irrepressible interlocutor. ‘English from England. Many books I have read from your country.’

‘Good,’ I growled.

‘Yes, many books. I enjoy particularly the novels written after the war.’

The words were overenunciated with a crazy relish, crisp and clipped, and addressed directly into my ear as the man, who was sitting at the next table, had pulled his chair out and was leaning across the narrow space between us.

‘And what is that book you are a-reading?’

Rudely, without raising my head, I said, ‘Graham Greene!’

The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Ah, Graham Greene, I like this author very much…
The Captain and the Enemy
. This was a
later book and not so interesting as
The 
Power and the Glory
, but it is very…’, he paused, searching for the words, ‘… provoking of thoughts.’ And then the man embarked on the most astonishing resumé of the Greene oeuvre:
Brighton
Rock, The Lawless Roads, The Comedians, Travels with my Aunt.
He’d read the lot. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘I may buy this book from you after you have read it? I would like to use it with my students.’

It was time to throw in the towel and, besides, it was becoming a privilege to be called a good friend by this fellow Greene fan.

‘May my friends and I join you at your table?’ he asked.

‘Please do.’ I dissolved and smiled as my new friend and his two friends and a friend of theirs and the latter’s cousin all pulled up chairs and sat down with me.

‘My name is Mourad; this is Ali; and this, Aziz and Abdullah and Hamid.’

‘I’m Chris – Christophe.’

We all shook hands and, in the face of such evident
goodwill
, my churlishness vanished.

‘You are here for holly-days?’ asked Mourad with an earnest smile as he inclined his head to listen intently to my answer.

I had never seen anyone revel so much in a simple exchange of words, and found it disarming. Mourad must have been in his mid-twenties, though his neat moustache, meticulously laundered clothes and polished lace-ups made him seem older.

I put away my book and we sat and sipped mint tea together, searching in a mixture of French and English for common ground. Mourad told me that he had recently finished an MA in English Literature at Meknes University,
hence his erudition, although his peculiarly clipped
enunciation
came from hours hunched over the radio listening to the BBC World Service. He had hoped to teach at the local college, but as there were no vacancies he tried to get by giving private lessons.

‘And what sort of living is that?’ Ali cut in. ‘No one here has any money to pay him, though they want to pass their exams sure enough! And he keeps lending them his books! So he has to work like me in the peach harvest to make ends meet.’ He emphasised his words, and Mourad’s folly, by suddenly grabbing hold of his friend’s shoulder and squeezing it fiercely.

But Mourad was not the only one of the group struggling to make a living. Most of them, it seemed, did a variety of irregular jobs, labouring or harvesting, as well as trying to pursue their ‘professional’ work. Understandably they were intrigued by my seed-collecting mission and, after I had paid the bill, we all strolled down the road to the Pâtisserie Central. Here we installed ourselves at a little melamine table beneath the stars and watched the evening promenade swell to fill the street, as we ate those sweet Moroccan pastries called gazelle horns, and sipped juice made from almonds.

The evening promenade was dazzling to watch. It was August, so the town’s population, normally around 25,000, had doubled, as
émigrés
returned from France and Germany for the summer holiday. This made for an extraordinary mix of cultures and dress. Whole families would promenade up and down the road, maybe a couple of dozen strong –
the older women veiled from head to toe, the teenagers provocatively dressed in skimpy singlets and the tightest of jeans. In between ran the whole gamut of European and Moroccan fashion, from exquisite silk caftans through Parisian haute couture to the coarse and shapeless sacks of the hardliners. Darkness fell suddenly and the heavy throng was illuminated by the lights from the cafés and the odd car cruising carefully through the crowd. The streets were thick with families milling and dust and warm darkness, and the sound of laughter and pleasantries. And there wasn’t a beer in sight.