The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (20 page)

It turned out that we never did repeat our seed-
collecting
enterprise. Back in Azrou, Mourad, with another timely piece of fortune, managed to land himself a job as a teacher. The money wasn’t much but it was enough to enable him to marry. His wife was a Berber whom he’d known since childhood, named Aïsha like his mother, and the couple moved to a rented house in the district of Sidi Assou. He was delighted – this was much closer to the life he’d hoped to lead – and when Aïsha became pregnant with their son Ilyas he wrote in glowing terms of the ‘new generation we are both producing that will forge in harmony a new culture’.

I considered asking Ali to join me instead in the
seedcollecting
work, but I wasn’t sure we could establish the same rapport. And then I, too, found other work. A publisher in London accepted my first book and with a few strokes of ink at the bottom of a contract turned me into a bona fide author. Mourad was tremendously pleased and impressed. He knew, he assured me, that I was destined for the literary life.

We still write to each other and, on rare occasions when Mourad takes me up on offers of help, I cross to Tangier with a few necessary medicines or books for his growing family of two boys and a girl, the latter of whom suffers
from asthma. While we sit together at a harbourfront café talking, as men of our age do, about our health and the sort of future we hope to steer our children towards, I sense how much the travel constraints still weigh on him. Of course he would like the extra consumer power that goes with working and living in Europe. But he insists that even more than this he would like to be free to dream: to plan trips, and adventures and opportunities for his children, without having them so categorically denied. It would be nice, for instance, to think of taking his children to Brighton and tasting that famous rock. 

C
ASA &
C
AMPO

S
OME YEARS LATER
I
FOUND MYSELF
reflecting on Mourad’s reaction to our home, after a phonecall from one Eduardo Mencos. El Valero had looked depressingly like a Berber farm to Mourad yet here was the director of
Casa & Campo
– one of Spain’s glossiest home and garden magazines – asking to come and view our garden. It seemed a ludicrous notion, but Señor Mencos was not a man to be gainsaid. ‘Didn’t you tell him that we don’t actually
have
a garden?’ Ana asked incredulously. ‘And this is just your average mountain farm with a vegetable patch on one terrace?’ I assured her that I had, but that this had been dismissed by my interlocutor as typical British modesty.

‘And you mentioned the old wrecks of cars scattered about the place, and the bedsteads used as gates?’ she continued.

‘Well, yes, I think I might have. Anyway, all farms have old cars and bedsteads on them,’ I countered, neither of the two having featured prominently in the conversation.

‘And that the swimming pool’s a pond full of frogs?’

‘Yes, I said all those things, but he’s read some article about us and is convinced he should come and see the place for himself. He’s not bringing a photographer, though – this would just be to, well… to meet us and have a look around.’

Ana groaned.
Casa & Campo
specialises in features and photos of salubrious dwellings with impeccable borders, topiary, gravel drives, zen follies and the like. ‘It’ll be a waste of everyone’s time,’ she insisted. ‘El Valero just isn’t a
Casa & Campo
sort of place. And I’m not sure I’d
particularly
want it to be.’

She was right, of course, but it seemed ungracious to cancel the visit now. Perhaps we could make some
improvements
. Standing on the terrace, outside the kitchen, I cast a cool appraising eye around our farm. ‘We could get rid of Custard,’ I suggested.

Ana came and stood beside me, and together we gazed down at the ancient yellow carcass of our old Renault 4 rusting away just beyond the steps to our house. Wasps were buzzing in and out of the jagged hole that had once been her sunroof; for some reason hot yellow tin is
irresistible
to wasps. ‘Well, at least it will keep the Guardia happy,’ she reluctantly agreed.

It’s wrong to get sentimental about cars, especially their battered old husks, but the truth is that you can’t help
remembering them fondly. They head my personal
hierarchy
of inanimate objects, along with guitars, walking sticks, the odd cooking pot and a beloved cherrywood corkscrew… Thinking about it, I seem to be consumed with sentiment for a whole array of objects, though cars are very much ahead of the pack.

Custard was the very first car that we bought when we settled in Spain: a canary-yellow Renault 4L, or a
Cuatro
Latas
(‘Four Tins’) as the locals call them. We were seduced utterly by her spotless bodywork and the sparkle of her windows, which we were assured was the work of one devoted lady owner, a pharmacist from Armilla. And in an automotive way Custard trod lightly upon the earth: she didn’t use a lot of fuel and she didn’t weigh much, and like the
Deux-Chevaux
she was a car designed to transport a basket of eggs the wrong way across a ploughed field with a peasant at the controls. That suited us fine, and also the price was right – the equivalent of £600 – which was as far as we could stretch at the time.

We took Domingo along with us to buy it, because he knows everything about cars. He slithered about beneath the car on the showroom floor for half an hour, then pronounced himself satisfied that she was in good order. And so the three of us clambered aboard and clattered proudly back to the Alpujarras. ‘I’m glad we’ve got a car like this,’ said Ana as the engine strained up the steep mountain track, bouncing in and out of the ruts. ‘We don’t want our neighbours to think we’re grand.’ At that time not many of our neighbours owned cars at all, but the look on their faces as they stopped their mules to wave us past held not a glimmer of envy. We called the car ‘Custard’ because it was that sort of yellow – well, the yellow you find in packets, at
any rate; personally, I make custard with brown sugar and cinnamon, so it comes out a sort of dull ochre.

Coming to live with us was a big lifestyle change for the car, with daily runs to the pharmacy replaced by the merciless battering of our track, the fording of the river and heavy loads of animal feed and building materials. Little by little the pristine yellow coat faded, bits began to drop off, and Custard was transformed into a most singular vehicle. The exhaust pipe fell off altogether and the slightest incline made the engine roar like a battle tank; the wheel bearings, as a result of constant soakings in the river, went rusty, so that as the wheels went round they did so with a sound like the twittering of many small birds; and the doors had been damaged by repeated blows and opened with the sound of braying donkeys. Ana found it a little
embarrassing
when people stared as we roared and twittered through the town. But despite the fact that the car sounded like a mobile zoo, we developed a great affection for her. She would go anywhere, in the foulest of conditions and with huge loads.

Domingo gave me a couple of lessons in how easy it is to maintain a Renault 4. You just buy the bits from town or from the dump, and bolt them on. To me it never seemed quite as easy as it looked when he did it, and the job was marred by my sloppy workmanship and complete mechanical incompetence. So, with the battering and bodging, Custard started to go downhill – metaphorically speaking.

It was a state brought home to us, with some melodrama, the following New Year’s Day, when my sister treated us to a wildly generous Christmas present of a night in one of Spain’s fanciest five-star hotels. We arrived late and not
a little frazzled, having rattled all the way from El Valero to Salinas near Loja, a journey of about three hours as it was then. Finally we pulled in through the hotel gates and clanked on along a drive that curled through groves of holm oaks heavily populated by rabbits. Turning a final corner, we came upon the gleaming white towers of the hotel, set amid sweeping lawns and pools with fountains that glittered in the evening sunlight. I pulled in amongst the rows of huge Mercedes and BMWs with blackened windows and
gleaming
paintwork. As if from nowhere, a flunky appeared, a superior-looking cove dressed in an archaic uniform and top hat. Grasping the passenger door, he opened it for Ana. It says a lot for the sort of place this was that, as the door slid off its hinges and clunked onto the ground, he batted not an eyelid. ‘Welcome to La Bobadilla, Madam, Sir,’ he said.

The next day we fixed the door back on with a judiciously placed nail, and limped back to El Valero. It was, however, to be Custard’s last major journey and within weeks she had spluttered to a halt by the old threshing circle above the house, where she rusted away beneath her shroud of wasps’ nests and plants.

Even Ana had to acknowledge that this current state was of no use to anyone, and we agreed to have the car cleared away. So a few days later, Pepe Pilili’s awesome JCB reduced Custard to a loveless lump of barely yellow metal, hoisted her up and dragged her across the river to the dump.

The ground still bore the indents of Pepe’s machine when Eduardo Mencos roared into the valley in a low-slung BMW
estate. I met him at the bridge, a great bear of a man, very blond for a Spaniard, and with a frank and genial manner. I could tell by the way he looked around him that he was a man with an eye for landscape. It was early summer and the heat of the sun was still melting the last of the snows in the high mountains, so the river was tumbling full and clear out of the narrow gorge. He had been gazing at the
riverbanks
lined with tamarisks in feathery flower, the yellow profusion of the
gayomba
and
retama
, and the poisonous pink blooms of the oleanders.

‘You’ve found yourself a Garden of Eden,’ he announced, striding forwards in a cloud of dust and enveloping one of my hands in his. ‘Even Spain, which is clearly the most beautiful country in the world, has little to offer as good as this. You live in Paradise. I am certainly looking forward to seeing your garden.’

‘Er, well, in a sense this is our garden,’ I said lamely.

Eduardo laughed heartily and slapped me on the back. ‘No, this is your farm,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look at your garden.’

We crossed the lower
acequia
and walked between the thick bramble hedges that border the field of alfalfa, towards the eucalyptus grove. ‘Nice-looking crop,’ he commented, but was still casting about for telltale signs of our more decorative patch of earth. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, climbing the stone steps that led up to the pool. ‘This is better – definitely better.’ The pool stood before us, dark green with the excrement of frogs, its still surface dusted with fallen yellow petals of broom. The great iron
waterwheel
grumbled quietly on its axle as it revolved slowly, heaving great quantities of water, fish shit and algae up into the stone filter bottle.

 Eduardo stopped: ‘Now, this is the way a pool should be. This is magnificent.’

I looked at the dark water, at the host of frogs burbling upon the rim, at the dragonflies flitting amongst the lilies and the flags. ‘It’s a bit on the grubby side at the moment,’ I apologised.

But Eduardo was having none of it. ‘What does it matter?’ he exclaimed. ‘If the water were clear, you wouldn’t get that wonderful effect of the blossom against the greenness, nor that reflection of the rocks and hills. And it doesn’t smell of stagnant water or chlorine. This pool is a work of art.’

I was beginning to warm to the man. I tore him away from the pool and led him up to the house. Eduardo took in the muddle of vernacular architecture with one sweeping glance. ‘There are a lot of buildings here,’ he commented. ‘Did you build some of them yourself?’ The question seemed ambiguous somehow, and not altogether admiring. He paused to peer through a gaping black hole, with a door swinging off its hinges. This was what I liked to call my workshop.  

Somebody once said to me that a man’s workshop is a good indication of the state of his mind. This was a rather unkind cut, for mine is perhaps better described as a wildlife reserve rather than a seat of industry and
creativity
. There are ants, cockroaches, earwigs and, though I’ve never encountered them, I know there’s the odd scorpion and centipede. It all lends a certain frisson of excitement to scrabbling around in the dark – there are no windows – among the chaotic heaps of tools and rubbish that litter the floor.  

When more rational and wholesome folks come to visit, they are appalled at the state of things. ‘Why don’t you
clean it out?’ they suggest helpfully. ‘Get a shadow-board, put up hooks, make shelves, put a light in…’ and so on. What these well-intentioned people don’t seem to realise is that to do any of these things one needs tools – and I can’t find the tools. Also, this represents my natural state of being, and I feel that once you start to tamper with how you operate naturally you are sailing into dangerous waters; that way lies despair, nervousness, and the unleashing of the dark beasts of the spirit. Better it is to suffer a few imperfections than risk lousing up all your better qualities by trying to rise above yourself.