The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (26 page)

‘Qué dice el hombre?’
came Paco’s voice from the roof.

‘What are you doing up there, man? We’re supposed to be off on a walk.’

‘I’m just finishing off these few tiles…’

I looked up at what he was doing, then moved around a bit and, shading my eyes with my hand, looked some more.

‘You’ve got that all wrong, Paco. That’s not how you put tiles on.’ I was rather pleased with the way I’d rattled off this traditional Alpujarran way of greeting, rubbishing a man’s efforts. My command of the idiom was improving.

Paco looked down at me from his vantage point with what I took to be a withering look, though I couldn’t see his face as it was silhouetted against the sky. ‘Cristóbal, every single man in this village has passed by my roof and said exactly what you’ve just said. Now I expect that sort of conservatism from my stick-in-the-mud Alpujarreño neighbours, but I thought you, as a
guiri,
knew a thing or two about the wider world.’

‘Apparently not, then, Paco. Perhaps you could illuminate my darkness with an explanation. Also who is this pig and why is it rubbing against your railings?’ A sleek pink pig – a Large White, as it happened – with a red collar and a bell hung about its neck, had just slunk into view.

‘That’, said Paco, climbing down his ladder, ‘is the Public Pig and it has come for its breakfast.’ He pulled its tail in a friendly way. ‘It’s communally owned by the people of Torvizcón and fed at the public expense until the
fiesta
of San Antón…’

‘And what happens then?’

‘Hombre,
then it gets raffled off and whoever wins it gets to eat it,’ he responded, before yelling, at the top of
his voice, ‘Paz!’ (pronounced as a Yorkshireman would say ‘path’) to summon his daughter from inside the house. ‘Your pig’s here,’ he shouted.

‘Voy,’
came the reply – ‘coming’. The pig started to get frisky at the sound of Paz’s voice, and began hopping from foot to foot jingling its bell.

‘As for the tiles…’ continued Paco. ‘We were in Galicia in the autumn and I noticed that in some villages they have this singular way of laying them so that they look good and drain better. But I fear it may take a thousand years before the
tontos
of this village accept that it’s actually an improvement. I sometimes wonder if the evolution of ideas actually works at a slower pace in the Alpujarras than elsewhere on the planet, And I also think, Cristóbal, that perhaps you have been living here too long.’

Before I could offer a considered reply to this
suggestion
, Paz came through the door, dressed in regulation school uniform of baggy jeans, tight T-shirt and hooded top. She was carrying a bowl of slops and leftovers. The Public Pig nearly turned itself inside out with delight. Paz placed the bowl on the ground and the pig launched itself upon the gruesome-looking fare, its face suffused with ecstasy.

‘Hola,
Paz,’ I said.
‘Qué tal?’
I wasn’t going to trouble an eighteen-year-old with
Por dónde andas?
or
Qué dice el hombre?

‘Things are fine,’ she said, fiddling with a troublesome lock of her long hair. ‘Though the exams are a bit of a pain right now.’

‘What are you studying these days?’ – the typical old man’s question.

 ‘I’m specialising in Classics… Ooh and I’ve got to run – I’ve got a Latin exam today and my lift to school is about to leave…’

‘Best of luck, then. I’m sure you’ll do fine – and so will your pig…’

‘It’s not my pig, Cristóbal, it’s the Public Pig; but I think it likes me a lot.’ And she bent to scratch it behind the ear while the pig looked at her thoughtfully.

I was looking at Paz thoughtfully, too, surprised to the point of speechlessness by her gestures and voice. It wasn’t that there was anything unusual about them; in fact the opposite. She sounded exactly like my own daughter. The style of delivery, the intonations, the body language and gestures – they were exactly the same. If I were to shut my eyes it could almost be Chloë. Of course they were both products of the same school, the Órgiva
bearpit
, but they weren’t close friends or even part of the same gang; after all, Paz is eighteen and Chloë fourteen. It was humbling to reflect how the influence we have as parents is as nothing compared with the power of the peer group. I pondered this fact a little sadly, as I waited for Paco to finish cleaning his tools. Eventually he emerged, pulling on a light jacket.

‘Vamos al campo,’
he said. ‘Let’s head for the hills.’

We walked together down the
rambla
– the flash-riverbed – out towards the Cádiar river and the Almegijar bridge,
stepping
up the pace a little to warm ourselves in the cool of the morning. Parked on the bridge was a big vintage motorbike and, standing beside it, a boyish grin playing behind his
moustache and spectacles, was its owner.
‘José, qué alegría
– what happiness, what are you doing here?’ I called.

‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ said Paco. ‘I invited José Pela to come along with us.’

‘Hola,
Cristóbal.
Qué dice el hombre?’
– we repeated all the conventions. But I was genuinely delighted to see José, who is the teacher at the primary school in Torvizcón. He had came down to the Alpujarras from Santander in the north almost twenty years ago, with his beautiful raven-haired wife, Mara, and they had a son not long after Chloë was born. I had first met him at the inaugural meeting of the
Amigos del Río Guadalfeo,
a campaign group set up to stop the dam being built in the Guadalfeo River, and we had remained good friends.

José had never learned to drive a car. His beloved
motorbike
was a much more suitable form of transport for getting to the little school far up in the folds of the
rambla,
where he used to teach, and he was quite content to leave the
driving
to Mara. Then, one morning six years ago, on the quiet road above Puerto Jubiley, Mara’s Land-Rover jumped the crash barrier and rolled over the edge. Nobody knows quite how this could have happened but José was left alone with their six-year-old son, Aretx. They had been a very close family, and the two were left utterly desolate.

When José moved to the school at Torvizcón it was a foregone conclusion that he and Paco would become friends. They both shared a restless curiosity about the world and its ways and, although José had a rather
different
approach – his unassuming manner and knack of
drawing
other people out made him a sensitive and popular teacher – he thoroughly enjoyed Paco’s more passionate and extrovert ways. I like them both immensely and often
think what a fine, albeit tiny,
tertulia
we would make. The
tertulia
is a peculiarly Spanish phenomenon where a group of friends will gather regularly to discuss a topic – be it politics, religion, music, poetry, literature, art or whatever. Although inevitably one drinks, as most
tertulias
gather in bars, it is the talk that is the thing. I had always wanted to be invited to join a proper long-established
tertulia
– Madrid has some that go back generations – but I don’t think Órgiva has such a thing… or at any rate I haven’t been asked to join it. I’m happy, though, to make do with Paco and José. They are opinionated, pleasingly radical and unstoppably loquacious, and our Almond Blossom Appreciation Society is, for me, about as good as a
tertulia
could ever be.

‘Last time I passed this way the path was somewhere here,’ said José, beating at some brambles with a stick. ‘But it’s got so overgrown. Nobody uses these paths any more.’ Nonetheless, after a bit of thrashing about, we found the cobbled old mule-path and began the long climb up to the village of Almegijar. Paco and José immediately launched into a torrent of animated conversation. As for me, I have always thought it unwise to talk too much when climbing steep hills, so I kept quiet and just slogged on.

It was not yet 9.30, but it was already hotting up and we soon stopped to take off our jackets and look at the view below us. ‘José is finally getting his act together and
finding
himself a new woman,’ confided Paco, wiping the sweat from his face with a spotted handkerchief. ‘He’s been on his own for long enough. I keep telling him it’s doing him no good. Eh, José?’

‘I suppose not,’ replied José, struggling to get his breath. ‘But sometimes I wonder.’

 ‘You can’t have doubts, man! You’ve got hordes of women lining up,’ said Paco with a grin. ‘They send him poetry,’ he added, turning to me.

‘Tell me more, José. What’s your secret?’

‘It’s the Internet,’ said Paco. ‘That’s the way things are done nowadays. José has put himself on offer on the Internet.’  

‘I posted a notice a few weeks ago,’ said José a little shyly. ‘And… well… I got an awful lot of replies. I’m not sure quite what to do about it.’  

‘It seems they’re all poets, José’s women – and they’re all desperate to marry him.’  

‘Have you actually met any of these people?’ I asked.  

José kicked a stone off the path and scratched his ear. ‘No, not yet,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to have to do something about it soon… You know, meet up with one of them.’  

‘Would that be the medical researcher from Sevilla you’re thinking of?’ asked Paco, who seemed well informed on the subject. ‘She wrote him pages and pages of barely disguised erotic verse. I think she could be the one, José, no?’  

‘Hmm, I mustn’t be too hasty, you know. It could all be a terrible mistake.’  

‘Don’t be a fool, man. You’ve got to try them all,’ said Paco with a salacious smirk. ‘Although it’s romantic love with a view to marriage that José’s after. He’s not just some cheap cyber-Lothario like you or me…’  

I was quite surprised by Paco’s irreverence when
talking
about what I reckoned must be really a rather sensitive subject for José, and tried to make my own comments more sympathetic. ‘Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ I enthused earnestly, ‘and I hope it works out for you. I’d certainly do it in your position…’

‘So would I,’ said Paco. ‘In fact, I’m thinking of doing it even though I’m not in José’s position. The thought of all that poetry makes my eyes water…’

‘I can’t see Consuelo getting terribly excited about it,’ I said.

‘It’s amazing,’ said José, ‘All those people out there on the Internet, just desperate to get together with somebody. It’s been like an avalanche, it really has.’

We were all quiet for a while, thinking our various thoughts on the theme.

By now we had reached the terraces just beneath the village. The path here was one of those beautiful ancient ways, with broad steps of cobbled white river-stones. ‘Here’s our first almond grove,’ I said. ‘Let’s stop and contemplate it for a bit.’

If ever I find myself doubting the pleasure of living somewhere as abstrusely remote as the Alpujarras, I think of moments like these. The pale stones of the track were interlaced with bright-green spring grass and in the corners were clumps of luminous yellow oxalis – the
pica-pica
that children love to pick and eat for the sweet vinegary taste of its stalks. Above the
pica-pica
were stone walls, harbouring a population of tiny lizards darting from sunshine to shade. And overhanging the walls were the blossoming almond trees.

Now, an almond flower is quite the loveliest thing ever seen. There’s only the subtlest of scents, but, with the exquisite beauty of the pale pink petals, clouds of them against the burned black of the trunk, you hardly need a
scent. And through the mist of petals, which hum with great blue
abejorros
or carpenter bees, you see the bright blue of the sky. It makes your heart droop with pleasure like a heavily laden branch.

We stood, the three of us, in this perfect place, drenched in warm winter sunshine. I sat down on a stone and squinted against the sun at the view.

‘Here, Cristóbal, drink…’ Paco nudged me with his
bota.

A
bota
is a leather wine bottle and an essential accessory for any self-respecting rural Spaniard. It’s shaped the way you’d think a goat’s stomach would be shaped, and made of soft brown goat hide with a waterproof lining of pine resin tar. In the plastic cap is a pinhole, just enough for a
needle-thin
stream of wine to pass.