The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (28 page)

‘Now, this one’s a better wine, Cristóbal,’ announced José. ‘Can you not perceive the difference? That last one, though rich and ruby red as you say, caked the mouth with a layer like pig fat does and would therefore be useless to accompany a meal…’

‘Whereas this delicious little wine,’ continued Paco, ‘fills your mouth with a blossoming vapour as it warms to your body temperature. It prepares the palate for the pleasure of food just as it prepares the soul for the pleasures of love.’ José and I both put down our glasses and stared hard at Paco, who was watching out for the youth to order a refill. ‘Paco,’ said José, ‘I should never have let you see those letters. I’m afraid the poetry’s gone clean to your head.’

Later, in the heat of the afternoon, we got lost on the hill; the path vanished, and after crashing ineffectually about
in the scrub for a time, we found ourselves beside an
espartalón,
a patch of esparto grass that looked like a reedy marsh, stranded on the dry hill. Esparto –
Stipa tenacissima
– is one of the defining plants of the Mediterranean. It grows abundantly in the wilder parts of Andalucía higher than a thousand metres above sea level. It’s a tough, wiry grass, coarse and virtually unbreakable – you can even tie knots with it. It was traditionally one of the great resources of the rural poor, used for making shoes, ropes, mats, baskets – anything that is now made with plastic or rubber.

We sat on a rock for a while and tried to get our bearings, while Paco absent-mindedly began plaiting some strands of grass. ‘Have you ever met Agustín?’ he asked.

‘Which Agustín? I know at least four Agustines.’

‘Agustín Góngora, the old man who has the esparto museum in Torvizcón.’

‘Ah, no. But I’ve been wanting to meet him and see his museum for years.’  

‘Then let’s go and see the old
comunista
right now,’ said Paco, jumping to his feet and heading off down towards the river.  

My enthusiasm was genuine. I had been intrigued by Agustín Góngora for years, ever since filling up the car with petrol in Torvizcón. Some years ago a certain Pepe Vílchez, a native of the village, had a big win on the National Lottery and with the spoils he decided to indulge his oldest and dearest fantasy, and built a colossal petrol station by the bridge at the bottom of the village. The crowning glory of this Herodean work was a niche set into the wall by the Coca-Cola vending machine, wherein was displayed an esparto statue of a mule accompanied by a couple of
officers
of the Guardia Civil. They wore the unmistakable patent
leather tricorn hats and belts and were properly hung with holsters and guns. But that aside, they were buck naked – and stupendously endowed – with every feature exquisitely fashioned from esparto. This deliciously irreverent tableau, I was told, was an original Góngora. It was there for years, but (sad to relate) the last time I went there it had disappeared.

We passed through the tangled back streets of Torvizcón until we reached a large house with a broad vine-shaded terrace. I remarked on the crowd milling around, chattering and enjoying the warm evening air.

‘That’s not a crowd,’ said Paco. ‘That’s Agustín’s family.’

We negotiated the throng of squabbling babies and
children
, mothers, fathers and aunts, until we came to the man himself, a brown-skinned, white-haired ancient, the
undisputed
king of this lively court. Paco embraced him warmly.

‘Hola,
Agustín. I’ve brought a couple of friends to see you.’

Agustín rose and shook our hands, studying us with his quick smiling eyes.
‘Encantado,’
he said. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to see the museum.’ And, so saying, he led the way round the back of the house and unlocked a low green door. ‘There was talk of installing my museum in some grander building down in the town,’ he told us. ‘But I prefer to keep it up here so the family can enjoy it and I can exercise some control over how it’s run.’

The museum was a typical Alpujarran house, a maze of small rooms with whitewashed walls and low beam and cane ceilings, also whitewashed. It was populated by a fantastic array of improbable characters and creatures. I walked from room to room, spellbound by what I saw. People had told me that Agustín had an extraordinary talent, but I had no
idea that he was this good. And the man was just the same, his sparkle and wicked wit undiminished by his eighty years or more, giving us a running commentary as we passed among his fabulous creations.

The singer Lola Flores was there, demurely clad, as was Miguel Ríos, the Granada rocker. A hoity-toity
schoolmistress
sat sidesaddle on muleback, going home for the holidays, while a voluptuous poultry-maid stood naked amid a hilarious gaggle of esparto chickens. There were local characters and satirical political figures, most of them semi-naked and all artfully and wittily crafted from esparto grass.

‘Now what do you think this is?’ the artist asked with a wicked grin, waving a couple of unfathomable creations at us. ‘Not the first glimmer of an idea…’ I ventured.

‘It’s a bra,’ he snorted. ‘And these are esparto knickers. It’s all that’s left of my lingerie line. I’ve been working on this for ten years now, but most of the more interesting creations are in Madrid. They’re going to get models to wear them on a catwalk for a TV show. The producer rang me the other day and complained that the knickers were too big and kept falling down, so I’m making some esparto braces to keep them up.’

I wondered aloud if I ought to buy a set for the wife. Paco shook his head. ‘Do you really want to go home stinking of costa and bearing a pair of esparto knickers?’ he asked. Perhaps not. A stunt like that could bring the reputation of the Almond Blossom Appreciation Society into serious disrepute. 

T
HE
W
AVE OF
C
OLD

I
N 2004 IT RAINED IN
J
UNE.
Two hours of torrential downpour made rivers in the dust and the hot pine trees steamed, filling the air with heady scent. Then it stopped, and we knew that it wouldn’t rain again till autumn. September came in hot and dry and, though there were some tantalisingly cloudy days towards the end of the month, not a drop of rain fell. And the same in October. If it doesn’t rain in October people start to scratch their heads and worry: this is the time when most of the year’s rain tends to fall, not gently like the spring showers, but in great bursts that wash away mountain tracks and flood the river-beds and
acequia
channels. The lack of rain that year became a talking point, as old sayings were dusted off and bandied about. The Spanish, who are much given to pithy and often meaningless rhymes, have a doom-laden saying for just about any weather condition in any season. The air
that autumn was thick with gloomy predictions in doggerel, but still there was no rain.

So there was no grass, either. The baked earth of summer stayed the same, whereas normally one of the beauties of autumn is the film of fine green grass that spreads like a low-lying mist across the parched land. In November the coolness turned to cold, and the days were filled with a beautiful clear autumn light. Some clouds gathered around the tops of the Sierra Nevada and in the morning we woke to see a sprinkling of new snow on the peaks. But that was all; no rain fell in November. It doesn’t rain a lot in December anyway, so by Christmas there was a tangible feeling of concern. And the incipient drought was not just confined to Andalucía; the whole of Spain was affected, including dank Galicia in the north. Reservoirs throughout the country were low, and in the mountains the springs began to dwindle as the aquifers that fed them dropped to critical levels.

By Boxing Day the Indian Ocean had erupted, taking three hundred thousand lives in a monstrous welling of waters, and leaving millions in destitution and misery. It seemed foolish and distasteful to complain of anything after a cataclysm like that, but here in Andalucía we had our own climate disaster. Rolling down from the north and
intensifying
fiercely as it crept over the heights of the sierras came what the Spanish call the
ola de frío
– the wave of cold. To the north of the mountains, in Guadix, the temperature sank that first night to eighteen degrees below zero,
freezing
the life from all but the hardiest shrubs and trees. As the mass of icy air came down off the mountains and moved south, it warmed a little but not enough to save the crops in fields and greenhouses from Málaga to Almería.
Well-established avocado trees hung limp and brown; the bananas, mangoes and papayas that had thrived on the semi-tropical coast shivered and died. In the greenhouses, the tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and beans – after
tourism
, the economic engine of this region – turned to mush. Tens of thousands of small farmers saw their hopes of a harvest crushed and their future in ruins.

We got off lightly. We woke that first morning with our water system frozen solid; this is normally such a mild climate that nobody bothers to bury their pipes. I got up before dawn – Chloë has to be on the school bus at eight o’clock – and put the kettle on. The cats, a good indicator of temperature, were lying in a heap in the warm ashes of the fire; the dogs, curled up with their noses up their arses, didn’t even move as I came down. Outside, the stars
glittered
bright in the icy air and the moon shone with a
terrible
pallor over the white valley. On dark winter schooldays, I light candles for Chloë as she eats her toast and honey. It’s a little thing, and foolish perhaps, but candlelight lends warmth to the dark of early morning. That morning, I left Ana in bed conserving some warmth, grabbed some brush and kindling and built a blazing fire. Then, to warm us all from within, I made a pot of thick, hot porridge.

As Chloë and I headed down the track I could see the sheep huddled together and steaming in the deep straw of the stable. Normally they sleep scattered about beneath the stars, in the yard. Reaching the fields down by the river we saw the scarecrow, immobile with his wooden gun, staring across a glittering field of alfalfa, each of the thousands of plants white with crystals of frost. At the mouth of the
irrigation
pipe was a small glass mountain of icicles. We had never seen anything like it before.

 Halfway across the river, Chloë cried out, ‘Look, Dad! There’s ice forming on the edge of the water!’ I couldn’t see it, being too busy steering out of the ford, but on the way back I pulled up on the hill leading down to the river, and got out to look. I stepped onto the muddy hummock that goes down to the water and promptly crashed down onto my back as my feet slipped away from under me on the ice.

I shot down the bank until I was in the water up to my knees, and howled curses as the bone-gnawing cold washed into my shoes and up my trousers. I struggled up,
halfwinded
, onto one elbow. To my right there came a groan and, seemingly in slow motion, the car, with the driver’s door open, slid slowly into the river and headed across to the middle. The handbrake had got frozen and hadn’t engaged properly. The river was about to pour in through the open door, so I staggered to my feet and plunged in pursuit of the car, hauled myself in and slammed the door. With my legs and feet numb I drove on up to the house and crawled back into bed with my sleeping wife. This is something really nice to do: get up, get really cold, then go back to bed and enjoy the wonder of the warmth of a human body. Your partner won’t like it a bit, but it’s only fair if you’re the poor schmuck who has had to get up and get the family ship underway.

Later, Manolo turned up wearing a black fur Red Army cap with a red star badge on it that Bernardo had bought for him on one of his periodic visits to the world outside the Alpujarras. He came bearing a frozen branch of
retama.
The sprinkler had been playing on it in the night, and as it froze hard the fronds had become more and more thickly encrusted with ice until it looked like a great glass
chandelier
.

‘Look how beautiful it is,’ he said with a great smile of delight.

This was an entirely different sort of winter from any we had known in our time in the mountains. And even the old folks, whose constant refrain is ‘This is the way it used to be back in the old days’, had seen nothing like it. The temperature on the north side of the Sierra Nevada stayed below fifteen degrees for weeks, causing thousands of hectares of olives to freeze and die. The whole harvest was lost. There was snow on the south coast, and even across the Mediterranean: the population of Algiers, most of whom had never seen snow, woke up one morning to find their seaside city cloaked in white.

On that day, there was a heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, which gave a little hope for water later in the year, and for the first time the snow reached the hills around our farm. I took the dogs for a walk and ten minutes up the track we were walking in a thin crust, which soon became a deep white blanket. The branches of the mountain shrubs drooped low and heavy with the weight of frozen snow, giving the landscape a surreal look; these Mediterranean plants were not conceived to bear snow. Soon it was knee-deep. The dogs had never seen snow and were wild with excitement, Bumble ploughing through it like a bulldozer, while Big leapt along in her footprints like a porpoise.

As I walked through this unfamiliar, glittering
landscape
, my thoughts turned to the high southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. I had an urge to climb as far as I could into that new and untouched landscape and ski beneath
the peaks and the startling blue sky, with only the swish of my skis breaking the muffled silence. Unfortunately I was hindered by two serious problems. Firstly, I hadn’t a clue how you got up there when the trails are covered with snow, and secondly I was a very rusty skier and not at all sure I could be trusted on my own. I put the case to my two friends, Jesús and Fernando, who run Nevadensis, a small company that arranges mountain-guiding for the Sierra Nevada.

‘You can come with us,’ they said. ‘We’re taking the mountain club from the university up there next week. We’re both going, and Gerardo will be leading us. You remember Gerardo?’

I did. Gerardo, who had led an ice-climbing weekend I once went on, was the Sierra Nevada’s equivalent of Sherpa Tenzing. In spite of being nearly as old as me, he was the fittest and hardest mountain man I had ever met. He was utterly indefatigable, and expected the same from everyone else. In a sudden rush of casual machismo, I put my deposit on the counter.

Ana was appalled when I told her. ‘You must be bonkers,’ she said, looking pityingly at me, ‘at your age and condition.’

I was about to remonstrate about the injustice of the remark when Château, our fat black cat who lives on the kitchen work-surface and only ever raises himself to eat or hawk up a fur-ball into the cutlery tray, suddenly leapt through the door and shot up the jacaranda tree. It was a thing he had never done before (or since), so we watched him agape. The cat looked pretty nippy on the lower part of the trunk, but as he gained the topmost fork his enormous inertia began to overcome his momentum. He teetered for a moment, scrabbling for a grip, and then fell clean out of the
tree with a great thump, knocking the wind out of himself. ‘There,’ said Ana picking up her astounded cat and
stroking
it. ‘Let that be a warning to you: you’re just too old and unfit for that kind of stunt.’

This needled me, so off I went.

The Nevadensis group consisted entirely of the university’s mountain club members, except for myself and a bloke called Paco, who was about the same age and level of fitness as me. We headed up the mountain to a refuge, then spent the afternoon practising the sort of skiing we were going to use to slide up from there – on through the snow towards the ominously-named Pico de los Machos.

The exercise involved fixing sealskins – well, not actually sealskins, but a fur-fabric substitute – to the bottoms of our skis, to enable us to ‘ski’ uphill. With varying degrees of success we attached the skins and, in a long straggly line, slithered off uphill. Once we had climbed high enough, we clamped our heels into the bindings and zoomed down, then turned round and clambered back up again. Of course, it all seemed pretty futile in the way that skiing does, but it was a lot of fun going down – and going up gave a sense it was doing you some good.  

After we had climbed and zoomed a few more times, we returned to the refuge to gather heaps of pine logs from the forest to warm the place up. As the sun slipped behind the peaks, the temperature dropped like a stone, so we all tumbled in and slammed the door to keep out the bitter cold. Then, to kill the hours of darkness and help forget the cold, we had a party. It was a fairly static sort of a party,
admittedly, as the refuge was tiny and there was no room to move – and in any case nobody fancied straying too far from the fire, which had been cunningly sited so that it heated only one corner of the room. But it was a talking, laughing and drinking party, with pasta and sausages, a lot of noise and a fair bit of booze.