Last Days of the Bus Club (15 page)

T
HE LOCALS SAY THAT IT IS
autumn rains that do the most damage. The sweet showers of the new year seep lightly into the earth to nourish the shallow-rooted spring flowers, making the country glorious with colour and scent. But autumn rains, falling, as they sometimes do in this steep country, in opaque and thunderous sheets, can flay the daylights out of the land. The shaly earth, lashed by a merciless barrage, crumbles and dissolves, forming grey rivulets that snake into ever greater rivulets. And the greater rivulets become torrents and cascades, tearing the sodden land into gullies and chasms, abysses and gorges. At which point the water, now thick and grey and slow-moving, with the sludge it has gathered in its headlong downhill rush, pours, along with a hundred thousand other torrents, into the mother of all torrents: the river.

Spain, of course, with the exception of lush and sodden Galicia in the Atlantic northwest, is a country racked with droughts. And the southeastern quadrant of the Peninsula,
which includes Almería, Murcia and our own province of Granada, is probably the driest part of Europe, with a rainfall not much greater than that of the Sahara Desert. And, although the following statement tends rather to the emotional than the statistical, of these driest parts of the dry, the driest of all is where we have chosen to make our stand: the Alpujarra. In fact it is only the presence of the snows on the peaks, and the aquifers beneath the Sierra Nevada, and the beautiful and intricate systems of irrigation devised by the Romans and the Moors, that keep our lush green valleys from becoming desert.

We often feel that we’re living on the edge, on the delicately balanced frontier of a changing climate. The mean annual temperature in the Peninsula has been higher these last few years than since the records began in about 1850, and not a winter passes without the violence of the weather causing mayhem and fatalities in some part of the country. Sometimes there’s a warning, a vision of the way things might go. In 1995, for instance, the year scheduled for the World Downhill Skiing Championships on the Sierra Nevada, there fell not a flake of snow, and the event had to be postponed for a year. The old boys who while away their days sitting at the entrances to the villages came out in force to announce that never before had such a thing been seen. Everybody shook their heads and, with earnest looks, predicted cataclysm and doom, although it has to be admitted that these are scenarios much discussed and enjoyed in the Alpujarra. Throughout the whole of that winter there was no rain and no snow, but in the summer, through the miracle of those bountiful aquifers, the springs and rivers kept on flowing. In 1996, it rained well and there was a thick cap of snow on the mountains.

So you never really know. Except in summer, when you can be fairly certain that between May and September you will have an unbroken succession of cloudless days, the weather in Andalucía does more or less what it will. ‘
¡Ay qué calor!
’ the Spanish groan, even when it’s not really that hot at all. The English may admit to a dull fascination with the weather, but the Spanish border on the obsessive in their weather commentary, which is an odd thing, since in summer every day is a cloudless day and the sun beats on down as predictably as ever.

After the agony of August is over, the first thing one does at the start of each day is scan the sky for sight of a cloud, that first harbinger of blessed rain. This is an activity fraught with frustration. The great black cloudbanks roll in from the west, spun off the mid-Atlantic lows, and usually spill their rain over Portugal, Huelva and Cádiz; Málaga might benefit from the last drops, but by the time they loom over us they’re all bluster, dry as a bone. It’s the hardest thing to bear when you’re desperate for rain, those clouds seemingly charged with moisture.

And so it was, in Chloé’s second year at college, that September crept in dry as a cracked stick, and it didn’t rain in October either. Even in November it only registered a couple of litres, according to Domingo’s rain gauge – a wheelbarrow whose dimensions, he reckons, roughly correspond to the required square metre. (This is the way that rainfall is measured in Spain: the litres that fall upon a square metre.) Halfway up the side of the barrow, at roughly the point where fifteen litres would fill it, depending of course on the levelness, or otherwise, of the ground upon which the barrow is parked, is a small hole that releases water at a known rate, increasing with the rise
in pressure as the water approaches the top and thus the awesome maximum capacity of the device. The unlettered Domingo, who is a person much given to such abstruse calculations, knows exactly how to calculate the sliding scale of water loss.

We have a rain gauge, too, a green plastic cone with a short spike in the bottom to stick in the earth. If it rains too much, it gets top-heavy and falls over in the wet mud. It’s a cheap bit of kit, made of poor quality brittle plastic and poorly calibrated; but if we wanted a proper quality rain gauge, we would have to shell out about a hundred and forty euros, which seems like an awful lot of money to pay for a calibrated plastic cone. Of course we’re talking about a professional rain gauge here; if you wanted to submit your findings to some learnèd body, then this is what you would have to have. And besides, you would have to be the sort of person who would be prepared to commit himself to getting up early in the morning – because for some unfathomable reason these sorts of things always have to be done early in the morning – at the same time every day on all the days of the year, read your rain gauge and send off the fruits of your investigations to the learned body.

Now I know that this is the way that we humans and our society achieve excellence and progress: by assiduousness and scrupulous attention to detail, and fortunately there are heaps of people who are really good at this sort of thing … but not me. I know full well that to have to spring out of bed on three hundred and forty days of the year simply to inform some learned body that once again there was not a single drop of moisture in the bottom of my rain gauge, well, I just wouldn’t have it in me, and being the sort of person I am, would be inclined to linger
on in bed and spice up the dispiriting readings with a few exciting extra millimetres.

Anyway, Domingo’s wheelbarrow and even our flimsy plastic cone were well up to the task of gauging the pathetic amount of rainfall we had in November. December was no better either: short, dry, sunny days; lunch on the terrace. We told friends and family in less favoured parts of the world, where it was gloomy and wet – England, mostly – how glorious our weather was.

Chloé came home from Granada for Christmas. I fetched her from the bus stop in Órgiva. These are some of my favourite moments in life, that small involuntary welling of the heart that must be how dogs feel when they lower their ears and wag their tail. I don’t have the same mastery of my ears, and my tail is purely vestigial, but the feeling is there, manifesting itself throughout my thorax whenever I see Chloé or Ana after an absence.

On the journey home, Chloé tried to explain to me the niceties of ‘Pragmatics’, one of the more unfathomable subjects of her translation and interpretation course, which I happily pretended to understand. This was not going to be a long visit – Chloé intended to head back to the city on Boxing Day – but we knew the score by now and felt happy and pleased to be granted this brief shred of her life. On the night of her arrival, the 23rd of December, to our intense relief and delight, the drought broke and the heavens finally opened. We sat by the fire, the three of us, tucking in to a dish of boar – the last frozen cuts we’d saved for the festivities – and double-shucked
habas
, rejoicing in
the waterproofing effect of the green rooves, and listening to the rain as it thundered on the earth of the roof, danced
zapateados
on the skylight, and roared on the corrugated iron of the porch.

This was rain like we had never heard rain before, though, and it made me uneasy. By two in the morning the sound of the roaring of the river that came up from the valley drowned even the infernal thundering of the rain on the roof. I lay wide awake in bed, wondering what we would find in the morning. At four on the morning of Christmas Eve the river sounded as if it were raging from the gorge like the hordes of Beelzebub. The phone rang. Nobody rings you that early in the morning unless there’s something really serious going on. I was awake anyway, racked by now with worry as the awful roaring in the valley swelled in a hellish crescendo. It was Domingo.

‘Cristóbal,’ he said, darkly. ‘Can you get me the keys to your car?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, although I had a pretty good idea what he did mean.

‘I’ve been down to the river and it’s tearing away the ground beneath the wheels. In half an hour, maybe sooner, you’re going to lose your car.’

The car is parked on the far side of the river, on the highest ground in the riverbed, about five metres above the bridge. The keys hang on the back of the kitchen door.

Domingo continued: ‘The bridge has gone; you’ve lost your
acequia
, your water supply, and the track on both sides of the river. The river has completely changed course and is about to take away the fields at the bottom of your farm. It’s still growing, and there’s no way of knowing what it’s going to do. Have you got a set of keys over this side?’

I could tell from the measured way that he was speaking that he was uncharacteristically rattled. I imagined that he had been out all night, rushing around the place fixing leaks and shuffling sheep about, and drenched to the skin, as his waterproof wear is not of the best.

There wasn’t an awful lot I could do about any of this: there were no keys on Domingo’s side of the river, and there was not a chance in a million of throwing the keys across the river, even if it were not swollen … so I went back to bed, where it was warm and dry and the Wife was. Later I lay awake in the pale morning darkness, listening to the hammering of the rain on the flat roof. Had I been a smoker, I would have smoked … in fact, this seemed like the perfect moment to take it up. There was a bull here that needed taking by the horns, but I thought it better to wait a bit till daybreak, and perhaps a lull in the rain, and I’d be feeling a lot more equable about things having had another couple of hours supine in bed.

With the first light of the morning I fished out an umbrella, shook the summer’s dead scorpions out of my wellingtons and stepped out into the rain. I squelched into a world that, having been hard and dry, had overnight become soft and sodden. The rain was still pouring on down and, although the cataclysmic downpour of the night seemed to have passed, the air was so full of water that it immediately condensed on my glasses. I wiped them with a rag I found in my pocket but it only made them worse, so I took them off and walked myopically and with some trepidation down the track towards the river, the dogs trotting along behind.

We hear the sound of the water all year round: in summer it dwindles to the faintest susurration as the water trickles
from pool to pool amongst the rocks, and in winter it’s a constant roaring, not unlike the sound of distant traffic on a motorway, the roaring of rubber on a road. It’s so constant that you barely notice it. This, though, was entirely different: the valley was awash with noise, the terrible noise of swollen and raging waters. The thunder of boulders crashing into one another punctuated the ceaseless roar of maddened water. Misty clouds moved amongst the mountains, cutting off the tops and creating the illusion of strange hills and crags where there were none. There were slender cascades where there never had been cascades before, tumbling high amongst the Aleppo pines on La Serreta, and, adding to the tumult, the crash and tumble of rockfall after rockfall, as familiar crags and pinnacles dissolved before my eyes and vanished in the raging grey water.

The dogs moved through this awful scene utterly indifferent to it, sniffing the new smells and wagging their tails. That’s the way dogs are: they may or may not be composed largely of love, but they have not the slightest interest in, nor appreciation of, landscape or beauty. They’re like teenagers in that respect. As for me, I stood on the corner, my jaw slack, spellbound by the sight of the river in flood. Where were the inoffensive little minnows, I wondered, the tadpoles and frogs, the green lines of tamarisk and oleander that bordered the river where it ran before? They hadn’t stood a chance.

The rain lashed on down as I continued towards the lower fields of the farm. I was heavy with water and the mud on my boots. The sheep peered from the stable door as we passed; they weren’t going anywhere; they hate to get wet. Finally I caught sight of the Trevélez River, rolling down the valley from the north. There was no way I could
even get to where I might be able to see the car: everything had gone. Where there had once been a rich vegetation of trees and bushes, and the road that led to the farm, there was nothing but river. As I stood there, gaping at it all, a whole hedge of brambles, tamarisk and broom came crashing down and whirled away on the flood.