Last Days of the Bus Club (18 page)

‘What are we going to do then, Cristóbal?’ asked Pepe.

‘Finish the job off. They’ve gone now.
Ya que estamos en el baile, bailemos.
’ Which translates, rather lamely, as ‘Now we’re at the dance, let’s dance’. It is not perhaps as good an expression as being hung for a sheep as a goat (which of course would be particularly apt in these parts), but it’s how the Spanish put it. And they like this sort of thing.
A saying is a
refrán
in Spanish, and cultured speakers are described, approvingly, as
muy refraneros.

Not long afterwards I took the bull by the horns –
cogí el toro por los cuernos
(as the
refrán
has it) – and set off to see the Hidrográfica boss in Granada. I knew that the fines imposed by the river authority for unauthorised messing with the river could be ruinous. And rightly so, for the water of the rivers is a public resource that should belong to everybody, and yet there are no end of villains, both private and corporate, who are engaged in siphoning off more than their fair share. It’s hardly unreasonable to expect to have to get authorisation for any use of the public resource. However, I did hear later that a friend whose
acequia
had similarly been damaged in the flood, had applied for permission and that permission did not come through for eighteen months. Of course, all the trees that he needed to water were dead by then. So I felt a certain justification in pitching in and getting on with the job.

Nonetheless, every day I was regaled by new horror stories of farmers ruined by colossal fines for the most minimal infraction of the rules. For some time Hidrográfica fines were Manolo’s sole topic of conversation, which rather ruined the pleasure of our hour of
manualidades
. Schadenfreude, as I think I have said somewhere before, is a common trait in the Alpujarra, a good-natured delight, even hilarity, when things go desperately wrong for the neighbours. That’s not to say that they won’t pitch in and help out with great generosity and enthusiasm to make whatever it was that went wrong go right again.

If you’re feeling remotely in need of an uplifting experience, the austere seat of the River Authority in Granada would be the wrong place to look for it. The offices are dark and slightly grubby, with not the least attempt to create a pleasing environment for work or visitors, no decorations except for a few torn posters announcing union meetings and the odd exhortation not to waste water. I felt a little nervous, in the way I tend to feel when entering a hostile environment, because, let’s face it, public administrative bodies are pretty hostile environments, and the plywood-partitioned rooms and frosted glass of the tenth floor did nothing to allay that feeling.

I had an appointment for the start of business at 8.30am, but when I arrived – on the dot – there were some men already in there. I kicked my heels in the corridor, trying to feign interest in boxes of papers and photocopiers. I couldn’t sit down and read a book, firstly because I was too agitated to concentrate and, secondly, there wasn’t a chair … and besides, I hadn’t brought a book.

After a while the men left and I walked into the office, about as depressing as an office can be, and with an incumbent to match. The Confederación Hidrográfica official was short, I think, although it was hard to tell, as he was sitting behind a desk and seemed reluctant to rise and greet me. He had a beard and was dressed in a brown shirt and tie.

The official barely registered my entrance and it transpired that he didn’t know anything about my case and nor was he much interested by it. After listening a little, while signing papers in a file in front of him, he suggested dismissively that I go to the floor below and talk to the secretaries about applying for permission retrospectively.
I was a little surprised by his brusqueness, but what did I expect? I was the felon, after all, and he was a
funcionario
, a civil servant, one of a section of society well known in Spain for their dismissive attitude to the public.

Things were different on the floor below. There was a lot more femininity, for a start, with four women hovering around what seemed to be an information desk. One of them smiled and asked how she could help me. I told her my sorry tale while the rest stopped what they were doing to listen. The first woman, Consuelo her name was, gazed at me intently until I had finished, at which point she piped up with: ‘You’re the one who wrote that book, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I replied a little surprised.

‘I liked the book,’ she said, smiling even more warmly. ‘So, if there’s ever anything I can do to help, then I’d be happy to do it.’ And so saying, she ushered me to an office at the end of the passage and introduced me, with all the pride and care you might reserve for a favourite brother, to the older woman behind the desk. ‘She’ll tell you the best way to present your case,’ I was reassured.

And indeed she did. I went home with instructions to prepare, in triplicate, a sketch of the site, a photo of the site before and after the work was carried out, a description of the site, a description of the work to be carried out, a sketch of the farm, a sketch of the river, an account of why I had failed to follow the correct procedures, a photocopy of the deeds of the farm, a photocopy of my identity document, a photograph of me, a document sworn in front of a public notary to say that I was who I said I was, and another to say that the photo resembled the person it purported to be, which was me … There was something else, too, but I forgot what it was.

I drove home over the hills, eager to get going, and a couple of days later I sent the whole shebang in a big, buff certified envelope to the Confederación Hidrográfica, and sat back to await results.

Now of course one doesn’t expect a quick reply from such a body and, as the weeks fled by, I might almost have forgotten all about the whole episode, were it not for Manolo reviving the subject in ever more spectacularly gloomy terms during
Manualidades
.

‘A man in Tablones had to sell his car and all his goats to pay the fine – and that was just for shifting a couple of rocks in the river. Juan Barquero knows a man who had to sell his farm and move away to another province … You might even have to go to prison,’ he added happily, while I hammered yet another almond into smithereens.

About six weeks later I found stuffed in my post office box a certified letter from the river authority. It told me that I had failed to append one of the required documents in appropriate form, and would I do the whole thing again and do it properly this time. The document conveying to me this information ran to five pages of incomprehensible codswallop. I scanned it in a perfunctory manner. At the end it said something about six months’ grace. I took this to mean that I didn’t have to lift another finger until the expiry of the six months, and having duly noted five months and twenty-nine days thence in my diary, forgot all about it. Well, ‘forgot all about it’ may be not entirely appropriate, given that twice a week during
Manualidades
I was reminded in the most lurid terms of the potential
nightmare ramifications of my misdeed. Domingo and Juan Barquero had taken up this refrain, too, and so every time I bumped into one or other of them I would be regaled with the same litany.

So on the twenty-ninth day of the fifth month after that initial notification, I fished out the document from what is affectionately known by my women as my ‘toy box’. Having not seen it for a bit, I scanned the document with a little more care and comprehension. Lord knows where I had got the ‘six months’ from. It said that I had but ten days from receipt of the registered letter to get the whole business in order … thus I was five months and nineteen days too late. Manolo and Domingo and Juan would be ecstatic. The shit was really going to hit the fan now.

I was seized with anguish about this, for, according to my friends and informants, this default would probably multiply by ten the already ruinous ramifications of my original crime. Failing to read the document correctly was no defence, as it is, apparently, the duty of the citizen to be properly informed. The whole thing made me feel very uneasy and nervous, and each passing week only added to my agitation about the outcome of my case.

And then I sat back and thought about it: more than six months had passed since I had failed to provide the authority with the correctly and duly filled-in forms … Perhaps they had forgotten.

‘No, they never forget,’ Manolo kindly assured me as he sliced off a thick lump of
chorizo
to go with his beer. ‘Sometimes they let it go on for years, and all the time the fine is increasing and you don’t even know. It’s a bad business, a bad business.’ And he shook his head in a feeble attempt at fellow feeling.

Lost in thought I attacked a few more
habas
. ‘I tell you what, Manolo: I’m just going to let it slide, forget the whole cussed issue. Sod ’em, I did my best, and if that’s not good enough for them, well … well …’

‘Well what?’

‘Well … we’ll just see what happens.’ And at that I scooped the
habas
and their outer shells into the same bucket, thus wasting a good half hour’s work.

Despite my bravado, I was quite seriously worried. Stressed, in fact. As the worry grew, I started to come out in boils, and all manner of unpleasant ailments began to assail my person. This thing was in me and doing me harm.

Then one day notification of a registered letter arrived in my post office box from Medio Ambiente – the Environment Department. I was on my way out, going away for a week, so I decided not to accept the letter then; I would pick it up when I came back. Of course, by the time I did come back, the post office, in their inimitable way, had returned the letter to the sender. The direst forebodings began to haunt me. I didn’t need corroboration from my neighbours to know that I had gone too far this time. The administration would be really riled up and out to get me for all I had got. I found it hard to get to sleep at night.

They kept me in this awful suspense for another month, and then there it was, a pink slip back in the post office box. I collected the letter from the desk, signed for it, and went to sit down in a bar so that I would not fall over when I discovered the terrible truth. I ordered a coffee and looked at the envelope for a bit, then tore into it. ‘
LEVE
’
was the first word I saw, because it was in capitals.
Leve
means ‘light’ … it seemed that my misdemeanour was being considered by the administration as ‘light’, i.e. not serious. I read on. The denouement was on the last of five pages: if within thirty days you have not appealed against our decision, you must pay a fine of ninety euros. Ninety euros! That was probably about a fifth of what the original permission would have cost me, had I applied for it.

This was as good a piece of news as the news that somebody wants ninety euros off you can be. I resolved to pay the fine without further ado, and accordingly scanned the rest of the letter to see how one went about paying it. It seemed that I would need a form called
Modelo
047.
I went back to the post office, because sometimes you can pay these things through that august institution, but no, they hadn’t the first idea what a
Modelo 047
was, or how to go about paying the fine.