The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (12 page)

The bulls failed to materialise, and who could blame them? For although the Parque de los Alcornocales is held in high esteem for its beauty, wildness and the variety of its flora and fauna, the corner that we had chosen to explore was distinguished by little other than heavy mud, aggressive vegetation and the apparent absence of any paths.

After what seemed like hours of beating our way morosely through this ill-favoured landscape, we came to a farm, where a short man with a moustache and a
cheese-cutter
cap appeared from beneath a tree and eyed us in an unfriendly fashion. ‘You want to be a bit careful if you’re planning to walk further,’ he growled. ‘They’re hunting today and there’s a lot of guns out on the hills. You want to stay on the track there and cut up the hill just before
you get to the reservoir. Don’t go past the reservoir or you stand a good chance of getting shot.’

‘W-wonderful,’ said Michael. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Go with God,’ said our man and returned to whatever it was he had been doing.

Michael looked at me meaningfully. ‘G-God, what an accursed b-bloody place! If you aren’t lost forever in the trackless forest, you get gored to death by b-bulls – and if the b-bloody bulls don’t get you, the goddam hunters’ll shoot you down! I tell you, Chris, this place is a d-death! Give me the city any day.’

It was hard to disagree just then. But I reminded Michael that this was not intended as a nature ramble. And getting lost and uncomfortable made things, well, almost authentic.

We struck onwards along a dull track for an hour, and then came to a reservoir. ‘We’re not supposed to go p-past the reservoir… That’s where we get shot,’ Michael groaned.

‘Yes, but there’s been nowhere to turn off until now. We’ll just go a little bit further and see if we can find a path uphill.’

We walked on until suddenly, rounding a tight corner, our way was blocked by a group of horned cows.

‘Oh J-Jeezus Christ!’ cried Michael.

‘They’re cows, Michael. They don’t mean us any harm.’

‘How do you know? Oh, God – they’re looking at us!’

It was true. The cows were looking at us in a bovine sort of a way, and seemed reluctant to move out of our path.

‘But that’s what cows do, Michael. They look at you with those big limpid eyes…’

‘They’re looking at us LIKE THEY WANT TO KILL US!!’

 ‘No they aren’t. I mean, they don’t. They’re not bulls – they’re cows, man.’

‘Oh yes? And what about those bloody great horns?’

‘Horns, Michael, contrary to popular belief, are not a defining male characteristic. These are cows – look, they’ve got udders.’ (So I confidently assured him, though I have since been told by a man who breeds
ganado bravo
–
fighting
cattle – that the cows are the most dangerous. The ferocious aggression for which they are bred, coupled with their maternal instinct, can make an extremely disagreeable companion on a woodland walk).

We skirted round the edge of this group of underrated beasts and cut up through the scrub, a hideous slope covered in chest-high cistus, brambles and gorse. ‘I reckon if we just keep on going up we can’t be far wrong,’ I said breezily, to comfort my agitated companion. It was already abundantly clear that his navigational skills were even poorer than my own, so I thought it best, for the good of the expedition, to assume command.

We climbed up and up and on and on. The breath burst from our lungs and our aching muscles begged us to stop, but still we climbed. After perhaps a couple of hours of battling through the beastly scrub, we found ourselves on the edge of a steep muddy track. Not caring a fig where it led, we followed it on up. Every now and then there were scatterings of fresh grain. I decided to keep quiet about this, as Michael, with his poor understanding of country ways, would be unlikely to recognise it as hunters’ bait. But after we passed the fifth or sixth heap, curiosity got the better of him.

‘What d’you suppose this stuff is, Chris?’

‘It’s just stuff.’ I figured that my friend was a man so
irrepressibly
urban that he was unlikely to know what wheat
and barley even looked like. And he was silent for a bit. I heard his heavy mud-clogged boots squelching on behind me. I could tell he was thinking.

‘But then why is there stuff, and to my untutored eye it looks like fresh stuff… Why are there regular heaps of fresh stuff?’

‘That’s just the way it is in the country: there’s fresh stuff all over the place – it’s seeds.’

‘You know what it makes me think of?’

‘No, tell me…’ I asked, bracing myself for trouble. His answer surprised me.

‘It makes me think of the years of hunger under Franco,’ he said. ‘Life really was desperate across this province in the 1940s.’ And Michael went on to tell me of a father and his fourteen-year-old son, who in desperation had left their mountain village to seek work on the coast. They had walked for a day and a half until they got to Málaga – the best part of a hundred-and-fifty kilometres. ‘And not only that,’ he continued, ‘but they spent five hungry days in the city looking for work, and when they didn’t find anything, they turned around and walked back – with no money and nothing to eat, just the figs and prickly pears they could pick as they passed. Just imagine… It’s one thing
walking
with your belly full of food and hope. But to trudge on starving and discouraged like that… How terrible that must be.’

I hadn’t seen this side of Michael before – he had always been the bold and witty raconteur, drawing out nuggets of erudition and displaying them with all the panache of a street performer. But there was a pared-down quality to his speech now and to the stories that followed, as if he were reaching for something elemental. Walking does that
for you: it beats out a different pace for your thoughts to follow.

We talked on – of the miners of Órgiva who would gather and plait esparto grass, to fashion shoes to walk with the next day, as they tramped up the hill to work each morning. The paths were so long and rough that their shoes only lasted a day’s journeying. And I remembered a story that an elderly couple in Torvizcón had told me, of how in the year of their marriage they had rented a farm high in the mountains above Trevélez, and staked all the money they had on some sacks of potatoes to produce a crop of ‘Papas de la Sierra’, which are highly prized as seed potatoes – or were, as nobody sows them any more. They worked all through that long summer nurturing the crop, their hope for a start in married life. But when it came to selling the fruits of their labour, the price they were offered by the wretched local merchants did not even cover the cost of the transport down from the hill. Pepe told me that even fifty years later he could still remember the misery he had felt as he climbed back to tell his wife the news of their destitution.

Michael listened. ‘I think it’s time for some lunch,’ he said.

We threw ourselves down on the track and unpacked the food. Soon the olives were caked in mud and there was mud on the bread. Tiny ants swarmed over the ham and sausage. We didn’t care, though. We just slumped on the ground and ate the ants and the mud along with the rest.

We had climbed above the woods now and could see all the way down to the sea at Barbate. The sun glittered through the mist and the Mediterranean shone as a sheet of white at the foot of the deep forest. ‘That’s where we
really ought to have started, down on the beach at Boloña,’ I suggested.

‘What!? Walk through even more of this beastly forest? Not b-bloody likely!’

It’s amazing how quickly one recovers with a bit of rest and food. With just a few false starts, we stumbled upon a path leading down into one of the typical ‘cloud valleys’ of the park, lush and dripping with mists. The sun broke out through the thick canopy of trees, hung with lichen and mosses. A clear stream meandered in its deep cleft.

We scrambled on down the valley, which had now thinned into a chestnut forest, until finally, at dusk, we entered the village of Sauceda. Michael knew all about it. In 1936, the first year of the Civil War, this village in the forest had become a hide-away for Republicans and for a while had flourished as a model community run along communist lines. Then, at first light one morning, Franco’s air force had bombed and strafed it to rubble, slaughtering hundreds of men, women and children. The only building to survive was the
ermita
, the little stone church.

The village now was used mainly as a summer camp but with the holidays still a few weeks away it was empty and had a ghostly feel. Worse still, the cabins all stank of bleach and there was not a single bar. We were reduced instead to cajoling the warden into selling us a box of ready-made 
sangría
. Michael’s face as he carried this box of foul liquid back to our cabin could have been used as a study for Christ Carrying the Cross.

Night came on and we sat in the dark on a stone wall, outside our chlorinated hut, and addressed ourselves to our muddy olives,
chorizo
and bread. We grimaced at one another as we washed it all down with the
sangría
. ‘Lord,’ I exclaimed, ‘if this was Morocco, we’d be sipping a delicious glass of mint tea right now; not poisoning our livers with this chemical muck.’

‘Ngraaughh,’ Michael agreed. He was gnawing hard on a hacking of
chorizo
.

I looked at the horrible, mud-caked sausage with distaste. ‘And why is it that we always end up eating some part of a pig?’ I demanded. ‘Surely we ought to make some efforts to be a little more authentic. No?’

‘W-well…’ answered Michael, taken slightly aback by my assertion. ‘It depends what you mean by authentic. Five hundred years ago converted Muslims and Jews were obliged to display a
jamón
swinging from their rafters as proof that they had genuinely adopted Christianity. Otherwise, they’d have been slung out of the country by the Inquisition. Why do you think the meat has achieved such iconic importance in this country? Anyway,’ he paused, ‘it makes sense that, as hispanicised Brits, we follow the same habits.’

He had a point. I took the slice of
chorizo
he’d balanced for me on the point of his knife, and settled back for a long, contemplative chew.

A sad fact about a long walk is that it tends to be
repetitious
and somewhat dull to relate. The scenery varies, as does the weather, and occasionally you run into a fellow
traveller. But mostly it’s just a matter of walking:
marvellous
for meditation, less so for dramatic narrative. And so it was for Michael and me. We trudged on. Michael became as foolishly nonchalant as I was about cow encounters and we talked a lot about our sore and weary bodies and – as you do when you’re hungry and have no prospect of a decent dinner – about the deliciousness of food.

Next to history and art, gastronomy is the subject that Michael most excels in. And he talked with great passion about El Rey de Copas, the restaurant of his friend and neighbour, Juan Matias, a chef who Michael insists is touched by culinary genius: a man who can slice, heat, mix or beat the edible bits that co-exist with him in his particular corner of the planet like no other cook. In the way that a really fine wine can touch the nerve endings of the soul and lift you briefly above the quotidian woes, so can his food. Or it can on a good day. For Juan Matias isn’t always in the mood for haute cuisine and the foodies who seek him out from as far afield as Madrid can, on occasion, find themselves presented with a dish of steak and chips. ‘But what steak! What chips!’ Michael enthused, kissing the ends of his fingers.

Not that we spent all our time on this walk discussing our favourite restaurants. No, indeed. There were moments when food, wine or even a decent bed for the night were mere passing thoughts. One was when we stumbled upon the Roman road that zigzags steeply up through dazzling mountain scenery to Benaocán, with its white stones, gutters, culverts and drainage systems almost entirely intact; and another on the high pass of Puerto Boyar just above the town of Grazalema, when we were treated to an extraordinary fiesta of birds.

We had stopped to guzzle oranges in the grass beneath a huge crag, pockmarked with little caves and nesting holes, when suddenly the air came alive with the beating of wings: there were choughs cawing, bee-eaters flashing the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught their feathers, crag martins racing hell for leather among the rocks, kestrels mewing, hawks hovering. Then, from somewhere in the upper air, came a whooshing sound, a great shadow passed over us, and with a sudden downdraft a huge eagle landed on the ledge not twenty feet above our heads. I looked up and gasped in wonder and, as I looked, down came another. They were so close that I could see the fierceness in their eyes, see the claws on those terrible talons, talons that could effortlessly crush the bone in your wrist. To see these magnificent creatures land on their nest so close to us was perhaps the most dazzling sight I had ever seen.