OUR FIRST LAMBS WERE BORN IN APRIL. On a bright spring morning I pushed open the stable door and discovered a steaming bundle of wet wool lying in the straw. A ewe was licking it happily and making the snickering noises that show maternal devotion in the ovine world. It was a small moment of triumph.
Over the next two weeks El Valero shrank to the confines of the stable as Ana and I hung about the ewes ready to help them through any obstetric difficulty. Few showed an interest in the service. Unlike their overdomesticated British counterparts, the Segureñas have an independent nature. They seemed happy to wait for the stable door to creak shut again before depositing their slithery offspring, quietly and without much fuss, into nests that they had scrabbled in the straw.
Inevitably, one or two did need a bit of help and Ana was ready to oblige. Ana is good at lambing, her hands are smaller than mine and better suited to the agonisingly constricted manipulations between the ewe’s pelvic bones to get the head or feet into the correct position for the exit. I was pleased to see her getting so involved after all her reservations about my sheep venture, although she was still far from enthusiastic about my plans for the expansion of the flock.
We kept the ewes and lambs penned close together for the first few days so the lambs could gather strength and bond strongly with their mothers; then we let them out.
‘You shouldn’t let the lambs out,’ said Domingo.
‘Why ever not?’
‘The sun will eat them, and their lungs will fill with dust. Dealers round here don’t like to buy lambs with the dirt of the campo on them.’
‘What should we be doing, then?’
‘You should separate them from the ewes when you let the sheep out in the morning, and leave the lambs in the stable.’
I looked at other shepherds’ arrangements for this. Their lambs had a pretty dismal existence, shut in all day long in a stable where no ray of sunshine entered, though the little creatures were indomitable. Not even the most cramped and mephitic hell-hole can kill the joy of young animals. The slightest irregularity in the dung-packed floor became a hillock from which they would leap and, however tightly packed together, they lost no opportunity for racing round and high-tailing their legs in the air.
It was undeniable that the sun wouldn’t eat the lambs in the stables, nor would their lungs clog with dust, and they certainly wouldn’t lose weight through excessive exercise. They could address themselves precociously and earnestly to the business of eating high-protein concentrates and getting to killing weight as fast as possible.
Ana and I walked down to the river-fields to see how they were getting on. The newborn lambs were wandering about, gingerly sniffing the grass, startled by the terrors of snails, grasshoppers and butterflies. The older lambs, still snowy white and tiny, had gathered in a group and were busy hurtling in a mass along the raised bank of the acequia only to stop all of a sudden, turn back and race to their mothers, grab a quick drink of milk and fall asleep in the sunshine.
It was a sight to move even the stoniest-hearted profiteer and we decided to keep the lambs out. They have a short enough life anyway and I couldn’t deny them some joy of it, not even in the interest of efficient husbandry.
A few weeks later I came home to find Domingo sitting on our terrace waiting to introduce me to his ‘friend’ Antonio Moya. As I climbed up the steps, sweating and dishevelled, the way I look after the lightest task, the creature seated beside Domingo uncoiled and advanced towards me, hand outstretched. It was enchanted to meet me; it had heard much about my exalted reputation and in the flesh I made such reports seem as shadows.
I stared open-mouthed at my flatterer, smooth-chested and meticulously groomed in his crisp white shirt, and gleaming with gold. Domingo’s friend was the dealer El Moreno: the dark one. I found it difficult to believe that a man with such a face could possibly deal on business terms with the general public. His smile could have been applied with the briefest burst of an aerosol, his eyes lacked the warmth of a cobra’s, and every line of his features, the dimple on his brow, the creases beside his mouth, the very set of his ears, spelt deceit.
‘Such a beautiful farm… and what a lovely house. You must be very happy here.’ He addressed me as one would a bat, staring at the shit-encrusted cave where it lived.
‘It suits us.’
‘I should think it does! You foreigners are so much cleverer than we Spanish.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘You choose such wonderful places to live. Domingo says you have some fine lambs to sell.’ His smile narrowed.
‘They’re not bad, but they’re not ready to sell yet.’
‘I have seen them and I will give you a very fair price for them.’
‘And how much would that be?’
‘Five thousand apiece for the lot.’
‘They’re not ready yet.’
‘I’ll take them as they are.’
‘Not for five thousand you won’t.’
‘But they’re camperos, they’ve got the dust of the field on them.’
‘I don’t care, I’m not selling them till they’re finished and it won’t be at a price like that.’
There followed a rapidly delivered tirade of blandishments, against which I stood my ground admirably.
‘Well, Cristóbal, it has been a pleasure – no, an honour – to do business with you. Until we meet again.’ And El Moreno strode off with Domingo, cursing insistently in his ear as far as I could make out.
‘So that was your friend El Moreno?’ I said next day to Domingo, a little puzzled by the apparent alliance.
‘Yes, we used to work together. He lost his driving licence, so I used to drive him round, visiting shepherds, and he taught me all the tricks of the trade.’
‘It must help a lot, knowing a dealer you can trust.’
‘Trust? You must be joking! Sooner trust the serpent himself.’
‘But you told me he was a friend…’
‘Well, yes, he is, but he’d still screw me, just like anybody else. He screws everybody.’
‘But what sort of friendship is that, for heaven’s sake?’
‘He does it for my own good, he says. It keeps me on my toes and teaches me a useful lesson. That way I avoid the pitfalls of being screwed by other dealers.’
‘It seems to me an awful way to carry on. Are all dealers such shameless shits?’
‘It’s their job; it’s the way the system works. They make their living by smooth talking, guile, knowing how to spin a story. It’s a skill, just like whatever skill it is that you have that enables you to make a living from whatever it is that you do.’
Domingo has always been a little unsure as to how we make ends meet, as indeed am I.
‘And by the same token it’s a part of the shepherd’s skill to cope with sharp dealers like El Moreno. A shepherd can’t survive if he only knows how to walk with his sheep. He must also know how to sell them. It’s the way life is, pitting one’s wits against others. Take my cousin Manuel, for instance. Manuel is a hopeless case. He sold all his lambs to El Moreno the other day for four thousand. That’s Manuel stuffed for the year now, penniless!’
‘And you stood and watched?’
‘Of course. I drove Moreno there.’
‘And you didn’t raise a finger to stop Manuel being screwed?’
‘It’s nature, isn’t it? There’s no point in saving a beetle from a blackbird…’
‘But if the beetle happens to be your cousin…?’
‘Bah! you have to learn from the blackbird.’
El Moreno must have heard on the bush telegraph that the lambs were still for sale. The next time I saw him he turned up alone, considering himself now on terms of sufficient intimacy to dispense with the guidance of Domingo. It was five in the afternoon and we were sitting on the tinao with a couple of English friends who had driven over from Órgiva.
El Moreno clapped me on the back and told me of how he was barely able to contain his delight at seeing me again, made himself known and agreeable to the rest of the company, and sat down to drink wine while we all took tea. Our friends were enchanted by him. Within ten minutes the assembled company were hanging on his every word and vying for his attention.
It was then that he introduced the subject of the lambs. ‘Let’s go down and have a look at them and see how they’ve got on,’ he suggested.
We leaned on the stable gate and gazed into the crowded pen.
I waited for Moreno to get the deal rolling… nothing. He considered the lambs in glum silence. I was the first to break.
‘Well?’
‘Well, they haven’t grown much, have they?’
‘They’ll be a good twenty kilos.’
‘Never!’
‘They weigh heavy, these Segureñas. All meat, you know.’
‘So, how much do you want for them?’
‘They are a good weight, and unless I’m mistaken the price has gone up… so if you take them all you can have them for six thousand pesetas each…’
‘No good, the price is much lower than that.’
‘… but if you want to select the best, then seven thousand.’
El Moreno shook his head and slipped into gear. ‘Hold this.’ He proferred a heavy bundle of notes. ‘I’m offering you four thousand five hundred – that’s nine hundred duros – and how many did you say there were? Thirty-seven lambs? That makes thirty-three thousand, three hundred duros – here it is in notes. Go on, count it…’
Now I consider myself fast enough with mental arithmetic for a negotiation on the price of some sheep, but I clearly wasn’t in the same league as El Moreno. His speed and accuracy were astonishing. He knew he had the advantage over me in this, but he was deliberately adding to my confusion by calculating partly in pesetas and partly in duros.
A duro is five pesetas and a common unit of currency throughout Spain. Often older people cannot compute in simple pesetas; one day in the bakery I heard a customer saying, ‘What do I owe you, Mari-Carmen?’ ‘Three hundred and ninety-five pesetas,’ came the reply. ‘Don’t be silly woman. What’s that in duros?’ ‘Seventy-nine.’ ‘Right then. Now we understand one another.’
As El Moreno spread the money, I kept my hands firmly behind my back and looked at the wall so as not to be hypnotised by that great wad of notes.
‘Hold these!’
‘Look, I’m not taking four thousand five hundred, nor five thousand. I said six.’
‘Alright then, if you must’ – and he grabbed my arm and slapped a tempting ten-thousand-peseta note into my quivering palm. Then he began counting again, interleaving crisp large notes with smaller grubbier ones of much lower denomination, and all the time switching between duros and pesetas in a low hypnotic numerical chant.
‘Umm… I’ve lost count.’
‘Right, let’s start again, ten, twenty, thirty,’ and off he went, slapping note after note on the pile.
The lambs considered us with suspicion from their huddle in the corner of the pen. Moreno had me right where he wanted. Apart from the dazzling arithmetical gymnastics his trick seemed to have something to do with making sure that I was always holding some of his money, and never giving a straight answer to my questions.
‘I’ve lost it,’ I pleaded. ‘How much are you offering me now anyway?’
‘I’m giving you a hell of a good deal here, you won’t get nine hundred and eighty duros anywhere else and that’s my top price.’
‘Well, I’m not selling them below five thousand five hundred. You know as well as I do that they’re a gift at that.’
‘Look, you’ve dragged me all the way out here…’
‘You invited yourself.’
‘I’ve come all this way and wasted a lot of time. I’m a busy man and I haven’t time for this sort of foolery.’ Saying which he strode off angrily down the hill. I started up towards the house.
‘Dammit,’ I muttered to myself. I couldn’t afford to lose the sale. ‘Perhaps I asked too much…’ I turned to find Moreno at my elbow.
‘Here, hold your hand out – count this – five, seven…’
I sold them in the end for five thousand two hundred apiece: that is to say one thousand and forty duros. The price for the lot was one hundred and ninety-two thousand four hundred pesetas – or thirty-eight thousand four hundred and eighty duros. Thank heavens Spanish sheep dealers don’t have guineas, pounds, shillings and pence in their armoury.
The buyer pays about ten percent as a deposit and then pays the rest when he comes to fetch the lambs. The next day El Moreno turned up with a lorry and four confederates. We counted the lambs from the stable into the lorry. Now you wouldn’t have thought that a dispute could arise over the matter of counting thirty-seven lambs one by one. But it did. So skilled were these men in the art of deceit that I seriously doubted my own ability to count.
Five thousand two hundred pesetas was far from being a good price for the lambs, and it might seem odd that I eventually decided to do business with a man whom I so utterly mistrusted. I had a good reason, though. We had had no better offer and we needed the money. Not long after El Moreno’s first visit, Ana had made an announcement that forcibly brought home to us the value of ready cash.
‘I think I’m pregnant, Chris,’ she said. It was an otherwise perfectly normal day. We were standing on the tinao sorting out a sack of almonds and watching the sheep munching their way through the wilderness.
‘Pregnant,’ I repeated absently.
‘I’m going to have a baby.’
‘You’re having a baby… but… but . .?’
I shuffled my feet before her, not quite sure how to arrange my limbs and features. There was too long a moment of confusion before I managed the right sort of grin and hugged her with exaggerated care.
‘God, that’s wonderful… I… er… hell, I hardly know what to say…’ We laughed nervously. This is said to be one of the key moments in life, and there I was messing it up.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby. I did. Children had for a long time been part of the grand plan in moving to El Valero, but despite our best efforts they hadn’t turned up and in the meantime other plans and pleasures had come creeping into the space I had reserved for fatherhood. I wondered, too, if we were really the right sort of people to take on this awesome responsibility. Was the eccentric lifestyle we had chosen the right thing for a creature as delicate as a baby? Running beneath all this disquiet was a deep vein of delight that I was scrabbling to reach.
That evening we opened a better bottle of wine than we might otherwise have drunk and illuminated our omelette and tomato salad with a candle and some flowers. Our supper conversation ranged over the new rogue element that we would now have to take into our calculations, but our words were carefully chosen so as not to tempt fate by anything too emphatic. If we hadn’t known ourselves to be sublimely content we might have each thought the other just a little depressed.
A few days later I telephoned my mother to tell her the news. This would be her first grandchild.
‘It appears, Mum, that at long last you’re going to be a grandmother.’
She was silent for an instant, and then she seemed to burst with happiness. I had never experienced anybody ‘bursting with happiness’ before and even filtered through international telephone cables, or zinging through the ionosphere, it blew me away. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘who knows what this baby will be like, or what my part in its existence will do to me? But just to hear that happiness in my mother’s voice makes it all worthwhile.’
I told Domingo, too, apropos of nothing. ‘En hora buena – congratulations,’ he replied, then added in an unusually thoughtful tone, ‘I’ve told you before that a baby is what you need at El Valero. You’ll get lonely all by yourselves on the wrong side of the river.’ And he returned to swatting a horsefly that was gorging itself on the blood of Bottom’s belly.
At the beginning of October I went to Sweden to spend a month shearing sheep. It may seem odd to go sheep-shearing in a Nordic country just as the winter comes on, but this was the way the Swedes liked it. I would go in October when the sheep were about to be housed for the winter, and then again in March just before they lambed. Swedish sheep, or most of them at any rate, need shearing twice a year, which was fine for me from a financial point of view, but a source of grief to the Swedish sheep-farmers, who had to pay for two shearings and earned nothing at all for the wool.
I had been going to Sweden twice a year for fifteen years but somehow, despite having some good friends there, that Nordic utopia had failed altogether to find a place in my heart. I found myself swamped by the lugubrium of the uncontaminated but dreary landscape and bored by the dullness of its spiritless towns and cities. I would drive sometimes for days through interminable pine forests in the snow to get to far-off farms where I would shear flocks of black sheep in dark barns beneath the dismal light of the glowering northern sky. The money was spectacularly good (and we would be needing it with a baby to take care of) but it was hard to stay cheerful.
During my previous trips Ana had looked after the farm on her own – ‘Ay, que valiente!’ local people would say when they heard. ‘To stay all on your own in a terrible place like that, ay por dios!’ But this time a friend of our Dutch neighbours, Belinda, a woman we had come to know well, offered to stay with Ana and keep her company. Belinda was a handy sort of a woman who amongst other things knew a thing or two about midwifery.
The shearing usually took about a month, and Ana had calculated that the baby would arrive round about the middle of November. Without the presence of Belinda I think we both would have felt a little uneasy.
Sweden passed even slower than usual that month, but at last I had completed the business and, with a boosted bank balance and a bag stuffed with pickled fish, smoked salmon and Swedish cheese-slicers, found myself back on the bus to Órgiva. It hauled its way up the long winding inclines from the coast into the mountains south of Granada just as the last rays of evening sunshine were setting on the snow-clad peaks. What a wonderful place to be born, I thought.
It was dark by the time I arrived at the bus station but Ana was there to meet me. She had been showing clear signs of the presence of somebody else inside her when I left and now there was no mistaking her condition. She moved self-consciously, with a slight backward lean to counterweight the swelling dome of her belly. We embraced tentatively and I stood back to admire the extraordinary phenomenon of two-persons-in-one.
‘I’m certainly glad to have you back, I don’t think it’s going to be long now,’ she said as I started up the Landrover.
‘I’m glad, too, I can tell you. God, it’s good to be home.’
The occasional absence is a great tonic for any relationship. I was always pleased to see Ana, but after a month in Sweden thinking shadowy thoughts of antenatal emergencies – well, I was ecstatic. She looked good and healthy, too, blooming as the cliché goes, and surprisingly at ease with the drama ahead.
Back at the farm, the sheep also looked fat and happy, and the dark green globes of the oranges on the trees were full of the promise of sweet fruit about to ripen. The ground beneath the odd fig tree that the sheep couldn’t get to was spattered with rotten purple fruit.
It took Ana to point out to me that there was also a rather bare look to the place. She really seemed quite concerned. In my absence, the sheep had been getting out of control, working their way through the farm, clearing the undergrowth and mowing the grass down to the level of the dust. That in itself was no cause for alarm but Ana pointed out places where the stone walls of the terracing had begun to crumble and fall, leaving dusty paths and hillocks of earth and stones.
Sheep tend not to go round the end of a wall to get on or off a terrace – they all jump up or down together in the middle – and a hundred and more little hooves at a time had started to take their toll. They had also climbed onto the wire protectors I had put round the new apricot trees, and nibbled the tops off. They had invaded the garden and eaten the buddleia and all the palm trees we’d put in; and then finally they had burst into and laid waste the holy of holies, Ana’s vegetable patch. They didn’t think much of the aubergines and chillis but had wolfed the rest.
‘I fear they’re going to turn the place into a desert,’ said Ana gloomily.
‘Maybe that would be better than the jungle it would be without them.’
‘I think I prefer the jungle with its flowers and greenery.’
‘Yes, you’re right… but I’m sure we’ll find a way of dealing with them,’ I said, stretching lazily out on my favourite corner of the terrace. ‘You can’t get everything right first try, can you?’
I’m not quite sure how I expected to spend those last fleeting moments of freedom before parenthood began; sitting, perhaps, on the terrace with Ana, sipping tea and indulging in whatever reveries the landscape triggered. I hadn’t imagined that I would be cast out each morning to wander the farm clutching a bucket of watered-down dog-turd.
Canina, as this concoction is known, was recommended to Ana as an excellent sheep deterrent and she was determined that I should liberally spatter each of our trees with it. Now, I was as concerned as Ana about the future of our orange and olive trees, and I knew better than to interfere with the nesting instincts of a very pregnant woman, but it was beyond me to accept this task with good grace.
Skill is paramount in the dousing and flicking of the esparto grass brush and there are obvious and unsavoury consequences to getting it wrong. I suffered all of them. There was also the disheartening knowledge that the deterrent effect would wear off, especially after a heavy rain, and that the moment you finish coating the last tree the sheep will be beginning some tentative nibbles at the first.
My afternoons were equally hectic. These were spent erecting some rudimentary fences to guide the sheep away from the vulnerable areas on the farm, beginning with the stalag perimeter fence that Ana had designed for her vegetable patch. If Ana had ever had a soft spot for sheep, those days were past. A stoical tolerance was the best they could hope for now.