DURING OUR FIRST YEARS at El Valero the weather had been more or less predictable. The summers were hot and the winters were mild. Although a feeling of nervous anticipation would set in when we contemplated the onset of the fierce summer heat, we were surprised, when it actually happened, by how well we adapted to it. We soon learned to drag the bed onto the roof and sleep beneath the stars, to hang a heavy blanket over the door to keep the cool air in the house, and to put a bottle of frozen water in the struggling gas fridge.
Winter weather was comfortable, cool and sunny, though with not quite enough rain to keep the flora of the hills in good fettle. Even during our own short time here we had noticed that the winters had seemed to become just slightly drier – nothing dramatic but enough to leave an air of dejection about the trees and a desperation among the more shallow-rooted plants.
The river ran on easily and inoffensively through winter and summer alike, swelling briefly as the June heat melted the mountain snow, then returning to its lazy summer level. The rain and the river muddled along in their own way, apparently reluctant to give us any trouble, until the summer after Chloë’s christ-ening when we had our first taste of serious drought.
Almost no snow had fallen that winter on the mountains, and the spring rains fell feebly and dried up with a spate of hot winds coming up from the Sahara. By June the river was no more than a few brackish puddles among the boulders, and then in July, for the first time in living memory, the trickle of water in the Cádiar river stopped altogether.
Dead fish lay rotting in the dry pools and the paths of the valley were ankle-deep in hot dust. The grass in the fields at El Valero withered to brown and crackled beneath our feet, and the leaves of the trees shrivelled and curled. On hot summer evenings in previous years we would stroll en famille down to the ford, and bathe in the pool, or sit enjoying the breeze and watching the swallows and bats put on their evening aerobatic show; but that summer it was difficult to imagine water ever running again in the river. The silence of the river was made more sinister by the insane screaming of the cicadas.
It’s the Greenhouse Effect, said some… the hole in the ozone layer… El Niño… an unfortunate alignment of planets. The old men shook their heads and predicted dark times to come. The drought affected the whole of Andalucía and most of Spain. Rivers and springs dried up all over the province; wells were down to the salty sludge at the bottom; whole forests of trees, even the hardy Aleppo pines, withered and died. Órgiva was limited to an hour of water a day, and there were bush-fires breaking out right across Spain.
Ana and I felt somehow let down by the river. We had bought our farm on its far side – cheap, because nobody else wanted to take the risk – and during all of our time here the river had been nothing but a good neighbour to us, entertaining us during the day and lulling us to sleep at night. It had left our bridges alone, it had permitted us to drive the Landrover through the ford at most times of the year, and it provided cool bathing to refresh us from the heat, and clear water to irrigate our crops. It showed none of the nasty tendencies we had been warned about – and now it had gone and dried up.
I had found the idea of living close to a really dangerous and elemental force rather appealing but it had become about as elemental as a duck-pond in a municipal park. It was a dying thing, it seemed. When I mentioned these thoughts to Domingo or his parents, they would shake their heads and look at me in consternation. Nonetheless, as September arrived and there was no sign of the thunderstorms that come to break the summer heat, people grew more and more concerned.
As if to compound the misery, towering banks of thunderheads would gather around the mountains, and then black clouds would boil up the valley, but not a drop of rain fell. As night drew on, the stars would appear through the gaps in the cloud and by the time midnight came the sky would be clear once again. Perhaps this really was a fundamental weather change.
A number of foreigners thought this was the case and talked of abandoning their Andalucian homes. Barkis’s rescuers, George and Alison, who live high up on the Contraviesa, were thinking of moving north to rain-sodden Galicia. They had created a water-garden with a pool and waterfall, right beside their house, but the spring that supplied its stream had dried up the year before and now there was barely enough water for the rabbits.
Moving away was hardly an option for us, as we had already burnt our boats by buying a farm that no one else was likely to want. It was a relief, though, not to have to bother ourselves about that decision. Like Domingo, we would be staying come fair weather or foul, and the knowledge that this was so served to strengthen the bonds between us.
Then in mid-September it rained. A few heavy drops fell, sporadically at first, each one making a small crater in the dust. Little by little the drops coalesced into a steady drizzle. The colour of the land darkened and the air filled with the smell of hot wet dust and pine. The stones in the river glistened and with the passing of the hours tiny rivulets and puddles began to form. A quiet sussuration became apparent where before there had been silence. By the morning, still with no heavy rain, the river was flowing again. With the lowering of the clouds everybody’s spirits started to lift. It rained lightly for three days, enough to settle the dust and build up the flow of the river, and then it stopped. Everybody agreed that there had not been enough rain to water even the peppers, and that the time for rejoicing had not yet come.
September moved into October with no more rain, though something kept the river going. And then in November the downfall began, not with a deluge, just a nice steady downpour that kept on coming day and night, day and night. By the morning of the second day there was a terrifying flow of dark water racing down from the gorge. Effortlessly it shifted the bridge out of the way, pulverising the stone piers and sweeping the beams far down the river. And with each passing hour it rose still more, bringing with it boulders the size of small buildings thundering like cannons as they moved through the awful tumult. The water was black and evil-smelling, and all the country round, normally so quiet, echoed to its monstrous noise.
The days of rain became weeks and our roof started to leak, the solar power died, and all the firewood was so soaked it was useless. The river thundered on, filling the valley with a sense of foreboding. As the earth became saturated with water, the hills began to crumble into the valleys. We would hear a roar and watch as hundreds of tons of sodden earth and rocks avalanched down the mountainside, bringing trees and bushes along with it. Much of the acequia was destroyed by landslips so that there was not even a trace of its former path, and a huge mass of rock had slithered down onto the track. The only way to get things up to the house now was with the wheelbarrow. I had never imagined such awesome erosion; the mountains were literally being swept down to the sea.
We had no telephone, which had the effect of emphasising our isolation, though we were also pleased not to be worrying people by telling them how awful things had become. There were fourteen buckets and bowls dotted about the house catching drips, and the nearest thing to good cheer was a dull fire smouldering in the chimney.
Ana, with her usual foresight, had amassed a decent stock of tinned tomatoes and dried pasta to eat, some potatoes, onions and flour, custard powder and anchovies, but there was little else. We weaved around the drips in the house, trying to find amusements for Chloë and distractions from the minor ailments that were beginning to plague us; coughs, sniffles, wheezy chests and a lassitude that the damp pages of Juliette and a water-logged herb garden could do little to alleviate.
I remembered Expira and Old Man Domingo’s warnings about the river and their dread tales of the Deaf One’s daughter dying in childbirth, or the woman with acute appendicitis whose mule was swept from beneath her when she tried to reach the hospital. So this was what they had been talking about.
There was a way out from El Valero if an emergency arose but it involved a four-hour walk up the hill and along to Mecina Fondales. The bridge at Mecina was an ancient stone one built fifty feet above the river in a narrow gorge and usable at any state of flood. This way might have been an option for shopping, at a pinch, but less useful in cases of appendicitis.
As our enforced isolation continued, we became daily more disheartened and began to feel a little threatened by the ceaseless roaring of waters and the rain and mist that now never left the valley. Under normal circumstances we would do all we could to avoid going to town, but now we were almost reduced to tears by the thought of its unattainable delights.
And then one day as I was wandering about down by the river, I saw Domingo. What struck me about his presence was that he was on our side of the river. When I had finished expressing my astonishment, he told me that he had managed to walk across in a place where the river was wider and shallower, using a stout stick to support himself. He had just come to check that we were alright. ‘What we need to do is fix up a cable across the river,’ he announced. ‘It’s never been done here before because people are too old-fashioned to think of anything new, but I think it could be the solution to your problems.’
The next morning I stood on the bank of the river just upstream from the ford, waiting while Domingo sorted out a tangle of string and wire on the far side. After several tries he managed to throw across a stone attached to a line of string. I pulled on the string and steadily the wire cable passed over the river. On the wire was a bag containing a spanner and a pair of bulldog clips. I passed the cable around the base of the trunk of a stout bush and connected it with the bulldog clips.
When I had finished, Domingo connected his end to the trunk of a tamarisk, in a similar manner to my side but including a tensioning screw, which he then wound up as tight as he could. Then he snapped a shackle onto the cable, and, suspended beneath it on a rope, inched out across the water. The cable stretched as he reached the middle but he was still a good metre above the river, and in less than a minute he landed among the bushes on our side.
I clapped him on the back and laughed for sheer relief that he was safe, and delight that the thing was going to work. We then set to work putting in a couple more tensioning screws and reinforcing the anchor around the bush, and within the hour we had a safe and serviceable aerial cableway that we could use until the river dropped enough to build a new bridge.
Over the following weeks we refined the ‘Flying Fox’ with a smooth-running system of ropes and pulleys, a comfortable canvas bucket-seat, and a landing platform on either side of the river. Its only small disadvantage was that, except for those with a very outward bound sort of disposition, you needed two people to make it work, thus reducing the already thin incidence of single visitors. Chloë loved to be hauled across; it was the best swing she has ever known. We all got pretty skilled at using it, passing across gas-bottles, sacks of animal-feed, sacks of shopping, a new water-tank, friends and neighbours and their children, some rams, and, on one occasion, a sick ibex.
The ibex had been found hiding in a bush by the ford one evening. It was stricken with the sarcoptic mange, a skin disease that the wild ibexes had picked up from flocks of sheep and goats. At the time the mange was sweeping through the ibex population and causing great concern to the Nature Protection Agency. Domingo suggested that we haul it across the river and take it to the Agency vet in town. We caught it, lashed the poor creature’s feet together and hung it from the shackle. Then we swung it across the river and dumped it in the back of Pepe’s Landrover, to the consternation of his dogs who were crammed to one side to make room. The vet bathed the ibex, vaccinated it and then released it a week later fully recovered. It took poor Pepe another week, however, to rid his dogs of the scourge.
When the rain finally stopped and the clouds lifted, we set about drying out the house, a matter of dragging outside anything that could be lifted and flinging open the doors and windows to let the sun and wind blast through. Then we began picking up the threads of our daily life. One afternoon, as I was hacking the finishing touches to a drainage channel from the sodden stable-yard, I was surprised to see Antonia walking up the path.
‘Hello,’ she said in her carefully intoned English. ‘I have brought something for you people all alone with no bridge. See, here are some cakes – and this bottle, I think, will cheer you up.’ It was always a pleasure to see Antonia and she was right about the Dutch gin, but it amazed me that she had appeared at all.
‘How did you get across the river?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me you can use the cable on your own?’
‘Domingo helped me,’ she answered simply. ‘He will come and join us, he is making the cable more strong. He wants to borrow something.’
Sure enough, Domingo soon sauntered up the hill, casting critical glances at my attempts – too little and too late – to make flood channels. He sat down with us and drank some tea, a thing he very rarely does, and even helped himself to one of Antonia’s cakes. Neither Ana nor I had ever known him to eat cake in our house before.
‘I want to borrow the fencing pliers.’
‘Of course. Why, what are you doing?’
‘Putting up a bit of fencing to stop the sheep shitting on Antonia’s terrace,’ he replied as if it was a routine farming chore.
That autumn Antonia had moved into the house at La Herradura, just across the valley, to get away from the turmoil of the building of a new battery rabbit and chicken farm at La Hoya. The owner of La Herradura was pleased to have Antonia living in the house at a peppercorn rent, as houses here seem to show their appreciation of a human presence by being slower to fall down. Domingo’s flock, unable to cross the river, was grazing that winter at La Herradura, and the sheep, all two hundred of them, liked to gather in a tight huddle on Antonia’s patio to shelter from the rain; hence the problem with the sheep-shit.
Domingo apparently needed to borrow a lot of tools for whatever it was that he was doing at La Herradura because he accompanied Antonia on almost all of her trips back and forth to the house. We grew used to seeing them walking together up to our patio and, if it surprised us that Domingo seemed rather more sociable than before, and Antonia somehow happier and more spirited, we neither of us felt inclined to comment on it.
By the middle of April the water level had gone down enough for us to build a new bridge. Domingo and I, with Bottom dragging the heavy green beams, built it in a short day, a considerable achievement I thought. I had no more illusions about its permanency. I had learned my lesson about building in the river. As the snow on the high mountains melted with the heat of early summer, the river rose again, giving the new bridge a battering, but leaving it this time where it was. Then the river settled down to its summer level, flowing peacefully down the valley. Having shown us its wrath, it was a good neighbour again.
The summer that followed the rains was a rather more auspicous season. The sheep thrived on the lush grasses that now covered the hill, giving us a fine yield of lambs. The holiday cottage that we called El Duque, the old name for the land on that side of the river, was occupied week after week by guests who were delighted with the beauty of the exuberantly blooming countryside. Our seed-merchant friend from Sussex came to stay, bringing a huge order for scores of different varieties, and the plants that were to bear the seeds responded to the mood of optimism by flowering in spectacular fashion. We felt ready for anything.
In September Chloë was due to start school. She was not quite four but Rosa had started the year before and Chloë was desperate to join her. She felt none of the trepidation of her parents about her coming ordeal. The day your first child starts school is a staging post of life, one of the many leaps into the abyss. We were horribly wistful at the thought of our only daughter lurching away from us in the Órgiva school bus but tried to make a decent show of sharing her excitement at becoming a proper Spanish schoolgirl.
August nights can be hot. You sit outside, scantily dressed for coolness, and the sweat still pours off you, while the frenzied screaming of the cicadas and other hot-night creatures makes your head reel.
That summer there was one spectacularly sultry night. Sleep would have been impossible so, after a late supper, we three – along with the two dogs – went down to the Cádiar for a midnight bathe. The moon was full to illuminate our path and we took some candles to light the shadows by the river.
There was a pool in the river which we had made by spanning the gap between a couple of rocks with some tree-trunks, and filling in the dam with stones and brushwood. We set the candles on the dam and slipped into the cool water. Swimming upstream a little, we drifted back with the lazy current and watched the moonlight and the candle-flames glittering in the ripples on the dark surface of the water. The canes and willows on the banks stood motionless in the breathless heat of the night. The dogs sat patiently by the water and Chloë, sitting like a mermaid on a rock, droned sleepily on through a succession of Spanish nursery rhymes that Rosa had taught her.
All of a sudden the dogs leapt to their feet and growled, staring into the distance up the river. The moon had sunk behind the Serreta now, and apart from the pool of light made by our candles, the river was in darkness. I shivered a little anxiously, wondering what might be out there. We peered into the shadows but could see nothing. And then little by little a pale mist seemed to fill the valley. It swelled and then shrank, and then started to take on a more solid form as it moved closer towards us. We stood and stared, transfixed.
Bonka started to bark furiously, and then I heard the bells. It was Domingo’s sheep moving down the moonlit river. I could just make out the tall shape of Bottom with her huge ears erect, at the head of the flock. As they drew closer I could make out Domingo riding the donkey; and behind him, with her arms around his waist and her head sleepy on his shoulder, was Antonia.
We slid like alligators back into the river and grinned at one another as they passed.