SO FAR AT EL VALERO we have resisted the call of the mobile phone. Its appeal is admittedly limited, since a mobile wouldn’t work where we live, surrounded as we are by a ring of mountains. But I’m a little uneasy in any case with telephone technology; I once wasted a morning trying to make a phone call from a friend’s house using the TV remote control. Ana, too, is something of a Luddite. She won’t have anything to do with computers, for example. Not long ago, someone gave her an old IBM golf-ball typewriter which is as big and heavy as a small traction engine. She was delighted with it even though it spatters any paper that passes through it with gobbets of light engine oil. ‘This is the future,’ she announced as she heaved the thing through the doorway.
For many years we had no phone at all at El Valero. We wrote letters to our friends and received letters in return, and on the odd occasion when there was something pressing, we would go to the telephone-house in Tíjolas. An enterprising family in the village had invested in a telephone meter. This enabled them to provide a public service and, with an astronomical multiplication of the already ruinous Telefónica rate, to turn a nice profit. However much they charged, though, the telephone-house was not a place for a relaxed call. The phone and its meter were mounted on the wall of the family sitting room, between a picture of the Bleeding Heart and a bunch of faded plastic flowers. Callers were clearly intruders on family life.
The quickest way to get to the telephone-house in those days was to trek down the river, the road being particularly bad. So a telephone call became quite a performance. First there was the bracing hour-long walk, crashing through the cane brakes and sloshing thigh-deep in fast-flowing water. Then there was the problem of insinuating yourself into a stranger’s home and trying not to drip river water onto the scrubbed floor.
The usual routine was to announce your arrival with a shout – or, at least that’s what the locals would do. I tended to be a bit hesitant, asking in excessively formal language ‘if perhaps I might make use, for a short time, of the telephone.’ The telephone-woman would then look me up and down disapprovingly, lingering with particular distaste on my sodden shoes, before gesturing with an imperious motion that I was to follow her through the fly-curtain. Once inside the gloomy sitting room, she would click the meter back to nought and then stand beside it, arms folded, glaring at me. On a really bad day, other members of the family would gather and glare, too.
As I dialled the exotic foreign number, I would stand tight to the wall and grin vacuously at the watchers as the phone rang away at the other end of the line. It would ring and ring – Telefónica gives you a minute – then stop. For the full minute everybody would stare at me.
‘No reply,’ I’d say to the telephone-woman.
‘He didn’t get a reply,’ she’d translate for the benefit of the others. They’d grunt at the news and shuffle out.
And then I would head back up the river, jogging and leaping rocks to try and get back before nightfall.
Ana and I made do with letters and the Tíjolas telephone-house for our first six years in Spain – including the time of Chloë’s birth, which in retrospect may have been a bit rash. But we were happy enough with the arrangement and agreed that life was probably better without a phone – even if we could have had one, which we couldn’t. For Telefónica, a corporation with little zest for philanthropy, was not going to run a land line all the way out to the valley and across the river just for us.
Then one early summer’s day in Granada we passed a shop promoting a new type of radio telephone. We went in to take a look and, like a couple of country bumpkins, were signing up before we knew it. It seemed almost too good to be true. We could purchase a brand new radio handset and base at a special price, grant-aided for outlying rural properties, and within a week an engineer would come to see about installing it.
And so he did, arriving hot and flustered after the walk from the bridge and complaining that the battery on his receiving apparatus was flat. He grumbled around the place for a further half hour, doing all that he could to make us feel guilty for the inconvenience we were causing him by our decision to install a telephone in a remote cortijo. He seemed to grow crosser by the minute until, finally, he pronounced, like some terrible indictment: ‘No, it won’t work. There’s no signal anywhere in the house. You’re just too far from everywhere.’
‘But you just said your battery was flat,’ I pointed out.
‘Claro – but that has nothing at all to do with it’, he growled. ‘Wait, there is just a faint signal right over there – it’s almost too feeble to hear but it’s the best you’re going to get out in this godforsaken place. This spot right here is where you must have your telephone.’ He looked at us with a sort of triumph.
‘We can’t put a telephone there,’ we gasped. ‘That’s right in the middle of the chumbo.’
Now, the chumbo (or more properly chumbera) is a prickly pear, a plant that adorns almost every cortijo in the peninsula. In the sixteenth century, when it was brought back along with agaves and gold and silver from the Americas, it was discovered not only to have tasty fruit but to have the extraordinary property of absorbing shit. The chumbo became an essential component of every country property, and it is a convenience rural folk find hard to give up. Last year a shepherd in Torvizcón, up the Cádiar river, showed me around his newly-modernised cortijo. Proudly he opened every door and displayed all the innovations: the TV, the chandelier, the fitted kitchen, until with a flourish he opened wide the door to the lavatory: ‘And here,’ he said, ‘is the toilet, with running water and everything. We fitted it last year’ – he looked at me to check that I was paying attention – ‘but thanks be to God, we have not yet had to make use of it!’
So, although there’s much to be said in favour of the chumbo, it’s not an obvious place for a telephone. I had imagined, perhaps foolishly, that we might be able to have the telephone in the house, but it was clearly not to be. ‘What you must do,’ said the engineer, ‘is build a construction – a sort of box – which can house the receiving apparatus.’
A telephone-box in the garden. Well, that did have a certain appeal and we set to discussing its construction the moment the engineer went off on his way. Ana was particularly keen. ‘If you are going to build a telephone receiving box out in the chumbo,’ she suggested, ‘then why not combine it with something more useful – like, say, a dog kennel?’
‘Why not indeed? Could it be a domed dog kennel do you think?’ I had always wanted to build a dome.
‘Whatever shape you like,’ said Ana who was pleased to have a dog kennel of any stamp – with flying buttresses, if necessary.
So I started on the domed dog kennel. But of course after a certain height the bricks started to fall inwards, and – despite looking for inspiration in a book on Istanbul, with pictures of the great mosque of Aghia Sophia – I grew disheartened, and flattened it off. The final result looked rather like a fairy mushroom, or the bottom floor of a truncated pagoda.
Two weeks later a new Telefónica engineer turned up. He was an altogether different man, a keen pigeon fancier, and with a full battery on his tester, which endeared him to me right away.
‘What on earth is that?’ he asked as he arrived, looking at the dog-kennel thing.
‘That’s the construction for housing the telephone receiving apparatus,’ I said proudly.
‘Good God, man, you can’t have a telephone there!’ He looked at me in astonishment. ‘It’s right in the middle of the chumbo!’
I told him about his predecessor with the flat battery. ‘Well, according to my meter, you can put the thing right here where we’re talking, slap bang in your kitchen… yes, that’s as good a signal as you’ll need.’ And he pointed to the wooden beam above the window, the ideal place for a phone. He wandered around the place a bit more for good measure, in case he could find a better signal anywhere else. Luckily he couldn’t.
‘Those are beautiful palomas you’ve got up there,’ he said, looking at the pigeons on our roof.
‘They’re lovely, aren’t they?’ I boasted. ‘They’re fan-tails.’ And as if on cue they began flopping about on the roof.
‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I like fan-tails, but they’re hopeless fliers, you know. I keep pigeons at home and I’ve got some wonderful fliers. I’ll bring you a few, if you like. Your telephone will start playing up in a week or so. I’ll bring the pigeons when I come and fix it.’
That night we celebrated the arrival of the new telephone by phoning my mother in England. Now, I’ve phoned my mother on countless occasions but rarely had I been so struck by the phenomenon of her voice appearing in my ear in another part of the world. It seemed incredible that I could chat to her while peering out of the doorway at our very own mountains and rivers. I could tell that she was similarly moved by the occasion. ‘Is that Chloë in the background? Good heavens, there’s Bonka!’ she exclaimed excitedly.
Next we rang Bernardo over on the other side of the valley. He had just installed one of these new contraptions too, so we rang to compare notes and offer mutual congratulations on our giant step into the future. La Cenicera, Bernardo and Isabel’s cortijo, is barely a kilometre away as the crow flies, and with the wind in the right direction you can shout across. Yet that night he might as well have been a mile underwater. We did our best for five minutes then plonked down the receiver, without having managed to glean even one word of Bernardo’s side of the conversation – if indeed it was Bernardo on the phone.
When Enrique the engineer turned up the following week to fix the phone, which had surpassed his prediction by packing up altogether, he came with a large cardboard box tucked under his arm. Inside were a couple of exquisite, white straight-tailed pigeons. We shut them in with our fan-tails for a week so they could get used to their new home, and then let them out. This was a revelation, for these palomas really knew how to fly. They launched together off the roof and soared out into the plains of shimmering air above the valley, far out over the river towards the hills beyond. Then, shining white against the deep blue sky and dark mountains, they raced each other back, winged up over the acacia and settled on the roof. Then off they set to do the whole thing again. It was exhilarating to watch them.
‘Our fan-tails don’t fly at all,’ said Ana. ‘They’re avian slobs. To think we might never have known what proper pigeon flight is!’
The Telefónica pigeons were inseparable and flew together farther and farther away, while the fan-tails ignored them completely, keeping up their cooing and flopping routine. After a time, though, it seemed the fliers were trying to encourage the slobs. The fan-tails would spend all day lined up on the edge of the roof in a long line – all of them who were not busy sitting on eggs in the coop below – and the flyers wandered calmly up and down behind them, pushing them off the roof and blocking them from landing again. A few of them did try some slightly more daring flights, even venturing over to the eucalyptus. As it happened, however, caution would have been a better option. The high-profile flights of the new pigeons attracted the attention of eagles, and one by one we started to lose the fan-tails. The Telefónica pigeons were too fast for the eagles, and too quick on the turn – but the poor fan-tails were easy prey.
One day, though, there was only one Telefónica pigeon; the eagles had finally managed to get his friend. The survivor was desolate, and pined for days, sitting miserably by himself and occasionally going for short, lonely flights, but with little spirit left. We didn’t mind losing the odd fan-tail; it kept the population under control, and I have to admit that it was pretty exciting to see the Bonelli’s eagles so close to the house. However, we were deeply saddened by the loss of the Telefónica pigeon. We felt we had lost something of beauty from our lives.
And then one morning I was out early, rowing up the oats and vetches in the river fields, when suddenly a whoosh of wings in the sky made me look up. There was a great gang of fan-tails with the Telefónica pigeon at their head, setting out on a long flight to the far end of the valley.At long last he had managed to persuade them, and now he had company to fly with.
Our visits from Enrique the engineer continued, but sadly he never managed to recreate with his tweaking of our phone system anything like the easy reach across the valley that the palomas had achieved. Bernardo still sounded as if he was talking from a deep sea trench.
One day, Bernardo and I were discussing this singular phenomenon, sitting on the stump of a fig tree by the spring, when Domingo chanced by on Bottom, his donkey.
‘You ought to get one of these wireless phones like we’ve got,’ said Bernardo, a little surprisingly.
‘Yes, you really should,’ I agreed, falling into line.
‘What use have I for such a thing?’ said Domingo, lurching to a stop. ‘I don’t know anyone to telephone, and even if I did, what would I say to them?’
We all considered this for a moment before Domingo added: ‘Anyway, I’m more interested in those new things, you know those things that go inside the computer…’ Bernardo and I stared back at him blankly.
‘Disks?’ I volunteered.
‘No – modems,’ he replied. I hadn’t, at that time, the first idea what a modem was, and judging from Bernardo’s fixed smile neither had he. Without realising he was out on a limb here, Domingo treated us to a resumé of the joys of surfing the Internet, and the difficulty we were going to have getting wired in the Alpujarras. Antonia was keen, apparently, to exhibit some of their sculptures online, but it would take a new generation of mobile phones and a laptop to stand a chance of getting it working. Bernardo seemed to be agreeing, though his broad smile still wasn’t giving anything away.
‘With new technology it pays to wait,’ Domingo continued.‘The quality and price always improve. Buy the first lot that come on the market and you’ll find it’s almost always crap.’
‘Es verdad – that’s true,’ we both mumbled.
Bottom twitched her ear to remove a fly, and looked at us thoughtfully, then, following an imperceptible command from Domingo, moved off at a trot. Bernardo and I stayed on the fig-stump for a bit in silence, and watched our neighbour disappearing down the road. We were neither of us in a hurry to resume the discussion about modems. I tried another tack.
‘Sometimes it’s better than others,’ I offered.
‘What is?’ asked Bernardo.
‘The telephone – sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s very bad.’
‘And sometimes it doesn’t work at all,’ he concluded.
‘Yup, that’s right.’
‘Somebody once told me why that is,’ said Bernardo. ‘Apparently the satellite has got a broken wing and now has to limp around in the sky like a three-legged dog.’
We sat a little bit longer, absorbing the full impact of this information until Bernardo noticed that the goats were getting dangerously close to his vegetables, and we brought our technological deliberations to a close.
In those first heady days our heads hummed with telephony and we were open to almost any idea of signals zinging their way across the stratosphere. It’s the only way that I can begin to explain why a secular-minded citizen, in sound mind and not under the influence of any drug, should wake up one morning convinced that he was hearing celestial music.
It happened within just a few weeks of installing the phone. On a morning almost indistinguishable from any other that dry, hot, cloudless summer, I woke to find the valley faintly ringing with a curious droning and humming sound. It certainly seemed unearthly, and had an awesome quality, as if the sound were emanating from the very rocks and hills. I woke Ana and asked if she thought it might be the Final Trumpet. I could tell she was unnerved by the way she listened intently for a while and then answered my question. Normally her first words are about tea.
‘Well, it doesn’t sound much like a trumpet to me. It’s more of a low drone,’ she concluded. I tried to argue that a celestial trumpet was hardly going to sound like the wind section of some seaside brass band but she seemed to have lost interest. Then the phone rang, unusually for such an early hour. It was someone blowing bubbles through a snorkel. We took it to be Bernardo ringing to see if we’d heard the noise too and if we knew anything about it. The whole valley it seemed was full of this sound, and as far as I knew, it was filling the whole world.
‘I think one of us ought to investigate,’ I said decisively, and pausing only to make myself decent (though in the circumstances nakedness might have been appropriate) I set out in search of the source of this phenomenon. First I walked down the track to the river and scoured the terraces and fields, then I crept down towards the riverbed and out through the tamarisk wood. Everywhere the sound was the same, neither louder nor softer. It came from the very bowels of the world and seemed as old as time. I was pondering on the music of the spheres, the ineffable humming and droning as the great balls of molten rock and gas hurtled their way through the cosmos, when I emerged from the shade of the eucalyptus grove and discovered that the noise was just a tiny bit louder. I was closer to the source. The golden oriole in the eucalyptus trilled out its fluty call, and then I saw them: two youngish couples, sitting cross-legged in a circle (if four people can be a circle) and blowing with intense concentration into didgeridoos.
One of the players caught a glimpse of me and looked up startled. The music stopped.
‘Good morning,’ I said as the group lowered the long wooden tubes from their mouths.
‘Hello,’ answered the tallest one, a man with the look of a rather dapper hippy, with neatly pressed clothes and clipped blond beard. ‘I hope you don’t mind us camping on your land…’
‘Not at all, please feel free. It’s not every day we wake to the sound of the didgeridoo.’ They moved round to make some room for me in the circle.
I learned that they were wandering didgeridoo teachers from Belgium who had come to ply their rather esoteric trade across Andalucia. This would hardly register as unusual amongst the incomers of the Alpujarras – there’s a local flamenco teacher from Denmark and a bloke from Sussex who shears the sheep – but I could imagine difficulties in finding pupils for Flemish didgeridoo lessons in wider Andalucia. Still, I kept such pessimistic predictions to myself and, sitting in the dewy grass beside their van, listened to what they had to say about this ancient instrument.
The didgeridoo is a long stem of gum tree, the inside of which has been gnawed out by termites. You don’t make your didgeridoo; you find it. You can decorate it to make it more to your liking, but the boring work has to be done by the termites. Heart of eucalyptus is as hard as steel. It’s a very ecological sort of instrument; apart from the noise it makes, it has a pretty minimal impact on the environment.
I had a free lesson, but couldn’t even get a whimper out of the thing. If you’re good, you should be able to make a continuous moaning sound, pulling air through your nose at the same time as you blow it out through your mouth and down the pipe. There was a part of me that day-dreamed about a life on the road, feckless and fancy-free, hauling my didgeridoo from town to town… but on reflection I decided that the dedication wasn’t really there.
Waving goodbye to my teachers I headed back up to the house for breakfast. I had a phone call to make.
It didn’t take long before we started to lose the romance of making phone calls. There weren’t many people we needed to phone and we soon ran out of things to say to those we did. Receiving calls, however, had an air of unpredictability about it and therefore kept its excitement. On many an evening we would sit around casting sideways looks at the telephone willing it to ring, but more often than not it didn’t.
The first people to start using it were the shepherds; it was getting near shearing time. Before the advent of our telephone, shepherds who wanted me to shear their flocks would actually arrive on our doorstep, more often than not either on muleback or on foot. Others prevailed upon more modern friends with vans to drive them, but even so it was quite an endeavour, as El Valero is a long way down from the mountains where most of the shepherds keep their sheep.
These days Alpujarran shepherds have become pretty adept in the use of mobile phones, but this wasn’t the case when our phone was first installed. In those distant days, grappling with a telephone was considered a serious business, and was certainly not to be undertaken when sober.
Typically a shepherd would wait until he had shut his flock in and done all the ancillary jobs before heading for the village and a bar with the necessary apparatus for making a telephone call. The flock would take a dim view of being shut in too long before nightfall; the jobs around the stable would take a good half an hour; the ride or walk to the village could be anything from one to three hours, and upon arrival at the bar, the shepherd would feel the need to fortify himself at length before embarking on the unfamiliar and alarming task at hand. So the early calls would start coming in round about midnight.
When we picked up the receiver, the first thing we would hear would be the music and shouting of a bar, with perhaps the electronic burbling of the fruit machines. There would be a long silence from the other end.
‘It’s a shearing job,’ Ana would say, handing me the phone.
I could imagine the character on the other end holding the handpiece at arm’s length, glaring at it with distaste and then shouting loudly at it. Of course when it spoke to them, they couldn’t possibly hear, because of the great distance between the diaphragm and the ear, and also the bedlam of noise around them in the bar. So the shepherd would shout at it angrily to speak up.
‘CRISTÓBAL!’ I would hear as a faint and raucous bellow.
‘Yes, speak to me…’
‘CRISTOOOBAAL!’
‘Alright, I can hear you. Speak now…’
‘CRIISTOOOBAAAL!!!’
‘YEES! WHAT DO YOU WANT?’
A silence from the other end, as the shepherd digested the idea that the plastic thing with the wire he was shouting at, had actually shouted back at him.
‘CRISTÓBAL. WHEN ARE YOU COMING TO SHEAR MY SHEEP?’
‘WHO ARE YOU?’
‘CRISTOOBAAL!’
‘YES, I CAN HEAR YOU, BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE.’
This would produce a silence on the other end, then some muttering as the other incumbents of the bar were consulted and some advice offered.
‘CRISTÓBAL…’
‘Look, I need to…’ but it was no good, my interlocutor had had enough and slammed the phone down.
That was the way it was with the shepherds on the telephone, though little by little, as they became more adept with it, and picked up a few of the necessary social skills, things got better, until finally we got to a point where we could even exchange rudimentary pieces of information over the phone.
Mistakes however remained inevitable. There was one evening, when Chloë answered the phone quite late at night. I noticed her move the earpiece sharply away from her ear to avoid being deafened by the raucous shout from the other end. ‘NO,’ she shouted back at the handset, ‘YOU CAN’T SPEAK TO MY HUSBAND BECAUSE I HAVEN’T GOT ONE. I’M ONLY SEVEN YEARS OLD!’ And she slammed the phone down.
I couldn’t help but feel proud of my daughter showing a bit of spirit.
And then, late one evening, the phone rang again. I picked it up and girded myself ready for the deafening shout.
‘Chris,’ it said softly. ‘Is that you?’
It was a person who knew the telephone, a blessing indeed.
‘Boss!’ I cried. ‘Tell me, what news from the wider world?’
‘Well,’ said Nat, my editor in London, for it was she. ‘Are you sitting down? Because I’ve got some news for you.’
‘No, I can’t sit down; I’m wedged into the corner by the telephone. That’s the way it is here. But I’ll lean on something instead.’
‘What I’m going to say,’ continued Nat in a soft tone, ‘is don’t get too excited – but Driving Over Lemons is going to be read on the radio, and it’s being ordered all over the place.’
I stared at the phone. None of us had expected anything like this. It was a bit like entering the local horticultural fete and finding you’ve won a rosette at the Chelsea Flower Show.