'They've got goats here, Ana.'

'How interesting.'

'Would you like a gla.s.s of milk?' asked Maria.

'Oh please,' we chorused, desperate for some event, some ritual to break the deadlock.

Pedro and Maria both leaped up and shot outside with a saucepan and a torch, slamming the door after them. Ana and I looked at each other in silence for a minute.

'It's going to be goat's milk,' whispered Ana. For some reason, she didn't want to be caught talking while our hosts were out of the room. 'They're going to milk a goat and give us the milk in a gla.s.s as if it came from a bottle.'

Maria and Pedro, however, had no such pretensions. Below us we heard a thumping and scuffling, a dark oath and the fart of a goat: then the metallic hiss as the two thin streams of milk spurted into the saucepan. Soon, but not too soon, for I think they too were trying to string the thing out as long as they could, our hosts returned with a saucepanful of white foam.

'Ah milk,' I said fatuously. 'Would it perhaps be goat's milk?'

'Of course. Now we must boil it.'

Maria took a camping stove and placed the saucepan on it. We all gathered round to watch.

'They're boiling the milk, Ana.'

'Look, apart from the fact that I can see they're boiling the milk, I happen to have studied Spanish for several years. I can more or less catch the drift of what's going on.'

Maria explained that the milk had to be brought to the boil three times before it could be drunk. 'Malta fever.'

This entertainment spun things out for a good twenty minutes, then we drank the horrible stuff. Romero stretched and yawned. I found myself talking again.

'Well, it's been a truly wonderful evening but . . . well, we're so tired we can hardly think straight. Time for bed, I think.'

Everybody agreed enthusiastically. Down the hill, beneath the pomegranate tree, Ana and I cleaned our teeth with the water that dribbled into the drum. It was a clear night with a sliver of bright moon lighting the rivers below us. The pines on the hill opposite were roaring in a high wind.

'Lord in heaven,' hissed Ana in the dark. 'How long are we staying here?'

'Five days, it was supposed to be.'

'Well, I don't think I can stand another evening like that. I suppose you enjoyed it because it was "the real thing"?'

'Enjoyed might be too strong a word. Perhaps we'd better go to town for the next few nights. I'll make some excuse.'

That night the wind rose still higher. It roared through the open bedroom window and blew a chair over. On the chair were Ana's clothes and her gla.s.s of water.

I had worried that the business of the wind and the chair might have been the end of our whole Andalucian escapade that is if we hadn't spent our every last bean buying the place and thus burned our boats. But no.

'I think it's wonderful,' said Ana. 'Though I do have certain reservations.'

'And what, pray, might they be?'

She then read to me from a long list of reservations she had prepared. It included recommendations regarding the road, the access, the water which had not impressed her in its existing state despite the four-piece bathroom suite and a number of other quibbles too petty to relate.

'Very well,' I muttered absently. 'I'll get all that seen to.'

A SUMMER APPRENTICESHIP.

BACK IN ENGLAND WE HAD TO SPLICE ALL THE FRAYING ENDS of the existence we were about to abandon. In practical terms this meant clearing our farm cottage and working out the last few months of our various jobs.

This was a much easier task for me as I had been leading a more or less itinerant life for the last few years. Most years, I would disappear abroad for two or three months to help research a travel guide I had been sent to China and Turkey, as well as Spain. Between times, I made a bit of money strumming a guitar in a Russian restaurant in London, and shearing and looking after sheep on the local farms. Then each Spring and Autumn, when the coffers got low, I would take off to Sweden for a few weeks, pursuing more lucrative shearing contracts.

Ana, however, had deeper roots to ease up literally so, as she had been running a small horticultural business and needed to search around for someone to manage it in her stead. There was also a great deal of paperwork to gather most importantly the sheaves of obscure doc.u.ments that were needed for permission to take Ana's beloved familiar, a black labrador-cross known as Beaune, and a few of her treasured plants along with us.

All this we reckoned would take nine months. Just time enough to prepare our relatives and friends for the fact that we would no longer be living amongst them. After six months, however, I found I could wait no longer and, under the thin pretence of learning from the inc.u.mbent how to run the farm, I took a cheap flight to Spain to see if El Valero was really there.

It was August, a punishingly hot month that year, and, arriving on the bus at orgiva, I picked my way out of town along an almost dry riverbed. I had a small bag you don't need much in summer in Andalucia and, perhaps a little less practically, a guitar in a case.

Towards noon I caught sight of the terraces of El Valero spreading above the riverbed. The farm looked wonderful and this was the worst time to see it. In the middle of the day the August sun bakes all colour from the landscape. What appear in the slanting rays of morning and evening as misty hills, with clefts and pinnacles of glowing rock, reveal themselves as shadowless wastes of scrub and thorn. Best to ignore the evidence of one's eyes and enjoy only the impressions at either end of the day.

I made a meal out of crossing the river below the farm, drenching myself from head to foot in cool water before climbing towards the house to find Romero. I had written to him, telling him I wanted to spend a month on the farm learning whatever he could teach me about it, and I supposed that his daughter had read the letter for him, for few country people over fifty here have an inkling about their written language.

As I climbed across the last terrace where the horses were tethered short in the shade of olive trees, I heard a familiar voice croaking out a song from the house. There was Romero sitting on his terrace, throwing stale bread to the dogs in the dust. He got up and lumbered towards me with a big grin. 'You've come and what's this? We shall have music. Estupendo Estupendo.'

'It's good to be here, Pedro,' I panted, wiping away the sweat that drenched my face.

'It's good that you've come. My people have left to live in town and it gets lonely up here, though of course I have the beasts and there's always G.o.d. And then we have the rivers and the mountains hah, this is indeed paradise I shall never leave. Come on in, I'm just making lunch.'

We ducked our heads and pa.s.sed through a doorway into the gloom. It was cooler in the tiny dark room, despite a fire blazing on the hearthstone. The air outside was simmering around forty degrees as we pulled two low chairs up to the flames. I watched as Pedro dazzled me with his artistry in the preparation of his staple fare, papas a lo pobre papas a lo pobre 'poor man's potatoes'. 'poor man's potatoes'.

First he put a deep frying-pan, hideously greasy and blackened, onto a tripod over the flames and into it poured what I judged to be two coffee-cupfuls (after-dinner size) of olive oil. Then with his pocket knife he hacked up a couple of onions, without being too delicate in the matter of peeling them. As they fizzled gladly in the oil, he pulled to pieces a whole head of garlic and tossed the lot into the pan.

'Don't you peel the cloves?' I asked.

'Lord no! If you don't peel them they don't burn, and they keep their flavour better. Less work too.'

He's right as a matter of fact.

He then took a bucket in which were potatoes hygienically swimming in water; these he had peeled. Squatting over the fire, sweat pouring from his huge body, he chopped them roughly great coa.r.s.e chips, straight into the spitting oil. When the pan was brimful he stirred it about a bit with a stick and added some twigs to the fire for a better blaze. In a basket hanging from a pole were green and red peppers. Taking five or six small ones, he again tossed them in whole.

'Right, that can look after itself for a bit now,' said Pedro, giving it a quick stir, and proceeded to the laying of the table. A wobbly wooden cable drum stood on the terrace. Upon this he placed an old fish-tin which he filled with a huge fistful of olives and a dozen pickled chilli peppers. From a paper sack he took a round loaf of bread like a river-stone and cut it into quarters, returning two to the sack. Then he put two bent forks and two tumblers on the table and went to check the main dish. I sat down and poured wine from the plastic bottle and ate an olive pickled with lots of garlic, lots of salt and a little less of thyme, lavender and heaven knows what else. A swig of the thick brown wine washed it down.

Gazing absently past the s...o...b..ring dogs and down the steep hill, I watched the two rivers curl from the gorge. The hills to the south were almost invisible in the haze of the heat. Another slug of wine and a deep, deep sigh. This was about to be one of those unforgettable meals.

Pedro emerged grinning with the sizzling pan which he plonked onto a tile carefully placed to prevent it staining the cable drum. Then he fetched a huge greasy ham, cut two enormous fatty wodges, and put it back on a hook on a beam. He then sat down on the step, took a swig of wine, and sighed with contentment.

I jabbed into the pan with my fork, gnawed on my ham, gulped my brown wine and chatted to my amiable host. The food was delicious. I did a lot of the cooking that month and it was almost always papas a lo pobre papas a lo pobre , which Pedro favoured for breakfast, lunch and supper, each time with the statutory two gla.s.ses of wine. But I never managed quite the same effect with the dish as Pedro achieved. , which Pedro favoured for breakfast, lunch and supper, each time with the statutory two gla.s.ses of wine. But I never managed quite the same effect with the dish as Pedro achieved.

'You've bought paradise,' he sighed. 'And for nothing. It was a gift. Here you have the finest air and water in the world. I've been around a bit,' and he indicated various spots in the surrounding hills, all visible from the house, 'but I've never found anywhere like this.'

'If you love it like you say you do, Pedro, why did you sell it?'

'My people. My people don't like it here. If it weren't for my people I'd stay here for ever. Here there's the best of everything in the world. There's rich soil it'll give you the best vegetables you'll ever eat; there's fruit drooping on the trees, sweet water from the spring, and all this glorious fresh air.'

We screwed up our eyes and looked out through the shimmering air onto fields baked by the ferocious sun.

'n.o.body will bother you out here; you won't have to worry about the bad milk of the town.'

'The what?' I asked.

'The people of the town, they're rotten right through not to be trusted, screw you soon as look at you. Nothing, let me tell you, Cristobal, is as important as being honest and straightforward and treating people right . . . but what do they care? You just be careful of them. Play some guitar.'

I needed no more asking. I took the guitar from its case, tuned it, and pottered into a flamenco piece. Pedro rocked back on his chair, listening with half-closed eyes, then started clapping and singing quietly. He sang badly, disjointed couplets delivered in a cracked groan of a voice, and the guitar-playing was all out of time and with the wrong chords. But we enjoyed it.

Pedro was the first to break off. He hauled himself to his feet, picked up the hunks of stale bread and ham fat from his plate and flung them at the creatures surrounding the table. The meal had come to a close.

'It's too hot to walk with the beasts,' he muttered. 'I'm going to sleep.'

I slept too, or tried to sleep, on a mattress on the floor of the big house, but the flies kept me awake. They were everywhere. I swatted at them and cussed and tossed and turned and all to no avail. I must have slept eventually, though, because I awoke in a boiling sweat to the sound of Pedro's voice ringing round the hills. I hauled my sopping body from beneath the thin sheet and blinked into the blinding light. Seven o'clock, the afternoon gone, but now not only was the sun burning fiercely from high in the sky, but all the hills and rocks were giving back as good as they had got and radiating heat vengefully back into the air. The air, sandwiched between its tormentors, had given up and lay draped over the valley like a rag.

Accustoming my eyes to the glare, I leaned over the terrace and spotted Pedro sitting motionless on his horse down by the river, surrounded by his little group of acolytes. He was singing.

Somewhere in the valley a frog was singing Polish up my fine crystal gla.s.ses . . .

A couple of terraces below the house was to be found one of the miracles of El Valero, a torrent of water that rushed out from a rock and tumbled into a little pool below. I sat in the pool and poured bucketful after bucketful over my head and body. There was a soapdish and a bottle of shampoo and towels and some washing hanging from a wire strung between two acacia trees. Without needing to put shoes or clothes on, I could take just five paces and pick oranges, mandarins, figs or grapes, fresh from the trees. I cooled them in the waterfall and stuffed myself.

From this vantage point I could see a farm in the shade on the west side of the valley. It was a low white building half-buried in surrounding clouds of olive trees. There lived Bernardo and Isabel and their children, a Dutch family fled from Rotterdam to farm olives and a few goats. That evening I went to introduce myself to valley society.

A couple of flimsy poles spanned the river and led to the foot of the steep path that wound up the hill to the Dutch couple's farm. As I stumbled across the stony lower terraces, an improbable procession emerged from the shrubbery of the terrace above. The motive force was a team of several goats, a mule and a sheep, all harnessed by the forefoot and connected by long ropes to a sort of human maypole: a large amiable-looking man who hadn't shaved that day, nor the day before, clad in T-shirt, floral Bermuda shorts and Wellington boots. Two children were running up the gra.s.sy slope behind him, each swinging a brightly coloured plastic bucket. The whole scene was oddly reminiscent of a television advertis.e.m.e.nt for breakfast cereal.

Suddenly they spied me. 'Whooa!' roared Bernardo, for it was he. The mule stopped, two goats pa.s.sed it on the left, one pa.s.sed between its legs, and the sheep darted down a bank on the right.

I climbed up to greet him.

'You must be the lunatic who's bought El Valero. We've heard about you,' he said with a chuckle, attempting to hold out his right hand but failing. 'Welcome to the valley. Wait while I put these creatures away and I can greet you properly.'

He set patiently about untangling the chaos of ropes and began distributing his animals among their various night quarters. 'So, are you going to come and live here, or just stay here for the summer holidays?' he asked, leading me to the terrace where Isabel, his wife, was already laying out some tapas.

'We're going to live here and try and farm the place.'

'Good. I hate to see more land abandoned. Wine for our new neighbour. We'll drink, if one needs any excuse to drink wine, to new life in the valley.'

Bernardo and Isabel were certainly doing their bit for new life in the valley. They had moved here five years before with their young son Fabian; a daughter, Maite, a sweet-faced child with long tresses of auburn hair, was born shortly after they arrived, and unless I was mistaken Isabel would be 'giving light', as the Spanish put it, again within a month or two. They had bought their farm derelict and abandoned and, with ferocious hard work and the dreamy enthusiasm which city people bring to country living, were turning it little by little into a working farm and a pleasure garden for the children.

There was much to talk about as we drank copious quant.i.ties of wine, the same brown stuff Pedro and I had been drinking over the river: costa costa as they call it, in deference to its being grown on the slopes above the coast. I felt relaxed and easy with these people who, with their big booming laughs and infectious good nature, filled the empty s.p.a.ce in the valley they had come to occupy. as they call it, in deference to its being grown on the slopes above the coast. I felt relaxed and easy with these people who, with their big booming laughs and infectious good nature, filled the empty s.p.a.ce in the valley they had come to occupy.

They told me how pleased Romero was to sell the place and I began to put them right, explaining how he was forever moaning about how much he loved the place and hated to be parted from it and 'especially for the misery of money I paid him.'

Bernardo looked in danger of choking on his wine. 'He and his people have been desperate to sell that place for years,' he said, 'and they couldn't get to town quick enough. He was about to give it to Domingo for a million then you came along and gave him five. He must have thought you fell off a Christmas tree! I mean who the h.e.l.l was going to buy a place that has no access, no running water, no electricity and that huge patch of land to work? I must say I think it very bold of you to have bought it. Or maybe you are a complete lunatic?'

'I'm at least half-lunatic,' I volunteered. 'But we'll manage somehow. It's an exciting challenge, and anyway, it beats being an insurance clerk working in an office.'

'Yes, but you don't look to me like an insurance clerk.'

'No, but I might have been . . .' and I recalled with a shudder the six months I'd once spent in an office.

'Well, it's good to have you here, though we'll miss Pedro and Maria,' said Isabel. 'Maria used to spend a lot of time over here with me, pouring her heart out while we did the washing together. She's nice.'

'And Pedro,' I added. 'I love the way he sings in the valley all alone except for his beasts. He's a natural.'

'He's a natural bad character,' said Isabel, laughing. 'A likeable rogue, you could say, but there's a darker side to him. I'd hate to imagine all his wife has had to put up with.'

'He's always been a very good neighbour to us,' countered Bernardo. 'He's helped me out when I've had a problem no end of times, generous with his time and always good for a laugh. Mind you, I've helped him out, too. We've done a lot of work together. I cleaned the whole of his acequia acequia his water channels with him this spring. Well, I cleaned it with Maria actually, while he walked with his beasts.' his water channels with him this spring. Well, I cleaned it with Maria actually, while he walked with his beasts.'

'It makes me sick the way that lazy swine just sits on his horse "walking with the beasts" all day,' said Isabel.

'Lazy?' I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable at the consensus forming about my new mentor. 'That man is strong as an ox and works like no one I've ever seen,' I said.

'He's good at putting on a show,' replied Isabel. 'But that'll be for your benefit. He likes to make the right impression. He's got a bad reputation in the valley, and it's justified. I've had a lot of trouble with him.'

'What sort of trouble?'

'He comes round here a lot when Bernardo's out. Says he's desperate to make love to me and if I don't let him he'll shoot himself, and the swine always carries his shotgun with him. "You'll have my blood on your hands!" he says. Well, I tell you I don't fancy him much he's so old and fat and ugly and I tell him that, too. So off he goes in a temper, and when he gets round the corner he fires his gun. Of course I rush out to see if he's really shot himself, and when I get round the corner there he is with a big grin on his face. I can't help laughing at it, but it's no joke really because he's so d.a.m.n big.'

'At least he's slow, though,' said Bernardo, quietly. 'His legs are bad so it wouldn't be too difficult to get away. Anyway we're none of us quite as good as we'd like to be. More wine?'

I worked my way drunkenly home, down the path to the river, in the early hours of the morning. It was a hot night, lit only by the stars and, as a reward for not tumbling all of the way down the steep descent, I treated myself to an hour flat on my back on a warm rock in the middle of the river. The nearest street-lighting was far away, so no dull glow marred the perfect blackness of the night sky, and more stars than I had ever seen glowed and winked. I saw literally dozens of shooting stars.

It must have been the Perseids: mid-August is usually the time for this shower of meteors to pa.s.s. But I didn't know about such things then and, anyway, my mind was too occupied with everything I'd heard to think of astronomy. 'It must always be like this on summer nights,' I thought fancifully as I dripped a crooked trail of water up towards the house.

A routine soon began to establish itself on the farm. In the morning Pedro and I would tour the terraces and collect the figs that had fallen from the trees in the night. We gathered them in buckets, soft and deep purple and squashy, and took them up to the pigs who lived in a pen at the end of the house. In the pen they had a mud-pool, a dust-bath and a cool corner shaded by a thick roof, where they panted away the heat of the day. Pigs love figs and they would squabble and bounce about with glee as we emptied about half a hundredweight of the luscious fruit into their stone troughs. Everyone around here keeps pigs, fattening them through the year and killing them, at the traditional matanzas, in the fly-free days of winter.

One day Pedro returned from an expedition outside the valley, his horse laden with huge green cannonb.a.l.l.s. Water-melon. 'So the pigs don't get bored with the figs,' he explained, cutting each melon into four and tossing them at the ecstatic creatures. 'They're giving them away in the vega vega now, before they plough the rest of the crop in.' now, before they plough the rest of the crop in.'

After fig-picking we would cut maize with sickles. The fields below the river were bright with a crop of forage maize, the brightest of the greens at this time of year. We gathered great handfuls of it and severed it at ground level with a curved pull of the sickle.

'Hold it like this, man, or you'll give yourself a nasty cut. You must treat the sickle with great respect.'

Having cut bundles far too heavy for a man to carry, we would hoist them onto our shoulders and trudge bent double up the hill to dump them in the troughs in the various buildings that served as stabling for the cows.

We would get these jobs out of the way before the sun touched the fields. Then I would prepare the papas a lo pobre papas a lo pobre or just a couple of thick slices of ham, bread and wine. 'Strong food!' roared Pedro with a manly guffaw. 'Eat strong food!' or just a couple of thick slices of ham, bread and wine. 'Strong food!' roared Pedro with a manly guffaw. 'Eat strong food!'

Strong food in these parts is chickens' heads, ham fat, pig's blood pudding, raw peppers and garlic, chumbos chumbos (p.r.i.c.kly pear), stale bread and wine. A great deal of manly merit accrues from the eating of strong food and the merit increases the earlier it is taken in the day. Thus a man who can stomach a burnt chicken's head and a hot pepper with a hunk of stale country bread and wash it down with a couple of gla.s.ses of (p.r.i.c.kly pear), stale bread and wine. A great deal of manly merit accrues from the eating of strong food and the merit increases the earlier it is taken in the day. Thus a man who can stomach a burnt chicken's head and a hot pepper with a hunk of stale country bread and wash it down with a couple of gla.s.ses of costa costa and do so with relish at breakfast is a man to be reckoned with. and do so with relish at breakfast is a man to be reckoned with.

This was Pedro's preferred diet. He offered me a chicken's head one morning, a ghastly-looking burnt thing with charred feathers on it that he had taken from the fire, waving it under my nose with a grin.

'Strong food for the guest of honour!'

When I demurred, he popped it into his own mouth and crunched it up, a glow of satisfaction suffusing his broad features. In the end I forced myself to submit to such staples for breakfast. It seemed somehow inappropriate to puddle about with cornflakes and milk while others were quite properly devouring more masculine stuff.