By Chris Stewart
I WAS just 21 when I first arrived in Spain, hitchhiking over the Pyrenees into this strange, seemingly African land.
In the company of a washing-machine repairman, I took my first
tentative steps in the language, as his little van bucketed down the
narrow road to Lérida.
I had come to Spain to learn the guitar. As we crossed the river
bridge into the town of Lérida, I looked down to where there were women
washing clothes in the slow-moving water.
I had recently learnt a piece by Gaspar Sanz, the “Dance of the
Washerwomen”, and there was a part of me that wondered if they might not
stop what they were doing and dance, if I were to play that piece.
Fortunately, I did not put this half-witted notion to the test.
It was autumn and the olives were hard green berries on the silvery
trees. The next day, as I walked west through olive groves towards
Tarragona, I picked one from the tree. It was bitter and dry and I
wondered what on earth it was, and why anyone would want to cultivate
such a thing. That night I stayed in a commercial hotel in Tárrega – 50
pesetas for supper and a bed in a room with three others.
Francisco Tárrega was a great composer and teacher of guitar. Among
other things, he wrote Lágrimas, a pretty piece that I played in a fast
and jolly fashion in the mistaken belief that lágrimas meant
“happiness”. It doesn’t; it means “tears”. I searched the little town
for signs of the master, but there were none, as he had never actually
been there.
By the time I got to Valencia, the oranges were ripe and I found work
on the harvest. It was not as easy as you’d think; it takes a
particular twist of the wrist to free the orange from the tree.
At the end of a week it was made clear to me that I was not an asset
in the orange fields. I remember the scent of oranges, and that the
ground was carpeted, unaccountably, with spring onions, as if they were
grass. I would pick handfuls to add to my lunchtime chorizo bocadillo.
Finally, I arrived in Sevilla, the self-proclaimed Queen of
Andalucia, and the only place for a romantically inclined young man to
learn the guitar. There, in Triana and the Barrio Santa Cruz, the spell
was finally cast, and yet another Englishman was caught by the
enchantment of Spain.
Twenty years later, I finally made it back, having bought a farm with
its own olives and oranges, and now that my wife and I have lived here
for 20 years and more, well, there’s no turning back.
Our daughter was born in the Clinica Inmaculada in Granada, and as
she passed through the school system and lived and played with the
families of her friends in the village, she brought us deeper into the
world that surrounds us.
We were unmistakably different, though. One day she took us to task
over this. “Why can’t you be like everybody else?” she asked. “Well, we
do what we can…” we replied.
“But what about these clothes pegs? None of my friends’ families have clothes pegs like ours.”
It was true: whereas everybody else had colourful plastic
clothes-pegs, we had wooden ones, one piece only and traditionally made
by gipsies. The reason behind this was that we had a parrot, and the
parrot would destroy plastic clothes-pegs in no time flat. But that was
neither here nor there; the wooden pegs marked us as ineluctably
different. We spoke good Spanish, though, but with funny accents, and
our child, who was obviously fluent in the local dialect, felt
humiliated yet more by our differentness.
Chloé has left home now, passed through the school system and on to
university in Granada, where she’s studying languages. I cannot think of
anywhere in the world where I would have rather seen her grow up than
in this little Spanish town. It gave her, among other things,
confidence, ease and social mobility.
George Borrow, the 19th-century author, wrote in The Bible in Spain:
“I will say for the Spaniards, that in their social intercourse no
people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what is due to the
dignity of human nature, or better understand the behaviour which it
behoves a man to adopt towards his fellow human beings. It is one of the
few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt,
and, I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolised.”
Well that’s what our daughter got from the village school. It didn’t
cost a lot, but we figured it was the right stuff. However, you may say,
things are not what they might be in Spain at the moment… And you
wouldn’t be far from the mark. “Nobody would want to be like Spain,”
said Robert Boucher, the US ambassador to the EU, recently. “It’s good
for nothing but flamenco and red wine.”
The king has just been caught red-handed killing elephants, and his
son-in-law, the Duke of Palma, has allegedly been caught with his
fingers in the public pot. He denies it. The judiciary has wrecked its
credibility by imposing a witch-hunt against Baltasar Garzón, who
inspired the admiration of the world by bringing to justice dictators,
drug-runners and terrorists, and investigating, as well as the morass of
corruption in the country, the crimes against humanity perpetrated
during the Civil War and dictatorship. And the jobless figures are by
far the worst in Europe, not helped by a national debt to make your eyes
water. The chips in Spain are good and down.
So, is it time to get out? Not likely. It’s just too good here, and
after 20 years, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I still love my
native Britain, but, as somebody remarked, it’s a nice place to get a
letter from… you wouldn’t want to live there.
Here we have space, solitary wilderness to walk the dogs; we have our
own oranges and olive oil; we pick lemons, almonds and apricots from
our trees. To keep us warm in winter the rivers bring us driftwood, and
there are prunings of olive and almond that burn hot as coal. The
sunshine provides our electricity; we have spring water piped into the
house.
True, we don’t have the benefits of rubbish collection, postal delivery or street-lighting… but you can’t have everything.
Admittedly, it’s country life that brings us all these delights.
Other more urban expatriates might see things differently. It’s in the
nature of the expat to grumble and criticise the host country, and lord
knows there’s enough to moan about… as there is in whatever land you
choose to make your stand. If you don’t like it, you can always leave…
but I can’t imagine how bad things would have to be to get us to leave.
For even after all these years, I still have a crazy romantic
illusion about Spain. As I speed home along the motorway, I cannot
suppress a frisson of delight as I pass the sign that says Seville,
Cordoba, Granada.
Everywhere there remain the traces of Spain’s richly textured
history, the caliphate of Cordoba that, when the rest of Europe was
still in the Dark Ages, was “the Ornament of the World”. The kingdom of
Granada, with its incomparable palace, the Alhambra. Beautiful riverside
Sevilla, where all the gold and silver stolen from the Americas was
landed and swiftly squandered by Church, monarchy and nobility.
The magic of Spain is there in the language, with its copious
admixture of Arabic, which for 800 years was spoken by everybody in the
peninsula. It’s in the fruit and the trees – the pomegranate from
Persia, the oranges from China, and almonds, saffron and aubergines.
The place is an inspiration, and had I not come to live in this
Arcadian valley within this extraordinary country, I never would have
found myself, nor the words to describe it.
Ay, Spain and your Spaniards… you’ve been through hard times before,
but you’ve come through right side up in the end. Let’s just keep our
fingers crossed and hope that the forces of reaction and stagnation –
the Church and the fascism even now creeping out of the woodwork – will
be confronted and subjugated, before things reach the pretty pass they
got to last time.
Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart, and his El Valero titles are available on Kindle, and in bookshops. Visit www.drivingoverlemons.co.uk for more information.
