Chris Stewart - Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham, my editors and publishers, for their encouragement, advice and friendship. They must at times have regretted the day we first sat munching oranges beside the river, discussing a book but if they did, they never let it show. Thanks also to Carole Stewart and Andrew Hogg for helping this book and its author along in a hundred different ways; to Domingo and his family; to Antonia and los del Puerto for their unstinting friendship and neighbourly help; and to the ever-inspiring, ever-welcoming Ortega family, who run the Bar Mirasierra, my office in rgiva. Above all, of course, warmest thanks to Ana and Chlo, who have put up with me, curbed my excesses, stopped me getting uppity, and provided so much of the material that you have just read.

Chris Stewart

DRIVING OVER LEMONS

Chris Stewart lives in Spain with his wife, Ana, and his daughter, Chlo.

EL VALERO

WELL, THIS IS NO GOOD, I DONT WANT TO LIVE HERE! I said as we drove along yet another tarmac road behind a row of whitewashed houses. I want to live in the mountains, for heavens sake, not in the suburbs of some town in a valley.

Shut up and keep driving, ordered Georgina, the woman sitting beside me. She lit another cigarette of strong black tobacco and bathed me in a cloud of smoke.

Id only met Georgina that afternoon but it hadnt taken her long to put me in my place. She was a confident young Englishwoman with a peculiarly Mediterranean way of seeming at ease with her surroundings. For the last ten years she had been living in the Alpujarras, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, south of Granada, and she had carved out a niche for herself acting as an intermediary between the farmers who wanted to sell their cortijos in the hills and move to town, and the foreigners who wanted to buy them. It was a tough job but no one who saw her ironing out deals with the coarsest peasant or arguing water rights with the most stubborn bureaucrat could doubt she was the woman for it. If she had a weakness at all it was in her refusal to suffer fools and ditherers.

Do you bully all your clients like this? I protested.

No, just you. Left here.

Obediently I turned the wheel and we shrugged off the last houses of rgiva, the market town where Id been adopted by my agent. We bumped onto a dirt track and headed downhill towards the river.

Where are the mountains? I whined.

Georgina ignored me and looked at the groves of oranges and olives on either side of the track. There were white houses covered in the scrags of last years vines and decked with bright geraniums and bougainvillea; mules were ploughing; boiler-suited growers were bent bum-up amid perfect lines of vegetables; a palm tree shaded the road where hens were swimming in the dust. Dogs slept in the road in the shade; cats slept in the road in the sun. The creature with lowest priority on the road was the car. I stopped and backed up a bit to go round a lemon.

Drive over lemons, ordered Georgina.

There were, it was true, a hell of a lot of lemons. They hurtled past, borne on a stream of water that bubbled nearby; in places the road was a mat of mashed fruit, and the earth beneath the trees was bright with fallen yellow orbs. I remembered a half-forgotten snatch of song, something about a lovelorn gypsy throwing lemons into the Great River until it turned to gold.

The lemons, the creatures and the flowers warmed my heart a little. We drove on through a flat plain quilted with cabbages and beans, at the end of which loomed a little mountain. After dipping a banana grove, we turned sharp right up a steep hill with deep cuttings in the red rock.

This looks more like it.

Just wait, were not there yet.

Up and up we went, bend after bend, the river valley spread below us like an aerial print. On through a gorge and suddenly we burst into a new valley. The plain we had crossed disappeared utterly, hidden from sight by the mass of mountain, and drowned by the roaring of the river in the gorge below.

Far below, beside the river, I caught sight of a little farm in a horseshoe-shaped valley, a derelict house on a cactus-covered crag, surrounded by unkempt fields and terraces of ancient olive trees.

La Herradura, Georgina announced. What about that, then?

Well, its nice to dream but the pittance weve got to spend is hardly going to buy us a place like that.

With the money youve got to spend you could afford that place and have some left over to do it up.

I dont believe you. You cant possibly be serious.

I was incredulous because this was so far beyond my wildest hopes. I had come to Spain with a sum of money that would barely stretch to a garden shed in the south of England, expecting to buy at best a ruined house with perhaps a little patch of land.

Well, theres no point in going any further. Ill have that one. Lets go down and see it.

We pulled the car off the road and tripped down a path. I was so overwhelmed with excitement and delight that I felt sick. I picked an orange from a tree, the first time Id ever done that. It was quite the most disgusting orange Id ever eaten.

Sweet oranges, said Georgina. Theyre mostly sweet oranges here good for juice. And the old men with no teeth like them.

This is it, Georgina. Its paradise. I want it. I mean, Ill buy it now.

Its not a good idea to be too hasty in these matters. Lets go and have a look at some other places.

I dont want to see anywhere else. I want to live here, and anyway Im your client. Surely we do what I want, not what you want!

We drove off, further into the valley, and Georgina took me to see a stone ruin that was slowly slithering down a hill towards a precipice. It was surrounded by rotting cactus, and groves of dead trees covered the dismal hill around it. A poisonous spring oozed from a clump of thorns at the bottom of the property.

Hell no, what did you want me to see that place for?

It has its good points.

It has the advantage of being a long way from the nearest golf course, but more than that I cannot see.

We moved on to look at a concrete blockhouse, a battery chicken shed, a filthy hovel infested with bats, and a sort of cave littered with turds and old bits of newspaper.

I dont want to see any more of this sort of thing. Lets go back to La Herradura.

So we did, and I sat on a warm stone in the riverbed, dreaming one of those rare dreams that suddenly start to materialise around you, until Georgina intruded.

I know its very nice, Chris, but there are problems with La Herradura. Its owned by a number of people, and they dont all want to sell and one of those who doesnt want to sell has access to a room he owns right plumb in the middle of the house. That could be inconvenient if not downright disagreeable. And then theres the matter of the water...

Her words faded as we both turned our heads to catch a snatch of song rolling towards us along the riverbed. I made out the words frog and crystal glasses but the rest was lost in a gruff baritone. From behind a rock came a red goat with only one horn. It eyed us up for a moment, then performed that trick that has so endeared the goat to mankind since the beginnings of time, the simultaneous belch and fart.

Clever the way they do that, isnt it?

Georgina ignored this observation. The man you see approaching us now, she announced in an urgent whisper, is the owner of the place across the river and I think that he may want to sell it.