Where have all the Spaniards gone?



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Chapter 43: Jesus Pobre
There's something special about this place. I love it.

I drive down the road towards Jesus Pobre. Now, where on earth would anyone name a village Poor Jesus? Well, there it is, with the regulation convent to house all those girls whom no-one wants. The poor peasants who cant afford a dowry for their daughters do what they have to do. They have a word with the mother superior, and another recruit enters the sacred portals. The peasant family no longer has to find bread for the girl and they dont have to give up half their patch of land as part of her dowry. Quite simply, the convent is full of girls whose parents cant afford to let them get married.

Opposite the convent is a field of almond trees. The trees are in full blossom. Underneath the trees the grass is full of those strange buttercups that look like cowslips. The view is magic. It is a painting with pointelliste brush strokes of white and pink above, and masses of yellow below.

If I drive to Tarbena, further to the south, I can let the car coast slowly down the winding hill south, through grove upon grove of almond trees all in full blossom. Half way down I get out of the car and look back at the terraces. The sunlight glints on the white petals. The yellow flowers in the grass are iridescent. It's fabulous. It's wonderful.

Next to the convent in Jesus Pobre is wonderful ruin. The guy I speak to in the village says it belongs to the convent. He snorts. I will get nothing from them, he assures me.

I know the ingrained Spanish peasant's hatred for the church, and decide to go and ask anyway.

The next day in the bar he asks me how I got on. I pull a face. "I told you so," he says, evidently greatly pleased that I got sent away with a flea in my ear.

*****

A few weeks later I am sitting in another bar. I am given some advice about a local builder. "Okay, okay, I promise I will have nothing to do with him."

Were the stories true? I dont know. But if only half the scams were based on fact I could do without knowing this guy.

I am told of a few more scams. One involves buying shares in some paintings which are to be sold. That sounds daft. Anyone who bought into that scheme must be off their head.

There is another scheme. The strange thing is, almost all these schemes are run by the English. The area seems to be largely populated by British crooks. This latest scheme involves buying up plots of land which are supposed to have planning permission but dont.

We drive past a sweet little cottage nestling under the western side of Mongo.

"You see that cottage?" My new friend points through the tangle of trees. "They never did find his wife. They say she is at the bottom of a well. But which well?" He shrugs his shoulders.

A couple of kilometres down the road he does a little detour. "Dont get involved with him." We slow to a crawl and peer towards a bungalow on the left, while he tells me a long and very complicated story of how many people got ripped off, the vast sums of money involved, and the nasty things that happened to one of the blokes who tried to do something about it.

God knows if all this is true.

*****

A year later I am in another bar. There is a Dutch couple sitting at one table, an English couple at another, and a single English lady at a third. It hasn't rained for months. It seems as tho it hasn't rained for years. "Have you got any water in your well?"

The Dutch couple pull faces.

"I haven't had water for the past two weeks," says the single English lady.

For weeks the main greeting is, "Ola! How's your water?"

The building has stopped in Calpe. Several high rise blocks stand abandoned. The town hall wont issue any more building permits unless you can prove you have your own water supply.

*****

When a bunch of Germans get together they either start brewing beer, or form a brass band. When the Welsh gang up they form a choir. It is said the English will form a club. Abroad they will undoubtedly form a tennis club, a bowls club, start a walking party, or pretend to get deeply embedded in local history.

All this is very well, but you can tell the English have arrived anywhere in force when you are stumbling through a dusty town that seems to have gone to sleep in the bright mid morning sun and you turn a corner, and there, across the street, is a charity shop.

You know that somewhere just out of town is a finca with a ramshackle yard. There will be makeshift pens harbouring a rescued donkey or two. There will be twenty-seven cats looking puzzled and wondering where their essential parts have gone. Dogs will look up at you with sad brown eyes.

Wherever the English go they immediately set up an animal sanctuary.

There is a certain English lady who likes to make sure all animals are properly domesticated. There are rules by which animals should live when in proximity to humans. Animals must at all costs be sanitised, sterilized, and humanised. Some even think they should be baptised, and when they die, properly burialised.

Wild animals are something different. Where I currently live, across the border in Portugal, there is a brisk trade in cats. It goes like this. Martha realises that the end of her garden is getting a bit out of hand. There are no less than three feral cats ranging across the land. Ferrel cats are NOT ALLOWED! Only domesticated cats are allowed on Martha's land. There is only one thing to do. She gets out the cat basket. It has a portcullis on the front. When a curious cat goes inside to see what it's all about, the portcullis is tripped, and the cat is captured

You can hear the swearing from a hundred yards. You back up the car, put basket and swearing cat in the back, and drive several miles to the river, over the bridge, and then, just to make sure, you drive ten miles back up the river on the other side, and then release the hysterical cat.

Then you put the basket back on a patch of land at the bottom of your garden ready to catch the next curious cat. Before long peace reigns in the garden as all the feral cats are safely across the water.

What this doesn't take into account is the fact that another Martha, who is in fact called Mary, lives on the other side of the river bank, and when she finds these feral cats roaming around the countryside, attacking her peace-loving domestic cats, and spraying everywhere, she immediately reaches for the cat basket with the portcullis drop. Hubby is commandeered to drive the station waggon ten miles downstream to the bridge, and the cats are duly released a suitable way from the bridge on the other side of the river.

A brisk trade in ferrying cats develops, and keeps the cats thoroughly confused, and the local English community busy throughout the long years of retirement.

Posses of earnest ladies are kept busy doing what some ladies have always seen as their most important role in life, catching stray grumpy male animals and cutting off their sexual parts. There is obviously some cathartic pleasure in this. It makes the males harmless, gets the females a quiet life, and keeps the population down to manageable levels.

To support the lifestyle of the English do-good lady abroad there needs to be some income. The ideal way to get the funds to pay for the vet to chop a bit here and a bit there, and to pay for the fencing and the food, is to have a bring-and-buy sale, and then start a charity shop.

There is one just across the street. In I go. There are shelves of books in English, books in German, and the occasional French novel. There are racks of clothes, and along one wall is a collection of frightful furniture, on top of which are spread some even more frightful nick-knacks.

On the back of the door is a notice about rabbits. Did you know that one rabbit can produce a quarter of a million rabbits in just two years? Odd, I always thought you needed two to get things going. English ladies abroad! The locals must find them exceedingly odd.

*****

I drive over to see a friend. It is a bit of a rigmarole. They live out in the campo beyond Polop. The road out of the village is fine, then you branch off to the right, and that road is fine for a kilometre or two, then it breaks down to a dirt track. Another kilometre and you reach a dry watercourse. This is a bit of a hazard as the boulders are rather large, and you have to weave a path around them. We jolt and jerk our way across, and then drive on for another kilometre to say hello.

At last we have a couple of days of rain. I decide to visit our new friends again. This time the watercourse is full of rushing water. Never mind, I'm sure I can get across. Except that I get one wheel stuck in a massive hole, and I can neither go forward, nor back. We have to get out and walk the rest of the way.

After a leisurely lunch we all go back to inspect my car. Heads are shaken. We investigate the hole. No. It cant be done. I am in too deep. "Leave it there till tomorrow. The water will have gone down by then."

We have to camp the night. The following day I go back to find the river bed is dry again. I jack up one corner of the car, throw rocks into the hole, and manage to drive the beast out again.

*****

We visit Phil. He has this wreck of a finca stuck in the middle of a field just to the south of La Nucia. We park up and jump out of the van. The smell is fantastic. The whole field is bristling with herbs; sage, thyme, fennel. We take deep breaths.

Phil gets out the paella pan. We sit round the fire which he stokes up in front of the rickety porch on the front of his hovel. We have just bought the rations. Phil drove his mahari out the back way, up through the pines. There is a supermarket down the road with a splendid selection of wine in the cellar. We get the vegetables from a couple of shops down in the village of Albir. They are chucked in the back of the mahari.

On the way back through the pines we get stuck. "I'll get a jack from the van" I say helpfully.

"No worry," says Phil, taking the shopping out the back. He unbuckles a couple of bits, removes them from the car, then between us we simply lift it up, and pull it round to a safer piece of ground, put everything back, and drive on. I must get a mahari; that's my kind of car.

We sit and watch the paella pot. Phil cuts up the rabbit and the chicken and throws it in. He pushes it around for a while in a businesslike way. Then he opens a bottle of tinto, and we get stuck in. Ten minutes later he chucks in some onions, and some other vegetables. Ten minutes later he tips a bag of rice onto it, and then tips a great shower of water over the whole thing, nearly extinguishing the fire. It bubbles contentedly away for half an hour while we put the world to rights.

I really like Spain.

*****

It's thursday evening. It's movie-time. We all pile into Rick's car. Rick used to own a garage in the UK. He retired and left his partner in charge. You can write the rest of the story yourself. Okay, so now Rick's been ripped off he is a bit up against it. Aren't we all? But, hold on, this guy is a motor mechanic.

Okay it's another story; but who cares if the stories all get mixed up. Pass the bottle, will you.

We drove down to Spain in the citroen. The back was full of Julie's gear that she was selling at boot-fairs on the way. The citroen seems unhappy. We had bother at the frontier. (See Chapter 38) But the real problem with the car happened in the south of France. We took it to a garage, and they claimed the machine was finished; clapped out; it wouldn't make another 100 kilometres; it wasn't worth repairing.

That night we camped close to a canal just north of Beziers. There were wooden ducks set out on the water to attract more ducks, which taste good when cooked over the brazier. We were surrounded by gypsies. One of them looked at the car, and did a bit of tinkering. "That will get you over the border, but not much further," he said.

We made it to Lliber in the Jalon valley, where we stopped with Rick and Anne at El Rancho. Rick took one look at the car and said, "I like citroens. Citroens are my speciality."

The following day we went off somewhere leaving him to attack the dying car. When we got back he pronounced the beast to be fully recovered and good for another quarter million kilometres.

The next day I drove into Calpe. It went like the wind, quiet as a bird. The machine was like new. Wonderful.

The point of all this rigmarole is to comment on Rick's car. It was, naturally, a citroen. There he was, a positive genius with citroens, and yet his own car was the worst ride I have ever taken. The back part of the car seemed to have large amounts of it missing. The suspension was non-existent, which meant we juddered up and down the whole way. One wheel had something wrong with it, which meant the car drove as if it had one square wheel. But it got us to Javea, where thursday night was English night at the movie house, and we watched some crummy Michael Caine movie.

Then we called into a bar and had fish and chips, and then jolted our way back home.

And this is Spain? English movies? Fish and chips? Yikes! What is happening to this country?

*****

We call into a bar in Benissa. It is market day. The streets are packed. This bar is run by a Colombian couple. I sit at a table playing cards with a bunch of guys. The cards are bigger than I am used to, and I dont quite get what all the pictures mean, but after a couple of goes I get the hang of the game.

Julie buys me a ron miel. I sit and play. Then a plate arrives. It is a rather delicious tapa: albondigas. The meat balls are delicious, and the sauce is spectacular.

A glass of tinto arrives. "Hey, this is good. Can I have another one?'

I dont get another plate of albondigas, but I do get something called a pelota. Good grief! Pelotas? I dont believe this. We are in the province of Valencia. Pelota is a game, rather like the English public school game of Fives, where you whack a ball at a wall, and hit it back again after the rebound: a sort of one-sided tennis.

The Spanish variety is played differently. Oops! Mistake. Serious mistake! This is not a Spanish game, but a Basque game. I have only seen this game played in Irun, right on the French border.



I look at my plate. The object is rather like the ball they use in pelota, hence the name. It is a large meatball wrapped in cabbage and soused in lemon juice. It is heavenly. The secret is to get your meatball to taste light, and to get the cabbage cooked just right so it is crisp and juicy, but without being flaccid.

Another glass of tinto arrives. Hey, I really do love Spain.

*****

It's all go. First we have the fancy lights, and the christmas festivities. The large stores now have a special table set up at the entrance. Those who have bought their christmas presents queue to have them nicely wrapped in fancy paper.

Christmas is a bit quiet, but not to worry. It's only another week to new year's eve. The village square is decked out with lights. There is a stage set up along one side. There will be a band. There will be at least one boring speech. There is a tableau showing the nativity scene, replete with manger, a few animals, and a set of figures depicting the usual suspects. At midnight there will be fifteen minutes of fireworks with the regulation rockets and star bursts.

Strictly speaking there should be the old fashioned ritual, but it seems to have fallen out of favour. We are supposed to eat twelve grapes while the clock is striking midnight; one for each month of the year.

A few days later its The Kings. This is christmas proper. We are supposed to give the presents on the sixth of january. That's when the kings arrive at the manger and present their gifts. So there are more celebrations.

And as if all this is not enough, the following week we have the feast of St Anthony, the patron saint of animals.

It was supposed to be market day for us under the tree in the square next to the church at Benissa. The place was packed, but not for us. Everywhere were folks dressed in their finest, and there were animals everywhere.

Apparently St. Anthony the Hermit, or St. Anthony the Great, was born in Egypt in 251 AD and lived to be 105. At age 34, he relinquished all his wealth and headed into the desert to be alone with God and meditate on Christ. He spent twenty years in isolation living in an abandoned Roman fort on a mountain by the Nile.

Later in life, according to legend, various animals helped guide Anthony on his travels, including a wolf and a raven. Once he cured a pig from illness; because of this he's often pictured wandering the wilderness with a pig by his side.
St. Anthony died on January 17, which is now celebrated as his spiritual birth in Heaven.

So here we have the whole of Benissa littering up the streets, and processing up the aisle to be blessed. There are cows and horses, all dressed up with fancy hats, and garlands round their necks. Some of the cutest shows contain a motley home collection of birds and beasts. There is a small girl in fancy dress sitting on a donkey. She has in one hand a white bird in a cage, and sleeping between the ears of the donkey is a cat, following are two dogs, tethered to the stirrups. There is even a row of tractors outside the church door waiting to be blessed.

*****

It is good friday. Patricio from the bar is going to join the parade. It is the traditional thing to travel round the twelve stations of the cross on the day of Christ's crucifixion. There is a set route, and it is clearly marked with votaries set in the walls at various points around the town.

We stock up with candles and repair to the first station, and there we start our slow, penitential walk around the town, each clutching his own candle, and trying to keep it alight. Bringing up the rear is a ragged brass band playing a dirge, with big bass drum prominent. Every so often we stop. I'm not quite sure what for. Maybe the priest is busy up front with some important mumbo-jumbo. I ask Patricio. He shrugs his shoulders. Who cares? It is the done thing to join the round, but one doesn't need to question why. It is simply a tradition.

I am happy with that. This is my home town. I can join in the important events. It reminds me that I do belong to a community.

The band has been silent for some time. Suddenly the big bass drum booms out again and the slow trumpet dirge begins, and we shuffle forward a few more yards to the next station of the cross.

When we get to the last station everybody simply drifts away, and we go back to the bar for a warming drink and some more albondigas, and a plate of higado (liver). Hey, this is more like it.

*****

It's lunch time. The sun is high in the sky. The fishing fleet is in. The seagulls circle and dive as the fishermen throw the debris overboard.

We briefly watch the action. Fish are packed into wooden boxes, ice is tossed over them, and they are pushed along runners into the auction building. A few minutes later the staff from the restaurants are carrying today's catch back to their restaurants.

Outside the restaurants we are given a glass which is topped up with sangria. We study the array of fish in the glass cabinets. There are four restaurants in a row facing the street, and there on the pavement each eaterie has its own glass case displaying today's specialities. There is everything there from red mullet to lobster. I could happily live here forever, simply eating my way through the contents of the cabinets.

We sit at a table. Our glasses are re-filled. The first course arrives. It is mussels in their shells laced with finely cut peppers and tomato in a dressing.

I'm on my fourth glass of wine. The red mullet arrives. The sea-gulls are still circling round the quay. The great rock of Calpe towers over us. The sun is warm. The baked mullet are delicious. I idly twirl my wine glass and wonder what I will eat tomorrow. Isn't it all simply wonderful? How could one do anything else with one's life? What else is there to do? I shall live here forever.
.... to be continued