A Lot Of Wind...

The bus that I take from Tarifa to just outside Algeciras where I teach in an English academy is regular but infrequent – I’m left with over an hour to kill before I start work and I kill it in a roadside venta with a café con leche and a slow, bad-tempered netbook. Since my previous job was in the same area I’ve been a regular there now for three years and the coffee is often plonked in front of me before I’ve opened my mouth. I take it to the terrace and sit in the deafening noise of the port traffic – juggernauts and container trucks – trying to concentrate on whatever it is that day.

The neighbourhood is called Los Pastores and the one behind it, where I work, El Cobre. Neither of these places will ever feature heavily in Ideal Home or Town & Country and the latter in particular raises eyebrows when I tell people I work there; they often seem mildly surprised that I’ve lived to tell the tale. I’ve never experienced anything on my way to or from work but a few curious looks and a laid-back family feel to what is undeniably a down-at-heel barrio. I would concede though that a number of the inhabitants appear to be interesting.

I’ve written about the venta before and the tortuously slow process through which I eventually came to feel accepted and comfortable there. Nowadays it’s a fait accompli; I’m more or less treated like royalty. I’ve seen staff come and go and whenever a newbie arrives he or she is taught quick sharp that mine’s a coffee. I’ve had knowing conversations with the dueña about how the ideal olive is a cracked one with the stone in, marinated in the Málaga style. I have tutted at news items on the (blaring) telly with the best of them.

In fact it isn’t the same bar as it was. Literally – they moved next door about a year ago, from the ground floor of their hostal into a single storey building at its side which was theirs already but had been lying unused. It was in that first bar, with its green andaluz tyles, that I learned just how noisy a game of dominoes can be in this country. The place seemed to attract the same huddle of middle-aged men every day, each of whom would take a hot drink or a pacharán over to their table and nurse it all evening while they screamed at each other.

One of them in particular, a white-haired man with a bulbous drinker’s nose, seemed to live in a permanent state of apoplexy. I have seen him go through a range of dramatic colour changes, culminating in a deep purple. I have seen him rise to his feet and physically threaten an opponent. I have seen the others gather around him with hands on his trembling shoulders, trying to calm him down. I’ve never seen him win a game of dominoes though. Not once.

“Coño!”

He seemed to be under the impression that everyone’s name is ‘coño’, also the term with which the landlord, another shouter and a dangerously overweight man, habitually addressed his wife. A stony faced, inscrutable woman, she didn’t seem in the least bit put out and managed to give the impression of being almost unaware of him, even as she brought him sandwiches. I’d been coming to the bar a good three months before she decided to stop overcharging me for my beer – I’ll never forget the day I got an extra twenty-five cents in my change and a sly smile out of her.

The only time I see them in concert, behaving like a couple as it were, is when they team up to pick on their put-upon barmaid (and cook, and cleaner…), which is rare because she gives as good as she gets and those arguments, even in this bar and this country, make everyone a little uncomfortable. When they finally peter out the relief is palpable.

In the new place things have been a little different. The domino men didn’t make the migration; they now gather in a place in El Cobre that I walk past on my way to and from work, able to hear them from one end of the street to the other. So it’s been a little quieter, though I use the term advisedly. The original premises have been given over to their son, who has spruced them up a bit, introduced wifi and who seems to spend an awful lot of time making sure the terrace tables are in a nice, straight line.

Quiet means merely having to cope with the full blast television and the people shouting at it. I can never quite understand what animates them – they’re always watching the same segment of an early evening news show that focusses on the food industry in Andalucia – slots on cheese factories and bakeries and so on – but evidently there are heartfelt opinions.

And, recently, another change; when I wander back up to get the bus home in the evenings, the place is now closed. I find myself worrying about the landlord’s health, which seems the most likely reason for their absence. Maybe his weight has finally got the better of him, or maybe they’ve just gotten too old to be hanging around in their own bar all day. A part of my daily life for the last three years, I miss them. I’d hate to think that one of them had toppled over like another domino. The put-upon stalwart is still there and piles up a plate of olives for me whenever I give her the nod, and there’s a new one who calls me hijo and who is utterly shocked and delighted when, on leaving each afternoon, I return my coffee glass to the bar.

If anywhere in Spain can be said to encapsulate it, it’s these places. Roadside bars and ventas, superficially devoid of charm but essentially full of it – they are vessels for all that’s typical and all that’s eccentric about daily life here and, as if to underline the latter, there’s a dog-eared piece of A4 paper taped to one of the pillars that announces the only house rule:

Singing Is Prohibited.

Oh how I’d love to have been here the night they felt it necessary to stick it up; I bet it was a good one.

Filthy smoke obscures the coastline as I pass through Pelayo, Spain’s wettest village they say and the last stop before I get off the bus for work. It’s a mountain village aboveAlgeciras, surrounded by beautiful Parque Natural – pines and cork oaks and rocky arroyos that spill down towards the sea. From Pelayo you can see both pillars of Hercules, one on either side of the Strait, or you can when the humid little pueblo isn’t shrouded in mist, which is most of the time.

Today though the fog has been replaced by the skyward plumes of dirty smoke on an otherwise clear day. Another long, dry summer is coming to an end and the crackling, brittle ground is burning. The brown cloud is drifting toward Getares, a suburb of the port, rising from a line of fire on the hills closest to the coast, maybe a kilometre from the road. Southern Spain is accustomed to wildfire and the authorities do not fuck around – the sky is loud and busy with helicopters that to and fro from a flooded quarry closer to town, huge and heavy water bags swinging from their bellies.

It’s quite something to see how much water those things hold – they release it slowly rather than all at once, making wet contrails for some distance before the bag is spent and the helicopter returns to the quarry. On the one hand, the quick and thorough response of the emergency services is testament to human ingenuity; how clever and conscientious we are, with our airborne water-carriers and our fire engines, our busy heroes working hard to save the day!

On the other hand, when you see how much of that water never reaches the ground, but hovers instead before drifting upwards and evaporating – sucked into nothing by a mocking sun – you can see exactly how frail we are in the face of nature’s full force.  Busy, brave little bees, but bumbling and butterfingered.

At the academy, classes are disrupted by the constant wupwupwup of the rotor blades above us. There’s a little excitement I suppose but not as much as I might have expected. In the three years I’ve lived in Spain there has never been a fire as substantial as this between Algeciras and Tarifa, but up on the Costa del Sol and further east they’re more common, and the children seem happy enough getting on with their day, entertained by the fluctuations in the volume of my voice as I raise and lower it over the noise.

Five hours later I’m back on the road with K, on our way home. The helicopters have been joined by tubby little yellow planes and the roads are still busy with the emergency response, but traffic flows. Up at Pelayo, the plume of smoke has abated but the aircraft are still active so the fire must still be raging out there somewhere. One of the reasons the reaction is so swift and comprehensive, I imagine, is that this is one of the windiest areas in Europe. The blaze could so easily engulf Getares or sweep in the other direction and take out the fincas and farmsteads that line the hidden coast between Pelayo and Tarifa. All of the conditions are present that might make a heart breaking tragedy for the area and a great spectacle for television viewers everywhere. Today, though, is one of those miraculous days in the Campo de Gibraltar – not even a gentle breeze, and among all the fire engines and police cars we don’t see a single ambulance. They stabilise and finally extinguish it at eight am the next morning and although it could have been ten or more times worse, it’s still bracing to learn that sixty whole hectares of countryside have been destroyed.

Except, it isn’t destruction, is it? It’s only that when it touches us – our homes, our things. We’re the only ones up there with the water bags and yellow bellies – industrious worriers, protecting our plots, standing against the world when we need to because although it cansustain us, it doesn’t have to. It may not even want to. The sun certainly didn’t look very worried yesterday. Its unimaginable energy is a one way street – we are miniscule accidents, unforeseen consequences of its rays, and it doesn’t give a shit.

The fire was no more or less welcome here than we are – its flames may as well have been petals or flapping wings, so natural were they and so thoroughly did they belong. The wildlife that can, leaves. The vegetation recycles without so much as a shrug. Those hectares will be blackened for some weeks, bare for some months; a year from now you will have to look very closely for the signs. Everything is in order, and we rage against it. We alone protest.

We alone object to being mere consequence. We long to be consequential, to radiate our own energy. To be our own sun; it’s a vanity of course but a beautiful one -it builds our cathedrals and splits our atoms, paints our paintings, sings our songs.

Gives us something to do.

The smartphones and motorway bridges, four wheel drives and TV shows – every bit as comprised of solar energy as the birds and the bees, the fir trees and the flames. Our artifice – the thing we call civilisation – is what makes us forgetful. We feel out of place, at odds with our world; we lose sight of the straight line that stretches from the centre of the sun to the keyboard of our computer. We think we’re different.

Another vanity – we’re no more special, and every bit as special, as the countless creatures that fled the fire yesterday, their survival instincts intrinsically linked to their reproductive cycle, and in that they are same as us. Nothing we do has a greater value or a greater role to play than our transmission of the most distilled form of the sun’s power that we have in our possession – our DNA.

Our children. Our greatest work of art, our most advanced technology.

And in an exquisite demonstration of just where we stand in the order of things, some of the little brats will grow up and drop their burning cigarettes on the dry grass, under the beating  September sun.

For protection from the brutal winds that blast the hills around Tarifa, the little homesteads that stud the slopes are invariably planted with something to surround them and take the brunt – some tall, bamboo-like grasses or a bank of prickly pear cactus. This evening these peripheries glow golden in the setting sun and so does the surrounding country as it descends from the high road to the shore below. I look down on it all from the bus window.

On the African coast Jebel Musa, Hercules’ southern pillar, peeks out from the murk of a marine layer and a few paltry tufts of cloud drift across the summit. Over Spanish soil the clouds are just as small and disparate but dirtier, full of rain. Above all that the sky is the tired blue of an ageing day. A lone vulture circles on this side of the strait – side to side and up and down through all the elements of the view, owning all of them. As it banks the sun catches its wings.

September light.

I’m on the bus because I’m back at work after a long and humid summer, but for all the mundane humdrummery of another working year, it does deliver this daily gift – the descent into the little pueblo that sits at Europe’s southernmost point, warmly lit by a yawning, westbound sun.

The winding mountain road straightens out as it slides toward the town and the vistas open up: the gleaming, endless Atlantic to my right, the Strait and Mediterranean to my left, Morocco dead ahead – I usually get a welcome text from Maroc Telecom about now, my eyes fixed on the little island that juts out toward that other continent, joined to this one by a slender causeway and adorned with a sturdy lighthouse and a Phoenician necropolis.

Septembers have been the same since we moved here. The same but different; our new Januaries, they usher in each year with daunting to-do lists, coupled with a sense of change and optimism. My first month here was a September and I was alone; K was back in Ireland filling boxes and working out her notice while I was charged with flat-hunting and starting my new job. Alone in a new country, that month was everything you’d expect it to be – it carved a notch at every point along the spectrum between thrilling and terrifying. Its successors have not been quite so dramatic, but the same tension, born of appetite for change on the one hand and fear of it on the other, arises like clockwork each Autumn as the beach season winds down and the tourists fade away.

For the first time this year, we failed to welcome the virgen and her procession as it filed through the Puerta de Jerez, the old mudejar entrance to the casco antiguo. We haven’t set foot in any of the casetas up at the recinta ferial this year. No fairground rides or junk food, no hooping rubber ducks at the patito stalls. We have other things on our minds and on our plates. Another side of Tarifa, and I suppose of life, has opened up to us a little.

K has been helping out at the local cat shelter and has roped me in. We go down each Saturday to where they’re cooped up, in what used to be the slaughterhouse, and muck them out and feed them. It isn’t pleasant – the makeshift space they have is inadequate in every respect – but it is good to get involved a little more in local life, to make some kind of contribution no matter how small. It has also incrementally increased the pie chart slice of our lives that we live in Spanish, and we have made new contacts, one of which has had an unforeseen consequence.

This summer, my attempts to sell my pictures down on the Alameda were stymied by the local police, but I’ve been busy and I now have product. I’ve spent the week mounting andframing images for display in Tarifa’s main exhibition space – the old refurbished royal prison where I’ve been invited to show my work alongside a trio of tarifeño artists, one of whom we met through the shelter.

So all of a sudden I’ve made some inroads, an important step forward in showcasing and selling my work. And, interestingly, it came of shovelling cat shit. As usual, I feel a little overwhelmed at the outset of my new year. The exhibition will keep me very busy for a week, rushing there each night when I finish at the academia, trying to figure out a pricing system and a work-flow so that I can take orders, if any are placed.

On top of that there’s A Lot Of Wind… and I really should be pitching more editors. Each day I eke out another little nugget of the book, perhaps as little as a hundred words, obsessed with the thing but unable to make it materialise any quicker. And, of course, the A Lot Of Wind… Big Secret that is almost upon us…

K will start her new job soon and that will bring changes for her, for us – I expect it will further focus the regular conversations we have about our future. The tone of them is evolving; we are less content to leave it at daydreaming, longing instead to pin things down. The usual suspects – what do we want? How do we get it? What will it look like?

The answer to the third question is becoming clearer, mostly through that process of elimination that is becoming older and crankier, increasingly impatient with the irritations, but also through the hopeful lens of our efforts, our tentative attempts to reinvent ourselves. The future is our homestead, our little patch of planet Earth, and these are our peripheries, the shoots of bamboo that once mature might take the brunt for us so that, when the wind blows, we can hunker down behind them and make our stand.

“You’d have a shit life,” says K, leafing through one of those magazines of hers in a deck chair out by the kidney-shaped pool, “without me.”

Strong words, but I believe she has me on this one. I give the proposition a moment’s thought, just in case, but no – I’ve got nothing. Still, I like to give as good as I get and after a brief period of reflection I manage to deliver a retort I think I can live with.

“We’re going to need more wine.”

“We have two bottles,” she says, eyes on the page.

“We have one bottle.” It’s exhilarating to be a step ahead of her. “I used some for the chicken.”

She looks up.

“You used a whole bottle of wine for your chicken?”

I shrug, lacking a magazine of my own to hide behind.

“That’s coq-au-vin, I’m afraid.”

She returns to her portfolio of cranky, hungry young women teetering on heels in what I assume are circus costumes.

“You’re a coq-au-vin, I’m afraid.”

I pick up my book. That’s as maybe, I think to myself, but we are going to need more wine.

The aquamarine squiggle of the reservoir is far below us, hazy as the sun sets. On the other side, Zahara de la Sierra is crab-like as it clings to its tower-topped hill, just another pueblo blanco among so many out here in the Sierra de Grazalema; Algodonales is turning on its streetlamps to the north, a slender strip of fairy light on the slopes. The blue grey forms of successive mountain ridges are graduated in ultraviolet shadow and a tiny, tiny lizard clambers about over the blades of grass beneath my chair.

We sit and silently look out over it all while the light recedes and further along the water someone plays some dreadful music so loudly it fills the valley and quietly enrages us.

In the morning, an expedition for wine. El Gastor is twenty minutes downhill on foot, along a road that overlooks endless rolling country to the north. The obligatory clutch of old men has collected in the shade of a climbing vine as we walk into the village and down a steep and narrow street to the central plaza. On our way we ask a man about open shops; we’re doubtful because it’s Sunday but he tells us there are two – one directly behind us and the other round the corner. We note that the one we’re right outside is open till two and decide to return after we’ve had a coffee.

Down in the square, I order a fanta for K and a beer for myself. Someone has stitched together sheets of that green plastic netting you see on farms and in greenhouses – enough of them to make a canopy big enough to be hung from the little town hall, covering the square between it and a cafeteria across the way. The strong sun shines through green and people out after Sunday mass – men in their seasonal short sleeves and women seated separately – take their coffees and cañas to the hum of gossip in the cooling polyethylene light.

It’s peak season in the south of Spain and El Gastor, like so many mountain towns, has in recent decades tapped the tourist well. At this time on a Sunday though it’s village life on evidence in the square. And what a life: too easy to appreciate these places in two dimensions – the past literally whitewashed by modern manicuring.  This was bandit country and they say El Tempranillo holed out here with his girlfriend, an El Gastor native, during the Peninsular war. In the country’s most recent conflict, the far-rightFalange took the town and subjected it to severe repression. These are the little streets through which the body of Diego Corrientes, made a twentieth century bandit by the occupiers, was paraded on a mule and there are plenty of people in the square today, men and women, old enough to remember.

We saunter back past the shops and pick up some wine. And beer. And crisps.

Later we sit in the half-shade beneath a sun sail out by the pool. K is back in a magazine and I’m in and out, keeping an eye on dinner. The other guests have left and we have the place to ourselves. It’s as we like it – quiet. Not even the couple who run the place show themselves, which tantalises the curious K. They are young Germans with an infant and she wants to know their story. Eventually, as we are about to eat, they pass by our casita on their way out for the evening and she gets to grill them. They’ve been here two years, having come from Málaga where she worked in childcare and he cooked. They found this place -  a big house and three bungalows – and took it. They say it’s been going well but that this year has been the worst.

After dinner we pull a couple of chairs up to the view and wonder about the details. How did they buy this place? Not on a cook’s wage. Did they come into money? Do they have an eye-watering mortgage? Will they make it?

We wonder because we wonder about our own future in Spain. Three years in there is still so much to be done, so much we still want. Risks to take, dreams to follow. So much that life could be but still isn’t.

There is no awful music tonight and the silence lulls as we pull a blanket over our legs and the stars come out. A mist is rising. By morning it will have covered our hillside in its grey cloak but for now we have the clear night sky and the valley. The distances reek of a time when this was frontier land, a swathe of strongholds resisting the Reconquista, now named for their location on what was the battleground between Christianity and Islam. Vejer de la Frontera down on the coast, Chiclana de la Frontera further along, then Jerez de la Frontera and Arcos de la Frontera and, north of here, Morón de la Frontera.

It isn’t that anymore. Apart from the odd burst of appalling pop, it couldn’t be more peaceful. With a little luck, the strife and turbulence that shaped these little towns is behind them just as, with a little more luck, we’ll be ready for any strife we have ahead of us. Life isn’t yet what it could be. It isn’t the fully realised dream. It isn’t the finished product. It isn’t enough. As the temperature drops and real black night closes in, however, I struggle beneath the dome of the stars to care all that much about what life isn’t.

Because it definitely isn’t shit.