A Lot Of Wind...

Very few of you, I imagine, will have enjoyed the depth of understanding, clarity of judgement or richness of insight that K and I have been enjoying recently with regard to the questions and quandaries of global geopolitics.  Perhaps as few as none of you will have been able to appreciate, as we have, the fine balances and convolutions, the real dilemmas and delicate considerations that George W Bush, for example, along with his now legendary team of peace enthusiasts – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell – will have had to grapple with in their relentless pursuit of justice in the Middle East.

The precision that will have had to accompany Bill Clinton’s more famous compassion as he weighed up the countless (and often contradictory) criteria for going into, or not going into, or going into and then pulling out of, a Kosovo descending into deadly chaos. The teetering structures and the slip-slide systems that threaten constantly to tumble on the turn of a card.

A card in a house of cards. The often split-second timing with which the great players must make their calls and live with the consequences: Franklin D Roosevelt, the Federal Reserve and the war in Europe, Saddam Hussein and his attempted liberation of Kuwait, Margaret Thatcher’s critical response to the Falkland crisis, without which the world would be so very different today – what all of these leaders had in common of course was an unwavering regard for the well-being of the people their decisions affected.

But how to make those decisions? How to make sense of it all, to weigh it all up, to navigate one’s way through the ethnic rivalries, religious conflicts and political machinations of a culture we may well struggle to understand? The malevolent undercurrents of historical resentments, the quick sands of long held grudges and hatreds held close to the bosom, the thin misleading refractions of propriety on the surface while the murk of corruption muddies the waters below – these are the swamps that our leaders must wade through in their never ending search for what they prize above all else – a morally correct course of action. The right thing to do.

No, it isn’t for you – simple, ordinary people – to appreciate, as K and I do, the heaviness of history’s hand as it rests upon those estimable shoulders, the gravity with which the awful responsibility of leadership presses down on those troubled heads. For our part, we understand all too well, and it is a profound understanding  – one that has matured, like an elegant, ageing wine, out of our efforts, over the last couple of weeks, to adopt a cat.

That’s right – this is a story about a cat.

Tommy doesn’t know his name is Tommy, but it is now. The exercise of control so often begins with language, of course, but while it might be a little imperialist of us, we had to call him something. Or rather, K did. We’ve known the friendly little fellow for a while – acallejero of the barrio, he’s been living a street away from our house, spending much of his time on a little plazuela we often pass. She has been unable to do so without saying hello to him, and he always reciprocates cordially. Apparently his name derives from the fact that he’s a tomcat although, for the record, he does indeed look just like Jerry’s nemesis.

A little over a fortnight ago I noticed one evening, not being able to see very well in the gloom, that one of Tommy’s ears was either gone or significantly reduced. The following morning I could see that it was still there but crumpled and bleeding from where he’d been scratching himself mercilessly. I dutifully reported my observation to K, who decided that we should get him to a vet and, since she was travelling at the time, delegated the project to me. With a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation for the trust she’d put in me – which I expressed to myself with the softly mumbled words ‘fuck sake’ – I set about the task, abducting the itchy and unsuspecting creature by bundling it into a transporter and hauling it off to the vet.

This was the beginning. As is so often the case with good intentions, I hadn’t really thought it through; the vet confirmed the presence of a parasite (let’s call it an insurrection) in Tommy’s ears. He would need drops twice daily for a week and we, therefore, would need the help of the local group of animalistas (let’s call them NATO) who run a shelter for strays. Into a cage he went, which I tried to make as comfortable as possible for him but which no doubt was a horrifying personal Guantanamo for Tommy. Over the next week or so his condition improved and he would perk up each time I came with the drops and some treats. I was bonding and he appeared to have succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome – we were already in deeper than I’d ever intended.

The upshot was that, having created this dependency (I’m looking at you, Egypt), it didn’t feel right to throw him back on the street. I convinced K that we should adopt him and we took him back to the vet this last Monday to have him castrated (let’s call it de-baathification) and tested for any illnesses. It turns out he has FIV, which is an immune deficiency that cats get, apparently. It makes them susceptible to things like ear insurrections and other bodily rebellions, so in that respect I suppose it’s a bit like fundamentalism.  A situation, then, which I for one thought was pretty complicated to begin with – given that we already have two cats – turns out to be even more so. Bit of a quagmire, in fact.

Intimations of Mesopotamia, anyone?

Life since Monday has been interesting. If I might be permitted to describe that day as 3/10, you could say that K and I are living in a post 3/10 world. As friendly as the little chap is, it turns out he has absolutely no intention of behaving like a lap cat, now or at any point in the foreseeable future; think of him then as our personal Afghanistan. Although the de-baathification went according to plan, he continues to display tomcat behaviour, and since this includes spraying everything in sight with his urine, we have been unable to reach any kind of indoor agreement with him.

Furthermore he has launched a number of attacks on our home soil, even making incursions over the back wall that our own two cats find impossible to scale. Whether there or in the front, he makes himself loudly known several times daily until such time as we capitulate and offer food. The noise that cat can make. The neighbours (former Soviet Union on one side, China on the other) must really hate us. Suddenly our own sovereignty is compromised, our borders breached. Whether we can adopt him or not would now appear to be very much his choice, and not ours.

A foreign adventure has come home to roost; a much longer battle than we had ever envisaged will be fought now on our own doorstep. And back patio. It is humbling and has rather taken the sheen off our sense of noblesse oblige. Either one of us could tell you for a fact that, in his darker moments, Barack Obama will have seriously considered bundling Iraq up into a box, driving out into the middle of nowhere, and leaving it there. On the other hand the experience does place us in a position to understand, only too well, the intricacies at stake and the fraught decision-making at play as the eyes of the world turn towards Putin, and his speculations in Ukraine and the Crimea.

I have written about Benarrabá before and about the spell it holds over us. Even by pueblo blanco standards, it is tiny, hidden from view at the end of a series of hairpin turns, a kilometre or so from the road that threads along the eastern side the Genal Valley and ends up in Ronda. A series of larger pueblos, with names from the days when this was Berber high ground, adorn the road like a string of gleaming worry beads.

Unlike them, it is hard to imagine Benarrabá expanding or modernising. Expansion, in fact, is impossible – the town is draped across a narrow ridge that offers no more space – and any modernisation going on around here is going on in Gaucín, a few kilometres down the road, so this little pueblo of six hundred souls sparkles alone in the green velvet of the valley, isolated on its summit but connected by sight – and the ineffables of culture and history – with other tiny towns, visible in the distance on the other side of the river.

We come in February every time, the Andalucian winter just beginning to lift and the skies wet with heavy raincloud. The topography always seems to punch a few holes in the grey blanket, though, and vertical shafts of sunlight play across the slopes as if painted there by a master; the brilliant sun shines through the murk like a miracle, even as mist envelops the hills above the slanted little settlement that has never failed to enchant.

When we first came here it embodied the sense of adventure and discovery that we were experiencing more or less continually as newcomers to Spain. Dizzy and intoxicated, barely a week could go by in those days without our taking off in the car to explore some fantastically foreign new place: some city to dazzle us or a corner of wilderness to wonder at. It is no exaggeration to say that the country was casting a charm over us.

That first February visit was unseasonably warm and sunny, in fact, the square full of people young and old, enjoying tapas of mushrooms picked in these hills, drinking good, cheap wine made in the valley and soaking up the welcome warmth and glaring light. It was magical; it made us feel that we were weaving magic with this, our new life.

The intervening years have seen us make the journey from that early amazement to a deepening sense of respect and, yes, love for the places we have seen and continue to see. Some alchemy takes place; the thrill of discovery gives way to the deeper satisfaction of rediscovery. The pleasures of novelty mature and blossom into the joys of familiarity, of el conocer – though foreigners here we can nowadays conjure a feeling of some kind of belonging, some kind of bond: as well as infiltrating the place we can feel that it has infiltrated us, that we are somewhat seasoned with its spiced flavours and fruity oils.

The buzz of first sight becomes the rush of return – to a tabanco in Jerez, an apartment in the Albayzin, a fish restaurant in El Puerto, a gorge in Asturias, a bar just off the square in Salamanca, a pueblo blanco; our trajectory through Spain is no longer a series of one night stands – it’s a real love affair now, a complete seduction.

Benarrabá, perhaps more than anywhere else, exemplifies that journey; by the time we make it through the rain and descend into the pueblo that reveals itself suddenly as if by sleight of hand, we feel we have history here. We love it and continue to come but the truth is we haven’t always been optimistic about it – I suppose you could say we have felt protective of it. Last year’s Feria was a worrying experience for anyone who cares about the place. The weather was bad and attendance was very poor. The stall holders in the square were idle and anxious, the bars on the ruta de tapas more or less empty.

It almost seemed as if the town was cursed as we huddled round the fire and chatted with the subdued landlady. With the cold and the wet and the relative silence the contrast with that first year could not have been greater. Unconsciously perhaps, we came to think of Benarrabá as Benarrabá The Unfortunate. A place in decline, afflicted with plain bad luck, a pueblo blanco trying to execute the same reinvention trick as the other pueblos blancos, but failing.

So it is not entirely without trepidation that we return this year. We know that the one, twelve room hotel is full – we have had to book a room in a casa rural on trust over the phone, with a number we got from reception – but the weather is truly awful and we can’t imagine many people braving it, despite the fact that there will be Guinness record attempt on Sunday. Something about the largest plate of ham and an enterprising idea on the part of some local bright spark, no doubt, but surely not enough to make a success of the Feria in these appalling conditions.

I call the number to get directions. The casa rural has no name, no web page – we know nothing about it, and have visions of staring at some elderly couple in their own living room. While on the phone I notice a dead cat in an unused water trough. As omens go it is not auspicious.

More hopefully, it turns out we don’t have a room in the house for the night. We have the house. Forty quid. And as we while away the rest of the day there do seem to be more people in town.  Our night ends with very good flamenco in a horrible, but adorable, little bar.

The following morning there is definitely something in the air – cars are being guided onto the school playground, and in the tent on the main square it looks like Benarrabá means business this time. One hundred and sixty-one cortadores have turned up with sharp knives and iberico hams and the central fountain has had a fifty square metre platter built around it. By noon the gathering has become a full blown media event. We are stunned by the scale of it and by the crowd that has materialised; the little town has really pulled one out of the hat.

The record attempt proceeds amidst loud cheering and the stop start bureaucracy of the digital clock. It is successful, as it happens, but that doesn’t really matter. Ham has drawn these people here but they’re not here for the ham. After all, nobody needs a fountainful of ham. It’s all a folly, on one level: a decidedly random event.

No, they don’t need ham, but they do need bread. They need life and today is a sign of life. Money will pour into the pueblo and its name will be heard far afield. More people will come. This is regenerative. The town has gathered in a show of unity, of what the Spanish call la convivencia. Despite the one-off nature of the day, it shares something with countless others. It is a ritual of sorts – something powerful has pulled people together. The same power that made them dance around the fire, gather in the arena, the same power that made them build those ancient places our archaeologists struggle to decipher. Benarrabá is blessed: it hums with a magnetism, and today isn’t the day to explain it. Now is not the time to figure it out.

It just happens.