The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 10

  I felt deeply sorry for him but I did not know what to tell him. That his extremism was alienating, that perhaps Mercedes’ reasons to live did not lie in the olive groves …

  Early the following morning, set to go, I drank my café at a bar in the square. The bearded patron, wiping his espresso machine with a cloth, never uttered a word. His lips were drawn, tight as an extended elastic band. Perched on high was a television, sound up, announcing the weather and news. No one was paying it any attention; I was the sole customer. From behind a door, an old woman in black appeared. She must have been ninety, with a clawed face. Tiny as a sparrow, unsteady as a skittle, she began to holler. I could not understand her screeching. The barman paid her no attention, kept polishing his shiny coffee machine. She screamed again, gripping the door frame with luminously white-fleshed talons, while emitting an unsettling high-pitched hum. Eventually, the man slapped his cloth against his immaculately clean counter and went in search of whatever she wanted. Returning, he handed her a pen and without a word, lips pursed, continued his housework. Mother and son? I wondered about his broken dreams, about their story, his father doubtless long since departed. I wished him good day as I settled two coins in a plastic saucer on the counter, but he only scowled at me.

  A caravan of rose-coloured clouds, now that the rain had let up, appeared from behind the stone and wood houses in the plaza. In the distance, iron-walled mountains, austere, forbidding, snow-capped. I stood a moment, looking, reflecting …

  The woman from the grocer’s across the square eyeballed me, then disappeared inside to her rotting foodstuffs. Climbing the cobbled lanes on my way to the bus shelter, from where I had disembarked a few days earlier, I passed a school where a black-clad woman was dragging a fat snivelling boy armed with satchel to the gates. The bus arrived; the same driver; one passenger. I boarded and took a seat, pausing an instant to bid farewell to a harsh, cruel earth.

  ANDALUCÍA

  Andalucía, Spain’s southernmost territory. It is where the Spain of our imaginations springs to life: flamenco, bullfighting, gypsy women in brightly coloured, frilled frocks beating their feet against the ground, Baroque churches, Moorish palaces and fortresses, sherry barons in Cordobes hats cantering on horseback across their estates, fiestas, ferías, music, soulful and passionate, the sweet scent of orange blossom and hectare after hectare of olive orchards …

  I was crossing the southern limit of my earlier experiences. From here on until I reached mainland Italy – Andalucía, Morocco, Algeria and Sicily – were uncharted territories: an exciting prospect. I was on my way to Córdoba, once Corduba, the Roman capital of Baetica and, later, capital of the western Islamic Empire, to meet up with a research scientist, a soil specialist, whose contact details I had found through a friend working at UNESCO. From Madrid, along the dull E5 motorway through Castilla-La Mancha, I journeyed across flat brown land. A man on the bus claimed that tapas originated in this central province of Castilla-La Mancha during the sixteenth century when it was discovered that mature cheeses disguised the taste of sour wines. Thus began the habit of serving a lump of smelly cheese with a glass of second-rate plonk.

  The Despeñaperros Pass, a natural, dramatic breach through the Sierra Morena, gateway to Andalucía, straddling the border between the two provinces. Here, kites hung heavily overhead while articulated lorries and coaches climbed in funereal procession due to a massive rock slide that had blocked off much of the defile. Either side of us were pine-verdant, craggy mountains shooting towards a thunderous sky. In spring, these mountainsides were golden with blossoming broom. In former times, bandits had lain in wait for the muleteers and journeymen moving north from the fertile lands of Andalucía, travelling this bullion route to Madrid, from the metal-rich estuaries and the ports of Cádiz and Sevilla, transporting mineral and agricultural wealth including famed Andalucían olive oils. At that stage, the pass was the only passage through and it grew in notoriety and danger because of it. There had been a staging post, a transportation stopover offering sustenance and a bed to the itinerant and weary. Don Quijote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, from Cervantes’ immortal novel, had stayed at the inn. Alas, long since gone. This Despeñaperros Pass, or Pass of the Overthrown Dogs, gained its name after a battle between the Christians and Moors in 1212 during the long and drawn-out years of La Reconquista, the repossession of Spain by the Christians. From here, after a humiliating defeat, the Moors fled with their tails between their legs.

  Our fifteen-minute coffee stop, first steps on Andalucían soil, was at a considerably less romantic location, a cafeteria set back from the roadside somewhere past Guarromán. The day was growing noticeably warmer. In its predominantly concrete garden cacti, palms and succulents sprouted as well as a few desultory, dusty olive trees laid out in a central weed-cluttered patch, each dripping with large black fruits. Their harvesters were sparrows. I helped myself to a couple of drupes and bit into them. They were not as sweet as the Romans I had tasted in Malta but neither were they overly bitter. Their deep burgundy flesh ink-stained my fingers.

  Back on the road, young olive groves planted in military rows in tilled red earth where not a weed or blade of grass sundered the regimented scene. I fancied that the earth, with its startling rustiness, its deep oxide-red, had been dyed with blood. After generations of violence and fighting, it was as though the corpses had fallen like forgotten fruit and steeped the landscape.

  Andújar, the largest producer of bottled sunflower oil in the world; a surprising fact, but out of sunflower season the only plant life was the olea. Andújar had once been an elegant Roman civil city, but I saw no trace of it as we passed through its ugly suburbs though splendid displays of flowering, feathery mimosas redeemed it to this passing stranger. In the Iglesia de Santa Maria hung El Greco’s Christ’s Oration in the Garden of Olives.

  The larger, elegant farmhouses set in the rolling plains were known in the south as cortijos. Gerald Brenan, who had resided in a village in Las Alpujarras up until the civil war, wrote in South from Granada: ‘The great cortijo or farm of the Andalusian plains is a direct descendant of the Roman villa. It has the same offices and rooms, excepting the hot baths, laid out round a spacious court. The ground floor contains the old mills, wine vats, and store rooms, and sometimes the stables, while the upper floor is divided between apartments for the owner and living-rooms for the bailiff. Over the monumental entrance-gate there is a niche for a sacred image, and above the house there is a mirador or lookout tower.’

  After the Catholics had reconquered Spain, the Moors, as well as all Jews who had not fled, were forced to take on the Christian faith. These ‘converts’ became known as Moriscos. But in spite of all promises to the contrary, the Christian monarchs eventually exiled them and divided up their properties between ranking clergy, military and aristocracy. Many of these had no knowledge or interest in the land and it was left to the less fortunate to labour for them. This system, known as Latifundia (meaning in Latin ‘spacious farms’), had been perfected by the Romans. Its legacy was hardship and poverty for all those who had no estates of their own, who toiled the soil for a pittance and were kept firmly in line by manager or overseers. Alternatively, the farm workers paid rents, collected by live-in bailiffs. Andalucía still suffers from such a hierarchy. Many of the cortijos remain in the possession of estate barons living elsewhere.

  I was gazing upon a sea of olives, no other crop. Olive oil opulence. There are an estimated 179 million olive trees in Andalucía. Beyond the early cultivation of the olive, the Romans, as elsewhere, generated a level of oil production that grew into a thriving empire-wide business. Later, the Moors contributed improved agricultural and irrigation techniques and alternative medicinal and culinary practices. For a while after the Moors and Jews had been driven out of Catholic Spain, olive oil was looked down upon as an inferior product, an eastern legacy. The Catholics preferred lard and, later, butter.

  From the window, much activity in the grounds of the magnifice
nt cortijos, labourers hard at work, pruning the trees. I spotted a tractor with trailer transporting branches still studded with drupes. I wondered if these were to be left to wither or if they would be separated and pressed at a later stage. Instead of one central torso shooting up from the root base, the trees possessed a trio of slender, slanting trunks, each hung with but a few branches. Low, severely pruned, tailor-made for easy harvesting. And the ground … I had never looked upon such weedless fields, as though they had been vacuum cleaned. Most of the groves were planted on inclines, without terracing. In the Jaén province of Andalucía, close to 150 million olive trees are farmed. Were the fields and plains kept so pristine, so denuded, by massive doses of weedkiller? Was this the olive fiasco Simon had spoken of?

  Running fast, parallel to the roadside, I sighted the mighty Río Guadalquivir. Its source, headwaters, north-west of Jaén, flowed from the Sierra de la Cazorla. It was slushy and mushroom-toned; polluted, not attractive. The 660-kilometre Guadalquivir was the backbone of the region. At its mouth, where I was heading later, access to the peninsula had been perpetrated by the earliest of traders and colonisers arriving from the east in long-oared galleys. They had crossed the Mediterranean greedy for the famed silver and iron that was mined along its banks …

  But for the time being there was nothing but olive trees. I wondered whether the river’s pollution was caused by olive farming. I had not discussed with eco-warrior Simon what impact the mountains of olive waste and the vegetable water were having on the countryside. Where to store it? What to do with it? Andalucía was harvesting and transforming the fruits of close to five million metric tons of olives into oil every year. Aside from the used water, this created three and a half million tons of dried waste. One of the great bonuses of olives is that everything, every last part of the drupe, is usable. What remains after the fruit has been pressed for extra virgin oil is a pomace that can be pressed again several times over until the final drop of oil has been wrung from it. This ultimate extraction produces an oil destined to be made into soap. When that last vestige of juice has been removed all that remains is a desiccated brown paste, the waste, the crushed residue of skin, stones and pulp. In Middle Eastern countries, the Arabs still feed this dried waste to their camels, believing it offers valuable nutrients. Some farmers return it as mulch to the trees. Spanish farmers used to press it into dried briquettes, similar to Irish peat blocks, to burn in their fireplaces. At home, at our local mill, as elsewhere in southern France and other countries, the waste feeds the fire that heats the water used during the oil extraction. But Spain’s residue was phenomenal. It would be impossible to burn such quantities at the mills. To utilise a small portion of these millions of tons of paste, two local electricity plants had been constructed, one in Córdoba and the other in Jaén, and there were others in the pipeline. A German organisation had made a bid for the contract, but I knew no more. But as for the vegetable water, a greasy residue – margine we call it in France – I had no idea what was happening to it. I was hoping that I would learn more when I met the scientist in Córdoba.

  I arrived in Córdoba late evening. The taxi from the bus depot sped through narrow, high-walled streets until, passing through a gated entrance, it deposited me in a splendidly romantic courtyard. I had fallen upon somewhere exquisite. The very reasonable room rate must have been due to the season. My unkempt windswept hair, hiking boots and cargo pants caused the porter to question my reservation. However, at reception I was greeted warmly and offered fruit-juice punch while I filled out the registration form.

  ‘Welcome, Señora Bridgewater. We sincerely hope you will enjoy your stay with us.’

  ‘Drinkwater, thank you.’

  A swift glance into the formal dining room decided me against staying in and I went ambling off down historic lanes until I came upon a cobblestoned plaza where I found an inviting taberna. It was well after ten o’clock. Not late for the Madrileños, but I was not acquainted with the habits here. At the bar, I requested a table and a glass of red wine. Within moments, a rather dapper gentleman was at my side.

  ‘Join us, why don’t you?’ Normally, I would have refused this Englishman, but I was tired, fancied some company and he seemed kind. I followed him to the upturned oak barrel where he and his wife were enjoying generous glasses of fino, tawny sherry.

  ‘We were talking about you earlier today,’ said the woman before I had settled my glass. I was taken aback. They were from Norfolk. ‘We spotted what we think was an exceedingly old olive tree standing alone in a field at a crossroads. We thought its age must have been the reason the farmers had kept it.’

  I was hooked.

  They had driven up that afternoon, along the N331, from Málaga where they were holidaying. ‘Somewhere close to Antequera,’ said the woman.

  There had been Roman settlements in the vicinity of Antequera. Might this be a Roman tree? Delighted by the encounter and that my olive quest excited others, I scribbled directions hastily on a napkin and confirmed that I would seek out their discovery.

  St Valentine’s Day in Córdoba. Heavy drizzle, but mild enough. My mobile had not been charged since Madrid and all telephone and Internet connections were down at the hotel, a designer’s extravaganza, fabulously palatial, built over Roman ruins, visible through the glass floor in the main salon. However its elegance was out of sync with its Fawlty Towers management. I was in possession of a room key that locked me out, hot water taps that produced no water and was addressed as Señora Bridgewater.

  I took a walk to the river, falling under the spell of the city instantly. Córdoba, capital of Andalucía, had, along with Baghdad, been the greatest city of the Western world. Descending cobbled streets lined with fruiting orange trees, I inhaled the damp air perfumed with citrus fruits. Wooden boxes of misshapen, green-tinged oranges were positioned on the steps of many of the doorways along with scribbled notes, Sírvase, ‘Help yourself’. Cocks crowed, chickens clucked in the city. Down at the water, disappointingly the Roman bridge that crossed the coursing, mouse-brown Río Guadalquivir was inaccessible, scaffolded for renovations. Workmen were everywhere, shouting to one another, their cries lost in the forceful downstream flow.

  I strolled the bankside down along the Paseo de la Ribera in the rain, photographing the impressive wooden water wheels. One of the greatest, most practical legacies of the Moors to Andalucía was their irrigation systems. The Romans knew a thing or two about irrigation. Pliny wrote in his Natural History: ‘There is no doubt that gardens should be attached to a villa and that they should be kept irrigated, watered if possible from a flowing stream, but otherwise from a well with a wheel, valve pumps, or by drawing with shadufs.’ But the Moors surpassed the Romans and, what is more, they had a lovely term for the business of irrigation, ‘the invention of summer’. These wheels down at the riverside were added by the Moors to original Roman mills. Today, they were abandoned, decaying, occupied by birds, plants and occasional rats. Like the sludged, contaminated river flowing fast at their bases, this seemed a sad relic of a once glorious past.

  The taxi dropped me outside the main building of the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture. It was housed in a finca, a farmhouse that for centuries had been the summer residence of the local bishop and was still known as the Alameda del Obispo, or Birch Tree of the Bishop. Directly after the civil war, Franco’s party had requisitioned it with its one hundred hectares and had converted it into civic offices. Today it was a research institute.

  The interior was a maze of locked doors along corridors reeking of school dinners. Nobody recognised the name of the doctor I was meeting. Across the country lane and a field carpeted with oranges, I tried the laboratory blocks. Here, I was greeted by antiseptic hospital smells and Dr Mendoza, who had kindly accepted my request even though he was leaving for Izmir the following afternoon. He cut a dashing figure in black sweater, jeans and spectacles; mid-thirties and seriously attractive. I had been expecting a gentleman of a certain age. His office was a bo
x spilling over with files, books both in Spanish and English and a computer. His expertise was soil and, given that olive trees were the dominant Andalucían crop, his research was the effects of intensive olive farming on soil.

  ‘And the results?’

  ‘Not good news. Our water situation is acute,’ he began.

  I had read in an English newspaper and, indeed, had been invited to discuss the problem on a BBC Radio 4 programme, that Spain’s olive crops were shrivelling due to drought. ‘Is it due to climate change?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Certainly, we have suffered one or two droughts but I believe there is also marketing hype in these press releases. True, the level of water in the reservoirs is falling and is not being replenished, but the trend towards lower rainfall levels, signalling global warming, is not the nub of the issue. Drought is not Andalucía’s primary concern. Our bigger problems lie elsewhere.’

  I begged him to spell it out.

  ‘In a few simple sentences,’ he began, ‘we are using our water faster than it is being replenished. This is caused by expanding agricultural needs and growing urbanisation.’

  ‘Where does the olive tree stand within all this?’

  ‘The olive plantations are being greatly extended. More importantly, they are descending from their traditional growth places in the mountains and stony hillsides into areas of arable farming.’

  ‘The olive tree is a Mediterranean treasure. How could it become the cause of such deep concern?’

  ‘It is not the olive tree itself but our farming methods that are causing the damage. Excessive irrigation in orchards that lack traditional drystone walling to shore up the earth, is causing the topsoil, the richest soil, to be washed away. Andalucía boasts 1.5 million hectares of olive plantations. These trees are being sprayed with a number of insecticides while the ground around their root base is being drenched in weedkillers. The earth is being over-irrigated to push up fruit production. Such an excess of water is causing the soil, packed with chemicals, to run off. The contaminated water is ending up in rivers, reservoirs, dams; all contain a high percentage of pesticides.’