The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 11

  I was silenced.

  ‘In short, we are poisoning our wells and springs, our water sources, poisoning our people and bleeding the land of nutrients and water for future generations.’

  ‘But the olive tree does not require heavy irrigation. It thrives happily in arid conditions. It does not suffer during a normal hot, dry Mediterranean summer?’

  ‘More than that. It has a remarkable facility to aid in the regeneration of subsoil water levels. Not dissimilar to the Moroccan ironwood.’

  I had never heard of the ironwood tree and I was taken aback by the depth of the problem.

  ‘The more the farmers irrigate, the greater the crop yield and the less the olive works for itself. The arithmetic is simple. A heavier crop load produces more olive oil.’

  ‘And greater financial rewards?’

  ‘Exactly. Unfortunately, there’s more. We are facing serious infringements of water rights. Illegal boring. And the Basin Authorities seem to be losing control.’

  ‘Do farmers have limited rights?’

  In Jaén, Dr Mendoza told me, 200,000 hectares carried certified Basin Authority entitlement whereas, in reality, 320,000 hectares were being irrigated. The difference was illegal. The olive producers were digging their own wells, boring deeper and deeper to subterranean levels that had never previously been touched. Without licences to do so.

  ‘They are stealing, we could say, the earth’s groundwater. And it is not being replenished. Slowly, day by day, year by year, we are destroying our soil. We are creating an unproductive earth. Here in the Andalucían groves, the losses are the most acute. This is desertification.’

  ‘Soil turned to desert?’

  ‘Yes. So, there you have the problems that lie before us. Polluted water, soil loss, desertification. All brought about by unsustainable farming.’

  ‘The lack of weeds and growth in the denuded orchards, what is that about?’

  ‘Less growth around the feet of the trees, the fewer predators to steal the water. Starve the land of all plant competition and only the olive tree is fed.’

  To maintain such barren fields, phenomenal tons of weedkillers, herbicides, were being packed into the soil. This, too, was causing erosion and pollution.

  ‘Until the late twentieth century, it was believed that earth acted as a protective filter that stopped pesticides seeping into underground waters. Our studies have shown that this is not the case. Pesticides are reaching subterranean beds yielding groundwater. They are also denying migrating birds, as well as endemic species, insects, too, in fact all varieties of flora and fauna, of their natural habitats and nutrition.’ The doctor drummed his fingers against an empty coffee mug. ‘So there you have it. The impoverishment of our terrestrial ecosystems at the hands of man.’

  ‘And the situation is …?’

  ‘Potentially devastating. We have to stop the degradation before it becomes irreversible.’

  We sat for a moment in silence. I was attempting to take this in. I was out of my depth.

  ‘What hope remains, if any?’

  He smiled. Here was where the science of soil erosion came into its own. Much study was being undertaken by his team on how most effectively to reintroduce the olive waste and its pruned branches back on to the land, to use the trees’ byproducts as soil amendment.

  ‘Compost out of the dead branches, for example.’

  Unfortunately, for the time being it was only cost effective on the great estates which owned their own almazaras, mills, from where the waste materials did not have to be transported. There was also a big push to encourage organic farming—

  ‘No more pesticides?’

  He nodded. ‘And to teach farmers about soil management, how to preserve and care for their earth.’

  ‘What about Dacus, the olive fly?’

  ‘Specialists are seeking alternative methods to combat the fly.’

  ‘Nothing yet?’

  ‘Alas not.’

  I asked him about the market for such phenomenal quantities of olive oil. ‘Surely, such a glut will drive prices down?’

  He shook his head. ‘Much of the oil is sold to Italy. This has been the pattern as far back as the Romans. Monte Testaccio on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy, close to the port of Ostia, was found by nineteenth-century archaeologists to be, not a hill but a tel, a mountainous collection of millions of shards of terracotta jars all originating from Spain, all fired during the Roman occupation of Spain, 212 BC to AD 422. It was calculated that they would have contained in total some two thousand million litres of olive oil, which certainly outstrips most modern harvests!’

  ‘But today Spain is no longer under Italian domination.’

  ‘We have our own operators who control the oil businesses. Olive oil is fashionable. Its health and medicinal properties are endlessly lauded, and the positive aspects of the Mediterranean diet cannot be denied, but there is a limit even to that market. The goal now is to create awareness in the countries that traditionally had never considered our products. China, Japan and Russia are the obvious future customers.’

  Dr Mendoza rose and I realised that I had taken up too much of his time. I thanked him for his generosity. He offered to drive me back to the city. Negotiating the traffic in a decrepit Fiat, two bucket seats for small children in the rear, I asked how he had fallen into the soil business.

  His maternal grandparents had picked olives. They had been hired hands up in the north of the province, which was one of the districts where he was testing the earth. To reach the farms where they gathered, they had walked ten to twelve kilometres and returned the same distance at night. His grandfather had also been a shepherd. They scratched a meagre existence, and when the war came along he was drafted into the Nacional military, fighting on Franco’s side. This had been a source of shame for Dr Mendoza until his grandfather had explained that you fought on the side of those who were controlling the district you lived in. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t about conscience or political allegiance; it was about survival. The land where his family had resided remained beautiful and relatively unspoiled. Dr Mendoza had enjoyed hiking there as a student. By working for its protection, he felt he was giving something back.

  We had arived at a busy intersection just north of the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos. The traffic was dense and I hurried to gather up my belongings.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, pushing open the door. ‘Enjoy Turkey.’

  ‘If you are interested in the future, go to Morocco, visit the Algerian Sahara. Desert returned to soil; now there’s an exciting challenge.’

  I spent the rest of my last day mooching about beautiful Córdoba, which had certainly fared better than Baghdad, walking, people-watching, reflecting. Simon had advised, ‘It’s important not to be overly romantic. You must be realistic about the olive tree. You do us a disservice otherwise.’ I think I was in shock.

  At every corner I was nagged at by gypsy women with penetrating eyes and hair swept untidily back into ponytails, attempting to palm me off with rosemary. ‘Señora, take one for your amigo,’ they pleaded, offering up aromatic sprigs clutched between blackened fingernails.

  The people, los Andaluzes, had another look here and their manners were more extravagant. Aftershave wafted in the air as the men strolled by. In the bars, the bodegas, resembling saloons in a western, women lounged against the counters, drinking beer, gossiping with the staff. They were dressed in thigh-hugging jeans ripped at the knees and stack-heeled boots. Their skin was dusky with flatter, splayed Spanish-Amerindian features.

  In the taberna where I ate lunch only one other table was occupied, by a young French couple, hands locked, engrossed in each other. Beams of dark wood criss-crossed whitewashed walls jollied up with brightly designed ceramic tiles. The broad black head and frozen fearful eyes of a bull adorned a space close to where I was seated. There were dozens of photographs, Hemingway moments in the ring. Trickles of blood, ribboned lances, matadores: repeats of the same man i
n a black embroidered montera hat striking a series of heroic poses. While I was leaning in close to study them my phone rang. It was Michel. I hadn’t been expecting him. Our daily calls usually took place in the evenings.

  The wild boars had paid a visit and ripped up sections of the recently laid water pipes up at the top of the land.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I sighed, glancing back at the photos on display. I am dead set against bullfighting. I am also dead set against boar-hunting, but if I could have got my hands on our offenders I would have stuck them in the ring with the matadors.

  An old girl shuffled in, a midget with scratched voice, shrieking like a parrot, hawking lottery tickets. My waiter and his colleague both hurried to the counter, digging into their pockets for cash. A football match kicked off on the overhead TV set and I received no further attention. In fact, had I been so inclined I might with perfect ease have walked off without settling my bill. The streets were deserted and the shutters on the shops had been clunked closed. Siesta time. Nothing would happen now till early evening. I meandered back to my hotel, peering down crooked lanes, at secluded, flower-decked patios, still fuming about the boars and our thousands of euros’ investment they had run over, deciding that a hire car was my next step. I had enjoyed my excursions by coach but I had destinations off the beaten track to visit, people I hoped to meet up with, and I wanted to pass along the byroads of la Ruta del Aceite, the Oil Route. I had not heard back from Mallorca, but I could not linger for it was still my intention to reach Cádiz for Mardi Gras. Unfortunately, Lent fell inconveniently early this year and time was pressing. I took a day to track the tree suggested to me by the Norfolk couple – Roman, I was still hoping – but I was unsuccessful. I must have misunderstood their directions. I drove in circles for several hours, up and down the same stretches of road, but I never found it. I was out of luck.

  The route, initially south-east from Córdoba, was flanked with razor-headed hills covered in endless rows of oliviers growing up out of bare, parched earth. Jaén province produces almost as much olive oil as mainland Italy. Beneath each tree was a shadow, like shreds of black silk, which I could not make out until I pulled over. Was it the netting used to catch falling fruit? No, it was the ruby-black fruits themselves. I was puzzled. To gather such a number of olives from the ground would be labour-intensive, financially unviable. The conundrum was explained further along the road when I saw half a dozen men on a hillside, stuffing fruits and branches into large buckets. The small hummocks of fruit were rolling down the inclines, powered by the wind force of two vacuum leaf collectors. Once at the foot, they were raked into piles, then thrown by hand into the plastic containers and finally wrapped up into a large cut of white cloth. I pulled over, grabbed my camera and began to photograph the unusual scene, but when the men spotted me they broke into shouts, yelling, cigarettes between lips, swearing obscenities. They dropped the containers and hid themselves behind the foliage as though they were Muslim women. Were they immigrants, were they stealing the olives? I called out, attempting to engage them in conversation, to discover whether they worked for a private cortijo or a larger, more industrial producer. Eventually, one fellow, in stained white T-shirt, with a hooked caliph’s nose, came out from behind his tree.

  ‘What you want?’ he yelled.

  These were casual or day labourers, known as los braceros, and probably had no involvement with olives throughout the rest of the year. They did not understand my Spanish, or chose not to, so I was unable to establish whether such brutal treatment of the drupes was usual practice hereabouts. Were these fruits intended for an international market? Were they flying a Spanish label, or were they to be shipped off to Italy and sold from there as an Italian product? He waved me away and turned his back.

  I cut off the Baena road and climbed north-east towards Martos, then swung off the beaten track following directions into parched hilly countryside south of Jaén. Awaiting me, alongside two matrons, was Perico, a bachelor in his early thirties with thick horn-rimmed spectacles, a well-established chef’s paunch, double chins with a bud of a beard and clipped punky hair slicked to a single point. This young chef, running the kitchens in the hotel where I had stayed in Córdoba, had inherited his grandfather’s seven hundred olive trees. The old man had planted up his finca on an all-but-forgotten bluff east of Baena, a town that could lay claim to the throne of the olive kingdom. Originally, Perico’s smallholding had boasted twice as many plants, a third of which had been more than a century old.

  His grandfather had been a Republican and had gone into hiding to escape death or prison. He had spent his ‘underground’ years as a captain and as a baker feeding comrades. Sometimes the men had hidden themselves in ancient groves where the silver-leafed canopies offered protection against aerial attacks. On occasions, they had secreted themselves within the concave trunks of centuries-old trees, used them as temporary bases during the civil war when they were on the run from the Nacionales. Meanwhile, Franco’s military had swept down upon Perico’s family farm, when his grandmother was home alone, and chopped down half their investment. It had been a punishment, payback for her husband’s politics. Afterwards, the government had seized the best sections of land. Eventually, when the grandfather was at liberty to return, he wept at the sorry condition of his farm and spent the following two decades rebuilding it. Beyond the war, olive oil was a major source of nutrition. It was a staple in an impoverished diet, during the ‘hungry years’ when entire families were starving.

  The grandfather was ninety-five now and in retirement, but he had continued to farm and harvest well into his late eighties. Perico earned his living as a chef because the smallholding was not sufficiently lucrative to meet the family’s needs. They were up against the majors or ‘more ruthless’ estates and big industrial producers. In order to hold his own in the marketplace he had joined forces with a neighbour who also ran an organic holding. Perico worked his groves in the mornings before heading off to the hotel in Córdoba and on Sundays. A chef, in Perico’s words, was a natural extension to living off the land: ‘From the soil to the kitchen.’ He always cooked with olive oil, but not necessarily his own. He searched out oils from around the globe, taking delight in discovering their diverse flavours. Was I aware that, today, there are over 2000 varieties of olive trees (I was not!) and that in Mexico there is an olive that grows to the size of a peach?

  His parents had expressed no interest in the farm. He had three sisters, no brothers – he was the youngest – and his father, also a chef, had died of a heart attack at fifty-eight and so the farm and its responsibilities had fallen to him; but he would never sell it.

  ‘Not even if I become a famous chef and go to Paris!’

  Both his grandparents and his mother lived on the land as well as two of his sisters.

  ‘A household of women,’ he grinned. He introduced me to both matriarchs, ‘the true chefs’ of the household. We all trooped through to the kitchen, sparse and whitewashed.

  His grandmother, Immaculada, was in her late eighties; her white hair slicked back into a tight bun, hooped gold earrings that softened the severity, a checked wrapover frock and dark bedroom slippers. Her hands were mottled with liver spots. She had a flared nose, strong, rustic features and chestnut eyes that rested unwaveringly upon me. Her daughter, Perico’s mother, Rosa, was a darker-haired version of her parent. Both women spoke of the posguerra, the post-civil war days, when people all around were dying of hunger. Their memories were unhappy ones, a bleak period in Andalucían history. The family had been so poor that at nine Rosa had been obliged to go into service at one of the local cortijos. They would have starved without the extra cash. Later, she picked cotton on an estate close to Córdoba and at weekends walked home to help with the farm. Back then there was no electricity. They walked everywhere. They washed their clothes in the stream and they were paid for doing others’ laundry, too. With domestic work and olive oil, they eked out an existence.

  Perico’s re
flections were more upbeat. When he was tiny, his grandfather had carried him side-saddle on his mula. During the ascent to the mountainous orchards the old man had sung and hummed to beast and boy and, when they reached the groves, he’d called out ‘Come! Come, Perico, the trees are growing goodies.’ And they were.

  ‘My grandfather had hidden sweets in every branch for me to harvest. I had grown up believing that the olive was a magical bonbon tree. Even without sweets, there is nothing quite so beautiful as a strong, well-cared-for olive tree. The groves of this region have sustained the people for centuries. We depend upon them.’

  Before I left, he handed me a bottle of his oil, lovingly cradled between hands with severely chewed nails.

  Winding my way back down rambling tracks, flanked by trees groaning with purply fruits, penetrating the Sierra Subbética Cordobesa, I was held up behind a tractor pulling an enormous trailer laden with unsorted olives and leaf debris. There was nothing to do but follow it. In fact, it turned off for Baena, Ciudad del Olivar y el Aceite, the City of the Olive Tree and Oil, and I decided to follow it. I had no appointments in Baena. I had been hoping to meet up with two brothers from there who were, if the market was to be believed, possibly the organic olive-farming stars of southern Spain, oilmen for generations. They claimed their family had been producing the finest cold-pressed, organic olive oil ‘since George Washington became President of the United States’. Unlike most other Spanish companies, these brothers had cracked the American market. What intrigued me most was one of their products, Flower of the Oil, Flor del Aceite, which, according to their advertising, was the grand cru of all olive oils.

  I had never encountered this product before. The fruits were gathered from the trees by hand and crushed the same day by granite stone mills. Normally, the crushed paste, or arujo, would be pressed and from that pressing would come the first extraction of extra virgin oil. But with their system this rare and exclusive product, the pomace, was left for several days to drip its golden liquid at its leisure. Normally, a pressing yields somewhere in the region of one litre of oil for every five kilos of olives. This process needed eleven kilos of fruit to produce one litre and this very exclusive oil was on sale in the United States in numbered bottles, at a price. I was both fascinated and sceptical.