The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 3

  Eventually our transport juddered back out of the border station. It was a quarter past nine. Beyond the windows, the deep, dark silhouettes of the January countryside were inpenetrable. I opened up the thumbed, yellowing paperback balanced on my knees: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: ‘… the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line …’ The Spain I was about to penetrate would be neither that of my childhood nor Orwell’s from his time of service with the militia during the civil war, but where my roads would lead me, what I would find, I had little inkling.

  Disembarking at Estaciós França, worn out after eleven hours of trains, a taxi delivered me to the attractive boutique hotel situated close to the Museu d’Art Contemporani, a couple of blocks from the Plaça de Catalunya, once the extremity of the old city walls, that stood at the head of the tree-lined Las Ramblas, where my husband awaited me. It was almost ten thirty, the perfect time to venture forth on a Friday night in search of dinner. Michel suggested we stroll Las Ramblas – the local Catalan language uses Les Rambles – and then double back to a bar, a cerveceria, he had discovered where they served delicious tapas.

  The late evening air was agreeable. Flower stalls lined the pedestrian walkways. Being together was a pleasure, precious days set aside before I disappeared south.

  ‘Rambla,’ I said, as we meandered hand in hand down the avenue and I revelled in the blast and spectacle of colours, the noise and activity, ‘is a derivative of the Arabic ramla, “a sandy or stony riverbed”.’

  During earlier times throughout Spain, in the dry season, the ramlas were access routes for packhorses and donkeys. The poet Federico García Lorca described Las Ramblas, this world-famous series of ramlas, as the only boulevard in the world that he wished would never end. In spite of its chaotic liveliness, its almost souk-like crush of life and commerce, I wondered why. It led directly to the port. Lorca was at home in ports with their transient encounters, the passage of itinerant peoples. He enjoyed the company of sailors, but he was not happy at sea; he was afraid of water. A son of well-heeled gentleman farmers, he was a child of the land. Earth images, olives especially, were omnipresent in his poetry and plays.

  Barcelona was vibrant, gearing up for its nocturnal pastimes. Long gone was a city chipped at the edges by civil war, where blood ran down the walls and trickled through the streets. Michel talked about the films he had seen at the festival and then we mused upon Spain, quite possibly the first land mass in Europe to have been inhabited. There were so many Spains. Was there a unifying heart to this nation? Spain, whose admission into the European Union transformed the prospects of a people pinched and deprived of democracy for half a century.

  ‘Spain is a land without a backbone,’ the philosopher and writer Ortega y Gasset observed in 1922. Divided by several high and jagged mountain ranges, las sierras, and rivers. Over millennia, these had created distinctive peoples with their own linguistic and cultural differences. Peoples who, until the late twentieth century, were almost incapable of being harnessed into a whole, into a coherent nation. I wondered whether these social fissures accounted in part for the nation’s tumultuous, fascistic history.

  ‘What do you hope to find here?’ Michel asked me.

  ‘For five centuries from 218 BC, the Romans ruled over this peninsula. They planted leagues of olive trees and transformed this fist of land into the world’s leading producer of olives and oil. They used the oil to fuel their capital, feed their armies and, for the transportation of those crops, they fired tons of clay pots, amphorae. Spanish olive oil was traded, delivered to the extremities of the Roman Empire. Yet the Spanish were never in the driving seat. Two thousand years on and the situation has changed. Spain has finally clawed itself to the position of olive oil superpower. They are farming over 300 million olive trees, producing 30 per cent of the world’s oil. They have usurped the title from Italy. I am looking forward to tracing the shift that has taken place and, who knows, perhaps I’ll find a Roman olive tree or two or, if I am really lucky, the oldest olive tree in the western Mediterranean.’

  Retracing our steps towards Plaça de Catalunya, crossing over by an empty pizzeria, we arrived at Michel’s choice of cerveceria, where parties of hungry men and women awaited tables in loud but good-natured fashion. We joined the queue. Once through the doors, we were directed to a pair of high stools at the bar. The noise level was staggering as though a grand fiesta were under way. Satisfied and expectant diners, families, couples, student groups, gaggles of girls, tables of silver-haired men sporting expensive suede shoes, corduroy trousers, casually elegant; black-haired women in leather and fur coats; a convivial mix. Our waiter, formal in black waistcoat and crisp white shirt, suggested a couple of beers. Glasses in hand, we pushed through the crowds, the length of the bar, inspecting wriggly, tentacly, saucy tapas offerings, a mouth-watering, colourful display. Sizzling in the spacious kitchen, hillocks of small fishes and other spiky, unrecognisable marine creatures were being grilled, fried, spatchcocked. Sharp, juicy aromas hit my nostrils. Gambas al ajillo. ‘Yes, I’ll have garlicky prawns swimming in warm olive oil. But raw sea urchins, fresh from the Med? No, thanks, I’ll give that black-quilled fellow a miss.’ Tiredness was soon replaced by ravenous hunger.

  Tapas: little dishes of raciones, rations, traditionally an accompaniment to aperitifs.

  ‘Where was the tapas born?’ I pondered.

  ‘The Spaniards eat so late – 10 p.m. is early in the major cities – that after work they congregate in bars where these varied nibbles stave off hunger and avoid the consumption of alcohol on empty stomachs.’

  ‘But what does tapa mean? What is the origin of this style of eating?’

  ‘In olden times, in order to keep flies from falling into a glass of liquid it was covered with a chunk of plain bread. Tapa means cover.’ Unlike mine, Michel’s Spanish was fluent.

  ‘So, the original tapa was an edible lid of bread?’

  ‘Later, the plain slice was dressed with humble tasties such as anchovies or olive oil.’

  We were ordering peelings of cured hams, shell and fish dishes, grilled gambas, octopus dressed with lemon and samphire – nothing so modest as a lid of bread! Each plate marinated or drowned in olive oil, coated in chunky nuggets of sea salt. On our high stools we guzzled, olive oil running through our fingers.

  ‘So, Spain has been cultivating olive trees for two thousand years?’

  ‘At least!’ I cried, mouth full.

  Spanish literature is rich with its symbols and folklore. I had read repeatedly that it was the Romans who brought the silvery beauty to the peninsula, but I felt certain this was not so. My guess was that it was the Phoenicians, those biblical Canaanites – originally from Israel, the Holy Land and disputed Palestinian territories – who resided along the coastline of Phoenicia – today Syria, Lebanon and Israel – who as sailors and merchants par excellence plied and dominated the trade routes of the Mediterranean. They, who gave us the first known written alphabet. They, who later created a powerful empire at Carthage in modern-day Tunisia and from its ports ruled the seas until the Romans destroyed them.

  But I was also nursing a personal hunch that the wild olive tree, Olea sylvestris, had been growing pretty much everywhere round the Med basin from prehistoric times, 12,000 years ago, perhaps as part of the regrowth of forests after the melting of Europe’s last Ice Age, and that if the Phoenicians did anything to kick-start the Iberian oil industry it was to transport their skills, to teach olive husbandry to the Iberians.

  ‘Can you prove all this?’

  ‘It depends what I find,’ I grinned.

  ‘But once the Romans conquered here, the oil industry took off at a rate of knots?’

  I nodded. ‘To such a degree that, centuries later, it was the Spanish who transported the olive tree to the Americas and by so doing changed irrevocably the history and cuisine of South America. In return, aside from boats
loaded with gold, they returned with coffee, tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers and tobacco as well as the small crimson cochineal insect used to dye the cotton grown in their numerous plantations.’

  Their twenty-first-century position as world leader in olive oil must be sweet revenge for the Spaniards who, as far as the olive goes, have lived for many centuries in the shadow of the Italians. I was fascinated to discover these immense farming activities for myself.

  During our precious weekend together, Michel and I walked for miles, flâneurs arm in arm, as we rarely have time to be in France, pausing for delicious, teeny cups of strong Arabic coffee in pasticerias, investigating wide uptown avenues where the architecture was flamboyant and fairytale-like, and he listened while I talked.

  ‘Since the Phoenicians founded Cádiz in 1100 BC, the Iberian peninsula has been a vital crossroads for culinary and cultural exchanges.’

  ‘That’s surprising. I thought it opened up later with the Moors?’

  ‘Certainly the Moors, who for more than seven hundred years from AD 711 ruled much of the land …’

  ‘… particularly in Andalucía.’

  ‘Yes, particularly in Andalucía,’ I laughed, enjoying Michel chipping in. ‘The Moors introduced a collection of fruits and spices: almonds, citrus, sugar cane, saffron, mint, cumin, cinnamon, and greatly contributed to the language, in particular words relating to agriculture, cooking and irrigation, but they did not bring olive oil. The Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians before them sowed the seeds of production and exchange here.’

  Before Michel left, I passed him the officially stamped letter informing us that the DDAF (Direction Départementale de l’Agriculture et de la Fôret) was profoundly concerned about the starlings. An official enquiry was now under way to assess the damage caused by winter flocks. The notification had been accompanied by a form. We were obliged to make a declaration stating what percentage of our crop had been eaten by birds and what percentage had been designated AOC fruits. He promised to handle it.

  After an early Monday morning au revoir to my man, I felt little desire to hang around the Mediterranean city we had been rediscovering together so I took a bus. I had been toying with the idea of revisiting Sitges – today a major gay resort; homosexuality in Franco’s Catholic Spain had been illegal. While searching out olive clues, I discovered that Sitges in the early sixties, around the time I had holidayed there with my family, was at the heart of a thriving counterculture, one of the few mainland towns nurturing an artistic resistance to the thirty-six-year dictatorship, but I found no pointers to an ancient olive culture. Instead, my first port of call was to be Empúries, Ampurias in Spanish.

  The Greeks, or, more specifically, the Phocaean-Greeks who hailed from Foça on the western seaboard of what is today Turkey, were the sailors who, around 600 BC, cruised into the harbour of Marseille, colonised it, christened it Massilia and then sailed on west, wheeling round the Gulf of Lions, to found Empúries in 575 BC. It is thought that these Phocaean-Greeks, like the Phoenicians and Etruscans, had already been trading with the indigenous people, the Indigetes, before they settled the territory. Where the Indigetes originally hailed from nobody knows, but their language was possibly Iberian.

  Empúries was to become the largest Greek emplacement on the Iberian peninsula, ideally situated as it was for commercial exchanges between Massilia (Marseille) and Tartessus, a very wealthy, long since sunk-without-trace city that neighboured Cádiz in the south. The Greeks must always have intended Empúries to be a dynamic economic centre because they christened it Emporiai, Trading Posts’, and it served them well, but they never mingled. They took no interest in the natives and their presence created enemies. The Phoenicians, who controlled Cádiz, judged them a threat, competitors to the commercial and business routes they were founding everywhere. To put a stop to these Greeks and to any ambitions they harboured about controlling this coastline or, indeed, the entire trading waters of the western Mediterranean, the Carthaginian-Phoenicians combined forces with the Etruscans, a people from ancient Italy and Corsica, to beat the Phocaeans back, defeating them in 535 BC in a showdown off the southern coast of Corsica.

  Sixty-five years earlier, the Carthaginians had failed to shut them out of Marseille, but the wheels of fortune in the Med were shifting once more and this vigorous skirmish, an overwhelming defeat for the Phocaeans, terminated all their dreams of far-west trading posts. Emporiai proved to be the pinnacle of their incursions as well as their undoing. They had been irrevocably scuppered, leaving the scene wide open to the Carthaginians. That was until, first seen bobbing on the horizon, thirsty for expansion and wealth, the Romans rowed in.

  To reach Empúries I was obliged to take an autobus to Girona and then another, climbing the Costa Brava towards its northern extremes. I made my way to the central estación de autobuses, a large and bustling terminus with a striking, if shabby, Art Deco façade. Once through hellish surburban traffic and a gunpowder-blue fog that hung like an interminable cloud, the countryside became quite lovely and frequently, around the high coastal bluffs of the Costa Brava, the ‘Wild Coast’, dramatic and unconstructed. I had not expected it to be so red-rock rugged and pine-green, with sheer, cragged walls plunging to the sea. Beneath, hidden bays, nestling coves. The tail end of January; almonds in blossom. Thoughts on ancient Greece, I recalled my arrival into the Peloponnesian city-state of Messini, built into headlands high above the port of Kalamata, at the foot of the village of Mauromati. Precisely one year earlier the first of the season’s almond flowers had greeted me. Those soft-hued petals, delicate as an oriental watercolour, semaphored spring. Today, the weather was so mild it might already have been spring. I had not even a jacket.

  Two hours after my departure, L’Escala, seaside resort, renowned throughout Spain for its anchovies. I climbed down from the bus, and asked directions from a man with bristling wheelbarrow moustache, black hat and wooden cane and began the hike north. The early haze had burned off. The light was nacreous, uplifting. Winding through country lanes set back a distance from the sea, my approach was flanked on either side by puddles of wild large-headed daisies, white clovers and a trio of wagtails feeding at the roadside.

  Pausing for breath, I sighted the curved sandy bay of Empúries / Emporiai behind which lay the ruins of the Greeks’ neapolis, new city. A short walk further north, on what had once been an offshore islet, at the mouth of the River Fluvia, would have found me at their palaiopolis, their first settlement here. Five years later – by which time they had perhaps encountered less resistance from the locals? – they had crossed the slender strip of water to the mainland and constructed the neapolis. The ruins that remained inland of the bay I was gazing upon were the relics of that second colony and of the Roman holding that came after them. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, each colonised this coast, but nothing of Phoenicia or its Carthaginian empire remains. The position was well situated, secluded yet perfectly accessible from the open sea: ideal. I was surprised to find that the bay lacked construction save for one hotel, a pure white building with clean angular, Art Deco lines nestling at the water’s edge.

  Apart from a woman with unruly black hair in pale blue summer dress accompanied by a younger man, the ruins were deserted. The couple were wandering about the neocropolis lower down the sloped land, closer to the beach from which the puzzle of archaeological stones had been cordoned off. Beyond the fence, a narrow, wooded pathway intersected ancient metropolis and sand and sea. People were jogging there, or walking dogs. I found the location peaceful and felt at ease; a place to retreat to, I thought, as I clambered over dry limestone walls where the skilled masonry work was shaded by umbrella pines. It was a typical Mediterranean location, well chosen by its colonisers. Occasional Hellenistic statues, bearded but lacking limbs, stood sentry over the Greek town, gazing impassively back to their mother country. The remnants of stone houses traced a design built around individual central courtyards. A temple constructed during the first century BC stood on the
site of an earlier hospital, dedicated to Isis and Serapis, Egyptian deities linked to medicine and health. A sign informed that these Greeks of Emporiai were trading with Egypt and that the temple was built by a merchant venturer from Alexandria. Terracotta water pipes were stacked here and there, probably Roman, but no olive mills, no pressing stones. Had the easterners planted no olive orchards here? From the bus I had spied fields of centennial olive trees, but nothing older. I walked the upper city, the Roman remains, where the cardo maximus was indented with chariot tracks. The Romans constructed a fish-salting factory here. This was the first of many I was to find dotted round the western basin. Garum, a paste of fish and olive oil, was the main export. And surely the esteemed anchovy business in neighbouring L’Escala found its genesis here?

  The Romans spent almost two centuries in their attempts to gain control of Iberia. Once theirs, they rechristened it Hispania and divided it into a trio of provinces: Baetica, Lusitania and Tarraconensis. Hispania Tarraconensis, the largest of the three, in which Empúries fell, was designated imperial and controlled by the emperor himself.

  Leaving the museum, housed in the church of a former Servite monastery, I glanced at my watch; it was lunchtime. The museum cafeteria was closed so I strolled towards the beach and the white hotel. Although it was out of season and structural work was going full tilt, the establishment was about to serve lunch in an airy, sparsely furnished dining room with wooden tables, solid dressers and whacky cane chairs. It boasted a splendid, far-reaching view out to sea and, northwards, along the coast. The menu was handwritten in Catalan with translations into Castilian Spanish. Catalan bears similarities to Provençal; both are Romance languages. With the help of my French, I found I could grasp certain phrases, reminding me that I was at the rim of the Mediterranean where webs, tapestry threads and sources intermingled.