The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 8

  My contact in Extremadura, a Brit who had settled on an olive farm in the lesser charted wild west of Spain, was in Brussels advising on a ‘sensitive project’. An octogenarian couple, also farmers, I was due to visit in Mallorca were leaving for the States and the soil specialist I hoped to hook up with in Córdoba was off on a lecture tour in Turkey. I looked east, west and south and judged that, whichever way I turned, I would probably lose out. So, when I returned to my hotel and found an email from Simon, the Brit in Extremadura, I decided to grab the opportunity. He was back home but for a limited spell.

  There was a choice of two Sunday buses travelling towards Portugal from the Estación Sur, one morning and one overnight, arriving Monday morning. Travelling after sunset meant no sights beyond the windows and, because I love setting off on a journey very early in the day, I opted for the morning ticket. A windy winter’s daybreak with discarded papers blowing to and fro in the streets, hoardings rattling like chained ghosts as I left the hotel at 6 a.m. by taxi. Along the way, venturing to the south of the city, youths grouped aimlessly about the deserted, shabby streets; little of the stately capital hereabouts.

  I was reflecting on my previous evening’s conversation with Michel. A list of birds had been declared by the Ministry authorities back home as ‘agricultural pests’, including starlings. Traps were being used. There had been an outcry by lobbyists at the senseless destruction of wood pigeons caught in them. Man against nature. I was wondering where it would end.

  Coach ticket purchased, I was directed to Departures in the basement.

  ‘Which quay?’

  ‘Between one and eighty-six. Check the screens.’

  Below, at transport level, teeming chaos, as though the entire city’s down-at-heelers had congregated. It dawned on me then that although I knew where I was going, clutching detailed instructions from Simon, I did not have the coach’s final destination. Without it, there was little chance I’d track the quay from where my transport was leaving. Groups of new Europeans stood about smoking, drinking coffee from paper mugs. Compared to the mass of Spanish and South American Indian faces, they looked pinched, pale, shifty. None spoke English and none understood my Spanish. I collared a pudgy-faced employee hurrying by. He glanced at my ticket and shrugged. I hurried back up to the ticket booth. It was unmanned. My coach was leaving in twenty minutes. I charged along the line of desks, shouting beyond the queues to sales staff, but the response was always the same. ‘Can’t help. It’s another company.’ I hared back to departure level. There must have been fifty coaches at their stands. I targeted those whose drivers were at the wheel. I had ten minutes. Each shook his head or continued to read his newspaper. I was becoming frantic until an inspector latched on to my sleeve and dragged me across the terminus. ‘Aquí,’ he was shouting, waving his free arm. ‘Aquí.’

  Four minutes to departure. Hoisting backpack, I climbed aboard. There was barely a soul and no driver. I took my chances.

  Madrid is the highest capital in Europe, perched at over 600 metres. The journey westwards towards Portugal remained altitudinous, leading firstly through scruffy, uninspiring, randomly constructed zones. Insignificant towns banked up against one another, an endless spill of concrete. Benidormisation. After two hours we were still spiralling, higher and higher into dense mountains. Storks were nesting in bell towers and on rooftops in the upland villages. This midland territory was different again. The route was elevated, cloud-cloaked. I was beginning to doubt whether the provincia of Extremadura could be an olive-growing region at all. Or was I to discover a hardier variety that could withstand this ruthless climate?

  Simon was employed in an advisory capacity for a slew of organisations striving for a greener environment. He had also written a paper, a copy of which sat on my lap. I was perplexed, taken aback to read that his position on olive farming was that it was a negative business.

  As far as Simon was concerned, the olive tree produced highly nutritious foodstuffs, offered medicinal properties, a means to an income in remote impoverished Mediterranean areas as well as an opportunity to keep communities and traditions alive. It was also a visual enhancement to the landscape. In fact, its silver-green foliage, its gnarled and twisted trunks, its low-swinging branches, its stonewalled terraces were as familiar and quintessential to the Med as the tideless sea itself. As well, the groves provided essential habitat for a wide variety of endemic flora and fauna and migrating birds. I was with him on all of this. So what was the problem?

  Simon’s reasoning seemed to be that too much of a good thing was dangerous. He argued that the subsidies given to farmers by the EU were based upon production and ignored earth maintenance.

  I had never really considered olives from this angle.

  Due to the giddying altitude – we were penetrating the Cordillera Central – the weather had degenerated dramatically. It was damp, drizzling, cloud-wreathed. Nondescript towns. One after another, passengers disembarked, weighed down by scruffy shopping bags, until only three remained. Beyond the windows a very different Spain, untouched by Europe or tourism; a less privileged population. Avenas de San Pedro was our coffee stop. Bells pealed, while bands of church-goers mounted the hilly streets. Surprisingly, in this remote outpost, the women were not black-clad. After Avenas we twisted up and round hairpin bends, passing a turn-off to the San Pedro Monastery, past high stone walls protecting terraced olive groves. Direction: Candeleda in Sierra de Gredos. The scenery changed dramatically, grew lovely although it was raining and steeled by clouds: alpine forests; stone drinking troughs, crossing the Río Pelayo I spotted wild goats. Storks were nesting on electricity pylons, even the rusted roof of an abandoned lorry. I spotted two females, heads covered in white scarves, riding their mules sidesaddle up the hillside, a Spain fast disappearing. Rivers, boulders, gullies, chalets, stone cotes barely sufficient to sleep one shepherd. Our altitude remained close to 1500 metres. I was glad of my sweaters and thick socks.

  Candeleda, a modest but attractive hill station, generated a vibrant Sunday atmosphere. Olives, drystone terraces, trilby-hatted, ruby-faced farmers in checked shirts with cherry-wood canes and solid boots, orange trees heavy with fruits lined the main street, jollying up the wet noontime. Simon had described the journey as two and a half hours. It was close to one. I had been on the bus since seven thirty. Outside the bars, meshed and puckered faces huddled together. These were flat-capped labourers with rolled umbrellas, tired cigarettes glued to lips. Back out in the open areas, farmers stared from the doorways of their rural abodes at the downpour keeping them from their fields. Madrigal offered the same picture of weathered faces and caps staring glumly at the rain, drumming fast, tapdancing on the roof of the bus.

  In 1932, Luis Buñuel, Spanish film director, shot a documentary, Tierra Sin Pan – Land Without Bread – exposing the impoverished living conditions in this region. I felt the bite of that poverty even today.

  We were drawing towards Portugal.

  I was wrong about Extremadura. It had been an olive-producing region for many centuries. Terraced groves were everywhere; trees as bent as arthritic fingers. My hopes of unearthing a really ancient olive tree here were soaring. In the high fields, rings of old stones. They encircled figs or stood alone. I had no notion what service they might have performed. Their presence was too frequent, I judged, to be wells. I had come across similar circular walled enclosures in other parts of the Mediterranean.

  Cuacos de Yuste: journey’s end.

  I stepped off the bus into afternoon drizzle, and no one to meet me. As I stretched my legs along a high road that overlooked the village, an ageing pick-up pulled up at the bus shelter. Simon, curly mid-brown hair, silvering sideburns, physically fit. No difficulty identifying one another. There was not another soul about.

  ‘You must be in need of coffee,’ he smiled, approaching.

  We entered a bar up the hill with roaring log fire. I was in the company of an amiable well-educated Englishman, glasses, softly spoken, with a
London, possibly East End, accent that had been polished. After, we set off for his holding twenty minutes’ drive out of town. As we bumped along the winding dirt tracks through an area that could not, by any standards, be judged over-populated or polluted by tourism, Simon bemoaned the many negative changes to his neighbourhood. Much of what I had seen up to this point led me to believe that these elevated posts west of Madrid were developing at a slower pace than anywhere I had visited until now. What I was witnessing were the ruins of a post-civil war inheritance; decades when hunger and deprivation ruled, decades from which the inhabitants were still in the process of recovery.

  ‘The twenty-first century is a relative stranger here,’ Simon explained. ‘It’s why I like it.’

  I saw few expressions of luxury, barely modern comforts. I asked Simon about the Franco years and the effects on this province.

  ‘Better ask Mercedes. She’s the one to discuss such subjects. She was born and raised in Cáceres, not far from here. But be warned: her parents were staunch Francoists.’

  Three red-brick hangars, equipped with what appeared to be hooks on sliding rails, stood in wide, flat, overgrown fields. Simon tutted and asked me if I knew what they were. I shook my head.

  ‘Tobacco plantations. Those ugly outhouses are for drying the leaves. This particular district of Extremadura is well represented, agriculturally speaking, by its cherries, raspberries, capsicum, pimiento or pepper, brought to the region by Columbus, and its olives, of course, but the produce that accrues the highest revenues is tobacco. Did you know,’ he asked, ‘that tobacco gleans the highest subsidies of all European crops?’

  I hadn’t known.

  ‘My neighbour receives sixty thousand euros a year in EU support. My olive and fig trees set on five hectares of land earn me the princely sum of twenty-eight euros. He sits in cafés and boasts his good fortune and says he no longer needs to deliver one ounce of tobacco because he can live off his grant.’

  I was puzzled. The fields had gone to rack and ruin. ‘But if the farmer does not produce tobacco, how can he expect finance from Brussels?’ And then I remembered. ‘The system’s changed.’

  Simon, at the wheel, nodded. ‘And I was one of those who fought for the changes.’

  Back home, whenever we took our olives to the mill, there were forms to be completed. Our fruits were weighed and the weight registered. Gérard, the miller, or his ageing assistant Alain, examined the drupes before shunting them off for washing. On completion, before we were entitled to carry our freshly pressed oil to the car, we climbed narrow stone stairs, dangerously slippery from olive paste, to the shop. There, we received a document that detailed the miller’s fees, the kilos of olives delivered, the quality of the drupes (fresh, mouldy, worm-eaten etc.), their colour, level of ripeness, maturity, the quantity of oil pressed from the fruits, measured not only in litres but also in kilos … Endless bureaucracy!

  Michel filed these records and, at the end of the season, he was obliged to send the originals to the olive authorities in Marseille, who forwarded them to Brussels. Approximately ten months later, paid directly into the farm bank account, we received half a euro for each litre of oil produced. As modest producers of approximately four hundred litres a year, we were honoured with some two hundred euros per annum. Both Michel and I had frequently asked ourselves whether it was worth the hassle, but to maintain our AOC we were obliged to follow every step of the tiresome procedure. That was until a couple of years ago.

  ‘When the system changed it caused chaos in France,’ I recalled.

  Every oleiculteur had been obliged to play noughts and crosses with a furnished aerial map of their estate, marking cadastred olive trees with red crosses, water sources with black circles, dotted lines etc. With this came a forty-six-page file. Forms. I handed ours to Michel who is expert at applying for film subsidies and should have been ideal casting for the task. However, the file proved so complicated and time-consuming that he ended up completing it during a flight to Taipei and, due to its registration deadline, was obliged to FedEx it from Asia.

  Due to the size of our holding we were among those who lost modestly on the deal. One hundred and eighty-six euros is our allocated aid. Today, olive farmers are paid by the tree rather than by production. In other words, whether we have a rotten year or bumper crop, our subvention sits at one hundred and eighty-six euros. Should we decide never to harvest another olive, never press another litre of oil, that is our affair. We are paid for the registered trees and we can religiously count on our predetermined stipend.

  ‘So, your neighbour, the tobacco merchant, has stopped working altogether and now simply collects his allocated sixty thousand a year?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  I asked Simon why he and others of like mind had battled so determinedly for the system to be overhauled.

  His answer was instantaneous. ‘The old method invited massive corruptions. The present way,’ he conceded, ‘is not foolproof but, generally speaking, less is being leaked out of the grant banks.’

  I wondered how accurate this was or whether, after so short a time, the balance sheets had not yet been fully accounted.

  In France, the reorganisation had met with habitual Provençal resistance. Dead set against any changes, the farmers went mad. Few of them could make head or tail of the forms. I couldn’t! So, due to procrastination, late or inaccurate returns, many had forfeited their grants altogether. Matters got so serious that our local branch of the Chambre d’Agriculture Alpes-Maritimes held regular one-day seminars on Accurate Form Completion. At one of these sessions, I learned from the Niçoise chief inspector of olive oil, a handsome young bachelor in his twenties, that several of the oleiculteurs had stormed out in fury. One is reported to have risen to his feet, beetroot with rage, screaming ‘Names, give me names. I want the names of those who thought up this fandangled system and I will take my hunting rifle to Brussels and personally blast every last one of them to shreds.’

  I glanced at Simon, picturing his chances against a furious French farmer with loaded gun. ‘The very mention of the name Brussels down our way causes violent apoplexy.’

  ‘It’s only for ten years,’ Simon assured me, ‘and if it proves non-negotiable, the bureaucrats will go back to the drawing board and think again.’

  I smiled, imagining the reactions of our agriculturalists to yet another round of bureaucratic innovations.

  ‘So will these tobacco fields eventually be sold off?’

  Simon let out a deep sigh. ‘The bugger’s asking one million euros. He’s received an offer, too, from a leisure company which is hoping to construct a golf course. Over my dead body,’ he mumbled.

  Was his neighbour aware that Simon was professionally involved in eco-farming?

  ‘I don’t want anyone to know! Nor that I am in the anti-tobacco lobby. Round here, they’d lynch me. The only thing that keeps that crafty widower sweet is my wife. He’s taken a shine to Mercedes.’

  Tobacco had become the highest subsidised crop because without such financial support Greece had refused to join the Union; its tobacco farmers would have been landed in a crisis. I had not been aware of the role tobacco played within the Greek economy though I was very aware of the astounding number of cigarettes smoked by the Greeks. It seemed a contradiction when France, following other countries, had banned smoking in public places.

  ‘I was fascinated by your thoughts on olive farming.’

  ‘Let’s talk over lunch.’

  We had arrived at Simon’s rustic idyll where a flat, curving dust track led us to the house. The excessive damp and continuing light rain had given the thick olive trunks a deep rich hue. His trees were young, stubby, well pruned.

  ‘We bought five hectares and a barn,’ he explained. ‘It lacked all amenities: water, electricity, habitation. I converted the barn into a house myself. We still don’t have planning permission,’ he laughed.

  ‘What?!’

  After he had purchased the property, he h
ad submitted his plans to the local council in Cuacos de Yuste, but had been greeted by bemused expressions. The clerk accepted them and shook his head in disbelief. ‘I’ve never seen these before.’

  Simon never heard another word and read the silence as acquiescence. He went ahead with the conversion and even built a second storey. He dug a well, installed electricity and was now in the process of completing a swimming pool. ‘But affairs are getting stricter, linked to national cadastres. I will register the pool at some point. I’ve been too busy.’

  Such an easy-come, easy-go attitude stumped me. I wondered whether Spanish farmers took their agricultural battles so lightly, or as seriously, as the French. Glancing at the Englishman at my side, I doubted it. He did not look as though anything would ruffle him.