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VIII. The Farm of the Seven Olive Trees

        I gave the house a name because it didn't really have one of its own - the local people simply referred to it as la casa de La Cacha, the house of the "fat woman", who sold it to the man whose son sold it to me. Now, of course, the villagers call it la casa del inglé, the Englishman's house. But for the rest of mankind, it is El Cortijo de los Siete Olivos.

        La Cacha's real name was Catalina and she grew up a stone's throw down the hill in her father's house. Her sad distinction was that she was an unwed mother, which in those days was tantamount to being a "fallen woman". The neighbours tell me that while working as a housekeeper for a land-owner across the valley she was made pregnant by the man's son and sent home in disgrace.

        This was seen as a great tragedy, in spite of the fact that Catalina was already a spinster 40 years old. Her father refused to take his daughter back in the family home, but in her condition couldn't put her in the street either, so he gave her the other house which stood on his land, just up the hill. He even insisted on drawing up a deed in her name, as if to erect a wall of shame around her, cutting a piece off from the rest of his property. That is why the house stands on such an unusually small plot, which, in turn, is why I could afford to buy it.

        There are two things about which the hard-bitten countryfolk here are especially unsentimental: one, as I have learned over the years, is anything even remotely related to sex, and the other is water. Catalina's father went so far as to stipulate that she could only use the water that filled her small aljibe from an ancient underground channel for domestic purposes, but not for watering any kind of crop. Also, she had to allow the overflow, or derrame, to flow on down, where he used it to water his orchard at the foot of the hill.

        There is a clause in the deeds of both properties which was inherited from this curious arrangement, according to which the reservoir itself does not belong to me but, rather, to the man who bought it from the heirs of Catalina's unforgiving father. But the notary assures me that such "home-made" clauses ("I hereby sell you this field but I retain the right to graze my donkey on it from March to June...") were common in the times when an escritura was often just a bit of paper signed with thumbprints, and that due to their irrational nature they never stand up in court. So I have no fear of losing my tiny aljibe, which only fills with rain water in springtime, anyway.

        Catalina made a living by raising chickens and selling the eggs in the market. I often imagine the suffering, between these walls, without solar-powered light bulbs or butane-burning refrigerator, of the unmarried woman alone with her unwanted child. But my bricklayer and the passing shepherd prefer to remember the good times they had here as young men, which may well have included visits under cover of darkness.

        This is precisely why the local ladies looked down on Catalina as a marrana, or slut, for a woman without a husband was a threat to every Christian household. But all of them, respectable señoras included, used to enjoy the bailes which Catalina gave to make some extra money. My neighbour Alfonso fondly recalls how someone would always bring along an accordion or a guitar so that the neighbourhood swains could steer the marriageable mozuelas, at less than arm's length if they dared, through a rasping pasodoble, here in the same raftered room where I am now writing, on my solar energy-powered computer, by the fire.

        I am told that her son is now the father of no less than twelve children of his own, and lives in another farm near the road to Alcalá. Catalina moved out when he married, around 1960, and ended her days at a relative's home near Puerto Lope. She sold the house to a field labourer whose nickname was Morcón (morcón is a kind of sausage) who 20 years later was killed in the compost shed at the end of the house when a mule reared up and drove an iron yolk into his chest. His widow and children immediately moved away and put the house up for sale. Perhaps it was because they superstitiously wanted to be rid of it that they asked for so little - less, in fact, than what I paid for the second-hand dos caballos delivery van which I had just bought from Pedro Romero.

        As the name indicates, the cortijo is surrounded with seven olive trees, as well as ten almond trees, two fig trees, one pomegranate and one quince tree, and a chumbera, or cactus. I thought that the "Farm of the Seven Olive Trees" sounded romantic, but to the villagers the name seems laughably modest, since any self-respecting finca has at least several hundred of the precious plants, not just seven.

        I had no idea of how to build, of where plaster should be used and where cement, or how a door or window frame were hung or pipes were laid, so I hired one of Rocio's student friends, who was studying to be an architect, to help me direct the six workers who were to make the place suitable for semi-civilized summertime living. But even resourceful José could not protect me from all the "unforeseeables".

        As soon as we began work, the venerable venero proved, as I have said, to be an unreliable source of water and ran dry. This meant that for the next six weeks (which was three times as long as my workers assured me the whole operation would take) I had to shuttle four 200-liter oil tanks a day down the bumpy road, to fill them at a fountain several kilometers away. The furgoneta managed to get me back to Paris by the end of the year, but there it was diagnosed by a Belleville mechanic as foutue and sold for scrap. It simply never occurred to me that construction requires not only plaster and cement, but, also, lots and lots of water. By the end of a seemingly endless summer of dust, heat and sweating workmen, I was so fed up that I wished I had never had the idea of buying a house in the first place.

        But when I returned to Spain the following spring, I had forgotten all that and discovered, for the first time, the thrill of having a house of my own, a place on which I had left my own personal imprint. And the view from the porch of Parapanda Mountain was so beautiful that I could scarcely tear myself away from my deck chair, especially when the setting sun made it glow as if it had been baked in a kiln. However, I had already made plans to visit old friends in Rio, and a few months later was off again.

        It was three years before I returned to live in my house, in the company of a handsome Brazilian woman and our chubby brown baby girl, Nina. From then on - the summer of 1989 - I set about making it suitable for permanent residence, which began with water. The country was in deep drought and the chances of digging a well which would work all year round seemed so small, from what the locals told me, that I audaciously decided to lay over one mile of black PVC pipe and hook up to the village water system. This required having a steam shovel dig a meter-deep trench across several olive groves, once the owners' authorization had been duly obtained.

        The whole operation cost me more than the original price of the house, and there was no guarantee that it would work, since Montefrio's water supply (initially pumped from a deep well in the mountains) comes from a holding tank on the hill above the village, from which it "falls" down by force of gravity alone. Since my house is almost as high as this depósito, and several miles away with numerous ups and downs in between, I could only guess, from visual sightings, using a carpenter's level attached to a long metal rod, that the difference in level - four or five meters at the most - would be sufficient for the flow to reach the top of my own reserve tank on the roof of the house. After several weeks of work, the day came when my father and I held up the black pipe to the required height and saw a sluggish, but sufficiently voluminous flow of water come out of the end, making me, now that the waterworks have been privatized, the company's highest situated and furthest removed customer.

        There seemed to be little chance of getting hooked up to the local electrical grid, because my farm is the only inhabited house for several kilometers around and a transformer just for me would be costly. So I acquired four photovoltaic panels, a couple of truck batteries and a set of 12-volt incandescent lights, as well as a generator for rainy days and electrical appliances. Sometimes I joke that the farm should be called the cortijo de los doce voltios ! It all costs me a great deal in burned-out batteries and fuel, but it allows me to live comfortably where I want to be, which is what counts. Since the mile of dirt road turns to mud after a few minutes of rain, I purchased a small Russian-made land vehicle which can crawl over any amount of damage caused by landslides and flash floods, which in due course came, and up almost anything but the olive trees themselves.

        The telephone was my greatest concern, since I was planning to resume work as a free-lance translator and interpreter, after a prolonged sabbatical. I put in my petition to the rural installation department in Granada, where I was told that I would spend several years on the waiting list. While there I happened to make friends with Mari Carmen, the refined, spinsterly type in charge who, in the course of the conversation, declared herself greatly interested in my pen and ink drawings.

        I invited her to lunch at a nearby restaurant so that we could look at them together, and I was soon invited to her flat in return to see her watercolours. Mari Carmen never mentioned my installation again _ personally, I think she was more concerned with finding herself a husband, and might have laboured under the delusion that I was a suitable candidate for such an arrangement. So I was amazed, a few months later, to find a team of men erecting a row of 22 telephone poles leading straight across the olive groves to my little house. What's more, the dear lady saw to it that I did not have to pay for a single one of them.

        This meant that I was now able to move my office out from the village, where I had it installed in a house in El Coro, and, in line with the revolutionary tele-work model, make my living in the place where I live. As things stand today, in the year 1995, I can receive a translation from Brussels or Paris as I have my breakfast of café con leche and toast spread with crushed tomato and olive oil, at 9 in the morning, knock it out on my laptop computer and send it back before enjoying my lunch of chicken legs roasted on the coals.

        The texts are transmitted by fax or, for the more up-to-date customers, in data files, in which case I don't even have to print them out on paper. Indeed, one of the ironies of working in such a remote place is that I find that my makeshift little office is better equipped for communication than some big outfits like Unesco, one of my customers. It gives me a special thrill to see my sleek little fax machine, designed to be plugged into a car's cigarette lighter, churning out the pages of French or Spanish on power captured from the same Andalucian sun which streams into my door and windows. I have even thought of calling my one-man company Sunshine Translations, for it is, I am fond of boasting, the world's first language office which runs its equipment on solar energy.

        But I have not, I am afraid, proven to be much of a farmer, gentleman or otherwise. It is one of those many things about me which reveal the undeniable fact that, apart from my birth certificate, passport and mother tongue _ and, some say, appearance _ I am not a true Englishman. As well as drinking my tea like the French do, nature - weak and without milk or sugar _ I hate flowers that are not growing wild and detest hardship or discomfort, which I do not believe are necessarily good for you. When I want tomatoes and cucumbers I prefer to buy them at the Monday morning market rather than coax them out of the ungrateful ground, and after keeping a donkey for my daughter to ride on, which meant shovelling manure every morning out of the stable, I decided I had no inclination for animal husbandry either, and gave the critter back to the gypsy who sold it to me. But my authentic English friends don't hold it against me, since my accent brands me as a foreigner in their eyes anyway.

        There were, admittedly, the ducks, but they had a gastronomical raison d'être. Andalucians do not eat duck and the meat is nowhere to be found, so, in a spirit of the strictest expediency, I bought a dozen in the market - where they are sold as pets - and let them roam about on the terrace. Once they were two or three months old I had to kill and clean them myself because my friends, who poke knives into pigs and chickens as if they were peeling a potato, felt that doing in a duck was like murdering a dog or a cat and squeamishly refused to do the job for me.

        So I braced myself to put into practice my long held belief that we should be able to kill the meat we eat. I tried to make it less unpleasant, for both me and the ducks, by swiftly decapitating them with a hatchet rather than slicing into the throat with a knife. To keep the bird still I put one foot on a wing and held its neck down on a stump of olivewood, by tying a string around the throat, and then swung as hard as I could.

        This made possible some monumental dinners of duck with oranges, duck with olives and duck with almonds, but after a marauding dog had a feast, during my absence, of duck with feathers, I had to have a pen built, which was, I thought, unsightly. Then I read in a book that ducks taste best when they have ponds to swim in, so I ordered a truckload of sand and cement and had one built, right below the terrace. But I didn't think of the stench that would arise from the "duck soup" which accumulated in it, when it warmed up under the August sun.

        So when some French friends got married in Granada the next year I decided to sacrifice my flock of ten and invite them to dine on a dish I invented especially for the occasion, duck stewed with figs and sweet Malaga wine. Ten severed, twitching necks spurt a lot of blood in every direction, so I did the job in a swimsuit and then hosed myself down, along with the bodies. But I was well rewarded when I saw 30 Parisians _ and even a few adventurous Andalucians - sucking the bones clean, as Manolo sang flamenco on the terrace under the moonlight. Some time later, I had the duck pond ploughed away to make way for something more practical, a septic tank.

        There were also the olives from the seven trees which I named the place for. When I went to Rio, just after remodelling the house, I told my gypsy friend, Franci, that his family could pick the fruit that winter for themselves. But when they took the sacks of olives to the village mill, the foreman there refused to believe that they were not stolen, since gypsies here don't usually own land. I got a phone call in Rio from my bank manager asking me to send a fax as soon as possible certifying that I had given them the olives, which I did. But the next year when I made the same offer, Franci declined, because, he explained apologetically, there were too few olives to make it worth their while picking them.

        This is not only because there are so few trees, but because I refuse to prune and till the soil around them, preferring to have more foliage and grass, which makes the tiny plot look like an oasis in the middle of what, with more and more olive trees being planted every day, is becoming a desert with rows of bushes. This is the subject of heated discussions with Yo-Yo, who takes care of my land, who simply cannot understand that I like the trees because they are pretty rather than, if one can use the term in this context, fruitful.

        After seeing several crops of olives shrivel up before my eyes, while I sat indolently drinking my glass of fino on the terrace, some Anglo-Saxon atavism in me took over and I decided to pick them myself. Not for oil, but to prepare them for eating, which seemed more personal than sending them to the mill, where they are tested to estimate the average yield and then weighed and mixed up with everyone else's. In other words, I wanted to be sure that I was eating my own olives.

        Everyone told me it was easy _ you simply buy a bag of caustic soda from the hardware store and throw it into a tub of water with the olives, and in a few days they are "cured", which means that the bitter substance, la fuerza, has been removed and floated to the surface. After that you only have to soak them for a month or two in the things that give them a special flavour, such as lemons, oranges, garlic, and branches of rosemary and thyme, which grow wild along the path behind my house.

        But just as I was about to buy the sosa, usually used for heavy-duty cleaning, a friend, realizing that the olives I had picked were ripe ones, warned me that it wouldn't work. The Andalucians only eat green, unripe olives, picked in November and still hard enough to stand up to the acid, but the ripe, soft ones were sure to fall apart under the same treatment. I would have to use the old-fashioned method, he said, which was to soak them in brine. That sounded fine, until I realized that it would take much longer and many changes of water and kilos of rock salt before they were ready, by which time many turned mushy and had to be thrown out.

        What with picking the olives one by one by hand, because beating them off the branches with a stick would, I was warned, damage the fruit, it all added up to more work than I was willing to do. The first experience was admittedly gratifying because I could surprise my local friends with a delicious tapa of black olives, which everyone agreed were much juicier than the green ones, while assuring me in the same breath that they would not be willing to go to the trouble themselves. But the following year almost half of them went bad and I got tired of hauling around pails of water, so I went back to letting the fruit rot on the branches. I think of it as returning to the soil from which it sprung, which is, after all, what nature intended.

        As well as the olives, the patch of land has, as I have said, ten almond trees, a few fig trees and a number of other plants which made it, from a farmer's viewpoint, self-sufficient. No matter how humble a farm was, and mine was one of the humblest, it had to have them, or it was not a cortijo.

        Since Morcón lived here, the neighbours tore up most of their own almond trees to make way for olives because, what with the fat European subsidies, oil became much more profitable. Also, the market for Spanish almonds had been swallowed up by the competition from California, which, as luck would have it, produces much bigger and cheaper nuts. I am told that they are also much less tasty, but this is not enough to console the Spaniards, since most of the almonds sold in the world, it seems, are used for decorating cakes, which means that flavour is less important than looks.

        In Montefrio, the remaining almond trees, most of which grow alongside roads or in places too rugged for olives trees, are harvested for family use only, and not for eating as we do, but for culinary purposes. There are not many sauces in Spanish cooking, but here we have one which is superb by any standards, the salsa de almendras which, like a nutty gravy, accompanies rabbit and chicken. But you must be invited into a home to eat it, because, like most of our best dishes, it is seldom served in restaurants. I therefore let my cleaning woman pick my almonds and take half of them home with her to cook with, after scattering my share on the floor of the granary upstairs, where they are left to dry. Every time I want to munch some almonds with my fino, I go upstairs, scoop up a fistful and then sit out on the porch and crack them, one by one, on the stone wall.

        But what I like best about my almond trees is that in February they make the cortijo look like an oasis of pink and white blossoms clinging to an arid slope, which makes it even more special in my eyes. A popular legend tells the tale of the Moorish sultan who took a Christian girl captive in battle and made her his wife. When winter came she would pine for the snows of her native land in the north, so he had the hills around his castle planted with almond trees. From then on, for a few weeks every year, she could gaze out over them and imagine she was in Navarra.

        There is a fig tree next to the aljibe, the water tank, but I was warned that the fruit of that variety is not edible _ the people call them hijos bravos, wild figs. The farm's two "good" fig trees grow further down the slope, but they are too tall to be harvested without climbing up into the branches, and by the time I get around to it I usually find that the birds have riddled most of the fruit with holes. I prefer another tree down the road because the branches are lower and the figs are sweeter and juicier, and it is there that I go on summer evenings to fill my saucepan.

        Fig trees bear fruit twice, once in July and once in September, and each crop has its own name. What in English are called "early figs" are brevas, huge in size and pale green in colour, while the second crop, simply called higos, are smaller, dark
purple and much tastier. The Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy says that the "b" in breva comes from the prefix "bi" in Latin, for the two crops.

        Beside the porch grows a pomegranate tree, granado, but I seldom have the patience to pick out and suck each of the grains, so they too are feasted on by the birds. Next to it is a cactus tree, chumbera. The prickly pear or "Barbary fig" _ which means Berber fig - has been a staple of the Andalucian diet ever since it was brought here from North Africa, but, once again, the trouble of picking them at the right moment and then peeling their prickly surface is just too much for this falso cortijero.

        When I bought the farm, a spreading plum tree gave shade to the porch, starting beside the door and reaching the stone balustrade. When the fruit was ripe I crushed it in a bucket with water and sugar to make a delicious juice which Nina and I would sip, as we cuddled in the Brazilian hammock which I hung between the tree and a pole I set in the terrace wall.

        But then its branches began dying and Yo-Yo told me it had to be cut down to the trunk, which, he promised, would soon grow fresh branches. To my disappointment, the trunk turned out to be just another almond tree and never bore plums again. It is common to graft the branches of other fruit trees onto the trunks of the hardy almonds, because that way they bear fruit quickly, although they also wither more easily.

        Just below the middle of the porch is a quince tree, membrillo, which most foreigners visiting the house think are large yellow apples. They are used to make jam, which I don't like and requires the use of a lot of sugar, so I usually leave them on the branch, like the pomegranates. Except when a passing hunter gives me a rabbit, of which there are many running through the olive groves. Then, if the quinces are ripe, I chop one up and stew the rabbit with it in the pressure cooker, along with white wine and thyme, and some mushrooms and potatoes. The tartness of the fruit gives a most agreeable tang to the dark, lean meat, and, along with the dry sherry, helps neutralize the gamey flavour.

        The truth of the matter is that I like looking at nature, and cooking and eating it, rather than getting it to do things for me, which makes me similar to many people I know who spend their lives in cities. When the mystified villagers ask me why I chose to settle here at all, rather than in some more civilized part of the country, or down on the coast with the other foreigners, I simply say "because it's so beautiful". I tease them by saying that I am the only person who lives in Montefrio just because he likes it, with no family ties to hold him back or economic reasons either, at least not until I recently began restoring cottages for holiday rental to other foreigners like myself. And after thinking about it for a moment, and remembering that there are more montefrieños living in Barcelona and Mallorca than here, they ruefully nod their heads in agreement.

        I love walking along the hillside to the ancient farmhouse, El Castellón, and prodding at the old stones with Juan, who has helped me discover several of their secrets. And high up on the loma beyond Juan's house there is a beautiful cortijera, who is so fair and pink and snub-nosed that I am forced to believe the long-buried genes of some Visigoth invader popped up in her when she came into the world.

        Now that Nina's mother and I have parted ways, I sometimes plan my afternoon strolls so that I will pass by Alicia's rambling house when she is sure to be washing her family's laundry at the spring, or driving the goats back into their cuadra for the night. We sit by the well in the dusk and I tell her about my cosmopolitan existence, so different to her backs-and-forths between cortijo, Montefrio and, now and then and for practical purposes only, Granada, and she listens admiringly, or at least respectfully. Tender glances are exchanged which, given the various voids looming between us, are doomed to lead to nothing tangible, and after a while I go on my way, happy to know that innocence still survives so close to home, even if it cannot be mine.

        And then there is the house itself, which marked my début as a self-taught architect. With José's enthusiastic encouragement, I gradually developed my own organic style of building, inspired by traditional Andalucian architecture rather than making a spruced-up copy of it. As usually happens with renovation projects, I set out to change a few doors and put in a bathroom, and ended by remaking the entire house.

        We made a kitchen where the main bedroom had been, given that the house had none, because the cortijeras cooked outdoors. The bedroom didn't have a window, so we bored through the 60 centimeter thick wall to make a big one, because I like cooking with a view of the mountains.

        We created an extension on the end of the house, where the compost shed was, for the bathroom. None of the old cortijos have bathrooms, of course _ the people just "go" outside in the stable, among the goats and sheep. In that already distant year of 1985, my lavish bathroom was the biggest in Montefrio at 9 square meters - with a family-sized tub, which my workers thought was somewhat fanciful for a house which at that time still had no supply of water. And I put the toilet next to one of its two big windows, so I can gaze out at the sierra while I sit on it. In fact, I carved out so many windows that you can almost walk from one end of the long, narrow house to the other without losing sight of the mountains.

        We rebuilt the long porch, part of which had collapsed, and laid down rough flagstones. Inside, we covered the ugly floor tiles made of pressed granite chips, a "modern" innovation which, as a cheap alternative to ceramics, was in vogue here in the 1950's, with brick-red terrace tiles called catalanas. Later I was to regret this, when I realized that, if I had pulled up the granite tiles rather than covered them, which was the easy solution recommended by José, I would have found the original floor of irregular slabs of stone, tajuletas, so detested by the villagers because they are hard to sweep, but from my point of view much more interesting to look at. Perhaps one day I will tear up the catalanas, and the granite tiles beneath them, to finally lay bare these time-worn stones, which I am so proud of in my Casa de las Piedras near the castle, where they were still uncovered.

        Beside the house there was the threshing floor or era, a circular platform paved with tightly fitted pebbles where, at harvest time, the farmers would crush the wheat kernels under the notched iron wheels of a mule-drawn sled, before winnowing them by tossing the mixture of grain and chaff in the air. The wind would blow the husks to one side in a cloud while the heavier grain fell neatly to the floor for gathering. Since I was not likely to use my era for threshing, it became the turn-around place for cars on the narrow lane. Later I built a garage on the far side of the era, but before the work was done I decided that it was too pretty to put cars in and transformed it into a holiday cottage, La Casita.

        At one end of the house, facing the era, was el gallinero, the chicken coop, a flimsy two-storied construction which I had torn down to make way for a firewood bin. Some time after I made the drawing shown here, I opened two windows at this end of the house which, quite unintentionally, resemble two eyes looking westward towards the town, "to see who is coming to visit me", I joke to my friends. The bin is filled each year after the olive harvest, when the trees are pruned of their less productive branches, and some older trees, for the same reason, are uprooted altogether to plant saplings in their place.

        The donkeys and mules slept inside the house, in a tiny stable at the eastern end, still strewn with straw when I found it, which I turned into my bedroom, exchanging the door for a window. The villagers think it is very funny that I should sleep in la cuadra, rather than in the original bedroom, which of course is now the kitchen, and I joke with them that now, another burro goes in there every night to sleep.

        The loft of the house is divided into three rooms whose ceiling is the underside of the sloping roof. At the west end was la cámara, the cold room or "chamber", where the hams were hung to dry in the winter air, after being rolled in salt on a slightly concave cement table, el saladero. The entire loft was crossed by long beams stretching from one side of the house to the other, called tirantes, which the workers told me were there to hold the outer walls together _ as if a stick with a twisted spike in either end could secure two solid piles of stone! These beams were so low that we couldn't walk in the loft without bending down, so I decided to pull them out altogether. The workers protested that if I did the house would fall down, so I took the saw in hand and cut them myself, one by one, to disprove their time-honoured theory which, as often happens with unchallenged beliefs, turned out to be false!

        After that all we had to do was remove the nails from the rafters, where the jamones and chorizos had been hung to dry, and to level out the sharply sloping floor with cement, to turn the cámara and the granary at the other end of the loft into ample bedrooms, with beds made of stone and plaster. The workers, who all sleep on spring mattresses, joked that such beds were in no danger of collapsing or creaking, when subjected to duress...

        I regretted having to tear out the food bins in the granary, so picturesque with their thin, rough walls, but I could simply think of nothing they could be turned into! In their place, we broke through the wall to install a double door with window panes, which opened onto the roof of the bathroom downstairs. When I sleep in The Granary, as I call it, I leave its shutters open so that the sun rising over Parapanda Mountain will awaken me. We built a fireplace in one corner with a sculpted table and a stool on either side, moulded to the shape of my own body. Palino and Gonzalete covered the seats with plaster and when it was half-dry I sat on them, as lightly as I could, with an empty cement sack under my bottom, to give them the right shape for un culo inglés.

        There was a small room in the middle which, from the look of it, was where the children slept. Everyone, even my closest supporters, was shocked when I told them I would fit a kitchenette and a bathroom with shower into the tiny space, but I did, and somehow, everyone now agrees, the room no longer seems as small as it did.

        That was the winter when the drought which had been afflicting Andalucia ever since I settled here, with less than one third of the yearly rainfall needed to make the crops grow over a period of several decades, came dramatically to an end. So much rain fell so suddenly that the underpinnings of buildings, bullrings and motorways sucked up the water like dry sponges and collapsed, including a large segment of my front porch.

        One stormy morning, having returned from a conference in Seville the night before, I noticed that the crack in the porch's retaining wall, caused as I knew by an almond tree which was growing among the uncemented stones when I bought the house, had widened considerably, in spite of the fact that we had cut it down and doused the stump with poison to kill the roots.

        I made a mental note to have them surgically removed, a big job which I had been hoping would prove unnecessary, went back into the house and sat at my desk by the window. A moment later I heard a great rumbling, which I thought was a thunderstorm down on the plain, but when I looked out of the window I saw, to my horror, the entire corner of my terrace falling away into the sky, in a single piece. It took the guilty almond tree with it _ its thirsty roots became bloated with all the water permeating the stones - and had I stayed outside a minute longer would have taken me too.

        The gap has since been rebuilt with the same stones, this time solidly cemented together by my workers, whom I always give a free hand as long as aesthetic factors are not involved. From the very beginning, Mellao, Palino, Falete and Perico, as these seasoned albañiles are known, never missed a chance to let me know that they thought I was mad for not tearing the whole thing down and building a snappy new chalé in its place. And the rough, hand-made look I favoured was so repulsive to them that during the very first week of la obra, they entreated me not to tell anyone in town that they were the builders, for fear that their workmanship would be ridiculed later on.

        I contemptuously waved away their suggestions to "improve" the old house with aluminium doors and windows, higher ceilings (which would have required raising the level of the roof, therefore destroying the intricate web of beams) and the omnipresent glossy kitchen tiles, as well as, of course, straightened-out, sharpened-up walls. Their own houses in the village, most of which were old constructions like mine, had been "modernized" in this way, I knew. They could not afford to simply tear their old house down and build a new one, so they covered over the lumpy walls and floors and beamed ceilings with new materials, squaring everything up. This sacrificed so much living space that the already small cottages became even smaller inside, so that their inhabitants, when you saw them together at home in the evening, seemed like children sitting in a toy-house at school.

        No, I told them, I wanted them to build me a house like their abuelos, their grandparents, used to make _ what they called basto, rough, crude, rather than fino, elegant. Some would even say merrily to me, as if I was out of my mind, "Ya sé, usted quiere que lo haga feo _ I know, you want me to make it ugly", which they thought was the most natural thing in the world, coming from me.

        In fact, I wanted the opposite of what the villagers were all busy doing _ to make an old house look older rather than newer. For example, instead of flattening out the barrigas, the lumps or "bellies" which deformed the walls because of the stones underneath, I often had them put in ones where I thought the wall was too flat. This was done by throwing a fistful of plaster at the wall, letting it dry a bit, and then smoothing it over with a wad of estopa or hemp fiber, until the protrusion was well integrated into the surface, barely noticeable but, undeniably, "there".

        I will never forget the day I broke the news to these trusty but unsophisticated fellows about what I wanted. As soon as they had chipped away all the old, loose plaster from the walls and were ready to apply a new coat, I announced that they should put their trowels and pendulums to one side and work without straight lines. Seeing disconcerted faces all around me, I had a moment of inspiration and shouted, "Plunge your hands into the plaster and run them over the wall as if you were stroking the body of a beautiful woman!", which sent them all into the fray amid lusty hooting. Moorish heritage notwithstanding, Andalucians are Romans at heart, for nothing moves them like a good piece of oratory.

        And nothing moves me like the white walls of Spain, Lorca's legendary blanco muro de España, by which I am sure he meant, as I do, the old ones with lumps, the walls whose rugged stones have been whitewashed so often that they seem to be imperceptibly melting, like the stalactites of a grotto. Each spring the women of all the country villages cover their heads with a kerchief and a big straw hat, to encalar, to whiten the houses, and mine too, as you can see my cleaning lady doing in the picture. The curious fact that this is considered to be a woman's job is due, precisely, to the sanitary nature of the task - as our word "whitewash" indicates, it is thought of as a way of cleaning and disinfecting the house, rather than actually painting it.

        A sack of what look like chunks of white rock is purchased and thrown gingerly, piece by piece and at arm's length, into a tub of water in the evening, where it boils furiously for a while before dissolving. This is killed matar la cal, "killing" or slaking the lime, and a drop in the eye can cause serious burns, even blindness. By morning the thick, milky liquid is "dead" and can be slapped on the walls with a round brush, which is attached to a long stick for the higher parts. It is when this has been done for many years, even centuries, that the surface takes on the appearance of an outer shell of molten rock, which is precisely what it is, and which I tried to preserve and enhance in my cortijo.

        When it was all done, I realized that the walls were their own decoration and did not need to be hung with pictures, although some have found their way there since. They were, and are, like a second skin without which I now feel strangely naked. And I say this in the humble awareness that, like any other kind of barrier, they might one day become so permeated with the suffering from without, and impregnated with the angst from within, that the old gypsy could suddenly roll up his blanket and go looking for another refugio.

        I feel I have built a poem in which the words are the ancient materials I found around me. The reading lamps, which are in every corner where one could wish to curl up with a book, are made of old roof tiles fitted into the rough walls. An earthenware jar I found in the ruined farm down the road, the orza in which the cortijeros store, throughout the winter and the spring, chunks of cooked pork in its own lard, supports the small table, also fitted into the wall, where I have my breakfast, near the door. The thin, twisted rafters, whitewashed, as I found them, in a single surface with the ceiling, resemble the webbing of a duck's foot, and one of my greatest pleasures is to see the sunlight, or the flickering of the flames, playing delicately over their undulating surface.

        For I have left the best part of the house for the end, the crowning _ and crown-shaped - glory of what the village wags call the lorenzificación of the Farm of the Seven Olive Trees: the fireplace, which stands at the western end of the living room. When I found the house, it was the typical chimenea of all the cortijos, a flat affair with a corniced mantle crudely shaped in plaster and painted over in dark green and red, with the initials of the owner in relief on either side of the hearth. I had dreamed all my life of having a fireplace of my own and in my own taste, so I put aside my respect for tradition and told José to tear it out and help me make an entirely new one.

        Curiously, it is the only thing in my house which has been admired by all the villagers who have visited it, but this says less about the charm of the thing itself than about them, with their latent avidity for newness. My fireplace is like a prehistoric cave, a gabled dolmen in the shape of a great white toadstool, and when I roast my dinner on its coals I feel like a Bedouin tribesman huddling inside his tent, with the difference that mine is made of stone.

        Since Anthony, for my 50-something-th birthday, bought an ingeniously designed wrought iron grill for me in Ronda, I have become un maître des grillades, as my French friends say _ as if it were not enough to be a master of sauces, stews and soups! Here, rabbit is usually chopped into small chunks and fried in olive oil and garlic. I prefer it grilled on the coals, after getting the butcher to cut it neatly down the middle, from the head to the tail. When these two long strips have soaked a while in olive oil and garlic, as well as a sprinkling of wild thyme, and I have a deep pile of red-hot coals in the hearth, I lay the strips across the grill and toast them as if they were long slices of bread. As soon as they get crisp and singed around the edges, they are done _ you must be careful to take rabbit off the fire at the right moment, or the meat dries out. Then I simply pull the strips into several parts with my fingers and share them around, so that everyone can suck the soft, delicate flesh from the bones.

        A leg of lamb grilled on the coals cannot, in my opinion, compare with the shoulder, because it is too thick and would have to be either too raw in the middle or too cooked on the outside. Whereas the shoulder _ la paleta - is ideal because of its broad, flat shape, like a table tennis racquet. I simply rub each shoulder with the usual things, insert a few slivers of garlic here and there and douse it with virgin olive oil, before laying them side by side _ one for every two or three people - on the parrilla, using the hocks as if they were frying pan handles, when I need to turn them over. I carve the shoulders by holding them upright over the board, by the same "handle", cutting the tender meat away from the bone as if I were whittling a stick. My faithful pooch gets one of the bones and the rest are used, the next day, to make a stew of judias, white beans, red peppers and whatever vegetables are in season, artichokes if possible.

        But my speciality is something I invented on my own, grilled oyster mushrooms, the fan-shaped fungi which we call by the generic name for mushrooms, setas (the round white ones are called champiñones de París). In Andalucia they are very popular and usually sautéed with meat or mixed with eggs to make a tortilla, but for my taste the result is too stringy and squishy. I prefer to sprinkle a kilo of the largest ones I can find in the market with olive oil and a little salt, and do them on the coals.

        This is laborious, but worth the trouble, especially when you have five or six people behind you fighting over each morsel _ which can best be described as a tiny, bacon-flavoured pancake - as it comes off the grill. The thing is to get them just crisp enough, and since they burn easily this means that I have to keep my nose to the coals and my knees on the floor of the fireplace, with a long pair of kitchen tongs in hand, to turn each one over and remove it at the right moment. I call this dish setas a la brasa.

        But when I first gave shape to the house within a house which is my fireplace, I thought less of the food I could cook in it than the evenings of flamenco which I could share with my friends. I imagined its flames flickering over their faces and drawing us all into a magical circle of sound, with the olive groves and the stars glowing all around in the darkness. So as soon as the winter set in, I invited Manolo and Franci, with several members of Franci's brood for las palmas, to gather around la lumbre, as we call home fire, and celebrate the joyous rite of flamenco, the most poetic music to issue from the hearts of unschooled men.

        There are many palos or melodic lines in flamenco, soleares, siguiriyas and martinetes, but the one I always ask Manolo to sing first, when he visits me in my white house in the hills, is la serrana, the mountain girl's song, the girl from la sierra, who in my mind's eyes, of course, is the innocent Alicia. And of its many coplas, or verses, my favourite is this one, because it evokes so plaintively the selfless kind of love which los andaluces still exalt in song and speech, even if, as for me, it is not their daily bread.

 

Hasta el olivarito del valle

acompañé a esta buena serrana

y le eché el brazo encima

como si fuera una hermana

 

I walked to the olive grove in the valley

beside this good mountain girl

with my arm around her shoulder

as if she were my own sister