Somewhere over France a bank of rain cloud, an inverted anvil of grey vapour, rises suddenly and singularly from the otherwise uninterrupted expanse of undulating whiteness below us. It throws a long, blue-grey shadow over the cloud canopy it defies, climbing vertically and coming to an end in a straight line that exactly describes a higher altitude, its upper limit a razor sharp edge, defying not just that lower strata but also expectations. It’s a surprise, an inexplicable shape, a visual shock.

Of course it only appears inexplicable. If I was sitting beside a meteorologist I might have it explained to me. The pressures at work, the anomalies, the weather fronts and the barometrics at play. I might be left (assuming it was a patient meteorologist) with a sound understanding, not only less mystified by what I was seeing but able, perhaps, to predict the next, capable of reading the conditions and spotting those that produce such a phenomenon. Assimilating the information, eliminating the surprise.

See it coming next time, in other words.

I’m not though. I’m sitting beside K and neither of us has a clue, so we crane our necks – her leaning over me – and stare at the funny thing till it goes past. We sit back and she returns to her book. Not a word. Sometimes it’s enough to look at something strange, then let it slip away without explanation.

Further on the cloud cover breaks up and diversifies: horse tails here and cumulus fluffs there as the crew tramp up and down the aisle in an incessant sales frenzy – nicotine substitutes and lottery tickets available with our tea, coffee, cologne, hot chocolate. There is nowhere on the back of my seat to put anything so my lap is a mess, as is the floor at my feet. For lack of pockets they’ve done away with the safety leaflets – instead the information is emblazoned on the yellow seat top, ten inches from my tired eyes. This permanent visual reminder of violent death gives the occasional bout of turbulence we rumble through a certain je-ne-sais-quoi.

I wish someone would explain turbulence to me. Again. In a way I’d find reassuring. But I suspect it’s impossible. I ask K to pass the lip balm, then chuckle to myself as I contemplate the ridiculousness of attempting to sooth a chapped lip as we hurtle helplessly towards the distant Earth, then stop chuckling as the turbulence starts up again. Right now, I’d probably tell a meteorologist to shut it. Happy-go-lucky P, our Irish pilot, comes on the tannoy to tell us, accompanied by the worst bumps yet, that we’ll be landing in twenty-five minutes. I hope he’s right.

Twenty-six minutes later it turns out that P’s native optimism is, at least on this occasion, well placed. Nine days after that it’s some other guy at the controls, though due to a quick turnaround at Nuremburg he doesn’t have time to chirp at us. K and I have a row of seats to ourselves; the one between us is vacant but I ask her to move into it for take-off, being superstitious about these things.

We rise steeply through the lower reaches of a cloudy sky, the ever-so-German houses beneath us shrinking rapidly, as do the spaces between them – a patchwork of brown tilled fields and the odd rhomboid of rapeseed yellow. For a brief, magical moment we skim along the upper boundary of the clouds, our wing tips picking up wisps of vapour as we go, then we rise again into the blue to leave them behind.

It’s the sharp climb from the runway that makes me most nervous and I generally stay that way until I can watch the relaxed crew share private jokes over the trolley they trundle out. The intervening minutes seem to me to be the bit when control is at its least optimal, when the pilot would have the least time to react to surprises. When I feel at my most helpless.

Helplessness and superstition are close cousins. What a week we’ve had; an exhausted K closes her eyes beside me having spent time with a family navigating their way through serious illness and near death, hanging on to the their seats with white knuckles, hoping to remain airborne. I’ve lost count of how many times this week we’ve crossed fingers or touched wood. For those of us who don’t pray what else is there to do but tend to each other with these old gestures, appealing to something, some hopeful connection between people and things that would mean our wishing might constitute something beyond our own comfort? That we might with our most intangible, inner impulses have some outer, tangible effect.

We zoom home at altitude, having stayed on for some sort of resolution and not had it. We have a life to go back to, reminded very powerfully of its worth by the events of the week. Everything remains – for the moment, literally – up in the air. We will wait, braced for impact but hoping for a safe landing. We’ll wait for daily dispatches from an old man asleep in a bed, a young boy who found his way home in the Albanian mist by holding on to a donkey’s tail, who stuck his fingers in his friend’s bullet wound, to save him as they hid in a bush, who developed an affection for the English as a prisoner of theirs in the desert.

Wait for news from his bedside. Doctor words, kind but careful- the levels of this and that, the rates, the changes. The explanations, the forecasts and tentative prognoses, the meteorology of hope: donkey’s tails, tools for navigation, that we might have a better understanding.

He’s back in the mist now, finding his way home. We’ll keep a light on and wait, illuminating his way and ours, trying to read the signs, to not be so helpless, to do what we usually fail to do.

Know what’s going to happen next.

]]> http://alotofwind.com/2013/05/15/el-vuelo/feed/ 2 robingraham El Vuelo http://alotofwind.com/2013/05/10/der-turm/ http://alotofwind.com/2013/05/10/der-turm/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 08:44:13 +0000 robingraham http://alotofwind.com/?p=3885 ]]>

How exquisite to race along the country roads of Franconia in Spring, the sky finally clear after a dreadfully long winter, the curving, sinking fields around us dappled with wildflower. We have some sublime music on and it exhilarates – a perfect match for the serene scenery, this central European tableau of farmhouse, mill and die wälder, the abundant patches of old forest that characterise northern Bavaria. We ride the melodies through dorf and altstadt, through the rock formations of Fränkische Schweiz, the territory between Bamberg and Bayreuth they call their little Switzerland – pretty towns, dark-beamed buildings as only the Germans can build them and at almost every junction of the roads a little brewery and biergarten.

We stop in at a favourite, Kathi Bräu, for some quark and onion on heavy brown bread, then set off again along the winding rivers that snake their way from Schloss to Schloss, the imposing castles that number even more here than they do in Andalusia. Our eyes and ears are joined in pleasure as the ensemble, a quintet, race through their bright, 1979 recording of self-penned pieces. The title of the collection, “Highway To Hell”, belies the uplifting nature of the Australian musicians’ performance.

A few days later, we’re without any soundtrack at all, not even a breeze to rustle up the leaves as we walk through forest near the little town of Kulmbach. It’s the kind of country we don’t have in Ireland – there isn’t enough space between things there to fit in places like this, where a country lane can lead though the woods from village to hamlet without a car in sight, nor any sign of a proper road. We ascend a slope on dirt tracks, on our way up to a tiny dorf, up on the open ground above – meadowlands on a height that will furnish us with panoramic views in every direction save the forest at our back. We make quick time and four men in front of us, in hiking gear, stop and stand aside to let us pass, raising their caps in a jocular salute to our stamina.

“At least you’re breathing heavily too,” says one of them to K, in German.

“Well, we’re not young anymore,” retorts K.

It’s a good-natured jibe and they laugh. I want to tell them that as an Irishman I couldn’t slow down even if I wanted to, having been told there’s good beer at the top of this hill, but I haven’t the language skills to deliver the line.

German woods, in my limited experience, are well tended. At intervals along the path, felled trees are stacked neatly. Neither sparse nor particularly dense, stumps punctuate the new growth and plenty of light is admitted to illuminate the foliage – abundant shades of the same colour. Ivies and grasses, shrubs and nettles clamber over each other on the ground while above them the bright salad of the younger trees stands against the darker, older, winter greens of the pines.

The beer is an organic zwickl and we wash it down with some cheese on bread. It’s a public holiday so, in contrast with the forest, there are numerous people up here, families and day trippers out for a bite to eat. Tennach is a pretty little dorf, all pitched roofs and wooden barns. Lazy-looking cattle feed in one of them, behind the biergarten. You can never eat as well or enjoy a beer so much as after a walk like that – three or four kilometres, uphill and at a pace.

Afterwards we take a different track – rather than descending on the one that brought us here, we choose a way that winds along the tree-covered crest of the hill. K wants to show me the turm, the tower she has often spoken of to me. The tower that entranced her and her little friend S so much that they set out one day from her house to go to it, not realising the distance involved, and failed to reach it after some hours walking. Tired feet and uncertainty turned them back at the edge of the forest. K returned to an apoplectic mother, muddy and one shoe down but safe. I don’t know what kind of reception S got at his house. They were five.

I feel like S2 as we peer through the tree trunks trying to spy the tower. K is puzzled because the new path begins to descend after a while and she doesn’t think it should. I don’t think she has her bearings (it’s a frequent problem) and tell her that, based on everything she has told me and pointed out, the tower is much further along the ridge and that we should be patient.

But we do keep descending and, after another kilometre, no sign of a tower.

“Wait a minute, is this like the coriander allergy thing?” I ask. “Is there really a tower, K?”

“Fuck off,” she says.

Another kilometre. No tower. We’ve taken a right to get ourselves back uphill and K doesn’t like it.

“I’ve reached the point,” she announces, “where I’m not really enjoying walking that much, any more.”

I’m all for continuing – I love a quixotic quest – but I have to wait and lean on K’s walking stick, which I appear to have acquired, and stare at my feet in a sulk, raindrops dappling the ground around them as she emasculates me by consulting the satnav on the smartphone.

Smartphone! Doesn’t she realise that, as a man, navigating country like this is an innate quality of mine? That in the olden days I would have been leaping around the place to bring her food? Hunting my prey? You know, squirrels and the like?

No. She does not realise; she consults the satnav.

Women – what do they know? Of course, we’re utterly lost by now and have given up completely on the tower. I understand how S must have felt and vow to K that I will return here with her and find it, one day. She merely nods, intent on her machine as we walk on, the objective now merely to get out of these woods and back down to a road where her dad can pick us up. The path is narrow, like a tunnel of muffled sound, a leaf kaleidoscope; the dead underfoot and the living above our heads. The machine guides us back to a larger path from where K knows the way down; another kilometre and we’ll be at the meeting point. Despite our abject failure it’s been a beautiful walk; eight kilometres or so, up and down in beautiful country that always delights me. I’m anticipating my next beer when K emits a breathy chuckle and raises her hand.

I follow her finger with my eyes and there it is. Just a few metres away but still almost hidden by the trees, like something out of a fairytale it stands, old grey stone rising high and silent in the shock of greens that surround it.

Der Turm.

The cobbles glisten along the Carrera del Darro and little rivulets of rainwater rush downhill as we walk up, our feet sodden in their inadequate shoes. The weather gives K an excuse to duck into one or two craft shops on our way but she isn’t buying today. She’s in good spirits though; I’m making her laugh – something I regularly try and fail to do.

We’re sharing a tiny umbrella so the view is downward, at the pavement and the street; the rain has managed to take us by surprise and we will be wet through by the time we’ve hiked up to our little cave in Sacromonte, the old gitano quarter that these days is a warren of tablaos that truck tourists in for a bite to eat, some flamenco, and out again.

Wet, cold and happy; we’ve spent the morning and afternoon wandering through our favourite place. Like a lion’s paw resting on mown grass, a few outcrops of the Sierra Nevada come to a stop here on the flat of the vega, the vast flood plain on which sprawls the modern city. Above it, on one of the lion’s claws, the old red fortifications of the Alhambra. On the next claw, the rambling, crumbling, tumbling network of streets and patios, palaces and carmens that makes up the Albayzin. Bougainvilleas and cypress trees pop up amongst the stone-walled gardens and dusty red roofs of old, white-washed town houses, churches and former minarets.

We passed the caracole bar on Plaza Aliatar and walked down Calle Agua del Albayzin to Plaza Larga and through the old Puerta de las Pesas. For once the views from San Nicolas didn’t stop us in our tracks – those from higher up in Sacromonte are even better, and we took the steps at the side and wandered down to Plaza San Miguel, then turned to descend to the city proper, stopping at an old minaret and saying hello to the two little stray cats that napped behind some rails there.

At each corner we stopped to sigh and hold hands. Spain is full of beautiful towns – the old stones of Extremadura and Castilla, the moss-strewn, misty villages of Galicia, the pueblos blancos of Andalusia – but there isn’t anywhere like this. A pair of heavy, happy souls were reminded of the reason we came to this country. It’s been over a year since we set foot in Granada and we castigated ourselves for it, resolved to come more often. It isn’t enough to say there isn’t anywhere in Spain like it; there isn’t anywhere on Earth.

What makes the heart attach itself to this place or that? I don’t know what to tell you about the city; some will feel it and some won’t. It’s a cultured, university town that nobody has gentrified. It still has an edge at night and some cranky ciudadanos – we see more than one street protest on our two-day visit. Flamenco and jazz provide the soundtrack, the visual motifs more Arab here, for obvious reasons, than anywhere else on the peninsula. Down-to-earth bars serve delicious, down-to-earth tapas (the only kind I’m after) for free; the pedants will tell you that a caña will cost you more here but it’s never enough to account for the generosity.

K’s two German friends, T and K2, have spent the morning up in the Alhambra so we’ve had the opportunity to stroll down to Gran Via, the city’s most handsome street, for a coffee. The other two will have seen the Courtyard of the Lions up there, no doubt – now refurbished and complete. All we’ve ever seen on our umpteen visits was scaffolding. Even so, we have preferred to opt out and grab some time with Granada, stepping in to some galleries we’re fond of to browse the work of local artists. One of them, on Reyes Católicos, is packed to the rafters with beautiful things we can never afford but love to look at. Another, on the other side of the street closer to Plaza Nueva, has more affordable things and a little engraving of a kitten grooming itself catches K’s eye.

We’ll return in the morning to buy it. Of course it reminds us of our own two felines – especially the smaller, wilder one we took in off the street. They’re an extra factor in our lives now and yes, we are ridiculous and yes, we do miss them and worry when we travel. They’ll have to come with us if we ever make good on our dream to live in this storied city.

For now though we need concentrate only on navigating the Darro and then the Paseo de los Tristes, then the steep Cuesta de Chapiz, then the curling Camino de Sacromonte that will take us into what is more or less countryside, a mere fifteen minutes from the cathedral. We giggle, our soaked feet warmed just a little with wine, and I play the fool for K’s entertainment.

When I lift the umbrella or tilt it to tease K we suddenly see the old red fort above us, the Comares Tower crowned in rainy grey mist, looking down on us as it has done so often. It’s an old friend.

As we reach the serpentine camino the gypsy houses pile up to our left, many of them caves built into the hillside, homes for hobbits in the Andalusian heat. We get out of our wet things and sit by a heater, rejoining the others for an account of their Alhambra visit. The cave is cosy – not a straight line in it and easily warmed. In the morning, before we leave town, we’ll take another walk, to pick up the engraving and to say goodbye again to Granada.

But we’ll never really say goodbye to it. Even if we never realise our dream to live here, it has become a part of us. It’s a symbol as well as a place. It reminds us each time we come, and always does it so wonderfully, even in the rain, that we need to keep reaching, that we have everything to hope for, that we’re on our way.

As if they had been waiting for the starter’s pistol, plants have sprung up in the cracked concrete, in the car parks and along the walls and pathways behind the promenade. All of a sudden everything man-made looks precarious, the full force of nature bursting through the chinks in a green profusion.

Not just green; springtime seems particularly fond of yellows and purples. As I reach the end of the paved paseo, the wooden walkway that wends along the graffiti-covered wall of the football ground looks as if it’s floating on a multi-coloured carpet. The ground-hugging coastal shrubs are beginning to curl over the edge of the wooden slats, turgid with renewed vigour. Spring has been a long time coming; they’ll have less time this year to go through their little life-cycles and they look like they know it.

A plethora of beautiful weeds climb higher, daisy varieties mostly – yellow-on-white, white-on-yellow, yellow-on-yellow and yellow-on-green – but also buttery, bell-like blooms, drooping gracefully from their stems. Whole patches of yellow made up of these and a particularly regal-looking daisy – swathes of cup and coronet the insects buzz over. Thistles abound in purple, as do flowering bushes in violet, vermilion and dusty, lazy lilac.

Up in the bird reserve the tufts of beach grass ripple in the seaward-blowing levante. The greens up here glow, almost, as big red cattle graze. The river is lively with fish until an old man throws a dog toy into it for his labrador to fetch for him while he calls encouragement from the rickety footbridge. The dog can’t get the toy back to his master fast enough; it’s a matter of the utmost urgency for the awkward swimmer, who eventually emerges from the water bone in mouth and bounding with pride.

Urgency. Another year is opening up like a flower to go through the brightest phase of its cycle and I’m feeling the imperative to make use of the time, to match the abundant energy all around me with my own. Apart from any wish I might have to “live life to the full” and what have you, there are genuine, pressing matters at hand, the obligation to make a living being uppermost. As an underemployed teacher, each summer is a gaping fiscal hole.

This year, I have a plan. Something I wanted to be ready for a full year ago but am only just ready for now. I’ve been trying to get a fine art product together for many, many months – tracking down suppliers, getting rid of them, replacing them, going over ideas with K, coming up with a look, a brand. It has been a slow, tortuous exercise in frustration but I’m just about good to go. When the idea came about I envisaged an online birth – a site launch and the associated social networking. I know better than that now; I’ll be starting in the street, down at the alameda where the tourists eat and promenade. From there, we’ll see.

On the one hand I’m excited about selling my own wares – it’s something I’ve been working towards; ‘dream’ is probably not too strong a word and who knows where the enterprise might take us? On the other, if Summer is on its way then so, inevitably, is Winter and come October when another season will have wound down, I will need to be looking back on some success, something to build on. I will need to have made a good start. What they call a ‘window of opportunity’ – I don’t want to let this one slip by. It’s a concrete example of what these few transitional years have been about: doing my own thing, using my own talents, making my own way.

And getting paid for it. The tricky bit. This isn’t a good time to be a writer, from a paycheck point of view, so while I continue to pitch non-responsive editors and hack away at the gnarly, deformed creature that is my fiction, I’m allocating the responsibility of earning a crust to my photography. It’s something I can control, from beginning to end. The only thing I can’t control is whether anyone will buy. So, nervous.

I’m no athlete but I imagine this is how it feels to be waiting for the starter pistol – a knotted stomach and a strangely empty head. I suppose this is the (late) springtime of my life. I’m at a ridiculous age for it but that’s not something I can change. A third metaphor to suggest itself is that of ‘thin ice’. My God, I’ve made some singular decisions to get here and so has K. We’re skating on them now. We haven’t convinced everyone that we’ve done the right thing. Some have yet to be convinced and some have already decided they never will be. It has been an issue for K especially and I feel for her.

When you choose such a path, you fall back on your own resources whether you like it or not; it becomes untenable to rely on the validation of others as so many of us so often do. Some will dismiss you as irresponsible, selfish, perhaps even crazy while others will dismiss your life as a cliché. What both dismissals have in common is mean-spiritedness, and that they originate in people who lack the courage to do something similar for themselves.

Fuck ‘em.

So tomorrow I’ll hoik my pictures down to the alameda and try to flog a few of them, and it might go well and it might not, and if it doesn’t I’ll do it again until it works, and if it never works I’ll do something else until that works, and through it all I’ll be doing my own thing, relying on my own resources and the support of my love, and that is wealth. That is life.

Time to blossom.

Half an hour ago I didn’t know there was such a thing as manzanilla amontillada; now I’m tipsy on it. I asked for an amontillado but the bartender poured me a glass of this unusual and similarly named manzanilla and, realising his mistake, let me have it as well. Between the amontillado, the amontillada and the manzanilla pasada (which I just had to try) I’m feeling decidedly warm on this hot day in Sanlucar de Barrameda – it’s the third day of a glorious spell of weather in Andalucia and I’m on my third sherry in the third town, after Jerez and El Puerto de Santa Maria, of the famous ‘sherry triangle’. The town, incidentally, from which Christopher Columbus set out on his third voyage to the New World.

Not that they call it sherry  – in Sanlucar, it’s manzanilla: a dry wine that tastes a little saltier than finos from elsewhere. The subtle difference is the product of terroir – yeast and soil and all the rest of it – but it’s more romantic to believe (which is probably why people have been told as much for centuries) that the saltiness is added by the marine breezes that blow through the bodegas here, up on the hill that overlooks the town.

It isn’t difficult to see why the place has given rise to a little romance. Wine towns always have a certain something and Sanlucar has the added boon of the water. It occupies the river mouth of the Guadalquivir where it flows into the Atlantic. Sea breezes do indeed blow over the bodegas and the Plaza del Cabildo, lined with wine-from-the-barrel bars, is one of the prettiest and best-used squares I’ve seen in Andalucia – bustling with families at their leisure, at their coffee and ice cream, their wine and raciones.

It’s our first time in the town and we have walked around, trying to pin it down. There is an ordinariness to its casco antiguo – the ramshackle network of narrow streets is as unimpressed by the visitor as it is unimpressive to the eye looking for monument or magnificence. Overall though the place has a very pleasing effect. ‘Jerez-On-Sea’ is the best we can come up with and if you’ve been to Jerez you’ll appreciate the compliment: sleepy, pretty, a little shabby here and there and pure andaluz, top to bottom.

After ‘lunch’ we execute a wobbly amble along the town’s broad alameda down to the water – brown with silt but still pretty and dividing the town from the squat pine forests of the Doñana National Park on the other side of the river. The heat is a little intense – at least it is to a couple of blow-in tarifeños, accustomed to cool winds. It’s as if somebody has pressed the Summer button, too low on patience after what has been a long Winter to bother with Spring.

A few apartment buildings have gone up down here, catering to the Summer client by the look of them, but most of the space is taken up by villas – Victorian in appearance and on a grand scale: these too must have been Summer residences and we wonder who built them. Sherry money perhaps, looking to get out of Jerez in the heat. They appear incongruous now, more English or German in appearance than anything else. More of a mystery – who lives in them these days?

“Hay, que calor!” says the woman in the Spar we go into to get a bottle of water for our room.

“Finalmente!” I reply, but it seems to throw her. Perhaps it has been warm here in Sanlucar for a while. The Spar – a not at all Spanish phenomenon – provides the observant eye today with an object lesson in Spanishness. It’s a big one, the size of a supermarket, and this being around four on an Iberian afternoon, it’s utterly deserted. Most tellingly, there’s a bar. A bar in a Spar. And people ask me why I love this country. Next time somebody asks me that I’m giving them directions to the Spar in Sanlucar de Barrameda.

We have an ice cream back on the square and then sleep for a while, waking up to the familiar rhythm of a Spanish procession – two beats followed by three half beats – somewhere outside. We never find it and assume that a band is practising somewhere.

The town scores well on the food front. At lunchtime I have some beautiful dressed octopus and we share some velvety, rosemary-infused cheese. Now that night is falling we pick a place on the plaza for tapas and a skewer of flame-grilled fish. It’s a self-service bar which means I’m the waiter: up and down between the bar and our table outside as each dish (we order too much) appears from the kitchen, another first for me. We don’t even know what kind of fish it is – something big enough to be meaty and some smoked anchovies, a tuna pudding and a “Gypsy’s Arm” – a roulade of potato, egg and tuna.

Inexorably we are drawn back to the sherry bar for a night cap, and we splash out on a couple of palo cortados from local bodega Barbadillo. I adore palo cortado but K is a little critical of this one.

“It’s no Apostoles,” she says, referring to the (very expensive) palo cortado that Gonzalez Byass make.

Airs and graces.

We struggle to sleep in the heat – I spend half the night trying to understand the incomprehensible aircon, which I never manage to activate, and killing mosquitos. It makes for a cranky morning but we soothe ourselves with a breakfast in the castle courtyard up on the hill. On our way up we find ourselves among the bodegas, the distinctive aroma of this region’s fortified wine all around, mingling with the orange blossom.

The castle is intact and sturdy, another relic of the Guzmans, and the views from its octagonal tower take in the town, the river, the national park and the sea. Even Huelva, nearly seventy kilometres along the cast, can be seen from here, reminding us how close we are to Portugal. Kestrels nest in the masonry and flit around us. The various chambers of the tower are hung with antique cartography so we can check out the town, the region and Tarifa where we live.

Sanlucar has been a tonic – nothing spectacular, it has made a gentle, lulling impression on us. I got to try some new wines and we’ve had our first taste of real heat this year. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for this: a meandering, laid back post that comes from a meandering two days in a lovely, laid back place.

The water is high in El Tajo and roars beneath the Puente Nuevo, dropping to the lower gorge in a ragged chute where the valley opens up below me into an open vista, ringed by mountains – gloomy today but spot lit here and there by a half-hidden sun. I’ve come down to stand on a ledge in the cliff side and wait for the light; sunbeams on the horizon edge closer as the heavy cloud cover oozes overhead. I want to catch it as it passes over the arches of the bridge, illuminating them in golden light against a backdrop of stormy, dark grey sky.

It happens for me eventually – a less-than-perfect result, not as impressive as the image I’d created in an expectant mind’s eye, but worth the wait. When I photograph I spend a lot of time like this: waiting, walking, chasing the light, letting it come to me. If I don’t get the shot I’m after I get another one, or just some time to be still and unwanting. When I get this one I walk further down to the base of the two hundred and twenty year-old bridge – the newest in town – and pass underneath it. The gorge is as dramatic, looking up from here, as it is looking down from up there and the river is loud – the lulling cacophony of big water, rushing through its looped and syncopated rhythms.

I’m glad to be down here because although I’m a fairly regular visitor to the town I’ve never made the descent on this side. My mental map of the place is expanded; I feel as if I’ve got to know it a little better. This isn’t a typical visit – I’m here without K and in the company of two English lords, two English ladies and a gaggle of their offspring. Three generations of nobility from the sceptered isle. As the soul of discretion I couldn’t possibly disclose my connection with their lordships, but I will say this: in keeping with my standing amongst these two families they have requested that I be ‘unobtrusive’. Since I’ve been exactly that for a full forty-one years I’m happy to comply. Problem is, when it becomes an imperative it’s a little like being asked not to think about the colour red, and that’s another reason for me to enjoy being alone down here, breathing a little easier while they go off to dinner.

Not that they’ve been anything but civil towards me. Lord F is, quite literally, adorable and may well have been written by Evelyn Waugh. His personal style was evident from the outset as M introduced us.

“Lorf F, can—“

“Yes.”

“Can I present R—“

“Splendid. Very good!”

“He’ll be taking—“

“Yes. Very good.”

“…a few photos—“

“Will he?” looking at me.

“You are clever. You won’t take too many, will you?”

“No, no—“

“Very good. Well done!”

And that was that. From then on, whenever he spotted me he would either tell me how clever I was or how well I was doing. A kindlier man I have never met and it would be wrong of me, I suppose, to caricature these people or tar them with so coarse a brush as the ineloquent ‘posh’.

But I will say this – on the train south tomorrow a conversation will take place in which names like Catherine Howard and Ann Boleyn are bandied about as if they were old friends of the family. “Battle of Blenheim!” someone will exclaim fondly, as if it had been a lovely day out. Most of us, I think I’m safe in assuming, would draw a distinction between the history of kings and queens on the one hand, and social history – the study of what life might actually have been like for real people in the past – on the other. For this family, it’s pretty much the same thing.

There are three bridges that span the gorge. The one I’m standing beneath is the most impressive, joining old Ronda with the newer, larger town close to El Tajo’s highest point. Further back are the Roman and Arab bridges – lower, smaller and older. All three will have played crucial roles in their time, both providing access and limiting it. Once the Puente Nuevo was completed in 1793, the town was free to burgeon on the other side where today the visitor will find most of Ronda’s amenities – the shops and schools, the fire house and health centres, the outlying industrial estates, the parks and stations.

On the original side of the bridge is the old town, tiny and visually intact. Another world, its narrow streets and pleasant squares persist, enduring as the world changes around them. There probably isn’t a prettier town in Spain. My experience with the lords and ladies makes an apt comparison – here I am in the company of a family who seem to me so redolent of the past and yet here they are, hopping on and off the bus on guided tours, planning meals (or having them planned) and buying souvenirs. For a couple of days I have access, though limited, to what is for me another world, and they emerge from what I’m sure are the most rarified of circumstances for a trip down the tracks of their family heritage. There’s a beautiful old railway that links Ronda to the coast. This family built it.

Quite something, then, to join them on the train as it trundles south. On the platform, M will explain to Lord F that I’ll be taking my leave of them in Algeciras and that I’ll send a link to an online album of photographs over the next few days. The patriarch will look at me in astonishment.

“You really are a magical fellow, aren’t you?”

“Wonderful thing of course, technology,” he will add as he turns back to the family, “as long as you can get it to work.”

In Algeciras they’ll wish me a very gracious farewell and deposit me back in my own life. They’ll be off to a gala dinner to celebrate the reunion and I’ll be off for a frozen pizza with K. It would be too easy here, of course, to take a parting shot at their cloistered and gentrified customs.

But I will say this – their meal will be coat and tie and it turns out they refer to the seating plan as the ‘placement’ (French pronunciation) which amuses M and I no end. Back in Tarifa I’ll still be feeling a little disorientated as I sit down to my quatro quesos with K.

“Very good!” I’ll tell her.

“Well done!”

]]> http://alotofwind.com/2013/04/06/los-puentes/feed/ 4 robingraham Los Puentes http://alotofwind.com/2013/03/29/la-isla/ http://alotofwind.com/2013/03/29/la-isla/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:07:05 +0000 robingraham http://alotofwind.com/?p=3816 ]]>

It’s easy to forget when you’re walking the narrow streets of the old town – hemmed in by the city walls – that you’re out on a headland here. Further up the coast and looking back in this direction it becomes obvious; Spain tapers to a fine point in Tarifa, a slender town that reaches out into the Strait like a white needle reversed. Reversed because it’s the eye of the needle that stretches seaward and not the point – at the very tip of the headland there is a thickening where a causeway divides the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and joins the town with the Isla de Tarifa, a round and rocky former island that since it was joined to the mainland in the early 19^th century has qualified as the most southerly point of the European continent.

The island is military and out of bounds. Walkers are welcome on the causeway – which, with the winds around here, is an act of bravery in itself at times – but no further. The island at the far end is gated and walled in with Napoleonic and British fortifications. It’s been tantalising me since I came to this town almost three years ago – a secret Tarifa has been keeping. When a tourist stands at the meeting point of the two seas and reads the ceramic plaque that tells them they’ve reached Europe’s southern extremity, they haven’t. They can see it in the form of the lighthouse that stands on the island’s southern coast but they’re still about a kilometre away. Which is to say, of course, I’m still about a kilometre away.

It’s been bugging me.

So when L, our friend and intercambio, announced a couple of weeks ago that the walking group he’s a member of had secured permission to get onto the island for a visit and that there were places available, I jumped on it. A visit to the tourist office to submit our photo id for military inspection and we were all signed up.

I say military – the island is in fact administrated by the Guardia Civil, the army having vacated in 2001 with the abolition of compulsory national service. Many Cádiz men of a certain age will have done their stint here but for us and L, who is madrileño, it has always been a mystery. Like any old sod of turf around here it is of course steeped in history – a place of sacrifice for the Phoenicians, the Romans may also have had a camp here but perhaps most interestingly, it is probably where a Berber scouting party led by one Tarif Ibn Malluk, who would give his name to the town, landed a year before the Arab invasion of the peninsula.

These days the island is the jewel in the crown of the Natural Park of the Strait, presumably because nobody can trample all over it; it’s covered in limonium, a hardy, ground-hugging and endangered shrub perfectly designed for local winds and a rare fern, also endangered. Bird life is monitored here. As we wander along its rock shore though, it’s the bones that strike us. The ground is littered with them, maybe three inches in length and too thick for bird bones. We never do figure out what they are as we explore the coves and rock shelves. It adds to the mystery.

The lighthouse is the tallest structure, white and raised to its current height in 1854. After that it’s the gun batteries, the monolithic semi-circles built here by British engineers in the 19th century; they are sturdy and dark, unused but in good condition. There are bunkers – eccentrically moulded concrete mounds that look like asturian brañas till you get up close. It’s a wild place with a windswept, Atlantic feel to it and nothing at all like any scenes that the words ‘southern Europe’ might conjure. Despite its ancient history its the 19th century that has left the largest physical impression.

Not the most evocative though. It’s the island’s more recent past that resonates most; at its centre lies the compound of living quarters for the soldiers who would have done their service here. Barracks and a canteen, tiled out in andalusian style just as the bars of the old town are at the far end of the causeway. Before the kite surfers came to Tarifa it was these young men, brought here from all over the country, who gave the town’s economy a much needed shot in the arm, shopping in the shops, eating in the bars and cafeterías, taking the local girls out, marrying them sometimes – there are families in town that came from such unions.

The buildings are abandoned now, crumbling and acquiring a patina of decay – peeling paint and chipped rendering, the interior spaces strewn with debris, the windows glassless cavities and the doors gone, requisitioned no doubt for some second purpose. For P, the group leader who did his service here, it must be strange to see the place is this state. Even for us it isn’t difficult to populate the place, in our mind’s eye, with the bustle of barrack life. The dorms, the athletics track, the little square replete with fountain – an avatar of the plazuelas these men would have known back home.

On the other side of an open space, on a part of the island we will not be visiting, another compound – the island’s current purpose is carried out over there behind high fences and beyond the reach of the curious. “Moors” still end up on this island, just as they first did thirteen centuries ago. These days they are picked up by the Spanish authorities – out on the Strait in some pathetic dinghy or in some coastal cove, thinking they’ve made it – and they are detained here: men, usually of sub-saharan origin in a desperate break for Europe and a new life.

Quite the reversal of fortune when held up agains the Arab and Berber invasion that in a way began right here, but fitting also, I suppose, that these men get to see this place before moving on, the water on one side of them and Iberia on the other as they nestle between the barracks, batteries and bunkers that so many have built to fortify this place: to protect Spain, to subdue it, to dominate the Straits that divide it from another world.

The sea is far below me, the cliff top far above and the curved cliff face on my left as the narrow track curls around it and reaches a ravine that’s not much less sheer than the rock to either side and covered in sub-tropical vegetation – deep greens in the form of ferns and palmitos, great leafy plant life speckled with the yellows and purples of spring.

Here the track becomes a set of old, uneven steps, steep and winding up the ravine in twists and sharp turns towards the top. Looking up at the zig zag stonework – almost swallowed up by foliage – and then over my shoulder out to sea and that other continent’s coast, it’s not the kind of spot where you would expect to bump into anyone. And yet, I hear voices.

They’re coming from behind and since I stop here to sit for a minute, they soon catch up. A pair of Englishmen – one is tall and straight-backed, wispy white hair blowing in the breeze, aquiline nose held high and appears, even up here after quite the hike, to be sauntering along as if on a quiet stroll round his own garden. He looks like I look when I take the few steps from the front door to the buzón to check for post, only taller and with better posture.

I feel a bit better when I see his companion, a stubby man with a snub nose, hair not so much white as dirty grey and beginning to stick to his head with perspiration, a few straggles of it escaping from beneath the temples of his glasses. It might be the setting, but my imagination dresses them both in the kind of naval uniforms you see in paintings of the battle of Trafalgar and the like – the rear admiral out in front, occasionally pointing out items of interest in the vegetation or out at sea, the hapless ensign trotting along behind, missing them all because his eyes are so firmly fixed on the uneven track, his mind on suppressing a dizzying fear of heights.

I offer a good morning and get a hearty one back from the admiral but his rotund companion looks a little put out to be spoken to and hurries along, struggling to keep up as their voices recede. I allow them a couple of minutes to get away from me and then tackle the steps myself. The naval thing sprang to mind, I suppose, because I’m scaling the near vertical eastern side of the Rock of Gibraltar, and everything about this place reeks of its naval and military past.

The very steps I’m climbing – with aching legs and out of breath – were put here by soldiers to connect the gun installations lower down with O’Hara’s Battery at the top – an artillery outpost that crowns Gibraltar at its highest point. Between the guns though there are only the steps and the greenery, the sea and Africa. You wouldn’t know where you were if it wasn’t for the view of the Moroccan coast and as for when; you might almost expect a Man-of-War to round the promontory’s southern tip, beating a path through the bright water and into view. Instead it’s container ships further out on the Strait, bound for the Atlantic.

Not knowing where you are might be an enjoyable sensation, but only fleetingly; if the feeling lasts, it unsettles. People like to know where they are. On the other side of the rock and far below me, the town is choc-a-bloc with clues and symbols to tell you exactly where you are – Union Jacks and dingy, pie & chip pubs, street names like Winston Churchill Avenue and Cumberland Road, King’s Yard Lane, Queen’s Road, Prince Edward’s Road, red telephone boxes, more Union Jacks. Nobody could ever accuse the locals of subtlety when it comes to declaring their allegiances.

The Franco years poisoned Spain for many Gibraltarians – they give the impression nowadays of regarding their neighbour to the north (and the east, and the west and, if you count Ceuta, the south) with suspicion and contempt. You’d need an attitude, I imagine, to carve out a life in an enclave like this. The symbols you surround yourself with would have to be imbued with a near physical potency if you weren’t to be subsumed – your anthem drowned out by the dirges and bulerias of flamenco, your women swathed in the finest jamón money could buy, your young befuddled by fresh fish and delicious seafood at reasonable prices. It can’t be easy to resist.

But resist they have. Flags, coats of arms and crests are more numerous here than anywhere I’ve ever been. Bit of a mystery to me, Britishness, if I’m honest, though I admire it in many ways – if the Rock is anything to go by it seems to be largely a matter of flags, armed forces and frozen pies. These things connect the people here to a mother country they might not even like all that much or recognise as their own. The truth is that Gibraltar is a singular place, its brand of Britishness an odd but unifying web connecting a unique collection of peoples from as far afield as historical Genoa and Malta, India and Morocco. Jews and Anglicans, Catholics and Muslims.

Mainly Catholics, a fact brought home by the little statuette of the Virgin I stumble across on my way up the steps, left by someone in a cleft, in prayer or remembrance of some sad thing. She has the same view as I do, the Strait that divides the continents, and it isn’t the first time that Christianity will have cast a watchful eye over these waters.

I’m flagging and beginning to wonder how many more of these wonky steps there are when I hear some voices again which, as they become louder, become more familiar. It’s the admiral and his ensign on their way back down. The taller man is still strolling easily, his one concession to the physical exertion that he has removed his pullover. It swings gently back and forth in his hand as he ambles.

The ensign, by now a mess of cholesterol and sweat, has elected in his breathless delirium to become talkative, rabbiting away at the admiral’s back as he stumbles along behind.

“It all depends on the hips, you see…”

“Hm.”

“…but he said…”

“Yes.”

“…that if we…”

“I see.”

His unflappable companion gives no indication that he’s listening, merely peppering the dialogue with a “hm” here and a “uhuh” there and putting up with it all very patiently, although I believe I see his hand tighten on the pullover a couple of times as they fade away below me. As I continue up the final set of stairs to the top, the oddness of the place is evident even in the flora – plants like Candytuft, Campion, chickweed and saxifrage: as strange and singular a mix as that of people in the town below.

When we first moved into the rental where we now live in the centre of the newer part of Tarifa, just outside the old city walls, we did what I imagine many couples do when they’ve been handed the keys but before they’ve moved any boxes – we cleaned the place from top to bottom. It didn’t look dirty but there is something about going over a new home with bleach and polish, and preparing to add your own dirt, that seems to make it yours. As a woman washes a man out of her hair, so we washed the old tenants away and started afresh. An additional incentive was the smell of cat that pervaded the place.

In the garden, same. It appeared to be some kind of feline colony with all the smells and deposits that that entails. I dug it up and planted aromatics, put down chicken wire and chased off anything with four legs for months, hissing and contorting my face in an effort to convince the neighborhood cat population that it wasn’t worth bothering with our garden anymore. I really went to town, procuring a pump action water gun and sprinkling the place with coffee grounds and lemon peel, as well as the more aggressive chilli powder.

The previous tenant, it became apparent from numerous conversations with the landlord, had made a refuge of the garden for the local strays, feeding them there, and in the house I bet; several of them would come boldly up to the window as if expecting to get in. I cursed her. Bonkers cat lady, I called her. Oh, how selfless and kind, to feed the cats. But not to us. Never mind us.

Anyway, none of my internet-researched anti-cat measures worked in any way, shape or form but gradually – thanks to the facial expressions and hissing – the sizeable contingent of tomcats and their attendant concubines faded away; we’d still see them round the place, but not in our garden. It was a huge effort if I’m honest and got to me at times a lot more than it should have done, but then there’s nothing quite as infuriating as finding one’s fingers in some tomcat poo when doing a spot of weeding (gardening gloves, people).

I was determined to get rid of them for the same reason as we had been determined to clean the inside of the house when we first arrived. Tabula rasa – a clean slate, a hygienic stamp of ownership on our new nest. Although the process in the garden was more gradual, we felt optimistic when Valentín came to live with us some months later, that we had procured the perfect weapon: a big, burly cat of our own to make the garden his.

No slate can ever be wiped completely clean though, can it? There is always the chalk dust and, beneath it, traces of words rubbed out, outlines of the past. Our little trace is called Estrella, a black female with gold spots who never quite went away. Her attachment to our house would appear to be at least as strong as ours. Stronger, probably. The nearest we’ve had to a concession from her was her decision to give birth to a litter of kittens just outside the garden, beneath the neighbour’s hedge.

“Year after year, she has kittens,” we were told.

She isn’t particularly pretty. She isn’t particularly healthy looking. Or friendly. She isn’t particularly ours. She doesn’t, for example, have a clue that her name, thanks to a whim on my part, is Estrella. She is one hundred percent Valentín-proof, appearing to give not the slightest of shits that he now lives here. Actually, Valentín has been a wash-out on that front; apart from Estrella, with whom he has adopted a policy of mutual disregard, he is afraid of other cats. He merely watches, and if they make any sudden moves, comes back inside.

Estrella’s kittens ransacked the garden but went away when they were old enough and things went back to normal. She would run away when she saw us but never too far. Well-established in the barrio, she gets titbits from the local shop and several neighbours so although a street cat from top to bottom, never looked painfully hungry. She would regularly leave vile messages and I therefore remained hostile.

Things began to change a couple of months back, during the coldest patch of weather this winter. Estrella started spending nights on our doormat in order to get herself off the near-freezing ground and only moving when we disturbed her by opening the door in the morning. She looked pregnant again. The cold was getting to us and we felt bad for the cat so we put one of our spare baskets out with a blanket in it, which she immediately moved into. I can’t remember exactly when I started feeding her, or putting the hot water bottle out at night, but as her belly grew we felt more and more protective.

A routine developed of two feeds a day and the water bottle at night. She got huge and must have been in some discomfort. We weren’t worried that she’d give birth in the porch – although sheltered, it isn’t sheltered enough. We did begin to anticipate that she’d have this lot somewhere in our garden and began to make plans for coping. We would seek the help of a nearby shelter with the kittens and as far as Estrella was concerned, we would try to get her sterilised afterwards. She appears to be eight or nine years old – she’s had enough kittens and deserves an easier life.

When we spotted her in the compartment where our water meter is (the door won’t close properly) we knew the kittens were on their way. Nature is cruel though and Estrella gave birth just as the heavens opened and it rained cold rain for a week. She wasn’t sheltered enough, the kittens were born onto cold wet ground and she wouldn’t let me near with the plastic bag and blanket I wanted to put under them, the only time I’ve ever heard her hiss. None of the kittens survived. K was heartbroken and I found it harrowing, to tell the truth.

She’s back in the porch now. I don’t know anything about whether cats grieve, what cognitive mechanisms are at work in her, whether we can talk about suffering. She’s full of milk though and must, at the very least, be in physical discomfort. We are more resolved than ever to do something for her and will be implementing a “training” program whereby she gets used to being fed in a transporter, so one day we can snap the door shut behind her and whisk her down to the vet. She won’t like it, but she won’t have to go through that again, and neither will K.

And neither will I, I suppose.

The lane leads down to the lower part of the town, which comes into view once we take a bend – the tall church against a backdrop of dark green mountainside, laden with low-lying cloud on this misty, wet morning. An elderly man is on his way up and about to pass us by, all flat cap and whiskers. We know he’s going to say hello because everybody in this place says hello.

“You’re in the hotel, are you?”, he asks. There’s only one twelve-room hotel in town and he hasn’t seen our faces before.

“Yes. You’re from here?” I reply.

He might not have understood me properly.

“I’m from here,” he announces.

“It’s very quiet,” I point out to him.

“It’s too quiet,” he says. “Out for a bit of a walk, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Down to the river, is it?”

We have no intention of going all the way down to the river; we just want to stroll around the tiny town up here on its height and freshen up a little after last night’s wine. He takes his leave of us with a cheerful declaration in incomprehensible andaluz and we continue on our way. It’s early (for Spain) on a Sunday morning and we don’t bump into anyone else as we explore the miniature pueblo, eventually passing by the heavy wooden doors of the taberna we spent the previous evening in, warming our feet by the log fire. The dueña there was friendly too.

“You’re in the hotel, are you?” she asked us.

“Yes. Is it usually this quiet?”

“The children are singing up in the square. Everyone’s up there. It’s carnaval, and there’s a food festival on, you know.”

“Yes. That’s why we’re here. We came two years ago. Seemed busier then.”

“The crisis. People aren’t spending (la gente está fria).”

With that an old lady she knew came in for a drink, then a succession of locals and the evening livened up. We spent it by the fire, glad because we’d been kept away from the one in the hotel by other guests, and had one of those meandering but cleansing conversations we seem more capable of away than we are at home. A little mutual support, a stuffed mushroom, bit of bickering, beautiful jamón, hake fritters, happy memories, sad ones and serious talk.

I think this is my favourite of the pueblos blancos, of the ones I’ve seen to date. You have to get off the mountain road between Gibraltar and Ronda, the old camino inglés, and drive along a winding country lane for a few kilometres to reach it. It’s a rural town; it has none of the pretensions of places like nearby Gaucín or pueblos further afield that know their own pulling power with the tourists, and work it. Charm though, it has. White-washed alleyways, the obligatory historical church, cobbles, cockerels and weathered old men – the whole bit.

Back at the hotel later we got to continue our fireside chat – everyone else had either had an early night or were across the way in the restaurant at dinner. We opened a bottle of Ronda wine and sat there drinking it from the glasses we’d found in our bathroom, our only company the night watchman who looked at the tv on mute or played with his phone. Later we moved outside, wrapped in blankets on our balcony, the mountain view a beautiful black void in the night.

The conversation, these days, often gets round to dreams of country living. Simple souls or misanthropes – either way we think we’d be happy away from the cut and thrust of the world. A steady diet of silence and space. Long walks and lazy living, if we can help it.

In the morning we paid peanuts for a filling breakfast, the table next to ours noisy with young men in protección civil overalls – local lads drafted in to guide visitors into parking spots and getting a free breakfast for their trouble. I hoped they’d be busy later. It would be a shame if the crisis put an end to the festival – another lifeline lost to this vulnerable place. Then we came for our stroll.

The little town is draped across a mountainside on two levels; once we pass the taberna we find ourselves walking uphill towards the upper part and its square. Views to the north of the Genal valley and at its far end, rocky, snow covered summits. The food festival people are setting up for the day in their marquee on the square. Bodegas and bakers, cheesemakers and chocolatiers. I get a few shots and try to ignore how desultory it all seems this time round. Fingers crossed for them.

Back at the hotel we’re already checked out and our stuff is in the car but I linger for a few minutes with the camera. Across the valley the sun is bursting through a break in the heavy cloud and splashing across the forested slopes. A white house gleams here and there in the sunbeams. It’s the kind of back lighting Charlton Heston as Moses would look good in and I try to capture it, but the camera doesn’t really do it justice.

We get in the car and head out of the town which, by the way, is called Benarrabá – a name which calls to mind its Moorish beginnings. It isn’t particularly easy; there’s only one way through the narrow streets and not enough room for two lane traffic, so when we encounter another couple of cars coming our way, a few minutes of tetris-like (rubik-like for the even older) manoeuvring ensues.

When we get to the patch of waste ground that passes for a car park on the edge of the pueblo, one of the protección civil guys waves us past, nodding as he recognises us. In a place like this it’s no surprise that he knows us, and even a little about us – that we’re visitors, that we’re leaving now, that we’ve had a good breakfast, that we’ve been in the hotel.