Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart Read Free Book Online

encourage him. I wanted to get to the dentist; I hadn’t been for nine years and I had a throbbing tooth. But the bicycle was a good touch, an unexpected narrative element. There never have been many bicycles in the Alpujarra – it’s not bicycling country, and also the nature of the indigenes is such that a bicycle would have been considered a rather racy and even improper thing. I put the handbrake on.
    ‘What they did was tie the bicycle to the mule’s tail and in this way they rode all over the Alpujarras, one on the mule and one on the bike. Of course, their father gave them a belting when he found out, but they had a lot of fun in the meantime. When they sold the mule, Fat Juan bought it. He said it was great to work with, except that it went berserk at the sight of a wheelbarrow or a concrete mixer.’
    I said that I didn’t believe they had actually tied a concrete mixer to its tail. ‘No,’ said Antonio. ‘But a concrete mixer has a wheel and I suppose in the eyes of a mule that makes it similar to a bicycle.’
    As a story the whole thing wasn’t up to much. I’ve heard worse, but on a scale of one to ten I’d give it two, or perhaps three. And these days I get told a lot of stories. The locals know that I write books about the Alpujarras, and the notion of having your story written down seems to exercise a peculiar appeal. They don’t seem to expect anyreward but, of course, the stories aren’t always good ones, and they are not always told when you want to hear them.
    Indeed, I had no sooner managed to shake Antonio off and was racing toward the town, driving like a banshee with the toothache, when just past the banana grove at El Granadino my old friend José Parra – a man who, rather oddly, keeps a lorry in his front room – leapt out into the road before me.
    ‘Cristóbal,
qué tal
? Hey, I’ve got something to tell you …’
    I looked pointedly at my watch. José Parra looked as if whatever he was about to tell me had been carefully rehearsed. ‘You know there used to be a mill up the river beyond your place …’
    I arrived an hour late for the dentist, which, as it happened, was no bad thing, as he too was behind, so I only had to wait another twenty minutes.

    Occasionally, though in truth not often, someone will tell me a story that etches itself deep into my mind and either illuminates or throws long shadows over the place I call home. Such a story was told to me by Rogelio, a sheep farmer who lives up on Cerro Negro, the Black Hill.
    Rogelio is the mildest of men, with white hair and apple cheeks and his farm is a fine example of how an Alpujarran farm ought to be run: the trees are all neatly pruned with an axe, and at their feet are stacked little piles of firewood; runnels and rills of clear water burble along earth channels and cascade over stone walls even to the far corner of the most distant terrace. Well-tended crops delight the critical eye. It speaks of hard work, a deep love of the land, and plenty of good home produce.
    I have known him for years, for he had a little flock of sheep that I used to shear and, although it barely repaid the cost of the petrol to drive up to his farm, I relished the few afternoons we spent together. Inevitably the day arrived when I had to announce that I was hanging up my shears and would no longer be able to shear the flock. He took this stoically and, after I had finished, invited me to watch the sun dropping low on the Contraviesa and share a few glasses of rough country wine. We had been sitting for a while in contemplative silence when I asked him if he had always lived at La Palma, his
cortijo
.
    ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I bought this farm forty-five years ago for five thousand pesetas. I was born way over there,’ and he indicated the great range of rolling blue hills that we were overlooking down to the south. ‘We lived in a very remote spot, just the three of us, my brother my mother and me.’
    ‘And your father?’
    ‘My