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

rocky ways of the Alpujarra (an activity like this ought to be done on foot to give it respectability and authenticity) armed with pen and notebook and perhaps a tiny, unobtrusive tape recorder. I would seek out the old folks with stories to tell, and they, bent over their mattocks, or leaning on the bar in remote village taverns, would share with me their stories of the past. Anthropological ethnography, I think the termis. Now, with the passing of the years, the old ambition had taken on a new urgency. The old folk, many of them left as the sole original occupants of mountain villages or near-derelict farms, were disappearing fast, and with it my chance to offer this community some writing of lasting cultural value.

    My mind was set. But, as so often happens, other more pressing tasks intervened and I found myself delaying and then delaying again the launch of my grand project and, as I was no longer shearing, I had no other reason to go up to Cerro Negro. I didn’t see Rogelio for a long time. And then, one day, not long after the hunters had slain the boar, our dogs, Bumble and Bao, decided to head off into the hills on their own and disappeared.
    I had made myself hoarse from shouting their names, and was pretty fed up with searching, when an Englishwoman who lived up on Cerro Negro rang to say that Ana was lying beneath the shade of a hedge in her garden and could I go and fetch her. Having established that she was talking not about my wife but one of our dogs (who have collars with the name ‘Ana’ and our telephone number), I set out, initially irked by having this long errand. Then I realized that the hedge in question was not far from Rogelio’s farm. This was too good an opportunity. I would visit him and flesh out the story I had begun. I printed it out and, armed with a brand-new pen and notebook, and a dog-lead, set off.
    Parking on the edge of the track up on Cerro Negro, I set out on foot for the final stretch to Rogelio’s farm. Savethe distant drone of a brush-cutter and the sound of goat bells coming up from the valley, it was quiet up there, far from the constant rushing of the rivers. A few flies kept me company. I pulled the brim of my hat down to keep off the glare of the midday sun.
    I called out loudly as I approached the house, this being the accepted etiquette for approaching an isolated
cortijo
. Shortly Rogelio emerged from round the corner of the house, holding an armful of laundry and a bag of clothes pegs. His wife was having trouble with her legs, apparently, and was bedridden, so Rogelio was now her full-time carer, and did all the housework as well as tending the farm. All this at eighty-two, and at harvest time he was still climbing high into the big old olive trees to beat down those last reluctant olives. He told me that he had picked over three tons by himself the previous winter. With a big smile he showed me the peg bag, which had a rather pretty doll’s dress sewn up at the bottom and a coathanger fixed to the top, so you could hang it on the line while you worked. It was an unexpected little masterpiece of intermediate technology , and typical of the witty and ingenious shifts of the rural poor of the Alpujarras and no doubt the rest of the country, too.
    ‘Cristóbal,’ he said, turning to me with a weather-beaten smile. ‘It’s good to see you, but what brings you all the way up here. It can’t be to waste your time talking to an old man like me, surely?’
    ‘But it is, Rogelio. It is. You remember that story you told me when I was last here, the one about your mother’s last days and the great debt you had to repay?’
    ‘I do,’ he said, with a peg in his mouth, as he skilfully smoothed the creases from the crumpled dress.
    ‘Well, I think it’s such a wonderful story that I would like to write it down and perhaps include it in a book with other stories like it, and I wanted to ask you if you would have any objections?’
    ‘Why would I object, Cristóbal? So