Last Days of the Bus Club (19 page)

‘Try the bank,’ they suggested.

Our local bank in Órgiva moves with the times. Given that a fair proportion of their clientele is English-speaking, they have decided to get in on the act. The first manifestation of this forward-looking policy was a big poster in the bank and a set of fliers in a heap on the counter. These advertised ‘On-Linen Banking’, and underneath the announcement of this unusual service, the baldly mendacious statement, ‘We Speak English’. They don’t speak English. Apart from the very charming Augustín, who can greet you with a garbled and almost unrecognisable ‘goomorrnin’, and might on occasions be persuaded to count from one to ten, nobody
has a word of anything but Spanish. So if you go in there hoping to do your banking – on linen or anything else – in English, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

That’s OK. They’re nice people and do what they can to run a halfway decent bank. As a consequence of once having had a bestselling book, we are treated in the bank as high rollers, and Augustín in particular is always at pains to ensure that our every whim is catered for. He seems to be in a constant state of agitation about the parlous state of our accounts, the utter fiscal chaos that reigns amongst them, the complete disregard for sensible banking practice. Now, the rates of interest paid to its customers by our bank are exiguous to say the least; you’d make more money if you lent it to a goat. But even so, our cavalier attitude is a source of constant distress to Augustín, and he is always on the lookout for one or other of us to ‘have a talk about it’.

He got hold of Ana a few months ago; she was in the bank and unable to slither away quickly enough.

‘Ana,’ said Augustín, ‘I think that between us we could make a better job of organising your financial situation.’

‘
Claro
, Augustín,’ she said, trying to sidle off.

‘We need to maximise the growth potential of your deposits,’ he continued. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’

Ana did understand what he was saying, but he thought he would illustrate the point with metaphor anyway.

‘Just think of the bank as a chestnut tree, and your accounts are like the chestnuts, or a cherry tree if you like, and cherries. Then think of yourselves as squirrels, or badgers perhaps …’

On and on went the convoluted wildlife talk, sporadically illustrated with graphs and tables that bore no resemblance whatever to badgers and squirrels. Ana could make neither
head nor tail of what he was on about, and was only able to get away by promising to send me in to discuss matters.

Thus betrayed by my own wife, I was unable to go anywhere near the bank for a long time. You’ll think us foolish perhaps, but sexing up the performance of our bank affairs would mean the difference between, say, a taxable interest of ten euros forty-seven cents per annum, and one of seventeen euros fifty-three. And a long session with Augustín droning on about cherries and chestnuts and farmers and their lemon trees, over a matter of seven euros and six cents – well, it hardly seemed worth the candle.

But to cut to the chase: having drawn a blank with the
Modelo 047
at the post office, where they hadn’t a clue about it, and in the town hall, where Mari-Ángeles the lady mayor was out having coffee, I decided to try the bank, in the hope that Augustín might not be waiting for me.

To check that he wasn’t there I peered through the double-doored security airlock (a curious invention that means you can’t get in while another person is trying to come out). It was rather dark in there. There was a figure waiting for the electronic permission to burst out into the rarefied atmosphere of the high street, with its smell of coffee, roasting chicken and patchouli oil. And then, bang! – the door flew open – and there like some sort of fairy godmother stood Augustín. He looked at me censoriously.

‘Goomorrnin Cristóbal,’ he said.

‘Ah, Augustín … er, I was just going into the bank,’ I explained, purposefully.

‘What for, Cristóbal? Can I be of help?’

‘Um, no, I don’t want to molest you during your coffee break.’

‘No, let me see. What is it?’

‘Oh, it’s a fine that I have to pay to Medio Ambiente. It’s not a lot of money but I can’t work out how to go about paying it and nobody seems able to help me. I need, apparently, to get hold of a
Modelo 047
.’

‘
047
?’ said Augustín with a chuckle. ‘That’s easy: you just download it from the Internet, fill it in. All they want is your name and address and the amount of money to be paid and that’s it,
pan comido
.’

‘Simple as that?’

‘Simple as that. Here, give it to me and I’ll do it after my coffee; it’ll only take a minute.’

‘A thousand thanks, Augustín, that’s so kind of you,’ and I was almost on the verge of adding, ‘maybe we could sit down for a bit and see if we can’t make some sense of our bank accounts’, but some blessed angel drew me back from the brink. So I went off into the town to deal with a few other pressing matters.

When I passed the bank again – Órgiva is not such a big town that you can go anywhere without repeatedly passing the bank – there were no customers, so I decided to nip in and check that the transaction had gone through.

‘Ah, Cristóbal,’ said Augustín. ‘I haven’t done it yet; I got busy. We’ll do it right now.’ And he moused about with the computer on his desk. He scrolled down, clicked a bit, and moused some more … a bit more fast-mousing and a couple of clicks. He frowned, reached for the form I had given him, scanned it a bit, frowned some more and returned to mousing.

I leaned on the counter, took my glasses off in case I would have to sign something, then put them on again when it became manifestly apparent that I wouldn’t be signing anything soon.

‘047,’
said Augustín. ‘Hmm. There’s an
046
and an
048
, but I can’t find the
047
. It doesn’t seem to be here.’

He frowned some more and flipped through the five pages of the document.

‘I know what we’ll do,’ he said brightly. ‘We’ll ring them. There’s a number here.’

He dialled a number. The phone rang four or five times, then came a long, speedily jabbered formula, ending in something like ‘How may I help you?’

‘It’s Augustín from the bank in Órgiva …’ At this, he was cut off, and I heard synthesised muzak. Augustín raised his eyebrows and grinned at me conspiratorially. I shifted from one leg to the other. The muzak went on. It was, as far as I could gather, a cod ‘Für Elise’, played on an electronic glockenspiel. After about five minutes, during which Augustín continued mousing and clicking in a small way, the muzak stopped. There was silence.

‘Speak to me,’ said Augustín. ‘
Dígame
.’

But nobody did; there was nobody there.

He frowned again and leafed through the papers, then dialled another number. I could hear the ringing, and then another jabbered formula.

‘It’s Augustín here, from the bank in Órgiva, and I’ve got a customer who wants to pay a …’

‘You’ll be needing an
047
, then,’ said the telephone voice.

‘Yes, but …’

‘Wait, I’m going to give you another number to ring.’

Augustín jotted down the number and, with a sigh, dialled it. He gave me a look of mock despair, and grinned, but wanly, then dialled the next number he had written on my form. After the inevitable jabbered reply he started doodling as more muzak – a jaunty Casio-generated
flamenco number this time – played. I found myself wondering what Kafka would have made of telephone muzak.

‘Good day. It’s Augustín here from Órgiva and I want to pay a fine to the department of the environment …’

‘It’ll be a
Modelo 047
you want…’

‘Yes, but I don’t seem to be able to download it…’

‘That’s because you can’t download the
047
; only the
046
…’

‘What do I do, then?’

There was a silence, during which Augustín fiddled with his biro.

‘I tell you what: I’ll give you another number to ring; this is not really my department, you see …’

I smiled gratefully at Augustín. I could see that his patience was soon going to run out, but I wanted to keep him hanging in there till we got some sort of a result. I shook my head in friendly collusion, tipped my hat back on my head, shifted from one leg to the other, leaned in a different direction on the counter and cleared my throat in an amiable way.

Augustín dialled the new number and avoided looking directly at me while he awaited results. Soon a person came on the line who seemed to know what we were talking about, and to have a sound grasp of administrative procedure. ‘… so I think you ought perhaps to get in touch with Madrid,’ I heard him say.

I can hardly expect you to believe me when I say that Augustín made no less than nine telephone calls in search of information on how to pay my fine, and in the end threw in the towel. ‘I’m so sorry, Cristóbal,’ he said, ‘but it’s beaten me. I cannot see the way through to solve this problem. Forgive me, but you’re on your own.’

I was starting, by this time, to think in an urgent way about some lunch, so I was quite relieved when Augustín finally admitted defeat. I went home for lunch: nettle soup again. And as I sat at my soup I flipped my way through the letter again. It was pretty unfathomable stuff, but all in all I figured that we had been going about it in the wrong way. I reckoned that what I ought to do was to sign the letter, in order to give the impression that I was in agreement with what it said – which broadly speaking I was – and then send the signed letter back to Medio Ambiente. Upon receipt of the aforementioned letter, they might in the fullness of time see fit to send me a copy of the undownloadable (I despise that word)
Modelo 047
. Thereafter I could hand over their, or rather my, ninety euros and rest easy once more.

This I did, and at the moment of writing – two years, and counting, after consigning the letter (registered) to the post, I’m still waiting for a reply.

I
WAS ON A RARE SHOPPING TRIP
to town, buying a couple of concrete pipes that I could no longer do without … and some crème fraîche to accompany a crop of late summer raspberries. I stopped to fill up with diesel.

‘Eenglish!’ A hoarse croak. I looked around. ‘Eenglish!’ once more. There’s only one person who calls me ‘Eenglish’, and that’s José Guerrero, my old sheep-shearing partner. ‘Eenglish’ is the only word of English he knows.

It was, indeed, he. I grinned with pleasure and strolled over to where he stood, leaning against the back of his van. I gave him an affectionate hug, not an easy thing to do because he’s a lot taller than me and I have to reach up on tiptoe, which makes me feel uncomfortably feminine. Perhaps I should stop the hugging and just shake his great bony frying-pan-sized hand, but hell, I love the guy, for all his roguish badness, and we have over the years been through thick and thin together. And I had not seen him in a long time.

‘Hey, Guerrero. So how are you doing?’

He coughed in what I thought was an alarming way.

‘Estoy hecho un hacha
(I’m made like an axe),’ he growled. He is a singularly artistic user of the Spanish language, which is one of the reasons I appreciate his company.

‘Looks like it’s your lucky day, bumping into me in town,’ he announced. ‘Look what I’ve got for you here.’

He led me to the back of the van and opened the door. A stink of sheep burst from the overheated boot. I staggered a little, theatrically, for actually there is nothing I like more than the sweet smell of wool and sheep shit; it weaves an olfactory spell that carries me far away and long ago.

‘BUAUUGGHH … don’t you know how to exercise the most basic elements of hygiene, Guerrero?’

‘You’re getting soft,’ he said. ‘That’s the smell of life itself.’ And he kissed his fingertips ecstatically.

‘So what have you got for me, then?’ I was curious. He lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke into the back of the van, and looked at me expectantly, tapping his foot. I peered into the dark interior, stuffed with shearing machines, boxes of the arcane paraphernalia of sheep-shearing and mephitic piles of shearing clothes. There were a couple of crates of wine in there, too.

‘One of those is for you – twelve bottles of the best Ribera del Duero you’ve ever tasted.’

I looked at my old friend in amazement. I mean, I have done him the odd favour in the past, but if there was a debt at all – and I didn’t recall one – then it would be worth a couple of drinks at the most.

‘No, they’re not from me,’ he explained. ‘They’re a present for you from some friends of mine who run a little hotel up Aranda way on the River Duero. These people are
your greatest fans; they’re just crazy about your books. I gave them the one with the parrot on the cover – you know, the one with me in it – and they just loved it.’

Now, there is nothing Ana and I like more than a good Ribera del Duero, and you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, so before Guerrero could change his mind I humped the crate into my car, which was, rather uncivically, still parked by the pump at the petrol station. Paco, whose petrol station it is, was watching this operation with interest. He walked over and stood beside José.

‘We’re having a party. We’re going to eat some goat, drink a little wine … You want to come along?’

‘When?’ I asked warily.

‘Right now.’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to get home.’

‘Why?’

I paused at this. It was unlikely they’d share my sense of urgency about the crème fraîche. ‘Because … because my wife is expecting me,’ I replied.

‘You’re not your own man, Eenglish,’ said Guerrero.

‘José is right,’ echoed Paco. ‘You’re soft.’

If the truth be told, I didn’t much fancy the goat option; we’d have to kill the poor animal for a start, and drink vast quantities of wine, most of it from the crate I’d just been given, while waiting for the goat to char slowly. And, as for the conversation … well, it would be man-talk – and man-talk wears thin pretty quickly. So, undoubtedly soft, and my own man or not, I stuck to my guns and sailed out of the garage, setting course for the hills and home.

On the way I considered the evening ahead, sitting out in the fading light on the terrace with the Wife, eating fresh raspberries from the garden with a dollop of crème fraîche
and a nice bottle of Ribera to finish it off. It seemed like a wise choice to me.

‘Eh, Eenglish!’ Guerrero again, on the phone this time, a month or so later. ‘We’re going to the north next week, you and me. We’re going to eat the most fantastic food and drink, a whole lot of wine and we’re going to see sheep, beautiful sheep like you’ve never seen sheep before … imagine.’

I could well imagine. This wouldn’t be the first such adventure we had embarked upon. They tended not to turn out well. ‘Ah, maybe you are,’ I countered, ‘but I’m not. I’ve got too much to be doing at home.’

‘You have to come; we’re going to meet some really interesting people like that Jesús and Eugenia in Aranda, you know, the ones who are so mad about your books, and there’ll be
chicas
too, slinky sexy
chicas
like you never dreamed of … and, besides, I need your car. For the wine,’ he explained. ‘We’re going to want to stock up in Aranda and all those crates are not going to fit in my car … are they?’

It was this that got me thinking the trip might not be such a bad idea. Ana and I had already got through those bottles from Aranda, and we loved them. It was a long time since we had drunk anything so good – rich and smooth with just an infinitesimal effervescence – and this from a small-scale producer, and organic to boot. It would be a shame to miss an opportunity to get to know the producers of this nectar.

And so, having squared things with the Wife, I signed up for the expedition, and threw in the car too … and a load of my books in Spanish that, for some unaccountable reason, Guerrero had thought might be useful along the way. ‘You
never can tell when you might need one,’ he said, a little mysteriously.

The hounds, who habitually bay at my heels for things that ought to have been done and yet are left undone, I fobbed off with a pack of lies, and, on an unusually cold morning in November, shivering in the pre-dawn mists, we set off.

José insisted on driving. ‘You drive like an old woman,’ he said. ‘If you drive, we’re never going to get there.’

Perhaps I should have protested this slight to the automotive side of my manliness; after all, I consider myself quite sharp and speedy behind the wheel, but in fact I was rather pleased with the idea of being able to laze a bit and enjoy the scenery. And what scenery it was: a little nausea-inducing at first, as Guerrero hurled us round the tight curves of the narrow road between Órgiva and Lanjarón. I held gingerly on to my guts and marvelled at the spectacular view of the sea far below and, unless I was much mistaken, the faintest glimpse of the first snow on the Rif in Morocco. Directly below us were hillsides of olive and almond, dropping all the way down to the Guadalfeo, the river that drains the Western Alpujarra. Then, in no time at all, we were out of the mountains, rocketing across the white bridge over the Tablate gorge, and racing down the sliproad onto the motorway.

I settled back to enjoy the long haul up the hill through the Valle de Lecrín, lush and bright at this time of year with ripening oranges and lemons. Guerrero lit what must have been his fifth cigarette of the journey, filling with smoke the only small pocket of clear air that remained in the car. I opened the window. Out went the smoke; in came a bone-chilling icy gale.

‘SHUT THE WINDOW, MAN! We’ll freeze to death.’

‘Not bloody likely; I need some air to breathe.’

I don’t object to cigarette smoke, particularly if it comes from roll-ups or good black tobacco, but José smoked Marlboro and it filled the car with the filthiest, most acrid miasma. I couldn’t take it. I opened all the other windows, too. Guerrero glared at me and growled something I didn’t catch, hugging his jacket around his bony frame.

On top of the dashboard, cunningly draped with an old red shirt, he had set up his speed trap warning device, which was plugged into the cigarette lighter. ‘This little machine is going to save us a whole lot of money in traffic fines,’ he announced. ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere without it.’

Almost as he spoke, and we had barely been on the motorway for five minutes, the thing started to screech like a demented cricket, gaining in intensity and frequency as we approached the danger. He eased off the gas and we passed by the radar trap at a more equable sort of a speed than the 150 at which we had been travelling.

‘Now, your job is to keep an eye out for the
cabrones
of
Tráfico
, and if they get anywhere near us you disconnect the box and poke it all down in the footwell. If they catch us with this, we’re stuffed; it’s four hundred euros straight down the line and they’ll break your balls for it. They don’t like ’em.’ But the danger passed; the cricket went back to sleep; the fifth cigarette was finished; I closed the windows; Guerrero hit the gas again; and the poor old car resumed its headlong flight towards Granada.

Any notions I might have entertained about a relaxed sightseeing trip enlivened by bouts of pleasant conversation, shot out of the window along with the smoke. My heart hit my boots as Guerrero got his phone out, peered down at it and, with his elbow propping the steering wheel in position, proceeded to jab out a text message.

The received wisdom is that stress is bad for you. I am not altogether convinced, and believe that a certain level of stress may be beneficial, in that it puts backbone into the flaccid man. But the level of stress that was building in the car was like nothing I have ever experienced; it was moving off the edge of the scale. Imagine if you will:

José is driving the car – a car conceived to operate smoothly at around 120 kilometres per hour – at somewhere between 150 and 160. At 140, the poor old thing seems to go through a barrier of violent juddering that frightens the life out of you. By 147, you’ve come through on the other side, but the gears are whining, the engine screaming, there’s air roaring through the gaps in the closed windows and there is an almost tangible sense of instability. A constant rain of insects immolate themselves, splattering against the windscreen, and the car rocks and rolls like a stagecoach. And you know only too well that to get back to the normal range of speeds you have to pass again through that terrifying band of violent vibration.

On top of all this, José had decided that we needed some exciting music to buck us up and speed us on our way. He looked disdainfully through my selection of cassettes; nothing in it was nasty and noisy enough, though. Well, you get like that with the passing of the years. ‘This is what we’ll have,’ he announced, triumphantly fishing a tape from his pocket. ‘Jorge Troghouwahb.’

‘And who the in the name of hell is Jorge Troghouwad?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Jorge Troghouwad is a genius. Hell, I can’t speak your language, read the cover!’

I looked at the cover. ‘George Thorogood and the Destroyers – Bad to the Bone,’ it said.

He slipped the cassette into the deck and turned the volume up, lit another cigarette – whereupon I reopened all the windows – and embarked upon an outrageous account of an amorous evening he had spent in the summer, with a bespectacled librarian from Santa Fe. The phone and the cigarettes occupied only one of his hands, but in order to get across the full salaciousness of his tale, he took, to my extreme alarm, both hands off the wheel. It was a good story but I was glad when it was over.

Coming down over the next pass, the cricket began to get agitated again. José braked hard; the car slewed a little and then shook like a dog in a river as the speed dropped through the critical band. A blessed moment of less terrifying speed. I was growing to look forward to the respite given me by the screeching of the cricket.

The phone rang. José checked the screen, and raised it to his ear. ‘
Dime primo
.
¿Qué te pasa?
’ (Tell me, cousin, what’s happening? – where ‘cousin’ is a gipsy form of greeting, very friendly.) He listened carefully, or as carefully as the deafening music and the screaming of the engine and the howling of the wind allowed. He frowned and sucked hard on his cigarette.

I sat back, watching the golden sandstone cliffs of the Sierra de Jaén loom before us and then enfold us in a deep defile, and reflected on how far my friend had come since many years ago we had sheared and travelled together all around Andalucía, working like dogs and living the low life, for a pitiful handful of grubby notes.

When I hung up my shears and dedicated myself to other activities, José stayed in shearing, but learned how to delegate, employing others to do the work while he discovered a surprising flair for organisation. His operation got bigger
and bigger, and now he travels every summer to Uruguay to handpick his forty or so expert shearers. He buys their air tickets, deals with their visas and work permits, arranges their insurance, accommodation, everything. Having been a shearer himself; he knows the score, so he treats his men fairly and firmly. He’s about the fourth biggest shearing contractor in the country, which does not make him very rich, but means that his boys, as he calls them, shear a hell of a lot of sheep. It’s a status that he has to defend fiercely; the world of big contracting is a pretty cut-throat business.