Last Days of the Bus Club (26 page)

El Valero, as I’ve made clear, is blessed with some of the finest oranges you can eat – the Washingtonias – as well as an inferior type, the sweet orange
dulces
, which are best left for squeezing. In addition, we have a few bitter orange trees dotted about. These were either there when we arrived or, in some cases, are sweet orange trees that have reverted. Bitter oranges, or Seville oranges as they’re known in Britain, are the wild form of the orange, and their rootstocks are used to take grafts of the less hardy, more delicate, eating oranges.

The thorns on a bitter orange tree are fierce, and the flesh and juice of the fruit is more sour than the sourest lemon. This, along with their hardiness, is why it is the
bitter oranges that are the tree of choice for urban planting. Bitter orange trees gladden the streets and squares of Spanish cities with their beauty and their scent, and of course, because they are more or less inedible, urban man feels no need to nick the fruit.

I say they are more or less inedible, but they are wonderful for cooking. The juice is sharper and bitterer than a lemon, and the zest, as well as tasting of orange, has that delicious quality of making your mouth tingle and water at the same time. This accounts for why they are the perfect fruit for making marmalade. And bitter orange marmalade, it occurs to me, is of fundamental importance to human existence; I breakfast upon it almost every day of my life.

Bitter orange juice also makes a fine substitute for lime or lemon when it comes to
ceviche
, which happens to be my favourite way to eat fish. There’s also an exquisite Middle Eastern dish of minced lamb cooked in bitter orange juice, and then there’s bitter orange ice cream; and, finally, a lemon drizzle cake made with oranges.

There are those (my own mother is one) who would have it that a drizzle cake is not a proper cake at all, because it doesn’t rise like a sponge. But, for my part, I don’t give a stuff for sponge and I defy anyone to come up with a better use for bitter oranges. My ‘bitter orange drizzle cake’ lurks like a toad in the bottom of the tin, thick and dense and heavy and wet with bitter juices – you really cannot imagine how delicious it is. Here’s the recipe:

T
HE THING ABOUT BEING AN EXPATRIATE
is that you come to believe that you alone have true insight into your adopted land, its customs and idiosyncrasies. You are convinced that your command of the language is better than that of other expats, and you tend to wince and look away whenever you encounter one of them making a bad fist of speaking it. You also fondly imagine that your friends amongst the natives are more interesting, more authentic and just plain better than everybody else’s. Now, of course, this is moronic nonsense that arises from an expat’s insecurities – but it’s the way it is. And the flipside is an almost craven gratitude for the slightest mark of approbation from your Spanish neighbours.

A few years ago I was lamenting to Carlos the municipal policeman that, if I lived here for the rest of my life, I would never be like a native: I look like a
guiri
, I lamented; I talk like a
guiri
; I even behave like a
guiri
. (
Guiri
is a slightly
pejorative term for a foreigner.) ‘No, no, no Cristóbal. Look at me,’ he said, presenting me with a fine view of his dark aquiline features. ‘Why, I’m a
forastero
, too’ (
forastero
means somebody from outside and in his case his forebears were from Morocco). ‘We’re all
guiris
here: we’ve come from all over and, besides, you’re one of us now; you have sowed your seed here.’

Carlos was referring, with a nice touch of bombast that is typical of the Spaniard, to the birth of my daughter, Chloé. From an expatriate’s point of view this made me feel pretty good. Imagine, then, my delight when Mari-Ángeles, mayoress of Órgiva, asked if I would deliver the
pregón
– the opening address – for the town’s annual
feria
. The
feria
is the high point of the year in the town’s festive calendar. For four or five days, everyone gives themselves up entirely to the urban pleasures of drinking, queuing for the giant communal paella and dancing
pasodobles
.

It occurred to me that Mari-Ángeles was perhaps scraping the barrel a little with her choice of
pregonero
. Perhaps there was nobody else who would do it, despite the rewards of a free bar tab – which is a pretty good emolument as it doesn’t take you and your friends long to notch up a fairly spectacular bill. And obviously, nobody wanted a repetition of the previous year when the town’s official chronicler delivered a
pregón
that went on for no less than two and a half hours without pause. The Spanish – and this is one of my pieces of privileged expatriate insight – are much given to pomposity and prolixity. But even in Spain two and a half hours is two and a half hours and, at the opening of a
feria
, it’s two and a quarter hours hours too long.

So there it was. I had been chosen to deliver the
pregón
and, after feeling rather puffed up and pleased, I fell into
considerable anguish. Normally, as you may have gathered, I go for spontaneity in public speaking, relying on the arrival of the muse in the nick of time to get me out of whatever hole I have dug for myself. Sometimes she’ll be there, whispering sweet inspiration; sometimes she’ll leave you in the lurch. Muses are like that. But it works more often than otherwise.

This time there was a bit more hanging on the event. So I took the sensible precaution of asking Augustín at the bank what a
pregón
should consist of. He considered for a minute, before declaring: ‘The most important thing is that it should be brief and lighthearted, a joke or two, to get them on your side. Then you have to thank everybody for anything you can think of, all the most excellent dignitaries who will be crammed up on the stage behind you, and flatter them a bit, and then finally hit the audience with a theme.

‘A good
pregón
ought to be a bit like foreplay,’ he added. ‘Something to get everyone in the mood and build up a bit of anticipation before the main event.’

I noted all this down assiduously.

The day eventually arrived and found me surprisingly relaxed. This was because I felt I’d nailed the theme part. I had hit on
convivencia
– the coming together and living in relative harmony of the different cultures that create the rich and noble mix of modern Órgiva society. And I had actually written and memorised a speech, with which Chloé, who is good on accurate Spanish idiom and takes it upon herself to edit out anything that she considers embarrassing, had lent an editorial hand via email and phone.

Chloé herself would be arriving on the day from Granada with a posse of friends, although she wasn’t sure if she’d be there for the start of my speech, as she had an earlier assignment, oddly enough, as a pallbearer. It was part of a protest against the cuts in education, which involved her and her friends whitening their faces and processing through the city streets with a cardboard coffin in which lay the mangled cadaver of Spanish public education.

The Órgiva
feria
takes place at the end of September, so, against the unlikely event of rain, they erect a huge marquee in the Plaza de la Alpujarra, with a stage up one end, a bar down the other and, in the middle, a great rabble of plastic chairs and tables around a dance floor. I was due on at seven, when the
feria
officially started, although in truth the festivities had already been swinging for some time, with the parading around town of the three beauty queens – adolescent, senior and infantile – accompanied by the oddly named ‘Mister Órgiva’.

At seven in the evening darkness was beginning to fall, so the lights were all on and the generators thundering away, and the gilded youth of Órgiva were galloping around the town in gangs, and the old folks were already getting tanked up in the bars, each of which had shelled out for a monster-decibel speaker-stack which blared out a selection of music seemingly selected by stone-deaf sociopaths. The noise level was like a fairground. Of course, it
was
a fairground.

I was hovering about for my
pregón
duties well before time and at about eight fifteen was ushered on stage. Apart from football, everything always kicks off late in Spain – and with a
pregón
that’s perhaps no bad thing, as by now the townsfolk were well oiled and I too had made modest
inroads on my free bar tab – a little whisky for the voice, followed by a couple of red wine chasers.

The ceremonials went like this. First the town dignitaries filed up onto the stage: Mari-Ángeles the mayoress, followed by the various councillors – culture in a slinky black dress; urbanisation, finances and environment each smartly besuited; sports in a clean tracksuit. These people would hover behind me, yawning, rocking back and forth, and grinning at their friends while I delivered my peroration. You would have thought that they could have had something to sit on, but no, they had to stand, which was doubtless why they were keen to avoid a repetition of the historian’s
pregón
. I lurked on the edge of the stage, grinning inanely while Mari-Ángeles warmed up the crowd and introduced me.

Was I nervous? A bit, I suppose. ‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ said Winston Churchill. I’ve given talks all over the place but home territory is a tough act, with the Spaniards not entirely convinced that you are speaking Spanish, and all the other expats turning out in the hope of seeing your downfall. And in Órgiva there are heaps of expats, most of them vocal critics and masters of scepticism, who are convinced (with a certain amount of justification, in this case) that, whatever it was you did, they could have done it much better themselves.

There was a half-hearted ripple of applause from the floor as Mari-Ángeles came to the end of her introduction and offered herself for the customary mayoral kiss. I kissed her warmly – and perhaps a little too moistly – on both cheeks. I moved to the microphone and tested it with a euphonious bit of throat clearing. I normally like to go for the deep abdominal voice production and do without
the microphone – I have a loud voice – but here, with the cacophony of
feria
clattering all around me, it had to be the microphone. I stood as tall as I could, tucked my belly in and, beaming ingratiatingly at the public, began.

‘
Hola
,
Hueveros!
” I shouted. ‘Hallo, Egg-People.’

I should explain. The Spaniards enjoy an inordinate fondness for the place where they were born, not so much to the country itself so much as their province, and above all else their town or, indeed, village. Thus, around our neck of the woods, you see car stickers that say ‘
Yo
♥
Granada que es mi
tierra
’ – ‘I love Granada, which is my land’. It’s hard to imagine people having stickers with ‘I love Basingstoke, which is my land’. We the English don’t have that same attachment, which may be why we have always been such travellers and explorers. The Spanish, convinced of the superiority of their land over all others, have tended to stay at home, except, of course, for the people of Trujillo and Cáceres in Extremadura, who would take off from time to time to distant continents in search of gold and silver to replenish the coffers of family, Church and State.

All Spaniards return home to their village for the annual
feria
, no matter if they live at the far end of the country; they’re like eels to the Sargasso in this. And as a consequence they have names for the inhabitants of every city, town and village in the country. Where we have Londoners, Mancunians and Yorkshiremen, they show more imagination, often giving a nod to distant history: thus the people of Cádiz are
Gaditanos
and those from Huelva are
Onubenses
, Gades and Onubes being the names of their respective towns under Roman rule. Elsewhere the derivations can be more obscure, as in the people of Órgiva being known as
Hueveros
, Egg People.

Apparently, back in the mists of time, a king of Spain took it into his head to pay a visit, somewhat unaccountably, to Órgiva. The townsfolk were so poor that they had no bunting to hang in the streets so some bright spark suggested that they hang garlands of broken eggshells to lend a festive air. This they did and it pleased the king so much that the people of Órgiva were known as
Hueveros
ever after. An alternative and pleasingly conflicting explanation is that some time in the 1920s the unpopular Alfonso XIII passed through the village and the people threw eggs at him.

And so, following my greeting, I started my
pregón
with this story. Most of the townsfolk, I was told later, had never heard it … and in fact I can’t remember where I got it from, so it might not have cut the mustard with my predecessor, the
chronista
. Still, it was short and sweet and seemed to go down quite well – or as well as any story can go down above the loudspeakers and alcohol-fuelled hollering that passes for conversation at
ferias
. But, as often happens after a good anecdote, I found myself losing the thread. I couldn’t quite remember how I was supposed to get from here to the main part of the speech. Luckily I had my notes, so I shook open my glasses, hooked one end over an ear (a sad pass to come to) and peered down at the scruffy and much-folded page before me. There was one word underlined helpfully at the top. ‘Foreplay,’ it said.

Foreplay … What the hell was that about? I couldn’t for the life of me fathom it out. I stared at the word for a bit, conscious of the yawning of the dignitaries from behind … and then the penny dropped.

Perhaps it was the whisky which had by now hit its mark, or perhaps it was just the relief of remembering why I had written it but I found myself announcing to the good
citizens of Órgiva that a
pregón
ought to be like a sort of foreplay before the
feria
, something to get the anticipation going. From a shuffling amongst the audience, a pricking up of ears, a graunching of plastic chairs on concrete, I inferred that there was some interest in what I was saying.

‘The sexual metaphor,’ I rabbited on, ‘is appropriate, because when you get to a certain age, you may find that the imagining and the anticipation of sex is actually better than the act itself, for to be truthful there are not so many occasions on which it is ever going to be as perfect, as agreeable to both parties, as uncomplicated or as pleasingly hygienic, as one had planned. And there lies the problem of the
pregón
. If I do my job properly and whip you all into a frenzy of anticipation, then we run the risk that the
feria
itself will be a terrible disappointment.’

There was at this point the nearest thing to a stunned silence that you can get in a municipal tent, as my audience struggled to understand why I was doing down the
feria
… or, worse, confiding to all and sundry that I was a bit of a letdown in the connubial department. I caught an anxious look from Ana and Chloé, who had made it from the funeral of education. But I was in too deep by this point to do anything other than wade on.