Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain Read Free

Still, with that tiny adjustment of the truth, I was able to arouse Ana’s enthusiasm to the point that she promised to keep an open mind when she arrived on the next available charter.
    I meanwhile stayed on, viewing my new property from every aspect. I scrambled up to the top of the twin-peaked hill across the river and looked across the dry scrub and pines to where El Valero appeared a little oasis with its dark fruit trees and bright streams of water. I could see Romero sitting in the riverbed on his horse, surrounded by his ill-favoured beasts, and his wife and daughter, backs bent to the planting of a terrace of garlic.
    I climbed up the steep ridge behind the farm, way up till I could no longer hear the river and was lost amid the rosemary and thyme, with just the sound of the wind in the broom and the cries of unfamiliar birds. From there I looked over the whole valley, which widened at one end to gently sloping green fields and orchards before disappearing altogether into the deep cleft in the mountain where the river came rushing through, and at the other narrowing to the rocky gorge at El Granadino, the little settlement at the southern end of the valley. The farm looked infinitesimally small at the foot of the great hill, with a hillock at its tip, like the horn on the nose of a rhinoceros.
    In the softening light of the afternoon I drove high up onto the Contraviesa, the great counterscarp to the southwest, and found a spot where I could see the whole valley, green and lovely and apparently inaccessible, lost amongst the dry hills of scrub and thorn.
    My head was whirling with excitement; wild ideas and dreams pouring in. It was an amazing prospect. Every way I walked, and from each approach, I wondered at the beauty of the two rivers pouring into the wide valley, and the tall narrow gorge at its mouth. Then something began to dawn on me. This was a natural spot for a reservoir. A dam just fifty metres wide at the mouth of the gorge would fill the whole valley in weeks – two rivers, narrow gorge, just a few illiterate peasants to re-locate; the coastal towns just twenty kilometres south were dry as bricks, people drinking salty water from drying wells. It all fitted together. That was why everyone wanted to sell their farms. They’d be under water in a few years.
    As this ghastly notion took hold, dark shadows started to shroud my new world. How the hell was I going to explain this to Ana? Even now, perhaps, she was scudding through the clouds towards the south of Spain. I ran dementedly down to the river to find Romero and his beasts.
    ‘Are they going to build a dam here and flood the valley?’
    My future – to say nothing of my marriage – depended upon his reply. He looked at me in some surprise, a cunning grin playing across his unlovely features.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ I squeaked, ‘that you’ve just sold me a place that will be twenty metres under the surface of a reservoir in a couple of years’ time?!’
    ‘
Claro
– naturally.’
    ‘How could you . .?’
    ‘Oh, you’ll be alright, they’ll pay you a whole heap of compensation for the place.’
    ‘But I haven’t bought it for the damn compensation, I want to live here . . . ’
    ‘That could well be difficult, under the water and that. But I must be off. I have to follow the beasts.’
    And so saying, he whopped his horse with a stick and disappeared up the river.

PARADISE SUBMERGED
    GEORGINA WAS LEANING ON A FRUIT MACHINE, READING A book about alchemy, when I burst into the Bar Retumba at the far end of town.
    ‘Georgina, what the hell is all this about a dam?’ I erupted.
    ‘A dam? What dam?’ She seemed genuinely puzzled.
    ‘Pedro Romero has just told me that they’re going to build a dam and flood the valley.’
    ‘Oh, that.’
    ‘What do you mean by “Oh, that!”?’
    My look of anguish must have moved her, for she softened her tone a little. ‘Well, yes, there was a plan about twenty-five