Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart

very long ago have been a real beauty. She had lovely gay eyes and the smile of someone whose beauty runs right through, like seaside rock.
    Domingo himself was sitting on the ground, filing the chain of a monster chainsaw. He greeted me with a friendly grin.
    We sat on low chairs around a cable drum. These cable drums are ubiquitous here; they make very good tables. The Sevillana, the electricity-generating company of Andalucía, has a generating station and a storehouse in the valley. So all the surrounding farms are liberally bestowed with the detritus of power generation. Over the years Pedro Romero had built an impressive collection of hawsers, girders, tensioning devices, ceramic insulators, steel rods and cables. ‘You can always find some use for such things and if you don’t nick it when you can, it won’t be there when you need it for something,’ he had explained.
    Expira carefully placed a sack over their drum, its lively colours showing its provenance as a sugar refinery on the coast, and served us with wine, bread, olives and ham. It was that hour of day . . . although exactly which hour of the day that is, I cannot quite say, as it always seems to be that time. We sat in a cloud of flies – there has to be some flaw in every paradise and flies had clearly been allocated to mine – and talked about the river and the valley and farming.
    ‘So you’re going to live at El Valero, are you?’ asked Old Man Domingo.
    ‘Yes, we’re moving down in the winter.’
    ‘El Valero is a good farm,’ he mused. ‘Plenty of sun and air and rich in water . . . ’
    ‘So they say.’
    ‘The pity is that it’s on the wrong side of the river. That river can swell with winter storms and you could be completely cut off for weeks or more. There was a woman died over there not too long ago. Her appendix swelled up: she was in great pain. They tried to get her across the river with the mules, but the current was too strong, knocked the mules over, so she died. Horrible.’
    ‘Yes, and then there was Rafaela,’ added Expira. ‘You know Rafaela Fernández, the deaf one’s daughter – she died in childbirth at El Valero. The river got up and took the bridge away. You’ll have to do something about it. It’s too dangerous living there with no bridge.’
    From here all we could see was a thin red trickle curling between the boulders in the riverbed.
    ‘It’s been a dry summer,’ continued Old Man Domingo. ‘Catastrophic. Hasn’t rained a drop since March. It just doesn’t rain like it used to do. Even in summer it used to rain, though it just did a lot of damage then, no good at all. I remember one summer a few years ago, along came a cloudburst . . . it was a bright, clear day and nothing but a dribble of water in the river, like now, and then suddenly there was a great rush of water and the river was full of dead pigs and goats and mules. The water actually went over the top of the Seven-Eye bridge down below the town. Yes, it certainly knew how to rain in those days.’
    ‘If it doesn’t rain any more then I needn’t bother to do anything about the bridge,’ I suggested hopefully.
    ‘But you never know what’s going to happen in the future. There could be a thunderstorm tomorrow. You can never trust the river. You should build a bridge and a road in and a road out up the back way in case the river takes the bridge.’ This was from Domingo, who had put aside his chainsaw and was drawing up a seat by the cable drum.
    ‘Up the back? You mean put a road right up that mountain?!’
    ‘It’s not that far. Three or four bends will take you up to the mining road at the top. A good digging machine would do it in a couple of days.’
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll have to put in a road and a bridge. But a bridge is going to be an expensive and difficult business . . . ’ ‘No, no, no, cost you pennies,’ he declared. ‘Just a few eucalyptus beams thrown across and a couple of piers made with some