Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart Page A

cement and river stones. You don’t want to spend any money building in the river. Whatever you build is bound to get washed away.’
    ‘Right then, some eucalyptus beams . . . ’
    ‘That’s simple enough,’ said Domingo. ‘Now is the waning of the August moon – just the time for cutting eucalyptus beams. Cut them at any other time, apart perhaps from the waning of the January moon, and they’ll rot. Juan Salquero owns that eucalyptus grove down the river there. I’ll square it with him and we’ll cut them tomorrow. To do the job really well we’ll want five fifteen-metre beams.’
    Next morning I arrived to find Domingo forty feet up a tree with his chainsaw – no gloves, no ropes, just his usual outfit of ragged sneakers, thin trousers and shirt. He had wedged himself in a fork and was leaning out with his foot hooked round a branch. The huge chainsaw, an ancient and terrible machine, unencumbered by any modern safety devices, was gnawing ferociously away at a thick trunk of poplar that was in the way of the operation.
    Domingo really was a phenomenon. When he was around, things that appeared impossible got done as if by magic. In no time at all we, or rather he, had cut down five huge straighttrunked eucalyptus, trimmed them up and taken the bark off them, then covered them with brush so the sun didn’t bake them too quickly. There they would lie until winter when we would find some way of hauling them out of the wood to wherever we decided to put the bridge.
    I hadn’t fancied using the chainsaw myself so I did the trimming with a hand-axe, and the peeling of the bark. We worked away through the morning until Domingo called a halt. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Let’s go and drink a glass of wine on the terrace. It’s too hot out here now.’
    So we went up to Domingo’s place where Old Man Domingo was sitting on a box not too far from a jug of wine, making baskets out of esparto grass.
    ‘For my niece,’ he explained. ‘She has a restaurant in Granada. Wins cookery prizes. She likes to have lots of esparto baskets all over the place, goodness knows why! Her customers are all doctors and professors and what have you. She’s just round the corner from the university. She says they feel at home with all these things from the country. Me, what do I know?’
    The middle of the day was, like every other middle of the day, scorching hot, but up on the Meleros’ terrace we were fanned by a gentle breeze and the roof was shaded by a giant eucalyptus. The air shimmered in the valley below us. I could see Pedro and his train of beasts heading up the path from the river for their siesta. From the olive groves on the western slope came the clink of a plough and the sound of Bernardo cursing his mule. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Expira. ‘We’re poor as can be and life is nothing but drudgery and pain, but I love this view.’ She smiled as she swatted at a cloud of flies with a dishcloth.
    ‘Yes, beautiful,’ I agreed. ‘I can hardly believe that we’re really going to come and live here.’
    ‘Do you have any children?’ she asked.
    ‘No, but we’re thinking about it.’
    ‘Thinking about it won’t do any good. You must have children, you’ll be so lonely otherwise all the way over there on your own. The valley needs more children. I need more children. My grandchildren are in Barcelona and I only see them once a year, and this one’ – she indicated her son – ‘this one doesn’t seem to want to get married. You couldn’t perhaps find some girl from “over there” for Domingo to marry, could you?’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I laughed.
    I had fulfilled a part of my brief. The new bridge was under way, even to the extent of something practical being done about it – the cutting of the beams. Next, Domingo and I headed off into the Alpujarras in search of a machine-man to build the road.
    In the car Domingo explained all there was to be known about machines. There were pits into