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Canigou

The places we desire are only times…

Mourid Barghouti

 

1955, midsummer. In the small town of Arles-sur-Tech at the foot of the French Pyrenees, Francesc Pujades looks south towards the Canigou massif. His life has been lived in the shadow of these hills, and he has walked them into his bones. He has lost count of the number of times he has climbed the Canigou itself.

On the other side of the massif lies Catalonia. Like many in the Roussillon borderlands, Francesc can trace a family line across the mountains, back to a time before they became a political as well as a topographical frontier. He knows the history. He knows that the Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed in 1659, saw the Spanish crown cede control of Northern Catalonia to France, in exchange for which Louis XIV renounced his claim to the southern lands, the County of Barcelona. He knows too that a little over three centuries later, the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer wrote his epic foundational poem of Catalonia, Canigó, in which the medieval war between Christians and Saracens for control of the Iberian Peninsula is the backdrop to a tragic tale of forbidden love drawn from folk mythology.

Gentil, the son of a nobleman, falls in love with a shepherd girl, Griselda, during the celebrations to mark the Feast of St. John. His father disapproves, and Gentil, who that very day has been made a knight, is dispatched to defend a strategic castle on the northern side of the Pyrenees. There, one night, as he gazes up at the snow-capped peak of the Canigou, his squire tells him that what appears to be snow are in fact the ermine cloaks of the mountain faeries draped over the mountain. Legend has it, the squire says, that any mortal who acquires such a cloak may have whatever he most desires. Dreaming of Griselda loved and lost, Gentil abandons his guard post and heads for the summit.

Francesc Pujades gazes up at the Canigou and begins to dream. Tomorrow, he thinks, is the 24th, the Feast of St. John. He knows the centuries-old tradition whereby vigil fires are lit to mark this day in June. A cleansing of spirits, a celebration of light as we turn once more toward winter. He has often helped with the building of these St. John’s fires in Arles-sur-Tech, but this year, he decides, he will go his own way. He gathers a bundle of firewood and sets off towards the mountain. By early evening he is at the summit, and as night begins to fall he lights a bonfire whose flicker can be seen across the Roussillon plain. The following year he does the same, and this time the towns and villages below wait for the mountaintop signal before lighting their own St. John’s fires.

An idea had been kindled in the wider imagination. In the years that followed, the flame lit at the summit, la Flama del Canigó, became a mother flame used to light countless other torches that were then relayed to towns across Catalonia. At first this chain of belonging was limited to the Catalan lands on the French side of the mountain, but in 1966 it stretched across the border into Franco’s Spain and was used to light a St. John’s fire in the town of Vic, just 70 kilometres north of the Catalan capital, Barcelona. Nine years later the dictator was dead. A tradition had been born.

The choreography of the event today is a work of communal imagination. On the Sunday before the Feast of St. John, small bundles of firewood are carried to the summit of the Canigou by volunteers from towns across Catalonia. Each is tied with a ribbon, striped yellow and red as the Catalan flag and bearing the name of its place of origin: Vinaròs, Lleida, Perpignan, the length and breadth of the land. Like wishing trees, some of the bundles have stuffed within them little notes, the handwritten desires of those who have laid them on the mountain. There they remain in readiness for the fire to come.

On the day before St. John’s Eve, a short ceremony takes place in Perpignan. Once a fortified gate to the medieval city, El Castillet is now home to the Catalan Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions, and there, in a small alcove, the mother flame has burned continuously since 1965. Three bearers stand at the ready, each holding a storm lantern. A wick is passed from source to lamp, the flame leaps, the bearers depart. That evening they reach the summit in the company of many, guided by head torch and song. At midnight an unlit torch is brought towards a lantern that has been carried from Perpignan. The flame catches, the torch is raised, and a short manifesto of belonging is read aloud. The incantation ends, the torch is lowered and the bundles ignite, warming the faithful and casting countless desires into the cold night air. La Flama has been renewed. Now, other lanterns are brought close to the fire, and once lit are carried back down the mountain. By dawn they will be on their way — relayed on foot, by bike, by car to hundreds of towns across the land. A thousand fires will burn that evening, each traceable to a single source.

I have failed twice to climb the Canigou. One time the car died halfway through the four-hour drive from my home just south of Barcelona. The second time I got as far as the Cortalets hut at 2100 metres before turning back. Seven hundred metres for another day. The memories of that time have yet to settle. Not because I failed to climb a mountain, but because of those I met along the way.

Personally I have little time for epic poetry in praise of homeland and identity, but I am drawn to another kind of story that is easy to find along the eastern tail of the Pyrenees. Stories of separation and loss, of borders crossed in the hope of holding on to something of a life. Stories that show us what we have to lose. So take the train from Barcelona and alight at the border, at Portbou. From there the Canigou is a six-day hike and the approach is arduous, but it brings its own rewards.

The hills which separate Portbou from France are passable in places. Most of the paths, however, are barely discernible, and the maquis scrubland offers only the barest shelter from relentless summer sun and bitter winter wind. You would not choose to walk here, but people don’t always have a choice. During the winter of 1938-39, thousands took to these hills and sought refuge across the border as Franco’s rebel troops pushed deep into Catalonia. One war ended, another began. Eighteen months later, in September 1940, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, followed a path in the opposite direction as he fled Nazi-occupied France. When he reached Portbou he was told that his Spanish transit visa was no longer valid, and hence, the following morning, he would be handed over to the French authorities. Later that evening, in room 3 of the Hostal Francia, he swallowed a large dose of morphine.

The dead can bring new life to a place. These days it is Benjamin who draws strangers to Portbou. They come to see the memorial sculpture, or to read his name engraved in stone on the wall of what was once the Hostal Francia. A few come to walk the hills along a waymarked trail that is named in his honour. Follow his footsteps into Spain, or do as I did and trace them back to France.

Half an hour after setting off from Portbou I reached a fork in the road. The waymark was clear — I should take the rising path to the right. The way, however, was barred by a gate, and strapped to its ribs was a sign, hand-painted in Catalan:

Walter Benjamin did not come this way. This is no memorial, because there was no path here before 1965. Private property. Keep out.

I clambered over the gate and began to climb towards the ridge along a path that became progressively thinner and steeper. After a while I no longer saw any waymarks, and I began to wonder if I had veered off. But from what? Genuineness, as Benjamin once wrote, is beyond reproducibility. Did it matter whether his footprint was pressed deep into the ground beneath my feet? I felt him at my shoulder, contemplating what had been created in his name. Consider the path, I heard him say, not as a forgery but as a translation, one that is faithful to the spirit of a lost original.

Eventually I emerged onto the ridge and stopped to rest in the shade of a solitary holm oak. I had met no-one since leaving Portbou, and no-one was waiting for me at the border. I ate a handful of walnuts and drew long on my water bottle. Then I stepped across an invisible line and began my descent into France. In Banyuls-sur-Mer, I found a cheap hotel just off the seafront. The receptionist waved away my passport.

Early the next morning I set off inland from Banyuls along the GR-10, the long-distance trail that runs the length of the Pyrenees along the French side. Up, up, up went the path, from time to time cutting across the zig-zag road that winds its way out of Banyuls. I tried to pace myself, stopping for a few minutes as I reached the marker post at each pass between ever higher lines of hills: the Col de Llagostera, the Col de Gascons. By the time I reached the grassy flat top of the Puig de Sallfort, I was a thousand metres above sea level. In the midday sun and seen from high above, the waters of the Mediterranean were iridescent, a shifting collage of greys and greens and blues. Cornish is the only language I know which can capture this in a single word: glas. Imagine the early settlers of a place we now call Cornwall. What lies in the foreground of their imagination, along whose roads do they come and go? The sea. So first a word for the colour of the indivisible sea. Grey, green, blue. Glas.

Facing west once more, I saw far in the distance the telecommunications antenna atop the rounded summit of the Puig Neulós, the final peak I had to traverse before reaching a bed for the night in the Chalet de l’Albère. Four more hours the signpost said.

Before supper that night in the Chalet I went out on to the wooden terrace and looked towards the setting sun. There it was, the silhouette of a mountain, four days walk away. I thought of Gentil, gazing at the summit and dreaming of Griselda, dreaming of finding what most he desires.

Famished and exhausted, I went back inside and made for a small corner table where I could eat alone. I was about to sit down when I heard his voice for the first time.

‘Assieds-toi avec nous’

It was more insistence than invitation, but said with a gentleness that made me want to accept. His name was Jean-Jacques, and he had set off that morning from Banyuls in the company of his brother, Pierre. Over supper, I shared with them my stories of Portbou and the Canigou, and I learned that they were planning to walk the GR-10 as far as Mérens-les-Vals, a week beyond my own destination.

‘Nous monterons peut-être au Canigou ensemble !’, said Jean-Jacques.

Or maybe I’ll need to be alone, I thought.

The following morning we left the Chalet together, but I was soon lagging behind and eventually lost sight of them as the path descended through woodland. It was there I came across one of the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, a tree that existed only for an instant, in a moment of perfect light. The skin of the cork oak had been stripped from its lower limbs, revealing flesh of burnt sienna, ochre, the tone shifting as sunlight flickered through the leaf cover, mottling the sheen of the naked trunk with darker spots the colour of Grenache. It was as if what flowed through the tree were not sap but wine from the Roussillon, drawn from the earth into which its roots sank. The light shifted, the colours faded. I gathered three small strips of cork from the ground and placed them carefully in my backpack. One for myself, two as a gift at supper tonight.

Around mid-afternoon I reached the hamlet of Les Illes and made my way to the Hostal dels Trabucayres. There on the wall to the right of the door was a marble plaque, like a fragment of an imaginary guest register from February 1939.

As the Spanish Civil War approached its grim conclusion, the country’s elected leaders gathered one final time in a farmhouse on the outskirts of La Vajol, an end-of-the-line village in the frontier hills. Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia was there. So too was his Basque counterpart, José Antonio Aguirre. And then there was Manuel Azaña, president of a now fractured Spain. There were no choices left. In the company of others whose names elude history, the three presidents followed a path that led from La Vajol to the Col de Lli, and from there down into France, to Les Illes. Relations between the three were strained, and it is said they walked apart, but they are together on the marble plaque.

Par ce lieu le 5-2-1939 passerent

chasses d’Espagne

par l’agression Nazi fasciste international

les Presidents

de la Republique, Manuel Azaña

de la Generalitat, Lluís Companys

de Euskadi, José A. Aguirre

La France leur accorda le droit d’asile

The right to asylum. What did they feel, those defeated presidents, as they stood at the Col de Lli that cold February morning, the whole of Spain at their backs? A sense of having failed their country? Relief at the possibility of refuge? What would it have done to them had they known that Franco’s dictatorship would persist for almost four decades? None of them would live to see democracy return to Spain. Azaña and Aguirre both died in exile, in 1940 and 1960, respectively. In August 1940, Lluís Companys was detained in Brittany by the German military police, who handed him over to the Spanish authorities. Two months later, he was taken from Madrid to Barcelona and shot by firing squad in the fortress atop Montjuïc, the city hill on which an Olympic stadium would be built fifty years later. They called it the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys.

On the door of the Hostal a handwritten note told me I would have to wait: Fermé jusqu’à 17 h. I rang the bell in hope and heard an upstairs window opening. Looking up I saw Jean-Jacques beaming down at me.

‘Go round the side,’ he said, ‘and I’ll let you in.’

The owner was running an errand, but he’d already asked her to save me a bed. That evening I told my two companions about the ephemeral tree and gave them each a piece of cork. We filled our glasses time and again, and went to bed heady on Grenache.

The next two days followed a similar pattern. Although we would set off together, I was unable to keep pace, my creaking frame no match for their lean and wiry bodies. Once they were out of sight I slipped into my own quiet rhythm, savouring the slow approach to the mountain. On the long descent into Arles-sur-Tech I looked towards the Canigou massif and thought of the poet Verdaguer, of Francesc Pujades, and of what they had spawned. Without the stories it was just a mountain hewn from granite and gneiss, but the stories matter.

When I reached the valley floor I stopped to look at a tourist information board by the bridge across the River Tech. A black and white photograph, taken in 1910, showed iron ore being transported by cable car down from the Batère mines, high above the town on the western flank of the valley. To the right of the photograph, three paragraphs of text in French, a brief synopsis of the history of the mines. Across the bottom of the panel, in black marker pen and capital letters, someone had written: EN CATALÀ. SOM PAÏSOS CATALANS. Write in Catalan. These are our lands.

The iron mines closed in 1987, but part of the building where the miners once lodged and ate has been transformed into a mountain refuge, reachable from Arles-sur-Tech along a path that climbs for over ten kilometres to an altitude of 1500 metres. Late that afternoon I limped along the tarmac in front of the refuge and saw Jean-Jacques and Pierre outside on the covered terrace. I joined them in a beer and showed them my problem, the sole of my right boot hanging loose at the toe. Jean-Jacques took the boot and told me to wait. I had been walking for five days, and now, just a day from the Canigou, the summit seemed further away than ever. As I was finishing my beer, Jean-Jacques reappeared, the sole of my boot glued and bound with duct tape.

‘Leave it taped until morning,’ he said. ‘It should hold as far as Cortalets.’

We walked together that final day, my flapping boot marking time, and I was glad of their company. For five days the skies had been clear, but the weather was changing, a storm was building. As I looked up at the sky I heard the voice of my Catalan father-in-law as clear as when he last spoke to me in this life: Cielo de panza de burra, agua segura. Rain for sure when the sky’s the colour of a donkey’s belly. Jean-Jacques smiled at the image.

‘If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t have to walk any further.’

At the Cortalets hut we ate lunch together, and then went outside to say our goodbyes. I glanced towards the summit, then down at my ragged boot. Spots of rain began to fall.

‘Remember,’ said Jean-Jacques, ‘it is just one time. Le Canigou t’attend !’

I reached into my backpack and took out a tiny bundle of sticks, tied with a black and white ribbon.

‘In case you climb the mountain,’ I said, handing them to Jean-Jacques.

The jeep taxi was waiting, one place left. Thirty minutes down a pitted access road, back to the valley below.

At home again I soon slipped back into work and routines, and a month went by before I realized that I hadn’t shared with my two French companions the few photographs I had of our days together. I sent them off, but heard nothing for a while, until one day I received an email reply from Pierre, only from Pierre. He had, he said, some terrible news. Jean-Jacques, suite à un accident de vélo très grave, est décédé.

In one of the photographs, taken on our final morning together, I am standing with Jean-Jacques by a marker post at the Col de Cirère, an altitude of 1731 metres. We have been following the rise and fall of the same path for almost 90 kilometres, and we have climbed, all told, over 4500 metres. In the photograph, exhaustion shrouds me like an aura. As for Jean-Jacques, he is smiling, strong, ready for more. There is not a hint of death in his eyes.

Looking at the photograph I remembered something from a story by John Berger in which he encounters and converses with his long-departed mother. She speaks to him on behalf of the dead, and asks of him just one thing. Write down what you find, she says, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.

One day soon I will return to the Cortalets hut and spend the night in preparation for an early start the following morning. The weather will be fine, my boots robust, and I will climb the Canigou. From the summit I will look, first south towards the place that has become my home, then north towards Arles-sur-Tech. But I will not dream as some Catalans do from here. The place they desire is a time when this mountain was a feature of home rather than an emblem of what has been lost. And while something of their land has become my home, and I have been welcomed by most with open arms, the place I desire is far away on an Atlantic coast. It is granite and gorse, bladderwrack and kelp. It is the taste and smell of salt and sardines. And it is a boy scampering down the dunes and out across the wet sand towards the tidal sea, still cold despite the summer. A boy oblivious to the fact that this is only time, and that one day it will be lost. Oblivious to the fact that there is a word in Cornish for the longing he will feel years later as he sits atop a far-off mountain. Hireth.

 


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All The Things You Give

It is All Souls’ Day. This is what I am thinking, although I say nothing. After work I go with P. to the hospital, where we find her father already asleep, or so it seems. He is still dressed, but covered with a blanket and facing the wall. The television is on, an early-evening action film, but he is oblivious. I lean over, kiss him on the cheek and rest my hand on his shoulder. He begins to stir, so I speak my name. Kiss, hand, name. He shifts a little, squints, and closes his eyes once more. Then, to my surprise, he turns open-eyed towards me and says something that I take, at first, to be delirium.

‘I’ve left you some fruit on the…’

He pauses, the sentence hangs in the air, the word not found. Lost in the twilight brain.

‘The bedside table, on the bedside table. Some fruit.’

The words come. I look to my right and see a mobile phone, a box of tissues and a glass of water. No fruit. But then I find them, tucked beneath an open tissue. Two ripe berries from a strawberry tree. I realize then what he has done.

A few days ago I had taken him out in his wheelchair, half an hour together in the hospital gardens. It was a sunny morning and I lingered, trusting that he wouldn’t catch cold. Along a path I had never before explored, we discovered, the two of us, a small grove of lemon trees, separated from the garden by a mesh fence, its diamond holes just too small to pass a hand through. And then, at the end of the path, another tree.

‘Miri, un arboç,’ I said. Look, a strawberry tree.

I reached up and picked one of the berries, knowing from its colour and feel that it was not yet ripe. I placed it in his hand and waited. With his right index finger, he rolled it back and forth across his left palm.

‘No te lo comas.’ Don’t eat it. ‘It’ll be sharp.’

He let the berry fall to the ground, and I wheeled him back to his room.

So, he had remembered all this today. A daughter this morning had taken him for a walk along the same path and they had picked a few berries from the tree. Ripe enough to eat. He must have held two of them in his hand, trusting that later I would visit. They were there waiting for me. The sweetest berries I’ve ever tasted. As sweet as a father’s love.

 

Strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo), and ripe berries


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After The Storm

Arànsa, a hamlet high in the Catalan Pyrenees. On the covered wooden terrace of the hostel an old man sits staring out onto the little village square, his two hands, right over left, pressing down on the stubby head of a walking cane held straight between his knees. I step past him onto the street and there, in contemplation of the mountains, hear a voice speak to me from behind.

At the edge of the village, look for a wooden sign nailed to a tree with roots for branches.

 

Dare to follow the empty road

 

 

into the monochrome Zone

 

 

and you will find signs of life

sheltering among the stones,

 

 

flowing free towards the valley floor.

 

 

Press on, and through a crown of thorns

you will see streaks of blue

begin to lift the pallor from the sky.

 

 

Back at the hostel, the old man is nowhere to be seen, and my description of him draws no recognition from any of the locals.


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242

Her neck is scraggy,

and she needs help standing,

but how majestic she looks

with that fine head of broccoli hair.

A mother of pines,

wearing her age so well.

 

 

[The Pi d’en Xandri is a stone pine (Pinus pinea) that stands near the head of a path leading from Sant Cugat (Catalonia) into the hills of the Parc de Collserola, on the other side of which lies the city of Barcelona. Dendrological analysis suggests that the tree germinated in 1774.]


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In the Pyrenees There is Beauty in Both Life and Death

1.

High in the Catalan Pyrenees

a lignified cetacean,

a washed-up monument to deep time,

to the singularity of sea bed and mountain peak.

 

Mountain pine. Pinus uncinata

Mountain pine. Pinus uncinata

 

2.

The Catalans call it clavell de pastor, shepherd’s carnation,

the name a reminder

that this is the wild source

of a flower we know from elsewhere,

a decoration for table or gravestone,

and once a symbol of revolution.

 

 

Maiden pinks. Dianthus deltoides

Maiden pinks. Dianthus deltoides

 

3.

Its purple cowls draw the eye,

invite the hand to touch,

revealing nothing, yet,

of the poisonous heart

that for millennia

has served schemers

and fooled the unknowing.

 

 

Wolf’s bane, monkshood. Aconitum napellus

Wolf’s bane, monkshood. Aconitum napellus

 

4.

Here at the source,

before contamination and ownership,

we may drink freely of the water of life.

 


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Two Trees

Ca-ca-ca-cak. Ca-ca-ca-cak. I hear them before I see them. One, then a second magpie bobbing around beneath one of the old carob trees that stand just off the riera, the now dry stream bed along which I am walking. The landscape around Sant Pere de Ribes is veined with several of these stony conduits, and since moving here three years ago I have followed their course, up into the hills to the west, or down to the sea some five kilometres to the east. I’m not going far today, however; I’m just using the stream bed as a logical way to orbit the town before nightfall.

The last hour of the last day of autumn. Surely a fine time for a walk. Forty minutes ago I had closed the front gate and looked up at a crisp Mediterranean sky with my coat still open, but the sun has dropped now behind the hills and the afternoon has turned dummity and cold. I button my coat and climb up out of the riera onto the path of dry compacted mud that runs along its side. The carob trees that line the way are restless now with the song of invisible birds calling out the passing of the day. In response, I find myself whistling the refrain of a Duke Ellington tune I’d been listening to at lunchtime, an eleven-note clarinet lick mimicking the Bluebird of Delhi.

I follow the path for a couple of hundred metres and then, after passing beneath the stone road bridge and its red-metal pedestrian twin that allow passage in and out of this side of town, I climb again, up the stony bank and onto firmer ground. Ahead of me on the same side of the road a paired line of Aleppo pines form an inviting tunnel through which I have often walked, but it is not these trees that have brought me this way. The tree I want to look at is an ash, and it stands at the edge of the little car park on the other side of the road.

The ash has lost now the last of its leaves, but a few bunches of brown keys still hang from its lower branches. I reach up and cup one of the clusters in my left hand. By keeping my palm steady I find that I can move my fingertips across individual keys without dislodging the whole cluster. Their touch reminds me of the fine tissue paper that my watchmaker father always used to protect the disassembled pieces of a work in progress. I open my palm and watch as two dry seeds spin slowly to the ground.

The browns and greys of the wintering tree contrast with the exaggerated tones of the plastic flowers that are strapped to its trunk. I think that someone has altered the arrangement since I was last here, but I can’t be sure. Plastic flowers give nothing away. They don’t wilt or fade, which I guess is the point. As a memorial they are meant to symbolise permanence, a triumph over time and events. Yet in wishing for a place where nothing is lost, we cut ourselves off from the gift of living in time, from the possibility of renewal. An absence of decay is not necessarily a sign of life.

I didn’t know Toni personally, although he’d served me on a number of occasions when I bought stuff from the hardware store where he worked. I’d also seen him a couple of times while out walking the woods around town, his face recognisable despite the helmet as he scudded by on his mountain bike. A man in his thirties from a local family, a friendly face at work. That was as much as I knew about him.

The absurdity of the accident must make the loss even harder to swallow. The little car park whose border is marked by four ash trees is an obvious place to leave your car if you’ve just finished your morning shift at the hardware store and are now planning to spend the afternoon up in the hills on your mountain bike. Toni had probably parked there on countless occasions, and he would have been aware of the slope and camber of the ground. As he unloaded his bike through the hatchback door, he wouldn’t have expected the car to move, and it was no doubt an instinctive action to push against it. The mechanics of it all favour a loss of footing, and then a drag until the first obstacle is met. Apparently the paramedics were soon at the scene, doing their best at the foot of an ash.

With the last light seeping from the day I decide to head for home. The road rises past the little car park, and then more steeply still towards the top end of town. Halfway up the hill I take a right turn along a street that gives me a level run to my own, and it is there that I am puzzled by the lights up ahead, braids of red that seem suspended in the air. As I approach the junction I see the source. Where the four streets meet there is a small roundabout, its central island home to an old carob tree that has held its ground throughout the development of the neighbourhood. Since I last passed by a week ago the tree has become a Christmas carob, its trunk and major branches adorned with beaded strands of tiny red lights. I like what has been done to the tree, and I’m sure Ramón will be able to tell me more about it.

Ramón and his wife Marta run the delicatessen that stands just off the roundabout, and they can be relied upon for good cheese and local news. I’m barely through the door before Ramón greets me with a resounding ‘Hombre, ¿qué tal? ¡Cuánto tiempo!’. I smile at the thought that for him, a customer he hasn’t seen for a week should be welcomed with the words long time no see. While I choose the cheese and ham that will be tonight’s supper I ask him about the tree. He looks up, places the knife on the wooden board in front of him and pushes his shoulders back until they are straight.

‘That’s our doing’, he says. ‘Well, not just us, the other shops along here have all chipped in. Council wouldn’t put up ten cents, even said we’d have to get special permission to hook the lights up to the grid.’

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Good on you.’

‘If it was up to me,’ Ramón said, ‘I’d have music playing in the street as well. Bring a bit of warmth to people’s lives.’

Having bought more than I need from the wily vendor I step back out into the evening and head off toward home. There is a hint of wood smoke in the air, and I think that perhaps I too will lay a fire in, make the house warm for when my wife gets home. Pausing at the end of the street I take a last look back at the illuminated carob, and there in the shimmer of its lights see the spectre of an ash standing alongside it. Two trees. One for sorrow, one for joy.

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In The Company Of Animals

It is the end of winter and I am out on the cusp of night and day. There is nothing of the frost of the last few mornings, and I know before I look that the stars will be tucked beneath a blanket of cloud. As I drop the latch on the front gate a familiar feral cat emerges from beneath a parked car and mews at me in hope. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

I stride off towards the southern edge of town and soon I am crossing the bridge across the riera, the seasonal watercourse that forms a natural boundary between the last houses and the fields beyond. Along the dry streambank a line of leafless poplars stand like giant upturned besoms. If I could I would take one and sweep the sky clean.

Beyond the bridge the road becomes first a gravelly path and then a more rugged track that cuts across the fields between drystone walls. A daylight of sorts is beginning to unfold around me now, although the sky remains the colour of wet clay. I know what my Catalan mother-in-law would say: Cielo de panza de burra, agua segura. When the sky is the colour of a donkey’s belly, it’s sure to rain.

Of all the local walks I’ve invented since moving to Sant Pere de Ribes three years ago, this is the one I keep coming back to. Eight kilometres of familiar yet unexhausted paths that can lead me into the day, much as a favourite bedtime story would ease me into sleep as a child. If, back then, the reward for early to bed was an extra chapter, then the prize for an early start today is in sharing the morning with others: with the rabbit shooting across my path and into the carob grove for cover, with the pied wagtails breakfasting on bugs in the freshly tilled field to the west, and with the pair of peacocks.

I hear their plaintive call well before reaching the end of the track and the smallholding where they live, but it is not until I am parallel to the farmhouse that I see them perched atop the two chimneys like ceremonial cowls, their draping trains tickling the terracotta roof tiles below. As I stand there watching, one of them begins to shake its tail feathers from side to side, and I’m reminded of a news article I’d read about the work of two Canadian researchers, Angela Freeman and James Hare. They discovered that the train displays of peacocks produce infrasonic signals, sounds that cannot be detected by the human ear but which both male and female peafowl are able to perceive. Freeman and Hare speculate that these infrasounds have something to do with maintaining territory, and may also add to the visual power of the trains in attracting females. If they are right, then there is something tragic about these two peacocks dutifully calling out and shaking their trains, despite living here in a kind of avian exile, far from others of their kind who might listen with more than superficial interest.

Beyond the smallholding the stony track narrows and becomes earthy as it skirts around the edge of the hamlet of Puigmoltó. It is here that my spirits are lifted again as I gaze ahead at what might as well be a field of strawberry ice cream flecked with the last snowflakes of winter. The path ends at the stone wall which encloses the grove, and here, up close, the colour scheme shifts. I reach over the wall and snap a flower from each of the two species of tree, letting them rest side by side in my palm. Now I can see that although the bitter almond blossom is predominantly pink and that of the sweet almond white, the delicate flowers of each contain subtle tones of both colours. Strawberry mixed with snow.

I let the petals fall to the ground and climb the gentle incline into the scraggy woodland to the south of the almond grove. First I follow a broad and stony track, then veer off down a half-hidden mulchy path that cuts back and forth through an undergrowth thick with mastic, rosemary and dwarf juniper. The sides of this path are pock-marked with the scrufflings of wild boar. I find myself mumbling the words of a local huntsman I met a couple of weeks back. ‘Hi ha almenys cent senglars en aquest bosc.’ At least a hundred boar in these woods, yet in three years I’d never seen more than telltale disturbed earth. One day, perhaps.

Whether it is the thought of boar or the fact that it is cold here in the dummity wood, I quicken my step along the bifurcating path, trusting my sense of direction. This, I think, is how best I like to walk, without map or compass in hand, wandering the borderlands between strangeness and familiarity, with the possibility of getting lost not as threat but as an invitation to learn.

After five minutes or so the path deposits me at a junction of five trails, and here I choose the most direct route out of the woods. As I emerge from the trees onto a low ridge I look up in the hope of seeing a break in the clouds, but the donkey’s belly remains unruffled.

Where the ridge path ends I need to make a choice, since it brings me out on the back road that links Sant Pere de Ribes with the neighbouring town, Vilanova. I could road walk all the way home, but I decide instead to go only as far as the next bend and there pick up a tarmaced trail that meanders through the vineyards that fill the land to the west of town.

At this hour of the day the vineyard trail is alive with the song and flight of countless birds. Blackcaps tut-tut at me from the hedgerows, while down in the vineyards proper, other birds – probably buntings but hard to discern in this light – flit around the bare stumps or perch briefly on the cordon wires along which the new vines will soon be trained. Walking here is easy, and a joy, and before I know it I am dropping down towards town. The path I’m on wends its way through a final patch of woodland before emerging alongside the castell de Ribes, which dominates the landscape on this side of town. Although the origins of the small castle lie in the tenth century it is now little more than a Mediterranean manor house proudly hanging on to its fortified past, its circular defence tower as obsolete as the shaking train of a solitary peacock.

Just after the castle the path empties onto the back road that earlier I had chosen not to take, and here I must choose again. I can make a beeline for home through the centre of town, or loop my way back along the dry bed of the riera. Although rain is in the air today, the last two weeks have been dry with cold nights and warm, sunny middays, so progress across the polished stones and cracked mud of the stream bed is relatively easy. Scattered around me are discarded juice cartons, cans and plastic bottles, man-made erratics that sooner or later will be washed into the sea, adding to our problems.

A path of dry, compact mud opens up now to my right and runs in parallel to the stony bed. It is as I join this path that I see the hound. Black, enormous and alone, sniffing around beneath the carob tree that stands where the riera curves around to the right. I pull up, unsure about the wisdom of moving closer. The hound has caught wind of me and has shifted its position to one of preparedness, head cocked forward, back legs slightly spread, a gangly sprinter desperate to leave the blocks.

I lose sense of time in this moment of shared alert, although it can only be a matter of seconds before I see the woman coming along behind. As she reaches the carob tree the hound cocks its head slightly to the right, and then back again in my direction. I call out to her. ‘Està bé? Puc seguir?’ She calls back, letting me know that yes, it’s fine to walk on. The hound seems as liberated by its owner’s voice as I am, and we set off toward one another almost at the same instant.

When our paths meet, I stop again and allow the dog to explore me with its nose. With its head tipped back its muzzle brushes against my breastbone, although I no longer feel intimidated by its size. It fixes me with amber eyes, and I shudder. Whether there is truly something in those eyes or they are simply acting as a temporary mirror for my own self, I can’t say. All I know is that I sense something forlorn about this creature.

‘Sembla que tens un nou amic!’ His owner is with us now, and she’s right, I can easily imagine this dog as a new friend. ‘Ès un danès?’, I ask her. To my surprise, she not only confirms that the glossy giant is indeed a great dane, but begins to tell me something of their life together. While the dog continues to snuffle at my feet the woman explains to me how our encounter would have been very different had we met five months ago.

‘Ha sigut un treball molt dur, ens ha costat molt.’ It’s been hard work, she tells me, really hard. The dog had been abandoned by its previous owner and had ended up in the hands of a group that organized dog fights for a betting syndicate. I don’t press her on how exactly she and her husband had rescued the dog. It is enough to feel my spirits buoyed by her account of the training they have had to do, day after day, to get the animal to where it is now, a friend in the making. I feel the dog’s wet nose against the back of my hand, and looking down I find myself gazing into its eyes, as if by staring long and hard enough I might discover some deeper truth about this animal’s life.

The woman and I bid our farewells and set off in our respective directions, but after a few steps I find myself pulling up again and turning my head. ‘Bona feina’, I call out to her. Good work. The words sound trite, but I had felt the need to say something, to acknowledge openly that I was glad there were people like her in this world. She pays me the courtesy of looking back. ‘Gràcies’, she says, and walks on, the dog loping ahead of her into a different kind of life.


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Midsummer Fires

Arles-sur-Tech is a small town at the eastern end of the French Pyrenees, and it is overshadowed to the north by the Canigó massif. These lands at the southernmost end of the Languedoc-Roussillon region have deep connections to Catalonia, both its language and traditions. On 23 June 1955, Francesc Pujades, a resident of Arles-sur-Tech, took it upon himself to continue a centuries-old European tradition by lighting a bonfire to mark the eve of St John’s Day. What made Pujades’ initiative stand out was that his fire burned at an altitude of 2,784 m, at the summit of the Canigó. The idea that followed was that a torch lit from the fire could serve as a mother flame, la flama, from which St. John’s fires could be lit in succession throughout the Catalan lands. As a symbol of a cultural identity that refused to be extinguished despite the prohibitions set in place by Franco’s dictatorship, la flama had considerable value, yet not until 1966 would the torch pass south of the Pyrenees. Today, however, la flama de Canigó is relayed freely throughout the land on both sides of the mountains, and St John’s Day is now a national holiday in Catalonia. As I walked home just before midnight on St John’s Eve, the streets around the main square of my Catalan hometown, Sant Pere de Ribes, were still alive to the sound of snappers, whistling rockets and conviviality.

In contrast to the light and spark of the night before, the town awoke to slate-grey skies, and around midday an intense storm blew in over the Mediterranean, rinsing the air of the gunpowder perfume that had hung heavy into the early hours. When the storm cleared I went out to walk some of the trails that wind their way through the vineyards, scrub and woodland that surround Sant Pere de Ribes. The dirt track I chose is lined to the west by carob trees, and at this time of year they are festooned with unripe glossy-green pods.

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

As the carob is also known as St John’s bread it seemed fitting to be following this path on his feast day. It also felt good to be alone after so much companionship the previous evening. Alone, that is, except for the birds, who seemed to be relishing the freshness of the storm-swept air. To my left, finches gold and green flitted over and among the vines, while ahead of me on the path, swallows swooped back and forth like stray fireworks. The skies, however, had yet to clear, and maybe it was this, their colour, that turned my mind to Cornwall. St John’s fires would also have been lit in many towns across my homeland, most notably, perhaps, as part of the Golowan festivities in Penzance. In Cornish, the verb golowi means both to enlighten and to illuminate, from the noun golow, light. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was common for the Feast of St John to be celebrated in Cornwall with bonfires, flaming tar barrels and torches, but adminstrative anxiety over insurance claims doused these traditions, which only re-emerged in force during the 1990s. Nowadays, festivities last a whole week, from St John’s Eve right through to the Feast of St Peter on 29 June.

As its name would suggest, my Catalan hometown of Sant Pere de Ribes also celebrates its annual festival on St Peter’s Day. So, barely a week after the St John’s festivities the streets were once again filled with the sound of fireworks and the hum of expectation. Before joining family for the traditional St Peter’s Eve supper I decided to retrace my steps from the previous week. The afternoon was much hotter this time, and I walked quickly past the carob trees with an eye on the shade offered by the small wood that lies at the head of the trail. Just before I reached the cover of pine and holm oak I stepped off into the scrub to inspect what is a dispenser of sweet carnality to all who walk this path in early September, a gnarled old fig tree. Now, in June, however, only green gobstoppers clung to its branches.

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

I pressed on into the wood and was glad that it offered a shaded path back down to the edge of town where my in-laws live. I reached their house just as the final guests were arriving, so I quickly showered and joined the party for an al fresco supper of cured ham, stuffed omelettes and grilled sardines, followed by a traditional sweet flatbread washed down with a bottle of Cornish sparkling wine that I had been saving for the occasion. As night closed in we waited expectantly for the aerial maroon that would signal the ten-minute countdown. As my in-laws house sits on the western permiter of town it offers a perfect vantage point from which to enjoy the firework display that is launched each year from the tenth-century castle nearby. On the stroke of 11 the first rocket was fired into the air, and for the next twenty minutes the skies were filled with willows and palms, serpents and strobes. The best, however, was yet to come, as the centrepiece of the St Peter’s festivities is a diabolic street parade culminating in the main square. Hessian-clothed and hooded demons of all ages take to the streets, holding aloft staffs from which fountains of fire shower sparks upon the expectant onlookers. The first time you witness it, it all appears quite mad.

St Peter's Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

St Peter’s Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

As I watched the parade I wondered whether next year I might spend these days in Penzance or in one of the other Cornish fishing communities that mark the Feast of St Peter, their patron, with bonfires. I remembered, then, something I had read back in March on the BBC News website. The item described how the only complete copy of the Catholicon Anglicum, a fifteenth-century Middle-English–Latin dictionary had been purchased by the British Library in order to save it from export to a private collection. Interestingly, one of the entries in this dictionary refers to ‘ban fyre, ignius ossium’, the bone-fire from which our modern bonfire is derived. As a young child I had encountered a similar Latin expression, fragilitis ossium, which for all its apparent authority did nothing to help me understand why my bones broke so much more easily than those of other children. The modern term for brittle bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, captures more of the problem, since we now know that the fragility is caused by a genetic defect that affects bone formation. Bone is a composite of two materials, a mineral called hydroxyapatite (a form of calcium phosphate) and the protein collagen. In brittle bone disease it is the latter which is deficient, either in quality or quantity, or both. Collagen is important as it gives bones a degree of flexibility, while the job of the mineral hydroxyapatite is to provide a complementary hardness. Too much collagen and our bones would be rubbery; too little or poor quality collagen and they become fragile.

As in so much of life, balance matters. A summer of too many wildfires can cause lasting damage to the scrub and woodland landscapes that surround my Catalan hometown, yet its people nonetheless turn to fire as a way of celebrating the feast days of St John and St Peter. For those who lived through Franco’s dictatorship it is a reminder, perhaps, that they now live in more enlightened times.