 |
|
Cooking outdoors
in paradise. |
Eike sold out, a seeming impossibility in our
little universe. He talked of going to New Mexico to join his child and
ex-wife.
Other Germans came less and less often. The thrill
of land ownership was gone. In their place came their friends, and then
strangers on vacation. Renters. People with no history, no respect for
the land. The camaraderie of the early colonization was fading fast.
Even Bill began to see the logic of taking advantage of the new influx,
and built three little cabins down by the river, rentals for friendly
strangers. Or just -- strangers.
From our front window we saw girls in pink
polyester jogging togs sucking yogurt drinks. Even the older people in
their black mourning wool, began demanding gadgets they were seeing on
TV. The younger people went to Almeria to work in the invernaderos,
the greenhouses where many of them got sick from the poisons. They
earned a pittance tending the fat unnatural tomatoes for the
greengrocers of northern Europe. They spent their money on
cosas tontas.
Bill bought a house in Picena, something no-one
would have predicted, and rented his finca to an Irish couple who wanted
to raise goats. He even got a computer that kept dying because of the
town's erratic electricity supply. Finally he announced he'd found a new
guru and was heading for the Orient in search of true enlightenment,
making all his marvelous experience in the Alpujarras sound false.
It was a blow, but I still wanted to stay on. We'd
bought a piece of land known as la gloria - half an acre with
orange and lemon , fig, almond, and a couple of olive trees. But we
couldn't make a go of it. Our own need for money , and Art's
restlessness, overcame my idealism. Our flight to England signaled the
dissolution of our marriage. I wanted to go back to Picena. Art didn't.
Our charming village home became a vacation site we traveled to for a
week at a time, from London. Then it became a rental cottage, then was
sold, along with la gloria, to an English pair who had a hobbyist
passion for exotic butterflies.
|
 |
|
Bill's porch |
Recently I searched for Picena on the internet,
for a lark. I saw that our neighbor's house, a place where we had sat
and eaten freshly slaughtered pig meat with Antonio and helped Marisela
make morcilla and longaniza sausage, was on the market for
about $45,000 - more than 100 times its value 15 years ago. It shocked
me. I remembered lying in bed at night, waiting to hear Antonio wander
home drunk, and sit on the stoop weeping loudly when Marisela locked him
out.
It seems to me now that the desire to live in
harmony with nature in southern Spain was a chimera - it gleamed always
before us, never quite attainable. The expatriates didn't need to make a
true commitment to peasant life, and the peasants were rapidly being
converted into eager consumers through the magic of television and the
need for money to buy what they saw.
I was saddened to think that all the world was
turning into a kind of cash-driven theme park, where progress would
shine brighter than the real sun and the old people in places like
Picena would die quietly in front of their televisions, licking the last
of the cherry-flavored yogurt off the spoon while, outside, the cherries
on the trees were being devoured by ravenous angry birds.
