What have we ever done for the Romans?

You may assume that there is very little social life, and that exciting local events are few and far between if you live in a semi-abandoned vilage in Soria. You would be correct. Once a year there is the traditional herding of the sheep along the Cañadas Reales, the ancient Roman routes to Madrid. There’s the quirky annual fiesta in the nearby village, San Pedro de Manrique, which involves the men running over hot coals with their womenfolk slung, fireman-style, over their shoulders. Alegedly last year the local cura (priest) took part, though he had to enlist a willing young lady in order to participate. At least, I’m assuming that’s what he did, rather than bash a parishioner over the head with a club, caveman-style, and carry her off on his back. The year is punctuated by the usual religious celebrations and Saints’ Days. A charming, resurrected Easter custom takes place in a small village half an hour or so away, which perches like Dracula’s castle on a rocky outcrop. The village stood empty for many years, but was recently repopulated, and now, as in times past, at Easter weekend every household builds a fire in its fireplace which emits a different-coloured smoke from its chimney.

And on the weekend before Easter there really is something to look forward to in Calahorra, a small town about an hour’s drive away, over the border in La Rioja, in a landscape of fertile, allotment-filled valleys. Calahorra is famous for its vegetables: in fact, we just missed by a week the annual gastronomic ‘festival de verduras’ (vegetable festival), announced the year before with a technicolour poster of a succulent dish of cooked vegetables, which, on closer inspection, was, of course, sprinkled with chopped ham. But we were visiting in time for an event which Angel and Pili suggested we all attend: the Roman Market. Picking up on their enthusiasm, and sensing that they perhaps don’t get out much, we agreed whole-heartedly. Any misgivings I might have had were quashed almost immediately on arrival. Emerging from a side alley onto the main thoroughfare which was thronged with stalls selling ‘Roman’ food and nick-nacks, we were startled by a loud fanfare and then crushed against the stalls as a legion of Roman centurions yomped past, scattering pushchairs, hand-holding couples and meandering grannies. A stern-faced messenger-boy preceeded the swarm of swarthy soldiers, bearing a golden staff with which he pushed people aside, clearing a space for them to march through. My mother and I were man-handled to one side, and stood watching admiringly as the conquerors stomped past in their tunics and breastplates, eyes focused forwards, standards high, like the cut of their hemlines. It was a blur of regal purple, fluttering flags, gold, leather, flashing swords, hairy legs and unshaven chins. If there was a paradise on earth, this was it, as far as I was concerned.

After the initial excitement, we wandered around perusing the stalls, which offered silver jewellery in unusual designs which I now wish I had bought, huge, round cheeses which let off a pungent smell , home-made cheesecakes, honey, spices, dried teas, leather sandals, and tacky garden ornaments including horrendous Bill-and-Ben flowerpot men made out of wood with Pinocchio noses and dried flowers for hair, objects I suspect your average Roman would have recoiled from in as much horror as we did. We sipped wine from terracotta cups and ate rich, deep red, sweaty chorizos. Then we headed up to the square as there seemed to be a bit of a commotion going on up there. On the way we passed a cross-section of a wooden Roman galley-ship which had been converted into a kid’s climbing-frame and was swarming with excited toddlers, a roped-off area strewn with straw in which a rather portly gladiator was training two very small boys to hit each other with real metal swords, and a side-stall selling beautiful headpieces of woven flowers, both fresh and artificial, where a man held up a mirror so that a coquettish four year-old in the crook of his arm, wearing one of these garlands, could admire herself. There was something uinversally pretty and historically nostalgic about these traditional crowns of flowers that drew little girls to the stall as if hypnotised, each one of them wanting to be a princess. I felt myself slipping into a trance as well: some genetic memory of maypoles and cornfields, a flash of medieval hey nonny-nonny, but I was awoken from my reverie by the sight of a small, tubby girl in hot pink leggings and a horizontally-striped t-shirt that made her look like a strawberry humbug, grabbing her mother’s hand and demanding a garland for her own head, her eyes shining with princess-lust.

We were not disappointed when we arrived at the sqaure. First of all there was an open-air compound housing a selection of impressive birds of prey, tagged and tied loosely to waist-high stands: various types of eagle, several owls who surveyed the crowd at almost 360 degrees with their stunning, cold, yellow eyes, and even a vulture with white, cotton-like bumfluff around its neck, and a pastel pink and blue head. But even better than this, a gladiator contest taking place before our very own eyes, where, in a circle of sand close enough to touch, beefy men, stripped to the waist, beat each other with swords or with their bare hands. Acted with convincing gusto, and one suspects, some pleasure in the physical brutality, there was also a scene where the losing gladiators were roughed up by their Roman handlers, and ‘sold’ to spectators.

‘Who will buy this slave?’ spat a thick-necked, bald-headed brute, covered in not very authentic tattoos and wearing heavy gold earrings, grabbing one of the losers by the arm and heaving him to his feet before casting him back down into the dust.

‘I will….’ I breathed wistfully. Now, where was that bag of coins? But the slave was sold to a rich man in a white tunic and red cloak, and dragged away into a tent. The fighting continued, with much fanfare and grunting, the sun toasting sweaty backs and arms red, swords and shields clashing, and flesh slapping with a sound that reminded me of the noise our local butcher in Calle de la Fe makes when he slams his hand with satisfaction onto a juicy side of meat he is about to carve up. I surveyed the crowd, privately concluding that there were a lot of very happy women and gay men in Calahorra this fine afternoon.

Later in the afternoon we met a friend of Angel and Pili’s for a drink, a local man who is apparently ‘very big in vegetables.’ He has several pickling and canning plants, and his wares apparently sell well in the gourmet club at Corte Ingles. As we sat in the plaza sipping cool beers he told us of a local custom which is peculiar to Calahorra, and takes place (according to him) only between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, (according to the internet, Easter Thursday and Good Friday) due to a dazzling bit of Catholic logic: this is precisely when Jesus is dead and can’t see what you’re up to, so you can get away with it. The activity is a billiard-style game called Juego de los Borregos, played on a table with only one pocket, and with eight small balls and a cue which is used horizontally like a handlebar to push the balls at the pocket. I am still at a loss as to which balls one is supposed to pot or not pot. The game is played only in the two casinos in the city, and women are strictly forbidden to attend, even as spectators. It draws huge audiences, and even huger bets, often groups of friends betting a massive sum of pooled money. The man who was big in vegetables told us of nights in his youth when he and groups of friends bet several thousand pesetas at a sitting, and normally lost. He was usually the treasurer.

‘I always kept a sum aside after it had gone in the kitty,’ he told us, with a wry smile, ‘all my mates, they said no, put it all in, bet the lot, come on, but I always insisted on keeping some back. Then at the end of the night, when we’d lost the lot, at least we had enough to go for a slap-up meal together and a few drinks.’

For some reason this game produces a kind of gambling frenzy in its followers, perhaps fuelled by all-night drinking, and there are a lot of rumours in Calahorra about fortunes made and lost, none of which are proven, but it is recorded that people have bet their cars, their businesses, and even their homes, and in most cases, have lost them. I didn’t like to say it, but I suspected that women weren’t allowed because although there are women gamblers, in general they are less likely to bet the house away from under them and their children.

‘Oh, I know a man who bet his wife once!’ said the Big Vegetable man, but I think he was joking.

After a day of strapping Romans and weird Easter customs, we headed back through the valleys full of allotments and away from Rioja province. Before lunch we had sat at another local bar in a side plaza next to a ‘Peña’ – a building with a roll-up metal door that looked a bit like a bus station, watching the ‘romans’ go in, and come out as unremarkable men in track suits, carrying sports bags with metal breast plates sticking out of them, feathered helmets carried in plastic bags, swords under the arm. In the car Angel told me that it’s very common in Calahorra for people to find Roman remains when carrying out building work at home, or on work premises.

‘Wow, do they get someone to come in and excavate, then? I asked, naively.

‘No.’ replied Angel. ‘What normally happens is, if they alert the authorities, they take about three years to come and do anything about it at all, seeing as you’re dealing with lazy-arsed civil servants who don’t give a shit about anything. In the meantime, your business is at a total standstill because you can’t do anything, you can’t carry on, you can’t call the renovations off. So instead, what most people do, if they find something, is they come in, in the middle of the night and they smash it all up so no-one knows there was ever anything there. Then they can carry on with the building work as planned. Otherwise nothing ever gets done. That’s Spain for you.’

It’s nothing, it’s just the countryside…

When I lived in Ibiza there was an American gay man, in his fifties, who, when he used to come on holiday,  would visit the restaurant where I worked, usually on his first night after arrival. Every time he came in for a drink, on that first night, he would cry, weeping silently into his beer as he stood there at the bar in his tight shorts, the hair on his head cropped close, his t-shirt sprayed across his broad chest.

‘I’m ok,’ he would assure us, the tears running down his face, ‘I’m just so…. so happy to be here again. It’s nothing, it’s just the city, the stress of the city….’

Once he had cried away the stress of the city he was fine, and free to enjoy the rest of his holiday. On arrival in Soria last week on my long-awaited Easter holiday, I was concerned that I may start doing the same, bursting into babyish tears when faced with the desired and longed-for countryside. It has seemed like a personal insult to all of us workers that Easter, due to a pagan system of calculation, has come right at the end of April this year, condemning us to almost four months of hard work without a single bank holiday or saint’s day. I mean, why come and live in Spain in that case? Might as well get a job in the UK!

On my visits to the pueblo I am always struck initially by sensory overload: the smells of cut grass, clean air, flowers, woodsmoke, the brackish smell of the nearby river, the brown embrace of fresh manure on the allotments, the scent of mud and crushed leaves. Instead of the growl and honk of traffic, the underground scream of the metro and blaring radios, grating voices, yowling sirens, tinny mobile tones and pulsating Reggaeton, I hear hooting cuckoos, tweeting finches, the sharp cry of crows, and the tinkling of mountain water. Above our heads, in the place of the city’s circling helicopters there are revolving vultures, silent and watchful, and at evening the flitter of bats flying in and out of the local church belfry, as if fulfilling the cliché purely to make us happy.

After Angel has collected us from Soria station and driven us over the hills, past the churning white wind farms, the solitary plaster dinosaur on the hillside, and the striped snow-poles by the side of the road, we are taken to their new home in another village, and treated to a lengthy lunch. The house is the epitome of shabby chic- crooked beams, spiders’ webs festooning the eaves like christmas decorations, an ancient iron stove in the kitchen, rickety furniture, faded lace curtains at the windows, and dusty stone floors. Downstairs in the laundry room one of the dogs (Grace’s daughter) has given birth to puppies, who are gently pulled out of their wooden den to be held, shut-eyed and wriggling, whimpering, their tiny paws clenching and unclenching, while mother looks on with suspicion and sagging tits. The other dog, a puppy who had been brought into the bar last year supposedly to die, after having somehow ingested forty pebbles, and was nursed back to life by Pili, who fed it pureed vegetables, olive oil and porridge until it expelled the stones, has now grown into a forty-five kilo hound who leaps up playfully and grasps your forearm in her massive jaws, almost knocking you to the ground. Aside from the inventive and entirely delicious food, some of it vegetarian in honour of my mother, there is a mysterious pot bubbling on the stove that Pili stirs occasionally.

‘Wild boar tongue,’ she informs us, and the family laugh heartily at my Mum’s horrified exrpesssion. Apparently the hound has become an efficient hunter, and had killed this boar in the mountains a few days ago. Making himself a sandwich with some mottled luncheon meat, Angel Jnr informs us that he is tucking into ‘pressed wild boar head.’ Like Italians, we stuff ourselves implausibly full with antipasti, sweet roasted red peppers dripping with olive oil, crisply fried langoustines wrapped in threads of crunchy potato, anchovies smothered in fresh garlic, and smooth white goat’s cheese.

The bar is no more: after a year of hard work, long days when only one or two customers would come in, busy holiday seasons but little else, they proposed paying less on the lease and opening only at weekends, but like most new-fangled concepts in the village, this was turned down by the owner, so they decided to leave hostelry and concentrate on the important business of living well and working less. Consequently, the latest plan is to cultivate organic vegetables to sell to friends and acqaintances in Madrid, with the eventual aim of also buying some livestock, chickens and sheep, maybe even a cow, so they can sell eggs, milk, chickens, and make cheese.

‘Bloody Hell, it really is Tom and Barbara.’ I tell them, and resolve to search Amazon for ‘The Good Life,’ though I can’t imagine it dubbed into Spanish.

The afternoon is spent on a roundabout trip to show us the new allotment, involving several rambling detours, including helping a visiting friend move house. A sofa, fridge-freezer, boxes of tools, kitchen appliances and standard lamps are passed from the back of a van into the arms of willing teenagers, stray friends, busy-looking men and Pili. My mother and I are gently shifted to one side, and occasionally handed a random curtain pole to take inside while the boys struggle past, laden down with the mens’ work. It is flattering and somehow endearing to be treated with kid gloves like this, as visiting tourists or perhaps dainty British ladies. The one moving house is a tall and beautiful man with delicate wrists, floppy hair, and a handsome, neanderthall face made more attractive by a brutal scar cutting across his thick lips and chin. Unfortunately he has a wife is in Madrid just about to give birth.

After the move there is an encounter with the village alcoholic.

‘Martini time, look at that.’ Angel nudges me in the ribs as we pass an old man in a deck chair clutching a cubata. He sits at the terrace to the ‘albergue’, flanked by a pot-bellied Vietnamese pig, a donkey, a friendly black and white sheepdog, and a small bay pony. The man sees me stroking the pony and staggers to his feet, three sheets to the wind. He walks sideways to talk to me, mumbling, and I don’t understand a thing he says.

‘Restraining order out on him, his wife, he used to beat her up, poor cow. The order includes the instruction not to drink.’ Pili whispers as we pass. ‘He hasn’t had a drink for a year. The albergue is the only place in the village that will serve him any booze. She won’t be happy about that.’

The allotment is a bucolic slice of heaven on earth. Overlooking it on one side is the old castle, in front the ridged face of the mountains, on the other side the romanesque remains of the old church on the hilside. Angel Jnr starts to till with the rotivator, furrowing dusty, sand-coloured topsoil into a display of rich, clay-brown earth. Pili starts to dig an irrigation channel from the well at the top of the field, Angel carries beams over to the tumble-down shed at the far corner, which he is to repair and build a roof for. Juan Carlos trundles the wheelbarrow backwards and forwards with baby plants, strawberries, carrots, aubergines, and seed potatoes. The sides of the plot are stacked with chopped trees and bundles of firewood, plants and branches they have cleared already from the wild patch of land. The sun glares at their bent backs, and the vultures circle silently. It all seems so perfect. But within very little time the shell of the rotivator cracks and breaks. Stormclouds gather overhead; the forecast was for heavy rains and storms.

‘We have to finish this before it breaks.’ Pili tells us, sweating into her overalls. Before the sky cracks and weeps. It’s nothing, it’s fine, it’s just the countryside, the countryside….

Who killed Bambi?

cherry blossoms, Yanguas, Soria

Another weekend, another visit to the pueblo. Like a good Spanish girl I now have my very own village to spend weekends and holidays in ‘con mi gente’ (with my folks). This time I took the coach up there with a friend after work on Friday, meeting, frazzled, at Avenida America station. As we settled into our fuzzy coach seats I noticed my handbag, normally clutched under my arm as tightly as a drill-instructor´s baton, had been slashed in transit on the metro,a gaping razor-blade cut all the way down the seam,so that it was almost spilling its guts. And here the old maxim is proved, girls: you get what you pay for in life. It was a quality handbag, soft leather with satin lining, and though the slasher had cut through both layers cleanly it appears his/her hand had been unable to slip inside due to the complication of the expensive lining. So after all they left empty-handed. After cursing the potential thief and the mutilation of a good handbag I began to relax as we pulled out of Madrid. Soon the sky was opening up, the slopes of the sierra falling back and the cares and stresses of the city falling away like sloughing off old, dead skin. I had been singled out from the pack; I had been stalked and hunted. But this prey had managed to escape.

Not so lucky if you happen to be prey in the countryside however. On the second morning as we ambled up to the bar we were met by a jaunty Angel Jr.

´What, you guys only just had breakfast? I’ve been up since 6! I went hunting with some friends of Dad’s.’ Please don’t show us what you caught, please don’t show us what you caught….

‘I shot 2 deer. Wanna see?’

‘Er, no thanks, I think we’ll just have a coffee.’

And we might have got away with not having to actually see the spoils had it not been for one of dad’s friends striding through the bar as we sipped our coffee and slapping Angel Jr on the back while telling us proudly,

‘He’s a good little hunter, this one, look what he caught this morning.’ As we glanced round to answer him we saw that behind us, without us noticing, Angel Jr had deposited a huge, grizzly chunk of deer on the metal table where we had eaten our dinner the night before. It was literally a chunk of haunch, something hacked off as if with a machete. Fur bristled along one side of it. Blood and gore oozed from the other side, across the metal table-top. My friend (a vegetarian) and I must have both pulled a ‘cara de circunstancia’ at this point. (A ‘Circumstance face’- one of those faces that says ‘Look, I really don’t know how to appropriately arrange my features right now. I know you were expecting something else, but this is all I can manage I’m afraid: a mortified grimace overlaid with the hint of a sickly smile. It’s the best I can do at such short notice. Sorry.’)

According to Pili it was a young deer, as was the other one Angel Jr had shot that morning. She went on to express her sympathy for it, telling me ‘Me da un poco pena, sabes?’ (I feel a bit sorry for it, you know?) She painted a pretty grim picture of hunting restrictions and permits out here in the back of beyond, hunters legally permitted to pick off older male deer basically shooting whatever takes their fancy. After all, who’s going to control who kills what out here? And it’s not as if they always eat the meat, either.

‘Oh no, sometimes they can’t be bothered to carry the carcass back- a deer’s quite heavy. So some of the time they just cut the head off as a trophy and leave the body out there.’ Food for the vultures, presumably. She then described how upset she’d been a while ago when the hunters brought back the ‘trophy’ of a very young deer’s head. Except they’d been unable to decapitate it cleanly for some reason, so instead of just cutting its head off they’d had to cut round its snout and under the eyes. Apparently it had retained its terrified expression.

‘And it was looking up at me with these big brown, pathetic eyes… poor little thing….’ So let me get this straight. Not only did they kill Bambi, they then had to go and cut it’s face off. Anyone would be traumatised under the circumstances. Even Pili, and she’s 100% Spanish.

Although I’m beginning to wonder. Perhaps she had some distant ancestor with British blood, as I have never met such a total Soft Lass around animals as Pili. Currently they have one rescue dog from Madrid (I ended up rescuing its sister, but that is another story). Now they have another rescue dog – an enormous hound of a mastiff which Angel calls ‘mi cachorrita’ (My Little Puppy) but is approximately twice his size. This second dog was snatched from the jaws of death, about to meet a watery end in a bucket with the rest of the litter. And these are by far not the only animals Angel and Pili have rescued in the years I have known them. They used to have a terrapin in the bathroom years ago which they fed jamon york (boiled ham) and which grew too big for its flippers, maybe as a direct result, so they released it into the wild. There are other dramatic rescue stories involving an oversized frog, and a small type of owl, and once, with the help of local authorities, after reporting the abuse, a mistreated donkey. I’m pretty sure the latter didn’t end up going home with them, whereas the others all did. Probably only because they didn’t have room.

But my favourite rescue story which perfectly illustrates Pili’s Spanish pragmatism combined with ‘British’ daft compassion is the story of The Snail. Recently they were offering a local speciality on the menu- snails. Pili had filled a cooking pot with cold water and deposited the live snails inside it to heat up slowly while she carried on cooking. Apparently this is the correct way to cook them, as at first they strain to escape. Then when it gets too hot it’s too late for them to retract back into their shells, so they are cooked half in and half out. Anyway, Pili turned round as the snails cooked to find one brave and tenacious individual hauling itself over the lip of the pan. Bearing in mind the hardships it had already suffered and the sheer improbability of it making it this far alive, she decided to spare its life and nicknamed it Sobreviviente (Survivor). Maybe she’d recently seen The Pianist, who knows? It had survived the Snail Genocide and was granted a pardon. From then on for the next 3 weeks it lived in the kitchen in a shoe box, fed on prime lettuce. A heart-warming story, most of us would agree. But, life being a bastard, and absurd to boot, Survivor only Survived 3 weeks, to meet an equally ghastly fate in a mean, Final Destination twist of fate. It may have escaped the frying pan but the Hounds of Hell were hot on its heels nevertheless. (Heels?…. slimey stump?….) One day one of the dogs bounded into the kitchen and Pili turned round at the sound of crunching to find Survivor gone and the dog wagging its tail and licking its lips.

So Pili is sentimental enough to rescue a snail, but pragmatic enough to slow-boil a panful of them live without batting an eyelid. And it doesn’t stop there. My friend was curious enough to ask what one of the items on the menu was- ‘pajaritos fritos.’ Now, translated straight, this means fried little birds. But surely it can’t actually mean?…. ‘It’s fried baby birds.’ she told us. ‘Quail chicks, but when they’re still really small.’ Somehow this shouldn’t have surprised either of us, yet it did. There is, after all, a great culinary tradition here of gobbling up baby animals- the younger the better. There is cochinillo (suckling pig), cabrito (baby goat), and corderito (little lamb). There are even chopitos (baby squid) which are battered and fried whole, and I must admit, totally delicious if you can handle the weeny tentacles, which I can. Oh, and there are also gulas (baby eel.) So no qualms about ripping tiny creatures from their mothers’ tit and slinging them into the cooking pot. And frying things whole and eating them with the head on and everything- that’s also pretty normal, and in some cases not as horrific as it sounds. Boquerones (whitebait) are eaten battered whole, as are the baby squid. But baby quails? Baby birds? Are you for real? Beak and all? Tiny little curled up feet and stumpy unformed wings? I just couldn’t get the image of their scrawny little necks out of my head, those wobbly necks and open beaks, bulging eyes and oversized bald heads. You’ve already killed Bambi. You can’t go and garrotte Tweety Pie and serve him up with chips as well.

‘Baby birds? Fried whole?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Pili, ‘They’re really crispy and delicious. I do feel a bit sorry for them, though, poor little things….’

La Casa de Abram, Yanguas, Soria

Death of a pueblo

It seems fitting that as an Easter trip, my Mother and I found ourselves in the gorgeous bleak countryside of España Profunda witnessing the story of a kind of death and resurrection, a clear example of what is intrinsically cyclical about life, all things dying away and coming back full circle. The village we were visiting and the circumstances of the friends we were visiting there seemed to encapsulate that decline of one thing and rise of another. While the village itself, no different from thousands of others in rural Spain, clung to life with white knuckles, turning what was essentially a slow death-mask to the world, my friends who had moved there from Madrid last year and had opened a bar appeared to have found new life and at last, hope.

Having checked in at the Casa Rural down the hill we wandered up to the deserted main square where the bus had dropped us earlier. When we’d spoken on the phone I’d asked Angel the name of their bar and how to find it.

‘Oh, you’ll find us easily.’ he said. ‘It’s called Casa de Abraham. Everyone here knows us.’

Everyone here? Everyone where….? There was not a soul in sight. I would have happily asked a local for directions if I could have found one. Heavy stone houses, as dry and sturdy as Derbyshire stone walls waited silently with shuttered windows. The only sound was the sluggish trickling of the river by the main road. Beyond the village were austere mountains and an expanse of sky rarely seen from the city, so much sky it was exhilerating. Luckily, just then the returning school bus pulled up, depositing Angel Jr and Juan Carlos, their sons, who cheerfully greeted us and led us uphill to the bar, while filling us in on their new life in the pueblo.

‘We sledged down this slope in the winter when it snowed, all the way to the road. It snowed loads. There weren’t any cars for days.’ they informed us as we made our way up a snaking cobbled road.

‘That’s where we live, the other side of that mountain.’ pointing past a romanic bell tower and some crumbling ruins on a hillside the other side of a dip.

‘There’s our new car!’ they pointed to a shabby jeep parked just inside an ancient gateway.

‘And here’s the bar.’

We would have had to make a detailled recce of the entire village to have found this. It nestled, low as a Hobbit house on the corner of a steep cobbled street, the entrance a solid wooden door on iron hinges. A hand painted sign hanging unobtrusively overhead indicated it was Abraham’s casa. On the telephone I had joked with Angel about which son he was going to sacrifice and he had answered that he hadn’t decided yet but was working on it.

Angel and Pili had undergone a stunning and welcome transformation. They were like the before and after victims of a zombie attack, only the other way round. In Madrid, due to the pressures of running their own struggling business and a family, and the pressures of the city itself, they had become zombified, leading a life that was a downward spiral of missed sleep and meals, impossible working hours, and unbearable stress. They both ended up with grey complexions, frazzled expressions and panda eyes as dark brown as old tea stains. They had owned a summer house here for many years, and last Summer moved here for good, closing the business, selling their house and starting a new life. Being industrious it was very little time before they had negotiated the lease on the bar and had opened it as compliment (for this read competition, village politics are harsh) to the only other bar in town. Here in the countryside they had become their old selves again, hippies and country-dwellers at heart. They had both put some weight on, their city pallor was now a rosy-cheeked glow, and though they were working hard with the Easter rush of customers, they were laughing more than I had seen them laugh for many years.

Later that evening we went back to the bar. There was a complicated procedure involving desperate attempts to find the live Barcelona/Arsenal game on the internet, after Angel had unsuccessfully flicked through all 927 cable channels looking for one that offered free football, pausing only to stare in contemplative mood at the abundant tits on one of the freeze-framed porn channels. In the end they found an internet channel and hooked it up to the television, and a group of men gathered round the set earnetly. It was a draw, thank goodness, so after much joking and vying with them, no-one had to admit national defeat. Angel Jr showed us video footage of nesting vultures which he had filmed for a school project, he brought out sets of antlers they had found on the mountainsides and explained their age and the process of shedding them, and a little later asked us if we would like to go to the slaughtering of a corderito (baby lamb), which we graciously declined. Surprisingly the bar filled up with male totty; every time the door opened my mother and I exchanged glances as yet another strapping bloke came in from the cold. Then came Felipe, a tiny little old man with a stick. Angel explained that he had fallen on the ice this winter in the pueblo and had broken his leg, and they had rushed him to hospital where he was fitted with a cast. Felipe had been sent to a ‘residencia’ for old people to recuperate, but with a month still to go, he had checked himself out and done a runner, as according to him ‘it was full of old people and really boring.’

‘He’s quite a character. We love him.’ Angel informed us, and after a drink or two we were given a blast of Felipe’s showmanlike abilities, as he serenaded my mother with coplas (traditional songs), and then recited patriotic Antonio Machado poetry to us about glorious and unforgettable Soria (Machado was an Andaluz poet who spent time in the province). As he circulated around the bar entertaining everyone with his stories and songs the stick became more than a stick- a prop. I remembered how attached I became to my stick for a while after fracturing my foot last year, and how useful it was to prod people with. Felipe used his to poke at people the other side of the bar to catch their attention, at other times it became an air guitar and finally a bandleader’s baton to be twirled over his head and held ramrod straight sticking up in front of his nose until the other locals told him laughingly to put it down, he´d have someone’s eye out with it.

After another vodka, and in oratory mood, Felipe told us a little of the history of the village. When he was a child there used to be 90 children at the local school; now there were 50 inhabitants in total. There used to be two bakers, a chemist’s, four churches (of which two remain) and two local businesses. There were two Visigoth warrior kings buried in the churchyard where the ruins are. The village started to decline in the seventies, people moved away and no-one came to replace them, and now apart from the houses there were only two rural hotels and two bars, mostly to accommodate weekenders from the cities, tourists and passing groups of hunters and hikers.

The next morning we coincided in the bar again over coffee, and we left Pili and a couple of locals discussing a consignment of jars of asparagus. Felipe took us to the local museum, of which he was keeper of the keys. He gave us an interesting tour, showing us the statue of the only known seated Jesus in Spain, a portrait of the ‘Virgin of the Milk’ who was breastfeeding her Christchild from what looked like a fried egg slapped on the front of her robe, a statue of the ‘Moorslayer’ on horseback, battered wooden chests for taking ecclesiatical robes and paraphenalia into war in order to be able to perform mass on the battlefield, gothic crucified christs dripping with rust-brown blood and the piece de resistance: a disconcerting picture of angels and cherubs and suchlike stitched from devout womens’ hair. When I mentioned this later back in Madrid to some students, they told me that here in Madrid there is a church housing the Cristo de Medinaceli, who is brought out and paraded in the Easter processions, and this statue apparently has a ‘wig’ made of womens’ hair, which is constantly being added to by the devout. When we got back to the bar the discussion about the jars of asparagus was still in full flow. We donned walking gear (what we had of it, including a pair of hiking boots kindly on loan from one of the regulars,) and Angel Jr led us away on a 7 km walk to the village where the family actually lived.

One of the high points of the walk was the incredible proximity of the vultures. There were scores and scores of them, gliding directly overhead, circling the peaks and valleys or perched in rows along the rocky ridges watching us with beady and hungry eyes, twiddling their feathers and waiting for one of us to trip and fall. Angel Jr informed us that he had feigned a fall a few times while walking in the mountains and had kept quite still, his eyes half-closed, until he heard the helicopter-blade whooshing of their wings and opened his eyes to find them virtually nose to beak with him. Supposedly they go for the soft, vulnerable eyes first. As soon as he moved they flew away. It was a disquieting sensation; although I have travelled extensively, it was only the second time I was consciously aware of a group of living creatures actively wishing my death so they could make a meal of me. The only other time I was spooked by this kind of reality check was when navigating the Galapagos islands in a smallish boat with a tour group, and being followed for several miles by Hammerhead sharks, their fins cutting the water in the wake of the boat and keeping perfect pace with us. Even thinking about it makes me shudder. I am of the generation that saw Jaws too young, when it came out, and has had a pathological fear of sharks and deep water ever since.

We followed an ancient Roman path, part of the old sheep and goat-herding route leading all the way to Madrid from Logroño, the other side of the mountains. The final part of the walk was through a wooded glade, pine trees on either side, bracken and scrubby thorns everywhere. Angel Jr showed us deer tracks, lizards, miniature ‘scorpions’ under stones, samples of the naturally-occuring mineral in the rocks, which formed almost perfect cubes grey as graphite, and the rooting grounds of wild boar, big swathes of earth churned over by their snouts as they searched for what he called ‘wild garlic’.

We arrived at their village which nestled in pastureland next to a river with a small waterfall. If the village below was semi-deserted, this really was the village at the end of the world. Here there were only 25 of the houses renovated and occupied only at weekends and holidays, with Angel and Pili and their family the only people to live here all year round. Angel Jr said it was best when the holidaymakers had all gone and they had the village to themselves. It was beautiful but eerie. The thought of living up here made me feel uncomfortable. No running water- that had to be brought up here by the road and then by track in 1000 litre tanks, no electricity- that was provided by generators, and in winter no other people at all. Also no heating- Pili had told me that they went out one day and when they came back the water in the dogs’ bowl was frozen solid, and when they checked the temperature it was minus 18.

On the way back down we saw a startled deer, zig-zagging away from us, its white tail flashing. When we trudged back to the bar a couple of hours later we were treated to a hearty meal by Pili who was churning out home-made food for a full house. Easter was good business and they had to make the most of the rush. There were days, she said, when one person called in for a coffee all day and the rest of the time she and Angel watched tv and pottered about on the internet.

The next day, after fond farewells and after Pili thrusting jars of locally-produced honey at us, we caught the only bus of the day back to Soria and from there to Madrid. Apart from the sheer pleasure of seeing my friends happy and rejuvenated after their radical life change, I genuinely fell for this bleak, semi-abandoned pueblo in the middle of nowhere. There is no way a confirmed urbanite like myself could live in a place like that, but it was the perfect place to get away from the city. Much as I adore Madrid, those of us who live here all agree that you have to get out from time to time, and, as the Spanish say, ‘breathe another air.’ There was something noble and tragic about this place clinging to life in the midst of the rugged hills of the least populated province of Spain. And the sadness in witnessing the apparent slow death of the pueblo was cancelled out by the happiness of seeing Angel and Pili and their children coming back to life, yawning and stretching and looking about them with new eyes as though waking from a bad dream. Lives can change, people can escape the rat-race and reinvent themselves; there is hope.