Free Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart Page B

the Seven-Eye Bridge and howls into town, carrying plastic bags and beercans before it. It moans and wails round every corner, thick with grit and gravel which stings your eyes and gets in your nose and sets your teeth on edge as you eat the public paella in the plaza.
    The only saving grace of the Orgiva Feria is the pinchito stall in the funfair, where you can lean against the tin bar hour after hour, munching your way through spicy skewers of pork and drinking warm dry sherry from a paper cup. It’s the thought of this — and the fact that Chloë enjoys hanging out at the fair with her schoolfriends — that keeps me going back each year. And besides, this Feria I had to show my face. I wasn’t going to let myself be bullied into missing the festive delights by some homicidal shepherd… even if he could lift a mule with one hand, and even if he did carry a ten-inch navajón.
    Almost as soon as Ana, Chloë and I arrived in town, I spotted Juan chatting with a couple of friends in the street. I was all for stepping over to him straight away and giving my masculinity an airing, but Ana made this impossible by walking off and leaving me with Chloë. A smart move. She knew I wouldn’t consider a brawl the most edifying spectacle for my six-year-old daughter.
    After Chloë had gone off with her friends, I settled down for a stint at the pinchito stall, and waited to run into Juan. Manolo and Domingo were both at the bar, and Domingo comfortingly assured me that Juan reckoned I had been Petra’s lover — why else would I interfere? — and that his anger was still festering.
    Juan, however, didn’t show up again.
     
     
     
    In the town a few weeks after Feria I ran into Petra for the first time since the night of violence. She embraced me warmly.
    ‘For Chrissake lay off, Petra!’ I said, backing off ‘You want to try and get me killed again?’
    ‘No, don’t worry about it, Chris. I just wanted to thank you for being so wonderful that night?
    ‘It’s all very well to say “Don’t worry”, but there’s a dangerous maniac out there with a big knife and if he sees his blonde all over me in the high street then I’m meat.’
    ‘Oh, Juan is alright. He’s not a dangerous maniac at all. In fact I must rush because I’m just going to pick him up and take him to hospital…’
    ‘You what?!’
    ‘He’s got kidney stones and the pain makes him crazy. That was partly what made him so aggressive that night; he was crazy with pain and I had refused to take him to hospital?
    ‘Petra, why on earth didn’t you say any of this then?’ I asked, appalled.
    ‘Perhaps I was wrong that night. Juan is usually as gentle as a lamb. Anyway I must fly. Bye!’
    I told Manolo what Petra had said. ‘Oh — Juan is alright,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t actually kill Pepe Diáz either, it was a heart attack. No, there’s no doubt about it, Juan wouldn’t have harmed you.’
    I looked at him sideways.
    ‘And what about the navajón he keeps in his boots?’ I asked.
    ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he answered with a smile. ‘I’ve never had any cause to look inside them.’

 

     
     
TELEPHONY
     
     
    SO FAR AT EL VALERO WE HAVE RESISTED THE CALL OF THE MOBILE phone. Its appeal is admittedly limited, since a mobile wouldn’t work where we live, surrounded as we are by a ring of mountains. But I’m a little uneasy in any case with telephone technology; I once wasted a morning trying to make a phone call from a friend’s house using the TV remote control. Ana, too, is something of a Luddite. She won’t have anything to do with computers, for example. Not long ago, someone gave her an old IBM golf-ball typewriter which is as big and heavy as a small traction engine. She was delighted with it even though it spatters any paper that passes through it with gobbets of light engine oil. ‘This is the future,’ she announced as she heaved the thing through the doorway.
    For many years we had no