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

who visited someone once and passed the night in a room where the window didn’t quite shut properly; no big thing; mind you, just a crack in the casement. Anyway, the next morning he woke up sick as can be, was dead by nightfall, and is now in the glory.’
    And he raised his eyes to heaven in that way that people here do whenever the glory comes into the conversation.
    ‘Blimey, Pedro, that was more than just a crack. We had the window open wide all night, and we’re alright – well, I think we are. I’ll just go and check that Ana’s okay.’
    ‘You’ve had a lucky escape but I’m moving out to the other house. Another night like that and I may not be so lucky. I have to take care, I’m old and feeble but I have no wish to pass to the glory yet.’
    I sat on the bed, checking that Ana had not succumbed to the lethal effects of the night breeze. She seemed alright.
    ‘Where’s my tea?’ she said.
    ‘Do you really want a morning cup of tea?’
    She weighed this carefully. ‘No, definitely not.’
    ‘I think Pedro is making
papas a lo pobre
and you could wash it down with a couple of glasses of
costa
.’
    ‘I’d rather die.’
    ‘It would appear that you nearly did, me also, and we nearly did for Pedro into the bargain. He says the night wind is absolutely lethal and you should never sleep with the windows open.’ ‘That man talks more cock than a cartload of hens. Really, I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’
    I assumed a pained expression at Ana’s choice of language.
    ‘Of course, of course, but you never know.’
    Ana got up, Beaune bounded off the bed, and the three of us went outside and watched the morning sun play with the shadows on the hills opposite. From below came the smell of frying potatoes, onions and garlic – strong food.
    A notion was forming in my head that the right thing to do on the first morning of our new life would be to climb the hill behind the house and survey our new domain together.
    ‘I can’t see why we have to clamber all the way up there to see the farm which is down here,’ said Ana.
    ‘Well, for one thing, it’s a natural and wholesome human urge to want to get to the top of whatever hill one sees. Without that urge we would scarcely be human . . . would we?’
    ‘That urge, as you put it, is utterly lacking in me.’
    ‘Don’t you long to know what’s over on the other side of a mountain?’
    ‘In the unlikely event of my curiosity being that strong, I think it would be far more sensible to drive round and see whatever it is as it’s meant to be seen,’ Ana countered. ‘Viewed from its own level ground.’
    Bernardo has an interesting comment on this subject. He too used to be possessed by that admirable urge to climb to the peak of whatever prominence he encountered, but living in the mountains changed all that and now he has not the least desire to climb even the humblest hillock. In fifteen years, he admits, he has never even seen the top of his own land, finding more than enough to occupy himself at the bottom of it. Still, such sentiments lay well ahead of me and I eventually cajoled Ana into the climb by dwelling on the healthy exercise the dog would get from such an expedition.
    Beaune raced gleefully into the scrub leaving us to climb slowly up behind her towards a concrete blockhouse perched at the hill’s summit. Amazingly enough, this blockhouse once presided over an aerial cableway that fifty years ago transported minerals across the valley, from the Minas del Conjuro ten kilometres to the east, out to the port of Motril thirty kilometres to the southwest.
    Once at the top, Ana seemed well pleased with the view. You lose the sound of the rivers up on the heights and a curious silence reigns, punctuated only by the cries of the tutubias and the breezes sighing in the broom. Beaune’s fur and our trousers were coated in scent from the bushes of rosemary we had bashed through and the fragrance was made more interesting by the