CLEMENTE CAUGHT ME by the fountain and we walked a few steps down among the stalls for the weekly market. They were being erected, as usual, rather late in the morning. ‘I heard the sad news about Peque’, I said, speaking of the death of his close friend while we were away, maybe two weeks ago. ‘Sad?’ said Clemente. ‘Bad, bad as it could be’.
Peque and Clemente were not just close, they were intimate friends.
Until illness struck Peque four months ago, he walked up the steep stone track to the ermita of San Lorenzo every morning, an hour or maybe less for him, though he was already 80. He had made the garden around the little church, set in a dell up on the mountain, into a place of beauty. Thanks to his patient work over the years, It has something very like a northern European lawn. There are water sprinklers – not so surprising, really, though it looks unusual up here: there is a lot of water at San Lorenzo. Over the years Peque had planted mildly ornamental trees, flowers, pampas grass. There is a grove of pines above the church, which makes it a sonorous, whooshing place on windy days. The whole of the village comes up on the first Sunday in August for the local pilgrimage to San Lorenzo.
Games include a tug of war and a flag waving contest, the latter also requiring real strength. You make a rapid, swirling circle with the flag – which is a heavy one – at head height, then drag it through the air, with huge force, low and parallel to the ground without ever touching it. Then up again and repeat – and repeat – and repeat until you are exhausted. Daniel (the builder) is best with the flag, but Martín (carpenter) is also surprisingly good, given his tendency to put on weight. This communal outing – the event is known as a romería – was Peque’s annual triumph, everyone congratulating him on the loveliness of the garden and how fitting it was for the church having it there.
Peque was tiny, his nickname of course an abbreviation of the word for ‘Small’, Pequeño. Clemente is short as well, but sturdy where Peque was birdlike, and Clemente wears a thick heavy beard, almost a spade beard, with streaks of white. They made an unusual working team, like two badly matched horses, Clemente a miniature plough horse, Peque more likely to prance a little, at least in his inclinations. He was a lively conversationalist, very free in his observations, as well as a natural gardener.
We often meet Clemente coming home with his donkey from his little farm (his finca), over by the pines in La Fortaleza and he likes to stop and talk a while. It was from him we first heard that Peque’s cancer was terminal.
Clemente had told us he visited Peque twice a week, walking over the alto, the little local pass, to the old people’s residencia in Don Gomez. ‘Se lo merece, he deserves it.’
His tone this morning was as grave as it could be.
‘It was about the Tuesday,’ he said, moving on from my expression of sympathy. ‘Or maybe it was Wednesday. I was up at the ermita unrolling a bale of wire, to make a fence, you see. It came to me to take a photo of San Lorenzo. So I did, and then I thought, ‘What if it turns out badly? I’d better take another’. So I did that too’.
‘Next, when I came down, I spoke to Antonio, the pastry cook (the pastelero) from Coria and I said to him, “What about a cake with San Lorenzo on it?” So I showed him the photo. “Claro” said Antonio. “Con mas motivo que nunca – with a better will than ever”. He had made Peque birthday cakes before, you see. Now there was a deeper reason.
‘So we started to plan a meal, only we meant to keep it a surprise. It was to be in the place just as you come into the village, on the left’. (Victor was telling us lately about a sumptuous wild boar stew that he and shooting friends had had there. Victor cleans out the swimming-pool and looks after safety; he’s a hard-slogging workman and a marvellous horseman too. All this with only one arm. The huntsmen’s meal at the new bar/restaurant had been a great success.)
‘I telephoned the bar and fixed it up’, said Clemente, ‘only I didn’t know how many people we would be, ten or maybe eleven. Or we might have been twelve. It was something to keep an eye on.
‘Peque was having a good spell, walking well. So we planned to go first to the bar in the square just here’ – pointing to El Capricho, increasingly concealed behind the now-burgeoning market stalls. Clemente and I were moving down hill all the while, step by step towards Capricho as the stall beside us claimed more ground.
‘So, on the day, we went up to Don Gomez and fetched him back in a friend’s car’ said Clemente, ‘and walked the short way to El Capricho and had a few wines together. Peque had no idea about the lunch. I still didn’t know exactly how many were coming, whether it was ten or eleven or possibly twelve.
‘After the wine, we walked back towards the lunch bar.’
To reach this, you have to pass the Medical Centre, where Don Jaime presides and has done for 30 years even though he lives across the border, in the province of Salamanca.
‘You know Peque had always got on very well with la Sara, she’s the nurse, of course. So he had to go in and see her, and she was there at the time, which was a good thing. Then one or two more of us went in and in the end all of us’. Crowding into the reception room in the converted house that serves as Medical Centre.
‘We had decided to pay the restaurant quietly among all of us. But not Peque, of course, it was his birthday. And on the day it didn’t matter at all how many of us were at the lunch. They looked after us splendidly. It was una comida de maravilla, a marvellous meal. Peque had beautifully done pork chops, beautifully cooked. And the cake. Antonio had drawn San Lorenzo on the icing in chocolate. It was beautiful too. With the path leading up to the church door and everything.’
By the weekend it was obvious that Peque was now very unwell. His sister from Villaviega came and spent time with him. (Villaviega is a satellite village with irrigable land, way down in the valley, but it belongs to the village proper. Villaviega elects a councillor to the village town hall. Peque’s father had moved down long ago and this was where Peque spent his childhood.)
‘Well, I passed the time at home, waiting for Peque’s niece to telephone from the residencia’, said Clemente. ‘No call. Nothing till the next day when she told me it couldn’t last long. In the evening, she called again and told me it was all over.
‘Peque had wanted to be cremated and he wanted his ashes placed in the church at San Lorenzo, maybe behind a stone, hidden. But Don Fulgencio (the priest) said that was ilegitimo, i-le-gi-ti-mo, so they decided in the end to bury him by his father in Villaviega’.
I gave Clemente my deepest condolences and walked down into the valley, then up again to the ridge on the path to La Serena. From here I cut back to the pass on the way to Don Gomez. This was the alto Clemente had crossed twice a week, walking up and then down to the neighbouring village to visit his friend during Peque’s months in the residencia there. I could almost see Clemente clomping up the hill.