THEY’RE TAKING the cork harvest at a finca on the way down to the river. ‘Why don’t you come along and see?’ says Fernando, who is acting as informal agent. We hurry over before the men take their lunch-break.
The leaves of the cork oaks look dense and bunched above. Blue flashes through the openings, a gentian blue – or, better in these parts, the blue of our local gromwell, lithospermum. It’s common right through spring here, brilliant blue eyes in the undergrowth or on rock walls, imperturbable, celestial. But the lithospermum‘s over now; summer’s come: the time for the stripping of the cork oaks has come with it. We have the sky only now instead of flowers, the proper heavens.
Sometimes the shadow of a bird passes across the tree trunks, across the heavy, knobbly branches and the weed-choked ground, the shadow bobbing and flitting through the leaves too quick for you to look up after the bird. The men are young. Flat stomachs. You can’t be fat and do this job. They work in pairs, one pair for each tree that they tackle: there’s one man at ground level, working at the main part of the trunk, the other up among the branches, often dangerously high-looking, whacking away single-handed with an axe, using the other hand to balance with. Sometimes these high-level axemen stretch way up to reach a good run of cork, sometimes they kneel on a doubtful-looking perch or in a cleft and whack away beneath them. You have to strike equally well with either hand. Ladders lean higgledy-piggledy against the lower trunks as if the high-level men have bounded up and then forgotten all about them. Which they probably have. You need all your concentration to strip a cork oak. And not fall off while you are doing it.
The trees already stripped are an astonishment, pale as a white skin, a woman’s skin dense with freckles, a little stretched, sometimes a little pitted, bare torsos with arms extended in often rather lumpy poses. All of them are statue-still in the great glade that they themselves compose. Above the tangle of leaves, the shining sky. Soon the stripped trunks will turn an intense salmon-red, as astonishing as the first pale, naked colour, then they will darken and darken for each of the ten years it takes the cork to grow back again, ready for the next harvest. The whole glade smells like a carpentry shop, intoxicating.
There are children about now; school is out for the summer, one little family. The parents keep a few pata negra pigs in a stone shed in the glade. There’s a hairy sausage dog.
The axes the men work with are quite light, with semi-circular heads. Their owners strike the cork – which is maybe as thick as a thumb is long – following a line of weakness or near-rupture to make the first opening. After a few rapid blows on the chosen line, to start it off, they begin to lever the cork as they strike, twisting the axe-head so that the loosened cork begins to come away a little from the tree beneath. You probably hit the loosened sheet a few times with the back of the axe-head, thwack, thwack, thwack. Everything’s very quick. But the noise is like slowed-down woodpeckers. Then you turn the axe upside down, like reversing arms. The bottom of the wooden handle, now uppermost, has been filed down to a flat, thin, wooden blade, allowing the axeman to work it in as a wedge between the cork and the tree. He levers with the handle (or sometimes with a big, one-purpose-only wooden lever) and pulls as he levers, the worker on the ground perhaps getting help from the man above. Large, uneven, loosely-formed, untidy rectangles of cork come away one by one as the work progresses, two, three, even four metres long. They fall heavily to the ground. The children shout in alarm at the dog, the children’s parents shout in alarm at the children. ‘Cuidado’, call the men among the trees. ‘Take care’.
The scene would be idyllic if it wasn’t obvious that this is hard work, serious hard work. The men take frquen pulls of water from a big jerry can standing among the trees.
The strips and planks of cork begin to build up on the ground. Sometimes they bounce a little. There’s a piece that’s rounded like an elephant’s trunk, bouncing and undulating. It IS an elephant’s trunk, death suddenly among us. For one bad moment it’s Robert Lowell’s dying whale, the lever a harpoon. It ‘works and drags/and rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags.’
And then the moment’s over. The tractor comes up with its trailer and all hands not in the branches toss the cork strips in until they mount high over the trailer’s rim. A net goes over the heaped strips and ropes are winched just tight enough to get the unsteady cargo safely down to the assembly place across from the cemetery, bouncing all the way.
When the tractor’s gone, some of the men carry straight on working. Others stroll around for a moment, easing backs and arms. Cordial chat breaks out. There are quite a few tattoos, baseball caps. Some wear gloves. Most don’t; they say the axe can slip in your hands. They proudly show us the hands in question – tree-blackened, callused. They are interested in the weight of cork they cut each day, not in the number of trees they clear. They can hardly hazard a guess how many that might be.
Sometimes the cutting team use mules to haul cork out of places where the ground is very difficult. ‘There are still plenty of mules in my village’, says one of the young men. ‘I’ll sell you one. How many would you like?’
Another says he’s a blacksmith, has made the axe he’s using this year. He pings it and it gives along satisfying ring, a bird call.
The axes are set well out from the handles, at right angles, naturally, joined to them by a steel haft, a bar long enough to wrap your whole hand round. You use this bar to hold the axe with when you turn it upside down to act as a lever. The blacksmith asks me if I’d like to have a go. Yes, I would. I try, not hitting nearly hard enough, standing at it straight and awkward. It’s a little lesson in how the axemen use the torsion of their bodies. More like tennis players than gymnasts – or, indeed, ordinary wood-choppers. Backs and shoulders bend and blend into the rapid stroke.
They have to cut very exactly. The pale skin revealed by removing the cork is an inner tegument covering the whole tree; it s existence allows you to strip the whole tree without it dying, as it would if you were removing normal bark. If you cut the tegument you risk damaging the tree, perhaps severely, say the axemen. The two together, tegument and cork, make the tree remarkably fire resistant. Just as well, we think, in an area where forest fire is the chief danger – and cork oaks are precious, really precious. You have to wait 30 years after a tree is planted before you take the first crop, and even then that’s often a poor one, obliging you to wait ten more years before a tree is really launched.
We walk away eventually with Fernando. Stripping cork-oaks is one of those demanding rural arts like making good wine or forging a clear, ringing axe head.