JESUS COMES DOWN A ROCKY PATH through pines, in quite a smart hat. On his left side, he’s carrying a tiny, leggy kid in the crook of his elbow. It’s linen white, looks as if it’s just come from the laundry. On the other side of his body, legs braced and the whole of its little frame supported on his right arm, he holds another kid, parti-coloured, black and white – and red as well, with blood. A very mucky kid.
‘Just born, just now. The other was half an hour ago. Terrific eating in six weeks or two months.’ He’s referring to the kids, of course.
‘I’ve got nine now , all males.’
The mother goat is right behind Jesus, as if physically attached to him. She’s blood all the way down the back of her legs and the last of the after-birth swings from her rear end, a thin long sack.
Jesus offers her the newest-born to sniff at then sets the two kids down side by side, the newest very wonky. The mother goes straight to it, starts to lick.
The little party is actually led by yet another goat which has to be shooed away as Jesus sets down the new-born, to prevent her getting in on the mothering.
‘She’s had hers already. It’s at home. She’s just out for the feed today.’
Jesus helps his son with a little finca just nearby, with guinea fowl and turkeys, a pair of each just at this moment. There is good water here.
In his free time, he marches his little flock of goats about the countryside, along with two half-grown puppies. No matter when, he always seems to have one pup in tow. Or two.
….
We walk on over the brow of the hill so densely forested till the coming of the fiery month of August. Now the burned trees, which were mostly still standing, have been converted into equally unsightly clear-cut, revealing a previously unknown crest to the top of the hill. With the mass cutting, the whole landscape has been dramatically reconfigured, vista upon vista suddenly revealed, with tracks we never knew about leading to abandoned animal-pens and roofless stone barns.
Down just beyond the hill is the loggers’ current worksite, no felling, no log lifting today, no lorries to take it away either since this is a bank holiday weekend. But there’s a huge pile of severed branches with their needles on, a big -bungalow-sized heap, giving off a lovely resinous odour.
Next week there will no doubt reappear an impressive machine we have often walked past in recent weeks, steel-built, green-painted. At one end the pine branches are fed into an open box like a vast, deep oven tray, pass through a digestive process inside the great contraption and emerge the other end ground up, ready now to be pressed into briquettes for people’s stoves or central heating.
The machine and its dark-browed, sweating servitors come from across the border with Portugal and so does the extra set of lorries which load up with the dusty, chewed up, briquette raw material. In this deep-country world of scant and often contradictory information, we believe from what we have heard there is a briquette factory somewhere just across the border.
Nothing from the human world being in evidence, beside ourselves, two red kites come over very low, swivelling their bodies, angling their wings, capable of any marvel in the flying line – most graceful of all the bigger birds of prey. We look up to admire them. Two griffon vultures are also overflying us, circling against the sky, one tier higher, wingspan average two metres ninety cms.. Their raggedy wing-tips are turned up like ailerons.
Though we are more Atlantic than Mediterranean in the sierra, the sky this morning is that cerulean, Mediterranean blue, as deep and piercing as the imagined Bavarian gentians in D. H. Lawrence’s poem or a Chagall night sky, up on the wall in a gallery on the Cote d’Azur. The local competitor for a comparable shade of blue – deep and piercing at the same time – is lithospermum, in English gromwells of one sort or another. We are worried because quite a lot of these are out already, Dec 7, peering at you bright-eyed from scraps of foliage on the tops of the stone walls. Have they mistaken the season and come out dangerously early?
The old ladies who take their afternoon walks a little closer to the village tell you it’s not right, never been like this before. It’s hot, too hot.
In Paris the climate change conference is under way but nobody mentions it – too far away for the imagination, perhaps, like the whole world of public affairs. There’s a general election here in two weeks’ time and nobody mentions that either.
We descend for an hour through pines, which take over again below the devastated hilltop. They too smell gorgeous. The pine needles glitter silver where the sun strikes them.
Then we tack back at lower level and cross a little bridge over a stream – all the roads round the back-valleys here are dirt. The stream glitters between dark patches of stiller water, fresh down from the Ermita de San Lorenzo. The greens are almost blue. There’s not enough water in the stream for the start of December.
Our journey back is uphill, though it drops down once or twice on the way up, meaning the labour of returning home is greater than the labour of leaving it. We are soon in a land of rock and olive trees. The olive leaves glitter like the pine needles. We shed quite a lot of clothing, look up at the mountains, say, as we often do, we ought to bring binoculars. But they are just one extra thing to carry.
A final hill which tests our breathing, and then we are past the spot where we met Jesus and his kids.
Picasso said once – maybe many times for all I know – that the landscapes people see are made up by painters. ‘Nature is one thing,’ he said. ‘Painting is another. Painting is an equivalent of nature (my italics). We owe the image we have of nature to painters. We can only perceive it through them.’
It’s true – they certainly offer ways of seeing. But not only the painters.
Last night, perhaps because mid-wnter is getting nearer, whatever the temperature, we were reading Keats’s St Agnes Eve out loud, antiphonally, perhaps a quaint proceeding. The poem evokes cold and coldness like no other in the language but is also incredibly rich in colours, offered, of course, for the mind’s eye only.
I think we have both been walking with Keats and his rich palette of colours in our minds all morning and we’ve come home feeling the countryside is made by poets just as much as painters. Our thanks to D. H. Lawrence as well as to John Keats.