Drinking Partner Jeremy Clarke Las Alpujan-as Asuc
Drinking Partner Jeremy Clarke Las Alpujan-as Asuccession of loud explosions reverberated across the ravine. I went and stood at the door of the shepherd's hut and looked out. A dense fog had descended. The explosions came from the direction of a tiny village called Atalbeitar.
There are four tiny villages perched on the side of the mountain, all of them ancient, poor and, in varying degrees, primitive. Of the four, Atalbeitar is easily the smallest and most primitive and commonly reputed to be a hotbed of black arts. I drove there once by mistake, and the crumbling desolation led me to assume the place was abandoned. So when I learnt that a small population existed within the crumbling walls, and moreover that a fiesta in honour of the village's patron saint was planned for Saturday night, I was keen to attend. The shattering explosions I could hear thundering across the mountainsides were fireworks, and these fireworks presumably heralded the start of the festivities.
But before I could head off I had the shepherd to deal with. He and I had spent the day drinking mutely together in a succession of village bars. And five minutes earlier, completely out of the blue, and in spite of the language difficulties, he'd declared his love and asked me to live with him Living with a 50-year-old Spanish shepherd as husband and wife wasn't really what I wanted, and I was anxious to get away.
I went back inside and told him (by miming drinking, dancing and singing) that I was leaving immediately for the fiesta at Atalbeitar. His lower lip shot out. He hung his head. He turned his back on me. Well, all right, then, I said. I'll stay. But only until we've drunk all the beer. Then I'm definitely going.
There were six bottles left — about half an hour's worth. We'd been prising off the caps so far with the side of his disposable lighter, which had become misplaced in the darkness of his hut. As a substitute he produced an old chrome-plated English policeman's whistle from a drawer, blew it, and levering with the ring at the end prised off a few caps. Two more toots signalled that the job was done.
I've noticed before what a wonderful cure for afflictions of the spirit is the urgent, slightly throaty sound of a policeman's whistle. The change was immediate. The shepherd forgot his grievance at once and became infected with hilarity. Worse still, he announced an intention to accompany me to the fiesta. He swapped his filthy anorak for a slightly less filthy tunic, fashioned, by the look of it, from an old blanket, and paraded his party outfit for my approval. I nodded judiciously, he blew the whistle and we headed off. With any luck, I reasoned, I could lose him at the fiesta by concealing myself among the dancers or something.
Visibility was down to a couple of yards. I drove with my nose to the windscreen. The shepherd put his head out of the window to alert me when we were in danger of driving off the edge. We drove like this along miles of mountain track, hardly knowing whether we were going up or down, seemingly alone in a blank universe. (We were fortunate, however, in having the best off-road vehicle there is — a 'compact' hire car.) After missing a crucial turning twice, the tumbledown houses on the outskirts of Atalbeitar finally loomed out of the fog.
I parked the car and we felt our way through a maze of narrow, claustrophobic streets and tunnels. The fiesta, when we found it, was a very low-key affair. In a clearing in the ruins, which passed for the village square, about 20 people of all ages were gathered around the blazing stump of an olive tree and passing around a jumbosized fizzy-drinks bottle containing some kind of hooch. It was very disappointing. I was expecting music at the very least, and maybe some dancing, with perhaps some vile communal barbarism involving a donkey or a tethered goose to round things off. Or perhaps, given Atalbeitar's reputation as a kind of university of magic, a Red Arrows-style display of synchronised broomstick aerobatics.
They shuffled their chairs along a bit to make room for the shepherd and me at their fire. The shepherd placed a chair under me, as if we were newly betrothed and I was in a delicate condition. And there we sat, lit by the flames, drinking what turned out to be some very palatable rosé until dawn. Not what I'd expected at all. But the quiet, accepting courtliness of the villagers, and the strange intimacy of seeing firelight reflected in their friendly eyes, and the lovely wine, of course, imparted a kind of magic to the night-long vigil that was in fact rather better than anything I could have hoped for or imagined.
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