Visitors

I got in Marta’s car this morning to find three Americans squashed in together, waiting to be taken to La Capitana, Marta’s mother’s farm. I was relieved to be speaking in English for once. Marta introduced them to her country in the best English she could, and when she slapped her elbow at a lorry that cut in front of us, we discovered that “up yours” is the same in both English and Spanish.

As soon as we arrived, she went straight to the bull pens where we were yesterday. She’d far rather herd bulls than Americans. We were handed over to her eldest sister, Conchita, who runs tours of the farm. Conchita is neater than Marta, but being seven months pregnant doesn’t stop her from rumbling along the bumpy track, piled into the tractor-trailer with rest of us.

So little rain this year has meant that there isn’t enough grass for the growing bulls. The guy driving the tour tractor used the journey to feed the animals. The bulls know exactly what’s happening, and start lowing as soon as they see the tractor. They’re familiar with the boy, so it’s not too dangerous for him to hop down from the tractor with a big sack of grain and walk beside the long feed-bins, pouring the food as he goes. He can’t be more than about eighteen. In the paddock holding the one-year-old bulls, he passed a sack of grain to someone sitting at the back of the trailer and told them to hang the open end of the sack over the edge as we drove along.

Conchita sometimes turns to me for help with an English word, or to translate the tourists’ technical questions. American Jim breeds cows at home, so he knows his stuff. He once raised some orphaned piglets in his oven, to keep their little bodies toasty-warm without their mother. I’m not sure where I stand in the group. Marta introduced me to the others as her friend, but I still got into the tour-trailer instead of helping her with the work. Sometimes I find myself telling the tourists things about Andalucía: what the bulls’ brands mean, how people make the barbed-wire gates, which wildflowers will grow when the rain comes, and the names of trees. Some of these things you’d only know if you grew up here, but others I learnt only yesterday. I still take hundreds of pictures, and I “ooh” and “ahh” with the tourists at all the things I haven’t seen before, and some of those I have. You can’t help it when you see a herd of jet-black bulls galloping across an open plain.

We visit the pigs again, and as we tickle their sweet little chins Conchita explains that jamón iberico tastes so good because the pigs only eat acorns. Nobody refused the offer of a little tapa of jamón when we got back to the cortijo.

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