More proverbs and stereotypes

Juana Panza

It struck me watching her eat dinner the other day that Juana is pretty much a dead ringer for Sancho Panza, though I suppose rightly she ought to be Teresa. Like Sancho, she is a great one for proverbs and has taught me a few good ones, particularly about squeezing the juice out of things. The other day she was pointing out how much I was spending redoing the house and I said Sandy would have to work a bit harder so that we could keep it up. She liked that and went on a bit about me in the house, Sandy out at work, ha ha, then commented that men were like lemons, you had to squeeze all the juice out of them while you could. Another time, when she and Pablo were getting in the van to pick olives, I joked to Consuelo that she wasn’t bothering to go too because Juana and Pablo were there to do it: what are parents for, and Juana came out with a proverb that roughly meant: a patch of land and an old man: squeeze them while you can. I don’t know if this is an Andaluz proverb: I haven’t found it on any of the many websites dedicated to Spanish proverbs. Spanish is a language rich in proverbs, one website begins, and Juana has more or less has one for every occasion. Meanwhile Pablo is keeping his end up. We invited them to dinner the other night and inevitably a large part of the conversation was about food and drink: Pablo explained how wine was better in a leather bottle and it turns out there is a proverb for that: el vino en bota, la mujer en pelotas – wine best in a skin, woman best in her skin (i.e. naked). Subtle they are not – Don Quixote was very scathing about Sancho Panza and his strings of proverbs – his wisdom is clearly a bit too homespun and I wonder if this is still a very basic Spanish way of talking: Pablo and Juana do bring proverbs out in a way I have never heard an English person do. Juana is also quite rotund and, by her own admission, has suffered with donkeys; I can see her riding across the plains towards Madrid, swearing a bit and thinking about her next meal.

We made a big effort with the food, but they seemed somewhat cautious about it: Pablo repeated several times that it was not good to eat too much at night, making the faces of someone suffering indigestion to show what might happen, particularly to Juana who, contrary to appearances, he claimed was delicate. “La Juana, la Juana es delicada, pero el Pablo, no, Pablo no es delicada,” he said. In fact, Juana is as strong as an ox and managed to get all the food down without any difficulty, though none of them really liked the green vegetables: not something I have ever seen them eat – only peppers, and cabbage. They were very taken with the tarte Tatin I had made –Andaluz people have a very sweet tooth – but also rather mystified. Juana asked me what the fruit was and Consuelo asked me if the base was a pancake (crepes, said as if it were Spanish, not French). When I said, no, it was “pasta,” which is pastry, she vaguely recognised the concept. They don’t really bake here – though you can buy French style tarts in some patisseries – and indeed, I realise baking is quite an English thing. When I noted the absence anywhere of any kind of cake tin, or indeed, Tupperware large enough to fit a Christmas cake, the woman in the Vera domestic store explained to me that “you (the English) are much more into baking than we are.”

Pablo, meanwhile, was very interested in the sour cream, and poked it about quite a lot as if it might bite him, asking what it was. I was pushed to explain, since I don’t really know what it is, though I use it quite often and was pleased to find it in the Intermarche. He told Consuelo to try it as it was not at all bad after all. She took a small teaspoon and seemed surprised it was not disgusting. Anyway, they took all the rest of the tart home with them, with great enthusiasm, packing it away quickly as if I might change my mind. It was a good evening with a lot of jokes, and I hope they didn’t have indigestion during the night.


Donkey work

Meanwhile, the donkeys are proving a handful. The other day, Lara insisted on leading them up to Juana’s with me; I could tell from the off that they were in the mood for tricks. As we saying goodbye to Juana, Penny, who could tell Lara didn’t really have a grip of what she was doing, suddenly went loco and careered off into the rambla; Juana briefly caught her but was obliged to let go as Penny was stronger. Penny then did about six fast circuits of the rambla, while Luca strained on the rope I was holding, desperate to make a similar break for freedom. Eventually, she wore herself out, but not before I had to send a hysterical Lara back to the house; not being used to horses she had no idea whether we would ever catch Penny again. Penny looked quite satisfied after her gallop and mildly walked back to her stable. Subsequently, we have had a few energetic walks, with me pitting my weight against Penny’s – apparently a donkey doesn’t wear a bridle with a bit, but you need one with a chain and all I had was a halter – until Pablo produced an ancient donkey bridle which I am trying to restore. Meanwhile, whenever they are out of their paddock, there is always something going on. I came out to check them and found Penny tangled herself up around several trees while Luca ate the orange tree. I can’t leave them like that when I am not there to disentangle them so have persuaded Sandy to allow me to create another field at the side of the land. More work for Juan and his men who might as well have Portacabins on our land since they are here most weeks:
At least the donkeys now have a huge stable, now completely renovated with great enthusiasm by Juan’s men, who have spent a lot of time replacing the roof, re-blocking the walls and putting in new stable doors.

Stuff a mushroom

When I went to post my last blog entry, I saw from the Google home page that a “blog of note” called To Do List has become a book. Exclamation mark! I guess it is like reincarnation: if blogs are good, then one day they can become books and go from being blind, shapeless things to having a hard back and crawling about on the shelves at Waterstones. Hmm – well, I wonder what To Do List is about – I couldn’t be bothered to look but I imagined it was one of those sex and shopping books with the coloured covers, only the ones with no sex or shopping, which are aimed at the older woman and are about how busy women’s lives are, how they spend all their time juggling and then their husband goes off and shags the nanny. There is a formula for UK books these days, if they are going to get into the top ten which is more or less all you can buy in any bookshop and is made up of some of the above, a few autobiographies of abused children and a couple of thrillers that claim to be better than, or as good as, that best seller about the Holy Grail which I couldn’t finish it was so boring.

Here, I can buy books in two main places: the tobacconist in Vera, which has a weird and random selection of things like Cervantes and Virgil mixed in with modern Spanish novels, or the Mojacar El Fuente newsagent, which has scholarly editions, massive academic dictionaries, histories of Almeria and then some regional cookery and romances. At least you never know what you will find lurking behind the newspapers.

As for me, I am doing more cooking. Lots of people told me that when I came to Spain I would have time to do creative things, like write a book about coming to Spain, but every time I try to sit down and read, let alone write, I think of a job I need to do, and cooking is time consuming. You might wonder what is the point when someone is just going to eat it and shit it out the other end, but if you go down that road you would not make the bed either, a thought that has crossed my mind.

I had not cooked much for about 14 years, or about as long as I have been married, until I came here. Sandy has done it all, but now he is not here much in the week so he has passed the oven glove to me. I didn’t like the idea at first, particularly having to think up what to give the children. All I could think of was my mother’s chicken paprika and perhaps one other recipe, since I am more inclined just to eat raw food myself. More worryingly, Sandy has a lot of cookery books that require you to do things with sheet gelatine, strainers or make sugar baskets. However, now I have discovered Delia Smith, who seemed pretty damn boring when she was on telly: it seems a minor miracle that if you follow the recipe it all works out. I have begun to feel quite smug, making a meal for the children in advance, even though it still takes about an hour out of the day and there is a fair chance they will say they don’t feel like that and would like a pizza. If I didn’t do it, I would have more time to do something more intellectually stimulating, like improving my Spanish, reading, or (ha ha) writing…

Shirley Conran famously said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom: another good housekeeping tip. I guess it depends what else you have to do, perhaps writing books about not wasting time stuffing mushrooms, or a to do list, maybe.

English and Spanish friends

Wednesday, market day, is my day out – all of fifteen minutes drive and I am in the town. I am beginning to enjoy it – you always meet someone and end up having a coffee in the Bar Plaza, which is heaving with old men drinking strange spirits in coffee through the morning. Once I have picked up my huge pile of forwarded junk mail, I tour round the market stalls picking out the fruit and vegetables that look best, and then normally go to the bank – which still has a friendly bank manager. I was pleased today to meet a new person, Lynne, whom I saw from afar and decided to talk to, since she had a nice red jacket and one of those faces that look a bit like a painting – that is, one by a real artist, not a pretty-as-a picture face; she is fifty something, I would say, from Brighton, where she used to have a clothes shop. She is now divorced and living in a country house here: she said it was hard but she had wanted a life where she didn’t spend every evening drinking and socialising and had time to grow vegetables. Now, of course, she feels consumed by Protestant work-ethic guilt, though not enough to make her throw the trowel in and go back to selling rags in a town that increasingly has the same high street as any other and where small individual shopkeepers can’t afford the rent. She said she was finding it hard here, so I asked what was hard and she said: the physical work, lighting wood stoves (agreed – I have just had a lorry load of wood delivered), dealing with water that doesn’t come on (agreed: the other day we had no water – the pump had air because the hose from the well had blocked up) and all the admin (agreed). It is certainly not easy for a woman on her own, but I looked at her and expected that she was something of a steel magnolia, or whatever the English version of that is. There are a number of women of this kind living out here, whether alone or with husband trailing along behind; despite being quiet they are actually hardy, and adopt stray dogs and do the garden and the vegetables until they are 100, like those famous 19th ceEnglish women travellers.

I liked Lynne and realised afterwards that I had missed talking to someone other than Spanish builders: Sandy is in Australia for another 3 weeks now so I am all the more pleased to make friends. I also saw Mercedes, Sylvia’s sister’s best friend: she is an oddly English Spanish woman – by which I mean that she is quiet, reserved and I would say fearful: she brought her husband to our meeting just in case: he is a policeman, too – they met when she was on holiday in Vera and I wonder she was bold enough, but Sylvia says she was very beautiful when young, so perhaps he approached her. She teaches English in Vera school, speaks good English and my Spanish is good enough, but there is still a barrier, which might be personality, or might be language – hard to say. She is from Madrid and went to British school, but is now desperate to live in the north, in Asturias, interestingly – much more sophisticated than down here. I imagine Asturias and Andalucía are as different as chalk and cheese, or perhaps Mercedes and I. However, we had a pleasant talk, and I learned a few things – that there are restaurants that don’t just do meat or fish on the grill, that currants don’t exist in Spain, and that she moderates her Madrid accent or the locals laugh at it for being posh – but at the same time that the Andaluz accent is seen as rather charming by madrilenos – perhaps a bit funny, but charming. Sylvia asked me afterwards how I found her so I said, that we got on, but not like you and me and she laughed and said well, it was unusual to get on as well as we did. And that is true: I never had a Sylvia before, and it is interesting she is half and half French and Spanish, not an English girl, or even an English sheep in Spanish wolf’s clothing, like Mercedes.

There are a lot of stereotypes in what I have written, I expect – not all Spanish women are strong, fat and capable of managing a runaway donkey, nor are all English ones cool but hardy gardeners and bakers. But when you move, you inevitably think in stereotypes, because you spend so much of your time comparing what was, with what is and also, of course, wondering where you stand in it and how you are liable to change.