The Unintended Gazpacho

It was one of those blisteringly hot, late summer afternoons. The heat shimmered above the scrubby, golden grass at the edge of the vegetable plot, where a couple of goats, tethered to a post nipped mercilessly at the dry tufts. Frustrated by the lack of verdure, they leapt up onto a dry stone wall, damaging it in the process, to reach the faint green of an overhanging olive branch.

Apart from the chomping of the goats, the countryside was silent. Not a bird sang. All was quiet; that is, except for the snoring which came from a small stone hut.

Until about two o’clock it had been cool enough to work, and Felix Gomez Gomez had been gathering tomatoes from his orchard. Many of them were the smaller ones, and a few were pear shaped. These he would bottle for his own consumption and some would be for Lula. She paid him reasonably well for them, in fact sometimes absent mindedly, a little too handsomely. Today he had also picked some prime specimens, large irregular beef tomatoes, which were so good, just diced and sprinkled with rock salt. He knew that Lula would appreciate them. She was one of the few who talked to him nowadays, he liked her for it, and besides, he felt somehow that there was a small chance of some physical comfort with her. His life was otherwise a lonely one exacerbated by alcoholism.

Lunch had consisted of a bottle of red wine and gazpacho; stale bread, olive oil and tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic and peppers, bashed up roughly with a wooden pestle in a cork bowl, and moistened with water from the pottery cántaro on the shelf in the corner. A slice or two of cheese had helped the last of the wine coax him into a somnolent trance.

Although he was probably younger than he looked, he was a diminutive wizened old man in appearance, with two crooked teeth, and a leathery, unshaven face. He slept his siesta in the relatively cool interior of his hut. His head had fallen forward onto his wine-stained shirt and the greasy flat cap, which otherwise never left his head, had fallen onto the cobbled floor. A couple of flies circled spasmodically above him as though savouring the pungent aroma of sweat which emanated from the open neck of his frayed shirt.

An observer from the village would have been surprised at his full head of hair. He was never to be seen without the flat cap, and the general assumption was that he was bald on top. No one was certain how old he was, least of all he himself.

He had been orphaned before the Spanish civil war, and all through it he had been cared for by the impoverished village community, along with the other waifs and strays. He remembered eating the weeds and plants which grew in the countryside, and in winter they were cooked up over a fire of olive prunings into a bitter porridge together with the rough meal obtained with difficulty from patches of oats, barley or wheat. Sometimes there were beans or chickpeas but not often, and those who were fortunate enough to own a hen or two were careful not to let them out until they had checked with a finger to see whether they had laid an egg or not.

After the war there were few men left in El Castaño de Guzmán. Some had died; some were in prison, which was much the same thing; others had been obliged to migrate to the north in search of work. Those who remained were the wounded, and the weak, and those too young to have been involved. Even years after the end of the second world war there had been a continued exodus of men seeking work in France, Germany and Britain, some of them the companions of his childhood and his youth.

For Felix nothing much had changed since the brief unsuccessful flirtation with democracy which had been the second republic; there had been poverty then as there was after the civil war and it would continue to exist in this corner of Spain for many decades.

As a young man, Felix had learned to keep himself in pocket by smuggling coffee into Spain from Portugal. He and his fellow contrabandists had had to struggle their way along the rough mountain trails with huge sacks of beans on their backs, tethered to esparto grass slings passed over their foreheads. Sometimes those fortunate enough to possess a mule or a donkey had been able to use them, but it was a risk to take beasts of burden for they were expensive and made easy targets for the guns of the border police. It had been a hard life, dodging the bullets of the Guardia Civil even for a young man, and besides he had grown up malnourished and his legs were bowed from childhood rickets.

All that was long over. Even now, new drains and mains water per being piped through the village. Also, he had the comfort of red wine. He could fill his belly from the small orchard and vegetable patch which had been left to him by his parents, and he had a rough whitewashed house of one room on the edge of the village. It had a fireplace with an iron cooking pot, and a courtyard at the back where his parents had kept a donkey. He often wished he had a donkey, but he could not afford it. He’d had one once, just after he had given up the coffee smuggling, when he was still flush with money, and before the drink had taken a hold of him. He had kept the donkey for ten years, but then one spring, when the cistus was bursting into bloom he had gambled it away during a binge drinking session from which he had awoken deathly white and shaking, frozen with cold, and lying in a ditch ten kilometres from home. He could remember nothing about getting there, nor of losing his donkey, but it was at just about the same time of year that the gipsy tribe camped down by the stream on their way north to the big horse fair, and by the time he had recovered sufficiently to investigate, the gipsies were gone, and the ashes of their fire long since cold.

Like most people in the village, Felix collected jam jars and old juice bottles for preserving the produce of his orchard, and when he returned to the village with his wheelbarrow full of tomatoes, he would lay them out carefully on the newspaper covered earthen floor. Over the next few days he would return to the orchard again and again until he had collected the whole crop. Then he would start to boil water over the fire in his iron pan; he’d dip the tomatoes into it, peel them quickly, and then press them with a wooden spoon into the glass jars. When he had ten or twelve jars filled to the brim, he would screw on the lids, and plunge the jars into the hot water. He’d bring them back up to the boil and simmer them for half an hour or so, then allow them to cool. Thus, over several days he preserved his crop for the winter and the following spring, and in November he would be able to make a stew of pig’s liver and tomato, onions and oregano, when he killed his pig. The onions were still in the ground, and he had picked the oregano and dried it in June.

Felix woke with a start from his slumber. He was still a little groggy from the wine. He needed a cup of coffee. He stood slowly, and bent to pick his cap off the floor. He tidied away the remains of his lunch onto a high stone shelf, and he hung the three legged stool onto a wooden peg in the stone wall. Light filtered in through the chinks between the loose tiles of the roof. He checked there was enough water in the pottery jug for tomorrow, and went out into the glare of the afternoon. He untied the goats from the wooden post and led them into the cool of the hut, shutting the door firmly behind them. In the pigsty next door he tipped some of last year’s acorns into the trough, along with a handful of maize and a huge roughly chopped ochre-fleshed pumpkin, which the pig attacked eagerly, slurping and crunching his way through the thick dark green skin.

Wearily Felix picked up the handles of the great wheelbarrow. His prize beef tomatoes perched on top of a mountain of lesser fruit. It was a wonderful sight, this scarlet mountain as he teetered along the lane and out into the middle of the quiet country road which skirted the village. It was a quiet road, unfrequented by any vehicle save the odd mule cart and twice a day the bus passed by, not necessarily stopping unless there was post or a passenger for El Castaño de Guzmán, which was a rare occurrence. Here there was a bar, La Parada, which was where the morning and afternoon buses could stop on their way between Huelva and Badajoz. Although the people of the village were some distance from the main road, the limited public transport was obliged to divert for the two or three pueblos which lay along this side route.

This was where Felix intended to take his cup of strong black coffee, accompanied by a shot of brandy. It was his habitual afternoon heart-starter, and would return him once more to the land of the living. At present he wandered along in a slightly befuddled condition, yet proudly aware of his mountain of tomatoes. His greatest pride and pleasure lay in the excellent specimens which rode along perched majestically like maharajas on their elephants, above the common throng. He could imagine Lula smiling as she took them from him, and she would surely ask him into the house for some refreshment.

It so happened that this was the eve of the day that four village boys had come of age and were off to do their military service on the morrow. The little group, was known as a quinto and they were merry, these boys, because they had been drinking for two days, not merely to give them the courage to leave the pueblo but because last night had been the second night of the village fiesta. As Felix hove unsteadily into view, wheeling his barrow along the raised hump which was the centre of the road, it occurred to one of the young men that it would be a splendid jape to run out into the road and give old Gonzalez Gonzalez a bit of a fright.

With hoots of laughter the young men ran out, dancing around Felix, and urging him to drink from their bottle. One of them gave the barrow a high spirited little nudge, and over it went, spilling its scarlet cargo all over the road. Felix let go the handle and raised his hands in the air “¡Ay,mis tomates!” he cried running around in circles, much to the amusement of the four young men. Felix was obviously distressed, he started to run here and there, picking up the tomatoes in apparent panic.

“Come on old man, join us for a drink. They’re only tomatoes!”

”Yes, join us for a drink, Gomez Gomez....the tomatoes can wait, we’ll pick them up later.”

“but, but....”spluttered Felix, for he knew what he was on about. It was that time of day.

One of the boys at least had had the decency to rescue the wheel barrow and the few tomatoes which remained in it, and he’d pushed it to the side of the road. The distant drone of an approaching motor could be heard, but the young men were singing loudly now, arms around each other’s shoulders in a fraternal spirit. They gathered Felix into the circle. He cast his eyes behind him anxiously and suddenly there was the blare of a horn, and they sprung into the scrubby hedge. The afternoon bus roared by, splattering its way through the tomatoes, and leaving behind it an unintended gazpacho.