COLD SIERRAS


I reached Córdoba on 12 December. While Sevilla had been grandly metropolitan like a would-be Paris, Córdoba was ancient, twisted and quite fascinating. The hostel was in the Judería or Jewish Quarter, a capillary network of narrow Kafkaesque streets; its entrance gave onto a little square called Plaza Juda where students sat on white iron seats at white iron tables in a mild sun that made me forget the icy morning. AND THE HOSTEL (like all those in Andalucia, quite palatial) WAS HEATED: I long wallowed in this mythical luxury.

Next morning, in frigid sunlight, the mosque was an experience photographs had scarcely prepared me for: a sacred grove of double arches in alternating red and grey stones, a mihrab whose mosaics glistened with shards of metal. Even the absurd vulgarity of the Christian increment did not spoil the effect: it deserves simply to be ignored.

In the patio outside was an orangery irrigated, as in the Alhambra, by fountains and water shooting down stone conduits - just what Ibn Battuta had seen at the mosque in Málaga.

By the Roman bridge I stopped a passer-by. ‘Is there a cheap bar I can eat at around here?’

‘I suggest my cafeteria. Come with me. It's a teacher training college.’

‘Oh, I was a teacher! - You're a professor, then?

‘That's right.’

In the basement of a large grey building we shouldered our way through crowds of students to a counter where I ordered a sandwich and a beer. ‘What will you have?’

‘Oh, I have a class to go to. Thanks all the same.’ He turned to the barman. ‘Put that on my tab.’

‘But you can't!’ I protested weakly.

‘Ah, but I can! Now I must rush. Nice meeting you.’

I thanked his back.

Rosa sent me this portrait of her

Left chewing on my own in the animated huddle, I was beginning to feel quite lonely; from time to time I cast surreptitious glances at two girls. To my consternation, I now found one of them was holding my gaze. I gulped my beer, and, as I turned to leave, they approached.

‘She wanted to talk with you.’ The girl nodded at her friend.

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘But delightful all the same.’

‘What are you doing in Córdoba?’

I told them about my trip.
           
‘That's fantastic. You must be quite brave.’

‘No. Just stupid. Or obstinate.’

A third friend joined us, and I was introduced: Araceli was the newcomer; the other two were Inmaculada and Rosa.

‘Like a guided tour of the college?’ asked Rosa.

‘I'd love that. But you must be busy?’

‘Only art this afternoon,’ said Inmaculada.

I accompanied them up the stairs. ‘Any men in your group?’

‘Well, no,’ said Araceli. ‘There are only men in other groups, not in ours.’

‘Your first year?’ I asked.

‘Our last, Nicolás.’

‘I used to be a teacher,’ I said, ‘but I couldn't wait to get out of the classroom.’

Rosa smiled. ‘We can't wait to get in.’

‘This is the library.’ Inmaculada waved at books.

Finally we reached the art class they were skiving. I was astonished to find that the middle-aged woman taking the class was not the least concerned the three friends were missing their lesson. I wandered blissfully among the flower of Cordoban youth. The painters were in threes and fours; I stopped at each painting to admire it and turn some fairly genuine compliment. All too soon I'd made the rounds. There was a murmured good-bye from thirty pink organs of speech, and the three friends were walking me down to the street where we said good-bye.

I now entered the Alcázar de los reyes católicos, where Ferdinand and Isabella had received Columbus, and wandered about its splashing Moorish gardens.

* * *

From Córdoba my way was northwest across the sierras. I left behind the grey fibres of last year's cotton and entered a country of red mountains with olive trees that stretched to all horizons but the peaks; here a hollow tapping could be heard as families knocked olives onto green tarpaulins, looked up at me and smiled. Frozen water gleamed in the dying light at road edge as I climbed towards Castellar de Santisteban on the evening of the fifteenth.

On the final ascent, a knot of children, guessing I was English (who but a mad dog, etc., would cycle through this cold?), pursued me in true Moroccan style chanting out of the fruit of their English lessons: ‘I love you! I love you!’ To my left was perhaps the most beautiful sight of my life: red soil, now gilded, with a distant dogstooth of mountains in aquamarine.

After a night over a disco, in the bitterest cold of first light, I raced down towards the dogstooth which I could barely see for tears. I wondered if I could make it to Aldeahermosa, a bare eight miles away, let alone cycle my usual fifty-odd miles to Villahermosa. Ears burning, feet numbed but aching, I reached the little town and tried warming my feet before an inadequate stove in a cold bar. Here I got to talking with a man in the building trade who shared a few hectares of olive trees with a brother.

‘Feet still cold?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Like to warm them over my fire?’

‘That would be wonderful.’

His room was garlanded with sausages and white puddings. I sat before the hearth, stretching out my toes to the gift of Prometheus and chewing a white pudding.

Later, as the sun rose, the white frost slowly faded, to lurk only in isolated shadows. There was another stove in another bar - at Villamanrique; then I entered a beautiful blood-red country under wispy blue.


                                                                                   * * *

By eleven o'clock in the morning of 17 December, I reached Ossa de Montiel under a grey threatening sky. Here I heard of the Lagunas de Ruidera where Don Quixote had had his very special vision. It was cold and threatening rain, so I decided to make the ten-mile detour to the hostel there. After all, if I could no longer follow Ibn Battuta, I could at least follow the Manchegan knight for a while.

There is a gash in the rolling Mancha tedium where a long necklace of lagoons of extraordinary beauty is threaded on the River Guadiana. The colours of these Lagunas de Ruidera range from improbable blues to deep algae greens. Having checked into the hostel where the receptionist lent me his copy of El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha - and a torch -, I set out for the Montesinos Cave.

That lowering afternoon I was don Quixote's bumbling avatar. As I cycled west I missed the turning to his cave. The road became a track, the track a sandy path snaking round the shores of lagoons; the last lagoon vanished, and I was on some blasted heath. After a five-mile detour as bumpy and slithery as any taken by my model, I was put right by an anchorite living in that dreary waste. If quixotic means inept, disoriented and absent-minded, then I was that.

The Montesinos Cave I found at length down a steep path away from the road. I tethered Rocinante to a dusty bush and approached the well signposted cave with caution. A rocky hole in the ground, the evidence of the work of the knight's sword is still visible: all the bushes hitherto encumbering the lips of the hole have fallen to the weapon, only a feathery green of weed and moss remaining.

Don Quixote's squire and his guide had let him down into the cave by a rope, flocks of birds squawking out to meet him; within its dark recesses the knight had fallen asleep; in a vision he found himself in a beautiful meadow before a glass palace from which emerged a venerable man who, introducing himself as Montesinos, led him in. In an alabaster-ceilinged room on a marble tomb lay Montesinos' friend Durandarte. Merlin had cast a spell on the friends some eight hundred years before - also on Durandarte's lady Belerma and squire Guadiana, along with five hundred others. Durandarte, dying in his friend's arms, had asked Montesinos to cut out his heart and give it to Belerma. The squire Guadiana wept with such abandon that he turned into the river that goes by his name, Ruidera with her seven daughters and two nieces likewise weeping themselves into the lagoons bearing the mother's name.

Durandarte, heartless, lay sighing on his sepulchre while, through the glass wall, they saw two rows of beautiful maidens in mourning marching before the distraught Belerma, who carried a linen shroud containing a mummified heart.

Unlike Don Quixote, I was not assailed by flights of crows, rooks and bats at the mouth of his cave; nor did I need a rope. The way was steep but easy enough to descend from one boulder to the next. When I reached the shaft, I found its ceiling oppressively low and claustrophobic; my borrowed torch simply revealed the darkness of the cave: I went no further.

At the hostel there was a group of young people studying design under the auspices of the Castilla-Mancha government. One of these - who, at the age of eighteen, owned an Italian-style clothing store in Madrid - accompanied me upstairs to a landing where he played the guitar - beautifully, though it was missing a string. The light was timed to go out every minute, so we were continually pressing it on.

We were soon joined by a dazzling slender girl; she brought with her a lad in glasses she'd persuaded to teach her the Sevillana del adios. The boy-merchant had a fine, firm voice; there was much feverish clapping, stamping and singing of 'el pañuelo del silencio' - 'the handkerchief of silence' - barely interrupted each minute by short darkness and a stabbing at the light button.

                                                                                   * * *

There were three more days of raw, bruising cold, through which the bicycle scarcely seemed to move. I hopscotched painfully from one bar to the next, temporarily thawing my feet over a stove and my hands round a coffee cup. Once there was a swath of thin snow to my south, a few isolated flakes driven by the wind; once there was icy rain. Where was my carpe diem? It had quite vanished in the numbing cold.

The sun was out again in Requena, though it was still cold. At the Banco Hispano Americano the manager, a jovial Ramón Bardisa, questioned me closely about my trip as he arranged for my credit card transaction.

‘And now - ‘ (he stood up, glasses gleaming, moustache and little horseshoe beard emphasising the smile) ‘ - and now you will be my guest at a Valencian almuerzo!’

After a Spanish omelette with onion sweetened with glasses of rosé wine, Ramón said: ‘There must be someone you'd like to call in Britain. Use the bank telephone, Nicolás.’

I finally got through to a friend I'd last seen in Barrow on 30 September - George Evans. Coincidentally he was leaving Walney Island at that very moment, having just resigned, so the call was rather brief. He was warm as ever but appeared to be in a hurry to get the warmth over with.

That evening at the hotel restaurant the same morose waiter who had tried overcharging me the previous evening switched the television from the channel I'd selected without offering a word of explanation. He was probably angry with me for finding him out in what I believe had been a genuine error: he'd charged me 325 pesetas for a bottle of wine I'd bought earlier at the bar (it had actually cost 175). After finishing my meal that evening, I asked for the bill, then wasted fifteen minutes waiting for him to bring it to me. Quite angry, I headed for the bar where a grandfather served me.

‘He is a very uncultured man, señor. Pay no attention to his childishness. It is enough for you to know that you are superior to him.’

Rebeca and Julián, the grandchildren, pacified me, showing me their English homework, and I spent a happy hour going through it with them.

Next morning, the 22 December, Ramón treated me to a café cortado (coffee laced with brandy, I believe), then persuaded the post office to accept a parcel from me (on Saturdays they normally only take letters), insisting on paying for it himself. Another cold sunny day, it made me feel the old urgency of carpe diem once more, as the tarmac appeared to fly beneath my tyres and I feasted on herring-boned sky and milk-blue mountains.

As I came racing down from the sierras towards Valencia, the temperature rose dramatically, and I was comfortable for the first time in over two weeks. Once more the city I'd been mugged in closed about me. This time I lodged in an hostal, but in the same street. For hours I explored the docks, looking vainly for a captain to take me to Alexandria: there were no ships bound for Egypt.

It was what I'd expected, but I was unreasonably disappointed. Away from Ibn Battuta and the absurd Manchegan knight, I now appeared to be cycling rather aimlessly across Europe.

I would try the docks of Barcelona. Then Marseilles of course. And Genoa. . . Yet this was not the journey I'd planned.