The Asparagus Path

There's a path that winds and turns between the small town of Santa Clara and the village of Alfarrobeira,  where I lived for eight years.   It is not much used and, as it is quite well-hidden at either end, there are not that many people who are aware of its existence.  From the town you would have to cross the open area of land behind the Junta da Freguesia building, and even then you wouldn't notice the start of the path unless you passed behind the carob tree which grows there;  its low,  drooping branches concealing the entrance.   At the other end the path comes out into  the far corner of an old orchard of gnarled apple trees and is hidden from the rutted track that leads into the village.  I knew about it because I do a lot of walking and am inquisitive by nature.

The path meanders between patches of scrubland and olive and almond groves for little more than a kilometre.  Lizards sun themselves on the dry-stone walls which line the path, marking the boundaries of land whose ownership has been long forgotten.  In February the spears of wild asparagus grow in profusion along the whole length of the path.  I've never seen it growing in such abundance.  I walked  this path whenever I needed to go into the town, unless it was absolutely necessary to take the car.  Everybody else would drive.  This would give me the feeling, as I sat with a morning coffee on the terrace of the Café Ramos, that I had experienced something that none of the other people around me had. I don't mean that I felt superior to them in any way;  just that I owned something that they didn't. It was a secret feeling that was mine alone.  It was this that brought me to feel a kinship with Ovidio, the shepherd who grazed his flock in the fields which bordered the path. Beyond a greeting I had never spoken to him.

I would stop to pick almonds and crack them open with stones.  I scored marks on the trees which produced only bitter fruit so that I would know to avoid them. I studied the ponderous passage of chameleons; so unhurried that eventually I would have to leave them to their watchful, interminable progress.  In spring I would marvel at the bright pink of the pyramid orchids and the tiny ophrys with the shiny blue-black jewelled centre and the delicate yellow beard and ears.  Snakes would slither away at my approach or drop heavily from the tops of the walls to conceal themselves in the undergrowth as I passed.  Brightly-coloured bee-eaters dipped and dived above the scrub. The tinkle of bells signalled the presence of the sheep somewhere to the side of the path and I might spot Ovidio sitting in the shade of an olive tree with his dogs at his side.  All this I would have with me on the terrace of the café.

On one twisting section of the path the carob trees lined both sides, and when the long bean-like pods grew thick in spring, an almost lightless tunnel was formed and I would enter that dark alley with a tingle of trepidation.  It reminded me of the crawling races that we used to have through the flood tunnels down by the river in my youth. There were two parallel tunnels about a metre in diameter which had two forty-five degree bends along their two hundred metre length. At the first bend it was very dark, and although you knew that the best thing to do would be to go fast to the next bend, your movements would become probing and sluggish as though you were having to move through something other than just darkness.  You would finally round the second bend and see the circle of daylight ahead toward which you would speed thinking that you must have lost the race.  But that dark, middle passage affected us all equally.

The blackness under the carob trees was not as absolute, but it reminded me of those tunnels; and as the long pods turned dry and chocolate brown, they added to the closed-in atmosphere so I was always glad to round the bend and see the bright sunlight up ahead.

There was an abandoned house set back from the path which I had tentatively explored. The house itself was barred but I had pushed open a door to what must have been the animals' shelter, and liked to go there and look at the leather-padded yokes hanging on the walls; the leather dry and brittle. Mysterious old agricultural implements were scattered on the earth floor with rakes and pitchforks; their tines thin, sharp and misshapen with rust.  From that room one day I heard the ringing of the sheep's bells and crept out to find them grazing amongst the olives which grew around the house.  I walked back to the path through the flock in time to see Ovidio, who passed without appearing to notice me.  His eyes shone with light and his passage seemed to leave a twinkling wake. I watched him move away from me towards Santa Clara and felt myself drawn along behind him.

He left the sheep on a patch of land at the edge of town and walked into the small bar there at the start of the tarmac.  He downed a bagaceira in one go and was poured another. I asked for a glass of red wine and sat at the table near the bar.  The owner and three or four others standing at the counter exchanged glances, then fixed their eyes on Ovidio until he spoke.

It had been lunchtime.  He had eaten some bread and sausage and washed it down with wine before laying down to snooze in the shade of an olive tree just by the asparagus path. Suddenly he had been pulled to his feet as invisible hands had grasped his arms and he'd felt himself rising slowly up from the field high into the air, with the bee-eaters diving and swooping around him.  He had joined in their aerial display before flying low across the town.  He had soared at increasing speed over the landscape, flashing above the town of Loulé and the church at Boliquieme, which was the last monument he recognised as that was the furthest point west that he had ever travelled.  He'd swept across terrain which looked familiar but was unknown to him.  Over vast plantations of orange and lemon trees he'd flown, swooping down low over dry patches of agave; so low that he could discern the yellow eye of the pink cistus and the needle-sharp points of the cactus.  Over garrigue and maquis he'd soared until he reached a range of hills higher than any that he'd seen, and knew that he was above the Serra de Monchique and heading for the ocean.  The huge expanse of the Atlantic  spread out in front of him as he turned sharp to follow the coastline down to Cabo San Vicente, which had been the last sighting of their native land for many of the adventurers who had sailed from Lagos in the fifteenth century.   He had flown  along the southern coast over the marshes at Lagoa and the cliffs of Albufeira, before turning inland again and spiralling down like an eagle to land softly again beneath that olive tree.  He had lain there a while, his body tingling with energy and his thoughts swirling in shapes and patterns that he couldn't hold or define. He'd risen to his feet with difficulty and headed straight for the bar and the stiff drink that he'd needed.

Ovidio finished recounting his flight across the country and downed his second bagaceira.  The barman poured him another and slid it across the counter. Throughout the telling of the tale the other men had smiled and nudged each other, looking over at me too, and winking.  After a short silence where we all took a long drink, one of them asked Ovidio just how much wine he had washed down his lunch with.  We all laughed.  He repeated the joke and we all laughed again, including Ovidio, who laughed the loudest.  Then in all seriousness he said that it had happened just the way he'd told it, and we all believed that it had.  It had been more than just a dream.

The asparagus path was all the more magical to me for its running in such close proximity to the normal byways used by everybody else, and for the knowledge that I might be the first person to walk along it that day; maybe the only person.  Like all secrets I guarded it jealously.  Martha K must have known about it. She and her husband had lived in Alfarrobeira for eighteen years.  Their drink problem was getting worse, and it was no surprise to anybody when it ended in tragedy.  She had started to drive back from the town in a bad state and had gone straight past her turning and ended up in the car park behind the Junta.  Her car was found the next morning with the driver's door wide open.  The GNR were slow to respond as usual but eventually came calling at the doors of the village.  Once I'd ascertained where she'd abandoned the car I knew where to look, and it was I who found her with those two fat policemen puffing along behind me.  She was almost certainly dead though neither of us had checked. The senior officer had sent his partner off to fetch a doctor while he sat on a stone wall mopping his brow, with not even a glance at the body.  He had checked his watch. He was probably thinking about lunch.  Martha K had looked quite at peace as she lay amongst the wild gladioli in the sunshine. 

It was a full five days before the car was moved; it sat there with the door still open.  I wondered how these men, who moved with the same ponderous indecision as chameleons, could have sailed thousands of miles of ocean on their voyages of discovery and conquest, then remembered that the conquistadors had been tough men from Estremadura; harsh barren lands that produced men of sinew and vitality that was lacking in their southern cousins.

Robert K was drunk for twelve days whilst a verdict of accidental death was being prepared for his late wife.  When he had recovered from that bout, he was a changed man; not exactly sober, but more restrained.  Oddly enough, after these events, he was one of the only other people I ever saw taking the asparagus path. Apart from him and Ovidio, I had the path much to myself.  There was a stooped old  man with a small sickle who cut the asparagus to sell at the market in Loulé, and when the carobs were ripe and dark, the gypsies would harvest them in huge sacks which their mules would carry down to the mini-market at Goncinha.  They would wait with stolid patience, sometimes for hours, for the sacks to be weighed and to be paid a meagre sum, most of which the men would spend on beer which they would drink right there in the shade outside the shop.

I sought sanctuary on the path more often as time passed, and life beyond its protective embrace changed for the worse.  Malign influences from outside had moved into the region, and even in Alfarrobeira there was a group of people who had begun to make life more unpleasant for the rest of us.  I saw two of my cats  killed by the dogs that they allowed to run loose.  I spoke to them about it without success, and when I threatened to take it further they laughed in my face. One of my car windows was  shattered and two of the tyres slashed.  They took ownership of  a bar in the town and began to terrorise the whole area.  Those brave enough to speak out were soon silenced as a café was trashed, shop windows were broken, and a man was killed with a knife. As an estrangeiro I was less able to intervene and decided to get out.  I gave notice to my landlord and at the end of the month, a van came to pick up my things.  I paid a local boy to drive my car into Santa Clara.

I walked across the old apple orchard and onto the path. It was midsummer and the tunnel through the heavily-laden carob trees was dark after the harsh sunlight, but there was no evil presence, and I welcomed the brief respite from the blazing heat. As I rounded the second bend I stood and stared a minute at the uneven arch of brightness against the deep shade of the overhanging trees.  I heard the tinkle of the bells from an almond grove up ahead and I envied Ovidio his dream flight across the countryside and his simple pure existence.  There was a group of gypsies knocking down the ripe carob beans with long bamboo poles from a stand of trees to my right. Men, women, boys and girls all joined in the harvest.  For them the asparagus path was not the place of refuge from the outside world that it was for me.  They already lived in their own separate settlement on the outskirts of the town, and would not be affected by the crime that was spreading across the region.  They had nothing of value to plunder and were left to their own devices. Theirs was already a world apart.

I passed the place where Martha K had laid down to die, and thought that there were worse ways to go than in an alcoholic stupour, and harsher, colder places to die than on the edge of that path.  A chameleon was rocking back and forth on the ground in front of me and I watched it perform its strange dance.  I reached out a hand and it hissed a warning.  I hoped that the indolent people of Santa Clara would find a way to save their lives from being taken over by the encroaching modern world, but doubted it. I'd seen too many chameleons squashed on the road.  I wanted to go into the café at the edge of town and drink a bagaceira for Ovidio.  I turned to look back along the path for the last time, still able to hear the click of the bamboo poles on the branches of the carob trees. The bee-eaters twisted and turned over the stunted olive trees, their bright colours flashing beams of light into my eyes, and I felt a weariness creep over me.  Suddenly I was pulled upwards as invisible hands grasped my arms and I felt myself rising slowly up from the path and high into the air, with the bee-eaters swooping and diving around me.