David, the driver in charge of taking us around, didn’t realize that he was supposed to be taking me back to the city this morning and when Cati, the conference organizer, asked him to do so, he asked if it would be all right to double up on a trip that someone else had booked, an older woman who needed to be taken to the Reina Sofía Medical Centre in the city. And I was like, cool, I don’t have a problem with that...and the nice part was that I got a tour of some of the smaller hamlets in the subbética, like Zagrilla and places like that which I know that I’ve always thought about travelling through by bike but never did. (Just as well: up until now I sincerely doubt that I would have been able to handle that much hill riding.)
So we went through Carcabuey, which is where David is from, to pick up this woman and her nephew. Nephew is probably a couple of years older than I am, balding, kind of like the actor Javier Cámara, but with a big ridge of bone missing from his skull about two inches above his brow line. According to David, the nephew used to be a fireman for the Mancomunidad until a car accidetn laid him low for a couple of months; now he spends most of his time caring for his dowager aunt, who is about seventy and has bone cancer. The aunt is not in good shape, and having to travel to Córdoba for radiotherapy every day for thirty-five days straight is not doing her any good – especially because she’s spent almost all her life in the pueblo and the lack of having moved anywhere by vehicular transit has made her unfortunately prone to car sickness. Which she was, several times in the car before we even hit the highway. But the two men were cool with it – I guess it’s a fairly common occurence – and they came prepared. (The truth of it is, I don’t actually know if she was being sick or not – she just kept making this sound like a frog croaking in a closed jam jar and I tried to think about it as little as possible.)
I love travelling through that area, but I can’t think of many other places, even within Andalucía, where the phrase “an area hobbled by poverty” is as apt. They’re not just poor; in a lot of places there, they don’t even want to give a face to how poor they are because just exposing themselves to outsiders would be a source of shame. It definitely fits the description of being “heartbreakingly beautiful”, and one interesting thing about it is that forest fires aren’t a problem in the area there’s no real one-upmanship to be gained by burning anything. (The area’s sparse population is also a benefit – if any suspicious behaviour took place there, half the residents would know who did it before the fire took hold. Like the old Canadian joke: “Could you identify the bank robber in a police lineup?” “Yeah! It were Joe Jones, from the fifth concession – I recognized him by the cigarette burns in his jacket!”)
The conference itself wasn’t a terribly formal affair – some 25 people, with the odd local senior citizen shuffling in and out, the organizers returning late after lunch, and I had to cut my presentation about ten minutes short. Which wasn’t such a big deal, though I do feel funny that they paid me €300 for 30 minutes of work. It’s almost not fair. But at the same time, it seems like the Mancomunidad has money to throw around: when I checked into the hotel and didn’t know if dinner was included in the deal, the Scottish receptionist said she’d check into it. I said that I didn’t want to rack up expenses for them more than I had to. She just kind of raised an eyebrow in a way that told me that that wasn’t that much of an issue.
I didn’t get to see Priego itself, which was a shame. I really would have liked to have taken a tour of the town, but that’s going to have to wait for next time, it seems...
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