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owners of the next-door farm.
    He hesitated for a moment and then placed a rough, relaxed paw into mine.
    ‘Arcadio. They told me someone new was up at the place,’ he said. His voice was uneven, rough-edged, as though it might fail him at any moment. His age was hard to guess: he could be anything from sixty to eighty, I thought. For a moment it looked as though there was nothing more to be said, but a hint of a smile was just visible on his thin, downturned mouth. I looked around at the trees surrounding us: short, stunted, with sharp-looking branches; they seemed to have been made in his image.
    ‘You’ll be wanting to harvest your almonds,’ he said. So that’s what they were: the green, felt-like fruits hanging in clusters from the branches actually contained nuts. ‘You’ve got a hundred and thirteen almond trees up there: could bring in a nice load.’
    I tried to hide my concern that he knew more about our farm than we did. ‘About a hundred’ was all we had been told when we got the place. What else did he know that we didn’t?
    ‘Is that what you’re doing here?’ I said. ‘Harvesting?’
    His face creaked into a wry smile.
    ‘How do you do it?’ Salud asked. ‘Just pick them with your hands? Or do you have to beat the tree to make the almonds fall down?’
    I’d been hoping she’d already know this, that she might have picked it up somewhere from the general stock of farming knowledge of her childhood. But oranges, it seemed, had been the only fruit in her household: anything to do with any other type of crop was a black hole.
    Arcadio was smiling again, not entirely pleasantly, I thought.
    ‘I’ll come up tomorrow and harvest them for you,’ he said, pointing to our almond trees with his thumb. ‘You can watch.’
    ‘That man,’ I said as we walked back up to the farm after saying our goodbyes, ‘is going to run rings round us.’
    At eight the following day I was alerted to his arrival by the sound of his Land Rover heaving its way slowly up the mountain road. We just had time to bolt down some breakfast before stepping outside to meet him on the flat piece of ground that lay just above the house.
    There was no ‘hello’, barely a greeting of any kind, just a nod of the head and a low, barely audible kind of animal call: ‘
Iéeah
.’
    He pointed at the ground beneath our feet. ‘This is where we used to bring all the produce from the terraces,’ he said.
    I looked down, not quite grasping what he meant. ‘This is the
era
,’ he explained. ‘Everything that was harvested was brought here and placed in a big pile before being taken to the village, to the market.’
    With all the steep slopes and narrow terraces that surrounded us, I had always been struck by this rare flat stretch of land which acted as a kind of plaza for the tiny hamlet that was now our home. We used it as a convenient place to park the car or to store building materials, but it seemed it was no accident in the landscape, and had played an important role at the heart of the communities that had once lived up here. I glanced around at it with a new-found respect: we would have to clear it up and make something of it. Right now it was a bit of a dump.
    ‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’d better get started.’ I looked over towards the east and the peak of the Talaia: the rising sun was just clipping the top and scattering its light over the farm: we only had a few hours before it would become uncomfortably hot to work.
    Salud nudged me in the ribs.
    ‘Would you like some coffee first?’ she asked Arcadio with a smile. For some reason she didn’t share the slight unease I had about the man.
    Arcadio gave a cough, although I quickly realised it was a sort of strangled laugh.
    ‘Don’t drink coffee,’ he said, and from a shapeless bag he carried over his shoulder he pulled out a soft leather gourd with a little black spout which he proceeded to lift above his mouth and then squeeze, forcing out a thin red liquid