Jamón de Jabugo

Jamón de Jabugo! It was 3.00 am and Pepé’s proclamation rang out loudly in the silence of the warm Barcelona night, as it had on so many other nights. Nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted to hear how much he loved this Spanish ham delicacy in the pre-dawn hours. Yet he persisted. The man was clearly mad, el loco, as he was known in the neighbourhood. And he was driving me mad too through sleep deprivation.

I was living in the old quarter of Sarrià, in Barcelona, while doing postgraduate research for my master’s dissertation. My confidence in my ability to produce research at this level was low because my supervisor knew nothing about the topic, so I was on my own. Dissertations are the most important part of postgraduate work because they are your opportunity to demonstrate that you are capable of producing original research that “rolls back the frontiers of knowledge” on the particular subject you have chosen. Quite frankly, I was terrified by the immensity of the challenge.

 Every day for six weeks I went to the history archives in Barcelona to review recently released documents on the detention and trial of leading members of the POUM, the independent Marxist party that fought alongside anarchists, communists and republicans against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish civil war. The details were fascinating because they included information from the interrogations of the POUM detainees, as well as transcripts from the trial itself. Interestingly, there was a copy of the (Stalinist) police record of the movements of one Eric Blair, more widely known as the acclaimed English writer George Orwell, author of Homage to Catalonia, 1984, and other significant works.

While the documents were fascinating, I was seriously concerned about how my rapidly growing pile of notes was going to lead into the production of a substantial piece of original research. Just describing the facts, without creating an argument would not be good enough. Such worries dogged me in the early hours of the morning, badly affecting my sleep. Then, just as I was beginning to drift off into sleep, Pepé would start to proclaim the wonders of Jamón de Jabugo. It was more than I could take and my boyfriend had to restrain me from marching upstairs to shut him up.

 Each morning, my increasingly gaunt reflection stared back at me in the mirror. I became obsessed with the need to sleep. It seemed to me that my days in the research centre were wasted because all I saw with each new box of documents was a sea of words that didn’t add up to the ever elusive argument I needed to complete my MA. How could I possibly write a postgraduate research dissertation on an average of two or three hours sleep at night? This question haunted me so much that even on the nights when Pepé didn’t shout Jamón de Jabugo I still didn’t sleep. A solution had to be found… quickly.

Llul, a kind friend, offered me the use of his rundown farmhouse in the countryside north of Barcelona. He stressed that the cottage was indeed run down, but it had an electricity supply and fresh water. It was set in the midst of a substantial forest, although there was a hostel at the end of the lane that connected the cottage with the rest of the world. That seemed good enough for me, even necessary, because I’d finished my work on the primary sources in the research centre which meant that the time had come to start writing my dissertation.

 A group of about six of us arrived at the farmhouse late on Friday afternoon. We had hoped to arrive earlier to enjoy the nearest beach, but typically the traffic was dense and we found ourselves stuck on the motorway for a while. When we arrived, I was astonished at the size of the “Can”, a Catalan word for a rural home. The building was much bigger than I had expected and a good deal more isolated. It was surrounded by dense forest through which a nearby stream flowed and that was to be my bath as there was no working shower in the cottage. Again, it was more than “good enough” for me because I was desperate, desperate to get away from Pepe and any other distraction.

Over the weekend, my friends and I drove to the beach and I went shopping for groceries in the nearest town to get a supply of food that would last until the following weekend, which was when my friends would be back. In those first two days, Saturday and Sunday, the beauty of the location began to work its magic on me and I felt myself relaxing into the place. We all enjoyed a huge lunch on Sunday afternoon, a sort of farewell meal as the rest of the party was heading back to Barcelona. Before she completed loading her car, my friend asked me if I would be alright here on my own. Until she posed that question, I had not considered this for a second. Now I felt a bit vulnerable knowing I would be alone in the forest at night. I reassured her that loneliness was not a concern, even though she had just made it one for me.

When the car departed and when its rear lights vanished around the bend in the lane, I found myself quite alone in the dusk, I quickly sought out the Alsatian dog that Llul had left me for company. Sara was more than happy to fulfil her responsibility as she was a highly sociable dog. Looking back, I believe I could not have spent the six weeks that I did spend in “Can Llul” without Sara. At night, I took her up into the bedroom I’d chosen to sleep in to keep watch for any danger. Danger was a broad and flexible concept that included the rats in the roof space that livened up in the evening. They inhabited the space just above the bedroom and seemed to spend the night playing tag. Proof of their residence could be seen every morning when I found rat excrement dribbling down the bedroom walls, from the gap between the ceiling and the wall.

Once I’d been in Can Llul for a few days, my fears faded and I became more confident in my ability to look after myself. For example, Llul had warned me that there was a nest of scorpions in the storage space under my bedroom and that I should habitually check my shoes before putting them on each morning. His advice was greatly appreciated because one morning I shook my red clogs when I got out of bed. A rather large, or so it seemed to me, black scorpion fell out onto the floor. It remained still, just where it had fallen, most likely on red alert. I had to get rid of it, otherwise its presence in the room would keep me awake all night. I ran downstairs and fetched a shovel and brush. Within 30 seconds I had corralled the scorpion onto the shovel and pitched it out of the window onto the vegetable garden below. Thankfully, I never saw it again.

At weekends, my friends returned to Can Llul so I joined them on the beach for some fun. But as soon as they left, I continued with a routine which started at 10.00 and finished at 5.00. For those 7 hours I wrote solidly with no distractions beyond the pattering of Sara’s nails as she wandered throughout the house and the hum of nearby bees. It all seemed to drift on an invisible wave of tranquillity. In the evening, the sounds changed from humming to chirping as the cicada calls floated on the night air. It was this chorus that accompanied me on my way home from the hostel at the bottom of the lane where I would go to have a beer, and chat with some of the guests. It was only a 15-minute walk and it gave me an opportunity to see and speak to other human beings. The balance between study and socialising was complete, although never again has it felt that perfect.

I completed my dissertation with two weeks to spare and as I walked down that lane from Can Llul to the hostel with my friend waiting for me in his car, I almost levitated with the sense of peace and fulfilment. My work on the MA was finished and I felt fairly confident about the quality I’d produced. After all, I’d come across a key document linking Stalinist police operations with George Orwell, proving that his suspicions about being followed were right. But of course, that was only a side show to the thesis itself, which is what the assessor would be scrutinising.

Back in Barcelona, Pepe was still proclaiming the wonders of jamón jabugo at 3.00 am, but now I had no research to distract me, so Pepe became my target. He had to go, so I began a campaign to involve the community in his detention and confinement in the psychiatric hospital run by the ministry of health. It took two weeks to get 500 names on our petition, plus a visit to the magistrate responsible for our neighbourhood. Initially, he was reluctant to grant our request, arguing that there were fifty or more Pepes in the Chinese quarter or the Gothic quarter, and the neighbours had to put up with ongoing anti-social behaviour. I listened calmly and then asserted that Sarrià was not the Chinese or Gothic quarter and said it in such a tone that conveyed our mutual understanding that my upper class neighbours would not stand for a rejection of their request to have Pepe dealt with decisively.

Shortly afterward police broke into Pepe’s flat and were apparently astounded at what they found there. After he’d been removed to the psychiatric hospital to be assessed and confined, my boyfriend and I walked up the stairs to find out what had been going on. The door had been damaged and swung open easily to the touch. Inside all was darkness and Pepe was nowhere around. We took a few steps into the flat, but all we could make out were chinks of light in the tiny spaces on the windows not entirely covered in paper. There was no electricity, so my boyfriend ran downstairs to get his torch. The beam illuminated hundreds of clippings taken from adult magazines and pasted onto every wall and every window in the flat. There were, as my boyfriend said, tits and bums everywhere in Pepe’s flat.

In the corner of one room, he had a row of bicycles, a dozen or so, that were propped up against three scooters and the scooters were aligned against a huge tractor wheel that probably weighed around 150 kilos or more. How he managed to it up get the stairs defies imagination. In the kitchen the beam of light revealed a rickety table arranged with four place mats, a set of playing cards, four glasses and a bottle of whisky, as yet unopened. All very mysterious and all potentially revelations as to what was going on in Pepe’s mind.

The following day, one of the neighbour’s informed us that Pepe had been detained. We took advantage of our last opportunity to look around his flat before the magistrate ordered the police to lock it up. This time we found about a dozen little packets placed in the corners of every room. They were bound like Egyptian mummies and inside there was jewellery, both silver and gold. Together, the “mummies” probably weighed around half a kilo, so their contents would be of some value. We felt we had to put them back where we’d found them as the police were now involved. By then, we’d had enough of Pepe’s flat, which spoke loudly of the horrors of his unbalanced mind. We needed peace at night and he needed to be cared for in a way that was appropriate for his mental health. Although he would be long dead now, I will never forget him. Pepe drove me into the depths of despair when I was trying to carry out postgraduate research, but then, if he hadn’t made things so difficult, I never would have had the magical experience of living in Can Llul, where I found balance and peace.