The Sweetness of Bitter Water

By Antonia Riley

The Sweetness of Bitter Water

New Book features a fantastic series of adventures and discovery of many cultures through the viewpoint of a passionate woman

Hamble, United Kingdom (Release Date TBD) Exploring the world has its challenges and rewards, and most importantly it can lead people to new boundaries of knowledge waiting to be discovered. In the new book The Sweetness of Bitter Water, author Antonia Riley invites readers to join her on a special adventure of the world like no other.

The Sweetness of Bitter Water tells the story of a womans passionate affair with light, a farm in Andalucia and a man. Alexia has read many novels and seen the television programs about moving to the Mediterranean. Her life has been a quest for adventure and this has caused her to live in the wilds of Alaska, sail in the Atlantic, fly planes, ride horses, and learn the art of painting. Now Alexia wants to obtain her own piece of barren, sun-drenched Spanish desert next to the sea and build a whitewashed Finca for herself and the love of her life. Could this be her destiny? Only time can tell.

Filled with countless travels, beautiful locations, and interesting characters, The Sweetness of Bitter Water is the kind of book that will entertain readers who enjoy traveling, researching and even day dreaming. Told through a ladys view point, it will generate a lot of interest among women and encourage others to go out adventuring or exploring many fascinating places around the world. It is also a useful guide for character study and can even be used as a reflection reference. To purchase a copy of Antonia Rileys The Sweetness of Bitter Water, be sure to visit Xlibris.com, Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com or simply visit the nearest bookstore today!

About the Author
Antonia Riley was born in the Netherlands, but a zest for travel caused her to immigrate first to the USA, then the UK. After a career in academe she needed a total change and started flying. She has published academic work, short stories, poetry, newspaper columns and sailing yarns. The Sweetness of Bitter Water is her first novel, soon to be followed by its sequel, The Road to Fernan Perez. When not sailing the yacht Sparrowsong, Antonia lives in the South of England and in Andalucia with her husband, Henry.

The Sweetness of Bitter Water * by Antonia Riley
Publication Date: July 7, 2006

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469103143

Antonia Riley

Antonia Riley was born in the Netherlands, but a zest for travel caused her to immigrate first to the USA, then the UK. After a career in academe she needed a total change and started flying. She has published academic work, short stories, poetry, newspaper columns and sailing yarns. The Sweetness of Bitter Water is her first novel, soon to be followed by its sequel, The Road to Fernan Perez. When not sailing the yacht Sparrowsong, Antonia lives in the South of England and in Andalucia with her husband, Henry.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

I kicked away a small scorpion with the toe of my far too fashionable sandal. It was still hot, but the heat was not unpleasant. I would have about an hour before the sun would set and the light reflected off the dry stone walls was golden. This had to be the perfect time for a picnic, here, in my finca, my farm on top of this steep hill in the south of Spain.

The hatch of my rental car squeaked as I opened it to get out some plastic folding chairs and a rickety card table. The squeak echoed around the surrounding hillsides and I noticed someone on a neighbouring farm looking in my direction. I waved and the figure waved back, satisfied I was not a vagrant or a squatter setting up for the night. The echo is a peculiar feature of La Joya de Agua Amarga, the valley my finca is situated in. You can hear voices for miles and any sudden rapport is certain to be heard by all the neighbours. It reminded me of the way sounds carry at sea. Many times I had to lower my voice on board our boat because my Pacific Northwest accent could be heard all over a marina. The echo would be a familiar feature to me in years to come, when I could no longer sail the oceans.

The place I had chosen for the picnic was, like all the land on my farm, uneven and rocky. The soil had long since washed away from this rocky outcrop and had ended up, in pitiful thinness, at the bottom of the steep escarpment, in the wide, dry riverbed below. Most of my land was part of this rambla, some forty meters below the hillock on which previous farmers had built their house and stables. These dwellings had been abandoned years ago and the dry stone walls, no longer tended, had fallen in on themselves. What I have here are thirty two thousand square meters of useless land and two dilapidated ruins. What I also have is a piece of Spain in which it has not rained for decades. I have light.

The small picnic table teetered on some loose stones and fell over. I put it back where it was and secured its legs with stones from the crumbled west wall of my house. A lizard scurried away when I disturbed its dwelling beneath the small pile of stones, its little shiny body in camouflage colours. My tablecloth made a sharp contrast with the surroundings in its exuberant red and white checks and the cool bag holding the champagne and the food glared equally in white and yellow stripes. Add to that my black and fuchsia coloured evening dress and shocking pink sandals and any contemporary artist would be able to do incredible things with that palette. My dinner guests, both professional painters, would love it or hate it, I was not sure which.

The breeze which had blown in from the sea, some two kilometres away and visible only as a small triangle of dark blue amid the beige and brown of the hills, died away. I stood still as the silence of the wind was filled in by the cicadas getting ready for their nightly performance. The food had attracted some bees which were busily humming away. I smelled the scent of the thyme I had crushed underfoot. But this is not a sweet landscape. My farm has resonances of defeat against nature, of decay and loss. The heat during the day is sapping, at night the desert is cold and alive with creatures. The rocks have split and crumbled from this daily temperature change and only a few trees and bushes can survive this harsh climate. Tumbleweed covers my land and will need to be removed before I can do anything with the two ruins on the hill. Even the water that runs under the rambla in an aquifer is brackish, due to a schism in the volcanic rock formations stretching out under the sea. That is why Agua Amarga has received its name: Bitter Water.

But it is exactly this roughness that has attracted artists to Agua Amarga for decades. Once it was an almost unreachable village of fishermen and goat farmers at the end of a long dirt track. The beach at the end of the Rambla forms a perfect waning moon shape, white, empty and locked in between dark, massive rocks. The rocks extend as plateaux under the sea, causing the sea to roar and foam even with little wind to whip it up. The artists saw the forces of nature in Agua Amarga, the uneven struggle of the farmers and fishermen against them, the vulnerability of the huddled white houses in the village and the small cortijos on the hills.

Pounded by the sea on one side and under constant threat from a flash flood roaring down the Rambla on the other, the inhabitants of Agua Amarga have become a stoic lot. They are the descendants of only three families who had the guts to stay and battle it out. It is easy to see this in the faces you see today in the Plaza Bar. They look similar, like brothers and sisters, and all the men have thick black or greying hair growing low on the forehead. The older women are short, squat and have small eyes. For some reason they all cut their equally thick hair short, which gives them a mannish look and makes it difficult for me to recognise them from behind. It is these people and this place that gave painters and poets inspiration and of late filmmakers have joined them. Impressionists have come and gone, cubists squared the rocks and the faces, would-be Chagalls, Dalis and Picassos tried to tame the sea and the sky onto canvas. The post-modernists came and stayed and now abstract contemporary painters create agonised images of the land and the village whipped by the Poniente from the west or the Levante from the east. I could see their subjects; I just could not paint them. I had never been able to paint, only to copy. At home in England I have several Monets, a Chagall and a Manet, all faithfully copied to a standard that has people asking me for the price.

I brought out the cutlery and the place settings from the car. I had placed the table where the west terrace will be, so we could watch the setting sun disappear behind the hills. This is one of my great pleasures on this farm, watching the sun set. The golden vanilla colour of the ruins makes them look edible. But as I prepared the picnic some clouds had rolled in from the sea and I was worried that the sunset might be marred by cloud cover.

The stones crunched under my city sandals as I treaded a narrow path through the tumbleweed, backwards and forwards from the car to the imaginary West Terrace. My wannabe painter’s eye scanned the valley now darkened by the sea fret. The light had gone flat and the sharp shadows dulled. Although it was a hot evening it suddenly felt almost chilly. My picnic would not be the same without the sunset I had envisioned.

But before I could get depressed about this, the sound of a car advancing slowly over the rocky track that leads to the finca announced the arrival of my life partner and my friends. Quickly I put the food out. Food is another, important part of my new Spanish life. The Andalucian kitchen of this area is equally robust as the village and the citizens of Agua Amarga. The tortilla you get in Maria’s Plaza Bar is heroic in its sizzling solidity. The simple fish grilled on a slab of metal, a la plancha, have been pulled out of the sea that day and displayed for instant sale in a boat on the beach. When the fishermen arrive and put their catch in the boat carrying my name, Antonia, the local women gather round it and start a raucous battle for the best fish. Maria always wins, but Paqi comes a very good second. Paqi is the proprietress of the Blue Bar, which is really called the Bar del Mar, but because it has such vivid light blue shutters everyone calls it the Blue Bar. She is the daughter of Agua Amarga’s Godfather, Ramon Hierro. This farmer owns most of the Rambla farmland and has his finger into everything that happens in Agua Amarga. I learned very early on that no one crosses Ramon Hierro if they expect to live in Agua Amarga in peace, and I have heeded that advice. I greet him courteously although he pretends not to see it and not to know me. He is the only person in Agua Amarga who has not welcomed me in the warmest possible way.

Always on the menu are calamares, squid. Fried, deep-fried or grilled, I love calamares. Whenever I come back to Agua Amarga I will stop in one of the two beach restaurants (in fierce competition with each other) and have squid and salad. The rubbery, white texture of the ring-shaped calamares is a particular delight to chew on while watching over the sea and relishing the being back feeling. Add some local chilled white wine and the cool salad and my life suddenly slows down from the airport rush to an agreeable tempo.

This evening, however, I had restricted myself to egg and asparagus salad, more California than Andalucia, sardines in tomato sauce and cold, stuffed red peppers. The absence of a kitchen on my hillock made serving hot dishes not an option and my diners had been told only to expect drinks, to celebrate the achat of my finca. The presence of a table and chairs would surprise them, let alone the equally unexpected presence of food.

The car had still quite a way to go, in first gear, down the narrow donkey track and I sat down and looked once more over my terrain. Arizona would be anyone’s first thought. Arizona, the Grand Canyon, the Nevada desert and John Wayne, coming across the ridge on horseback. The landscape has been carved out by ancient rivers into mesas, plateaux with sharp edges and steep drops down to the ramblas. From the mesas rise buttes much like the Arizona one filmed by the makers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The biggest Rambla is the one that runs just below my hill, all the way down through the village of Agua Amarga, into the sea.

No one builds on the Rambla, because every fifty years or so it remembers what it was created by in the first place. The melting snows of the Sierra

Nevada sometimes create a raging flood. The parched land cannot absorb it and the water builds up to a wall of mud, water and debris of over four meters high, demolishing and killing everything in its way. Eventually this torrent runs out into the sea. The last flood tore away several houses that have never been rebuilt and the villagers treat the Rambla with great respect. People play football on it, and, inland, animals graze on it but no building permission will be given for the Rambla. That is also the reason why my ruins are situated where they are, high above the highest recorded flood level.

Across from my finca, in the other bank of the Rambla, are caves. These caves have been inhabited by locals and gypsies for centuries. In this climate, a cave dwelling is beautifully cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I was told the average temperature in such a cave is about nineteen degrees centigrade. The rock is white and therefore the walls of the cave are pre-painted as it were, for the inhabitants to decorate with paintings and carvings. People lived in these caves until quite recently. The poet and playwright Garcia Lorca set his ominous play Bodas de Sangre, The Blood Wedding, in exactly such a cave near Pozo de Los Frailes, just up the road from me.

Now, I do not think anyone lives in the caves around Agua Amarga but animals and sometimes some hippies, re-living their parents’ tales of Spanish life in the Sixties in Marbella and the Balearics. I was just too young in the Sixties to go down to Spain and experience that mix of languorous freedom, sensuous heat and bead-hung, flower-adorned self-seeking drug indulgence. No Sheltering Sky for me in those days, but serious high school work and strict parents. And now that age has gone although a few painted caravans and Volkswagen Pop-Tops still can be seen in Agua Amarga, parked on the Rambla.

The car carrying my other half Edward and our friends roared as the small Diesel engine tried to negotiate the final steep bit to get up to the carved out parking area on the hillock. The man I share my life with and whom I love above all else got out and opened the doors for my friend Laura, a petite animated woman, and her husband Horacio. Laura and Horacio are our artist friends. They live by their painting and have a beautiful studio in the village. They are part of that elusive group of artists who now inhabit Agua Amarga. These are not extrovertly artistic types, spreading their wares to be seen and bought locally. Rather, they quietly live and work in Agua Amarga and exhibit their works of art in Madrid, Paris, Vienna and the USA. This group cannot really be called a group at all. They are painters, sculptors, poets, writers, filmmakers and actors as individually different as can be. But their collective presence has ensured that Agua Amarga has a sense of quiet difference from other villages of this kind. Houses have gone up in the traditional style, but they are refined and architecturally splendid, blending perfectly with the environment. Discussions start in the Plaza Bar, which end up in heated debates about some Movement, someone’s philosophy of art, or the deeper meaning of blue in somebody else’s painting. The Paris Left Bank has nothing in vicious competition on Agua Amarga’s artists. I have been asked to introduce my friends to the US and the British art world, which I am doing while writing this book. A sideline, you might call it, harking back to my friends in The Keyes, Florida and Park City, Utah who are art dealers and painters, and my knowledge of the London art scene, minimal though it is.

As an aspiring painter but reasonably good copyist, I long to be part of the world of artists, just as I am an aspiring member of the world of classical ballet, flying, ocean sailing and dressage. I am a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, someone might say. But then, I am good at languages. Mathematics eludes me; longitude and latitude are my greatest enemies in doing my dead reckoning on board and in the air, but languages are my lifeline. On many occasions I have sat around a table with 16 people, all of who have been from different parts of Europe or even the world. I recall, with great clarity and a furtive rumbling of the stomach, how I did not get to eat during those dinners. Someone was lobbing insults at some one else, which had to be translated sensitively for fear of breaking up the party. Someone’s daughter was engaged to someone else’s son, and they would happen to be from different sides of the Maginot Line. So I had to step in and rescue the betrothal, in spite of the increasing hostilities between the prospective mothers in law. Evenings with Edward’s business partners have often depended on my ability to not to indulge in the white wine before they did.

But now, in Spain, the final test of my language ability will be to avoid acquiring the peculiar, difficult accent of Andalucia. Horacio has warned me not to pick up that accent, but it is hard for someone just learning the language to distinguish between proper Spanish, that is the language of Castile, and the thick local Andalucian babble which drops just about every letter it can.

More immediately, however, looms the prospect of a whole evening in Spanish. Laura speaks French, but Horacio does not, neither does Edward. So Spanish into English and vice versa it is and I foresee a very slimming picnic for myself, being too busy translating to eat. But that does not matter. This is my first party on the Hill of Finca Los Tigres. A year from now, where I have set up the picnic table will be a terrace, with soft lights and a shimmering swimming pool. The larger house will be called Casa el Cazador, Hunter House. Over there, a little lower on the hill, facing the sea, will be a smaller Casita called El Rayo, Lightning. And between them will run a big dog, possibly a German Shepard, called Storm. I let the names roll off my tongue as if I am tasting the food in front of me. Someone once told me a name is good when you can pronounce it ten times over on a ship’s radio without thinking it sounds silly. While I repeat the names over and over again in my mind, rearranging a fork here, a glass there, they become part of my future. Then I welcome Edward and our friends to my Finca.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

My roots are in the dark cold north. The Netherlands may not be as far north as Scandinavia but it can outdo Sweden and Norway in cold, wet weather any time. My roots may be there, but that surely must have been mistake. Someone miscalculated in their geographical determination and placed me too far north and in the wrong language area. From earliest childhood on I had a tendency to mimic others who were speaking a foreign language. German was easy. I grew up only ten miles from the German border and although hostilities had ceased only ten years beforehand my parents were happy to take me there. They pushed me to speak German in shops and on campsites, sending me off to buy daily necessities and food. I have forever maintained that you can speak any language if you are hungry enough.

The fantastic array of German cakes displayed in the neighbouring town of Muenster was awe-inspiring to the sweet-loving little kid that was me. Every year, at Christmas time, we went to the Muenster Christ Kindl Markt. That was an array of stalls set up by local merchants around the large Muenster Cathedral. The little stalls sell hot mulled wine, red candied apples and candy floss and any manner of gingerbread figures and other Christmas delicacies. Although it was Christmas time it usually rained, but we were dry under the Gothic arcades lining the cobbled streets. In the Cathedral Court stood an enormous Christmas tree entirely draped in white lights, its boughs glistening with the steady drizzle. My candied apple usually got soggy before we reached the tree and I discarded it half-eaten, in favour of a mug of hot mulled Glueh Wein. The mug had a picture of Munster on it and if you paid some more you could keep it. I still have a collection of Christmas Wine Mugs somewhere in my attic, from all over Germany, Switzerland and Austria because I could never resist keeping them, to my parents’ dismay. Some are probably still sticky from that overly sweet spiced wine, boiled to death in large cauldrons and handed out in a stern manner by German matrons who saw to it that everybody waited their turn. They did not find it odd, however, that even little children drank their concoction, which must have had a good deal of alcohol still in it. It was Christmas, it rained and the kids were cold and wet, so it was probably seen as a potent medicine against colds and flu.

Those dark nights in Muenster gave me a sense that Christmas could actually be fun. It surely was not fun in Holland, when I was growing up. Holland was and is a staunchly Calvinist nation. Christmas is still seen as a time for religious festivity and mild mid-winter holiday behaviour. But on Christmas Day the restaurants and hotels are closed, people remain indoors because it usually rains and churchgoers rest from their visit to the Midnight service. There was no Christmas Turkey, because that was seen as a somewhat over the top American invention. The Christmas trees were there, lit in predominantly white lights. Coloured lights were strictly for exhibitionists or Catholics. And since our country had had a permanent battle between Catholics and Protestants, which had been won by Protestants who therefore regarded Catholics with some suspicion, coloured lights were just not done. Below the three big rivers that cut our country in half, the Catholic population forms the majority and their habits are influenced by France. Their Burgundian life style, however, is frowned upon by the strict Protestants of the north. Coloured lights would have been a sure sign of Popery, just as you could determine which religion a Dutch person was by on what finger he wore his wedding ring: left for Catholic, right for Protestant.

Since people have to have a reason to give each other presents and need some cheer in the murky daylight and the long nights of the north, Holland had always had Saint Nicholas. This patron saint of sailors and children probably originated in Turkey, but for some reason his myth has placed him firmly in Spain. Apparently a Bishop Nicholas saved countless little children from Moorish attacks in his monastery and has therefore been appointed the patron saint of children. How he also got to be involved with sailors is less clear to me. However, the myth had evolved over the centuries, effortless incorporating Norse mythology, Catholic religion and pagan habits, as well as the history of the defence against the Ottoman Empire and a bit of industrial revolution to boot. Saint Nicholas arrives in Holland by steamboat from an unidentified port in Spain. He is accompanied by his white horse, which harks back to the Norse myth of Sleipnir, Wodan’s eight-legged steed. With them are numerous pages, who are white but have been blackened, like the Black and White Minstrels, and wear luscious velvet Spanish Court costumes of the 17th century. They carry the Saint’s Great Book, in which the names of naughty children appear, with a remark that they do not deserve a present this year. Many little souls have been marred by this strict adherence to the rules, because the Dutch used to take this very seriously. Saint Nicholas would be greeted formally by either a member of the Royal House of Orange, or the Mayor of Amsterdam, as the small steamer moored in the vast Port of Amsterdam. From there, the saint began his procession through the Netherlands, to end in the apotheosis on the 5th of December, when he would ride across the rooftops with his Blackamoors, all girls but strangely enough named Black Andreas. The Black Peter dropped the presents through the chimneys of houses where kids had been good. These kids would have placed a carrot and cookies in their shoes for weeks, placed these shoes in front of the fire, and came down early each morning to see if the Horse had eaten them because if the Horse had taken the little offerings, the Saint would visit their house on the great day. Their names would be on the Black Peter’s list and they would not be taken away in infamy to Spain, in a big sack, to learn some manners. Singing the appropriate songs also had an