Pedro is gone.

Pedro is gone.  And his passing marks the end of an era.  He was one of the last remaining true Andalusian peasants. I do not use that word in a derogatory sense. We were neighbours for over 15 years when we lived in the country, and this man who had little or no formal education taught me so many things that I feel privileged to have known him. He taught me about the phases of the moon and how they influence crops and animals, the reading of the sky to foretell the weather, what should be planted where and when and how ...

The rhythm of his life was the rhythm of the natural world: a time to till, a time to sow and a time to reap. He tilled the soil, his own and ours, with a wooden Roman plough drawn by two donkeys. When each harvest came he brought me tomatoes and peppers and potatoes... Each Friday, when his wife Ana baked in the wood oven, he brought me a loaf of bread made with flour made from his own wheat that he took to the mill with the help of his donkeys. In the summer he would bring me bowls of refreshing prickly pears already peeled so that I would not prick my fingers on the spines.

When there was little work to do in the fields he picked esparto grass and wove halters for the donkeys and binding for the home-made cheese which would give it a crisscross pattern on the outside.

His animals adored him and followed him constantly. When he passed by, the donkeys would call out to him when they were not needed to work, and in the evening they would follow him home. His dogs were his constant companions as he went about his tasks. They did not lead a charmed life, these animals, but neither did he.  They lived as he did, a simple, spartan life reduced to the bare essentials: no electricity or running water.  The water was drawn from the well at the bottom of the hill and Ana did her washing down there too and hung the clothes on the nearby bushes to dry.

Ant yet, the greatest lesson I learned through Pedro was not taught to me directly by him, but as a consequence of decisions made for him by others.  When, following local custom, lots were drawn to decide who would inherit which part of the property, Pedro lost the house where he was born and the land he had worked all his life. This went to the widow of a brother who lived far away and had not been back in many decades. Pedro inherited a small house in the village and some dispersed plots of land. 

Pedro's children then decided that it was time for their father to give up working and settle in the village.  But how was a man who had lived all his life in the country where there was always something to do going to reconcile himself to a village life of tedium? When I went to see him around Christmas that year and asked about the donkeys, Pedro told me that they had been sold. He began to cry. One of those donkeys had been with him for 40 years. The light went from his eyes and that was really the death of Pedro. He went into a decline and spent seven years in bed unable to recognise anyone, though I felt that he did recognise voices because, when I went to see him and spoke to him, he would raise his hand and look towards me, albeit with expressionless, unseeing eyes.

That greatest lesson of all was the value of animals in the lives of people who live in communion with them. Pedro is now gone, but in fact he left a long time ago when his donkeys were taken from him.