Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

Toloriu, the Catalunyan Pyrenees

What was he going to do with this place? Felip Portera gazed at the semi-ruined building: Casa Bima. He had been farming these steep green Pyrenean hillsides since he was a boy. The land itself had been in his family for countless generations, and in that time he’d seen the grand old house decay with increasing speed.

Now it was almost a ruin: his cows enjoyed it mostly, as a shelter from cold winter rain and hot Catalan sun, from the mountain winds and thunderstorms. The windows were all broken, the roof was worse than useless; snakes slept in the courtyard in June.

Yet it must have been magnificent once: the views across the valley to Felip’s family house, in the handsome stone hamlet of Toloriu, perched on the opposing crag, were truly stirring. A suitable place for an emperor’s daughter.

Felip whistled for Miro, his dog, who was intent on worrying a calf.

‘Miro. Parada. Miro!’

The young dog perked his ears, and tilted his head; the old farmer tried to look serious and, frowning, he tutted and waved a finger; and then he abandoned the attempt at being stern, and he smiled at the puppyish animal, indulgently.

Leaning on his weary knees, Felip picked up a stick, and threw it; the happy dog galloped down the hill in the early spring sunshine.

Again Felip turned his attention to the house. One day very soon, as a family, they would have to decide: demolish it once and for all? Or rebuild it and refurbish, turn it into an attraction for tourists, by using the legends?

The story was indeed romantic. The daughter of the last Aztec emperor who married a bold Catalan conquistador, Juan Pedro de Grau, who then brought his imperial bride all the way across the seas, to this lonely mountain valley!

Amazing.

It must have been a bewildering experience, Felip mused, as he sat on a bare rock, and unwrapped his lunchtime bocadillo. She was the daughter of a living god, born into the court of an exotic empire, surrounded by priests and lords and bloody sacrifice on sunlit pyramids; then she moved here, to a damp house in the cloudy green Pyrenean meadows, where she was surrounded by white peasants and burly farmers.

What did she think as she stared from her kitchen at the goats, listening to their tinkling bells? Did she remember the old gods, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, as she helped to churn the butter? Did she daydream of the skull racks of the eagle warriors, as they brought in the sows for branding?

Over the years Felip had tried to learn as much as he could about this girl, the emperor’s daughter, Xipahuatzin Montezuma, not least because of the intriguing legends of a treasure, buried hereabouts. What could it be? The great and secret treasure of Montezuma himself? A cache of marvellous gold and turquoise? Eighty years ago some Germans had apparently rented the sloping fields of Casa Bima and tried to find it, and failed; every so often, every few years, someone else made the long wearying walk from Toloriu, already a remote spot in the mountains, to try to find the same. No one had ever found anything. Of course.

Because it was just a legend. And now the house was a saddening sight, and fewer and fewer visitors made the effort to see an old ruin, full of cowpats, vipers and damp cobwebs. Yes, one day soon they would have to decide what to do: probably they would demolish it, maybe build something new. A hotel with a pool. For proper tourists.

Rubbing his hands, Felip finished his sandwich and threw the last piece of crust to the happy dog.

‘ Anem hi, Miro.’ He turned, commencing his walk back to Toloriu. His precious day off was being wasted, his wife would be back from Urgell with the grandchildren soon enough.

But again he paused at the top of the forest path, and gazed at the tall, notable yellow shrub. This singular morning glory plant grew around Casa Bima, and only around here, on the southeast-facing slope. It was a curiosity in itself. Felip could remember when there were hundreds of these distinctive shrubs on this slope, but they too had dwindled over the years: because of climate change, perhaps? The plants seemed very susceptible to altering conditions — very delicate and fragile.

And then that Scotsman had come here, nearly two years ago; the tall old man with the charming smile — who had picked most of the seeds! Felip remembered the man’s agreeable but distracted nature. He had presumed, at the time, that he was an eccentric botanist. If so, he was surely not a very good botanist: by picking all the seeds he seemed to have killed off nearly all the remaining shrubs.

Felip did not, however, especially mind this destruction. The plant was a nuisance. Occasionally one of his cows would stray near the forest, and nibble the leaves and seeds, and then fall sick. So he wasn’t upset that the plant was dying out, even if it was rather pretty. And now there was just one plant left.

Why not get rid of it altogether? The farmer nodded to himself. Yes: tomorrow he would get up early and he would come back here, and pull up the last shrub by its roots, get rid of it once and for all: burn the golden flowers and toxic seeds. Then he would do something about the rotten old fencing in the woods.

Calling his dog to heel with a cheerful whistle, Felip Portera continued his stroll along the dappled green path, to his village in the hills. A wind was picking up, and it was time to go home. And as he walked away, the little golden flowers shivered, in the sweet and freshening breeze.