Mystery fungus

I am walking in the woods, when I spot it. The size of my hand, bright red, with five prongs sticking out like a starfish, I’ve never seen anything like it before, I bend down to look closer and then reel back. It smells putrid. I prod it with a stick – not a good idea – and the smell bursts into the damp air. Looking as closely as I dare, I think I can identify the remains of insects, their bodies half liquefied in suppurating pools of black gunge. There are no leaves, no chlorophyll, so it must be some kind of fungus, I suppose.

I have no idea what it is so I take a photo and go to ask our neighbours. They have lived in the same farm all their lives, and their ancestors too..

“No, I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen one in my life,” says the aitatxi (grand-father). “Where did you find it?” asks.

Nobody at the farm has noticed them before, though they often chase their sheep through those very same woods. I send an email to my friend Claude, who is very knowledgeable on plant life: no idea.

How come nobody knows what it is called? It is very memorable. If you see it, if you smell it, you can’t forget it.

In the end, I look on Google and quickly come across examples, but only from Australia and New Zealand. My fungus is called Clathrus archeri, devil’s fingers, or octopus stinkhorn. It is not the carnivore that I suspected. The putrefying black gunge is emitted by the plant to attract insects, which then distribute its spores.

Persistence brings results, and I eventually find some European examples. It was first seen in the Vosges in north-eastern France in 1914, unwittingly introduced by antipodean reinforcements in the First World War, on clothing or boots, perhaps. It invaded Britain during the Second World War, first being spotted in Cornwall in 1946, according to Kew Gardens.

Since then it has been conquering Europe, sneeking along the Pyrenees into Cantabria. The first reports in Spain date to 1963. In Castilian Spanish it is called estrella roja. In Euskera: izar gorri. Both mean red star.

I go back to the neighbours and ask aitatxi again: no, he doesn’t know the name. The fungus must have just arrived here for the first time.

It is a curious time-bomb. It has taken 100 years to cross France and has only just exploded in northern Navarre. Not only a time-bomb: a stink-bomb too.

The theatre group "Sorgin Haizeak" performed in the village square

Before I went to Zugarramurdi, I had consigned witches to history.

When I was a child, every time I went to bed I jumped in as quickly as possible. I was convinced that the witch which lived in the cupboard underneath would grab my legs. But I stopped believing in God when I was fourteen, and with him, the devil, witches, fairies, hobgoblins, and other charlatans.

Witches, I thought, might genuinely believe that they had exceptional powers or, more likely, pretend in order to gain money or prestige. But true witches had never existed. And clearly fakes were of no interest. Witchcraft was too cutesy for a 14-year-old boy. Too full of clichés for a grown-up man.

Even when I walked the GR10 and passed within a frog’s leap of Zugarramurdi, I didn’t make the detour. Then last Saturday I went there and changed my mind.

I only went because it  was the first fine day for a week, and we needed to get out. “There’s a midsummer Witch Day,” I said to Veronica. “Let’s go.”

III Día de las brujas en Zugarramurdi [3rd Zugarramurdi Witch Day]

Barrenetxea: Graziana de Barrenetxea "the queen of the coven" lived here. She died in prison

When we arrived a witch was unpacking her broomstick from the boot of her car. Later we saw her selling her wares at a stall in the street market (sorry, no toads today). There were people who could interpret Tarot cards and a man who could read your palm – incongruously dressed in a Chinese kimono and hat. A shop selling pottery witches – old hags on broomsticks. The usual meaningless commercialism, I thought. And then we went to a lecture followed by a tour of the museum, and entered a different world.

A visit to the Witch Museum in Zugarramurdi is essential if you want to understand what happened in the village

Although the museum has only existed for three years, the village has been famed for witchcraft for centuries. Four centuries to be exact. In November 1610 a costly show trial was held in distant Logroño at the Inquisition headquarters. Over forty inhabitants of Zugarramurdi were investigated on suspicion of witchcraft after an impressionable young girl had reworked wild stories from Ciboure on the coast. Confessions were often extracted by torture.

By the time of the trial, after nearly two years of investigations, thirteen of the accused had already died in prison, but that didn’t deter the Inquisitors. Effigies were made and the bones of the dead disinterred, put into boxes, and brought to the dock. Thirty-six of the accused were found guilty. Twelve were burned at the stake. Although five of them had already died in prison, that didn’t deter the Inquisitors either. There were twelve people condemned to death, and twelve would be burned.

The confessions were sometimes ridiculous:

María de Jureteguía, aged 22, said that when she went to the Sabbat, her aunt rubbed her with “flying unguent”. Once, she came out of a small hole in the wall and she realised that she had shrunk. When she asked about it her aunt said not to worry, now that she was back to normal.

Another woman confessed that she had been to bed with the devil on several occasions and had subsequently given birth to twins and triplets – all of them toads, all marked with the sign of the devil.

The implausibility of the confessions didn’t deter the Inquisition either. Witchcraft was being practised in Zugarramurdi and it had to be stamped out.

One motivation for the Inquisitors was simply money. They were career-minded, and the more convictions they obtained the more they advanced. They also supplemented their incomes from the fines and confiscations. And for neighbours seeking revenge for some real or imagined slight, it was a good opportunity. Accusations of witchcraft had a great advantage over other false claims. In the law of the time, if an accusation was rejected the complainant could be punished as if he had committed the crime. Not so for accusations of witchcraft.

A modern witch in the grocery shop in Zugarramurdi

We left the museum heads full of questions. Why were witchcraft trials a phenomenon from 1450 to 1650? Why not before, nor after? How did the late medieval representation of a witch as the naked temptress, complete with broomstick between her thighs, become the modern old crone? Why has the hysteria recurred so frequently? Take Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s; communists in America in the 1950s, to quote only two modern examples. Eleven of the 36 found guilty were men, including the “King of the coven”. The men seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness. Why? Most importantly, how did one man, Alonso Salazar Frias, a junior Inquisitor, manage to put a stop to the trials? I will have to do some research…

By the time we had listened to the lecture and gone round the museum, we were convinced that there had never been any witches – not even silly women pretending to be witches – at Zugarramurdi. If we hadn’t gone to the museum we would have been none the wiser. All around were stalls touting happy please-take-me-home witches, complete with hats, cats and bats, and of course miniature broomsticks – cashing in on the lies which had led to innocent people being tortured and burned at the stake. Truth and money make uneasy bedfellows in Zugarramurdi.

Then, in the evening we went to the “witches” cavern just outside the village for a different kind of experience. The cavern is huge – well, cavernous – and a perfect setting when you have an audience of at least a thousand to fill it. Dimly lit, it was magic. If there had only been a few participants in some occult ceremony it would have been sinister, but this evening it was enchanting.

A tame Black Sabbath

We saw, first, Oskorri, an electric-folk group playing whirling dance tunes with a distinctly Celtic tinge. They were followed by a prudish re-enactment of a witches’ coven by villagers – instead of kissing the devil’s arse, the traditional sign of allegiance, they blow him a kiss.

The factoría Alter Zinema

Finally, the cave was filled with a much more daring multimedia performance based on sex, drugs and rock and roll – or at least as near to rock-and-roll as traditional Basque folk dancing gets. A brew of primeval grunts and erotic heavy breathing from extensively painted but near-naked dancers running around the cave, was interspersed with laughably twee dance routines that could have graced an open-air tourist spectacle. I liked it. Veronica didn’t.

Not quite Basque rock-and-roll

In swirling midnight mist as we drove home, the air was full of witches. I still don’t believe in them, but I am interested in them, now. It was a good day: we came away with questions, not answers.

Tribute to Basque strength: harrijasotze

We only go into the butchers in Leítza to buy some muslos de pollo – literally chicken muscles but we leave with directions for a museum dedicated to a different kind of muscles – human ones.

The walls of the shop were plastered with photos of massive stones being lifted by hulky men. These must be harrijasotzaile.

“Who are they?” I ask in my simplified Spanish, pointing to the men in the photos.

“My father and my brother,” explains the butcher.

The stones on their shoulders are labelled 250kg, 294kg; most are rectangular blocks but some are spherical. There is a trophy on one shelf. Looking at the butcher, I guess that he doesn’t participate but I ask anyway.

“Do you do it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I prefer fiestas.”

By way of explanation he sends us off to a museum just out of town. When we arrive at Peru-Harri, we tell the guide where we have come from.

“The butcher’s my son,” she says, followed by something which we subsequently interpret as: “My daughter, Maite, will get you an orange juice.”

The daughter notices our blank looks, and admits: “My mother does talk rather quickly.”

The tour begins and the mother, also called Maite, points out the hillside opposite the museum: the dolmens (one capped by a Basque beret), the standing stones, the stone circles, the stone slab walls, and the silver-painted stone statues, all new – all larger than life.

To the right of the sculpture the slab lists 12 Basque words: eskertu (to thank), eskaini (to give), eskatu (to ask for), eskuratu (to take charge of) … all connected with the word for hand – esku.

For her family, she explains, stone is symbolic. A link with the past. A part of Basque identity. And harrijasotze – lifting stones – embodies all that is best in Basque culture:  physical and mental strength, and hard work. She talks with undisguised passion. Unfortunately we can understand little, and none of the jokes which keep the coach party laughing. I become progressively more fascinated by the woman herself. She is noticeably female, slim, fragile, elegant, vivacious, extravagant and babbling. She is disconcertingly petite.

Naturally, most of the museum is dedicated to harrijasotze. In the late 1980s it was her husband Iñaki Perurena, who hauled a 320kg stone up onto his shoulder, creating a new world record, and at the same time lifting his sport out of its obscurity. (He also competes in another Basque sport – poetry competitions, in which the poets have to improvise alternate lines on a given subject.)

Maite Perurena at the Peru-Harri museum

On 8 February 2003 her son Iñaxio Perurena spent a whole day lifting a stone from the ground onto his shoulder. The stone weighed 100kg. He lifted it 1,700 times. It took him 9 hours, 9 minutes, 39 seconds. (In 1999, his father had only managed 1,000 lifts – in 5 hours.)

Maite does manage to charge the exhibits with emotion, but what the museum lacks is the physical presence of its heroes, the grunts and groans, the dripping sweat and the sheer strength radiating from their muscles.

The museum is dedicated to stone, claims Maite. It is true, but really it is a temple dedicated to ancestor worship – except that the ancestors are still living. The stones are cult objects and she is one of the handmaidens. What does she think of her butcher son, I wonder.

We went to Leítza just to sample cider. Only when I research on the internet afterwards do I realise that quite by chance we stumbled on the shrine to a world champion.

More [in Spanish]

Basque sports derive from everyday rural life

We have each paid 30 euros to watch a man run 89 times round a bullring alone. The other competitor dropped out, but Xabier still has to run the 8.9km to the finish line in order to claim the prize. It is, as the newspaper says next day, un reto descafeinado – a decaffeinated finish.

When the competition started an hour and a half ago, there was much more adrenalin in the air. 6,000 euros is at stake in a personal bet between Ander Erasun and local lad Xabier Zaldua. They are to chop 10 logs and then run 10 km. Xabier is 32 and Ander only 18, which means that as the mid-day start nears, Ander is bookies’ favourite.

And this kind of bet is taken seriously. Deadly seriously. In March Joxe Mendizabal, a former champion aizkolari (axeman), came out of retirement. After the competition – which he lost – the doctor declared that he was fit to go out for lunch. He never arrived, collapsing on the restaurant steps: his heart suddenly stopped beating.

The competition takes place in the Plaza de Toros in Azpeitia  before 700 spectators. Mostly male and well over 40, many wear the regulation black beret. Our two bulls in the centre of the ring have a series of kanaerdikos (logs with a circumference of 54 inches – 1.37m) in front of them. They each leap onto their first log, standing with their feet apart. The axes flash up and down and the V-shaped cut grows rapidly. Ander clearly makes his own decisions, but Xavier is guided by his trainer who taps the log with a stick to show where he should chop next. Just as it seems that they risk cutting off their toes they change sides and after five minutes they have both finished their first log. There are another nine to go. Ander edges ahead but seems stiff, nervous. The crowd is attentive but not yet tense, with most of the encouragement going to the local lad: “Chabi, Chabi!” they cry.

Ander finishes the logs well before Xabier and has already sprinted – too fast – one and a half times round the edge of the arena before Xabier joins him. They run together for a while and then, to a burst of applause, Xabier passes him. Another turn of the ring and suddenly Ander starts to wobble and within 20m has hobbled to the side and is leaning dejectedly on the barrier. He is shaking his head, looking white, a paleness reflected in the face of his trainer. He is led away to the first aid tent.

Later I ask Maika, one of the few female aizkolariak, what will happen now. How can a farmer’s son afford to pay such a bet?  He can’t, she says, but the takings from the show need to be taken into account. Each of the aizkolaraki will get half. Then they will settle the bet between them. So Ander will finish up with 4,000 euros and Xavier with 16,000 euros. “I don’t think it is healthy,” she says, “there is too much money involved.”

Report on the competition (in Spanish)

One evening, I tried to walk to nearby Zubieta, plainly visible in the valley below. I could see several paths and tracks heading in the right direction, and others which arrived successfully. But joining up the ends proved impossible. Likely-looking routes led to steep escarpments or trundled merrily as far as a barn and stopped. Of course there were no waymarks.

Chastened, the next day I took my GPS with me, only to discover that the tracks marked on the map were mostly fantasies. By dint of persistence I eventually found the way. It was only then that I realised that this is what Europe must have been like two centuries ago.* A typical meadow is dissected by three or four routes. And a little higher up, in the heath, there are tracks of all kinds running in every direction. Sheep, cattle, and humans are still maintaining paths and creating new ones.

In England and Wales it is a different story. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, as the countryside emptied into towns and tyres replaced feet, footpaths fell out of use. By the 1960s action was needed to preserve those which had survived. Definitive maps were drawn up. Since then, the Ordnance Survey and local councils have taken over. They are doing for paths what turnpikes and McAdam did for roads. Ways now have Rights. They are defined in law, regulated, mapped, and protected. There are fewer of them but they are better – they have been domesticated.

Of course, not all paths appear on OS maps, but walkers are attracted to those which do. Like electricity, walkers tend to pass where there is least resistance. Other possibilities are neglected and disappear.

Here, at the western end of the Pyrenees, the process of domestication has only just begun. In the rolling hills of the Basque country, lines of communication are still undisciplined and disorganised, but alive and kicking. Wild, in fact.
—-
Graham Robb’s excellent Discovery of France describes the phenomenon as it existed in 19th century France:

When Napoleon’s statisticians first surveyed the westernmost Breton département, Finistère, they were startled to find that almost one-fifth of the total surface was taken up by ‘roads and byways’… Further studies confirmed these incredible figures. Finistère was an extreme case, but many other départements turned out to be crazed with tiny roads. (pp 143–4)

Giant puffball mushroom

Walking in the hills above Zubieta, in Navarra I come across some immense globular mushrooms. They look like giant puffballs to me. Fresh, puffballs have a wonderfully earthy smell. Cooked, they have a nutty flavour and a texture rather like aubergines. In principle puffballs are easy to recognise – no stem and no gills.

Just to be safe, I stop a passing tractor. “I don’t know what they are called but, no, they are not edible,” I am told. At a nearby farm I ask again. “It’s a Bejin de puta – tart’s mushroom. No good.” says the woman, but her father is more circumspect. “You may be able to eat it. I wouldn’t!”

But the more I search on the internet, the more I am convinced that my specimen is indeed an edible puffball. I find various names for it in Spanish (Bejín, Pedo de lobo, Cuesco de lobo), Euskera (Astaputz erraldoi) and French (Vesse de loup). I also discover that Pedo de lobo, Cuesco de lobo, Vesse de loup and even the scientific name for the species Lycoperdon all mean wolf’s fart. Astaputz erraldoi means an enormously vulgar farting person. Why? Because the mushroom propagates by exploding, releasing a cloud of brown spores into the air.

At that stage the puffball is indeed inedible but when young it is delicious, yet nobody eats them. Well, would you eat something called a “wolf’s fart”?

Beware: it seems that small puffballs have been confused with immature specimens of the deadly amanite phalloïde [see wikipedia for good pictures] but this one was definitely mature. It weighed 435g.

“¿Gusanos, como gusanos de tierra? – Worms, like earthworms?” I have just seen half a worm outside, left on the side of the plate after some bird’s breakfast. It looked more like a sausage than a worm.

“Yes,” she says.

We have come to see our neighbour making cheese in her farmhouse kitchen, above the cowshed. “There are 19 of them. They keep us warm,” she says.

“But I saw you buying milk in the supermarket yesterday!”

“Yes, all their milk goes to their calves. I make sheep’s cheese. The lambs have already gone.”

She grew up here and has been making cheese “since I was this high,” she says, indicating her knees.

Seven litres of sheep’s milk in a galvanised bucket, the kind you can buy in any hardware shop. Warm to 36 degrees centigrade. Pour in 2ml of liquid rennet and turn off the heat.

“Instead of rennet from a bottle you can use fresh tripe,” she explains, but she doesn’t recommend it. (Rennet is naturally present in the stomachs of all mammals – it enables us to digest our mother’s milk, and makes milk curdle.)

She offers us a cup of tea while we wait for the milk to separate. “Earl Grey, Spanish tea is tasteless,” she claims.

After 20 minutes the rennet has done its job. She whisks the curds and whey vigorously, then reheats to 39 degrees to kill the worms.

“That’s all there is to it,” she smiles, plunging her arms into the bucket, pressing the whey out of the spongy mass which has settled in the bottom and pushing it into a mould. “It’ll be ready in two months.”

Later she will boil the remaining whey to extract the curd cheese: requesón – literally re-cheese, more cheese from the same milk.

After an hour I am thirsty so I fish my bottle out of my rucksack and drink while walking. After four hours we stop to gobble down a maximum of food in a minimum of time. The high point of the day is when we reach the summit of the Unboto (800m) and stop for three minutes. We arrive back at Lekaroz, after five and a half hours of intense walking.

The views, it has to be said, were stupendous. Rollicking green hills with distant pinnacles behind. We saw corzos (roe deer), three – too far away to photograph. Someone pointed to a grove of what looked like silver birch (abedul) and said “tejos” (yew trees). (Didn’t understand.) Then we stumbled upon the precioso (wonderful) restaurant of Etxebertzeko borda in the middle of nowhere. Naturally it was closed: restaurants here open from 13:30 to 15:30. Suddenly, I understood why I didn’t need to bring lunch. And why we were rushing. We had to get home in time to eat.

But even here I was mistaken. At the end Pascual explained “Normally we do stop more often but we are organising a competition at the end of May, and we wanted to see how long it would take the fastest walkers.” Undoubtedly somebody had explained this to me; I simply hadn’t understood.

It is still cold, so in the DIY shop I buy a bow saw and ask, in halting Spanish, where I can purchase wood for the fire. The man behind the counter replies: “¿Madera? No, ¡leña! – Wood? No, firewood!” My first lesson in Spanish

“I don’t know,” he continues. Nobody here buys wood. They just cut it down. If you don’t own a forest, you find someone who does.

Finally I discover a timber yard. I am confronted by a gigantic crane, with jaws capable of lifting several complete tree trunks at once, being driven by a man of similar dimensions. “I would like a few branches for my stove,” I explain timidly. No problem. I drive into the hanger and we fill up the back of the car. Kindling, he says, is free.

On a wall of the nearby town of Doneztebe is a poster. Four hulking blokes with their names and ages, four axes, a large pile of leña, a date and a time, and “1500 euros”. The rest of the poster is in Basque, so I have to ask one of our new neighbours to translate. It’s a private bet on who can cut the most wood, with the 1500 euros going to the winner.

Although the town only boasts 1500 inhabitants, it has five different shops offering various degrees of equipment for dealing with anything from a twig to a forest. Big Mat is the largest building in town.

The Iraty forest, a stone’s throw from here, is the largest beech forest in Europe covering 173sq km.

Second lesson: although the hills abound with sheep pasture, they take wood seriously here.

Vines in the snow

Today, snow has been slathered like sun-cream onto the Mediterranean beaches. In our village, the houses have icicle fangs biting into the wind. The Montagne d’Alaric (600m), the first bastion of the Corbières as they rise out of the plain, sparkles. We can’t go to work because the roads are blocked.

Two days ago, I was in the garden weeding the broad beans, in a tee-shirt.

“In my lifetime,” says Marc, importantly, “I have only seen this much snow three times, and never in March.” Marc is 60 years-old. “It is horrible,” he adds.

9 March 2010: la Montagne d'Alaric, as seen from Camplong d'Aude

I don’t agree. For years I have dreamed of climbing Alaric on snowshoes but there has never been enough snow – normally just a few whispers each winter.

Veronica accompanies me to the bottom of the hill. We walk through vineyards, which have been pruned within an inch of their lives, the souches (vine stems) bristling through the snow. Higher up, the newly unfamiliar path is betrays me several times, the trees bending under the weight of the snow barring the route. I struggle through whipped cream. At the summit, the snow has been peeled off by the wind. I realise that the earth here is deep red, not dusty pink. It is a strange dream.

At the "Pas du loup" above the "Jambon"