I’d like to talk about the unexpected and the uncertain.
And of the magical and the sacred, of synchronicities, coincidences and causes.

On a day like today, four years ago, we held my father’s funeral.
It was a lyrical farewell, as he would have wanted, and just a stone’s throw from the tomb of Manolete, the legendary bullfighter.
The coffin descended to the sound of the violin, a serenade played live in his honour, on his journey to rejoining my mother.

Only later did I realize that many, many years before, he himself had serenaded her… gathered underneath her balcony along with a group of university troubadours, and singing the same kind of love song that now echoed around him.

It was no surprise that in the days that followed, locals wondered who exactly the deceased might have been… who could have brought about such a stir in Córdoba’s historic cemetery?

As the saying goes: as we live, so we die…

He was born on the day of Saint Pedro, the name he was destined to bear in more ways than one, since as the firstborn in the Seville of that time, he also had to be called Pedro after his father.

He died in the month of October, just as he had once predicted in a poem written in his own hand. He was buried on All Saints’ Day in a cemetery inundated with flowers.

He left us in the middle of harvesting our Picual olives. As the funeral procession passed through the Molino de Santa Ana estate on its way to his resting place, it suddenly started to pour with rain, just the way he liked it. “That’s what I call good weather,” Pedro the agronomist used to say. And then, quite miraculously, at the very moment the hearse reached the gates of the La Salud cemetery, the rain stopped and the sun shone high in the sky until the ceremony ended.

It was as if everything had been orchestrated from some higher place, in harmony with the sacred verse:

“Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

On the last night – though none of us knew it would be the last – he asked me how the juice of the Picual fruit tasted, saying he had never seen such beautiful olives in his life. He spoke to me from his hospital bed in Seville, where he was under observation. It was Halloween, and while children outside were tricking and treating, he was extremely concerned about an excruciating pain in his shoulders, which the doctors kept assuring him was nothing more than a muscular condition…

But once again, he was right. The pain was in fact a warning, as he was going into cardiac arrest. His heart stopped beating at three in the morning, and caught us all off-guard, like a thief in the night.

I remember him smiling, full of jokes, always ready with a story, eloquent and kind. That’s how he was…. Indeed it was how he won my mother’s heart and the affection of everyone around him.

The last thing he said to the workers on the estate, when they asked after his health, was “fortunately I’m still alive and kicking.”

His singularity and knowledge live on in the olive trees he planted, and in the quality of the extra virgin olive oils we continue to craft each year.

He despised falsehood above almost anything else, and in his memory remains the truth and Olive Oil, over and above all.

His uniqueness and knowledge live on in the olive trees he planted, and in the quality of the extra virgin olive oils we produce each year. He despised falseness more than almost anything, and so in his memory remain, as the Spanish saying goes,  the truth and olive oil, over and above all.

Elena Vecino (Founder of La Cultivada). » Cultivate « yourself with our blog.