Sabino the Cow Man

Sabino was standing at the bottom of the ladder in his madreñas or clogs that add another couple of inches to his already large stature. He was leaning on his stick watching me struggle with the foam gun I was using to replace tiles that had been lifted in the gale. My hands were covered in a sticky paste that was gluing my fingers together.

Sabino speaks Asturianu or Bablé, the local language, and although he speaks in Castellano to me I find it difficult to follow sometimes because of the accent. Vacas (cows) become bAH-kes and words that end in 'o' in Spanish end in 'u' (oo). All those oos make the cooing language sympathetic with the sound of surprise in every sentence.

A village stalwart, Sabino doesn't drive and rarely leaves the mountain valleys. The first time I met him he asked where I was from. 'Ah, las Inglaterras,' he said and paused. 'They don't have cows there, do they?' He paused again. 'At least not like the cows here.'

Asturian cows are big, beautiful jersey-type cows with wide noses that snort a stream of hot air on your outstretched hand and look at you with seductive brown eyes rimmed with black and cream. When they get frisky they jump over the fences and dry stone walls and mill around on the roadside until Conchi or Sabino comes along to round them up with a few touches of the switch and some shouting.

He complains that people don't want to work with cows any more. The village is suffering a decline in population that leaves me puzzled when I stop to think about it. The village houses with their well-worked stone doorways and their solid walls of mampostería or unworked stone, tell you that once this land supported many families not just at the subsistence level of a small-holding, or minifundio, but with a surplus that allowed decorative extras. Now it seems the same land does not give enough even to live poorly.

Tino, who was a lorry driver but now owns a furniture shop near Cornellana and dedicates his spare time to small-scale market gardening, knows the reason. 'La gente es zoqueta,' he says. 'People are stupid. They don't want to work and when they work they want it all to be easy. They think they can just make a living with cows, but it never used to be like that. You need to diversify. The land is good. You can grow anything here and all they want is a cash crop and go live in the city.'

Sabino has other ideas. I'm up the ladder and my hands are turning into paddles with this sticky foam so I have to come down and give him my full attention. The real problem these days, he tells me, is that all these city types are a bunch of maricones who don't know the front of a cow from its rear end.