Sanibel Scribbles

by Christine Lemmon

  Vicki watched the woman’s face, as if watching her soap opera, and made sure to accentuate her hand gestures because that too helped Rosario to better understand. This time she casually waved her hand in the air to say, “Isabella will be fine, don’t worry about her.” She didn’t understand why Rosario worried about Isabella to begin with, only that she would be fine.

  As she fried the potatoes and onion together slowly in oil, without browning, Rosario took the time to carefully and passionately watch Vicki’s facial and hand gestures, as if watching someone directing traffic. Both only listened to ten percent of each other’s words, but las mujeres communicated.

  Rosario nodded, “Si, si.” She beat the eggs well, added them to the pan, and then let them fry for a moment.

  She placed a plate on top of the omelet and turned the frying pan upside down, then slipped the tortilla back into the pan on the other side. She signaled to the American to stand up and take watch of the eggs and then left the kitchen. When she returned, she had a suitcase in hand.

  “Rosario, ¿adonde vas?” Vicki asked where she was going.

  “Hoy, no, mañana, si.” she said. “No place today, tomorrow, yes.”

  She turned the stove off and, for the first time, Rosario sat down, setting her chores aside as she spoke and cried. She was homesick. She missed her extended family in Pamplona. But her husband had a good job at the post office downtown, and they would never move back there, not now that the kids were grown and living in Madrid. Her children liked this modern world, their home, and moving back to Pamplona would mean leaving them behind.

  Rosario’s husband, Isabella, and her two married sons and their families made the trip to Pamplona only twice a year. Rosario and Isabella took a third trip each fall and would be leaving tomorrow for a short time. She bragged about Pamplona as if she herself had designed it. She described it as a prosperous city with high-rise apartment blocks, nice lawns, and factories, if Vicki understood correctly. She said Pamplona was so old that, from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, it was the capital of the kingdom of Navarre. After the Civil War, she said her people had changed it into a flourishing city. She boasted that her people were hardworking, religious, and conservative.

  As she wiped her eyes with her dishcloth, she said she loved that city, but her husband was from Madrid. She said she often regretted having fallen in love with a man from another city because it forced her to choose between her man and her family, and her man would never leave Madrid. She chose Lorenzo, and ever since they had lived together happily in Madrid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ROSARIO WAS QUEEN OF the house and wore the crown of the kitchen. She peeled, sliced, and minced garlic like the CEO of a large corporation cutting out the waste and getting to the core of business. She monitored the amount of food in the pantry, inspecting the onions, red and green peppers, and making sure nothing went moldy, just as the head of a company watches for excess spending and costly items not being used. She walked around her kitchen with a confidence that declared this woman knew every nook and cranny, and every speck of dirt in need of cleaning. She knew when the dish towel needed a washing and when the window needed opening. She gave her kitchen the stream of fresh air it needed, exactly when it needed it. She knew darn well how to peel an onion without tears, but at times, perhaps like a CEO too passionately and emotionally connected to the corporation, she let it burn her eyes and she cried. The voluntary downsizing hurt worst, the day when both her sons left the nest. And sometimes she stayed awake at night, calculating how much a new ironing board might cost or what ingredients she needed to make the world’s best paella feast for her family. At other times she slept deeply, dreaming of a new apron.

  Each morning she awoke refreshed and made her commute to work down the long hallway and into the kitchen, often stopping to pick up her daughter’s red robe from the floor, then going forward when she saw her husband’s green sweater just a few steps ahead.

  At times, when she saw the yellow sun rising through the kitchen window, she slowed, then continued her commute down the hallway, not stopping to pick up the mess. Long before anyone else would wake, she would stand at that window, watching the sunrise while praying to her own superior. She gave thanks for the God-given products she had carefully found to feed her family throughout the years, nourishing them with nature’s best, never purchasing anything with ingredients she didn’t understand or couldn’t pronounce.

  At other times she simply needed a rest, and then she would return, noticing once again the gorgeous green avocado she had sliced for her husband’s sandwich and the ripe, red tomatoes she chopped for the stew, and after pouring olive oil into the pan, she would rub a little extra into her hands, pampering herself in a secret, still moment. Every so often she ran her oily hands through her thick, long hair to moisturize its gray strands, then she quickly pinned it up in her daily bun, the bun she had begun wearing years ago when her hair still shone a deep black.

  Perhaps the only thing that set her apart from a CEO was that she delegated nothing. She got down on her knees to clean the hardwood floors. She made several trips up and down the flights of stairs, carrying as many bags of food as she could fit securely in her arms. She washed her husband’s and her daughter’s clothes, and ironed them all without complaint. She played moderator when Isabella and her father discussed marriage. He loved his daughter but didn’t hold back when it came to pressuring her regarding a husband and grandchildren. At times, Rosario—peacemaker, heart of the household—stepped between them and resolved the heated talks in an authoritative yet fair tone of voice, despite her own secret longing for her daughter to find the right man and get married.

  Rosario made sure there were just enough pears and garbanzo beans and other food items to sustain her household before she left for Pamplona, but still, she didn’t feel deserving of her getaway. She needed to trust that everything would run fine without her for a short time.

  Her absence with the power she held triggered a sort of celebration of gluttony for her husband Lorenzo and, incidentally, for Vicki.

  The rebellious fiesta began that night at supper, with a pitcher of fruit-filled sangria. Lorenzo insisted that Vicki write down the ingredients of his infamous sangria, made of vino tinto, liquor, brandy, sugar, pears and apples. He added the ingredients with pride, as if turning water into wine. Then he urged Vicki to make the second pitcher as he watched with the impish grin of a little boy, claiming that his wife had put this recipe to rest long ago.

  As Vicki chopped the fruit, Lorenzo drank glass after glass, telling her he had fallen in love with his wife because she was from Pamplona and Pamplona had better fiestas than any other city in Spain. He said he later had been disappointed to learn that his wife never liked the annual fiesta in Pamplona. She found it overwhelming, but he would one day convert her into a party animal. He had said years ago that he and his father would have fiesta after fiesta, almost every day.

  “Do you have a lot of fiestas today?” she asked in Spanish.

  “No, no mas,” he answered honestly.

  “Would you rather live in Pamplona?”

  “Desde Madrid al Cielo,” he replied.

  “Si, si,” she said. “I’ve heard that phrase before from several others, that after Madrid, there is only one destination: Heaven.”

  Lorenzo admitted he felt guilty and knew his wife would not like the fiesta he was hosting, but he added that la comida and bebida (food and drink) were his only rebellions in life. He knew he acted in disobedience toward his wife, the domestic queen, but couldn’t resist his passion and respect for food. As Evelyn would have said, Lorenzo had never outgrown the sweet stage of life. He diluted his coffee with sugar cubes and leche and the normally mellow, loving father couldn’t harm a fly. He caught bugs in a glass, then let them free outside. He served as an all-around obedient husband who appreciated his wife’s home-cooked meals of lentil soup, garbanzo beans with carrots and olive oil, octopus and Spain’s
best paella. He needed his sweets and sangria once in awhile, and knew that meant sneaking them. Rosario had long ago prohibited such indulgences out of worry over his mammoth stomach.

  “When Rosario gets worried over mi estomigo, I say, come here, give me a hug,” explained Lorenzo in Spanish. “I tell her one hug cada dia will add muchos years to my life. She hugs me with a smile every morning. I walk into her kitchen, and she stops everything. I know she has a lot of work to do. She drops everything to hug me. Then she returns to work. Ahhh, Rosario! This is why she is so good at her job. She is the heart of the household, the queen of our castle.”

  After the sangria, he opened a white paper bag full of an assortment of galletas and dulces—his favorite being nothing more than gourmet chips dipped in a candied glaze of chopped peanuts.

  Between chomps he lazily sang, “Da da da de da de da.” To Vicki, it sounded like the tune from “If I Were a Rich Man.”

  She tried asking if he had seen Fiddler on the Roof, but the word “fiddler” wasn’t in her dictionario. Still, she felt sure she heard this Spaniard mumbling the Jewish song.

  “Da de da dee da de da,” he sang as he controlled the outpouring of the sangria. This fiesta wasn’t about to end, not until the last drop was drunk.

  “Mas, mas, Victoria,” he announced, as if he were a ruler. But he was no ruler, just a harmless, hard-working man who liked to party. But he made it clear that once he slurred his first word, he always stopped drinking.

  “Are you saying you do not drink to get drunk?” asked Vicki.

  “Nunca, nunca! Yo no bebo demasiado porque los espanoles tienen la digni-dad,” he said. “Never! Spaniards only drink to enhance their perspective and wit, but once they get drunk, they’ve lost their dignity.”

  “Tengo una pregunta,” said Vicki. “Madrid is a major city.”

  “Si, si,” he said.

  “It’s a big city, a successful city, a busy city.”

  “Si, si, claro que si,” he flagged her onward, eager for her question.

  “Everyone naps every single day. They close down shops and put a halt to business.”

  “Siesta, si.”

  “Well, if you add up all those siestas, do you know how many hours it takes away from business in a single year?” she asked as she downed sangria.

  “Si, muchos anos, si.”

  “Well, we can hardly fit in an hour lunch break back in the States, let alone a sit-down lunch, or a coffee in a real mug, not a to-go cup, but a real, breakable mug, so tell me, what is your secret? How can a city flourish despite the fact that professionals shut everything down to nap every single afternoon?”

  “Divine intervention,” he said in slightly slurred Spanish. “Divine intervention.”

  “Oh,” she replied. “That explains it.”

  Lorenzo took advantage of his wife’s absence for the rest of the week.

  One fiesta after the next. Every night he’d open the little white bakery bag of goodies as if he were Santa Claus dipping into his sack of toys.

  Despite these late-night indulgences, something significant clicked for Vicki during the day. As she sat in the front row of her History of Spanish Civilization class, she took notes in Spanish without thinking about translations, conjugations, or meanings. She no longer strained to interpret the professor. Without any delay in her mind, she now understood her classes, and her headaches disappeared.

  She felt on top of the world. The pages of her Spanish grammar books had come alive. She felt immersed in Spain and its culture. At last, she could understand her professors, Lorenzo, and the people on the streets of Madrid, and that meant she had become fluent in Spanish. As if the joy of it all fueled her, she regularly left class and walked the streets of Madrid for hours; alone, yes, but as a loner, no. She needed time alone, time to think about herself in relation to the world around her. As Pablo Picasso once said, “Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.”

  She wanted to enjoy her own company. Why shouldn’t she? She’d have to be with it the rest of her life. And still, after death, she’d again have to live with her mind, her soul, her spirit, herself. She walked under the luminous blue sky that Velazquez once painted and felt the warm air blanketing her skin.

  Feeling peaceful and happy as she walked, she allowed herself to think, not letting anything get in the way of her true thoughts. There was a time when she didn’t allow herself an activity like this, a time when she didn’t have time for a bad mood or for sad thoughts that might surface, but now, as she walked, she didn’t hold back. At first, her thoughts fluctuated like Picasso’s erratic eras in painting. So, in the next minute, she felt outraged, in a dark blue mood. Deep down inside lurked despair. Grandma and Rebecca were no longer just a phone call away. Her parents’ home in the country had been reduced to a memory. She could never scoop another ice-cream cone in her family business again. She felt far away from her sister. She felt furious, fed up with her breathing problem. Breathing was the source of life! She walked faster.

  Others were walking, too. Punks with rebel hair, mothers with grocery bags and toddlers, and business people with briefcases followed the rhythm pulsing through the streets of Madrid. They strutted rather than walked. Into the darkness, people went. The nights belonged to everyone.

  She walked through Gran Via, a major thoroughfare in Madrid, past cinemas, shops, and fast-food restaurants. After several miles, she knew her walking had become obsessive, like searching for seashells that day on the beach, but she could neither stop nor slow her pace.

  But then she walked past a bucket and a gray bundle crunched up on the sidewalk outside the El Corte Inglés department store, and for a moment, felt guilty about her nightly fiestas with Señor Lorenzo. She had no money to donate to the bucket, so she sat down on the cold pavement and smiled at the ancient, sunken black eyes hidden inside a hooded flannel shawl. Still out of breath from her walk, she couldn’t talk, and if she could, she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know why she sat down next to this stranger who was busy with her hands. At first, she repeatedly twisted her gray hair, then switched to fondling a pebble on the sidewalk, or touching the sidewalk itself. For a long moment, Vicki heard silence, and she decided the homeless bundle, nobody’s grandmother, might want to share her story. The woman kept touching anything in sight, as if to say, “I am lonely. I am starving for conversation. Please help me.”

  Unlike story-sharing on Tarpon Key, there was no wine or rippling currents, just an empty bottle of tequila and the sound of honking horns. But the woman, like every other homeless person, and every other living creature, had a story to share, and Vicki felt like listening.

  Out from the black flannel, a scaly, wrinkled hand wiped a cold tear from her eye, but she said nothing. She assumed that wearing this woman’s shoes must be horrible because typically in Spain, children, grandchildren and extended families don’t allow their aging mothers to sit in rags begging for money. “This is my choice,” said the woman, who wasn’t wearing any shoes. “I want to be here, exactly where I am,” she said in Spanish, and nothing else. After about five minutes, Vicki got up and walked away.

  Like descending into Hell, the subway’s escalating stairs took her deep into the earth, at least ten floors down. She learned slowly, but she learned. No eye contact. Look straight ahead. Which line to take? Sometimes she got confused. Attention Deficit Disorder, maybe. So she’d just ride. Any line, any color. Once she hopped on, and a little old man grabbed her, pulling her off before the doors shut and the subway took off. Whispering in Vicki’s ear, he warned her about some “peligroso” stop. That meant dangerous. His eyes speckled with blue, green, brown, and yellow—an artist’s palate—as he held her hand tightly, walking her to another stop. He nudged her to board. As he stood outside on the subway platform, he waved through the closing glass doors. His angelic eyes looked familiar. He then pulled out a straw hat with a hole in the top and put it on his head, laughing. It couldn’
t be Howard without the sideburns, without the beard. No, Howard wasn’t that old. But he did have Howard’s bluish-gray eyes. They waved until the subway car pulled away, and she could no longer see the stranger. Everyone has that one moment in life, in which they look back, wondering whether or not they have encountered an angel, and they try questioning the sparkle they saw in the eyes or the manner in which the stranger vanished after helping. Everyone wants to believe they bumped into an angel, and there’s no reason not to believe, they decide, until they bump back into the same character a month later, and he’s honking and swearing one car back from them in traffic. She wouldn’t bump into this fellow again because she wanted to believe he was more.

  She always power-walked over the bridge, then slowed as she passed the two fountains in the park, taking a favorite bench outside the Prado Museum. Here she tried to memorize the photographic grandeur of the fourteen mammoth white arches, sculpted with various statues, leading to the museum doors. She appreciated the art of the tall, slender black lanterns and the stone-carved figures surrounding her in the park.

  She knew returning to visit Tarpon Key someday might be easier than it would be returning to one of the world’s most famous art museums, with its collection of over 4,000 masterpieces, many of them acquired by Spanish kings. It might be difficult returning to this, so she wanted to remember everything. That way she could return in daydreams. As a submarine that had traveled from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico, and now the Mediterranean Sea, she never wanted to forget the route she had traveled and looked forward to the route ahead.

  She closed her eyes and felt a cool, autumn Madrid breeze tickle the hair on her arms. She felt alive and in love. Yes, in love with life. She promised herself that when she returned to the United States, she would carry a blanket in her car at all times, and stop and sit in parks whenever time allowed.

  Oops! Time would never allow such a thing, so she would have to make time instead. Sitting in a park would be a priority from now on, and she would cook more than microwave entrees. She would use fresh basil and olive oil and no more garlic powder. She would take time to use the real thing, to peel, then mince or chop or thinly slice its cloves, depending on the degree of flavor she would want. And she would walk into a church and pray, or take a long walk and pray. She would do all of these things and more. Now she knew why people said, “I’m going to take time and go on a vacation.” They never said, “Time is giving me a vacation.” So she would do these things, not because time had become more generous, but because she would become a bit more selfish and take a larger piece of time. No one is given time. It’s up to people to find it, grab it, and take advantage of it in a wonderfully outlandish and selfish way.