Her daydreaming relaxed her like a catnap as her eyes settled on the white pillar of the museum, and she remembered that life was but a passing mist and nothing lasts forever. Sadness, anger, resentment, and worry pass like the clouds—some are just slower-moving storms.
“I’ve got no money,” she said to a homeless man who sat down next to her.
“I have no intention of begging for dinero from you, Americana,” he replied in Spanish. “Although I feel I am entitled to it.”
“Oh? And why do you feel you are entitled to money?” she asked.
“I have a noble title in life,” he boastfully claimed in a blend of Portuguese and Spanish. “My nobility dates back to the Middle Ages, to the time the Christians started reclaiming land from the Arab invaders.”
“Then how can someone so noble end up homeless?” she wanted to know.
“Aye, everyone grabbed on to some noble title back then,” he admitted with a grunt.
“You believe that every person in Spain has some nobility?”
“Si, si.” He nodded, then inched his way closer to her on the bench.
“It’s hard to compete when the whole country is noble. This is why I am left homeless,” he said. “I am homeless because I do not believe someone of noble title should work.”
Having never met a more arrogant but charming bum, she got up and walked inside the museum for her fifth time that semester. Each time left her more entranced, more invigorated with confidence, determination and inspiration to accomplish something significant in life, but at this stage, she didn’t know what. She refused to worry about her future now. She was in the moment, and the moment meant Spain. When it came time to do something significant in life, she would know. Ideas would come to her, doors would open, and people with a purpose would pop into her life. She would be ready, but for now, for today, she could only think about the moment, and the moment wasn’t picking apples from an orchard in Michigan or eating a piece of Red Velvet Cake at the Bubble Room on Captiva Island, although she wouldn’t mind a quick moment of that kind. Her moment was Spain—where her greatest present accomplishment might be doing laundry.
After spending hours in the museum, she walked the several miles back to her early-evening economics class. By then she had a decision to make. Either she could return to the apartment, or she could walk back to Calle Preciados and drop by the corner of El Corte Inglés at around six-thirty and see if a black Mercedes had showed up. After all, today was October fourth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SHE CASUALLY STOOD OUTSIDE the doors of the crowded department store, which sold Levis for about ninety-three dollars a pair. Feeling indecisive, like a woman impulsively ready to spend money but also fearful of wasting that money, she started to walk away, then turned back once more, as if giving the black Mercedes one last chance. She remembered its driver saying that if the corner looked busy, he wouldn’t park the car but would instead pull up along the curb so she could hop in. Did she really want to step into the car of an unknown foreign man? What would it cost her? Was there a return policy? Would he return her to the curb if things didn’t work out?
Suddenly, she didn’t want to invest anything of herself with this stranger, and she started to walk away. She felt proud and without regret, a woman choosing to leave the expensive clothes behind. Then she noticed the old woman in the same gray rags she had seen earlier., She was still sitting on the same piece of sidewalk square. Vicki changed her mind.
“Have you seen a man in a black Mercedes?” she asked in Spanish.
“No,” replied the woman.
She wanted to better describe Rafael but didn’t know the Spanish word for dimples, so, instead, she sat down next to the woman to wait, listening to the sound of coins dropping into the bucket every couple of seconds. Some coins landed with a splash. Others sounded like a single droplet of light rain. The bucket never went dry. The people of Spain wouldn’t allow it to, and the old woman, probably noble, surely seemed to be surviving off a country that cared.
Vicki looked up as if giving Rafael one last chance. “He is just a man, a stranger,” Vicki told the woman.
“Why would I get in a car and drive away with a man who doesn’t speak English?” she asked, then, feeling horribly foolish for making plans with him in the first place, she quickly squeezed the cold hand next to her, stood up, and started crossing the street in the direction of the apartment. Why, of course he had forgotten about her, their encounter, their plans to meet on a crowded corner of all places! And she too would make it a forgotten moment, and him, a forgotten stranger.
As she reached the other side of the street, she felt someone yanking her sweater from behind. Her heart made a record-breaking leap over the high jump as she whirled around, ready to protect herself with a fist, but she couldn’t hit the little old woman under the gray shawl, frantically flinging her cane in the air and pointing it toward the department store.
“El hombre, el hombre,” she cried.
“Gracias,” said Vicki.
“Vive!” shouted the woman.
A black Mercedes had parked along the curb, and Rafael stood with a bouquet of purple, yellow, and red tulips on the corner. He held the flowers as if he understood where the American woman came from, as if he knew that tulips made her want to dance and scrub streets with buckets of cold water and old-fashioned brooms, and that tulips marked every corner of her hometown, and that now they might make her homesick. He formally held the flowers, yet casually looked around as if his fifty-five minutes of tardiness meant nothing at all.
The two women re-crossed the street together. The older took her seat on the sidewalk corner. The younger accepted the bouquet of tulips and got in the car.
They drove ten minutes to what Rafael kept calling el museo de cera. Vicki had no idea what the words meant nor where they were going. She didn’t care as she softly caressed each of the silky petals.
“Me gustan,” she told him she liked the flowers. “How did you know that tulips are my favorite flower?” she asked in Spanish.
“Son preciosas como ti.” He told her they were as precious as she was. Then, he asked slowly in Spanish. “Of all the flowers in el mundo, why are they your favorite?”
She carefully laid out the correct Spanish words in her mind before speaking. “I’m from Holland, Michigan. It’s a ciudad en los Estados Unidos that holds an entire festival for tulips.”
“A festival of tulips? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said the Span ish stranger next to her.
She paused a moment to translate his words, then responded slowly. “People have been celebrating the flowers for hundreds of years, since 1632, when the interest in tulip growing exploded over in Holland, the country,” she added, and tried hard to remember the words of her professor when he had lectured about the flowers.
“Tulip growing developed into a craze, and there was wild activity in tulip stock. People asked outrageous prices for a single bulb.” She noticed him staring more at her than at the road he was driving down, so she stopped talking.
He waved for her to continue. “Mas, mas. Quiero escuchar mas.” He said he wanted to hear more.
She continued in fluent yet slow Spanish. “The tulip situation got out of control, and finally, after many Dutch people went bankrupt, the government stepped in to regulate the tulip trade.”
He smiled and said in his native language, “And Victoria, after all of that, the tulips survived and still stand proud every spring.”
“Si, Si,” she answered.
Following their drive, Rafael parked and they walked into a building where they were greeted by the king and queen of Spain. Vicki peeked into an anteroom and noticed Michael Jackson standing as he had on the cover of his Thriller album, then John Wayne. A distance away she noticed Mother Theresa. Had Vicki died and gone to Heaven? Then she glanced much further and saw Hitler! No, Hell. It struck her like a matador strikes a bull. El museo de cera meant wax museum.
They began
their tour in the political room, walking past Hitler and other political figures, then they stopped in front of Franco.
“I was talking to a señora,” said Vicki. “And she was telling me she missed Franco as ruler, that his collapse triggered a sort of social and sexual revolution, a downfall of morals.”
“Si, si,” answered Rafael. “Divorce, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and adultery were all illegal under Franco.”
“Digame,” she said, wanting to know his views of this stern ruler. “Rafael, ¿que piensas de Franco?”
He spoke clearly and slowly, and it only took her mind a second to translate his Spanish words into her English words. In fact, she heard his Spanish words as English in her mind. He was better than any history book she had ever read and more interesting than any class she had ever taken.
“When Franco died, our country was reborn,” he said, staring Franco in the eyes. “With his collapse, Spain jumped from dictatorship to democracy overnight, Victoria.” As he spoke, he looked back and forth between Franco and his American guest. “It marked the last Fascist regime in Europe.”
“Mas, mas. Quiero eschuchar,” she said. “I told you about tulips. Now you tell me about Franco.”
“Forty anos of dictatorship and order at the expense of freedom,” he said, shaking his head as if scolding the wax figure in front of him. “My father, my cousins, anyone who protested against the restrictions on speech and press and assembly were disciplined.”
“Your people must have been furious,” she commented.
“Si, la gente de mi pais were afraid. You would be too, Victoria. But Franco had power, too much power. He was empowered by the army, church, and the Falange Party.”
She knew now that Rafael and Rosario had different perspectives. Rosario missed the stern order Franco insisted upon for Spain. Rafael despised the man.
“¿Su vida esta muy diferente sin Franco, no?” She wanted to know if and how life changed when Franco no longer had power.
“Ahhh, si, si,” he replied. “Franco limited the cultural and intellectual aspirations of my people. With Franco gone, the fashion industry flourished. Women used to wear mostly black. Without Franco, they immediately started wearing some of the most daring colors.” He laughed. “What a statement—so modern—the models made as they walked down the European runways in wild colors for the first time. Las mujeres mostly dress daring in the city. Countrywomen are still conservative.”
“¿Por que?” She wanted to know why they dressed in black in the country.
“La muerte,” he said. “Death is all over, Victoria. In the country, they mourn for several years after the death of family. Because they have such large familias, they’re always mourning someone and always wearing black.”
Might wearing black actually help someone overcome grief? Maybe she should have worn her black dress instead of that pastel bikini right after Rebecca died. Then again, neither Rebecca nor Grandma would have wanted her to go around wearing black for months. Rebecca once said that black darkened her eyes, and Grandma, well, she only wore purple.
“Estamos de moda, Victoria,” Rafael declared proudly, as he turned and walked toward the next room.
She couldn’t argue. They did look like a country in style!
They entered the dark movie monster room where the damp coldness reminded Vicki of a cellar. They were the only ones touring, and she wished the museum had more customers. As Rafael took hold of her hand tightly, she felt sudden fear. Not from the mummies and monsters, but from the man wearing glasses, walking by her side and now holding her hand, the man wearing cologne she had never smelled before, a scent that said this man liked fine dining, red wine, and conversation, and romance to go along with it all. She could always tell much about a man based on the cologne he chose to wear.
Who was he? Why did she get in the car with him in the first place? How did it all start? What if he were married? Well, if he was, this luxurious man was a Titanic heading for disaster. Suddenly a sharp pain struck her chest like an iceberg. She couldn’t breathe, and her legs shook. Her vision blurred, and she knew she was losing the mind-over-matter battle once more.
Her panic attack had begun. It would be a matter of minutes before she would start to hyperventilate. She tried to listen to Rafael’s slow, clear Spanish narration of the tour. He knew a lot about wax figures, but did he know CPR? She dropped her purse so she could bend down and catch her breath, but Don Rafael insisted that he be the one to pick it up. She didn’t want to die, not here in the wax museum, not here in Spain. The figures around her looked real—real and dead, as if they should be resting in coffins instead of standing around in a basement, staring into space.
As they entered another political room, Rafael’s voice grew louder, filled with excitement. “El es un amigo de mi padre, muy especial, Victoria. Y el tambien.” He pointed to a wax person. “Once, he and my father were friends, and look there! They too were friends! Now, they are dead. Now, they are wax sculptures in a museum.”
She knew Rafael’s father had important friends. Anyone made into wax after death is important. She knew Rafael’s father was important. Anyone who is merely friends with wax sculptors must be important himself. She wanted to know more, but at this point she was only half concerned with the stories of the wax figures. Most of her attention went to talking herself out of a panic attack in the cold, dark, creepy museum. Not only was she standing in a spooky-looking room with a mysterious man, but she was with a man whose father had friends turned into wax!
She felt relieved when the tour ended, and they drove away. After a while they parked the car and walked to Café Gijon, located near the Plaza de Cibeles at the edge of the prestigious Barrio de Salamanca, a wealthier part of town. It was a chilly night, so once inside the warm café, cozily designed with polished paneling and gilt mirrors, Vicki didn’t want to leave. It didn’t matter that they both had already drunk two espressos. Neither felt ready to venture out into the windy night, and something about the century-old café stirred a desire for fine conversation.
They stayed in the café with its black and white tabletops for almost four hours, discussing a 1942 novel Vicki was reading for her Spanish literature class.
“So Pascual Duarte is your favorite novel,” said Vicki. “I could hardly understand the plot, themes, and characters, but now it all makes sense to me!”
“Camilo Jose Cela won the Nobel Prize for literature back in 1989.” Rafael waved his hands as he spoke, as if his gestures were part of Spain’s language and as important as words. “It is my favorite book, and I’ve read it several times.”
“I stayed up until three in the morning trying to make sense of it all,” said Vicki. “I found it so sad.”
“It is written in a type of realism known as tremendismo,” said Rafael.
“Do you know what tremendismo means, Victoria?”
“No, ¿que significa?” she asked.
“It features the antihero and an insistence on the ugly, harsh aspect of life.”
“Why do you love such a depressing novel?” she asked him in Spanish.
“Porque.” He looked down. “I have had several depressing moments.”
“Digame.” She told him she wanted to know more. “Mañana, mañana.” He told her he’d tell her another time. “That means you’d like us to meet again.”
“Si, si. But we must carefully choose our cafés,” he whispered, looking around at others who were sitting at nearby tables, some holding books, others looking over a stack of paper that looked like a manuscript.
“¿Por que? Why do we have to choose carefully?”
He shook his head. “Victoria, choosing a café in Spain is like favoring one political party over the other. Cafés have reputations. There are right-wing and left-wing cafés, cafés for artists and cafés for writers. There is a café for everything.”
“Just like there is a time for everything,” she added.
“Claro.”
“So what is
this café known for?”
“What did we just discuss?” He asked in Spanish, but Vicki understood it like English. “Literature.”
He smiled, giving her a nod of approval, then responded slowly, “You have your answer. Hemingway loved this café.”
When it came time for them to part, Rafael insisted she tell him where she was living so he could properly drop her off on the sidewalk below, but she refused. Despite the wonderful evening she had, she wanted to retain her privacy and that of her Spanish family, just in case, so she had him drop her off on the same corner where he had picked her up earlier that night. It was only a couple blocks from where she lived, and she never minded walking the city alone at night. In Madrid, a night without the moon meant nothing, thanks to the city lights.
“Then we meet next week, same time, same place,” said Rafael.
“Yes, I will be here,” she said. “And I will try not to be early this time.”
Her fingers went numb as she climbed under the covers and lit a gardenia-scented candle beside her bed. The tiny apartment felt cold this late at night, but she couldn’t resist. She had to write about her conversations with Rafael to her grandmother.
Dear Grandma,
I’ll call him Rafael de España. He transforms Spanish into more than grammar off the pages of a book. He brings it to life for me. He takes the language barrier away. As he speaks to me, slowly and without shouting, I feel way beyond the culture shock and, I think, homesickness. I think it’s time to stop crossing off days in big black marker on my calendar. As I lie in bed and hear his views of Spain and fashion and his people in my mind, I am glad to be here. There is no place I would rather be at this given time. I love this country now. I started loving it the moment I started breaking the language barrier. I love it a little better now that I have Rafael as a friend. This may sound dramatic, Grandma, but I know you love reading romance. And I don’t mind living it.
Sanibel Scribbles Page 29
