P.S. Is there really such a thing as soul mates?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ON JULY 18, 1936, MANY painful letters were written. The rightist revolt had been launched. The National Socialist parties of Italy and Germany fully supported the army and had decided to seize power and destroy the Second Republic. This decision began the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans set up camp in the urban areas of Madrid. The rebels, who called themselves the Nationalists, moved in from Morocco. They were led by General Francisco Franco as they entered Barcelona, establishing themselves in the provinces of Catalonia, Murcia, and Valencia, explained the professor.
Like armies of rebels, ants moved their way through the veins inside Vicki’s left arm, heading toward her shoulder. Then the professor explained that the death toll, an omen of sorrow for the Republicans, sounded early in 1939, when Franco’s forces, after weeks of bitter siege, entered Barcelona.
A bow and arrow—no, it was a sword. No, the date was 1939. A bullet struck Vicki in the heart, and she bent over at her desk to catch her breath. She declared herself crazy. How could a lecture alone cause a panic attack?
The professor continued. The Nationalists had control. They had disciplined, well-armed troops. They were led by experienced generals and had plenty of materials from abroad. Writers have described it as if they were on a sort of Holy Crusade to crush the infidels as they chanted, “Long Live Death!”
Vicki’s attempts to catch her breath became loud sighs of frustration and forced yawns. Sweat formed on her forehead, and she could no longer decipher the giant map of Madrid on the board in the front of class. The only thing that looked somewhat normal was the Pablo Picasso painting hanging on the wall next to her desk, and the more she listened and the worse her anxiety grew, the more his Cubist art made sense.
The battle lost, she nearly collapsed on the floor as she ran out of the classroom door, her conceived escape route. Alone on the sidewalk outside, perhaps where the Republicans once established their base of support, she felt ridiculous that such symptoms could be coming from her mind. These panic attacks were becoming a bad habit. Like a soldier wounded while simply listening to the history of the Spanish Civil War, she started running toward the big hospital she had seen a few blocks away. She allowed no time to talk herself out of this one. She was dying. Her mind had convinced itself of that.
She knew the word corazon meant heart, but her Spanish came out broken under pressure, as she explained her pain to the nurses. After sitting in a crowded waiting room for a good hour, the nurse led her into a bigger room with other sick people lying on beds, then told her to take her shirt off.
“I need a curtain, a door, a private room,” she said, glancing around at the crowded room filled with dark-haired men. They wheeled in a divider.
A doctor with messed-up hair appeared completely overburdened with ill people seeking free medical care. Vicki felt like a pathetic character in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar—just one more body demanding the doc’s attention. “Heal me, I’m hurting. Heal me, I’m bleeding. Heal me, I’m dying.”
Unfortunately, none of the doctors on duty spoke her native language, and in a time of crisis, English would have been comforting.
The doctor’s assistants hooked the ECG up to her chest. As they rapidly talked medical terminology, she lost all capacity for translating. Abducted by outer space aliens, she lay on the cold table looking up at the bright fluorescent light. Speaking their own language, they poked her and stuck her with things, then debated amongst themselves.
After the ECG, they led her in a wheelchair into a waiting room. An unfamiliar-looking man in a white coat asked her questions. He wanted to know her symptoms. She had a perfectly fluent Spanish conversation with Rafael, so why couldn’t she have one now? Why hadn’t she read the Spanish version of those medical encyclopedias? She had no idea how to say heart attack in Spanish. Then again, she did just leave the Spanish Civil War lecture, in which the professor used the words golpe for military attacks and the word guerra for war. Close enough. She’d give it a try.
“Tengo un dalor en mi corazon, como un golpe o una guerra. Si, tengo un guerra en mi corazon.”
She judged the doctor’s silence as poor bedside manners. Then he started to laugh. He laughed from his gut, and tears streamed down his face. She lay on the hospital bed with stabbing sensations piercing her heart. She knew what she had said. She had told the young Spanish doctor that she had a war or militaristic attack on her heart. The more the doctor laughed, the younger he looked.
“Well, good, I’m glad I’m a stress relief for you. So can you treat wars of the heart, Doc?” She said it in English but didn’t care. She cried, while the doctor laughed. “I’m feeling better, Doc. You must think I’m a hypochondriac wanting attention, and the hospital is the only place for me to get it.”
Finally, he managed to pat her on the knee and ask her slow, simple questions requiring no more than a yes-or-no answer. She must have answered one too many no’s because he then wheeled her into the same ECG room that she had been in with the nurses and began hooking her up again.
She felt like a child on a merry-go-round, lying that she had not yet been on the ride, and she felt guilty, but didn’t know what to say to stop the ride from starting. It was too late to admit she already went through the ECG with the other little people in white suits.
“Worry no. I explore you,” the doctor said in an attempt at speaking English.
“Explore me? Goodness, Doc, that’s worse than me having a war of the heart.”
Just then the nurse who hooked her up to the ECG the last time, returned.
“Hola!” said Vicki.
The nurse began waving her arms and shouting loudly at the doctor.
Both stared down at their abductee, so confused! She just answered “no” to the ECG question five minutes ago. Unhooking her, they took blood instead.
An hour later, the doctor explained something about stress and wished her well. She left the hospital alone, alive, and feeling like a soldier sent home from war, only there was no fanfare because she hadn’t earned any medal for heroism. There was no one to greet her and no one to offer her counsel that comes with mental discharge. She stood on the sidewalk outside the hospital and felt lost, so she wandered to the corner of El Corte Inglés department store. She was an hour early for her date with Rafael and didn’t want to be there. She had wanted to be late for him, a Spaniard who never let time get the best of him. He’d show up in an hour and fifteen minutes. Well, probably an hour and a half. He didn’t care about time. No one in Spain cared about time. What were they doing in those moments of tardiness? Were they having a hard time ending incredible conversations? Were they savoring those last mouthfuls of paella? Were they engaged in a moment of poetry, passion, and whatever else happened in moments of poetry and passion? Were they slowly sipping the last few drops of their coffee in breakable, non-transportable coffee cups while sitting still in one chair, doing nothing but sipping and talking?
Well, just as they were probably making the most of their moments of tardiness, she decided she would now make something of her moments of earliness. She had never had a homeless person as a friend before, nor tried making one a friend. They didn’t exactly fill the streets back home in her part of the woods, and if they did, she had never noticed. There was a shelter, and it may have been full, but they never sat around on the streets, not that she observed, and they never begged for money. If they had, she had never given a penny.
She took a seat on the sidewalk next to the woman bundled in gray, the same one she had spoken to last time. The people back home would be dressing up like bums about this time of year. Greedy trick-or-treaters. She was always one of them.
They sat side by side in silence, as close yet distant as two pumpkins in a patch, one severely and recognizably bruised and the other ready to be picked with hidden dents. Then, in slow, clear terms, Vicki started talking about what she had lost and left behind. She s
poke words in English but mostly in Spanish.
“Keeping myself busy and hiding my grief like that did me no good,” she said slowly. “And my hidden pain manifested itself in the form of fear, that I too might die in my sleep, and that fear progressed into a phobia of falling asleep and, worse, into full-blown panic attacks.”
She didn’t care that her words came out a combination of Spanish and English at the same time, a form of Spanglish. It felt good talking about it, as if the seeds of a pumpkin were being scraped out of her.
The old woman, who constantly fidgeted with her dry, cracking hands, stopped her fidgeting and patted Vicki on the back, carving a smile on her face.
“Gracias.” Vicki didn’t know what else to say. “¿Come te llamas?” asked Vicki. “What is your name?”
“Triste,” answered the woman. And Vicki interpreted it to mean sad, but if the woman wanted to be called Triste, she would call her that.
“Why do you sit here every day like this?” The smiling pumpkin with the no-longer-hidden dent asked the uncarved pumpkin covered in bruises.
“Tengo muchos anos, I am very old,” she answered. “The churches, they tried taking me in. I am muy proud of España. I never have hunger. La gente de españa, they fill my bucket cada dia.”
As she spoke, she never smiled or looked Vicki in the eyes. “I am a woman, very stubborn. I don’t want strangers to take me in. If I had familia, si, I’d go in. Pero I have no familia. As a young woman I watched my country go mad.”
Vicki had heard about the destruction and wastage of the Spanish Civil War in class, but now she saw the emotional bruises all over this woman.
“Franco and his war killed my parents, my brothers, my newlywed husband. It killed my grandfather and uncles and everyone I loved. I have been mourning ever since, muchos anos.”
She stared at the people walking by and continued. “I have come far. I went from wearing a black shawl to wearing a gray shawl. People called me loco. They told me to stop mourning. I told them ‘no!’ The tragedy of my country has wounded my soul for life. I made a decision. I chose to mourn one year for each of my loved ones lost in that war. Then, I decided to mourn for every Spaniard who died in the battle. I sentenced myself to mourning for life. Now, an old woman on the sidewalk, I am proud of the years I have put into full-time mourning. I sit on the sidewalk, watch strangers go by, and pray for them. I pray that España will never divide in such an animalistic manner again. Si, I will pray and mourn until the day I die. It is my purpose in life.”
“Well, blessed are those who mourn,” said Vicki, reciting Jesus’ words and the Sermon on the Mountain. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
The woman reached within the dark blanket wrapped around her and pulled out an embroidered purple handkerchief, saying it had at one time belonged to her mother. It was the only thing she grabbed the day her mother died, and now it had years of tears soaked into it.
“Go,” said Triste, flagging the handkerchief in the air.
“You want me to leave?” asked Vicki.
“Go,” said the woman. “Get on with your life.”
“I want to.”
“Get on with your life,” she said again. “Live life.”
“I will.”
“Live life. Live life now.”
“I want to live life now,” answered Vicki. “I will live now. Thank you.”
The words made sense to her, and she was not only a smiling pumpkin, but someone had lit a candle and placed it inside of her.
And then a paper bill floated down, landing in the bucket like an autumn leaf falling from a brittle branch, and Rafael reached his arm out to Vicki, helping her up from the sidewalk like someone salvaging a fallen apple. She squeezed his hand tightly as she stood up. She didn’t realize until she stood up how long she had been sitting there. Her buttocks felt achy and cold from the cement, but she felt alive. There was only a minor sore spot from where she had sat, and it was already healing.
They drove, then walked, discussing projects Rafael was working on. He had met with another designer in Paris, and the two would be joining together to create a line of dressy yet casual jeans that can go anywhere, that can walk a person right across international boundaries, if she interpreted him correctly—whatever that meant. He told her about his other line, which had a tag of Spain’s flag sewn on the back left pocket, and told her that earlier in the day he had met up with sales representatives who call on clothing stores located around the Calle de Serrano and Calle Ortega y Gasse in the Salamanca District, best known for Spanish names. They usually placed the new designs in this area first, and the store owners there enjoyed being the first to introduce the new items.
They stopped outside a high-rise hotel on a busy street, and he looked accused of wrongful action as he urged her inside the lobby. “Una sorpresa for you on the top floor, nada mas,” he explained in Spanish. “Nothing more.”
They took the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor and stepped out onto a balcony glowing from candlelit tables and stars overhead. Three men were playing instruments: one, the tambourine; the second, a bagpipe; and the third, castanets. She felt like a voyager arriving in another world, another life. As one waiter led them to an intimate corner table, another poured red wine into their glasses almost before they had sat down.
She hadn’t eaten anything all day, and now the live instrumental music became as intoxicating as the wine she was sipping. Under its influence, everything possessed extra vitality, and she couldn’t help but notice the details all around her. She swished the velvety wine around her glass and nibbled on assorted cheeses, cubes of yellow, orange, and white. Looking down at Madrid gave her the same sort of feeling she had experienced sitting atop the lighthouse tower, looking down on the island. But instead of palm tree tops, these were rooftops. The lights from the city below looked like white Christmas-tree bulbs.
Her toes tingled as she felt tipsy from just a few sips of wine on her empty stomach. “Do you know, Rafael, where light comes from?”
“Digame,” he said, aware of the trick question.
“Those lights you see below us, the city lights, they’re lightning bugs reincarnated,” she continued under the influence of the wine that had overtaken her mind.
“¿Que?” He didn’t understand.
She switched to English and slurred slightly. “Bullies once stomped on the fortunate little things and smeared them against the cement. Now they’re shining so brightly again. I toured the Edison home back in Fort Myers, but I know the truth. It was really just a reincarnated lightning bug factory.”
“Tu eres una mujer muy interesante.” He said she was an interesting woman, although he didn’t understand a thing she had said.
“Gracias.” She felt dramatic, a woman in a black-and-white movie, as she tried to decipher where the man-made window lights of the city ended and where the large celestial bodies composed of gravitationally contained hot gases emitting electromagnetic radiation started. Music and another sip of strong wine influenced her imagination, so she decided not to take another sip until she had real food in her stomach. She no longer had to promise herself to live for the moment; she was living the moment, and she appreciated it, every detail.
“Te quiero, voy a ir a America y casarme con tu,” Rafael broke the silence by telling her he loved her, he was going to America with her, and he wanted to marry her.
She ignored his comments, at least for a moment. She needed another cube of cheese, several cubes. She downed them quickly, knowing she had to take back her mind and drown out the little alcoholic grapes that wanted badly to speak for her tonight, to marry this man, to run away with him, and to have a good time. As always, she understood his Spanish well, even with a few glasses of wine in her, so she didn’t have to double-guess what he had just said, all in a single sentence, completely out of the blue. Had Rafael, her friend and tour guide, turned himself into the stereotypical romantic male Spaniard? They hadn’t yet kisse
d, and now he wanted to marry her?
“No, no mas,” she said to the waiter trying to pour more red wine into her glass.
“Si, si, mas,” Rafael told the waiter trying to pour more red wine into his glass.
“Si, si, mas,” she said to the other waiter carrying the silver tray of cheese cubes.
“No, no mas,” he said to the waiter carrying the silver tray of cheese cubes.
Suddenly, she decided she had no intention of kissing him, ever. Second, she told herself, she didn’t want him in that sort of way. She wanted him as a friend, a conversationalist, a companion, a shoulder to lean on in times of foreign distress, a man who could teach her about this country, its people, their passions and fears. She wanted him for all of these things, but not for Mr. Right. She was still waiting for the right timing for Mr.
Right.
She let his words linger in midair as the wine spoke to her mind. As she stared at the miles of city lights, she pretended she was a queen, looking down upon her kingdom. The wine spoke in a deep, romantic tone, telling her to consider his proposal. She would switch to white wine, something with a dry voice. No wonder Spaniards drank the red. It was so much fuller and livelier. She was having a difficult time standing up to its overpowering and seductive voice. She needed an American friend right now so that together they could laugh at Rafael’s proposal. She needed a pen and paper to write Grandma a letter. Grandma would surely tell her, “Now, now, now, forget it, young lady! Stick to your senses! Your father would kill you, but keep writing me letters, and don’t leave out a single detail! And oh, those dimples!”
Sanibel Scribbles Page 30
