“Victoria, estoy sufriendo,” whispered Rafael as he stood up and tugged on her sweater so she’d follow him. The fight wasn’t over, but he led her down the bleachers and out to his car.
They drove into the country with a clear sky overhead. “Bullfighting—hoy isn’t all that it once used to be, Victoria,” said Rafael.
“Why not?”
“Now it shares the fame with soccer matches.”
“It looked pretty significant to me,” she said.
“Tambien, there have been changes in Spain’s economy. Many ranches were sold. On the ranches in the past, owners could selectively breed los toros. Breeding the right sort of bull for a fight almost classified as an art, or a science, I don’t know which. No, bulls of today don’t always have the space for exercise and natural grazing on ranches.”
“The bulls looked healthy,” she said.
“They aren’t as wild as they once were.”
They pulled up to a brown acorn-style cottage, and Vicki was pleased to notice horses, not bulls or sheep, grazing behind a white picket fence. Several smaller cottages were up and down the hill.
Rafael got out of the car, telling her to stay put, and walked up to a building that looked like an office. When he went inside, she quickly rummaged through his glove compartment, in search of anything that might have his last name on it. But, like her own glove compartment, Rafael kept a tidy car with not a crumb of evidence.
He returned to the car and told her he had rented horses for a few horas, but she refused to take part in the adventure. She credited herself as too smart for that. In fact, she was borderline paranoid. She refused to be murdered somewhere in the country of Spain on her semester abroad. She also noticed her mind getting a bit dramatic, but she blamed it on television and movies. A simple horseback ride in the country on a gorgeous, calm day almost always led to murder in the movies.
“No. I don’t want to ride horses at a time like this. You’re married, and you should be riding horses with your wife.” She knew she said it in English, and she felt a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach, moths killing butterflies – they were taking over.
They sat together on the trunk of his Mercedes, which was parked inconspicuously under the shade of towering trees.
“Ay, Victoria.” Rafael reached above him and pulled an oak leaf off a low-hanging branch. “I married young. Many years ago, I discovered that my wife had cheated on me, over and over again. I should have known. I loved her more than she loved me. I should have read her face. She looked like stone.”
He made an awful stone face, freezing all his expressions. “No laughter, no tears, no yelling. Numb to life. I’ve never seen emotions come from her. She is made of makeup and designer clothes, my designer clothes, and nothing more.”
“Well, you did choose her to be your wife, and now, you probably have a family with her—kids you are responsible for.”
“No, Victoria. She refused to have children, telling me only after we were married that children demand too much attention. The truth is, she demands too much attention, and children would take that away from her.”
“You wanted children?”
“Si, si, claro que si.” He extended his arms up and outward in a fashion like the trees around them. “But she went and had surgery without telling me. In Spain, do you realize how abnormal this entire thing is?”
“Rafael, this is abnormal for anywhere in the world. Have you discussed divorce?”
“Si, si. No, no. My country, under Franco, didn’t allow divorce.”
“But Franco is dead, Rafael.”
“But fear is alive, Victoria.”
“Then you too will die,” said Vicki.
“I will not die!”
“No, but you are living a dead life.”
“I am alive now that I know Victoria de los Estados Unidos. Si, I am alive again.”
“¿Quien estas, Rafael?”
“No. My name is not important. I want you to know me, Rafael.” He pounded on his heart.
“I can’t know you if I don’t know your past. I do not know you,” said Vicki.
She got up and walked away, and he followed. “I practiced law, as many university students in España do. Then, I inherited money from my father. He owned banks throughout Spain, so I do not have to work, ever again. I am made of old money, but designing clothes is my passion in vida, my only passion, next to my new friendship with you, mi preciosa.”
She felt a smile for the first time since they had arrived at the ranch. She tried to contain it, but couldn’t. She didn’t want to be a stone, numb to emotions, especially to a man so appreciative of details. Emotions happened like reflexes, yet Rafael cherished them after years of living without.
“Follow me,” he said. “I have a surprise for you.”
He popped the trunk of his car and took out a pile of black dresses and white cotton tops with sheer floral sleeves. “Try them on for me, por favor.”
“Where should I try them on?” she asked.
“Aqui. Here.”
She laughed with the excitement of new clothes, yet felt horribly shy, embarrassed to model in front of a man who worked with European models on a daily basis. Her emotions ran in circles. She felt honored that he wanted to give her this wardrobe. She also felt insecure that perhaps it was a hint that her clothes were ugly. What if they didn’t fit past her thighs? She would hug him anyway. No, she would hit him for being married. She felt in love, yet frightened. Were these the emotions he saw and liked on her face? Well, Rafael deserved credit himself. He was a man who provoked many emotions, and he stirred hers all at once.
“I designed them over the past few months with you, Victoria, in my mind.”
She walked behind a tree trunk, wishing it were a thick banyon instead of an oak. He could see part of her. Her stomach? Her thighs? She didn’t mind him seeing her stomach. She minded her thighs. She slid her top over her head then unsnapped her pants. As she struggled to pull them off, she knew the tree trunk no longer hid her behind. She tossed the pants on the ground and grabbed the black dress, hanging on Rafael’s finger. She pulled it up, wondering if it might get stuck at the waist. No, of course not. Designed by a successful European fashion designer, it had to fit. Well, now she’d find out if he really designed it for her, with her in mind. Yes, it pulled up over her waist and up to her neck perfectly, as if painted onto her body. If there was such a thing, she would declare it her soul dress, a dress made just for her, a dress perfectly in tune with her body, her style, her emotions. If the dress had cost four hundred dollars in America, she’d open a new credit card to buy it. She’d grow old wearing this dress that he designed for her, sexy yet classic.
“I help you. I help you.” He piled her long blond hair in a bun on her head and zipped the dress up to her neck. “Si, si. I made this for you, Victoria, for you.”
She believed him now as she walked with a sway of her shoulders once around his Mercedes, spinning a couple times, then returned to where he sat on the car.
“¿Te gusta?” she asked.
“¡Me encanta!” She loved the dress, but knew she’d never have a place to wear it. She didn’t live a soap opera life, nor did she attend the type of American parties that called for this sort of dress. She longed to be a part of a social world that wore these dresses. However, no matter how dressed up she might become, she wanted to remain full of emotions, full of life.
He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her close, kissing her for the first time on the lips. “Te quiero,” he whispered in her ear.
“No, no.” She wiped her lips and backed away, not sure where this dress and its maker might take her.
“Si, si. Te quiero,” he said again, smiling.
She knew his words meant both love and want, and this she had to stop. Despite the fact that he had married a stone, he was still married to that stone. She wanted to kiss him, to hold his hand, to walk to places she had never seen with him, but she refused to do this wi
th a married man. She felt pity for him, yet he had choices to make concerning his marriage, his situation.
“Te quiero,” he said, pulling her close again. Then he whispered something else in her ear, and she had to pause to interpret. Her heart pounded in a way she never felt before, a pounding that terrified her more than her worst panic attack ever could, a pounding that excited her more than her first innocent kiss years before, a pounding that sounded as foreign as the sound of Madrid’s city streets back when she first arrived in this country. She had no idea her heart was capable of so many different rhythms, like rain, pounding, beating, pouring, dropping, and so on, depending on the season, the place and the other weather patterns occurring simultaneously.
“No!” shouted the woman from Holland, Michigan, a woman with values, with fears, with dreams of her own, a woman who picked a tulip, then felt guilty for months, guilty on a deeper level than penalties and fines, guilty for having taken something that didn’t belong to her.
“Si, si.” He kissed her neck slowly this time, whispering, “Mas, mas.”
“No. I have to tell you something, Rafael.” She pushed him away.
“Si, si, digame,” said the man from Spain, a native to a country with a rich history of passion and drama, a country drunk on romance. “Te quiero.”
“You cannot have me, Rafael. You cannot love me.”
“¿Por que? ¿Por que?”
“You are married. You are not mine to take. I’m certainly not going to influence something so significant. I don’t want to live with that burden.”
“But I do not love her,” he replied.
“Then be a man and do something about it.”
“I will. I want to, but not now. Now I am with you.”
“Well, don’t think you can go on living in a miserable marriage while wining and dining me on the side. Forget it.” She had said it all in Spanish, and gave credit to the Spanish soap opera she had watched so many times with Rosario.
“Ahora, ahora, te quiero.” He still wanted her.
She allowed him to kiss the back of her neck, and it sent chills down her spine, the kind that, in a romance novel, would sweep a woman off her feet and right into mad passionate love for endless hours, only to be left both spent and content. Grandma would be skipping ahead a few pages just to get to the steamy part of this letter. But this wasn’t a romance novel. This was life, her life. She couldn’t help it that she viewed marriage as sacred, as Rafael began to slowly unzip her dress, kissing further down her back. He then pulled it down off her waist. Her mind raced. This was her life, no one else’s. Why would she let a few romantic moments in Spain screw up her entire life to come? Then again, it might add incredibly dramatic colors to her canvas, but what would it do to someone else’s canvas?
She stepped back several feet. “No, Rafael. No,” she said as she reached for her jeans on the ground. “Please wait for me in the car. I want to leave now.” On the corner of El Corte Inglés, he said there was nothing sacred about his marriage arrangement and, had he known back then that his wife would take a malicious turn in life, if he had seen through her insincerity, he never would have married her. He had tried every attempt imaginable at making the marriage work. He would never break a commitment without first trying everything to save it.
“No, Rafael de España, no,” she told him, and got out of his car.
She didn’t know what else to say and didn’t want him to see her cry, so she put her sunglasses on, although the sun had gone down. She knew he wasn’t about to smile, and she was glad because she couldn’t stand to see those dimples one more time.
She also couldn’t stand to see him without his smile, so she turned her back to him, kissed her two fingers, extended her arm back and started to wave, without turning to peek. She could see him in the reflection of the department store window, just as she had the first time they met. He didn’t know she could see him as he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and made the sign of the cross. She started to walk away, but kept waving. She walked with a purpose. What purpose? She didn’t know, just the sort of purpose that says this good-bye is forever. She heard his car drive away, and as badly as she wanted to turn to look one last time, she didn’t. The backward good-bye wave would have to do, and she felt like a hummingbird that flies backward to move away from flowers whose nectar they’ve been sipping. Just like these small birds, her legs and feet felt too weak to walk, but she had to. She couldn’t fly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MAÑANA CAME ALL TOO soon. Sure, there’d be another tomorrow, but it would be a tomorrow in the United States, not Spain. Vicki wanted to stay anchored there a little longer, in the country that lusted for life and stayed up all night. She wasn’t ready to pull up anchor, yet her life and school were calling her back.
Maybe someday she would return to Spain to operate a bed-and-breakfast in the mountains, live on a yacht in Barcelona, or rent a tiny studio apartment near her Spanish family and turn her letters to Grandma into a novel of some sort.
On her hands and knees and in a temper, Rosario scrubbed the wooden floors for hours, moving Vicki’s heavy suitcases over so she could clean the floor under them. It took no words to understand her loss. She had allowed a stranger into her home, her kitchen, the most private and intimate aspect of her life, the part that now smelled of paprika and garlic-scented chorizo, slowly simmering on the stove, and now that stranger was leaving.
At quarter to nine, she kneeled down next to her señora to rest before her flight, and placed her hand on the woman’s hands, blistered from cleaning. Rosario stopped, and for a moment the two sat in silence on the floor, listening to traffic and voices from the street below. They didn’t need or attempt to talk. The woman handed Vicki a sheet of stationery. There was a quote scribbled in English, and Vicki knew Rosario had gone to great lengths to get this translated. It read:
What do you have to fear? Nothing. Whom do you have to fear? No one. Because whoever has joined forces with God obtains three great privileges: omnipotence without power, intoxication without wine, and life without death. —St. Francis of Assisi
Isabella had left the apartment earlier in the evening because she had weekend social plans brewing in the streets below, and Vicki knew they were probably with Ron. Lorenzo went to mass but hugged Vicki tightly before he left.
Together the women dragged the luggage down the flights of stairs to the street below, and Rosario flagged down a taxi. She kissed Vicki on both cheeks, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross, and then blew a kiss as her American daughter climbed into the taxi and drove away.
The taxi headed down the narrow street, and Vicki didn’t trust herself to turn around to see the señora standing alone on the curb with her dirty apron and strands of hair falling from her bun for fear she would burst into tears. She did, however, catch a glimpse of Lorenzo, standing in a bakery window eating a huge cream puff. She laughed at the man who claimed to be at mass.
Next, the taxi stopped in traffic at the El Corte Inglés corner. Cars were honking, and one man got out of his car to yell at someone in another car. She ignored the scene and instead watched a homeless woman, sitting on the pavement outside the department store. People were dropping coins into her bucket, but the old woman never smiled. Then a man dressed in black pants and a black turtleneck walked over to the woman and handed her what looked like a cup of something warm to drink, still steaming. He sat down next to her and opened the woman’s hands, placing the mug between her palms, and held them for a moment.
Vicki tried unrolling the window of the cab, but it must have been on safety lock. She tried opening the door, but the cab started to move. She pounded on the windows. One more smile, one more wave. She had to tell them both how much she loved them. She wanted now to tell Rafael how she appreciated him, and that of all the Spaniards she had grown to know, she loved him the most. She wanted to thank this man for teaching her about the Spaniards from the inside out. She wanted to remove the excess sweaters that
had crowded her suitcases and wrap them around Triste. She loved this country, and she loved its people. She loved Rafael. If she could only stay a little longer.
“Wait. Let me out. Stop!” She cried either out loud or to herself, she didn’t know which.
The taxi driver stared in his rearview mirror and kept driving. She felt like an animal in a cage being taken away, somewhere. She was leaving the country she now loved, the country that taught her to live life and not fear death at a time in her life when she needed that particular lesson.
As she watched out the back window of the cab, the gray bundle and the black velvet next to it grew smaller and smaller, as did the Spanish city, located at the foot of the Guadarrama Mountains. She didn’t want to leave and found herself already mourning this country, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. She didn’t know which she loved more: the people or the place. The tears in her eyes clouded her vision, turning the scene behind her into a Salvador Dali surrealist painting.
At the airport, she had a good hour before her flight. Vicki felt an adult butterfly emerging in her stomach, pumping body fluid through its soft veins and expanding its wings.
Dear Grandma,
TIME, WEATHER AND DEATH—these three words transcend any culture and language. These three things are completely out of our control, yet everything is planned around them. Even if a fiesta is planned for mañana, TIME moves on at its own pace, turning that fiesta into nothing more than a memory. WEATHER behaves rudely, when it likes, pouring rain on the guests of the fiesta. DEATH, should it be told, shows up just before the fiesta. And for that person, who may have been living in a countdown of anticipation, the fiesta never comes. This is why people fear death. They cannot control it.
P.S. Please give Pooch a hug for me, Gram. I’m assuming dogs make it to Heaven? They must!
Sanibel Scribbles Page 35
