“Your mother isn’t here,” she pointed out. “And the stove’s broken.”
“Then I’ll put on a Sinatra tape and we’ll go to bed and make love.”
“All night?”
“If music be the food of love . . .”
“I fancy steak and chips. First,” she added.
“I’ll go into the village and get food. You stay here and prepare for a gourmet meal—sausages grilled over the fire and potatoes baked in their skins in the ash—and a night of debauchery.”
“Don’t forget the wine,” Diane said.
She was lighting candles as I trudged along the driveway, knee deep in snow, wearing rubber boots, sheepskin jacket, and a knitted hat. Behind me the kitchen and living room glowed cozily in the candlelight.
It wasn’t far to the village along the route Emilio had taken us on when we first saw the house, but now the road was in total darkness; the snow had thickened into a blizzard, there was a deceptive fork in the road and an irrigation ditch to one side of it.
I passed a couple of abandoned cars. Somewhere ahead lay the crossroads on the road from Denia. They were perilous enough in normal driving conditions, and I worried about what they might be like tonight.
Five minutes passed and there was no sign of the intersection. Maybe I had taken the wrong fork. I took a few more steps—and plunged into the eight-foot-deep, snow-filled irrigation ditch. Pain leaped up my left leg.
I tried to haul myself onto the roadside but fell back, cracking my head on a protruding boulder. My skull filled with cold and pain. I lay still for a moment, part of my reeling brain anticipating headlines.
SUN-SEEKING AUTHOR DIES IN BLIZZARD
BODY FOUND CLOSE TO NEW HOME
And the first paragraph: A would-be author who was trying to write a bestselling thriller about Siberia died yesterday in Spain in a Siberian-style snowstorm.
Ludicrous. I heard echoes of well-meaning friends’ voices from the past. “Writing a thriller in Spain? Get back to the real world.” If I was shipped back to England as a corpse, they’d be exchanging hindsight wisdom all the way to the morgue. I had to get out of the ditch.
I tried once again but its sides had been cemented, and they were sheathed in ice. I waded through snow, pain shooting from shin to thigh. I felt blood seeping from the wound.
A tractor passed, thick-ribbed tires gripping the surface. I shouted. But the tractor trundled away and was lost in the veil of snow. Panic set in, and yet Diane and a blazing fire were only a few hundred yards away . . .
I encountered another boulder protruding from the cement. I got one foot onto it, but the sole of my rubber boot was as slippery as the ice and I fell back again.
Further on the ditch became more shallow. I managed to scramble onto the roadside and lay there for a few minutes. Hypothermia next! Even more ridiculous. I stood up. My head ached and my leg was numb but as far as I could make out there were no bones broken.
But where was I? On the way to the crossroads or on the other branch of the fork? I decided to retrace my footsteps, cautiously, as though I were making my way through a minefield.
Then, like the sound of a tank in a war movie, I heard a metallic clatter. The beams of headlamps peered through the falling snow. I waved and shouted. A van with chains on its wheels stopped. And Ángel climbed out!
I grinned stupidly.
As he drove toward the village, he told me that when he had reached home after leaving our house, he had fitted the chains on the tires. When the lights had gone out, he had driven back to our house to see if he could help.
Diane had told him that I had set out for the shops. I asked him where the chains came from. “When I lived in Andalusia I used to drive in the Sierra Nevada mountains,” he said. And why had he taken what I now realized was the wrong fork? “Because you took it.”
I had been contemplating firing him. And I would probably contemplate it again when he perpetrated some unfathomable transgression in the garden, but there was a lot to be said for his inscrutable logic.
He took me to a practicante, an upmarket nurse, who stitched a six-inch gash on my shin, painted it with antiseptic, bandaged it, and gave me aspirin for my aching head.
I bought black buttifara and pink chorizo sausages flavored with paprika and garlic and a bottle of red Rioja wine.
After Ángel had dropped me at home, Diane grilled the sausages over the fire. I buried four potatoes in the glowing ash and opened the bottle of wine.
Never had a fire been more embracing, never had a meal been so appetizing. Through a gap in the drapes I could see falling snow filling the night.
I wheeled a heater into our bedroom, placed a candlestick on a saucer on a bedside table, and climbed into bed.
Diane joined me and said: “So what about the debauchery?”
The thaw the following day was as abrupt and dramatic as the blizzard had been. Water swept from the grounds of the haunted mansion across the road, depositing earth and gravel in our driveway; the lawn became a lake; the branches of the orange trees shed dripping loads of snow that thumped onto the ground.
The sun jeweled the melting snow with diamonds; the garden filled with the music of running water and birds sang along with it.
There was no sign of the builders. But Emilio and Ángel reported for work, although until the thaw finally spent itself, there was nothing for them to do. Both displayed the extremes of their characters: Emilio, singing robustly, stored parts of the minstrel gallery, wooden steps, balustrade, and floorboards, on the covered terrace, Ángel wandered around the garden humming plaintive melodies from the south.
In the afternoon a gale sprang up, spattering the outside walls of the house with mud and sand. Surveying the mess, I was once again plagued with doubts. I was crazy to want a beamed dining hall in the middle of plantations of Diane’s “embryonic marmalade.”
I drove to the coast, to a beach deserted except for a man with a beard throwing a stick for his dog. Leaning into the wind, I watched the rollers breaking into spray on rocks out to sea before spilling themselves on the sand.
When the wind had blown away some of my doubt I returned to the house.
Emilio was hosing down the walls of the house, and Ángel was staring dreamily at a patch of exposed earth between wings of snow melting in his stockade.
He pointed at the wet soil. Green snouts were pushing their way through it.
I frowned. “What are they?”
“New potatoes,” he said. “I planted them when you were in Madrid.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Well done, Ángel, you’re a genius.”
He nodded: no need to orally confirm the obvious.
I walked back to the house. Lamb chops, green peas, and new potatoes in the dining hall before spring? It sounded good to me.
FIVE
A Plague of Pigeons
A fine day, a false spring day, the sort of day when echoes of childhood abound. Poinsettias raised their dying petals, clumps of wild freesias and narcissi bloomed among the Bermuda buttercups in the orchard, silver snail trails laced the driveway.
But the day was flawed: the dining hall wasn’t finished—the walls were a mere six feet high—a stark reminder of the follies foreigners could perpetrate.
What we needed was a diversion. And we got more than one: a flock of birds with feathers as bright as jockey silks, a precociously amorous puppy, and two cats, one with four legs, the other with three.
The puppy arrived, unseen at first, while we were eating lunch on the terrace at the rear of the house. Empanadillas—small pasties filled with tuna fish, tomato, and peas or spinach—avocado salad, slices of cold potato omelet, and a bottle of white wine.
Despite the voices of spring, birdsong, and murmur of insects, Diane and I ate a despondent meal. Although we had cajoled and threatened Tomás the builder, sturdily built with unevenly chopped black hair, on the phone that morning, we had extricated nothing but vague promises, the opening chapters of my
novel were being sabotaged by worry and the weather—while I was describing a sweltering day in Moscow, here it had snowed, now while I was approaching Novosibirsk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in a blizzard, here the sun was shining; Jonathan’s first day at kindergarten in Denia had been disrupted scarily by ghosts and skeletons (visitors from a neighborhood carnival) and at the moment he was vehemently pro-Canadian. I watched him kicking a football by himself in the garden and knew he needed more than just his parents to shepherd him through what lay ahead.
Halfway through our meal, Ambrosio, a muscular young man with a roguish smile, strode down the driveway to service the blue, rectangular swimming pool—clean the tiles with a vacuum attached to a suction hose that writhed like a stricken python and preempt the formation of algae with liquid chlorine.
Ambrosio was honest to a fault, often telling me I paid him too much. But I didn’t reduce the payments, because I had already overstepped my modest budget so comprehensively that a few hundred pesetas wouldn’t affect bankruptcy proceedings one way or the other.
When water stopped gushing from a pipe at the rear of the pump room—the backwash to clear muck from the filter—I gave him his money and a beer. He drank slowly, frowning.
“What’s the matter, Ambrosio?”
“You could do the pool yourself,” he said.
“Don’t you want the money?”
“It isn’t that.” He wiped a mustache of foam from his lip. “I shouldn’t be taking it.”
The prospect of operating the mysterious controls in the pump room while simultaneously plotting to kidnap the Russian president on the Trans-Siberian in my thriller made my head ache.
“Don’t let it worry you,” I told him.
“All right,” he said, implying that if I wanted to continue throwing good money after bad that was my business. The phone rang and Diane went indoors to answer it. Ambrosio finished his beer but he didn’t look as if he was going anywhere.
In the ensuing silence I heard yelping from the direction of the driveway. I walked around the side of the house with Ambrosio, whose frown was now knotted between his eyes.
The yelping came from inside his van. Sheepishly he opened the rear doors. Three khaki-colored puppies with paws the size of a Great Dane’s lay among the pipes and brushes.
Ambrosio said: “So, what do you think?”
“What do you mean, what do I think?”
It was a well-established practice to dump unwanted animals on foreigners, and it was not uncommon to arrive home to find a litter of kittens outside your door. I didn’t blame the owners: many of them couldn’t accommodate pets in cramped homes and they dealt with them as best they could.
Ambrosio claimed he had found the puppies on a rubbish dump and taken pity on them. He had brought them to the most simpatico foreigners he could think of. His roguish smile wavered a little under the impact of the last transparent fib.
He took the puppies out of the van and arranged them at my feet. They were well on their way to maturity, part boxer, part ridge-back, part donkey.
“You need guard dogs,” he said.
“Que no!” We had owned a boxer in Ireland, an escapologist who could have climbed the walls of a prison; he had died prematurely from a rare liver disease and I didn’t want all that grief again.
The puppies sat down and, brown eyes staring at me, wagged their tails.
It was as if they had been trained as accomplices by Ambrosio, archexponent of a brand of charm that derives from exuberant humor, compassion, and manipulative prowess. I knew he was deceiving me, he knew I knew, and yet we both went on sparring.
“No, thank you,” I said addressing Ambrosio and his canine cohorts. “No puppies.”
“They like you.”
“I’m honored, but no.”
“Dogs are no problem,” he said.
“Unless you’re a cat.”
“Just one?”
Well, come to think of it taking walks wasn’t much fun without a dog . . .
Ambrosio, sensing doubt, pounced. He picked up a puppy and handed it to me.
“Not that one.” It was a female, and I shuddered at the thought of more big-footed, Khaki-colored puppies being born in the future. “Maybe that one.”
He handed me the puppy I was pointing at. It lay on its back in my hands, unquestionably male.
Ambrosio picked up the other two, put them in the back of the van and came back to me. “You’ll never regret it,” he said. He smiled. “We understand each other, you and me.”
He made off at great speed in the van just as Diane emerged from the house.
She pointed at the puppy in my arms. “What’s that?”
“That’s Jones,” I said. To this day I have no idea where the name came from.
“You haven’t—”
Yes, I said, I had.
“But we agreed . . .”
Had we? I couldn’t remember. “We need a guard dog.”
“To guard against what? The orange groves aren’t exactly teeming with rogues and vagabonds.”
“And I need a dog to keep me company on walks.”
“I’m not good enough?” We had walked hundreds of miles together, in upstate New York when we had rented a house at Tomkins Cove on the Hudson River and in the birch woods outside Moscow when I was a newspaper correspondent there.
“I’ll take both of you with me,” I told her.
“You’ll feed it?” We had a four-stomach family now.
“Of course.”
“Clear up its mess?”
“He’s too small to make much.”
Which was when Jones began to pee copiously.
When we returned to the terrace we found to our astonishment that we had also acquired a cat. It was an overweight tabby with a white blaze on its chest and it was sitting like a buddha on the step while Jonathan stroked it.
I put Jones on the floor and said to him: “For crying out loud, where did that come from?”
“It was just here,” Jonathan said.
“Well, it can go back to where it came from.”
“Maybe it hasn’t got a proper home,” Jonathan said.
At that moment Jones began to advance on the cat, which was blinking in the sunlight, monarch of all it surveyed. The cat spat at him. Unperturbed, Jones continued his approach.
The cat feinted with a left dab and let fly with a right hook, bloodying his nose.
“Obviously,” I said, “we can’t keep both of them.”
“Why not? The cat can be mine, the dog yours.” He stroked Jones, who was whimpering.
I knew that eventually I would succumb to his persistence. A cat washing itself in front of a blazing fire helped make a home, and a home, not a residence, was what we needed. I also realized that for Jonathan to come home from the kindergarten to two animals would smooth his transition into his new life. The son of a Canadian mother and an English father with Irish blood in his veins, growing up in Spain in a region where a lot of locals spoke another language, Valenciano . . . Difficulties in finding an identity lay ahead. Blond hair among children who were predominantly dark wouldn’t help either. Luckily he had inherited his mother’s charm and he loved sports, invariably an asset in male company in Spain. I imagined him, puppy under one arm, standing among a group of children urging on the players of the Denia football club.
So both animals stayed. I named the cat Ethel after a rotund aunt who used to get drunk on chocolate liqueurs and stay for extended weekends at my parents’ house until my father gave her the taxi fare and sent her home.
That afternoon Jones, dropping the pretense of extreme puppy-hood, burrowed under the cypress hedge and dug up several rows of seeds in a neighbor’s garden. The neighbor, a young six-foot woman with a deceptively shy manner, called at the house and told Diane: “I’m going to call the dog catcher.”
The previous day I had seen the dog catcher, a wizened predator, snare a black-and-white stray with a loop of wire on the end of a stick, bundle
it into his van, and drive it away to be destroyed.
The neighbor, it transpired, was the Avon representative in the village, and Diane appeased her by buying a bottle of body lotion and a jar of face cream. She served manzanilla tea and biscuits to clinch the deal and Jones’s neck was saved.
Jones soon emerged as an energetic lover, frequently being caught in flagrante delicto with any accommodating bitch. On one occasion I parted him from a scruffy mongrel with a bucket of water.
Bitches apart, he loathed all other dogs and loved all humans with the exception of Eduardo the woodman. For some unfathomable reason the woodman, squat and saturnine, infuriated him, and when he delivered logs for the fire, Jones had to be locked in an improvised pen where, teeth bared, he hurled himself against chain link.
A friend of ours, a sassy New York painter, Beryl Kranz, lived nearby in a converted farmhouse where she painted nudes in her studio. Eduardo offered to pose for her but pulled out when he heard that we often brought Jones there. A pity, because the vision of Jones chasing a naked woodman round her studio was appealing.
On the day Jones and Ethel joined the family, Emilio was working alone in the half-finished dining hall. A longtime adversary of his, Jesús, who delivered the canisters of butane gas, arrived while the two animals were sparring on the terrace, Ethel with regal aplomb, Jones in fits and starts.
Jesús wore orange overalls, and had developed a callus on one shoulder from carrying the heavy canisters from his company truck.
Young and sleek, he intimidated and infuriated Emilio. Vociferous in debate in the village, Emilio was politically right of Attila the Hun until anyone admitted he might be correct; then he would have bought Lenin a drink if he’d walked into the bar. In fact, he hated verbal accord on any subject, so Jesús made a point of agreeing with him on all topics.
To attract the attention of Jesús on his rounds it was necessary to display an orange flag, in our case a dust cloth on a broom stuck between the bars of the gate. When Jesús walked down the driveway from his truck that afternoon, orange canister on one shoulder, Emilio emerged from the dining hall.
Spanish Lessons Page 5
