Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  I bristled, the Irish in me. “Why the hell do you say that?”

  “Because he’s a slob,” Gina said. “He hates everyone.” She glanced at his throwing knives slotted into a mahogany case lined with green baize.

  “I don’t hate everyone,” Chimo said. “Just you sometimes,” nodding at Gina. “And foreigners who come to my country and take us for idiots. Think they can rob us blind.”

  I tried to control myself. “As a matter of fact I love Spain and all the Spaniards I’ve met so far. With the possible exception of you.” He selected a knife from the box and tested the blade with his thumb. “I want to be accepted here but with people like you around I’m not so sure.” He drew a spot of blood on his thumb. “And by the way,” I added, “I’ve told the Guardia how they may be able to prove the robberies were nothing to do with the circus.”

  I struck a one thousand-peseta bet with him that the thief wasn’t a foreigner. I took his address in a small town in Andalusia and told Gina that when I came to write a book about a small circus I would bear her in mind.

  I frowned. “You’re Italian, aren’t you? What are you doing in a Spanish circus?”

  “I met Chimo,” she said almost spitting, “when he was on vacation in Italy. Napoli, where all the crooks come from. He felt at home there . . .”

  The circus left the following day.

  Chimo was right: the thief was a foreigner. A Dutchman. He was caught red-handed with the loot from the robberies in a house in a village five miles away in the hills.

  The two young Guardia called again at our house and gave me back my spinning wheel. So it hadn’t been stolen. “We want to thank you,” Crew-cut said. “We took your advice and traced the girl who cleaned the houses where the robberies took place. She comes from the village where the Dutchman lived . . . He had been asking her questions about the contents of the places where she worked.”

  They saluted and departed, heels of their polished shoes tapping crisply on the driveway.

  I sent Chimo a one thousand-peseta bill, harboring only one regret about the whole affair. I wished that instead of Spiderwoman her daughter-in-law had fallen in my lap.

  SEVEN

  Quake in the Kitchen

  By March, work on the dining hall was progressing slowly but majestically. The cinder-block walls stood ten feet high. The hearth was big enough to accommodate a blazing tree stump. The inglenook, or chimney corner, was furnished with a stone bench covered with terra-cotta tiles. The wing of a small castle was rising before our eyes.

  In the garden Ángel’s vegetables were burgeoning. Lettuce tied with raffia to keep their hearts crisp; rows of beans heavy with pods; turnips, swedes, and parsnips visibly swelling just above the surface of the ground; tomato, eggplant, and pepper seedlings sprouting.

  Diane and I were long-term city dwellers but now, watched over by Ángel, we raked and hoed and watered late into the bat-flitting dusk. Ángel even allowed me to sow radish seed; within a fortnight we were eating pink and peppery roots.

  The purple bracts (not flowers, Ángel told me) of bougainvillea framed the arches of the covered terrace; jasmine scented the twilight; the blossom of wattle (not mimosa, Ángel said) hung from trees near the pool in powdery yellow tresses. Delicate green leaves were unfurling on our two grapevines that only last month had looked as dead as driftwood; tiny green grapefruit and oranges crowded the citrus trees.

  We were melding with the life of the region, and we were pleased to see this was especially so with Jonathan.

  His name had been put forward for one of Denia’s fallas, the eight or so carnival groups whose activities, although not markedly religious, reached a climax at the time of San José (St. Joseph) in March, when towering papiér-mâché statues of politicians, statesmen, local dignitaries, tourists, and anyone worthy of ridicule—they were made by specialized craftsmen in towns all over the region and took a year to build—were put to the torch in the darkened streets. He had put the carnival ghosts and skeletons of that first day at school behind him and become an ardent supporter of the Valencia city football team.

  Our lives seemed to be proceeding as fluidly as the passing of the seasons, the friendly curiosity of the villagers dispatching our doubts until we heard a subterranean disturbance in the garden. A rumbling growl accompanied by a fetid waft of gas from Hades that reached the kitchen.

  Maybe it was an earthquake. There had been a mini-tremor a few years earlier and stories persisted that Montgo, our olive-green-and-gray guardian mountain, had once been volcanic—it was featured in a 1968 movie, Krakatoa, East of Java, about the eruption there in the 1880s.

  Ambrosio, who was working in the pump room, hurried into the dining hall to advise us because, as he was the one who dug craters and sank pipes for swimming pools, he was an authority on underground phenomena. Ángel followed him—the disturbance had occurred in his domain. Emilio, being an authority on all topics, joined them.

  The three builders who had reported for work that morning and their foreman, a chain smoker with a mat of gray hair sprouting from the top of his shirt, were already there. They seemed to be unmoved by the noise and the smell but Emilio yelled for calm just the same. Ángel went out and patroled the limits of the dining hall; Ambrosio lapsed into deep thought, occasionally sniffing the sulfurous air.

  The ground beneath us trembled, the faintest of movements but ominous just the same.

  The foreman pointed at the floor with his thumb and spoke in broad Valenciano.

  I turned to Emilio. “What did he say?”

  “He said that when they laid the foundations they may have struck a fault.”

  “Maybe Montgo has reawakened,” said Ángel, who had returned from the garden.

  I suspected that the sewer pipes were at the root of the disturbances, but Emilio would entertain no such mundane explanation. “There could be a major tremor,” he said, “right under the dining hall. Here where we’re standing. It could bring down the walls!”

  Emilio’s dramatics got to me. I imagined the walls cracking, falling in slow motion, dragging the rest of the house with them.

  I consulted Ángel, hoping for some soothing message from the clouds. “The problem,” he said, fingering a pink birthmark on one pale cheek, “is underground.” Far away from the jurisdiction of the heavens, I supposed.

  Stunned by such a blindingly obvious deduction, everyone else fell silent.

  As dusk fell, the men, who had resumed work, departed leaving Diane, Jonathan, myself and the animals to face the night with whatever lurked underground.

  When we woke the next morning, a gray wig of cloud lay on Montgo, often a prelude to rain that could last two or three days. If it was relentless enough, it transformed roads into canals and flooded the low-lying streets of Denia, occasionally sweeping cars into the harbor to join the small fishing fleet and the modest yachts moored outside the Club Nautico.

  If the heavens really opened maybe the rain would drown the restless spirits beneath our house.

  One of the workmen arrived at eight A.M., collected tools from the garage, and threw them into the back of a van.

  I asked where he was going and he said: “We won’t be able to work there,” waving one hand toward the dining hall. “Not in the rain without a roof.”

  “Then build a roof.”

  He laughed uncertainly and drove away. More inside work in Denia probably. Somewhere there existed an owner of a new house who prayed for rain as devoutly as I prayed for fine weather.

  The first fat drops fell a few minutes later. Ambrosio arrived on a moped to tell me he couldn’t clean the pool yet because this was red rain, from the Sahara, which left a residue from the desert and he would only have to clean it all over again.

  Emilio covered the lengths of wood he had been amassing with a tarpaulin—his proposed minstrel gallery had become a certainty, as though I had missed a committee meeting in which a final decision had been rubber-stamped.

  Ángel, gazing at the clo
ud over Montgo, said the rain would probably be so intense that it could strip the fruit from the trees and cripple the plants in the vegetable patch.

  “You said we needed rain,” I reminded him.

  “Not red rain,” he said ominously.

  Red rain sounded Biblical. An exotic upgrade on the minor vicissitudes we had recently experienced. No water for two days, because workmen mending a road had bulldozed the supply pipe—we washed with water from the pool and drank bottled water.

  No electricity, because lightning had blown out a power station.

  Mold on our bedroom ceiling and a noise like a skirl of Scottish bagpipes when we turned on the taps in the bathroom.

  I phoned half a dozen plumbers to get the noise fixed. Each time a woman said: “He’ll call you when he gets home from work,” a formula apparently agreed upon by a committee of plumbers’ womenfolk. None of them ever called me.

  Finally I made contact with an actual plumber who ill-advisedly picked up the phone himself. With a sigh he agreed to investigate the source of our piped lament and turned up half an hour later, a short and bird-bright artisan carrying a dusty leather tool bag.

  He listened to the skirl of the pipes so appreciatively that I thought he was going to conduct them with a spanner. He replaced the spanner in the bag, said: “It’s an airlock, I’ll be back,” and hurried away. When I called his number two days later, a woman said: “He’ll call you when he gets back from work.” We never saw him again.

  The mold grew on the wall above the bed, which had been repaired since I had broken it. And it grew luxuriously, as swiftly as mustard and cress, green in its infancy, black as it matured.

  I scuffed it with steel wool, saturated it with bleach, painted over it, and replaced broken bricks on the outside wall, but it was resilient, this fungus, and whatever I did, it returned with renewed vigor.

  Then one evening the first mosquito of the year flew in through the window and I sprayed the bedroom with insecticide. The following morning the mold looked decidedly off color; within two days it had disintegrated into powder that I removed with a duster.

  As the first drops of supposedly red rain fell, Jesús arrived with a canister of gas, arranged himself comfortably in the living room, and accepted a cup of camomile tea—he was a hypochondriac and believed it settled his stomach.

  Emilio sat opposite him and made a few unfavorable observations about the new attitudes that had followed the death of Franco, a liberated attitude to sex, freedom of speech, and leniency in dealing with crime among them. The conventional argument against these reforms was the crime and prurience they had spawned; the argument in favor of them was the reinstatement of man’s birthright to say and do what he believed to be right without being locked up for treason.

  “Junkies? They would have been given an overdose in Franco’s day.” With one finger Emilio sawed at the cleft in his chin where a thicket of bristles grew. “Rapists? They would have been castrated.”

  “Emilio is right,” Jesús said, deliberately intimidating him with outrageous assent. “Enemies of the State? There weren’t any—they were all garroted.” He leaned back in his chair, lean and sleek and provocative.

  “But wasn’t it a crime simply to speak your mind?” Diane asked.

  “It depended what was on your mind.” Emilio gave the plastic table a thump. “What drove our enemies all over the world crazy was that under Franco we had peace. Socialists everywhere hated us for that. But when Franco died . . .” He opened his fist as though it were full of spiders.

  “Your family did flee from Franco,” Jesús observed.

  “So? I was born in America. I can’t speak for my parents.”

  “Of course you can’t.” Jesús rolled a cigarette and lit it with an old flint lighter.

  Rain drummed on the roof but thankfully there had been no more underground eruptions, although I detected faint traces of brimstone in the air. I felt as if this was a waiting time, that Emilio and Jesús sensed that unplumbed forces were about to be released and were relieving their tension with words.

  “Yes, Franco was a good man for the country,” Jesús said. “Spain needs a strong leader. Only today a widow put a gas container outside her gate for me to change. It was stolen before I got there. That wouldn’t have happened in Franco’s day.” He smoked serenely.

  Emilio punched the palm of one hand with his fist. “Of course it wouldn’t have happened in Franco’s day. In Franco’s day she wouldn’t have been able to afford gas.”

  “But she would have lived in peace.”

  “If she hadn’t starved. Haven’t you heard of the Years of Hunger after the Civil War? And what about the camps?”

  “What camps?” Ángel asked innocently.

  “The camps where anyone who spoke out against Franco was left to rot.”

  Jesús, canny advocate, stood up, pinched out his cigarette, and made for the door. If there had been a jury present he would have winked at its members.

  Emilio retired to the garage.

  Diane said: “I’m confused. When that spat started Emilio was pro Franco.”

  “And when he finished he was anti. Compromise . . . Politicians could learn a lot from both of them.”

  We were interrupted by an underground growl from the direction of the kitchen.

  We went outside. The rain hadn’t persevered—what had fallen wasn’t even red—and the dripping clouds were lined with sunlight.

  Emilio was kneeling in the driveway, one hand cupped to his ear. I couldn’t hear anything but he seemed to be receiving Stygian intelligence.

  “What is it, Emilio?”

  “It could be the faults . . .”

  I knelt beside him. The earth shook, the unmistakable smell of sewage filled my nostrils. To hell with Emilio and his half-baked suppositions.

  “It’s the sewer,” I shouted. “There’s a blocked pipe down there. Call a specialist.”

  He looked at me reprovingly. “I already have,” he said.

  The specialist, Paco, was a hairpin of a man with a raffish white mustache. He arrived on a bicycle.

  According to Emilio, he had once worked in a bank. Finance and sewage were certainly disparate, but bank clerks often led dual careers. I frequently had to wait in my bank in Denia while the cashier attended to his deck-chair franchise; a clerk in charge of foreign exchange ran a boarding kennel.

  The specialist, wearing jeans and a scuffed leather jacket, parked his bicycle in the garage and, waving aside introductions, walked to the site of the septic tank with the sure step of a water diviner obeying a sprig of hazel.

  He laid a gauge with a quivering needle on the ground, nodding with melancholy satisfaction as the needle went into convulsions.

  “Is it serious?” Diane asked.

  He favored her with one of those tight smiles that experts bestow on laymen and held up one hand. Then he knelt, one ear to the ground, at various locations in the garden. Finally, he shook his head fatalistically, combing his mustache with the tips of his fingers.

  “Well?”

  He addressed Emilio in Valenciano.

  “He says,” Emilio translated, “that you have more than one septic tank, possibly two.”

  “That’s good?” I asked.

  “Not when the pipe between them is blocked.”

  “Then tell him to unblock it.”

  “It’s not as easy as that—he doesn’t know where the pipe and the other tank are because it doesn’t have a lid. He says it will cost money . . .”

  “How much money?” The vague estimate sounded ominous.

  “That depends . . .”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Diane irritably, “he’s not looking for the source of the Nile.”

  “Do you want him to go ahead?” Emilio demanded. “He’s a very busy man. There are a lot of old pipes in this neighborhood.” No. 1 septic tank coughed and its heavy iron lid moved. “He is the best,” Emilio added.

  “Okay, tell him to get on with it,
” I said quickly, because I had no option.

  The specialist knelt again, grasped the metal handle on top of the lid, and pulled. It came out like a cork and he peered into the heaving abyss.

  He replaced it and went to his bicycle. Returning with an azada, he followed what I presumed he thought was the underground route of the pipe leading to the second tank on the other side of the house. There he crossed the lawn to a bed of petunias and began to dig in it. Luckily Ángel, who had taken his wife to the hospital for a checkup, wasn’t present to witness the desecration.

  An hour later he was standing knee deep in a hole.

  Diane brought him a bottle of beer and he conferred with Emilio.

  “What does he say?” I asked.

  “He says the pipe isn’t there.”

  “I can see that. What does he intend to do?”

  “Dig somewhere else.”

  The specialist began to hack rhythmically at rain-softened earth beneath the cypress hedge.

  Half an hour later he stopped and summoned Emilio again.

  “What does he say this time?”

  “It isn’t there either.”

  “He’s going to dig somewhere else?”

  Emilio nodded and while the specialist debated where to excavate I wandered around the garden, seeking inspiration. Foolishly I hadn’t made any arrangement about payment and it was beginning to look as if I would have to ask for a bank overdraft to settle the bill.

  I was standing between the two almond saplings, already bearing a few nuts covered with green velvet skin, when the ground stirred beneath my feet.

  I poked it with a twig. The twig sank inches deep in mud. Reasoning vaguely that I might be able to release a pocket of gas trapped in the earth, I fetched a steel stake from the garage and hammered it home.

  The specialist was deep in his third hole when a full-blooded eruption shook the ground between the two saplings. This was followed by a surge of sludge that tossed aside the stake.

  The specialist nodded sagely and conferred with Emilio.

  “What’s he saying?” I demanded.