She bounced on the bed. “With Serge I have to have the most powerful springs.” She winked again.
“Even without him,” Diane whispered to me.
As we headed for the terrace the agent tried to get into the act, which was undermining all the tenets of his profession. “It’s a long way from the sea,” he told Mrs. Prodski.
“I hate the sea,” she said. “It has taken my father.”
The agent smiled uncertainly. Then, believing that he was getting the hang of this sado-masochistic hype, told her the nearest town, Denia, was at least two miles away and there were no buses.
She punched him on the arm. “Vunderbar. Space! Let’s have another snorting.” She led us back to the bar.
Diane beckoned me into the kitchen. “She’s acting as though she’s the owner and we’re the buyers.”
“We’ll have to change tactics,” I said. “Damn the place with faint praise.”
“Maybe. But I’ll fire a couple more shots first.”
We all went into the garden.
“We’re hoping the snake won’t come back,” Diane said.
“For why?” Mrs. Prodski asked.
“I don’t like snakes.”
“Serge is getting them by the tails and jerking them like a whip so their backings break.” She snapped her fingers.
“And the neighbors,” Diane breathed.
Mrs. Prodski tugged her skirt, which was riding high on her nut-cracker thighs. “What about them?”
“They make a lot of noise,” Diane whispered. “Parties, that sort of thing.” The neighbors were, in fact, quiet, amiable, and helpful.
“Orgies?”
“I don’t really know about—”
“Serge and I are tolerable. We orgy sometimes.”
I decided that it was time to change tactics. I gestured towards Montgo. “The view is beautiful but it gets a little boring.”
“I am not liking your mountain.” Mrs. Prodski shivered histrionically. “Mountains press upon me.”
“The garden is adequate, nothing exciting,” I told her.
“Serge likes to labor.”
“And it’s very quiet here.”
“I like to hear living.”
The agent, trying to adapt to this new strategy, asked Mrs. Prodski if she liked cats. When she shook her head vehemently he started to tell her there was a dearth of them in the neighborhood but Diane immediately reverted to her original tactics. “Litters of them. Look at her,” pointing at Ethel. “She has kittens every time she looks at a tomcat. She goes with the house when we sell it,” she added.
The little train hooted from the orange groves.
I pointed at it. “That will get you to Benidorm in one hour, if you like crowded beaches,” I added, back to damning with faint praise.
“Trains are death,” Mrs. Prodski said mysteriously.
The agent, now totally disorientated, played it safe. “Guaranteed sunshine all the year round,” he said nodding toward the sun, which promptly disappeared behind a cloud.
“I loov rain.”
“We get some, of course,” he said.
“I loov it on my face. I open my mouth to it.”
“It hasn’t rained for three months,” Diane said.
“You should be here in the spring,” I said. “The wildflowers . . .” I was about to mention the rampant weeds as well but she interrupted. “I am only liking the flowers of the mountains,”
“But you don’t like mountains.”
Another joke bubbled. She stifled a laugh. “Serge fell off a mountain,” she said.
“That was bad luck.”
“He will not like your mountain.”
The dialogue had now become so surrealist and confusing that I was becoming increasingly confident a deal would not be struck.
“Do you like oranges?” I asked her.
She stared at me incredulously. “Oranges are souring of the stomach.”
“Grapefruit?”
“Grapefruit are the plague.”
“We’ve got plenty of both,” I said.
“Driving on the back roads can be pretty scary,” Diane said. “They’re too narrow, too dangerous.”
“I am liking poum-poum driving. You know, ins and outs.” She spun an imaginary steering wheel.
“For poum-poums you must find bigger roads.” Diane turned to me and whispered, “Indianapolis?”
“I make my own poum-poums,” Mrs. Prodski said with dignity. “Now I am thinking about another snorting.”
As she poured herself a brimming glass of vodka I said: “I’m sorry the house isn’t up to your expectations, Mrs. Prodski. But don’t worry, you’ll find somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” She pretended to squeeze the last drops of vodka from the bottle. “I loov it here. If anything is going wrong Serge will correct.”
“So how are you going to get us out of this mess?” I asked Diane as we ate lunch on the terrace. “Mrs. Prodski is very keen, according to your friend the agent.”
“We did both agree we wanted to sell.”
Jonathan finished his fresh fruit salad and said: “Sell what?”
“Go and pick some lemons,” Diane said, “and I’ll make lemonade.”
“What exactly did that form you signed say?” I asked her when he had gone to the end of the garden.
“It gave him the exclusive right to sell our house.”
“And that was all?”
“It was only one paragraph long.” She spooned pineapple and nectarine.
The phone rang in the living room; I answered it. It was the real estate agent.
“I’m calling about Mrs. Prodski,” he said.
“An extraordinary woman.”
“Yes,” he said wearily, “quite extraordinary.”
“Does she want to make an offer for the house?”
“Oh, yes, she wants to make an offer all right,” he said.
“But she doesn’t even know the asking price.”
“It’s irrelevant.”
“What do you mean, irrelevant?”
“She’s offering to pay in her own currency,” the agent said.
“Slotis? Something like that?”
“Levs.”
“Not much of a demand for levs round here.”
“Know what I think, Mr. Lambert? I think she is one of a breed. We real estate agents meet a lot of them. Looking at other people’s houses is their hobby. They have no intention of buying.”
“But she is offering levs.”
“Knowing you won’t accept them. She’s had a good morning out. A free ride. Lots of vodka.”
“Wodka.”
“But don’t worry, I’ve got other clients.”
I was sure he had. Buying and selling property was big business in the region and scams abounded. But the culprits were mostly foreigners who cheated other foreigners—selling houses they didn’t own or properties on which money was owed or taking deposits and vanishing with the loot. The problem was that a curious naivete assailed many expatriates when they set foot in Spain: if they all observed the same procedures followed in their own countries they would put the property sharks out of business.
“I’ll bring them around on one condition,” the agent went on. “That you and your wife don’t interfere.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m taking the house off the market.”
“But it’s only been on it a day.”
“I’m not selling.”
“But your wife—” He sounded as if he was in shock.
“Signed an agreement, I know. All it does is give you the sole right to sell our house. But if we don’t want to sell it’s superfluous. And in any case, legally it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
“But—”
“Burn it,” I said, and hung up.
I told Diane and she kissed me. We inspected the newly covered dining hall and wandered round the sunlit garden. Our vision was still on course.
&n
bsp; “By the way,” she said as we walked back into the house. “The fridge has iced up.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I will correct.”
Although we had navigated Mrs. Prodski and the Dutch real estate agent there were still dangerous waters ahead, in particular the leak somewhere between the road and the house. Donning the mantle of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, I gave my “little gray cells” a good shake, stood in the driveway, and reviewed the evidence. The gray cells failed to respond.
I picked my way among the excavations, once again tried to follow the currents of water—they trickled prettily in all directions—and listened to the sounds of seepage. There was a clue somewhere there but it refused to stand up and take a bow.
Diane came out of the house on her way to the Citroën parked on the roadside next to the Jaguar—we could no longer maneuver either of them onto the ruins of the driveway.
“They’re doing well.” She pointed at a clump of marguerites in the flowerbed beside it. They were indeed: whereas most other plants had succumbed to the heat the white, daisy-like blossoms of the marguerites were proliferating.
My gray cells stirred. When Diane had gone I consulted Ángel, who was picking tomatoes in his prison yard, his face beneath his battered straw hat resolutely pale despite the fierce sunshine.
“When was the new driveway laid?” I asked him.
“A few months before you moved in,” he said. He took a bite out of a large, overripe tomato.
“Was the previous one wider?”
“It wasn’t narrower.”
“So it was wider?”
“I suppose so,” he conceded.
“So if a water pipe was laid under the old driveway it could now be under the flowerbed beside it?”
Like a witness in court perceiving a trap in every question, Ángel warily admitted this might be so. I beckoned; he finished the tomato and followed me onto the driveway.
“Look.” I pointed at the marguerites. “Doing well, aren’t they?”
Ángel admitted they were.
“Because they’re being watered. Get your towel, dig there, and I think you’ll find the leak because that’s where the pipe was laid in the first place.”
The denouement! Little gray cells in overdrive. Such a scene was usually set in the living room of an English country mansion but a shattered driveway next to a baronial dining hall would do just as well.
Ángel dug tentatively as though excavating an unexploded mine and finally uncovered a small jet of water escaping from a corroded pipe. It saturated the roots of the marguerites before heading for the substratum of the driveway.
But I wasn’t yet finished. I went down on one knee and, like a golfer measuring up a putt, squinted across the driveway at the water meter. The leak was between the meter and the road so the water company would have to pay for the repairs and the destruction wrought by their employees.
At that moment Javier, the plumber who had been injured during the running of the bulls, arrived. He was, he said, on the road to recovery. “Concussion takes its time.” He shook his head and winced.
I clapped him on the shoulder. “You were very brave,” I said.
I led him to the bathroom. “Are you well enough to fix this?” I turned on one of the washbasin taps and the shuddering recommenced. “You promised . . .”
I didn’t think the noise had anything to do with the leak in the driveway and I was sure Javier could fix it.
“I’m thinking of joining the Moors and Christians,” he said. “As a Moor . . . I thought you might like to join with me.”
“Not my style, Javier.”
“All right, if you think I let you down during the running of the bulls . . .” He turned his back on the source of the shuddering.
“Aren’t you going to fix it?”
“My head aches,” he said.
“Okay, you win—I’ll join the Moors and Christians with you. Next year.”
Obviously a long and bruising relationship lay ahead of us.
He kicked the U-bend beneath the basin and the shuddering faltered. Spanish plumbing, I reflected, was pretty basic, but did that really matter so long as plumbers such as Javier understood its foibles?
The next time I turned one of the washbasin taps the water flowed without a murmur. Later that day Pablo and Pedro fixed the leak I had located and began to repair the shattered driveway.
I retired to the terrace and began to read an Agatha Christie paperback.
SEVENTEEN
Diane Grits Her Teeth
The heat welded August onto July. We had envisaged a leisurely month eating salads and drinking iced tea beside the pool and, after I had finished my writing stint for the day, driving into the hills in the cool of the evening to look for villages we hadn’t yet discovered. We had reckoned without the roofing party.
The foreman of the building team that had constructed the dining hall told me it was a tradition, a get-together thrown after the last tile has been slotted above the rafters. The red and yellow Spanish flag is raised, all the irritations of gestation forgotten—or so he claimed optimistically.
Ángel and Emilio appointed themselves as consultants. Both saw themselves as the ultimate authorities on roofing parties; both offered contradictory advice on almost everything and sulked if their suggestions were disregarded.
The first minefield was the guest list. The only certainties were the builders and their families and Vicente. After that selection became invidious. Should we invite the mayor and Bernardo the wastrel? Certainly we couldn’t invite everyone we knew in the village—at least one hundred altogether.
Emilio submitted a list omitting Ángel. Ángel submitted a list omitting Emilio. Both claimed the omissions were oversights. Both of their lists were comprehensively different.
Finally we called on our limited reserves of diplomacy and invited fifty, mostly tradespeople and casual friends we had met at Pilar’s and the Bar Paraiso. No mayor—we didn’t really know him; no Bernardo, who might binge and wreck the whole enterprise. Then we set about victualing; I ordered the booze, Diane the food.
Paella, Diane decided, would be the hub around which the meal would be constructed, after all it was said to have originated during hard times as an economical stomach filler, and we couldn’t afford a seven-course banquet.
Both Ángel and Emilio, it transpired, were masters in the preparation of a paella. Ángel said the rice should be fried in sofrito—olive oil, garlic, onions—before stock was added, the Alicante method. Emilio said the stock should be added to the rice and they should be fried together, Valencian style.
Ángel recommended the addition of meatballs. Emilio, pounding the kitchen table with a wooden meat tenderizer, denounced this as sacrilege—chicken, pork, diced ham, lobster, shrimps, clams, and mussels were the only true occupants of the paella pan. As far as I was concerned anything was acceptable, except snails.
Diane didn’t take any notice of either of them: she was doing the cooking: the party was her show and no one was going to mess around with her.
From the pasteleria in the village she ordered homemade cocas—open tarts filled with sardines, anchovies, onions, and tomatoes or peas, the forerunners of pizzas that the Spanish were said to have introduced into Naples centuries ago—tortillas, anise-flavored doughnuts, and custard-filled pastries.
From Pilar she ordered fresh pineapples, nectarines, muscatel grapes, and Manchego cheese. She herself would, she said, make Gazpacho Andaluz, cold tomato soup, also called liquid salad.
I ordered sparkling wine known as cava—the best barely distinguishable from champagne—red and white wine, brandy, and beer. When Emilio heard I intended to make sangria he said it was the best thirst quencher in Spain on a hot day. Ángel said it was rubbish concocted for tourists.
We rented a paella pan, brightly burnished and as big as a cartwheel, and I cut twigs from orange trees for the barbecue fire. Ángel and Emilio said they would help with the paella, a recipe f
or disaster as I should have realized.
Diane began preparations a week before the party and whenever possible I escaped to make the other arrangements—to hire a musician, a plump guitarist with black curls and cheeks as rosy as a Russian doll’s, rent trestle tables and chairs, and buy cigars from the tobacconist in the village.
As well as cigars and cigarettes he sold postage stamps and glossy gossip magazines, creased by customers who came to read but not to buy.
A cracked bell above the door announced your arrival from the dazzling outdoors and from the depths of the cobwebbed gloom came reedy whispers.
Then he materialized, striped pajamas protruding from baggy trousers, cardigan unevenly buttoned, searching his scalp for wisps of hair in case they had been stolen overnight.
Behind him, his wife was just discernible, clothed in Bible black, spoon poised above a bowl of soup, part of an old-fashioned tableau in a penny arcade waiting for a coin to drop.
If you bought a small bottle of beer, which he was licensed to sell, he became convivial, even more so if you bought him one as well. Once, after aiming the neck of the bottle into his mouth, he produced from under the counter a sepia photograph of himself, as a fierce young man with oiled hair and a bandolier heavy with bullets. He was dressed in one of the ragbag uniforms the Republicans wore during the Civil War and he looked as if he might have just killed someone.
Suddenly I saw him behind the counter, young and careless with his life, even more so with the lives of his enemies. I asked for a stamp for the United Kingdom and he grew old again, brooding darkly while his wife sipped broth. Finally he said: “How much is it?”
“Fifty pesetas,” I said—enough to buy ten stamps but he could do with the money. His wife said: “And don’t forget the two beers, you old goat.” He regarded her affectionately through the muslin gloom. We have shared, you and I, the look said, and once you were a tigress.
I paid him; he tossed the coins into the open drawer of an antique cash register and a moth flew out. As I left he retreated through the gloom navigating phantom obstacles, sat beside his wife, and dunked a crust of bread in their shared bowl of broth.
Spanish Lessons Page 18
