Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  Later that day when the bar was packed with orange pickers lunching off fabada, bean and pork stew, a specialty of Asturias in the north of Spain, fireworks blew up as I was returning to the restaurant.

  No one ever ascertained how the fireworks, which had been stored for a fiesta in a shed in a field, were ignited. But thunder-flashes exploded like grenades, Roman candles pumped balls of colored fire into the air, rockets took off as venomously as guided missiles.

  The pyrotechnics finally broke Aitor’s tenuous grasp on sanity. Just as I arrived he did snatch a gun from under the bar and aimed it at a recognizable enemy, Rupert. Not wanting to see Rupert, a reprobate from an age of chivalry and derring-do, blown away with a broken ballpoint in his hand and a packet of crackers in his bag, I vaulted the bar and tried to grab the gun—a rusty pistol that had probably seen service in the Civil War—that Aitor was aiming at him.

  Aitor possessed the strength of a madman and we wrestled energetically. Before I finally overcame him he pulled the trigger, the bullet punching a hole in the window and narrowly missing a couple of orange pickers.

  I was never quite sure whether Rupert knew that Aitor had loosed off a shot at him or whether he had confused it with the fire-works or whether he had thrust the plugs so firmly into his ears that he had heard nothing.

  Aitor was locked in a police cell and could be seen through a grill in the surface of the sidewalk through which well-wishers passed cigarettes to prisoners.

  He was later transferred to a mental home.

  Rupert flew back to London on a whim and finished revising his memoirs in various watering holes where peace and quiet reigned and supplies of Fernet Branca and cheese crackers were inexhaustible.

  TWENTY

  Ángel’s Last Stand

  We had anticipated a pause in November before making the decisions about our future in the orange groves.

  But Ángel sidetracked any such leisurely expectations; first by threatening to quit, then, indirectly, by involving me with a fugitive from Russia and a Mafia lieutenant.

  He made his first move when I drove him in Diane’s Citroën to a garden center on the other side of Montgo where he got a discount.

  It was an untidy time of year, windows of sunshine opening onto periods of gloom, rainstorms filling the fields to overflowing. The wheels of the battered little car tossed up wings of spray as we forded a flooded crossroads; clouds obscured Montgo’s flat brow.

  When Ángel wasn’t in communication with the clouds, he often consulted the mountain as though it was some prehistoric deity.

  He wasn’t alone in his reverence. Although it wasn’t all that high—753 meters at its peak—the land on either side was so flat that it affected the moods of the inhabitants.

  When it wore a wig of raincloud, the fingers of the grape-pickers moved nimbly and the old women in the village weaving and crocheting in their patios took their unfinished baskets and shawls indoors; if eagles floated above it in a blue sky, the pickers poured wine down their throats from porróns, wine bottles with long spouts, and took a long siesta and the old women stitched and weaved unhurriedly.

  On its Mediterranean side Montgo was green and granite gray, on this its flank, it was the color of mellow red brick. From a distance it looked like a legless elephant, a cave for one eye, trunk reaching for the coast. It was also a clock: Spaniards could tell the time by the height of its shadows.

  Badgers and wildcats lived on its slopes and a lake lapped a cave inside it. The fragments of an Iberian village thousands of years old stood clustered at one end. Herbs broke underfoot, their scents crackling in the nostrils—marjoram, camomile, rosemary, thyme, sage, anise . . . such a potpourri that in Moorish times the Great Caliph, Abd-ar-Rahman, ordered them to be officially listed.

  Driving to the garden center a few weeks earlier, Ángel had pointed at Montgo’s shadows. “It’s eleven o’clock.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said.

  “Mas o menos, more or less.”

  “Wrong. Today is Monday?”

  “And tomorrow will be Tuesday.”

  “Think about the time again,” I told him.

  He thought. “It’s eleven.”

  “Ten. Summertime ended over the weekend and the clocks went back an hour.”

  It was one of my few triumphs over Ángel—his attitude encouraged pettiness—and on this sullen November day he was to have his revenge.

  The plants outside the garden center were marshaled around a stone farmhouse with a long arched terrace where raisins had once dried before the vines were ravaged by phylloxera, the disease that arrived via France.

  But there were no longer any vivid splashes of color among the climbers, bushes, and saplings. Bougainvillea, oleander, hibiscus, and plumbago; jasmine that made nosegays of patios in the summer, and dama del noche, which at night smelled of harems—all had faded with the passing of summer.

  Only inside did plants bloom luxuriantly beside packets of seeds, bulbs, tubers, and corms. The glass-roofed center smelled of the jungle and cats employed to catch rats and mice slept in its humid warmth.

  While I chose an orchid for Diane I told Ángel to buy tulip and daffodil bulbs, dahlia tubers, and seeds for bedding plants, anything except salvias because the prim red flowers were as common as sparrows in English parks.

  I also bought one of those miniature watering cans with a long spout with which old ladies sprinkle hanging baskets of petunias—and themselves—because I am a softer touch in a gardening center than a hypochondriac in a pharmacy.

  Driving home, we passed broad-beamed women hunting snails in a dripping pause in the rain beside ranks of leafless vines as forlorn as gravestones. Flannels of cloud hung over Montgo.

  As soon as we pulled up in the driveway I escaped into the kitchen for coffee while Ángel retired to the garage with our purchases.

  Diane examined the white-and-greenish orchid in its transparent package quizzically. “It’s a sweet thought,” she said, “but—”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Don’t you remember me telling you they are my least favorite flower? They make me think of funerals, I don’t know why . . .”

  “I’ll bring you weeds next time,” I said and strode across the driveway toward the garage. Which was when a sudden gust of wind betrayed Ángel.

  It picked up an empty packet from the garage where he was sowing seeds in shallow boxes filled with damp loam and deposited it at my feet.

  Across the packet above a picture of a familiar flower, I read one damning word: salvias. I picked up the packet and showed it to Ángel. “I thought I asked you NOT to buy them.”

  “I thought you said buy them.”

  “No, you didn’t, Ángel.” I knew we had reached a crossroads in our relationship and I think he realized it too. “You wanted salvias. You’ll have to empty the seed box and buy a packet of petunias out of your own money.”

  The confrontation was unseemly and trivial but ultimatums are rarely the causes of war: it’s what precedes them that counts.

  Two spots of red appeared on his cheeks, the only time I had seen him evince any physical signs of anger.

  He picked up the box and placed it in the back of his van.

  Sitting behind the wheel of his van, he wound down the window. “Did I tell you I have been offered a job in Granada?”

  “No, Ángel, you didn’t.”

  “I will have to think about it,” he said.

  “You do that, Ángel.”

  He nodded, adjusted his disgraceful hat, and drove away.

  Ángel was also responsible for the next distraction. I was in the Bar Paraiso drinking coffee when I noticed him playing chess with a stranger, an old man.

  Mid-morning regulars eyed them speculatively, because Ángel rarely lingered over his bottle of mineral water in the bar and, in any case, strangers were always the objects of conjecture, particularly this one who wore a shapka, a Russian-style fur hat. He was tall and skinny and his gray topc
oat looked as though it contained an in-built clothes hanger. He reminded me of a superannuated spy.

  When Ángel noticed me he whispered to the stranger, laid down his king in surrender—I had never realized his talents extended to chess—and hurried out of the bar.

  The stranger smiled at me and held up a pawn, an invitation to a game, a common enough gesture in Moscow’s Gorky Park. I joined him more out of curiosity than a desire to play, because chess makes my head ache.

  While he set up the pieces I waded straight in. “Are you Russian?”

  “No,” he said, “Spanish.” We shook hands across the board and its two armies of worn and chipped warriors. “My name’s Enrique. But I’ve lived in Russia for fifty years.” He spoke English carefully as though the vowels were made of broken glass.

  “I lived in Moscow for a year,” I told him.

  “As a journalist?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “You don’t strike me as a member of the diplomatic corps,” he said, taking one of my pawns with a deftness not far removed from contempt. “Your friend—Ángel, isn’t it?—tells me that you’ve had a disagreement.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “A pity. When you reach my age”—he must have been in his eighties—“you realize that all dissent is a waste. I realized it almost too late.”

  “Almost?”

  “I have come back to make my peace,” he said, removing one of my knights. “You see, I fought in the Civil War—on the right side but the side that lost, the Republicans. So I went to the Soviet Union where I could still practice what I had fought for.”

  “And you still believe in Communism after all these years?”

  “I believe in equality,” he said with dignity, adding: “You realize I’m threatening your queen?”

  “Of course,” I said, withdrawing her masterfully as though I was working to a preconceived and Machiavellian plan. “But not Communism?”

  “No political system is perfectly conceived: they all adapt to circumstance.”

  “At least you’ve acquired the politician’s skill of never answering a straight question,” I said.

  I made a stupid blunder with a bishop, so confusing him that he removed his fur hat, as soft and black as satin, revealing a shiny bald scalp.

  He stroked the hat lovingly. “When I bought it,” he said, “it was full of fleas.”

  Three moves later he called “Checkmate,” and I moved a respectful distance from his hat.

  The return of this prodigal might have passed off more smoothly if another veteran, Ramón, hadn’t arrived in the village independently two days later, singing the praises of the right-wing Nationalists who had triumphed all those years ago. Ramón had fled with his family to New York in 1938 when the Republicans were still in power in the region. Both émigrés, I suppose, had decided to make the journey to Spain this November in case another winter took them from this life before they could make the pilgrimage.

  Ramón wore a fedora and dark glasses and polished his fingernails on the lapels of his coat like a card sharp, but when he took off his shades his old eyes watered. He was shorter than Enrique, his skin was dry and mottled, but he had a good head of cropped, stonegray hair.

  By mutual agreement Enrique, the old Communist, and Ramón, the venerable Fascist, met the village elders beneath the acacia trees on alternate days.

  “It’s better that way,” Ramón told me. “We don’t want to start fighting the war all over again.”

  The thought of the two ancients doing battle with their walking sticks over a conflict that most Spaniards tried hard to forget seemed ridiculous, but I kept my counsel.

  Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were Enrique’s prime time and I listened fascinated to his stories about life in Moscow, because I had only experienced it through a position of journalistic privilege.

  He turned out to be a stoic who viewed the injustices under the Soviet rule philosophically. “You can’t have equality in thirty degrees of frost,” he said. “Someone will always hog the fire.”

  He was a great believer in the effect of climate on national character. “Russians are impassive because frost freezes their tongues. Spaniards are extroverts because sunshine reaches their hearts.”

  I put it to him that, in the final reckoning, there wasn’t much to choose between Communism and capitalism.

  Surprisingly he nodded. “Communism is the equal distribution of poverty, capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Take your pick.”

  “But you’ve dedicated your life to Communism,” I protested.

  “To its ideals,” he said. “Not its abuses.”

  Enrique fingered his fur hat; I drew back in case it still harbored fleas.

  I met Ramón with the old men on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—they all gave the acacia trees a wide berth on Sundays when their womenfolk called the shots, attending Mass, parading their grandchildren, soaped and shining in the village, ordaining mealtimes.

  He told me that when he first settled in New York he worked the numbers racket in Spanish Harlem and became a lieutenant in the Mob. He saw nothing wrong in the activities of the Mafia. “Organized crime isn’t as dangerous as random violence. Ask any cop.”

  He had earned good money—“Taking it from mugs”—bought a house with a front lawn and a poolroom in New Jersey, and married off two of his three daughters who now had sons “with prospects.” In the Mafia, I presumed.

  It was his unmarried daughter, Raquel, who had persuaded him to return to Spain. “A good girl but butch.” Reared, I guessed, as the son he had never had.

  I asked him about the Civil War.

  “Disorganized,” he said. Which was when I first detected a hint of reticence foreign to his nature. It made me curious.

  I watched him speculatively as he was driven away in a hired car by Raquel, pouter-plump and bespectacled, to the house they rented in Denia.

  The following day I questioned Enrique, who was staying in a bleak, cabbage-smelling hotel on the coast—it must have reminded him of Moscow—about Ramon. But I got the impression he was holding back too.

  It was beginning to look as though I had another mystery on my hands. But before trying to solve it I had to attend to Hoppity.

  The condition of his stump had deteriorated, blood and pus leaking from it, so we took off his splint—these days he was chewing through one a week—put him in a cat basket, and took him to the vet. During his nine-month residence with us he had become the most pampered memeber of the family—even Jones nuzzled him before trying to steal his food.

  The vet, a caring practitioner named Juan, the owner of a mustache as luxuriant as the fur of some of his patients, wasn’t optimistic.

  He dressed the wound and prescribed medicine. “If he isn’t better in a couple of days . . .” His mustache drooped.

  We put Hoppity back in his basket and took him to the car through a waiting room where a dachshund was inadvisably curling its lip at a large dog, a German shepherd.

  Back home Hoppity got to work on the bandage with his teeth. We gave him milk in a saucer and filleted sardines but he ignored both.

  He spent the next day disposing of the remnants of the bandage and sleeping. When we stroked him the following morning he barely stirred and the wound was suppurating badly.

  Diane and I took Jonathan aside and told him there was no point in prolonging Hoppity’s suffering.

  Jonathan asked: “Why doesn’t God do something about it?”

  “He is,” Diane said. “Through us. We mustn’t let him down.”

  Eyes moist, Jonathan ran to his room.

  I took Hoppity back to Juan, who gave him an injection. He died swiftly and painlessly, tipping forward into Juan’s hands as he had once tipped forward when he tried to raise his healthy paw.

  That night I heard him tapping round the house on his wooden leg. But it was only a dream.

  Two day’s after Hoppity’s death, still intrigued
by Ramón’s oblique attitude to the Civil War, I again tackled Enrique and asked him if he remembered his Fascist contemporary in those blood-stained years.

  “Who knows? It was a long time ago, another lifetime,” Enrique said.

  He was eating churros and drinking chocolate milk outside a mobile café, part of a traveling market that assembled in the village once a week.

  I persevered. “You did live here at the same time as he did.”

  “Maybe,” Enrique said. “But Ramón is a common name and sometimes the years do more than age people—they remodel them.”

  “You were about the same age.”

  Enrique swallowed the last mouthful of churro and licked sugar from his fingertips. Beside us women burrowed in heaps of second-hand clothes.

  “We lived here half a century ago,” he said. “He is now American, I am Russian.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re Spanish. And I don’t think you’re telling the whole truth.”

  He finished his chocolate milk and threw the plastic cup into a litter bin.

  “The truth,” he said, “is the shining light of civilization but sometimes it should be dimmed. Politicians know that if they are truthful all the time anarchy will prevail. The truth can hurt too. Why hurt people? Don’t lie, just sometimes keep truth under wraps.”

  “You fought for what you saw as the truth in 1936,” I said.

  “That was an absolute truth. We Republicans fought against corruption, privilege, exploitation.”

  He stood up and put his fur hat on his bald head and we walked together through the streets filled with pale sunshine.

  I didn’t let up. “But after the war Franco brought stability to Spain.”

  “Stalin brought stability to Russia. Ask the legions he slaughtered, ask anyone who survived the penal camps.”

  “So what is truth?” I asked.

  “It’s what you believe in at a given time. Like fashion it changes.”