by R. M. Green
“There,” she said, “that’s better.”
Charlotte didn’t tarry to thank the couple as they didn’t seem aware of her, the Palais Royal or anything else in the world except each other.
With a half-smile and a sigh only reserved for those in the deepest state of contentment, Charlotte left the new acquaintances and walked slowly out of the gates and onto the Rue Saint Honoré.
THE WEDDING PRESENT
Wilfredo Hernandez was a happy man. He was far from rich, he had never had much money but he was proud that he had always provided for his family; that his two surviving children had shoes, books and pencils for school growing up; and that his wife, Delia, only scolded him in jest.
And now, in Wilfredo’s sixtieth year, his oldest child, Ernesto, an electrician in the new resort that had sprung up from the sands by the Pacific, was happily married with three healthy boys of his own, and his little Rosita, his youngest child (a gift to him and Delia after the tragic loss of her older brother, Carlos, at the age of 8 from meningitis), born eighteen years before, was getting married.
She is a good girl, thought Wilfredo as he rode the ancient former American school bus. It was now painted in gay colours with the words ‘Jesus El Salvador’ emblazoned on the sides, and a photograph of a topless Aida Yespica, the Venezuelan supermodel, torn from a magazine on the dashboard alongside a small plastic statue of the Virgin Mary, She will make a good wife.
It was true. Rosa, raven-haired, dark-eyed and only a trifle plump, he felt, had a joy for life, a lively mind and was hard-working, bringing in much needed cash to the household by working diligently as a cleaner for several American retired couples living in the same resort where her brother plied his trade. She was an excellent cook, thanks to her mother, made a lot of her own clothes, and had a beautiful singing voice… and she was in love and about to be married to Jorge.
And this is why Wilfredo was so proud. Jorge Diaz was 24, spoke English and had been to Miami to train as a chef and was now the sous chef at the new restaurant, Las Olas, conveniently located just at the gates of the resort, so tritely named, El Dorado (“The gringos love it,” so claimed the oleaginous PR director for the resort, Miguel, who made everyone call him Mike and whose bonhomie was as phoney as his toupée).
Yes, Wilfredo’s musings continued over the din of the engine as he bumped and bounced in his seat, half holding onto his appropriately battered straw hat as the warm wind rushed into the open windows (“Latino AirCon,” as Ernesto called it). Yes, Jorge is going places. He is a good man and will be a good father and he will have his own restaurant someday. Rosita is a lucky girl… and Jorge is a lucky boy!
So lost in these happy, idle thoughts, Wilfredo half forgot where he was and what he was doing. A blare from the bus klaxon and the squeal of hot brakes brought him sharply back to the present moment and just in time… “Dios! My stop!”
The door would have opened had there been one, and Wilfredo stepped down, not onto the dusty path that lined the roads in his village some fifteen miles away, but onto fresh tarmac, the still slightly tacky, oil-slick, wet-look asphalt of the brand new shopping mall in San Lorenzo.
***
Tom Wyche was a rarity in San Lorenzo; he didn’t live at El Dorado, he didn’t play golf, and he did speak Spanish. An oddity among the mainly monolingual expats who had come in droves to retire to the sun at a third of the cost of doing the same thing in Arizona, Tom was sixty-two, originally from Maryland and spoke Spanish thanks to the fact his father trained a few horses near Fair Hill, where all of the grooms and stall cleaners were Mexican, and as a boy hanging around the barns all summer while his father was busy with training, Tom, a quick learner, had picked up a range of skills from riding restless two-year-old colts to driving a tractor, from fixing broken doors and windows to speaking reasonably good, if rather earthy, Spanish.
The army, college, career as the owner of a small construction firm, marriage, kids and divorce had all followed in the typical order of things and as soon as the crash of 2008 seemed inevitable, Tom sold his business, his house and his Ford F250, and having been assiduous in preparing all his documents, with the assistance of a superb, if bossy, immigration lawyer, he left the US forever.
His ex-wife, Gloria, who had long ago remarried and lived in Vancouver with her architect husband, told him to take care and wished him well. His twin sons, Tom Jr and Tim had left several years before. Tom Jr was doing something financial in Singapore and Tim was bumming around Europe, teaching English, smoking pot and chasing girls (usually with not inconsiderable success). Tom had nothing keeping him and he decided he wanted to be in Latin America and build things again. But not buildings this time. Thirty years of building houses was enough. So now, he intended to turn his hobby into a full time job. Tom had come to build boats; traditional, old-fashioned wooden boats.
Thankfully, he didn’t need to earn any money from it, but that would be nice too, he thought. He did it for the joy of the craft. He had owned a sixteen-foot wooden Dory fishing boat on the Chesapeake and, spurning fibreglass and chrome, he copied the design and built one of his own. It took him three years but it was beautiful and when his neighbour offered him six thousand dollars for it, Tom was inspired.
So, he bought an old truck and two derelict fishing shacks on the coast a few miles along from San Lorenzo and did them up himself, installing electricity, plumbing and ceiling fans (he hated air conditioning), and with his personable nature and decent Spanish, he achieved in turning these tumbledown hovels into a small but perfectly comfortable home for himself and a well-equipped workshop for his boat-building. He seldom wore a shirt or shoes and his skin was deeply tanned, so much so that his tattoos recklessly and drunkenly acquired while in the army in Germany, were barely visible. His hair, thick and white, was clean but wild and unruly, and he was always bareheaded. His hands were strong and slender but bore the scars of many years of working in his craft. Old army discipline meant that despite his rather unconventional lifestyle, he cleaned his own house, ironed his own clothes and was always close shaved. He had a local widow woman, Mabel, come in twice a week to cook for him as he was useless in the kitchen. She would give him a list of food to buy and she would cook up several dishes, which he would keep in the noisy fridge that was always working overtime in the intense heat. The fact that after a couple of years she occasionally stayed overnight seemed to suit them both and generally they watched TV, ate a little dinner, drank a little wine and just lay in the dark holding one another, listening to the ‘tchak tchak’ of the geckos and the sea breeze ruffling through the palms. The only thing Tom did cook was the odd fish he caught himself when taking out one of his boats for a test run. Thus he had lived for nearly eight years now and had seen San Lorenzo grow from a small town with nothing but palm trees and plantains, a single store called the San Jose Mini Super and a reputation for good fishing, to a thriving town with bright white towering condos for retired middle Americans, two golf courses, gourmet restaurants, multi-screen sports bars, fast food outlets and stores that the locals could only dream of shopping in. Tom generally spurned the fancy restaurants, avoided the golf course like the plague and kept out of the gringo bars, preferring to sip the odd rum and coke at the little Mini Super which had half-heartedly set out a couple of plastic tables and a few mismatched chairs under a corrugated iron canopy, thus doubling as a bar laughingly known as Las Terrazas. Still, the booze was cheap and they did great breaded chicken fingers and a diabolically hot sauce for two bucks.
Why he chose San Lorenzo when he did can only be put down to the same instinct that compelled him to sell up just before the credit crunch bit: a sort of prescience for change. In any event, he arrived when there was virtually nothing and now that the influx of gringos with spare cash and nothing but time had arrived, he had orders for boats to last him the next three years. He always asked for half the money up front. After all, some of these retired
types were getting on a bit. But if the inevitable happened before the boat was built, Tom returned the deposit minus cost of materials to the widow.
And it was this full order book that impelled him into San Lorenzo today. He needed a few things from the hardware store. Most of the time he got his wood and other materials from local traders and farmers from the interior but occasionally when he needed nails or a new blade for a plane, he would get in his formally red, now sun bleached pink truck and drive the six miles into town. No longer along a bumpy rutted dusty track that was nigh on impassable in rainy season when it was transformed into an oozing serpent of mud, but a shiny new four-lane highway connecting the whole country from the northern frontier to the southern border via the fleshpots of the rapidly growing capital.
Tom pulled into the vast parking lot, full of old American and newer Japanese SUVs with the occasional German all-terrain vehicle, several yellow, rusting, dented but highly polished taxis and a bright silver Hummer, belonging to the local servant of the people, the town mayor Rafael Avila, who had, by stroke of luck, found himself the sole owner of the choicest ocean-front lots when the town council ‘voted’ to privatise the land. The Mayor, in case you are wondering, was coincidentally the brother of ‘Mike’ Miguel, the PR guru of El Dorado. Again, by sheer happenstance, the Mayor’s other brother, Juan, owned the main condo construction company in San Lorenzo and his sister, Margarita, ran the leading estate agents. The locals, who never seemed bitter because most of them depended on the Mayor’s family for their livelihoods, often called San Lorenzo, Ciudad Avila. However, the Avilas were invested in the town. The family had grown melons there since long before independence and they were proud of growing a gleaming, modern town out of the sand and dust. True, the locals could only dream of eating in the town’s fancy French and Italian restaurants but on birthdays and saints days, they could stretch to the local McDonalds where an enterprising manager had recently installed a karaoke system and created the McWedding reception; it was not an uncommon sight to see the blushing bride tucking into a quarter-pounder while her proud and slightly tipsy father sang along with Julio Iglesias. They even provided mini wedding cake brownies with frosting and a blind eye was turned if the guests wanted to provide their own liquid refreshments.
There was a small but decently equipped public health clinic and a good school built and sponsored by the Avila family, and since drink-driving and speeding laws were seldom enforced, and the Avilas were also patrons of the week-long festival of flowers every April, when the entire town got drunk on the local rum and Cerveza Nacional, stopped work and spent every night delighting in the fireworks handed out for free (of which most Latin Americans are so inordinately fond), no one really begrudged them their millions.
Wilfedo had spent his entire life in his village of Santa Maria. He considered himself fortunate; the civil war, the death squads, the terror had largely bypassed Santa Maria. It was not strategically situated and was most often ignored by rebels and government troops alike save for the occasional visit to steal the odd rusting car or round up a few scrawny chickens. Neither side had any use for watermelons, so the Avilas and the equally insignificant village of San Lorenzo were largely left alone. Wilfredo was proud that he could read and write thanks to an Italian Jesuit, Father Pierro, who taught him and a few of the other boys who weren’t needed in the fields under an old Ceiba tree, and although he had never been to the capital, he read all the newspapers that occasionally found their way into the village, often months old, but earning him the reputation as the local scholar. As it happened, the only other diligent student spelling out words from the bible and the lives of the saints under that Ceiba tree was our old friend, Rafa Avila. He did leave for the capital as soon as he turned fifteen and well, we know how he turned out.
Wilfredo went into the family business, fishing. They had two boats. One little more than a raft for close-to-shore catches and the other a twelve-foot kayak which although sitting in it redefined the phrase, for those in peril on the sea, never capsized and helped Wilfredo, his mother (his father having succumbed to pneumonia when he was ten) and his seven brothers and sisters survive and get married.
Now that Rosita and Ernesto were earning, and Delia had a small stand which was famous along twenty miles of the coast for the delicious breaded red snapper it served, Wilfredo was able to fish just three days a week. He had a heart murmur that had been diagnosed by the visiting doctor (another social amenity sponsored by the Avilas) and was advised to take things easier, which he found frustrating.
So, when the joyous news of Rosa’s wedding was announced, Wilfredo decided to devote his time to making the lovebirds a wonderful wedding present. Jorge had an old car and his father had left him a small adobe house on the edge of Santa Maria. But the house was old and in need of repair. So Wilfredo decided that his wedding present would be to build a new bathroom and kitchen for his daughter and new son. Like all the men in the village, Wilfredo grew up learning how to mend nets, repair the boats and most families built their own houses. Now, although the houses were built in the old style, electricity, running water and sanitation were the norm along with incongruous satellite-TV dishes. Jorge’s house did have electricity and running water but the bathroom was old and dingy, and the kitchen was not fit for a chef and his excellent cook of a bride. Having discussed plans with Jorge and keeping it secret from Rosa, Wilfredo had begun the process and the rooms were freshly plastered and painted, and Ernesto had put in lights and had managed to get a modest but attractive bathroom suite from a condo that was being ‘updated’ by its new, rather fussy Bostonian owners who were happy to let him have it for nothing since he offered to take it away and rewire their apartment for free. The kitchen had proved more of a problem. Space was limited and although the oven and the fridge had been found and were ready for installation and Jorge was delighted with everything, there remained one final item to find and fit. Ironically enough, it was the kitchen sink. Wilfredo regarded this as his solemn undertaking and he had heard of a new store in San Lorenzo that had every type of tap and sink you could buy, some even made in China. And as he stood on the baking tarmac listening to the whoosh of enormous cars with blackened windows speed by behind him, he looked up and saw the huge yellow letters, ten feet tall on the roof of the building scream the name ‘Daly’, he felt the thrill of the explorer well up within him. He took off his hat, awestruck as if standing in the Vatican itself, and walked slowly towards the gleaming new hyperstore.
Rafa Avila was having a bad week. Normally good natured and affable with a generosity of spirit enabled by extreme wealth and love of life, today was not going to plan. He had terrible heartburn and sitting in the cockpit of his Hummer, despite the icy cold air conditioning, sweating in his Egyptian cotton shirt and light grey Italian suit; he removed his black-rimmed rectangular French glasses and pinched his nose. Corpulent but not fat, bald and moustached, Rafael Avila usually cut a debonair, sophisticated figure. Today, however, he felt jaded and bile-ridden. Vexed with his wife, Susana, who had texted him from Miami to say she was staying on an extra week to ‘pick up a few things’, Rafa grudgingly admitted to himself how much he missed her. Married for thirty years with four fantastic kids, all graduates or studying in the US, Rafa was not the slightest bit bothered at his wife’s shopping spree but he missed her. He missed her sense of humour, her wisdom and even at fifty-five he missed her warm, voluptuous body in his bed at night. Rafael had been something of a lothario at the university in the capital, where he had studied law until the civil war had interfered with his studies…that is to say, they had dragged his professor from his bed one night and shot him in the car park of the national soccer stadium. And when he fled to America with the help of the professor’s widow, who was born in Texas, and enrolled at college in Amarillo, his Latin-lover looks and brooding manner had gained him many conquests. Yet since the day he met Susana, shortly after returning home armed with a law degree and full of
lofty ideas of modernising his country, he had been what his brother, that idiot, the lubricious Miguel had called ‘untypically and pitifully faithful’. She had been gone a month. “Everything you can get in Miami you can buy in the Royal Mall for not much more,” Rafael said ruefully to himself. “And now this! Begging at the door of a Mexican! Unthinkable!”
Rafael Avila was rich. And he had become rich through manipulation, force of character and some extremely creative bookkeeping. He had almost single-handedly built San Lorenzo from nothing and although he glossed over some of the less than scrupulous methods he had employed to get where he was today, he was proud of his town, proud of the jobs it provided and proud of the fact that he could walk (or rather drive) down the street and receive what seemed to him genuine waves and smiles from the locals. In fact, unlike his oafish brother who was a slave to the gringo retirees or his avaricious sister, Rafael loved San Lorenzo. His life was different now and he spent his days in endless meetings and at pompous society events, glad-handing the local dignitaries or politicians visiting from the capital, or schmoozing investors on the golf course. Golf! What a ridiculous game! He loathed it with an almost unreasonable passion. It gave him blisters on his hands, pains in the arches of his feet and sand in his teeth, but from years of socialising he had actually become a reasonable player; that is to say, just good enough to lose when it was expedient to do so. He lived in suits. He hated suits. And although he wore them with the easy grace of one accustomed to bespoke tailoring, Rafa was never happier than when he and Susana put on jeans and cowboy boots and went off to their ranch thirty miles inland, going on long trail rides and taking a picnic of cold chicken and the deliciously sweet, juicy watermelons which had sustained his family for generations.